“Unseal it, then. Unseal it and read it to me.”
Brigitte shifts from foot to foot, obviously wishing she were elsewhere. “I’m not sure I should.”
“Whoever sent it to me probably wants me to know what it says, right?”
“Well…I suppose.”
“Then open it and read it to me. I can promise you that if you don’t, it will probably be weeks before I get around to opening it myself. I have far too much on my hands.” He rips out another page of another report and folds it lengthwise, already visualizing a triangular tuck in the tail section that might make the staple redundant. Staples seem like cheating.
“Well.” Brigitte chews the inside of her cheek. Then she opens the envelope, which is not in fact sealed; the flap has merely been slipped inside. “It’s…um, it’s a Form 74.”
“Really. And a Form 74 is?”
“Leave. It’s the form granting compassionate leave.”
“Ah,” Arthit says. He creases the page with his thumbnail to sharpen the fold. “Does it say when the leave begins?”
“It starts today,” Brigitte says. She blinks rapidly, and for a moment Arthit is afraid she will burst into tears. “In fact, it starts now.”
Arthit says, “Mmm-hmm.” He launches the plane, which sails across the room rewardingly. “And is there anything about how long this compassion will last?”
“Until further notice,” Brigitte says.
“That’s a very generous serving of compassion,” Arthit says. “Definitely something to remember.”
I hope you know what a big favor this is,” grumbles the man behind the desk. Through the floor-to-ceiling window with the desk positioned in its center, Rafferty sees the silvered windows of the office tower across the street.
“And I hope you know how much I appreciate it,” Rafferty says to Wichat with the smallest smile he can manage. “The people who want this book written feel you might have a special perspective on Pan.”
“I was around,” Wichat says. His shoulders are hunched and high, and it looks protective. “I was just a foot soldier then, but I was around.”
“That’s not what I hear. I hear you were already on the way up.”
Wichat shakes his head. “The big guy then was Chai. He was generous with his men. He took care of me. I did what he needed done, and he took care of me.” Wichat tilts the chair back, dangerously close to the plate glass behind him.
“Doesn’t that scare you? It’s, what, twenty-eight stories down?”
Wichat says, “Nothing scares me.”
“Well, lucky you. Did anything scare Pan?”
“If it did, he didn’t show it. He could have been pissing his pants, but he looked like something carved into that wall of his. Nothing showed except what he wanted to show. Had a way of bringing down the corners of his mouth so hard they almost touched. Scared the shit out of people.”
“You knew him when he made the move, right? The move to the massage parlors.”
“The Mound of Venus,” Wichat says lightly, as though he’s been asked an unexpectedly easy question. “Sure.”
“Where’d he get the money?”
Wichat picks up a battered pack of cigarettes and tweezes one out between his first and second fingers. He puts it in his mouth and picks up a gold lighter. “Trying to quit,” he says.
“Yeah, well, lighting one is a surefire method.”
“I don’t light as many as I used to,” Wichat says, blowing a plume of smoke across the desk. “Don’t smoke them so far down either.”
“Where’d he get the money?”
“He didn’t need money. How do I know my name isn’t going to be all over your book?”
“If it is, you can kill me.”
“Funny,” Wichat says dourly. “No names, got it?”
“Got it.”
“I wouldn’t tell you shit if you didn’t have so much fucking weight behind you.”
“As I said, I appreciate it. Where’d he get-”
“I told you,” Wichat snaps. “He already had some. And he didn’t need as much as you’d probably think. He got the first Mound pretty much free, just the old gun-to-the-head negotiation. The guy who owned it had made the wrong decisions about who to be friends with. It would have been a small funeral. So he signed it over to Pan for maybe enough baht to buy a week’s worth of chewing gum, and Pan fixed the place up.”
“And then?”
“And then he made a bunch of money from the first Mound and opened the others. Business, right? Make profit and reinvest it. Selling pad thai, selling pussy. Same-same, you know?”
“What else?”
Wichat reaches up and passes a palm over the surface of his oily hair. Then he makes a palm print on the desk’s smooth surface and looks down at it as though evaluating its worth as evidence. “What else, what else.” He drags on the cigarette again and examines it, obviously thinking about what he’s going to say next. “Two things,” he says. “You didn’t hear this from me, but there were two things.” He glares at the half-smoked cigarette, stubs it out, and drops it in the ashtray. “Hard not to pick these things up and light them later, you know? Especially when you were poor once.”
“Get a jar of water,” Rafferty says. “Drop them into it.”
