Wichat’s eyes widen slightly. His complexion is rough and pitted. He must have had terrible acne as a kid. Acne plus poverty; if Rafferty didn’t know the man was a killer and perhaps worse, he might even feel sorry for him.
“Hang on,” Wichat says. He picks up his phone and punches a single number. “Get me a jar of water and bring it in here. No, not a glass. If I wanted a glass, I would have asked for a glass. A jar, and a coaster to go under it. A little more than half full. No lid.” He hangs up. To Rafferty he says, “Good idea.”
“You were about to tell me two things.”
“Bunch of half-smoked cigarettes floating around, that’s going to stink.”
“Yeah. And?”
“Good idea.” His eyes drop to the surface of the desk, scanning it as though he’s looking for an objection to what he’s about to do. “Two things,” he says. “First, the Mounds of Venus weren’t the whole story, okay? He also owned a bunch of handcuff houses, you know handcuff houses?”
“Pretend I don’t.”
“Houses where the girls aren’t…eager, you know? Where they’re handcuffed to the bed. Some guys
“Are you sure of this?”
“You’ve got to be kidding me. This is dangerous stuff I’m telling you. I don’t want to know it myself. You think I’d make it up?”
“Pan acts like prostitutes are his fallen sisters.”
“Pan’s one of the world’s great liars.” Wichat brings both hands up, scrubbing the air to erase the remark. “But the Thai girls, the ones who worked in the Mounds? He took good care of them. They got paid good, and they got time off and everything. I even heard he takes care of some girls who got sick. But that’s just Thais, you understand? Just Isaan. The Burmese, he treated them like shit.”
“And the second thing?”
“You seen his hands?”
“You mean the scars?”
“Yeah. You’ve never seen him in a short-sleeved shirt because those burns, they go all the way up to his shoulders and even the front of his chest. It looks like he dived headfirst into a fire to pull something out. He disappeared for a couple of months, and when he came back, he had those scars. He wouldn’t talk about them, but it was only about six months later he got his first factory and started closing down the whorehouses.”
“A fire,” Rafferty says.
“Yeah. He came through some sort of fire, and then he was a different guy.”
“What year?”
“Oh, shit, who knows? He was still closing down the knock shops, so-”
The office door opens, and an exquisite young woman comes in carrying a jar of water. The jar has a label that says “Jif” on it.
“Oh, come on,” Wichat says angrily. “It’s bad enough to have a fucking jar on my desk without the whole world knowing what kind of peanut butter I eat. Peel that thing off.”
“Yes, sir,” the girl says. She wears a pale salmon-colored business-formal office suit, all in silk. Wichat watches her rear end as she goes back out.
“More butt than brains,” Wichat says admiringly.
Rafferty says, “The year.”
A heavy blink. “Yeah. Like I said, he still had one of the Mounds, or maybe two. Must have been-this is a guess-1993? Maybe ’94. In there somewhere.”
“Do you have anything to do with him now?” Rafferty asks. “With Pan?”
Wichat picks up the pack of cigarettes again. “I don’t care who called me about you,” he says. “Just pretend you didn’t ask that question.”
THE SIDEWALK IS at full bake, heat ripples so pronounced that pedestrians look like he’s seeing them underwater. Rafferty ducks into an air-conditioned drugstore, one in a British chain that’s established itself in Bangkok’s high-rent commercial districts. He pulls out the cell phone and dials the number from memory.
“I need to access the morgue at the Bangkok Sun,” he says without returning the greeting from the other end. “Somebody has to call and set it up.”
“You can’t get in yourself?” It is the first man, the man from the car again. His speech is still mush-thick, but at least it’s understandable.
“Sure I can get in myself. I’ll make a request, and then the request will get processed, and then they’ll let me in, and it’ll be the middle of next week. You guys want to sit around playing blackjack or whatever you do while I go through all that, or you want to move things along?”
“How’d you do with the cop?”
“I did better with the crook. It’ll be in my report.”
“Give me a preview.”
“I think I’ll wait,” Rafferty says, “until I’m talking to someone who matters.”
“You’re just making it easier,” the man says.
“If it wasn’t easy, you wouldn’t be able to do it.”
A pause, although Rafferty can hear the breathing on the other end of the line. Then the man says, “How long will it take you to get there?”
“Twenty, thirty minutes.”
“It’ll be set up.” The man disconnects.
Thirty-five minutes later, Rafferty discovers he’s in luck. Both 1993 and 1994 have been computerized and cross-indexed. It takes him less than an hour to find fires.
