A Nail Through the Heart (12 page)

Rafferty is too drained to force a reply. “Have you seen anyone go in and out of the apartment next door in the past few days?”

“My, my,” she says. “A mystery.”

“It’s important. I wouldn’t bother you otherwise.”

“‘Bother’ is kind of a strong word.” She leans forward slightly, and Rafferty catches a whiff of fresh bread. “Only the maid,” she says. “Porkpie or whatever her name is.”

“Doughnut.”

“She came out of the apartment yesterday, about four. I practically bumped into her, right where you’re standing. She was carrying a shopping bag full of stuff.”

“This one,” Rafferty says, showing her Doughnut’s photograph. He forces a smile. The corners of his mouth feel like they weigh ten pounds each.

“That’s her. First time anybody’s been next door in weeks.”

He leans forward to rest his weight against the wall. It brings him closer to her, but she does not step back. “When Mr. Ulrich was here, were you aware of anything strange going on?”

“Claus? Strange?” She blows on the surface of her coffee, and he can feel the breeze of her breath. “Claus Ulrich is the most boring man alive.” She looks down at the coffee and back up at him. The gaze has a sleepy force behind it.

“People coming and going?”

“Only the maid. Popcorn.” Her eyes crinkle just enough to register amusement, not enough to emphasize wrinkles. “Why do they call themselves things like that?”

“Because they can.”

“I had a maid once, called herself Pun. This was a girl who wouldn’t recognize a joke if it wore a T-shirt with JOKE written on it.” She moves toward him very slightly and slips a finger through the hooked handle of the coffee cup. “So. As someone who’s almost, sort of, halfway, second cousin to the Thais, what’s your theory?”

This woman is not going to be rushed. “Thais have very long names. If they didn’t choose short ones, they’d never get to the verb in a sentence. ‘Pun’ is short for ‘Apple.’ Girls like the word, and they choose the last syllable, but they can’t produce the terminal
l
, so it comes out ‘pun’ instead of ‘pl.’ Okay?”

“Okay. A little silly, but okay. Your turn for a question.”

“Were you ever in Claus’s apartment?”

She looks past him for a moment, deciding whether to answer. “Once. I needed to borrow something.”

“What?”

“Oh, who knows? A cup of sugar, isn’t that what it always is?”

“Just curious?”

A sleepy shrug. “This is Bangkok. Boring or not, he could have been anybody over there, just on the other side of the wall. A random silly-nickname generator. Someone who performed human sacrifices.”

“But he wasn’t.”

“Not with that furniture. If he was sacrificing anything, it was taste.” She hoists the coffee cup and extends it in his direction. She gives him a lopsided grin. “You want some? I just made a pot.” She blows coffee steam toward him. “It’s hot.”

“No, thanks,” Rafferty says virtuously. “I have to get home to my kids.”

Her eyes slide over his face. “It’s hot every morning,” she says.

RAFFERTY DOESN’T EVEN
make it to the elevator. Instead he drops his bag to the floor and leans heavily against the wall of the corridor.

A wealthy foreigner, committed to a particularly furtive form of sexual expression, settles in Bangkok. So there, at any rate, is the
reason for the lack of footprints Rafferty’s been wondering about. For good reason the man keeps to himself, except for his erotic partners, who are undoubtedly professionals. He wouldn’t find many volunteers. The Thais, overwhelmingly, take a simpler view of sex. They see it as fun.

Then the man disappears. Normally, you’d look for one of the partners. Maybe things went too far; maybe he violated the limits they set before they started the session. Rafferty doesn’t know much about S&M, but he’s certain that some sort of pact exists between the participants, some line that won’t be crossed, some magic word to bring things to a halt. There has to be something to protect the one who is being done
to.

Perhaps Claus Ulrich crossed the line, turned a deaf ear to the word. The session stopped being sex, however ritualized and however twisted, and became real violence. The partner became a victim. Maybe there was an injury, maybe worse. A grudge was held. The partner, or her pimp, or her friend, came back to settle things. Uncle Claus either fled—in a great hurry, obviously—or was taken. Or was killed there, leaving stains in the grouting of the maid’s bathroom.

So what about the maid?

A young girl with modest skills, just down from the thin-dirt farms of Isaan. She gets one job in Bangkok, lasts for a few weeks—long enough to wheedle a reference—and quits. She immediately turns up at Claus Ulrich’s, and he hires her because his maid of ten years or so has just been killed in a motorbike accident. Eight weeks later Claus Ulrich is missing.

A thought straightens Rafferty’s spine. A really convenient time for the first maid to die, wasn’t it?

He goes back and knocks again.

“You came back.” She has brushed her hair so it falls to her shoulders. Rafferty liked it better the other way. She has put the coffee down somewhere, and her arms are crossed loosely across her chest.

“I was thinking about the maid,” he says.

Something like disappointment flickers in her face, but she masters it and gives him a perfunctory smile. “What about her?”

“The first one, actually. I was thinking it must have upset Claus when she was killed. She’d worked for him for so long.” He knows the answer from her face, even before he stops speaking.

“Noot? Killed? Don’t be silly, she quit. Drove Claus up the wall, too. He offered her the world to stay, but she’d had enough. I mean, you’ve seen the place. Can you imagine cleaning all that every day?”

“Do you have any idea where she is?”

“This very moment, you mean?”

The question surprises him. “If you know.”

“Sure. She’s down in Mr. Choy’s apartment—he’s a Chinese gentleman? He’s in latex. I mean as a business, not a wardrobe. It’s 4-B. She’s been working there since the day she left Claus.”

The door to 4-B opens a few inches. The woman peering through the crack is small, wiry, and dark-skinned, probably in her early fifties. “Mr. Choy not here,” she says.

“But you’re Noot,” Rafferty says.

She nods, her eyes fixed on him. He is willing to bet she has her foot against the door.

“I was just wondering why you quit your job working for Mr. Ulrich, upstairs.”

Noot ponders the question for a moment and then gives him the brilliant smile Thais often use as a polite way of saying no.

She closes the door in his face and throws the lock.

T
he portable generator, which has been chugging away with a noise like a tethered helicopter, is suddenly silenced. The lights that were wheeled in blink out and give way to early daylight, dim enough in this narrow alley to turn the thing on the ground into something more reassuring, say, a bundle of rags. Sodden, muddy, twisted into heavy ropes and tossed onto the filthy concrete, disquietingly stained and reeking of urine. Just a bundle of rags, nothing worth a second look.

But Rafferty’s first look, while the lights were still shining, was enough. It was enough to send him four or five automatic steps backward, enough to make him glad he had not eaten breakfast. The others in the alley, the ones who got here before the sun rose, are not so squeamish. Three uniformed policemen on hands and knees crawl around the bundle of rags, searching for bits of a puzzle that are too small to see from a standing position. One of them is studying the face that emerges from the bundle.

Dead, wet, and dirty, the man still looks surprised.

Rafferty has to turn away. Death and destruction have been too much in his thoughts lately. Faced with the real thing, in the cooling flesh, he wants to gag.

It is only 8:25
A.M.

“You’d better tell me about it, Poke.” Arthit, wrapped in a long overcoat against what he probably thinks is an early-morning chill, has a paper cup half full of coffee in his hand and a stiffness in his face warning Rafferty that their personal relationship is not at the fore-front of the conversation.

“Tell you about what? You called me here, remember?”

“The safecracker. Why were you asking about Cambodian safecrackers?

Rafferty takes another step away from the body and lets his eyes wander over the blank wall opposite, a reassuringly detail-free wall without a single window. “Well, Arthit, since you ask so nicely, what level of detail would you prefer?”

“Microscopic.”

So he tells it all, beginning with the maid’s reference from Madame Wing, right through the hole in the lawn and the empty safe and the missing whatever-it-is.

Arthit listens without so much as a nod. “And where have you gotten on it?”

“Nowhere. I was going to start after lunch.”

“Well, you’ve just started.” He lifts the cup in the direction of the body. “Meet Tam. Not Cambodian, but definitely a safecracker. One of our best.” Arthit’s tone is regretful. “Wasted here, really. Had the kind of skills he could have put to better use in Monaco or Switzerland, someplace with really serious safes.”

“But she said he was a Cambodian.”

“He was probably hired by a Cambodian.”

“You think he’s my guy. Why?”

Arthit dips a hand into one of the pockets on his outsize coat and comes up with a steamed dumpling wrapped in paper. “Hold this,” he says, thrusting the coffee at Rafferty and peeling the paper back from the bun. When his mouth is full, he says, “See any mud in this alley?”

Rafferty doesn’t have to look. “Only on the—on
him,
I mean.”

“Very good.” He repossesses the coffee. “So, to pursue the Socratic method further, where is Madame Wing’s house?”

“The river, Arthit. And don’t ask me what you get all over you when you dig a hole near the river.”

“Wouldn’t dream of it. If Socrates had known where to stop, he might not have had to drink that hemlock cocktail.”

Four policemen come into the alley with a stretcher. Beyond them Rafferty can see the crowd of onlookers, see the dirt on their faces and the rips in their clothing. Klong Toey is Bangkok’s port and one of its worst slums. The people craning their necks are poor and probably hungry, but they are alive.

“So this guy is muddy—”

“Tam.” Arthit puts some force into the syllable, and Rafferty knows he is being reminded that the man had a name and people who called him by it. A life.

“Tam, then. Is that all? He’s muddy?”

“No. He was working for a Cambodian. We’ve already interviewed his wife. One of the first cops on the scene recognized him, and somebody went to talk to her. Tam told her all about the assignment. He was going to make her rich. Thought he was going after the Saudi crown jewels.”

The crook’s chimera. “Can I talk to her?”

“Under normal circumstances you’d enjoy it. I’m told she’s ravishing, real trip-over-the-curb material. I don’t know why I never expect crooks to have good marriages, but she’s devastated by Tam’s death. So, sure, you can talk to her, but I don’t know what you’ll get. She never saw the guy.” He wads up the paper wrapping from his bun and shoves it into his pocket. When his hand comes out, it has another bun in it.

“Anyway,” Rafferty says, “what’s the point?” He sees the second half of Madame Wing’s fee fade into the distance. “I haven’t got a job anymore.”

One of Arthit’s eyebrows comes up. Rafferty secretly thinks he practices in front of a mirror. “No? Why not?”

“There’s been a murder, hasn’t there? It’s police business now.”

Slowly and deliberately, giving it all his attention, Arthit nods. “Well, as you say, it’s a murder. You’d certainly think the police would leap into it, wouldn’t you?” He glances around the alley, at the stretcher bearers and the knot of cops gathered near the body. “Why don’t you just step around the corner with me while we explore this further?”

Rafferty follows him out of the alley into the sunlight, and they take up a spot against the wall of a building that leans alarmingly toward the street. A thousand-watt glare from Arthit pushes the spectators back a respectful distance.

“Moving right along,” Arthit says, picking absently at the paper on the second bun. “Maybe you can suggest to me the names of two or three police officers who would like to be the ones to find the link between the murder of a safecracker in Klong Toey and the rich and connected Madame Wing. Maybe you can even help us frame the delicate language in which we make the connection. Especially since it was almost certainly Madame Wing’s own employees who carted the dead man away and dropped him in that alley, making her an accessory after the fact, at the very least.”

“Why do you think that?”

“Our Cambodian obviously got what he wanted, because you’ve been hired to find it. Not much point in hauling a body across town when you’re carrying something valuable. On the other hand, for a rich woman with a secret, Tam’s body would be like hanging out a flag.” He looks down at the bun and extends it toward Rafferty, who shakes his head, unable even to look at it.

“So if you can accomplish all that in a way that will advance the career of the lucky officer, as opposed to bringing it to a decisive halt, then you can definitely help me.”

“You have a problem,” Rafferty says sympathetically.

“I’m not so sure I’m the one with the problem,” Arthit says, looking directly at him.

“Aahhh.” Rafferty waves the bun away again, and this time Arthit draws his hand back. “So what you’re suggesting—”

“I’m not suggesting anything,” Arthit says. “I asked you for information, and you provided it to me. I, being possessed of a free and open nature, then shared some information with you. Upon reflection I’ve decided that the murder of a professional safecracker, however beautiful his widow, does not warrant an extensive commitment of police resources in these troubled times. We have the public safety to consider. We ate a fine breakfast, or at least I did, and we went our separate ways.”

Rafferty needs to be sure. “You to police work, and I—”

“To do whatever you wish,” Arthit says blandly. “Earning favors, perhaps.”

There is a bustle of motion from the alley, and the stretcher bearers come out, their shoulders hunched against Tam’s weight. One well-shaped hand hangs over the edge of the stretcher, bouncing with the bearers’ steps. To Rafferty it looks like someone gesturing for attention.

“Got it,” he says.

“Of course, given my concern for your safety,” Arthit continues, “I will expect us to keep each other informed.” He pushes himself away from the wall, slopping some coffee on the sidewalk. The coat looks very heavy on his shoulders.

Rafferty follows him to a waiting car, and Arthit slides in.

“Arthit.”

His tone stops Arthit from closing the door. Arthit waits, taking a first bite out of the bun.

“I think there’s blood in Claus Ulrich’s apartment.” He tells Arthit about the stains in the bathroom and then about the videotapes and the missing software.

Arthit’s mouth twists as though the pork in the bun has gone bad. “You can buy the porn on Silom Road at night, right on the sidewalk. Illegal, of course, but so is half of everything people do in Bangkok. The stains are heaviest near the tub?”

“A few splashes farther out.”

“Probably didn’t cut himself shaving, then,” Arthit says, and it suddenly occurs to Rafferty that his friend has seen many more
bodies than he has. After peering beneath the polite veil of the social fabric long enough to write three books on the underbelly of Asia, Rafferty thought he had become hardened, but compared to Arthit he’s a fluffy animal toy.

“It might not be blood,” he says without much conviction.

“I’ll get someone to check it. If we’ve got two dead people, you were probably right. There’s a connection, and it’s the maid.”

“She does keep popping up.”

“You’re pretty good at this,” Arthit says around a fresh mouthful of steamed bun.

“I don’t know. I do know, though, that I’m not good enough at it to chow down while a dead man’s lying six feet away. Gnawing away at that bun like that.”

“Life goes on,” Arthit says. He leans back against the seat and closes his eyes for a moment. “If there’s one thing we’ve learned, all of us, in the last few weeks, it’s that life goes on.”