"So the first maid stayed with him for ten years?"
"Or more." She makes a patient show of checking a piece of paper in front of her. "Ten years and seven months."
"And then he called you for a replacement."
"Nine weeks ago." She pauses. "As I said."
He feels a flare of irritation. "So you did. And, as I said a minute ago, the man's disappeared, and so has the maid. The maid you selected for him." He sits back, watching her, and then puts out an index finger to move the Bangkok Domestics business card he took from Claus Ulrich's desk. "The maid whose fingerprint you forgot to get."
She straightens, and laces her fingers together on the desk. "Surely there's no question that the maid had anything to do with it."
"Isn't there? Do you know where she is? Has she called to say she's available for work again?"
The air-conditioning unit kicks out for a moment and then kicks in with a depressed hum, something it does every forty seconds or so. However thriving it may once have been, the present Bangkok Domestics is a one-room operation, housed in a deteriorating four-story walk-up in the Pratunam area of the city. If the firm is profitable these days, it is saving a fortune on office space.
"Has she?" Rafferty asks again, since the woman has apparently slipped into a meditative trance, staring down at her file.
"No," she says, without looking up. A furrow appears between her eyebrows, and a fine snow of face powder sifts down toward her lap.
"Right," Rafferty says. "Tell me what the police will say. A missing farang, a missing Thai maid, who cleaned out her room before she left. A farang woman who's come to Bangkok to try to find him. Tell me what the police will say."
"The police are not involved," she says, tidying the piles of paper on her desk.
"Not officially," Rafferty says. He holds up his cell phone. "But perhaps they could be helpful." The woman blinks twice. He begins to dial.
She tells him what he wants to know.
What Claus Ulrich requested-what he had requested both times from Bangkok Domestics-was a relatively young woman, in her early twenties, who could cook and clean and who had at least one strong reference.
"And she had a reference?" Rafferty asks.
A hesitation. The woman's eyes drop to the file again but don't focus on it. "Yes."
"I want to talk to the reference."
"Oh, no," the woman says immediately. "Out of the question."
"Not really," Rafferty says. "Not when you think about it."
She pushes her chair back from the desk very quickly, as though there might be a snake beneath it. "Please, no. This woman is a very good customer. Also-how can I put this? — she is not someone I would want to make angry. She is formidable." The French pronunciation.
"She'll get over it."
The chair is already pressed against the wall so she can go no farther, but she flutters her hands at him, making him feel like a bird she is trying to shoo out a window. "Please, let me explain. There are people you meet who, you know at once, will make a good friend. I'm sure this has happened to you. And then, much more rarely, there are people who you know immediately will make a bad enemy." The fluttering turns into a fanning gesture, as though her face is hot. "A very bad enemy."
"This is a woman you met on the phone," Rafferty says, "not on a battlefield."
"I was called to her house," the woman says, as though this will make it all clear. "I spent time with her. She is…" She searches the air above Rafferty's head, looking for the words. "She is not easily forgettable."
"Well, I'm sorry, because I'm going to have to talk to her. In fact, I need a photocopy of the reference she wrote."
"This is very bad." She is fanning herself again.
Rafferty smiles at her reassuringly. "Oh, come on. What can she do to you?"
"I don't want to know," the woman says.
Three minutes and one more mention of the police later, he has a copy of the letter of reference and a pair of fuchsia-colored sticky notes with Doughnut's address and the number for the sole telephone in the village she left behind. Halfway to the door, he turns back.
"It might be a good idea to talk to Ulrich's first maid, too."
A pause, during which the woman seems to be framing her reply. "She's dead," she says at last. "Motorbike accident. That's why he needed a new one."
Rafferty takes another look at the cramped little office. "Where do your girls come from?"
She blinks surprise at the question. "The northeast, mostly."
"Do you have any former go-go girls working for you?"
The heavily powdered upper lip rises a scornful quarter of an inch. Compared to the dead white of the powder, her teeth are yellow. "Of course not."
"Why not?"
"They're liars and thieves, every one of them. Liars and thieves."
"Really," Rafferty says, thinking of Rose's roomful of scrubbed hopefuls and then the scrubbed room Doughnut had left behind. "We couldn't have that, could we?"
14
The maid's address is the Bangkok Bank Building," Rafferty says into the cell phone. He has ducked into the bank's deep doorway to escape the setting sun's final attempt to incinerate the city before giving up for the night.
"Maybe she sleeps with her money," Arthit says.
"And the telephone number is not in service."
"Careful girl." Arthit covers the mouthpiece and says something to someone else. "I'm back," he says. "Maybe she was planning to steal something and disappear."
"And maybe she got caught," Rafferty says. "And overreacted."
"And maybe it has nothing to do with anything. Maybe she was living on the street. By the way, thanks for the photo. I faxed it down there and asked a couple of guys to check the hospitals and compare it with the boards." The "boards," at least one in every community struck by the tsunami, display the photos of corpses that have washed ashore. A crowd gathers to study them each morning, all hoping to find, and hoping not to find, someone they love.
"So I don't have to go down?" He tries to keep the relief out of his voice. It is after five o'clock now, and it has been a long day: the meeting with Clarissa Ulrich, Uncle Claus's apartment and the Expat Bar, the scene with Miaow. The sneer from the woman at Bangkok Domestics.
"Probably not. There's no Ulrich on the hospital lists, although it could be that he's unconscious and didn't have any ID. The picture will help there. He's not on the computers of any of the hotels whose computers weren't destroyed."
"Your guys ought to show the picture to the people from the other hotels."
"Really." Arthit sounds like he's rolling the word uphill. "We never would have thought of that. Where there are people from the other hotels, they'll talk to them."
"This guy is not a beach bunny, Arthit. He weighs three hundred pounds, and according to Clarissa, he burns faster than bacon. And you should see the apartment; it looks like he roomed with Ludwig of Bavaria. No one with taste like that goes outdoors if he can help it. And the only thing I can see him doing with a coconut palm is eating it."
"So what's your guess?"
"I think it has something to do with the maid. Her name is Tippawan Dangphai."
"Dangphai," Arthit says with the tone-deaf inflection of someone who is writing and talking at the same time. "Nickname?" All Thais have nicknames, a necessity in a country where a name can have six to eight syllables.