"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."
20
Tam's widow, Mai, is one of the most beautiful human beings Rafferty has ever seen. Her eyes-puffy now from crying-tilt upward above an extraordinary pair of cheekbones, smooth enough to have been shaped by running water. Her nose is delicate and finely formed. She wears her black hair chopped short to reveal a swan's neck and collarbones as refined as an angel's wings. The tilted eyes are a light brown with flecks of gold buried in them. She is the color of weak tea, with a hint of heat just beneath the skin.
"He was the sweetest man," she is saying. "He even loved my mother." The memory of his sweetness brings the tissue back up to her eyes. The floor of the neat little apartment, a concrete cube as brightly decorated as a doll's house, is littered with tight balls of Kleenex from the box on the table in front of her. The woman has been crying for hours.
"I'm sure your mother-" Rafferty begins helplessly, demonstrating all his skill with female grief.
"My mother is a dragon," Mai says. She wads up the latest Kleenex and throws it at the carpet. It rolls up against the television, and Rafferty sees, on top of the big, old-fashioned set, a color photo of her and Tam, framed in teak. They look young and radiant and secure. The world has just been waiting for their arrival to make it complete. Nothing bad will ever happen to them.
Through the window above the TV set, Rafferty can see the sloping corrugated-iron roofs that keep the rain out of a rambling cluster of squatters' shacks. The building in which Mai lived with Tam is a modest apartment house in aggressively unadorned Soviet cement, obviously put up ten or twelve years ago in the expectation that the neighborhood would somehow mysteriously gentrify. The occupants of the shacks, only a couple of dilapidated miles from the alley where Tam's body was found, have apparently not gotten the news, or perhaps the general or police captain who owns the land is waiting for a better offer before he calls in the bulldozers. The result is a representative square of the Bangkok patchwork: poverty, aspiration, and affluence, jammed side by side, kings next to deuces as though a pack of cards has been thrown into the air. Beyond the shimmering iron of the shacks' roofs, the broad brown ribbon of the Chao Phraya winds its way to the Gulf of Thailand.
"I told him to stop," Mai says. She puts a hand on top of her head, as though to keep it from exploding. "I told him to do something else. I begged him, told him we didn't need the money, it wasn't worth the risk. He was so proud of what he could do. 'Top two percent,' he kept saying. 'It's all in the fingers.' Like he was a magician or a violin player, not a criminal." She stops, blinks. "The Cambodian man was a violin player."