"Poke, you're not the first person to try to help that kid. He's had a lot of chances."
"Oh, please, Hank. Compared to who?"
"You can't think about these children in the same way you think about American kids. Compared to a lot of the little lost souls abandoned on the streets of Southeast Asia, that's compared to who."
"We're getting along fine," Rafferty says, and the door to the apartment opens and the boy walks in. He has the worst black eye Rafferty has ever seen, something straight out of the "Our Gang" comedies. The scrape on his forehead is a crust of brown, but his long hair is clean and neatly brushed. It falls over the damaged eye with a sort of Veronica Lake effect. He waves stiffly at Rafferty, as though the gesture is new to him, and Rafferty returns the wave.
"He's a good kid to have on your side in a fight," Rafferty continues, making a fist and pretending to hit himself in the jaw. The boy laughs. Rafferty tells Morrison about the attack the previous evening, making it sound like a random mugging. He smiles at the boy and gets one in return. Superman sits on the carpet, waiting for Rafferty to finish. He fidgets from side to side. He looks eager about something.
"Well, be careful of him," Morrison says. "Don't give him a chance to steal from you."
"I'm not worried about that. It's just stuff."
"That's either a noble statement or a stupid one. Bye, Poke."
Rafferty hangs up the phone and looks at the boy. The boy looks expectantly back at Rafferty, as though he is waiting for something. Rafferty feels his smile go stale, and he sees something like disappointment come into the boy's eyes. Finally, just the tiniest of gestures, the boy turns his head an eighth of an inch toward the opposite wall and lifts his chin.
Rafferty looks in the indicated direction. His fax has a paper tray attached to it.
"You fixed it!" Rafferty jumps to his feet and practically runs to the fax. The paper tray is in place, firmly anchored and ruler straight. He turns to the boy.
"I fixed the ring, too," the boy says shyly. "Now it only rings twice before it answers."
"This thing has been broken for months."
"Easy," the boy says. He is looking at the carpet.
Rafferty starts to hug him and then slaps his hands together instead. There are probably twenty ways to handle this, and nineteen of them are wrong. He goes through at least seventeen of them mentally before he says, "How much do you know about garbage disposals?"
Sok Pochara is having an unusual day.
He has been driving the cab since 6:00 A.M. His first fare, a farang man, threw up in the backseat, reminding Sok that it is rarely a good idea to pick up someone who is flagging you on all fours. After Sok cleaned the cab, he picked up the fat twins, two men in their forties who looked exactly alike, dressed exactly alike, and talked exactly alike. They could barely squeeze into the back of the cab. When he dropped them off, they split the fare exactly and tipped precisely the same amount, which is to say zero. They were followed by a ladyboy in an all-white wedding gown with sparkles on it who was weeping uncontrollably and who jumped out of the cab at a stoplight without paying him. The cab is still sweet with his/her perfume when he picks up the girl with the two big suitcases.
Airport, he thinks as he pulls to the curb, barely beating out two other cabs. He loads her luggage, as heavy as he is, into the trunk, gets back into the cab, and says, "Where?"
"Anywhere," she says. "Just drive."
"That could get expensive," he says, and she reaches forward and drops a thousand-baht bill on the seat beside him. "I'll drive," Sok says.
Half an hour passes. Sok decides to see how many times he can cross the river without covering the same ground twice. The meter says 820 baht when the girl's cell phone rings.
"Hello?" she says. Then she listens for a long minute. Then she says, "I understand," and leans forward and says to Sok, "Stop here."
Sok pulls to the curb and starts to get out to help her with the suitcases, but she says, "Wait," and hands him another 500 baht. "Stay here," she says. "In a minute you'll see me talking to a man. When we finish, he'll get into the cab, and you take him anywhere he wants to go. When he gets out, he will take my suitcases with him."
Another one, Sok thinks. Maybe I should be doing construction work.
Within seconds, a cab pulls up to the curb in front of them, and Sok watches as a man gets out. He is short and dark, and there is something wrong with one of his hands. He waves his cab away with the bad hand, and when it has disappeared in traffic, the young woman gets out of Sok's cab. The man gives her a big envelope and comes toward Sok's cab. He gets in and says, "Drive."
Sok lets him out in Pratunam twenty minutes later. The man melts into the crowd, pulling the suitcases.
An hour after that, Madame Wing tears open the envelope and sinks her nails into the maid's eyes.
29
Madame Wing does not telephone to demand an update that night. Rafferty calls anyway to report that he has identified the Cambodian man, but Pak says she is too busy to come to the phone. "Nothing else is happening," Rafferty says.
"According to you," Pak says mysteriously, and hangs up.
"Why do I have the feeling," Rafferty asks Rose, "that things are being kept from me?"
Rose is settled at Rafferty's desk, doing her business accounts. She has a pencil in her hand, another behind her ear, and a hank of hair between her teeth, usually a prelude to some frustrated pencil chewing. Twice a week she writes down in a ledger every baht she has earned and every baht she has spent-for food, rent, shampoo, soap, clothing, pink plastic hair clips, donations at the temple, money sent to her family, and-finally-her business expenses: tuk-tuk fares, advances to the women, new T-shirts and jeans for their interviews, cell-phone charges. The exercise does little for her mood.
"When I think of all the money I threw away when I was dancing," Rose says, studying the numbers on the page, "I could scream."
Rafferty looks at the familiar terrain of her profile, at the play of light on her hair, at her straight back and at the smooth skin over the curve of her neck. At the carefully ironed shirt she wears tucked in to her jeans because the bottom is frayed and it embarrasses her. "I haven't heard you scream in a while."
"Since you gave me that money, I have nine thousand baht in the bank," she says, ignoring him. "A little more than two hundred dollars. Do you think I should send some of it home?"
"Save it for a rainy day," he says in English.
"Poke," she says gently in Thai, "it rains nearly every day."
A wave of longing, mixed with something like loneliness, washes over him. "All the more reason," he says, also in Thai.
"I'll send them five thousand. Half and a little bit. That will make them happy."
"You make a lot of people happy, Rose."
She says nothing. Rafferty can almost see the words hanging in the air between them. He feels the same breathless awkwardness he experienced in junior high, when he first asked a girl for a date. The stillness in the room presses in on him like water.
"Rose-"
"Don't confuse me, Poke," she says. She closes the ledger with a soft pop. She still has not turned to face him.
"I'm not trying to confuse you."
She waves the words off. "But you are. You're making me think too much. And don't tell me I said I'd think about it. I am thinking about it." The chair's hinged back creaks when she leans away from the desk, as though she wants to be farther from the ledger and the numbers it contains. Her right hand tightly grips the arm of the chair. "We were fine until you started. We got along, we laughed, we didn't…we didn't ask questions. I was comfortable here. Now you want to change everything-adopt Miaow, bring the boy in, marry me. You do want to marry me, don't you?"