If she is among these tiny victims he needs to know it, before he forces her to tell this story to Morrison. Face after face, scream after scream, he searches for her.
And finds Superman.
He is one of only four boys. Uncle Claus definitely preferred to torment girls. He gave special attention to the boys, however. They presented a different set of anatomical possibilities. What he did to Superman passes Rafferty's understanding so completely that it seems like the work of a different species.
Sixteen hundred photos. At least forty children.
By the time Rafferty turns off the computer, he could kill Claus Ulrich himself.
The phone rings deep in the pocket of Rafferty's jeans, hard to fish out in the cramped backseat of a tuk-tuk. He doesn't even hear it at first. He is trying to lose himself in the heat and light of the day, trying to leave the morning and its bright, terrible screen behind. It is a window he wishes he had never opened.
He wrestles the phone free on the fifth ring and surveys the traffic in front of him. If they don't get a break, he is going to be late meeting Miaow.
"Poke," Arthit says. "There's a lot happening. The stains in the bathroom are blood."
"Good."
"Excuse me?"
"The man was a pig. No, that's not fair to pigs. I'll tell you about it when I see you."
"And another thing. The address for Doughnut's sister was real, but she's moved. A while back, one neighbor says. But, Poke? The blood changes things. I've got two patrolmen talking to everyone in the building. She must have told someone where she was going."
"That's great," Rafferty says. He has to force himself to pay attention.
There is a pause, Arthit undoubtedly evaluating Rafferty's tone. "Are you okay?"
"Peachy. By the way, the Cambodian definitely got Madame Wing's attention." He tells Arthit about the note and the suitcase.
"Ten million baht?" Arthit sounds like he is trying to swallow a whole chicken, perhaps alive. "Shredded? That's a whole new kind of hatred."
"Let's hope it was only nine million and he kept a million to pay the guard." Rafferty heaves a sigh that seems to come from the navel. "For now I guess the thing to do is to find the sister."
"If we get something, where will you be?"
"Adopting a child," Rafferty says.
32
Taking the chain from around his neck, Rafferty unlocks the cabinet and puts the CD-ROMs, minus their bootleg cases, inside. They fill the space. He does not return the gun.
A sport coat he never wears conceals the bulge at his waistband. In the mirror he sees himself pale-faced and drawn, overdressed and already perspiring.
He flops heavily down on the couch to wait, wondering how he can face Superman. For that matter, he's not sure he can look Miaow in the eyes. What he has seen is such a horrific violation of the most basic human trust that all adults should be ashamed.
Some people deserve to die, Rose had said. What blight destroyed Claus Ulrich so completely? Did he grow around something vile and alien, like a knot in a tree? Clarissa, Rafferty thinks, with a sudden surge of nausea. Clarissa's loving Uncle Claus. He leans forward to rest his face in his hands, trying to rub away the images he has just seen and the image of Clarissa's face.
He knows the popular Western psychology: Everybody is a cloud of inner children and warring adults. Rafferty has met sadistic policemen who loved their kids, corrupt lawyers who took care of their aging parents. He has come to expect the beast beneath the skin and to respect those who keep it under control. Rose had talked about karma, about people whose reality was stripped from them by some tremendous event, cutting them adrift like ghosts, forcing them to seek their reality in sensation.
No matter how you explain it, Rafferty has never met anyone whose character was as deeply fractured as Claus Ulrich's.
Had he taken care of Clarissa as penance? Was it his way of proving to himself that he was still human? Was Clarissa the one thing that allowed him to sleep at night, the thing that prevented him from putting the gun into his mouth? Or did he not even connect the two? Was his spirit so completely sundered that he felt nothing but sexual excitement when he was brutalizing those children, nothing but greed when he was selling the pictures, nothing but love when he was with Clarissa?
The reason for the multiple entry stamps for Cambodia and Laos in Uncle Claus's passport is now clear: He was hunting children.
And the way the apartment is furnished suddenly makes sense: all that ornate clutter, all that distraction, all those things competing for attention. No clear vistas. Put Claus Ulrich in a bare Japanese room and he would probably have cut his stomach open.
Judging from the occasional date stamps, the missing disks, 500–599, 700–799, and 800–899, contained pictures that were taken eighteen to twenty years ago, during a two-and-a-half-year period when Uncle Claus had been especially active. The most recent photo in the 500 series had been dated 1986, and the earliest dated shots in the 800 series had been taken in January of 1989. The 900 series ended in April of that year.
Rafferty is certain he knows why those three disks were not in the apartment.
It gives him no pleasure to have solved the puzzle. He feels as if he weighs five thousand pounds. He knows that the hours he spent in front of that screen have changed him for the worse, and he hates Claus Ulrich for it as much as he has ever hated anybody in his life.
Empty, bleak, overdressed, and exhausted, he slumps onto the couch to wait for Miaow. The gun feels cold near his heart. For the first time in years, he wishes he knew how to pray.
Hank Morrison's refuge for Bangkok's discarded children occupies a half block of baking pavement surrounded by dirty chain-link. In the center of the pavement, two knots of kids collide noisily in the shade of a squat concrete building that has been painted a squint-inducing shade of buttercup yellow. Oversize Disney characters decorate the walls. As he half drags a reluctant Miaow across the asphalt, Rafferty notes that there are three pictures of Goofy.
Morrison is a tall, slender man with theatrically steel gray hair and sky blue eyes, surrounded by the kind of creases that always identify actors as pilots in the movies. He has a rigid military bearing that may be due to a bad back; he bends stiffly to extend his hand to Miaow.
"And this is Miaow," he says. To his credit, he doesn't slow down and overact the words, as many adults do when they first address a child. If he is surprised at the glare he gets in return, he doesn't show it.
"Why don't you guys sit down?" Morrison goes behind a beat-up desk and hauls out his chair to make things a little less intimidating. Miaow and Rafferty claim territory on a narrow orange couch made of vinyl. Miaow sits rigidly, her spine at a perfect ninety degrees, but Rafferty leans back to demonstrate how relaxed he is and feels his sweat-soaked sport coat squish beneath his weight.
"This isn't going to take long," Morrison says. He is speaking Thai for Miaow's benefit. He smiles at her again. "And it isn't going to hurt a bit."
Miaow gives a short sniff.
Morrison bends forward. "Are you unhappy to be here, Miaow?" His Thai is accented but serviceable, much better than Rafferty's.
"Not talk," Miaow says in English. Her words land on the floor between them like stones.
"We're going to have to talk a little," Morrison says, still speaking Thai. "That's what we're here for."
"Talk no good," Miaow says, sticking to English. Rafferty looks at her, puzzled. It is the kind of pidgin she spoke eight months ago. She's moved far beyond it now.
"You don't have anything to be afraid of," Morrison says. "All we want to do is fix things so you can stay with Poke until you grow up. You want that, don't you?"