On the sidewalk in front of the restaurant, he watches until the two of them are out of sight, trying to rationalize away the uneasiness he feels about having ordered someone's death as casually as if it had been on the menu. When he turns, he bumps against someone. Looking down, he sees the dark little man from the soi, the one who had hit him with the gun. Behind him are his three teammates. One of them-the man whose nose Rafferty tried to drive into his brain-is wearing a raccoon's mask that resolves itself into two black eyes that look borrowed from a cartoon. A long swelling, big enough to hide a baguette in, runs across his forehead, just above the eyebrows.
"Someone needs to talk to you," the little man says. His right hand disappears into a small leather tote bag, secured by a shoulder strap. Protruding an inch or two from a hole cut into the side of the bag, a few inches from Rafferty's belly, is the barrel of a gun.
Rafferty says, "It took her long enough."
39
The fragrance of the flowers is so overpowering, Rafferty thinks, that it ought to tint the air-perhaps salmon, with halos of pink around the naked bulbs dangling from the bare electrical cords high overhead. The perfume seems thick enough to foam around his feet as he pushes his way through it, with two of the men in front of him and two behind.
There are obviously people here and there, but none in sight. The rows of flowers are too high, the aisles between them too narrow. He can hear voices occasionally, the energetic back-and-forth of bargaining, frequent bursts of laughter.
The five of them stop in front of a volcano of orchids taller than Rafferty. The small dark man, who has been directly behind Rafferty, steps forward and puts out a hand. He looks almost apologetic.
"Skip it," Rafferty says.
"Those are the rules."
"Make new ones."
The man takes the gun from his bag, shows it to Rafferty, then drops it back in and zips the bag tightly shut. He walks several yards away and places the bag on a display table beneath a spray of exotic flowers that look like they evolved to snatch bats in midflight. Then he comes back and raises his arms to shoulder height, inviting Rafferty to pat him down. "Do you want to check us? Lift your shirts," he says to the others.
"Skip it. So I can see you haven't got guns? You'll have one when I give you mine, won't you?"
"Look around," the small man says. "This is a public place. Everybody in Bangkok who wants flowers is here."
"Compromise," Rafferty says. He slides the automatic free of his trousers, pops the clip, and hands the clip to the small dark man. Holding the gun between thumb and forefinger, he lets it dangle harmlessly in the air. "That's the only clip," he says. "Trust me."
"I don't actually have to." The dark man hikes his pant leg to show Rafferty a small automatic tucked into an ankle holster and then he grins like a small boy doing a magic trick.
"On the other hand," Rafferty says, bringing the barrel of the gun up beneath the man's chin, "there's still the one under the hammer. Jesus. Every time you think mankind has evolved, you get slapped in the face with a dead fish."
"Tell me about it," says a voice from behind him. A woman.
"Soon as he gives me his gun."
She sighs. "Do you really think we'd bring you here to kill you?"
"It doesn't seem efficient. If I know anything about you, it's that you're efficient."
"You came all this way," Doughnut says, with the sorely tried air of someone forced to state the obvious. "We might as well talk."
"The clip," Rafferty says. "These things cost money."
The man slowly hands it over, watches with total concentration as Rafferty slips the clip back in and secures the automatic beneath his waistband. Then he nods, and Rafferty turns to face Doughnut.
At first glance she is completely unremarkable, someone he would pass on the street and not remember a moment later. He would put her in her forties, but he knows she can't be. The photos on the missing disks were taken toward the end of the eighties, and she must have been ten to twelve at the time, like the other children in the AT Series. She can't be much older than twenty-nine or thirty. After what she has lived through, he thinks, she should look eighty.
Shoulder-length hair, painstakingly parted and brushed, frames a round, somewhat flat face with the low nose and full lips of Isaan. Her skin is dark, unlightened by makeup, its duskiness emphasized by a fine white scar that runs the length of her chin, the result of a slicing wound. She wears the prim pastel clothes of an office lady, a bank teller, someone with a job in the safe world.
The eyes don't look at the safe world. They are black, the purest, deepest black, and they seem to be set several inches behind the face, like those of someone holding up a costume mask and peering through it. Someone with a lot of practice at estimating arm's reach and staying outside it.
She submits patiently to his gaze and then gives him a perfunctory smile that tells him he's looked long enough. "Just a flower seller."
"You're just a flower seller," Rafferty says, "in the same way Joan of Arc was just a farm girl."
She turns without a word and leads him down the aisle, the four men trailing behind, Joan of Arc's soldiers in T-shirts and plastic flip-flops. They make two turns, and Rafferty has no idea what direction they're going in.
"Here," Doughnut says. They have reached a rickety structure, roughly square and no more than ten feet on a side, framed in unfinished lumber. Chicken wire nailed to the uprights turns it into a cage of sorts. A table, four feet square and topped with scarred plywood, tilts alarmingly in the center of the cage. Flowers stretch away in all directions, sullen smears of color. Doughnut opens a plywood door and stands aside. "Okay?"
"And if it weren't?" She follows him in without answering. "Your office?"
"Might be, might not be." She closes the door and takes the seat nearest it. Rafferty takes the seat opposite and sees that the open door concealed a television set wired to a VCR.
"So you're Poke," Doughnut says when she is settled. She beats a quick tattoo on the tabletop with her fingernails. "And you think I'm going to tell you my story."
"It's me or the police." He places a hand on the table, and it dips a couple of inches and rocks up again. One leg too short.
She leans back and puts one arm up, over the back of her chair. "Why would I be afraid of the police?"
He sits opposite her. His chair rocks, too. "Because you killed Claus Ulrich."
Doughnut looks like she is stifling a yawn. "You can prove this?"
"I don't have to. You were there. You disappeared. You left bloodstains. You were in the pictures. For the cops that's a royal flush: means, motive, opportunity."
A golden box of Dunhill cigarettes appears on the table, along with a slender silver lighter, either a Mark Cross or a good knockoff. "The police don't actually need anything. They just manufacture what they don't have." She flips the box open, one-handed. "Why would my story interest you?"
"Because a nice lady came all the way from Australia to learn what happened to Claus, and I told her I'd find out."
She lights up and plumes smoke from her nostrils. "The famous niece, I suppose." She rolls the tip of her cigarette gently on the plywood surface of the table to remove a film of ash. The corners of her mouth go down, her first overt display of emotion. "So she asked you. And you always do what you say you'll do?"
"It makes it easier to get up in the morning."
The four men are arrayed behind her, tallest to shortest, as though they've lined up for a photo, peering in through the chicken wire. She turns to see what he is looking at and waves the men away with the hand holding the cigarette. They melt like gnomes into the flowers. Several moments pass, measured in exhalations of smoke. "Let's see," she says at last. "I have a question for you first. Do you think murder is a crime?"