After the week he has had, there is only one truthful reply. "I used to."
She gazes at the cigarette, turning it in her hand so she can read the gold writing on the filter. "If I killed Claus Ulrich, was that a crime?"
"I saw the pictures," he says.
"So what you're saying is, I tell you my story and then wait while you decide my fate."
Rafferty shifts in the hard chair. "I'm not really comfortable with playing judge."
She smiles slightly at the evasion. "But that's what you're doing."
"I think I'd like a cigarette." He hasn't smoked in almost a year.
She extends the pack and the lighter. "This makes you nervous?" She is very calm.
"I'd smoke used toilet paper to get rid of the smell of these flowers."
"Too much of anything will make you sick," she says. "Unless you're already sick, of course." She watches him light up. The lighter is a real Mark Cross. He turns it over and sees the initials "C.U." engraved in a flowing script, fancy as a minaret. "It was his," she says.
Rafferty turns the lighter over in his hand. "You left an awful lot there. Money, watches, all sorts of stuff. Why take this?"
"I didn't want anything he'd touched. But he used this." Her gaze floats over his left shoulder, unfocused. "Do you remember the red candles?"
"I'll remember them my whole life." The flame haloed in the photographs, the spills of hot wax across the children's abdomens.
"So will I. So will Toom." She meets his eyes and gives him the perfunctory smile again. "My older sister. Toom."
"How did he get his hands on you?"
She regards him for a moment as though he is a distance she will have to cross, and then she sighs. "My mother sold us when I was ten and Toom was twelve," she says. "A lady came from Bangkok and promised my mother she could find us good work in the city. Washing dishes in a restaurant, she said. When we got bigger, we could be waitresses, with uniforms, two for each of us. She showed my mother a big color picture of the uniform. How I wanted to wear those clothes. I still remember exactly what they looked like." She draws a finger down the scar on her chin, and Rafferty would bet she doesn't know she's doing it. "The lady told my mother we could make two or three hundred dollars a month in the restaurant. My father didn't earn two hundred dollars in a year. She offered an advance on our salary. Is any of this new to you?"
People are beginning to move past them, choosing the blooms they will sell in the shops, in the streets. They glance incuriously at the two of them, just a farang and a Thai woman, having a conversation, probably bargaining over the price of flowers. "I know about it in the abstract, as something that happens. As a personal story, it's new."
"I'm aware it's not original. The same thing happened to the other girls in the house."
"What house?"
She shakes her head impatiently. "The one that wasn't a restaurant. Everything that happened to any of us happened to all of us."
Rafferty tries to keep the revulsion out of his voice. "You were ten."
"Almost eleven. And it hurt more than I could believe. But not for long, at least, you know, not down there. I didn't stay eleven for long either. It was interesting. In no time at all, I was older than my sister. Even though she was twelve. She was the one who kept crying. I was the one who decided, as you Americans like to say, 'Fuck this.'"
"You tried to escape?"
"Of course. The first time I didn't even get out of the building. They used wet towels on us. No marks, you see. Customers don't like scarred girls. They hit us until their arms got tired, and then they gave up. Just locked us up. Toom hadn't tried to get away, but they beat her anyway, just to show me what would happen if I did it again."
There is heat inside Rafferty's chest. "Who were they?"
"Two Chinese men. Lee and Kwan. They were brothers and they owned the house, the restaurant, everything. They owned us. After they beat Toom, I decided to wait. I realized I could wait. I learned to live through things. To look at the ceiling, as long as they left me on my back. When they didn't, I looked at the wall, or the floor, or the pillow, if I was someplace fancy enough to have pillows."
"How long did this go on?"
"A year, three months, and two days. I was marking the days on the floor under the bed with a pen I had brought with me from my village. My mother had bought it for me so I could write down people's orders in the restaurant. I was going to smile at them and nod and write down their orders exactly right. They were going to love me."
She closes her eyes for a moment. When she opens them, she is gazing at the cigarette in her hand. "Then Claus came along."
Rafferty can see no change in her face, but she has sunk the fingernails of her left hand into the edge of the table. There are bands of white around the knuckles. He waits.
A deep drag, two jets of smoke. "He didn't look any worse than anybody else until I realized that the other girls were hiding. They had disappeared through the doors. Behind the sofa. One of the girls who couldn't get out of the room pissed her pants right there."
"He took you."
She shakes her head. "Actually, that time he took her. Her mistake. He liked piss." She sees him looking at her hand and relaxes it. "He liked pretty much everything, as long as it hurt or humiliated us. I figured out later that what really interested him was hurting us inside. It wasn't enough that we'd bled and been burned and pissed on. We had to feel like we were shit. We had to want to stop living. Some of us tried to."
The scars on Toom's wrist, Rafferty thinks but does not say. Something Chouk Ran said comes to mind. "He put a nail through your heart."
She looks at him, startled. "Yes," she says. "And the person who got up from that bed was never the same again." She passes her fingertips over her cheeks as though she was spreading makeup. "But I didn't know that until he took me." She drops her hand to the table, slides open the pack of cigarettes and extracts one, lights it off the butt in her hand, and drops the butt to the floor. "And I'm not going to talk about it. I promised myself, after I finished with him, that I would never talk about it again. Never think about it again. It was all I'd thought about for most of my life, do you realize that? Most of my fucking life I've been thinking about Claus Ulrich. Anyway, you saw the pictures of the others. There was nothing special about me. It all happened, and it all hurt, and it all took forever, and that's all there was to it, except that he took me again and then again. He was thinking up new things. That's what I thought at the time anyway. It wasn't until years later, when I opened his filing cabinets and saw the videos, that I realized he wasn't even a creative pervert. He just imitated the stuff he imported from Japan."
Her hair, there is something about her hair.
"Such a dull, ordinary man," she says. "You expect beasts to be different, but they're not. They're as boring as everybody else."
"You can't tell anything about anybody," Rafferty says. "You, for instance. Looking at you, no one would ever guess what you've survived." He is studying her hair, the perfection with which it has been brushed. Something stirs inside him.
"Then he took both of us," she says. She watches him for a reaction. "Sisters. Some men like sisters, you know? They like them-together. He made us do things to each other. Sex things. Then…" She falters. Looks down at her lap. He sees that the part in her hair is straight enough to have been cut with a knife.
Like Miaow's.
The perfection of Miaow's part is one of the ways she proves she can control things. He mentally waves the image away, but it persists. "Then what?"
"Then this," she says. "This is something you haven't seen."