But she’s so occupied in looking for it that she doesn’t see the dirty, ragged, long-haired boy who pushes past her with the sweating farang man in tow, doesn’t see the boy turn to follow her with his eyes fixed on the damp bundle pressed to her chest, watching her as though nothing in the world were more interesting.
2
The boy sees her go, assessing her without even thinking about it: Just got here. Still got mud between her toes. Doesn’t know anything. Looks stunned, like someone hit her in the face with a pole.
The baby’s not hers. Too pale.
He thinks, Another one.
The nervous man behind him slows again. The boy hesitates grudgingly, feeling like he’s trying to lead a cat. For a moment weariness washes over him like warm water. He longs to disappear into the crowd and leave the foreigner to fend for himself, but the others are waiting, and they’re hungry.
“Come on,” he says in English. “Nothing to worry.”
“I don’t know,” the man says.
The boy stops. He draws a deep breath before he speaks; it will not do to show his frustration. “What problem now?”
“It’s not dark enough.”
“When it dark,” the boy says, “they all gone.”
“Just ten minutes,” the man says. He is in his forties, with hair brushed forward over a plump baby’s face that seems to be mostly lower lip. Despite his eagerness not to be noticed, he wears a bright yellow shirt and green knee-length shorts across wide hips. A fanny pack dangling below his belly thoughtfully announces the location of his valuables. To the boy he looks as conspicuous as a neon sign.
“Ten minute too long.” The boy’s eyes, tight-cornered and furious, skitter across the man’s face as though committing the features to some permanent archive, and then he turns away with a shrug.
The man says, “Please. Wait.”
The boy stops. Plays the final card. “Come now. Come now or go away.”
“Okay, okay. But don’t walk so fast.”
The sun is gone now, leaving the sky between the buildings a pale violet through which the evening star has punched a silver hole. The boy sometimes thinks the sky is a hard dome lit inside by the sun and the moon, and peppered with tiny openings. From the outside the dome is bathed in unimaginable brilliance, and that light forces its way through the pinpricks in the sky to create the stars. If the sky dissolved, he thinks, the light from outside would turn the earth all white and pure, and then it would catch fire like paper. But in the dazzling moment before the flames, it would be clean.
“We go slow,” he says. There may not be another man tonight. The crowds on the sidewalk are thinning. The kids are hungry. He drags his feet to prevent the man from falling behind.
The man says, “You’re handsome.”
“No,” the boy says without even turning his head. “Have better than me.”
They turn a corner, into an east- west street. They are walking west, so the sky pales in the sun’s wake until it slams up against a jagged black line of buildings. Before he returned to Bangkok, this city he hates, the boy had grown used to the soft, leaf-dappled skyline of the countryside. The horizon here is as sharp as a razor cut.
“There,” the boy says, indicating with his chin. “The window.”
Across the street, nine impassive children loiter against the plate glass of a store window. They wear the filthy clothing of the street, mismatched and off-size. Three of the five boys are eye-catchingly dirty. The four girls, who look cleaner, range in age from roughly eleven to fourteen. The boys look a year or two younger, but it might just be that girls in their early teens grow faster than boys.
They pay no attention to the man and the boy across the street.
“Keep walking,” the boy says. “Don’t slow down too much, but look at the window, like you’re shopping. When we get around the corner, tell me the sex and the color of the shirt of the one you want. Or take two or three. They don’t cost much.”
The man looks toward the shop windows. “Then what?” he asks.
“Then they come to the hotel,” the boy says.
3
The Big Guy’s eyes keep landing on Rafferty.
He’s developed a visual circuit that he follows every time a card is dealt: look at the dealer’s hands, look at the new faceup card in the center of the table, look at Rafferty. Then he lifts the corners of the two facedown cards in front of him, as though he hopes they’ve improved while he wasn’t paying attention to them. He puffs the cigar clenched dead center in his mouth and looks at Rafferty through the smoke.
This has been going on for several hands.
Rafferty’s stomach was fluttering when he first sat down at the table. The flutter intensified when the Big Guy, whom no one had expected, came through the door. Like the others in the room, Rafferty had recognized the Big Guy the moment he came in. He is no one to screw with.
But Rafferty may have to.
He has grown more anxious with each hand, fearing the moment when he’ll have to test the system. And now he can feel the Big Guy’s gaze like a warm, damp breeze.
With a flourish, the dealer flips the next-to-last of the faceup cards onto the green felt. It’s a six, and it has no impact on Rafferty’s hand, although one of the other men at the table straightens a quarter inch, and everyone pretends not to have noticed. The Big Guy takes it in and looks at Rafferty. His shoulders beneath the dark suit coat are rounded and powerful, the left a couple of inches lower than the right. The man’s personal legend has it that it’s from twenty years of carrying a heavy sack of rice seed, and he is said to have punched a tailor who proposed extra padding in the left shoulder of his suit coat to even them out.
A massive gold ring sporting a star ruby the size of a quail’s egg bangs against the wooden rim of the table as he clasps fat, short-fingered hands in front of him. Rafferty finds it almost impossible not to look at the man’s hands. They are not so much scarred as melted, as though the skin were wax that had been stirred slowly as it cooled. The surface is ridged and swirled. The little finger on the left hand doesn’t bend at all. It looks like he had his hands forced into a brazier full of burning charcoal and held there. The mutilated left hand lifts the corners of the facedown cards with the careful precision of the inebriated, the immobile little finger pointing off into space. The Big Guy was drunk when he arrived, and he is well on his way to being legless.
“What are you doing here, farang?” the Big Guy asks very quietly in Thai. The soft tone does not diminish the rudeness of the question. His mouth is a wet, pursed, unsettling pink that suggests lipstick, and in fact he swipes his lips from time to time with a tube of something that briefly makes them even shinier.
“I’m only part farang,” Rafferty says, also in Thai. “My mother’s Filipina.” He smiles but gets nothing in return.
“You should be in Patpong,” the Big Guy says, his voice still low, his tone still neutral. “Looking for whores, like the others.” He picks up his glass, rigid pinkie extended like a parody of gentility.
“And you should watch your mouth,” Rafferty says. The glass stops. One of the bodyguards begins to step forward, but the Big Guy shakes his head, and the bodyguard freezes. The table turns into a still life, and then the Big Guy removes the cigar from the wet, pink mouth and sips his drink. Minus the cigar, the mouth looks like something that ought not to be seen, as unsettling as the underside of a starfish.