“Dead?”
“Deeply dead. Pulverized. So everybody takes a good look, and the body gets hauled away, and next day there’s Pan again, telling them they need protection.” Arthit picks up the bottle and squints at the label. “It’s really whiskey,” he says, sounding surprised. “My head should be on the table by now.”
“Keep trying.”
Arthit presses the bottle to his cheek, as though his face is hot. “Of course, the guy who got tossed out of the car had a boss, and Pan gets grabbed and taken to him. They’re going to chop him up and prolly-probably-use him for bait, but the boss wants to take a look at him first. They’re all there, Pan and the three guys who grabbed him, in the boss’s office. And the boss, a management-level crook named Chai, asks Pan why he shouldn’t just be killed right there. Pan says, ‘Choose one of these guys.’”
As long as he has the bottle in his hand, Arthit pours and drinks. “You understand that this is hearsay, right? It’s not like it’s in his file or anything. Anyway, Pan says that thing about choosing a guy, and Chai figures what the hell and points at the biggest one, and in about five seconds the big guy is dead on the floor with an ice pick through his temple, and Pan has the dead man’s gun and it’s pressed against the back of Chai’s skull. But he doesn’t pull the trigger. What he does is say, ‘Choose another one.’” Arthit looks toward the door as a car hisses by, narrowing his eyes against the glare through the door.
“There’s buckets of this kind of stuff at the beginning, but of course if it’s not in a file somewhere, it never happened. Anyway, Pan becomes one of Chai’s enforcers and works his way up, and the next thing we know-say he’s twenty-three, twenty-four-he’s taken over a massage place, just a dump off Sukhumvit. Real junk pile. Cops called it ‘the armpit,’ because it was hot and dirty and wet and it smelled. A total bottom-level, ten-dollar pounding parlor. Women, the kindest way to describe them would be ‘motherly.’ Title to the place changes hands, and trucks pull up, and a bunch of heavyweights go in with sledgehammers, and a couple tons of dirt get dumped in front, and there are a few weeks of banging and hammering and painting and flower planting, and the dirt gets turned into a big hill leading up to the front door, which is now black glass-etched, okay? — and a huge purple sign goes up that says ‘The Mound of Venus,’ and Pan owns the fanciest public whorehouse in Bangkok. And then he owns two, and then three. And they’ve all got that little hill outside, and they’re called, I don’t know, Mound Two and Mound Three.”
“The Mound of Venus?” Rafferty asks. “In English?”
“That touch of class,” Arthit says.
“And from that he got into everything.”
“You name it,” Arthit says, “and he’s in it. The first Mound was maybe nineteen years ago, and now he’s in everything. Hotels, apartment buildings, office blocks, toy manufacturing.” He wipes a palm over his forehead although the bar is cool. “In fact, manufacturing of all kinds-shoes, clothes, dishes, anything with a label on it. Factories everywhere. He’s a baht billionaire. For all I know, he’s a dollar billionaire, too.”
Rafferty drains his beer and watches the remaining bits of foam form little bubble continents as they slide down the inside of the glass. Finally he says, “Something’s missing. Where’s the connective tissue? I mean, there’s a gulf between baby thug-slash-sex mogul, as opposed to getting manufacturing rights to half the logos in the world. You don’t just buy into the kind of businesses he runs. For that you have to get to the really big boys. That’s a closed club.”
“You’re right,” Arthit says. “There’s something hidden there. And that’s probably the reason he doesn’t want his life story written.”
“You’ve mentioned his file a couple of times-”
“Have I?” Arthit’s eyebrows rise. “I shouldn’t have.” He picks up the glass and regards it with severity. “Muss-must be the drink talking.”
“Why?”
Arthit says, “Why’ is an extremely broad question.”
“Why shouldn’t you have mentioned his file?”
“If you ever looked at it, you’d know.”
“I don’t think I’m likely to get a look at it.”
“You’re certainly not. It’s sensitive information. Privileged.”
“Privileged how?”
“Strictly cops only. You’d have to get a cop very drunk for him to tell you that Pan’s file is about three pages long, with wide margins and big type, and it reads like the stuff the Catholic Church gives the pope when they want somebody sainted, except shorter. Zero real information. And this is a guy everybody knows is dirty.”
“But he’s a Boy Scout on paper.”
Arthit leans forward, pushing his face toward Rafferty’s. “You’re only hearing part of what I’m saying. The file’s interesting, but what’s more interesting is the amount of power it took. ’Nough power to get somebody who’s way, way up there to pull a big, fat, dirty file, hundreds of pages thick, and replace it with a box of candy. And I mean it’s been pulled everywhere. It’s not on paper at the stations, it’s not online, it’s not in the backup systems. Least not the ones I can access.”
“How unusual is that?”
The glass comes up again and gets tilted back. Rafferty watches the level drop. “Very,” Arthit says when he can talk again. “Extremely. Almost unprecedented.” He fans his face, which, thanks to the alcohol, is as red as the liquid that indicates the temperature in an old-time thermometer. “Poke. You don’t want to get anywhere near whoever deleted those files. Which means you don’t want to get near Pan.”
An hour later Rafferty steers Arthit’s car along the shining street, still wet from the drizzle, to the curb in front of the house that Arthit and his wife, Noi, share. Arthit has his head thrown back and his eyes closed, but when the car stops, he sits forward and looks around at the neighborhood as though he’s never seen it before.
He turns to face Rafferty. His eyebrows contract. “My car, right?”
“Right,” Rafferty says, pulling the key from the ignition.
Arthit blinks lids as heavy as a lizard’s. “How’d I get over here?”
“Seemed like a good idea, since you’d drunk most of the Johnnie Walker Black in Bangkok.”
“Did I?” Arthit seems pleased to hear it.
Rafferty gives his friend a second to find his way into the present. “I have a question for you.”
“And I,” Arthit says with careful precision, “am hip-deep in answers.”
“You knew all about Pan, about the amount of power behind him, earlier this evening.”
Arthit says, “Oh,” and turns to look out the window at his house, at the place where he had once thought he and Noi would raise their children. He breathes on the window to fog it. “That.”
“Well, knowing all of it, why did you let things get so out of hand at the card table? Why didn’t you defuse it earlier?”
“The right question,” Arthit says thickly, “is, why didn’t I give a fuck?”
Rafferty waits.
Arthit slumps sideways, his cheek pressed against the passenger window. “Between us,” he says.
“Fine.”
“I mean it. Not even Rose.”
This stops Rafferty for a moment. There’s nothing he keeps from Rose. He looks at his friend’s drained, crumpled face and says, “Not even Rose.”
“Noi needs…pills to sleep,” Arthit says. The words seem to require physical effort. “The pain’s worse and worse. It keeps her up. I can hear her breathing. So the doctor, the new one, he gives her sleeping pills. Strong ones. She’s been getting them for more than three months.”
Noi has been Arthit’s wife for seventeen years. Her nervous system is being ravaged by multiple sclerosis. In the last few months, her decline has been brutally swift. She is a burning match. Arthit has been reduced to the role of helpless bystander.
“Do they work?”
“I wouldn’t know,” Arthit says.
“Why not?”
Arthit opens the glove compartment and snaps it shut again. “Every night she goes into the bathroom and she brushes her teeth, and then I listen as she fills a glass with water and shakes a pill out of the bottle, and then she comes to bed. Just like the doctor told her to. And I lie there and listen to her breathe, hear the catch in her breath, and I know she’s awake.” He opens the little compartment door again and leaves it hanging, the dim splash of light from inside it bringing his thighs and belly out of the darkness. “And this morning I went into the kitchen to make her some pancakes, as a surprise. She loves pancakes.”