“But what?”
“But I don’t want to be here alone.”
“That damn Da,” Boo says. “Ghosts everywhere.” He straightens partway and looks down at Tee. “You going to be okay?” It’s more a threat than a question.
Tee averts his eyes. “I guess.”
“Won’t be long.”
As Boo starts to move to his left, he sees Dr. Ravi, who’s still standing in the doorway, unfold three legs at the bottom of one of the pipe-like objects to create a tall tripod. He bends down and picks up one of the lights and starts to screw it onto the top of the tripod. He has to stand on tiptoe to tighten the light. He handles the objects clumsily. They’re obviously unfamiliar to him, and assembling them fully engages his attention.
At the edge of the driveway, Boo pauses and steadies his breathing. The driveway is about fifteen feet wide, and with the Mercedes behind him there’s no cover at all. He waits until Dr. Ravi turns his back to the door, picks up the light, now securely atop the pole, and carries it left, out of sight. Then Boo crouches low, takes one last look at the door and the window, and sprints, bent almost double, over the cracked asphalt. He has made it most of the distance across when his toe catches on the edge of a fractured, uptilted piece of paving. He windmills his arms, he tries desperately to find a point of balance, but he was moving too fast, and there’s no question. He’s going down.
At the last possible second, he realizes he’s going to land on his elbows, and he pulls them back to avoid breaking them, and he hits flat on his stomach. The grunt that the impact forces out of him can be heard even over the generator. He remains absolutely still, holding his breath, his eyes glued to the doorway, wishing fiercely for invisibility, and he hears someone inside say, “Somebody’s out there.”
And then something cold and wet touches his arm.
“Why Dr. Ravi?” Arthit asks.
The taxi is absolutely rocketing now that the densest parts of the city are behind them, the driver using flashing headlights, a nasal horn, and a well-oiled accelerator pedal to muscle the rest of the world out of the way.
“Process of elimination,” Rafferty says as the landscape flashes past. “What it comes down to is that nobody else knows as much about what’s happening in Pan’s life, no one else is in daily contact with him. Let’s say Dr. Ravi applied for the job because he thought, like a lot of people, that Pan was a great man.”
“He probably could have been,” Arthit says.
“Pan?” the driver asks. “You mean the one with all the money? What a guy.”
Arthit says, “I rest my case.”
“And maybe one reason Dr. Ravi wanted the job was that it hadn’t escaped his attention that Pan could have a significant political future,” Rafferty says. “And let’s say that Dr. Ravi has unexpectedly democratic sentiments and he thinks that Pan might be the person who could finally give the poor a say in how the country is run.”
“I’d vote for him,” the driver says.
“Just drive,” Kosit says.
“I’d like to be next in line for his girls, too,” the driver says.
“Here’s the thing,” Arthit says to the driver. “Shut up and drive, or when we get there, I’ll shoot you.”
Rafferty looks over at him, and Arthit shrugs.
“Cops,” the driver grumbles.
“And get us there in ten minutes,” Arthit says, “and you’ll make an extra five thousand baht.”
The driver says, “Driving.”
“So he gets the job, Dr. Ravi does,” Rafferty says, “and the first thing he does is go through everything in the files, probably including some stuff he shouldn’t have seen at all. As he told me, he’s the media director. He needs to know whether there are any skeletons in the closet. He’s expecting one or two-nobody gets as rich as Pan without a few skeletons folded away here and there-but he’s not prepared for a hundred and twenty-one of them.”
Arthit thinks about it for a moment. “How do you know he found out about that?”
Rafferty also thinks for a second, then shakes his head. “Actually, I don’t. But he knew what Snakeskin was.”
Arthit says, “Mmmmm.”
“So let’s say he didn’t know about what happened at the factory. But the deal with Ton, with Snakeskin, is happening in real time, in the office Pan shares with Dr. Ravi, and Dr. Ravi found out about it.”
He breaks off as Arthit touches his knee and lifts his eyebrows at the driver, whose eyes keep going to the rearview mirror.
“And that information…um, confounded Dr. Ravi’s expectations, and all of a sudden his political allegiances shifted. I mean, drastically. Whether he knew about the fire or not, he suddenly realizes that the archangel is in bed with the archfiend. So Dr. Ravi decides to use his privileged position to work against you-know-who’s ever getting elected to anything, and here comes the last thing on earth he wants to see: some hack writer, and a farang to boot, all set to crank out a biography of the no-longer-great man.”
“Why would he think the book would be sympathetic?”
“My fault. I kicked him out of the office before I told Pan about the threats from the other side, before we came to our understanding. When the door opens, half an hour later, Pan and I are getting along great, so great that I’ve been invited to the malaria thing, and then Pan’s lending my wife diamonds worth millions, and I’m apparently allowed to drop by whenever I want. So sure, Dr. Ravi figures the book will be a whitewash, a fan letter. I’m going to turn Pan into Gandhi.”
Arthit scratches his head. “So it was Dr. Ravi who warned you not to write the book.”
“Yeah. I don’t think he was actually going to carry out the threats. He thought I’d scare off easily, and I would have if it hadn’t been for Ton. But he got some people who are really serious about their politics to keep an eye on me, and when he told them to discourage me for a second or third time, they went a little overboard.”
Arthit glances at the bandaged hand. “I’d say so.”
“I’d like to keep listening,” the driver says, “but we’re almost there. It’s the next right.”
49
Boo rolls over four or five times, as fast as he can-sky, driveway, sky, driveway-heading for the weeds, putting distance between himself and the…the whatever it was. He reaches the edge of the drive and worms his way into the weeds, pulling himself along on his elbows, just as a brilliant light pours out of the window on the left. The light is pointed directly at Boo. He knows he’s been spotted, and he’s on the verge of getting to his knees so he can run, but the light slowly slides past him. He’s just realizing that they didn’t see him after all when the light picks out an old gray dog, sitting in the center of the driveway, scratching its ear.
“A dog,” somebody inside says.
The light, Boo can see now, is the one Dr. Ravi was assembling. He’s standing in the window, holding the pipe so he can turn the light right and left without burning his hands on the fixture. The dog gets up slowly, obviously stiff in the joints, gives its ribs a halfhearted scratch with a back paw, looks at Boo, and wags its tail. Then it starts to amble toward him.
“Where’s it going?” a different voice-Pan-asks.
Boo is frantically trying to wave the dog off. A little creakily, the dog goes down on its front legs, paws wide, ready to play.
“Maybe there’s somebody there,” Dr. Ravi says.
“Gun,” Pan says. He is still out of sight.
“It’s probably some kid. Who’s going to show up with a dog?”
“Gun,” Pan snaps.
Dr. Ravi lets go of the light, and it ends up pointing at the spot where Boo left Tee. Boo peers through the weeds, trying to see something, anything-the pale oval of a face, the gleam of eyes. But there’s nothing. So the good news is that they don’t see Tee. The bad news is that the dog is headed straight for Boo.