Street Music Page 11

  Rose says, “I’m happy.”

  He says, “Me too,” and Fon leads the women in a round of applause that almost makes him jump out of his skin. He’d forgotten they were in the room.

  A little after 4 p.m., his phone rings. Leon, it reads, and for the hundredth time since his friend died he resolves to change the caller ID to the name of the bar.

  “Is Toots,” she says, as she always does.

  “Hi, Toots.”

  “Bob problem.”

  “You’re telling me?”

  “You come here. Bob problem. Maybe big problem.”

  “What kind of—”

  “You come here.”

  “I’m busy right now,” he says, and the front door opens. Miaow comes through, followed by Edward. In lockstep, they go straight to the kitchen, and Rafferty can absolutely not avoid glancing at the drawer with his journal in it. “Wait, Toots. What kind of problem? And why me?”

  “Why you?” She sounds incredulous. “You his friend.”

  “He has . . .” he hesitates, but finishes the sentence anyway, “a lot of friends.”

  “You friend number one. You come. You come now.” She disconnects.

  From the kitchen, Miaow calls, “Something wrong?”

  “No, nothing, somebody else’s problem.” He drops the phone into his shirt pocket and stands there, irresolute, thinking, friend number one?

  “Anything serious?” Miaow is standing in the entryway to the kitchen.

  “No. I mean, I don’t know, but I know it’s not our problem. Don’t eat the som tam.”

  “Why not?”

  “Fon thinks it might be a little old. Just leave it alone.”

  “Will you be back for dinner?”

  “I have no idea. Just don’t eat the—”

  “Yeah, got it. What are you looking for?”

  “My phone.”

  “It’s in your shirt pocket.” She comes all the way into the room. “Are you sure it’s nothing serious? You usually know where you put something, especially if it’s like ten seconds ago.”

  “My father’s forgetting things, too,” Edward calls cheerily from the kitchen. “We look for his keys almost every day.”

  “I’m not forgetting things. It’s just . . . you guys going to run lines?”

  “When we’re not canoodling,” Miaow says.

  “Well, don’t get too involved with the canoodling. There’s a quintet of bar workers here. They’ll rate your technique, laugh you all the way to Cambodia.” He slaps his pockets for his keys, finds them, and says, “And some information remains within the family, right?”

  “Sure. Will you be home for dinner?”

  Edward says, “What information?”

  “I have no idea about dinner,” Rafferty says. “Didn’t I already say that? Listen, I wouldn’t eat the—right, right, I told you. Go say hello to your mother. Tell her I’ll be back later, okay?”

  Miaow is saying, “But Mom will want to know if—” when he pulls the door closed behind him.

  11

  Queen’s Mansion

  The traffic is building to its early-evening delirium as he does his much-practiced broken-field running across Silom. He earns a couple of honks, but they’re purely ceremonial: the cars are barely inching forward. Only once does his heart rate increase, and that’s when he steps between two cars and in front of a motorcycle that’s doing about forty kilometers per hour, zigzagging between vehicles that are eighteen inches apart. It streaks past him, a girl with wet, shiny hair clinging one-handed to the backseat. The bike’s blaring horn leaves him with his fingers in his ears.

  Patpong is glum, dull, ugly, and relatively empty. The colored lights haven’t been flicked on yet and women are ambling toward the bars dressed in T-shirts and jeans, many of them with hair as wet from their afternoon showers as the girl on the motorcycle’s had been. They look younger and less sophisticated out here; they haven’t put on their work faces yet. Making up is a communal ritual performed in tribes in front of the mirrored wall that’s a feature of so many bars, the women catching up on the events of the day, each tribe dodging the members of the others.

  Once, he thinks, as he often does, this was Rose’s life. And now she’s at home with what’s-his-name, Frank, his son is named Frank.

  The rusty bell announces him to the thin scrum of afternoon drinkers: the guy with the hair, the two Bob Campeau wannabes he’d had to bribe to leave him and Bob alone the previous night, a couple of newbies—tourists, looking disappointed with what might be their first Patpong adventure—and, perched expertly on a barstool, whispering fiercely to Toots, an attractive woman in her early fifties whose hair is the kind of flat matte black that proclaims dye job even from across the street. She might, Rafferty conjectures, be having second thoughts about the dye since she’s doing nothing to hide the inch of steel gray that bisects her head, straight as the track of a bullet, on either side of the center part. Toots spots him and lifts her chin at him as he comes in, and the other woman turns to glance at him, then looks back to Toots and shakes her head, disappointment in any language. Despite the low-budget implications of the dye job, she’s wearing a loose, light blouse that’s silk even from this distance and a pair of shoes by a guy Rose has intermittently obsessed over, Christian Louboutin, their provenance announced by the blood-red soles, effortlessly displayed by the neatly crossed ankles she’s propped on the rung of her stool. There are a lot of fake Louboutin shoes in Bangkok, and he’d bet that these aren’t among them. She also has the perfect ankles for the shoes, which is to say flawless. Rafferty is a highly qualified arbiter of ankles.

  He waves at the members of the Campeau fan club, nods at the guy with the hair, and ignores the tourists, who return the favor. As he pulls up a stool at the bar, leaving one empty between himself and the woman with the two-tone hair and the expensive shoes, Toots says, in Thai, “Here he is.”

  “Here I am,” he agrees in Thai. He lowers his voice and glances, meaningfully, he hopes, at Campeau’s carbon copies, and puts a finger to his lips. “What’s the problem?”

  The woman with the two-tone hair purses her mouth: he’s being too direct. He says to Toots, “Would you please introduce us?”

  “Khun Ratana,” Toots says. “This is Khun Poke.”

  Ratana says, “Poke?” She looks startled.

  “Philip,” Rafferty says. “My real name is Philip. My father called me Poke.” It doesn’t look like that response cleared up much of anything, but he’s not in the mood to replay the whole thing about how he’d poked his nose into things when he was a kid, so he just says, “American nickname. What’s going on with Bob?”

  Khun Ratana exchanges a look with Toots, and Toots says, in Thai, “He’s stronger than he looks. And smarter.”

  Ratana glances at Rafferty again, and when she catches him looking directly at her, her skepticism dissolves instantly into a radiantly meaningless smile. “I’m sure he is,” she says to Toots in English, “if you say so.” She gazes past Toots, studying the bar. “Do you have Dr. Pepper?”

  “No. Have cola, have Fanta.”

  “Which flavors?”

  Toots shrugs. “All terrible. Have beer.”

  “Well,” the woman—Ratana—says, “if you say so.”

  The glance Toots gives Rafferty is so fast he almost misses it, but Ratana slaps the back of Toots’ hand in reproach and Toots yanks it back, and they both laugh.

  “Dr. Pepper,” Toots says scornfully. “I know you one hundred year, you never drink Dr. Pepper.” She leans down to open the refrigerator.

  “It sounds so healthy,” Ratana says. She turns to Rafferty and says, “I don’t know you.” Her English is excellent.

  “That makes us even. I don’t know you, either.”

  “Although Bob did say you were a friend.”

 
; “Ah,” Rafferty says, not sure how to react to his promotion; he’d never really thought of Campeau as a friend. “You’re another one of Bob’s, um . . .” he glances away, but the clones are talking to each other. “His friends?”

  “I’m his landlady. I own the apartment house he lives in. Long time now, fourteen years, I think.”

  “I see.” He watches Toots pop the cap from a Singha and decides against asking for one. She probably wouldn’t give it to him, anyway. “What seems to be the problem?” He holds up a wait a minute finger and says to Toots, “How old is the coffee?”

  She closes one eye in concentration. “Two day. Maybe three.”

  “Well, then. A very small cup, if you can chip it out of the pot.”

  Pouring into a mug, Toots says, “Joking. Not old.”

  Ratana says, “I got a call this morning from the person in the apartment next to your friend’s. She said she heard things breaking and slamming against the wall, and at some point someone screamed.”

  “Screamed?”

  “Well, shouted. I’m just telling you what she said.”

  “Male or female?”

  “I didn’t ask.”

  “What time? I mean, was she calling while it was going on, or—”

  “No, later. She said it woke her up about four in the morning and she wanted me to know, but she didn’t want to bother me at that—”

  “Okay, late last night, early this morning. And so—let me just think this through—Bob’s neighbor hears all that ruckus, maybe violence, in the middle of the night—”

  “Ruckus?”

  “Noise—you know, things banging around.”

  “Ruckus,” she says with the air of someone memorizing a word.

  “And she waits until this morning to call you, and you call Toots, and Toots says to call me.”

  “No, I—”

  “And nobody thinks to call, you know, the cops.”

  Ratana says, “Bob hates the cops.”

  Toots says, “Everybody hate—” but Ratana says, over her, “He told me to call you if anything went wrong. I didn’t know how to get in touch with you.”

  “He told you to call me?”

  “If there’s a problem. Yes.”

  “But Toots didn’t just give you my phone number.”

  “Want to know,” Toots says, as though it were the most obvious thing in the world. “Want to know what happen.”

  “Well,” Rafferty says, “what did happen?”

  “I don’t know,” Ratana says with the air of someone being asked a stupid question. “He said to call—”

  “Okay, okay, I’ve got that part. So what you seem to be saying is that no one has been in the apartment since all the ruckus.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “For example, you. You haven’t been to—”

  “No, no, no.” She’s wiping the words out of the air as she speaks.

  “And you want me to look.”

  “Yes.”

  Rafferty says, “He could be dead in there.”

  “Oh, no,” Ratana says, picking up her beer. “He’s too mean to die.”

  For the past five or six years it’s been evident to Rafferty that Bangkok is under energetic and perpetual attack by developers. Individual buildings, groups of adjoining buildings, even entire streets have fallen prey to the bulldozers, creating new neighborhoods for people to get lost in, vainly seeking their familiar landmarks. Here and there, while navigating a “renovated” area, Rafferty has grown used to seeing the odd building or two that miraculously escaped improvement, as though their bit of the street had somehow been folded out of sight when the heavy machinery showed up, leaving them as they were: low, dumpy, sooty concrete buildings, glum but familiar among the shiny strangers, the only bad teeth in the block’s gleaming new smile.

  Khun Ratana is a fast walker, and she has the advantage of knowing where she’s going. Rafferty scrambles to keep up, one eye on the red soles, as she leads him over a zigzag path through patchwork neighborhoods, carrying on a conversation in which she largely replies to him over her shoulder. Bob, she says again, has been living in the apartment for fourteen years, which tells him it wasn’t the one Malee stole everything of value out of, when she broke Bob’s heart.

  “I bought the building just before he moved in,” she says in Thai. The silver hair on either side of her part gleams in the late-afternoon sun. “Most of the apartments were occupied when I bought it, so he was my first new tenant, the first one I really had to talk to. One of the first Americans I ever talked to, in fact.” She tilts her head to one side. “We’ll go left up here.”

  “So,” he prompts, “one of the first Americans you—”

  “Yes. I got to know him because I’d spent every baht I had to buy the building, and I was living in it to save money when he moved in, and I was worried about things breaking, maintenance problems, because I couldn’t afford the repairs. So, naturally, things broke, and Khun Bob fixed them.”

  Rafferty says, “Really” because it’s the only thing that comes to him.

  “He wouldn’t let me pay him, either. It was embarrassing. I’d knock on his door to tell him what was wrong and promise to pay him as soon as I could, and he always just shook his head. ‘What else am I doing?’ he’d say. He was my first American, and I remember thinking that Americans were very generous and very sad.”

  “Sad?”

  “I don’t think I’ve ever known anyone sadder than he is. I’ve met lots of Americans since then so I know they’re not all like that. He’s still the saddest.”

  “Really.”

  She slows and looks back at him. “Don’t you think he’s sad?”

  Rafferty opens his mouth and closes it. Then he says, “Yes, I guess I do. I met him later than you did, only about eight years ago. I thought he was mostly angry.”

  “Broken heart,” she said, as if it were self-evident. “Men don’t know how to live through having their hearts broken. It changes them.”

  “It doesn’t change women?”

  “Women expect to have their hearts broken. It’s part of being a woman. We live through it the best we can. For men, it’s a surprise. They always think they’ll get their way in the world, and then they don’t.”

  “You’re not worried about him?”

  She stops until he catches up with her. “Of course I am.”

  It’s a four-story building, squat and stubby-looking in contrast with the newer, more ambitious structures on the street, and it encapsulates most of the cheap Bangkok building conventions of the 1950s: colorless concrete; aluminum-frame windows; tiny balconies, no more than a couple of feet deep and five or six feet long. Many of the balconies are decked out with things hung up to dry: clothes, towels, sheets, washrags. In front of the building, to the left of the double glass doors, is a highly conspicuous wooden structure about the size and shape of the prow of a large sailboat. The wood has been stained a golden brown, and incised into it are the words queen’s mansion.

  “Mansion,” she says, opening the door with a key card. “Everything in Bangkok is a mansion.”

  “I’ve noticed. Is there any way for you to keep track of those key cards?”

  “No.” She shoulders the door aside and holds it for him. “First floor, stairs on the right. Oh, sorry, for you Americans, second floor. At first I tried to make everyone turn the keys in when they moved, but by then there were people who said they lost theirs or they’d accidentally packed them, and how could I know whether that was true?”

  Rafferty pulls open a metal fire door in the right wall of the small lobby, undecorated but for a large color photo of the former king and his queen—Sirikit, now the Queen Mother—in an ornate gilt frame. He holds it open for Ratana, who has slowed to wai the royalty, and then he follows her up.

  “A
gentleman,” she says. “So one year I changed the code and gave everyone new cards, and for the next six weeks my life was hell. Everybody got locked out. No one threw away the old cards and they’d try to use them instead, so I was getting calls day and night from people who were stuck at the door. The next year I changed the color of the cards and asked for the old ones back, but some people had more than one of the old ones and were apparently color blind, too, so I still got calls. So I gave up.” She stops at the switchback and looks down at him. “You think maybe someone broke in and hurt him?”

  “For all I know, he knocked over his ironing board and he’s still asleep.”

  “Toots says . . .” She turns away from him and opens the door, but he stops her by saying, “Toots says? Toots says what?”

  “That he was very sad last night. Sadder than usual.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “He wouldn’t go home. She says in all the time she’s been there, thirty years or however long it’s been, he never insisted on staying after closing time. But last night he sat there, without saying anything, just drinking until she had turned on the lights, swept, washed the glasses, everything. She finally had to give him a beer to take with him and lock him out, and she said, the way he walked up Patpong, he didn’t look like he knew where he was.”

  Rafferty says, “Shit,” and comes up another two steps. “But wait, he was alone? All the noise your tenant heard. I mean, do you think he had a fight or something?”

  “I don’t know. That’s why you’re with me. And do I think he killed himself or somebody else did? I don’t know that, either.”

  “Well, let’s go.”

  The hallway is narrow and dim and damp-smelling, lighted in the daytime only by a floor-to-ceiling window at each end. The corridor runs east-west, and Rafferty finds himself peering directly into the last moments of the sun, glaring at him with an almost personal ferocity between two newer and higher buildings. By the time he looks away from the brightness he already has the sun imprinted on his retinas, and the hallway seems impenetrably dark. He looks down at the floor, blinking hard, and what he sees, cheap linoleum, does not reassure him: Bob should be living better than this. He’s trying to push down a rising tide of uneasiness when fluorescent lights stutter on overhead, probably on a timer, and Ratana says, “Right here.”