Fools' River Read online

  “You must have been horrified.”

  “Yes,” she says. “The picture was enough to frighten me half to death. But, to be totally honest with you, I’d been expecting something like this for years.”

  “Why?”

  She clears her throat and then strokes it with her fingers, like someone trying to resist a cough. “Stuart didn’t take sex seriously on an emotional level, but someone like him, sooner or later, is going to come up against someone who does take it seriously, A husband, a boyfriend, girlfriend, a father, the mailman. Who knows? I continually expected a call saying he’d been shot to death or run over by a tractor. He had a penchant for rural girls.” She closes her eyes briefly, and when she opens them, she’s looking at the bookshelf. “But I hadn’t expected anything as . . . as operatic as this.”

  “So you came here and started to talk to people.”

  “With no real point. I knew I wouldn’t learn anything valuable. I just wanted to get a sense of his world, by which I mean the last world he was aware of. So I talked to the fading sex addicts on Patpong because he’d mentioned ‘the guys’ at that bar, and they were surprisingly sympathetic. The one with the awful comb-over—”

  “Bob Campeau.”

  “I suppose. He patted me on the shoulder. One of the most awkward gestures I’ve ever seen, but he meant well.”

  “Did he get up off his stool?”

  “Yes. Is that unusual?”

  “Close to unique.”

  “Well,” she says, looking at nothing. “He did.” Then she turns back to the table, picks up the china again, and says, “Maybe we should go see Stuart.”

  He knows traffic is terrible by now, and he doesn’t want to look at his watch, but he says, “How far away is it?”

  “Not far,” she says. “Ninety, a hundred feet.”

  14

  Cast Aside in the New Order of Things

  He follows her down a long hallway with a gleaming marble floor, past a kitchen half the size of his apartment, where two Thai women in blue jeans and T-shirts are loading an industrial-size dishwasher. “These are Ning and Som,” Mrs. Dependahl says. The women turn at the sound of their names, and one of them smiles—the one on the left, Ning, Rafferty supposes, since we read left to right and Mrs. Dependahl named her first. Ning—if that’s who she is—is in her mid-twenties and plump, with an intelligent, slightly apprehensive expression. The other, who has to be Som, is older and rail thin, graying hair pulled back mercilessly to make a no-nonsense bun with a pencil stuck through it, and bright, sharp-cornered eyes.

  Rafferty says hello. Ning nods and extends the gesture into a very slight bow, as though she half expects a slap, rubbing her hands together a bit anxiously while Som gives him the measured nod and pursed lips of a teacher who’s heard all about him and is just waiting for him to act up.

  “They’re angels, hospice people,” Mrs. Dependahl says. “I don’t know what I’d do without them.”

  “He’s here?” Rafferty says. He’d figured the hospice was elsewhere in the city.

  “Of course he’s here. One thing I’ve got here is space.” To Som she says, “I have a shopping list if you get time to go to Foodland.”

  “Villa better,” Som says.

  “I know you like Villa,” Mrs. Dependahl says with a tiny measure of steel, “but I prefer the meat at Foodland, so let’s go to Foodland today, okay?”

  Som nods with the air of someone who’s keeping score, then turns back to the dishwasher, and Fran leads him down the hall. “Som is the wife Stuart actually needed,” she says. “He’d have been terrified of her.” She opens another door, and the marble floor turns to unconvincing wood laminate, the bare walls painted a flat white. “Servants’ quarters,” she says unapologetically.

  She goes to a varnished wooden door, but as she’s about to turn the handle, Rafferty says, “Before we go in, does he . . . I mean, can he . . . ?”

  “Is he aware? The doctors say no, but they would, wouldn’t they? Otherwise they’d have to admit that they have no idea. That’s what I’m most afraid of, actually, that he’s in there somewhere, in a tiny little bright box, fully aware and screaming to be let out.” She breaks off, chewing on her lower lip. “Som—who, as you might have noticed, is not the sunniest house on the block—Som thinks he hears everything, registers everything. She calls him ‘Big Ears,’ as though he eavesdrops on every word spoken within a mile, and she talks to him all the time, resuming one-sided conversations from the day before, telling him about the weather, the prime minister, the latest family ghost story, the price of a kilo of rice.” She pauses for a moment, as though she’s lost her place. “Telling him . . . ahh, what she and Ning are going to do for him moment by moment, like a play-by-play announcer, getting irritated with him when he’s not being good.”

  “Being good?” Rafferty says.

  “You know, when he’s got drool on himself or—oh, I don’t know, anything that she disapproves of, and she disapproves of everything. It upset me at first, but Ning, who’s terrified of Som, says that it’s what Stuart needs, he needs to be treated like everyone else. Ning, being Ning, plays good cop and tells him he’s looking handsome each morning and, um . . .” She lowers her head, and he hears her draw a couple of deep breaths. “It’s a blessing they’re here,” she says. “They give him, between them, a kind of community.”

  “And you,” he says. “Don’t forget about you.”

  “I try,” she says. “I do what I can do. Let’s go introduce you.”

  The room is sparsely furnished, a long hospital bed, the back raised to an angle of about thirty degrees, a wheeled table, probably for food and palliative supplies, two barstools, high enough so that the people who sit on them are at eye level with the man in the bed. The walls are completely bare.

  The man in the bed looks diminished in a way that suggests evaporation over a long period of time. He’s on his side, facing away from them, so all Rafferty can see are the hunched shoulders and the slight frame beneath the white sheets and a close-cropped head of gray hair, just mowed back, it seems, with an electric razor.

  Fran is talking before the door closes behind them. “Good morning, Stuart. It’s hot as hell out, even for this time of year, and I’ve brought you a visitor, a man named Poke Rafferty—isn’t that a silly name? Why are you called Poke?”

  “When I was a kid,” he says, “I poked my nose into things that didn’t concern me. My father had an irritable side, and he called me Poke.”

  “Well, Stuart has spent his entire life, seventy-three years of it, without a single nickname, haven’t you, Stuart? Not even Stu.” They’ve come around the bed now, and what Rafferty sees first are Stuart’s arms on top of the sheets, the elbows bent and the wrists close together, like those of a man in prayer, except that one hand is a few inches higher than the other and both are crumpled into loose fists that look permanent. His nails need to be cut. There’s something utterly defenseless about the position. The hands have a discarded, forgotten air, something cast aside in the new order of things.

  Beneath the short, unevenly cropped hair, Stuart’s face is still beautiful: an aquiline nose, fine cheekbones, a strong cleft chin, and an unexpectedly sensitive mouth. His eyes are closed most of the way, just the whites and the very bottoms of his irises visible beneath the long lids. He smells of sweat, staleness, and urine.

  “Isn’t he handsome?” She tugs the sheet, which looks like it’s been ironed, out from under his elbows and arranges it up around his wrists. Half of his tattoo, the Tenniel illustration of Alice’s caterpillar, protrudes above the sheet’s edge. “The curled fingers?” she says. “That’s a kind of atrophy of the muscles. You’d think they’d get looser, but instead they . . . umm, contract like that. There’s something graceful about it, isn’t there?”

  “Very,” he says, because it’s the only word that presents itself.

/>   “Stuart, I brought Mr. Rafferty in here to meet you because he’s looking for the people who did this to you, and I thought you’d like to know that. Mr. Rafferty has written a whole book about Bangkok,” she says, and then she uses the back of her hand to swipe at her cheeks, “and he knows it backward and forward. He can find anybody. He’s helped lots of people, haven’t you, Mr. Rafferty?” She sounds furious.

  “I have.”

  She says, through teeth that might as well be glued together, “And you can find them, can’t you?”

  “I can.”

  “And you will?”

  It feels like talking to a ghost, but the anger has risen to the back of his throat, and he says to Stuart, “I will.”

  “He’s exactly who we need,” she says to her husband, and now she’s not bothering to wipe the tears away, although her voice is under control. “And when he’s got them, Stuart, when he finds them . . . well, tell him, Mr. Rafferty, tell Stuart what you’re going to do to them.”

  Rafferty comes to the side of the bed, heavy with fury, as he leans down to talk directly to Stuart. Speaking around what feels like a half-swallowed stone, he says, “I am going to fuck them up. I’m going to fuck them up so badly their shadows will try to run away.”

  Movement at the edge of Poke’s vision draws his eye. The two Thai women from the kitchen are standing in the doorway. Ning’s mouth is slightly open, and her eyes are wide. Som looks like she can’t decide whether it would be impolite to look amused.

  “And when he’s done, Stuart,” Fran Dependahl says, “he’s going to come back here and tell you every single thing he did to them. Twice, if you want to hear it again.” She looks at Rafferty expectantly.

  “I will,” he says again. And then, to the unmoving man on the bed, he says, “I promise.”

  15

  Staring into the Glare

  When he leaves, ten minutes later, Rafferty goes down the front steps of Fran Dependahl’s sprauncy condo building carrying a cardboard box that once contained a dozen bottles of a red Bordeaux he’s wanted to taste for most of his adult life. It’s now filled haphazardly with a miscellany of documents, notebooks, paperback mysteries, folded newspapers, wallet contents, anything and everything with writing on it that had been in the apartment Stuart had been living in—not the present one—when Fran arrived in Bangkok. After Fran cleared it all out, she’d asked the police if they wanted it, but they had not expressed interest.

  It’s a hike to get to the Skytrain, and Fran had been telling Stuart the truth about the heat, so Rafferty flags a cab, shoves the box across the backseat, and slides in behind it. As the car pulls into traffic, his phone buzzes on his hip.

  “Where are you?” It’s Arthit.

  “Sukhumvit, Soi . . . uhh, Twenty, give or take.”

  “Which direction?”

  “South, essentially.”

  “Tell you what. Meet Clemente at Chu’s in the Exchange Tower on Asoke. Second floor. Driver can drop you right there. She should be there about now.”

  “Okay, Chu’s. Just talked with the woman whose husband is brain-dead. Saw him, and I’ll tell you, Arthit, it was rough.” He leans forward to give the driver the new destination.

  “Let Clemente go to Edward’s later today,” Arthit says. “It’ll help get her feet wet, give her some experience with what we’re looking for and a little emotional motivation at the same time.”

  “I’ll work it out with her. I want to be there, too.”

  “Fine.”

  “Thanks for getting on this so quickly.”

  “Someone has to,” Arthit says. “It’s awful.” He disconnects.

  What he doesn’t see through the restaurant’s glass walls when he reaches the top of the escalator, lugging his Bordeaux box, is Clemente. But he immediately spots an unoccupied table for four with two storage boxes on it, both thoughtfully marked as police property in enormous Thai characters, just in case there’s anyone in the restaurant who wouldn’t already want to eavesdrop on the conversation between a farang and a brisk-looking, uniformed policewoman with enormous golden eyes.

  Chu’s is small, crowded, and deafening, but Clemente has obviously pulled rank. The boxes sit atop one of the few tables where people can hear one another, because it’s up against the wall. When he goes in, a college-age waiter intercepts him and says, in English, “Five, ten minute, sir.”

  “I’m with the cop,” Rafferty says, pointing his chin at the table with the boxes on it. He jiggles his own box as further credentials. “Where’s my friend?”

  The boy looks past him a bit anxiously, as though he fears the appearance of an entire uniformed division. “She . . . she in kitchen.”

  “In the kitchen,” he says.

  “She want to see how making food.”

  “Right, well, she’s a member of the . . . umm, the food squad. Everything okay back there, all clean and everything?”

  “Clean enough to whistle,” the boy says.

  Rafferty thinks about correcting him and then realizes he has no answer for the inevitable question, What’s so clean about a whistle? So he says, “She shouldn’t give you any trouble, then. I’ll go wait for her. Coffee, black, please.”

  As he sits down behind the big boxes that say police, putting his own carton on the chair beside him, he feels the curious eyes of the other customers. In a way, he thinks, this whole episode—since he spotted the boxes, minus Clemente, waiting for him on the table, the interaction with the waiter, all of it—is probably a good thing. It’s allowed him to put a little space between him and the rage that rose up in him the moment he saw Stuart Dependahl in his perpetual, useless attitude of prayer.

  The detachment lasts until he opens the first of Clemente’s boxes and takes out a thin, battered wallet with the rigidity of leather that’s spent some time in water. It’s been relieved of any cash or credit cards it might have contained, but behind a piece of clear plastic—glued to it now by the coating on its surface—is a small color photo. A laughing woman in her early thirties, wearing a bathing suit, a big-brimmed sun hat, and dark glasses, sits on a dock that reaches out into what seems to be a lake. Gathered around her like baby chicks are two boys of four or five, twins from the look of them, and a little blonde girl, a toddler, probably two. The twins are laughing hilariously at something as their little sister watches them with her mouth open and their mother, despite her own laughter, squints a bit painfully at the camera. The photographer’s shadow stretches toward them like a long, pointing finger; the sun was almost directly behind him, which explains his wife’s expression: She’s staring into the glare. On one level, Rafferty thinks, this is a family whose problem is that they’ll get to their cabin or their hotel room and realize they had so much fun they forgot to slather the kids with sunscreen.

  But their real problem, of course, is that Daddy is dead.

  The picture could have been taken ten or twelve years ago, maybe even more; bathing suits and sun hats don’t change all that rapidly. The little boys are towheads with mops of blond hair that wouldn’t have looked out of place at any time, even during Rafferty’s childhood. But the edges of the picture are still sharp and uncreased, and the colors are still crisp, and even in its present state the picture has a hard-edged digital quality. So let’s say eleven, twelve years old. That would put the boys in their teens and in high school now and their little sister somewhere in the wind-tunnel drama of junior high.

  Do they have any idea what actually happened to their father?

  Do they believe he just paid a visit to Bangkok and mysteriously fell into a canal with casts on his unbroken legs? What story were they told? And why is all this stuff still in a box, in storage? This should obviously be an active investigation.

  A slight drop in the conversation level makes him look up, and he sees Clemente threading her way toward him, people sliding their chairs asid
e in deference to her uniform and doing double takes at her face. In a country where most women have hair that shines and ripples like a conditioner commercial, Clemente’s chopped thatch is thick, black, almost coarse, with no sense of direction: Despite high-energy brushing, it flies out toward all points of the compass. She has unusually broad shoulders for a woman so short, and a strong, pronounced jaw. In Bangkok this adds up to a highly distinctive appearance, but almost no one who meets her winds up remembering anything except the extraordinary eyes, the color of fine, pale amber, that seem to take up half her face. If she had barged into Chu’s with a machine gun, blown out the windows, and killed half the customers, the only thing on all the identikit pictures would be a pair of eyes.

  “What were you doing back there?” he says as she slides into the chair opposite him.

  “I want the eggs Benedict,” she says, in Thai, although her English is extremely good, “but with bacon, not ham, and I wanted to make sure I’d get lean bacon. I hate fatty bacon.”

  “I know exactly how important that is.”

  She gives him a level look that almost makes him push his chair back. “I put up with a lot from my fellow officers, the male ones anyway, to wear this uniform. The least it can do for me is get me some good bacon.”

  “Can you order me the same thing?”

  In English she says, “I took all the lean stuff.”

  “Oh, well,” Rafferty says. “I’m not really hungry anyway.”

  “Oh. Right.” She puts her elbow on the table and rests her chin on her hand. “That’s right, you were visiting the guy who didn’t die, weren’t you?”