Fools' River Read online

“And his wife. And ‘die’ is a relative term.”

  “Well, I didn’t really take it all,” she confesses, reaching up to flag a waiter and getting the attention of all of them. To the one who arrives first, she says, “Give my colleague some of my bacon, a reasonable amount, for his eggs Benedict. What kind of toast?” she asks Rafferty.

  “Whatever they dare to serve you.”

  When the waiter is gone, he taps a finger on each of the police boxes. “Have you looked at these?”

  “As much as I could, although I didn’t have a lot of time.”

  “Did you see this?” He slides the wallet over to her.

  “Yes.” She closes the wallet to hide the family’s smiles. “That was when I stopped looking.”

  “I’m amazed you’ve already scored two boxes.”

  “Well, the colonel,” she says, promoting Arthit from his actual grade of lieutenant colonel, “called me after you left his house last night, so I started ringing up the stations right then and kept it up until about three. I found two more guys with casts, by the way, so the official number, although we’re the only ones tracking it, is fourteen, and the colonel was saying there might be another.”

  “Might be, but he somehow lived through it. I’m going to try to track him down.”

  “So with fourteen or maybe fifteen cases—”

  “So far.”

  “Right, well, I couldn’t reach anyone that late at two stations that handled four of them, and for the other ten cases there are possessions from only two of them in various evidence rooms.” She flicks a forefinger at the closer of the two boxes. “These two.”

  “Only two?”

  “Some of the relatives came to Bangkok to take their . . . uh, loved one home for burial. Other people arranged for their embassy to handle it. The ones who came in person took the effects, meaning this kind of stuff, with them or left it in their hotel rooms or threw it out, no way for us to know what happened after it was given to them.”

  “They weren’t held as evidence?”

  She looks down at the table and doodles something invisible on it with her forefinger. “In those cases either it wasn’t treated as a crime or it had been classified as unsolved and essentially closed, so the stuff would have been dumped. The people at the station who gave me these were a little sticky about it. They had to call supervisors for clearance, which, if I can judge from the end of the conversation I heard, was not easy to get. I could see that they were worried about being embarrassed.”

  “Because they were incompetent?” he asks. She looks at him as though slightly confused. “Or corrupt?”

  Rafferty senses someone standing at the table and looks up to see the young waiter who had asked him to wait. He’s got Rafferty’s coffee in his hand, but it’s forgotten. He’s staring at Clemente’s eyes.

  “You can put it down,” she says briskly. “And I have an iced coffee coming. Are you all waiting for it to get cold enough?”

  “Sorry.” The waiter wheels around and almost bumps into another, who’s holding a sweating glass of iced coffee.

  “No, here,” Clemente says, pointing at the spot where she’d like the coffee placed. To Rafferty she says, “I think corrupt is a better bet. These feel low-down, thugs operating on a small level, picking off everybody’s least favorite tourists, shaking all the money out of their pockets and credit-card accounts, and then dumping them in a canal. My guess is that a couple of people at the stations in the districts where most of the bodies were found know who’s behind it and are on the pad. They file the cause of death as ‘heart stopped’ and pocket part of the proceedings.”

  “My feelings exactly.”

  She gives him a quick smile, which he returns without knowing he’s doing it. “The colonel’s, too,” she says. “So later today I’ll contact the other stations and see what they’ve got, and I’ll also go over to the kid’s house, your daughter’s friend’s house. About his father.”

  “I’ll go with you,” Rafferty says. “Miaow usually gets home from school around three-thirty, and I’ve left her a message asking her to have Edward—that’s the kid—call me to say what time he’ll be at his house.”

  “I can do it alone,” she says, and there’s a bit of prickle in her tone.

  “I’m sure you can,” Rafferty says, “but I already know Edward. He’s ashamed of his father. He doesn’t like the way his dad is with women. It’ll be awkward for him to explain it to you. If I’m there, it’ll all be out on the table from the beginning. Save you a little emotional tiptoe.”

  She thinks about it for a second and gives him a small, unreadable smile that he doesn’t mistake for agreement. “Okay.”

  He pushes the nearest box, the one with the wallet in it, a few inches down the table. “What are you going to do with all this stuff?”

  “Try to make sense out of it.” She reaches into a bag at her feet and comes up with a tablet, which she flicks into life. “I started looking through the first box while I was waiting for them to dig out the second one.” She swipes the screen and tilts it toward him. “This was the first thing I thought of. It’s simple, but it might show us something.” What Rafferty sees are four vertical columns: one of numbers, one of people’s names, both Thai and non-Thai, written in the Roman alphabet, a third that seems to contain places—addresses, street names, what might be business names—and a fourth, which is empty. “It’s just a spreadsheet,” she says, sounding apologetic. “I’m entering all the numbers, whatever they are, in the left-hand column and all the names and other stuff in columns two and three, and when I’m done, I can just tell it to arrange the numbers on the left lowest to highest, and all the repeated numbers, if there are any, will be stacked on top of each other.”

  “And you can also alphabetize the data,” Rafferty says.

  “Exactly. And the fourth column, the one that’s blank right now, will have a number that will correspond to the one I write on the box that entry came from. That way if the same phone number, address, whatever, pops up two or more times, we can look at the box numbers and see which victim entered it and whether more than one did.”

  “My, my,” Rafferty says.

  Clemente passes a finger over the screen, making the figures scroll up. She’s input several screens’ worth already, so she’s been hard at it. “I was in charge of most of the computer stuff at the first station I worked at, the one where the colonel met me before he rescued me and moved me downtown. I had pretty good database software there—by police standards anyway.” She looks at the screen, her mouth pulled over to one side. “This is kind of primitive by contrast, but it should work, don’t you think?”

  “I’d be doing it on bits of paper,” he says, “so I’m the wrong guy to ask.”

  She blinks at him once, apparently weighing her response, then says, “Do you even have a spreadsheet program?”

  “I guess.” He thinks for a moment. “Open Office?”

  “That’ll do it. Better than Microsoft because they’ll never upgrade you without asking.”

  She looks up. “Ahh,” she says, “food.”

  “How does he seem to you?” Rafferty says. The place has emptied out some, and they can hear each other without shouting.

  “Compared to what?” A few bits of substandard bacon have been shoved to one side of the plate, possibly for reevaluation.

  Rafferty reaches over and takes one, and she points the tines of her fork at him in a businesslike threat. He says, “I don’t know. Does he seem happy?”

  “You’ve known him longer than I have,” she says. “To me he’s the colonel. I don’t see him personally, the way you do.”

  “Not so often these days,” Rafferty says.

  “I’m not sure what you’re asking,” Clemente says, and then sits back so quickly a jack-in-the-box might have popped open in front of her, and she blushes. “Oh,” s
he says. “You mean you’ve seen him less since he . . . he married . . .”

  “It’s complicated,” he says. “He’s still my closest friend, but . . . well, we’ve both got things, you know, pulling at us.”

  “He’s a remarkable man,” Clemente says. “If you let that friendship wear out, or however you’d put it, I think that would be—excuse me—foolish.”

  “You’re right,” Rafferty says. “You’re absolutely right.”

  “Is it . . .” She lowers her face to her plate as though she thinks she might have spotted something worth eating.

  “Is it what?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Boy,” he says, “look at us tiptoe.”

  “Please excuse the question. Is it your partners? I know that sometimes when men stop being friends, it’s because the partners don’t like each other.”

  “No,” Rafferty says. “It’s my fault. It’s entirely my fault. The only thing my wife has to do with it is that she’s pregnant, and it’s . . . I don’t know, it’s very emotional.”

  “Is she worried about the pregnancy?”

  Rafferty sits back and looks at the emptying restaurant without seeing any of it. “You know,” he says, “she is. I think she’s worried sick.”

  16

  Soi Nowhere

  Fon has chosen to meet her at a little elbow-bend soi, full of food vendors and their carts, one of the few “food streets” the government hasn’t bulldozed to make way for the ugly, upscale concrete of new money that’s gradually making Bangkok look like every other town with big bucks and bad taste. The moment Rose gets out of the taxi—Rafferty made her promise not to take a moto—the smells from the soi take her back years, to her arrival in Bangkok, with the mud of Fools’ River still between her toes. Her first friends in the bar had taken her to places like this, on little streets so indistinguishable from one another that she thought of them all as “Soi Nowhere.” The women had sealed their friendship by lending or even giving her the small amounts of money it took to eat there. At the time she’d been terrified of the work she was being paid to do, but some of her happiest memories are of those meals, with girls who knew their way around this horrible, bewildering, wonderful city and had survived all the experiences she dreaded with their souls intact. More or less.

  She’d scoffed at Rafferty’s insistence that she take a cab, but now she feels like phoning him to say thanks. Even the taxi ride had been too bumpy for comfort. She feels as though there’s something heavy and syrupy rolling around in her abdomen, something that wanted to keep moving when the cab slowed and that practically towed her into the front seat when the driver finally stopped at the curb. Once out of the car, she grabs a deep breath and crosses the width of the sidewalk. It seems to take a long time, during which tiny, bright fireworks go off in front of her, and once across she leans against a building for a slow, shaky moment, the fireworks yielding to gray flowers that bloom in her field of vision. The heat is so extreme it seems personal, a slap in the face, and the scent of the food almost mocks her with the contrast between who she is now and who she was when she first smelled it. It seems stronger now, less appetizing, almost . . . the smell of all that meat . . .

  She forces herself to breathe through her mouth, slowly and evenly for a count of ten in and ten out, her gaze locked on the sidewalk because the motion of the cars going by pushes her to the edge of vertigo. When she chances breathing through her nose again, she finds that the odor of the food has gathered and concentrated itself until it’s overpowering. Maybe this wasn’t a good idea. Maybe she should have stayed home, in bed. Poke wasn’t there, so he wouldn’t have known how weak she’d been—

  “Are you all right?” The words are in English.

  She looks up to see a sunburned farang boy, a little younger than Edward, redheaded, beaky, skinny, and angular, in a T-shirt and a pair of jeans. Braces glint on his teeth. Behind him, looking at her uncertainly, is a neatly dressed woman, wearing too many layers for a day so hot, who has to be the boy’s mother.

  The mother leans forward and says, very slowly and a bit loudly, “He. Wants. To. Know—”

  “I’m fine,” Rose says. She blots sweat from her upper lip. “I mean, I will be fine, in . . . in just a minute.”

  The mother leans toward her, eyes narrowed assessingly. “I think you need to sit down,” she says. It’s the tone of someone who doesn’t get a lot of argument.

  “I . . . I don’t think I can walk right now.”

  “There are lots of chairs just in this little street right here,” the mother says, glancing into the soi. “There are even some in the shade. Willis and I can help you, one of us on each side. If we leave you here, I’m afraid you’ll fall, and you’re . . . well, you’re so tall. It’s a long way down.”

  “It’s just a few steps,” Willis says. “I’ll be over here, and Mom will be over there, okay?”

  “I’m very good at this,” the mother says. “I was a nurse for centuries. Here. Put your arm around my shoulder and lean a little on Willis. He’s stronger than he looks.”

  Willis says, “Jeez.”

  “I don’t know,” Rose says, and then the sidewalk dips a bit beneath her feet, and she says, “Thank you.” She edges uncertainly away from the stability of the wall.

  “I’m Joyce,” the mother says, draping Rose’s arm over her shoulders, “and you already know Willis’s name.”

  “It’s Will,” Willis says, “not—”

  “Yes, dear,” Joyce says. “Here we are, up and moving; isn’t this nice? Lean on me, lean on me. What’s your name, dear?”

  “Rose. That’s—” She grabs a deep breath of air that’s too hot. “That’s my American name. My Thai name is Kwan.”

  “That’s a pretty name,” Joyce says, and Rose can hear, even through her unsteadiness, that it’s the mechanical reply of someone who is focused on what she’s doing. “What’s it mean, dear?”

  “Spirit,” Rose says. The soi opens up in front of them, and to their right are the promised shaded chairs. They’re all occupied.

  “Isn’t that beautiful, being called Spirit,” Joyce says matter-of-factly. They’re nearing the chairs around the closest table now, and the three young women sitting there look up and see them coming. One of them, a girl in her early twenties, leaps to her feet and pushes her chair toward Rose.

  “Such nice people,” Joyce says. “Careful, careful. The Thais are such—just a little to your left, dear—such nice people.” The woman who surrendered her chair is moving at a near jog toward the closest cart. “Here we are . . . umm, Kwan,” Joyce says. “Let’s just turn you around with your back to the chair so you can sit, and we’ll guide you down.”

  The other women have gotten up, too, looking at Rose with obvious concern.

  “I’m fine,” Rose says in Thai and then in English. “I was just dizzy.”

  “Thank you,” Joyce says to the woman who had been sitting in the chair next to Rose and who has shouldered Willis aside to help Rose sit down. To Rose she says, “Do you want to bend forward, dear, put your head between your knees?”

  Rose is sharply aware again of the fullness in her lower abdomen, and she says, “No, thank you. I’ll be fine.”

  Joyce has knelt in front of her, peering into her face. “Have you eaten today? Do you think it’s the heat? Oh, look at this sweet thing.” Rose looks up and to her right to see the woman whose chair she’s taken, whose short-chopped hair is streaked with blonde, approaching with a cup in her hand, full of something cold enough to make the cup sweat in the humidity.

  Rose can smell her own perspiration. Her hair is hot on her back. The other two women, one with a tight ponytail and the other with the guileless face of a twelve-year-old, are creating a ring of chairs so Joyce and Willis can sit facing Rose. Then Blonde Streaks is there with the cup extended, and Rose reaches for it, but the American woman�
��Joyce, Rose thinks—intercepts it and says, “Just a few sips at first, dear,” and then hands it to her.

  The water is ice cold, and for a moment it creates a bright red spasm of pain in the center of Rose’s chest. She must have reacted somehow, because Joyce says, “See? Slowly, slowly.”

  Willis says to his mother, “She’s so pretty.”

  “She understands English, Willis,” Joyce says, and Rose looks up to see Willis go sunset red. Ponytail and Twelve-Year-Old laugh. Blonde Streaks says, “She is pretty, isn’t she?”

  Joyce takes the seat opposite Rose, and Ponytail makes little sweeping motions with the backs of her hands, scooting Willis toward the remaining chair. Willis says, “Kob kun krup.” One of the women, maybe Blonde Streaks, says, in English, “Oh, very good,” and at that moment some of Rose’s dizziness dissipates.

  “The heat,” Twelve-Year-Old suggests.

  “Have you eaten anything?” Joyce asks again, and Ponytail says, “Some rice? Something light?” and Blonde Streaks says, “Just suck on the ice in the cup. That’ll help.”

  For a dizzying few seconds, Rose is back in her village, in the middle of the ring of friends and neighbors who materialized to surround anyone who was hurt or ill, offering assistance and advice, often conflicting, and she finds herself blinking back tears. A familiar voice says, in Thai, “Always the center of attention.” Rose lifts her head, feeling the chair spin beneath her, to see Fon pushing in between Ponytail and Twelve-Year-Old. Behind her is an older woman with deep-set eyes, a downturned mouth, and thinning gray hair. She looks familiar.

  Fon was Rose’s—Kwan’s—first Bangkok friend. When Kwan appeared, wide-eyed and lost, in the bar—tricked into the journey down to Bangkok by a woman who befriended her and lied to her about everything—Fon was the one who opened her arms to the newcomer. She shared her room with the new girl, navigated her through the Borgia-like personal politics of the bar, and after Rose, who had no sexual experience, failed utterly to please her first customer, an influential cop, Fon was the one who taught her the “pet tricks,” as Rose thought of them, that would satisfy even the high standards of the Bangkok Royal Police.