The Hot Countries Read online

  “Like a lot of babies,” Rafferty says. He holds up a hand. “Wait. Just wait. You can’t just tell a guy that he’s suddenly got armfuls of children when—”

  “There are triplets on my mother’s side,” Rose says.

  Miaow laughs a mouthful of noodles onto her plate.

  “Right,” Rafferty says. “Why not quints? Why not nine? We could have a baseball team.”

  “The twins aren’t a joke,” Rose says. “I might have twins.”

  “Well,” Rafferty says.

  Now they’re both looking at him.

  “Sounds exciting,” he says. “Really. Honest.”

  Rose is watching him closely, as though, after all these years, Mr. Hyde is finally beginning to emerge. “You don’t want two babies, do you?”

  “Sure I do,” Rafferty says. “I just thought we’d have them one at a time, like other people.”

  “Will they be identical?” Miaow asks. “You know, like a set?”

  Rose says, “My mother’s father looks just like his brother.”

  “My, my, my,” Rafferty says. “Isn’t life interesting?”

  Miaow snickers in a way she knows he finds irritating.

  Rose has lowered her eyes, closing him out, as she fishes in the bowl for another bit of orange. “Are you going back to that bar tonight?”

  Even this is safer ground. “Depends. Are you going to watch Barchester Towers?”

  “Sure,” Miaow says.

  Rose says, “I like the bad priest.”

  Rafferty says, “Then I guess I’ll go hang with my posse.”

  “It was inevitable,” Varney is saying, waving the hand with the beer in it, “that people back then would have created the Delsarte method, or something like it.” He’s picked up a shred of conversation Rafferty fumbled, and he seems dead set on carrying it all the way to the end zone. “It’s acting pre-psychology. Pre-Freud, pre-Jung. It was the age of phrenology, when a head doctor analyzed character by the bumps on the outside of the skull. The outside.”

  “Outside,” Hofstedler responds politely, but the glance he gives Rafferty isn’t a grateful one. The men in here can relate to the hot countries; nineteenth-century acting isn’t even on their horizon.

  Thanks to the downpour, the bar is almost empty—no guy whose name might be Ron, no Growing Younger Man, none of the occasionals: just Rafferty, Campeau, Hofstedler, Varney, and Toots. The rain is hammering down outside, the night-market vendors perched on their molded plastic chairs beneath the blue tarp, blowing smoke into the rain and peering down the deserted street.

  Varney says, “People knew how their friends and enemies behaved, but not why, right? No complexes, no subconscious, no past trauma. People were defined from the outside, by their roles in life: noble, peasant, servant, merchant, mother, soldier. You acted on a stage by doing an imitation. The very word ‘act’ suggests imitation, not insight. Put the character on like a costume. The Friar’s robes. Lear’s crown. The villain’s mustache,” he says, tugging on one end of his own. “If you’re a boy in Shakespeare’s company, Juliet’s gown.”

  Rafferty says to Hofstedler, not making much of an effort to lower his voice, “How’s Wallace?”

  “Not good,” Hofstedler says, sotto voce, politely keeping his eyes on Varney. “Forgets where he lives, yes? Talks always about some girl from sixty years ago. Name is Jah. Jah, Jah, Jah.”

  Varney says, “Sorry?”

  “I was agreeing only,” Hofstedler explains. “I say, ‘Ja, ja.’”

  “’Cause, I mean, I’d hate to bore you.” Varney shows his big yellow teeth in a smile that demonstrates how much he’d hate to bore them.

  “Nein,” Hofstedler says. He gets more German when someone opposes him. “Acting from two hundred years ago, very interesting. Yes, something I wonder about frequently.”

  The door opens, letting in the rattle of rain and a tiny climate of hot, wet air, and everyone in the bar turns to see a small boy drip his way in. He’s eight or nine, hunger thin, wearing a sopping, too-big T-shirt that makes his neck look even frailer than it is. His amateur buzz cut, possibly self-inflicted, is all different lengths and sparkles with drops of water. He gives the room a quick glance, goes straight to Rafferty, and lifts himself on tiptoe to slap something down on the bar. A second later the door closes behind him.

  “Your birthday?” Campeau says.

  “It’s not just from two hundred years ago,” Varney says, as though there’s been no interruption. He’s responding to Hofstedler, but his eyes are on Poke. “It was the way the Greeks acted their plays. It’s the style you see in silent movies. It’s Noh, it’s Kabuki, it’s the style of temple dance, all over Asia.”

  Rafferty tries to open the envelope in the conventional way, peeling back the flap, but the paper is too cheap, and the whole thing pulls apart in his hands. He has to worry it away from the folded sheet, thicker and heavier, inside.

  “Nineteenth-century ballet, opera—it’s all Delsarte,” Varney says, apparently armed with a month’s worth of material. “Classical painting and sculpture. The Pietà. The pose is everything.”

  Rafferty recognizes the heavy piece of paper as coated stock, meaning it has a slightly shiny layer of clay on one side of it, which allows colors to be printed brilliantly but turns into a kind of stickum when it gets wet. While it’s still folded, Rafferty can see that whatever is written on the other side is in black and seems to be a single word in reasonably large type. Varney’s voice drones on, something about the vocabulary of emotion and how so many of the expressions we still use—“stiff with fear” is the one Rafferty catches—are external descriptions of internal processes.

  He pries the paper open, a bit at a time, until he’s looking at the type. It says:

  $3,840,000

  A sort of high-blood-pressure hiss fills his ears, drowning out both Varney’s voice and some quarrelsome interjection from Campeau, who’s been acting increasingly fed up. The number is a sum Rafferty has thought about a hundred, two hundred times since the night a house belonging to a man named Haskell Murphy caught fire and blew up. A house that had contained plastic explosives, three-dimensional models of well-planned atrocities to advance some obscure political agenda, a brutally abused child, and six hard-sided military briefcases, battlefield rated and practically indestructible, each stuffed full of tightly banded hundred-dollar bills. The cases had been stacked tidily on the floor of a closet, next to a cache of explosives wrapped in some kind of rubberized sheet.

  The number on the sheet of paper is Rafferty’s estimate of the total in the six cases, based on the one briefcase he’d taken with him, which had contained exactly $640,000.

  The cases had all been packed identically, the band around each stack of hundreds helpfully announcing the total as $10,000. He’s found himself doing this multiplication in the middle of the night, while making coffee, walking on a sidewalk, having a conversation. It always comes out the same.

  He sits back from the bar, looking not at the number but the paper. The fold is precise, letter style, creating equal thirds. The numbers are centered on the page.

  The numbers—

  Campeau says to Varney, “Jesus, you got a lot of crap in your head.” It doesn’t sound like a compliment.

  “Guilty,” Varney says cheerfully. “It’s a curse, I suppose.”

  “Buncha useless fucking knickknacks,” Campeau grumbles.

  —the numbers are very black. They have the resolute unambiguity of a computer printout, which is what they are. They read three million, eight hundred and forty thousand dollars, and nothing else. Three million, eight—

  Hofstedler says, “You are saying what, Poke?”

  “Sorry,” Poke says. “Nothing.” He folds the paper, watching his hands shake and trying to still them.

  Varney is saying, “ . . . like the old cabinet of
curiosities, just a room full of stuff, not categorized, not classified, something feathery here, something shiny there—”

  “The Kunstkammer,” Hofstedler offers. “The closet of wonders. The paw of a monkey, a map of hell, a footprint from a million years ago, books, clockworks, paintings, the twisted horn of a narwhal—”

  “That’s it,” Varney is saying. “The museum before there were museums. Odds and ends, this and that. Facts, ideas, fantasies. Rocks and bottles.”

  Rafferty is half listening and half back in that night of flood and death and flames, the battered girl Treasure running into Murphy’s burning house, reflected upside down in the black water until the moment it breathed in for the last time and blew, pieces thrown a hundred feet into the air, fire raining down around him.

  When he had finally clawed his way out of there that night, away from the heat and smoke, he had that one briefcase in the trunk of his car. The money, most of it, is still hidden in a hundred places in the apartment he shares with Rose and Miaow. He had thought it was over.

  He had been wrong.

  “Having a bag full of facts,” Campeau says. His voice sounds like the scratch of a striking match. “What’s it mean? It ain’t the same as wisdom.”

  “No, Bob, it’s not the same,” Varney says. “Facts are just things—any kind of thing: could be a handful of cards, a couple pieces of metal, a wad of cotton, some black powder.”

  There’s something in Varney’s voice, the edge of something just barely concealed, a razor beneath a sheet of paper, and Rafferty glances up, his hands folded on top of the wet envelope, to find the man’s bright blue eyes on him. The moment Rafferty looks at him, Varney’s gaze skitters away, fast as a drop of water sizzling across a hot pan.

  It suddenly seems to Rafferty that the paper with the numbers on it warms beneath his hands. He’s certain that Varney knows what’s written there.

  “But wisdom, Bob,” Varney says, “at least in my opinion, wisdom is knowing how to take those things, the cards or the metal and the powder and the cotton, and put them together in a way that turns them into something. A royal flush, for example.” He looks at Rafferty again, holds his gaze for a moment, and then turns back to Campeau and says, “Or a bullet.”

  Rafferty swivels his stool to the left until he’s facing Varney directly. The stool squeals, and he finds Varney regarding him with what seems to be a mixture of curiosity and amusement.

  Varney says, “Get a letter?”

  Rafferty slips the wet paper into the pocket of his T-shirt. Something is squeezing his chest, and he recognizes it as a blend of fury and fear. He says, “Do you ever shut up?”

  “Have I gone on too long?” Varney’s tone is mild, but the amusement in his face has hardened into an expression that shouldn’t be caught in freeze-frame. And, Rafferty thinks, Varney knows it and shows it to him anyway.

  “This is my fourth night here since you showed up,” Rafferty says, the anger putting a steel rod between his shoulders, stiffening his neck, “and the only thing I’ve heard is your voice.”

  Hofstedler says, “Poke,” and puts a hand on Poke’s arm.

  “I know,” Varney says, cocking his head slightly to one side as though he’s curious. “It’s a terrible trait. I was alone too much as a child.”

  “And I can see why,” Poke says. Without taking his eyes off Varney’s, he says, “Check, please, Toots.”

  “Early,” Toots says. “They still looking TeeWee.”

  “There are worse things than English actors,” Rafferty says.

  “Kid must have brought you bad news, huh?” Varney says. He’s still smiling.

  Campeau says, “You know what, sonny? I heard enough, too.”

  “I also would like to talk sometimes,” Hofstedler says deferentially.

  “Well, fine, Leon,” Varney says. There are tight red highlights at his cheekbones. “We’re all eager to hear it. Go right ahead.” He rests an elbow on the bar, puts his chin in his hand, and waits. Drums his fingers, once. No one says anything, and Toots puts a check in front of Rafferty.

  “Need a topic?” Varney asks Hofstedler. “Wagner, maybe? Nietzsche? Why Shakespeare is better in German? Who was it who translated him again?”

  Hofstedler says, “Goethe.” The back of his neck is turning a dark cherry red.

  “Much better in German, with Goethe and all,” Varney says. “The Bauhaus school? Caspar David Friedrich? Eugenics? Nerve gas? Aryan bloodlines? Innovative operations for changing eye color?”

  “This is enough,” Hofstedler says.

  “Guess it is.” Varney gets up. He reaches over and turns his glass on its side, flooding the bar with beer.

  Campeau gets off his stool.

  “Come on, Gramps,” Varney says. He takes a step back. “Tote that old bag of bones over here.”

  “I’m buying your drinks,” Rafferty says. “Get out of here.”

  “Too bad,” Varney says. “I was just beginning to work the room.” His eyes, fixed on Poke’s, are bright with something that might be glee.

  The door opens, letting in a gust of wind, bearing the ghosts of many cigarettes, and Pinky Holland puts his head in. He says, “Whoops,” and starts to back out.

  “Come on in, Pinky,” Rafferty says. “Mr. Mustache here is just leaving.”

  “Naw, that’s okay,” Pinky says. “Just . . . you know, popping in. Maybe later.” The door rattles when he closes it.

  “Thanks for the drinks,” Varney says. He puts on a shiny black slicker, very deliberately, taking his time. “Quite a mood change there. You ever think about medication?” He takes a step in Poke’s direction.

  “You’re big,” Rafferty says, stepping toward him. “But I fight dirty.”

  “Pitty-pat, pitty-pat,” Varney says, tapping his chest with a flat hand. “Guess we’ll have a chance to find out sooner or later, won’t we?” He pushes his stool over, and it hits the floor with a bang that sends Toots eight inches into the air. “Be seeing you.”

  He walks the length of the bar, and Campeau sidles around behind his own stool.

  Just before Varney reaches the door, Rafferty says, “Why were you looking for me?”

  “Looking for you?” Varney says without turning back. “Why the fuck would I look for you?”

  He leaves the door wide open, and Rafferty gets up and closes it. When he turns back to the bar, everyone is staring at him. He says, “He has been looking for me, and he’s had someone watching me. It’s a bar girl, and I need to find her. Short, wide face, late twenties, long, loopy spiral curls. She’s got a . . . a birthmark or something, above her mouth. Left side, I think.” No one responds, and he adds, “I think this might be important.”

  Campeau says, “No one like that comes to mind right off the bat.”

  “Thought you knew everyone.”

  “Slowing down,” Campeau says, looking embarrassed. “Losing the old moxie.”

  “Anybody?” Rafferty says to the bar at large. “Come on, this isn’t a very long street.”

  Hofstedler says, “Tomorrow. Just before the bars open.” He looks around the bar and swallows, someone about to reveal a secret. “Meet me here and we talk to my ladyboys.”

  6

  Not the Shophouse

  Wallace Palmer awakes to darkness, the only light a somewhat-less-dim rectangle that indicates the window. He peers at it and shakes his head to clear the fog; the window is on the wrong side of the room. Is he sleeping with his head at the foot of the bed? His sleep these days is thinner than the worn sheet that covers him, laundered almost out of existence. He couldn’t have moved around that much without waking up. Or could he?

  He can’t remember. Has he done this before? He knows that the window should be over—

  Oh. Not the shophouse. The new apartment. The new new apartment. The one he still can’t navigate i
n the dark without bumping into things. Not the place above the shop where he lived for all those years, his first home in Bangkok when he came back after the war, fifty-some years ago: the two rooms with the wooden shutters over the windows that you could prop open. Concrete walls two feet thick, cool wooden floors, the smell of cooking from downstairs. In the shophouse he could put his hand on anything no matter how dark it was, since no one but he ever moved anything. Living there alone while he ransacked Bangkok for Jah. Because he’d destroyed things with Jah.

  He hears rain, spattering against the tin housing of the air conditioner.

  He sits up with a soft grunt, swings his long legs over the edge of the hard little bed, and puts his feet on the floor. Carpet. Not the shophouse, then, the apartment. The second apartment, or maybe the third. What had happened to the shophouse?

  Now that he knows which room he’s in, which year he’s in, his hand can find—after a couple of timid sweeps—the surprisingly heavy little brass lamp on the table beside the bed. He spiders around its base with his fingers to find the chain and tugs it. The bulb puts out just enough piss-yellow light to show him a low-ceilinged, heavily shadowed room, with a wide recessed closet yawning open in one corner, one of its sliding doors derailed and leaning at a seasick angle against the wall. His clothes, what remain of them, hang any old way, not so much organized as abandoned. The air conditioner sits idly in the window with the rain banging off it. He decided long ago to live with the heat. After all, he’d chosen the heat. The bathroom is over there, through that grimy door. He reminds himself again to take a sponge to the door.

  One of these days.

  With his sight restored, the world tilts slightly and snaps into place with an almost audible click. Time reintroduces itself, as it has a way of doing lately. The shophouse had been demolished years ago, along with the whole neighborhood, a cluster of two- and three-story structures of inky, mildewed concrete webbed with thick electrical wires, the whole thing built on either side of a narrow soi paved over one of Bangkok’s lost canals. A genuine neighborhood, the remnants of one of the small villages Bangkok had devoured, a place where he was the only farang among people who’d known one another for years. They’d raised one another’s children, each woman automatically picking up and soothing the nearest crying child. He’d spent months looking out the window and trying to pair the kids with their biological mothers. People who took the time to stop and talk when they met, whose grandparents had been friends, who shared old jokes, who had accepted him with smiles.