“Where’d he get the money?”

“He didn’t need money. How do I know my name isn’t going to be all over your book?”

“If it is, you can kill me.”

“Funny,” Wichat says dourly. “No names, got it?”

“Got it.”

“I wouldn’t tell you shit if you didn’t have so much fucking weight behind you.”

“As I said, I appreciate it. Where’d he get-”

“I told you,” Wichat snaps. “He already had some. And he didn’t need as much as you’d probably think. He got the first Mound pretty much free, just the old gun-to-the-head negotiation. The guy who owned it had made the wrong decisions about who to be friends with. It would have been a small funeral. So he signed it over to Pan for maybe enough baht to buy a week’s worth of chewing gum, and Pan fixed the place up.”

“And then?”

“And then he made a bunch of money from the first Mound and opened the others. Business, right? Make profit and reinvest it. Selling pad thai, selling pussy. Same-same, you know?”

“What else?”

Wichat reaches up and passes a palm over the surface of his oily hair. Then he makes a palm print on the desk’s smooth surface and looks down at it as though evaluating its worth as evidence. “What else, what else.” He drags on the cigarette again and examines it, obviously thinking about what he’s going to say next. “Two things,” he says. “You didn’t hear this from me, but there were two things.” He glares at the half-smoked cigarette, stubs it out, and drops it in the ashtray. “Hard not to pick these things up and light them later, you know? Especially when you were poor once.”

“Get a jar of water,” Rafferty says. “Drop them into it.”

Wichat’s eyes widen slightly. His complexion is rough and pitted. He must have had terrible acne as a kid. Acne plus poverty; if Rafferty didn’t know the man was a killer and perhaps worse, he might even feel sorry for him.

“Hang on,” Wichat says. He picks up his phone and punches a single number. “Get me a jar of water and bring it in here. No, not a glass. If I wanted a glass, I would have asked for a glass. A jar, and a coaster to go under it. A little more than half full. No lid.” He hangs up. To Rafferty he says, “Good idea.”

“You were about to tell me two things.”

“Bunch of half-smoked cigarettes floating around, that’s going to stink.”

“Yeah. And?”

“Good idea.” His eyes drop to the surface of the desk, scanning it as though he’s looking for an objection to what he’s about to do. “Two things,” he says. “First, the Mounds of Venus weren’t the whole story, okay? He also owned a bunch of handcuff houses, you know handcuff houses?”

“Pretend I don’t.”

“Houses where the girls aren’t…eager, you know? Where they’re handcuffed to the bed. Some guys like that. They like to punch the girls a little, too, a few of them. So Pan had, I don’t know, maybe four or five of those places. Only Burmese girls, trucked in. He wouldn’t use Thai girls, they had to be Burmese.”

“Are you sure of this?”

“You’ve got to be kidding me. This is dangerous stuff I’m telling you. I don’t want to know it myself. You think I’d make it up?”

“Pan acts like prostitutes are his fallen sisters.”

“Pan’s one of the world’s great liars.” Wichat brings both hands up, scrubbing the air to erase the remark. “But the Thai girls, the ones who worked in the Mounds? He took good care of them. They got paid good, and they got time off and everything. I even heard he takes care of some girls who got sick. But that’s just Thais, you understand? Just Isaan. The Burmese, he treated them like shit.”

“And the second thing?”

“You seen his hands?”

“You mean the scars?”

“Yeah. You’ve never seen him in a short-sleeved shirt because those burns, they go all the way up to his shoulders and even the front of his chest. It looks like he dived headfirst into a fire to pull something out. He disappeared for a couple of months, and when he came back, he had those scars. He wouldn’t talk about them, but it was only about six months later he got his first factory and started closing down the whorehouses.”

“A fire,” Rafferty says.

“Yeah. He came through some sort of fire, and then he was a different guy.”

“What year?”

“Oh, shit, who knows? He was still closing down the knock shops, so-”

The office door opens, and an exquisite young woman comes in carrying a jar of water. The jar has a label that says “Jif” on it.

“Oh, come on,” Wichat says angrily. “It’s bad enough to have a fucking jar on my desk without the whole world knowing what kind of peanut butter I eat. Peel that thing off.”

“Yes, sir,” the girl says. She wears a pale salmon-colored business-formal office suit, all in silk. Wichat watches her rear end as she goes back out.

“More butt than brains,” Wichat says admiringly.

Rafferty says, “The year.”

A heavy blink. “Yeah. Like I said, he still had one of the Mounds, or maybe two. Must have been-this is a guess-1993? Maybe ’94. In there somewhere.”

“Do you have anything to do with him now?” Rafferty asks. “With Pan?”

Wichat picks up the pack of cigarettes again. “I don’t care who called me about you,” he says. “Just pretend you didn’t ask that question.”

THE SIDEWALK IS at full bake, heat ripples so pronounced that pedestrians look like he’s seeing them underwater. Rafferty ducks into an air-conditioned drugstore, one in a British chain that’s established itself in Bangkok’s high-rent commercial districts. He pulls out the cell phone and dials the number from memory.

“I need to access the morgue at the Bangkok Sun,” he says without returning the greeting from the other end. “Somebody has to call and set it up.”

“You can’t get in yourself?” It is the first man, the man from the car again. His speech is still mush-thick, but at least it’s understandable.

“Sure I can get in myself. I’ll make a request, and then the request will get processed, and then they’ll let me in, and it’ll be the middle of next week. You guys want to sit around playing blackjack or whatever you do while I go through all that, or you want to move things along?”

“How’d you do with the cop?”

“I did better with the crook. It’ll be in my report.”

“Give me a preview.”

“I think I’ll wait,” Rafferty says, “until I’m talking to someone who matters.”

“You’re just making it easier,” the man says.

“If it wasn’t easy, you wouldn’t be able to do it.”

A pause, although Rafferty can hear the breathing on the other end of the line. Then the man says, “How long will it take you to get there?”

“Twenty, thirty minutes.”

“It’ll be set up.” The man disconnects.

Thirty-five minutes later, Rafferty discovers he’s in luck. Both 1993 and 1994 have been computerized and cross-indexed. It takes him less than an hour to find fires.

Five show promise. Two of them are the most melancholy of all crimes, the burning of a slum that had the misfortune to occupy land earmarked for more profitable purposes. People died in one of these fires. Both had been euphemistically designated as accidental. Then there are two house fires that destroyed or damaged the homes of the powerful. Nobody died, so the fires were probably just attention-getters. The fifth is a factory conflagration, a virtual explosion of highly flammable materials in a facility that turned out stuffed animals for an American toy maker. The fire had happened around 3:00 A.M. during a “ghost shift,” a shift the American company knew nothing about. After the workers on the night shift left, the ghost-shift workers were brought in to use inferior materials to bootleg identical animals for direct sale at the bazaars of Asia. One of the differences between the superior and the inferior materials was that the inferior materials weren’t fireproofed.

The fire killed one hundred twenty-one people. The factory’s windows were barred, and the iron doors had been locked from the outside. People had been stacked in front of the doors in smoldering piles, like kindling. Some had died with their arms protruding between the bars on the windows, reaching frantically for the world. The company that had rented the factory to the Americans had proved to be a shell corporation owned by another shell corporation. No one who supervised the ghost shift had been found. No one had ever been charged.