35

The envelope says, DON’T COME IN. CALL A FRIEND.

It sits, meticulously centered, on the coffee table in front of the couch in Arthit’s living room. It is the only thing on the table. The characters are written in thick black felt-tip. Noi’s usual handwriting was slapdash, the lines of text slanting up to the right in a way that Arthit always saw as optimistic. But these words are ruler-straight and meticulously formed. The kind of care she would take with the last thing she would ever do.

Where did she sit to write it? he asks himself, and immediately knows the answer: the kitchen table. There had been a half-drunk cup of tea on the table. He’d seen it before his foot slipped.

“Can I get you anything?” Kosit asks.

Sitting in the center of the couch, Arthit shakes his head. He says, “She didn’t finish her tea.”

Kosit blinks and says, “I hadn’t noticed that.”

“She was in a hurry,” Arthit says. “She wanted to make sure.”

“Sure?”

“That I didn’t come home too early. That the…that the pills had time to work.” He can’t find the voice to continue, so he clears his throat and looks back down at the envelope. He hasn’t opened it yet. He’s not sure he’ll ever be able to open it.

The front door stands wide open, and an ambulance’s red lights blink on-off-on through the window. A few people have gathered curiously on the sidewalk. Arthit can hear the medical technicians talking in the bedroom. When they wheel Noi out, it will be the last time she ever leaves the house. Their house.

Of course he had gone in.

After all, he’d come home early. She might still have been…

“A glass of water,” he says. His voice is husky.

“Sure,” Kosit says. He gets up but stops as two uniformed patrolmen come in. “What?” he asks. “Why are you here?”

“We got called. Fatality, right?” The senior patrolman is in his early fifties, nut brown. He’s got a nose as bulbous as a head of garlic, the skin covering it a miniature map of broken veins. Beneath a flop of dirty hair are tiny eyes, the whites a disconcertingly sweet pink. His younger partner looks embarrassed, his eyes fixed on the carpet.

“Suicide,” Kosit says. “The survivor is a cop. You’re not needed.”

“We got a call,” says the senior patrolman. “From headquarters.”

“It’s a mistake,” Kosit says. “Go away.”

“From whom?” Arthit asks.

“Excuse me?” The senior patrolman scratches the back of his neck, revealing a dark, damp circle under his right arm.

Arthit says, “I asked who put out the call.”

“You’re the husband, right?” says the senior patrolman. He waits for an answer, letting the silence yawn between them.

“I am,” Arthit says at last.

“Yeah, well, then, I don’t see that you need to know who put out the call.” His partner shifts his gaze from the carpet to the tops of his own shoes.

“You’re being offensive,” Kosit says. “This man is a lieutenant colonel on the force. We have a note, in the handwriting of the deceased.”

“Where?” asks the senior patrolman. He takes two more steps into the room, claiming it as his own.

“It’s-” Kosit says, glancing down. The coffee table is bare. “It’s in the…um, kitchen,” he says.

“We’ll need it to take it,” says the senior patrolman. “And, sir,” he says to Arthit, “we’ll need your weapon.”

Arthit says, “What’s your name?”

“And where’s your name plate?” Kosit demands.

“In the car.” The senior patrolman rests his hand on the butt of his automatic. “I want the weapon, sir. Now.”

“Why is your name plate in the car? And him”-he lifts his chin at the embarrassed partner-“did he forget his, too?”

“For the third time,” the patrolman says, “I want your weapon.”

“I’ll have to get it,” Arthit says, standing up. He goes toward the dining room, then stops and says over his shoulder, “Surely you’re not going to let me go alone. How do you know I’m not going to come back shooting?”

“Go with him,” the senior patrolman says to his partner, who swallows convulsively at the prospect.

“I’ll go,” Kosit says. “This man’s rank deserves that kind of respect.”

The wheels of the gurney squeal from the hallway. Arthit forces himself not to turn to look, but the senior patrolman’s eyes flick toward the noise, and he watches with some curiosity. “Go,” he says.

Arthit leads Kosit through the dining room, listening to Noi’s progress down the hall on the other side of the house. “This is about taking me off the board,” he says very softly to Kosit when they’re crossing the breakfast nook. “It’s about the thing Poke’s involved in, the thing with Pan.”

“Who put out the call?” Kosit says.

“Thanom. He’s probably the guy who scrubbed Pan’s records.”

“That tapeworm. What can I do?”

“Give me your money.”

Kosit pats his pockets, locates a wad of bills folded so tightly they look like they’ve been ironed, and passes them to Arthit. Arthit pulls out his own money, puts the two stashes together, and slips them back in his pocket.

By now they are in the kitchen. Moving quickly, Arthit goes to the kitchen table, the table where he and Noi ate breakfast only that morning, where she rested her head on his shoulder, the table where they’d eaten all their meals since it became more difficult for her to carry the food even as far as the breakfast nook. The table where she probably wrote the note.

Next to the half-empty teacup, on which he now sees a pale lipstick print that stabs him through the center of his heart, are the gun belt and holster. Arthit pulls the automatic free and lets the belt and holster fall to the floor. He stares down at the gun in his hand long enough to make Kosit put a hand on his arm.

Arthit looks up. “Count to thirty,” he says. “Then knock over the table and call for help.”

“Got it.”

Arthit opens the back door. “I’ll call you after I buy a new phone. They’ll be looking out for calls from this one.” He takes his phone out of his pocket and hands it to Kosit. The two men regard each other for a long, silent moment.

“I’m counting,” Kosit says. “One…”

Arthit takes one last look at Noi’s kitchen. Then he says, “Thanks. I won’t forget this.” A moment later he’s out the door and into the dark, wet warmth of the night, the gun cold and reassuringly solid in his hand.

36

He should have accepted the painkillers Dr. Pumchang offered.

If he bends his elbow sharply and holds the taped hand against his chest at about heart level, the throbbing subsides to a point at which it’s just a hairsbreadth on the wrong side of unbearable. He cradles the left wrist in his right hand, with the result that he has no hands free. It’s getting dark, but the sidewalks are still crowded, and he negotiates his way through the oncoming crowd, hands clasped to the center of his chest like someone who is about to open them to sing, his elbows pointed out in front of him to keep anyone from blundering into the rigid, swollen, white-wrapped rectangle that used to be his left hand.

His cell phone rings, and he lets go of the bad hand long enough to bring the phone’s display into his field of vision. Arthit’s number again. He’ll have to answer sooner or later, but right now he hasn’t got the courage to find out what’s happened. Not that a cop will tell him. But why doesn’t Arthit have his phone? He’ll face it when he gets home.

Rafferty is a city boy by choice, and this is normally the hour he likes best, when the day shrugs its shoulders and allows the night to slip back in, when Bangkok goes through four or five kinds of light in an hour. The show begins with the gradual softening of dusk, the buildings’ windows growing brighter and their edges sharper against the darkening sky as the first bats flap raggedly across it, and finishes with the sidewalks chalky with the spill of light from stores and restaurants and bars, and the bluish electric snap from the buzzing streetlights high overhead. He’s often thought that Tolouse-Lautrec would have loved it.