Timothy Hallinan: The Fourth Watcher

For a moment their eyes meet and Rose smiles, but the girl quickly turns away, browsing yet another stall.

Rose offers one-third of the asking price for the Totoro shirt, settles in thirty seconds for half, and bags it. It’s her present to herself. Although she’s squeezed every baht since she moved in with Rafferty and stepped out from under the waterfall of money that flowed from the pockets of the customers in the bar, today she can buy herself a present. After all, this is her day. Then, feeling a little guilty, she buys another-girl’s size eight-for Miaow. Unlike virtually all of Miaow’s other T-shirts, this one isn’t pink, but the child has watched the animated film about Totoro so many times that she goes around the apartment she shares with Rose and Rafferty singing the theme song in phonetic Japanese.

A glance at her oversize plastic wristwatch tells Rose that Peachy will already be in the office, and she has come to expect Rose to be on hand. She dumps the bag with the T-shirts into her purse, a leather tote the size of home base, and edges through the press of shoppers toward the soot-stained four-story office building, an architectural monument to melancholy, where Peachy and Rose’s Domestics operates.

As she nears the door, she is reassembling the girl’s face in her mind. Just as a tingle of prerecognition begins to build, someone swats her lightly on the shoulder, and the image dissolves.

“Fon,” Rose says, feeling the smile break over her face. “Money day.”

“Seven months,” Fon says proudly. “It’s been seven months.” In her mid-thirties, dark-skinned, with a plain face made even plainer by a dolefully long upper lip, Fon is still beautiful when she smiles. She barely comes up to Rose’s shoulder, so she embraces the taller woman by hugging her arm. “So the money’s small, no problem,” she says. “They like me, and I like them.”

“They should like you,” Rose says. “They’re lucky to have you.”

They start up the stairs, and Rose resolves for the fiftieth time to sweep them sometime soon. They may have been swept to celebrate the millennium, but not very well. Grit scrapes beneath her shoes. It sounds like someone chewing sand.

“It’s the kids,” Fon says. “I love those kids.” With two children of her own, in the care of her mother, up north, Fon has adopted the family who employs her. She stops climbing, and Rose pauses with her. “When I think I was going to go to work at the Love Star, I can’t believe how lucky I am.”

The Love Star is among the grimmest of the bars that line the red-light street Patpong, a dank little hole where men sit at a bar chugging beer while kneeling girls chug them. Working at the Love Star is the lowest rung on the ladder for aging go-go dancers, last stop before the sidewalk. Fon was only a few days away from spending her working hours on her knees when Rose found her a family who needed a housekeeper and babysitter. While some girls enjoy dancing in the better bars, no one enjoys working at the Love Star.

“You made your own luck,” Rose says. “Anyway, that’s what Poke says. ‘Everybody makes their own luck.’”

“What about karma?” Fon asks, eyebrows raised. They are climbing again.

“Poke’s an American. Americans think karma is a soft drink.”

Fon gives her a light, corrective pinch on the arm. “How can you explain luck without karma?”

“Americans are crazy,” Rose says. “But I’m working on him.”

“Any progress?”

They reach the top of the stairs and start down the hall. Three women, wearing the street uniforms of jeans and T-shirts, are lined up outside the open door of the office. They look much more like domestic workers than the go-go dancers they used to be. “Some,” Rose says. “He’s not living entirely on meat. He’s beginning to realize he doesn’t know any thing.”

The women greet Rose and Fon at the door. Fon takes her place at the end of the line, and Rose goes in to see Peachy, looking harried behind her desk. She wears one of her memorable collection of work outfits. This one somehow manages to combine bright-colored stripes and polka dots in a design that looks like the first draft of an optical illusion. Like all of Peachy’s dresses, today’s is held in place by buttons the size of saucers.

“Everybody was early,” Peachy says, lifting a hand to her lacquered hair without actually touching it. Her eyes register Rose’s jeans and white men’s shirt-one of Rafferty’s-with a barely perceptible wince. “There were five of them here when I arrived.”

“You look very pretty today,” Rose says. The statement is not entirely truthful, but she knows how good it makes Peachy feel. If you can bring sweetness to somebody’s day, Rose’s mother always says, do it.

“Really?” Peachy’s hand returns to the general territory of her hair. “You like these colors?”

“They’re very vivid,” Rose says. “Like your personality.”

Peachy’s smile is so broad her ears wiggle. “I wasn’t sure,” she says. “I thought it might be a little young for me.”

“Poke always says you’re as young as you make other people feel.”

“And to think,” Peachy says, “I didn’t like him when I first met him.”

“Lots of people don’t,” Rose says.

Peachy shakes her head. “You’re a lucky girl.”

“Peachy?” It is the woman at the head of the line. “I’m going to be late for work.”

“Sorry, Took,” Rose says, stepping aside. “Come in and get rich.”

Peachy counts out the week’s wages for Took, a gratifying wad of crisp thousand-baht bills and some of the friendly-looking red five hundreds and hands it to her. “Too much,” Took says. “I still owe you six thousand from my advance.” She gives back fifteen hundred baht. “Only three more paydays,” she says happily, “and we’ll be even.”

Peachy sweeps Took’s returned money into the open drawer and pulls out a ledger to enter the repayment.

“Lek,” Rose says to the next woman in line, a girl who had danced beside her at the King’s Castle. “How is it at the new place?”

“The woman’s fine,” Lek says, wedging past the departing Took to get to the desk. She is a very short woman whose plump face displays frayed remnants of the baby-chipmunk cuteness that tempted so many men in the bar when she was in her early twenties. Now, ten years later, she has the look of a child’s toy that’s been through a lot. “The man has something on his mind, but he hasn’t done anything stupid yet.”

Peachy’s eyes come up fast, and Rose mentally kicks herself for raising the topic. When Rafferty first forced the partnership on her, Peachy had been terrified of placing former bar dancers-prostitutes, in her mind-with the firm’s clients. “Are you provoking him?” Peachy asks.

“It’s hard to dust without bending over,” Lek says. “If I could leave my behind at home, there’d be no problem.” Peachy blushes, but Lek laughs and says to Rose, “Remember the guys who always looked at the mirror behind us? He’s one of them.”

“I was always careful of those,” Rose says. “No telling what they wanted.”

“Oh, yes there was,” Lek says. “Anyway, Peachy, don’t worry. If he comes on too hard, I’ll just ask you to find me someplace else. No way I’m going back to that.” She folds her money and slips it into her back pocket. “You know how people talk about money as units? Like this many baht is so many dollars or pounds or whatever? I have my own unit of currency.”

“What is it?” Rose asks, against her better judgment.

“The short-time,” Lek says. “This money is about six and a half short-times. Six and a half times I don’t have to pretend that the guy who’s grunting on top of me is the prince I’ve been waiting for all my life. Six and a half times I’m not lying there reminding myself where I put my shoes in case I have to get out fast.”