Timothy Hallinan - The Fourth Watcher

From behind Rafferty someone squeals “Anh!” and he turns to see Fon grinning at Mrs. Pongsiri like a long-lost sister.

“Fon,” Mrs. Pongsiri says in a voice Rafferty has never heard before: higher, softer, younger, the voice of the bars and clubs. She opens her arms like a soprano reaching for the top note. Fon shoves her way between Rafferty and Kosit, and the two women embrace. Mrs. Pongsiri kisses Fon on the cheek and squeezes her so hard that Fon lets out a little squeak. Holding Fon at arm’s length, Mrs. Pongsiri looks back to the couch full of money and says, “But what in the world-”

Now the other women reappear. Lek and one other, whose name Rafferty doesn’t know, give Mrs. Pongsiri wide, white smiles as they pick up their hair dryers and get back to work.

“You’re. . drying money?” Mrs. Pongsiri asks, the question wrinkling her forehead.

“We need to make it look old,” Rafferty says. “So we washed it.”

Mrs. Pongsiri blinks heavily, obviously sorting through, and rejecting, half a dozen questions. Finally she settles on the practical. “Don’t you have a dryer?”

“Sure,” Rafferty says, “but I think it’ll make them too stiff.”

Mrs. Pongsiri wearily shakes her head. “Softener sheets,” she says, as though speaking to a disappointing child. “Just throw them in with the money.”

Kosit and Rafferty look at each other.

“I bought a box of them today,” Mrs. Pongsiri says. “I’ll be right back.” She gets a new grip on her purse and bustles down the hall. As she unlocks her door, Rafferty hears her say, “Men.”

Kosit gives a disbelieving glance at the shirt cardboards Rafferty has glued together, looks at the suitcase and the bent coat hangers Rafferty plans to use for support, and says, “Never.”

Through the open door to the living room, Rafferty hears the women talking. He feels like his battery died and corroded days ago, but the women are fully charged. For most of them, this is the first time they’ve worked their normal hours in months.

“Why not?” He and Kosit are sitting on the bed.

Kosit picks up the shirt boards. Rafferty’s newly laundered shirts, stripped from the cardboard, litter the floor. “Too flexible,” Kosit says, bending them. “Even glued together. You need it to be rigid. This stuff is heavy. And the lever won’t work. Not enough pressure.”

“Start with the boards. What can we do?”

“Can’t add much weight,” Kosit says, thinking. “What about those books in the living room?”

“Books are heavy,” Rafferty says.

“The covers aren’t. Get a bunch of hardbacks and some sort of cutter. Look.” He frames a book cover in his hands and mimes placing them across the platform of shirt boards. “Overlap them,” he says. “Crisscrossed. Glued on both sides, so they don’t bend.”

“That leaves the lever,” Rafferty says.

“It leaves a lot of things,” Kosit says. “The hinges on the suitcase, for example. You need to oil them so they’re almost friction-free.” He opens and closes the suitcase several times. “Too much resistance,” he says.

“I’ve got oil. What about the lever?”

“I can fix the lever. But you need more. .” Kosit searches for the word, then brings his hands slowly together and pulls them apart quickly.

Rafferty says, “Shit. Well, it’s not the end of the world. I don’t think I’ll need this. It’s just insurance.”

Kosit sits back, looking doubtfully at the suitcase, at the mess they have made. Then his face clears, and he points at the mattress. His eyebrows come up in a question.

“Sure,” Rafferty says. “If the next four or five hours go wrong, I’ll never sleep on it again anyway.”

He gets up and goes into the living room to get the books and an X-acto knife. The production line is in full swing. The dryer, with the last load in it, is running in the kitchen. Two women crumple or fold the bills and smooth them again. Another chooses one bill out of four or five and makes a small mark with a felt-tip, either black or red, like those used by banks. Fon has taken to writing random phone numbers with a ballpoint pen on every tenth or twelfth bill. She passes the bills on to Mrs. Pongsiri, who sorts the baht and the dollars into two stacks and smooths them again.

Suddenly Mrs. Pongsiri breaks into a laugh and then reaches over and swats Fon lightly on top of the head. The other girls gather round to look at the bill, and then they all laugh. Rafferty reaches for it and turns it over. It is an American hundred. In the slender margin at the edge, Fon has carefully written, “Love you long time.”

Getting into the spirit, Mrs. Pongsiri says, “Roll up some of the American hundreds. Roll them very tightly and then unroll them again.”

Kosit, framed in the doorway to the bedroom, eyes her narrowly for a moment and then says, “Good idea.”

“Americans in my club,” Mrs. Pongsiri says, hurrying the words. She has apparently just remembered that Kosit is a cop. “They do that all the time, and then they inhale something through it.”

“Probably vitamin C,” Kosit says. “I’m sure there are no drugs at your club.”

“Very high-end,” Mrs. Pongsiri agrees.

“What’s the name of your club?” Kosit asks.

“It’s called Rempflxnblt, ” says Mrs. Pongsiri, sneezing most of the word into her palm. She presses an index finger beneath her nostrils. “Sorry. It’s the perfume in the fabric softener.”

“Mrs. Pongsiri my mama-san once,” Fon says cheerfully in English. Mrs. Pongsiri blanches. “Same-same with Lek and Jah. Very good mama-san. Never hit girls, never take money.”

“Almost never,” Lek says, and the other women laugh again.

Lek is wrapping rubber bands around the stacks: ten thousand dollars per stack in American hundreds, one hundred bills in each stack of thousand-baht notes. She ran out of rubber bands ten minutes ago, and the women removed a remarkable variety of elastic loops from their hair. Mrs. Pongsiri traipsed down the hall a second time and came back with a box containing enough scrunchies to style a yeti. Rafferty is a little worried about the predominance of beauty products, but he figures if the stacks are mixed up enough, they won’t be so conspicuous.

With a thwack, Lek snaps a bright pink scrunchie around a wad of thousand-baht notes, and Rafferty’s cell phone shrills. Every eye in the room goes to him as he opens the phone and puts it to his ear.

“Coming up,” Leung says. “With a surprise.”

“What I don’t need right now is a surprise.”

“This is a surprise you’d rather have now than later. You might want to meet me in the hall.” He hangs up.

“How much more?” Rafferty asks the women.

“Halfway done,” Fon says. “We kept some to speed things up.” The other women laugh, some more heartily than others.

“If you do,” Rafferty says, “take the stuff on the coffee table. It may not be as pretty, but it’s real.” He pulls a dozen hardcover books of approximately the same size off the shelf and heads for the bedroom. He has just dropped them in front of Kosit, who is sitting on the bed, which has a long rip in it where the policeman worked out a spring, when the doorbell rings.

“Listen,” Kosit says. “The bedsprings aren’t enough.”

“Well, Jesus,” Rafferty says. He can barely focus on the problem. “Use anything.”

Kosit shakes his head. “I don’t know-”

“Use those,” Rafferty says, pointing to the stun grenades hanging from Kosit’s belt. “That ought to open things up.”

Kosit tilts one up and lets it drop back. “I’m not sure. The pins are hard to pop. They take a good hard tug. I don’t know if the lever-”