Timothy Hallinan - A Nail Through the Heart

Arthit glances at him and then away again. "The pseudonymous Doughnut. Disappeared, has she?"

"Without a trace."

"If she'd left a trace, Poke, she wouldn't have disappeared. She'd just be temporarily occluded."

"It's a good thing I like you," Rafferty says, "because if I didn't, you'd be unbearable."

"One thing that might interest you. Your two friends on the police force both resigned this morning."

"Well, they weren't really cut out for the job, were they? Did they give any explanation?"

"Real estate," Arthit says. "They're going into real estate."

"I thought it took capital to get into real estate."

"Well, apparently they have some." Arthit picks up the bone left from his steak, gives it a once-over, and drops it back onto the plate. "There are some things it's good not to look into too closely."

Rafferty is watching ash glaze over the glow inside the coals.

"Everybody, especially everybody in the West, thinks the guilty are guilty and the innocent are innocent," Arthit says. "Okay, so there are a few people who are just plain guilty. Madame Wing is a good example. Then there are an approximately equal number of people who are just plain innocent. I know three or four, and so do you. Everybody else is somewhere in the middle, trying to muddle through it all. After spending most of my life as a policeman, I still believe that most people are as good as they know how to be."

"Based on what evidence?"

"Little things, big things. On the big side, say, Angkor or Chartres."

"You could just as easily say those are ego. The old big-buildings-equal-big-dicks theory."

"No." Arthit puts his beer down and picks up Rafferty's. "They're aspiration. Spirit carved in rock. An enormous attempt over hundreds of years to express something that people feel deeply but don't know how to talk about. Something that's in the center of most of us, turned into millions of tons of stone. Ego-well, Albert Speer's designs for the Third Reich, those were ego. Ego pure and simple. The Brandenburg Gate, the Chrysler Building-those are aspiration."

"I don't know. More evidence."

"My wife's eyes," Arthit says. "Miaow's face." He reaches over and punches Rafferty on the thigh, harder, Rafferty hopes, than he intended to. "Friendship."

Rafferty grasps the handle of the fork. It has grown warm to the touch. "You got me," he says.

"You're such an unconvincing cynic," Arthit says. "I don't know why you even bother to try."

"I've been hearing that a lot lately."

"You know what a cynic is?"

"Yes, Arthit. A cynic is a disappointed romantic."

"A cynic is someone who's been on the train too long."

"The train," Rafferty says, and waits for it.

"I've always wondered why people travel by train," Arthit says. "Trains invariably pass through the shabbiest, most wretched parts of cities. To someone who lived his entire life on a train, the world would seem to be long stretches of emptiness occasionally interrupted by patches of ugliness. Once in a while, you need to get off the train and see what the world's really like."

"Yeah, yeah."

"You've been on an unusually long train ride-"

"All right, Arthit. You don't have to hammer it into my skull."

"Oh, I don't know." He slaps Rafferty's empty bottle against his palm. "Westerners seem to have difficulty with metaphors. I've often wondered whether it has something to do with the frontal lobe. Your heads are shaped so oddly."

"Tell it to Isaac Newton."

"You're going to adopt a child, Poke," Arthit says in a tone of gentle reproof. "You're going to be in charge of her universe, at least until she's old enough to take charge of it herself. You need to work on your worldview. And hers, too, since it's not the same as yours."

"I'm learning about that."

"And Rose's." He plucks at the crease of his pants. "How does she explain all this?"

"Hungry ghosts."

"See? Nothing even close to what you've probably come up with."

"Do you believe in them?"

"Hungry ghosts? Oh, yes indeed. The world is full of them."

"Then how-" Rafferty begins. "Hell. Okay, the world is swarming with hungry ghosts. How do I protect my wife and child? War and famine and pestilence and random malice, I'm comfortable with those. You can see them and smell them. I sort of know what to do about them. But this other stuff…"

"Don't be silly. You're making a family. You'll love them. You'll do things for them. You'll hold them when they need it and let them hold you when you need it. You'll listen to them when they try to educate you. Life is stronger than death when there's love in it. And along the way you'll change. Nothing changes a really putrid worldview like doing something good for someone who needs it."

"You big cream puff."

"I do have a soft center," Arthit says, "and I'm proud of it."

A cool wind suddenly materializes, brightening the coals and soothing Rafferty's raw and battered skin. "My God," he says. "A breeze."

Arthit lifts his face to it and breathes deeply. He closes his eyes. "If life were any better," he says, "we could sell tickets."

For the second night in a row, sleep won't come. After two hours or so, he simply settles back and lets the feelings bombard him. They pummel him from every direction, riddling him, blowing holes in his consciousness like cosmic rays, except that the particles seem to be the size of basketballs.

Even with the air-conditioning at full, he is perspiring. When the sheets on his bed become damp, he gets up and moves back to the couch. He fits into its new lumps and valleys as though he's been sleeping there for years and gazes out through the sliding door. A high, thin fog has settled over the city like ash, like the settling coals on the balcony, probably cold by now. Something seems to have burned out inside him, too.

He doesn't know whether it's something he can ever light again.

He is mentally rewriting his relationship with the boy, playing an especially agonizing game of "what if," when he hears the whispers at the door. He reaches automatically for the gun, realizes it's not there, and gets up, wrapping the sheet over his shoulders. Before he can make it to the door, it opens.

Rose and Miaow are standing there, pale as ghosts in the fluorescent light of the hallway.

"We couldn't sleep," Miaow says.

And Rose says, "Neither of us." She clears her throat. "Could sleep," she says. Then she adds, "With you here alone." She has a plastic bag in her hand.

Rafferty wants to say something, but he finds that he can't. He steps back, inviting them in.

Miaow steps forward, her eyes wide at the ruin of the apartment, but Rose hesitates, looking down at something beside the door. "Do you have a guest?"

"Where's Superman?" Miaow asks. She points her chin toward her room. "Is he-"

"We have to talk about Boo," Rafferty says. He steps forward and rests a hand on her shoulder, and her warmth travels up his arm and straight to his heart. "About all of it. Tomorrow." Rose has stooped down to pick something up, and when she rises, she has in her hand a pair of shoes-battered, worn out, scuffed, and beaten. The soles flap loose like a clown's. Shoes, Rafferty thinks, as some of his new happiness drains away, that were probably retrieved from a trash bin and then carefully placed at his door.

"What are these?" Rose asks. "They're not yours."

"No," Rafferty says, the word finding its way around the sudden weight in his chest. "They're not." Miaow's head comes up sharply, and her eyes pierce him.

"Then why are they here?"

"Aaaahhh," Rafferty says. He drops to his knees and hugs Miaow, and although she stiffens for a moment, she exhales and settles against him and lets her head fall onto his shoulder. He kisses the knife-straight part in her hair and looks back up at Rose. "I guess someone's decided to go barefoot."