Timothy Hallinan - A Nail Through the Heart

The Blue Rises Up For the thousandth time in twelve weeks, the blue of the tsunami rises up-now safely contained behind the glass screen-and breaks to pieces on the trunks of the palms. At this point, as everyone in the world who has a television knows, the horizon tilts to a forty-five-degree angle. Then the camera moves back, herky-jerky to the rhythm of the cameraman's steps, and another wave rushes forward to devour the one before it and shatter itself against a low wall, and the small figures resolve into running people, and for the first time you can hear the shouts and the occasional scream.

And around the camera now, as it turns to show us the single street of the village, awash with the detritus of deck chairs and plastic bags, more water surges ashore. You can no longer see the running people.

Moon and river. House and trees.

The hard line of the roof lops the lower half from the rising moon. Across the river, the city of eight million shimmers like the ghost of a brushfire.

In the dark trees at the river's edge, a rustle of birds. In the palm of Tam's hand, the sudden spark-red pain of a splinter.

The shovel he has driven deep into the mud strikes something hard and stops. The laws of physics force Tam's hands down the wet wooden handle and drive the sharp fragment a full inch into his lotioned and pampered palm.

It is a measure of the care Tam takes with his hands that his first thought is, Thank God it's the left, giving him approximately one-fifth of a second of gratitude before the second thought lights up the night: The safe.

He straightens slowly against his aching back, hoping the water in the hole has muffled the sound of metal striking metal, but the man above him, the man holding the flashlight in his one good hand, has seen Tam's hands skid down the handle and bends forward and says, "Something?"

Tam wiggles the blade of the shovel. The surface, whatever it is, is smooth and slick, not a rock.

"A rock," he says. Then he says, for the third time, "I hate this water."

Not that hating it does any good. Even in a hole less than four feet deep, the water seeps in and saturates the dirt. It turns it into a sluggish, heavy soup, precisely the old red of dried blood, that slops over the sides of the shovel and splatters back down. And rises up from below: For every shovelful of mud Tam throws over the side, a pint of warm, muddy river water seeps into the bottom of the hole.

Bangkok is a river town, built around a network of canals radiating off the Chao Phraya, the silt-saturated River of Kings. The city's office towers, roads, and palaces float queasily on a tropical flood-plain. Even in the dry season, the water is always there, pooled just beneath the dirt, just beneath the pavement. Waiting for some fool with a shovel.

But now the fool has struck gold. No, not gold. Jewels.

Tam leans on the shovel and gazes down into the hole to hide the elation in his face. There must be a way to get rid of the man above him for a minute. A minute is all it would take.

The moon has lifted its dappled face another fraction above the house: old Thai style, graceful angles of dark, heavy teak. Large and sprawling, it opens to grand verandas that gaze down across a sweep of grass to the river. In Bangkok only wealthy people have room for grass. They surround it with high concrete walls topped with shards of broken glass to keep people like Tam and the other man at bay. The house is unlighted. According to the other man-who says his name is Chon, although it is not-it is empty.

The emerging moon sharpens the house's shadow across the lawn.

The empty house, the glass-topped wall, the jewels: Chon had known many things. Not until this moment, though, leaning on a shovel up to his hips in muddy water, with his palm bleeding, does Tam actually believe that Chon knows the location of the most famous invisible jewels in Southeast Asia.

Okay, so maybe Tam can't make Chon leave. Time is still on his side. If he can slop around in the hole for another forty minutes or so, they'll have to fill it in, and then he can come back on his own. Chon has arranged for the watchman to disappear for only ninety minutes. When he made this point, Chon had pointed at the face of his heavy watch, gleaming in the moonlight above the ruined left hand with the crushed fingers on it.

The hand had made Tam think of a swatted spider the first time he saw it. The second time he looked at the hand, he noticed that three of the fingers had no nails. After that he stopped looking at it.

If Chon is right about what's in the safe, Tam will never have to open another one.

"So who is she, this woman?" he asks as he slips the shovel aimlessly into the mud.

"A general's widow." Chon is bent forward, beaming the flashlight's yellow cone straight down, trying to see through the reddish brown water that swirls around Tam's legs. Looking for the straight lines, the edges of the safe, that will announce that the hole is in the right place.

"What time?" Tam asks, just to make Chon move the light.

"Twelve twenty-two," Chon says, beaming the flashlight at the watch. "Jewels won't be much deeper." Is there a note of suspicion in his voice?

The jewels. Like a magic spell, the words ease the pain in Tam's back. Even his palm stops hurting. In 1987 a Thai servant, returning home after a long period of service to the Saudi royal family, brought with him a suitcase full of jewels that belonged to the princess he worked for. Prodded by the Saudis, the Bangkok police arrested the servant and held a press conference to let the jewels dazzle the cameras. After an unexplained delay of several months, the jewels were shipped back to Saudi Arabia, where they were promptly pronounced to be fakes.

The entire population of Thailand immediately concluded that the police had commissioned the manufacture of the fakes so they could either sell the real articles or give them to their wives. Since then the Saudi jewels have been the object of feverish speculation among Bangkok's jewel thieves. So when Chon told his story in the jail cell where he and Tam met, Tam's interest was fully engaged. A lifetime of relative virtue, he thought, was finally being rewarded. A policy of nonviolence. Stealing only from the rich. Gifts to monks. Pleasantries to his in-laws. His wife, the great treasure of his life, would be so happy.

"I thought you said she was a policeman's widow," Tam says at last, sluicing mud over the side of the hole.

Chon wiggles the flashlight back and forth, a negative. "Who cares? Just dig. Once you hit the safe, we have to pull it out, open it, put it back-"

"Yeah, yeah." The shovel slices through the water and probes soft mud, a good foot from the safe. Tam steps off the shovel carefully, lifts it, and dumps a streaming load of mud over the side of the hole. "How are we going to clean up all this mud?" he asks, keeping his voice light.

"Don't worry about it," Chon says.

"I wasted five minutes cutting out that square of lawn to hide the hole. What good is that going to do if the lawn is covered in mud?"

"I said don't worry about it."

"Right. You're not digging." Tam slides the edge of the shovel through the mud. The safe seems to be about eighteen inches long. "How big is this thing?"

"It's a cube," Chon says grudgingly. "About two feet on a side."

Tam has located the corner of the safe. Turning his back to Chon to mask his actions, he slips the shovel down along its side and uses the handle as a lever to worry the safe free of the mud's grasp. It gives a few inches, and Tam wiggles the shovel around to scoop up some of the mud, which he tosses over the edge of the hole.