Timothy Hallinan - The Queen of Patpong

"Sorry," a boy says from stage right.

"Put the light on the cyclorama back the way it was," Mrs. Shin says. "I want to see this whole transition come together. Luther, you cue everything. Everybody ready?"

A general chorus of readiness from all over the theater as the cyclorama brightens, and then Mrs. Shin claps again and says, "From 'Come away,' Luther. Go."

Luther cramps his way stage left, toward the bottom of the stairway, and says, " 'Come away, servant, come; I am ready now. Approach, my Ariel, come.' "

The sky darkens and the onstage lights dim, and Rafferty hears a howling wind, punctuated by crashing waves, and suddenly there's a sunburst at the very top of the rock as Miaow, wearing a waist-length shirt of little mirrors above black tights, is transfigured by a pure white spotlight, and she lifts her arms high, the brilliant mirrors flung out like an exploding star, and says, " 'All hail, great master! grave sir, hail!' " and Rafferty gets goose bumps.

"That works," Mrs. Shin says as she resumes her seat. "That'll wake them up."

Miaow is maneuvering her way down the uneven, curving staircase as though she's been walking it her entire life, throwing off points of light as effortlessly as she throws off her lines. The spotlight follows her, and down below, Luther realizes he's not standing in his own light and makes the adjustment.

"Look at her," Mrs. Shin says proudly. "She doesn't even check to see where she's putting her feet."

"She's been in more dangerous places than this," Rafferty says.

"She's going to be wonderful."

Four feet from the bottom of the stairway, Miaow makes a flying leap to the stage floor, leaving behind the follow spot, whose operator hadn't expected the jump. Mrs. Shin, who hadn't been expecting it either, starts and emits a mild "Eek." Miaow is all over the stage now, owning it, swooping and diving ceaselessly as she describes the storm she caused, the storm that drove onto the island the boat containing Prospero's evil brother and the king of Naples. As he watches and listens, Rafferty begins to feel an odd kind of tension, the sort of low-level electrical charge he experiences in his scalp and skin when he's close to working his way through a problem. Despite the sensation, which definitely demands attention, he's distracted by something very different in Miaow's voice, a quality that's nothing like how she had played the lines when he helped her learn them. He looks up at the stage and then glances over at Mrs. Shin to find her leaning on the back of the row of seats in front of them, staring at Miaow as though the entire speech is new, something Shakespeare, against all odds, just wrote.

"What in the world is she doing?" Mrs. Shin asks, although Rafferty doesn't think the question is addressed to him.

Miaow is certainly doing something. The tale of how she bewitched the ship and made all aboard terrified that they were about to drown, how she drove them to leap into the raging sea, and how she dispersed them around the island in small groups, is told with white-hot fury, as tightly focused as the flame from an acetylene torch. When she assures Prospero that the shipwrecked courtiers are all safe on solid ground, their clothing not even wet, she sounds bitterly regretful, as though she'd rather report they'd been flayed alive one at a time and their skins hung over bushes to dry. When, in answer to a question from Prospero, she describes the king's son sitting and sighing on a rock, " 'His arms in this sad knot,' " she accompanies the words with a petulant crossing of her arms, and she gets a laugh from offstage. Somebody else whistles, perhaps at the sheer amount of energy Miaow has just generated.

There's a silence. Luther has been so busy watching Miaow that he's forgotten his line. Now he turns to face the audience and asks, "Is she going to do it like that?"

"Good question," Mrs. Shin says, moving back into the aisle. "Mia. Where did that come from?"

Miaow takes a step back and looks down at the stage floor, and the spotlight goes out, and she's just a little girl again. Rafferty thinks she's going to retreat into sullenness. But she says, "Ariel hates them. She hates all of them."

"Why?"

"They're bad. Look what they did. How they stole everything from Prospero. How they put him and the baby-I mean Miranda, who didn't know anything and never hurt anybody-into a leaky boat and tried… tried to drown them. In the ocean. Like kittens nobody wants."

Rafferty feels a blaze of love for his daughter, but that little zigzag of electricity returns. Something he's missing…

"But Ariel doesn't care about Prospero, Mia," Mrs. Shin says reasonably. "It doesn't really matter to her whether Prospero succeeds in trapping his brother. Remember, Prospero is Ariel's master. He enslaved her, didn't he?"

"But first he rescued her," Miaow says, and her eyes dart to Rafferty for an instant, and then she looks down at the floor again. "And he… uh, he taught her stuff. And he took care of her."

Rafferty wants to get up and vault over the orchestra pit and hug his daughter, but she wouldn't speak to him for days. He hears Mrs. Shin talking to Miaow, but he's not following the words, he's thinking about the play. Prospero brought his enemies to his island. He didn't search out his enemies. He brought them to him.

He brought them to him.

On the phone Arthit says, "We've found three so far."

Rafferty is jammed up against the door on the passenger side of the cab, the bandaged elbow lifted awkwardly over his chest so he doesn't lean on it. The driver's seat is pushed all the way back, so Miaow had volunteered to sit behind it, but now she's toppled sideways, her head on her arm and her eyes closed. She's probably exhausted from the energy she burned on the stage. Her yellowish chop of hair is inches from Rafferty's knee, and it takes an effort not to rest a protective hand on it. But he doesn't want to wake her, and she'd hate it anyway, so he concentrates on speaking quietly into the phone. "That was quick," he says.

"I found a Phuket cop who's been assigned to an inactive post, and I offered him money. You owe me ten thousand baht, by the way. And he's only started."

"Inactive posts" are a uniquely Thai way of saving institutional face while dealing with the inept or the haplessly corrupt who get caught in plain sight; they're assigned to an empty desk in front of a bare wall and have to show up every day to punch the clock and sit there as they slowly descend into madness. The poor guy in Phuket probably leaped at the offer.

"You think there will be more?" Rafferty is looking out the window at a surprising flow of traffic for 4:00 P.M. They're doing maybe ten, twelve kilometers per hour.

"What I think is that he found records of three dead girls in about four hours," Arthit says. "Horner has been coming in and out of the country several times a year for almost twelve years. So yes, I think there will be more."

"And they match his dates here."

"So far. All either while he was here or within ten days after he left. The one who was found late had been in the water longer than the others."

"Any identities?"

"No. But they're all in their late teens or early twenties. Right in the range."

Rafferty glances over at Miaow, whose eyes are still closed, and cups the phone, bringing it so close to his mouth that his lips brush it. "What about cause of death?"

"They all had knife wounds. No real autopsies, so we don't know whether they were alive when they went into the water."

"When you say knife wounds…"

"I mean carved. Thirty or forty cuts. Shallow, deep, straight, curved. Little designs here and there. Wounds that would have taken time. He enjoyed himself."