Free A Nail Through the Heart by Timothy Hallinan Page A

dancers for whom they uprooted whatever lives they had to move to Bangkok. “What’s your Claus look like, Mac?”
    O’Connor tents his fingers and peers through them. “Dishy in that kind of seedy way that suggests piercings in unexpected places. About twenty-four or—”
    “Wrong Claus, Mac.” Rafferty displays the picture again. “This guy’s in his fifties and big as a house.”
    “Definitely the wrong Claus. Not likely to be at Narcissus either. If you’re over thirty these days, forget it. It’s getting so they barely let you in if you shave.”
    “Such a life,” Hofstedler says unpleasantly. “Such values, yes?”
    “I don’t notice you taking home any matrons,” Mac says from the safety of his booth.
    “Okay,” Rafferty says, getting up. “He keeps a low profile, doesn’t mingle with the European community here, he’s probably not gay, hedoesn’t go to clubs, and he’s got an awkward name. I guess that’s information. Sort of.”
    “He is not leading an open life,” Hofstedler observes. “Do you know what kind of a man he is?”
    “A small-time saint, from what I’ve been told, although my source is biased.”
    “I doubt he’s a saint,” Hofstedler says.
    “Why? Because he doesn’t troll the bars?”
    “One reason people come here, as I believe you said in your book,” Hofstedler continues comfortably, “is that here it is possible to behave openly in ways that one would hide at home.”
    “I wrote that?” Rafferty says.
    “It makes you wonder, does it not,” Hofstedler says, “what kind of behavior one would hide in Bangkok.”

11
Not Big Enough to Sell Gum
    I was really little,” Miaow says without preamble. She is speaking Thai. “Maybe five or four.” Miaow has no idea how old she actually is, so they took a vote and decided she’s eight, although she could be a big seven or a small nine. “I slept under bridges. There were rats there that bit my fingers. When it rained, I slept in the doors of stores that were closed. Men came around all the time to chase us away. At night I went behind restaurants and waited for them to close. They throw away a lot of food, did you know that?”
    “I wouldn’t be surprised,” Rafferty says. On his lap is a plastic bag containing a bright pink T-shirt, which Miaow bought for him on the sidewalk. He is perspiring against the plastic, but he doesn’t want to move the bag.
    “Well, I didn’t know it until some other kid told me. We had to keep changing restaurants. If a place threw away really good food, the big kids would learn about it and take it all.” She looks at a large spot on the carpet for a moment—a spot Rafferty and Rose have been battling for weeks—and then out at the balcony. “Kids can be mean, you know. Some adults think all kids are cute, but we’re not. Some kids are as mean as adults.”
    “I’m sorry, Miaow.” She rarely speaks of her life before he met her. Much of what he knows about it he has learned from the pictures she draws, Crayola nightmares of children huddling together on sidewalks surrounded by adult knees. Once in a while, there’s an adult face with big, sharp, white teeth.
    “No problem,” she says. “It’s the way it was.” She brushes a stray hair from her face and runs her palms over her head to make sure her part is straight. It’s an aspect of the world she can control. “I wasn’t big enough to sell gum. So I just asked people for money. But most days nobody gave me any. I was really, really hungry. It was all I could think about.”
    “Poor baby,” he says without thinking. She usually meets pity with scorn, but today she lets it pass.
    “It’s hard to sleep when you’re hungry. You know you’re going to wake up hungry. You know you’ll be hungry all day. Sometimes I got so hungry I fell down.”
    “That should never have happened.”
    “It happens to lots of kids. It’s happening right now. Out there.” She lifts her chin to the glass doors and the city