Killing Rain

would protect me! That something like this would never happen!”
    Hilger looked at him. For the first time in the conversation, he let some emotion creep into his voice. Part of it was for effect. But not all of it.
    “Two of my best men just died protecting you,” he said. “And a bodyguard who I set you up with.”
    Manny didn’t answer. Hilger found his silence characteristically petulant. Three men had just died for him, and he couldn’t even say, All right, that’s a fair point.
    “If you go to other people,” Hilger went on, “it complicates my job. Give me some time to solve the problem before you do something to complicate it, all right?”
    “I have other friends,” Manny said again.
    Hilger sighed. Time for a reality injection.
    “Manny, the people you’re talking about aren’t your friends. They’re people you know, who have interests. If those people decide that their interests are out of alignment with yours, you’ll find that they become decidedly unfriendly. How will I protect you then?”
    Manny looked at him, resenting him for not being more fearful of the threat, and for making a veiled one of his own.
    “Make them suffer,” he said again, demanding something to save face.
    Hilger nodded. More because he was thinking of his men than out of any particular desire to appease Manny, he said, “I will.”
    SEVEN
    THERE WERE A FEW HOURS to kill before I met Dox for our evening out, so I took a cab to nearby Silom to look for an Internet café.
    I rarely take down an electronic bulletin board once I’ve established it. Clients need a way to reach me, and maintaining the bulletin boards provides it. But when business necessity doesn’t justify the continued maintenance, pleasure, in the form of nagging hope, provides the necessary motivation instead. If I’d ever established a board with Midori, who had loved me, then shunned me after learning that I had killed her father, I would probably check it all the time. In lieu of a board, I commune with my hopes for Midori by listening to her CDs, four of them now, each deeper, more soulful, more daring than the last; by imagining enthusiasts applauding her piano in the dark jazz joints of lower Manhattan, for which she had left Tokyo; by whispering her name every night like a sad incantation that always summons, along with certain qualities of her spirit, the continued pain of her absence.
    Checking the bulletin board I had established with Delilah, I told myself, was a mix: business and pleasure. The introduction she had provided was what led to the Manny assignment, and, if I could straighten out the aftermath of that one, there might be more where it came from. But business wasn’t really why I kept the bulletin board, or why I continued to check it almost every day. The real reason, I knew, was the stolen time we had spent together in Rio after our initial run-in in Macau and my subsequent near-death experience there.
    It wasn’t just the sex, good as it had been; nor was it only her stunning looks. Instead it was something deep inside her, something I couldn’t reach. What that thing might be I couldn’t really say: regret over her role in so many killings; bitterness at her ill treatment at the hands of her organization; sorrow over the normal life, the family, that she had chosen to forgo and that probably now would be denied to her forever. She hadn’t been the perfect companion with me. She could be demanding, sometimes moody, and she wasn’t without a temper. But sweetness and perfection were the charade I assumed she played with the targets of her work. The uncertainty and the barriers that spiced her relationship with me made her feel real, and led me in the direction of trusting her. And trust, as I was discovering with Dox, is a dangerous narcotic. I thought I had weaned myself from its rapture, gotten the monkey off my back. But then I had a little taste, and that thing I’d lived without for so many years was suddenly indispensable.
    I had the cab let me off at Silom Road under the Sala Daeng sky train station. The sky train had opened a few years earlier, and this was the first time I was back in Bangkok to witness its effect. I wasn’t sure I liked it. No doubt its presence made the city easier to traverse, bringing together points once rendered impractically distant by automotive gridlock. But there was a price. The overhead passage of steel tracks and concrete platforms smothered the streets below in shadow, and