Breathing Water: A Bangkok Thriller

And she feels eyes upon her. Someone is looking fixedly at her. She can feel this kind of thing. It is the dim, warm pressure of a gaze, fainter than the most tentative breeze, as faint as the weight of light falling through an open door. From behind her.

She turns to look, and someone stumbles into her, hard enough to knock her to an elbow and send the bowl into the air, the coins spiraling loose and ringing against the pavement. Hard enough to make her grab Peep so tightly he squeals and then begins to cry.

Someone is gabbling at her in some language-Sorry sorry sorry-it’s English, Da realizes, and she looks up, Peep squalling against her chest, to see a thin farang woman with hair the color of copper, a color that doesn’t even pretend to be real. The woman is waving her hands around, almost in tears, loudly saying the same thing, Sorry sorry sorry. She drops to her knees and begins to pick up the coins that hit the sidewalk.

“Okay,” Da says, embarrassed for the woman, with the sweat dripping off the tip of her long, bony nose. “Me okay. Baby, him okay.”

“I just wasn’t looking,” the woman says. She snatches a coin just inches in advance of a man’s shoe, barely getting her raw-looking knuckles out of the way. “Are you sure he’s all right?” She looks at Peep more closely and says, “Oh, my God, he’s adorable.”

“Him…pretty,” Da says.

“Pretty?” the woman says. She is dropping into the bowl the coins she picked up. “He’s precious, just a real little heartbreaker. How the girls will love him-he is a boy, isn’t he?”

Da says, “Boy.”

“And look at those lashes. Why is it always boys who get those beautiful eyelashes? Although you didn’t exactly get shortchanged in that department either. I feel like Bigfoot,” the woman says, looking around for more coins. “Just hoofed over you like a heffalump. Honey,” she says, putting a red-nailed hand on Da’s arm, “I am so sorry.”

“No problem,” Da says. Peep has stopped crying and is regarding the woman’s hair with wide-eyed uncertainty.

“Look at that little angel,” the woman says. “Just look at him. Couldn’t you just eat him up?”

Da says, “Eat?”

“Oh, you poor thing,” the woman says. “Here I am, gabbing on and on like this. Of course you need to eat. A lot more than you need a bunch of sloppy sympathy. Here.” She unsnaps a big straw purse and pulls out a wad of red five-hundred-baht bills. “You just buy as much food as you can choke down, and get that little angel a new blanket. The one you’ve got needs a couple of hours in a good strong bleach solution.” She puts two of the notes, and then a third, into Da’s bowl.

“Too much,” Da says.

“Nonsense. Plenty more where that comes from.” The eyes on either side of the sunburned nose are a pale, faded blue that Thai people associate with ghosts, but they seem kind. “Look at you,” she says. “Probably never done anything wrong in your sweet little life, and here you are. I have to tell you, honey, with all due respect to your beautiful country and everything, it stinks.”

Da takes the third note out of the bowl and extends it. She says, “Please?”

“Honey, you knock that off. Put that back, or I’ll give you a bunch more.” The woman gets to her feet. “I’m Helen,” she says. She jabs her chest with an index finger. “Helen. Me Helen.” Then she points at Da. “You?”

“My name me, Da.”

“Da,” Helen says. “What a pretty name. And Junior there?”

“Sorry?”

Helen points at Peep. “Name?”

“Name him, Peep.”

“Name him…” Helen says, her voice trailing off. “Oh, oh. His name, his name is Peep. Peep, right?”

Da says, “Peep.”

“Da and Peep,” Helen says. “Peep and Da.”

“Happy,” Da says, and then runs the sentence through her mind once and says, “Happy meet you.”

“Oh, well, honey,” Helen says, blinking fast, “I’m happy to meet you, too. And I’ll be back here tomorrow. I’ll be back here every day this week, and I’ll be looking for you.” She tugs her blouse straight, puts the strap of the big straw purse over her shoulder. She waves at Peep. “You take care of that little treasure,” she says. “Bye, now.”

Da says, “Bye-bye,” and Helen is gone.

And immediately the space is filled by the tree-trunk man in the blue shirt, who snatches the five-hundred- baht bills out of the bowl, bends down, and says furiously, “Never do that. Never. Never give money back. Do you understand me?”

Da lowers her head. Peep begins to cry again. “I understand,” Da says.

“You’re here to get it, not give it away.” And then the man is gone.

Da sits there, bouncing Peep to quiet his crying, trying to reassemble the feeling she had before Helen bumped into her. But what she feels instead is the warmth of that fixed gaze.

When she turns this time, she sees him: a spectrally slender boy of thirteen or fourteen, with a sharp- featured face and long, knotted hair. A moment later, like an animal disappearing into the brush around her village, he is gone.

12

The Chuckle Is a Perfectly Acceptable Form of Laughter

You guys do this often?” Rafferty asks.

“Often enough,” says the man on his right, the one who spoke before.

“The driver must be built like a sumo wrestler. When he got in, it felt like the car was going to tip over.”

“You hear that?” the man asks in Thai. “A sumo wrestler.”

The man in front makes a sound that Rafferty identifies as a chuckle. Despite having read countless novels in which characters chuckle more or less continuously, this is the first time Rafferty has actually heard someone do it.

Rafferty says, “He chuckled.”

“He’s a merry soul,” says the man to his right.

“It’s important to be happy in one’s work,” Rafferty says.

“Do you always chatter like this when you’re frightened?”

Rafferty says, “I’d be frightened if you hadn’t put the hood on.”

“That just means we’re not going to kill you. It doesn’t mean we’re not going to beat the shit out of you.”

“When I’m frightened, I shut up,” Rafferty says.

After a moment of silence, the man to his right chuckles.

“You chuckled, too,” Rafferty says. “Did somebody teach all you guys to chuckle?”

“The chuckle,” the man to his right says, “is a perfectly acceptable form of laughter.”

“You speak very good English.”

They ride in silence for a few moments. Then the man says, “Here’s the problem: It doesn’t matter whether I like you. I’ll do anything to you that I’m told to do. Kill you without a thought. So go ahead and entertain us, but it won’t make any difference.”

Rafferty says, “Why waste good material?”

Down a ramp and over some speed bumps. The car stops, and a hand grasps Rafferty’s arm.

“Let’s go. And don’t suddenly get stupid.”