Breathing Water: A Bangkok Thriller

dusky skin is stretched tightly over his bones and his eyes have the unblinking luster Da associates with the simple-minded.

“Kep?”

“The one in the blue shirt.” The woman puts her folded blanket on the pavement and sits on it. The boy immediately sits beside her. He puts an open hand, dark and elongated as a monkey’s paw, on her leg, palm up. “How much money has Kep taken from you today?”

“More than three thousand baht.”

The other woman raises her eyebrows. “Good day.”

“One woman gave me fifteen hundred.”

“The farang with the metal hair?”

“Yes.”

“Lucky you. She comes every day. She works somewhere down there. One of the buildings.”

“Does Kep tell the truth about how much money he takes?”

“No. He’ll put a thousand in his pocket and pass the rest on to Wichat.”

“Wichat? The man in the office?”

“That’s Wichat.”

“He doesn’t make enough money without stealing from me?”

“For these people there’s never enough money. They’d eat the world if they could get their jaws wide enough.”

“It isn’t fair.”

The other woman laughs. The sound draws the skeletal child’s empty gaze, but then his eyes drift downward again. “Fair,” the woman says. She laughs again.

“Well, it’s not.”

“No,” the other woman says. She fans herself halfheartedly. “You’ve had a good day,” she says, “but it was luck. I’ve been watching you.”

Da is looking at the boy’s eyes. He seems to be gazing at a point four or five feet in front of him, about as high as the center of his chest. Da says, “Am I doing something wrong?”

“You don’t move around enough. You need to get their attention. Push the bowl in their direction, get up on your knees so they can’t pretend they don’t see you.”

“But if I get up, it wakes Peep.”

“Who?” the woman asks.

“Peep,” Da says. “The baby. If I get up, it-”

“You named it,” the other woman says. She looks at Peep and then averts her eyes and shakes her head as though in distaste. “You shouldn’t do that.”

“Why? He needs a name.”

“You shouldn’t,” the woman says. “But you already did, didn’t you? So why talk about it? Anyway, move around more. If you don’t make good money, they treat you badly. Kep especially.” With a grunt she gets to one knee. “Not much longer,” she says. The boy rises to his feet and extends a hand to her, but she pushes it away, not ungently, and gets up unaided.

“Wait a minute,” Da says. “Why shouldn’t I name him?”

The other woman says, “You’ll find out soon enough.” The boy grabs the back of her blouse and knots it in his hand, and she rests her hand on the nape of his neck as the two of them wade into traffic, zigzagging through it as though the cars and motos and tuk-tuks are an elaborate mirage. Only when they are safely across does Da take her eyes off them, and when she does, she realizes that someone is standing beside her.

She looks up. It is the boy with the tangled hair.

He leans down, and she is startled by how clean he is. His clothes are filthy, but his skin shines.

“When you want to run away,” he says, “turn your bowl upside down and put it in front of you.”

“Run away? Why would I want to run away?”

“Just turn the bowl upside down,” the boy says, backing away from her, his eyes scanning the sidewalk. “Don’t look for me. Just turn your bowl upside down.”

17

Charm Doesn’t Make the Cut

Elora Weecherat is fearsomely stylish, nothing like the retro siren of Rafferty’s imagination. The instant he sees her in the sparse, creatively wrapped flesh, the faint French accent becomes a heady, even cloying, whiff of Paris, the Paris of haute couture and hold the sauce, the Paris that Rafferty glimpses on the pages of Rose’s fashion magazines, where “beautiful” means undernourished and overdressed. Beneath the drape of expensive clothes, Weecherat is as thin as a piece of paper and probably, he thinks, as easy to cut yourself on.

By the time he comes through the door, her tape recorder is already on, its little red eye glowing on the table. She is seated in regal state on one of the two pumpkin-colored chairs in the corner of the dentist’s waiting room, and she starts talking before the door has closed behind him.

“You don’t look like your photo.” She redrapes her skirt and crosses her legs in a single choreographed motion. Her cheekbones are so prominent that her face is almost diamond-shaped, and her eyes have sunk deeply into her face. The eyes may be deep-set, but they are very bright eyes, and they don’t look like they miss much.

“Ah, but I’ve brought my personality,” Rafferty says.

“Charm doesn’t make the cut.”

“Is that English?”

“The cut,” she says, the word itself sharp. “The twenty-five percent of my story that my editor will remove just to remind himself that he can.” She turns the tape recorder a fraction of an inch toward him. “Let’s get to it.”

“First,” Rafferty says, and he reaches over and turns the tape recorder off.

Weecherat gathers her draperies around her. “No tape, no talk.”

“This is background,” Rafferty says. “If the discussion goes well, I’ll let you turn that thing on again and I’ll give you the stuff for attribution.”

She settles back and realigns her shawl, which is the color of a buttercup, until it is at a precise vertical.

“You’re interested in Pan,” he says.

She shrugs, and her lower lip pops out. It is a very French shrug, and suddenly Rafferty has a plausible biography: rich family, French education, interested in fashion, but not enough talent to make a living at it and too hardheaded to specialize in writing about it. Therefore, the business beat. “In the way one is interested in faulty plumbing or a grotesque tattoo,” she says. “Good plumbing is a blessing. A really marvelous tattoo is an enhancement. Pan has the opportunity to be both and has chosen to be neither. He eats money and vomits it in public. Pan is a swine.”

Rafferty reaches into his shirt pocket and pulls out the two lists, the one Dr. Ravi gave him and the one he copied onto the legal pad. He puts the second yellow sheet in front of her and points at a line halfway down the page.

She looks at the name that is written there, which is her own. “Yes?”

“You’re one of about seventy people whose names I was given this morning. Would you say that most of these people share your opinion of Pan?”

She holds out a hand, its nails painted black. He passes her the remaining yellow pages. Her eyes go down them quickly, and then she flips through the sheets as though looking for a contradiction. The lower lip makes a reappearance. “These people would not be invited to his wedding, if that’s what you mean. Or, if they were, you’d be a fool to eat the cake.”

“Do you think a good book can be written from these sources?”