Breathing Water: A Bangkok Thriller

it. Makes you think there were only two possible options: give Pan everything he wanted or kill him, and for some reason Pan couldn’t be killed. So the little whorehouse owner disappears, and six months later we’ve got the tycoon on our hands.”

“And even someone like you doesn’t know who it is.”

Porthip swivels his chair ninety degrees so he is looking out the window at the brightness of the new day, and at the sight the muscles of his face soften. Something about the reaction strikes Rafferty as almost infinitely sad. For a moment he thinks Porthip will drop the shield that’s been in place throughout the conversation, but what Porthip says is, “Nobody knows. Nobody’s talked.” He turns back to face Rafferty, the mask of pain tightly in place. “And don’t forget, we’re talking about years ago. Whoever it was, he could be dead by now.”

Rafferty doesn’t even have to look at the yellow sheet to punch in the number. It rings once, and then it is picked up, but the person at the other end doesn’t say anything.

“This is stupid,” Rafferty says. “If you don’t talk, how am I supposed to know I’ve got the right number? You want me to blab about all this when I don’t even know who’s on the line?”

“Jutht a minute,” says the man on the other end, a voice Rafferty recognizes from the car that sped him away from Miaow’s school. But the man sounds like he has a mouthful of potatoes.

A moment later a new voice says, “What is it?”

“What’s wrong with the other guy?”

“He ate something hot. Why are you bothering us?”

“I want to tell you that I just wasted an hour talking to Porthip. I’m supposed to be filing some sort of report in a couple of days, and if they’re all as uninformative as he is, it’s going to be pretty thin.”

“That’s not our problem.”

Rafferty is almost certain the voice belongs to Captain Teeth, Ton’s enforcer, next to him in the photo from the Garden of Eden. “I’m supposed to be writing a book here. These are my sources, remember? The ones you gave me. The information value of the conversation I just had was zero. Porthip doesn’t like Pan. That sound like a chapter to you?”

“Like I said, not our problem. Make something out of it.”

“I’m beginning to wonder about your competence.”

“You’re beginning-” The other man starts to laugh. “Our competence. I’ll tell you what. We’re competent to make a hole where you and your family used to be. Just do your fucking job. Himself doesn’t like excuses.” The man hangs up.

Rafferty stands there, weak with anger. What he wants to do is phone Arthit and ask his friend to find out whatever he can about Porthip and Ton, but he knows that’s not possible. For the first time since he met Arthit, they might as well be strangers.

Noi, he thinks, with a jolt of despair. He can’t even ask about Noi without feeling like he’s imposing. And he still hasn’t told Rose that Arthit’s afraid Noi is planning to kill herself. It’s almost enough to make Rafferty’s own troubles seem trivial.

Except for Rose and Miaow.

He considers calling Kosit, but the people Arthit fears could obviously erase Kosit from the equation even more easily than they could Arthit, since Kosit is a much more obscure cop than Arthit. The second obvious source of information, newspapers, is also closed to him. He figures it’s not just the Sun where the computers are programmed to let out a squawk every time someone enters Pan’s name. It’s easy to see himself sitting in the empty morgue of some paper, suddenly being joined by Captain Teeth and a couple of lifters who specialize in joint dislocation and eardrum ruptures.

He could say it’s research, of course. He resolves to hold that option for later.

So.

So, he guesses, that makes it time to eat.

He turns idly in the direction that most of the foot traffic is moving in, looking for someplace where he can get a salad or something light. In this heat he’d rather eat a bowling ball than a chunk of meat. He figures he’ll grab a table big enough to write on, clear a space, and go back to work on his list. Maybe start playing with scenarios. He’s long known that he thinks more clearly when he writes, that the act of waiting for his hand to finish forming the words slows his thought processes in a way that opens them up, allows him to see three or four possible alternative paths rather than just the most obvious one.

One problem is that there’s been no time to reflect. This is Thursday, just minutes into P.M. The card game had been Tuesday night, the phone calls and the abduction in front of Miaow’s school had happened on Wednesday morning. Looking back, Wednesday seems a week long: the threats, the abduction, the office suite, leveling with Pan-which he still thinks might have been a mistake, especially in light of what Porthip had to say about him-the meeting with Weecherat and then with Arthit, the encounter at the party with Captain Teeth, the event in Pan’s sparkling garden.

Ton. The snake in the cabinet. Miaow’s terror. The microphones in the apartment.

And today: Learning about Weecherat’s murder. Arthit’s remoteness. The fourth-floor apartment, and then Porthip, the dying man, smelling of mold and bitterness behind his desk.

And almost willfully uncommunicative. Why had he been on the list?

The thought stops Rafferty midstep, and someone passes him, brushing him lightly, as though he or she had sidestepped at the last moment in order to avoid bumping into his back. Rafferty glances up as the person passes, but the question about Porthip claims his attention and leads to another question: What if they’re all like that? And then to a third: Does anyone actually want this book written?

And, if not, what the hell is going on?

But before he can begin to consider that, his consciousness is flooded by a detailed, high-definition visual memory of the person who had brushed past him. The shape of the shoulders, the way he carried himself, the color of his clothes.

The hair.

Rafferty breaks into a run, dodging between people, pushing his way through the crowd and the heat, not seeing anything ahead of him, no one that could be who he thinks it was. An alleyway opens to his right, and he stops.

Alleyways.

If it’s who he thinks it was, if he went into an alley, if he doesn’t want to be found, well…

He won’t be found.

Still, it could have been someone else. It probably was. In Bangkok there must be a thousand people who look like that.

And it doesn’t do Rafferty any good to wonder about it. He needs to get to a table, he needs to start writing. He needs to stop reacting and begin to plan. He needs to solve the problem of Rose and Miaow.

Today it’s flies.

They land on Da’s wrists and hands and ears. They swarm Peep’s face and crawl toward the moisture in the corners of his eyes. He swings his fat little fists back and forth, but seconds after the flies take off, they land again. She hears their buzz even over the noise of the crowd, and that thought straightens her spine.

She’s grown accustomed to the sound of the crowd.

Was it yesterday that it was so deafening?

Was it yesterday that she met that woman across the street, with her skeletal, shining-eyed child? Remembering that the woman and the boy hadn’t been in the van that morning, Da scans the sidewalk across the street and sees her. But the boy’s not with her.

There’s no question that it’s the same woman who’s sitting there: same color blanket, same long, loose hair, same faded denim blouse. But she’s not upright, not up on her knees with her bowl out. She sits hunched over, like someone who’s been kicked in the stomach. And in place of the skeletal child, she holds a bundle, tightly wrapped in a blanket.

A passing schoolchild tosses a sidelong glance at Peep. Da has almost stopped noticing how people avoid her eyes; they look at the baby, they look at the bowl, but they don’t look at her. She is becoming used to this.