Breathing Water: A Bangkok Thriller

one side of it. Keep your eyes on me as long as you can. Relay any signal I give you. If I want you, I’ll just wave you in. Two fingers means call some more kids. But if there’s trouble”-he holds up his right hand, fingers splayed-“five fingers means run for your lives, got it? In different directions. When you know you’re clear, get back to where we got off the bikes and find a place to hide there. We’ll meet up there and figure out what’s next.”

Nobody says anything. Boo holds up his hand again, two fingers extended. “Means what?”

“Phone kids,” says the smaller boy.

“And?” He displays all five fingers.

“Run,” Da says.

Boo looks directly into her eyes. “And you’d better.”

After Ren and Kai leave to pick up their muscle, Ton remains at his desk. It seems like a long time since he’s been alone in this room. He interlaces his fingers and rests his chin on them, and then he closes his eyes to eliminate distraction while he works his way through a conversation he does not want to have.

The position he’s in now is the one he dreamed of when he was a young man, the outcome he’d hoped for when he married into a ranking family by taking the scandal daughter, the one no one could manage, the woman who has become the wife he never sees. It’s taken him years of patient labor to build the trust of those above him, but he’s in his element now: behind the scenes, working in partnership with the kingdom’s most powerful men to maintain the order of things. To keep the kingdom secure, to keep the proper class-the educated class, the traditional leaders-in charge. To keep the nation moving forward. Thailand is already the wealthiest state in Southeast Asia, and Ton has become an important part of the group that has worked in an unbroken line, generation after generation, to accomplish that.

And, of course, he’s gotten very rich doing it.

But there are things about it he hates. There are times in the past week when he’s felt like a thug. Having to associate with Ren and Kai-having them in his house-has been almost physically painful at times. But there was no alternative. There was no possibility of allowing the usual four or five levels of management to know about the arrangement with Pan. It would have been in the papers within weeks of their agreement. He’ll have to do something about Ren and Kai, but he can worry about that later.

Now is the problem. Things are going outside the lines and have been ever since the reporter had to be killed, and he’s moments from a conversation that actually frightens him. He can’t remember the last time he was frightened.

He is working on his third possible opening, trying to find a way to position the discussion without its leading to something disastrous being said, when he becomes aware of a regular fluctuation of light, visible even through his closed eyelids. With a sigh of resignation, he opens his eyes and looks at the halogen lamp on his desk, which is blinking on and off. He pushes his chair back a foot or two and reaches down to the lowest drawer, which he pulls open. The files stacked inside are bulky and hard to handle, and he needs both hands to remove them and put them on the desk. The desk lamp continues to flicker as he leans back down to the drawer. On the bottom edge, his fingers find the small metal tab and pull it forward. A little snicking sound signals the rise, no more than half an inch, of the drawer’s false bottom. Ton lifts the bottom panel to a vertical position and pulls out the flat telephone that’s stored beneath it.

Only one person has this number.

Ton breathes twice, swallows, picks up the receiver, and says, “Yes, sir.”

“My boy,” says the man on the other end. “How are you?”

“I’m somewhat preoccupied. I’m sorry to have bothered you, but there’s a problem.”

“No bother, no bother. Before we get to the problems, I want to apologize.”

This line had not arisen in any of his visualizations of the conversation. “For what, General?”

“I didn’t like your idea, the farang snooping around in Pan’s past. Too fancy, I thought. Well, I was wrong. It was obvious almost immediately that Pan wouldn’t get to election day without all that bothersome material coming to light. Got me thinking in other directions.”

“It did?”

“Yes, and I have exactly what we need. But first, tell me about this bullshit announcement he’s threatening to make.”

“It’s Porthip. With Porthip dying-”

“Your farang went to the hospital tonight,” the general says, as though Ton weren’t speaking. “With a cop and another man. The other man could have been a cop, too.”

The back of Ton’s shirt is suddenly damp. “He did?”

“He did. And Porthip told him.”

“He told him? You mean, about Snakeskin?”

“About Snakeskin, about you. You personally. You want to hear the tape?”

“No. That…um, that won’t be necessary.”

“You didn’t know your farang was there, did you?”

This is the topic he knows he can’t control. All he can do is step up to it. “No. He shook his tail. I can’t use my best people, because they know who I am, and of course I’m connected to you. So I have to use contract guys, and they’re not-”

“I understand,” the general says.

Ton tugs his shirt away from his skin and manages not to sigh in relief. “Thank you. But if Porthip’s talking-”

“Don’t worry. We’ve had the limiter removed from his morphine drip, and the nurse has traded his pain pills for junk. An antifungal medicine, I think. Without the pills he’ll medicate himself out of existence by morning. Kinder that way, really.”

“If there’s an autopsy-”

“Not your business,” the general says, and his tone has stiffened. “You already have more, apparently, on your plate than you can handle. But even if there is an autopsy, even if some zealot decides to check the cause of death for a man who was, after all, a terminal-cancer patient, they’ll be expecting to find morphine in his system, won’t they? Worst comes to worst, it’s a compassionate death, maybe a slap on the hand for the supervising doctor.”

“Yes, sir.”

“The announcement.”

“I told Pan early this morning that we’d discuss things further in a couple of weeks. He said I wasn’t in charge.”

“Excuse me?”

“With Porthip dying, he said, there wasn’t anybody who could hold the factory over his head anymore. At least nobody who had actually been part of it. So he said we were no longer running his campaign. He’ll still work with us, he says-he’ll need help when he’s elected-but he thinks he’ll win in a landslide now that the fire can’t come back to haunt him. In fact, he said he was going to use it.”

“How the hell does he propose to do that?”

“Without Porthip, he says, he’s the hero of the fire. What he’s going to do is to get the press together-and you know how they’ll show up, especially after the malaria party-and he’s going to announce his plan to turn the factory into a monument to the people who died there. He’ll talk about how he saw the smoke from the road, about how he tried to save them, show his scars. He’s going to say that’s why he bought the place, so he could consecrate it. He’ll clean it out some and make it safe for the public to visit, and he’s going to carve into the walls the names of the people who died there and turn the big workroom in the front into a gallery, with melted machines and photos of the place after the fire. He’s finding pictures of the people who worked there-while they were still alive, I mean-and he’s going to put those with the other pictures. And then he’ll announce a grant of five million baht to fund a commission to look into the working conditions of people who do bottom-wage piecework, especially people who come to Bangkok from the northeast. And after all that, he’ll close things out by announcing that he’s running for the National Assembly, where he can really do something about these issues.”

“That’s it,” the general says. “That’s why he insisted on getting hold of the factory. And it’s brilliant. He’ll have every vote in the northeast. Too bad we can’t work with him.”