Breathing Water

by Timothy Hallinan

“Yes, he is,” Arthit says. “But as you pointed out, he’s not the only one.” Neither the dealer nor the hatchet-faced man reacts, but two of the businessmen draw sharp breaths. “Tip here,” Arthit says, indicating the hatchet-faced man, “joined us this evening straight from the monkey house, where he’ll be staying for—how long is it, Tip?”

  “Four years,” Tip says.

  “With a little time off for tonight,” Arthit says. “Because Tip is way, way too lucky.”

  “I saw the signal,” Pan says. “But if he’s so fucking good, how come he hasn’t won anything tonight?”

  “He’s not supposed to. He’s been feeding Mr. Rafferty.”

  “Feeding?”

  “He’s been watching you,” Rafferty says in English, with Arthit providing more or less simultaneous translation and, to all appearances, enjoying it. “You’re watching him to see whether he’s cheating, but what he’s doing is lighthousing me, based on what he sees you do and what I have in my hand. Before I bet this last hand, I picked up eight chips and rattled them four times to tell I was holding four eights. He gave me a sign that said bet the house, and I did.”

  “You shit farang,” Pan says. Rafferty starts to get up, but Arthit waves him back to his seat.

  “You should be grateful,” Arthit says. “Tip pulled this trick in a game a few months ago that cost a friend of yours almost four million baht. So you got a free lesson. And before you get any more disagreeable, this is a sanctioned police operation, and you’re all going to get your money back.”

  “And you’re going to lose your job,” Pan says. “I don’t want my fucking money back. I came here to play cards.”

  “Tough,” Arthit says. To the dealer he says, “Give him the two hundred seventy-five thousand he came in with. Mr. Vinai,” he says to the man on Rafferty’s right, “you came in with a hundred and eighty-seven thousand. Officer Kosit here will count it out for you. You had two-ten,” he says to the other businessman.

  “He’s a cop also?” Pan says, glaring at the dealer. He grabs the glass of brandy in front of him but doesn’t drink. “Is he? A cop?”

  “Why?” Arthit says. “Are you going to get him fired, too?”

  “I might,” Pan says. “What was the point of all this?”

  “We, by which I mean the Bangkok police, arranged this game at the request of some people you know, actually—two of the guys who run the casinos on the Cambodian border. They face this stuff all the time.” He pauses, glances at Rafferty, and adds, “Also, in the interest of full disclosure, there’s Mr. Rafferty’s book.”

  “A book?” This is one of the businessmen. “He’s writing a book?”

  “He is,” Arthit answers. He is answering the businessman, but he’s watching with thinly veiled pleasure as Pan’s face turns an even deeper red. “What’s it called, Poke?”

  “Living Wrong,” Rafferty says. “I apprenticed myself to seven different kinds of crooks and then went along on an operation. Tip here is the last of my mentors.”

  Pan seems to be having trouble breathing. “I’ll have you sweeping streets for this,” he says to Arthit. Kosit, the other cop, has been counting out chips and has slid several stacks toward Pan. Pan backhands them, scattering them across the table, then turns to Rafferty. “And you,” he says, “I’ll have you run out of the country.” He takes the cigar from his mouth, drops it on the carpet, and steps on it.

  “That’s going to cost you,” Rafferty says in Thai. “Somebody’s got to pay for the rug.”

  “One more word out of you,” Pan says, “and I’ll put my foot on your head.” This is a violent insult for a Thai.

  “Sorry,” Rafferty says. He is so angry he feels like his throat has been sewn half shut. “I forgot that you’re used to dirt floors.”

  Arthit says, “Poke!” and Pan brings back his hand and slings the cognac, glass and all, at Rafferty. The glass strikes Rafferty in the center of his chest. Cognac splashes down his jacket and onto his trousers, and before he knows it, he’s up and leaping at Pan even as the bodyguards push in front of him, and then there’s an earsplitting bang and all eyes turn to Arthit, who’s just put a hole in the ceiling.

  “That’s enough of everything,” he says. “The evening is over. Each of you just take your money and go somewhere else to play. Is that clear?”

  Rafferty is chest to chest with the nearer bodyguard. Everyone is now standing.

  “I said, ‘Is that clear?’” Arthit demands.

  The two businessmen are already backing away from the table, but Pan takes a step forward. “Colonel,” he says to Arthit, “do you doubt I can have you fired? Do you doubt I can have this cheat’s visa canceled?”

  “I think money usually gets its way,” Arthit says, his eyes as hard as marbles. “But not without consequences.”

  Pan’s flush deepens. “You’re threatening me?”

  “Oh,” Arthit says, “I think we’re past threats.” To Kosit he says, “Shoot the bodyguards if they so much as move.”

  Even the businessmen who were backing away from the table stop. Someone’s cell phone begins to ring, but no one makes a move to answer.

  Most Thais have an exquisitely accurate ability to read the emotional temperature of a confrontation and to veer away, even if it’s at the absolute last moment, from the point at which no one can back down without a serious loss of face. In the part of Rafferty’s mind that is functioning clearly, he knows that the line has just been crossed. And he knows that—since he’s not a Thai—he’s the only one with no significant face at stake, the only one who can step back, the only one who can retreat to the safe side of the line.

  Slowly he eases himself away from the bodyguard and toward the table. He raises his hands, palms out, and sits. Then he looks down at his sport coat and brushes beads of cognac off it. The movement draws the attention of everyone in the room. “Since I offended you,” Rafferty says to Pan, “what could I do to calm you down?”

  Pan licks the pink lips. The look of uncertainty is back. “What…what could you…”

  “What would it take?” Rafferty says. “To wrap this up, to send you home happy.”

  Two heavy blinks. “There’s…there’s nothing….”

  “Sure there is,” Rafferty says. “You’re too busy and too important to waste time making trouble for us, and Arthit doesn’t want to have to deal in consequences. And neither do I. So what would it take? An apology? A promise to leave your name out of the book? What?”

  “Ah,” Pan says. His eyes dart around the room, and then he says again, “Ah.” He moves to the table and picks up some chips, then lets them trickle through his fingers, apparently giving them all his attention. “An apology,” he says, as though the concept is new to him. He brings his eyes to Arthit’s and says, “You. Would you apologize?”

  “Sure,” Arthit says, although the word seems to hurt.

  “And you, farang? Would you apologize?”

  “I’ll apologize for playing unfairly,” Rafferty says. “And for being rude. Would that do it?”

  For a moment he thinks it will work, but then Pan shakes his head.

  “No,” he says. “I want a fair game.”

  “I’m out,” says one of the businessmen, and the other nods agreement.

  “No problem,” Pan says. He lifts his chin to Rafferty. “He’s the one I want to play against.”

  “He doesn’t have any money,” Arthit says.

  “I didn’t say anything about money,” Pan says.

  Rafferty says, “Then what?”

  “You like it here, don’t you?” Pan asks, and Rafferty feels a sudden dip in the center of his stomach.

  Studying Pan’s face, Arthit says, “I don’t know about this.”

  Pan looks at Arthit and then at Rafferty. “Aren’t we looking for a way to walk out of this room?”

  Rafferty says, “We are.”

  “Then these are the stakes,” Pan says. “If you lose, you will voluntarily leave Thailand.”


  “Poke,” Arthit says.

  “I can’t do that,” Rafferty says. “I have a wife and daughter to take care of.”

  Pan shrugs the higher shoulder. “That should make the game more interesting.”

  “Forget it.”

  The flush on Pan’s face deepens. “Consider the alternative,” he says. “I destroy your friend here, and then I have you thrown out of the country, and then your friend undertakes some act of vengeance that probably gets him killed.”

  A vista of emptiness opens up in front of Rafferty. It feels like part of the walls and floor have fallen away and there is nothing above or below but gray, empty space with drizzle falling through it. Life without Thailand: life somewhere else, uprooting Miaow, explaining it all to Rose.

  Possibly losing both Rose and Miaow.

  Rafferty says, “And if I win?”

  Pan shrugs. “Name your bet.”

  Suddenly Rafferty thinks of something he might actually like to have. More important, it’s something Pan will never give him. If Pan won’t bet, they might all be able to walk away from the table. “I’m a writer,” he says. “I want your permission to write your life story, without interference.”

  “You’re joking,” Pan says. His biography is a kind of holy grail among Thai publishers, as unattainable as it is desirable. Several well-known writers have announced plans to write the man’s life, only to abandon the project later for unspecified reasons. The only book that actually made it to press was lost when the printing plant burned down.

  “That’s what I want,” Rafferty says. “Gives you something worth playing for.”

  Without taking his eyes from Rafferty’s, Pan raises his right hand and massages the lower left shoulder as though it is still sore from the seed sack’s strap. He seems completely unconscious that he is doing it. Then he laughs, but without much conviction. “Write my life story? And I don’t try to stop you?”

  Rafferty says, “You not only don’t try to stop me. You cooperate.”

  “I’m leaving,” says one of the businessmen. “Send the money to my office.” The other joins him to leave, but Pan says, “You’re staying here. Keep an eye on the farang. I’m not going to get cheated again.”

  His eyes drop to the green surface of the table and then come up to Rafferty’s. The room is silent and as motionless as a window display. He purses his lips and drums his fingertips on the table for a second. His eyes make their quick circuit of the room. Then he says, “I can beat you.”

  “Poke,” Arthit says. “Don’t do it.”

  “Got an alternative?” Rafferty still can’t believe that Pan will accept the stakes. He reaches over and grabs the deck of cards, squares it, cuts and shuffles it once, puts it in front of the spot where Pan had been sitting, and waits to see what the man will do. With an abrupt jerk, almost a muscle spasm, Pan lifts the low shoulder and lets it fall again. Then he adjusts his jacket and points to his fallen chair. One of the bodyguards picks it up and puts it back in position, and Pan sits. He puts out a hand, and a bodyguard gives him a cigar, which he centers in the pink mouth. He waits a moment, until the lighter has come and gone, and then shuffles the deck twice and passes it to Rafferty to cut again.

  “So tell me,” he says, picking up the deck. “Why are you so interested in writing about my life?”

  “Something Balzac said,” Rafferty answers. “I just want to know whether it’s true.”

  The first two facedown cards hit the table, one for Rafferty, one for Pan. “Who is Balzac?”

  “A French writer who died a long time ago.”

  Rafferty’s second facedown card lands.

  “And what did he say?”

  “Something to the effect that behind every great fortune lies a great crime.”

  Pan’s second card lands eighteen inches from his first.

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  6

  Mound of Venus

  The owner has taken advantage of the cool air towed in by a late-night drizzle to kill the expensive air-con and prop open the door to the street. It’s one of Arthit’s regular haunts; he had stopped at the bar to grab a full bottle of Johnnie Walker Black before heading for a corner booth. Rafferty followed along.

  The place is funereally quiet, the drinkers solitary islands of silence, except for Arthit and Rafferty, who whisper, heads together, in the corner. Now and then the gloom lifts as a car passes in the soi, the small street outside, with a sizzle of tires on wet pavement, its headlights throwing the drinkers near the door into sharp silhouette.

  “Call him in the morning,” Arthit says, putting down the bottle for the fourth time. He’s knocked back about a third of the contents, and the ice over which he poured the first few drinks is now a memory. “Tell him you’ve changed your mind.” He hoists his glass.

  “He gets his way too often,” Rafferty says. “He needs his goddamn face slapped.”

  Arthit takes two long swallows, the way Rafferty drinks water. “Far be it from me,” he says over the rim of the glass, “to remind you of one of the foremost precepts of your adopted culture: Keep a cool heart.”

  “Like you did,” Rafferty says, and immediately regrets it.

  Arthit lifts his drink and sights the bar through it, turning his head slowly with the glass in front of one eye. He doesn’t speak.

  Rafferty says, “Sorry.”

  “You’re right,” Arthit says. He takes yet another numbingly large slug of Black. “I behaved like a child. And Pan should never have been in that game. I put Vinai in charge of choosing our pigeons, and I am-most—” He shakes his head. “Almost called the whole thing off when he brought Pan in. But Vinai said Pan would enjoy it, said he’d think it was a terrific joke.”

  “He might have, if he hadn’t been so drunk.”

  “Well,” Arthit says, and drinks, a sip this time. “He was.” He looks idly around the bar, just a cop survey, obviously not expecting anything interesting. “You don’t want to write the book.” His eyes wander to the glass in his hand, and he sets it on the table again and picks up the bottle.

  Rafferty has seen his friend knock it back before, but never quite like this. “What’s that thing with his lips?”

  “He got burned, don’t know how. You saw his hands. The file on him said the lip balm is psylochogical—psychological. He thinks they’re hot, his lips, so he cools them down with menthol.”

  “If I’m going to quit, tell me what I’m missing. What’s the story I’m not going to write?”

  Arthit closes his eyes, and for a moment Rafferty thinks he might be going to slump sideways, but then he opens them again, looking at a spot in the center of the table with an intensity that suggests that he’s trying to get the room to hold still. “Father was a farmer. Had some land, Isaan dirt, all rocks and scrub. Every year they’d work themselves to death, and every year they’d borrow money. They were going to lose everything. So Pan came to Bangkok.” He sits there, regarding the invisible spot on the table.

  “And?” Rafferty prompts.

  Arthit tilts his head back as though it is too heavy for his shoulders. “And he’s a tough boy. You can see that when you look at him, even now.”

  “He’s gotten soft,” Rafferty says.

  “He’s hard underneath it.” Arthit’s eyes go to the wall, and he squints slightly. “He came to Bangkok, I said that, right?”

  “Right.”

  “Okay. Good to know I didn’t imagine it. So.” He blinks heavily. “He chose three blocks in Pratunam, not far from where Rose and Peachy have their office now. Sidewalk market, lots of stalls. Remember, he’s about seventeen years old. He goes to the stallholders and tells them they need protection.” Arthit turns the glass in his fingers. “They say they’ve already got protection, and he says no they don’t. The next day the guy who’s collecting the protection money gets thrown out of a car in the middle of one of the blocks.”

  “Dead?”

  “Deeply dead. Pulverized. So everybody takes a goo
d look, and the body gets hauled away, and next day there’s Pan again, telling them they need protection.” Arthit picks up the bottle and squints at the label. “It’s really whiskey,” he says, sounding surprised. “My head should be on the table by now.”

  “Keep trying.”

  Arthit presses the bottle to his cheek, as though his face is hot. “Of course, the guy who got tossed out of the car had a boss, and Pan gets grabbed and taken to him. They’re going to chop him up and prolly—probably—use him for bait, but the boss wants to take a look at him first. They’re all there, Pan and the three guys who grabbed him, in the boss’s office. And the boss, a management-level crook named Chai, asks Pan why he shouldn’t just be killed right there. Pan says, ‘Choose one of these guys.’”

  As long as he has the bottle in his hand, Arthit pours and drinks. “You understand that this is hearsay, right? It’s not like it’s in his file or anything. Anyway, Pan says that thing about choosing a guy, and Chai figures what the hell and points at the biggest one, and in about five seconds the big guy is dead on the floor with an ice pick through his temple, and Pan has the dead man’s gun and it’s pressed against the back of Chai’s skull. But he doesn’t pull the trigger. What he does is say, ‘Choose another one.’” Arthit looks toward the door as a car hisses by, narrowing his eyes against the glare through the door.

  “There’s buckets of this kind of stuff at the beginning, but of course if it’s not in a file somewhere, it never happened. Anyway, Pan becomes one of Chai’s enforcers and works his way up, and the next thing we know—say he’s twenty-three, twenty-four—he’s taken over a massage place, just a dump off Sukhumvit. Real junk pile. Cops called it ‘the armpit,’ because it was hot and dirty and wet and it smelled. A total bottom-level, ten-dollar pounding parlor. Women, the kindest way to describe them would be ‘motherly.’ Title to the place changes hands, and trucks pull up, and a bunch of heavyweights go in with sledgehammers, and a couple tons of dirt get dumped in front, and there are a few weeks of banging and hammering and painting and flower planting, and the dirt gets turned into a big hill leading up to the front door, which is now black glass—etched, okay?—and a huge purple sign goes up that says ‘The Mound of Venus,’ and Pan owns the fanciest public whorehouse in Bangkok. And then he owns two, and then three. And they’ve all got that little hill outside, and they’re called, I don’t know, Mound Two and Mound Three.”