Breathing Water

by Timothy Hallinan

  “The Mound of Venus?” Rafferty asks. “In English?”

  “That touch of class,” Arthit says.

  “And from that he got into everything.”

  “You name it,” Arthit says, “and he’s in it. The first Mound was maybe nineteen years ago, and now he’s in everything. Hotels, apartment buildings, office blocks, toy manufacturing.” He wipes a palm over his forehead although the bar is cool. “In fact, manufacturing of all kinds—shoes, clothes, dishes, anything with a label on it. Factories everywhere. He’s a baht billionaire. For all I know, he’s a dollar billionaire, too.”

  Rafferty drains his beer and watches the remaining bits of foam form little bubble continents as they slide down the inside of the glass. Finally he says, “Something’s missing. Where’s the connective tissue? I mean, there’s a gulf between baby thug–slash–sex mogul, as opposed to getting manufacturing rights to half the logos in the world. You don’t just buy into the kind of businesses he runs. For that you have to get to the really big boys. That’s a closed club.”

  “You’re right,” Arthit says. “There’s something hidden there. And that’s probably the reason he doesn’t want his life story written.”

  “You’ve mentioned his file a couple of times—”

  “Have I?” Arthit’s eyebrows rise. “I shouldn’t have.” He picks up the glass and regards it with severity. “Muss—must be the drink talking.”

  “Why?”

  Arthit says, “Why’ is an extremely broad question.”

  “Why shouldn’t you have mentioned his file?”

  “If you ever looked at it, you’d know.”

  “I don’t think I’m likely to get a look at it.”

  “You’re certainly not. It’s sensitive information. Privileged.”

  “Privileged how?”

  “Strictly cops only. You’d have to get a cop very drunk for him to tell you that Pan’s file is about three pages long, with wide margins and big type, and it reads like the stuff the Catholic Church gives the pope when they want somebody sainted, except shorter. Zero real information. And this is a guy everybody knows is dirty.”

  “But he’s a Boy Scout on paper.”

  Arthit leans forward, pushing his face toward Rafferty’s. “You’re only hearing part of what I’m saying. The file’s interesting, but what’s more interesting is the amount of power it took. ’Nough power to get somebody who’s way, way up there to pull a big, fat, dirty file, hundreds of pages thick, and replace it with a box of candy. And I mean it’s been pulled everywhere. It’s not on paper at the stations, it’s not online, it’s not in the backup systems. Least not the ones I can access.”

  “How unusual is that?”

  The glass comes up again and gets tilted back. Rafferty watches the level drop. “Very,” Arthit says when he can talk again. “Extremely. Almost unprecedented.” He fans his face, which, thanks to the alcohol, is as red as the liquid that indicates the temperature in an old-time thermometer. “Poke. You don’t want to get anywhere near whoever deleted those files. Which means you don’t want to get near Pan.”

  AN HOUR LATER Rafferty steers Arthit’s car along the shining street, still wet from the drizzle, to the curb in front of the house that Arthit and his wife, Noi, share. Arthit has his head thrown back and his eyes closed, but when the car stops, he sits forward and looks around at the neighborhood as though he’s never seen it before.

  He turns to face Rafferty. His eyebrows contract. “My car, right?”

  “Right,” Rafferty says, pulling the key from the ignition.

  Arthit blinks lids as heavy as a lizard’s. “How’d I get over here?”

  “Seemed like a good idea, since you’d drunk most of the Johnnie Walker Black in Bangkok.”

  “Did I?” Arthit seems pleased to hear it.

  Rafferty gives his friend a second to find his way into the present. “I have a question for you.”

  “And I,” Arthit says with careful precision, “am hip-deep in answers.”

  “You knew all about Pan, about the amount of power behind him, earlier this evening.”

  Arthit says, “Oh,” and turns to look out the window at his house, at the place where he had once thought he and Noi would raise their children. He breathes on the window to fog it. “That.”

  “Well, knowing all of it, why did you let things get so out of hand at the card table? Why didn’t you defuse it earlier?”

  “The right question,” Arthit says thickly, “is, why didn’t I give a fuck?”

  Rafferty waits.

  Arthit slumps sideways, his cheek pressed against the passenger window. “Between us,” he says.

  “Fine.”

  “I mean it. Not even Rose.”

  This stops Rafferty for a moment. There’s nothing he keeps from Rose. He looks at his friend’s drained, crumpled face and says, “Not even Rose.”

  “Noi needs…pills to sleep,” Arthit says. The words seem to require physical effort. “The pain’s worse and worse. It keeps her up. I can hear her breathing. So the doctor, the new one, he gives her sleeping pills. Strong ones. She’s been getting them for more than three months.”

  Noi has been Arthit’s wife for seventeen years. Her nervous system is being ravaged by multiple sclerosis. In the last few months, her decline has been brutally swift. She is a burning match. Arthit has been reduced to the role of helpless bystander.

  “Do they work?”

  “I wouldn’t know,” Arthit says.

  “Why not?”

  Arthit opens the glove compartment and snaps it shut again. “Every night she goes into the bathroom and she brushes her teeth, and then I listen as she fills a glass with water and shakes a pill out of the bottle, and then she comes to bed. Just like the doctor told her to. And I lie there and listen to her breathe, hear the catch in her breath, and I know she’s awake.” He opens the little compartment door again and leaves it hanging, the dim splash of light from inside it bringing his thighs and belly out of the darkness. “And this morning I went into the kitchen to make her some pancakes, as a surprise. She loves pancakes.”

  Rafferty feels a tremor of dread but says, “Okay.”

  “And in the tin of flour, a couple of inches down, I found one of those plastic bags that’s got the little zipper along the top, and it was full of pills. There were eighty-one of them, Poke.”

  Rafferty says, “Oh?” Then he says, “Ohhhh.”

  Arthit puts both hands on his friend’s arm. “Eighty-one of them,” he says. “Hidden from me.”

  7

  The Silk Room

  The phone in the Silk Room rings at 11:17 P.M.

  The man in the big bed is awake immediately. Late-night phone calls are so common that his wife sleeps in the Teak Room, more than thirty meters down the hallway. It is a very big house.

  “Yes.” He switches on the bedside lamp, and the pale silk walls of the room appear. He listens for a moment, until something he hears brings him up to a full sitting position. His forehead wrinkles and then smooths immediately, automatically erasing the display of concern even though there’s no one to see it. “Seriously? A farang?”

  He peels back the blankets and gets up, a lithe, slender, balding man in his early fifties, whose face retains the fine bone structure that had made so many well-bred hearts flutter when he was younger, the bone structure that landed him the problem daughter of one of Thailand’s oldest families, now sleeping down the hall. He wears silk pajamas. “Was he drunk? He must have been drunk.”

  A desk, the work of some English craftsman who’s been dead for three centuries, gleams between the heavily curtained front windows. On one corner is a silver tray holding a decanter of water and a heavy, deeply cut crystal glass. The man cradles the phone between ear and shoulder and uses both hands to pour, being careful not to splash any water onto the wood. He picks up the water and sips. “No,” he says, “not at all. You were right to call.” He puts the glass back on the tray and picks up a pen. “Spell
it?” He listens and then writes, Rafferty. The man on the other end asks him a question.

  “Let me think about that for a second.” His underlings call him “Four-Step” behind his back, because of his insistence on thinking things through four and sometimes even five steps in advance. He closes his eyes briefly, his finger making tiny circles on the wooden surface of the desk.

  His eyes open. “Good idea,” he says. “Two in English and two in Thai. All morning papers, and one of them should be the Sun. You’ll need to make the calls right now and use my name to make the morning editions. And I need information about Rafferty. By the time the papers come out.” He listens again for a moment, and impatience twists his face. “Everything,” he says. “I need everything.”

  8

  Six Separate Hells

  The children who joined the boy in the alley have eaten their fill at a roadside soup stand, and the boy has given each of them a small amount of money for the needs of the following day. The little ones are already curled up on old blankets spread over the dirt floor close to the damp wooden walls, since they go to sleep earliest. The older kids take the middle of the room, with the biggest ones in front, near the door, next to lengths of two-by-four with nails driven through them at one end.

  Just in case.

  The boy steps outside into the misting rain, pushing the shack’s wooden door closed behind him. The mud, thick beneath his flip-flops, slopes down toward the edge of the river, which is low at this season. A cloud of mosquitoes orbit him, but he waves them off and makes his way up to the boulevard, where he flags down a motorcycle taxi.

  There’s a one-in-three chance that he’s guessed right about where the village girl with the baby will end up. She came out of Wichat’s building, and Wichat maintains three holding pens, or at least three the boy knows about. There could be more.

  But his luck is good. He is sheltered in a doorway when another moto-taxi bounces over the ruts and stops in front of the empty-looking building across the street. She is on the backseat, the baby at her chest and a white plastic bag dangling from her free hand. He retreats into the darkness as she climbs off and takes her first real look at her destination.

  PARTWAY ACROSS THE stretch of mud, Da stops.

  Six or seven steps distant, seen through the gaping doorway, the hall is ghost-dark. To Da’s heightened senses, the building teems with spirits. It is roofed but unfinished, surrounded by an expanse of mud behind a rusted chain-link fence. Pitting its surface are dark, empty windows that look to Da like missing teeth. Patches of plaster have peeled from the walls, exposing sagging layers of crude, handmade mud bricks. The place smells of piss and abandonment.

  Da takes two more steps, peering into the hall that yawns in front of her. There is enough city light reflecting off the low clouds to dilute the blackness of the hall into a kind of darkness in suspension, like a glass of water into which a writing brush has been dipped repeatedly. A long pool of black rainwater has collected against the left wall. Dimly visible at the hall’s far end is a staircase.

  The baby sleeps, heavy and loose-limbed, in her left arm, curled against her chest. The baby’s blanket stinks of ammonia. A heavy plastic shopping bag cuts into the fingers of her right hand. Behind her she can hear the mechanical heartbeat of the motorcycle taxi that brought her, as the driver waits to make sure she’s in the right place before he abandons her.

  A thin wash of light dances on the ceiling of one of the rooms on the second floor. A candle. So someone is here. Da turns and lifts the bag, swinging it back and forth as a good-bye to the driver. She tries to smile. He pops the moto into gear, and Da stands there, watching the red dots of his taillights disappear in the falling mist.

  Then she hoists the baby higher, takes a deep breath, climbs three steps, and passes through the doorway.

  Instantly something scuttles away from her along the opposite wall, the one to her left, creating a V-shaped wake in the water: a rat. Da doesn’t like rats, but she’s lived with them all her life. There are worse things than rats.

  The only doors in the hall are on the left, but they are closed, and nothing could make Da step into the water. That leaves the stairs.

  Da has climbed stairs more frightening than this one.

  On the edge of her village in the northeast was the house where the woman died. It was the largest house in the village, with two stories above the ground, this in a town where most families shared a single wooden room.

  The woman had lived alone. She was not born in the village, and she was not friendly. She moved through the streets without talking to the other women. She didn’t use the town shops. The shutters over her windows were kept closed.

  So no one knocked on her door. And when she died, when Da was eleven, it was more than a week before the smell announced it, and two of the village men forced their way in and came out running, their hands over their noses and mouths.

  In the year that followed, people gave the house a wide berth. One of the village grannies, a woman who had dreamed several winning lottery numbers, said she heard the sound of weeping coming from the house. No one else heard it, but no one else had dreamed winning lottery numbers either.

  Naturally, the boys talked about going in. And talked about it and talked about it, until finally Da said she was going in. And quickly, before she could lose her nerve, she pried open the front shutters, hoisted herself over the sill, and let herself drop to the floor. Stood there, holding her breath, listening to the house creak in the heat. Felt the dust on the floor beneath her bare feet. Heard the rustling of mice in the walls.

  Heard the weeping.

  It came from upstairs. It flowed like water, without pauses for breath, a river of grief. Whoever or whatever was making that sound, it did not need to breathe. But it needed comforting. With every hair on her arms standing upright, Da went to the stairs.

  There was no increase in volume as she climbed. The weeping filled the air evenly, like dust in a storm, the same everywhere.

  The stairs took Da up to a short hallway. The weeping came through the open door at the end of the hall, a room that was tightly shuttered, because it was even darker than the hallway. Da slid one foot forward, then the other, moving as silently as she could. It seemed to her that it took a very long time to reach the door, and when she did, she put a hand against the jamb for balance and looked in.

  The bed was terribly stained. Da’s mind reeled back from considering what had caused the stains, and she forced her eyes past the stain, to the edge of the bed, to the corner of the room. And stopped.

  Slowly she looked back at the bed. Nothing, nothing but the stains. She looked away again, and felt her knees weaken.

  The woman was sitting on the edge of the bed, slumped forward over her lap. Long gray hair hung loosely all the way to the blanket, covering her face. But when Da looked at her, she was gone.

  Da grasped the doorframe with both hands and let her eyes scan the room. While her eyes were moving, the woman was clearly visible. When she looked directly at the bed, it was empty. But the weeping continued whether the woman was visible or not.

  Da forced herself to study the empty bed. This time she could see something: The pillows beyond the spot where the woman had been sitting were wavering, as though Da were looking at them over a steaming kettle.

  “Please,” Da said, and then stopped to clear her throat. “Please don’t cry.”

  The weeping continued.

  “Don’t cry,” Da said. “It’s all over. Whatever broke your heart, it’s over. You need to go.”

  A moment of silence, and into it Da said, “And if you can’t go yet, I can come back. If you don’t want to be alone, I mean. I can come see you again. I can be your friend.”

  Nothing.

  “You don’t have to be alone,” Da said.

  Then the bed creaked and the crack between the shutters seemed to widen, letting in more light, and Da took a lightning step back.

  She could see the pillows cle
arly.

  Da heard the house again, heard the wood groan and shift, heard the mice in the walls. Heard, as though from very far away, the boys outside calling her name. She felt the weight of her own body return to her, and she shifted from foot to foot, wondering what would be the most polite way to take her leave, just in case something remained to say good-bye to.

  After a moment she backed away from the door. Halfway down the hall, she stopped and said, “Bye,” and gave a wai of respect. Then she turned and walked, without hurrying, to the head of the stairs, and down them, then across the living room and through the window into the bright sunlight and the circle of waiting boys, all demanding to know what it was like, what she’d seen, and all unsatisfied when she said, “Nothing,” and walked home alone.

  And now, with the weight of the strange baby against her chest, with her left arm aching from the burden and the handle of the plastic bag cutting into the fingers of her right hand, Da looks at the stairs in the unfinished apartment house and begins to climb.

  On the second story, there are no doors in the doorways and the openings are pale with light. Da peers into the first one and finds herself in one of the waiting rooms for hell.

  A kerosene lantern. Its glow falls on hunched shoulders, bent backs, sharply angled necks, open wounds. Four of the people are fragments: their limbs are twisted or missing, their torsos folded over stunted appendages. The effect is of a roomful of people assembled, in the dark, from the litter of a battlefield. The fifth one, the whole one, is a child of ten or twelve. Da has to look twice to see the harelip that pulls her face up into a permanent grimace, like a painting smeared by a malicious hand before the oils were dry.