Breathing Water

by Timothy Hallinan

  “A lot of them.”

  Rafferty says, “Got an extra ticket?”

  Pan opens his eyes, still looking at the ceiling, and says, “Your wife, the one who thinks I’m a great man. Is she from Isaan?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is she pretty?”

  “I think it’s absolutely safe,” Rafferty replies, “to say she’s pretty.”

  “Good.” Pan leans back and puts his other foot on the desk. His eyes close again. “You get two tickets.”

  15

  No Witnesses

  He leans against the carved Mesopotamian wall, his shoulders midway between a king’s sandaled feet. After the mausoleum chill of the house, the heat actually feels good. He settles his shoulders against the warm brick, reaches into the rear pocket of his jeans, and pulls out the yellow sheets containing the list he copied on the thirty-sixth floor.

  The list Dr. Ravi gave him at Pan’s command is in his shirt pocket. He opens it, too, and spends three or four minutes going back and forth between them.

  Not a single name appears on both lists.

  He is pushing that around in his mind when the low growl of an engine brings his head up.

  Idling at the curb six or seven feet from him is a carbon-black, dark-windowed SUV, expensively pimped out in customized chrome. The word LEXUS is inscribed on the door in silvery italics eighteen inches high. Deep blue lights blink beneath the chassis and bounce off the asphalt, in time to a throbbing bass line that makes the entire vehicle pulsate. The windows are heavily tinted. The behemoth just sits there, a sort of right-hand drive Death Star energized by techno music. It doesn’t seem to be going anywhere.

  A movement at the edge of his vision draws his gaze. In the turret beside the gate, the guard has picked up the phone. His eyes, like Rafferty’s, are on the SUV.

  There is no one on the sidewalk. Except for the guard behind his bulletproof glass and whoever is in the SUV, there are, Rafferty realizes, no witnesses.

  Not a comfortable way to look at it.

  He could move, but there’s nowhere to go, just the wall with its frozen kings and hanging gardens, which he can neither climb nor melt into. A look at the guard’s anxious face makes it clear he’s not going to open any doors. Even if Rafferty turns and runs the long block to the corner, the SUV can keep up with him easily, and there’s no place to run to.

  The SUV’s horn is tapped twice, like it’s clearing its throat for attention. A back window goes down five or six inches, and something long and shiny comes through the opening and points at Rafferty. It is the barrel of a rifle.

  Rafferty can feel the precise spot in the center of his chest on which the rifle is trained, as though a stream of cold air were pouring through the muzzle of the gun. He can feel his knees loosen. He rests more of his weight against the wall just to stay upright. He feels his pulse bump against the band of his wristwatch.

  After what feels like an eternity, someone in the vehicle laughs, and it pulls slowly away from the curb.

  The license plate is not Thai. It has only five digits. Rafferty doesn’t even need to write them down.

  “THIS IS ELORA.” The voice is brisk and cool. Rafferty has an image of a slender vamp from the 1940s, wearing seamed stockings and a dress with shoulder pads, her hair loosely rolled up around her head. A sort of executive big-band singer.

  “Ms. Weecherat. This is Poke Rafferty.” This is his third cab in twenty minutes, and no one seems to be following it. His body still feels loose and nerveless, emptied by the draining of all that adrenaline.

  “You were going to call me back.”

  “And here I am.”

  “This morning. While you were news.” The words are in precise English, with a faint accent that could be French.

  “I’m still news.”

  “That’s what everybody thinks.” Definitely French. “But it’s not true unless you have something new.”

  “Do I ever.”

  A moment’s evaluative pause. “If you want to talk to me, I’ll need to meet you,” she says.

  “That could be difficult.”

  “Call me again when it’s not.”

  “Wait. You want what I have.”

  “Because.”

  “Because it’s sensational.”

  “Then I definitely need to meet you.”

  Rafferty says, “Someplace we won’t be seen.”

  “Where are you?”

  “New Petchburi Road.” It’s not true, but it’s not far off.

  “How’s traffic?”

  “I’m in Bangkok,” Rafferty says. “How would it be?”

  “Where are you headed?”

  “Toward Silom. Okay, I know where. Write this down.” He gives her an address on Silom and then a suite number. “That’s my dentist. I know her well enough for this.”

  “A dentist? This had better be worth it.”

  “Can you make the deadline for tomorrow’s paper?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then it’ll be worth it.”

  HE HAS BEEN in the fourth cab only a minute when his phone rings.

  “What the hell are you doing?” It is the man who sat next to him in the Lincoln.

  “I’ve been thinking about buying a cab. Thought I’d try a few out.”

  “Where are you?”

  “Rama IV Road,” Rafferty lies. “You mean your guys lost me?”

  “Yes,” the man says. “But we know exactly where everyone else is.”

  “When this is over,” Rafferty says, “I’m going to pull your teeth one by one and shove them up your nose.”

  “No point getting mad at me. Just don’t disappear again, or there will be consequences.”

  “What was that cute thing with the SUV?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Do you want this book or not?”

  “He wants it.”

  Rafferty says, “And he’ll be unhappy if things go wrong.”

  “Things won’t go wrong.”

  “They will if you ever pull anything like that again,” Rafferty says, and disconnects. Then he sags back against the seat and works on his breathing.

  16

  Fair

  The day is endless.

  The river of people continues to flow past her, sometimes in full flood, sometimes at a trickle. Occasionally the people arrive in knots and tangles, as though they were snarled in the branches of a floating tree. People are most likely to give when the river is trickling. They can see her from farther away then; they have time to make up their minds, to fish out the money so they can drop it into the bowl without slowing. No one wants to slow. Most look no further than the upraised bowl, as though it were floating unaided above the sidewalk. A few glance at her very quickly and then look away, embarrassed.

  The tree-trunk man in the blue shirt is always somewhere nearby. Every time someone drops paper money into her bowl, he is there, snatching it.

  Da has begun to keep a count in her head, just as something to do. When she was small, she discovered she was good with numbers. She did the math, mostly subtraction, that spelled out her family’s finances. She is surprised by the amount of money that has fallen into the bowl. Counting Helen’s 1,500 baht, it comes to 3,200, plus the coins that she hasn’t counted yet. So say 3,500 baht.

  The man in the office said they took 40 percent. That means she keeps 60 percent. To do the math, she divides by ten—let’s say that’s 350 baht—and then multiplies by six.

  More than 2,000 baht.

  There were twenty or twenty-five beggars in that building. If all of them take in as much as she, the man in the office is making something like 28,000 baht a day. There are probably other beggars in other buildings. He is probably making…she works out the answers, but she has to stop and double-check the zeros in her head. He is probably making more than a million baht a month.

  Da’s father earned less than 13,000 baht a year.

  Still, she thinks, they have p
eople to pay. Money to the police not to chase the beggars away. There are businesses behind her, their front doors opening onto the sidewalk. The business owners probably get paid something, too.

  Someone drops a coin into her bowl, and she looks up to see a little boy of nine or ten, scurrying away as though he’s done something he’s ashamed of. He is the first child she has seen since morning. That means school is out. It’s after two-thirty, perhaps three. At four o’clock it will be over.

  They have to pay the drivers, she thinks, the man in the blue shirt. Maybe rent for the half-finished building they sleep in. The vans, the gasoline. Expenses.

  Still, it’s a lot of money. It’s the most money she’s even thought about in her life. She sees again the shoes the man in the office had worn, shoes that looked as if their soles had never left a carpet.

  Maybe he has a hundred beggars. Maybe two hundred.

  Peep makes the rising sound that means he wants her to look at him. She drops her eyes to her lap, and sure enough he is gazing at her, the gaze that makes her feel he can see right through her. She feels the smile spread over her face, and then a thought chases it away.

  Did they have to pay for him?

  How much do you pay for a baby? Do they all cost the same? Are they priced by the pound, like meat? Do beautiful ones cost more than ugly ones? Is there an extra charge for light skin, like Peep’s, or a discount for dark babies? Do children of different ages cost different amounts?

  Different ages.

  The oldest undamaged child she has seen is the skeletal boy of four or five. Where are the older children?

  “How are you doing?”

  It’s a woman’s voice, and there he is, the skeletal boy, and behind him is the woman from the van. The child looks at nothing, clutching the woman’s sleeve in a hand that’s all knuckles.

  “Can we go now?” Da asks.

  “Another hour. Kep has gone to eat something. He does this every day. We’ve got half an hour before he gets back.” The woman shakes her sleeve free, but the child immediately reclaims it, without even glancing at it. His 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?”

  “Of course not. Whatever he is, Pan has done some good. He has a kind of prehensile charm that some people find attractive. A biography, if it’s going to be worth anything, needs to get as much of the story as possible. Otherwise it’ll be Mao’s Little Red Book. Of interest to no one but the people who already believe it. Who gave this to you?”

  “I’ll tell you in a minute. Maybe.”

  She shakes her head impatiently. “I don’t see how you could even be considering this approach, since he’s authorized you to write the book. I’d think he’d want something that would position him for the Nobel Prize.”

  “Like the perspective you’d get from these folks?” He hands her the list Dr. Ravi gave him.

  She looks at it, and then she does what Rafferty had done; she puts them side by side, her eyes going from one to the other. When she turns her gaze to him, there is a glint of amusement in her eyes. “Exactly.”