Breathing Water

by Timothy Hallinan

  “Next time,” says the one with the drunken teeth, “you’ll be limping for a week.”

  Then he brings up his right hand and, with his index finger, flicks Rafferty across his open left eye.

  The pain is dazzling, enough to take Rafferty to his knees, both hands cupped over the assaulted eye. Tears stream down his face. After what seems like ten minutes, he becomes aware of an open hand extended down to him.

  He looks up with his good eye to see a man in his early fifties with long, wavy hair, worn brushed back without a part, in a senatorial style. His hand is framed by half an inch of immaculate white French cuff fastened by a link of lapis lazuli set in gold. “Please,” the man says. “Let me help you up.”

  “Thank you.” Rafferty reaches up to give the man his hand and is more or less hauled to his feet.

  “I saw that,” the man says. “Filthy trick.”

  Rafferty mops his face with the sleeve of his jacket. The vision in his left eye is badly blurred. “And he’ll have an opportunity to regret it.”

  The senator smiles gently. “Don’t say it too loudly. There are people in Bangkok who could wipe you up like a spill, and Ton is one of them.”

  “Ton?”

  “Oh,” the senator says, dropping his eyes to adjust an immaculate cuff. “I thought you knew.” When he looks back up, he is smiling. “Given the beauty of your companion, you have good reason to stay alive. If I were you, I would think of Ton as a wrecking ball and stay out of his path.” He nods slightly. “Please excuse me.”

  The senator moves off, doing a little genteel glad-handing here and there, and Rafferty turns to find Rose standing behind him. “Nice-looking man,” she says.

  “He returns the compliment. In fact, everyone returns the compliment. You’re all anybody here wants to talk to me about.”

  “That’s not surprising, considering that one of your eyes is bright red. You look better when they match. What happened?”

  “I ran into a finger.”

  “Who was it attached to?”

  “Captain Teeth.”

  Rose says, “Is this something else I have to worry about?”

  “Worry?” Rafferty says, blinking against the pain. “In a gathering like this one?”

  21

  Net Profits

  The evening’s final act begins about nine-thirty as Pan steps up onto the orchestra’s platform. He raises both hands, gesturing for silence. The fiddlers desist.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” Pan says. “On behalf of the Malaria Relief Fund, I want to thank you all for coming and invite you out into the garden for our closing presentation. I’m sure you’ll find it worthwhile.”

  He steps down and weaves his way through the crowd, as conspicuous in his awful clothes as a peacock among pigeons. He winks at Rose as he passes. They wait a bit and then go out and down the steps, following the crowd along the narrow paved track, and the little village is to their left. “By the way,” Rafferty says, “the votes have been tallied, and it’s official. You obliterated every woman here.”

  “I already married you, Poke,” Rose says. “But don’t stop just because of that.”

  Someone jostles Rafferty’s shoulder roughly and pushes past him. It is Captain Teeth, the man who flicked Rafferty’s eye. He turns back to stare at Rose and makes a loud slurping noise with his tongue.

  “If you learn how to swallow,” Rose calls to him, “you won’t have to do that.”

  “He knows how to swallow,” Rafferty says, his eyes on the man’s. “He eats shit every time the boss loosens his belt.”

  Captain Teeth flushes and starts to pivot, but the man next to him grabs his arm and gives it a yank. With his upper lip pulled back to bare his awful teeth, Captain Teeth makes a V with his index and middle fingers, jabs them in the direction of Rafferty’s eyes, and then allows himself to be dragged away. The beautifully dressed man is not with them.

  Rose says, “Would that be—”

  “It would,” Rafferty says.

  “He doesn’t like you much.” She fans her hand beneath her nose. “Ohhh, those pigs.”

  “Half an hour ago, Pan had wind machines, like in the movies, set up behind them, just to move the smell around.”

  “He doesn’t trust much to chance, does he? The diamonds for me, the fans for the pigs. He really piles it on.”

  They are cresting the hill that slopes down to the garden. “It’s probably a good thing it didn’t occur to him to put the diamonds on the pigs,” Rafferty says.

  “We should suggest that for next time.” Rose passes her fingertips over the stones. “It was nice to wear them once, though.” Rafferty doesn’t say anything, and Rose hits him in the ribs with her elbow. “You dummy,” she says. “You say one word about how you wish you could buy me something like this and I’ll stick my finger in your other eye.”

  “At least they’d be the same color.”

  “Look at that,” Rose says, stopping. Rafferty stands there, feeling the crowd part around them and flow past, apparently unimpressed by the sight below.

  The garden is an explosion of light. Six-story palm trees, gilded by light, dazzle against the black sky. Enormous ferns are transparent green, backlit by thousands of watts. Apples glisten in the foliage of the tree, and a pinspot picks out the snake as it winds its silver spiral down the trunk. The whole thing nestles like an emir’s jewels against the dark velvet wall of greenery. It is vulgar, ostentatious, biblically ridiculous, and absolutely beautiful.

  Movement beyond the garden catches Rafferty’s eye. The members of the press have been released from their eighty-proof cage and are streaming toward the lights like moths. Nipping at the heels of the press, herding them like a border collie, is Dr. Ravi. He and two guards shepherd them to an area on the opposite side of the tree from the crowd.

  “This could be interesting,” Rafferty says. “Look, he’s set it up so the guests are in the picture.”

  Pan emerges from the greenery and steps up onto a wooden platform, about eighteen inches high, positioned beneath the tree. Flashbulbs explode, making Pan’s movements as jerky as stop-motion animation.

  “Welcome to the garden,” Pan says. He is wearing a microphone on a headset, and his voice echoes. “And to Net Profits.” He says the words in English and then reverts to Thai. “You’ll see why we’re calling it that in a moment. When the Malaria Relief Fund proposed this event, I decided immediately that we should end the evening here, in the Garden of Eden.” He pauses as Dr. Ravi and the two guards finish jamming the press into their assigned area and then reaches into his pocket and pulls out a fan of three-by-five cards. “Most of us here tonight are Buddhists. But for Christians and Muslims, this garden was the setting of creation.” He is reading now; the words—which, Rafferty thinks, he obviously didn’t write—sound stiff and uncomfortable in his mouth. “It was here that the Deity shaped, from clay and divinity and a rib, the creatures who would sit on the throne of the world He made. They were perfect in form and perfect in health. And they were perfect in their innocence.”

  A murmur starts to run through the crowd, and Rafferty sees heads turn, sees people step back and bump into those behind them. He hears Rose start to laugh, and say, “Oh, no.”

  The thick ferns to Pan’s left part. Adam and Eve enter their garden, holding hands. Neither of them is a minute over nineteen, and they are as naked as the day they were born except for a couple of strategic and mysteriously adhesive leaves. As the beautiful couple walks to the base of the tree, seemingly unaware that the garden is full of overdressed millionaires, every flashbulb in Thailand goes off, and it suddenly occurs to the people in the front of the crowd that they have just been captured in a front-page photo. There are more attempts to back away, and Pan has to raise his voice to speak over the protests.

  “But there was something else in the garden,” he reads from the cards, “a creature whose sting we continue to feel even today. And no, ladies and gentlemen, it wasn’t the snake with his shi
ning apple of temptation. It was a much smaller creature, a tiny, seemingly harmless creature, that finds us at our most vulnerable.” Adam and Eve lie down together on the moss at the base of the tree. Their arms intertwine as the flashbulbs reach the intensity of antiaircraft artillery. The people at the front of the group are trying to back away while the people at the rear are pressing forward for a better look.

  “The anopheles mosquito,” Pan says. He starts to grin but fights it down. “It took its first drink of human blood here in the garden, and it went forth and multiplied. It multiplied by the millions and became a swarm that fills the night with the world’s number-one killer. The humblest, bringing down the most mighty. But it could have been stopped right here, ladies and gentlemen—” Adam has wrapped both arms and one leg around Eve, and a fig leaf flies into the air from between them and dawdles its way down again. Now the crowd is seriously trying to get out of camera range, and Rose is laughing so hard she has to lean against Rafferty.

  “It could have been stopped here, but it wasn’t, because one thing was missing from the garden.” Pan raises his hand and makes a magical pass at the tree, and a glittering gold net drops from it, covering Adam and Eve only seconds before the pictures would have become useless for news purposes. Movement continues beneath the net. Pan takes advantage of the diversion to light a cigar. “A net, ladies and gentlemen,” he says through a haze of smoke. “A simple net. A net that still stops malaria today, that can help us to eradicate it from the face of the earth. And I’m proud to announce that my own initial contribution to Net Profits will be ten million baht. That’ll buy one hundred and fifty thousand nets, but that’s just a beginning. I’m hoping we’ll buy a million nets with the money we raise tonight, and, fortunately, there are people here this evening—good friends of mine, each and every one of them—who will make me look like a tightwad.” He creases the cards up the middle and tosses them over his shoulder, then glances down at the golden net, which is still in motion. “So,” he says, “why don’t we give these kids a little privacy and go up to the house and write some checks?”

  22

  Buttercup

  It’s almost eleven when Elora Weecherat steps onto the sidewalk. Late for her, but it’s been a frustrating evening.

  She’d stopped for a quick dinner after her meeting with Rafferty, just a simple coq au vin and a fresh baguette at a French bistro on Silom where she knew the cooking was actually French, not Thai-French, which she supposes has its charms, but not for her. A glass and a half of Côtes du Rhône had washed everything down with the dusty red taste of the Left Bank, and she was feeling carefree and mentally limber by the time she plopped into the chair in her cubicle in the newsroom, logged onto the computers, and started to slap out Rafferty’s story.

  It came easily, but it came wrong. The opening was too leisurely, the language didn’t achieve the muted tension she was aiming for. This man has been threatened with death, and the death of those he loves. The people behind that threat are almost certainly overwhelmingly powerful, and their motive is probably to create a book that would serve as a preemptive strike against Pan, should he decide to take advantage of his political potential.

  Halfway through rewriting the opening paragraphs, she stops and asks herself how she feels about that. She loathes Pan for his vulgarity and the way he treats the women who are foolish or greedy enough to rise to his bait. On the other hand, there is no doubt that Thailand should be moving toward real democracy, untidy as that may be. Weecherat has little innate sympathy for the poor, primarily because she believes that beautiful things are always created by the privileged. One may wish for the proletariat to rise above poverty without also wanting them to design one’s clothes.

  So she detects a little bias problem in the story’s point of view. And, perhaps more important, the piece isn’t sufficiently discreet. No matter how big the story is, she has no desire to feel on her own back the sights that are presumably trained on Rafferty’s. She needs to get her personal opinions out of the way and make the language more suggestive and less explicit. She needs to make the reader see something she doesn’t actually say. And amp up the tension at the same time.

  She reaches out and straightens the small photograph of her daughter, the only personal item in the cubicle, then kisses the tip of her index finger and touches it to the child’s nose.

  She has worked most of her way through the story, feeling more in control of the material, when an instant message pops up on her screen. The night editor would like to see her.

  She gets up, irritably redrapes her scarf, and threads a path between the empty desks to the office at the far end of the room. The night editor, a fat, balding hack who has gained thirty pounds since smoking was banned in the building, swivels in his chair to face her. He holds up a printout.

  “Where’s this going?”

  “If you’ll let me finish it,” Weecherat says, “you’ll see.”

  “Just tell me. My eyes are tired.”

  Weecherat sighs and talks him through the story, painstakingly telling it exactly as she intends to write it, eliminating her personal bias and skirting the occasional misdirection that will allow her to imply more than she actually says. When she finishes, he regards her long enough for her to feel uncomfortable.

  He drops the printout on the desk. “So you’re selling me a story that could bring the cops down on the paper if anything happens to this farang. We become the keepers of the keys if things go wrong.”

  “That’s one way to look at it.”

  “Give me another.”

  “I just told it to you. The first person ever authorized to write Pan’s biography is being forced under threat of death to write a character assassination. That meets my definition of news.”

  He nods slowly, as though considering her argument. “And what’s this mystery information? The stuff you’re leaving out?”

  The nape of Weecherat’s neck suddenly feels cold. “You don’t need to know,” she says. “It won’t be in the story.”

  His index finger snaps against the edge of his desk with a thwap. “Don’t tell me what’s material. You’re taking us in a direction that could put us in a courtroom.”

  “Oh, don’t be silly. If the police do come to us, we’ll tell them everything. We can’t be sued for libel if the police demand the information, and you know it.” She hears the pitch of her voice and takes a step back in an attempt to lower the temperature. A question occurs to her. “What are you doing reading this? You don’t usually monitor stories in real time.”

  His gaze drifts past her, and she has to fight the urge to turn and look over her shoulder. The tips of his fingers land in the middle of the printout and scrabble it back and forth over the surface of the desk. “You’re right,” he says at last. “Don’t tell me. It’s probably better that I don’t know.”

  “You didn’t answer my question.”

  He stands, picks up her printout, wads it into a ball, and drops it in the trash. “Didn’t I? Sorry. Go finish your story.”

  Back at her cubicle, she rereads what she’s done, types in a few minor changes, and then finishes. She spends twenty minutes fast-forwarding through her tape of the conversation to make sure she’s quoted Rafferty accurately, and then pushes “send.” After she gets up and hefts her purse to her shoulder, she turns to look across the dim room at the bright window in the night editor’s office and finds him looking at her.

  She gives him a cool but proper fingertip wave. He nods and swivels his chair to turn his back to her.

  The moment she is gone, he swivels around again and gets up. He goes to Weecherat’s cubicle and picks through the things in her drawers until he finds her tape recorder. He opens it and checks that the tape is inside. Then he returns to his office.

  Traffic is thinning at this hour. Weecherat steps into the street and extends an arm, palm down, and pats the air to signal a cab. One pulls out from the curb a short distance away, swings into the traffic lane, and sw
erves toward her. She glances down to gather her shawl so it won’t catch in the taxi’s door, then the glare of headlights brings her eyes up and she sees the cab bearing down on her. The two steps she manages to scramble back, toward the safety of the curb, put her directly behind a parked truck, and that’s where the cab hits her, slamming her against the lower edge of the truck so hard she is almost cut in two.

  The driver flicks on the wipers to clear blood from the windshield and shifts into reverse. The transmission lets out a squeal of protest. Something is caught beneath the truck. The driver throws his door open, climbs out, and slams the door on his thumb. He yelps in pain, opens the door, and lopes away into traffic, dodging between cars and holding his injured thumb close to his chest.

  As traffic whisks past the scene, Weecherat’s buttercup scarf flutters in the windstream.

  23

  Close Enough

  The moment the apartment door opens, Miaow pushes through, saying, “It was on television.”

  “Then I guess it really happened,” Rafferty says, standing in the bluish fluorescent light of the hallway. He puts a hand on Miaow’s head. “Don’t you have something to say to Mrs. Pongsiri?”

  “Thank you,” Miaow recites dutifully. “I had a very nice time.”

  “It was a little holiday for me,” Mrs. Pongsiri says. She is wearing full evening makeup and a silk robe in all the hues of the rainbow, plus a few that were deleted for aesthetic reasons. Her apartment, the lamps mysteriously sheathed with colored scarves, gleams behind her like a Gypsy caravan. “This is the first night in months I haven’t gone to the bar.”