Breathing Water: A Bangkok Thriller pr-3

by Timothy Hallinan

  Breathing Water: A Bangkok Thriller

  ( Poke Rafferty - 3 )

  Timothy Hallinan

  Timothy Hallinan

  Breathing Water: A Bangkok Thriller

  PART I

  THE GULF

  1

  Pinch It

  The man behind the desk is a dim shape framed in blinding light, a god emerging from the brilliance of infinity. The god says, “Why not the bars? You’re pretty enough.”

  The girl has worked a finger into the ragged hole in the left knee of her jeans. The knee got scraped when the two men grabbed her, and she avoids the raw flesh. She raises a hand to shade her eyes so she can look at him, but the light is too bright. “I can’t. I tried for two nights. I can’t do it.”

  “You’ll get used to it.” The god puts a foot on the desk. The foot is shielded from the light by the bulk of his body, and she can see that it is shod in a very thin, very pale loafer. The sole is so shiny that the shoe might never have been worn before. The shoe probably cost more than the girl’s house.

  The girl says, “I don’t want to get used to it.” She shifts a few inches right on the couch, trying to avoid the light.

  “It’s a lot more money. Money you could send home.”

  “Home is gone,” the girl says.

  That’s a trifle, and he waves it away. “Even better. You could buy clothes, jewelry, a nice phone. I could put you into a bar tonight.”

  The girl just looks down and works her finger around inside the hole. The skin around the scraped knee is farm-dark, as dark as the skin on her hand.

  “Okay,” the man says. “Up to you.” He lights a cigarette, the flame briefly revealing a hard face with small, thick-lidded eyes, broad nostrils, pitted skin, oiled hair. Not a god, then, unless very well disguised. He waves the smoke away, toward her. The smoke catches the glare to form a pale nimbus like the little clouds at which farmers aim prayers in the thin-dirt northeast, where the girl comes from. “But this isn’t easy either,” the man says.

  She pulls her head back slightly from the smoke. “I don’t care.”

  The man drags on the cigarette again and puts it out, only two puffs down. Then he leans back in his chair, perilously close to the floor-to-ceiling window behind him. “Don’t like the light, do you? Don’t like to be looked at. Must be a problem with a face like yours. You’re worth looking at.”

  The girl says, “Why do you sit there? It’s not polite to make your visitors go blind.”

  “I’m not a polite guy,” says the man behind the desk. “But it’s not my fault. I put my desk here before they silvered those windows.” The building across Sathorn Road, a sea-green spire, has reflective coating on all its windows, creating eighteen stories of mirrors that catch the falling sun early every evening. “It’s fine in the morning,” he says. “It’s just now that it gets a little bright.”

  “It’s rude.”

  The man behind the desk says, “So fucking what?” He pulls his foot off the desk and lets the back of the chair snap upright. “You don’t like it, go somewhere else.”

  The girl lowers her head. After a moment she says, “If I try to beg, I’ll just get dragged back here.”

  The man sits motionless. The light in the room dims slightly as the sun begins to drop behind the rooftops. Then he says, “That’s right.” He takes out a new cigarette and puts it in his mouth. “We get forty percent. Pratunam.”

  She tries to meet his eyes, but the reflections are still too bright. “I’m sorry?”

  “Pra…tu…nam,” he says slowly, enunciating each syllable as though she is stupid. “Don’t you even know where Pratunam is?”

  She starts to shake her head and stops. “I can find it.”

  “You won’t have to find it. You’ll be taken there. You can’t sit just anywhere. You’ll work the pavement we give you. Move around and you’ll probably get beat up, or even brought back here.” He takes the cigarette out of his mouth, looks at it, and breaks it in half. He drops the pieces irritably into the ashtray.

  “Is it a good place?”

  “ Lot of tourists,” he says. “I wouldn’t give it to you if you weren’t pretty.” He picks up the half of the cigarette with the filter on it, puts it in his mouth, and lights it. Then he reaches under the desk and does something, and the girl hears the lock on the door snap closed. “You want to do something nice for me?”

  “No,” the girl says. “If I wanted to do that, I’d work in the bar.”

  “I could make you.”

  The girl says, “You could get a fingernail in your eye, too.”

  The man regards her for a moment and then grunts. The hand goes back under the desk, and the lock clicks again. “Ahh, you’d probably be a dead fish anyway.” He takes a deep drag and scrubs the tip of the cigarette against the bottom of the ashtray, scribbles something on a pad, rips off the page, and holds it out. His eyes follow her as she gets up to take it. “It’s an address,” he says. “Go there tonight, you can sleep there. We’ll pick you up at six-thirty in the morning. You’ll work from seven to four, when the night girl takes over.” He glances at a gold watch, as thin as a dime, on his right wrist. In English he says, “How’s your English?”

  “Can talk some.”

  “Can you say ‘Please, sir’? ‘Please, ma’am’? ‘Hungry’?”

  “Please, sir,” the girl says. “Please, ma’am.” A flush of color mounts her dark cheeks. “Hungry.”

  “Good,” the man says. “Go away.”

  She turns to go, and his phone buzzes. He picks up the receiver.

  “What?” he says. Then he says to the girl, “Wait.” Into the receiver he says, “Good. Bring it in.” A moment later an immaculately groomed young woman in a silk business suit comes in, carrying a bundle of rags. She holds it away from her, her mouth pulled tight, as though there are insects crawling on it.

  “Give it to her,” the man says. “And you,” he says, “don’t lose it and don’t drop it. These things don’t grow on trees.”

  The young woman glances without interest at the girl with the torn jeans and hands the bundle to her. The bundle is surprisingly heavy, and wet.

  The girl opens one end, and a tiny face peers up at her.

  “But…” she says. “Wait. This…this isn’t-”

  “Just be careful with it,” the man says. “Anything happens to it, you’ll be working on your back for years.”

  “But I can’t-”

  “What’s the matter with you? Don’t you have brothers and sisters? Didn’t you spend half your life wiping noses? Just carry it around on your hip or something. Be a village girl again.” To the woman in the suit, he says, “Give her some money and put it on the books. What’s your name?” he asks the girl holding the baby.

  “Da.”

  “Buy some milk and some throwaway diapers. A towel. Wet wipes. Get a small bottle of whiskey and put a little in the milk at night to knock the baby out, or you won’t get any sleep. Dip the corner of the towel in the milk and let it suck. Get a blanket to sit on. Got it?”

  “I can’t keep this.”

  “Don’t be silly.” The man gets up, crosses the office, and opens the door, waving her out with his free hand. “No foreigner can walk past a girl with a baby,” the man says. “When there are foreign women around, pinch it behind the knee. The crying is good for an extra ten, twenty baht.”

  Dazed, holding the wet bundle away from her T-shirt, Da goes to the door.

  “We’ll be watching you,” the man says. “Sixty for you, forty for us. Try to pocket anything and we’ll know. And then you won’t be happy at all.”

  “I don’t steal,”
Da says.

  “Of course not.” The man returns to his desk in the darkening office. “And remember,” he says. “Pinch it.”

  Four minutes later Da is on the sidewalk, with 250 baht in her pocket and a wet baby in her arms. She walks through the lengthening shadows at the aimless pace of someone with nowhere to go, someone listening to private voices. Well-dressed men and women, just freed from the offices and cubicles of Sathorn Road, push impatiently past her.

  Da has carried a baby as long as she can remember. The infant is a familiar weight in her arms. She protects it instinctively by crossing her wrists beneath it, bringing her elbows close to her sides, and keeping her eyes directly in front of her so she won’t bump into anything. In her village she would have been looking for a snake, a stone in the road, a hole opened up by the rain. Here she doesn’t know what she’s looking for.

  But she’s so occupied in looking for it that she doesn’t see the dirty, ragged, long-haired boy who pushes past her with the sweating farang man in tow, doesn’t see the boy turn to follow her with his eyes fixed on the damp bundle pressed to her chest, watching her as though nothing in the world were more interesting.

  2

  Mud Between Her Toes

  The boy sees her go, assessing her without even thinking about it: Just got here. Still got mud between her toes. Doesn’t know anything. Looks stunned, like someone hit her in the face with a pole.

  The baby’s not hers. Too pale.

  He thinks, Another one.

  The nervous man behind him slows again. The boy hesitates grudgingly, feeling like he’s trying to lead a cat. For a moment weariness washes over him like warm water. He longs to disappear into the crowd and leave the foreigner to fend for himself, but the others are waiting, and they’re hungry.

  “Come on,” he says in English. “Nothing to worry.”

  “I don’t know,” the man says.

  The boy stops. He draws a deep breath before he speaks; it will not do to show his frustration. “What problem now?”

  “It’s not dark enough.”

  “When it dark,” the boy says, “they all gone.”

  “Just ten minutes,” the man says. He is in his forties, with hair brushed forward over a plump baby’s face that seems to be mostly lower lip. Despite his eagerness not to be noticed, he wears a bright yellow shirt and green knee-length shorts across wide hips. A fanny pack dangling below his belly thoughtfully announces the location of his valuables. To the boy he looks as conspicuous as a neon sign.

  “Ten minute too long.” The boy’s eyes, tight-cornered and furious, skitter across the man’s face as though committing the features to some permanent archive, and then he turns away with a shrug.

  The man says, “Please. Wait.”

  The boy stops. Plays the final card. “Come now. Come now or go away.”

  “Okay, okay. But don’t walk so fast.”

  The sun is gone now, leaving the sky between the buildings a pale violet through which the evening star has punched a silver hole. The boy sometimes thinks the sky is a hard dome lit inside by the sun and the moon, and peppered with tiny openings. From the outside the dome is bathed in unimaginable brilliance, and that light forces its way through the pinpricks in the sky to create the stars. If the sky dissolved, he thinks, the light from outside would turn the earth all white and pure, and then it would catch fire like paper. But in the dazzling moment before the flames, it would be clean.

  “We go slow,” he says. There may not be another man tonight. The crowds on the sidewalk are thinning. The kids are hungry. He drags his feet to prevent the man from falling behind.

  The man says, “You’re handsome.”

  “No,” the boy says without even turning his head. “Have better than me.”

  They turn a corner, into an east- west street. They are walking west, so the sky pales in the sun’s wake until it slams up against a jagged black line of buildings. Before he returned to Bangkok, this city he hates, the boy had grown used to the soft, leaf-dappled skyline of the countryside. The horizon here is as sharp as a razor cut.

  “There,” the boy says, indicating with his chin. “The window.”

  Across the street, nine impassive children loiter against the plate glass of a store window. They wear the filthy clothing of the street, mismatched and off-size. Three of the five boys are eye-catchingly dirty. The four girls, who look cleaner, range in age from roughly eleven to fourteen. The boys look a year or two younger, but it might just be that girls in their early teens grow faster than boys.

  They pay no attention to the man and the boy across the street.

  “Keep walking,” the boy says. “Don’t slow down too much, but look at the window, like you’re shopping. When we get around the corner, tell me the sex and the color of the shirt of the one you want. Or take two or three. They don’t cost much.”

  The man looks toward the shop windows. “Then what?” he asks.

  “Then they come to the hotel,” the boy says.

  3

  The Big Guy

  The Big Guy’s eyes keep landing on Rafferty.

  He’s developed a visual circuit that he follows every time a card is dealt: look at the dealer’s hands, look at the new faceup card in the center of the table, look at Rafferty. Then he lifts the corners of the two facedown cards in front of him, as though he hopes they’ve improved while he wasn’t paying attention to them. He puffs the cigar clenched dead center in his mouth and looks at Rafferty through the smoke.

  This has been going on for several hands.

  Rafferty’s stomach was fluttering when he first sat down at the table. The flutter intensified when the Big Guy, whom no one had expected, came through the door. Like the others in the room, Rafferty had recognized the Big Guy the moment he came in. He is no one to screw with.

  But Rafferty may have to.

  He has grown more anxious with each hand, fearing the moment when he’ll have to test the system. And now he can feel the Big Guy’s gaze like a warm, damp breeze.

  With a flourish, the dealer flips the next-to-last of the faceup cards onto the green felt. It’s a six, and it has no impact on Rafferty’s hand, although one of the other men at the table straightens a quarter inch, and everyone pretends not to have noticed. The Big Guy takes it in and looks at Rafferty. His shoulders beneath the dark suit coat are rounded and powerful, the left a couple of inches lower than the right. The man’s personal legend has it that it’s from twenty years of carrying a heavy sack of rice seed, and he is said to have punched a tailor who proposed extra padding in the left shoulder of his suit coat to even them out.

  A massive gold ring sporting a star ruby the size of a quail’s egg bangs against the wooden rim of the table as he clasps fat, short-fingered hands in front of him. Rafferty finds it almost impossible not to look at the man’s hands. They are not so much scarred as melted, as though the skin were wax that had been stirred slowly as it cooled. The surface is ridged and swirled. The little finger on the left hand doesn’t bend at all. It looks like he had his hands forced into a brazier full of burning charcoal and held there. The mutilated left hand lifts the corners of the facedown cards with the careful precision of the inebriated, the immobile little finger pointing off into space. The Big Guy was drunk when he arrived, and he is well on his way to being legless.

  “What are you doing here, farang?” the Big Guy asks very quietly in Thai. The soft tone does not diminish the rudeness of the question. His mouth is a wet, pursed, unsettling pink that suggests lipstick, and in fact he swipes his lips from time to time with a tube of something that briefly makes them even shinier.

  “I’m only part farang,” Rafferty says, also in Thai. “My mother’s Filipina.” He smiles but gets nothing in return.

  “You should be in Patpong,” the Big Guy says, his voice still low, his tone still neutral. “Looking for whores, like the others.” He picks up his glass, rigid pinkie extended like a parody of gentility.

  “And you shoul
d watch your mouth,” Rafferty says. The glass stops. One of the bodyguards begins to step forward, but the Big Guy shakes his head, and the bodyguard freezes. The table turns into a still life, and then the Big Guy removes the cigar from the wet, pink mouth and sips his drink. Minus the cigar, the mouth looks like something that ought not to be seen, as unsettling as the underside of a starfish.

  The others at the table-except for Rafferty’s friend Arthit, who is wearing his police uniform-are doing their best to ignore the exchange. In an effort to forget the cards he’s holding, which are terrifyingly good, Rafferty takes a look around the table.

  Of the seven men in the game, three-the Big Guy and the two dark-suited businessmen-are rich. The Big Guy is by far the richest, and he would be the richest in almost any room in Bangkok. The three millionaires don’t look alike, but they share the glaze that money brings, a sheen as thin and golden as the melted sugar on a doughnut.

  The other four men are ringers. Rafferty is playing under his own name but false pretenses. Arthit and one other are cops. Both cops are armed. The fourth ringer is a career criminal.

  One of the businessmen and the Big Guy think they’re playing a regular high-stakes game of Texas Hold’em. The others know better.

  It’s Rafferty’s bet, and he throws in a couple of chips to keep his hands busy.

  “Pussy bet,” says the Big Guy.

  “Just trying to make you feel at home,” Rafferty says. In spite of himself, he can feel his nervousness being muscled aside by anger.

  The Big Guy glances away, blinking as though he’s been hit. He is an interesting mix of power and insecurity. On the one hand, everyone at the table is aware that he’s among the richest men in Thailand. On the other hand, he has an unexpectedly tentative voice, pitched surprisingly high, and he talks like the poorly educated farmer he was before he began to build his fortune and spend it with the manic disregard for taste that has brought him the media’s devoted attention. Every time he talks, his eyes make a lightning circuit of the room: Is anyone judging me? He doesn’t laugh at anyone’s jokes but his own. Despite his rudeness and the impression of physical power he conveys, there’s something of the whipped puppy about him. He seems at times almost to expect a slap.