Breathing Water: A Bangkok Thriller pr-3

by Timothy Hallinan

  Rose surprises Rafferty by scrawling, in very large letters, a word he didn’t know she could write. The word is SHIT.

  Rafferty takes the pen and turns the page over. On the clean side, he writes, I’ll move us soon. Without even showing it to Rose, Miaow grabs the paper and scribbles How? hard enough to rip the paper.

  Rafferty writes, I don’t know.

  25

  Like He Ate a Grenade

  Snarls of dust, smeared windows, grit on the linoleum, the tiny brown cylinders of mouse droppings. In the middle of the floor, a three-inch cockroach, dead and belly-up, its legs folded as precisely as scissors. The smell of damp.

  Rafferty says, “It’s fine.”

  “It needs cleaning,” says Rafferty’s landlady, Mrs. Song. She looks even more worried than usual.

  “I’ll clean it.”

  “No, no, no.” Mrs. Song pats the air in Rafferty’s direction to repel the remark. “I’ll have a crew come in.”

  “Today?”

  “Well,” Mrs. Song says, giving the word tragic weight. The morning light seeps through the dirty windows like sour milk. “Maybe not today,” she says.

  “That’s what I thought. I’ll take care of it.”

  “But you’re not moving,” Mrs. Song says. Change petrifies her. She’d probably be happiest if the building were empty and sealed. She clamps her purse firmly against her side with her upper arm as though she expects it to try to escape.

  “No. I want this one and the one upstairs. Both of them.”

  “But why?”

  Rafferty says, “Because people can’t see through walls.”

  As the elevator doors slide closed behind him, Arthit says, “Have you seen this?” A copy of the Sun is folded under his arm. He is in street clothes, since Rafferty didn’t want the people who are watching the place to see anyone in uniform. Mrs. Song, trailing anxiety like a perfume, has gone down to the utility closet in the underground garage for mops, pails, and cleaning supplies.

  “I haven’t gone out yet today.” Rafferty is holding a roll of paper towels. “But there’s no story. The guy who called last night said that there would be no story.”

  “Oh, there’s a story,” Arthit says. His mouth is pulled into an inverted U so pronounced that it makes him look like a grouper. He hands the Sun to Rafferty, who tucks the roll of towels under his arm to take the paper. It is folded tightly around a front-page piece beneath the headline SUN REPORTER KILLED.

  Dark spots swarm in front of Rafferty’s eyes, and he is suddenly light-headed. He hands the paper back and says, “I can’t read it.”

  “It’s who you think it is,” Arthit says. “Hit-and-run. Driver fled the scene.”

  Rafferty pivots away from Arthit, crosses the hall, and kicks the elevator hard enough to dent the door and send a telegram of pain all the way up to his quadriceps. “She had a daughter,” he says. His voice feels like it has had knots tied in it. “Seven years old.”

  “A son, too,” Arthit says. “It was a hit-and-run in the most literal sense. The guy who hit her couldn’t get the car going, so he climbed out and ran. Which is how we know the car that hit her was a taxi, and that it was stolen.”

  “So it wasn’t an accident. What a surprise. I don’t suppose there was a witness.”

  “It’s not in the story, but there was. The driver was short and very wide in the shoulders.”

  Rafferty looks up quickly. “And?”

  “And?” Arthit screws up his face a moment. “Oh, yeah, and. He closed the car door on his finger, and he apparently snarled or something, because the witness saw his teeth.”

  “They were crooked,” Rafferty says.

  “I’d ask how you know that,” Arthit says, “but I don’t want to hear the answer.”

  “Give me the paper.”

  Arthit hands it to him, and Rafferty drops the roll of towels to the floor and scans the story about Weecherat, then flips through the pages until he comes to the third section. Pan’s fund-raiser owns the front page, above the fold. Rafferty tilts toward Arthit the two-column color photo, which shows Adam and Eve from behind, stark naked from that angle, ambling toward a conspicuously horrified crowd of well-dressed millionaires. “Right here,” he says, putting his fingertip above Captain Teeth’s head. “And this is the fucker he works for. I don’t know his full name, but his nickname-”

  “-is Ton,” Arthit interrupts. “How do you know this is the guy?”

  “He’s got teeth like he ate a grenade. They go all over the place. And it makes sense, because Ton wouldn’t talk to me last night.”

  Arthit takes the paper and refolds it carefully, as though the task were important, as though it were the national flag. He avoids Rafferty’s eyes. “That’s your evidence? Ton wouldn’t talk to you? He’d refuse to talk to the prime minister if he felt like it. And get away with it.”

  “He didn’t talk to me because he knew I’d recognize his voice. He’s the guy who ordered me to write the book.”

  Arthit is still looking at the newspaper. “And you can prove that, of course.”

  “Check his office. He’s on the thirty-sixth floor of whatever building it is. I’ll bet you anything you want.”

  “There’s nothing I want,” Arthit says. “Which is a good thing, because I’m not making that inquiry.”

  “Here’s what happened: Weecherat files her story. It goes into a computer. The computer has been programmed to flag anything with Pan’s name in it. The flag kicks the story to someone at the paper, who calls someone higher up at the paper, who calls Ton. Ton sticks his little warning in my kitchen cabinet, and then he thinks it would be tidier if Elora wasn’t floating around with the number of the floor he’s on. So he sends Captain Teeth to take care of her.”

  “Ton is untouchable,” Arthit says.

  “Oh, fuck that.”

  “Listen to me, Poke.” Arthit has crumpled the paper in his fist without even knowing it. “Ton could run over an entire nursery school, on purpose, right in front of me, and back up to get the ones he missed the first time, and I’d probably offer to pay for his car wash. I’m telling you, these people are not accountable. Remember that miserable kid of General Aparit’s? Shot two cops and killed one of them in a drug bust at a rave club? He’s assistant to a cabinet secretary now. Aparit is a panhandler compared to Ton. It would be worth my job to look cross-eyed at him. And right now, with Noi the way she is, I can’t even entertain the fantasy.”

  Rafferty turns away and looks through the open door of the unoccupied apartment. He hears himself say, “Right.” He bends down and picks up the roll of paper towels and pitches it underhand at the floor. The towels unroll clear across the empty room, making the only clean path on the floor. “Here’s something else you won’t want to do anything about. Weecherat had a tape recorder. My interview was on it. What do you want to bet it’s missing?” He hears the elevator doors open and glances over his shoulder, expecting to see Mrs. Song struggling mournfully with an armful of cleaning stuff. Instead it’s Lieutenant Kosit, whom he hasn’t seen since he dealt the card game that got Rafferty into this mess.

  “Pretty impressive stuff,” Kosit says, “and expensive, too. Cost maybe eight hundred, nine hundred U.S. apiece. Three of them.” He’s wearing olive drab shorts and a camouflage T-shirt in green and brown.

  “Where?” Rafferty says.

  “Center of the ceiling. They bored a little hole for each microphone. Theory is that nobody ever looks up. The holes are only about half an inch in diameter, and just to make sure they wouldn’t catch your eye, they glued some kind of white cloth over the openings. The mikes are omnidirectional, sensitive across three hundred sixty degrees.”

  “Which rooms?”

  “Living room, kitchen, bedroom. Nothing in the bathroom or Miaow’s room. They feed to a transmitter inside your couch. They unstitched the liner on the bottom, put the thing inside, and tacked the cloth back.”

  “What’s the range?” This is Arthit, and
it’s purely an instinctive reaction. The moment the question is out, he squeezes his eyes shut and shakes his head.

  Kosit throws Arthit an inquisitive glance and then squints down the hallway for the answer. He has a seamed, leathery smoker’s face, and the squint creates a fan of deep creases radiating out from the corner of each eye. “Mile? Maybe a little more. So forget finding the listening post. It’s somewhere in a two-mile circle of Bangkok. And even if the sun shone straight down through the clouds to show you exactly where it was, you’d probably just find another transmitter to boost the signal and pass it along.”

  Rafferty has no intention of looking for it. “Nothing in the hallway outside?”

  Kosit shakes his head. “No.”

  “Cameras?”

  “No, and it’s a good thing. I was quiet, but not invisible.” Kosit grins. “You should have heard your wife and daughter, arguing about school and her hair color as though there was nobody else in the place.”

  Rafferty says, “Her hair color?”

  “Poke,” Arthit says. “What are you going to do about this?”

  Rafferty turns back to the filthy, empty apartment. “What do you think I’m going to do? I’m going to take advantage of it.”

  When Da and Peep are pushed into the van that morning, there is only one other woman inside. She balances a very dark-skinned, black-eyed child, perhaps two years old, in her lap. The woman with the skeletal child is not there. Da assumes they will wait for her, but the man in the awful blue shirt-what was his name? Kep? — slides the door closed behind her with a bang. It is too angry a sound for so early in the morning.

  “Where are they?” Da asks quickly, before Kep can get around the van and climb behind the wheel.

  “Who knows? One of the tough men from the business came and got them very early.” The child in the other woman’s lap tilts its head to one side and trains its enormous eyes on Peep. Peep has been whimpering, fretful at being jostled as he and Da were hurried downstairs, but when he feels the other child’s gaze, he goes quiet, and the two of them regard each other like members of some rare species unexpectedly come face-to-face.

  “Will she be all right?” Da asks, but before the other woman can answer, Kep pops open the driver’s door and slides his bulk onto the seat. An unlit cigarette hangs from his lips. Before he starts the car, he twists back to speak to Da, although he doesn’t bother to turn his head far enough to meet her eyes.

  “No giving money back today, got it?”

  He seems to expect a reply. “I heard you the first time.”

  “And get off your ass. Don’t just sit there.”

  Anger flares in the center of Da’s chest. “I made money yesterday.”

  Kep throws an arm back and swipes halfheartedly at her, but she easily ducks out of reach. “Listen to me, you snotty little bitch. You make as much as I tell people you make. If you don’t want to wind up in some dirt-road whorehouse, you’ll be nice to me.”

  “I’ll never work in a whorehouse.”

  “You remember that when I bring a bunch of my friends by to break you in.”

  “You have friends?”

  The other woman puts a cautioning hand on Da’s arm. This time Kep turns all the way around to glare at her. He closes his fist and slowly brings it up into the center of her field of vision. “Women with bruises on their face make money,” he says. “If you don’t shut your mouth, you’ll find out.” For a moment Da is too furious to care whether he hits her or not, but the woman squeezes her arm, and Peep chooses that instant to begin to cry. Da lowers her gaze, and after a brief eternity, stretched out by Peep’s squalling, Kep turns away and starts the van.

  He guns the engine, throwing the two women back against the seats, and then the van hits a pothole. Kep lets go of the wheel with one hand long enough to light his cigarette and say, “There must be a better way to earn a living.”

  A carpet to muffle the echoes, maybe tack a blanket to a wall, hang something over the windows to cover them when the lights are on at night. Some soft, absorbent surfaces. The place sounds like an empty swimming pool, and that won’t do. Grab a few chairs, a table. Something to sit on, and around, while they do what they have to do.

  Bare minimum.

  Once the floors are clean, just fold some more blankets on them. Haul the spare pillows downstairs. If they have to sleep there, which he doesn’t think they will, it’ll only be for one night. With what he has in mind, they won’t have much time for sleep anyway.

  Mrs. Song had helped for a while, running water and sloshing around in the bathroom before making her retreat, scattering excuses and tracking water behind her. As soon as the elevator doors had closed, Rafferty had gone into the bathroom for a look, but he couldn’t see that she’d accomplished much, other than getting it amazingly wet. So he’d balled up a bunch of the paper towels and scrubbed at the floor, walls, and toilet until he was certain the room wouldn’t horrify Rose. He found that the tight coil of anxiety that was wrapped around his heart seemed to ease when he was cleaning.

  At least he was doing something.

  Now, back in the living room, he uses the widest of the brooms to push a quickly growing ridge of dirt across the floor. He can still feel the scrape of it beneath his shoes, but the floor looks better. The air is razor-sharp with ammonia, and the windows are cleaner. A couple of hours more and the place will be almost presentable. Ugly, empty, and not home, but presentable. There’s no balcony for some reason, just a window where the sliding glass door is in their own apartment. It could be worse, he thinks, and anyway it’s just for a couple of days.

  He won’t be able to stretch it any longer than that.

  He feels eyes on him and turns to see Rose standing in the doorway, her shoulders high and her hands pushed deep in the pockets of her jeans. He says, “No problems?”

  “Someone followed us to the school. A dark blue Lexus. Two men in the front seat. They didn’t try to stay out of sight.”

  “They want us to know they’re watching.”

  Rose takes in the room and nods at the clean window. “You’ve got talent.”

  “Don’t get any ideas.”

  She steps back, into the hallway. “I’ve been in the building three or four minutes,” she says. “We’d better go upstairs and make some noise.”

  It’s such a relief for Rafferty to be back in his apartment, away from that forlorn, filthy space, that he can almost forget about the microphones.

  But only almost.

  “I’m worried about Miaow,” Rose says. She doesn’t look particularly worried. She looks like someone deeply focused on filing her nails, which is what she is doing.

  His fingers halt above the keyboard, but just for a moment. “You mean the thing with the snake?”

  “No. I think that’s past. But she’s not as happy as she usually is.”

  “I’ve noticed. But whatever it is, she’ll get over it,” Rafferty says for the microphones, without taking his eyes off his laptop. He is making a list, and he pauses to come up with something fatherly. “She’s just at an awkward age.” This is his third pass at the list, and it gets longer every time. Only Item One remains the same from draft to draft: Get Rose and Miaow out of the way.

  “She doesn’t want to be called Miaow anymore,” Rose says, and something in her voice makes Rafferty look up. “She wants to be Mia.”

  Rafferty frowns a question at her, and Rose lifts her eyebrows and nods. No bullshit, in other words. Then she says, “And she’s ashamed of being so dark.”

  Rafferty gives up on his list. “Oh, boy.”

  “She asked me about whitening creams. She’d like to dye her hair reddish brown, too.”

  “Yeah, well, I’d like to be Johnny Depp,” Rafferty says, “but that’s not going to happen either.”

  Rose says, “Johnny Depp’s got a girl. A French girl.”

  “Not that part,” Rafferty says. “I’d like to be Johnny Depp selectively.”

  “It’s easy t
o make fun of it,” Rose says, “but it’s important to Miaow. You probably remember, maybe not very clearly, what it was like to be young.”

  “I’m not that much older than you are.”

  “Actually,” Rose says, “compared to me, you’re a big, sheltered baby.” She extends her arms and gives her nails a critical survey. “But we’re going to have to figure out what to say to Miaow. She’s already worried about being short, and she doesn’t think she’s pretty. And now she feels like a dark little peasant girl with the wrong name.”

  “I don’t know,” Rafferty says. “This seems like mother territory to me.”

  “No problem. I’m just being polite, sharing the situation with you. I’ve already decided how to deal with it.”

  “Yeah? How?”

  “I’m going to dye her hair and buy her some whitening cream.”

  “The hell you are.”

  “As you said, it’s mother territory.”

  “Well,” he says. Nothing authoritative comes to him. Then he says, “What are you going to call her?”

  “Whatever she wants.”

  “Not Harold,” Rafferty says. “I draw the line at Harold.”

  Rose says, “Children need a strong father.”

  He reviews his list, which now has two items on it, and he’s not sure about the second one. “So I’ve done my part?”

  “You’re everyone’s dream father.”

  “Okay.” He looks at his watch. “It’s late enough to start to bother people about this book.” He picks up the phone, glances involuntarily at the patch of cloth covering the microphone in the ceiling, and dials a number high up on the yellow list. “Mr. Porthip, please,” he says. He covers the mouthpiece with one hand and says to Rose, “The way this guy looks, I think I should talk to him first, or he won’t be around.”

  26