Breathing Water: A Bangkok Thriller pr-3

by Timothy Hallinan

  And no, he didn’t know how Pan had gotten his start, how he had climbed from thugdom to the top of the industrial heap, or even-for sure-that there was any thugdom back there in the first place. “Common criminal” had just been a figure of speech based on, you know, how he dresses and behaves in public. There were rumors, of course. There were always rumors wherever there were envious people, but nothing official. And of course he’d be delighted to let Rafferty look at the official records, especially considering who had called him to suggest that he find time for this meeting, nothing would make him happier, but he would have to exceed his authority to do so. No matter how high you rise, there’s always someone higher, isn’t there? Although Rafferty, as a freelance writer with two-no, three-books to his credit and another one in the pipeline (isn’t that the term you use, “pipeline”?), yes, Rafferty probably lives a much freer and less constrained life than a simple civil servant. How I envy you that freedom as I sit chained to this desk all day, working for the people’s good.

  And now you’ve got this fascinating project about one of Bangkok’s most…uh, visible citizens.

  And I’d like nothing better than to show you the files, but it’s impossible. Just procedure, rules and regulations, you know. But of course all of Pan’s records are accessible. The police didn’t lose records. There were backups of backups of backups. To purge anything, even something inconsequential, would be a vast enterprise, requiring hundreds of man-hours. But nothing of that kind had happened in Pan’s case. The records are there, but unavailable, I’m sorry to say.

  By now Thanom had taken the paper clip off the sheets and was flicking one end of it with an index finger to make it spin. The activity had the unfortunate effect of making him look even more like a monkey, one who is on the verge of inventing a tool but probably won’t. When Rafferty asks him about Pan’s political aspirations, the paper clip sails off the desk and lands in Rafferty’s lap.

  On the street, having wasted much of his morning and with yet another interview in front of him, Rafferty asks himself again: What do they actually want?

  Several hours later Arthit has made a third improvement to his new paper-plane design when someone knocks on his door. Elaborately folded official reports, symmetrically streamlined and sharply pointed, most of them with a downturned nose borrowed from the Concorde, litter the carpet. The nose looks good, but it seems to impair the lift a good paper plane needs, so Arthit has just counterweighted the tail with a staple and launched it across the room.

  He doesn’t bother to tell whoever it is to come in.

  Arthit doesn’t have anything as grand as a secretary, but he has access to a pool of women with widely varying skill levels. The one who comes through the door is his favorite: in her sixties, dressed and made up like a nineteen-year-old, she calls herself Brigitte, after Brigitte Bardot. Except for Arthit she is probably the only person in the station who remembers Bardot in all her pouting, carnal glory.

  “For you,” she says. She has an envelope in her hand.

  “So I assumed,” Arthit says. “Since this is the office you brought it to. What is it?”

  “I don’t know,” Brigitte says, although her eyes say she does. “It’s sealed.”

  “Unseal it, then. Unseal it and read it to me.”

  Brigitte shifts from foot to foot, obviously wishing she were elsewhere. “I’m not sure I should.”

  “Whoever sent it to me probably wants me to know what it says, right?”

  “Well…I suppose.”

  “Then open it and read it to me. I can promise you that if you don’t, it will probably be weeks before I get around to opening it myself. I have far too much on my hands.” He rips out another page of another report and folds it lengthwise, already visualizing a triangular tuck in the tail section that might make the staple redundant. Staples seem like cheating.

  “Well.” Brigitte chews the inside of her cheek. Then she opens the envelope, which is not in fact sealed; the flap has merely been slipped inside. “It’s…um, it’s a Form 74.”

  “Really. And a Form 74 is?”

  “Leave. It’s the form granting compassionate leave.”

  “Ah,” Arthit says. He creases the page with his thumbnail to sharpen the fold. “Does it say when the leave begins?”

  “It starts today,” Brigitte says. She blinks rapidly, and for a moment Arthit is afraid she will burst into tears. “In fact, it starts now.”

  Arthit says, “Mmm-hmm.” He launches the plane, which sails across the room rewardingly. “And is there anything about how long this compassion will last?”

  “Until further notice,” Brigitte says.

  “That’s a very generous serving of compassion,” Arthit says. “Definitely something to remember.”

  32

  Innocent as a Dusting of Snow

  I hope you know what a big favor this is,” grumbles the man behind the desk. Through the floor-to-ceiling window with the desk positioned in its center, Rafferty sees the silvered windows of the office tower across the street.

  “And I hope you know how much I appreciate it,” Rafferty says to Wichat with the smallest smile he can manage. “The people who want this book written feel you might have a special perspective on Pan.”

  “I was around,” Wichat says. His shoulders are hunched and high, and it looks protective. “I was just a foot soldier then, but I was around.”

  “That’s not what I hear. I hear you were already on the way up.”

  Wichat shakes his head. “The big guy then was Chai. He was generous with his men. He took care of me. I did what he needed done, and he took care of me.” Wichat tilts the chair back, dangerously close to the plate glass behind him.

  “Doesn’t that scare you? It’s, what, twenty-eight stories down?”

  Wichat says, “Nothing scares me.”

  “Well, lucky you. Did anything scare Pan?”

  “If it did, he didn’t show it. He could have been pissing his pants, but he looked like something carved into that wall of his. Nothing showed except what he wanted to show. Had a way of bringing down the corners of his mouth so hard they almost touched. Scared the shit out of people.”

  “You knew him when he made the move, right? The move to the massage parlors.”

  “The Mound of Venus,” Wichat says lightly, as though he’s been asked an unexpectedly easy question. “Sure.”

  “Where’d he get the money?”

  Wichat picks up a battered pack of cigarettes and tweezes one out between his first and second fingers. He puts it in his mouth and picks up a gold lighter. “Trying to quit,” he says.

  “Yeah, well, lighting one is a surefire method.”

  “I don’t light as many as I used to,” Wichat says, blowing a plume of smoke across the desk. “Don’t smoke them so far down either.”

  “Where’d he get the money?”

  “He didn’t need money. How do I know my name isn’t going to be all over your book?”

  “If it is, you can kill me.”

  “Funny,” Wichat says dourly. “No names, got it?”

  “Got it.”

  “I wouldn’t tell you shit if you didn’t have so much fucking weight behind you.”

  “As I said, I appreciate it. Where’d he get-”

  “I told you,” Wichat snaps. “He already had some. And he didn’t need as much as you’d probably think. He got the first Mound pretty much free, just the old gun-to-the-head negotiation. The guy who owned it had made the wrong decisions about who to be friends with. It would have been a small funeral. So he signed it over to Pan for maybe enough baht to buy a week’s worth of chewing gum, and Pan fixed the place up.”

  “And then?”

  “And then he made a bunch of money from the first Mound and opened the others. Business, right? Make profit and reinvest it. Selling pad thai, selling pussy. Same-same, you know?”

  “What else?”

  Wichat reaches up and passes a palm over the surface of his oily hair.
Then he makes a palm print on the desk’s smooth surface and looks down at it as though evaluating its worth as evidence. “What else, what else.” He drags on the cigarette again and examines it, obviously thinking about what he’s going to say next. “Two things,” he says. “You didn’t hear this from me, but there were two things.” He glares at the half-smoked cigarette, stubs it out, and drops it in the ashtray. “Hard not to pick these things up and light them later, you know? Especially when you were poor once.”

  “Get a jar of water,” Rafferty says. “Drop them into it.”

  Wichat’s eyes widen slightly. His complexion is rough and pitted. He must have had terrible acne as a kid. Acne plus poverty; if Rafferty didn’t know the man was a killer and perhaps worse, he might even feel sorry for him.

  “Hang on,” Wichat says. He picks up his phone and punches a single number. “Get me a jar of water and bring it in here. No, not a glass. If I wanted a glass, I would have asked for a glass. A jar, and a coaster to go under it. A little more than half full. No lid.” He hangs up. To Rafferty he says, “Good idea.”

  “You were about to tell me two things.”

  “Bunch of half-smoked cigarettes floating around, that’s going to stink.”

  “Yeah. And?”

  “Good idea.” His eyes drop to the surface of the desk, scanning it as though he’s looking for an objection to what he’s about to do. “Two things,” he says. “First, the Mounds of Venus weren’t the whole story, okay? He also owned a bunch of handcuff houses, you know handcuff houses?”

  “Pretend I don’t.”

  “Houses where the girls aren’t…eager, you know? Where they’re handcuffed to the bed. Some guys like that. They like to punch the girls a little, too, a few of them. So Pan had, I don’t know, maybe four or five of those places. Only Burmese girls, trucked in. He wouldn’t use Thai girls, they had to be Burmese.”

  “Are you sure of this?”

  “You’ve got to be kidding me. This is dangerous stuff I’m telling you. I don’t want to know it myself. You think I’d make it up?”

  “Pan acts like prostitutes are his fallen sisters.”

  “Pan’s one of the world’s great liars.” Wichat brings both hands up, scrubbing the air to erase the remark. “But the Thai girls, the ones who worked in the Mounds? He took good care of them. They got paid good, and they got time off and everything. I even heard he takes care of some girls who got sick. But that’s just Thais, you understand? Just Isaan. The Burmese, he treated them like shit.”

  “And the second thing?”

  “You seen his hands?”

  “You mean the scars?”

  “Yeah. You’ve never seen him in a short-sleeved shirt because those burns, they go all the way up to his shoulders and even the front of his chest. It looks like he dived headfirst into a fire to pull something out. He disappeared for a couple of months, and when he came back, he had those scars. He wouldn’t talk about them, but it was only about six months later he got his first factory and started closing down the whorehouses.”

  “A fire,” Rafferty says.

  “Yeah. He came through some sort of fire, and then he was a different guy.”

  “What year?”

  “Oh, shit, who knows? He was still closing down the knock shops, so-”

  The office door opens, and an exquisite young woman comes in carrying a jar of water. The jar has a label that says “Jif” on it.

  “Oh, come on,” Wichat says angrily. “It’s bad enough to have a fucking jar on my desk without the whole world knowing what kind of peanut butter I eat. Peel that thing off.”

  “Yes, sir,” the girl says. She wears a pale salmon-colored business-formal office suit, all in silk. Wichat watches her rear end as she goes back out.

  “More butt than brains,” Wichat says admiringly.

  Rafferty says, “The year.”

  A heavy blink. “Yeah. Like I said, he still had one of the Mounds, or maybe two. Must have been-this is a guess-1993? Maybe ’94. In there somewhere.”

  “Do you have anything to do with him now?” Rafferty asks. “With Pan?”

  Wichat picks up the pack of cigarettes again. “I don’t care who called me about you,” he says. “Just pretend you didn’t ask that question.”

  The sidewalk is at full bake, heat ripples so pronounced that pedestrians look like he’s seeing them underwater. Rafferty ducks into an air-conditioned drugstore, one in a British chain that’s established itself in Bangkok’s high-rent commercial districts. He pulls out the cell phone and dials the number from memory.

  “I need to access the morgue at the Bangkok Sun,” he says without returning the greeting from the other end. “Somebody has to call and set it up.”

  “You can’t get in yourself?” It is the first man, the man from the car again. His speech is still mush-thick, but at least it’s understandable.

  “Sure I can get in myself. I’ll make a request, and then the request will get processed, and then they’ll let me in, and it’ll be the middle of next week. You guys want to sit around playing blackjack or whatever you do while I go through all that, or you want to move things along?”

  “How’d you do with the cop?”

  “I did better with the crook. It’ll be in my report.”

  “Give me a preview.”

  “I think I’ll wait,” Rafferty says, “until I’m talking to someone who matters.”

  “You’re just making it easier,” the man says.

  “If it wasn’t easy, you wouldn’t be able to do it.”

  A pause, although Rafferty can hear the breathing on the other end of the line. Then the man says, “How long will it take you to get there?”

  “Twenty, thirty minutes.”

  “It’ll be set up.” The man disconnects.

  Thirty-five minutes later, Rafferty discovers he’s in luck. Both 1993 and 1994 have been computerized and cross-indexed. It takes him less than an hour to find fires.

  Five show promise. Two of them are the most melancholy of all crimes, the burning of a slum that had the misfortune to occupy land earmarked for more profitable purposes. People died in one of these fires. Both had been euphemistically designated as accidental. Then there are two house fires that destroyed or damaged the homes of the powerful. Nobody died, so the fires were probably just attention-getters. The fifth is a factory conflagration, a virtual explosion of highly flammable materials in a facility that turned out stuffed animals for an American toy maker. The fire had happened around 3:00 A.M. during a “ghost shift,” a shift the American company knew nothing about. After the workers on the night shift left, the ghost-shift workers were brought in to use inferior materials to bootleg identical animals for direct sale at the bazaars of Asia. One of the differences between the superior and the inferior materials was that the inferior materials weren’t fireproofed.

  The fire killed one hundred twenty-one people. The factory’s windows were barred, and the iron doors had been locked from the outside. People had been stacked in front of the doors in smoldering piles, like kindling. Some had died with their arms protruding between the bars on the windows, reaching frantically for the world. The company that had rented the factory to the Americans had proved to be a shell corporation owned by another shell corporation. No one who supervised the ghost shift had been found. No one had ever been charged.

  Rafferty prints out all five stories. Each of the pieces ultimately dithers off into the vague language the Thai police use to describe their lack of progress in an investigation that’s aimed directly at somewhere they’re not going to be allowed to go. And there’s no doubt there are heavyweights behind at least some of the fires. The slums were burned to make way for buildings, the houses probably burned as warnings, and the toy factory burned through inhuman stupidity, coupled with greed for yet more profit.

  The odds were good that Pan had been involved in one of them. And Rafferty would guess it was one of the ones that involved death, given the magnitude of the fa
vors he had been granted.

  Rafferty had misquoted Balzac: Behind every great fortune is a great crime. Pan’s fortune might have begun in fire.

  The time crawls past.

  Arthit refuses to go home early. He doesn’t want to explain to Noi that he has effectively been suspended from the force. She’ll take the blame, knowing that his work is the only thing he has now. She doesn’t need the guilt.

  So he does something he’s never been good at: He wastes time. He’s been busy his entire adult life. He doesn’t take vacations-something he regrets now; he should have taken Noi to Hawaii, to Los Angeles, to Tahiti-somewhere that would have made her happy. He should have done a million things, but he didn’t. He was who he was, and she had loved him-she still loves him-anyway.

  He spends half an hour trying out pens in a stationery store, writing the names of everyone he knows, including Noi’s doctors. He browses shelves of books he wouldn’t read if they materialized one morning under his pillow. He walks through unfamiliar neighborhoods, seeing some of Bangkok’s remaining small villages, seeing how the people stiffen and grow quiet at the sight of his uniform. Tasting the bitterness in the back of his throat that it should be so.