Breathing Water: A Bangkok Thriller pr-3

by Timothy Hallinan

  And that something has to be connected with Pan. This all began with Pan.

  He catches a whiff of his own sweat and glances down at his shirt.

  Right, clothes. The booths that crowd the sidewalks of Pratunam are beginning to shut-there’s a dark spot here and there where the spotlights have already been doused-but the sellers who are active are eager to accommodate a policeman. Within twenty minutes he has bags containing three anonymous plaid shirts, a couple of generic T-shirts, and two pairs of preshrunk, precreased, totally indestructible and wholly synthetic pants that will probably be the last man-made objects on earth. His shoes are a dead giveaway, cop from soles to laces, but they fit well, and if anyone gets close enough to look at them, he’s finished anyway. He makes a final stop at a booth that sells toiletry articles and buys a razor, some shaving foam, a comb, and a toothbrush. The woman studies him as she puts them into the bag, wondering why a cop needs to buy the stuff for a night out and concluding that he’s got some action lined up somewhere. She practically winks at him as she hands him his purchases.

  She’ll remember him, too.

  So far, he thinks, tucking the bag under his arm with the others, I might as well be fluorescent, leaving glowing footprints everywhere I go. How the hell did crooks manage?

  Still, with the change of clothes in a bag and the night stretching out around him in all directions, he can feel a sort of click inside, a hardening of purpose and sharpening of focus he has come to regard as his cop mode. When he feels like this, he occasionally visualizes himself as a human flashlight, pointed forward, sharp-eyed, able to ignore the irrelevant and cut through the fog of confusion. This is when he does his best work.

  But the lift in his spirits doesn’t last long. He’s looking for someplace he can change clothes when he sees the blinking lights. Regular, steady, red flashes, coming from the intersection half a block in front of him. He turns around to put some distance between himself and the police van, then halts. There are red lights in the street behind him, too, at the other end of the block. And he stands there, clutching the bags as the illusion of competence recedes, asking himself why on earth he took the time to go shopping on the same street where he used an ATM.

  “They took the kid away from her,” Da says. “Like it was a lamp or something, not a…a child. And next time I saw her, she had a new one. They gave her a baby. The same way they gave Peep to me.”

  “Wichat did,” Rafferty says, just trying to keep track.

  Da says, “I guess so.”

  “He’s been sending beggars out with babies for at least a year,” Boo says. “Everybody on the street knows it. But nobody says anything. He’s not a friendly guy.”

  “Where does he get them? Any idea what he’s doing?”

  Boo says, “What I think he’s doing is selling them. I think he’s buying them someplace, maybe from people who steal them, and then keeping them until he can find a buyer. And giving them to beggars, so that…well, that way he doesn’t have to draw attention by storing a whole bunch of babies somewhere.”

  “And beggars with babies make more money,” Da says. “At least that’s what he told me.”

  “You say babies,” Rafferty says. “How old is a baby?”

  “A year,” Superman says with a shrug. “Maybe a year, eighteen months. Like Peep.”

  “So they can’t talk,” Rafferty says.

  Da says, “No. I didn’t see any that were old enough to talk, except some who were injured and the boy they took away, and he was simple or something. He never said a word.”

  “Why does that matter?” Superman says. He squints, working it out. “Because…what? Because babies can’t tell the people who buy them that they were stolen?”

  “Sure,” Rafferty says. “And maybe because if they could talk, they wouldn’t speak Thai.”

  Da looks down at Peep as though he could answer her question. “Not speak Thai?”

  “Three or four years ago,” Rafferty says, “there was a big baby racket in Cambodia. People went there from America and Europe, thousands of them, to adopt children who were supposed to be orphans. But they weren’t orphans. They’d been bought from poor families for fifty or a hundred dollars. Sometimes they were just stolen. The new parents paid anywhere from thirty to fifty thousand dollars for a baby. The money was supposed to pay some sort of official fees.”

  Boo says, “Thirty to fifty thousand per kid?”

  “Per kid.”

  “There were four or five babies at the place I was staying,” Da says. The numbers are unimaginable. “And I think they may have more places.”

  “They have three more,” Boo says. “My guess is that they’ve got fifteen or twenty babies at any time.”

  Rafferty says, “A while back I heard something about babies being brought here, carried across the border by women who pretended to be their mothers. Makes sense, I suppose, just thugs shaking hands across the border. The racket was too profitable to let it go. But I’m not sure what you want me to do. Do you want to find a way to get-What’s the baby’s name?”

  “Peep,” Da says.

  “Do you want to get Peep back to his mother or something?”

  “Oh,” Da says, looking like someone who has just been surprised by a loud noise. “I don’t…I mean, I don’t-”

  Rafferty’s phone rings. He pulls it out of his pocket and checks the display, which says KOSIT.

  There is nowhere to go. Another van has pulled up at each end of the block, straight across all the lanes to cut off the traffic, and Arthit sees six or eight uniformed policemen climb out of each. They obviously intend to work toward one another in the hope that Arthit is somewhere between them. He sees them split up, some moving slowly, trolling the sidewalk, while others stop and talk to the vendors.

  The uniforms have fanned out onto both sides of the street, which is now empty of traffic and too wide and well lit to cross comfortably. Arthit knows he’d never make it to the other side. He’s closer to the vans in front of him, so he turns around and moves with the crowd, which is gradually slowing to a stop. The cops at either end are funneling people down to single file, peering at faces.

  He stops walking. Faces? How would they know what he looks like? It’s surprising enough that Thanom could scramble a force so quickly; there’s no way he’s had the time to print out and distribute a stack of Arthit’s file photos. He moves a bit farther along until he’s in front of a booth that’s gone dark, and he steps back into the gloom and squints at the group of cops that’s working its way toward him from his left.

  He knows some of them. He sees three men and one woman he has worked with, nobody he could call a friend but people who can identify him on sight. Even a change of clothing isn’t going to allow him to slip away.

  The nearest pair of cops reaches the booth where he bought his shirts. The vendor keeps his face down, not wanting to challenge the cops in any way, but then he looks up and nods an answer. He talks for a moment, waving his hand along the sidewalk in Arthit’s direction. Then he comes out from behind his counter and indicates the booth where Arthit bought the razor.

  The dark spot where Arthit is standing suddenly feels quite a bit brighter than it did a moment ago. Without looking left or right, he crosses the uneven sidewalk to its far edge and begins to move slowly along, his left shoulder almost brushing the walls of the buildings that face the booths. Unlike some areas of Pratunam, where booths hem the sidewalks on both sides, here they’re only on the traffic side. Opposite them are older, somewhat run-down buildings, mostly four- and five-story structures with shops at street level and apartments or offices above them. The street windows are mostly dark now, the shops locked, but he’s hoping that one of the doors leading upstairs will be open.

  Keeping his movement small, using nothing but his left arm, he pushes on doors as he goes past them, twisting the occasional handle. He’s getting too close to a group of three cops who are stopping people on the sidewalk. If they look up and survey the c
rowd, they’ll see his face. Arthit is on the verge of taking a desperate chance and crossing the wide, empty street when the door he’s pushing on swings away from him.

  He’d actually given up, and the open door takes him by surprise. He has to back up a step to go through it. It’s a glass door, framed in weathered, pockmarked aluminum. When it shuts behind him, he checks to see whether it can be locked from inside, but no-it needs to be keyed.

  He finds himself in a small, murky space with just enough room for the door to clear the bottom step. The only light other than the splash from the street comes from a fluorescent tube at the top of the stairway. Without a backward glance, he turns away from the street and starts to climb the stairs, trying not to hurry. Hurry draws attention.

  The night opens to the whoop-whoop-whoop of another police vehicle forcing its way through traffic. They must have called for additional support after they talked to the vendors in the booths. Thanom is serious, or whoever is pulling Thanom’s strings is serious.

  At the top of the stairs, he finds a door and a switchback leading to another flight of stairs. He reaches up and pops the fluorescent tube loose and stands for a moment in the welcome darkness. Then he climbs the next flight of stairs.

  There are three floors above the shop, then a short flight of stairs that leads to the roof. Each stair landing has a light, and after a moment’s thought he leaves the others on. If the cops come up the stairs and discover that the first fluorescent has been detached from its connection, additional tampering on the higher floors will just give them a trail to follow. He might as well put up a sign that says LOOK HERE. At the very top of the stairs, he checks out the door to the roof and finds it padlocked on the inside. He goes back down to the door on the first landing and gives it a shove. It opens onto a hallway, only ten or fifteen meters long, with two doors on each side. Four apartments in all.

  He knows that finding an empty apartment is too much to hope for, but he quietly tries the doorknobs anyway. All locked. At the third one, he hears a questioning voice from inside: Someone must be waiting for a visitor. He barely makes it back to the stairwell before he hears the apartment door open. A moment later it closes again. He leans against the wall on the dark stair landing, fighting to get his breath under control.

  Then, forcing his legs to move again, he turns and hauls himself up the stairs to the next floor. The apartment doors here are also locked, but at the end of the hall is a fifth door, which he pulls open. He finds himself looking at mops and brooms. A big, rust-stained, industrial-size basin hangs from one wall. A sagging shelf above the sink holds floor wax, powdered cleanser, paper towels. Nothing he can use. He thinks about taking the powdered cleanser, maybe throwing it into someone’s eyes, then rejects it. There will certainly be a gun pointed at him, and he’ll be dead before his target even sneezes.

  He’s climbing up to the third floor when he hears the door to the street open.

  “Wait here,” says a male voice. It’s a voice that sounds comfortable with command. “We’ll go up. You guys keep your eyes on the sidewalk. And nobody gets out through this door.”

  Rafferty is in the dirty, empty master bedroom of the fourth-floor apartment with no memory of how he got there. “He can’t come here,” Rafferty says. “This place is being watched twenty-four hours, and it’s the first place they’ll look. If he calls you, tell him not to come here.”

  “I don’t know whether he’ll call me,” Kosit says. “And there’s no way for me to reach him.”

  Rafferty’s bandaged hand fires off a telegram of pain. He’s accidentally put it against the wall to steady himself. He tucks it safely under his right arm and considers whether to ask the next question. “Did you see her?”

  A pause. Then, “Yes.”

  “Did he?”

  “The envelope on the door said not to go in, but you know him. He figured she might still be alive.”

  Rafferty’s eyes are closed so tightly he sees red fireworks. “How bad was it?”

  “She was an angel,” Kosit says. Rafferty can hear him swallow even on the phone. “She put on a really nice dress and even some makeup. She got all pretty, lay on her back, spread her hair out on the pillow, and went to sleep.”

  “God bless her,” Rafferty says around the stone in his throat. “Hold on.” He tucks the phone under his left arm, wipes the cheeks he hadn’t known were wet, and dries his hand on his shirt. Then he puts the phone back to his ear. “Do you have any idea where he might have gone?”

  “Nope. I’m at the station now, and there was kind of a flurry a little while ago. Thanom sent a bunch of guys out to Pratunam, but even if it was Arthit, I’m sure he’s not there anymore.”

  Rafferty sniffles and says, “He’d want to buy clothes. Pratunam would be good.”

  “Yeah. But you know he’s not going to hang around anywhere. He’s probably in some hotel by now.”

  “I hope so. What did her note say?”

  “He didn’t open it.”

  “No, I suppose not. He’d want to be alone when he did that.”

  “Right. God forbid he should get emotional in front of somebody.”

  “If he does call you, tell him I’ll be out of here by the end of the day tomorrow. All three of us will. Tell him I’ll have my cell phone.”

  “If they can put a flag on his phone, they can do the same to yours.”

  “I’ll buy a stolen one as soon as I’m off everybody’s radar and call to give you the number. Tell him I can meet him any time after about three tomorrow. We should all be free and clear by then.”

  “Just call me,” Kosit says. “That fucker Thanom.”

  “Thanom could monitor your phone, too.”

  “I’m not important enough.”

  “You were at the card game. You’re Arthit’s friend. You should get another cell phone. When you’ve got it, call my landline at the apartment to leave the number. Make something up-you’re calling about the carpeting or something. I can retrieve it from voice mail even if I’m not there.”

  “Will do.”

  “I’ve got to call you back in a few minutes, after I finish something here. I need you to buy some stuff for me tomorrow morning.” Rafferty disconnects and wipes at his cheeks again. Then, blinking fast, he goes back into the living room. Boo and Da look up when he comes in.

  “You okay?” Boo asks.

  “It’s a rough time.” Rafferty sits on the stool with the cracked seat. “Listen, I can either write this story or put you together with someone who can do it better than I could. But I want to do something else, too. I want you to meet a guy named Pan.”

  Boo’s eyes widen. “The rich guy? The gold car?”

  “That’s the one.”

  Da says, “Why?”

  “I don’t know what I think about him,” Rafferty says, “and a lot depends on who he really is. What he does after he meets you might answer some questions. But I have to tell you that it could be dangerous. I don’t think it will be, but I can’t be certain. And at least we’ll walk in with our eyes open. So it’s up to you.”

  Da says, “Everything I’ve done for weeks has been dangerous.”

  “You’re a brave kid,” Rafferty says. He turns to Boo. “Let’s talk about what I need you to do tomorrow morning.”

  “How many do you want?” Boo asks.

  “Fourteen or fifteen, boys and girls. Is that a problem?”

  Boo says, “You’re the one with the problems.”

  Two pairs of feet, coming up. They’ve already checked the first floor. For a moment, Arthit had thought he might be able to get past them while they were checking out the apartments, slip down the stairs, and deal somehow with whomever they left at the door. But they were smarter than that. At the first-floor landing, there was a short silence, and then the fluorescent light came back on.

  “Well, look at that,” said the authoritative voice. “Is the light out on the next floor?”

  Arthit heard one pair of shoes go up three or f
our steps. “No,” said the younger voice. “It’s on.”

  “Okay. You wait here. And take your damn gun out. You think you’re in line for dinner or something?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Don’t move, got it? If you hear something, you just stay here. Yell if you have to, but wait for me.”

  “Fine.”

  “And remember. He’s dangerous and he’s armed. Nobody’s going to get crazy if you shoot him.”

  “But he’s-Do you really think-”

  “Doesn’t matter what I think. It’s what I’ve been told.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  The door had closed, and Arthit had waited motionlessly for five or six minutes on the steps just above the third-floor landing until the older cop came back into the stairwell on the second floor and the two men began to climb. Shoes in hand, Arthit moved on flat feet, letting the noise below him drown out the sound of his own movement until he was at the padlocked door to the roof. He can go no farther.

  It’s just a matter of time.

  While the other two are still moving, he puts the bags at his feet, laying them down in slow motion so the plastic won’t crackle. On the second floor of apartments, the two cops go through the same routine, the younger one waiting in the stairwell while the older one goes into the hallway. As Arthit stands there, his back to the door to the roof, waiting for them to come, waiting for whatever will happen when they do, he realizes he feels nothing except an overpowering loneliness. For fourteen years Noi has been the first person he saw every morning, the person he held as he slept. The sound of her laughter was the world’s most beautiful music.

  They were going to get old together.

  She had put on lipstick for him. Before she sipped at the tea that she used to wash down the pills, she had put on the light pink lipstick he loved best. That morning, when she moved to his side of the breakfast table and rested her head on his shoulder, she had known it would be the last time.

  Arthit finds he doesn’t care whether he lives or dies.

  He waits, his body feeling as heavy and inert as stone, as they finish on the second floor and climb to the third. He can probably measure the rest of his life in minutes. The gun at his waist is sharp and hard against his stomach. He takes it out and looks at it for a second, then very slowly lays it down beside the bags. There’s no way he’s going to shoot a policeman.