“You think everybody can use these?” Rafferty asks.
“Are you serious?” Boo says. “They’re kids. Kids can figure this stuff out while they’re sleeping. You’re the guys who read the directions.”
“They need to keep them out of sight,” Rafferty says. “Under their shirts or something, until they absolutely have to pull them out. And the people they’re photographing can’t see them.” He picks one up. “Watch. The screen swivels up, so you can look down at it. Hold the camera at chest or even belt level, just don’t bring it up to the eye. Anything held up to the eye is a dead bust.”
“Anything else?” Boo says. “I mean, anything we can’t work out ourselves?”
“Yes. I’m deadly serious about them staying out of reach. If anyone even looks at you, beat it. Walk away. If they come after you, run. But these things have a zoom lens, so don’t get close. Is that understood? Because if it isn’t, we can forget it right now.”
“Relax,” Boo says. “This isn’t as dangerous as what they do every night. Sooner or later one of the pedos is going to grab a kid and hold him hostage while he tries to talk his way through the cops.”
At the word “pedos,” Arthit and Kosit both look up at Boo. Before they can ask a question, though, Rafferty says, “But I’m not responsible for that. They’re not doing that for me. They’re doing this for me, and they’ll be careful, all right?”
“Pedos’?” Kosit demands, his eyes narrow.
“I’ll tell you later,” Rafferty says.
Boo says, “Who are we watching?”
“A bunch of guys,” Rafferty says. “You’ve met Pan and Dr. Ravi, so you should be on the team at Pan’s place, but stay out of sight. Officer Kosit has pictures of most of the others.”
“They just brought me along to carry stuff,” Kosit says. He reaches back into the bag and takes out a manila envelope. From the envelope he withdraws several black-and-white photographs, pulled from police files by the patrolman who helped him arrest Rafferty. He puts the first one on the shawl.
“Wichat,” Boo says sourly, looking down. “Some of us already know him by sight.”
“I do,” says the girl with the exploding hair.
“Okay,” Boo says, “you and two others will be on Sathorn.” To Kosit he says, “Who else?”
“A cop,” Kosit says, putting a photo of Thanom on the shawl. “This is someone to be very careful of.”
“Looks like a monkey,” Boo says.
“He is a monkey,” Arthit says. “He’s the world’s only man-eating monkey.”
“And there’s also a rich guy,” Rafferty says. Ton looks up, startled by the camera, in one of the photos taken at the malaria event. Captain Teeth glowers over Ton’s shoulder “The guy just behind him is not anyone to get close to.”
Rafferty spreads the pictures out. “There’s one more,” he says. “But we haven’t got a photo. He’ll probably be with these two, or with the one with the bad teeth, there, in the picture. You’ll pick them all up at the house where the rich guy, whose name is Ton, lives, or maybe at his office.”
“You have addresses?” Boo is examining the photos one at a time.
“Sure,” Rafferty says.
“And what you want…” Boo says.
“I want everything they do, wherever they go. And I’ll say it one more time: I want the kids to stay as far away as possible. I’d rather have bad pictures, or no pictures, than to have a kid get caught. Teams of no fewer than three, so they divide up if they get chased.”
“Phones,” Kosit prompts.
“Right. Here’s how you talk to me, and to each other, if anything happens.”
Kosit upends the bag, and a dozen cell phones, all makes and several colors, cascade out. “Stolen and resold,” Kosit says. “Although as a cop I’d never say that. The SIM cards are all new, bought for cash. Prepaid up to five thousand baht each. No records, nothing that can be traced.”
“And one each for you and Rose,” Rafferty says to Miaow, picking up two of them. “Get out your old ones.”
Not speaking, Miaow shifts her weight so she can reach into her pocket. She comes up with her phone, holding it without looking at anyone. She seems to be staring through the nearest wall and all the way across the river. When Miaow moves, Da’s eyes go to her. Rafferty takes the phone and hands it to Rose, who’s holding her own.
“Throw them in the river,” he says.
Rose nods, but for the moment she puts them on the dirt floor.
“Are we clear on all this?” Rafferty asks Boo.
Boo puts down the photos and picks up one of the phones. “Starting when?”
“Right now. I’ll give everybody money for moto-taxis. Just wave the bills at them. And listen, if anybody gets something out of the ordinary-for example, if any of these people meet each other-I want a phone call the moment you’ve got your video and you’re out of sight.” He gets up, dusting his jeans, and Arthit and Kosit follow suit. “I’m going to say it again, and I’m talking to every single one of you. If you’re in any kind of danger, forget the video. Just run.”
“We already know about running,” says the girl with the exploding hair.
“Good,” Rafferty says. “Let’s get started.”
“She needs to work it out for herself,” Rose says.
“She and Arthit,” Rafferty says. “Nobody needs my help.” They have their arms comfortably dangling from each other’s waists, and they stand only a few feet from the edge of the water, now just a black, flat, featureless plain with an upside-down city glittering near the opposite shore.
“Don’t be silly,” Rose says. She turns and lightly kisses the side of his neck. “You help just by being there.”
He leans toward her, forcing her to prolong the kiss. “That’s not enough.”
“She can’t confide in you,” Rose says. “She doesn’t know what’s wrong. All she knows is that she doesn’t fit anywhere. Not at school, not with the kind of kids who used to be her friends. She’s somewhere between here and there, and no one in either place really accepts her.”
“We accept her.”
“Come on. We’re wallpaper. In a kid’s life, the only people who really exist are other kids. Parents are like large, troublesome stuffed animals.”
“So what you’re telling me, in your tactful Thai way,” Rafferty says, turning to face her and cupping her chin in one hand, “is that I should keep my mouth shut.”
“Until she asks you,” Rose says. “Which she probably won’t.” She looks up at him for a moment, and then she says, “I never tell you how handsome you are.”
“And I know why.”
“Don’t even try that,” she says. “You know perfectly well how women look at you.”
“They sense solidity,” Rafferty says. “They know I’ll keep a fire burning in the mouth of the cave and that there will always be a haunch to gnaw on. Even if I put them in danger all the time. Rose, I’m so sorry about-”
“What they know,” Rose interrupts, “is that you’d give them a great time if you decided to pile on.”
Rafferty says, “Pile on?”
Rose leans forward and brushes his lips with hers. “Go away,” she says. “Do what you and Arthit have to do. Be careful. Watch out for Arthit. I don’t know how much he wants to stay alive. And don’t worry about Miaow. She’s tougher than you are.”
Rafferty says, “Pretty much everyone is.” He starts to climb up the bank but turns back and says, “Get rid of those phones.”
45
You’re Not Hopeless After All
They don’t know where he is,” Captain Teeth says, putting down the phone and following Ton with his eyes. “He’s out with the wife somewhere.”
Ton is agitated in a way that unnerves Ren. The man paces the room, running his fingertips over the surfaces of the furniture as though expecting dust. He straightens everything he touches: photos, pens, ashtrays, knickknacks, but he never looks down at the result. He continually tug
s at the sleeves of his jacket, as though they’re riding up on him. He buttons and unbuttons his sport coat. He hasn’t sat down in the twenty minutes since he burst into the room, swearing about Pan.
“Call back whoever you talked to,” Ton says. “Tell him if he can’t find his boss and put me in touch with him in half an hour, it’ll be years before he gets another job. I need the woman’s phone located, and that man’s boss is the only one who can authorize it.”
“Fine,” Captain Teeth says, dialing. He turns his back to Ton and, looking at Ren, rolls his eyes.
“Pan’s going to make an announcement,” Ton says. “He’s going…to make…an announcement. After everything we’ve learned from this…this fishing expedition with Rafferty, he’s going to make an announcement? You,” he says to Ren, “get on the phone and-” He is still for the first time since he came through the door. “No,” he says. “Forget it. I’ll be back in a minute.”
Ton goes through the door and into a long, dim hallway, paneled in reflective mahogany. The only lights gleam above paintings: a darkly polished Vuillard, two gauzy Renoirs, a pallid, drooping Madonna by the Dutch Vermeer forger of the 1930s, Han van Meegeren. Three doors down, he pushes his way into a room that’s empty except for some bare bookshelves, a grand piano, and a cello, leaning carelessly against a chair. On one of the bookshelves near the door is a telephone.
Ton picks it up, dials a number from memory, and says, “General? I’m sorry to bother you, but I think we should talk.” He listens for a second. “No, sir, I don’t think it’s anything fatal. But if you could give me a few minutes-Fine. I’ll wait for your call.” He hangs up and blots the bead of perspiration that’s gliding down toward his jawline.
The nurse’s crepe-soled shoes squeak on the linoleum as she hurries after them. “Please, please,” she says. It’s an urgent whisper. “You can’t go in there. He’s not allowed to have visitors right now.”
Kosit speaks in his normal tone of voice, without looking back. “Did you see my uniform when we passed you?”
“Of course,” she hisses. “But still, the doctor says-”
“Tell the doctor to say it to me,” Kosit says. He pushes open the door to the patient’s room. “Now go away. We’re not going to interfere with your curing him.”
The nurse says, “There’s no curing him.”
“Then what are you worried about?” Kosit stands aside and lets Rafferty and Arthit precede him. Then he follows and closes the door in the nurse’s face. He turns his back to it and leans against it, his arms crossed.
The room is as dim and airless as a sealed cave. The flame on a candle, Rafferty thinks, would burn straight up, without a flicker. Porthip has been assigned to a high floor, with a view of Bangkok in all its sloppy, energetic life, a decision that seems to Rafferty to be tactless. Through the gauze-curtained window, arteries of light mark the progress of traffic down Sukhumvit, and neon smears the darkness with the vibrant colors of the city’s nightlife. By contrast, the single light hanging above the bed is a chalky bluish white, turning the face above the tugged-up covers into a pallid waxwork.
Porthip is flat on his back. His eyes are closed. The fat around his eyes has been burned away, and the eyeballs beneath the lids seem unusually large, as spherical as marbles. Suspended halfway down the intravenous drip that snakes under the covers to attach to the man’s wrist is a morphine-delivery unit with a plunger the patient can use when the pain is too much to bear. Beside the bed, green screens monitor the struggles of the heart that gave out yesterday, abandoning the depleted body to the cancer that is devouring it. As he approaches the bed, Rafferty studies the face. Stripped of the energy that had animated it, it seems a frail mask, bones hollowed out to create a thin shell over emptiness. Rafferty feels a cold prickling between his shoulder blades, seeing his own face in forty or fifty years.
Porthip’s eyelids flicker.
Rafferty says, “You’re awake.”
The eyes open, focused somewhere beyond Rafferty. With evident effort, Porthip brings them to Rafferty’s face. His forehead creases for a second and then clears. “You,” he says. “I wondered.”
“Wondered what?”
“How long,” Porthip says. “Before you…” He lifts his chin, indicating the morphine drip. “Push that thing, would you?”
“Sure.” Rafferty depresses the plunger, and a moment later Porthip’s eyes slowly close and then reopen.
“Nothing,” he says. His voice is a husk, just a rough surface wrapped around breath. “I’ve pushed it too often. The limiter’s kicked in. But when it works, it’s great stuff. I’ve…seen things. On the walls. On the insides of my eyelids.” His back arches as a spasm runs through him. His eyes close. “Death,” he says.
Rafferty says, “So what?”
“Ah,” Porthip says, opening his eyes. “You’re angry.”
“You lied to me.”
Porthip says, “Why should you be different?”
“You’re dying. Why waste the effort now? What possible difference could it make to you at this point?”
“Habits,” Porthip says. “Hard to break.”
“Snakeskin,” Rafferty says. “It owned the factory that burned down. And you owned Snakeskin. With Tatsuya.”
“Tatsuya,” Porthip says, and this time he does smile. “The partner every businessman dreams of. Dead for years and years. Tatsuya is a signature machine back in Tokyo.”
“I don’t care about Tatsuya. You owned that factory.”
“Not according to the records,” Porthip says.
“No, of course not. But if you didn’t own it when it burned, then you did something that doesn’t make any business sense at all. You, as Snakeskin, bought a destroyed factory, paid good money for it, and then just let it sit there. You didn’t clean it up, you didn’t put it to use. It could be making money again. So why buy it if you weren’t going to do any of that?”
“Interesting question,” Porthip says.
“I don’t think you did buy it. I think you already owned it. You just quietly sold it to yourself, passed it from one company to another. You couldn’t sell it to someone else because it might have attracted media attention. The papers would have been interested. A lot of people died there.”
“One hundred,” Porthip says, and takes a breath. “And twenty-one.”
“And around the time of the fire, Pan disappears, and when he comes back, he’s got burns all over him and there’s suddenly some serious weight behind him. He’s doing big-boy business, the kind of business that requires someone to open doors. Someone like you.”
“You know,” Porthip says, “you can push the plunger on that thing up there until your thumb falls off, but it only delivers so much. They let you control your pain, but only up to a point. There’s a limiter that won’t let you go all the way to where I want to go. For that you need a doctor who’s so high up nobody would ever question him.”
“You owned that factory,” Rafferty says. “Pan got burned there, somehow, and you wound up owing him. And you’re high enough up that no one would, as you say, question you.”
Porthip’s body goes rigid, and his mouth tightens into a line as straight as a slice. Then his lips part and he lets out a long sound that’s just his breath traveling over his vocal cords, wind through a pipe organ.
“Pan put the locks on,” Porthip says when he can talk. His voice is frayed and ragged, and he’s taking more frequent breaths. “He put the bars on the windows. We had a…a problem with the ghost shift. Day jobs, some of them had day jobs. They were tired. People kept going outside, going into the sheds where the stuffing was stored. Big…soft piles of stuffing. For the bunnies, for the kittens. The ghost shift…they took naps there.” He struggles under the covers until he has an arm free, and then he lifts a twig-thin hand to the plunger and pushes it home. “Nothing.” He is panting with the effort. “But I can pretend I feel better.”
“They took naps,” Rafferty prompts.
“
I hired Pan from Chai, who was the top crook then. I needed four or five heavyweights to keep the workers on the ball. Except for Chai, Pan was the only one who knew who I was, the only one-” His body arches again, his eyes slam shut, and a stream of air hisses between his lips. “He was the only one who knew anything. The others were just…muscle.”
“What happened?”
“There was…a rule,” Porthip says. “There had to be two guards outside. One of them had to have the key. One of them always…always had to have the key.” His eyes close again, and the lids flutter as though the eyeballs behind them are rolling up. Rafferty puts a hand on the arm Porthip extricated from the covers. The man’s eyes open. “Key,” he repeats.
He turns his head to the right, as though it eases the pain. “So Pan stops by the place in the middle of the night. He used to do that, just to…to keep everybody awake. And there’s smoke coming out of the windows, and people inside are screaming. He runs around the building, looking for the men who were supposed to…to be there…but they’ve gone…to…to eat. They’ve got the key. Pan went crazy. He tried to knock down the doors. They were iron, hot iron, and he was trying to push them open. He tried to pull the bars off the windows, even though flames were already coming out of them. He reached between the bars, into the fire. He tried to pull people through. He actually pulled one set of bars out and yanked three people through the window, but they were dead. They were on fire, but he pulled them over the windowsill and fell backward. They landed on top of him, burning. He rolled out from under them and tried to go in through the window, but he couldn’t. It was an inferno.” Porthip licks his lips. “Can I have some water?”
Rafferty picks up the glass with the straw in it and positions it under Porthip’s mouth, then waits as the man drinks.
Breathing Water: A Bangkok Thriller pr-3 Page 30
