Breathing Water: A Bangkok Thriller pr-3

by Timothy Hallinan

  “And that’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to watch. And if I see anything I don’t like, I’ll come back out and we’ll wait.”

  “You will not,” Da says. “You’ll show off, do something brave. And stupid.”

  “You know,” Boo says, “I was doing just fine until you came along.” He turns and faces the road, a dark ribbon in the moonlight. “We’ve got some brush on this side of the road. Stay close to it, and duck in if you hear a car.” Without waiting for a response, he starts toward the factory.

  “It’s the cell network guy,” Ren says, holding out the cordless phone to Ton.

  “Give me the phone number for Rafferty’s woman,” Ton says. Into the phone he says, “Hi, Poy. Thanks for calling. I’m sorry to interrupt your evening, but this’ll just take a minute. Listen, I’ve had a theft from one of my businesses… No, nothing serious, but you can’t let these things go. Got to make an example, or other people start to get ambitious, you know what I mean?” He laughs, extending a hand for the slip of paper on which Ren has written Rose’s phone number. He opens and closes the hand quickly several times to hurry Ren. “She’s got her cell phone on,” he says into the telephone, “and I need a location.” He takes the slip of paper from Ren, glances at it, listens for a moment, and says, “Wait.” To Ren he says, “How long since you checked to see whether she’s still got the phone?”

  “Kai called a few hours back.”

  “Call again, now.”

  “But we already-”

  “Do it. I’m not going through all this and then sending out a bunch of people to find a phone that’s in a trash can somewhere.”

  “Fine.” With a glance at the paper from which he copied the number, Ren dials. He closes his eyes as he waits and then opens them, listens, and disconnects. “The little girl answered,” he says.

  “Fine. They’ll be together.” Into the phone Ton says, “Here’s the number. How close can you get?” He goes to the big desk, sits down, and powers up a computer. “No,” he says. “I doubt she’s got a GPS phone. Probably just some junk she bought used. Does it matter?” He clicks a mouse to bring up Google Earth and positions the cursor over Bangkok. “Really,” he says. “Within fifty meters? That’s amazing. Listen, give it to me in coordinates if you can. I want to try to locate it on the computer.”

  Kai comes into the room and looks first at Ton and then at Ren.

  “It’s the guy at the phone company,” Ren says quietly. “Tracking down the woman and the girl.”

  “I’m ready,” Ton says, with a pencil in his free hand. “Just read it to me.” He writes some numbers on the pad and says, “As close as fifty meters, huh? Well, I owe you. And I’m sorry about the bother. Go back to your party.” He drops the phone on the desk and starts to punch numbers into the computer. “Where are you?” he asks out loud. “Let’s just zoom in a little bit-” The sentence ends in a surprised puff of air. He sits perfectly still, staring at the screen. Both Kai and Ren are looking at him.

  Finally Ton tears his eyes from the computer. “Get me four guys right now,” he says. “Guys who don’t much care what they have to do and don’t have any idea who you work for. You won’t believe where you’re going to take them.”

  “Whoever it was,” Da says, looking at the phone, “they hung up.”

  “Where did you get that?” Boo says, taking the phone out of her hand.

  “It was on the floor at the shack.”

  “And you picked it up.”

  She reaches for it, but he puts it behind his back. “Nobody wanted it,” she protests. “Everybody else had one.”

  “And you left it on.”

  “Well,” she says, “what good is it if it’s off? Oh, come on, I never had one before.”

  “And you haven’t got one now,” Boo says. He powers the phone off, brings his arm back, and throws it over the nearest fence.

  “Hey,” Da says.

  He steps toward her, showing her a face that’s all muscle. “Suppose it had rung while we were inside? Suppose we’re watching something we’re not supposed to see, and your damn phone rings. Has anybody else got one that’s on?”

  One of the boys holds one up. “It’s on silent.”

  “Turn it off.”

  “Okay, okay.”

  “Anything else stupid?” Boo asks. “Any alarm clocks? Talking dolls? Anybody got squeakies in their tennis shoes?”

  Nobody answers him.

  “When we get to the gate, you two”-he points at Da and one of the boys-“you wait across the street. Get behind some bushes. You,” he says to the other boy, the smaller of the two. “You come just inside the gate and to one side of it. Keep your eyes on me as long as you can. Relay any signal I give you. If I want you, I’ll just wave you in. Two fingers means call some more kids. But if there’s trouble”-he holds up his right hand, fingers splayed-“five fingers means run for your lives, got it? In different directions. When you know you’re clear, get back to where we got off the bikes and find a place to hide there. We’ll meet up there and figure out what’s next.”

  Nobody says anything. Boo holds up his hand again, two fingers extended. “Means what?”

  “Phone kids,” says the smaller boy.

  “And?” He displays all five fingers.

  “Run,” Da says.

  Boo looks directly into her eyes. “And you’d better.”

  After Ren and Kai leave to pick up their muscle, Ton remains at his desk. It seems like a long time since he’s been alone in this room. He interlaces his fingers and rests his chin on them, and then he closes his eyes to eliminate distraction while he works his way through a conversation he does not want to have.

  The position he’s in now is the one he dreamed of when he was a young man, the outcome he’d hoped for when he married into a ranking family by taking the scandal daughter, the one no one could manage, the woman who has become the wife he never sees. It’s taken him years of patient labor to build the trust of those above him, but he’s in his element now: behind the scenes, working in partnership with the kingdom’s most powerful men to maintain the order of things. To keep the kingdom secure, to keep the proper class-the educated class, the traditional leaders-in charge. To keep the nation moving forward. Thailand is already the wealthiest state in Southeast Asia, and Ton has become an important part of the group that has worked in an unbroken line, generation after generation, to accomplish that.

  And, of course, he’s gotten very rich doing it.

  But there are things about it he hates. There are times in the past week when he’s felt like a thug. Having to associate with Ren and Kai-having them in his house-has been almost physically painful at times. But there was no alternative. There was no possibility of allowing the usual four or five levels of management to know about the arrangement with Pan. It would have been in the papers within weeks of their agreement. He’ll have to do something about Ren and Kai, but he can worry about that later.

  Now is the problem. Things are going outside the lines and have been ever since the reporter had to be killed, and he’s moments from a conversation that actually frightens him. He can’t remember the last time he was frightened.

  He is working on his third possible opening, trying to find a way to position the discussion without its leading to something disastrous being said, when he becomes aware of a regular fluctuation of light, visible even through his closed eyelids. With a sigh of resignation, he opens his eyes and looks at the halogen lamp on his desk, which is blinking on and off. He pushes his chair back a foot or two and reaches down to the lowest drawer, which he pulls open. The files stacked inside are bulky and hard to handle, and he needs both hands to remove them and put them on the desk. The desk lamp continues to flicker as he leans back down to the drawer. On the bottom edge, his fingers find the small metal tab and pull it forward. A little snicking sound signals the rise, no more than half an inch, of the drawer’s false bottom. Ton lifts the bottom panel to a vertical position and pulls out
the flat telephone that’s stored beneath it.

  Only one person has this number.

  Ton breathes twice, swallows, picks up the receiver, and says, “Yes, sir.”

  “My boy,” says the man on the other end. “How are you?”

  “I’m somewhat preoccupied. I’m sorry to have bothered you, but there’s a problem.”

  “No bother, no bother. Before we get to the problems, I want to apologize.”

  This line had not arisen in any of his visualizations of the conversation. “For what, General?”

  “I didn’t like your idea, the farang snooping around in Pan’s past. Too fancy, I thought. Well, I was wrong. It was obvious almost immediately that Pan wouldn’t get to election day without all that bothersome material coming to light. Got me thinking in other directions.”

  “It did?”

  “Yes, and I have exactly what we need. But first, tell me about this bullshit announcement he’s threatening to make.”

  “It’s Porthip. With Porthip dying-”

  “Your farang went to the hospital tonight,” the general says, as though Ton weren’t speaking. “With a cop and another man. The other man could have been a cop, too.”

  The back of Ton’s shirt is suddenly damp. “He did?”

  “He did. And Porthip told him.”

  “He told him? You mean, about Snakeskin?”

  “About Snakeskin, about you. You personally. You want to hear the tape?”

  “No. That…um, that won’t be necessary.”

  “You didn’t know your farang was there, did you?”

  This is the topic he knows he can’t control. All he can do is step up to it. “No. He shook his tail. I can’t use my best people, because they know who I am, and of course I’m connected to you. So I have to use contract guys, and they’re not-”

  “I understand,” the general says.

  Ton tugs his shirt away from his skin and manages not to sigh in relief. “Thank you. But if Porthip’s talking-”

  “Don’t worry. We’ve had the limiter removed from his morphine drip, and the nurse has traded his pain pills for junk. An antifungal medicine, I think. Without the pills he’ll medicate himself out of existence by morning. Kinder that way, really.”

  “If there’s an autopsy-”

  “Not your business,” the general says, and his tone has stiffened. “You already have more, apparently, on your plate than you can handle. But even if there is an autopsy, even if some zealot decides to check the cause of death for a man who was, after all, a terminal-cancer patient, they’ll be expecting to find morphine in his system, won’t they? Worst comes to worst, it’s a compassionate death, maybe a slap on the hand for the supervising doctor.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “The announcement.”

  “I told Pan early this morning that we’d discuss things further in a couple of weeks. He said I wasn’t in charge.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “With Porthip dying, he said, there wasn’t anybody who could hold the factory over his head anymore. At least nobody who had actually been part of it. So he said we were no longer running his campaign. He’ll still work with us, he says-he’ll need help when he’s elected-but he thinks he’ll win in a landslide now that the fire can’t come back to haunt him. In fact, he said he was going to use it.”

  “How the hell does he propose to do that?”

  “Without Porthip, he says, he’s the hero of the fire. What he’s going to do is to get the press together-and you know how they’ll show up, especially after the malaria party-and he’s going to announce his plan to turn the factory into a monument to the people who died there. He’ll talk about how he saw the smoke from the road, about how he tried to save them, show his scars. He’s going to say that’s why he bought the place, so he could consecrate it. He’ll clean it out some and make it safe for the public to visit, and he’s going to carve into the walls the names of the people who died there and turn the big workroom in the front into a gallery, with melted machines and photos of the place after the fire. He’s finding pictures of the people who worked there-while they were still alive, I mean-and he’s going to put those with the other pictures. And then he’ll announce a grant of five million baht to fund a commission to look into the working conditions of people who do bottom-wage piecework, especially people who come to Bangkok from the northeast. And after all that, he’ll close things out by announcing that he’s running for the National Assembly, where he can really do something about these issues.”

  “That’s it,” the general says. “That’s why he insisted on getting hold of the factory. And it’s brilliant. He’ll have every vote in the northeast. Too bad we can’t work with him.”

  “He’s going to make the announcement at the…” Ton trails off, looking at a spot in the air in front of him. His face is suddenly warm.

  “At the factory?” the general says.

  “Yes, sir.” Ton picks up his cell phone but drops it again. He rapidly flexes the fingers of his free hand, looking down at the phone.

  “It would be extremely effective,” the general says. “You wouldn’t be able to count all the votes it would bring. It would probably put me back on the sleeping pills. But thanks to you, thanks to your farang, I’ve found an alternative. Have you been following this kid-oh, well, at my age everybody’s a kid-this young man who started out with the sidewalk popcorn machines?”

  “I know something about him.”

  “Branching out. A couple of guesthouses, some gift shops in the lobbies of hotels and small airports. Got the rights to an American restaurant franchise called Greens. Heard of it?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Just the usual burgers and junk, but they have some sort of handbook full of policies to make the business greener, you know? More environmentally responsible.”

  “Like what?”

  “Who cares? Maybe they use the methane from cattle farts to power the stoves. How do I know? Thing is, green is good. Thing is, the kid’s Isaan. Thing is, the kid will listen to reason.”

  “But, I mean, with Pan on the ticket-if he’s running against Pan-no matter how good he is, Pan will wallop him, won’t he?”

  The general says nothing. In the silence that follows, Ton picks up his cell phone and scrolls down toward Captain Teeth’s number. Then he stops scrolling and says, “Oh.” He puts the cell phone back on the desk. “I see.”

  “And think how the votes would pour in,” the general says, “if he were stepping into the shoes of a martyr.”

  Ton says, “Yes.”

  “Then we’re finished?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Good work,” the general says. “Without your farang I never would have looked around.” The general clears his throat. “You can get your hands on him, right? Not that he could prove anything, but just for neatness’ sake.”

  “Yes, sir. I know where his wife is.”

  “Good, good. You’re a valuable asset, Ton.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  The general hangs up.

  Ton puts the phone back into the the drawer and replaces the false bottom. He closes the drawer and realizes he forgot to put the files back, so he swears between his teeth, opens the drawer again, and drops the files into it. He is conscious of a prickling of sweat at his hairline.

  He wishes he could talk to his wife.

  When he’s finished straightening the files, he sits looking down at the open drawer for a full minute. Then he picks up his phone, scrolls the rest of the way down, and presses “call.” He waits, drumming the fingers of his left hand on the desk. Then he says, “Listen. I need one of them, either the woman or the girl, to be able to talk. It may be the only way to bring Rafferty in. But here’s the important thing: I can’t figure why they’re at the factory unless Pan’s there.”

  “Okay,” Captain Teeth says.

  “If he’s there, take him out.”

  “You mean-”

  “You know what I mean
. Take him out, and take out anybody who sees anything. Just leave me one of those females in a condition to talk on the phone.”

  Captain Teeth says, “You’re the boss.”

  “And one more thing. If Pan goes down tonight, we have to talk about what happens to the guys who are with you.”

  “Well,” Captain Teeth says, “I’m not related to any of them.”

  48

  Waiting Patiently for Blood

  The generator sounds like it has a respiratory disease.

  It sputters, coughs, hiccups. Then it makes a phlegmy, ratcheting, throat-clearing sound for ten seconds or so, and the whole pathology starts over.

  It’s so loud, Boo thinks, that he could ride in on horseback and no one would hear him.

  The big black Mercedes sits empty at the end of the cracked drive, a car-shaped hole in the darkness, its motor ticking as it cools. Boo keeps himself to the darkest areas, moving from the shadow of one bush to another to avoid the thin, chilly-looking moonlight. The ground underfoot is littered with chunks of concrete, jagged-edged, irregular, heavy enough to pitch him facedown if he trips on one. Spiderwebs lace the spaces between the weeds, fat spiders straddling the centers, waiting patiently for blood. Boo isn’t particularly afraid of spiders, but he doesn’t like walking face-first into one.

  And the place smells as if the hair of a million women was burned inside.

  Boo can stroll the darkest, narrowest alley in Bangkok on a moonless night without so much as a bump in his pulse rate, but this weedy field with its blackened, abandoned factory makes the hair on his arms stand up. The generator goes into a paroxysm of coughing, and suddenly there is light on the bottom floor of the building.

  Or is there? The interior is so black that there’s nothing for the light to bounce off; it’s like looking into an infinite space. If it weren’t for the long rectangles of illumination spilling onto the weeds through the doors and windows and shining on the newly visible profile of the Mercedes, Boo’s not sure he’d even register the light. But he knows one thing: Light or no light, the place doesn’t feel any friendlier.