Breathing Water

by Timothy Hallinan

  A massive gold ring sporting a star ruby the size of a quail’s egg bangs against the wooden rim of the table as he clasps fat, short-fingered hands in front of him. Rafferty finds it almost impossible not to look at the man’s hands. They are not so much scarred as melted, as though the skin were wax that had been stirred slowly as it cooled. The surface is ridged and swirled. The little finger on the left hand doesn’t bend at all. It looks like he had his hands forced into a brazier full of burning charcoal and held there. The mutilated left hand lifts the corners of the facedown cards with the careful precision of the inebriated, the immobile little finger pointing off into space. The Big Guy was drunk when he arrived, and he is well on his way to being legless.

  “What are you doing here, farang?” the Big Guy asks very quietly in Thai. The soft tone does not diminish the rudeness of the question. His mouth is a wet, pursed, unsettling pink that suggests lipstick, and in fact he swipes his lips from time to time with a tube of something that briefly makes them even shinier.

  “I’m only part farang,” Rafferty says, also in Thai. “My mother’s Filipina.” He smiles but gets nothing in return.

  “You should be in Patpong,” the Big Guy says, his voice still low, his tone still neutral. “Looking for whores, like the others.” He picks up his glass, rigid pinkie extended like a parody of gentility.

  “And you should watch your mouth,” Rafferty says. The glass stops. One of the bodyguards begins to step forward, but the Big Guy shakes his head, and the bodyguard freezes. The table turns into a still life, and then the Big Guy removes the cigar from the wet, pink mouth and sips his drink. Minus the cigar, the mouth looks like something that ought not to be seen, as unsettling as the underside of a starfish.

  The others at the table—except for Rafferty’s friend Arthit, who is wearing his police uniform—are doing their best to ignore the exchange. In an effort to forget the cards he’s holding, which are terrifyingly good, Rafferty takes a look around the table.

  Of the seven men in the game, three—the Big Guy and the two dark-suited businessmen—are rich. The Big Guy is by far the richest, and he would be the richest in almost any room in Bangkok. The three millionaires don’t look alike, but they share the glaze that money brings, a sheen as thin and golden as the melted sugar on a doughnut.

  The other four men are ringers. Rafferty is playing under his own name but false pretenses. Arthit and one other are cops. Both cops are armed. The fourth ringer is a career criminal.

  One of the businessmen and the Big Guy think they’re playing a regular high-stakes game of Texas Hold’em. The others know better.

  It’s Rafferty’s bet, and he throws in a couple of chips to keep his hands busy.

  “Pussy bet,” says the Big Guy.

  “Just trying to make you feel at home,” Rafferty says. In spite of himself, he can feel his nervousness being muscled aside by anger.

  The Big Guy glances away, blinking as though he’s been hit. He is an interesting mix of power and insecurity. On the one hand, everyone at the table is aware that he’s among the richest men in Thailand. On the other hand, he has an unexpectedly tentative voice, pitched surprisingly high, and he talks like the poorly educated farmer he was before he began to build his fortune and spend it with the manic disregard for taste that has brought him the media’s devoted attention. Every time he talks, his eyes make a lightning circuit of the room: Is anyone judging me? He doesn’t laugh at anyone’s jokes but his own. Despite his rudeness and the impression of physical power he conveys, there’s something of the whipped puppy about him. He seems at times almost to expect a slap.

  The two architecturally large bodyguards behind him guarantee that the slap won’t be forthcoming. They wear identical black three-button suits and black silk shirts, open at the neck. Their shoulder holsters disrupt the expensive line of their suits.

  The Big Guy’s eyes are on him again, even though the dealer’s hands are in motion, laying down the final card of the hand. And naturally it’s when Rafferty is being watched that it happens.

  The final card lands faceup, and it’s an eight.

  Rafferty would prefer that someone had come into the room and shot him.

  4

  They Could Be Anywhere

  Just ust an alley.

  Bangkok has thousands of them. To a newcomer—like the girl with the baby, the boy thinks—they’re just places to get lost in: filthy concrete underfoot, the chipped and peeling rear walls of buildings that turn their painted faces to the streets, hot exhaust and dripping water from air-conditioning units, loops and webs of black-rubber-coated wiring. Piles of trash and the rats they attract. The barbed, high-throat reek of urine.

  But to the boy this alley is as good as a compass. He knows precisely how many steps it is to the busy brightness of the boulevard. He can feel on the surface of his skin the open space of the smaller alleys that branch off to the left and right. He could tell you without looking how many stories make up the building at his back.

  It’s just one of the thousands of alleys in the boy’s mental navigation system, as safe or as dangerous as the person he shares it with. The person he shares it with now is definitely dangerous, but probably not under these circumstances.

  He wears a polo shirt and a pair of cheap slacks, robbed of their crease by Bangkok’s damp heat. Barely taller than the boy, the man is as wide and unyielding as a closed door. The square face is so flat it seems to have been slammed repeatedly against a wall. The man’s eyes scan the boy’s face as though they’re trying to scour the skin away.

  The boy says, “You’re lying. I saw his wallet when he paid me.”

  Behind the door-shaped man is another man, taller and more slender, but equally hard-faced. The taller man has both hands wrapped firmly around the elbow of a third man, who studies the concrete beneath his feet as though he’s looking for the faint lines that will betray a secret door.

  The third man is handcuffed, his arms behind him.

  “It’s full, but it’s mostly ones,” the door-shaped man says. “Here. Look for yourself,”

  The wallet he extends has been taken from the handcuffed man. It is sticky, damp with the sweat of heat and fear. The boy doesn’t touch it. “Ones now,” he says. “But tens and twenties before.”

  The man in handcuffs hears the argument without understanding a word. He speaks German and English, but no Thai. His face is blank with the sheer effort of running mentally through all the things he might have done, all the choices he might have made, dozens of them, large and small—anything that would not have led him to this minute. This minute when his life, his life as he has come to know it, ends.

  “Look at it, damn you,” says the door-shaped man.

  The boy says, “One hundred dollars.”

  “You little shit,” the door-shaped man says. A scuff of shoe on concrete draws his attention, and two children enter the alley from the even narrower passage that runs off to the left. He turns back to the boy and gives the wallet a shake. “Are you saying I’m lying?”

  The boy looks past the wallet, at the man’s eyes. “One hundred,” he says.

  The man stares at him, then nods abruptly, as though agreeing with himself about something. He shoves the wallet into his hip pocket. “In that case,” he says, “fuck off.” He starts to turn to go, but the boy’s hand lands on his arm, and the man yanks his arm away as though the boy carried disease.

  He brings the arm back, as if to hit the boy, but then his eyes go past the boy’s face and settle on something behind him. Four children have come into the alley from the boulevard. Behind them are three more.

  The taller man, the one holding the prisoner’s arm, feels a presence at his back. He glances over his shoulder. Three children stand there, although he could not have said where they came from. He’s almost certain the alley dead-ends behind him. He licks his lips and says, “Uhhh, Chit…”

  “One hundred,” the boy says. “Now. In one minute, two hundred.”


  Half a dozen children come out of the alley to the right.

  The children are ragged and dirty, their hair matted, their upper lips caked with sweat and snot. Many of them are barefoot, their feet so filthy it looks like they are wearing boots. Some of them are only eight or nine, and some are in their early teens. They say nothing, just stand there looking wide-eyed at Chit, the door-shaped man.

  There are fifteen or twenty in all. Over the hum of traffic from the boulevard, Chit can hear them breathe. Three more appear at the alley’s mouth.

  The boy says, “Thirty seconds.”

  Chit draws his lips back, baring his teeth as though he is about to take a bite out of the boy’s throat. His hand goes to his pocket and emerges with a wad of twenties. With his eyes fixed on the boy’s, he counts off five of them, holds them out, and drops them to the ground.

  The boy bends down and picks them up. “Thank you,” he says, as politely as if they’d been neatly folded and handed to him in an envelope. He puts them into his pocket and turns to go.

  “Wait,” Chit says. The boy pauses, but the other children are already melting away. “Tomorrow night.”

  The boy says, “No. There are other police, not as greedy as you.”

  “Try it,” Chit says. “See how long you live.”

  The boy turns back to him. “I could say the same to you.” He looks up and down the alley, taking in the remaining children. “They could be anywhere,” he says. “Any time. Waiting for you.”

  Chit surveys the upraised faces, smells the dirt and sweat. He raises both hands, palms out. “All right, all right. No more bargaining. Fifteen percent off the top.” The boy is impassive. “Twenty,” Chit says.

  “Tomorrow,” the boy says. He saunters to the end of the alley and goes left, onto the sidewalk of the boulevard. The children drift away.

  Chit’s eyes burn holes into the boy’s back. He turns to the handcuffed man and slaps him hard, then slaps him again. Then he catches the taller man’s eye and jerks his chin upward, a command. The taller man reaches behind the prisoner, and a moment later the man’s hands are free.

  This is not what the prisoner had expected. The thought ricochets through his mind: Shot running away?

  He flinches when Chit’s hand comes up, but it holds nothing except the prisoner’s wallet. Chit removes the cash, then pulls out a slender deck of credit cards. “Gerhardt,” he says, reading the name off the top card. “Gerhardt, around the corner is an ATM. You withdraw everything you can get on all your cards and give it to me. Tomorrow morning you leave Thailand. Understand?”

  Gerhardt says, “I…I leave? You mean, no jail?”

  Chit says, “And you never come back.”

  Gerhardt starts to thank him and then bursts into tears.

  5

  All In

  It’s an eight.

  The other six men at the table barely give it a glance, but Rafferty suddenly has a buzzing in his ears that sounds like a low-voltage power line. He squeezes his eyes closed and opens them again.

  It’s still an eight.

  The Big Guy leans forward, watching him. He passes the tube over his lips and says, in that high, buttery voice, “The farang is interested.”

  Rafferty barely hears him. If he were forced at gunpoint to make an estimate—and it’s looking increasingly likely that someone will be at gunpoint soon—Rafferty would put the value of the chips in the pot somewhere in the neighborhood of 750,000 baht—about $24,000 U.S. Not exactly the national debt, but certainly the largest amount he’s ever risked on the turn of a card.

  Of course, he’s only been playing for ten days.

  Feeling the Big Guy’s eyes on him, he grabs eight chips off his stack and clicks them together four times. He does his best to make the gesture seem natural, but it feels like the staged business it is, transparently phony, bad blocking in an amateur play. He closes his hand around the chips and finds them wet with sweat.

  The Big Guy leans back in his chair, his pink mouth puckering around his cigar. The bodyguards watch everyone else.

  The man three seats to Rafferty’s right had dealt the hand. He’s a sallow-faced man in a shiny suit that’s either brown or green depending on the light, but not a good shade of either. He waits indifferently for the man to his left to make his move. The man, one of the businessmen, makes a tight little mouth like a reluctant kiss and throws in a couple thousand. The uniformed man on the businessman’s other side, Rafferty’s friend Arthit, has the bet in hand and tosses it into the pot with the air of someone making a donation at the temple of an unreliable god. The moment Rafferty has been dreading has arrived. He tries to look thoughtful as he waits to be told what to do.

  The one whose job it is to tell him, seated directly opposite him at the round green felt table, is as lean as a matador and as dark as a used teabag, with a hatchet-narrow face, and hair that has been dyed so black it has blue highlights. With his eyes resting lazily on the pile of chips in the center of the table, he turns the signet ring on his right hand so the stone is beneath his finger and then brings it back up again.

  The hum in Rafferty’s ears rises in pitch, as though the power line has been stretched tighter. The room seems to brighten.

  It takes all of Rafferty’s willpower to keep his hands steady as he pushes his entire pile of chips toward the center of the green felt. He says, “I’m all in.”

  There is a general shifting around the table as people adjust themselves in their chairs and survey the new landscape of risk. Rafferty has about 290,000 baht in chips—he’s been having a selectively good night, just barely not good enough to be suspicious. This is a bet that could remove at least two of the players from the game.

  One of them is the Big Guy.

  Four days ago, when this game was being planned, there had been only three people in the room: Rafferty, Arthit, and the hatchet-faced man. They had been sitting in a dingy meeting room in a police station, a room to which the hatchet-faced man had been brought directly from his jail cell. He’d been promised six months off his sentence if he succeeded in fooling the pigeons—the businessmen—at the table, thereby guaranteeing that he’d do his best with the four dodges he was to perform during the game. Arthit and the other policeman, whose name is Kosit, had been promised a “consideration” of 50,000 baht apiece by the casino owners who were looking for ways to spot the dodges, and for whose enlightenment the game is secretly being videotaped.

  But no one had expected the Big Guy.

  And now, seated to Rafferty’s left, he blows out a quart of cigar smoke and leans back in his chair. His eyes flick to Rafferty again and then away. Late forties, strong as a horse beneath fifteen pounds of soft, wet fat, he holds the cigar dead center in a tightly pursed mouth.

  He says in English, “Bluff.”

  “Easy to find out,” Rafferty says. His heart is beating so hard he can actually feel the cloth of his shirt brush his chest.

  A cloud of smoke, waved away so the Big Guy can peer down at Rafferty’s chips. “How much is that, farang?”

  “Two hundred ninety-two thousand,” Rafferty says.

  “I’ve only got two-eighty-five.”

  “In or out?” asks the dealer.

  “In,” says the Big Guy. He pushes his chips into the center of the felt and then drops the last few thousand-baht chips on top of the pile, one at a time. Then he switches to Thai. “Look at your money,” he says, “because you’re never going to see it again.”

  The hatchet-faced man throws in his cards. The dealer and the man next to him also fold. Arthit takes a last look at the faceup cards and then mucks his own, making it unanimous. The man to Rafferty’s right, who has already folded, shifts in his chair to watch the showdown.

  “After you,” Rafferty says to the Big Guy. The Big Guy moves the cigar to the corner of that pink mouth and flips his cards. He’s got a straight: four, five, six, seven, eight.

  “Gee,” Rafferty says. He looks at the Big Guy’s hand and shake
s his head in admiration. Then he turns over one of his hole cards: an eight. “Let’s see,” he says, squinting at the table. “I haven’t played for very long, but this is an eight, and there are two more of them over there, so that makes three, right?” He flips the other card. “And here’s another one. So that means I’ve got four eights.” He looks around the table. “Who wins?”

  The Big Guy’s chair hits the floor with a bang, and the bodyguards step forward to flank him. “Who wins?” He takes three steps back, one of the bodyguards whisking the fallen chair out of his way. “You’re a cheat, you and that blue-haired freak over there. And you picked the wrong game.” He pushes back his suit coat, and suddenly Arthit is standing with his police automatic in his hand.

  “Don’t move,” Arthit says, and Kosit, the man who dealt the hand, also pulls a gun and waves it around as though to say, Look what I have, although he doesn’t point it at anyone. “Khun Pan,” Arthit says to the Big Guy, “if you’re thinking about getting that little gun out of your shoulder holster, I have to advise against it.” The dealer’s gun comes to rest pointed at the nearest bodyguard.

  “This…this game is fixed.” Pan is so furious he’s spluttering.

  “Of course it is,” Arthit says. His eyes flick to the bodyguard at Pan’s right, who’s looking jumpy. “By the way, just to put all the information on the table, there’s no reason not to shoot you, so don’t get silly.”

  “You should be ashamed,” Pan says. “Siding with this farang against a table full of honest Thais. He’s a cheat.”