Breathing Water

by Timothy Hallinan

  12

  The Chuckle Is a Perfectly Acceptable Form of Laughter

  You guys do this often?” Rafferty asks.

  “Often enough,” says the man on his right, the one who spoke before.

  “The driver must be built like a sumo wrestler. When he got in, it felt like the car was going to tip over.”

  “You hear that?” the man asks in Thai. “A sumo wrestler.”

  The man in front makes a sound that Rafferty identifies as a chuckle. Despite having read countless novels in which characters chuckle more or less continuously, this is the first time Rafferty has actually heard someone do it.

  Rafferty says, “He chuckled.”

  “He’s a merry soul,” says the man to his right.

  “It’s important to be happy in one’s work,” Rafferty says.

  “Do you always chatter like this when you’re frightened?”

  Rafferty says, “I’d be frightened if you hadn’t put the hood on.”

  “That just means we’re not going to kill you. It doesn’t mean we’re not going to beat the shit out of you.”

  “When I’m frightened, I shut up,” Rafferty says.

  After a moment of silence, the man to his right chuckles.

  “You chuckled, too,” Rafferty says. “Did somebody teach all you guys to chuckle?”

  “The chuckle,” the man to his right says, “is a perfectly acceptable form of laughter.”

  “You speak very good English.”

  They ride in silence for a few moments. Then the man says, “Here’s the problem: It doesn’t matter whether I like you. I’ll do anything to you that I’m told to do. Kill you without a thought. So go ahead and entertain us, but it won’t make any difference.”

  Rafferty says, “Why waste good material?”

  DOWN A RAMP and over some speed bumps. The car stops, and a hand grasps Rafferty’s arm.

  “Let’s go. And don’t suddenly get stupid.”

  “I don’t suddenly get stupid,” Rafferty says, sliding across the leather. “I have to work up to it.”

  A few short steps, a wait, and then a bell rings. Rafferty hears the doors slide open, and he’s guided in. The man says, “Use the key for express. No stops.” Rafferty counts his pulse as the elevator rises, not because he thinks it’ll be useful but because it seems to be the only information available. At the count of seventy-three, the elevator does a stomach-churning deceleration, and at seventy-seven it comes to a full stop. An amplified woman’s voice with a fruity, phony-upper-class British intonation, says, “Thirty-six.” Then she repeats it in Thai.

  “Shit,” says the man who has been doing all the talking. “I forgot about that.”

  Rafferty says, “I didn’t hear it in either language.”

  “No, you didn’t. And you don’t mention it while you’re talking to the man, understand? If you want to get through the day alive, you’ll forget all about it.”

  “It’s gone.”

  “Good.” Hands take his elbows as the doors slide open and a wave of cold air rolls at them. “You’re going straight now. I’ll tell you when we’ve got to turn.”

  Four turns later he is stopped. He hears a very faint tapping sound that could be fingers on a keyboard. Several keyboards. A secretarial pool? It’s easy to envision one of those big open rooms with chest-high walls. A secretarial pool, in the kind of office where a hooded man doesn’t invite speculation.

  So an office suite. On the thirty-sixth floor of some building, almost certainly in the Sathorn district.

  A door squeaks open to his right, and hands grasp his shoulders and turn him ninety degrees to point him toward it.

  “Walk four or five steps directly forward and then stop. When you hear the door close, take the hood off.”

  Rafferty counts off five steps, feeling thick carpet underfoot. The door closes with the same squeak. He removes the hood.

  He is in a conference room. A single glance makes it clear that what is conferred about here is money, gobs and gobs of money. The table, at least sixteen feet long, is teak. It doesn’t look like a veneer. It looks like twelve hundred pounds of extremely valuable, endangered hardwood. Surrounding it are eight high-backed teak chairs with sky blue woven-silk cushions, the precise color of the carpet. Dead center in front of one chair is a bright yellow legal pad and a single ballpoint pen.

  Other than the pad and pen, the surface of the table gleams empty except for a squat black high-tech object at one end, an obviously expensive Whole Geek Catalog item that looks to Rafferty like it might spring a set of pincers and decide to crawl across the table toward him. The walls, covered in a cream-colored fabric, host large rectangular pale patches, announcing where pictures or posters were probably removed for his visit. Near the top of the wall to his right are two small square windows: a projection booth.

  Rafferty takes a couple of steps, and a tinny voice says, “Sit.” The voice comes from the techno-thing on the table, which Rafferty belatedly recognizes as a conference-call terminal. He glances up at the windows of the projection booth, but the glass is dark. Whoever is watching him is sitting well back in the gloom.

  “Here, I assume.” Rafferty pulls out the chair in front of the legal pad and sits. “Listen,” he says. “I appreciate you sending the car and everything, but if this is about the book, you should know that I’m not going to—”

  “Of course it’s about the book,” the man says. “I want it written immediately.”

  Rafferty parrots, “You want it written.” He feels like a man who’s just been shown proof that two plus two is a subtraction problem.

  “Beginning today. You’ll be paid a substantial advance, which will be transferred into your account at Thai Fisherman’s Bank, the Silom branch, in ninety minutes. It’s account 044–35-11966, is it not?”

  “I’ll take your word.”

  “Look under the legal pad.”

  Rafferty says, “No.”

  A pause, just long enough for Rafferty to swallow.

  “Excuse me?”

  “I’m not going to write the book.”

  “You’re mistaken. You’re not only going to write it, you’re going to file regular reports on your progress. You’re going to share the chapters with us as you finish them. We’ll have suggestions. You will accept them.”

  “It’s not going to get that far. I’m not going to write it. So, with that out of the way, you can go back to standing behind the screen and working the levers or whatever it is you do with your time.” He starts to get up.

  “If you go through that door before I excuse you, you’ll have a very brief time to regret it.”

  Rafferty analyzes the sentence for a moment and lowers himself back into the chair.

  “Mr. Rafferty. Has someone told you not to write this book?”

  “No. Actually, I’ve decided to write a children’s book. Mr. Bunny’s Bow Tie. It’s about a little rabbit who’s frustrated because her husband wants to wear bow ties and she can’t tie bows. You see, her paws—”

  “And were there threats involved?”

  “The problem is that rabbits don’t have fingers—”

  “Against your wife and daughter, perhaps?”

  Rafferty says nothing.

  “I’ll take that as a yes. Two things you need to know. First, we can protect you and your family better than anyone else in Bangkok. Second, whatever you may have been threatened with, I promise you that it would be a feather bed compared to what we will do if you don’t cooperate with us.”

  Rafferty realizes that he has crumpled the top sheet on the yellow pad.

  “So let’s not waste time. Lift the legal tablet. Look beneath it.”

  He does as he’s told, forcing his hands to be steady. He finds two sheets of paper, stapled together.

  “Those are names,” the man says. “Most of those people will talk to you willingly. The book will also require some investigative work, nothing you can’t handle, judging from what you’ve already w
ritten. The last number, at the bottom of the second page, is the one you call to communicate with me. Is all that clear?”

  What’s clear to Rafferty is that he needs to get out of the room. He can’t do anything until he’s out of the room. “What else?”

  “Now and then we’ll have people watching you, just to make sure you’re giving us the time and energy we expect. Occasionally an addition to that list will probably occur to us, and we might call to tell you about it. Your cell phone number is 012–610–2230, isn’t it?”

  Cell phones aren’t listed. Rafferty says, “Don’t showboat.”

  “This is Wednesday. You’ll get the advance in your account today. You’ll leave most of that in the bank. We’ll know how much you withdraw, down to the last baht. We don’t want you running around with so much cash it gives you stupid ideas. I’ll expect the initial report on Monday, and it will be substantial if you don’t want things to get uncomfortable. Your family will be under continuous surveillance, which you should find reassuring.”

  “Not exactly.”

  “Well, you’re right. It’s a two-edged sword. But as long as you’re doing what you should, they’ll be better protected than the prime minister.”

  “And when this is over,” Rafferty says, “how do I find you?”

  “You won’t have to worry about that. If you’re foolish enough to try, we’ll find you.”

  Rafferty says, “I’ll look forward to it.”

  “Don’t waste energy being angry. You have work to do.”

  “So,” Rafferty says, holding up the two pages, “I take these with me?”

  “Of course not,” the man says. “You copy the information onto the legal pad and take it away in your own handwriting. And you leave the pen on the table.”

  “I like the pen.”

  “Fine. One of my men will buy a box of them and then, when no one is in your apartment, he’ll pick your locks and put them on your daughter’s pillow. That’s the bedroom to the left of the front door, I believe. Before you get to the bathroom.”

  Rafferty sits for a long moment, feeling the blood pound in his ears. Then he picks up the pen and begins to write.

  13

  They Dimple the Surface

  Standing on the sidewalk, counting to fifteen as he’s been told to do before removing the hood, Rafferty smells something tantalizingly familiar. He hears the surge of the car’s engine. At the count of twelve, he pulls off the hood and finds himself in a small soi. At the end, a black Lincoln Town Car makes a left onto a broad and busy boulevard. Mud has been smeared over the license plate.

  Two passing women look at him, standing there, dangling a brown pillowcase from one hand. One of them says something, and they giggle. They step into the street to avoid him.

  He needs to know where he is, but before that he needs to know he still has a family. He yanks his cell phone from his pocket with so much force that he pulls the pocket inside out. Baht notes flutter to the pavement. He leaves them there, just putting a foot on one, as he dials.

  Rose answers on the second ring.

  “Everything okay?” he asks.

  “I’m making noodles. Does that sound okay?”

  “Sounds like heaven.” He stoops to pick up the money.

  “I’m such a housewife,” Rose says. “If anyone had told me three years ago I’d be awake at this hour, making noodles with an apron on, I’d have laughed at them.”

  “I knew it, though,” Rafferty says. “I knew the first moment I saw you, up on that stage wearing ten sequins and that crooked tinfoil halo, that there was a vacuum cleaner in your future.”

  “Good thing you didn’t say it. I’d have had them throw you out of the bar.”

  “Listen,” he says. “Be careful today. Don’t open the door to anyone you don’t know. And I think one of us ought to go get Miaow when school’s out.”

  Rose sighs and says, “Why does life with you have to be so interesting?”

  He says good-bye and works his inverted pocket back inside his pants, then takes a survey. Down at the end of the soi, several stands cluster, nothing more than dusty awnings tacked to the backs of buildings and propped up in front with wooden doweling. As he moves toward them, he sees that they’re selling luggage, mostly knockoffs of Tumi and Louis Vuitton. And then the fragrance in the air resolves itself into curry and basmati rice, and he knows where he is: He’s in the Indian district.

  And the ass end of Bangkok, as far as Rafferty is concerned. He knows that it can be difficult to get either a taxi or a tuk-tuk here. He’s sworn off motorcycle taxis since he went down on one a couple of months back. He has forbidden Miaow to ride them, too, giving her extra money every school day for taxis.

  Six dollars a day, he thinks, trudging toward the boulevard. Twenty-four, twenty-five every week. When he first came to Bangkok, those taxis would have cost a buck, a buck twenty-five. In a week that would have been—

  He stops, halted by the realization that he’s taking refuge in details. The part of his mind that earns its keep by imposing order on the world is offering up bright little beads of factual material for him to string into a reality that doesn’t include anything that’s happened since he sat down at the card game last night: Pan’s drunkenness, the threats, his abduction.

  Noi’s pills. The sound of Arthit’s voice when he told Rafferty about them. Noi’s pain.

  And today’s displays of naked power.

  The floor plan to his apartment. His bank-account and cell-phone numbers. The kind of power most farang never experience.

  Rafferty knows Thailand well enough to be aware that people above a certain social and political level are virtually unaccountable, shielded from the consequences of their actions by layers of subordinates and networks of reciprocal favors and graft that corrupt both the police and the courts. These are the people, the “big people,” whom Rose despises, the people who attend dress balls with blood on their hands. There are not many of them, relatively speaking, but they have immense mass and they exert a kind of gravity that bends tens of thousands of lives into the orbit of their will.

  Most farang pass through the gravitational Gordian knot of Bangkok unscathed, like long-haul comets for whom our solar system is just something else to shoulder their way past. Farang have no formal status here. They come and go. They dimple the surface of the city’s space-time like water-striding insects, staying a few months at a stretch and then flitting elsewhere. They don’t have enough mass to draw the gaze of the individuals around whom the orbits wheel.

  But Rafferty is being gazed at. And he knows all the way to the pit of his stomach that it’s the worst thing that can happen to him. If they decide it is in their best interest, they can blow through him and his cobbled-together family like a cannonball through a handkerchief.

  If he goes in one direction, Rose and Miaow are in danger. If he goes in the other direction, Rose and Miaow are in danger. And “in danger” is a euphemism.

  He is leaning against a building. His skin is slick and cold with evaporating sweat. Panic is barking useless orders at him: Get the family to the airport. (Rose and Miaow don’t have passports.) Hurry them out of Bangkok. (We’re being watched.) Disappear into the city. (Not possible.) Kill everybody. (Who?)

  He pushes himself free of the building on legs that feel as numb as prosthetics and makes his way down the soi to the boulevard.

  Where he stops, looking left, then right. Which way to go?

  Both directions are wrong, but one must be less wrong than the other.

  What he needs to do is buy time. He needs to do things that both sides will see as compliance while he figures out which chunk of Bangkok masonry he can pry loose to make a hiding place for his family. Once they’re out of the line of fire, he can think about next steps. About removing himself from the equation. Finding some way to step aside at the last possible moment and let the opposing forces annihilate each other.

  Just as he figures out where he needs to go next, his c
ell phone rings, and it’s someone summoning him to the one place in Bangkok he wants to be.

  14

  The First Paradise

  You wait,” the guard says, shutting the little glass door in the booth. The glass is at least an inch thick, certainly bulletproof.

  The booth occupies the base of a semicircular clay-brick turret beside an enormous pair of weathered bronze gates that stretch twenty feet toward the paper-white sky. Mesopotamian lions rear up on them, claws extended and teeth bared. The Mesopotamian theme continues on the clay-brick walls, covered with bas-relief figures of standing kings, slender and stiff-kneed and tightly robed. Sprouting here and there among the kings are outcrops, planted with vegetation that spills over the edges. Green streamers dangle downward.

  The Hanging Gardens of Babylon, Rafferty realizes. Not even remotely what he’d expected.

  The wall is perhaps a fifth of a mile long. It occupies the entire block. Rafferty tries to remember what used to be here, but nothing comes to mind. Bangkok is like that, he thinks: One day you look up and there’s a building, and the field, the house, the slum—whatever it was before, it is gone forever.

  The sun’s glare makes him uncomfortably aware that it is almost noon. He is glancing at his watch when the guard opens the little window again and says, “Through here.” A narrow door, barely wide enough for one person to pass through, opens in the left gate. On the other side of the door stands a short, slender, dark-complected man in a pale yellow shirt and triple-pleated, salmon-colored golf slacks.

  “Please,” he says in English, “come in, come in.”

  The door in the gate clangs closed, and the slender man in the bright clothes climbs into a little white electric golf cart that has been remodeled to look like a very large and steroidal swan. One wing is improbably upraised to shade the passengers. All that Rafferty can see as the cart whirs into motion is greenery, thickly tangled and thorny, a second wall. At the wheel of the cart, the slender man says, without turning to Rafferty, “I am Dr. Ravi.”