Breathing Water: A Bangkok Thriller

24

At 12:42 A.M., Captain Teeth says, “They’ve got cops.”

“I’d imagine so,” says the man who had sat next to Rafferty in the car. “He fired that thing four or five times.” He gets up from the soft black leather couch, turning back to center his drink, straw-colored liquid over ice, on a thick coaster. In this house, rings on the tables are strongly discouraged. When he is satisfied with the placement of the glass, the man noiselessly pads across the carpet to the console, where he grabs the second set of headphones. The console, just a cheap black table with the receiver on it, has been shoved up against a wall, displacing an ornate teak-and-suede sofa that is now jammed haphazardly into a corner, where it disrupts the meticulous feng shui of the room.

The room is a home office, all dark wood-and-leather furniture and the half-hidden glint of gold on the spines of unread books. The walls are the color of strong coffee, a deeply grained mahogany that’s been varnished to a reflective luster. Three flat-screen televisions are hung on one wall in a perfect vertical, and two computer screens flicker on the console behind the desk. The desk is empty but for a small thicket of expensively framed photographs, each one showing a handsome, richly dressed man standing with other richly dressed men, mostly less handsome, who face the camera with the air of having been interrupted in the middle of something important. There is one photograph of a thickset woman in her forties, her wrinkles retouched but her disappointment intact. She is flanked by two younger women and a teenage girl, forcing the requisite smiles, who are clearly her daughters.

The room is completely silent. The entire house has been soundproofed because its mistress does not sleep well. The men at the console press their headphones to their ears, one standing and one sitting, for several moments. The man who had spoken to Rafferty in the car drops his phones onto the console for a moment and returns to the couch, moving in and out of bright areas beneath the recessed pin spots in the ceiling. He grabs the drink and totes it over to the console, sits in the wheeled black leather office chair beside Captain Teeth, and slaps the phones back on.

“Pretty dumb story, even if they’re telling it to cops,” he says, listening. “Wonder where they put the snake.”

“Probably the refrigerator,” says Captain Teeth. A new bandage, pristine white, is neatly wrapped around his left thumb.

“She’d never let him do that. Listen to her. She’s not going to have any cobras in her refrigerator.”

“She’s extremely fine,” Captain Teeth says. “You didn’t see her.”

“If you’re a good boy,” the other man says, “you can have her when this is over.”

Captain Teeth shakes a cigarette out of a pack, holds it beneath his nose, and inhales the fragrance. He knows better than to light it. Only one person is allowed to smoke in this house. “I’ll never be that lucky. But I’ll tell you, if she’d be nice to me, I’d spend my life keeping snakes out of her refrigerator.”

“I can fix it. Give you a few hours with her before we put her away.”

“Better-looking than Eve. You didn’t get to see Eve either.”

“I saw her on TV.”

“Yeah?” Captain Teeth squints against a burst of static, puts down the unlit cigarette, and fiddles with the volume knob. “You see me? I was right up front. Till I had to leave, anyway.”

“The wife’s better than Eve. And she’s yours if you want her.” The man from the car slips one of the earphones off and tucks it behind his ear. “Okay, you got the story? The kid was playing with the gun, no damage done except the holes in the cabinet and the floor. The cops went through the place, probably looking in closets and under beds to make sure nobody was dead, and everybody said good night, and they left. I leave anything important out?”

“No.”

“I mean, if himself decides to listen to the tape. Have I left anything out?”

“No. That’s all of it.”

“When they go to bed, you rewind the tape and go through it again. Just to make sure.”

The two of them listen for a few minutes. The man from the car drains his drink. Then he asks, “Why’d you have to leave the party early?”

“Just business,” Captain Teeth says. “Listen. They’re going to bed.” He reaches over to the other man’s glass and loops a finger through the hole in the center of one of the ice cubes. He pulls the cube out and drops it into his mouth. Around the cube he says, “You really think I can have her?”

A voice behind them says, “It’ll be a waste if you don’t.” They turn to see the man in the photographs on the desk, wearing a dark blue silk robe. “Because no one else ever will.”

The men at the console leap to their feet. The man in the robe goes to the desk, opens the top drawer, and pulls out a pack of cigarettes and shakes one loose. “Kai,” he says to Captain Teeth. He picks up a gold lighter and flicks it. “Have you told Ren here what you did earlier this evening, after you deserted the party?” He regards the two of them over the flame.

“No,” Kai says.

“Didn’t tell him how you hurt your thumb?” The man in the robe is in the darker half of the office, away from the desk lamps on the console, and the flame of the lighter brings his face out of the gloom and plants bright pinpricks in the center of his eyes. “Nothing?”

“No, sir.”

“How sensitive of you not to embarrass him,” the man in the robe says. “Then I’ll tell him. What Kai did tonight,” he says, his eyes on Ren, “was pick up the shit you dropped.”

Ren licks his lips and says, “Excuse me?”

“The elevator,” says the man in the robe. He lets the lighter go out, throwing his face back into darkness. His voice is soft, but the edges are rough enough to remove skin. “You made three mistakes, didn’t you?”

“Three?” Ren asks. He puts a steadying hand on the console.

“One of them was just stupid. Taking the farang up in that elevator. Stupid, but understandable. You could have used the service elevator, but that one was right there, wasn’t it? Right there in the garage.”

“Yes, sir,” Ren says, around a swallow.

“So you saved a few steps. You used it. And it told the farang what floor we were on. And then you made a more serious mistake.” He flicks the lighter again, puts the cigarette in his mouth, touches the flame to its tip, and takes a drag that brings the coal to life. Then he exhales a stream of smoke and flips the cigarette straight at Ren. It strikes Ren in the center of the chest, and he drops to his knees as though he’s been shot, although what he’s doing is trying frantically to retrieve the cigarette before it scorches the carpet. He scrambles after it and grasps it between thumb and forefinger. When he knows he won’t drop it, he starts to rise, but the man in the blue robe says, “Stay there.”

Ren freezes in a crouch. His legs are bent at acute angles, and he is balanced on the balls of his feet.

“Is that position comfortable?” the man in the blue robe asks.

“Uh, no, sir.”

“Well, let’s see how comfortable it is in, say, two hours.” He comes out from behind the desk and stands over Ren. Then he draws back his right hand and slaps the crouching man hard enough to snap his head around and make him put his free hand down to keep from toppling over.

“I didn’t say you could use your hands,” says the man in the blue robe.

“Sorry, sir,” Ren says. The left side of his face is flaming. His legs have begun to tremble from the strain.

“Put your hands on your knees.” Ren does as he’s told. The cigarette in his left sends up a lazy filigree of smoke. The man in the blue robe slaps him again and then again, and when Ren puts a hand down, the man in the robe plants a slippered foot on it and grinds it into the carpet with the edge of the heel. “What was your second mistake?”

“I told him…I told him not to tell you.”

“You didn’t want me to be angry at you,” says the man in the blue robe. “You didn’t want me to-what? Speak harshly to you? Raise my voice? Shake my finger at you? So, since you didn’t want to endure that, since you were afraid of being shouted at, I didn’t know the truth, that Rafferty had information that could bring him back to us. And then you made your third mistake. The one that’s almost impossible to forgive.”

“Sir?” Ren’s face is running with sweat, partially from the strain of maintaining the position, but mostly from fear.

“You lost him. And while you didn’t have him in your sights, he met with that reporter. And he told her what he knew. Do you know what that did to us?”

“No, sir.”

“It took this entire operation out of bounds. This was supposed to be quick and easy. Threaten the man, set him loose, see what happens, what he finds out, and then take whatever action turned out to be necessary. Maybe nothing, maybe just give him his money and forget about him. Instead, because of you, Kai had to take definitive action tonight. He had to kill that reporter.”

“I-” Ren says, and runs out of steam.

“And he hurt his thumb. Didn’t you, Kai?”

“It’s okay,” Kai says.

“No, it’s not okay. None of it’s okay. It’s not okay that Ms. Weecherat is dead. Quite apart from the fact that she had children, and no child should lose a parent like that, it means we might have to manage the police, and that means that more people will be on the edge of our little circle. Not to mention those who have already been added. The night editor at her paper, for example.”

“He can’t-” Ren says. “He can’t know who it was who-”

“No, he can’t. And it wouldn’t affect me personally if he did. I’m not the one who’s at risk here. You are. Kai is. A couple of people just above you in the company. Lifters and door openers. But I’m supposed to protect my people, aren’t I? So your tiny, contemptible act of cowardice puts me in the position of having to behave like a common gangster. It means that Rafferty will almost certainly have to die, since he knows perfectly well that we killed the reporter. This was not the way this was supposed to work out.” His eyes go to the cigarette in Ren’s hand. “Are you planning to smoke that?”

“No, sir. I wouldn’t. It’s, um…it’s yours.”

“Well, if you’re not going to smoke it, what should you do with it?”

Ren says, “Put it out?”

The man in the robe sighs in irritation. “Of course put it out.”

“Then…” Ren says, “then I can get up?”

“No.”

Ren’s eyes dart around the room, looking for anything close at hand. “Then where should I-”

“Put it out,” the man in the blue robe says, “on your tongue.”

Miaow clutches the pen vertically in her fist, even though she has been trained at school to hold it at a slant between her fingers. Looking at the pen, upright as a flag, looking at the dimples in the brown knuckles as her fist moves across the paper, Rafferty sees hours of practice, wiped away by fear. It makes him so angry his mouth tastes of metal.

Miaow’s eyes flick back and forth between the note Rafferty wrote and the translation she is making. In English it says, They can hear everything we say. She does a final check of her looping Thai script and passes it to Rose, who scans it and shuts her eyes in an expression that looks more like irritation than fear. She opens them and points at the corners of the bedroom, jabs her finger toward the door leading to the living room and Miaow’s room, then lifts her palms in a question.

Rafferty shrugs and shakes his head: Don’t know. He mimes zipping his mouth closed and then takes the pen from Miaow and writes, We can only say things we want them to hear.

Miaow says, “Well, duh,” and then blanches and covers her mouth.

Rafferty gives her the pen, and she translates, with Rose looking over her shoulder. Even before she has finished, Rose is nodding impatiently, a gesture that means, Yeah, yeah, yeah. She takes the pen and begins to write in Thai. Rafferty hates including Miaow in this conversation, but his written Thai is rudimentary at best, and Rose can’t read English beyond “Hello” and and “I love you,” the phrases every bar girl learns to write during her first week on the job, so Miaow is irreplaceably in the middle. Her shoulders brushing against both Rose’s and Rafferty’s, Miaow follows Rose’s moving hand much as Rafferty followed hers.

The three of them huddle on the new blue bedspread Rose just bought, in a semicircle of light thrown by the lamp that stands on the bedside table. All the other lights in the apartment have been turned off. Rafferty has draped a blanket over the air conditioner in the bedroom’s only window to prevent light leaks that might be visible from the street.

He is certain that someone is down in the street.

Miaow takes the pen and paper and translates quickly: How long?

Rafferty writes, I’ll call Arthit in the morning from the hallway. He’ll send someone to find the microphones. Miaow translates, and Rose nods and writes something. Miaow, reading over her moving hand, nods in agreement and takes the pad almost before Rose finishes. When she is done, Miaow turns it to Rafferty. It says, Can we get out of here?

Rafferty shrugs again and takes the pad. He writes, They’re watching. Miaow reads it and shortcuts the process by jerking a thumb toward the glass door to the balcony and the window with the air conditioner in it and miming binoculars.

Rose surprises Rafferty by scrawling, in very large letters, a word he didn’t know she could write. The word is SHIT.

Rafferty takes the pen and turns the page over. On the clean side, he writes, I’ll move us soon. Without even showing it to Rose, Miaow grabs the paper and scribbles How? hard enough to rip the paper.

Rafferty writes, I don’t know.