Breathing Water: A Bangkok Thriller

26

Porthip seems even more frail than he had at Pan’s fund-raiser. The enormous office, jammed with Chinese antiques, has an unpleasantly sour smell, like damp, dirty cloth that has been allowed to mildew. The black lacquered desk is bare except for a glass and a matching pitcher of water with slices of lemon floating in it. Ringing the pitcher in a semicircle are seven vials of prescription drugs. Porthip follows Rafferty’s gaze and points a knotted, quivering finger at each vial in turn. The skin on his hand is hairless and yellow, the veins like blue highways.

“Pain, pain, nausea, pain, diuretic, antidepressant-if you can imagine that, an antidepressant for death-and these big ones that don’t do anything.” His voice is taut, making Rafferty think of wire being drawn through a hole too small for it. He is speaking English.

“But you take them,” Rafferty says.

“Because I’m supposed to. That’s what they’re for. They’re nothing, but they make me feel better because I take them. They give me the illusion I’m doing something, not just lying down to die.”

“You never know.”

“If that comforts you, go ahead and believe it,” Porthip says. “But I’ll tell you: Every cell in your body knows. You know with every breath you take. You know every time the second hand on your watch goes all the way around, and you think, ‘There’s another one gone.’”

Rafferty takes a longer look at the man. The face is taut and shrunken, but the tightly cut Chinese eyes are bright with fury, the eyes of an animal in a trap. “What does it make you want to do?”

“Be twenty,” Porthip says. “Twenty with a hard dick.”

Rafferty says, “I wouldn’t mind that myself.”

What happens to Porthip’s face could be a smile or it could be pain. When it passes, he says, “This isn’t what we were going to talk about.”

“No. Pan.”

Porthip puts both hands flat on the desk. They still tremble. “Are you going to ask me questions, or am I supposed to make a speech?”

“He’s a complicated character,” Rafferty says, feeling sententious. “I want both the good and the bad in the book. Let’s start with-”

“He’s as complicated as a cow patty,” Porthip says, waving off Rafferty’s assertion. “You’ve got the basics, right? I mean, someone gave you the background: Isaan, poor kid, farmer’s son, couldn’t read, probably never saw a roll of toilet paper until he was sixteen or seventeen. Came to Bangkok and made his fortune, a little shady at first, maybe, what with the poking parlors, but that was the only route open, since we evil rich control all the access to capital. But he ran circles around us with his native Isaan wit. That’s the hero version, how he used all that peasant cunning to make half the baht in Thailand and now he sprinkles them around like lustral water, anointing whole areas of the country, and he’s become the Bodhi tree people sit under to find enlightenment.”

“Yeah, I’ve heard all that.”

Porthip shakes his head in what could be disgust. “And you’ve met him.”

“Three times.”

“What did you think?”

“I don’t know. Good and bad, I guess.”

“Good and bad,’” Porthip repeats scornfully. He pours himself a glass of water, the edge of the pitcher rattling against the glass in his unsteady hand. A slice of lemon falls into the glass, and water splashes on the desk. Rafferty wants to help but knows the effort won’t be appreciated. “First thing I’m going to tell you…” Porthip says, and he raises the glass to his lips and drinks. He holds up a finger. Rafferty waits until the man has swallowed, and Porthip picks up the sentence. “…is, don’t believe anything he tells you. Not anything. If he says it’s sunny, buy an umbrella. If he tells you he’s giving you something, put your hand over your wallet. He lies every time he exhales.”

“Poor people have a different impression. He funds hospitals, he-”

“Bullshit. He never gives away a nickel. He’d steal from a corpse if he could find anybody dumb enough to lend him a shovel.”

“So where do these stories come from?”

Porthip allows his eyes to roam over Rafferty’s face, long enough for the scrutiny to be rude. He does not look impressed by what he sees. “He’s not complicated, but he’s smart. Do you understand the difference?”

“I like to think I’m capable of making basic distinctions, yes.”

“The whole thing-the outrageous spending, the gold Rolls-Royce, the rough edges, the awful clothes, the beautiful women, the fuck-you attitude-it’s all for effect. It’s all lies. The philanthropy, which isn’t even his money. He never uses a dime of his own. He’s got half a dozen backers, guys who are tired of being on the edges, and they bankroll all this crap. He wants to build some little health clinic and pay some quack doctors who couldn’t get work at a real hospital if the plague hit, and these guys pony up. If he wants to create a Potemkin village, some feminist paradise where all the women are empowered at their looms while the men sit around and drink all day, those guys not only pay for the looms, they buy the goddamn fabric. He’s got warehouses full of the fucking stuff. Mice chew on it. It never seems to occur to anyone that the world isn’t clamoring for an infinite supply of amateur weaving. It’s good for potholders, junk to sell the tourists, but come on, they’re making miles of the stuff. You could cover the road from here to Chiang Mai with it. And it would be uglier than the asphalt.”

“Why would these people give him money? What’s the payback?”

Porthip puts the glass on the desk, hard enough to crack it, and glares at Rafferty. “You know the answer to that, and if you don’t, get out of here. You’re not worth talking to.”

“Power,” Rafferty says. “Money.”

A wide expanse of yellow teeth, either a smile or a grimace. “Of course. Pan’s aiming high. These guys, the ones who are backing him, want to be in the middle of everything. They want access to the well. Because, of course, it’s not just money. It’s a torrent of money, a tsunami of money. They’re rich now, but nothing compared to how rich they could be if Pan makes it.”

“Makes it to what?”

“Some high national office,” Porthip says. “I’m not saying prime minister, but I wouldn’t be surprised if that wasn’t the ultimate target. Cabinet level anyway.”

“He hasn’t said anything about that. Not to me, and not publicly.”

“He will,” Porthip says. “He’ll lie about it first, but he will.” Porthip dips his index finger into the glass of water and touches it to his tongue, as though to cool it. “Look at the political landscape. Look at what that idiot Thaksin did, paying all those farmers for their votes. The people who raise pigs want to rule the country.”

Rafferty says, “Maybe they should have a say in things.”

The lower lid of Porthip’s left eye begins to twitch rhythmically. “Maybe they should,” he says, “but if they ever get it, they’d probably deserve a chance to vote for someone who’s really what Pan claims to be.”

“Which is?”

“Someone who gives a shit.”

“So,” Rafferty says, “at one point he’s a pimp with some massage parlors, and now he owns the rights to trademarks, he’s got factories, he’s a possible political force. He’s somebody that people like you have to put up with. How did he make the jump? What’s missing?”

Porthip passes a hand over his brow and closes his eyes. He keeps them closed so long that Rafferty is on the verge of asking whether the man is all right. When the eyes open, they are pointed at the ceiling and the muscles surrounding them are tightly bunched, the left eye still twitching. The man breathes raggedly, catches the breath in his throat, and then lets it out in a rush. He breathes deeply two or three times, and only then does he look back down at Rafferty.

“He owned…somebody’s soul,” Porthip says. The four words require two breaths. He blots perspiration from his upper lip. “He knew something about somebody big. Maybe he did something to put that person hopelessly in debt. Whoever it was, he paid it back by putting up millions and millions. He opened doors. And he kept quiet about it. Makes you think there were only two possible options: give Pan everything he wanted or kill him, and for some reason Pan couldn’t be killed. So the little whorehouse owner disappears, and six months later we’ve got the tycoon on our hands.”

“And even someone like you doesn’t know who it is.”

Porthip swivels his chair ninety degrees so he is looking out the window at the brightness of the new day, and at the sight the muscles of his face soften. Something about the reaction strikes Rafferty as almost infinitely sad. For a moment he thinks Porthip will drop the shield that’s been in place throughout the conversation, but what Porthip says is, “Nobody knows. Nobody’s talked.” He turns back to face Rafferty, the mask of pain tightly in place. “And don’t forget, we’re talking about years ago. Whoever it was, he could be dead by now.”

Rafferty doesn’t even have to look at the yellow sheet to punch in the number. It rings once, and then it is picked up, but the person at the other end doesn’t say anything.

“This is stupid,” Rafferty says. “If you don’t talk, how am I supposed to know I’ve got the right number? You want me to blab about all this when I don’t even know who’s on the line?”

“Jutht a minute,” says the man on the other end, a voice Rafferty recognizes from the car that sped him away from Miaow’s school. But the man sounds like he has a mouthful of potatoes.

A moment later a new voice says, “What is it?”

“What’s wrong with the other guy?”

“He ate something hot. Why are you bothering us?”

“I want to tell you that I just wasted an hour talking to Porthip. I’m supposed to be filing some sort of report in a couple of days, and if they’re all as uninformative as he is, it’s going to be pretty thin.”

“That’s not our problem.”

Rafferty is almost certain the voice belongs to Captain Teeth, Ton’s enforcer, next to him in the photo from the Garden of Eden. “I’m supposed to be writing a book here. These are my sources, remember? The ones you gave me. The information value of the conversation I just had was zero. Porthip doesn’t like Pan. That sound like a chapter to you?”

“Like I said, not our problem. Make something out of it.”

“I’m beginning to wonder about your competence.”

“You’re beginning-” The other man starts to laugh. “Our competence. I’ll tell you what. We’re competent to make a hole where you and your family used to be. Just do your fucking job. Himself doesn’t like excuses.” The man hangs up.

Rafferty stands there, weak with anger. What he wants to do is phone Arthit and ask his friend to find out whatever he can about Porthip and Ton, but he knows that’s not possible. For the first time since he met Arthit, they might as well be strangers.

Noi, he thinks, with a jolt of despair. He can’t even ask about Noi without feeling like he’s imposing. And he still hasn’t told Rose that Arthit’s afraid Noi is planning to kill herself. It’s almost enough to make Rafferty’s own troubles seem trivial.

Except for Rose and Miaow.

He considers calling Kosit, but the people Arthit fears could obviously erase Kosit from the equation even more easily than they could Arthit, since Kosit is a much more obscure cop than Arthit. The second obvious source of information, newspapers, is also closed to him. He figures it’s not just the Sun where the computers are programmed to let out a squawk every time someone enters Pan’s name. It’s easy to see himself sitting in the empty morgue of some paper, suddenly being joined by Captain Teeth and a couple of lifters who specialize in joint dislocation and eardrum ruptures.

He could say it’s research, of course. He resolves to hold that option for later.

So.

So, he guesses, that makes it time to eat.

He turns idly in the direction that most of the foot traffic is moving in, looking for someplace where he can get a salad or something light. In this heat he’d rather eat a bowling ball than a chunk of meat. He figures he’ll grab a table big enough to write on, clear a space, and go back to work on his list. Maybe start playing with scenarios. He’s long known that he thinks more clearly when he writes, that the act of waiting for his hand to finish forming the words slows his thought processes in a way that opens them up, allows him to see three or four possible alternative paths rather than just the most obvious one.

One problem is that there’s been no time to reflect. This is Thursday, just minutes into P.M. The card game had been Tuesday night, the phone calls and the abduction in front of Miaow’s school had happened on Wednesday morning. Looking back, Wednesday seems a week long: the threats, the abduction, the office suite, leveling with Pan-which he still thinks might have been a mistake, especially in light of what Porthip had to say about him-the meeting with Weecherat and then with Arthit, the encounter at the party with Captain Teeth, the event in Pan’s sparkling garden.

Ton. The snake in the cabinet. Miaow’s terror. The microphones in the apartment.

And today: Learning about Weecherat’s murder. Arthit’s remoteness. The fourth-floor apartment, and then Porthip, the dying man, smelling of mold and bitterness behind his desk.

And almost willfully uncommunicative. Why had he been on the list?

The thought stops Rafferty midstep, and someone passes him, brushing him lightly, as though he or she had sidestepped at the last moment in order to avoid bumping into his back. Rafferty glances up as the person passes, but the question about Porthip claims his attention and leads to another question: What if they’re all like that? And then to a third: Does anyone actually want this book written?

And, if not, what the hell is going on?

But before he can begin to consider that, his consciousness is flooded by a detailed, high-definition visual memory of the person who had brushed past him. The shape of the shoulders, the way he carried himself, the color of his clothes.

The hair.

Rafferty breaks into a run, dodging between people, pushing his way through the crowd and the heat, not seeing anything ahead of him, no one that could be who he thinks it was. An alleyway opens to his right, and he stops.

Alleyways.

If it’s who he thinks it was, if he went into an alley, if he doesn’t want to be found, well…

He won’t be found.

Still, it could have been someone else. It probably was. In Bangkok there must be a thousand people who look like that.

And it doesn’t do Rafferty any good to wonder about it. He needs to get to a table, he needs to start writing. He needs to stop reacting and begin to plan. He needs to solve the problem of Rose and Miaow.

Today it’s flies.

They land on Da’s wrists and hands and ears. They swarm Peep’s face and crawl toward the moisture in the corners of his eyes. He swings his fat little fists back and forth, but seconds after the flies take off, they land again. She hears their buzz even over the noise of the crowd, and that thought straightens her spine.

She’s grown accustomed to the sound of the crowd.

Was it yesterday that it was so deafening?

Was it yesterday that she met that woman across the street, with her skeletal, shining-eyed child? Remembering that the woman and the boy hadn’t been in the van that morning, Da scans the sidewalk across the street and sees her. But the boy’s not with her.

There’s no question that it’s the same woman who’s sitting there: same color blanket, same long, loose hair, same faded denim blouse. But she’s not upright, not up on her knees with her bowl out. She sits hunched over, like someone who’s been kicked in the stomach. And in place of the skeletal child, she holds a bundle, tightly wrapped in a blanket.

A passing schoolchild tosses a sidelong glance at Peep. Da has almost stopped noticing how people avoid her eyes; they look at the baby, they look at the bowl, but they don’t look at her. She is becoming used to this.

Da shakes her head, and Peep stares up at her. She will not become used to this.

A schoolchild, she thinks. Kep may be eating. This is the time he disappears to eat; the woman said so.

After three or four minutes of searching the sidewalk for the awful blue shirt, she gets up. The traffic hurtles by, all gleam and glass and chrome and steel. She has not actually crossed a Bangkok street yet, except when many others were crossing, too, but now she is alone. A big something goes by, and there is enough open air behind it that she grasps Peep so hard he squeals, and then she steps out onto the pavement. Two motorcycles beep at her and split up, one going behind her and the other in front of her, and when the one that went in front of her is gone, there is room enough between cars for her to run into the second lane. She stops as a truck barrels past and a boy sitting on top of it shouts something down, and then she’s in the middle of the street, dripping sweat, watching the traffic come from the other direction. But this time she gets a break, because a bus makes a turn at the corner, stopping all the cars, and she has enough time to crawl across on her hands and knees if she wanted to.

The woman does not look up, not even when Da says, “Hello.”

This close, she can see that the bundle in the woman’s lap is a baby, not much older than Peep. The woman holds it carelessly, as though it were a newspaper or something else that can’t be damaged by letting it roll onto the pavement. The child’s eyes are wide and startled, like the eyes of someone who has just learned that people sometimes hurt each other on purpose.

“Are you all right?” Da asks. She sits back on her heels, village style.

The woman says, “Go away.”

“Kep’s probably eating.”

“Who cares? Go away.” She has not turned her head, not given Da so much as a glance.

“Where’s…um, where’s…” She doesn’t know the name of the missing child.

“Gone. I don’t want to talk about it.” She reaches up and scrubs the palm of her hand fiercely across her cheeks. “Little idiot. He never even learned to button his shirt right.”

“Gone where?” People are pushing past them now as the afternoon rush intensifies, but neither of them pays any attention. Their bowls are on the pavement, forgotten.

“I had to button it every morning. Can you believe that? Seven years old and he couldn’t-” She stops talking abruptly.

“He’s seven? He looks so much younger.”

“They let him starve,” the woman says. “When he was three, his mother knew he was wrong. He didn’t look at things. He didn’t learn. So she fed her other kids, and after a while she pushed him out of the house. He didn’t get enough to eat, so he stayed small.”

“But then how…why did you have him?”

“I took him. Nobody wanted him. He just sat and cried because he was hungry. His mother had three healthy kids and no money; she couldn’t take care of an idiot. I didn’t…I didn’t have any. Children, I mean. When I ran to Bangkok, I brought him with me.”

“I thought they gave him to you.”

“No. I was different.” She passes her sleeve over her face and sniffles. “I told them that people would give more because he was an idiot. I mean, he wasn’t really an idiot, he was…he was just a little…a little, aaahhh, slow. And he was-” She loses her voice for a second and clears her throat. “He was sweet.”

“I don’t understand,” Da says. “He was yours. You mothered him, so he was yours. Where is he? And why do you have this baby?”

“I told you,” the woman says in a tone of pure rage. “I told you not to name yours. They’ll take him. They take all of them. I thought I was safe, because nobody would want him, but I was wrong. I wasn’t making enough money. They said he was too stupid, he was a freak, people didn’t want to see him on the sidewalk. So they took him away from me.”

“Where is he? Why do they take the babies? Where do the babies come from? Can’t you get him back?” The questions are tumbling out, and Da has to pause, get a breath. “Where have they taken him?”

The other woman says, “I don’t know. I’ll never know. Because he’s not…not normal. When they take yours, and they will, they’ll sell him.”

Da feels like she has been punched. “Sell him.”

“Of course, you idiot. What do you think they do with them? Send them to school? Buy them toys on their birthdays? They sell them. They sell them to anyone who wants them, anyone who can afford them. But Tatti-I mean…I mean, the boy-I don’t know what they’ll do with him. No one will see how sweet he is. No one will see that he needs to be loved. They’ll just see an idiot who can’t button his shirt. He’s not worth anything.” She bends forward and begins to weep in earnest, the child on her lap wide-eyed and frightened.

“What can I do to help you?” Da asks, and a heavy hand lands on her shoulder. She looks up to see Kep glowering down at her. His red face proclaims several beers, or possibly whiskey, with his lunch.

“What are you doing here?”

“I…ah, she seemed upset, so-”

“It’s none of your fucking business. You get your ass across that street before I count to ten, or I’ll kick you all the way across it.” He reaches down and grabs Peep, snatching him from her lap and hauling him up by one arm, and Peep starts to scream. Da is up immediately, reaching for Peep, and when Kep is slow to release the boy’s arm, she sinks her nails into the man’s wrist.

He yanks his hand back as she struggles against Peep’s sudden weight. Kep looks in disbelief at the red welts on his skin. “That’s it, you bitch,” he says. “You have no idea what you’re in for. Now get over there.”

With Peep in her arms, she negotiates the traffic, her heart pounding in her throat. She is so shaken she can’t follow what’s happening around her: It’s a series of quick, still, semitransparent pictures as though the world were reflected in a bubble that pops after a moment, and then there’s another bubble inside that, and then that pops, and inside that one…

Then, somehow, she is on the other side of the road. She spreads her blanket and sinks trembling onto it, absently bouncing Peep against her breast to quiet him. To quiet herself. Across the way, the woman holds her bowl up, her arm raised at the awkward angle of someone imploring mercy, her head sharply down. Kep is nowhere in sight.

When she can keep her hands steady, Da takes her bowl and puts it in front of her on the pavement. Upside down.