Breathing Water (17 page)

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 pave
ment. 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.

F
irst, get Rose and Miaow out of the line of fire. Somehow. Second, separate Ton temporarily from his muscle, even if it’s only for personal satisfaction. The muscle is vulnerable, even if Ton isn’t. The muscle can be made to bleed. Third, disappear.

Fourth, work out what they really want.

It can’t actually be a book. The timing doesn’t make sense. If they’re worried about Pan suddenly announcing that he’s running for office, what good is a book going to do? It’ll take months to print and distribute, assuming that Rafferty lives long enough to write it.

Whatever it is, they’ll need it faster than that.

He studies the list of names on the yellow sheets, looking for what they have in common beyond their animus toward Pan. All but two, one of whom was Weecherat, are male. All but three are in business, according to the addresses, which are either in care of a company or are suite numbers in business buildings. He tries to pair the names with the faces he saw at Pan’s party and realizes they are all approximately the same age, in their late fifties or early sixties. Once again Weecherat was an exception. They probably chose her because she’d written unflatteringly about Pan, and, of course, when they’d put her name on the
list, Rafferty hadn’t yet heard the number of the floor Ton’s office was on. They had no way of knowing he’d try to use that information for insurance.

The yellow scarf comes into his mind’s eye, her preoccupation with the drape of the scarf. The way her face had softened when she mentioned her daughter.

He fights down the anger and the guilt and makes notes, just to process the information with both his mind and his hand, to see what links might open up. Doesn’t see a meaning behind the patterns, although there’s an elusive little flicker there somewhere.

His mind keeps wandering into scenarios, based on assumptions about what it is that Ton and his accomplices might really want. He follows one line of plausibility to its end—a bad end—and backs up and starts over. This time, with slightly different variables, the process takes him to a different end, different but still bad. Start again, factor in a new initiative on his part, and this time the ending is, to view it charitably, ambiguous. Maybe ambiguous is the best he can hope for. Maybe ambiguous should sound good to him.

The tuna salad in front of him has warmed to room temperature as the restaurant has filled and then emptied around him. Now the waitresses straighten the room, squaring the chairs and dusting the seats, laying down new linen, folding napkins and wiping their fingerprints off clean glasses, joking and talking quietly, and glancing over at him from time to time. They notice that he seems to be completely unaware of them, just staring through the window and sometimes making a note in the little notebook in front of him.

And he’s cute, one of them says. Is he part Thai?
Hasip-hasip
, fifty-fifty? After a whispered conversation at the far end of the room, the boldest of them takes the matter in hand.

“Have problem?” she says.

Rafferty almost jumps out of his seat. He had no idea anyone was near, much less standing at his elbow. He looks up to see a girl of seventeen or eighteen, cute in a baby-puffy way, wearing the kind of accessories that girls her age in the United States would either scorn as cluelessly uncool or embrace as post-retro irony: Hello Kitty earrings, little butterfly hair clips, a long curved comb at the back of her head, decorated with a row of hearts, to pull the long black hair out of the way.

“Just thinking,” Rafferty says, ripping himself, with a certain amount of relief, out of the latest lethal scenario. “Sometimes thinking is the only thing I know how to do.”

“Food not okay?”

He’s forgotten about the food. He has to look down at it. “It’s fine.”

“How you know?”

“Excuse me?”

“You no eat.” Just a ghost of a smile to acknowledge that she won the exchange, and then it evaporates.

“I thought I was hungry, but I wasn’t.”

She opens a graceful hand, palm up, slightly curled fingertips a few inches from the plate. “You want I take?”

“Sure. Thanks. Sorry to waste it.”

“Not waste,” she says. “Can give to kid. You know? Some kid not have eat.” She raises the fingertips to her mouth, looking uncertain. “Boss not know.”

“Don’t worry. I won’t tell him.” This girl, and others like her, had helped Miaow survive, sometimes with their boss’s knowledge and sometimes without, when she was on the street.

When she was being protected by—

The vision of the boy who pushed past him on the sidewalk is suddenly in his mind again. And it brings with it a jumbled confusion of impressions and emotions: kindness and violence, hope and disappointment, failure. Mostly, and most deeply, failure. A failure he has hoped a thousand times to be able to rectify. He has prayed for a chance to rectify it.

But he looks at everything he’s facing at the moment, at the danger and the isolation, and his only thought is,
Please, not now
.

THE BOY DOESN’T
come.

Da sits there, the inverted red bowl as conspicuous to her as a fire on the sidewalk, terrified that Kep will suddenly materialize, swearing at her, threatening her. Maybe snatching Peep away from her.

She constantly scans the crowd for the blue shirt. Twice she glimpses blue and grabs the bowl and holds it upright, but it’s someone else both times. Someone who doesn’t look anything like Kep.

She thinks,
I could get up and walk away myself.

And go where?
says a voice in her head.
And do what? You couldn’t take care of yourself before, when you were alone. And now look at you, you’re stuck with a baby. And you’re waiting for this boy? You don’t even know anything about him
.

“I do too,” Da says aloud, without realizing it. “I saw him disappear.” One minute he had been there, and an instant later he wasn’t. She had recognized it then. This place was his forest, just as the land around her village had been her forest. She’d grown up there, gotten into danger there, escaped it there. She’d known where to go, how to live there, what was safe and what wasn’t. If someone had been lost there, Da would have been the person to trust.

Trust
, the voice says.
Why do you think you can trust him?

Da thinks, Because his face was clean. Because his clothes were dirty but his face was scrubbed. There was something about him that said he was more than he seemed to be. And because she believes that she can sometimes see things in people that are invisible to others.

Blue down the sidewalk. She grabs her bowl and turns it upright. As she watches Kep stride down the sidewalk, she pulls the coins from her pocket and drops them inside. Looking away, as though she doesn’t know he’s coming to get her, she raises the bowl.

RAFFERTY CLAPS HIS
hands twice. With the floor covered by the cheap, worn rug, taken from a dusty room full of stuff that tenants have abandoned over the years, and with blankets tacked to two walls to create a soft corner, the sound of the clap dies immediately. The sheets hung over the windows soak up the echoes, too. When he’d started putting the pieces together, two hours ago, the sound had reverberated with a
spang
like a gunshot in a tunnel. The acoustic revisions were made between trips to the eighth floor every seven or eight minutes to make some noise for the microphones until Rose and Miaow came home, but for the past ninety minutes he’s been able to stay on the fourth floor. He’s finished making the place functional with a chipped and splintered coffee table flanked by two rattan chairs adopted from the leave-behind room, one of which sags drunkenly to the right, and a wooden stool, painted apple green, with a crack running down the center of the
seat that widens when it’s sat on and snaps back closed again quickly enough to pinch the sitter’s bottom.

Pinch or not, this is better. This will work.

His watch says 4:50. Miaow had been sulky when she peeked into the fourth-floor apartment on her way up, practically rolling her eyes at Rafferty’s efforts. For all Rafferty knows, she and Rose are planning her new life, her life as Mia, right now. Father of the year, he thinks, not even realizing that his newly introverted daughter is going through a crisis. When he finds his way out of this mess, he’s going to rethink this whole fatherhood thing. He’s obviously not doing it right. He knows
nothing
about little girls. And his own father, who abandoned the family when Rafferty was seventeen, didn’t provide much in the way of a paternal role model. But he’ll do better.

It’s comforting to look forward to a time when he can focus on being a better father. When Miaow’s problems will be as important to him as they are to her.

“Looks great,” someone says. “You’ve got a real eye for decoration.”

Rafferty turns to see Lieutenant Kosit leaning against the edge of the doorway. He is in street clothes, and looped over his thick fingers is the handle of a fancy plastic shopping bag from an electronics shop on Silom.

“I think the blankets provide a kind of unexpected élan,” Rafferty says. “Who would ever have believed those colors would go together?”

Kosit says, “No one.” He holds out the bag. “You owe me seven thousand baht.”

“Jesus. I’m not using it for opera.”

“You needed some way to jack it into your speakers, right? Well, that’s where they get you. Connectors. That’s where they got
you
, anyway.” He fishes out a receipt and flaps it in Rafferty’s direction. “See? Connectors, twenty-three hundred baht.”

“How about we forget the money and I come over and redecorate your apartment?”

Kosit looks around the room with great interest. “Sure. I have a cute little French maid’s outfit, all black and white with ruffles. I haven’t been able to talk anyone into wearing it.”

Rafferty says, “Will you take a check?”

IN THE ELEVATOR
Rafferty says, “Seen much of Arthit?”

“Nobody has. He’s like the Ghost of the Station. You see him around corners once in a while, but by the time you get there, he’s disappeared.”

Rafferty sags against the wall. “Hell.”

“What’s wrong?” Kosit asks. “You two are close. I tried to ask him what was going on, and he practically bit my nose off.”

“Problems of some kind. He won’t talk to me either.”

“Must be bad, then. You guys are like a pair of gloves.”

“It’s bad. Listen, do whatever you can, okay? Even if he acts like you’re imposing and he’d be happy if you fell off the edge of the earth, just sort of take his temperature every so often. He may need help any time, and you know him. He’d rather die than ask for it.”

“I know. I mean,
I’m
a guy, but he takes it to ridiculous lengths.”

The elevator stops. Before the doors open, Rafferty says, “Remember, don’t say anything inside.”

Kosit nods and claps a hand to his mouth, and Rafferty crosses the hall and opens the door.

Rose and Miaow are in the living room. A heavy, unmistakably toxic chemical odor punches him in the nose. Miaow is sitting on the hassock with a towel over her shoulders and something slick and gleaming—vegetable oil or petroleum jelly, maybe—spread over her forehead and cheeks. She’s as shiny as a potato bug. Rose, who has a mouth full of Q-tips, is wearing rubber gloves and combing something viscous through Miaow’s thick hair, which has been parted even more ruler-straight than usual. His daughter doesn’t meet his eyes, but she registers Kosit behind him and slams her lids shut as though that could make both men disappear.

Rose says around the Q-tips, “Don’t distract me. Whatever you want in the kitchen, you know how to find it.”

“Yes, I love you, too. I think it’s time for a beer.” He gives Kosit raised eyebrows and gets a nod, so Rafferty goes into the kitchen, the bullet holes in the linoleum and the cabinet looking as big as lunar craters, and pops the refrigerator door. “Which do I want?” he asks aloud. “Singha,” he says, holding up one finger, “or Tiger?” He holds up another.

Kosit gives him two fingers back, so Rafferty pulls a Singha for
himself and a Tiger for Kosit. “And does my brusque little honey want anything?”

“Half an hour without being asked what I want.”

“This is wonderful,” Rafferty says, uncapping the beers. “We’ve reached the point in our relationship where we no longer have to be careful of each other’s feelings. We’re finally finished with all that tiptoeing around the real issues, all those secret resentments.” He hands Kosit his bottle and takes a haul off his own. “Our long national nightmare is over at last.”

Rose pulls a couple of Q-tips from her mouth and uses them to wipe carefully at Miaow’s hairline and then, with the other end, the curl of her ear. “Go away. Go in the other room. This is girl business.”

“If you want me—”

“I won’t,” Rose says.

“—you know where to find me. Just hovering aimlessly at the end of an invisible thread, putting my entire life on hold while I wait to see how I can be of service.”

Miaow says, “
Poke
,” in a tone that practically takes the paint off the walls.

“I guess it’s unanimous. Okay,” he says to Kosit, “the bedroom it is.”

The two of them sit on the bed and drink. Rafferty slides open the headboard and grabs a wad of baht. He counts out seven one-thousand-baht notes and hands them to Kosit. Kosit pulls out the receipt again and puts it on the bed, smoothing it with the side of his hand, to show that it’s actually for sixty-eight hundred. Then he fishes around in his pockets until he comes out with a sweat-damp clump of smaller bills, which he pries apart with blunt, tobacco-yellow fingers. He hands Rafferty a salad of twenties and fifties and a couple of coins. While Rafferty drops the money uncounted into the compartment in the headboard, Kosit probes his shirt pocket and pulls out a crumpled pack of Marlboros, undoubtedly Korean street fakes, and wiggles his eyebrows in interrogative mode. Rafferty reaches down to the floor on Rose’s side of the bed and comes up with the swimming-pool-size ashtray she uses at night. Kosit looks at it so gratefully that Rafferty thinks he might take a bite out of it, but instead he shakes a bent cigarette free and lights up. His face assumes an expression of such relief that Rafferty toys with the idea of lighting one himself, but he muscles it aside. The two
men sit in companionable silence in the middle of a miasma of smoke, sipping their beers, while feminine mysteries unfold unwitnessed in the living room.