Breathing Water (22 page)

He kicks off his shoes just inside the front door and pads through the silent living room, smelling the lemon scent of the spray wax Noi uses anywhere there’s a square foot of exposed wood. Without slowing down, he drops the Keaton DVD, still in its plastic bag, next to the cascade of unopened mail on the dining-room table, and goes through the nook and into the kitchen. As he comes into the warm, yellow room, as he unbuckles his gun belt and puts it on the table, his stockinged foot hits something slippery, and he looks down at the floor to see a spill of flour.

His heart literally stops.

Then it kicks itself back into life with tremendous force, and he stands there with it thumping in his ears, staring down at a sifting of flour across the tile, as clean and innocent as a dusting of snow.

Feeling like a man walking against a stiff wind, Arthit forces himself across the kitchen and into the hallway, where he stops, two steps in, and looks at the envelope taped to the closed bedroom door.

T
he tail is wearing a yellow shirt.

He’s been back there for blocks now. Rafferty has glimpsed him three times as he did experimental zigzags between boulevards and
sois
. He thinks it might be time to get a look at his shadow’s face, for future reference.

The office building is unremarkable, neither new nor old, certainly not architecturally distinctive, and there’s not a soul in it Rafferty knows. He enters the lobby anyway, walking with the brisk purpose of someone who actually has a destination. Without looking around, he pushes the call button for the elevator and waits. When it comes, he turns to face front as he punches the button for the sixth floor. He doesn’t see the yellow shirt as the doors close.

He gets off on the sixth floor, trots down a couple of flights on the fire stairs, and hits the button for the elevator again. He rides it down to the underground parking garage, which opens not onto Silom but onto a small cross street. Up the slope of the exit ramp and then a quick right, away from Silom. A short jog brings him to an alley, which he takes to the next little
soi
, one that will lead him back down to Silom.
He crosses it and takes it to Silom, then crosses that and waits on the sidewalk, watching the building he just went into.

Looking for someone else who’s watching it.

And almost misses him, because he’s looking for yellow, and what he finally sees is navy blue, a dark T-shirt that says
BAJA CALIFORNIA
on it. The man in blue is short but broad-shouldered, with medium-length hair that’s been parted in the middle and then gooped with mousse to make it fall in spiky curls over his forehead. A small soul patch clings to his lower lip with all the uncertainty of a misplaced comma.

No yellow shirt. Is he being double-teamed?

Rafferty watches for a few more minutes, just to make certain that Yellow Shirt isn’t around, then turns and follows the flow on the sidewalk until he gets to a recessed doorway, leading into a shop that sells fantasy underwear. Rose laughed out loud at the display window once, although Rafferty still sneaks a look at it now and then.

He punches a number into his cell, waits a moment, and then says, “Floyd. It’s Poke. I need a favor.”

“Why am I not surprised?” says Floyd Preece.

“It’s not a conventional favor, Floyd. There’s money in it.” He looks down the street and doesn’t see either the blue shirt or the yellow one. Blue Shirt worries him a little, because he’d gone unnoticed the whole time Rafferty was isolating Mr. Yellow. The last thing he needs right now is to be followed by someone with real skills.

“How much?” Floyd Preece is a freelance journalist hanging on in Bangkok by his badly chewed fingernails. He’s a first-class investigative reporter, but his talent is significantly outweighed by an avid enthusiasm for controlled substances and a total lack of interpersonal skills. Preece has never crossed a bridge he didn’t burn behind him, and he’s now living in a thin-towel, short-time hotel and maybe six months away from having to teach English, which is the wrong end of the rainbow altogether. Nobody in Bangkok will work with him, but he’s got the gifts Rafferty needs right now.

“If you get me what I want, five hundred U.S. If you don’t, two-fifty for trying.”

“Sounds low.”

“You don’t even know what it is yet.”

“Still sounds low.” There is a pause and the scraping of one of the
wooden matches Preece favors, and Rafferty listens to the man suck a cigar into life. “You landed the whale, didn’t you? Mr. Pick His Nose in Public himself. Got to be a big fat advance there. How much did you get?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t checked. Okay, a thousand if you get it, five hundred if you don’t, and if that’s not enough, I’ve got other numbers in my speed dial.”

“I’ll need the five up front.” Another big, wet inhale, followed by a muted cough.

“You’ll get half of it, later tonight or tomorrow morning. I’ll call and tell you where we can meet. Have you got a pencil?”

“Sure. But I need—”

“I don’t care what you need, what you’re getting is two-fifty up front. Now, take this down and get it right, okay? I haven’t got time to repeat it.” Up the street, maybe two-thirds of a block away, he catches a glimpse of the yellow shirt. He backs farther into the doorway and gives Preece the dates and details of the fires. “I’m most interested in the slum fire where there were fatalities and in the factory.”

“This for the book?”

“That doesn’t concern you—”

“—’cause if it is, you’re really pitching me low.”

“Yes or no, Floyd? Before I count to three. One…two…”

“Okay, okay. Jeez. I thought we were friends.”

Rafferty says, “You did? Well, good, then this will clarify things. What I want is everything you can get, but especially this: Who built the new buildings on the sites of the slums that burned, and who owned the factory? Both before and after the fire, if there was enough of it left to sell.” The yellow shirt is gone again.

“I remember it,” Preece said. “Went out there, tried to get some pix to sell. Brought along a stuffed bunny, put it on the dirt in the foreground, and shot past it. Used a wide-angle for depth of field. Like irony, you know? Building was solid concrete. Not much damage, except to the stuff inside. And the people, of course.”

“Right, the people.”

“If it turns out the fire has anything to do with your guy, you should look at these pix. I’d let you have a couple for the right price. Great story angle, you know? Up from the flames and all that.”

“Listen, I also want to know if anyone died in either of those fires who shouldn’t have been there. Somebody with some rank, somebody who didn’t belong.”

“Got it.”

“Tell you what,” Rafferty says, feeling a prickle of guilt. Preece is almost at the stage where he’ll have to start reusing toothpicks. “We’ll make this a sliding scale. I’ll pay you the thousand if you get me the basics. Anything past that, I’ll pay you more, up to a total of twenty-five hundred.”

“Why?” Preece’s voice is sharpened by suspicion.

“Because we’re friends. And because I’m in a hurry. I need this like day after tomorrow at the latest, but call me anytime you get anything good. And, Floyd. Be a little careful, okay?”

“Oh, come on.” Another draw on the cigar. “Bangkok is my beat.”

“Fine. But keep your eyes open.” Rafferty disconnects.

At the edge of the doorway, he looks back up the street. No followers he can identify. He turns to continue in the direction he’d been going in, and there’s Mr. Yellow, flanked by two others. Both of the others are wearing suit jackets, and their hands are thrust into their jacket pockets.

“You haven’t been good,” says the man in yellow.

“Do we know each other?” Rafferty asks.

“Good question,” the man in yellow says. “You know how a scientist looks at a bug? He gets to know the bug pretty well, but does the bug know him?”

“Shoot me,” Rafferty says, “but spare me the metaphors.”

“Come on. We’ve got to talk. You walk next to me, okay? And Mr. Left and Mr. Right will follow us so they can shoot you and disappear quickly if they have to.” He puts a hand on Rafferty’s arm, which Rafferty shrugs off, but to no effect—the man grabs him again.

Rafferty says, “I am so fucking sick of this.”

“You’ve been making me look bad,” the man says. He’s average height for a Thai, maybe five foot nine, a little meaty, with a receding hairline that gives him a thinker’s forehead. A pair of round, black, resolutely opaque sunglasses straddles a shapeless, fleshy nose. A few hairs straggle despairingly across his upper lip as though they’ve slowed to wait for the others to catch up.

“Hard to believe anyone could make you look bad,” Rafferty says. “Where are we going?”

“Right here.” The man opens the door to a large black SUV that Rafferty recognizes, his stomach clenching like a fist, as the one that had been idling in front of Pan’s Mesopotamian wall. “Get in,” Yellow Shirt says, holding wide the rear door.

“I’d rather not.”

“Okay, then, we’ll kill you.”

“And if I get in?”

The man in the yellow shirt smiles. “Wait and see.”

Rafferty climbs up onto the step that will take him into the SUV’s backseat, and his cell phone vibrates in his pocket. “Hold it,” he says, pulling it out.

The man’s hand is immediately on Rafferty’s wrist. “Put that back. Now.”

The readout says
ARTHIT
.

“Whoever it is,” the man in the yellow shirt says, “you can talk to him later.” And he plucks the phone out of Rafferty’s hand. It’s a very fast, very precise move.

Rafferty says, “Hey,” but someone pushes him hard, between the shoulder blades, and he lurches face-first through the door, cracking his shins on the second step. He lands on the leather backseat and is pushing himself up when the man in the yellow shirt, who is now in the front seat, points a small silvery automatic at him over the seat back.

“Just sit up,” he says. Rafferty sees his own face reflected in the dark glasses. He looks frightened. “In the middle. Don’t do anything stupid.”

Rafferty does as he’s told, and seconds later Mr. Left and Mr. Right climb into the car on either side of him. For a moment they sit there in silence, and Rafferty listens to the engine ticking as it cools. The tinted windows make them invisible from the sidewalk, but he doesn’t think they’d have shut down the engine if the plan called for them to shove a dead man out of the car and peel off into traffic.

“You’re not taking us seriously,” says Yellow Shirt. He looks at the phone. “Who’s Arthit?”

“A friend.”

“If he’s a friend, he’ll wait. I’m running out of patience with you. We
called to tell you not to write the book. We did that little show outside Pan’s place. But here you are, running around and talking to people. As I said, it makes me look bad. So here we are again.” He waits.

Rafferty feels like the slowest person in the car. It hadn’t occurred to him that he was dealing with the other side. He’d half figured that the ones who warned him away from the book had been Pan’s guys, despite Pan’s denial, and that they’d be put on hold after he and Pan had their little talk. “What do you want me to say?” he asks.

“Nothing. And I want you to
do
nothing, and I mean nothing. No more meetings, no more conversations, no more research. This is the third time we’ve had to interact. The fourth time you’ll die. Understand?”

“Yes.”

“Are you right-handed or left?”

There is no way to know how to answer this question. Rafferty makes a blind choice. “Left.”

“See how you are?” Yellow Shirt says sadly. “I’ve been
watching
you, remember? Look at this gun.” He lifts it from the seat back and moves it slowly to Rafferty’s right. Rafferty is tracking it with his eyes, watching the light through the front windshield glint off the barrel, when Mr. Left shifts his weight, and then something cracks down onto the muscle between Rafferty’s neck and his left shoulder. His arm goes numb, and as his head jerks toward Mr. Left and he registers the blackjack in the man’s hand, the same thing happens to his right shoulder.

He makes a sound that’s all
U
’s and
H
’s, a sound someone might make as a bull plows into his midsection, and he realizes he can barely lift his arms. Through the roaring in his ears, he hears Yellow Shirt.

“You’re right-handed, and you should have realized I’d know it. But to show you that we can get along if you’ll drop the project, we’ll leave your right hand alone.”

As though from a spot four or five feet above his own head, Rafferty watches his limp, numb left hand as Mr. Left picks it up and puts it on the back of the front seat. He holds it there as Mr. Right brings his blackjack up and then
down
onto the intricate latticework of bones in the back of the hand, and Rafferty’s scream tears his throat ragged.

“You should see a doctor,” Yellow Shirt says. “Probably a couple of fractures, and hands need to be looked at fast.” He waves the gun back
and forth again. “This will take hours to treat. You’ll be out of circulation for the rest of the day, and then you’re going to stop, right? I’m going to tell my principal that you’re quitting, and you’re not going to make me look bad again.”

“No,” Rafferty says, through a windpipe that feels narrower than a pencil. “I mean, yes. I’m quitting.”

Yellow Shirt nods. “Good, good. You can get out now. Wasn’t this better than getting shot?” He leans over the seat and drops the cell phone into Rafferty’s shirt pocket. “You can call your friend back,” he says. “Although it may be a while before you can dial.”

T
his is for
teeth
,” Dr. Pumchang says. From the speaker in the corner of the room, the Carpenters are singing “Rainy Days and Mondays,” a song Rafferty had hoped never to hear again.

“It’ll do,” Rafferty says, between jaws tight enough to have been wired together. “I just need to know whether it’s broken.”

He sits with his left hand throbbing in a steel bowl of ice water while his dentist, with doubt animating every muscle in her face, lines up small pieces of dental X-ray film to create a rectangular area a little bigger than Rafferty’s hand. Out in the waiting room are the pumpkin-colored chairs where he and Elora Weecherat had talked.

“The machine can only photograph a small area at a time,” Dr. Pumchang says. “I’m going to have to take a dozen pictures. Why can’t you be like everyone else and go see a real doctor?”

“It’s not like I play the piano,” Rafferty says, and then grabs a breath and holds it as the nerves in his arm stand up and do the wave to pass a burst of pain along to the part of his brain that keeps track of such things. When he can talk, he says, “I use this hand mainly to comb my hair.”

“How did this happen?” Dr. Pumchang puts the last piece of film in place and studies the quiltlike rectangle she has created. With a long, meticulously lacquered fingernail, she pushes one edge piece half a millimeter toward the center. The picture painted on the nail is Hokusai’s famous ocean wave.

“I closed a car door on it.”

Dr. Pumchang makes a noise Rafferty’s mother would have called a raspberry. “Single point of impact,” she says. “Not a straight line of force, like a car door. No abrasions, no broken skin. If you’re not going to tell me the truth, don’t tell me anything.”

“Fine,” Rafferty says. “Don’t ask me questions.”

“What it
looks
like,” she says, “is that someone slammed it with something small and heavy.”

“That’s what it looks like, huh?”

“Dry your hand,” she says. Her lips are drawn so tight that they’ve practically disappeared.

He takes the towel and very gently pats the hand dry.

“Flap it around. Let the air get to it. Get it dry.”

“The film gets wet in my mouth. How come it can’t get wet now?”

“Just listen to the nice music and do what I say. Or go see a hand doctor.”

“Nobody listens to the Carpenters anymore.”

“I do.”

“Probably cheaper than anesthetic.”

Dr. Pumchang pulls the X-ray unit toward him. “Put the hand down carefully, fingers as close together as you can get them, palm flat, if you can do it, and
don’t mess up my film
. If you move the pieces around, I’ll have to do the whole thing over again, and I’ll probably think better of it.”

“So much for bedside manner,” Rafferty says, lowering his palm carefully onto the pieces of film and hoping she doesn’t notice how they spread out beneath his hand.

“Just be quiet and hold still.” She positions the lens over the center of his wrist, leaves the room, and Rafferty hears a short buzz. Then she comes back in and moves the lens a couple of inches. “I really don’t know why I’m doing this.”

“Because you’re a good Buddhist.”

“Don’t push it.” She leaves again, and Rafferty hears the buzz again. “By the time we finish this,” she says, coming back into the room, “you’ll probably be sterile.”

“OKAY,” DR. PUMCHANG
says, “what you’ve got is two fractures. Second and third metacarpals.” She is peering at the pieces of film, which she’s joined together with transparent tape and clipped onto a light box. “They’re pressure breaks, like you’d get if you bit down too hard on a chicken bone. Can you visualize that?”

This was exactly what Rafferty hadn’t wanted to hear. “All too vividly.”

“The good news is that almost all the pieces are in place. In other words, the splinters are right where they should be. More or less. Properly cared for, the bones should knit without any real lasting damage.”

“And what constitutes ‘properly cared for’?”

“A splint, then a cast, a month or so of not using it.” She looks over at him. “Say something so I know you’re listening to me.”

“Okay. I’m listening to you. Here’s what I want you to do: I want you to take the case this awful Carpenters CD came in, and I’ll put my palm on it with my fingers jammed together, and you just tape the hell out of it. That way I’ll be back on the street in about ten minutes.”

“This is your
hand
,” Dr. Pumchang says. “You’ve only got two of them. You’re risking severely impaired function. How would you like not to be able to bend your fingers?”

“For how long?”

“For the rest of your life.”

“Oh.”

“In the best prognosis, you might be able to use it as a Ping-Pong paddle.”

“Well, then,” Rafferty says, “you’d better tape it really well.”

DOWN ON THE
street, it takes him three one-handed tries to bring up “recent calls” on his cell phone and press the “connect” button to dial Arthit. He puts the phone to his ear, looking down at the white adhesive-taped rectangle of his left hand, and waits.

“Hello,” says someone who is not Arthit.

The hair on the back of Rafferty’s neck stands on end. The tone is recognizable the world around. “Is Arthit there?”

Not-Arthit says, “Who is this?”

“I’ll call him back.” Rafferty folds the phone one-handed and puts it into his shirt pocket. There’s no question in his mind that Arthit’s phone has just been answered by a police officer. Immediately his phone starts to ring. He doesn’t even have to look at the readout to know it’s the cops, calling him back.