Breathing Water (26 page)

R
afferty says, “I like the hair.”

Miaow says, “Really? You’re not just trying to make me feel better? You don’t think it looks dumb? And fake?”

Rose says in Thai, “It’s very stylish. It’s not supposed to look real, Miaow, not any more than lipstick is. And it catches the light well. Lots of highlights.”

“Honest? I mean, you really think so? Do you think the kids at school will, um…?”

“If they don’t like it,” Rafferty says, “it’ll just be because they’re envious.”

“Oh, come on,” Miaow says.

Rose says, “It makes you look older.”

The morning light pours in through the sliding door to the balcony, bouncing off the glass top of the coffee table to create a rectangle of sunlight on the ceiling. Other than the sunlight, nothing in the apartment is moving. The small tape recorder is hooked up, via its expensive connectors, to Rafferty’s amplifier, and the voices come out of the bookshelf speakers on either side of the empty room.

Down on the fourth floor, Rose says, in person, “This is ridiculous. It’s way too big.”

She is wearing a gray uniform jacket and matching slacks. The slacks have a black stripe down each side. Under the jacket are a white shirt and a black clip-on tie. Her shoes are cheap black lace-ups with rubber soles.

“Hair down inside your shirt,” Rafferty says. “All of it. Tie it back with a rubber band or something.”

“So? Everything will still be too big.” She pulls at the waistband of the pants. “I’m swimming in it.”

“Don’t worry, you won’t be.” Rafferty goes behind her and tries to gather her hair between his hands but gives up immediately. “Two-hand job,” he says. “I’m disqualified.”

“Do you actually think this will work?” She has tugged the back of the shirt away from her neck and is stuffing hair down inside it. “I look like a clown.”

“It’ll happen fast,” he says, “and we’ll set it up. Like a bluff in poker. They’ll see what we want them to see. They’ll hear a male voice just before they see you. They’ll put it together themselves and see a man for the three or four seconds you’re visible. And don’t forget, there will be other stuff going on.”

“But why is everything so big? Did Kosit get the wrong size?”

“No. You and Miaow each have three shirts, two pairs of pants, an extra pair of shoes, a couple of towels, and the other stuff on the list, right?”

“I put it together myself.”

“And you brought the wide scarf I took out of your closet.”

“It’s a shawl,” she says, “and yes, I have it, although I can’t imagine where I’m going to wear a cashmere shawl when I’m supposed to be running for my life.”

“You’re going to wear it under your shirt, tied around your middle. With all those extra clothes inside it. You’re going to be a guy with a gut. And the uniform will fit once you’ve got your belly on.”

She gives the collar a tug and puts on the cap. “So?” she says. “Is it me?”

“Tilt the cap back a little bit to close the gap between it and the collar.”

Rose uses both hands to reset the cap, being careful not to allow any hair to fall out of it. “Maybe I should just cut it off.”

“It’ll be fine. We’ll bobby-pin the cap so it can’t slip.”

“Listen to you,” she says. “I married a hairdresser.”

“You wish.”

“Poor Arthit,” Rose says. “How will he get by? She was the only thing he loved in the world.”

“I have to find him,” Rafferty says.

“Let him lick his wounds. He’s not someone who asks for help.”

“No, but that doesn’t mean I don’t want to give him some. And I have to see whether there’s any way I can get him out of this jam with Thanom. Especially since it’s basically my fault.”

His cell phone rings. “Put the shawl on the table and put the stuff on it,” he says. “Try to get it even. You don’t want a lumpy stomach.” He opens the phone and says, “Yeah?”

“Snakeskin Industries,” Floyd Preece says. “Am I good or what?”

“I don’t know, Floyd. What’s Snakeskin Industries?”

“A
snakeskin
. It’s something that’s empty when it’s left behind. It’s the company that owned the factory that burned down, the one that made Buffy the Bunny, remember?”

“I remember. But I also remember, from reading the newspapers, that it
was
empty—it was a holding company that was held by another holding company, and nobody could identify any of the officers.”

“Yeah, well, Snakeskin didn’t own it when it burned down.”

“I’m not following you. You just said—”

“You’re right about the cops; they couldn’t find anything about the company that owned the place when the fire happened. The American corporation that made the bunnies or whatever they were leased the place, and the company they leased it from was a system of double and triple blinds. But eighteen months later the factory, the shell of it anyway, was sold, and the company it was sold to, the company that sold it a second time, was Snakeskin Industries.”

“I guess that’s interesting. Sort of.”

“Oh, it’s interesting,” Preece says. “Because of who Snakeskin sold it to.”

Rafferty waits for a second or two and then says, “This is an irritating pause.”

“They sold it to Pan.”

Rafferty watches Rose pile Miaow’s and her things in even layers as he thinks. “You’re right,” he says, “that qualifies as interesting. It’ll be even more interesting if you know who owns Snakeskin.”

“I don’t know who the Thai principal is, but a special permit was issued to Snakeskin Industries to operate in Thailand under partial foreign ownership.”

“Foreign as in?”

“As in a guy named Tatsuya Kanazawa. And, as you might guess from the name, old Tatsuya isn’t Thai.”

“Japanese,” Rafferty says, and a little jolt of electricity fizzes through him. “Is he—did you read anything about him being yakuza?”

“No,” Preece says patiently. “But it’s still morning.”

“And there was nothing on the other partner, the Thai partner?”

“No again. But Tatsuya’s part owner of another business in Bangkok, too.”

“Let me guess,” Rafferty says. “Steel.”

“Awwwww,” Preece says. “Tell me you didn’t already know all this.”

“You’ve done great, Floyd.”

“Money,” Preece says. “You were supposed to give me some last night.”

“I’ll call you later and let you know where to meet me.”

“You’d better,” Preece says. “Or I won’t tell you the rest of it.” He hangs up.

“I don’t know about this,” Rose says, looking down at the strata of stuff she’s spread over the shawl.

“Don’t worry about it,” Rafferty says. “You’re going to be a great-looking fat guy.”

“
IT’S HOT DOWN
here,” says the man who’s been assigned to Rose. “Gotta be thirty-one, thirty-two degrees.”

“You’re breaking my heart,” Captain Teeth says on the other end of the phone.

“All I’m saying, why can’t we take turns? One of us goes to get cool for a few minutes, then comes back and—”

“Not the plan,” Captain Teeth says. “The man wants everybody on the job.”

“Well, what are they doing? Does it sound like they’re coming out or what?”

“They’re sitting around talking about hair color.”

“Must be the little girl. She had it dyed red a day or two ago.”

“Apparently it looks great,” Captain Teeth says. “Stay where you are.” He closes the phone and drops it onto the console.

Out on the street in front of Rafferty’s apartment house, the man who’s been assigned to Rose watches a few street kids float by. Five or six of them. They’ve been up and down the street a couple of times, just straggling along, peering through the windows of parked cars and generally looking for trouble. One of them had asked him for money, and the man had shown the kids the back of his hand and told them to beat it. But they were back.

If he had his way, the man who’s been assigned to Rose thinks, they’d all be rounded up and put in jail. Little animals. They invade neighborhood after neighborhood, looking for pockets to pick, things to steal. Give
real
crooks a bad name. Lock them all in a cage, drop the key in the river, and drop the cage on top of it. Or do like they did in that Japanese movie, whatever it was called—
Battle Royale
, that was it—and strand them on an island and force them to kill one another until only one’s left. And then write a new ending and kill the one who’s left.

At the corner the kids turn around and drift back aimlessly, and suddenly one of the kids at the rear of the pack lets out a scream of warning, and about ten new kids round the corner at a run. The gang the man has been watching breaks into a full-out sprint with the others in pursuit. The ones in front look terrified. Two of the bigger boys in the group that’s chasing them are waving something that look like ax handles. They chase the smaller group like a pack of wild dogs.

The man settles back in his doorway to enjoy the show. The kids in front make a rapid turn to their right, as tightly knit as a flock of swallows, and disappear down the ramp into the garage beneath the apartment house. The other group, the larger group, follows.

A man in the garage bellows in Thai, “Out! Get out!” and a second later the kids erupt onto the street again, the groups mixed now into a single cloud of children, and there’s another deep shout, and a tall,
fat guard in uniform runs out of the garage behind them, brandishing a billy club. The kids pick up the pace, and five or six seconds later they’ve all vanished around the corner, the guard in pursuit.

The man who’s been assigned to Rose realizes he’s stepped out into the sunlight to watch the spectacle, and he retreats back into the shade. For a few seconds, it occurs to him, he was so interested he hadn’t given a thought to how hot it is.

IN THE GARAGE
, Rafferty puts his unbandaged hand up to the spot on his cheek where Miaow kissed him just before she joined the swarm of kids and charged up to the street, her ragged clothes fluttering as she ran. The sight produced a surprising pang. When he first met her, she’d been running with kids just like these.

He goes to the elevator and pushes the button for the fourth floor. Time for Part Two.

S
unlight as thin and unsatisfying as gruel, not even intense enough to throw shadows. The phone at Rafferty’s ear is slick with sweat, an aftereffect of Rose and Miaow’s escape.

“He’s not in,” says Porthip’s secretary.

“When will he
be
in?” The floor he spent so much time cleaning has gotten gritty again, and he drags his feet over it, enjoying the sound.

“I have no idea.”

Just for the hell of it, he kicks the stool that’s pinched his butt so many times and watches it topple over onto its side. He doesn’t think he’ll ever have to see it again, and he won’t miss it. “Is that usual?” he asks. “That you’d have no idea when he’ll be in?”

“No,” she says. “When he gets in touch with me, would you like me to tell him what this concerns?”

“He’ll know what it concerns,” Rafferty says. “Can’t
you
get in touch with
him
?”

The woman does not reply for a moment, and then she says, “No.”

“Really. Is
that
usual?”

“Oh, well,” she says. “It’ll be in the paper tomorrow anyway. He’s in the hospital.”

“Which one?”

“I can’t tell you that.”

“Sure you can.” He looks at his watch. About forty minutes more on the tape that’s running upstairs. He’ll have to go up, do his stuff in the apartment, and put in the next cassette. “Anyway, there’s only one hospital he’d go to.”

“Really,” she says neutrally.

“Sure. Bumrungrad.”

There’s a short pause, and she says, “Well, that’ll be in the paper, too. But before you get smug, Bumrungrad’s a very big hospital.”

“Right,” Rafferty says. “I’ll never manage to find him.”

He hangs up and calls Kosit.

“OUT OF THE
question,” Dr. Ravi says. He’d answered the phone at Pan’s office. “You can’t just stop by and see him any time.”

“It’s not any time,” Rafferty says. “It’s half an hour from now.”

“This is a very bad day. Extremely busy.”

Rafferty has no trouble visualizing the little man, probably wearing another ambitiously pleated pair of slacks, seated behind the desk in the small office outside Pan’s big one. “Sorry it’s a bad day, but I’m coming anyway.”

“He won’t see you.”

“He’ll see me. Just say one word to him. Say ‘Snakeskin.’”

The pause is so long that Rafferty thinks Dr. Ravi has hung up. When he does speak, all he says is, “Half an hour?”

“Yes. But two other people are going to get there first, two kids. Let them in and have them wait. It’s important that they’re not out on the street when I arrive.”

“Any other orders?” Dr. Ravi says.

“That’ll do for now,” Rafferty says.

He folds the phone and sits on the stool, which he has put upright again. The day in front of him is a maze, an urban labyrinth with several ways in and probably only one safe way out. Within an hour Rose should call to tell him they’re with Boo’s kids down at the river. They’ll be fine down there, at least until dark, when he’ll move them. Assuming that he’s alive to do it.

The taped hand goes into spasms, sending a long, dark line of pain up his arm. When he stands up, the stool pinches him, and this time his kick sends it all the way to the opposite wall, where it breaks into pieces.

There are at least three places he needs to go. At some point he’ll have to dump the final tails, so no one from either side is riding his slipstream. He’s pretty sure he knows how to do it, but he’s been wrong a lot recently, so he turns his mind to it, and while he worries about that, he also worries about time. This is Saturday, and his bank will close early. He focuses on the schedule, trying to factor in imponderables, such as bad traffic or a sudden bullet in the back of the head.

Instead he finds himself worrying about Arthit. His best friend, alone for the first time in his adult life, is floating somewhere on the tide of the city, adrift over depths of abandonment and grief. Running from his loss, running from whatever it is that Rafferty has let out of the bottle. And as hard as it is for Rafferty to imagine Arthit needing help, he probably does. He probably needs several kinds of help.

HE CAN GIVE
himself ten minutes, no more. The seconds tick off in his mind as he moves through the apartment silently while he and his wife and child chat with each other over the speakers.

From the headboard of the bed, he takes the Glock and the spare magazine. His closet yields up a pair of running shoes and his softest, most beat-up jeans, since he may have to wear them for some time. He chooses a big linen shirt that’s loose enough to conceal the gun. After he changes, he slips his cell phone into his pocket, where it will stay until he replaces it later in the day. He goes to the sliding glass door to close it but stands for a moment looking past the balcony and out over the city. Its sheer size is a comfort. It unfolds around him in all directions, block by block like giant tiles, fading eventually into the perpetual smog and water vapor that obscure the place’s real size, but he knows that it goes on and on. People have hidden in it for years, just another stone on the beach. He turns and goes over to the little tape recorder, rests his finger on the “stop” button, and waits for a natural pause.

“Hang on a minute,” he says out loud. He pushes “stop.” “I’m going out for a couple of hours, but I’ll get back in plenty of time for dinner.
Anybody want anything?” There is no reply, since he’s pulling out the cassette in the recorder and slipping another in. He rewinds the new tape all the way to the beginning of the leader, which will give him twenty seconds or so of silence before Miaow and Rose start talking. He says, “Okay, then, bye,” pushes “play,” and goes out the door, putting some muscle into closing it so it can be heard. He’s still standing out there, waiting for the elevator, when he hears Rose’s voice through the door.

The new tape is a little less than two hours long, the product of their trip down to the fourth floor on the previous morning. He has that much time until the apartment goes silent. After that they’ll begin to wonder. When the curiosity gets too strong, they’ll come through the door.

And then they’ll probably be looking to kill people.

THE GUY BEHIND
him isn’t trying to be inconspicuous. He stays two or at most three cars back all the way, a cell phone pressed to one ear. When Rafferty’s taxi stops at the gates to Pan’s earthly paradise, the follower cruises past slowly, then pulls in to the curb halfway down the block.

When the guard opens the gate, Dr. Ravi is already standing there. He lifts his left hand to study his watch, says, “Seven minutes late,” and turns to climb into the swan. “As I told you, time is very tight today.” The vehicle is moving while Rafferty still has one foot on the ground.

“Are my guests here?”

Dr. Ravi purses his lips around something small and sour and says, “They are.”

Rafferty says, “You were never poor.”

If the comment surprises Dr. Ravi, he doesn’t show it. “No. We weren’t rich, but we weren’t poor.”

“You managed to pay for Oxford.”

“Cambridge,” he says, biting the syllables. “I was on a partial scholarship.”

They are cresting the hill that blocks the view of the garden. “You don’t like street kids.”

Dr. Ravi’s shoulders rise and fall. “I don’t mind them in the street. In the house is a different matter.”

“Is that a sentiment your employer shares?”

“I have no idea. He was more like them when he was young than I was.”

“People change,” Rafferty says as the apple tree gleams its way into sight.

A diplomatic head waggle of disagreement. “In some ways. At the core, though, I think they stay the same.”

“Really? You don’t think power corrupts?”

Dr. Ravi makes a tiny adjustment to the steering column with no discernible effect. “It corrupts the corruptible.”

“Ah.” Rafferty sits back and watches the garden slide past. “You knew what Snakeskin meant.”

“Of course. The first thing I did when I came to work here was to go through the documents that spell out Khun Pan’s past.”

“Why would you do that?”

Dr. Ravi turns to face him for a moment, a glance that’s meant to put Rafferty in his place, and then looks back at the road. “I’m his media adviser, remember? I need to know what’s back there, what’s on record, in case something gets dredged up. It probably wouldn’t surprise you to know that there are people in the media who don’t like him.”

“So you’re an expert on his past.”

Dr. Ravi worries the idea for a few seconds and says, “To some extent.”

“Then how’d he get burned?”

They glide past the empty little village, as deserted now as Da’s is. The pigs watch them go with lazy attention, as though wondering whether the swan is edible. “That”—Dr. Ravi accelerates slightly, as though the talk has gone on too long—“you’ll have to ask
him
about that.”

THE FIRST THING
he hears when he opens the front door is laughter, coming from the back of the house, the direction of Pan’s office. Then he hears voices, Pan’s surprisingly wispy one and Da’s. Whatever Pan says, Da starts laughing again.

She turns to smile a greeting at Rafferty as he pushes the door open.
Pan is standing in the middle of the room with Peep in his arms. The baby’s dirty blue blanket looks incongruous against the yellow silk covering Pan’s chest, beneath the unsettling pink of his mouth. Boo lounges behind Pan’s desk with his hands folded over his nonexistent belly, apparently completely at ease, and Da occupies the chair Rafferty had claimed four days earlier, the afternoon before the gala fund-raiser.

“What a treat,” Pan says to Rafferty, although his smile is measured. “You have very interesting friends.”

“She’s from Isaan,” Rafferty says.

“Yes,” Pan says, “we’ve had a few minutes to get that on the table. And he’s a flower of the pavement, isn’t he?”

“Or a weed,” Boo says. He grins, but his eyes are watchful.

“Have they told you why I brought them here?”

“We just got here,” Da says. “And we don’t really know.”

“Well, it’s probably rude to bring up business so quickly, but Dr. Ravi says you’re pressed for time.”

Pan gives Peep a little bounce. “Dr. Ravi is an old woman. When you’re as rich as I am, time is elastic.”

“It’s elastic when you’re poor, too,” Boo says.

“That’s true, isn’t it?” Pan says. “I hadn’t thought of it, although I should have. I was poor long enough. But for everybody else, everybody who has something but not enough, time is rigid. It’s a floor plan for the day, isn’t it? You can only stay in each room so long.”

“So,” Rafferty says, “are we going to sit around and philosophize, or should we get down to it?”

Pan’s smile dims a notch. “You seem to be in more of a hurry than I am.”

“Cute baby, isn’t it?” Rafferty says.

“Adorable.” Pan raises Peep and makes a little kiss noise. Peep screws up his face, waves a fist, and starts to cry. Da rises and goes to take him, then carries him back to her chair.

“Did Da tell you where she got him?”

“Where she
got
him?” Pan’s smile widens again. “I’ve been familiar with those mechanics since I was, let’s see, about twelve.”

“He was handed to her,” Rafferty says. “Five days ago. By an old acquaintance of yours.”

Boo sits straighter behind the desk.

Still watching Peep, Pan says, “You think I know someone who gives away babies?”

“Well, you used to know him. His name is Wichat.”

Pan turns his head a few inches to the left and regards Rafferty as though he’s favoring his dominant eye. “You’ve been busy.” He leans back, resting part of his broad bottom on the edge of the desk. “If you wanted to know about all that, you could have talked to me.”

“You
did
work with Wichat.”

“Of course. I started out with him. Dozens of people could tell you that.
I
would have told you, if you’d asked. It’s no secret. I was a crook. There weren’t a lot of other employment opportunities for someone like me. And if you wanted to be a crook in those days, at least in the part of Bangkok I was being a crook in, you did business with Wichat. Actually, with Wichat’s boss, Chai. Is this going to be in the book?”

“Unless you can come up with something better.”

Pan seems suddenly to remember that Boo and Da are in the room. The smile returns, and he looks down at Da, who is holding Peep. The baby’s cries have faded to a damp snuffle. “Girls always look most beautiful holding babies,” he says.

Rafferty says, “Not a really contemporary point of view.”

Pan lets his gaze linger on Da for a moment, and then he says, “I’d rather it weren’t in the book, but if it is, you should be very clear on the point that I’ve had nothing to do with Wichat, or anyone like Wichat, for twenty years. I have no idea whether Wichat is—what?—giving out babies? Why would anyone give out babies?” He tugs at the crease in his sky-blue slacks. “And why tell me about it now?”

“I’m sorry,” Rafferty says. “I haven’t done this right. We’re actually here to ask for your help.”

Pan’s eyebrows climb half an inch. “Help.”

“See, this is what I think is happening. Wichat is buying babies from poor families, some of them probably Cambodian, and selling them to rich people, to
farang
. And he stashes the kids in the interim with female beggars. He hides them in plain sight and even makes a little extra money. Da says people give more to—”

“A woman with a baby,” Pan says with badly masked impatience. “Obviously. But how in the world do you think I can help?”

“I’m not completely sure,” Rafferty says. He leans against the wall beside the door. “Da and Peep ran away from Wichat’s guys because she was going to get raped. Boo helped them escape. And of course they have something that belongs to Wichat, which is to say Peep. So they’re on the run now, and I’m hiding them.”

Pan lets his eyes drift back down to Da and Peep. Behind him, Boo looks past him at Rafferty, his eyebrows elevated in a question. Pan says, “Why? Why are you hiding them?”