Breathing Water (24 page)

“Sure he is,” Dit says on the phone.

“Then
why isn’t he answering his phone
?” Kai demands. “The fucking thing has been ringing for twenty or thirty seconds.”

Dit says, “Oh.”

“Get your ass up there. Knock on the door. If he doesn’t answer, pick the lock and take a look. If he
does
answer, just turn around and go down the stairs. Don’t answer any questions, just get out of there.”

“Wait,” Ren says. “Let me try something.” He takes out his own cell phone and dials Rafferty’s cell number. Listens as it begins to ring.

Fails to hear it in his earphones.

“Go in,” Kai says to Dit. “Go in now.”

“I TOOK CARE
of Miaow for a while,” Boo is telling Da. “Way before she met Poke. She was only four or five then, but she was already on the street. Four or five, right?” he asks Rafferty.

“That’s what she says. She also says you saved her life.”

“She could take care of herself, even then.” But Boo’s cheeks have gone pink. “And I didn’t take very good care of her when I started using
yaa baa
, did I?”

Da says, “You did
what
?”

“All day and all night.”

Rafferty’s cell phone rings.

“Why would you do that?” Da asks.

“I was crazy,” Boo says. To Rafferty he says, “Aren’t you going to answer that?”

“Not yet,” Rafferty says. It rings again.

“Then when?” Boo asks. “What are you waiting for? A sign of some kind?”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” Rafferty says. “Everybody except me knows what I should do.” He pulls out the phone and looks at it. His forehead creases for a moment as he looks at the number, and then he’s up and running toward the door.

“Stay here,” he says. “Don’t go anywhere, don’t open this door.”

He takes the stairs three at a time, catching his foot once and landing on his outstretched palms, and he screams at the pain, but even while he’s screaming, he’s pushing himself to his feet again and running upstairs for all he’s worth. If someone
was
watching the building, he has to be in the apartment. On the seventh floor, it suddenly occurs to him that the door to the eighth might be locked, and although he thinks it’s impossible for his heart to beat any faster, it accelerates in his chest anyway and doesn’t slow until the eighth-floor doorknob turns in his hand. He hurries down the corridor, fishing out his keys, and mutes the phone before slipping the key into the door.

Behind him the elevator moans and shudders into motion, bringing someone up.

He pushes the apartment door open slowly, breathing through his mouth to silence his panting. He pulls out the phone again, but it’s no longer ringing. Tucking the reinjured hand beneath one arm and forcing himself to breathe regularly, he closes the door slowly, tiptoes to the bathroom, and flushes the toilet. Then he closes the door sharply. Still in the hallway outside the bathroom, he mops his forehead and pushes the button to return the most recent call.

RAFFERTY’S VOICE IN
his earphones brings Ren bolt upright. Rafferty says, “Yeah?”

Kai has his cell phone to his ear. “Where were you?” He’s pulled the earphones off and is looking at them as though they’d suddenly started transmitting classical music.

“What do you care? And aren’t you supposed to
know
where I am? Something wrong with your terrific surveillance system?”

“You…ahhh, you didn’t answer.” Kai puts one of the phones back over his free ear.

“I was washing my hands, if you actually need to know. Something I usually do after I go to the bathroom.”

Kai turns to Ren and gestures frantically at his own telephone. Ren looks at him, bewildered, and Kai puts a hand over the mouthpiece of his cell phone and rasps, “
Dit
.”

“Oh,” Ren says, dialing. He waits as the phone on the other end rings.

“Huh,” Rafferty says. “Sounds like someone’s in the hall.”

“Oh, yeah?” Kai says. “You’re…um, you’re home, then?”

“Where else would I be? Hold on, somebody’s just standing out there while his cell phone rings.”

Ren says into his phone,
“Dit. Get out of there.”

“It’s probably nothing,” Kai says. “How did the interviews go?”

“Are we
chatting
?” Rafferty says. “And don’t tell me it’s nothing when it’s at the door of my own apartment.” There’s a pause. “Well,” he says. “Nobody there. Didn’t even leave a copy of the
Watchtower
.” Kai hears the door close. “So was there a reason you called?”

“Just reminding you there’s a deadline coming up.”

“That’s very thoughtful of you.” He disconnects, and a moment later Ren and Kai hear him in their earphones, saying to the empty room,

“What a bunch of idiots.”

H
is first stop, maybe a quarter of a mile from the house, is an ATM. He withdraws the limit on his bank card, then inserts a credit card and does it again. Standing with his back to the sidewalk and his head down, panting from the run and feeling his shirt plaster itself to his spine, he watches the crisp new thousand-baht notes slide through the slot.

Put it together with what he already has and what Kosit gave him, and he’s got twenty-three thousand baht. Not enough, not when he has no idea how long he’ll be on the run.

On the run.
Considering who he’s running from, tonight may be the last time he’ll be able to do this without sending skyrockets through the computer system. By tomorrow he probably won’t even get his card back.

He wants to try the credit card again, but someone is waiting behind him, and he doesn’t want anyone looking at him for long. He’s pulled his shirt free of his trousers to hide the gun and opened his collar, but he’s still unmistakably in uniform.

A police car speeds by, lights blinking, going in the direction of his house. Time to move.

At the curb he flags a motorcycle taxi, and the driver fishtails to a stop with an alacrity that makes it obvious he’s registered that Arthit’s a cop, loose shirttails or no loose shirttails. This does not make Arthit any happier than he is already.

“Pratunam,” he says, and wraps his hands around the coward’s grab bar on the rear of the rider’s seat as the bike leaps forward.

And finds himself looking at the denim landscape of the driver’s back and seeing his wife’s eyes.
Noi
, he thinks.

In self-defense he conjures up Thanom’s monkey face and waits for the surge of good, cold, cleansing fury. But instead something hollow and dark spins in a widening whirlpool beneath his heart, and he thinks again,
Noi
.

“THEY DUG A
new river,” Da is saying in the fourth-floor apartment, “and then they built a dam just below where they dug, so all the water went into the new riverbed and our river dried up.” She tilts a plastic baby bottle, bought at Foodland that morning, into Peep’s mouth. “They were smart,” she says. “They did it toward the end of the summer, when the river always got low anyway. When the water stopped, we all thought it would start again by the time the rains came. But it didn’t.”

“Where did it go?” Rafferty says.

She is studying the baby’s face. “To a golf course. When we went and looked, everybody was Japanese. All the golfers, I mean. The people who chased us away were Thai.”

“You went and looked?”

“Well, sure,” she says, meeting his eyes. “We wondered where our river had gone, so we followed the new one.”

Boo is watching her as she talks. She glances over at him, and he holds his arms out to take the baby. She hands Peep to him without a moment’s hesitation. When the child is comfortable in Boo’s lap, he slips the nipple of the bottle between Peep’s lips. Da watches long enough to make sure Peep is drinking before she returns her gaze to Rafferty. For a moment she seems to have forgotten where she is in her
story, and Rafferty wonders for the third or fourth time about the relationship between them.

“They chased you away,” he prompts.

“They didn’t want us there. The place was so green and pretty and full of important people, and we were all dusty and had holes in our clothes. About a week later, they brought the big machines and knocked our houses down.”

“Where did everyone go?”

She shakes her head. “Wherever they could. My mom and dad took my sisters and went to live with my mother’s parents. But my grandfather doesn’t have any money, so I came here.” She flicks her eyes toward Boo. “To beg.”

“Was there any kind of piece of paper? Did anyone ever show you anything that said they had the right to take the river? Or knock down the houses?”

She slips her index finger into the hole above the knee of her jeans and tugs at its edge. “The policemen who came with the machines had something, some piece of paper a lot of the people in the village had signed.”

“What, a deed? Did someone pay you all something?”

“My father said it was something they were told to sign so they could vote. All the people who signed it were old enough to vote.”

“Did it
say
anything about voting? Did it say anything about—I don’t know—a bill of sale or anything?” He stops because she is looking down, working the finger in the hole in her jeans, and her face is darkening.

After a moment she says, “I don’t know.”

Rafferty says, “I see.” He should have known she couldn’t read.

“But that’s not why we’re here anyway,” Boo says into the silence. “It’s about the baby. It’s about Peep.”

HE BLOWS OUT
in relief as the machine yields five thousand baht more. That’s twenty-eight thousand, roughly eight hundred American dollars. The credit card worked again, but he’s hit the limit for twenty-four hours, and by then the cards will be dead anyway. Thanom has the clout for that, and the people who are screwing with Rafferty have enough power, and probably enough foot soldiers, to put a man on every ATM in Bangkok.

His shirt is soaked through, the sweat turning the chocolate brown material almost black. It’s still hot out, but this is the sweat of fury. When he thinks of Thanom, his hands involuntarily clench at his sides. The man has deprived Arthit of his time to mourn.

What would Noi want Arthit to do now? The answer comes as clearly as if she were standing beside him, whispering in his ear. He should take care of himself.

He briefly asks himself whether the best way to take care of himself would be to turn himself in, then dismisses it. The two cops who came to his door had removed their name plates. If only one of them hadn’t been wearing his name, Arthit might have chalked it up to sloppiness or a memory lapse. But both of them? Something very wrong there. Kosit was the one who had called in the death, so whoever took the call knew there was another cop in Arthit’s house. The two who came to the door didn’t want Kosit to know their names.

He doesn’t think Thanom would have him killed. But
something
was going on, something outside the normal course of official detention and questioning. Maybe it was just a stall for time; maybe he was going to be lost in the system for a while, stuck in some cell somewhere with no way out until he could be “discovered” and apologized to, maybe even given some sort of token, a raise or something. But that could be weeks from now, after whatever it is Thanom thinks Arthit knows will no longer have value.

And that something has to be connected with Pan. This all began with Pan.

He catches a whiff of his own sweat and glances down at his shirt.

Right, clothes. The booths that crowd the sidewalks of Pratunam are beginning to shut—there’s a dark spot here and there where the spotlights have already been doused—but the sellers who are active are eager to accommodate a policeman. Within twenty minutes he has bags containing three anonymous plaid shirts, a couple of generic T-shirts, and two pairs of preshrunk, precreased, totally indestructible and wholly synthetic pants that will probably be the last man-made objects on earth. His shoes are a dead giveaway, cop from soles to laces, but they fit well, and if anyone gets close enough to look at them, he’s finished anyway. He makes a final stop at a booth that sells toiletry articles and buys a razor, some shaving foam, a comb, and a toothbrush. The woman studies him as she puts them into the bag, wondering why
a cop needs to buy the stuff for a night out and concluding that he’s got some action lined up somewhere. She practically winks at him as she hands him his purchases.

She’ll remember him, too.

So far,
he thinks, tucking the bag under his arm with the others,
I might as well be fluorescent, leaving glowing footprints everywhere I go.
How the hell did crooks manage?

Still, with the change of clothes in a bag and the night stretching out around him in all directions, he can feel a sort of
click
inside, a hardening of purpose and sharpening of focus he has come to regard as his cop mode. When he feels like this, he occasionally visualizes himself as a human flashlight, pointed forward, sharp-eyed, able to ignore the irrelevant and cut through the fog of confusion. This is when he does his best work.

But the lift in his spirits doesn’t last long. He’s looking for someplace he can change clothes when he sees the blinking lights. Regular, steady, red flashes, coming from the intersection half a block in front of him. He turns around to put some distance between himself and the police van, then halts. There are red lights in the street behind him, too, at the other end of the block. And he stands there, clutching the bags as the illusion of competence recedes, asking himself why on earth he took the time to go shopping on the same street where he used an ATM.

“THEY TOOK THE
kid away from her,” Da says. “Like it was a lamp or something, not a…a child. And next time I saw her, she had a new one. They gave her a baby. The same way they gave Peep to me.”

“Wichat did,” Rafferty says, just trying to keep track.

Da says, “I guess so.”

“He’s been sending beggars out with babies for at least a year,” Boo says. “Everybody on the street knows it. But nobody says anything. He’s not a friendly guy.”

“Where does he get them? Any idea what he’s doing?”

Boo says, “What I think he’s doing is selling them. I think he’s buying them someplace, maybe from people who steal them, and then keeping them until he can find a buyer. And giving them to beggars, so that…well, that way he doesn’t have to draw attention by storing a whole bunch of babies somewhere.”

“And beggars with babies make more money,” Da says. “At least that’s what he told me.”

“You say babies,” Rafferty says. “How old is a baby?”

“A year,” Superman says with a shrug. “Maybe a year, eighteen months. Like Peep.”

“So they can’t talk,” Rafferty says.

Da says, “No. I didn’t see any that were old enough to talk, except some who were injured and the boy they took away, and he was simple or something. He never said a word.”

“Why does that matter?” Superman says. He squints, working it out. “Because…what? Because babies can’t tell the people who buy them that they were stolen?”

“Sure,” Rafferty says. “And maybe because if they
could
talk, they wouldn’t speak Thai.”

Da looks down at Peep as though he could answer her question. “Not speak Thai?”

“Three or four years ago,” Rafferty says, “there was a big baby racket in Cambodia. People went there from America and Europe, thousands of them, to adopt children who were supposed to be orphans. But they weren’t orphans. They’d been bought from poor families for fifty or a hundred dollars. Sometimes they were just stolen. The new parents paid anywhere from thirty to fifty thousand dollars for a baby. The money was supposed to pay some sort of official fees.”

Boo says, “Thirty to fifty thousand per
kid
?”

“Per kid.”

“There were four or five babies at the place I was staying,” Da says. The numbers are unimaginable. “And I think they may have more places.”

“They have three more,” Boo says. “My guess is that they’ve got fifteen or twenty babies at any time.”

Rafferty says, “A while back I heard something about babies being brought here, carried across the border by women who pretended to be their mothers. Makes sense, I suppose, just thugs shaking hands across the border. The racket was too profitable to let it go. But I’m not sure what you want me to do. Do you want to find a way to get—What’s the baby’s name?”

“Peep,” Da says.

“Do you want to get Peep back to his mother or something?”

“Oh,” Da says, looking like someone who has just been surprised by a loud noise. “I don’t…I mean, I don’t—”

Rafferty’s phone rings. He pulls it out of his pocket and checks the display, which says
KOSIT
.

THERE IS NOWHERE
to go. Another van has pulled up at each end of the block, straight across all the lanes to cut off the traffic, and Arthit sees six or eight uniformed policemen climb out of each. They obviously intend to work toward one another in the hope that Arthit is somewhere between them. He sees them split up, some moving slowly, trolling the sidewalk, while others stop and talk to the vendors.

The uniforms have fanned out onto both sides of the street, which is now empty of traffic and too wide and well lit to cross comfortably. Arthit knows he’d never make it to the other side. He’s closer to the vans in front of him, so he turns around and moves with the crowd, which is gradually slowing to a stop. The cops at either end are funneling people down to single file, peering at faces.

He stops walking.
Faces?
How would they know what he looks like? It’s surprising enough that Thanom could scramble a force so quickly; there’s no way he’s had the time to print out and distribute a stack of Arthit’s file photos. He moves a bit farther along until he’s in front of a booth that’s gone dark, and he steps back into the gloom and squints at the group of cops that’s working its way toward him from his left.

He
knows
some of them. He sees three men and one woman he has worked with, nobody he could call a friend but people who can identify him on sight. Even a change of clothing isn’t going to allow him to slip away.

The nearest pair of cops reaches the booth where he bought his shirts. The vendor keeps his face down, not wanting to challenge the cops in any way, but then he looks up and nods an answer. He talks for a moment, waving his hand along the sidewalk in Arthit’s direction. Then he comes out from behind his counter and indicates the booth where Arthit bought the razor.

The dark spot where Arthit is standing suddenly feels quite a bit brighter than it did a moment ago. Without looking left or right, he crosses the uneven sidewalk to its far edge and begins to move slowly
along, his left shoulder almost brushing the walls of the buildings that face the booths. Unlike some areas of Pratunam, where booths hem the sidewalks on both sides, here they’re only on the traffic side. Opposite them are older, somewhat run-down buildings, mostly four- and five-story structures with shops at street level and apartments or offices above them. The street windows are mostly dark now, the shops locked, but he’s hoping that one of the doors leading upstairs will be open.