Breathing Water (30 page)

T
hey don’t know where he is,” Captain Teeth says, putting down the phone and following Ton with his eyes. “He’s out with the wife somewhere.”

Ton is agitated in a way that unnerves Ren. The man paces the room, running his fingertips over the surfaces of the furniture as though expecting dust. He straightens everything he touches: photos, pens, ashtrays, knickknacks, but he never looks down at the result. He continually tugs at the sleeves of his jacket, as though they’re riding up on him. He buttons and unbuttons his sport coat. He hasn’t sat down in the twenty minutes since he burst into the room, swearing about Pan.

“Call back whoever you talked to,” Ton says. “Tell him if he can’t find his boss and put me in touch with him in half an hour, it’ll be years before he gets another job. I need the woman’s phone located, and that man’s boss is the only one who can authorize it.”

“Fine,” Captain Teeth says, dialing. He turns his back to Ton and, looking at Ren, rolls his eyes.

“Pan’s going to make an announcement,” Ton says. “He’s going…to make…an announcement. After everything we’ve learned from this…this fishing expedition with Rafferty, he’s going to make an
announcement
? You,” he says to Ren, “get on the phone and—” He is still for the first time since he came through the door. “No,” he says. “Forget it. I’ll be back in a minute.”

Ton goes through the door and into a long, dim hallway, paneled in reflective mahogany. The only lights gleam above paintings: a darkly polished Vuillard, two gauzy Renoirs, a pallid, drooping Madonna by the Dutch Vermeer forger of the 1930s, Han van Meegeren. Three doors down, he pushes his way into a room that’s empty except for some bare bookshelves, a grand piano, and a cello, leaning carelessly against a chair. On one of the bookshelves near the door is a telephone.

Ton picks it up, dials a number from memory, and says, “General? I’m sorry to bother you, but I think we should talk.” He listens for a second. “No, sir, I don’t think it’s anything fatal. But if you could give me a few minutes—Fine. I’ll wait for your call.” He hangs up and blots the bead of perspiration that’s gliding down toward his jawline.

THE NURSE’S CREPE-SOLED
shoes squeak on the linoleum as she hurries after them. “Please,
please
,” she says. It’s an urgent whisper. “You can’t go in there. He’s not allowed to have visitors right now.”

Kosit speaks in his normal tone of voice, without looking back. “Did you see my uniform when we passed you?”

“Of course,” she hisses. “But still, the doctor says—”

“Tell the doctor to say it to me,” Kosit says. He pushes open the door to the patient’s room. “Now go away. We’re not going to interfere with your curing him.”

The nurse says, “There’s no curing him.”

“Then what are you worried about?” Kosit stands aside and lets Rafferty and Arthit precede him. Then he follows and closes the door in the nurse’s face. He turns his back to it and leans against it, his arms crossed.

The room is as dim and airless as a sealed cave. The flame on a candle, Rafferty thinks, would burn straight up, without a flicker. Porthip has been assigned to a high floor, with a view of Bangkok in all its sloppy, energetic life, a decision that seems to Rafferty to be tactless. Through the gauze-curtained window, arteries of light mark the progress of traffic down Sukhumvit, and neon smears the darkness with the
vibrant colors of the city’s nightlife. By contrast, the single light hanging above the bed is a chalky bluish white, turning the face above the tugged-up covers into a pallid waxwork.

Porthip is flat on his back. His eyes are closed. The fat around his eyes has been burned away, and the eyeballs beneath the lids seem unusually large, as spherical as marbles. Suspended halfway down the intravenous drip that snakes under the covers to attach to the man’s wrist is a morphine-delivery unit with a plunger the patient can use when the pain is too much to bear. Beside the bed, green screens monitor the struggles of the heart that gave out yesterday, abandoning the depleted body to the cancer that is devouring it. As he approaches the bed, Rafferty studies the face. Stripped of the energy that had animated it, it seems a frail mask, bones hollowed out to create a thin shell over emptiness. Rafferty feels a cold prickling between his shoulder blades, seeing his own face in forty or fifty years.

Porthip’s eyelids flicker.

Rafferty says, “You’re awake.”

The eyes open, focused somewhere beyond Rafferty. With evident effort, Porthip brings them to Rafferty’s face. His forehead creases for a second and then clears. “You,” he says. “I wondered.”

“Wondered what?”

“How long,” Porthip says. “Before you…” He lifts his chin, indicating the morphine drip. “Push that thing, would you?”

“Sure.” Rafferty depresses the plunger, and a moment later Porthip’s eyes slowly close and then reopen.

“Nothing,” he says. His voice is a husk, just a rough surface wrapped around breath. “I’ve pushed it too often. The limiter’s kicked in. But when it works, it’s great stuff. I’ve…seen things. On the walls. On the insides of my eyelids.” His back arches as a spasm runs through him. His eyes close. “Death,” he says.

Rafferty says, “So what?”

“Ah,” Porthip says, opening his eyes. “You’re angry.”

“You lied to me.”

Porthip says, “Why should you be different?”

“You’re dying. Why waste the effort now? What possible difference could it make to you at this point?”

“Habits,” Porthip says. “Hard to break.”

“Snakeskin,” Rafferty says. “It owned the factory that burned down. And you owned Snakeskin. With Tatsuya.”

“Tatsuya,” Porthip says, and this time he does smile. “The partner every businessman dreams of. Dead for years and years. Tatsuya is a signature machine back in Tokyo.”

“I don’t care about Tatsuya. You owned that factory.”

“Not according to the records,” Porthip says.

“No, of course not. But if you didn’t own it when it burned, then you did something that doesn’t make any business sense at all. You, as Snakeskin, bought a destroyed factory, paid good money for it, and then just let it sit there. You didn’t clean it up, you didn’t put it to use. It could be making money again. So why buy it if you weren’t going to do any of that?”

“Interesting question,” Porthip says.

“I don’t think you
did
buy it. I think you already owned it. You just quietly sold it to yourself, passed it from one company to another. You couldn’t sell it to someone else because it might have attracted media attention. The papers would have been interested. A lot of people died there.”

“One hundred,” Porthip says, and takes a breath. “And twenty-one.”

“And around the time of the fire, Pan disappears, and when he comes back, he’s got burns all over him and there’s suddenly some serious weight behind him. He’s doing big-boy business, the kind of business that requires someone to open doors. Someone like you.”

“You know,” Porthip says, “you can push the plunger on that thing up there until your thumb falls off, but it only delivers so much. They let you control your pain, but only up to a point. There’s a limiter that won’t let you go all the way to where I want to go. For that you need a doctor who’s so high up nobody would ever question him.”

“You owned that factory,” Rafferty says. “Pan got burned there, somehow, and you wound up owing him. And you’re high enough up that no one would, as you say, question you.”

Porthip’s body goes rigid, and his mouth tightens into a line as straight as a slice. Then his lips part and he lets out a long sound that’s just his breath traveling over his vocal cords, wind through a pipe organ.

“Pan put the locks on,” Porthip says when he can talk. His voice is
frayed and ragged, and he’s taking more frequent breaths. “He put the bars on the windows. We had a…a problem with the ghost shift. Day jobs, some of them had day jobs. They were tired. People kept going outside, going into the sheds where the stuffing was stored. Big…soft piles of stuffing. For the bunnies, for the kittens. The ghost shift…they took naps there.” He struggles under the covers until he has an arm free, and then he lifts a twig-thin hand to the plunger and pushes it home. “Nothing.” He is panting with the effort. “But I can pretend I feel better.”

“They took naps,” Rafferty prompts.

“I hired Pan from Chai, who was the top crook then. I needed four or five heavyweights to keep the workers on the ball. Except for Chai, Pan was the only one who knew who I was, the only one—” His body arches again, his eyes slam shut, and a stream of air hisses between his lips. “He was the only one who knew anything. The others were just…muscle.”

“What happened?”

“There was…a rule,” Porthip says. “There had to be two guards outside. One of them had to have the key. One of them always…always had to have the key.” His eyes close again, and the lids flutter as though the eyeballs behind them are rolling up. Rafferty puts a hand on the arm Porthip extricated from the covers. The man’s eyes open. “Key,” he repeats.

He turns his head to the right, as though it eases the pain. “So Pan stops by the place in the middle of the night. He used to do that, just to…to keep everybody awake. And there’s smoke coming out of the windows, and people inside are screaming. He runs around the building, looking for the men who were supposed to…to be there…but they’ve gone…to…to eat. They’ve got the key. Pan went crazy. He tried to knock down the doors. They were iron, hot iron, and he was trying to push them open. He tried to pull the bars off the windows, even though flames were already coming out of them. He reached between the bars, into the fire. He tried to pull people through. He actually pulled one set of bars out and yanked three people through the window, but they were dead. They were on fire, but he pulled them over the windowsill and fell backward. They landed on top of him, burning. He rolled out from under them and tried to go in through the
window, but he couldn’t. It was an inferno.” Porthip licks his lips. “Can I have some water?”

Rafferty picks up the glass with the straw in it and positions it under Porthip’s mouth, then waits as the man drinks.

“He was burned. Badly. His clothes were synthetics. They melted into his skin. He was in terrible pain. But when the guards came back, he killed them. Then he loaded them in the trunk of his car and dumped them in the river. At five
A.M.
he came to my house. He could barely stand up.”

“And you took care of him.”

“He almost died there. He tried to save those people. Never, not once, did he do anything that would have…exposed me. He was the kind of man you wanted to do something for.”

Arthit says, “But you’re exposing him now, aren’t you?”

Porthip looks past Rafferty and lets his eyes settle on Arthit. “He’s not the same man. Before, he had…he had honor.”

“What does that mean?” Rafferty asks.

“You’re doing so well,” Porthip says. “I’d hate…hate to deprive you of the satisfaction.”

“You backed him. You put him into businesses he never could have gotten into on his own.”

“At first,” Porthip says. “For a while.”

“And then you sold the factory to him.”

“No,” Porthip says. “You’re missing it.”

“Missing what?”

“Snakeskin.
Snakeskin
sold the factory to Pan.”

Rafferty says, “I just said that.”

Porthip shakes his head. “You said
I
sold it to him.”

From behind Rafferty, Arthit says, “It’s a corporation, Poke. It’s not an individual. It remains Snakeskin no matter who owns it.”

“Oh, Jesus,” Rafferty says. “You sold the company.”

Kosit closes his eyes and nods.

“To whom?”

Porthip’s lids open, and he looks at Rafferty out of the corners of his eyes. He lifts his hand toward the morphine-delivery unit and caresses the plunger with his fingertips, then lets the hand drop. “You don’t know?” he asks. “You haven’t figured it out?”

Rafferty tilts his head back and closes his eyes and lets the realization wash over him. When he opens them again, he finds Porthip looking at him with some of the old energy.

“Ton,” Rafferty says. “You sold it to Ton. And
Ton
gave the factory to Pan.”

“See?” Porthip says. “You’re not hopeless after all.”

T
hey haven’t even gotten into the hospital’s parking lot when Rafferty’s phone rings.

“Wichat came out of his office,” says a child’s voice. “With three big guys.”

“Who is this?”

“Nit,” says the child. “I’m the girl who runs fast.”

“Good work, Nit. Stay away from him. Be careful.”

“I’m always careful.”

“Has he met anybody?”

“No, but he went to your apartment building, where we were this morning. He’s in there now.”

Rafferty’s heart sinks. He’d been pretty sure it would happen, but he hadn’t wanted to believe it. He puts out a hand to stop Arthit and Kosit. “Where are you?”

“In front of the building. Across the street.”

“You know the garage door, where you went in before?”

“Sure.”

“Okay. Stay across the street but move left, so the garage door is to your right. Keep moving until you’re looking at the left edge of the building. You should be able to see the balconies that stick out on that side.”

“Hang on. Yeah, sure. I can see them.”

“Okay. Count up eight stories. Tell me whether you see any lights in the windows next to that balcony.”

“…six…seven…No. It’s dark.”

“Okay, now count down four floors. Wait. Is someone keeping an eye on the entrance, in case they come out?”

“Sure.” The tone is edged with impatience.

“There’s no balcony on the fourth floor, but there are windows in the same—”

“Got it. Yeah, there are lights on.”

“Son of a
bitch
,” Rafferty says in English. “Okay, thanks,” he says in Thai to the girl. “Get out of sight. The people Wichat wants aren’t there, and he’ll be out any minute. Wait around the corner on—”

“On Silom,” Nit says, and this time the impatience isn’t just at the edges.

“Right.” He snaps the phone closed and pops a sweat that’s pure anger.

“Well,” he says to Arthit, “we’ve got the answer to one question. Pan and Wichat still keep the chat line open.”

“On what evidence?”

“Pan just tried to sell Boo and Da to Wichat. I told Pan they were staying on the fourth floor of my apartment house. I didn’t tell anybody except Pan. And Wichat’s up there right now with some goons, probably punching holes in the walls.”

“What does that prove?” Arthit asks. “In the larger picture, I mean.”

“Well, I think we can assume that Pan is no longer the self-appointed guardian of the poor of Isaan. If he ever was. Da’s about as poor and as Isaan as it’s possible to be, and he tried to hand her to a Bangkok crook who probably wants her dead.” He kicks a tire on the nearest car, hard enough to set off a whooping alarm. “This is going to kill Rose. She thinks he’s a great man.”

Arthit says, “And then there’s Ton.” He grabs Rafferty’s arm and hauls him away from the squalling car.

“Yes,” Rafferty says. He can’t get a breath that’s deep enough to unlock his chest. “There’s Ton.”

“What do you think that’s about?” Kosit asks.

Rafferty says, “The word that comes to mind is ‘sellout.”

“
EVERYBODY ELSE IS
staying put,” Rafferty says, putting the phone away. “The kids say nobody’s moving.” The three of them are sitting on plastic chairs at an outdoor noodle stall off Sukhumvit. Kosit is slurping rice noodles loudly enough to be heard over the traffic, while Arthit pushes his spoon through the broth as though he expects to discover something of value at the bottom of the bowl. Occasionally he stops shoving the utensil around and passes his hand over the bristle on his chin. All the while his eyes burn a hole in the center of the bowl.

Rafferty watches Arthit brood, thinks of three or four modestly helpful things to say, and rejects all of them. Instead he takes a mouthful of noodles and boils his tongue. He forces the scalding liquid down and grabs a glass of water, holding the coolness in his mouth on the theory that it will keep his tongue rare, as opposed to well done. He lets the silence stretch and then swallows the water and says, “It’s the only thing that makes any sense.”

Without looking up, Arthit says, “What is?”

“A deal. A terrifically secret deal. Between Ton—Mr. Establishment—and Pan. Ton must have taken a look at him and seen a guy who had peasant roots and lots of charisma, was terrifically popular, and was an obvious candidate sooner or later. The worst-case scenario would have been that Pan runs and gets elected, and Ton’s guys have got to get him out somehow. The best-case scenario would have been that he runs and gets elected—”

“And they own him,” Arthit says. He drops the spoon into the bowl. “Ton’s group aren’t against Pan running for office. They’re
for
it. Because they made a deal with him. They think they’re going to control the first Isaan prime minister.”

“Why would he go for it?” Kosit asks with his mouth full. “He could get elected without them.”

“I’ll make a few guesses,” Arthit says. “They tell him he won’t get assassinated during the campaign, for one thing. They say he won’t have to worry about a coup if he gets elected and that they can make everything a lot easier for him once he’s in office. Cooperation from the legislature. No pesky investigation every time he slips a million baht into his pocket.”

Rafferty says, “And I was, to use a business term, due diligence. They set me up to see whether the man could really get elected.”

“Meaning what?” Kosit says.

Rafferty takes another mouthful of water. “Ton wanted to know whether I could discover the monstrosity in Pan’s past, the thing that would make it impossible for him to get elected. I think they saw the same blank space Arthit talked about at the very beginning, the link missing in Pan’s story, the link between Pan the pimp and Pan the great industrialist. They wanted to see whether I could find out what it was. If Pan runs for national office, how likely is it that the fire at the factory will come out? If it did, it’d be fatal. People will put up with a lot from a candidate, as American politics prove over and over again, but it’s hard to put a positive spin on mass murder. Ton figures only a very small number of people know about it, and they’re all on his side. So he set me loose to see whether I’d find it. He gave me clues, put me in touch with some of the right people, because after Pan goes public as a candidate, he’ll be investigated by the best, and they won’t miss anything obvious. I was his way of knowing whether the campaign could survive the attention of the press.”

“And he doesn’t know you’ve figured it out,” Kosit says. “That’s why the announcement on Monday.”

“I don’t actually understand that,” Rafferty says.

Arthit pushes his chair back and says, “Neither do I.”

Kosit picks up his bowl in both hands and drains the broth without apparent injury. “Why not?”

“Because I’m on the loose,” Rafferty says. “Because Arthit’s on the loose. Because there’s no way he can know what we’ve learned or what we’re up to, so why not just wait until we’re under control? What’s so special about Monday? They could announce any time in the next few weeks, but no, it’s Monday, and here
we
are rattling around all over Bangkok, and Ton has no idea what we do or don’t know. It’s not…
characteristic. He’s careful, and here he is allowing Pan to go public while these wild cards are all over the table.”

Arthit says, “Maybe Ton’s not in charge.”

Rafferty is about to fill his mouth with water again, but he puts the glass back down. “Right. What’s happening right now? Porthip’s dying. Porthip might be the only person who actually knows firsthand what happened at the factory. Everybody else just has hearsay.” A thought strikes him. “Except maybe Wichat. Wichat was working for the same crook Pan was, back when it happened. Maybe that’s why Pan tried to hand him the kids, because he can’t piss Wichat off.”

“Could be,” Arthit says, nodding. “Keep going.”

“So with Porthip about to vanish from the scene, Pan wants to redefine the relationship. He tells Ton he’s going to announce–”

“And Ton says no,” Arthit says. “And Pan doesn’t like to be told no. So let’s say he decides to announce anyway. The announcement is a demonstration that he’s going to be more independent now, that it’s going to be a collaboration or nothing.”

Rafferty says, “Works for me.”

“One thing I can tell you,” Arthit says. “This is bigger than Ton. He’s rich and nice-looking and he married well, but he’s not in charge of anything this big. There’s someone else, someone up in the nosebleed echelons of society. Military or conservative for a dozen generations. And what that means…” He looks at Kosit, who’s been shifting eagerly on his chair, practically raising his hand to speak. “What does that mean?”

“That Ton’s on the spot,” Kosit says. “He’s sitting on a burner.”

For the first time, Arthit looks like himself. He leans over and swats Kosit lightly on the head. “That’s exactly right.”

Rafferty says, “Hold on,” and opens his phone. “What?”

“Pan and the little guy,” Boo says on the other end of the line. “Dr. something, the one with the big nose and the slacks with all those pleats?”

“Another player on the move,” Rafferty says to Arthit. To Boo he says, “What are they doing?”

“They pulled out of Pan’s right after I talked to you, about ten minutes ago. Big black car, not the gold one. They’re heading away from town, on some nowhere road.”

“What direction? Where are you?”

“North, sort of. Out toward Chatuchak. Bunch of factories.”

Rafferty says, “Factories.”

“The guy with the nose is driving,” Boo says. “Pan’s in the back.”

“How far behind are you?”

“A few blocks. We’re on three motos, no lights. You’re going to have to pay these guys extra for that.”

“Who’s ‘we’?” Rafferty realizes he’s standing, and a sudden stab of pain tells him that he’s tried to reach into his trouser pocket with the bandaged hand, looking for small bills to pay for their meal. Kosit gets up and drops a few fifty-baht notes on the table.

“Just kids,” Boo says.

“Which kids?”

“Nobody you know.”

Something in his tone rings wrong, but Rafferty dismisses it, since there’s nothing he can do about it anyway. “Stay far back. I’m pretty sure we know where he’s going. We’re way the hell on the other side of town, but we’ll be there as soon as we can. And listen to me. When they stop, you call to tell us where it is. And that’s
it
. You do not go in until we get there. Not you, not any of your kids. You wait outside and out of sight until we arrive.”

“You worry too much,” Boo says. He disconnects.

“I worry too much,” Rafferty says to no one.

“We’ll be where?” Arthit asks. Kosit is already out on the street, hailing a cab.

“The famous factory. Dr. Ravi’s taking Pan out there as we speak.” A taxi flashes its headlights and cuts through traffic at an acute angle to reach them. “And I think the time has come to get their attention.” Rafferty climbs into the back, beside Arthit, as Kosit slips into the front seat and pushes his badge at the startled driver.

“Right now,” Kosit says, “it is impossible for you to drive too fast.”