Breathing Water (8 page)

Y
ou wait,” the guard says, shutting the little glass door in the booth. The glass is at least an inch thick, certainly bulletproof.

The booth occupies the base of a semicircular clay-brick turret beside an enormous pair of weathered bronze gates that stretch twenty feet toward the paper-white sky. Mesopotamian lions rear up on them, claws extended and teeth bared. The Mesopotamian theme continues on the clay-brick walls, covered with bas-relief figures of standing kings, slender and stiff-kneed and tightly robed. Sprouting here and there among the kings are outcrops, planted with vegetation that spills over the edges. Green streamers dangle downward.

The Hanging Gardens of Babylon, Rafferty realizes. Not even remotely what he’d expected.

The wall is perhaps a fifth of a mile long. It occupies the entire block. Rafferty tries to remember what used to be here, but nothing comes to mind. Bangkok is like that, he thinks: One day you look up and there’s a building, and the field, the house, the slum—whatever it was before, it is gone forever.

The sun’s glare makes him uncomfortably aware that it is almost
noon. He is glancing at his watch when the guard opens the little window again and says, “Through here.” A narrow door, barely wide enough for one person to pass through, opens in the left gate. On the other side of the door stands a short, slender, dark-complected man in a pale yellow shirt and triple-pleated, salmon-colored golf slacks.

“Please,” he says in English, “come in, come in.”

The door in the gate clangs closed, and the slender man in the bright clothes climbs into a little white electric golf cart that has been remodeled to look like a very large and steroidal swan. One wing is improbably upraised to shade the passengers. All that Rafferty can see as the cart whirs into motion is greenery, thickly tangled and thorny, a second wall. At the wheel of the cart, the slender man says, without turning to Rafferty, “I am Dr. Ravi.”

“I recognized your voice from the phone,” Rafferty says. Dr. Ravi’s receding hair makes his noteworthy nose seem even larger. His entire face points forward, like a 1950s hood ornament.

“I’m often told I have a distinctive voice,” Dr. Ravi says. “I think it’s the influence of Cambridge.”

Arthit also went to school in England, but his linguistic suitcase isn’t packed with such plummy vowels and half-chewed consonants.

“Sounds like you were there for years.”

He gets a quick glance, but the wall of foliage is upon them. Dr. Ravi slows the cart, slides a hand into his pocket, and brings out a slim remote, which he points at the green barrier. A portion of it detaches itself and begins to swing inward.

Rafferty says, “Lot of protection.”

“Human nature,” Dr. Ravi announces gravely, “is to want.”

“I’ve noticed.”

The paved track they’re following describes a slow turn through the tangle of scrub, and the view widens suddenly. Rafferty stifles the urge to gasp.

They are entering the Garden of Eden.

The cart passes through a flaming gate, from the top of which a gigantic hand points a single finger outward. The flames are made of gold, beaten thin and curled into phantasmagorical shapes. Large red stones glow at the base of the flames, simulating coals. On the far side of the gate are green, gentle hills, pools complete with swans, ferns,
and willows, and, in the center of the garden, an artificial apple tree hung with glistening red and green fruit. A gleaming silver snake curls around the trunk of the tree. It has a red apple in its jaws.

Rafferty says, “Um.”

“The first paradise,” Dr. Ravi says.

From several hundred possible questions, Rafferty randomly chooses one. “How did he get the apples to glow like that?”

“That’s what everyone asks,” says Dr. Ravi smugly. “The red ones are covered in tiny rubies, thirteen or fourteen hundred on each. The green ones are made with emeralds.”

“It’s like a fundamentalist theme park,” Rafferty says maliciously. “Faith World.”

Dr. Ravi says, “Hardly,” in a voice like a pair of tin snips.

A brace of peacocks wander by, the males wasting their time trying to dazzle each other.
Men
, Rafferty thinks. White ponies dawdle and trot here and there. A couple of them have spiral horns protruding from their foreheads.

“I didn’t know there were unicorns in the Garden of Eden.”

“Obviously there weren’t,” Dr. Ravi says. He’s still offended. “Or they’d exist today, wouldn’t they? One assumes that God works in first drafts and doesn’t revise, or there wouldn’t have been such a flap about evolution. But this is Khun Pan’s Eden, and he wanted unicorns.”

Rafferty watches the apple tree recede. The bed of deep green moss that surrounds it looks like it was created to be reclined upon. “Is Eve home?”

Pursed lips and a pause. “On occasion.”

“I’d like to see that.”

“I rather doubt that you will.”

The narrow road they are navigating is so smooth and the cart so silent that Rafferty has the illusion of being towed over ice. “Why Mesopotamia? Why Eden? Why not something Thai?”

The pursed lips again. “If you had done any research this morning, you would know that Khun Pan enjoys annoying certain people. Spending this kind of money to re-create the Judeo-Christian paradise in a Buddhist society…well, it…it—”

“It pisses people off.”

“And occasionally he opens the grounds for a charity event. Tonight,
for example. It’ll draw movie stars, television crews, newspapers, and pour more salt into the wounds of the wellborn. All of this did not come cheap,” Dr. Ravi says. He allows the corners of his mouth to lift, revealing unexpected dimples. “If it doesn’t upset people repeatedly, it’s not cost-effective.”

For the second time, Rafferty catches a whiff of something that is quite distinctly not the perfume of paradise. “What am I smelling?”

The smile, such as it is, reappears. “That’s the
other
creation myth. You’ll see it in a moment.” The golf cart labors up a hill. “I must warn you, your reception will probably not be a warm one.”

“I’m not expecting a corsage.”

“He seems to regret the entire evening. And especially you.”

“Oh, fuck him,” Rafferty says, and Dr. Ravi’s startled sideways glance makes the cart swerve. “I’ll give him whatever he gives me. And something really stinks. It smells like—”

The furrows in Dr. Ravi’s brow are so pronounced that he looks like a basset hound. “I’m quite serious. He’s not at his best this morning. I would avoid offending him.”

“Or what?” Rafferty says. “That’s the question of the day. Or what?”

Dr. Ravi says, “Oh, dear.”

“What do you care? I suppose you have to put up with him, but that’s not my problem. And you know what? You don’t actually have to put up with him. There are lots of jobs for a broad-voweled Oxford graduate like you.”

“Cambridge.”

“Just checking.”

“You really are a disastrous choice. I don’t know what he was thinking.” The cart crests the hill, and Dr. Ravi says, “There it is. Your other creation myth.”

At the foot of the gradual downslope before them gleams a white marble mansion, a Parthenon of twenty or twenty-five rooms, marble columns and all. In front of it is a small, rickety, blow-the-house-down northeastern farm village: four raggedy stilt houses and a rice paddy half the size of an Olympic swimming pool. A bamboo fence surrounds a churned-up sea of filth in which five mammoth pigs wallow. From the sheer volume of the stink, rich enough to thicken the air to an unwholesome syrup, it’s clear that the pen has not been mucked out
in some time. During Rafferty’s weeks in Rose’s village, he has become familiar with pigsties.

“It’s not usually this bad,” Dr. Ravi says, averting his face from the smell without taking his eyes off the road. The paved track, Rafferty sees, will take them past the pigsty before delivering them to the classical pretension of the front porch. “As I said, he’s got an event tonight, an antimalaria fund-raiser, and lots of the big folks will come. He likes to let it all ripen when they’re here.”

“My wife says he rubs their noses in it, but I didn’t know she meant literally.”

“Your wife is Thai?”

“As Thai as tom yum kung.” Tom yum kung is the national soup, eaten everywhere.

“Was she poor?”

Rafferty glances over at Dr. Ravi, but he seems to be giving all his attention to the task of steering the cart. “Very.”

“Then she’ll appreciate this,” he says as the stench envelops them. “The pigs are named after our last five prime ministers.”

AFTER THE SCRAMBLED
symbolism of the grounds, the house is just another ordinary Greek Revival mansion roughly the size of the Taj Mahal. Rafferty follows Dr. Ravi across gleaming marble floors until they reach the big, closed double doors at the back of the house.

Dr. Ravi’s knock, so feathery it wouldn’t wrinkle linen, is answered by something that sounds like a sea lion nailed to a rock. With a final glance that combines haughtiness and supplication, Dr. Ravi opens the door and gestures Rafferty through. Rafferty has the feeling that Dr. Ravi wants to hide behind him.

The room they enter is square, with walls approximately twenty-five feet long. The focal point is a teak desk inlaid with mother-of-pearl. The far wall is glass, opening onto a sun-soaked vista of plants and flowers. Seated behind the desk, his back hunched defensively against the glare, is Pan. Without looking up, he says, “You.”

“Always a good guess.” Rafferty bends down to look at Pan’s face. The man cradles his head in both hands as though afraid it will roll off his neck and crack open on the desk. His eyes are deep-sunk and
red-rimmed, and a silvery little aura of gray bristle glints on his chin. He has not shaved this morning. The silver dusting his chin looks odd beneath the bootblack sheen of his hair.

“You didn’t waste any time, did you?” Pan snaps in Thai. Dr. Ravi starts to translate, but Rafferty raises a hand.

“If you mean the newspapers,” he replies, also in Thai, “I didn’t have anything to do with it.”

“Of course you did.”

Rafferty says, “Good-bye, and good luck with your hangover.”

“Wait,” Dr. Ravi says, putting a placating hand on Rafferty’s arm.

“Like I said in the cart, fuck him. I took all the shit last night I’m willing to take.”

“I’m sure he doesn’t mean to offend you,” Dr. Ravi says with an imploring glance at Pan.

“Who else?” Pan squeaks. “Who else had anything to gain?”

Rafferty has a hand on the doorknob. “Any of them. Anybody who wanted a journalist in his pocket.”

After an evaluative moment, Pan mops his face, lowers his head even farther, and says, “Owwwwww. I hurt.”

“Tell somebody who cares.”

“Okay, okay,” Pan says. He closes his eyes in a long wince. “How much not to write it?”

Rafferty hasn’t expected this, although he realizes he should have. He thinks for a moment and says, “I’m not sure I can have this conversation.”

“Five hundred thousand baht. Cash, right now.” Pan slowly opens a drawer, like someone pushing his way through a thick liquid, and pulls out a wad of thousand-baht notes.

“Even disregarding everything else,” Rafferty says, “and there’s a lot to disregard, that’s peanuts.”

Pan’s face is suddenly a deep, choleric red, and he slams the drawer closed with a sound like a pistol shot. He starts to sputter something, then removes one hand from his temple and actually covers his mouth with his fingers and lets his eyes droop shut. He sits there for a moment, breathing heavily, then lowers his hand, opens his eyes, and says, “All right. You’re angry. Pim told me it was my fault.”

“Pim?”

“One of my bodyguards. He said I was terrible.”

“You were.”

“I’m not—I’m not a good drinker,” Pan says.

“You were—” Rafferty turns to Dr. Ravi and says, in English, “I don’t know the Thai. Tell him he was appalling.”

“I think…” Dr. Ravi swallows. “I think he’s already gotten that message.”

“A bodyguard can level with him and you can’t? What kind of amanuensis are you?”

“I’m not an amanuensis. I’m his media director.”

“Goddamn it,” Pan says in heavily accented English. “Speak Thai. Or translate.”

“Sorry, sorry.” Dr. Ravi switches to Thai. “The
farang
said he also sometimes behaves unwisely when he drinks.”

“I did?” Rafferty asks.

“He is certain he contributed to the problem.” There is a sheen of perspiration at Dr. Ravi’s hairline.

Pan’s eyes look like they were pounded into his head solely to hold up the bags of fluid hanging beneath them. They creak around to Rafferty’s. Pan waits, the pink mouth half open, like someone watching to see whether the water will ever boil.

“I did,” Rafferty says. “We all did.”

A sigh escapes Dr. Ravi.

“
All
of us,” Pan says. He burps and pats the center of his chest. “We all behaved badly.”

“Fine.”

Pan nods. “One million baht.”

Rafferty says to Dr. Ravi, “Am I allowed to sit down or what?”

“Please, please,” Dr. Ravi says. “Sit.”

“Thanks.” Rafferty pulls a chair to the edge of the desk. “I need to think for a second.”

“Fine.” Pan puts his forehead back into his hands. “If I start to snore, wake me up.”

“How are you going to get in shape for your party tonight?”

Pan says to the desk, “Steam, sauna, herbal tea, massage, boom-boom with triplets from Laos, a few drinks.”

“Triplets?”

Pan grunts. “I really only like one of them, but I’m never sure which one it is.”

“I want to ask you a question.”

“So?”

“Why do you care about sex workers with HIV?”

Pan separates his fingers and peers at Rafferty between them. “Who says I do?”

“The hundred and fifty of them you’re taking care of.”

Pan brings the scarred hands back together. All Rafferty can see is the Elvis-black hair and the silver grizzle on the chin. “Who else will?” Pan says.

“I didn’t think you liked prostitutes.”

“You were wrong. It’s
farang
I don’t like. Those women and me, we’re mushrooms, sprung from the same shit. They’re my sisters for life. ‘Whore’ is just a word for something they have to do for a while.”