Breathing Water (2 page)

T
he boy sees her go, assessing her without even thinking about it: Just got here. Still got mud between her toes. Doesn’t know anything. Looks stunned, like someone hit her in the face with a pole.

The baby’s not hers. Too pale.

He thinks,
Another one
.

The nervous man behind him slows again. The boy hesitates grudgingly, feeling like he’s trying to lead a cat. For a moment weariness washes over him like warm water. He longs to disappear into the crowd and leave the foreigner to fend for himself, but the others are waiting, and they’re hungry.

“Come on,” he says in English. “Nothing to worry.”

“I don’t know,” the man says.

The boy stops. He draws a deep breath before he speaks; it will not do to show his frustration. “What problem now?”

“It’s not dark enough.”

“When it dark,” the boy says, “they all gone.”

“Just ten minutes,” the man says. He is in his forties, with hair
brushed forward over a plump baby’s face that seems to be mostly lower lip. Despite his eagerness not to be noticed, he wears a bright yellow shirt and green knee-length shorts across wide hips. A fanny pack dangling below his belly thoughtfully announces the location of his valuables. To the boy he looks as conspicuous as a neon sign.

“Ten minute too long.” The boy’s eyes, tight-cornered and furious, skitter across the man’s face as though committing the features to some permanent archive, and then he turns away with a shrug.

The man says, “Please. Wait.”

The boy stops. Plays the final card. “Come now. Come now or go away.”

“Okay, okay. But don’t walk so fast.”

The sun is gone now, leaving the sky between the buildings a pale violet through which the evening star has punched a silver hole. The boy sometimes thinks the sky is a hard dome lit inside by the sun and the moon, and peppered with tiny openings. From the outside the dome is bathed in unimaginable brilliance, and that light forces its way through the pinpricks in the sky to create the stars. If the sky dissolved, he thinks, the light from outside would turn the earth all white and pure, and then it would catch fire like paper. But in the dazzling moment before the flames, it would be clean.

“We go slow,” he says. There may not be another man tonight. The crowds on the sidewalk are thinning. The kids are hungry. He drags his feet to prevent the man from falling behind.

The man says, “You’re handsome.”

“No,” the boy says without even turning his head. “Have better than me.”

They turn a corner, into an east-west street. They are walking west, so the sky pales in the sun’s wake until it slams up against a jagged black line of buildings. Before he returned to Bangkok, this city he hates, the boy had grown used to the soft, leaf-dappled skyline of the countryside. The horizon here is as sharp as a razor cut.

“There,” the boy says, indicating with his chin. “The window.”

Across the street, nine impassive children loiter against the plate glass of a store window. They wear the filthy clothing of the street, mismatched and off-size. Three of the five boys are eye-catchingly dirty. The four girls, who look cleaner, range in age from roughly eleven to
fourteen. The boys look a year or two younger, but it might just be that girls in their early teens grow faster than boys.

They pay no attention to the man and the boy across the street.

“Keep walking,” the boy says. “Don’t slow down too much, but look at the window, like you’re shopping. When we get around the corner, tell me the sex and the color of the shirt of the one you want. Or take two or three. They don’t cost much.”

The man looks toward the shop windows. “Then what?” he asks.

“Then they come to the hotel,” the boy says.

T
he Big Guy’s eyes keep landing on Rafferty.

He’s developed a visual circuit that he follows every time a card is dealt: look at the dealer’s hands, look at the new faceup card in the center of the table, look at Rafferty. Then he lifts the corners of the two facedown cards in front of him, as though he hopes they’ve improved while he wasn’t paying attention to them. He puffs the cigar clenched dead center in his mouth and looks at Rafferty through the smoke.

This has been going on for several hands.

Rafferty’s stomach was fluttering when he first sat down at the table. The flutter intensified when the Big Guy, whom no one had expected, came through the door. Like the others in the room, Rafferty had recognized the Big Guy the moment he came in. He is no one to screw with.

But Rafferty may have to.

He has grown more anxious with each hand, fearing the moment when he’ll have to test the system. And now he can feel the Big Guy’s gaze like a warm, damp breeze.

With a flourish, the dealer flips the next-to-last of the faceup cards onto the green felt. It’s a six, and it has no impact on Rafferty’s hand,
although one of the other men at the table straightens a quarter inch, and everyone pretends not to have noticed. The Big Guy takes it in and looks at Rafferty. His shoulders beneath the dark suit coat are rounded and powerful, the left a couple of inches lower than the right. The man’s personal legend has it that it’s from twenty years of carrying a heavy sack of rice seed, and he is said to have punched a tailor who proposed extra padding in the left shoulder of his suit coat to even them out.

A massive gold ring sporting a star ruby the size of a quail’s egg bangs against the wooden rim of the table as he clasps fat, short-fingered hands in front of him. Rafferty finds it almost impossible not to look at the man’s hands. They are not so much scarred as melted, as though the skin were wax that had been stirred slowly as it cooled. The surface is ridged and swirled. The little finger on the left hand doesn’t bend at all. It looks like he had his hands forced into a brazier full of burning charcoal and held there. The mutilated left hand lifts the corners of the facedown cards with the careful precision of the inebriated, the immobile little finger pointing off into space. The Big Guy was drunk when he arrived, and he is well on his way to being legless.

“What are you doing here,
farang
?” the Big Guy asks very quietly in Thai. The soft tone does not diminish the rudeness of the question. His mouth is a wet, pursed, unsettling pink that suggests lipstick, and in fact he swipes his lips from time to time with a tube of something that briefly makes them even shinier.

“I’m only part
farang
,” Rafferty says, also in Thai. “My mother’s Filipina.” He smiles but gets nothing in return.

“You should be in Patpong,” the Big Guy says, his voice still low, his tone still neutral. “Looking for whores, like the others.” He picks up his glass, rigid pinkie extended like a parody of gentility.

“And you should watch your mouth,” Rafferty says. The glass stops. One of the bodyguards begins to step forward, but the Big Guy shakes his head, and the bodyguard freezes. The table turns into a still life, and then the Big Guy removes the cigar from the wet, pink mouth and sips his drink. Minus the cigar, the mouth looks like something that ought not to be seen, as unsettling as the underside of a starfish.

The others at the table—except for Rafferty’s friend Arthit, who is wearing his police uniform—are doing their best to ignore the exchange. In an effort to forget the cards he’s holding, which are terrifyingly good, Rafferty takes a look around the table.

Of the seven men in the game, three—the Big Guy and the two dark-suited businessmen—are rich. The Big Guy is by far the richest, and he would be the richest in almost any room in Bangkok. The three millionaires don’t look alike, but they share the glaze that money brings, a sheen as thin and golden as the melted sugar on a doughnut.

The other four men are ringers. Rafferty is playing under his own name but false pretenses. Arthit and one other are cops. Both cops are armed. The fourth ringer is a career criminal.

One of the businessmen and the Big Guy think they’re playing a regular high-stakes game of Texas Hold’em. The others know better.

It’s Rafferty’s bet, and he throws in a couple of chips to keep his hands busy.

“Pussy bet,” says the Big Guy.

“Just trying to make you feel at home,” Rafferty says. In spite of himself, he can feel his nervousness being muscled aside by anger.

The Big Guy glances away, blinking as though he’s been hit. He is an interesting mix of power and insecurity. On the one hand, everyone at the table is aware that he’s among the richest men in Thailand. On the other hand, he has an unexpectedly tentative voice, pitched surprisingly high, and he talks like the poorly educated farmer he was before he began to build his fortune and spend it with the manic disregard for taste that has brought him the media’s devoted attention. Every time he talks, his eyes make a lightning circuit of the room:
Is anyone judging me?
He doesn’t laugh at anyone’s jokes but his own. Despite his rudeness and the impression of physical power he conveys, there’s something of the whipped puppy about him. He seems at times almost to expect a slap.

The two architecturally large bodyguards behind him guarantee that the slap won’t be forthcoming. They wear identical black three-button suits and black silk shirts, open at the neck. Their shoulder holsters disrupt the expensive line of their suits.

The Big Guy’s eyes are on him again, even though the dealer’s hands are in motion, laying down the final card of the hand. And naturally it’s when Rafferty is being watched that it happens.

The final card lands faceup, and it’s an eight.

Rafferty would prefer that someone had come into the room and shot him.

J
ust ust an alley.

Bangkok has thousands of them. To a newcomer—like the girl with the baby, the boy thinks—they’re just places to get lost in: filthy concrete underfoot, the chipped and peeling rear walls of buildings that turn their painted faces to the streets, hot exhaust and dripping water from air-conditioning units, loops and webs of black-rubber-coated wiring. Piles of trash and the rats they attract. The barbed, high-throat reek of urine.

But to the boy this alley is as good as a compass. He knows precisely how many steps it is to the busy brightness of the boulevard. He can feel on the surface of his skin the open space of the smaller alleys that branch off to the left and right. He could tell you without looking how many stories make up the building at his back.

It’s just one of the thousands of alleys in the boy’s mental navigation system, as safe or as dangerous as the person he shares it with. The person he shares it with now is definitely dangerous, but probably not under these circumstances.

He wears a polo shirt and a pair of cheap slacks, robbed of their crease by Bangkok’s damp heat. Barely taller than the boy, the man is as
wide and unyielding as a closed door. The square face is so flat it seems to have been slammed repeatedly against a wall. The man’s eyes scan the boy’s face as though they’re trying to scour the skin away.

The boy says, “You’re lying. I saw his wallet when he paid me.”

Behind the door-shaped man is another man, taller and more slender, but equally hard-faced. The taller man has both hands wrapped firmly around the elbow of a third man, who studies the concrete beneath his feet as though he’s looking for the faint lines that will betray a secret door.

The third man is handcuffed, his arms behind him.

“It’s full, but it’s mostly ones,” the door-shaped man says. “Here. Look for yourself,”

The wallet he extends has been taken from the handcuffed man. It is sticky, damp with the sweat of heat and fear. The boy doesn’t touch it. “Ones now,” he says. “But tens and twenties before.”

The man in handcuffs hears the argument without understanding a word. He speaks German and English, but no Thai. His face is blank with the sheer effort of running mentally through all the things he might have done, all the choices he might have made, dozens of them, large and small—anything that would not have led him to this minute. This minute when his life, his life as he has come to know it, ends.

“Look at it, damn you,” says the door-shaped man.

The boy says, “One hundred dollars.”

“You little shit,” the door-shaped man says. A scuff of shoe on concrete draws his attention, and two children enter the alley from the even narrower passage that runs off to the left. He turns back to the boy and gives the wallet a shake. “Are you saying I’m lying?”

The boy looks past the wallet, at the man’s eyes. “One hundred,” he says.

The man stares at him, then nods abruptly, as though agreeing with himself about something. He shoves the wallet into his hip pocket. “In that case,” he says, “fuck off.” He starts to turn to go, but the boy’s hand lands on his arm, and the man yanks his arm away as though the boy carried disease.

He brings the arm back, as if to hit the boy, but then his eyes go past the boy’s face and settle on something behind him. Four children have come into the alley from the boulevard. Behind them are three more.

The taller man, the one holding the prisoner’s arm, feels a presence at his back. He glances over his shoulder. Three children stand there, although he could not have said where they came from. He’s almost certain the alley dead-ends behind him. He licks his lips and says, “Uhhh, Chit…”

“One hundred,” the boy says. “Now. In one minute, two hundred.”

Half a dozen children come out of the alley to the right.

The children are ragged and dirty, their hair matted, their upper lips caked with sweat and snot. Many of them are barefoot, their feet so filthy it looks like they are wearing boots. Some of them are only eight or nine, and some are in their early teens. They say nothing, just stand there looking wide-eyed at Chit, the door-shaped man.

There are fifteen or twenty in all. Over the hum of traffic from the boulevard, Chit can hear them breathe. Three more appear at the alley’s mouth.

The boy says, “Thirty seconds.”

Chit draws his lips back, baring his teeth as though he is about to take a bite out of the boy’s throat. His hand goes to his pocket and emerges with a wad of twenties. With his eyes fixed on the boy’s, he counts off five of them, holds them out, and drops them to the ground.

The boy bends down and picks them up. “Thank you,” he says, as politely as if they’d been neatly folded and handed to him in an envelope. He puts them into his pocket and turns to go.

“Wait,” Chit says. The boy pauses, but the other children are already melting away. “Tomorrow night.”

The boy says, “No. There are other police, not as greedy as you.”

“Try it,” Chit says. “See how long you live.”

The boy turns back to him. “I could say the same to you.” He looks up and down the alley, taking in the remaining children. “They could be anywhere,” he says. “Any time. Waiting for you.”

Chit surveys the upraised faces, smells the dirt and sweat. He raises both hands, palms out. “All right, all right. No more bargaining. Fifteen percent off the top.” The boy is impassive. “Twenty,” Chit says.

“Tomorrow,” the boy says. He saunters to the end of the alley and goes left, onto the sidewalk of the boulevard. The children drift away.

Chit’s eyes burn holes into the boy’s back. He turns to the handcuffed man and slaps him hard, then slaps him again. Then he catches
the taller man’s eye and jerks his chin upward, a command. The taller man reaches behind the prisoner, and a moment later the man’s hands are free.

This is not what the prisoner had expected. The thought ricochets through his mind:
Shot running away?

He flinches when Chit’s hand comes up, but it holds nothing except the prisoner’s wallet. Chit removes the cash, then pulls out a slender deck of credit cards. “Gerhardt,” he says, reading the name off the top card. “Gerhardt, around the corner is an ATM. You withdraw everything you can get on all your cards and give it to me. Tomorrow morning you leave Thailand. Understand?”

Gerhardt says, “I…I leave? You mean, no jail?”

Chit says, “And you never come back.”

Gerhardt starts to thank him and then bursts into tears.