Breathing Water Read online

  “Thank you,” she says. She has taken eight or nine steps when she turns back to him. “My name is Da,” she says. “What’s yours?”

  The boy says, “I’m Boo.” He looks even slighter in the bright morning light. He can’t have an ounce of fat on his body, and once again she is struck by the concentration of life in the tight-cornered eyes. “When you come back, we’ll get something to eat.”

  The hut is the most primitive kind of toilet, just a hole in the earth with four walls built around it and a length of cloth hanging in the open doorframe. There is no roof, but even without one the reek is overwhelming. Da looks down in the hole, as village children learn to do, not eager to squat over a snake or a poisonous spider, and is surprised to see water only a foot or so beneath the edge of the hole. Then she thinks, The river, and takes care of her needs. She unwraps Peep and takes off his soiled diaper, suddenly realizing that she’d left the shopping bag with the clean diapers, with the towel, with the milk and whiskey, at the beggars’ apartment house.

  Well, there’s no way she can put the old one back on him. She folds it and drops it into the hole, then cleans him up with paper from the roll beside the hole and totes him back outside with his bottom bare to the breeze. When she comes around the corner, Boo sees Peep and grins. It is the first time she has seen him smile. She feels herself smile back at him, and her heart lifts. Just for a moment, she isn’t worried about anything.

  “Cute butt,” Boo says.

  “It works, too. I have to get some diapers and a couple of towels and some of those little packets of wet tissues, and—”

  “Relax,” he says. “There’s a Foodland a few blocks that way.”

  “Open this early?”

  “Foodland is like Bangkok,” Boo says. “It never closes.” They are climbing the path, Boo first and Da following. The day opens around them as they get higher, the river flowing below and buildings rising ahead. The mud has a fetid smell, but as they approach the top of the bank, it gives way to the stench of exhaust. Da prefers the smell of the mud. Boo looks back over his shoulder at her. “How old are you?”

  “Seventeen. What about you?”

  “Fourteen. Or maybe fifteen. There was kind of a disagreement about when I was born.”

  “Who disagreed?”

  He glances across the road and raises his eyebrows to indicate a lane that runs off it, away from the river. “My sister and my brother.”

  They cross the road and enter the lane, lined on both sides with old-style Bangkok buildings, shopfronts at street level with one or two stories rising above them. “Where are they now? Where are your parents?”

  Boo says, “Gone,” in a tone that does not encourage further discussion. “Up here about half a block,” he says. “The woman makes good noodles.”

  “How do the kids eat?”

  He stops and waits until she is beside him, and the two walk on together. “We work with some cops,” he says. “I go to the places where the guys go who are looking for children, and I talk to them, I tell them I have what they want. Then I take them to look at the kids—the ones you saw asleep in there—and they pick out the ones they want. We get a room at a sex hotel and deliver the kids. Two minutes later the cops bang on the door.”

  Da can hardly believe it. “And the men go to jail?”

  “No. The cops are crooked. They take all the guy’s money and drag him to an ATM to get more, and then they tell him if he doesn’t leave Thailand the next day, they’ll lock him up forever. They pay me, maybe thirty, forty dollars, depending on how much the man had. Sometimes more. They keep most of it.”

  “The man doesn’t get arrested?”

  “No, but he’s out of Thailand. And the kids can eat.”

  They walk as Da considers it. There’s not much traffic yet, and the lane is almost peaceful. “Who thought of it?”

  “I did.”

  “How did you find the cops?”

  He gives her a quick glance. “You mean crooked ones?”

  “Yes.”

  He laughs. “What’s hard is to find straight ones.”

  Small bright plastic chairs, red and blue, are drawn up on the sidewalk, flanking a sloping table covered in a burnt-orange oilcloth. A frilly, smooth-trunked tree provides shade. Over a charcoal fire burning in a black metal drum at the curb, a wok smokes and sputters, and four people are already slurping out of faded plastic bowls. The smell of the food makes Da realize she’s starving, and that Peep must be, too. “I’ve got to get something for Peep,” she says.

  “After you eat. One thing you learn on the street is to take care of yourself first. You’re no good to anyone unless you’re strong.” He waves at the woman beside the fire, broad and brown and sturdy, who gives him a bright good-morning smile and starts throwing things into the wok without asking what he wants.

  “Your girlfriend?” she shouts, stirring in some chopped garlic and a handful of cilantro.

  Da is surprised to see Boo blush.

  “Look how shy,” the woman says, laughing. She pours liquid down the sides of the wok, and fragrant steam billows up as the others at the table, three men and a woman, laugh, too. “Such a handsome boy, if he’d only get his hair cut. Honey,” she says to Da, “cut it while he’s asleep if you have to.”

  “I just need to comb it,” Boo says. His face is scarlet.

  “You couldn’t comb it with a tractor,” the woman says. This time Da laughs with everyone else, and after a moment Boo smiles, too.

  “I have very fresh chicken this morning,” the woman says. “An hour ago it was a customer.”

  “Two of everything,” Boo says. “Except jokes.”

  “You should always start the day laughing.” The woman is throwing things into the wok with both hands. “If you don’t, you’ll end it crying, my mama used to say.” She looks at Da again and says, “Isn’t she pretty?”

  There’s unanimous agreement among the customers, and it’s Da’s turn to blush.

  Da sits there, in the shade, smelling the food, watching the woman’s sure, quick hands and listening to the flow of chatter and laughter, and suddenly the entire scene blurs and ripples, and she is surprised to realize that she has to wipe her eyes.

  “Don’t cry, honey,” the woman calls out. “He’s not that ugly.”

  “I’m sorry,” Da says, drying her cheeks on her T-shirt. “I just felt like I was back home.”

  WITH ANOTHER NINETY minutes on tape in the apartment downstairs, and with Rose back in bed and Miaow reading in her room, Rafferty has time on his hands. When he came home the previous evening, he’d been able to spot two of the people watching the apartment. He’d guess that there’s one more, one assigned to each of them. The third one had undoubtedly been behind Rafferty, following him, and probably peeled off when he saw Rafferty was going home, probably called the others for confirmation that Rafferty had actually arrived and entered the building. There’s not that much traffic on Rafferty’s soi. No point in the follower drawing attention to himself.

  Probably two shifts, possibly even three, since apparently money is no object. Not much use trying to memorize all the faces when they’ll change in a few hours. He figures that they’ve chosen their surveillance spots and that by and large they’ll stick to them, so he’ll keep an eye on those places. He needs to find spot number three.

  And soon. His best guess is that he can continue for another day, two or three at most, to do a convincing imitation of someone who thinks he has a book to write. If they’re unconvinced, there’s nothing to say they won’t grab either Rose or Miaow as a way of holding his feet to the fire.

  To get whatever it is they really want.

  How would Ton be working the surveillance? The watchers are in the street. The microphones are in the ceiling. Presumably someone is listening in real time, and the two groups, the watchers and the listeners, are communicating. When the information from inside the apartment indicates that the family won’t be going anywhere, all but one of the w
atchers are probably encouraged to leave their positions. No sense drawing attention to themselves needlessly. They’d be somewhere nearby, most likely someplace crowded out on Silom, with cell phones. When the listeners hear that someone is going to leave the building, all of them would get a call and move into their spots.

  Maybe the best thing to do is to separate them. The three of them go out and head in a different direction, put some distance between them, and then…

  And then…what? If one member of the family disappears, Ton’s guys will probably kill the other two. Rafferty has to take Weecherat’s murder as a message. Rose and Miaow need to vanish at the same time, and then Rafferty needs to become invisible, too.

  Information overload, he thinks. There’s a lot of information going to Ton’s men, between the sounds coming in over the microphones and what the watchers are seeing. They’ll be comfortable, maybe a little lax. All those eyes, all those ears. He needs to exploit that. Create a disconnect of some kind, a contradiction between what they hear and what they see, and use the confusion to make two people vanish in plain sight. Up until now he’s been focused on figuring out how to make them think that Rose and Miaow are still in the apartment for a day or so after they’ve left it. He’s been trusting himself to come up with the way to get them out, postponing dealing with the big illusion while he putters around preparing this beginner’s parlor trick, which will be useless until they’ve gone.

  Putting second things first.

  He looks at his watch: 9:25. Time to imitate a writer. He puts the yellow list on the table and starts to dial numbers. He starts with the cop and then moves to the gangster.

  THEIR BELLIES ARE full. Peep is clean and freshly diapered, engrossed in a bottle of formula from Foodland. Da and Boo sit on the riverbank in the shade, watching the river slide by.

  “I don’t know what I can do for you,” Da says. “I’m probably too old to help you with those cops. Peep’s too young. We’re just two more mouths for you to feed. And you did all that—I mean, Kep and all of it—for me.”

  Boo watches a gleaming white cruiser speed upstream. The reddish brown water parts before it, sluicing up over the sides, all the way up to the big red letters that say RIVER QUEEN.

  “Rich people,” he says. “That’s from the Queen Hotel. Rich farang being taken up to look at the ruins at Ayutthaya. Do you know how much it costs to sleep there for one night?”

  Da says, “In Ayutthaya?”

  “No, Da,” Boo says with exaggerated patience, “not in Ayutthaya. At the Queen Hotel.”

  “How would I know? I’ve never even been in a hotel.”

  “Three hundred, four hundred dollars,” he says. “Some of the rooms cost more than a thousand dollars.”

  Da looks over at him. It sounds like a lot of money. “How many baht?”

  “More than thirty thousand.”

  “Thirty thousand? My whole village didn’t have thirty thousand baht.”

  “The people on that boat could buy your village with what’s in their pockets. They wouldn’t even have to go to an ATM. But they wouldn’t want your village.” The boat is well upstream by now, and Da can make out some of the men and women gathered at the back of it. Most of them wear white clothes, and many of them look fat. “But you know what some of them would want?”

  “What?”

  “Peep.”

  Da says, “Oh,” and she sees it all. Poor mothers, rich people, and the currency a baby. She holds Peep a little more snugly.

  “I didn’t get you away from them because I need your help,” Boo says. “What I want you to do is talk to somebody. About you and Peep.”

  “Who? Who would want to know about us?”

  Boo shakes his head. “I have no idea whether he’ll want to know. I don’t even know if he’ll let me in. But if he’ll talk to us, he can do something about it.”

  “What? What can he do?”

  Boo takes her hand in his. Hers is cold, but his is warm and dry. It feels natural to her. He says, “If he wants to, he can tell the world.”

  PART III

  ALL THE WAY DOWN

  31

  A Man Who Has Just Been Hit by a Train

  As always lately, the first thing Arthit sees when he comes into the room is Noi’s face in the photograph.

  What he really sees is the back of the photograph, since it’s turned toward his swivel chair on the far side of his dented, olive drab steel desk. What he’s actually looking at is a cardboard stiffener with a fold-out triangle to make the frame stand upright. But what he sees is the two of them, ridiculously young and fate-temptingly happy, the immaculate white linen thread of marriage tied loosely around their foreheads. He’d had a couple of drinks for courage before the wedding, and his face is a bright red that’s part alcohol, part blush. Noi’s is alive with mischief. Below the edge of the photo, she had just made a trial grab at the part of him that now belonged exclusively to her. Although of course all of him actually belonged exclusively to her.

  As he drags himself in, he doesn’t see the window he fought to get, or the dull, industrial, alley-bisected view it looks out onto, or the rattan cricket on the table, or the couch pillows covered in yellow silk that Noi picked out, or the photographs of himself on the wall, standing next to men-of-the-moment, mostly forgotten now but worth pointing a camera at, back whenever. He doesn’t see the rug he hauled in a year ago, grunting under its weight, because he hated the brown linoleum.

  Just the photograph. Just his wife’s face.

  Of course he knows that he’s not seeing the other things. He’s stopped seeing them in self-defense, amazed to learn how much sadness inanimate objects can give off, an emotional vapor that says, When I bought that / was given that /put that there, I didn’t know. I thought the world’s natural state was to be whole, I thought it would remain whole.

  I thought if anything ever happened to one of us, it would happen to me.

  Beside the framed photograph, a stack of work waits for him. Papers he needs to review pointlessly, reports he needs to initial pointlessly, a calendar of pointless meetings he’ll drag himself to, just a little late, so he can sit on the periphery, against the wall instead of at the table, and try to look attentive. Try not to look like a man who has just been hit by a train.

  He trudges across the room and sits down with a sigh he doesn’t hear. The chair makes its invariable squeak of complaint, something he has meant to take care of for weeks—a squirt of WD-40, what could be easier? It would just take a second. The can is on top of the filing cabinet, put there at his request by one of the secretaries a million years ago. Picking it up would take more strength than he possesses. He thinks briefly about getting up and throwing the chair through the window. That’s something he can visualize doing. Breaking things. For that he could find strength.

  He reads the first sentence on the top page of the stack and then reads it again. Halfway through he goes back to see what the memo’s subject is. It’s got something to do with a new copying loop, a list of people who are to be copied automatically on several sorts of documents, very few of which ever cross his desk. He takes the page, rips it lengthwise down the center, and sits there, holding half of the sheet in each hand, looking right through the photograph.

  In the three days since he found the pills buried in the flour, Noi has paled and lightened. She seems to walk more weightlessly, to absorb more light, to carry her pain more easily, as though it were a cloak she can lift from her shoulders when the weight becomes too much for her. Today, as she stood at the stove heating the water for his coffee, he had the sense that if he squinted hard enough, he could see the stove through her. That she was some sort of colored projection in the air.

  That she was already beginning to fade.

  Of course, the impulse, the instinct, is to hold on, to wrap his arms around her and anchor her. To do whatever it takes to keep her beside him. But to do that would be to keep her in her pain, the smoldering in her nervous system that will
simply get worse until she bursts into flame like a paper doll. Fire no one can put out. Won’t it be better if she simply goes to sleep?

  Of course it would. Of course it wouldn’t.

  That morning, as he drank his coffee, trying to act the way he acted every morning—as though this were just the beginning of another day in an infinite progression of days—Noi pulled her chair around from the side of the table where she usually sits and put it beside his. She wound her arms around his neck and leaned against him. He sat there cup in hand, inhaling the smell of her shampoo, feeling the heat from her skin, listening to the flow of her breath and watching the room ripple through the tears in his eyes, while his heart slammed against his ribs like a fist. They sat there until the coffee was cold. Neither of them spoke a word.

  His phone rings.

  He looks at it as he might look at a scorpion on his desk. It continues to ring. Finally he drops the scrap of paper in his left hand and reaches for the receiver, seeing the glint of his wedding ring. Picks up the receiver and says his name.

  “This is Thanom,” says the voice on the other end, a voice with some snap to it. “We need to talk. Now. Come up here.”

  Arthit hangs up the phone, thinking, Poke.

  “I’VE JUST HAD an interesting chat,” Thanom says as Arthit comes through the door. Today Thanom is in his usual uniform, not the ceremonial outfit Poke had described him wearing at Pan’s fund-raiser. He has a short, flattened nose and an upper lip that’s longer than the nose above it. Those features, plus round black eyes as expressive as bullet holes, have always made him look to Arthit like a monkey. But he’s not a monkey one should underestimate. Thanom has a perpetually wet index finger raised to detect the slightest shift in the political winds.

  “Really,” Arthit says. “A chat with whom?” He has not been invited to sit.

  Thanom gives a tug at the left point of his collar. “A friend of yours. The farang who’s writing Pan’s biography. What’s his name?”