Breathing Water Read online

  The boy moves beside him without a glance. He has a hand on the arm of a young woman—a girl, really—who holds a baby. Neither of them seems to notice Rafferty, but the boy, without turning his head, says, “You’re being followed.”

  Lowering his gaze to look at his watch again, Rafferty says, “How many, and what color shirt?”

  “One. Blue. Can I get rid of him?”

  “Don’t hurt him. I’m in enough trouble already. Nobody in yellow?”

  “Not for the last three blocks anyway.”

  “Let’s lose him.”

  The boy shrugs assent and moves on. The girl beside him risks one short look at Rafferty, then snaps her head forward again, but not before her eyes slide down to the white-wrapped hand. She tosses a quick, puzzled smile and hurries on beside the boy, putting her free hand on his arm in a way that makes Rafferty think, Hmmmm, even under these circumstances.

  A broad incline of steps opens up to Rafferty’s left, rising to a complex of shops and restaurants that’s anchored by an enormous and brilliantly lit McDonald’s, in front of which Ronald offers the passing crowd a permanent plastic wai, hands palm to palm against his chest in greeting. Halfway up the steps, Rafferty turns idly and surveys the crowd, still trying to look like the man whose date hasn’t shown.

  His phone rings again, and again it’s Arthit’s number.

  The sidewalk teems with people: those who left work late, those who are starting the evening early, those who are squeezing in some last-minute shopping, those who just want to move around now that the day’s heat is lifting, those whose fingers are happiest in other people’s pockets, those who are always on the street. Rafferty’s attention is drawn by a shout and a sudden knot of people on the sidewalk, a little eddy like a whirlpool twelve or fifteen feet away. Another shout, a curse this time, and the knot dissolves, and three children streak for the curb. One of them holds a wallet straight up in the air like the Olympic torch. The children pause in the parking lane, tossing the wallet back and forth, and then there’s an eruption of people, shoved forward from behind, and the children take off, heading back down Silom, away from Rafferty, with Blue Shirt in pursuit, screaming after them and stretching his arms in front of him as he runs, as though they were as elastic as chewing gum and he could suddenly extend them and snag the nearest kid.

  “Now,” the boy says, suddenly beside him. “Down, into the crowd, and around the corner. We’ll be there.” He descends a step and then turns back and says, “If you’ll talk to me, I mean.” Then he hops lightly down the stairs and melts into the crowd, and Rafferty, feeling old and fragile by contrast, pulls out his cell phone and, with some difficulty, opens it, then presses and holds the 1 key to speed-dial Rose. By the time she answers, he is already at the foot of the steps, pressing the bad hand to his chest.

  “Rose,” he says. “Get Miaow and leave the apartment.” He finds an entry point in the crowd and steers himself into the stream of people. “No, nothing’s wrong. I just need you to get your two watchers out of the way. I want to get into the building without being seen. Tell Miaow you’ll buy her an ice cream or something. Call me when you know you’re being followed.” He folds the phone against his chin and drops it into his shirt pocket, then grabs his left wrist again as the hand seems to balloon with pain.

  Five minutes later, standing on the side street with the boy and the young woman looking at him expectantly, he answers the phone, and Rose says, “The apartment’s clear. They’re behind us.”

  “THERE ARE TWENTY-FOUR right now,” Boo says. He reaches up to the wall behind him and rubs the hanging blanket between his thumb and forefinger as though he’s thinking about buying it. “Sometimes there are more, sometimes not so many.”

  “Twenty-six,” says the girl, who has been introduced as Da. “If you count us.”

  “Twenty-five and a half,” Boo says, and Da grins, and Rafferty has to tighten his jaw to keep it from dropping. The kid made a joke? In the old days, a little less than two years ago when the boy—then known by his street name, Superman—first barged into their lives—he’d rarely smiled at anything lighter than a five-act tragedy.

  “Excuse me,” Da says politely. “Why is your hand like that?”

  “I don’t want to forget my Carpenters CD,” Rafferty says. “This way I never do.”

  “But—” Da says, looking puzzled.

  The boy says, “Don’t joke with her. She believes everything.”

  And Rafferty watches in amazement as the girl takes one hand off the baby and swats Superman—Boo—across the head.

  “But you can’t play it,” Da says, glaring at the boy, who’s cringing in mock terror, “if it’s all taped up like that.”

  “This is my contribution to the evening, wherever I go,” Rafferty says. “Making sure that there’s at least one Carpenters CD that nobody can play.”

  “Who stomped on your hand?” Boo asks.

  “Someone you’ll never have to meet.”

  The boy shrugs without much interest and looks around. Despite Rafferty’s efforts, the apartment on the fourth floor is dingy and cheerless. Through a six-inch gap between the sheets and pillowcases he hung over the windows, he can see wet-looking streaks of whatever the hell is left on glass after it’s been badly washed.

  “Why are we here?” Boo asks. “Where’s Miaow?”

  “We’re here because we can’t go upstairs for a bunch of reasons,” Rafferty says, “and Miaow is out right now with Rose.”

  “What reasons?” the boy asks.

  The girl asks, “Who’s Miaow?”

  “My daughter,” Rafferty says, and suddenly an idea breaks over him like a wave. It’s enough to make him sit forward and forget about the hand for a moment. “Twenty-four kids? You’ve got twenty-four kids?”

  “Give or take,” Boo says.

  Da says, “How old is Miaow?”

  “Then you can help me,” Rafferty says, closing his eyes. He’s been in another poker game for the past few days, he realizes, playing against pros this time, and he’s suddenly been dealt a hand full of wild cards. He’s already seeing it in his mind, setting up the bluff, figuring out what he’ll need.

  “Good,” Boo says, settling into his uncomfortable chair, “because we need you to help us, too.”

  Da says again, “How old is—” but the boy cuts her off with a glance.

  “WHERE ARE YOU?” demands Captain Teeth.

  “Outside the apartment,” says the man who had been watching Rafferty. “I only lost him for five or ten minutes this time.”

  Captain Teeth rests his forehead in his hand. “What do you mean, this time?”

  “He went into a building an hour or so ago. He must have come out the back way or something, because I was out front the whole time. I picked him up about half an hour later, and he’d hurt his hand somehow. He went into another building and got it bandaged, and then…well, then—”

  “Kid stole your wallet.” Captain Teeth turns up the volume on the console. He has one earpiece of his headphone still in place, and the cell phone pressed to his other ear. Rafferty’s apartment is silent.

  “Three of the little bastards. But I got it back.”

  “I don’t give a shit about your wallet. You shouldn’t have chased them.”

  “It was my wallet.”

  “Oh, golly,” Captain Teeth says, listening to the silence in Rafferty’s living room. “A few baht, some fake ID, maybe a condom. No wonder they tossed it.”

  “They got eight hundred baht.”

  “You’d already lost him once, you idiot. You should have stayed with him.”

  “Okay.” When Captain Teeth doesn’t say anything, the man adds, “Sorry.”

  “Any chance it was a setup?”

  “You mean, do I think he’s running a ring of homeless kids? No. The sidewalk was full of them. Must have been twenty.”

  Captain Teeth says, “Is that normal?”

  “No,” the man says grudgingly, “but come on
. They move around. If they didn’t, everybody’d be on the lookout all the time.”

  “What about the hand?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe cut, maybe broken. All wrapped up in bandages.”

  “Any lights on in the apartment right now?”

  The man on the street counts balconies and corner windows until he gets to Rafferty’s floor. “The one in the living room.”

  “Well, I can’t hear him.”

  “Are the woman and the girl in there? I don’t see the guys who follow them.”

  “No,” Captain Teeth says. “They went out ten, fifteen minutes ago. The guys are behind them.”

  “So,” the man on the street says, “what’s the problem? There’s no one for him to talk to.”

  “The woman got a phone call just before they went out,” Captain Teeth says. “And what it all adds up to is that we don’t really know where Rafferty is, and the building went for ten minutes or so with nobody watching it.” He sits back in his chair and takes the nail of his uninjured thumb between his straggling incisors.

  The man on the other end of the phone says, “Kai?”

  Captain Teeth—Kai—says, “I’m thinking.” The door to the office opens, and Ren comes in, looking sleepy. He’s breathing through his mouth to cool the burned spot on his tongue. He looks at Kai, with the phone to one ear, and raises his eyebrows questioningly.

  “Go inside,” Kai says into the phone.

  “And do what? Knock on his door?”

  “Yes.”

  “He’s in there, I’m telling you.”

  “Based on what?” Kai hears something in his other ear. “Hold on,” he says. To Ren he says, “Grab the headphones.”

  Ren pulls out his chair, sits, and clamps the phones to his ears. Together the two of them listen to a ringing telephone in Rafferty’s apartment.

  Ren looks over at Kai and says, “So?”

  “So some kids picked Dit’s pocket, and Dit chased them and lost Rafferty, and the other two followed the woman and the girl out of the apartment, and now it’s Dit’s best guess that Rafferty’s at home.”

  “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.”

  37

  I Might as Well Be Fluorescent

  His 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 b
linking, 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.