Behind every great fortune is a great crime…For American ex-pat writer Poke Rafferty, a late-night poker game delivers an unexpected prize: an "opportunity" to write the biography of Khun Pan, a flamboyant, vulgar, self-made billionaire with a criminal past and far-reaching political ambitions. The win seems like a stroke of luck, but as with so many things in vibrant, seductive, contradictory Bangkok – a city of innocence and evil, power and poverty – the allure of appearances masks something much darker. Within a few hours of folding his cards, Rafferty, his wife, Rose, beloved adopted daughter, Miaow, and best friend, Arthit, an honest Bangkok cop, have become pawns in a political struggle among some of Thailand 's richest, most powerful, and most ruthless people.A hero to the poor and dispossessed, Pan is like a bone in the throats of the beautiful, sophisticated "good" people who own and control every facet of Thailand and want more. There are many who would prefer that a book, especially a sympathetic book, stay unwritten. And there are others who want to expose Pan's darker secrets, information useful in a preemptive strike against this profligate billionaire who can threaten their hold on power – a situation they will go to murderous lengths to prevent.Damned if he does, damned if he doesn't, Rafferty is breathing water and sinking deeper in a sea of intrigue with each passing hour. The trouble multiplies when a missing young street friend of Miaow's reappears, needing Rafferty's help to protect an innocent village girl trapped in a baby-selling ring. Pushed ever closer to the abyss, Rafferty has one chance to get them all out alive. But to succeed, this foreigner must do the impossible – keep a cool Thai heart.Set in the Thailand of today's headlines – a nation of unrest, political uncertainty, corruption, and tradition, where the future looks dangerously precarious – Breathing Water is the story of a deadly game in which the stakes are enormous and life is literally cheap. The most compelling Poke Rafferty thriller yet, it is a journey that goes beyond the illusion of order and stability into a world where a wrong turn can lead to chaos, and where love and courage may not be enough to hold back the darkness.
This book is dedicated to the memory of Raleigh Philp,
who left behind an ever-widening wake of inspiration,
and to Alicia Aguayo from her
The man behind the desk is a dim shape framed in blinding light, a god emerging from the brilliance of infinity. The god says, “Why not the bars? You’re pretty enough.”
The girl has worked a finger into the ragged hole in the left knee of her jeans. The knee got scraped when the two men grabbed her, and she avoids the raw flesh. She raises a hand to shade her eyes so she can look at him, but the light is too bright. “I can’t. I tried for two nights. I can’t do it.”
“You’ll get used to it.” The god puts a foot on the desk. The foot is shielded from the light by the bulk of his body, and she can see that it is shod in a very thin, very pale loafer. The sole is so shiny that the shoe might never have been worn before. The shoe probably cost more than the girl’s house.
The girl says, “I don’t want to get used to it.” She shifts a few inches right on the couch, trying to avoid the light.
“It’s a lot more money. Money you could send home.”
“Home is gone,” the girl says.
That’s a trifle, and he waves it away. “Even better. You could buy clothes, jewelry, a nice phone. I could put you into a bar tonight.”
The girl just looks down and works her finger around inside the hole. The skin around the scraped knee is farm-dark, as dark as the skin on her hand.
“Okay,” the man says. “Up to you.” He lights a cigarette, the flame briefly revealing a hard face with small, thick-lidded eyes, broad nostrils, pitted skin, oiled hair. Not a god, then, unless very well disguised. He waves the smoke away, toward her. The smoke catches the glare to form a pale nimbus like the little clouds at which farmers aim prayers in the thin-dirt northeast, where the girl comes from. “But this isn’t easy either,” the man says.
She pulls her head back slightly from the smoke. “I don’t care.”
The man drags on the cigarette again and puts it out, only two puffs down. Then he leans back in his chair, perilously close to the floor-to-ceiling window behind him. “Don’t like the light, do you? Don’t like to be looked at. Must be a problem with a face like yours. You’re worth looking at.”
The girl says, “Why do you sit there? It’s not polite to make your visitors go blind.”
“I’m not a polite guy,” says the man behind the desk. “But it’s not my fault. I put my desk here before they silvered those windows.” The building across Sathorn Road, a sea-green spire, has reflective coating on all its windows, creating eighteen stories of mirrors that catch the falling sun early every evening. “It’s fine in the morning,” he says. “It’s just now that it gets a little bright.”
“It’s rude.”
The man behind the desk says, “So fucking what?” He pulls his foot off the desk and lets the back of the chair snap upright. “You don’t like it, go somewhere else.”
The girl lowers her head. After a moment she says, “If I try to beg, I’ll just get dragged back here.”
The man sits motionless. The light in the room dims slightly as the sun begins to drop behind the rooftops. Then he says, “That’s right.” He takes out a new cigarette and puts it in his mouth. “We get forty percent. Pratunam.”
She tries to meet his eyes, but the reflections are still too bright. “I’m sorry?”
“Pra…tu…nam,” he says slowly, enunciating each syllable as though she is stupid. “Don’t you even know where Pratunam is?”
She starts to shake her head and stops. “I can find it.”
“You won’t have to find it. You’ll be taken there. You can’t sit just anywhere. You’ll work the pavement we give you. Move around and you’ll probably get beat up, or even brought back here.” He takes the cigarette out of his mouth, looks at it, and breaks it in half. He drops the pieces irritably into the ashtray.
“Is it a good place?”
“ Lot of tourists,” he says. “I wouldn’t give it to you if you weren’t pretty.” He picks up the half of the cigarette with the filter on it, puts it in his mouth, and lights it. Then he reaches under the desk and does something, and the girl hears the lock on the door snap closed. “You want to do something nice for me?”
“No,” the girl says. “If I wanted to do that, I’d work in the bar.”
“I could make you.”
The girl says, “You could get a fingernail in your eye, too.”
