Breathing Water: A Bangkok Thriller полностью

“It could have been stopped here, but it wasn’t, because one thing was missing from the garden.” Pan raises his hand and makes a magical pass at the tree, and a glittering gold net drops from it, covering Adam and Eve only seconds before the pictures would have become useless for news purposes. Movement continues beneath the net. Pan takes advantage of the diversion to light a cigar. “A net, ladies and gentlemen,” he says through a haze of smoke. “A simple net. A net that still stops malaria today, that can help us to eradicate it from the face of the earth. And I’m proud to announce that my own initial contribution to Net Profits will be ten million baht. That’ll buy one hundred and fifty thousand nets, but that’s just a beginning. I’m hoping we’ll buy a million nets with the money we raise tonight, and, fortunately, there are people here this evening-good friends of mine, each and every one of them-who will make me look like a tightwad.” He creases the cards up the middle and tosses them over his shoulder, then glances down at the golden net, which is still in motion. “So,” he says, “why don’t we give these kids a little privacy and go up to the house and write some checks?”

It’s almost eleven when Elora Weecherat steps onto the sidewalk. Late for her, but it’s been a frustrating evening.

She’d stopped for a quick dinner after her meeting with Rafferty, just a simple coq au vin and a fresh baguette at a French bistro on Silom where she knew the cooking was actually French, not Thai-French, which she supposes has its charms, but not for her. A glass and a half of Côtes du Rhône had washed everything down with the dusty red taste of the Left Bank, and she was feeling carefree and mentally limber by the time she plopped into the chair in her cubicle in the newsroom, logged onto the computers, and started to slap out Rafferty’s story.

It came easily, but it came wrong. The opening was too leisurely, the language didn’t achieve the muted tension she was aiming for. This man has been threatened with death, and the death of those he loves. The people behind that threat are almost certainly overwhelmingly powerful, and their motive is probably to create a book that would serve as a preemptive strike against Pan, should he decide to take advantage of his political potential.

Halfway through rewriting the opening paragraphs, she stops and asks herself how she feels about that. She loathes Pan for his vulgarity and the way he treats the women who are foolish or greedy enough to rise to his bait. On the other hand, there is no doubt that Thailand should be moving toward real democracy, untidy as that may be. Weecherat has little innate sympathy for the poor, primarily because she believes that beautiful things are always created by the privileged. One may wish for the proletariat to rise above poverty without also wanting them to design one’s clothes.

So she detects a little bias problem in the story’s point of view. And, perhaps more important, the piece isn’t sufficiently discreet. No matter how big the story is, she has no desire to feel on her own back the sights that are presumably trained on Rafferty’s. She needs to get her personal opinions out of the way and make the language more suggestive and less explicit. She needs to make the reader see something she doesn’t actually say. And amp up the tension at the same time.

She reaches out and straightens the small photograph of her daughter, the only personal item in the cubicle, then kisses the tip of her index finger and touches it to the child’s nose.

She has worked most of her way through the story, feeling more in control of the material, when an instant message pops up on her screen. The night editor would like to see her.

She gets up, irritably redrapes her scarf, and threads a path between the empty desks to the office at the far end of the room. The night editor, a fat, balding hack who has gained thirty pounds since smoking was banned in the building, swivels in his chair to face her. He holds up a printout.

“Where’s this going?”

“If you’ll let me finish it,” Weecherat says, “you’ll see.”

“Just tell me. My eyes are tired.”

Weecherat sighs and talks him through the story, painstakingly telling it exactly as she intends to write it, eliminating her personal bias and skirting the occasional misdirection that will allow her to imply more than she actually says. When she finishes, he regards her long enough for her to feel uncomfortable.

He drops the printout on the desk. “So you’re selling me a story that could bring the cops down on the paper if anything happens to this farang. We become the keepers of the keys if things go wrong.”

“That’s one way to look at it.”

“Give me another.”

“I just told it to you. The first person ever authorized to write Pan’s biography is being forced under threat of death to write a character assassination. That meets my definition of news.”