Breathing Water: A Bangkok Thriller полностью

Five show promise. Two of them are the most melancholy of all crimes, the burning of a slum that had the misfortune to occupy land earmarked for more profitable purposes. People died in one of these fires. Both had been euphemistically designated as accidental. Then there are two house fires that destroyed or damaged the homes of the powerful. Nobody died, so the fires were probably just attention-getters. The fifth is a factory conflagration, a virtual explosion of highly flammable materials in a facility that turned out stuffed animals for an American toy maker. The fire had happened around 3:00 A.M. during a “ghost shift,” a shift the American company knew nothing about. After the workers on the night shift left, the ghost-shift workers were brought in to use inferior materials to bootleg identical animals for direct sale at the bazaars of Asia. One of the differences between the superior and the inferior materials was that the inferior materials weren’t fireproofed.

The fire killed one hundred twenty-one people. The factory’s windows were barred, and the iron doors had been locked from the outside. People had been stacked in front of the doors in smoldering piles, like kindling. Some had died with their arms protruding between the bars on the windows, reaching frantically for the world. The company that had rented the factory to the Americans had proved to be a shell corporation owned by another shell corporation. No one who supervised the ghost shift had been found. No one had ever been charged.

Rafferty prints out all five stories. Each of the pieces ultimately dithers off into the vague language the Thai police use to describe their lack of progress in an investigation that’s aimed directly at somewhere they’re not going to be allowed to go. And there’s no doubt there are heavyweights behind at least some of the fires. The slums were burned to make way for buildings, the houses probably burned as warnings, and the toy factory burned through inhuman stupidity, coupled with greed for yet more profit.

The odds were good that Pan had been involved in one of them. And Rafferty would guess it was one of the ones that involved death, given the magnitude of the favors he had been granted.

Rafferty had misquoted Balzac: Behind every great fortune is a great crime. Pan’s fortune might have begun in fire.

THE TIME CRAWLS past.

Arthit refuses to go home early. He doesn’t want to explain to Noi that he has effectively been suspended from the force. She’ll take the blame, knowing that his work is the only thing he has now. She doesn’t need the guilt.

So he does something he’s never been good at: He wastes time. He’s been busy his entire adult life. He doesn’t take vacations-something he regrets now; he should have taken Noi to Hawaii, to Los Angeles, to Tahiti-somewhere that would have made her happy. He should have done a million things, but he didn’t. He was who he was, and she had loved him-she still loves him-anyway.

He spends half an hour trying out pens in a stationery store, writing the names of everyone he knows, including Noi’s doctors. He browses shelves of books he wouldn’t read if they materialized one morning under his pillow. He walks through unfamiliar neighborhoods, seeing some of Bangkok’s remaining small villages, seeing how the people stiffen and grow quiet at the sight of his uniform. Tasting the bitterness in the back of his throat that it should be so.

He thumbs through stacks of bootleg DVDs, eyed nervously by sidewalk vendors who yanked the albums of pornography out of sight at his approach. To his immense surprise, he finds a film by Buster Keaton, Sherlock Jr., that he’s never seen. There it is, sandwiched in between more usual titles like Terminator 48 and Revolving Door of the Dead. Noi loves Keaton and his modern disciple, Jackie Chan. When he tries to pay for the movie, the vendor waves his money off, but Arthit takes a thousand-baht note, puts it on the table, and slams a DVD case on top of it, harder than he had intended to. With the Keaton in a plastic bag, he trudges off, ashamed to be dressed as a policeman.

He thinks about calling Rafferty, but what would he say? He doesn’t know how to ask for help, and even if he did, he can’t imagine what help Rafferty could offer. Rafferty has more than enough to deal with now. Struck by the thought, he stops and dials Kosit.

“How’s Poke doing?” he asks.

“You mean other than being outmatched and outweighed and not having any idea what to do about it?”

Arthit says, “Right.”

“This is stupid,” Kosit says. “You’re worried about Poke, and Poke’s worried about you. Why don’t you talk to each other?”

“Because I can’t help him.”

“And vice versa. So let me make a suggestion.”

“Go ahead.”

“Get drunk together. Get drunk and sloppy and say a bunch of stuff you’ll regret tomorrow. You’ll both feel better.”

“Go catch a crook,” Arthit says, and hangs up.