Breathing Water (13 page)

I
t’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.”

He nods slowly, as though considering her argument. “And what’s this mystery information? The stuff you’re leaving out?”

The nape of Weecherat’s neck suddenly feels cold. “You don’t need to know,” she says. “It won’t be in the story.”

His index finger snaps against the edge of his desk with a
thwap
. “Don’t tell me what’s material. You’re taking us in a direction that could put us in a courtroom.”

“Oh, don’t be silly. If the police do come to us, we’ll tell them everything. We can’t be sued for libel if the police demand the information, and you know it.” She hears the pitch of her voice and takes a step back in an attempt to lower the temperature. A question occurs to her. “What are you doing reading this? You don’t usually monitor stories in real time.”

His gaze drifts past her, and she has to fight the urge to turn and look over her shoulder. The tips of his fingers land in the middle of the printout and scrabble it back and forth over the surface of the desk. “You’re right,” he says at last. “Don’t tell me. It’s probably better that I don’t know.”

“You didn’t answer my question.”

He stands, picks up her printout, wads it into a ball, and drops it in the trash. “Didn’t I? Sorry. Go finish your story.”

Back at her cubicle, she rereads what she’s done, types in a few minor changes, and then finishes. She spends twenty minutes fast-forwarding through her tape of the conversation to make sure she’s quoted Rafferty accurately, and then pushes “send.” After she gets up and hefts her purse to her shoulder, she turns to look across the dim room at the bright window in the night editor’s office and finds him looking at her.

She gives him a cool but proper fingertip wave. He nods and swivels his chair to turn his back to her.

The moment she is gone, he swivels around again and gets up. He goes to Weecherat’s cubicle and picks through the things in her drawers
until he finds her tape recorder. He opens it and checks that the tape is inside. Then he returns to his office.

Traffic is thinning at this hour. Weecherat steps into the street and extends an arm, palm down, and pats the air to signal a cab. One pulls out from the curb a short distance away, swings into the traffic lane, and swerves toward her. She glances down to gather her shawl so it won’t catch in the taxi’s door, then the glare of headlights brings her eyes up and she sees the cab bearing down on her. The two steps she manages to scramble back, toward the safety of the curb, put her directly behind a parked truck, and that’s where the cab hits her, slamming her against the lower edge of the truck so hard she is almost cut in two.

The driver flicks on the wipers to clear blood from the windshield and shifts into reverse. The transmission lets out a squeal of protest. Something is caught beneath the truck. The driver throws his door open, climbs out, and slams the door on his thumb. He yelps in pain, opens the door, and lopes away into traffic, dodging between cars and holding his injured thumb close to his chest.

As traffic whisks past the scene, Weecherat’s buttercup scarf flutters in the windstream.

T
he moment the apartment door opens, Miaow pushes through, saying, “It was on
television
.”

“Then I guess it really happened,” Rafferty says, standing in the bluish fluorescent light of the hallway. He puts a hand on Miaow’s head. “Don’t you have something to say to Mrs. Pongsiri?”

“Thank you,” Miaow recites dutifully. “I had a very nice time.”

“It was a little holiday for me,” Mrs. Pongsiri says. She is wearing full evening makeup and a silk robe in all the hues of the rainbow, plus a few that were deleted for aesthetic reasons. Her apartment, the lamps mysteriously sheathed with colored scarves, gleams behind her like a Gypsy caravan. “This is the first night in months I haven’t gone to the bar.”

“Were they really naked?” Miaow says. Her eyes are so wide he can see white all around her irises, and the evening’s excitement seems to have driven away the clouds that have been hovering over her head. “I mean,
really
?”

“Close enough,” Rafferty says. “Thank you, Mrs. Pongsiri. I’ll baby-sit your bar girls some evening.”

He gets a flirtatious smile and a disapproving shake of the head. Raf
ferty doubts there’s a man in the world who could mix messages like that. “You wouldn’t say that if your wife could hear you.”

“No, I wouldn’t,” he says. “And she’s not going to hear it from anybody here either. Is she, Miaow?”

“Why couldn’t I go with you?” The petulance returns.

“No kids allowed. Just a bunch of rich people standing around sneering at each other. Bye, Mrs. Pongsiri.” He leads Miaow down the hall. “Anyway, it was all boring except for the two minutes you saw on television.”

“The garden was pretty. I would have liked it.”

“It didn’t smell as good as it looked.” He opens the door to the apartment and steps aside to allow Miaow to precede him. As he closes the door, Rose comes out of the bedroom, already in shorts and a T-shirt.

“You should get out of that monkey outfit,” she says.

“Miaow was just telling me that Pan’s little show was on TV.”

“It was,” Miaow says, heading for her room.

“That was fast.” Rose stops at the kitchen counter. “I’m going to make some Nescafé,” she says. “Want some?”

“Have I ever wanted any?”

“Not that I remember.”

“But I might want it at this hour?”

“You’ll never truly become Thai until you learn to enjoy Nescafé.”

“Then I guess I’m locked out of paradise.”

“I don’t know about you,” Rose says, crossing the kitchen, “but I had enough of paradise tonight. The kids were pretty, though, weren’t they?”

“Enthusiastic, too.”

“I could never do that,” Rose says with one hand on the handle of the cabinet. “Work naked like that. I was offered more money to move to the upstairs bar and do shows—you know,
shows
—but the idea made my stomach—” She pulls the door open, and there is a white blur of motion, and Rose takes an enormous, instinctive leap backward as something explodes off the shelf toward her. Packages tumble to the counter, pushed aside by whatever it is. Rose’s scream is so high that Rafferty squints against the sound, and he stands as though he has been nailed in place, staring at the thing that has landed on the floor only a
few inches short of Rose, who is backing away, both hands out to fend it off.

It raises itself to a vertical position, perhaps three feet off the floor, its hood spread wide, its tongue tasting the air.

Rafferty later has no memory of having grabbed Rose. All he can remember is the two of them in the living room, his fingers digging into her upper arms, as Miaow charges down the hall toward them. He stops her with a single barked syllable. The cobra remains upright, swaying from side to side.

“
Miaow
. Stay there. Rose, go over there, near the front door, with Miaow.” He grabs the white leather hassock from beside the coffee table with both hands and pushes it across the room to the edge of the kitchen counter. It blocks the entrance to the kitchen.

The cobra drops flat, out of sight beneath the edge of the hassock.

“It can get over that,” Rose says.

“Yell if it does,” Rafferty says, already on the run. “Then go into the hallway and close the door.”

He shoulders open the bedroom door and leaps onto the bed, belly-first. He pulls over his head the chain he wears around his neck and slides aside a panel in the headboard to reveal a locked metal door.

“I can’t see it,” Rose calls.

“Don’t try!” Rafferty shouts. “Don’t go near the kitchen.” He fumbles with the key dangling from the chain, trying to get it into the lock. It keeps skittering away from the slot. “Yell if it starts to come over the hassock.” He finally gets the key into the slot, cranks it to the right, and yanks the door open. His hand hits the heavy cloth bundle, and he pulls it out and unwraps it.

The Glock is cold and oily to the touch. It takes him three attempts to ram the magazine home, and when he tries to rack a shell into the chamber, his hands slide uselessly over the slick metal. He has to dry them on the bedspread before he can snap the barrel back.

Rose screams his name.

He rolls off the bed and charges into the living room to see the cobra slithering over the hassock as though it were a molehill. Rose and Miaow are backing toward the door to the hall. Its attention attracted by all the movement, the cobra rises up again, and Rafferty sights down the barrel.

“Don’t!” Miaow shouts. “
Look
. It hasn’t got any fangs. It’s been—”

Her voice disappears in the roar of the gun, three fast shots, and a bullet hurls the snake backward as though it’s been yanked by an invisible wire, over the hassock and back into the kitchen. Rafferty runs to the edge of the hassock and looks down to see it writhing on the floor. He fires two more times, the first bullet digging a useless hole in the linoleum. The second goes straight through the cobra’s flat head, and the writhing slows.

“It was defanged,” Miaow says from behind him. She sounds accusing.

“I don’t care if it subscribed to the
Ladies’ Home Journal
,” Rafferty says. His legs are shaking violently. He puts a hand on the counter to steady himself. “Any cobra that comes into this apartment is snake meat.”

“It obviously didn’t
come in
here,” Rose says.

Rafferty’s cell phone rings.

He and Rose hold each other’s eyes until Miaow says, her voice high and unsteady, “Aren’t you going to answer it?”

“They already left their message,” Rafferty says, but he takes the phone out of his pocket, flips it open, and says, “Yes?”

“There won’t be any story in the newspaper,” says the man who sat next to him in the Lincoln. “You won’t try anything cute again. I assume you got our present by now. If not, you might want to skip tomorrow’s breakfast cereal. The next one will be in your daughter’s bed, and it’ll have fangs.”

“Got it,” Rafferty says, but his eyes are searching the apartment. He sidesteps Rose and Miaow and looks under the coffee table. Nothing.

“And we’re not happy that you’re spending time with Pan.”

“Oh, use your fucking head,” Rafferty says. “He can make a lot of trouble if he thinks I’m not writing the book he wants. This is going to be hard enough without that.” There is nothing under the counter either.

“Just a minute,” the man on the other end says. Rafferty can hear a palm cover the mouthpiece and a muffled conversation, both voices male. “Okay,” the man says. “You can stay in touch with Pan. But don’t get fancy again, because you’re all out of warnings.”

“One more thing,” Rafferty says, “and then you can hang up and
high-five each other on scaring a little girl half to death. That skinny old guy, Porthip. The one who sells the steel. He won’t talk to me until someone calls to tell him he should. I thought you assholes were on top of details.”

“He’ll get a call tomorrow.”

“
Now
would be the time to hang up on me,” Rafferty says, “but I’m hanging up on you instead.”

He closes the phone and looks at Rose and Miaow. More bad news to deliver. He puts his finger to his lips, then uses the same finger to make a circle that indicates the room in general, and then he touches his ear. He says, “I’ll clean this up. Miaow, go to bed.” He gestures her not toward her bedroom but toward the room he shares with Rose.

She says, “I’m frightened.”

Rafferty is checking the underside of his desk, but he turns and goes to Miaow. Kneeling, he wraps his arms around her. She fidgets, but then she puts an arm around his neck and presses her forehead against his chest.

Rafferty says, “So am I.”