Breathing Water: A Bangkok Thriller

Timothy Hallinan Breathing Water: A Bangkok Thriller

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 hijito

PART I. THE GULF

1

Pinch It

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.”