Breathing Water Read Online Free PDF Page B

their office now. Sidewalk market, lots of stalls. Remember, he’s about seventeen years old. He goes to the stallholders and tells them they need protection.” Arthit turns the glass in his fingers. “They say they’ve already got protection, and he says no they don’t. The next day the guy who’s collecting the protection money gets thrown out of a car in the middle of one of the blocks.”
    “Dead?”
    “ Deeply dead. Pulverized. So everybody takes a good look, and the body gets hauled away, and next day there’s Pan again, telling them they need protection.” Arthit picks up the bottle and squints at the label. “It’s really whiskey,” he says, sounding surprised. “My head should be on the table by now.”
    “Keep trying.”
    Arthit presses the bottle to his cheek, as though his face is hot. “Of course, the guy who got tossed out of the car had a boss, and Pan gets grabbed and taken to him. They’re going to chop him up and prolly—probably—use him for bait, but the boss wants to take a look at him first. They’re all there, Pan and the three guys who grabbed him, in the boss’s office. And the boss, a management-level crook named Chai, asks Pan why he shouldn’t just be killed right there. Pan says, ‘Choose one of these guys.’”
    As long as he has the bottle in his hand, Arthit pours and drinks. “You understand that this is hearsay, right? It’s not like it’s in his file or anything. Anyway, Pan says that thing about choosing a guy, and Chai figures what the hell and points at the biggest one, and in about five seconds the big guy is dead on the floor with an ice pick through his temple, and Pan has the dead man’s gun and it’s pressed against the back of Chai’s skull. But he doesn’t pull the trigger. What he does is say, ‘Choose another one.’” Arthit looks toward the door as a car hisses by, narrowing his eyes against the glare through the door.
    “There’s buckets of this kind of stuff at the beginning, but of course if it’s not in a file somewhere, it never happened. Anyway, Pan becomes one of Chai’s enforcers and works his way up, and the next thing we know—say he’s twenty-three, twenty-four—he’s taken over a massage place, just a dump off Sukhumvit. Real junk pile. Cops called it ‘thearmpit,’ because it was hot and dirty and wet and it smelled. A total bottom-level, ten-dollar pounding parlor. Women, the kindest way to describe them would be ‘motherly.’ Title to the place changes hands, and trucks pull up, and a bunch of heavyweights go in with sledgehammers, and a couple tons of dirt get dumped in front, and there are a few weeks of banging and hammering and painting and flower planting, and the dirt gets turned into a big hill leading up to the front door, which is now black glass—etched, okay?—and a huge purple sign goes up that says ‘The Mound of Venus,’ and Pan owns the fanciest public whorehouse in Bangkok. And then he owns two, and then three. And they’ve all got that little hill outside, and they’re called, I don’t know, Mound Two and Mound Three.”
    “The Mound of Venus?” Rafferty asks. “In English?”
    “That touch of class,” Arthit says.
    “And from that he got into everything.”
    “You name it,” Arthit says, “and he’s in it. The first Mound was maybe nineteen years ago, and now he’s in everything. Hotels, apartment buildings, office blocks, toy manufacturing.” He wipes a palm over his forehead although the bar is cool. “In fact, manufacturing of all kinds—shoes, clothes, dishes, anything with a label on it. Factories everywhere. He’s a baht billionaire. For all I know, he’s a dollar billionaire, too.”
    Rafferty drains his beer and watches the remaining bits of foam form little bubble continents as they slide down the inside of the glass. Finally he says, “Something’s missing. Where’s the connective tissue? I mean, there’s a gulf between baby thug–slash–sex mogul, as opposed to