Read Breathing Water for Free Online

getting manufacturing rights to half the logos in the world. You don’t just buy into the kind of businesses he runs. For that you have to get to the really big boys. That’s a closed club.”
    “You’re right,” Arthit says. “There’s something hidden there. And that’s probably the reason he doesn’t want his life story written.”
    “You’ve mentioned his file a couple of times—”
    “Have I?” Arthit’s eyebrows rise. “I shouldn’t have.” He picks up the glass and regards it with severity. “Muss— must be the drink talking.”
    “Why?”
    Arthit says, “Why’ is an extremely broad question.”
    “Why shouldn’t you have mentioned his file?”
    “If you ever looked at it, you’d know.”
    “I don’t think I’m likely to get a look at it.”
    “You’re certainly not. It’s sensitive information. Privileged.”
    “Privileged how?”
    “Strictly cops only. You’d have to get a cop very drunk for him to tell you that Pan’s file is about three pages long, with wide margins and big type, and it reads like the stuff the Catholic Church gives the pope when they want somebody sainted, except shorter. Zero real information. And this is a guy everybody knows is dirty.”
    “But he’s a Boy Scout on paper.”
    Arthit leans forward, pushing his face toward Rafferty’s. “You’re only hearing part of what I’m saying. The file’s interesting, but what’s more interesting is the amount of power it took. ’Nough power to get somebody who’s way, way up there to pull a big, fat, dirty file, hundreds of pages thick, and replace it with a box of candy. And I mean it’s been pulled everywhere. It’s not on paper at the stations, it’s not online, it’s not in the backup systems. Least not the ones I can access.”
    “How unusual is that?”
    The glass comes up again and gets tilted back. Rafferty watches the level drop. “Very,” Arthit says when he can talk again. “Extremely. Almost unprecedented.” He fans his face, which, thanks to the alcohol, is as red as the liquid that indicates the temperature in an old-time thermometer. “Poke. You don’t want to get anywhere near whoever deleted those files. Which means you don’t want to get near Pan.”
     
    AN HOUR LATER Rafferty steers Arthit’s car along the shining street, still wet from the drizzle, to the curb in front of the house that Arthit and his wife, Noi, share. Arthit has his head thrown back and his eyes closed, but when the car stops, he sits forward and looks around at the neighborhood as though he’s never seen it before.
    He turns to face Rafferty. His eyebrows contract. “My car, right?”
    “Right,” Rafferty says, pulling the key from the ignition.
    Arthit blinks lids as heavy as a lizard’s. “How’d I get over here?”
    “Seemed like a good idea, since you’d drunk most of the Johnnie Walker Black in Bangkok.”
    “Did I?” Arthit seems pleased to hear it.
    Rafferty gives his friend a second to find his way into the present. “I have a question for you.”
    “And I,” Arthit says with careful precision, “am hip-deep in answers.”
    “You knew all about Pan, about the amount of power behind him, earlier this evening.”
    Arthit says, “Oh,” and turns to look out the window at his house, at the place where he had once thought he and Noi would raise their children. He breathes on the window to fog it. “That.”
    “Well, knowing all of it, why did you let things get so out of hand at the card table? Why didn’t you defuse it earlier?”
    “The right question,” Arthit says thickly, “is, why didn’t I give a fuck?”
    Rafferty waits.
    Arthit slumps sideways, his cheek pressed against the passenger window. “Between us,” he says.
    “Fine.”
    “I mean it. Not even Rose.”
    This stops Rafferty for a moment. There’s nothing he keeps from Rose. He looks at his friend’s drained, crumpled face and says, “Not even Rose.”
    “Noi needs…pills to sleep,” Arthit says. The words