Bangkok Noir

At the Nana and Sukhumvit Road intersection, beside the police traffic control box on the corner, they met and climbed into a taxi. “How do you know this isn’t another trap?” Chinapat asked.

Seven held the suitcase on her lap. “Soon the Japanese will be looking for you.”

He knew there was no going back to Queen Sirikit Center. “Do we have enough money?”

Seven nodded her head. “For the startup, yes. Then we’ll need financing. Worry about that later.”

Not only had she saved Chinapat from falling into a trap laid by the Japanese, but she had the most calming effect when it came to assigning worry to a future to-do list. He could love a woman like that.

3.0

Where are you?

Bangkok Port

Located at the mouth of the Chao Phraya River, Bangkok Port—people also called it the Port of Klong Toey—had been a trading hub since the ninth century. A lot of sailors, pirates, traders, merchants and adventurers had walked the docks. As the taxi pulled to a stop, the sky was dotted with large cranes like columns of dinosaur skeletons erected up and down the shoreline of the Chao Phraya. Beyond the cranes were cargo ships, rice barges and fishing ships at anchor. Waiting.

Wires from Seven’s cell phone ended inside her ears. She talked as they walked down the road. Chinapat shifted the suitcase from one hand to the other. Real cash had a certain heft; the weight of money, though, never seemed heavy. They walked for fifteen minutes, and the sun was overhead and hot. Sweat rolled down Chinapat’s face, but Seven’s skin was cool and untouched by a single drop of perspiration. That’s when they saw a skinny whitehaired farang man with a broad smile, waving, in the distance. As they came closer, the man could have passed for late forties to early seventies. He introduced himself as Mr. Shockley and led them up the gangplank of the ship with “DOLPHIN SHEPHERD” stenciled on the bow.

“Welcome, partners,” Shockley said. “Let me show you around.”

First stop, and his point of pride, was a crane equipped with a large metal claw—a giant version of the fairground arcade game. Chinapat exchanged a look with Seven.

“Are you the owner?” asked Chinapat, frowning under his baseball cap.

“I am authorized to act on behalf of the owners,” he said. “As chunks of ice shelves calf into the Antarctic, we bring the ship alongside and harvest the purest drinking water on the planet. Australia is running out of fresh, pure water. So is Japan. The future of water is locked in icebergs.”

“How do you drink an iceberg?” asked Chinapat.

“You bottle it,” Shockley said.

Seven took the suitcase from Chinapat and handed Jaul’s pimping money over to Shockley. “Aren’t you going to count it?” she asked.

“No need,” he said.

“Now that we are partners, shouldn’t we know who our partners are?” Seven asked, wondering if this was the first time that brothel money had been laundered through an iceberg business.

“Yeah, that’s right,” said Chinapat. “Partners shouldn’t have secrets from each other.”

Shockley had hoped they would have taken more interest in the machinery, the engineering work that had gone into the crane, and shown some curiosity about where the ice was stored on board and how it was transferred to the bottling plants. He loved telling others stories of the early days of trial and error, testing, equipment breakdowns and violent storms at sea, where it was like riding an eighteenstory building struggling sideways over forty-foot waves. He led them to a stateroom and sat them at a conference table. There was a huge computer screen, and Shockley clicked the mouse to fill the screen with what looked familiar to Chinapat. A fishing village in a small bay.

“That’s a village in Japan. It’s Taiji,” said Chinapat.

“Our new bottling plant will be located here,” he said, directing a cursor to a point near the village center. “We will employ most of the able-bodied men in the village.”

“Who is ‘we’?” asked Seven.

The problem with the word “we,” she thought, is that the edges break off when it comes to describing the merger of intelligences that include human interfaces. Unscrambling the nodes and networks is a messy business.

Shockley scratched his chin and smiled. “The original settlers of the Antarctic,” he said, looking at the two new partners and trying to read their reaction. “Those who know the icebergs better than anyone.”

“Dolphins,” said Chinapat. “We’re back to dolphins again.”

“We are returning to the sea,” said Seven with a smile.

“The water inside icebergs is thousands of years old. Some icebergs have drinking water older than man,” said Shockley. “There is no manmade tradition older than iceberg water. We have approached the Taiji people, who have agreed to give up killing dolphins for harvesting pure water. The new harvest carries the dignity of the past, and it is the past they worship.”