The Fear Artist pr-5

by Timothy Hallinan

“Rattled.”

  “Yeah, you know. American slang? Rattled? Having a guy die on me and all that. People running. Shots being fired. Shots you denied, by the way. Not the ideal spot for concentration.”

  “You’re not used to having people die on you.”

  “Not especially.”

  Major Shen sits back and crosses his legs, a man with all the time in the world. “And yet people die around you with some regularity.”

  The room suddenly feels not so much cool as frigid. Rafferty tries to keep his face blank as he ransacks his mind for anything that could connect him directly to any of the people who actually have died around him since he came to Bangkok. “You must know something about my life I don’t.”

  Shen lowers his head and looks at Rafferty from under his eyebrows. “A Chinese gangster. An American defense contractor who apparently had some sort of relationship with your wife.” He checks his perfect nails female-style, extending his arm, fingers straight, and looking at the back of his hand. “To name just two.” He lifts his head and turns the smile on again, the picture of someone whose memory has just kicked in. “Oh, and that billionaire Pan, so that’s three. That we know of. Not exactly a bookish life, is it?”

  Rafferty doesn’t reply. But there’s only one person in Bangkok who might conceivably have told Shen about both Howard Horner, the defense contractor, and Chu, the Chinese triad leader. Under his breath he says, “Fucker.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “I said ‘Fucker,’ ” Rafferty says to the mirror. “But it wasn’t aimed at you.”

  “Well, I’m sure that whoever it is, he’s shaking in his boots. Anyway, to get back to our business. We’re concerned with this man and what he might have said. You’re the person he said it to, and I have to observe that you’re leading an interesting life here. In times of crisis, we tend to clump interesting people together, at least to the point of asking them polite questions, but-”

  “You know what’s really interesting?”

  “-but sometimes mistakes are made,” Shen finishes.

  “Meaning sometimes you’re not so polite to people who haven’t done anything.”

  The remote shrug again. “I’d be lying if I said it never happened.”

  “I’ll remember that for when the press talks to me.”

  Major Shen smiles. “The press will not talk to you.”

  Rafferty listens to the statement several times in memory. It has the effect of sobering him up. He nods.

  “The woman’s name,” Shen says.

  Rafferty sits back. “I don’t remember it.”

  “Why ‘Helena’?”

  “I have no idea. It’s probably where she lives, whoever she is.”

  Tented fingertips. “So your hypothesis is that he was asking you to contact this woman?”

  “I don’t have a hypothesis. For all I know, Helena, or Montana, is his Rosebud.”

  Shen leans forward a quarter of an inch, and for such a small move it’s immensely unfriendly. “But it isn’t his Rosebud. It’s a city. He gives you a name and a city. A who and a where, so to speak.”

  “I suppose so.”

  “But you don’t remember the name.”

  Rafferty raises a hand to stop him and shuts his eyes. Pictures the fallen man, feels the chill of rain on the back of his neck, sees again the jolting, out-of-focus chaos in the background and the brilliance of the TV crew’s light. Forces himself to concentrate on the man’s lips, thinking of the close-up in Citizen Kane when Kane says “Rosebud.” But the man’s lips barely move at all.

  He opens his eyes. “No, I don’t.”

  Major Shen sighs and then says, “So what you’re willing to tell us is that he said three words: a name you can’t remember and a city in Montana.” He nods as though something has been confirmed. “You have been to Montana, haven’t you? You’ve been all over. You spent quite a bit of time in Manila, for example, and Jakarta. Denpasar. I could name some more if I looked at my notes.”

  Rafferty knows where this is going, and it makes him very uneasy. “That’s not exactly a secret. I wrote books about both the Philippines and Indonesia.”

  “You have to admit, you’ve got an unusual profile.”

  “I don’t have to admit shit.”

  “This is not a constructive atti-”

  “What happened today had nothing to do with me. Your crowd was chasing his crowd, or the crowd he got caught up in. He got shot, he had to grab onto someone, and I was there. Are you suggesting that I went to Indonesia and the Philippines because I’m involved with Muslim separatists or terrorists of some kind? Because if you are, I want my embassy here now.”

  “My, my,” Major Shen says.

  “My, my yourself.” Poke looks back at the mirrored window with its unspoken threat. Whatever else this is, it’s bullying, and he learned long ago that giving in to bullies just signals weakness. “I’m finished talking. Arrest me or something.”

  “Please, Mr. Rafferty.” Shen does that glance over Rafferty’s shoulder again, as though there were a teleprompter back there. “You grew up in California, isn’t that right?”

  “You know it is.”

  “And so did I. Orange County, whereas you were in …” He seems either to be searching for the name or giving Rafferty a chance to supply it, but Rafferty doesn’t. “Lancaster,” he says.

  “Just a couple of California boys,” Rafferty says. “Under other circumstances we’d probably go surfing.”

  “This is a different world,” Major Shen says. “It’s no longer necessary to arrest people.”

  “It never really was,” Rafferty says. “Bullies in uniforms have always found shortcuts.”

  “This … posturing is not helpful, not to either of us.”

  “Possibly not. Let me go back to my earlier question. You want to know what’s really interesting?”

  Shen rubs his eyes with both hands, his first admission that he’s tired. “Not particularly, no.”

  “That you’re asking me who he was and what he said, but not who shot him.”

  Rafferty is rewarded with a blink. “That’s not a question that-”

  “I mean, if I had arranged the … whatever you want to call it-meeting, collision, whatever-then I should be a suspect, shouldn’t I? Accomplice at least. I brought him within range of the rifle, right?”

  Major Shen purses his lips and turns his head away from Rafferty, putting himself in profile to whoever is behind the window. It’s almost the same as saying, Wouldn’t it have been nice if someone had anticipated this question?

  “You know who shot him,” Rafferty says. “Don’t you? And you know who he was, too.”

  Shen doesn’t seem to have heard a word. “Give me the woman’s name.”

  “Arrest me or I’m leaving, and then you’ll have to hold me.”

  Major Shen pushes both hands down on the tabletop as though to rise and opens his mouth, but there’s a clack that Rafferty identifies as a coin, or some other object made of metal, being rapped against the other side of the mirror. The major sits back in his seat, closes his eyes slowly, and opens them again, and he’s once more looking over Rafferty’s shoulder. “Of course we’re not going to hold you,” he says, and he produces a smile a lot less polished than the one Rafferty’s been seeing, the smile of someone who’s not very good at masking rage. “This is just a discussion.”

  Rafferty gets up, unsure of what’s happening. The rap of the coin changed everything. He says to Shen, “Don’t forget your shoes.”

  “And you, Mr. Rafferty.” Although Rafferty is now standing beside him, Shen does not turn his head but continues to address the chair Rafferty vacated. “If you think of the name, you’ll call me.”

  “Absolutely.”

  “That’s good, then. Well,” Major Shen says to the chair, “we’ll meet again.”

  “I’ll look forward to it.” Rafferty goes to the door and opens it, almost surprised to find it unlocked. “I’ll find my own way out.” />
  “Wait-” Major Shen is pushing himself to his feet like he’s coming out of a trance, but he’s too slow to keep Rafferty from opening the door and going through it, into the short hallway beyond. There’s a door to Rafferty’s right, and he turns the knob and then kicks it open. It bangs against the wall, and two men leap to their feet in front of the trick mirror.

  The nearer man is thin all the way: thin body, thin lips, thin rimless spectacles clinging to a thin nose. He’s all verticals, just bones in a black suit. “Richard,” Rafferty says to him, “just to complete the thought, fuck you.”

  “You’re way too confident for your own good, Poke,” Richard Elson says. He sounds almost frightened.

  “What happened? Secret Service lend you to the Ghostbusters? Kind of a demotion, isn’t it?”

  “Hey,” says the other man in the room, a ball of fat topped by a thatch of unruly reddish-gray hair that’s been slapped any old way on top of a fat red face. He’s much shorter than Elson, thirty years older, and maybe eighty pounds heavier. The loud, ragged Hawaiian silk shirt he wears above his worn-looking jeans is buttoned for dear life over a paunch the size of an elephant’s rump.

  “And you are?” Rafferty’s so angry his voice feels thick in his throat.

  The redheaded man shoulders Elson aside. Protruding from each nostril is a tuft of red hair so substantial that Rafferty imagines himself grabbing them in his fists and chinning himself on them. “Somebody who could squash you by snapping my fingers.” He’s got a voice like gravel in a glass.

  “Yeah, but what good would it do you? You’d still be wearing that shirt.”

  The redheaded man’s face goes a deep, cardiac scarlet, and Elson says, “Poke.”

  Rafferty feels a hand on his arm, and then it becomes a grip, and he’s pulled from behind, out the door, which slams closed.

  “Very foolish,” Major Shen says. His forehead is wet. “Very foolish indeed.”

  Rafferty says, “Let go of me.”

  “You’ve been in Thailand long enough to know the value of keeping a cool heart,” Shen says without loosening his grip. He seems actually shaken. “It’s a shame you haven’t adopted it as a policy.” He propels Rafferty down the hall, away from the interrogation room, and through a pair of swinging doors that open onto a broader corridor. Seated there on metal folding chairs are the two heavyweights who’d met Poke in his elevator. The one he thinks of as Smiley leaps to his feet when he sees Shen.

  Shen shoves Rafferty hard, so hard he stumbles halfway across the corridor. Only the opposite wall keeps him from going down “My men will take you home,” Major Shen says, smoothing his hair. “Bangkok is very dangerous right now.”

  The place looks wrong.

  He sees it the moment he comes in. Even with all the furniture out of place for painting, it’s obvious that someone has been here, but it takes him a moment to spot what it is that caught his eye. The black drop cloth, which he had painstakingly aligned with the baseboards, isn’t tucked in as neatly as he’d left it. He feels a clamping around his heart, and he goes double-time to the bedroom.

  But the safe in the headboard above the bed is closed and locked, and the sliding panel that hides it is still on its latch. Rafferty tugs the panel open anyway, in a gingerly fashion, half expecting it to explode, but all it does is catch slightly at the point where it always catches. He tugs the safe door, and it reassuringly refuses to swing open. He sits on the side of the bed he shares with Rose, thinking about the men who invaded this room, pawing at their things, and the image sends him to the closet, where he sees that some of her clothes, which she hangs at precise intervals, with about an inch between hangers, have been moved. For a moment he sees little bright objects, like crinkles of aluminum foil, floating in front of his eyes. They recede, leaving him with his pulse trying to hammer its way out at his temples.

  Just to be sure, he goes back to the bed and opens the safe. The oilcloth wrapped around the Glock is right where it should be. He prods it with his index finger, and its weight reassures him.

  But the ten one-thousand-baht bills are gone. Just, he thinks, by way of a snicker.

  Rafferty pushes sharply at the upper-right corner of the safe’s back wall, and it pops open a quarter of an inch or so. He gets his fingertips into the gap and slides the wall to the left.

  The rubber-banded packet of thousand-baht bills, fifty of them, is still there. He regards it for a moment and then pulls it out, secures the wall again, and closes the safe. He folds the thousands once and shoves them into his pocket. Cash seems like a good idea. Sits on the bed, not really thinking about anything, just trying to get a sense of how cold the water really is.

  It feels pretty cold.

  It’s almost midnight. He knows he won’t sleep, so he leaves the apartment and goes down to Silom in the rain, crosses over to Patpong, and reenters the Expat Bar. He’s greeted by the same crew as though they haven’t seen him for years. Toots produces his beer, sans glass. He holds up a finger for another. It’s a two-at-a-time night.

  At two o’clock he wobbles into the street, drunker than he’s been in years. The bars are closing, their lights blinking out, and shirtless country boys are tearing down the night market. Their skin is gleaming wet as they wheel up and down through the drizzle on forklifts, hissing cigarettes clenched in their teeth, just barely missing as many tourists as possible. Ignoring the come-ons of a couple of dodgy ladyboys in a darkened shop doorway, Rafferty takes a zigzag path back home. Without even turning off the bedroom light, he collapses in his wet clothes on the bed and immediately passes out, only to wake up moments later thinking, The trash.

  He hauls himself to his feet and takes the elevator, barefoot, to the basement. For the first time all day, he’s in luck; the wad of clothes he dropped down the chute is on top of the pile. When he rifles through it, almost the first thing he sees is the yellow stub of paper with the little diamond cut from its center. Feeling obscurely victorious at recovering the one thing Shen’s men hadn’t spotted on the videotape, he tucks the stub into his hip pocket, puts the clothes back on the pile, and drops a couple of full trash bags on top of it for verisimilitude. He rides the elevator back up, keeping his eyes open because the world spins when he closes them.

  With the precision of the very drunk, he gets a roll of masking tape from the pile of paint supplies, goes back into the hall, and folds the stub into a narrow strip, which he tapes on top of the lintel above the door to the stairs, at the far end of the hall. He presses it flat, so it’s invisible from beneath. Then he wobbles his way back inside and crawls on his hands and knees onto the bed.

  When he wakes up the next morning, the lamp on the table is burning cheerlessly in the shaft of sunlight falling through the window, he feels as if a small airplane is being assembled inside his head, and he’s still wearing his damp jeans and the shirt that says LET’S TOGETHER!! But the woman’s name has arrived while he was sleeping: Helen, not Helena, Eckersley. And not Montana but the other one, the one he always confuses with Montana-Wyoming. Cheyenne, Wyoming.

  4

  A Climate of Highly Evolved Uncertainty

  The little bouquet of rain-beaded flowers beside Arthit’s breakfast plate is an unwelcome surprise.

  Standing beside his chair, he looks down at it as he might a millipede. This is the work of Pim, the eighteen-year-old former aspiring tart whom Rafferty and Rose grabbed off the street and foisted upon him as a combination maid and spy, charged with letting them know if he started drinking again.

  He has watched with some uneasiness as the gardens created by his late wife, Noi, have come back to life beneath Pim’s fingers. It had caused him actual physical pain to see the gardens go to seed as Noi’s condition worsened. After she died, he stopped seeing them altogether, literally keeping his eyes averted as he walked to and from the house. And here they are, reborn. He supposes he should be happy about it, but those were Noi’s flowers. No one else’s to tend, no one else’s to nurse back to hea
lth.

  Noi had started digging the beds the day after they moved into the house, back when her illness was an occasional inconvenience rather than a constant torment. Even as her condition worsened, she had delighted in filling the house with sunbursts in glass jars and a potpourri of fragrances: jasmine, lavender, tuberose, gardenias, old roses-Bourbons and damasks, varieties that had been popular a hundred years ago, before all the scent had been bred out.

  And here they are again.

  He hears Pim in the kitchen, rattling pans and singing a pop song with a tune she can’t carry, and his heart grows even heavier. The situation has to be confronted. Even if he’s wrong about what’s happening, it has to be confronted. He can’t have Pim thinking their relationship is anything other than what it is.

  He’s been telling himself he was imagining it. But he’s been ignoring signals for months. He’s not a garden, and he can’t be tended by another.

  But she’s taken such good care of him. And she’s so vulnerable. He closes his eyes and draws a calming breath, then takes the first difficult step.

  “Pim,” he says.

  The doorbell rings.

  “Yes?” she calls. There’s water running; she hasn’t heard the doorbell.

  “Is the coffee ready?” he asks, grasping the opportunity to dodge. “Someone’s at the door.”

  She bustles through the door, drying her hands, chubby and frizzy-haired, with an adult face that’s just beginning to shape itself out of the child’s. “I’ll get it,” she says.

  “No, no.” He waves her back toward the kitchen. “You can’t do everything. I can still walk.”

  “Coffee,” she says. Her eyes go to the flowers and then up to his, but he’s turning to avoid her gaze, heading for the door.

  As he goes, he checks the heavy steel watch on its too-loose band-8:45. Early for anyone he knows to come ringing the bell.

  And it isn’t anyone he knows.

  The woman who stands with no umbrella beneath the sheltering overhang of the roof is in her late thirties or early forties. She’s fit, but not in that grim, zero-carb, no-pain-no-gain way Arthit sees a lot of these days, in the minor wives of rich men, in the secretaries and receptionists who want to become the minor wives of rich men. She’s … she’s sleek. It’s easy to see her emerging from the sea, with a little ornamental glisten going on, and climbing up onto a rock to let the sun dry her. Water, he thinks, a bit wildly, would bead on her skin. And in fact it has, on the side of her neck.