The Fear Artist pr-5

by Timothy Hallinan

Anna is pointing at her pad again. It says, What did you tell them?

  He hesitates for a moment and sees that she registers the hesitation. “I told them he said ‘Helena.’ ” He remouths it when he sees Anna squinting at him. “As in the city in Montana. And I said couldn’t remember the other thing he said to me, which was a woman’s name.”

  “Not smart,” Arthit says.

  Rafferty allows his irritation to show. “Well, I couldn’t remember it. But when I woke up this morning, I had it loud and clear. So I guess the question is whether I should call Major Shen and tell him what it is.”

  “American name?”

  “Yes.”

  “Let’s think about it,” Arthit says. “About your calling Major Shen. While we try to figure out what’s going on.”

  “Why? Why not just tell him?”

  Arthit holds up three fingers, Thai style, beginning with the middle finger and ending with the pinkie. “Three reasons. First, Shen is paranoid enough to believe that you were lying last night-that you actually knew it all along and stalled so you could warn people or clean things up or some other nonsense. Second, you have no idea why the man on the street told you that name-and no, I don’t want to know what the name is, and I certainly don’t want Anna to know. For all you know, it leads to a massive booby trap.” He stops and stares at the floor as though he’s just heard what he said.

  “And third?”

  “Third, Shen’s people have a lot on their plate right now. They haven’t got time for irrelevancies. Maybe if you stay off their radar, just live a normal life, they’ll forget about you. Maybe.”

  “But you don’t think they will, do you?”

  “No,” Arthit says. “I don’t.”

  Pim surprises all of them by saying, “Why am I here? Why did you want me to hear this?”

  “Because you live here,” Arthit says. “Because it could affect you.”

  Pim says, “That means you’re going to do something? To help Poke?”

  “Well,” Arthit says, “of course I am.”

  Pim smiles for the first time since Rafferty arrived and gets up. “I’m going to make more coffee,” she says. And she leaves.

  “More coffee” Turns into an impromptu meal, since no one but Anna has eaten breakfast. Anna has gone into the kitchen to help Pim clean up, leaving Poke feeling guilty that he’s not in there, too, rather than sitting with Arthit, who’s been waited on by women all his life. Arthit is using Anna’s absence to talk about things he’s not comfortable sharing with her.

  “We’ve got to look at how Shen’s people reacted,” he says. “They were there, on the scene, almost before the American bumped into you. It’s impossible that they showed up so quickly. He drew them, or someone else in that crowd drew them. And they get a few seconds of film of the dead man’s face and share it, and people snap to attention-both here and in America, if Elson and the other guy are any indication. Everybody desperately needs to know what he said.”

  “A climate of highly evolved uncertainty.”

  “Okay,” Arthit says. “One: They know who the man is, or there wouldn’t be all this hand-wringing. Two: It’s important enough to keep the footage off TV, and I’ll bet there won’t be anything in the papers. Three: They’re crazy to know what he said. What does that suggest to you?”

  “One of two things,” Rafferty says. “Either he’s someone who wasn’t supposed to be here at all, and they have no idea what he was up to and what he was doing here. Or he’s somebody they lost.”

  Arthit says, “Lost,” but Rafferty can’t tell whether it’s a question, a confirmation, or just a repetition.

  “Yeah. Like he’s a piece that disappeared from the board, and when he suddenly turns up, it catches everybody off guard and they all scurry. Why did he disappear? Where’s he been? Why is he back? Who is he working for? And whatever they think he told me, it’s important, so even if they’re ninety percent sure he just accidentally bumped into me, the ten percent is probably enough to keep them interested.”

  “There’s another issue, too,” Arthit says. “Who shot him? If it was Shen’s guys, then they were killing someone with information they needed, and apparently they needed it pretty badly. Doesn’t make a lot of sense.”

  “Maybe they didn’t need it,” Rafferty says. “Maybe what they needed was to make absolutely certain he didn’t pass it to anyone else.”

  There’s a silence as they both consider the implications. Pim laughs in the kitchen.

  “I’ll call in a few favors,” Arthit says. “See whether I can learn anything. In the meantime you keep a low profile and don’t do anything stupid.”

  Rafferty says, “You know about hawks?”

  “I know a few things about hawks,” Arthit says patiently. “What did you have in mind?”

  “Hawks have amazing eyesight, but they can only see something when it’s moving. As long as I don’t move around, just-as you say-live a normal life, stand still … well, maybe they won’t look at me.”

  Arthit’s expression is not encouraging.

  “Works for rabbits,” Rafferty says.

  “Sooner or later,” Arthit says, “most rabbits get eaten.”

  Closing the door after Poke, Arthit turns to see Anna standing a few feet behind him. She holds up her pad, and he reads: Will he be careful?

  “It depends,” Arthit says.

  She shrugs the question.

  “On whether he gets mad. He’s a good guy, but he gets a little crazy when he’s mad. Fortunately, he seems to have miraculous karma, because otherwise he’d have been dead years ago.”

  She nods. She seems to be waiting for something.

  Arthit says, “Well,” and can’t think of anything to follow it with.

  She watches for a moment to make sure he’s not going to continue and then starts to write. She lifts the pencil and swivels the pad toward him. It says, Lunch?

  The word opens an unexpected door in Arthit’s day. He hasn’t gone anywhere with a woman since Noi’s death. He feels his mouth open and close a couple of times, realizes that’s exactly the wrong reaction since his mouth is mostly what she looks at. He says, “We just ate breakfast. And I have to work.” As she begins to put the pad into her purse, he lays a hand on her arm. “What about dinner?”

  5

  Hand Puppets

  “Don’t move around,” Rafferty quickly finds, means don’t do anything even remotely interesting.

  It means no going across town to check out the laundry that the yellow ticket came from. It means no phoning Cheyenne, Wyoming, and trying to get a listing for Helen Eckersley. It means, if he’s going to be really careful, not even trying to find her online. It means don’t call Floyd Preece at the Bangkok Sun-who got his job because Rafferty gave him the biggest scoop of his career-to find out whether pressure was brought on the paper not to cover the shooting death of a farang in Bangkok and, if so, by whom it was brought.

  Because, for all Rafferty knows-and Arthit drove the possibility home with some force-he’s under surveillance. His cell phone might as well be a radio station.

  “Don’t move around” even means not going anywhere near the no-name bar where all the obsolete spooks hang out, to see whether anyone can match an identity to his description of Mr. Nose-Hair.

  What it does mean is, paint the apartment.

  So he goes back to the paint store, trying not to check for watchers, trying not to look like a bad actor who knows he’s on camera. The cabbie, like every other driver in Bangkok, has the radio tuned to the news, which is monitoring centimeter by centimeter the rise of the water level in the Chao Phraya and the flooding-rapidly spreading some say-in the ancient capital city of Ayutthaya, about forty miles upstream. The rain, the cresting waters, seem real to him in a way that Shen and the redheaded spook don’t. By the time he’s in the paint store, all he’s thinking about is buying, for the second time, the Apricot Cream that Rose picked for the living room-he adds some white this time-and the Urban Dec
ay that Miaow will probably love for all of three weeks before it’s replaced in her affections by Advanced-Rot Brown or Swollen-Lip Fuchsia or Infected-Piercing Scarlet. He comes back out into the drizzle, toting the familiar weight of the paint, focusing on the task at hand, and finds himself standing dead center in the splash he’d made when the first cans burst open. It’s dappled now by a confused pattern of footprints, a diagram of some impossible dance step. Surrounded by a wash of Apricot Cream, he thinks, The man died in my arms. Then he thinks, And there’s nothing I can do about it. He goes home.

  The paint rolls on smoothly, and for a while Rafferty is able to submerge his simmer of uneasiness in the well-being that comes only with mindless work where progress is obvious: A larger area is Apricot Cream now, and a smaller area is white. More of life, he tries to convince himself, should be like this.

  In between stretches of precariously maintained well-being, he misses Rose and Miaow. He goes back to worrying about Major Shen and worrying more sharply about the Americans. He feels-like an old bruise he can’t do anything about except wait for it to fade-a sense of unfulfilled responsibility toward the man who died.

  He had used his last breath to tell Rafferty something and his last burst of energy to give him something. What was Rafferty supposed to do about that?

  Paint these fucking walls?

  With part of the longest wall in the living room done and the apartment’s air gelatinous with the smell of paint, he begins to feel twinges of a new anxiety, a tiny and unpleasant electrical charge fizzling its way up his spinal column. What will he do with himself when he runs out of walls? The hallway immediately presents itself as a solution. It’s white, and there’s no reason for it not to be white, but he hasn’t got any white paint. He grabs his wallet and Rose’s umbrella and locks the door behind him.

  White paint is simple-no mixing needed, so he can buy it anywhere. Also, he can use the errand as a way to take the situation’s temperature. Maybe’s he’s got delusions of grandeur, maybe he’s not on anyone’s watch-and-report list. He walks a couple of blocks toward a hardware store, doing his best not to look like he’s checking reflections in shop windows, scoping the sidewalk, stealing glances at slow-moving cars, which on this stretch of Silom, especially in this weather, is all of them.

  A few years earlier-doing research for a book-he’d taken lessons in tailing people and in spotting people who might be tailing him. His instructor had been a possibly-retired, possibly-not-retired CIA guy named Arnold Prettyman. Prettyman had claimed he was retired, but the likelihood of any statement’s being true declined the moment Arnold said it was. Rafferty always figured Prettyman was on some sort of string, like so many of Bangkok’s substantial population of old spooks. Arnold, unfortunately, has gone into Permanent Deep Cover, but his lessons still ring true. Arnold didn’t eat it because he failed to pick up a tail.

  So Rafferty does as he was taught. He’s got an advantage because people aren’t out wandering in the rain unless they have to be, so the sidewalks, usually thronged, are thinly populated. He goes into a few stores he doesn’t need anything from and buys something cheap and plausible. Once or twice he turns around, the image of a man who should make lists but doesn’t, and goes back to a store he passed a minute or two before, looking for scrambling, for stalling, for people suddenly turning to study the traffic. Twice he comes out of a store and does Bangkok’s distinctive dodge-the-traffic dance to cross the boulevard and go into a shop on the other side, looking through the new store’s window to see whether anyone goes into the shop he just vacated.

  The second time someone does. It’s a young, short-haired woman wearing reflective aviator shades on a rainy day. He’d seen her when he first hit Silom. She’s inside just long enough, he figures, to present some identification, ask a couple of questions, and get a look at the shopkeeper’s copy of the receipt. Then she’s out again, raising the lapel on her stylish raincoat and talking on a cell phone. She smiles at it, as Thai women often do, but it seems unlikely anyone is being amusing on the other end of the line.

  He buys two pairs of athletic socks he actually needs and accepts the cashier’s apology for giving him half a pound of change. This is the second shop to give him coins, and his pants are sagging. Wondering whether it’s some sort of plot to make it impossible for him to run away, he goes two more shops down to buy a can of eggshell-white flat enamel.

  Probably four people, he decides as he treks back home, tugging his pants up every few steps. Maybe five. Pretty expensive. And who has that kind of money? Old Uncle Sam, that’s who.

  He wants to hold his wife, he wants to see his daughter, he wishes all of this would go away, and he’s certain to the soles of his shoes that it won’t.

  When he opens the apartment door, the smell of the paint rolls out at him with an almost liquid impact. He stands there looking at his handiwork and sees where the coat is uneven, where the join with the ceiling is jagged, where he laid it on thick enough to carve graffiti into the paint.

  He discovers that he hates apricot.

  Breathing the fumes shallowly, he puts the can of white on the floor in the hallway and goes into his bedroom to drain his pockets of change before his jeans fall off.

  All year long he puts his coins into a couple of sixteen-ounce cans that originally held tomato sauce. He has no idea why he ever bought tomato sauce, but the cans work as piggy banks. The arrangement is that he empties all his loose change into the cans every night, and on Miaow’s birthday-which they celebrate on Rose’s, since no one knows what Miaow’s birthday actually is-he and she count it together, and the next day he totes it to the bank and gets the equivalent in paper currency and gives it to her.

  She hadn’t been particularly eager to count with him on her most recent birthday, but she’d still wanted the bills. He more or less coerced her to join him on the floor, sliding the coins around on the glass-topped table and making countable piles until he announced that she had four hundred thirty baht coming.

  Now he dumps handfuls of change on top of the dresser, and as he does it, the anxiety and frustration he feels about his present situation blends into his unhappiness about his relationship with Miaow, and it all becomes a single dark wind blowing on the back of his neck.

  Too many of the things he and Miaow used to share with joy are disappearing, being replaced by a kind of weary tolerance on her side and a baffled and apparently useless love on his. More and more it seems to him that she’s on the other side of a thick membrane, permeable to her, allowing her to come through for brief visits, but solid as glass to him. It even-it especially-repels his feelings.

  His pockets empty at last, he looks down at the mountain of coins. It’s a sad pile. He opens the drawer and stands there, stupefied.

  The tomato cans are empty.

  He’s almost meditatively thought-free for a long moment, just registering what he sees. One of the cans had been full and the other about one-third full. Now there are ten or fifteen coins in each can. He picks up the nearer can and rattles it, as though that will prove something.

  He turns slowly and surveys the room, as if he expects to see an untidy heap of coins glistening in the center of the bed or on the carpet. Or a path of dropped coins leading to the door.

  And then he has a truly terrible notion.

  He goes to the bed, slides aside the door in the headboard, and opens the safe. There it is, the oilcloth with the Glock wrapped in it. On the previous evening, he’d jabbed it with his finger, checking its weight.

  The moment he wraps his hand around it, his heart plummets.

  He pulls it out, takes a corner, lets it fall open, and looks down at the big, doubled Ziploc bag that’s been jammed full of coins and rubber-banded into a semblance of solidity. His gun is gone.

  Thinking is preferable to panicking, but harder to do.

  It’s early for a beer, only about four-thirty. Given the thorniness of the mental list he’s making, though, he decides to pretend that his watc
h and the sun are both slow. He sits at the counter with a Singha sweating in front of him, and he draws a crude map, a diagram of his situation. He writes so much that he knows he can accidentally mislead himself with narrative, working instinctively to create plausibility. But he lacks spatial imagination, so diagrams force him to stick to the facts.

  In the first rough draft, he puts himself in the center of the horizontal page, with a line leading to the fallen farang. From the farang other lines lead, like spokes, to Major Shen, Richard Elson, the red-haired man, Cheyenne, Helen Eckersley. Whoever or whatever Helen Eckersley might actually be.

  He looks at it and pushes it aside. The beer waves at him, so he pays it a little attention.

  The second draft puts the farang in the center and transforms Rafferty into one of a planetary system of satellites that include Shen, the red-haired man, Elson, Cheyenne, and a little black circle for Helen Eckersley. Even as he adds the dry-cleaning shop to the little solar system, he realizes that the image is wildly unbalanced in favor of nations other than Thailand. That reminds him of the Growing Younger Man saying that one of the factors in the current political situation is the pressure that comes from other countries-to contain the Muslim situation, to maintain a profitable peace.

  He studies his diagram for a moment, assigning countries of origins to its components. Then he crumples it up and takes another sheet of paper.

  America, America, America, America: The third diagram presents a situation in which Thailand is almost marginal, represented by Shen and his grand-opera thugs, whom Rafferty suddenly visualizes as hand puppets. Outnumbering them, overwhelming them, possibly providing the hands that animate them, are the fallen farang, Elson, American multinational companies and their governmental and diplomatic shills, Cheyenne, Helen Eckersley, and the kind of organization that mounts a four- or five-person tail. Even Shen has a connecting line to America: years spent there before his return to the kingdom as a sort of semi-indigenous American spook. A hand puppet.