The Fear Artist pr-5

by Timothy Hallinan

  “And?” he says.

  “And here.” Her finger returns to the track and follows it about five inches. “This is a Muslim village. Full of, of boys who have already been in trouble.” She shuffles back a couple of steps, away from the table, her eyes on the miniature village, full of tiny, unsuspecting Muslims. Her head jerks right an inch or two and comes back, as it does sometimes. He’s not sure she’s even aware of it.

  “That’s good,” he says.

  He can hear her swallow.

  “That’s where I chose,” he says. “Now tell me why I changed my mind.”

  She crosses her arms tightly across her narrow chest. Her head comes forward on her neck, a movement that always seems more animal than human to him. It brings her eyes two inches closer to the problem. He waits, and she puts her tongue just behind her upper teeth and makes a tsssss-tssssss-tsssssss sound.

  He says, “I can hear that, and if you don’t know you’re doing it, you’re dead.”

  “I know I’m doing it.” The head jerk again. “Which way is the train coming?”

  “Smart girl,” he says.

  “Because if it’s coming this way”-she points her finger down the track toward the village-“and if it’s going fast, all the stuff that blows off it will be going this way, too. And these houses-”

  “And if it derails?”

  “It’s here,” she says, and she shoves past him and knocks down some of the little houses.

  He grabs her wrist, and, so quickly he doesn’t see the move, she snatches her hand free, raking his forearm with her nails and leaving red welts. He steps forward and slaps her, hard enough that the tangle of hair snaps around. When it settles, some of it is hanging directly in front of her face.

  Treasure doesn’t back away or clear the hair. The eyelids are halfway down again, and he thinks-once again-that he wished he had that expression in the interrogation rooms. Then whatever was behind her eyes goes out, and she’s so far inside herself he almost feels her leave the room.

  “Don’t break these things,” he says, but he knows he lost his authority the moment he grabbed her. “That was good, though, Treasure, that was very good. Do you want to go with me when I do it?”

  He waits, and he thinks she’s gone to the deep place, as she does sometimes, occasionally for days, but then she says, “You know you won’t take me.”

  He won’t. “Make a deal. By tomorrow night tell me where it’s going to be and why, and I’ll think about it.” He takes a quick step and puts his hand on the nape of her neck, feeling the shudder that rolls through her. “And don’t ever break anything on this table again.”

  She says nothing, and he squeezes the muscles in her neck. Her mouth opens. He releases her, and it closes. He squeezes it again, four times, and as her mouth opens and closes, he says, in a good semblance of her voice, “I’m sorry, Papa.”

  Her eyes have closed. He lets go of her, and she moistens her lips.

  “Go to bed,” he says.

  She turns her back to him and drifts slowly away, back toward the green curtain. “Hwa has a boyfriend,” she says, almost singing it. “He’s Thai. They meet each other in the pool house. I think she talks to him about us.”

  Murphy makes a note to talk to Hwa. “And you’re not just making this up because she threw out your meat.”

  “Up to you,” she says. “Mr. Smart Man.” She leans back against the curtain and wraps it around her again. “Song had her Thai man here. I, I, I creeped them.”

  “What did you see?”

  “In the living room. They had their hands all over each other.”

  “Why is the Humvee gone? If he came here, where’s his car?”

  “He came on a motorbike. In the rain.”

  “Well, Song has a taste for the lowest common denominator.”

  “He followed her out, her in the Humvee and him on …” Her voice trails away and she turns her face down slightly. There’s a mirage of a smile on her lips.

  “What else did you see?”

  “They went up the hall to Neeni’s room,” she says. “They went in.”

  Moving slowly, he bends and retrieves one of the pieces he knocked to the floor, one he hadn’t picked up. When he is sure his voice will be steady, he says, “Who went in?”

  She pulls the edge of the curtain up beneath her eyes like a veil and gives him a skittering glance over it. “Both of them.”

  He knows his face is scarlet-even if he couldn’t feel it, he can read the satisfaction in her eyes-but there’s nothing he can do about it except let it flame. “What did you see? Wait, first, tell me exactly how you did it. Where you were and how you got there.”

  “When, when he came on his motorcycle, I was out front. Nobody could see, could see me because I had the night around me. She opened the, the, the gate from inside, and he went to the front door. I went fast to the back patio and watched them through the window in the living room. I got so close I almost laughed. When they got up and went to the hall, I came in through the dining room and ghostwalked to the hall. I, I got down on the floor like you taught me and put just enough of my face around the corner so I could see.”

  “So you were at the other end of the hall. The living-room end.”

  She nods.

  Twenty-five, thirty feet. “And.”

  “Song went in first. Then he went in. They both bent down, like they were looking at her or, or touching her, and then they laughed. After a while he straightened up, and I went somewhere else.”

  “How long were they bent over her?”

  “I don’t know. Not long.”

  Her voice is calm now. She’s not really interested in what happened in Neeni’s room, although Neeni was her mother, back before she got lost in her whiskey-codeine. What she’s interested in is its effect on him.

  She says, “I want to go outside now.”

  “It’s raining. It’s late.” He’s thinking how easy it would be to break Song’s neck, beautiful or not.

  “I want to go outside now.”

  “If you want to,” he says, turning toward the door, “you will.”

  Walking toward the kitchen on his way to the stairs, he says, “Stay out of here for the rest of the night, and don’t turn the train on. You can try to figure it out tomorrow, when I-”

  There’s a faint plucking at his waistband, and then a wasp stings him, hard, between the shoulder blades. He wheels to see her backing away, holding the Buck knife. He can see all her teeth, and she is not smiling.

  “Phung,” she says, her eyes enormous. “Phung will protect you.”

  Feeling as though his jaws are locked together, he says, “Put the knife on the table. Come here.”

  But her lids drop again, and she stands in the center of the room, arms hanging down and eyes half closed, swaying like someone at the end of a rope.

  He takes the knife out of her hand and goes to the door and turns off the light. Leaving her there, swaying in her white nightgown.

  He has no idea what to do with her.

  18

  The Diamond-Shaped Cutout

  After two days holed up in yet another cheap hotel-on the outskirts of the city this time-Rafferty goes on the offensive.

  The first good news of a dull, wet day is that the laundry that issued the yellow ticket, however many months or years ago, is still in business.

  From across the intersection, Rafferty peers at it through the drizzle. It sits at the corner of two small, anonymous streets not far from the hotel where he’d kept Shen’s man from falling off the roof. Its flyblown windows, ice blue from the fluorescents inside, face out from the bottom floor of yet another cheap hotel with an ersatz-fancy name, the Royal Residence. The hotel has a doomed look. For one thing, it’s only five stories high, the kind of building that’s not going to last long in the new Bangkok, where everything that can’t go up gets torn down.

  He’s walked around the block twice, wielding a hundred-baht umbrella against the intermittent drizzle an
d using it to hide his face from time to time. Nothing has caught his attention. The days and nights since he escaped his apartment car have blurred into a new kind of marathon in which the runner jogs lethargically through wide, featureless stretches of boredom and then runs for his life from the occasional lion.

  His head is almost too heavy to hold upright, and he feels that his control of his emotions is precarious. He has to go into the laundry, but he has a condensation of dread in his core. Not dread that something horrible will happen to him when he gets inside, but a conviction that if anything at all goes wrong-any complication, no matter how minor-he’ll burst into tears. He’s been alarmingly close to tears lately. More than anything in the world, he wants to hug his wife and be ignored, in person, by his daughter. He’d give anything to see their eyes.

  In addition to everything else, he’s out of money. He’s called his father’s number in Virginia twice and had no answer, not even a machine. He’s got a couple of frugal days in his pocket, and that’s it.

  And he’s left another message on the voice mail of the elusive Helen Eckersley. He hung up feeling even spookier about her than before. There’s something wrong in the house that phone is ringing in. In his old life, he would have scoffed at such an intuition, but after all his time with Rose he takes it much more seriously.

  Ahhh, Rose. He looks both ways and steps into the street.

  When he’s eight or ten steps from the laundry door, one of his new phones rings. He’s carrying three at the moment, and he juggles frantically through them, thinking, hoping, wishing it will be Rose or Miaow. Eventually he works out which phone it is and thumbs it open. Arthit says, “I’m looking at your new picture. It just landed on my desk.” He covers the mouthpiece with his hand, and then he’s back. “On everyone’s desk.”

  Rafferty’s been worrying about this. They have at least two descriptions of him in his pathetically thin disguise now, one each from the guy on the roof and the kid behind the hotel desk. “How bad is it?”

  “It’s terrible. It’s so terrible it’s great. Shen’s guy, up on the roof? He must be really grateful. Your hair’s three inches longer and floppy, and you’re very dark. You look like Hugh Grant playing Gandhi.”

  Rafferty steps under the laundry’s awning and tilts the umbrella forward, so it’s between him and the eyes on the sidewalk. The building seems to ripple against his back, and he feels suddenly seasick. He closes his eyes, then hurriedly reopens them. “That’s good, I guess. I’m so tired I halfway wish they’d catch me.”

  “Look,” Arthit says, and clears his throat. “I haven’t wanted to bother you with this, but Pim’s run off. Three days ago. She feels guilty, I suppose.”

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake. Are you looking for her?”

  “She’s not going to want to be found.”

  “Who cares what she wants? She’s a baby. She’s going to be somewhere around Soi Seven. She was working the sidewalk outside the Beer Garden when I found her. Where else would she go?”

  Arthit says, “Home?”

  “No. Tell me, did she ever have any money at all?”

  “Never. I had to keep a few hundred baht in a bowl so she could go buy stuff when I called and asked for it.”

  “She sent it all home,” Rafferty says. “Every baht. That’s a big family up there. She’s going to be working. Go arrest her.”

  “Poke. We’ve actually got bigger problems than Pim.”

  “Rose will kill me.”

  “I’m telling you, even if I find her, or you find her, she won’t come back to my place. She’s got a problem with-Poke, it was getting really odd around the edges. She’s a sweet, good-hearted girl, but she’s a baby.”

  “That’s my point. She can’t be hooking on a sidewalk, not there. You know who she’ll be pulling? Drunks from the Beer Garden who can hardly walk, who’ll take it out on her when they can’t get it up. Guys who haven’t got enough money to go to Nana.”

  “I know,” Arthit says, “but I’m telling you, she’s not going to go anywhere with me.”

  “Just a couple of minutes ago, I was thinking that one more problem would probably make me cry. I’m on the verge of getting weepy here.”

  “Where’s ‘here’?”

  “Over near Khao San.”

  “Still? Isn’t that kind of slow-learner behavior?”

  “I have to be somewhere. You’re changing the subject.”

  “I am. She came down to Bangkok alone, and she’s going to have to take care of herself for now. She won’t come back with me, and I haven’t got anyplace else to put her.”

  “My apartment?”

  “Think, Poke. Have a good cry and see if it clears your mind. Your apartment is almost certainly under surveillance. She’d be safer on a hillside in Afghanistan than at your place. I’ll try to come up with something, okay?”

  “Me, too.”

  “Anyway, you’ve had some good news today. The new picture is useless.”

  “Listen,” Rafferty says, “I don’t get it. About the picture. Shen is working with the Americans, right? I mean, that’s who Murphy is, that’s who Elson is. The Americans could get a good, current picture of me here in about fifteen seconds. Why haven’t they?”

  “I’ve been asking the same question. But for now they’re looking for Hugh Grant. In blackface.”

  “Still, it’s something to think about. Along with everything else, and Pim.”

  “I’ll help her any way I can. From a distance. She’ll bolt if she sees me.”

  “Thanks, Arthit. One more thing. Is there any way I can find out whether Murphy has been traveling?”

  “Yes,” Arthit says. “You can ask me, ‘Arthit, has Murphy been traveling lately?’ ”

  “What, you were saving this as a surprise?”

  “I knew you’d appreciate it. And this is why, aside from general karmic reasons, you want me on your side. I wanted to keep this query away from Shen, so I requested a restricted-substances watch on him.”

  “Will that really keep the information secret?”

  “Secret from everyone who’s not paying for it, like narco bosses. But there’s no reason Shen should be paying for it. Got a pencil?”

  “Sure,” Rafferty says, closing his eyes to listen.

  “In the past ten days, he’s been down to Yala twice. That was kind of interesting, because he used a chartered plane both times. The second time he filed a flight plan for Phuket and then diverted to Yala.”

  “Lot of Muslims in Yala.”

  “Majority population in places. Just today a buffalo stepped on a land mine and three kids were killed by automatic fire from a moving car. Buddhists are generally peaceful, but tempers are pretty short down there.”

  “Yala,” Rafferty says. “In the south.”

  “Yes, Poke, Yala is in the south.”

  “Think it’s been sunny down there?”

  “Why? Do you want to work on your tan?”

  “The man who was killed. The top of his head was sunburned.”

  “Hmmm. I don’t know for a fact that it’s been sunny down there, but I’d bet good money it’s been sunnier there than it has been here.”

  “Where else has Murphy been?”

  “Three nights ago he flew to Kuala Lumpur. Don’t know why. Stayed one night and came back the next.”

  “Kuala Lumpur,” Rafferty says with his eyes closed. He’s so tired that he visualizes writing it so he won’t forget. “Thanks, Arthit. Call on this phone for now and leave a message if it’s off. If I toss it, I’ll get you the new number.”

  He disconnects and looks up. The clouds have thinned enough to allow the afternoon sun to point a few shiny fingers down, picking out this car and that window and making them gleam unconvincingly against the gray of the day. Rafferty says, “Special effects,” and pushes off the wall, tucking the phones into various pockets. A knot of girls go by, maybe eight of them, crowded beneath three overlapping umbrellas, taking tiny steps to stay together. They�
�re laughing, and a couple of them eye him. He lets them pass, then falls in behind them, toward the laundry’s door.

  A chime rings as he pushes the door open. A woman of forty or so, Southeast Asian but probably not Thai, looks up from stuffing clothes into a bag and gives him a measured smile. She’s behind a waist-high counter, one end of which is piled with unsorted garments of all kinds. As he nears her, he also sees an older woman, silver hair drawn back in a long, loose, shining ponytail, sitting in a chair behind the clothing. Her head is down, and she’s doing something involving a skein of green yarn-crocheting or knitting.

  “Yes?” This is the younger woman. She’s not expending the energy most Thais put into a greeting.

  “This ticket,” he says, suddenly at something of a loss. “Someone gave it to me, and, uh …”

  He fishes it out of his shirt pocket and hands it to her, still folded.

  She takes it with a small, polite smile and opens it and stares down at it. When her eyes come up to his, they’re terrified. She says, “You … you … who are you? Who gave you-”

  The older woman says something in a language Rafferty doesn’t speak but thinks is Vietnamese. Her tone is sharp enough to bring the other woman to a stop. She stands there, fingering the hole in the ticket, and the fear in her face turns with no transition at all to desolation and then tears. They’re completely silent tears, and they gleam suddenly on her cheeks as the sun pokes another hole in the clouds outside. She brings her empty hand up, straight-fingered, to cover her mouth, but still the tears come, and still she holds Rafferty’s gaze, although he’s not certain she even sees him.

  The older woman lifts her head and repeats herself more sternly, and Rafferty sees that she’s blind, her eyelids two swirls of flesh mutilated in some terrible injury, a long time ago.

  The crying woman closes her eyes and lets her head droop, an attitude of purest defeat. Her shoulders rise and fall with her sobs, but she still hasn’t made a sound. She leans down and places her fingers gently on the older woman’s wrist and turns her hand palm up. Then she puts the yellow ticket into the waiting hand.