The Fear Artist pr-5

by Timothy Hallinan

  “And here’s a little question,” Ming Li says. “Why don’t they have a good picture of you?”

  “Yeah.” Rafferty goes back to surveying the soi. “I’ve been asking myself the same-”

  His eye is drawn to a bright patch of color: A handsome Thai man in his early thirties comes up the street, holding an umbrella to shield several hundred dollars’ worth of clothing-white slacks and a peach-colored shirt under a short black leather jacket. With him, ignoring the umbrella, hanging on to his arm, and talking a hundred miles an hour, is Pim.

  He sits forward, and Ming Li follows his gaze. “Her?” she says. Then, before he can answer, she says, “Boy, look at her. She’s flying.”

  “Is she?” Rafferty tries to see her through Ming Li’s eyes. Pim’s free arm is making short, meaningless gestures, like a charade of stuttering. The half of her that’s not under the umbrella is wet enough to shine. Her steps are so approximate she’s almost falling over her feet. She’s back in sidewalk-tart clothes-tight, glittering shorts, an off-the-shoulder T-shirt with a big red lipstick mark on it, the ghost of a giant’s kiss. Her hair has been frizzed out in all directions and sprayed, and it sparkles.

  “Stay here,” he says, and gets up and goes down the steps to the soi, heading into the middle of the street to intersect them. He can hear Pim’s voice now, high and slightly shaky, broken by an occasional burst of laughter. She’s not just flying. She’s pasted.

  He says, “Pim.”

  The Thai man stops, but Pim takes another step and stumbles, and he tugs on her arm. She squints at Rafferty and starts to smile, but the expression dies on her face, and she takes a step back.

  Once again the Thai man restrains her.

  Rafferty wipes water off his face and says, “Pim,” again.

  “Not Pim,” says the Thai man. “Name now is Angel.”

  “I’m talking to her, not you.”

  Pim pulls at the Thai man’s arm, shifting from foot to foot in her eagerness to leave. The man yanks her arm sharply, and she stands still, looking down at the street, heedless of the rain.

  “You want her?” the Thai man says.

  Rafferty says to him, “Go away.”

  The Thai man steps to the side and gives Pim a little push. “Go in, Angel,” he says in Thai, “and I’ll see you back at the room after three. Not before.”

  Pim makes a wide circuit around Rafferty, eyes down, and hurries into the Beer Garden.

  “You give her the pipe?” Rafferty asks, also in Thai.

  “We share. She likes it more than I do.”

  Rafferty turns to follow her in, but the man says, “She won’t go with you. Not unless I tell her to. And if you go in there and make a problem, guess who will get beat up.”

  Rafferty stops, feeling Ming Li’s gaze from across the street.

  “But if you want to talk to her,” the man says, “pay me forty dollars for a short time. I’ll go get her for you. Talk as much as you want for an hour. Forty dollars.”

  “How about I pay you fifty and just break your nose?”

  “Go back home,” the Thai man says. “Where you understand how things work.”

  Rafferty stands there looking at the entrance to the bar. He mentally runs two or three chains of events and can’t find one where he’d have the time to get involved and stay involved.

  He’s about to turn and go when the man says scornfully, “Big talk.”

  Rafferty turns and nods at him. So furious it feels as though the road is rippling beneath his feet, he takes a few steps toward the side of the street where Ming Li is waiting-standing now-and as he passes the handsome Thai man, he folds his right arm, brings it as far across his chest as he can, as though he’s scratching his left shoulder, sets his feet, and swings the point of his elbow into the man’s throat. He scores a direct hit on the larynx. The man makes an agonized rasping sound and goes down on his back, both hands to his throat. He lies there coughing and hacking, rolling from side to side in a puddle, knees drawn up, and Rafferty bends over him and says, “I’ll be back. If I see a bruise on her, if I see a Band-Aid on her finger, I’ll have you torn into small pieces and fed to soi dogs. I will find your mother and make her watch them eat you. Nod if you understand.”

  He waits, and the man nods. Rafferty leans closer. “And keep her away from that pipe.”

  He straightens and sees a ring of watching people, mostly men. One of the women from the Beer Garden, a familiar-looking one, gives him a covert thumbs-up.

  “Something wrong with his throat,” Rafferty says. “Listen to him. It might be contagious.” He keeps walking as Ming Li comes down the steps and falls in beside him.

  “If that’s mercy,” she says, “I can do without it.”

  DAENG IS ON the floor again. He’s come to prefer the floor. When he’s there, at least he knows he’s not going to fall.

  He’d never imagined he could hurt this much.

  “Up,” says the farang-Murphy, his name is Murphy-and the two men yank him upright. They shove him back into the chair, and Daeng squints through his one open eye at Murphy.

  “I’m not going to play with you anymore,” Murphy says. “Did you know Rafferty before that night?”

  “No.” He’s answered this a dozen times.

  “Did you arrange to be the first man on the roof?”

  “Ask the others.”

  Murphy goes to the little table, knocked crooked and spattered with blood now, and picks up the box cutter.

  Daeng’s bowels loosen. His forearms are already scored with shallow, intensely painful cuts.

  “Did you arrange to be the first man on the roof?” He wiggles the box cutter. “Yes or no.”

  “No, no, no.”

  “Did he tell you anything while you were up there with him?”

  “No.”

  “You didn’t talk about anything.”

  “I told you. We fought, he hit me with the door, I stumbled. I was falling off the building, and he stopped me, he grabbed my belt, and-”

  “And he saved your life, and you repaid him by letting him go.”

  “Yes.”

  Murphy holds the box cutter vertical, inches from Daeng’s face. He says, “Stick out your tongue.”

  Daeng says, “Uhhhhh, uhhhhhhh,” and then he’s weeping again.

  “This is the third time you’ve been brought in and questioned, but you’ve never told the story about him saving you before, have you?” Murphy makes a quick movement and nicks the end of Daeng’s nose.

  Daeng is sobbing too hard to answer.

  “So you’ve had a lot of time to think this up. Maybe you and Rafferty worked it out together. How many times have you talked to him since that night?”

  “Ne-ne-never, never.”

  “I told you to stick out your tongue.”

  A huge shudder racks Daeng, but he puts out his tongue.

  “You know how much it hurts when you bite your tongue?” Murphy says. His voice is calm, even gentle, like an adult explaining something to a child. “Just full of nerve endings, the tongue is. Imagine what it would feel like for me to start at the tip and saw back an inch or so. Give you a forked tongue.”

  One of the guards makes a choking sound.

  Murphy looks up at the man behind Daeng. He says, “Are you in the wrong room?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Do you think this piece of shit has told us everything he knows?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Well, what would you suggest? Tell me what to do to him. Come on, be creative.”

  The guard clears his throat.

  “Sorry? You said what? Pull his hair? Call him names?” Murphy nods. “Good idea. Do it.”

  “Sir?”

  “It’s kind of crude, but who knows? Ball up your fist and punch him in the face. And I want to see you put some back into it.”

  Daeng pulls his tongue in and squeezes his eyes shut. He hears the guard come around the chair, hears the feet stop in front of him. T
he guard’s breathing sounds ragged.

  “Well?” Murphy says. “You waiting for him to bloom or something?”

  Daeng hears feet scuff the concrete, and his head explodes. The force of the blow takes him off the chair and onto the floor again. He curls himself up against kicks and hears the guard hissing with pain.

  “Broke your knuckle,” Murphy says. “Poor baby. Get him into the chair again.”

  For what feels like the hundredth time, Daeng is lifted into the chair, hearing the gasp from the guard with the broken knuckle. The entire world is a pillow of pain Daeng is sinking into. The cheekbone on which the guard broke his knuckle beats with a hot red pulse, and blood is trickling down the side of Daeng’s neck. The swelling from the cheekbone pushes against his one open eye.

  “Cuff his ankles to the chair,” Murphy says. “We’re down to it.”

  The guards drag his feet up against the chair legs. Daeng doesn’t even try to resist. He hopes they’ll kill him. His wife and children flash in front of him, and he silently says good-bye, hoping their spirits will hear. He feels the warmth of the tears running down his face.

  “Look at me,” Murphy says.

  Daeng opens his right eye as far as he can. Murphy has the box cutter in his hand again.

  “This is it,” Murphy says. “You tell me right now whether there’s anything more we need to know about you and Rafferty. I want you to talk, and clearly. To give you some motivation, here’s what I’m going to do if I’m not satisfied: I’m going to cut off your lips. You,” he says to the guards. “Grab his lips. You take the top, you take the bottom. Pull them as far away from his teeth as you can.”

  Daeng tastes salt and sweat on the men’s hands, and then his lips are almost torn from his face.

  Murphy’s eyes are boring into him. “You know, if I do this, nothing will happen to me. No one will even speak sharply to me. Not a frown in the hallway. You, on the other hand, will terrify everyone who sees you, and you’ll spend the rest of your life trying to keep your teeth wet.”

  He brings the box cutter closer. “Trying to pronounce the letters b and p,” he says. “And f.”

  He stops. He’s still looking at Daeng, but his face has gone slack, and it feels to Daeng as though Murphy is seeing straight through him. Then the gray-blue eyes lift to a point just above Daeng’s head and wander slowly to the right. Murphy stands up straight and backs up until he bumps the table, and then he sits, the box cutter dangling from his hand. “Or w,” he says to no one. Or m.” He closes his eyes for a moment. Without opening them, he says to the guards, “I don’t want those lips to move at all, is that clear?”

  Both guards say, “Yes, sir,” and pull even harder on Daeng’s lips.

  Murphy gets up and comes back over. He leans down so he’s only inches from Daeng’s face and says, “I want you to say something for me. Okay?”

  Daeng tries to answer, but all that comes out is a vowel.

  “Exactly,” Murphy says. “Now, here’s what I want you to say. I want you to say ‘Helen.’ ”

  Daeng says, quite clearly, “Helena.”

  “Wait, wait, wait,” Murphy says. He bows his head and closes his eyes. Without looking up he says, “Now say ‘Cheyenne.’ ”

  Daeng begins to speak, but Murphy says, over him, “ ‘Eckersley,’ say ‘Eckersley.’ ”

  It’s a difficult word because it’s nothing Daeng has heard before, but he says, “Eckersley.”

  Murphy whirls and flips the table so it lands legs-up, the sound ear-popping in the small room, “Motherfucker. The worst-case scenario, in three-fucking-D. No, no. Wait.” He turns back to Daeng. “Say ‘Cheyenne.’ ”

  Daeng begins the word, but Murphy’s not listening. He tosses the box cutter onto the floor, pulls out the cell phone in his pocket, and speed-dials a U.S. number. He glances over at Daeng and the guards and carries the phone into a corner, with his back to them. Daeng hears him release a quiet laugh, just a single, unamused syllable, and say, “Paul.”

  Murphy listens for a second and then says, “Have you been in her house since you had your visit with her?” He turns, so Daeng is looking at his profile. Murphy’s eyes are closed. “Well, go in. Use her phone and download her voice mail. I want to know who’s called her. Especially from over here.” Impatience tightens his face. “Yes, yes, from Bangkok.… Of course Bangkok. Just do it.” Murphy punches at the phone with a stubby finger and winces as he looks at Daeng, as though just registering the injuries. “For Christ’s sake, let go of him. You,” he says to Daeng. “You’ll be fine in a week or two.” He picks up the box cutter and slides the blade back in. Then he goes to the door, moving like an old man. “Just fine.”

  “What should we do with him?” asks the man with the swelling hand.

  Murphy puts a hand on the doorknob and turns back to face them. “Daeng,” he says. “Means ‘red,’ right? Same nickname I had, back when I was a kid. Red.” He looks down at the floor. As the guard is about to speak again, he says, “Bury him in solitary. As deep as you can. The most solitary solitary you’ve got. A week at least, until I say he can go. He talks to nobody.”

  He puts the phone into his pocket. “You’re lucky, Red,” he says. “You’ll get to kiss your wife again.”

  22

  The Red Man

  The room is a faded green not found in nature, pale and spectral in the overhead fluorescents. All the way around the room, about three feet from the floor, are tiny, grimy handprints, hundreds of them, as though left by an army of invisible children. They seem to jump and twitch in the lights’ flicker.

  Sitting on a pillow, Rafferty can’t keep his eyes off the handprints. He keeps asking himself where the children are.

  The sobs have subsided to irregular gasps and sniffles. The two women lean against each other, a limp pantomime of grief. The older one has collapsed against the younger, her arm thrown heavily over the other woman’s shoulders. And yet it seems to Rafferty that the older, with her terrible, devastated eyes, is the one who is recovering more quickly. In the last half minute or so, her hand has grasped the loose fabric of her pajama-style trousers and formed a fist around the cloth. Ming Li sits on the floor in front of them, face submissively down, her little MacBook Air closed to hide the screen shot of the newspaper from Cheyenne. She keeps her eyes on the floor, giving the women the invisibility they need to recover themselves.

  The older woman coughs, so suddenly and loudly that the younger one flinches. She says, without lifting her head toward Rafferty, “How you find us?”

  “My sister,” Rafferty says with a nod at Ming Li. “She followed you when you left the shop.”

  Ming Li says to the older woman, very formally, “I am sorry.”

  “No matter,” the woman says. “Name you, child?”

  “Ming Li. This is my older brother, Poke.”

  “We’re both sorry,” Poke says. “Sorry to bring you terrible news.”

  “Twice,” says the older woman. She sniffles percussively. “My name is Thuy. This girl is my daughter, Jiang.”

  Jiang, who is in her forties, shakes her head in the negative, although it’s hard to tell what she’s objecting to.

  Rafferty says, “What was Helen’s name?”

  “Bey,” Thuy says. “Means ‘baby.’ ” She coughs again and says, “Baby sister for me.”

  “The man who was killed,” Rafferty says, “gave me-”

  “Billie Joe,” Thuy says. “Billie Joe Sellers.”

  “Well … um, Billie ran into me-”

  “Billie Joe,” Thuy says.

  “The last thing Billie Joe did was stick that ticket in my pocket.” Rafferty tugs at the edge of his pocket. “It was very, very hard for him to do that. He didn’t have any strength left. But he did it because he wanted me to have that ticket.”

  “Stop,” says the younger one, Jiang. She releases a sharp barrage of Vietnamese, and when she stops, Rafferty tells the rest of the story.

  When he’s finished, Thuy
puts her hand across her mouth, as though trying to hold something in. Her shoulders shake several times, and she sniffs twice.

  “That night cops came to my apartment and dragged me down to an interrogation room. I saw a man there, an American.”

  Thuy could be made from stone, but Jiang’s eyes widen. She glances away quickly and translates.

  “I’m going to tell you what he looked like,” Rafferty says. “He was short and-”

  Thuy says, in English, “Red.”

  The rain hid them when they came.

  The monsoon had hit with fury that year, rain so thick, so dense that people disappeared into the gray, two or three meters away. The rains dragged an unusual cold front behind them, and for people whose skin was always wet, the cold seemed to reach straight through and scrape at the center of their bones.

  All the huts leaked. It was a season of dripping water. The rice was rotting, and green mold grew on clothes that were folded and stacked. The paddies had overflowed the dikes so that water ran ankle-deep through the mud street of the village.

  They sat in the huts day and night and shouted at each other over the rain. The hut that Thuy and Jiang shared with Bey had a corrugated tin roof the rain struck like hammers. The hut had belonged to Thuy’s husband, but he’d gone to fight against the Saigon government and the Americans, and he’d been killed in an ambush only thirty kilometers away. He’d been nineteen when he died, and she’d been seventeen. She’d been carrying the child who her mother, who was never wrong about a baby’s sex, had assured her would be a girl. Bey and Thuy’s mother was dead now, but Thuy had her daughter, whom she named Jiang.

  Now only women, children, and old men lived there. But some of the village’s men-and women, too-had fought and been captured and had been made to talk before they died. In Saigon’s eyes the place was a nest of traitors, and in the end they paid for that.

  It was very late. The village was asleep, and the rain had driven even the dogs inside, so there was no warning when seven heavily armed men came up the path: three Americans and four Vietnamese troopers. The Vietnamese were scum, tattooed and drug-raddled, released from the worst of the city’s prisons to earn their freedom by killing the men and women who were trying to reclaim Vietnam for the Vietnamese. It took the team only a few minutes to kick in the village’s doors and drag the terrified people out of their houses and into the downpour, making them squat in a dark field of mud at the edge of town.