The Fear Artist pr-5

by Timothy Hallinan

  And because no one had warned them not to, they told the men Bey’s husband’s name, making the mistake that, years later, would result in Bey’s being beaten to death in a cold little house in Wyoming.

  “What can you do?” Jiang asks. “They’re just people. They don’t know how to lie.”

  Rafferty says, “You have a very good heart.”

  Billie Joe had bought the dry-cleaning shop for them before he brought them to Bangkok, and he’d taken the lease on the apartment. The name on the lease was a Thai name, no way to trace them through that. The shop was in the same name.

  “Did you know that Billie Joe was in Bangkok this time?” Rafferty says. He is folding a piece of paper on which Jiang has written in Vietnamese two words he asked her to write.

  “No,” Thuy says. “He never call or come say hello.”

  Jiang says, “What will you do?”

  “Well,” Rafferty says, “I don’t think I have any choice. I’m going to try to destroy Murphy.”

  Both women look down, unwilling to show him the doubt in their eyes.

  “It’s okay,” Rafferty says. “I barely believe it myself.”

  He puts the folded paper into the pocket of his T-shirt. “Are you going someplace new?”

  “Yes,” says Thuy. “Back to the northeast.”

  “Good, good. Don’t tell me any more. Does the shop have voice mail?” He turns to Ming Li and reaches down to give her a hand, but she tucks her feet under her and rises in a single, smooth movement, her bag already in her hand.

  “Yes,” Thuy says. “Have.”

  “I’ll call here and leave a message if I make it, if Murphy is finished. If you don’t hear from me, I guess you’ll have to figure that Murphy won.”

  Ming Li says, “He’s smarter than he looks. My brother, I mean.”

  “He look pretty smart,” Thuy says kindly.

  “Thank you for talking to us,” Ming Li says. “We’re very sorry to have made you so unhappy.”

  Thuy says, “Truth is always best.” Then she starts crying, full out, as though she’s just this moment heard the news of her sister’s death.

  At the door Rafferty looks around again. They live very sparely: a bed that doubles as a couch, a threadbare chair with a deeply dented cushion, a small television on a low black table that’s ornately inlaid with abalone, a two-burner hot plate, and a waist-high refrigerator. Another bright calendar on the wall, this one from last year. A few books in Vietnamese. The bathroom, where they probably wash the dishes, is just a tiny box of a room with a sink and a showerhead dangling at the end of a length of flexible tubing. It hangs on a hook above a damp concrete floor that slopes down to a central drain.

  The awful green walls.

  Rafferty asks Jiang, “Who made the handprints?”

  Jiang says, “They’re from the family who lived here before us. My mother bought this paint very cheap, and we put on two coats to hide them, but after a few months the little hands came through. Cheap paint, it doesn’t cover anything. I wanted to paint again because this color is so ugly, but she wouldn’t let me. She says the handprints are really-”

  “The village,” Thuy says, rubbing an arm across her ravaged eyes. “The children in the village. They stay with us now.”

  Since Thais love an excuse for a party, most Western holiday celebrations have found fertile soil in Bangkok, and Halloween has done even better than others. It takes Ming Li about six minutes with her iPhone and Google Translate to find a Halloween store, near enough for them to get there before closing.

  They ride through the monotony of the rain without speaking, their ears ringing with the story Thuy and Jiang told, with the images of the three captive boys and the children in the hut. The cabbie has Thai pop on the radio instead of the flood news, although he cranks it down when they get in. Ming Li wrinkles her nose at it and stares out the window, looking like someone studying a landscape of regret. Staring out his own window, Rafferty hears her sigh.

  It’s almost eight o’clock, the hour when one Bangkok turns into another Bangkok, folding the worn-out day neatly and putting it away, amping up the energy for the night. Some neighborhoods disappear into gloom while others suddenly flower, as streets that were nondescript in daylight put on their feather boas and bright sequins, and bloom revealed in their true colors, like some mousy male bank clerk who goes home, rinses off the dust, changes clothes, names, and sexes, and emerges as Fabulosa, Queen of the Night.

  “Bangkok may not be glamorous,” Rafferty says as they pass a pink-lit bar, the door flanked by hostesses shivering in cheap, shiny gowns and elbow-length gloves, “but it’s got lurid down cold.”

  Ming Li doesn’t even grunt. Ten minutes into the ride, she says, “It would be nice if something really terrible happened to that man.”

  “I can but try,” Rafferty says.

  “I want to be in the middle of it.” She sounds like someone in an argument that’s been going on so long it’s become chronic.

  “We’ll see.”

  “You couldn’t have followed those women home.”

  “I could have if they hadn’t already seen me.”

  “Yeah, and if your grandmother had wheels, she’d be a tea cart.”

  “Frank,” Rafferty says. “Frank used to say that.”

  This time Ming Li does grunt.

  “Does it ever worry you?” he asks. “How he’s shaped you, what he’s turned you into?”

  She turns her back on Bangkok and gives him her eyes, full bore, and he’s pierced by the thought that she’s becoming a beautiful woman. “Are you shitting me?”

  “What kind of language is …?”

  “I’ve seen the alternatives. Hanging around with girls just like me, picking on girls who aren’t just like me, buying ugly clothes with famous names to appeal to boys who talk through their noses and think tattoos are really daring. Whoa, dude, take your life in your hands, light a cigarette. Hey, man, let’s rebel by refusing to learn anything. Let’s be dull, stupid, ordinary kids who are looking forward to being dull, stupid, ordinary adults. No thanks, and with change. And by the way, I don’t see you living in some plaid-shirt American town and flashing your junk at Builders Emporium all weekend.”

  “You can thank Frank for that, too.”

  “Oh, of course, you poor baby. You chased your terrible runaway father all the way to Asia, such a sad story. And look how badly it’s worked out. You’re living here, married to the best-looking woman in the world, with a daughter who’s-”

  “Okay, okay.”

  “Lighten up on Frank. He gave me that money for you, he stole that passport. And you know what else? We could use him. I’d take him over Ivan the Useless, or whatever that guy’s name is, any day.”

  “Not me,” Rafferty says. “I know Vladimir’s a cheat and a liar and that he’d sell me out in a minute. But I keep expecting Frank to be something else.”

  “Like what?”

  He feels silly as he says it, but he can’t not say it. “A father.”

  “Oh, you’re so breaking my heart. Tell you what. Let’s just ignore each other.”

  “We’re both upset,” Rafferty says.

  “Gee. You think?” She looks at her watch. “We should be there by now.”

  “You here now,” the driver says, angling sharply to the curb. And there it is, a big, brightly lit store with a bunch of creatively melted and fractured mannequins in the window and the word ZOMBIETOWN in letters that look like the Hollywood sign. Ming Li reaches across the seat and jabs Rafferty with her forefinger.

  “Sorry.”

  He hands the driver the fare. “Both of us. Imagine living through that.”

  “Why did he kill her?”

  One of the fluorescents in the store flickers out, and Rafferty says, “Later. Let’s get in there so they can close up and go home.”

  The store smells like a freshly opened box of latex gloves. The young salesgirl who hurries to help them wears a fraying bedsheet, a
stringy wig of dead white hair, and two ounces of face powder. She’s drawn a gruesome red scar down her left cheek, with stitches of black thread glued in place. After the green apartment, it’s so innocent it makes Rafferty want to weep. She looks at both of them, clearly trying to find a racial classification, and gives up. In careful English she says, “Welcome to Zombietown. I am the Mistress of the Night.”

  “Whoo,” Rafferty says, rubbing his arms with a shudder that surprises him by being real. In return he gets a grin, rich in plastic fangs. In Thai he says, “I want something, a mask, that wears glasses.”

  “Of course,” says the Mistress of the Night, in English. “Glasses.”

  Ming Li says, “Why do we want glasses? Actually, what are we doing here?”

  “One thing at a time.” They follow the Mistress of the Night toward the back of the store. She calls out to someone, putting a little edge into it, and the lights snap back on. The Mistress of the Night turns dramatically and raises an open hand in a sweeping gesture that takes in a segment of wall hung with plastic masks of the full-size, pull-over-the-heard variety.

  She looks at Ming Li and says, in English, “For your daughter?”

  “Sister,” Rafferty says. “No, bigger. For me.” He points at a goofy-looking face with buckteeth, sleepy eyes, a lopsided grin, and a pair of black-framed glasses hanging from ears like cup handles. “Him.”

  “Mortimer Snerd,” the Queen of the Night says doubtfully. “Not very scary.”

  “Really?” Rafferty says. “I think he’s terrifying.”

  In yet another cab, Rafferty fumbles with the X-acto knife the Mistress of the Night sold him. The fourth time the driver hits a bump, Ming Li says, “Oh, give it here.” The cab reaches the bottom of a ten-degree grade and plows into a temporary lake, hydroplaning briefly and skewing sickeningly to the left, until the driver slows and the tires find the pavement again. The moment the cab loses contact with the street, Ming Li lifts the knife’s point an inch above the surface of the mask and waits.

  Rafferty says, “Don’t cut yourself.”

  “You know,” she says, going back to working the knife very precisely through the rubber, “if you hadn’t said that, I absolutely would have cut myself. ‘Don’t fall down the stairs,’ ” she says through her nose. “ ‘Don’t hit your thumb with that hammer.’ ‘Don’t crawl into the refrigerator and pull the door closed and die there.’ Welcome to the Useless Warnings Brigade.”

  “I had to say something.”

  “If you have to say something, tell me why he killed her.”

  “Right.” He settles back and closes his eyes for a second. “Well, the first thing is that I don’t actually know anything. This is all guesses.”

  “Guesses are a beginning.”

  “Okay. Okay, okay, okay.” Now he’s gazing through the window, trying to assemble the chronology. “I think Murphy was looking for Sellers and Helen-sorry, Bey-off and on for years. Practically ever since he found out about them, after Americans were allowed back into Vietnam. But it got really important in the past four or five years, as his stock started to go up with the American spooks and he had even more to lose. The Islamic unrest started here, and the Americans needed someone who could do dirty work but be deniable. He’s perfect for them. He’s former Phoenix Program, so he knows the drill, he’s even had a security clearance, and he’s in business all over Southeast Asia. He’s the ideal listening post, and he can go operational, too. So one day some aging general in Washington says, ‘What about old Murphy?’ and they pick up the phone and give him a call.”

  Ming Li is holding the knife still and watching the windshield wipers lose their fight with the rain as she listens. “Yeah?”

  “So for Murphy it’s the golden ring. Suddenly he’s got the government helping with his business, making his cover look even better, throwing contracts at him. But there’s a problem, and that’s what happened in that village. Given to the wrong media, the wrong administration, it could destroy him. So all of a sudden, catching up to Bey and Billie Joe moves way up his to-do list.”

  “And,” Ming Li says, “he’s got new resources now. To help him find them.”

  “And he did,” Rafferty says.

  “And they hurt her for twenty-four-”

  “Trying to make her tell them-”

  “-where Billie Joe is.”

  “So about five days before Billie Joe runs into me,” Rafferty says, “she tells them what they wanted to know-”

  “And what she says is, ‘He’s here, in Thailand,’ except they can’t pin down his exact location. But they’ve got some sort of pipeline to him, and to draw him they set up that thing you got in the middle of. And it does draw him, and they do the dirty. And Murphy thinks he can relax, except that suddenly you’re there and Billie Joe talked to you.”

  “And let’s not forget, there may be something in Yala, which probably has its own calendar. So Murphy might be getting squeezed from three or four directions at once.”

  They both think for a moment. The driver says, “At once,” and Ming Li jumps, but Rafferty shakes his head. The guy’s just trying out the phrase.

  “You said the government might pay him through his company,” Ming Li says, lowering her voice. “Why would they do it that way?”

  “You tell me. Vladimir wouldn’t have asked that question.”

  Ming Li gives him a sour smile and finishes her work on the mask. She sheathes the X-acto carefully and says, “So it looks legit if the money transfers are revealed. So they can deny any spook connection.”

  Rafferty says, “Let’s hope so. Plausible deniability. Keeping him at arm’s length. If there’s no daylight between him and them, we’re-I’m-probably dead.”

  “Coming up,” the driver says, and Rafferty looks out through a slant of rain at the high walls the Southeast Asian rich use to help the poor keep their distance. A moment later Murphy’s gates slide into view and the cabbie slows, but Rafferty says, “Keep going. Go to the corner and make the turn and wait for me.”

  “You get wet,” the cabbie says.

  “I’ll get dry again.”

  “Here, stop here.” Looking at Ming Li, he points to the ground: Stay here. She gives him a frown, but he lifts his chin toward the driver and mimes him turning the wheel and driving away, and Ming Li makes a face he chooses to take as acquiescence.

  When he opens the car door, the rain is a roar. He’s soaked before the door closes again. He realizes that the glue might not hold, that the ink might run, that Murphy might miss it altogether if the rain gets any heavier. He realizes that he never seems to have a backup plan.

  The glue doesn’t hold. The plastic slides over the surface of the wet wood as though the glue were grease. But the ink that forms the Vietnamese words Jiang had written is thick and black, from an alcohol-based Sharpie, and it reads dark, hard-edged, and clear. He shoves his single pushpin through the bit of the plastic mask and then through the paper, and pushes the point deeply into the wood of the gate, hammering it once with the heel of his hand, the one he scraped on the pavement when he went down beneath the weight of Billie Joe Sellers.

  He backs up, shaking the hand to get rid of the pain, and sprints for the cab. Ming Li pulls away from him when he climbs in, dripping profusely, and the driver makes a tsk-tsk sound as he puts the car in gear.

  “It’s up?” Ming Li asks.

  “It’s up.”

  God turns the rain off, and the sudden silence makes Rafferty’s ears pop. He opens his mouth wide to equalize the pressure.

  Ming Li says, “And what exactly is it you think this will accomplish?”

  “What do I hope it will accomplish, you mean.”

  “Fine. What do you hope it will accomplish?”

  “Well,” he says as the cab swings back onto a busy, four-lane boulevard, “I’m hoping it’ll shake the paper.”

  24

  That Night

  That night soldiers and emergency workers slap another hundred th
irty thousand sandbags on the dikes in the city’s lower-lying areas. The river rises silently, running fast between its banks. More water is diverted into more canals, and more canals overflow. The national death toll from the flood is estimated at more than three hundred and, like the water, rising.

  That night Rose opens her eyes on the thin mat of folded clothes she and Miaow use as a bed and realizes she’s alone. She gets up silently, not wanting to wake Fon’s parents, and tiptoes outside. Through a clearing in the clouds, a half-moon gleams, sharp-edged and pockmarked in the clear night air, and fifteen meters away she sees her daughter, sitting against the town’s biggest tree, with her knees drawn up and her head down, misery in every curve of her body.

  Miaow doesn’t look up as Rose sits beside her on the wet earth, but she leans against her mother, and Rose can feel her shoulders shaking. Water drips musically from the tree.

  When she’s gotten herself under control, Miaow wipes her nose with her index finger and says, “I’m so sad.”

  Rose hugs her a little closer. “I know, baby, but we’ll go home soon.”

  Miaow swallows loudly and says, “I want … I want a steak.”

  “Well, that’s easy-”

  “Why do I have to pretend I’m special all the time? I’m not a vegan. I was just trying to be different, to be … be … be special-”

  Rose strokes her hair, something Miaow normally won’t permit. “Everyone tries to be special, Miaow.”

  “No they don’t,” Miaow says. “You-”

  “Sweetie, Poke and I aren’t any different-”

  “Not you and Poke,” Miaow says, and Rose feels her own eyebrows climb. “It’s Andrew. He doesn’t pretend to be anything. He’s just dweeby and weird with his stupid glasses and his … his … his pants too high and his-oh, his hair. He dyed his hair to match mine because it never occurred to him I’d dye mine to match his. Ohhhh,” Miaow wails, throwing her arms around her mother’s neck, “I miss Andrew so much.”