The Fear Artist pr-5

by Timothy Hallinan

  A movement of her hands stops the avalanche of impressions, and Arthit feels his face heat up. There’s a glint in her own eyes that suggests she has some idea where his mind was. Arthit forces a smile through his blush and waits for her to say something.

  She tilts her head to one side, very slightly, and gives a tiny shrug. Then she looks down at her black alligator purse, and Arthit takes advantage of the moment to look again at her long, slender neck. There’s a smooth little layer of fat just beneath the skin, softening the contours of her throat. A faint crease runs the base of her neck, between the short crop of black hair and the collar of her blouse, as though the skin had been folded once, very carefully. The crease is so shallow he doubts he could feel it even with the most sensitive part of the tip of his finger.

  Neither of them has spoken a word.

  Arthit clears his throat to say something, but as he does so, she takes a business card out of the purse and presents it to him politely, both hands extended. Now there’s a shadow of regret in her face, somehow formal.

  DR. ANCHALI “ANNA” CHAIBANCHA, it says, PROJECT SUPERVISOR, WITTAYALAI SCHOOL FOR THE DEAF.

  She’s looking at him expectantly, and two shoes drop simultaneously: He knows why she hasn’t spoken, and he knows who she is.

  “Anna,” he says, and there’s a sudden tangle of emotions that threatens to clamp his throat shut. “I’m sorry,” he continues, aware of her eyes on his lips. “I didn’t recognize you.”

  She holds her right hand up, vertically, making a small side-to-side gesture, erasing the mistake. Then she startles him by reaching down and grasping his wrist, looking directly into his eyes.

  “I’m better,” he says, understanding. “Every day is a little easier.”

  Anna pulls in the corners of her lips a bit.

  He shakes his head and abandons the lie. “No, it’s not. Every day feels just exactly like the day before. But I’m not as bad as I was, so every day must be somewhat better, even if I’m not conscious of it. Please,” he says, suddenly seeing the rain, suddenly remembering his manners. “Won’t you come in?” And he turns, her fingers still around his wrist, and sees Pim standing in the hallway, her hands dangling forgotten at her sides. In one is a saucer, and hanging from the other, her finger looped through the handle, is one of Noi’s everyday coffee cups. All the spirit has fled from her face.

  “Pim,” he says, hearing a ghastly heartiness in his voice, “this is Anna-Dr. Chaibancha, a friend of my … my wife’s. I haven’t seen her since … since the cremation.”

  They’re at the dining-room table, the breakfast plates still empty, the bowl of Pim’s bright flowers between them. Coffee cools in their cups, strong, with a dark brown fragrance.

  Pim has learned to make it exactly as he likes it.

  Arthit looks at the fine porcelain cups, which he hasn’t seen since Noi died, and then at Anna, and he gives Pim credit. She can spot a lady when she sees one.

  “It wasn’t good for me to live alone,” Arthit says, although nothing Anna has done seems to be a request for an explanation. She watches his lips in a way that’s somehow both personal and not. “A farang friend of mine forced himself in here one day and found me drunk at ten in the morning, and the next thing I knew, Pim was here.” He’s suddenly certain that Pim is listening on the other side of the door. “She’s been wonderful,” he says.

  Anna has a thin gold ballpoint and a pad bound in pale blue leather. She writes and turns it toward him. It says, She’s in love with you.

  “That’s possible,” he says, a bit stiffly. He tilts his head toward the door. “It’s something I’m thinking about.”

  Poor man, Anna writes. She shakes her head, but there’s a hint of humor in it, too. Watching him across the table, she must be seeing a tired-looking man in his middle forties with a heavy, downturned mouth, permanently flared nostrils, slightly receding hair, and the eyes of an orphaned five-year-old. He’s not very well shaved, and his shirt is badly ironed. He needs a haircut. She reaches over to pat his hand, but he speaks before she can do it.

  “This is the kind of thing,” he says, “that I could use some help with.” He picks up the coffee and drinks it in self-defense.

  She gives him a smile that lifts his heart in a way it hasn’t been lifted in some time and sips her own coffee.

  “You’re … ahhh, teaching,” he says. Her silence hovers between them, seeming to need to be filled. “How long have you been …?” He abandons the question. “It’s very nice to see you. Noi and I were such hermits,” he says, not wanting to bring up the illness that had kept her home. “We let a lot of old friends slip away. She talked about you, though.”

  It was true. Noi and Anna had been children together, back in what Arthit always thought of as Noi’s golden childhood, spent in the lap of the family that had been extremely displeased at her marriage so far below her social status-to a lowly policeman, the son of another policeman. Anna has the same gloss to her, a kind of natural polish buffed by privilege that rough wear hasn’t scratched.

  She’s writing now, and he watches with pleasure. She’s left-handed, her fingers long and cream-colored, with varnished, untinted nails. The pen appears weightless in her hand, and Arthit enjoys the play of delicate muscles beneath smooth skin.

  She tears off the page and slides it over to him, then goes back to writing.

  I’ve wanted to come for months, it says. But I didn’t want to intrude. And I was afraid a little, too. You were so devastated at the temple. I didn’t know how you’d be and whether I could do anything …

  The next piece of paper skims the table.

  … no matter how you were. And I felt terrible about it, because I knew that Noi would have wanted me to make sure you were all right. But I’m a coward.

  She’s stopped writing and is watching him read. When he’s finished, Arthit says, “But you’ve come now, and-”

  Anna is shaking her head, denying herself any credit. She reaches down and brings up the purse again.

  When her hand comes back into view, it’s holding a four-by-five photograph, in color. She places the very tips of her fingers on its edge, as though she’s hesitant to touch it, and pushes it across the table. There’s something apologetic in the way she pulls her hands back.

  A big man lying in the rain on an oddly colored sidewalk, his torso in the lap of another man, who’s clearly calling for help.

  Arthit looks at the sitting man’s face.

  Forty minutes later Rafferty says, “I hope this is interesting. I was sitting at home, just sort of wishing for a merciful death.”

  Arthit, heading through the dining room toward the kitchen, says, “It’s interesting. Sit down and you’ll find out.”

  Rafferty chooses the armchair he’s chosen for years and sits carefully, trying to keep his head from rolling off his neck. His throat is dry, and his tongue feels like it has a seat cover on it. The morning light, even through the thick clouds, is bright enough to make noise.

  He has to stand again almost immediately as Arthit comes back with Pim in tow. She’s carrying a fancy coffee cup, thin enough to let him see the coffee through the porcelain. She hands it to him without meeting his eyes or saying hello and trudges away, shuffling her feet like someone who’s polishing the floor with her socks. Arthit returns Poke’s questioning glance with a man-to-man combination of wide eyes and shrugged shoulders that means, I’d scream and break things if I could, but I can’t, and I’ll tell you about it when there are no women around.

  Rafferty starts to sit again, but no such luck. Into the room comes a very trim and, he thinks, quite beautiful woman about Arthit’s age.

  She’s wearing a dark blue blouse, possibly silk, with loose half sleeves that bare elegant forearms and an exquisite pair of hands. The blouse hangs over white linen slacks, only slightly wrinkled despite the damp of the day. She has a short chop of thick, willful hair, brushed back to reveal a porcelain forehead and large, rounded eyes, a brown that goe
s golden in the sunlight streaming through the windows.

  “This is Anna,” Arthit says, and Rafferty hears a note in his friend’s voice that he hasn’t heard in months and months.

  He greets Anna in Thai, and she makes a fluid, practiced gesture, first almost touching her fingertips to her lips and then to her ear and ending with her upraised palm facing him. Arthit says, “Anna doesn’t hear or speak. But she can read your lips.”

  Rafferty says, “In English?” and at the last moment diverts the question to her instead of Arthit.

  Anna gives him a broad smile, and Arthit says, “In Serbo-Croatian, probably.”

  Still smiling, Anna sits on the couch and tucks her legs under her.

  Arthit takes the other end of the couch and clears his throat. “It’s because Anna reads lips that we’re all here.”

  Rafferty hears a floorboard creak in the dining room. Since Arthit is still looking at him, he makes a small movement with his head toward the noise.

  “Poke,” Arthit says, a bit stagily. “Why don’t you go into the kitchen and get Pim? She lives here, too, and she ought to hear this.”

  “Let me have a gulp of coffee first,” Rafferty says. He takes a long sip, replaces the cup on the saucer with a clatter, and yawns loudly to give Pim the chance to duck back into the kitchen. He glimpses the look that passes between Arthit and the woman-Anna, her nickname is Anna-as he leaves the living room. The look was shared amusement, and it’s a look that, Rafferty thinks, usually takes a while to develop.

  “Hey, Pim,” he says. She’s sitting at the kitchen table with an empty cup-a chipped mug, not one of the good ones-in front of her. He goes to the coffeemaker and hoists the carafe. “Want some more?”

  She shakes her head.

  He carries it over anyway, glances down at the cup, and says, “Well, you can’t have more if you haven’t had any.” He pours her half a cup. “It’s good. Come on, it’ll get your heart beating.”

  He’s been speaking English, and he knows she understands only bits of it. From the look on her face, she’s not even trying.

  “Can I have more?” He holds up his empty cup.

  “Can have what you want,” she says.

  She’s such a puffy, hapless little thing, short, plump-faced, uncertain. When he’d first met her, she was trying to work the sidewalk on Sukhumwit Soi 7, and he’d dragged her home to meet Rose. He and Rose had thought they were doing a favor for both her and Arthit when they suggested she come to help him with the house, but looking at her now, he’s not sure he was right.

  “Why don’t you come into the living room for a minute?”

  “I’m not really a servant,” she says in Thai. “I can stay here if I want.”

  “It’s not an order. I think Arthit just wants to make sure you know what’s happening.”

  She blows out a gallon of air in a way that reminds him she isn’t really that much older than Miaow and gets up, mug in hand.

  “Wait,” he says. He turns to the cupboards, which he had helped Arthit clean and organize in the aftermath of Noi’s death, and pulls out one of the porcelain cups, with saucer. It takes him only a few seconds to fill it with fresh coffee and hold out his hand for the mug. She hesitates for a moment, and then they swap, and Rafferty follows her into the living room.

  Arthit gets up as they enter and ushers her to the second armchair. Anna’s eyes follow Pim as she crosses the room. When they’re all seated and Anna’s gaze has dropped to her lap, Rafferty leans back and sees, for an instant, the same tableau but with different people: Rose and himself in the armchairs, Arthit and Noi on the couch. Seeing Anna in Noi’s place, he feels a sharp, almost-physical twinge of loss, an emotional cramp.

  Since someone has to say something, he toasts Pim with his cup and says, “This is great coffee.”

  “You’ve met Anna before, I think,” Arthit said. “At the temple. For Noi’s …”

  “I remember,” Rafferty says, just to break in on Arthit’s pause.

  “She and Noi grew up together,” Arthit says. “Now, once in a while, she reads lips for the police when there’s video evidence that doesn’t have sound or where the voices aren’t audible.”

  “Ahh,” Rafferty says. “The footage that didn’t make the news.”

  “You already know about this?” Arthit asks. “That there’s official interest, I mean?” Anna watches Arthit’s lips and then turns to Rafferty for his answer.

  “They hauled me in last night, about nine o’clock.”

  “Who?”

  “A Major Shen.”

  “Not a Major Shen,” Arthit says astringently. “The one and only Major Shen.”

  “Who is he?”

  “I don’t know him personally, but my impression is that he’s the worst possible news.”

  “I’ve got worse,” Rafferty says. “He grilled me in a crappy little room with one of those mirrors in it, and on the other side of the mirror were a couple of guys from my own country-you know, the land of the free. One of them was our pal Elson.”

  Anna nods and holds up her free hand. With the other she’s writing on a small pad. She tears off a sheet and hands it to Arthit.

  “She says that makes sense. Shen works with the Americans.”

  “On what?” Rafferty asks Anna, who’s writing again.

  “The situation in the south,” Arthit reads from her pad.

  “Sure,” Rafferty says. “He was all over me about Indonesia and the Philippines, like I was some sort of courier for militant Islam.”

  Arthit is nodding before Rafferty finishes speaking. “It’s just a matter of time before one of the big jihadists is caught here, either down south or in Bangkok,” Arthit says. “We’ve got a big Arab population in Bangkok and a lot of native Muslim discontent down there.”

  “Who’s Shen with? I didn’t recognize the uniform.”

  “It hasn’t been worn in public much. It’s a little operatic if you ask me. Listen, I know him for only one reason, and that’s because he was given permission to take pretty much anyone he wanted from any department he wanted. And he chose knuckle-draggers, the kind of guys you’d take into the street if you thought you might have to fire into a crowd.”

  Anna is writing again, but this time she holds the pad up for everyone to see. It says, in English, Who was the other one?

  Rafferty says, “You mean, with-”

  “With Elson,” Arthit says. Anna nods and pulls from the pad the page she’d begun to write on. She folds it neatly in precise halves and puts it on the coffee table.

  “Never saw him before,” Rafferty says. “Short, fat, redheaded, red-faced. High blood pressure and a short fuse, great combination. Maybe sixty-five, maybe seventy. Had what would have been a handlebar mustache if it had been on his upper lip instead of coming out of his nose. Dressed like a budget tourist.”

  Arthit shakes his head. “No idea.”

  Anna is writing again, and they all wait. Even Pim is watching her with half-concealed curiosity. When Anna holds the pad up, it says, They wanted to know what the man in the street said to you?

  “Yes. Could you see what it was?”

  She shakes her head. No plosives, she writes. No fricatives. No rounded vowels. He was in profile.

  “A plosive is like a b or a p,” Arthit says, with the air of someone parading new knowledge. “A fricative is an f or a v. They’re easy to see.”

  “And a rounded vowel,” Rafferty says, “is a rounded vowel.” He thinks for a moment. “No m’s either. How about that?”

  Impossible to read in profile, Anna writes.

  “Major Shen was … upset with her,” Arthit says. “He swore at her, accused her of lying.” Rafferty is surprised at the anger behind those words, and Pim listens with her mouth open. Anna puts a hand on Arthit’s wrist as though to stop him, but he’s too steamed to slow down. “Even though he knows her, she said he treated her like a … like trash off the street.”

  Anna is writing. She holds up the pad, a
nd it reads Very bad man.

  “What do you mean, he knows you?”

  “When they were kids,” Arthit says. “They’re both from respectable families without much money, people who all pretty much know each other. Old families, but not powerful.” Anna nods. “It’s a relatively small circle, all living in Bangkok, all going to the same schools. She knew him when they were ten or eleven. Hell, Noi probably knew him.”

  Anna has been writing, and they wait until she finishes. She holds up the pad. Bad even then. He hurt weak kids. He stole things.

  “He’s lived in America,” Rafferty says, and waits as she writes.

  Military school, Anna’s upraised pad says.

  “He lived there long enough to get dual citizenship,” Arthit says. “That’s part of his legend, the only Thai cop with dual citizenship.” He shakes imaginary water from his fingers as though to say, Big deal. “People say he got recruited by the American spooks, and then a couple of years ago he was back here again, sent by the U.S. to help us deal with the problems in the south, although we all know what that really means. It means they want a listening post and an errand boy in the department.”

  “He did go all glimmery about my potential Muslim connections.”

  “Sure he did,” Arthit says. “For Shen’s department ‘Muslims’ is the answer to every question. Probably looks for an imam under his bed every night.”

  “Well,” Rafferty says, “Somebody killed about five thousand people down south.”

  “I’m not saying the problem isn’t real. What I’m saying is that we’re using bad people to fight bad people, and you do not want to be in the middle of that.”

  “Yeah, well, that’s where I think I am.”