The Fear Artist pr-5

by Timothy Hallinan

  So he’d kissed it all good-bye, disappeared for a while into Indonesia, and spent some of the money he’d taken from the people who paid not to be on the monthly Phoenix lists. When he reemerged, he’d settled into business mode, making his boring millions as the guy who knew who to pay and how much, where to get everything from steel wheels to bulk rubber, and doing the occasional bit of freelance wetwork when someone earned it. He’d maintained his connections to the spooks, since he had so many lines out and would be silly not to listen in. Sell information and plausible lies, get richer, get fatter, get laid, shoot someone once in a while, and dream of the old days.

  Slow death.

  And then those idiots flew into the Twin Towers screaming the name of God, and the President of the United States looked up from the children’s book he was reading to a classroom full of kids and thought, Yikes. Terrorists without uniforms, children with grenades, an enemy without borders. Bad guys hiding in plain sight. Everyday people, people who look like everyone else, serving as double agents or actual combatants. In small, isolated, backward villages. In difficult terrain crisscrossed by secret paths. In countries where people hate us.

  Jeez, the President thought, what does this remind me of?

  So naturally the plan the Pentagon dusted off and revised and presented to the White House was based on the Phoenix Program, and it was accepted while Murphy was in the middle of complicated but boring negotiations for a pottery plant in northeast Thailand. The proceedings barely kept him awake, and his eyes were drooping in a meeting when he got the call he’d never thought would come.

  How would he like, the suit had asked, to stick with the business as a cover and go back to doing what he’d been doing before, but also, from time to time, a little more? Or, whenever circumstances permitted, a lot more. Help the Thais deal with the Muhammads in the deep south and keep an eye open in case al-Qaeda or some other suicide club decided it needed to take things out of Camel World and into Bangkok or Yala, way down south, until things cooled off.

  Fucking paradise.

  The driver says, “What about the gate, sir?”

  Murphy looks up. “Oh.” They’ve come to a stop, and the gates designed to keep people like him away from houses like this gleam ice white in the headlights. “Hold on.” He unbuckles the belt wrapped around the briefcase and fingers his way through the wads of documents, toiletries, and stray sticky notes until he finds the remote, which he points through the window at the gates.

  “Wow,” the driver says as the house is revealed: two and a half staggered stories with balconies everywhere, useless chimneys for useless fireplaces, a tiled roof gleaming with drizzle, water already standing in some parts of the yard. Manderley in the tropics.

  “Do your work, son,” Murphy says, “show up every day, stand tall, skim that graft, and you can buy the place. But you better do it fast if you wanna buy it from me.” He automatically counts the lit windows: four. The pair of lamps behind the living-room curtain operate on a timer, so they don’t tell him anything. The light in Song’s room, on the second floor, is on, but the Humvee is gone, so she’s out fucking around on him, which he should have expected, coming back early. The light gleams in the front window of the bathroom next to Treasure’s room, but that doesn’t mean anything either, because the kid has nightmares all the time, which is no surprise, since she has them when she’s awake, too. And to the right of the house, light spills onto the lawn and trees from the big windows in his train room. Those shouldn’t be on.

  He wants to go back to the airport. Fly someplace with mud and thick greenery and short, smooth, brown women.

  The light that shouldn’t be burning. Which will it be tonight? Someone who wants to kill him or someone who can break his heart without even trying?

  17

  Treasure

  “Right, hurry me up,” Murphy grumbles, getting out of the car before the driver can dart around to open the door. “Beat it,” he says. “The gate closes fast, so don’t hit the brakes when you’re halfway through. I’d tell you to give Shen a kiss for me, but I think I’m too short for him.” He gets a better grip, two-handed, on the gaping briefcase and wrestles it up the curving brick path to the double front door, his spirits and the shoulders of his shirt getting damp in the drizzle. The house rises up in front of him, a monument to bad judgment. Once on the porch, he blows out a long, heavy breath, feeling like a resentenced prisoner. He says, “ ‘Home is the sailor,’ ” and keys in a code on a pad to his right. The lock responds with a discreet snap, and he’s in.

  The minute the door closes, he turns to the interior keypad, entering a five-digit code followed by two pushes of the zero key; if someone forgets to do this, as Neeni-the current wife number one-always does when she’s been indulging in her whiskey and cherry-codeine cough-medicine cocktails, sirens wail and the lights all over the place blink on and off. And she stands there, mouth hanging open, trying to remember what to do until somebody comes to help.

  She’ll be able to buy a lot of cough syrup when he finally cuts her loose. She’ll probably miss this place when she’s in Mudville, but she’ll have her codeine and her Jack. And this time he won’t go back for her.

  He puts the briefcase on the high-backed chair to the left of the door, a chair that exists for the sole purpose of giving him a place to put the briefcase. During his two years in the house, he has methodically broken or torn up anything anyone else ever put there, and he’s finally got them trained, except for Neeni. Neeni can’t be trained after, say, 4:00 P.M.

  On the other hand, she’s not out fucking someone, and Song is.

  There’s the light in his train room to think about, so he opens the drawer of an almost-antique marble-topped table and keeps pulling until he can reach beneath it and peel back the surgical tape that holds the knife on the underside. It’s a Buck 119, one he’s had since Vietnam, sharpened so often that the six-inch blade is probably a quarter of an inch narrower than it was new. The heft of it in his hand is deeply familiar. He lays it quietly on the table and leans against the wall to work his boots off. In his socks he moves lightly across the marble-floored entrance hall, the knife in his hand, his arm loose and relaxed. To his left, the living room is pale with the light from the lamps on their automatic timers, and in front of him yawns the formal dining room, now dim but dominated nonetheless by the silhouette of the enormous, six-hundred-pound mahogany table Song had insisted on, back when he still thought she was cute.

  To the right, just his side of the stairs to the upper floors, an L-shaped hall leads to the doorway of a small den and then, a few yards later, turns left and ends in the train room. He could go through the dining room and then the kitchen to get to the train room, but those rooms aren’t carpeted, and he’s quieter on the carpet. At the turn in the hallway, an open door lets him look into Neeni’s room. He’d moved her down here eight or ten months ago, after her third fall down the stairs. He can hear her snoring, and something in the shape of her body beneath the covers-always unexpectedly small, given how large she looms in his memory-calls him in. The glass on her bedside table is one-third full of a familiar reddish tan fluid. It’s a big glass.

  She’s asleep or, more accurately, passed out, her long black hair fanned across the pillow, her arm bent at the elbow so that her open hand rests on the pillow, only inches from her face. The defenselessness of the slender wrist, the curl of the fingers, touches something deep inside him, and he bends down, studying the face that so drew him once, with its high, angel’s-wing cheekbones and astonishingly fine nose, as perfect and surprising as a baby’s. He’d been on his way home from an all-night drunk in a pig-shit village in Laos the first time he saw her, wearing a Tweety T-shirt and a wraparound skirt, coming out of the temple at about eight in the morning, gleaming in the honey-colored sun like some elegantly articulated, long-vanished exotic preserved in amber, just for him.

  He can still see the colors the sunlight discovered in her hair.

  She turns he
r head a few inches toward the light falling through the door, and the loose pouches beneath her eyes and the new softness under her chin become visible. Something heavy settles in Murphy’s chest, some regret that he won’t be able to return her to that village as she was when he took her out of it.

  Back in the day, back in ’Nam, he’d never been able to kill the beautiful ones. Despite the business-as-usual betrayals: the working girls with big smiles counting the troops and memorizing the positions of the barracks when they were sneaked into the base for a short-time tussle, then pointing out officers in civvies in the street, targeting them for the knife from behind or the rolled grenade. The pretty village teenager filing reports with Charlie’s artillery battalions. He could round up the women, he could bring them in, he could scare them till they pissed themselves, but he couldn’t kill them if they were beautiful.

  Well, he thinks, straightening up with a sigh, there was probably no one anywhere who didn’t draw the line at something. He’s faced down fifteen-year-old Muslim kids who fired automatic weapons into women and children in village markets without any apparent hesitation but who fought for their lives when a soldier was shoving pork into their mouths.

  His shoulders sag. Maybe it’s just the flight, the waits at both ends. He feels weary, and he has an impulse to crawl in beside Neeni. But she’d turn away from him, draw her legs up, make herself small.

  And there’s still the train room.

  He looks away from her without any sense of loss; he had to learn to disconnect from her years ago, although the feeling manages to sneak back. At the door to her room, he pauses, looking down the hall toward the open door to the train room. He hears a faint clicking sound, regular and slightly syncopated, and he recognizes it. He relaxes, just a little. But he shouldn’t hear it.

  How tough should he be? More to the point, given what he’s seeing in her the past two years, would it make any difference?

  He moves on the balls of his feet, breathing silently, until he’s standing a foot or two from the door, looking into the room. The clicking noise has stopped.

  It’s a big room, created by knocking together a maid’s quarters and a breakfast area and moving the external wall out about eight feet. Evenly lit by pin spots recessed in the ceiling, it has a thickly carpeted floor in West Point gray and walls covered with shelving of blond wood, mostly empty but crowded in a few places by what look like mass collisions of cast-metal toys: trucks, cars, farm machinery, military vehicles, and trains-mostly trains.

  Without looking right or left, he slips the Buck knife into a belt loop, snagging the top of the guard inside the loop so the knife won’t fall out, and walks into the room as though he thinks he’s completely alone. About two-thirds of the room is taken up by an enormous table, plywood on sawhorses, clamped together into a dependable flatness and covered with a two-inch layer of Styrofoam painted green. Carved and punched into the Styrofoam is a scale-model tropical world: four-inch hills, roads with little houses clinging to them like limpets, tiny villages, two-inch palm trees, rubber plantations with their military platoons of trees in straight lines, shallow, mirrored ponds, a narrow-gauge railroad. This is a precise scale model of a few square miles in Yala, the southernmost province of Thailand, just above the border with Malaysia.

  The railroad is the key to it all.

  A finger touched to the top of the transformer at one side of the miniature confirms that it’s hot. He cranks the lever, and a small train, a golden yellow diesel that’s a perfect model of several actually in use in the area, clickety-clicks its way along the track, nearing a small station. With the total concentration he devotes to everything he does, he brings the train to the exact point where it would stop to take on and discharge passengers, then breaks the current. In the absence of the train’s noise, the room almost pulses with silence.

  To the left and right of the big windows hang heavy, dark green, floor-to-ceiling curtains that he draws against the morning light when he’s worked through the night in here. One of them bells out slightly from the wall.

  Murphy sweeps several pieces out of the miniature world-buildings and trees, mostly-and they clatter against each other as they hit the carpet. While the sound is still ringing in his ears, he says in a low, animal growl, “I … smell … something … ALIVE.”

  The last word is a roar. In the silence that follows it, he can hear an almost-inaudible sound, bone dry and fast and irregular: teeth chattering. The chattering gives way to something airy, high, and faint that could be a sob, a whimper, or even a nervous giggle. Or, since it’s her, all three at once.

  He crosses the room in a leap and yanks aside the curtain.

  A figure in white, a single loose garment modeled on Wendy’s nightgown in the animated Peter Pan, stands there, her back pressed to the wall. She’s small, even for twelve, and almost emaciated, even though she eats like a wolf. Her arms are black with burned cork, as is her face, except for a straight horizontal stripe of brownish pink skin over the bridge of her nose, broken by two eyes, tiny circles of a wolfish amber completely surrounded by white, trained up at his face with an energy he can almost sense on his skin. Her hair, black with a reddish tint, is an uncombed tangle, shoulder length, and damp. She won’t let anyone get near it.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Ghosting.” Her voice is unexpectedly low-pitched, a boy’s voice, and there’s a tremor in it that could be fear or excitement or both.

  “Where’s the rotten meat? It works better if you stink.”

  For a tenth of a second, a pink tongue flicks across the blackened lower lip. “I’m on a, a, a sneak. If I smell bad, they’ll know I’m there.”

  He puts a curled index finger under her chin and pulls it up, not particularly gently. “That’s not what I asked you. I asked you where the meat was.”

  Her teeth chatter for a moment, and he feels her chin tremble. “Hwa threw it out. She thought it was just spoiled.”

  “That’s Hwa’s job,” he says. “Protect us from spoiled meat. Protect us from you.” He takes hold of a knot of hair and gives it a yank, and for a moment her eyes narrow, although she doesn’t make a sound. “I ought to slap you,” he says. “Some fucking ghost. ‘My maid threw out the spoiled meat.’ Oh, well, let’s just stop the war until the little rich girl can age another porterhouse.”

  The child says, “You’re right.”

  “You want to play this, play it real. If you don’t want to play it, go be a little girl. I’m not saying you should stink right now, but if you want rotten meat, you keep it away from the maid.” She’s looking at nothing in the middle of the room. “Treasure? Listening or not?”

  “In a, in a real war,” Treasure says to the middle of the room, “if my, my maid figured out what I was doing, I’d kill her.” She speaks her own version of English, flavored with Lao and Vietnamese.

  “Then you’d have to get another one. And then she’d find the meat because you’re so sloppy, and you’d have to kill her and hire another one, and a few months later you’d have so many dead maids you’d have to move out of the house. Dead maids stacked everywhere.”

  “I’d hide the meat better,” Treasure says, still looking at nothing.

  “Don’t have maids,” Murphy says. “Unless you can trust them with your life, don’t have maids.”

  “Can you trust Hwa and Phung with your life?”

  “They won’t be with us much longer.”

  She ignores his response. “If you find out you can’t trust them, are you going to-”

  “We’re not in a real war,” Murphy says.

  Treasure says, “Hwa couldn’t protect you from, from me. Phung couldn’t. Nobody could.” She pulls the curtain over her lower half and edges sideways as though she expects a blow.

  “In five years, maybe. I won’t worry until then.” He picks up the fallen model pieces, his back to her. He can hear her coming, and when he turns to look, she’s a few feet from him, still holding the bottom of the curtain
, dragging it away from the wall as though it’s her connection to safety. “Have you figured it out?” he asks, looking down at the railroad.

  “It’s, it’s, it’s not the station.”

  “Let go of that thing. And don’t tell me where it’s not going to be. Tell me where it will be.”

  The curtain flops back against the wall, and she’s standing beside the table, carefully out of arm’s reach. He can smell the feral odor of her; she bathes only when she wants to, and she wears a nightgown until the seams are parting and it’s stiff with dirt, when she replaces it with an identical one, maybe a quarter size larger, sewn by Hwa or Phung. She’s refused to wear anything else since she saw the cartoon Wendy in flight, when she was seven. Neeni had sewn them at first, but these days it’s dangerous to let Neeni near a sewing machine.

  “There,” she says, pointing a dirty finger at a length of track that borders an orderly stretch of rubber trees.

  A little kernel of excitement flares in his chest. “Why there?”

  “What you said.” She looks up at him, but the moment he meets her gaze, her eyelids come down halfway. “Acc-access, escape, blame.” She leans forward and touches the tracks, then traces the finger back across the treetops of the rubber plantation to a narrow road. “Park here, go through here, plant it here, go back and get into the car, and you can turn around and you go, you go this way.” The finger stops at an intersection. “Here, you go right or left. No-nobody sees you twice.” She lifts her face toward his but keeps her eyelids low, and he has the feeling she can see him through them.