The Fear Artist pr-5

by Timothy Hallinan

  “Is that really the issue?” Ming Li says. “What he’ll do for money? He’s your father, not your child. He’s not going to sponge off you.”

  “I suppose-”

  “But that’s not the point, is it? It’s that you’re doing the big tough-guy cowboy act: This town’s not big enough for both of you.”

  “I’m not sure it is.”

  “I’d be here,” Ming Li says.

  “And that would be great,” he says.

  A silence claims the room. She’s curled up in her chair, looking at him. Her head is pulled back on her neck as though she half expects him to take a swing at her.

  “You know,” he says, “if it was okay with Frank, and if it wouldn’t bring him across the ocean, I could probably work out a way for you to stay here.”

  Her eyes widen, and she doesn’t make a sound, but when she blinks, a tear slips down her cheek. Then she’s up, and her arms are around him. “You don’t know,” she says, “you can’t know, how much that means to me.”

  “It’s just an-”

  “I don’t belong anywhere-not America, not even China, not anymore. I’m a nuisance to my mother, and Frank … well, Frank doesn’t need me. He’d go anywhere in the world that appealed to him and never even ask if I wanted to go. He’d forget to pack me.”

  Poke says, “Vladimir is crazy about you.”

  She laughs and backs off, wiping her nose. “I know. But he’s not exactly what I have in mind.”

  “And I’m crazy about you, too.”

  “Thank you,” she says. She squares her shoulders and rubs her face with her forearm. “I won’t hold you to it, but thank you. All right, I won’t go with you to Arthit’s. I’ll be around the corner in the car, with the motor running, just in case.”

  “Can you drive?”

  “Better than you, in a pinch. Nobody drives like a teenager.”

  He nods. A moment ticks by. He says, “And you can hold me to it.”

  “Well,” she says, and takes a shaky breath. Then she abandons the sentence and goes to the bed. “You wanted small,” she says, all business. “Mrs. Ma had a lot of Chinese guns, but Frank always called them ‘three-finger specials’ because they blow up all the time, so these are both Colts. They’re kind of beat up, and this one fires hot, Mrs. Ma said, but they work.” She picks up the smaller and racks it, the slide smooth and precise-sounding. “Forty-five. Kicks like a horse, according to Mrs. Ma, so I figure this one is yours.” She taps the barrel on a box. “Ammo here. And the other one is mine.” She drops the gun back on the bed and licks her lips, looking down at them. “She said hello, by the way. Mrs. Ma did.”

  “I couldn’t have gotten through this without you,” he says.

  “I know that. But don’t make me cry anymore. It messes up my self-image.”

  “Fine.” He pushes off from the wall. “I’m going to put on a dry shirt, and then we’ll go.”

  “I’ll drive.”

  “No,” he says. “Let’s save that weapon until we need it. Which we probably will.”

  28

  Tangled Web

  “I went around the block half a dozen times,” Rafferty says. There are candles burning on the living-room table, and Arthit clearly hadn’t been expecting anyone. He feels very much like the uninvited guest, so he’s making small talk to soften his entrance. “Nobody seemed to be watching the house.”

  “It’s kind of surprising,” Arthit says. He blows out the candles and glances at Anna, who immediately drops her eyes in a way that probably looks demure to Arthit but to Rafferty looks like a plain old guilty conscience. “I keep checking,” Arthit says, turning on the lights. “It’s been that way for days, which is odd. There’s nothing my superiors would rather do than hang me out the window in the rain.”

  Anna holds up her pad, aiming it at Poke. It says, You’ve been careful? When she glances up at Poke, she catches him staring and gives him a tentative smile. He smiles back, his face as stiff as cardboard.

  “Careful as I can be,” he says.

  Arthit hasn’t sat yet. He says, “You want a drink?”

  “Beer would be nice.”

  “Fine.” He turns toward the dining room, but Anna is up and on her way, motioning Arthit back to the couch.

  “I feel guilty,” Arthit says as he sits down.

  “About what?”

  “All this.” He raises his chin in the direction Anna took. “I’m here, feeling like I’m living in a greeting card, while you’re out there with half the world looking for you.”

  “I’m doing okay,” Rafferty says. “And you have a life to live.”

  “I hope so. I mean, I know so. And I know that this will be over soon, and we’ll all be back to normal. But I wish Rose had been around to get used to … this …” he says, with a vague circular gesture that takes in the two of them and Anna, in the other room. “I wish she could have gone through it in stages, like I did, instead of being presented with it in full bloom, so to speak, when she gets back.” His tone is light, but his eyes hold Poke’s. “She loved Noi so much.” He stops and swallows. “Will she be okay with it?”

  “I can’t say,” Poke tells him. “We’ll have to let time sort it out.” He feels the coldness of the answer. “Everything is … good with the two of you?”

  Arthit says, “I don’t know what I’ve done to deserve it.” He turns his head a few inches toward the dining room and continues. “She’s not Noi, I know that, but no one is. No one ever could be. But she’s not like anyone I’ve ever known, and-” He looks down at his knees and crosses his blunt, dark hands in his lap. The lamp makes his gold wedding band gleam. He shrugs. “And I think she loves me.”

  There’s no way around it. “I’m sure she does.” His throat feels so tight he’s surprised Arthit can’t hear it.

  “I didn’t mean to talk about this,” Arthit says, “You’ve got all these problems, and I’m rattling along about being in love. Please forgive me. You’ve got something important to talk about.”

  “It’s all important,” Rafferty says, automatically. While Anna’s still out of the room, he asks, “Did Kosit follow Eddie Bland from the airport?”

  “Straight to a big house that turns out to be Murphy’s. Still there. And he’s booked back to Kuala Lumpur at midnight, so he’ll probably stay put till then.”

  “I guess Kosit can go home, then,” Rafferty says, getting up as Anna comes into the room, a middle-height, sturdily built woman who moves like a very light one. The businesslike chop of her hair bares her face, her smooth brow, her wide-set, guileless eyes. She hands him the beer in a bottle and smiles, then closes her eyes and screws up her face with effort.

  Arthit watches with an expression halfway between apprehension and fierce pride.

  Anna, her eyes still closed, says, slowly and tonelessly, “No … glass.” Her eyes fly wide open and go to Arthit’s, and he’s beaming from ear to ear. She drops her head to hide her own smile and turns deep red, and Rafferty wishes lightning would strike him where he stands.

  Anna gives him a shy, quick glance and hands Arthit a glass with a good four fingers’ worth of whiskey in it. Then she mimes wiping sweat off her forehead and collapses beside him on the couch, letting her head drop onto his shoulder.

  “We’ve been working on that,” Arthit says. He rests his free hand on her thigh. “She thinks she sounds ugly when she talks. But she doesn’t.” He catches himself and shakes his head. “Please. Let’s talk about your problems.”

  “Well, first,” Rafferty says, sitting, “I’m very happy for both of you.”

  Anna says, out loud, “Thank you.” She drags out the a on “thank” a bit experimentally and gives both words the same pitch and the same stress, but her voice is low and pleasant, coming from someplace in the center of her chest. Arthit’s face, as he watches her, is as transparent as water.

  “So,” Rafferty says, mostly to break the moment, because it’s too painful to look at, “I want to bounce something off
you.”

  “Anything,” Arthit says. “And if I can help, tell me.”

  “No, I don’t want to involve you. But you can give me an opinion.” He tries not to glace at Anna and fails. She smiles encouragingly.

  “Helen Eckersley,” he says. “The woman in Cheyenne.” For a wild, panicked moment, remembers that when he talked to Anna last, he said, “Helena,” but she hasn’t noticed the change; perhaps it’s the difficulty in lip-reading either word. And Arthit doesn’t know that Eckersley is dead, that she was Vietnamese, a survivor of the massacre in the Delta, but he knows he hasn’t. They’ve barely spoken, beyond immediate needs, for days. It’s Ming Li he’s been talking with. “I called her in the States, starting a few days back. Left three or four messages on her machine. I never talked to her. But she called me a couple of days ago. She’s here. She wants to meet me.”

  Arthit says, “Mmm-hmm,” but there’s nothing in his face. Anna’s eyes, on the other hand, are sharp with interest.

  “So I’m thinking about doing it.”

  Arthit looks over Poke’s shoulder, in the general direction of the front door, and Poke knows he’s thinking. “For what purpose?”

  “She was the last person on Sellers’s mind. She was important to him. Part of my problem is that I don’t know who he actually was or why he was killed.” He’s never lied to Arthit before, and every sentence makes him feel more counterfeit. “She might be able to tell me-I don’t know-who he was, beyond his name, what he was doing here. What his relationship was with Murphy.”

  “What if she’s a plant of some kind? What if Murphy-”

  “They didn’t know her name, remember? That’s why they were after me in the first place.”

  “Suppose they figured it out somehow,” Arthit says. “Suppose it’s not even really the same person. Suppose it’s a trap and she’s just some floater, just some burnout he’s picked up and paid a few hundred bucks to call you and try to set up a meeting.”

  Anna is writing, and when she lifts the pad, the words startle him. It says, No. Too dangerous.

  “I followed her today,” Rafferty says, and Anna sits just a tiny bit straighter. “She went to the place where Sellers was shot. Stood in the rain in the middle of the spilled paint, praying.”

  Arthit says, “Doesn’t mean anything. Maybe it was a show. Maybe they knew you’d be following her.”

  They certainly did, Poke thinks. “Maybe. But maybe she’s got something I need to know to get myself out of this. It’s pointless to pretend they’re not going to find me sooner or later.”

  “I still don’t think you should do it, but if you do, where?”

  “The new shopping mall on Rama IV. At the peak of business, about eight-thirty tomorrow night. We-I-spent part of the day checking it out.”

  Arthit says, “ ‘We’?”

  “A friend.”

  Arthit nods, but he’s obviously stored the evasion to question it later. “So there will be people around.”

  “Thousands of them. Not the kind of place to make a big fuss.”

  “Good and bad both,” Arthit says. “It also means they can salt the crowd. And getting out can be a problem.”

  The comment catches Rafferty unprepared, since he’s given no thought at all to how he’ll get out. “If there’s anyone there, they’ll be watching her,” he says. “What I’m planning to do is get there two, two and a half hours early so I can look the place over again. Then I’ll go into the business center on the fourth level with a couple of books for them to copy, so I have a reason to stay there. It’s got a big window, but it’s away from the heaviest traffic. I’m going to ask her to meet me at the fountain on the first floor. I can see it from up there.” Up to this point, he’s rehearsed it mentally, but now he’s off the map. “When she shows,” he says, “I’ll go back into the business center and call her and tell her to go out through the front. If anyone is watching, they’ll see her answer the phone and trail along after her. I’ll go down the interior stairs and out the other way.” As he invents it, it feels almost plausible. “Then I’ll call her again and tell her to walk toward the back of the lot, and I’ll pick her up in my car. If there are people behind her, I’ll just keep driving.”

  Arthit says, “You have a car?”

  “Rented.” He’s startled again by how little he’s told Arthit. “Got it this morning.”

  Arthit shakes his head. “You can’t use your ID or your credit cards. Who rented it for you?”

  “The same friend. You’ve never met him.” He gets back to what he came to say. “So. I’ll get there about six-thirty, stay mainly in the business center, wait and keep my eyes open for the opposition, and then leave through one door while they’re following her through another. What do you think?”

  “I think it would be better if you had someone to watch as she leaves and make sure she comes out alone, not trailing some posse.”

  Anna holds up her pad. She’s written Don’t do it and underlined the words twice.

  “I agree,” Arthit says. “I’ll go. Instead.”

  Anna’s face freezes. She looks like someone who’s seen lightning and is waiting for the thunder.

  Rafferty says, “You wouldn’t recognize her.”

  “Describe her to me.”

  “No. No, it’s not possible.” He gets up, just to do something. “I can’t put you in that position. Suppose you’re right, suppose she really is a plant, suppose it’s a trap and Shen’s people are there with Murphy. How could you explain it? You’d be committing suicide. Your career would be over.”

  Arthit looks at his glass and swallows most of what remains, and Anna watches every move as though she’s afraid she’s seeing him for the last time. He lowers the drink and looks up at Rafferty. “I’m not sure what you might get that’s worth the risk.”

  “I’m not sure of anything,” Rafferty says, sitting again. He closes his eyes and rubs them with the heels of his palms. “Except that this can’t drag on much longer. They’re going to catch me sooner or later, and if they don’t, I’m going to die of exhaustion. And I’m lonely. I want my wife and daughter back. I want my life to be ordinary again, the way it was before. When I barely appreciated it. I just want to get through this and put things back together and then be grateful for everything I have, everything I had, before all this began. Honest to God, Arthit, when I get through this, I’ll never be bored again. If you ever hear me complain, you have permission to kick me. Hard.”

  Arthit says, “Why does it take something terrible to make us understand how blessed we are?” He leans forward, and Anna shifts away slightly. Rafferty thinks, She’s frightened. But then he pictures Pim, blistered on speed and hanging on a pimp’s arm, and the moment passes.

  “If you have to do it,” Arthit says, “just think it through a few more times. I’ll do the same, and we’ll talk tomorrow. Maybe we can find a way to improve it.”

  Rafferty wants to tell his friend the truth, that he’ll be nowhere near the shopping mall, but he can’t. And it feels like he’s lost something else, something almost as precious as his wife and child, and the anger he’s been carrying gives him a sharp shake. “I’ll do that,” he says, getting up and avoiding Anna’s eyes. “Listen, one other thing. Maybe this doesn’t mean anything, or maybe it does, I don’t know. I think Murphy has been misrepresenting how close he is with the U.S. people here, how much they know about what he’s doing. I think he’s lying to Shen.”

  “Why? What makes you say so?”

  The instant he looks at Anna, her eyes skitter away, but they snap back to him the moment he begins to speak. He talks to Arthit, but he feels her gaze like warmth on his cheek. “I had a talk with someone who’s with them-the U.S., I mean-and I’m not mentioning a name, okay? You never heard a name from me.”

  Arthit’s forehead wrinkles in a question, but he says, “Sure.”

  “And this guy seemed to be worried that Murphy has gone off the tracks, the way he did in Vietnam. They’re not hear
ing much in the way of reports from him, and they’re getting worried that he’s … well, overenthusiastic in the way he does things. The bottom line is, the newspapers are taking an interest in Murphy, thanks in part to me, and if there’s a bad story, I’m pretty sure Shen doesn’t know that the Americans are going to deny any direct involvement. Shen will be left holding the bag. You know the drill: ‘We’ve used Mr. Murphy as an intelligence source from time to time, but no one here authorized anything beyond that.’ So who else is responsible? Shen, that’s who.”

  “That’s interesting,” Arthit says. “There’s a space between them. You might be able to get a lever in there, especially if Shen thinks he’ll to be the scapegoat in case anything goes wrong. But you’d have to find a way to get the word to Shen.”

  “I’m working on that,” Rafferty says. “Maybe you can think about it, too.” He smiles and directs the smile at Anna as well. “So there are two things to consider until tomorrow.”

  “Turn your enemies against each other,” Arthit says. “Very Sun-tzu.”

  “It’ll be interesting to see who turns up at the shopping mall tomorrow,” Rafferty says. “If this woman is a plant, if Murphy set her up, maybe Shen’s people won’t even be told about it. Might just be Murphy and a thug or two if his plans for me include stuff he thinks Shen might draw the line at.” He picks up the beer again and knocks back about half of what’s left. “Is it just me, or is this complicated?”

  “ ‘O, what a tangled web we weave,’ ” Arthit says, and Rafferty feels a sharp pang of conscience, but his friend’s eyes are direct and clear; he’s talking about Murphy. “But it all seems simpler if we just keep the end in mind. Getting you out from under.”

  “Right,” Rafferty says. “Thanks for everything.” To Anna, who has sprung to her feet, he says, “And thanks for the beer.”

  She nods, and Rafferty surprises himself by reaching for her hand and saying, “And take good care of my friend. He needs it.”

  She looks at Arthit, at her own hand clasped in Rafferty’s, at the floor, at everything in the room, before she looks at him. When she does, he sees that her eyes are moist. She says, in her low, uninflected voice, “I will.”