The Fear Artist pr-5

by Timothy Hallinan

  “No problem, then.” Murphy reaches into the pocket of his jeans and pulls out a plastic flex-tie. “Lie down and put your hands behind you, and we’ll get this done, and then we’re square. In fact, I might have work for you in a week or two.”

  “It wasn’t personal,” Janos says, going to his knees, and Murphy moves behind him, and their relative positions, the classic execution tableau, tell Janos that he’s wrong, that it was personal all along, and he’s just grasping that and thinking about standing when the bullet, the first of two, tears into the base of his skull.

  32

  Neeni and Treasure

  The woman in the bed is beautiful and tiny. She lies on her back, one hand dangling off the side of the mattress. Her eyes are half open, focused on the far edge of the world. Rafferty passes a hand over them, but she’s either unconscious or so deeply intoxicated that she doesn’t register the movement. The room smells stickily of artificial cherry from the two open bottles of cough syrup on the table. He lifts the glass beside them and smells the cherry again, floating against a background of whiskey.

  This is Murphy’s life, he thinks. This overstuffed, leaking house, the woman who’s never here, the one dying slowly in the bed, and the child who sleeps beneath that schizophrenic ceiling. The narrow bed, the chipped dresser, the black-and-white memories in the locked room. Whatever it is that visits him when he sleeps. Murphy’s life is all collateral damage.

  Tikka-tikka-tikka-tikka comes the sound from the room at the end of the hall. He takes a deep breath, touches the gun again as though it’s a talisman, and leaves the bedroom and its unconscious mistress, heading down the hall toward the light. The pressure of passing time pushes at his back, making him walk a little faster.

  The room is big and brightly lit, and on a huge raised platform a small, golden train races around a curving track. The miniature landscape is Southeast Asia, someplace where rubber is grown. Standing just inside the doorway, watching the train click its way through the intricate loops and over the tiny hills, he says, “Hello.”

  No response, but he knows she’s here. He can smell her, and it almost breaks his heart. No child should smell like that. No child should be here.

  After a moment a voice says, “Who are … are you?”

  “A friend of your father’s.”

  Silence, except for the train. It negotiates a tight curve, just barely, and Rafferty says, “Should this be going so fast?”

  “You don’t, you, you don’t know how to slow it down,” the voice says, and this time Rafferty locates it; it comes from behind the open door to the kitchen.

  “I can figure it out,” he says. “I think.”

  “You look stupid,” says the voice. “You’re too stu-stupid to figure it out.”

  “Maybe,” Rafferty says. “Maybe I’m smart enough to wear a stupid mask.”

  Another pause. Then, in an almost-musical tone, “You forgot something. When you were here before.”

  “Did I?”

  “Look at the roof of the train station, Mr., Mr. Stupid.”

  He goes to the table, one eye on the door. It takes him a moment to find what he’s looking for in the tiny world; there are dozens of isolated structures and two small towns in the landscape, but then he sees the station and the pink thing on its roof. “My ear,” he says. “I lose ears all the time. I drop them everywhere.”

  The silence this time is so long he wonders whether she has an escape route of some kind. Then, very slowly at the edge of the door, a tangle of reddish black hair comes into view, followed by a cheek, an eye, and a nose. Precisely half a face, no more, dark as the night outside but for the strip, shockingly pale, that contains her eye and the bridge of her nose.

  She can’t be much older than Miaow.

  “Ears don’t fall off,” she says slowly. “You have to cut them off.”

  “Mine do,” Rafferty says. He reaches up and tugs his real ear, where it protrudes through the hole in the side of the mask. “And then they grow back.”

  “No,” she says, and it’s almost a shout. Her one visible eye, which has been fixed on his, wanders downward, going aimlessly left and right, as though she’s reading something written on the air or on a falling page, and then the movement stops and she’s looking at a spot on the floor about halfway between them. A pink tongue touches the center of her lower lip and then disappears. The energy that had been animating her face seems to have fled. Dully, she says, “They stay off.”

  “Why are your teeth black?” Rafferty asks.

  She doesn’t move, and she continues to stare at the floor, but a moment later she says, “What?”

  “Why are your teeth black?”

  The face disappears behind the door again. “So I can smile in the dark.”

  He feels the connection between them fraying, and he urgently wants to maintain it. He says, without a moment’s thought, “Could you make mine black, too?”

  “I don’t get that close,” she says without reappearing.

  He moves carefully, making no quick gestures and not looking in her direction, to the edge of the train table and locates the transformer. “You’re right,” he says. “I don’t know how to slow it down. Can you fix it?”

  “You have to go away,” she says. “Back to the door you came in through.”

  “Fine, here I go.” He backs up. “I’m in the door. Do you want me to go farther?”

  “No. Just stay there.”

  She comes out from behind the door. Beneath the dark charcoal, her face is beautiful, with a high, narrow nose, the full lower lip he’d seen on the small sleeping woman, and eyes that could be Lao or Vietnamese. But she’s far too thin, her knees below the smudged nightgown swollen like parentheses. The skin of her legs is scraped, punctuated by bruises and insect bites. Her feet are muddy. One of them-the right-is bleeding, leaving little stencil marks of red on the carpet as she walks. Twigs and leaves are caught in the tangles of her hair. Her eyes look into his and beyond them, and he can almost feel her gaze scraping the back of his skull. She never looks away as she moves. Not until she stops, at the edge of the train table, do her eyes drift downward, and once again he has the sensation of something, a current or something, being disconnected. He says, “Are you sure I shouldn’t back up some more?”

  Instead of answering him, she turns to the train table and looks down at it until Rafferty actually begins to wonder if she’s forgotten he’s there. But then she reaches out long fingers and adjusts the lever on the transformer, and the train slows. She says, “Take off your mask.”

  “If you take yours off.”

  She turns her head partway toward him, but her eyes remain on the table. “It doesn’t come off.”

  “Okay,” he says. “I’ll take mine off anyway.” He pulls it over his head and waits, but she’s not looking at him. He says, “Why are you by yourself?”

  “Mommy One had too many cheerses,” she says. “Mommy Three is out with a boy somewhere, fucking. One of our maids has a boy, too, the maid who let you and your friend in.”

  “Cheerses?”

  “You know.” She mimes holding a glass and lifts it toward him and says, brightly, “Cheers.”

  “Why does she do that?” Rafferty asks.

  “She wants to die, but she’s trying to do it by accident.”

  “Has she told you that?”

  The girl’s lip curls. “I don’t talk to her. She’s weak.”

  “You said Mommy One and Mommy Three. Where’s Mommy Two?”

  “She went into the river,” she says. “In Laos.”

  “How long ago?”

  She doesn’t look down at her hand, but first the thumb and then all four fingers curl under, one at a time, and Rafferty can almost hear her counting. “When I was seven.”

  “And now you’re twelve.”

  Her eyes flick up to his and then away again. “How do you know?”

  “I have a daughter. She’s twelve.”

  She nods, fiddling with
one of the little trees on the table and taking in the information. “Do you like her?”

  Rafferty’s voice feels hoarse when he says, “I love her.”

  Now she looks at his face, inspecting it as though she expects a test on what he looks like. “What are you?” she asks.

  “A lot of things. Anglo and Filipino, mostly. What about you?”

  “Lao, Thai, and what my, my, my father is.”

  “We’re both mix-ups,” he says.

  She shrugs the topic away and looks back at the train layout. “If you’re smart, why did you wear a stupid mask?”

  “If people don’t know you’re smart, you can surprise them.”

  She sticks out her lower lip, possibly thinking about it.

  “Why wear a mask that looks like you?” he says. He realizes he’s talking because he half expects her to vanish, like smoke. “If you’re stupid, you wear a smart mask. If you’re mean, you wear a nice mask. That’s what a mask is, something to hide who you really are.”

  She says nothing.

  “What does yours hide?”

  She pulls back her lips and shows him the black teeth, the gums above and below them a startling pink by contrast. “Nothing. This is me. Back up some more.”

  He takes three steps back, but she seems to have lost interest in him. Looking down at the world on the table, she says, “I can see things.”

  “I’m sure you can.”

  “I saw you and your girlfriend come in. I saw you surprise that stupid Hwa.”

  “The maid?”

  “Hwa,” she says sharply. “Her name is Hwa. She’s going to quit soon, but she doesn’t know I know about it.” She slows the train and speeds it up again. “I see all sorts of things.”

  “I believe you.”

  She leans over the train setup and moves something Rafferty can’t see, just a rapid movement with her hand. “Do you see things?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “How old is your daughter?”

  “Twelve. Same as you.”

  “What’s her name?”

  “Miaow,” Rafferty says. “Like the sound a cat makes.”

  She’s looking at whatever she moved in the miniature jungle, but he thinks she knows to a millimeter how far away he is. “My name is,” she says. She adjusts something on the table. She opens her mouth and closes it, opens and closes it again. “My name is Treasure.”

  “That’s a beautiful name.”

  “My,” she says.

  He waits.

  She turns her face partway to him again, but her eyes remain on the table. “My, my father named me.”

  “Aaahhh,” Rafferty says, at a complete loss. “Well, you’re the only-”

  “My father did,” she says. “Are you really my, my, my father’s friend?”

  Rafferty says, “What do you think, Treasure?”

  She says, “I think he’ll kill you.”

  What he wants to do is approach her slowly and put his arms around her, but he doesn’t think that’s a language she’s learned. “Maybe he will,” he says. “Can I come in?”

  “Five steps,” she says. “One, two, three, four, five.” She backs away a step for every one he comes forward, and then she turns and runs to the wall with the big windows in it, windows that are bordered by long, dark green velvet curtains. She pushes one of the curtains aside and then wraps the lower part of it around her waist and legs. “You can’t come here,” she says.

  “Fine.” He says, “Look,” and takes three steps toward her, and as she starts to step to the side, he comes to a sudden stop. Feeling like a bad mime, he puts his hands up and pushes them, flat and open, against an imaginary pane of glass. “This is as far as I can go.”

  She tilts her head to one side and startles him by emitting a short, very high syllable that sounds like Eeeeee. She says, “Do it again, do it again.”

  “If you want me to.” He goes back to the table and takes the same three steps, and this time he not only stops but also pulls his head back as though he’s hit it on something, then rubs his forehead and mimes the pane of glass again.

  Treasure is leaning forward, one arm wrapped in the curtain, and she’s biting on a thumbnail. She says, her voice high and the words tumbling over one another, “And I can walk through it and you can’t, you can’t, but I can.”

  “That’s right.” He moves to the right, and she counters warily in the other direction, her face suddenly stiff, but then he edges left again, always moving his hands over the invisible pane of glass. “And I can’t get around it either.”

  “Only me,” she says. “Only I can go through it. Even if you’re mad at me, you can’t go through it.”

  “I’m not going to get mad at you.” He goes back to the table and looks around the room. “I can’t go over there where you are, but is it okay if I look at the rest of this room?”

  “Yes.” She passes her tongue quickly over her lips. “If, if, if, if you want to come over here, you let me, me, move first, and when I’m somewhere else I’ll tell you a magic word so you can get through.”

  “Awwww,” he says. “Tell it to me now.”

  “No. Only when I’m somewhere else.”

  “All right. But over here is okay?” He indicates his half of the room. “You’re sure?”

  “If I, if I tell you to stop-”

  “I’ll stop.”

  “Fine.”

  There are bookshelves, the big table, and a door that he thinks probably leads to a closet. He checks the shelves first, but it’s just stuff: a lot of metal toys including an assortment of train components, a few creased paperback books with nothing hidden in them, some more old china like the junk in the sideboard, a small coin collection on cotton under glass, with a Purple Heart in the middle of it. Improbably, a snow globe. On one end of the second shelf, a small, mud-daubed bird’s nest.

  Rafferty traces its shape in the air, his fingers inches from it, careful not to touch it. “This is yours.”

  “How do you know?” She’s leaning far forward, her weight borne by the velvet curtain.

  “You’re the only one who would have seen it.”

  “I saw it. In a tree. Down there, too.”

  He looks at the shelf below and sees a paper wasp’s nest. “How did you get this? They would have stung you.”

  “They did. Here and here and here. And on my eye. My eye was closed for a long time. I couldn’t tell how far away he, he, he-”

  “I had one when I was a boy. But I waited until they were gone.”

  “I wanted it,” she says.

  “It’s beautiful.” He goes to the closet and says, “I’m going to open this door.”

  “My, my father will be mad.”

  Rafferty jumps back as though he’s frightened. “Is he in here?”

  He gets the Eeeeeeee again, and she sways back and forth in the curtain. “He’s not here. If he was here, I couldn’t talk to you. I can only talk to, to, to him.”

  “Well, here goes.” He turns the knob, but the door is locked.

  “You don’t see things,” she says. She sounds disappointed.

  “Not like you do. Can you teach me?”

  “It’s secret.”

  “Gee,” Rafferty says regretfully. “I really wanted to look inside, too.”

  “Are you going to say, say thank you?”

  “Of course.”

  “Go over there. To the train.”

  He does as he’s told. Treasure steps back toward the wall and pulls the curtain over her until she’s completely hidden, except for her face. Then she puts a hand over her eyes.

  She says, “I can’t see you.”

  He scans the miniature world frantically, but there is so much detail: hundreds of little trees, all those structures, the tracks, the towns, the train stations. One small one, one a little bigger, and one-

  The biggest train station. There it is, brass dulled with use, on the floor beneath the ceiling of the train station. He has to slip a single fi
nger in to fish it out. A Gardner key, the kind usually used to open safe-deposit boxes.

  He picks it up and palms it, then says, “Thank you.”

  Treasure hums, a disjointed melody without a key.

  She continues to hum as he goes back to the closet door and raises both hands above his head. The humming stops. Mumbling something he hopes sounds magical, he rubs his hands together and then brings them to the left side of his head and pretends to pull the key out of his ear.

  She has spread the fingers of the hand over her face to look at him, but she doesn’t say anything, so Rafferty unlocks the door and pulls it open.

  He sees a few bright tropical shirts hanging on a rod, six medium-size hard-sided leather briefcases, and two bricks of something wrapped in dark plastic. Everything is very neat, the angles precise, the edges of the briefcases, stacked on their sides with the handles facing him, plumb straight.

  He pulls one of the briefcases out.

  “It’s money,” Treasure says. “They’re all money.”

  “Can I open one?”

  She says nothing, just sways back and forth in the curtain and begins to hum again. She seems to be losing interest.

  He goes down on one knee and pops the clips on the briefcase. Hundred-dollar bills, all facing the same way, gleam greenly up at him. He does a quick estimate: sixteen stacks, maybe four hundred bills to a stack, is $640,000. Six cases. Four million dollars, give or take. He removes Ming Li’s camera from his pants pocket, turns off the flash, and photographs the money. Then he closes the snaps and puts the case back.

  “And this?” he says, touching the plastic wrap.

  “Boom,” she says. “Uncle Eddie.”

  “Uncle Eddie,” he says. “Did you see him yesterday?”

  “Yes. But he, he didn’t see me.”

  “Nobody sees you,” he says, “unless you want them to.” Then he closes the briefcase and puts it back in the closet. He’s about to pick up one of the plastic-wrapped bricks when she speaks.

  “I know where the boom is,” she says.

  “It’s here, isn’t it?”

  “It’s there,” she says. “Too.”

  He looks over his shoulder at her, but she’s hanging by one hand from the curtain, looking at the train table.