The Fear Artist

by Timothy Hallinan

  After fifty very long minutes, the phone rings. Rafferty grabs it, ignores the person who is peering at him, and says, “Hello.”

  “Don’t say anything,” Arthit says. “If you don’t have cash, get some immediately, because this is the last time you’ll be able to use a card for a while. If they haven’t been cut off already, I mean. Then go someplace no one will look for you and stay there. Stay off the street, stay out of restaurants.”

  “Why?”

  “They aired the footage tonight, you and the other man, on three stations. The other man’s face was blurred out, but the cameraman did a very nice zoom on you as you called for help, and they froze it there. You’re famous.”

  “People are looking at me right now.”

  “Smile at them and get out of there, without hurrying. Get as far away as you can, as inconspicuously as you can. Taxis should be safe. For most drivers the shift hasn’t changed since about four, and the clip aired at six-thirty. Get a cab, get money, and go someplace private. I’ll call this number in three or four hours to see where you are.”

  “Got it.” He’s most of the way out of the warren of shops, holding the phone with two hands to mask the lower part of his face.

  “Here’s what’s happening,” Arthit says. “We just got an alert with your face, taken from the video, on it. The man who was killed yesterday—Warren Alfred Campbell, it says his name was—was shot three times. I doubt that’s a real name, because they went to all that trouble to blur his face. The bullet that killed him was a through-and-through, nothing left for forensics to look at. But there were two other slugs in him, and they’re saying they came out of your gun. Poke, the whole world is going to be looking for you.”

  HE GRABS A cab, no eyes in the mirror this time, and visits two ATMs within five minutes. One card yields forty thousand, one twenty-five thousand. He goes to a third machine, a few miles in the opposite direction, and uses the debit card for an emergency account he keeps in Miaow’s name. It cheerfully gives him another twenty-five thousand. He thinks about emptying it, decides it might attract attention to the account and therefore to Miaow, and leaves thirty-something thousand in it.

  His pockets bulging, he flags another cab and doubles back to the Khao San area, full of white foreigners, about a kilometer from backpacker central. He gets out a couple of blocks from his destination, walks in the wrong direction until the cab turns a corner, and then jogs to a short-time hotel where he can pay with cash and they won’t ask for a passport.

  The room is barely twelve feet to a side and painted a dirty mint green that his newly developed painter’s eye automatically disdains. Two narrow beds claim most of the space. There’s a built-in table poking out of the wall between them and a corroded aluminum lawn chair with nylon webbing at the foot of one bed. Cockroaches scramble when he opens the door of the plywood armoire that serves as a closet.

  The first thing he does—after closing the armoire door so the bug party can resume—is collapse on the bed nearer to the door. For a long time, perhaps thirty or forty minutes, he lies on his back, his arm thrown across his eyes, partly to blot out the fluorescents and partly because the weight is somehow comforting.

  His heart is pounding, and it’s not because of the short jog. He’s feeling waves of something so close to panic that it’s not worth calling it anything else—black, gelid waves that climb his spine and squeeze his heart and make his skin prickle with sweat. When he finally turns on his side, the pillow is damp. He spends another ten minutes with his knees drawn up to lessen the tension in his gut, his arms wrapped around the dank pillow. His eyes are open and unfocused, all his attention fixed on the scenarios he’s running in his head, one bad ending after another.

  Things to do: one, two, three, no good. One, two, three, four, no good. Blind alleys everywhere.

  He realizes he has one thing going for him: his mother’s Asian genes.

  In the bluish light of the tiny, damp bathroom, its grouting black with mold, he looks at himself in the peeling mirror. The hotel’s sole gestures in the direction of amenities are a paper-thin sliver of soap in a plastic sleeve and a black plastic comb in a cellophane envelope. Experimentally, he wets his hair and uses the comb to part it in the middle and to bring it forward over his forehead on either side of the part, a fading hairstyle once favored by about 90 percent of young Thai men. His hair is shorter on the left because of the paint he cut away, but even given that, the new hairstyle helps a little. His black Asian hair won’t draw anyone’s attention, and it’s a natural match with his smooth features and black eyes, heavily influenced by his mother’s Filipina blood. At a glance, from a distance, he could pass for Thai.

  Makeup, he thinks. He can darken his skin. The city is jammed with dark-skinned people at the moment, in from the countryside to get away from the flooding up-country. Tens of thousands of them.

  Color is a dividing line here, as in so many other places. There are skin tones that make a person almost invisible. And he’s been described as a farang. People won’t be looking at a dark-skinned man, especially with this see-it-everywhere hair.

  He can get makeup, he thinks, without even having to go into a store. It’s not much—different hair, a new skin tone. But it lifts his spirits. He’s doing something. He pulls out his cell phone and scrolls through his phone book.

  “Hello?” says Mrs. Shin, Miaow’s drama teacher.

  “Mrs. Shin, this is Poke Rafferty. How are you?”

  “I’m fine. Is something wrong with Mia?”

  “No, she’s okay, better than okay. Listen, I’m in a jam. Have you watched television tonight?”

  “I never watch television.”

  “Well, you’ll probably see it tomorrow in the paper. It’s a big story, and it’s bad, and I’m in the middle of it. I have to ask you to take my word that the whole thing is a setup.”

  “What whole thing?”

  “Do you trust me?”

  A pause, and then she says, “I’ve seen how you are with Mia.”

  “Good. Then I need you to trust me that what you’ll hear tomorrow is a lie, and before you hear about it, I need you to go to the school and get some theatrical makeup. Dark, like a heavy tan.”

  “Foundation, you mean.”

  “Whatever it’s called. Not for Othello but for—I don’t know—Caliban. The stuff the kid who played Caliban wore. A couple of tubes.”

  “I can do that. You’re really not going to tell me what this is about?”

  “You’ll know soon enough. It’s bad, but it’s not true. And Miaow—Mia—is safe, and so is Rose. When you get the makeup, I need you to leave it in the bushes up in that planter to the right of the door to your apartment house. I’ll pick it up later tonight.”

  “How cloak-and-dagger.”

  “I’ll tell you all about it when I can.”

  “Give me an hour,” Mrs. Shin says.

  “When you need something done,” Rafferty says, “Call a Korean.”

  HIS NEXT CALL is to one of the first friends he made in Bangkok, Dr. Ratt. Dr. Ratt, whose name is a shorter, modernized version of one with ancient royal connections, has founded a small empire by putting uniformed doctors and nurses into automobiles and keeping five or six cars on the move at all times, thereby defeating Bangkok’s epic traffic by ensuring that medical help is usually in the neighborhood. They’re good enough friends that Dr. Ratt listens without questions, although he must have dozens. Half an hour later, six blocks from his hotel and still waiting for Arthit’s call, Rafferty climbs into the backseat of a Toyota Corolla with a doctor and a nurse, in full official regalia, sitting in front. They nod hello but ask him no questions.

  After a stop to put three stitches in a patient, they drop him two corners from Mrs. Shin’s apartment and circle the block while he cuts across a couple of sois to get to the building, where he reaches into the bushes and comes out with a brown paper bag. Then they return him to the place where they picked him up. He hikes back to the hotel, c
alls Dr. Ratt, and arranges to be picked up by another team at 7:00 A.M.

  The safest place to be, he figures, is nowhere, and what could be more nowhere than the backseat of a car rolling through Bangkok at random?

  Just another dark-skinned guy idling along in the back of a car. While he figures out how to live through all this. Whatever this is.

  Part Two

  EIGHT STORIES DOWN

  10

  Up Against the Night

  FOR FIVE ENDLESS days, Rafferty sees the world through the wet windows of a succession of heavily air-conditioned Toyota Corollas, saying good-bye to each weary doctor-nurse team as they clamber out after an eight-hour shift and hello to the bright, fresh ones getting in. Dr. Ratt once told him that the doctors who drive his cars have all had what he described as “a little trouble” in their careers, or else they’d be working in some nice clean hospital that doesn’t go anywhere instead of driving around Bangkok all day. If they get fired from this job, they’ll be pulling the graveyard shift in some twenty-four-hour VD clinic. And they’ve apparently been told that any loose lips about having Rafferty in the car will get them fired. There’s a conspicuous lack of curiosity.

  He gets up before it’s light outside and spreads Mrs. Shin’s dark gel over his face and ears and the back of his neck. Last, he does the backs of his hands. He learns accidentally that if the tiny cake of soap supplied by his fifth-rate hotels sits in a little water overnight, it produces a gelatinous mass that he can spread on his comb. Applied to damp hair, it makes it even darker and holds it in place for hours. Dark-skinned, black-haired, center-parted, he walks the four or five blocks to the pickup point and gets into the first of the day’s cars. He’s passed from one team to another until the shift that ends at midnight drops him a few blocks away from the designated depressive fleabag of the evening. The routine has a deadening sameness to it, but still each day has some event to distinguish it.

  On day one, Arthit redefines good fortune.

  “You’re in luck,” Arthit says on Anand’s cell phone. “The only decent picture they have is the one from your book.”

  “Looking for Trouble in Thailand?”

  “That’s the one.”

  “Why am I in luck? That’s a pretty good picture.”

  “Every copy in Bangkok is apparently a bootleg from a photocopy. The contrast is so high that you could be anybody.”

  “They’re not using the picture of me with Campbell, or whatever his name is, the one from the video? I guess they still don’t want anyone to see his face.”

  “You’re in three-quarters in the video,” Arthit says. “Authority figures like full-face.”

  “And I’m not officially a suspect?”

  “Not officially, no. But it’s kind of hard not to connect the dots. The bullets the coroner pulled out of Mr. Campbell were supposedly fired by your gun, and the police want to talk to you. It doesn’t sound like they want to name you Farang of the Year.”

  “What do they think they’ll get out of this? Why would they take my gun and fire a couple of shots into a dead man?”

  “I can think of two things,” Arthit says. “First, they’ve got you hog-tied if they catch you and demand to know what the dead man said. Tell the truth, the line will be, and they’ll make it all go away. Stonewall and you’re in prison for the rest of your life, which probably actually means dead, since they won’t want you talking to anyone else. So that’s one thing: to force you to level with them.”

  “I did level with them.”

  “Yeah, well. Then there’s the other reason. The country had problems, both political and religious, even before the flooding started. It’s possible the government won’t be allowed to serve its full term. It could get yanked if Bangkok floods badly, although this group had nothing to do with decades of bad or nonexistent flood planning. But even if we don’t get wet, there’s the situation in the south. We’ve got disorganized jihad going on down there, or maybe it’s organized jihad and we’re just clueless about it. And now a foreigner has been murdered, on the fringes of a demonstration over the violence down there. For the image of the country, not to mention the need to protect their own asses, Shen’s guys need to solve that crime, even if one of them committed it himself. You’re one way to solve it, and a way with no political or religious implications, since you’re farang.”

  “Yup,” Rafferty says. “I guess you could say I’m in luck.” It’s not time yet for him to meet the car, so he’s gazing through the window of his hotel room, which looks onto a narrow, filthy alley much favored by rats. Sure enough, he sees a big one strolling right down the middle, ignoring the rain, as though it were in his own driveway. Poke envies it. “What would you do in my position?”

  Arthit sighs into the mouthpiece. “I’ve been thinking about that for days. I have nothing that might make a real difference, and my instinct is that you shouldn’t do anything at all until we’ve got a better idea. Do your rabbit thing. Keep still and stay out of their line of vision.”

  “So if you were me, you wouldn’t go in and try to explain. You know, confront the problem head-on and all that.”

  “No,” Arthit says. “If I could get my list of alternative courses of action up to ninety or a hundred, that would still be the one on the bottom.”

  After this conversation Arthit stops calling for a few days, which is fine with Rafferty; he’s already as depressed as he can be without losing his ability to think straight.

  On day two, waiting in the backseat while the doctor and nurse are tending to someone inside a fancy condominium, he calls Rose’s new phone with his own new phone, just to hear the voice of someone who cares about him.

  He says, “I’m lonely.”

  “I could send you Miaow. There are worse things than being lonely. What’s going on down there?”

  “I’m being nowhere. Riding around in cars all day and sleeping in boom-boom hotels at night. You’d like my new hairstyle.”

  “We’re sleeping on folded clothes, half an inch thick. Oh, forget it, I’m sorry. I have no business whining to you about anything. Even Miaow’s worried, during the brief moments when she’s not feeling personally inconvenienced by the weather.”

  “Well, worry about me,” he says. “Someone should.”

  “I do. And I love you. We’re taking care of ourselves, we’re fine. Forget about us. You just go be nowhere and work your way out of this. Whoops, I have to hang up—it’s my turn for the shower.” She hangs up.

  Rafferty says, “You’re the only person in Thailand who wants to get wet,” but he’s talking to dead air. He puts the phone down and sees a streak of light skin on the back of his hands. He’s got to be on guard against sweating or brushing his hands against things. He rubs at the hand until the streak is smoothed out, then leans across the front seat and tilts the rearview mirror until he can see himself. He looks okay except for the end of his nose, which is a little pinkish. With the tips of two fingers, he tries to cover the pink spot, but the gel doesn’t want to spread, so he licks his fingertips. The moisture does the job. He does the best he can to check his ears and the back of his neck, but it isn’t much.

  Makeup, he discovers, is more complicated than men think it is.

  On day three he realizes that Bangkok is a city of fathers and daughters. He sees them everywhere, at all ages and in all sizes: fathers with infants they hold as though they’ve just been handed a soap bubble; fathers with toddlers, their hand clamped inside their father’s hand as they claim the sidewalk, step by step; fathers with preteens, following obediently three steps behind their daughters in case school friends should happen to see them; fathers with the grim, desperate pride of someone who’s sired a beauty and, unfortunately for his peace of mind, remembers what he was like when he was a boy.

  He wonders for a moment how the men would look if he could see them through their daughters’ eyes, then immediately banishes the notion. He gets glimpses of himself, occasionally, reflected in Miaow’s eyes
, and what he thinks he sees is the ruin of a statue placed on a pedestal that was too high for it, just chunks of anatomical rubble on a stone platform with recognizable bits and pieces—an eye, a smile, a strong arm—capable of provoking mild affection and somewhat more intense irritation.

  And he asks himself, looking at the fathers, how anyone has the courage to embark on that voyage. To accept a child, not knowing the first thing about how much she can be shaped and how much of her character is set in genetic stone, to make the breathtaking assumption that you will always know what’s best for her and are competent to guide her toward it.

  Sheer hubris.

  Miaow came to him and Rose preshaped by her years on the sidewalk, and in some ways that was probably an advantage. She had learned, within limits, what was necessary to her and what was superfluous, what she would put up with and what she wouldn’t. He hadn’t known then—he didn’t know now, for that matter—whether she’d been abused sexually during those five or six wild-child years. But then, he thinks, every infant comes into the world trailing an infinite cloud of mystery behind it: where she came from, where she’s going, who she really is, what she can do, what she can learn, whether she’ll bring joy or heartbreak, whether there is darkness at her core. What landslide of karma has rolled her into this life.

  Miaow is twelve or thirteen now. When they took her in, she was seven or eight. In those five years, he’s tried every parenting approach he can, with little success, he thinks, before abandoning all of them in favor of two governing principles. First, to do no harm. Second, to place no limit on the amount of love he is willing to give. The ideas made sense when they came to him, but in the past year he’s begun to wonder whether there’s a third principle—the most important principle—he hasn’t thought of. Or maybe Rose was right when she said if he wanted something that wouldn’t change, he should have bought a table.