The Fear Artist

by Timothy Hallinan

  Helen Eckersley had been discovered in her living room by her maid. Eckersley had, the local sheriff said, “been beaten repeatedly over a period of twenty-four hours or more with a poker from her own fireplace set.”

  “They hurt her for a whole day,” Ming Li says, leaning over his shoulder. “They had questions.”

  According to a department spokesperson, the paper says, the killers broke all the bones in her arms and legs, as well as her collarbones, before shattering her skull. Some of the injuries were almost a full day older than others. The newspaper’s description of the murder is “merciless, prolonged, and brutal.”

  “I’m glad they tell us it was brutal,” Ming Li says. “We might have missed it.”

  Rafferty can feel the pulse thumping inside his left wrist as he finishes reading. “Any updates?”

  “Not on this site. I’m going to look in a few other places.”

  Reading, Rafferty says, “And good luck to him.”

  “Who?”

  “The mayor, who’s the usual local gasbag. Says the killers will ‘be pursued tirelessly.’ They have no idea what just hit them.”

  Ming Li is running her fingernail lightly down the screen as she reads the end of the story. “What did?”

  “The same thing that’s after me right now. Notice what’s not here?”

  She leans closer, as if he’s challenged her to spot something very small. “No. What?”

  “Her age. Her family. Her marital status. Anything that indicates that she didn’t just materialize unnoticed in Cheyenne from some other dimension. None of the inevitable neighbors seem to have come forward to say the things they always say: ‘She kept to herself.’ ‘I never thought anything like this could happen here.’ She seems—I don’t know—disconnected. There’s no background information: ‘A native of Purdue, Indiana, Ms. Eckersley worked at the Cheyenne Public Library, and raised hydrangeas’—that kind of stuff.”

  “Maybe she wasn’t from there.”

  Rafferty remembers the little curlicues in the way she spoke. “I’m pretty sure she wasn’t.”

  Ming Li says, “Nobody deserves to die like that.”

  Rafferty says, “A lot of people have died like that.”

  A LONG, COLD cup of coffee later, it’s 9:30 P.M. and Rafferty’s reached the point where the caffeine is actually making him sleepier when Ming Li says, “Nothing much more. I’ve been through everything I can find, and they’re still looking for whoever did it, and the sheriff is still saying they’ll get him.”

  “What time is it?”

  “You have a watch.”

  “What time is it in Wyoming?”

  She looks at her own watch and bangs the keys for a second. “About eight-thirty A.M.”

  “Well, I suppose morgues open early.”

  She cocks her head to one side, waiting for the rest of it.

  He takes out his newest cell phone, the one he hasn’t used, and hands it to her. “Get the phone number for the morgue in Cheyenne, or call the sheriff’s office if you can’t find the morgue and ask them for it.”

  “I’ll find the morgue.”

  “Give yourself an accent. You’re calling from Bangkok to see whether Helen Eckersley’s body has been claimed. If they ask who you are, you say something like, ‘I’m calling on behalf of the family of a woman from here, a Thai woman who called herself Helen, who ran away from her husband in America several years ago and took a new last name, which the family doesn’t know. The last anyone heard, she was in Wyoming. They’re worried because she hasn’t called them or returned calls for ten days or so. If someone has claimed Ms. Eckersley’s body, or if she’s not Asian, then she’s not the woman we’re looking for.’ ”

  “ ‘And if no one has, and if she’s Asian,’ ” Ming Li says in a businesslike voice, reading a number off the screen and pushing the buttons on the phone, “ ‘maybe we can help you identify her.’ ”

  “Good.”

  She looks up at him, waiting for the phone on the other end to ring. “You need me,” she says. Then she says, “Hello?” and goes into her pitch.

  Listening to her voice without even hearing the words, he realizes again what their father has turned her into. Living in China, at the mercy of the Triad he worked for, Frank Rafferty had transformed his half-Chinese daughter into an asset. By the time she was eight, she was following people. At ten she was running low-level cons and forging signatures. At twelve she was helping to plan their escape, carrying in her head secrets that would have killed her father, her mother, and herself if someone had wormed them out of her. He’d worked with her, Frank had, until she had a coat of solid brass and her English was accent-free and she was fluent in Mandarin and Cantonese, and in her spare time he had her throwing fastballs in their courtyard in preparation for their annual ritual of watching the World Series on satellite. When Poke met her, she was capable of pegging him with a hard, wet lychee pit at sixty feet, and she had.

  And Frank, self-exiled in Asia, had talked to her endlessly about his lost son. About Poke, whose mother he’d abandoned to flee to China when Poke was seventeen. When Frank and Ming Li had emerged from China for an unexpected and unwanted reunion a few years back, Poke had been surprised and even touched to learn how much she knew about him, this girl whose existence he’d never even suspected. He’d softened slightly toward his father, begun to think there might be a relationship there after all. And then Poke’s father had pulled yet another con.

  Even her body language, as she works the phone, is efficient, precise, persuasive. Instead of her usual teenage sit-on-the-lungs posture, she’s perched bolt upright, her spine an inch or two from the back of the chair. Her free hand pats at her hair, as though she’s moments away from getting up and going into a meeting. There’s a half smile on her face; she obviously knows that people can hear a smile even if they don’t realize it.

  Her eyebrows go up and her eyes widen in misleading candor as she asks a question. He turns back to the window, not sure how he feels about any of this. She’s seventeen, no matter what her passport says, and her father has turned her into a professional, a con artist and a premature cynic who finds the entirety of American civilization wanting. Miaow, at twelve or thirteen, has reservoirs of scorn, but as someone who was abandoned on the sidewalk at the age of two or three, she’s earned it.

  Ming Li is the only sister he’s ever had. What has his miserable father done to her?

  Reflected in the window, he sees her stand up, and he opens his mouth wide to clear his face of whatever expression he’d been wearing and turns to face her.

  She says, “Helen Eckersley was Asian.”

  20

  Boom in Yala

  THERE ARE TWO places he could go, but it’s 10:00 P.M. already, and the laundry will be closed. So at least he’s spared that. For the moment.

  With some misgivings, then, he calls Vladimir and tells him to come get his money. And thinks of a way to put Ming Li to work.

  An extra pair of eyes, she’d said. Well, why not?

  He’d told Vladimir to go to the closed Asia Books on Sukhumvit and then call him. A thumb on the phone had cut short Vladimir’s protest that he could be trusted with the actual destination. He’d hauled Ming Li out onto the sidewalk, the guys in Coffee World drooping in disappointment, and grabbed a cab for Sukhumvit. The drizzle had lifted, but the streets still shone like obsidian and the air smelled almost fresh, or at least wet.

  According to the driver’s radio, water from the rising river is being diverted into several canals, and residents of the areas intersected by those canals are being advised to get their belongings—and, presumably, their asses—to higher ground. The cabbie says to Ming Li, in Thai, “It’s going to be bad.”

  “Poot Thai medai,” Ming Li says. I don’t speak Thai.

  “There’s already flooding around the Temple of Dawn,” Rafferty says in Thai.

  “My house is near there,” the driver says. “My wife’s taken the kids to her parent
s. Where do you live?”

  “Silom.”

  “Never happen,” the driver says. “Silom is a rich area.”

  “Yes, but does the water know that?”

  Ming Li is ignoring the chatter. She seems entranced to see Bangkok again. Her nose is practically pressed to the taxi’s window.

  “The guy,” Rafferty says to her in English. “He’s six-two or so, getting a little paunchy, with a long face, a black mustache, and eyebrows that almost meet over his nose. And a cleft in his chin deep enough to be a national park. Head shaped like a bullet, black hair—”

  “Got it,” she says. Her breath fogs the window.

  “Practically oozes melancholy.”

  “I said I’ve got it.”

  “He looks the way a Gypsy violin sounds.”

  “Tall, narrow-faced, dark hair, cleft chin, unibrow, mustache, depressive. Looks Russian, in other words.” There’s a lot of patience in her tone.

  “Oh, right, I forgot. He’s Russian.”

  “I said I’ve got it.”

  “Good. You just stand a few stores down and wait for me to call.”

  “I’m seeing a lot of girls on this street,” she says.

  “Oh, good Lord,” he says, remembering Pim.

  “Well, if you don’t mind depraved tourists hitting on your little sister, I don’t.”

  “They’ll survive the encounter,” he says.

  He lets her out a few blocks from the store, tells her to be careful, and gets a snort in return. The cab takes him another quarter of a mile to a small soi with a cluster of Arab restaurants on it. He goes into the second one back from the boulevard and orders a Diet Coke. One swallow into the second can, his phone rings.

  “I am here,” Vladimir says. “You are not.”

  “Okay. Face Sukhumvit so the store is at your back. Got it?”

  “This is not difficult.”

  “Turn left and start walking. Call me in two blocks.”

  “You are not trusting me.”

  “Of course I trust you. We’re friends.” He disconnects, and the phone rings instantly.

  “He’s towing somebody,” Ming Li says.

  “Does he know it?”

  “Yes. The guy was about twenty feet past me, so I was in between them, right? Fighting off prospective husbands right and left.”

  “Come on, come on.”

  “So he put the phone away, turned and looked past me, and gave the other guy what I’d call a ‘significant glance.’ You know, melodramatic countries shouldn’t even try to spy. Russians all think they’re in an opera.”

  Rafferty signals the waiter and makes a scribbling motion in the air. “Can you tamp down the adrenaline a little? So they’re both coming toward me, right?”

  “I don’t know where you are, do I? Sorry, it’s just that it’s so much fun to be doing this again.”

  “Vladimir turned away from you, and he and the other one are going in that direction.”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, that’ll lead you to me, unless I move. Describe the other one.”

  “Mmmm. That’s not easy. He looks like every Caucasian gene in the planet was put into a blender and—”

  “Never mind. I know who it is.” He hands the waiter some money and waves off a halfhearted offer of change. “Okay. Where are you?”

  “Crossing a big, insane intersection with a street coming in at a diagonal and—yikes!—buses going in the wrong direction in the lane nearest the curb.”

  “Right. Okay. Dawdle a little. Hang back. Look both ways. Stop for a minute or two.”

  “I’m very popular when I stop.”

  “Dazzle them. Burn off some of that energy. I have to hang up.”

  His call-waiting signal beeps again. “Vladimir,” he says. “You’re being a bad boy.”

  “Always,” Vladimir says. “But why you telling me now?”

  “What’s-his-name—I mean, Janos.”

  “Oho,” Vladimir says. “You are looking, yes? Where?”

  “Why is he here?”

  “He is not trusting me. You are not trusting me, he is not trusting me. Good thing Vladimir is not sensitive.”

  “I asked why he’s—”

  “You owe him money. He is not wanting to have to kill me to get it.”

  “Money for what?”

  “Ah-ah. We talking when we see each other.”

  “Okay. Keep walking. In about three blocks, there’s a hotel, the Alpine Suites. Go through the lobby and into the bar. I’ll be in a booth at the back. Bring Janos.”

  “You buy me drink?”

  Rafferty says, “Oh, for Christ’s sake,” and turns off the phone.

  ON THE WAY in, he stops at reception and asks for three standard letter-size envelopes. He takes them into the men’s room, claims a stall, and closes the door, then does some quick sorting with the hundreds and twenties Ming Li brought from America.

  The bar is empty. At this hour most of the businessmen who stay here are out experiencing the more vivid aspects of Bangkok life. He calls Ming Li and says, “I’m in a hotel up ahead of you, the Alpine Suites. They’ll be going into it, if they haven’t already. Just walk past it, twenty or thirty yards. The guy Vladimir is towing is going to come out in a few minutes. Make sure he goes all the way away, and then come in and go through the lobby into the bar.”

  Ming Li says, “I’m not old enough to—”

  Rafferty hangs up and waves across the room to Vladimir and Janos, who is two steps behind. Vladimir crosses the room as though it’s a minefield, eyes everywhere, and slides into the booth. When Janos starts to follow, Rafferty holds up an envelope and says, “Take this and go away.”

  Janos crinkles his generic forehead and says, “Why should I—” and then hefts the envelope and changes the subject. “How much?”

  “One thousand, U.S.”

  “Ha,” Janos says. He pops the flap on the envelope and looks inside. “This one, this Vladimir, he is so cheap. You I can work for.”

  “And you probably will, but right now go away. All the way out of the hotel and then into a cab and somewhere else. I have someone watching, and I’ll know.”

  “You learn fast,” Janos says. To Vladimir he says, “Bye-bye, cheapskate.”

  Watching Janos go, Vladimir sags back against the booth and says, “Five hundred. I tell him you can only pay five hundred. You Americans, you throw money ewerywhere. And still nobody love you.”

  “What did he find out?”

  “Oh, no, no. Do not reduce me to laughter. First I am seeing some money. Already you owe me.”

  “Well, gee,” Poke says, taking out another envelope. “I don’t know. Now that you’ve told me I’m overpaying—”

  “Him,” Vladimir says, both eyes on the envelope. “You pay him too much. Me, I am contractor. Always you pay contractor good.” He lifts the cleft chin in the direction of the envelope. “How much?”

  “Two thousand.” He puts it on the table. “For everything you told me last time, and for getting things moving.”

  Vladimir shrugs and reaches for it. “Good.” He uses his fingertips to square the envelope precisely with the table’s edge and folds his hands over it.

  “Not going to count it?”

  “I trust you.” He surveys the room lazily, and Rafferty figures he’s memorizing everything in it. “I count it later. One more small information for you. Murphy has first name. Heskell.”

  “Heskell?”

  “No,” Vladimer says. “Heskell.”

  “Oh,” Rafferty says. “Haskell.”

  “I tell you two times, Heskell.” His eyes lock on something and follow it. He reaches up and smooths his hair. “This is pretty girl,” he says, and Rafferty looks up to see Ming Li.

  “Get you guys something?” Ming Li asks. “You must be Vladimir.”

  Vladimir says to Rafferty, “She is yours?”

  “How Old World,” Ming Li says. She looks down at Poke. “Scoot over, whoever you are.”


  “I’m Poke,” Poke says as Ming Li sits. “Vladimir knows my name. Vladimir, this isn’t Minnie Lee. Minnie, this isn’t really Vladimir.”

  Vladimir says, “Poke is not a name.”

  “If you’d told my father that thirty-seven years ago, I’d have been spared a life of shame.”

  “Poke is better than Philip,” Ming Li says. She looks at the envelope. “Is that what I think it is?”

  Vladimir puts a protective hand on the envelope and says, “Depends what you think—”

  “Money,” she says. “You going to earn it?”

  Vladimir straightens up an inch or so and looks down his considerable nose at her. “Is already earned.”

  The two of them examine each other in a way that makes Poke feel he’s in the next room.

  Into the silence he says, “I wonder how you get a drink in here.”

  Vladimir says, “You have wery interesting eyes.”

  Ming Li says, “You’ve got a nice kind of aging-Borat thing going yourself.”

  “Was a time,” Vladimir says mournfully, “you would have chased Vladimir through the woods.”

  “And caught him, too,” Ming Li says.

  “Would either of you like a—”

  “But your eyes,” Vladimir says, sliding the envelope back and forth with his fingertips. “Yes, pretty, wery pretty, but interesting.”

  “I’m just your basic hybrid.”

  “Glad you guys are getting along,” Poke says.

  Vladimir says to Poke, “She is baby spy, yes?”

  “I’m his bankroll,” Ming Li says.

  “Yes? And you are knowing him how?”

  “I’ve heard about him my entire life.” She laces her fingers together and clasps her hands over her heart. “This is a dream come true.”

  Vladimir’s lower lip comes out half an inch, apparently propelled by doubt. “You are young,” he says. “You will have better dream later.”

  “Hey,” Rafferty says. “My life is in danger.”

  “You guys talk for a minute.” Ming Li gets up. “What do you want?”

  Rafferty asks for a Singha. Vladimir says, “Wodka. The bottle, please,” and watches her cross the room.