The Fear Artist

by Timothy Hallinan

  The waitress takes the twenty, turns it over to check the back, and shrugs. She heads for the front door.

  “Drinking last night,” Vladimir says apologetically. “But Shen—”

  “I’m not thinking about Shen yet.” Rafferty leans forward, his elbows on the table. “I have to do this one step at a time. Right now Murphy’s what I need to think about. He’s driving this train, and, what’s more, the son of a bitch is overdue.”

  “Getting personal, no good,” Vladimir says.

  “Me?” Rafferty cuts into his eggs. “Personal?”

  “Speaking of personal,” Ming Li says, “I want to try something out on Vladimir and … and this gentleman.”

  “Janos,” Janos says.

  “Thank you.” Ming Li gives him a smile that makes him smooth his shirt and sit straighter, and Rafferty realizes she’s got it calibrated, and that was about a 6.8. He thinks, God, what’s she going to be like at twenty? She says, “I’ve been wondering about the time they almost caught you in that hotel near Khao San. It doesn’t feel right to me.”

  “Ahhh,” Vladimir says, nodding. “This is talent.”

  Ming Li says, “You, too?”

  “How could I not?” Vladimir says. He passes an open hand over his brow, reducing the shine somewhat. “It doesn’t work.”

  Rafferty says, “What doesn’t?”

  “This is the way it’s supposed to look,” Ming Li says. “This is what you’re supposed to think happened. Shen watched the house until Arthit left, and then he went in and tricked the seventeen-year-old maid into telling him which neighborhood you were hiding in. Is that about it?”

  Rafferty nods.

  “And the maid knows this,” Ming Li continues, “because nothing is kept secret from her in that house, even though Arthit’s contact with you could put him in jail. It’s nothing he’d keep from a maid.”

  “Well,” Rafferty says, feeling uneasy, “Pim and I have a history. I put her there.”

  “Baby Spy wery smart,” Vladimir says. “This is not something Shen could know. That you and small-girl maid have friendship. How? What record is this on? What paper, where?”

  Ming Li says, “Ventriloquism.”

  Janos says, “Obviously.”

  “What?” Rafferty says. It’s almost a snap. “What’s obvious? It doesn’t do me any good if all you spooks sit there nodding sagely at one another and looking wise. What’s ventriloquism? I mean, other than that parlor trick Murphy can apparently do.”

  Ming Li says, “You’re not going to like this.”

  Rafferty says, “I’m getting good at living with things I don’t like.”

  “This is a lecture from Frank, almost word for word. Let’s say you have a piece of intelligence you want to act on. You can’t be completely sure it’s going to bring your problem to an end, and if it doesn’t, if the problem isn’t solved, then the fact that you have the information will tell the other side who your source is. And you don’t want that, because if the plan fails, you need that source to remain in place.”

  “So you pick dummy,” says Vladimir. “Same like wentriloquist.”

  “Wait a minute,” Rafferty says.

  “They set Pim up,” Ming Li says, so deliberately that she seems to be laying the words on the table one at a time. “And they did it so well that even she thinks she gave you up.”

  “She did give me—”

  “When all along,” Ming Li says over him, “there was someone else in the house. Someone who heard all of it. Someone, in fact, who came straight to Arthit from Major Shen and didn’t even pretend otherwise.”

  Rafferty says, “No.” And feels a deep throb of certainty that says, Yes.

  Everybody looks at him. Their eyes, the clatter of silverware, the noise and the smells of the restaurant, the bright yellow of his egg yolks—it all crowds in on him. He hauls himself to his feet, fighting a wave of nausea. “I’ll be back.” On the way out, he pushes past the waitress carrying Vladimir’s large Singha back to him.

  Out on the street, he goes half a block before he registers that it’s still raining. He edges toward the storefronts on the theory that rain doesn’t fall straight down and there’s at least a possibility that it’s slanting away from the buildings.

  The strategy’s failure distracts him from his panic about Arthit and Anna. By the time he makes the first right, having apparently decided subconsciously to walk around the block, his clothes are already clinging to him. He thinks about buying an umbrella and then forgets about it, seeing in his mind’s eye Arthit, how happy he looked with Anna; seeing Pim, the loss and the devastation in her face outside the Beer Garden. The pimp and, waiting for her later, the pipe.

  What can he do? What can he do for anyone?

  And while he’s at it, what can he do for himself?

  He can’t find a way around it: Ming Li and Vladimir are almost certainly right. Shen’s visit with Pim was an ice-cold act of ventriloquism. Pim was dropped out a window to keep the secret that Arthit, lost in the long loneliness following Noi’s death, is falling in love with someone who has been inserted into the household, into his heart, to betray him.

  But at the same instant, he questions the whole thing. Why? Why would Anna Chaibancha, well born and well raised, financially comfortable, someone who has turned her disability into a career, helping others to overcome the same challenge—a long-ago friend, for heaven’s sake, of Arthit’s dead wife—why would she allow herself to be put in this position?

  Does it even matter why? The fact is there, blunt and ugly and unarguable. She’s a spy, she’s working for people who are enemies to both Poke and Arthit. She could break Arthit’s heart all over again and probably will. And she’s responsible, at least in part, for what’s happened to Pim.

  By the time he reaches the second corner, he’s stopped noticing the rain again, and he’s turning the situation over in his mind, trying to bottle up the anger so he can think coldly.

  When the idea comes, it’s beyond cold. To make it work, he’ll have to lie to the best friend he’s ever had.

  “SHE’S STAYING AT the Chiang Palace,” he says to Janos before he’s even seated. “I called her back this morning, and that’s how they answered the phone. I need you to get in there, find out what room she’s in, and get a look at her.”

  “How do I find out what room she’s in?”

  “I have to tell you this?”

  Vladimir says, “This is why you get contractor,” and Janos says, over him, “No, no. I can handle it. But what then? After I know what room—”

  “Then you find a way to get a look at her. They’ll have photocopied her passport when she checked in, so see if you can get a copy. Get police ID or bribe the desk clerk.”

  “After that?” Janos says.

  “After that I pay you fifteen hundred U.S.”

  “That’s good, but, what do we do next?”

  “You wait around, being invisible, and the moment you see her come down, you call me. If she’s leaving, you follow.” To Vladimir he says, “Can you get a car?”

  Vladimir looks longingly at the empty bottle in front of him. “Can buy one.”

  “Next option.”

  “Rent, can rent one.”

  “Good. Use the money I’ve already given you. Once you’ve got it, I’ll replace it and give you more.” He leans back in his chair and closes his eyes again, and he’s rewarded by the room tilting and whirling slowly to the right. He reopens his eyes, looking for something stationary that will help him stop the room’s spin, and sees the concern in Ming Li’s face. “I’m okay,” he says.

  “You and Frank,” she says. “If someone chopped off your leg, you’d say, ‘No problem, I’ve got another one.’ What are we going to do about that woman with Arthit?”

  “Nothing,” Poke says. “Not now.”

  “Then when?”

  “A long time from now. The next ice age. Maybe tonight, maybe tomorrow. Let’s throw some more stuff at the wall and se
e what sticks. Then we’ll worry about her.”

  “MR. ELSON’S OFFICE.”

  “Is he there?” Rafferty says. He’s standing in the doorway of a closed shoe store, not far from his apartment. All he wants in the world is walk over there, take a shower, take a nap, and start painting the walls.

  “I’m sorry, he’s in a meeting.” From the vowels, she’s come straight from Georgia, the American one, with the peaches.

  “Please tell him Frank Rafferty called, from the TV station.”

  “Does he have your number?”

  “No. I’ve got a stack of calls to make. I’ll call back later.”

  “He has a lunch at noon. You might try him a little after one. He’s always back by one.”

  “Thanks,” Rafferty says. “That’s very helpful.”

  He hangs up and leans against the door of the closed shop, feeling the tightness across the tops of his shoulders. By now Janos is manufacturing some plausible reason for hanging around in the lobby of the Chiang Palace, although with the rain, no excuse is really necessary. He’ll be wearing a nice, unremarkable suit, just another interchangeable farang businessman, dazzled by the City of Angels. No one will look at him twice. Vladimir will be scouting for a car.

  Or, he thinks, talking to Murphy.

  Does Vladimir have the nerve? There’s no question that he’s afraid of Murphy. If Rafferty’s the one who ends up dead and Vladimir is on the wrong side, Vladimir is going to spend the next four or five years looking over his shoulder for Murphy. If he were in Vladimir’s shoes, Rafferty would give it some thought.

  Eleven-fourteen A.M.

  How is he even going to stay awake? He feels like he hasn’t slept in days. He closes his eyes against the gray day, and what he sees is his living room, with all of them in their usual places: Rose and Miaow on the sofa, himself on the white leather hassock, facing them over the glass table. Nothing special, just three people in a room, a moment with nothing to make it memorable, maybe even a little boring, maybe Miaow would rather be with Andrew, maybe Rose is fretting about business falling off at the domestics agency, maybe he’s thinking about money, worrying about the bills for Miaow’s school, about the bank balance. Maybe they’re all preoccupied, in their own separate worlds, maybe even wishing, for the moment, anyway, that they were somewhere else.

  And he would give everything he’s ever owned and might ever own in the future to be in that room right this moment. Bored, irritated, apprehensive, hungover, angry—it wouldn’t matter. It would be the three of them. It would be his world, back again.

  “Wake up,” Ming Li says.

  He opens his eyes, and she’s standing there under a new black umbrella. She hands him another, still rolled up, purchased two doors away.

  “You know what?” he asks.

  “I know how,” Ming Li says. “I know whether. But I don’t know what. Sorry, Frank used to say—”

  “Here’s what.” He pushes himself away from the window and opens his umbrella. He takes her by the arm and turns her, and they step out onto the sidewalk. “Murphy can’t do this to me. The son of a bitch isn’t going to know what hit him.”

  AT YET ANOTHER Coffee World, he types everything he knows about Murphy, except for the names of Thuy and Jiang, on the keyboard of Ming Li’s little computer, and she pays a few baht to get the boy behind the counter to print out two copies for her. Following Rafferty’s instructions, she picks them up with a napkin, avoiding both the paper’s surface and the boy’s curious gaze, and takes them back to the table. Using the napkin, she folds one of the copies and opens a boxful of envelopes that she bought when she bought the umbrellas. She uses the napkin to take the envelope out, too, and when she’s gotten the printed page into it, without touching either, she dips one of the napkins into a glass of water and slides it over the mucilage on the flap. With the napkin she pushes it across the table, untouched, to Rafferty, who uses another napkin to pick it up and yet another to wrap it. Then he slips it into the pocket of his jacket.

  She says, “Now what?”

  “Now we take that one with us,” he says, indicating the second copy, “in case it becomes useful.”

  “How might it become useful?”

  “I have no idea,” he says, standing up for what feels like the ten-thousandth time that day, “but humor me.”

  “WHO WAS THAT?” Ming Li asks as he shuts off the phone. They’re side by side, umbrellas overlapping, as the rain pounds down.

  “Floyd Preece, a reporter at the Bangkok Sun. I gave him the best story of his life three years ago, about beggars and gangsters and a baby-selling ring, and it made his career. I just gave him another one.”

  “You kind of misled him. All those witnesses you were throwing around.”

  “I’ll get Thuy and Jiang to talk to him. If he calls me back and says his editor is interested, I’ll leave a message for the two of them to call me, and we’ll work it out. He’ll do anything they want, including not mentioning their real names or their locations, to get them to tell the story. This is front-page stuff.” He frames the words in the air with his free hand. “ ‘PROMINENT AMERICAN BUSINESSMAN TIED TO VIETNAM MASSACRE.’ And under that, in upper- and lowercase, ‘U.S. War on Terror Connection Suspected.’ ”

  “That’ll make the American embassy happy.”

  “Fuck them,” Rafferty says. “If a government can’t carry out its policies in the light of day, it should make new policies.”

  Ming Li stops walking. “Do you know how many people would be put out of business if that happened?”

  “Well, at the risk of being repetitive, fuck them, too. My wife and child and I are threatened by all this nonsense because we’re too small to matter.” He takes her arm and tows her along. “It’s like some clodhopper with thick boots stomping on a bee. ‘Oh, you mean lots of little things that don’t sting got killed, too? Well, gee, too bad. They’re collateral damage. How do they expect me to tell the difference from way up here?’ This is not what America was supposed to be.”

  “I don’t talk politics,” Ming Li says. “It’s a principle.”

  “Politics is supposed to be a delivery system for food, security, and freedom.”

  “Oh, my God,” Ming Li says. “No wonder you’re so disillusioned.”

  “What time is it?”

  “Look at your watch. Okay, okay, sorry. Male prerogative and all, ask the little woman. It’s about seven to one.”

  “Perfect. Keep your eyes open for a very skinny American in a dark suit. Short hair, glasses, walks like his spine won’t bend.”

  “We’re on a sidewalk in Bangkok, which has fourteen million people in it, and you think we’re going to run into a single, specific person.”

  “I’m in the zone.”

  “Well, warn me next time, and I won’t ask stupid questions.”

  “It’s the end of lunch hour. For this guy lunch hour is sixty minutes, minus ten for walking, five in each direction. He absolutely will be back at his desk one hour after he left it. And when he first came to Bangkok, I searched his suitcase and he had a stack of receipts from the restaurants on our right.”

  “Then this is the Secret Service guy, right? Poke, I know him. He’s the one Frank bargained with, the one who got him out of here.”

  “Sorry.” Rafferty lifts his shoulders and lets them drop, then turns his head from side to side. “I’m forgetting things. This isn’t a good time to be—”

  She puts her fingertips on his arm. “You’re not forgetting anything that matters, so relax. You’re just focusing. It’s like taking a test in school. You don’t need to remember your math if the question is about history.”

  He looks down at her and is surprised all over again at how young she looks. “I hope Frank appreciates you.”

  “He does. Of course, he thinks he created me.” She gives him a sharp elbow. “There’s your boy.”

  Ten feet ahead of them, Elson has come out of the door to an Italian restaurant and is fighting with hi
s umbrella, which seems to have a broken rib.

  “You stay back,” Rafferty says. “I don’t want him to know you’re here.” He picks up the pace. “Here, fellow American,” he says, coming alongside Elson and offering half of his umbrella. “No point in getting wet. That awful suit might shrink.”

  “Poke,” Elson says, his lips even thinner than usual. His eyes scan the street. “I can’t talk to you. I can’t be seen talking to you. You know that.”

  “Not Poke,” Poke says. “Frank. Frank Rafferty. You know, news organizations tape their incoming calls. And these days even someone like me can order up a voiceprint, if he’s got the money.”

  “Lower that umbrella,” Elson says, moving away. Rafferty brings his down in front of him, and Elson continues to fight with his own until they’ve got their backs to a building and he succeeds in opening it. He holds it beside Poke’s, effectively masking both of them from view.

  “I had no idea you’d be involved in this,” Elson says. He’s almost whispering. “You were the furthest thing from my mind, or I’d never have used that name. I didn’t like the way things were shaping up, and I thought having a news crew or two on hand would keep them from going too bad. When the woman at the station asked my name, I blanked.”

  “ ‘The way things were shaping up,’ ” Rafferty repeats.

  “You know.” Elson lowers his umbrella a couple of inches, does a quick survey, then brings it back up. “With Murphy. I don’t like Murphy. I don’t trust him. I had a feeling he was out to kill that man.”

  “Sellers.”

  “Yes. He told us Sellers was operating in the south with the insurgents, that he’d been engaged with militants in three countries—here, the Philippines, Indonesia. All countries that Sellers had traveled to, according to the records. But I didn’t like the way things smelled. I wanted to talk to the guy, but Murphy said he didn’t have a location. Just said he—I mean, Sellers—was guaranteed to come to the demonstration because he was organizing it, so Murphy got Shen to put his guys out there, and they charged the demonstrators, or so they said—this is how it got back to me anyway—and fired tear gas at them, and in the melee Sellers got shot.”