The Fear Artist

by Timothy Hallinan

  “With me underneath him.”

  Elson shakes his head. “Who knew you’d be there? I mean, who could have known?”

  “But you knew, after it happened, that they’d go nuts if they found out the name of the person who called the station and asked for the crew and it turned out to be my father. Makes it a little harder for Shen to believe I was there by accident.”

  “I don’t think they did,” Elson says. “It never got back to me, and it would have. Murphy wanted everything about you, but the relationship between you and your father is down a few levels. He wouldn’t have turned it up unless he already knew what he was looking for.”

  It’s begun to rain again, and the two of them are getting wet, since Elson is using the umbrellas as a wall to hide behind. “Why is it down a few levels?”

  “He’s living right there in Virginia,” Elson says, “in a nice, expensive house, on Uncle Sam’s tab. And he was a high-ranking criminal in a Chinese triad. We’re not going to put him on a billboard.”

  “Plausible deniability.”

  Elson shrugs. “If you like.”

  “I don’t like anything. There’s a coffee place right down here. Got a second floor, where no one on the sidewalk will be able to see us. Come on.”

  “I have to get back.”

  “Dick. If I do what I’m about to do without telling you about it, without giving you a chance to get in position, you’ll regret it for the rest of your career.”

  “I’d love a cup of coffee,” Elson says.

  “THE VIETNAMESE? THE newspapers?” Elson has his forehead in his right hand.

  “The Phoenix Program returns to Southeast Asia. And the explosion down south, don’t forget the explosion. That’ll look good to the New York Times.”

  “We don’t know anything about the murder in the States. We don’t know anything about an explosion.”

  “Who’s ‘we’?”

  “Good point. I’m not in the chain of command. He just wanted me at your … um, interview so I could tell him if you were lying.”

  “Who is in the chain of command?”

  “That’s the question. The ambassador, undoubtedly. They’re not going to run anything in the country without him knowing about it. The CIA guys at the embassy. But it might not be the ones you’d expect. They keep all this kind of nebulous.”

  “Sure. This is shit nobody wants on his shoes.”

  “It’s a different world, Poke.”

  “And we helped to make it that way.”

  Ming Li comes up the stairs with a cup in her hand and sits down at a table behind Elson. She doesn’t glance at them.

  Pulling at his sodden suit coat, Elson says, “Jesus, I’m sick of being wet.”

  “Yeah?” Rafferty says. “How’s your rice crop doing? Your house been swept away yet?”

  “Fine, fine.” Elson lifts his hands, showing Rafferty his palms. “Guilty of thinking of myself.”

  “That’s sort of what we do,” Rafferty says. “We Americans. A tsunami hits Japan and we start worrying about radioactive flounder off Santa Monica.”

  “What do you want me to do? Agitate for a change in global policy?”

  “Let’s start with this,” Rafferty says. He puts on the table the second copy of what he wrote in Coffee World. “Read it. And while you’re reading, tell me why you guys never put up a decent picture of me.”

  The look he gives Rafferty is almost guilty. “We didn’t request one,” he says. “I didn’t pass the request along, and Murphy probably didn’t want to do it himself, didn’t want the embassy to realize that it was he, not Shen, who was looking for an American. And there are virtually no good pictures of you on the Internet. Just your author picture, over and over.”

  “So I have you to thank. Well, what you’re about to read isn’t going to seem very grateful.”

  Elson squeezes his eyes closed and rubs at the bridge of his nose. Then he lets out a deep, melancholy breath and pulls the page to him. Rafferty drinks his coffee, and his eyes briefly meet Ming Li’s. It’s comforting, he decides, to have her there.

  Shaking his head in disbelief, Elson runs the tip of his index finger down the edge of the page. Halfway down, he says, “Beat her to death?” but it’s not a real question, just another way of exhaling. When he’s finished, he folds the paper with great precision and stares at it.

  “All true?” he finally says.

  “To the best of my knowledge.” Poke thinks for a second. “Yeah. All true.”

  “And you’ve given this—”

  “To the Viets and a newspaper here in Bangkok.”

  Elson says, “I don’t know what I can do with any of this. If I go to anybody who is in the chain of command, the first question is going to be, who gave me the intel? And then they’re going to want to nail you to the floor until they’ve verified everything, which could take months, and they might even give Murphy a crack at you to see who comes out on top.”

  “Here’s what I want: I want you to say you received this anonymously today.” He puts two fingers into the bottom of his T-shirt and uses them to pull the napkin-wrapped envelope from his jacket pocket. “It’s the same thing you just read, everything from the Vietnam massacre to the murder in Wyoming and Murphy’s role here, including the names of Shen and Sellers.” He tugs the napkin, and the envelope falls to the table. Elson pushes his chair back as though he’s afraid his DNA might jump from him to it. “You’re going to have to handle it, Dick. You can’t give it to them without touching it.”

  “How did I get it?”

  “Did you hang up your raincoat in the restaurant?”

  “Sure. It was dripping.”

  “Well, somebody put it in your pocket while you were eating. You found it when you got back to the office, and you knew they’d want to evaluate it.”

  “That’s ridiculous.”

  “So figure out something better.”

  Elson shakes his head. “But … I mean, what’s your objective? Do you actually care whether we—they, whoever they are—are embarrassed, or whatever, by being linked with him?”

  “If you really want to know, I don’t give a shit. If people do business with rats, they should expect to get the plague. On the other hand, if something should happen to Murphy, I just think this is information that you—or they, whoever they are—should have, before they make a big stink about it and call attention to the connection, to the fact that this guy was essentially their boy, on their payroll, doing their bidding. Before people figure out how dirty the bidding was.”

  Elson starts to pick up the envelope and then pulls his hand back. “There’s no telling how they’ll react if something happens to him.”

  “I understand that. But it seems to me, as a good citizen, that they should know about the massacre in Vietnam and the murder in Cheyenne and the murder here in Bangkok and the possibility of a major newspaper story and the interest of the Vietnamese before they go out and do something that will have the whole world looking at them.”

  Elson picks up the envelope. “I’ll think about it. But Jesus, Poke. You’re supposed to be a travel writer, as far as I know. How does someone like you get this devious?”

  “I’m just writing,” Poke says. “I got stuck in somebody else’s story. All I’m trying to do is write my way out.”

  27

  The River Spirit

  HE JERKS AWAKE as the car begins to move, ripped from a dream in which Miaow was back on the sidewalk, her clothes and face filthy. She was running from someone, a shadowy shape looming behind her. His mouth tastes foul, and his heart is hammering, pumping pure panic through his veins.

  “What?” he says. A rattle of rain hits the windshield.

  “We going,” Vladimir says, turning on the wipers.

  “Who? Oh, you mean—”

  “Lady. Janos just give me one ring. Means she going.”

  “Time is it?”

  “You have watch.”

  “Right, right. Ahh, twenty to s
ix.” Through the windows the city is gliding into the terminal stages of dusk, hurried by the heavy cloud cover.

  “The hotel’s coming up,” Rafferty says.

  “I know, I know. Don’t tell me things I know, yes?”

  “But you’re going to pass it.”

  “I will be in front of them. Janos will be behind. If they looking, they will see Janos. Nobody looks at car in front when they think they being followed.”

  “So,” Rafferty says, rubbing his face with his palms and wishing he had some coffee. “They see Janos, and—”

  “And then I tell him go away. Then I let them pass me, but no problem because I was in front before. I do this many, many time, okay? When you were boy, I was doing this.”

  “Fine.”

  Vladimir moves his lips before speaking, as though rehearsing the line. “Where is Baby Spy?”

  “She’s running some errands.” He’s not about to tell Vladimir that she’s in Chinatown, visiting a little old Chinese lady named Mrs. Ma, who sells illegal handguns.

  “She is really your sister?”

  “Half sister.”

  “Ahhh,” Vladimir says. Then he peers through the window and says, “This your lady, I think.”

  They’re creeping past the hotel as the traffic builds up to the nightly post–6:00 P.M. snarl, and Rafferty sees an attractive, tall, blond woman in a gray business suit, late thirties or early forties, coming through the revolving door and getting a big-tipper’s salute from the doorman. He springs to the side of an idling white sedan and pulls the door open for her. The hotel’s driveway is a looping curve up and down a gentle hill with the entrance at the top, and coming on foot down the left side of the curve, signaling a taxi, is Janos.

  “Tell him to forget it,” Rafferty says.

  “Why? We all in position. Why?”

  “Look at her. She’s as Caucasian as Finland. I was hoping maybe she was a daughter, some sort of relative, but she hasn’t got any Asian blood.”

  “So?”

  “Well, if it looked like she might be for real—even if it only looked a little bit like that—it would have changed things. It might have meant she doesn’t belong to Murphy. But Jesus, look at her. Why is Janos talking to himself?”

  “Talking to me,” Vladimir says, tapping the ear farthest from Rafferty.

  “Take that thing out,” Rafferty says. “Put the phone on speaker.”

  “I think we quitting. You say we—”

  “Well, we’re here. Let me hear him.”

  Mumbling to himself, Vladimir puts the phone beside him on the seat and pushes a button.

  “… car has been waiting almost half an hour,” Janos is saying. “Rented by the concierge in her name, Eckersley.”

  Rafferty mutters,

  “I wish I had someone to search her room.”

  “Baby Spy.”

  “She’s busy.” He slumps back in the seat. “All right. Let’s do it.” He pulls an envelope out of his pocket and puts it on the seat, beside the phone. “That’s another two thousand.”

  Vladimir grunts acknowledgment and cuts the wheel toward the curb, just squeezing past the car in front of him as the sedan with the woman calling herself Helen Eckersley comes down the curve of the hotel driveway. In the passenger’s mirror, Rafferty sees Janos’s cab slow to let her in. When he looks back at the seat, the envelope is gone.

  “Good,” Vladimir says. “If they are professional, now ewerybody looking at him.”

  On the phone Janos says, “This is her first time out of the room since I got to the hotel this morning.” Then he says, probably to his driver, “No, never mind. I’m on the phone.”

  “She waiting in room for your call,” Vladimir says.

  “Maybe.” Rafferty yawns hugely, watches the windshield in front of him steam up, and wonders why he’s here.

  “You know today, Thai gowernment—Bangkok Metropolitan Authority—tell ewerybody in office to come to City Pillar Shrine for ceremony to Ka Kang. You know Ka Kang?”

  “No.”

  “Goddess of riwer, spirit of Chao Phraya. Ceremony to ask her to lower lewel of water before city floods.”

  “Makes sense.”

  Vladimir glances over at him and says, “You been here too long.”

  “See, that’s the problem with America,” Rafferty says. “We don’t have enough gods. Our plane is late, we blame the president because of all the security nonsense. The price of bread goes up, we blame the president for the economy. The president, whoever it is, is just some schmuck in the White House who has no idea what to do about the price of bread, no idea what to do about the planes not taking off on time. But Americans don’t have a goddess of flight schedules or a patron saint of dietary staples, so we vote out the president and his gang of robbers and vote in some other idiot and a bigger gang of robbers, and two years later we’re all demanding to know why everything hasn’t been fixed.”

  Janos says, over the phone, “But the river spirit can’t lower the Chao Phraya.”

  “Neither could the president. Point is, the Thais know who to blame. The river spirit. If it rains too much, they don’t take it out on the ballot box.”

  Janos says, “So you don’t think the government is responsible for anything?”

  “Oh, it’s responsible,” Rafferty says. He draws Miaow’s favorite doodle, a round-headed cat with six whiskers, on the steamed window. “It’s responsible for the sloppiness and imprecision of the War on Terror, for example. It’s responsible for taking people’s tax dollars and spending the country into debt on useless wars and pointless pork projects to buy votes. It’s responsible for bailing out the banks instead of standing up for the people the banks cheated. It’s responsible for plenty.”

  “American people,” Vladimir says, pronouncing it “pipple” and dividing his attention between the rearview mirror and the car in front of him. “American pipple all baby. Ewery pipple except American know what is gowernment. Gowernment is machine rich people inwent to take more. Same when we have king, same when we have pope, same when we have Communist. Is no grawity, no Isaac Newton, in gowernment. Money go up, up to rich people. Power go up, up to people with power. Always same.”

  “Her driver is looking back at me,” Janos says.

  “Good.”

  There’s a whiplash of lighting, and the phone sputters, and Janos can be heard saying, “Left-hand turn signal.”

  “Good. You follow, but slow. Then turn and come around block so you behind us.”

  “Why are we bothering?” Rafferty asks.

  Vladimir says, “Is information. Maybe is lie, yes? But you see lie, and maybe sometime you see through it, like window, to truth.” He makes the left and slows to pull over until the sedan is past them. Three cars later he eases back into the traffic.

  Rafferty lengthens the whiskers on Miaow’s cat face and says, “I want to go home.”

  “Open window,” Vladimir says. “You make front all cloudy.”

  “Maybe you can see through it to the truth,” Rafferty says, but he opens his window.

  “You think this is funny,” Vladimir says, “but is life. We newer see ewerything. Life is looking through cloud, try to see who is your friend, who is your lover, who is wanting to kill you. What is true, what is not. God makes insect look like stick, make fly look like bee. Poison mushroom look like good one. Child killer look like schoolteacher. People show teeth when they smile, show teeth when they bite. Baby Spy, Baby Spy wery lucky. She learn early to look for real thing. You, you cannot tell. Snake tell you he is horse, you probably look for saddle.”

  “Yeah,” Rafferty says, “it’s swell to doubt everything. It’s a great way to live, holding everything up to the light all the time, checking every label, looking for the spider in your pocket.”

  Vladimir makes a clucking noise. “You are in bad mood.”

  “Gee, you think?” He sits up, his exhaustion gone. “Hold it, I know where she’s going.”

  “Where?�
�

  “They’re going to turn up here. You keep going, two more turns, then you turn, same direction as them. Tell Janos to wait at the corner. He can follow them again when they come back down.”

  “Maybe you wrong,” Vladimir says, but at that moment the sedan’s turn indicator begins to blink. He says, “Huh.”

  “Nyaaa-nyaaa,” Rafferty says. “Skip this turn and the next, then make the one after. You’ll go uphill and then take a right, and we’ll be looking down at them.”

  Vladimir barks orders at Janos, and then he and Rafferty ride in silence until the second turn comes up, and Rafferty says, “One more,” and Vladimir snaps, “Yah, yah, yah.” He takes the turn and points the car up a gentle hill.

  “At top?” he says.

  “Yes. Kill your lights just before you turn right and then pull to the left curb.”

  “Street is one-way?”

  “It is.”

  “This part Bangkok, I don’t know.”

  “You haven’t missed much. Turn coming up.”

  When Vladimir switches the lights off, Rafferty realizes that it’s gotten darker than he thought. “Go down half a block before you pull over,” he says.

  “Cannot get close with no lights.” Vladimir is peering through the windshield. “They see car with no lights, they know we looking.”

  “It’s dark,” Rafferty says. “It’s raining. Tell you what.” He picks up the phone and says, “Janos. Go to the next turn and then come up here and go right. I’m pretty sure you’ll drive past them, and when you do, hit your brakes for a second, slow down, and then drive away.”

  “Wery good,” Vladimir says grudgingly.

  “I’m learning,” Rafferty says. “Just hanging around with you, I’m learning.”

  Vladimir says, “Peh,” but he looks pleased.

  They make the turn, and a glance along the street tells Rafferty he was right; between the rain and the darkness, they can’t see more than a block. Vladimir pulls to the curb and puts the car in its lowest gear to slow it. Half a block down, the rain eases, and Rafferty says, “Stop,” and Vladimir uses the hand brake so the brake lights won’t come on.