The Fear Artist

9

The Diamond Sutra . He forgot the Diamond Sutra, the laundry ticket the dying man slipped into his shirt pocket. It’s still in his apartment house, taped above the door leading to the stairs.

He gives the cabbie the address and settles back. He won’t know whether he can get in if he doesn’t try.

Money is an issue. He’s going to have to get some, and it’ll have to be right away, in case they put a stop on his cards. He’s pretty certain that Shen’s outfit could do it with a phone call.

Somebody who could squash you by snapping my fingers, Murphy had said.

Power in the dark.

What scares him most about Murphy is that he’s an American and he had official American help, in the person of Elson. That means that Rafferty’s Get Out of Jail Free card, the American embassy, is probably off-limits. Not that he’d ever go there; that would mean good-bye to Rose and Miaow and his life here, since the only thing the embassy could do for him, in an extreme situation, is to spirit him out of the country, and that’s never been an option.

Still, part of him had been aware that the option was always there, and now it isn’t.

Maybe he’s reading the situation wrong. Maybe he’s caught paranoia from Shen and the trio at the no-name bar, and this whole thing is actually blowing past him, not at him. After all, he really doesn’t know anything. Maybe by morning he won’t be on anybody’s mind.

He hangs on to that thought like it’s a life preserver until the cabbie makes the turn into Soi Pipat and he sees the red lights strobing-two police cars and a military van pulled up in front of his apartment house. He says to the driver, “Keep going. Change of mind. Take me down to the Indian district.”

It’s a long haul, and the driver’s eyes, flicking to him in the rearview mirror, don’t make it any shorter. He’ll remember Rafferty’s face. The evening’s traffic is in between waves, the business traffic thinning and the night traffic building, and the average speed is probably seven or eight miles per hour. Rafferty’s legs are crossed, and his dangling foot bobs up and down mechanically. He stills it, and a minute later it’s in motion again. He puts both feet on the floor for the remainder of the ride.

When he gets there, he pays the driver and hurries along the maze of dim alleys. The fragrance of spices and the tang of grilling meat hang heavy in the air. Along the right side of the fifth or sixth alley he enters, he sees a line of portable booths selling stolen cell phones. He checks his money and bargains back and forth from one shop to another until he buys the cheapest one on sale.

He moves on a few yards and uses the phone to call a policeman named Anand, one of the few cops Arthit trusts. When Anand answers, Rafferty asks him to go to Arthit’s house and lend Arthit his phone, so Arthit can call the new cell number. Then he closes the new phone and waits, pacing the alleyways for almost half an hour, drawing some odd attention.

In fact, it’s very odd attention. He can understand people looking at him the third time he goes by, but a few of them aren’t just looking, they’re staring. Two men in particular watch him pass, talking to each other in an energetic fashion.

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, calls 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.