The Fear Artist

12

Nui was right, Poke thinks. Go after the most dangerous one first.

He begins with what he knows. Helen Eckersley. Cheyenne.

A trip to Pantip Plaza, Bangkok’s hub for stolen, cloned, and bootlegged hardware and software, buys him a lightly used, somewhat stripped-down netbook-total weight about four pounds-and an extra battery. It costs him a little less than twenty thousand baht, making a substantial hole in his reserves. Even with the money he pulled out of the ATMs on that last night, he’s getting down to small money.

He’ll have to do something about that.

But first he spends a little more on a second throwaway phone and some minutes to put into it. Now he’s got two phones that can’t be traced to him, and one of them is about to be used for something dangerous. After he’s done it, he won’t be able to use the phone to call anyone he cares about.

Before he can make the call, he needs information. He takes the computer into a Coffee World, feeling oddly exposed because all the shops in the chain resemble one another, and he’s well known in the two he frequents near his apartment. He half expects to be called by name. A large cup of coffee and a hundred baht buy him the right to jack the netbook into one of their LAN connections for a lot longer than he hopes he’ll need to.

It takes him about two minutes to get a phone number in Cheyenne, Wyoming, for Helen Eckersley.

It’s a little after 8:00 P.M. in Bangkok, making it seven in the morning in Wyoming. Good enough, he figures; if he wakes her, he wakes her. He punches in the number on the new phone, closes the lid of the computer, steps onto the sidewalk, and presses SEND. The connection takes so long that he pops beads of sweat, envisioning airless rooms where men listen on headphones, but eventually a phone begins to ring on the other end: once, twice-five times in all. And then he hears a woman, a smoker’s deep voice curlicued by some kind of accent. “This is Helen. I can’t come to the phone right now, but if you hang up without leaving a message, you’ll break my heart. You wouldn’t want to break my heart, would you?”

He gives it a moment’s thought and then breaks her heart. Feeling as though two electronic exposures-the telephone and the Internet-are enough for the moment, he goes back in, unplugs, pays his bills, and hurries off down the sidewalk.

This is the time of day he feels safest. The daylight is gone, and the neon is on, and the sidewalks are jammed. Tonight, for the first time, he’ll return to the hotel room he left in the morning. He’s never felt sufficiently secure until now to risk going to the same place twice.

It’s the passage of time, he thinks. He’s become old news.

He turns down a soi, thinking about money. He’s definitely going to need money. Rose and Miaow are going to need money.

And although he doesn’t want to contact him, he does in fact know someone with money.

It’s still too early, so he goes into a bookstore, buys a paperback, and takes it into a small neighborhood restaurant, where he dares to sit in the window. He doesn’t draw a glance. For the first time since he went down on that street under the dying man’s weight, he loses himself in someone else’s story. By the time he comes out, it’s ten o’clock, which makes it 10:00 A.M. in Virginia.

The phone informs him it’s got about forty dollars’ worth of time on it. He dials a number he never thought he’d call.

“Speak now or forever hold your peace,” a female voice says.

Rafferty says, “Excuse me?”

“It’s the marriage liturgy,” the voice says, “and if I know that, somebody who grew up in China, why don’t you?”

“Ming Li,” Rafferty says. “Are you engaged?”

“Older brother,” she says, and the delight in her voice raises his spirits. “Oh, I miss you. Are you coming here, please, are you?”

“Afraid not. Why are you fixated on the marriage liturgy?”

“It’s so civilized. It’s such a good idea. We should hear it every time somebody suggests something life-changing. Someone neutral should have to step forward and say, ‘Before this stupid girl makes up her mind to buy that car or kiss that hulking boy, does anyone know better? If so, speak now or forever hold your peace.’ ”

“Are you regretting something?”

“Why am I here?” she asks in a modulated wail. “I’m dying here.”

“Everybody has to die somewhere.”

“Don’t sprain your sympathizer.”

He finds himself grinning at the phone. He hadn’t even known he had a half-Chinese half sister until his father dragged her out of China and into his life during one hair-raising week a couple of years earlier. And now, he discovers, he’s been missing her. “So what’s wrong? You don’t like America?”

“These kids,” she says. “They’ve got the fullest wallets and the emptiest heads on earth. My jaw has dropped open so often I’m holding it up with duct tape. This is like a desert, for … for conversation or thinking or anything except looking like a pop tart and hating on other girls.”

“Why are you hanging around with kids?”

A very brief pause, and when she begins talking, she’s picked up the pace, putting distance, he thinks, between her and an unexpected question. “Who else has any time? You know, China wasn’t paradise, but I learned things. I had school, and I was thinking in two languages, and Dad was training me to be a spy or a crook all the time. And I was memorizing his invisible maps and his old grudges. It was … you know, a full childhood. The kids-I mean the people-here are label-literate, but that’s about it. They wouldn’t know a good book if one snapped closed on their foot, but they can spot Louis Vuitton at a hundred yards. And nobody ever, ever makes me laugh.”

“I’m feeling really sorry for you. Is your-our-father there?”

“No,” she says. “He’s not. How’s that for a change of pace? Dad’s not here. He spends all his time over at the spy shop.”

“Surely he’s told them everything he knows by now.”

“He makes up new stuff every day. Everyone just sits and soaks it up.”

“I’ll bet.”

“He likes the attention. It’s kind of sad. You’ve got a problem, don’t you? I can hear it in your voice. Oh, you lucky, lucky thing. I’d give anything for a problem.”

“No, things are just great here.” It occurs to him he’s been on the phone for too long. “I need some money.”

“Really. How much?”

“Fifteen thousand dollars.”

“I’ll talk to Dad.”

“I need it fast. And tell him he also has to figure out a way to get it to me without my needing to present ID anywhere official.”

“Oh, no,” Ming Li says. “You don’t have a problem.”

“Just ask him for me, okay? And don’t call me. I’m serious about that. Don’t call me for any reason. I’ll call you tomorrow, okay?”

“Just so I’ve got it right,” she says, “you need fifteen K as fast as possible, you don’t want to have to identify yourself to get it, and don’t call us, we’ll call you.”

“I’ve actually missed you,” he says.

“Don’t make me cry. I think that week in Bangkok was the last time I was happy. I know it was.”

“I’ll call you tomorrow,” he says.

In the entire week that made Ming Li so happy, she’s the only thing Rafferty remembers fondly. When his father barged into Rafferty’s life, running from the Chinese crime lord whose retirement assets he had stolen, Ming Li was a teenager, although she claimed to be older, and she was already tougher than Rafferty; she’d had a lifetime of training as her father’s secret weapon in his long, patient plan to liberate himself and his Chinese wife and daughter from the Triad he’d been working for. Without her, all of them-Rafferty, Rose, Miaow, and Rafferty’s father, Frank-would probably have wound up several fathoms down in the Gulf of Thailand.

But he hadn’t been able to reconcile with his father, no matter how much Ming Li had wanted it to happen.

Will his father pony up the money? Certainly he will. Ming Li will give him no peace until he does.

In fact, Rafferty thinks, he should have asked for twenty. Frank has broken enough laws in his life to figure out how to get the money to Bangkok without leaving a trail. He’ll get his money.

He says it to himself again to make it true. Money is the only guarantee that the person he’s about to talk to won’t just turn around and sell him.

This is the longest he’s been out in public, not protected by the hard shell and tinted windows of the Toyotas, since he left his apartment building on the floor of Mrs. Pongsiri’s car. But he’s feeling more confident now; he’s just another dusky-skinned guy who parts his hair in the middle, walking around Bangkok in the dark at ten-thirty.

He flags a taxi and gives the driver instructions in the mock-Indian accent Miaow used to laugh at. Every time he uses it, it makes him miss his daughter even more fiercely.

There are times when he looks back on his life before Bangkok and sees it as a rudderless drift across an expanse of water; any direction he took was potentially right and potentially wrong, and there were no guideposts or landmarks to say which was which. The boat he was in wasn’t home, but it had familiarity, and that was enough to make him mistake it for home. It was more like home, anyway, than the stone house in the middle of the Lancaster desert he’d grown up in, a time he remembers as a series of explosions between his taciturn Irish father and his half-Filipina mother, who had been born with all her nerve endings exposed. In between the explosions, there had been silences as profound as the fading of a gong. Then, finally, the long, long silence that began the day his mother came home to find a note on the mantel telling her she owned more than a million dollars’ worth of real estate. The envelope also contained a key to the safe-deposit box with the deeds in it and a short paragraph of farewell from her China-bound husband.

A few years later, Poke had chased his father across the water to Shanghai, had found the woman for whom Frank had deserted Poke’s mother. He’d been turned away. After that he’d been alone in his little boat for years, bobbing along on the warm seas of Southeast Asia, distracting himself by writing facile books about cultures whose surfaces he’d barely scratched, until through some enchantment of navigation, he washed up on the island that had Rose and Miaow on it. Where he finally found out what home meant.

“We’re here,” the driver says.

Rafferty looks up to see the unlit wall of the no-name Bar, thanks him, and climbs out.

He stands there in the dark as the cab’s taillights recede and almost converge down the soi, asking himself whether this is actually necessary. It would be easier, faster, and more painless, he thinks, to just walk up to a cop, pull a toy gun, and take a couple through the head. What he’s about to do terrifies him to the point where his hands and feet feel numb.

But what’s the alternative? He can’t ride around in cars for the rest of his life.

If he’s going to get out from under all this, he needs a specific kind of help. If he’s going after the most dangerous one first, the person he has to trust is one of the least trustworthy people he’s ever met.