The Fear Artist

18

After two days holed up in yet another cheap hotel-on the outskirts of the city this time-Rafferty goes on the offensive.

The first good news of a dull, wet day is that the laundry that issued the yellow ticket, however many months or years ago, is still in business.

From across the intersection, Rafferty peers at it through the drizzle. It sits at the corner of two small, anonymous streets not far from the hotel where he’d kept Shen’s man from falling off the roof. Its flyblown windows, ice blue from the fluorescents inside, face out from the bottom floor of yet another cheap hotel with an ersatz-fancy name, the Royal Residence. The hotel has a doomed look. For one thing, it’s only five stories high, the kind of building that’s not going to last long in the new Bangkok, where everything that can’t go up gets torn down.

He’s walked around the block twice, wielding a hundred-baht umbrella against the intermittent drizzle and using it to hide his face from time to time. Nothing has caught his attention. The days and nights since he escaped his apartment car have blurred into a new kind of marathon in which the runner jogs lethargically through wide, featureless stretches of boredom and then runs for his life from the occasional lion.

His head is almost too heavy to hold upright, and he feels that his control of his emotions is precarious. He has to go into the laundry, but he has a condensation of dread in his core. Not dread that something horrible will happen to him when he gets inside, but a conviction that if anything at all goes wrong-any complication, no matter how minor-he’ll burst into tears. He’s been alarmingly close to tears lately. More than anything in the world, he wants to hug his wife and be ignored, in person, by his daughter. He’d give anything to see their eyes.

In addition to everything else, he’s out of money. He’s called his father’s number in Virginia twice and had no answer, not even a machine. He’s got a couple of frugal days in his pocket, and that’s it.

And he’s left another message on the voice mail of the elusive Helen Eckersley. He hung up feeling even spookier about her than before. There’s something wrong in the house that phone is ringing in. In his old life, he would have scoffed at such an intuition, but after all his time with Rose he takes it much more seriously.

Ahhh, Rose. He looks both ways and steps into the street.

When he’s eight or ten steps from the laundry door, one of his new phones rings. He’s carrying three at the moment, and he juggles frantically through them, thinking, hoping, wishing it will be Rose or Miaow. Eventually he works out which phone it is and thumbs it open. Arthit says, “I’m looking at your new picture. It just landed on my desk.” He covers the mouthpiece with his hand, and then he’s back. “On everyone’s desk.”

Rafferty’s been worrying about this. They have at least two descriptions of him in his pathetically thin disguise now, one each from the guy on the roof and the kid behind the hotel desk. “How bad is it?”

“It’s terrible. It’s so terrible it’s great. Shen’s guy, up on the roof? He must be really grateful. Your hair’s three inches longer and floppy, and you’re very dark. You look like Hugh Grant playing Gandhi.”

Rafferty steps under the laundry’s awning and tilts the umbrella forward, so it’s between him and the eyes on the sidewalk. The building seems to ripple against his back, and he feels suddenly seasick. He closes his eyes, then hurriedly reopens them. “That’s good, I guess. I’m so tired I halfway wish they’d catch me.”

“Look,” Arthit says, and clears his throat. “I haven’t wanted to bother you with this, but Pim’s run off. Three days ago. She feels guilty, I suppose.”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake. Are you looking for her?”

“She’s not going to want to be found.”

“Who cares what she wants? She’s a baby. She’s going to be somewhere around Soi Seven. She was working the sidewalk outside the Beer Garden when I found her. Where else would she go?”

Arthit says, “Home?”

“No. Tell me, did she ever have any money at all?”

“Never. I had to keep a few hundred baht in a bowl so she could go buy stuff when I called and asked for it.”

“She sent it all home,” Rafferty says. “Every baht. That’s a big family up there. She’s going to be working. Go arrest her.”

“Poke. We’ve actually got bigger problems than Pim.”

“Rose will kill me.”

“I’m telling you, even if I find her, or you find her, she won’t come back to my place. She’s got a problem with-Poke, it was getting really odd around the edges. She’s a sweet, good-hearted girl, but she’s a baby.”

“That’s my point. She can’t be hooking on a sidewalk, not there. You know who she’ll be pulling? Drunks from the Beer Garden who can hardly walk, who’ll take it out on her when they can’t get it up. Guys who haven’t got enough money to go to Nana.”

“I know,” Arthit says, “but I’m telling you, she’s not going to go anywhere with me.”

“Just a couple of minutes ago, I was thinking that one more problem would probably make me cry. I’m on the verge of getting weepy here.”

“Where’s ‘here’?”

“Over near Khao San.”

“Still? Isn’t that kind of slow-learner behavior?”

“I have to be somewhere. You’re changing the subject.”

“I am. She came down to Bangkok alone, and she’s going to have to take care of herself for now. She won’t come back with me, and I haven’t got anyplace else to put her.”

“My apartment?”

“Think, Poke. Have a good cry and see if it clears your mind. Your apartment is almost certainly under surveillance. She’d be safer on a hillside in Afghanistan than at your place. I’ll try to come up with something, okay?”

“Me, too.”

“Anyway, you’ve had some good news today. The new picture is useless.”

“Listen,” Rafferty says, “I don’t get it. About the picture. Shen is working with the Americans, right? I mean, that’s who Murphy is, that’s who Elson is. The Americans could get a good, current picture of me here in about fifteen seconds. Why haven’t they?”

“I’ve been asking the same question. But for now they’re looking for Hugh Grant. In blackface.”

“Still, it’s something to think about. Along with everything else, and Pim.”

“I’ll help her any way I can. From a distance. She’ll bolt if she sees me.”

“Thanks, Arthit. One more thing. Is there any way I can find out whether Murphy has been traveling?”

“Yes,” Arthit says. “You can ask me, ‘Arthit, has Murphy been traveling lately?’ ”

“What, you were saving this as a surprise?”

“I knew you’d appreciate it. And this is why, aside from general karmic reasons, you want me on your side. I wanted to keep this query away from Shen, so I requested a restricted-substances watch on him.”

“Will that really keep the information secret?”

“Secret from everyone who’s not paying for it, like narco bosses. But there’s no reason Shen should be paying for it. Got a pencil?”

“Sure,” Rafferty says, closing his eyes to listen.

“In the past ten days, he’s been down to Yala twice. That was kind of interesting, because he used a chartered plane both times. The second time he filed a flight plan for Phuket and then diverted to Yala.”

“Lot of Muslims in Yala.”

“Majority population in places. Just today a buffalo stepped on a land mine and three kids were killed by automatic fire from a moving car. Buddhists are generally peaceful, but tempers are pretty short down there.”

“Yala,” Rafferty says. “In the south.”

“Yes, Poke, Yala is in the south.”

“Think it’s been sunny down there?”

“Why? Do you want to work on your tan?”

“The man who was killed. The top of his head was sunburned.”

“Hmmm. I don’t know for a fact that it’s been sunny down there, but I’d bet good money it’s been sunnier there than it has been here.”

“Where else has Murphy been?”

“Three nights ago he flew to Kuala Lumpur. Don’t know why. Stayed one night and came back the next.”

“Kuala Lumpur,” Rafferty says with his eyes closed. He’s so tired that he visualizes writing it so he won’t forget. “Thanks, Arthit. Call on this phone for now and leave a message if it’s off. If I toss it, I’ll get you the new number.”

He disconnects and looks up. The clouds have thinned enough to allow the afternoon sun to point a few shiny fingers down, picking out this car and that window and making them gleam unconvincingly against the gray of the day. Rafferty says, “Special effects,” and pushes off the wall, tucking the phones into various pockets. A knot of girls go by, maybe eight of them, crowded beneath three overlapping umbrellas, taking tiny steps to stay together. They’re laughing, and a couple of them eye him. He lets them pass, then falls in behind them, toward the laundry’s door.

A chime rings as he pushes the door open. A woman of forty or so, Southeast Asian but probably not Thai, looks up from stuffing clothes into a bag and gives him a measured smile. She’s behind a waist-high counter, one end of which is piled with unsorted garments of all kinds. As he nears her, he also sees an older woman, silver hair drawn back in a long, loose, shining ponytail, sitting in a chair behind the clothing. Her head is down, and she’s doing something involving a skein of green yarn-crocheting or knitting.

“Yes?” This is the younger woman. She’s not expending the energy most Thais put into a greeting.

“This ticket,” he says, suddenly at something of a loss. “Someone gave it to me, and, uh …”

He fishes it out of his shirt pocket and hands it to her, still folded.

She takes it with a small, polite smile and opens it and stares down at it. When her eyes come up to his, they’re terrified. She says, “You … you … who are you? Who gave you-”

The older woman says something in a language Rafferty doesn’t speak but thinks is Vietnamese. Her tone is sharp enough to bring the other woman to a stop. She stands there, fingering the hole in the ticket, and the fear in her face turns with no transition at all to desolation and then tears. They’re completely silent tears, and they gleam suddenly on her cheeks as the sun pokes another hole in the clouds outside. She brings her empty hand up, straight-fingered, to cover her mouth, but still the tears come, and still she holds Rafferty’s gaze, although he’s not certain she even sees him.

The older woman lifts her head and repeats herself more sternly, and Rafferty sees that she’s blind, her eyelids two swirls of flesh mutilated in some terrible injury, a long time ago.

The crying woman closes her eyes and lets her head droop, an attitude of purest defeat. Her shoulders rise and fall with her sobs, but she still hasn’t made a sound. She leans down and places her fingers gently on the older woman’s wrist and turns her hand palm up. Then she puts the yellow ticket into the waiting hand.

The blind woman’s mouth tightens. Something rough catches in her throat, and the work in her lap slides to the floor, the needles making a faint clinking sound. She passes her fingertips over the surface of the ticket, once, then again, and then-very slowly-again. She lets out a rasp of breath and tightens her hands into fists and brings them up so they meet in front of her heart, and she screams.

“How do we know?” the younger woman says. She regards him out of the corners of her eyes. “You could be anyone.”

The door to the shop has been closed and locked, and the lights in the front room are off. They’ve all moved to the room at the rear, a big, raw room with unpainted walls and a cement floor that smells of starch and ironed cotton and has two walls lined with battered washing machines and dryers. The rain’s pattering sound comes through a glassless, barred window.

He and the younger woman are sitting on folding chairs. The older woman is curled on her side, her back to them, on a cot beneath an enormous, almost painfully colorful calendar depicting some sort of festival in front of a Vietnamese temple. The younger woman has covered her with an old coat.

“I’m just me,” Rafferty says. “He pretty much died in my lap.”

“How many day?” the woman on the cot asks in English without turning. The words are heavily accented. They’re the first words she’s spoken since she released three screams that, Rafferty thought, could have brought her heart up with them.

“Nine,” he says. “Or maybe eight.”

“Why hasn’t it been in the papers?” the younger woman asks. She’s wide-faced, the lower half of her features overhung by extraordinarily prominent cheekbones. Now that she’s not weeping, her eyes are difficult to read.

“I think you know why.”

Both women are silent, but the woman on the cot stiffens.

“He was involved in something secret, something very bad,” Rafferty says. “A long time ago. Looking at you, I’m going to say it was in Vietnam.”

The woman on the cot says, “Who send you?”

“That ticket sent me. He gave it to me.”

“You say so,” says the woman on the cot. “True, not true, how do we know? You go now.”

“Why would I lie to-”

“You kill him, take ticket. Friend of you kill him, give you ticket. You go.”

“He talked to me,” Rafferty says.

A pause. Then, “He say what?”

Rafferty sits back and crosses his arms, realizes how defensive it looks, and uncrosses them, but the sudden chill of caution remains. “I don’t think I’ll tell you. You don’t trust me, and I’m not sure I trust you. I’m at risk here, too.”

The woman on the cot rolls onto her back and turns the brutalized face to him, and he has an uneasy feeling she can see him. She says again, “He say what?”

Rafferty gets up. “I’m sorry I’ve caused you so much sadness. I didn’t know the ticket was … was bad news.” He goes to a small desk and takes a pencil and a piece of yellow paper. “If you want to talk to me, call this number. I won’t answer it, but leave a one-word message on the voice mail. Don’t say who you are-the word will tell me. If it feels okay to me, I’ll either come back here or call you.”

“What word?” asks the younger woman.

Rafferty looks at the older woman and says, “Helen.”

The older woman says, “Wait.”

“No.” He puts the pencil down. “Let’s all think about this.”

“When you come back,” the younger woman says defiantly, “we won’t be here.”

Rafferty says, “I don’t blame you. I wouldn’t be here either, if I had a choice. If you want to talk again, call and say ‘Helen,’ and we’ll figure out a way to meet that makes all of us feel safe.”

The older woman sits up and releases a stream of Vietnamese at her daughter-Rafferty suddenly sees beyond the savagery of what’s been done to her face and finds the resemblance-but he keeps moving, through the door, through the shop. The younger woman follows him, putting a hand on his arm, but he shrugs her off and twists the lock, eager to be out of the shop and back in the cleansing, softening drizzle in the streets.

He’s gone three slow, careful blocks, the umbrella pulled low to cover part of his face, when the phone in his shirt pocket rings. He steps out of the flow of pedestrians, up against a shop window, and does a quick street survey in the time it takes him to close the umbrella and retrieve the phone. No one seems to be paying any attention to him.

This can’t keep up forever. Sooner or later he’s going to look up and find the eyes that are trained on him.

He doesn’t recognize the number on the display. He scans the block again and says, “Hello.”

“Where are you?” It’s a woman’s voice.

“Who is this?”

“Older brother, shame on you, not recognizing my voice. Where are you?”

“I’m in Bangkok.”

“Well, yeah, but where in Bangkok?”

A terrible conviction seizes him. “Where are you?”

“I didn’t want to go to your apartment in case it was uncool or something,” Ming Li says, “so I’m standing around in the rain with a bunch of money in my pocket. And I’m hungry.”

“You’re in Bangkok?” Rafferty says. “But the phone number-”

“Hopeless, you’re hopeless. You need me so badly. It’s a global phone, silly. And it is soooo cool to be here. Asia, I smell Asia again. I thought I’d never smell anything except America as long as I lived. Fabric softener and frying fat, mixed together, that’s what America smells like. Come get your little sister. Buy her something to eat.”