The Fear Artist

19

“Oh, my God, I’m here,” Ming Li says. They’re in a tiny restaurant off of Silom, empty but for them, and she’s got four entree dishes and a bowl of rice in front of her. Two of the dishes are already empty, and the one that’s currently claiming her attention is a hellacious mix of stir-fried basil, crisp pork, and enough tiny red chilies to bring moisture to her brow. “Nothing in America tastes like anything. It’s like reading about food, not eating it.”

He feels like he’s still catching up with the fact that she’s here. And he can’t stop looking at her. She was a striking girl two years ago, and she’s turning into a beautiful young woman. “So, you got through immigration with no problem?”

“I’m eighteen. It says so on my passport.” She breaks off and looks quickly down at the bowl in front of her. The tips of her ears are scarlet. “Boy, this is good,” she says. “Nothing like it in, um, America.”

Rafferty says, “Eighteen. Chinese eighteen or American eighteen?”

“Chinese,” she says to the tabletop.

“So. That makes you seventeen, counting the American way.” He watches her make piles of food at the edge of the bowl. “And when you were here almost two years ago, you were twenty-two.”

She says, “Would you have let me help? If you’d known?”

“Probably not.

She looks up at him for the first time. “And did I make any mistakes? Did I screw up?”

“No.”

“See? I spared you a lot of unnecessary worry. And anyway, you bought it.”

“Actually, I didn’t. I checked it. I asked your-sorry, our-father, and he said …” He breaks off. “Sure,” he says, “Dad said. I should have known right there.”

“Before you beat up on Dad, here.” She reaches into a purse so big that Rose would envy it, pulls out a well-worn American passport, and slides it across the table. “Hello, Bob.”

Rafferty opens it and finds the picture of himself from the back of his books-a good copy this time-and the name Robert Delacroix. It expires in seven months.

“Courtesy of some people in his shop,” Ming Li says. “Although they don’t know it. It’ll be good for hotels and stuff, but I wouldn’t cross any borders.”

Rafferty is flipping through the pages to see where he’s been. “Delacroy or Delacwah?”

“How would I know? I’m from China.”

“Maybe old Bob is from Louisiana.”

“I wouldn’t know that either.” She stops the spoon halfway to her mouth, fans herself with her free hand, and says, “So. Good or no good?”

He smiles at her. Every now and then he catches, in her Asian features, a glimpse of his own, courtesy of their father. “Good. Very good.”

She empties the spoon, then turns it upside down and licks it. “And are you glad to see me? No matter how old I am?”

“I’m … surprised.”

“Don’t go overboard. I fly a hundred thousand miles to bring you a stack of money and a passport, and you don’t even hug me.”

He kisses the tips of his fingers, reaches across and plants them on her forehead, then gives a little shove. He gets a basil-green grin in response. “I’m very, very happy, okay? I’m a little perplexed, because this is a dangerous place.”

Her eyes widen. “Bangkok? You mean, the flooding? It doesn’t seem so-”

“No. Sitting at this table. Being near me.”

“Look,” she says, holding out a rock-steady hand. “I’m shaking. You haven’t actually asked about Dad.”

“How’s Dad?”

“Ehhhhh.” She swivels the hand back and forth. “Fifty-fifty. I just wanted you to ask.”

“And your mom?”

“She’s better than he is.” She picks up the dish and pours a pool of cooking oil, all that’s left of the basil and pork, onto the rice and shovels it into her mouth. Around it she says, “She found a Chinatown somewhere near us, and she goes there on the bus every morning. She plays mah-jongg with a bunch of old ladies, and they cheat her, and then she buys a whole chicken from a Chinese grocery, one they’ve killed in front of her, and brings it home and uses it for soup. She’s very heavily into soup these days.”

“What kind of soup?”

“Who knows? They’ve all got chicken in them, though. Healthy soup. They’re black, mostly, and they’ve got cloud’s ears-that’s a fungus-in them and some shells and I suppose whatever was wearing them and some stringy greens, and they smell kind of awful. They’re good for reducing heat and wind, she says.”

“Well, that’s nice, I guess.”

“It would be if I were hot and windy. But I don’t eat them, and Dad doesn’t really eat them, and-oh, well, it’s all pretty sad. They don’t even talk to each other.”

“He didn’t talk to mine either.”

“So you’ve told me. Over and over.” She leans forward and puts her hand on top of his. “Older brother, how would you feel if he came back here to live?”

“I’d feel like moving.”

“He misses Asia even more than I do.” She gives his hand a businesslike pat. “Think about it for a while. Get used to the idea.”

“I’m already used to it. Asia’s a big place. There are lots of continents available to him.”

She puts her spoon aside for practically the first time since they sat down, and he feels a little pang of guilt. “All right, all right,” he says. “I’ll think about it, but don’t get optimistic.”

“Don’t you want to know how much he sent you?”

“Why, yes, I would, Ming Li. How much did he send me?”

“Twenty K.”

Rafferty says, “Well, well.”

“I played on his guilt,” she says, grabbing the spoon again and sorting through a mound of pad thai as though she’s counting the shrimp. “He does feel guilty, you know.”

“I’m sure it’s eating him alive. But the money is welcome. Where are you staying?”

Her eyebrows vault toward her hairline. “With you.”

“But where’s your stuff?”

She pats the big purse. “In here.” She pulls out a couple of folded shirts, a pair of jeans, and a little bag of sample-size soap and shampoo and puts them on the table. “Tourist cover,” she says, and she shows him a small silver digital camera and a spiral notebook. The notebook says MY TRAVEL JOURNAL in bright yellow letters. “Smile,” she says, and takes his picture. “Got a little computer and everything.”

“Ming Li,” he says, trying to see through the black hole in his vision where the flash went off. “When did you land in Bangkok?”

A shrug, the same shrug Miaow does to indicate a question not worth answering. She’s putting things back into the bag. “I don’t know. Three hours ago?”

“Well, turn around and go back. This isn’t going to work. The people who are looking for me don’t play nicely.”

“That’s exactly why you need me.” She offers him a dripping spoon, and he shakes his head. “An extra pair of eyes, a messenger no one’s ever seen before, someone who can do one thing while you’re doing something else, a trained surveillance artist who could follow a flea across a dog, a trained surveillance spotter who’ll pick up on a watcher way before you do.…”

“No.”

“And someone who instantly turns you into half of a couple, not a creepy-looking solo guy with dark makeup and a hairstyle even Hugh Grant gave up on years ago.”

“I know,” he says. “I know about the hair-”

She drops the spoon in the pad thai. “And the other thing about me is that I look like everybody here. Someone arrests you, I just take a step back and they won’t even see me.”

“No.”

“And I’ve got computer skills that make you look like someone who’s just learning to work a calculator.”

“All right,” he says, gratified by the surprise in her face. “Computer skills I can use. For the moment anyway. Have you finished eating?”

“I eat when you want me to,” Ming Li says, pushing the plate away and standing up. “Let’s go save your butt, older brother.”

He’s not even halfway through his coffee before Ming Li says, “Whoa.”

While he was still ordering, she had pulled a little MacBook Air out of her bag and logged into Coffee World’s router, and from that point on she’d been lost to him. He’d put down her tea and sweet rolls and stood there, feeling large and aimless, as she ignored him. A couple of young men looked at her and then at him, and he could almost see them dismissing him as competition: Guy thinks he looks like Hugh Grant. He finally said, “Well, just call if you need anything else,” and went to sit facing the window as the dusk wrapped itself around the drizzle and lights popped on. And then she’d said, “Whoa.”

“Whoa what?”

“Whoa the Wyoming Eagle Tribune. You need to read this.” She gets up, grabs one of the rolls, takes out half of it with a single bite, and then passes him the computer one-handed. It’s even lighter than his netbook, back in the hotel room.

He’s looking at a headline that reads CHEYENNE WOMAN KILLED.

He’d known it, he’d known it almost all along. That phone was ringing in a bad house. He opens his eyes, which he hadn’t realized he’d squeezed shut, and goes back to the screen.

Helen Eckersley had been discovered in her living room by her maid. Eckersley had, the local sheriff said, “been beaten repeatedly over a period of twenty-four hours or more with a poker from her own fireplace set.”

“They hurt her for a whole day,” Ming Li says, leaning over his shoulder. “They had questions.”

According to a department spokesperson, the paper says, the killers broke all the bones in her arms and legs, as well as her collarbones, before shattering her skull. Some of the injuries were almost a full day older than others. The newspaper’s description of the murder is “merciless, prolonged, and brutal.”

“I’m glad they tell us it was brutal,” Ming Li says. “We might have missed it.”

Rafferty can feel the pulse thumping inside his left wrist as he finishes reading. “Any updates?”

“Not on this site. I’m going to look in a few other places.”

Reading, Rafferty says, “And good luck to him.”

“Who?”

“The mayor, who’s the usual local gasbag. Says the killers will ‘be pursued tirelessly.’ They have no idea what just hit them.”

Ming Li is running her fingernail lightly down the screen as she reads the end of the story. “What did?”

“The same thing that’s after me right now. Notice what’s not here?”

She leans closer, as if he’s challenged her to spot something very small. “No. What?”

“Her age. Her family. Her marital status. Anything that indicates that she didn’t just materialize unnoticed in Cheyenne from some other dimension. None of the inevitable neighbors seem to have come forward to say the things they always say: ‘She kept to herself.’ ‘I never thought anything like this could happen here.’ She seems-I don’t know-disconnected. There’s no background information: ‘A native of Purdue, Indiana, Ms. Eckersley worked at the Cheyenne Public Library, and raised hydrangeas’-that kind of stuff.”

“Maybe she wasn’t from there.”

Rafferty remembers the little curlicues in the way she spoke. “I’m pretty sure she wasn’t.”

Ming Li says, “Nobody deserves to die like that.”

Rafferty says, “A lot of people have died like that.”

A long, cold cup of coffee later, it’s 9:30 P.M. and Rafferty’s reached the point where the caffeine is actually making him sleepier when Ming Li says, “Nothing much more. I’ve been through everything I can find, and they’re still looking for whoever did it, and the sheriff is still saying they’ll get him.”

“What time is it?”

“You have a watch.”

“What time is it in Wyoming?”

She looks at her own watch and bangs the keys for a second. “About eight-thirty A.M.”

“Well, I suppose morgues open early.”

She cocks her head to one side, waiting for the rest of it.

He takes out his newest cell phone, the one he hasn’t used, and hands it to her. “Get the phone number for the morgue in Cheyenne, or call the sheriff’s office if you can’t find the morgue and ask them for it.”

“I’ll find the morgue.”

“Give yourself an accent. You’re calling from Bangkok to see whether Helen Eckersley’s body has been claimed. If they ask who you are, you say something like, ‘I’m calling on behalf of the family of a woman from here, a Thai woman who called herself Helen, who ran away from her husband in America several years ago and took a new last name, which the family doesn’t know. The last anyone heard, she was in Wyoming. They’re worried because she hasn’t called them or returned calls for ten days or so. If someone has claimed Ms. Eckersley’s body, or if she’s not Asian, then she’s not the woman we’re looking for.’ ”

“ ‘And if no one has, and if she’s Asian,’ ” Ming Li says in a businesslike voice, reading a number off the screen and pushing the buttons on the phone, “ ‘maybe we can help you identify her.’ ”

“Good.”

She looks up at him, waiting for the phone on the other end to ring. “You need me,” she says. Then she says, “Hello?” and goes into her pitch.

Listening to her voice without even hearing the words, he realizes again what their father has turned her into. Living in China, at the mercy of the Triad he worked for, Frank Rafferty had transformed his half-Chinese daughter into an asset. By the time she was eight, she was following people. At ten she was running low-level cons and forging signatures. At twelve she was helping to plan their escape, carrying in her head secrets that would have killed her father, her mother, and herself if someone had wormed them out of her. He’d worked with her, Frank had, until she had a coat of solid brass and her English was accent-free and she was fluent in Mandarin and Cantonese, and in her spare time he had her throwing fastballs in their courtyard in preparation for their annual ritual of watching the World Series on satellite. When Poke met her, she was capable of pegging him with a hard, wet lychee pit at sixty feet, and she had.

And Frank, self-exiled in Asia, had talked to her endlessly about his lost son. About Poke, whose mother he’d abandoned to flee to China when Poke was seventeen. When Frank and Ming Li had emerged from China for an unexpected and unwanted reunion a few years back, Poke had been surprised and even touched to learn how much she knew about him, this girl whose existence he’d never even suspected. He’d softened slightly toward his father, begun to think there might be a relationship there after all. And then Poke’s father had pulled yet another con.

Even her body language, as she works the phone, is efficient, precise, persuasive. Instead of her usual teenage sit-on-the-lungs posture, she’s perched bolt upright, her spine an inch or two from the back of the chair. Her free hand pats at her hair, as though she’s moments away from getting up and going into a meeting. There’s a half smile on her face; she obviously knows that people can hear a smile even if they don’t realize it.

Her eyebrows go up and her eyes widen in misleading candor as she asks a question. He turns back to the window, not sure how he feels about any of this. She’s seventeen, no matter what her passport says, and her father has turned her into a professional, a con artist and a premature cynic who finds the entirety of American civilization wanting. Miaow, at twelve or thirteen, has reservoirs of scorn, but as someone who was abandoned on the sidewalk at the age of two or three, she’s earned it.

Ming Li is the only sister he’s ever had. What has his miserable father done to her?

Reflected in the window, he sees her stand up, and he opens his mouth wide to clear his face of whatever expression he’d been wearing and turns to face her.

She says, “Helen Eckersley was Asian.”