The Fear Artist

24

That night soldiers and emergency workers slap another hundred thirty thousand sandbags on the dikes in the city’s lower-lying areas. The river rises silently, running fast between its banks. More water is diverted into more canals, and more canals overflow. The national death toll from the flood is estimated at more than three hundred and, like the water, rising.

That night Rose opens her eyes on the thin mat of folded clothes she and Miaow use as a bed and realizes she’s alone. She gets up silently, not wanting to wake Fon’s parents, and tiptoes outside. Through a clearing in the clouds, a half-moon gleams, sharp-edged and pockmarked in the clear night air, and fifteen meters away she sees her daughter, sitting against the town’s biggest tree, with her knees drawn up and her head down, misery in every curve of her body.

Miaow doesn’t look up as Rose sits beside her on the wet earth, but she leans against her mother, and Rose can feel her shoulders shaking. Water drips musically from the tree.

When she’s gotten herself under control, Miaow wipes her nose with her index finger and says, “I’m so sad.”

Rose hugs her a little closer. “I know, baby, but we’ll go home soon.”

Miaow swallows loudly and says, “I want … I want a steak.”

“Well, that’s easy-”

“Why do I have to pretend I’m special all the time? I’m not a vegan. I was just trying to be different, to be … be … be special-”

Rose strokes her hair, something Miaow normally won’t permit. “Everyone tries to be special, Miaow.”

“No they don’t,” Miaow says. “You-”

“Sweetie, Poke and I aren’t any different-”

“Not you and Poke,” Miaow says, and Rose feels her own eyebrows climb. “It’s Andrew. He doesn’t pretend to be anything. He’s just dweeby and weird with his stupid glasses and his … his … his pants too high and his-oh, his hair. He dyed his hair to match mine because it never occurred to him I’d dye mine to match his. Ohhhh,” Miaow wails, throwing her arms around her mother’s neck, “I miss Andrew so much.”

That night Pim’s second customer passes out on top of her, in the middle of saying something. She waits politely for him to finish speaking, and when she realizes he won’t, she rocks him back and forth, using her elbows against the mattress for leverage, until he rolls off, landing on his back on the edge of the bed, his knuckles brushing the carpet.

Pim shakes him twice, saying, “Hello,” because she doesn’t remember his name. He begins to snore.

She gets up and pulls on her clothes, looks around the room, and sees his trousers on the carpet in front of the bathroom door. The wallet is in the right-hand back pocket, and she eases it out, looking for her sixteen hundred baht. What she sees is a stack of American twenties as thick as a comic book. She works two out, and then the nameless man snores again, loudly enough to make her jump, and she takes five more, and then five after that. She jams the money into the back pocket of her jeans and quietly lets herself out.

Thirty minutes later she’s sitting in an alley off Sukhumvit with her back against a fence made of chain-link and big sheets of rippled green plastic, with her legs crossed and a flimsy plastic Ziploc bag in her lap. From the bag she takes an aluminum-foil pipe and a big, crumbly pinch of crushed yaa baa tablets. She pushes the speed into the bowl of the pipe, being careful not to bend the pipe so sharply it’ll crimp the air flow, and then-with the pipe dangling loosely from her mouth-she breaks a wooden match, licks it to get it wet enough that it won’t catch fire, and shoves the sharp end into the jet of a disposable butane lighter. A flick of the wheel shows her that the flame is still fat and yellow and soft, so she turns up the flow and wiggles the splinter of wet wood to close the opening some more, burning her fingertips, until the lighter produces a blue needle of flame. Then she points the needle into the pipe and hits the smoke, and her heart rises eagerly to greet its new friend. This is the first time she’s done it alone. This is the first time she hasn’t had to share.

As she exhales and hits it again, she sees Arthit’s sad, disapproving eyes. She slams her own eyes shut and fills her lungs until they feel like they’ll explode.

In less than a minute, the Earth, with Arthit and her family and everyone else pinned helplessly to its surface, is a thousand feet below her and, all alone in the sky, she can look down on the dark, folded world with cities gleaming in its seams. It’s so beautiful she thinks she might cry.

That night Vladimir uses his teeth to unscrew the cap from his second bottle of vodka. He’s in his same old room but sitting on the new Kirghiz carpet he bought with the money Rafferty paid him.

He reaches for his empty glass, but it dodges at the last moment and he knocks it over. He closes one eye and fixes the glass with a glare until he’s wrapped his fingers around it. As he pours, he asks himself for the thirtieth or fortieth time since he opened the first bottle how much he could earn by telling what he knows-from a safe distance, of course-to Murphy. He asks again the corollary question: Who is more likely to be alive in a few days, Murphy or Rafferty? When this is over, who will he have to share Bangkok with? He gets the same answer he’s been getting all night long. It’s not the answer he wants, but if there’s one thing Vladimir has learned in a lifetime of betraying and being betrayed, it’s that winning is all that matters.

The rain hits the window, hard as a handful of nails.

But there remains the problem, he thinks as he raises the glass. There remains the problem of Baby Spy. He could not do this to Baby Spy. So much youth, so much promise, such a beautifully devious nature. He could do nothing to harm her. His soul, his magnificent Russian soul, would not permit it.

His eyes fill up in admiration of the oceanic vastness of his soul, even as the dry clockwork of his mind says, There must be a way to get her off the stage, just for the amount of time it would take.

That night Anna awakes with a start, breathing fast, feeling as though she’s been in free fall. It’s the second time in a few days this has happened. She finds herself wrapped in Arthit’s arms again; he’s been hugging her in his sleep as though he’s afraid she’ll dissolve before he can wake up.

She eases herself loose, hearing him murmur a protest, but he’s still asleep. His breathing is deep and regular, his face-when she turns to look at it-is soft, relieved of the tension it harbors all day, tension that really abandons it only when he sleeps.

And, she thinks, with a tiny pinch in her heart, when he looks at her.

His hair always gets flattened by the pillow. The second morning she woke up with him, she went to the kitchen and got him some coffee and then steered him to a mirror and wrote a note saying it looked as if someone had ironed him. He had laughed a mouthful of coffee onto the mirror, and that sad little maid, whatever her name was, had come running at the sound

A thousand things had gone through the girl’s face. She’d been happy and amazed to hear him laugh, but she hadn’t known Anna was there, and the girl’s head was made of glass. Anna could see everything.

The poor kid.

Anna has one of what she’s come to think of as her moments, when she feels as though all the strings that run through her life, the ones that attach her to her work, to her son, to her future and his, to the promises and commitments she’s made, the bad decisions and the good, have tangled inside her into a giant, misshapen knot she’ll never be able to untie and isn’t allowed to cut. She knows that whatever she does next will be wrong.

In a whisper even she can barely hear, she says to Arthit, “I had no idea this would happen. Please,” she says, “you have to believe me. I never thought it would turn out like this.”

That night at 4:20 A.M., Murphy’s headlights illuminate the opening gate, and he stops the car with a jerk. Unsure of what he’s seeing, he hits the remote again to reverse the gate’s course. Then he turns on the high beams and gets out of the car, leaving the engine idling and the door open. Ignoring the rain, he moves quickly to the gate, keeping to one side so his shadow in the headlights doesn’t obscure what’s stuck there.

It’s not until he’s practically on top of it that the object resolves itself into what he actually knew it was at first sight: a human ear. The hairs that rise on the back of his neck don’t go down again until he touches it and realizes it’s plastic.

He rips it from the gate and finds himself automatically beginning to slip it into his shirt pocket. Time folds around him, and he’s back there, with the old blood on his pocket and the weight of the reeking necklace bumping against his chest. His heart galloping, he pulls the folded, sodden piece of paper off the thumbtack that secures it. Tilting it toward the headlights and opening it up, he sees, in thick black lines, two words in Vietnamese that he automatically translates: Four survivors. He backs away until his shoulder blades touch the gate, folding the paper as though to hide the words from prying eyes, and slowly turns in a half circle, looking for the enemy.

Back in the car, he watches in the rearview mirror as the gates close safely behind him. When he’s pulled in to his usual parking space in front of the house, he shuts off the engine and sits there, his hands still on the wheel, feeling the muscles in his shoulders and back bunch and jump like those of someone who’s been wired to a field generator. He waits until it’s stopped and his breathing has smoothed out, and then he gets out of the car, leaving the note and the plastic ear on the passenger seat.

He’s just keyed in the front-door combination and pushed the door open when something cold touches the back of his neck, and for a second his heart slams itself shut so hard he thinks he’s dying. But then he smells her.

As he turns slowly to face her, Treasure backs away, out of arm’s length, holding his automatic in both hands, in the approved shooter’s position. It’s pointed directly at his heart. Her face is blackened except for the narrow, skin-colored strip that contains the bridge of her nose and her wide, wide eyes. When she smiles and takes another step back, he sees that she’s also somehow blackened her teeth.

“If this was a real war,” Treasure says, shivering with some unreadable emotion, “you’d be dead now.”

In the house the alarm begins to shrill.

That night, A little before five in the morning, Rafferty snaps awake to a high, repetitive bleat, coming from the clutter of cell phones on the bedside table. He rolls over, spots the one that’s blinking, and picks it up. Presses the button to answer but says nothing.

“Hello?” a woman says. She’s American. “Hello? Is anyone there?”

He says nothing. He doesn’t know the voice.

“Are you there? Is this voice mail, is that it?” She waits as Rafferty silently counts to three. “Well, if it is, I’m calling Mr. Rafferty? You’ve phoned me several times, but I wasn’t able to return the call, and I’m sorry about that, but here I am at last. Sorry about the time, too, but I just landed. You’ve got my hotel number in your phone now, and I’m in Bangkok. Oh,” she says, “silly me. This is Helen Eckersley.”

Rafferty waits until she’s hung up. He powers the phone off and pops out the SIM card. Then he pulls the battery from the back, just to be sure. With a loud sigh, he gets up and crosses the room, slides the water glass out of its clear plastic sleeve, and drops the card and the battery into the sleeve, knotting it so they can’t slip out. He goes into the bathroom and turns on the hot water, letting it run to get it as hot as possible as he flips on lights in the bedroom and opens his deteriorating shoulder bag. Throws in the plastic sleeve and then wads up the day’s T-shirt and stuffs it in, too.

When he’s finished with the bag, he pours both the room’s packets of instant coffee into the glass and totes the glass into the bathroom, where he runs the hot water into it, stirring with his finger. Two minutes later, wearing a mustache of powdered coffee, he calls Ming Li’s room and gives her five minutes to pack and meet him in the hall.

At 5:28 A.M., they check into a third-class hotel several kilometers away. Rafferty slides the Delacroix passport across the desk, expecting the clerk to reject it, but all he does is look quizzically at Ming Li, photocopy the page with Rafferty’s photo on it, and hand it back, along with a room key. Aside from the two of them and the clerk, the huge lobby is empty, and Rafferty feels the man’s eyes on them all the way to the elevator.

Up in the room, Ming Li offers to take the couch, since she’s the shorter of the two, but Rafferty claims it, and as she snores daintily on top of the still-made bed, he gazes down at the predawn lights of Bangkok and realizes-for the first time-that when someone thinks he’s looking at city lights, 90 percent of what he sees is darkness.