The Fear Artist

32

The woman in the bed is beautiful and tiny. She lies on her back, one hand dangling off the side of the mattress. Her eyes are half open, focused on the far edge of the world. Rafferty passes a hand over them, but she’s either unconscious or so deeply intoxicated that she doesn’t register the movement. The room smells stickily of artificial cherry from the two open bottles of cough syrup on the table. He lifts the glass beside them and smells the cherry again, floating against a background of whiskey.

This is Murphy’s life, he thinks. This overstuffed, leaking house, the woman who’s never here, the one dying slowly in the bed, and the child who sleeps beneath that schizophrenic ceiling. The narrow bed, the chipped dresser, the black-and-white memories in the locked room. Whatever it is that visits him when he sleeps. Murphy’s life is all collateral damage.

Tikka-tikka-tikka-tikka comes the sound from the room at the end of the hall. He takes a deep breath, touches the gun again as though it’s a talisman, and leaves the bedroom and its unconscious mistress, heading down the hall toward the light. The pressure of passing time pushes at his back, making him walk a little faster.

The room is big and brightly lit, and on a huge raised platform a small, golden train races around a curving track. The miniature landscape is Southeast Asia, someplace where rubber is grown. Standing just inside the doorway, watching the train click its way through the intricate loops and over the tiny hills, he says, “Hello.”

No response, but he knows she’s here. He can smell her, and it almost breaks his heart. No child should smell like that. No child should be here.

After a moment a voice says, “Who are … are you?”

“A friend of your father’s.”

Silence, except for the train. It negotiates a tight curve, just barely, and Rafferty says, “Should this be going so fast?”

“You don’t, you, you don’t know how to slow it down,” the voice says, and this time Rafferty locates it; it comes from behind the open door to the kitchen.

“I can figure it out,” he says. “I think.”

“You look stupid,” says the voice. “You’re too stu-stupid to figure it out.”

“Maybe,” Rafferty says. “Maybe I’m smart enough to wear a stupid mask.”

Another pause. Then, in an almost-musical tone, “You forgot something. When you were here before.”

“Did I?”

“Look at the roof of the train station, Mr., Mr. Stupid.”

He goes to the table, one eye on the door. It takes him a moment to find what he’s looking for in the tiny world; there are dozens of isolated structures and two small towns in the landscape, but then he sees the station and the pink thing on its roof. “My ear,” he says. “I lose ears all the time. I drop them everywhere.”

The silence this time is so long he wonders whether she has an escape route of some kind. Then, very slowly at the edge of the door, a tangle of reddish black hair comes into view, followed by a cheek, an eye, and a nose. Precisely half a face, no more, dark as the night outside but for the strip, shockingly pale, that contains her eye and the bridge of her nose.

She can’t be much older than Miaow.

“Ears don’t fall off,” she says slowly. “You have to cut them off.”

“Mine do,” Rafferty says. He reaches up and tugs his real ear, where it protrudes through the hole in the side of the mask. “And then they grow back.”

“No,” she says, and it’s almost a shout. Her one visible eye, which has been fixed on his, wanders downward, going aimlessly left and right, as though she’s reading something written on the air or on a falling page, and then the movement stops and she’s looking at a spot on the floor about halfway between them. A pink tongue touches the center of her lower lip and then disappears. The energy that had been animating her face seems to have fled. Dully, she says, “They stay off.”

“Why are your teeth black?” Rafferty asks.

She doesn’t move, and she continues to stare at the floor, but a moment later she says, “What?”

“Why are your teeth black?”

The face disappears behind the door again. “So I can smile in the dark.”

He feels the connection between them fraying, and he urgently wants to maintain it. He says, without a moment’s thought, “Could you make mine black, too?”

“I don’t get that close,” she says without reappearing.

He moves carefully, making no quick gestures and not looking in her direction, to the edge of the train table and locates the transformer. “You’re right,” he says. “I don’t know how to slow it down. Can you fix it?”

“You have to go away,” she says. “Back to the door you came in through.”

“Fine, here I go.” He backs up. “I’m in the door. Do you want me to go farther?”

“No. Just stay there.”

She comes out from behind the door. Beneath the dark charcoal, her face is beautiful, with a high, narrow nose, the full lower lip he’d seen on the small sleeping woman, and eyes that could be Lao or Vietnamese. But she’s far too thin, her knees below the smudged nightgown swollen like parentheses. The skin of her legs is scraped, punctuated by bruises and insect bites. Her feet are muddy. One of them-the right-is bleeding, leaving little stencil marks of red on the carpet as she walks. Twigs and leaves are caught in the tangles of her hair. Her eyes look into his and beyond them, and he can almost feel her gaze scraping the back of his skull. She never looks away as she moves. Not until she stops, at the edge of the train table, do her eyes drift downward, and once again he has the sensation of something, a current or something, being disconnected. He says, “Are you sure I shouldn’t back up some more?”

Instead of answering him, she turns to the train table and looks down at it until Rafferty actually begins to wonder if she’s forgotten he’s there. But then she reaches out long fingers and adjusts the lever on the transformer, and the train slows. She says, “Take off your mask.”

“If you take yours off.”

She turns her head partway toward him, but her eyes remain on the table. “It doesn’t come off.”

“Okay,” he says. “I’ll take mine off anyway.” He pulls it over his head and waits, but she’s not looking at him. He says, “Why are you by yourself?”

“Mommy One had too many cheerses,” she says. “Mommy Three is out with a boy somewhere, fucking. One of our maids has a boy, too, the maid who let you and your friend in.”

“Cheerses?”

“You know.” She mimes holding a glass and lifts it toward him and says, brightly, “Cheers.”

“Why does she do that?” Rafferty asks.

“She wants to die, but she’s trying to do it by accident.”

“Has she told you that?”

The girl’s lip curls. “I don’t talk to her. She’s weak.”

“You said Mommy One and Mommy Three. Where’s Mommy Two?”

“She went into the river,” she says. “In Laos.”

“How long ago?”

She doesn’t look down at her hand, but first the thumb and then all four fingers curl under, one at a time, and Rafferty can almost hear her counting. “When I was seven.”

“And now you’re twelve.”

Her eyes flick up to his and then away again. “How do you know?”

“I have a daughter. She’s twelve.”

She nods, fiddling with one of the little trees on the table and taking in the information. “Do you like her?”

Rafferty’s voice feels hoarse when he says, “I love her.”

Now she looks at his face, inspecting it as though she expects a test on what he looks like. “What are you?” she asks.

“A lot of things. Anglo and Filipino, mostly. What about you?”

“Lao, Thai, and what my, my, my father is.”

“We’re both mix-ups,” he says.

She shrugs the topic away and looks back at the train layout. “If you’re smart, why did you wear a stupid mask?”

“If people don’t know you’re smart, you can surprise them.”

She sticks out her lower lip, possibly thinking about it.

“Why wear a mask that looks like you?” he says. He realizes he’s talking because he half expects her to vanish, like smoke. “If you’re stupid, you wear a smart mask. If you’re mean, you wear a nice mask. That’s what a mask is, something to hide who you really are.”

She says nothing.

“What does yours hide?”

She pulls back her lips and shows him the black teeth, the gums above and below them a startling pink by contrast. “Nothing. This is me. Back up some more.”

He takes three steps back, but she seems to have lost interest in him. Looking down at the world on the table, she says, “I can see things.”

“I’m sure you can.”

“I saw you and your girlfriend come in. I saw you surprise that stupid Hwa.”

“The maid?”

“Hwa,” she says sharply. “Her name is Hwa. She’s going to quit soon, but she doesn’t know I know about it.” She slows the train and speeds it up again. “I see all sorts of things.”

“I believe you.”

She leans over the train setup and moves something Rafferty can’t see, just a rapid movement with her hand. “Do you see things?”

“Sometimes.”

“How old is your daughter?”

“Twelve. Same as you.”

“What’s her name?”

“Miaow,” Rafferty says. “Like the sound a cat makes.”

She’s looking at whatever she moved in the miniature jungle, but he thinks she knows to a millimeter how far away he is. “My name is,” she says. She adjusts something on the table. She opens her mouth and closes it, opens and closes it again. “My name is Treasure.”

“That’s a beautiful name.”

“My,” she says.

He waits.

She turns her face partway to him again, but her eyes remain on the table. “My, my father named me.”

“Aaahhh,” Rafferty says, at a complete loss. “Well, you’re the only-”

“My father did,” she says. “Are you really my, my, my father’s friend?”

Rafferty says, “What do you think, Treasure?”

She says, “I think he’ll kill you.”

What he wants to do is approach her slowly and put his arms around her, but he doesn’t think that’s a language she’s learned. “Maybe he will,” he says. “Can I come in?”

“Five steps,” she says. “One, two, three, four, five.” She backs away a step for every one he comes forward, and then she turns and runs to the wall with the big windows in it, windows that are bordered by long, dark green velvet curtains. She pushes one of the curtains aside and then wraps the lower part of it around her waist and legs. “You can’t come here,” she says.

“Fine.” He says, “Look,” and takes three steps toward her, and as she starts to step to the side, he comes to a sudden stop. Feeling like a bad mime, he puts his hands up and pushes them, flat and open, against an imaginary pane of glass. “This is as far as I can go.”

She tilts her head to one side and startles him by emitting a short, very high syllable that sounds like Eeeeee. She says, “Do it again, do it again.”

“If you want me to.” He goes back to the table and takes the same three steps, and this time he not only stops but also pulls his head back as though he’s hit it on something, then rubs his forehead and mimes the pane of glass again.

Treasure is leaning forward, one arm wrapped in the curtain, and she’s biting on a thumbnail. She says, her voice high and the words tumbling over one another, “And I can walk through it and you can’t, you can’t, but I can.”

“That’s right.” He moves to the right, and she counters warily in the other direction, her face suddenly stiff, but then he edges left again, always moving his hands over the invisible pane of glass. “And I can’t get around it either.”

“Only me,” she says. “Only I can go through it. Even if you’re mad at me, you can’t go through it.”

“I’m not going to get mad at you.” He goes back to the table and looks around the room. “I can’t go over there where you are, but is it okay if I look at the rest of this room?”

“Yes.” She passes her tongue quickly over her lips. “If, if, if, if you want to come over here, you let me, me, move first, and when I’m somewhere else I’ll tell you a magic word so you can get through.”

“Awwww,” he says. “Tell it to me now.”

“No. Only when I’m somewhere else.”

“All right. But over here is okay?” He indicates his half of the room. “You’re sure?”

“If I, if I tell you to stop-”

“I’ll stop.”

“Fine.”

There are bookshelves, the big table, and a door that he thinks probably leads to a closet. He checks the shelves first, but it’s just stuff: a lot of metal toys including an assortment of train components, a few creased paperback books with nothing hidden in them, some more old china like the junk in the sideboard, a small coin collection on cotton under glass, with a Purple Heart in the middle of it. Improbably, a snow globe. On one end of the second shelf, a small, mud-daubed bird’s nest.

Rafferty traces its shape in the air, his fingers inches from it, careful not to touch it. “This is yours.”

“How do you know?” She’s leaning far forward, her weight borne by the velvet curtain.

“You’re the only one who would have seen it.”

“I saw it. In a tree. Down there, too.”

He looks at the shelf below and sees a paper wasp’s nest. “How did you get this? They would have stung you.”

“They did. Here and here and here. And on my eye. My eye was closed for a long time. I couldn’t tell how far away he, he, he-”

“I had one when I was a boy. But I waited until they were gone.”

“I wanted it,” she says.

“It’s beautiful.” He goes to the closet and says, “I’m going to open this door.”

“My, my father will be mad.”

Rafferty jumps back as though he’s frightened. “Is he in here?”

He gets the Eeeeeeee again, and she sways back and forth in the curtain. “He’s not here. If he was here, I couldn’t talk to you. I can only talk to, to, to him.”

“Well, here goes.” He turns the knob, but the door is locked.

“You don’t see things,” she says. She sounds disappointed.

“Not like you do. Can you teach me?”

“It’s secret.”

“Gee,” Rafferty says regretfully. “I really wanted to look inside, too.”

“Are you going to say, say thank you?”

“Of course.”

“Go over there. To the train.”

He does as he’s told. Treasure steps back toward the wall and pulls the curtain over her until she’s completely hidden, except for her face. Then she puts a hand over her eyes.

She says, “I can’t see you.”

He scans the miniature world frantically, but there is so much detail: hundreds of little trees, all those structures, the tracks, the towns, the train stations. One small one, one a little bigger, and one-

The biggest train station. There it is, brass dulled with use, on the floor beneath the ceiling of the train station. He has to slip a single finger in to fish it out. A Gardner key, the kind usually used to open safe-deposit boxes.

He picks it up and palms it, then says, “Thank you.”

Treasure hums, a disjointed melody without a key.

She continues to hum as he goes back to the closet door and raises both hands above his head. The humming stops. Mumbling something he hopes sounds magical, he rubs his hands together and then brings them to the left side of his head and pretends to pull the key out of his ear.

She has spread the fingers of the hand over her face to look at him, but she doesn’t say anything, so Rafferty unlocks the door and pulls it open.

He sees a few bright tropical shirts hanging on a rod, six medium-size hard-sided leather briefcases, and two bricks of something wrapped in dark plastic. Everything is very neat, the angles precise, the edges of the briefcases, stacked on their sides with the handles facing him, plumb straight.

He pulls one of the briefcases out.

“It’s money,” Treasure says. “They’re all money.”

“Can I open one?”

She says nothing, just sways back and forth in the curtain and begins to hum again. She seems to be losing interest.

He goes down on one knee and pops the clips on the briefcase. Hundred-dollar bills, all facing the same way, gleam greenly up at him. He does a quick estimate: sixteen stacks, maybe four hundred bills to a stack, is $640,000. Six cases. Four million dollars, give or take. He removes Ming Li’s camera from his pants pocket, turns off the flash, and photographs the money. Then he closes the snaps and puts the case back.

“And this?” he says, touching the plastic wrap.

“Boom,” she says. “Uncle Eddie.”

“Uncle Eddie,” he says. “Did you see him yesterday?”

“Yes. But he, he didn’t see me.”

“Nobody sees you,” he says, “unless you want them to.” Then he closes the briefcase and puts it back in the closet. He’s about to pick up one of the plastic-wrapped bricks when she speaks.

“I know where the boom is,” she says.

“It’s here, isn’t it?”

“It’s there,” she says. “Too.”

He looks over his shoulder at her, but she’s hanging by one hand from the curtain, looking at the train table.

“He, he, he moved it,” she says. “From here to there and then here again. To fool me. But I, I, I know where it is.”

Rafferty gets up and goes back to the table. It’s not just Southeast Asia, he realizes. It’s someplace specific. Positioning himself so she can’t see what he’s doing, he takes the camera out again and snaps three shots of the tabletop. As he puts the camera back, he says, “It’s here somewhere, isn’t it?”

“A clue,” she says accusingly. “I left you a clue. You don’t see anything.”

“You’re so smart,” he says. Relatively close to him and a little to his left is a stretch of track that leads through rubber plantations, paralleling a two-lane road. It goes past the train station where he found the key and then skirts a small village. On the track, about ten inches from the train station, on the opposite side from the station, is the plastic ear from his mask.

“The train will be coming toward me, right?” he says. “There will be people in the station and people on the train.”

“The boom is Plan A,” she says. “The fire is Plan B. Plan C is the boom and the-”

Her voice breaks off. He hears the curtain slide over her, and then he hears a noise from the door to the kitchen that stops the blood in his veins.

“He doesn’t need to know what Plan C is,” Murphy says. He pushes Ming Li in ahead of him, the revolver in his hand pointed at the center of her back. “Treasure’s not usually so friendly. You’re lucky she didn’t sink her teeth into you.” He gives Ming Li another push. “Go over to your friend.”

“Brother,” she says, joining Rafferty at the table. She’s not wearing the mask, and her eyes are all over the room.

“Treasure,” Murphy says, “come out from there. Now. You don’t want me to have to come get you.”

The green curtain slides aside. Treasure’s face hangs down, hidden by her hair. She seems to be looking directly at her feet.

“Go to the dining room,” he says. “Get the magic chair. Now.”

She runs across the room and out through the door. For that moment Murphy’s eyes are on her, and Rafferty raises his hand to put it on Ming Li’s shoulder, but Murphy points the gun at him and shakes his head. Ming Li has turned her own head to follow Treasure, and when she looks back to Murphy, her eyes are as hard and black as onyx.

Murphy leans against the train table. The locomotive continues its tikka-tikka-tikka path past his left hand, its engineer unaware of the giant in the sky. “Where are your Viet witnesses?”

“I don’t know.”

“We’ll see about that.”

“I don’t know. Not any more than Bey did.”

“Bey? Oh, Bey. Right. In Wyoming. That was her real name, wasn’t it?”

“It was.”

“She didn’t mention more witnesses. Maybe Paul didn’t ask. Do they exist?”

“Four of them. But I don’t know where they are.”

Murphy says, “Mmm-hmmm.” He seems to be thinking about something else.

“But Bey did say that Billie Joe was in Bangkok.”

“On the wrong side again,” Murphy says, “working for the poor, persecuted ragheads. All I had to do was get some people on the inside to put out the word about the demonstration, and there he was. And there you were, too.”

“By accident.”

“Looks like it. He told you Eckersley’s name. Why didn’t you just say so? I probably would have watched you for a little bit and then let you go.”

“I didn’t remember it.”

“Doesn’t matter now. Doesn’t much matter about the witnesses either. According to Shen, you’ve fucked me good and proper.” His eyes go to the open closet, and he shakes his head again. “Everything. This little shit just told you everything, didn’t she? My little Treasure.”

“If you hadn’t walked in,” Rafferty says, “I’d have taken her with me.”

“That would have been good. She’s a problem, she is.” He looks toward the door that Treasure disappeared through. “So you found survivors of the massacre. Talked to the newspapers, the Vietnamese, the Americans. A trifecta. Guaranteed to give the pussy patrol the squits. Same as they get every time we’re in a fucking war.”

“Is that what this is?” Rafferty says “A war? I thought it was a license for you to fuck people up.”

“You don’t care that people are getting blown up down south,” Murphy says. The cords at the side of his neck are beginning to stand out. “You don’t care that they throw bombs into the marketplaces and the elementary schools and cut the heads off monks. You don’t give a shit that the most powerful country of the twenty-first century can’t figure out how to protect itself from a few illiterates who are still stuck in the ninth, still trying to get even for the fucking Crusades.” He walks across the room, stiff-jointed with anger, until he has his back to the curtain that Treasure had wrapped herself in. “Just like you didn’t care, or you wouldn’t have if you’d been old enough, that nobody knew who the enemy was in Vietnam, that a sweet-looking old granny-san could roll a grenade at you without even saying hello.”

Treasure comes slowly into the room dragging one of the spindly chairs that had been drawn up to the dining-room table, and Murphy points to her to bring it to him.

“No,” he says, “what you need is a Nazi army, all in a uniform that says ‘bad guy’ from half a mile away, with blood on their teeth and dueling scars. Waste those people, you’d sit in front of your TV and applaud. Wave your flag and get all teary-eyed. But women? Children? Some twelve-year-old Muhammad with a suicide vest in his closet? Ohhhhh, nooooooooo, Mr. Bill,” he says in a falsetto. “The weepy wailers come out in the papers and on TV, and when the weepy wailers come out, the pussy patrol gets the squits, and you know what happens then?”

Ming Li says, “Pussy patrol is a nice phrase.” She sounds calm, but her eyes haven’t left Murphy’s.

“What happens then,” Murphy says, and his face is suddenly scarlet, “what happens then is that we lose the fucking war.” He’s spitting at them as he talks. With his free hand, he snatches the chair from Treasure, who leaps backward and stands at an unconscious approximation of attention, with her feet together and her arms straight down, tight at her sides. Murphy turns the chair around and sets it in front of himself, leaning on its back. “Because here’s the chain of command,” he says, “here’s how it works. A bunch of guys, and these days maybe a woman, in two-thousand-dollar suits and a uniform or two, sit around a polished table in some air-conditioned room so they won’t have to get too warm or too cold and say things like ‘measured response’ and ‘surges’ and ‘tactical support’ and ‘appropriate force,’ and that’s at one end of the chain, okay?” He holds his hands up, about two feet apart, the revolver pointed at the ceiling, and he moves them, still separated by a couple of feet, left to right in jerky increments, as if measuring something. “And at the other end of the chain is some poor asshole on his back in the dirt, swelling up in the sun, with his intestines tied around his neck. So, you know, all well and good, that guy’s not going to cut off another head, and his friends will probably think twice about it, too, but then somebody takes a picture, and it gets into the papers, and the weepy wailers start up, and those people who were sitting around that table and sending down the orders in their nice, polite language turn into the pussy patrol, waving their hands and saying, ‘Not us, no, no, not us, we never called for such a thing, we would never condone the indiscriminate use of lethal force against a civilian population.’ And right then and there, they lose the war, no matter how many Americans have been shot to death and blown up trying to win it, and lost their arms and legs and dicks-do you know that castration from improvised explosive devices is one of the most common injuries in Iraq? — because these people in their suits and their fucking air-conditioning still haven’t figured out that there’s no such thing as civilians anymore.”

“Let us walk out of here,” Rafferty says. His mouth is so dry he can hear his lips sliding over his teeth, and his voice sounds thin in his ears. “You’ve got your money. You know how to disappear. You’ve done it before.”

“Not that easy,” Murphy says. “Not anywhere near that easy. I’m going to disappear, but you, you’re a loose end.” He sits in the chair, the gun loosely pointed at them. “Treasure.”

Treasure doesn’t move.

“Treasure,” Murphy says again.

The child begins to sway back and forth, her head still down. She leans so far forward that Rafferty steps toward her to break her fall, but Murphy raises the gun so it’s aimed at Rafferty’s chest. Treasure slowly lifts her head until she’s looking at her father.

“You two,” Murphy says. “Pull up your shirts.”

Rafferty does, followed by Ming Lee. Murphy’s eyes drop to the gun at Rafferty’s waist and then go to Ming Li, and he says, “Girl. Turn around.” When her back is to him and the gun is visible at the small of her back, Murphy says, “Stop turning.”

He leans back in the chair, and it creaks. “Both of you. Hands on your head, fingers interlaced, and don’t neither of you move. Treasure. You get those guns.”

“ ‘Don’t neither of you,’ ” Ming Li says, and Rafferty hears her swallow. “I learned English in China, and I speak it better than you do.”

“You’re prettier than I am, too, but that’s not going to help you. Do it, Treasure. And bring them here.”

The child remains still.

“Treasure,” Murphy says. “Come here.”

The girl remains where she is, and Rafferty sees her hands curl into fists.

“She’s showing off for company,” Murphy says. “If you’re not standing in front of me by the count of three, you know what’s going to happen. One … two …”

“Leave her alone,” Rafferty says.

“Three,” Murphy says, and by the time he’s finished the word, she’s standing in front of him. He lifts his free hand and slaps her face. Her head whips to one side and back, but her feet don’t move. Rafferty involuntarily starts forward, but Murphy’s gun returns to him. “Never get between a parent and a child. You just make things worse. Treasure has broken some big rules, and she knows it. Treasure,” he says, a little more loudly, and she raises her head halfway, so she seems to be looking at his knees. “Go get the guns and bring them to me.”

She turns, moving disjointedly toward Rafferty, her head still down as though she’s presenting her bare neck to the blade, her feet sliding over the carpet and her back stiff. She pulls the gun from under his belt without so much as a glance at him, and then she goes to Ming Li and takes hers.

Ming Li says, “Poor baby.”

“On the windowsill,” Murphy says.

The child looks up at Rafferty, and he gives her a tiny nod: Do as you’re told. The guns look enormous in her hands. She does that slow, sliding walk, never lifting her feet from the carpet, until she’s at the window. Murphy turns his head slightly to keep her in sight, warily, Rafferty thinks. “Up there,” he says. “Put them right there, on the sill. Now come here.” When she’s reached him, he puts his free arm around her as she squeezes her eyes shut, and he lifts her to his knee.

“We’re going to do a little show for our guests,” Murphy says. “Do you want to, Treasure?” He puts his hand on the back of her neck and squeezes the muscle, and when her mouth opens, he answers in an uncanny imitation of her voice, “Yes.” He relaxes his pressure, and her mouth closes. He squeezes again, one time for each syllable, and the child’s mouth seems to say, “Yes, Daddy, please.” Her eyes are wide now, white showing all the way around her irises. Her gaze goes to Rafferty and bounces away with something like shame, looking everywhere in the room.

“What do I say to people when Daddy’s not here?” Murphy says, and Treasure’s mouth opens and closes again as that high, breathless voice says, “Nothing.”

Ming Li says, “That’s enough, you sick fuck. Just shoot us.”

There’s a movement at the edge of Rafferty’s vision, and he turns to the door to see the small woman from the bedroom, wearing a T-shirt and shorts, the clothes she’d undoubtedly worn in her village, holding a glass of cherry-colored whiskey, and she shrills, “Baby!” and throws the glass at Murphy.

It hits him on the left shoulder and splashes on him as Treasure leaps from his lap, and he jumps up, swearing, but Neeni retreats down the hall, saying, “My baby, my baby,” and Treasure grabs the chair he was sitting in by its legs and runs at the train table, swinging the chair over her head and bringing it down on the miniature world, and tiny trees and bits of buildings fly into the air. She lifts it again, emitting a high, thin, ceiling-scraping scream, and slams it into the train table again, and this time pieces fly several feet in the air.

Ming Li takes two quick steps toward the windowsill with the guns on it, but Murphy says, “Don’t,” and comes toward the ruined miniatures as Treasure, still screaming, raises the chair again. When Murphy’s eyes go to the movement, Rafferty grabs the engine of the train and yanks it off the tracks. The last two or three cars break off and tumble free, but the rest of them remain attached, and when he swings it around, what hits Murphy across the face is the sharp-cornered end of a twenty-pound metal whip.

It rips skin from his forehead and snaps his head back and sends him crashing against the table, his gun arm hanging down, his elbow against the edge of the table, and Rafferty raises his right foot and puts all his weight into forcing his shoe straight through the wrist of Murphy’s gun hand. Hears the change in the intensity of Murphy’s scream and the muffled sound of the elbow snapping backward. The gun falls from Murphy’s hand.

Treasure drops the chair and leans forward at the waist, fists clenched, screaming, “Do it again, do it again, do it again!” and Murphy pushes himself away from the table, his face a mass of blood and torn skin, and lurches toward the guns on the windowsill. But Ming Li is already there, and she fires twice at Murphy’s midsection, and he folds in half with a long shudder of a groan and goes down.

Coming up with the gun Murphy dropped, Rafferty hears nothing but the echo of the shots and then, from the hall, a rapidly repeated prayer in Lao.

Murphy moans and rolls over.

Ming Li steps back, out of his reach, with her gun aimed at his forehead. Her face is pale, but her hand is steady.

“Always had trouble …” Murphy says. He grabs a breath and says, “… shooting the pretty ones.”

Her voice shaking, Ming Li says, “You didn’t even get close, fat man.”

Murphy is losing a lot of blood, the stain spreading rapidly outward over the carpet. To Poke, Ming Li says, “What should we do?”

“We’re going to let him die,” Rafferty says. “And then I’m going to figure out how to deal with this.” He takes a quick step toward her, puts his arms around her, and squeezes. To the side of his neck, Ming Li says, “Might be a good idea to start that now. Figuring out how to deal with this, I mean.”

He pushes her to arm’s length and looks at her, but she won’t meet his eyes. “Are you okay?”

“I’ll be better when I’m moving.”

Murphy makes a noise that might be a cough, and Ming Li steps back, slipping out of Rafferty’s grasp, and points the gun at Murphy’s midsection.

Rafferty says, “Here you go, then. Get Neeni-that’s the woman who threw the glass-and take her out to the car. Carry her, if you have to. The maid, whatever her name is, can take care of her.”

“Where will she be?”

“In her room, I think, probably in bed. Straight down the hall, the door to the left. Grab some clothes for her. I don’t think she’ll be coming back.”

“And?”

“And then come back in here and get three or four of the briefcases in that closet. Take them to the car. They’re full of money.”

“What about you?”

“I’m going to find Treasure.”

He watches Ming Li go, moving quickly but not hurriedly, and thinks, Frank taught her well. His heart is hammering in his temples, and he thinks his knees might go out. So he kneels down beside Murphy and studies him. The man’s breathing is shallow and irregular, and his eyes seem to be watching something projected on the ceiling. His face is white as paper, making the hair on his head and the tufts coming out of his nostrils seem a brighter orange, almost clownish. The smell of blood rises from the carpet around him. Rafferty is slightly surprised to find that he feels no pity for the man. When he stands up, he nudges Murphy’s side with his toe. He gets no reaction.

He leaves the room through the door to the kitchen and sees the double doors at the back of the dining room standing wide, with rain slanting in to puddle on the floor, and he realizes he’s lost track of time. It could have been a minute since Treasure ran out of the train room, or it could have been five.

He does a quick check of at the living room-unoccupied-and decides she’s outside. From what he can see, she more or less lives outside. He takes the distance to the back door at a trot, then slows and steps through it into the night.

There’s rain, but it’s not heavy enough to impair visibility. The yards is as wide as the house, though not particularly deep, backing up fifteen or twenty feet to a white plaster wall that’s got some kind of dense hedge growing in front of it, four or five feet thick. The foliage looks black, although it’s probably dark green. Three trees spread their branches to create a sort of canopy over most of the ground.

The water back here is at least four inches deep. He starts by jogging to his left, his shoulder only a few inches from the wall of the house, slowing when he comes to the living-room windows, which permit a long rectangle of pale light to reflect on the standing water and shine off the trunk of the nearest tree. The hedge is a dark green, shiny-leafed, thorny-looking, and dense. At the end of the house there’s a wall that runs straight back to create a corner with the hedged wall at the rear, so unless she’s gone over the wall, this isn’t where she came. He doesn’t see a way over the wall.

Up, he thinks, and he slogs through the water to the nearest tree, but the trunk is smooth, the bark almost slick to the touch. He checks the branches anyway. No platform, no tree house, no fort. Squinting against the rain, he surveys the other two trees, but no straight lines, no paler shapes, reveal a structure in either of them.

He feels time passing. His anxiety level, the terror he deferred while Murphy had his gun on them, has been rising for the past minute or two, and he wills it down, breathing against the tightness in his chest and working his way back along the edge of the house. The wall here is vertical iron bars, and he can see the light from Murphy’s train room shining in the water. Impossible for Treasure to have slipped between the bars.

Water-covered lawn, three trees, hedge. No Treasure. No place for Treasure. He realizes he’s been expecting a structure of some kind, a place she can shut others out of. Someplace where she can be whatever she really is, when her father’s not nearby.

But it’s not here.

So it has to be in the hedge.

He splashes across the yard to the bushes and bends down; she’s much shorter than he is. About halfway across the yard, almost straight back from the dining-room doors, he spots it: an opening in the bushes, perhaps three feet high. In front of it, he drops to his knees in the water and sees that it’s a tunnel, neatly clipped into the foliage. It’s very dark, but it seems to go in a couple of feet and then curve right.

Putting one hand on the lawn below the water, he reaches in and waves his other hand around, hoping to avoid coming face-to-belly with one of the extravagant spiders of the tropics. He’s never lost the fear of spiders that made Frank call him a sissy thirty or so years ago, and he performs this check instinctively even though he’s certain she’s just crawled through here and there won’t be any webs. There won’t be any webs, he says to himself, and he crawls in.

Eighteen or twenty inches in, the tunnel turns sharply to the right. Following it, scraping his back and shoulders on the sheared-off twigs, he puts his hand on something hard, and his fingers turn into a bright orange, barbed-wire jolt of pain. When he yanks his hand up, it brings weight with it. It’s clamped into a mousetrap. He pries the trap off and drops it, then crawls farther in, sweeping the dirt from side to side and finding four more traps, which he pushes out of his way. Suddenly he feels the space expand and rise above him. He stops and looks straight down at the black water, willing his pupils to open wider. He hears the rain pattering on something, but he’s not being rained on.

He puts a hand up and finds smooth, heavy plastic, feeling the sticks and leaves of the hedge on the other side. He tries not to focus on anything, knowing that the peripheral vision is more sensitive, and out of the darkness a shape emerges, a bit farther in and to his right, rectangular and relatively light-colored. It’s wood, his fingers tell him, finished wood with a smooth surface, and he finds the top and immediately knocks something over, small, light, and slick to the touch, and he knows what it is.

A plastic disposable lighter.

He’s certain he’s alone in here, but he doesn’t know how far back the hollow goes. He picks up the lighter and flicks the wheel. And feels the blood leave his face.

Treasure has used pieces of plywood to create irregular walls, not so much walls as a gallery space. Color pictures from books and magazines cover every inch, overlapping here and there. There must be a hundred of them.

Ballerinas. Princesses. Girls in frilly, pale dresses. Girls holding hands with other girls, laughing with other girls. Girls at parties, giving one another presents. One wall is devoted entirely to a single large picture, twenty or thirty copies of it: a young girl in a loose white dress, her hair alive with sunlight, walking a dappled path in green, hospitable woods. The picture has been trimmed to the girl’s left side, and the forest on the right has been left uncropped and the pictures placed seamlessly beside each other so she perpetually emerges from the green of the forest to the safety of her path. Again and again and again. A girl, floating through a world of green light. On a path.

Rafferty wipes his eyes fiercely and wishes Murphy could die twice.

On top of the table are rounded stones and dried thistles and another mud-smoothed bird’s nest. A loose handful of wild grass splays gracefully from the top of what Rafferty recognizes as a cough-medicine bottle. Another medicine bottle holds a single, half-burned candle.

He takes a last look around, replaces the lighter on the table, and crawls out again, back into Treasure’s other world.