The Fear Artist

34

For the first few miles, Neeni’s sobs supply the soundtrack. Every now and then, she says, “Baby baby baby baby.” She never says, Treasure.

Then the crying softens and gradually dies away, and Rafferty looks in his rearview mirror to see her lying on the backseat, her knees drawn up and her head in the maid’s-Hwa’s-lap. Hwa’s eyes are on his in the mirror.

Ming Li is sitting as close as she can get to the passenger door, hugging her knees. Her eyes are partly closed, and she seems to be memorizing the dashboard.

The rain has let up again, but water is inches deep in the streets, masking the potholes, and he has to go slowly to avoid mishap. He doesn’t think he could endure a mechanical breakdown right now; he has an image of himself disappearing screaming into the night, leaving all of them behind.

A tiny snore comes from the backseat. He looks in the mirror again and meets Hwa’s eyes.

“You like her,” he says. “At least you said you did.”

“She’s never hurt anybody.”

“She’s in for a rough time. Do you want to help her?”

No answer. Hwa turns and looks out the window. She says, “Help how?”

“Say yes and I’ll give you two thousand U.S. tonight, when we get where we’re going. Just for agreeing to try.”

“Help how?” Hwa says again.

“She needs to get over this, and she needs to get well. Tomorrow I’ll give you six thousand dollars, and you go out and find a nice two-bedroom apartment in the Silom area and rent it. Furnished, so you don’t have to waste a day shopping for furniture.”

“I like shopping for furniture.”

“Then you can look for it after you move in, replace things if you want, but you need to find something you can move into right away, because I don’t have room for you, and I think she needs to be someplace that will eventually feel like home. I’ll pay the rent and expenses and give you two thousand U.S. every month. And I’ll get you a doctor, a good doctor who’s a friend of mine, to help with her. She needs to get off the codeine. I’ll keep this up as long as he says she’s making progress and as long as I think she’s being taken care of. And the day the doctor tells me Neeni is over it, that she can live without it, I’ll give you fifty thousand dollars.”

Hwa strokes Neeni’s hair. Without looking up, she says, “You must be rich.”

“I’ve come into some money,” Rafferty says.

“Fifty thousand is a lot,” Hwa says. “Why don’t we see what happens first?”

“You’ll do it?”

“Why not?” Hwa says. “Poor thing. He took everything away from her. He took her out of her village, he took her away from her family, he took her daughter. Yes, I’ll help her.”

Rafferty says, “Thank you.”

For a few slow, waterlogged miles, he drives to the sound of Neeni’s snoring. He says, “She’s going to want a drink when she wakes up.”

“She’s going to want a drink every moment of the day for months,” Hwa says.

Rafferty makes the turn onto Silom, feeling the nearness of the apartment ease the tightness in his chest. To Ming Li he says, “What is it? What are you thinking about?”

“Vladimir,” she says.

Some of the strain immediately comes back. “Yeah. Me, too.”

“At first I thought he was just waiting for a chance to sell you out, but then he … he changed somehow, and I thought, well, maybe I was wrong.”

“He likes you,” Rafferty says. “He’s got an eye for talent. And it doesn’t hurt that you’re beautiful.”

“Whatever it was. I thought he was with us. But somebody told Murphy we were at his house, and I don’t know who else-”

“Oh,” Hwa says. “That was me. I did it.”

Ming Li turns to her. “How?”

“I was worried about Neeni,” she says. “I didn’t know what you really wanted.”

“The phone button,” Rafferty says.

“And I lied about it.” Hwa looks again at Rafferty in the rearview mirror. “I’m sorry.”

“No problem,” he says. “Keep taking care of her that well and everything will be fine.”

Ming Li pushes past him and stops, surveying the room. “God. No wonder you’ve been sleeping in hotels.”

“Oh, no,” Rafferty says, exhausted at the sight of the place. “I’d forgotten how bad it was. At least it doesn’t still stink of paint.” Feeling like he weighs a thousand pounds, he steps aside and lets Hwa in, leading a blinking, confused-looking Neeni by the hand. “Take her to the couch,” he says. His voice sounds ragged, and his throat is raw. “It’s the one thing you can get to. Beer?” he says to Ming Li without thinking, and then says, “Of course not.”

“Of course yes,” she says. “I’ve got it coming, after tonight.”

“As long as we’re breaking rules,” Rafferty says to Hwa, “do you think a drink would help her? We’ve got some Crown Royal someone gave us a few years ago, but I don’t think it spoils. And would you like something?”

“Bring her the whiskey, a good big glass of it. When she’s lying down-Is there a bed somewhere?”

“There will be in a minute.”

Neeni’s eyes have come up at the mention of the word “whiskey,” and she’s looking from Rafferty to Hwa and back again.

“When she’s lying down,” Hwa says, “I’ll make some tea.”

“Fine.” He looks around the familiar space, and all he wants to do is curl up and sleep. You want to help me, Ming Li?”

In the kitchen he pulls out his last two big bottles of Singha as Ming Li takes a drinking glass from the cupboard. She stands there, looking at the other cupboards, which are closed. “Whiskey?”

“To the left. Behind some cans of stuff, in a blue sort-of-velvet bag.” He opens the drawer, takes out the bottle opener, flips it into the air, closes his eyes, and puts out his hand. The moment his eyes close, the floor dips beneath him, and as he opens them, the bottle opener lands with a flat, reassuring smack, dead center in his palm. To Ming Li, who is staring at him with one eyebrow raised, he says, “My luck is back.”

Twenty minutes later Neeni and Hwa are set up in Poke and Rose’s room, and he and Ming Li, whose face is turning stop-sign red from the beer, have put new sheets on Miaow’s bed and moved things around to create a path to the door. “Bathroom’s on the left,” he says as she follows him into the living room. He hears Hwa clanking the teapot in the kitchen and takes a quick peek into his bedroom, where Neeni is sitting on the far side of the bed, her back to the door, drinking.

“I’m not going to sleep in Miaow’s room,” Ming Li says. “You are.”

“Wrong. I’m sleeping here.”

She gives the couch a disapproving look and drains the rest of her beer. “It looks too short.”

“I’ve slept on it before.”

Ming Li yawns enormously. “It’s not too short for me.”

Hwa comes out of the kitchen with the mug Rose always uses, steaming away like a witch’s kettle. She says, “Do you have some socks I could wear?”

“Second drawer of that … that thing in there.” He waves his hand at the bedroom. “The dresser.”

“I like to sleep in socks,” Hwa announces, and goes into Poke and Rose’s room, shutting the door behind her.

Rafferty collapses onto the couch and folds himself forward like someone fighting a faint. The events of the past hour or so, which he’s been holding at bay with action, swirl in his head, a jumble of color and noise and blood and eyes: Treasure’s eyes, Ming Li’s eyes as she stared at Murphy. He breathes slowly and regularly, staring at the carpet, and lets the feelings catch up with him. A noise brings him back into the room. Ming Li is looking down at him.

“You okay?”

“Getting there,” he says. “That awful leather bag. Can you bring it to me?”

She picks it up beside the door, where Rafferty dropped it, and hands it to him. He pulls out cell phone after cell phone until he has his old one, the one he used before everything began. Holding it again, back in his own apartment, he begins to believe that it might actually all be over.

As he dials, Ming Li says,

“Older brother, not to doubt your judgment, but is it safe here?”

“We’ll know in a second. Okay, shhh.” He looks up at her, scoots over to make room on the couch, and then says, into the phone, “I need to talk to Shen. Tell him it’s Rafferty.”

Ming Li says, “Shen?”

“Now or never,” he says to her. He waits a moment, until he hears, “Hello.”

He closes his eyes, grabs a deep breath, and says, “I wanted to tell you I’m at home, and I’d appreciate your letting me stay here. And there are reasons you should.”

Shen says nothing.

“Murphy is dead. Do you want to hear about it?”

“It’s eleven-thirty at night. You’ve had people wake me up. What else do I have to do?”

“He pulled me out of that mall, the one you didn’t see me in, and cuffed me and took me to his house. He was pretty crazy, talking about how I had screwed him over and that the best thing for him to do would be to disappear. His daughter was in the house-” Rafferty stops for a second and clears his throat. “She was having some sort of breakdown.”

“That poor child,” Shen says.

“He took a briefcase full of money out of a closet and put it in his car, I guess. Anyway, out through the front door. Then he poured gasoline all over the place and set fire to it, then hauled the girl and the maid and that sedated wife of his out. I got my hands free-”

“How?”

“An ancient yoga technique that took me years to learn,” he snaps. “Do you want me to explain it to you?”

The couch shifts. He opens his eyes to see Ming Li getting up, shaking her head, and going into the kitchen.

“No.”

“And I broke the side window. There were two guns on the windowsill. I took one and went through the window, and when I came around the house, he shot at me. I shot him, maybe twice, and then the little girl screamed and ran into the house, and he followed her, even though I think he was hit pretty bad. And I backed the hell away, and the place blew up.”

Shen lets a moment or two pass. “That’s quite a story.”

Rafferty hears the refrigerator open and close.

“I know. I’d barely believe it myself, except that the witnesses-the maid and the wife-saw it the same way.”

“Did they.” It’s not a question.

“They did, and that leads me to my second point. I know you’ve been told about the things I did regarding Murphy during the past week or so, because I intentionally said them to someone who would tell you. They’re all true. The U.S. embassy will abandon him in a heartbeat, deny any connection at all. But I didn’t tell your friend everything. For example, I didn’t tell her that there are four living witnesses to the worst thing he did there during the war, a rampage that killed nobody except women, children, and old men. Those survivors will be available to the papers, if it comes to that. When Murphy added all that up, he said that the best thing for him to do would be to disappear. What I think he meant by that was-”

“I know what he meant by it.”

There’s a clinking of glass on glass in the kitchen.

“So here he is, disappeared, in a sense. And I have a present for you. I’m e-mailing you some photographs. The first three are snapshots from Murphy’s War, his time in Vietnam. No one who ever helped him would want them to appear in a newspaper.”

“Is he recognizable?”

“Some people don’t change. Second, if you saw Treasure, if you were at his house, you saw his train set.”

“I did.”

“Well, this may surprise you, but the train layout was a model of a real place, somewhere in Yala. If you take the pictures I’m sending you and get someone to look at them and compare them with Google Earth pictures of Yala, down where the rubber plantations are, I’m sure you’ll find it. In the picture you’ll see a pink thing, the ear from a rubber mask. Where that ear is, a little bit north of a train station, there either is or isn’t going to be a cache of explosives, if it hasn’t been blown before your men get there. If it hasn’t, if you get there first, you’ll be a hero.”

Shen sighs. “The ear from a rubber mask.”

“It’s a long story.”

“When I get to the house, will the physical evidence support your version of events?”

Ming Li comes in with a glass in her hand that’s got a couple inches of whiskey in it.

Rafferty says, “I don’t know what’ll still be standing. But I think you’ll be able to see the broken window in the train room, and the gun should be on the windowsill, and the place will reek of gasoline. Oh, and there will be money in his car, so you might want to get someone out there before the fire crew goes through it. And also, I don’t know if there’ll be anything left of it, but there was a cabinet built against the back of the house, full of cans of gasoline, so I guess he had this possibility in mind for a while.”

“It’s a somewhat drastic measure, don’t you think?”

“He was a drastic guy. So yes, the evidence will be a good enough match, I think, especially compared to the alternative, which would be opening up the whole thing with Murphy through the newspapers and probably raking up what happened in Vietnam, complete with pictures, and the Vietnamese government getting involved, and the U.S. disclaiming a connection with him, and-”

“Yes, yes. The little girl,” Shen says. “You say she died in the fire?”

“She ran in before the house blew up. She didn’t come out.”

Shen says, “Probably for the best.”

It stops Rafferty for a second. What he hears in Shen’s voice might be genuine sympathy. He has to force himself back on track. “Maybe so,” he says. “My guess is that you’ll find a rifle in the place that matches the bullets in Billie Joe Sellers.”

“We might.”

Ming Li tilts the glass of whiskey and drinks. Rafferty makes a grab for it, but she snatches it out of his reach.

“So,” he continues, “I guess the headline tomorrow or the next day would be along the lines of ‘AMERICAN BUSINESSMAN DIES IN FIRE,’ something like that. Leaving me out of it, since including me would open up all these cans of worms. Maybe ‘ARSON SUSPECTED.’ ”

“I can practically see it now.”

“And then, a day later, a story about the heroic action of your unit, discovering the explosives in Yala, preventing a massive loss of life and-”

“I could write it myself,” Shen says.

“And finally a modest little squib somewhere about a correction in the ballistics in the death of Billie Joe Sellers and an exoneration of anyone previously considered a person of interest. No names, so as not to drag anyone through the dirt again. Maybe a courtesy call to the American embassy just to say you’ve cleared it up and I’m not on anyone’s list.”

Shen says, “And of course the rifle is in plain sight.”

“I don’t know,” Rafferty says, his energy suddenly abandoning him. “I can’t tell one rifle from another. But I’m sure you’ll be able to put your hands on it.” Ming Li plops down on other end of the couch and drinks again. “You know, it’s a pleasure to be able to rattle on like this without having resort to my terrible Thai. You were right-we really are just a couple of California boys.”

Shen says, “Go to sleep,” and hangs up.

Rafferty lowers the phone to his lap, shakes his head to uncramp his neck, and says to Ming Li, “Give me that.”

“You don’t run everything, older brother,” Ming Li says. Her voice is as thin as a scratch on glass. “I’m going to pour part of the bottle into another glass and leave it there for Hwa in case Neeni needs it, and I’m taking the bottle with me, into that room down the hall where I can lock the door and drink until I’m finished drinking.” She’s blinking fast, and there are tears in her eyes. “And I don’t want to hear from you about it, and if I’m hungover tomorrow, I want you to baby me without one word about how it’s my own fault.”

Rafferty says, “Can I get some and drink it with you? I won’t take too much.”

“Fine.” She swipes her arm over her face. “But we’re not talking, not about anything, not tonight and maybe not ever. We’re going to drink and keep our mouths shut.”

Rafferty gets up and brushes her shoulder with his hand, so lightly he’s not certain they actually touched. “That sounds great,” he says.