The Fear Artist

7

Power in the dark.

Rafferty has always been fascinated by enormous power-power on an imperial scale-exercised in secret. He’s spent much of his adult life traveling among the powerless, among people who generally are who they say they are and do what they say they’ll do. People who have little and seem unwilling to become someone else in order to have more. In the past decade, this kind of behavior has become regarded by many as naive and even quaint, behavior that identifies people who haven’t figured out the new rules.

Power in the dark seems to Rafferty to be the defining form of evil in the twenty-first century. It’s evolved from an occasional governmental tactic into business as usual, as the world’s rulers find goals in common-usually economic goals that benefit the rich and strengthen the rulers’ hold on power-and pursue them jointly, turning out the lights on the contradictions between what they say and what they do.

Rafferty can remember, hazily, a time in which getting caught in a lie was a career-threatening crisis for a politician, at least in the countries that retain pretensions of democracy. Now there’s a whole thesaurus of euphemisms for lying, and it’s opened daily.

It’s the age of equivocation, the age of the press secretary, the age of entire ministries of spin, the age of collusion and obfuscation, the age when the future is on teleprompter and the script is kept in a vault. Anytime politicians talk about “transparency,” Rafferty thinks, voters need to reach for the X-ray glasses. Whatever compact of honesty was presumed in the past to exist between the rulers and the ruled is fast dwindling in the rearview mirror.

His own country is as bad as any of them and worse than some. Secret enterprise, stringently denied, is the order of the day. Which has created a boom market for people who are skilled at working in the dark.

What it really is, it seems to him, is the Age of the Spook.

When, he thinks, the day’s agenda seems to have been carved into black stone in a dark room, when you feel as helpless as a penny on a railroad track, and when you glimpse spooks in your peripheral vision, it’s time to go talk to some spooks.

It’s probably not actually called the No-Name Bar, but no name is visible from the sleepy soi outside. Just a stretch of stucco the color of cream with dirt stirred into it and a pair of the smoked-glass doors that are ubiquitous among Bangkok’s shadier business establishments. The soi itself is almost as featureless as the stucco wall: a thin seam of asphalt too narrow for two cars, framed by a sidewalk of tilting, badly set paving stones that are interrupted every now and then by one of those peculiarly Bangkok trees, wizened, largely leaf-free little spindles that look like they’d be more comfortable bent over a walker. Trees that look like they’ve got a cough.

The bar is just as he remembers it, which is to say it’s more cramped than it appears from outside and as dark as a bat’s theme park. He has the brief sensation that nothing at all has changed since he was last here, that the people inside have been frozen in place until he breaks the spell by opening the door.

It’s a long, narrow room that gives the impression that all the right angles are subtly off. The front doors open directly onto the bar, which looks solid enough to repel a blast from a shotgun. The bar is U-shaped and protrudes into the center of the room like a stuck-out tongue, with two wary-looking bartenders in the center. The patrons all sit on the far side of the bar, facing the door. The rest of the room is occupied by a series of booths along the right wall, the dividers between them projecting out so far that the walkway that leads past them isn’t much wider than a single heavyset man. A tiny transparent lightbulb, perhaps twenty watts, hangs like a distant, dying star over each booth.

The booths’ occupants are shielded from view by the booth dividers, which are unusually high, about the height of the wall around a toilet cubicle in a public restroom. Rafferty sees only five people at the bar, three sitting on stools spaced well apart and the two working behind it, but there could be twenty more people in the place, enjoying their nice covert drinks as they hatch conspiracies or practice character assassination in smaller groups. He has a feeling the only reason the noise level doesn’t drop when he walks in is that there isn’t a noise level. If people are talking, they’re talking in whispers.

Everyone he can see is looking at him.

The no-name is one of two spook bars to which Rafferty was brought by Arnold Prettyman, the putatively retired CIA man who was killed when he turned over the wrong rock while he was working on Rafferty’s behalf. Rafferty has no idea whether his accidental role in Prettyman’s death is known in this bar, but it very well may be. Information is the currency in the room. This is where the cloak-and-dagger friends and enemies of Arnold’s shadowy youth and middle age gather to refight the old battles, from back in the 1960s and ’70s, when they were outplotting and shooting at each other. The thawing of the Cold War and the shift of the global stress lines from Southeast Asia to the Middle East stranded a lot of spooks in the jungles where they’d been stationed, and a remarkable number of them rolled downhill to Bangkok.

And now they congregate day after day, night after night, in the no-name bar. It’s a deadlier version, Rafferty thinks, of the Expat Bar, but just as sad.

One bartender looks at a customer, gets a minuscule nod, and comes to take Rafferty’s order while the other bartender heads for one of the hidden booths. The three customers have swiveled their stools to turn their backs, but Rafferty can feel their eyes in the mirror on the opposing wall.

The bartender lifts his chin in a silent query, as though the sound of his voice is classified, and Rafferty orders yet another Singha beer, one of the big ones. The bartender makes no move to get the drink until Rafferty sees, in the mirror, a hand extend into the narrow aisle beside the booths and make the okay sign. The bartender examines Rafferty again as though he’s checking for a hidden weapon or an ulterior motive and then slides open the cooler behind the bar. Rafferty is watching the man’s movements when something heavy lands on his shoulder. A hand with a plenteous crop of black hair.

When he looks up, he sees a darkly shadowed chin, divided by a cleft that looks like it was incised with a hatchet. The chin and jaw are the widest parts of the head, which narrows as it rises toward a curly fringe of black hair, parted in the center and brushed over the forehead in very peculiar bangs. The upper lip is so long that Rafferty wonders whether the man can smell his food. Beneath a single solid hedge of eyebrow, a pair of tiny black eyes crowd as close together as a flounder’s. The overall effect should be silly, but it’s light-years from silly.

“You was friend with Arnold, yes?” The voice is liquid and heavy and saturated with melancholy; it sort of rolls around like mercury. The accent is Boris-and-Natasha Russian, but, like the face, deeply not comic.

“I was, yes.” It seems natural to echo the question’s structure.

“And Arnold.” The hand on Rafferty’s shoulder tightens, and the squeezed-together eyes get closer to him. “Arnold is now with the fishes?”

Rafferty shakes his head, not understanding. “I’m sorry-”

“Sleeps,” the man says, turning it into “slips.” “Arnold, he slips with the fishes?”

“Not unless they buried him at sea,” Rafferty says. “Last time I saw him, he was dry.”

“But not …” the Russian hesitates. “Not feeling good.”

“Not feeling much of anything.”

The eyes come even closer, and Rafferty smells a great many onions. “You killed him?”

“No,” Rafferty says. “Not directly, at least.”

“Hah,” the man says. It sounds to Rafferty like he’s indicating that he’d laugh if someone would only teach him how. The bartender pours half of the beer into a smeared glass and slaps both bottle and glass down on the bar. The noise makes Poke jump. The Russian straightens up and says “Hah” again.

“So,” Rafferty says, hoisting the glass, “you knew Arnold.”

“Long time, wery long time. Arnold and me …” He holds up his index and middle finger, close together, side by side. “Like this, you know?”

“I guess.” This isn’t the most comfortable news.

The man shakes his head fondly. “I try to kill him many, many time. Once I make honey trap-You know honey trap?”

“With a woman, right?”

“And such a woman.” The man claps Rafferty on the shoulder again, and beer slops onto the bar. “Such a woman usually I kip for myself. But Arnold is problem. Arnold always is problem. So I make under bed, Semtex. Bed wery old, bend down when somebody sit on it, make two piece metal come together.” His hands, palm to palm, are a couple of inches apart. “Make circuit, yes? Booooom.” His hands come together and fly apart. They’re enormous.

“Boom,” Rafferty says, mainly to show he’s listening.

“Arnold, always he come elewen o’clock morning.” A tap on the crystal of his steel wristwatch. “I put Semtex nine o’clock, when woman is go eat. But she like money too much, bring cook back from restaurant to make jiggy-jig fast before Arnold come. Cook wery fat, sit down … Poh!”

“ ‘Poh’?” Rafferty says.

“Hah,” the man says a third time, with something regretful in it. “Woman wery angry. Get cook-” He mimes brushing pieces of the cook off his sleeves. Then he picks up the bottle in front of Poke, which is still half full, knocks most of it back, does a basso profundo burp, and says, “You come.” He turns away. Rafferty drops some bills on the bar and follows.

They pass four of the five booths. In each, three or four men, their faces pasteurized by the gloom, glance up at him with the impatient air of people whose conversation has been interrupted. To the men in the third booth, the Russian says, “You right, Arnold is dead.”

One of the men in the booth raises his glass in a toast and says, “Good.”

Two men wait in the final booth, the one to which the Russian leads him. Rafferty’s eyes are adjusting to the darkness, and as he sits, he sees that one of them affects the ever-stylish Dr. Evil look, with a shaved head, a mustache, a goatee, and a single earring above a pale garment that might be the grandchild of a Mao jacket, while the other is simply part of the scenery, a man with no distinguishing characteristics whatsoever. A written description would read, “Medium everything.” Like the man with the cleft chin, these two appear to be in their sixties or early seventies, but preserved in something potent and perhaps poisonous. Rafferty slides in beside Dr. Evil as the man with the Russian accent says, “You buy, yes?” and shouts something to the bartender without waiting for an answer.

“Vladimir,” the man says, pointing at himself as he sits. “Pierre,” he says, indicating Dr. Evil. “And, um …”

“Janos,” says the man without any characteristics.

“Always I forget,” Vladimir says. “This is why you genius.”

Janos nods modestly, and everyone waits, looking at Poke.

“Ummm, Poke,” Poke says.

“So this one,” Vladimir says, tilting his head at Poke, “who says name is Ummm Poke, he was friend with Arnold. Arnold now he slip with the fishes, but friend who says name is Ummm Poke is here. Friend want something, yes?”

“Yes,” Poke says. “And my name really is-”

“Poke,” Vladimir says with the weary air of someone who knows much, much better. The bartender appears with a tray on which he has crowded a bottle of Johnnie Walker Black and three glasses, plus another megabottle of Singha, apparently to replace the one Vladimir drank. He slams the whole thing on the table, prompting a startled hiss from the next booth, and shimmers off into the gloom.

“I’ve got a description of someone,” Rafferty says when everyone’s glasses are full. “Someone about your age. I need to know whether any of you recognize him and, if you do, who he is.”

“This is big job,” Vladimir says automatically. “You have money?”

“Sure.” Rafferty pulls all the bills from his front pocket and counts them out, with every eye in the booth following his hands. “Eleven thousand three hundred baht,” he says. He pushes it into the center of the table and then cups his hands over it and waits.

“We need contract,” Vladimir says. “Werbal contract. Ewerybody listen, ewerybody talk. Anybody know anything, we split up even, okay?”

“No,” says Janos. “Whoever knows most gets half.”

“We can do without you,” Vladimir says. “Plenty other guys in here.”

“Okay, even,” Janos says.

Vladimir says, “Good.” He mimes a handshake with each of them without reaching out very far, then takes a hundred-baht note and hands it to Poke. “For taxi,” he says, turning it into “texi.” “But why you think we maybe know him?”

“He’s in your business, he’s your generation, and his taste in clothes says he’s been in the region for a long time.”

Dr. Evil says, in a dry, wispy voice that reminds Rafferty of the dry rustle a T-shirt makes when he pulls it over his head, “Reason is always refreshing.”

“He’s American,” Rafferty says, pocketing the hundred baht. “Maybe sixty-five now, short and thick, with a big gut. Red hair going gray, bright red face.”

“You talking before about his clothes,” Vladimir says.

“Right. Dresses awful. Jeans and a Hawaiian shirt. Wrinkled. Like a tourist who’s spent ten years in a suitcase.”

All the spies look at all the other spies. All that’s needed for atmosphere, Rafferty thinks, is a ticking clock. The silence stretches out as he tilts his glass back and lowers the beer’s level. Dr. Evil starts to open his mouth, but Vladimir shakes his head a quarter of an inch, one time. They look at each other some more.

“What else?” Vladimir says.

“Hair coming out of his nose. If he was Rapunzel, he could lower his nose hair to let the prince climb up.”

Vladimir nods sadly and says, “More money.”

“Where’s the nearest ATM?”

“Around the corner,” says Dr. Evil in his frayed voice. “I’ll go with you.”

Vladimir says immediately, “We all go.”

“Nobody goes,” Rafferty says. “First you tell me a little more, and if I decide I want you to keep talking, I’ll go get the money.”

Vladimir says, “You no trust us.”

“Sure I do. I just don’t want to have to get up if it’s not necessary.”

Vladimir nods at Dr. Evil, and Dr. Evil says, “Maybe Murphy.”

“Maybe?” Rafferty says.

Vladimir fingers the cleft in his chin and looks disappointed. “Please,” he says. “You think my name Vladimir? Him, you think his name Janos? This one Pierre? We think your name really Poke?”

“Of course not,” Dr. Evil says. “But Murphy, that’s what he called himself then. Sometimes Murph.”

“Where? When?”

“Wietnam.” Vladimir is watching Rafferty’s eyes. “American in Wietnam, not always white hat, you know?”

“I know.”

Dr. Evil leans in and lowers his rustle of a voice to the point where Rafferty has to strain to hear him. “Murphy was Phoenix.” He straightens a bit, watching for a reaction. “You know about Phoenix?”

“Targeting?” Rafferty says. He read something about this years ago. “Targeting … targeting what? Collaborators, Vietcong sympathizers?” He knows he’s about to hear something he doesn’t want to hear.

“Arnold, he know Murphy,” Vladimir says sleepily, his eyes half-closed. “Arnold say Murphy hard-core. Wery hard-core.”

Dr. Evil says, “To be hard-core in Phoenix is to be very, very hard-core.”

Silence falls again. The three men gaze at Rafferty as though they’re waiting for him to wave his hands and materialize their dinner, and Rafferty says, “Back in a minute.” He gets up.

“Thirty thousand,” Vladimir says. “Ten, ten, ten.”