The Fear Artist (29 page)

Knowing the answer, Rafferty says, “Because.”

“Because Murphy had probably learned we were alive. Because he had become very powerful. Because some reporter had written about our village from an interview he did with one of the Vietnamese troopers, and he’d said there were survivors. Because the story of the village was being denied. Because the truth of what happened could destroy Murphy. Because Murphy would be coming for us.”

T
HEY’D BEEN IN
Bangkok for twelve years, arriving after spending two years in a village in the northeast, learning some Thai and staying out of sight. While they were there, Americans, obviously former soldiers—not Murphy, but probably working for him—had come to the reconstructed village in Vietnam several times, asking about survivors who had lived there during the war. But no one knew where Thuy, Jiang, and the two now-grown children were, just that Bey had gone to America with her husband.

And because no one had warned them not to, they told the men Bey’s husband’s name, making the mistake that, years later, would result in Bey’s being beaten to death in a cold little house in Wyoming.

“What can you do?” Jiang asks. “They’re just people. They don’t know how to lie.”

Rafferty says, “You have a very good heart.”

Billie Joe had bought the dry-cleaning shop for them before he brought them to Bangkok, and he’d taken the lease on the apartment. The name on the lease was a Thai name, no way to trace them through that. The shop was in the same name.

“Did you know that Billie Joe was in Bangkok this time?” Rafferty says. He is folding a piece of paper on which Jiang has written in Vietnamese two words he asked her to write.

“No,” Thuy says. “He never call or come say hello.”

Jiang says, “What will you do?”

“Well,” Rafferty says, “I don’t think I have any choice. I’m going to try to destroy Murphy.”

Both women look down, unwilling to show him the doubt in their eyes.

“It’s okay,” Rafferty says. “I barely believe it myself.”

He puts the folded paper into the pocket of his T-shirt. “Are you going someplace new?”

“Yes,” says Thuy. “Back to the northeast.”

“Good, good. Don’t tell me any more. Does the shop have voice mail?” He turns to Ming Li and reaches down to give her a hand, but she tucks her feet under her and rises in a single, smooth movement, her bag already in her hand.

“Yes,” Thuy says. “Have.”

“I’ll call here and leave a message if I make it, if Murphy is finished. If you don’t hear from me, I guess you’ll have to figure that Murphy won.”

Ming Li says, “He’s smarter than he looks. My brother, I mean.”

“He look pretty smart,” Thuy says kindly.

“Thank you for talking to us,” Ming Li says. “We’re very sorry to have made you so unhappy.”

Thuy says, “Truth is always best.” Then she starts crying, full out, as though she’s just this moment heard the news of her sister’s death.

At the door Rafferty looks around again. They live very sparely: a bed that doubles as a couch, a threadbare chair with a deeply dented cushion, a small television on a low black table that’s ornately inlaid with abalone, a two-burner hot plate, and a waist-high refrigerator. Another bright calendar on the wall, this one from last year. A few books in Vietnamese. The bathroom, where they probably wash the dishes, is just a tiny box of a room with a sink and a showerhead dangling at the end of a length of flexible tubing. It hangs on a hook above a damp concrete floor that slopes down to a central drain.

The awful green walls.

Rafferty asks Jiang, “Who made the handprints?”

Jiang says, “They’re from the family who lived here before us. My mother bought this paint very cheap, and we put on two coats
to hide them, but after a few months the little hands came through. Cheap paint, it doesn’t cover anything. I wanted to paint again because this color is so ugly, but she wouldn’t let me. She says the handprints are really—”

“The village,” Thuy says, rubbing an arm across her ravaged eyes. “The children in the village. They stay with us now.”

S
INCE
T
HAIS LOVE
an excuse for a party, most Western holiday celebrations have found fertile soil in Bangkok, and Halloween has done even better than others. It takes Ming Li about six minutes with her iPhone and Google Translate to find a Halloween store, near enough for them to get there before closing.

They ride through the monotony of the rain without speaking, their ears ringing with the story Thuy and Jiang told, with the images of the three captive boys and the children in the hut. The cabbie has Thai pop on the radio instead of the flood news, although he cranks it down when they get in. Ming Li wrinkles her nose at it and stares out the window, looking like someone studying a landscape of regret. Staring out his own window, Rafferty hears her sigh.

It’s almost eight o’clock, the hour when one Bangkok turns into another Bangkok, folding the worn-out day neatly and putting it away, amping up the energy for the night. Some neighborhoods disappear into gloom while others suddenly flower, as streets that were nondescript in daylight put on their feather boas and bright sequins, and bloom revealed in their true colors, like some mousy male bank clerk who goes home, rinses off the dust, changes clothes, names, and sexes, and emerges as Fabulosa, Queen of the Night.

“Bangkok may not be glamorous,” Rafferty says as they pass a pink-lit bar, the door flanked by hostesses shivering in cheap, shiny gowns and elbow-length gloves, “but it’s got lurid down cold.”

Ming Li doesn’t even grunt. Ten minutes into the ride, she says, “It would be nice if something really terrible happened to that man.”

“I can but try,” Rafferty says.

“I want to be in the middle of it.” She sounds like someone in an argument that’s been going on so long it’s become chronic.

“We’ll see.”

“
You
couldn’t have followed those women home.”

“I could have if they hadn’t already seen me.”

“Yeah, and if your grandmother had wheels, she’d be a tea cart.”

“Frank,” Rafferty says. “Frank used to say that.”

This time Ming Li does grunt.

“Does it ever worry you?” he asks. “How he’s shaped you, what he’s turned you into?”

She turns her back on Bangkok and gives him her eyes, full bore, and he’s pierced by the thought that she’s becoming a beautiful woman. “Are you shitting me?”

“What kind of language is …?”

“I’ve seen the alternatives. Hanging around with girls just like me, picking on girls who
aren’t
just like me, buying ugly clothes with famous names to appeal to boys who talk through their noses and think tattoos are really daring. Whoa, dude, take your life in your hands, light a cigarette. Hey, man, let’s rebel by refusing to learn anything. Let’s be dull, stupid, ordinary kids who are looking forward to being dull, stupid, ordinary adults. No thanks, and with change. And by the way, I don’t see
you
living in some plaid-shirt American town and flashing your junk at Builders Emporium all weekend.”

“You can thank Frank for that, too.”

“Oh, of course, you poor baby. You chased your terrible runaway father all the way to Asia, such a sad story. And look how badly it’s worked out. You’re living here, married to the best-looking woman in the world, with a daughter who’s—”

“Okay, okay.”

“Lighten up on Frank. He gave me that money for you, he stole that passport. And you know what else? We could
use
him. I’d take him over Ivan the Useless, or whatever that guy’s name is, any day.”

“Not me,” Rafferty says. “I know Vladimir’s a cheat and a liar and that he’d sell me out in a minute. But I keep expecting Frank to be something else.”

“Like what?”

He feels silly as he says it, but he can’t
not
say it. “A father.”

“Oh, you’re
so
breaking my heart. Tell you what. Let’s just ignore each other.”

“We’re both upset,” Rafferty says.

“Gee. You think?” She looks at her watch. “We should be there by now.”

“You here now,” the driver says, angling sharply to the curb. And there it is, a big, brightly lit store with a bunch of creatively melted and fractured mannequins in the window and the word
ZOMBIETOWN
in letters that look like the Hollywood sign. Ming Li reaches across the seat and jabs Rafferty with her forefinger.

“Sorry.”

He hands the driver the fare. “Both of us. Imagine living through that.”

“Why did he kill her?”

One of the fluorescents in the store flickers out, and Rafferty says, “Later. Let’s get in there so they can close up and go home.”

The store smells like a freshly opened box of latex gloves. The young salesgirl who hurries to help them wears a fraying bedsheet, a stringy wig of dead white hair, and two ounces of face powder. She’s drawn a gruesome red scar down her left cheek, with stitches of black thread glued in place. After the green apartment, it’s so innocent it makes Rafferty want to weep. She looks at both of them, clearly trying to find a racial classification, and gives up. In careful English she says, “Welcome to Zombietown. I am the Mistress of the Night.”

“Whoo,” Rafferty says, rubbing his arms with a shudder that surprises him by being real. In return he gets a grin, rich in plastic fangs. In Thai he says, “I want something, a mask, that wears glasses.”

“Of course,” says the Mistress of the Night, in English. “Glasses.”

Ming Li says, “Why do we want glasses? Actually, what are we doing here?”

“One thing at a time.” They follow the Mistress of the Night toward the back of the store. She calls out to someone, putting a
little edge into it, and the lights snap back on. The Mistress of the Night turns dramatically and raises an open hand in a sweeping gesture that takes in a segment of wall hung with plastic masks of the full-size, pull-over-the-heard variety.

She looks at Ming Li and says, in English, “For your daughter?”

“Sister,” Rafferty says. “No, bigger. For me.” He points at a goofy-looking face with buckteeth, sleepy eyes, a lopsided grin, and a pair of black-framed glasses hanging from ears like cup handles. “Him.”

“Mortimer Snerd,” the Queen of the Night says doubtfully. “Not very scary.”

“Really?” Rafferty says. “I think he’s terrifying.”

I
N YET ANOTHER
cab, Rafferty fumbles with the X-acto knife the Mistress of the Night sold him. The fourth time the driver hits a bump, Ming Li says, “Oh, give it here.” The cab reaches the bottom of a ten-degree grade and plows into a temporary lake, hydroplaning briefly and skewing sickeningly to the left, until the driver slows and the tires find the pavement again. The moment the cab loses contact with the street, Ming Li lifts the knife’s point an inch above the surface of the mask and waits.

Rafferty says, “Don’t cut yourself.”

“You know,” she says, going back to working the knife very precisely through the rubber, “if you hadn’t said that, I
absolutely
would have cut myself. ‘Don’t fall down the stairs,’ ” she says through her nose. “ ‘Don’t hit your thumb with that hammer.’ ‘Don’t crawl into the refrigerator and pull the door closed and die there.’ Welcome to the Useless Warnings Brigade.”

“I had to say something.”

“If you have to say something, tell me why he killed her.”

“Right.” He settles back and closes his eyes for a second. “Well, the first thing is that I don’t actually know anything. This is all guesses.”

“Guesses are a beginning.”

“Okay. Okay, okay, okay.” Now he’s gazing through the window, trying to assemble the chronology. “I think Murphy was looking for Sellers and Helen—sorry, Bey—off and on for years. Practically
ever since he found out about them, after Americans were allowed back into Vietnam. But it got really important in the past four or five years, as his stock started to go up with the American spooks and he had even more to lose. The Islamic unrest started here, and the Americans needed someone who could do dirty work but be deniable. He’s perfect for them. He’s former Phoenix Program, so he knows the drill, he’s even had a security clearance, and he’s in business all over Southeast Asia. He’s the ideal listening post, and he can go operational, too. So one day some aging general in Washington says, ‘What about old Murphy?’ and they pick up the phone and give him a call.”

Ming Li is holding the knife still and watching the windshield wipers lose their fight with the rain as she listens. “Yeah?”

“So for Murphy it’s the golden ring. Suddenly he’s got the government helping with his business, making his cover look even better, throwing contracts at him. But there’s a problem, and that’s what happened in that village. Given to the wrong media, the wrong administration, it could destroy him. So all of a sudden, catching up to Bey and Billie Joe moves way up his to-do list.”

“And,” Ming Li says, “he’s got new resources now. To help him find them.”

“And he did,” Rafferty says.

“And they hurt her for twenty-four—”

“Trying to make her tell them—”

“—where Billie Joe is.”

“So about five days before Billie Joe runs into me,” Rafferty says, “she tells them what they wanted to know—”

“And what she says is, ‘He’s here, in Thailand,’ except they can’t pin down his exact location. But they’ve got some sort of pipeline to him, and to draw him they set up that thing you got in the middle of.
And
it does draw him, and they do the dirty. And Murphy thinks he can relax, except that suddenly you’re there and Billie Joe talked to you.”

“And let’s not forget, there may be something in Yala, which probably has its own calendar. So Murphy might be getting squeezed from three or four directions at once.”

They both think for a moment. The driver says, “At once,” and Ming Li jumps, but Rafferty shakes his head. The guy’s just trying out the phrase.

“You said the government might pay him through his company,” Ming Li says, lowering her voice. “Why would they do it that way?”

“You tell me. Vladimir wouldn’t have asked that question.”