Timothy Hallinan - The Fourth Watcher

“Oh, sure. My time is your time. What did you have in mind?”

“I thought we might crack open Agent Elson’s shell. Just a little. Sort of give us an idea of what’s inside it.”

“How?” Rafferty’s cell phone rings, and he says, “Hold that thought,” and answers it.

“Poke?” It is Prettyman’s voice, and it sounds strained to the point of strangulation. “Get your ass over here. Right now. ”

"What the fuck have you gotten me into?” Prettyman demands, leaning so close that Rafferty can see the gray in his Ming the Merciless goatee. Prettyman’s well-estab

lished distaste for personal proximity is no match for the urgency he feels. Rafferty has seen the man under pressure before-in fact, Prettyman’s approach to life seems to be to create pressure and then cave in to it-but this is something new. The intensity even reaches his eyes.

And that makes Rafferty very uncomfortable. During their acquaintance Prettyman has revealed few admirable qualities, but he doesn’t frighten easily. At the moment he is scared half to death. They are in the back room of the Nana Plaza bar, and the bass from the sound system thumps in two-four time through the wall, synchronized approximately with Rafferty’s heartbeat. The room is empty except for the table at which they sit, the four chairs that have gathered around it for company, a wall full of framed photographs, and a Plexiglas box padlocked on a black stand. Beneath the box, displayed like an Academy Award, is a SIG-Sauer nine-millimeter automatic.

“I gather you had a nibble,” Rafferty says.

“A nibble ? It was like sinking a hook in fucking Moby-Dick.” Prettyman shows a lot of teeth. It is not a smile. “First person I called, wham. All I did was mention the name, and I thought the guy was going to come through the line and grab my tongue. So I think, Whoa, slow down, and I get off the line. And three other guys call me within fifteen minutes.” Prettyman hears the pitch of his own voice and sits back, eyeing the room as though he wishes it were much larger and, perhaps, made of steel. “A number I didn’t think anybody had,” he says, more quietly if not more calmly. Despite the coolness of the room, his shirt is patchy with sweat, and not just in the obvious places.

Rafferty gives him a minute in the name of tact and then says, “What kind of guys?”

“Not your problem.” Prettyman seems to be regretting his volatility. He makes a show of straightening his cuffs. A cup of coffee toted in from the bar is cooling in front of him untouched, and a paint-thinner smell announces the brandy it’s been laced with.

“It certainly is my problem, Arnold. Look, I’m not asking for names and addresses. Americans, Chinese, Thais, military, diplomats, spooks, cops, gangsters-what?”

“All of the above,” Prettyman says in the satisfied tone of someone who predicted disaster and turned out to be right. “And with a lot of weight-very high-density guys.” He drums the table with his fingernails. “What are those little stars called? The ones that are so dense?”

“Little dense stars?” Rafferty guesses. His heart isn’t in it.

“ Dwarf stars,” Prettyman says. “A cubic inch of a dwarf star weighs as much as the earth. Think dwarf star. That kind of density.”

“And what did these very heavy guys tell you?” Rafferty lifts his own coffee, pretends to sip. His hand is not completely steady, so he puts it on the table again.

Prettyman is still buying time by adjusting his clothes. “From one perspective they didn’t tell me shit. No answers, not even rude ones. What they wanted was to know what I knew. From another perspective, of course, they told me quite a bit.”

“For example.”

“The whole world wants to get its teeth into Frank Rafferty. Way it sounded, they’d chew your father up and fight over the scraps.”

Rafferty’s initial doubts about involving Prettyman suddenly intensify. He pushes his chair back and gets up, feeling the other man’s eyes follow him. Three or four steps carry him to the wall with the photos on it. A younger Prettyman stares out from each of them: in a jungle, wearing fatigues; centered and fuzzy in an obvious telephoto shot, talking to a woman on some Middle European street; posed dramatically in front of the Kremlin in a trench coat that might as well have spy stenciled on the back. The others are all variations on the theme: spook at work.

“I didn’t know you guys liked to have your picture taken so much,” Rafferty says. “This looks like the wall at a local chamber of commerce.”

“Fuck the pictures,” Prettyman says.

“So they’re eager,” Rafferty says, still studying the photos. “So they’ve got a lot of weight. Puts you in an interesting position.”

“Puts me right up the fecal creek,” Prettyman says. Then he hears the implication. “You don’t actually think I’d shop you, Poke?” Rafferty turns to see him widen his eyes, which succeeds only in making them bigger. They’re still the eyes of someone who could spot an opportunity through a sheet of lead.

“Please, Arnold,” Poke says.

“And even if I would,” Prettyman says immediately, “I don’t actually know anything, do I? I’m the guy in the middle, the one all these wide-track trucks think has the marbles, and I don’t even know if the guy is really your father.”

“Of course you do. There’s no way you haven’t learned that much.”

“This does not make me happy, Poke,” Prettyman says. He turns his coffee cup ninety degrees and then back again, and wipes sweat from the side of his neck. “It’s not the kind of attention I want to attract. I’m a settled man here, retired from the Company, whatever you may think. The world has passed me by, and that’s fine. A man at my time of life doesn’t need the adrenaline jolts I liked twenty years ago. A little money, the occasional girl, regular habits. The same pillow every evening. A house I can leave in the morning knowing I’ll be coming back to it at the end of the day. No more night crawls, no more tracking boring people across boring cities and then discovering that they’re not so boring after all, that in fact they’d like to kill you.”

Infected by Prettyman’s anxiety, Rafferty does his own scan of the room, wondering whether there’s a microphone somewhere. He lifts the pictures, crosses the room and looks under the table, comes up, catches Prettyman studying him, and says, “Have you left the bar tonight, Arnold?”

Prettyman hesitates, just his normal disinclination to part with information. “I went home for dinner.”

“After you made the calls?”

“Some of them. I made more from home.”

“And when you left here, or when you came back, were you followed?”

The question makes Prettyman shift in his chair, sliding from side to side as though smoothing down a lump in the cushion. He licks his lips. “That book you were going to write,” he says. “How good did you get at spotting a tail?”

“Obviously not too good.” He sits again. “I still smell like an issue of Vanity Fair. ”

“Then you know,” Prettyman says. “It’s not easy. Give me half a dozen good people and I could follow Santa all the way around the world without tipping him off.” He blinks a couple of times and blots his upper lip with the side of his index finger. “But I don’t think so. For one thing, no one knows where I live.”

“They didn’t know the phone number either.”

“No,” Prettyman says grimly. “And don’t think I’m not keeping that in mind.”

“Because of course you do know something, don’t you? You know that Frank’s in Bangkok and that I’m in contact with him. You know where I live. Not exactly a Chinese wall. You’ve probably operated on less.”