Timothy Hallinan - The Fear Artist

“This is the kind of thing,” he says, “that I could use some help with.” He picks up the coffee and drinks it in self-defense.

She gives him a smile that lifts his heart in a way it hasn’t been lifted in some time and sips her own coffee.

“You’re … ahhh, teaching,” he says. Her silence hovers between them, seeming to need to be filled. “How long have you been …?” He abandons the question. “It’s very nice to see you. Noi and I were such hermits,” he says, not wanting to bring up the illness that had kept her home. “We let a lot of old friends slip away. She talked about you, though.”

It was true. Noi and Anna had been children together, back in what Arthit always thought of as Noi’s golden childhood, spent in the lap of the family that had been extremely displeased at her marriage so far below her social status-to a lowly policeman, the son of another policeman. Anna has the same gloss to her, a kind of natural polish buffed by privilege that rough wear hasn’t scratched.

She’s writing now, and he watches with pleasure. She’s left-handed, her fingers long and cream-colored, with varnished, untinted nails. The pen appears weightless in her hand, and Arthit enjoys the play of delicate muscles beneath smooth skin.

She tears off the page and slides it over to him, then goes back to writing.

I’ve wanted to come for months , it says. But I didn’t want to intrude. And I was afraid a little, too. You were so devastated at the temple. I didn’t know how you’d be and whether I could do anything …

The next piece of paper skims the table.

… no matter how you were. And I felt terrible about it, because I knew that Noi would have wanted me to make sure you were all right. But I’m a coward .

She’s stopped writing and is watching him read. When he’s finished, Arthit says, “But you’ve come now, and-”

Anna is shaking her head, denying herself any credit. She reaches down and brings up the purse again.

When her hand comes back into view, it’s holding a four-by-five photograph, in color. She places the very tips of her fingers on its edge, as though she’s hesitant to touch it, and pushes it across the table. There’s something apologetic in the way she pulls her hands back.

A big man lying in the rain on an oddly colored sidewalk, his torso in the lap of another man, who’s clearly calling for help.

Arthit looks at the sitting man’s face.

Forty minutes later Rafferty says, “I hope this is interesting. I was sitting at home, just sort of wishing for a merciful death.”

Arthit, heading through the dining room toward the kitchen, says, “It’s interesting. Sit down and you’ll find out.”

Rafferty chooses the armchair he’s chosen for years and sits carefully, trying to keep his head from rolling off his neck. His throat is dry, and his tongue feels like it has a seat cover on it. The morning light, even through the thick clouds, is bright enough to make noise.

He has to stand again almost immediately as Arthit comes back with Pim in tow. She’s carrying a fancy coffee cup, thin enough to let him see the coffee through the porcelain. She hands it to him without meeting his eyes or saying hello and trudges away, shuffling her feet like someone who’s polishing the floor with her socks. Arthit returns Poke’s questioning glance with a man-to-man combination of wide eyes and shrugged shoulders that means, I’d scream and break things if I could, but I can’t, and I’ll tell you about it when there are no women around .

Rafferty starts to sit again, but no such luck. Into the room comes a very trim and, he thinks, quite beautiful woman about Arthit’s age.

She’s wearing a dark blue blouse, possibly silk, with loose half sleeves that bare elegant forearms and an exquisite pair of hands. The blouse hangs over white linen slacks, only slightly wrinkled despite the damp of the day. She has a short chop of thick, willful hair, brushed back to reveal a porcelain forehead and large, rounded eyes, a brown that goes golden in the sunlight streaming through the windows.

“This is Anna,” Arthit says, and Rafferty hears a note in his friend’s voice that he hasn’t heard in months and months.

He greets Anna in Thai, and she makes a fluid, practiced gesture, first almost touching her fingertips to her lips and then to her ear and ending with her upraised palm facing him. Arthit says, “Anna doesn’t hear or speak. But she can read your lips.”

Rafferty says, “In English?” and at the last moment diverts the question to her instead of Arthit.

Anna gives him a broad smile, and Arthit says, “In Serbo-Croatian, probably.”

Still smiling, Anna sits on the couch and tucks her legs under her.

Arthit takes the other end of the couch and clears his throat. “It’s because Anna reads lips that we’re all here.”

Rafferty hears a floorboard creak in the dining room. Since Arthit is still looking at him, he makes a small movement with his head toward the noise.

“Poke,” Arthit says, a bit stagily. “Why don’t you go into the kitchen and get Pim? She lives here, too, and she ought to hear this.”

“Let me have a gulp of coffee first,” Rafferty says. He takes a long sip, replaces the cup on the saucer with a clatter, and yawns loudly to give Pim the chance to duck back into the kitchen. He glimpses the look that passes between Arthit and the woman-Anna, her nickname is Anna-as he leaves the living room. The look was shared amusement, and it’s a look that, Rafferty thinks, usually takes a while to develop.

“Hey, Pim,” he says. She’s sitting at the kitchen table with an empty cup-a chipped mug, not one of the good ones-in front of her. He goes to the coffeemaker and hoists the carafe. “Want some more?”

She shakes her head.

He carries it over anyway, glances down at the cup, and says, “Well, you can’t have more if you haven’t had any.” He pours her half a cup. “It’s good. Come on, it’ll get your heart beating.”

He’s been speaking English, and he knows she understands only bits of it. From the look on her face, she’s not even trying.

“Can I have more?” He holds up his empty cup.

“Can have what you want,” she says.

She’s such a puffy, hapless little thing, short, plump-faced, uncertain. When he’d first met her, she was trying to work the sidewalk on Sukhumwit Soi 7, and he’d dragged her home to meet Rose. He and Rose had thought they were doing a favor for both her and Arthit when they suggested she come to help him with the house, but looking at her now, he’s not sure he was right.

“Why don’t you come into the living room for a minute?”

“I’m not really a servant,” she says in Thai. “I can stay here if I want.”

“It’s not an order. I think Arthit just wants to make sure you know what’s happening.”

She blows out a gallon of air in a way that reminds him she isn’t really that much older than Miaow and gets up, mug in hand.

“Wait,” he says. He turns to the cupboards, which he had helped Arthit clean and organize in the aftermath of Noi’s death, and pulls out one of the porcelain cups, with saucer. It takes him only a few seconds to fill it with fresh coffee and hold out his hand for the mug. She hesitates for a moment, and then they swap, and Rafferty follows her into the living room.

Arthit gets up as they enter and ushers her to the second armchair. Anna’s eyes follow Pim as she crosses the room. When they’re all seated and Anna’s gaze has dropped to her lap, Rafferty leans back and sees, for an instant, the same tableau but with different people: Rose and himself in the armchairs, Arthit and Noi on the couch. Seeing Anna in Noi’s place, he feels a sharp, almost-physical twinge of loss, an emotional cramp.