Timothy Hallinan - The Fear Artist

“But you don’t think they will, do you?”

“No,” Arthit says. “I don’t.”

Pim surprises all of them by saying, “Why am I here? Why did you want me to hear this?”

“Because you live here,” Arthit says. “Because it could affect you.”

Pim says, “That means you’re going to do something? To help Poke?”

“Well,” Arthit says, “of course I am.”

Pim smiles for the first time since Rafferty arrived and gets up. “I’m going to make more coffee,” she says. And she leaves.

“More coffee” Turns into an impromptu meal, since no one but Anna has eaten breakfast. Anna has gone into the kitchen to help Pim clean up, leaving Poke feeling guilty that he’s not in there, too, rather than sitting with Arthit, who’s been waited on by women all his life. Arthit is using Anna’s absence to talk about things he’s not comfortable sharing with her.

“We’ve got to look at how Shen’s people reacted,” he says. “They were there, on the scene, almost before the American bumped into you. It’s impossible that they showed up so quickly. He drew them, or someone else in that crowd drew them. And they get a few seconds of film of the dead man’s face and share it, and people snap to attention-both here and in America, if Elson and the other guy are any indication. Everybody desperately needs to know what he said.”

“A climate of highly evolved uncertainty.”

“Okay,” Arthit says. “One: They know who the man is, or there wouldn’t be all this hand-wringing. Two: It’s important enough to keep the footage off TV, and I’ll bet there won’t be anything in the papers. Three: They’re crazy to know what he said. What does that suggest to you?”

“One of two things,” Rafferty says. “Either he’s someone who wasn’t supposed to be here at all, and they have no idea what he was up to and what he was doing here. Or he’s somebody they lost.”

Arthit says, “Lost,” but Rafferty can’t tell whether it’s a question, a confirmation, or just a repetition.

“Yeah. Like he’s a piece that disappeared from the board, and when he suddenly turns up, it catches everybody off guard and they all scurry. Why did he disappear? Where’s he been? Why is he back? Who is he working for? And whatever they think he told me, it’s important, so even if they’re ninety percent sure he just accidentally bumped into me, the ten percent is probably enough to keep them interested.”

“There’s another issue, too,” Arthit says. “Who shot him? If it was Shen’s guys, then they were killing someone with information they needed, and apparently they needed it pretty badly. Doesn’t make a lot of sense.”

“Maybe they didn’t need it,” Rafferty says. “Maybe what they needed was to make absolutely certain he didn’t pass it to anyone else.”

There’s a silence as they both consider the implications. Pim laughs in the kitchen.

“I’ll call in a few favors,” Arthit says. “See whether I can learn anything. In the meantime you keep a low profile and don’t do anything stupid.”

Rafferty says, “You know about hawks?”

“I know a few things about hawks,” Arthit says patiently. “What did you have in mind?”

“Hawks have amazing eyesight, but they can only see something when it’s moving. As long as I don’t move around, just-as you say-live a normal life, stand still … well, maybe they won’t look at me.”

Arthit’s expression is not encouraging.

“Works for rabbits,” Rafferty says.

“Sooner or later,” Arthit says, “most rabbits get eaten.”

Closing the door after Poke, Arthit turns to see Anna standing a few feet behind him. She holds up her pad, and he reads: Will he be careful?

“It depends,” Arthit says.

She shrugs the question.

“On whether he gets mad. He’s a good guy, but he gets a little crazy when he’s mad. Fortunately, he seems to have miraculous karma, because otherwise he’d have been dead years ago.”

She nods. She seems to be waiting for something.

Arthit says, “Well,” and can’t think of anything to follow it with.

She watches for a moment to make sure he’s not going to continue and then starts to write. She lifts the pencil and swivels the pad toward him. It says, Lunch?

The word opens an unexpected door in Arthit’s day. He hasn’t gone anywhere with a woman since Noi’s death. He feels his mouth open and close a couple of times, realizes that’s exactly the wrong reaction since his mouth is mostly what she looks at. He says, “We just ate breakfast. And I have to work.” As she begins to put the pad into her purse, he lays a hand on her arm. “What about dinner?”

“Don’t move around,” Rafferty quickly finds, means don’t do anything even remotely interesting.

It means no going across town to check out the laundry that the yellow ticket came from. It means no phoning Cheyenne, Wyoming, and trying to get a listing for Helen Eckersley. It means, if he’s going to be really careful, not even trying to find her online. It means don’t call Floyd Preece at the Bangkok Sun- who got his job because Rafferty gave him the biggest scoop of his career-to find out whether pressure was brought on the paper not to cover the shooting death of a farang in Bangkok and, if so, by whom it was brought.

Because, for all Rafferty knows-and Arthit drove the possibility home with some force-he’s under surveillance. His cell phone might as well be a radio station.

“Don’t move around” even means not going anywhere near the no-name bar where all the obsolete spooks hang out, to see whether anyone can match an identity to his description of Mr. Nose-Hair.

What it does mean is, paint the apartment.

So he goes back to the paint store, trying not to check for watchers, trying not to look like a bad actor who knows he’s on camera. The cabbie, like every other driver in Bangkok, has the radio tuned to the news, which is monitoring centimeter by centimeter the rise of the water level in the Chao Phraya and the flooding-rapidly spreading some say-in the ancient capital city of Ayutthaya, about forty miles upstream. The rain, the cresting waters, seem real to him in a way that Shen and the redheaded spook don’t. By the time he’s in the paint store, all he’s thinking about is buying, for the second time, the Apricot Cream that Rose picked for the living room-he adds some white this time-and the Urban Decay that Miaow will probably love for all of three weeks before it’s replaced in her affections by Advanced-Rot Brown or Swollen-Lip Fuchsia or Infected-Piercing Scarlet. He comes back out into the drizzle, toting the familiar weight of the paint, focusing on the task at hand, and finds himself standing dead center in the splash he’d made when the first cans burst open. It’s dappled now by a confused pattern of footprints, a diagram of some impossible dance step. Surrounded by a wash of Apricot Cream, he thinks, The man died in my arms . Then he thinks, And there’s nothing I can do about it . He goes home.

The paint rolls on smoothly, and for a while Rafferty is able to submerge his simmer of uneasiness in the well-being that comes only with mindless work where progress is obvious: A larger area is Apricot Cream now, and a smaller area is white . More of life, he tries to convince himself, should be like this.

In between stretches of precariously maintained well-being, he misses Rose and Miaow. He goes back to worrying about Major Shen and worrying more sharply about the Americans. He feels-like an old bruise he can’t do anything about except wait for it to fade-a sense of unfulfilled responsibility toward the man who died.