Timothy Hallinan - The Fear Artist

He had used his last breath to tell Rafferty something and his last burst of energy to give him something. What was Rafferty supposed to do about that?

Paint these fucking walls?

With part of the longest wall in the living room done and the apartment’s air gelatinous with the smell of paint, he begins to feel twinges of a new anxiety, a tiny and unpleasant electrical charge fizzling its way up his spinal column. What will he do with himself when he runs out of walls? The hallway immediately presents itself as a solution. It’s white, and there’s no reason for it not to be white, but he hasn’t got any white paint. He grabs his wallet and Rose’s umbrella and locks the door behind him.

White paint is simple-no mixing needed, so he can buy it anywhere. Also, he can use the errand as a way to take the situation’s temperature. Maybe’s he’s got delusions of grandeur, maybe he’s not on anyone’s watch-and-report list. He walks a couple of blocks toward a hardware store, doing his best not to look like he’s checking reflections in shop windows, scoping the sidewalk, stealing glances at slow-moving cars, which on this stretch of Silom, especially in this weather, is all of them.

A few years earlier-doing research for a book-he’d taken lessons in tailing people and in spotting people who might be tailing him. His instructor had been a possibly-retired, possibly-not-retired CIA guy named Arnold Prettyman. Prettyman had claimed he was retired, but the likelihood of any statement’s being true declined the moment Arnold said it was. Rafferty always figured Prettyman was on some sort of string, like so many of Bangkok’s substantial population of old spooks. Arnold, unfortunately, has gone into Permanent Deep Cover, but his lessons still ring true. Arnold didn’t eat it because he failed to pick up a tail.

So Rafferty does as he was taught. He’s got an advantage because people aren’t out wandering in the rain unless they have to be, so the sidewalks, usually thronged, are thinly populated. He goes into a few stores he doesn’t need anything from and buys something cheap and plausible. Once or twice he turns around, the image of a man who should make lists but doesn’t, and goes back to a store he passed a minute or two before, looking for scrambling, for stalling, for people suddenly turning to study the traffic. Twice he comes out of a store and does Bangkok’s distinctive dodge-the-traffic dance to cross the boulevard and go into a shop on the other side, looking through the new store’s window to see whether anyone goes into the shop he just vacated.

The second time someone does. It’s a young, short-haired woman wearing reflective aviator shades on a rainy day. He’d seen her when he first hit Silom. She’s inside just long enough, he figures, to present some identification, ask a couple of questions, and get a look at the shopkeeper’s copy of the receipt. Then she’s out again, raising the lapel on her stylish raincoat and talking on a cell phone. She smiles at it, as Thai women often do, but it seems unlikely anyone is being amusing on the other end of the line.

He buys two pairs of athletic socks he actually needs and accepts the cashier’s apology for giving him half a pound of change. This is the second shop to give him coins, and his pants are sagging. Wondering whether it’s some sort of plot to make it impossible for him to run away, he goes two more shops down to buy a can of eggshell-white flat enamel.

Probably four people, he decides as he treks back home, tugging his pants up every few steps. Maybe five. Pretty expensive. And who has that kind of money? Old Uncle Sam, that’s who.

He wants to hold his wife, he wants to see his daughter, he wishes all of this would go away, and he’s certain to the soles of his shoes that it won’t.

When he opens the apartment door, the smell of the paint rolls out at him with an almost liquid impact. He stands there looking at his handiwork and sees where the coat is uneven, where the join with the ceiling is jagged, where he laid it on thick enough to carve graffiti into the paint.

He discovers that he hates apricot.

Breathing the fumes shallowly, he puts the can of white on the floor in the hallway and goes into his bedroom to drain his pockets of change before his jeans fall off.

All year long he puts his coins into a couple of sixteen-ounce cans that originally held tomato sauce. He has no idea why he ever bought tomato sauce, but the cans work as piggy banks. The arrangement is that he empties all his loose change into the cans every night, and on Miaow’s birthday-which they celebrate on Rose’s, since no one knows what Miaow’s birthday actually is-he and she count it together, and the next day he totes it to the bank and gets the equivalent in paper currency and gives it to her.

She hadn’t been particularly eager to count with him on her most recent birthday, but she’d still wanted the bills. He more or less coerced her to join him on the floor, sliding the coins around on the glass-topped table and making countable piles until he announced that she had four hundred thirty baht coming.

Now he dumps handfuls of change on top of the dresser, and as he does it, the anxiety and frustration he feels about his present situation blends into his unhappiness about his relationship with Miaow, and it all becomes a single dark wind blowing on the back of his neck.

Too many of the things he and Miaow used to share with joy are disappearing, being replaced by a kind of weary tolerance on her side and a baffled and apparently useless love on his. More and more it seems to him that she’s on the other side of a thick membrane, permeable to her, allowing her to come through for brief visits, but solid as glass to him. It even-it especially -repels his feelings.

His pockets empty at last, he looks down at the mountain of coins. It’s a sad pile. He opens the drawer and stands there, stupefied.

The tomato cans are empty.

He’s almost meditatively thought-free for a long moment, just registering what he sees. One of the cans had been full and the other about one-third full. Now there are ten or fifteen coins in each can. He picks up the nearer can and rattles it, as though that will prove something.

He turns slowly and surveys the room, as if he expects to see an untidy heap of coins glistening in the center of the bed or on the carpet. Or a path of dropped coins leading to the door.

And then he has a truly terrible notion.

He goes to the bed, slides aside the door in the headboard, and opens the safe. There it is, the oilcloth with the Glock wrapped in it. On the previous evening, he’d jabbed it with his finger, checking its weight.

The moment he wraps his hand around it, his heart plummets.

He pulls it out, takes a corner, lets it fall open, and looks down at the big, doubled Ziploc bag that’s been jammed full of coins and rubber-banded into a semblance of solidity. His gun is gone.

Thinking is preferable to panicking, but harder to do.

It’s early for a beer, only about four-thirty. Given the thorniness of the mental list he’s making, though, he decides to pretend that his watch and the sun are both slow. He sits at the counter with a Singha sweating in front of him, and he draws a crude map, a diagram of his situation. He writes so much that he knows he can accidentally mislead himself with narrative, working instinctively to create plausibility. But he lacks spatial imagination, so diagrams force him to stick to the facts.

In the first rough draft, he puts himself in the center of the horizontal page, with a line leading to the fallen farang. F rom the farang other lines lead, like spokes, to Major Shen, Richard Elson, the red-haired man, Cheyenne, Helen Eckersley. Whoever or whatever Helen Eckersley might actually be.