Timothy Hallinan: The Fear Artist

The uniforms manhandle Rafferty downhill and position him in a doorway, out of the rain, so the fallen man and the other police are behind him. The street is empty now, except for the knot of men in front of the paint shop. Rafferty tries to turn to look behind him, but the cop pulls him back into position and says, “Papers.”

“That man’s been shot,” Rafferty says, the realization dawning on him at last. “He needs a doctor.”

“Nobody got shot.” The cops exchange a fast glance, and the one who’s not holding Rafferty lets his eyes flick up the hill. “He’ll be fine,” his partner says.

“I heard the gun,” Rafferty says. “He was bleeding like-”

“He wasn’t shot,” the cop says. “There wasn’t any gun.” He gives Rafferty’s arm a token shake. “Let me see your papers.”

Rafferty says, “Oh, for Christ’s sake,” but he digs in the rear pockets of his jeans and pries his wallet out. As he begins to open it, he sees the smear of blood on his hand. “Look,” he says, holding it under the nose of the nearer cop. “He was bleeding. Don’t tell me he wasn’t-”

“Nosebleed,” the cop says. “Papers, now .”

Rafferty wipes the blood on the thigh of his jeans and fishes through the wallet until he comes up with two tissue-soft sheets of paper, almost transparent with wear. He opens one and then the other. “Passport. Current visa.”

“Where are the originals?” the nearer cop says. He’s meaningfully lean, the kind of thin that rarely signals an easy nature, and his lips are as sharp as a parrot’s beak. His partner, younger and fleshier, seems to be fixated on what’s happening up the hill, his mouth half open.

“At my apartment.”

“Philip Rafferty,” the cop reads aloud, mangling both names. “You’re a resident of Thailand?”

“That’s what the visa says.”

The cop gives him small, tight eyes, as though he’s already sighting a weapon. “I ask you questions,” he says in English. “You answer, you understand?”

“Yeah, I think I can follow that.”

“Why don’t you carry originals?”

“Because someone might take them, some cop or someone, and I’d have to get new ones.”

The cop says, “Puh,” just barely not a spit. He holds out the copies and, as Rafferty reaches for them, drops them. They flutter to the wet pavement.

For a few seconds, Rafferty looks into the cop’s eyes. What he sees there makes him nod and bend down to pick up the papers.

The cop puts his foot on them.

“Fine,” Rafferty says, straightening. He can hear the blood in his ears. “Fuck them, I can make new ones.”

The cop moves his foot. The papers are translucent with water and smeared with mud. “Pick up,” he says. “If you not, if you walk away, I stop you and say I want papers, then arrest you because you don’t have.”

Rafferty leans against the wall, feeling the pulse thrum at the side of his neck. “Back up,” he says. “Until you back up, I’ll stand here and we’ll look at each other.”

The soft-faced cop tells his partner, in Thai, to stop fooling around. After a moment the lean cop backs away and then makes a gesture, palm up, in the direction of the documents.

Rafferty bends and peels the papers free of the sidewalk, but as he straightens, the lean cop steps closer again, and his fingers dart into the pocket of Rafferty’s T-shirt. When they come out, they’re holding a yellow slip of paper, tightly folded. He opens it to reveal a small diamond shape, cut into the center by someone who’s folded it into quarters and then snipped off the tip of the central fold. “What’s this?”

“That’s my yellow piece of paper,” Rafferty says. He’s never seen it before.

“What does it say?”

“The rules by which I live,” Rafferty says. “The Diamond Sutra.”

The other cop looks over his partner’s shoulder and laughs. “It’s your laundry ticket,” he says.

Rafferty says, “It’s in code.”

The plump cop laughs again, and even the lean one relaxes a little. He hands the ticket back, saying, “You going to need the clean clothes. You all dirty.”

“Thanks. I hadn’t noticed.”

The lean cop backs away. “You go now. Go home.”

“I need to buy some more paint.”

“Home. Cannot go in store now.”

Rafferty turns to look uphill again, and the plump cop stands in his way, although Rafferty gets a quick glimpse of a tight knot of uniforms and plainclothes around the fallen farang .

“Go,” the plump cop says. “Go now or we arrest you.”

“I’ve got an apartment to paint,” Rafferty says, pocketing the yellow ticket.

“Have too much paint in Bangkok,” says the plump cop. “Can buy anywhere. You go.”

“I go,” Rafferty says, sidestepping the lean cop and plodding downhill. A siren emits a short, throat-clearing whoop behind him, and he turns to see an ambulance glide into position in front of the paint store. The lean cop waves him on: Keep going .

At the foot of the mild little hill is a good-size four-lane boulevard, and Rafferty is surprised to see the wet pavement shining in a flat, uninterrupted slab, as empty as outer space. A block to his right, he sees a barrier: white sawhorses set up on the far side of the turn that leads up to the hill with the paint shop on it. Half a dozen policemen wearing yellow slickers have assumed poses of varying vigilance, facing the oncoming traffic.

Turning around, Rafferty sees a mirror version of the blockade two blocks in the other direction. Since there’s no traffic on the street he’s just hiked down, it’s not a difficult guess that it’s been barricaded, too, a few blocks away in both directions.

It feels strange to him; Bangkok is many things, but it’s never empty. As he walks, he sees the wide blue eyes and feels again the sudden jerk of the body atop his when the first bullet struck it. Feels retroactively an unbidden thrill at having been missed. Whoever was shooting was either very good or completely indifferent. Or both.

The man’s odd haircut, the haircut of someone who might not have been able to let go of being military. When Rafferty was growing up in the desert outside Lancaster, California, he had met men like that, friends of his father, men who had gone into service at eighteen, probably leaving behind a teenager they no longer wanted to be, and then spent three or four decades having everything decided for them. Men who, at the age of fifty, had never given a thought to how they should comb their hair.

But if one of those men had been killed, he thinks as he makes his way down the center of the wet, deserted boulevard, there might have been a cop or two, maybe an ambulance. Not half a dozen policemen, barricades, plainclothes guys, multiple ambulances, and-he remembers the handsome one with the puffy eyes-spooks.

Definitely spooks.

Despite the rain, his clothes are stiffening with the paint, his entire front and left side a patchwork of apricot with artistic mottlings of Urban Decay. Looking down at it now, in the even gray light, he decides the apricot is too strong for the living room. It needs more white.

Spooks.

He knows what the apartment will look like, since he’s responsible for its looking that way, but his spirits still plummet as he comes through the door. Everything-couch, glass table, white leather hassock, his weensy cheap desk-has been shoved uselessly into the middle of the room, like mismatched dancers coming together for the fancy steps. The carpet, which he’s wanted to replace for years, is covered by a funereal black drop cloth giving off a sour reek of mold.

There is literally nowhere to sit.

Okay, why didn’t he turn the couch around so he could sit on it? What was he thinking?