Timothy Hallinan - The Fear Artist

“I’ve been to Montana. I went there once, when I was a kid. The woman’s name was just a name, and I was a little rattled.”

“Rattled.”

“Yeah, you know. American slang? Rattled? Having a guy die on me and all that. People running. Shots being fired. Shots you denied, by the way. Not the ideal spot for concentration.”

“You’re not used to having people die on you.”

“Not especially.”

Major Shen sits back and crosses his legs, a man with all the time in the world. “And yet people die around you with some regularity.”

The room suddenly feels not so much cool as frigid. Rafferty tries to keep his face blank as he ransacks his mind for anything that could connect him directly to any of the people who actually have died around him since he came to Bangkok. “You must know something about my life I don’t.”

Shen lowers his head and looks at Rafferty from under his eyebrows. “A Chinese gangster. An American defense contractor who apparently had some sort of relationship with your wife.” He checks his perfect nails female-style, extending his arm, fingers straight, and looking at the back of his hand. “To name just two.” He lifts his head and turns the smile on again, the picture of someone whose memory has just kicked in. “Oh, and that billionaire Pan, so that’s three. That we know of. Not exactly a bookish life, is it?”

Rafferty doesn’t reply. But there’s only one person in Bangkok who might conceivably have told Shen about both Howard Horner, the defense contractor, and Chu, the Chinese triad leader. Under his breath he says, “Fucker.”

“Excuse me?”

“I said ‘Fucker,’ ” Rafferty says to the mirror. “But it wasn’t aimed at you.”

“Well, I’m sure that whoever it is, he’s shaking in his boots. Anyway, to get back to our business. We’re concerned with this man and what he might have said. You’re the person he said it to, and I have to observe that you’re leading an interesting life here. In times of crisis, we tend to clump interesting people together, at least to the point of asking them polite questions, but-”

“You know what’s really interesting?”

“-but sometimes mistakes are made,” Shen finishes.

“Meaning sometimes you’re not so polite to people who haven’t done anything.”

The remote shrug again. “I’d be lying if I said it never happened.”

“I’ll remember that for when the press talks to me.”

Major Shen smiles. “The press will not talk to you.”

Rafferty listens to the statement several times in memory. It has the effect of sobering him up. He nods.

“The woman’s name,” Shen says.

Rafferty sits back. “I don’t remember it.”

“Why ‘Helena’?”

“I have no idea. It’s probably where she lives, whoever she is.”

Tented fingertips. “So your hypothesis is that he was asking you to contact this woman?”

“I don’t have a hypothesis. For all I know, Helena, or Montana, is his Rosebud.”

Shen leans forward a quarter of an inch, and for such a small move it’s immensely unfriendly. “But it isn’t his Rosebud. It’s a city. He gives you a name and a city. A who and a where, so to speak.”

“I suppose so.”

“But you don’t remember the name.”

Rafferty raises a hand to stop him and shuts his eyes. Pictures the fallen man, feels the chill of rain on the back of his neck, sees again the jolting, out-of-focus chaos in the background and the brilliance of the TV crew’s light. Forces himself to concentrate on the man’s lips, thinking of the close-up in Citizen Kane when Kane says “Rosebud.” But the man’s lips barely move at all.

He opens his eyes. “No, I don’t.”

Major Shen sighs and then says, “So what you’re willing to tell us is that he said three words: a name you can’t remember and a city in Montana.” He nods as though something has been confirmed. “You have been to Montana, haven’t you? You’ve been all over. You spent quite a bit of time in Manila, for example, and Jakarta. Denpasar. I could name some more if I looked at my notes.”

Rafferty knows where this is going, and it makes him very uneasy. “That’s not exactly a secret. I wrote books about both the Philippines and Indonesia.”

“You have to admit, you’ve got an unusual profile.”

“I don’t have to admit shit.”

“This is not a constructive atti-”

“What happened today had nothing to do with me. Your crowd was chasing his crowd, or the crowd he got caught up in. He got shot, he had to grab onto someone, and I was there. Are you suggesting that I went to Indonesia and the Philippines because I’m involved with Muslim separatists or terrorists of some kind? Because if you are, I want my embassy here now.”

“My, my,” Major Shen says.

“My, my yourself.” Poke looks back at the mirrored window with its unspoken threat. Whatever else this is, it’s bullying, and he learned long ago that giving in to bullies just signals weakness. “I’m finished talking. Arrest me or something.”

“Please, Mr. Rafferty.” Shen does that glance over Rafferty’s shoulder again, as though there were a teleprompter back there. “You grew up in California, isn’t that right?”

“You know it is.”

“And so did I. Orange County, whereas you were in …” He seems either to be searching for the name or giving Rafferty a chance to supply it, but Rafferty doesn’t. “Lancaster,” he says.

“Just a couple of California boys,” Rafferty says. “Under other circumstances we’d probably go surfing.”

“This is a different world,” Major Shen says. “It’s no longer necessary to arrest people.”

“It never really was,” Rafferty says. “Bullies in uniforms have always found shortcuts.”

“This … posturing is not helpful, not to either of us.”

“Possibly not. Let me go back to my earlier question. You want to know what’s really interesting?”

Shen rubs his eyes with both hands, his first admission that he’s tired. “Not particularly, no.”

“That you’re asking me who he was and what he said, but not who shot him.”

Rafferty is rewarded with a blink. “That’s not a question that-”

“I mean, if I had arranged the … whatever you want to call it-meeting, collision, whatever-then I should be a suspect, shouldn’t I? Accomplice at least. I brought him within range of the rifle, right?”

Major Shen purses his lips and turns his head away from Rafferty, putting himself in profile to whoever is behind the window. It’s almost the same as saying, Wouldn’t it have been nice if someone had anticipated this question?

“You know who shot him,” Rafferty says. “Don’t you? And you know who he was, too.”

Shen doesn’t seem to have heard a word. “Give me the woman’s name.”

“Arrest me or I’m leaving, and then you’ll have to hold me.”

Major Shen pushes both hands down on the tabletop as though to rise and opens his mouth, but there’s a clack that Rafferty identifies as a coin, or some other object made of metal, being rapped against the other side of the mirror. The major sits back in his seat, closes his eyes slowly, and opens them again, and he’s once more looking over Rafferty’s shoulder. “Of course we’re not going to hold you,” he says, and he produces a smile a lot less polished than the one Rafferty’s been seeing, the smile of someone who’s not very good at masking rage. “This is just a discussion.”

Rafferty gets up, unsure of what’s happening. The rap of the coin changed everything. He says to Shen, “Don’t forget your shoes.”