Timothy Hallinan - The Fear Artist

“Bring her the whiskey, a good big glass of it. When she’s lying down-Is there a bed somewhere?”

“There will be in a minute.”

Neeni’s eyes have come up at the mention of the word “whiskey,” and she’s looking from Rafferty to Hwa and back again.

“When she’s lying down,” Hwa says, “I’ll make some tea.”

“Fine.” He looks around the familiar space, and all he wants to do is curl up and sleep. You want to help me, Ming Li?”

In the kitchen he pulls out his last two big bottles of Singha as Ming Li takes a drinking glass from the cupboard. She stands there, looking at the other cupboards, which are closed. “Whiskey?”

“To the left. Behind some cans of stuff, in a blue sort-of-velvet bag.” He opens the drawer, takes out the bottle opener, flips it into the air, closes his eyes, and puts out his hand. The moment his eyes close, the floor dips beneath him, and as he opens them, the bottle opener lands with a flat, reassuring smack, dead center in his palm. To Ming Li, who is staring at him with one eyebrow raised, he says, “My luck is back.”

Twenty minutes later Neeni and Hwa are set up in Poke and Rose’s room, and he and Ming Li, whose face is turning stop-sign red from the beer, have put new sheets on Miaow’s bed and moved things around to create a path to the door. “Bathroom’s on the left,” he says as she follows him into the living room. He hears Hwa clanking the teapot in the kitchen and takes a quick peek into his bedroom, where Neeni is sitting on the far side of the bed, her back to the door, drinking.

“I’m not going to sleep in Miaow’s room,” Ming Li says. “You are.”

“Wrong. I’m sleeping here.”

She gives the couch a disapproving look and drains the rest of her beer. “It looks too short.”

“I’ve slept on it before.”

Ming Li yawns enormously. “It’s not too short for me.”

Hwa comes out of the kitchen with the mug Rose always uses, steaming away like a witch’s kettle. She says, “Do you have some socks I could wear?”

“Second drawer of that … that thing in there.” He waves his hand at the bedroom. “The dresser.”

“I like to sleep in socks,” Hwa announces, and goes into Poke and Rose’s room, shutting the door behind her.

Rafferty collapses onto the couch and folds himself forward like someone fighting a faint. The events of the past hour or so, which he’s been holding at bay with action, swirl in his head, a jumble of color and noise and blood and eyes: Treasure’s eyes, Ming Li’s eyes as she stared at Murphy. He breathes slowly and regularly, staring at the carpet, and lets the feelings catch up with him. A noise brings him back into the room. Ming Li is looking down at him.

“You okay?”

“Getting there,” he says. “That awful leather bag. Can you bring it to me?”

She picks it up beside the door, where Rafferty dropped it, and hands it to him. He pulls out cell phone after cell phone until he has his old one, the one he used before everything began. Holding it again, back in his own apartment, he begins to believe that it might actually all be over.

As he dials, Ming Li says,

“Older brother, not to doubt your judgment, but is it safe here?”

“We’ll know in a second. Okay, shhh.” He looks up at her, scoots over to make room on the couch, and then says, into the phone, “I need to talk to Shen. Tell him it’s Rafferty.”

Ming Li says, “Shen?”

“Now or never,” he says to her. He waits a moment, until he hears, “Hello.”

He closes his eyes, grabs a deep breath, and says, “I wanted to tell you I’m at home, and I’d appreciate your letting me stay here. And there are reasons you should.”

Shen says nothing.

“Murphy is dead. Do you want to hear about it?”

“It’s eleven-thirty at night. You’ve had people wake me up. What else do I have to do?”

“He pulled me out of that mall, the one you didn’t see me in, and cuffed me and took me to his house. He was pretty crazy, talking about how I had screwed him over and that the best thing for him to do would be to disappear. His daughter was in the house-” Rafferty stops for a second and clears his throat. “She was having some sort of breakdown.”

“That poor child,” Shen says.

“He took a briefcase full of money out of a closet and put it in his car, I guess. Anyway, out through the front door. Then he poured gasoline all over the place and set fire to it, then hauled the girl and the maid and that sedated wife of his out. I got my hands free-”

“How?”

“An ancient yoga technique that took me years to learn,” he snaps. “Do you want me to explain it to you?”

The couch shifts. He opens his eyes to see Ming Li getting up, shaking her head, and going into the kitchen.

“No.”

“And I broke the side window. There were two guns on the windowsill. I took one and went through the window, and when I came around the house, he shot at me. I shot him, maybe twice, and then the little girl screamed and ran into the house, and he followed her, even though I think he was hit pretty bad. And I backed the hell away, and the place blew up.”

Shen lets a moment or two pass. “That’s quite a story.”

Rafferty hears the refrigerator open and close.

“I know. I’d barely believe it myself, except that the witnesses-the maid and the wife-saw it the same way.”

“Did they.” It’s not a question.

“They did, and that leads me to my second point. I know you’ve been told about the things I did regarding Murphy during the past week or so, because I intentionally said them to someone who would tell you. They’re all true. The U.S. embassy will abandon him in a heartbeat, deny any connection at all. But I didn’t tell your friend everything. For example, I didn’t tell her that there are four living witnesses to the worst thing he did there during the war, a rampage that killed nobody except women, children, and old men. Those survivors will be available to the papers, if it comes to that. When Murphy added all that up, he said that the best thing for him to do would be to disappear. What I think he meant by that was-”

“I know what he meant by it.”

There’s a clinking of glass on glass in the kitchen.

“So here he is, disappeared, in a sense. And I have a present for you. I’m e-mailing you some photographs. The first three are snapshots from Murphy’s War, his time in Vietnam. No one who ever helped him would want them to appear in a newspaper.”

“Is he recognizable?”

“Some people don’t change. Second, if you saw Treasure, if you were at his house, you saw his train set.”

“I did.”

“Well, this may surprise you, but the train layout was a model of a real place, somewhere in Yala. If you take the pictures I’m sending you and get someone to look at them and compare them with Google Earth pictures of Yala, down where the rubber plantations are, I’m sure you’ll find it. In the picture you’ll see a pink thing, the ear from a rubber mask. Where that ear is, a little bit north of a train station, there either is or isn’t going to be a cache of explosives, if it hasn’t been blown before your men get there. If it hasn’t, if you get there first, you’ll be a hero.”

Shen sighs. “The ear from a rubber mask.”

“It’s a long story.”

“When I get to the house, will the physical evidence support your version of events?”

Ming Li comes in with a glass in her hand that’s got a couple inches of whiskey in it.

Rafferty says, “I don’t know what’ll still be standing. But I think you’ll be able to see the broken window in the train room, and the gun should be on the windowsill, and the place will reek of gasoline. Oh, and there will be money in his car, so you might want to get someone out there before the fire crew goes through it. And also, I don’t know if there’ll be anything left of it, but there was a cabinet built against the back of the house, full of cans of gasoline, so I guess he had this possibility in mind for a while.”