Timothy Hallinan: The Fear Artist

“And you, Mr. Rafferty.” Although Rafferty is now standing beside him, Shen does not turn his head but continues to address the chair Rafferty vacated. “If you think of the name, you’ll call me.”

“Absolutely.”

“That’s good, then. Well,” Major Shen says to the chair, “we’ll meet again.”

“I’ll look forward to it.” Rafferty goes to the door and opens it, almost surprised to find it unlocked. “I’ll find my own way out.”

“Wait-” Major Shen is pushing himself to his feet like he’s coming out of a trance, but he’s too slow to keep Rafferty from opening the door and going through it, into the short hallway beyond. There’s a door to Rafferty’s right, and he turns the knob and then kicks it open. It bangs against the wall, and two men leap to their feet in front of the trick mirror.

The nearer man is thin all the way: thin body, thin lips, thin rimless spectacles clinging to a thin nose. He’s all verticals, just bones in a black suit. “Richard,” Rafferty says to him, “just to complete the thought, fuck you.”

“You’re way too confident for your own good, Poke,” Richard Elson says. He sounds almost frightened.

“What happened? Secret Service lend you to the Ghostbusters? Kind of a demotion, isn’t it?”

“Hey ,” says the other man in the room, a ball of fat topped by a thatch of unruly reddish-gray hair that’s been slapped any old way on top of a fat red face. He’s much shorter than Elson, thirty years older, and maybe eighty pounds heavier. The loud, ragged Hawaiian silk shirt he wears above his worn-looking jeans is buttoned for dear life over a paunch the size of an elephant’s rump.

“And you are?” Rafferty’s so angry his voice feels thick in his throat.

The redheaded man shoulders Elson aside. Protruding from each nostril is a tuft of red hair so substantial that Rafferty imagines himself grabbing them in his fists and chinning himself on them. “Somebody who could squash you by snapping my fingers.” He’s got a voice like gravel in a glass.

“Yeah, but what good would it do you? You’d still be wearing that shirt.”

The redheaded man’s face goes a deep, cardiac scarlet, and Elson says, “Poke.”

Rafferty feels a hand on his arm, and then it becomes a grip, and he’s pulled from behind, out the door, which slams closed.

“Very foolish,” Major Shen says. His forehead is wet. “Very foolish indeed.”

Rafferty says, “Let go of me.”

“You’ve been in Thailand long enough to know the value of keeping a cool heart,” Shen says without loosening his grip. He seems actually shaken. “It’s a shame you haven’t adopted it as a policy.” He propels Rafferty down the hall, away from the interrogation room, and through a pair of swinging doors that open onto a broader corridor. Seated there on metal folding chairs are the two heavyweights who’d met Poke in his elevator. The one he thinks of as Smiley leaps to his feet when he sees Shen.

Shen shoves Rafferty hard, so hard he stumbles halfway across the corridor. Only the opposite wall keeps him from going down “My men will take you home,” Major Shen says, smoothing his hair. “Bangkok is very dangerous right now.”

The place looks wrong.

He sees it the moment he comes in. Even with all the furniture out of place for painting, it’s obvious that someone has been here, but it takes him a moment to spot what it is that caught his eye. The black drop cloth, which he had painstakingly aligned with the baseboards, isn’t tucked in as neatly as he’d left it. He feels a clamping around his heart, and he goes double-time to the bedroom.

But the safe in the headboard above the bed is closed and locked, and the sliding panel that hides it is still on its latch. Rafferty tugs the panel open anyway, in a gingerly fashion, half expecting it to explode, but all it does is catch slightly at the point where it always catches. He tugs the safe door, and it reassuringly refuses to swing open. He sits on the side of the bed he shares with Rose, thinking about the men who invaded this room, pawing at their things, and the image sends him to the closet, where he sees that some of her clothes, which she hangs at precise intervals, with about an inch between hangers, have been moved. For a moment he sees little bright objects, like crinkles of aluminum foil, floating in front of his eyes. They recede, leaving him with his pulse trying to hammer its way out at his temples.

Just to be sure, he goes back to the bed and opens the safe. The oilcloth wrapped around the Glock is right where it should be. He prods it with his index finger, and its weight reassures him.

But the ten one-thousand-baht bills are gone. Just, he thinks, by way of a snicker.

Rafferty pushes sharply at the upper-right corner of the safe’s back wall, and it pops open a quarter of an inch or so. He gets his fingertips into the gap and slides the wall to the left.

The rubber-banded packet of thousand-baht bills, fifty of them, is still there. He regards it for a moment and then pulls it out, secures the wall again, and closes the safe. He folds the thousands once and shoves them into his pocket. Cash seems like a good idea. Sits on the bed, not really thinking about anything, just trying to get a sense of how cold the water really is.

It feels pretty cold.

It’s almost midnight. He knows he won’t sleep, so he leaves the apartment and goes down to Silom in the rain, crosses over to Patpong, and reenters the Expat Bar. He’s greeted by the same crew as though they haven’t seen him for years. Toots produces his beer, sans glass. He holds up a finger for another. It’s a two-at-a-time night.

At two o’clock he wobbles into the street, drunker than he’s been in years. The bars are closing, their lights blinking out, and shirtless country boys are tearing down the night market. Their skin is gleaming wet as they wheel up and down through the drizzle on forklifts, hissing cigarettes clenched in their teeth, just barely missing as many tourists as possible. Ignoring the come-ons of a couple of dodgy ladyboys in a darkened shop doorway, Rafferty takes a zigzag path back home. Without even turning off the bedroom light, he collapses in his wet clothes on the bed and immediately passes out, only to wake up moments later thinking, The trash .

He hauls himself to his feet and takes the elevator, barefoot, to the basement. For the first time all day, he’s in luck; the wad of clothes he dropped down the chute is on top of the pile. When he rifles through it, almost the first thing he sees is the yellow stub of paper with the little diamond cut from its center. Feeling obscurely victorious at recovering the one thing Shen’s men hadn’t spotted on the videotape, he tucks the stub into his hip pocket, puts the clothes back on the pile, and drops a couple of full trash bags on top of it for verisimilitude. He rides the elevator back up, keeping his eyes open because the world spins when he closes them.

With the precision of the very drunk, he gets a roll of masking tape from the pile of paint supplies, goes back into the hall, and folds the stub into a narrow strip, which he tapes on top of the lintel above the door to the stairs, at the far end of the hall. He presses it flat, so it’s invisible from beneath. Then he wobbles his way back inside and crawls on his hands and knees onto the bed.

When he wakes up the next morning, the lamp on the table is burning cheerlessly in the shaft of sunlight falling through the window, he feels as if a small airplane is being assembled inside his head, and he’s still wearing his damp jeans and the shirt that says LET’S TOGETHER!! But the woman’s name has arrived while he was sleeping: Helen , not Helena, Eckersley. And not Montana but the other one, the one he always confuses with Montana-Wyoming. Cheyenne , Wyoming.