The Fear Artist

“Maybe they didn’t need it,” Rafferty says. “Maybe what they needed was to make absolutely certain he didn’t pass it to anyone else.”

There’s a silence as they both consider the implications. Pim laughs in the kitchen.

“I’ll call in a few favors,” Arthit says. “See whether I can learn anything. In the meantime you keep a low profile and don’t do anything stupid.”

Rafferty says, “You know about hawks?”

“I know a few things about hawks,” Arthit says patiently. “What did you have in mind?”

“Hawks have amazing eyesight, but they can only see something when it’s moving. As long as I don’t move around, just-as you say-live a normal life, stand still … well, maybe they won’t look at me.”

Arthit’s expression is not encouraging.

“Works for rabbits,” Rafferty says.

“Sooner or later,” Arthit says, “most rabbits get eaten.”

Closing the door after Poke, Arthit turns to see Anna standing a few feet behind him. She holds up her pad, and he reads: Will he be careful?

“It depends,” Arthit says.

She shrugs the question.

“On whether he gets mad. He’s a good guy, but he gets a little crazy when he’s mad. Fortunately, he seems to have miraculous karma, because otherwise he’d have been dead years ago.”

She nods. She seems to be waiting for something.

Arthit says, “Well,” and can’t think of anything to follow it with.

She watches for a moment to make sure he’s not going to continue and then starts to write. She lifts the pencil and swivels the pad toward him. It says, Lunch?

The word opens an unexpected door in Arthit’s day. He hasn’t gone anywhere with a woman since Noi’s death. He feels his mouth open and close a couple of times, realizes that’s exactly the wrong reaction since his mouth is mostly what she looks at. He says, “We just ate breakfast. And I have to work.” As she begins to put the pad into her purse, he lays a hand on her arm. “What about dinner?”

5

Hand Puppets

“Don’t move around,” Rafferty quickly finds, means don’t do anything even remotely interesting.

It means no going across town to check out the laundry that the yellow ticket came from. It means no phoning Cheyenne, Wyoming, and trying to get a listing for Helen Eckersley. It means, if he’s going to be really careful, not even trying to find her online. It means don’t call Floyd Preece at the Bangkok Sun- who got his job because Rafferty gave him the biggest scoop of his career-to find out whether pressure was brought on the paper not to cover the shooting death of a farang in Bangkok and, if so, by whom it was brought.

Because, for all Rafferty knows-and Arthit drove the possibility home with some force-he’s under surveillance. His cell phone might as well be a radio station.

“Don’t move around” even means not going anywhere near the no-name bar where all the obsolete spooks hang out, to see whether anyone can match an identity to his description of Mr. Nose-Hair.

What it does mean is, paint the apartment.

So he goes back to the paint store, trying not to check for watchers, trying not to look like a bad actor who knows he’s on camera. The cabbie, like every other driver in Bangkok, has the radio tuned to the news, which is monitoring centimeter by centimeter the rise of the water level in the Chao Phraya and the flooding-rapidly spreading some say-in the ancient capital city of Ayutthaya, about forty miles upstream. The rain, the cresting waters, seem real to him in a way that Shen and the redheaded spook don’t. By the time he’s in the paint store, all he’s thinking about is buying, for the second time, the Apricot Cream that Rose picked for the living room-he adds some white this time-and the Urban Decay that Miaow will probably love for all of three weeks before it’s replaced in her affections by Advanced-Rot Brown or Swollen-Lip Fuchsia or Infected-Piercing Scarlet. He comes back out into the drizzle, toting the familiar weight of the paint, focusing on the task at hand, and finds himself standing dead center in the splash he’d made when the first cans burst open. It’s dappled now by a confused pattern of footprints, a diagram of some impossible dance step. Surrounded by a wash of Apricot Cream, he thinks, The man died in my arms. Then he thinks, And there’s nothing I can do about it. He goes home.

The paint rolls on smoothly, and for a while Rafferty is able to submerge his simmer of uneasiness in the well-being that comes only with mindless work where progress is obvious: A larger area is Apricot Cream now, and a smaller area is white. More of life, he tries to convince himself, should be like this.

In between stretches of precariously maintained well-being, he misses Rose and Miaow. He goes back to worrying about Major Shen and worrying more sharply about the Americans. He feels-like an old bruise he can’t do anything about except wait for it to fade-a sense of unfulfilled responsibility toward the man who died.

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