The Fear Artist

“The man who lives here,” the sergeant says, looking like he wants to wipe his forehead.

“He left about noon. I came up in the elevator-I’d been down at Foodland, getting some rice and some chilies. I go through a lot of chilies. And I got two new towels also, very nice, yellow but not one of those awful yellows, a soft yellow, like … like butter. And they-”

“The man,” the sergeant says through his teeth.

“And they were only forty baht,” Mrs. Pongsiri says very fast, getting it in before he can interrupt again. “And he came out of the apartment and helped me carry the bags even though he had to put down his suitcase-”

“There’s no suitcase missing,” the sergeant says. “We went through this place last night, and there was only one suitcase in it, and it’s still here.”

“It was new,” Mrs. Pongsiri says. “Still all shiny. A hard one, with wheels. It looked like the ones they sell at the Silom end of Patpong Two. But those are fakes, and this might have been-”

“Did he say where he was going?”

“Chiang Mai,” she said. “With them.”

“The … uh, the wife-”

“And daughter. Not a very pretty little girl, but smart as a whip. Do you have children?”

“No, I-”

“Of course not, you’re practically a child yourself. Are you sure you wouldn’t like some-”

The sergeant puts up both hands, palms out. “No, no. But thank you.”

“Four days,” she says. “He said he’d be back in four days. Said they’d all be back in four days.” She brushes her hands together and pushes off from the wall again, stumbling toward the sergeant, who backs against the door. “Whoops,” she says. “Well, bye-bye. I live right there,” she adds, pointing. “Where that open door is.”

Rafferty ducks into the kitchen as she swings the door closed. She goes straight to the mirror in the living room and begins to smooth her hair back, clucking at the state of her makeup. Her eyes find his in the mirror, and she begins to laugh.

Forty minutes later the cops are long gone, and Rafferty comes out of the elevator in the underground garage to find a silver Toyota waiting. The car’s rear door is already open, so he’s visible for just a couple of seconds. When he’s lying on the floor in the back, Mrs. Pongsiri climbs in and rests her high heels on his ribs.

“Careful with that,” he says.

“You not hide behind woman,” she says as the car jerks into motion, “but hide under woman, no problem.”

The driver laughs along with her.

7

I Try to Kill Him Many, Many Time

Power in the dark.

Rafferty has always been fascinated by enormous power-power on an imperial scale-exercised in secret. He’s spent much of his adult life traveling among the powerless, among people who generally are who they say they are and do what they say they’ll do. People who have little and seem unwilling to become someone else in order to have more. In the past decade, this kind of behavior has become regarded by many as naive and even quaint, behavior that identifies people who haven’t figured out the new rules.

Power in the dark seems to Rafferty to be the defining form of evil in the twenty-first century. It’s evolved from an occasional governmental tactic into business as usual, as the world’s rulers find goals in common-usually economic goals that benefit the rich and strengthen the rulers’ hold on power-and pursue them jointly, turning out the lights on the contradictions between what they say and what they do.

Rafferty can remember, hazily, a time in which getting caught in a lie was a career-threatening crisis for a politician, at least in the countries that retain pretensions of democracy. Now there’s a whole thesaurus of euphemisms for lying, and it’s opened daily.

It’s the age of equivocation, the age of the press secretary, the age of entire ministries of spin, the age of collusion and obfuscation, the age when the future is on teleprompter and the script is kept in a vault. Anytime politicians talk about “transparency,” Rafferty thinks, voters need to reach for the X-ray glasses. Whatever compact of honesty was presumed in the past to exist between the rulers and the ruled is fast dwindling in the rearview mirror.

His own country is as bad as any of them and worse than some. Secret enterprise, stringently denied, is the order of the day. Which has created a boom market for people who are skilled at working in the dark.

What it really is, it seems to him, is the Age of the Spook.

When, he thinks, the day’s agenda seems to have been carved into black stone in a dark room, when you feel as helpless as a penny on a railroad track, and when you glimpse spooks in your peripheral vision, it’s time to go talk to some spooks.

It’s probably not actually called the No-Name Bar, but no name is visible from the sleepy soi outside. Just a stretch of stucco the color of cream with dirt stirred into it and a pair of the smoked-glass doors that are ubiquitous among Bangkok’s shadier business establishments. The soi itself is almost as featureless as the stucco wall: a thin seam of asphalt too narrow for two cars, framed by a sidewalk of tilting, badly set paving stones that are interrupted every now and then by one of those peculiarly Bangkok trees, wizened, largely leaf-free little spindles that look like they’d be more comfortable bent over a walker. Trees that look like they’ve got a cough.

The bar is just as he remembers it, which is to say it’s more cramped than it appears from outside and as dark as a bat’s theme park. He has the brief sensation that nothing at all has changed since he was last here, that the people inside have been frozen in place until he breaks the spell by opening the door.

It’s a long, narrow room that gives the impression that all the right angles are subtly off. The front doors open directly onto the bar, which looks solid enough to repel a blast from a shotgun. The bar is U-shaped and protrudes into the center of the room like a stuck-out tongue, with two wary-looking bartenders in the center. The patrons all sit on the far side of the bar, facing the door. The rest of the room is occupied by a series of booths along the right wall, the dividers between them projecting out so far that the walkway that leads past them isn’t much wider than a single heavyset man. A tiny transparent lightbulb, perhaps twenty watts, hangs like a distant, dying star over each booth.

The booths’ occupants are shielded from view by the booth dividers, which are unusually high, about the height of the wall around a toilet cubicle in a public restroom. Rafferty sees only five people at the bar, three sitting on stools spaced well apart and the two working behind it, but there could be twenty more people in the place, enjoying their nice covert drinks as they hatch conspiracies or practice character assassination in smaller groups. He has a feeling the only reason the noise level doesn’t drop when he walks in is that there isn’t a noise level. If people are talking, they’re talking in whispers.

Everyone he can see is looking at him.

The no-name is one of two spook bars to which Rafferty was brought by Arnold Prettyman, the putatively retired CIA man who was killed when he turned over the wrong rock while he was working on Rafferty’s behalf. Rafferty has no idea whether his accidental role in Prettyman’s death is known in this bar, but it very well may be. Information is the currency in the room. This is where the cloak-and-dagger friends and enemies of Arnold’s shadowy youth and middle age gather to refight the old battles, from back in the 1960s and ’70s, when they were outplotting and shooting at each other. The thawing of the Cold War and the shift of the global stress lines from Southeast Asia to the Middle East stranded a lot of spooks in the jungles where they’d been stationed, and a remarkable number of them rolled downhill to Bangkok.

And now they congregate day after day, night after night, in the no-name bar. It’s a deadlier version, Rafferty