The Fear Artist

“No. But you must know somebody who knows somebody who-You know.” He holds out the remaining bills.

“We do.” Janos says, staring at the money.

“Then I’ll just top these up,” Rafferty says. He looks Vladimir directly in the eyes. “And when one of you gets something or thinks of something, call my cell and leave a message.” He writes his number on each of the three bills still in his hand and puts one on top of each stack. “Are we even?”

The men pull the money to them, and Vladimir says, “Until you owe us again.”

Rafferty gets up, then leans forward and touches his fingertip to the cleft in Vladimir’s chin. “How do you shave in there?”

“Not shaving,” Vladimir says. “I hit them with hammer and bite them off inside.”

As he opens the door, Rafferty hears Vladimir say, “Hah.”

9

The Safest Place to Be Is Nowhere

The Diamond Sutra . He forgot the Diamond Sutra, the laundry ticket the dying man slipped into his shirt pocket. It’s still in his apartment house, taped above the door leading to the stairs.

He gives the cabbie the address and settles back. He won’t know whether he can get in if he doesn’t try.

Money is an issue. He’s going to have to get some, and it’ll have to be right away, in case they put a stop on his cards. He’s pretty certain that Shen’s outfit could do it with a phone call.

Somebody who could squash you by snapping my fingers, Murphy had said.

Power in the dark.

What scares him most about Murphy is that he’s an American and he had official American help, in the person of Elson. That means that Rafferty’s Get Out of Jail Free card, the American embassy, is probably off-limits. Not that he’d ever go there; that would mean good-bye to Rose and Miaow and his life here, since the only thing the embassy could do for him, in an extreme situation, is to spirit him out of the country, and that’s never been an option.

Still, part of him had been aware that the option was always there, and now it isn’t.

Maybe he’s reading the situation wrong. Maybe he’s caught paranoia from Shen and the trio at the no-name bar, and this whole thing is actually blowing past him, not at him. After all, he really doesn’t know anything. Maybe by morning he won’t be on anybody’s mind.

He hangs on to that thought like it’s a life preserver until the cabbie makes the turn into Soi Pipat and he sees the red lights strobing-two police cars and a military van pulled up in front of his apartment house. He says to the driver, “Keep going. Change of mind. Take me down to the Indian district.”

It’s a long haul, and the driver’s eyes, flicking to him in the rearview mirror, don’t make it any shorter. He’ll remember Rafferty’s face. The evening’s traffic is in between waves, the business traffic thinning and the night traffic building, and the average speed is probably seven or eight miles per hour. Rafferty’s legs are crossed, and his dangling foot bobs up and down mechanically. He stills it, and a minute later it’s in motion again. He puts both feet on the floor for the remainder of the ride.

When he gets there, he pays the driver and hurries along the maze of dim alleys. The fragrance of spices and the tang of grilling meat hang heavy in the air. Along the right side of the fifth or sixth alley he enters, he sees a line of portable booths selling stolen cell phones. He checks his money and bargains back and forth from one shop to another until he buys the cheapest one on sale.

He moves on a few yards and uses the phone to call a policeman named Anand, one of the few cops Arthit trusts. When Anand answers, Rafferty asks him to go to Arthit’s house and lend Arthit his phone, so Arthit can call the new cell number. Then he closes the new phone and waits, pacing the alleyways for almost half an hour, drawing some odd attention.

In fact, it’s very odd attention. He can understand people looking at him the third time he goes by, but a few of them aren’t just looking, they’re staring. Two men in particular watch him pass, talking to each other in an energetic fashion.

After fifty very long minutes, the phone rings. Rafferty grabs it, ignores the person who is peering at him, and says, “Hello.”

“Don’t say anything,” Arthit says. “If you don’t have cash, get some immediately, because this is the last time you’ll be able to use a card for a while. If they haven’t been cut off already, I mean. Then go someplace no one will look for you and stay there. Stay off the street, stay out of restaurants.”

“Why?”

“They aired the footage tonight, you and the other man, on three stations. The other man’s face was blurred out, but the cameraman did a very nice zoom on you as you called for help, and they froze it there. You’re famous.”

“People are looking at me right now.”

“Smile at them and get out of there, without hurrying. Get as far away as you can, as inconspicuously as you can. Taxis should be safe. For most drivers the shift hasn’t changed since about four, and the clip aired at six-thirty. Get a cab, get money, and go someplace private. I’ll call this number in three or four hours to see where you are.”

“Got it.” He’s most of the way out of the warren of shops, holding the phone with two hands to mask the lower part of his face.

“Here’s what’s happening,” Arthit says. “We just got an alert with your face, taken from the video, on it. The man who was killed yesterday-Warren Alfred Campbell, it says his name was-was shot three times. I doubt that’s a real name, because they went to all that trouble to blur his face. The bullet that killed him was a through-and- through, nothing left for forensics to look at. But there were two other slugs in him, and they’re saying they came out of your gun. Poke, the whole world is going to be looking for you.”

He grabs a cab, no eyes in the mirror this time, and visits two ATMs within five minutes. One card yields forty thousand, one twenty-five thousand. He goes to a third machine, a few miles in the opposite direction, and uses the debit card for an emergency account he keeps in Miaow’s name. It cheerfully gives him another twenty-five thousand. He thinks about emptying it, decides it might attract attention to the account and therefore to Miaow, and leaves thirty-something thousand in it.

His pockets bulging, he flags another cab and doubles back to the Khao San area, full of white foreigners, about a kilometer from backpacker central. He gets out a couple of blocks from his destination, walks in the wrong direction until the cab turns a corner, and then jogs to a short-time hotel where he can pay with cash and they won’t ask for a passport.

The room is barely twelve feet to a side and painted a dirty mint green that his newly developed painter’s eye automatically disdains. Two narrow beds claim most of the space. There’s a built-in table poking out of the wall between them and a corroded aluminum lawn chair with nylon webbing at the foot of one bed. Cockroaches scramble when he opens the door of the plywood armoire that serves as a closet.

The first thing he does-after closing the armoire door so the bug party can resume-is collapse on the bed nearer to the door. For a long time, perhaps thirty or forty minutes, he lies on his back, his arm thrown across his eyes, partly to blot out the fluorescents and partly because the weight is somehow comforting.

His heart is pounding, and it’s not because of the short jog. He’s feeling waves of something so close to panic that it’s not worth calling it anything else-black, gelid waves that climb his spine and squeeze his heart and make his skin prickle with sweat. When he finally turns on his side, the pillow is damp. He spends another ten minutes with his knees drawn up to lessen the tension in his gut, his arms wrapped around the dank pillow. His eyes are open and unfocused, all his attention fixed on the scenarios he’s running in his head, one bad ending after