The Fear Artist

“I guess in the end,” Rafferty says, “happiness is the only thing that matters.”

The nurse says, “That and making sure they live through their teens.”

On day four, two things happen. First, he allows himself to admit how much he hates fast food. When the on-duty doctor and nurse take a meal break, they usually choose an American chain because that’s the fastest, and he winds up with something to go, which he eats out of a bag, sitting on the backseat. His clothes stink of fried food. He’s gaining weight. His knees and hips hurt from being seated for so long. He’s perpetually damp.

He hates all of it. He will never eat another cheeseburger.

Second, he learns he can handle the sidewalk. At 4:00 P.M., in the open-air market mecca of Pratunam, Dr. Ratt pulls the car into a nearby soi and Rafferty ventures out into the crowds for a jittery experimental jaunt. The clouds have parted to allow the sun to drop by for a few hours, and it’s remarkably bright, as though it’s putting out extra effort to make up for a long absence. What’s more, it seems brightest wherever he is. He has the sensation that a spotlight is trained on him, tracking him wherever he goes, as if he were the lead actor in a musical. He doesn’t want to hold anyone’s gaze for a beat too long, but he doesn’t want to release it and miss the spark of recognition either. One girl of eighteen or nineteen locks her eyes on his as his heart rate skyrockets, but then she breaks into a wide Thai smile, lowering her head as she passes, leaving him gasping in her wake. He’s powerless not to turn and make sure he’s all right, and when he does, he catches her looking back at him. She sticks out her lower lip in a pout, shrugs, and goes on her way.

He spends more than an hour being a pedestrian without any alarms going off. He draws an occasional glance because of his height, but the Thais are growing taller at an extraordinary rate. As far as he can tell, no one finds him suspicious or familiar-looking or even interesting. He experiments with retracting his aura as he walks, just keeping his gaze on the middle distance and reeling in his energy. It occurs to him that this is a skill that Janos, the indescribable man at the no-name Bar, has mastered.

When he goes back to the soi, the car is gone. They’re undoubtedly answering a radio call. He kneels beside a parked car long enough to check the makeup, which looks passable, then he heads for a real test. Moving with the crowd, he tries his hand with a couple of the vendors under the tarps, still bellied down beneath the weight of collected rain. Hoping that in the press of shoppers no one will actually pay attention to him, he buys a medium-size shoulder bag in artificial leather that’s so artificial it’s hard to tell what it’s pretending to be. Into it, over the course of stops at several booths, he packs four T-shirts, two long- sleeved shirts, one pair of wash-and-wear slacks to alternate with his jeans, six pairs of socks, a travel bottle of liquid laundry detergent, and a small selection of essential toiletries, including some hair oil. He also buys a big pair of sunglasses, wondering why he hadn’t thought of them earlier.

Finally he chooses a woman’s compact, which is the nearest he can come to a pocket mirror. The vendor who sells it to him gives him an idle glance and says to him, in Thai, that she hopes his girlfriend will like it.

After a moment of panic, he answers her in English, with a sort of comic-hall Indian accent that used to make Miaow laugh. She nods and turns to the next customer. To test his new voice, he buys a decent cake of soap and two more disposable razors and strikes up a conversation, sounding to himself like a Taj Mahal tour guide. But the man in the booth answers pleasantly enough. Rafferty is apparently plausible as a sort of pan-Southeast Asian/Indian hybrid. It’s not going to hold up for a second if the police stop him, but that’s not what it’s for; it’s to keep the curious eye from pausing on him long enough for next steps to be taken.

On day five he makes his decision.

Dr. Ratt himself is at the wheel, with his wife and nurse, Nui, sitting regally beside him in one of her many custom-made silk uniforms. At Rafferty’s request, Dr. Ratt drives him down the street where it all began, cruising past the splash of color as Poke tries to visualize where the crowd came from, where Campbell, if that’s really the dead man’s name, might have joined it, and why he might have been in that neighborhood.

How an American ex-soldier got caught up in a riot over the problems in the south. A bunch of farmers and villagers and people trying to run businesses, banding together and coming up to the capital as a group to protest the lack of effective action by the government as Buddhists continue to be shot, bombed, run over, and beheaded on an almost-weekly basis.

As though she’s reading his thoughts, Nui, without turning her head, says, “How long can you keep this up?”

“As long as I have to, or as long as it takes them to figure it out.”

Nui wiggles a little, seeking the next degree of comfort on her infinite scale, but doesn’t honor his remark with a response. Her conversation is peppered with silences, usually indicating disapproval.

“To figure what out?” Dr. Ratt says, probably mostly to be polite.

“Either that they actually don’t want to talk to me because the problem has gone away or that I’m the one behind this stupid disguise and they catch me.”

“It seems to me,” Nui says, “that you’re taking a very passive course of action.”

“That’s occurred to me, too. But it feels like I’m up against the night, you know what I mean? This thing is so unfocused, its edges are so blurred, that I feel like I’m one person who’s been ordered to keep it from getting dark.”

“Or this rain,” Dr. Ratt says. “Same thing. Nowhere to get hold of it.”

“Really,” Nui says.

They drive in silence for a moment, and then Dr. Ratt says, “When she says ‘Really’-”

“I know,” Rafferty says.

“It’s not big and unfocused at all,” Nui says, “even if you think you’re up against the whole War on Terror. Actually, the entire thing comes down to three people, doesn’t it? Whatever is going on, it’s being pointed at you by three people.”

“I suppose it is.”

“This Thai secret policeman with the Hollywood uniform, the little redheaded farang, and that man from the American Secret Service.”

“I don’t think he’s really involved.”

“He was in that room, looking at you,” Dr. Ratt says.

“A while ago he wrote some reports that named me,” Rafferty says. “When he broke the North Korean counterfeit-money ring. My name is linked to his in some government computer. When Shen’s people ran my name through the database after Campbell, or whatever his name is, got killed, Elson’s came up, too. My guess is he was drafted into that observation room.”

“Maybe he’s where you begin,” Nui says.

“Maybe he is,” Rafferty says. “And maybe there’s something to being passive for a while. At least until I can see three or four moves ahead. That’s the rabbit strategy.”

“Rabbits,” Nui says, “usually get-”

Rafferty says, “Everybody tells me that.”

Nui says, “You need to choose one of them and figure out how to make a move.”

“Which one?”

This time she does turn around. “The most dangerous one,” she says.

11

The Missing Sea

The house still smells of Anna’s perfume.

Pim opens the back door to let in some air and pads through the empty rooms to the front, which she also opens. For good measure she raises the windows in the living room. It’s drizzling and cool, but at least it doesn’t smell like her out there.

Gasoline and exhaust and wet dirt smell good to her.