The Fear Artist

pair of floors, so it’s behind him.

The roof is smaller than he imagined, just black tar ringed by a knee-high barrier with nothing beyond it but gasoline-saturated air all the way to the sidewalks. Behind him, about eight feet high and nine feet square, is the housing for the stairs. The door yawns open now, the chain with the padlock dangling from it, still connected to the anchor plate he’d yanked from the wall. Someone has put a small round metal table and a lightweight aluminum folding chair just beyond the door. Rising through the center of the table is an ancient umbrella, its cloth covering dissolved by the toxins in the air, its naked ribs tucked in protectively. It is anchored by a cylinder of cement that he can tell at first glance is too heavy to lift.

Useless. All useless. Even the chair, it’s as light and flimsy as a flyswatter.

It’s windy up here. The rain stings his face.

He can hear the man climbing toward him. He hears the feet on the stairs and the crackle of his radio, and then the man is calling for backup, trying to get someone up to the roof with him.

Is he coming all the way up or not?

Poke doesn’t even have time to get to the edge of the roof to see whether the fire escape comes all the way up. If the man comes through that door, he’s going to have his gun in his hand, and Rafferty, crawling carefully over the low wall and onto the fire escape, will look as big as a bus.

He pulls the door all the way open, tugging it against the wind, and positions himself behind it, holding his breath as he listens, becoming more certain with every moment that the man won’t come onto the roof until he’s got a whole posse with him. But then he hears the scrape of a shoe, and in the cold, milky fall of light through the door he sees a shadow: shoulders and a head. The shadow stops, and so does Rafferty’s heart.

Radio static. The scratch of grit underfoot. The shadow gets a little longer.

Rafferty can hear the man breathe.

There’s a distant boom, the door to the stairs being thrown open again on the ground floor, and shouting voices from below, echoes of unintelligible questions. The man standing only a few feet from Rafferty apparently draws courage from them; he calls out in response, and the shadow lengthens again. Almost the entire silhouette is visible.

Rafferty shoves the heavy door, using all his strength and all its weight to flatten the man standing on the other side of it. The door bounces back toward him, and he sees that the man has gone down outside the housing for the stairs. He’s rolling away toward the front edge to escape Rafferty, the hand with the gun in it coming up, and Rafferty jumps as high as he can and comes down with both feet on the man’s rib cage.

The momentum pitches him forward, and he lands on both knees, hard, as something skitters past him across the roof-the man’s gun. He makes a despairing leap for it as it slides toward the low wall, and then the man’s fingers are in his hair, yanking him back. As Rafferty topples backward into a pool of water, he recognizes that it’s the smaller of the two men who took him from his apartment to Major Shen’s interrogation room, the one he thought of as Smiley.

The man pulls himself to his feet and launches a kick, but Rafferty scrabbles back and it misses him by an inch. The man grunts, off-balance, and his momentum carries him backward, toward the gun and the roof’s edge. Rafferty throws out a foot and hooks the man’s ankle, and the man pitches back, falling, and makes a wild swoop with his arms to turn and stop himself. He takes one more automatic stumble back, and then his feet slip out from under him on the wet surface. The top of the low wall hits him at the waist, his chest and arms and shoulders and head hanging over it with nothing beneath him but concrete eight stories down, and he screams and his legs scissor and flail, and it’s obvious that he’s going over.

The next thing Rafferty knows, he has the man’s shirt in his fists, and it tears away in his hands, and the man grabs at Rafferty’s wrists and misses. Somehow Rafferty gets his fingers under the broad leather belt of the man’s uniform. But the man is struggling frantically, every motion taking him farther over the side until Rafferty wedges both feet against the base of the wall, both his hands around the belt, and pulls until he hears another scream and recognizes it as his own as he wrenches the man back, over the wall, and then he’s flat on his back with the man facedown across his legs.

The two of them lie there, wheezing, and then the uniformed man pulls himself to his hands and knees and crawls away from the edge of the roof. He’s weeping, high broken sounds like a child’s cries. When he stands, Rafferty can see his knees trembling. Flat on his back, his strength gone, Rafferty looks up at his captor.

The crying man keeps his eyes on Rafferty as he picks up the gun, his hand shaking so badly he almost drops it again. Then, with great care, as though he’s navigating a landscape of broken glass, he backs up several steps and turns his back.

Rafferty waits a moment, partly because he can’t believe it and partly because he’s not certain he can move. Then he brings himself to a sitting position and from there to all fours. When he stands, he finds that his legs will more or less carry him.

And he hears the men coming up the stairs.

The fire escape is where it should be. It stops at the eighth-floor window, but it’s only about nine feet down. He jams his feet into his shoes, grabs the leather bag and commits to the jump before he has time to think about it, going over the low wall on his belly and hanging by his hands before making the drop.

He’s gone down two floors on the rusted stairs on wobbly legs, descending in a barely controlled fall, before the man on the roof fires his gun twice.

His cab is where it’s supposed to be, the driver working on a new wet cigarette. Everything that just happened to him took less than eight minutes.

IF I GOT away with that that, Rafferty thinks, tonight I can get away with anything.

He gives the driver the address on Soi Pipat and leans back. He stinks with sweat and fear, and he finds the man looking at him in the rearview mirror.

“Would you sell me a cigarette?” Rafferty asks. He hasn’t smoked in years.

“It’s a present,” the driver says, passing one back. “Looks like that was a rough visit.”

“Easy to check in,” Rafferty says, hearing his voice shake. “Hard to check out. Got a lighter?”

“Can’t smoke in the cab.” The driver leans right, his hand fishing for something, and then holds up a disposable plastic lighter. “Put your head out the window.”

“Eat one yourself,” Rafferty says. He’s feeling light-headed, and the first lungful of smoke tilts the horizon alarmingly. For a ghastly, weightless moment, he thinks he’ll pass out.

“Feeling better?” the driver asks.

“I must be,” Rafferty says over the noise of the wind. “It’s a big, surprising world, and it must contain at least one thing I feel better than. I’m alive, right?”

“And married,” the driver says.

Rafferty brings his head back in but leaves the hand with the cigarette in it dangling out of the cab. “How can you tell?”

“In the eyes. You have married eyes.”

“Really. That’s amazing.”

“Joking,” the driver says. “The way you speak Thai, you must speak it at home. You don’t have that up-on- tiptoes thing in your voice that most people have when they’re speaking a foreign language. You speak it to somebody who’s not going to laugh at you. So you’re married to a Thai woman.”

Rafferty says, “Very impressive.”

“When you drive one of these things ten hours a day, you get good with people.”

“I have a Thai daughter, too.”

“Yes? Not fifty-fifty?”

“No. We adopted her.”

“Was she poor?”

“Living on the sidewalk.”

“Good for you. Good merit for your karma.” He looks back again. “Who do you love most, the wife or the daughter?”

“How can I answer that? I love them both so much it makes my teeth hurt. What about you?”

“Four,” he says. “Two sons and two daughters. I’m supposed to love the sons most, but I don’t.”

“And your wife? Is she beautiful?”