The Fear Artist

“There,” she says, pointing a dirty finger at a length of track that borders an orderly stretch of rubber trees.

A little kernel of excitement flares in his chest. “Why there?”

“What you said.” She looks up at him, but the moment he meets her gaze, her eyelids come down halfway. “Acc-access, escape, blame.” She leans forward and touches the tracks, then traces the finger back across the treetops of the rubber plantation to a narrow road. “Park here, go through here, plant it here, go back and get into the car, and you can turn around and you go, you go this way.” The finger stops at an intersection. “Here, you go right or left. No-nobody sees you twice.” She lifts her face toward his but keeps her eyelids low, and he has the feeling she can see him through them.

“And?” he says.

“And here.” Her finger returns to the track and follows it about five inches. “This is a Muslim village. Full of, of boys who have already been in trouble.” She shuffles back a couple of steps, away from the table, her eyes on the miniature village, full of tiny, unsuspecting Muslims. Her head jerks right an inch or two and comes back, as it does sometimes. He’s not sure she’s even aware of it.

“That’s good,” he says.

He can hear her swallow.

“That’s where I chose,” he says. “Now tell me why I changed my mind.”

She crosses her arms tightly across her narrow chest. Her head comes forward on her neck, a movement that always seems more animal than human to him. It brings her eyes two inches closer to the problem. He waits, and she puts her tongue just behind her upper teeth and makes a tsssss-tssssss-tsssssss sound.

He says, “I can hear that, and if you don’t know you’re doing it, you’re dead.”

“I know I’m doing it.” The head jerk again. “Which way is the train coming?”

“Smart girl,” he says.

“Because if it’s coming this way”-she points her finger down the track toward the village-“and if it’s going fast, all the stuff that blows off it will be going this way, too. And these houses-”

“And if it derails?”

“It’s here,” she says, and she shoves past him and knocks down some of the little houses.

He grabs her wrist, and, so quickly he doesn’t see the move, she snatches her hand free, raking his forearm with her nails and leaving red welts. He steps forward and slaps her, hard enough that the tangle of hair snaps around. When it settles, some of it is hanging directly in front of her face.

Treasure doesn’t back away or clear the hair. The eyelids are halfway down again, and he thinks-once again- that he wished he had that expression in the interrogation rooms. Then whatever was behind her eyes goes out, and she’s so far inside herself he almost feels her leave the room.

“Don’t break these things,” he says, but he knows he lost his authority the moment he grabbed her. “That was good, though, Treasure, that was very good. Do you want to go with me when I do it?”

He waits, and he thinks she’s gone to the deep place, as she does sometimes, occasionally for days, but then she says, “You know you won’t take me.”

He won’t. “Make a deal. By tomorrow night tell me where it’s going to be and why, and I’ll think about it.” He takes a quick step and puts his hand on the nape of her neck, feeling the shudder that rolls through her. “And don’t ever break anything on this table again.”

She says nothing, and he squeezes the muscles in her neck. Her mouth opens. He releases her, and it closes. He squeezes it again, four times, and as her mouth opens and closes, he says, in a good semblance of her voice, “I’m sorry, Papa.”

Her eyes have closed. He lets go of her, and she moistens her lips.

“Go to bed,” he says.

She turns her back to him and drifts slowly away, back toward the green curtain. “Hwa has a boyfriend,” she says, almost singing it. “He’s Thai. They meet each other in the pool house. I think she talks to him about us.”

Murphy makes a note to talk to Hwa. “And you’re not just making this up because she threw out your meat.”

“Up to you,” she says. “Mr. Smart Man.” She leans back against the curtain and wraps it around her again. “Song had her Thai man here. I, I, I creeped them.”

“What did you see?”

“In the living room. They had their hands all over each other.”

“Why is the Humvee gone? If he came here, where’s his car?”

“He came on a motorbike. In the rain.”

“Well, Song has a taste for the lowest common denominator.”

“He followed her out, her in the Humvee and him on …” Her voice trails away and she turns her face down slightly. There’s a mirage of a smile on her lips.

“What else did you see?”

“They went up the hall to Neeni’s room,” she says. “They went in.”

Moving slowly, he bends and retrieves one of the pieces he knocked to the floor, one he hadn’t picked up. When he is sure his voice will be steady, he says, “Who went in?”

She pulls the edge of the curtain up beneath her eyes like a veil and gives him a skittering glance over it. “Both of them.”

He knows his face is scarlet-even if he couldn’t feel it, he can read the satisfaction in her eyes-but there’s nothing he can do about it except let it flame. “What did you see? Wait, first, tell me exactly how you did it. Where you were and how you got there.”

“When, when he came on his motorcycle, I was out front. Nobody could see, could see me because I had the night around me. She opened the, the, the gate from inside, and he went to the front door. I went fast to the back patio and watched them through the window in the living room. I got so close I almost laughed. When they got up and went to the hall, I came in through the dining room and ghostwalked to the hall. I, I got down on the floor like you taught me and put just enough of my face around the corner so I could see.”

“So you were at the other end of the hall. The living-room end.”

She nods.

Twenty-five, thirty feet. “And.”

“Song went in first. Then he went in. They both bent down, like they were looking at her or, or touching her, and then they laughed. After a while he straightened up, and I went somewhere else.”

“How long were they bent over her?”

“I don’t know. Not long.”

Her voice is calm now. She’s not really interested in what happened in Neeni’s room, although Neeni was her mother, back before she got lost in her whiskey-codeine. What she’s interested in is its effect on him.

She says, “I want to go outside now.”

“It’s raining. It’s late.” He’s thinking how easy it would be to break Song’s neck, beautiful or not.

“I want to go outside now.”

“If you want to,” he says, turning toward the door, “you will.”

Walking toward the kitchen on his way to the stairs, he says, “Stay out of here for the rest of the night, and don’t turn the train on. You can try to figure it out tomorrow, when I-”

There’s a faint plucking at his waistband, and then a wasp stings him, hard, between the shoulder blades. He wheels to see her backing away, holding the Buck knife. He can see all her teeth, and she is not smiling.

“Phung,” she says, her eyes enormous. “Phung will protect you.”

Feeling as though his jaws are locked together, he says, “Put the knife on the table. Come here.”

But her lids drop again, and she stands in the center of the room, arms hanging down and eyes half closed, swaying like someone at the end of a rope.

He takes the knife out of her hand and goes to the door and turns off the light. Leaving her there, swaying in her white nightgown.

He has no idea what to do with her.