The Fear Artist

18

The Diamond-Shaped Cutout

After two days holed up in yet another cheap hotel-on the outskirts of the city this time-Rafferty goes on the offensive.

The first good news of a dull, wet day is that the laundry that issued the yellow ticket, however many months or years ago, is still in business.

From across the intersection, Rafferty peers at it through the drizzle. It sits at the corner of two small, anonymous streets not far from the hotel where he’d kept Shen’s man from falling off the roof. Its flyblown windows, ice blue from the fluorescents inside, face out from the bottom floor of yet another cheap hotel with an ersatz-fancy name, the Royal Residence. The hotel has a doomed look. For one thing, it’s only five stories high, the kind of building that’s not going to last long in the new Bangkok, where everything that can’t go up gets torn down.

He’s walked around the block twice, wielding a hundred-baht umbrella against the intermittent drizzle and using it to hide his face from time to time. Nothing has caught his attention. The days and nights since he escaped his apartment car have blurred into a new kind of marathon in which the runner jogs lethargically through wide, featureless stretches of boredom and then runs for his life from the occasional lion.

His head is almost too heavy to hold upright, and he feels that his control of his emotions is precarious. He has to go into the laundry, but he has a condensation of dread in his core. Not dread that something horrible will happen to him when he gets inside, but a conviction that if anything at all goes wrong- any complication, no matter how minor-he’ll burst into tears. He’s been alarmingly close to tears lately. More than anything in the world, he wants to hug his wife and be ignored, in person, by his daughter. He’d give anything to see their eyes.

In addition to everything else, he’s out of money. He’s called his father’s number in Virginia twice and had no answer, not even a machine. He’s got a couple of frugal days in his pocket, and that’s it.

And he’s left another message on the voice mail of the elusive Helen Eckersley. He hung up feeling even spookier about her than before. There’s something wrong in the house that phone is ringing in. In his old life, he would have scoffed at such an intuition, but after all his time with Rose he takes it much more seriously.

Ahhh, Rose. He looks both ways and steps into the street.

When he’s eight or ten steps from the laundry door, one of his new phones rings. He’s carrying three at the moment, and he juggles frantically through them, thinking, hoping, wishing it will be Rose or Miaow. Eventually he works out which phone it is and thumbs it open. Arthit says, “I’m looking at your new picture. It just landed on my desk.” He covers the mouthpiece with his hand, and then he’s back. “On everyone’s desk.”

Rafferty’s been worrying about this. They have at least two descriptions of him in his pathetically thin disguise now, one each from the guy on the roof and the kid behind the hotel desk. “How bad is it?”

“It’s terrible. It’s so terrible it’s great. Shen’s guy, up on the roof? He must be really grateful. Your hair’s three inches longer and floppy, and you’re very dark. You look like Hugh Grant playing Gandhi.”

Rafferty steps under the laundry’s awning and tilts the umbrella forward, so it’s between him and the eyes on the sidewalk. The building seems to ripple against his back, and he feels suddenly seasick. He closes his eyes, then hurriedly reopens them. “That’s good, I guess. I’m so tired I halfway wish they’d catch me.”

“Look,” Arthit says, and clears his throat. “I haven’t wanted to bother you with this, but Pim’s run off. Three days ago. She feels guilty, I suppose.”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake. Are you looking for her?”

“She’s not going to want to be found.”

“Who cares what she wants? She’s a baby. She’s going to be somewhere around Soi Seven. She was working the sidewalk outside the Beer Garden when I found her. Where else would she go?”

Arthit says, “Home?”

“No. Tell me, did she ever have any money at all?”

“Never. I had to keep a few hundred baht in a bowl so she could go buy stuff when I called and asked for it.”

“She sent it all home,” Rafferty says. “Every baht. That’s a big family up there. She’s going to be working. Go arrest her.”

“Poke. We’ve actually got bigger problems than Pim.”

“Rose will kill me.”

“I’m telling you, even if I find her, or you find her, she won’t come back to my place. She’s got a problem with-Poke, it was getting really odd around the edges. She’s a sweet, good-hearted girl, but she’s a baby.”

“That’s my point. She can’t be hooking on a sidewalk, not there. You know who she’ll be pulling? Drunks from the Beer Garden who can hardly walk, who’ll take it out on her when they can’t get it up. Guys who haven’t got enough money to go to Nana.”

“I know,” Arthit says, “but I’m telling you, she’s not going to go anywhere with me.”

“Just a couple of minutes ago, I was thinking that one more problem would probably make me cry. I’m on the verge of getting weepy here.”

“Where’s ‘here’?”

“Over near Khao San.”

“Still? Isn’t that kind of slow-learner behavior?”

“I have to be somewhere. You’re changing the subject.”

“I am. She came down to Bangkok alone, and she’s going to have to take care of herself for now. She won’t come back with me, and I haven’t got anyplace else to put her.”

“My apartment?”

“Think, Poke. Have a good cry and see if it clears your mind. Your apartment is almost certainly under surveillance. She’d be safer on a hillside in Afghanistan than at your place. I’ll try to come up with something, okay?”

“Me, too.”

“Anyway, you’ve had some good news today. The new picture is useless.”

“Listen,” Rafferty says, “I don’t get it. About the picture. Shen is working with the Americans, right? I mean, that’s who Murphy is, that’s who Elson is. The Americans could get a good, current picture of me here in about fifteen seconds. Why haven’t they?”

“I’ve been asking the same question. But for now they’re looking for Hugh Grant. In blackface.”

“Still, it’s something to think about. Along with everything else, and Pim.”

“I’ll help her any way I can. From a distance. She’ll bolt if she sees me.”

“Thanks, Arthit. One more thing. Is there any way I can find out whether Murphy has been traveling?”

“Yes,” Arthit says. “You can ask me, ‘Arthit, has Murphy been traveling lately?’ ”

“What, you were saving this as a surprise?”

“I knew you’d appreciate it. And this is why, aside from general karmic reasons, you want me on your side. I wanted to keep this query away from Shen, so I requested a restricted-substances watch on him.”

“Will that really keep the information secret?”

“Secret from everyone who’s not paying for it, like narco bosses. But there’s no reason Shen should be paying for it. Got a pencil?”

“Sure,” Rafferty says, closing his eyes to listen.

“In the past ten days, he’s been down to Yala twice. That was kind of interesting, because he used a