The Fear Artist

chartered plane both times. The second time he filed a flight plan for Phuket and then diverted to Yala.”

“Lot of Muslims in Yala.”

“Majority population in places. Just today a buffalo stepped on a land mine and three kids were killed by automatic fire from a moving car. Buddhists are generally peaceful, but tempers are pretty short down there.”

“Yala,” Rafferty says. “In the south.”

“Yes, Poke, Yala is in the south.”

“Think it’s been sunny down there?”

“Why? Do you want to work on your tan?”

“The man who was killed. The top of his head was sunburned.”

“Hmmm. I don’t know for a fact that it’s been sunny down there, but I’d bet good money it’s been sunnier there than it has been here.”

“Where else has Murphy been?”

“Three nights ago he flew to Kuala Lumpur. Don’t know why. Stayed one night and came back the next.”

“Kuala Lumpur,” Rafferty says with his eyes closed. He’s so tired that he visualizes writing it so he won’t forget. “Thanks, Arthit. Call on this phone for now and leave a message if it’s off. If I toss it, I’ll get you the new number.”

He disconnects and looks up. The clouds have thinned enough to allow the afternoon sun to point a few shiny fingers down, picking out this car and that window and making them gleam unconvincingly against the gray of the day. Rafferty says, “Special effects,” and pushes off the wall, tucking the phones into various pockets. A knot of girls go by, maybe eight of them, crowded beneath three overlapping umbrellas, taking tiny steps to stay together. They’re laughing, and a couple of them eye him. He lets them pass, then falls in behind them, toward the laundry’s door.

A chime rings as he pushes the door open. A woman of forty or so, Southeast Asian but probably not Thai, looks up from stuffing clothes into a bag and gives him a measured smile. She’s behind a waist-high counter, one end of which is piled with unsorted garments of all kinds. As he nears her, he also sees an older woman, silver hair drawn back in a long, loose, shining ponytail, sitting in a chair behind the clothing. Her head is down, and she’s doing something involving a skein of green yarn-crocheting or knitting.

“Yes?” This is the younger woman. She’s not expending the energy most Thais put into a greeting.

“This ticket,” he says, suddenly at something of a loss. “Someone gave it to me, and, uh …”

He fishes it out of his shirt pocket and hands it to her, still folded.

She takes it with a small, polite smile and opens it and stares down at it. When her eyes come up to his, they’re terrified. She says, “You … you … who are you? Who gave you-”

The older woman says something in a language Rafferty doesn’t speak but thinks is Vietnamese. Her tone is sharp enough to bring the other woman to a stop. She stands there, fingering the hole in the ticket, and the fear in her face turns with no transition at all to desolation and then tears. They’re completely silent tears, and they gleam suddenly on her cheeks as the sun pokes another hole in the clouds outside. She brings her empty hand up, straight-fingered, to cover her mouth, but still the tears come, and still she holds Rafferty’s gaze, although he’s not certain she even sees him.

The older woman lifts her head and repeats herself more sternly, and Rafferty sees that she’s blind, her eyelids two swirls of flesh mutilated in some terrible injury, a long time ago.

The crying woman closes her eyes and lets her head droop, an attitude of purest defeat. Her shoulders rise and fall with her sobs, but she still hasn’t made a sound. She leans down and places her fingers gently on the older woman’s wrist and turns her hand palm up. Then she puts the yellow ticket into the waiting hand.

The blind woman’s mouth tightens. Something rough catches in her throat, and the work in her lap slides to the floor, the needles making a faint clinking sound. She passes her fingertips over the surface of the ticket, once, then again, and then-very slowly-again. She lets out a rasp of breath and tightens her hands into fists and brings them up so they meet in front of her heart, and she screams.

“How do we know?” the younger woman says. She regards him out of the corners of her eyes. “You could be anyone.”

The door to the shop has been closed and locked, and the lights in the front room are off. They’ve all moved to the room at the rear, a big, raw room with unpainted walls and a cement floor that smells of starch and ironed cotton and has two walls lined with battered washing machines and dryers. The rain’s pattering sound comes through a glassless, barred window.

He and the younger woman are sitting on folding chairs. The older woman is curled on her side, her back to them, on a cot beneath an enormous, almost painfully colorful calendar depicting some sort of festival in front of a Vietnamese temple. The younger woman has covered her with an old coat.

“I’m just me,” Rafferty says. “He pretty much died in my lap.”

“How many day?” the woman on the cot asks in English without turning. The words are heavily accented. They’re the first words she’s spoken since she released three screams that, Rafferty thought, could have brought her heart up with them.

“Nine,” he says. “Or maybe eight.”

“Why hasn’t it been in the papers?” the younger woman asks. She’s wide-faced, the lower half of her features overhung by extraordinarily prominent cheekbones. Now that she’s not weeping, her eyes are difficult to read.

“I think you know why.”

Both women are silent, but the woman on the cot stiffens.

“He was involved in something secret, something very bad,” Rafferty says. “A long time ago. Looking at you, I’m going to say it was in Vietnam.”

The woman on the cot says, “Who send you?”

“That ticket sent me. He gave it to me.”

“You say so,” says the woman on the cot. “True, not true, how do we know? You go now.”

“Why would I lie to-”

“You kill him, take ticket. Friend of you kill him, give you ticket. You go.”

“He talked to me,” Rafferty says.

A pause. Then, “He say what?”

Rafferty sits back and crosses his arms, realizes how defensive it looks, and uncrosses them, but the sudden chill of caution remains. “I don’t think I’ll tell you. You don’t trust me, and I’m not sure I trust you. I’m at risk here, too.”

The woman on the cot rolls onto her back and turns the brutalized face to him, and he has an uneasy feeling she can see him. She says again, “He say what?”

Rafferty gets up. “I’m sorry I’ve caused you so much sadness. I didn’t know the ticket was … was bad news.” He goes to a small desk and takes a pencil and a piece of yellow paper. “If you want to talk to me, call this number. I won’t answer it, but leave a one-word message on the voice mail. Don’t say who you are-the word will tell me. If it feels okay to me, I’ll either come back here or call you.”

“What word?” asks the younger woman.

Rafferty looks at the older woman and says, “Helen.”

The older woman says, “Wait.”

“No.” He puts the pencil down. “Let’s all think about this.”

“When you come back,” the younger woman says defiantly, “we won’t be here.”

Rafferty says, “I don’t blame you. I wouldn’t be here either, if I had a choice. If you want to talk again, call and say ‘Helen,’ and we’ll figure out a way to meet that makes all of us feel safe.”

The older woman sits up and releases a stream of Vietnamese at her daughter-Rafferty suddenly sees beyond the savagery of what’s been done to her face and finds the resemblance-but he keeps moving, through the door, through the shop. The younger woman follows him, putting a hand on his arm, but he shrugs her off and twists the lock, eager to be out of the shop and back in the cleansing, softening drizzle in the streets.

He’s gone three slow, careful blocks, the umbrella pulled low to cover part of his face, when the phone in his shirt pocket rings. He steps out of the flow of pedestrians, up against a shop window, and does a quick street survey in the time it takes him to close the umbrella and retrieve the phone. No one seems to be paying any