The Fear Artist

“I’m sorry, he’s in a meeting.” From the vowels, she’s come straight from Georgia, the American one, with the peaches.

“Please tell him Frank Rafferty called, from the TV station.”

“Does he have your number?”

“No. I’ve got a stack of calls to make. I’ll call back later.”

“He has a lunch at noon. You might try him a little after one. He’s always back by one.”

“Thanks,” Rafferty says. “That’s very helpful.”

He hangs up and leans against the door of the closed shop, feeling the tightness across the tops of his shoulders. By now Janos is manufacturing some plausible reason for hanging around in the lobby of the Chiang Palace, although with the rain, no excuse is really necessary. He’ll be wearing a nice, unremarkable suit, just another interchangeable farang businessman, dazzled by the City of Angels. No one will look at him twice. Vladimir will be scouting for a car.

Or, he thinks, talking to Murphy.

Does Vladimir have the nerve? There’s no question that he’s afraid of Murphy. If Rafferty’s the one who ends up dead and Vladimir is on the wrong side, Vladimir is going to spend the next four or five years looking over his shoulder for Murphy. If he were in Vladimir’s shoes, Rafferty would give it some thought.

Eleven-fourteen A.M.

How is he even going to stay awake? He feels like he hasn’t slept in days. He closes his eyes against the gray day, and what he sees is his living room, with all of them in their usual places: Rose and Miaow on the sofa, himself on the white leather hassock, facing them over the glass table. Nothing special, just three people in a room, a moment with nothing to make it memorable, maybe even a little boring, maybe Miaow would rather be with Andrew, maybe Rose is fretting about business falling off at the domestics agency, maybe he’s thinking about money, worrying about the bills for Miaow’s school, about the bank balance. Maybe they’re all preoccupied, in their own separate worlds, maybe even wishing, for the moment, anyway, that they were somewhere else.

And he would give everything he’s ever owned and might ever own in the future to be in that room right this moment. Bored, irritated, apprehensive, hungover, angry-it wouldn’t matter. It would be the three of them. It would be his world, back again.

“Wake up,” Ming Li says.

He opens his eyes, and she’s standing there under a new black umbrella. She hands him another, still rolled up, purchased two doors away.

“You know what?” he asks.

“I know how,” Ming Li says. “I know whether. But I don’t know what. Sorry, Frank used to say-”

“Here’s what.” He pushes himself away from the window and opens his umbrella. He takes her by the arm and turns her, and they step out onto the sidewalk. “Murphy can’t do this to me. The son of a bitch isn’t going to know what hit him.”

At yet another Coffee World, he types everything he knows about Murphy, except for the names of Thuy and Jiang, on the keyboard of Ming Li’s little computer, and she pays a few baht to get the boy behind the counter to print out two copies for her. Following Rafferty’s instructions, she picks them up with a napkin, avoiding both the paper’s surface and the boy’s curious gaze, and takes them back to the table. Using the napkin, she folds one of the copies and opens a boxful of envelopes that she bought when she bought the umbrellas. She uses the napkin to take the envelope out, too, and when she’s gotten the printed page into it, without touching either, she dips one of the napkins into a glass of water and slides it over the mucilage on the flap. With the napkin she pushes it across the table, untouched, to Rafferty, who uses another napkin to pick it up and yet another to wrap it. Then he slips it into the pocket of his jacket.

She says, “Now what?”

“Now we take that one with us,” he says, indicating the second copy, “in case it becomes useful.”

“How might it become useful?”

“I have no idea,” he says, standing up for what feels like the ten-thousandth time that day, “but humor me.”

“Who was that?” Ming Li asks as he shuts off the phone. They’re side by side, umbrellas overlapping, as the rain pounds down.

“Floyd Preece, a reporter at the Bangkok Sun. I gave him the best story of his life three years ago, about beggars and gangsters and a baby-selling ring, and it made his career. I just gave him another one.”

“You kind of misled him. All those witnesses you were throwing around.”

“I’ll get Thuy and Jiang to talk to him. If he calls me back and says his editor is interested, I’ll leave a message for the two of them to call me, and we’ll work it out. He’ll do anything they want, including not mentioning their real names or their locations, to get them to tell the story. This is front-page stuff.” He frames the words in the air with his free hand. “ ‘PROMINENT AMERICAN BUSINESSMAN TIED TO VIETNAM MASSACRE.’ And under that, in upper- and lowercase, ‘U.S. War on Terror Connection Suspected.’ ”

“That’ll make the American embassy happy.”

“Fuck them,” Rafferty says. “If a government can’t carry out its policies in the light of day, it should make new policies.”

Ming Li stops walking. “Do you know how many people would be put out of business if that happened?”

“Well, at the risk of being repetitive, fuck them, too. My wife and child and I are threatened by all this nonsense because we’re too small to matter.” He takes her arm and tows her along. “It’s like some clodhopper with thick boots stomping on a bee. ‘Oh, you mean lots of little things that don’t sting got killed, too? Well, gee, too bad. They’re collateral damage. How do they expect me to tell the difference from way up here?’ This is not what America was supposed to be.”

“I don’t talk politics,” Ming Li says. “It’s a principle.”

“Politics is supposed to be a delivery system for food, security, and freedom.”

“Oh, my God,” Ming Li says. “No wonder you’re so disillusioned.”

“What time is it?”

“Look at your watch. Okay, okay, sorry. Male prerogative and all, ask the little woman. It’s about seven to one.”

“Perfect. Keep your eyes open for a very skinny American in a dark suit. Short hair, glasses, walks like his spine won’t bend.”

“We’re on a sidewalk in Bangkok, which has fourteen million people in it, and you think we’re going to run into a single, specific person.”

“I’m in the zone.”

“Well, warn me next time, and I won’t ask stupid questions.”

“It’s the end of lunch hour. For this guy lunch hour is sixty minutes, minus ten for walking, five in each direction. He absolutely will be back at his desk one hour after he left it. And when he first came to Bangkok, I searched his suitcase and he had a stack of receipts from the restaurants on our right.”

“Then this is the Secret Service guy, right? Poke, I know him. He’s the one Frank bargained with, the one who got him out of here.”

“Sorry.” Rafferty lifts his shoulders and lets them drop, then turns his head from side to side. “I’m forgetting things. This isn’t a good time to be-”

She puts her fingertips on his arm. “You’re not forgetting anything that matters, so relax. You’re just focusing. It’s like taking a test in school. You don’t need to remember your math if the question is about history.”

He looks down at her and is surprised all over again at how young she looks. “I hope Frank appreciates you.”

“He does. Of course, he thinks he created me.” She gives him a sharp elbow. “There’s your boy.”

Ten feet ahead of them, Elson has come out of the door to an Italian restaurant and is fighting with his umbrella, which seems to have a broken rib.

“You stay back,” Rafferty says. “I don’t want him to know you’re here.” He picks up the pace. “Here, fellow American,” he says, coming alongside Elson and offering half of his umbrella. “No point in getting wet. That awful suit might shrink.”