The Fear Artist

Murphy lifts the gun until it’s pointing directly into Janos’s left eye. He says, “See this?” and immediately brings the edge of his left hand down on the bridge of Janos’s nose, which breaks. Blood pours over Janos’s chin and onto the front of his shirt, and he coughs and begins to bend forward, but Murphy grabs his hair and pulls him upright. He takes a step back, the gun still pointed at Janos’s eye, and says, “Put your finger under it and push up a little. It’ll hurt like a son of a bitch, but the bleeding will slow. Where’s Rafferty?”

“Your house.” He blinks away the tears, but all that does is show him the gun and Murphy’s eyes more clearly, and he can’t look at the glee in Murphy’s eyes; he’s seen people who enjoyed this before, but not like this. He lets his eyes water. He lets his nose bleed.

“What’s he doing there?”

“Looking for something. I don’t know what.”

“Who else is here?”

“Nobody.”

Murphy raises his left hand again. “You can’t imagine how it’ll feel if I hit it again.”

“Vladimir. And some Thai boy.”

“Vladimir.” Murphy does a little two-syllable laugh. “Talk about the big guns.” He leans in toward Janos, and Janos flinches. “I’ve forgotten your name.”

“Janos.”

“Right, Janos. So, Janos, where’s your cell phone?”

“Shirt pocket.”

“Don’t be stupid now.” Murphy touches the gun to Janos’s forehead and lifts the cell phone out of his pocket. “Rafferty’s number in here?”

“Speed dial two.”

“And Vladimir?”

“Four.”

“Great, we’re making progress. Look, we’re both pros, and I’ve got nothing against you, but I don’t want you warning Vladimir and Vladimir calling Rafferty, so I’m going to need to slow you down a little. Lie down in between these cars.”

That’s when the coffee lets go, and Janos feels the wet heat on the front of his pants. “I … I don’t want to.”

“All I’m going to do is put flex-ties on your wrists and ankles. I know you’ll get out of them eventually, but by then I’ll have Vladimir under control. What’s his car look like?”

“Gray Mazda. Sedan.”

“So what you need to do is let me put the restraints on you and then promise me, one professional to another, that you’ll repay my leaving you alive by not finding a way to get in contact with Rafferty.”

“I don’t know his number. It’s in the phone, that’s all.”

“No problem, then.” Murphy reaches into the pocket of his jeans and pulls out a plastic flex-tie. “Lie down and put your hands behind you, and we’ll get this done, and then we’re square. In fact, I might have work for you in a week or two.”

“It wasn’t personal,” Janos says, going to his knees, and Murphy moves behind him, and their relative positions, the classic execution tableau, tell Janos that he’s wrong, that it was personal all along, and he’s just grasping that and thinking about standing when the bullet, the first of two, tears into the base of his skull.

32

Neeni and Treasure

The woman in the bed is beautiful and tiny. She lies on her back, one hand dangling off the side of the mattress. Her eyes are half open, focused on the far edge of the world. Rafferty passes a hand over them, but she’s either unconscious or so deeply intoxicated that she doesn’t register the movement. The room smells stickily of artificial cherry from the two open bottles of cough syrup on the table. He lifts the glass beside them and smells the cherry again, floating against a background of whiskey.

This is Murphy’s life, he thinks. This overstuffed, leaking house, the woman who’s never here, the one dying slowly in the bed, and the child who sleeps beneath that schizophrenic ceiling. The narrow bed, the chipped dresser, the black-and-white memories in the locked room. Whatever it is that visits him when he sleeps. Murphy’s life is all collateral damage.

Tikka-tikka-tikka-tikka comes the sound from the room at the end of the hall. He takes a deep breath, touches the gun again as though it’s a talisman, and leaves the bedroom and its unconscious mistress, heading down the hall toward the light. The pressure of passing time pushes at his back, making him walk a little faster.

The room is big and brightly lit, and on a huge raised platform a small, golden train races around a curving track. The miniature landscape is Southeast Asia, someplace where rubber is grown. Standing just inside the doorway, watching the train click its way through the intricate loops and over the tiny hills, he says, “Hello.”

No response, but he knows she’s here. He can smell her, and it almost breaks his heart. No child should smell like that. No child should be here.

After a moment a voice says, “Who are … are you?”

“A friend of your father’s.”

Silence, except for the train. It negotiates a tight curve, just barely, and Rafferty says, “Should this be going so fast?”

“You don’t, you, you don’t know how to slow it down,” the voice says, and this time Rafferty locates it; it comes from behind the open door to the kitchen.

“I can figure it out,” he says. “I think.”

“You look stupid,” says the voice. “You’re too stu-stupid to figure it out.”

“Maybe,” Rafferty says. “Maybe I’m smart enough to wear a stupid mask.”

Another pause. Then, in an almost-musical tone, “You forgot something. When you were here before.”

“Did I?”

“Look at the roof of the train station, Mr., Mr. Stupid.”

He goes to the table, one eye on the door. It takes him a moment to find what he’s looking for in the tiny world; there are dozens of isolated structures and two small towns in the landscape, but then he sees the station and the pink thing on its roof. “My ear,” he says. “I lose ears all the time. I drop them everywhere.”

The silence this time is so long he wonders whether she has an escape route of some kind. Then, very slowly at the edge of the door, a tangle of reddish black hair comes into view, followed by a cheek, an eye, and a nose. Precisely half a face, no more, dark as the night outside but for the strip, shockingly pale, that contains her eye and the bridge of her nose.

She can’t be much older than Miaow.

“Ears don’t fall off,” she says slowly. “You have to cut them off.”

“Mine do,” Rafferty says. He reaches up and tugs his real ear, where it protrudes through the hole in the side of the mask. “And then they grow back.”

“No,” she says, and it’s almost a shout. Her one visible eye, which has been fixed on his, wanders downward, going aimlessly left and right, as though she’s reading something written on the air or on a falling page, and then the movement stops and she’s looking at a spot on the floor about halfway between them. A pink tongue touches the center of her lower lip and then disappears. The energy that had been animating her face seems to have fled. Dully, she says, “They stay off.”

“Why are your teeth black?” Rafferty asks.

She doesn’t move, and she continues to stare at the floor, but a moment later she says, “What?”