The Fear Artist

“If you want me to.” He goes back to the table and takes the same three steps, and this time he not only stops but also pulls his head back as though he’s hit it on something, then rubs his forehead and mimes the pane of glass again.

Treasure is leaning forward, one arm wrapped in the curtain, and she’s biting on a thumbnail. She says, her voice high and the words tumbling over one another, “And I can walk through it and you can’t, you can’t, but I can.”

“That’s right.” He moves to the right, and she counters warily in the other direction, her face suddenly stiff, but then he edges left again, always moving his hands over the invisible pane of glass. “And I can’t get around it either.”

“Only me,” she says. “Only I can go through it. Even if you’re mad at me, you can’t go through it.”

“I’m not going to get mad at you.” He goes back to the table and looks around the room. “I can’t go over there where you are, but is it okay if I look at the rest of this room?”

“Yes.” She passes her tongue quickly over her lips. “If, if, if, if you want to come over here, you let me, me, move first, and when I’m somewhere else I’ll tell you a magic word so you can get through.”

“Awwww,” he says. “Tell it to me now.”

“No. Only when I’m somewhere else.”

“All right. But over here is okay?” He indicates his half of the room. “You’re sure?”

“If I, if I tell you to stop-”

“I’ll stop.”

“Fine.”

There are bookshelves, the big table, and a door that he thinks probably leads to a closet. He checks the shelves first, but it’s just stuff: a lot of metal toys including an assortment of train components, a few creased paperback books with nothing hidden in them, some more old china like the junk in the sideboard, a small coin collection on cotton under glass, with a Purple Heart in the middle of it. Improbably, a snow globe. On one end of the second shelf, a small, mud-daubed bird’s nest.

Rafferty traces its shape in the air, his fingers inches from it, careful not to touch it. “This is yours.”

“How do you know?” She’s leaning far forward, her weight borne by the velvet curtain.

“You’re the only one who would have seen it.”

“I saw it. In a tree. Down there, too.”

He looks at the shelf below and sees a paper wasp’s nest. “How did you get this? They would have stung you.”

“They did. Here and here and here. And on my eye. My eye was closed for a long time. I couldn’t tell how far away he, he, he-”

“I had one when I was a boy. But I waited until they were gone.”

“I wanted it,” she says.

“It’s beautiful.” He goes to the closet and says, “I’m going to open this door.”

“My, my father will be mad.”

Rafferty jumps back as though he’s frightened. “Is he in here?”

He gets the Eeeeeeee again, and she sways back and forth in the curtain. “He’s not here. If he was here, I couldn’t talk to you. I can only talk to, to, to him.”

“Well, here goes.” He turns the knob, but the door is locked.

“You don’t see things,” she says. She sounds disappointed.

“Not like you do. Can you teach me?”

“It’s secret.”

“Gee,” Rafferty says regretfully. “I really wanted to look inside, too.”

“Are you going to say, say thank you?”

“Of course.”

“Go over there. To the train.”

He does as he’s told. Treasure steps back toward the wall and pulls the curtain over her until she’s completely hidden, except for her face. Then she puts a hand over her eyes.

She says, “I can’t see you.”

He scans the miniature world frantically, but there is so much detail: hundreds of little trees, all those structures, the tracks, the towns, the train stations. One small one, one a little bigger, and one-

The biggest train station. There it is, brass dulled with use, on the floor beneath the ceiling of the train station. He has to slip a single finger in to fish it out. A Gardner key, the kind usually used to open safe-deposit boxes.

He picks it up and palms it, then says, “Thank you.”

Treasure hums, a disjointed melody without a key.

She continues to hum as he goes back to the closet door and raises both hands above his head. The humming stops. Mumbling something he hopes sounds magical, he rubs his hands together and then brings them to the left side of his head and pretends to pull the key out of his ear.

She has spread the fingers of the hand over her face to look at him, but she doesn’t say anything, so Rafferty unlocks the door and pulls it open.

He sees a few bright tropical shirts hanging on a rod, six medium-size hard-sided leather briefcases, and two bricks of something wrapped in dark plastic. Everything is very neat, the angles precise, the edges of the briefcases, stacked on their sides with the handles facing him, plumb straight.

He pulls one of the briefcases out.

“It’s money,” Treasure says. “They’re all money.”

“Can I open one?”

She says nothing, just sways back and forth in the curtain and begins to hum again. She seems to be losing interest.

He goes down on one knee and pops the clips on the briefcase. Hundred-dollar bills, all facing the same way, gleam greenly up at him. He does a quick estimate: sixteen stacks, maybe four hundred bills to a stack, is $640,000. Six cases. Four million dollars, give or take. He removes Ming Li’s camera from his pants pocket, turns off the flash, and photographs the money. Then he closes the snaps and puts the case back.

“And this?” he says, touching the plastic wrap.

“Boom,” she says. “Uncle Eddie.”

“Uncle Eddie,” he says. “Did you see him yesterday?”

“Yes. But he, he didn’t see me.”

“Nobody sees you,” he says, “unless you want them to.” Then he closes the briefcase and puts it back in the closet. He’s about to pick up one of the plastic-wrapped bricks when she speaks.

“I know where the boom is,” she says.

“It’s here, isn’t it?”

“It’s there,” she says. “Too.”

He looks over his shoulder at her, but she’s hanging by one hand from the curtain, looking at the train table.

“He, he, he moved it,” she says. “From here to there and then here again. To fool me. But I, I, I know where it is.”

Rafferty gets up and goes back to the table. It’s not just Southeast Asia, he realizes. It’s someplace specific. Positioning himself so she can’t see what he’s doing, he takes the camera out again and snaps three shots of the tabletop. As he puts the camera back, he says, “It’s here somewhere, isn’t it?”

“A clue,” she says accusingly. “I left you a clue. You don’t see anything.”

“You’re so smart,” he says. Relatively close to him and a little to his left is a stretch of track that leads through rubber plantations, paralleling a two-lane road. It goes past the train station where he found the key and then skirts a small village. On the track, about ten inches from the train station, on the opposite side from the station, is the plastic ear from his mask.

“The train will be coming toward me, right?” he says. “There will be people in the station and people on the train.”