The Fear Artist

“The boom is Plan A,” she says. “The fire is Plan B. Plan C is the boom and the-”

Her voice breaks off. He hears the curtain slide over her, and then he hears a noise from the door to the kitchen that stops the blood in his veins.

“He doesn’t need to know what Plan C is,” Murphy says. He pushes Ming Li in ahead of him, the revolver in his hand pointed at the center of her back. “Treasure’s not usually so friendly. You’re lucky she didn’t sink her teeth into you.” He gives Ming Li another push. “Go over to your friend.”

“Brother,” she says, joining Rafferty at the table. She’s not wearing the mask, and her eyes are all over the room.

“Treasure,” Murphy says, “come out from there. Now. You don’t want me to have to come get you.”

The green curtain slides aside. Treasure’s face hangs down, hidden by her hair. She seems to be looking directly at her feet.

“Go to the dining room,” he says. “Get the magic chair. Now.”

She runs across the room and out through the door. For that moment Murphy’s eyes are on her, and Rafferty raises his hand to put it on Ming Li’s shoulder, but Murphy points the gun at him and shakes his head. Ming Li has turned her own head to follow Treasure, and when she looks back to Murphy, her eyes are as hard and black as onyx.

Murphy leans against the train table. The locomotive continues its tikka-tikka-tikka path past his left hand, its engineer unaware of the giant in the sky. “Where are your Viet witnesses?”

“I don’t know.”

“We’ll see about that.”

“I don’t know. Not any more than Bey did.”

“Bey? Oh, Bey. Right. In Wyoming. That was her real name, wasn’t it?”

“It was.”

“She didn’t mention more witnesses. Maybe Paul didn’t ask. Do they exist?”

“Four of them. But I don’t know where they are.”

Murphy says, “Mmm-hmmm.” He seems to be thinking about something else.

“But Bey did say that Billie Joe was in Bangkok.”

“On the wrong side again,” Murphy says, “working for the poor, persecuted ragheads. All I had to do was get some people on the inside to put out the word about the demonstration, and there he was. And there you were, too.”

“By accident.”

“Looks like it. He told you Eckersley’s name. Why didn’t you just say so? I probably would have watched you for a little bit and then let you go.”

“I didn’t remember it.”

“Doesn’t matter now. Doesn’t much matter about the witnesses either. According to Shen, you’ve fucked me good and proper.” His eyes go to the open closet, and he shakes his head again. “Everything. This little shit just told you everything, didn’t she? My little Treasure.”

“If you hadn’t walked in,” Rafferty says, “I’d have taken her with me.”

“That would have been good. She’s a problem, she is.” He looks toward the door that Treasure disappeared through. “So you found survivors of the massacre. Talked to the newspapers, the Vietnamese, the Americans. A trifecta. Guaranteed to give the pussy patrol the squits. Same as they get every time we’re in a fucking war.”

“Is that what this is?” Rafferty says “A war? I thought it was a license for you to fuck people up.”

“You don’t care that people are getting blown up down south,” Murphy says. The cords at the side of his neck are beginning to stand out. “You don’t care that they throw bombs into the marketplaces and the elementary schools and cut the heads off monks. You don’t give a shit that the most powerful country of the twenty-first century can’t figure out how to protect itself from a few illiterates who are still stuck in the ninth, still trying to get even for the fucking Crusades.” He walks across the room, stiff-jointed with anger, until he has his back to the curtain that Treasure had wrapped herself in. “Just like you didn’t care, or you wouldn’t have if you’d been old enough, that nobody knew who the enemy was in Vietnam, that a sweet-looking old granny-san could roll a grenade at you without even saying hello.”

Treasure comes slowly into the room dragging one of the spindly chairs that had been drawn up to the dining-room table, and Murphy points to her to bring it to him.

“No,” he says, “what you need is a Nazi army, all in a uniform that says ‘bad guy’ from half a mile away, with blood on their teeth and dueling scars. Waste those people, you’d sit in front of your TV and applaud. Wave your flag and get all teary-eyed. But women? Children? Some twelve-year-old Muhammad with a suicide vest in his closet? Ohhhhh, nooooooooo, Mr. Bill,” he says in a falsetto. “The weepy wailers come out in the papers and on TV, and when the weepy wailers come out, the pussy patrol gets the squits, and you know what happens then?”

Ming Li says, “Pussy patrol is a nice phrase.” She sounds calm, but her eyes haven’t left Murphy’s.

“What happens then,” Murphy says, and his face is suddenly scarlet, “what happens then is that we lose the fucking war.” He’s spitting at them as he talks. With his free hand, he snatches the chair from Treasure, who leaps backward and stands at an unconscious approximation of attention, with her feet together and her arms straight down, tight at her sides. Murphy turns the chair around and sets it in front of himself, leaning on its back. “Because here’s the chain of command,” he says, “here’s how it works. A bunch of guys, and these days maybe a woman, in two-thousand-dollar suits and a uniform or two, sit around a polished table in some air-conditioned room so they won’t have to get too warm or too cold and say things like ‘measured response’ and ‘surges’ and ‘tactical support’ and ‘appropriate force,’ and that’s at one end of the chain, okay?” He holds his hands up, about two feet apart, the revolver pointed at the ceiling, and he moves them, still separated by a couple of feet, left to right in jerky increments, as if measuring something. “And at the other end of the chain is some poor asshole on his back in the dirt, swelling up in the sun, with his intestines tied around his neck. So, you know, all well and good, that guy’s not going to cut off another head, and his friends will probably think twice about it, too, but then somebody takes a picture, and it gets into the papers, and the weepy wailers start up, and those people who were sitting around that table and sending down the orders in their nice, polite language turn into the pussy patrol, waving their hands and saying, ‘Not us, no, no, not us, we never called for such a thing, we would never condone the indiscriminate use of lethal force against a civilian population.’ And right then and there, they lose the war, no matter how many Americans have been shot to death and blown up trying to win it, and lost their arms and legs and dicks-do you know that castration from improvised explosive devices is one of the most common injuries in Iraq? — because these people in their suits and their fucking air-conditioning still haven’t figured out that there’s no such thing as civilians anymore.”

“Let us walk out of here,” Rafferty says. His mouth is so dry he can hear his lips sliding over his teeth, and his voice sounds thin in his ears. “You’ve got your money. You know how to disappear. You’ve done it before.”

“Not that easy,” Murphy says. “Not anywhere near that easy. I’m going to disappear, but you, you’re a loose end.” He sits in the chair, the gun loosely pointed at them. “Treasure.”

Treasure doesn’t move.

“Treasure,” Murphy says again.

The child begins to sway back and forth, her head still down. She leans so far forward that Rafferty steps toward her to break her fall, but Murphy raises the gun so it’s aimed at Rafferty’s chest. Treasure slowly lifts her head until she’s looking at her father.

“You two,” Murphy says. “Pull up your shirts.”

Rafferty does, followed by Ming Lee. Murphy’s eyes drop to the gun at Rafferty’s waist and then go to Ming Li, and he says, “Girl. Turn around.” When her back is to him and the gun is visible at the small of her back, Murphy says, “Stop turning.”

He leans back in the chair, and it creaks. “Both of you. Hands on your head, fingers interlaced, and don’t neither of you move. Treasure. You get those guns.”

“ ‘Don’t neither of you,’ ” Ming Li says, and Rafferty hears her swallow. “I learned English in China, and I speak it better than you do.”