The Fear Artist

Yes, Rafferty thinks, and says, “No. I was hoping I was wrong. I’m not the one who figured it out. I never would have thought of it. It was one of the spies. And the way they put it, it made sense, and I-”

“And you didn’t tell me.” The rain rattles the awning above them.

Rafferty feels his friend’s gaze, but there’s no way he can return it. “I couldn’t. Just because they said it, that didn’t make it true.”

“And you needed to get a message to Shen, remember? If you’re being honest, I mean, and if you don’t mind my saying so, it’s about time.” Arthit tilts back in his chair, the front legs lifting off the cement. “Anyway, it worked, didn’t it? Shen’s backed completely away from Murphy’s death.” He picks up his bottle and watches two girls run by, sheltering together under a piece of plastic sheeting. He puts the bottle back down, untasted. “I’m glad the … the strategy succeeded,” he says. “And I know that what she did almost got you killed and that I’m probably a bad friend for not putting that first. But I can’t pretend I like the way you handled it.”

Rafferty can think of no reply, so he says, “I’m sorry.”

“Yes. Well, I’m sorry, too, but that doesn’t fix anything.”

A young woman trots by beneath an umbrella, but Rafferty is so distracted he forgets to look at her. Too late, he turns his head to see her retreating back.

“Not her,” Arthit says.

“Arthit. What can I do?”

“I’m not sure you can do anything. Maybe we need to leave each other alone for a while. Let the bruises heal. Right now it’s like a cold sore. I keep prodding it with my tongue because I can’t believe how much it can hurt. Maybe I just need to get used to the idea it’s there, and then I’ll be able to leave it alone. Maybe even forget it.”

“I haven’t got anything to say. Anything that would matter.”

“I don’t know why I’m telling you this, but she did it for her country. The oldest excuse of all, the one they sell us over and over. They told her it was to fight the killings in the south, try to bring some peace down there. They showed her pictures of what was happening, bad enough that she had to ask them to stop. They made it all about children and monks being killed, bombs in Buddhist temples, you know. They said you and I were either one thing or the other, either bad guys or medium guys who were being used by the bad guys, and that she could help, she could save lives, by making friends with me and telling them what was happening. So I asked, ‘Did they tell you to sleep with me?’ She said no, said that she had no idea she was going to fall in love with me. She said, ‘It just happened.’ She said, ‘All that other stuff is over now, but I still love you.’ ” He leans forward, and the legs of his chair bang down on the cement. “That’s what she said.”

“Maybe she does. She told me not to go to the mall because it was too dangerous. She said it twice.”

“Of course, all that sailed right past me,” Arthit says. “Since I had no idea what the two of you were actually talking about.” He shakes his head. “That’s enough of that. She also said this morning that she didn’t tell Shen about you going-supposedly going-to the mall. She’d decided that he was wrong about you.” He stops and drinks. “Wrong about both of us. The only thing she gave him was your information about Murphy. Murphy had already told Shen about the mall.”

“Could be,” Rafferty says. “They apparently had a terrific fight when Murphy came in.”

Arthit says, “This is all miles beyond speculation at this point. And I can’t honestly say I give a damn about either Murphy or Shen. What I give a damn about is being lied to by two people I didn’t think would lie to me.”

Rafferty says, “There she is.”

The streetlights seem very bright despite the rain, and the world looks jerky, as if things start and stop and start and stop, and she has a feeling that’s familiar now, that her feet are a long, long way down and she’s above herself. Above everyone else. Floating.

But jerky. Maybe one more hit before she goes into the bar will smooth out the jerkiness. Or maybe she’ll just get used to it. Maybe she’ll learn to like it.

Even the water flowing past her feet, way down there in the street, moves in little jerks. And so do the men coming toward her. She tells herself, Smile, and she feels her face obey. She’s not a pretty girl, people say, but they tell her she has a nice smile.

So she smiles.

And she slows to meet them, a bit disorganized, some parts of her body slowing at different speeds from others, and she has to take an extra step, and as she does it, she sees who they are. She sees their faces and their eyes, and she feels the concern and the disapproval and the shock and all the other strings that flow from them to her, strings that will wrap around her if she lets them, like the string on a balloon that wants to float free, and a bolt of panic shoots her in the heart, and she turns and runs, splashing through the water to the small streets branching away to her right, away from those men and their expectations and hopes and conditions, and toward the dark, safe place where she can be alone with the pipe.

Rafferty’s elevator seems to take forever to climb the seven floors, and he uses the time to try to shake off the last glimpse of Treasure-although he knows he’ll carry it with him forever-the loss of Janos, the sight of Pim wobbling away through the rain toward God-only-knows-what, and the slump of his friend’s back as he trudged away toward Sukhumvit to find a cab to take him back to that house, where he’ll have to begin, all over again, his life as a man alone. As bad as Poke feels about Arthit, though, it’s Treasure who breaks his heart.

When he keys the door and pushes it open, Miaow explodes off the couch with the kind of scream girls her age usually reserve for adolescent pop singers and shoves herself against him so hard that he thinks for a moment she’s trying to push him back out the door, but then her arms go around him and his around her, and he looks down at her chopped, red-dyed hair as if it were heaven’s meadow and then beyond her to see Rose-impossibly, excessively, ridiculously beautiful-get up from the couch to wait her turn, at Ming Li sitting in an effortless half lotus on the floor, and, regarding him uncertainly from Rafferty’s usual seat on the hassock, still in the two-hands T-shirt, Andrew.

Blinking fast, Rafferty bends down and hoists a squealing Miaow off her feet and totes her into the living room, not even feeling her weight, and says, meaning every syllable, “I’m so happy we’re all here.”

The hamburger arthit picked up because it was the fastest thing he could think of has grown cold and greasy-smelling, and now, as he lifts the latch on the gate, it’s also getting wet. It couldn’t be as wet as he is, he thinks, but it’s certainly too wet to eat. And, come to think of it, who needs to eat?

He’s halfway up the concrete walk to the door when he sees her, sitting on the top step with water dripping from the ends of her short, blunt-cut hair, her head down. As he nears, he can see her shoulders stiffen, but she doesn’t raise her eyes to his.

He stops in front of her. She still hasn’t looked up, and she’s in the middle of the step, so he’ll have to squeeze past her to get to the door. What does he say to get her attention? Excuse me? His sigh seems to come from his center of spiritual gravity, and she dips her head even lower. He looks past her at the house with its dark windows and its familiar, empty rooms, and he throws the hamburger into the hedge and says, “Please. Come in.”

That night the rain upriver eases for a while, and three runoff dams that had been emptied to prevent their bursting are reopened to drain off some of the water rampaging down to the sea, and the level in the river drops. It’s not much of a drop, and it’s probably only for one night. But it is one night.

The next morning, drinking his coffee, Rafferty reads the newspaper story headlined BODY FOUND IN BURNED HOUSE: ARSON SUSPECTED. He reads it again, more slowly, and then puts the paper down and says aloud, to no one, “One body?”