The Fear Artist Page 3

  “Flown north,” Rafferty says, “as you so cannily deduced. So what’s the news?”

  “King’s Group bars,” Campeau says immediately. He lifts a hand and lets it land flat on the bar with a thwack. “Raised the bar fine. Six hundred baht, can you believe it. Just to get the girl out the door. I remember when all night long didn’t—”

  “Two dollars,” Hofstedler says. “Toots?” Toots bends down beneath the bar and comes up with a big brandy snifter half full of loose one-dollar bills. “Zis is a new rule,” Hofstedler continues for Poke’s benefit. “Two dollars every time somebody says ‘I remember when.’ ”

  Campeau drops a thousand-baht bill into the snifter and makes change, very decidedly in his favor.

  “And the principle is?” Rafferty says.

  “To keep us from haffing ze same conversation we’ve been haffing zince Nixon was president—”

  “That crook,” says the Growing Younger Man, sitting in his usual spot at the far end of the bar. He looks up at everyone, his eyebrows yanked higher than Lucille Ball’s by his most recent face lift. “Just saying,” he adds apologetically.

  “But why?” Rafferty asks. “It was a perfectly good conversation. I had it many times.”

  “They want six hundred baht,” Campeau repeats in a tone sharp enough to etch glass. “And me on a fixed income.”

  “That’s awful,” Rafferty says, putting a little extra on it.

  “Easy for you to say,” Campeau snarls, “considering what you’ve got at home.”

  Rafferty smiles. “Careful, Bob.”

  “Toots,” Hofstedler says soothingly, “top Bob up, would you? Put it on my tab.”

  “So.” Rafferty is already tiring of his night out. “What does anybody hear about the Red Shirts? Or riots in general?”

  Toots gets very busy polishing beer mugs.

  “Red Shirts are mostly lying low, since the new prime minister was elected, hoping she’s the miracle that will solve everything,” the Growing Younger Man says. “I was with a girl three or four days ago, says her village has a couple of Red Shirt biggies in it, organizers, and they’re just staying in the house. Playing cards, she says. Nobody wants to put the new prime minister on the spot. Not yet anyway.”

  “Girl from where?” Campeau asks, drawn from his sulk by the only topic that interests him.

  “Rainbow 2, over at Nana.”

  “You’re shitting me. That place is ruined, all those Japanese guys, paying two thousand, three thousand—”

  “Where’s the village?” Rafferty asks, mostly to shut Campeau up.

  “Isaan.” The Growing Younger Man tears the top off a small packet and empties a fine green powder into his glass. He clinks his ring against it, and Toots puts down a very well-polished mug and hurries to take the glass. “Practically in Laos,” he says, his eyes on Toots as though he’s on the lookout for knockout drops. He raises a hand to tell them all that he’ll be back after the commercial and leans forward to watch her pour two fingers of bourbon into his glass and top it off with steaming water from a heat pump. She wraps a napkin around it and carries it to him. It’s a green that Rafferty doesn’t really want to look at, the color of spring gone wrong. “Probably was in Laos fifty years ago,” the Growing Younger Man continues, studying the glass. “Uttaradit, up where that bird’s-beak piece of Laos pokes into Thai territory.”

  “I know where it is. Heard about anything, any demonstrations in Bangkok?”

  “You will not,” Hofstedler says. “Never. If two hundred people were rioting upstairs in ze King’s Castle right now—across ze street—we would never hear of it. There would be zecret people, people without uniforms, everywhere. Every tourist with a camera would haff to give it up. Now we haff ze zecret cops.”

  “It’s not the Red Shirts anymore,” the Growing Younger Man says. “These days when there’s a crowd of people throwing things, it’s either Buddhists from down south screaming for people to control the Muslims or it’s Muslims screaming that they’re the victims of prejudice. Either side, they come up to Bangkok and shout for attention. Get a bunch of people tramping the streets now, that’s probably what it’s going to be about.”

  Rafferty says, “Really.”

  “And it’s not all Thais either. There’s a lot of outside players.” The Growing Younger Man stirs the drink, studying it for something, perhaps a chemical reaction. “Every country that’s ever had a bomb go off. And then there’s all the international business interests. Multinationals, American, German, even Chinese. Lot of big money depends on Thai people turning up for work and their factories not getting blown up or burned down. So no, not just the Red Shirts anymore.”

  “Do you know what he is drinking?” Hofstedler says, leaning in confidentially.

  Rafferty wants the Growing Younger Man to keep talking, but there’s no sidestepping Leon. “I’m not sure I want to.”

  “Tell him.” Hofstedler doesn’t call the Growing Younger Man by name because he can’t remember it. Neither can Rafferty; he’s just the Growing Younger Man, the plastic surgeons’ retirement plan, twenty-five years of trying to look young for bar girls who don’t care about anything except the weight of his wallet.

  “It’s nothing, just a drink.” The Growing Younger Man looks as embarrassed as Botox will let him look. He fingers his newest set of hair plugs, wistful little tufts of aspiration.

  “Nein, nein,” Hofstedler says. “Tell him.”

  “It’s an invention of mine. I call it a Hot Whiskey Boom-Boom.”

  “What’s in it?”

  He spreads his fingers and ticks them off as he goes. “Whiskey, hot water, Lipo-C—that’s a liquid vitamin C with very small molecules, plus human growth hormone and spirulina.”

  “Spirulina,” Campeau says. “Pond scum. Yum, yum.”

  “The Aztecs ate it. All the time.” The Growing Younger Man slaps his bicep. “Aztec guys were up for it day and night.”

  Campeau looks over at him. “Yeah?”

  “It’s like natural Viagra,” the Growing Younger Man says. He sips his drink and produces a minor grimace. “Better, because it doesn’t affect your blood pressure. Have you read all the warnings on a package of Viagra?”

  “The one I like,” Campeau says, “is ‘Call your doctor if an erection persists more than four hours.’ I’d call a lot of people, but my doctor wouldn’t be one of them.”

  “Four hours,” Rafferty says, “you could hang your umbrella on it. Be handy in this weather.”

  “I’ve been drinking it for two years,” the Growing Younger Man says, “and I’ve never had old Buster fail to show up since.”

  Hofstedler says, “Buster?”

  Campeau says, “Not once?”

  Rafferty says, “How’s it taste?”

  The Growing Younger Man says, “Awful. Look at it, for Chrissakes. Green as the meat at Foodland.”

  “But you drink it,” Campeau says.

  “Buster,” says the Growing Younger Man with a decisive nod. “He’s always there.”

  There is a moment of religious silence as everyone, except probably Toots, contemplates the fickleness of Buster. This is, after all, why these otherwise-intelligent men packed up their lives and moved here from less carnal climes. Only to be double-crossed by Buster.

  “I’ll try one,” Campeau says. “Gimme.”

  “Do you know how much this stuff costs?” The Growing Younger Man pulls his glass closer to his chest.

  “Are you kidding me? Twenty years you been sitting next to me, knocking back one throat-closer after another, and I been sitting here, really nice about it, no matter what it looked like. And I listened to you whine about Jah for two years—”

  “I did not whine about Jah—”

  “In a city with twenty-nine million available women in it, I nodded and said ‘poor you’ a thousand times while you droned on, Jah this, Jah that—”

  “Buy your own,” The Growing Younger Man says. “Jah was nothing—”

&
nbsp; “She sure wasn’t,” Campeau said. “Barely competent.”

  The Growing Younger Man says, attempting to narrow his eyes, “Excuse me?”

  “Me, too,” Hofstedler says to him. “If you haff anger for Bob, you haff anger for all of us. You talked about her zo much that we all—”

  “Leave me out of it,” Rafferty says. “I wouldn’t know Jah if she walked through the door wearing a neon hat.”

  “Like you need—” Campeau says, and breaks off.

  Rafferty leans forward. “Yes, Bob?”

  “Nothing,” Campeau says. “Jesus, everybody’s so fucking touchy. I remember when you could—”

  “Two dollah,” Toots says, slapping the snifter on the bar again. “And this time I make change.”

  The tips of Campeau’s ears turn a deep red. For a moment, Rafferty thinks, things could get ugly, and then he realizes he’s just forgotten what it’s like. He says, “This is great, you know?”

  Hofstedler says, “What is?”

  “This. Just guys. Everybody bullshitting, not even expecting anyone to believe anything. Nobody’s talking about feelings, nobody will remember in ten minutes what anyone else said. We can all get wound up and then let it blow away. You know, the way things should be.”

  “You should come more often,” the Growing Younger Man says. “It’s like this every night.”

  “I’ll pay Campeau’s fine,” Rafferty says. “Just because I’m happy to see him.” The beer announces its alcohol content with a welcome glow. Like pink lampshades in a dim restaurant, it makes everybody look better. “I remember when people weren’t so touchy, too. So there, that’s four bucks I owe, and I’ll buy a round for everybody.”

  “I don’t really want to drink that shit anyway,” Campeau says almost affably to the Growing Younger Man.

  “I actually did Jah, too,” Rafferty says to the Growing Younger Man. “A couple of times.” He raises both hands. “Just kidding. Honest.”

  3

  You’d Still Be Wearing That Shirt

  THE APARTMENT HOUSE is right where he left it. He approaches it at a diagonal, following an invisible ley line that he can’t sense when he’s completely sober. Or half sober. He’s been out three hours, he’s had three more king-size beers on top of the two at the apartment, and the last thing he ate was a small helping of stir-fried chicken with basil and chilies about noon, before he went to the paint store. The beer has the whole hotel to itself.

  “Eighth floor,” he says to the elevator, accompanying the words with a lordly wave of the hand. Once inside, he says, “Here. Allow me,” and pushes the button. As it rises, he bends his knees in a little plié that made Miaow laugh back when he invented it to help her with her fear of elevators. When he adopted her off the sidewalk, she’d never been in an elevator, and they did their plié together for months. With the dissonant emotional chords alcohol usually sounds in him, he immediately sinks into a kind of depressive nostalgia for the days when Miaow and he were closer, when she looked up to him. When she still thought he knew something.

  She’s always been spiky and strong-willed, but when he summons up the picture of her with her hair parted strictly down the middle and pasted down with water, the way she’d worn it for years, looking up at him with a mixture of hope, faith, and potential disappointment—the emotional attitude created by a childhood of betrayal and homelessness—he can’t help missing the little girl she was then. And how essential she made him feel.

  This is an issue Rose laughs off, as she does Miaow’s relationship, whatever it is, with Andrew. The last time he talked about it, Rose said, “If you didn’t want her to change, you should have bought a table instead.”

  “A table,” he says aloud as the elevator doors open and the two men in uniform peer in at him.

  Bruisers, both of them, wearing uniforms he doesn’t recognize. One’s smiling, one’s not.

  “Wrong floor,” he says, pushing the CLOSE DOORS button, but the one who’s smiling sticks his foot in front of the door. In a moment of alcohol-fueled misjudgment, Rafferty aims a kick at the foot, misses, and staggers backward.

  The smiling one laughs. He says, “We thought you’d never get home, Mr. Rafferty.”

  The one who isn’t smiling takes Rafferty’s T-shirt in both fists and pulls him out of the elevator as though he’s an autumn leaf. The smiling one pushes the button that holds the elevator.

  “There,” he says in more-than-serviceable English. “Now we don’t have to think about the elevator, do we? It’ll be here when we want it.”

  “Who are you guys?” Rafferty slaps at the hands of the man holding his shirt, and the man raises them in mock surrender and takes a step back.

  “We’ve come to take you with us,” Smiley says.

  “Really.” Rafferty says, heading for his door, “shame you went so far out of your—” He’s almost yanked off his feet by the neck of his T-shirt, which has stopped moving so suddenly it feels like he snagged it on a building.

  “Yes,” Smiley says, stepping into the elevator as his friend hoists Rafferty under his arm and carries him back across the hall. “With us.”

  THE ROOM, WINDOWLESS and badly lit, is about half the size of Miaow’s bedroom. Which, Poke thinks—working on staying calm—he should be painting right now.

  He’s been given some time to worry about why he’s here, in this piss-colored room with the splintered table, the requisite mirror along one wall, the ghost fragrance of sweat and tobacco, and the mysterious and deeply unsettling stains on the floor.

  It’s cold in here, but he’s sweating and he can smell himself. On the other hand, at least some of his drunkenness is abandoning him, probably looking for a more lighthearted environment.

  The only furniture in the room is the battered table with two chairs across it. Smiley had put him into the chair facing the door. After five or ten uncomfortable minutes spent in cheerless speculation about the stains on the floor, Rafferty realized that the two front legs on his chair had been sawed down by half an inch, so that he was continually sliding forward. With a cheery wave at the mirror, he got up and swapped chairs. Then he sat there for another twelve minutes, breathing as evenly as possible, at which point he got up and tried the door, which was locked.

  “Okay,” he said to the microphone high in the corner. “It’s nine forty-one. At nine-fifty I’m throwing the chair through the mirror.” He went to the mirror and held his wrist to the glass. “Synchronize watches.”

  At 9:49 the door opens and the slender, handsome Thai with the pouches beneath his eyes—the one who’d moved him away from the fallen farang—comes in. He’s no longer in street clothes. Instead he wears a tightly creased uniform like the ones worn by the men who brought Rafferty here. He closes the door behind him, giving it a little tug to make sure the latch is engaged, and extends a long-fingered hand to drop a manila envelope onto the table.

  Rafferty takes a closer look. The man’s hair is slicked back to reveal a sharp widow’s peak, the point of which is echoed by the tip of his long chin. In a gene pool that mostly dictates rounded features, he’s all acute angles, almost fox-faced. His shoulders are broad and his hips narrow, and his uniform fits in a way that says expensive tailor with a mild French accent.

  He smiles, and his teeth are breathtaking. “Sorry to have kept you waiting,” he says in that same pure, American English. “It’s a bad time in Bangkok, and not just because of the rain. Although after what you went through today, I’m sure that’s no news to you.”

  He pushes back the chair on his side, the one with the sawed-off legs, and his smile broadens. He slips out of his shoes, puts one chair leg inside each of them to even it, and sits. “Old trick, the sloping chair,” he says. “Not meant for you, of course. They should have brought you a different one.”

  Rafferty says nothing, just watches the man squeeze out the charm.

  The slender man nods appreciation of Rafferty’s lack of response. He picks up the envelope and tilts it. Five
color photos slide onto the table. He fans them out, one-handed: Rafferty up on his elbow on the sidewalk, the bleeding white man clinging to him. Talking to him.

  “Who is he?” the slender man says.

  “Who are you?” Rafferty says.

  “Oh, good heavens,” he says with a good-natured chuckle. He resists, Rafferty thinks, slapping his forehead. “I’m Major Shen. And you’re Philip Rafferty, American travel writer, born in California in the United States, now a Bangkok resident, married to a Thai national and the adoptive father of a Thai child.”

  “Ah, the power of intelligence,” Rafferty says. “Or maybe just information. Major in what?”

  “I’m sorry?” The man looks down at himself and tugs his sharply creased sleeve. “Oh, the uniform. Well, yes, we haven’t put much effort into public relations. But the question on the table, so to speak, is who is he?”

  “Quid pro quo,” Rafferty says, half expecting two guys to burst into the room toting rubber hoses.

  “Really?” Major Shen purses his lips. “If you must. In America you’d probably say we’re affiliated with Homeland Security.”

  Rafferty says, with a sinking feeling, “Mmmmm.”

  “But don’t let that bother you. We’ll talk for a few minutes and then you’ll be on your way and you can forget all about me.” The smile gets switched on and off. “Who is he?”

  “I have no idea. He’s someone who got shot and bumped into me and then got shot again.”

  Major Shen looks down at the table. “I see. You’re shortchanging me.”

  Rafferty’s vision dims and flickers with sudden rage. “Well, what do you think happened? You think he got mixed up in a running crowd and steered it through the streets of Bangkok until he found the one person he was looking for? Maybe he knew someone was going to shoot at him and he wanted to die in my arms? So he could give me the password that opens the cave or something?” He sits back, reminding himself he’s been drinking and his judgment may not be at its sharpest.