The Fear Artist (17 page)

“Which way?” the driver asks.

“I don’t care, as long as we pass some hotels.”

“Turn right, then,” the driver says. “Make you happy again.”

They’re waiting outside
, he thinks.
And they’re at two hotels at least
.

“On the right,” the driver announces, “the Happy Palace.”

The Happy Palace is badly named, if appearances aren’t seriously deceiving. And this time the men are on opposite curbs, facing in different directions.

He also sees a dark, unmarked car parked a few spaces from the hotel.

Okay, three hotels, and probably more. They’re covering multiple hotels. They know he’s in Khao San but not where. And they’re undoubtedly carrying photos and showing them in the hotels, so at least the desk guy at his current hotel hasn’t identified him.

Yet. There are a lot of cheap hotels down here.

The pictures were bad, Arthit had said.

How did they learn he was in Khao San?

Another hotel, no one outside this time. Inside, talking to the desk clerk? Or perhaps they don’t have enough men to cover all the hotels from outside, so they’re taking them in stages.

If it’s the latter, maybe he can …

“Go to the Regent, please.” It’s the hotel he stayed in last night and to which he had expected to return that evening.

“Anywhere you say.”

“And please throw out that cigarette and start a new one. That one looks awful.”

“Smells good, though.” But the driver lowers the window and tosses the wet cigarette.

The block the Regent is on looks empty. “Drive past,” Rafferty says, “and make the right.”

“Sure. You speak Thai very well.”

“Not really, but thank you.” There’s no one on the sidewalk on either side of the hotel. No parked car. The driver makes the right, and Rafferty says, “Let me out here.”

When they’ve come to a stop, the driver says, “One hundred twenty.”

“Fine.” Rafferty hands him two hundreds and then shows him a five-hundred. “Drive around the block nice and slow, three—no, four—times. If you don’t see me, stop here and wait for five minutes. I’ll have you take me somewhere else, and I’ll give you this as a tip. Okay?”

“Like a movie,” the driver says. “No problem.”

As he rounds the corner toward the hotel, Rafferty feels as if every pore on his body has opened. He can feel the faintest stirring of the air, he can hear the ticking of the rain on pavement and the legs of his trousers brushing each other. He keeps his head motionless, but his eyes scan the block. If they’re here, Shen’s men, they’re out of sight and keeping still. The fact that they’re not here now—if they’re
really
not here—doesn’t mean they won’t be here soon.

All this anxiety for a couple of tubes of greasepaint and a useless passport. No, he corrects himself, it’s to keep them from
seeing
the greasepaint. It’s the color of his skin that keeps people’s eyes moving, keeps them from looking twice. He’ll lose that advantage if they get his bag.

And he might still need his passport.

But his body is arguing with him. His feet feel like they’re encased in cement, and he seems to be walking into a wind. When he gets to the four steps leading up to the Regent’s tattered lobby, he can’t force himself to climb them. He keeps walking, all the way to the end of the block, and then turns the corner and collapses against the side of the nearest building.

He’s breathing as though he’s run a couple hundred yards, and his heart pounds in his ears like a drum at the bottom of a swimming pool. He wipes his face, and his hand comes away wet and
brown with makeup. A car turns in to the street a block away, tires hissing on the pavement, and Rafferty pushes himself off the building and goes back the way he came, turning onto the street the Regent is on. He’s a quarter of the way along when a sweep of headlight announces that the car has made the same turn, right behind him.

He thinks, despairingly,
Rose. Miaow
. The muscles at the base of his spine contract.

He slows, staggering a little bit ostentatiously, and wraps an arm around a lamppost, just a drunk whose world is turning too quickly, and lets his head droop in the pre-puke pose. The car hums past, not slowing in front of the hotel, glowing straight away into the wet night, going someplace where people probably aren’t frightened, and Rafferty says to himself,
That’s it. That’s the sign I needed
, and he climbs the steps to the Regent Hotel. He pushes on the door, gets a squeal of protest that could wake the dead, and pulls instead. Pasting a smile onto his face, he goes in.

A
NNA’S WEIGHT AGAINST
his shoulder has already become familiar. Arthit is already comfortable with the brush of her thick, short-cut hair on his cheek. He could recognize her perfume in a crowd.

How in the world did he get here so quickly?

This is the fourth night in a row he’s left work and driven to the school where she teaches. All the way across Bangkok tonight, he’d imagined the way her face lights up when she sees him, as though she secretly hadn’t expected him to come.

She leans forward a couple of inches, turns down the car’s air conditioner—which she thinks is a waste of money—then nestles against him again. She traces a question mark in the air:
Is that all right?
He says, “Yes,” knowing now that she can interpret the vibrations.

She brushes his cheek with her fingertips and then draws a question mark on that, too. “Yes,” he says again, and she laughs low in her throat.

He laughs, too. There’s a quick contraction of guilt—
Noi
—but it passes. Noi wouldn’t want him to mourn forever.

The first night, she’d chosen the restaurant, a white-tablecloth, Vivaldi-Muzak Italian place on Sukhumvit, the kind of place Noi loved but that always made Arthit feel awkward, as though he were moments away from dropping the four-pound fork onto the wooden floor and drawing the eye of everyone in the place, all of whom would wonder,
What’s
he
doing in here?

In fact, the staff of the restaurant had barely glanced at him, but they treated Anna like royalty. From the moment the maître d’ walked right around a waiting couple to lead them to a flower-bedecked window table, they received a level of service that made Arthit feel almost important. A cool nod at the maître d’ and a smudged glass had been swept out of sight and replaced by one that looked as if angels had been buffing it for days. It wasn’t the kind of servile, resentful attention his uniform usually draws; it was more as though the restaurant had opened in the sole hope of attracting people just like Anna, and here one was at last. He felt throughout the meal like the obscure princeling of some minor but emerging royalty.

She’d seemed completely unaware of the staff’s eager attention, and he’d thought,
This is how it is wherever she goes
.

He’d tried to avoid looking at the prices on the menu, felt his tension mount, and wondered what “piccata” and “tagliatelle” meant. Even during his time in school in England, he’d stuck to Asian and, when unavoidable, English food. Beyond a few obvious dishes, he had no idea what to order, and yet it seemed as though dealing with the waiter was going to be his job.

It became clear that she had the situation under control when she passed him her menu with her finger on something called “osso buco” and then put up a second finger and tapped the menu with them twice, just in case he’d missed the first sign.

After the waiter left, she extended a hand as though inviting him to cover it with his own, but as he reached for it, it was withdrawn, leaving a square of paper. His reflexes, for once, were operating, and he put his hand over the paper with almost no hesitation and drew it toward him. It said,
Meat, right?
Y
ou look like you eat meat
. He’d raised his eyes to hers and burst out laughing.

She’d laughed with him and then widened her eyes and fanned her face as though to say,
Near escape
.

“I’ve eaten Italian before,” he said, and then qualified it, “Pizza.” She’d started to laugh again, and he’d added, “And spaghetti.”

Her gaze on his lips felt like a cool breeze. He said, slowly, “A lot of spaghetti,” just to prolong the feeling.

They’d traded spoken words and written notes through three courses, dessert, and a bottle of wine. In his memory the entire evening seems to have been candlelit. A high, silent room lit by candles with Anna in the center of it.

He still can’t believe how much he learned about her across that table. It all felt so natural, so effortless that he can almost hear the tone of her voice as she told him about herself, although of course she never spoke a word. Forty-three, divorced, the mother of a twelve-year-old boy whose much richer and higher-ranking father had simply taken the child. The boy, she’s told, is beginning to be a problem, but she’s not being consulted on how to help, which seems to be the only aspect of her life that frustrates her.

Like Noi, she was born and educated in the city, first at schools for the deaf and then, defying all predictions, at Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok’s best. Unlike Noi, who’d quit not only school but her entire family to marry a policeman, Anna had graduated and then won a doctorate from their school of education.

She’s been deaf her entire life. Arthit’s immediate reaction when she told him that was,
She’s never heard music
. It was the only moment of pity he’s had for her since they met. She’s too capable and too complete to pity. And it occurred to him on their second night together that she’s been spared the clashing, senseless, cacophonous sound that Bangkok is rich in. She lives, he’d thought, in a bell of silence.

The car purrs to a stop, and he waits for her to lift her head from his shoulder and tilt her face to his. She’s done it two nights running, and tonight makes it three. He kisses her lightly on the lips, and she reaches up and squeezes his earlobe. He wraps his fingers around her wrist, turns her hand toward him, and kisses her palm, directly below the thumb. He says, in English, “Mount of Venus.” Then, in Thai, “It tells me whether you have qualities
like kindness, harmony, love. And sensuality.” He presses it experimentally with his fingertips and shakes his head. “Oh, well. You could still go into politics.”

She blows a puff of air at him, but it turns into a laugh. He opens his door, patting the air with a palm, meaning
Stay there
, and gets out. He goes around and opens her door, and she extends a hand, half appreciatively, half in parody of the helpless, well-bred lady who needs assistance getting out of the car. When she’s standing upright, she sags against him and taps her fingers over her heart.

They’re halfway up the walk when the front door opens. Pim’s smile of welcome fades when she sees Anna, but she manages a nod before turning around and retreating up the hallway and into her room. Anna watches the girl go, looking perplexed.

Arthit says, “Coffee?”

Anna shakes her head, still looking down the hallway. And, as if she’d felt Anna’s attention, Pim sticks her head out of her door and calls, “Did your friend show you the charts?”

Arthit says, “Which friend?”

Her forehead wrinkles. “Ummm, Prem? He works with you.”

Arthit says, “Prem?” All the joy of the evening vanishes. “Please. Come in here.”

She moves reluctantly down the hallway toward them, stopping without actually coming into the room.

“This man, Prem. Did he phone?”

“You didn’t talk to him?”

“Pim. Tell me what happened.”

She blinks at his tone. “He came here about ten minutes after you—”

“This morning?” He steps forward but stops, seeing that he’s frightening her.

Pim says, “Yes.”

“Describe him.”

Suddenly Pim’s face is white, and she’s squinting as though she expects a slap. “Tall,” she says. “Handsome. Combs his hair …” Her voice falters.

“Straight back,” Arthit says, and Anna, reading his lips, releases a sharp sigh that just misses being a cough. “What did he do?”

“I had … uhhh, I’d spilled something.” She’s tugging at her frizzy hair with one hand. “And he … he helped me—”

“What charts?”

“Charts, he said, he said you wanted—” Her chin crumples into a pattern of dimples, and a tear slides down her cheek. “Hotels, charts of hotels. He tricked me.”

Arthit’s face is rigid. “Tricked you how?”

“I don’t know how he did it—”

“Did
what
?”

Anna can’t hear the tone, but she sees Pim step back.

“I told him—I
think
I told him—that Poke was around Khao San. In a cheap hotel near Khao San.”

“Which hotel?”

“I didn’t know that.” She’s crying openly now, not even trying to hide it.

Anna puts a hand on Arthit’s arm, but he shrugs her off.

“You’re certain.”

“Yes,
yes
, I don’t know where he is, where he’s staying. I mean, Prem acted nice, and he knew all about you, and he … he helped—” She backs up a step, and Anna follows her, a hand outstretched, but Pim looks down at it and then wails, running into her room and slamming the door.

Arthit says, in English, “Shit.” To Anna, in Thai, he says, “Wait here for a minute. Right back.” He goes down the hall and into the bedroom. When he comes out, a moment later, he has a transparent zippered plastic bag in his hands with what looks like oversize pieces of confetti in it.

“SIM cards,” he says. “Out of confiscated phones.” He sits on the couch and pulls out his phone and opens it. He slides the back off and tries to work the SIM card out, but his hands are shaking, and Anna takes it from him as she sits. She slips a nail under the edge of the card and pops it out, then holds out her hand with the card in it.

Arthit takes it and puts it on the table, then replaces it in her hand with one from the bag. A few seconds later, she closes the phone and hands it back to him with the new card in it.

Arthit takes a deep breath and says, “I hope this is the right thing to do,” and dials the number of Poke’s throwaway.