The Fear Artist (21 page)

How tough should he be? More to the point, given what he’s seeing in her the past two years, would it make any difference?

He moves on the balls of his feet, breathing silently, until he’s standing a foot or two from the door, looking into the room. The clicking noise has stopped.

It’s a big room, created by knocking together a maid’s quarters and a breakfast area and moving the external wall out about eight feet. Evenly lit by pin spots recessed in the ceiling, it has a thickly carpeted floor in West Point gray and walls covered with shelving of blond wood, mostly empty but crowded in a few places by what look like mass collisions of cast-metal toys: trucks, cars, farm machinery, military vehicles, and trains—mostly trains.

Without looking right or left, he slips the Buck knife into a belt loop, snagging the top of the guard inside the loop so the knife won’t fall out, and walks into the room as though he thinks he’s completely alone. About two-thirds of the room is taken up by an enormous table, plywood on sawhorses, clamped together into a dependable flatness and covered with a two-inch layer of Styrofoam painted green. Carved and punched into the Styrofoam is a scale-model tropical world: four-inch hills, roads with little houses clinging to them like limpets, tiny villages, two-inch palm trees, rubber plantations with their military platoons of trees in straight lines, shallow, mirrored ponds, a narrow-gauge railroad. This is a precise scale model of a few square miles in Yala, the southernmost province of Thailand, just above the border with Malaysia.

The railroad is the key to it all.

A finger touched to the top of the transformer at one side of the miniature confirms that it’s hot. He cranks the lever, and a small train, a golden yellow diesel that’s a perfect model of several actually in use in the area, clickety-clicks its way along the track, nearing a small station. With the total concentration he devotes to everything he does, he brings the train to the exact point where it would stop to take on and discharge passengers,
then breaks the current. In the absence of the train’s noise, the room almost pulses with silence.

To the left and right of the big windows hang heavy, dark green, floor-to-ceiling curtains that he draws against the morning light when he’s worked through the night in here. One of them bells out slightly from the wall.

Murphy sweeps several pieces out of the miniature world—buildings and trees, mostly—and they clatter against each other as they hit the carpet. While the sound is still ringing in his ears, he says in a low, animal growl, “I … smell … something … 
ALIVE
.”

The last word is a roar. In the silence that follows it, he can hear an almost-inaudible sound, bone dry and fast and irregular: teeth chattering. The chattering gives way to something airy, high, and faint that could be a sob, a whimper, or even a nervous giggle. Or, since it’s her, all three at once.

He crosses the room in a leap and yanks aside the curtain.

A figure in white, a single loose garment modeled on Wendy’s nightgown in the animated
Peter Pan
, stands there, her back pressed to the wall. She’s small, even for twelve, and almost emaciated, even though she eats like a wolf. Her arms are black with burned cork, as is her face, except for a straight horizontal stripe of brownish pink skin over the bridge of her nose, broken by two eyes, tiny circles of a wolfish amber completely surrounded by white, trained up at his face with an energy he can almost sense on his skin. Her hair, black with a reddish tint, is an uncombed tangle, shoulder length, and damp. She won’t let anyone get near it.

“What are you doing?”

“Ghosting.” Her voice is unexpectedly low-pitched, a boy’s voice, and there’s a tremor in it that could be fear or excitement or both.

“Where’s the rotten meat? It works better if you stink.”

For a tenth of a second, a pink tongue flicks across the blackened lower lip. “I’m on a, a, a sneak. If I smell bad, they’ll know I’m there.”

He puts a curled index finger under her chin and pulls it up, not particularly gently. “That’s not what I asked you. I asked you where the meat was.”

Her teeth chatter for a moment, and he feels her chin tremble. “Hwa threw it out. She thought it was just spoiled.”

“That’s Hwa’s job,” he says. “Protect us from spoiled meat. Protect us from you.” He takes hold of a knot of hair and gives it a yank, and for a moment her eyes narrow, although she doesn’t make a sound. “I ought to slap you,” he says. “Some fucking ghost. ‘My maid threw out the spoiled meat.’ Oh, well, let’s just stop the war until the little rich girl can age another porterhouse.”

The child says, “You’re right.”

“You want to play this, play it real. If you don’t want to play it, go be a little girl. I’m not saying you should stink right now, but if you want rotten meat, you keep it away from the maid.” She’s looking at nothing in the middle of the room. “Treasure? Listening or not?”

“In a, in a real war,” Treasure says to the middle of the room, “if my, my maid figured out what I was doing, I’d kill her.” She speaks her own version of English, flavored with Lao and Vietnamese.

“Then you’d have to get another one. And then
she’d
find the meat because you’re so sloppy, and you’d have to kill her and hire another one, and a few months later you’d have so many dead maids you’d have to move out of the house. Dead maids stacked everywhere.”

“I’d hide the meat better,” Treasure says, still looking at nothing.

“Don’t have maids,” Murphy says. “Unless you can trust them with your life, don’t have maids.”

“Can you trust Hwa and Phung with your life?”

“They won’t be with us much longer.”

She ignores his response. “If you find out you can’t trust them, are you going to—”

“We’re not in a real war,” Murphy says.

Treasure says, “Hwa couldn’t protect you from, from
me
. Phung couldn’t. Nobody could.” She pulls the curtain over her lower half and edges sideways as though she expects a blow.

“In five years, maybe. I won’t worry until then.” He picks up the fallen model pieces, his back to her. He can hear her coming, and when he turns to look, she’s a few feet from him, still holding the bottom of the curtain, dragging it away from the wall as though it’s her connection to safety. “Have you figured it out?” he asks, looking down at the railroad.

“It’s, it’s, it’s not the station.”

“Let go of that thing. And don’t tell me where it’s not going to be. Tell me where it
will
be.”

The curtain flops back against the wall, and she’s standing beside the table, carefully out of arm’s reach. He can smell the feral odor of her; she bathes only when she wants to, and she wears a nightgown until the seams are parting and it’s stiff with dirt, when she replaces it with an identical one, maybe a quarter size larger, sewn by Hwa or Phung. She’s refused to wear anything else since she saw the cartoon Wendy in flight, when she was seven. Neeni had sewn them at first, but these days it’s dangerous to let Neeni near a sewing machine.

“There,” she says, pointing a dirty finger at a length of track that borders an orderly stretch of rubber trees.

A little kernel of excitement flares in his chest. “Why there?”

“What you said.” She looks up at him, but the moment he meets her gaze, her eyelids come down halfway. “Acc-access, escape, blame.” She leans forward and touches the tracks, then traces the finger back across the treetops of the rubber plantation to a narrow road. “Park here, go through here, plant it here, go back and get into the car, and you can turn around and you go, you go this way.” The finger stops at an intersection. “Here, you go right or left. No-nobody sees you twice.” She lifts her face toward his but keeps her eyelids low, and he has the feeling she can see him through them.

“And?” he says.

“And here.” Her finger returns to the track and follows it about five inches. “This is a Muslim village. Full of, of boys who have already been in trouble.” She shuffles back a couple of steps, away from the table, her eyes on the miniature village, full of tiny, unsuspecting Muslims. Her head jerks right an inch or two and comes back, as it does sometimes. He’s not sure she’s even aware of it.

“That’s good,” he says.

He can hear her swallow.

“That’s where I
chose
,” he says. “Now tell me why I changed my mind.”

She crosses her arms tightly across her narrow chest. Her head
comes forward on her neck, a movement that always seems more animal than human to him. It brings her eyes two inches closer to the problem. He waits, and she puts her tongue just behind her upper teeth and makes a
tsssss-tssssss-tsssssss
sound.

He says, “I can hear that, and if you don’t know you’re doing it, you’re dead.”

“I
know
I’m doing it.” The head jerk again. “Which way is the train coming?”

“Smart girl,” he says.

“Because if it’s coming
this
way”—she points her finger down the track toward the village—“and if it’s going fast, all the stuff that blows off it will be going this way, too. And these houses—”

“And if it derails?”

“It’s
here
,” she says, and she shoves past him and knocks down some of the little houses.

He grabs her wrist, and, so quickly he doesn’t see the move, she snatches her hand free, raking his forearm with her nails and leaving red welts. He steps forward and slaps her, hard enough that the tangle of hair snaps around. When it settles, some of it is hanging directly in front of her face.

Treasure doesn’t back away or clear the hair. The eyelids are halfway down again, and he thinks—once again—that he wished he had that expression in the interrogation rooms. Then whatever was behind her eyes goes out, and she’s so far inside herself he almost feels her leave the room.

“Don’t break these things,” he says, but he knows he lost his authority the moment he grabbed her. “That was good, though, Treasure, that was very good. Do you want to go with me when I do it?”

He waits, and he thinks she’s gone to the deep place, as she does sometimes, occasionally for days, but then she says, “You know you won’t take me.”

He won’t. “Make a deal. By tomorrow night tell me where it’s going to be and why, and I’ll think about it.” He takes a quick step and puts his hand on the nape of her neck, feeling the shudder that rolls through her. “And don’t
ever
break anything on this table again.”

She says nothing, and he squeezes the muscles in her neck. Her mouth opens. He releases her, and it closes. He squeezes it again,
four times, and as her mouth opens and closes, he says, in a good semblance of her voice, “I’m sorry, Papa.”

Her eyes have closed. He lets go of her, and she moistens her lips.

“Go to bed,” he says.

She turns her back to him and drifts slowly away, back toward the green curtain. “Hwa has a boyfriend,” she says, almost singing it. “He’s Thai. They meet each other in the pool house. I think she talks to him about us.”

Murphy makes a note to talk to Hwa. “And you’re not just making this up because she threw out your meat.”

“Up to you,” she says. “Mr. Smart Man.” She leans back against the curtain and wraps it around her again. “Song had her Thai man here. I, I, I creeped them.”

“What did you see?”

“In the living room. They had their hands all over each other.”

“Why is the Humvee gone? If he came here, where’s his car?”

“He came on a motorbike. In the rain.”

“Well, Song has a taste for the lowest common denominator.”

“He followed her out, her in the Humvee and him on …” Her voice trails away and she turns her face down slightly. There’s a mirage of a smile on her lips.

“What else did you see?”

“They went up the hall to Neeni’s room,” she says. “They went in.”

Moving slowly, he bends and retrieves one of the pieces he knocked to the floor, one he hadn’t picked up. When he is sure his voice will be steady, he says, “Who went in?”

She pulls the edge of the curtain up beneath her eyes like a veil and gives him a skittering glance over it. “Both of them.”

He knows his face is scarlet—even if he couldn’t feel it, he can read the satisfaction in her eyes—but there’s nothing he can do about it except let it flame. “What did you see? Wait, first, tell me
exactly
how you did it. Where you were and how you got there.”

“When, when he came on his motorcycle, I was out front. Nobody could see, could see me because I had the night around me. She opened the, the, the gate from inside, and he went to the front door. I went fast to the back patio and watched them through the window in the living room. I got so close I almost laughed.
When they got up and went to the hall, I came in through the dining room and ghostwalked to the hall. I, I got down on the floor like you taught me and put just enough of my face around the corner so I could see.”

“So you were at the other end of the hall. The living-room end.”

She nods.

Twenty-five, thirty feet. “And.”

“Song went in first. Then
he
went in. They both bent down, like they were looking at her or, or touching her, and then they laughed. After a while he straightened up, and I went somewhere else.”

“How long were they bent over her?”

“I don’t know. Not long.”

Her voice is calm now. She’s not really interested in what happened in Neeni’s room, although Neeni was her mother, back before she got lost in her whiskey-codeine. What she’s interested in is its effect on him.

She says, “I want to go outside now.”

“It’s raining. It’s late.” He’s thinking how easy it would be to break Song’s neck, beautiful or not.

“I want to go outside now.”

“If you want to,” he says, turning toward the door, “you will.”

Walking toward the kitchen on his way to the stairs, he says, “Stay out of here for the rest of the night, and don’t turn the train on. You can try to figure it out tomorrow, when I—”

There’s a faint plucking at his waistband, and then a wasp stings him, hard, between the shoulder blades. He wheels to see her backing away, holding the Buck knife. He can see all her teeth, and she is not smiling.