The Fear Artist (38 page)

“And maybe the clouds will open and a shaft of light will shine on you and a voice will say, ‘All is forgiven.’ ”

“Could be.”

“Three is a lot. Two I can just cuff to the steering wheel. The third one—”

“The armrest in the backseat. It’s got an opening in it. You can pass a cuff through it, and she won’t be going anywhere.”

“She might be able to yank it off.”

“That’ll be the invalid.”

“Okay.” She shifts her weight, looks at her watch, and says, “Unbelievable. We’ve only been here thirteen minutes. Are you sure about the noise?”

He says, “Get out.”

“It’s raining.”

“I’m
so
sorry.”

“All right,” she says. “But if this takes the curl out of my hair …” She fluffs her perfectly straight hair at him, a Thai gesture of dismissal, and climbs out, and Rafferty puts the windows all the way up. When Ming Li is eight or ten feet away, he begins to shout. She puts a hand to her ear, and he shouts more loudly, and she shrugs and comes back to the car. Once inside, she swivels the rearview mirror toward herself, combs her bangs with her fingers, and says, “Better than I hoped. The rain helps—it’s noisier than you’d think. You’re sure they won’t be able to reach the door handles.”

“Yes, I’m sure. Would you like me to cuff you to the—”

“No thanks.”

“Anyway, you’re staying with them unless something—” The cell phone rings. Rafferty glances at it, says, “Janos” to Ming Li, and then, “Yes?” into the phone.

“Shen’s here.”

“Where?”

“Ground floor. The three cops down there all answered their phones a minute ago and met over in front of the mall shrine, and Shen showed up. They’re in a huddle.”

“And the two on the fourth floor?”

“They’re looking over the railing, watching.”

“How does Shen look?”

“Pissed off, and the other three look like they’d like to turn and run. Here come the fourth-floor boys, heading for the escalator. I’ve got to go into a store for a minute. One of them glanced at me.”

“Call me back when you can.” He puts the phone in his pocket and wishes he had a cigarette. How many nights ago was it that he smoked the cabdriver’s, after Shen’s guy almost went off the roof? “I don’t suppose you have a cigarette?”

“I’m young,” Ming Li says, “not stupid. No Murphy?”

“Not yet. But he’s there, I’m sure he is.”

“Then let’s go in.”

“I’m not
that
sure.” He opens his door. “I need to walk around a little.”

The rain is a fine sprinkle, nearly body temperature. He hasn’t gone ten steps when a mosquito whines in his ear, and then another. He waves a hand around to clear them, feeling the weight of the gun under his shirt. His shoes, soaked again, squelch in the mud. An image of Murphy in his awful shirt, his face red with anger, pops into his mind, and at that precise moment the phone rings.

He grabs it, snaps, “Hold on,” and sprints for the car. Ming Li looks up, startled from some reverie as he jumps into the seat. He says, “Murphy?”

“Let me tell you,” Janos says. “It will interest you, I promise.”

“Do it, do it, but make it short.”

“So Shen goes up to the fourth floor with the two boys who were doing circles up there and goes into the business center. He comes out a minute later, actually scratching his head. For a second I thought he knew he was being watched and he wanted to demonstrate—”

“Get to it.”

“He was scratching his head,” Janos continues implacably, “and then he looks down at his shirt. He pulls a cell phone out of his pocket and has a short conversation, very grim, and then starts running up the escalator. He keeps looking up, as though he’s going all the way to the top, and I’m scrambling to the stairs at the rear, and as I get up to the fifth floor, I hear voices above me, so I go out on the fifth level and walk the length of the plaza, and when I turn, I see Shen up on the sixth level, the top, heading for the stairs as though the place is on fire, and he pulls the door open, and Murphy pushes him away and comes through the door with a woman following him.”

“The woman from the hotel.” In one part of his mind, Rafferty is regretting that he was right about Anna. There can’t be any doubt now.

“Yes, her. Anyway, Shen practically jumps on him. Shouting and waving his arms and—”

“Can you see Murphy now?”

“They’re still going at it.”

“Thanks. Call me if anything changes.”

“If Murphy disappears, you mean.”

“He’s not going to stay in sight. Try to see where he goes, and call me if the woman disappears.”

“Got it.”

Rafferty disconnects and starts the car. Ming Li is looking straight out the window, but he can feel the intensity coming off her in waves. She seems to be heating the car. He says, “You like this, don’t you?”

“Compared to Virginia? This is heaven.”

“Here goes.” He pushes speed dial for Vladimir. “Have your boy call the maid in two minutes,” he says. “He should tell her to open the gate for him. Oh, and it’s raining, so she should come out with an umbrella. Think she’d do that for him?”

Vladimir says, “Is wery handsome boy.”

W
HEN
R
AFFERTY STEPS
through the half-open gate, the maid lets out a squeak. He’s wearing the one-eared Mortimer Snerd mask.

He says, “Quiet. No one will hurt you.’ He takes her upper arm and tugs her toward the house, slowing for a moment when he sees that the yard is under several inches of water. He says, “Is there a way not to get our feet soaked?”

“You could leave,” the maid says. She’s pale-skinned and Chinese-featured and hard-eyed. Her accent sounds Vietnamese, although the English comes quickly. The squeak aside, she’s handling the situation as though it happens every week.

But she does turn to look back over her shoulder as headlights hit the front of the big house, bringing it sharply out of the darkness and creating an upside-down mirror palace on the water’s surface. Ming Li pulls the Toyota in very slowly, trying to avoid running it off the invisible driveway and into the mud.

“Should she go straight?” Rafferty asks. “And if you tell me a lie and she winds up stuck on the lawn, you’re going for a swim.”

“Straight another two meters,” she says. “Then left to the front of the house.”

“Get in front of the car and guide her in.” He takes the umbrella from her hand.

The two of them back up as the maid waves Ming Li forward, the car churning twin wakes to the right and left. When the Toyota is clear of the closing gates, Rafferty holds up both hands
and the car stops. He takes the maid’s arm. “How many people inside?”

“Two. Neeni and the girl.”

“Where’s the other maid—Phung? Where’s Wife Number Two?”

“Phung has the night off. Won’t come back until tomorrow morning. The missus, who knows? Shopping, maybe. Maybe in some hotel with someone she’s known half an hour.”

“You don’t like her.”

“I don’t like any of them except Neeni, the poor thing.”

“Where are they? Neeni and the girl?”

The car door opens, and Ming Li gets out. She’s wearing a Morticia Addams mask they’d picked up that morning at Zombietown, its long, black nylon hair hanging over a loose white blouse and dark jeans.

“Neeni is in bed,” the maid says, looking at Ming Li. “The girl, who knows? Cutting worms in half, maybe. Or she could be watching us right this minute.”

“Okay. I need you to get into the car.”

She shakes her head impatiently. “No. What you
need
is for me to open the door. I have to key in the alarm and then go in and enter the code that resets it, or it’ll go off.” She shakes her arm free and heads for the house.

“Yes,” Rafferty says, “that’s what I meant,” and splashes through water at least three inches deep.

Catching up to him to get under the umbrella, Ming Li says, “I told you to get a scarier mask.”

“He doesn’t need to scare me,” the maid says over her shoulder. “I only work here, and I won’t be doing that for much longer. Just don’t hurt Neeni.”

“I’m not going to hurt anybody,” Rafferty says.

“Well,” the maid says, “good luck with that.”

They step up onto the porch, the surface of which is about half an inch above the water, and the maid keys in a combination of numbers on a pad to the left of the door. The door clicks, and she pushes it open.

“What’s the code?” Rafferty asks. He steps in and leans the
umbrella against a big chair, making a mental map of the hallway, the large living room, the dimly lit dining room. In the rear wall of the dining room are a bank of windows and a pair of double doors with big panes of glass in them.

“Three-six-one-six-nine,” the maid says. “Then you hit zero twice.”

“Three-six-one-six-nine,” Ming Li repeats. “Zero-zero.”

Rafferty says, “What happens if we leave the door open?”

“Alarms. And alarms go off if I don’t key in the inside code, too, right about now.”

“Go to it.”

The maid punches up some numbers and then pushes a button with
ALT
under it and another above a tiny black telephone icon. She holds the telephone button down for a count of three and then steps back, hands folded in front of her.

“What’s that button?” Rafferty asks.

“If you don’t hold it down, the alarm will go off anyway. That way, even if someone has the combination, it probably won’t work.”

“What’s the code in here?” Rafferty asks.

“I’ll write it down for you.” She crosses the hall, opens the drawer in a marble-topped table, and pulls out a pen and pad. “For outside,” she says, writing
3616900
. “In here, this one.” She writes
43892
. “Then hold down the little phone button for a count of three.”

“And when I open it from inside?”

“No problem. You only need the code for closing it after it gets opened from out there.”

A telephone begins to ring, straight ahead in the dusk of the dining room. Then another, from somewhere to the left, and another. “Let it ring,” the maid says. “It’s for him, and no one who calls him will talk to anyone else. They won’t even leave a message. If there’s no answer here, they call his cell phone.”

It seems as though phones are ringing all over the house. Rafferty automatically counts the rings until, at six, they stop.

“Good,” he says. He swallows. The ringing telephones have made it real, somehow. Everything he wants in the world right
now comes down to the next few minutes. “Now you go with Morticia here.”

“And if I don’t want to?”

“Then Morticia will shoot you,” Ming Li says. She pulls up her shirt to display the gun stuck into her pants.

“I’m not getting shot,” the maid says. “The car?”

“The car.”

Rafferty says, “Where’s Neeni?”

“Down the hall. Last room before it turns left.”

“Thanks. Go with Morticia.”

He watches them cross the porch and step down into the black water, now dappled with widening concentric circles as the rain gains strength. When Ming Li opens the door of the car and steps aside for the maid to climb in, he hears a metallic click behind him, and he whirls.

Nothing. No one is there. The heavy dining-room furniture stands there like massive, browsing herbivores. Nothing seems to have changed.

Turning back to close the front door, he replays what he saw and realizes what was different. Ignoring the urge to double-check, he very deliberately shuts the door and makes sure it’s engaged, all his attention trained on the open space at his back. Only when the door is secure does he turn, unhurriedly, to face the back of the house.

The double door at the rear of the dining room is open an inch or two. Not enough to admit a telltale draft, but not actually closed either. Closing it would probably have made the latch engage with another, louder click.

Rafferty says, “My, my.” His face is cool with perspiration. He touches the gun through his shirt, just making sure it he’ll get it on the first try, and moves down the hallway.

The living room is sunken two steps, carpeted in an oyster white with a random gray fleck, mercilessly overfurnished in gray leather and distressed, whitewashed wood. It is the work of a professional designer who thought the room was bigger. The room smells of damp, most likely water seepage from the storm. Bangkok’s emerging upper-middle class has created a boom market for
new, semipalatial houses built of soda crackers and promises, and Rafferty is pleased to see that Murphy has bought one.

There’s nowhere for anyone to hide in the living room, so he puts it behind him and goes into the dining room, looking at everything except the open door. Twelve high-legged chairs surround the big table, and a mahogany sideboard towers almost to the ceiling on the left. Jammed into the corner is a card table, inlaid with stylized face cards of agate and jasper and other colored stones. Four cane-bottomed chairs lean against it, price tags still visible on the backs. Everything he can see looks like it arrived on the same truck. It’s a big room, but there’s barely space to move.

The phones begin to ring again: one in the room he’s in, one from behind him in the living room, and at least two others, one faint enough to be upstairs. The insistency of the noise increases his uneasiness. He counts six rings again, standing still, until they stop.

Ahead of him, through an eight-foot archway, is a blinding kitchen, all reddish saltillo tile, pale beige granite, and white appliances, as brilliantly lit as an operating room. He stands in the archway between the dining room and the kitchen, listening. Now that the phones have gone silent, he hears rain on the windows and the
pat-pat-pat
of a leak, water dripping onto fabric.

And then he smells something. It’s faint and sharp at the same time, like urine on a floor two or three rooms away, or the germy odor of dirty clothes that have been piled damp in a hamper for days. The door creaks behind him. He turns, but it’s swaying back and forth by itself, obeying the air currents that ghost through the room.

He leaves it ajar and goes back toward the entrance hall, thinking about calling Ming Li, but what’s he going to say? There’s a spook in here with me? He knows who it is, and he’s pretty sure he’s not afraid of her.