The Fear Artist (40 page)

The first key on the ring opens the door.

The room is as long as the bathroom and twice as wide. It’s unfinished; there’s no drywall, and the floor is bare plywood. A small cache of firearms, including holstered sidearms, automatic weapons, and what seem to be wooden spears, fills one corner. Old uniforms hang on hooks set into the two-by-four uprights in the wall, and a low table, the size of a single bed, is piled with papers and photo albums. He opens one and sees a much younger Murphy and two other Americans in camouflage fatigues grinning at the camera. They flank a stick, much like the ones he sees in this room, on which is impaled the wide-eyed head of a young Asian male.

He pulls out Ming Li’s little silver camera and photographs the page. And the next. And the next. They get worse by the page. By the time he goes downstairs, he’s moving much more quietly. He doesn’t want to wake the dead.

He’s halfway down when he hears the noises from below, a whirring and a faint, repetitive clicking.

J
ANOS IS SLOWED
by the crowd on the main floor and has to push his way to the entrance and then run, as fast as he can, around the entire structure to reach the door at the bottom of the stairs. It’s heavy steel, and he pulls it open with both hands, only to hear the indignant voices of the two women climbing back up.

He’s missed Murphy. If it
was
Murphy.

And now he’s out of position, not watching the girl, not watching Murphy, not watching Shen. He can almost see the thousand dollars he’s been promised floating away, above the roofs of the parked cars. He can’t just go back in and hope everything’s fine. He has to know whether he was right, and he has to know which exit Murphy will take. If it
was
 …

He bats the doubt away and stands still, letting his eyes go soft and unfocused, trying to keep the entire scene in front of him in sight. It’s dark and raining, which doesn’t help. When he’s got the gaze he wants, he very slowly turns his head, taking in the part of the lot that’s visible from this side of the building, looking for nothing but movement.

He gets it, three parking rows away, a short man in a hurry, zigzagging between wet, gleaming cars, not paying any attention to him at all. Janos takes off at a run, up on the balls of his feet to avoid making scuffing noises, trying not to catch up to Murphy but to get a look at which way his car is going, so he can direct Vladimir and the Thai pretty boy who romanced Murphy’s maid. Then he’s to alert Rafferty on the phone, and Vladimir will call to confirm or deny that Murphy is headed home.

Janos slows and stops. He’s a row of cars beyond the one he spotted Murphy in, but he can’t see the man. To his right he hears a car start, and he turns toward it.

And hits his cheekbone on the fast-moving barrel of a gun.

It’s a revolver, Janos registers instinctively, and the sight on the end of the barrel has torn the skin over his right cheekbone. He raises a hand to touch it, but the revolver comes down on top of his wrist, very fast, and Janos knows that a bone has been broken.

Not until then does he look into Murphy’s blue eyes, eyes the color of the sky on a hazy day. Janos steps back, banging into the car behind him, and Murphy says, “Where’s Rafferty?”

Janos says, “Who?”

Murphy lifts the gun until it’s pointing directly into Janos’s left eye. He says, “See this?” and immediately brings the edge of his left hand down on the bridge of Janos’s nose, which breaks. Blood pours over Janos’s chin and onto the front of his shirt, and he coughs and begins to bend forward, but Murphy grabs his hair and pulls him upright. He takes a step back, the gun still pointed at Janos’s eye, and says, “Put your finger under it and push up a little. It’ll hurt like a son of a bitch, but the bleeding will slow. Where’s Rafferty?”

“Your house.” He blinks away the tears, but all that does is show him the gun and Murphy’s eyes more clearly, and he can’t look at the glee in Murphy’s eyes; he’s seen people who enjoyed this before, but not like this. He lets his eyes water. He lets his nose bleed.

“What’s he doing there?”

“Looking for something. I don’t know what.”

“Who else is here?”

“Nobody.”

Murphy raises his left hand again. “You can’t imagine how it’ll feel if I hit it again.”

“Vladimir. And some Thai boy.”

“Vladimir.” Murphy does a little two-syllable laugh. “Talk about the big guns.” He leans in toward Janos, and Janos flinches. “I’ve forgotten your name.”

“Janos.”

“Right, Janos. So, Janos, where’s your cell phone?”

“Shirt pocket.”

“Don’t be stupid now.” Murphy touches the gun to Janos’s forehead and lifts the cell phone out of his pocket. “Rafferty’s number in here?”

“Speed dial two.”

“And Vladimir?”

“Four.”

“Great, we’re making progress. Look, we’re both pros, and I’ve got nothing against you, but I don’t want you warning Vladimir and Vladimir calling Rafferty, so I’m going to need to slow you down a little. Lie down in between these cars.”

That’s when the coffee lets go, and Janos feels the wet heat on the front of his pants. “I … I don’t want to.”

“All I’m going to do is put flex-ties on your wrists and ankles. I know you’ll get out of them eventually, but by then I’ll have Vladimir under control. What’s his car look like?”

“Gray Mazda. Sedan.”

“So what you need to do is let me put the restraints on you and then promise me, one professional to another, that you’ll repay my leaving you alive by not finding a way to get in contact with Rafferty.”

“I don’t know his number. It’s in the phone, that’s all.”

“No problem, then.” Murphy reaches into the pocket of his jeans and pulls out a plastic flex-tie. “Lie down and put your hands behind you, and we’ll get this done, and then we’re square. In fact, I might have work for you in a week or two.”

“It wasn’t personal,” Janos says, going to his knees, and Murphy moves behind him, and their relative positions, the classic execution tableau, tell Janos that he’s wrong, that it
was
personal all along, and he’s just grasping that and thinking about standing when the bullet, the first of two, tears into the base of his skull.

T
HE WOMAN IN
the bed is beautiful and tiny. She lies on her back, one hand dangling off the side of the mattress. Her eyes are half open, focused on the far edge of the world. Rafferty passes a hand over them, but she’s either unconscious or so deeply intoxicated that she doesn’t register the movement. The room smells stickily of artificial cherry from the two open bottles of cough syrup on the table. He lifts the glass beside them and smells the cherry again, floating against a background of whiskey.

This is Murphy’s life, he thinks. This overstuffed, leaking house, the woman who’s never here, the one dying slowly in the bed, and the child who sleeps beneath that schizophrenic ceiling. The narrow bed, the chipped dresser, the black-and-white memories in the locked room. Whatever it is that visits him when he sleeps. Murphy’s life is all collateral damage.

Tikka-tikka-tikka
-
tikka
comes the sound from the room at the end of the hall. He takes a deep breath, touches the gun again as though it’s a talisman, and leaves the bedroom and its unconscious mistress, heading down the hall toward the light. The pressure of passing time pushes at his back, making him walk a little faster.

The room is big and brightly lit, and on a huge raised platform a small, golden train races around a curving track. The miniature landscape is Southeast Asia, someplace where rubber is grown. Standing just inside the doorway, watching the train click its way through the intricate loops and over the tiny hills, he says, “Hello.”

No response, but he knows she’s here. He can smell her, and it almost breaks his heart. No child should smell like that. No child should be here.

After a moment a voice says, “Who are … are you?”

“A friend of your father’s.”

Silence, except for the train. It negotiates a tight curve, just barely, and Rafferty says, “Should this be going so fast?”

“You don’t, you, you don’t know how to slow it down,” the voice says, and this time Rafferty locates it; it comes from behind the open door to the kitchen.

“I can figure it out,” he says. “I think.”

“You look stupid,” says the voice. “You’re too stu-stupid to figure it out.”

“Maybe,” Rafferty says. “Maybe I’m smart enough to wear a stupid mask.”

Another pause. Then, in an almost-musical tone, “You forgot something. When you were here before.”

“Did I?”

“Look at the roof of the train station, Mr., Mr. Stupid.”

He goes to the table, one eye on the door. It takes him a moment to find what he’s looking for in the tiny world; there are dozens of isolated structures and two small towns in the landscape, but then he sees the station and the pink thing on its roof. “My ear,” he says. “I lose ears all the time. I drop them everywhere.”

The silence this time is so long he wonders whether she has an escape route of some kind. Then, very slowly at the edge of the door, a tangle of reddish black hair comes into view, followed by a cheek, an eye, and a nose. Precisely half a face, no more, dark as the night outside but for the strip, shockingly pale, that contains her eye and the bridge of her nose.

She can’t be much older than Miaow.

“Ears don’t fall off,” she says slowly. “You have to cut them off.”

“Mine do,” Rafferty says. He reaches up and tugs his real ear, where it protrudes through the hole in the side of the mask. “And then they grow back.”

“No,”
she says, and it’s almost a shout. Her one visible eye, which has been fixed on his, wanders downward, going aimlessly
left and right, as though she’s reading something written on the air or on a falling page, and then the movement stops and she’s looking at a spot on the floor about halfway between them. A pink tongue touches the center of her lower lip and then disappears. The energy that had been animating her face seems to have fled. Dully, she says, “They stay off.”

“Why are your teeth black?” Rafferty asks.

She doesn’t move, and she continues to stare at the floor, but a moment later she says, “What?”

“Why are your teeth black?”

The face disappears behind the door again. “So I can smile in the dark.”

He feels the connection between them fraying, and he urgently wants to maintain it. He says, without a moment’s thought, “Could you make mine black, too?”

“I don’t get that close,” she says without reappearing.

He moves carefully, making no quick gestures and not looking in her direction, to the edge of the train table and locates the transformer. “You’re right,” he says. “I don’t know how to slow it down. Can you fix it?”

“You have to go away,” she says. “Back to the door you came in through.”

“Fine, here I go.” He backs up. “I’m in the door. Do you want me to go farther?”

“No. Just stay there.”

She comes out from behind the door. Beneath the dark charcoal, her face is beautiful, with a high, narrow nose, the full lower lip he’d seen on the small sleeping woman, and eyes that could be Lao or Vietnamese. But she’s far too thin, her knees below the smudged nightgown swollen like parentheses. The skin of her legs is scraped, punctuated by bruises and insect bites. Her feet are muddy. One of them—the right—is bleeding, leaving little stencil marks of red on the carpet as she walks. Twigs and leaves are caught in the tangles of her hair. Her eyes look into his and beyond them, and he can almost feel her gaze scraping the back of his skull. She never looks away as she moves. Not until she stops, at the edge of the train table, do her eyes drift downward, and once
again he has the sensation of something, a current or something, being disconnected. He says, “Are you sure I shouldn’t back up some more?”

Instead of answering him, she turns to the train table and looks down at it until Rafferty actually begins to wonder if she’s forgotten he’s there. But then she reaches out long fingers and adjusts the lever on the transformer, and the train slows. She says, “Take off your mask.”

“If you take yours off.”

She turns her head partway toward him, but her eyes remain on the table. “It doesn’t come off.”

“Okay,” he says. “I’ll take mine off anyway.” He pulls it over his head and waits, but she’s not looking at him. He says, “Why are you by yourself?”

“Mommy One had too many cheerses,” she says. “Mommy Three is out with a boy somewhere, fucking. One of our maids has a boy, too, the maid who let you and your friend in.”

“Cheerses?”

“
You
know.” She mimes holding a glass and lifts it toward him and says, brightly,
“Cheers.”

“Why does she do that?” Rafferty asks.

“She wants to die, but she’s trying to do it by accident.”

“Has she told you that?”

The girl’s lip curls. “I don’t talk to her. She’s weak.”

“You said Mommy One and Mommy Three. Where’s Mommy Two?”

“She went into the river,” she says. “In Laos.”

“How long ago?”

She doesn’t look down at her hand, but first the thumb and then all four fingers curl under, one at a time, and Rafferty can almost hear her counting. “When I was seven.”

“And now you’re twelve.”

Her eyes flick up to his and then away again. “How do you know?”

“I have a daughter. She’s twelve.”

She nods, fiddling with one of the little trees on the table and taking in the information. “Do you like her?”

Rafferty’s voice feels hoarse when he says, “I love her.”

Now she looks at his face, inspecting it as though she expects a test on what he looks like. “What are you?” she asks.

“A lot of things. Anglo and Filipino, mostly. What about you?”

“Lao, Thai, and what my, my, my father is.”

“We’re both mix-ups,” he says.

She shrugs the topic away and looks back at the train layout. “If you’re smart, why did you wear a stupid mask?”

“If people don’t know you’re smart, you can surprise them.”

She sticks out her lower lip, possibly thinking about it.