The Fear Artist (41 page)

“Why wear a mask that looks like you?” he says. He realizes he’s talking because he half expects her to vanish, like smoke. “If you’re stupid, you wear a smart mask. If you’re mean, you wear a nice mask. That’s what a mask is, something to hide who you really are.”

She says nothing.

“What does yours hide?”

She pulls back her lips and shows him the black teeth, the gums above and below them a startling pink by contrast. “Nothing. This is me. Back up some more.”

He takes three steps back, but she seems to have lost interest in him. Looking down at the world on the table, she says, “I can see things.”

“I’m sure you can.”

“I saw you and your girlfriend come in. I saw you surprise that stupid Hwa.”

“The maid?”

“Hwa,”
she says sharply. “Her name is Hwa. She’s going to quit soon, but she doesn’t know I know about it.” She slows the train and speeds it up again. “I see all sorts of things.”

“I believe you.”

She leans over the train setup and moves something Rafferty can’t see, just a rapid movement with her hand. “Do you see things?”

“Sometimes.”

“
How
old is your daughter?”

“Twelve. Same as you.”

“What’s her name?”

“Miaow,” Rafferty says. “Like the sound a cat makes.”

She’s looking at whatever she moved in the miniature jungle, but he thinks she knows to a millimeter how far away he is. “My name is,” she says. She adjusts something on the table. She opens her mouth and closes it, opens and closes it again. “My name is Treasure.”

“That’s a beautiful name.”

“My,” she says.

He waits.

She turns her face partway to him again, but her eyes remain on the table. “My, my father named me.”

“Aaahhh,” Rafferty says, at a complete loss. “Well, you’re the only—”

“My father did,” she says. “Are you really my, my, my father’s friend?”

Rafferty says, “What do you think, Treasure?”

She says, “I think he’ll kill you.”

What he wants to do is approach her slowly and put his arms around her, but he doesn’t think that’s a language she’s learned. “Maybe he will,” he says. “Can I come in?”

“Five steps,” she says. “One, two, three, four, five.” She backs away a step for every one he comes forward, and then she turns and runs to the wall with the big windows in it, windows that are bordered by long, dark green velvet curtains. She pushes one of the curtains aside and then wraps the lower part of it around her waist and legs. “You can’t come here,” she says.

“Fine.” He says, “Look,” and takes three steps toward her, and as she starts to step to the side, he comes to a sudden stop. Feeling like a bad mime, he puts his hands up and pushes them, flat and open, against an imaginary pane of glass. “This is as far as I can go.”

She tilts her head to one side and startles him by emitting a short, very high syllable that sounds like
Eeeeee
. She says, “Do it again, do it again.”

“If you want me to.” He goes back to the table and takes the same three steps, and this time he not only stops but also pulls
his head back as though he’s hit it on something, then rubs his forehead and mimes the pane of glass again.

Treasure is leaning forward, one arm wrapped in the curtain, and she’s biting on a thumbnail. She says, her voice high and the words tumbling over one another, “And I can walk through it and you can’t, you can’t, but I can.”

“That’s right.” He moves to the right, and she counters warily in the other direction, her face suddenly stiff, but then he edges left again, always moving his hands over the invisible pane of glass. “And I can’t get around it either.”

“Only me,” she says. “Only I can go through it. Even if you’re mad at me, you can’t go through it.”

“I’m not going to get mad at you.” He goes back to the table and looks around the room. “I can’t go over there where you are, but is it okay if I look at the rest of this room?”

“Yes.” She passes her tongue quickly over her lips. “If, if, if, if you want to come over here, you let me, me, move first, and when I’m somewhere else I’ll tell you a magic word so you can get through.”

“Awwww,” he says. “Tell it to me now.”

“
No
. Only when I’m somewhere else.”

“All right. But over here is okay?” He indicates his half of the room. “You’re sure?”

“If I, if I tell you to stop—”

“I’ll stop.”

“Fine.”

There are bookshelves, the big table, and a door that he thinks probably leads to a closet. He checks the shelves first, but it’s just stuff: a lot of metal toys including an assortment of train components, a few creased paperback books with nothing hidden in them, some more old china like the junk in the sideboard, a small coin collection on cotton under glass, with a Purple Heart in the middle of it. Improbably, a snow globe. On one end of the second shelf, a small, mud-daubed bird’s nest.

Rafferty traces its shape in the air, his fingers inches from it, careful not to touch it. “This is yours.”

“How do you know?” She’s leaning far forward, her weight borne by the velvet curtain.

“You’re the only one who would have seen it.”

“I saw it. In a tree. Down there, too.”

He looks at the shelf below and sees a paper wasp’s nest. “How did you get this? They would have stung you.”

“They did. Here and here and here. And on my eye. My eye was closed for a long time. I couldn’t tell how far away he, he, he—”

“I had one when I was a boy. But I waited until they were gone.”

“I
wanted
it,” she says.

“It’s beautiful.” He goes to the closet and says, “I’m going to open this door.”

“My, my father will be mad.”

Rafferty jumps back as though he’s frightened. “Is he in here?”

He gets the
Eeeeeeee
again, and she sways back and forth in the curtain. “He’s not here. If he was here, I couldn’t talk to you. I can only talk to, to, to him.”

“Well, here goes.” He turns the knob, but the door is locked.

“You
don’t
see things,” she says. She sounds disappointed.

“Not like you do. Can you teach me?”

“It’s secret.”

“Gee,” Rafferty says regretfully. “I really wanted to look inside, too.”

“Are you going to say, say thank you?”

“Of course.”

“Go over there. To the train.”

He does as he’s told. Treasure steps back toward the wall and pulls the curtain over her until she’s completely hidden, except for her face. Then she puts a hand over her eyes.

She says, “I can’t see you.”

He scans the miniature world frantically, but there is so much detail: hundreds of little trees, all those structures, the tracks, the towns, the train stations. One small one, one a little bigger, and one—

The biggest train station. There it is, brass dulled with use, on the floor beneath the ceiling of the train station. He has to slip a single finger in to fish it out. A Gardner key, the kind usually used to open safe-deposit boxes.

He picks it up and palms it, then says, “Thank you.”

Treasure hums, a disjointed melody without a key.

She continues to hum as he goes back to the closet door and raises both hands above his head. The humming stops. Mumbling something he hopes sounds magical, he rubs his hands together and then brings them to the left side of his head and pretends to pull the key out of his ear.

She has spread the fingers of the hand over her face to look at him, but she doesn’t say anything, so Rafferty unlocks the door and pulls it open.

He sees a few bright tropical shirts hanging on a rod, six medium-size hard-sided leather briefcases, and two bricks of something wrapped in dark plastic. Everything is very neat, the angles precise, the edges of the briefcases, stacked on their sides with the handles facing him, plumb straight.

He pulls one of the briefcases out.

“It’s money,” Treasure says. “They’re all money.”

“Can I open one?”

She says nothing, just sways back and forth in the curtain and begins to hum again. She seems to be losing interest.

He goes down on one knee and pops the clips on the briefcase. Hundred-dollar bills, all facing the same way, gleam greenly up at him. He does a quick estimate: sixteen stacks, maybe four hundred bills to a stack, is $640,000. Six cases. Four million dollars, give or take. He removes Ming Li’s camera from his pants pocket, turns off the flash, and photographs the money. Then he closes the snaps and puts the case back.

“And this?” he says, touching the plastic wrap.

“Boom,” she says. “Uncle Eddie.”

“Uncle Eddie,” he says. “Did you see him yesterday?”

“Yes. But he, he didn’t see me.”

“Nobody sees you,” he says, “unless you want them to.” Then he closes the briefcase and puts it back in the closet. He’s about to pick up one of the plastic-wrapped bricks when she speaks.

“I know where the boom is,” she says.

“It’s here, isn’t it?”

“It’s there,” she says. “Too.”

He looks over his shoulder at her, but she’s hanging by one hand from the curtain, looking at the train table.

“He, he, he moved it,” she says. “From here to there and then here again. To fool me. But I, I, I know where it is.”

Rafferty gets up and goes back to the table. It’s not just Southeast Asia, he realizes. It’s someplace specific. Positioning himself so she can’t see what he’s doing, he takes the camera out again and snaps three shots of the tabletop. As he puts the camera back, he says, “It’s here somewhere, isn’t it?”

“A
clue
,” she says accusingly. “I left you a clue. You don’t see
anything
.”

“You’re so smart,” he says. Relatively close to him and a little to his left is a stretch of track that leads through rubber plantations, paralleling a two-lane road. It goes past the train station where he found the key and then skirts a small village. On the track, about ten inches from the train station, on the opposite side from the station, is the plastic ear from his mask.

“The train will be coming toward me, right?” he says. “There will be people in the station and people on the train.”

“The boom is Plan A,” she says. “The fire is Plan B. Plan C is the boom
and
the—”

Her voice breaks off. He hears the curtain slide over her, and then he hears a noise from the door to the kitchen that stops the blood in his veins.

“He doesn’t need to know what Plan C is,” Murphy says. He pushes Ming Li in ahead of him, the revolver in his hand pointed at the center of her back. “Treasure’s not usually so friendly. You’re lucky she didn’t sink her teeth into you.” He gives Ming Li another push. “Go over to your friend.”

“Brother,” she says, joining Rafferty at the table. She’s not wearing the mask, and her eyes are all over the room.

“Treasure,” Murphy says, “come out from there. Now. You don’t want me to have to come get you.”

The green curtain slides aside. Treasure’s face hangs down, hidden by her hair. She seems to be looking directly at her feet.

“Go to the dining room,” he says. “Get the magic chair. Now.”

She runs across the room and out through the door. For that
moment Murphy’s eyes are on her, and Rafferty raises his hand to put it on Ming Li’s shoulder, but Murphy points the gun at him and shakes his head. Ming Li has turned her own head to follow Treasure, and when she looks back to Murphy, her eyes are as hard and black as onyx.

Murphy leans against the train table. The locomotive continues its
tikka-tikka-tikka
path past his left hand, its engineer unaware of the giant in the sky. “Where are your Viet witnesses?”

“I don’t know.”

“We’ll see about that.”

“I don’t know. Not any more than Bey did.”

“Bey? Oh,
Bey
. Right. In Wyoming. That was her real name, wasn’t it?”

“It was.”

“She didn’t mention more witnesses. Maybe Paul didn’t ask. Do they exist?”

“Four of them. But I don’t know where they are.”

Murphy says, “Mmm-hmmm.” He seems to be thinking about something else.

“But Bey did say that Billie Joe was in Bangkok.”

“On the wrong side again,” Murphy says, “working for the poor, persecuted ragheads. All I had to do was get some people on the inside to put out the word about the demonstration, and there he was. And there you were, too.”

“By accident.”

“Looks like it. He told you Eckersley’s name. Why didn’t you just say so? I probably would have watched you for a little bit and then let you go.”

“I didn’t remember it.”

“Doesn’t matter now. Doesn’t much matter about the witnesses either. According to Shen, you’ve fucked me good and proper.” His eyes go to the open closet, and he shakes his head again. “Everything. This little shit just told you everything, didn’t she? My little Treasure.”

“If you hadn’t walked in,” Rafferty says, “I’d have taken her with me.”

“That would have been good. She’s a problem, she is.” He looks
toward the door that Treasure disappeared through. “So you found
survivors
of the
massacre
. Talked to the newspapers, the Vietnamese, the Americans. A trifecta. Guaranteed to give the pussy patrol the squits. Same as they get every time we’re in a fucking war.”

“Is that what this is?” Rafferty says “A war? I thought it was a license for you to fuck people up.”

“You don’t care that people are getting blown up down south,” Murphy says. The cords at the side of his neck are beginning to stand out. “You don’t care that they throw bombs into the marketplaces and the elementary schools and cut the heads off monks. You don’t give a shit that the most powerful country of the twenty-first century can’t figure out how to protect itself from a few illiterates who are still stuck in the ninth, still trying to get even for the fucking Crusades.” He walks across the room, stiff-jointed with anger, until he has his back to the curtain that Treasure had wrapped herself in. “Just like you didn’t care, or you wouldn’t have if you’d been old enough, that nobody knew who the enemy was in Vietnam, that a sweet-looking old granny-san could roll a grenade at you without even saying hello.”