The Fear Artist (45 page)

Mrs. Janos looks at Vladimir, who nods. She says to Rafferty,
“Köszi.”

Vladimir says, “Is thank you. In Hungarian.”

“I guessed that,” Rafferty says. The entire situation seems almost ostentatiously bogus. “How long,” he says, pronouncing the words slowly and carefully and feeling like someone on his first trip abroad, “were you two together?”

Mrs. Janos shakes her head sharply and says something that’s mostly consonants and resentment.

“She shakes head for yes,” Vladimir says. “Where she comes from, shake head is yes, nod is no.” Mrs. Janos shakes her head again, and Vladimir says, “You see? She agree wery much.”

“Well, I am sorry about him. I didn’t know him that well.” He’s talking directly to her, 90 percent certain that he’s being swindled, but what’s the alternative? Even if it’s only 10 percent likely that the woman is who Vladimir said she is, he should do this.

Anyway, it’s Murphy’s money.

“I know that money can’t replace someone you love,” he says, taking a very fat envelope from his pocket, “but I hope this … um … this gesture will make things easier for you.”

Mrs. Janos is looking at the envelope. So is Vladimir. Rafferty hands it to her and gets up, saying to Vladimir, “It’s thirty thousand dollars.” He reaches into his pocket and pulls out a twenty, which he drops on the table. “For the burgers.” To Mrs. Janos he says, “Good-bye, and I really am sorry.”

She startles him by taking his hand in both of hers and bowing until her cheek is touching the back of his hand and saying,
“Köszi, köszi, köszi.”

Rafferty looks over at Vladimir, whose big cleft chin is puckering. “Please,” Rafferty says, “Please.”

And he turns and flees.

B
Y FOUR O’CLOCK
that afternoon, Hwa is out looking for an apartment and Neeni is curled up on the side of the bed Rose sleeps in, drinking a weak whiskey-soda. Ming Li, with four aspirins and a quart of coffee in her system, is running a roller over the wall that ends at the entrance to the kitchen while Poke turns the longest wall a nice uniform shade of Apricot Cream. The short walls—the one between the living room and the bedroom and the one with the sliding glass door in it—are glowing with new color, and even Rafferty has to admit it’s nice.

“Warms up the room,” he says as paint runs down the underside of his forearm.

With her eyes on the wall she is painting, Ming Li says, “What that man was doing, what he was doing to Treasure.”

Rafferty keeps painting. He doesn’t think she really wants him to look at her.

“It’s sort of like, I mean, what you said about me and—It’s a little like, it’s kind of like …”

“No, it isn’t. Nothing like it.”

“How? I mean, why do you say—”

“Murphy destroyed Treasure. He turned her into a mirror, someone he could see his reflection in, someone who would be him when he was gone. He didn’t love her. Well, maybe he did. Maybe he loved her when he ran into that house, but I don’t know, maybe he was chasing himself. Anyway, he’s not Frank and you’re not Treasure. What Frank was doing was protecting you, in a dangerous place, the best way he knew how. By teaching you what he knew. He did it because he knew he might not always be there to take care of you, and he wanted to give you gifts you could use when he was gone. He did it because he loved you.”

Ming Li says, “Oh.”

“And he turned out a really amazing young woman.”

He hears a long sniff. Then she says, “I shouldn’t drink. I get soft when I’ve drunk too much.”

“Frank and I
both
love you,” Rafferty says.

She sniffs again and says, “I need some more paint.”

“I’ll bring it over.”

He gets up, can in hand, and there’s a knock at the door.

“It’s probably not the police,” he says, pouring paint into Ming Li’s roller pan. He puts the can down and goes to the door.

Andrew has put gel on his hair and spiked it up in twenty directions. He wears a painfully white, painfully new T-shirt with two handprints on it, one in blue and one in pink, and a pair of jeans so stiff they look like he stole them from the mannequin in the store window. He leans back to look up at Rafferty and says, “They’re coming. They’re coming. Miaow called me to say they’re coming.” He blinks a couple of times, centers his glasses, and tries it again. “They’re coming.” As he did all those days ago, he leans to one side to look around Poke, and his face falls, and he says, “Aren’t they?”

“Great shirt,” Rafferty says.

Andrew’s cheeks turn bright red, and he looks at his feet. “The pink hand is Miaow’s,” he says. “The blue one is mine. We sneaked into the craft room at school to make it.”

“Well, I’ve got something you can put on over it.” He steps aside, and as Andrew comes in, he says, “Do you know how to paint trim?”

B
Y SIX O’CLOCK
that evening, Miaow’s room looks like the inside of an old bruise, and Andrew has pronounced the color cool. The pigments on the walls are even and flat, and the trim has a certain youthful flash and abandon, nothing Rafferty can’t paint over later. He is washing the rollers in the sink when Andrew comes in, back in his two-hand T-shirt, and says, “What time will they be here?”

“About ten tonight.”

Andrew’s eyes widen and his mouth drops open, and the look he gives Rafferty is rich in betrayed promise.

“Trains,” Rafferty says, feeling guilty. “They can’t get here ahead of the train. Anyway, that gives me time to put everything back, get it all pretty again.”

Dolefully, Andrew says, “I guess.”

From the living room come the sounds of Ming Li herding Hwa and Neeni out the door, taking them to a hotel to free up some beds.

Rafferty says, “You’ll get to see her tomorrow. Tell you what. I’ll keep her out of school tomorrow. You guys can spend the whole day together.”

“Mr. Rafferty,” Andrew says, “tomorrow is Saturday.”

“Why, so it is,” Rafferty says. “You lose track of time when you get old. Don’t worry, you’ll see her tomorrow, and trust me, you have no idea how happy she’s going to be. Excuse me for a minute, would you?” And he goes into the living room and forces himself to make the call he least wants to make.

T
HE RAIN IS
dense enough to distort the neon across the street like a wet oil painting that’s been smeared by the side of someone’s hand, but the
soi
outside the Beer Garden is still full of men.

“Sexual desire,” Rafferty says, “is waterproof.”

Arthit grunts. He has a beer in front of him, untouched, and he hasn’t said ten words since he sat down.

“Thank you for coming,” Rafferty says. “I think it’ll mean more if it’s both of us.” Arthit doesn’t reply, and Rafferty blunders ahead to fill the silence. “Both of us talking to her, I mean. If she even comes.”

“I still can’t have her back. It won’t work.”

“I said I could take care of it. I have some money I don’t know what to do with.”

“Good for you.” He downs the first swallow of beer. Rafferty’s is mostly gone.

Rafferty says, “What’s happening with … with you and Anna?”

Three soaked men run by, hooting at one another, and crowd into the bar.

“She told me all about it this morning, before she left. And when she was finished, I wanted her to leave. So what could be happening? Nothing. She was someone else. She wasn’t who I—I suppose I was more vulnerable than I should have been, because …” He drinks again and puts the bottle down. The muscles at the corners of his jaws bunch. “And I have no idea how I feel about that scene you played two nights ago. I suppose on some level it didn’t
concern me at all, but you stood in my living room and lied and lied and lied, and you knew what was happening, and you never said a word.”

“I couldn’t.”

“I’m a big boy. Were you afraid of breaking my heart?”

Yes
, Rafferty thinks, and says, “No. I was hoping I was wrong. I’m not the one who figured it out. I never would have thought of it. It was one of the spies. And the way they put it, it made sense, and I—”

“And you didn’t tell me.” The rain rattles the awning above them.

Rafferty feels his friend’s gaze, but there’s no way he can return it. “I couldn’t. Just because they said it, that didn’t make it true.”

“
And
you needed to get a message to Shen, remember? If you’re being honest, I mean, and if you don’t mind my saying so, it’s about time.” Arthit tilts back in his chair, the front legs lifting off the cement. “Anyway, it worked, didn’t it? Shen’s backed completely away from Murphy’s death.” He picks up his bottle and watches two girls run by, sheltering together under a piece of plastic sheeting. He puts the bottle back down, untasted. “I’m glad the … the
strategy
succeeded,” he says. “And I know that what she did almost got you killed and that I’m probably a bad friend for not putting that first. But I can’t pretend I like the way you handled it.”

Rafferty can think of no reply, so he says, “I’m sorry.”

“Yes. Well, I’m sorry, too, but that doesn’t fix anything.”

A young woman trots by beneath an umbrella, but Rafferty is so distracted he forgets to look at her. Too late, he turns his head to see her retreating back.

“Not her,” Arthit says.

“Arthit. What can I do?”

“I’m not sure you can do anything. Maybe we need to leave each other alone for a while. Let the bruises heal. Right now it’s like a cold sore. I keep prodding it with my tongue because I can’t believe how much it can hurt. Maybe I just need to get used to the idea it’s there, and then I’ll be able to leave it alone. Maybe even forget it.”

“I haven’t got anything to say. Anything that would matter.”

“I don’t know why I’m telling you this, but she did it for her country. The oldest excuse of all, the one they sell us over and over. They told her it was to fight the killings in the south, try to bring some peace down there. They showed her pictures of what was happening, bad enough that she had to ask them to stop. They made it all about children and monks being killed, bombs in Buddhist temples, you know. They said you and I were either one thing or the other, either bad guys or medium guys who were being used by the bad guys, and that she could help, she could save lives, by making friends with me and telling them what was happening. So I asked, ‘Did they tell you to sleep with me?’ She said no, said that she had no idea she was going to fall in love with me. She said, ‘It just happened.’ She said, ‘All that other stuff is over now, but I still love you.’ ” He leans forward, and the legs of his chair bang down on the cement. “That’s what she said.”

“Maybe she does. She told me not to go to the mall because it was too dangerous. She said it twice.”

“Of course, all that sailed right past me,” Arthit says. “Since I had no idea what the two of you were actually talking about.” He shakes his head. “That’s enough of that. She also said this morning that she didn’t tell Shen about you going—supposedly going—to the mall. She’d decided that he was wrong about you.” He stops and drinks. “Wrong about both of us. The only thing she gave him was your information about Murphy. Murphy had already told Shen about the mall.”

“Could be,” Rafferty says. “They apparently had a terrific fight when Murphy came in.”

Arthit says, “This is all miles beyond speculation at this point. And I can’t honestly say I give a damn about either Murphy or Shen. What I give a damn about is being lied to by two people I didn’t think would lie to me.”

Rafferty says, “There she is.”

T
HE STREETLIGHTS SEEM
very bright despite the rain, and the world looks jerky, as if things start and stop and start and stop, and she has a feeling that’s familiar now, that her feet are a long,
long way down and she’s above herself. Above everyone else. Floating.

But
jerky
. Maybe one more hit before she goes into the bar will smooth out the jerkiness. Or maybe she’ll just get used to it. Maybe she’ll learn to like it.

Even the water flowing past her feet, way down there in the street, moves in little jerks. And so do the men coming toward her. She tells herself,
Smile
, and she feels her face obey. She’s not a pretty girl, people say, but they tell her she has a nice smile.

So she smiles.

And she slows to meet them, a bit disorganized, some parts of her body slowing at different speeds from others, and she has to take an extra step, and as she does it, she sees who they are. She sees their faces and their eyes, and she feels the concern and the disapproval and the shock and all the other
strings
that flow from them to her, strings that will wrap around her if she lets them, like the string on a balloon that wants to float free, and a bolt of panic shoots her in the heart, and she turns and runs, splashing through the water to the small streets branching away to her right, away from those men and their expectations and hopes and conditions, and toward the dark, safe place where she can be alone with the pipe.

R
AFFERTY’S ELEVATOR SEEMS
to take forever to climb the seven floors, and he uses the time to try to shake off the last glimpse of Treasure—although he knows he’ll carry it with him forever—the loss of Janos, the sight of Pim wobbling away through the rain toward God-only-knows-what, and the slump of his friend’s back as he trudged away toward Sukhumvit to find a cab to take him back to that house, where he’ll have to begin, all over again, his life as a man alone. As bad as Poke feels about Arthit, though, it’s Treasure who breaks his heart.

When he keys the door and pushes it open, Miaow explodes off the couch with the kind of scream girls her age usually reserve for adolescent pop singers and shoves herself against him so hard that he thinks for a moment she’s trying to push him back out the door, but then her arms go around him and his around her, and he looks down at her chopped, red-dyed hair as if it were heaven’s meadow
and then beyond her to see Rose—impossibly, excessively, ridiculously beautiful—get up from the couch to wait her turn, at Ming Li sitting in an effortless half lotus on the floor, and, regarding him uncertainly from Rafferty’s usual seat on the hassock, still in the two-hands T-shirt, Andrew.