The Fear Artist (5 page)

“Why wasn’t it on television?”

The smile peeks out and goes away again. “As I said, it shows he spoke to you for ten seconds or thereabouts.”

“Mostly not. Mostly he was working up to talking. He had blood in his throat, and he made a bunch of noises before he could actually say anything.” Major Shen’s eyes have drifted with apparent disinterest until he’s looking over Rafferty’s shoulder. “You say you saw the film. You must have seen all the blood he coughed up.”

Major Shen’s eyes come back. “But
then
he spoke.”

“Yes.” The alcohol chimes in again, bringing anger with it. “And even though I resent the hell out of being dragged down here like this and I
really
resent your bringing my wife and daughter into the conversation, I’ll tell you what he said. He said a name—a woman’s name, I think—and then the name the name of a city.”

“A city?” Shen smooths an eyebrow with the tip of his index finger. “What city?”

What city had it been? Rafferty draws a blank, and then the name appears before him, and he grabs at it. “Helena.”

Major Shen closes his eyes and furrows his brow for a moment, as though he thinks he might have seen Helena at some point and is trying to picture it. When he opens them, he’s looking over Rafferty’s shoulder again. “In Montana?”

“If that’s where Helena is. Montana, Wyoming—sure, Montana. I guess.”

The pouchy eyes, which Rafferty’s altered perspective suddenly recognizes as the aftermath of alcohol, return to Rafferty’s face. “You remember ‘the name of a town in Montana’ but not the name.”

“I’ve been to Montana. I went there once, when I was a kid. The woman’s name was just a name, and I was a little rattled.”

“Rattled.”

“Yeah, you know. American slang? Rattled? Having a guy die on me and all that. People running. Shots being fired. Shots you denied, by the way. Not the ideal spot for concentration.”

“You’re not used to having people die on you.”

“Not especially.”

Major Shen sits back and crosses his legs, a man with all the time in the world. “And yet people die
around
you with some regularity.”

The room suddenly feels not so much cool as frigid. Rafferty tries to keep his face blank as he ransacks his mind for anything that could connect him directly to any of the people who actually
have
died around him since he came to Bangkok. “You must know something about my life I don’t.”

Shen lowers his head and looks at Rafferty from under his eyebrows. “A Chinese gangster. An American defense contractor who apparently had some sort of relationship with your wife.” He checks his perfect nails female–style, extending his arm, fingers straight, and looking at the back of his hand. “To name just two.” He lifts his head and turns the smile on again, the picture of someone whose memory has just kicked in. “Oh, and that billionaire Pan, so that’s three. That we know of. Not exactly a bookish life, is it?”

Rafferty doesn’t reply. But there’s only one person in Bangkok who might conceivably have told Shen about both Howard Horner, the defense contractor, and Chu, the Chinese triad leader. Under his breath he says, “Fucker.”

“Excuse me?”

“I said ‘Fucker,’ ” Rafferty says to the mirror. “But it wasn’t aimed at you.”

“Well, I’m sure that whoever it is, he’s shaking in his boots. Anyway, to get back to our business. We’re concerned with this man and what he might have said. You’re the person he said it to, and I have to observe that you’re leading an interesting life here. In times of crisis, we tend to clump interesting people together, at least to the point of asking them polite questions, but—”

“You know what’s
really
interesting?”

“—but sometimes mistakes are made,” Shen finishes.

“Meaning sometimes you’re not so polite to people who haven’t done anything.”

The remote shrug again. “I’d be lying if I said it never happened.”

“I’ll remember that for when the press talks to me.”

Major Shen smiles. “The press will not talk to you.”

Rafferty listens to the statement several times in memory. It has the effect of sobering him up. He nods.

“The woman’s name,” Shen says.

Rafferty sits back. “I don’t remember it.”

“Why ‘Helena’?”

“I have no idea. It’s probably where she lives, whoever she is.”

Tented fingertips. “So your hypothesis is that he was asking you to contact this woman?”

“I don’t have a hypothesis. For all I know, Helena, or Montana, is his Rosebud.”

Shen leans forward a quarter of an inch, and for such a small move it’s immensely unfriendly. “But it isn’t his Rosebud. It’s a city. He gives you a name and a city. A who and a where, so to speak.”

“I suppose so.”

“But you don’t remember the name.”

Rafferty raises a hand to stop him and shuts his eyes. Pictures the fallen man, feels the chill of rain on the back of his neck, sees again the jolting, out-of-focus chaos in the background and the brilliance of the TV crew’s light. Forces himself to concentrate on the man’s lips, thinking of the close-up in
Citizen Kane
when Kane says “Rosebud.” But the man’s lips barely move at all.

He opens his eyes. “No, I don’t.”

Major Shen sighs and then says, “So what you’re
willing
to tell us is that he said three words: a name you can’t remember and a city in Montana.” He nods as though something has been confirmed. “You
have
been to Montana, haven’t you? You’ve been all over. You spent quite a bit of time in Manila, for example, and Jakarta. Denpasar. I could name some more if I looked at my notes.”

Rafferty knows where this is going, and it makes him very uneasy. “That’s not exactly a secret. I wrote books about both the Philippines and Indonesia.”

“You have to admit, you’ve got an unusual profile.”

“I don’t have to admit shit.”

“This is not a constructive atti—”

“What happened today had nothing to do with me. Your crowd was chasing his crowd, or the crowd he got caught up in. He got shot, he had to grab onto someone, and I was there. Are you suggesting that I went to Indonesia and the Philippines because I’m involved with Muslim separatists or terrorists of some kind? Because if you are, I want my embassy here now.”

“My, my,” Major Shen says.

“My, my yourself.” Poke looks back at the mirrored window with its unspoken threat. Whatever else this is, it’s bullying, and
he learned long ago that giving in to bullies just signals weakness. “I’m finished talking. Arrest me or something.”

“Please, Mr. Rafferty.” Shen does that glance over Rafferty’s shoulder again, as though there were a teleprompter back there. “You grew up in California, isn’t that right?”

“You know it is.”

“And so did I. Orange County, whereas you were in …” He seems either to be searching for the name or giving Rafferty a chance to supply it, but Rafferty doesn’t. “Lancaster,” he says.

“Just a couple of California boys,” Rafferty says. “Under other circumstances we’d probably go surfing.”

“This is a different world,” Major Shen says. “It’s no longer necessary to arrest people.”

“It never really was,” Rafferty says. “Bullies in uniforms have always found shortcuts.”

“This … posturing is not helpful, not to either of us.”

“Possibly not. Let me go back to my earlier question. You want to know what’s really interesting?”

Shen rubs his eyes with both hands, his first admission that he’s tired. “Not particularly, no.”

“That you’re asking me who he was and what he said, but not who shot him.”

Rafferty is rewarded with a blink. “That’s not a question that—”

“I mean, if I had arranged the … whatever you want to call it—meeting, collision, whatever—then I should be a suspect, shouldn’t I? Accomplice at least. I brought him within range of the rifle, right?”

Major Shen purses his lips and turns his head away from Rafferty, putting himself in profile to whoever is behind the window. It’s almost the same as saying,
Wouldn’t it have been nice if someone had anticipated this question?

“You
know
who shot him,” Rafferty says. “Don’t you? And you know who
he
was, too.”

Shen doesn’t seem to have heard a word. “Give me the woman’s name.”

“Arrest me or I’m leaving, and then you’ll
have
to hold me.”

Major Shen pushes both hands down on the tabletop as though
to rise and opens his mouth, but there’s a
clack
that Rafferty identifies as a coin, or some other object made of metal, being rapped against the other side of the mirror. The major sits back in his seat, closes his eyes slowly, and opens them again, and he’s once more looking over Rafferty’s shoulder. “Of course we’re not going to hold you,” he says, and he produces a smile a lot less polished than the one Rafferty’s been seeing, the smile of someone who’s not very good at masking rage. “This is just a discussion.”

Rafferty gets up, unsure of what’s happening. The rap of the coin changed everything. He says to Shen, “Don’t forget your shoes.”

“And you, Mr. Rafferty.” Although Rafferty is now standing beside him, Shen does not turn his head but continues to address the chair Rafferty vacated. “If you think of the name, you’ll call me.”

“Absolutely.”

“That’s good, then. Well,” Major Shen says to the chair, “we’ll meet again.”

“I’ll look forward to it.” Rafferty goes to the door and opens it, almost surprised to find it unlocked. “I’ll find my own way out.”

“Wait—” Major Shen is pushing himself to his feet like he’s coming out of a trance, but he’s too slow to keep Rafferty from opening the door and going through it, into the short hallway beyond. There’s a door to Rafferty’s right, and he turns the knob and then kicks it open. It bangs against the wall, and two men leap to their feet in front of the trick mirror.

The nearer man is thin all the way: thin body, thin lips, thin rimless spectacles clinging to a thin nose. He’s all verticals, just bones in a black suit. “Richard,” Rafferty says to him, “just to complete the thought, fuck you.”

“You’re way too confident for your own good, Poke,” Richard Elson says. He sounds almost frightened.

“What happened? Secret Service lend you to the Ghostbusters? Kind of a demotion, isn’t it?”

“Hey
,” says the other man in the room, a ball of fat topped by a thatch of unruly reddish-gray hair that’s been slapped any old way on top of a fat red face. He’s much shorter than Elson, thirty
years older, and maybe eighty pounds heavier. The loud, ragged Hawaiian silk shirt he wears above his worn-looking jeans is buttoned for dear life over a paunch the size of an elephant’s rump.

“And you are?” Rafferty’s so angry his voice feels thick in his throat.

The redheaded man shoulders Elson aside. Protruding from each nostril is a tuft of red hair so substantial that Rafferty imagines himself grabbing them in his fists and chinning himself on them. “Somebody who could squash you by snapping my fingers.” He’s got a voice like gravel in a glass.

“Yeah, but what good would it do you? You’d still be wearing that shirt.”

The redheaded man’s face goes a deep, cardiac scarlet, and Elson says, “Poke.”

Rafferty feels a hand on his arm, and then it becomes a grip, and he’s pulled from behind, out the door, which slams closed.

“Very foolish,” Major Shen says. His forehead is wet. “Very foolish indeed.”

Rafferty says, “Let go of me.”

“You’ve been in Thailand long enough to know the value of keeping a cool heart,” Shen says without loosening his grip. He seems actually shaken. “It’s a shame you haven’t adopted it as a policy.” He propels Rafferty down the hall, away from the interrogation room, and through a pair of swinging doors that open onto a broader corridor. Seated there on metal folding chairs are the two heavyweights who’d met Poke in his elevator. The one he thinks of as Smiley leaps to his feet when he sees Shen.

Shen shoves Rafferty hard, so hard he stumbles halfway across the corridor. Only the opposite wall keeps him from going down “My men will take you home,” Major Shen says, smoothing his hair. “Bangkok is very dangerous right now.”

T
HE PLACE LOOKS
wrong.

He sees it the moment he comes in. Even with all the furniture out of place for painting, it’s obvious that someone has been here, but it takes him a moment to spot what it is that caught his eye. The black drop cloth, which he had painstakingly aligned with
the baseboards, isn’t tucked in as neatly as he’d left it. He feels a clamping around his heart, and he goes double-time to the bedroom.

But the safe in the headboard above the bed is closed and locked, and the sliding panel that hides it is still on its latch. Rafferty tugs the panel open anyway, in a gingerly fashion, half expecting it to explode, but all it does is catch slightly at the point where it always catches. He tugs the safe door, and it reassuringly refuses to swing open. He sits on the side of the bed he shares with Rose, thinking about the men who invaded this room, pawing at their things, and the image sends him to the closet, where he sees that some of her clothes, which she hangs at precise intervals, with about an inch between hangers, have been moved. For a moment he sees little bright objects, like crinkles of aluminum foil, floating in front of his eyes. They recede, leaving him with his pulse trying to hammer its way out at his temples.

Just to be sure, he goes back to the bed and opens the safe. The oilcloth wrapped around the Glock is right where it should be. He prods it with his index finger, and its weight reassures him.

But the ten one-thousand-baht bills are gone. Just, he thinks, by way of a snicker.

Rafferty pushes sharply at the upper-right corner of the safe’s back wall, and it pops open a quarter of an inch or so. He gets his fingertips into the gap and slides the wall to the left.

The rubber-banded packet of thousand-baht bills, fifty of them, is still there. He regards it for a moment and then pulls it out, secures the wall again, and closes the safe. He folds the thousands once and shoves them into his pocket. Cash seems like a good idea. Sits on the bed, not really thinking about anything, just trying to get a sense of how cold the water really is.