The Fear Artist (10 page)

“Who?” asks the man who’d gone into the apartment, the sergeant.

“Them,” she says, going toward the garbage chute next to the elevator. “The
farang
and his wife.”

“You know them?” the sergeant demands.

Mrs. Pongsiri turns and looks at the sergeant long enough to make him fidget. “They live here,” she says slowly, as though talking to someone who’s challenged. “I live
there
. The elevator is
here
. How could I
not
know them?”

“How well do you know them?”

“I know the wife to say hello, how are you. The little girl doesn’t talk to anybody, but she used to be sweet.”

“And the man?”

“Farang,”
she says tartly. “I don’t like
farang
.”

“Why not?”

“Thailand,” she says. “Thailand is for Thais. We have too many
farang
.”

“You’ve been here all day?”

“I’m here every day,” Mrs. Pongsiri says. “I go out once in a while to pick up a little something.”

“Did you see them leave?”

“The wife and the daughter went together, two or three days ago. They went up north, Chiang Mai, I think.”

“And the man?”

“Why are you hurrying me? I’m going to tell you.” She blows some wispy hair away from her eyes and sways a bit, the picture of someone who’s had a couple too many. Then she leans comfortably against the wall and smiles at them.

“So tell me,” the sergeant says. “I haven’t got the whole day.”

“Come to my apartment,” she says, and Rafferty starts looking around for a place to hide. “You’re a handsome boy, we could have a drink and talk about it.”

“No,” the sergeant says. One of the men is laughing, and the sergeant starts to smile, too, but tucks it away before it can claim possession of his mouth. “It’s very nice of you, but I’m on duty. About the man—”

“Go ahead,” says the cop who laughed. “We’ll stay here.”

“The man who lives here,” the sergeant says, looking like he wants to wipe his forehead.

“He left about noon. I came up in the elevator—I’d been down at Foodland, getting some rice and some chilies. I go through a lot of chilies. And I got two new towels also, very nice, yellow but not one of those awful yellows, a soft yellow, like … like butter. And they—”

“The man,”
the sergeant says through his teeth.

“And they were only forty baht,”
Mrs. Pongsiri says very fast, getting it in before he can interrupt again. “And he came out of the apartment and helped me carry the bags even though he had to put down his suitcase—”

“There’s no suitcase missing,” the sergeant says. “We went through this place last night, and there was only one suitcase in it, and it’s still here.”

“It was new,” Mrs. Pongsiri says. “Still all shiny. A hard one, with wheels. It looked like the ones they sell at the Silom end of Patpong Two. But those are fakes, and this might have been—”

“Did he say where he was going?”

“Chiang Mai,” she said. “With them.”

“The … uh, the wife—”

“And daughter. Not a very pretty little girl, but smart as a whip. Do you have children?”

“No, I—”

“Of course not, you’re practically a child yourself. Are you sure you wouldn’t like some—”

The sergeant puts up both hands, palms out. “No, no. But thank you.”

“Four days,” she says. “He said he’d be back in four days. Said they’d all be back in four days.” She brushes her hands together and pushes off from the wall again, stumbling toward the sergeant, who backs against the door. “Whoops,” she says. “Well, bye-bye. I live right there,” she adds, pointing. “Where that open door is.”

Rafferty ducks into the kitchen as she swings the door closed. She goes straight to the mirror in the living room and begins to smooth her hair back, clucking at the state of her makeup. Her eyes find his in the mirror, and she begins to laugh.

Forty minutes later the cops are long gone, and Rafferty comes out of the elevator in the underground garage to find a silver Toyota waiting. The car’s rear door is already open, so he’s visible for just a couple of seconds. When he’s lying on the floor in the back, Mrs. Pongsiri climbs in and rests her high heels on his ribs.

“Careful with that,” he says.

“You not hide behind woman,” she says as the car jerks into motion, “but hide
under
woman, no problem.”

The driver laughs along with her.

P
OWER IN THE
dark.

Rafferty has always been fascinated by enormous power—power on an imperial scale—exercised in secret. He’s spent much of his adult life traveling among the powerless, among people who generally are who they say they are and do what they say they’ll do. People who have little and seem unwilling to become someone else in order to have more. In the past decade, this kind of behavior has become regarded by many as naïve and even quaint, behavior that identifies people who haven’t figured out the new rules.

Power in the dark seems to Rafferty to be the defining form of evil in the twenty-first century. It’s evolved from an occasional governmental tactic into business as usual, as the world’s rulers find goals in common—usually economic goals that benefit the rich and strengthen the rulers’ hold on power—and pursue them jointly, turning out the lights on the contradictions between what they say and what they do.

Rafferty can remember, hazily, a time in which getting caught in a lie was a career-threatening crisis for a politician, at least in the countries that retain pretensions of democracy. Now there’s a whole thesaurus of euphemisms for lying, and it’s opened daily.

It’s the age of equivocation, the age of the press secretary, the age of entire ministries of spin, the age of collusion and obfuscation, the age when the future is on teleprompter and the script is kept in a vault. Anytime politicians talk about “transparency,” Rafferty thinks, voters need to reach for the X-ray glasses.
Whatever compact of honesty was presumed in the past to exist between the rulers and the ruled is fast dwindling in the rearview mirror.

His own country is as bad as any of them and worse than some. Secret enterprise, stringently denied, is the order of the day. Which has created a boom market for people who are skilled at working in the dark.

What it
really
is, it seems to him, is the Age of the Spook.

When, he thinks, the day’s agenda seems to have been carved into black stone in a dark room, when you feel as helpless as a penny on a railroad track, and when you glimpse spooks in your peripheral vision, it’s time to go talk to some spooks.

I
T’S PROBABLY NOT
actually called the No-Name Bar, but no name is visible from the sleepy
soi
outside. Just a stretch of stucco the color of cream with dirt stirred into it and a pair of the smoked-glass doors that are ubiquitous among Bangkok’s shadier business establishments. The
soi
itself is almost as featureless as the stucco wall: a thin seam of asphalt too narrow for two cars, framed by a sidewalk of tilting, badly set paving stones that are interrupted every now and then by one of those peculiarly Bangkok trees, wizened, largely leaf-free little spindles that look like they’d be more comfortable bent over a walker. Trees that look like they’ve got a cough.

The bar is just as he remembers it, which is to say it’s more cramped than it appears from outside and as dark as a bat’s theme park. He has the brief sensation that nothing at all has changed since he was last here, that the people inside have been frozen in place until he breaks the spell by opening the door.

It’s a long, narrow room that gives the impression that all the right angles are subtly off. The front doors open directly onto the bar, which looks solid enough to repel a blast from a shotgun. The bar is U-shaped and protrudes into the center of the room like a stuck-out tongue, with two wary-looking bartenders in the center. The patrons all sit on the far side of the bar, facing the door. The rest of the room is occupied by a series of booths along the right wall, the dividers between them projecting out so far that the
walkway that leads past them isn’t much wider than a single heavyset man. A tiny transparent lightbulb, perhaps twenty watts, hangs like a distant, dying star over each booth.

The booths’ occupants are shielded from view by the booth dividers, which are unusually high, about the height of the wall around a toilet cubicle in a public restroom. Rafferty sees only five people at the bar, three sitting on stools spaced well apart and the two working behind it, but there could be twenty more people in the place, enjoying their nice covert drinks as they hatch conspiracies or practice character assassination in smaller groups. He has a feeling the only reason the noise level doesn’t drop when he walks in is that there
isn’t
a noise level. If people are talking, they’re talking in whispers.

Everyone he can see is looking at him.

The no-name is one of two spook bars to which Rafferty was brought by Arnold Prettyman, the putatively retired CIA man who was killed when he turned over the wrong rock while he was working on Rafferty’s behalf. Rafferty has no idea whether his accidental role in Prettyman’s death is known in this bar, but it very well may be. Information is the currency in the room. This is where the cloak-and-dagger friends and enemies of Arnold’s shadowy youth and middle age gather to refight the old battles, from back in the 1960s and ’70s, when they were outplotting and shooting at each other. The thawing of the Cold War and the shift of the global stress lines from Southeast Asia to the Middle East stranded a lot of spooks in the jungles where they’d been stationed, and a remarkable number of them rolled downhill to Bangkok.

And now they congregate day after day, night after night, in the no-name bar. It’s a deadlier version, Rafferty thinks, of the Expat Bar, but just as sad.

One bartender looks at a customer, gets a minuscule nod, and comes to take Rafferty’s order while the other bartender heads for one of the hidden booths. The three customers have swiveled their stools to turn their backs, but Rafferty can feel their eyes in the mirror on the opposing wall.

The bartender lifts his chin in a silent query, as though the
sound of his voice is classified, and Rafferty orders yet another Singha beer, one of the big ones. The bartender makes no move to get the drink until Rafferty sees, in the mirror, a hand extend into the narrow aisle beside the booths and make the okay sign. The bartender examines Rafferty again as though he’s checking for a hidden weapon or an ulterior motive and then slides open the cooler behind the bar. Rafferty is watching the man’s movements when something heavy lands on his shoulder. A hand with a plenteous crop of black hair.

When he looks up, he sees a darkly shadowed chin, divided by a cleft that looks like it was incised with a hatchet. The chin and jaw are the widest parts of the head, which narrows as it rises toward a curly fringe of black hair, parted in the center and brushed over the forehead in very peculiar bangs. The upper lip is so long that Rafferty wonders whether the man can smell his food. Beneath a single solid hedge of eyebrow, a pair of tiny black eyes crowd as close together as a flounder’s. The overall effect should be silly, but it’s light-years from silly.

“You was friend with Arnold, yes?” The voice is liquid and heavy and saturated with melancholy; it sort of rolls around like mercury. The accent is Boris-and-Natasha Russian, but, like the face, deeply not comic.

“I was, yes.” It seems natural to echo the question’s structure.

“And Arnold.” The hand on Rafferty’s shoulder tightens, and the squeezed-together eyes get closer to him. “Arnold is now with the fishes?”

Rafferty shakes his head, not understanding. “I’m sorry—”

“Sleeps,” the man says, turning it into “slips.” “Arnold, he slips with the fishes?”

“Not unless they buried him at sea,” Rafferty says. “Last time I saw him, he was dry.”

“But not …” the Russian hesitates. “Not feeling good.”

“Not feeling much of anything.”

The eyes come even closer, and Rafferty smells a great many onions. “You killed him?”

“No,” Rafferty says. “Not directly, at least.”

“Hah,” the man says. It sounds to Rafferty like he’s indicating
that he’d laugh if someone would only teach him how. The bartender pours half of the beer into a smeared glass and slaps both bottle and glass down on the bar. The noise makes Poke jump. The Russian straightens up and says “Hah” again.

“So,” Rafferty says, hoisting the glass, “you knew Arnold.”

“Long time, wery long time. Arnold and me …” He holds up his index and middle finger, close together, side by side. “Like this, you know?”

“I guess.” This isn’t the most comfortable news.

The man shakes his head fondly. “I try to kill him many, many time. Once I make honey trap—You know honey trap?”

“With a woman, right?”

“And such a woman.” The man claps Rafferty on the shoulder again, and beer slops onto the bar. “Such a woman usually I kip for myself. But Arnold is problem. Arnold always is problem. So I make under bed, Semtex. Bed
wery
old, bend down when somebody sit on it, make two piece metal come together.” His hands, palm to palm, are a couple of inches apart. “Make circuit, yes?
Booooom
.” His hands come together and fly apart. They’re enormous.

“Boom,” Rafferty says, mainly to show he’s listening.

“Arnold, always he come elewen o’clock morning.” A tap on the crystal of his steel wristwatch. “I put Semtex nine o’clock, when woman is go eat. But she like money too much, bring cook back from restaurant to make jiggy-jig fast before Arnold come. Cook wery fat, sit down … 
Poh!
”

“ ‘Poh’?” Rafferty says.

“Hah,” the man says a third time, with something regretful in it. “Woman wery angry. Get cook—” He mimes brushing pieces of the cook off his sleeves. Then he picks up the bottle in front of Poke, which is still half full, knocks most of it back, does a basso profundo burp, and says, “You come.” He turns away. Rafferty drops some bills on the bar and follows.