The Fear Artist (20 page)

He’s not having fun. And he’s got a footprint a mile wide.

He grunts at the thought of how much effort it’s going to take.

The driver says, “Sir?”

“When I want you,” Murphy says, “I’ll say, ‘Hey.’ Got it?”

“Yes, sir.”

“You just get me home and I’ll see they give you another one of those pretty medals.” Get rid of the house first, he thinks. Sell it under the name he used to buy it and leave the money in that account forever because the Thais hover like flies around a transaction that big. Bring in some fruitcake to buy all the fake antiques and all the real antiques and the fancy couches and rugs and
Song’s goddamn mahogany table. Give some money to the little women so they can go home rich to Mudville. Pay off the help—enough so they don’t complain but not so much that they brag about it.

Just like before. Except for Treasure. This is, what? The third time? But the first since Treasure—since it was clear who Treasure was.

Disappear and roll up the street behind him. Get a room somewhere, just him and his briefcase and his jeans and his shirt and his brains and his reflexes, someplace shadowy in the middle of the concrete jungle, the lines laid out like a spider to tip him if anyone’s looking for him. Tell everybody who matters that he’ll be back when he feels like it.

Let the weekly money accumulate in the bank accounts. Let people begin to miss him so he can raise his prices when he’s ready to start up again.

Find someplace for Treasure. Somehow.

Tuck her away under something very heavy with a high fence around it and then cut the strings, go rogue. Play some games, operate on his own without all these assholes looking over his shoulder all the time, doing the official
tsk-tsk-tsk
for the microphones while they urge him on with their hands.
Plausible deniability
, another concept born in ’Nam, using euphemisms like “action” for “killing” in case they were being recorded. Well, fuck plausible deniability, fuck the politicians, so busy covering their asses they’d blow a hand off if they farted, fuck the career officers with their eyes on the next star on their shoulder, who want the results but not the tactics. Fuck them all.

Do what he wants for a change.

Play without rules. Blow away some ragheads, maybe. Even up the odds down south. Operate the way he used to operate, back … back …

Back when he was young.

He hears himself groan and says to the driver, “No, I’m not talking to you.”

There are times when he sees himself as a hand grenade on a pool table. All the neat little balls rolling politely around
according to the laws of physics, clacking off at their precious Euclidean angles, and here comes this kind of odd-looking ball that wobbles a bit and then blows all the balls near it to powder and creates a whole new order on the green felt, or what remains of the green felt. When the felt’s ripped to shit and all the balls are banging back and forth and hopping off the table and hitting the floor and breaking apart, that’s when a man can do some
real
work.

He had thought his time was over forever. People with his skill set and his experience were an embarrassment, like scraps of memory from an epic national drunk a few decades ago. America had fled the jungles and the rice paddies, it had abandoned the napalm and the Agent Orange and Phoenix Program tactics and entered into its World Policeman phase, and the way they played it, there was Good Cop and there was Gooder Cop. Benign capitalism pasteurizing the globe with blue jeans and shampoo and fine dentistry. Someone like Murphy, or an enterprise like Phoenix—which had taken out a couple thousand civilians a month, shredded the Geneva Conventions, interrogated with extreme prejudice around the clock on the faintest suspicion—well, as far as the new and improved United States was concerned, it was
shocking
to hear reports. The accounts of those things had been overblown, misreported, misinterpreted, or—if all the evidence hadn’t been destroyed—they’d been the work of a few out-of-control individuals who’d twisted circumstances to their own personal purposes. Tragedies of war, never to be repeated.

So he’d kissed it all good-bye, disappeared for a while into Indonesia, and spent some of the money he’d taken from the people who paid not to be on the monthly Phoenix lists. When he reemerged, he’d settled into business mode, making his boring millions as the guy who knew who to pay and how much, where to get everything from steel wheels to bulk rubber, and doing the occasional bit of freelance wetwork when someone earned it. He’d maintained his connections to the spooks, since he had so many lines out and would be silly not to listen in. Sell information and plausible lies, get richer, get fatter, get laid, shoot someone once in a while, and dream of the old days.

Slow death.

And then those idiots flew into the Twin Towers screaming the name of God, and the President of the United States looked up from the children’s book he was reading to a classroom full of kids and thought, Yikes. Terrorists without uniforms, children with grenades, an enemy without borders. Bad guys hiding in plain sight. Everyday people, people who look like everyone else, serving as double agents or actual combatants. In small, isolated, backward villages. In difficult terrain crisscrossed by secret paths. In countries where people hate us.

Jeez
, the President thought,
what does this remind me of?

So naturally the plan the Pentagon dusted off and revised and presented to the White House was based on the Phoenix Program, and it was accepted while Murphy was in the middle of complicated but boring negotiations for a pottery plant in northeast Thailand. The proceedings barely kept him awake, and his eyes were drooping in a meeting when he got the call he’d never thought would come.

How would he like, the suit had asked, to stick with the business as a cover and go back to doing what he’d been doing before, but also, from time to time, a little more? Or, whenever circumstances permitted, a lot more. Help the Thais deal with the Muhammads in the deep south and keep an eye open in case al-Qaeda or some other suicide club decided it needed to take things out of Camel World and into Bangkok or Yala, way down south, until things cooled off.

Fucking paradise.

The driver says, “What about the gate, sir?”

Murphy looks up. “Oh.” They’ve come to a stop, and the gates designed to keep people like him away from houses like this gleam ice white in the headlights. “Hold on.” He unbuckles the belt wrapped around the briefcase and fingers his way through the wads of documents, toiletries, and stray sticky notes until he finds the remote, which he points through the window at the gates.

“Wow,” the driver says as the house is revealed: two and a half staggered stories with balconies everywhere, useless chimneys for useless fireplaces, a tiled roof gleaming with drizzle, water already standing in some parts of the yard. Manderley in the tropics.

“Do your work, son,” Murphy says, “show up every day, stand tall, skim that graft, and you can buy the place. But you better do it fast if you wanna buy it from
me
.” He automatically counts the lit windows: four. The pair of lamps behind the living-room curtain operate on a timer, so they don’t tell him anything. The light in Song’s room, on the second floor, is on, but the Humvee is gone, so she’s out fucking around on him, which he should have expected, coming back early. The light gleams in the front window of the bathroom next to Treasure’s room, but that doesn’t mean anything either, because the kid has nightmares all the time, which is no surprise, since she has them when she’s awake, too. And to the right of the house, light spills onto the lawn and trees from the big windows in his train room. Those shouldn’t be on.

He wants to go back to the airport. Fly someplace with mud and thick greenery and short, smooth, brown women.

The light that shouldn’t be burning. Which will it be tonight? Someone who wants to kill him or someone who can break his heart without even trying?

“R
IGHT, HURRY ME
up,” Murphy grumbles, getting out of the car before the driver can dart around to open the door. “Beat it,” he says. “The gate closes fast, so don’t hit the brakes when you’re halfway through. I’d tell you to give Shen a kiss for me, but I think I’m too short for him.” He gets a better grip, two-handed, on the gaping briefcase and wrestles it up the curving brick path to the double front door, his spirits and the shoulders of his shirt getting damp in the drizzle. The house rises up in front of him, a monument to bad judgment. Once on the porch, he blows out a long, heavy breath, feeling like a resentenced prisoner. He says, “ ‘Home is the sailor,’ ” and keys in a code on a pad to his right. The lock responds with a discreet snap, and he’s in.

The minute the door closes, he turns to the interior keypad, entering a five-digit code followed by two pushes of the zero key; if someone forgets to do this, as Neeni—the current wife number one—always does when she’s been indulging in her whiskey and cherry-codeine cough-medicine cocktails, sirens wail and the lights all over the place blink on and off. And she stands there, mouth hanging open, trying to remember what to do until somebody comes to help.

She’ll be able to buy a lot of cough syrup when he finally cuts her loose. She’ll probably miss this place when she’s in Mudville, but she’ll have her codeine and her Jack. And
this
time he won’t go back for her.

He puts the briefcase on the high-backed chair to the left of the
door, a chair that exists for the sole purpose of giving him a place to put the briefcase. During his two years in the house, he has methodically broken or torn up anything anyone else ever put there, and he’s finally got them trained, except for Neeni. Neeni can’t be trained after, say, 4:00
P.M
.

On the other hand, she’s not out fucking someone, and Song is.

There’s the light in his train room to think about, so he opens the drawer of an almost-antique marble-topped table and keeps pulling until he can reach beneath it and peel back the surgical tape that holds the knife on the underside. It’s a Buck 119, one he’s had since Vietnam, sharpened so often that the six-inch blade is probably a quarter of an inch narrower than it was new. The heft of it in his hand is deeply familiar. He lays it quietly on the table and leans against the wall to work his boots off. In his socks he moves lightly across the marble-floored entrance hall, the knife in his hand, his arm loose and relaxed. To his left, the living room is pale with the light from the lamps on their automatic timers, and in front of him yawns the formal dining room, now dim but dominated nonetheless by the silhouette of the enormous, six-hundred-pound mahogany table Song had insisted on, back when he still thought she was cute.

To the right, just his side of the stairs to the upper floors, an L-shaped hall leads to the doorway of a small den and then, a few yards later, turns left and ends in the train room. He could go through the dining room and then the kitchen to get to the train room, but those rooms aren’t carpeted, and he’s quieter on the carpet. At the turn in the hallway, an open door lets him look into Neeni’s room. He’d moved her down here eight or ten months ago, after her third fall down the stairs. He can hear her snoring, and something in the shape of her body beneath the covers—always unexpectedly small, given how large she looms in his memory—calls him in. The glass on her bedside table is one-third full of a familiar reddish tan fluid. It’s a big glass.

She’s asleep or, more accurately, passed out, her long black hair fanned across the pillow, her arm bent at the elbow so that her open hand rests on the pillow, only inches from her face. The defenselessness of the slender wrist, the curl of the fingers, touches
something deep inside him, and he bends down, studying the face that so drew him once, with its high, angel’s-wing cheekbones and astonishingly fine nose, as perfect and surprising as a baby’s. He’d been on his way home from an all-night drunk in a pig-shit village in Laos the first time he saw her, wearing a Tweety T-shirt and a wraparound skirt, coming out of the temple at about eight in the morning, gleaming in the honey-colored sun like some elegantly articulated, long-vanished exotic preserved in amber, just for him.

He can still see the colors the sunlight discovered in her hair.

She turns her head a few inches toward the light falling through the door, and the loose pouches beneath her eyes and the new softness under her chin become visible. Something heavy settles in Murphy’s chest, some regret that he won’t be able to return her to that village as she was when he took her out of it.

Back in the day, back in ’Nam, he’d never been able to kill the beautiful ones. Despite the business-as-usual betrayals: the working girls with big smiles counting the troops and memorizing the positions of the barracks when they were sneaked into the base for a short-time tussle, then pointing out officers in civvies in the street, targeting them for the knife from behind or the rolled grenade. The pretty village teenager filing reports with Charlie’s artillery battalions. He could round up the women, he could bring them in, he could scare them till they pissed themselves, but he couldn’t kill them if they were beautiful.

Well, he thinks, straightening up with a sigh, there was probably no one anywhere who didn’t draw the line at something. He’s faced down fifteen-year-old Muslim kids who fired automatic weapons into women and children in village markets without any apparent hesitation but who fought for their lives when a soldier was shoving pork into their mouths.

His shoulders sag. Maybe it’s just the flight, the waits at both ends. He feels weary, and he has an impulse to crawl in beside Neeni. But she’d turn away from him, draw her legs up, make herself small.

And there’s still the train room.

He looks away from her without any sense of loss; he had to learn to disconnect from her years ago, although the feeling
manages to sneak back. At the door to her room, he pauses, looking down the hall toward the open door to the train room. He hears a faint clicking sound, regular and slightly syncopated, and he recognizes it. He relaxes, just a little. But he shouldn’t hear it.