The Fear Artist (39 page)

So he takes the stairs, two at a time, stands at the top for a moment, and decides to start with the most distant door and work his way back. The door at the end opens into what is clearly the master bedroom, the size of a small ballroom with a vaulted ceiling. It looks to him like it was decorated by the birds who drape
Disney heroines in badly designed gowns: an acre of shell pink organdy hangs from a towering frame above the king-size bed, which is mounded with enormous pastel pillows, like big Valentine candies. The wall to the right is mirrored from floor to ceiling, reflecting an ambitious home gym: treadmill, rowing machine, and a couple of hinged and counterweighted contraptions whose function he can only guess at. An overstuffed couch and a table jostle each other under the front window. Money—quite a bit of it—has been misspent here.

The newer wife, he thinks.

He angles across the room, smelling sachet and face powder and the raw, jangly perfume of hair spray, into a bathroom so prettied up it seems like an architectural euphemism for the natural functions it was built to accommodate. A connecting door opens into a smaller room.

Clearly this is where Murphy recharges his prodigious, murderous energy. The carpet was either never laid or has been peeled back, baring a floor of gray, industrial cement. A narrow single bed has a paper-thin pillow and two rough blankets thrown over it. At the foot of the bed is an olive green, army-issue trunk, securely locked, and on the opposite wall is a rough, barely finished wooden dresser with white china knobs on the drawers. Above the dresser, set into the wall where a mirror might be, is a gun safe, which is locked as tightly as the chest. The furniture is dented and scratched, and as Rafferty looks around the room, he has the sense that this value-free assemblage of chipped, hard-surfaced junk has followed Murphy from place to place, while a succession of newly graduated village girls filled the other rooms of houses just like this one with the imitation lives they’d seen on television.

Being in Murphy’s room brings back the sense of pressurized fury he’d experienced when he saw the man face-to-face. He has an impulse to call Janos, but instead he looks at his watch—6:52. He’s been inside for only fourteen minutes. Murphy doesn’t expect him to show up at the shopping plaza until eight or eight-thirty. He’s got plenty of time.

Then why is he so frightened?

•  •  •

M
URPHY IS PACING
the rear office area of a sixth-floor clothing store, fighting a case of the jitters and telling Andrea Fallon, the aging Khao San junkie posing as Helen Eckersley, for the third time what she’s supposed to do when Rafferty finally shows up. He knows he’s repeating himself, but some little animal in his chest is clawing to get his attention. Andrea is just barely not rolling her eyes when his cell phone rings. He glances at the readout, which says
ALARM
.

As he looks at the word, the little animal in his chest begins to use its teeth. “Yeah?”

“Mr. Murphy, we’ve got an entry at your house, but someone there diverted the alarm to the telephones. No one is answering.”

“How long ago?”

“How long—”

“How long since the relay came through your office to ring the phones?”

“A little less than fifteen minutes.”

“What the
fuck
have you been doing for fifteen minutes?”

“We didn’t have this number in the main file. We had to look at your forms—”

“You dumb shit.” Murphy punches the
DISCONNECT
button so hard he cracks the screen. “Get out of here,” he says to Fallon. “Call me tomorrow for the rest of your money.”

“Yeah, right,” Fallon says, “and you’ll mail me the check.” She holds out her hand, palm up. “Gimme.”

“Oh, sure,” Murphy says. “Sure thing.” He grabs her upper arm, pinching the area between the bicep and the bone viciously enough to make her gasp. With his other hand he seizes her wrist and brings her open hand up into her face, with enough force to send her staggering back to the wall, blood streaming from her split lip. “Clean yourself up and get out of here.”

He leaves her leaning against the wall, swearing at him, and goes out into the store. Despite the external display of anger, there’s a kind of glee at his center, and his vision and hearing are amplified. He feels like he could hear a whisper a mile away. It’s a state of consciousness he loves.

The immediate problem, of course, is getting out. If Rafferty’s
not here, he’s got someone else here, on the lookout. The store is obviously being watched. The only way out without taking the escalator, in full view of a thousand people, is the staircase he came up. The entrance to the stairs is about eight meters from the door to the shop. Left, from his perspective.

As always when he’s in this state, ideas announce themselves to him complete and fully formed.

“You,” he says softly to the woman who seems to be in charge. “Don’t say no, don’t give me any shit, don’t attract any attention, just do what I tell you to do, or three days from now there’ll be a toy store in this space. Are you listening?”‘

“Yes,” she says, and a part of him registers the thick, badly applied makeup, the sickly perfume with the pampered-animal smell beneath it, the fragility of her neck.

“That one, over there,” he says, pointing at a salesgirl who, like the manager, is as tall and lean as a fashion model. “Get her.”

While the woman scurries to do his bidding, Murphy puts his hands under one of the heavy rods the dresses hang from and pushes up. As he hoped it would, it lifts easily from the wall bracket. He pulls it down and steps behind the counter, where he tilts the rod until all the clothes slide to the floor, leaving him holding a round bar about seven feet in length. To the two approaching women, their eyes on the spill of clothes, he says, “The longest things you’ve got, dresses, coats, I don’t care what they are, but they’ve got to be long. Understand?”

The manager starts to say something, but Murphy feels his eyes widen, and she retreats, calling instructions in Thai to the other woman. Customers are beginning to pay attention as the two of them scoop clothes from displays everywhere in the store, throw them over their arms and shoulders, and hurry back to Murphy, who holds the pole horizontal.

“Hang ’em up. Jam them together. I want a wall, you got it?” He holds the bar by one end, the other end slanted up slightly, and the women hook hangers over it until it’s about three-quarters full, the clothes sliding down to his end to be smashed together by gravity. Murphy says, “Fill it up.”

The saleswoman says, “The
clothes
,” and Murphy whirls on her
so fast that some of the hangers fly off the other end of the rod.
“I’m not going to tell you again.”

A customer backs out of the store, followed by another.

The saleswoman takes off at a run. Fifteen seconds later the rod is packed with hanging clothes. Murphy shoves the garments on the near end together to bare about a foot of rod. “On your shoulder,” he says to the manager. Then he clears the other end and sets it, not particularly gently, on the salesgirl’s shoulder. “Put your hand on it, stupid. If it falls off, you’ll be sorry for the rest of your short, shitty life. Now, stay there.”

He goes toward the door of the shop, turns his back to it, and pulls a revolver out of the holster at the center of his spine. “Hey!” he shouts, although everyone in the shop is staring at him. “This is a national security incident.” He repeats the words “national security” in Thai. “We have a threat, but nobody’s going to get hurt if you do what I say.” He holds up his cell phone with his free hand. “I want to see your cell phones, right now, and I mean everyone. If you don’t show me a cell phone and I find one on you, you won’t go home tonight. Get them out and hold them up.”

Every person in the store—five customers and three employees—holds up a phone. “Put them on that table full of T-shirts, near the front door. Do
not
go out of the shop. You, you, you. Go to the table and drop your phone on it, then come back. Keep your hands in sight. Good. Now turn around and go through that door in the back. He waves the revolver at the door. “You’ll stay there for five minutes. In five minutes come out. Everyone understand?”

A few people reply automatically, but most of them head for the door, moving fast, as though they’re anticipating a bullet in the back. When the door has closed behind the last of them, Murphy shouts, “Five minutes!” Then, to the two women, he says, “I’m going to get behind these clothes, and when I say ‘Walk,’ we’re going to walk at normal speed. Outside the door we’ll turn left, all moving together, until we get to the stairs. Then we’re going through that door, all together. Both of you got it?”

The women nod, and the store manager clears her throat, licks her lips, and says, “Yes.”

“No hurrying, nothing out of the ordinary. You’re just a couple
of women carrying a lot of clothes, okay? There’s a truck waiting down there, and you’re just taking them down the stairs, right?”

“Fine,” says the manager.

“Keep me in the middle, same distance from both of you. Go at the count of three. Carefully, so nothing happens to the clothes. Ready. One. Two. Three.”

They’re both taller than he is, but he hunches down anyway. He knows he’s invisible from below. It’s a watcher a level up that worries him.

A
ND THAT’S PRECISELY
where Janos is, drinking his third cup of coffee, shifting from foot to foot and wishing with some intensity that he could take a bathroom break. He’s been staring for almost twenty minutes at the front of the store that Murphy went into, and it feels like an hour. The woman has gone into the store, too, and she hasn’t come out yet, so he’s stuck here. He has no idea where Shen is, although Rafferty hadn’t seemed worried about Shen. But it’s sloppy. He needs half a dozen people, with radios, to do this right.

He’s pulling out his phone to give Vladimir a piece of his mind when the women come out, carrying what looks like a whole rack of clothes. He goes up on tiptoe to see whether he can look over it, but he can’t; he’d have to be practically on top of them to do that.

So they’re moving clothes—they’ll take them to the escalator. Except that they turn left, heading for the stairway, the stairway Murphy came up. Maybe it’s nothing, maybe the people who run the mall don’t want that kind of shop business done in sight of the customers. Or maybe Murphy’s got himself an escort.

Rafferty’s not due to arrive for ninety minutes. Why would Murphy be leaving? And would he be leaving without the woman?

If it’s not Murphy, and Janos goes out of position to check, he could miss it if Murphy actually does move. This might be a diversion to draw whoever’s watching, leaving the area clear for Murphy to walk out two minutes from now, big as life. Janos leans forward, elbows on the railing. He’s forgotten about pissing. The shop attendant in front pulls the door to the stairs open, toward
her, and gives it a shove; it’s the kind that swings closed automatically, and they’ll have to hurry to get through before it shuts on them. And they’re not going to make it. The woman in front is through, and the door is closing on the center of the rack, and then it’s pushed back again, and it opens and starts to close, and the woman at the back pushes it open again.

Two people, three shoves on the door. The woman in front could have kicked back at it, or …

Vladimir and the boy are at the front exit, waiting for word.
Why would Murphy leave the woman?

Janos makes a decision and takes the down escalator in a kind of swan dive.

T
HE THIRD BEDROOM
is small and dim and smells like a sickroom. Rafferty flicks on the wall switch, but nothing happens. The only light comes through the door in the hallway. He stands there, letting his eyes adjust, listening for the sound of movement behind him, and gradually he sees a milky line of light beneath a door in the room’s far right corner.

To open that door, he’ll have to go through the bedroom, and he realizes that he doesn’t want to. Rose, he thinks, would take one look and back away, saying, “Bad place.”

The rumpled bed, the sheets creased sharply, as though the person who sleeps there perspires heavily, a lemon yellow, edgy smell that Rafferty associates with fever, the absolutely bare walls—not a picture, not a poster, not a mirror—all fill him with a deep uneasiness. His eyes go to the ceiling. The area above the bed has been attacked with paint: spirals and loops and jagged, shapeless lines, random as roughly torn paper, in dark reds and chromium yellows and a lot of black. Years ago Rafferty had seen video of a spider spinning a web under the influence of lysergic acid, and that web had the same uncontrollable, fractured energy. Imagination as broken glass. He looks away, feeling vertiginous, and then up again. This is what the person on the bed, lying on her back, would have seen: a ceiling full of cracks and fault lines, a solidity on the verge of flying apart, but to what end? Would something come down—was that the meaning of the slashes of red
and yellow?—or would the person on the bed be drawn up? And up to what?

Holding his breath, he enters the room and walks swiftly to the door with light beneath it, which he pulls open. It’s a bathroom, very long and narrow, with a window at each end, looking out on both the back and the front yards. Other than the peculiar shape, it’s purely functional: small and plain, with a single fluorescent tube running almost the full length of the ceiling. The bathtub, located below the back window, is piled full of white, an irregular, cloudlike surface of white cloth. He reaches over and tugs a fold close to him, and what he’s holding is a filthy white nightgown. He looks again. There must be thirty of them in the tub.

The nightgown smells of damp and sweat and dirt. It’s the same smell he’d caught downstairs, standing in the archway to the kitchen with the open door behind him.

From nowhere Miaow’s face suddenly swims up at him with its usual mix of hope and apprehension, and he finds himself on the verge of tears. He wants to be anywhere in the world but here.

He tosses the nightgown back into the tub and looks around to find a reason for the room’s shape. And there it is, a door in the wall opposite the small bedroom, closed and locked. Feeling the pressure of time, he goes quickly through the bedroom and into Murphy’s room. It takes him about four minutes to find the ring of keys; he begins by pulling out the drawers in the dresser and feeling their undersides. The bottom drawer comes out completely, and there it is, on the bare concrete floor beneath.