Koko

“Well, hang on, because here comes the good part,” Tina said.

2

“I don’t think adult men actually exist anymore—if they ever did,” Judy said. “They really are just grown up little boys. It’s demeaning. Michael is a caring, intelligent person and he works hard and all that, but what he believes in is ridiculous. After you reach a certain level, his values are completely childish.”

“At least they’re that mature,” said Pat Caldwell. This conversation too was conducted over the telephone. “Sometimes I’m afraid that Harry’s are just infantile.”

“Michael still believes in the army. He’d deny that, but it’s the truth. He takes that boy’s game as the real thing. He loved being part of a group.”

“Harry had the time of his life in Vietnam,” Pat said.

“The point is that Michael is going back. He wants to be in the army again. He wants to be part of a unit.”

“I think Harry just wants something to do.”

“Something to do? He could get a job! He could start acting like a lawyer again!”

“Hmm, well, perhaps.”

“Are you aware that Michael wants to sell his share of the practice? That he wants to move out of Westerholm and work in a slum? He thinks he isn’t doing enough. I mean, he has a little tiny point, you have to be a doctor in a place like this to find out how really political it is, you wouldn’t believe how much infighting goes on, but that’s life, that’s all it is.”

“So he’s using the trip to give himself time to think about it,” Pat suggested.

“He’s using the trip to play army,” Judy said. “Let’s not even mention how he’s guilt-tripping himself about Ia Thuc.”

“Oh, I think Harry was always proud of Ia Thuc,” Pat said. “Some day, I ought to show you the letters he wrote me.”

3

The night before he flew to Singapore, Michael dreamed that he was walking at night along a mountain trail toward a group of uniformed men sitting around a small fire. When he gets nearer, he sees that they are ghosts, not men—flames show dimly through the bodies in front of the fire. The ghosts turn to watch him approach. Their uniforms are ragged and stiff with dirt. In his dream Michael simply assumes that he had served with these men. Then one of the ghosts, Melvin O. Elvan, stands and steps forward. Don’t mess with Underhill, Elvan says. The world is full of hurt.

On the same night, Tina Pumo dreams that he is lying on his bed while Maggie Lah paces around the bedroom. (In real life, Maggie disappeared again as soon as his face had begun to heal.) You can’t win a catastrophe, Maggie says. You just have to try to keep your head above water. Consider the elephant, his grace and gravity, his innate nobility. Burn down the restaurant and start over.

The shutters of the bungalow were closed against the heat. A film of condensation lay over the pink stucco walls, and the air in the room was warm, moist, and pink dark. There was a strong, dark brown smell of excrement. The man in the first of the two heavy chairs now and then grunted and stirred, or pushed his arms against the ropes. The woman did not move, because the woman was dead. Koko was invisible, but the man followed him with his eyes. When you knew you were going to die, you could see the invisible.

If you were in a village, say—

If the smoke from the cookfire wavered and rose straight into the air again. If the chicken lifted one foot and froze. If the sow cocked her head. If you saw these things. If you saw a leaf shaking, if you saw dust hovering—

Then you might see the vein jumping in Koko’s neck. You might see Koko leaning against a hootch, the vein jumping in his neck.

This is one thing Koko knew: there are always empty places. In cities where people sleep on the pavement, in cities so crowded people take shifts in bed, cities so crowded no one single person is ever truly quiet. In these cities especially there are always hollow realms, eternal places, places forgotten. Rich people leave the empty places behind, or the city itself leaves them behind.

The rich people move everything out and forget, and at night eternity quietly breaks in with Koko.

His father had been sitting in one of the two heavy chairs the rich people had left behind. We use everything, his father said. We waste no part of the animal.

We do not waste the chairs.

There was one memory he had seen in the cave, and in memory no part of the animal is wasted.

This is one thing Koko knew: they thought the chairs weren’t good enough for them. Wherever they went had better chairs.

The woman didn’t count, Roberto Ortiz had just brought her along. There weren’t even enough cards for the ones that counted, much less the ones they brought along. When they answered the letters they were supposed to come alone, but the ones like Roberto Ortiz thought where they were going was nothing, who they were going to see was nobody, and it would all be over in ten minutes.… They never thought about the cards, no one had leaned over them at night and said: We waste no part of the animal. The woman was half-Indian, half-Chinese, something like that, maybe just a Eurasian, someone Roberto Ortiz had picked up, someone Roberto Ortiz was planning to fuck the way Pumo the Puma fucked the whore Dawn Cucchio in Sydney, Australia, just someone dead in a chair, just someone who wouldn’t even get a card.

In his right jacket pocket he had all five Rearing Elephant cards, all the regimental cards he had left, with the names written lightly, penciled lightly, on four of them. Beevers, Poole, Pumo, Linklater. These were for when he went to America.

In his left jacket pocket he had an ordinary pack of Orchid Boy playing cards, made in Taiwan.

When he had opened the door wearing the big Tim Underhill smile, the hey baby how’s it shakin’ smile, and seen the woman standing next to Roberto Ortiz wearing her own hello don’t mind me! smile, he had understood why there were two chairs.

In the cave there had been no chairs, no chairs for the lords of the earth. The cave made Koko shake, his father and the devil made him shake.

“Of course it’s okay,” he had said. “There’s not much here, but you have a chair apiece, so come in and sit you down, sit you down, don’t mind that the place is so bare, we’re making changes all the time, I don’t actually work here.…”

Oh, I pray here.

But they took the chairs anyhow. Yes, Mr. Roberto Ortiz had brought all his documentation, he brought it out, smiling, just beginning to look curious, beginning to notice the dust. The emptiness.

When Koko took the documents from the man’s hand, he switched on the invisibility switch.

It was the same letter for all of them.

Dear (name),

I have decided that it is no longer possible for me to remain silent about the truth of the events which occurred in the I Corps village of Ia Thuc in 1968. Justice must finally be done. You will understand that I myself cannot be the one to bring the truth of these events to the world’s eyes and ears. I was a participant in them, and have besides turned my horror at these events to account in works of fiction. As a representative, past or present, of the world press, as one who visited the scene of a great unknown crime and saw it at first-hand, would you care to discuss this matter further? I myself have no interest whatever in the profits that might be made from publishing the true story of Ia Thuc. You may write to me at (address) if you are interested in coming East to pursue this matter. I ask only, for reasons of my own security, that you refrain from discussing this matter with, or even mentioning it to, anyone until we have had an initial meeting, that you make no notes or diary entries pertaining to myself or Ia Thuc until we meet, and that you come to our first meeting with the following proofs of identity: a) passport, and b) copies of all stories and articles you wrote or to which you contributed, concerning the American action in the I Corps village of Ia Thuc. In my opinion, you will find our meeting more than worthwhile.

Yours sincerely,

Timothy Underhill,

Koko liked Roberto Ortiz. He liked him very much. I thought I could just show you my passports and drop off my material, he said, Miss Balandran and I had planned to see Lola, it’s getting late for a meeting now, Miss Balandran particularly wanted me to see Lola, it’s a form of entertainment well known in this city, could you come around to my hotel tomorrow for lunch, you’ll have time to look over the material in the file.…

Do you know Lola?

No.

Koko liked his smooth olive skin, his glossy hair, and his confident smile. He had the whitest shirt, the glossiest tie, the bluest blazer. He had Miss Balandran, who had long golden legs and dimples and knew about the local culture. He had been going to drop something off and arrange a meeting on his own ground, as the Frenchmen had done.

But the Frenchmen only had each other, they did not have Miss Balandran smiling so prettily, urging him so quietly, so sexily, to agree.

“Of course,” Koko said, “you must do as your beautiful escort says, you must see all the sights, just stop in for a second, have a drink and let me take an initial look at what you’ve brought …”

Roberto Ortiz never noticed that Miss Balandran flushed when Koko said “escort.”

Two passports?

They were sitting in the chairs, smiling up at him with such confidence, such assurance, their clothes so beautiful and their manners so good, knowing that in minutes they would be on their way to the nightclub, to their dinner and their drinks, their pleasures.

“Dual citizenship,” Ortiz said, glancing slyly at Miss Balandran. “I am Honduran as well as American. You’ll see all the Spanish-language publications in the file, besides the ones you’re familiar with.”

“Very interesting,” Koko said. “Very interesting, indeed. I’ll just be back in a moment with your drinks, and we can toast the success of our venture as well as your night out on the town.”

He went behind the chairs into the kitchen and turned the cold tap on and off, banged a cabinet closed.

“I wanted to say how much I’ve enjoyed your books,” Roberto Ortiz called from the living room.

On the counter beside the sink were a hammer, a cleaver, an automatic pistol, a new roll of strapping tape, and a small brown paper bag. Koko picked up the hammer and the pistol.

“I think The Divided Man is my favorite,” Roberto Ortiz called out.

Koko put the pistol in his coat pocket and hefted the hammer. “Thank you,” he said.

They were just sitting in the chairs, looking forward. He came gliding out of the kitchen and he was invisible, he made no noise. They were just waiting for their drinks. He came up behind Roberto Ortiz and he raised his arm and Miss Balandran didn’t even know he was there until she heard the squashy sound of the hammer hitting Roberto Ortiz’s head.

“Quiet,” he said. Roberto Ortiz collapsed into himself, unconscious but not dead. A snail trail of blood crawled out of his nose.

Koko dropped the hammer and quickly moved between the chairs.

Miss Balandran gripped the arms of her chair and stared at him with dinner plate eyes.

“You’re pretty,” Koko said, and took the pistol from his pocket and shot her in the stomach.

Pain and fear took people in different directions. Anything having to do with eternity made them show you their real selves. No part of the animal was wasted. Remembrance, the whole thing they had been, just sort of took over. Koko figured the girl would get up and come for him, move a couple of steps before she realized half her guts were still back in the chair. She looked like one hell of a fighter, like a scrapper. But she couldn’t even get out of the chair—it never even crossed her mind to get out of the chair. It took her a long time even to move her hands off the arms of the chair, and then she didn’t want to look down. She shit herself, like Lieutenant Beans Beevers, down in Dragon Valley. Her feet went out, and she started shaking her head. She looked about five years old all of a sudden.

“Jesus Christ,” Koko said, and shot her in the chest. The noise hurt his ears—it really bounced off those stucco walls. The girl had sort of melted back into the chair, and Koko had the feeling that the sound killed her before the second bullet did.

“All I got is one rope,” Koko said. “See?”

He got down on his knees and put his arms between Roberto Ortiz’s twisted-up feet to pull the rope out from under the chair.

Roberto Ortiz didn’t as much as groan the whole time Koko was tying him up. When the rope tightened over his chest and clamped his arms, he pushed out a little air that smelled like mouthwash. A red knot the size of a baseball had flowered on the side of his head, and a trickle of blood matted the hair behind the knot in a way that reminded Koko of a road on a map.

From the shelf in the kitchen he fetched the cleaver, the roll of strapping tape, and the brown paper bag. Koko tossed the cleaver on the floor and took a new washcloth out of the bag. He pinched Roberto Ortiz’s nose between his forefinger and thumb, pulled up, and stuffed the washcloth into Ortiz’s mouth. Then he peeled off a length of the tape and wound it three times around the bottom half of Ortiz’s face, sealing in the washcloth.

Koko took both sets of cards out of his pockets and sat cross-legged on the floor. He placed the cards beside him and rested the handle of the cleaver on his thigh. He watched Ortiz’s eyes, waiting for him to wake up.

If you thought there were good parts, if you were a person who thought about the good parts, this was the good part now, coming up.

Ortiz had webby little wrinkles next to his eyes, and they looked dirty, full of dirt, because his skin was that olive color. He had just washed his hair, and it was thick and shiny black, with the sort of waves in it that looked like real waves, one after the other. You thought he was handsome, until you noticed his boxer’s dented little blob of a nose.

Ortiz finally opened his eyes. Give him this much, he got the whole situation right away and tried to jump forward. The ropes caught him short before he even got started, and he wrestled with them for a second before he got that too. He just gave up, sat back and looked from side to side—tried to take everything in. He stopped when he saw Miss Balandran melted into her chair and he really looked at her and then he looked straight at Koko and tried to get out of the chair again but kept on staring at Koko when he realized he couldn’t.

“Here you are with me, Roberto Ortiz,” Koko said. He picked up the regimental cards and held the good old Rearing Elephant out toward Ortiz. “Recognize this emblem?”

Ortiz shook his head, and Koko could see pain floating in his eyes.

“You have to tell me the truth about everything,” Koko said. “Don’t go out on a lie, try to remember everything, don’t waste pieces of your own brain. Come on, look at it.”

He saw how Roberto Ortiz was concentrating. The awakening of some little cell way back in his head flared in his eyes.

“I thought you’d remember,” Koko said. “You showed up with the rest of the hyenas, you must have seen it somewhere. You walked all around, you probably worried about getting your spit-shine boots all dirty—you were there, Roberto. I asked you here because I wanted to talk to you. I wanted to ask you some important questions.”

Roberto Ortiz groaned through the washcloth and tape. He issued a plea with his big soft brown eyes.

“You won’t have to talk. Just nod your head.”

If you saw a leaf shaking.

If the chicken froze on one foot.

If you saw these things, no part of the animal was wasted.

“The Elephant stands for the 24th Infantry, right?”

Ortiz nodded.

“And would you agree that the elephant embodies these traits—nobility, grace, gravity, patience, perseverance, power and reserve in times of peace, power and wrath in times of war?”

Ortiz looked confused, but nodded.

“And in your opinion, did an atrocity take place in the I Corps village of Ia Thuc?”

Ortiz hesitated, then nodded again.

Koko was not in a darkened room in a pink stucco bungalow on the fringe of a tropical city, but on a frozen tundra under a sky of high hard blue. A constant wind skirled and rippled the thin layer of snow over a layer of ice hundreds of yards deep. Far off to the west sat a range of glaciers like broken teeth. God’s hand hung hugely in the air, pointing at him.

Koko jumped up and rapped the butt of his pistol against the knot on Ortiz’s head. Just like a cartoon, Ortiz’s eyes floated up into his head. His whole body went loose. Koko sat down and waited for him to wake up again.

When Ortiz’s eyelids fluttered, Koko slapped him hard, and Ortiz jerked his head up and stared wildly at him, all attention again.

“Wrong answer,” Koko said. “Even the court-martials, unfair as they were, couldn’t say there was any atrocity. It was an act of God. A literal act of God. Do you know what that means?”

Ortiz shook his head. The pupils of his eyes looked blurry.

“It doesn’t matter. I want to see if you remember certain names. Do you remember the name Tina Pumo, Pumo the Puma?”

Ortiz shook his head.

“Michael Poole?”

Ortiz wearily shook his head again.

“Conor Linklater?”

Another shake of the head.

“Harry Beevers?”

Ortiz lifted his head, remembering, and nodded.

“Yes. He talked to you, didn’t he? And he was pleased with himself. ‘Children can kill,’ he said, didn’t he? ‘It doesn’t matter what you do to a killer.’ And ‘The Elephant takes care of its own.’ He said that, ‘The Elephant takes care of its own.’ Right?”

Ortiz nodded.

“You sure you don’t remember Tina Pumo?”

Ortiz shook his head.

“You’re so fucking dumb, Roberto. You remember Harry Beevers, but you forget everybody else. All these people I have to find, have to track down … unless they come to me. Big joke! What do you think I should do after I find them?”

Ortiz cocked his head.

“I mean, do you think I should talk to them? These people were my brothers. I could step outside of all this shit, I could say, I cleaned up my share of the cesspool, now it’s someone else’s turn, I could say that, I could start all over, let it be someone else’s responsibility. What’s your best opinion on that, Roberto Ortiz?”

Roberto Ortiz communicated by means of mental telepathy that Koko should now let it be someone else’s responsibility to clean up the cesspool.

“It’s not that easy, Roberto. Poole was married when we were over there, for God’s sake! Don’t you think he told his wife about what happened? Pumo had Dawn Cucchio, don’t you think he has another girlfriend, or a wife, or both, right now? Lieutenant Beevers used to write to a woman named Pat Caldwell! You see how it never stops? That’s what eternity means, Roberto! It means Koko has to go on and on, cleaning up the world … making sure no part is wasted, that what travels from one ear to another ear is rooted out, nothing left over, nothing wasted.…”

For a second he actually saw red—a vast sheet of blood washing over everything, carrying everything with it, houses and cows and the engines of trains, washing everything clean.

“You know why I wanted you to bring copies of your articles?”

Ortiz shook his head.

Koko smiled. He reached out and picked the thick file of articles off the floor and opened it on his lap. “Here’s a good headline, Roberto, DID THIRTY CHILDREN DIE? I mean, is that yellow journalism, or what? You can really be proud of yourself, Roberto. It’s right up there with BIGFOOT DEVOURS TIBETAN BABY. What’s your answer, anyhow? Did thirty children die?”

Ortiz did not move.

“It’s cool if you don’t want to say. Satanic beings come in many forms, Roberto, in many, many forms.” As he spoke, Koko took a pack of matches from his pocket and set the file alight. He fanned it in the air to keep the fire alive.

When the flames neared his fingers, Koko dropped the burning papers and kicked them apart. The small flames left greasy black scorches on the wooden floor.

“I always liked the smell of fire,” Koko said. “I always liked the smell of gunpowder. I always liked the smell of blood. They’re clean smells, you know?”

I always liked the smell of gunpowder.

I always liked the smell of blood.

He smiled at the little flames guttering out on the floor. “I like how you can even smell the dust burning.” He turned his smile to Ortiz. “I wish my work was done. But at least I’ll have two pretty passports to use. And maybe when I’m done in the States, I’ll go to Honduras. That makes a lot of sense, I think. Maybe I’ll go there after I check out all these people I have to check out.” He closed his eyes and rocked back and forth on the floor. “Work never leaves you alone, does it?” He stopped rocking. “Would you like me to untie you now?”

Ortiz looked at him carefully, then nodded very slowly.

“You’re so stupid,” Koko said. He shook his head, smiling sadly, took up the automatic pistol, and pointed it at the middle of Roberto Ortiz’s chest. He looked directly into Ortiz’s eyes, then shook his head again, still smiling sadly, braced his wrist with his left hand, and fired.

Then he watched Roberto Ortiz die fighting and twitching and struggling to speak. Blood darkened the pretty blazer, ruined the pretty shirt and the luxurious necktie.

Eternity, jealous and alert, watched with Koko.

When it was done, Koko wrote his name on one of the Orchid Boy playing cards, grasped the cleaver, and pushed himself up off the floor to do the messy part of the job.

PART

THREE

THE

TIGER BALM

GARDENS

1

“Just let me keep the books,” Michael Poole said to the erect little woman, all black shining hair and deep dimples, beside him. Her name tag read PUN YIN. She tilted his carry-on bag toward him, and Poole took the copies of A Beast in View and The Divided Man from the open pouch on the side. The stewardess smiled and began making her way forward through the pediatricians.

The doctors had started to unwind as soon as the plane hit cruising level. On earth, visible to their patients and other laymen, Michael’s colleagues liked to appear knowing, circumspect, and only as juvenile as conventional American ethics permitted; aloft, they acted like fraternity boys. Pediatricians in playclothes, in terrycloth jogging suits and college sweaters, pediatricians in red blazers and plaid trousers roamed the aisles of the big airplane, glad-handing and bawling out bad jokes. Pun Yin got no more than halfway toward the front of the plane with Michael’s bag when a squat, flabby doctor with a leer like a Halloween pumpkin positioned himself before her and did an awkward bump and grind.

“Hey!” Beevers said. “We’re on our way!”

“Give me an S,” Conor said, and lifted his glass.

“You remember to get the pictures? Or did your brain collapse again?”

“They’re in my bag,” Poole said. He had made fifty copies of the author’s photo on the back of Orchid Blood, Underhill’s last book.

All three men were watching the unknown doctor twitch around Pun Yin while a group of medical men yipped encouragement. The pretty stewardess patted the man on the shoulder and squeezed past him, interposing Michael’s bag between the doctor and herself.

“We’re going to face the elephant,” Beevers said. “Remember?”

“Could I forget?” Poole asked. During the Civil War, when their regiment had been founded, “facing the elephant” had been slang for going into battle.

In a loud, blurry voice Conor asked, “What traits are embodied in the elephant?”

“In time of peace or in time of war?” Beevers asked.

“Both. Let’s hear the whole shootin’ match.”

Beevers glanced at Poole. “The elephant embodies nobility, grace, gravity, patience, perseverance, power, and reserve in times of peace. The elephant embodies power and wrath in times of war.”

A few of the pediatricians nearest stared at him in affable confusion, trying to share the joke.

Beevers and Poole began to laugh.

“Damn straight,” Conor said. “That’s it, there it is.”

Pun Yin glimmered for a moment far away at the head of the cabin, then swished a curtain before her and was gone.

2

The airplane slowly digested the thousands of miles between Los Angeles and Singapore, where the corpses of Miss Balandran and Roberto Ortiz sat undiscovered in a bungalow on a leafy road; the doctors settled into their seats, overcome by alcohol and the exhaustion of travel. Bland food arrived, considerably less delicious than the smile with which Pun Yin placed it before the passengers. Eventually the stewardess removed their trays, poured out brandy, plumped up pillows for the long night.

“I never told you what Underhill’s old agent told Tina Pumo,” Poole said to Beevers across a dozing Conor Linklater.

Shafts of light pierced the long dark cabin of the 747. Soon Savannah Smiles would be shown, to be followed by a second movie which starred Karl Malden and several Yugoslavians.

“You mean you didn’t want to tell me,” Beevers said. “It must be pretty good.”

“Good enough,” Poole admitted.

Beevers waited. At last he said, “I guess we do have about twenty more hours.”

“I’m just trying to get it all organized.” Poole cleared his throat. “At first, Underhill behaved like any other author. He bitched about the size of his printings, asked where his royalty checks were, things like that. Apparently he was nicer than most writers, or at least no worse than most. He had his odd points, but they didn’t seem serious. He lived in Singapore, and the people at Gladstone House couldn’t write to him directly because even his agent only had a post office box number.”

“Let me guess. Then things took a turn for the worse.”

“Very gradually. He wrote a couple of letters to the marketing people and the publicity department. They weren’t spending enough money on him, they weren’t taking him seriously. He didn’t like his paperback jacket. His print run was too small. Okay. Gladstone decided to put a little more effort into his second book, The Divided Man, and the effort paid off. The book made the paperback best-seller list for a month or two and sold very well.”

“So was our boy happy? Did he send roses to Gladstone’s marketing department?”

“He went off the rails,” Poole admitted. “He sent them a long crazy letter as soon as the book hit the list—it should have got on higher and sooner, the ad campaign wasn’t good enough, he was sick of being stabbed in the back, on and on. The next day another ranting letter showed up. Gladstone got a letter every day for a week, long letters, five and six pages. The last couple threatened them with physical abuse.”

Beevers grinned.

“There was a lot of stuff about them shafting him because he was a Vietnam veteran. I guess he even mentioned Ia Thuc.”

“Hah!”

“Then after the book dropped off the list he began a long fandango about a lawsuit. Weird letters started turning up at Gladstone House from a Singapore lawyer named Ong Pin. Underhill was suing them for two million dollars, that being the amount the lawyer had calculated had been lost to his client through Gladstone’s incompetence. On the other hand, if Gladstone wished to avoid the expense and publicity of a trial, Ong Pin’s client was willing to settle for a single one-time payment of half a million dollars.”

“Which they declined to pay.”

“Especially since they had observed that Ong Pin’s address was the same post office box to which Underhill’s agent, Fenwick Throng, sent his mail and royalty checks.”

“That’s our boy.”

“When they wrote back, giving him the option of taking his next book elsewhere if he was not satisfied with their efforts, he seemed to come to his senses. He even wrote to apologize for losing his temper. And he explained that Ong Pin was a lawyer friend of his who had lost his office, and was temporarily living with him.”

“A flower!”

“Well, anyway … he made the threat of a two-million-dollar lawsuit sound like a drunken prank. Things settled down. But as soon as he submitted his next book, Orchid Blood, he got crazy again and started threatening lawsuits. Ong Pin wrote some sort of goofy screed in the kind of English you get in Japanese instruction manuals, you know? And when the book came out, Underhill mailed a box with dried-up shit in it to the president of Gladstone, Geoffrey Penmaiden, who I guess everybody knew and revered. It was like sending a turd to Maxwell Perkins. Then the book came out and flopped. Just sank out of sight. They haven’t heard a word from him since, and I don’t think they’re too eager to work with him again.”

“He sent shit in a box to Geoffrey Penmaiden? The most famous publisher in America?” Beevers asked.

“I think it had more to do with self-hatred than craziness,” Poole said.

“You think they’re not the same?” Beevers reached over and patted Michael’s knee. “Really.”

When Beevers canted back his seat and closed his eyes, Michael switched on the reading light and picked up his copy of A Beast in View.

At the beginning of Underhill’s first novel, a rich boy named Henry Harper is drafted and sent to basic training in the South. The sort of person who gradually but thoroughly undermines the favorable first impression he creates, Harper is superficially charming, snobbish, selfish. Other people chiefly either disgust or impress him. Of course he detests basic training, and is detested by every other recruit on the base. Eventually he meets Nat Beasley, a black soldier who seems to like him in spite of his faults and who detects a decent person beneath Henry’s snobbery and self-consciousness. Nat Beasley defends Harper and gets him through basic. Much to Harper’s relief, his father, a federal judge in Michigan, is able to fix it that Henry and Beasley are assigned to the same unit in Vietnam. The judge even manages to get Henry and Nat on the same flight from San Francisco to Tan Son Hut. And during the flight, Henry Harper strikes a bargain with Nat Beasley. He says that if Nat continues to protect him, Henry will guarantee him half of all the money he will ever earn or inherit. This is a sum of at least two or three million dollars, and Beasley accepts.

After about a month in the country, the two soldiers get separated from their unit while on patrol. Nat Beasley picks up his M-16 and blows a hole the size of a family Bible in Henry Harper’s chest. Beasley switches dogtags and then destroys Harper’s body so completely that it is utterly unrecognizable. He then takes off cross-country toward Thailand.

Michael read on, flipping pages at the bottom of a shaft of yellow light while an incomprehensible movie played itself out on the small screen before him. Snores and belches from sleeping pediatricians now and then cut across the humming silence of the cabin. Nat Beasley makes a fortune brokering hashish in Bangkok, marries a beautiful whore from Chiang Mai, and flies back to America with a passport made out to Henry Harper. Pun Yin, or one of the other stewardesses, audibly sighed in a last-row seat.

Nat Beasley rents a car at the Detroit airport and drives to Grosse Point with the beautiful Chiang Mai whore beside him. Michael saw him seated at the wheel of the rented car, turning toward his wife as he pointed to Judge Harper’s great white house at the far end of a perfect lawn. Behind these images, accompanying them, arose others—Poole had not spent so many hours in the air since 1967 and moments from his uneasy flight into Vietnam, encased in the self-same uneasiness, twined around the adventures of Nat Beasley, the running grunt.

The strangeness of going to war on a regular commercial flight had stayed with him for the entire day they were in the air. About three-fourths of the passengers were new soldiers like himself, the rest divided between career officers and businessmen. The stewardesses had spoken to him without meeting his eyes, and their smiles had looked as temporary as winces.

Michael remembered looking at his hands and wondering if they would be limp and dead when he returned to America. Why hadn’t he gone to Canada? They didn’t shoot at you in Canada. Why hadn’t he simply stayed in school? What stupid fatalism had ruled his life?

Conor Linklater startled Michael by snapping upright in his seat. He blinked filmy eyes at Michael, said, “Hey, you’re poring over that book like it was the Rosetta stone,” and leaned back, asleep again before his eyes were closed.

Nat Beasley strolls through Judge Harper’s mansion. He muses on the contents of the refrigerator. He stands in the judge’s closet and tries on the judge’s suits. His wife lies across the judge’s bed, flipping through sixty cable channels with the remote-control device.

Pun Yin stood beside Michael with her arms angelically outstretched, floating a blanket down over Conor Linklater’s body. In 1967, a girl with a blonde pageboy tapped his arm to awaken him, grinned brightly over his shoulder, and told him to prepare for descent. His guts felt watery. When the stewardess opened the door, hot moist air invaded the aircraft and Michael’s entire body began to sweat.

Nat Beasley lifts a heavy brown plastic bag from the trunk of a Lincoln town car and drops it into a deep trench between two fir trees. He takes a second, lighter bag from the trunk and drops it on top of the first.

The heat, Michael knew, would rot the shoes right off his feet.

Pun Yin switched off his reading light and closed his book.

3

The General, who was now a storefront preacher in Harlem, had left Tina alone with Maggie for a moment in the clutter of his ornate living room on 125th Street and Broadway. The General had been a friend of Maggie’s father, apparently also a general in the Formosan army, and after General Lah and his wife had been assassinated, the General had brought her to America—and this stuffy apartment in Harlem had been where Maggie had fled! It was a puzzle, a relief, an irritation.

For one thing, his girlfriend turned out to be the daughter of a general. This explained a lot about Maggie: she came by her pride naturally; she was used to getting her own way; she liked to speak in communiqués; and she thought she knew all about soldiers.

“Didn’t you think I was worried about you?”

“You don’t mean worried about me, you mean jealous.”

“What’s wrong with that?”

“Because you don’t own me, Tina. And because it only works when I’m gone and you don’t know where I am. You’re like a little boy, you know?”

He let that one pass.

“Because when I live with you, Tina, you wind up thinking that I’m this half-crazy little punk who really just gets in the way of thinking about business and hanging out with the guys.”

“That just says that you’re jealous, Maggie.”

“Maybe you’re not so dumb after all,” Maggie said, and smiled at him. “But you have too many problems for me.” She was sitting on an ornately brocaded couch with her legs folded under her, wrapped in some loose flowing dark woolen thing that was as Chinese as the couch. The smile made Tina want to put his arms around her. Her hair was different, less scrappy, more like a smooth thatch. Tina knew how Maggie’s heavy silky hair felt in his hands, and he wished he could ruffle it now.

“Are you saying you don’t love me?”

“You don’t stop loving people, Tina,” she said. “But if I moved back in with you, pretty soon you’d be secretly wondering how you could get rid of me—you’re so guilty, you’ll never let yourself get married to anybody. You’ll never even get close.”

“You want to marry me?”

“No.” She watched his suspicious, surprised response. “I said, you have too many problems for me. But that’s not the point. How you behave is the point.”

“Okay, I’m not perfect. Is that what you want me to say? I’d like you to come back downtown with me, and you know it. But I could just as well walk away right now, and you know that too.”

“Think about this, Tina. When I was putting all those ads in the Voice for you?”

He nodded.

“Didn’t you like seeing them?”

He nodded again.

“You looked for them every week?”

Tina nodded yet again.

“Yet you never even considered putting one in yourself, did you?”

“Is that what this is about?”

“Not bad, Tina. I’m glad you didn’t say you were too old for that sort of thing.”

“Maggie, a lot of things are going wrong right now.”

“Did the city close Saigon?”

“I closed it. It was getting to be impossible to cook and kill bugs at the same time. So I decided to concentrate on killing bugs.”

“As long as you don’t get mixed up and start cooking them.”

Annoyed, he shook his head and said, “It’s costing me a ton of money. I’m still paying a lot of salaries.”

“And you’re sorry you didn’t go to Singapore with the little boys.”

“Let’s put it this way. I’d be having more fun than I am now.”

“Right now?”

“Now in general.” He looked at her with love and exasperation, and she looked calmly back. “I didn’t know you wanted me to put ads in the Voice too—otherwise I would have. It never occurred to me.”

She sighed and raised a hand, then slowly let it fall back to her folded knees. “Forget about it. But just remember that I know you a lot better than you’ll ever know me.” She gave him another calm look. “You’re worried about them, aren’t you?”

“Okay, I’m worried about them. Maybe that’s why I wish I was with them.”

She slowly shook her head. “I can’t believe that you get half-killed and think that you should be able to go on the way you did before—like nothing happened.”

“Plenty happened, I don’t mind admitting it.”

“You’re scared, you’re scared, you’re scared!”

“Okay, I’m scared.” He exhaled noisily. “I don’t even like going out alone in the daytime. At night I hear noises. I keep thinking—well, weird shit. About Nam.”

“All the time, or just at night?”

“Well, I can catch myself thinking weird shit at any time of the day or night, if that’s what you mean.”

Maggie swung her legs out from beneath her. “Okay, I’ll come down and stay with you for a while. As long as you remember that you aren’t the only one who can walk away.”

“How the hell could I forget that?”

And that was all it took. He did not even have to confess to her that right before he had come uptown, he’d been standing in his kitchen holding a bottle of beer and for a second had known that it was Ba Muy Ba and that the bullet with his name on it, the one that had missed him all those years ago, was still circling the world, homing in on him.

The General who was now a preacher stared at Tina just as if he was still a pissed-off general, and then barked a few words at Maggie in Chinese. Maggie answered with a phrase that sounded sullen and adolescent, and the General proved to Tina once and for all that he would never comprehend the Cantonese language by beaming at Maggie and taking her in his arms and kissing the top of her head. He even shook Tina’s hand and beamed at him too.

“I think he’s happy to get rid of you,” Tina said as they waited for the slow-moving, odorous elevator.

“He’s a Christian, he believes in love.”

He could not tell if she were being sardonic or literal. This was often the case with Maggie. The elevator clanked up to the General’s floor and opened its mouth. A sour stench of urine rolled out. He could not let Maggie see that he was afraid of the elevator. She was already inside, looking at him intently. Tina swallowed and stepped into the reeking mouth of the elevator.

The doors slammed behind him.

He managed to smile at Maggie. Getting inside was the hardest part.

“What did he say to you, just before we left?”

Maggie patted his hand. “He said you were a good old soldier, and I should take care of you and not get too mad at you.” She glinted up at him. “So I told him you were an asshole and I was going back with you only because my English was getting rusty.”

Downstairs, Maggie insisted on taking the subway, and demonstrated that she could still do an old trick of hers.

They had reached the top of the steps and were moving toward the token booth. The wind cut through his heavy coat and lifted the hood against the back of his head. When he looked around for Maggie and did not see her, the moment filled with a bright dazzle of panic.

A noisy knot of boys in black jackets and knit caps, one of them toting a huge radio, were punching the air and bopping along the platform in time to a Kurtis Blow song. Black women in heavy coats leaned against the railing and paid them no attention. Far ahead, a few men and women stared almost aimlessly down the tracks. Tina was suddenly, painfully aware of how high up in the air he was—suspended like a diver on a board. He wished that he was holding onto a railing—it was as if the wind could lift him off the platform and smack him down onto Broadway.

He had automatically fallen into line at the token booth. The boys had collected up at the head of the platform. Tina reached into his pocket, furious with Maggie for disappearing and furious with himself for caring.

Then he heard her giggle, and he snapped his head sideways to see her already past the turnstile and out on the platform beside the impassive women. Her hands were shoved deep in the pockets of her down coat, and she was grinning at him.

He got his token and went through the turnstile. He felt absurdly tangible. “How did you do that?”

“Since you wouldn’t be able to do it anyhow, why should I tell you?”

When the train roared up before them, she took his hand and pulled him into the subway car.

“Are they in Singapore yet?” she asked him.

“They got there three or four days ago, I think.”

“My brother says they’re going to Taipei too.”

“I guess it’s possible. They’ll go wherever they have to go to find Underhill.”

Maggie gave him a half-scathing, half-sympathetic look. “Poor Tina.” She took Tina’s hand into her soft, down-padded lap.

He sat beside her in the loud train, his fear now mostly under control. No one was staring at him. His hand rested within both of Maggie’s funny little hands, in her lap.

South they flew beneath Manhattan in the filthy train, Maggie Lah with her large secret feelings and Tina Pumo with his, which ran queerly parallel to those of his friends under the patient gaze of Pun Yin. I love Maggie and I am afraid of that. She’s a kind of original. She leaves me in order to keep me, she’s smart enough to get out before I kick her out, and she proves it by coming back as soon as I really need her. And maybe Underhill is crazy and maybe I’m crazy too, but I hope they find him and bring him back.

Here is Tim Underhill, Tina thought, here is Underhill out in a section of Camp Crandall known familiarly to the madmen of the good old Rearing Elephant as Ozone Park. Ozone Park is a bleak section of wasteland about the size of two city blocks between the rear of Manly’s “club” and the wire perimeter. Its amenities consist of one piss-tube, which provides relief, and a huge pile of empty metal barrels, which offers shade and a pervasive smell of oil. Ozone Park does not officially exist, so it is safe from the incursions of the Tin Man, for whom, in true army fashion, should exactly equals is. Here is Tim Underhill, in the company of a number of comrades wasted on Si Van Vo’s 100s and getting more wasted on a little white powder Underhill has produced from one of his pockets. Here is Underhill recounting to all the others, who include besides myself, M.O. Dengler, Spanky Burrage, Michael Poole, Norman Peters, and Victor Spitalny, who just lurks around the edges of the barrels, now and then tossing little stones toward the others, the tale of the running grunt. A young man of good family, Underhill says, the son of a federal judge, is drafted and sent to good old Fort Sill in beautiful Lawton, Oklahoma.…

“I sure get sick of the sound of your voice,” sneers Spitalny from off to the side, near the barrels. He flings a stone at Underhill and strikes him in the middle of his chest.

“You’re still nothing but a fucking queer,” Spitalny says.

—And you’re still a shithead, Pumo remembers saying eloquently to Spitalny, who returned the favor by throwing a stone at him, too.

It took a long time to adjust to the “flowers,” because it took a long time to understand that Underhill never corrupted anybody, that he could not corrupt anybody because he himself was not corrupt. Though most of the soldiers Puma knew claimed to despise Asian women, nearly all of them used whores and bar girls. The exceptions were Dengler, who clung to his virginity in the belief that it was the talisman that kept him alive, and Underhill, who picked up young men. Pumo wondered if the others knew that Underhill’s flowers were in their early twenties, and that there had been only two of them. Pumo knew this because he had met them both. The first was a one-armed former ARVN with a girl’s face who lived with his mother in Hue and made a living grilling meat at a food stall until Underhill began to support him. The other flower actually worked in the Hue flower market, and Pumo had eaten dinner with the young man, Underhill, the young man’s mother, and his sister. He had seen such a remarkable quantity of tenderness flow among the other four people at the table that he would have been adopted by them if he could. Underhill supported this family, too. And now in an odd way Pumo supported them, for when Underhill’s best-loved flower, Vinh, finally managed to locate him in New York in 1975, Pumo remembered the excellence of the meal as well as the warmth and kindness in the little house, and hired him. Vinh had undergone deep changes—he looked older, harder, less joyous. (He had also fathered a child, lost a wife, and served a long apprenticeship in the kitchen of a Vietnamese restaurant in Paris.) None of the others knew Vinh’s history. Harry Beevers must have seen him once with Underhill and then forgotten the occasion, because for reasons of his own Beevers had convinced himself that Vinh was from An Lat, a village near Ia Thuc—whenever Beevers saw either Vinh or his daughter, he began to look persecuted.

“You look almost happy now,” Maggie said to him.

“Underhill can’t be Koko,” Tina replied. “The son of a bitch was crazy, but he was crazy in the sanest possible way.”

Maggie did not say or do anything, did not change her grip on his hand, did not even blink at him, so he could not tell if she had heard him. Maybe she felt insulted. The noisy subway clattered into their station and came to a jerky stop. The doors whooshed open, and Pumo froze for a second. As the noises outside the car resolved themselves, Maggie pulled him to his feet. When Pumo got out of the train he bent over and hugged Maggie as hard as he could.

“I love you too,” she said. “But I don’t know if I’m being crazy in a sane way, or vice versa.”

She gasped when they turned into Grand Street.

“I suppose I should have prepared you,” Pumo said.

Stacks of bricks, piles of boards, bags of plaster, and sawn lengths of discarded pipe covered the sidewalk outside Saigon. Workmen in green parkas and heavy gloves, heads bent against the wind, wheeled barrows of rubble out of the front door and laboriously dumped them into a skip. Two trucks stood double-parked beside the skip, one marked with the name SCAPELLI CONSTRUCTION CO., the other bearing the stenciled legend MCLENDON EXTERMINATION. Men in hard hats wandered back and forth between the restaurant and the trucks. Maggie saw Vinh talking to a woman holding a wide set of unrolled blueprints, and the chef winked at her, then waved at Pumo. “Must talk,” he called out.

“What’s it like inside?” Maggie asked.

“Not as bad as it looks from here. The whole kitchen is torn apart, of course, and most of the dining room is too. Vinh’s been helping me out, cracking the whip when I’m not around. We had to take down the whole back wall, and then we had to rebuild some of the basement.” He was fitting his key into the white door next to Saigon’s door, and Vinh shook the architect’s hand and came over in a rush before he could open it.

“Nice to see you again, Maggie,” Vinh said, and followed it with something in Vietnamese to Pumo. Tina answered in Vietnamese, groaned, and turned to Maggie with increased worry plain on his face.

“Floor fall down?”

“Someone broke in this morning. I haven’t been in since about eight, when I went out to get breakfast and check in with some suppliers. We’re expanding the kitchen, as long as we have to do all this work, and as usual I have to chase around all over the place, which I was doing until I was stopped in my tracks by the back page of the Village Voice.”

“How could anybody break in with all this going on?”

“Oh,” he said. “They didn’t break into the restaurant. They broke into my loft. Vinh heard someone moving around upstairs, but he thought it was me. Later he went up to ask me about something, and realized that it must have been an intruder.”

Tina looked almost fearfully up the narrow flight of steps that led to his loft.

“I don’t suppose Dracula came back to pay a social call,” she said.

“No, I don’t suppose so either.” Tina did not sound convinced of this. “The bitch might have remembered some stuff she forgot to steal, though.”

“It’s just a burglar,” Maggie protested. “Come on, let’s get out of the cold.” She took a couple of steps up the stairs, then reached down, grasped Tina’s elbows with both hands, and pulled him toward her. “You know when most burglaries are committed, white boy? Around ten in the morning, when the bad guys know everybody else is at work.”

“I know that,” Tina smiled at her. “Honest, I know that.”

“And if little Dracula comes back for your body, I’ll turn her into … hmm …” She rolled her eyes up and stuck a forefinger into her cheek. “Into egg drop soup.”

“Into Duck Saigon. Remember where you are.”

“So let’s go up and get it over with.”

“Like I said.”

He followed her up the stairs to the door of his loft. Unlike the white door downstairs, it was locked.

“One better than Dracula,” Maggie said.

“It locks when you close it. I’m still not sure it wasn’t goddamned Dracula.” Pumo unlocked the door and stepped inside ahead of Maggie.

His coats and outerjackets still hung on their hooks, his boots were still lined up beneath them.

“Okay so far.”

“Stop being such a coward,” Maggie said, and gave him a push. A little way along was the door to his bathroom. Nothing in the bathroom was disturbed, but Pumo had a vivid vision of Dracula standing in front of the shaving mirror, bending her knees and fluffing up her Mohawk.

The bedroom was next. Pumo took in the unmade bed and empty television stand—he had left the bed that way, and had not yet replaced the nineteen-inch Sony Dracula had stolen from this room. The closet doors hung open, and a few of his suits drooped from their hangers toward an untidy heap of other clothes.

“Goddamn, it was Dracula.” Pumo felt a layer of sweat pop out over what seemed his entire body.

Maggie looked up at him questioningly.

“The first time she stole my favorite jacket and my favorite pair of cowboy boots. SHIT! She loves my wardrobe!” Pumo slammed his fists against the sides of his head.

He was instantly across the room, lifting articles of clothing from the closet floor, examining them and putting them back on hangers.

“Did Vinh call the police? Do you want to call them?”

Pumo looked up at Maggie from an armload of clothes. “What’s the point? Even if they find her and by some miracle put her away, she’ll be back outside in about a day and a half. That’s how we do it in this country. In Taipei you probably have an entirely different system.”

Maggie leaned against the doorframe. Her arms hung straight down, parallel to each other, at an angle to her body. She had funny knobby little hands, Pumo noticed for perhaps the thousandth time. She said, “In Taipei, we staple their tongues to their upper lips and hack three fingers off each hand with a dull knife.”

“Now that’s what I call justice,” Pumo said.

“In Taipei, that’s what we call liberalism,” Maggie said. “Is anything missing?”

“Hang on, hang on.” Pumo put the last suit on its hanger, the hanger on the rail. “We haven’t even gotten to the living room yet. I’m not even sure I want to get to the living room.”

“I’ll look in there, if you like. As long as we can eventually come back in here and take our clothes off and do all those things we were originally intending to do.”

He looked at her with undisguised astonishment.

“I’ll make sure the enemy has retreated from the living room,” Maggie said in her flat precise voice. She disappeared.

“GODDAMN IT! DAMN IT!” Pumo yelled a few seconds later. “I KNEW IT!”

Maggie leaned into the bedroom again, looking startled and a little breathless. Her heavy black hair swung, and her lips were parted. “You called?”

“I don’t believe it.” Pumo was gazing at the empty night-stand beside his bed, and looked palely up at Maggie. “How does the living room look?”

“Well, in the second I had before I was distracted by the screams of a madman, it appeared to be slightly rumpled but otherwise okay.”

“It was Dracula, all right.” Pumo did not like the sound of slightly rumpled. “I knew it, damn it. She came back and stole all the same stuff all over again.” He pointed to the nightstand. “I had to buy a new clock radio, and that’s gone. I got a new Watchman, and the asshole stole that too.”

Pumo watched beautiful little Maggie come floating into his bedroom in her loose flowing Chinese garment and mentally saw a fearful vision of his living room. He saw the cushions ripped, the books tumbled from the shelves, his desk upended, his living room television gone, the answering machine gone, his checkbooks, the ornamental screen he brought back from Vietnam, his VCR, and most of his good liquor, all gone. Pumo did not consider himself immoderately attached to his possessions, but he braced himself for the loss of these things. He would mind most of all about the couch, which Vinh had made and upholstered for him by hand.

Maggie lifted a drooping corner of a blanket with one hovering foot, and uncovered the clock radio and the new Watchman, which had apparently fallen from the nightstand sometime in the morning.

Without a word, she led him into the living room. Pumo admitted to himself that it looked almost exactly as it had when he left it.

The smooth, plump, speckled blue fabric still lay unblemished over Vinh’s long couch, the books still stood, in their customary disorder, on the shelves and, in piles, on the coffee tables; the television stood, stupid as an idol, in its place on the shelf beneath the VCR and the showy stereo. Pumo looked at the records on the shelf beneath and knew immediately that someone had flipped through them.

At the far end of the room two steps led up to a platform, also carpentered by Vinh. Here were shelves stacked with bottles—a couple of shelves crammed with cookbooks, too—a sink, a concealed icebox. An armchair, a lamp. Shoved into a corner of the platform was Pumo’s desk and leather desk chair, which had been pulled out and moved to one side, as if the intruder had wished to spend time at the desk.

“It doesn’t look too bad,” he said to Maggie. “She came in here and looked around, but she didn’t do any damage I can see.”

He moved more confidently into the room and closely examined the coffee table, the books, the records, and the magazines. Dracula had lingered here—she had moved everything around a little.

“The Battalion Newsletter,” he finally said.

“The what?”

“She took the Ninth Battalion Newsletter. It comes twice a year—I hardly even look at it, to tell you the truth, but I never throw out the old one until I get the new one.”

“She’s queer for soldiers.”

Pumo shrugged and went up the steps to the platform. His checkbook and the Saigon checkbook were still on the desk, but had been moved. And there beside them was the missing Newsletter, lying open to a half-page photo of Colonel Emil Ellenbogen, retiring from the second-rate post in Arkansas to which the Tin Man had been sent after his disappointing term in Vietnam.

“No, the bitch just moved it,” he called down to Maggie, who was standing in the middle of the room with her arms wrapped about herself.

“Is everything on your desk?”

“I don’t know. I think something’s gone, but I can’t tell what it is.”

He surveyed his messy desktop again. Checkbooks. Telephone. Answering machine, message light flashing. Pumo pushed rewind, then playback. Silence played itself back. Had she called first to make sure he was out? The more Pumo looked at the top of his desk, the more he thought something was missing, but he could not attach this feeling to a specific object. Beside the answering machine was a book called Nam which he was certain had been on one of the coffeetables for months—he had given up in the middle of the book, but kept it on the table because to admit that he was never going to finish it felt like opening the door to the worst kind of luck.

Dracula had picked up the Newsletter and the copy of Nam and set them down on the desk while she mused through his checkbooks. Probably she had touched everything on the desk with her long strong fingers. For a second Pumo felt sweaty and dizzy.

In the middle of the night Tina woke up with his heart pounding, a mad terrible dream just disappearing into the darkness. He turned his head and saw Maggie fast asleep on the pillow, her face curled up into itself like the curl of her hand. He could just make out her features. Oh, he loved seeing Maggie Lah asleep. Without the animation of her character her features seemed anonymous and wholly Chinese.

He stretched out again beside her and lightly touched her hand. What were they doing now, his friends? He saw them walking down a wide sidewalk, their arms linked. Tim Underhill could not be Koko, and as soon as they found him they would know it. Then Tina realized that if Underhill was not Koko, someone else was—someone circling in on them, circling in on all of them the way the bullet with his name on it still circled the world, never falling or resting.

In the morning he told Maggie that he had to do something to help the other guys—he wanted to see if he could find out more about Koko’s victims, find out more that way.

“Now you’re talking,” Maggie told him.

4

Why questions and answers?

Because they go in a straight line. Because they are a way out. Because they help me to think.

What is there to think about?

The usual wreckage. The running girl.

Do you imagine that she was real?

Exactly. I imagine she was real.

What else is there to think about?

The usual subject, my subject. Koko. More than ever now.

Why more than ever now?

Because he has come back. Because I think I saw him. I know I saw him.

You imagined you saw him?

It is the same thing.

What did he look like?

He looked like a dancing shadow. He looked like death.

Did he appear to you in a dream?

He appeared, if that is the word, on the street. Death appeared on the street, as the girl appeared on the street. Tremendous clamor accompanied the appearance of the girl, ordinary street noise, that earthly clamor, surrounded the shadow. He was covered, though not visibly, with the blood of others. The girl, who was visible only to me, was covered with her own. The Pan-feeling poured from both of them.

What feeling is that?

The feeling that we have only the shakiest hold on the central stories of our lives. Hal Esterhaz in The Divided Man. The girl comes to speak to me with her terror, with her extremity, she runs toward me out of chaos and night, she has chosen me. Because I chose Hal Esterhaz, and because I chose Nat Beasley. Not yet, she says, not yet. The story is not yet over.

Why did Hal Esterhaz kill himself?

Because he could no longer bear what he was only just beginning to know.

Is that where imagination takes you?

If it’s good enough.

Were you terrified when you saw the girl?

I blessed her.

As soon as the plane took off, Koko too would be a man in motion.

This is one thing Koko knew: all travel is travel in eternity. Thirty thousand feet above the earth, clocks run backward, darkness and light change places freely.

When it got dark, Koko thought, you could lean close to the little window and if you were ready, if your soul was half in eternity already, you could see God’s tusked grey face leaning toward you in the blackness.

Koko smiled, and the pretty stewardess in first class smiled back at him. She leaned forward, bearing a tray. “Sir, would you prefer orange juice or champagne this morning?”

Koko shook his head.

The earth sucked at the feet of the plane, reached up through the body of the plane and tried to pull Koko down into itself, suck suck, the poor earth loved what was eternal and the eternal loved and pitied the earth.

“Is there a movie on this flight?”

“Never Say Never Again,” the stewardess said over her shoulder. “The new James Bond movie.”

“Excellent,” Koko said, with real inward hilarity. “I never say never, myself.”

She laughed dutifully and went on her way.

Other passengers filed down the aisles, carrying suitbags, shopping bags, wicker baskets, books. Two Chinese businessmen took the seats before Koko, who heard them snap open their briefcases as soon as they sat down.

A middle-aged blonde stewardess in a blue coat leaned down and smiled a false machine smile at him.

“What shall we call you today, hmm?” She raised a clipboard with a seating chart into his field of vision. Koko slowly lowered his newspaper. “You are …?” She looked at him, waiting for a reply.

What shall we call you today, hmm? Dachau, let’s call you Lady Dachau. “Why don’t you call me Bobby?”

“Well then, call you Bobby is what I’ll do,” the woman said, and scrawled Bobby in the space marked 4B on the chart.

In his pockets, Roberto Ortiz had carried his passports and a pocketful of cards and ID, as well as six hundred dollars American and three hundred Singapore. Big time! In a pocket of his blazer Koko had found a room key from the Shangri-La, where else would an ambitious young American be staying?

In Miss Balandran’s bag Koko had found a hot comb, a diaphragm, a tube of spermicidal jelly, a little plastic holder containing a tube of Darkie toothpaste and a toothbrush, a fresh pair of underpants and a new pair of tights, a bottle of lip gloss and a lip brush, a vial of mascara, a blush brush, a rat-tailed comb, three inches of a cut-down white plastic straw, a little leather kit ranked with amyl nitrate poppers, a tattered Barbara Cartland paperback, a compact, half a dozen loose Valium, lots of crumpled-up Kleenex, several sets of keys, and a big roll of bills that turned out to be four hundred and fifty-three Singapore dollars.

Koko put the money in his pocket and dropped the rest onto the bathroom floor.

After he had washed his hands and face he took a cab to the Shangri-La.

Roberto Ortiz lived on West End Avenue in New York City.

On West End Avenue, could you feel how the lords of the earth, how God himself, hungered for mortality? Angels flew down West End Avenue, their raincoats billowing in the wind.

When Koko walked out of the Shangri-La he was wearing two pairs of trousers, two shirts, a cotton sweater, and a tweed jacket. In the carry-on bag in his left hand were two rolled-up suits, three more shirts, and a pair of excellent black shoes.

A cab took Koko down leafy Grove Road to Orchard Road and on through clean, orderly Singapore to an empty building on a circular street off Bahru Road, and on this journey he imagined that he stood in an open car going down Fifth Avenue. Ticker tape and confetti rained down upon him and all the other lords of the earth, cheers exploded from the crowds packing the sidewalks.

Beevers and Poole and Pumo and Underhill and Tattoo Tiano and Peters and sweet Spanky B, and everybody else, all the lords of the earth, who may abide the day of their coming? For behold, darkness shall cover the earth. And the lawyer boy, Ted Bundy, and Juan Corona who labored in fields, and he who dressed in Chicago as a clown, John Wayne Gacy, and Son of Sam, and Wayne Williams out of Atlanta, and the Zebra Killer, and they who left their victims on hillsides, and the little guy in the movie Ten Rillington Place, and Lucas, who was probably the greatest of them all. The warriors of heaven, having their day. Marching along with all those never to be caught, all those showing presentable faces to the world, living modestly, moving from town to town, paying their bills, all those deep embodied secrets.

The refiner’s fire.

Koko crawled in through his basement window and saw his father seated impatient and stormy on a packing crate. Goddamned idiot, his father said. You took too much, think they’ll ever give someone like you a parade? We waste no part of the animal.

He spread the money out on the gritty floor, and that did it, the old man smiled and said, There is no substitute for good butter, and Koko closed his eyes and saw a row of elephants trudging past, nodding with grave approval.

On his unrolled sleeping bag he placed Roberto Ortiz’s passports and spread out the five Rearing Elephant cards so he could read the names. Then he rooted in a box of papers and found the copy of the American magazine, New York, which he had picked up in a hotel lobby two days after the hostage parade. Beneath the title, letters of fire spelled out: TEN HOT NEW PLACES.

Ia Thuc, Hue, Da Nang, these were hot places. And Saigon. Here is a hot new place, here is Saigon. The magazine fell open automatically to the picture and the paragraphs about the hot new place. (The Mayor ate there.)

Koko lay sprawled on the floor in his new suit and looked as deeply as he could into the picture of the hot new place. Deep green fronds waved across the white walls. Vietnamese waiters in white shirts whipped between crowded tables, going so fast they were only blurs of light. Koko could hear loud voices, knives and forks clanking against china. Corks popped. In the picture’s foreground, Tina Pumo leaned against his bar and grimaced—Pumo the Puma leaned right out of the frame of the picture and spoke to Koko in a voice that stood out against the clamor of his restaurant the way a saxophone solo stands out against the sound of a big band.

Pumo said: “Don’t judge me, Koko.” Pumo looked shit-scared.

This was how they talked when they knew they stood before eternity’s door.

“I understand, Tina,” Koko said to the little anxious man in the picture.

The article said that Saigon served some of the most varied and authentic Vietnamese food in New York. The clientele was young, hip, and noisy. The duck was “heaven-sent” and every soup was “divine.”

“Just tell me this, Tina,” Koko said. “What is this shit about ‘divine’? You think soup can be divine?”

Tina blotted his brow with a crisp white handkerchief and turned back into a picture.

And there it was, the address and the telephone number, in the soft cool whisper of italics.

A man sat down beside Koko in the fourth row of the first-class compartment, glanced sideways, and then buckled himself into his seat. Koko closed his eyes and snow fell from a deep cold heaven onto a layer of ice hundreds of feet deep. Far off, dim in the snowy air, ranged the broken teeth of glaciers. God hovered invisibly over the frozen landscape, panting with impatient rage.

You know what you know. Forty, forty-one years old. Thick fluffy richboy-blond hair, and thin brown glasses, heavy face. Heavy butcher’s hands holding a day-old copy of the New York Times. Six-hundred-dollar suit.

The plane taxied down the runway and lifted itself smoothly into the air, the envious mouths and fingers fell away, and the jet’s nose pointed west, toward San Francisco. The man beside Koko is a rich businessman with butcher’s hands.

A black-naped tern flies across the face of the Singapore one-dollar note. A black band like a burglar’s mask covers its eyes, and behind it hovers a spinning chaos of intertwined circles twisting together like the strands of a cyclone. So the bird agitates its wings in terror, and darkness overtakes the land.

Mr. Lucas? Mr. Bundy?

Banking, the man says. Investment banking. We do a lot of work in Singapore.

Me too.

Hell of a nice place, Singapore. And if you’re in the money business, it’s hot, and I mean hot.

One of the hot new places.

“Bobby,” the stewardess asks, “what would you like to drink?”

Vodka, ice-cold.

“Mr. Dickerson?”

Mr. Dickerson will have a Miller High Life.

In Nam we used to say: Vodka martini on the rocks, hold the vermouth, hold the olive, hold the rocks.

Oh, you were never in Nam?

Sounds funny, but you missed a real experience. Not that I’d go back, Christ no. You were probably on the other side, weren’t you? No offense, we’re all on the same side now, God works in funny ways. But I did all my demonstrating with an M-16, hah hah.

Bobby Ortiz is the name. I’m in the travel industry.

Bill? Pleased to meet you, Bill. Yes, it’s a long flight, might as well be friends.

Sure, I’ll have another vodka, and give another beer to my old pal Bill here.

Ah, I was in I Corps, near the DMZ, up around Hue.

You want to see a trick I learned in Nam? Good—I’ll save it, though, it’ll be better later, you’ll enjoy it, I’ll do it later.

Bobby and Bill Dickerson ate their meals in companionable silence. Clocks spun in no-time.

“You ever gamble?” Koko asked.

Dickerson glanced at him, his fork halfway to his mouth. “Now and then. Only a little.”

“Interested in a little wager?”

“Depends on the wager.” Dickerson popped the forkful of chicken into his mouth.

“Oh, you won’t want to do it. It’s too strange. Let’s forget it.”

“Come on,” Dickerson said. “You brought this up, don’t chicken out now.”

Oh, Koko liked Billy Dickerson. Nice blue linen suit, nice thin glasses, nice big Rolex. Billy Dickerson played racquetball, Billy Dickerson wore a sweatband across his forehead and had a hell of a good backhand, real aggressor.

“Well, I guess being on a plane reminded me of this. It’s something we used to do in Nam.”

Definite look of interest on good old Billy’s part.

“When we’d come into an LZ.”

“Landing Zone?”

“You got it. LZ’s were all different, see? Some were popping, and some were like dropping into the middle of a church picnic in Nebraska. So we’d make the Fatality Wager.”

“Like you’d bet on how many people would get killed? Buy the farm, like you guys used to say?”

Buy the farm. Oh, you sweetheart.

“More on if someone would get killed. How much money you carrying in your wallet?”

“More than usual,” Billy said.

“Five, six hundred?”

“Less than that.”

“Let’s make it two hundred. If somebody dies at the San Francisco airport while we’re in the terminal, you pay me two hundred. If not, I’ll give you one hundred.”

“You’ll give me two to one on someone dying in the terminal while we’re going through customs, getting our bags, stuff like that?”

“That’s the deal.”

“I’ve never seen anyone kick off in an airport,” Billy said, shaking his head, smiling. He was going to take the bet.

“I have,” Koko said. “Upon occasion.”

“Well, you got yourself a bet,” Billy said, and they shook hands.

After a time Lady Dachau pulled down the movie screen. Most of the cabin lights went out. Billy Dickerson closed Megatrends, tilted his seat way back, and went to sleep.

Koko asked Lady Dachau for another vodka and settled back to watch the movie.

The good James Bond saw Koko as soon as he came on the screen. (The bad James Bond was a sleepy Englishman who looked a little bit like Peters, the medic who had been killed in a helicopter crash. The good James Bond looked a little like Tina Pumo.) He walked straight up to the camera and said, “You’re fine, you have nothing to worry about, everybody does what they have to do, that’s what war teaches you.” He gave Koko a little half-smile. “You did well with your new friend, son. I noticed that. Remember now—”

Ready on the right? Ready on the left? Lock and load.

Good afternoon, gentlemen, and welcome to the Republic of South Vietnam. It is presently fifteen-twenty, November three, 1967. You will be taken to the Long Binh Replacement Center, where you will receive your individual unit assignments.

Remember the darkness of the tents. Remember the metal lockers. Remember the mosquito netting on the T-bars. Remember the muddy floors. Remember how the tents were like dripping caves.

Gentlemen, you are part of a great killing machine.

This is your weapon. It may save your life.

Nobility, grace, gravity.

Koko saw an elephant striding down a civilized European avenue. The elephant was buttoned into an elegant green suit and tipped his hat to all the charming ladies. Koko smiled at James Bond, who jumped out of his fancy car and looked Koko straight in the eye, and in quiet clear italics said, Time to face the elephant again, Koko.

A long time later they stood in the aisle, holding their carry-on baggage and waiting for Lady Dachau to open the door. At eye level directly before Koko hung the jacket of Billy Dickerson’s blue linen suit, all correctly webbed and criss-crossed with big easy-going, casual-looking wrinkles that made you want to be wrinkled yourself, as easy and casual as that. When Koko glanced up he saw Billy Dickerson’s blond hair ruffling out over the perfect collar of the linen suit. A pleasant smell of soap and aftershave emanated from good old Bill, who had disappeared into the forward toilet for nearly half an hour that morning while no-time turned into San Francisco time.

“Hey,” Dickerson said, looking over his shoulder at Koko, “if you want to call off that bet it’s okay with me, Bobby. Pretty crazy.”

“Indulge me,” Koko said.

Lady Dachau got the signal she was waiting for and opened the door.

They walked into a corridor of cool fire. Angels with flaming swords waved them forward. Koko heard distant mortar fire, a sign that nothing truly serious was happening: the Tin Man had just sent out a few boys to use up some of this month’s quota of the taxpayers’ money. The cool fire, frozen into patterns like stone, wavered beneath their feet. This was America again. The angels with flaming swords gave flaming smiles.

“You remember me mentioning that trick?”

Dickerson nodded and lifted an eyebrow, and he and Koko strolled along toward the baggage area. The angels with flaming swords gradually lost their numinosity and became uniformed stewardesses pulling wheeled carts behind them. The flames curling in the stone hardened into stiff cold patterns.

The corridor went straight for perhaps twenty yards, then slanted off to the right.

They turned the corner.

“A men’s room, thank God,” Dickerson said, and sped on ahead and shouldered open the door.

Smiling, Koko sauntered after, imagining an empty white-tiled place.

A woman in a bright yellow dress who passed before him exuded the hot, bloody aroma of the eternal world. For a moment a bright sword flickered in her hand. He pushed open the door of the men’s room and had to shift his case to one side to swing open another door almost immediately behind it.

A bald man stood at one of the sinks, washing his hands. Beside him a shirtless man leaned over a sink and scraped lather from his face with a blue plastic razor. Koko’s stomach tightened. Good old Billy was far down a row of urinals, more than half of which were occupied.

Koko saw his tense, haunted-looking face in the mirror. He jumped at himself out of his own eyes.

He went to the first urinal and pretended to pee, waiting for everyone to leave him alone with Dickerson. Something had gotten loose inside him, buzzed under his ribs, made him so lightheaded that he wobbled.

For an instant he thought he was already in Honduras, his work was either completed or ready to be begun all over again. Under an immense sun little brick-colored people milled around a comically provincial airport with tumble-down shacks, lounging policeman, and dozing hounds.

Dickerson zipped up, moved swiftly to the sink, passed his hands through a stream of water and a stream of air, and was gone almost before Koko came back to the men’s room.

He hurried out. The loose thing in his chest buzzed painfully against his ribs.

Dickerson was moving quickly into a huge room where carousels like black volcanos whirred and gouted suitcases down their ribbed flanks. Nearly everyone on their flight was already gathered around the second carousel. Koko watched Dickerson work his way around the edge of the people waiting for their bags. The thing in his chest slipped down into his stomach, where it flew like an angry bee into his intestines.

Sweating now, Koko crept through the people who stood between himself and Dickerson. Lightly, almost reverently, he brushed his fingers over the linen sleeve that held Dickerson’s left arm.

“Hey, Bobby, I don’t feel right, you know,” Dickerson said, bending forward and lifting a big Vuitton suitcase off the belt.

Koko knew one thing: a woman had picked out that bag.

“About the money thing. Let’s eighty-six the whole idea, okay?”

Koko nodded miserably. His own beat-up case was nowhere on the carousel. Everything had gone slightly blurry around the edges, as if a fine mist hung in the air. A tall black-haired woman who was a living sword plucked a tiny case off the belt and—Koko saw through the descending mist—smiled at Dickerson.

“Take care,” Dickerson said.

A uniformed man walked unerringly up to Dickerson and passed him through customs with a few questions. Dickerson strode off to a window to have his passport stamped.

Dazed, Koko saw his own suitcase thump down the side of the carousel and glide past him before he thought to lift it off the belt. He watched Dickerson’s steadily dwindling body pass through a door marked EXIT-TRANSPORTATION.

In Customs the inspector called him “Mr. Ortiz” and searched the ripped lining of his suitcase for diamonds or heroin.

At Immigration he saw flaming wings sprout from the uniformed shoulders of the man in the booth, and the man stamped his passport and welcomed him back to the country, and Koko grabbed his old case and his carry-on bag and ran to the nearest men’s room. He dropped the bags just inside the door and sprinted into an open toilet. As soon as he sat down his bowels opened, then opened again. Fire dripped and spurted from him. For a moment Koko’s stomach felt as though a long needle had pierced it; then he bent forward and vomited between his shoes. He sat in his own stink for a long time, his bags forgotten, thinking only of what was there before him.

Eventually he wiped himself off, moved to the sink, washed his face and his hands, put his head beneath the cold water.

Koko took his bags outside and waited for the transfer bus to take him to the terminal from which his New York flight would leave. The air smelled of chemicals and machinery: everything before him looked two-dimensional and newly washed, drained of color.

In the second terminal Koko found a bar and ordered a beer. He felt that time had stopped—that it waited for him to wake it into life again. His breathing was shallow and slightly rushed. At the front of his forehead was a light, empty sensation, as if some moderate pain had just ceased. He could remember very little of what had happened to him during the past twenty-four hours.

He could remember Lady Dachau.

Gentlemen, you are part of a great killing machine.

Ten minutes before boarding, Koko went to his gate and stood looking out the window, an unobtrusive man seeing an elephant in a suit and hat rearing up out of a wide dark pool of blood. When the first-class passengers were called, he filed on board and took his seat. He told the stewardess to call him Bobby.

Then everything really was all right, the sweet ache and buzz came alive within him again, for a pudgy man in his thirties dropped a briefcase into the aisle seat, shrugged off a green knapsack and set it beside the briefcase, removed his suit jacket to expose a striped shirt and dark blue suspenders, and snapped his fingers for the girl to take his jacket. The man shoved the knapsack into the overhead compartment, picked up his briefcase and squeezed into his seat. He scowled at Koko, then began to root through the contents of the briefcase.

“I don’t suppose you’re a betting man,” Koko said.

1

Michael Poole stood at the window of his hotel room, looking down with an almost alarming sense of freedom at a long stretch of Singapore. The surprisingly green, surprisingly neat scene before him fell away to what he supposed was the east. A long way off, tall office blocks rose in a clean white cluster that might have been a transplanted section of midtown New York City. Nothing else in the scene before Poole even faintly resembled Manhattan. Trees with broad crowns that looked as edible as vegetables filled most of the space between himself and the tall white buildings, and because Michael was far above the tops of these trees, they seemed almost carpetlike. Between the broad areas filled in by the treetops swept wide roadways with smooth unblemished surfaces. Expensive cars coursed along these perfect roads, as many Jaguars and Mercedes as on Rodeo Drive. Here and there, through gaps in the trees, tiny people drifted along broad malls. Nearer the hotel, bungalows of pink or creamy stucco with wide porches, columns, and tiled roofs occupied green hillsides. Some of these had open courtyards, and in one of them a stocky woman in a bright yellow robe hung out her wash. In the immediate foreground, not at all obscured by the ubiquitous trees, the swimming pools of his own and other hotels sparkled like tiny woodland lakes glimpsed from an airplane. A canopy of red and blue stripes bordered the most distant pool, where a woman swam dogged laps; at the intermediate pool a bartender in a black jacket set up his bar. Beside the pool nearest Michael a Chinese boy dragged a stack of thick pads toward a row of empty redwood frames.

This luxurious city both surprised him, reassured him, and excited him more than he was willing to admit. Michael leaned forward against the window as if he wanted to take flight through the glass. Everything down there would be warm to the touch. The Singapore of his imagination had been a combination of Hue and Chinatown with a generalized smear of sidewalk food vendors and trishaws. He had pictured a version of Saigon, a city he had seen only briefly and disliked. (Most of the combat soldiers Michael knew who had visited Saigon had disliked it.) Just looking at those smooth quadrants of treetops, those neat serrated roofs, the tropical bungalows and the shining pools, made Poole feel better.

He was elsewhere, without doubt he was somewhere new: he had managed to step out of his life, and until this moment he had been unaware of how much he had wanted or needed to do that. He wanted to stroll beneath those healthy trees. He wanted to walk along the wide malls and smell the perfumed air he remembered from their arrival at Changi airport.

Just then his telephone rang. Michael picked it up, knowing that Judy was on the other end of the line.

“Good morning, gentlemen, and welcome to the Republic of Singapore,” came the voice of Harry Beevers. “It is presently nine-thirteen on the trusty Rolex. You will report to the coffee shop where you will receive your individual assignments.… Guess what?”

Michael said nothing.

“A glance through the Singapore telephone directory uncovers no listing for a T. Underhill.”

A little more than an hour later they were walking down Orchard Road. Poole carried the envelope full of Underhill’s jacket photos, Beevers carried a Kodak Instamatic in his jacket pocket and was awkwardly examining a map folded into the back of Papineau’s Guide to Singapore, and Conor Linklater slouched along with his hands in his pockets, carrying nothing. During breakfast they had agreed to spend the morning like tourists, walking through as much of the town as they could cover—“getting the feel of the place,” as Beevers said.

This section of Singapore was as bland and inoffensive as their coffee shop breakfast. What Dr. Poole had not seen from the window of his hotel room was that the city had a lot in common with the duty-free area of a large airport. Every structure that was not a hotel was either an office building, a bank, or a shopping mall. The majority were the latter, most of them three or four levels high. A giant poster across the topmost level of a tall building still under construction depicted an American businessman speaking to a Singaporean Chinese banker. In a balloon above the American’s head were the words I am glad I learned of the fantastic return on my money I can earn by investing in Singapore! To which the Chinese banker replies With our beneficial investment program for our overseas friends, it is never too late to take part in the economic miracle of Singapore!

Right now, you could step into a glass-fronted shop and buy cameras and stereo equipment; across the six-lane street, you could climb a flight of marble steps and choose from seven shops selling cameras, stereo equipment, electric razors, and electronic calculators. Here was the Orchard Towers Shopping Center, and here, across the street, shaped vaguely like a ziggurat, was the Far East Shopping Center, which had a long red banner reading GONG HI FA CHOY, for it was just past the Chinese New Year. Next to the Orchard Towers Shopping Center stood the Hilton, where middle-aged Americans breakfasted on a terrace. Further back there had been the Singapura Forum, where a stocky Malay with the face of William Bendix had played a hose over the flagstones. Far up on a hill they had seen a gardener toiling at keeping the grounds of the Shangri-La as immaculate as the center court at Wimbledon. Ahead down Orchard Road were the Lucky Plaza Shopping Center, the Irana Hotel, and the Mandarin Hotel.

“I think Walt Disney went crazy one day,” said Conor Linklater, “and said ‘Fuck the kids, let’s invent Singapore and just make money.’ ”

When they passed the Prosperity Tailor Shop a grinning little man came out and followed them, trying to talk them into a purchase.

“You tough customers!” he said after the first half block. “You get ten percent off sale price. Best offer in whole city.” After they had actually crossed over the big intersection at Claymore Hill, he became more insistent. “Okay, you get one-quarter off discount price! I can go no lower!”

“We don’t want suits,” Conor said. “We’re not looking for suits. Give up.”

“Don’t you want to look good?” the tailor asked. “What’s the matter with you guys? You enjoy looking like tourists? Come to my shop, I make you look like sophisticated gentlemen, one-quarter off discount price.”

“I already look like a sophisticated gentleman.”

“Could do better,” said the tailor. “What you’re wearing cost you three-four hundred dollars at Barneys, I give you three times the suit for same price.”

Beevers ceased his impatient jigging on the sidewalk. The expression of unguarded astonishment on his face was as good as a Christmas present to Michael Poole and, he supposed, to Conor.

“I make you look like Savile Row,” said the tailor, who was a round-faced Chinese man in his fifties wearing a white shirt and black trousers. “Six hundred-fifty-dollar suit, three hundred seventy-five dollars. Discounted price five hundred, I give you one-quarter off. Three hundred seventy-five dollars, price of couple good dinners at Four Seasons. You lawyuh? Stand in front of Supreme Court, you not only win case, everybody say ‘Where you get that suit? Must be from Prosperity Tailor Shop, Wing Chong, proprietor’!”

“I don’t want to buy a suit,” Beevers said, looking shifty now.

“You need suit.”

Beevers yanked the camera from his pocket and snapped the man’s picture as if he were shooting him. The tailor grinned and posed. “Why don’t you attack one of these guys instead of me? Why don’t you go back to your shop?”

“Lowest prices,” the man said, trembling with suppressed hilarity. “Three hundred fifty dollars. I go any lower, can’t pay rent. Go any lower, children starve.”

Beevers shoved the camera back into his pocket and turned to Michael with the air of an animal caught in a trap.

“This guy knows everything else, maybe he knows Underhill,” Michael said.

“Show him the picture!”

Michael took the envelope of photographs from under his arm and opened it.

“We are police officers from the City of New York,” Beevers said.

“You lawyuh,” said the tailor.

“We are interested in knowing if you have ever seen this man. Show him the picture, Mike!”

Michael took out one of the photographs of Tim Underhill and held it up before the tailor.

“Do you know this person?” Beevers asked. “Can you recall ever having seen him prior to now?”

“I never see this person prior to now,” said the tailor. “It would be honor to meet this person, but he could not pay even rock-bottom price.”

“Why not?” Michael asked.

“Too artistic,” the tailor said.

Michael smiled and began to slide the picture back into the envelope when the tailor bent forward and grasped the print.

“You give me picture? Have plenty more?”

“He’s lying,” Beevers said. “You’re lying. Where is this man? Can you lead us to him?”

“Celebrity picture,” the tailor said.

“He just wants the picture,” Michael said to Beevers.

Conor slapped the tailor on the back and laughed out loud.

“What do you mean, he just wants the picture?”

“Hang on wall,” the tailor said.

Michael handed him the photograph.

The tailor tucked it under his arm and bowed, giggling. “Thank you very much.” He turned around to walk back up the broad mall. Well-dressed Chinese men and women strolled toward them beneath the overhanging trees. The men wore blue suits, neat ties, and sunglasses and looked like the banker on the banner. The women were slim and good-looking and wore dresses. Poole realized that he, Beevers, and Conor were a racial minority of three. A long way down the mall, beside a poster that surrounded Chuck Norris’s scowl with leaping flames and a lot of Chinese characters, a teenage Chinese girl idled along, looking absently into shop windows. She wore what must have been a school uniform of flat white skimmer, white middy blouse with a black tie, and loose black skirt. Then an entire pack of such girls, neat as a row of ducks, swung into view behind her. Across the street next to a poster advertising McDonald’s hamburgers a square white sign advised SPEAK MANDARIN—ASSIST YOUR GOVERNMENT. Suddenly Poole could smell the perfume in the air, as if some invisible, exotic flower bloomed all around him. He felt unreasonably happy.

“If we’re looking for the Boogey Street Underhill used to talk about, why don’t we just take a cab?” Poole said. “This is a civilized country.”

2

Stung by a recognition, Tina Pumo woke up in what at first seemed utter darkness. His heart was beating very loudly. He imagined that he must have cried out, made at least some sound, before he awakened, but Maggie slept on undisturbed beside him. He raised his arm and looked at the luminous hands on the face of his watch. It was three twenty-five.

Tina knew what had been stolen from his desk. If Dracula had not moved everything around, he would have noticed its loss immediately, and if the two days since the break-in had been normal working days, he would have noticed its absence as soon as he sat down. But these two days had been anything but normal—he had spent at least half of each working day downstairs with the builders, contractors, carpenters, and exterminators. They finally seemed to have rid Saigon’s kitchen of all its insects, but the exterminator was still in a state closely resembling euphoria at the number, variety, and hardiness of the bugs he had had to kill. At least a few hours a day had to be spent convincing Molly Witt, his architect, that she was designing a kitchen and an enlarged dining room, not a high-tech operating room. The rest of the time he had spent with Maggie, talking as he had never talked in his life about himself.

Tina felt almost as if Maggie had unlocked him. In two days she had gone a long way toward drawing him out of a shell he had barely known he was in.

In a way he was still only beginning to understand, that shell had been formed in Vietnam. Pumo felt humbled by this new knowledge—Dracula had terrorized him by awakening feelings that Pumo had fondly, even proudly, imagined he had put away with his uniform. Pumo had imagined that it was only other people who had allowed themselves to be scarred by Vietnam. He used to feel at a safe emotional distance from all that had happened to him there. He had left the Army and got on with his life. Like virtually every other veteran, he’d gone through a period of aimlessness and dislocation when he coasted just alongside life, but that time had come to an end six years earlier, when he made his move with Saigon. He had, it was true, continued to go from girl to girl, and as he grew older, the girls had gotten younger by staying the same age. He fell in love with the shape of their mouths or the shape of their forearms or the eloquence of the relationship between their calves and their thighs; he fell in love with the way their hair swung or their eyes took him in. Until Maggie Lah had stopped him dead, he thought now, he had fallen in love with everything there was about a person except the actual person.

“Do you think there is a real point where then stops and now begins?” Maggie had asked him. “Don’t you know that down deep the things that happen to you never really stop happening to you?”

It had crossed his mind that she might think this way because she was Chinese, but he had kept silent about this theory.

“Nobody can walk away from things the way you think you walked away from Vietnam,” she told him. “You saw your friends get killed, and you were just a boy. Now, after a relatively minor beating, you’re afraid of elevators and you’re afraid of subways and dark streets and God knows what else. Don’t you think there’s some connection?”

“I guess,” he admitted. “How do you know about it though, Maggie?”

“Everybody knows about it, Tina,” she said. “Except a surprising number of middle-aged American men, who really do believe that people can start fresh all over again, that the past dies and the future is a new beginning, and that these beliefs are moral.”

Now Pumo carefully left his bed. Maggie did not stir, and her breathing went on quietly and steadily. He had to look at his desk to see if he was right about what had been stolen. Pumo’s heart was still pounding, and his own breathing sounded very loud to him. He proceeded cautiously across the bedroom in the dark. When he put his hand on the doorknob, he was visited by the sudden image of Dracula standing just on the other side of the door. Sweat broke out on his face.

“Tina?” Maggie’s crystalline voice floated on a dead-level current of breath from the bedroom.

Pumo stood in the dark empty hallway. No one was there—as if Maggie had helped dispel the threat.

“I know what’s missing,” he said. “I have to check it out. Sorry I woke you up.”

“It’s okay,” Maggie said.

His head pounded, and he could still feel little tremors in his knees. If he stood in that spot any longer, Maggie would know something was wrong. She might even feel that she had to get out of bed to help him. Pumo moved down the hall into the loft’s living room and pulled the cord that switched on the overhead lights. Like most rooms used almost entirely in the daytime, when seen this late at night Pumo’s living room had an eerie quality, as if everything in it had been replaced by an exact replica of itself. Pumo went across the room, up the steps to the platform, and sat down at his desk.

He could not see it. He looked beneath the telephone and the answering machine. He moved the checkbooks to one side and lifted stacks of invoices and receipts. He checked behind a box of rubber bands and moved a box of tissues. Nothing. It could not have been hidden by the bottles of vitamins beside the electric pencil sharpener, nor by the two boxes of Blackwing pencils beside that. He was right: it wasn’t there. It had been stolen.

To be certain, Pumo looked under his desk, leaned over the top and looked behind it, and then poked through his wastebasket. The wastebasket contained lots of balled-up tissues, an old copy of the Village Voice, the wrapper from a Quaker Oats Granola Bar, begging-letters from charities, grocery coupons, several unopened envelopes covered with announcements that he had already won a valuable prize, and a cotton ball and sealer from a bottle of vitamins.

Crouching beside the wastebasket, Pumo looked up and saw Maggie standing in the entrance to the living room. Her arms dangled at her sides and her face still seemed full of sleep.

“I know I look a little crazy,” he said, “but I was right.”

“What is missing?”

“I’ll tell you after I think about it for a couple of seconds.”

“That bad?”

“I don’t know yet.” He stood up. His body felt very tired, his mind not at all. He came down from the platform and went toward her.

“Nothing’s that bad,” she said.

“I was just thinking about a guy named M.O. Dengler.”

“The one who died in Bangkok.”

When he reached her he took one of her hands and opened it, like a leaf, on his own hand. Seen like this, her hand looked normal, not at all knobby. Lots of tiny wrinkles criss-crossed her palm. Maggie’s fingers were small, slim as cigarettes, slightly curled.

“Bangkok would be a filthy place to die,” she said. “I loathe Bangkok.”

“I didn’t know you’d ever been there.” He turned her hand over. Her palm was almost pink, but the back of her hand was the same golden color as the rest of her. Maybe the joints of her hand were slightly larger than one would expect. Maybe the bones of her wrist protruded.

“You don’t know much about me,” Maggie said.

They both knew he was going to tell her what had been stolen from his desk, and that this conversation was only a period in which Pumo could digest the fact of its loss.

“Have you ever been to Australia?”

“Lots of times.” She gave him a look of mock disgust disguised as no expression at all. “I suppose you went there on R&R and spent seven days seeking sexual release in an alcoholic blur.”

“Sure,” Pumo said. “I was under orders.”

“Can we turn off the lights and go back to sleep?”

Pumo astonished himself by yawning. He reached up and pulled the cord, putting them in darkness.

She led him back down the narrow corridor and into the bedroom. Pumo groped his way to his side of the bed and climbed in. He felt more than saw Maggie roll onto her side and prop herself up on one elbow. “Tell me about M.O. Dengler,” she said.

He hesitated, and then a sentence appeared fully-formed in his mind, and when he spoke it, other sentences followed, as if they were appearing of their own will. “We were in a kind of swampy field. It was about six o’clock in the afternoon, and we’d been out since maybe five that morning. Everybody was pissed off, because we had wasted the whole day, and we were hungry, and we could tell the new lieutenant had no idea what he was doing. He had just come in two days before, and he was trying to impress us with how sharp he was. This was Beevers.”

“Could have fooled me,” said Maggie.

“What he did was take us off into the wilderness on an all-day wild goose chase. What the old lieutenant would have done, what was supposed to happen, was that we got set down in the LZ, poked around for a while to see if we could find anybody to shoot at, then we’d go back to the LZ for lift out. If you got some action, you call in an air strike or you call in artillery or you shoot it out, whatever’s right. You respond. That’s all we were there for—we were just there to respond. They sent us out there to get shot at so that we could shoot back and kill a lot of folks. That was it. It was pretty simple, when you come right down to it.

“But this new guy, Beans Beevers, acted like … You knew you were in trouble. Because in order to respond, you have to know what’s out there that you are responding to. And this new guy who was fresh out of ROTC at some fancy college acts like he’s in an old movie or something. Inside his head, he’s already a hero. He’s gonna capture Ho Chi Minh, he’s gonna wipe out a whole enemy division, there’s a Medal of Honor already minted with his name on the certificate. He’s got that look.”

“When do we get to M.O. Dengler?” Maggie asked softly.

Pumo laughed. “Right now, I guess. The point is, our new lieutenant took us way out of our area without knowing it. He got so excited he misread his map, and so Poole kept sending the wrong coordinates back to base. We even lost our F.D., which nobody does. We’re supposed to be getting back to the LZ, and nothing around us looks familiar. Poole says, ‘Lieutenant, I’ve been looking at my map, and I think we must be in Dragon Valley.’ Beevers tells him he’s absolutely wrong, and to keep his mouth shut if he wants to stay out of trouble. ‘Watch out, you might get sent to Vietnam,’ Underhill says, which really begins to piss off the lieutenant.

“So instead of confessing that he was wrong and making some kind of joke about it and getting the hell out, which would have saved everything, he makes the mistake of thinking about it. And unfortunately there’s a lot to think about. An entire company had been shot to pieces in Dragon Valley the week before, and the Tin Man was supposed to be cooking up some combined action. Beevers decides that since we’re supposed to provoke action and respond to it, and since we had providentially found ourselves in what might be the perfect place for action, we ought to provoke a little of it. We’ll advance into the Valley a little, he says, and Poole asks if he can figure out our real coordinates and radio them in. Radio silence, Beevers says, and shuts him up. Poole is supposed to be chicken-hearted, get it?

“Beevers is thinking that we might spot a few Viet Cong, or maybe a small NVA detachment, which is what’s supposed to be down there, and if we’re lucky shoot the crap out of them and get a respectable body count, and go back with our new lieutenant blooded. Well, by the time we got back he was blooded, all right. He signals us to continue moving into the Valley, see, and everybody but him knows this is totally crazy. A creep named Spitalny asks how long we were gonna keep this up, and Beevers yells back, ‘As long as it takes! This isn’t boy scout camp!’ Dengler says to me, ‘I love this new lieutenant,’ and I see he’s grinning like a boy with a big piece of pie. Dengler has never seen anything like this new lieutenant before. He and Underhill are cracking up.

“Finally we get to this thing like a swampy field. It’s just getting dark. The air’s full of bugs. The joke, if it is a joke, is over. Everybody’s beat. On the far side of the field is a stand of trees that looks like the beginning of jungle. There are a few bare dead logs in the middle of the field, and some big shell holes full of water.

“I got a funny feeling the minute I laid eyes on the field. It looked like death. That’s the best I can say. It looked like a goddamned graveyard. It had that fixin’-to-die smell—maybe you know what I mean. I bet if you go to the pound and get into that room where they kill the dogs nobody wants, you’d get that same smell. Then I saw a helmet liner lying out next to a shell crater. A little way off from it I saw the busted-off stock of an M-16.

“ ‘Suppose we explore this piece of real estate and see what’s on the other side before we go back to camp,’ Beevers said. ‘Looks good, doesn’t it?’

“ ‘Lieutenant,’ Poole said, ‘I think this field is probably mined.’ He saw what I did, see?

“ ‘Do you?’ Beevers asked. ‘Then why don’t you go out there first, Poole? You just volunteered to be our point man.’

“Fortunately, Poole and I weren’t the only ones who had seen the helmet liner and the stock. They wouldn’t let Poole go out there by himself, and they weren’t about to try it for themselves either.

“ ‘You think this field is mined?’ Beevers asked.”

“You men think this field is mined?” screamed Lieutenant Beevers. “You actually think I’ll fall for that one? This is a struggle for command, and like it or not, I’m in command here.”

Grinning, Dengler turned to Puma and whispered, “Don’t you love the way his mind works?”

“Dengler whispered something to me, and Beevers blew up. ‘Okay,’ he yelled at Dengler, ‘if you think this area is mined, prove it to me. Throw something out there and hit a mine. If nothing blows up, we all go into the field.’ ‘Whatever you say,’ Dengler said—”

“As the lieutenant wishes,” Dengler said, and looked around him in the gloom. “Throw the lieutenant,” Victor Spitalny muttered. Dengler saw a good-sized rock buried in the muck near him, pushed it free with his boot, bent down, put his arms around it, and lifted it.

“—and he picked up a rock about the size of his head. Beevers was getting madder by the second. He told Dengler to heave the goddamned thing out into the field, and Poole came up next to Dengler to take half the weight. They did a one-two-three and heaved the thing maybe twenty yards. Everybody but the lieutenant fell down and covered his face. I heard the rock land with a thud. Nothing. I think we all expected a pressure mine to send shrapnel off in all directions. When nothing happened, we picked ourselves up. Beevers was standing there smirking. ‘Well, girls,’ he said. ‘Satisfied now? Need more proof?’ And then he did an amazing thing—he took off his helmet and kissed it. ‘Follow this, it has more balls than you do,’ he said, and he cocked his arm back and tossed his helmet as far as he could out into the field. We all watched it sail up. By the time it started to descend, we could hardly see it anymore.”

They watched the lieutenant’s helmet disappear into the grey air and the swarming bugs. By the time the helmet hit the ground it was nearly invisible. The explosion surprised them all, except at that level where they could no longer be surprised by anything. Again, all except Beevers flopped into the muck. A column of red fire flashed upward and the ground bounced under their feet. Set off either by a malfunction or by the vibration, another mine detonated a beat after the first, and a chunk of metal whizzed past Beevers’ face, so close he could feel its heat. He either fell down on purpose or collapsed in shock next to Poole. He was panting. Everyone in the platoon could smell the acrid stink of the two explosions. For a moment everything was still. Tina Pumo lifted his head, half-expecting another of the mines to go off, and as he did so he heard the insects begin their drilling again. For a moment Tina thought he could see Lieutenant Beevers’ helmet out on the far end of the mined field, lying miraculously undamaged though somehow stuffed with leaves beside a twisted branch. Then he saw that the leaves formed a pattern of eyes and eyebrows inside the helmet. Finally he saw that they were real eyes and eyebrows. The helmet was still on a dead soldier’s head. What he had taken for a branch was a severed arm in a sleeve. The explosion had unearthed a partially buried and dismembered corpse.

From the other end of the field a loud inquisitive voice called out in Vietnamese. Another voice screeched in laughter, and joyfully shouted back.

“I think we’re in a situation here, Lieutenant,” Dengler whispered. Poole had taken his map out of its wax case and was running his fingers along trails, trying to figure out exactly where they were.

Looking across the field at the American head which had floated in its American helmet out of the substance of the field, Poole saw a series of abrupt, inexplicable movements of the earth—as if invisible rodents tore around, roiling the sodden earth here, tossing spears of grass there. Something trembled the log near the field’s far end and pushed it backwards an inch or two. Then he finally realized that the platoon was being fired on from the rear.

“There were a couple of explosions, and a lot of yelling in Vietnamese from all around us—I think they had let us just blunder along without being really certain of where we were. Beevers’ radio silence at least did that much. The ones behind us started shooting, and probably the only thing that saved our lives was that they weren’t sure where we were, exactly, so they put their fire where they thought we were, the same field where they’d wiped out nearly a whole company a week before. And their fire exploded maybe eighty percent of the mines they had buried with the American bodies.”

It looked as if underground fireworks were destroying the field. There came a staggered, arhythmic series of double explosions, the booming thud of the shell answered immediately by the flat, sharp crack of the mine. Yellow-red flashes engulfed orange-red flashes, then both flashes drowned in a boil of smoke and a gout of earth, throwing up a ribcage lashed against a web belt, an entire leg still wearing a trouser leg and a boot.

“Why did they booby-trap the dead bodies?” Maggie whispered.

“Because they knew that someone would come back for them. You always come back for your dead. It’s one of the only decent things about war. You bring your dead back with you.”

“Like going after Tim Underhill?”

“No, not at all. Well, maybe. I suppose.” He extended his arm. Maggie rested her head on it and snuggled closer to him.

“Two guys got blown to pieces as soon as we started moving into the field. Beevers ordered us forward, and he was right, because they were readjusting their fire to blast the shit out of us where we were. The first guy to go was a kid named Cal Hill who had just joined up with us, and the other was a guy named Tattoo Tiano. I never knew his real name, but he was a good soldier. So Tattoo got killed right away. Right next to me. There was this blast that almost tore my head off when Tattoo set off the mine, and honest to God the air turned bright red for a second. He really was right next to me. I thought I was dead. I couldn’t see or hear anything. There was nothing but this red mist all around me. Then I heard the other one go off, and I could hear it when Hill started screaming. ‘Move your tail, Pumo,’ Dengler yelled. ‘You still got it, move it.’ Norm Peters, our medic, somehow got over to Hill and tried to do something for him. I finally noticed that I was all wet, covered with Tattoo’s blood. We started getting a little light fire from up ahead, so we got our weapons off our backs and returned fire. Artillery rounds started landing back in the fringe of jungle we had just left. I could see Poole yelling into his radio. The fire got a little heavier. We scattered out through the field and hunkered down behind whatever we could find. Along with a few other people I flattened out behind the fallen tree. I could see Peters wrapping up Cal Hill, trying to stop his blood loss, and it looked inside out to me—it looked like Peters was torturing Hill, squeezing the blood out of him. Hill was screaming his head off. We were demons, they were demons, everybody was demons, there were no people left in the world anymore, only demons. Hill sort of didn’t have any middle—where his stomach and guts and his cock should have been there was only this flat red puddle. Hill could see what had happened to him, and he couldn’t believe it. He wasn’t in Nam long enough to believe it! ‘Stop that man screaming!’ Beevers yelled. Some more light fire came at us from ahead, and then we heard someone shouting at us from up there. ‘Rock ’n roar,’ this guy was shouting, ‘Rock ’n roar!’ ‘Elvis,’ Dengler said, and a whole bunch of guys started yelling at him, and squeezed off a couple of shots. Because this was the sniper who had appointed himself our official assassin. He was one amazing shot, let me tell you. I raised up and got off a shot, but I knew it wasn’t any good. M-16s used these little 5.56 millimeter bullets instead of 7.62 rounds, and so the cartridge clips were easier to carry, eleven ounces instead of more than twice that, but the rounds spun in the air, so they wobbled like crazy once they went a certain distance. In some ways, the old M-14 was better—not only did it have better distance, you could actually aim an M-14. So I squeezed off some rounds, but I was pretty sure that even if I could see old Elvis, I wouldn’t be able to hit him. But at least I’d have the satisfaction of knowing what he looked like. Anyhow, so there we were, stuck in a minefield between a lot of NVA, maybe a couple of companies working their way south to link up with whatever they had in the A Shau Valley. Not to mention Elvis. And Poole couldn’t tell anybody where we were, because not only had the lieutenant gotten us lost, his radio had been hit and the fucker was no good anymore. So we were locked in. We spent the next fifteen hours in a field full of dead men—with a lieutenant who was losing his mind.”

“Oh God oh God,” Pumo heard the lieutenant repeating over and over. Calvin Hill noisily continued to die, screaming as if Peters were poking hot needles through his tongue. Other men were screaming too. Pumo could not see who they were, and he did not want to know who they were. Part of Pumo wanted to stand up and get killed and get it over with, and part of him was as scared of this feeling as of anything else that had happened. He made the interesting discovery that there are layers of terror, each one colder and more paralyzing than the one before it. Mortar rounds landed in the field at regular intervals, and machine-gun fire now and then sprayed in from the sides. Pumo and everyone else huddled in whatever troughs, shellholes, or bunkers they half-found, half dug for themselves. Pumo had finally seen the lieutenant’s ruined helmet: it rested against the kneecap of a dead soldier who had been lifted out of the ground by an exploding mine. His kneecap, attached to his calf but to nothing else and white beneath its coating of grime, lay on the ground only inches from the soldier’s head and shoulders, likewise attached to nothing else. The dead soldier was looking at Pumo. His face was very dirty. His eyes were open, and he looked stupid and hungry. Every time the ground rumbled and the sky split apart with a new explosion, the head tilted a little more toward Pumo and the shoulders swam across the ground toward him.

Pumo flattened himself against the ground. The coldest, deepest layer of terror told him that when the dead soldier finally swam up and touched him, he’d die. Then he saw Tim Underhill crawling toward the lieutenant and wondered why he bothered. The sky was full of tracers and explosion. Night had come on in an instant. The lieutenant was going to die. Underhill was going to die. Everybody was going to die. That was the great secret. He seemed to hear M.O. Dengler saying something to Poole and laughing. Laughing? Pumo was intensely aware, as the world darkened and swooned around the impossibility ofthat laugh, of the odor of Tattoo Tiano’s blood. ‘Did the lieutenant shit in his nice new pants?’ Underhill said. ‘Mike, get your radio to work, will you?’ Dengler asked in a very reasonable voice.

A huge explosion rocked Pumo as it tore apart the sky. The air turned white, red, deep black. Womanish-sounding screams came from a soldier Pumo could immediately identify as Tony Ortega, Spacemaker Ortega, a good but brutal soldier who in civilian life had been the leader of a motocycle gang called the Devilfuckers in upstate New York. Ortega had been Victor Spitalny’s only friend in the platoon, and now Spitalny would have no friends. Pumo realized that this didn’t matter, Spitalny would get killed with the rest of them. Spacemaker Ortega’s screams gradually sank into the dark, as if he were being carried away. “What are we going to do, what are we going to do, oh God oh God,” Beevers wailed. “Oh God oh God oh God, I don’t want to die, I don’t I don’t I can’t die.”

Peters crawled away from the dead Ortega. In a sudden loud burst of light Pumo saw him moving toward a twitching man ten or twelve yards off. Another land mine inaudibly went off, for the ground shook and the dead man swam a few inches nearer Pumo.

A soldier named Teddy Wallace announced that he was going to waste that fucker Elvis, and a friend of his named Tom Blevins said he’d follow. Pumo saw the two soldiers rise into crouches and take off across the field. Before he had gone eight steps, Wallace stepped on a pressure mine and was torn apart from crotch to chest. Wallace’s left leg blew sideways and seemed to run above the field for a short time before it fell. Tom Blevins got a few steps further before he pitched over as neatly as if he had tripped over piano wire. “Rock ‘n roar!” Elvis shouted from up in the trees.

Suddenly Pumo became aware that Dengler was beside him. Dengler was grinning. “Don’t you think God does all things simultaneously?” Dengler asked him.

“What?” he asked. Life doesn’t make sense, he thought, the world doesn’t make sense, war doesn’t make sense, everything is only a terrible joke. Death was the great secret at the bottom of the joke, and demons watched the world and capered and laughed.

“What I like about that idea is that in a funny way it means that the universe actually created itself, which means that it goes on creating itself, get me? So destruction is part of this creation that goes on all the time. And on top of that is the real kicker, Pumo—destruction is the part of creation that we think is beautiful.”

“Get fucked,” Pumo said. Now he understood what Dengler was doing: talking nonsense to wake him up and make him capable of acting. Dengler didn’t understand that the demons had made the world, and that death was their big secret.

Pumo became aware that he had not spoken in a long time. His eyes were filled with tears. “Are you awake, Maggie?” he whispered.

Maggie breathed on easily and quietly, her perfect round head still resting on his shoulder.

“That bastard stole my address book,” Pumo whispered. “Why the hell would she want my address book? So she can steal clock radios and portable televisions from everyone I know?”

In a carrying voice, Underhill said, “The demons are abroad and Dengler is trying to convince Pumo that death is the mother of beauty—”

“No, I’m not,” Dengler whispered, “you got it wrong, that’s not it, beauty has no mother.”

“Jesus,” Pumo said, and wondered how Underhill knew about the demons, he must have seen them too.

Another great light exploded in the sky, and he could see the surviving members of the platoon lying as if frozen in a snapshot, their faces turned to Underhill, who seemed as calm, peaceful, and massive as a mountain. There was another secret here, a secret as deep as the one the demons had, but what was it? Their own dead, and the booby-trapped dead of the other company, lay sprawled all over the field. No, the demons are deeper, Pumo thought, because this isn’t just hell, this is worse than hell—in hell you’re dead and in this hell we still have to wait for other people to kill us.

Norm Peters scurried back and forth, plugging sucking chest wounds. Then darkness enclosed them again. When another giant light illuminated the sky a few seconds later, Pumo saw that Dengler had left him and was following Peters around, helping him. Dengler was smiling. He saw Pumo staring at him, and grinned and pointed upwards. Shine on, he meant, shine on, remember everything, the universe is making itself up right now.

Late at night the NVA began dropping in 60-mm shells from the M-2 mortars that had been taken from the American company. Several times in the hour before morning Pumo knew that he had gone stone crazy. The demons had come back, and roamed laughing through the field. Pumo finally understood that they were laughing at him and Dengler, for even if they lived through this night they would not be saved from dying senseless deaths, and if all things were simultaneous their deaths were present now, and memory was a twisted joke. He saw Victor Spitalny sawing the ears off Spacemaker Ortega, the former ruler of the Devilfuckers, and that made the demons dance and cackle too. “What the fuck are you doing?” he hissed, and picked up a clod of earth and threw it at him. “That was your best friend!”

“I gotta have somethin’ to show for this,” Spitalny said, but he gave up anyhow, shoved his knife back in his belt and scuttled away like a jackal surprised at his feast of carrion.

When the helicopters finally came in the NVA company had disappeared back into the jungle, and the Cobras, the gun-ships, merely slammed a half-dozen rockets into the canopy and fried a few monkeys before wheeling grandly in the air and returning to Camp Crandall. The other helicopter descended over the clearing.

You never remembered how almost tranquil a UH1-B was until you were in one again.

3

“To tell you the truth, we’re New York City policemen,” Beevers said to the taxi driver, a gaunt, toothless Chinese in a T-shirt who had just asked why they wanted to go to Boogey Street.

“Ah,” the driver said. “Policemen.”

“We’re here on a case.”

“On a case,” said the driver. “Very good. This for television?”

“We’re looking for an American who liked Boogey Street,” Poole hastily explained. Beevers’ face had turned red and his mouth was a thin line. “We know he moved to Singapore. So we’d like to show his picture around on Boogey Street to see if anybody knows him.”

“Boogey Street no good for you,” the driver said.

“I’m getting out of this cab,” Beevers said. “I can’t stand it anymore. Stop. Pull over. We’re getting out.”

The driver shrugged and obediently switched on his turn signal to begin making his way across three lanes to the curbside.

“Why do you say Boogey Street is no good for us?” Poole asked.

“Nothing there anymore. Mister Lee, he clean it all up.”

“Cleaned it up?”

“Mister Lee make all the girl-boys leave Singapore. No more—only pictures.”

“What do you mean, only pictures?”

“You walk down Boogey Street at night,” the driver patiently explained, “you go past many bars. Outside bars you see pictures. You buy pictures, take them home.”

“Goddamn,” Beevers said.

“Someone in one of those bars will know Underhill,” Poole said. “He might not have left Singapore just because the transvestites did.”

“You don’t think so?” Beevers yelled. “Would you buy a jigsaw puzzle if the most important piece was missing?”

“See points of interest in Singapore,” the driver said. “Tonight, Boogey Street. For now, Tiger Balm Gardens.”

“I hate gardens,” Beevers said.

“Not flower garden,” the driver said. “Sculpture garden. Many style Chinese architecture. Depictions of Chinese folklore. Thrilling scenes.”

“Thrilling scenes,” Beevers said.

“Python devouring Goat. Tiger ready for attack. Ascension of White Snake Spirit. Wild Man of Borneo. So Ho Shang trapped in Spider’s Den. Spider Spirit in form of Beautiful Woman.”

“Sounds good to me,” Conor said.

“Best part, many scenes of torture. Scenes in infernal regions depicting punishment given souls after death. Very beautiful. Very instructive. Very scary.”

“What do you think?” Conor asked.

“It’s the punishment given souls before death that worries me,” Poole said. “But let’s have a look.”

The driver instantly cut across three lanes of traffic.

He dropped them off at the bottom end of a wide walk leading up to a gate with the words HAW PAR VILLA suspended between green and white columns. People streamed in both directions through this gate. Above it was a hillside of purple-grey plaster that to Poole resembled a section from a giant brain. A short distance away stood a taller, gaudier gate in the shape of a tiered pagoda. Chinese people in short sleeves and summer dresses, Chinese teenagers in wildly colored clothes, schoolgirls uniformed like boys at an English public school, old couples holding hands, crew-cut boys skipping along in short pants, all these people milled up and down the broad walkway. At least half of them seemed to be eating something. The sun sparkled off the white paint of the pagoda gate and threw deep black shadows across the slabs of the walk. Poole wiped sweat off his forehead. The day grew hotter every hour, and his collar was already damp.

They passed beneath the second gate. Just past a huge allegorical figure representing Thailand was a tableau of a peasant woman sprawled on the representation of a field, her basket lost behind her, her arms outstretched in a plea for help. A child raced toward her, a peasant in shorts and a pagoda hat extended an arm to threaten or aid. (The handout booklet explained that he is offering her a bottle of Tiger Balm.) Two oxen locked horns in the background.

Sweat poured down Poole’s face. He remembered a muddy field slanting down a Vietnamese hillside and Spitalny raising his rifle to sight on a woman scampering toward a circle of hootches beyond which lean oxen grazed. Her bright blue pajamas shone vividly against the brown field. Mosquitos. The heavy pails of water suspended on a wooden yoke over the woman’s shoulders hampered her movements: Poole remembered the shock of recognizing that the pails of water were as important to her as her life—she would not throw the yoke off her shoulders. Spitalny’s rifle cracked, and the woman’s feet lifted, and for a moment she sped along parallel to the ground without touching it. Soon she collapsed in a blue puddle beside the long curved yoke. The pails clattered downhill. Spitalny fired again. The oxen bolted away from the village, running so close together their flanks touched. The woman’s body jerked forward as if it had been pushed by an invisible force, and then began to roll loosely downhill. Her forearms flipped up, out, up like spokes on a broken flywheel.

Poole turned to Harry Beevers, who had glanced at the statues on top of the brain-wall and was now staring at two pretty Chinese girls giggling together near the pagoda gate. “Do you remember Spitalny shooting that girl outside Ia Thuc? The one in blue pajamas?”

Beevers glanced at him, blinked, then looked back at the sculptures of the farmer and his wife. He nodded and smiled. “Sure. But that was in another country, and besides, the wench is dead.”

“No,” Conor said, “that was another wench, and besides, the country’s dead.”

“She was obviously VC,” Beevers said. He glanced again at the Chinese girls as if they too were Viet Cong who ought to be executed. “She was there, therefore she was VC.”

The two girls were now walking past Beevers as if on tiptoe. They were slender girls with shoulder-length black hair and dresses of the sort, Poole thought, that used to be called frocks. Were there still frocks? He glanced up the hill and saw another pack of schoolgirls in uniform—dark blazers and flat hats.

“This whole place is back in the fifties,” Beevers said. “I don’t mean the gardens, I mean Singapore. It’s about 1954 over here. You get arrested for jaywalking, littering, and spitting on the street. You ever go to one of those towns out West where they reenact gunfights? Where the falls are all rehearsed and the guns have no bullets and nobody gets hurt?”

“Aw, come on,” Conor said.

“I have a feeling that’s Boogey Street,” Beevers said.

“Let’s find the torture chamber,” Poole said, and Conor laughed out loud.

On the crown of the hill, with a view down across the terraces and ornaments of the garden, stood a giant brain of gnarled, twisted blue plaster. A white sign announced in red letters: TORTURE CHAMBER HERE. “Hey, this doesn’t look so bad,” Beevers said. “I ought to get pictures of this.” He took his Instamatic out of his pocket and checked the number on the back. Then he went up the low concrete steps and through the entrance. Winking at Poole, Conor followed.

The cool, shady interior of the plaster grotto had been divided in half by a walkway from which one looked down through wire fences at a sequence of busy scenes. When Poole stepped inside, his friends were already well along, Beevers snapping shot after shot with his camera up to his eye. Most of the Chinese in the Torture Chamber stared at the tableaux beneath them without betraying any feeling at all. A few children chattered and pointed.

“Great, great stuff,” Beevers said.

CHAMBER OF BOULDERS, read a plaque before the first scene. THE FIRST COURT. From between the halves of a giant slablike boulder protruded the heads, legs, trunks, arms of people eternally crushed to death. Claw-footed demons in robes pulled screeching children toward the boulder.

In the SECOND COURT, horned devils pierced sinners with huge pronged forks and held them over flames. Another demon ripped the stomach and intestines from an agonized man. Others hurled children into a long pool of blood.

A blue demon sliced off the tongue of a man tied to a stake.

Poole wandered along the path between the exhibits, hearing Harry Beevers’ camera clicking, clicking away.

Grinning devils cut women in half, sliced men into sections, boiled screaming sinners in vats of oil, grilled them against red hot pillars.…

Conscious—nearly conscious—of another memory hidden beneath this one, Poole found himself remembering the emergency ward where during his internship he had spent too much time tying blood vessels and cleaning wounds, listening to screams and moans and curses, attending to people with their faces cut to pieces by knives or windshields, people who had nearly killed themselves with drugs …

… sell me some of that fuckin’ morphine, Doc? a young Puerto Rican in a blood-soaked T-shirt asked him while he frantically sutured a long wound with baseball stitches, sweating as the addict’s blood pooled around him …

… blood everywhere, blood on the concrete slab, blood on the rocks, severed arms and legs on the floor, naked men hung split open by the knives sprouting from an evil tree …

“Clean out of my eyesight, man,” Poole heard Conor say. “Hey, Mikey, these guys really believed in survival and fitness, huh?” Survival and fitness? He realized that Conor meant survival of the fittest.

Why did Beevers want pictures of this stuff?

He heard the screaming of a long-dead soldier named Cal Hill and heard Dengler’s funny, snide Midwestern voice saying Don’t you think God does all things simultaneously?

Dengler was right, God did all things simultaneously.

Every day of those months, Poole had forced himself to go to work. He had forced himself out of bed, into the drizzle of the shower, pulled himself into his clothes, grimly started his car, struggled into his scrub suit in a depression almost too total to be seen. He had gone for days without speaking to anyone. Judy had attributed his gloom, silence, and buried rage to the stresses and miseries of the emergency room, to the presence of people dying literally under his hand, to the abuse pouring out of everyone around him.…

Sweating in the cool shade of the plaster cave, Poole moved a few paces along. A woman wearing the white hide of a rabbit on her back and a man covered by a pig’s coarse hide knelt before an imperious judge. Poole remembered the rabbit Ernie’s mild beautiful fearful eyes. Other figures busied themselves around them. A monster aimed a spear, a scribe wrote on an eternal scroll. Almost exactly a year later, during his pediatric residency at Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital in New York, Poole had finally understood.

And here it was again, that place, in a plaster brain on top of a hill in Singapore.The Tenth CourtFor human souls destined to be reborn as a beast and other lower forms of life, they are provided by the court with the necessary coverings such as fur, hide, feathers, or scales before entering the whirlpool of fate, in order that the eternal souls may take a definite shape.

Poole heard Beevers laughing to himself outside the grotto.

He wiped his forehead and walked outside into a blast of heat and a blinding dazzle of sunlight. Harry Beevers stood before him, grinning with all his overlapping teeth.

A little way down the hill lay a huge pit filled with plaster replicas of giant blue-green crabs. Big black toads stared fixedly out through the mesh. In another brain-grotto on the other side of the path a giant woman with a chicken’s head and corpse-white arms yanked at the arm of her husband, who had the wattled head of a duck. Poole saw murder in the woman’s determination, the duck-man’s alarm. Marriage was murder.

Beevers snapped off another picture. “This is great,” he said, and turned around to focus on the giant wrinkled brain they had just left. TORTURE CHAMBER HERE.

“There are girls in New York,” Beevers said, “who will go crazy when they see these pictures. You don’t think that’s right? There are girls in New York who’d go down on Gabby Hayes if he showed them this stuff.”

Conor Linklater strolled away laughing.

“You think I don’t know what I’m talking about?” His voice was too loud. “Ask Pumo—he hangs out where I hang out, he knows.”

4

After they left the Tiger Balm Gardens they walked for a long time without quite knowing where they were or where they were going. “Maybe we should go back to the Gardens,” Conor said. “This is nowhere.”

It was nearly a literal, though a peaceful, nowhere. They were walking uphill along a smooth grey road between a high bank covered with perfectly mown grass and a long slope dotted with bungalows set at wide intervals amongst the trees. Since leaving the Gardens the only human being they had seen had been a uniformed chauffeur in sunglasses driving an otherwise empty black Mercedes Benz 500 SEL.

“We must have walked over a mile already,” Beevers said. He had torn the map out of Papineau’s Guide, and was turning it over and over in his hands. “You can turn back by yourself if you want to. There’ll be something at the top of this hill. Pretty soon Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello will drive by in a woodie. Goddamn, I can’t find where we are on the fucking map.” He almost immediately stopped walking and stared at a certain point on the misleading map. “That stupid shit Underhill.”

“Why?” Conor asked.

“Boogey Street isn’t Boogey Street. That dodo didn’t know what he was talking about. It’s B-U-G-I-S Street. Boo-giss Street. That has to be it, there isn’t anything else even close.”

“But I thought the cabdriver …?”

“It’s still Boo-giss Street, it says so right here.” He looked up with wild eyes. “If Underhill didn’t know where he was going, how the hell does he expect us to find him?”

They trudged further uphill and came to an intersection without roadsigns. Beevers resolutely turned right and began marching off. Conor protested that the center of town and their hotel were the other way, but Beevers continued walking until they gave in and joined him.

Half an hour later an amazed-looking taxi driver stopped and picked them up.

“Marco Polo Hotel,” Beevers said. He was breathing heavily, and his face had become so mottled Poole could not tell if it was pink flecked with white, or white flecked with pink. A sweat stain shaped like a torpedo darkened the back of his jacket from shoulder to shoulder and extended a damp fin down to the small of his back. “I have to have a shower and a nap.”

“Why you going in opposite direction?” the driver asked.

Beevers refused to speak.

“Hey, we got a little bet going,” Conor said. “Is it Boo-giss Street or Boogey Street?”

“Is same thing,” the driver said.

1

As far as Conor was concerned, this whole Bugis Street deal stank. Fifty feet from its entrance, where the cabdriver from the restaurant had pointed to it, Bugis Street looked just right for a guy like Underhill. Lots of flashing lights, bar signs, neon, crowds of people milling around. But once you were actually there, you saw who those people were and you knew that Tim Underhill wouldn’t go anywhere near them. White-haired ladies with leathery, saggy upper arms holding hands with turtle-faced old parties in baggy shorts and Supp-Hose. They had the lost, childlike air of tourists anywhere, as if what they were looking at were no more real than a television commercial. About half the people Conor could see walking up and down Bugis Street had clearly arrived in the JASMINE FAR EAST TOUR buses parked outside the entrance to the street. Way up above everybody’s heads, a pale blue flag drooped from the top of a long pole held by a breezy young blonde woman in a crisp, starched-looking blazer of the same pale blue.

If this bunch of ham and eggers came traipsing through South Norwalk, Conor knew he wouldn’t be able to ignore them the way the other half of the people on Bugis Street were doing. Shifty-looking little guys darted in and out of the bars and shops. Pairs of whores in wigs and tight dresses strutted up and down the street. If you were a player in Singapore, this is where you came—Conor guessed that they had developed selective vision, and no longer really saw the tourists.

Conor could hear the Stones’ “Jumping Jack Flash” drilling through some slow-moving cowboy song from Porter Waggoner, both of them battling the strange caterwauling of what must have been a Chinese opera—screechy voices beating up a melody that would give a headache to a dog. This noise was piped out of different bars through little speakers set above the doors, usually right above the head of a beckoning doorman. The whole thing gave Conor a headache. Probably the brandy after their dinner at the Pine Court didn’t help, even if it was XO, which Harry Beevers claimed was liquid gold. Feeling as if cymbals were being slammed together next to his ears, Conor walked along behind Beevers and Mike Poole.

“Might as well start right here,” Mike said, turning toward the first bar on their side of the street, the Orient Song. The doorman straightened up as they approached and began waving them in with both arms. “Orient Song your bar,” he yelled. “Come to Orient Song! Best bar on Bugis Street! Americans all come here!”

Near the door a little old man in a dirty white smock twitched into life. He grinned, showing sparse yellow teeth, and swept his arm theatrically toward the display of framed photographs next to him.

They were eight-by-twelve glossies, black and white, with names printed in the white space just above the bottom of the frame. Dawn, Rose, Hotlips, Raven, Billie Blue … parted lips and arched necks, sex-drenched Oriental faces framed in soft black hair, plucked eyebrows above willful eyes.

“Four dollars,” the old man said.

Harry Beevers grabbed Conor’s forearm and pulled him through the heavy door. Cold air-conditioned air chilled the sweat on Conor’s forehead, and he yanked his arm out of Beevers’ grasp. Americans, paired like Mallard ducks, turned smiling toward them from their stations near the bar.

“No luck here,” Beevers said. “This is just a tour bus joint. The first bar on the street is the only one these yo-yos feel safe in.”

Poole said, “Let’s ask anyhow.”

At least the entire front half of the bar was taken up by American couples in their sixties and seventies. Conor could dimly hear someone banging chords on a piano. Out of the general hum of voices Conor heard a female voice calling someone Son and asking where his nametag was. He eventually realized that she was addressing him.

“You gotta get the spirit, boy, you gotta wear the tag. We’re a fun bunch!” Conor looked down at the sun-tanned, heavily wrinkled face of a woman beaming at him and wearing a nametag which read HI! ETHEL’S A JAUNTY JASMINE!

Conor looked over her head. Behind her a couple of old boys in rimless glasses who looked like the doctors on the flight over were checking him out less benevolently—he was wearing his Agent Orange T-shirt, and did not resemble a Jaunty Jasmine.

He saw Beevers and Poole approaching the bar, where a stocky man wearing a velvet bow tie was serving drinks, washing glasses, and talking out of the side of his mouth all at once. He reminded Conor of Jimmy Lah. The back of the bar was another world. On the far side of all the Jasmines, parties of Chinese men sat around round tables drinking brandy from magnums, shouting jokes at one another, and desultorily talking with the girls who drifted by their tables. Far at the back a black-haired man in a tuxedo who looked neither Chinese nor Caucasian sat at a baby grand, singing words Conor could not hear.

He squeezed past the woman, who went on mouthing cheerful meaningless sounds, and got to the bar just as Mikey took one of the photographs of Underhill out of the envelope. “Let’s have a drink, what d’you say, gimme a vodka on the rocks.”

The bartender blinked, and a brimming glass appeared on the bar before Conor. Beevers already had one, Conor saw.

“Don’t know him,” the bartender said. “Five dollars.”

“Maybe you remember him from years back,” Beevers said. “He would have started coming here around 1969, ’70, around then.”

“Too long ago. I was little boy. Still in school. Wif da priests.”

“Take another look,” Beevers said.

The bartender removed the picture from Poole’s fingers and flipped it over his shoulder. “He is a priest. Named Father Ball-cock. I don’t know him.”

As soon as they got back out onto the humid street, Harry Beevers took a step ahead of the other two and faced them with his hands in his pockets and his shoulders raised. “I don’t care, I have to say it. I get the wrong vibes entirely from this place. There isn’t a chance in hell that Underhill’s still here. My gut tells me to go to Taipei—it’s more like his kind of place. Take my word for it.”

Poole laughed. “Not so fast, we just got started. There are at least twenty more bars on this street. Somewhere along the line, someone will know him.”

“Yeah, someone has to know him,” Conor said. He felt more confident of this after having put down his vodka.

“Ah, the peanut gallery has an opinion too,” Beevers said.

“You got your rocks off in Taipei, so you want to go back there now,” Conor said. “It’s so fucking obvious.” He stomped away to avoid hitting Beevers. Cries of “Best bar! Best bar!” erupted from various doormen. Conor felt his shirt sticking to his back.

“So it’s Swingtime next, is it?” Beevers had come up on the far side of Mike Poole, and Conor felt a little flare of satisfaction: Beevers wasn’t taking any chances with him.

“Yeah, let’s try out good old Swingtime,” Poole said.

Beevers made an ironic little bow, pushed open the door, and let the other two precede him into the bar.

After Swingtime came the Windjammer, after the Windjammer the Ginza, the Floating Dragon, and the Bucket of Blood. The Bucket of Blood was a real bucket of blood, Conor thought—that had been his father’s term for any dive with rickety stools and ripped booths, a floor too scummy to be visible, and crapped-out drunks lining the bar. Beevers groaned when one of the shambling drunks followed another into the cubicle that was the men’s room and, to judge by the noise, began tearing his arms out by the sockets. The flat-faced bartender just glanced at the photograph of Underhill.

Conor understood why the Jaunty Jasmines stayed down at the end of the street.

Harry Beevers looked like he wanted to suggest giving up and going back to the hotel, but Poole kept them moving from one bar to another. Conor admired the way he kept on going without getting discouraged.

At the Bullfrog the guys sitting around the tables were so drunk they looked like statues. There were moving pictures of waterfalls on the walls. At the Cockpit Conor finally noticed that at least half the whores in the place weren’t women at all. They had bony knees and big shoulders; they were men. He started laughing—men with big tits and good-looking cans!—and sprayed beer all over disgusted Harry Beevers.

“I know this guy,” the bartender said. He looked again at Underhill’s face, and started smiling.

“See?” Conor asked. “See now?” Beevers turned away, wiping his sleeve.

“Does he come in here?” Mike asked.

“No, other place I worked. Good-time Charlie. Buy everybody a drink!”

“You sure it’s the same man?”

“Sure, that’s Undahill. He was around for a couple years, back in the old days. Spend lots of money. Used to come in da Floating Dragon, before it change hands. I worked nights, see him alla time. Talk, talk, talk. Drink, drink, drink. Real writah! Show me a book, something about animal—”

“A Beast in View.”

“Beast, right.”

When Poole asked if he knew where Underhill was now, the man shook his head and said that everything had changed from the old days. “Might ask at Mountjoy, right across street. Real hard core over there. Probably be someone there who remembers Undahill from old days, like me.”

“You liked him, didn’t you?”

“For a long time,” the bartender said. “Sure, I liked Undahill for a long time.”

2

Conor felt uneasy almost as soon as they walked into the Lord and Lady Mountjoy, and he couldn’t figure out why. It was a quiet place. Sober men in dark suits and white shirts sat in booths along the sides of the room or at little square tables set out on a slippery-looking parquet dance floor.

There were no transient whores in this place, just guys in suits and ties, and one character in a glittery blouse, sprayed piled-up hair, and about a hundred scarves hung loose around his neck, who was cooling out at a back table.

“Loosen up, for God’s sake,” Beevers said to Conor. “You got the runs or something?”

“Don’t know him, never saw him,” the bartender said. He had barely glanced at the photograph. He looked like a young Chinese version of Curly, the bald stooge in the Three Stooges.

“The bartender across the street told us that this man used to frequent this place,” Beevers said, pushing himself against the bar. “We’re detectives from New York City, and it’s important to a lot of people that we find this man.”

“Bartender where?” When Beevers had said the word “detective” a lead shield had slammed down over the bartender’s face, making him look a lot less like Curly.

“The Cockpit,” Mike said. He gave a fierce sidelong glance at Beevers, who shrugged and began toying with an ashtray.

The bartender shrugged.

“Is there anyone here who might remember this man? Anyone who was around Bugis Street in those days?”

“Billy,” the bartender said. “He’s been here since they paved the street.”

Conor’s heart sank. He knew who Billy was, all right, and he really didn’t want to have to talk to him.

“In da back,” the bartender said, and confirmed Conor’s fears. “Buy him a drink, he’s friendly.”

“Yeah, he looks friendly,” Beevers said.

At the back table Billy had straightened his shoulders and was patting his hair. When they approached his table, carrying their own drinks and a double Chivas Regal, he put his hands in his lap and beamed at them.

“Oh, you bought me a little drinkie, how dear of you,” Billy said.

Billy wasn’t Chinese, but he wasn’t anything else either, Conor thought. His eyes might have been almond-shaped, but it was hard to see them under all the makeup. Billy’s skin was very pale and he spoke with a British accent. All of his gestures suggested that a woman had been trapped inside his body and on the whole was enjoying herself in there. He raised his drink to his lips, sipped, and set it down gently on the table.

“I hope you gentlemen are going to join me?”

Mike Poole sat down opposite Billy, and Harry Beevers drew up a chair beside him. Conor had to sit on the bench beside Billy, who turned his head and flicked his eyelashes in his direction.

“Are you gentlemen new to Bugis Street? Your first night in Singapore, perhaps? You are looking for entertainment of an exotic nature? Precious little left in our city, I fear. Never mind—anyone can find what he wants, if he knows where to look.”

Another lidded glance at squirming Conor.

“We’re looking for someone,” Poole said.

“We’re—” Beevers began, and then looked up in astonishment at Poole, who had just stamped on his foot.

Poole said, “The young man at the bar thought you might be our best chance. The person we’re looking for lived or still lives in Singapore, and spent a lot of time on this street ten to fifteen years ago.”

“Long time ago,” Billy said. He cast his eyes down, tilted his head. “This person have a name?”

“Tim Underhill,” Poole said. He placed one of the photographs beside Billy’s drink. Billy blinked.

“Does he look familiar?”

“He might.”

Poole pushed a Singapore ten-dollar note across the table and Billy twinkled it away. “I believe I did know the gentleman.” Billy made an elaborate business of scrutinizing the photograph. “He was a bit of a one, wasn’t he?”

“We’re old friends of his,” Mike said. “We think he might need our help. That’s why we’re here. We’d appreciate any information you could give us.”

“Oh, everything’s changed since those days,” Billy said. “The whole street—really, you’d hardly know it.” He moodily inspected the photograph for a moment. “Flowers. He was the man for flowers, wasn’t he? Flowers this and flowers that. He’d been a soldier in the war.”

Poole nodded. “We met him in Vietnam.”

“Beautiful place, once,” Billy said. “Free-wheeling.” He startled Conor by asking, “Did you ever see Saigon, lover?”

Conor nodded and gulped down a mouthful of vodka.

“Some of our best girls used to work there. Nearly all gone now. The wind shifted. Got too cold for them. Can’t blame them, can you?”

Nobody said anything.

“Well, I say you can’t. They lived for pleasure, for delight, for illusion. Can’t blame them for not wanting to start grubbing away at some job, can you? So they scattered. Most of the best of our old friends went to Amsterdam. They were always welcome in their own very elegant clubs—the Kit Kat Club. You gentlemen ever see the Kit Kat Club?”

“What about Underhill?” Beevers asked.

“All mirrors, three stages, chrystal chandeliers, best of everything. It’s often been described to me. There’s nothing like the Kit Kat in Paris, or so I hear.” He sipped his scotch.

Conor said, “Look, do you know where we can find Underhill, or are we just dicking around?”

Another of Billy’s silken smiles. “A few of the entertainers who worked here are still in Singapore. You might try to see Lola perform. She works good clubs, not these remnants left on Bugis Street.” He paused. “She’s vivacious. You’d enjoy her act.”

3

Four days earlier, Tina Pumo was interrupted by Maggie Lah’s giggling over the front page of the New York Post while they ate breakfast together at La Groceria. (Tina was sentimentally attached to the little restaurant where he had so often read and reread the back page of the Village Voice.) They had each purchased newspapers at the newsstand on Sixth Avenue, and Tina was deep into the Times’s restaurant reviews when Maggie’s laughter distracted him. “Something funny in that rag?”

“They have such great headlines,” Maggie said, and turned the tabloid toward him: YUPPIE AIRPORT MURDER. “Random word order,” Maggie said. “How about AIRPORT YUPPIE MURDER? Or YUPPIE MURDER AIRPORT? Anyhow, it’s always nice to read about the end of a yup.”

Tina eventually found the story in the Times’s Metropolitan section. Clement W. Irwin, 29, an investment banker whose income was in the upper six figures and was regarded as a “superstar” by his peers, had been found stabbed to death in a men’s room near the Pan American baggage counters at JFK airport. Maggie’s paper carried a photograph of a blubbery face with small, widely set eyes behind heavy black eyeglasses. Equal amounts of appetite and aggression seemed stamped into the features. The caption read: Yuppie financial whiz Clement W. Irwin. On the inside pages were photographs of a townhouse on East 63rd Street, a manor on Mount Avenue in Hampstead, Connecticut, and a low, rambling beach house on the island of St. Maarten. The story in the Post, but not the Times, contained the speculation that Irwin had been murdered by either an airport employee or a fellow passenger who had been on his flight from San Francisco.

3

The morning after his tour of the Bugis Street bars, Conor Linklater swallowed two aspirin and a third of a bottle of Pepto-Bismol, showered, dressed in jeans and a short-sleeved shirt, and then joined the other two in the Marco Polo’s coffee shop.

“What kept you?” Beevers said. He and Michael were garbaging down on the weirdest-looking breakfast Conor had ever seen. They had toast and eggs and that stuff, but they also had bowls of gooey white pasty porridge full of green and yellow shit and fatty evil things that would have looked like eggs if they hadn’t been green. Both Mike and Beevers seemed to have taken no more than a bite or two of this substance.

“Little rocky this morning, think I’ll pass on breakfast,” Conor said. “What is that stuff, anyhow?”

“Don’t ask,” Beevers said.

Mike asked, “Are you sick, or just hung over?”

“Both, I guess.”

“Diarrhea?”

“I chugged down a ton of Pepto-Bismol.” The waiter came up, and he ordered coffee. “American coffee.”

Beevers smiled at him and pushed a folded copy of the Straits Times across the table. “Take a look and tell me what you think.”

Conor scanned headlines about new sewage treatment plants, about the increase of bank loans to nonbank customers, the expected overload of bridge traffic on the New Year’s holiday, and finally saw this headline in the middle of the page: DOUBLE HOMICIDE IN EMPTY BUNGALOW.

An American journalist named Roberto Ortiz, Conor read, had been found slain in a bungalow on Plantation Road. Also found was the body of a young woman identified only as a Malaysian prostitute. Forensic pathologists stated that the corpses, found in a state of putrefaction, had been dead approximately ten days. The bungalow was the property of Professor Li Lau Feng, who had left it vacant for a year while he taught at the University of Jakarta. Mr. Ortiz’s body had been mutilated after death from gunshot wounds. The unidentified woman had also died of gunshot wounds. Mr. Ortiz was a journalist and the author of two books, Beggar Thy Neighbor: United States Policy in Honduras and Vietnam: A Personal Journey. Police were said to have evidence linking this crime to several others committed in Singapore during the past year.

“What kind of evidence?” Conor asked.

“I bet they found Koko cards,” Beevers said. “They’re finally getting cagey. You think they’d release a detail like that if it happened in New York? Don’t be crazy. Mutilated, it says. What do you want to bet his eyes were poked out and his ears were cut off? Underhill’s at work, my friends. We came to the right place.”

“Jesus,” Conor said. “So what do we do? I thought we were going to, ah, look for this, ah …”

“We are,” Poole said. “I got all the papers and guidebooks in the gift shop, and we were just about to try to find out where this Lola works, if she is working. The clerks in the shop won’t admit to ever having heard of anybody named Lola, so we have to do it this way.”

“But this morning,” Beevers said, “we thought we ought to look at the places where they found the other bodies. The bungalow where they found the Martinsons, and this one, and the Goodwood Park Hotel.”

“Should we maybe talk to the police? Find out if there were cards with these other people?”

“I don’t feel like turning Underhill over to the police,” Beevers said. “Do you? I mean, is that what we came here for?”

“We still don’t know it’s Underhill,” Poole said. “We don’t even know he’s still in Singapore.”

“You don’t shit in your backyard. You got it now, Michael?”

Poole was going page by page through the Straits Times.

“Here’s Underhill right now,” Conor said. “He still wears that funky old bandanna. He’s fat as a pig. He gets stoned out of his gourd every single night. He owns a flower shop. All these young guys work for him, and he bores the shit out of them when he talks about all the stuff he did in Nam. Everybody loves the old ratbag.”

“Dream on,” Beevers said.

Poole had gone on to another paper, and was flipping pages with the regularity of a metronome.

“Every now and then he goes into his study or whatever, locks the door, and sweats out a new chapter.”

“Every now and then he locks himself in an abandoned building and kills the shit out of somebody.”

“Are those eggs really a hundred years old?” Conor asked. He had picked up the menu while Beevers spoke. “What’s the green shit?”

“Tea,” Poole said.

Ten minutes later Poole found a small advertisement for “The Fabulous Lola” in Singapore After Dark, one of the cheap guides to Singapore’s night life he had picked up in the gift shop. Lola was appearing at a nightclub called Peppermint City at an address up in the ten thousands out on a road too far from the center of the city to be on Beevers’ map.

All three men stared at a tiny black and white photograph of a girlish male Chinese with plucked eyebrows and high teased hair.

“I don’t feel too good already,” Conor said. He had turned as green as a century egg, and Poole made him promise that he would spend the day in his room and see the hotel doctor.

4

Michael did not know what he expected to learn from the murder sites any more than he could anticipate what Lola might tell him, but seeing the places where the deaths occurred would help him to see the deaths themselves.

He and Beevers walked in less than ten minutes to the villa on Nassim Hill where the Martinsons had been found.

“Picked a nice place, at least,” Beevers said.

Surrounded by trees, the villa stood on a little rise in the land. With its red roof tiles, golden plaster, and big windows, it might have been one of the pretty houses Michael had seen from the window of his hotel the previous morning. Nothing about it suggested that two people had been murdered there.

Poole and Beevers walked through the trees to shade their eyes and peered into a room like a long rectangular cave. In the middle of the wooden floor, thick with balls of dust like dirty cotton, as if someone had pitched brown paint onto the floor and then made a half-hearted attempt to clean it up, was a wide eccentric stain surrounded by dots and splashes.

Then Poole realized that a third shadowy reflection had fallen between his own and Beevers’, and he jumped, feeling like a child caught stealing. “Please excuse me,” a man said. “I did not mean to startle.”

He was a massive Chinese in a black silk suit and gleaming black tasseled loafers. “You are interested in the house?”

“Are you the owner?” Poole asked. He seemed to have appeared from nowhere, like a well-dressed ghost.

“I am not only the owner, I am the neighbor!” He swept his arm sideways toward another villa just a short distance up the hillside but barely visible through the trees. “When I saw you walk up, I thought to protect against vandalism. Sometimes young people come here to use the empty building—young people same all over, correct?” He laughed in a series of flat hollow barks. “When I see you, I know you are not vandals.”

“Of course we’re not vandals,” Beevers said a little testily. He looked at Poole and decided not to say that they were New York City detectives. “We were friends of the people who died here, and since we came here on a tour, we decided to take a look at the place where it happened.”

“Very unfortunate,” the man said. “Your loss is my loss.”

“Very kind,” Poole said.

“I am speaking commercially. Since the event, nobody wants to look at the house. And if they did, we could not let them in to show it because the police have sealed it!” He pointed out the rain-spattered yellow notice and the seal on the front door. “We cannot even wash away the bloodstains! Oh, excuse me, please, I did not think! I regret what happened to your friends, and I do sympathize with your grief.” He straightened up, and took a few steps backward in embarrassment. “It is cold in St. Louis now? You are enjoying the Singapore weather?”

“You didn’t hear anything?” Beevers asked.

“Not on that night. Otherwise, I heard things many times.”

“Many times?” Poole asked.

“Heard him for weeks. A teenager. Never much noise. Just one boy who slipped in and out at night like a shadow. Never caught him.”

“But you saw him?”

“Once. From the back. I came down from my house and saw him walking through the hibiscus trees. I called to him, but he did not stop. Would you? He was small—just a boy. I called the police, but they could not find him to keep him out. I locked the place, but he always found a way back in.”

“He was Chinese?”

“Of course. At least I assumed he was—I only saw him from the back.”

“Do you think he committed the murders?” Poole asked.

“I don’t know. I doubt it, but I don’t know. He seemed so harmless.”

“What did you mean, you heard him?” Beevers asked.

“I heard him singing to himself.”

“What did he sing?” Poole asked.

“A song in a foreign language,” the man said. “It was not any dialect of Chinese, and it was not French or English—I have often wondered if it was Polish! It went … oh …” He burst out laughing. “It went ‘rip-a-rip-a-rip-a-lo.’ ” He sang the words almost tunelessly and laughed again. “So melancholy. Two or three times I heard the song coming from this house while I sat in my courtyard in the evening. I came down here as quietly as I could, but he always heard me coming and hid until I left.” He paused. “In the end, I accepted him.”

“You accepted a housebreaker?” Beevers asked.

“I came to think of the boy as a sort of pet. After all, he lived here like a little animal. He did no damage, and he sang his lonely little song. Rip-a-rip-a-rip-a-lo.”

He seemed a little forlorn. Poole tried to imagine an American tycoon looking forlorn in a black silk suit and tasseled loafers, but failed.

“He must have left before the murders.” The man looked at his watch. “Anything else?”

He waved good-bye as they walked back down to Nassim Hill and was still waving when they turned toward Orchard Road to find a cab.

They saw where the body of Clive McKenna had been discovered as soon as their cabdriver pointed out the Goodwood Park Hotel. The white hotel stood on a rise that looked down toward the fringes of the city’s business district and the land fell away in a steep green slope. When the cab dropped them off, Poole and Beevers walked through a fringe of shrubbery and looked down the hill. Some tough, dark green plant like myrtle covered it, and low hedges grew at intervals.

“He lured him here,” Beevers said. “They probably met at the bar. Let’s go out for some fresh air. In goes the knife. Good-bye, Clive. I wonder—I wonder if we can find out anything interesting at the desk.” Beevers sounded very cheerful, almost as if he were celebrating the murder.

Inside, Beevers asked, “Was a Mr. Underhill registered here around the time Mr. McKenna was killed?” He held a ten-dollar note folded into his palm.

The clerk bent over and pushed buttons on the computer terminal set beneath the registration desk. He dismayed Michael Poole by reporting that a Mr. Timothy Underhill had been expected six days before the discovery of Clive McKenna’s body, but had not arrived to claim his room.

“Bingo,” Beevers said, and the desk clerk reached for the bill. Beevers pulled his hand out of reach. “Do you have an address for Underhill?”

“Sure,” the clerk said. “Fifty-six Grand Street, New York City.”

“How did he make the reservation?”

“No record. It must have come in by telephone. We have no credit card number.”

“No record of where he called from?”

The clerk shook his head.

“Not good enough.” Beevers snatched back the note and smirked at Michael.

They went back out into the sun.

“Why would he use his real name if he was paying in cash?” Michael asked.

“Michael, he was so high he thought he could get away with anything. He’s a shake ‘n’ bake, Michael—killing people is not logical behavior. This man is drooling at the mouth and you want to know why he uses his real name! See how I saved ten bucks?” Beevers nodded to the doorman, who whistled to the rank of waiting cabs.

“You know,” Poole said, “I have the feeling I’ve heard that address, 56 Grand Street, before. It seems so familiar.”

“Jesus, Michael.”

“What is it?”

“Pumo’s restaurant, dumbo. Saigon is at 56 Grand Street. In the City of New York in the State of New York in the United States of America.”

Plantation Road began with a tall hotel at the corner of a busy six-lane road and almost instantly became a comfortable upper-middle-class enclave of long low bungalows behind wide lawns and locked gates. When they came to number 72, Beevers told the driver to wait and the two men left the cab.

The bungalow where Roberto Ortiz and the woman had died stood out in the sunlight like a pink cake. Flowering hibiscus trees grew on either side, their shadows floating over the dark lawn. A clean yellow notice had been wired to the gates, announcing that the Singapore Police Department had sealed the house for the purposes of a homicide investigation. Two dark blue police cars were pulled up before the gates, and Poole could see uniforms moving past the windows inside the house.

“You noticed yet how good-looking the policewomen are in this country?” Beevers asked. “I wonder if they’d let us inside?”

“Why don’t you tell them that you’re a detective from New York?” Poole said.

“I’m an officer of the court, that’s why,” Beevers said.

Poole turned around to look at the house across the street. A middle-aged Chinese woman stood at a living room window with her arm around the waist of a younger, taller woman with her right hand on her hip. Both women looked very tense. Poole wondered if they had ever heard a young man singing a strange song that sounded like rip-a-rip-a-rip-a-lo.

Poole and Harry Beevers returned to the Marco Polo and found a frowsy, red-eyed Conor Linklater who reminded Michael of Dwight Frye in Dracula. The hotel had given him the name of a doctor in the building next door, and Poole and Beevers helped him into the elevator and out into the sunlight. “I can come with you tonight, Mikey,” he said. “This is a real temporary thing.”

“You are staying home tonight,” Poole said.

“Yeah, count me out too,” Beevers said. “I’m too beat to chase around to another fag bar. I’ll stay home and tell Conor what we did all day.”

They were moving unsteadily down the sidewalk, Michael and Beevers on either side of Conor, who took little shuffling steps, afraid to risk walking normally.

Beevers said, “In a couple of years, we’ll be sitting in a screening room, watching ourselves do this. Half the people in the world will know that Conor Linklater had the runs. I wish Sean Connery were twenty years younger. It’s really too bad that all the right actors are too old now.”

“Olivier really is too old, I guess,” Michael said.

“I mean guys like Greg Peck, Dick Widmark, guys like that. Paul Newman’s too short, and Robert Redford’s too bland. Maybe they ought to go for the intensity and get James Woods. I could live with that.”

5

The taxi wound through Singapore until it struck a belt road and then it went so far that Poole began to wonder if the nightclub was in Malaysia. Before long the only lights close at hand were the arc lamps above the six-lane highway. Dark empty land lay on both sides of the road, here and there punctuated by small isolated clusters of lights. They were nearly alone on the road and the driver was going very fast. It seemed to Poole that the wheels were not actually touching the road.

“Are we still in Singapore?” he asked. The driver did not respond.

Eventually the car jerked off the highway onto an access road to a shopping mall that gleamed like a space station in the darkness—longer, taller, and more elaborate than any of the shopping centers on Orchard Road. A vast, nearly empty parking lot surrounded it. Huge vertical posters covered with Chinese letters the size of a man hung down the sides of the mall. A rank of palm trees hung frozen in the white artificial light.

“Are you sure this is where Peppermint City is?” Poole asked.

The driver braked to an abrupt halt before the undead palm trees and sat behind the wheel like a statue. When Poole hesitantly repeated his question, the man bawled out something in Chinese.

“How much?”

The man yelled the same phrase.

Poole handed over a bill whose denomination he could not see, received a surprising amount of change, and tipped with another random bill. When the cab took off he was alone.

The mall seemed to have been constructed of dull grey metal. Through huge windows on the ground floor Poole could see two or three tiny figures wandering past closed shops far down at the mall’s opposite end.

Glass doors whooshed open and cold air enveloped him. The doors sealed up behind him. Goose bumps rose on his arms.

Before him a vacant corridor led to a vast high-vaulted space. Poole felt as if he had entered an empty church. Mannequins posed and stretched in the display windows of closed shops. Invisible escalators whirred. God had gone home and the cathedral was as empty as a bomb crater. As Poole passed into the great vault, he saw a few scattered people moving in a waking trance across the mezzanine, past darkened rows of shops.

Poole wandered through the ground floor of the mall, certain that the driver had taken him to the wrong place. For a long time he could not even find the escalator, and thought he would have to drift all night past Good Fortune Toys, Merlion Furniture, and Mode O’Day, Clothes for Discriminating Women. Finally he turned a corner at a restaurant called Captain Steak and saw the wizened baseball-capped head of an elderly Chinese man floating downwards toward him above the escalator’s steel flank.

On the third level his feet began to ache—the floor was flat, unyielding stone. Red and orange sweatshirts, trapped birds, hung in a black window. Poole sighed and kept on walking. Could he get a taxi back to town, way out here? He felt that nobody would speak to him and he would never be able to make himself understood. He understood why George Romero had filmed Dawn of the Dead in a shopping mall.

This was Singapore at its most sterile and perfect. Randomness, dirt, and vitality had been ruthlessly excluded. Michael wished he were back at the Marco Polo, getting drunk with Beevers and watching the finance programs and soap operas that made up Singapore television.

On the fifth level he walked, disheartened, down corridors even darker and emptier than those on the floors below. Up here, not a single shop or restaurant remained open. He was on the fifth floor of a suburban shopping mall, and he had been stranded miles out of town. Then, at the curve of the corridor, the dark shop windows gave way to walls covered with small white tiles that shone with the light from a row of angled spots. Through an opening in the wall, Poole saw men in suits, girls in tight cocktail dresses, everybody smoking in hazy blue light. A good-looking hostess stood at a desk and smiled at him while speaking into a telephone. Just outside the entrance a pink neon sign flashed PEPPERMINT CITY! beside a leafless tree which had been painted white and hung with tiny white bulbs.

Poole went through the entrance and the shopping mall disappeared. Fanning out before before and below him was an enormous fantasy that looked like tea time on the grounds of a Mississippi plantation. On the other side of the desk, hostesses led couples down to ranks of round white tables of ornate cast iron, and seated them on white cast-iron ice-cream chairs. The floor and walls had been painted flat black. Other ice-cream chairs and tables sat on the mezzanine and risers on both sides of a busy, crowded bar. In the middle of the floor, surrounded by the tables, a boy in an illuminated fountain spouted water from his mouth.

The woman at the desk led him to a small white table on a platform beyond the bar. Poole ordered a beer. Young homosexual couples who wore suits and looked like MIT graduate students shuffled around on a small dance floor in front of the stage. Other couples like them occupied most of the seats in the club—boys in round glasses gripping cigarettes and trying not to look self-conscious. Scattered through the club were a few Englishmen and Americans earnestly making conversation with their Chinese and Eurasian escorts. Most of the couples drank champagne, most of the boys, beer.

A few minutes later the quiet music suddenly ceased. The boys dancing in front of the stage grinned and applauded as they went toward their seats. The telephone rang very loudly, and the cash register went bing!, and a few voices obliviously rose up before they, too, ceased.

Four chunky Filipinos, one Eurasian, and a slender Chinese boy bounced onto the stage. From the opposite side, a stagehand pushed on a bulky synthesizer and rolled it past the drums. All the musicians but the Chinese were dressed alike in blousy yellow shirts and tight red velvet vest-and-trouser outfits. They carried their instruments onstage with them—two guitars, a conga drum, an electric bass—and began playing a bland, processed version of “Billie Jean” as soon as the drummer and keyboard player had reached their instruments. The Eurasian and the keyboard player had short curly hair and sunglasses like Michael Jackson, and the others had John Lennon’s droopy hair, round glasses, and sly sidelong glances. It was clear that they had been a band long before Lola hired them: Poole imagined that if he came back to Singapore in twenty years, he would see the same musicians grown older and paunchier, no less mechanical, and probably in the same clothes.

It was Michael Jackson’s year, and Lola too had adopted the mass of curls and sunglasses, as well as a single white glove. He wore glittery Spandex tights, glossy high black boots, and a loose white off-the-shoulder blouse. Heavy earrings glittered in the curly hair, and a clutch of heavy bracelets slithered up and down his arm. The boys at the tables in front of the stage clapped and whistled, and Lola pranced through an energetic but lifeless version of Michael Jackson’s dance moves. From “Billie Jean,” they went into “Maniac,” then into “MacArthur Park.” Lola’s costume changes drew claps and whistles.

Poole picked up the request card folded at his table, flattened it out and wrote I like your act. Would you be willing to talk to me about an old friend from Bugis Street? He raised his arm and the waitress took the form and went down the steps to wind through the tables to pass the slip up to Lola.

Still singing “Cross My Heart” and dressed now in a red long-sleeved blouse and a necklace of heavy purple glass beads, Lola snatched the card from the waitress and twiddled it flirtatiously through his fingers before opening it. His face was still for no more than half a second before he spun around, stamped his foot, extended his arms and rattled his bracelets and sang out “Cross my heart!”

After nearly an hour Lola left the stage bowing and blowing kisses. The MIT boys stood up and applauded. The band took an almost mockingly low bow.

Poole waited for his check after the lights went up. Some of the young Chinese boys had gathered around a door at the side of the stage, and occasionally someone opened the door and let them in and out.

When the boys had left or returned to their tables for the second performance, Poole knocked on the flimsy black door. It swung open. Crowded into a small, smoky lounge, the musicians looked up from the floor and the ancient sofa. The room smelled of tobacco, sweat, and makeup. Lola half-turned from the mirror before him and peered out from beneath the towel that covered his head. He held a flat case of black powder in one hand and an eyebrow brush in the other.

Poole stepped into the room.

“Close the door behind you,” one of the musicians said.

“You want to see me?” Lola asked.

“I enjoyed your performance,” Poole said. He stepped forward. The fat conga player pulled back his legs to permit Poole to move forward another step. Lola smiled and pulled the towel from his head.

He was smaller and older than he appeared onstage. Beneath the makeup, a network of knifelike little wrinkles had chipped into the girlish face. His eyes were tired and cautious. Sweat still sparkled in his springy hair. He nodded at the compliment and turned back to the mirror.

“I sent the note about Bugis Street,” Poole said.

Lola’s hand came away from his eyes and he very slightly turned his head to take in Poole.

“Do you have a minute?”

“I don’t remember ever seeing you before.” Lola’s English was nearly accentless.

“This is my first time in Singapore.”

“And you have something extremely pressing on your mind.”

One of the musicians guffawed.

“I heard about you from a man named Billy,” Poole said. He seemed to be missing something, some secret that the others knew.

“And what were you doing with Billy? Looking for entertainment? I hope you found some.”

“I was looking for a writer named Tim Underhill,” Poole said.

Lola startled him by slamming down the little case of mascara with enough force to raise a dingy cloud of powder. “You know, I thought I was ready for this, but I am not ready for this.”

He thought he was ready for this? Poole thought. He said, “Billy said you might have known Underhill, or might even know where he is.”

“Well, he isn’t here.” Lola stepped forward. “I don’t want to talk about this. I have another show to do. Leave me alone.”

The other musicians watched with good-natured indifference.

“I need your help,” Poole said.

“What are you, a cop? Does he owe you money?”

“My name is Michael Poole. I’m a doctor. I used to be a friend of his.”

Lola pressed his palms to his forehead. He looked as if he wished that Poole was a dream that would simply go away. He peeled his hands away from his head and rolled his eyes upward. “Oh. God. Well, here it is.” He turned to the conga player. “Did you ever know Tim Underhill?”

The conga player shook his head.

“You weren’t on Bugis Street at the start of the seventies?”

“We were still in Manila,” the conga player said. “We were the Cadillacs in 1970. Played Subic Bay.”

“Played all those bars,” said the keyboard player. “Great days, man. You got anything you wanted.”

“Danny Boy,” the keyboard player said.

“Danny Boy. Sailors got Danny Boy.”

“Can you tell me where to find him?” Poole asked.

Lola noticed that his fingers were dusty with black powder, and gave himself a disgusted look in the mirror before plucking a tissue from a box on his table. He deliberately, slowly, wiped his fingers while gazing at himself in the mirror. “I don’t have anything to hide,” he told the mirror. “Quite the reverse, in fact.”

Then he glanced again at Poole. “What are you going to do when you find him?”

“Talk to him.”

“I hope that isn’t all you’re going to do.” Lola exhaled loudly, clouding the mirror’s surface. “I’m really not ready for this yet.”

“Just name a time and a place.”

“A time and a place,” sang the keyboard player, “give me the time and the place.”

“Subic Bay,” said the conga player.

“Ah, do you know Bras Basah Park?” Lola asked.

Poole said that he could find it.

“I’ll meet you there tomorrow at eleven, maybe.” Lola again confronted himself in the mirror. “If I’m not there, forget all about it. Don’t come back. Okay?”

Poole had no intention of honoring that pledge, but he nodded.

The conga player began singing “Do you know the way to Bras Basah Park?” and Poole left the room.

6

The next morning, half an hour’s walk brought Poole to within sight of a small green triangle of ground set between Orchard Road and Bras Basah Road. He was alone—Conor was too weak from whatever bug had attacked him to have walked the three miles to the park, and Beevers, who had appeared in the coffee shop with bags under his eyes and a red scratch above his right eyebrow, had claimed to think it better for Michael to “feel out” the singer by himself.

Poole understood why Lola had chosen Bras Basah Park for their meeting. It was probably the most public park he had ever seen. Nothing that happened there would be hidden from the buildings on the other sides of the two wide roads, or from the drivers of the cars that ceaselessly swept past. Bras Basah Park was about as private as a traffic island.

Three broad, curving paths of amber brick intersected it and converged at the park’s narrow eastern end, where a wider walkway circled an abstract bronze sculpture and led out past a wooden sign.

Poole walked along Orchard Road until he reached the stoplight that would allow him to cross into the empty park. It was five minutes to eleven.

When he sat down on one of the benches on the path nearest Orchard Road, he looked around, wondering where Lola was now, and if he was watching him from one of the windows facing the park. He knew the singer would make him wait, and wished that he had thought of carrying a book with him.

Poole sat on the wooden bench in the warm sun. An old man tottered by on a stick, and took an amazingly long time to pass before Poole. Poole watched him take his tiny steps past all the benches, past the sculpture, past the sign, and finally out into the middle of Orchard Road. Twenty-five minutes had gone by.

Here he was, sitting alone on a bench on a glorified traffic island in Singapore. He felt, all at once, monumentally alone. He considered the possibility—no, the likelihood—that if he were never to go back to Westerholm the person who would miss him most would be a little girl for whom he could do nothing but buy books.

That was okay. That was all right. He’d miss Stacy too, just as much, if she were to die while he was gone. It was funny, Poole thought: in medical school you learned one hell of a lot about matters of life and death, but you didn’t learn beans about mourning. They didn’t teach you anything about grief. These days, grief seemed one of the absolutely essential human emotions to Dr. Michael Poole. Grief was right up there with love.

Poole remembered standing alone in a hotel room in Washington, watching as a gaudy van crunched in the front end of a dusty little car, remembered walking in brisk cold air alongside whiskery veterans accompanied by Dengler’s double and the ghost of Tim Underhill. He remembered Thomas Strack.

He saw fat ladies waving banners and cold clouds scudding through grey air. He remembered how the names had walked right out of the black wall, and his mouth flooded with the bitter, essential taste of mortality. “Dwight T. Pouncefoot,” he said, and heard the glorious absurdity of that name. His eyes blurred, and he began to giggle uncontrollably.

For some time he went on laughing and crying at once. An extraordinary mixture of feelings had come steaming up through his chest, filling every crevice, leaping every synapse. He laughed and cried, filled with the taste of mortality and grief, which was both bitter and joyous. When the emotion began to fade, he yanked his handkerchief from his pocket, wiped his eyes, and saw beside him on the bench a scrawny middle-aged man who looked like a Chinese Roddy McDowall. The man was watching him with mingled curiosity and impatience. He was one of those men who look like teenagers into their mid-forties, and then suddenly wrinkle into aged boy-men.

Michael took in the man’s brown trousers and pink shirt with its collar carefully folded over the collar of the brown plaid sports jacket, the carefully flattened-down hair, and only then realized that this was Lola in his civilian clothes and out of his makeup.

“I suppose you’re crazy too,” Lola said in a flat accentless voice. His face twitched into a complicated pattern of chips and wrinkles as he smiled. “Makes sense, if you’re a friend of Underhill’s.”

“I was just thinking that only a really terrible war would kill a guy named Dwight T. Pouncefoot. Don’t you agree?” The name brought on another spasm of those radically contradictory feelings, and Poole closed his mouth against an onslaught of mad giggling laughter.

“Sure,” Lola said. Poole let his hands fall into his lap and saw, with a little shock of relief and surprise, that Lola was almost entirely unaffected by his outburst. He had seen worse. “You were in Vietnam with Underhill?”

Poole nodded. He supposed that was all the explanation Lola needed.

“You were close friends?”

Poole said, “He saved a lot of lives in a place called Dragon Valley, just by keeping everybody calm. I guess he was a great soldier. He liked the excitement of combat, he liked being on patrol, he liked that adrenaline rush. He was smart, too.”