Koko

“You have not seen him since the war?”

Poole shook his head.

“You know what I think?” Lola asked, and answered his own question as Poole waited. “I think you can’t help Tim Underhill.” He glanced at Poole, then looked away.

“Where did you meet Underhill?”

Lola looked straight at Poole again, his mouth working as if to locate and expel an irritating seed. “At the Orient Song. It’s completely different now—they have tour groups, and a few of the Bugis Street people are paid a few dollars to sit in the back and look dissipated.”

“I was there,” Poole said, remembering the Jaunty Jasmines.

“I know you were there. I know every place you went. I know everything you and your friends did. Many people called me. I even thought that I knew who you were.”

Poole just kept silent.

“He used to talk about the war. He used to talk about you. Michael Poole, right?” When Poole nodded, Lola said, “I think you might be interested in what he used to say about you. He said that you were destined to become a good doctor, marry a perfect bitch, and live in the suburbs.”

Poole met Lola’s grin with his own.

“He said you’d eventually begin to hate the job, the wife, and the place where you lived. He said he was interested in how long it would take you to get there, and what you would do after that. He also said he admired you.”

Poole must have looked startled, because Lola said, “Underhill told me you had the strength to tolerate a second-rate destiny for a long time. He admired that—because he could not, he had to find a tenth-rate destiny, or a twelfth-rate, or a hundredth-rate. After his writing stopped working for him, your friend went in search of the bottom. And people who seek the bottom always find it. Because it’s always there, isn’t it?”

What sent him there, Poole wanted to ask, but Lola went on talking—fast. “Let me tell you about the Americans who came here during Vietnam. These people could not adjust to life in their own country. They felt more comfortable in the East. A lot of them liked Asian women. Or Asian boys, like your friend.” A bitter smile. “A lot of them wanted to be where they thought drugs were plentiful. Most of the Americans who felt that way went to Bangkok, some bought bars in Patpong or Chiang Mai, others got into the drug trade.” He glanced at Poole again.

“What did Underhill do?”

Lola’s face broke into a wilderness of wrinkles. “Underhill was happy with his work. He lived in a tiny room in the old Chinese section, put his typewriter up on a box. Little record player—he spent his money on records, books, Bugis Street, and drugs. But he was a sick person. He loved destruction. You said he was a good soldier. What do you think makes a good soldier? Creativity?”

“But he was a creative person—nobody could say he wasn’t. He even wrote his best books here.”

“He wrote his first book in his head in Vietnam,” Lola said. “He only had to put it down. He sat in his little room, typed, went out to Bugis Street, picked up boys, did whatever he did, took whatever he took, the next morning typed some more. Everything was easy. You think I don’t know? I know—I was there. When his book was finished, he had a big party in the Floating Dragon. That’s when a man I know, a friend of mine named Ong Pin, met him. Then he was all set to start his next book. He says to me, he knew all about this crazy man, he knows him from the inside, he has to write a book about him. He has something to figure out—he’s very mysterious. Mysterious in lots of ways. He needs money, but he says he has a scheme that will make him set up for life. But before he can get it, he has to borrow—he needs money to stay afloat. He borrows from everybody. Me included. A lot of money. He will pay me back, of course he will. He is a famous author, isn’t he?”

“Is that how the lawsuit came about?”

Lola gave him a sharp look, then a twisted smile. “It seemed like such a good idea to him. He was going to get hundreds of thousands of dollars. Underhill had one big problem—he couldn’t write anything he thought was any good. He started two, three books after The Divided Man. Ripped them all up. He went crazy—so he and Ong Pin threatened the publisher with a lawsuit. Get a lot of money all at once, pay everybody back. When this brilliant idea didn’t work, Underhill got tired of Ong Pin. He threw him out of his place, he sent everybody away. He beat a boy up—crazy stuff. Then he disappeared. Nobody could find him. After that I heard stories about him. Underhill was living in hotels and running out in the middle of the night after running up huge bills. Once I heard he was sleeping under a certain bridge, and some people and I went there to see if we could at least shake a few dollars out of him, maybe beat him up, but he wasn’t there. I heard he was spending whole days in an opium house. Then I heard he was even crazier than before—going around telling people that the world was filthy, and that I was a demon, Billy was a demon, God was going to destroy us. Scared me, Doctor. Who could tell what this crazy man would do? He hated himself, I knew that. People who hate themselves, who cannot stand what they think they are, can do anything, you know. He was blackballed from bars in every part of town. Nobody saw him, but everybody heard stories. He found the bottom, he did that.”

Poole groaned inwardly. What had happened to Underhill? Maybe the drugs he had taken had ruined him by making it impossible for him to write well.

As Lola talked, Poole found himself remembering the night in Washington he had gone with a woman lawyer to see a jazz piano player named Hank Jones. He had been in town to give testimony at a hearing on Agent Orange. Poole knew very little about jazz, and now he could remember none of the actual music Hank Jones had played. But what he did remember was a grace and joy that had seemed abstract and physical at once. He could remember how Hank Jones, who was a middle-aged black man with grizzled hair and a handsome, devilish face, had tilted his head over the keyboard, purely responsive to the flow of his inspirations. The music had gone straight into Michael Poole. Passion so light! Passion so singing! Poole had known that by a miracle of sympathy, he was hearing the music as the young lawyer heard it. And after the set, when Jones was standing next to the piano talking to his fans, Poole had seen the man’s blazing delight in what he had done. This shone forth even in the grace of his movements, and Poole had felt as though he were watching an old lion filled with the essence of lionhood.

And something had struck him then, that of all the people he knew, probably only Tim Underhill would have known this blazing inner weather.

But Underhill had only had a couple of years of what Hank Jones seemed to have had for decades. He had cheated himself of the rest of it.

There was a long pause. “You have read his books?”

Poole nodded.

“Are they any good?”

“The first two were very good.”

Lola sniffed. “I thought they would all be terrible books.”

“Where is he now? Do you have any idea?”

“Are you going to kill him?” Lola squinted at Poole. “Well, maybe somebody should kill him and end his misery before he kills someone else.”

“Is he in Bangkok? Taipei? Back in the States?”

“Someone like him cannot go back to America. He went somewhere else, I’m sure of that—like a crazy animal crawling off to a safe place. I always thought he would go to Bangkok. Bangkok would be perfect for him. But he used to talk about Taipei, so maybe he went there. He never paid me the money he owed me, I can tell you that.” The squint was now a look of pure malice. “The crazy man he was going to write about—that was him. He did not even know that much, and people so ignorant about themselves are dangerous. I used to think I loved him. Loved him! Dr. Poole, if you find your friend, I hope you will be very careful.”

1

Michael Poole and Conor Linklater had already been in Bangkok—and Harry Beevers in Taipei—for two days when Tina Pumo made his discovery, which came in the mundane surroundings of the Microfilm Room of the main branch of the New York Public Library. He was writing a book about Vietnam, he had explained to a stocky, sixtyish, bearded man in a handsome black suit, in particular a book about the Ia Thuc court martials.

Which newspapers did he want? Copies of the daily New York, Washington, Los Angeles, and St. Louis papers and the national news magazines for the months of November 1968, and March 1969. And because he wanted to see the obituaries of Koko’s victims, he requested the London Times, Guardian, and Telegraph for the week of January 28, 1982, and the St. Louis papers for the week of February 5, 1982, as well as the Paris daily papers for the week of July 7, 1982.

The bearded man told Pumo that it would usually take a great deal of time to locate and assemble that amount of material, but that he had both good news and bad news for him. The good news was that the various microfilms pertaining to the Ia Thuc incident had already been assembled—there were even a couple of sources, long articles in Harper’s, the Atlantic, and American Scholar, which he had overlooked. The bad news was that this material was still awaiting redistribution because someone else was also researching Ia Thuc. A journalist named Roberto Ortiz had requested the same information three days earlier, consulted them again a day later, and had spent Tuesday afternoon examining them again, today being Wednesday—Village Voice day, Pumo reflexively thought.

Tina had never heard of Roberto Ortiz, and his private emotion at this news was principally gratitude that he would not have to wait days for the microfilm to be located. He was just double-checking, Tina told himself, making up for the feeling of having missed something important by not going along with the others to Singapore. If he discovered anything they ought to know, he could call them at the Marco Polo.

Before the articles were located and assembled, he read what the news magazines and the New York Times had said about Ia Thuc. He was seated in a plastic chair before a plastic desk; the chair was not comfortable and the microfilm machine took up so much of the desk that he had to rest his notebook in his lap. Within minutes, none of this mattered at all. What happened to Pumo within ten minutes of starting to read a Newsweek story entitled “Ia Thuc: Shame or Victory?” was very similar to what happened to Conor Linklater when Charlie Daisy put an album of SP4 Cotton’s photographs before him. He had managed to forget how public it all had been.

Here spoke Lt. Harry Beevers according to Newsweek: “In this war we are here to kill Charlies, and Charlies come in all shapes and sizes. My own personal body count is thirty dead VC.” Children Killer? asked Time, which described the lieutenant as “gaunt, hollow-eyed and -cheeked, desperate, a man on the edge.” Were They Innocent? asked Newsweek, which said the lieutenant was “perhaps as much a victim of Vietnam as the children he is alleged to have killed.”

Tina could remember Harry Beevers at Ia Thuc. “I have a personal body count of thirty dead gooks! You guys have any balls, pin a medal on me right now.” The lieutenant was high and babbling, he couldn’t shut up. When you stood next to him, you could almost feel the blood zooming around his arteries. You knew that you’d burn your fingers if you touched him. “War makes everybody the same age!” he had bawled out to the reporters. “You assholes think there are children in this war, you think children even exist in this war? You know why you think that way? Because you’re ignorant civilians, that’s why. There are no children!”

These were the articles that had nearly hanged Beevers, and Dengler with him. In Time: “I deserve a goddamned medal!” Funny, Pumo thought, how in Beevers’ recollections of these events he always said the rest of the platoon deserved goddamned medals too.

Surrounded by a bubble of unearthly stillness, Pumo remembered how crazy and taut everybody had felt then, how close that boundary was between morality and murder. They had been nothing but nerves hooked up to trigger fingers. The stink of the fish sauce, and the smoke rising from the pot. Up on the sloping hillside, a girl lay in a crumpled blue heap before her wooden yoke. If the village was empty, who the fuck was doing the cooking? And who were they cooking for? Everything was as still as a tiger in the grass. The sow grunted and cocked her head, and Pumo remembered whirling around, weapon ready, and almost blasting a dirty child in half. Because you couldn’t know, you never knew, and death could be a little smiling child with an outstretched hand; it zapped your brain, it fried it, and you either blasted away at everything in sight or you made yourself melt into whatever was behind you. Like the tiger in the grass, you could save your life by becoming invisible.

He looked at the photographs for a long time—Lieutenant Beevers, skinny as a sapling, with a haggard face and spinning eyes. M.O. Dengler, unidentified, white tired eyes flashing from beneath his helmet liner. All that green around them, that palpitating, trembling, simmering green. The mouth of a cave—“like a fist,” Victor Spitalny said at the court-martial.

Then he remembered Lieutenant Harry Beevers lifting a girl of six or seven out of a ditch by her ankles, a muddy naked child, with that Vietnamese fragility, those chicken bones in her neck and arms, and swinging her around like an Indian club. Her mouth was a downturned curve, and her skin had begun to pucker where the fire had gotten her.

Pumo’s entire body felt wet and his sides were cold with sweat. He had to stand up and get away from the machine. He tried to shove his chair back and moved the entire desk. He swiveled his legs and got up and moved, bolted, out into the center of the Microfilm Room.

They had crossed over, all right. Koko had been born on the other side of the boundary, where you met the elephant.

A little smiling child stepped forward from a black immensity, cupping death in its small hands.

Let the guy with the Spanish name have Ia Thuc, Tina thought, it’ll just be another book. I’ll give it to Maggie at Christmas, and she’ll be able to tell me what happened there.

He looked up and the door opened. A boy with a sparse beard and a single dangling earring stepped in with double handfuls of microfilm spools. “You Puma?”

“Pumo,” Tina said, and accepted the microfilm.

He returned to his little desk, unloaded the microfilm of Time magazine, and loaded in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch for the month of February 1982. He scrolled across the pages of print until he found the headline AREA EXECUTIVE, WIFE, SLAIN IN FAR EAST.

The article contained less information about the deaths than Pumo had already learned from Beevers. Mr. and Mrs. William Martinson of 3642 Breckinridge Drive, a respectable upper-middle-class couple, had been mysteriously slain in Singapore. Their bodies were discovered by a real-estate appraiser entering a supposedly empty bungalow in a residential section of the city. The motive was presumed to be robbery. Mr. Martinson had traveled extensively in the Far East in his business as Executive Vice President and Marketing Director of Martinson Tool & Equipment Ltd., and was frequently accompanied by his wife, an equally distinguished citizen of St. Louis.

Mr. Martinson, sixty-one, was a graduate of St. Louis Country Day School, Kenyon College, and Columbia University. His great-grandfather, Andrew Martinson, had founded Martinson Tool & Equipment in St. Louis in 1890. The deceased’s father, James, had been president of the company from 1935 to 1952, and had also been president of the St. Louis Founders’ Club, the Union Club, and the Athletic Club as well as serving in prominent positions on many civic, educational, and religious bodies. Mr. Martinson joined his family’s business, now under the presidency of his older brother, Kirkby Martinson, in 1970, using his experience of the Far East and skill as a negotiator to increase Martinson’s annual revenues by what was reputed to be several hundred million dollars.

Mrs. Martinson, the former Barbara Hartsdale, a graduate of the Academie Française and Bryn Mawr College, had long taken a prominent role in civic and cultural affairs. Her grandfather, Chester Hartsdale, a second cousin of the poet T.S. Eliot, founded the Hartsdale’s department store chain, for fifty years the leading retail outlet throughout the Midwest, and served as ambassador to Belgium after the First World War. The Martinsons were survived by Mr. Martinson’s brother Kirkby and sister, Emma Beech, of Los Angeles; by Mrs. Martinson’s brothers, Lester and Parker, directors of the interior decoration firm La Bonne Vie in New York City; and by their children: Spenser, employed by the Central Intelligence Agency, of Arlington, Va.; Parker, of San Francisco, Ca.; and Arlette Monaghan, an artist, of Cadaques, Spain. There were no grandchildren.

Tina examined the photographs of these two exemplary citizens. William Martinson had possessed close-set eyes and a fringe of white hair around a smooth intelligent face. He had a prosperous, secretive, badgerlike air. Barbara Martinson had been caught smiling, close-mouthed, almost shyly, while looking sideways. She looked as if she had just thought of something funny and rather bawdy.

On what would have been the third page was a headline reading MARTINSONS RECALLED BY NEIGHBORS, FRIENDS. Pumo began skimming the small print on the monitor’s screen, wrongly suspecting that he already knew all the substantial information about the Martinsons that he was ever going to know. The Martinsons had of course been loved and admired. Of course their deaths were a tragic loss to the community. They had been handsome and generous and witty. Less predictably, William Martinson was still known to his oldest friends by his Country Day nickname, “Fuffy.” It was often remembered that Mr. Martinson had shown remarkable business ability after his decision to resign from journalism and join the family firm during a crisis at Martinson Tool & Equipment.

Journalism? Pumo thought. Fuffy?

Successful in Two Careers, claimed a subhead. William Martinson had majored in journalism at Kenyon College and earned a Master’s degree at Columbia’s School of Journalism. In 1948 he joined the staff of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and was soon recognized as a reporter of exceptional talent. In 1964, after holding several other prestigious journalistic posts, he became a correspondent from Vietnam for Newsweek magazine. Mr. Martinson reported from Vietnam for the magazine until the fall of Saigon, by which time he had become bureau chief. He still maintained his home and friendships in St. Louis, and in 1970 was given a celebration dinner at the Athletic Club for his contributions to the American understanding of the war, especially his work in reporting what at first had seemed a massacre at the village of …

But Pumo had stopped reading. For a time he was not conscious of hearing or seeing anything—Ia Thuc had blindsided him again. He gradually became aware that his hands were taking the St. Louis microfilm from the machine. “That goddamned Beevers,” he said to himself. “That goddamned fool.”

“Simmer down, man” said a flat stoned voice from behind him. Pumo tried to whirl around in his plastic chair and banged himself on the molded back hard enough to give himself a bruise. He rubbed his thigh and looked up at the boy with the tentative beard. “Puma, right?”

Pumo sighed and nodded.

“You still want these?” He held out another stack of microfilm containers.

Pumo took them, waved the boy off, and went back to the screen. He did not know what he was looking at, what he was looking for. He felt as if he had been struck by lightning. Goddamned Harry Beevers, who had made such a big deal of his research, had not even scratched the surface of Koko’s murders. Pumo felt another wave of concentrated rage go through him.

He slammed in the microfilmed London Times hard enough to vibrate the desk. Noises of dismay, evident at a low level for some time, came more loudly through the partition separating him from the next monitor.

Pumo scanned across the text until he found the headline and subhead he wanted, JOURNALIST-NOVELIST MCKENNA SLAIN IN SINGAPORE. Came to Prominence During Vietnam Era. Clive McKenna had made the front page of the Times of 29 January, 1982, six days after his death and one day after the discovery of his body. Mr. McKenna had worked for Reuters News Service in Australia and New Zealand for ten years and was then transferred to Reuters’ Saigon Bureau, where he had quickly become known as a dashing figure akin to the legendary Sean Flynn. Mr. McKenna had distinguished himself by being the first English newsman to cover the seige at Khe Sanh, the My Lai massacre, the fighting in Hue during the Tet offensive of 1968, and was the only English journalist present immediately after the disputed events in the hamlet of Ia Thuc which resulted in the court-martials and eventual acquittals of two American soldiers. Mr. McKenna left the world of print journalism in 1971, when he returned to England to write the first of a series of international thrillers that quickly made him one of England’s most prominent and best-selling authors.

“He was on the goddamned helicopter,” Pumo said out loud. Clive McKenna had been on the helicopter that brought the reporters into Ia Thuc, William Martinson had been on the helicopter, and no doubt the French reporters had been on it too.

Pumo removed the microfilm and replaced it with that of the microfilm of the French newspaper. He could not read French, but in the prominent black-bordered article on the first page of L’Express he had no trouble finding the words Vietnam and Ia Thuc, which were the same in English and French.

A square masculine head with brown eyes behind large grey glasses appeared around the side of Pumo’s carrel. “Excuse me,” it said. It poked a few inches further past the divider, exposing a polka dot bow tie. “If you cannot control yourself or your vocabulary I shall have to ask you to leave.”

Pumo felt like hitting the pompous ass. The bow tie reminded him of Harry Beevers.

With a self-conscious awareness that most of the people in the Microfilm Room were looking at him, he gathered up his coat and handed the film in at the desk. In a furious rush he ran down the steps and out through the library’s great front doors. Snow swirled about him.

Pumo turned downtown on Fifth Avenue and marched along, his hands in his pockets and a brown tweed cap from Banana Republic on his head. It was very cold, and this helped. Random violence was much less likely when everybody was trying to get indoors as fast as possible.

He tried to remember the reporters at Ia Thuc. They had been part of a larger group that had come to Camp Crandall from further down in Quang Tri province, where the brass wanted them to see various dread object lessons. After they filed their obligatory stories, or so army theory went, they could choose less embattled areas for their follow-up stories. About half of the big contingent said fuck it and went back to Saigon, where they could get smashed, smoke opium, and make fun of Rolling Thunder and the so-called “MacNamara Line” that was supposed to replace it. All the television reporters went to Camp Evans so they could get to Hue easily, stand on a pretty bridge with a mike up their chops, and say things like “I am speaking to you from the banks of the Powder River in the centuries-old city of Hue.” A lot of the others had stayed in Camp Evans, where they could be flown a few klicks north and write stirring stuff about the helicopters landing at LZ Sue. A handful had decided to go out into the field and see what was happening in a village called Ia Thuc.

Pumo’s enduring impression of the reporters was of a crowd of men in very deliberate almost-uniforms surrounding a ranting Harry Beevers. They had resembled a pack of dogs, alternately barking and gulping bits of food.

Of the men who had surrounded Harry Beevers on that afternoon, four were now dead. How many were left alive? Pumo put his head down, walking fast down Fifth Avenue in a dry swirl of windblown snow, and tried to focus on the number of men standing around Beevers. They were a numberless pack, remembered that way, and he tried instead to see them as they left the helicopter.

Spanky Burrage, Trotman, Dengler, and himself had been carrying bags of rice out of the cave and stacking them beneath the trees. Beevers was jubilant, among other reasons because they had discovered boxes of Russian weapons underneath the rice, and he was spinning around like a dancing toy. “Get those children out,” he was shouting, “stack them next to the rice, and put the weapons right beside them.” He was pointing at the helicopter, which was flattening out the grass as it settled swaying toward the earth. “Get ’em out! Get ’em out of here!” Then the men had begun leaving the Huey Iroquois.

In his mind he saw them jumping out of the Iroquois and bending over as they ran toward the village. Like all reporters, they were trying to look like John Wayne or Erroll Flynn, and there had been … five of them? Six?

If Poole and Beevers got to Underhill in time, maybe they could save at least one life.

Pumo looked up and saw that he had walked all the way to 30th Street. Looking at the street sign, he at last clearly saw the reporters jumping out of the Huey Iroquois and running through the grass blown down like cat’s fur rubbed the wrong way. One man had been followed by a pair of men, then another single man loaded with cameras, and another who ran as if his legs hurt him, and one bald man. One of the reporters had spoken in soft, fluent, rattling Spanish to a soldier called La Luz, who had muttered something that included the word maricón and turned away. La Luz had been killed a month later.

Cold shadows were already spilling across the street, and within the shadows layers of dead snow lifted and spun. He got them all over to Singapore and Bangkok, the reporters, he figured out a way to pluck their strings and get them to come to him. He’s a spider. He’s a little smiling child with an outstretched hand. The streetlamps clicked on, and for a second the middle of Fifth Avenue, crowded with taxis and buses, looked discolored, bleached. Pumo tasted the bite of vodka on his tongue and turned off on 24th Street.

2

Until Pumo had finished two drinks, he had taken in only the row of bottles behind the bartender, the hand giving him the glass, and the beautiful glass itself, filled with ice and clear liquid. He thought he might even have closed his eyes. Now his third drink had appeared before him, and he was still coming out of it.

“Yeah, I was in AA,” the man beside him was saying, evidently continuing a conversation that had been in progress for some time. “But do you know what I said? I said fuck it. That’s what I said.”

Pumo heard the man saying that he had chosen hell. Like everyone else who had chosen hell, he recommended it very highly. Hell wasn’t as bad as it was cracked up to be. His friend’s purple face sagged and his breath stank. Demons jabbed out their little fists and forks inside his fallen cheeks and lit yellow fires in his eyes. He put a heavy dirty hand on Pumo’s shoulder. He said he liked his style—he liked a man who closed his eyes when he drank. The bartender barked and retreated into a smoky cave.

“Did you ever kill anybody?” Pumo’s friend asked. “Pretend you’re on television and you have to tell me the truth. Ever waste anybody? My money says you did.”

He pushed his hand down hard on Pumo’s shoulder.

“I hope not,” Pumo said, and gulped a third of his new drink.

“So so so so soooo,” the man breathed. Inside him, the demons went wildly to work, poking out their little forks, dancing, stoking their yellow fires. “I recognize that answer, my friend, it is the answer of a former warrior. Am I right? Or—am I right?”

Pumo pulled himself free of the man’s hand and turned away.

“You think that counts?” the man asked. “It does not. Except in one way. When I ask you, did you ever kill anyone, that is to say, have you ever taken a life in the way you take a drink or in the way you take a piss, I am asking if you are a killer. And everything counts, even if you killed while in the uniform of your country. Because then technically you’re a killer.”

Pumo forced himself to turn again toward the man’s blazing face and the stench of his body. “Get away from me. Leave me alone.”

“Or what? You’ll kill me like you killed ’em in Vietnam? Look at this.” The demon-man held up a fist. It looked like a dented grey garbage can. “When I killed him, I killed him with this one here.”

Pumo felt the walls of the cave focusing down in on him like the lens of a camera. Smoke and foulness darkened the air, streaming toward Pumo from the demon-man.

“Wherever you are, see, that’s where you are,” the man said. “You’re not safe. I know. I’m a killer too. You think you can win, but you can’t win. I know.”

Pumo backed away toward the door.

“Roger,” the man said. “Roger wilco. Wherever you are, get it?”

“I know,” Pumo said, and yanked bills out of his pocket.

When he got out of the cab, the windows on the second floor were full of light. Maggie was home, oh thank you God. He looked at his watch and was astonished that nine o’clock was so near. Many hours had disappeared from his day. How long had he spent in the bar on 24th Street and how many drinks did he have there? Pumo remembered the demon-man and thought he must have had a lot more than three.

He propped himself against the wall as he worked his way up the narrow white staircase. Pumo unlocked his door and let himself into warmth and mellow light.

“Maggie?”

No reply.

“Maggie?”

Pumo unbuttoned his heavy coat and tossed it onto one of the pegs. When he reached for the tweed cap from Banana Republic, he touched his forehead and had a sudden vision of the cap resting bottom-side up on the seat of a taxi.

He came out of the corridor into the main room of his loft and immediately saw Maggie sitting up on the platform, behind his desk, with her hands folded over the telephone. Her eyebrows were a straight line and the ruff of her live lovely hair glowed. Her mouth was closed so tightly she looked as if she had trapped some small creature within it.

“You’re drunk,” she said. “I just called three hospitals, and you were in a bar.”

“I know why he killed them,” Pumo said. “I even saw them, over in Nam. I can remember how they looked jumping out of the helicopter. Did you know, I mean do you know, that I love you?”

“Nobody needs your kind of love,” Maggie said, but even though Pumo was drunk he could see that her face had softened. The small thing was no longer trapped in her mouth. He started to explain about Martinson and McKenna and how he had met a demon in hell, but Maggie was already coming toward him. Then she was undressing him. When he was naked she grabbed his penis and towed him like a tugboat down the hall and into the bedroom.

“I have to call Singapore,” he said. “They don’t even know yet!”

Maggie slipped into bed beside him. “Now let’s make up before I remember everything I thought could have happened to you while I was waiting for you and get angry again.” She put her arms out and pulled her whole body into his. Then she jerked her head back. “Ugh! You have a funny smell. Where were you, in a burning trash can?”

“It was the demon-man,” Pumo said. “His smell soaked through from when he put his hand on my shoulder. He said hell wasn’t really so bad because you got used to it after a while.”

“Americans don’t know anything about demons,” Maggie said.

After a while Tina thought that Maggie made him feel so wickedly good that she must be a demon too. That was how she knew so much about things. Dracula had been a demon, and the man in the bar was a demon, and if you knew how to spot them you could probably see demons strolling up and down the streets of New York. Harry Beevers—there was another demon. But then the demon-things that Maggie Lah was doing to him would not let him concentrate on anything but the notion that after he married Maggie life would be very interesting because then he’d be married to a demon.

Two hours later Pumo awakened with a headache, the sweet, grainy taste of Maggie in his mouth, and the knowledge that he had left an important task undone. A well-known dread about the restaurant displaced all his other thoughts and would not go away until he remembered how he had spent the afternoon. He had to call Poole in Singapore and tell him what he had learned about the victims. He checked his clock radio: it was a quarter to eleven. In Singapore it would be a quarter to eleven in the morning. There was a chance he could still catch Poole in his room.

Pumo got out of bed and put on a robe.

Maggie was sitting on the couch, holding a pencil upright in her hand like a paintbrush and examining something she had drawn on a yellow legal pad. She looked up at him and smiled. “I’ve been thinking about your menu,” she said. “Since you’re redoing so much, why not work on the menu too?”

“What’s wrong with the menu?”

“Well,” Maggie said, and Pumo knew that she was really going to tell him. He skirted around her and went up the platform steps to his desk. “For one thing, dot matrix printing looks ugly. It makes it look as though your kitchen is run by a computer. And the paper is pretty, but it gets dirty too fast. You need something with more gloss. And the layout isn’t clean enough, and you don’t need such lengthy descriptions of the dishes.”

“I often wondered what was wrong with the menu.” Pumo sat at his desk and began hunting for the telephone number of the hotel in Singapore. “When the Mayor comes in, he likes to read those descriptions out loud. To savor them.”

“The whole thing looks like scrambled eggs. I hope the designer didn’t charge you much.”

Pumo had of course designed the menu himself. “He was amazingly expensive. Oh, here it is.”

He dialed the operator and explained that he wanted to call Singapore.

“Take a look at how much nicer your menu could be.” Maggie held up the legal pad.

“Is there writing on that pad?”

At last he was connected to the Marco Polo Hotel. The desk clerk told him that no Dr. Michael Poole was registered there. No, there was no mistake. No, there could be no mistake. There were also no guests named Harold Beevers or Conor Linklater.

“They have to be there.” Pumo began to feel desperate all over again.

“Call his wife,” Maggie said.

“I can’t call his wife.”

“Why can’t you call his wife?”

The desk clerk came back on the line before he could think how to answer Maggie’s question. “Dr. Poole and the others were staying with us, but they checked out two days ago.”

“Where did they go?”

The clerk hesitated. “I believe Dr. Poole made travel arrangements for his party through the concierge’s office in the lobby.”

The man went off to see what he could find out, and Maggie asked, “Why can’t you call his wife?”

“Don’t have my address book.”

“Why don’t you have your address book?”

“It was stolen,” Pumo said.

“Don’t be ridiculous. You’re just being nasty because of what I said about your menu.”

“For once, you’re wrong. I—”

The clerk returned and told Puma that Dr. Poole and Mr. Linklater had purchased air tickets to Bangkok, and that Mr. Beevers had booked a flight to Taipei. Since the gentlemen had not used the concierge to book hotel rooms in these cities, the clerk did not know where the gentlemen were staying.

“Why would anyone steal your address book? Who would steal anyone’s address book, for that matter?” She paused. Her eyes widened. “Oh. When you got up that time. When you told me that awful story.”

“That’s who stole it.”

“How creepy.”

“That’s what I say. Anyhow, I don’t have Mike’s home phone number.”

“Please excuse my saying the obvious, but you could almost certainly get it from Information.”

Pumo snapped his fingers and called Information in Westchester County for Michael Poole’s telephone number. “Judy must be at home,” he said. “She has to get to school in the morning.”

Maggie nodded rather grimly.

Pumo dialed Michael’s number. After two rings, an answering machine cut in and Pumo heard his friend’s voice saying “I cannot answer the phone at this time. Please leave a message and I will get back to you as soon as possible. If you must speak to someone here, call 555-0032.”

That number must belong to one of the doctors in his group, Pumo thought, and said, “This is Tina Pumo. Judy, can you hear me?” Pause. “I’m trying to get in touch with Mike. I have some information he will want to know, and he’s checked out of the hotel in Singapore. Will you get back to me as soon as you have his new number? It’s important that I talk to him. Bye.”

Maggie carefully put the legal pad and the pencil down on the coffee table. “Sometimes you act as if women just did not exist.”

“Huh?”

“When you want to talk to Judy Poole, whose number do you request from Information? Michael Poole’s. And whose number do you get? Michael Poole’s. It never occurred to you to ask for Judith Poole’s number.”

“Oh, come on. They’re a married couple.”

“What do you know about married couples, Tina?”

“What I know about married couples is, she’s out,” he said.

Soon Tina began to think that Maggie might be right after all. Both of the Pooles had demanding jobs that involved appointments and emergencies, and it was logical that they might have separate telephone lines. He had resisted the idea because it was not his own. But the next morning as he badgered the carpenters and morbidly inspected every new hole in the walls for signs of roaches and spiders, he still could find no grounds to question his certainty that Judy Poole had not been home on the night he called. People usually had their answering machines where they could hear them—especially if they turned the machines on while they were home. That was why they turned them on. Therefore he could excuse his immediate rejection of Maggie’s ideas—if they had a dozen telephone lines and he had called every one the results would have been identical.

When Maggie asked him if he intended to see if there was a separate listing for Judy, and Pumo said, “Maybe. I have a lot to do today, I guess it can wait.”

Maggie smiled and flicked her eyes slyly upward. She knew she had won, and was too smart to ask him a second time.

Until seven o’clock in the evening, the day after Pumo’s discovery that Koko’s victims had been the journalists at Ia Thuc, time went by almost normally. He and Maggie had spent the day in cabs and subways, in other restaurants, and in an office with lithographs by David Salle and Robert Rauschenberg where Lowery Hapgood, Molly Witt’s partner, flirted with Maggie while he explained a new shelving system. They did not get back to Tina’s loft until just before seven. Maggie asked him if he felt like eating anything and lay down on the long couch, and Tina dropped into a chair at the table and said he supposed so.

“What are we going to do about it, then?”

Tina picked up the morning’s Times, which he had tossed onto the table. “I understand that many women delight in creating meals.”

“Let’s get a little bit stoned and go to Chinatown and get duck feet. Yum.”

“That’s the first time you wanted to get high since you started living here.”

Maggie yawned, flinging out her arms. “I know. I’m getting so boring. I said it just now out of nostalgia for when I was interesting.”

“Hold on,” Pumo said, staring at a small article on the third page of the first section.

He was looking at a headline that read: ORTIZ, JOURNALIST, SLAIN IN SINGAPORE. The body of Roberto Ortiz, 47, a prominent member of the press corps, had been discovered the day before by police in an empty house located in a residential section of Singapore. Mr. Ortiz and an unidentified woman had died of gunshot wounds. Robbery was not assumed to be the motive. Roberto Ortiz, born in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, educated privately and at the University of California at Berkeley, was born into an influential Central American newspaper family and became a freelance reporter contributing to many Spanish- and English-language periodicals. Mr. Ortiz had spent the years 1964–1971 in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, covering the Vietnam War for a variety of journals, and out of this experience had come his book Vietnam: A Personal Journey. Mr. Ortiz was well known for his wit, flamboyance, and personal courage. Singapore police had released the information that the death of Mr. Ortiz appeared to be related to several unsolved killings in the city.

“Something has stolen your attention from your teenage drug addict mistress,” Maggie said.

“Read this.” Pumo walked to the couch and handed her the paper. She read half of it lying down, but sat up to finish it. “You think he was another one of them?”

Pumo shrugged—suddenly he wished that Maggie were somewhere else, making her smart remarks about drugs. “I don’t know. There’s something about this—there’s something about him. The man who was killed.”

“Roberto Ortiz.”

He nodded.

“Did you ever meet him?”

“There was a Spanish-speaking reporter who came to Ia Thuc.” Dark feelings churned within Pumo. He could not stand this, any of it—his nice loft, the mess downstairs in the restaurant, and right now he could not stand Maggie either.

“He got the last one,” Pumo said with what felt like the last fragments of his restraint. From now on he was running on empty. “There were five reporters who came into Ia Thuc, and now they’re all dead.”

“You look awful, Tina. What do you want to do?”

“Leave me alone.” Pumo stood up and leaned against the wall. Without volition, as if his hand had chosen to close itself, he made a fist. Quietly at first and then with growing force, he began hitting the wall.

“Tina?”

“I said, leave me alone.”

“Why are you hitting the wall?”

“Shut up!”

Maggie was silent for a long time while Pumo continued to beat his fist against the wall. Eventually he changed to his left fist.

“They’re over there, and you’re over here.”

“Brilliant.”

“Do you think they know about this Ortiz?”

“Of course they know about it!” Pumo shouted. He turned around so that he could yell better. Both of his hands felt raw and swollen. “They were in the same city!” Pumo felt murderous. Maggie was sitting on the couch staring at him with big kitten eyes. “What do you know about anything? How old are you? You think I need you? I don’t need you around me!”

“Good,” Maggie said. “Then I don’t have to be your nurse.”

A wave of pure blackness went through Tina Pumo. He remembered the demon-man who had smelled like burning garbage putting a grey hand on his shoulder and telling him he was a killer. Hell was pretty nice, Pumo thought. He found himself going toward the kitchen cabinets Vinh had hung. Look what you can do in hell. He opened the first cabinet and was almost surprised to see dishes stacked on the shelves. The neat dishes looked absolutely foreign to him. He hated the dishes. Pumo picked up the topmost dish and hefted it in both hands for a moment before dropping it. It smashed into half a dozen sections when it struck the floor. See what you could do when you lived in hell? He took another plate and threw it down. Pieces of china flew out and skidded beneath his dining table. He worked down the stack, sometimes dropping just one dish, at other times two or three. He dropped the last plate with great deliberation, as if he were conducting a scientific experiment.

“You poor bastard,” Maggie said.

“Okay, okay.” Pumo pressed his hands to his eyes.

“Do you want to go to Bangkok to see if you can find them? It couldn’t be that hard to do.”

“I don’t know,” Pumo said.

“If being here makes you feel so bad, you ought to go. I could even book the tickets for you.”

“I don’t feel so bad anymore,” Pumo said. He went across the room to an armchair and sat down. “But maybe I’ll go. Does the restaurant really need me?”

“Does it?”

He thought. “Yes. That’s why I didn’t go in the first place.” He looked over the rubble of the plates. “Whoever made that mess ought to be executed.” When he grinned his face looked ghastly. “I retract that.”

“Let’s go to Chinatown and get soup,” Maggie said. “You are a person in great need of soup.”

“Would you go to Bangkok with me if I decide to go?”

“I hate Bangkok,” Maggie said. “Let’s go to Chinatown instead.”

They found a cab on West Broadway, and Maggie gave directions to the Bowery Arcade, between Canal and Bayard streets.

Fifteen minutes later Maggie was speaking Cantonese to a waiter in a small shabby room papered with handwritten menus like scrolls. The waiter was about sixty and wore a filthy yellow uniform that had once been white. The waiter said something that made Maggie smile.

“What was that?”

“He called you an old foreigner.”

Pumo looked at the shuffling waiter’s bent back and the iron-grey stubble covering his head.

“It’s an expression.”

“Maybe I should go to Bangkok.”

“Just say the word.”

“If they knew that this other journalist, this Ortiz, was killed in Singapore, why would they leave there and go to Bangkok?”

The waiter set before them bowls of a creamy porridge-like substance very similar to that Michael Poole had eaten for breakfast in Singapore. “Unless they found out that Tim Underhill had left town.”

“And Harry Beevers went to Taipei?” Maggie smiled at this thought, which evidently struck her as ridiculous.

Pumo nodded. “So they must have learned that Underhill was in one of those two places, and split up to try to find him. But why didn’t they call me first? If they learned that Underhill was out of Singapore after they read about Ortiz, they must know that Underhill is innocent.”

“Well, you can fly from Singapore to Bangkok in about an hour,” Maggie said. “Eat your soup and stop worrying.”

Pumo tried his soup. Like everything really funny-looking that Maggie urged on him, it did not taste at all the way it looked. The soup was not at all creamy, but tasted of wheat, pork essence, and something that tasted like cilantro but couldn’t be. He wondered if he could put a variation of this soup on the new menu. He could give it some name like Strength to Carry Two Oxen Soup, and serve it in little cups with lemon grass. The Mayor would love it.

“Last fall, around Halloween, I saw the wonderful Harry Beevers,” Maggie said. “I did this stupid thing, just to get him worked up. He was following me around a liquor store, and he was so arrogant he thought I didn’t see him. I was with Perry and Jules, you know, my downtown friends.”

“Roberto Ortiz,” Pumo said, having finally remembered the detail that had nagged him since seven o’clock. “Oh, my God.”

“They’re nice, they’re just perpetually out of work, which is why you can’t stand them. Anyhow, I saw Harry gloating around after me, and when I knew he was looking I stole a bottle of champagne. I was feeling nasty.”

“Roberto Ortiz,” Pumo repeated. “I’m sure that was the name.”

“I’m almost afraid to ask what you’re talking about,” Maggie said.

“When I looked up the newspapers in the Microfilm Room, the librarian told me that all those files had already been assembled for someone else who was researching a book about Ia Thuc. I think the librarian said the man’s name was Roberto Ortiz.” Tina looked virtually bug-eyed at Maggie. “Get it? Roberto Ortiz had already been dead for something like a week. I have to call Judy Poole and see if she knows where Michael is.”

“It still doesn’t exactly make sense, Tina.”

“I think Koko killed the last journalist, and then I think he got on a plane and came to New York.”

“Maybe it was Roberto Gomez at the library, or Umberto Ortiz, or some other name like that. Or maybe it was a reporter like Ernie Anastos. J.J. Gonzales. David Diaz. Fred Noriega.” She tried to think of other Hispanic reporters on New York City television, but couldn’t.

“Looking up articles on Ia Thuc?”

Pumo nervously finished his soup.

As soon as he had hung up his coat in the loft he switched on the lights and went up to his desk. Still wearing her down coat, Maggie trailed into the room after him.

This time Pumo asked Information in Westchester for Judith Poole’s listing in Westerholm, and was given a number that did sound to him gloomily like the alternate number on Michael’s recorded message. Pumo dialed it and Judy answered after a few rings. “This is Mrs. Poole.”

“Judy? This is Tina Pumo.”

Pause. “Hello, Tina.” Another deliberate pause. “Please excuse my asking, but would you mind my asking why you’re calling? It’s getting very late, and you could leave a message on Michael’s machine if it’s for him.”

“I already left a message on Michael’s machine. I’m sorry it’s late, but I have some important information for Mike.”

“Oh.”

“When I called him at the hotel in Singapore, I was told that they had checked out.”

“Yes.”

What the hell is going on here? Pumo wondered. “I was hoping that you could give a number for where they are now. Michael’s been in Bangkok for two or three days now.”

“I know that, Tina. I’d give you his number in Bangkok, but I don’t have it. We didn’t have that sort of conversation.”

Tina groaned silently. “Well, what’s the name of his hotel?”

“I don’t think he told me. I’m sure I didn’t ask.”

“Well, could I give you a message for him? He has to know some things I’ve discovered in the past few days.” When Judy said nothing, Pumo went on. “I’d like you to tell him that Koko’s victims, McKenna and Ortiz and the others, were the journalists at Ia Thuc, and that I think Koko might be in New York, calling himself Roberto Ortiz.”

“I don’t have the faintest idea of what you’re talking about. What’s this about victims? What do you mean, victims? What’s this Koko stuif?”

Michael looked over at Maggie, who rolled her eyes and stuck her tongue out.

“What the hell is going on here, Tina?”

“Judy, I’d like you to ask Michael to call me as soon as possible after he talks to you. Or give me a call and tell me where he is.”

“You can’t say something like that to me and then just hang up! I want to know a thing or two, Tina. Suppose you tell me who’s been calling me up at all hours and not saying anything.”

“Judy, I don’t have any idea who that could be.”

“I suppose Michael didn’t ask you to do that now and then, just to check up on me?”

“Oh, Judy,” Pumo said. “If someone is bothering you, call the police.”

“I have a better idea,” she said, and hung up.

Pumo and Maggie went to bed early that night, and Maggie wound her arms around him, hooked her feet around the back of his legs, and held him tight. “What can I do?” he asked. “Call all the hotels in town and ask if Roberto Ortiz is registered?”

“Stop worrying,” Maggie said. “Nobody’s going to hurt you as long as I’m here.”

“I almost believe you,” Pumo laughed. “Maybe I was wrong about the name. Maybe it was Umberto Diaz, or whoever you said.”

“Umberto wouldn’t hurt a fly.”

“Tomorrow I’ll talk to that guy at the library,” Pumo said.

Maggie fell asleep after they made love, and for a long time Pumo tested his memory without shaking his conviction that the name spoken by the librarian had been Roberto Ortiz. He finally fell asleep.

And woke all at once, as if prodded by a sharp stick, hours later. He knew something horrible, knew it absolutely and with the total unblinking certainty with which the worst things are embraced in the dark of the night. Pumo understood that when daylight came he would begin to doubt this certainty. The worst thing would no longer seem rational or persuasive once the sun came up. He would be lulled, he would accept Maggie’s comforting explanations. But Tina promised himself that he would remember how he felt at this moment. He knew that it was not Dracula or any other criminal who had broken into his apartment. Koko had come into his apartment. Koko had stolen his address book. He needed their addresses in order to hunt them down, and now he had them.

Then another section of the puzzle slotted into place for Pumo. Koko had called Michael Poole’s number, been given Judy’s number by the answering machine, and promptly dialed it. And kept on dialing it.

Pumo did not get to sleep for a long time. Eventually a thought even he knew was paranoid joined the others, that Koko had murdered the investment banker, Clement W. Irwin, in the airport, and this thought, for all its obvious irrationality, kept him awake even longer.

3

After breakfast, Maggie went off to Jungle Red to have her hair trimmed and Pumo went downstairs to talk to Vinh. No, Vinh had not seen anyone hanging around outside the building during the past few days. Of course with all the workmen he might have missed something. No, he could not remember any unusual telephone calls.

“Were there any calls from people who hung up as soon as you answered?”

“Of course,” Vinh said, and looked at Pumo as if he had lost his mind. “We get those calls all the time. Where do you think you are? This is New York!”

After he left Vinh, Pumo took a cab up to the 42nd Street library. He went up the wide steps, through the doors, past the guards, and returned to the desk where he had begun his research. The stocky bearded man was nowhere in sight, and a blond man half a foot taller than Pumo stood behind the desk holding a telephone up to his ear. He glanced at Pumo, then turned his back to continue his conversation. When he set down the telephone he came slowly toward the desk. “May I help you?”

“I was doing some research here two days ago, and I’d like to check on something,” Pumo said. “Do you know the man who was on duty then?”

“I was here two days ago,” the blond man said.

“Well, the man I spoke to was older, maybe sixty, about my height, with a beard.”

“That could be a million people in here.”

“Well, could you ask someone?”

The blond man raised his eyebrows. “Do you see anyone here besides me? I can’t leave this desk, you know.”

“Okay,” Pumo said. “Then maybe you could give me the information I was looking for.”

“If you want a particular microfilm and you’ve been here before, then you know how to fill out the forms.”

“It’s not that kind of information,” Pumo persisted. “When I requested some articles on a certain subject, the man who was working here told me that someone else had recently requested the same information. I’d like the name of that man.”

“I can’t possibly give you that information.” The blond man arched his back and looked down at Poole as if he were standing above him, on a ledge.

“The other man did, though. It was a Spanish name.”

The blond man was already shaking his head. “Not possible. It’s not like the old slip in the back of the book business.”

“You don’t recognize the description of the other clerk?”

“I am not a clerk.” There was now a straight red line across each of the blond man’s cheekbones. “If you do not wish to request microfilms, sir, you are wasting the time of several people who do.”

He looked pointedly over Pumo’s shoulder, and Pumo, who for some time had experienced the sensation that someone was staring at him, looked back too. Four people stood behind him, none of them looking anywhere in particular.

“Sir?” the librarian said, and tilted the tip of his chin like a baton at the man immediately behind Pumo.

Pumo wandered away toward the carrels to see if the bearded man would appear. For twenty minutes, the blond man either attended to researchers, talked on the telephone, or preened at the desk. He did not once look at Pumo. At twenty minutes past eleven he consulted his watch, raised a flap in the desk, and strode out of the room. A young woman in a black wool sweater took his place, and Pumo returned to the desk.

“Gee, I don’t really know anyone here,” she said to Pumo. “This is my first day—I only passed my internship two weeks ago, and I spent most of the time since then in Incunabula.” She lowered her voice. “I loved Incunabula.”

“You don’t know the names of any well-dressed sixty-year-old men with beards in this library?”

“Well, there’s Mr. Vartanian,” she said with a smile. “But I don’t think you could have seen him at this desk. There’s Mr. Harnoncourt. And Mr. Mayer-Hall. Maybe even Mr. Gardener. But I don’t know if any of them ever had Microfilm, you see.”

Pumo thanked her and left the room. He thought he might see the bearded man if he wandered through the library and poked his head into offices.

He set off down the corridor, looking at the people who filled the upper floors of the great library. Men in cardigan sweaters, men in sports jackets, moved from the elevators to office doors, women in sweaters and jeans or in dresses hurried down the wide corridor. A wonderful dandy in a resplendent suit, a bristling beard, and gleaming eyeglasses swept through a door, and all the other staff members nodded or said hello. He was taller than the librarian Pumo had spoken to, and his beard was glossy red-brown, not salt-and-peppery black.

The visitors to the library carried their coats like Pumo and looked less certain of their destinations. The dandy passed through them like a steamship pushing through a crowd of row-boats and strode down the corridor and turned a corner.

Just as Pumo reached the corner he had the same sensation of being watched he’d had in the Microfilm Room. He looked over his shoulder and saw the crowd of visitors dispersing, some going into the Microfilm Room, others into other rooms. Still others boarded the elevator. The library staff had all gone through office doors, except for two women on their way to the ladies room. Pumo turned the corner and thought he had lost the tall dandy before he had quite realized that he’d decided to follow him. Then he saw a glossy black shoe flicking around another corner.

Pumo jogged down the hallway, hearing the soles of his shoes click against the brown marble. When he came walking fast around the corner the dandy was nowhere in sight, but a door marked STAIRS was just closing halfway down the otherwise empty hallway before him. Then from down at the far end of this corridor came a pair of young Chinese women, each carrying two or three books bristling with marker slips. As he watched them come gliding toward him across the marble floor, one of the women glanced up at him and smiled.

Pumo opened the door to the stairs and stepped onto the landing. A large red numeral 3 was painted on the wall before him. As soon as the door closed behind him, he heard footsteps, softer than his own, coming down the corridor from the same direction he had taken. The dandy’s footsteps sounded on the cement stairs above. Pumo began to go up the stairs. It seemed to him that the footsteps in the corridor paused at the staircase door, but he could be certain only that he heard them no more. Footsteps climbed the stairs toward the fifth floor.

The door below him clicked open. Pumo did not look down until he was at the landing where the stairs changed direction. He went to the railing and bent over to see the person who had just come onto the staircase. He could see only the railing and a wedge of stairs twisting around and around beneath him. Whoever was down there stopped moving. Pumo could still hear the tall dandy’s steps ticking hollowly upward.

He moved a step away from the railing and looked up.

The footsteps from below began to ascend toward him.

Pumo took the step back to the railing and looked down, but at once the ascending footsteps stopped again. Whoever was coming toward him had moved back under the protection of the staircase.

Pumo’s stomach went cold.

Then the third-floor door opened again, and the two Chinese women entered the staircase enclosure. He saw the tops of their heads and heard their clear emphatic voices, speaking Cantonese. Above, the door to the fifth floor slammed shut.

Pumo unfroze and left the railing.

He opened the door marked PERSONNEL ONLY on the fifth-floor landing and stepped into a vast dark space filled with books. The tall dandy had disappeared into one of the aisles between the stacks. His quiet footsteps came as if from everywhere in the enormous room. Tina could not hear any noises from the other side of the staircase door, but had a sudden, urgent image of a man creeping up the last few steps.

He stepped quickly into the stacks and found himself in a long empty aisle perhaps a yard wide between towering steel bookshelves. Far above, low-wattage bulbs beneath conical shades cast dim but distinct pools of illumination. The tall man’s footsteps were no longer audible.

Pumo forced himself to move more slowly. Just as he reached a wide middle aisle, he heard the clicking of the door which opened onto the staircase. Someone slipped inside and closed the door behind him.

He could virtually hear the person who had just entered, wondering which aisle he had gone down. Pumo could not help feeling a prickle of fear.

Then he heard slow footsteps far off to his left. Pumo began to move toward the dandy, and heard the person who had just entered the stacks start down one of the narrow aisles. His feet hushed along in the soft, slow rhythms of the good old Jungle Walk.

Either he was going completely paranoid, Pumo thought, or Koko had followed him into the stacks. Koko had stolen his address book and discovered that the other men were out of town, and he was going to begin his excellent work all over again in America with Tina Pumo. He was all stoked up from reading about Ia Thuc, and Tina was next on his list.

But of course it would turn out that the person who had just come into the fifth-floor stacks was a librarian. The door said PERSONNEL ONLY. If Pumo turned down an aisle and ran into him, he’d turn out to be a fat little guy with Hush Puppies and a button-down shirt. Pumo went as noiselessly as possible down the wide middle aisle, doing a pretty fair Jungle Walk himself. Three aisles from the end, he stopped to listen.

From off to the left came quick faint footsteps that must have been the dandy’s. If anyone else moved through the stacks, he was walking too quietly to be heard. Pumo peeked down a long aisle. Pools of light lay between columns of shelved books. He ducked into the aisle.

It seemed as long as a football field, narrowing, a tunnel seen through the wrong end of a telescope. Pumo moved quietly down the long tight aisle. In a queer hallucinatory trick of vision the spines and titles of books seemed to creep by him as they moved while he stood still. W.M. Thackeray, Pendennis, Vol. 1. W.M. Thackeray, Pendennis, Vol. 2. W.M. Thackeray, The Newcomes. The Virginians. The Yellowplush Papers, ETC., bound in pink cloth board with gold lettering and published by Smith, Elder & Co. Lovel the Widower, ETC., in matching pink and gold from Smith, Elder.

Pumo closed his eyes and heard a man cough softly into his fist one aisle away. Tina’s eyes flew open, and the titles of the books before him melted into a single gorgeous Arabic scrawl of gold over a pink background. He supposed he nearly fainted.

The man who coughed took an almost silent step forward. Pumo stood still as a statue, afraid to breathe even though the man in the next aisle could only be the librarian in Hush Puppies. Whoever it was took three swift, gliding steps down the aisle.

When Pumo thought that the other man had gone far enough up toward the middle aisle, he began to move toward the door.

In that instant, as if Tina had given a cue, someone whistled the beginning of “Body and Soul” far away toward the left side of the room—an ornate performance full of scoops and trills and vibrato.

Pumo heard the man in the next aisle begin to move less cautiously toward the whistler. Someone off that way slid several books off a shelf—the dandy had found what he had been looking for when he came into the stacks. The man in the next aisle turned into the middle aisle. Pumo realized that if he had parted the Thackeray volumes in front of him, he would have seen the face of the man in the next aisle. His heart began to pound.

Just as the other man passed before the head of the aisle in which he had been hiding, Pumo emerged from the stacks and was only a few paces from the door to the staircase. A dim, shielded light burned above it. He took a step toward the door.

The knob began to revolve and Pumo’s heart stopped for the space of a single beat. The knob revolved and the whole door swung abruptly in on a bubble of conversation and a sudden tide of light.

Dark figures stepped toward him. Pumo stopped moving; they stopped moving too. The high-pitched conversation abruptly ceased. Then he saw that they were the Chinese women he had seen in the third-floor corridor.

“Oh!” both women uttered in a whisper.

“Excuse me,” Pumo whispered back. “I guess I got lost or something.”

They waved him forward, grinning now that they were over the surprise of seeing him, and Pumo went past them through the door and out onto what felt like the safety of the landing.

Back in his loft that night Pumo told Maggie only that he had not been able to confirm that the other person looking at material about Ia Thuc had used the murdered journalist’s name. He did not want to describe what had happened in the stacks, because nothing really had happened. After a long dinner and a bottle of Bonnes Mares at a good restaurant across the street, he was too ashamed of his panic. It had been imagination doing a nasty trick with the materials of his memory, and Maggie was right, he was still trying to get over his experiences in Vietnam. The bearded man had given him some name like Roberto Diaz, and everything else was just fantasy. A fellow passenger or a coked-up airport employee had killed the yuppie at JFK. Maggie looked so beautiful that even the bored SoHo waiter stared at her, and the wine was full of subtle tastes. He looked at her face glowing at him across the table and knew that as long as your health and your money held out, the world was sane.

The next day neither Pumo nor Maggie looked at The New York Times, neither of them paused to look at the headlines of the tabloids on the newsstands they hurried past on their various errands, LIBRARY CHIEF SLAIN said the Post, with imperfect accuracy. The News settled for the Agatha Christie-like touch of MURDER IN THE LIBRARY. Both tabloids gave half of their front pages to a portrait shot of Dr. Anton Mayer-Hall, a tall bearded man in a double-breasted suit. Dr. Mayer-Hall, Director of Projects for New York Public Libraries and a staff member of the library for twenty-four years, had been found slain in a section of the fifth-floor stacks reserved for library personnel. It was speculated that he had used that section of the fifth floor as a shortcut to his office, where he had been due for an appointment with the library’s publicity director, Mei-lan Hudson. Ms. Hudson and her assistant Adrien Lo, using the same shortcut, had stopped and questioned an intruder in the same section of the library where Dr. Mayer-Hall was murdered a few minutes before their discovery of the body. The intruder, whose description was now in the hands of the police, was being sought for questioning. The Times offered its readers a smaller photograph and a detailed map with arrows and an X where the body was found.

4

What do you fear?

I fear that I made him up. That I gave him all his best ideas.

You fear that he is an idea come to life?

He is his own idea come to life.

How did Victor Spitalny get to Bangkok?

It was simple. He found a soldier at the airport who was willing to switch his nametag and travel documents for the sake of going to Honolulu instead of Bangkok. So everything proved that PFC Spitalny went to Honolulu on Air Pacific Flight 206—not only the tickets, but also and including check-in lists, passenger rosters, seating charts filled out in-flight, and boarding passes. A PFC named Victor Spitalny could conclusively be shown to have stayed in a single room at the Hotel Lanai costing the equivalent of twenty dollars American per night for six nights, and to have returned on Air Pacific Flight 207, arriving back in Vietnam at 2100 hours 7 October 1969. It was indisputable that PFC Spitalny had gone to and returned from Honolulu during the time that he had disappeared in the middle of a street riot in Bangkok.

Finally, a PFC named Michael Warland who claimed to have lost all his papers admitted that on the morning of 2 October 1969 he had met and spoken with PFC Victor Spitalny who had suggested that they exchange places during their R&Rs. When he did not locate PFC Spitalny in the airport on 8 October, he stored his belongings in a locker and returned to his unit. When the deception was revealed, PFC Spitalny was listed as AWOL.

What did all this do for Spitalny?

It bought him weeks of time.

Why did Spitalny want to go to Bangkok with Dengler?

He had already planned it all.

What happened to the girl?

The girl disappeared. She ran through an enraged crowd in Patpong, showing on her palms blood shed in a cave in Vietnam, and ran invisibly through the world for years until I saw her. Then I began to understand.

What did you understand?

She was back because he was back.

Then why did you bless her?

Because if I saw her, then I was back too.

1

On West End Avenue the old lady nodded at him from a window in an apartment building across the street and he waved up at her. The doorman, in an ornate uniform of blue and grey with gold epaulettes, was also looking at him, but in a far less friendly manner. The doorman, who had known Roberto Ortiz, would not let him in, though inside was where he had to be. He could still see the Ia Thuc photographs he had looked at in the library, and the darkness at the center of those photographs, which had made him shake, pressed him toward the inside, the harbor that inside was.

You crazy? the doorman said. You outa your mind? You can’t go in there.

I have to go in there.

The world had given him Pumo the Puma, standing in the Microfilm Room like an answered prayer, and Koko switched on the invisibility switch and followed Pumo-the Puma down the corridor and up the stairs and into the vast room filled with book cases in tall rows, and then everything had gone wrong, the world had tricked him, the Joker jumped out of the pack cackling and dancing—another man died in front of him, not Pumo the Puma, and it was Bill Dickerson again. The getting away. The escape. So Koko himself had to hide, the world was slick and savage and it turned its back on you. On Broadway mad old shapes in rags with bare swollen feet rushed at you, speaking in tongues, their lips black because they breathed fire. The ragged mad shapes knew about the Joker because they had seen him too, they knew Koko was going astray, astray, and they knew about Koko’s mistake in the library. This time he had won the wager again, but it was the wrong wager because it was the wrong man. Then Puma had melted away. When the mad ragged bums spoke in tongues they said, You’re making mistakes! Bad mistakes! You don’t belong here!

I can’t let you in here, the doorman said. You want me to call the cops? Get away or I’ll call the cops, get your ass out of here.

Koko was standing now on the corner of West End Avenue and West 78th Street, the molten center of the universe, looking up at the building where Roberto Ortiz had lived. A vein jumped in his neck, and the cold bit his face.

The old lady could come down and lead him into the building, Koko thought, where he could ride up and down on the elevators and wear Roberto Ortiz’s clothes forever. In warmth and safety. Now he was in the wrong world and nothing in the wrong world was right.

This was one thing Koko knew. He was not supposed to live in a small bare room next to the crazy man at the Christian’s Association.

He had the address book all laid out on the little table. He had the names and addresses circled.

But Harry Beevers did not answer his telephone.

But Conor Linklater did not answer his telephone.

Michael Poole’s answering machine spoke in Michael Poole’s voice and gave another number where a woman answered. This woman had a stern, unforgiving voice.

Koko remembered, I always liked the smell of blood.

Koko felt the cold tears on his face and turned away from the old woman’s window and began to walk down West End Avenue.

The crazy man’s hair was ropes and his eyes were red. He lived in the room next to Koko and he came in and he laughed and said—what all this shit on the walls, boy? Killin’ is a see-yun. The crazy man was black and wore exhausted black man’s clothes.

Things were going fast and Koko was going fast down West End Avenue. Frozen bushes burst into flame, and across the street a tall woman with red hair whispered, Once you kill ’em, they your responsibility forever.

The woman with the hard voice knew that.

On wide crowded 72nd Street he crossed over to Broadway. And behold darkness shall cover the earth. Yet once a little while, and I will shake the heavens and the earth.

For he is like a refiner’s fire.

If he said that to the woman, would she know how he felt in the toilet after Bill Dickerson walked away? In the library, when the Joker jumped out of the pack and jigged and capered between the books?

I didn’t start off in this business to accept substitutes, he said to himself. I can say that to her.

Time was a needle and at the end was the needle’s eye. When you passed through the needle—when you pulled the needle through its own eye after you—

a man of sorrow and acquainted with grief were you.

A man in a golden fur coat was staring at Koko and Koko stared right back. I am not troubled by the hostile stares of strangers, I am a man rejected and despised. “I am a man rejected and despised,” Koko said to the staring man, who had already turned his back and was walking away.

Koko walked tense and haunted down Eighth Avenue. Everything between West End Avenue, twenty blocks north, and Eighth Avenue had passed in a blurred moment. The world glittered as a cold thing glitters. He was outside not inside, and back in his terrible room the black man waited to tell him about sin.

The grinning demons loved the men and women they escorted through eternity—demons had a great secret, they too were created to love and be loved.

“Are you speaking to me?” asked an old man with a polished face and a dirty black beret. The old man was not one of the ragged shapes sent to torture him: the old man spoke in English, not in tongues. A jewel of snot hung from his nose. “My name is Hansen.”

“I’m a travel agent,” Koko said.

“Well, welcome to New York,” said Hansen. “I guess you’re a visitor here.”

“I’ve been away a long time, but they’re keeping me busy. Keeping me busy in all directions.”

“That’s good!” the old man chortled. He was delighted to have someone talk to him.

Koko asked if he could buy him a drink, and Hansen accepted with a grateful smile. The two of them went into a Mexican restaurant on Eighth Avenue near 55th Street and when Koko called for “Mexican drinks!” the bartender placed two fizzy-looking, frothy-looking, soupy-looking drinks before them. The bartender had frizzy black hair, olive skin, and a drooping black moustache, and Koko liked him very much. The bar was warm and dark and Koko liked the silence and the bowls of salty chips placed beside the red sauce. The old man kept blinking at Koko as if he could not believe his luck.

“I’m a veteran,” Koko said.

“Oh,” the old man said. “I never went.”

The old man asked the bartender what he thought about the guy in the library.

“He was a mistake,” Koko said. “God blinked.”

“What guy?” said the bartender, and the old man wheezed and said, “Newspapers eat that shit up.”

To the bartender and the old man, Koko said, “I am a man despised and rejected, a man of sorrow and acquainted with grief.”

“I am the same,” the bartender said.

Old Hansen raised his glass and toasted him. He even winked.

“Do you want to hear the song of the mammoths?” Koko asked.

“I always liked elephants,” Hansen said.

“I am the same,” the bartender said.

So Koko sang the song of the mammoths, the song so ancient even the elephants had forgotten its meaning, and old Hansen and the Mexican bartender listened in reverent silence.

PART

FOUR

IN THE

UNDERGROUND

GARAGE

1

Two days earlier, Michael Poole stood at the window of his hotel room, looking down at Surawong Road, so jammed with trucks, taxicabs, automobiles, and the little covered motorized carts called ruk-tuks that the traffic formed a seamless body. Across Surawong Road lay the Patpong District, where the bars and sex shows and massage parlors were only just beginning to open up. The room’s air conditioner set up a rattling hum beside Poole, for while the air was so grey as to be nearly grainy, the day was even warmer and more humid than Singapore had been that morning. Out of sight behind Poole and, like both the air conditioner and the traffic in full spate, Conor Linklater was walking around the room, picking up the guest book, looking at all the furniture, inspecting the postcards in the desk drawer, and all the while talking to himself. He was still excited by what the cabdriver had said to them.

“Right away,” Conor mumbled. “Can you believe that? I mean, is this place about getting your rocks off, or what?”

The driver had informed them that this hotel was very convenient, being on the fringe of the Patpong area, and then had permanently impressed Conor with both himself and the city of Bangkok by asking if the gentlemen wished to stop at a massage parlor before reaching their hotel. No ordinary massage parlor, no tank with skinny country girls who did not know how to behave, but a luxurious place, real sophistication, porcelain bathtubs, elegant rooms, full body massages, girls so beautiful they made you come two-three times before you even got going. He had promised girls so pretty they looked like princesses, movie stars, Playboy centerfolds, girls as voluptuous and yielding as the girls in dreams, girls with the thighs of drum majorettes, the breasts of Indian goddesses, the faces of cover girls, the silken skin of courtesans, the subtle minds of poet-diplomats, the agility of gymnasts, the muscle tone of swimmers, the playfulness of monkeys, the stamina of mountain goats, and best of all …

“Best of all,” Conor mused. “Best of all. No women’s lib. How about that? I mean, I got nothing against women’s lib. Everybody’s a free man in this world, girls included, and I know lots of women who are better men than most men. But how much of that stuff do you have to listen to? Especially in the bedroom? I mean, most of ’em already make twice as much money as I do, they run computers, they run offices, they run companies, Donovan’s is full of ’em, they won’t even let you buy ’em drinks, they make a face if you open the door for ’em, I mean, maybe we shoulda done what the guy said …”

“Umm,” Poole said. Conor himself was hardly paying any attention to his babbling, and any response was sufficient.

“… do it later, doesn’t matter, hey, they have two restaurants in this hotel, nice bar too, I bet it’s nicer here than wherever the Lost Boss is now, goin’ around telling everybody he’s a cop or a secret agent or the Bishop of New York.”

Poole laughed out loud.

“Right! I mean, one hand feeds the other, but with that guy …”

If by four o’clock all of Bangkok seemed congested, the few square blocks that made up Patpong were already even more crowded than that. The usual traffic filled the street, and the sidewalks were so crowded Poole could see very little of the pavement. People milled around on the sidewalks before the bars and sex clubs, flowed up and down the stairs and fire escapes. Around them signs sparkled and flashed: MISSISSIPPI, DAISY CHAIN, HOT SEX, WHISKEY, MONTMARTRE, SEX, SEX, and many others, all crowding together and shouting for attention.

“Dengler died out there,” Conor said, looking down on Phat Pong Road.

“Yes, he did,” Michael answered.

“It looks like the goddamn monkey house.”

Poole laughed. That was what it looked like, all right.

“I think we’re gonna find him, Mikey.”

“I do, too,” Poole said.

2

After he and Conor returned to the hotel that evening, Michael waited while the Thai switchboard operator put through his credit card call to Westerholm, New York. He finally had something positive to say about what Beevers called their “mission.” He had seen something in a bookstore that confirmed his impression that he and Conor would find Underhill in Bangkok. If it took two days, they might be coming home two days after that—with Underhill in tow or not, however it worked out. Michael wanted to find some detox clinic where Underhill could straighten himself out and get the rest Poole was sure he needed. Anybody who had survived Bangkok for a long time would need a good rest. If Underhill had committed murder, Poole would find him a great lawyer and get him started on the insanity defense that would at least keep him out of jail. That might not be sufficiently dramatic for a mini-series, but it would be the best ending for Underhill and anyone who cared about him.

What Poole had seen in Patpong’s most uncharacteristic place of business, a huge bright bookstore called Patpong Books, had given him indirect proof of Underhill’s innocence and his presence in Bangkok. Poole and Conor had walked into the bookstore to get out of the heat and escape the crowds for a moment. Patpong Books was cool and uncrowded, and Michael was happily surprised to see that the fiction department took up at least a third of the store. He could get something for himself, and something to give to Stacy Talbot too. He wandered down the fiction aisles, not realizing that he was looking for Tim Underhill’s name until he found an entire shelf filled with Underhill’s novels. There were four and five copies of every Underhill novel, hardcovers interspersed with paperbacks, from A Beast in View to Blood Orchid.

Didn’t that mean that he lived here? That he was a customer of Patpong Books? The shelf of novels reminded Poole of the “Local Authors” shelf at All Booked, Westerholm’s best bookstore—it was as good as a signed statement that Underhill frequented the shop. And if he did that, would he also be going out and killing people? Poole could almost feel Underhill’s presence near his well-stocked shelf. If he did not come in, would the store stock so many books by a writer so obscure?

It added up, at least to Poole, and once Poole had explained it to him, to Conor too.

When he and Conor left their hotel earlier that day, Poole’s first impression was that Bangkok was Thailand’s Calcutta. Whole families seemed to live and work on the streets, for often Poole saw women crouching on a broken pavement, feeding the children that roiled around them while smashing up concrete with the hammers in their free hands. Down the center of every sidewalk sat a row of women hacking a trench with hammers and picks. Smoke from cook-fires drifted from the vents inside half-constructed buildings in vacant lots. Plaster dust and hard little motes that stung the skin, smoke and grease and exhaust fumes hung in the grey air. Poole felt the permeable membrane of the air settle over his skin like a cobweb.

Here was a great red sign for the HEAVEN MASSAGE PARLOR, and here were rising stairs of concrete painted with blue stars, where a barefoot, spindly woman sat morosely beating a squalling child in the midst of a welter of bags, bottles, and parcels tied with coarse rope. Her hand struck its face, her fist struck its chest. The stairs led up to a wide canopy advertising the HONEYPOT NIGHTCLUB and RESTAURANT. The woman stared through Dr. Poole, and her eyes said: This is my child, this is my dwelling, you are invisible to me.

For a second he felt dizzy; a grey shadowland surrounded him, a world of shifting dimensions and sudden abysses, where reality was no more than just another illusion. Then he remembered seeing a woman in blue tumble down a wet green hillside, and knew that he was flinching away from his own life.

Michael knew about the flinch. Once he had persuaded Judy to come into New York with him to see Tracers, a play written and performed by Vietnam veterans. Michael thought it was a wonderful play. Tracers put you very close to Vietnam, and virtually every minute of it called up pictures and echoes of his time there. He found himself crying and laughing, undone by uncontrollable feelings, as on the bench in Bras Basah Park. (Judy had thought Tracers a sentimental form of therapy for the actors.) At various times in the play, a character named Dinky Dau pointed an M-16 straight at Michael’s head. Dinky Dau probably could not see Michael, who was in the eighth row, and the gun was not loaded, but when the muzzle swung toward him, Michael felt dizzy and faint. Helplessly, he felt himself squeezing as far back in his seat as he could go, holding tightly onto the armrests. He hoped he did not look as frightened as he felt.

Bangkok aroused some of the same feelings in him as Dinky Dau’s gun. At the dedication of the Memorial, fourteen years of his life had just dropped away. He had been a raw nerve, a boy soldier again, invisible inside nice, comfortable, humane Dr. Poole. It seethed that nice comfortable Dr. Poole was only the scaffolding around that raw nerve.

How strange it was to be so invisible, his real self so invisible to others. Michael wished that Conor and Pumo had gone to Tracers with him.

Michael and Conor walked past a dusty window filled with trusses and artificial legs like amputations, bent at the knee. “You know,” Conor said, “I’m homesick. I want to eat a hamburger. I want a beer that doesn’t taste like it was made with stuff they swept up off the street. I want to be able to go to the can again—that shit I got from the doctor closed my asshole so tight it’s just a seam. You know the worst? I even want to pick up my toolchest again. I want to come home from work, clean up, and get down to my good old bar. Don’t you miss stuff like that, Mikey?”

“Not exactly,” Poole said.

“Don’t you miss work?” Conor’s eyebrows lifted. “Don’t you miss getting on your whatsit, your stethoscope, all that? Telling kids it’s only gonna hurt a little bit?”

“I don’t really miss that side of it,” Poole said. “In fact, I haven’t been very happy with my practice lately.”

“Don’t you miss anything?”

I miss a girl in St. Bart’s hospital, Michael thought, but finally said, “Some of my patients, I guess.”

Conor gave him a suspicious look and suggested they turn around and take a look at Patpat before they caught Black Lung disease. They had come nearly all the way to Charoen Krung Road, the Oriental Hotel, and the river.

“Patpong,” Michael corrected. “Where Dengler was killed.”

“Oh, that Patpong,” Conor said.

If Patpong held an initial surprise, it was that it was no larger than what Poole had seen from his window. The section of Bangkok that attracted male tourists from all over America, Europe, and Asia was only three streets long and one street wide. Poole had imagined that like the St. Pauli section of Hamburg it covered at least a few more blocks. At five in the afternoon, the neon signs blazed above the heads of the crowds of men going in and out of the bars and massage parlors. 123 GIRLS WET. SMOKING. A tout positioned at the bottom of a flight of stairs whistled at Poole and slipped into his hands a brochure listing the specialties of the house.

Beautiful girl hostesses—continuous show!

1 free drink per customer

All languages, international clientele

Ping-Pong balls

Smoking

Magic Marker

Coca Cola

Striptease

Woman-woman

Man-woman

Man-woman-woman

Room for use and observe

As he read this document, a small Thai male interposed himself between Michael and Conor. “You in good time,” he said. “Late is too late. Choose now, you get best.” He took a fat credit-card holder from his jacket pocket, and let it drop down in segments, flipping open as it fell to reveal photographs of perhaps sixty naked girls. “Pick now—late is too late.” He grinned, wonderfully at ease with himself, his product, and his message, and showed bright gold incisors.

He held the ribbon of photographs up to Conor’s face. “All available! Going fast!”

Michael saw Conor’s face turn red, and pulled him down the street, shooing the massage parlor tout away with his other hand.

The tout waggled his photos in the air and made them shimmy.

“Boys, too. Pretty boys, boys all sizes. Later is too late, especially for boys.” From another pocket he withdrew another wad of photographs. These too he let waterfall out of his palm. “Beautiful, hot, suck you, fuck you, smoke you—”

“Telephone,” Poole said, thinking he had read the word on the menu from the sex club.

The tout frowned and shook his head. “No telephone—what you want? You on death trip?” He started to fold and gather his photographs into stacks as he backed away from them. For a moment he regarded them both very shrewdly. “You two guys on real death trip? Real kinky? Must be very, very careful.”

“What’s with this guy?” Conor said. “Show him the picture.”

The little tout was looking nervously from side to side. He had folded his wares into his jacket pockets. Poole held out one of the photographs from the manila envelope. The tout licked his lips with a long colorless tongue. The man stepped backward, grinned emptily at Conor and Michael, and transferred his attentions to a tall white boy in a Twisted Sister T-shirt.

“I don’t know about you,” Conor said, “but I could use a beer.”

Poole nodded, and followed him up the stairs to the Montparnasse Bar. Conor disappeared through a curtain of blue plastic streamers, and Michael followed him into a small, dimly lighted room ringed with chairs. From one wall jutted a tiny bar behind which stood a huge Samoan in a tight red muscle shirt. A small raised wooden stage took up the front of the room. Conor was handing bills to an obese woman seated at a desk just inside the door. “Admission, twenty baht,” she croaked at Poole.

Poole glanced toward the stage, where a chunky Thai girl wearing a bra was doing something that required her to hunch down over her splayed knees. A dozen undressed girls inspected Poole and Conor. The only other man in the room was a drunken Australian bulging out of a sweat-stained tan suit and clutching a tall can of Foster’s Lager. A girl was curled up in his lap, playing with his necktie and whispering into his ear.

“You know what I was trying to think of, out on the street?” Michael asked. “Smoking.”

“I hope they don’t have it,” Conor said.

The girl onstage flashed a broad smile and cupped her hands just below her vagina. A Ping-Pong ball appeared in its folds, then disappeared back up inside her, then finally dropped out onto her palm. Another Ping-Pong ball popped into view.

Four girls had appeared around them, smiling and cooing. Two sat in the chairs on either side of them, and the other two kneeled.

“You very handsome,” said the girl before Poole. She began to stroke his knee. “You be my husban’?”

“Hey,” Conor said, “if these people can do shit like that with Ping-Pong balls …”

They ordered drinks for two of the girls, and the others padded across the room. Onstage, the Ping-Pong balls were rotating in and out of sight with the speed of a revolving door.

The girl beside Poole whispered, “You hard yet? I make hard.”

Another strikingly pretty girl emerged through the curtain of streamers beside the stage. She was naked, and to Poole she looked no older than fifteen. The girl smiled at the men and women before her, then displayed a cigarette at the end of her fingers like a tiny baton, and lit it with a pink disposable lighter.

The girl bent backwards with a smooth acrobatic motion, thrusting her slender legs and pubis at the audience, and planted one hand on the floor. With the other she reached between her legs and inserted the cigarette into her vagina.

“This is getting deep,” Conor said.

The tip of the cigarette glowed, and half an inch of ash formed at the tip. The girl reached forward and removed the cigarette. A plume of smoke blew from her vagina. She repeated this performance several times. Poole’s girl began stroking the inside of his thigh and talking to him about growing up in the country.

“My momma poor,” she said. “My village poor-poor. Many many days, no eat. You take me back to America? I be your wife. Be good wife.”

“I already have a wife.”

“Okay, I be number-two wife. Number two be best wife.”

“I wouldn’t be surprised,” he said, looking at the girl’s dimpled face. He drank his beer and felt very tired and comradely.

“In Thailand, many men have number-two wife,” she said.

The teenager onstage blew a perfect smoke ring out of her vagina. “Pussy blow fractals!” the Australian yelled. “Record collectors are fun to go around with, cricketers swing big bats, but mathematicians are in their prime!”

“You have many television sets?” the girl asked Poole.

“Many.”

“You have washer-dryer?”

“Absolutely.”

“Gas or electric?”

Poole considered. “Gas.”

The girl pursed her lips. “You have two cars?”

“Of course.”

“You get extra car for me?”

“In America, everybody gets their own car. Even children get their own car.”

“You have children?”

“No.”

“I give children,” the whore said. “You nice man. Two children, three children, all you want. Give American names. Tommy. Sally.”

“Nice kids,” Poole said. “I miss them already.”

“We have best sex, your whole life long. Even sex with your wife get better.”

“I don’t have sex with my wife,” Poole said, amazing himself.

“Then we have twice as much sex, make up.”

“Pussy smoke cigarette, now pussy talk telephone,” the Australian said. “Pussy call University of Queensland, tell them I’ll be late.”

The nymph onstage sprang upright and bowed. All the girls, the Australian, and Poole applauded loudly. When she walked off, a tall, naked young woman came through the streamers with a big folder of paper and a handful of Magic Markers.

Poole finished his beer and watched the girl onstage plant two Magic Markers in her vagina and hunker over a large sheet of paper to draw a very creditable horse.

“Where do gay men go in Bangkok?” Poole asked. “We’re looking for a friend of ours.”

“Patpong three. Two streets up. Gayboys. You are not a gayboy?”

Poole shook his head.

“Come in back with me. I smoke you.” She threw her arms around his neck. Her skin had a delicious fragrance akin to the smell of apples, oiled leather, and cloves.

Poole and Conor left as the artist onstage was completing a landscape with mountains, a beach and palm trees, sailboats, and a sun with rays.

Just down the block from the Montparnasse were two dun-colored steps leading up to an open door and a sign reading PATPONG BOOKS. While Poole discovered the row of Underhill’s novels, Conor went off to look at magazines. Poole asked both the clerk on duty and the manager if they knew or had ever seen Tim Underhill, but neither man even knew his name. Poole bought the hardcover copy of The Divided Man he had carried up to the register to ask about, then he and Conor went out to have a beer at the Mississippi Queen.

“Hell, I signed one of those Koko cards myself,” Conor said at the bar.

“I did too,” Poole said. “When was yours?” He had never imagined that only one member of the platoon had cut off ears and written Koko on a regimental card, but Conor’s admission gave him a mixture of surprise and pleasure.

“The day after Ho Chi Minn’s birthday. We had to go out on some damn coordinated patrol with platoon two. Just like on Ho’s birthday. Except that this time the NVA mined the perimeter, and one of the tanks hit a fragmentation mine. Which slowed everything way, way down. Remember crawling out along the road, probing for the rest of the mines? Shoulder to shoulder? Anyhow, after that, Underhill surprised their point man out in the bushes, and we got the rest of ’em in a killing box.”

“Right,” Poole said. He could remember seeing the North Vietnamese soldiers moving like ghosts, like deer, along the road. They had not been boys. They were men in their thirties and forties, lifelong soldiers in a lifelong war. He had wanted very much to kill them.

“So when it was all over, I went back and did the point man.” A tiny girl in a black leather bra and black leather microskirt had taken the stool beside Conor, and was bending over the bar grinning at him to catch his attention. “I mean, I can remember cutting that dude’s ears off,” Conor said. “It was hard to do, man. An ear is all like gristle. You wind up only cutting off the top part, and it doesn’t look like an ear. It was like I wasn’t thinking, like I wasn’t even myself. I had to keep on sawing back and forth. And when I cut through it, his head slapped right down on the mud and I was holding this ear. Then I had to roll him over and do it all over again.”

The girl, who had listened carefully to this speech, pushed herself away from the bar and went across the big room to whisper to another bar girl.

“What did you do with the ear?” Poole asked.

“Threw it into the trees. I’m no pervert.”

“Right,” Poole agreed. “It would be pretty sick to save the ears.”

“Damn straight,” Conor said.

3

The telephone had gone from making a buzzing sound to total dead silence to a high-pitched whistle. Conor looked up from the pictures of naked girls in the magazine he had bought at Patpong Books.

“When did you do yours?” Conor said.

“My what?”

“Koko card.”

“About a month after the court-martials were announced. It was after a patrol in the A Shau Valley.”

“End of September,” Conor said. “I remember that one. I picked up the bodies.”

“Yes, you did.”

“In the tunnel—where the other big cache was. The rice cache.”

“That’s the one,” Poole said.

“Old Mikey,” Conor said. “You’re an animal, man.”

“I still don’t know how I did it,” Poole said. “Gave me nightmares for years.”

Then the operator cut through the whistling to say, “We are connecting you to your party, sir,” and Michael Poole readied himself to talk to his wife while still holding up before him, fresh from its long internment within him, the memory of using his K-Bar to saw off the ears of a corpse propped up against a fifty-pound bag of rice. And the darker memory of using his knife on the dead man’s eyes.

Victor Spitalny had seen the body first, and had come out of the tunnel bawling Awww Righht!

The silence deepened and changed texture. Two deep thudding clicks came over the line, like firm but complex linkages made in deep space.

Poole looked at his watch. Seven o’clock P.M. in Bangkok, seven in the morning in Westerholm, New York.

After all this time he heard the sound, familiar as a lullaby, of the American dial tone, which abruptly ceased. More deep-space silence, followed by the dim ringing of a telephone.

The telephone ceased ringing with a clunk that meant the answering machine was on. At seven in the morning, Judy was either still in the bedroom or down in the kitchen.

Michael waited through Judy’s message. When the beep came, he said, “Judy? Are you home? This is Michael.”

He waited three, four, five beats. “Judy?” He was about to hang up where he heard a loud click and his wife said, “So it’s you,” in a flat, uninflected voice.

“Hello. I’m glad you answered.”

“I guess I’m glad too. Are the children having fun in the sun?”

“Judy—”

“Are they?”

Poole had a quick, guilty flash of the girl rubbing his crotch. “I suppose you could call it fun. We’re still looking for Tim Underhill.”

“How nice for you.”

“We learned that he left Singapore, so Beevers is in Taipei and Conor and I are in Bangkok. I think we might find him in the next few days.”

“Dandy. You’re in Bangkok, reliving your venereal youth, and I’m doing my job in Westerholm, which happens to be the location of your house and your medical practice. You remember, I hope, if your faulty short-term memory has not already erased it, that I wasn’t exactly overjoyed when you announced that you were taking this trip of yours?”

“I didn’t exactly announce it in that sense, Judy.”

“Bad short-term memory, what did I tell you?”

“I thought you’d be happy to hear from me.”

“I don’t precisely wish you ill, no matter what you may think.”

“I never thought you did.”

“In a way I’m almost glad you left, because it gives me the space for some long-overdue thinking about our relationship. I really wonder whether we’re doing either one of us any good anymore.”

“You want to talk about that now?”

“Just tell me one thing—did you ask one of your little friends to call me up periodically, to check on whether or not I’m home?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“I am talking about the little gnome who loves the sound of my voice on the answering machine so much that he calls up two or three times a day. And by the way, I don’t care if you don’t trust me anymore than that because I am a person who takes responsibility for herself around here, Michael, and I always have been.”

“You’re getting anonymous phone calls?” Michael asked, grateful to have discovered a reason for his wife’s hostility.

“As if you didn’t know.”

“Oh, Judy,” he said, and his pain and regret were very clear in his voice.

“All right,” she said. “Okay.”

“Call the police.”

“What good will that do?”

“If he calls that often, they’ll be able to nail him.”

There was a long silence between them that to Michael seemed almost comfortable, marital.

“This is wasting money,” Judy said.

“It’s probably some student’s idea of a joke. You need to relax a little, Judy.”

She hesitated. “Well, Bob Bunce asked me for dinner tomorrow night. It’ll be nice to get out of the house.”

“The wasp expert?” Michael said. “Good.”

“What are you talking about?”

Two years before, Michael had told some people at a faculty party about Victor Spitalny running out of the Ia Thuc cave screaming about being stung by millions of wasps. This was one part of Ia Thuc that he was able to speak about: it was harmless, and nobody died in this story. All that happened was that Victor Spitalny tore out of the cave, scraping his face with his fingernails and screaming until Poole rolled him up in his groundcloth. When he stopped screaming, Poole unwrapped him. Spitalny’s face and hands were covered with rapidly disappearing red welts. “Ain’t no wasps in Vietnam, little brother,” SP4 Cotton said, snapping a picture of Spitalny half-emerged from the groundcloth. “Every other kind of bug, but ain’t no wasps.”

A six-three English teacher named Bob Bunce, who had floppy blond hair and a thin patrician face and wore beautiful tweed suits, told Michael that since wasps were found throughout the northern hemisphere, there must be wasps in Vietnam. Michael thought that Bunce was a smug self-important know-it-all. He was supposed to come from a wealthy Main Line family and to be teaching English because he had a priestly calling to it. Bunce was a liberal’s wet dream. He had gone on to say that because Vietnam was a semitropical country, wasps would be rare, and anyhow that most wasps in all parts of the world were solitaries. “And aren’t there more interesting questions about Ia Thuc than this, Michael?” he had insinuatingly asked.

“It doesn’t matter,” Michael said now to Judy. “Where are you going to go?”

“He didn’t tell me, Michael. Where he takes me is not so ultra-important. I’m not asking for a four-star dinner, you know, all I want is a little company.”

“Fine.”

“It’s not as though you’re exactly starving for companionship, is it? But I think there are massage parlors in Westerholm, too.”

“I don’t think so,” Michael laughed.

“I don’t want to talk anymore,” Judy promptly said.

“Okay.”

Another lengthy silence.

“Have a nice dinner with Bunce.”

“You have no right to say that,” Judy told him, and hung up without saying good-bye.

Michael gently replaced the receiver.

Conor was walking around the room, looking out the window, bouncing on the balls of his feet, avoiding Michael’s eyes. At length he cleared his throat. “Trouble?”

“My life is becoming ridiculous.”

Conor laughed. “My life always was ridiculous. Ridiculous isn’t so bad.”

“Maybe not,” Michael said, and he and Conor shared a smile. “I think I’m going to bed early tonight. Do you mind being alone? Tomorrow we can make a list of places to visit and really get down to work.”

Conor took a couple of the photographs of Tim Underhill with him when he left.

4

Relieved to be alone, Michael ordered a simple meal from room service and stretched out on his bed with the copy of The Divided Man he had purchased that afternoon. He had not read Underhill’s most successful book in years, and he was surprised by how quickly he was caught up in it again, how thoroughly it managed to distract him from his worries about Judy.

Hal Esterhaz, the hero of The Divided Man, was a homicide detective in Monroe, Illinois, a medium-sized city filled with foundries, auto-body shops, and vacant lots behind chain-link fences. Esterhaz had served as a lieutenant in Vietnam, and had returned home to marry and quickly divorce his high school girlfriend. He drank a lot, but for years had been a respected police officer with an uncomfortable secret: he was bisexual. His guilt over his sexual longings for other men accounted not only for his drinking, but also his occasional brutality with arrested criminals. Esterhaz was careful about this, and let himself beat only those criminals—rapists and child molesters—most despised by other policemen.

Michael suddenly found himself wondering if Esterhaz had been based on Harry Beevers. This thought had never occurred to him when he first read the book, but now, although the detective was tougher and more enigmatic than Beevers, Poole virtually saw the Lost Boss’s face on his body. Beevers was not bisexual, at least as far as Michael knew, but Poole would not have been surprised to learn that Beevers had a wide streak of sadism hidden within him.

Michael also saw another likelihood that had slipped past him when he first read the book. Monroe, Illinois, the gritty city through which Hal Esterhaz pursued the mystery at the heart of The Divided Man, sounded very much like Milwaukee, Wisconsin, the city M.O. Dengler had described so often. Monroe had a large Polish population on its south side, a large black ghetto on its near north side, and a major league ball team. The mansions of the rich stood along three or four streets near its lakefront. A dark, polluted river ran through its seedy downtown. There were paper mills and tanneries, adult bookstores, bowling allies, miserable winters, bars and taverns everywhere, barrel-shaped women in babushkas waiting at bus stops. This was the landscape of Dengler’s childhood.

Poole was soon so taken up in the novel’s story that it was more than an hour before a third belated recognition stung him, that The Divided Man was virtually a meditation on Koko.

An unemployed piano player is found with his throat slit in his room at a shabby downtown hotel called the St. Alwyn. Beside the body has been placed a piece of paper with the words Blue Rose penciled upon it. Hal Esterhaz is assigned to the case, and recognizes the victim as a regular patron of one of Monroe’s gay bars. He had once had sex with the man. Of course he suppresses the information about his fugitive relationship with the victim when he files his report.

A prostitute is the next victim, found with her throat slit in an alley behind the St. Alwyn, and again there is a note: Blue Rose. Esterhaz learns that she too had lived in the hotel and was a friend of the piano player; Esterhaz suspects that she witnessed the murder or knew something that would lead the police to the killer.

A week later, a young doctor is found slaughtered in his Jaguar, parked in the garage of the lakefront mansion where he lived alone with a housekeeper. Esterhaz reports to the scene miserably hung over, still wearing yesterday’s clothes, with no real memory of the night before. He had visited a bar called the House of Correction, he can remember ordering drinks, talking, he remembers putting on his coat, having trouble with the sleeves … after that everything is black until the telephone call from his station, which had awakened him on the couch. What makes him feel far worse than his hangover is that the young doctor had been his lover for more than a year some five years before. No one, not even the doctor’s housekeeper, had known. Esterhaz conducts a competent scene-of-the-crime investigation, discovers a piece of paper with the words Blue Rose written on it, questions the housekeeper and bags and tags all the physical evidence, and when the medical examiner has finished and the body is removed, returns to the House of Correction. Another blackout, another morning on the couch with a half-empty bottle and a blaring television.

The following week another body is discovered, that of a male hustler and drug addict who had been one of Esterhaz’s informants.

The next victim is a religious fanatic, a butcher who preaches to a congregation in a downtown storefront. Esterhaz not only knows this victim, he hates him. The butcher and his wife had been the most brutal of the series of foster parents who had raised Esterhaz. They had beaten and abused him almost daily, keeping him home from school to work out of sight in the back of the butcher shop—he was a sinner, he had to work until his hands bled, he had to memorize Scripture to save his soul, he was damned no matter how much Scripture he memorized so he required more beatings. He had been taken from the butcher’s house only after a social worker had made an unannounced visit and discovered him covered in bruises and locked in the freezer “to repent.”

In fact Hal Esterhaz is not even his real name, but had been given to him by social workers: his identity and parentage, even his exact age, are mysterious. All he knows of his origins is that he was found at the age of three or four, covered with frozen mud, wandering the downtown streets near the river in the middle of December. He had known no language; he had been starved nearly to death.

Even now, Esterhaz could not remember long stretches of his wretched childhood, and could remember none of his life before he was found wandering naked and starved on a street beside the Monroe River. His dreams of that time were of a golden world where giants petted him, fed him, and called him by a name that was never audible.

Hal Esterhaz had twice dropped out of school, been in trouble with the law, had spent his adolescence in a steamy obliterating hatred of everything about him. He had joined the army in a fit of drunken self-loathing, and the army had saved him. All his most decent, most dependable memories virtually began with basic training. It was, he thought, as if he had been three times born: once into the golden world, then into frozen, bitter Monroe, finally into uniform. His superiors had soon recognized his innate abilities and eventually recommended him for OCS. In exchange for another four years of service he would happily have served anyhow, he received the training that sent him to his second tour in Vietnam as a lieutenant.

After the murder of the butcher, Esterhaz begins to dream of washing blood from his hands, of standing sweaty and fearful at his sink, holding his bloodied hands under the steaming water, his shirt off, his chest dappled with red … he dreams of opening a door onto a garden of sick roses, roses of an unnatural, bright, chemical blue. He dreams that he is driving his car into deep darkness, with a familiar corpse on the seat beside him.

A second recognition came to Michael at this point, that surely he remembered M.O. Dengler once inserting into his tales of a fabulous Milwaukee—tales of finding a sick angel in a packing case and feeding him Cracker Jacks until he could fly again, of the man who made ice burn by breathing on it, of the famous Milwaukee criminal from whose mouth rats and insects flew instead of words—something about his parents being only half his parents, whatever that had meant.

Poole fell asleep with the book on his chest, no more than a hundred yards or so from the spot on Phat Pong Road where Dengler had bled to death.

1

According to the Army of the United States of America, Private First Class Dengler was the victim of a homicidal attack by person or persons unknown. Said attack occurred during Private Dengler’s Rest and Recreation tour in the city of Bangkok, Thailand. Private Dengler suffered multiple cranial fractures, compound fractures of right and left tibia and fibula, fracture of the sacrum, rupture of the spleen, rupture of the right kidney, and puncture wounds in the upper portions of both lungs. Eight of Private Dengler’s fingers had been severed, and both arms were dislocated. The nose and jaw had been splintered by multiple fractures. The skin of the deceased had been severely abraded, and much of the face torn away by the assailants. Identification had been secured through the victim’s dogtags.

The Army found it unwise or unnecessary to speculate on the reasons for the attack on Private First Class Dengler, restricting its comments in this regard to a consideration of the tensions that grew up between members of the American Armed Forces and native populations.

2

In the light of the Sergeant Khoffi (1967) and Private First Class Springwater (1968) incidents in Bangkok, the formation of a commission to recommend on the advisability of restricting Rest and Recreation tours in the city of Bangkok to officer rank personnel was advised. (Attention was also drawn to less severe incidents in Honolulu and Hong Kong, and to the military-civilian-police triangle pertaining in these cities.)

Give us data, the Army pleaded, give us a Commission. (The recommendation was noted, considered, and shelved.) We advise an on-site study. (Also shelved.) Good liaison with local police being imperative, we suggest an assignment of officers with police training to police departments in Rest and Recreation areas where incidents such as above have been proven to be likely. (This recommendation, offered as a sop to the Police Department of the City of Bangkok, was never taken any further.) It was recommended that Military Police in Bangkok liaise with the Bangkok Police Department to seek out and locate local witnesses to the attack on PFC Dengler, identify and apprehend the soldier who had been seen in PFC Dengler’s company just before the incident, and seek to apprehend and prosecute all those responsible for the homicide of PFC Dengler. The unidentified soldier who had been seen with PFC Dengler was finally named three weeks later as PFC Victor Spitalny, who had been sent to Honolulu for his R&R.

3

In PFC Dengler’s medical files, cause of death was given as loss of blood due to gross physical trauma.

His parents were informed that he had died bravely and would be very much missed by his fellow soldiers—Beevers wrote this letter half-resentfully, loaded on popskull vodka from Manly’s private stock.

Then the Army held its breath. Victor Spitalny was not pulled out of the Heaven Massage Parlor or the Mississippi Queen by the Bangkok police, and the American MPs in Bangkok did not pull him out of a Patpong gutter. Police in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, which rather surprisingly turned out to be the birthplace of PFC Spitalny, did not locate the missing soldier, charged by now with the crime of desertion, at his parents’ house, the house of his former girlfriend, or at the Sports Tavern, Sam ‘N’ Aggie’s, or the Polka Dot Lounge, where the deserter had sought diversion and entertainment before entering military service.

No one in Bangkok, Camp Crandall, or the Pentagon mentioned a little girl who had run bleeding down Phat Pong Road, no one alluded to the shouts and cries that disappeared into the polluted air. The little girl disappeared into rumor and fiction, then disappeared altogether, like the thirty children in the cave at Ia Thuc, and eventually the army, having moved on to other cases and other problems, forgot that it was holding its breath.

4

What was it like to go on R&R?

It was like being on another planet. Like being from another planet.

Why was it like being from another planet?

Because not even time was the same. Everybody moved with great unconscious slowness, everybody talked slow and smiled slow and thought slow.

Was that the only difference?

The people were the biggest difference. What they thought was important, what made them happy.

Was that the only difference?

Everybody’s making money and you’re not. Everybody’s spending money, and you’re not. Everybody’s got a girl. Everybody’s got dry feet and they all eat real food.

What did you miss?

I missed the real world. I missed Nam. Where there’s a whole different top ten.

Top ten?

Sounds that make you feel sick with excitement. You want the songs from your own planet.

Will you tell me about the girl?

She came out of the screams the way birds come out of clouds. She was an image—that was the first thing I thought. That she had to be seen, that she had to present herself. She was from my world. She was loose. The way Koko got loose.

Why did you think she was screaming?

I thought she was screaming because of the nearness of ultimate things.

How old was she?

She might have been ten or eleven.

What did she look like?

She was half-naked, and her upper body was covered with blood. There was blood even in her hair. Her hands were outstretched in front of her, and they were red with blood too. She might have been a Thai. She might have been Chinese.

What did you do?

I stood on the sidewalk and watched her run past me.

Did anybody else see her?

No. One old man blinked and looked troubled. Nothing else.

Why didn’t you stop her?

She was an image. She was uncanny. She’d have died if you stopped her. Maybe you’d die too. I just stood there in the midst of the crowd and watched her run past me.

How did you feel when you saw her?

I loved her.

I felt I saw everything that was the truth in her face—in her eyes. Nothing is sane, that’s what I saw, nothing is safe, terror and pain are beneath everything—I think God sees things that way, only most of the time He doesn’t want us to see it too.

I had the Pan-feeling. I felt like she had burned my brain. I felt like my eyes had been scorched. She thrashed down the bright street in the midst of all her commotion, showing her bloody palms to the world, and she was gone. Pan-ic. The nearness of ultimate things.

What did you do?

I went home and wrote. I went home and wept. Then I wrote some more.

What did you write?

I wrote a story about Lieutenant Harry Beevers, which I called “Blue Rose.”

1

Michael Poole and Conor Linklater separated on their second day in Bangkok. Conor went through a dozen gay bars in Patpong 3, asking his question about Tim Underhill to baffled but kindly Japanese tourists who usually offered to buy him a drink, to jumpy-looking Americans who usually pretended that they could not see or hear him, and to various smiling Thai men, who assumed that he was looking for his lover and offered the services of decorative young men who would soon heal his broken heart. Conor had forgotten his stack of photographs in his hotel room. He looked at small, pretty boys in dresses and thought of Tim Underhill while wishing that these frothy creatures were the girls they so much resembled. The bartender in a transvestite bar called Mama’s made Conor stop breathing for a few seconds when he blinked at Underhill’s name and stood looking at him, smiling and stroking his chin. But at last he giggled and said, “Never saw him in here.”

Conor smiled at the man, who appeared to be melting a lump of some delicious substance, chocolate or butter, on his tongue. “You acted like you knew him.”

“Can’t be sure,” the bartender said.

Conor sighed, took a twenty-baht note from the pocket of his jeans, and slid it across the bar.

The man pocketed the bill and stroked his chin again. “Maybe, maybe,” he said. “Undahill. Timofy Undahill.” Then he looked up at Conor and shook his head. “Sorry, my mistake.”

“You little asshole,” Conor heard himself say. “You shithead, you took my money.” Without in any way planning to do so and without even recognizing that he was suddenly very angry, Conor ground his teeth and reached across the bar. The bartender giggled frantically and stepped backwards, but Conor lunged for him and closed his hands on his white shirt.

“Earn your money, goddamnit. Who did you think it was? Someone who came in here?”

“Mistake, mistake!” the bartender cried. A few men who had been drinking at the bar had come toward Conor and the bartender, and one of these men, a Thai in a light blue silk suit, patted Conor on the shoulder.

“Calm yourself,” the Thai said.

“Calm myself, nothing,” Conor said. “This asshole took my money and now he won’t talk.”

“Here is money,” said the bartender, still yanked halfway across his bar. “Have free drink. Please. Then please leave.” He plucked the bill from his pocket and dropped it on the bar.

Conor let go of the man. “I don’t want the money,” he said. “Keep the goddamn money. I just want to know about Underhill.”

“You are looking for a man named Tim Underhill?” asked the dapper little Thai in the blue silk suit.

“Sure, I’m looking for him!” Conor said, too loudly. “What does it look like I’m doing? I’m his friend. I haven’t seen him in fourteen years. My friend and I came here to find him.” Conor violently shook his head, as if to shake off sweat. “I didn’t mean to get rough, or nothing. Sorry I grabbed you like that.”

“You have not seen this man in fourteen years, and now you and your friend are looking for him.”

“Yeah,” Conor said.

“And yet you become so emotional! You threaten this man with violence!”

“Hey, it snuck up on me. And I’m sorry, but I mean, I didn’t threaten nobody around here, not yet anyhow.” Conor pushed his hands into the pockets of his jeans and began backing away from the bar. “Gets frustrating after a while, looking for a guy nobody knows. Look, I’ll see you sometime.”

“You misunderstand!” said the Thai man. “Americans are always so quick!”

To Conor’s vast discomfort, everybody had a good laugh at this.

“What I mean is, we might be able to help you.”

“I knew this shithead heard of him.” He glowered at the bartender, who raised his hands placatingly.

“He is going to be your friend, do not call him names,” said the Thai. “Isn’t that right?”

The bartender spoke in Thai—a rush of noise that to Conor sounded like “Kumquat crap crop crap kumquat crap crap.”

“Crop kumquat telephone crap crop dee crap,” said the man in the blue suit.

“Hey, give me a break,” Conor said. “Is he dead or something?”

The bartender shrugged and stepped away. He lit a cigarette and watched the man in the blue suit.

“We both think we may know him,” said the man in the blue suit. He picked up Conor’s twenty-baht note, and held it upright, like a candle.

“Crap crop crap crop,” the bartender said, turning away.

“Our friend is uneasy. He thinks it is a mistake. I think it is not.” He twinkled the bill into one of his pockets.

The bartender said, “Crap crop crop.”

“Underhill lives in Bangkok,” said the Thai in the blue silk suit. “I am sure he still lives here.”

The bartender shrugged.

“Used to come in here. Used to come into Pink Pussycat. Used to come into Bronco.” The man in the blue suit showed all his teeth in a laugh. “He knew friend of mine, Cham.” The man grinned even more broadly. “Cham very bad. Very bad man. You know telephone? Cham like telephone. He knew him.” He tapped the bar with a long fingernail made lustrous with lacquer.

“I want to meet this guy Cham,” Conor said.

“This is not possible.”

“Everything is possible,” Conor said. “There’s money in it for you. Where does this guy hang out? I’ll go there. Does he have a telephone number?”

“We go out couple bars,” Connor’s new friend told him. “I take care of you, you see. I know every place.”

“He know every place,” the bartender said.

“And you knew Underhill?”

The man nodded, distorting his face into a mask of comical omniscience. “Very well, I know him, very well. You want proof?”

“Okay, give me proof,” Conor said, wondering what he would do.

The little Thai thrust his face up close to Conor’s. He smelled powerfully of anise. There were tiny white scars at the corners of his eyes, like calcified razor nicks. “Flowers,” he said, and laughed.

“You got it,” Conor said. “That’s it.”

“We have drink first,” said the man in the blue suit. “Must prepare.”

2

They had several drinks while they prepared. The dapper little man extracted an envelope and a fountain pen from the inside pocket of his jacket and declared that they needed to make a list of Underhill’s haunts, along with a list of the bartenders and patrons who would be most likely to know where to find him. There were bars in Patpong 3, bars in an area called Soi Cowboy off Sukhumvit Road, bars in hotels, bars in Klang Toey, Bangkok’s port, Chinese “tea houses” off Yaowaroj Road, and two coffee shops—the Thermae, and the one in the Grace Hotel. Underhill had been known in all these places, and might still be known in some.

“This all cost money,” said Conor’s new friend, putting his envelope in a side pocket of his jacket.

“I have enough money to go around a few bars.” Conor saw an expression of nervous suspicion cross the little man’s face. He added, “And something for you on top.”

“On top, very good,” the man said. “I take my share now—come out on top!”

Conor pulled a wad of crumpled bills from his pocket, and the man plucked out a purple five-hundred-baht note.

“We go now,” he said.

They dropped into every bar remaining in Patpong 3, but Conor’s new friend saw nothing that pleased him.

“We get taxi,” the little man said. “Go all ’round city, find the best places, the most exciting, and that is where we will find him!”

They went out onto the crowded street and stopped a cab. Conor climbed into the back seat while the little man spoke to the driver for a long time. He gestured and grinned, “Crap crop katoey crap crop crap baht mai crap.” Several bills passed to the driver.

“Now all is taken care of,” the man announced when he climbed in beside Conor.

“I don’t even know your name,” Conor said, and extended his hand.

The man smiled and pumped his hand. “My name is Cham. Thank you.”

“I thought Cham was your friend. Who knew Tim.”

“He is Cham, I am Cham. Probably our kind driver is also Cham. But my friend is too bad, too bad.” He giggled again.

“And what’s ‘katoey’?” Conor asked, quoting the one word repeated in the various Thai conversations he had overheard that did not sound like a bathroom joke.

Cham smiled. “A ‘katoey’ is a boy who dresses up like a girl. You see? I will not lead you astray.” He clamped his hand on Connor’s knee for a second.

Oh fuck, Conor thought, but merely slid another inch or two away on the car seat.

“And what’s this telephone stuff?” he asked.

“What is what?” Cham’s attitude had subtly changed—his smile had a forced, glittering edge.

They were speeding through a river of traffic, bumping over tram tracks, going miles away from the center of town, or so it seemed to Conor. “Telephone. You said something about it back at Mama’s.”

“Oh, oh.” Cham had returned to his normal self. “Telephone. I thought you said another word. It is nothing to concern you. Telephone is a Bangkok word. Many many meanings.” He glanced sideways at Conor. “One meaning—to suck. You see? Telephone.” He clapped his little hands together, and his eyes closed as if in amusement.

Conor and Cham spent the next two hours in bars filled with hungry-looking girls and sleek, prowling boys; Cham conducted long discussions full of exclamations and laughter with a dozen bartenders, but nothing happened except the exchange of bills. Conor drank cautiously at first, but when he noticed that the excitement of feeling so near to Underhill meant that the alcohol had little effect on him, he drank as he would at Donovan’s.

“He has not been here in a long time,” Cham said, turning to Conor with his happy smile. Conor again noticed the white little chips of scar tissue around his eyes and mouth. It looked as though a doctor had removed Cham’s real face and replaced it with this smooth, boyish mask. He laid his neat sand-colored hand over Conor’s. “Do not worry. We will find him soon. Do you care for another vodka?”

“Hell, yes,” Conor said. “In the next joint.”

They walked out into gathering twilight, Cham’s hand resting between Conor’s shoulder blades. Conor wondered if he ought to call Michael Poole back at the hotel, and then stood rooted to the sidewalk, thinking that he saw Mikey getting into a cab outside a glittery place called Zanzibar across the street. “Hey, Mike!” he yelled. The man ducked through the door of the cab. “Mikey! Over here!”

Cham put the tips of his fingers to his lips. “Shall we eat?”

“I just saw my friend. Over there.”

“Is he looking for Tim Underhill too?”

Conor nodded.

“Then there is no point in our staying in Soi Cowboy.”

In minutes they were driving down shining streets past flashing signs in a moving traffic jam. Gangs of boys on mopeds swept past them. People spilled in and out of nightclubs.

Once Conor turned from saying something to Cham and saw peering in through the window beside him a gaunt, stricken, sexless ghost’s face, empty of everything but hunger.

“You mind if I ask you a question?” Conor heard his own voice, and it was the voice of a drunken man. He decided he didn’t really care. The little guy was his friend.

Cham patted his knee.

“How’d you get all those damned little scars on your face? You run into a fish hook factory or something?”

Cham’s hand froze on his knee.

“It must be a hell of a story,” Conor said.

Cham bent forward and said “Crap crop crap klang toey” to the driver.

“Crap crap crap,” the driver answered.

“Katoey?” Conor asked. “I’m sick of those guys.”

“Klang Toey. Port area.”

“When do we get there?”

“We are there now,” Cham said.

Conor got out of the cab at the end of the world. The fishy, pungent smell of sea water filled the air. The skull face pressed to the window of this cab floated up in his mind.

“Telephone!” he yelled. “I Corps! What about it!”

Cham pulled him away from the distant sight of the river toward a bar called Venus.

They had drinks at Venus and Jimmy’s and Club Hung; they had drinks in places without names. Conor found himself leaning against Cham, or Cham leaning against him as the cab whirled around a corner. He looked sideways, pulling Cham’s hand off his leg, and again saw a bony, sunken face peering through the window with dead eyes. A chill went over his body, as if he were standing wet and naked in a cold breeze. He yelled, and the face flickered and disappeared.

“Nothing,” Cham said.

They went up flights of stairs to dark rooms smelling of incense where ceramic pillows lay at the heads of empty divans and Chinese men stopped playing mah-jongg long enough to examine Underhill’s photograph. In the first such place, they frowned and shook their heads, in the second they frowned and shook their heads, and in the third they frowned and nodded.

“They knew him here?” Conor asked.

“They throw him out of here,” Cham said.

Conor found himself seated at a linen-covered table in the lobby of a hotel. A great distance away a young Thai in a blue jacket read a paperback book behind the registration desk. A cup of coffee steamed before Conor, and he picked it up and sipped. Young men and women sat at every table, and girls crossed their legs on the couches that ringed the lobby. The coffee burned Conor’s mouth.

“He comes here sometimes,” Cham said. “Everybody comes here sometimes.”

Conor bent to sip his coffee. When he looked up the lobby was gone and he was gripping the door handle in the back seat of the cab.

“Your friend was bad, very bad,” Cham was saying. “No longer welcome anywhere. Is he bad, or just sick? Please tell me. I want to know about this man.”

“He was a great fucking guy,” Conor said. The subject of Underhill’s greatness seemed inexpressibly immense, too immense to be conquered by mere words.

“But he is very silly.”

“So are you.”

“But I do not vomit the contents of my stomach in public places. I do not cause consternation and despair all about me. I do not threaten and abuse those who have any sort of authority over me.”

“That sure sounds like Underhill, all right,” Conor said, and fell asleep.

He had a moment’s dream of the ghostly face pressing against the window, and jolted awake with the recognition that the face was Underhill’s. He was alone in the back seat.

“What?” he said.

“Crap crop crop crop,” said the driver, leaning over the back of the seat and holding out a folded piece of paper.

“Where is everybody?” Conor vaguely took the note and looked out of his window. The cab had stopped in a broad alley between a tall concrete structure that looked like a parking garage and a windowless one-story building, also of concrete. A sodium lamp painted the concrete and the surface of the alley with harsh yellow light.

“Where are we?”

The driver jabbed the note at Conor, using it to point down at his leg. Conor confusedly followed the man’s gesture and saw his penis, white as a mackerel in the darkness of the taxi, draped over his right thigh. He bent forward to shield himself from the eyes of the driver and stuffed himself back inside his jeans. His heart was pounding, and his head ached. None of this made sense anymore.

Finally Conor took the folded paper from the driver. There were a few lines of spidery black writing. You drank too much. Your friend may be here. Take care if you go in. The driver has been well paid. A telephone number had been written at the bottom of the paper. Conor balled up the note and got out of the cab.

The driver circled around him, switching on his lights. Conor dropped the wad of paper and kicked it away. Half a dozen men in close-fitting Thai suits had materialized outside the smaller concrete building and were slowly drifting toward him across the alley. Conor felt like running—the unsmiling men reminded him of sleek sharks. His legs barely kept him upright. The headlights of the circling cab hurt his eyes. He wanted a drink.

“You come in?” The Thai closest to him was smiling like a corpse made up by an undertaker. “Cham talked to us. We waited for you.”

“Cham’s no friend of mine,” Conor said. All of the men were waving him toward the door of the windowless concrete building. “I’m not goin’ in there. What you got in there, anyhow?”

“Sex show,” said the death’s head.

“Oh, hell,” Conor said, and let them urge him toward the door. “Is that all?”

Inside he paid three-hundred-baht admission to a woman who wore dark glasses and earrings shaped like Coca-Cola bottles with breasts. “Love those earrings,” he said. “You know Tim Underhill?”

“Not here yet,” the woman said. The Coke bottles with breasts swung like hanged men.

Conor followed one of the men down a long dark corridor into a big low-ceilinged room which had been painted black. Dim red lights burned above rows of camp chairs and red spots pointed at two stages, one directly before the chairs, the other beside a crowded bar. A naked girl danced on each stage, flipping her hair and snapping her fingers. The girls had unsteady breasts, narrow hips, and pubic hair like small black badges. In the red light their lips looked black. Most of the customers in the chairs and standing at the bar were Thai men, but scattered through the crowd were a few drunken white men like himself, and even a few white couples in American clothes. Conor half-sat, half-fell into an empty chair near the back of the room and ordered a beer that cost a hundred baht from a half-naked girl who materialized beside him.

That bastard took my cock out of my pants, he thought. Guess I’m lucky he didn’t cut it off and take it home in a bottle. He drank his beer, then a succession of beers as the girls onstage changed faces and bodies, swapped short hair for long hair, baseball breasts for football breasts, pillowy hips for greyhound hips. They blew out smoke and smiled like girls on dates. Conor decided that he liked these girls. One of them could open Coca-Cola bottles with her vagina—the top came off the bottle with a loud, echoing report. This girl’s face was oddly harsh and wistful, with high precision-engineered cheekbones and gleaming eyes like paper cuts. After she popped open the bottles, she tilted her backside against the wall of the stage, her pretty legs in the air, and inhaled the soda from the bottle. When she stood up, she released the liquid back into the bottle in a hissing jet. As far as Conor knew, there wasn’t a single girl in Donovan’s who could do this trick.

He had reached that ironbound stage of drunkenness, he realized, that could not be affected by a dozen more drinks.

When he looked at the side stage he felt his face turn red, his ears blaze. A slim young creature had shimmied out of her dress to reveal that she had small, pretty breasts and an erect cock. Another slender katoey knelt to take the erection in her mouth. Conor turned his eyes back to the center stage, where a girl with the self-possessed face of a dictator’s mistress was about to do something with a large reddish dog.

“Gimme a whiskey,” Conor told the waitress.

When the dictator’s mistress and the dog left the stage, a short muscular Thai male and a girl with waist-length hair bounded up. Soon they were locked in intercourse, altering their positions, drawing up their knees and revolving as if they were suspended in the air. One of the katoeys to Conor’s side sighed and arched his girl’s back. Conor ordered another whiskey. A ghostly Tim Underhill sat applauding at his side.

Suddenly Conor was unable to tell which of the people onstage were men and which were women. They were men with breasts, women with erections. They had melted together—he saw the flash of a girl’s smile, plump buttocks, a broad thigh. Then all four performers were standing up and bowing like actors, the young woman delicately flushed across the top of her breasts. To Conor, the four people onstage seemed to be encased in the memory of pleasure, as different from those cheering them as Martians, as untouchable as angels.

That’s it! Conor thought. It flashed before him that a moment of total clarity and truth had just passed. Conor saw himself standing before a great wall of dazzling brightness, an impenetrable, unknowable realm where the sexes melted together and language was music and things moved so swiftly and brightly they hurt the eyes.

Then he fell back into cold reason. The performers now draped in robes and shuffling offstage in the emptying club were drug addicts and whores who lived in riverfront shacks, and he was drunk. Tim Underhill was a boozy wreck, just like him. Conor groped for that moment of clarity in order to dismiss it completely, but could find only the memory of sitting in bars and the taxi, of a hunt so fruitless it might have been for a unicorn instead of a man.

He thought that his whole life was a history of not understanding what the hell was going on—a history of not getting it.

Conor wiped his hands on his jeans and dully followed the last of the customers down the dark corridor and outside into the warm night.

A handful of men from the club had drifted toward the parking garage. They were all dressed in smooth-fitting Thai suits and resembled mercenary soldiers on home leave. One of them wore dark glasses. Conor weaved outside the door of the club, sensing that they were waiting for him to leave.

It was suddenly clear to him that what they had seen in the club was only a prelude to the real event of the night. They were not satisfied with what satisfied everyone else. Me too, Conor thought, remembering the feelings he’d had while the performers took their bows. There’s more—there’s one hell of a lot more. And something else made Conor move toward the waiting men. Underhill would have been with them. That was why Cham had brought him here. Whatever the men were awaiting was the real last act of the performance which already had taken Conor so far.

As Conor stepped toward the men, the Thai in dark glasses muttered something to his friends and broke away to approach him. He held up a hand like a policeman halting traffic, then made a sweeping-away gesture. “Performance ovah,” he said. “You must go.”

“I want to see what else you guys got on tap,” Conor said.

“Nothing else. Must leave now.” The man repeated the whisk-broom gesture.

Without appearing to have moved at all, the other men were now much nearer to Conor, who felt a familiar surge of excitement and anticipation at the proximity of danger. Violence hung about these men like a fog.

“Tim Underhill told me to come here,” he said in a loud voice. “You know him, right?”

A buzz of soft talk broke out behind the man in sunglasses. Conor heard what sounded like “Underhill,” followed by suppressed laughter. He relaxed. The man in sunglasses glanced back at him in a wordless command to stand still. The men spoke to each other again, and one of them made what was obviously a joke, and even Sunglasses smiled.

“Let’s see what you guys got goin’ here,” he said.

“Crap crop crap!” one of the men shouted, and the others showed yellow smiles.

Sunglasses walked toward Conor with an officer’s strut. “Do you know where you ah?”

“Bangkok. Jesus, I ain’t that drunk. Bangkok, Thailand. The goddamn kingdom of Siam.”

Big yellow smile, and a shake of the head. “What street you on? What district?”

Conor said, “I don’t even give a shit.”

At least a few of the men must have understood him, for they called out tauntingly to Sunglasses. Conor heard in their tone a cynical, end-of-the-world edge he had heard nowhere in the world in the past fourteen years. They could have been saying either: Kill him and let’s move or Let the asshole American come along.

Sunglasses squinted up at Conor with a look that mingled doubt and amusement. “Twelve hundred baht,” he finally said.

“This show better be four times as good as the other one,” Conor muttered, and pulled his crumpled wad of bills from his pocket. The little group of men had already begun moving toward the towering concrete garage, and Conor stumbled along behind them, trying to keep himself moving in a straight line.

The man in sunglasses moved ahead of the rest and opened a door set beside the garage’s exit ramp. The little group began filing through the door into a dimly lighted stairwell. Sunglasses flapped his hand in the air and hissed, urging Conor to come in.

“Here I am,” Conor said, and hurried after the others.

3

The next day Conor told himself that he could not really be certain about what had happened after he followed the other men down into the lower depths of the garage. He’d had so much to drink that he had been unsteady on his feet. In a sex club he had seen a vision of—what? angels? splendor?—and it had mix-mastered his brain. He had not understood more than one word spoken inside the garage, and he could not even be certain about that word. He had been light-headed enough to have heard unspoken words and seen imaginary things; Conor felt that in some way he had been light-headed since he and Mikey and Beevers had boarded the Singapore Airlines jet in Los Angeles. Since then, reality had bent backwards in on itself in some extraordinary way, putting him into a world where people looked at scenes from hell, where plump little girls blew smoke rings out of their pussies, where men turned into women and women into men. They were getting close to Tim Underhill, Mikey said, and Conor felt that closeness every time he wondered about what happened in the garage. Getting close to Underhill probably meant you were getting into some territory where everything was upside down by nature, where you couldn’t trust your own senses. Underhill liked those places—he had liked Vietnam. Underhill was like a bat, he felt comfortable upside down. And Koko did too, Conor supposed. The next day, he decided not to tell anyone about what he had or had not seen, not even Mike Poole.

* * *

Conor had followed the men down the concrete stairs in the dark, thinking that civilians were always wrong about violence. Civilians thought that violence was action, one guy hitting another, crunching bones and spattering blood—ordinary people thought you could see violence. They thought you could avoid it by not looking at it. But violence was not action. Above all violence was a feeling. It was the icy envelope around all the business of blows and knives and guns. This feeling was not even really connected to the people using the weapons—they had just put their minds inside the envelope. Inside the envelope they did what was necessary.

This cold, detached feeling was all around Conor as he went down the stairs.

Conor soon lost count of the number of flights they had descended. Six levels down, or seven, or eight … the concrete steps ended two floors beneath the level on which they had last seen a parked car. A broad step led down to an irregular grey floor that looked like lumpy cement but proved to be packed earth. The light at the base of the stairs cast a thick slow light twenty or thirty feet out into shadowy greyness melting into a deep black that seemed to go on forever. The air was cold and stale and viscous.

One of the men called out a question.

There was a rustle of sound, and a light went on far at the back of the basement. Beneath it, just now lowering his hand from the light cord, stood a Thai male in his late fifties or early sixties wearing a very tentative smile. A long bar with tall and short glasses, buckets of ice, and a double rank of bottles had been set up on a long table in front of the man. The man slowly extended both arms to lean against the bar. The top of his head shone.

The Thais moved toward the bar. They were speaking in low voices in which Conor could still hear that battlefield tone. Sunglasses summoned him imperiously to the bar.

He ordered whiskey, having an idea that a warm substance like whiskey would support him and hold him up, instead of cutting him off at the knees in the way a cold substance would. “Put some ice in it, man,” he told the bartender, whose bald head was covered with tiny beads of sweat as regular as eggs in a carton. The whiskey was some single malt with an unpronounceable Scottish name, and tasted startlingly of tar, old ropes, fog, smoke, and charred wood. Swallowing the stuff was like ingesting a little island off the Scottish coast.

Sunglasses nodded curtly at Conor, and took a drink poured from the same bottle.

Who were these guys? In their smooth taut suits, they might have been gangsters; they might just as easily have been bankers and insurance executives. They had the assurance of people who had never been forced to worry about money.

Harry Beevers, he thought. They sit back and watch the money come home through the door.

Sunglasses stepped away from the other men, raised his hand, and waved to the other side of the basement.

Quiet footsteps came forward out of the darkness. Conor gulped some of the miraculous whiskey. Two figures appeared at the edge of the light. A little Thai man in a khaki suit, bald as a bullet and with deep lines and pockmarks in his cheeks, moved unsmilingly toward the group of men around the bar. With one hand he held the elbow of a beautiful Asian woman who wore only a loose black robe several sizes too large for her. The woman seemed dazed by the light. She was not Thai, Conor thought—her face was the wrong shape. She might have been Chinese; she might have been Vietnamese. She needed the subtle pressure of the man’s hand at her elbow to keep her moving. Her head lolled, and her mouth parted in a half-smile.

The man brought her a few more steps forward. Now Conor saw that he wore lightly tinted wire-rimmed glasses. Conor knew his type—he was absolutely military. The bullet-headed man was not a rich man, but he had the instinctive authority of a general.

Conor thought he heard one of the men beside him whisper “telephone.”

When they were squarely in the light the little man took his hand from the woman’s elbow. She swayed gently, then steadied herself by widening her stance and straightening her shoulders. She looked out through half-lidded eyes, smiling mystically.

The General stepped behind her and slid the robe off her shoulders. The woman now looked mysteriously larger, more formidable, less like a captured thing. Her shoulders were slim, and there was a slim affecting helplessness in the way her rounded forearms turned out, exposing a single blue brush-stroke inside the hollow of her elbow, but all of her body, even the way her calves narrowed into her ankles, had a polished perfect roundness, so that the naked woman seemed as sturdily made as a bronze shield. Her skin, a dark smudgy gold like wet sand on a beach, finally convinced Conor that she was Chinese, not a Thai: all the other men were sallow beside her.

His first instinct, faced with the woman’s beautiful unconscious defiance, was to wrap her back up in the robe and take her home. Then four decades of training as an American male reasserted themselves. She had been paid well, or would be; that she looked far healthier than the girls in the sex club across the alley meant only that she would earn many times their price for submitting to a gang bang performed by half a dozen respectable citizens of Bangkok. Conor did not at all feel like joining in, but neither did he think that the woman needed protection. That she was exceptionally good-looking was no more than a professional asset.

He looked at the men around him. They were a club, and this was their ritual. Every week or so they gathered in some inconvenient and secret place, and one after another had sex with a drugged beauty. They’d talk about the women the way wine snobs talked about wine. The whole thing was creepy. Conor asked the bartender for another drink and promised himself that he would leave as soon as everybody else got busy.

If this was what Underhill got up to when he wanted to swing, he was tamer than he used to be.

But why would Underhill join a group whose purpose was to have sex with a girl!

If they start to have sex with each other, Conor thought, I’m out of here.

Then he was glad he had another drink, because the General stepped in front of the woman, cocked his right arm back, and slapped her hard enough to make her stagger back. He shouted a few words—“Crap crap!”—and she straightened up and stepped forward again. Her face was tilted like a shield and she was still smiling. A red, hand-shaped blotch covered the entire surface of her left cheek. Conor took a healthy, numbing slug of his drink. The General slapped her again, and the Chinese woman tottered back and straightened herself before she fell. Tears made neat tracks down her cheeks.

This time the General struck her with a straight blow to the side of her chin and knocked her flat on the ground. She murmured and rolled over, showing them dusty buttocks and a long scratch in her golden, dust-covered back. When she succeeded in hitching herself up on her hands and knees, the ends of her hair pooled on the dirt floor. The General kicked her very hard in one hip. The woman grunted and went down again. The General stepped smartly toward her and kicked her a little less forcefully in the side just beneath her ribcage. The woman writhed away into shadow, and quite gently the General bent down to extend his hand and help her to crawl back into the best light. Then he kicked her with great determination in the thigh, almost instantly raising a bruise the size of a salad plate. He proceeded to walk around her body, giving her a flurry of kicks.

It was just like the sex club, Conor saw—the sex club was just the map. Here the map was ripped away and you saw a tough little man beat up a woman in front of other men. That was how you had your fun. Down here in the garage, you got your ultimate sex club.

It made sense of the violence he had felt, anyhow.

The General examined the prostrate, huddled woman for a moment before accepting a drink from Sunglasses. He took a good mouthful, swished it around in his mouth, and swallowed. He stood and surveyed his work, his right arm bent at the elbow, the half-empty glass held with unconscious rigidity. He looked like a man taking time out from a difficult job with the satisfaction of knowing that so far he had given a superior performance.

Conor wanted to get out.

The General set down his glass and bent to help the woman stand. It was not easy to get her up. Her pains made it difficult for her to move out of a crouch, but she willingly took the General’s hand. Her dark-gold skin had bruised purple and black, and a large swelling distorted the line of her jaw. She got to her knees and rested there, breathing softly. She was a soldier, she was a ground-pounder. The General nudged her plump backside with one of his loafers, then kicked her hard. “Crap, crop crap,” he muttered, as if embarrassed that the others should hear him. The woman tilted her face to the light, and Conor saw how far she was willing to go. They could not stop her. They could not even touch her. Her face was a shield again, and the side of her mouth that was not swollen moved in an echo of her earlier smile.

The General struck her temple with the back of his hand. The woman canted over, caught herself with an outstretched arm, and brought herself erect again. She sighed. A smear of red feathered the corner of one eye. The General’s lips moved in a silent command, and the woman visibly focused herself and got up on one knee. Then she levered herself upright. Conor felt like applauding. The woman’s eyes shone.

With the force of some crazed bird escaping his throat, a loud burp tasting of smoke and pitch flew from Conor’s mouth. Most of the men laughed. Conor was amazed that the woman laughed too.

The General lifted the shirt-jacket of his Thai suit and pulled a revolver from the waistband of his trousers. He crooked his second finger through the trigger guard and displayed the revolver on his palm. Conor didn’t know much about guns, but this one had flashy grips carved from some milky substance like ivory or mother-of-pearl, and filigreed scrollwork on the side plate beneath the cylinder. Intricate scrolling covered the barrel. It was a pimp gun.

Conor stepped backwards, then stepped backwards again. Finally his brain caught up with his body. He could not stand and watch while the General shot her—he couldn’t save her, and he had the terrible feeling that the woman would fight him if he tried, that she did not care to be saved. Conor moved backwards as silently as possible.

The General began to speak. He was still displaying the pimp gun on his palm. His voice was soft and urgent, persuasive, soothing, and compelling at the same time. He sounded just like a General to Conor. “Crap crop crap crap crop crop crop crap,” the General intoned. Give me your poor your huddled masses. O glorious we. “Crop crop crop crop crap.” Gentlemen, we are gathered here today. Conor eased himself further back into the darkness. The bartender’s eyes flicked at him, but the men did not move. “Crop crap.” Glory glory heaven heaven love love heaven heaven glory glory.

When Conor thought he was close enough to the bottom of the staircase, he turned around. It was less than six feet away.

“Crap crop crop.” There came the unmistakable metallic click that meant the firing mechanism was cocked.

A shot echoed loudly through the basement. Conor jumped for the stairs, hit the bottom step, and scrambled up, no longer caring how much noise he made. When he reached the first landing he heard another shot. It was muffled by the ceiling of the basement, and this time he knew that the General was not shooting at him, but Conor ran up the stairs until he reached ground level, and hurried outside. He was out of breath and his legs were trembling. He staggered through the hot wet air, and came out of the alley onto a main road.

A grinning one-armed man beeped the horn of his ruk-tuk and steered the rackety little vehicle straight at him. When he stopped he bobbed his head and asked, “Patpong?”

Conor nodded and got in, knowing that he could walk to his hotel from there.

On Phat Pong Road Conor staggered through the crowd to the hotel, went to his room and collapsed on the bed. He kicked his shoes off lying down, and saw the bruised naked woman and the little General with his pimp gun. Conor finally swam out into deep sleep on the tide of the recognition that he had learned what “telephone” meant.

1

The elephant appeared to Michael Poole a short time after Conor had seen him getting into a taxi outside a bar in Soi Cowboy. Michael had failed twice by then, as Conor was to continue failing for the rest of the day, and the elephant’s appearance so thoroughly surprised him that he immediately took it as a token of success. He needed this encouragement. In Soi Cowboy, Michael had shown Underhill’s photograph to twenty bartenders and fifty patrons and a handful of bouncers; not one had even bothered to look at it carefully before shrugging and turning away. Then he’d had an inspiration, to look at Bangkok’s flower market. “Bang Luk,” said one of the bartenders, and a taxi took him across town to Bang Luk, a narrow strip of cobbled street near the river.

Flower wholesalers had set up their wares in a series of empty garages on the left-hand side of the little alley, and displayed them on carts and tables set out before the garages. Vans pulled in and out of the alley. On the alley’s right-hand side, a row of shops lined the ground floor of three-story apartment houses with French windows and abbreviated balconies. Washing on clotheslines hung before half of the open French windows, and the third of these balconies, above a shop called Jimmy Siam, had been covered with green plants and bushes in earthenware pots.

Michael paced slowly down the cobbles, breathing in the odors of a thousand flowers. Men watched him from beside the barrows of birds of paradise and carts laden with dwarf hibiscus. This was not the tourist’s Bangkok, and anyone who looked like Michael Poole—a tall white man in jeans and a short-sleeved white safari jacket from Brooks Brothers—did not belong here. Without feeling in any way threatened, Poole did feel extremely unwelcome. Some men loading flats of flowers into a mustard-colored van gave him only a brief glare and returned to their work; others watched him so intently that he could feel their eyes on him long after he had passed by. In this way Michael walked all the way to the end of the alley, and he stopped to look over a low concrete wall to the silty Chaophraya River, churning with an incoming tide. A long white double-decker boat marked ORIENTAL HOTEL moved slowly downriver.

He turned around, and a few men slowly returned to their work.

He returned to Charoen Krung Road on the pavement opposite the flower stalls, looking into every shop he passed for a glimpse of Tim Underhill. In a dingy café Thai men in dirty jeans and T-shirts drank coffee at a counter; in Gold Field, A Limited Partnership, a receptionist stared back at him from behind a screen of ferns; in Bangkok Exchange, Ltd., two men spoke into telephones at large dark desks; in Jimmy Siam, a bored girl tilted her head and stared into space at a counter full of cut roses and lilies; in Bangkok Fashions a lone customer dangled a baby on her hip and flipped through a rack of dresses. The last building in the row was a shuttered bank with chains across the doors and cardboard squares on the windows. Michael passed by a stop sign and was back out onto Charoen Krung Road without having seen Underhill or even sensed the possibility of his presence. He was a baby doctor, not a policeman, and whatever he knew about Bangkok had been read in guidebooks. Michael looked out into the maze of traffic. Then a ponderous movement in a sidestreet across the road caught his attention. He focused on it and found that he was looking at an elephant, a working elephant.

It was an old elephant, a laborer among elephants, carrying half a dozen logs rolled in its trunk as easily as if they were cigarettes. It plodded down the middle of the street past inattentive crowds. Michael Poole was charmed, as enchanted as a child would be by a mythical beast. Outside of zoos, elephants were mythical beasts: in this one he saw what he would have hoped to see. An elephant wandering a city street: he remembered a picture from Babar, one of Robbie’s sacred books, and that old deep grief waved to him again.

Michael watched the elephant until it disappeared behind jiggling crowds and a wall of shop signs in enigmatic Thai.

He turned south and drifted for a block or two. Tourist Bangkok—his hotel and Patpong—might as well have been in a different country. White men might have been seen in the flower market before, but here they were unknown. In his short-sleeve safari jacket, his White Man in the Tropics regalia, Michael was an intrusive ghost. Nearly every one of the people on his side of the street stared at him as he went by. Across the street were warehouses with low, slanting tin roofs and broken windows; on his side small dark people, mostly women, carried babies and shopping bags up and down the sidewalks and in and out of dusty shops. The women gave him sharp, anxious looks; the babies goggled at him. Poole liked the babies. He had always liked babies, and these were fat, clear-eyed, and curious. His pediatrician’s arms longed to hold them.

Poole moved on past drugstores with window displays of hair and snake’s eggs, past shoebox restaurants with fewer people in them than flies. When he walked past a school that resembled a public housing development, he thought of Judy again with a renewal of his old despondency. He thought, I’m not looking for Underhill, I’m just getting away from my wife for a couple of weeks. His marriage seemed a kind of prison to him. His marriage seemed a deep pit in which he and Judy endlessly circled around Robbie’s unspoken death with knives in their hands.

Drink it down, drink it down.

Poole walked beneath a highway overpass and eventually came to a bridge over a little stream. On the far bank was a hodgepodge village of cardboard boxes, nests of newspaper and trash. This warren smelled much worse than the compound of gasoline, excrement, smoke, and dying air that filled the rest of the city. To Poole’s nose it stank of disease—it stank like an unclean wound. He stood on the quavery little bridge and peered into the paper slum. Through an opening in a large carton he saw a man lying in a squirrel’s nest of crumpled paper, staring out at nothing. A smudge of smoke curled up into the air from somewhere back in the litter of boxes, and a baby cried out. The baby squalled again—it was a cry of rage and terror—and the cry was abruptly cut off. Poole could all but see the hand covering the baby’s mouth. He wanted to wade through the stream and do medicine—he wanted to go in there and be a doctor.

His pampered, luxurious practice also felt like a confining pit. In the pit he patted heads, gave shots, took throat cultures, comforted children who would never really have anything wrong with them, and calmed down those mothers who took every symptom for a major illness. It was like living entirely on Heath Bar Crunch ice cream. That was why he would not let Stacy Talbot, whom he quite loved, disappear entirely into the care of other doctors: she brought him the real raw taste of doctoring. When he held her hand he confronted the human capacity for pain, and the stony questions beyond pain. That was the cutting edge. That was as far as you could go, and for a doctor it was a deep, humbling privilege to go there. Just now this unscientific notion was full of salt and savor, the real taste of things.

Then Poole caught again that cryptic exhalation from this human sewer, and knew that someone was dying, breathing in smoke and breathing out mortality, back in the rubble of packing cases and smudgy fires and bodies wrapped in newspapers. Some Robbie. The baby gasped and screamed, and the greasy smudge of smoke unraveled itself in the heat. Poole tightened his hands on the wooden railing. He had no medicine, no supplies, and this was neither his country nor his culture. He sent a feeble non-believer’s prayer for well-being toward the person dying in the pain and stink, knowing that any sort of well-being would be a miracle for him. This was not where he could help, and neither was Westerholm. Westerholm was an evasion of everything his poor feeble prayer was sent out against. Poole turned away from the world across the stream.

He could not stand finishing out his life in Westerholm. Judy could not stand his impatience with his practice, and he could not stand his practice.

Before Poole stepped off the bridge, he knew that his relationship to these matters had irrevocably changed. His inner compass had swung as if by itself, and he could no longer see his marriage or his medical practice as responsibilities given to him by a relentless deity. A worse treachery now than to Judy’s ideas of success—which were Westerholm’s—was treachery to himself.

He had decided something. The grip of his habitual life had loosened. It was to allow something like this, and to allow Judy to do what she might, that he had accepted Harry Beevers’ absurd offer to spend a couple of weeks wandering around places he didn’t know in search of a man he wasn’t sure he wanted to find. Well, he had seen an elephant in the streets, and he had decided something.

He had decided really to be himself in relationship to his old life, to his wife and his comfortable job. If really being himself put his old life at risk, the reality of his position made the risk bearable. He would let himself look in all directions. This was the best freedom, and the decision allowed him to feel very free.

I’ll go back tomorrow, he told himself. The others can keep on looking. Koko was history, Judy was right about that; the life he had left claimed him now.

Michael nearly turned around to recross the wobbly bridge and go back to the hotel and book the next day’s flight to New York. But he decided to continue wandering south for a time on the wide street that ran parallel to the river. He wanted to let everything, the strangeness of Bangkok and the strangeness of his new freedom, soak into him.

He had come upon a tiny, busy fair tucked behind a fence in a vacant lot between two tall buildings. From the street he had first seen the crown of a Ferris wheel, and heard its music competing with hurdy-gurdy music, childish squeaks of pleasure, and what sounded like the soundtrack of a horror movie played through a very poor sound system. Poole walked on a few paces and came to the opening in the fence that admitted people to the fair.

The lot, no more than half a block square, was a jumble of noise, color, and activity. Booths and tables had been set up everywhere. Men grilled meat on skewers and passed them to children, candy makers handed out paper cups of sticky candy, other men sold comic books, toys, badges, magic tricks. At the back of the lot children and adults stood in line to get on the Ferris wheel. At the far right of the lot, other children howled with pleasure or froze in terror atop wooden horses on a carousel. On the lot’s far left had been constructed the gigantic plasterboard front of a castle, painted to resemble black stone and decorated with little barred windows. They suddenly reminded Michael of those in St. Bartholomew’s Hospital; the whole false front of the funhouse reminded Michael of St. Bartholomew’s. Looking up, he could identify the window behind which Dr. Sam Stein sat plotting, the one to the room in which Stacy Talbot lay reading Jane Eyre.

The huge grey hungry face of a vampire, red-lipped mouth open to expose sharp fangs, had been painted across one side of the plasterboard façade. Bursts of cackling laughter and eerie music came from behind the plasterboard. Horror’s conventions were the same everywhere. Within the funhouse, skeletons jumped out of dark corners and mad leering faces gave the young a reason to put their arms around each other. Warty-nosed witches, sadistic capering devils, and malignant ghosts parodied disease, death, insanity, and ordinary colorless human cruelty. You laughed and screamed and came out on the other end into the carnival, where all the real fears and horrors lived.

After the war, Koko had decided it was too scary out there, and had ducked back inside the funhouse with the ghosts and the demons.

Across the fairground Poole saw another towering Westerner, a blonde woman who must have been wearing high heels to reach her height of about six feet—her hair was rapidly going grey, and had been tied into a braid at the nape of her neck. Then Poole took in the breadth of the shoulders and knew that the person across the fairground was a man. Of course. From the grey in his hair, from his loose embroidered linen shirt and long braid, Poole gathered that this was a hippie who had wandered east and never returned home. He had stayed in the funhouse too.

When the man turned to inspect something on a table Poole saw that he was a little older than himself. The hippie’s hair had receded from his crown, and a grey-blond beard covered the lower part of his face. Oblivious to the alarm bells ringing throughout his nervous system, Poole continued to watch the man as if aimlessly—he noticed the deep lines in the tall man’s forehead, the creases dragging at his wasted cheeks. Poole thought only that the man looked oddly familiar: he thought he must have been someone he’d met briefly during the war. They had met inside the funhouse, and the man was a Vietnam veteran; Poole’s old radar told him that much. Then sensations of both pain and joy jostled within him, and the tall, weathered man across the fairground raised the object he had been examining to within a foot of his face. It was a rubber mask of a demon’s catlike face. The man answered its grimace with a smile. Michael Poole finally realized that he was looking at Tim Underhill.

2

Poole wanted to raise his hand and shout out Underhill’s name, but he made himself keep standing quietly between the vendor of grilled meat and the line of teenagers waiting to get inside the funhouse. Poole finally felt his heart beating. He took in several deep slow breaths to calm down. Until this moment he had not really been certain that Underhill was still alive. Underhill’s face was of a lifeless whiteness that made it clear the man spent very little time in the sun. Yet he looked fit. His shirt was brilliantly clean, his hair was combed, his beard had been trimmed. Like all survivors, he looked wary. He had lost a good deal of weight, and Poole guessed that he’d also lost a lot of teeth. But the doctor in Poole thought that the most visible fact about the man across the fairground was that he was recovering from a good many self-inflicted wounds.

Underhill paid for the rubber mask and rolled it up and slid it into his back pocket. Poole was not yet ready to be seen, and he moved backward into the shadow of the funhouse. Underhill began moving slowly through the crowd, now and then pausing to inspect the toys and books arrayed on the tables. After he had admired and purchased a little metal robot, he gave a last satisfied, amused look at the diversions around him, and then turned his back on Poole and began working his way through the crowds toward the sidewalk.

Was this what Koko did, wander through a street fair buying toys?

Without even glancing toward the far bank, Poole clattered over the flimsy bridge after Underhill. They were moving toward central Bangkok. It had grown darker since Poole had first come upon the fair, and dim lights now burned in the shoebox restaurants. Underhill moved at an easy pace and was soon a block ahead of Poole. His height and the brilliant whiteness of his shirt made him very easy to see in the turmoil and congestion of the sidewalk.

Poole remembered how he had missed Tim Underhill on the day of the Memorial’s dedication. That Underhill had been lost, and here was this Underhill, a ravaged looking man with a braid in his whitening hair, just strolling beneath a noisy concrete traffic overpass.

3

Underhill’s stride lengthened as he neared the corner that led to Bang Luk. Poole saw him round the corner at the shuttered bank like a man hurrying to get home, and jogged through the darkness and the crowd of milling Thais on the sidewalk. Underhill had simply melted through all the people, but Poole had to jump down into the street. Horns blared, lights flicked at him. The street traffic too had increased, and now it was thickening into the perpetual traffic jam of Bangkok’s night.

Poole ignored the honking and began running. A taxi zipped past him, then a bus, packed to the windows with people, who grinned down and called out to him. He reached the corner in a few seconds and trotted over the cobbles into Bang Luk.

Men still loaded vans and trucks with flats of flowers; the shop windows spilled out light. Poole glimpsed a billowing shirt as white as a ghost and slowed to a walk. Underhill was opening the door between Jimmy Siam and Bangkok Exchange Ltd. One of the flower wholesalers at a depleted barrow called out to him, and Underhill laughed and twisted around to shout something back in Thai. He waved at the vendor, went inside, and closed the door behind him.

Poole stationed himself against the first of the garages. Within minutes a light went on behind the shutters above Jimmy Siam. Now Poole knew where he lived; an hour earlier he had not thought he would ever find him.

A vendor emerged from the garage and frowned at Poole. He picked up a large jade plant in a pot and carried it inside, still scowling.

The shutters opened above Jimmy Siam’s. Through the opened French windows Poole could see a flaking white ceiling dripping thin stalactites of paint. A moment later Underhill appeared carrying a large jade plant very much like the one the suspicious vendor had taken inside. He set the plant down on his balcony and went inside without closing the French windows.

The vendor darted out through his garage door and glared at Poole. The man hesitated a moment, then began walking toward Poole, speaking vehemently in Thai.

“I’m sorry, I don’t speak your language,” Poole said.

“You go away, scum,” the man said.

“All right,” Poole said. “No need to be so upset.”

The man uttered a long sentence in Thai and spat on the ground.

Underhill’s light snapped off. Poole looked up at the windows, and the stocky little flower vendor rushed a few steps toward him, waving his hands in the air. Poole retreated a few steps. Underhill was dimly visible through the French windows, drawing them closed.

“No bother!” the man shouted. “No make sick! Go away!”

“For God’s sake,” Poole said. “Who do you think I am?”

The vendor shooed him back a few more paces, but scurried back into his garage as soon as Underhill appeared at his street door. Poole shot back into the darkness by the wall. Underhill had changed into a conventional Western white dress shirt and a baggy seersucker jacket that flapped around him as he walked.

Underhill turned onto Charoen Krung Road and began marching through the crowds on the sidewalk. Poole found himself stalled behind groups of men or whole gatherings of families who had assembled on a patch of sidewalk and intended to stay there. Children jumped and yelled; here and there a boy fiddled with the controls of a radio. Underhill’s head floated above the rest, moving easily and steadily toward Surawong Road.

He was going to Patpong 3. It was a long walk, but presumably Underhill wanted to save the few baht of the ruk-tuk fare.

Then Poole lost sight of him. It was as if his tall form had disappeared, like the White Rabbit, into a hole in the ground. He was visible nowhere on the long stretch of sidewalk. When Poole looked at the jammed street, he did not see Underhill there either—only a priest in a saffron robe melting imperturbably through the unstoppable traffic.

Poole jumped up, but saw no tall grey-haired white man making his way through the crowds. When his heels hit the pavement again, Poole started running.

Unless Underhill had been swallowed up by the earth, he must have either gone into a shop or turned down a sidestreet. As Poole ran past all the little businesses he had passed on his way to the wobbly bridge and the fair, he looked into each window. Most of the cafés and shops were closed now.

Poole swore to himself. He had managed to lose Underhill; the earth had swallowed him up; he had known he was being followed and he had slipped into a secret cave, a lair. In the lair he dressed in fur and claws and became Koko—he became what the Martinsons and Clive McKenna had seen in the last minutes of their lives.

Poole saw a dark cave shaped like a fist opening out in the middle of the impoverished little shops.

He was running along through the mass of people on the sidewalk, half-pushing people out of his way, sweating, irrationally convinced that Beevers had been right all along and that Underhill had gone down into his cave. Budlike horns nestled in his thinning hair.

A few steps later Poole saw that the buildings separated a block away, and a narrow street went down toward the river.

Poole hurtled into a narrow passageway lined with stalls and vendors of silk and leather bags and paintings of elephants marching across fields of blue velvet. The inevitable tribe of women and children squatted beside the wall to Poole’s left, chipping away at their eternal trench. Poole saw Tim Underhill almost at once, far ahead of him, just crossing with a lengthening step a wide empty place where the byway turned up to the right instead of continuing on the short distance to the river. A low wall and a white building lay behind the curve in the road, and Underhill strode past these as he began to move uphill.

Poole hurried down past the vendors and without quite seeing it passed an ORIENTAL HOTEL legend stenciled on a wall. When he reached the bottom of the little road, he looked right and saw Underhill passing through the large glass doors of an immense white structure which extended all the way down to Poole and all the way up past the entrance to an only partially visible garage.

Poole hopped onto the sidewalk and ran past the older wing of the hotel toward the entrance. Large plate-glass windows gave him a view of the entire lobby, and he could see Underhill making his way past a florist’s window and bookshop, apparently going toward a cocktail lounge.

He reached the revolving door and was welcomed into the lobby by big smiling Thai men in grey uniforms and realized that he had followed Underhill to a hotel. Three of Koko’s murders had taken place in hotels. Poole slowed down.

Underhill walked past the entrance to the lounge and continued briskly on through a door marked EXIT—Poole saw a flash of darkness distantly illuminated by a lantern on a tall standard. Underhill passed through the door and went out onto the grounds behind the hotel.

Clive McKenna’s body had been found on the grounds of the Goodwood Park Hotel.

Poole followed his horned monster to the exit and very slowly pushed it open. He was surprised to find himself on a pebbled walk that led down past tall lanterns and a poolside garden to a series of descending terraces with candle-lit tables. On the other side of the tables the river shimmered, reflecting the lights of a restaurant on its opposite bank and the sidelights of various small craft. Uniformed waiters and waitresses attended to people eating and drinking at the tables. The scene was so different from the sordid vista Poole had expected that it took him a moment to locate Underhill’s tall figure just now making his way down to the lower terraces.

Poole finally took in the presence of a restaurant behind the glowing yellow windows to his right.

Tim Underhill was making for one of the few empty tables remaining on the long flat terrace directly before the river. He sat down and began looking around for a waiter. A trickle of people coming up a sunken walkway beside the pool emerged on the lower terraces at the far side of the hotel. A young waiter approached Underhill’s table and took what must have been a drink order. Underhill smiled and talked, and for a time he put his hand on the young waiter’s arm, and the young waiter smiled and made a joke.

The sacred monster shriveled away, blushing. Unless he had arranged a meeting with someone, Underhill came to this elegant place to have a drink in a nice setting and flirt with the boy waiters. As soon as the waiter left him, Underhill took a paperback book from one of the pockets of the seersucker jacket, turned his chair to face the river, propped an elbow on the table, and began to read with an air of habitual concentration.

Here the river did not have the weedy, vegetal stench Poole had caught at the end of the flower market. This stretch of the river smelled only of river, an odor at once brisk and nostalgic, evocative of movement itself, reminding Poole that he would soon be returning home.

He told a professional young person that he merely wanted a drink on the terrace, and the professional young person waved him down the torch-lit steps. Poole went all the way down to the final terrace, and slipped into a seat at the last table in the row.

Three tables away, his legs crossed at the ankle, Tim Underhill faced the river, occasionally looking up from his book to gaze at it. Here the river’s odor carried strong overtones of silt and something almost spicy. The water rhythmically splashed against the piers. Underhill sighed contentedly, sipped his drink, and dove back into his book. Poole made out from three tables away that it was a Raymond Chandler novel.

Poole ordered a glass of white wine from the same young waiter with whom Underhill had flirted. Conversations flowed and sparkled at the tables strung out along the terrace. A small white launch periodically ferried guests from the pier below the terrace to a restaurant on the island halfway across the river. At intervals, bearing lights fore and aft, wooden boats shaped as oddly as boats in dreams slipped past on the black water: boats with dragons’ necks, boats with round swollen bellies and beaks like birds, long flat houseboats hung with washing from the decks of which children stared at Poole with grave, unseeing faces. The darkness deepened, and the voices from the other tables grew louder.

When Poole saw Underhill order another drink from the young waiter, again laying his hand on the boy’s sleeve and saying something that made the boy smile, he took out his pen and wrote a message on his cocktail napkin. Aren’t you the famous storyteller of Ozone Park? I’m at the last table to your right. The boy was now drifting down the row of tables, and Michael, like Underhill, caught his sleeve.

“Will you please give this note to the man whose order you just took?”

The boy dimpled, having understood this request by his own lights, and promptly moved back along the row of tables. When he reached Underhill’s table he dropped the napkin, which he had folded in half, beside Underhill’s elbow.

“Oh?” Underhill said, looking up from Raymond Chandler.

Poole watched him splay the book open on the table and pick up the napkin. For a moment Underhill’s face betrayed no response except to become remarkably concentrated. The whole inner man came to attention. He was even more focused than he had been on his book. Finally he frowned at the little note—a frown of intense mental effort instead of displeasure. Underhill had been able to keep himself from immediately glancing to his right until he had fully considered the note. Now he did so, and his eyes quickly found Poole’s.

Underhill swiveled his chair sideways and let a slow smile spread through his beard. “Lady Michael, it’s better than you know to see you again,” he said. “For a second I thought I might be in trouble.”

For a second I thought I might be in trouble.

When Michael Poole heard those words, the horned monster in Underhill’s body shriveled away for good: Underhill was as innocent of Koko’s murders as any man who feared becoming the next victim had to be. Michael was on his feet before he knew it, moving forward past the intervening tables to embrace him under a brightly glowing torch.

1

A little more than ten hours before the meeting of Dr. Michael Poole and Tim Underhill on the riverside terrace behind the Oriental Hotel, Tina Pumo awoke in a state of uncertainty and agitation. He had more to do in one day than anyone sane would ever attempt. There were meetings not only with Molly Witt and Lowery Hapgood, his architects, and David Dixon, his lawyer, with whom he hoped to iron out an ironclad way to get Vinh his naturalization papers, but immediately after lunch he and Dixon were to go to his bank to negotiate a loan to cover the rest of the construction costs. The inspector from the Health Department had told Pumo he intended to “reconnoiter ’round about sixteen-hundred hours” to make sure that the insect problem had finally been “squared away to base-line acceptability.” The inspector was a Midwestern Vietnam veteran who spoke in a mixture of military jargon, yuppie lingo, and obsolete slang that could sound alternately absurd or menacing. After these meetings, all of them either expensive, frustrating, or intimidating, he had to get down to his equipment supplier on the fringes of Chinatown and pick up replacements for what seemed dozens of pots, pans, and utensils which had managed to go astray during the reconstruction. Sometimes it seemed that only the biggest woks had stayed where they had been put.