Thai Horse

THE JUDAS FLOWER

In April the winds sweep down the mountainsides of northern Thailand, chasing away the last of the monsoon clouds and wafting across the fields of red, white and purple flowers. The flowers sway like rows of ballet dancers as the sun burns down on them and they burst into bloom and the mountainsides arid fields become a tapestry of color.

But like some species of butterflies that live only for a single day, the flowers die quickly, each leaving behind a pale green seed pod that looks like an onion on a stick. In the months before April the plants toil day and night to produce alkaloids, which are stored in these seed pods. When the pod is cut, the milky alkaloid oozes out and quickly dries and darkens.

When the petals fall, the hill people in their flat straw hats appear on the steep slopes where the flowers grow and move through the rows, slicing the sides of the pods and gathering the thick sap with iron spoons before it hardens.

General Dao, the phu yai ban of the Hsong hill tribe had watched the previous spring as his villagers tapped the pods. As village headman it was his custom to sit like a god on his black horse on the crest of the hill with the strap of his M-14 draped around his shoulders like a sling, his arms resting on the butt and barrel of his weapon, observing the harvest while his two shotgun guards sat nearby. The guards took turns scanning the sky and valley with powerful binoculars, watching for signs of federal troops or helicopters, while below, on the sides of the hill known as Powder Mountain, the field workers tapped the pods.

As phu yai ban, Dao was elected by his fellow villagers. Like his father, he settled disputes of every kind, listened to the problems of his villagers, and negotiated for the Hsong with the outside world. The Hsong were part of a tribal sect called the Phui Thong Luang, the Spirits of the Yellow Leaves, a small, elusive group whose isolation had enabled them to maintain customs and traditions that were centuries old.

Dao was a compact man, hardened, as were all the Hsong people, by the harsh life of the mountains. He was thirty-seven and looked fifty-five, although he was still handsome, with a face that was a bronze square, a wide mouth and a broad, flat nose. He preferred dark green military clothing to traditional garb, as did his men. His black hair was wrapped with a red bandanna. Occasionally he would take the binoculars and watch the women workers, who wore brightly colored blouses with striped yokes, colorful pants fitted tightly around the hips and draped at mid-calf — called pasin and resembling old- fashioned pedal pushers — and large, flamboyant turbans of gaily colored material woven with silver beads.

The sap they were gathering was opium gum.

The natural alkaloid was morphine.

And the pretty little purple, white and red flowers were Papaver somniferum, which proliferate like weeds in Southeast Asia. No innocent garden flowers, the somniferum poppy is a metaphor for the best and worst in man, a symbol of good and evil. It is both heaven and hell contained in a white pod that is not much bigger than a man’s thumb. Like the mythical song of the Sirens, the promise is alluring but the reality is deadly, for while opium begets painkilling morphine, it also begets heroin.

Dao did not know any of the statistics or demographics of drug use. He did not know where his packages were going, who would buy them, or who would eventually use the product of his crop. He had never heard of a spike or a jolt or a rush or a high or uppers, downers, hash, pot, boo, toot, coke, smack, crack, H, horse, lid, hit, popping, chipping, mainlining, tripping, acid or poppers. He did not know that his crop might kill some pitiful junkie half of a world away or that teenage gangsters might die in the street fighting over an ounce of the white powder that would eventually be refined from the sap of the little flowers. He had never seen a hypodermic needle. It was the cash crop of the village and had been for years, and to Dao and the rest of the Hsong tribe there was nothing wrong with selling it.

But the government had said it was wrong and had begun a program to coerce farmers into growing coffee, mushrooms and maize instead of poppies. There had been trouble in the hills. The Leums and the Lius and many other hill tribes had been attacked by the army and had their crop confiscated and burned, but the government had never approached Dao. His tribe was large and controlled a difficult, rugged section of the mountains. He was a fiery and independent leader as well as a dangerous adversary. Dao controlled only 250 hectares of poppy fields — about a hundred acres — hardly enough to start a war over. Besides that, the young general, as phuyai ban, was supposed to report to the government’s district director, but two years earlier he had expelled the nai amphoe from Hsong and the government had never replaced the man.

But the young general still followed the same precautions. When the sky had turned red and the river sparkled like gold, Dao rode down to a small hooch located at the center of the fields and went inside. The place smelled sweet like new-mown grass. The opium gum had been brought there and wrapped in one-and-a- half-kilogram packages called joi. There it would retain its potency indefinitely unless refined.

The packages of gum, which looked like dark brown cake icing, were stacked in saddlebags. A ten-kilo package of gum and another containing one kilo of the same substance lay on the wrapping table. Dao took out a knife and twisted the point into one of the packages, drawing back a small, sticky dab, which he rolled between his fingers until it was a small ball called a goli. He put it under his tongue, closed his eyes and sucked on it, rolling it around in his mouth. Then he smiled. Excellent.

That night the packages were loaded on mules, and before dawn, Dao and four of his most trusted men led the mules off through the forest toward the House of the Golden Lady. They rode for two hours through dense brush, staunch spears of bamboo as tall as pine trees, enormous teak trees choked with crawling vines. They rode along paths only the best-trained eyes could spot, paths that were crawling with deadly krites and patrolled by black panthers and tigers.

They stopped when they heard the familiar deep rumble through the towering overgrowth ahead, tethered their horses and walked the last mile as though mesmerized by the rumble, which finally crescendoed into a roar. When at last they broke out of the jungle, they were at the mouth of a deep, rocky gorge, veiled by sprays of mist that billowed out around them from the thundering waterfall called the Golden Lady at the far end of the vale. Struggling over slippery rocks at the edge of the river until the earth was trembling underfoot, they finally found the entrance to the cave known as the House of the Golden Lady.

Hsong leaders had been hiding their opium gum here for centuries. Now the place was better than ever, for it was not only suicidal to reach on foot but inaccessible to government choppers. They stacked the joi of opium gum deep in the cave, covered them with straw paper, and there they remained until the time to deal.

Now it was fall and the previous day the Chiu Chao boss had sent his messenger to the Hsong village to request a meeting. Dao had sent the Straw Sandal back to his boss with the kilo of gum as a gesture of goodwill, so they could check the quality.

Most of the hill tribes still sold opium gum in its raw stage, but the Hsong tribe had its own refinery, a crude but effective little factory in a room no larger than a bedroom. The Chiu Chaos preferred to refine their own heroin, but the Hsong had always produced the powder themselves. It was a matter of pride to Dao as well as of economics. It takes two thousand poppies to make a kilo of opium gum. A kilo of gum sold in the hills for seventy dollars, a kilo of China White sold for nine hundred dollars. To Dao the difference was worth the effort. It meant more rifles for the men, more pigs and buffalo, and perhaps even a new truck for the village, bolts of Thai silk for the women, and for himself, a new radio with shortwave. He had no idea that the same pound of heroin was worth half a million dollars in New York, or that it would be stepped up six or seven times after that, making the street value close to four million dollars.

That night the Hsong cranked up the little furnace. They mixed ten kilos of gum with water and cooked it in an enormous brass wok until it was a dark, thick mass that looked like heavy molasses. Then they poured it into an ancient wooden press and squeezed the water out. What was left was a kilo of morphine base granules. Mixed with water and acetic anhydride in a small still and dried under grow lamps and pressed again, it produced a brick of pure white powder, which they branded with a stamp: 999. The mark of Hsong and a guarantee that the one-kilo brick of China White was 99.9 percent pure heroin.

Just after sunrise, the chopper took off from Chang Mai and headed for the village of the Hsong, seventy miles away. The day before, Tollie Fong had sent his Straw Sandal to General Dao to arrange the meeting. The ritual of dealing was a formality, but one they had performed at villages like this all over northern Thailand during the past few months. The emerald-green mountains slipped below them and grew more rugged and less penetrable. Mountain roads twisted up the sides of the lush peaks and ended suddenly at landslides or were simply devoured by the foliage. From the air it was easy to see why the army was frustrated in its attempts to discourage or destroy the poppy crop here.

Fong sat in the copilot’s seat of the chopper with his three aides in the seats behind him — the White Fan, who was in charge of rituals and for this trip would also serve as Fong’s secretary and financial adviser, and two gunmen, Billy Kot and Soon. The messenger had completed his duties and returned to Bangkok.

The White Fan, an ancient seer pushing eighty with wispy white hair and the remnants of a white goatee, wore the traditional silk cheongsam of the Chinese and had devoted his life to tradition and ritual. He hated to fly, particularly in this mixing bowl of an airplane, but his inscrutable face gave no hint of his discomfort. He sat with his eyes closed and his small black bag of tricks between his feet. Soon, a reliable executioner, dozed beside him, unconcerned by the flying.

Economics, as well as killing, was Tollie Fong’s business. Getting the smack from the hills to the marketplace, whether it was Singapore or Marseilles, New York or Grand Rapids, was also his business. Fong had first been introduced to the trade while he was still in his early teens by his father, who had gone to college in the United States and understood Americans. Fong remembered that night well.

1962. The eve of the Chinese New Year, the Year of the Tiger.

Outside their window, there were dancers and dragons in the street. Firecrackers rattled in the gutters and the stars over Hong Kong were concealed behind a glittering wall of skyrockets.

Young Fong, not yet fourteen, wanted to be out there with the rest of his friends, but his father was insistent. He had called his bing yahn, his soldiers, to a meeting and the White Palm executioner leaned toward his five officers and placed his hand on his son’s knee. ‘I have spent several hours with the san wong and it is important that you understand our new plans.

‘First, you must understand about Americans. They are very self-indulgent. They are eager to try new things. They are very sociable and they go to great lengths to impress their friends. They tend to do things in great masses. They live on borrowed money and their goals in life are security — and pleasure.

‘Now they are becoming involved in a great turmoil over the fighting in Vietnam. There is revolutionary protest by the young people. And’ — his eyes lit up — ‘they have discovered drugs. Marijuana, peyote, the chemical called acid. It is just beginning. The san wong believes these young people are ripe for other drugs.

‘Until now, the customers for powder have been mostly beggars, people of the streets, thieves and thugs. There is some trade with the very wealthy, but very few users in between. The Sicilians control the trade.

‘So we have three plans. First, it is time to move on the Sicilians. This will not be done easily, but we may be able to supply them and use their people for our own distribution.’

‘Can we trust them?’ one of the bing yahn asked.

‘Never! Always be wary of them. When it is convenient, we will make our war and destroy them, but that is a long time away. For now, we must help create the demand and make the deals, so we need the Sicilians. Second, the American soldiers in Vietnam and Thailand are at our very door and the war is growing. There will be many more soldiers coming. This war will last a long time, as it did with the French. We will sell them powder at cost plus ten percent.’

‘At cost?’ one of the bing yahn said with surprise.

‘Plus ten percent, to create the need,’ Fong corrected. ‘And they will take this need back to the States with them and pass the need on to their friends and they will all grow old with the demon. These will be our customers. They will be accustomed to pure China White and will not be satisfied with the Turkish and Mexican brown shit the Sicilian sell. Finally, we must encourage the hill people to grow more poppies, for the demand will be greater than any of us realize. All other business in which the White Palms are involved must come second to this.’

That was the night he had assigned his five captains, who called themselves the Dragon’s Breath, to open the markets in Saigon and keep them supplied.

‘We must plan this move most carefully and then wait,’ he said, ‘for it will be two or three years before we make our move, but it is a good plan and it will work.’

When his captains had left, the older Fong turned to his son. ‘You must understand the economics of this business,’ he said softly but firmly. ‘There are millions, perhaps billions, of dollars at stake, Right now your destiny is to follow me as Red Pole of the White Palm Chiu Chao. But this business will open things up for you. The more you know, the more important you will become. Who knows how far you can go. . .

The Red Pole had prepared his son well. Tollie Fong’s mentor was Joe Lung, who would later be the only member of the Dragon’ Breath to survive Hatcher’s brutal massacre on the Mekong. Lung guided a vigorous training program. A year with the Ninja in Tokyo, six months with the SAVAK in Iran, another six months with thuggee Sikhs in Bombay. And another year spent with a master of tai chi and karate on Okinawa.

But always there was the business of the trade to learn, and Fong learned it from the experts by interning in the business offices of the Chiu Chaos in Hong Kong, Bangkok, Singapore and Seattle. Before he was twenty he was in New York learning the business of the street and had already killed three times , for his main role in the hierarchy of the White Palm was still to take his father’s place as the Red Pole executioner.

As the new san wong of the White Palms, Fong would have made his father proud, for he had become an expert at the economics of the trade. Now the profits were so enormous that police could be bought and whole nations could be corrupted. Dope smuggling had become the most profitable business in the world, and a fifth of all the heroin sold in the United States came from the Golden Triangle in northern Thailand. And despite his ch’u-tiao, his blood oath to kill Hatcher — the man who had executed his father and now Joe Lung — the business of powder had to come first, for he had stretched his authority by setting up deals with the most productive hill tribes in the Golden Triangle.

Each year he had spread his empire farther, moving more deeply into the Triangle, taking dangerous risks with the suspicious and volatile mountain bandits. Every time the government burned out a field or coerced a hill tribe into planting coffee or mushrooms, Fong went deeper and found new tribes willing to cultivate the lucrative poppy.

His gamble had paid off handsomely. Fong now controlled the flow of Thai heroin for all the Chiu Chao families, and that was almost 5 percent of all the heroin that came out of Thailand. And in secret conclave, the Chiu Chaos were at that very moment, confirming him as san wong, master of all the families.

Fong needed someone to take his place as enforcer, someone he could trust. He decided that someone would be Billy Kot.

Handpicked from among the many assassins who served the White Palms, Kot was bright, clever, awesomely ruthless and, in Fong’s eyes, the most efficient killer in the world, next to Tollie Fong himself. Kot was only twenty-six, but he was a college graduate, and now it was time to move him up.

Leaning over the back of the seat, Fong began a dialogue with Billy Kot, who leaned forward with his ear close to Fong’s mouth.

‘You must learn this part of the business because you are going to be the next Red Pole.’

Kot reared back in surprise, for the news was totally unexpected.

‘It is more than just the business of the Red Pole,’ said Fong. ‘You must not only enforce the rules of the Society, you must also control negotiations up here as well.’

‘I understand,’ Billy Kot said, trying to control his excitement at the news. ‘I promise to be worthy of your trust.’

‘You must learn the ways of each of the hill leaders. To us they are like arteries to the heart. They must learn to trust you. And they are all different.’

‘What of General Dao?’

‘General Dao has been head of the Hsong tribe for fourteen years, since he was twenty-two,’ Fong began. ‘For three hundred miles in every direction, the tribes fear the Hsong.’

‘Is he a warlord?’

‘He does not start things, but be does not bow down either. They have not waged war on anyone for at least ten years.’

‘So he is a tough guy,’ Billy Kot said.

‘Very. The army is afraid of him. Two years ago he threw out the nai amphoe, and Bangkok never even replaced the man. He is not like some of the others, always crying about the federals burning their fields, trying to gouge a few extra dollars for every joi.’

‘Is he friendly?’ Kot asked.

‘He smiles,’ Fong answered with a shrug, ‘but he is cautious. The secret is to treat him with respect, never threaten him. An insult or threat, even an unwitting one, could be mistaken as an act of war. His bing yahn would drop us all on the spot. At the very least he would end our arrangement. So be careful.’

‘I will just listen this time.’

‘No, do what your spirit says. If you make a slip, the White Fan will warn you. He will stand or sit between us and Dao and to the side, partly facing us. If he shakes his head, stop talking, and he will handle the problem.’

‘How much gum does the Hsong produce?’

‘He is not a big producer, but the powder is as pure as it gets and he does it all, including the refining. Each year he has increased his production. I don’t know what the yield will be this year.’

Below them they saw a village, not large, perhaps a hundred hooches, forming neat patterns on a high, lush mesa. Beyond it was Powder Mountain, its poppy fields denuded by the harvest. The pilot jockeyed the chopper around and put it down beside a dirt road at the foot of the mountain.

‘This is the main village,’ Fong said as they crawled out of the plane. ‘There are three or four smaller ones around. And the Hsong bing yahn live in the jungle. They are everywhere, do not underestimate them.’

‘How many soldiers?’ asked Billy Kot.

‘I have no idea,’ Fong answered. ‘Three hundred maybe.’

‘Weapons?’

‘Everything. Subguns, M—14s, grenade launchers, a lot of small stuff. Very well armed.’

A battered antique of an army truck was waiting for them. They crawled in the back and sat facing each other as it rattled and rocked up the barely passable road to the village, thirty-five hundred feet above the valley floor.

‘He can use a new truck or two,’ said Fong, nodding to the White Fan. The old man made a mental note of it. He never wrote anything down.

Kot watched as the truck climbed the dusty road. He spotted a momentary flash of sun on steel in a tree, saw movement in another.

‘His bing yahn are everywhere,’ he said.

‘Hai. Real monkeys,’ Fong answered with a nod.

When they reached the crest of the hill, the truck stopped in front of a small hooch, a box of a house with one door and one window, which sat apart from the rest of the village. An armed guard stood at the side of the door.

‘Just watch how it is done,’ Fong said.

The formalities dated back to the time of the Opium Wars in China, almost a hundred and fifty years ago. Fong posted Soon on the opposite side of the door and entered the hooch with the Fan and Billy Kot.

It was a small room with four mats on the floor in the center, two facing each other, two stretched between them, forming a square in the middle of the room. Dao stood in front of one of the mats with two of his troopers posted in each corner of the room behind him. Beside Dao stood the fai thaan, a man whose face was etched with the crevices of time and whose teeth were stained dark brown from chewing betel nuts. The fai thaan was the cook and chief refiner of the Hsong tribe. At his feet was a small package wrapped in flat green leaves.

Fong walked casually to the center of the room and, facing Dao, pressed the palms of his hands together and bowed in a wai to show his respect for the Hsong leader and the brewer of magic powder. Dao answered the wai and then the Fan took his place facing the old cook and put his black bag at his feet. Kot stood behind Fong.

‘I would like to introduce my bing yahn, Billy Kot, to the general,’ Fong said. ‘He will soon take my place as White Palm Red Pole.’

A look of concern crossed Dao’s face. ‘Is something wrong?’ he asked.

‘No, no,’ Fong answered hurriedly. ‘I am to become san wong of the Chiu Chaos. From this day on, Billy Kot will be my eyes and ears and voice. He will speak for me and he will negotiate fairly with all the tribes that supply us with powder.’

Dao looked at Kot for several seconds, studying the young man’s smooth features. He had eyes like his boss’s, hard and glazed with abstract menace.

‘So he is learning?’ said Dao.

‘Hai,’ Fong answered.

The general appraised Kot once more and nodded curtly with a smile.

‘Ho,’ Dao answered, slapping his right fist into the palm of his left hand, a sign of acceptance. They did not shake hands, because to touch another in Thailand is considered an insult. He sat cross-legged on the mat in front of him. Fong did the same, followed by the Fan, the new Red Pole, and the fai thaan. It was only after they were seated that Dao acknowledged the Fan.

‘Are you well, Phat Lom?’ he asked. The old man nodded and smiled faintly as he opened his bag and took out an abacus. He placed it in front of him.

‘Hai, hai,’ Dao said, nodding briskly. Then he slapped his hands together and smiled broadly. ‘So, now it is time to deal,’ he said, arid nodded to the fai thaan, who carefully unfolded the leaves from the package. The white brick branded ‘999’ gleamed on the mat before them. He picked up the snow-white square with both hands and offered it to the White Fan, who took it, held it in one hand, and weighed it by feel, first holding it on its side in the palm of his hand, then turning it on end. He nodded once, curtly, indicating the weight was proper. He stood and walked to the window and held the brick in the sunlight and studied it for several minutes, blowing gently on the surface. He scraped up a fingernail full and, holding it to a nostril, slowly inhaled it. He waited for another minute or two for it to take effect, then he scraped up another fingernail full and put it in his mouth and tasted it. Finally he returned and placed the brick in front of General Dao.

He held up three fingers to Fong.

Khuna-phaap di thi soot. First quality.

‘Excellent as always,’ said Fong. ‘How much did you get this year?’

‘Ninety hundred and thirty-five joi,’ Dao answered, obviously proud of the yield. Fong, too, was delighted. Almost fifteen hundred kilos of gum, a hundred fifty kilos of heroin.

‘That is fifty kilos more than last year,’ he said.

‘A very good year,’ answered the general.

On the previous buy, Fong had paid nine hundred dollars per kilo. He looked over at the Fan, whose fingers were shooting the small colored balls of the abacus back and forth. The Fan held up two fingers, then three, then one, then a fist. It was a simple code, which only Fong and the Fan understood.

Although Kot did not understand the code, he made some quick calculations in his head. Not bad, he thought. A mere $135,000 for 15 keys of pure smack.

Fong turned to him and asked him what he thought the price should be. It was an unexpected test. Actually the price was immaterial. Considering the Chiu Chao profit margin, they could easily afford to pay Dao four or five times the normal price and hardly feel it. But this was business, and a dollar was a dollar.

Kot tried to think like the Red Pole. He had to weigh two things: first, whether to raise the price at all and, second, if so, how much to raise it without spoiling the general. Upping the price fifty dollars a joi would not hurt them that much. It would be significant enough to impress the hill chief and still not appear overly generous.

‘Fifty more a joi,’ Kot answered.

Kot knew from the slight twinkle in Fong’s eye it was a good answer. Fong turned back to the general. ‘My bid would have been twenty-five,’ he said with a smile. ‘The new Red Pole is more generous than I.’

General Dao was obviously pleased. The Fan showed no expression. His fingers were busy working the colored marbles on the abacus. He held up another combination of fingers.

The entire package would cost $142,500, or 2,850,000 bahts.

‘How does two million eight sound?’ Fong asked. ‘I am most pleased,’ Dao said, slapping his fist into his palm. The deal was concluded. Fong reached into the black bag and took out several packets of purple baht notes and stacked them neatly in front of Dao. When he had stacked the entire two million plus, he did a wai.

‘The entire amount as agreed. When can Mr Kot expect delivery?’

‘Will three days be satisfactory, starting in the morning?’ Dao asked.

‘Excellent.’ And he, too, smacked his fist in his palm. ‘And if it will not offend the general, I would like to make the Hsong a gift of two new trucks, to celebrate the new Red Pole.’

Dao was both surprised and pleased. Two new trucks in the bargain! ‘You are very generous, my friend,’ he said. ‘The Hsong will be most happy to work with Mr Kot.’

‘Mai,’ Fong said with a nod and rose. They left the hooch and Soon joined them as they walked back to the truck.

Fong was pleased with his choice of Billy Kot and he slapped his new Red Pole on the arm.

‘You did very well in there,’ he said reassuringly. ‘I do not think you will have any problems.’

‘Mm goi,’ Billy Kot said with a wai.

‘One hundred and fifty kilos of pure for a hundred forty thousand dollars and two trucks,’ Fong said. ‘What does that come to, White Fan?’

The Fan had already figured up the profit, based on the morning street price in Manhattan. He flashed his fingers in the code. ‘Three million, seven hundred thousand dollars,’ Fong said, beaming. ‘Fair work for one day.’

Wherever there were human beings, there were dope traders ready to prey on them. In the Hotel Vitosha in Sofia or L’Hotel Pique in Marseilles or the Garden Hotel in Amsterdam, Syrians, Turks and Lebanese met with Chinese, Sicilian and American gangsters to trade in heroin, cocaine and marijuana. They were the power bosses of the dope trade. They had developed the shipping routes from the Orient to Amsterdam, London and Rome, and from there to major ports in North America, where one thousand kilos — 2,200 pounds — of heroin went for a billion dollars and change before it was even cut for the Street.

Their partners were the Sicilians, for in the years since the end of the Vietnamese war they had made their agreements with the American mobsters and spread their deadly powder to most of the major cities in the United States.

The drug lords had turned smuggling into a bizarre art, a deadly game of hide-and-seek between ‘mules,’ the couriers who did the actual heroin smuggling, and drug and customs agents. The lethal powder was smuggled in hollow gemstones, icons and statues. In Tampax and condoms. In dolls, books, diplomatic pouches, and major shipments of coffee, soybeans and bamboo. It was dissolved in water and then suitcases, paintings, rugs and clothing were soaked in it and carried or shipped into the United States. Smugglers buried it in the desert until they made their deals, then sent it across borders by feeding it to their camels, addicting them, and training them to follow specific routes in order to get more.

For every drug bust there was a new scheme. For every pound that was confiscated, ten pounds got through.

In Bangkok and Hong Kong, Tollie Fong and his White Palms had developed the most obscene and terrifying smuggling techniques of all. Now it was time to make a major drug move on the United States. They had almost three tons of 99.9 percent pure China White secreted in Bangkok ready for a mass shipment to America.

The prediction made by Tollie Fong’s father twenty- three years earlier was finally coming true. The years had been good to them. And Fong had the perfect plan. It had been approved by the old san wong.

Tollie Fong was positioned to make war on the sworn enemy of the Chiu Chaos, La Cosa Nostra — the Mafia.

A SUGGESTION

Earp came out of Sweets Wilkie’s office and went up the steps and through the glass beads into the Longhorn Saloon’s ‘Hole in the Wall.’ The Honorable was seated in his stuffed chair, his imposing presence making it seem like a throne. He was reading as usual. The fringed lamp was the only light on in the large alcove. There was no one else in the room, and the lights over both the poker and pool tables had been turned off. Earp pulled up a chair and sat down beside him.

‘Little late for you, isn’t it?’ he said.

‘I’m engrossed,’ the Honorable said, without looking up.

‘My man in Hong Kong just called.’

‘Urn-hum,’ the Honorable said, still reading his book.

‘A man named Hatcher is coming in on the morning plane. Hatcher is an assassin. He works for Sloan.’

‘Perhaps a coincidence?’

‘Not a chance. Sloan comes in. Now Hatcher follows him. No, he isn’t coming for the fucking waters.’

‘And this Hatcher is dangerous?’

‘He’s wasted half of Hong Kong in the last forty-eight hours. The guy’s a walking plague.’

‘Would you like a suggestion?’

‘Don’t I always?’

The Honorable dipped his finger in wine, turned the page of his book and licked his finger. ‘Arrange for him to come here,’ he said. ‘Check him out up close and on friendly territory.’

‘That’s a little dangerous, isn’t it?’ Earp said. ‘Bringing him right into the living room?’

‘If he’s as dangerous as you say and he’s here to assassinate Thai Horse, he’s also very smart. He’ll wind up here sooner or later anyway.’

The Honorable looked up and what might have passed for a smile crossed his lips.

‘As the Thais say, “It is easier to kill a friendly tiger than a mad dog.”

KRUNG THEP

Hatcher stirred as the 747 banked sharply and swept over Bangkok on its approach to the city and the flight attendant announced their approach to Don Muang airport. Still half asleep, Hatcher remembered Bangkok as a city of gold and silver temples, of spires and domes, and delicate, beautiful women, as fragile as china, swathed in radiant silk.

He pulled back the curtain arid it was like looking down on a painting. Even in the gray predawn light with the sun a shimmering promise on the horizon, Bangkok was like a gleaming jewel in the palm of Buddha’s hand, and the Chao Phraya River was an endless life line stretching from little finger to thumb. Hundreds of golden domes and spires reached through the morning mist like flowers seeking the sun. It was these holy places and the canals which coursed through the city that defined Bangkok’s character and personality. Centuries ago there were no roads in Bangkok; its streets were dozens of canals called klongs that wound through it, their banks draped with flowers arid trees. Progress had changed that. A few major water arteries still served the city; the rest had been filled in to become boulevards and lanes. But the flowers remained and the streets were demarcated as much by orchids, bougainvillea and palm trees as they were by gutters and sidewalks. Through the mists of morning, Hatcher occasionally caught a glimpse of the canals jammed with slender, long-tailed hang yao laden with fresh fruit, flowers and wares as the river people made their way to the floating markets on the banks of the main river.

As the plane began its descent the sun rose over the horizon, and the morning mist, set ablaze by the fires of dawn, turned to steam, vanished, and revealed in stunning glory a sparkling city of gold.

This was a land so alien to Westerners that it was like flying into another planet. The tourists ‘oohed’ and ‘aahed’ at the sight. Everything below them seemed clean and fertile and seductive. And yet he knew that beneath the beauty there was also the agony of great poverty, that children bathed in their own refuse and were sold on the streets, that heroin was part of the rate of exchange, that there were sixty or seventy homicides a month, that the cold steel and mirrored glass towers of the Westerners were slowly corrupting Bangkok’s ancient and exquisite beauty, and that automobiles were polluting the city’s air. Perhaps, he thought, the Thais would tire of the foreigners and throw them out, as their ancestors had done two hundred years before when the farang had tried to replace the gentle compassion of Buddha with the rigid, intractable arrogance of Christianity.

To survive as a farang in Bangkok, Westerners had to accept its philosophy even if they did not understand it. Here Buddha was the benevolent saint. Rich Thais bought buttons of gold leaf and pressed them on temples and icons. The poor covered statues with broken teacups. Everyone paid tribute and came to pray, to ask for favors from Buddha, for the Thais thought nothing of asking for a big fish on their line or a winning lottery ticket or a beautiful woman for the night or a handsome man to curl up with when the sun vanished. The subtleties were lost to those from the West whose God, modeled by pompous, arrogant, self-appointed intermediaries, was an angry God, less compassionate, less forgiving, and devoid of any sense of humor. To the Thais, who believed the smile was born in their country, Buddha was a kind and generous God, capable of impish tricks, laughter and infinite joy, a God who asked nothing, demanded nothing, and smiled on those who laid tribute at his feet.

Perhaps that is why, to the Thai, arguing was a sin, raising one’s voice was an insult, and anger was intolerable. One had to love a people whose philosophy of life was summed up by their reaction to almost everything: Mai pen rai— ‘Never mind.’ While Hatcher did not begin to understand the intricacies of Hinayana Buddhism, one thing he did understand was that Buddhists believed that our temporary existence on earth was uncertain at best; that concern was folly and anger was futile; that confrontation was an embarrassment, anxiety was a sin, and life was a process of forgiving. It was a philosophy be had tried to embrace, but there were psychological responses so ingrained in Westerners that it was difficult for a farang to ignore them.

And while Hatcher had understood and tried to practice the Thai philosophy in the past, this time it was not working for him. He was overwhelmed with anxiety, and what he feared most was what he would learn about Cody in Bangkok. The closer the plane got to the airport, the more his anxiety grew. Even identifying his former friend would be a major problem. Would he still recognize Cody? It had been almost twenty years since he had last seen his friend. And he had probably changed his name.

But Hatcher’s greatest fear concerned Cody himself. What was he doing here, and why had he kept his identity a secret all these years? Was he a collaborator? A junkie? A drug smuggler? If he was smuggling drugs, was he tied in with Tollie Fong and the Chiu Chao triads? Or was there some even darker secret that Hatcher could not imagine?

Was Cody actually dead? Even if he had escaped the plane crash fifteen years ago, Cody could have died in the prison camp or in any of a dozen other ways. Fifteen years was a long time.

Hatcher also remembered that there was no such thing as a fact in Thailand. Truth was a crucible for what was real and what was imagined, what was veritable and what was spiritual. At best, a fact in Bangkok was an abstraction of reality, a perception of the individual. Truth was often an illusion and things were never what they appeared to be.

Yet try as he might, Hatcher could not come up with a single positive reason for Cody to remain in hiding.

Finally there was the most gnawing question of all: if Cody was involved in some dark scheme, what would he, Hatcher, do about it? Ignore it and go home? Try to set up the meet with his father anyway? Perhaps Cohen’s advice was the best advice of all — turn his back on the whole thing and go home.

That was not a viable option for Hatcher.

He had an obligation to Buffalo Bill Cody. He had made a promise and he meant to keep it.

Anyway, he was hooked, he had to play the hand out, no matter what the outcome.

He cleared customs without incident and found a taxi. The trip to town was a surreal fantasy, a wondrous journey through a dazzling array of cultures, sounds and sights that might have hypnotized Sinbad. The city’s beauty had always fascinated Hatcher, and now, coming back after five years, he was stunned again by its veiled mysteries and hidden promises.

The twenty-mile trip to town passed quickly, and the lush green fields of the countryside surrendered abruptly to the city as they passed the spectacular Chitralada Palace, the residence of King Bhumibol, the benevolent and well-loved ruler, whose great-great-grandfather, Rama IV, better known as King Mongkut, brought the English schoolteacher Anna Leonowens to Siam in the 1860s to enlighten his children. Although her autobiography, The King and I, and the play and movie based on it, had brought fame to Thailand, they were banned as inaccurate.

The taxi passed the Royal Turf Club racetrack, past fields where daily kite fights were a prelude to dusk and over Phadung Klong, the main canal of the city. In two hours the boulevard would be gutter-to-gutter cars, sputtering motorized pedicabs called samlors, and tuk-tuks, the strange three-wheel two-seaters that weave in and out of the traffic and drive everyone mad and whose name describes the sound of their small motors.

But in the early light of day, the city was as it might have been a century before. They drove down an almost deserted Bamrung Muang Road, where orchids, jasmine and roses cascaded over fences, past estates where young women in embroidered costumes practiced ceremonial dances and flirted with the long shadows of daylight on lawns of emerald velvet. The cool morning breeze sifted through the open windows of the taxi, carrying with it the constant tinkle of temple bells from the wats, the Buddhist temples that were everywhere, their rooftops a delicate mosaic of colored spirals and gold-tiled domes, their eaves adorned with curling yellow finials called chofas.

A Thai businesswoman in western dress, her Mercedes parked by the curb, placed a wreath of jasmine on a miniature but elaborate spirit house and clasped her hands in a wai, possibly asking the spirits for a successful day. The tiny temples were everywhere, looking like cluttered, gloriously painted dollhouses mounted on posts. They were always decked with offerings: hand-painted vases filled with roses, smoking joss sticks, necklaces of orchids, notes to the spirits, brightly dyed strips of silk, even food. Seeing the little temples, Hatcher remembered a mercenary named sickle Knowles, who always offered a bullet to the spirits before a job.

A half-dozen monks in saffron robes rushed out of a nearby wat with their brass alms bowls, seeking their first meal of the day. Two blocks away a country woman, her head wrapped in a brightly jeweled turban and her lips permanently stained brown by the betel nuts she chewed, sat in the middle of the sidewalk stringing jasmine blossoms. And a block farther, a greengrocer was busy arranging his stall with a dazzling array of pineapples, bananas, mangoes and durians, the large, spiky fruit most foreigners hated.

They passed the towering swing of Phatpu, where athletes once swung in giant arcs for the pleasure of the King until the practice was banned as too dangerous, and there the flower-lined streets gave way to the crowded old town. The incongruities continued: a noble but derelict Victorian palace with gingerbread turrets stood behind a cinema; an enormous three-story-high Buddha rested between two glass and concrete office buildings; a group of street urchins dashed along the curb with the grace of ballet dancers, playing soccer with a rattan ball, rousting a flock of migratory swallows that seemed to flutter constantly in search of roosting places among the statues and temples. And there were touches of Thai whimsy: a barbershop called the Darling, a restaurant called the Puberty, a hotel that rented rooms by the hour called Bungalow Home Fun.

The street ended abruptly at Yawaraj Road, which marked the beginning of Yawaraj, or Chinese Town. As the traffic increased khaki-clad traffic cops in gleaming white pith helmets began to appear, and the driver relied more on his horn than on his driving skills to make his way through the choked alleys. Streets funneled, became narrow and claustrophobic, wound uncertainly past ancient and ramshackle wooden buildings wedged against one another. Occasionally an elegant Chinese pagoda roof topped the otherwise undistinctive rows of shops that offered rare foods, aphrodisiacs, Cantonese vitamins and magic herbs. The streets became more constricted, curving through the Nakorn Kasem, the Chinese market known as Thieves’ Market, a misnomer, since most of the shops sold such unromantic articles as toilets, water pumps and light fixtures. The real lure of Yawaraj was the dusty, dimly lit antique shops. Shopkeepers were already busy hauling their clutter of treasures outside, where they spilled over the sidewalks: porcelains, teak furniture inlaid with mother-of-pearl, rosewood screens, brass and copper lamps.

The driver turned into New Road and headed down the last few blocks to the river at the far edge of Yawaraj and pulled up in front of the Muang House, a middle- class hotel, which Hatcher preferred over the luxury hotels of Bangkok. It was air-conditioned, so mosquitoes would not be a problem. The taxi then went down past the produce market to the Oriental.

The restaurant was outside at the back of the hotel on a flower-filled terrace above the broad, sweeping Chao Phraya River. Below it, long bats puttered through the morning mist on the way to the floating market while on the far side the spires of a dozen wats pierced the low-lying veil. It was not yet 7 A.M. The restaurant was deserted except for Sloan, who stood at the railing sipping coffee and staring down at the river. The early morning breeze flapped the jacket of his white raw-silk suit. With his pale blue shirt, he might easily have been mistaken for a salesman or a business executive. He finally took a table near the railing, and with his Ben Franklin glasses perched halfway down his nose, he opened the Bangkok Post, one of the country’s three English language newspapers, folding it lengthwise the way subway riders do in New York.

There was another reason for Hatcher’s gnawing anxiety in coming to Bangkok. Harry Sloan. Expediency was Harry’s middle name.

Before the mission ended, Hatcher feared, he might have to stand between Murphy Cody and Harry Sloan.

How much should I tell him? Hatcher wondered. Does he need to know anything?

‘Sawat-dii,’ the head waiter said with a bow. ‘Breakfast, please?’

Hatcher pointed toward Sloan and followed the ornately dressed young man to the table. Sloan looked up over his glasses and then down at his watch.

‘Right on time,’ he said. ‘Punctuality, the mark of a dependable man.’

Hatcher ordered fresh orange juice, coffee and an English muffin. When the waiter left the table, he took off his glasses and laid them carefully on a corner of the table.

There was no smile on Sloan’s face, although his voice was as soft as usual. ‘You’ve been having yourself quite a time over in the colony,’ he said.

‘What do you mean?’

Sloan smiled condescendingly. ‘Just so you understand, I’ve got a fire under my ass in Madrango. I don’t need a shoot-out on Victoria Peak, cops getting blown up, a Goddamn tong war between Cohen and Tollie Fong, a shoot-out upriver with half the Ts’e K’am Men Ti getting knocked off. What I’m saying, all of a sudden the priorities have shifted. Madrango is what’s important right now.’

‘You’re a little confused, Harry,’ Hatcher’s wrecked voice answered just as softly. ‘I didn’t draw a line in the ground and dare them to step over it. They were trying to kill me. What was I supposed to do, play sitting duck?’

‘Nobody expects that.’

‘Then let me do my job.’

‘You know how important it is to keep the brigade quiet, particularly now. There’s too much at stake. Here, in Central America, in the Middle East. Hell, I’ve got cards all over the table.’

Hatcher stared across the table at Sloan. He shook out his napkin and dropped it on his lap as the waiter brought his coffee.

‘You knew the risk when you brought me into this,’ Hatcher said, doctoring his coffee with generous amounts of cream and sugar. ‘And we both knew I was in trouble the minute that son of a bitch Varney showed up at your door. As you always say, if one person knows, everybody knows. Of course, it didn’t help that the bastard was on Fong’s payroll.’

‘The late bastard, I hear.’ The smile returned, the slick tone of voice was back. ‘Just remember, in the future these things can be negotiated.’

‘There wasn’t time for that. They didn’t ring Cohen’s doorbell and suggest a little pow-wow first —, Sloan’s words suddenly sank in and Batcher stopped for a moment, staring at him. ‘What do you mean, they can be negotiated. You can’t negotiate anything with the Chiu Chaos.’

Sloan leaned across the table. ‘I can handle it,’ he said nonchalantly.

‘How?’

‘We do business with these countries. When we need to put the squeeze on assholes like Fong, there are ways of doing it.’

‘Harry, nobody puts the squeeze on assholes like Fong.’

The waiter came with their breakfast. Sloan had ordered eggs, bacon, toast, fruit. Other guests began drifting into the restaurant.

‘What the hell happened upriver?’ Sloan asked as he salt-and-peppered his eggs.

‘I was looking for information, ‘ Hatcher said.

‘I hope what you got was worth the body count.’

‘When did you start worrying about body counts?’ Hatcher said sarcastically.

Sloan leaned across the table. ‘Did you find out anything or not?’ he said.

‘I got some leads.’

‘That’s it? All I get out of this breakfast is that you got some leads.’

‘We’ll talk about it if they pan out.’

Sloan leaned back and sighed. He looked back over the river, arranging his thoughts.

Hatcher said very matter-of-factly, ‘Harry, I came over here to find Murphy Cody and that’s what I’m going to do. And I’m going to do it my way, which doesn’t include giving you progress reports every thirty seconds. I said I’d be alive for breakfast today, and here I am. What the hell do you care whether I get into it with the Ts’e K’am or Fong or anybody else? That’s my problem. I don’t even work for the brigade anymore, I’m just a private citizen looking for an old pal.’

‘I admire your talent at oversimplification,’ Sloan said and then chuckled. ‘Well, I’ve got some bad news for you, and some worse news for you after that. Which would you like first?’

Hatcher sighed. ‘Why do you smile when you say that?’ he asked.

‘I can be just as perverse as you,’ he said. ‘The worse news is that they found Cody’s dog tags on the site of the crash.’

Hatcher scowled at him, letting the information sink

‘When did you hear that?’

‘Last night. They turned up when the site was checked back in ‘76. It wasn’t in the report because he was already declared dead and the government file was closed when they were found.’

‘How did you find out?’

‘You know Flitcraft, he doesn’t miss a base. He sent a routine inquiry to the POW commission and the insurance company after we got Windy’s report. The information on the dog tags was buried in an insurance wrap-up but was never added to the government file. They couldn’t have cared less by then.’

Hatcher thought a moment. Actually it was good news to him. It resolved a problem he had in dealing with Cody’s identity in the prison camp. ‘That could explain why the Vietcong didn’t exploit him.’

‘I don’t get you,’ Sloan said.

‘Up until now it really bugged me,’ Hatcher said. ‘It didn’t make sense. If Charlie had the son of the commanding general, they were in a good position to do some hard trading, but they never did. Now we know why. He dumped them, Harry, so they wouldn’t know who he was.’

Sloan’s eyebrows rose. It was obvious that had not occurred to him. ‘You have a real knack for making things work for you,’ he said.

‘I also pinpointed that floating camp called the

Huie-kui. It was located on the Laotian side of the

Annimitique Mountains around a town called Muang.

It was a transition camp for Vietnamese quislings—’

‘Well, shit,’ Sloan snorted in disgust.

‘Let me finish!’ Hatcher whispered. ‘There were also eight or ten American POWs in this camp, a kind of permanent slave labor. I’ve got an eyewitness who thinks he saw Cody up there.’

‘Thinks?’

‘We’re talking ten, eleven years ago.’

Sloan scratched his chin with the back of one hand.

‘What happened to this camp after the war?’ he asked.

Hatcher shook his head. ‘I don’t know. But I do know the commandant was so corrupt he couldn’t go back to Hanoi. He turned rabbit and ran.’

‘So it’s conceivable that if Cody was in the camp, he could have run, too,’ Sloan said.

Hatcher nodded. ‘You got it.’

‘Where did you hear this?’

‘Chin Chin land, from a trader they call the Dutchman. That’s why I went up there. It didn’t have anything to do with Ts’e K’am.’

Sloan’s ego could be stroked. He stared across the table at Hatcher for a long time before he said, ‘It’s still all maybe and could be.’

‘Yes.’

‘So we still don’t have anything positive but Wol Pot.’

‘Right again,’ Hatcher said.

‘This is MIA shit, Hatch,’ Sloan said. ‘I’ll tell you what I don’t think — I don’t think there’re twenty-four hundred missing Americans doing time in Hanoi, or up there teaching the Vietnamese how to play Monopoly or any other damn thing. Maybe a handful wandering around Laos or North Vietnam. Maybe a few turncoats. The rest of them were probably tortured to death or shot or died of malnutrition or disease. Those are the ones who weren’t killed on the spot. Hell, a lot of good people got wasted in Nam, Hatch. Why torture the ones back home with hope. Besides, back in the real world you can get poisoned by a pill from the drugstore, get run down by some drunk on the highway. There’re worse ways to die than serving your country.’

‘Why didn’t you mention that back in Georgia when you were conning me into this trip?’

‘I never said he was alive.’

‘You implied it enough to get me over here.’

‘Well, I’ll say one thing, your attitude is a hell of a lot more positive than it was in Georgia — or even Hong Kong.’

‘Let’s just say we’ve elevated a wild-goose story to a premise.’

‘That’s bullshit. I know you. I can tell when that nose of yours starts working. You’re on to something.’

‘That’s accurate,’ Hatcher said with a nod.

‘You think Cody’s alive?’

‘Let’s just say I think it more than I did in Hong Kong.’

‘Why?’

‘Little things. Intuition.’

‘But nothing you could take to court.’

‘Nope.’

‘Uh-huh. Okay.’

Hatcher had left out several important pieces of the puzzle. That the commandant who had escaped to Bangkok was Wol Pot. That the Dutchman thought the man who could be Cody was on drugs. He didn’t tell Sloan about the hoochgirl, Pai, and he still had not mentioned Thai Horse. Why? he asked himself. Because he didn’t trust Sloan was the answer.

‘The issue is, Is Murphy Cody alive, and if so, what’s he into?’ Sloan said. ‘That’s the issue.’

‘Back in Georgia, you told me if I found Cody there would be no questions asked,’ Hatcher said. ‘The old man just wanted to say good- bye, you said. That was the only issue.’

Sloan lit a cigar, tapped ash off it and watched the wind break it up and twirl it away. He stared out over the river.

Both men were thinking about other times, times when they trusted and relied on each other, when there was an unwritten, unspoken bond between them that went beyond duty and orders and was an almost psychic link between thought and action. Los Boxes had struck that bond and shattered it.

Now they were skirting the issue, neither of them willing to lay it out to deal head-on with the problem. Sloan didn’t want to make a verbal commitment, he never did. In the past, he had always left the dirty words unsaid.

‘What this is really about is protecting the general’s reputation, keeping the old man from being embarrassed,’ Hatcher repeated.

Sloan’s eyebrows made little half-circles. ‘There could be more to it than that.’

‘Like what’s Cody been up to for the past fifteen years?’ said Hatcher.

‘That enters into it.’

‘That wasn’t part of the deal.’

‘Christ, Hatch, you’ve been doing this kind of thing for almost twenty years. Do I have to draw pictures for you?’

‘Yeah, draw me some pictures,’ Hatcher whispered. ‘Seems pretty simple to me,’ Sloan said.

‘You’re asking me to make a very heavy judgment call here,’ Hatcher said.

‘You’ve made them before. What’s the problem? Seems to me you’re leaning over backwards to give your old school chum the benefit of the doubt.’

‘We’re not just talking about an old school chum, we’re talking about Buffalo Bill’s son.’

‘That’s the whole point,’ said Sloan.

‘Why don’t you just come right on out with it,’ Hatcher’s tortured voice asked. ‘You want me to dust Cody, don’t you?’

He’s done it again, thought Hatcher, that slick- talking bastard has done it again.

‘I want you to find out if he’s alive, and if he is, why he hasn’t turned up,’ Sloan said slowly and distinctly. ‘And if he’s mixed up in something — unsavory . .

He let the sentence fade out.

‘Unsavory? Unsavory? Aren’t we getting a little cute here,’ Hatcher snapped.

‘We never had to talk about this kind of thing before,’ said Sloan, his eyes narrowing.

The tickling sensation in Sloan’s gut turned sour. What had happened to Hatcher? he wondered.

‘Why 4on’t you just lay it out for me,’ Hatcher said. Sloan still wouldn’t commit. He stared into space, puffing on his cigar.

‘You’re telling me you want Cody hit,’ Hatcher said, and there was genuine surprise in his voice.

‘I’m telling you, you have options, like you always did.’

‘Well,’ growled Hatcher, ‘I don’t want the option. I didn’t come over here to kill anybody. I came to find out whether Murphy Cody is dead or alive, period. Now you’re throwing a lot of new rules at me.’

‘No rules—’ Sloan said.

‘I’m not going to make that kind of decision,’ Hatcher whispered.

‘Then call me,’ Sloan said flatly. ‘I’ll make it for you.’

‘This guy was a war hero, Harry.’

‘So was Benedict Arnold.’

‘What do you know that I don’t?’ Hatcher demanded.

‘Not one fucking thing,’ Sloan snapped back.

‘Then it seems to me you’re drawing some pretty harsh conclusions.’

‘Well, what the hell conclusion would you draw?’ Sloan appealed. ‘You sized it up yourself a minute ago. The guy is missing for fifteen years. Then he apparently turns up alive in Bangkok and doesn’t want anybody to know it, and now Windy Porter’s dead and this Wol Pot is on the run. Supposing the two Chins who wasted Porter were running interference for Wol Pot. Suppose he and Cody are in something together.’

‘Suppose, suppose, suppose,’ Hatcher said angrily. ‘Hell, we’re not even sure Cody’s alive. This Wol Pot could be pulling some kind of a scam on all of us.’

‘Hey, I buy that, okay,’ Sloan agreed. Then he said, almost offhandedly, ‘If that’s the way it is, dust the little bastard off, too.’

‘Is it really that easy for you, Harry?’ Hatcher asked. ‘Dust off Cody, dust off the Thai.’

Sloan sighed. His shoulders drooped and he suddenly seemed ten years older.

‘We’ve been fighting these shadow wars for too many years to change now,’ Sloan said wearily.

‘And if Murph’s clean?’

‘Then set up the meeting with Buffalo Bill. Look,’ he sighed, ‘you do what you have to do, I do what I have to do. You start looking for answers to a lot of questions, you’re gonna be dead, Hatch. That’s basic and you know it. You don’t have time for that. All we got is clicks and reflexes. You got two choices on any given day — do it or don’t do it. If you don’t know the options going in, if you haven’t made the decision, they’ll get you. Have I ever told you any different? Has there ever been any question in your mind about that?’

‘Not before now,’ Hatcher said without looking at Sloan.

‘Then maybe I’ve got the wrong man.’

‘Maybe so.’

‘You want out?’

Hatcher thought about it. He had mixed emotions about Murph Cody. One man thought he was a hero, another thought he was a maniac. Now the mission had taken on new complexities. It was no longer a question of is he alive or isn’t he, but whether he should stay alive or not. Hatcher knew if he bowed out, Sloan would bring in someone else, someone who would do the job without thinking, some expedient butcher.

And what are you, Hatcher, he thought to himself, an inexpedient butcher?

In Hatcher’s mind he was the only one in a position to make that judgment call. Much as he hated it, Sloan had done it again. He had put Hatcher in the middle. To Hatcher there was only one alternative.

He nodded slowly. ‘I’m still in,’ he said. ‘If he’s alive, I’ll find him.’

‘Then what?’

‘Then I play it by ear.’

Sloan stared across the table at him for several moments, then said, ‘Fair enough.’ He slid a manila envelope across the table to Hatcher.

‘What’s this?’ Hatcher asked.

‘It’s everything the embassy had on Windy Porter, for what it’s worth. His diary has a few locations that might help you.’

‘How about police reports?’

Sloan chuckled again, as if he were enjoying heaping bad news on Hatcher. He finished his coffee and dabbed his lips with his napkin.

‘Well, uh, that’s the other bit of bad news. We’ve had a little trouble with the local cops.’

‘What kind of trouble?’

‘They’re playing hard to get. They stiffed a runny- nosed embassy errand boy, told him they’re holding all of Windy’s stuff until they complete their investigation and they won’t talk about it.’

‘They probably don’t have much anyway.’

‘You’ll be dealing with a major named Ngy. I’ll be tied up making the arrangements to get Windy back to the States. If you need me, call Flitcraft, he can always get in touch.’

‘Is this Ngy going to give me a bad time?’ Hatcher asked.

‘They don’t call him the Mongoose for nothing,’ Sloan answered.

THE MONGOOSE

When Hatcher left the Oriental, he checked out the taxis and limos in front of the hotel. It was his custom to hire a car for a week at a time so it would always be available at a good price. And he also looked for a driver who was street-smart, somebody clever who knew where to get answers.

The Mercedes and Rolls-Royce limousines were lined up first, followed by more conventional cars, Ply- mouths and Toyotas. The drivers, all smiling, held open the doors and motioned him inside. They were all too clean, too civilized and uniformed. He looked past the row of limos and cabs to a small, wiry Thai standing beside a three-wheel tuk-tuk near the end of the line. The little man appeared to be exercising. He stepped back suddenly and thrashed his arms in a series of hard jabs, sparring with an imaginary opponent, then jogged forward, threw a hard kick that was shoulder-high and turned back, jogging in place. He saw Hatcher watching him and smiled.

The little man jogged past the big expensive cars to Hatcher and bowed. He was wearing cutoff jeans and a white t-shirt with ‘Harvard Drinking Team’ on the front in dark blue letters.

‘Sawat-dii,’ he said, a general greeting in Thai that could mean anything from ‘Hi’ to ‘Good-bye’ and bowed again to Hatcher.

‘Sawat-dii, khrap,’ Hatcher answered. ‘Phom maa jaak Muang Saharat.’

He was about five five and in his mid-twenties, with a flat nose and a wide face. A mixture of Thai and Chinese, Hatcher thought. Like many Thai men, he wore a tattoo on his shoulder. Hatcher recognized the tattoo as Kinnari, the half-woman, half-bird goddess, a harbinger of good luck.

‘I know you are American, I speak English,’ the lad said proudly.

‘Sabai-dii. What’s your name?’

‘Tsi Tei Nyk. Everybody call rue Sy.’ He exhibited two ragged rows of ruined teeth. ‘You name?’

‘Hatch.’

Sy pointed back and forth between them. ‘Sy, Hatch.’

‘You got it right.’

‘Good stuff.’

‘Yeah, good stuff,’ Hatcher agreed. ‘You exercise like that a lot, do you?’ He threw a couple of playful punches to make his point.

‘I am a boxer,’ Sy said proudly, sticking out his chest in an exaggerated show of pride. ‘I drive tuk-tuk until I get money to quit.’

He jumped back and thrashed his arms in another series of jabs, threw another hard kick, and jogged in place. ‘I practice every morning at dawn for two hours. And thirty minutes each afternoon I practice my moves.’

‘You want to work for me for about a week?’

‘A week? Do what?’

‘Translate for me.’

‘Everybody here speak English. And you speak Thai,’ Sy said.

Hatcher nodded. ‘Yeah but not Sabai-dii. You get me around, tell me about people. Help me get things done. No problems.’

‘Ahh. No problems,’ Sy said, and suddenly he understood what he was being hired for. ‘Mai pen rai.’

‘That’s right, mai pen rai,’ Hatcher agreed. ‘So how much?’

‘Every day. All the time?’

‘I sleep late,’ Hatcher said with a smile.

Sy chuckled and nodded slowly. ‘I gotcha. Sleep late, stay up late.’

‘That’s about it.’

Sy, his hands folded behind his back, paced back and forth in front of Hatcher, his forehead wrinkled in a frown. ‘I will have a fight tomorrow night, so I cannot work then.’

‘Okay.’

‘And I must do my moves each afternoon.’

‘I understand,’ said Hatcher. ‘Where do you fight?’

‘Everywhere. Tomorrow at the Royal Park near Wat Phat,’ he said proudly. ‘If I get good enough, someday I will become a member of the King’s guard.’

‘That’s what you want, huh, to be a King’s guard?’

‘Yes. I have asked Buddha for that gift every day for twelve years. I wear the hai-huang and tattoo to guide me to that job.’

He reached inside his shirt and took out a circular brass ornament on the end of a silver chain. A reclining Buddha was engraved in its center. The Thais were big on amulets, which they called hai-huang, meaning ‘worries away,’ and some had amulets for every occasion. There were stalls and shops that specialized in amulets near all of the four hundred wats in Bangkok.

‘That’s a handsome hai-huang,’ said Hatcher. ‘Okay, I’m sure we can find thirty minutes for you to practice every day. Maybe I’ll even go to the fights with you.’

‘I will get you ticket,’ the driver said excitedly, thrusting his leg out to the side in two hard kicks.

‘Okay, so how much?’ Hatcher asked again.

Sy stopped and held out his hand, the fingers splayed out. ‘Fi’ dollars, American bucks.’

‘An hour?’ Hatcher said.

‘All day.’

‘Five dollars a day?’ Hatcher said with surprise.

‘And I eat.’

‘Right. Five dollars a day and meals.’

‘Chai,’ the little Thai said.

‘You’re worth more.’

‘More?’

‘Twenty bucks a day.’

‘A day!’ Sy said, his eyes growing twice their size. Hatcher nodded.

‘I am rich man,’ said the delighted Sy. ‘I will rent a car.’

‘Can you drive a car?’

‘Sure, okay.’

‘Okay, I’ll throw in the car,’ said Hatcher.

‘Throw in?’

‘I’ll rent the car.’

‘A jeep?’ Sy said excitedly.

‘No, something better.’

‘Jeep is good. Take bumps good.’

‘Too hard on the ass,’ Hatcher whispered. ‘And too hot.’

‘Merkedes?’ Sy said, coming down hard on the c.

‘How about a chevy?’

‘Chevy? Ah, Chevrolet?’

‘Chai,’ Hatcher answered.

‘Okay,’ Sy answered with a shrug.

‘Okay, here’s what we do. We’re going to the police station. Then we’re going back to my hotel, rent a car and then I’m going to study some reports for an hour or two. You can practice. There’s a small park across from the hotel. Then you and me, we’ll check out Bangkok.’

Major Tan Ngy stood behind the desk, his hands clasped behind his back, his face a mask, staring at the memorandum that lay in front of him. He was annoyed, annoyed that the chief had ordered him to cooperate with the Americans, annoyed that the Americans had even asked to interfere with the business of the Bangkok police. And that’s what the American was coming for, to interfere.

Why was it that the Americans always felt they could step in and take over? No matter where they were in the world, they expected reports — and authority — to be handed over to them, just like that. The death of the American intelligence officer, Porter, was a local police matter, a homicide on the streets f Bangkok. It was not the business of the United States Army or military intelligence or this Hatcher. It was his business. Ngy was head of the homicide division of the Bangkok police and he had nothing against Americans in general, but he did not like their interfering in his business.

Ngy was an excellent police officer, tough, resilient, uncompromising and honest, all of which had earned him the nickname the Mongoose. The Mongoose did not need Americans snooping around, implying that his investigative abilities were inferior or inadequate.

That was the worst part about it — he had nothing to report. His investigation was stymied. The trail was growing colder by the day, and Ngy knew that with each passing hour the killers moved a little farther out of reach. Now the Yankee would come in and offer to solve the matter, just like that. He had dealt with Americans before. Arrogant. Presumptuous. Conceited. Superior. And yet he would have to be almost obsequious. The chief’s memo was quite clear about that. Be friendly, it said. Not just courteous, friendly!

It was not going to be a good day.

He looked at his watch. Fifteen minutes. In fifteen minutes the American would arrive. Oh, he would be prompt. My God, were these people never late? He would make the usual salutatory comments. He would be patronizing. He would smile a lot. Then he would offer to assist the local police. It was always assist.

At two minutes before the hour, Ngy’s assistant tapped on his door and almost reverently announced the arrival of Hatcher.

Ngy walked over very close to the police sergeant. ‘He is an American Army officer, not the president of the United States,’ he hissed under his breath.

‘Y-y-yes, sir,’ the sergeant stammered, surprised at the major’s subdued but vehement outburst.

‘Show him in,’ Ngy said, marching back to his desk.

Hatcher approached the meeting with the same anxieties as Ngy. He didn’t want to stir up anything. He wanted the Americans to stay off the case, but he wanted copies of the police reports and a sense of their progress. He wasn’t sure just how to pull that off without raising Ngy’s suspicions. But he was sure that he would not mention Wol Pot, Cody, Thai Horse or any other aspect of the case.

Hatcher was surprised at how big the office was. This was, after all, the office of a homicide cop, not the prime minister. It was a high room, hollow-sounding, with spotless tiled floors, its sparse furniture polished and free of dust and blemishes. Papers fluttered listlessly on desks, stirred by the ceiling fan. The sounds of traffic and bells ringing and people moving were a murmur from behind closed shutters.

The major was short and trim, neatly dressed in a khaki business suit, a pale blue shirt and a yellow tie. His mustache and hair were trimmed with infinite care, his nails were manicured, his black boots buffed to a blinding shine. His face was a mask, revealing neither pleasure nor pain, surprise nor ennui, friendliness nor antagonism.

Murder at a poker table, thought Hatcher.

Hatcher knew all about him. He had worked his way up through the ranks, attended the American FBI training academy, spent six months working with police in New York City, had once been part of a team that had tracked heroin movements from the Golden Triangle into Malaysia, a team comprised mostly of U.S. Drug Enforcement agents. His arrest record was the envy of most department heads.

Ngy was a precise man, it wasn’t hard to tell. Everything about him was precise. The way he was dressed. His office. His desk! Everything on it was arranged in perfect geometric patterns, letters, pens, blotters, phone, all in tight little squares.

Precise, precise, precise. A man with a big ego and one easily bruised. Hatcher would have to be very careful dealing with this cop whose underlings, behind his back, called him the Mongoose.

‘Major,’ Hatcher said in his most sincere tone, ‘I’m Hatcher. Can’t tell you how much I appreciate your time.’

Ngy’s smile struggled not to be a sneer. 1t is my pleasure, Colonel,’ he said earnestly. ‘I am embarrassed that such a thing could happen here. I had hoped Bangkok was more civilized.’

Uh-oh, thought Hatcher, he’s having trouble with it.

‘These things happen,’ Hatcher said. ‘Do you think robbery was the motive?’

Aha, fishing, thought Ngy. He’s being subtle. Well, it won’t hurt to give him a little bit.

‘No,’ Ngy answered. ‘Nothing was taken. It appears he stepped into a fight and was killed for his trouble. There are witnesses who saw the whole thing.’

This is a smart cop, thought Hatcher. If there are witnesses he’s picked them clean., no need for me to appear interested. That’ll throw him off a little.

Hatcher decided to give him a little something in return.

‘That sounds just like Windy — that was his nickname, Windy — anyway, he was that kind, always ready to help someone in trouble.’

Ngy nodded, still smiling. ‘I see,’ he said. He seems to be leading me down this dead end, thought the Thai policeman, a chance killing. Didn’t he know that Ngy knew that Porter was an intelligence officer? Intelligence officers were not likely to be killed by chance.

‘Ironic, isn’t it,’ Hatcher went on, ‘an intelligence officer getting killed like that. He . . . deserved . . . I don’t know, a more . . . exotic death.’

Clever! thought Ngy. That clears the air about Porter’s job. He poses the problem and then answers it. What is the game here?

‘Well, we haven’t ruled out other considerations yet,’ Ngy said. ‘It’s just that from all the surface evidence it appears he was just an unfortunate good Samaritan.’

Is he here because he knows something we don’t know? thought Ngy. Perhaps Porter was on some questionable intelligence job and Hatcher is here to find out how much we know. Ngy decided to drop his hook a little deeper. ‘Was he . . . uh, involved in anything that might have a bearing on the case?’ Ngy asked.

Hatcher shook his head. Good, thought Hatcher, he doesn’t know a thing. He’s really fishing now.

‘No, actually his job was pretty much confined to embassy security. He wasn’t a working field agent. Windy was close to retirement. This was considered a kind of easy job to go out on.’

Ngy thought, Do I trust him? If what he says is true, then the Porter case could very likely be a chance encounter that ended in death. It would make the lack of arrests somewhat more palatable to his superiors.

‘Well, rest assured we are doing everything in our power to find the killers. We have adequate descriptions of both of them, and the man in the other boat.’

‘Other boat?’

Well, obviously he hasn’t spent a lot of time on this matter, thought Ngy. Even the papers had reported that there was a man in the other boat. I’ll give him some more free information. See how he reacts.

‘The one who seemed to be the intended victim,’ Ngy said. ‘He jumped in the river when this all started. It could very well be some kind of grudge fight between Street gangs and your Major Porter stumbled on to it. There was also a prostitute involved — but there was no implication that the major even knew her. I assure you we don’t suspect any connection between them.’

‘Thank God for that. This has been rough enough on his wife.’

Ngy thought, perhaps he can help with the note. He reached into the folder and tool out a five-by-seven sheet of lined three-ring notebook paper. It was stiff and faded and the blue ink was smeared.

‘We found this,’ Ngy offered. ‘But even our handwriting experts cannot decipher what was written on it.’

Hatcher looked closely at the paper, turned it over and looked at the back. It was the page from Porter’s diary on the day he died. He dropped it back on Ngy’s desk, not wanting to seem too eager.

‘Probably his grocery list,’ Hatcher said with a chuckle.

‘Probably,’ Ngy said with an equally forced smile.

‘Perhaps I could show this to some of his associates. I may be able to turn something up that will help you.’

Ngy was immediately suspicious again. But he decided his fears were unfounded. This Hatcher appeared to have no interest in the case other than to officially report he had looked into it. Thus far he had made no attempt to interfere. Ngy decided a concession or two would be all right.

‘I see no problem there,’ Ngy said with a smile.

Okay, thought Hatcher, now comes the breakthrough. ‘Good,’ he said. ‘Well, I know you’re busy.

I’m here really to see that the remains get back safely. Let the family know that the police are working on it. You know how it is, they’re on the other side of the world. . .

Ngy nodded vigorously. Why not put him at ease, he thought, get rid of him once and for all.

‘Perhaps,’ said Ngy, ‘it might help if you took a copy of the investigation report back to the family. Let them know that we’re doing everything possible.’

Hatcher could hardly contain his joy. Point, game, match, set.

‘Excellent idea, Major. I’m sure it will help.’

Harmless, thought Ngy after Hatcher had left. Apparently the Americans trusted Ngy’s handling of the case.

Sy and Hatcher returned to the hotel, where Hatcher rented a dark blue two door Chevy sedan. Then he went up to his room, ordered a bottle of Jack Daniel’s and a pot of Thai tea. He turned up the air conditioning, turned on the ceiling fan, peeled off his shirt, poured himself a cup of tea and laced it with whiskey, and sat down on the rattan sofa with all the files spread out on a coffee table.

The report was short and simple and told him very little. Witnesses reported that a man had made an arrangement with a prostitute named Sukhaii who worked on the Phadung Klong near New Road market. While they were in the cabin of her boat, a hang-yao approached and two men got out and started to board the boat adjoining Sukhaii’s. The American, Windy Porter, apparently went to the aid of the prostitute and was stabbed by one of these men. He fell overboard and his body was retrieved quickly by several boat people. The man with Sukhaii jumped over board and escaped the scene. The killers escaped in the hang yao, which was later recovered with its owner, who also had been stabbed to death. The autopsy showed two stab wounds, one in the lower right chest, the other straight down into his neck, by a thin blade knife that had coursed down seven inches and pierced the heart.

It could be coincidence, thought Hatcher, that the killers had used a killing thrust that had become a trademark of the Chiu Chaos.

The officers making the report assumed that the two intruders were attempting to rob the prostitute and her mark and Porter unfortunately had interceded. Descriptions were vague. one of the killers was described as ‘a Chinese man with a streak down the side of his face and a bad eye.’

Police had been unsuccessful in locating the mark who had jumped overboard and swum for his life. Sukhaii had given them an insignificant description of him — five six, 150 pounds, brown eyes, black hair, narrow face. No name. According to the report, the killers had said nothing to her.

Was it Wol Pot? If so, why 1id Porter mix it up with the two men who were obviously after the ex-Vietnam prison commander? Perhaps it was simply chivalry. More likely, Porter knew that if they lost Wol Pot they would also lose Cody. So he’d tried to help out.

Hatcher pored over every slip of paper, writing down anything that seemed significant. There were more than a dozen locations mentioned in the daily diaries, although it appeared that Porter practiced a very simple surveillance and did not ask any questions about Wol Pot or Taisung or whatever the hell his name was.

He added to his list every location that was mentioned more than once, including the American Deli. Porter had been there three times, once with a notation:

‘Ate lunch while observing subject from across the street.’ He also had attended several sporting events, including the horse races and boxing matches.

Hatcher also added to the list ‘Tombstone’ and ‘The Longhorn,’ the two locations mentioned to Daphne by the ex-GI at the Ts’e K’am Men Ti battle. When he was finished he had a list of fifteen or twenty locations. Then be started checking them more carefully, trying to form some kind of profile of this Wol Pot in his mind.

As soon as Hatcher was gone, Sloan left the hotel and took an air-conditioned limo to the embassy. He signed the necessary papers and made the :necessary arrangements to ship Major Porter’s earthly remains to San Francisco on an Army transport leaving the next day. In all, the Porter business took a couple of hours. He lunched with Harvey Kendall, a diplomat familiar with DEA and NSA operations in the area, and made small talk for an hour.

Then he took a tuk-tuk to Yawaraj. Driving into Chinese Town was like entering the wide end of a funnel. They went down one twisting, tortuous street to another and then to an alley suffocated by row shops and then another alley, even more claustrophobic, and from there to its dead end at the river.

The old man who ushered Sloan through the innocuous-looking door was as old and wasted as the doorman the previous night. His eyes were unfocused burned-out coals, his face was caved in and as wrinkled as a pitted prune, and he was skeletal.

The timbers and slats were webbed by spiders. The old place creaked and groaned with age. Below him, Sloan could see the desk and, behind it, cubicle after cubicle. Faintly, he could hear an occasional cough, and softly, far back in the room, a vague tenor voice was crooning an Irish lullaby. The old man led Sloan down the rickety wooden stairwell into the den, into smoke that swirled in wispy whirlpools under a broad ceiling fan that hung on the end of a long, 1ender pole, which vanished up into darkness. The sweet mown-grass odor of opium drifted up the stairway, and Sloan’s mouth went dry with anticipation.

He paid for his pipe and followed the old prune-faced man to a cubicle with two narrow cots. He lay down. It was hot in the room, and he peeled off his tie and opened his shirt to the waist. He was already dizzy from the fog of opium smoke that settled like morning mist on the floor of the large room. His eyes kindled with excitement as he watched the old man roll a goli of thick, brown-black opium between his fingers and stuff it in the bowl of the pipe and stoke it up.

While Sloan waited, his mind. drifted to Hatcher and his growing rejection of the brigade. Damn you Hatcher, damn your soul, Sloan thought to himself. You can’t reject all the good guys we had in the brigade. God, look what’s happened to them. Eddie Conlan dead in Libya. Ike Greenbaum burned to a crisp in a crack-up in Chile. Dick Mazetti running some halfassed security outfit in Florida and drinking himself to death in a wheelchair. Jack Burbank blinded by terrorists in the Lebanon embassy explosion. Molly McGuire, one leg short, serving out his time in the Immigration Service. The Immigration Service, for God’s sake. How many times had he saved Hatcher’s ass? And mine? They had all put their asses on the line, Hatcher as well. Were any of them less heroic because they didn’t wear a uniform? Who could say they weren’t heroes?

The old man took a deep draw and passed the pipe to Sloan, who drew deeply on the pipe, felt the hot smoke burn down his throat and fill his lungs. He quickly forgot Hatcher and t1e brigade. He turned away from thoughts of the past and almost immediately he was euphoric, his mind in another time and place, his cares and worries dismissed from his mind. He closed his eyes and saw green fields drifting with the wind. He did not hear the person enter the cubicle or the squeaking of the other cot.

‘Did you see Hatcher?’ a voice asked.

Sloan answered without opening his eyes. ‘Yes.’

‘And?’

‘He’s getting closer. I told you he could find him. It’s just a matter of time.’

‘Has he spotted Wol Pot?’

‘No.’

‘Does he know who Wol Pot really is?’

‘He didn’t say.’

‘And Thai Horse?’

Sloan was tired of talking, tired of thinking about questions and framing answers. He was at the doorway of the Land of Nod and then as he entered he said dreamily, ‘Didn’t mention Thai Horse. Didn’t mention Wol Pot. Didn’t mention bangles, baubles or beads or moonlight and roses. Nightingales in Berkeley Square. Pigeons on statues and bright yellow ribbons. Didn’t mention any of it. Look, Hatcher will find Cody. He’s onto something, I can tell. I know him as well as I know myself. He’s the best there is.’

AN APPOINTMENT IN PARIS

Ismala Hadif, who had been code-named the Hyena by Interpol and the CIA, was possibly the most wanted terrorist in the world. CIA had positively identified him as the instigator of the bombing of airport terminals in Vienna and Rome in which a total of sixty-seven people, mostly women and children, had died, eighteen of them American kids on a summer tour, all under sixteen. He was also the prime suspect in a Berlin nightclub bombing in which thirteen had died, nine of them women, and was believed to have killed an American ambassador’s wife in Tunisia during a failed attempt to assassinate the ambassador himself. His acts of terrorism and assassination had been documented for four years, and yet he moved through the free world as freely as a breath of air, a master of disguise and audacity.

Among experts in terrorism, Hyena was the most hated man on a long list. An ingenious and dedicated fanatic, Hyena was trained in Libya and lived in Tehran. He had left his home a week earlier, and intelligence sources had spotted him and followed him to Cairo, where they had lost him.

Another pursuer had not.

Hyena had been quietly tracked on a circuitous route that had ended in Paris, where he was now travelling with a forged Turkish passport, credit cards and papers identifying him as a salesman for a cigarette company in Ankara. Hyena, who was fluent in several languages, including Turkish, and shaved his beard and dyed his hair gray, adding twenty years to his appearance. Contacts had changed his eyes from dark brown to blue. Lifts in his boots added two inches to his normal height of five eight. He was staying in a large and costly chain hotel near the center of the city, a departure from his usual procedure.

His target was General Karl Shustig, the American military genius who was also an expert in security. Shustig had been chiefly responsible for some recent masterly security measures, measures that had foiled Hyena’s plans on two previous occasions. But Shustig was guilty of violating his own safety rules. A man addicted to habit, he followed the same routine every day; he was picked up at the same hour, driven down the same streets to his office arid returned in the same way. A car went ahead of and behind his vehicle, but this was hardly adequate security. Shustig had become complacent after four months in Paris. He had dismissed the possibility of a terrorist attack on himself.

To Hyena he was a perfect target. A personal friend of the American president and a man rumored to be the next member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, he was also an easy hit. A bomb capable of destroying an entire city block would be planted in a sewer main on the route to Shustig’s office. Hyena would activate it from two blocks away by radio control as Shustig’s car went over the man-hole. The explosion would destroy most of the block and certainly atomize the general’s car.

Two days before, Hyena had scouted out the sewer line, picked the location, and found among the loose bricks and slime on the sides of the narrow tunnel a perfect place to hide the bomb. Even a last-minute inspection of the sewer lines would not reveal the presence of the explosive.

Hyena was content with his preparations. He would plant the bomb tonight and do the job the following morning. A tape claiming responsibility for the assassination had already been prepared and would be delivered to radio stations ten minutes after the deed was done. He walked back through the wide tunnel with the sounds of the Paris sewer roaring in his ears. Hate motivated Hyena, murder satisfied him. If he died, his two sons would follow soon after him. The way to heaven was a river of Western blood.

He did not see the bearded man in the shadowy tunnels behind him. As clever and cautious as Hyena was, his tail was better than he.

Earlier in the day this same bearded man had entered the West German embassy wearing overalls, carrying an electrician’s tool chest and using false credentials identifying him as an electrician. The gu.ard had asked him to open the case and he had lifted the drawer straight up, high enough for the guard to see under it. He waved the bearded man on. Once inside, the bearded man knew every inch of the building. He had been studying its floor plans for days. He had gone straight to the utility closet on the lower floor, found a folding aluminum ladder stored there, and carried it to the storage closet adjacent to the reception room on the first floor. He stepped into the reception room and looked it over. It was a towering room with a thirty-foot ceiling. An enormous glass chandelier with hundreds of small teardrop ornaments dangling from its mirrored sockets cast a bright orb over the entire room. The room was filled with people preparing a reception that night. In the confusion the bearded man went unnoticed. He studied the room for several minutes, paying particular attention to the chandelier, then left.

Now the bearded man was watching from the restaurant on the mezzanine of the hotel when Hyena returned. He got up and walked quickly to the elevator, got off on the fourth floor, walked up one floor and waited until he heard the elevator doors open. He cracked open the door slightly, watched as Hyena went by, waited until he got out his key, then slipped through the door and walked to-ward Hyena.

The terrorist turned with a start, then relaxed. The man was stooped and looked about sixty. He had a gray beard and white hair. The bearded man smiled and Hyena nodded curtly before opening the door. The bearded man took three steps and chopped him viciously at the base of the skull. Hyena dropped straight to his knees. He was unconscious before they hit the floor. The bearded man grabbed the back of his collar to keep him from falling, shoved him into the room and closed the door. He threw Hyena on the bed, put on a pair of thin plastic gloves, stripped Hyena, gagged him, and tied him naked to a chair. He put a DO NOT DISTURB sign on the door, turned on the TV loud, pulled over another chair and sat down facing Hyena. There was a leather band tied around Hyena’s wrist with a key attached to it. The bearded man reached into his sleeve and drew out a stiletto. He sliced the leather band and took the key.

He slapped Hyena’s face several times. The Arab’s eyes fluttered open, and when they managed to focus, Hyena looked at the bearded man with terror. He tried to talk, but the gag was so tight it was cutting the corners of his mouth. The bearded man held a finger to his lips. ‘Shh,’ he hissed very softly.

Then he reached out suddenly and grabbed Hyena’s face in one hand. His grip was like a vise. Hyena could not move his head; the bearded mans fingers stretched almost from one ear to the other_ His other hand appeared before Hyena’s face holding the narrow dirk, honed to a gleaming edge. The blade was seven or eight inches long. He held the point of it just under Hyena’s left eye, its point drawing a pearl of blood. Hyena’s eyes fluttered. The bearded man could smell his fear.

‘Where is the bomb?’ the bearded man whispered in perfect Arabic. He let go of Hyena’s face and held the key in front of his eyes. ‘Where is the case that goes with this?’

Hyena shook his head furiously. The bearded man grabbed his face again, held it tightly.

‘I ask one more time, then you will lose this eye. In the end I will find it anyway. Save yourself pain and me time.’

Hyena shook his head again.

The bearded man jammed the knife point in, twisted it, and very deftly popped out Hyena’s left eye.

Hyena’s scream was stifled by the gag. The bearded man held a mirror before Hyena’s pain-glazed right eye and the Arab killer stared in horror t the bleeding hole in his face.

Hyena’s head was throbbing. He felt sick to his stomach and the room was rocking in and out of focus. The bearded man screwed off the top of the hilt of the knife and removed a small round honing dowel. He began to sharpen the knife. The blade rang in the air like a bell as he swept it back and forth across the stone.

Is he going to cut my throat? Hyena wondered. Good God, who is he? Will I die without knowing who killed me?

The bearded man stared at him, still half smiling, and said softly, ‘You will never sire another child killer.’

He shoved his knees between Hyena’s knees and spread Hyena’s legs with his own. He placed the knife flat against Hyena’s crotch. The razor edge rested against Hyena’s penis.

‘The bomb?’ the bearded man whispered in Hyena’s ear. He twisted the knife slightly so it bit the flesh. Hyena’s good eye closed with pain.

‘Quickly,’ the bearded man whispered. ‘I am running out of time and patience. Tell me, and I will cut your throat and you will hardly feel it and you will be dead very quickly. Otherwise, you die with humiliation. The Hyena will go to heaven as a eunuch.’

Hyena swallowed. Sweat poured down his face and chest in rivers. His eye throbbed with pain. He could feel the blade of the knife slicing into the side of his manhood. He opened his remaining eye and looked toward the bed.

The bearded man pulled back the mattress. A small black briefcase lay between mattress and springs. He took the key that had been fastened to Hyena’s wrist and unlocked the case.

The bomb was impressive and formidable. Plastique and a lot of it, enough to take out the Eiffel Tower. The case contained both a radio control unit and a timer. The bearded man turned back to Hyena and smiled.

‘I am a man of my word,’ he said quietly. He grabbed a handful of Hyena’s hair and pulled his head back. Hyena’s Adam’s apple bobbed like a fishing cork in his throat. The bearded man slit Hyena’s throat to the jugular.

He closed the case, threw the mattress back in place, untied Hyena and let him fall in a pile on the floor. He removed the bomb carefully from the case and left the radio device in it. Then he laid the floor plans of the West German embassy on the bed, crossed to the door and looked cautiously into the hall. Empty.

He left the DO NOT DISTURB sign on the door and walked down two flights of stairs to his own room and entered it. He was already packed, and the room had been charged in advance to a blind account with a Geneva address. He had one small suitcase and the black tool chest when he left the hotel. He went straight to the airport and checked his bag, went to the men’s room, opened the tool chest and took out a pair of overalls and put them on. Then he took another cab to the West German embassy.

He showed the security guard the false credentials identifying him as an electrician, opened his case and lifted the drawer out so the guard could see the tools in the compartment under it. The guard waved him on. He entered by the side door, went straight to the storage room, took the tall ladder and went quickly to the crowded reception room and set it up. A rigid-looking German approached the bearded man as he started to climb up to the towering chandelier. The bearded man held up a light bulb and pointed to the chandelier, and the German shrugged and went away

He removed the drawer of his tool chest, reached under it, and pulled free the bomb that was attached to the underside of the drawer by small suction cups and carefully attached it to the pipe that supported the giant glass dome. He set the timer for 6:30P.M.

Five minutes later he had replaced the ladder and was gone. He walked four blocks, hailed a cab and returned to the airport, where he retrieved his suitcase and left the tool chest in the same pay locker. He went into a stall in the men’s room and opened the suitcase. There was a small battery-operated makeup mirror and a makeup kit inside, and he removed his wig and makeup, pulled off the overalls and stuffed them in a brown bag with the makeup. He put on a white shirt, blue tie and a sports jacket and closed the suitcase. When he left the stall, he dropped the bag with the makeup in it in a trash can.

The American ambassador was a tall, deeply tanned man, who, although in his sixties, was in excellent physical condition and looked forty-five. And he could be persuasive. Tonight was an extremely important reception, for his mission was to convince the representatives of several European countries that terrorism had reached epidemic proportions. In effect, it was time to declare war on terrorists, although he knew that several of the countries had been spared any terrorist attacks and were reluctant to incur the ‘wrath of the Arab killers by making any overt moves on them.

At six-five, as he was getting ready to leave for the reception, he received an urgent phone call on his red phone. There was reason to believe that an extremely dangerous Libyan terrorist known as Hyena was in Paris, he was told. This was confidential information, but security would be critical and extra precautions were being taken at that very moment. The phone call went on for ten minutes as a state department under-secretary explained in boring detail what was going to be done.

‘Listen here,’ the ambassador said impatiently, ‘I’m going to be late for a very important reception. Can’t we discuss this first thing in the morning?’

The flustered secretary apologized and rang off.

‘God, these officious little pipsqueaks in State drive me mad,’ he complained to his wife. ‘Now we’re going to be late.’

‘Let’s twist its tail tonight, Geoffrey,’ he told his driver as they got in the limousine. ‘We’re running late.’

A block later an accident delayed them another ten minutes. The ambassador glared at his watch.

‘Damn,’ he said to his wife, ‘we’re going to be almost a half hour late. Damn, damn, damn!’

Ambassadors from Finland, France and Holland were in the receiving line when the bomb exploded. There was a moment of deafening sound, of fire and light, as the crowded room was illuminated and assaulted simultaneously. The boom of the bomb was followed almost immediately by shrieks of pain and terror. The chandelier had shimmered and burst, its hundreds of glass ornaments reduced to thousands of gleaming shards.

The deadly glass darts projected by the force of the explosion streaked down into the crowd below. Like chunks of diamond shrapnel they ripped into the dignitaries. Pale women in expensive gowns, their faces suddenly shredded by bits of glass and metal, staggered into one another. Ambassadors in cutaway coats were driven to their knees and assassinated by glittering arrows of death. And in the momentary silence that follows any shock and before chaos breaks out, the chandelier, weakened by the explosion, swung feebly and then its support snapped and it plunged down on top of the dead and wounded in a great splash as the rest of the glass shattered on impact.

‘M-my God,’ the American ambassador cried out as they turned off the main street into the drive of the embassy. Ahead of them in the garish beam of their headlights, people in their evening finery, bleeding and blind, were staggering out of the shattered reception hail into the street.

KLONG GIRL

Sy was in a small park across the street, practicing his moves. He looked good, a quick jabber with good legs. Hatcher reached in the car window, tooted the horn and the driver came immediately.

‘I am looking for a girl named Sukhaii who works on the Phadung Klong near New Road,’ Hatcher said.

‘Is she a whore?’

‘Yes,’ Hatcher replied, repeating the girl’s description from the police report. ‘Five two, sixteen years old, ninety pounds. A real princess, they say.’

‘Of course she is a real princess,’ Sy said with a shrug. ‘Who would go with an ugly whore?’

‘That’s very philosophical,’ Hatcher said.

‘It may take a little time to find her,’ Sy said, ‘the water babies do not stay in the same place on the klong.’

‘While we’re at it,’ said Hatcher, ‘I’m also looking for these two people.’ He showed Sy the photograph of Cody and Pai taken in Vietnam fifteen years ago.

‘Is this old picture?’ Sy asked.

Hatcher nodded. ‘Fifteen years,’ he growled.

‘They change a lot,’ Sy said.

Hatcher nodded again. ‘I’m sure of it,’ he said.

‘This is American and Thai girl?’ Sy asked.

‘No. The man was an American flier, but the girl was Vietnamese.’

‘Ah,’ Sy said. He stared at the picture for at least a minute and then nodded and passed it back to Hatcher.

As they drove through the crowded streets, Hatcher reflected on his plan. First, try t find the girl, since she was the only person who had actually seen both Wol Pot and Windy Porter’s killers. Then he would start checking out Porter’s surveillance locations to see if that produced anything. Near the top of the list was the section called Tombstone and the Longhorn Bar. The subject of Thai Horse was touchy, since it involved street gossip. Was there really a Thai Horse, and if so, was it a gang? A man? Wol Pot or Cody? Or someone new? Because Hatcher could not tie it directly to Cody, he would play that by ear.

The trip to Phadung Klong took only a few minutes; the intersection was a few blocks away, just past the sprawling produce market now almost deserted for the day and across a short arched bridge at the klong. It took Sy three stops and the better part of an hour talking to river people to get a lead on the girl.

‘They say she works closer to Rama Four Road,’ he said returning to the car. ‘We find her, mai pen rai,’

They drove parallel to the klong, separated from it by thick banyan trees, flowering orchids and shacks built on stilts over the banks of the river. At Rama Four, Sy parked the car and disappeared. down the bank of the Hong. He was gone for another fifteen minutes.

‘She has moved to Klong Mahachai,’ he said when he got back. ‘But it will be difficult to locate her until tonight. We should find her near the Maharaj Road crossing close to the Thieves’ Market in Chinese Town.’

At dusk they drove to Maharaj Road, and Sy once again scouted the banks of the klong. He was gone only a few minutes this time.

‘We have luck,’ he said proudly. ‘Come.’

He led Hatcher along the edge of the klong, past several boats.

‘You be careful, okay, pheuan?’ Sy said. ‘Sometime the girl boss he looks to steal your money, watch, you know? But I be behind you,’ he said, pointing down the row of snakeboats and houseboats that were tied to the bank and to one another. There were many young women sitting in the bows of the boats, smiling, appraising, inviting a bid from the crowds along the canal. Hatcher followed Sy as they threaded through the crowd of gaping tourists that was already beginning to gather on the bank and past several boats until the little Thai stopped a man who was heading upstream with a fishing pole.

‘Sukhaii?’ Sy asked ‘You know which is her boat?’

The old man smiled gleefully, nodding vigorously, and pointed over Sy’s shoulder to a long boat practically at their feet.

‘My trip,’ Hatcher said and walked uncertainly across the first hang yao and past a muscular Thai, who stared at his chest as he passed but did not look at his face. He scrambled aboard the second boat as a young girl, no more than sixteen, came from under the thatched hooch at the rear. Lowering her head slightly, she stared at him over her nose. Her eyes got dusky brown. She had it down to a science.

‘Sukhaii?’ Hatcher asked.

‘You know my name?’ she said, surprised.

Hatcher nodded. ‘Chai,’ he said.

‘You want do some sanuk?’ she asked in shattered English. She pulled him close and rubbed against him, still smiling. She was warm and soft to the touch and had a sprig of jasmine behind her ear. For a moment Hatcher thought about having little sanuk with her. He gently took her by the arm so she wouldn’t bolt and held up an American fifty-dollar bill.

‘I am not here for fun,’ he said in Thai.

The girl look startled and tried to pull away from him.

‘Look,’ he said, ‘fifty dollars American. That’s one thousand bahts, two purples. You want this?’

The girl stared at the fifty and Hatcher dropped her arm.

The muscular Thai in the other boat stared casually across the deck at them but said thing.

‘What for?’ she asked cautiously.

‘There was a man here the other night when the killing occurred in the next boat. He jumped overboard.’

‘Chai. .

‘What did he look like?’

The girl thought for a moment and held her hand out, about five and half feet above the deck.

‘This tall. Very brown eyes. Black hair. Thin face. About like you heavy.’

‘Built like me but shorter?’

‘Chai.’

‘Any scars — uh, marks on his face or body?’

Sukhaii’s eyebrows rose. ‘Ah chai, chai . . . he has dragon. Here.’

She laid her hand on her chest

‘A tattoo of a dragon?’

She nodded.

‘Now, this guy, he was in a big hurry, yes?’

She nodded her head vigorously. ‘He was afraid.’ ‘I’m sure. Now, the way I see it, he didn’t have time to get dressed before he went swimming,’ Hatcher whispered.

She looked at him suspiciously but did not answer.

‘He probably didn’t take his clothes with him—’

‘Chai, chai, took clothes—’

‘Mai,’ Hatcher said, shaking his head. ‘No time.’

‘I told police—’

‘I am not the police. I don’t care .what you told the police. And I do not tell the police anything.’

‘I tell police everything,’ she said defiantly.

‘I think perhaps he may have left his pants behind—’

She shook her head frantically.. ‘Mai, mai. No wallet.’

‘I didn’t say anything about a wallet,’ Hatcher said softly.

The young girl was beginning to panic. She looked past Hatcher at the Thai on the other boat.

‘Look here, I’m not from the police, I am Amehricaan,’ Hatcher said. ‘All I want are the ID papers that were in the wallet. I don’t care about anything else, you can keep the money or anything else of value. I just want the papers, understand?’

Her eyes shifted behind him again. He turned. The Thai stood near the port side of the boat but did not come aboard. He was dressed in a purple pakoma, a kind of man’s sarong-pants and a white cotton tank shirt. There was a large tattoo of an orchid with a snake entwined around it on his right forearm. He smiled briefly at Hatcher and then looked at the girl.

‘What does he want?’ the man asked Sukhaii in Thai.

Hatcher interjected. ‘I was offering the young woman fifty American dollars for the identification papers in a wallet left here the other night. No questions asked. I’ll forget I was ever here, okay? No police. It is personal. All I want are the papers.’

The Thai came aboard and walked close to Hatcher. He was two or three inches shorter— but his body was hard and veins etched his biceps. He studied Hatcher’s face for a full minute through eye the color of mud. Behind him, Sy stepped on the other boat, waving away the water babies and vendors who squawked at him.

The tattooed man lowered his eyes and said, ‘You wallet?’

Hatcher shook his head. ‘Mai.’

‘You friend’s wallet?’

Hatcher did not lie. He shook his head again. ‘Chai.’

‘Huh,’ the Thai said. He stepped past Hatcher and whispered to the young prostitute. She stared up at him for several moments and nodded. ‘How much?’ he asked and she whispered, ‘Ten thousand bahts.’

Five hundred dollars, thought Hatcher, and the girl was probably holding back another hundred or two. Wol Pot did okay.

‘Why did you keep it from the police?’ the Thai whispered.

‘I thought he might come back,’ she lied, and he said, ‘Then get it and I will deal with the farang.’

He did not say the word for foreigner with any contempt and he was perfectly at ease and relaxed, as if he and Hatcher were old friends. If his whore’s swiping the wallet upset him, it didn’t show. He motioned Hatcher inside the hooch, so the other river people could not see them. Nervously Sy moved closer.

Sukhaii went to a chest, took out a snakeskin wallet and gave it to the Thai, who opened it, took out a handful of purple bahts, and stuffed them in his pocket.

‘I am sorry,’ she said repentantly. He shrugged and said casually, ‘Mai pen rai,’ motioned her to leave and then leafed through the wallet and found a small gold amulet in one of the compartments. It joined the money. He looked back at Hatcher.

‘Sixty dollars American,’ he said. His smile grew a little larger. Hatcher had forgotten that in Thailand the first price was never the final one.

‘Khit waa phaeng pai,’ Hatcher answered, as was expected of him. ‘Fifty-five,’ he countered.

The Thai’s smile grew larger still and he shrugged. ‘Fifty-seven, if it is what you want,’ he said with a broad, broken-toothed grin and handed the wallet to Hatcher to check, and Hatcher leafed quickly through the contents.

‘Good,’ he said, handing the Thai the fifty-seven dollars. ‘Khop kun. Sawat-dii.’

‘Now, one more thing,’ Hatcher said to the girl, taking out a twenty-dollar bill, ‘another twenty American if you will tell me what the man with the knife said to you.’

‘He said nothing!’ she cried out quickly.

But the Thai was eyeing the twenty. He looked at the bill and then looked out of the hooch at the river for several seconds. ‘Tell him.’

‘But they said —,

‘Tell him!’

The girl was almost out of breath with fear. ‘They said they would cut my face until I looked like a grandmother,’ she said weakly, staring at the floor.

‘Why would they do that?’

‘If I told the police anything about them.’

‘What else?’

‘They asked if I knew an address’

‘Whose address?’

‘It did not make sense. It was the horse in the myth.’

‘Thai Horse?’ Hatcher asked eagerly. The girl nodded. The Thai reached out slowly and plucked the twenty from Hatcher’s fingers. The seventy-seven dollars joined the rest of the booty. Then the Thai reached to the back of his belt and brought out a teak billy club a foot long. He stood four or five feet in front of Hatcher and smacked the club in the palm of his hand.

‘Maybe you give me rest of money or maybe you gold Rolex, hey?’ the Thai said, still smiling.

Hatcher backed up a foot or so. His body began to tense up and his eyes narrowed. Not another sateng,’ Hatcher whispered hoarsely.

The smile stayed, but the Thai’s eyes got a little crazy. He spread his feet and stood with the club held out at his side.

‘I hurt you,’ the Thai pimp said.

The words were hardly out of his mouth when Sy jumped on the boat behind him. The Thai spun around and took a hard backhand swipe at Sy but it was wide, and before he could swing again, Sy kicked him twice, hard kicks, one in the chest, one on the point of his jaw. The Thai fell back against Hatcher but jabbed the stick underhand into Hatcher’s stomach. Though the blow glanced off Hatcher’s side, it caught him off guard, and the Thai broke loose and charged Sy. The little man hit him with three hard jabs straight from the shoulder. The Thai’s head bobbed, but the punches did not stop him. He kept coming. He grabbed Sy in a bear hug and lifted him off the deck. Before he could throw him overboard, Hatcher reached out and dug iron fingers into the Thai’s shoulder. He dug deep, found the nerve he was seeking and ground it against the Thai’s shoulder blade.

The Thai was temporarily paralyzed. His arms dropped, the club clattered on the deck and Sy twisted loose, stepped back a step and hit him in the face with a double combination: whip, whip whip, whip.

The Thai staggered backward clutching a bleeding nose and fell against the side of the hooch. The small shack collapsed, and he toppled to the deck covered with bamboo strips and lay dazed for a moment. Hatcher stooped over him, picked up the billy and tossed it into the river. The Thai wiped the blood off his surprised face.

‘I am boxer,’ Sy said and motioned to Hatcher to follow him off the hang yao.

Hatcher looked down at the stricken Thai and smiled. ‘Sawat dii,’ he said with a half-assed salute.

They went back up the bank of the klong with Sy strutting ahead of him, brushing aside the roving vendors and prostitutes. When they got to the car, he held the door open for Hatcher.

‘You looked real good in there, pheuan’ Hatcher said and crawled into the sedan. He went through the papers and found the passport. According to the information on it, Wol Pot was five six, weighed 154 pounds and lived on Raiwong Road, which was in Chinese Town. But Hatcher had something even better than a description.

He was staring down at the passport photograph of Wol Pot, the Vietnamese whose real name was Taisung, the commandant of the Huie-kui prison camp.

ROGUE TIGER

He would come to be known as Old Scar. He lay in the tall grass at the edge of the pond watching the chital stag rutting in the mud fifty feet away. He had been stalking the herd for three hours, sometimes lying motionless for thirty or forty minutes at a time as they moved down through the sandy nullah and out of the ravine into the flat plain and from there through the ten-foot-high bamboo grove to the water hole.

In his day, Old Scar had been a magnificent tiger, over five hundred pounds, faster than any male within a hundred miles, indomitable, and so powerful he had once brought down a seven-hundred-pound buffalo and hauled it with his iron jaws almost a quarter of a mile to his family and then hid the carcass twenty feet above the ground in a tree. This had been some tiger.

Now he was old and crippled by rheumatism. Old battle wounds ached when he crawled. His teeth were yellow and one of his cuspids was broken off. And a huge, ragged scar etched his face from between his eyes down the side of his muzzle to his jaw, the signature of a younger, more aggressive male who would have killed any other tiger of that age and infirmity. But Old Scar had still been a little too tough for the young buck, and he had shown enough stuff to take a draw and walk away from the fight with only his wound.

Old Scar carefully placed one enormous paw in front of the other, creeping by inches toward the unsuspecting deer so as not to rustle the dry leaves under him. For all his twenty-two years he had hunted the same way, with the stealth and patience and speed he had learned watching his mother. He was moving by pure instinct now. Except that all his tricks were failing him.

The stag raised his head suddenly and sniffed the air. There was no wind, so he had not yet picked up the tiger’s scent, but he was wary. The herd was spread out and knee-deep in the water. They knew better than to go any deeper, for the pond was also the home of several crocodiles. But they were vulnerable and the big five- hundred-pound buck was responsible.

Old Scar was rigid in his crouch. His once powerful legs were hugged up against his belly, ready to spring, his ears forward, his tail erect. But he had lost his touch and a leaf crackled suddenly under him; the chital spooked and ran, and the herd scattered with it. Old Scar charged after the stag as it darted this way and that, turning suddenly back toward the water. Old Scar dodged with the chital, got inside its turn and was within striking distance. But as he made his big move the stag kicked out both its rear legs. One hoof caught Old Scar in the right eye and the pupil burst like a marble exploding. The tiger roared with pain, took one futile, prideful swipe of his mighty paw and missed by a mile.

The stag and the herd were gone.

Old Scar collapsed in the water, roaring with the pain in his legs and shoulders and from the eye he had just lost to a deer. He rested, panting, in the warm water for an hour and then dragged himself to the muddy banks and rolled in the soft, wet earth to heal his aching body.

The situation was getting desperate. It was his twentieth try in two days, and his twentieth miss. The day before, a careless lemur had moved within striking distance and then had outrun him, dashing up a tree to safety. There had been a time when Old Scar could have taken the tree in three bounds. But he had wearily turned in defeat and skulked away from the monkey’s shrieked insults. Old Scar was very hungry.

The herd did not return, and finally he decided to move to another watering hole. He was going back into the territory of another young male, but Old Scar had no choice. He was too tired to go any farther. As he stalked carefully through the brush, a sharp scent stung his nostrils. It was an odor that stirred old longings in the tiger. The smell of a tigress in estrus. And then he heard her growling, a strange, demanding and instantly seductive call, and he heard the male answer her from nearby. Old Scar hunched down and crept forward, peering through the tall grass and saw the female approach the male, begin to nuzzle him, arouse him, and then she lay down and he straddled her. Old Scar watched, remembering his younger days when the females wanted him and flirted with him.

Old Scar moved on, picking up another scent. Chital. He could smell its fresh blood and he knew the male had been lured away from his dinner by the female. He crept forward, following the scent of the freshly killed deer until he found it, hidden deep in a bamboo thicket where even the vultures could not see it.

Old Scar lay on his empty belly and as hungry as he was he fastidiously dressed the dead animal as all tigers do. He started at the rear, licking away the blood, then ripping into the rump with his shearing teeth, pulling out the intestines with his incisors, and cleaning the bones with a tongue like sandpaper.

Old Scar could put away forty pounds of food a day. He had not eaten in three days, and he consciously kept from purring as he ate so as not to attract the male. He could hear the other two cats screaming in ecstasy and he knew it was safe to keep eating. But then he heard the other male rolling over and snorting. Still hungry, the old giant crept off through the tall grass. He knew he could not survive another fight with a young tiger. It was getting dark, so he found a hollow tree and slept the night.

Now he had been wandering aimlessly for two more days, unsuccessfully seeking food, and his hunger was turning to anger. Then Old Scar found himself in a place that was vaguely familiar. He began to recognize landmarks and remembered things from his youth. This was where he had begun life, where his mother had taught him all the tricks before sending him out to find his own territory.

He patrolled the plot of land, looking for traces of other tigers, but there were none. Old Scar realized there was very little grass here. And there were houses built around one side of the lake and where there once had been a large bamboo-fringed bay there were vegetables growing. The forest was now a hundred yards from the lake with only reeds to provide cover for him.

The tigers’ two biggest enemies, progress and man, had stolen more of their domain. But Old Scar was too tired to go any farther. On the far side of the lake he could see people moving about. He crawled on his belly, sneaked into the lake and crouched there quietly, cooling himself, bathing his wounds and drinking the cool water.

It was near dusk when he saw the child: a girl, no more than three years old, a naked toddler who had wandered away from her mother’s eye. She strolled along the water’s edge, kicking at it, making splashes.

Old Scar watched her with his one good eye. She looked like a monkey, perhaps more meat. She didn’t appear as fast and she had no tail. He pulled his legs up under him, got ready. His ears leaned forward, his lips crept back away from his teeth.

The little girl danced straight to him. When she was perhaps five feet away, she saw the giant, hunched in water up to his shoulders, his yellow eyes afire, his broken teeth twinkling. Before she could scream, the tiger lunged. One giant leap and Old Scar had her in his jaws. As he would have done with any animal, he bent her head back like a deer’s, bit hard into the throat and suffocated her. Then he turned and sneaked back to the safety of the jungle with his kill. He settled down and started to lick off the blood.

He had tasted better meat and his eye had festered and he was feverish and agitated, but the kill was easy and the food was nourishing. The next day he sneaked back down to the lake. This time he crept closer to the village, close enough to see another child playing in the dirt at the edge of the village.

In the next week Old Scar killed two more children, a crippled old monk and a full-grown woman who was doing her wash in the lake.

That was when Max Early was called in. That was when the party started. And that was when Hatcher finally began to unravel the riddle of Murphy Cody.

DOGS

At first, Wol Pot’s wallet seemed to yield very little besides his passport. There was a driver’s license with an address on Rajwang Road in Chinese Town, two bet tickets from the racetrack, obviously losers, and a ticket to a boxing match, now past. According to Wol Pot’s papers he was a ‘produce salesman.’

There was nothing else of interest in the wallet.

Over breakfast, Hatcher spread the two photos, of Wol Pot and Pai and Cody, in front of Sy.

‘I’m also looking for this guy,’ Hatcher confided, tapping the picture of Wol Pot.

Sy studied the photographs for a few moments.

‘I think on this girl since yesterday,’ he said. ‘She is most beautiful. I maybe see her but . . . I think that about all beautiful women.’

‘Do you remember where?’ Hatcher asked.

Sy shook his head. ‘He is with this girl?’ he asked, pointing to the photo of Cody.

‘Maybe, maybe not. I don’t know. The GI is the one I’m looking for.’

‘Okay,’ Sy said. ‘Where do we go first?’

Hatcher took out his list of locations from Porter’s day book. Unfortunately Porter’s diary contained notations on locations and times but no addresses and no comments. He also had the address from Wol Pot’s passport, an address in Yawaraj. He took out the sheet the Mongoose had given him, the water-streaked page from Porter’s diary dated the last day of Porter’s life, and spread it out on the table. That was all he had to go on, that and a note to check out a bar called the Longhorn in a place called Tombstone and another note: ‘Thai Horse?’ He smoothed the water-ruined sheet carefully on the table and perused it once more, but the only thing legible was part of one entry:’ . . . try, 4:15p . .

‘Address from passport is in Chinese Town,’ Sy said. ‘Rajwang Road. We start there maybe?’

‘Good idea,’ Hatcher said. But it wasn’t. The address turned out to be phony — a non-number along the river on the edge of Chinese Town. The closest number to it was an ancient building that in disrepair seemed ominous. Its wooden walls were faded and peeling from the sun and rain, the windows were boarded over, and it seemed to sag in the middle, as though the very floors were tired. A deserted old relic squeezed between two other deserted old relics. Hatcher tried the doors of the three warehouses but they were nailed shut. Deserted buildings. Obviously nobody lived in them. Wol Pot’s address was an empty pier.

What was Wol Pot doing there? Obviously Porter had been following Wol Pot and made notations of every place the man went. The first two locations on the list were restaurants in Chinese Town, but they yielded nothing. Hatcher assumed that Wol Pot had eaten there. The managers of both studied Wol Pot’s photo for a long time, then shrugged. ‘Maybe’ was the consensus.

‘What’s next?’ Sy asked.

‘You know a place called the Stagecoach Deli.’

‘Okay,’ Sy said. ‘Very near here.’

‘We’ll try it next.’

They drove through noisy, tacky Patpong with its blaring loudspeakers outside gaudy bars and dazzling neon signs, fully ablaze in mid afternoon, and turned at a place called Jack’s American Star and the San Francisco Bar, which advertised topless go-go dancers who performed ‘special shows.’

Then suddenly they were on a street out of the past, away from the neon glare, the bellowing loudspeakers and the hawkers. It could have been a street in any Western American town and even in the daylight there was about it an unreal atmosphere. Sunbeams, like spotlights, sliced through the late afternoon mist from the nearby river, and it was eerily quiet, like a ghost town.

‘Stop here!’ Hatcher ordered as they turned into the street. He got out of the car, surveying the strange, winding road. A wooden marker had been tacked over the regular street sign. CLEMENTINE WAY, it read.

‘This has to be the section they call Tombstone, right?’ Hatcher said to Sy.

‘That’s good guess. I saw in the movie over at Palace one time. The O.K. Gunfight.’

‘Gunfight at the O.K. Corral,’ Hatcher corrected.

‘That’s it, Burt Reynolds.’

‘Lancaster.’

‘Chai,’ Sy said, smiling his row of battered teeth.

Hatcher walked down through the mist, past the Hitching Post, which had elegant ‘Western boots and tall cowboy hats displayed in the window. He checked the menu pasted to the window of Yosemite Sam’s, and it reminded him of home: Brunswick stew, chili, spareribs and pork barbecue. The Stagecoach Deli was a few doors farther down the street. It had swinging doors and an imitation Tiffany window but offered lower East Side New York fare. A little farther on was Langtry’s Music Hall. The photographs in its two-pane windows were of naked Thai and Chinese dancers, but it too conformed to the Western motif that dominated the street. The windows also featured old posters of entertainers from the gay nineties. Lillian Russell, Houdini, Lillie Langtry and Eddie Foy. It did not open until 6P.M.

He walked down one side of the street, crossed over and came back up the other side, passing other quaint spots. An ice cream parlor called Pike’s Peak, a ham- and-egg joint called the Roundup, which advertised American doughnuts in its window. A movie theater, the Palace, which according to its marquee played American double features.

And there was the Longhorn, its flat roof dwarfed by a soaring onion-domed wat directly behind it. The Longhorn’s sign was shaped like a giant scroll, rolling over the entrance from one side to the other. There was an old-fashioned wooden Indian propped by the swinging doors and long wooden bus-stop benches on both sides of the door, and a balcony over the sidewalk supported by unfinished four-by-fours.

Someone had gone to a lot of trouble to make this small, isolated section authentic.

A large black man was sitting on one of the benches in front of the bar’s beveled glass window, drinking a can of Japanese beer. He was leaning back against the window of the saloon with his eyes closed, letting the afternoon sun burn a hole in him. Every so often he would take a swig from the can.

Hatcher crossed back to the Stagecoach Deli and checked out the short street. There was a hint of music and conversation from behind the closed doors of Tombstone but none of the hawking and loudspeakers of Patpong, a block away.

The notations in Porter’s notes said, ‘Stagecoach Deli, taxi, 10A.M., 1 hr’; the following day, ‘Stagecoach Deli, noon, 45 mins’; and the day after that, ‘Palace Theater, 2:30 P.M., 35 mins.’ Did that mean Wol Pot had come to these places in a taxi or had he been watching them from a taxi? He could have eaten at the Stagecoach Deli in forty-five minutes but he had spent only thirty-five minutes at the Palace Theater, hardly time to see a film.

The two places formed a perfect triangle with the Longhorn as the apex. He took out the water-scarred sheet the Mongoose had given him, and studied the partially legible entry.

try, 4:15 p . . ‘was still all he could decipher.

The entry could have referred to Langtry’s Music Hall: ‘Langtry, 4:15 P.M.’ It fit. Was it possible that Wol Pot had been observing the Longhorn four days in a row, each day a little later than the day before? He remembered what the ex-soldier upriver had told Daphne. ‘Go to the Longhorn in Tombstone, a lot of Americans living in Bangkok hang out there.’

An ironic scenario popped into Hatcher’s mind. Perhaps Wol Pot had lost track of Cody. Wol Pot was looking for Cody, and Porter was following Wol Pot.

‘I’m going to take a look at the Longhorn,’ Hatcher told Sy.

Before Hatcher could cross the street, another man came down the sidewalk toward the bar. He was wearing tan safari shorts, a faded red tank top, and red, white and blue sneakers. A red bandanna held scruffy blond hair out of his eyes.

He had a dog on the end of a long leather leash. It was a big, ugly, dumb-looking animal, which looked like a cross between a Great Dane and a spaniel with some hound dog thrown in. He had sleepy yellow eyes, a long, slobbery muzzle and a long, skinny tail that drooped until it rose at the end. His coat was shiny deep brown except for a large white spot that looked as if someone had thrown paint on his shoulder. There was nothing symmetrical about the spot; it covered half his face and then dribbled down his chest, where it was speckled with brown spots. The dog didn’t walk, it loped, and it didn’t look bright enough to scratch an itch.

The black man opened one eye, saw the dog, and started to chuckle to himself. ‘The chuckle started at his big, burly shoulders and rip pled down to his portly waist. He kept his mouth shut hut eventually the chuckle burst out in the form of a loud snort, followed by a stream of beer.

‘Lord laughing out loud, would you look at that big, lazy, ugly, dumb-ass, sissified, silly-tailed dog over there.’

‘Excuse me, you talkin’ about my dog, Otis?’ the man in the red, white and blue sneakers said with a scowl.

‘I’m talking about that big, lazy, ugly, dumb-ass, sissifled, silly-tailed dog right there. Would his name be Otis?’

‘What do you mean, “would be”? His name is Otis’

‘Well then, that’s who I’m talkin’ about.’

‘You’re really pissing me off, brother, I told you, that’s my dog.’

‘If you don’t say anything, nobody’ll know.’

‘I’m proud of that fuckin’ dog, man.’

‘Then you’re dumber than he is.’

‘Maybe you’d like to gum your dinner tonight. Maybe you’d like to pick your teeth up off the floor and carry them home in your pocket.’

‘Yeah, and maybe you’d like me to pull your tongue down and tie it to your dick.’

‘Lord God a’mighty, you must be having a lucky day. You must think this is the luckiest fuckin’ day in your lousy, worthless, fuckin’ life.’

‘I don’t need luck to grind you into the street and make a big ugly spot out of you.’

‘I hope you’ve made your peace with God. I hope you’ve kissed that wart-faced, fat, smelly old whore of a mother of yours Ah-dee-fuckin’-ose, because you’re about to be nothin’ but patty sausage.’

‘Shit, I don’t know how you lived this long, somebody hasn’t parked a sixteen-wheel goddamn Mack truck in that ugly fuckin’ mouth of yours, it’s big enough, that’s for damn sure.’

‘I’ll kick your ass all the way back to King Tut’s court. I’ll kick you right outa this century.’

‘Well then, why don’t just get to it, motor mouth.’

‘Kiss this sweet earth farewell, motherfucker.’

‘That’ll be the day, you stand-short, rubber-muscled dipshit.’

‘Why don’t you stop talkin’ and start fightin’.’

‘Well, what are you waiting for, you little dork, a goddamn band or somethin’. Goddamn fireworks. Goddamn invitation from the fuckin’ president.’

‘Listen, they friends most time,’ Sy confided to Hatcher. ‘I bring Amehrikaan tourist here alla time, they buddies usually.’

‘Buddies!’ Hatcher answered with surprise.

‘Most time.’

The white man tied the big dog to one of the posts in front of the Longhorn and struck a classic boxing pose, holding one fist close to his face, snapping his nose with his thumb and shooting his other arm out tauntingly.

‘Get serious, Potter,’ the black man said with a smile. ‘I’ll whack you into the sidewalk, won’t be nuthin showin’ but the top of your miserable head.’

‘Well, get at it, Corkscrew, get at it,’ the man called Potter said, dancing about.

A large man with shoulders like a bison’s stepped out of the Longhorn and stood with his bands on a waist the size of a ballet dancer’s. He had snow-white hair and a white handlebar mustache, and he wore cowboy boots and jeans and a holster with a .357 Python jammed in it.

Hatcher watched the display with open-mouthed awe. What we got here is a time warp, he thought to himself.

The white-haired man stepped between Potter and Corkscrew and laid a gentle hand on their shoulders. ‘What the hell’s going on?’ he asked?

‘He’s making fun of my dog,’ Potter snapped. The white-haired man looked at the dog and smothered a laugh of his own.

‘You know what that dog’s name is?’ asked the black man, still struggling to keep from laughing. ‘Otis. Otis, for God’s sake. His name’s enough to make a grown man cry.’

Potter struggled to get at him and the big man pushed him gently back.

‘Just take it easy, Benny,’ the white-haired man said. ‘Come in, I’ll buy you both a drink. You can leave Otis tied up there on the post.’

Benny looked stricken.

‘Somebody’ll steal him,’ he said, panic in his voice. Corkscrew broke out in gales of laughter, but the white-haired man tried to be diplomatic. ‘I don’t think so,’ he said quietly. ‘I don’t think anybody’ll steal your dog.’

‘Not unless they’re real, real hungry,’ said Corkscrew through laughter that was approaching tears.

‘Damn it, Corkscrew, I’ve had enough!’ Benny roared.

‘Aw hell, c’mon,’ Corkscrew said, ‘I’ll buy the damn drinks.’

The white-haired man herded them both into the saloon. Otis watched them go, then flopped down on the sidewalk, snorted, and fell sound asleep.

‘Who’s the big guy with the—’ Hatcher said, twirling his fingers at the corners of his mouth.

‘Mr Mustache? That is Earp,’ Sy answered.

‘Earp?’

Sy nodded once emphatically.

‘Not Wyatt Earp?’ Hatcher asked, almost sarcastically.

Sy reacted with surprise.

‘You know him?’ he asked.

‘No, I just guessed.’ Hatcher sighed.

‘That very good,’ Sy replied, obviously impressed.

‘I think I’ll just check that place out,’ Hatcher said, heading across the street toward the door of the Longhorn.

‘I wait here,’ Sy said. He started practicing a few moves on the sidewalk.

‘Suit yourself,’ Hatcher said.

When he stepped inside, the time warp was complete. He waited for a few seconds, letting his eyes grow accustomed to the dark interior. Then he fixed the details of the place in his head so he wouldn’t forget them. It seemed remarkably authentic, a big room with green shades over the tables and sawdust on the floor; ceiling fans lazily circulating the air, which smelled of bar drinks and hamburgers; an antique bar that stretched the width of the room, and obviously had come from America, with a beveled mirror behind it, which made the saloon seem wider; large letters engraved in the glass that spelled ‘Tom Skoohanie’ and under the name, ‘The Galway Roost, 1877’; a beat-up old buffalo head with one eye and a black patch over the other; faded daguerreotypes and drawings of famous outlaws, lawmen and Indians on the wall, a vintage Wurlitzer jukebox in a corner, turned very low, playing an old record — Tony Bennett’s ‘Younger Than Springtime’; in another corner, a bulletin hoard covered with notes, business cards and patches from Army, Navy and Marine units; on one side of the room, raised a couple of steps above the floor, a smaller room behind a beaded curtain.

The man called Wyatt Earp sat at one end of the bar chatting with Corkscrew and Benny, who seemed to have forgotten their differences.

The bartender was a tall, elegant black man in a black T-shirt covered by a suede vest, blue jeans and cowboy boots. He wore a cowboy hat big enough to take a bath in with a red, yellow and green parrot feather stuck in its band. The only other person in the main room had long blond hair and sat hunched over the bar.

Nobody gave Hatcher a first look as he walked toward the bar, yet he felt a sudden chill, like a cold wind blowing across the back of his neck, and the hair on the back of his arms stood up. He felt uncomfortable, as if, uninvited, he was entering a private club. Why had Wol Pot come to Tombstone day after day for short periods of time? Was he indeed watching the Longhorn? Was he following Cody? Thai Horse?

Was the answer to the riddle of Murph Cody somewhere in that room?

TOMBSTONE

Hatcher knew he would have to proceed with caution. If Cody was alive and in Bangkok, he obviously did not want to be recognized, so it was reasonable to assume that anyone who knew him was protecting his identity. Did someone here know about Huie-Kui, the ghost camp? Or Wol Pot, Cody, ‘Thai Horse? He knew caution was called for — about what he said and to whom.

‘What’s your poison?’ the bartender asked in a deep cultured voice that was almost operatic.

‘Singha,’ Hatcher answered.

‘Draft, bottle or can?’

‘Draft.’

The bartender filled a frosted mug with Thai beer, all the while keeping his eyes on Hatcher. ‘First drink’s on the house,’ he said, sliding it down the bar. Hatcher held out his hand and felt the cool, wet glass slap his palm.

‘Khawp khun,’ he said.

‘You’re welcome.’

The black man’s face was friendly but his sparkling eyes were suspicious.

‘You don’t look like the average tourist we get in here,’ he said, casually running a rag over the highly polished bar. ‘You have the look of a man who did some time in-country.’

‘Military intelligence out of Cam Ranh,’ Hatcher answered.

‘Special Forces,’ said the bartender. ‘I was never sure where the hell I was. Where you from?’

The man who was slouched over the bar sat up and leaned on his arms, staring at Hatcher through faraway gray eyes; eyes that were bloodshot and drowsy. Clean- shaven with his long, blond surfer’s hair tied back in a ponytail, he had on an unbuttoned khaki safari jacket with sweat stains half-mooning the armpits, no shirt, a pair of white tennis shorts and old-fashioned high-top Keds. Hatcher could not guess his age, which could have been thirty-five or fifty. The man said nothing. He just stared at Hatcher for a while, then turned back to his half-empty drink and stared into it.

‘I like to keep moving, never nest anywhere for too long,’ was Hatcher’s whispered answer.

‘What brings you to Bangkok?’

‘Vacation. My driver said this was the place to come. Who knows, I might bump into an old pal.’

‘Who knows?’ the bartender answered, noncommittally.

Hatcher patted the bar, trying to keep the conversation alive, and said, ‘I’m guessing this bar didn’t come from anywhere near Thailand.’

‘You do know your bars,’ said the bartender. He stroked the worn top affectionately. This one and the mirror and old John Ford up there,’ he said, wiggling a thumb over his shoulder toward the one-eyed bison’s head, ‘came here from one of the finest saloons in the U.S.’

‘Is that a fact,’ said Hatcher.

‘Old Skoohanie was a Texas cowboy -· and one lucky Irishman. One night he wandered into a gambler’s tent in Abilene — when Abilene wasn’t much more than a passing thought — and runs forty bucks to six thousand. Ends up owning the tent, the tables, the bank, the whole megilah. That was the beginning of the Galway Roost.’ He stopped long enough to draw himself half a glass of beer.

‘Which doesn’t explain how it got here,’ said Hatcher.

‘There was this mealy-mouthed little sapenpaw name of Edgar Skoohanie in my outfit in Nam who was always bragging about this bar of his,’ the bartender went on. ‘So I told him if he ever wanted to sell out, let me know. Sure enough, one day I get a call and the voice on the other end of the hook says, “This is Edgar Skoohanie, remember me?” Like anybody with an IQ of more than ten would forget a name like Edgar Skoohanie, right, and I says sure and he says things aren’t going well for the oh Roost and he’s gonna change it into a disco! A fucking disco, for God’s sake. We kicked it back and forth and I end up with the bar and the mirror and Edgar throws in old one-eyed John Ford there and next thing you know, I’m in business. Twelve thousand purple for the lot and four thousand more to get it shipped over.’

The bartender never spoke in terms of American money, he talked of bahts, one baht being about five cents American; of purples, which were five-hundred baht notes, or browns, which were ten bahts, or greens, which were twenty, or reds, which were a hundred. He paused again, this time to draw Hatcher another beer, then said, ‘What else was there to do but open up the Longhorn?’

‘Bet a good story goes with the bullet hole in that mirror,’ said Hatcher.

‘Not as interesting as the one that goes with that voice of yours,’ the bartender answered.

‘Talked when I should have listened,’ Hatcher growled.

The barkeep responded with a barracks-room laugh. Two gold teeth gleamed from the side of his mouth. A full carat’s worth of diamond twinkled from the center of one of them.

‘I do like a man who can joke about his mistakes,’ he said, sticking out a hand big enough to crush a basketball. ‘Name’s Sweets Wilkie, I own the place.’

‘Hatch,’ Hatcher answered.

As Wilkie and Hatcher talked, two Thai girls entered from a door at the rear. They were beautiful young girls with long black hair that cascaded down their backs almost to their waists. They were dressed in cowgirl miniskirts, cobra-skin cowboy boots and fake pinto pony vests, their budlike breasts holding the vests at bay. Neither of them could have been more than fifteen. They hit Sweets Wilkie from both sides, giggling and wrapping their arms around him and kissing him on both cheeks.

‘This is Jasmine, we call her Jazz, and this is Orchid,’ Wilkie said, obviously enjoying the attention. ‘We been married about a year now.’

‘You and Orchid?’ Hatcher asked. Wilkie looked surprised and said, ‘Hell, both of ‘em.’

‘Both of them!’

‘Been married and divorced six times since I been here and I’m yet to lay out one baht for alimony. I figure this time I’ll double up — maybe I’ll get a little luckier.’

His glittering grin lit up the darkened bar. He swatted the girls on their ample derrières and they moved on down the bar.

‘Welcome to Tombstone,’ the blond man suddenly mumbled, nodding as though he were about to fall asleep, and continuing to stare into his drink.

‘Meet Johnny Prophett, the official poet laureate of Tombstone,’ Wilkie said.

‘My pleasure,’ said Hatcher.

Prophett looked over his nose at Hatcher, smiled wanly, and held out in Hatcher’s general direction a hand that was cold and lifeless.

‘How many Americans live in Bangkok?’ Hatcher asked.

Prophett stood up unsteadily hopping two or three steps on his right foot. His eyes were beginning to water and he shrugged his shoulders and scratched his arms, and Hatcher realized, seeing him on his feet, that Prophett was rail-thin, almost emaciated. Prophett held his arms out at his sides like an evangelist on a roll. ‘Four, maybe five hundred,’ he said. ‘In all shapes and sizes. Engineers, salesmen, tennis bums, stock racketeers, gamblers, walking wounded, cynics, miscreants, displaced persons, anti-socials. You name it, we are it.’

Well, thought Hatcher, than narrows the odds on finding Cody from five million to one to four hundred to one.

Wilkie said casually, ‘Just a bunch of relocated Yanks.’

‘God’s fucked up, man,’ Prophett meandered. ‘Supposed to be dead on the far side of the river. Bloody boatman hasn’t figured out what happened. Even a poet has a hard time making any sense outa that one.’

‘Right,’ Wilkie agreed and Hatcher nodded, although neither of them knew what Prophett was talking about. ‘Johnny’s doing a book,’ he said by way of explanation and winked.

‘Bombay and tonic,’ Hatcher said to Wilkie.

Wilkie took the glass, put in a handful of ice cubes, and filled it with soda water.

As Prophett rambled on, a man came from behind the beads, shaking his hands as though they were cramped. He was a bizarre sight a husky man pushing six feet, walking with a little strut, his shoulders rocking back and forth. He wore jeans and a white sleeveless T-shirt. The skull imprinted on the front had a rose in its bony teeth and Grateful Dead printed across the back. His arms were thick and muscular and his hands, although large, had slender, almost delicate fingers. Thick black hair curled around his shoulders and tumbled down over his forehead. What was bizarre was a thin, red line that ran from his forehead down across the bridge of his nose to the point of his chin. His face was painted black on one side of the line and white on the other.

‘That’s Wonderboy, our resident minstrel,’ Prophett said.

Wonderboy walked to the bar and held his hand out toward Sweets Wilkie.

‘My luck’s on vacation,’ he said. ‘The box, Maestro.’ Wilkie handed him a four-string guitar, polished and well worn, an instrument obviously cared for with great affection. The strange-looking man walked over to the Wurlitzer, pulled the plug with a booted foot, and sat down next to it.

He closed his eyes and laid his head back against the wall and started singing: “Hey Jude, don’t let her go. . .

It was a beautiful voice. Clear, deep, a touch of whiskey in its high tones, and he gave the song such a plaintive plea that one wanted to grab Jude and shake some sense into his head.

Prophett leaned over and whispered, ‘Five feet from a flame-thrower when it took a mortar. Nobody really wants to see what’s under that paint.’

As the afternoon wore on, the bar began to ff1 up. Wilkie commandeered Benny Potter to help as the bar began to stack up two deep. His eyes watering, Prophett began hunching his shoulders and absently scratching his arms. A man entered the Longhorn walking with a funny little jump step, as if he had just fallen off a two-story building and landed flat on his feet. He had the trunk and arms of a weight lifter but skinny spindles for legs. He skipped straight to Earp and whispered something to him. Earp got up and went behind the bar and through a door into the rear of the building somewhere. The man with the funny walk went up the steps and through the beads into the small alcove.

‘That’s Gallagher,’ said Prophett. ‘Gerald Gallagher from Hobart, Indiana, owns a club called Langtry’s across the street. Naked girls. Not ladies, girls. Gallagher doesn’t hire them if they’re over twelve. In Gallagher’s book, any woman over twelve is menopausal. In the United States, he’d be stoned to death in the public square.’

‘How come he walks so funny?’ Hatcher asked.

‘His jeep hit a land mine. The floorboard almost put him in orbit,’ said Prophett. ‘His feet never woke up.’

‘I assume you were in Nam,’ Hatcher said to Prophett. Prophett stared back into his glass. ‘Hell, I was with Gallagher the day he blew up. I left a leg in that jeep.’

He held out his right leg and tapped on it with a knuckle. It made a metallic sound, ping, like hitting an empty water pipe.

Prophett, Hatcher said to himself, that name is vaguely familiar.

Earp came back into the bar and went up through the beads into the Hole in the Wall. He sat down beside the Honorable, who was watching two men play eight ball.

‘That’s Hatcher down there talking to Johnny,’ he said.

‘Ah, you followed my advice, then.’

‘Sy didn’t steer him here, he turned upon his own.’

‘As I predicted.’

‘Don’t get smug on me. I’m not so sure it’s a good idea, playing along with this guy.’

‘I knew he would end up here sooner or later,’ the Honorable said, proud that his intuition had paid off. Earp took a long cheroot from his vest pocket and lit it, twisting it slowly between his fingers so it would burn evenly.

‘He’s flashing around a picture of Wol Pot. Also Cody. And he works for Sloan.’

The Honorable made a temple of his fingers and rested his mouth against its peak.

‘He told Sweets he was here on vacation, but Sy connected with him after he had breakfast with Sloan,’ Earp went on. ‘He’s not here by accident.’

‘Chance perhaps. They both are here, they both —,

‘Let’s be serious. He’s tracking, and I say if he’s here this quickly, he’s too close.’

‘Don’t let your paranoia cloud good judgment.’

‘I say he’s on to something.’

‘A fair call. Maybe you can find out what.’

‘I say Thai Horse takes him out.’

‘Kill him?’

‘Don’t you understand, this is a very dangerous man. I know him by reputation. He was a sanctioned assassin in Nam. They sent him out with a list. When he scratched off the last name, he came in and got another list. He’s not some dumb gumshoe from San Francisco.’

‘All the more reason to be cautious. I gave you my suggestion. Get next to him. Befriend him. Find out what he’s doing here. You can’t go around just recklessly knocking people off, Mr Earp. Regardless of what we call it, this is not the O.K. Corral.’

Earp glanced down at the bar. Hatcher and Prophett were chatting. The whispering man seemed to show no interest in what was going on behind the beads.

‘I will also remind you that Porter was killed here.’

‘So?’

‘So even if you decide to do something rash, don’t do it in Bangkok. Lure him out in the countryside somewhere. Two in a row would attract a lot of attention from the Americans.’

‘Great idea,’ Earp said flatly. ‘I’ll just invite him on a picnic.’

‘You must be resourceful. You sound like you’re panicking. You still have the advantage, Wyatt. We know more about him than he knows about us. Now you must find out why he’s here.’

‘I don’t think you could torture that out of him.’

‘You know what they say about getting more with candy than sour cream.’

‘This man moves very fast. This is his kind of game.’

‘If he is connected to Sloan and you kill him, they’ll send somebody else.’

‘Not if it’s done right.’

The Honorable leaned back and smiled. ‘That’s all I’m suggesting, dear friend,’ he said with a wave of his hand. ‘Whatever you do, do it properly. As you pointed out, it is a dangerous game and he’s very good at it.’

‘Very good doesn’t cut it. He’s an expert.’

As Earp spoke a boxy man in tennis shorts and a white T-shirt got up from the poker table and approached a portly gentleman in white. He drew up a chair and sat down facing the white-haired gentleman, who put aside his book and took a sip from the wineglass as the dark-haired man leaned forward and spoke to him in whispered tones. The older man nodded sagely as the other spoke and pointed to the card game behind the glass-beaded curtain.

Earp turned on his barstool, facing the main room, took out his .357 with the special barrel and laid it casually on the corner of the bar. Hatcher watched the ritual with more than mild interest.

‘That’s Eddie Riker, the ice cream parlor, remember? talking to the Honorable,’ Prophett rambled on to Hatcher, nodding toward the older man. ‘The Honorable is the official banker of Tombstone.’ His nose began to run and he sniffed, then began scratching his side. ‘Kind of sets his interest on what the loan’s for, a little less for eating money until payday than, say, to cover a turn of the cards at the poker game up there in the Hole in the Wall.’

‘And the guy with the cannon is the Brink’s man?’

Prophett laughed. “Brink’s man,” that’s slick. The Brink’s man is Wyatt T. Earp, known to us as W.T. He kind of covers the money box, case somebody should take a notion to heist it. Him and that piece he calls his Buntline Special.’

‘Looks like he can handle the job.’

‘The Thai police leave us alone, they let old W.T. keep things quiet.’

‘That’s a helluva weapon,’ said Hatcher, nodding toward the Magnum. ‘You could walk to Milwaukee on the barrel.’

Prophett started to laugh again. Up above, the Honorable opened the strongbox: and took out what appeared to be a loan note. He scribbled on it and slid it to Riker, who scribbled on it, and then the Honorable counted out five purples and slid them across the table. Riker nodded his thanks and went back to the game.

‘Riker is have a bad day,’ said Prophett.

Wilkie ambled back up the bar.

‘How we doing here?’ he asked.

‘I’ll have a beer,’ Hatcher said. ‘Wouldn’t mind turning a few cards, either.’

Wilkie stared at him for a moment and then said, ‘They’re kind of funny about who plays in the game. But if you hang around long enough and they get to know you, they’ll invite you.’

‘Kind of a closed corporation,’ Hatcher suggested.

‘Kind of.’ Wilkie went back down the bar and started talking to a customer.

‘Was Sweets who started Tombstone,’ Prophett said, and his words began to run together. ‘Sweets and Wyatt. Sweets was an English professor at Tuskegee Institute, got his master’s with honors from Atlanta University, what’d they do? They drafted him. A teacher, a teacher, man, and they dumped him in Nam and the teacher became Sergeant ‘Wilkie and he looked around at what was happening and he never went home. Opened the Longhorn, then Eddie Riker started up Pike’s Peak —‘

Wilkie’s eyes cut toward Prophett. He was smiling at his bar trade, but Hatcher could tell he was listening to Prophett ramble on about Tombstone and the Longhorn. Suddenly he turned and went to the end of the bar and said something to Corkscrew. The black man got up without looking down the bar and went behind the beads.

‘— and Corkscrew and Potter opened Yosemite Sam’s. Wonderboy opened the Stagecoach,’ Prophett mumbled on, staring down at the bar. ‘Max, he couldn’t stand anyplace dark, closed up, he went down south to do some farming. And Kilhanney, poor fuckin’ Kil — that goddamn Taisung.

Hatcher, lulled by the low, rambling conversation, was suddenly jerked awake. He tried not to show his surprise when Prophett said the name. Taisung! Wol Pot’s real name.

Before he could continue, Prophett was cut off. ‘Hey!’ Wilkie called from down the bar and Prophett looked up, startled. Wilkie moved quickly back up to them. ‘Easy, kid,’ he said, rather sternly. ‘Save it for the book.’

Hatcher looked around at the Hole in the Wall. Vaguely, behind the veil of beads, he could make out a woman among the seven players at the table.

The woman playing poker got up and left the game, standing just behind the curtains for a moment while she counted a handful of bahts, then proceeding into the main room. She was a handsome woman, big-boned and broad-shouldered, with hardly any waist at all. Her blond hair was turning white, belying her features, which placed her under forty. She was wearing a loose-fitting white cotton blouse and a skirt of turquoise Thai silk and thong sandals.

Hatcher remembered her from pictures as being smaller, more delicate, a woman dwarfed by the camera equipment and canvas bag slung over her shoulder. Saigon, toward the end. Melinda Prewett had won a Pulitzer Prize for her pictures of destruction, fear, hatred and pain. When the war ended, she had left a lucrative job with Life magazine and vanished. ‘My camera has nothing else to say,’ was her swan song.

She walked directly toward him, stuffing the fistful of bahts in her skirt pocket and stopped when she got to Johnny Prophett. She put her arm around his shoulder and whispered, ‘Hi,’ in his ear. His face lit up and he laid his cheek against the back of her hand.

‘Howdja do?’ he asked.

‘Made midgets of ‘em all,’ she said softly in his ear. ‘Time for your medicine.’

‘Right,’ he said, his speech beginning to get worse. ‘Meet Hatch. He’s on vacation from the world.’

‘That’s nice,’ she said. She stared hard at Hatcher for several moments, then smiled and said, ‘Welcome to Tombstone, Mr Hatch. Enjoy your stay.’

LEG WORK

Taisung!

The mention of the prison camp commandant by Prophett was definitely a break, but how did it fit in? Obviously Prophett had known the commandant of the Huie-kui prison camp before he had changed his name to Wol Pot. That could mean only one thing to Hatcher

— Prophett had been in the camp or knew people who were.

Several questions troubled Hatcher. Did Prophett know where Taisung/Wol Pot was now? Did any of the other regulars know him? Did any of them know Cody? And who or what was Thai Horse and did he — or it — fit into this picture anywhere?

Hatcher took an ice-cold shower to kill the effects of the afternoon of beer drinking. He thought about Ron Pelletier. They had worked in the brigade together many times. Sloan had told him Pelletier was working immigration out of Chuang Mai, which was in the hill country 430 miles to the north of Bangkok. Pelletier had been in Thailand for two years. Perhaps he knew something, anything, that would help unravel the riddle of Murphy Cody. Pelletier was an old friend and a man he could trust. He made a call to the night number of the Immigration Service and left a message for Pelletier, knowing it was a long shot.

He stretched out on the floor, naked under the ceiling fan, watching the shadows whirling above him as images galloped through his brain: the painted face of Wonderboy as he sat in the corner singing; one-legged Johnny Prophett, reeling around the bar; Gallagher hot-footing it across the room; the Honorable sitting in the corner dipping his finger in wine and turning the pages of his book while Earp with his cannon watched over everyone.

His thoughts kept going back to Prophett and he opened his ch’uang tzu-chi, picturing the emaciated writer as he tried to remember where he had heard that name. All he really knew about him was that he was a writer and had lost a leg in a jeep accident.

Then suddenly he sat up.

Paget!

It wasn’t the name that was familiar, it was the face. But it didn’t fit the name Johnny Prophett. His name was James Paget. He had seen Paget’s byline and picture many times during the war.

Why had he changed his name to Prophett? And if he had changed his name, had others among the regulars changed theirs? And why? Hatcher decided to take another long shot. It was 9 P.M., 9A.M. in Washington. Flitcraft would be in the office by now. He put in the call and went through the security drill.

‘I’ve got some names I’d like you to check on,’ he told his Washington contact. ‘I don’t have much else, but let’s see just how good you really are. One of them is a civilian. James Paget. A journalist . .

He dictated the other names of the regulars he had committed to memory: Max Early, who had been attacked in a tunnel by bats and now lived on a farm because he couldn’t stand closed-in places; Potter, who, with Corkscrew, had held off a whole company of Vietnamese but lost Corkscrew’s brother while they were at it; Eddie Riker, who was the best damn slick pilot in Nam; Gerald Gallagher, who walked like a man on hot coals; and Wyatt Earp, a great-grandson of the real Wyatt Earp, who had been a full colonel in CRIP and had done four tours back to back. Bits and pieces.

‘I’ve also got two nicknames — real long shots,’ Hatcher said, giving Flitcraft Wonderboy and Corkscrew.

‘I’ll get back to you,’ said Flitcraft, unfazed by the skimpy information Hatcher provided on these men.

Hatcher ordered a salad and coffee to the room. As he was eating, the phone rang. He snatched it up, thinking perhaps it was Flitcraft.

‘Hello?’

‘Hatch?’

‘Yeah?’

‘Pelletier . .

The big man sat hunched over the corner of the bar. He was well over six five, with the beefy shoulders and chest of a professional football player. His right sleeve was tucked in the pocket of his field jacket. His remaining hand was enormous and his wrist was the size of a hawser. Time and duty had ravaged and scarred his face. His gray-flecked mustache was trimmed below the corners of his mouth, and his black hair was balding at the temples and turning white around the edges. Dark brown eyes glared unflinchingly from behind slightly tinted, gold-rimmed glasses. A mean- and dangerous-looking man, he did not smile easily, nor was he prone to casual conversation. When he did have something to say, he said it in a deep, flat, clipped monotone.

Hatcher had worked with Pelletier many times and in many places through the years arid knew him to be a staunch and loyal ally and a relentless enemy. Before joining the brigade, Pelletier had been a career marine and had once carried two wounded men at the same time for a mile through the South Asian jungle. Big men. Pelletier looked up as Hatcher entered the bar, and what might have passed for a smile crossed his lips. He offered the enormous hand.

‘Original bad penny,’ he said, ‘Good t’see you, mate.’

‘And you,’ Hatcher’s ruined voice answered sincerely.

‘Glad you’re alive. Heard all kinds of rumors,’ Pelletier said, his eyes boring in from behind the glasses.

‘Like what?’

‘You were dead,’ said Pelletier. ‘Knew that was shit.’

‘What else?’

‘Sloan dumped on you. Did a bad stretch in Los Boxes. He sprang you. You did a Judge Crater.’

‘That’s pretty accurate.’ Hatcher nodded.

‘That son of a bitch. ‘N’you’re still in bed with him?’

‘Not really, I’m doing a little free lance involving an old friend.’

‘Anybody I know?’

‘I don’t think so,’ Hatcher answered, and the big man dropped the subject immediately. Years in the brigade had taught both men not to ask too much about any mission unless they were personally involved. ‘You look pretty rough yourself, Ron. What happened to the arm?’ Hatcher asked.

‘Gangrene. Crunched it in the field, couldn’t find a saw-bones.’

‘Where?’

‘Afgo. . . ‘Bout you?’ he nodded toward Hatcher’s throat.

‘They don’t permit talking in the Boxes. I cleared my throat at the wrong time.’

‘Jesus.’

‘Whatever you’ve heard about that place, it wasn’t bad enough.’

Pelletier drained his glass and held the empty up to the waitress.

‘Lotta good guys went across, hatch,’ he said.

‘Yeah.’

They sat silent for a few moments while the girl brought their drinks.

‘Keeping busy here?’ Pelletier asked, making conversation.

Hatcher shrugged. ‘Been hanging out in a place called the Longhorn.’

‘Sure, down in Tombstone,’ Pelletier said.

‘What do you think of the place?’

Pelletier shrugged. ‘Good American food down there. Bunch of expatriate Americans turning a buck.’

‘Know any of them?’

Pelletier shook his head. ‘Ain’t been down there in a couple months. Place called Yosemite Sam’s has good ribs.’

‘What’ve they got you doing?’ Hatcher asked.

‘Sloan got me a berth with immigration. Got six months t’go on my thirty years. Finish my time, keep my retirement.’

‘I suppose he has his moments.’

‘Suppose. Chicken-shit job, checking locals looking to emigrate.’

‘What else?’ Hatcher asked casually.

Pelletier hesitated long enough to swallow half his drink and wipe his mouth with the back of his hand. He stared at Hatcher for several seconds, thinking the question over, then he chuckled. ‘Been keeping an eye on the hill tribes, see who’s big in 999.’

‘What’s the word?’

‘Your old pal Tollie Fong’s real busy. Still on your case?’

Hatcher nodded. ‘Remember Joe Lung?’

‘That pig sticker.’

‘He tried to dust me in Hong Kong a couple of nights ago. He won’t be sticking any more pigs.’

Pelletier smiled. ‘Good riddance.’

‘I’m sure Fong intends to honor his ch’u-tiao against me.’

‘Maybe too busy right now... Chiu Chaos cornered a lot of this year’s crop.’

‘How much?’

Pelletier shrugged. ‘The DEA thinks Fong’s got two, three tons of pure, stashed.’

‘In Bangkok?’

Pelletier nodded, finished his drink and ordered another, then said, ‘Having trouble moving it. Feds’re looking for a big shipment. A big shipment.’

‘When?’

‘Any day. Concern you?’

‘I’m not sure,’ Hatcher answered. ‘Have you heard any talk about an outfit called Thai Horse?’

Pelletier’s eyebrows rose. ‘Heard that one too, huh? You don’t miss a trick.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Street rumors. Jerry Cramer in the DEA says the word is around that a bunch called Thai Horse has been clipping Fong’s couriers. That’s all it is, rumors.’

‘Know anything about them, any details?’ Hatcher asked.

Pelletier shook his head. ‘A mean bunch, what I hear. Knocked off three of Fong’s couriers. As I get it, a couple months ago they were buying babies off the street here, killing ‘em, stuffing ‘em with skag.’

‘My God!’

‘They got dumped down on the Malay border. Driver got away.’

‘They’re worse than the Chiu-Chaos.’

‘Suppose. Fong’s done worse.’ He shrugged. ‘So far they only took Fong for maybe a hundred keys. Drop in the bucket.’

Hatcher’s mind did some fast arithmetic.

‘That’s four million dollars’ worth of White before it hits the street,’ he said.

‘What’s two hundred twenty pounds against three tons?’

‘Bad face for Fong, makes him look bad. Others might try.’

This time Pelletier’s smile broadened. ‘Be a shame, huh? You take that fucker out, Hatch, they’ll give you downtown Chicago.’

‘I’m just looking for a guy, not looking for trouble.’

‘You’ve changed,’ Pelletier said.

‘Time’ll do it to us all.’

‘If you need any help . . . ‘Pelletier said, letting the offer hang in mid-sentence.

‘Thanks,’ Hatcher said. ‘If I get in trouble there’s nobody I’d rather have back me up than you.’

‘Yeah,’ Pelletier said without a hint of emotion, ‘same with me.’

When Hatcher left the bar an Hour later, he was unaware of movement in the dark shadows of a closed shop across the street. Glittering eyes watched him hail a taxi. As it pulled away a tall Chinese man stepped from the shadows, entered a car that was waiting nearby. It followed Hatcher all the way back to the hotel.

INVITATION

The next morning, the Bangkok Nation told Hatcher that aside from the daily races at the Phat racetrack, Sy’s boxing tournament was the only other sports event of the day.

The big story on the front page was the bombing of the West German embassy in Paris. Seven people, including the Finnish and Swedish ambassadors and their wives, had been killed. The American ambassador had arrived late and missed the explosion.

In a related story, French officials stated that the infamous terrorist known as Hyena, whose body was discovered later in the day in a hotel room, was believed to be responsible for the attack. Their conjecture was that Hyena had later been murdered in an internal dispute with one of his own people.

Hatcher threw the paper aside and studied the photograph of Wol Pot for several minutes, memorizing his eyes, the shape of his face, his ears, the configuration of his nose and lips, committing them to his ch’uang tzu-chi, the window to his mind. He tried to imagine what Wol Pot would look like if he shaved his head or grew a beard or mustache. The keys were Wol Pot’s eyes, savage and merciless, his ears, which were large and stood away from his head, and his nose, which was long and narrow, unlike that of most Indo-Chinese, whose features tended to be more blunt and heavy.

In his ch’uang tzu-chi, Hatcher isolated a strip from Wol Pot’s forehead to the tip of his chin, concentrating on that area of Wol Pot’s face.

Hatcher spent most of the morning checking out the crowded and noisy Sanam Luang produce market, showing Wol Pot’s photograph to stall keepers and boat people, hoping perhaps someone would recognize the man who had listed himself as a produce salesman on his passport. Nothing. He visited the passport office in the hope that Wol Pot would be remembered there. Certainly he must have applied for a new passport. But once again he ran into a wall of shaking heads and silence. It was highly likely that the elusive Wol Pot had purchased a fake passport, which was not that difficult to do in Bangkok.

A check of the rest of the locations in Porter’s book proved uneventful. Hatcher’s best lead to Wol Pot seemed to be his penchant for sports, although spotting the little Vietnamese in the crowds that attended the horse races and boxing matches seemed unlikely. The trip to the horse races yielded nothing but crowds of frenzied bettors, since the only thing Thais seemed to like better than sports was gambling.

He returned to the Longhorn in the late afternoon and gave Sy the rest of the day off to prepare for his boxing match that night, promising he would use the ringside ticket Sy had given him. The crowd would be smaller than at the track, and since the tickets in Wol Pot’s wallet were for a previous boxing match it was obvious he liked the sport.

Wilkie seemed delighted to see him. Up in the Hole in the Wall, there was a great deal of activity among the regulars. The poker game had been suspended, and several of them were sitting around the table, talking excitedly. W. T. was leaning back iii his chair, sighting down the barrel of a .30 caliber rifle with a gold inlaid barrel and a stock of hand-carved teak. A formidable weapon and a beautiful one.

‘You’re a betting man, Hatch,’ Wilkie yelled as he entered the Longhorn. ‘Better hop up there and get in on the fun.’

‘What’s going on?’ Hatcher asked, entering the Tombstone inner sanctum.

‘Tigers!’ Prophett said with a touch of awe in his voice.

‘Tigers?’ Hatcher said with surprise.

‘A tiger, to be precise,’ Earp said polishing his rifle with a chamois cloth. ‘A rogue tiger running crazy down the peninsula. Killed a couple of kids and an old man. Max Early has put together a hunt.’ He seemed in a more friendly mood than he had been the day before and obviously was excited by the thought of the excursion.

‘Kind of sudden, isn’t it?’ Hatcher responded.

‘This is a man-eater,’ said Potter. ‘He’s not going to sit around waiting for us to rent tuxedos for the affair.’

‘It goes down tomorrow morning whether we’re there or not,’ said Earp. ‘And we’re gonna be there. This is one bad animal.’

‘Everybody kicks in two purples, killer take all,’ Wonderboy said. They were like kids planning a holiday.

‘Sweets will hold the wagers. He has to stay here and mind his store,’ said Corkscrew.

‘How about the rest of you?’ Hatcher asked.

‘We’re declaring a holiday,’ Gallagher said brightly.

‘We’re taking the dawn plane to Surat Thani,’ said Earp. ‘Leaves at five A.M. Takes an hour. Max’ll pick us up, takes another hour to drive to his place. We’ll be tracking the bastard by eight. With any luck we’ll be back on the seven o’clock flight tomorrow night. It’ll sure perk up your vacation. Interested?’

‘This an official invitation?’ Hatcher asked.

‘Why not?’ said Riker. ‘The bigger the pot the better.’

‘How about a weapon?’ Hatcher asked.

‘Max’ll fix you up,’ Corkscrew said with a wave of his hand.

Max Early was the only one of the regulars Hatcher had not yet met. The tiger hunt was a perfect opportunity to get closer to these men and particularly Prophett. Thus far, his only glimmer of a lead was Prophett’s mention of Taisung.

‘Pai-tio, soldier, great sanuk,’ Corkscrew said with a grin. The Thais tended to divide everything in life into two categories: mai-tio, which was serious stuff, like work, and pai-tio, which was sanuk—fun.

‘You’ll love it, Hatch,’ said Potter. ‘Give you something to talk about when you get back to the World.’

‘Why not, maybe I’ll get lucky and pay for part of the trip,’ Hatcher said.

‘Great! How many’ve we got now?’ Wonderboy asked.

‘There’s you, Melinda, Johnny, W.T., Corkscrew and Potter, Gallagher, Ed Piker, Hatch here, and Max, of course — that’s nine,’ said the Honorable, who was keeping a list.

‘Are you the official referee of this operation?’ Hatcher asked with a smile.

‘I’m treasurer and chief logistician of this little club,’ the Honorable said to Hatcher. ‘I’ll take one purple for the plane ticket and put your change in the ledger.’

‘Fair enough,’ Hatcher said, handing him the purple note.

Riker rubbed his hands together eagerly and said, ‘Not a bad little pot. Five thousand bahts.’

‘Give Sweets two more for the bet and you’re officially in,’ Earp said. ‘And be at the airport by four-forty- five or you may not get a seat. This is one game you don’t want to miss.’

And a strange game it was, thought Earp. We’re watching him while he watches us. Grudgingly, he admitted to himself that the Honorable was right — they had to isolate Hatcher and find out what his game really was. And now Max had provided the perfect solution to the problem. For if Hatcher was as dangerous as Earp suspected, what better way for him to die than chasing a killer tiger.

A TOUGH GAME