Koko (41 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conor wanted to get out.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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