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
