because it — seemed to disappear all the time.’
‘It wasn’t uncommon for them to move their camps around.’
‘I know. It never occurred to me before, I always assumed he was dead, but maybe the celebrity was Murph.’
‘Do me a favor, will you, Commander? Keep this under your hat. If Cody is alive, give me a chance to find him.’
Schwartz stared hard at Hatcher and then slowly nodded. ‘He deserves that.’
Hatcher’s thoughts went back to the hoochgirl. ‘Did you like his girl?’ Hatcher asked.
‘Are you kidding? She made Natalie Wood look like Porky Pig.’ Schwartz paused for a minute and then said, ‘Would you like to see her? I got a picture of her in my scrapbook.’
On the way to the airport, Hatcher’s pulse began racing, his nerves humming. Forty-eight hours before, the whole notion that Murph Cody was still alive had seemed like a big joke to Hatcher. Now there was a question in his mind. When Hatcher was studying criminal detection, Sloan, his mentor, had once said, ‘Don’t ever trust written reports. When it’s in writing, people tend to make themselves look good.’
It had cost him forty-eight hours to run that theory, but he was glad he had. He thought about the three men he had interviewed, each with a different view of Cody, each affected in a different way by his own role in the events of that fateful day when Murphy Cody had disappeared.
To Schwartz, Cody was a hero doing a dirty job; to Fraser, a war-loving madman; to Simmons, a haunting ghost whose cold fist squeezed Simmons’s heart. To Fraser, escape from the flaming wreckage of Cody’s plane was impossible; to Schwartz, it was a toss-up; to Simmons, it was a reality.
And, too, there was Schwartz’s report of this ghost camp, Huie-kui. Could that be the reason Cody had never turned up? Had he been a prisoner for all those years? And if so, how did he get out?
There was one other thing that gnawed at Hatcher’s brain. If Murphy Cody had died, where had Wol Pot, the Thai, come up with his name? Wol Pot had a lot of questions to answer.
There was only one thing on which Fraser and Schwartz seemed to agree — that Pai, Cody’s hoochgirl, was special. Looking at the photograph Schwartz had given him, Hatcher had to agree. It was a colour photograph, dog-eared and faded. In the picture, Cody was standing in front of his thatched hooch, his arm around a small, almond-colored beauty, her chin down, staring mystically up at the camera. She looked almost childlike. But while her body was the body of a young girl, her eyes seemed to reflect some inner knowledge that was far beyond her years. Hatcher stared at those eyes, felt them connect, could almost see them blink. He put the photograph back in his wallet.
He looked at his watch. In twelve hours he would be in Bangkok. He hoped Windy Porter would have a lot of answers for him. He had no way of knowing that at almost that same moment Windy Porter was dying in the dark waters of the Phadung Klong, four thousand miles away.
STORK
The stork’s legs were four feet long from its knees to the soles of its feet. It bobbed through the crowd and every move was perfect. The four-foot stilts lifted the surreal bird a foot above the rest of the bizarre crowd, which it stalked, chin out, butt out, butt in, chin in, a rainbow- hued spray of feathers sprinkled with glitter bursting from its yellow bustle, its face painted white, its lips exaggerated and bright yellow, vertical blue streaks painted from its forehead through its eyes all the way down to its chin, a wig of bright blue feathers sweeping straight back from its forehead, its body encased in a yellow feathered body stocking. There was no way to tell whether the person encased in the costume was male or female.
Surrounding it was an eerie assortment of other surreal creatures, their heads jogging in waves to the Eurythmics’ ‘Would I Lie to You Baby,’ which thundered from a dozen monster speakers. Spinning spears of flashing strobe lights augured down from the ceiling. Below the clear lucite dance floor, a six-foot Mako shark circled in its tank, agitated by the beat.
The Annual Critter Ball had attracted its biggest crowd yet to Split Personality — known as the Split — Atlanta’s environment club, a fancy name for a disco. In the balcony, Spears and Hedritch surveyed the crowd dubiously. In a roomful of bizarre people, they stood out by the very nature of their normalcy, dressed as they were in dark blue suits, even though they had taken off their ties and opened their shirt collars.
‘Christ, this is absolutely insane,’ said Spears, the taller of the two, a six-footer, blond and square-jawed, with the look of a forty-year-old surfer. Hedritch was five foot nine with balding dark hair, a neck the size of a tire and big ears. Very big ears.
‘Let’s call it off,’ Hedrich said, looking around the supercharged dance floor. ‘We don’t need this shit.’
‘You don’t call
‘This goes way beyond a security risk,’ Hedritch snapped nervously.
‘So what’s new? Let’s give him the bad news. Maybe he’ll take our advice for a change.
‘Yeah, sure he will,’ Hedritch answered.
They turned and went back through the crowd to the balcony entrance. The stork’s eyes, glittering, watched them all the way.
