Thai Horse

That had been two years before their meeting in the dismal office on Cat Street. Cohen lad come a long way by then, had become the Tsu Fi, the master conniver of the island. And in the next few years he and Hatcher became allies, each feeding information and assistance to the other, ultimately learning to trust each other as friends.

Hatcher stared across the bay at the sprawling houses almost hidden by trees near the peak of Victoria Mountain.

Cohen’s lair.

My God, Hatcher wondered, is the little guy still alive?

ch’uang tzu-chi

As he sat staring across the bay, his eyes occasionally drooping with exhaustion, Hatcher suddenly began to feel a vague sense of malaise. The old clicks were at work. Perhaps it was coming back to the East, the sudden flood of memories invoked by the past. The Far Easterners had a strong premonitory sense; they believed not only in reincarnation but in visions. Hatcher bad never bought the concepts, and yet at times in the past his clicks, or instincts or memories or whatever they might be called, had warned him of danger.

Now his clicks suddenly began racing overtime.

Sloan was on his way to Hong Kong. There was more to that than just a friendly visit to check in with Hatcher.

He had been too tired for it to register before, but now, relaxing half asleep on the balcony over1ooking the harbor, he had an overwhelming sense that something had gone wrong. What other reason would Sloan have for coming to Hong Kong?

Westerners might call it memory introspection, instinct. The Chinese always seemed to have a more poetic way of expressing such things. The Chinese called it ch’uang tzu-chi, the window to oneself.

Sloan had always said that to indulge in ch’uang tzu-chi was suicidal, that memories were weapons that attacked the mind, dulled the senses. Were distractions, misdirections, a deadly indulgence. Sloan was right, but only within the context of his own reality, for without the window there was nothing to draw on.

In Los Boxes, all Hatcher had was ch’uang tzu-chi. At first Hatcher had found the indulgence almost impossible, like drinking from an empty cup. But with the help of 126 he had reconstructed that part of the past that gave him pleasure. Moments of discovery; taste of new wine, a brush of warm lips, the touch another body, the urgency of orgasm; brief moments when love was a word away and pleasure seemed infinite and he had momentarily escaped the passion of death; moments he could reach out and touch again in the misery of his cell. Eventually they gave him life.

Hatcher now tried to shrug them away, however. He decided to take a quick nap. It would be four hours before Sloan arrived, and in four hours Hatcher could take the edge off his jet lag. He went back into the room, stripped and lay flat on his back on the floor, staring up at the ceiling fan and the whirling shadows above it.

Lying on the floor, waiting for sleep to come rather than trying to induce it, Hatcher was rushed back in time by the slatted shutters that threw striped shadows on the wall, back to Los Boxes, to a time when he had embraced ch’uang tzu-chi and, with it, a facsimile of sanity. He had become addicted, and after Los Boxes had fought to free himself of the habit, a kind of cold-turkey repudiation of past and pleasure.

Now as he lay on the floor that window opened again, and there, beyond its ghostly sill, was the image of the first moment he saw Ginia: a soft red dawn spreading over the flat marsh, setting the shimmering water afire for an instant.

His first reaction was physical. She was standing on the marina dock near a sailboat, wearing a pair of brief shorts and a bikini top, and he was stunned by the perfection of her body, so stunned that he stopped loading his boat and stared without realizing it. Then he looked up and saw she was staring back at him with eyes so brown they were almost black.

‘If you take everything off me, I’ll get arrested for indecent exposure,’ she said with a hint of a smile.

Her companion, a flaccid rich boy recovering from a hangover, his character as shaky as his hands, was unfurling the main sheet. He looked up and said, ‘What’d you say?’

‘Not a thing, my dear,’ she purred, and when he turned back to his chore, she stared back at Hatcher. Hatcher walked directly to her side, looked down at her, and shook his head very slowly. ‘Life is just too damn short,’ Hatcher’s ruined voice whispered.

She was mesmerized by the shattered sound of his voice, and she smiled, then laughed, then nodded. ‘Oh, how true.’

Hatcher pointed to the wobbly youth struggling with his mainsail.

‘Roger,’ she said softly.

Hatcher turned toward him and said as loudly as he could, ‘Roger?’

Roger looked up, steadying himself by grasping the mast.

‘Roger, you’ll be happy to know that you can go home,’ Hatcher said. ‘Go back to bed. The lady’s coming with me.’

‘Who says?’ the shocked Roger demanded weakly. Hatcher looked back at her and she said, ‘I says, Roger.’ What a day that had been. What a dazzling moment when she had loosened the straps and dropped the bra, touched his face with her fingertips, leaned over and kissed his throat, when her breasts had brushed against his bare chest for the first time and he had reached up, running his fingers under her hair at the back of her neck, felt her skin grow erect under his touch and felt the goose flesh rise on his own arms and shoulders, and caressed her as she caressed him until they were both shaking with anticipation. They had postponed it for an eternity, touching, exploring, their lips flirting as they whispered to each other, until his fingers stroked her soul and their trembling