Koko

1

Michael Poole stood at the window of his hotel room, looking down with an almost alarming sense of freedom at a long stretch of Singapore. The surprisingly green, surprisingly neat scene before him fell away to what he supposed was the east. A long way off, tall office blocks rose in a clean white cluster that might have been a transplanted section of midtown New York City. Nothing else in the scene before Poole even faintly resembled Manhattan. Trees with broad crowns that looked as edible as vegetables filled most of the space between himself and the tall white buildings, and because Michael was far above the tops of these trees, they seemed almost carpetlike. Between the broad areas filled in by the treetops swept wide roadways with smooth unblemished surfaces. Expensive cars coursed along these perfect roads, as many Jaguars and Mercedes as on Rodeo Drive. Here and there, through gaps in the trees, tiny people drifted along broad malls. Nearer the hotel, bungalows of pink or creamy stucco with wide porches, columns, and tiled roofs occupied green hillsides. Some of these had open courtyards, and in one of them a stocky woman in a bright yellow robe hung out her wash. In the immediate foreground, not at all obscured by the ubiquitous trees, the swimming pools of his own and other hotels sparkled like tiny woodland lakes glimpsed from an airplane. A canopy of red and blue stripes bordered the most distant pool, where a woman swam dogged laps; at the intermediate pool a bartender in a black jacket set up his bar. Beside the pool nearest Michael a Chinese boy dragged a stack of thick pads toward a row of empty redwood frames.

This luxurious city both surprised him, reassured him, and excited him more than he was willing to admit. Michael leaned forward against the window as if he wanted to take flight through the glass. Everything down there would be warm to the touch. The Singapore of his imagination had been a combination of Hue and Chinatown with a generalized smear of sidewalk food vendors and trishaws. He had pictured a version of Saigon, a city he had seen only briefly and disliked. (Most of the combat soldiers Michael knew who had visited Saigon had disliked it.) Just looking at those smooth quadrants of treetops, those neat serrated roofs, the tropical bungalows and the shining pools, made Poole feel better.

He was elsewhere, without doubt he was somewhere new: he had managed to step out of his life, and until this moment he had been unaware of how much he had wanted or needed to do that. He wanted to stroll beneath those healthy trees. He wanted to walk along the wide malls and smell the perfumed air he remembered from their arrival at Changi airport.

Just then his telephone rang. Michael picked it up, knowing that Judy was on the other end of the line.

“Good morning, gentlemen, and welcome to the Republic of Singapore,” came the voice of Harry Beevers. “It is presently nine-thirteen on the trusty Rolex. You will report to the coffee shop where you will receive your individual assignments.… Guess what?”

Michael said nothing.

“A glance through the Singapore telephone directory uncovers no listing for a T. Underhill.”

A little more than an hour later they were walking down Orchard Road. Poole carried the envelope full of Underhill’s jacket photos, Beevers carried a Kodak Instamatic in his jacket pocket and was awkwardly examining a map folded into the back of Papineau’s Guide to Singapore, and Conor Linklater slouched along with his hands in his pockets, carrying nothing. During breakfast they had agreed to spend the morning like tourists, walking through as much of the town as they could cover—“getting the feel of the place,” as Beevers said.

This section of Singapore was as bland and inoffensive as their coffee shop breakfast. What Dr. Poole had not seen from the window of his hotel room was that the city had a lot in common with the duty-free area of a large airport. Every structure that was not a hotel was either an office building, a bank, or a shopping mall. The majority were the latter, most of them three or four levels high. A giant poster across the topmost level of a tall building still under construction depicted an American businessman speaking to a Singaporean Chinese banker. In a balloon above the American’s head were the words I am glad I learned of the fantastic return on my money I can earn by investing in Singapore! To which the Chinese banker replies With our beneficial investment program for our overseas friends, it is never too late to take part in the economic miracle of Singapore!

Right now, you could step into a glass-fronted shop and buy cameras and stereo equipment; across the six- lane street, you could climb a flight of marble steps and choose from seven shops selling cameras, stereo equipment, electric razors, and electronic calculators. Here was the Orchard Towers Shopping Center, and here, across the street, shaped vaguely like a ziggurat, was the Far East Shopping Center, which had a long red banner reading GONG HI FA CHOY, for it was just past the Chinese New Year. Next to the Orchard Towers Shopping Center stood the Hilton, where middle-aged Americans breakfasted on a terrace. Further back there had been the Singapura Forum, where a stocky Malay with the face of William Bendix had played a hose over the flagstones. Far up on a hill they had seen a gardener toiling at keeping the grounds of the Shangri-La as immaculate as the center court at Wimbledon. Ahead down Orchard Road were the Lucky Plaza Shopping Center, the Irana Hotel, and the Mandarin Hotel.

“I think Walt Disney went crazy one day,” said Conor Linklater, “and said ‘Fuck the kids, let’s invent Singapore and just make money.’ ”

When they passed the Prosperity Tailor Shop a grinning little man came out and followed them, trying to talk them into a purchase.

“You tough customers!” he said after the first half block. “You get ten percent off sale price. Best offer in whole city.” After they had actually crossed over the big intersection at Claymore Hill, he became more insistent. “Okay, you get one-quarter off discount price! I can go no lower!”

“We don’t want suits,” Conor said. “We’re not looking for suits. Give up.”

“Don’t you want to look good?” the tailor asked. “What’s the matter with you guys? You enjoy looking like tourists? Come to my shop, I make you look like sophisticated gentlemen, one-quarter off discount price.”

“I already look like a sophisticated gentleman.”

“Could do better,” said the tailor. “What you’re wearing cost you three-four hundred dollars at Barneys, I give you three times the suit for same price.”

Beevers ceased his impatient jigging on the sidewalk. The expression of unguarded astonishment on his face was as good as a Christmas present to Michael Poole and, he supposed, to Conor.

“I make you look like Savile Row,” said the tailor, who was a round-faced Chinese man in his fifties wearing a white shirt and black trousers. “Six hundred-fifty-dollar suit, three hundred seventy-five dollars. Discounted price five hundred, I give you one-quarter off. Three hundred seventy-five dollars, price of couple good dinners at Four Seasons. You lawyuh? Stand in front of Supreme Court, you not only win case, everybody say ‘Where you get that suit? Must be from Prosperity Tailor Shop, Wing Chong, proprietor’!”

“I don’t want to buy a suit,” Beevers said, looking shifty now.

“You need suit.”

Beevers yanked the camera from his pocket and snapped the man’s picture as if he were shooting him. The tailor grinned and posed. “Why don’t you attack one of these guys instead of me? Why don’t you go back to your shop?”

“Lowest prices,” the man said, trembling with suppressed hilarity. “Three hundred fifty dollars. I go any lower, can’t pay rent. Go any lower, children starve.”

Beevers shoved the camera back into his pocket and turned to Michael with the air of an animal caught in a trap.

“This guy knows everything else, maybe he knows Underhill,” Michael said.

“Show him the picture!”

Michael took the envelope of photographs from under his arm and opened it.

“We are police officers from the City of New York,” Beevers said.

“You lawyuh,” said the tailor.

“We are interested in knowing if you have ever seen this man. Show him the picture, Mike!”

Michael took out one of the photographs of Tim Underhill and held it up before the tailor.