Poole heard Beevers laughing to himself outside the grotto.
He wiped his forehead and walked outside into a blast of heat and a blinding dazzle of sunlight. Harry Beevers stood before him, grinning with all his overlapping teeth.
A little way down the hill lay a huge pit filled with plaster replicas of giant blue-green crabs. Big black toads stared fixedly out through the mesh. In another brain-grotto on the other side of the path a giant woman with a chicken’s head and corpse-white arms yanked at the arm of her husband, who had the wattled head of a duck. Poole saw murder in the woman’s determination, the duck-man’s alarm. Marriage was murder.
Beevers snapped off another picture. “This is great,” he said, and turned around to focus on the giant wrinkled brain they had just left. TORTURE CHAMBER HERE.
“There are girls in New York,” Beevers said, “who will go crazy when they see these pictures. You don’t think that’s right? There are girls in New York who’d go down on Gabby Hayes if he showed them this stuff.”
Conor Linklater strolled away laughing.
“You think I don’t know what I’m talking about?” His voice was too loud. “Ask Pumo—he hangs out where I hang out, he knows.”
4
After they left the Tiger Balm Gardens they walked for a long time without quite knowing where they were or where they were going. “Maybe we should go back to the Gardens,” Conor said. “This is nowhere.”
It was nearly a literal, though a peaceful, nowhere. They were walking uphill along a smooth grey road between a high bank covered with perfectly mown grass and a long slope dotted with bungalows set at wide intervals amongst the trees. Since leaving the Gardens the only human being they had seen had been a uniformed chauffeur in sunglasses driving an otherwise empty black Mercedes Benz 500 SEL.
“We must have walked over a mile already,” Beevers said. He had torn the map out of
“Why?” Conor asked.
“Boogey Street isn’t Boogey Street. That dodo didn’t know what he was talking about. It’s B-U-G-I-S Street. Boo-giss Street. That has to be it, there isn’t anything else even close.”
“But I thought the cabdriver …?”
“It’s still Boo-giss Street, it says so right here.” He looked up with wild eyes. “If Underhill didn’t know where he was going, how the hell does he expect us to find him?”
They trudged further uphill and came to an intersection without roadsigns. Beevers resolutely turned right and began marching off. Conor protested that the center of town and their hotel were the other way, but Beevers continued walking until they gave in and joined him.
Half an hour later an amazed-looking taxi driver stopped and picked them up.
“Marco Polo Hotel,” Beevers said. He was breathing heavily, and his face had become so mottled Poole could not tell if it was pink flecked with white, or white flecked with pink. A sweat stain shaped like a torpedo darkened the back of his jacket from shoulder to shoulder and extended a damp fin down to the small of his back. “I have to have a shower and a nap.”
“Why you going in opposite direction?” the driver asked.
Beevers refused to speak.
“Hey, we got a little bet going,” Conor said. “Is it Boo-giss Street or Boogey Street?”
“Is same thing,” the driver said.
1
As far as Conor was concerned, this whole Bugis Street deal stank. Fifty feet from its entrance, where the cabdriver from the restaurant had pointed to it, Bugis Street looked just right for a guy like Underhill. Lots of flashing lights, bar signs, neon, crowds of people milling around. But once you were actually there, you saw who those people were and you knew that Tim Underhill wouldn’t go anywhere near them. White-haired ladies with leathery, saggy upper arms holding hands with turtle-faced old parties in baggy shorts and Supp-Hose. They had the lost, childlike air of tourists anywhere, as if what they were looking at were no more real than a television commercial. About half the people Conor could see walking up and down Bugis Street had clearly arrived in the JASMINE FAR EAST TOUR buses parked outside the entrance to the street. Way up above everybody’s heads, a pale blue flag drooped from the top of a long pole held by a breezy young blonde woman in a crisp, starched-looking blazer of the same pale blue.
If this bunch of ham and eggers came traipsing through South Norwalk, Conor knew he wouldn’t be able to ignore them the way the other half of the people on Bugis Street were doing. Shifty-looking little guys darted in and out of the bars and shops. Pairs of whores in wigs and tight dresses strutted up and down the street. If you were a player in Singapore, this is where you came—Conor guessed that they had developed selective vision, and no longer really saw the tourists.
Conor could hear the Stones’ “Jumping Jack Flash” drilling through some slow-moving cowboy song from Porter Waggoner, both of them battling the strange caterwauling of what must have been a Chinese opera— screechy voices beating up a melody that would give a headache to a dog. This noise was piped out of different bars through little speakers set above the doors, usually right above the head of a beckoning doorman. The whole thing gave Conor a headache. Probably the brandy after their dinner at the Pine Court didn’t help, even if it was XO, which Harry Beevers claimed was liquid gold. Feeling as if cymbals were being slammed together next to his ears, Conor walked along behind Beevers and Mike Poole.
“Might as well start right here,” Mike said, turning toward the first bar on their side of the street, the Orient Song. The doorman straightened up as they approached and began waving them in with both arms. “Orient Song your bar,” he yelled. “Come to Orient Song! Best bar on Bugis Street! Americans all come here!”
Near the door a little old man in a dirty white smock twitched into life. He grinned, showing sparse yellow teeth, and swept his arm theatrically toward the display of framed photographs next to him.
They were eight-by-twelve glossies, black and white, with names printed in the white space just above the bottom of the frame. Dawn, Rose, Hotlips, Raven, Billie Blue … parted lips and arched necks, sex-drenched Oriental faces framed in soft black hair, plucked eyebrows above willful eyes.
“Four dollars,” the old man said.
Harry Beevers grabbed Conor’s forearm and pulled him through the heavy door. Cold air-conditioned air chilled the sweat on Conor’s forehead, and he yanked his arm out of Beevers’ grasp. Americans, paired like Mallard ducks, turned smiling toward them from their stations near the bar.
“No luck here,” Beevers said. “This is just a tour bus joint. The first bar on the street is the only one these yo-yos feel safe in.”
Poole said, “Let’s ask anyhow.”
At least the entire front half of the bar was taken up by American couples in their sixties and seventies. Conor could dimly hear someone banging chords on a piano. Out of the general hum of voices Conor heard a female voice calling someone Son and asking where his nametag was. He eventually realized that she was addressing him.
“You gotta get the spirit, boy, you gotta wear the tag. We’re a fun bunch!” Conor looked down at the sun- tanned, heavily wrinkled face of a woman beaming at him and wearing a nametag which read HI! ETHEL’S A JAUNTY JASMINE!
Conor looked over her head. Behind her a couple of old boys in rimless glasses who looked like the doctors on the flight over were checking him out less benevolently—he was wearing his Agent Orange T-shirt, and did not resemble a Jaunty Jasmine.
He saw Beevers and Poole approaching the bar, where a stocky man wearing a velvet bow tie was serving
