Koko

wants, if he knows where to look.”

Another lidded glance at squirming Conor.

“We’re looking for someone,” Poole said.

“We’re—” Beevers began, and then looked up in astonishment at Poole, who had just stamped on his foot.

Poole said, “The young man at the bar thought you might be our best chance. The person we’re looking for lived or still lives in Singapore, and spent a lot of time on this street ten to fifteen years ago.”

“Long time ago,” Billy said. He cast his eyes down, tilted his head. “This person have a name?”

“Tim Underhill,” Poole said. He placed one of the photographs beside Billy’s drink. Billy blinked.

“Does he look familiar?”

“He might.”

Poole pushed a Singapore ten-dollar note across the table and Billy twinkled it away. “I believe I did know the gentleman.” Billy made an elaborate business of scrutinizing the photograph. “He was a bit of a one, wasn’t he?”

“We’re old friends of his,” Mike said. “We think he might need our help. That’s why we’re here. We’d appreciate any information you could give us.”

“Oh, everything’s changed since those days,” Billy said. “The whole street—really, you’d hardly know it.” He moodily inspected the photograph for a moment. “Flowers. He was the man for flowers, wasn’t he? Flowers this and flowers that. He’d been a soldier in the war.”

Poole nodded. “We met him in Vietnam.”

“Beautiful place, once,” Billy said. “Free-wheeling.” He startled Conor by asking, “Did you ever see Saigon, lover?”

Conor nodded and gulped down a mouthful of vodka.

“Some of our best girls used to work there. Nearly all gone now. The wind shifted. Got too cold for them. Can’t blame them, can you?”

Nobody said anything.

“Well, I say you can’t. They lived for pleasure, for delight, for illusion. Can’t blame them for not wanting to start grubbing away at some job, can you? So they scattered. Most of the best of our old friends went to Amsterdam. They were always welcome in their own very elegant clubs—the Kit Kat Club. You gentlemen ever see the Kit Kat Club?”

“What about Underhill?” Beevers asked.

“All mirrors, three stages, chrystal chandeliers, best of everything. It’s often been described to me. There’s nothing like the Kit Kat in Paris, or so I hear.” He sipped his scotch.

Conor said, “Look, do you know where we can find Underhill, or are we just dicking around?”

Another of Billy’s silken smiles. “A few of the entertainers who worked here are still in Singapore. You might try to see Lola perform. She works good clubs, not these remnants left on Bugis Street.” He paused. “She’s vivacious. You’d enjoy her act.”

3

Four days earlier, Tina Pumo was interrupted by Maggie Lah’s giggling over the front page of the New York Post while they ate breakfast together at La Groceria. (Tina was sentimentally attached to the little restaurant where he had so often read and reread the back page of the Village Voice.) They had each purchased newspapers at the newsstand on Sixth Avenue, and Tina was deep into the Times’s restaurant reviews when Maggie’s laughter distracted him. “Something funny in that rag?”

“They have such great headlines,” Maggie said, and turned the tabloid toward him: YUPPIE AIRPORT MURDER. “Random word order,” Maggie said. “How about AIRPORT YUPPIE MURDER? Or YUPPIE MURDER AIRPORT? Anyhow, it’s always nice to read about the end of a yup.”

Tina eventually found the story in the Times’s Metropolitan section. Clement W. Irwin, 29, an investment banker whose income was in the upper six figures and was regarded as a “superstar” by his peers, had been found stabbed to death in a men’s room near the Pan American baggage counters at JFK airport. Maggie’s paper carried a photograph of a blubbery face with small, widely set eyes behind heavy black eyeglasses. Equal amounts of appetite and aggression seemed stamped into the features. The caption read: Yuppie financial whiz Clement W. Irwin. On the inside pages were photographs of a townhouse on East 63rd Street, a manor on Mount Avenue in Hampstead, Connecticut, and a low, rambling beach house on the island of St. Maarten. The story in the Post, but not the Times, contained the speculation that Irwin had been murdered by either an airport employee or a fellow passenger who had been on his flight from San Francisco.

3

The morning after his tour of the Bugis Street bars, Conor Linklater swallowed two aspirin and a third of a bottle of Pepto-Bismol, showered, dressed in jeans and a short-sleeved shirt, and then joined the other two in the Marco Polo’s coffee shop.

“What kept you?” Beevers said. He and Michael were garbaging down on the weirdest-looking breakfast Conor had ever seen. They had toast and eggs and that stuff, but they also had bowls of gooey white pasty porridge full of green and yellow shit and fatty evil things that would have looked like eggs if they hadn’t been green. Both Mike and Beevers seemed to have taken no more than a bite or two of this substance.

“Little rocky this morning, think I’ll pass on breakfast,” Conor said. “What is that stuff, anyhow?”

“Don’t ask,” Beevers said.

Mike asked, “Are you sick, or just hung over?”

“Both, I guess.”

“Diarrhea?”

“I chugged down a ton of Pepto-Bismol.” The waiter came up, and he ordered coffee. “American coffee.”

Beevers smiled at him and pushed a folded copy of the Straits Times across the table. “Take a look and tell me what you think.”

Conor scanned headlines about new sewage treatment plants, about the increase of bank loans to nonbank customers, the expected overload of bridge traffic on the New Year’s holiday, and finally saw this headline in the middle of the page: DOUBLE HOMICIDE IN EMPTY BUNGALOW.

An American journalist named Roberto Ortiz, Conor read, had been found slain in a bungalow on Plantation Road. Also found was the body of a young woman identified only as a Malaysian prostitute. Forensic pathologists stated that the corpses, found in a state of putrefaction, had been dead approximately ten days. The bungalow was the property of Professor Li Lau Feng, who had left it vacant for a year while he taught at the University of Jakarta. Mr. Ortiz’s body had been mutilated after death from gunshot wounds. The unidentified woman had also died of gunshot wounds. Mr. Ortiz was a journalist and the author of two books, Beggar Thy Neighbor: United States Policy in Honduras and Vietnam: A Personal Journey. Police were said to have evidence linking this crime to several others committed in Singapore during the past year.

“What kind of evidence?” Conor asked.

“I bet they found Koko cards,” Beevers said. “They’re finally getting cagey. You think they’d release a detail like that if it happened in New York? Don’t be crazy. Mutilated, it says. What do you want to bet his eyes were poked out and his ears were cut off? Underhill’s at work, my friends. We came to the right place.”

“Jesus,” Conor said. “So what do we do? I thought we were going to, ah, look for this, ah …”

“We are,” Poole said. “I got all the papers and guidebooks in the gift shop, and we were just about to try to find out where this Lola works, if she is working. The clerks in the shop won’t admit to ever having heard of anybody named Lola, so we have to do it this way.”

“But this morning,” Beevers said, “we thought we ought to look at the places where they found the other bodies. The bungalow where they found the Martinsons, and this one, and the Goodwood Park Hotel.”

“Should we maybe talk to the police? Find out if there were cards with these other people?”