dismayed Michael Poole by reporting that a Mr. Timothy Underhill had been expected six days before the discovery of Clive McKenna’s body, but had not arrived to claim his room.
“Bingo,” Beevers said, and the desk clerk reached for the bill. Beevers pulled his hand out of reach. “Do you have an address for Underhill?”
“Sure,” the clerk said. “Fifty-six Grand Street, New York City.”
“How did he make the reservation?”
“No record. It must have come in by telephone. We have no credit card number.”
“No record of where he called from?”
The clerk shook his head.
“Not good enough.” Beevers snatched back the note and smirked at Michael.
They went back out into the sun.
“Why would he use his real name if he was paying in cash?” Michael asked.
“Michael, he was so high he thought he could get away with anything. He’s a shake ‘n’ bake, Michael—killing people is not logical behavior. This man is drooling at the mouth and you want to know why he uses his real name! See how I saved ten bucks?” Beevers nodded to the doorman, who whistled to the rank of waiting cabs.
“You know,” Poole said, “I have the feeling I’ve heard that address, 56 Grand Street, before. It seems so familiar.”
“Jesus, Michael.”
“What is it?”
“Pumo’s restaurant, dumbo. Saigon is at 56 Grand Street. In the City of New York in the State of New York in the United States of America.”
Plantation Road began with a tall hotel at the corner of a busy six-lane road and almost instantly became a comfortable upper-middle-class enclave of long low bungalows behind wide lawns and locked gates. When they came to number 72, Beevers told the driver to wait and the two men left the cab.
The bungalow where Roberto Ortiz and the woman had died stood out in the sunlight like a pink cake. Flowering hibiscus trees grew on either side, their shadows floating over the dark lawn. A clean yellow notice had been wired to the gates, announcing that the Singapore Police Department had sealed the house for the purposes of a homicide investigation. Two dark blue police cars were pulled up before the gates, and Poole could see uniforms moving past the windows inside the house.
“You noticed yet how good-looking the policewomen are in this country?” Beevers asked. “I wonder if they’d let us inside?”
“Why don’t you tell them that you’re a detective from New York?” Poole said.
“I’m an officer of the court, that’s why,” Beevers said.
Poole turned around to look at the house across the street. A middle-aged Chinese woman stood at a living room window with her arm around the waist of a younger, taller woman with her right hand on her hip. Both women looked very tense. Poole wondered if they had ever heard a young man singing a strange song that sounded like
Poole and Harry Beevers returned to the Marco Polo and found a frowsy, red-eyed Conor Linklater who reminded Michael of Dwight Frye in
“You are staying home tonight,” Poole said.
“Yeah, count me out too,” Beevers said. “I’m too beat to chase around to another fag bar. I’ll stay home and tell Conor what we did all day.”
They were moving unsteadily down the sidewalk, Michael and Beevers on either side of Conor, who took little shuffling steps, afraid to risk walking normally.
Beevers said, “In a couple of years, we’ll be sitting in a screening room, watching ourselves do this. Half the people in the world will know that Conor Linklater had the runs. I wish Sean Connery were twenty years younger. It’s really too bad that all the right actors are too old now.”
“Olivier really is too old, I guess,” Michael said.
“I mean guys like Greg Peck, Dick Widmark, guys like that. Paul Newman’s too short, and Robert Redford’s too bland. Maybe they ought to go for the intensity and get James Woods. I could live with that.”
5
The taxi wound through Singapore until it struck a belt road and then it went so far that Poole began to wonder if the nightclub was in Malaysia. Before long the only lights close at hand were the arc lamps above the six- lane highway. Dark empty land lay on both sides of the road, here and there punctuated by small isolated clusters of lights. They were nearly alone on the road and the driver was going very fast. It seemed to Poole that the wheels were not actually touching the road.
“Are we still in Singapore?” he asked. The driver did not respond.
Eventually the car jerked off the highway onto an access road to a shopping mall that gleamed like a space station in the darkness—longer, taller, and more elaborate than any of the shopping centers on Orchard Road. A vast, nearly empty parking lot surrounded it. Huge vertical posters covered with Chinese letters the size of a man hung down the sides of the mall. A rank of palm trees hung frozen in the white artificial light.
“Are you sure this is where Peppermint City is?” Poole asked.
The driver braked to an abrupt halt before the undead palm trees and sat behind the wheel like a statue. When Poole hesitantly repeated his question, the man bawled out something in Chinese.
“How much?”
The man yelled the same phrase.
Poole handed over a bill whose denomination he could not see, received a surprising amount of change, and tipped with another random bill. When the cab took off he was alone.
The mall seemed to have been constructed of dull grey metal. Through huge windows on the ground floor Poole could see two or three tiny figures wandering past closed shops far down at the mall’s opposite end.
Glass doors whooshed open and cold air enveloped him. The doors sealed up behind him. Goose bumps rose on his arms.
Before him a vacant corridor led to a vast high-vaulted space. Poole felt as if he had entered an empty church. Mannequins posed and stretched in the display windows of closed shops. Invisible escalators whirred. God had gone home and the cathedral was as empty as a bomb crater. As Poole passed into the great vault, he saw a few scattered people moving in a waking trance across the mezzanine, past darkened rows of shops.
Poole wandered through the ground floor of the mall, certain that the driver had taken him to the wrong place. For a long time he could not even find the escalator, and thought he would have to drift all night past Good Fortune Toys, Merlion Furniture, and Mode O’Day, Clothes for Discriminating Women. Finally he turned a corner at a restaurant called Captain Steak and saw the wizened baseball-capped head of an elderly Chinese man floating downwards toward him above the escalator’s steel flank.
On the third level his feet began to ache—the floor was flat, unyielding stone. Red and orange sweatshirts, trapped birds, hung in a black window. Poole sighed and kept on walking. Could he get a taxi back to town, way out here? He felt that nobody would speak to him and he would never be able to make himself understood. He understood why George Romero had filmed
This was Singapore at its most sterile and perfect. Randomness, dirt, and vitality had been ruthlessly excluded. Michael wished he were back at the Marco Polo, getting drunk with Beevers and watching the finance programs and soap operas that made up Singapore television.
On the fifth level he walked, disheartened, down corridors even darker and emptier than those on the floors below. Up here, not a single shop or restaurant remained open. He was on the fifth floor of a suburban shopping mall, and he had been stranded miles out of town. Then, at the curve of the corridor, the dark shop windows gave way to walls covered with small white tiles that shone with the light from a row of angled spots. Through an opening in the wall, Poole saw men in suits, girls in tight cocktail dresses, everybody smoking in hazy blue light. A good-looking hostess stood at a desk and smiled at him while speaking into a telephone. Just outside the entrance a pink neon sign flashed PEPPERMINT CITY! beside a leafless tree which had been painted white and hung with tiny white bulbs.
