concern you. Telephone is a Bangkok word. Many many meanings.” He glanced sideways at Conor. “One meaning— to suck. You see? Telephone.” He clapped his little hands together, and his eyes closed as if in amusement.
Conor and Cham spent the next two hours in bars filled with hungry-looking girls and sleek, prowling boys; Cham conducted long discussions full of exclamations and laughter with a dozen bartenders, but nothing happened except the exchange of bills. Conor drank cautiously at first, but when he noticed that the excitement of feeling so near to Underhill meant that the alcohol had little effect on him, he drank as he would at Donovan’s.
“He has not been here in a long time,” Cham said, turning to Conor with his happy smile. Conor again noticed the white little chips of scar tissue around his eyes and mouth. It looked as though a doctor had removed Cham’s real face and replaced it with this smooth, boyish mask. He laid his neat sand-colored hand over Conor’s. “Do not worry. We will find him soon. Do you care for another vodka?”
“Hell, yes,” Conor said. “In the next joint.”
They walked out into gathering twilight, Cham’s hand resting between Conor’s shoulder blades. Conor wondered if he ought to call Michael Poole back at the hotel, and then stood rooted to the sidewalk, thinking that he saw Mikey getting into a cab outside a glittery place called Zanzibar across the street. “Hey, Mike!” he yelled. The man ducked through the door of the cab. “Mikey! Over here!”
Cham put the tips of his fingers to his lips. “Shall we eat?”
“I just saw my friend. Over there.”
“Is he looking for Tim Underhill too?”
Conor nodded.
“Then there is no point in our staying in Soi Cowboy.”
In minutes they were driving down shining streets past flashing signs in a moving traffic jam. Gangs of boys on mopeds swept past them. People spilled in and out of nightclubs.
Once Conor turned from saying something to Cham and saw peering in through the window beside him a gaunt, stricken, sexless ghost’s face, empty of everything but hunger.
“You mind if I ask you a question?” Conor heard his own voice, and it was the voice of a drunken man. He decided he didn’t really care. The little guy was his friend.
Cham patted his knee.
“How’d you get all those damned little scars on your face? You run into a fish hook factory or something?”
Cham’s hand froze on his knee.
“It must be a hell of a story,” Conor said.
Cham bent forward and said “Crap crop crap klang toey” to the driver.
“Crap crap crap,” the driver answered.
“Klang Toey. Port area.”
“When do we get there?”
“We are there now,” Cham said.
Conor got out of the cab at the end of the world. The fishy, pungent smell of sea water filled the air. The skull face pressed to the window of this cab floated up in his mind.
“Telephone!” he yelled. “I Corps! What about it!”
Cham pulled him away from the distant sight of the river toward a bar called Venus.
They had drinks at Venus and Jimmy’s and Club Hung; they had drinks in places without names. Conor found himself leaning against Cham, or Cham leaning against him as the cab whirled around a corner. He looked sideways, pulling Cham’s hand off his leg, and again saw a bony, sunken face peering through the window with dead eyes. A chill went over his body, as if he were standing wet and naked in a cold breeze. He yelled, and the face flickered and disappeared.
“Nothing,” Cham said.
They went up flights of stairs to dark rooms smelling of incense where ceramic pillows lay at the heads of empty divans and Chinese men stopped playing mah-jongg long enough to examine Underhill’s photograph. In the first such place, they frowned and shook their heads, in the second they frowned and shook their heads, and in the third they frowned and nodded.
“They knew him here?” Conor asked.
“They throw him out of here,” Cham said.
Conor found himself seated at a linen-covered table in the lobby of a hotel. A great distance away a young Thai in a blue jacket read a paperback book behind the registration desk. A cup of coffee steamed before Conor, and he picked it up and sipped. Young men and women sat at every table, and girls crossed their legs on the couches that ringed the lobby. The coffee burned Conor’s mouth.
“He comes here sometimes,” Cham said. “Everybody comes here sometimes.”
Conor bent to sip his coffee. When he looked up the lobby was gone and he was gripping the door handle in the back seat of the cab.
“Your friend was bad, very bad,” Cham was saying. “No longer welcome anywhere. Is he bad, or just sick? Please tell me. I want to know about this man.”
“He was a great fucking guy,” Conor said. The subject of Underhill’s greatness seemed inexpressibly immense, too immense to be conquered by mere words.
“But he is very silly.”
“So are you.”
“But I do not vomit the contents of my stomach in public places. I do not cause consternation and despair all about me. I do not threaten and abuse those who have any sort of authority over me.”
“That sure sounds like Underhill, all right,” Conor said, and fell asleep.
He had a moment’s dream of the ghostly face pressing against the window, and jolted awake with the recognition that the face was Underhill’s. He was alone in the back seat.
“What?” he said.
“Crap crop crop crop,” said the driver, leaning over the back of the seat and holding out a folded piece of paper.
“Where is everybody?” Conor vaguely took the note and looked out of his window. The cab had stopped in a broad alley between a tall concrete structure that looked like a parking garage and a windowless one-story building, also of concrete. A sodium lamp painted the concrete and the surface of the alley with harsh yellow light.
“Where are we?”
The driver jabbed the note at Conor, using it to point down at his leg. Conor confusedly followed the man’s gesture and saw his penis, white as a mackerel in the darkness of the taxi, draped over his right thigh. He bent forward to shield himself from the eyes of the driver and stuffed himself back inside his jeans. His heart was pounding, and his head ached. None of this made sense anymore.
Finally Conor took the folded paper from the driver. There were a few lines of spidery black writing.
The driver circled around him, switching on his lights. Conor dropped the wad of paper and kicked it away. Half a dozen men in close-fitting Thai suits had materialized outside the smaller concrete building and were slowly drifting toward him across the alley. Conor felt like running—the unsmiling men reminded him of sleek sharks. His legs barely kept him upright. The headlights of the circling cab hurt his eyes. He wanted a drink.
“You come in?” The Thai closest to him was smiling like a corpse made up by an undertaker. “Cham talked to us. We waited for you.”
“Cham’s no friend of mine,” Conor said. All of the men were waving him toward the door of the windowless concrete building. “I’m not goin’ in there. What you got in there, anyhow?”
“Sex show,” said the death’s head.
“Oh, hell,” Conor said, and let them urge him toward the door. “Is that all?”
Inside he paid three-hundred-baht admission to a woman who wore dark glasses and earrings shaped like Coca-Cola bottles with breasts. “Love those earrings,” he said. “You know Tim Underhill?”
“Not here yet,” the woman said. The Coke bottles with breasts swung like hanged men.
