Koko

bat, he felt comfortable upside down. And Koko did too, Conor supposed. The next day, he decided not to tell anyone about what he had or had not seen, not even Mike Poole.

*  *  *

Conor had followed the men down the concrete stairs in the dark, thinking that civilians were always wrong about violence. Civilians thought that violence was action, one guy hitting another, crunching bones and spattering blood—ordinary people thought you could see violence. They thought you could avoid it by not looking at it. But violence was not action. Above all violence was a feeling. It was the icy envelope around all the business of blows and knives and guns. This feeling was not even really connected to the people using the weapons—they had just put their minds inside the envelope. Inside the envelope they did what was necessary.

This cold, detached feeling was all around Conor as he went down the stairs.

Conor soon lost count of the number of flights they had descended. Six levels down, or seven, or eight … the concrete steps ended two floors beneath the level on which they had last seen a parked car. A broad step led down to an irregular grey floor that looked like lumpy cement but proved to be packed earth. The light at the base of the stairs cast a thick slow light twenty or thirty feet out into shadowy greyness melting into a deep black that seemed to go on forever. The air was cold and stale and viscous.

One of the men called out a question.

There was a rustle of sound, and a light went on far at the back of the basement. Beneath it, just now lowering his hand from the light cord, stood a Thai male in his late fifties or early sixties wearing a very tentative smile. A long bar with tall and short glasses, buckets of ice, and a double rank of bottles had been set up on a long table in front of the man. The man slowly extended both arms to lean against the bar. The top of his head shone.

The Thais moved toward the bar. They were speaking in low voices in which Conor could still hear that battlefield tone. Sunglasses summoned him imperiously to the bar.

He ordered whiskey, having an idea that a warm substance like whiskey would support him and hold him up, instead of cutting him off at the knees in the way a cold substance would. “Put some ice in it, man,” he told the bartender, whose bald head was covered with tiny beads of sweat as regular as eggs in a carton. The whiskey was some single malt with an unpronounceable Scottish name, and tasted startlingly of tar, old ropes, fog, smoke, and charred wood. Swallowing the stuff was like ingesting a little island off the Scottish coast.

Sunglasses nodded curtly at Conor, and took a drink poured from the same bottle.

Who were these guys? In their smooth taut suits, they might have been gangsters; they might just as easily have been bankers and insurance executives. They had the assurance of people who had never been forced to worry about money.

Harry Beevers, he thought. They sit back and watch the money come home through the door.

Sunglasses stepped away from the other men, raised his hand, and waved to the other side of the basement.

Quiet footsteps came forward out of the darkness. Conor gulped some of the miraculous whiskey. Two figures appeared at the edge of the light. A little Thai man in a khaki suit, bald as a bullet and with deep lines and pockmarks in his cheeks, moved unsmilingly toward the group of men around the bar. With one hand he held the elbow of a beautiful Asian woman who wore only a loose black robe several sizes too large for her. The woman seemed dazed by the light. She was not Thai, Conor thought—her face was the wrong shape. She might have been Chinese; she might have been Vietnamese. She needed the subtle pressure of the man’s hand at her elbow to keep her moving. Her head lolled, and her mouth parted in a half-smile.

The man brought her a few more steps forward. Now Conor saw that he wore lightly tinted wire-rimmed glasses. Conor knew his type—he was absolutely military. The bullet-headed man was not a rich man, but he had the instinctive authority of a general.

Conor thought he heard one of the men beside him whisper “telephone.”

When they were squarely in the light the little man took his hand from the woman’s elbow. She swayed gently, then steadied herself by widening her stance and straightening her shoulders. She looked out through half- lidded eyes, smiling mystically.

The General stepped behind her and slid the robe off her shoulders. The woman now looked mysteriously larger, more formidable, less like a captured thing. Her shoulders were slim, and there was a slim affecting helplessness in the way her rounded forearms turned out, exposing a single blue brush-stroke inside the hollow of her elbow, but all of her body, even the way her calves narrowed into her ankles, had a polished perfect roundness, so that the naked woman seemed as sturdily made as a bronze shield. Her skin, a dark smudgy gold like wet sand on a beach, finally convinced Conor that she was Chinese, not a Thai: all the other men were sallow beside her.

His first instinct, faced with the woman’s beautiful unconscious defiance, was to wrap her back up in the robe and take her home. Then four decades of training as an American male reasserted themselves. She had been paid well, or would be; that she looked far healthier than the girls in the sex club across the alley meant only that she would earn many times their price for submitting to a gang bang performed by half a dozen respectable citizens of Bangkok. Conor did not at all feel like joining in, but neither did he think that the woman needed protection. That she was exceptionally good-looking was no more than a professional asset.

He looked at the men around him. They were a club, and this was their ritual. Every week or so they gathered in some inconvenient and secret place, and one after another had sex with a drugged beauty. They’d talk about the women the way wine snobs talked about wine. The whole thing was creepy. Conor asked the bartender for another drink and promised himself that he would leave as soon as everybody else got busy.

If this was what Underhill got up to when he wanted to swing, he was tamer than he used to be.

But why would Underhill join a group whose purpose was to have sex with a girl!

If they start to have sex with each other, Conor thought, I’m out of here.

Then he was glad he had another drink, because the General stepped in front of the woman, cocked his right arm back, and slapped her hard enough to make her stagger back. He shouted a few words—“Crap crap!”—and she straightened up and stepped forward again. Her face was tilted like a shield and she was still smiling. A red, hand- shaped blotch covered the entire surface of her left cheek. Conor took a healthy, numbing slug of his drink. The General slapped her again, and the Chinese woman tottered back and straightened herself before she fell. Tears made neat tracks down her cheeks.

This time the General struck her with a straight blow to the side of her chin and knocked her flat on the ground. She murmured and rolled over, showing them dusty buttocks and a long scratch in her golden, dust-covered back. When she succeeded in hitching herself up on her hands and knees, the ends of her hair pooled on the dirt floor. The General kicked her very hard in one hip. The woman grunted and went down again. The General stepped smartly toward her and kicked her a little less forcefully in the side just beneath her ribcage. The woman writhed away into shadow, and quite gently the General bent down to extend his hand and help her to crawl back into the best light. Then he kicked her with great determination in the thigh, almost instantly raising a bruise the size of a salad plate. He proceeded to walk around her body, giving her a flurry of kicks.

It was just like the sex club, Conor saw—the sex club was just the map. Here the map was ripped away and you saw a tough little man beat up a woman in front of other men. That was how you had your fun. Down here in the garage, you got your ultimate sex club.

It made sense of the violence he had felt, anyhow.

The General examined the prostrate, huddled woman for a moment before accepting a drink from Sunglasses. He took a good mouthful, swished it around in his mouth, and swallowed. He stood and surveyed his work, his right arm bent at the elbow, the half-empty glass held with unconscious rigidity. He looked like a man taking time out from a difficult job with the satisfaction of knowing that so far he had given a superior performance.

Conor wanted to get out.

The General set down his glass and bent to help the woman stand. It was not easy to get her up. Her pains made it difficult for her to move out of a crouch, but she willingly took the General’s hand. Her dark-gold skin had bruised purple and black, and a large swelling distorted the line of her jaw. She got to her knees and rested there, breathing softly. She was a soldier, she was a ground-pounder. The General nudged her plump backside with one of his loafers, then kicked her hard. “Crap, crop crap,” he muttered, as if embarrassed that the others should hear him.