The woman tilted her face to the light, and Conor saw how far she was willing to go. They could not stop her. They could not even touch her. Her face was a shield again, and the side of her mouth that was not swollen moved in an echo of her earlier smile.
The General struck her temple with the back of his hand. The woman canted over, caught herself with an outstretched arm, and brought herself erect again. She sighed. A smear of red feathered the corner of one eye. The General’s lips moved in a silent command, and the woman visibly focused herself and got up on one knee. Then she levered herself upright. Conor felt like applauding. The woman’s eyes shone.
With the force of some crazed bird escaping his throat, a loud burp tasting of smoke and pitch flew from Conor’s mouth. Most of the men laughed. Conor was amazed that the woman laughed too.
The General lifted the shirt-jacket of his Thai suit and pulled a revolver from the waistband of his trousers. He crooked his second finger through the trigger guard and displayed the revolver on his palm. Conor didn’t know much about guns, but this one had flashy grips carved from some milky substance like ivory or mother-of-pearl, and filigreed scrollwork on the side plate beneath the cylinder. Intricate scrolling covered the barrel. It was a pimp gun.
Conor stepped backwards, then stepped backwards again. Finally his brain caught up with his body. He could not stand and watch while the General shot her—he couldn’t save her, and he had the terrible feeling that the woman would fight him if he tried, that she did not care to be saved. Conor moved backwards as silently as possible.
The General began to speak. He was still displaying the pimp gun on his palm. His voice was soft and urgent, persuasive, soothing, and compelling at the same time. He sounded just like a General to Conor. “Crap crop crap crap crop crop crop crap,” the General intoned. Give me your poor your huddled masses. O glorious we. “Crop crop crop crop crap.” Gentlemen, we are gathered here today. Conor eased himself further back into the darkness. The bartender’s eyes flicked at him, but the men did not move. “Crop crap.” Glory glory heaven heaven love love heaven heaven glory glory.
When Conor thought he was close enough to the bottom of the staircase, he turned around. It was less than six feet away.
“Crap crop crop.” There came the unmistakable metallic click that meant the firing mechanism was cocked.
A shot echoed loudly through the basement. Conor jumped for the stairs, hit the bottom step, and scrambled up, no longer caring how much noise he made. When he reached the first landing he heard another shot. It was muffled by the ceiling of the basement, and this time he knew that the General was not shooting at him, but Conor ran up the stairs until he reached ground level, and hurried outside. He was out of breath and his legs were trembling. He staggered through the hot wet air, and came out of the alley onto a main road.
A grinning one-armed man beeped the horn of his ruk-tuk and steered the rackety little vehicle straight at him. When he stopped he bobbed his head and asked, “Patpong?”
Conor nodded and got in, knowing that he could walk to his hotel from there.
On Phat Pong Road Conor staggered through the crowd to the hotel, went to his room and collapsed on the bed. He kicked his shoes off lying down, and saw the bruised naked woman and the little General with his pimp gun. Conor finally swam out into deep sleep on the tide of the recognition that he had learned what “telephone” meant.
1
The elephant appeared to Michael Poole a short time after Conor had seen him getting into a taxi outside a bar in Soi Cowboy. Michael had failed twice by then, as Conor was to continue failing for the rest of the day, and the elephant’s appearance so thoroughly surprised him that he immediately took it as a token of success. He needed this encouragement. In Soi Cowboy, Michael had shown Underhill’s photograph to twenty bartenders and fifty patrons and a handful of bouncers; not one had even bothered to look at it carefully before shrugging and turning away. Then he’d had an inspiration, to look at Bangkok’s flower market. “Bang Luk,” said one of the bartenders, and a taxi took him across town to Bang Luk, a narrow strip of cobbled street near the river.
Flower wholesalers had set up their wares in a series of empty garages on the left-hand side of the little alley, and displayed them on carts and tables set out before the garages. Vans pulled in and out of the alley. On the alley’s right-hand side, a row of shops lined the ground floor of three-story apartment houses with French windows and abbreviated balconies. Washing on clotheslines hung before half of the open French windows, and the third of these balconies, above a shop called Jimmy Siam, had been covered with green plants and bushes in earthenware pots.
Michael paced slowly down the cobbles, breathing in the odors of a thousand flowers. Men watched him from beside the barrows of birds of paradise and carts laden with dwarf hibiscus. This was not the tourist’s Bangkok, and anyone who looked like Michael Poole—a tall white man in jeans and a short-sleeved white safari jacket from Brooks Brothers—did not belong here. Without feeling in any way threatened, Poole did feel extremely unwelcome. Some men loading flats of flowers into a mustard-colored van gave him only a brief glare and returned to their work; others watched him so intently that he could feel their eyes on him long after he had passed by. In this way Michael walked all the way to the end of the alley, and he stopped to look over a low concrete wall to the silty Chaophraya River, churning with an incoming tide. A long white double-decker boat marked ORIENTAL HOTEL moved slowly downriver.
He turned around, and a few men slowly returned to their work.
He returned to Charoen Krung Road on the pavement opposite the flower stalls, looking into every shop he passed for a glimpse of Tim Underhill. In a dingy cafe Thai men in dirty jeans and T-shirts drank coffee at a counter; in Gold Field, A Limited Partnership, a receptionist stared back at him from behind a screen of ferns; in Bangkok Exchange, Ltd., two men spoke into telephones at large dark desks; in Jimmy Siam, a bored girl tilted her head and stared into space at a counter full of cut roses and lilies; in Bangkok Fashions a lone customer dangled a baby on her hip and flipped through a rack of dresses. The last building in the row was a shuttered bank with chains across the doors and cardboard squares on the windows. Michael passed by a stop sign and was back out onto Charoen Krung Road without having seen Underhill or even sensed the possibility of his presence. He was a baby doctor, not a policeman, and whatever he knew about Bangkok had been read in guidebooks. Michael looked out into the maze of traffic. Then a ponderous movement in a sidestreet across the road caught his attention. He focused on it and found that he was looking at an elephant, a working elephant.
It was an old elephant, a laborer among elephants, carrying half a dozen logs rolled in its trunk as easily as if they were cigarettes. It plodded down the middle of the street past inattentive crowds. Michael Poole was charmed, as enchanted as a child would be by a mythical beast. Outside of zoos, elephants
Michael watched the elephant until it disappeared behind jiggling crowds and a wall of shop signs in enigmatic Thai.
He turned south and drifted for a block or two. Tourist Bangkok—his hotel and Patpong—might as well have been in a different country. White men might have been seen in the flower market before, but here they were unknown. In his short-sleeve safari jacket, his White Man in the Tropics regalia, Michael was an intrusive ghost. Nearly every one of the people on his side of the street stared at him as he went by. Across the street were warehouses with low, slanting tin roofs and broken windows; on his side small dark people, mostly women, carried babies and shopping bags up and down the sidewalks and in and out of dusty shops. The women gave him sharp, anxious looks; the babies goggled at him. Poole liked the babies. He had always liked babies, and these were fat, clear-eyed, and curious. His pediatrician’s arms longed to hold them.
Poole moved on past drugstores with window displays of hair and snake’s eggs, past shoebox restaurants with fewer people in them than flies. When he walked past a school that resembled a public housing development, he thought of Judy again with a renewal of his old despondency. He thought, I’m not looking for Underhill, I’m just
