Koko

bound to tell Conor and Beevers that I’ve met you, but I don’t know how you feel about that either.”

“Do what you want,” Underhill said. “But I feel like you want to drag me out of my cave by my hair, and I’m not sure I want to leave it.”

“Then don’t!” Michael had cried.

“But maybe we can help each other,” Underhill said.

“Can I see you again tomorrow?”

“You can do anything you like,” Underhill had said.

As Michael Poole walked the last two hundred yards to his hotel, he wondered what he would do if a madman danced like a moving shadow on the hot crowded street behind him. Would he see a vision, as Underhill apparently had? Would he turn and try to run him down? Victor Spitalny, the lowlife’s lowlife, changed everything. A moment later Michael realized that Harry Beevers might have his mini-series after all—Spitalny put a few colorful new wrinkles in Beevers’ story. But was it for that he had come so far from Westerholm?

It was one of the easiest questions Poole had ever asked himself, and by the time he was going up the stairs into his hotel, he had decided to keep quiet for a little while about having found Tim Underhill. He would give himself a day before speaking to Conor and summoning Beevers. In any case, he discovered as he passed the desk, Conor was still out. Poole hoped that he was enjoying himself.

PART

FIVE

THE SEA

OF

FORGETFULNESS

1

Two days later, it was as if the world had flipped inside-out. The suddenness of events and the haste of Poole’s preparations had left him so breathless that he could still not be certain, carrying two bottles of Singha beer toward the table in the airport bar where Conor sat blinking at his progress, what he made of it at all.

Underhill was supposed to come with them on their flight, and part of Conor’s look at Michael as he came toward him from the crowded passengers-only bar was a gathering doubt that the writer would make it to the airport on time. Conor said nothing as Michael set down his beer and took the seat beside him. He bent forward as if to examine the floor, and his face was still white with the shock of what had happened back in New York while they had been making their separate tours of Bangkok. Conor still looked as if a loud noise had just awakened him.

Michael contented himself with a sip of the strong, cold, bitter Thai beer. Something had befallen Conor two nights earlier, but he would not discuss it. He too looked as if he were remembering some of the sentences Underhill had written in his dialogues with himself. Poole guessed that these questions and answers were a way of kicking a disused engine back into life: Underhill was teaching himself to work again. Along the way he had described what he called the Pan-feeling. According to Underhill, this had to do with “the nearness of ultimate things.”

“What are you thinking about, Mikey?” Conor asked.

Poole just shook his head.

“Stretch my legs,” Conor said, and jumped up and wandered toward the gates through which the passengers came for their own and other international flights. It was fifty minutes before the scheduled flight time, which an airline officiai had informed them had been delayed an hour. Conor bounced on his heels and scrutinized the people streaming through the gate until Underhill’s failure to arrive made him so nervous that he had to spin off and take a quick tour of the gift shop windows. At the entrance to the racks of duty-free liquor he checked his watch, shot another glance at the new arrivals, and dodged inside.

Ten minutes later he emerged with a yellow plastic shopping bag and dropped into his old seat beside Poole. “I thought if I went in there, he’d show up.”

Conor forlornly examined the Thais, Americans, Japanese, and Europeans pushing into the International departures lounge. “Hope Beevers made his plane.”

Harry Beevers was supposed to have taken a flight from Taipei to Tokyo, where he was to connect with a JAL flight that would bring him to the San Francisco airport an hour after their own arrival. They were all to take the same flight to New York from San Francisco. Beevers’ immediate reaction to the news of Pumo’s death had been the observation that the asshole would still be alive if he had come with them instead of staying behind to run around after his girlfriend. He asked clipped impatient questions about just when they were going to be in San Francisco, and why they couldn’t wait for him to come back to Bangkok. He was pissed off, he thought it was unfair that Poole and Linklater had found Tim Underhill: it was his idea, he should have been the one. “Make sure he gets on that plane,” he said. “And don’t let him lie to you.”

Poole had pointed out that Underhill could not have killed Tina Pumo.

“Tina lived in So Ho,” Beevers said. “Open your eyes, will you? He was in the restaurant business. How many coke dealers do you think live in SoHo? Not everything is the way it looks.”

Conor finished off his beer, jumped up again to inspect the incoming passengers, and returned. By now all the seats in the departure lounge were occupied, and the new arrivals either sat on the floor or wandered the wide aisles before the duty-free shops. As it filled, the lounge had gradually come to resemble Bangkok itself: people sat in chairs and sprawled over empty sections of the floor, the air seemed hot and smoky, voices cried out “Crap crap crop crop!”

After a long crackling burst of Thai from the loudspeaker, in which Poole thought he heard the words San Francisco, Conor again jumped up to check the board on which departures were listed. Their flight had been rescheduled to take off in fifty-five minutes. Unless they delayed it further, they would land in San Francisco at the same time as Beevers, who would never forgive them for having been duped. Beevers would insist on going back to Bangkok on the spot. He’d stage a chase through the streets, with police sirens and dashes across rooftops, concluding with the triumphant handcuffing of the villain and an astonishing explanation of how Underhill had killed the journalists and arranged Pumo’s murder. Beevers saw things in the terms rendered by car chases and lockstep summations.

Poole was very tired. He had slept little last night. He had called Judy, and she had curtly given him the news of Tina’s death. “Whoever did it is supposed to be the same person who killed the man in the library. Oh, you haven’t heard about that yet?” Unable to keep the satisfaction from her voice, she explained the circumstances of the death of Dr. Mayer-Hall.