Koko (22 page)

Michael Poole stood at the window of his hotel room, looking down with an almost alarming
sense of freedom at a long stretch of Singapore. The surprisingly green, surprisingly
neat scene before him fell away to what he supposed was the east. A long way off,
tall office blocks rose in a clean white cluster that might have been a transplanted
section of midtown New York City. Nothing else in the scene before Poole even faintly
resembled Manhattan. Trees with broad crowns that looked as edible as vegetables filled
most of the space between himself and the tall white buildings, and because Michael
was far above the tops of these trees, they seemed almost carpetlike. Between the
broad areas filled in by the treetops swept wide roadways with smooth unblemished
surfaces. Expensive cars coursed along these perfect roads, as many Jaguars and Mercedes
as on Rodeo Drive. Here and there, through gaps in the trees, tiny people drifted
along broad malls. Nearer the hotel, bungalows of pink or creamy stucco with wide
porches, columns, and tiled roofs occupied green hillsides. Some
of these had open courtyards, and in one of them a stocky woman in a bright yellow
robe hung out her wash. In the immediate foreground, not at all obscured by the ubiquitous
trees, the swimming pools of his own and other hotels sparkled like tiny woodland
lakes glimpsed from an airplane. A canopy of red and blue stripes bordered the most
distant pool, where a woman swam dogged laps; at the intermediate pool a bartender
in a black jacket set up his bar. Beside the pool nearest Michael a Chinese boy dragged
a stack of thick pads toward a row of empty redwood frames.

This luxurious city both surprised him, reassured him, and excited him more than he
was willing to admit. Michael leaned forward against the window as if he wanted to
take flight through the glass. Everything down there would be warm to the touch. The
Singapore of his imagination had been a combination of Hue and Chinatown with a generalized
smear of sidewalk food vendors and trishaws. He had pictured a version of Saigon,
a city he had seen only briefly and disliked. (Most of the combat soldiers Michael
knew who had visited Saigon had disliked it.) Just looking at those smooth quadrants
of treetops, those neat serrated roofs, the tropical bungalows and the shining pools,
made Poole feel better.

He was elsewhere, without doubt he was somewhere new: he had managed to step out of
his life, and until this moment he had been unaware of how much he had wanted or needed
to do that. He wanted to stroll beneath those healthy trees. He wanted to walk along
the wide malls and smell the perfumed air he remembered from their arrival at Changi
airport.

Just then his telephone rang. Michael picked it up, knowing that Judy was on the other
end of the line.

“Good morning, gentlemen, and welcome to the Republic of Singapore,” came the voice
of Harry Beevers. “It is presently nine-thirteen on the trusty Rolex. You will report
to the coffee shop where you will receive your individual assignments.… Guess what?”

Michael said nothing.

“A glance through the Singapore telephone directory uncovers no listing for a T. Underhill.”

A little more than an hour later they were walking down Orchard Road. Poole carried
the envelope full of Underhill’s jacket photos, Beevers carried a Kodak Instamatic
in his jacket pocket and was awkwardly examining a map folded into the back of
Papineau’s Guide to Singapore
, and Conor Linklater slouched along with his
hands in his pockets, carrying nothing. During breakfast they had agreed to spend
the morning like tourists, walking through as much of the town as they could cover—“getting
the feel of the place,” as Beevers said.

This section of Singapore was as bland and inoffensive as their coffee shop breakfast.
What Dr. Poole had not seen from the window of his hotel room was that the city had
a lot in common with the duty-free area of a large airport. Every structure that was
not a hotel was either an office building, a bank, or a shopping mall. The majority
were the latter, most of them three or four levels high. A giant poster across the
topmost level of a tall building still under construction depicted an American businessman
speaking to a Singaporean Chinese banker. In a balloon above the American’s head were
the words
I am glad I learned of the fantastic return on my money I can earn by investing in
Singapore!
To which the Chinese banker replies
With our beneficial investment program for our overseas friends, it is never too late
to take part in the economic miracle of Singapore!

Right now, you could step into a glass-fronted shop and buy cameras and stereo equipment;
across the six-lane street, you could climb a flight of marble steps and choose from
seven shops selling cameras, stereo equipment, electric razors, and electronic calculators.
Here was the Orchard Towers Shopping Center, and here, across the street, shaped vaguely
like a ziggurat, was the Far East Shopping Center, which had a long red banner reading
GONG HI FA CHOY
, for it was just past the Chinese New Year. Next to the Orchard Towers Shopping Center
stood the Hilton, where middle-aged Americans breakfasted on a terrace. Further back
there had been the Singapura Forum, where a stocky Malay with the face of William
Bendix had played a hose over the flagstones. Far up on a hill they had seen a gardener
toiling at keeping the grounds of the Shangri-La as immaculate as the center court
at Wimbledon. Ahead down Orchard Road were the Lucky Plaza Shopping Center, the Irana
Hotel, and the Mandarin Hotel.

“I think Walt Disney went crazy one day,” said Conor Linklater, “and said ‘Fuck the
kids, let’s invent Singapore and just make money.’ ”

When they passed the Prosperity Tailor Shop a grinning little man came out and followed
them, trying to talk them into a purchase.

“You tough customers!” he said after the first half block. “You get ten percent off
sale price. Best offer in whole city.” After
they had actually crossed over the big intersection at Claymore Hill, he became more
insistent. “Okay, you get one-quarter off discount price! I can go no lower!”

“We don’t want suits,” Conor said. “We’re not
looking
for suits. Give up.”

“Don’t you want to look good?” the tailor asked. “What’s the matter with you guys?
You
enjoy
looking like tourists? Come to my shop, I make you look like sophisticated gentlemen,
one-quarter off discount price.”

“I already look like a sophisticated gentleman.”

“Could do better,” said the tailor. “What you’re wearing cost you three-four hundred
dollars at Barneys, I give you three times the suit for same price.”

Beevers ceased his impatient jigging on the sidewalk. The expression of unguarded
astonishment on his face was as good as a Christmas present to Michael Poole and,
he supposed, to Conor.

“I make you look like Savile Row,” said the tailor, who was a round-faced Chinese
man in his fifties wearing a white shirt and black trousers. “Six hundred-fifty-dollar
suit, three hundred seventy-five dollars. Discounted price five hundred, I give you
one-quarter off. Three hundred seventy-five dollars, price of couple good dinners
at Four Seasons. You lawyuh? Stand in front of Supreme Court, you not only win case,
everybody say ‘Where you get that suit? Must be from Prosperity Tailor Shop, Wing
Chong, proprietor’!”

“I don’t want to buy a suit,” Beevers said, looking shifty now.

“You need suit.”

Beevers yanked the camera from his pocket and snapped the man’s picture as if he were
shooting him. The tailor grinned and posed. “Why don’t you attack one of these guys
instead of me? Why don’t you go back to your shop?”

“Lowest prices,” the man said, trembling with suppressed hilarity. “Three hundred
fifty dollars. I go any lower, can’t pay rent. Go any lower, children starve.”

Beevers shoved the camera back into his pocket and turned to Michael with the air
of an animal caught in a trap.

“This guy knows everything else, maybe he knows Underhill,” Michael said.

“Show him the picture!”

Michael took the envelope of photographs from under his arm and opened it.

“We are police officers from the City of New York,” Beevers said.

“You lawyuh,” said the tailor.

“We are interested in knowing if you have ever seen this man. Show him the picture,
Mike!”

Michael took out one of the photographs of Tim Underhill and held it up before the
tailor.

“Do you know this person?” Beevers asked. “Can you recall ever having seen him prior
to now?”

“I never see this person prior to now,” said the tailor. “It would be honor to meet
this person, but he could not pay even rock-bottom price.”

“Why not?” Michael asked.

“Too artistic,” the tailor said.

Michael smiled and began to slide the picture back into the envelope when the tailor
bent forward and grasped the print.

“You give me picture? Have plenty more?”

“He’s lying,” Beevers said. “You’re lying. Where is this man? Can you lead us to him?”

“Celebrity picture,” the tailor said.

“He just wants the picture,” Michael said to Beevers.

Conor slapped the tailor on the back and laughed out loud.

“What do you mean, he just wants the picture?”

“Hang on wall,” the tailor said.

Michael handed him the photograph.

The tailor tucked it under his arm and bowed, giggling. “Thank you very much.” He
turned around to walk back up the broad mall. Well-dressed Chinese men and women strolled
toward them beneath the overhanging trees. The men wore blue suits, neat ties, and
sunglasses and looked like the banker on the banner. The women were slim and good-looking
and wore dresses. Poole realized that he, Beevers, and Conor were a racial minority
of three. A long way down the mall, beside a poster that surrounded Chuck Norris’s
scowl with leaping flames and a lot of Chinese characters, a teenage Chinese girl
idled along, looking absently into shop windows. She wore what must have been a school
uniform of flat white skimmer, white middy blouse with a black tie, and loose black
skirt. Then an entire pack of such girls, neat as a row of ducks, swung into view
behind her. Across the street next to a poster advertising McDonald’s hamburgers a
square white sign advised
SPEAK MANDARIN—ASSIST YOUR GOVERNMENT.
Suddenly Poole could smell the perfume in the air, as if some invisible, exotic flower
bloomed all around him. He felt unreasonably happy.

“If we’re looking for the Boogey Street Underhill used to talk
about, why don’t we just take a cab?” Poole said. “This is a civilized country.”

Stung by a recognition, Tina Pumo woke up in what at first seemed utter darkness.
His heart was beating very loudly. He imagined that he must have cried out, made at
least some sound, before he awakened, but Maggie slept on undisturbed beside him.
He raised his arm and looked at the luminous hands on the face of his watch. It was
three twenty-five.

Tina knew what had been stolen from his desk. If Dracula had not moved everything
around, he would have noticed its loss immediately, and if the two days since the
break-in had been normal working days, he would have noticed its absence as soon as
he sat down. But these two days had been anything but normal—he had spent at least
half of each working day downstairs with the builders, contractors, carpenters, and
exterminators. They finally seemed to have rid Saigon’s kitchen of all its insects,
but the exterminator was still in a state closely resembling euphoria at the number,
variety, and hardiness of the bugs he had had to kill. At least a few hours a day
had to be spent convincing Molly Witt, his architect, that she was designing a kitchen
and an enlarged dining room, not a high-tech operating room. The rest of the time
he had spent with Maggie, talking as he had never talked in his life about himself.

Tina felt almost as if Maggie had unlocked him. In two days she had gone a long way
toward drawing him out of a shell he had barely known he was in.

In a way he was still only beginning to understand, that shell had been formed in
Vietnam. Pumo felt humbled by this new knowledge—Dracula had terrorized him by awakening
feelings that Pumo had fondly, even proudly, imagined he had put away with his uniform.
Pumo had imagined that it was only other people who had allowed themselves to be scarred
by Vietnam. He used to feel at a safe emotional distance from all that had happened
to him there. He had left the Army and got on with his life. Like virtually every
other veteran, he’d gone through a period of aimlessness and dislocation when he coasted
just alongside life, but that time had come to an end six years earlier, when he made
his move with Saigon. He had, it was true, continued to go from girl
to girl, and as he grew older, the girls had gotten younger by staying the same age.
He fell in love with the shape of their mouths or the shape of their forearms or the
eloquence of the relationship between their calves and their thighs; he fell in love
with the way their hair swung or their eyes took him in. Until Maggie Lah had stopped
him dead, he thought now, he had fallen in love with everything there was about a
person except the actual person.

“Do you think there is a real point where
then
stops and
now
begins?” Maggie had asked him. “Don’t you know that down deep the things that happen
to you never really
stop
happening to you?”

It had crossed his mind that she might think this way because she was Chinese, but
he had kept silent about this theory.

“Nobody can walk away from things the way you think you walked away from Vietnam,”
she told him. “You saw your friends get killed, and you were just a boy. Now, after
a relatively minor beating, you’re afraid of elevators and you’re afraid of subways
and dark streets and God knows what else. Don’t you think there’s some connection?”