Koko (40 page)

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.

Conor followed one of the men down a long dark corridor into a big low-ceilinged room
which had been painted black. Dim red lights burned above rows of camp chairs and
red spots pointed at two stages, one directly before the chairs, the other beside
a crowded bar. A naked girl danced on each stage, flipping her hair and snapping her
fingers. The girls had unsteady breasts, narrow hips, and pubic hair like small black
badges. In the red light their lips looked black. Most of the customers in the chairs
and standing at the bar were Thai men, but scattered through the crowd were a few
drunken white men like himself, and even a few white couples in American clothes.
Conor half-sat, half-fell into an empty chair near the back of the room and ordered
a beer that cost a hundred baht from a half-naked girl who materialized beside him.

That bastard took my cock out of my pants, he thought. Guess I’m lucky he didn’t cut
it off and take it home in a bottle. He drank his beer, then a succession of beers
as the girls onstage changed faces and bodies, swapped short hair for long hair, baseball
breasts for football breasts, pillowy hips for greyhound hips. They blew out smoke
and smiled like girls on dates. Conor decided that he liked these girls. One of them
could open Coca-Cola bottles with her vagina—the top came off the bottle with a loud,
echoing report. This girl’s face was oddly harsh and wistful, with high precision-engineered
cheekbones and gleaming eyes like paper cuts. After she popped open the bottles, she
tilted her backside against the wall of the stage, her pretty legs in the air, and
inhaled the soda from the bottle. When she stood up, she released the liquid back
into the bottle in a hissing jet. As far as Conor knew, there wasn’t a single girl
in Donovan’s who could do this trick.

He had reached that ironbound stage of drunkenness, he realized, that could not be
affected by a dozen more drinks.

When he looked at the side stage he felt his face turn red, his ears blaze. A slim
young creature had shimmied out of her dress to reveal that she had small, pretty
breasts and an erect cock.
Another slender
katoey
knelt to take the erection in her mouth. Conor turned his eyes back to the center
stage, where a girl with the self-possessed face of a dictator’s mistress was about
to do something with a large reddish dog.

“Gimme a whiskey,” Conor told the waitress.

When the dictator’s mistress and the dog left the stage, a short muscular Thai male
and a girl with waist-length hair bounded up. Soon they were locked in intercourse,
altering their positions, drawing up their knees and revolving as if they were suspended
in the air. One of the
katoeys
to Conor’s side sighed and arched his girl’s back. Conor ordered another whiskey.
A ghostly Tim Underhill sat applauding at his side.

Suddenly Conor was unable to tell which of the people onstage were men and which were
women. They were men with breasts, women with erections. They had melted together—he
saw the flash of a girl’s smile, plump buttocks, a broad thigh. Then all four performers
were standing up and bowing like actors, the young woman delicately flushed across
the top of her breasts. To Conor, the four people onstage seemed to be encased in
the memory of pleasure, as different from those cheering them as Martians, as untouchable
as angels.

That’s it! Conor thought. It flashed before him that a moment of total clarity and
truth had just passed. Conor saw himself standing before a great wall of dazzling
brightness, an impenetrable, unknowable realm where the sexes melted together and
language was music and things moved so swiftly and brightly they hurt the eyes.

Then he fell back into cold reason. The performers now draped in robes and shuffling
offstage in the emptying club were drug addicts and whores who lived in riverfront
shacks, and he was drunk. Tim Underhill was a boozy wreck, just like him. Conor groped
for that moment of clarity in order to dismiss it completely, but could find only
the memory of sitting in bars and the taxi, of a hunt so fruitless it might have been
for a unicorn instead of a man.

He thought that his whole life was a history of not understanding what the hell was
going on—a history of not getting it.

Conor wiped his hands on his jeans and dully followed the last of the customers down
the dark corridor and outside into the warm night.

A handful of men from the club had drifted toward the parking garage. They were all
dressed in smooth-fitting Thai suits and resembled mercenary soldiers on home leave.
One of them wore
dark glasses. Conor weaved outside the door of the club, sensing that they were waiting
for him to leave.

It was suddenly clear to him that what they had seen in the club was only a prelude
to the real event of the night. They were not satisfied with what satisfied everyone
else. Me too, Conor thought, remembering the feelings he’d had while the performers
took their bows. There’s more—there’s one hell of a lot more. And something else made
Conor move toward the waiting men. Underhill would have been with them. That was why
Cham had brought him here. Whatever the men were awaiting was the real last act of
the performance which already had taken Conor so far.

As Conor stepped toward the men, the Thai in dark glasses muttered something to his
friends and broke away to approach him. He held up a hand like a policeman halting
traffic, then made a sweeping-away gesture. “Performance ovah,” he said. “You must
go.”

“I want to see what else you guys got on tap,” Conor said.

“Nothing else. Must leave now.” The man repeated the whisk-broom gesture.

Without appearing to have moved at all, the other men were now much nearer to Conor,
who felt a familiar surge of excitement and anticipation at the proximity of danger.
Violence hung about these men like a fog.

“Tim Underhill told me to come here,” he said in a loud voice. “You know him, right?”

A buzz of soft talk broke out behind the man in sunglasses. Conor heard what sounded
like “Underhill,” followed by suppressed laughter. He relaxed. The man in sunglasses
glanced back at him in a wordless command to stand still. The men spoke to each other
again, and one of them made what was obviously a joke, and even Sunglasses smiled.

“Let’s see what you guys got goin’ here,” he said.

“Crap crop crap!” one of the men shouted, and the others showed yellow smiles.

Sunglasses walked toward Conor with an officer’s strut. “Do you know where you ah?”

“Bangkok. Jesus, I ain’t that drunk. Bangkok, Thailand. The goddamn kingdom of Siam.”

Big yellow smile, and a shake of the head. “What street you on? What district?”

Conor said, “I don’t even give a shit.”

At least a few of the men must have understood him, for they called out tauntingly
to Sunglasses. Conor heard in their tone a
cynical, end-of-the-world edge he had heard nowhere in the world in the past fourteen
years. They could have been saying either: Kill him and let’s move or Let the asshole
American come along.

Sunglasses squinted up at Conor with a look that mingled doubt and amusement. “Twelve
hundred baht,” he finally said.

“This show better be four times as good as the other one,” Conor muttered, and pulled
his crumpled wad of bills from his pocket. The little group of men had already begun
moving toward the towering concrete garage, and Conor stumbled along behind them,
trying to keep himself moving in a straight line.

The man in sunglasses moved ahead of the rest and opened a door set beside the garage’s
exit ramp. The little group began filing through the door into a dimly lighted stairwell.
Sunglasses flapped his hand in the air and hissed, urging Conor to come in.

“Here I am,” Conor said, and hurried after the others.

The next day Conor told himself that he could not really be certain about what had
happened after he followed the other men down into the lower depths of the garage.
He’d had so much to drink that he had been unsteady on his feet. In a sex club he
had seen a vision of—what? angels? splendor?—and it had mix-mastered his brain. He
had not understood more than one word spoken inside the garage, and he could not even
be certain about that word. He had been light-headed enough to have heard unspoken
words and seen imaginary things; Conor felt that in some way he had been light-headed
since he and Mikey and Beevers had boarded the Singapore Airlines jet in Los Angeles.
Since then, reality had bent backwards in on itself in some extraordinary way, putting
him into a world where people looked at scenes from hell, where plump little girls
blew smoke rings out of their pussies, where men turned into women and women into
men. They were getting close to Tim Underhill, Mikey said, and Conor felt that closeness
every time he wondered about what happened in the garage. Getting close to Underhill
probably meant you were getting into some territory where everything was upside down
by nature, where you couldn’t trust your own senses. Underhill liked those places—he
had
liked
Vietnam. Underhill was like a 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.