Koko (28 page)

He seemed a little forlorn. Poole tried to imagine an American tycoon looking forlorn
in a black silk suit and tasseled loafers, but failed.

“He must have left before the murders.” The man looked at his watch. “Anything else?”

He waved good-bye as they walked back down to Nassim Hill and was still waving when
they turned toward Orchard Road to find a cab.

They saw where the body of Clive McKenna had been discovered as soon as their cabdriver
pointed out the Goodwood Park Hotel. The white hotel stood on a rise that looked down
toward the fringes of the city’s business district and the land fell away in a steep
green slope. When the cab dropped them off, Poole and Beevers walked through a fringe
of shrubbery and looked down the hill. Some tough, dark green plant like myrtle covered
it, and low hedges grew at intervals.

“He lured him here,” Beevers said. “They probably met at the bar. Let’s go out for
some fresh air. In goes the knife. Good-bye, Clive. I wonder—I wonder if we can find
out anything interesting at the desk.” Beevers sounded very cheerful, almost as if
he were celebrating the murder.

Inside, Beevers asked, “Was a Mr. Underhill registered here around the time Mr. McKenna
was killed?” He held a ten-dollar note folded into his palm.

The clerk bent over and pushed buttons on the computer terminal set beneath the registration
desk. He dismayed Michael Poole by reporting that a Mr. Timothy Underhill had been
expected six days before the discovery of Clive McKenna’s body, but had not arrived
to claim his room.

“Bingo,” Beevers said, and the desk clerk reached for the bill. Beevers pulled his
hand out of reach. “Do you have an address for Underhill?”

“Sure,” the clerk said. “Fifty-six Grand Street, New York City.”

“How did he make the reservation?”

“No record. It must have come in by telephone. We have no credit card number.”

“No record of where he called from?”

The clerk shook his head.

“Not good enough.” Beevers snatched back the note and smirked at Michael.

They went back out into the sun.

“Why would he use his real name if he was paying in cash?” Michael asked.

“Michael, he was so high he thought he could get away with anything. He’s a shake
‘n’ bake, Michael—killing people is not logical behavior. This man is drooling at
the mouth and you want to know why he uses his real name! See how I saved ten bucks?”
Beevers nodded to the doorman, who whistled to the rank of waiting cabs.

“You know,” Poole said, “I have the feeling I’ve heard that address, 56 Grand Street,
before. It seems so familiar.”

“Jesus, Michael.”

“What is it?”

“Pumo’s restaurant, dumbo. Saigon is at 56 Grand Street. In the City of New York in
the State of New York in the United States of America.”

Plantation Road began with a tall hotel at the corner of a busy six-lane road and
almost instantly became a comfortable upper-middle-class enclave of long low bungalows
behind wide lawns and locked gates. When they came to number 72, Beevers told the
driver to wait and the two men left the cab.

The bungalow where Roberto Ortiz and the woman had died stood out in the sunlight
like a pink cake. Flowering hibiscus trees grew on either side, their shadows floating
over the dark lawn. A clean yellow notice had been wired to the gates, announcing
that the Singapore Police Department had sealed the house for the purposes of a homicide
investigation. Two dark blue police cars were pulled up before the gates, and Poole
could see uniforms moving past the windows inside the house.

“You noticed yet how good-looking the policewomen are in this country?” Beevers asked.
“I wonder if they’d let us inside?”

“Why don’t you tell them that you’re a detective from New York?” Poole said.

“I’m an officer of the court, that’s why,” Beevers said.

Poole turned around to look at the house across the street. A middle-aged Chinese
woman stood at a living room window with her arm around the waist of a younger, taller
woman with her right hand on her hip. Both women looked very tense. Poole wondered
if they had ever heard a young man singing a strange song that sounded like
rip-a-rip-a-rip-a-lo.

Poole and Harry Beevers returned to the Marco Polo and found a frowsy, red-eyed Conor
Linklater who reminded Michael of Dwight Frye in
Dracula.
The hotel had given him the name of a doctor in the building next door, and Poole
and Beevers helped him into the elevator and out into the sunlight. “I can come with
you tonight, Mikey,” he said. “This is a real temporary thing.”

“You are staying home tonight,” Poole said.

“Yeah, count me out too,” Beevers said. “I’m too beat to chase around to another fag
bar. I’ll stay home and tell Conor what we did all day.”

They were moving unsteadily down the sidewalk, Michael and Beevers on either side
of Conor, who took little shuffling steps, afraid to risk walking normally.

Beevers said, “In a couple of years, we’ll be sitting in a screening room, watching
ourselves do this. Half the people in the world will know that Conor Linklater had
the runs. I wish Sean Connery were twenty years younger. It’s really too bad that
all the right actors are too old now.”

“Olivier really is too old, I guess,” Michael said.

“I mean guys like Greg Peck, Dick Widmark, guys like that. Paul Newman’s too short,
and Robert Redford’s too bland. Maybe
they ought to go for the intensity and get James Woods. I could live with that.”

The taxi wound through Singapore until it struck a belt road and then it went so far
that Poole began to wonder if the nightclub was in Malaysia. Before long the only
lights close at hand were the arc lamps above the six-lane highway. Dark empty land
lay on both sides of the road, here and there punctuated by small isolated clusters
of lights. They were nearly alone on the road and the driver was going very fast.
It seemed to Poole that the wheels were not actually touching the road.

“Are we still in Singapore?” he asked. The driver did not respond.

Eventually the car jerked off the highway onto an access road to a shopping mall that
gleamed like a space station in the darkness—longer, taller, and more elaborate than
any of the shopping centers on Orchard Road. A vast, nearly empty parking lot surrounded
it. Huge vertical posters covered with Chinese letters the size of a man hung down
the sides of the mall. A rank of palm trees hung frozen in the white artificial light.

“Are you sure this is where Peppermint City is?” Poole asked.

The driver braked to an abrupt halt before the undead palm trees and sat behind the
wheel like a statue. When Poole hesitantly repeated his question, the man bawled out
something in Chinese.

“How much?”

The man yelled the same phrase.

Poole handed over a bill whose denomination he could not see, received a surprising
amount of change, and tipped with another random bill. When the cab took off he was
alone.

The mall seemed to have been constructed of dull grey metal. Through huge windows
on the ground floor Poole could see two or three tiny figures wandering past closed
shops far down at the mall’s opposite end.

Glass doors whooshed open and cold air enveloped him. The doors sealed up behind him.
Goose bumps rose on his arms.

Before him a vacant corridor led to a vast high-vaulted space.
Poole felt as if he had entered an empty church. Mannequins posed and stretched in
the display windows of closed shops. Invisible escalators whirred. God had gone home
and the cathedral was as empty as a bomb crater. As Poole passed into the great vault,
he saw a few scattered people moving in a waking trance across the mezzanine, past
darkened rows of shops.

Poole wandered through the ground floor of the mall, certain that the driver had taken
him to the wrong place. For a long time he could not even find the escalator, and
thought he would have to drift all night past Good Fortune Toys, Merlion Furniture,
and Mode O’Day, Clothes for Discriminating Women. Finally he turned a corner at a
restaurant called Captain Steak and saw the wizened baseball-capped head of an elderly
Chinese man floating downwards toward him above the escalator’s steel flank.

On the third level his feet began to ache—the floor was flat, unyielding stone. Red
and orange sweatshirts, trapped birds, hung in a black window. Poole sighed and kept
on walking. Could he get a taxi back to town, way out here? He felt that nobody would
speak to him and he would never be able to make himself understood. He understood
why George Romero had filmed
Dawn of the Dead
in a shopping mall.

This was Singapore at its most sterile and perfect. Randomness, dirt, and vitality
had been ruthlessly excluded. Michael wished he were back at the Marco Polo, getting
drunk with Beevers and watching the finance programs and soap operas that made up
Singapore television.

On the fifth level he walked, disheartened, down corridors even darker and emptier
than those on the floors below. Up here, not a single shop or restaurant remained
open. He was on the fifth floor of a suburban shopping mall, and he had been stranded
miles out of town. Then, at the curve of the corridor, the dark shop windows gave
way to walls covered with small white tiles that shone with the light from a row of
angled spots. Through an opening in the wall, Poole saw men in suits, girls in tight
cocktail dresses, everybody smoking in hazy blue light. A good-looking hostess stood
at a desk and smiled at him while speaking into a telephone. Just outside the entrance
a pink neon sign flashed
PEPPERMINT CITY
! beside a leafless tree which had been painted white and hung with tiny white bulbs.

Poole went through the entrance and the shopping mall disappeared. Fanning out before
before and below him was an enormous fantasy that looked like tea time on the grounds
of a Mississippi plantation. On the other side of the desk, hostesses led
couples down to ranks of round white tables of ornate cast iron, and seated them on
white cast-iron ice-cream chairs. The floor and walls had been painted flat black.
Other ice-cream chairs and tables sat on the mezzanine and risers on both sides of
a busy, crowded bar. In the middle of the floor, surrounded by the tables, a boy in
an illuminated fountain spouted water from his mouth.

The woman at the desk led him to a small white table on a platform beyond the bar.
Poole ordered a beer. Young homosexual couples who wore suits and looked like MIT
graduate students shuffled around on a small dance floor in front of the stage. Other
couples like them occupied most of the seats in the club—boys in round glasses gripping
cigarettes and trying not to look self-conscious. Scattered through the club were
a few Englishmen and Americans earnestly making conversation with their Chinese and
Eurasian escorts. Most of the couples drank champagne, most of the boys, beer.

A few minutes later the quiet music suddenly ceased. The boys dancing in front of
the stage grinned and applauded as they went toward their seats. The telephone rang
very loudly, and the cash register went
bing!
, and a few voices obliviously rose up before they, too, ceased.

Four chunky Filipinos, one Eurasian, and a slender Chinese boy bounced onto the stage.
From the opposite side, a stagehand pushed on a bulky synthesizer and rolled it past
the drums. All the musicians but the Chinese were dressed alike in blousy yellow shirts
and tight red velvet vest-and-trouser outfits. They carried their instruments onstage
with them—two guitars, a conga drum, an electric bass—and began playing a bland, processed
version of “Billie Jean” as soon as the drummer and keyboard player had reached their
instruments. The Eurasian and the keyboard player had short curly hair and sunglasses
like Michael Jackson, and the others had John Lennon’s droopy hair, round glasses,
and sly sidelong glances. It was clear that they had been a band long before Lola
hired them: Poole imagined that if he came back to Singapore in twenty years, he would
see the same musicians grown older and paunchier, no less mechanical, and probably
in the same clothes.

It was Michael Jackson’s year, and Lola too had adopted the mass of curls and sunglasses,
as well as a single white glove. He wore glittery Spandex tights, glossy high black
boots, and a loose white off-the-shoulder blouse. Heavy earrings glittered in the
curly hair, and a clutch of heavy bracelets slithered up and down his arm. The boys
at the tables in front of the stage clapped and
whistled, and Lola pranced through an energetic but lifeless version of Michael Jackson’s
dance moves. From “Billie Jean,” they went into “Maniac,” then into “MacArthur Park.”
Lola’s costume changes drew claps and whistles.

Poole picked up the request card folded at his table, flattened it out and wrote
I like your act. Would you be willing to talk to me about an old friend from Bugis
Street?
He raised his arm and the waitress took the form and went down the steps to wind
through the tables to pass the slip up to Lola.

Still singing “Cross My Heart” and dressed now in a red long-sleeved blouse and a
necklace of heavy purple glass beads, Lola snatched the card from the waitress and
twiddled it flirtatiously through his fingers before opening it. His face was still
for no more than half a second before he spun around, stamped his foot, extended his
arms and rattled his bracelets and sang out “Cross my heart!”

After nearly an hour Lola left the stage bowing and blowing kisses. The MIT boys stood
up and applauded. The band took an almost mockingly low bow.

Poole waited for his check after the lights went up. Some of the young Chinese boys
had gathered around a door at the side of the stage, and occasionally someone opened
the door and let them in and out.

When the boys had left or returned to their tables for the second performance, Poole
knocked on the flimsy black door. It swung open. Crowded into a small, smoky lounge,
the musicians looked up from the floor and the ancient sofa. The room smelled of tobacco,
sweat, and makeup. Lola half-turned from the mirror before him and peered out from
beneath the towel that covered his head. He held a flat case of black powder in one
hand and an eyebrow brush in the other.