Koko (29 page)

Poole stepped into the room.

“Close the door behind you,” one of the musicians said.

“You want to see me?” Lola asked.

“I enjoyed your performance,” Poole said. He stepped forward. The fat conga player
pulled back his legs to permit Poole to move forward another step. Lola smiled and
pulled the towel from his head.

He was smaller and older than he appeared onstage. Beneath the makeup, a network of
knifelike little wrinkles had chipped into the girlish face. His eyes were tired and
cautious. Sweat still sparkled in his springy hair. He nodded at the compliment and
turned back to the mirror.

“I sent the note about Bugis Street,” Poole said.

Lola’s hand came away from his eyes and he very slightly turned his head to take in
Poole.

“Do you have a minute?”

“I don’t remember ever seeing you before.” Lola’s English was nearly accentless.

“This is my first time in Singapore.”

“And you have something extremely
pressing
on your mind.”

One of the musicians guffawed.

“I heard about you from a man named Billy,” Poole said. He seemed to be missing something,
some secret that the others knew.

“And what were you doing with Billy? Looking for entertainment? I hope you found some.”

“I was looking for a writer named Tim Underhill,” Poole said.

Lola startled him by slamming down the little case of mascara with enough force to
raise a dingy cloud of powder. “You know, I thought I was ready for this, but I am
not ready for this.”

He thought he was ready for this? Poole thought. He said, “Billy said you might have
known Underhill, or might even know where he is.”

“Well, he isn’t here.” Lola stepped forward. “I don’t want to talk about this. I have
another show to do. Leave me alone.”

The other musicians watched with good-natured indifference.

“I need your help,” Poole said.

“What are you, a cop? Does he owe you money?”

“My name is Michael Poole. I’m a doctor. I used to be a friend of his.”

Lola pressed his palms to his forehead. He looked as if he wished that Poole was a
dream that would simply go away. He peeled his hands away from his head and rolled
his eyes upward. “Oh. God. Well, here it is.” He turned to the conga player. “Did
you ever know Tim Underhill?”

The conga player shook his head.

“You weren’t on Bugis Street at the start of the seventies?”

“We were still in Manila,” the conga player said. “We were the Cadillacs in 1970.
Played Subic Bay.”

“Played all those bars,” said the keyboard player. “Great days, man. You got anything
you wanted.”

“Danny Boy,” the keyboard player said.

“Danny
Boy.
Sailors got Danny
Boy
.”

“Can you tell me where to find him?” Poole asked.

Lola noticed that his fingers were dusty with black powder, and gave himself a disgusted
look in the mirror before plucking a tissue from a box on his table. He deliberately,
slowly, wiped his fingers while gazing at himself in the mirror. “I don’t have anything
to hide,” he told the mirror. “Quite the reverse, in fact.”

Then he glanced again at Poole. “What are you going to do when you find him?”

“Talk to him.”

“I hope that isn’t all you’re going to do.” Lola exhaled loudly, clouding the mirror’s
surface. “I’m
really
not ready for this yet.”

“Just name a time and a place.”

“A time and a place,” sang the keyboard player, “give me the time and the place.”

“Subic Bay,” said the conga player.

“Ah, do you know Bras Basah Park?” Lola asked.

Poole said that he could find it.

“I’ll meet you there tomorrow at eleven, maybe.” Lola again confronted himself in
the mirror. “If I’m not there, forget all about it. Don’t come back. Okay?”

Poole had no intention of honoring that pledge, but he nodded.

The conga player began singing “Do you know the way to Bras Basah Park?” and Poole
left the room.

The next morning, half an hour’s walk brought Poole to within sight of a small green
triangle of ground set between Orchard Road and Bras Basah Road. He was alone—Conor
was too weak from whatever bug had attacked him to have walked the three miles to
the park, and Beevers, who had appeared in the coffee shop with bags under his eyes
and a red scratch above his right eyebrow, had claimed to think it better for Michael
to “feel out” the singer by himself.

Poole understood why Lola had chosen Bras Basah Park for their meeting. It was probably
the most public park he had ever seen. Nothing that happened there would be hidden
from the buildings on the other sides of the two wide roads, or from the drivers of
the cars that ceaselessly swept past. Bras Basah Park was about as private as a traffic
island.

Three broad, curving paths of amber brick intersected it and
converged at the park’s narrow eastern end, where a wider walkway circled an abstract
bronze sculpture and led out past a wooden sign.

Poole walked along Orchard Road until he reached the stoplight that would allow him
to cross into the empty park. It was five minutes to eleven.

When he sat down on one of the benches on the path nearest Orchard Road, he looked
around, wondering where Lola was now, and if he was watching him from one of the windows
facing the park. He knew the singer would make him wait, and wished that he had thought
of carrying a book with him.

Poole sat on the wooden bench in the warm sun. An old man tottered by on a stick,
and took an amazingly long time to pass before Poole. Poole watched him take his tiny
steps past all the benches, past the sculpture, past the sign, and finally out into
the middle of Orchard Road. Twenty-five minutes had gone by.

Here he was, sitting alone on a bench on a glorified traffic island in Singapore.
He felt, all at once, monumentally alone. He considered the possibility—no, the likelihood—that
if he were never to go back to Westerholm the person who would miss him most would
be a little girl for whom he could do nothing but buy books.

That was okay. That was all right. He’d miss Stacy too, just as much, if she were
to die while he was gone. It was funny, Poole thought: in medical school you learned
one hell of a lot about matters of life and death, but you didn’t learn beans about
mourning. They didn’t teach you anything about grief. These days, grief seemed one
of the absolutely essential human emotions to Dr. Michael Poole. Grief was right up
there with love.

Poole remembered standing alone in a hotel room in Washington, watching as a gaudy
van crunched in the front end of a dusty little car, remembered walking in brisk cold
air alongside whiskery veterans accompanied by Dengler’s double and the ghost of Tim
Underhill. He remembered Thomas Strack.

He saw fat ladies waving banners and cold clouds scudding through grey air. He remembered
how the names had walked right out of the black wall, and his mouth flooded with the
bitter, essential taste of mortality. “Dwight T. Pouncefoot,” he said, and heard the
glorious absurdity of that name. His eyes blurred, and he began to giggle uncontrollably.

For some time he went on laughing and crying at once. An extraordinary mixture of
feelings had come steaming up through his chest, filling every crevice, leaping every
synapse. He laughed
and cried, filled with the taste of mortality and grief, which was both bitter and
joyous. When the emotion began to fade, he yanked his handkerchief from his pocket,
wiped his eyes, and saw beside him on the bench a scrawny middle-aged man who looked
like a Chinese Roddy McDowall. The man was watching him with mingled curiosity and
impatience. He was one of those men who look like teenagers into their mid-forties,
and then suddenly wrinkle into aged boy-men.

Michael took in the man’s brown trousers and pink shirt with its collar carefully
folded over the collar of the brown plaid sports jacket, the carefully flattened-down
hair, and only then realized that this was Lola in his civilian clothes and out of
his makeup.

“I suppose you’re crazy too,” Lola said in a flat accentless voice. His face twitched
into a complicated pattern of chips and wrinkles as he smiled. “Makes sense, if you’re
a friend of Underhill’s.”

“I was just thinking that only a really terrible war would kill a guy named Dwight
T. Pouncefoot. Don’t you agree?” The name brought on another spasm of those radically
contradictory feelings, and Poole closed his mouth against an onslaught of mad giggling
laughter.

“Sure,” Lola said. Poole let his hands fall into his lap and saw, with a little shock
of relief and surprise, that Lola was almost entirely unaffected by his outburst.
He had seen worse. “You were in Vietnam with Underhill?”

Poole nodded. He supposed that was all the explanation Lola needed.

“You were close friends?”

Poole said, “He saved a lot of lives in a place called Dragon Valley, just by keeping
everybody calm. I guess he was a great soldier. He liked the excitement of combat,
he liked being on patrol, he liked that adrenaline rush. He was smart, too.”

“You have not seen him since the war?”

Poole shook his head.

“You know what I think?” Lola asked, and answered his own question as Poole waited.
“I think you can’t help Tim Underhill.” He glanced at Poole, then looked away.

“Where did you meet Underhill?”

Lola looked straight at Poole again, his mouth working as if to locate and expel an
irritating seed. “At the Orient Song. It’s completely different now—they have tour
groups, and a few of the Bugis Street people are paid a few dollars to sit in the
back and look dissipated.”

“I was there,” Poole said, remembering the Jaunty Jasmines.

“I know you were there. I know every place you went. I know everything you and your
friends did. Many people called me. I even thought that I knew who you were.”

Poole just kept silent.

“He used to talk about the war. He used to talk about you. Michael Poole, right?”
When Poole nodded, Lola said, “I think you might be interested in what he used to
say about you. He said that you were destined to become a good doctor, marry a perfect
bitch, and live in the suburbs.”

Poole met Lola’s grin with his own.

“He said you’d eventually begin to hate the job, the wife, and the place where you
lived. He said he was interested in how long it would take you to get there, and what
you would do after that. He also said he admired you.”

Poole must have looked startled, because Lola said, “Underhill told me you had the
strength to tolerate a second-rate destiny for a long time. He admired that—because
he could not, he had to find a tenth-rate destiny, or a twelfth-rate, or a hundredth-rate.
After his writing stopped working for him, your friend went in search of the bottom.
And people who seek the bottom always find it. Because it’s always there, isn’t it?”

What sent him there, Poole wanted to ask, but Lola went on talking—fast. “Let me tell
you about the Americans who came here during Vietnam. These people could not adjust
to life in their own country. They felt more comfortable in the East. A lot of them
liked Asian women. Or Asian boys, like your friend.” A bitter smile. “A lot of them
wanted to be where they thought drugs were plentiful. Most of the Americans who felt
that way went to Bangkok, some bought bars in Patpong or Chiang Mai, others got into
the drug trade.” He glanced at Poole again.

“What did Underhill do?”

Lola’s face broke into a wilderness of wrinkles. “Underhill was happy with his work.
He lived in a tiny room in the old Chinese section, put his typewriter up on a box.
Little record player—he spent his money on records, books, Bugis Street, and drugs.
But he was a sick person. He loved destruction. You said he was a good soldier. What
do you think makes a good soldier? Creativity?”

“But he was a creative person—nobody could say he wasn’t. He even wrote his best books
here.”

“He wrote his first book in his head in Vietnam,” Lola said. “He only had to put it
down. He sat in his little room, typed, went
out to Bugis Street, picked up boys, did whatever he did, took whatever he took, the
next morning typed some more. Everything was easy. You think I don’t know? I know—I
was there. When his book was finished, he had a big party in the Floating Dragon.
That’s when a man I know, a friend of mine named Ong Pin, met him. Then he was all
set to start his next book. He says to me, he knew all about this crazy man, he knows
him from the inside, he has to write a book about him. He has something to figure
out—he’s very mysterious. Mysterious in lots of ways. He needs money, but he says
he has a scheme that will make him set up for life. But before he can get it, he has
to borrow—he needs money to stay afloat. He borrows from everybody. Me included. A
lot of money. He will pay me back, of course he will. He is a famous author, isn’t
he?”

“Is that how the lawsuit came about?”

Lola gave him a sharp look, then a twisted smile. “It seemed like such a good idea
to him. He was going to get hundreds of thousands of dollars. Underhill had one big
problem—he couldn’t write anything he thought was any good. He started two, three
books after
The Divided Man.
Ripped them all up. He went crazy—so he and Ong Pin threatened the publisher with
a lawsuit. Get a lot of money all at once, pay everybody back. When this
brilliant
idea didn’t work, Underhill got tired of Ong Pin. He threw him out of his place,
he sent everybody away. He beat a boy up—crazy stuff. Then he disappeared. Nobody
could find him. After that I heard stories about him. Underhill was living in hotels
and running out in the middle of the night after running up huge bills. Once I heard
he was sleeping under a certain bridge, and some people and I went there to see if
we could at least shake a few dollars out of him, maybe beat
him
up, but he wasn’t there. I heard he was spending whole days in an opium house. Then
I heard he was even crazier than before—going around telling people that the world
was filthy, and that I was a demon, Billy was a demon, God was going to destroy us.
Scared me, Doctor. Who could tell what this crazy man would do? He hated himself,
I knew that. People who hate themselves, who cannot stand what they think they are,
can do anything, you know. He was blackballed from bars in every part of town. Nobody
saw him, but everybody heard stories. He found the bottom, he did that.”