by Peter Straub
He squeezed past the woman, who went on mouthing cheerful meaningless sounds, and got to the bar just as Mikey took one of the photographs of Underhill out of the envelope. “Let’s have a drink, what d’you say, gimme a vodka on the rocks.”
The bartender blinked, and a brimming glass appeared on the bar before Conor. Beevers already had one, Conor saw.
“Don’t know him,” the bartender said. “Five dollars.”
“Maybe you remember him from years back,” Beevers said. “He would have started coming here around 1969, ’70, around then.”
“Too long ago. I was little boy. Still in school. Wif da priests.”
“Take another look,” Beevers said.
The bartender removed the picture from Poole’s fingers and flipped it over his shoulder. “He is a priest. Named Father Ball-cock. I don’t know him.”
As soon as they got back out onto the humid street, Harry Beevers took a step ahead of the other two and faced them with his hands in his pockets and his shoulders raised. “I don’t care, I have to say it. I get the wrong vibes entirely from this place. There isn’t a chance in hell that Underhill’s still here. My gut tells me to go to Taipei—it’s more like his kind of place. Take my word for it.”
Poole laughed. “Not so fast, we just got started. There are at least twenty more bars on this street. Somewhere along the line, someone will know him.”
“Yeah, someone has to know him,” Conor said. He felt more confident of this after having put down his vodka.
“Ah, the peanut gallery has an opinion too,” Beevers said.
“You got your rocks off in Taipei, so you want to go back there now,” Conor said. “It’s so fucking obvious.” He stomped away to avoid hitting Beevers. Cries of “Best bar! Best bar!” erupted from various doormen. Conor felt his shirt sticking to his back.
“So it’s Swingtime next, is it?” Beevers had come up on the far side of Mike Poole, and Conor felt a little flare of satisfaction: Beevers wasn’t taking any chances with him.
“Yeah, let’s try out good old Swingtime,” Poole said.
Beevers made an ironic little bow, pushed open the door, and let the other two precede him into the bar.
After Swingtime came the Windjammer, after the Windjammer the Ginza, the Floating Dragon, and the Bucket of Blood. The Bucket of Blood was a real bucket of blood, Conor thought—that had been his father’s term for any dive with rickety stools and ripped booths, a floor too scummy to be visible, and crapped-out drunks lining the bar. Beevers groaned when one of the shambling drunks followed another into the cubicle that was the men’s room and, to judge by the noise, began tearing his arms out by the sockets. The flat-faced bartender just glanced at the photograph of Underhill.
Conor understood why the Jaunty Jasmines stayed down at the end of the street.
Harry Beevers looked like he wanted to suggest giving up and going back to the hotel, but Poole kept them moving from one bar to another. Conor admired the way he kept on going without getting discouraged.
At the Bullfrog the guys sitting around the tables were so drunk they looked like statues. There were moving pictures of waterfalls on the walls. At the Cockpit Conor finally noticed that at least half the whores in the place weren’t women at all. They had bony knees and big shoulders; they were men. He started laughing—men with big tits and good-looking cans!—and sprayed beer all over disgusted Harry Beevers.
“I know this guy,” the bartender said. He looked again at Underhill’s face, and started smiling.
“See?” Conor asked. “See now?” Beevers turned away, wiping his sleeve.
“Does he come in here?” Mike asked.
“No, other place I worked. Good-time Charlie. Buy everybody a drink!”
“You sure it’s the same man?”
“Sure, that’s Undahill. He was around for a couple years, back in the old days. Spend lots of money. Used to come in da Floating Dragon, before it change hands. I worked nights, see him alla time. Talk, talk, talk. Drink, drink, drink. Real writah! Show me a book, something about animal—”
“A Beast in View.”
“Beast, right.”
When Poole asked if he knew where Underhill was now, the man shook his head and said that everything had changed from the old days. “Might ask at Mountjoy, right across street. Real hard core over there. Probably be someone there who remembers Undahill from old days, like me.”
“You liked him, didn’t you?”
“For a long time,” the bartender said. “Sure, I liked Undahill for a long time.”
2
Conor felt uneasy almost as soon as they walked into the Lord and Lady Mountjoy, and he couldn’t figure out why. It was a quiet place. Sober men in dark suits and white shirts sat in booths along the sides of the room or at little square tables set out on a slippery-looking parquet dance floor.
There were no transient whores in this place, just guys in suits and ties, and one character in a glittery blouse, sprayed piled-up hair, and about a hundred scarves hung loose around his neck, who was cooling out at a back table.
“Loosen up, for God’s sake,” Beevers said to Conor. “You got the runs or something?”
“Don’t know him, never saw him,” the bartender said. He had barely glanced at the photograph. He looked like a young Chinese version of Curly, the bald stooge in the Three Stooges.
“The bartender across the street told us that this man used to frequent this place,” Beevers said, pushing himself against the bar. “We’re detectives from New York City, and it’s important to a lot of people that we find this man.”
“Bartender where?” When Beevers had said the word “detective” a lead shield had slammed down over the bartender’s face, making him look a lot less like Curly.
“The Cockpit,” Mike said. He gave a fierce sidelong glance at Beevers, who shrugged and began toying with an ashtray.
The bartender shrugged.
“Is there anyone here who might remember this man? Anyone who was around Bugis Street in those days?”
“Billy,” the bartender said. “He’s been here since they paved the street.”
Conor’s heart sank. He knew who Billy was, all right, and he really didn’t want to have to talk to him.
“In da back,” the bartender said, and confirmed Conor’s fears. “Buy him a drink, he’s friendly.”
“Yeah, he looks friendly,” Beevers said.
At the back table Billy had straightened his shoulders and was patting his hair. When they approached his table, carrying their own drinks and a double Chivas Regal, he put his hands in his lap and beamed at them.
“Oh, you bought me a little drinkie, how dear of you,” Billy said.
Billy wasn’t Chinese, but he wasn’t anything else either, Conor thought. His eyes might have been almond-shaped, but it was hard to see them under all the makeup. Billy’s skin was very pale and he spoke with a British accent. All of his gestures suggested that a woman had been trapped inside his body and on the whole was enjoying herself in there. He raised his drink to his lips, sipped, and set it down gently on the table.
“I hope you gentlemen are going to join me?”
Mike Poole sat down opposite Billy, and Harry Beevers drew up a chair beside him. Conor had to sit on the bench beside Billy, who turned his head and flicked his eyelashes in his direction.
“Are you gentlemen new to Bugis Street? Your first night in Singapore, perhaps? You are looking for entertainment of an exotic nature? Precious little left in our city, I fear. Never mind—anyone can find what he wants, if he knows where to look.”
Another lidded glance at squirming Conor.
“We’re looking for someone,” Poole said.
“We’re—” Beevers began, and then looked up in astonishment at Poole, who had just stamped on his foot.
Poole said, “The young man at the bar thought you might be our best chance. The person we’re looking for lived or still lives in Singapore, and spent a lot of time on this st
reet ten to fifteen years ago.”
“Long time ago,” Billy said. He cast his eyes down, tilted his head. “This person have a name?”
“Tim Underhill,” Poole said. He placed one of the photographs beside Billy’s drink. Billy blinked.
“Does he look familiar?”
“He might.”
Poole pushed a Singapore ten-dollar note across the table and Billy twinkled it away. “I believe I did know the gentleman.” Billy made an elaborate business of scrutinizing the photograph. “He was a bit of a one, wasn’t he?”
“We’re old friends of his,” Mike said. “We think he might need our help. That’s why we’re here. We’d appreciate any information you could give us.”
“Oh, everything’s changed since those days,” Billy said. “The whole street—really, you’d hardly know it.” He moodily inspected the photograph for a moment. “Flowers. He was the man for flowers, wasn’t he? Flowers this and flowers that. He’d been a soldier in the war.”
Poole nodded. “We met him in Vietnam.”
“Beautiful place, once,” Billy said. “Free-wheeling.” He startled Conor by asking, “Did you ever see Saigon, lover?”
Conor nodded and gulped down a mouthful of vodka.
“Some of our best girls used to work there. Nearly all gone now. The wind shifted. Got too cold for them. Can’t blame them, can you?”
Nobody said anything.
“Well, I say you can’t. They lived for pleasure, for delight, for illusion. Can’t blame them for not wanting to start grubbing away at some job, can you? So they scattered. Most of the best of our old friends went to Amsterdam. They were always welcome in their own very elegant clubs—the Kit Kat Club. You gentlemen ever see the Kit Kat Club?”
“What about Underhill?” Beevers asked.
“All mirrors, three stages, chrystal chandeliers, best of everything. It’s often been described to me. There’s nothing like the Kit Kat in Paris, or so I hear.” He sipped his scotch.
Conor said, “Look, do you know where we can find Underhill, or are we just dicking around?”
Another of Billy’s silken smiles. “A few of the entertainers who worked here are still in Singapore. You might try to see Lola perform. She works good clubs, not these remnants left on Bugis Street.” He paused. “She’s vivacious. You’d enjoy her act.”
3
Four days earlier, Tina Pumo was interrupted by Maggie Lah’s giggling over the front page of the New York Post while they ate breakfast together at La Groceria. (Tina was sentimentally attached to the little restaurant where he had so often read and reread the back page of the Village Voice.) They had each purchased newspapers at the newsstand on Sixth Avenue, and Tina was deep into the Times’s restaurant reviews when Maggie’s laughter distracted him. “Something funny in that rag?”
“They have such great headlines,” Maggie said, and turned the tabloid toward him: YUPPIE AIRPORT MURDER. “Random word order,” Maggie said. “How about AIRPORT YUPPIE MURDER? Or YUPPIE MURDER AIRPORT? Anyhow, it’s always nice to read about the end of a yup.”
Tina eventually found the story in the Times’s Metropolitan section. Clement W. Irwin, 29, an investment banker whose income was in the upper six figures and was regarded as a “superstar” by his peers, had been found stabbed to death in a men’s room near the Pan American baggage counters at JFK airport. Maggie’s paper carried a photograph of a blubbery face with small, widely set eyes behind heavy black eyeglasses. Equal amounts of appetite and aggression seemed stamped into the features. The caption read: Yuppie financial whiz Clement W. Irwin. On the inside pages were photographs of a townhouse on East 63rd Street, a manor on Mount Avenue in Hampstead, Connecticut, and a low, rambling beach house on the island of St. Maarten. The story in the Post, but not the Times, contained the speculation that Irwin had been murdered by either an airport employee or a fellow passenger who had been on his flight from San Francisco.
3
The morning after his tour of the Bugis Street bars, Conor Linklater swallowed two aspirin and a third of a bottle of Pepto-Bismol, showered, dressed in jeans and a short-sleeved shirt, and then joined the other two in the Marco Polo’s coffee shop.
“What kept you?” Beevers said. He and Michael were garbaging down on the weirdest-looking breakfast Conor had ever seen. They had toast and eggs and that stuff, but they also had bowls of gooey white pasty porridge full of green and yellow shit and fatty evil things that would have looked like eggs if they hadn’t been green. Both Mike and Beevers seemed to have taken no more than a bite or two of this substance.
“Little rocky this morning, think I’ll pass on breakfast,” Conor said. “What is that stuff, anyhow?”
“Don’t ask,” Beevers said.
Mike asked, “Are you sick, or just hung over?”
“Both, I guess.”
“Diarrhea?”
“I chugged down a ton of Pepto-Bismol.” The waiter came up, and he ordered coffee. “American coffee.”
Beevers smiled at him and pushed a folded copy of the Straits Times across the table. “Take a look and tell me what you think.”
Conor scanned headlines about new sewage treatment plants, about the increase of bank loans to nonbank customers, the expected overload of bridge traffic on the New Year’s holiday, and finally saw this headline in the middle of the page: DOUBLE HOMICIDE IN EMPTY BUNGALOW.
An American journalist named Roberto Ortiz, Conor read, had been found slain in a bungalow on Plantation Road. Also found was the body of a young woman identified only as a Malaysian prostitute. Forensic pathologists stated that the corpses, found in a state of putrefaction, had been dead approximately ten days. The bungalow was the property of Professor Li Lau Feng, who had left it vacant for a year while he taught at the University of Jakarta. Mr. Ortiz’s body had been mutilated after death from gunshot wounds. The unidentified woman had also died of gunshot wounds. Mr. Ortiz was a journalist and the author of two books, Beggar Thy Neighbor: United States Policy in Honduras and Vietnam: A Personal Journey. Police were said to have evidence linking this crime to several others committed in Singapore during the past year.
“What kind of evidence?” Conor asked.
“I bet they found Koko cards,” Beevers said. “They’re finally getting cagey. You think they’d release a detail like that if it happened in New York? Don’t be crazy. Mutilated, it says. What do you want to bet his eyes were poked out and his ears were cut off? Underhill’s at work, my friends. We came to the right place.”
“Jesus,” Conor said. “So what do we do? I thought we were going to, ah, look for this, ah …”
“We are,” Poole said. “I got all the papers and guidebooks in the gift shop, and we were just about to try to find out where this Lola works, if she is working. The clerks in the shop won’t admit to ever having heard of anybody named Lola, so we have to do it this way.”
“But this morning,” Beevers said, “we thought we ought to look at the places where they found the other bodies. The bungalow where they found the Martinsons, and this one, and the Goodwood Park Hotel.”
“Should we maybe talk to the police? Find out if there were cards with these other people?”
“I don’t feel like turning Underhill over to the police,” Beevers said. “Do you? I mean, is that what we came here for?”
“We still don’t know it’s Underhill,” Poole said. “We don’t even know he’s still in Singapore.”
“You don’t shit in your backyard. You got it now, Michael?”
Poole was going page by page through the Straits Times.
“Here’s Underhill right now,” Conor said. “He still wears that funky old bandanna. He’s fat as a pig. He gets stoned out of his gourd every single night. He owns a flower shop. All these young guys work for him, and he bores the shit out of them when he talks about all the stuff he did in Nam. Everybody loves the old ratbag.”
“Dream on,” Beevers said.
Poole had gone on to another paper,
and was flipping pages with the regularity of a metronome.
“Every now and then he goes into his study or whatever, locks the door, and sweats out a new chapter.”
“Every now and then he locks himself in an abandoned building and kills the shit out of somebody.”
“Are those eggs really a hundred years old?” Conor asked. He had picked up the menu while Beevers spoke. “What’s the green shit?”
“Tea,” Poole said.
Ten minutes later Poole found a small advertisement for “The Fabulous Lola” in Singapore After Dark, one of the cheap guides to Singapore’s night life he had picked up in the gift shop. Lola was appearing at a nightclub called Peppermint City at an address up in the ten thousands out on a road too far from the center of the city to be on Beevers’ map.
All three men stared at a tiny black and white photograph of a girlish male Chinese with plucked eyebrows and high teased hair.
“I don’t feel too good already,” Conor said. He had turned as green as a century egg, and Poole made him promise that he would spend the day in his room and see the hotel doctor.
4
Michael did not know what he expected to learn from the murder sites any more than he could anticipate what Lola might tell him, but seeing the places where the deaths occurred would help him to see the deaths themselves.
He and Beevers walked in less than ten minutes to the villa on Nassim Hill where the Martinsons had been found.
“Picked a nice place, at least,” Beevers said.