Ortiz looked at him carefully, then nodded very slowly.
“You’re so stupid,” Koko said. He shook his head, smiling sadly, took up the automatic pistol, and pointed it at the middle of Roberto Ortiz’s chest. He looked directly into Ortiz’s eyes, then shook his head again, still smiling sadly, braced his wrist with his left hand, and fired.
Then he watched Roberto Ortiz die fighting and twitching and struggling to speak. Blood darkened the pretty blazer, ruined the pretty shirt and the luxurious necktie.
Eternity, jealous and alert, watched with Koko.
When it was done, Koko wrote his name on one of the Orchid Boy playing cards, grasped the cleaver, and pushed himself up off the floor to do the messy part of the job.
PART
THREE
THE
TIGER BALM
GARDENS
1
“Just let me keep the books,” Michael Poole said to the erect little woman, all black shining hair and deep dimples, beside him. Her name tag read PUN YIN. She tilted his carry-on bag toward him, and Poole took the copies of A Beast in View and The Divided Man from the open pouch on the side. The stewardess smiled and began making her way forward through the pediatricians.
The doctors had started to unwind as soon as the plane hit cruising level. On earth, visible to their patients and other laymen, Michael’s colleagues liked to appear knowing, circumspect, and only as juvenile as conventional American ethics permitted; aloft, they acted like fraternity boys. Pediatricians in playclothes, in terrycloth jogging suits and college sweaters, pediatricians in red blazers and plaid trousers roamed the aisles of the big airplane, glad-handing and bawling out bad jokes. Pun Yin got no more than halfway toward the front of the plane with Michael’s bag when a squat, flabby doctor with a leer like a Halloween pumpkin positioned himself before her and did an awkward bump and grind.
“Hey!” Beevers said. “We’re on our way!”
“Give me an S,” Conor said, and lifted his glass.
“You remember to get the pictures? Or did your brain collapse again?”
“They’re in my bag,” Poole said. He had made fifty copies of the author’s photo on the back of Orchid Blood, Underhill’s last book.
All three men were watching the unknown doctor twitch around Pun Yin while a group of medical men yipped encouragement. The pretty stewardess patted the man on the shoulder and squeezed past him, interposing Michael’s bag between the doctor and herself.
“We’re going to face the elephant,” Beevers said. “Remember?”
“Could I forget?” Poole asked. During the Civil War, when their regiment had been founded, “facing the elephant” had been slang for going into battle.
In a loud, blurry voice Conor asked, “What traits are embodied in the elephant?”
“In time of peace or in time of war?” Beevers asked.
“Both. Let’s hear the whole shootin’ match.”
Beevers glanced at Poole. “The elephant embodies nobility, grace, gravity, patience, perseverance, power, and reserve in times of peace. The elephant embodies power and wrath in times of war.”
A few of the pediatricians nearest stared at him in affable confusion, trying to share the joke.
Beevers and Poole began to laugh.
“Damn straight,” Conor said. “That’s it, there it is.”
Pun Yin glimmered for a moment far away at the head of the cabin, then swished a curtain before her and was gone.
2
The airplane slowly digested the thousands of miles between Los Angeles and Singapore, where the corpses of Miss Balandran and Roberto Ortiz sat undiscovered in a bungalow on a leafy road; the doctors settled into their seats, overcome by alcohol and the exhaustion of travel. Bland food arrived, considerably less delicious than the smile with which Pun Yin placed it before the passengers. Eventually the stewardess removed their trays, poured out brandy, plumped up pillows for the long night.
“I never told you what Underhill’s old agent told Tina Pumo,” Poole said to Beevers across a dozing Conor Linklater.
Shafts of light pierced the long dark cabin of the 747. Soon Savannah Smiles would be shown, to be followed by a second movie which starred Karl Malden and several Yugoslavians.
“You mean you didn’t want to tell me,” Beevers said. “It must be pretty good.”
“Good enough,” Poole admitted.
Beevers waited. At last he said, “I guess we do have about twenty more hours.”
“I’m just trying to get it all organized.” Poole cleared his throat. “At first, Underhill behaved like any other author. He bitched about the size of his printings, asked where his royalty checks were, things like that. Apparently he was nicer than most writers, or at least no worse than most. He had his odd points, but they didn’t seem serious. He lived in Singapore, and the people at Gladstone House couldn’t write to him directly because even his agent only had a post office box number.”
“Let me guess. Then things took a turn for the worse.”
“Very gradually. He wrote a couple of letters to the marketing people and the publicity department. They weren’t spending enough money on him, they weren’t taking him seriously. He didn’t like his paperback jacket. His print run was too small. Okay. Gladstone decided to put a little more effort into his second book, The Divided Man, and the effort paid off. The book made the paperback best-seller list for a month or two and sold very well.”
“So was our boy happy? Did he send roses to Gladstone’s marketing department?”
“He went off the rails,” Poole admitted. “He sent them a long crazy letter as soon as the book hit the list—it should have got on higher and sooner, the ad campaign wasn’t good enough, he was sick of being stabbed in the back, on and on. The next day another ranting letter showed up. Gladstone got a letter every day for a week, long letters, five and six pages. The last couple threatened them with physical abuse.”
Beevers grinned.
“There was a lot of stuff about them shafting him because he was a Vietnam veteran. I guess he even mentioned Ia Thuc.”
“Hah!”
“Then after the book dropped off the list he began a long fandango about a lawsuit. Weird letters started turning up at Gladstone House from a Singapore lawyer named Ong Pin. Underhill was suing them for two million dollars, that being the amount the lawyer had calculated had been lost to his client through Gladstone’s incompetence. On the other hand, if Gladstone wished to avoid the expense and publicity of a trial, Ong Pin’s client was willing to settle for a single one-time payment of half a million dollars.”
“Which they declined to pay.”
“Especially since they had observed that Ong Pin’s address was the same post office box to which Underhill’s agent, Fenwick Throng, sent his mail and royalty checks.”
“That’s our boy.”
“When they wrote back, giving him the option of taking his next book elsewhere if he was not satisfied with their efforts, he seemed to come to his senses. He even wrote to apologize for losing his temper. And he explained that Ong Pin was a lawyer friend of his who had lost his office, and was temporarily living with him.”