What was Wol Pot doing there? Obviously Porter had been following Wol Pot and made notations of every place the man went. The first two locations on the list were restaurants in Chinese Town, but they yielded nothing. Hatcher assumed that Wol Pot had eaten there. The managers of both studied Wol Pot’s photo for a long time, then shrugged. ‘Maybe’ was the consensus.
‘What’s next?’ Sy asked.
‘You know a place called the Stagecoach Deli.’
‘Okay,’ Sy said. ‘Very near here.’
‘We’ll try it next.’
They drove through noisy, tacky Patpong with its blaring loudspeakers outside gaudy bars and dazzling neon signs, fully ablaze in mid afternoon, and turned at a place called Jack’s American Star and the San Francisco Bar, which advertised topless go-go dancers who performed ‘special shows.’
Then suddenly they were on a street out of the past, away from the neon glare, the bellowing loudspeakers and the hawkers. It could have been a street in any Western American town and even in the daylight there was about it an unreal atmosphere. Sunbeams, like spotlights, sliced through the late afternoon mist from the nearby river, and it was eerily quiet, like a ghost town.
‘Stop here!’ Hatcher ordered as they turned into the street. He got out of the car, surveying the strange, winding road. A wooden marker had been tacked over the regular street sign. CLEMENTINE WAY, it read.
‘This has to be the section they call Tombstone, right?’ Hatcher said to Sy.
‘That’s good guess. I saw in the movie over at Palace one time. The O.K. Gunfight.’
‘Gunfight at the O.K. Corral,’ Hatcher corrected.
‘That’s it, Burt Reynolds.’
‘Lancaster.’
‘Chai,’ Sy said, smiling his row of battered teeth.
Hatcher walked down through the mist, past the Hitching Post, which had elegant ‘Western boots and tall cowboy hats displayed in the window. He checked the menu pasted to the window of Yosemite Sam’s, and it reminded him of home: Brunswick stew, chili, spareribs and pork barbecue. The Stagecoach Deli was a few doors farther down the street. It had swinging doors and an imitation Tiffany window but offered lower East Side New York fare. A little farther on was Langtry’s Music Hall. The photographs in its two-pane windows were of naked Thai and Chinese dancers, but it too conformed to the Western motif that dominated the street. The windows also featured old posters of entertainers from the gay nineties. Lillian Russell, Houdini, Lillie Langtry and Eddie Foy. It did not open until 6P.M.
He walked down one side of the street, crossed over and came back up the other side, passing other quaint spots. An ice cream parlor called Pike’s Peak, a ham- and-egg joint called the Roundup, which advertised American doughnuts in its window. A movie theater, the Palace, which according to its marquee played American double features.
And there was the Longhorn, its flat roof dwarfed by a soaring onion-domed wat directly behind it. The Longhorn’s sign was shaped like a giant scroll, rolling over the entrance from one side to the other. There was an old-fashioned wooden Indian propped by the swinging doors and long wooden bus-stop benches on both sides of the door, and a balcony over the sidewalk supported by unfinished four-by-fours.
Someone had gone to a lot of trouble to make this small, isolated section authentic.
A large black man was sitting on one of the benches in front of the bar’s beveled glass window, drinking a can of Japanese beer. He was leaning back against the window of the saloon with his eyes closed, letting the afternoon sun burn a hole in him. Every so often he would take a swig from the can.
Hatcher crossed back to the Stagecoach Deli and checked out the short street. There was a hint of music and conversation from behind the closed doors of Tombstone but none of the hawking and loudspeakers of Patpong, a block away.
The notations in Porter’s notes said, ‘Stagecoach Deli, taxi, 10A.M., 1 hr’; the following day, ‘Stagecoach Deli, noon, 45 mins’; and the day after that, ‘Palace Theater, 2:30 P.M., 35 mins.’ Did that mean Wol Pot had come to these places in a taxi or had he been watching them from a taxi? He could have eaten at the Stagecoach Deli in forty-five minutes but he had spent only thirty-five minutes at the Palace Theater, hardly time to see a film.
The two places formed a perfect triangle with the Longhorn as the apex. He took out the water-scarred sheet the Mongoose had given him, and studied the partially legible entry.
try, 4:15 p . . ‘was still all he could decipher.
The entry could have referred to Langtry’s Music Halclass="underline" ‘Langtry, 4:15 P.M.’ It fit. Was it possible that Wol Pot had been observing the Longhorn four days in a row, each day a little later than the day before? He remembered what the ex-soldier upriver had told Daphne. ‘Go to the Longhorn in Tombstone, a lot of Americans living in Bangkok hang out there.’
An ironic scenario popped into Hatcher’s mind. Perhaps Wol Pot had lost track of Cody. Wol Pot was looking for Cody, and Porter was following Wol Pot.
‘I’m going to take a look at the Longhorn,’ Hatcher told Sy.
Before Hatcher could cross the street, another man came down the sidewalk toward the bar. He was wearing tan safari shorts, a faded red tank top, and red, white and blue sneakers. A red bandanna held scruffy blond hair out of his eyes.
He had a dog on the end of a long leather leash. It was a big, ugly, dumb-looking animal, which looked like a cross between a Great Dane and a spaniel with some hound dog thrown in. He had sleepy yellow eyes, a long, slobbery muzzle and a long, skinny tail that drooped until it rose at the end. His coat was shiny deep brown except for a large white spot that looked as if someone had thrown paint on his shoulder. There was nothing symmetrical about the spot; it covered half his face and then dribbled down his chest, where it was speckled with brown spots. The dog didn’t walk, it loped, and it didn’t look bright enough to scratch an itch.
The black man opened one eye, saw the dog, and started to chuckle to himself. ‘The chuckle started at his big, burly shoulders and rip pled down to his portly waist. He kept his mouth shut hut eventually the chuckle burst out in the form of a loud snort, followed by a stream of beer.
‘Lord laughing out loud, would you look at that big, lazy, ugly, dumb-ass, sissified, silly-tailed dog over there.’
‘Excuse me, you talkin’ about my dog, Otis?’ the man in the red, white and blue sneakers said with a scowl.
‘I’m talking about that big, lazy, ugly, dumb-ass, sissifled, silly-tailed dog right there. Would his name be Otis?’
‘What do you mean, “would be”? His name is Otis’
‘Well then, that’s who I’m talkin’ about.’
‘You’re really pissing me off, brother, I told you, that’s my dog.’
‘If you don’t say anything, nobody’ll know.’
‘I’m proud of that fuckin’ dog, man.’
‘Then you’re dumber than he is.’
‘Maybe you’d like to gum your dinner tonight. Maybe you’d like to pick your teeth up off the floor and carry them home in your pocket.’
‘Yeah, and maybe you’d like me to pull your tongue down and tie it to your dick.’
‘Lord God a’mighty, you must be having a lucky day. You must think this is the luckiest fuckin’ day in your lousy, worthless, fuckin’ life.’
‘I don’t need luck to grind you into the street and make a big ugly spot out of you.’