Thai Horse (48 page)

‘You looked real good in there,
pheuan’
Hatcher said and crawled into the sedan. He went through the papers and found the passport. According to the information on it, Wol Pot was five six, weighed 154 pounds and lived on Raiwong Road, which was in Chinese Town. But Hatcher had something even better than a description.

He was staring down at the passport photograph of Wol Pot, the Vietnamese whose real name was Taisung, the commandant of the Huie-kui prison camp.

ROGUE
TIGER

He would come to be known as Old Scar. He lay in the tall grass at the edge of the pond watching the chital stag rutting in the mud fifty feet away. He had been stalking the herd for three hours, sometimes lying motionless for thirty or forty minutes at a time as they moved down through the sandy nullah and out of the ravine into the flat plain and from there through the ten-foot-high bamboo grove to the water hole.

In his day, Old Scar had been a magnificent tiger, over five hundred pounds, faster than any male within a hundred miles, indomitable, and so powerful he had once brought down a seven-hundred-pound buffalo and hauled it with his iron jaws almost a quarter of a mile to his family and then hid the carcass twenty feet above the ground in a tree. This had been some tiger.

Now he was old and crippled by rheumatism. Old battle wounds ached when he crawled. His teeth were yellow and one of his cuspids was broken off. And a huge, ragged scar etched his face from between his eyes down the side of his muzzle to his
jaw
, the signature of a younger, more aggressive male
who
would have killed any other tiger of that age and infirmity. But Old Scar had still been a little too tough for the young buck, and he had shown enough stuff to take a draw and walk away from the fight with only his wound.

Old Scar carefully placed one enormous paw in front of the other, creeping by inches toward the unsuspecting deer so as not to rustle the dry leaves under him. For all his twenty-two years he had hunted the same way, with the stealth and patience and speed he had learned watching his mother. He was moving by pure instinct now. Except that all his tricks were failing him.

The stag raised his head suddenly and sniffed the air. There was no wind, so he had not yet picked up the tiger’s scent, but he was wary. The herd was spread out and knee-deep in the water. They knew better than to go any deeper, for the pond was also the home of several crocodiles. But they were vulnerable and the big five- hundred-pound buck was responsible.

Old Scar was rigid in his cro
u
ch. His once powerful legs were hugged up against his belly, ready to spring, his ears forward, his tail erect. But he had lost his touch and a leaf crackled suddenly under him; the chital spooked and ran, and the herd scattered with it. Old Scar charged after the stag as it darted this way and that, turning suddenly back toward the water. Old Scar dodged with the chital, got inside its turn and was within striking distance. But as he made his big move the stag kicked out both its rear legs. One hoof caught Old Scar in the right eye and the pupil burst like a marble exploding. The tiger roared with pain, took one futile, prideful swipe of his mighty paw and missed by a mile.

The stag and the herd were gone.

Old Scar collapsed in the water, roaring with the pain in his legs and shoulders and from the eye he had just lost to a deer. He rested, panting, in the warm water for an hour and then dragged himself to the muddy banks and rolled in the soft, wet earth to heal his aching body.

The situation was getting desperate. It was his twentieth try in two days, and his twentieth miss. The day before, a careless lemur had moved within striking distance and then had outrun him, dashing up a tree to safety. There had been a time when Old Scar could have taken the tree in three bounds. But he had wearily turned in defeat and skulked away from the monkey’s shrieked insults. Old Scar was very hungry.

The herd did not return, and finally he decided to move to another watering hole. He
w
as going back into the territory of another young male, but Old Scar had no choice. He was too tired to go any farther. As he stalked carefully through the brush, a sharp scent stung his nostrils. It was an odor that stirred old longings in the tiger. The smell of a tigress in estrus. And then he heard her growling, a strange, demanding and instantly seductive call, and he heard the male answer her from nearby. Old Scar hunched down and crept forward, peering through the tall grass and saw the female approach the male, begin to nuzzle him, arouse him, and then she lay down and he straddled her. Old Scar watched, remembering his younger days when the females wanted him and flirted with him.

Old Scar moved on, picking up another scent. Chital. He could smell its fresh blood and he knew the male had been lured away from his dinner by the female. He crept forward, following the scent of the freshly killed deer until he found it, hidden deep in a bamboo thicket where even the vultures could not see it.

Old Scar lay on his empty belly and as hungry as he was he fastidiously dressed the dead animal as all tigers do. He started at the rear, licking away the blood, then ripping into the rump with his shearing teeth, pulling out the intestines with his incisors, and cleaning the bones with a tongue like sandpaper.

Old Scar could put away forty pounds of food a day. He had not eaten in three days, and he consciously kept from purring as he ate so as not to attract the male. He could hear the other two cats screaming in ecstasy and he knew it was safe to keep eating. But then he heard the other male rolling over and snorting. Still hungry, the old giant crept off through the tall grass. He knew he could not survive another fight with a young tiger. It was getting dark, so he found a hollow tree and slept the night.

Now he had been wandering aimlessly for two more days, unsuccessfully seeking food, and his hunger was turning to anger. Then Old Scar found himself in a place that was vaguely familiar. He began to recognize landmarks and remembered things from his youth. This was where he had begun life, where his mother had taught him all the tricks before sending him out to find his own territory.

He patrolled the plot of land, looking for traces of other tigers, but there were none. Old Scar realized there was very little grass here. And there were houses built around one side of the lake
a
nd where there once had been a large bamboo-fringed bay there were vegetables growing. The forest was now a hundred yards from the lake with only reeds to provide cover for him.

The tigers’ two biggest enemies, progress and man, had stolen more of their domain. But Old Scar was too tired to go any farther. On the far side of the lake he could see people moving about. He crawled on his belly, sneaked into the lake and crouched there quietly, cooling himself, bathing his wounds and drinking the cool water.

It was near dusk when he saw the child: a girl, no more than three years old, a naked toddler who had wandered away from her mother’s eye. She strolled along the water’s edge, kicking at it, making splashes.

Old Scar watched her with his one good eye. She looked like a monkey, perhaps more meat. She didn’t appear as fast and she had no tail. He pulled his legs up under him, got ready. His ears leaned forward, his lips crept back away from his teeth.

The little girl danced straight to him. When she was perhaps five feet away, she saw the giant, hunched in water up to his shoulders, his yellow eyes afire, his broken teeth twinkling. Before she could scream, the tiger lunged. One giant leap and Old Scar had her in his jaws. As he would have done with any animal, he bent her head back like a deer’s, bit hard into the throat and suffocated her. Then he turned and sneaked back to the safety of the jungle with his kill. He settled down and started to lick off the blood.

He had tasted better meat and
his
eye had festered and he was feverish and agitated, but the kill was easy and the food was nourishing. The next day he sneaked back down to the lake. This time he crept closer to the village, close enough to see another child playing in the dirt at the edge of the village.

In the next week Old Scar killed two more children, a crippled old monk and a full-grown woman who was doing her wash in the lake.

That was when Max Early was called in. That was when the party started. And that
w
as when Hatcher finally began to unravel the riddle of Murphy Cody.

DOGS

At first, Wol Pot’s wallet seemed to yield very little besides his passport. There was a d
r
iver’s license with an address on Rajwang Road in Chinese Town, two bet tickets from the racetrack, obviously losers, and a ticket to a boxing match, now past.
According
to Wol Pot’s papers he was a ‘produce salesman.’

There was nothing else of interest in the wallet.

Over breakfast, Hatcher spread the two photos, of Wol Pot and Pai and Cody, in front
o
f Sy.

‘I’m also looking for this guy,’ Hatcher confided, tapping the picture of Wol Pot.

Sy studied the photographs for a few moments.

‘I think on this girl since yesterday,’ he said. ‘She is most beautiful. I maybe see her but
. . .
I think that about all beautiful women.’

‘Do you remember where?’ Hatcher asked.

Sy shook his head. ‘He is with this girl?’ he asked, pointing to the photo of Cody.

‘Maybe, maybe not. I don’t know. The GI is the one I’m looking for.’

‘Okay,’ Sy said. ‘Where do we go first?’

Hatcher took out his list of locations from Porter’s day book. Unfortunately Porter’s diary contained notations on locations and times but no addresses and no comments. He also had the address from Wol Pot’s passport, an address in Yawaraj. He took out the sheet the Mongoose had given him, the water-streaked page from Porter’s diary dated the last day of Porter’s life, and spread it out on the table. That was all he had to go on, that and a note to check out a bar called the Longhorn in a place called Tombstone and another note: ‘Thai Horse?’ He smoothed the water-ruined sheet carefully on the table and perused it once more, but the only thing legible
was part
of one entry:’
. . .
try, 4:15p
. .

‘Address from passport is in Chinese Town,’ Sy said. ‘Rajwang Road. We start there maybe?’

‘Good idea,’ Hatcher said. But it wasn’t. The address turned out to be phony
—
a non-number along the river on the edge of Chinese Town. The closest number to it was an ancient building that in disrepair seemed ominous. Its wooden walls were faded and peeling from the sun and rain, the windows were boarded over, and it seemed to sag in the middle, as though the very floors were tired. A deserted old relic squeezed between two other deserted old relics. Hatcher tried the doors of the three warehouses but they were nailed shut. Deserted buildings. Obviously nobody lived in them. Wol Pot’s address was an empty pier.

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 a
n
d 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 bello
w
ing 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
m
ovie 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 ‘
W
estern boots and tall cowboy hats displayed in the wi
n
dow. 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 Hall: ‘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 o
u
t 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.