“Well, take it off the list,” Sonja said. “Take it off.”
He inflated his chest. Diana fixed him with steady pale eyes.
Somchai had rehearsed with Grossmann the words he was to say to the taxi driver about going to the zoo. Khun Otto had told him to sit in the front seat, for that was what men did in Australia. He sat in the front and said, “Take to Taroona Park, please.”
The driver turned to him, squinting. “Eh?”
“Taroona Park,” Somchai said loudly.
“No such place, mate,” the driver replied. He glanced at the trademark on Somchai’s backpack. “You from Thailand?”
Somchai did not reply.
The driver translated the question: “Khun pen khon Thai mai. Khrap.” Somchai smiled and nodded. The driver sympathized. Australia was horrible, and he was dying to go home. He would, as soon as he’d earned enough money to buy a rice field.
Somchai explained that he had to go to the zoo, to meet someone there at lunchtime.
“But it’s only nine o’clock,” the driver said. “If I take you by the harbor tunnel you’ll be there before ten. You’ll have to wait for hours.”
By the time they reached Oxford Street, the driver had proposed a different and better travel plan. Instead of going by taxi all the way, Somchai should ride to Circular Quay and catch the zoo ferry across Sydney Harbor. “You’ll save fifteen dollars,” he said, and translated this sum into baht.
Somchai laid his hand on the driver’s arm. “I’m in your debt,” he said, nodding portentously.
At Circular Quay, the taxi driver parked and accompanied Somchai to the wharf from which ferries to the zoo departed. They arrived just in time to miss one. Green water swung up and down, slapping against the pylons. The cabbie apologized and accompanied Somchai to the ticket kiosk, where he bought a ticket. He explained that the next ferry would leave in forty minutes and showed his compatriot where to wait. He even offered to order him coffee, but Somchai did not want anything to drink. He wanted to stare at the foreigners. “Too many foreigners here,” he said, making a face. “They live here,” the driver explained.
Weasel noticed Somchai half an hour later, when she and Deborah arrived at the Quay. “Remember him?” she asked. Deborah looked blank. “He got off our flight,” Weasel prompted.
“They all look the same to me.”
Honey, are you in the wrong job, Weasel thought. She said, “He’s got long hair, he’s got only one ear, and he looks like he’s wearing acrylic fingernails. How can you say … ?”
Deborah giggled. “Oh, you know what I mean.”
They made their way to a cafe beside the seawall. This part of Sydney usually felt clean and crisp from the salty air off the harbor, but the wind was already hot and the temperature was climbing through the twenties. Weasel glanced to the west, to the skies over Parramatta.
“Cumulonimbus,” she said. “That’ll be the thunderstorm this arvo.”
Every few minutes, ferries surged against the nearby wharves, unloaded and loaded passengers, and departed on a whirlpool, while overhead, seagulls balanced on the air, screaming to be fed. A few yachts were already out; by noon, there would be scores of them tacking back and forth, since Wednesday was a racing day for people who could afford time off in the middle of the week.
“You notice so much,” murmured Smith. “I don’t know how you do it.”
Weasel felt herself relax. “Don’t you?” she said. “Don’t you know the basic—”
“I wish you’d teach me,” Smith interjected. Sergeant Miller remained outwardly calm. She had already established that Deborah was also on leave until Easter Monday. The way things were going, they could spend Thursday and Friday in bed.
“Have I said something wrong?” Deborah asked.
Weasel had turned to hide her smile and was staring across the water. As she looked at Smith again, she saw a man she recognized coming toward them. She narrowed her eyes, trying to recall where she had seen him before. Was he on a suspect list? Every day, she spent forty minutes memorizing faces, and she reckoned she now had about two thousand mug shots stored in her head. A gust of wind lifted his long hair and made it lash about.
“Tell you what,” she said. “How about we decide on a mark—any mark—and spend until lunchtime on a surveillance exercise. Then we can have lunch and …”
“Fabulous!” Smith said.
“Okay. Pick someone.”
Deborah glanced around. “Him,” she said, as Parker strode past.
It was a stupid choice because his height made him so easy to follow, but Sergeant Miller did not mention this. Instead, she leaned across the table and touched Deborah’s hand. “Good,” she said. “Let’s do it.” She had remembered he was the one they called Dandruff: a semi-frequent traveler to Thailand, who had had a brass elephant in his sock.
Parker was feeling hot and sticky after his cab ride from the domestic terminal. He sat on a wooden bench and tried to read the Sydney Morning Herald, but the wind buffeted the pages and after a few moments he gave up and looked irritably about. He had had a trying morning already. On the flight to Sydney he was seated beside the lunatic director of finance, on his way to the periodontist, who twitted him about the financing of U-1. “You must be onto some good contracts, John. I reckon that lab costs three hundred thousand dollars a year to run.” Parker chose to remain silent, but after a few minutes the wretch plucked his sleeve. “Why are you going to Sydney?” he asked.
“I’m giving a lecture at Sydney University.”
“I’d like to come to that.”
“It’s by invitation only, I’m afraid. Had I known you were interested, I’d have arranged a ticket.”
A party of adolescent schoolchildren spilled onto the quay, apparently free to spend their last day before the Easter break on a trip to the zoo. A teacher tried to quiet them, but already they had broken into rival gangs and were yelling insults at each other. One pimpled youth was teasing a colossal puppy of a girl, who emitted ear-splitting squeals. Suddenly she leaped up and ran. As she dashed past the bench where Parker was sitting, he darted his foot forward.
“Oh, sorry! Sorry!” she said as she picked herself up. Her palms were grazed.
He gave a nod of acknowledgment for her apology.
The ferry arrived. Parker hung back while mothers pushed strollers on board and the yelling mob of schoolchildren surged forward. He was just about to step onto the end of the gangplank when a woman’s voice called, “Hold it!” He looked round. A creature with a face like a rat and peroxide hair was taking a photograph of a friend.
Minutes later, when he was standing at the bow, admiring the harbor, he saw them again. The rat-faced woman was still photographing her friend, who was equipped with a glorious set of mammary glands. Parker did not consider himself a breast man, but hers were so palpable he had an urge to squeeze them with both hands. The one with the camera said, “To the left a bit.” He was standing to her left. The voluptuous one simpered at him as she stepped closer. He gave a hesitant smile.
“Sorry,” she said.
“I don’t mind at all.”
For a moment the three of them said nothing. Then the rat piped up, “I’ll take both of you.”
Parker smiled down at the glorious udders and put his arm around her shoulders. He breathed in deeply. “The sea breeze,” he said. “Lovely smell of dilate dimethyl sulfide.”
“Beg yours?”
“I’d like to stroke your clitoris,” he added quietly.
“Pardon?”
He switched on his moth-eaten smile. “Say cheese.”
As soon as he heard the click, he disengaged his arm. How much more exciting, he thought, as he moved away from them, to do everything in imagination, instead of groveling about in copulation, with its smells and noises. He had enjoyed thinking about what he would do to Lek much more than actually doing it. One never seemed able to achieve exactly what one fancied.
On the northern shore of the
harbor, a bus was waiting to take the ferry passengers to the main gate of the zoo. Weasel wanted to know what the mark had said to Smith.
“I didn’t hear,” Deborah insisted.
They paid their entrance fees. Ahead of them, Parker was crossing the road, striding toward the information desk, where a vivacious, well-groomed matron wore a badge saying FRIEND OF THE ZOO.
She gave him a map and, leaning over the counter, pointed out where he was now—“near the alligators”—and what to look for in this area: koalas, then the giraffe paddock to the left, and, not far away, the chimps. “So sweet,” she said. “They’ve got lots of babies at the moment, with little white topknots of hair.” She pointed with a red-lacquered nail to drawings of an elephant, a tiger, a rhino, hippo, orangutan, camel, crocodile, bears … “The insect house, the seal playpen.” She wound up with an expansive gesture that knocked a kilo bag of compost off the counter, onto Parker’s foot. He picked it up and handed it to her. “I’m so sorry!” she said. “There really isn’t enough space for the Zoo Doo here.” Her diamond-ringed hands set the bag upright again. “But people love it, you know. If you’re a gardener …”
“I’ll buy some on the way out,” Parker said, with a courteous nod.
What an interesting face, she thought. Such appealing eyes.
Chapter Eighteen
Parker had almost an hour to spare before the rendezvous at the chimpanzee enclosure. He bought a soft drink from the kiosk and sat in the shade to read his newspaper. It was the usual set of catastrophes: war, famine, and stalled peace talks. Things will be different soon, he reflected. In a few years, a live birth will be page one news.
“He’s meeting someone,” Weasel said. She had explained to Smith that their aim now was to make themselves invisible to the mark while at all times keeping him in sight. “He’s making it easy for us,” she added.
Now and again, Parker allowed his attention to drift away from the dreary pap of economic and political woes and linger on his amorous encounter on the ferry. My sex life is undergoing a renaissance, he thought, recalling in detail what he had done with Sonja three nights earlier and then the fun he’d had with Lek. In the months during which he was concentrating on perfecting Vaccine II, Sonja’s conjugal demands had been loathsome, but now that he was feeling confident about the progress of V II, he was thinking about sex a great deal. He wondered if he could find the bosomy girl again and say, “Come here and I’ll lick between your toes,” and watch her squirm.
The gardens were beginning to get crowded. He threw his newspaper in a bin and looked around at the scores of people, white for the most part, although many of these were torturing their natural color to a reddish brown. “Your hobby is growing skin cancers, is it?” he murmured to a blonde who had fried herself the color of teak. She had a cystal dolphin hanging around her neck. Parker particularly disliked dolphinophiles. They were among the worst of the ecomystics, the ones who would close the schools and universities, except for courses in “feeling.” In them he detected the signs of the tide of superstition that was sweeping forward, bringing a new Dark Age. He passed a middle-aged woman with art nouveau fairies hanging from her ears. “New Age thought policewoman,” he muttered. When he first met Sonja she wore fairy earrings after office hours. He gave a whinny of disgust.
A sign on the low Cyclone-wire fence said PAN TROGLODYTES, beside a map of Africa showing in black the areas where chimpanzees came from. In theory, Parker said to himself. The poor old trogs will be extinct soon, unless something is done about Africa.
Inside the fence there was a moat of khaki water and, behind it, a grassy hillside with bushes, a tall dead tree, rocks, and climbing structures. The chimps, although captive, were untamed. They bounded, loped, and staggered about in boisterous activity, like a game of football, all jinks and dashes, unexpected U-turns and sudden acts of aggression. A big male bared his fangs at a female who was eating an apple, then reached to snatch it from her. “Get it, boy!” Parker called out. But the female turned and offered as a distraction her raw pink behind. “It’s a trick,” Parker said to no one in particular. A mother pushing a pair of twins in a stroller moved away from him. Above them, the sky was turning purple-gray, and the heat had suddenly increased. Leaves twisted fretfully in the hot breeze. Parker stood close to the wire, shaking his head at the big black male; while he was copulating, she was gobbling up the apple, and as soon as she finished the last bite she stood up, almost knocking her lover off his feet. “Sucker,” Parker chortled. He glanced around and noticed Somchai at the far end of the wire, standing near one of the zoo security guards, a uniformed man with a walkie-talkie. Somchai had been watching him, he realized, but when they made eye contact the Thai gave a very small shake of his head.
Somchai had been waiting by the chimpanzee enclosure for almost two hours. The security guard, who did not like the look of him, had finally decided to question him. Somchai thought he was a policeman and was terrified. I should have done exactly what Khun Otto told me, he rebuked himself. He had never seen so many white people. Their horrible pale eyes would not leave him alone.
On the hillside beyond the moat, the chimps hooted, hugged, bit and caressed each other. Their hands were like those of very old workmen, with black wrinkled skin and nails as thick as curved stones. From time to time they paused to cast yearning, puzzled glances at the humans on the other side of the moat.
After watching them for a few minutes, Parker felt melancholy. One point six percent, he said to himself. There was only 1.6 percent difference between the DNA of Pan troglodytes and Homo sapiens. When he thought about the limitations imposed on man by evolution, what a tiny flame his intellect was, what an ocean of darkness his inheritance from the animal world, was it any wonder an intelligent man despaired?
The air was so hot, it was difficult to breathe.
With an effort, Parker drew back from his reflections on the human race and looked around for Somchai again. The Thai had vanished. Then a movement caught Parker’s attention, a flash like a match flaring. He saw Somchai waiting for him about five meters away, on a path leading down toward the harbor. When they made eye contact, the Thai again gave a small shake of his head. Parker knew these Bangkok louts. The climate turned their brains to oil. They throve on drama—and you could add to that Asian shyness, the way they preferred to do things unseen. All the same, he felt faintly alarmed.
The Thai was carrying a blue backpack and kept just ahead of him on the brick path, his shoulder-length hair floating up and down in the hot, gusty wind. At the end of the path there was a cage of orangutans.
Somchai leaned on the outer wire, with his fingers hooked through it, pretending to watch an ape that swung listlessly from an old tire. The policeman, as he thought him, had not bothered to follow Somchai, and there were no other policemen in sight now. A group of people shouted at the orangutan, trying to stimulate it to do something interesting. After a while they drifted away, giving Parker room to stand beside Somchai. As soon as he moved forward, the Thai walked off toward a grove of hakeas.
Parker waited for a moment, then followed. He felt anxious, foolish, and irritable from the heat and the effort of skirting the dry, twisted trees without having his eye poked by their small, tough leaves.
The hakea grove ended in a cliff bisected by a flight of broken steps. Somchai did not really know what he was doing; he just wanted to get away from the hundreds of foreigners.
Parker peered over the edge and saw the Thai already at the bottom of the steps, signaling him to follow. Down there, hidden from public view, the park turned into a wilderness. There was nobody else in sight. Parker moved his feet gingerly, negotiating the crumbling stairs.
Above him, Susan Miller was standing on the edge of the hakea grove, waiting for Smith, who had gone to find a toilet. It had been a boring exercise until a few moments ago. But after Debbie left, Weasel had realized with a jolt that the mark was ticktacking with the long-haired Asian she had seen leaving the fli
ght from Bangkok that morning. The mark was a frequent visitor to Thailand, and now he had a clandestine meeting in the zoo? Christ almighty! This is a handover, she thought. The backpack was luggage from the hold; it had got past the sniffer dog.
Weasel remembered from the zoo map that there was a service road branching off a path about fifty meters away. The road, she recalled, led down to the area where the mark was heading. She began to run.
Down below, it was as hot as a jungle and had the warm stink of rotting vegetation. There were long canes of elephant grass ending in feathery seed heads, lambs’-tongue, purple trumpets of morning glory, spicy-smelling lantana vines, and crofton weed. Ahead of Parker, the Thai ran through the knee-high grass, turning every so often to look back. They came upon an earth path that ended in a curved concrete wall. Somchai disappeared behind it. When Parker followed him around the curve, he realized they had reached the Zoo Doo pit; inside the concrete semicircle was a mountain of garden cuttings, straw, shredded paper, and animal dung. In the dripping heat, he could feel waves of hotter air rising from the compost. Parker wiped sweat from his eyes with his sleeve.
“What’s wrong?” he demanded.
“Police following me,” Somchai said. He glanced at the clifftop, which was now all they could see of the zoo. The humidity and the storm in the air made Parker feel he could keel over.
“Don’t be bloody ridiculous! Why would the police be following you?”
At that moment, Weasel came dashing at full tilt around the side of the compost pit, as astonished at running into them as they were at seeing her. “Police!” she shouted. She reached into her bag for her pass. Somchai bent quickly to the ground. “Stand up!” she yelled.
He had his knife in his fist—and suddenly it flew.
Weasel collapsed like an ox. When he pulled the blade out of her throat, a gout of blood bubbled after it. Somchai grunted and, grasping a handful of yellow hair, cut her from ear to ear.
White Eye Page 24
