Koko brt-1

by Peter Straub

  Suddenly Conor was unable to tell which of the people onstage were men and which were women. They were men with breasts, women with erections. They had melted together—he saw the flash of a girl’s smile, plump buttocks, a broad thigh. Then all four performers were standing up and bowing like actors, the young woman delicately flushed across the top of her breasts. To Conor, the four people onstage seemed to be encased in the memory of pleasure, as different from those cheering them as Martians, as untouchable as angels.

  That’s it! Conor thought. It flashed before him that a moment of total clarity and truth had just passed. Conor saw himself standing before a great wall of dazzling brightness, an impenetrable, unknowable realm where the sexes melted together and language was music and things moved so swiftly and brightly they hurt the eyes.

  Then he fell back into cold reason. The performers now draped in robes and shuffling offstage in the emptying club were drug addicts and whores who lived in riverfront shacks, and he was drunk. Tim Underhill was a boozy wreck, just like him. Conor groped for that moment of clarity in order to dismiss it completely, but could find only the memory of sitting in bars and the taxi, of a hunt so fruitless it might have been for a unicorn instead of a man.

  He thought that his whole life was a history of not understanding what the hell was going on—a history of not getting it.

  Conor wiped his hands on his jeans and dully followed the last of the customers down the dark corridor and outside into the warm night.

  A handful of men from the club had drifted toward the parking garage. They were all dressed in smooth-fitting Thai suits and resembled mercenary soldiers on home leave. One of them wore dark glasses. Conor weaved outside the door of the club, sensing that they were waiting for him to leave.

  It was suddenly clear to him that what they had seen in the club was only a prelude to the real event of the night. They were not satisfied with what satisfied everyone else. Me too, Conor thought, remembering the feelings he’d had while the performers took their bows. There’s more—there’s one hell of a lot more. And something else made Conor move toward the waiting men. Underhill would have been with them. That was why Cham had brought him here. Whatever the men were awaiting was the real last act of the performance which already had taken Conor so far.

  As Conor stepped toward the men, the Thai in dark glasses muttered something to his friends and broke away to approach him. He held up a hand like a policeman halting traffic, then made a sweeping-away gesture. “Performance ovah,” he said. “You must go.”

  “I want to see what else you guys got on tap,” Conor said.

  “Nothing else. Must leave now.” The man repeated the whisk-broom gesture.

  Without appearing to have moved at all, the other men were now much nearer to Conor, who felt a familiar surge of excitement and anticipation at the proximity of danger. Violence hung about these men like a fog.

  “Tim Underhill told me to come here,” he said in a loud voice. “You know him, right?”

  A buzz of soft talk broke out behind the man in sunglasses. Conor heard what sounded like “Underhill,” followed by suppressed laughter. He relaxed. The man in sunglasses glanced back at him in a wordless command to stand still. The men spoke to each other again, and one of them made what was obviously a joke, and even Sunglasses smiled.

  “Let’s see what you guys got goin’ here,” he said.

  “Crap crop crap!” one of the men shouted, and the others showed yellow smiles.

  Sunglasses walked toward Conor with an officer’s strut. “Do you know where you ah?”

  “Bangkok. Jesus, I ain’t that drunk. Bangkok, Thailand. The goddamn kingdom of Siam.”

  Big yellow smile, and a shake of the head. “What street you on? What district?”

  Conor said, “I don’t even give a shit.”

  At least a few of the men must have understood him, for they called out tauntingly to Sunglasses. Conor heard in their tone a cynical, end-of-the-world edge he had heard nowhere in the world in the past fourteen years. They could have been saying either: Kill him and let’s move or Let the asshole American come along.

  Sunglasses squinted up at Conor with a look that mingled doubt and amusement. “Twelve hundred baht,” he finally said.

  “This show better be four times as good as the other one,” Conor muttered, and pulled his crumpled wad of bills from his pocket. The little group of men had already begun moving toward the towering concrete garage, and Conor stumbled along behind them, trying to keep himself moving in a straight line.

  The man in sunglasses moved ahead of the rest and opened a door set beside the garage’s exit ramp. The little group began filing through the door into a dimly lighted stairwell. Sunglasses flapped his hand in the air and hissed, urging Conor to come in.

  “Here I am,” Conor said, and hurried after the others.

  3

  The next day Conor told himself that he could not really be certain about what had happened after he followed the other men down into the lower depths of the garage. He’d had so much to drink that he had been unsteady on his feet. In a sex club he had seen a vision of—what? angels? splendor?—and it had mix-mastered his brain. He had not understood more than one word spoken inside the garage, and he could not even be certain about that word. He had been light-headed enough to have heard unspoken words and seen imaginary things; Conor felt that in some way he had been light-headed since he and Mikey and Beevers had boarded the Singapore Airlines jet in Los Angeles. Since then, reality had bent backwards in on itself in some extraordinary way, putting him into a world where people looked at scenes from hell, where plump little girls blew smoke rings out of their pussies, where men turned into women and women into men. They were getting close to Tim Underhill, Mikey said, and Conor felt that closeness every time he wondered about what happened in the garage. Getting close to Underhill probably meant you were getting into some territory where everything was upside down by nature, where you couldn’t trust your own senses. Underhill liked those places—he had liked Vietnam. Underhill was like a bat, he felt comfortable upside down. And Koko did too, Conor supposed. The next day, he decided not to tell anyone about what he had or had not seen, not even Mike Poole.

  * * *

  Conor had followed the men down the concrete stairs in the dark, thinking that civilians were always wrong about violence. Civilians thought that violence was action, one guy hitting another, crunching bones and spattering blood—ordinary people thought you could see violence. They thought you could avoid it by not looking at it. But violence was not action. Above all violence was a feeling. It was the icy envelope around all the business of blows and knives and guns. This feeling was not even really connected to the people using the weapons—they had just put their minds inside the envelope. Inside the envelope they did what was necessary.

  This cold, detached feeling was all around Conor as he went down the stairs.

  Conor soon lost count of the number of flights they had descended. Six levels down, or seven, or eight … the concrete steps ended two floors beneath the level on which they had last seen a parked car. A broad step led down to an irregular grey floor that looked like lumpy cement but proved to be packed earth. The light at the base of the stairs cast a thick slow light twenty or thirty feet out into shadowy greyness melting into a deep black that seemed to go on forever. The air was cold and stale and viscous.

  One of the men called out a question.

  There was a rustle of sound, and a light went on far at the back of the basement. Beneath it, just now lowering his hand from the light cord, stood a Thai male in his late fifties or early sixties wearing a very tentative smile. A long bar with tall and short glasses, buckets of ice, and a double rank of bottles had been set up on a long table in front of the man. The man slowly extended both arms to lean against the bar. The top of his head shone.

  The Thais moved toward the bar. They were speaking in low voices in which Conor could still hear that battlefield tone. Sunglasses
summoned him imperiously to the bar.

  He ordered whiskey, having an idea that a warm substance like whiskey would support him and hold him up, instead of cutting him off at the knees in the way a cold substance would. “Put some ice in it, man,” he told the bartender, whose bald head was covered with tiny beads of sweat as regular as eggs in a carton. The whiskey was some single malt with an unpronounceable Scottish name, and tasted startlingly of tar, old ropes, fog, smoke, and charred wood. Swallowing the stuff was like ingesting a little island off the Scottish coast.

  Sunglasses nodded curtly at Conor, and took a drink poured from the same bottle.

  Who were these guys? In their smooth taut suits, they might have been gangsters; they might just as easily have been bankers and insurance executives. They had the assurance of people who had never been forced to worry about money.

  Harry Beevers, he thought. They sit back and watch the money come home through the door.

  Sunglasses stepped away from the other men, raised his hand, and waved to the other side of the basement.

  Quiet footsteps came forward out of the darkness. Conor gulped some of the miraculous whiskey. Two figures appeared at the edge of the light. A little Thai man in a khaki suit, bald as a bullet and with deep lines and pockmarks in his cheeks, moved unsmilingly toward the group of men around the bar. With one hand he held the elbow of a beautiful Asian woman who wore only a loose black robe several sizes too large for her. The woman seemed dazed by the light. She was not Thai, Conor thought—her face was the wrong shape. She might have been Chinese; she might have been Vietnamese. She needed the subtle pressure of the man’s hand at her elbow to keep her moving. Her head lolled, and her mouth parted in a half-smile.

  The man brought her a few more steps forward. Now Conor saw that he wore lightly tinted wire-rimmed glasses. Conor knew his type—he was absolutely military. The bullet-headed man was not a rich man, but he had the instinctive authority of a general.

  Conor thought he heard one of the men beside him whisper “telephone.”

  When they were squarely in the light the little man took his hand from the woman’s elbow. She swayed gently, then steadied herself by widening her stance and straightening her shoulders. She looked out through half-lidded eyes, smiling mystically.

  The General stepped behind her and slid the robe off her shoulders. The woman now looked mysteriously larger, more formidable, less like a captured thing. Her shoulders were slim, and there was a slim affecting helplessness in the way her rounded forearms turned out, exposing a single blue brush-stroke inside the hollow of her elbow, but all of her body, even the way her calves narrowed into her ankles, had a polished perfect roundness, so that the naked woman seemed as sturdily made as a bronze shield. Her skin, a dark smudgy gold like wet sand on a beach, finally convinced Conor that she was Chinese, not a Thai: all the other men were sallow beside her.

  His first instinct, faced with the woman’s beautiful unconscious defiance, was to wrap her back up in the robe and take her home. Then four decades of training as an American male reasserted themselves. She had been paid well, or would be; that she looked far healthier than the girls in the sex club across the alley meant only that she would earn many times their price for submitting to a gang bang performed by half a dozen respectable citizens of Bangkok. Conor did not at all feel like joining in, but neither did he think that the woman needed protection. That she was exceptionally good-looking was no more than a professional asset.

  He looked at the men around him. They were a club, and this was their ritual. Every week or so they gathered in some inconvenient and secret place, and one after another had sex with a drugged beauty. They’d talk about the women the way wine snobs talked about wine. The whole thing was creepy. Conor asked the bartender for another drink and promised himself that he would leave as soon as everybody else got busy.

  If this was what Underhill got up to when he wanted to swing, he was tamer than he used to be.

  But why would Underhill join a group whose purpose was to have sex with a girl!

  If they start to have sex with each other, Conor thought, I’m out of here.

  Then he was glad he had another drink, because the General stepped in front of the woman, cocked his right arm back, and slapped her hard enough to make her stagger back. He shouted a few words—“Crap crap!”—and she straightened up and stepped forward again. Her face was tilted like a shield and she was still smiling. A red, hand-shaped blotch covered the entire surface of her left cheek. Conor took a healthy, numbing slug of his drink. The General slapped her again, and the Chinese woman tottered back and straightened herself before she fell. Tears made neat tracks down her cheeks.

  This time the General struck her with a straight blow to the side of her chin and knocked her flat on the ground. She murmured and rolled over, showing them dusty buttocks and a long scratch in her golden, dust-covered back. When she succeeded in hitching herself up on her hands and knees, the ends of her hair pooled on the dirt floor. The General kicked her very hard in one hip. The woman grunted and went down again. The General stepped smartly toward her and kicked her a little less forcefully in the side just beneath her ribcage. The woman writhed away into shadow, and quite gently the General bent down to extend his hand and help her to crawl back into the best light. Then he kicked her with great determination in the thigh, almost instantly raising a bruise the size of a salad plate. He proceeded to walk around her body, giving her a flurry of kicks.

  It was just like the sex club, Conor saw—the sex club was just the map. Here the map was ripped away and you saw a tough little man beat up a woman in front of other men. That was how you had your fun. Down here in the garage, you got your ultimate sex club.

  It made sense of the violence he had felt, anyhow.

  The General examined the prostrate, huddled woman for a moment before accepting a drink from Sunglasses. He took a good mouthful, swished it around in his mouth, and swallowed. He stood and surveyed his work, his right arm bent at the elbow, the half-empty glass held with unconscious rigidity. He looked like a man taking time out from a difficult job with the satisfaction of knowing that so far he had given a superior performance.

  Conor wanted to get out.

  The General set down his glass and bent to help the woman stand. It was not easy to get her up. Her pains made it difficult for her to move out of a crouch, but she willingly took the General’s hand. Her dark-gold skin had bruised purple and black, and a large swelling distorted the line of her jaw. She got to her knees and rested there, breathing softly. She was a soldier, she was a ground-pounder. The General nudged her plump backside with one of his loafers, then kicked her hard. “Crap, crop crap,” he muttered, as if embarrassed that the others should hear him. The woman tilted her face to the light, and Conor saw how far she was willing to go. They could not stop her. They could not even touch her. Her face was a shield again, and the side of her mouth that was not swollen moved in an echo of her earlier smile.

  The General struck her temple with the back of his hand. The woman canted over, caught herself with an outstretched arm, and brought herself erect again. She sighed. A smear of red feathered the corner of one eye. The General’s lips moved in a silent command, and the woman visibly focused herself and got up on one knee. Then she levered herself upright. Conor felt like applauding. The woman’s eyes shone.

  With the force of some crazed bird escaping his throat, a loud burp tasting of smoke and pitch flew from Conor’s mouth. Most of the men laughed. Conor was amazed that the woman laughed too.

  The General lifted the shirt-jacket of his Thai suit and pulled a revolver from the waistband of his trousers. He crooked his second finger through the trigger guard and displayed the revolver on his palm. Conor didn’t know much about guns, but this one had flashy grips carved from some milky substance like ivory or mother-of-pearl, and filigreed scrollwork on the side plate beneath the cylinder. Intricate scrolling covered the barrel. It was a pimp gun.

  Co
nor stepped backwards, then stepped backwards again. Finally his brain caught up with his body. He could not stand and watch while the General shot her—he couldn’t save her, and he had the terrible feeling that the woman would fight him if he tried, that she did not care to be saved. Conor moved backwards as silently as possible.

  The General began to speak. He was still displaying the pimp gun on his palm. His voice was soft and urgent, persuasive, soothing, and compelling at the same time. He sounded just like a General to Conor. “Crap crop crap crap crop crop crop crap,” the General intoned. Give me your poor your huddled masses. O glorious we. “Crop crop crop crop crap.” Gentlemen, we are gathered here today. Conor eased himself further back into the darkness. The bartender’s eyes flicked at him, but the men did not move. “Crop crap.” Glory glory heaven heaven love love heaven heaven glory glory.

  When Conor thought he was close enough to the bottom of the staircase, he turned around. It was less than six feet away.

  “Crap crop crop.” There came the unmistakable metallic click that meant the firing mechanism was cocked.

  A shot echoed loudly through the basement. Conor jumped for the stairs, hit the bottom step, and scrambled up, no longer caring how much noise he made. When he reached the first landing he heard another shot. It was muffled by the ceiling of the basement, and this time he knew that the General was not shooting at him, but Conor ran up the stairs until he reached ground level, and hurried outside. He was out of breath and his legs were trembling. He staggered through the hot wet air, and came out of the alley onto a main road.

  A grinning one-armed man beeped the horn of his ruk-tuk and steered the rackety little vehicle straight at him. When he stopped he bobbed his head and asked, “Patpong?”