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 switched 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 Maiden 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 compaign 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 onetime 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.’
‘A flower!’
‘Well, anyway…he made the threat of a two-million-dollar lawsuit sound like a drunken prank. Things settled down. But as soon as he submitted his next book, Orchid Blood, he got crazy again and started threatening lawsuits. Ong Pin wrote some sort of goofy screed in the kind of English you get in Japanese instruction manuals, you know? And when the book came out, Underhill mailed a box with dried-up shit in it to the president of Gladstone, Geoffrey Penmaiden, who I guess everybody knew and revered. It was like sending a turd to Maxwell Perkins. Then the book came out and flopped. Just sank out of sight. They haven’t heard a word from him since, and I don’t think they’re too eager to work with him again.’
‘He sent shit in a box to Geoffrey Penmaiden? The most famous publisher in America?’ Beevers asked.
‘I think it had more to do with self-hatred than craziness,’ Poole said.
‘You think they’re not the same?’ Beevers reached over and patted Michael’s knee. ‘Really.’
When Beevers canted back his seat and closed his eyes, Michael switched on the reading light and picked up his copy of A Beast in View.
At the beginning of Underhill’s first novel, a rich boy named Henry Harper is drafted and sent to basic training in the South. The sort of person who gradually but thoroughly undermines the favorable first impression he creates, Harper is superficially charming, snobbish, selfish. Other people chiefly either disgust or impress him. Of course he detests basic training, and is detested by every other recruit on the base. Eventually he meets Nat Beasley, a black soldier who seems to like him in spite of his faults and who detects a decent person beneath Henry’s snobbery and self-consciousness. Nat Beasley defends Harper and gets him through basic. Much to Harper’s relief, his father, a federal judge in Michigan, is able to fix it that Henry and Beasley are assigned to the same unit in Vietnam. The judge even manages to get Henry and Nat on the same flight from San Francisco to Tan Son Hut. And during the flight, Henry Harper strikes a bargain with Nat Beasley. He says that if Nat continues to protect him, Henry will guarantee him half of all the money he will ever earn or inherit. This is a sum of at least two or three million dollars, and Beasley accepts.
After about a month in the country, the two soldiers get separated from their unit while on patrol. Nat Beasley picks up his M-16 and blows a hole the size of a family Bible in Henry Harper’s chest. Beasley switches dogtags and then destroys Harper’s body so completely that it is utterly unrecognizable. He then takes off cross-country toward Thailand.
Michael read on, flipping pages at the bottom of a shaft of yellow light while