He staggered. He almost went down. He had to take a step back, take a deep breath, reassure himself that this was real, or that he was.

He glanced up. Visible over the door in spillover light from within were the painted words RICK’S CAFE AMERICAIN.

What else could it be? he told himself, and walked on in.

He bellied up to the bar, and the words “Hi, guys!” burst out through his shyness, propelled by loneliness and the longing for homelike things.

Conversation died. Faces turned to him. He realized then that many of those faces diverged pretty widely from the human norm. It made no particular impression on him. He had no problem with jokers, and besides, these were Americans.

He looked at the bartender. He was a joker, too, a squatty little guy with warty slate-gray skin, stone bald, with a line of fleshy spines running from the top of his head down his back to the tip of a short, heavy tail. He didn’t seem to be wearing anything but a grimy barkeep’s apron.

“I’d like a Pepsi,” Mark said.

“‘He’d like a Pepsi,’” a voice echoed. Mark had done enough time in the schoolyards of his childhood to be all too familiar with that mocking tone. He blinked around, wondering what he’d done.

He was beginning to register a few details his initial rush of homesickness had obscured. Like the poster of Bloat on one wall, like an obscene parody of Buddha. The stern visage of General Francis Zappa affixed to the dartboard with a fistful of darts through his prominent nose. Most alarmingly, the poster of the Turtle floating above the battle lines in Czechago with a peace sign painted on his shell had been crossed out with emphatic slashes of red paint.

A pair of left hands gripped Mark’s biceps and spun him around. He found himself looking into a round, malevolent Charlie Brown kind of face, with neutral-colored hair roached up in a butch cut and round wire-rimmed glasses of the kind the kids all called Lennons – what Mark himself was wearing. The overhead light pooled in the lenses and hid the eyes behind.

“You stink like a nat,” the round-faced man said, “and you look like some kind of hippie.”

Mark had been letting his hair grow. He took a breath that was like dry-swallowing aspirin.

The man confronting him folded two sets of arms across his chest. Muscles rolled like billiard balls in the biceps. Below the lower set of arms were two sets of bulges that suggested more pairs of arms concealed under the tan T-shirt.

The sound system was cranking “Sympathy for the Devil,” which Mark didn’t think was propitious. “You don’t belong here,” the round-faced man said.

“Yeah,” said a man with a fierce bird’s head, white-crested and short-beaked. “This is our bar, nat.”

“Cut him some slack, Luce,” said a man who stood behind the man in the Lennon glasses. He loomed above the rest, at least Mark’s height, six-four. He had square-cut brown bangs and dark-prince good looks, though his height and the length of his face and lantern jaw gave him the appearance of Lurch’s ingйnue brother. He wore a tweed jacket buttoned over a black T-shirt.

He reached over the caterpillar man’s top shoulder with a huge, horrible green-on-green-mottled spiky lobster claw, placed the tip under Mark’s chin, and tipped Mark’s head up. Porcelain-hard spines dug into Mark’s flesh.

“W-why did you do that to Turtle’s picture?” asked Mark, partially emboldened by the intercession.

Luce’s four free hands shoved him in the chest. Hard. He stumbled back away from the claw.

“Are you stoned or just stupid?” Luce demanded. “He sold us out, man!”

“What are you talking about? What did he do?”

Luce looked around at his buddies with an exaggerated expression of disbelief. “‘What did he do?’” he mimicked. “What did he do? He only wiped out the fucking Rox. He’s only the biggest joker-killer in all history, you nat piece of shit! Where have you been, some other fucking planet?”

Well, yes, Mark thought. His lips began to spill denial: “Turtle would never do anything like that, there’s got to be some mistake”

A chuckle fell across anger and exculpation alike. “He doesn’t really get it,” the tall man said with a lazy smile. “He burned his brain out on drugs a long time back. Just look at him.”

His friend’s calm voice seemed to drain Luce of rage. He blew out a disgusted breath. “He doesn’t look like an objective socialist,” he said cryptically, and turned his back, “He’s bogus. Get him out of here.”

More hands were laid on Mark – purple hands, feathered claw hands, a pair of hands shiny with what looked like mineral oil. He expected the bum’s rush back to the street, but instead they propelled him away from the bar, in the general direction of the saloon-style doors.

He figured he had received a pretty clear message, though, so he kept walking that way. He was almost out when a boozy voice hailed him from the dim depths of the bar.

“Where’s your hurry, mate? Come along on back. I’ll set you straight right quick.”

Heat lightning flashed and grumbled over the Thonburi slums across the Menam Chao Phrya. Sitting in the quietly opulent dining room of the Oriental Hotel, Helen Carlysle set down her wineglass and looked out the floor-to-ceiling windows, out over the terrace toward the river, where the bow-and-stern lanterns of barges bobbed like fireflies.

“I wonder where Lynn and Gary are,” she said.

Belew sat back with his arm cocked over the back of his chair. “On a plane for Ankara,” he said, and sipped wine.

She looked at him, her eyes huger than usual. “What are you talking about?”

“They packed up their gear and flew out a couple of hours ago.”

“What on earth are they doing?”

He smiled into the wine he swirled in his glass. “Following leads, I expect.”

“But why – why didn’t they tell us?”

“‘The gods love the obscure and hate the obvious,’ the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad tells us. One assumes they had their reasons.” He set his wineglass down and signed for the waiter. “Here, you’d best eat something, child. You need to keep your strength up.”

Monsoon arrived that night, blowing sheets of rain and white pulses of lightning before it. Belew and Helen made love in her room with the French doors to the balcony wide open, the curtains snapping like banners, the rain splashing across their naked bodies in raw, stinging gouts.

Belew had been the gentlest lover she had known in her limited experience, and far and away the most skillful. Tonight he was wild, obsessed, and the things he did left her shaking and breathing in short, desperate gulps, sure she could not endure any more. But she could; and he drove her again and again to the point of pure overload.

Deep in the night, with her hands twined in fists around the silken bands that bound her wrists to the brass bedstead, she felt his lips go away from her. She moaned, and reached with her hips, and then looked up to see him kneeling Buddha-like between her smooth outstretched thighs, and lightning silvered her skin and his as he quoted again from the Upanishads.

“‘This Self is the honey of all beings, and all beings are the honey of this Self’” he said, and lowered his face into her once more.

“You may wonder,” the man at the corner table boomed as Mark threaded his way past the pool table, “why I’m not off in Manila running Flip whores like all the other expatriate Ozzies.” He frowned. “Often wonder myself. Habit, mostly, I suppose.”

Mark, who was wondering no such thing, stopped by the round knife-scarred table and dithered. “Sit down, sit down. Christ, you make me nervous.”

Mark sat. He glanced toward the bar. The dozen or so American jokers there seemed to have forgotten about him. He turned his attention to his host.