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tiffin,” he said.
    â€œTiffin time, breh-heh,” said Frogget.
    â€œTake care of yourself, Jack,” said Yardley, and left with Frogget shambling after him.
    â€œI think I’ll go whore hopping,” said Smale in a thoughtful voice. He pressed down the lid of his cigarette can and said, “Say, Jack, what was the name of that skinny one you fixed me up with? Gladys? Gloria?”
    I pretended not to hear.
    â€œGive me her number. God, she was a lively bit of crumpet.” He stared at Leigh and said, “She does marvelous things to your arse.”
    â€œAsk Wally,” I said.
    â€œIt was like being dead,” said Smale, still addressing Leigh. He grinned. “You know. Paradise.”
    Wally was polishing glasses at the far end of the bar, smiling at the glasses as he smiled at the counter when he wiped it and at the gin bottle when he poured. Wally said, “What you want, Mr. Smale? You want mushudge?” He nodded. “Can.”
    â€œAw hell,” said Smale. “Maybe I should forget it. I could have another double whiskey, toss myself off in the loo, and go down to the amusement park and play the pinball machines. What do you think?” He leered at me, then snorted and sloped off.
    Leigh did not say anything right away. He climbed onto a barstool and dabbed at the perspiration on his upper lip with his finger. He looked at his finger, and feelingly, said, “How do you stand it?”
    It made me cringe. It happened, this moment of worry when, hearing a question that never occurred to me, I discovered that I had an answer, as once in the Tai-Hwa on Cecil Street, a stranger wearing dark glasses asked, “Where you does wuck?” and I remembered and was afraid.

4
    I N MY CUBICLE , irritably dialing a third hotel, I heard Gopi coming. Then, in Singapore, disability determined the job; Gopi, a cripple, was a
peon
from birth. He could be heard approaching by the sigh-shuffle-thump of his curious bike-riding gait. One leg was shorter than the other, and the knee in that rickety limb bent inward, collapsing into the good leg and making Gopi lean at a dangerous angle as he put his weight on it. A long step with his good leg checked his fall, and that was how he went, heaving along, dancing forward, swaying from side to side, like the standing dance of a man pumping a bike up a steep hill.
    Some years ago a horse named Gopi’s Dream ran an eight-furlong race at the Singapore Turf Club. I was not a member of that club, but two dollars got me into the grandstand with the howling mob; and it was there that I spent at least one afternoon of every race meeting. I had just arrived and was getting my bearings when I saw that the horse I had picked for the first race had been scratched. There were poor odds on all the others except Gopi’s Dream, and the logic of choosing this horse was plain to me. I put ten dollars on him to win, though my usual bet was a deuce on a long shot to place, bolstered by a prayer, which I screamed into my hands as the ponies leaped down the homestretch. I told myself that half the bet was Gopi’s Deepavali present. Gopi’s Dream won, as all horses do when the logic is irrefutable, and it paid two hundred dollars; half I put away for Gopi, the rest I lost in the course of the afternoon.
    The next day I took Gopi to a shop over on Armenian Street and had him fitted for a brace and a boot with a five-inch sole. He was a bit rocky on it at first, but soon he got the hang of it and instead of his cyclist’s swaying he learned a jerking limp, dragging the enormous boot and clumping it ahead of him and then chasing it with the other leg. The brace clinked and the boot gave out long twisting squeaks. The odd thing was that although he walked fairly straight he walked much more slowly, perspiring and pulling and swinging the boot along.
    He stopped wearing the apparatus. He told me in Malay that it was “biting” his leg and