Excerpt from The Laughing Monsters by Denis Johnson, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

The entertainment got too loud. I adjusted my screen and put my fingers on the keyboard. Rude of me. But I hadn't asked him to sit down.

"My wife is quite ill," he said, and he paused one second, and added, "terminal," with a sort of pride.

Meanwhile, two meters off, by the pool, the performer had set his shirt and pants on fire.

To Tina:

I saw a couple of US soldiers in weird uniforms at the desk when I checked in. This place is the only one in town that has electricity at night. It costs $145 a day to stay here.

Hey—the beard's coming off. It's no camouflage at all. I've already been recognized.

With the drumming and the whooping, who could talk? Still, Horst wouldn't let me off. He'd bought a couple of rounds, discussed his wife's disease … Time for questions. Beginning with Michael.

"What? Sorry. What?"

"I said to you: Michael is here."

"Michael who?"

"Come on!"

"Michael Adriko?"

"Come on!"

"Have you seen him? Where?"

"He's about."

"About where? Shit. Look. Horst. In a land of rumors, how many more do we need?"

"I haven't seen him personally."

"What would Michael be here for?"

"Diamonds. It's that simple."

"Diamonds aren't so simple anymore."

"Okay, but we're not after simplicity, Roland. We're after adventure. It's good for the soul and the mind and the bank balance."

"Diamonds are too risky these days."

"You want to smuggle heroin? The drugs racket is terrible. It destroys the youth of a nation. And it's too cheap. A kilo of heroin nets you six thousand dollars US. A kilo of diamonds makes you a king."

To Tina I wrote: Show's over now. Everyone appears uninjured. The whole area smells like gasoline.

"What do you think?" Horst said.

"What I think is, Horst—I think they'll snitch you. They'll sell you diamonds and then they'll snitch you, you know that, because around here it's nothing but snitches."

Maybe he took my point, because he stopped his stuff while I wrote to Tina:

I'm getting drunk with this asshole who used to be undercover Interpol. He looks far too old now to get paid for anything, but he still sounds like a cop. He calls me Roland like a cop.

At any point I might have asked his first name. Elmo?

Horst gave up, and we just drank. "Israel," he told me, "has six nuclear-tipped missiles raised from the silos and pointing at Iran. Sometime during the next US election period—boom-boom Teheran. And then it's tit for tat, that's the Muslim way, my friend. Radiation all around."

"They were saying that years ago."

"You don't want to go home. Within ten years it will be just like here, a bunch of rubble. But our rubble here isn't radioactive. But you won't believe me until you check it with a Geiger counter." The whiskey had washed away his European manner. He was a white-haired, red-faced, jolly elfin cannibal.

In the lobby we shook hands and said good night. "Of course they'd like to snitch you," he said. He stood on his toes to get close to my left ear and whisper: "That's why you don't go back the way you came."

*   *   *

Later I lay in the dark holding my pocket radio against the very same ear, listening with the other for any sound of the hotel's generator starting. A headache attacked me. I struck a stinky match, lit the candle, opened the window. The batting of insects against the screen got so insistent I had to blow out the flame. The BBC reported that a big storm with 120-kilometer-per-hour winds had torn through the American states of Virginia, West Virginia, and Ohio, and three million homes had suffered an interruption in the flow of their electricity.

Here at the Papa Leone, the power came up. The television worked. CCTV, the Chinese cable network, broadcasting in English. I went back to the radio.

Excerpted from The Laughing Monsters by Denis Johnson. Copyright © 2014 by Denis Johnson. Excerpted by permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.