Koko

by Peter Straub

  “Just tell me this, Tina,” Koko said. “What is this shit about ‘divine’? You think soup can be divine?”

  Tina blotted his brow with a crisp white handkerchief and turned back into a picture.

  And there it was, the address and the telephone number, in the soft cool whisper of italics.

  A man sat down beside Koko in the fourth row of the first-class compartment, glanced sideways, and then buckled himself into his seat. Koko closed his eyes and snow fell from a deep cold heaven onto a layer of ice hundreds of feet deep. Far off, dim in the snowy air, ranged the broken teeth of glaciers. God hovered invisibly over the frozen landscape, panting with impatient rage.

  You know what you know. Forty, forty-one years old. Thick fluffy richboy-blond hair, and thin brown glasses, heavy face. Heavy butcher’s hands holding a day-old copy of the New York Times. Six-hundred-dollar suit.

  The plane taxied down the runway and lifted itself smoothly into the air, the envious mouths and fingers fell away, and the jet’s nose pointed west, toward San Francisco. The man beside Koko is a rich businessman with butcher’s hands.

  A black-naped tern flies across the face of the Singapore one-dollar note. A black band like a burglar’s mask covers its eyes, and behind it hovers a spinning chaos of intertwined circles twisting together like the strands of a cyclone. So the bird agitates its wings in terror, and darkness overtakes the land.

  Mr. Lucas? Mr. Bundy?

  Banking, the man says. Investment banking. We do a lot of work in Singapore.

  Me too.

  Hell of a nice place, Singapore. And if you’re in the money business, it’s hot, and I mean hot.

  One of the hot new places.

  “Bobby,” the stewardess asks, “what would you like to drink?”

  Vodka, ice-cold.

  “Mr. Dickerson?”

  Mr. Dickerson will have a Miller High Life.

  In Nam we used to say: Vodka martini on the rocks, hold the vermouth, hold the olive, hold the rocks.

  Oh, you were never in Nam?

  Sounds funny, but you missed a real experience. Not that I’d go back, Christ no. You were probably on the other side, weren’t you? No offense, we’re all on the same side now, God works in funny ways. But I did all my demonstrating with an M-16, hah hah.

  Bobby Ortiz is the name. I’m in the travel industry.

  Bill? Pleased to meet you, Bill. Yes, it’s a long flight, might as well be friends.

  Sure, I’ll have another vodka, and give another beer to my old pal Bill here.

  Ah, I was in I Corps, near the DMZ, up around Hue.

  You want to see a trick I learned in Nam? Good—I’ll save it, though, it’ll be better later, you’ll enjoy it, I’ll do it later.

  Bobby and Bill Dickerson ate their meals in companionable silence. Clocks spun in no-time.

  “You ever gamble?” Koko asked.

  Dickerson glanced at him, his fork halfway to his mouth. “Now and then. Only a little.”

  “Interested in a little wager?”

  “Depends on the wager.” Dickerson popped the forkful of chicken into his mouth.

  “Oh, you won’t want to do it. It’s too strange. Let’s forget it.”

  “Come on,” Dickerson said. “You brought this up, don’t chicken out now.”

  Oh, Koko liked Billy Dickerson. Nice blue linen suit, nice thin glasses, nice big Rolex. Billy Dickerson played racquetball, Billy Dickerson wore a sweatband across his forehead and had a hell of a good backhand, real aggressor.

  “Well, I guess being on a plane reminded me of this. It’s something we used to do in Nam.”

  Definite look of interest on good old Billy’s part.

  “When we’d come into an LZ.”

  “Landing Zone?”

  “You got it. LZ’s were all different, see? Some were popping, and some were like dropping into the middle of a church picnic in Nebraska. So we’d make the Fatality Wager.”

  “Like you’d bet on how many people would get killed? Buy the farm, like you guys used to say?”

  Buy the farm. Oh, you sweetheart.

  “More on if someone would get killed. How much money you carrying in your wallet?”

  “More than usual,” Billy said.

  “Five, six hundred?”

  “Less than that.”

  “Let’s make it two hundred. If somebody dies at the San Francisco airport while we’re in the terminal, you pay me two hundred. If not, I’ll give you one hundred.”

  “You’ll give me two to one on someone dying in the terminal while we’re going through customs, getting our bags, stuff like that?”

  “That’s the deal.”

  “I’ve never seen anyone kick off in an airport,” Billy said, shaking his head, smiling. He was going to take the bet.

  “I have,” Koko said. “Upon occasion.”

  “Well, you got yourself a bet,” Billy said, and they shook hands.

  After a time Lady Dachau pulled down the movie screen. Most of the cabin lights went out. Billy Dickerson closed Megatrends, tilted his seat way back, and went to sleep.

  Koko asked Lady Dachau for another vodka and settled back to watch the movie.

  The good James Bond saw Koko as soon as he came on the screen. (The bad James Bond was a sleepy Englishman who looked a little bit like Peters, the medic who had been killed in a helicopter crash. The good James Bond looked a little like Tina Pumo.) He walked straight up to the camera and said, “You’re fine, you have nothing to worry about, everybody does what they have to do, that’s what war teaches you.” He gave Koko a little half-smile. “You did well with your new friend, son. I noticed that. Remember now—”

  Ready on the right? Ready on the left? Lock and load.

  Good afternoon, gentlemen, and welcome to the Republic of South Vietnam. It is presently fifteen-twenty, November three, 1967. You will be taken to the Long Binh Replacement Center, where you will receive your individual unit assignments.

  Remember the darkness of the tents. Remember the metal lockers. Remember the mosquito netting on the T-bars. Remember the muddy floors. Remember how the tents were like dripping caves.

  Gentlemen, you are part of a great killing machine.

  This is your weapon. It may save your life.

  Nobility, grace, gravity.

  Koko saw an elephant striding down a civilized European avenue. The elephant was buttoned into an elegant green suit and tipped his hat to all the charming ladies. Koko smiled at James Bond, who jumped out of his fancy car and looked Koko straight in the eye, and in quiet clear italics said, Time to face the elephant again, Koko.

  A long time later they stood in the aisle, holding their carry-on baggage and waiting for Lady Dachau to open the door. At eye level directly before Koko hung the jacket of Billy Dickerson’s blue linen suit, all correctly webbed and criss-crossed with big easy-going, casual-looking wrinkles that made you want to be wrinkled yourself, as easy and casual as that. When Koko glanced up he saw Billy Dickerson’s blond hair ruffling out over the perfect collar of the linen suit. A pleasant smell of soap and aftershave emanated from good old Bill, who had disappeared into the forward toilet for nearly half an hour that morning while no-time turned into San Francisco time.

  “Hey,” Dickerson said, looking over his shoulder at Koko, “if you want to call off that bet it’s okay with me, Bobby. Pretty crazy.”

  “Indulge me,” Koko said.

  Lady Dachau got the signal she was waiting for and opened the door.

  They walked into a corridor of cool fire. Angels with flaming swords waved them forward. Koko heard distant mortar fire, a sign that nothing truly serious was happening: the Tin Man had just sent out a few boys to use up some of this month’s quota of the taxpayers’ money. The cool fire, frozen into patterns like stone, wavered beneath their feet. This was America again. The angels with flaming swords gave flaming smiles.

  “You remember me mentioning that trick?”

  Dickerson nodded and
lifted an eyebrow, and he and Koko strolled along toward the baggage area. The angels with flaming swords gradually lost their numinosity and became uniformed stewardesses pulling wheeled carts behind them. The flames curling in the stone hardened into stiff cold patterns.

  The corridor went straight for perhaps twenty yards, then slanted off to the right.

  They turned the corner.

  “A men’s room, thank God,” Dickerson said, and sped on ahead and shouldered open the door.

  Smiling, Koko sauntered after, imagining an empty white-tiled place.

  A woman in a bright yellow dress who passed before him exuded the hot, bloody aroma of the eternal world. For a moment a bright sword flickered in her hand. He pushed open the door of the men’s room and had to shift his case to one side to swing open another door almost immediately behind it.

  A bald man stood at one of the sinks, washing his hands. Beside him a shirtless man leaned over a sink and scraped lather from his face with a blue plastic razor. Koko’s stomach tightened. Good old Billy was far down a row of urinals, more than half of which were occupied.

  Koko saw his tense, haunted-looking face in the mirror. He jumped at himself out of his own eyes.

  He went to the first urinal and pretended to pee, waiting for everyone to leave him alone with Dickerson. Something had gotten loose inside him, buzzed under his ribs, made him so lightheaded that he wobbled.

  For an instant he thought he was already in Honduras, his work was either completed or ready to be begun all over again. Under an immense sun little brick-colored people milled around a comically provincial airport with tumble-down shacks, lounging policeman, and dozing hounds.

  Dickerson zipped up, moved swiftly to the sink, passed his hands through a stream of water and a stream of air, and was gone almost before Koko came back to the men’s room.

  He hurried out. The loose thing in his chest buzzed painfully against his ribs.

  Dickerson was moving quickly into a huge room where carousels like black volcanos whirred and gouted suitcases down their ribbed flanks. Nearly everyone on their flight was already gathered around the second carousel. Koko watched Dickerson work his way around the edge of the people waiting for their bags. The thing in his chest slipped down into his stomach, where it flew like an angry bee into his intestines.

  Sweating now, Koko crept through the people who stood between himself and Dickerson. Lightly, almost reverently, he brushed his fingers over the linen sleeve that held Dickerson’s left arm.

  “Hey, Bobby, I don’t feel right, you know,” Dickerson said, bending forward and lifting a big Vuitton suitcase off the belt.

  Koko knew one thing: a woman had picked out that bag.

  “About the money thing. Let’s eighty-six the whole idea, okay?”

  Koko nodded miserably. His own beat-up case was nowhere on the carousel. Everything had gone slightly blurry around the edges, as if a fine mist hung in the air. A tall black-haired woman who was a living sword plucked a tiny case off the belt and—Koko saw through the descending mist—smiled at Dickerson.

  “Take care,” Dickerson said.

  A uniformed man walked unerringly up to Dickerson and passed him through customs with a few questions. Dickerson strode off to a window to have his passport stamped.

  Dazed, Koko saw his own suitcase thump down the side of the carousel and glide past him before he thought to lift it off the belt. He watched Dickerson’s steadily dwindling body pass through a door marked EXIT-TRANSPORTATION.

  In Customs the inspector called him “Mr. Ortiz” and searched the ripped lining of his suitcase for diamonds or heroin.

  At Immigration he saw flaming wings sprout from the uniformed shoulders of the man in the booth, and the man stamped his passport and welcomed him back to the country, and Koko grabbed his old case and his carry-on bag and ran to the nearest men’s room. He dropped the bags just inside the door and sprinted into an open toilet. As soon as he sat down his bowels opened, then opened again. Fire dripped and spurted from him. For a moment Koko’s stomach felt as though a long needle had pierced it; then he bent forward and vomited between his shoes. He sat in his own stink for a long time, his bags forgotten, thinking only of what was there before him.

  Eventually he wiped himself off, moved to the sink, washed his face and his hands, put his head beneath the cold water.

  Koko took his bags outside and waited for the transfer bus to take him to the terminal from which his New York flight would leave. The air smelled of chemicals and machinery: everything before him looked two-dimensional and newly washed, drained of color.

  In the second terminal Koko found a bar and ordered a beer. He felt that time had stopped—that it waited for him to wake it into life again. His breathing was shallow and slightly rushed. At the front of his forehead was a light, empty sensation, as if some moderate pain had just ceased. He could remember very little of what had happened to him during the past twenty-four hours.

  He could remember Lady Dachau.

  Gentlemen, you are part of a great killing machine.

  Ten minutes before boarding, Koko went to his gate and stood looking out the window, an unobtrusive man seeing an elephant in a suit and hat rearing up out of a wide dark pool of blood. When the first-class passengers were called, he filed on board and took his seat. He told the stewardess to call him Bobby.

  Then everything really was all right, the sweet ache and buzz came alive within him again, for a pudgy man in his thirties dropped a briefcase into the aisle seat, shrugged off a green knapsack and set it beside the briefcase, removed his suit jacket to expose a striped shirt and dark blue suspenders, and snapped his fingers for the girl to take his jacket. The man shoved the knapsack into the overhead compartment, picked up his briefcase and squeezed into his seat. He scowled at Koko, then began to root through the contents of the briefcase.

  “I don’t suppose you’re a betting man,” Koko said.

  1

  Michael Poole stood at the window of his hotel room, looking down with an almost alarming sense of freedom at a long stretch of Singapore. The surprisingly green, surprisingly neat scene before him fell away to what he supposed was the east. A long way off, tall office blocks rose in a clean white cluster that might have been a transplanted section of midtown New York City. Nothing else in the scene before Poole even faintly resembled Manhattan. Trees with broad crowns that looked as edible as vegetables filled most of the space between himself and the tall white buildings, and because Michael was far above the tops of these trees, they seemed almost carpetlike. Between the broad areas filled in by the treetops swept wide roadways with smooth unblemished surfaces. Expensive cars coursed along these perfect roads, as many Jaguars and Mercedes as on Rodeo Drive. Here and there, through gaps in the trees, tiny people drifted along broad malls. Nearer the hotel, bungalows of pink or creamy stucco with wide porches, columns, and tiled roofs occupied green hillsides. Some of these had open courtyards, and in one of them a stocky woman in a bright yellow robe hung out her wash. In the immediate foreground, not at all obscured by the ubiquitous trees, the swimming pools of his own and other hotels sparkled like tiny woodland lakes glimpsed from an airplane. A canopy of red and blue stripes bordered the most distant pool, where a woman swam dogged laps; at the intermediate pool a bartender in a black jacket set up his bar. Beside the pool nearest Michael a Chinese boy dragged a stack of thick pads toward a row of empty redwood frames.

  This luxurious city both surprised him, reassured him, and excited him more than he was willing to admit. Michael leaned forward against the window as if he wanted to take flight through the glass. Everything down there would be warm to the touch. The Singapore of his imagination had been a combination of Hue and Chinatown with a generalized smear of sidewalk food vendors and trishaws. He had pictured a version of Saigon, a city he had seen only briefly and disliked. (Most of the combat soldiers Michael knew who had visited Saigon had disliked it.) Just looking at those smooth quadrants of treetops, those
neat serrated roofs, the tropical bungalows and the shining pools, made Poole feel better.

  He was elsewhere, without doubt he was somewhere new: he had managed to step out of his life, and until this moment he had been unaware of how much he had wanted or needed to do that. He wanted to stroll beneath those healthy trees. He wanted to walk along the wide malls and smell the perfumed air he remembered from their arrival at Changi airport.

  Just then his telephone rang. Michael picked it up, knowing that Judy was on the other end of the line.

  “Good morning, gentlemen, and welcome to the Republic of Singapore,” came the voice of Harry Beevers. “It is presently nine-thirteen on the trusty Rolex. You will report to the coffee shop where you will receive your individual assignments.… Guess what?”

  Michael said nothing.

  “A glance through the Singapore telephone directory uncovers no listing for a T. Underhill.”

  A little more than an hour later they were walking down Orchard Road. Poole carried the envelope full of Underhill’s jacket photos, Beevers carried a Kodak Instamatic in his jacket pocket and was awkwardly examining a map folded into the back of Papineau’s Guide to Singapore, and Conor Linklater slouched along with his hands in his pockets, carrying nothing. During breakfast they had agreed to spend the morning like tourists, walking through as much of the town as they could cover—“getting the feel of the place,” as Beevers said.

  This section of Singapore was as bland and inoffensive as their coffee shop breakfast. What Dr. Poole had not seen from the window of his hotel room was that the city had a lot in common with the duty-free area of a large airport. Every structure that was not a hotel was either an office building, a bank, or a shopping mall. The majority were the latter, most of them three or four levels high. A giant poster across the topmost level of a tall building still under construction depicted an American businessman speaking to a Singaporean Chinese banker. In a balloon above the American’s head were the words I am glad I learned of the fantastic return on my money I can earn by investing in Singapore! To which the Chinese banker replies With our beneficial investment program for our overseas friends, it is never too late to take part in the economic miracle of Singapore!