Koko

by Peter Straub

  Tina had never heard of Roberto Ortiz, and his private emotion at this news was principally gratitude that he would not have to wait days for the microfilm to be located. He was just double-checking, Tina told himself, making up for the feeling of having missed something important by not going along with the others to Singapore. If he discovered anything they ought to know, he could call them at the Marco Polo.

  Before the articles were located and assembled, he read what the news magazines and the New York Times had said about Ia Thuc. He was seated in a plastic chair before a plastic desk; the chair was not comfortable and the microfilm machine took up so much of the desk that he had to rest his notebook in his lap. Within minutes, none of this mattered at all. What happened to Pumo within ten minutes of starting to read a Newsweek story entitled “Ia Thuc: Shame or Victory?” was very similar to what happened to Conor Linklater when Charlie Daisy put an album of SP4 Cotton’s photographs before him. He had managed to forget how public it all had been.

  Here spoke Lt. Harry Beevers according to Newsweek: “In this war we are here to kill Charlies, and Charlies come in all shapes and sizes. My own personal body count is thirty dead VC.” Children Killer? asked Time, which described the lieutenant as “gaunt, hollow-eyed and -cheeked, desperate, a man on the edge.” Were They Innocent? asked Newsweek, which said the lieutenant was “perhaps as much a victim of Vietnam as the children he is alleged to have killed.”

  Tina could remember Harry Beevers at Ia Thuc. “I have a personal body count of thirty dead gooks! You guys have any balls, pin a medal on me right now.” The lieutenant was high and babbling, he couldn’t shut up. When you stood next to him, you could almost feel the blood zooming around his arteries. You knew that you’d burn your fingers if you touched him. “War makes everybody the same age!” he had bawled out to the reporters. “You assholes think there are children in this war, you think children even exist in this war? You know why you think that way? Because you’re ignorant civilians, that’s why. There are no children!”

  These were the articles that had nearly hanged Beevers, and Dengler with him. In Time: “I deserve a goddamned medal!” Funny, Pumo thought, how in Beevers’ recollections of these events he always said the rest of the platoon deserved goddamned medals too.

  Surrounded by a bubble of unearthly stillness, Pumo remembered how crazy and taut everybody had felt then, how close that boundary was between morality and murder. They had been nothing but nerves hooked up to trigger fingers. The stink of the fish sauce, and the smoke rising from the pot. Up on the sloping hillside, a girl lay in a crumpled blue heap before her wooden yoke. If the village was empty, who the fuck was doing the cooking? And who were they cooking for? Everything was as still as a tiger in the grass. The sow grunted and cocked her head, and Pumo remembered whirling around, weapon ready, and almost blasting a dirty child in half. Because you couldn’t know, you never knew, and death could be a little smiling child with an outstretched hand; it zapped your brain, it fried it, and you either blasted away at everything in sight or you made yourself melt into whatever was behind you. Like the tiger in the grass, you could save your life by becoming invisible.

  He looked at the photographs for a long time—Lieutenant Beevers, skinny as a sapling, with a haggard face and spinning eyes. M.O. Dengler, unidentified, white tired eyes flashing from beneath his helmet liner. All that green around them, that palpitating, trembling, simmering green. The mouth of a cave—“like a fist,” Victor Spitalny said at the court-martial.

  Then he remembered Lieutenant Harry Beevers lifting a girl of six or seven out of a ditch by her ankles, a muddy naked child, with that Vietnamese fragility, those chicken bones in her neck and arms, and swinging her around like an Indian club. Her mouth was a downturned curve, and her skin had begun to pucker where the fire had gotten her.

  Pumo’s entire body felt wet and his sides were cold with sweat. He had to stand up and get away from the machine. He tried to shove his chair back and moved the entire desk. He swiveled his legs and got up and moved, bolted, out into the center of the Microfilm Room.

  They had crossed over, all right. Koko had been born on the other side of the boundary, where you met the elephant.

  A little smiling child stepped forward from a black immensity, cupping death in its small hands.

  Let the guy with the Spanish name have Ia Thuc, Tina thought, it’ll just be another book. I’ll give it to Maggie at Christmas, and she’ll be able to tell me what happened there.

  He looked up and the door opened. A boy with a sparse beard and a single dangling earring stepped in with double handfuls of microfilm spools. “You Puma?”

  “Pumo,” Tina said, and accepted the microfilm.

  He returned to his little desk, unloaded the microfilm of Time magazine, and loaded in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch for the month of February 1982. He scrolled across the pages of print until he found the headline AREA EXECUTIVE, WIFE, SLAIN IN FAR EAST.

  The article contained less information about the deaths than Pumo had already learned from Beevers. Mr. and Mrs. William Martinson of 3642 Breckinridge Drive, a respectable upper-middle-class couple, had been mysteriously slain in Singapore. Their bodies were discovered by a real-estate appraiser entering a supposedly empty bungalow in a residential section of the city. The motive was presumed to be robbery. Mr. Martinson had traveled extensively in the Far East in his business as Executive Vice President and Marketing Director of Martinson Tool & Equipment Ltd., and was frequently accompanied by his wife, an equally distinguished citizen of St. Louis.

  Mr. Martinson, sixty-one, was a graduate of St. Louis Country Day School, Kenyon College, and Columbia University. His great-grandfather, Andrew Martinson, had founded Martinson Tool & Equipment in St. Louis in 1890. The deceased’s father, James, had been president of the company from 1935 to 1952, and had also been president of the St. Louis Founders’ Club, the Union Club, and the Athletic Club as well as serving in prominent positions on many civic, educational, and religious bodies. Mr. Martinson joined his family’s business, now under the presidency of his older brother, Kirkby Martinson, in 1970, using his experience of the Far East and skill as a negotiator to increase Martinson’s annual revenues by what was reputed to be several hundred million dollars.

  Mrs. Martinson, the former Barbara Hartsdale, a graduate of the Academie Française and Bryn Mawr College, had long taken a prominent role in civic and cultural affairs. Her grandfather, Chester Hartsdale, a second cousin of the poet T.S. Eliot, founded the Hartsdale’s department store chain, for fifty years the leading retail outlet throughout the Midwest, and served as ambassador to Belgium after the First World War. The Martinsons were survived by Mr. Martinson’s brother Kirkby and sister, Emma Beech, of Los Angeles; by Mrs. Martinson’s brothers, Lester and Parker, directors of the interior decoration firm La Bonne Vie in New York City; and by their children: Spenser, employed by the Central Intelligence Agency, of Arlington, Va.; Parker, of San Francisco, Ca.; and Arlette Monaghan, an artist, of Cadaques, Spain. There were no grandchildren.

  Tina examined the photographs of these two exemplary citizens. William Martinson had possessed close-set eyes and a fringe of white hair around a smooth intelligent face. He had a prosperous, secretive, badgerlike air. Barbara Martinson had been caught smiling, close-mouthed, almost shyly, while looking sideways. She looked as if she had just thought of something funny and rather bawdy.

  On what would have been the third page was a headline reading MARTINSONS RECALLED BY NEIGHBORS, FRIENDS. Pumo began skimming the small print on the monitor’s screen, wrongly suspecting that he already knew all the substantial information about the Martinsons that he was ever going to know. The Martinsons had of course been loved and admired. Of course their deaths were a tragic loss to the community. They had been handsome and generous and witty. Less predictably, William Martinson was still known to his oldest friends by his Country Day nickname, “Fuffy.” It was often remembered that Mr. Martinson had shown remarkable busine
ss ability after his decision to resign from journalism and join the family firm during a crisis at Martinson Tool & Equipment.

  Journalism? Pumo thought. Fuffy?

  Successful in Two Careers, claimed a subhead. William Martinson had majored in journalism at Kenyon College and earned a Master’s degree at Columbia’s School of Journalism. In 1948 he joined the staff of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and was soon recognized as a reporter of exceptional talent. In 1964, after holding several other prestigious journalistic posts, he became a correspondent from Vietnam for Newsweek magazine. Mr. Martinson reported from Vietnam for the magazine until the fall of Saigon, by which time he had become bureau chief. He still maintained his home and friendships in St. Louis, and in 1970 was given a celebration dinner at the Athletic Club for his contributions to the American understanding of the war, especially his work in reporting what at first had seemed a massacre at the village of …

  But Pumo had stopped reading. For a time he was not conscious of hearing or seeing anything—Ia Thuc had blindsided him again. He gradually became aware that his hands were taking the St. Louis microfilm from the machine. “That goddamned Beevers,” he said to himself. “That goddamned fool.”

  “Simmer down, man” said a flat stoned voice from behind him. Pumo tried to whirl around in his plastic chair and banged himself on the molded back hard enough to give himself a bruise. He rubbed his thigh and looked up at the boy with the tentative beard. “Puma, right?”

  Pumo sighed and nodded.

  “You still want these?” He held out another stack of microfilm containers.

  Pumo took them, waved the boy off, and went back to the screen. He did not know what he was looking at, what he was looking for. He felt as if he had been struck by lightning. Goddamned Harry Beevers, who had made such a big deal of his research, had not even scratched the surface of Koko’s murders. Pumo felt another wave of concentrated rage go through him.

  He slammed in the microfilmed London Times hard enough to vibrate the desk. Noises of dismay, evident at a low level for some time, came more loudly through the partition separating him from the next monitor.

  Pumo scanned across the text until he found the headline and subhead he wanted, JOURNALIST-NOVELIST MCKENNA SLAIN IN SINGAPORE. Came to Prominence During Vietnam Era. Clive McKenna had made the front page of the Times of 29 January, 1982, six days after his death and one day after the discovery of his body. Mr. McKenna had worked for Reuters News Service in Australia and New Zealand for ten years and was then transferred to Reuters’ Saigon Bureau, where he had quickly become known as a dashing figure akin to the legendary Sean Flynn. Mr. McKenna had distinguished himself by being the first English newsman to cover the seige at Khe Sanh, the My Lai massacre, the fighting in Hue during the Tet offensive of 1968, and was the only English journalist present immediately after the disputed events in the hamlet of Ia Thuc which resulted in the court-martials and eventual acquittals of two American soldiers. Mr. McKenna left the world of print journalism in 1971, when he returned to England to write the first of a series of international thrillers that quickly made him one of England’s most prominent and best-selling authors.

  “He was on the goddamned helicopter,” Pumo said out loud. Clive McKenna had been on the helicopter that brought the reporters into Ia Thuc, William Martinson had been on the helicopter, and no doubt the French reporters had been on it too.

  Pumo removed the microfilm and replaced it with that of the microfilm of the French newspaper. He could not read French, but in the prominent black-bordered article on the first page of L’Express he had no trouble finding the words Vietnam and Ia Thuc, which were the same in English and French.

  A square masculine head with brown eyes behind large grey glasses appeared around the side of Pumo’s carrel. “Excuse me,” it said. It poked a few inches further past the divider, exposing a polka dot bow tie. “If you cannot control yourself or your vocabulary I shall have to ask you to leave.”

  Pumo felt like hitting the pompous ass. The bow tie reminded him of Harry Beevers.

  With a self-conscious awareness that most of the people in the Microfilm Room were looking at him, he gathered up his coat and handed the film in at the desk. In a furious rush he ran down the steps and out through the library’s great front doors. Snow swirled about him.

  Pumo turned downtown on Fifth Avenue and marched along, his hands in his pockets and a brown tweed cap from Banana Republic on his head. It was very cold, and this helped. Random violence was much less likely when everybody was trying to get indoors as fast as possible.

  He tried to remember the reporters at Ia Thuc. They had been part of a larger group that had come to Camp Crandall from further down in Quang Tri province, where the brass wanted them to see various dread object lessons. After they filed their obligatory stories, or so army theory went, they could choose less embattled areas for their follow-up stories. About half of the big contingent said fuck it and went back to Saigon, where they could get smashed, smoke opium, and make fun of Rolling Thunder and the so-called “MacNamara Line” that was supposed to replace it. All the television reporters went to Camp Evans so they could get to Hue easily, stand on a pretty bridge with a mike up their chops, and say things like “I am speaking to you from the banks of the Powder River in the centuries-old city of Hue.” A lot of the others had stayed in Camp Evans, where they could be flown a few klicks north and write stirring stuff about the helicopters landing at LZ Sue. A handful had decided to go out into the field and see what was happening in a village called Ia Thuc.

  Pumo’s enduring impression of the reporters was of a crowd of men in very deliberate almost-uniforms surrounding a ranting Harry Beevers. They had resembled a pack of dogs, alternately barking and gulping bits of food.

  Of the men who had surrounded Harry Beevers on that afternoon, four were now dead. How many were left alive? Pumo put his head down, walking fast down Fifth Avenue in a dry swirl of windblown snow, and tried to focus on the number of men standing around Beevers. They were a numberless pack, remembered that way, and he tried instead to see them as they left the helicopter.

  Spanky Burrage, Trotman, Dengler, and himself had been carrying bags of rice out of the cave and stacking them beneath the trees. Beevers was jubilant, among other reasons because they had discovered boxes of Russian weapons underneath the rice, and he was spinning around like a dancing toy. “Get those children out,” he was shouting, “stack them next to the rice, and put the weapons right beside them.” He was pointing at the helicopter, which was flattening out the grass as it settled swaying toward the earth. “Get ’em out! Get ’em out of here!” Then the men had begun leaving the Huey Iroquois.

  In his mind he saw them jumping out of the Iroquois and bending over as they ran toward the village. Like all reporters, they were trying to look like John Wayne or Erroll Flynn, and there had been … five of them? Six?

  If Poole and Beevers got to Underhill in time, maybe they could save at least one life.

  Pumo looked up and saw that he had walked all the way to 30th Street. Looking at the street sign, he at last clearly saw the reporters jumping out of the Huey Iroquois and running through the grass blown down like cat’s fur rubbed the wrong way. One man had been followed by a pair of men, then another single man loaded with cameras, and another who ran as if his legs hurt him, and one bald man. One of the reporters had spoken in soft, fluent, rattling Spanish to a soldier called La Luz, who had muttered something that included the word maricón and turned away. La Luz had been killed a month later.

  Cold shadows were already spilling across the street, and within the shadows layers of dead snow lifted and spun. He got them all over to Singapore and Bangkok, the reporters, he figured out a way to pluck their strings and get them to come to him. He’s a spider. He’s a little smiling child with an outstretched hand. The streetlamps clicked on, and for a second the middle of Fifth Avenue, crowded with taxis and buses, looked discolored, bleached. Pumo tasted the bite of vodka on his
tongue and turned off on 24th Street.

  2

  Until Pumo had finished two drinks, he had taken in only the row of bottles behind the bartender, the hand giving him the glass, and the beautiful glass itself, filled with ice and clear liquid. He thought he might even have closed his eyes. Now his third drink had appeared before him, and he was still coming out of it.

  “Yeah, I was in AA,” the man beside him was saying, evidently continuing a conversation that had been in progress for some time. “But do you know what I said? I said fuck it. That’s what I said.”

  Pumo heard the man saying that he had chosen hell. Like everyone else who had chosen hell, he recommended it very highly. Hell wasn’t as bad as it was cracked up to be. His friend’s purple face sagged and his breath stank. Demons jabbed out their little fists and forks inside his fallen cheeks and lit yellow fires in his eyes. He put a heavy dirty hand on Pumo’s shoulder. He said he liked his style—he liked a man who closed his eyes when he drank. The bartender barked and retreated into a smoky cave.

  “Did you ever kill anybody?” Pumo’s friend asked. “Pretend you’re on television and you have to tell me the truth. Ever waste anybody? My money says you did.”

  He pushed his hand down hard on Pumo’s shoulder.

  “I hope not,” Pumo said, and gulped a third of his new drink.

  “So so so so soooo,” the man breathed. Inside him, the demons went wildly to work, poking out their little forks, dancing, stoking their yellow fires. “I recognize that answer, my friend, it is the answer of a former warrior. Am I right? Or—am I right?”

  Pumo pulled himself free of the man’s hand and turned away.

  “You think that counts?” the man asked. “It does not. Except in one way. When I ask you, did you ever kill anyone, that is to say, have you ever taken a life in the way you take a drink or in the way you take a piss, I am asking if you are a killer. And everything counts, even if you killed while in the uniform of your country. Because then technically you’re a killer.”