Koko

by Peter Straub

  Pumo forced himself to turn again toward the man’s blazing face and the stench of his body. “Get away from me. Leave me alone.”

  “Or what? You’ll kill me like you killed ’em in Vietnam? Look at this.” The demon-man held up a fist. It looked like a dented grey garbage can. “When I killed him, I killed him with this one here.”

  Pumo felt the walls of the cave focusing down in on him like the lens of a camera. Smoke and foulness darkened the air, streaming toward Pumo from the demon-man.

  “Wherever you are, see, that’s where you are,” the man said. “You’re not safe. I know. I’m a killer too. You think you can win, but you can’t win. I know.”

  Pumo backed away toward the door.

  “Roger,” the man said. “Roger wilco. Wherever you are, get it?”

  “I know,” Pumo said, and yanked bills out of his pocket.

  When he got out of the cab, the windows on the second floor were full of light. Maggie was home, oh thank you God. He looked at his watch and was astonished that nine o’clock was so near. Many hours had disappeared from his day. How long had he spent in the bar on 24th Street and how many drinks did he have there? Pumo remembered the demon-man and thought he must have had a lot more than three.

  He propped himself against the wall as he worked his way up the narrow white staircase. Pumo unlocked his door and let himself into warmth and mellow light.

  “Maggie?”

  No reply.

  “Maggie?”

  Pumo unbuttoned his heavy coat and tossed it onto one of the pegs. When he reached for the tweed cap from Banana Republic, he touched his forehead and had a sudden vision of the cap resting bottom-side up on the seat of a taxi.

  He came out of the corridor into the main room of his loft and immediately saw Maggie sitting up on the platform, behind his desk, with her hands folded over the telephone. Her eyebrows were a straight line and the ruff of her live lovely hair glowed. Her mouth was closed so tightly she looked as if she had trapped some small creature within it.

  “You’re drunk,” she said. “I just called three hospitals, and you were in a bar.”

  “I know why he killed them,” Pumo said. “I even saw them, over in Nam. I can remember how they looked jumping out of the helicopter. Did you know, I mean do you know, that I love you?”

  “Nobody needs your kind of love,” Maggie said, but even though Pumo was drunk he could see that her face had softened. The small thing was no longer trapped in her mouth. He started to explain about Martinson and McKenna and how he had met a demon in hell, but Maggie was already coming toward him. Then she was undressing him. When he was naked she grabbed his penis and towed him like a tugboat down the hall and into the bedroom.

  “I have to call Singapore,” he said. “They don’t even know yet!”

  Maggie slipped into bed beside him. “Now let’s make up before I remember everything I thought could have happened to you while I was waiting for you and get angry again.” She put her arms out and pulled her whole body into his. Then she jerked her head back. “Ugh! You have a funny smell. Where were you, in a burning trash can?”

  “It was the demon-man,” Pumo said. “His smell soaked through from when he put his hand on my shoulder. He said hell wasn’t really so bad because you got used to it after a while.”

  “Americans don’t know anything about demons,” Maggie said.

  After a while Tina thought that Maggie made him feel so wickedly good that she must be a demon too. That was how she knew so much about things. Dracula had been a demon, and the man in the bar was a demon, and if you knew how to spot them you could probably see demons strolling up and down the streets of New York. Harry Beevers—there was another demon. But then the demon-things that Maggie Lah was doing to him would not let him concentrate on anything but the notion that after he married Maggie life would be very interesting because then he’d be married to a demon.

  Two hours later Pumo awakened with a headache, the sweet, grainy taste of Maggie in his mouth, and the knowledge that he had left an important task undone. A well-known dread about the restaurant displaced all his other thoughts and would not go away until he remembered how he had spent the afternoon. He had to call Poole in Singapore and tell him what he had learned about the victims. He checked his clock radio: it was a quarter to eleven. In Singapore it would be a quarter to eleven in the morning. There was a chance he could still catch Poole in his room.

  Pumo got out of bed and put on a robe.

  Maggie was sitting on the couch, holding a pencil upright in her hand like a paintbrush and examining something she had drawn on a yellow legal pad. She looked up at him and smiled. “I’ve been thinking about your menu,” she said. “Since you’re redoing so much, why not work on the menu too?”

  “What’s wrong with the menu?”

  “Well,” Maggie said, and Pumo knew that she was really going to tell him. He skirted around her and went up the platform steps to his desk. “For one thing, dot matrix printing looks ugly. It makes it look as though your kitchen is run by a computer. And the paper is pretty, but it gets dirty too fast. You need something with more gloss. And the layout isn’t clean enough, and you don’t need such lengthy descriptions of the dishes.”

  “I often wondered what was wrong with the menu.” Pumo sat at his desk and began hunting for the telephone number of the hotel in Singapore. “When the Mayor comes in, he likes to read those descriptions out loud. To savor them.”

  “The whole thing looks like scrambled eggs. I hope the designer didn’t charge you much.”

  Pumo had of course designed the menu himself. “He was amazingly expensive. Oh, here it is.”

  He dialed the operator and explained that he wanted to call Singapore.

  “Take a look at how much nicer your menu could be.” Maggie held up the legal pad.

  “Is there writing on that pad?”

  At last he was connected to the Marco Polo Hotel. The desk clerk told him that no Dr. Michael Poole was registered there. No, there was no mistake. No, there could be no mistake. There were also no guests named Harold Beevers or Conor Linklater.

  “They have to be there.” Pumo began to feel desperate all over again.

  “Call his wife,” Maggie said.

  “I can’t call his wife.”

  “Why can’t you call his wife?”

  The desk clerk came back on the line before he could think how to answer Maggie’s question. “Dr. Poole and the others were staying with us, but they checked out two days ago.”

  “Where did they go?”

  The clerk hesitated. “I believe Dr. Poole made travel arrangements for his party through the concierge’s office in the lobby.”

  The man went off to see what he could find out, and Maggie asked, “Why can’t you call his wife?”

  “Don’t have my address book.”

  “Why don’t you have your address book?”

  “It was stolen,” Pumo said.

  “Don’t be ridiculous. You’re just being nasty because of what I said about your menu.”

  “For once, you’re wrong. I—”

  The clerk returned and told Puma that Dr. Poole and Mr. Linklater had purchased air tickets to Bangkok, and that Mr. Beevers had booked a flight to Taipei. Since the gentlemen had not used the concierge to book hotel rooms in these cities, the clerk did not know where the gentlemen were staying.

  “Why would anyone steal your address book? Who would steal anyone’s address book, for that matter?” She paused. Her eyes widened. “Oh. When you got up that time. When you told me that awful story.”

  “That’s who stole it.”

  “How creepy.”

  “That’s what I say. Anyhow, I don’t have Mike’s home phone number.”

  “Please excuse my saying the obvious, but you could almost certainly get it from Information.”

  Pumo snapped his fingers and called Information in Westchester County for Michael Poole’s telephone number. “Judy must be at home,”
he said. “She has to get to school in the morning.”

  Maggie nodded rather grimly.

  Pumo dialed Michael’s number. After two rings, an answering machine cut in and Pumo heard his friend’s voice saying “I cannot answer the phone at this time. Please leave a message and I will get back to you as soon as possible. If you must speak to someone here, call 555-0032.”

  That number must belong to one of the doctors in his group, Pumo thought, and said, “This is Tina Pumo. Judy, can you hear me?” Pause. “I’m trying to get in touch with Mike. I have some information he will want to know, and he’s checked out of the hotel in Singapore. Will you get back to me as soon as you have his new number? It’s important that I talk to him. Bye.”

  Maggie carefully put the legal pad and the pencil down on the coffee table. “Sometimes you act as if women just did not exist.”

  “Huh?”

  “When you want to talk to Judy Poole, whose number do you request from Information? Michael Poole’s. And whose number do you get? Michael Poole’s. It never occurred to you to ask for Judith Poole’s number.”

  “Oh, come on. They’re a married couple.”

  “What do you know about married couples, Tina?”

  “What I know about married couples is, she’s out,” he said.

  Soon Tina began to think that Maggie might be right after all. Both of the Pooles had demanding jobs that involved appointments and emergencies, and it was logical that they might have separate telephone lines. He had resisted the idea because it was not his own. But the next morning as he badgered the carpenters and morbidly inspected every new hole in the walls for signs of roaches and spiders, he still could find no grounds to question his certainty that Judy Poole had not been home on the night he called. People usually had their answering machines where they could hear them—especially if they turned the machines on while they were home. That was why they turned them on. Therefore he could excuse his immediate rejection of Maggie’s ideas—if they had a dozen telephone lines and he had called every one the results would have been identical.

  When Maggie asked him if he intended to see if there was a separate listing for Judy, and Pumo said, “Maybe. I have a lot to do today, I guess it can wait.”

  Maggie smiled and flicked her eyes slyly upward. She knew she had won, and was too smart to ask him a second time.

  Until seven o’clock in the evening, the day after Pumo’s discovery that Koko’s victims had been the journalists at Ia Thuc, time went by almost normally. He and Maggie had spent the day in cabs and subways, in other restaurants, and in an office with lithographs by David Salle and Robert Rauschenberg where Lowery Hapgood, Molly Witt’s partner, flirted with Maggie while he explained a new shelving system. They did not get back to Tina’s loft until just before seven. Maggie asked him if he felt like eating anything and lay down on the long couch, and Tina dropped into a chair at the table and said he supposed so.

  “What are we going to do about it, then?”

  Tina picked up the morning’s Times, which he had tossed onto the table. “I understand that many women delight in creating meals.”

  “Let’s get a little bit stoned and go to Chinatown and get duck feet. Yum.”

  “That’s the first time you wanted to get high since you started living here.”

  Maggie yawned, flinging out her arms. “I know. I’m getting so boring. I said it just now out of nostalgia for when I was interesting.”

  “Hold on,” Pumo said, staring at a small article on the third page of the first section.

  He was looking at a headline that read: ORTIZ, JOURNALIST, SLAIN IN SINGAPORE. The body of Roberto Ortiz, 47, a prominent member of the press corps, had been discovered the day before by police in an empty house located in a residential section of Singapore. Mr. Ortiz and an unidentified woman had died of gunshot wounds. Robbery was not assumed to be the motive. Roberto Ortiz, born in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, educated privately and at the University of California at Berkeley, was born into an influential Central American newspaper family and became a freelance reporter contributing to many Spanish- and English-language periodicals. Mr. Ortiz had spent the years 1964–1971 in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, covering the Vietnam War for a variety of journals, and out of this experience had come his book Vietnam: A Personal Journey. Mr. Ortiz was well known for his wit, flamboyance, and personal courage. Singapore police had released the information that the death of Mr. Ortiz appeared to be related to several unsolved killings in the city.

  “Something has stolen your attention from your teenage drug addict mistress,” Maggie said.

  “Read this.” Pumo walked to the couch and handed her the paper. She read half of it lying down, but sat up to finish it. “You think he was another one of them?”

  Pumo shrugged—suddenly he wished that Maggie were somewhere else, making her smart remarks about drugs. “I don’t know. There’s something about this—there’s something about him. The man who was killed.”

  “Roberto Ortiz.”

  He nodded.

  “Did you ever meet him?”

  “There was a Spanish-speaking reporter who came to Ia Thuc.” Dark feelings churned within Pumo. He could not stand this, any of it—his nice loft, the mess downstairs in the restaurant, and right now he could not stand Maggie either.

  “He got the last one,” Pumo said with what felt like the last fragments of his restraint. From now on he was running on empty. “There were five reporters who came into Ia Thuc, and now they’re all dead.”

  “You look awful, Tina. What do you want to do?”

  “Leave me alone.” Pumo stood up and leaned against the wall. Without volition, as if his hand had chosen to close itself, he made a fist. Quietly at first and then with growing force, he began hitting the wall.

  “Tina?”

  “I said, leave me alone.”

  “Why are you hitting the wall?”

  “Shut up!”

  Maggie was silent for a long time while Pumo continued to beat his fist against the wall. Eventually he changed to his left fist.

  “They’re over there, and you’re over here.”

  “Brilliant.”

  “Do you think they know about this Ortiz?”

  “Of course they know about it!” Pumo shouted. He turned around so that he could yell better. Both of his hands felt raw and swollen. “They were in the same city!” Pumo felt murderous. Maggie was sitting on the couch staring at him with big kitten eyes. “What do you know about anything? How old are you? You think I need you? I don’t need you around me!”

  “Good,” Maggie said. “Then I don’t have to be your nurse.”

  A wave of pure blackness went through Tina Pumo. He remembered the demon-man who had smelled like burning garbage putting a grey hand on his shoulder and telling him he was a killer. Hell was pretty nice, Pumo thought. He found himself going toward the kitchen cabinets Vinh had hung. Look what you can do in hell. He opened the first cabinet and was almost surprised to see dishes stacked on the shelves. The neat dishes looked absolutely foreign to him. He hated the dishes. Pumo picked up the topmost dish and hefted it in both hands for a moment before dropping it. It smashed into half a dozen sections when it struck the floor. See what you could do when you lived in hell? He took another plate and threw it down. Pieces of china flew out and skidded beneath his dining table. He worked down the stack, sometimes dropping just one dish, at other times two or three. He dropped the last plate with great deliberation, as if he were conducting a scientific experiment.

  “You poor bastard,” Maggie said.

  “Okay, okay.” Pumo pressed his hands to his eyes.

  “Do you want to go to Bangkok to see if you can find them? It couldn’t be that hard to do.”

  “I don’t know,” Pumo said.

  “If being here makes you feel so bad, you ought to go. I could even book the tickets for you.”

  “I don’t feel so bad anymore,” Pumo said. He went across the room to an armchair and sat d
own. “But maybe I’ll go. Does the restaurant really need me?”

  “Does it?”

  He thought. “Yes. That’s why I didn’t go in the first place.” He looked over the rubble of the plates. “Whoever made that mess ought to be executed.” When he grinned his face looked ghastly. “I retract that.”

  “Let’s go to Chinatown and get soup,” Maggie said. “You are a person in great need of soup.”

  “Would you go to Bangkok with me if I decide to go?”

  “I hate Bangkok,” Maggie said. “Let’s go to Chinatown instead.”

  They found a cab on West Broadway, and Maggie gave directions to the Bowery Arcade, between Canal and Bayard streets.

  Fifteen minutes later Maggie was speaking Cantonese to a waiter in a small shabby room papered with handwritten menus like scrolls. The waiter was about sixty and wore a filthy yellow uniform that had once been white. The waiter said something that made Maggie smile.

  “What was that?”

  “He called you an old foreigner.”

  Pumo looked at the shuffling waiter’s bent back and the iron-grey stubble covering his head.

  “It’s an expression.”

  “Maybe I should go to Bangkok.”

  “Just say the word.”

  “If they knew that this other journalist, this Ortiz, was killed in Singapore, why would they leave there and go to Bangkok?”

  The waiter set before them bowls of a creamy porridge-like substance very similar to that Michael Poole had eaten for breakfast in Singapore. “Unless they found out that Tim Underhill had left town.”

  “And Harry Beevers went to Taipei?” Maggie smiled at this thought, which evidently struck her as ridiculous.

  Pumo nodded. “So they must have learned that Underhill was in one of those two places, and split up to try to find him. But why didn’t they call me first? If they learned that Underhill was out of Singapore after they read about Ortiz, they must know that Underhill is innocent.”