Koko

by Peter Straub

  Just as the other man passed before the head of the aisle in which he had been hiding, Pumo emerged from the stacks and was only a few paces from the door to the staircase. A dim, shielded light burned above it. He took a step toward the door.

  The knob began to revolve and Pumo’s heart stopped for the space of a single beat. The knob revolved and the whole door swung abruptly in on a bubble of conversation and a sudden tide of light.

  Dark figures stepped toward him. Pumo stopped moving; they stopped moving too. The high-pitched conversation abruptly ceased. Then he saw that they were the Chinese women he had seen in the third-floor corridor.

  “Oh!” both women uttered in a whisper.

  “Excuse me,” Pumo whispered back. “I guess I got lost or something.”

  They waved him forward, grinning now that they were over the surprise of seeing him, and Pumo went past them through the door and out onto what felt like the safety of the landing.

  Back in his loft that night Pumo told Maggie only that he had not been able to confirm that the other person looking at material about Ia Thuc had used the murdered journalist’s name. He did not want to describe what had happened in the stacks, because nothing really had happened. After a long dinner and a bottle of Bonnes Mares at a good restaurant across the street, he was too ashamed of his panic. It had been imagination doing a nasty trick with the materials of his memory, and Maggie was right, he was still trying to get over his experiences in Vietnam. The bearded man had given him some name like Roberto Diaz, and everything else was just fantasy. A fellow passenger or a coked-up airport employee had killed the yuppie at JFK. Maggie looked so beautiful that even the bored SoHo waiter stared at her, and the wine was full of subtle tastes. He looked at her face glowing at him across the table and knew that as long as your health and your money held out, the world was sane.

  The next day neither Pumo nor Maggie looked at The New York Times, neither of them paused to look at the headlines of the tabloids on the newsstands they hurried past on their various errands, LIBRARY CHIEF SLAIN said the Post, with imperfect accuracy. The News settled for the Agatha Christie-like touch of MURDER IN THE LIBRARY. Both tabloids gave half of their front pages to a portrait shot of Dr. Anton Mayer-Hall, a tall bearded man in a double-breasted suit. Dr. Mayer-Hall, Director of Projects for New York Public Libraries and a staff member of the library for twenty-four years, had been found slain in a section of the fifth-floor stacks reserved for library personnel. It was speculated that he had used that section of the fifth floor as a shortcut to his office, where he had been due for an appointment with the library’s publicity director, Mei-lan Hudson. Ms. Hudson and her assistant Adrien Lo, using the same shortcut, had stopped and questioned an intruder in the same section of the library where Dr. Mayer-Hall was murdered a few minutes before their discovery of the body. The intruder, whose description was now in the hands of the police, was being sought for questioning. The Times offered its readers a smaller photograph and a detailed map with arrows and an X where the body was found.

  4

  What do you fear?

  I fear that I made him up. That I gave him all his best ideas.

  You fear that he is an idea come to life?

  He is his own idea come to life.

  How did Victor Spitalny get to Bangkok?

  It was simple. He found a soldier at the airport who was willing to switch his nametag and travel documents for the sake of going to Honolulu instead of Bangkok. So everything proved that PFC Spitalny went to Honolulu on Air Pacific Flight 206—not only the tickets, but also and including check-in lists, passenger rosters, seating charts filled out in-flight, and boarding passes. A PFC named Victor Spitalny could conclusively be shown to have stayed in a single room at the Hotel Lanai costing the equivalent of twenty dollars American per night for six nights, and to have returned on Air Pacific Flight 207, arriving back in Vietnam at 2100 hours 7 October 1969. It was indisputable that PFC Spitalny had gone to and returned from Honolulu during the time that he had disappeared in the middle of a street riot in Bangkok.

  Finally, a PFC named Michael Warland who claimed to have lost all his papers admitted that on the morning of 2 October 1969 he had met and spoken with PFC Victor Spitalny who had suggested that they exchange places during their R&Rs. When he did not locate PFC Spitalny in the airport on 8 October, he stored his belongings in a locker and returned to his unit. When the deception was revealed, PFC Spitalny was listed as AWOL.

  What did all this do for Spitalny?

  It bought him weeks of time.

  Why did Spitalny want to go to Bangkok with Dengler?

  He had already planned it all.

  What happened to the girl?

  The girl disappeared. She ran through an enraged crowd in Patpong, showing on her palms blood shed in a cave in Vietnam, and ran invisibly through the world for years until I saw her. Then I began to understand.

  What did you understand?

  She was back because he was back.

  Then why did you bless her?

  Because if I saw her, then I was back too.

  1

  On West End Avenue the old lady nodded at him from a window in an apartment building across the street and he waved up at her. The doorman, in an ornate uniform of blue and grey with gold epaulettes, was also looking at him, but in a far less friendly manner. The doorman, who had known Roberto Ortiz, would not let him in, though inside was where he had to be. He could still see the Ia Thuc photographs he had looked at in the library, and the darkness at the center of those photographs, which had made him shake, pressed him toward the inside, the harbor that inside was.

  You crazy? the doorman said. You outa your mind? You can’t go in there.

  I have to go in there.

  The world had given him Pumo the Puma, standing in the Microfilm Room like an answered prayer, and Koko switched on the invisibility switch and followed Pumo-the Puma down the corridor and up the stairs and into the vast room filled with book cases in tall rows, and then everything had gone wrong, the world had tricked him, the Joker jumped out of the pack cackling and dancing—another man died in front of him, not Pumo the Puma, and it was Bill Dickerson again. The getting away. The escape. So Koko himself had to hide, the world was slick and savage and it turned its back on you. On Broadway mad old shapes in rags with bare swollen feet rushed at you, speaking in tongues, their lips black because they breathed fire. The ragged mad shapes knew about the Joker because they had seen him too, they knew Koko was going astray, astray, and they knew about Koko’s mistake in the library. This time he had won the wager again, but it was the wrong wager because it was the wrong man. Then Puma had melted away. When the mad ragged bums spoke in tongues they said, You’re making mistakes! Bad mistakes! You don’t belong here!

  I can’t let you in here, the doorman said. You want me to call the cops? Get away or I’ll call the cops, get your ass out of here.

  Koko was standing now on the corner of West End Avenue and West 78th Street, the molten center of the universe, looking up at the building where Roberto Ortiz had lived. A vein jumped in his neck, and the cold bit his face.

  The old lady could come down and lead him into the building, Koko thought, where he could ride up and down on the elevators and wear Roberto Ortiz’s clothes forever. In warmth and safety. Now he was in the wrong world and nothing in the wrong world was right.

  This was one thing Koko knew. He was not supposed to live in a small bare room next to the crazy man at the Christian’s Association.

  He had the address book all laid out on the little table. He had the names and addresses circled.

  But Harry Beevers did not answer his telephone.

  But Conor Linklater did not answer his telephone.

  Michael Poole’s answering machine spoke in Michael Poole’s voice and gave another number where a woman answered. This woman had a stern, unforgiving voice.

  Koko remembered, I always liked the smell of blood.

  Koko fel
t the cold tears on his face and turned away from the old woman’s window and began to walk down West End Avenue.

  The crazy man’s hair was ropes and his eyes were red. He lived in the room next to Koko and he came in and he laughed and said—what all this shit on the walls, boy? Killin’ is a see-yun. The crazy man was black and wore exhausted black man’s clothes.

  Things were going fast and Koko was going fast down West End Avenue. Frozen bushes burst into flame, and across the street a tall woman with red hair whispered, Once you kill ’em, they your responsibility forever.

  The woman with the hard voice knew that.

  On wide crowded 72nd Street he crossed over to Broadway. And behold darkness shall cover the earth. Yet once a little while, and I will shake the heavens and the earth.

  For he is like a refiner’s fire.

  If he said that to the woman, would she know how he felt in the toilet after Bill Dickerson walked away? In the library, when the Joker jumped out of the pack and jigged and capered between the books?

  I didn’t start off in this business to accept substitutes, he said to himself. I can say that to her.

  Time was a needle and at the end was the needle’s eye. When you passed through the needle—when you pulled the needle through its own eye after you—

  a man of sorrow and acquainted with grief were you.

  A man in a golden fur coat was staring at Koko and Koko stared right back. I am not troubled by the hostile stares of strangers, I am a man rejected and despised. “I am a man rejected and despised,” Koko said to the staring man, who had already turned his back and was walking away.

  Koko walked tense and haunted down Eighth Avenue. Everything between West End Avenue, twenty blocks north, and Eighth Avenue had passed in a blurred moment. The world glittered as a cold thing glitters. He was outside not inside, and back in his terrible room the black man waited to tell him about sin.

  The grinning demons loved the men and women they escorted through eternity—demons had a great secret, they too were created to love and be loved.

  “Are you speaking to me?” asked an old man with a polished face and a dirty black beret. The old man was not one of the ragged shapes sent to torture him: the old man spoke in English, not in tongues. A jewel of snot hung from his nose. “My name is Hansen.”

  “I’m a travel agent,” Koko said.

  “Well, welcome to New York,” said Hansen. “I guess you’re a visitor here.”

  “I’ve been away a long time, but they’re keeping me busy. Keeping me busy in all directions.”

  “That’s good!” the old man chortled. He was delighted to have someone talk to him.

  Koko asked if he could buy him a drink, and Hansen accepted with a grateful smile. The two of them went into a Mexican restaurant on Eighth Avenue near 55th Street and when Koko called for “Mexican drinks!” the bartender placed two fizzy-looking, frothy-looking, soupy-looking drinks before them. The bartender had frizzy black hair, olive skin, and a drooping black moustache, and Koko liked him very much. The bar was warm and dark and Koko liked the silence and the bowls of salty chips placed beside the red sauce. The old man kept blinking at Koko as if he could not believe his luck.

  “I’m a veteran,” Koko said.

  “Oh,” the old man said. “I never went.”

  The old man asked the bartender what he thought about the guy in the library.

  “He was a mistake,” Koko said. “God blinked.”

  “What guy?” said the bartender, and the old man wheezed and said, “Newspapers eat that shit up.”

  To the bartender and the old man, Koko said, “I am a man despised and rejected, a man of sorrow and acquainted with grief.”

  “I am the same,” the bartender said.

  Old Hansen raised his glass and toasted him. He even winked.

  “Do you want to hear the song of the mammoths?” Koko asked.

  “I always liked elephants,” Hansen said.

  “I am the same,” the bartender said.

  So Koko sang the song of the mammoths, the song so ancient even the elephants had forgotten its meaning, and old Hansen and the Mexican bartender listened in reverent silence.

  PART

  FOUR

  IN THE

  UNDERGROUND

  GARAGE

  1

  Two days earlier, Michael Poole stood at the window of his hotel room, looking down at Surawong Road, so jammed with trucks, taxicabs, automobiles, and the little covered motorized carts called ruk-tuks that the traffic formed a seamless body. Across Surawong Road lay the Patpong District, where the bars and sex shows and massage parlors were only just beginning to open up. The room’s air conditioner set up a rattling hum beside Poole, for while the air was so grey as to be nearly grainy, the day was even warmer and more humid than Singapore had been that morning. Out of sight behind Poole and, like both the air conditioner and the traffic in full spate, Conor Linklater was walking around the room, picking up the guest book, looking at all the furniture, inspecting the postcards in the desk drawer, and all the while talking to himself. He was still excited by what the cabdriver had said to them.

  “Right away,” Conor mumbled. “Can you believe that? I mean, is this place about getting your rocks off, or what?”

  The driver had informed them that this hotel was very convenient, being on the fringe of the Patpong area, and then had permanently impressed Conor with both himself and the city of Bangkok by asking if the gentlemen wished to stop at a massage parlor before reaching their hotel. No ordinary massage parlor, no tank with skinny country girls who did not know how to behave, but a luxurious place, real sophistication, porcelain bathtubs, elegant rooms, full body massages, girls so beautiful they made you come two-three times before you even got going. He had promised girls so pretty they looked like princesses, movie stars, Playboy centerfolds, girls as voluptuous and yielding as the girls in dreams, girls with the thighs of drum majorettes, the breasts of Indian goddesses, the faces of cover girls, the silken skin of courtesans, the subtle minds of poet-diplomats, the agility of gymnasts, the muscle tone of swimmers, the playfulness of monkeys, the stamina of mountain goats, and best of all …

  “Best of all,” Conor mused. “Best of all. No women’s lib. How about that? I mean, I got nothing against women’s lib. Everybody’s a free man in this world, girls included, and I know lots of women who are better men than most men. But how much of that stuff do you have to listen to? Especially in the bedroom? I mean, most of ’em already make twice as much money as I do, they run computers, they run offices, they run companies, Donovan’s is full of ’em, they won’t even let you buy ’em drinks, they make a face if you open the door for ’em, I mean, maybe we shoulda done what the guy said …”

  “Umm,” Poole said. Conor himself was hardly paying any attention to his babbling, and any response was sufficient.

  “… do it later, doesn’t matter, hey, they have two restaurants in this hotel, nice bar too, I bet it’s nicer here than wherever the Lost Boss is now, goin’ around telling everybody he’s a cop or a secret agent or the Bishop of New York.”

  Poole laughed out loud.

  “Right! I mean, one hand feeds the other, but with that guy …”

  If by four o’clock all of Bangkok seemed congested, the few square blocks that made up Patpong were already even more crowded than that. The usual traffic filled the street, and the sidewalks were so crowded Poole could see very little of the pavement. People milled around on the sidewalks before the bars and sex clubs, flowed up and down the stairs and fire escapes. Around them signs sparkled and flashed: MISSISSIPPI, DAISY CHAIN, HOT SEX, WHISKEY, MONTMARTRE, SEX, SEX, and many others, all crowding together and shouting for attention.

  “Dengler died out there,” Conor said, looking down on Phat Pong Road.

  “Yes, he did,” Michael answered.

  “It looks like the goddamn monkey house.”

  Poole laughed. That was what it looked like, all right.


  “I think we’re gonna find him, Mikey.”

  “I do, too,” Poole said.

  2

  After he and Conor returned to the hotel that evening, Michael waited while the Thai switchboard operator put through his credit card call to Westerholm, New York. He finally had something positive to say about what Beevers called their “mission.” He had seen something in a bookstore that confirmed his impression that he and Conor would find Underhill in Bangkok. If it took two days, they might be coming home two days after that—with Underhill in tow or not, however it worked out. Michael wanted to find some detox clinic where Underhill could straighten himself out and get the rest Poole was sure he needed. Anybody who had survived Bangkok for a long time would need a good rest. If Underhill had committed murder, Poole would find him a great lawyer and get him started on the insanity defense that would at least keep him out of jail. That might not be sufficiently dramatic for a mini-series, but it would be the best ending for Underhill and anyone who cared about him.

  What Poole had seen in Patpong’s most uncharacteristic place of business, a huge bright bookstore called Patpong Books, had given him indirect proof of Underhill’s innocence and his presence in Bangkok. Poole and Conor had walked into the bookstore to get out of the heat and escape the crowds for a moment. Patpong Books was cool and uncrowded, and Michael was happily surprised to see that the fiction department took up at least a third of the store. He could get something for himself, and something to give to Stacy Talbot too. He wandered down the fiction aisles, not realizing that he was looking for Tim Underhill’s name until he found an entire shelf filled with Underhill’s novels. There were four and five copies of every Underhill novel, hardcovers interspersed with paperbacks, from A Beast in View to Blood Orchid.