Koko

by Peter Straub

  What did you do?

  I stood on the sidewalk and watched her run past me.

  Did anybody else see her?

  No. One old man blinked and looked troubled. Nothing else.

  Why didn’t you stop her?

  She was an image. She was uncanny. She’d have died if you stopped her. Maybe you’d die too. I just stood there in the midst of the crowd and watched her run past me.

  How did you feel when you saw her?

  I loved her.

  I felt I saw everything that was the truth in her face—in her eyes. Nothing is sane, that’s what I saw, nothing is safe, terror and pain are beneath everything—I think God sees things that way, only most of the time He doesn’t want us to see it too.

  I had the Pan-feeling. I felt like she had burned my brain. I felt like my eyes had been scorched. She thrashed down the bright street in the midst of all her commotion, showing her bloody palms to the world, and she was gone. Pan-ic. The nearness of ultimate things.

  What did you do?

  I went home and wrote. I went home and wept. Then I wrote some more.

  What did you write?

  I wrote a story about Lieutenant Harry Beevers, which I called “Blue Rose.”

  1

  Michael Poole and Conor Linklater separated on their second day in Bangkok. Conor went through a dozen gay bars in Patpong 3, asking his question about Tim Underhill to baffled but kindly Japanese tourists who usually offered to buy him a drink, to jumpy-looking Americans who usually pretended that they could not see or hear him, and to various smiling Thai men, who assumed that he was looking for his lover and offered the services of decorative young men who would soon heal his broken heart. Conor had forgotten his stack of photographs in his hotel room. He looked at small, pretty boys in dresses and thought of Tim Underhill while wishing that these frothy creatures were the girls they so much resembled. The bartender in a transvestite bar called Mama’s made Conor stop breathing for a few seconds when he blinked at Underhill’s name and stood looking at him, smiling and stroking his chin. But at last he giggled and said, “Never saw him in here.”

  Conor smiled at the man, who appeared to be melting a lump of some delicious substance, chocolate or butter, on his tongue. “You acted like you knew him.”

  “Can’t be sure,” the bartender said.

  Conor sighed, took a twenty-baht note from the pocket of his jeans, and slid it across the bar.

  The man pocketed the bill and stroked his chin again. “Maybe, maybe,” he said. “Undahill. Timofy Undahill.” Then he looked up at Conor and shook his head. “Sorry, my mistake.”

  “You little asshole,” Conor heard himself say. “You shithead, you took my money.” Without in any way planning to do so and without even recognizing that he was suddenly very angry, Conor ground his teeth and reached across the bar. The bartender giggled frantically and stepped backwards, but Conor lunged for him and closed his hands on his white shirt.

  “Earn your money, goddamnit. Who did you think it was? Someone who came in here?”

  “Mistake, mistake!” the bartender cried. A few men who had been drinking at the bar had come toward Conor and the bartender, and one of these men, a Thai in a light blue silk suit, patted Conor on the shoulder.

  “Calm yourself,” the Thai said.

  “Calm myself, nothing,” Conor said. “This asshole took my money and now he won’t talk.”

  “Here is money,” said the bartender, still yanked halfway across his bar. “Have free drink. Please. Then please leave.” He plucked the bill from his pocket and dropped it on the bar.

  Conor let go of the man. “I don’t want the money,” he said. “Keep the goddamn money. I just want to know about Underhill.”

  “You are looking for a man named Tim Underhill?” asked the dapper little Thai in the blue silk suit.

  “Sure, I’m looking for him!” Conor said, too loudly. “What does it look like I’m doing? I’m his friend. I haven’t seen him in fourteen years. My friend and I came here to find him.” Conor violently shook his head, as if to shake off sweat. “I didn’t mean to get rough, or nothing. Sorry I grabbed you like that.”

  “You have not seen this man in fourteen years, and now you and your friend are looking for him.”

  “Yeah,” Conor said.

  “And yet you become so emotional! You threaten this man with violence!”

  “Hey, it snuck up on me. And I’m sorry, but I mean, I didn’t threaten nobody around here, not yet anyhow.” Conor pushed his hands into the pockets of his jeans and began backing away from the bar. “Gets frustrating after a while, looking for a guy nobody knows. Look, I’ll see you sometime.”

  “You misunderstand!” said the Thai man. “Americans are always so quick!”

  To Conor’s vast discomfort, everybody had a good laugh at this.

  “What I mean is, we might be able to help you.”

  “I knew this shithead heard of him.” He glowered at the bartender, who raised his hands placatingly.

  “He is going to be your friend, do not call him names,” said the Thai. “Isn’t that right?”

  The bartender spoke in Thai—a rush of noise that to Conor sounded like “Kumquat crap crop crap kumquat crap crap.”

  “Crop kumquat telephone crap crop dee crap,” said the man in the blue suit.

  “Hey, give me a break,” Conor said. “Is he dead or something?”

  The bartender shrugged and stepped away. He lit a cigarette and watched the man in the blue suit.

  “We both think we may know him,” said the man in the blue suit. He picked up Conor’s twenty-baht note, and held it upright, like a candle.

  “Crap crop crap crop,” the bartender said, turning away.

  “Our friend is uneasy. He thinks it is a mistake. I think it is not.” He twinkled the bill into one of his pockets.

  The bartender said, “Crap crop crop.”

  “Underhill lives in Bangkok,” said the Thai in the blue silk suit. “I am sure he still lives here.”

  The bartender shrugged.

  “Used to come in here. Used to come into Pink Pussycat. Used to come into Bronco.” The man in the blue suit showed all his teeth in a laugh. “He knew friend of mine, Cham.” The man grinned even more broadly. “Cham very bad. Very bad man. You know telephone? Cham like telephone. He knew him.” He tapped the bar with a long fingernail made lustrous with lacquer.

  “I want to meet this guy Cham,” Conor said.

  “This is not possible.”

  “Everything is possible,” Conor said. “There’s money in it for you. Where does this guy hang out? I’ll go there. Does he have a telephone number?”

  “We go out couple bars,” Connor’s new friend told him. “I take care of you, you see. I know every place.”

  “He know every place,” the bartender said.

  “And you knew Underhill?”

  The man nodded, distorting his face into a mask of comical omniscience. “Very well, I know him, very well. You want proof?”

  “Okay, give me proof,” Conor said, wondering what he would do.

  The little Thai thrust his face up close to Conor’s. He smelled powerfully of anise. There were tiny white scars at the corners of his eyes, like calcified razor nicks. “Flowers,” he said, and laughed.

  “You got it,” Conor said. “That’s it.”

  “We have drink first,” said the man in the blue suit. “Must prepare.”

  2

  They had several drinks while they prepared. The dapper little man extracted an envelope and a fountain pen from the inside pocket of his jacket and declared that they needed to make a list of Underhill’s haunts, along with a list of the bartenders and patrons who would be most likely to know where to find him. There were bars in Patpong 3, bars in an area called Soi Cowboy off Sukhumvit Road, bars in hotels, bars in Klang Toey, Bangkok’s port, Chinese “tea houses” off Yaowaroj Road, and two coffee shops—the Thermae, and the one in the Grace Hotel. Underhill
had been known in all these places, and might still be known in some.

  “This all cost money,” said Conor’s new friend, putting his envelope in a side pocket of his jacket.

  “I have enough money to go around a few bars.” Conor saw an expression of nervous suspicion cross the little man’s face. He added, “And something for you on top.”

  “On top, very good,” the man said. “I take my share now—come out on top!”

  Conor pulled a wad of crumpled bills from his pocket, and the man plucked out a purple five-hundred-baht note.

  “We go now,” he said.

  They dropped into every bar remaining in Patpong 3, but Conor’s new friend saw nothing that pleased him.

  “We get taxi,” the little man said. “Go all ’round city, find the best places, the most exciting, and that is where we will find him!”

  They went out onto the crowded street and stopped a cab. Conor climbed into the back seat while the little man spoke to the driver for a long time. He gestured and grinned, “Crap crop katoey crap crop crap baht mai crap.” Several bills passed to the driver.

  “Now all is taken care of,” the man announced when he climbed in beside Conor.

  “I don’t even know your name,” Conor said, and extended his hand.

  The man smiled and pumped his hand. “My name is Cham. Thank you.”

  “I thought Cham was your friend. Who knew Tim.”

  “He is Cham, I am Cham. Probably our kind driver is also Cham. But my friend is too bad, too bad.” He giggled again.

  “And what’s ‘katoey’?” Conor asked, quoting the one word repeated in the various Thai conversations he had overheard that did not sound like a bathroom joke.

  Cham smiled. “A ‘katoey’ is a boy who dresses up like a girl. You see? I will not lead you astray.” He clamped his hand on Connor’s knee for a second.

  Oh fuck, Conor thought, but merely slid another inch or two away on the car seat.

  “And what’s this telephone stuff?” he asked.

  “What is what?” Cham’s attitude had subtly changed—his smile had a forced, glittering edge.

  They were speeding through a river of traffic, bumping over tram tracks, going miles away from the center of town, or so it seemed to Conor. “Telephone. You said something about it back at Mama’s.”

  “Oh, oh.” Cham had returned to his normal self. “Telephone. I thought you said another word. It is nothing to concern you. Telephone is a Bangkok word. Many many meanings.” He glanced sideways at Conor. “One meaning—to suck. You see? Telephone.” He clapped his little hands together, and his eyes closed as if in amusement.

  Conor and Cham spent the next two hours in bars filled with hungry-looking girls and sleek, prowling boys; Cham conducted long discussions full of exclamations and laughter with a dozen bartenders, but nothing happened except the exchange of bills. Conor drank cautiously at first, but when he noticed that the excitement of feeling so near to Underhill meant that the alcohol had little effect on him, he drank as he would at Donovan’s.

  “He has not been here in a long time,” Cham said, turning to Conor with his happy smile. Conor again noticed the white little chips of scar tissue around his eyes and mouth. It looked as though a doctor had removed Cham’s real face and replaced it with this smooth, boyish mask. He laid his neat sand-colored hand over Conor’s. “Do not worry. We will find him soon. Do you care for another vodka?”

  “Hell, yes,” Conor said. “In the next joint.”

  They walked out into gathering twilight, Cham’s hand resting between Conor’s shoulder blades. Conor wondered if he ought to call Michael Poole back at the hotel, and then stood rooted to the sidewalk, thinking that he saw Mikey getting into a cab outside a glittery place called Zanzibar across the street. “Hey, Mike!” he yelled. The man ducked through the door of the cab. “Mikey! Over here!”

  Cham put the tips of his fingers to his lips. “Shall we eat?”

  “I just saw my friend. Over there.”

  “Is he looking for Tim Underhill too?”

  Conor nodded.

  “Then there is no point in our staying in Soi Cowboy.”

  In minutes they were driving down shining streets past flashing signs in a moving traffic jam. Gangs of boys on mopeds swept past them. People spilled in and out of nightclubs.

  Once Conor turned from saying something to Cham and saw peering in through the window beside him a gaunt, stricken, sexless ghost’s face, empty of everything but hunger.

  “You mind if I ask you a question?” Conor heard his own voice, and it was the voice of a drunken man. He decided he didn’t really care. The little guy was his friend.

  Cham patted his knee.

  “How’d you get all those damned little scars on your face? You run into a fish hook factory or something?”

  Cham’s hand froze on his knee.

  “It must be a hell of a story,” Conor said.

  Cham bent forward and said “Crap crop crap klang toey” to the driver.

  “Crap crap crap,” the driver answered.

  “Katoey?” Conor asked. “I’m sick of those guys.”

  “Klang Toey. Port area.”

  “When do we get there?”

  “We are there now,” Cham said.

  Conor got out of the cab at the end of the world. The fishy, pungent smell of sea water filled the air. The skull face pressed to the window of this cab floated up in his mind.

  “Telephone!” he yelled. “I Corps! What about it!”

  Cham pulled him away from the distant sight of the river toward a bar called Venus.

  They had drinks at Venus and Jimmy’s and Club Hung; they had drinks in places without names. Conor found himself leaning against Cham, or Cham leaning against him as the cab whirled around a corner. He looked sideways, pulling Cham’s hand off his leg, and again saw a bony, sunken face peering through the window with dead eyes. A chill went over his body, as if he were standing wet and naked in a cold breeze. He yelled, and the face flickered and disappeared.

  “Nothing,” Cham said.

  They went up flights of stairs to dark rooms smelling of incense where ceramic pillows lay at the heads of empty divans and Chinese men stopped playing mah-jongg long enough to examine Underhill’s photograph. In the first such place, they frowned and shook their heads, in the second they frowned and shook their heads, and in the third they frowned and nodded.

  “They knew him here?” Conor asked.

  “They throw him out of here,” Cham said.

  Conor found himself seated at a linen-covered table in the lobby of a hotel. A great distance away a young Thai in a blue jacket read a paperback book behind the registration desk. A cup of coffee steamed before Conor, and he picked it up and sipped. Young men and women sat at every table, and girls crossed their legs on the couches that ringed the lobby. The coffee burned Conor’s mouth.

  “He comes here sometimes,” Cham said. “Everybody comes here sometimes.”

  Conor bent to sip his coffee. When he looked up the lobby was gone and he was gripping the door handle in the back seat of the cab.

  “Your friend was bad, very bad,” Cham was saying. “No longer welcome anywhere. Is he bad, or just sick? Please tell me. I want to know about this man.”

  “He was a great fucking guy,” Conor said. The subject of Underhill’s greatness seemed inexpressibly immense, too immense to be conquered by mere words.

  “But he is very silly.”

  “So are you.”

  “But I do not vomit the contents of my stomach in public places. I do not cause consternation and despair all about me. I do not threaten and abuse those who have any sort of authority over me.”

  “That sure sounds like Underhill, all right,” Conor said, and fell asleep.

  He had a moment’s dream of the ghostly face pressing against the window, and jolted awake with the recognition that the face was Underhill’s. He was alone in the back seat.

  “What?” he said.

>   “Crap crop crop crop,” said the driver, leaning over the back of the seat and holding out a folded piece of paper.

  “Where is everybody?” Conor vaguely took the note and looked out of his window. The cab had stopped in a broad alley between a tall concrete structure that looked like a parking garage and a windowless one-story building, also of concrete. A sodium lamp painted the concrete and the surface of the alley with harsh yellow light.

  “Where are we?”

  The driver jabbed the note at Conor, using it to point down at his leg. Conor confusedly followed the man’s gesture and saw his penis, white as a mackerel in the darkness of the taxi, draped over his right thigh. He bent forward to shield himself from the eyes of the driver and stuffed himself back inside his jeans. His heart was pounding, and his head ached. None of this made sense anymore.

  Finally Conor took the folded paper from the driver. There were a few lines of spidery black writing. You drank too much. Your friend may be here. Take care if you go in. The driver has been well paid. A telephone number had been written at the bottom of the paper. Conor balled up the note and got out of the cab.

  The driver circled around him, switching on his lights. Conor dropped the wad of paper and kicked it away. Half a dozen men in close-fitting Thai suits had materialized outside the smaller concrete building and were slowly drifting toward him across the alley. Conor felt like running—the unsmiling men reminded him of sleek sharks. His legs barely kept him upright. The headlights of the circling cab hurt his eyes. He wanted a drink.

  “You come in?” The Thai closest to him was smiling like a corpse made up by an undertaker. “Cham talked to us. We waited for you.”

  “Cham’s no friend of mine,” Conor said. All of the men were waving him toward the door of the windowless concrete building. “I’m not goin’ in there. What you got in there, anyhow?”

  “Sex show,” said the death’s head.

  “Oh, hell,” Conor said, and let them urge him toward the door. “Is that all?”

  Inside he paid three-hundred-baht admission to a woman who wore dark glasses and earrings shaped like Coca-Cola bottles with breasts. “Love those earrings,” he said. “You know Tim Underhill?”