Koko

by Peter Straub

  Poole ignored the honking and began running. A taxi zipped past him, then a bus, packed to the windows with people, who grinned down and called out to him. He reached the corner in a few seconds and trotted over the cobbles into Bang Luk.

  Men still loaded vans and trucks with flats of flowers; the shop windows spilled out light. Poole glimpsed a billowing shirt as white as a ghost and slowed to a walk. Underhill was opening the door between Jimmy Siam and Bangkok Exchange Ltd. One of the flower wholesalers at a depleted barrow called out to him, and Underhill laughed and twisted around to shout something back in Thai. He waved at the vendor, went inside, and closed the door behind him.

  Poole stationed himself against the first of the garages. Within minutes a light went on behind the shutters above Jimmy Siam. Now Poole knew where he lived; an hour earlier he had not thought he would ever find him.

  A vendor emerged from the garage and frowned at Poole. He picked up a large jade plant in a pot and carried it inside, still scowling.

  The shutters opened above Jimmy Siam’s. Through the opened French windows Poole could see a flaking white ceiling dripping thin stalactites of paint. A moment later Underhill appeared carrying a large jade plant very much like the one the suspicious vendor had taken inside. He set the plant down on his balcony and went inside without closing the French windows.

  The vendor darted out through his garage door and glared at Poole. The man hesitated a moment, then began walking toward Poole, speaking vehemently in Thai.

  “I’m sorry, I don’t speak your language,” Poole said.

  “You go away, scum,” the man said.

  “All right,” Poole said. “No need to be so upset.”

  The man uttered a long sentence in Thai and spat on the ground.

  Underhill’s light snapped off. Poole looked up at the windows, and the stocky little flower vendor rushed a few steps toward him, waving his hands in the air. Poole retreated a few steps. Underhill was dimly visible through the French windows, drawing them closed.

  “No bother!” the man shouted. “No make sick! Go away!”

  “For God’s sake,” Poole said. “Who do you think I am?”

  The vendor shooed him back a few more paces, but scurried back into his garage as soon as Underhill appeared at his street door. Poole shot back into the darkness by the wall. Underhill had changed into a conventional Western white dress shirt and a baggy seersucker jacket that flapped around him as he walked.

  Underhill turned onto Charoen Krung Road and began marching through the crowds on the sidewalk. Poole found himself stalled behind groups of men or whole gatherings of families who had assembled on a patch of sidewalk and intended to stay there. Children jumped and yelled; here and there a boy fiddled with the controls of a radio. Underhill’s head floated above the rest, moving easily and steadily toward Surawong Road.

  He was going to Patpong 3. It was a long walk, but presumably Underhill wanted to save the few baht of the ruk-tuk fare.

  Then Poole lost sight of him. It was as if his tall form had disappeared, like the White Rabbit, into a hole in the ground. He was visible nowhere on the long stretch of sidewalk. When Poole looked at the jammed street, he did not see Underhill there either—only a priest in a saffron robe melting imperturbably through the unstoppable traffic.

  Poole jumped up, but saw no tall grey-haired white man making his way through the crowds. When his heels hit the pavement again, Poole started running.

  Unless Underhill had been swallowed up by the earth, he must have either gone into a shop or turned down a sidestreet. As Poole ran past all the little businesses he had passed on his way to the wobbly bridge and the fair, he looked into each window. Most of the cafés and shops were closed now.

  Poole swore to himself. He had managed to lose Underhill; the earth had swallowed him up; he had known he was being followed and he had slipped into a secret cave, a lair. In the lair he dressed in fur and claws and became Koko—he became what the Martinsons and Clive McKenna had seen in the last minutes of their lives.

  Poole saw a dark cave shaped like a fist opening out in the middle of the impoverished little shops.

  He was running along through the mass of people on the sidewalk, half-pushing people out of his way, sweating, irrationally convinced that Beevers had been right all along and that Underhill had gone down into his cave. Budlike horns nestled in his thinning hair.

  A few steps later Poole saw that the buildings separated a block away, and a narrow street went down toward the river.

  Poole hurtled into a narrow passageway lined with stalls and vendors of silk and leather bags and paintings of elephants marching across fields of blue velvet. The inevitable tribe of women and children squatted beside the wall to Poole’s left, chipping away at their eternal trench. Poole saw Tim Underhill almost at once, far ahead of him, just crossing with a lengthening step a wide empty place where the byway turned up to the right instead of continuing on the short distance to the river. A low wall and a white building lay behind the curve in the road, and Underhill strode past these as he began to move uphill.

  Poole hurried down past the vendors and without quite seeing it passed an ORIENTAL HOTEL legend stenciled on a wall. When he reached the bottom of the little road, he looked right and saw Underhill passing through the large glass doors of an immense white structure which extended all the way down to Poole and all the way up past the entrance to an only partially visible garage.

  Poole hopped onto the sidewalk and ran past the older wing of the hotel toward the entrance. Large plate-glass windows gave him a view of the entire lobby, and he could see Underhill making his way past a florist’s window and bookshop, apparently going toward a cocktail lounge.

  He reached the revolving door and was welcomed into the lobby by big smiling Thai men in grey uniforms and realized that he had followed Underhill to a hotel. Three of Koko’s murders had taken place in hotels. Poole slowed down.

  Underhill walked past the entrance to the lounge and continued briskly on through a door marked EXIT—Poole saw a flash of darkness distantly illuminated by a lantern on a tall standard. Underhill passed through the door and went out onto the grounds behind the hotel.

  Clive McKenna’s body had been found on the grounds of the Goodwood Park Hotel.

  Poole followed his horned monster to the exit and very slowly pushed it open. He was surprised to find himself on a pebbled walk that led down past tall lanterns and a poolside garden to a series of descending terraces with candle-lit tables. On the other side of the tables the river shimmered, reflecting the lights of a restaurant on its opposite bank and the sidelights of various small craft. Uniformed waiters and waitresses attended to people eating and drinking at the tables. The scene was so different from the sordid vista Poole had expected that it took him a moment to locate Underhill’s tall figure just now making his way down to the lower terraces.

  Poole finally took in the presence of a restaurant behind the glowing yellow windows to his right.

  Tim Underhill was making for one of the few empty tables remaining on the long flat terrace directly before the river. He sat down and began looking around for a waiter. A trickle of people coming up a sunken walkway beside the pool emerged on the lower terraces at the far side of the hotel. A young waiter approached Underhill’s table and took what must have been a drink order. Underhill smiled and talked, and for a time he put his hand on the young waiter’s arm, and the young waiter smiled and made a joke.

  The sacred monster shriveled away, blushing. Unless he had arranged a meeting with someone, Underhill came to this elegant place to have a drink in a nice setting and flirt with the boy waiters. As soon as the waiter left him, Underhill took a paperback book from one of the pockets of the seersucker jacket, turned his chair to face the river, propped an elbow on the table, and began to read with an air of habitual concentration.

  Here the river did not have the weedy, vegetal stench Poole had caught at the end of the flower market. This stretch of
the river smelled only of river, an odor at once brisk and nostalgic, evocative of movement itself, reminding Poole that he would soon be returning home.

  He told a professional young person that he merely wanted a drink on the terrace, and the professional young person waved him down the torch-lit steps. Poole went all the way down to the final terrace, and slipped into a seat at the last table in the row.

  Three tables away, his legs crossed at the ankle, Tim Underhill faced the river, occasionally looking up from his book to gaze at it. Here the river’s odor carried strong overtones of silt and something almost spicy. The water rhythmically splashed against the piers. Underhill sighed contentedly, sipped his drink, and dove back into his book. Poole made out from three tables away that it was a Raymond Chandler novel.

  Poole ordered a glass of white wine from the same young waiter with whom Underhill had flirted. Conversations flowed and sparkled at the tables strung out along the terrace. A small white launch periodically ferried guests from the pier below the terrace to a restaurant on the island halfway across the river. At intervals, bearing lights fore and aft, wooden boats shaped as oddly as boats in dreams slipped past on the black water: boats with dragons’ necks, boats with round swollen bellies and beaks like birds, long flat houseboats hung with washing from the decks of which children stared at Poole with grave, unseeing faces. The darkness deepened, and the voices from the other tables grew louder.

  When Poole saw Underhill order another drink from the young waiter, again laying his hand on the boy’s sleeve and saying something that made the boy smile, he took out his pen and wrote a message on his cocktail napkin. Aren’t you the famous storyteller of Ozone Park? I’m at the last table to your right. The boy was now drifting down the row of tables, and Michael, like Underhill, caught his sleeve.

  “Will you please give this note to the man whose order you just took?”

  The boy dimpled, having understood this request by his own lights, and promptly moved back along the row of tables. When he reached Underhill’s table he dropped the napkin, which he had folded in half, beside Underhill’s elbow.

  “Oh?” Underhill said, looking up from Raymond Chandler.

  Poole watched him splay the book open on the table and pick up the napkin. For a moment Underhill’s face betrayed no response except to become remarkably concentrated. The whole inner man came to attention. He was even more focused than he had been on his book. Finally he frowned at the little note—a frown of intense mental effort instead of displeasure. Underhill had been able to keep himself from immediately glancing to his right until he had fully considered the note. Now he did so, and his eyes quickly found Poole’s.

  Underhill swiveled his chair sideways and let a slow smile spread through his beard. “Lady Michael, it’s better than you know to see you again,” he said. “For a second I thought I might be in trouble.”

  For a second I thought I might be in trouble.

  When Michael Poole heard those words, the horned monster in Underhill’s body shriveled away for good: Underhill was as innocent of Koko’s murders as any man who feared becoming the next victim had to be. Michael was on his feet before he knew it, moving forward past the intervening tables to embrace him under a brightly glowing torch.

  1

  A little more than ten hours before the meeting of Dr. Michael Poole and Tim Underhill on the riverside terrace behind the Oriental Hotel, Tina Pumo awoke in a state of uncertainty and agitation. He had more to do in one day than anyone sane would ever attempt. There were meetings not only with Molly Witt and Lowery Hapgood, his architects, and David Dixon, his lawyer, with whom he hoped to iron out an ironclad way to get Vinh his naturalization papers, but immediately after lunch he and Dixon were to go to his bank to negotiate a loan to cover the rest of the construction costs. The inspector from the Health Department had told Pumo he intended to “reconnoiter ’round about sixteen-hundred hours” to make sure that the insect problem had finally been “squared away to base-line acceptability.” The inspector was a Midwestern Vietnam veteran who spoke in a mixture of military jargon, yuppie lingo, and obsolete slang that could sound alternately absurd or menacing. After these meetings, all of them either expensive, frustrating, or intimidating, he had to get down to his equipment supplier on the fringes of Chinatown and pick up replacements for what seemed dozens of pots, pans, and utensils which had managed to go astray during the reconstruction. Sometimes it seemed that only the biggest woks had stayed where they had been put.

  Saigon was scheduled to reopen in three weeks, and in more ways than one Pumo’s ability to meet this deadline would count heavily with the bankers. The restaurant had to be running very close to full capacity for a specific number of days before it would begin to make money again. For Pumo, Saigon was a home, a wife, and a baby too, but for the bankers it was a questionably efficient machine for turning food into money. All of this made him feel rushed, anxious, stressed, but it was the presence of Maggie Lah, still sleeping on the other side of his bed, that was most responsible for his feeling of uncertainty.

  He could not help this; he regretted it, and at some miserable future hour, he knew, he would hate it, but she irritated him, lying sprawled over half of his bed as if she owned it. Pumo could not divide his life in two and give half of it away. Just concentrating on the daily details took so much energy that his eyes started to close before eleven o’clock. When he woke up in the morning, Maggie was there; when he rushed through lunch she was there; when he looked at blueprints, scanned a profit and loss projection, or even read the newspaper, she was there. He had included Maggie in so many parts of his life that now she had the feeling she belonged in all of them. Maggie had come to feel that she had a right to be in the lawyer’s office, the architect’s brownstone, the supplier’s warehouse. Maggie had taken a temporary condition for a lifelong change and had managed to forget that she was a separate person.

  So she took it for granted that she could lie across half his bed every night. So she put in her two cents with Molly Witt, suggesting changes in the floor tiles and the hardware on the cabinets. (Molly had agreed with all her suggestions, but that was beside the point.) So she told him his old menu was no good, and made up some silly new design she expected him to adopt on the spot. People liked those descriptions of the food. Lots of people even needed them.

  Pumo could not forget that he loved Maggie, but he no longer needed a nurse, and Maggie had lulled him into forgetting what he was like when he was normal. She was so lulled herself she had lost her timing.

  He would have to take her with him today. Molly’s partner would flirt with her. David Dixon, a good lawyer but otherwise a grown-up adolescent who thought only about money, sex, sports, and antique cars, would amusedly tolerate her presence and give Tina knowing looks. If the banker got a look at her, he’d think Tina was a flake and turn down the loan. At Arnold Leung’s, the old Chinese supplier would cast forlorn, despairing looks at her and start sidelong conversations about how she was ruining her life with an “old foreigner.”

  Maggie’s eyes opened. She looked at Tina’s empty pillow, and then rolled her head up to weigh and parcel him in one measuring glance. Maggie couldn’t even wake up like other people. Her face looked smooth and dusky, the whites of her eyes glinted. Even her round full lips looked smart.

  “I see,” she said on a little sigh.

  “Do you?” Pumo said.

  “Do you mind if I don’t come with you today? I ought to go up to a Hundred-twenty-fifth Street to see the General. I have been neglecting my duty. He gets very lonely.”

  “Oh.”

  “Besides, you look grumpy today.”

  “I’m … not … grumpy,” Pumo said.

  Maggie gave him another slow, measuring look and sat up in bed. Her skin seemed very dark in the half light. “He hasn’t been well lately. He’s worried about losing the lease on the storefront.”

  She jumped out of bed and skimmed over the floor to the bathroom. For a moment the
bed seemed astoundingly empty. The toilet flushed, water pounded through the overhead pipes. He could feel Maggie vigorously brushing her teeth, using up all the energy and air in the bathroom, draining the power from the shaver’s socket and the light fixtures, making the towels wilt on the rack.

  “You don’t mind, do you?” she called out brightly. Her voice was slushy with toothpaste. “Tina?”

  “I don’t mind,” he said in a voice carefully calculated to be almost too low for her to hear.

  She came out of the bathroom and gave him another considering look. “Oh, Tina,” she said, and moved past him to the closet and began to dress.

  “I have to be alone for a while.”

  “You don’t have to tell me. Should I come back tonight?”

  “Do what you like.”

  “I’ll do what I like, then.” Maggie dressed quickly in the dark woolen garment she had worn when he had fetched her from the General’s apartment.

  Maggie and Pumo spoke very little between then and the time they both left the loft to walk down the staircase to Grand Street. Dressed in their heavy winter coats, they stood together in the cold. A garbage truck down at the end of the street noisily crunched up some wooden object that cracked and split like human bones.

  Maggie looked so misleadingly small, standing next to him in her padded coat—she might have been a girl going off to high school. It occurred to Pumo that they would not have any problems if they never had to get out of bed. A recollection of Judy Poole’s caustic voice on the telephone made him say, “When Mike Poole and the other guys get back here …”

  Maggie tilted her head expectantly, and Tina wondered if what he was going to say was more complicated than he wished. Maggie did not flinch.