Koko

by Peter Straub

  Maggie rushed into the car and darted to the nearest window as the doors closed. The man in the black topcoat was just now nearing the turnstile, and behind him something else melted and flowed, passed between the men and women waiting to get to the platform, grinned at her and danced all but invisibly, seeing her but unseen as the train pulled away from the station.

  Maggie collapsed into a seat. After a time she became aware that she was trembling. “He killed him,” she said to herself. When she repeated this statement, the few people around her stood up and moved farther down the length of the car. It seemed to Maggie that what had killed her lover and pursued her into the station had not been human but a supernatural force, a grinning evil thing that could change its shape or become invisible. The only proof she had of its humanity had been the way the pot had connected to its head, and how it had sprawled onto Pumo’s glass table. A wave of nausea and of disbelief went through her. Maggie was sobbing now, and she swiped at her eyes. She bent over and looked at her shoes. They were not bloodstained, not even the soles. She shuddered again and wept to herself all the rest of the long way uptown. Tears streamed down her face while she changed trains. She felt like a beaten animal returning home. Now and then she started and cried out, thinking that she had caught a glimpse of Tina’s crazy shadowy killer moving behind the backs of people standing at the straps in front of her, but when the people parted and fled no one was there, he had melted away again.

  At 125th Street she ran down the steps, crossing her arms over her chest for warmth. Her tears were going to freeze, she thought, and she would be trapped inside the icy seal over her face.

  She parted the doors of the General’s storefront church and slipped inside as quietly as she could. Warmth and the odor of burning candles immediately surrounded her, and she nearly collapsed. The General’s congregation sat solidly in their chairs; Maggie stayed at the back of the church, trembling and gripping her arms, uncertain of what to do next. Now that she was here, she was uncertain even of why she had returned to the bright little church. Tears streamed down her face. The General finally caught sight of her and raised one eyebrow in a kindly, questioning look that did not fail to contain a portion of alarm. He doesn’t know, Maggie thought, hugging herself and shaking, silently crying. How can he not know? Then Maggie realized that Tina Pumo still sat dead in his loft and nobody but herself and his murderer knew of it. She had to call the police.

  9

  As yet ignorant of these events which would soon bring him back to New York, Michael Poole emerged for the second time that day from Bang Luk, the alleyway which housed the flower market and Tim Underhill’s rooms, and turned north up Charoen Krung Road. It was just past twelve-thirty at night. The streets were even more congested than they had been earlier, and under normal circumstances even a passionate walker like Dr. Poole would unquestioningly have stepped to the curb, raised his arm, and taken the first vehicle that stopped for him. It was still very hot, his hotel was two or three miles away, and Bangkok is no city for long walks. But these were not normal circumstances, and Dr. Poole never considered interring himself in a car for the length of his journey back to his bed. In any case he was in no hurry to get to bed—he knew he would be unable to sleep. He had just finished spending a little more than seven hours with Timothy Underhill, and he needed time to think as much as he needed sheer thoughtless exercise. By most ways of reckoning, very little had happened during the seven hours: the two men had talked over their drinks on the terrace; still talking, they had gone by ruk-tuk to the Golden Dragon on Sukhumvit Road and eaten excellent Chinese food while they continued their conversation; they had taken another ruk-tuk back to the little set of rooms above Jimmy Siam and talked, talked, talked. Michael Poole could still hear Tim Underhill’s voice in his ears—he felt as if he were walking to the rhythms of the sentences spoken by that voice.

  Underhill was a wonderful man. He was a wonderful man with a terrible life, a wonderful man with terrible habits. He was terrible and he was wonderful. (Michael had had more to drink during these seven hours than was his habit, and all the alcohol had warmed and muddled him.) Poole realized that he was moved, shaken, even in a sense awed by his old companion—awed by what he had risked and overcome. But more than that, he was persuaded by Underhill. It was shiningly certain that Underhill was not Koko. All his subsequent conversation had gone to prove what Poole had felt in Underhill’s first words to him on the terrace.

  In all the turmoil of his life, Tim Underhill had virtually never ceased to consider Koko, to ponder and wonder over that figure of anarchic vengeance—he not only made Harry Beevers a latecomer to the issue, he demonstrated the shallowness of Beevers’ methods. Poole walked northward in the dark steaming city, hemmed all about by rushing, indifferent men, and felt how thoroughly he sided with Underhill. Eight hours earlier, Dr. Poole had crossed over a rickety bridge and felt himself coming into a new accommodation with his profession, with his marriage, above all with death. It was almost as if he had finally seen death with enough respect to understand it. He had stood before it with his spirit wide open, in a very undoctorly way. The awe, the terror were necessary—all such moments of rapturous understanding fade, leaving only the dew of their passing, but Poole could remember the sharp, salty, vivid taste of reality, and the humility he had felt before it. What had persuaded him about Tim Underhill was his sense that for years, in book after book, Underhill had actually climbed over the railing and crossed the stream. He had opened his spirit wide. He had done his best to fly, and Koko had virtually given him his wings.

  Underhill had flown as far as he could, and if he had crashed, an abrupt landing might have been one of the consequences of flight. All the drinking and drugs, all his excesses, had not been undertaken to aid the flight—as Beevers and people like him would instantly have assumed—but to numb and distract the man when he had gone as far as he could and still had fallen short. Underhill had gone farther than Dr. Poole, who had used his mind and his memory and his love for Stacy Talbot, which was wrapped like a layer of bandages around his old love for Robbie: Underhill had harnessed up his whole imagination, and imagination was everything.

  This, along with a great deal more, had tumbled out on the terrace, over dinner in the noisy bright enormous Chinese restaurant, in the unbelievable shambles of Underhill’s apartment. Almost nothing had been explained in sequence, and the unhappy details of the author’s life had often dragged Poole’s attention away from Koko. The outline of Underhill’s life was that of a series of avalanches. At present, however, he was living quietly and doing his best to work again. “Like learning to walk again,” he told Poole. “I staggered and then I fell down. All the muscles shrank, nothing worked right. For eight months, if I wrote one paragraph after six hours’ work, it was a good day.”

  He had written a strange novella called “Blue Rose.” He had written an even stranger one called “The Juniper Tree.” Now he wrote dialogues with himself, questions and answers, and he was halfway through another novel. He had twice seen a girl running up the street toward him covered in blood, making an unearthly noise—the girl was part of the answer, he said, that was why he had seen her—she announced the nearness of ultimate things. Koko was Underhill’s way of getting back inside Ia Thuc, and so was the vision of a girl running in panic down a city street, and so was everything he had written.

  What made everything worse, Underhill said, was that Koko was the lowlife’s lowlife, Victor Spitalny.

  “I worked it all out,” Underhill told him at the Golden Dragon. “I did one of those Koko numbers, you did one, and I think Conor Linklater did one—”

  “He did,” Michael said. “And I did one too—you’re right.”

  “No kidding,” Underhill said. “You think you didn’t show it? You’re not exactly the atrocity type, Michael. I worked out that it could only have been Spitalny. Unless it was you, of course, or Dengler, both of which were equally unlikely.

  “I came to Bangkok to l
earn what I could about Dengler’s last days, because I thought maybe that would get me started writing again. And then, my friend, all hell broke loose. The journalists started dying. As you and Beevers noticed.”

  “What do you mean, journalists?” Michael asked innocently.

  Underhill had stared at him with his mouth open for a moment, then had burst into laughter.

  Poole reached the wide, jumbled intersection of Charoen Krung Road with Surawong Road and stood still in the dense hot night for a moment. Using the resources of a few provincial libraries and bookstores in Bangkok, Underhill had discovered what Harry Beevers, with a research assistant and a vast library system, had not. It took Poole’s breath away, that Beevers would have overlooked, even denied, the connection among the victims.

  Because that connection put them all in danger. Underhill was certain that Spitalny had followed him, in both Singapore and Bangkok.

  He had only caught glimpses. He’d had the sensation of being watched and followed. In the Golden Dragon he told Michael, “A few weeks after the bodies were found in Singapore, I came down to the street and had this feeling that something really bad, but something that belonged to me, was hiding somewhere and watching me. As if I had a sick, bad brother who had come back after a long time away, and was going to make my life hell before he went away again. I looked around, but I didn’t see anything but the flower sellers, and as soon as I got out onto the road, the feeling went away.” And in his messy room, with the demon masks nailed up on the wall and a smeary mirror and an ivory straw before him on the table, he said: “Remember my telling you about the time I walked outside and had this feeling—that something bad had come back for me? I thought it was Spitalny, of course. But nothing happened. He just melted away. Well, about two days after that, a few days after the Frenchmen were killed here, I had the same feeling on Phat Pong Road. It was much stronger this time. I knew someone was there. I turned around, almost sure that he was right behind me, and that I’d see him. I spun. He wasn’t behind me—he wasn’t even right behind the people right behind me. I couldn’t see him anywhere. But you know, I did see something strange. It’s hard to put this into words, even for me, but it was like, way back down there, way way down the street, there was something like a moving shadow drifting back and forth behind these people who were much more visible, no, not drifting because it was much more animated, dancing back and forth behind all those people, grinning at me. I just had this little glimpse of someone moving insolently fast, someone just filled with glee—and then he vanished. I almost puked.”

  “And what do you want to do now?” Poole asked. “Would you come back to America? I’m almost honor-bound to tell Conor and Beevers that I’ve met you, but I don’t know how you feel about that either.”

  “Do what you want,” Underhill said. “But I feel like you want to drag me out of my cave by my hair, and I’m not sure I want to leave it.”

  “Then don’t!” Michael had cried.

  “But maybe we can help each other,” Underhill said.

  “Can I see you again tomorrow?”

  “You can do anything you like,” Underhill had said.

  As Michael Poole walked the last two hundred yards to his hotel, he wondered what he would do if a madman danced like a moving shadow on the hot crowded street behind him. Would he see a vision, as Underhill apparently had? Would he turn and try to run him down? Victor Spitalny, the lowlife’s lowlife, changed everything. A moment later Michael realized that Harry Beevers might have his mini-series after all—Spitalny put a few colorful new wrinkles in Beevers’ story. But was it for that he had come so far from Westerholm?

  It was one of the easiest questions Poole had ever asked himself, and by the time he was going up the stairs into his hotel, he had decided to keep quiet for a little while about having found Tim Underhill. He would give himself a day before speaking to Conor and summoning Beevers. In any case, he discovered as he passed the desk, Conor was still out. Poole hoped that he was enjoying himself.

  PART

  FIVE

  THE SEA

  OF

  FORGETFULNESS

  1

  Two days later, it was as if the world had flipped inside-out. The suddenness of events and the haste of Poole’s preparations had left him so breathless that he could still not be certain, carrying two bottles of Singha beer toward the table in the airport bar where Conor sat blinking at his progress, what he made of it at all.

  Underhill was supposed to come with them on their flight, and part of Conor’s look at Michael as he came toward him from the crowded passengers-only bar was a gathering doubt that the writer would make it to the airport on time. Conor said nothing as Michael set down his beer and took the seat beside him. He bent forward as if to examine the floor, and his face was still white with the shock of what had happened back in New York while they had been making their separate tours of Bangkok. Conor still looked as if a loud noise had just awakened him.

  Michael contented himself with a sip of the strong, cold, bitter Thai beer. Something had befallen Conor two nights earlier, but he would not discuss it. He too looked as if he were remembering some of the sentences Underhill had written in his dialogues with himself. Poole guessed that these questions and answers were a way of kicking a disused engine back into life: Underhill was teaching himself to work again. Along the way he had described what he called the Pan-feeling. According to Underhill, this had to do with “the nearness of ultimate things.”

  “What are you thinking about, Mikey?” Conor asked.

  Poole just shook his head.

  “Stretch my legs,” Conor said, and jumped up and wandered toward the gates through which the passengers came for their own and other international flights. It was fifty minutes before the scheduled flight time, which an airline official had informed them had been delayed an hour. Conor bounced on his heels and scrutinized the people streaming through the gate until Underhill’s failure to arrive made him so nervous that he had to spin off and take a quick tour of the gift shop windows. At the entrance to the racks of duty-free liquor he checked his watch, shot another glance at the new arrivals, and dodged inside.

  Ten minutes later he emerged with a yellow plastic shopping bag and dropped into his old seat beside Poole. “I thought if I went in there, he’d show up.”

  Conor forlornly examined the Thais, Americans, Japanese, and Europeans pushing into the International departures lounge. “Hope Beevers made his plane.”

  Harry Beevers was supposed to have taken a flight from Taipei to Tokyo, where he was to connect with a JAL flight that would bring him to the San Francisco airport an hour after their own arrival. They were all to take the same flight to New York from San Francisco. Beevers’ immediate reaction to the news of Pumo’s death had been the observation that the asshole would still be alive if he had come with them instead of staying behind to run around after his girlfriend. He asked clipped impatient questions about just when they were going to be in San Francisco, and why they couldn’t wait for him to come back to Bangkok. He was pissed off, he thought it was unfair that Poole and Linklater had found Tim Underhill: it was his idea, he should have been the one. “Make sure he gets on that plane,” he said. “And don’t let him lie to you.”

  Poole had pointed out that Underhill could not have killed Tina Pumo.

  “Tina lived in So Ho,” Beevers said. “Open your eyes, will you? He was in the restaurant business. How many coke dealers do you think live in SoHo? Not everything is the way it looks.”

  Conor finished off his beer, jumped up again to inspect the incoming passengers, and returned. By now all the seats in the departure lounge were occupied, and the new arrivals either sat on the floor or wandered the wide aisles before the duty-free shops. As it filled, the lounge had gradually come to resemble Bangkok itself: people sat in chairs and sprawled over empty sections of the floor, the air seemed hot and smoky, voices cried out “Crap crap crop crop!”

  After a long cracklin
g burst of Thai from the loudspeaker, in which Poole thought he heard the words San Francisco, Conor again jumped up to check the board on which departures were listed. Their flight had been rescheduled to take off in fifty-five minutes. Unless they delayed it further, they would land in San Francisco at the same time as Beevers, who would never forgive them for having been duped. Beevers would insist on going back to Bangkok on the spot. He’d stage a chase through the streets, with police sirens and dashes across rooftops, concluding with the triumphant handcuffing of the villain and an astonishing explanation of how Underhill had killed the journalists and arranged Pumo’s murder. Beevers saw things in the terms rendered by car chases and lockstep summations.

  Poole was very tired. He had slept little last night. He had called Judy, and she had curtly given him the news of Tina’s death. “Whoever did it is supposed to be the same person who killed the man in the library. Oh, you haven’t heard about that yet?” Unable to keep the satisfaction from her voice, she explained the circumstances of the death of Dr. Mayer-Hall.

  “Why do they think it’s the same guy?”

  “There were two Chinese women who saw Tina in the stacks a few minutes before they discovered the body. They recognized his picture when they saw the papers this morning. It’s all on the news. Tina was the suspect they were looking for—these women saw him coming out of the stacks. It’s obvious what happened.”

  “What happened?”

  “Tina got lost in the stacks, God only knows what he was doing in the library, and he happened to see this crazy man kill the librarian. He got away, but the man tracked him down and killed him. It’s obvious.” She paused. “I’m sorry to cut your fun short.”

  He asked if she were still getting the anonymous calls.

  “Lately he has been saying that there is no substitute for butter, or something like that. I just erase the tapes as soon as he says his piece. When this guy was a kid, somebody drummed nonsense into his head from morning to night. I bet he was an abused kid.”