Koko

by Peter Straub

  “They were the worst things in the world when that happened,” she said. “The most pathetic. I felt like that when—when it happened. When he almost caught me.” She paused for a moment, and her face smoothed out again with the weight of what she was remembering. “I could see him, but not his face. I suppose I was a little crazy. I felt as though I must have been covered in blood, and I kept checking myself, but there wasn’t a drop on me.” Her eyes met his with an electric jolt.

  “You want to pour boiling water over him,” Poole said.

  “That could be.” Her mouth twisted in an odd little smile. “Could someone like that ever be afraid?”

  When he said nothing, Maggie went on in a rush. “When I was in the loft—during that time—if you had seen him too—you wouldn’t think so. He talked very smoothly. He was almost seductive. I don’t mean he wasn’t utterly crazy, because he was, but he was in control of himself. Confident. He was trying to charm me out of hiding, and if Tina’s body hadn’t been right in front of me, he might have done it.” Her hands, of the same golden tan as the rest of her, with long elegant fingers and incongruously square, sturdy wrists, had begun to tremble. “He was like a—a demon. I thought I’d never get away.”

  Now she looked really stricken, and he took her hands in his. “It sounds funny, but I think he’s been frightened all his life.”

  “You sound like you almost feel sorry for him.”

  Poole thought of Underhill’s long labor. “It isn’t that so much—I guess I feel we have to invent him in order to understand him.”

  Maggie slowly drew her hands out from under his. “You must be learning about that from your friend Timothy Underhill.”

  “What?”

  Maggie propped her chin in her hand. Wholly fraudulent, wide-eyed innocent incredulity, comic right down to its core, flashed at him for a perfectly timed beat. “Your friend Harry Beevers can’t act very well.”

  So she knew: she had seen it. “I suppose not,” he said.

  “This man Underhill came back with you.”

  Poole nodded. “You’re wonderful.”

  “Harry Beevers is the one who is wonderful. I suppose he wants the police to waste time trying to locate Tim Underhill while he actually finds Koko himself.”

  “Something like that.”

  “You’d better be careful, Doctor.” A multitude of unspoken warnings crowded in behind this one, and Poole did not know if he had been advised to beware of Koko or Harry Beevers. “Do you have time to take me to one more place? I don’t want to go there alone.”

  “I suppose I don’t have to ask where it is?”

  “Hope not.” She stood up.

  They went outside to a Sixth Avenue that seemed to have been darkened by their conversation. Poole felt that Koko, Victor Spitalny, might be watching them from behind the big windows across the avenue, or through binoculars from some high hidden vantage point.

  “Get a cab,” she said. “There’s one more thing I want to do.”

  She picked up something at the newsstand, joined Michael as a cab pulled over, and climbed into the back seat. He looked down at her lap and saw that what she had bought was a copy of the Village Voice.

  Michael told the driver to stop first on Grand Street off West Broadway, then to take him to Twenty-fourth and Tenth.

  “This is a present for buying me lunch.” She moved the thick tabloid onto Michael’s lap, and then took a pair of large, round, wire-rimmed sunglasses from her bag and put them on. For a moment she appeared to be reading the yellow DRIVER ALLERGIC—DO NOT SMOKE and DRIVER NOT REQUIRED TO CHANGE BILLS OVER TWENTY signs applied here and there to the grimy plastic window before them.

  “Are you sure you want to go to Saigon?”

  “I want to see Vinh,” she said. “I like Vinh. Vinh and I have long confidential talks. We agree that white Americans are an incomprehensible and exotic people.”

  “Have you been there since that night?”

  “Don’t you know the answer to that?” She removed the sunglasses and gave him an almost sullen look.

  “I’m glad we could talk,” he said.

  At this she unself-consciously took his hand. Michael could feel the pulse beating in her warm dry hand.

  At Grand Street Michael was surprised to see a brass-bound case displaying a menu and a small sign in the restaurant window.

  “Doesn’t it look great?” she asked him in her flat crisp voice. “We’ll open as soon as the court lets us. Vinh asked me to help him out. Of course I’m grateful to have the work. It means that I don’t have the feeling that I lost quite all of him.”

  When the cab stopped, she swung the door open, and said, “Maybe I shouldn’t say this, but you seem very unsettled. There’s room for you in here”—she nodded toward the building—“if you need a place to stay.” She waited for him to say something.

  “I’ll come in and see you before long,” he finally said. “Are you planning to stay here now?”

  She shook her head. “Call me at the General’s.” Then she smiled in the face of his mystification and left the cab.

  “Who is the General?”

  Maggie glanced down at the paper in his lap.

  He looked at the front page, where she had somehow managed to write a telephone number. When he looked back up, she was already opening the door of the restaurant.

  1

  “Is this really your idea of half an hour?” Beevers scowled as he let Poole into his messy dark studio apartment. Conor smiled enigmatically at him from a chair, and Tim Underhill, dressed in worn jeans and an old hooded sweatshirt, waved at him from another. Even in the dim light, Tim looked far more like his old self than he had in Bangkok—broader, healthier, less wasted. Shaking his hand and grinning, Tim was nothing like a criminal, nothing like a madman, nothing like the person Poole had thought he had been searching for.

  “We ordered a pizza,” Beevers said. “There’s some left.”

  On the table, dark with grease, sat a curdled slice of pizza in a cardboard box.

  Poole refused, and Beevers snapped the lid down over the remains and took the box into the kitchen.

  Conor winked at Poole.

  “Now that he’s here,” Beevers called from the kitchen, “does anybody want a drink?”

  “Sure,” Conor said.

  “Coffee,” said Underhill, and Poole said, “Me too.”

  They heard cabinet doors popping open, glasses slamming down on a counter, the refrigerator opening, ice cubes cracking from the tray. “So what the hell took you so long?” Beevers shouted. “You think we’re playing a game here? I got news for you—you’d better begin to take this seriously.”

  Underhill grinned at Poole from his seat by the main window in Beevers’ apartment. Beside him on the little table that held a telephone was a thick stack of papers.

  “Writing something?” Michael asked.

  Underhill nodded, and Beevers yelled again, “Sometimes I think I’m the only person here who really takes this whole project seriously.”

  He appeared with two short squat glasses filled with ice and a clear liquid, one of which he set down before Conor. Then he walked brusquely around Poole to get to the other side of the table, where he had evidently been sitting before Michael’s arrival. “You can make your own coffee, you live here too,” he said to Underhill.

  Underhill immediately stood up and went into the kitchen.

  “I suppose I had better fill in Dr. Poole on what we have been discussing in his absence,” Harry said. He sounded grumpy and pleased with himself at the same time. “But I want to settle something first.” Beevers raised his glass and squinted unpleasantly over the rim. “I don’t suppose that you waited for the rest of us to leave so that you could go running back to Murphy and tell him everything you know. I don’t really suppose that, Michael. Or do I?”

  “Why would you?” Michael had to suppress both his surprise and the desire to laugh. Beevers had become very taut.

  “You mi
ght want to destroy the work we’ve been doing. To get in good with Murphy. You might just think you have to become a sort of double agent in order to cover your ass.”

  “Double agent,” Conor said.

  “Keep quiet,” Harry snapped. “I want to know about this, Michael.”

  Poole suddenly understood from the way they were looking at him that both Conor and Underhill knew that he had spent the past hour with Maggie Lah. “Of course I didn’t go back to Murphy. He was busy with Maggie, anyhow.”

  “So what did you do?”

  “I had to pick up some things for Judy.”

  Underhill smiled.

  “I don’t know why all you guys are against me,” Beevers said. “I am working, night and day, on something that ought to make you all rich.” Another suspicious look at Poole. “And if Judy wanted some things, I don’t know why she didn’t just ask Pat to bring them up to her.”

  “Pat’s going to Westerholm?”

  “This afternoon. She told me this morning. You didn’t know?”

  “I left in kind of a rush.” Poole folded the newspaper on his lap.

  Underhill brought him his cup of coffee, and Michael sipped, grateful for the interruption. He had never been in Beevers’ apartment, and his curiosity at last made him take a good look at his surroundings.

  His second impression, like his first, was of a mess so pervasive it could nearly be called squalor. On the table between Beevers and Conor stood a small stack of plates topped with dirty silverware. Underhill’s cases and bags sat behind his chair beside a disorderly heap of newspapers and magazines. Beevers still read Playboy and Penthouse, Poole saw. What most gave the room its air of utter disorder were the videotapes that lay heaped and scattered on the floor. There were hundreds of them, in and out of their boxes, tossed on the carpet as though a small child had been playing with them. Dirty shirts, underwear, and khaki trousers lay on the far side of the grey convertible couch where Tim must have slept. To one blank space of wall had been taped a long photograph of the actress Nastassia Kinski entwined with a snake. Beside this hung two framed covers of national news magazines, each showing Lieutenant Harry Beevers’ haggard face. In a little L-shaped alcove was a small bed like a child’s with a pillow in a black pillowcase and black sheets visible beneath a rumpled duvet. The entire apartment smelled of pizza and unwashed laundry.

  In his immaculate suits, his braces and his bow ties, Harry came back every night to this depressing sty. The one purposeful, orderly corner of the apartment, Poole saw, was the little island Underhill had made of his chair and the table with its stack of typed pages.

  “I know the place is a little messy,” Harry said. “What do you think happens when you put a couple of bachelors together? I’m really going to clean it up pretty soon.” He looked around energetically, as if ready to begin now, but his eye stopped on Conor Linklater, who stirred uneasily.

  “I’m not going to clean your apartment for you,” Conor said.

  “Tell him what we were talking about,” Beevers said.

  2

  “Harry wants us to do a few things for him,” Conor said, resenting the way Beevers got his kicks by ordering everybody around.

  “For me? Me?”

  “Okay, you can explain it yourself if you don’t like the way I do it, Harry.”

  “I have my reasons.”

  With Beevers you never reached the end of these little games.

  “Well,” Conor began, “when we were just sort of shooting the breeze in here we found something out.”

  And there Mikey was—he heard it and he was tuned in, all of him.

  “It was something I didn’t tell you about, back in Bangkok. I figured I wanted to think about it myself, and then, you know, Tina got killed and we came back, and all that.”

  Poole nodded.

  “Remember when we were talking about that place where you go—where a bunch of rich guys watch somebody kill a girl?”

  “I remember.”

  “Well, I figured Tim was lying when he said he never went there. Because I got in by using his name. That’s the reason I got in. Tim’s name was like a kind of code, like a password or something.”

  “Exactly,” Underhill said.

  “So when he dodged around it on the plane, I figured he didn’t want to admit he went in for this sick little death trip, you know?”

  “But I had never been there,” Underhill said.

  “And a lot of other things. He didn’t know anybody named Cham, and the Cham I met knew all about him. And he was never blackballed from all the bars and places I went to, but the guy who took me around heard that Tim Underhill had been kicked out of at least half of them.”

  “I thought you had a picture,” Poole said.

  “Well, I forgot it that day. But everybody knew his name, so I thought it must be Tim. But—”

  Mikey got it right away.

  “It was another man,” Mike said.

  “Bingo.”

  “Truth is,” said Tim, “in Bangkok I pretty much laid low. I was busy getting myself together. Mainly I was trying to get back to work. In the two years I lived in Bangkok, I don’t think I set foot in Patpong more than twice.”

  “So,” Beevers said, unable to be silent any longer, “remember the time we went to Goodwood Park?”

  “He used Tim’s name.”

  “He always used Tim’s name. Everywhere he went. Even when they were in the same city.”

  “Which explains why my reputation was even worse than my own efforts should have made it,” Tim said. “The amazing Victor Spitalny was going around telling people he was me.”

  “So it’s perfect that Murphy is looking for Underhill,” Beevers said. “And what I have been suggesting to our friends while we were waiting for you is the next logical step. It’s what we were talking about on the plane. We look for him too.”

  “Just the way we did in Singapore and everywhere else.”

  Very pleased with himself, he took a big swallow of his drink. “We do exactly what we did before. With this difference. Now we know who we’re really looking for. I think we have a better chance of finding him than the police do. Where do you think he would be most at home?”

  Nobody spoke.

  “Where in New York City?”

  Conor could not stand this anymore, and said, “Go on, tell us.”

  Beevers smirked. “Chinatown. I think he’d roll down to Mott Street the way a stone rolls downhill. The man has not been in this country in fifteen years! How does it look to him? Like a foreign country! It is a foreign country to him.”

  “You want us to go around Chinatown looking for him, like instant replay?” Conor asked. “I don’t know.”

  “We’re five yards from the end zone, Conor. Do you want to quit now?”

  Poole asked if Beevers really wanted Tim Underhill to go around Chinatown looking for himself.

  “I have a couple of other ideas for you and Tim. What I’m talking about isn’t just walking around Chinatown talking to waiters and bartenders. That part of it I’m willing to take on myself. But do you remember my mentioning advertising? I want to put Tim’s name where Koko will see it every time he goes outside. Let’s surround him with it. And when he’s feeling totally hemmed in, let’s give him an out. And run him straight into a trap.”

  “A killing box,” Mikey said.

  “A trap. We capture him. We hear whatever he has to say. And then we turn him over to the police.”

  He looked around as if he expected disagreement and was prepared to face it down. “We’ve spent too much time and money to settle for anything less. Spitalny killed Tina Pumo. He is out there right now, trying to figure out how to kill us. Three of us, anyhow—he doesn’t know Tim is here any more than the police do.” He sipped from his drink. “Michael, I’m in the telephone book. I’m sure that by now he knows where I live. I have every reason to want this lunatic put out of the way. I don’t want to spend the rest of my life wondering if a madman is
going to come up behind me and cut my throat.”

  Sometimes Conor could almost admire Harry Beevers.

  “So I’m talking about putting up flyers on windows, on lampposts, bus shelters, anywhere he might notice them. And I worked out a couple of ads for the Village Voice. It’s an outside chance, but one worth taking. And there’s another idea Tim was interested in—I’d like you to consider this seriously, Michael. You two could go out to Milwaukee to see Spitalny’s parents and his old girlfriends or his what have you. You might be able to learn something crucial out there. It’s not impossible that he has written, called them, something. Anything!”

  Beevers’ eyes shone with his satisfaction in this scheme. For one thing, it got Tim Underhill out of his hair for a couple of days. Beevers had already asked Conor if he wanted to go to Milwaukee too, but he had refused. Ben Roehm needed a second carpenter for a small renovation job, and he had told Conor that Tom Woyzak “wasn’t a problem anymore.” His niece Ellen had filed for divorce in December. Woyzak had beaten her up once too often, and was now in a drug and alcohol treatment center.

  Mikey surprised Conor by saying, “I’ve been thinking along those lines myself. Do you want to give it a try, Tim?”

  “It could be interesting,” Underhill said.

  “Tell me what you think of the newspaper ads first.” Beevers handed Poole the sheet of paper on which he had printed the messages for the back page of the Voice:

  TIM UNDERHILL—END THE WAR AND COME HOME. CALL HARRY BEEVERS 555-0033.

  UNDERHILL—THE GRUNT CAN STOP RUNNING. 555-0033.

  “And here’s one of the flyers I had run off.” Beevers stood up and removed the top sheet from a stack of papers on a bookshelf above his head. “I had three hundred of these made up at a print shop around the corner. I can put one on every lamppost—he’ll see it, don’t worry about that.”

  On the flyer’s yellow paper was a message in large black letters:

  TIM UNDERHILL

  YOU WHO WERE AT IA THUC

  AND LAST SEEN IN BANGKOK

  COME HOME WE