Koko

by Peter Straub

  5

  Back in the double room, Underhill took off the black wide-brimmed hat and long black coat he must have picked up on Canal Street, and Poole called downstairs and ordered what looked like the best red wine on the Pforzheimer’s list, a 1974 Chateau Talbot, and a Sprite for Underhill. They all wanted something to take the taste of their dinner from their mouths.

  “You even put ketchup on your cabbage,” Maggie said to Tim.

  “I just asked myself, what would Conor Linklater do if he were here?”

  “Who do we call first?” Michael asked. “Debbie, or one of the boys?”

  “Would he have written to her?”

  “Possible,” Poole said, and dialed Debbie Tusa’s number.

  A teenage boy answered the phone and said, “You want my mom? Hey, Mom! Mom! A guy on the phone!”

  “Who’s this?” asked a tired voice a moment later. Poole could hear a television set bellowing in the background.

  He introduced himself and briefly explained what he was doing.

  “Who?”

  “Vic Spitalny. I believe you used to go out with him when you both attended Rufus King High School.”

  She said nothing for a moment. “Oh, my God. Who are you again?”

  Poole again recited his name and history.

  “And where did you learn my name?”

  “I’ve just been with Victor’s parents.”

  “Vic’s parents,” she said. “George and Margaret. Well, well. I haven’t thought about that poor guy in about ten years, I bet.”

  “So you haven’t heard anything from him since he went into the service.”

  “Since long before that, Doctor. He dropped out of school in our senior year, and I had been going out with Nick, that’s the guy I married, for a year already. Nick and I split up three years ago. How come you’re interested in Vic Spitalny?”

  “He kind of slipped out of sight. I’m interested in what happened to him. Why did you call him ‘that poor guy’ just now?”

  “I guess that’s pretty much what he was. I went out with him, after all, so I never thought he was as bad as the other kids did. In fact I thought he was kind of sweet, but … Vic wasn’t what you’d call a real oddball, there was at least one guy who was worse off than what he was, it was just, nobody would give him a chance. He was kind of shy—he loved working on his car. But I hated going to his house.”

  “Why?”

  “Old George’s tongue used to drop out of his mouth the second I set foot on the sidewalk—he was always touching me. Ugh. I could see what he was doing to Vic—he just cut him down, all the time. I just couldn’t take it anymore, eventually. Then Vic dropped out of school. He was flunking a lot of courses, anyway. And he got drafted.”

  “You never heard from him after that?”

  “I just heard about him,” she said. “It was in all the papers, when he deserted. Pictures and everything. Right before Nick and me got married. There was Vic on the front page of the Sentinel. Second section. All that stuff about his running away when that Dengler guy was killed—everything about that was weird. It was even on TV that night, but I still didn’t believe it. Vic wouldn’t do anything like that. It all seemed so mixed up to me. When the army guys came around after that—you know, investigating—I said, you guys made a mistake. You got it wrong.”

  “What do you think happened, then?”

  “I don’t know. I guess I think he’s dead.”

  Room service arrived. Underhill let Maggie taste and approve the wine, tipped the waiter, and brought Michael a glass just as he finished his conversation with Debbie Tusa. The wine immediately dissolved the greasy taste of the sausage.

  “Cheers,” Maggie said.

  “She doesn’t even think he deserted.”

  “His mother doesn’t either,” Maggie said. Poole looked at her in surprise. She must have picked up this information on her Maggie-radar.

  Bill Hopper, one of Spitalny’s high school friends, said in the course of Michael’s short conversation with him that he knew nothing about Victor Spitalny, had never liked him, and didn’t want to know anything about him. Vic Spitalny was a disgrace to his parents and to Milwaukee. Bill Hopper was of the opinion that George Spitalny, with whom he worked at the Glax Corporation, was one hell of a good man who had deserved a better son than that. He went on for a time, then told Poole to get off his case, and hung up.

  “Bill Hopper says our boy was a sicko, and nobody normal liked him.”

  “You didn’t have to be normal to dislike Spitalny,” Underhill said.

  Poole sipped the wine. His body suddenly felt limp as a sack. “I wonder if there’s any point in my calling this other guy. I already know what he’s going to say.”

  “Aren’t you going on the theory that Spitalny will eventually turn to someone for help?” Maggie asked innocently. “And here we are in Milwaukee.”

  Poole picked up the phone and dialed the last number.

  “Simroe.”

  Poole began speaking. He felt as though he were reading lines.

  “Oh, Vic Spitalny,” Mack Simroe said. “No, I can’t help you find him. I don’t know anything about him. He just went away, didn’t he? Got drafted. Well, you know that, right? You were there with him. Umm, how did you get my name?”

  “From his parents. I had the impression they thought he was dead.”

  “They would,” Simroe said. Poole could hear him smiling. “Look, I think it’s nice you’re looking for him—I mean, it’s nice somebody’s looking for him, but I never even got a postcard from the guy. Have you talked to Debbie Maczik? Debbie Tusa, she is now?”

  Poole said that she had not heard from him either.

  “Well, maybe that’s not too surprising.” Simroe’s laugh sounded almost embarrassed. “Considering, I mean.”

  “You think he’d still be that guilty about his desertion?”

  “Well, not only that. I mean, I don’t think the whole story ever came out, do you?”

  Poole agreed that it had not, and wondered where all this was going.

  “Who’s going to go check up on a thing like that? You’d have to go to Bangkok, wouldn’t you?”

  You would, and he had, Poole said.

  “So was it just coincidence, or what? It sure seemed funny at the time. The only guy worse off than he was—the only guy who was as much of a loser as he was, actually more so.”

  “I’m not sure I’m following you,” Poole said.

  “Well, Dengler,” Simroe said. “It sure looked funny. I guess I thought he must have killed him over there.”

  “Spitalny knew Dengler before they got to Vietnam?”

  “Well, sure. Everybody knew Dengler. All the kids did. You know how everybody knows the one kid who just can’t get it together, whose clothes are all raggy—Dengler was a basket case.”

  “Not in Vietnam, he wasn’t,” Poole said.

  “Well, naturally Spitalny hated Dengler. When you’re down low, you hate whatever’s beneath you, right?”

  Poole felt as though he had just stuck his finger in a socket.

  “So when I saw in the paper about Manny Dengler dying over there and Vic running away, I thought there must be more to it. So did most people, most people who knew Manny Dengler, anyhow. But nobody expected to get any postcards from him. I mean …”

  When Poole hung up, Underhill was staring at him with eyes like lanterns.

  “They knew each other,” Poole said. “They went to school together. According to Mack Simroe, Dengler was the only kid who was even more out of it than Spitalny.”

  Underhill shook his head in wonder. “I never even saw them talk to each other, except that once.”

  “Spitalny arranged to meet Dengler in Bangkok. He set it up in advance. He was planning to kill him—they worked out a place to meet, just the way he did with the journalists fourteen years later.”

  “It was the first Koko murder.”

  “Without the card.”

  “B
ecause it was supposed to look like mob violence,” Underhill said.

  “Goddamn,” Poole said. He dialed Debbie Tusa’s number again, and the same teenage boy yelled, “HEY, MOM! WHO IS THIS GUY?”

  “I give up, who are you?” she said when she picked up.

  Poole explained who he was and why he was calling again.

  “Well, sure Vic knew Manny Dengler. Everybody did. Not to speak to, but to see. I think Vic used to tease him now and then—it was sort of cruel, and I didn’t like it. I thought you knew all about it! That’s why it seemed so mixed up to me. I couldn’t figure out what they were doing together. Nicky, my husband, thought Vic stabbed Manny or something, but that has to be crazy. Because Vic wouldn’t have done anything like that.”

  Poole arranged to meet her for lunch the next day.

  “Spitalny came into our unit and found Dengler there,” Underhill was saying to Maggie. “But everything has changed about Dengler—he’s loved by everybody. Did he talk to him? Did he make fun of him? What did he do?”

  “Dengler talked to him,” Poole said. “He said, a lot of things have changed since high school. Let’s just make like we never met until now. And in a way, they never had met—Spitalny had never met our Dengler before.”

  “When they came out of the cave,” Underhill said, “didn’t Dengler say something like ‘Don’t worry about it? Whatever it was, it was a long time ago.’ I thought he meant—”

  “I did too—whatever Beevers did in there. I thought he was telling Spitalny to cut himself loose from it.”

  “But he was saying it was a long time since Milwaukee,” Underhill said.

  “He meant both,” Maggie said. “Backwards and forwards, remember? And he knew that Spitalny wouldn’t be able to handle whatever happened to all of them in there. He knew who Koko was right from the start.” Suddenly Maggie yawned, and closed her eyes like a cat. “Excuse me. Too much excitement. I think I’ll go next door and go to bed.”

  “See you in the morning, Maggie,” Underhill said.

  Poole walked Maggie to the door, opened it for her, and said “Goodnight.” On impulse he stepped out into the hallway after her.

  Maggie raised her eyebrows. “Walking me home?”

  “I guess I am.”

  Maggie moved down the hallway to her own door. The corridor was noticeably colder than the rooms.

  “Tomorrow the Denglers,” Maggie said, putting the key in the lock. She seemed very small, standing in the immense dim corridor. He nodded. The look she gave him deepened and changed in quality. Poole suddenly knew how it would feel to put his arms around Maggie Lah, how her body would fit into his. Then he felt like George Spitalny, drooling over Maggie.

  “Tomorrow the Denglers,” he said.

  She looked up at him oddly: he could not tell if what he thought he had just seen, the increase in weight and gravity, had been real. It had been like being touched. Poole thought that he wanted Maggie to touch him so badly that he had probably invented everything.

  “Want to come in?” she asked.

  “I don’t want to keep you up,” Poole said.

  She smiled and disappeared around her door.

  6

  Harry Beevers stood on Mott Street, looking around and thinking that he needed a killing box: someplace where he could watch Koko until it was time to either capture him or kill him. Spitalny would have to be led into a trap where Harry controlled the only way in or out. Harry considered that he was good at setting up killing boxes. Killing boxes were a proven skill. Like Koko, he had to pick his own battleground—draw his victim out into the territory he had chosen.

  Some of Harry’s flyers had been ripped off and thrown away, but most of them still called out from lampposts and shop windows. He began to walk south down Mott Street, sharing it on this cold day with only a few hurtling Chinese, heavily bundled and chalky with the cold. All he had to do was find a restaurant that looked quiet enough for his initial rendezvous with Spitalny—he would soothe him with food—and then work out where to take him afterwards. His apartment was out, though in some ways its seclusion was perfect. But he had to take Koko someplace which would in itself constitute an alibi. A dark alley behind a police station would be just about perfect.

  Beevers could see himself slumping out of the alley like some heroic Rambo, heavy-shouldered, panting, spattered with his enemy’s blood, gesturing a crowd of stupefied officers toward Spitalny’s body—There’s the man you’re looking for. Jumped me while I was bringing him in.

  He had to buy a good knife, that was one thing he had to do. And a pair of handcuffs. You could snap a pair of handcuffs on a man before he knew what was happening. Then you could do what you liked to him. And unlock the handcuffs before the body hit the floor.

  On the corner of Bayard Street he hesitated, then turned east toward Confucius Plaza. He came to Elizabeth Street, turned in and walked back north a few steps before deciding it was all wrong—nothing but tenements and murky little Chinese businesses. Koko would see it for a trap right away—he’d know a killing box when he saw one. Harry went back to Bayard Street and continued on toward Bowery.

  This was a lot more promising.

  Across Bowery stood Confucius Plaza, an immense office and apartment complex. On one corner stood a bank shaped like a modernist pagoda in red lacquer, across the street a Chinese cinema. Cars swept unendingly around a long traffic island that extended from Bowery around the corner into Division Street. At the apex of the traffic island was a tall statue of Confucius.

  This was too public for his meeting with Koko. He looked across the street to the Plaza. A lower building, of perhaps fifteen stories, fronted Bowery, blocking from view the lower half of the taller residential tower. The buildings had a slightly molded look that carried the eye along, and behind them, Harry thought, must be a terrace or a plaza—trees and benches.

  And that gave it to him—at least half of it. Into his mind had come the image of the park bordered by Mulberry and Baxter streets near the western end of Chinatown. Now this park would be empty, but in the spring and summer the little park was crowded with lawyers, bailiffs, judges, and policemen taking a break from their duties. This was Columbus Park, and Harry knew it well from his early days as a litigator—he had never really connected it to Chinatown in his mind. Columbus Park was an adjunct to the row of government buildings lined up along Centre Street.

  The Criminal Courts building stood between Centre and Baxter at the top end of Columbus Park; down at the bottom end was the smaller, more prisonlike structure of the Federal Courthouse; and further south, between Worth and Pearl streets, a block from the park, was the even more penitential structure, grim and dirty and oozing gloom at all seasons, of the New York County Courthouse.

  Harry instantly discarded the notion of meeting Koko in a restaurant. He would ask him to meet in Columbus Park. If Koko had moved into Chinatown, he would know the park by now, and if he had not, the idea of meeting in a park would serve to make him feel secure. It was perfect. It would look good in the book too, and play beautifully in the movie, but it would be fiction. The meeting in Columbus Park would be part of the myth; it did not have to be real to be part of the myth. For Harry intended only to make Koko think that they would meet in the park. Harry would send him through somewhere else first, and that would be his killing box.

  Harry stood freezing on the corner of Bayard Street and Bowery. A black stretch limousine pulled up to the curb before him and two short, pudgy Chinese men with glossy tiny feet got out of the backseat. They wore dark suits and sunglasses, and their hair was slicked back. They looked like twin dwarfs with zombie faces and stiff, self-important movements. One of them slammed the door of the limousine, and they strode across the sidewalk to push their way into one of the restaurants across from Confucius Plaza. One of them passed within a foot of Harry without in any way registering his presence. Harry thought that if he had been standing in his path, the little gangster would have knocked him over and walked
across his body the way Elizabeth walked over Raleigh’s cloak.

  He moved across the sidewalk to the car. Harry felt even colder than before—in every car that sped down Bowery, in every apartment in Confucius Plaza, was a flat-faced chink who did not care if Harry Beevers lived or died. How had all the little bastards clawed their way up out of the laundries? He bent over the trunk of the limousine and looked down at sixteen layers of meticulously applied black lacquer. The skin of the car looked as deep as a lake. Harry gathered a good gob of phlegm and saliva in his mouth and spat it onto the trunk of the limousine. It began to slide a bit toward the fender.

  Harry stepped back from the car and began to walk up the block. He was on the verge of thinking that now he was wasting his time here and that he should be checking out Bayard Street’s western end when the smooth, unbroken row of Chinese restaurants ceased and he found himself staring into a cave. His feet stopped moving and his heart thumped like the kick of a rabbit’s back legs. On both sides the tiles of the buildings folded in to form a wide passage. Of course it was not a cave. He was standing before an arcade.

  Down in the distance he could see women’s underwear in forlorn shades of pink and pale blue stretched across forms in a lighted window. Near it a pair of giant’s eyeglasses stared out from an optician’s window. Further back a restaurant sign floated in grey air. Harry walked into the arcade. One old Chinese woman shuffled toward him, in the dimness of the arcade no more than a wrinkled forehead and a pair of averted eyes.

  Harry paused outside Chinatown Opticians and peered through the empty left orb of the giant’s glasses. Behind the counter in the deserted shop a clerk with a punk crewcut and cheeks inflamed with acne stared into a Chinese-language edition of Playboy.