Koko

by Peter Straub

  Later in the evening Harry got hungry, but could not stomach the thought of eating more Chinese food. Also nauseating was the idea of Michael Poole and Tim Underhill, both of whom had seemed to give up on sex, being with Maggie Lah—only he would really know what to do with a girl like that. This was so funny it hurt. He went to his refrigerator, thinking almost angrily about Maggie Lah, and found within it a couple of apples, a few carrots, a wedge of cheese already beginning to go dry and hard.

  Resentfully Harry dropped most of these things on a plate and carried it into the living room. If nothing happened—if his instincts had been so entirely wrong—he would have to go out to the airport and try to muzzle Poole. Maybe he could send him somewhere else for a day or two.

  Late at night Harry sat in the dark with the telephone and answering machine before him, sipping his drink and watching the red message light on the machine. In the silver city light coming through the window, everything looked poised. Countless times Harry had waited like this in the jungle, not moving, the world suspended around him.

  Then the telephone rang, and the message light began to blink. Harry extended his hand and waited for the caller to identify himself. The tape switched on, and a second of silence hissed through the speaker. Harry lifted the receiver and said, “I’m here.”

  It was not until then that he knew: he heard Koko waiting for him to say more.

  “Talk to me,” Harry said.

  Tape hiss came through the little speaker in the answering machine.

  “Backwards and forwards, isn’t that right? You wrote that? I know what you mean. I know—you want to go back to the beginning.”

  He thought he heard a soft slow intake of breath.

  “This is how we’re going to do it. I want you to meet me in a certain place, a safe place. Called Columbus Park, right on the edge of Chinatown. From there we can cross the street and go into the Criminal Court building, where you will also be safe. I know people there. These people trust me. They will do whatever I say. I will take you into a private room. You’ll be able to sit down. Everything will be over. Do you hear me?”

  Hissing silence.

  “But I want to be certain that I will be safe too. I want to see that you will do what I ask you to do. So I want you to take a certain route to Columbus Park, and I will be watching you all along this route. I want to see you follow my orders exactly. I want to see that you do exactly what I ask you to do.”

  When no words came from Koko, Harry said, “Tomorrow afternoon at ten minutes to three, I want you to start on Bowery, across from the north end of Confucius Plaza. Enter an arcade in the middle of the block between Canal and Bayard and walk through the arcade to Elizabeth Street. Turn left and go to Bayard Street. Walk west on Bayard until you come to Mulberry Street. Across the street is Columbus Park. Go across and enter the park. Go down the path and sit on the first bench. In exactly two minutes I will enter the park from the southern end and join you on the bench. Then it will all be over.”

  Harry took a deep breath. He could feel his whole upper body sweating into the turtleneck. He wanted to say something else—something like we both need to do this—but the other end of the line clicked down, and the dial tone began.

  Harry sat for a long time in the dark. Then he switched on the desk lamp and called the Tenth Precinct. Without giving his name, he left a message for Lieutenant Murphy that Timothy Underhill would be arriving at La Guardia airport at two o’clock the next afternoon on a Republic flight from Milwaukee.

  That night he lay awake in bed a long time, indifferent to sleep.

  3

  Crime and death surrounded the elephant, crime and death were the atmosphere through which he moved, the air he pulled into his lungs through his long grey trunk. And this is one thing Koko knew: though you move through the city the jungle stares at you, every step. There is no jungle but the jungle, and it grows beneath the sidewalks, behind the windows, on the other sides of the doors. Birds cry out in the midst of traffic.

  If he could have gone up to the old lady on West End Avenue, she would have dressed him in fine clothes and tamed him by easing his heart. But Pilophage the Doorman had turned him away, and the mad beasts had growled and shown their teeth, and his heart had not been eased.

  The door opened, and—

  The door opened, and Blood the Butcher slid into the room. Here was the demon Misfortune, and with the demon came the wire-haired bat, Fear.

  Koko sat alone in his room, his cell, his egg, his cave. The light burned, and the egg the cell the cave caged all the light and reflected it from wall to wall, let none escape for Koko needed it every bit.

  Flames jumped from the floor of Koko’s room but did not sear him. Dead children clustered round him, crying out, and the others cried out from the walls. Their mouths open, their elbows pressed close to their sides. The children exhaled the reeking breath of lions, for they lived in the cave as he lived in the cave, backwards and forwards.

  The door opened, and—

  A fire sprang up and a wind sprang up.

  Spare my life, a child cried out in bat language.

  Pilophage the General posed for his portrait before Justinen, the painter. The General looked grand and good, with his plumed hat beneath his arm. The Lieutenant stood in the dark cave, not good or grand, with his surfboard out before him. His shovel. And the girl in the alley off Phat Pong Road looked at him and knew.

  Do you want to know what’s dark?

  The Devil’s arsehole is dark. Koko went into the cave and into the Devil’s arsehole and there met the Lieutenant, Harry Beevers, his surfboard his shovel his weapon out before him, being fingered, being fluted, being shot—shooting. You want a piece of this? The Lieutenant with his cock sticking out and his eyes glowing. Then the Devil closed his nose and closed his eyes and stuck his fingers in his ears and eternity came in a thunderclap, eternity happened all at once, backwards and forwards. The woman crawled up from Nicaragua and gave birth and died in a black cloud, naked and covered in frozen mud.

  At the thought of Harry Beevers the children quailed and threw their arms around each other, and their stink doubled and redoubled.

  Good afternoon, gentlemen, and welcome to the Devil’s Arse-hole. It is presently no time no date no year. You will presently take yourself to the Bowery Arcade, and there you will once again face the elephant.

  4

  And when Babar went to bed he could not sleep. Discord and misfortune had come to Celesteville. Outside Babar’s window demons chattered. When Pilophage the General opened his massy mouth, snakes and bats flew out.

  We have turned every one to his own way, every one to his own way.

  Tapitor, Capoulosse, Barbacol. Podular. Pilophage. Justinen. Doulamor. Poutifor. Sturdy Hatchibombitar, whom the stunned child within Babar the King had loved best, with his red shirt and checked cap, his sturdy shoulders and broad back—the street sweeper, a man of no ambition but to keep the streets clean, a kind man, honest, sweeping and sweeping away the filth.

  5

  At the cusp of the night he heard outside his window the wingbeats not of birds, as at first it seemed, but of dark terrible creatures twice the size of bats. These creatures had come out of the earth in order to find him, and they would torment themselves at the window for a long time before wheeling away and returning to the earth. No other person would see or hear them, for no other person could. Harry himself had never seen them. The position of his bed in the little alcove beside the bathroom did not give him a view of the window. Harry lay in the dark for a long time, listening to the feathery, insistent sound of the wings. Eventually the din began to lessen. One by one the creatures flew back to their hole in the earth, where they huddled together squeaking and biting, dreamily licking the drops of blood from one another’s bodies. Harry listened in the dark as their number shrank to a final two or three that actually thumped against the glass in their desperation. Eventually these too flapped off. Morning was only a few hours away. />
  He finally slept an hour or two, and when he woke up he faced the old problem of the reality of the creatures. In the light of morning it was too easy to dismiss them as imaginary. On the nights they came, four or five nights since he had been out of uniform, they were real. He would have seen them, he had known, if he had dared to look.

  But they had failed again, and at nine he got out of bed feeling both tired and invigorated. He showered carefully and long, scrubbing and soaping and fondling, sliding his hand up and down the shaft of his penis, cupping his balls, rubbing and pulling.

  He dressed in the same jeans and sweater he had worn the previous day, but beneath the sweater wore a fresh shirt, stiff with starch.

  When he looked at himself in the mirror beside his bed, he thought he looked like a commando—like a Green Beret. He drank two cups of coffee and remembered how he had felt on certain mornings in Camp Crandall before going out on patrol. The bitter coffee, the weight of the automatic pistol on his hip. On some of those mornings his heart had felt as hard and tight as a walnut, his skin had tingled, it had seemed to him that he saw and heard like an eagle. The colors of the tents, the red dust in the roadway, the wire glinting on the perimeter. The slight hazy dullness of the air. Beneath all the other odors of men and machinery had been a live green scent, delicate and sharp as the edge of a razor. For Harry, this had been the basic smell of Vietnam. In Ia Thuc he had grabbed an old woman’s shoulder and pulled her harshly toward him, shouting some question he could not recall, and beneath the coarse smell of wood smoke the green razor of this scent had sliced out toward him from her body.

  If a woman smelled like that, Harry thought, she’d put a hook in you that you’d never get out.

  He drank another cup of coffee on the fold-out couch and tried to visualize in sequence every action that would bring him together with Koko in the Bowery Arcade. At one forty-five he would take a cab to the northeast corner of Bowery and Canal. It would then be about two o’clock and Lieutenant Murphy and two or three uniformed policemen would just be meeting the Republic flight from Milwaukee at La Guardia. In Chinatown the day would be cold, grey, wintry, and few people would be on the street. Harry planned to walk across Bowery and station himself on the wide traffic island just north of Confucius Plaza for a fast look at the block containing the arcade. He visualized the long block, the tiled façades of the restaurants with their plate-glass windows. A few men and women moving quickly in heavy coats. If Spitalny had decided to conceal himself in a doorway or behind a restaurant window, Harry would see him, and immediately disappear into Confucius Plaza and wait for Spitalny to panic when he realized that something had gone wrong. When Spitalny came out of hiding, Harry could follow him and finish him off as soon as they were alone. If he did not see Spitalny waiting to ambush him—and he did not think he would—Harry planned to recross Bowery and make a quick pass through the arcade just to make sure that the staircase had not been closed or blocked. If anything unusual were going on in the arcade, he would have to follow Spitalny out onto Elizabeth Street and get up close behind him before he got to Bayard Street. Elizabeth Street was Harry’s fallback—few restaurants, gloomy tenements. But if everything went as he imagined it would, Harry planned to go back across Bowery and conceal himself among the trees and benches at the base of Confucius Plaza. There he would wait until fifteen minutes before the time he had given Koko—until twenty-five to three—then he would cross Bowery one final time, make a final pass through the arcade to see that all was clear at the Elizabeth Street end, and then wait for Koko on the staircase.

  Sitting on his couch and holding the warm mug of coffee, Harry envisioned the sweep of the tiled floor toward the wide entrance. Harry would see everyone who passed by illuminated by the natural light of the street—when they turned toward the entrance and faced him, it would be as if a spotlight had been turned on them. Victor Spitalny would be burned a little brown from years of living under the Singapore sun, there would be deep lines in his face, but his hair would still be black, and in his close-set brown eyes would still be the expression of baffled grievance he had worn throughout his tour of duty.

  Harry saw himself moving silently up the stairs as soon as Spitalny had passed him, treading softly over the tiles to come up behind him. He would slip the gravity knife out of his pocket. Spitalny would hesitate before leaving the arcade, as he would hesitate before entering it. Stringy and ungainly inside his ugly clothes, inside his madness, he would stand exposed for a second: and Harry would clamp his left arm around his neck and drag him out of the light back into the arcade.

  Harry brought his coffee to his lips and was startled to find that it had gone cold. Then he grinned—the terrible creatures had come for Victor Spitalny.

  When he could no longer ignore his hunger, Harry went out to a deli on Ninth Avenue and bought a chicken salad sandwich and a can of Pepsi. Back in his apartment, he could only eat half the sandwich—his throat closed, and his body would not allow him another bite. Harry wrapped up the other half of the sandwich and put it in the refrigerator.

  Everything he did seemed italicized, drenched in significance, like a series of scenes from a film.

  When Harry came out of his kitchen, the framed magazine covers blared out at him like loud music. His face, his name. It took the breath right out of his body.

  6

  Before going downstairs for the cab, he poured himself a shot of Absolut. It was treacly from the freezer, and slid into his throat like a bullet made of mercury. The bullet froze whatever it touched, and evaporated into warmth and confidence as soon as it touched his stomach. Harry capped the bottle and returned it to the freezer.

  Alone inside the elevator, Harry took out his pocket comb and ran it through his hair.

  Outside on Ninth Avenue he raised his arm, and a cab swooped across two lanes and came to rest before him. The door locks floated up with an audible pop! Everything now was a sequence of smooth, powerful actions. Harry climbed into the back seat and gave the directions to the driver.

  Down Ninth Avenue the taxi went, everything clear, everything seen in the frame of the moment. A tall window reflected a sky filled with heavy clouds. Above the roof of the cab Harry heard sudden wing beats, swift and loud.

  He stepped out of the cab onto an empty sidewalk and looked south across busy Canal Street to the block that contained the arcade. A crowd of people carrying shopping bags and small children turned off Canal down Bowery. While Harry stood watching another small group composed of young Chinese men in suits and topcoats walked out of the Manhattan Savings Bank and also turned down Bowery. In a few seconds the second group had overtaken the first, and walked past the arcade without even glancing in. Suddenly all of Harry’s plans and precautions seemed unnecessary—he was an hour early, all he had to do was go into the arcade and hide on the staircase.

  He hunched his shoulders against this heresy as much as against the cold. Visualizing an action helped bring it into being. The preparations were themselves a stage in Koko’s capture, an essential aspect of the flow of events.

  Harry trotted through a break in the traffic and jumped up onto Stage Two of his preparations, the traffic island north of Confucius Plaza. He could see the entire block between Canal and Bayard, but he was exposed to anyone who would happen to look across the street. Harry backed away toward the far side of the island. The Chinese businessmen were waiting to cross Bayard, and the family with the babies and shopping bags was just straggling past the arcade. Nobody stood pretending to read the menus in the restaurant doorways, no faces were visible in the windows.

  When the light changed Harry ran back across Bowery and ducked into the arcade for Stage Three.

  It was even better than he remembered it—darker, so quiet it was hushed. One old lady dawdled between the shops. Today there were even fewer customers than he had seen two days before. The staircase to the lower level was nearly invisible, and when Harry glanced down it he saw joyfully that the bulb at the bottom of t
he staircase had burned out, and no one had replaced it. The lower level of the arcade was illuminated only by the weak light from the barbershop’s windows.

  He gave a quick check to the arcade’s far end. A skinny Chinese in pajamas stared at him from the stoop of a tenement before retreating back inside.

  Stage Four began at the base of Confucius Plaza. A few Chinese in padded coats came across the wide plaza and were admitted into the office building at Harry’s back. They paid no attention to him. Half a dozen concrete benches sat among the trees and planters on the plaza. Harry chose one that gave him an uninterrupted view.

  Now and then a truck stopped directly before him and blocked his view; once a delivery van parked directly in front of the arcade. Harry checked his watch as he waited for the van to pull away, and saw that it was two-twenty.

  He felt for the knife in his coat pocket. The pocket seemed to be empty. Harry groped more industriously. The knife still eluded him. Sweat began to drip down into his eyebrows. He tore off his right glove and thrust his hand into the pocket—the knife was gone.

  People passing in cars were pointing at him, laughing, leaving him behind as they swept by on their ways to parties, receptions, interviews.…

  He poked his fingers to the bottom of the pocket and found a rip in the lining. Of course his pockets were ripped, the coat was eight years old, what did you expect? The knife lay inside the hem, useless as a toothbrush. Harry worked it up the lining, and gradually got it near enough to the rip so that he could thrust his fingers through and feel for it. A row of stitches popped, and the rip widened. He found the knife and drew it up and transferred it to his left pocket.