Koko brt-1

by Peter Straub

  “I already look like a sophisticated gentleman.”

  “Could do better,” said the tailor. “What you’re wearing cost you three-four hundred dollars at Barneys, I give you three times the suit for same price.”

  Beevers ceased his impatient jigging on the sidewalk. The expression of unguarded astonishment on his face was as good as a Christmas present to Michael Poole and, he supposed, to Conor.

  “I make you look like Savile Row,” said the tailor, who was a round-faced Chinese man in his fifties wearing a white shirt and black trousers. “Six hundred-fifty-dollar suit, three hundred seventy-five dollars. Discounted price five hundred, I give you one-quarter off. Three hundred seventy-five dollars, price of couple good dinners at Four Seasons. You lawyuh? Stand in front of Supreme Court, you not only win case, everybody say ‘Where you get that suit? Must be from Prosperity Tailor Shop, Wing Chong, proprietor’!”

  “I don’t want to buy a suit,” Beevers said, looking shifty now.

  “You need suit.”

  Beevers yanked the camera from his pocket and snapped the man’s picture as if he were shooting him. The tailor grinned and posed. “Why don’t you attack one of these guys instead of me? Why don’t you go back to your shop?”

  “Lowest prices,” the man said, trembling with suppressed hilarity. “Three hundred fifty dollars. I go any lower, can’t pay rent. Go any lower, children starve.”

  Beevers shoved the camera back into his pocket and turned to Michael with the air of an animal caught in a trap.

  “This guy knows everything else, maybe he knows Underhill,” Michael said.

  “Show him the picture!”

  Michael took the envelope of photographs from under his arm and opened it.

  “We are police officers from the City of New York,” Beevers said.

  “You lawyuh,” said the tailor.

  “We are interested in knowing if you have ever seen this man. Show him the picture, Mike!”

  Michael took out one of the photographs of Tim Underhill and held it up before the tailor.

  “Do you know this person?” Beevers asked. “Can you recall ever having seen him prior to now?”

  “I never see this person prior to now,” said the tailor. “It would be honor to meet this person, but he could not pay even rock-bottom price.”

  “Why not?” Michael asked.

  “Too artistic,” the tailor said.

  Michael smiled and began to slide the picture back into the envelope when the tailor bent forward and grasped the print.

  “You give me picture? Have plenty more?”

  “He’s lying,” Beevers said. “You’re lying. Where is this man? Can you lead us to him?”

  “Celebrity picture,” the tailor said.

  “He just wants the picture,” Michael said to Beevers.

  Conor slapped the tailor on the back and laughed out loud.

  “What do you mean, he just wants the picture?”

  “Hang on wall,” the tailor said.

  Michael handed him the photograph.

  The tailor tucked it under his arm and bowed, giggling. “Thank you very much.” He turned around to walk back up the broad mall. Well-dressed Chinese men and women strolled toward them beneath the overhanging trees. The men wore blue suits, neat ties, and sunglasses and looked like the banker on the banner. The women were slim and good-looking and wore dresses. Poole realized that he, Beevers, and Conor were a racial minority of three. A long way down the mall, beside a poster that surrounded Chuck Norris’s scowl with leaping flames and a lot of Chinese characters, a teenage Chinese girl idled along, looking absently into shop windows. She wore what must have been a school uniform of flat white skimmer, white middy blouse with a black tie, and loose black skirt. Then an entire pack of such girls, neat as a row of ducks, swung into view behind her. Across the street next to a poster advertising McDonald’s hamburgers a square white sign advised SPEAK MANDARIN—ASSIST YOUR GOVERNMENT. Suddenly Poole could smell the perfume in the air, as if some invisible, exotic flower bloomed all around him. He felt unreasonably happy.

  “If we’re looking for the Boogey Street Underhill used to talk about, why don’t we just take a cab?” Poole said. “This is a civilized country.”

  2

  Stung by a recognition, Tina Pumo woke up in what at first seemed utter darkness. His heart was beating very loudly. He imagined that he must have cried out, made at least some sound, before he awakened, but Maggie slept on undisturbed beside him. He raised his arm and looked at the luminous hands on the face of his watch. It was three twenty-five.

  Tina knew what had been stolen from his desk. If Dracula had not moved everything around, he would have noticed its loss immediately, and if the two days since the break-in had been normal working days, he would have noticed its absence as soon as he sat down. But these two days had been anything but normal—he had spent at least half of each working day downstairs with the builders, contractors, carpenters, and exterminators. They finally seemed to have rid Saigon’s kitchen of all its insects, but the exterminator was still in a state closely resembling euphoria at the number, variety, and hardiness of the bugs he had had to kill. At least a few hours a day had to be spent convincing Molly Witt, his architect, that she was designing a kitchen and an enlarged dining room, not a high-tech operating room. The rest of the time he had spent with Maggie, talking as he had never talked in his life about himself.

  Tina felt almost as if Maggie had unlocked him. In two days she had gone a long way toward drawing him out of a shell he had barely known he was in.

  In a way he was still only beginning to understand, that shell had been formed in Vietnam. Pumo felt humbled by this new knowledge—Dracula had terrorized him by awakening feelings that Pumo had fondly, even proudly, imagined he had put away with his uniform. Pumo had imagined that it was only other people who had allowed themselves to be scarred by Vietnam. He used to feel at a safe emotional distance from all that had happened to him there. He had left the Army and got on with his life. Like virtually every other veteran, he’d gone through a period of aimlessness and dislocation when he coasted just alongside life, but that time had come to an end six years earlier, when he made his move with Saigon. He had, it was true, continued to go from girl to girl, and as he grew older, the girls had gotten younger by staying the same age. He fell in love with the shape of their mouths or the shape of their forearms or the eloquence of the relationship between their calves and their thighs; he fell in love with the way their hair swung or their eyes took him in. Until Maggie Lah had stopped him dead, he thought now, he had fallen in love with everything there was about a person except the actual person.

  “Do you think there is a real point where then stops and now begins?” Maggie had asked him. “Don’t you know that down deep the things that happen to you never really stop happening to you?”

  It had crossed his mind that she might think this way because she was Chinese, but he had kept silent about this theory.

  “Nobody can walk away from things the way you think you walked away from Vietnam,” she told him. “You saw your friends get killed, and you were just a boy. Now, after a relatively minor beating, you’re afraid of elevators and you’re afraid of subways and dark streets and God knows what else. Don’t you think there’s some connection?”

  “I guess,” he admitted. “How do you know about it though, Maggie?”

  “Everybody knows about it, Tina,” she said. “Except a surprising number of middle-aged American men, who really do believe that people can start fresh all over again, that the past dies and the future is a new beginning, and that these beliefs are moral.”

  Now Pumo carefully left his bed. Maggie did not stir, and her breathing went on quietly and steadily. He had to look at his desk to see if he was right about what had been stolen. Pumo’s heart was still pounding, and his own breathing sounded very loud to him. He proceeded cautiously across the bedroom in the dark. When he put his hand on the doorknob, he wa
s visited by the sudden image of Dracula standing just on the other side of the door. Sweat broke out on his face.

  “Tina?” Maggie’s crystalline voice floated on a dead-level current of breath from the bedroom.

  Pumo stood in the dark empty hallway. No one was there—as if Maggie had helped dispel the threat.

  “I know what’s missing,” he said. “I have to check it out. Sorry I woke you up.”

  “It’s okay,” Maggie said.

  His head pounded, and he could still feel little tremors in his knees. If he stood in that spot any longer, Maggie would know something was wrong. She might even feel that she had to get out of bed to help him. Pumo moved down the hall into the loft’s living room and pulled the cord that switched on the overhead lights. Like most rooms used almost entirely in the daytime, when seen this late at night Pumo’s living room had an eerie quality, as if everything in it had been replaced by an exact replica of itself. Pumo went across the room, up the steps to the platform, and sat down at his desk.

  He could not see it. He looked beneath the telephone and the answering machine. He moved the checkbooks to one side and lifted stacks of invoices and receipts. He checked behind a box of rubber bands and moved a box of tissues. Nothing. It could not have been hidden by the bottles of vitamins beside the electric pencil sharpener, nor by the two boxes of Blackwing pencils beside that. He was right: it wasn’t there. It had been stolen.

  To be certain, Pumo looked under his desk, leaned over the top and looked behind it, and then poked through his wastebasket. The wastebasket contained lots of balled-up tissues, an old copy of the Village Voice, the wrapper from a Quaker Oats Granola Bar, begging-letters from charities, grocery coupons, several unopened envelopes covered with announcements that he had already won a valuable prize, and a cotton ball and sealer from a bottle of vitamins.

  Crouching beside the wastebasket, Pumo looked up and saw Maggie standing in the entrance to the living room. Her arms dangled at her sides and her face still seemed full of sleep.

  “I know I look a little crazy,” he said, “but I was right.”

  “What is missing?”

  “I’ll tell you after I think about it for a couple of seconds.”

  “That bad?”

  “I don’t know yet.” He stood up. His body felt very tired, his mind not at all. He came down from the platform and went toward her.

  “Nothing’s that bad,” she said.

  “I was just thinking about a guy named M.O. Dengler.”

  “The one who died in Bangkok.”

  When he reached her he took one of her hands and opened it, like a leaf, on his own hand. Seen like this, her hand looked normal, not at all knobby. Lots of tiny wrinkles criss-crossed her palm. Maggie’s fingers were small, slim as cigarettes, slightly curled.

  “Bangkok would be a filthy place to die,” she said. “I loathe Bangkok.”

  “I didn’t know you’d ever been there.” He turned her hand over. Her palm was almost pink, but the back of her hand was the same golden color as the rest of her. Maybe the joints of her hand were slightly larger than one would expect. Maybe the bones of her wrist protruded.

  “You don’t know much about me,” Maggie said.

  They both knew he was going to tell her what had been stolen from his desk, and that this conversation was only a period in which Pumo could digest the fact of its loss.

  “Have you ever been to Australia?”

  “Lots of times.” She gave him a look of mock disgust disguised as no expression at all. “I suppose you went there on R&R and spent seven days seeking sexual release in an alcoholic blur.”

  “Sure,” Pumo said. “I was under orders.”

  “Can we turn off the lights and go back to sleep?”

  Pumo astonished himself by yawning. He reached up and pulled the cord, putting them in darkness.

  She led him back down the narrow corridor and into the bedroom. Pumo groped his way to his side of the bed and climbed in. He felt more than saw Maggie roll onto her side and prop herself up on one elbow. “Tell me about M.O. Dengler,” she said.

  He hesitated, and then a sentence appeared fully-formed in his mind, and when he spoke it, other sentences followed, as if they were appearing of their own will. “We were in a kind of swampy field. It was about six o’clock in the afternoon, and we’d been out since maybe five that morning. Everybody was pissed off, because we had wasted the whole day, and we were hungry, and we could tell the new lieutenant had no idea what he was doing. He had just come in two days before, and he was trying to impress us with how sharp he was. This was Beevers.”

  “Could have fooled me,” said Maggie.

  “What he did was take us off into the wilderness on an all-day wild goose chase. What the old lieutenant would have done, what was supposed to happen, was that we got set down in the LZ, poked around for a while to see if we could find anybody to shoot at, then we’d go back to the LZ for lift out. If you got some action, you call in an air strike or you call in artillery or you shoot it out, whatever’s right. You respond. That’s all we were there for—we were just there to respond. They sent us out there to get shot at so that we could shoot back and kill a lot of folks. That was it. It was pretty simple, when you come right down to it.

  “But this new guy, Beans Beevers, acted like … You knew you were in trouble. Because in order to respond, you have to know what’s out there that you are responding to. And this new guy who was fresh out of ROTC at some fancy college acts like he’s in an old movie or something. Inside his head, he’s already a hero. He’s gonna capture Ho Chi Minh, he’s gonna wipe out a whole enemy division, there’s a Medal of Honor already minted with his name on the certificate. He’s got that look.”

  “When do we get to M.O. Dengler?” Maggie asked softly.

  Pumo laughed. “Right now, I guess. The point is, our new lieutenant took us way out of our area without knowing it. He got so excited he misread his map, and so Poole kept sending the wrong coordinates back to base. We even lost our F.D., which nobody does. We’re supposed to be getting back to the LZ, and nothing around us looks familiar. Poole says, ‘Lieutenant, I’ve been looking at my map, and I think we must be in Dragon Valley.’ Beevers tells him he’s absolutely wrong, and to keep his mouth shut if he wants to stay out of trouble. ‘Watch out, you might get sent to Vietnam,’ Underhill says, which really begins to piss off the lieutenant.

  “So instead of confessing that he was wrong and making some kind of joke about it and getting the hell out, which would have saved everything, he makes the mistake of thinking about it. And unfortunately there’s a lot to think about. An entire company had been shot to pieces in Dragon Valley the week before, and the Tin Man was supposed to be cooking up some combined action. Beevers decides that since we’re supposed to provoke action and respond to it, and since we had providentially found ourselves in what might be the perfect place for action, we ought to provoke a little of it. We’ll advance into the Valley a little, he says, and Poole asks if he can figure out our real coordinates and radio them in. Radio silence, Beevers says, and shuts him up. Poole is supposed to be chicken-hearted, get it?

  “Beevers is thinking that we might spot a few Viet Cong, or maybe a small NVA detachment, which is what’s supposed to be down there, and if we’re lucky shoot the crap out of them and get a respectable body count, and go back with our new lieutenant blooded. Well, by the time we got back he was blooded, all right. He signals us to continue moving into the Valley, see, and everybody but him knows this is totally crazy. A creep named Spitalny asks how long we were gonna keep this up, and Beevers yells back, ‘As long as it takes! This isn’t boy scout camp!’ Dengler says to me, ‘I love this new lieutenant,’ and I see he’s grinning like a boy with a big piece of pie. Dengler has never seen anything like this new lieutenant before. He and Underhill are cracking up.

  “Finally we get to this thing like a swampy field. It’s just getting dark. The air’s full of bugs. The joke, if it is a jok
e, is over. Everybody’s beat. On the far side of the field is a stand of trees that looks like the beginning of jungle. There are a few bare dead logs in the middle of the field, and some big shell holes full of water.

  “I got a funny feeling the minute I laid eyes on the field. It looked like death. That’s the best I can say. It looked like a goddamned graveyard. It had that fixin’-to-die smell—maybe you know what I mean. I bet if you go to the pound and get into that room where they kill the dogs nobody wants, you’d get that same smell. Then I saw a helmet liner lying out next to a shell crater. A little way off from it I saw the busted-off stock of an M-16.

  “ ‘Suppose we explore this piece of real estate and see what’s on the other side before we go back to camp,’ Beevers said. ‘Looks good, doesn’t it?’

  “ ‘Lieutenant,’ Poole said, ‘I think this field is probably mined.’ He saw what I did, see?

  “ ‘Do you?’ Beevers asked. ‘Then why don’t you go out there first, Poole? You just volunteered to be our point man.’

  “Fortunately, Poole and I weren’t the only ones who had seen the helmet liner and the stock. They wouldn’t let Poole go out there by himself, and they weren’t about to try it for themselves either.

  “ ‘You think this field is mined?’ Beevers asked.”

  “You men think this field is mined?” screamed Lieutenant Beevers. “You actually think I’ll fall for that one? This is a struggle for command, and like it or not, I’m in command here.”

  Grinning, Dengler turned to Puma and whispered, “Don’t you love the way his mind works?”

  “Dengler whispered something to me, and Beevers blew up. ‘Okay,’ he yelled at Dengler, ‘if you think this area is mined, prove it to me. Throw something out there and hit a mine. If nothing blows up, we all go into the field.’ ‘Whatever you say,’ Dengler said—”

  “As the lieutenant wishes,” Dengler said, and looked around him in the gloom. “Throw the lieutenant,” Victor Spitalny muttered. Dengler saw a good-sized rock buried in the muck near him, pushed it free with his boot, bent down, put his arms around it, and lifted it.