by Peter Straub
8
He ate dinner in a little Italian restaurant and again immersed himself in The Ambassadors. The next day, he told himself, he would fly off into Koko’s childhood. He felt poised on the brink of some great change, but ready for it. The Health and Hospitals Corporation of New York gave fifty-thousand-dollar grants to doctors to set up storefront offices in places where people needed medical care, and after that loaned you money at the prime rate which you did not have to start repaying for two years. Two, three, four more days at the most, Poole thought; then he could finally get off the bridge and go into the places where he was needed. His whole body warmed.
9
When Poole got back to Conor’s apartment he turned on all the lights and sat down on a kitchen chair to read until he could go to bed. A feeling of unfinished business nagged at him until he remembered the Babar books and nearly decided to put on his coat and fetch them from the car. He stood up, walked past the telephone, and remembered something else.
He had never called the stewardess who had known Clement W. Irwin, Koko’s first American victim. Poole was surprised that he had remembered the man’s name.
But what was the name of the stewardess? He tried to remember the name of their own stewardess. Her name had been something like his. Mikey. Marsha. Michaela, Minnie, Mona. No—it had reminded him of an Alfred Hitchcock movie. Grace Kelly. A blonde … Tippi Hedren, the actress who had been in The Birds. Then he remembered the name as easily as if the name tag was still in front of him: Marnie. And Marnie’s friend had been named … Lisa. He groped for her last name. How could he have been stupid enough not to write it down. What’s your friend’s last name, he had asked her. “———–,” she had said. Something about Ireland. Lisa Dublin. Lisa Galway. That was close. Lisa Ulster. Like in Hellman’s, Marnie had said. Lisa Mayo.
Poole rushed to the phone and dialed information in New York City. She would not have a listed number, of course, nothing was that easy, and he would have to work out a way to get a stewardess’s telephone number from the airline that employed her. He asked for the listing, and the line went silent with an electronic clunk. That’s it, Poole thought, no listing, but a robot’s voice immediately came on the line, saying “The number you have requested is” and gave him seven digits, then repeated them.
Poole dialed, hoping it was the same Lisa Mayo. If it was, she was probably thirty thousand feet in the air, on her way back to San Francisco.
The telephone rang four, five times, and was picked up a second before Poole hung up.
A young woman said, “Yes.”
“My name is Dr. Michael Poole, and I am looking for the Lisa Mayo who is a friend of Marnie’s.”
“Marnie Richardson! Where did you meet her?”
“In an airplane coming back from Bangkok.”
“Marnie’s pretty wild. Uh, I gave up doing a lot of stuff when I moved out of San Francisco. It’s nice of you to call, but—”
“Excuse me,” Poole said. “I think you have the wrong idea. I’m calling about the man who was killed at JFK about three weeks ago, and Miss Richardson said that you knew him.”
“You’re calling about Mr. Irwin?”
“In part,” Poole said. “You did see him on the flight just before he was killed?”
“You bet I did. I saw him maybe a dozen times a year. He went back and forth to San Francisco almost as often as I do.” She hesitated. “I was shocked when I read about what happened to him, but I can’t say I was real sorry. He wasn’t a very nice man. Oh, I shouldn’t have said that. Mr. Irwin wasn’t popular with any of the crews, that’s all, he was a very demanding man. But what business is it of yours, anyway? Did you know Mr. Irwin?”
“I am primarily interested in the man who sat beside Mr. Irwin on the flight to New York. I wondered if you could remember anything about him.”
“Him? This is very mysterious. Besides, it’s getting late and I have an early call tomorrow. Are you a cop?”
The implications of that “him?” put goose bumps on Poole’s arms. “No, I’m a doctor, but I do have some connection with the police investigation of Mr. Irwin’s murder.”
“ ‘Some’ connection?”
“I’m sorry it’s so vague.”
“Well, if you think that guy who sat next to Mr. Irwin had anything to do with it, you’re really barking up the wrong tree.”
“Why?”
“Because he couldn’t have had anything to do with it. He couldn’t. I see a lot of people in the work I do, and that guy was one of the nicest, shyest … I felt sorry for him, having to sit next to the Beast. That’s what we called Mr. Irwin. Well, come to think of it, he even sort of charmed the Beast—he got Mr. Irwin to talk to him, and he got him to make a bet on something or other.”
“Do you remember his name?”
“It was some kind of Spanish name—Gomez, maybe? Cortez?”
There you are, Poole thought, and drew in a sharp breath.
“What?”
“Does Ortiz sound right? Roberto Ortiz?”
She laughed. “How did you know that? That’s right—and he said to call him Bobby. Bobby seemed just right, you know, he was just like a Bobby.”
“Is there anything specific you can remember about him? Anything he said, or talked about, or anything in particular?”
“It’s funny—when I look back on him, all I get is this blur with a smile in the middle of it. The whole crew liked him, I remember. But as for anything he said … wait … wait.”
“Yes?” Poole asked.
“I can remember something funny he did. He kind of sang. I mean, he didn’t sing a song, you know, a song with words, but he sang this kind of weird little thing.”
“What was it like?”
“Well, it was kinda strange. Like nonsense words—like a foreign language. But you could tell it wasn’t any real language. It was like … ‘pompo-po, pompo-po, polo, polo, pompo-po,’ something like that.”
The goosebumps were back on Poole’s arms. “Yes,” he said. “Thank you.”
“Is that all you wanted?”
“ ‘Pompo-po, pompo-po …’ or like ‘rip-a-rip-a-rip-a-lo’?”
“Pretty close,” the girl said.
PART
SEVEN
THE
KILLING
BOX
1
“I don’t know if there’s any name for those experiences,” Underhill said. He sat near the window, Poole on the aisle, Maggie between them. They were somewhere in the air over Pennsylvania, or Ohio, or Michigan. “You could call them peak experiences, but that’s a term that covers a lot of ground. Or you might call it ecstasy, since that’s what it sounds like. You might even call it an Emersonian moment. You know Emerson’s essay, ‘Nature’? He talks about becoming a transparent eyeball—‘I am nothing; I see all; the currents of Universal Being circulate through me.’ ”
“Sounds like just another way to face the elephant,” Maggie said in her precise unsentimental voice. Both Poole and Underhill laughed. “You should not make so much of it. When you saw your son, you should have expected something like this … experience to follow.”
“I didn’t see my son,” Poole began, and then his objections dried to powder in his mouth. He had not been certain that he was going to tell Underhill and Maggie about the “god,” and his uncertainty had continued even while he described what he had seen, but Maggie’s short sentence rang within him.
“But you did,” Maggie said. “You saw what he would be like as a man. You saw the real Robbie.” She looked at him very quizzically. “That’s why you loved the figure you saw.”
“Are you for hire?” Underhill asked.
“How much money you got?” Maggie asked in the same disinterested voice. “Going to cost you plenty, if you want me to keep saying the obvious.”
“I liked the theory that it was an angel.”
“I did too,” Maggie said. “Very possible.”
They rode on for a time in sil
ence. Michael knew that Robbie could not have grown into the man he had seen: but he thought that he had been given a vision of a perfect Robbie, one in whom all his best instincts had flowered. It would have been some quality beyond happiness, something like rapture, to have fathered the man he had seen beside his son’s grave. In a sense he had fathered that man, exactly. No one else had. He had not hallucinated or imagined the man so much as he had authored him.
Poole felt as though with a few simple words Maggie Lah had restored his son to him. For as long as he lived, that boy was his, that man was his boy. His mourning was really over.
When at last he could speak again, Poole asked Tim if he had done any research for The Divided Man. “I mean, did you consult any guidebooks, anything like that?”
“I don’t think there are any guidebooks to Milwaukee,” Underhill said.
Maggie permitted herself an amused little noise that sounded very like a snicker.
“Most American cities don’t have guidebooks,” Underhill said. “I mainly remembered what M.O. Dengler used to say about it. After that I turned my imagination loose on it, and I guess it did a reasonable job.”
“In other words,” Michael said, “you could say that you authored the city.”
“I authored it,” Underhill agreed, looking faintly puzzled.
Maggie Lah turned a gleaming eye upon Poole. She astounded him by lightly patting his knee, as if in congratulation or commendation.
“Am I missing something?” Underhill asked.
“You’re doing pretty well so far,” Maggie said.
“Well, I have a thought about Victor Spitalny and his parents,” Tim said, trying to cross his legs and learning that he did not have enough room. “Imagine how most parents would feel if their child disappeared. Don’t you think that they would keep telling themselves that the child was still alive, no matter how long the disappearance lasted? I suppose that Spitalny’s parents are a little different from most. Remember—they made their kid feel like an adopted orphan, if my imagination is any good. They turned their kid into the Victor Spitalny we knew, and he later turned himself into Koko. So I’ll bet that his mother says she knows he’s dead. She already knows he killed Dengler. But I bet she knows that he’s done other killings.”
“So what will she think about us and what we’re doing?”
“She might just think we’re fools and humor us along with cups of tea. Or she might lose her temper and throw us out.”
“Then why are we on this airplane?”
“Because she might be an honest lady who had a cuckoo for a son. There are lots of different kinds of misfortune, and her son might have been one of the worst. In which case she’ll share any information she has.”
Underhill saw the expression on Michael’s face and added that the only thing he really knew about Milwaukee was that it was going to be about thirty degrees colder than New York.
“I think I can see why they don’t have many tourists,” Maggie said.
2
At one o’clock in the afternoon, Michael Poole stood at the window of his room in the Pforzheimer Hotel, looking down at what would have been a four-lane street if parallel drifts of snow nearly the height of the parking meters had not claimed half of the first lane on either side. Here and there cars had been submerged beneath the parallel ranges of old snow, and channels like mountain passes had been cut between the cars to provide passage to the sidewalk. On the cleared portion of the road, intermittent cars, most of them crusted with frozen khaki-colored slush, streamed past in single file. The green of the traffic light on Wisconsin Avenue, at the front of the hotel and at the very edge of Michael’s vision, gleamed out in the oddly dusky air as if through twilight. The temperature was zero degrees Fahrenheit. It was like being in the middle of Moscow. A few men and women bundled in thick coats moved quickly down the sidewalk toward the light. The light changed from a gleaming green nimbus to a gleaming red nimbus, and even though no cars appeared in the intersection, the pedestrians stopped to obey the DON’T WALK command.
It really was the city Dengler had described. Poole felt like a Muscovite looking at Moscow with eyes washed clean. He had finished the long, long process of mourning his son. What was left of Robbie was within him. He did not even feel that he needed the Babar books, which were still in the trunk of the Audi. The world would never be whole again, that was that, but when had the world been whole? His grief had flared up, then subsided again, and his eyes had been washed clean.
Behind him Tim Underhill and Maggie Lah were laughing at something Tim had drawled.
The lights at the end of the block changed to green, and the command switched to WALK. The pedestrians began to move across the street.
Maggie had been put into a single room next to this one, where Poole and Underhill had placed their bags on the two double beds. It was a high-vaulted room with faded flocked wallpaper, a threadbare carpet with a floral pattern, and a rococo mirror in a gilt frame. On the walls hung large nineteenth-century paintings of dogs panting over mounds of bloody dead pheasants and portraits of smug, big-bellied burghers in frock coats and striped satin waistcoats. The furniture was nondescript, worn, and sturdy, and the size of the room made it look small. In the bathroom the taps and fittings were brass, and the tub stood like a lion on four heavy porcelain paws. The windows, through which the three of them now looked down onto the street, extended nearly from floor to ceiling and were hung with dark brown swag curtains drawn back with worn, heavy velvet ropes. Poole had never been in a hotel room like it. He thought it was like being in some splendid old hotel in Prague or Budapest—through twenty-foot windows like these with such a vast, elegant, decaying room at his back, he should have heard the sounds of sleigh bells and horses’s hooves.
In the Pforzheimer’s lobby, uniformed midgets the size of the numerous ferns had stood before the polished mahogany of the registration desk; the clerk had worn half-glasses and a narrow bow tie, and looked out upon a rich landscape of shining brass, yards of tartan carpet, glowing lamps, and immense paintings so dark that big shapes loomed out of a general blur. There was of course no computer behind the desk. A wide staircase curved up toward what a plaque identified as the Balmoral Room, and down at the far end of the lobby, a corridor led past trees in pots and glass cases filled with the stuffed heads of animals toward a dimly glowing bar.
“I sort of feel that the Neva is only a pace or two away,” Poole said, looking out at the snow.
“And police in bearskin hats and leather boots to the knees strut up and down on the Prospekt,” Underhill said.
“Waiting to apprehend the naked men who have been forced out of the forest by the extreme cold,” Maggie said.
Yes, that was it. There would be a great forest only a mile or two distant, and at night if you opened the windows of ballrooms you would hear the cries of wolves.
“Let’s take a look at the telephone book,” Poole said, turning from the window.
“Let’s find the telephone book,” Underhill said.
The telephone itself, an old-fashioned black Bakelite model with a rotary dial but without the usual instructions for dialing the laundry, room service, the concierge, and the desk—without even a message light—stood on a military table beside Poole’s bed.
The two men began opening drawers in the various chests and cabinets against the walls. In a tall highboy Underhill found a television set that swiveled out on a shelf. Poole found a Gideon Bible and a booklet entitled “The Pforzheimer Story” in a long drawer lined with crinkly paper imprinted with Christmas trees. Underhill opened a cabinet between the tall windows and discovered rows of books. “My God,” he said, “a library. And what books! Kitty’s Pretty Muff, Mr. Ticker’s Toenail, Parched Kisses, Historic Residences of the Malay Peninsula… Oh!” He pulled out a battered copy of The Divided Man. “Does this mean I’m immortal, or does it mean I’m ridiculously obscure?”
“Depends on how you feel about Kitty’s Pretty Muff,” Maggie sai
d, taking the book from the shelf. “Isn’t the telephone book in here somewhere?” She began to root in the lower half of the cabinet.
“Faeries, Tales, and Confusions at Birth,” Underhill said, removing another book from the shelves.
Maggie pulled a hidden lever, and another shelf moved into view from the back of the cabinet, carrying a silver cocktail shaker containing a musty collapsed web and a shriveled spider, a tarnished ice bucket, a nearly empty bottle of gin, a nearly full bottle of vermouth, and a bottle of rusty-looking olives. “This stuff must have been here since Prohibition,” Maggie said. “No telephone book, though.” She stood up, shrugged, and took her book to the couch.
“This isn’t much like traveling with Harry Beevers and Conor Linklater,” Poole said. “When I asked Conor if he wanted to change his mind about coming along with us, he said, ‘I got better ways to idolize my time.’ ” He looked out the window and saw big flakes of snow spinning through the close dark air.
“What’s your book about?” Underhill asked behind him.
“Torture,” Maggie said.
Poole heard car horns blasting, and stepped closer to the window. The heads of horses appeared at the far right of his vision, gradually pulling into view an empty hansom cab driven by a man with a fat purple face. The driver steered his cab imperiously down the center of the street, forcing oncoming cars out of its way.
“So is mine,” Underhill said. “Just kidding, Maggie. Keep your hands off.”
“No pictures in yours. Mine is nothing but pictures.”
“We got the right books.”
Poole turned from the window as Maggie left Underhill grinning on the couch behind her and marched with a look of mock determination to a low wooden chest beneath the mirror. Poole walked over and picked up Maggie’s book. On every page was a photograph of kittens dressed in jackets and hats of the 1920s. The kittens seemed to be held in place with metal straps and braces concealed beneath their outfits, and had been posed reading novels, dealing cards, playing tennis, smoking pipes, getting married.… The kittens’ eyes were glassy with terror, and all of them looked dead.
