Koko brt-1

by Peter Straub

  “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.”

  “Because 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 sai
d.

  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.

  Tattered posters advertising a Chinese opera covered the walls of the arcade. Other posters concerned rock clubs. A few shops along, the gloom grew thicker and the arcade angled off toward what must be Elizabeth Street. The ripped posters led toward a shoebox-sized restaurant called Malay Coffee Shop, which showed a large white CLOSED sign on its door. A few feet farther, just before the angle in the arcade, a narrow tiled staircase led down to another level. A fat arrow had been painted on the side of the staircase, below it the words FORTUNE BARBER SHOP.

  Harry went slowly down the steps, ducking his head to see how far the lower level extended. Two grey-haired barbers sat in their own chairs inside the Fortune Barber Shop while a third barber snipped at an old woman’s hair. Two other shops, one with a poster in its window of a levitating Ninja with an outflung leg, filled out the short downstairs level. Harry stopped moving about halfway down the stairs. His eyes were at the level of the arcade’s tiled floor. Nobody walking in would see him, but he would have a perfect vi
ew of them.

  He moved a step up, and in the brighter outside air two short males moved past the arcade’s entrance. The zombies. As soon as they had passed the entrance, they snapped back to reappear, looking into the arcade. Their sunglasses were like wide black holes in their faces. Harry moved quietly down a step and watched the two zombies glance at each other and take a step into the arcade. Their bodies blurred in the darkness. They came forward, stocky, almost stumping on their legs like sumo wrestlers. As they came nearer Harry saw that their hands were balled into fists. They stood three feet from him, their thick short arms swinging. One of them spoke softly in Chinese, and Harry understood the words as if they had been in English. The bastard isn’t here. The second man grunted.

  His life was not like other lives, other people thought the world was solid and were blind to the great tears and rents in the surface of existence. Harry’s mind filled with the wingbeats of insects and the cries of children.

  The surface of the world almost shredded and allowed his real life to take place.

  The two men turned around in perfect unison, like dance partners, and went back outside the arcade. Harry waited on the steps a minute, two minutes, he did not know how long. The old woman from the barber shop came slowly up the steps, rapping on the tiles with a wooden cane. He moved aside to let her pass along the railing, and she wordlessly pulled herself up past him. He was invisible: no one had seen him. He wiped his wet palms on the flanks of his coat and went up to the main level of the arcade.

  Empty: the world had closed up again.

  Harry trotted downstairs to the Ninja shop and spent fifty-six dollars on a gravity knife and a pair of handcuffs. Then he mounted the stairs again.

  At the entrance he bent forward and looked south down Bowery. The limousine was no longer parked in front of the restaurant. Harry smiled. Inside the chauffeur’s once doubtless pristine white handkerchief was a fat yellow wad of Harry Beevers.

  Someone was staring down from a window high up in Confucius Plaza; someone in a passing car turned his head to gaze at him. Someone was watching him, for his life was like a film and he was the hero of that film. “I found it,” he said, knowing that someone heard him: or that someone watching him had read his lips.