Koko
Koko
Peter Straub
Peter Straub’s most acclaimed and biggest-selling novel – a visceral thriller with its roots in Vietnam – now reissued in a different cover style and making its first appearance on the HarperCollins list.‘KOKO… ’ Only four men knew what it meant. Vietnam vets. One was a doctor. One was a lawyer. One was a working stiff. One was a writer. All were as different as men could be – yet all were bound eternally together by a single shattering secret. And now they are joined together again on a quest that could take them from the graveyards and fleshpots of the Far East to the human jungle of New York, hunting an inhuman ghost of the past risen from nightmare darkness to kill and kill…
Koko
Peter Straub
Copyright (#ulink_b9283ec9-f597-587f-9551-41ecefbffa72)
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd.
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk/)
First published in Great Britain by Viking 1988
Copyright © Seafront Corporation 1988
The Author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalgue copy of this book is available from the British Library
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks
HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication
Source ISBN: 9780007103676
Ebook Edition © JUNE 2010 ISBN: 9780007375516
Version: 2016-11-23
Praise (#ulink_b3a0c62d-62cb-5ef1-ada6-3ee5cf0962c6)
KOKO
‘A masterpiece…a crime novel, a suspense novel, a horror novel and a study of human relationships. Fascinating and complex.’
Houston Post
‘Gripping…The characters are realistic and complex, and the story continues to resonate in the mind long after the final page is turned.’
Publishers Weekly
‘Vastly entertaining and brilliantly written…evokes bizarre fevers and brimstone terror…Peter Straub flexes all his muscles…his style is at its peak…Koko is his finest work…with an inspired, wonderfully handled ending…judged as a thriller it deserves to be compared to the best.’
Washington Post
‘Remarkable…an unusual and wonderfully suspenseful thriller…evokes a fascinating and frightening picture of war and its aftermath.’
Boston Herald
Dedication (#u3adbd2c5-20dc-50d1-aba7-1ed05cfe7008)
For Susan Straub and For Lila J. Kalinich, M.D.
Epigraph (#u3adbd2c5-20dc-50d1-aba7-1ed05cfe7008)
I believe it is possible and even recommended to play the blues on everything.
FRANK MORGAN, alto saxophonist
Table of Contents
Cover Page (#ud85ec293-edd0-5f44-9802-bd25cf1d3b20)
Title Page (#u67db81be-21ae-5340-95e4-3beae2cfe324)
Copyright (#u08fe8b18-f444-54fa-9946-773a0f8b1f90)
Praise (#u2f1690c7-02ff-592d-8205-df3ef4d92aba)
Dedication (#u43a2ce6c-1a58-579d-8f9a-78a343e643ea)
Epigraph (#u635e66c0-b4b7-53fc-9089-3750788b0349)
PART ONE The Dedication (#uf9a4a06d-ca60-518a-a900-af566461a3a0)
1 Washington, D.C. (#u15ba07f5-a844-5a50-ab1c-da1abbbd8609)
2 Message (#ue10eb0fa-0d4e-5780-b6bc-90cacb78cf9e)
3 Reunion (#u61cc00c2-d657-5c5f-a232-65989376baa2)
4 The Answering Machine (#ub12a66d6-6e4a-5d3a-8c2f-86ec0d449209)
5 Beans Beevers at the Memorial (#ubbe0ed45-de8c-5851-8d7d-b08980e7ab0e)
PART TWO Preparations for Takeoff (#udc2a6cd7-e17e-5de0-bbf5-071c8240a935)
6 Beevers at Rest (#udec070fb-548f-5522-9b12-234f07894a9a)
7 Conor at Work (#u8549c5d4-8f36-5aca-aab8-15833900feef)
8 Dr Poole at Work and Play (#u87daaac8-e3a9-5d0a-b598-16124cd9d16f)
9 In Search of Maggie Lah (#u247c98a0-b3d6-5ebf-90af-cbd950a778f1)
10 Conversations and Dreams (#u575ff2b7-4503-5c57-976a-b2631fc16546)
11 Koko (#uff721bee-7d43-530f-8d55-0f6aa7586617)
PART THREE The Tiger Balm Gardens (#ue29ee6f3-1424-5a78-a767-80c07d7be532)
12 Men in Motion (#u22cff4cb-4258-5906-9fd3-c6c63e0086cf)
13 Koko (#u4f850afb-dfc1-5c55-9f8a-4bad9681670a)
14 Remembering Dragon Valley (#litres_trial_promo)
15 Meeting Lola in the Park (#litres_trial_promo)
16 The Library (#litres_trial_promo)
17 Koko (#litres_trial_promo)
PART FOUR In the Underground Garage (#litres_trial_promo)
18 The Steps to Heaven (#litres_trial_promo)
19 How Dengler Died (#litres_trial_promo)
20 Telephone (#litres_trial_promo)
21 The Riverside Terrace (#litres_trial_promo)
22 Victor Spitalny (#litres_trial_promo)
PART FIVE The Sea of Forgetfulness (#litres_trial_promo)
23 Robbie, with Lantern (#litres_trial_promo)
24 In the Cave (#litres_trial_promo)
25 Coming Home (#litres_trial_promo)
26 Koko (#litres_trial_promo)
PART SIX The Real Raw Taste (#litres_trial_promo)
27 Pat and Judy (#litres_trial_promo)
28 A Funeral (#litres_trial_promo)
29 The Line-up (#litres_trial_promo)
30 A Second Reunion (#litres_trial_promo)
31 Encounters (#litres_trial_promo)
PART SEVEN The Killing Box (#litres_trial_promo)
32 First Night at the Pforzheimer (#litres_trial_promo)
33 Second Night at the Pforzheimer (#litres_trial_promo)
34 The End of the Search (#litres_trial_promo)
35 The Killing Box (#litres_trial_promo)
PART EIGHT Tim Underhill (#litres_trial_promo)
And then what happened? (#litres_trial_promo)
Keep Reading (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
By Peter Straub (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
PART ONE The Dedication (#ulink_ac3cdc70-e985-5872-86a1-e90c522360c2)
1 Washington, D.C. (#ulink_27edc551-8955-5b35-b8a0-25c8b41c5172)
1
At three o’clock in the afternoon of a grey, blowing mid-November day, a baby doctor named Michael Poole looked down through the windows of his second-floor room into the parking lot of the Sheraton Hotel. A VW van, spray-painted with fuzzy peace symbols and driven by either a drunk or a lunatic, was going for a ninety-eight-point turn in the space between the first parking row and the entrance, trapping a honking line of cars in the single entry lane. As Michael watched, the van completed its turn by grinding its front bumper into the grille and headlights of a dusty little Camaro. The whole front end of the Camaro buckled in. Horns blew. The van now faced a stalled, frustrated line of enemy vehicles. The driver backed up, and Michael thought he was going to escape by reversing down the first row of cars to the exit onto Woodley Road. Instead, the driver nipped the van into an empty space two cars down. ‘Well, damn,’ Michael said to himself – the van’s driver had sacrificed the Camaro for a parking place.
Michael had called down twice for messages, but none of the other three men had checked in yet. Unless Conor Linklater was going to ride a motorcycle all the way from Norwalk, they would almost certainly take the shuttle from New York, but Michael enjoyed the fantasy that while he stood at the window he would see them all step out of the van – Harry ‘Beans’ Beevers, the Lost Boss, the world’s worst lieutenant; Tina Pumo, Pumo the Puma, whom Underhill had called ‘Lady’ Pumo; and wild little Conor Linklater, the only other survivors of their platoon. Of course they would arrive separately, in taxis, at the front of the hotel. But he wished they would get out of the van. He hadn’t known how strongly he wanted them to join him – he wanted to see the Memorial first by himself, but he wanted even more to see it later with them.
Michael Poole watched the doors of the van slide open. There appeared first a hand clamped around the neck of a bottle which Michael immediately recognized as Jack Daniel’s sour mash whiskey.
The Jack Daniel’s was slowly followed by a thick arm, then a head concealed by a floppy jungle hat. The whole man, now slamming the driver’s door, was well over six feet tall and weighed at least two hundred and thirty pounds. He wore tiger-stripe fatigues. Two smaller men similarly dressed left through the sliding door in the side of the van, and a big bearded man in a worn flak jacket closed the van’s passenger door and went around the front to take the bottle. He laughed, shook his head, and upended it into his mouth before passing it to one of the others. Individually and collectively they looked just enough like dozens of soldiers Poole had known for him to lean forward, staring, his forehead pressed against the glass.
Of course he knew none of these men. The resemblance was generic. The big man was not Underhill, and the others were none of the others.
He wanted to see people he had known over there, that was the large simple truth. He wanted a great grand reunion with everyone he had ever seen in Vietnam, living or dead. And he wanted to see the Memorial – in fact Poole wanted to love the Memorial. He was almost afraid to see it. From the pictures he had seen, the Memorial was beautiful, strong and stark, and brooding. That would be a Memorial worth loving. The only memorial he’d ever expected to have was a memorial to separateness, but it belonged to him and to the cowboys out in the parking lot, because they were forever distinct, as the dead were finally distinct. Together they were all so distinct that to Poole they almost felt like a secret country of their own.
There were names he wanted to find on the Memorial, names that stood in place of his own.
The big cowboy had taken a slip of paper from his shirt pocket and was writing, bent halfway over the hood of the van. The others unloaded duffel bags from the back of the van. The Jack Daniel’s bottle circulated until the driver took a last slug and eased it into one of the bags.
Now Michael wanted to be outside, to be moving. According to the schedule he picked up at the registration desk downstairs, the parade up Constitution Avenue had already begun. By the time he had his first look at the Memorial and came back, the others would have checked in.
Unless, that is, Harry Beevers had managed to get drunk at the bar of Tina Pumo’s restaurant and was still asking for one more vodka martini, one more little teeny martooni, we’ll catch the five o’clock shuttle instead of the four o’clock, or the six o’clock, or the seven. Tina Pumo, the only one of the old group Poole saw with anything like regularity, had told him that Beevers sometimes spent all afternoon in his place. Poole’s only contact with Harry Beevers in four or five years had come three months before, when Beevers had called him up to read aloud a Stars and Stripes article, sent to Beevers by his brother, about a series of random murders committed in the Far East by someone who identified himself as Koko.
Poole stepped back from the window. It was not time for Koko, now. The giant in tiger stripes and jungle hat finished putting his note under one of the Camaro’s windshield wipers. What could it say? Sorry I beat up your car, man, come around for a shot of Jack –
Poole sat down on the edge of the bed, picked up the receiver, and after a second of hesitation dialed Judy’s number at school.
When she answered he said, ‘Well, I’m here, but the other guys haven’t checked in yet.’
‘Do you want me to say, “Poor Michael”?’ asked Judy.
‘No, I thought you’d like to know what’s going on.’
‘Look, Michael, is something special on your mind? This conversation has no point. You’re going to spend a couple of days going all drunk and sentimental with your old army buddies. Do I have any place in that? I’d just make you feel guilty.’
‘I still wish you’d have come along.’
‘I think the past is in the past because that’s where it belongs. Does that tell you anything?’
‘I guess it does,’ Michael said. There was a moment of silence that went on too long. She would not speak until he did. ‘Okay,’ Michael finally said. ‘I’ll probably see Beevers and Tina Pumo and Conor tonight, and there are some ceremonies I’d like to take part in tomorrow. I’ll get home Sunday about five or six, I suppose.’
‘Your patients are extremely understanding.’
‘Diaper rash is rarely fatal,’ Michael said, and Judy uttered a smoky exhalation that might have been laughter.
‘Should I call you tomorrow?’
‘Don’t bother. It’s nice, but don’t bother, really.’
‘Really,’ Michael said, and hung up.
2
Michael moved slowly through the Sheraton’s lobby looking at the men lined up at the registration desk, among them the big cowboy in tiger-stripe fatigues and his three buddies, and the groups of people sitting on padded dark green chairs and banquettes. The Sheraton was one of those hotels with no true bar. Women in clinging, filmy dresses brought drinks to the twenty or thirty tables in the sunken lobby. The waitresses all seemed to have descended from the same tall, languid, handsome family. Where these princesses might normally have served gin-and-tonics and Perriers-and-lime to men with dark suits and power haircuts – to men like Michael Poole’s neighbors in Westchester County – now they set down shots of tequila and bottles of beer before wildmen in battle jackets and bush hats, in funky fatigues and funkier khaki ballcaps.
The sulphurous conversation with his wife made Michael want to sit down among the wildmen and order a drink. But if he sat down, he would be drawn into things. Someone would begin to talk to him. He would buy a drink for a man who had been in some of the same places he had been, or had been near the places he had been, or who had a friend who had been near those places. Then the man would buy him a drink. This would lead to stories, memories, theories, introductions, vows of brotherhood. Eventually he would join the parade as part of a gang of strangers and see the Memorial through the thick insulating comfort of alcohol. Michael kept moving.
‘Cavalry all the way!’ shouted a whiskey voice behind his back.
Michael went through a side door out into the parking lot. It was just a little too cold for his tweed jacket and sweater, but he decided not to go back upstairs for his coat. The heavy billowing sky threatened rain, but Michael decided that he didn’t much care if it rained.
Cars streamed up the ramp from the street. Florida license plates, Texas plates, Iowa and Kansas and Alabama, every kind and make of vehicle, from hardcore GM pickups to tinny Japanese imports. The van cowboy and his friends had driven to Washington from New Jersey, the Garden State. Tucked beneath the Camaro’s windshield wiper was the note: You were in my way so FUCK YA!!!
Down on the street, Michael flagged a cab and asked the driver to take him to Constitution Avenue.
‘You gonna walk in the parade?’ the driver immediately asked.
‘That’s right.’
‘You’re a vet, you were over there?’
‘That’s right.’ Michael looked up. From the back, the cabdriver could have been one of the earnest, desperate, slightly crazed students doomed to flunk out of medical school: colorless plastic glasses, dishwater hair, pale youthful skin. His ID plate said that his name was Thomas Strack. Blood from an enormous pimple had dried on the collar of his shirt.
‘You ever in combat? Like in a firefight or something?’
‘Now and then.’
‘There’s somethin’ I always wanted to ask – I hope you don’t take no offense or nothing.’
Michael knew what the cabdriver was going to ask. ‘If you don’t want me to take offense, don’t ask an offensive question.’
‘Okay.’ The driver turned his head to glance at Michael, then looked straight ahead again. ‘Okay, no need to get heavy.’
‘I can’t tell you how it feels to kill someone,’ Michael said.
‘You mean you never did it.’
‘No, I mean I can’t tell you.’
The cabbie drove the rest of the way in boiling silence. You coulda told me something. Gimme a little gore, why don’t you? Lemme see that good old guilt, lemme see that fine old rapture. The past is in the past because that’s where it belongs. Don’t bother, really. You were in my way, so fuck ya.
I’ll take a triple Finlandia martini on the rocks, please, hold the olives, hold the vermouth, please, hold the rocks, please, and get the same thing for my four hundred buddies in here, please, They might look a little funny, but they’re my tribe.
‘This okay?’ the cabbie asked. Beside the car was a wall of people. Michael could see flags and men carrying banners suspended between poles. He paid the driver and left the cab.
Michael could see over the heads of most of the people lining the sidewalk. Here the tribe had gathered, all right. Men who had once been soldiers, most of them dressed as though they were still soldiers, filled the width of Constitution Avenue. In platoon-sized groups interspersed with high school bands, they marched raggedly down the street. Other people stood on the sidewalk and watched them go by because they approved of what they were, what they meant because of what they had done. By standing there the bystanders applauded. Until now, Michael realized, he had resisted fully believing in the reality of this parade.
It was not ticker tape and limousines on Fifth Avenue – the Iranian hostages had been given that one – but in most ways this was better, being more inclusive, less euphoric but more emotional. Michael edged through the people on the sidewalk. He stepped off the curb and fell in behind the nearest large and irregular group. Surprised tears instantly filled his eyes.
The men before him were three-fourths jungle fighters with everything but Claymores and M-16s, and one-fourth pudgy WWII vets who looked like ex-boxers. Michael realized that the sun had come out only when he saw their long shadows stretching out to him on the street.
He could see Tim Underhill, another long shadow, striding along with his belly before him and cigar smoke drifting in his wake. In his mind, Underhill was muttering obscene hilarious remarks about everyone in sight and wearing his summer uniform of a bandanna and blousy fatigue pants. A streak of mosquito blood was smeared across his left shoulder.
In spite of everything, Michael wished that Underhill were beside him now. Michael realized that he had been considering Underhill – not brooding or thinking about him, considering him – since Harry Beevers had called him at the end of October to tell him about the newspaper articles his brother had sent him from Okinawa.
In two separate incidents, three people, an English tourist in his early forties and an older American couple, had been murdered in Singapore just about the time the Iranian hostages had returned to America. The murders were thought to have been committed at least a week to ten days apart. The Englishman’s body was found on the grounds of the Goodwood Park Hotel, those of the American couple in a vacant bungalow in the Orchard Road section of the city. All three bodies had been mutilated, and on two of them had been found playing cards scrawled with an unusual and enigmatic name: Koko. Six months later, in the summer of 1981, two French journalists were found similarly mutilated in their Bangkok hotel room. Playing cards with the same name had been placed on the bodies. The only difference between these killings and those that had happened after Ia Thuc, a decade and a half earlier, was that the cards were not regimental, but ordinary commercial playing cards.
Michael thought Underhill lived in Singapore. At least Underhill had always claimed that he was going to move there after he got out of the army. But Poole could not make the mental leap required to convict Tim Underhill of murder.
Poole had known two extraordinary human beings during his time in Vietnam, two men who had stood out as exceptionally worthy of respect and affection in the half-circus, half-laboratory of human behaviour that a longstanding combat unit becomes. Tim Underhill was one, and a boy from Milwaukee named M.O. Dengler was the other. The bravest people he had ever known, Underhill and little Dengler had seemed perfectly at home in Vietnam.
Tim Underhill had gotten himself back to the Far East as soon as possible after the war and had become a moderately successful crime novelist. M. O. Dengler was killed in a freakish street accident while on R&R in Bangkok with another soldier, named Victor Spitalny, and never returned from Asia at all.
Oh, Michael Poole missed Underhill. He missed them both, Underhill and Dengler.
The group of vets behind Michael, as scattered and varied as those before him, gradually caught up with him. He became aware that he was no longer marching alone, but was moving along between the crowds lining both sides of the street with a couple Dengler-sized boonie-rats, fiercely moustached, and an assortment of polyester-suited VFW types.
As if he had been reading his thoughts, one of the Denglersized boonie-rats walking beside Michael sidled up to him and whispered something. Michael bent down, cupping his ear.
‘I was a hell of a fighter, man,’ the little ex-soldier whispered a shade louder. Tears gleamed in his eyes.
‘To tell you the truth,’ Michael said, ‘you remind me of one of the best soldiers I ever knew.’
‘No shit.’ The man nodded briskly. ‘What outfit was you in?’
Poole named his division and his battalion.
‘What year?’ The man cocked his head to check out Poole’s face.
‘’Sixty-eight, ‘sixty-nine.’
‘Ia Thuc,’ the boonie-rat said immediately. ‘I remember that. That was you guys, right? Time magazine and all that shit?’
Poole nodded.
‘Fuckin’-A. They shoulda give that Lieutenant Beevers a fuckin’ Medal of Honor for what he done, and then took it away again for shootin’ off his mouth in front of fuckin’ journalists,’ the boonie-rat said, sidling away with an easy fluid motion that would have been noiseless if they had been walking over brittle twigs.
Two fat women with short fluffy hair, pastel pantsuits, and placid church-picnic faces were rhythmically waving between them a red banner with the stark black letters POW-MIA. A few paces behind marched two youngish ex-soldiers bearing another banner: COMPENSATE FOR AGENT ORANGE. Agent Orange –
Victor Spitalny had tilted his head and stuck out his tongue, claiming that the stuff tasted good. You motherfuckers, drink it down! This shit’s boo-koo good for your insides! Washington and Spanky Burrage and Trotman, the black soldiers on the detail, cracked up, falling into the thick jungly growth beside the trail, slapping each other on the back and sides, repeating ‘boo-koo good for your insides’ and enraging Spitalny, whom they knew had only been trying, in his stupid way, to be funny. The smell of Agent Orange, halfway between gasoline and industrial solvent, stuck to all of them until sweat and insect repellent and trail grime either covered it up or washed it off.
Poole caught himself wiping the palms of his hands together, but it was too late to wash away the Agent Orange.
How does it feel to kill somebody? I can’t tell you because I can’t tell you. I think maybe I got killed myself, but not before I killed my son. You shit in your pants, man, you laugh so hard.
3
By the time Michael Poole reached the park, the parade had melted down into a wandering crowd, marchers and onlookers moving together across the grass. Loose, ragged groups streamed over the entire landscape, walking through the sparse trees, filling the whole scene. Though he could not see the Memorial, Michael knew where it was. About a hundred yards before him, the crowds were moving down a grade into a natural bowl from which came the psychic flare of too many people. The Memorial stood at the bottom of all those people. Michael’s scalp tingled.
A phalanx of men in wheelchairs were pushing themselves across the long stretch of grass before the bowl. One of the chairs tilted over sideways and a gaunt, black-haired, legless man with a shockingly familiar face spilled out. Michael’s heart froze – the man was Harry Beevers. Michael started to run forward to help. Then he checked himself. The fallen man was surrounded by friends, and in any case he could not be Poole’s old lieutenant. Two others righted the chair. They held it steady as the man braced himself on his stumps. Then he pushed himself up onto the metal footrests. The man reached up, grasped the armrests, and with neat gymnastic skill deposited himself in his own seat.
The men in wheelchairs were gradually overtaken by the crowd. Michael looked around him. All about were familiar faces which at second glance resolved into the faces of strangers. Various large bearded versions of Tim Underhill were moving toward the grassy bowl, also several wiry Denglers and Spitalnys. A beaming, round-faced Spanky Burrage slapped the palm of a black man in a Special Forces hat. Poole wondered what had happened to the dap, the complicated series of handgrips that blacks in Vietnam used to greet one another. There had been a wonderful mixture of seriousness and poker-faced hilarity about daps.
People streamed down into the bowl. Old women and babies clutched tiny flags. To Michael’s right, two young men on crutches were followed by an old gaffer, his bald head factory-white, with a row of medals pinned above the left pocket of his plaid shirt. Beside him a florid septuagenarian in a VFW garrison cap struggled with a shiny four-sided walker. Poole looked into the face of every man roughly his own age, and found most of them looking back at him – a crossfire of frustrated recognitions. He took a step forward across the trampled grass and looked straight ahead.
The Memorial was a long, intermittently visible line of sheer black tying together the heads and bodies of the people before it. Men ranged all along its top, walking along over its crew cut of grass as if pacing it off. Others lay down and leaned over to trace names engraved in the polished stone. Poole moved several steps forward, the crowded bowl in front of him widened and fell away, and the entire scene stood before him.
The huge broken black wing of the Memorial was surrounded by people without being engulfed by them. Poole imagined that it would take a lot to engulf this Memorial. Pictures had not quite conveyed its scale. Its strength came from its mass. Only inches high at the tapered ends, it rose to more than twice the height of a man at its folded center. Separated from it by a foot or so of earth already sprouting little flags, letters pinned to sticks, wreaths, and photographs of the dead, a sloping path of granite blocks ran its length.
The people before this emphatic scar in the earth passed slowly before the increasingly tall panels. Now and then they paused to lean forward and touch a name. Michael saw a lot of embraces. A skinnier version of an unloved basic training sergeant was inserting a handful of small red poppies one by one into the cracks between the panels. From immediately in front of the Memorial, a large wedge-shaped crowd fanned upward into the grassy bowl. A dense impacted wave of emotion came from all of these people.
Here was what was left of the war. The Vietnam War consisted of the names etched into the Memorial and the crowd either passing back and forth before those names or standing looking at them. For Poole, the actual country of Vietnam was now just another place – Vietnam was many thousands of miles distant, with an embattled history and an idiosyncratic and inaccessible culture. Its history and culture had briefly, disastrously intersected ours. But the actual country of Vietnam was not Vietnam; that was here, in these American names and faces.
The ghost-Underhill had appeared beside Michael again, kneading one beefy shoulder with bloody fingers – bright smears of insect blood across his tanned skin. Ah, Lady Michael, they’re all good folks, they just let themselves get messed up by the war, that’s all. A dry chuckle. We didn’t do that, did we, Lady Michael? We tend to be above it all, don’t we? Tell me we do.
I thought I saw you smash in a car to get to a parking space, Poole said to this imaginary Tim Underhill.
I only smash up cars on paper.
Underhill, did you kill those people in Singapore and Bangkok? Did you put the Koko cards on their bodies?
I don’t think you’d better pin that one on me, Lady Michael.
‘Airborne!’ someone shouted.
‘Airborne all the way!’ someone else shouted back.
Poole worked his way closer to the Memorial through the mostly stationary crowd. The sergeant who looked like his old sergeant from Fort Sill was now slipping the tiny red poppies into the crack between the last two tall panels. Protruding from between the panels, the little poppies reflected twice, so that two black shadows lay behind each red dart. A big wild-haired man held up a Texas-sized flag with a waving golden fringe. Poole stepped up beside a Mexican family posted directly beside the granite walk and for the first time saw the reflection in the tall black panel. Mirrored people streamed before him. The reflections of the Mexican family, a man and a woman, a pair of teenage girls, and a small boy holding a flag, all stared at the same spot on the wall. Between them, the reflected parents held a framed photograph of a young Marine. Poole’s own uptilted head seemed, like the others, to be searching for a specific name. Then, as in an optical illusion, the real Poole saw names leap out from the black wall. Donald Z. Pavel, Melvin O. Elvan, Dwight T. Pouncefoot. He looked at the next panel. Art A. McCartney, Cyril P. Downtain, Masters J. Robinson, Billy Lee Barnhart, Paul P. J. Bedrock. Howard X. Hoppe. Bruce G. Hyssop. All the names seemed strange and familiar, in equal measure.
Someone behind him said ‘Alpha Papa Charlie,’ and Michael turned his head, his ears tingling. Now people completely filled the shallow bowl. They covered the rise behind it. Alpha Papa Charlie. Without asking, there was no way of telling which of the men, white-haired, bald, pony-tailed, with faces clear and pockmarked, seamed and scarred, electric with feeling, had spoken. From a huddle of four or five men in jungle hats and green jackets came another, rougher voice saying ‘…lost him outside Da Nang.’
Da Nang. That was in I Corps, his Vietnam. For a moment or two there Poole could not move his arms or legs. Into him streamed place names he had not remembered for fourteen years – Chu Lai, Tarn Ky. Poole saw a narrow dirt alleyway behind a row of huts; he smelled the clumps of drying marijuana hanging from the ceiling of a lean-to where a mamasan with the irresistible name of Si Van Vo lived and prospered. The Dragon Valley, oh God. Phu Bai, LZ Sue, Hue, Quang Tri. Alpha Papa Charlie. On the other side of a collection of thatched huts a line of water buffalos moved across a mud plain toward a mountain trail. Millions of bugs darkened the humid air. Marble Mountain. All those charming little places between the Annamese Cordillera and the South China Sea, where the dead SP4 Cotton, killed by a sniper named Elvis, had lazily spun in frothing pink water. The A Shau Valley: yea, though I walk…
Yea, though I walk through the A Shau Valley, I shall fear no evil. Michael could see M. O. Dengler bouncing along a high narrow trail, grinning over his shoulder at him, blivets and ammunition strung across his back. On the other side of Dengler’s joyous face was a green, unfolding landscape of unbelievable depth and delicacy, plunging thousands of feet into mists, shading into dozens of different shades of green and rolling on all the way to a green, heavenly infinity. You been bad? Dengler had just asked him. If you haven’t, you ain’t got nothin’ to worry about. Yea, though I walk through the A Shau Valley…
Poole finally realized he was weeping.
‘Polish on both sides, yeah,’ said an old woman’s voice quite near him. Poole wiped his eyes, but they filled again, so quickly he saw nothing but colorful blurs. ‘Whole neighborhood was Polish, both sides, up and down. Tom’s father was in the Big One, but the emphysema kept him home today.’ Poole took his handkerchief out of his pocket and pressed it to his eyes and tried to bring his crying under control. ‘I said, old man, you can do what you like but nothin’ is gonna keep me away from DC, come Veteran’s Day. Don’t you worry, son, nobody here minds if you cry your eyes out.’
Poole slowly realized that this last comment had been directed at him. He lowered his handkerchief. An obese white-haired woman in her sixties was looking at him with grand-motherly concern. Next to her stood a black man in a faded Special Forces jacket, an Anzac hat astride an unruly Afro.
‘Thanks,’ Poole said. ‘This thing’ – he gestured behind him at the Memorial – ‘finally got to me.’
The black ex-soldier nodded.
‘Actually, I heard somebody say something, can’t even remember what it was now…’
‘Yeah, me too,’ said the black man. ‘I heard somebody say “about twenty klicks from An Khe,” and I…my damn stomach just disappeared.’
‘I I Corps,’ Michael said. ‘You were a little south of me. Name’s Michael Poole, nice to meet you.’
‘Bill Pierce.’ The two men shook hands. ‘This lady here is Florence Majeski. Her son was in my unit.’
Poole had a strong, sudden desire to put his arms around the old woman, but he knew that he would break down again if he did that. He asked the first question that came to mind: ‘You get that hat off an ARVN?’
Pierce grinned. ‘Snatched it right off, riding by in a jeep. Poor little bastard.’
Then he knew what he really wanted to ask Pierce. ‘How can you find the names you’re looking for, in all this crowd?’
‘There’s Marines at both ends of the Memorial,’ Pierce said, ‘and they have books with all the names and the panels they’re on. Or you could ask one of the yellow caps. They’re just here today, on account of all the extra people.’ Pierce glanced at Mrs Majeski.
‘They had Tom right there in the book,’ the old lady said.
‘I see one over thataway,’ Pierce said, pointing off to Michael’s right. ‘He’ll find it for you.’ In the midst of a little knot of people, a tall, bearded, young white man in a yellow duckbill cap was consulting sheets in a looseleaf binder and then gesturing toward specific panels.
‘God bless you, son,’ said Mrs Majeski. ‘If you’re ever in Ironton, Pennsylvania, I want you to stop in and pay us a visit.’
‘Good luck,’ Pierce said.
‘Same to both of you.’ He smiled and turned away.
‘I mean it now!’ Mrs Majeski yelled. ‘You stop in and see us!’
Michael waved, and moved toward the man in the yellow cap. At least two dozen people had him circled, and all seemed to be leaning toward him. ‘I can only handle one at a time.’ the man with the cap said in a flat Midwestern voice. ‘Please, okay?’
Poole thought. The others ought to be at the hotel by now. This is a ridiculous gesture.
The young man in the yellow cap consulted his pages, indicated panels, wiped moisture from his forehead. Michael soon stood before him. The volunteer was wearing blue jeans and a denim shirt unsnapped halfway down over a damp grey T-shirt. His beard glistened with sweat. ‘Name,’ he said.
‘M. O. Dengler,’ Poole said.
The man riffled through his pages, located the D’s, and ran his finger down a column. ‘Here we go. The only Dengler is Dengler, Manuel Orosco, of Wisconsin. Which happens to be my home state. Panel fourteen west, line fifty-two. Right over there.’ He pointed to the right. Small poppies like red pinpoints dotted the edges of the panel, before which stood a large unmoving crowd. NO MORE VIETNAMS, announced a bright blue banner.
Manuel Orosco Dengler? The Spanish names were a surprise. A sudden thought stopped Michael as he made his way toward the blue banner through the crowd: the guide had given him the wrong Dengler. Then he remembered that the guide had said that this was the only Dengler. And the initials were right. Manuel Orosco had to be his Dengler.
Poole was directly in front of the Memorial once again. His shoulder touched the shoulder of a shaggy-haired, weeping vet with a handlebar moustache. Beside him a woman with white blonde hair to the waist of her blue jeans held the hand of a little girl, also blonde. A child without a father, as he was now forever a father without a child. On the other side of the broken strip of sod, planted with flags and wreaths and photographs of young soldiers stapled to wooden sticks, the four-teenth panel, west, loomed before him. Poole counted down until he reached the fifty-second line. The name of M.O. Dengler, MANUEL OROSCO DENGLER, etched in black polished granite, jumped out at him. Poole admired the surgical dignity of the engraving, the unadorned clarity of the letters. He knew that he had never had any choice about standing in front of Dengler’s name.
Dengler had even liked the C-rations scorned by the others. He claimed the dogfood taste of army turkey loaf, canned in 1945, was better than anything his mother had ever made. Dengler had liked being on patrol. (Hey, I was on patrol the whole time I was a kid.) Heat, cold, and dampness had affected him very little. According to Dengler, rainbows froze to the ground during Milwaukee ice storms and kids ran out of their houses, chipped off pieces of their favorite colors, and licked them until they were white. As for violence and the fear of death, Dengler said that you saw at least as much violence outside the normal Milwaukee tavern as in the average firefight; inside, he claimed, you saw a bit more.
In Dragon Valley, Dengler had fearlessly moved about under fire, dragging the wounded Trotman to Peters, the medic, keeping up a steady, calm, humorous stream of talk. Dengler had known that nothing there would kill him.
Poole stepped forward, careful not to trample on a photograph or a wreath, and ran his fingers over the sharp edges of Dengler’s name, carved into the chill stone.
He had a quick, unhappy, familiar vision of Spitalny and Dengler running together through billowing smoke toward the mouth of the cave at Ia Thuc.
Poole turned away from the wall. His face felt too tight. The blonde woman gave him a sympathetic, wary half-smile and pulled her little girl backwards out of his way.
Poole wanted to see his ex-warriors. Feelings of loneliness and isolation wrapped themselves tightly around him.
2 Message (#ulink_79297092-866f-5474-938b-9a5e69eb3d1a)
1
Michael was so certain that a message from his friends would be waiting for him at the hotel that once he got there he marched straight from the revolving door to the desk. Harry Beevers had assured him that he and the others would arrive ‘sometime in the afternoon.’ It was now just before ten minutes to five.
Poole started to scan the wall behind the desk for his messages as soon as he could read the room numbers beneath the pigeonholes. When he was three-fourths of the way across the lobby, he saw one of the white hotel message forms inserted diagonally into his own rectangular box. He immediately felt much less tired. Beevers and the other two had arrived.
Michael stepped up to the desk and caught the clerk’s eye. ‘There’s a message for me.’ he said. ‘Poole, room 204.’ He took the oversize key from his jacket pocket and showed it to the clerk, who began to inspect the wall behind him with an almost maddening lack of haste. At last the clerk found the correct slot and withdrew the message. He glanced at the form as he handed it to Poole, then smiled.
‘Sir.’
Michael took the form, looked first at the name, and turned his back on the clerk to read the message. Tried to call back. Did you really hang up on me? Judy. The time 3:55 was stamped on the form in purple ink – she had called just after Michael had left his room.
He turned around and found the clerk looking at him blankly. ‘I’d like to know if some people who were supposed to be here by now have checked in yet.’
Poole spelled the names.
The clerk slowly pecked at buttons on a computer terminal, frowned, tilted his head, frowned again, and without changing his posture in any way looked sideways at Michael and said, ‘Mr Beevers and Mr Pumo have not arrived as yet. We have no booking for a Mr Linklater.’
Conor was probably saving money by sleeping in Pumo’s room.
Poole turned away, folded Judy’s message into his jacket pocket, and for the first time since his return saw what had happened to the lobby.
Men in dark suits and striped neckties now occupied the banquettes and tables. Most of them had no facial hair and wore white name tags crowded with print. They were talking quietly, consulting legal pads, punching numbers into pocket computers. During his first surreal eighteen months back from Vietnam, Michael Poole had been able to tell if a man had been in Vietnam just by the way he held his body. His instinct for distinguishing vets from civilians had faded since then, but he knew he could not be mistaken about this group.
‘Hello, sir,’ said a clarion voice at his elbow.
Poole looked down at a beaming young woman with a fanatical face surrounded by a bubble of blonde hair. She held a tray of glasses filled with black liquid.
‘Might I inquire, sir, if you are a veteran of the Vietnam conflict?’
‘I was in Vietnam,’ Poole said.
‘The Coca-Cola Company joins the rest of America in thanking you personally for your efforts during the Vietnam conflict. We wish to take this opportunity to express our gratitude to you, and to introduce you to our newest product, Diet Coke, in the hope that you will enjoy it and will share your pleasure with your friends and fellow veterans.’
Poole looked upward and saw that a long, brilliantly red banner of some material like parachute silk had been suspended far above the lobby. White lettering said: THE COCA-COLA CORPORATION AND DIET COKE SALUTE THE VETERANS OF VIETNAM! He looked back down at the girl.
‘I guess I’ll pass.’
The girl increased the wattage of her smile and looked amazingly like every one of the stewardesses on Poole’s flight into Vietnam from San Francisco. Her eyes shifted away from him, and she was gone.
The desk clerk said, ‘You’ll find your meeting areas downstairs, sir. Perhaps your friends are waiting for you there.’
2
The executives in their blue suits sipped their drinks, pretending not to monitor the girls walking around the lobby with their inhuman smiles and trays of Diet Coke. Michael touched Judy’s note in his jacket pocket. Either it or the tips of his fingers felt hot. If he sat down in the lobby bar to watch the arrivals coming through the door, within minutes he would be asked if he were a veteran of the Vietnam conflict.
Poole went to the bank of elevators and waited while an odd mixture of veterans and Coca-Cola executives, each group pretending the other group did not exist, left the car. Only one other man, a drunken mountainous being in tiger-striped fatigues, entered the elevator with him. The man studied the buttons and pushed SIXTEEN four or five times, then stumbled against the railing at the back of the car. He emitted a foggy bourbon-flavored burp. Poole finally recognized him as the van driver who had smashed into the Camaro.
‘You know this, don’t you?’ the giant asked him. He straightened up and began to bellow out a song Poole and every other veteran knew by heart. ‘Homeward bound, I wish I were homeward bound’…
Poole joined him on the second line, singing softly and tunelessly, and then the car stopped and the door opened. The giant, who had closed his eyes, continued to sing as Poole stepped from brown elevator carpet to green hall carpet. The doors slid shut. The elevator ascended and Poole heard the man’s voice echoing down the shaft.
3 Reunion (#ulink_1f5f80f8-582f-5a34-b29f-87177c0e5445)
1
A North Vietnamese soldier who looked like a twelve-year-old boy stood over Poole, prodding his neck with the barrel of a contraband Swedish machine gun he must have killed someone to get. Poole was pretending he was dead so that the NVA would not shoot him; his eyes were closed, but he had a vivid picture of the soldier’s face. Coarse black hair fell over a broad, unlined forehead. The black eyes and abrupt, almost lipless mouth seemed nearly serene in their lack of expression. When the rifle barrel pushed painfully into his neck, Poole let his head slide fractionally across the greasy earth in what he hoped was a realistic imitation of death. He could not die: he was a father and he had to live. Huge iridescent bugs whirred in the air above his face, their wings clacking like shears.
The tip of the barrel stopped jabbing his neck. An outsized drop of sweat squeezed itself out of Poole’s right eyebrow and trickled into the little depression between the bridge of his nose and the corner of his eye; one of the rusty-sounding insects blundered into his lips. When the N V A did not move on to any of the real corpses near him, Poole knew that he was going to die. His life was over, and he would never know his son, whose name was Robert. Like his love for this unknown son, the knowledge that the soldier was going to blow his head apart here on the narrow field full of dead men was total.
The shot did not come. Another of the rusty insects fell onto his sweat-slick cheek like a spent bullet and took a maddening length of time scrabbling to its legs before it lumbered off.
Then Poole heard a faint click and rustle, as of some object being pulled from a casing. The soldier’s feet moved as he shifted his weight. Poole realized that the man was kneeling beside him. An entirely uncurious hand, the size of a girl’s, pushed his head flat into the smeary earth, then yanked his right ear. His impersonation of a dead man had been too successful – the NVA wanted his ear as a trophy. Poole’s eyes snapped open by themselves, and before them, on the other side of a long grey knife where the sky should have been, hung the motionless black eyes of the other soldier. The North Vietnamese gasped. For a brimming half-second the air filled with the stench of fish sauce.
Poole jackknifed up off his bed and the NVA melted away. The telephone was ringing. The first thing he was fully conscious of was that his son was gone again.
Gone too were the corpses and the lumbering insects. Poole groped for the phone. ‘Mike?’ came tinnily from the receiver. He looked over his shoulder and saw bland pale wallpaper, a painting of a misty Chinese landscape over the bed. He found that he could breathe.
‘This is Michael Poole,’ he said into the receiver.
‘Mikey! How are you? You sound a little weirded-out, man.’ Poole finally recognized the voice of Conor Linklater, who had turned his head away from the telephone and was saying,’ ‘Hey, I got him! He’s in his room! I told you, man, Mike’s just gonna be in his room, remember?’ Then Conor was speaking to him again. ‘Hey, didn’t you get our message, man?’
Conversations with Conor Linklater, Michael was reminded, tended to be more scattered than conversations with most other people. ‘I guess not. What time did you get in?’ He looked at his watch and saw that he had been asleep for half an hour.
‘We got here about four-thirty, man, and we called you right away, and at first they said you weren’t here and Tina made ‘em look twice and then they said you were here, but nobody answered your phone. Okay. How come you didn’t answer our message?’
‘I went out to the Memorial,’ Poole said. ‘I got back a little before five. I was in the middle of a nightmare when you woke me up.’
Conor did not say good-bye and he did not hang up. Speaking more softly than before, he said, ‘Man, you sound like that nightmare really weirded you out.’
A rough hand tugging his ear away from his head; the ground greasy with blood. Poole’s memory gave him the picture of a field where exhausted men carried corpses toward impatient helicopters in the hazy blue light of early morning. Some of the corpses had blood-black holes where they should have had ears. ‘I guess I went back to Dragon Valley,’ Poole said, having just understood this.
‘Be cool,’ Conor Linklater said. ‘We’re already out the door.’ He hung up.
Poole splashed water on his face in the bathroom, roughly used a towel, and examined himself in the mirror. In spite of his nap he looked pale and tired. Megavitamins encased in clear plastic lay on the counter beside his toothbrush, and he peeled one free and swallowed it.
Before he went down the hall to the ice machine, he dialed the number for messages.
The man who answered told him that he had two messages. ‘The first one is stamped 3:55, and reads “Tried to call back –”’
‘I picked that one up at the desk,’ Poole said.
‘The second is stamped 4:50, and reads “We just arrived. Where are you? Call 1315 when you return.” It’s signed “Harry.”’
They had called while he was still downstairs in the lobby.
2
Michael Poole paced back and forth between the window overlooking the parking lot and the door. Whenever he got to the door, he stopped and listened. The elevators whirred in their chutes, carts squeaked past. After a little while he heard the ping! of the elevator, and he cracked the door open to look down the corridor. A trim grey-haired man in a white shirt and a blue suit with a name tag on the lapel was hurrying toward him a few paces ahead of a tall blonde woman wearing a grey flannel suit and a paisley foulard tied in a fussy bow. Poole pulled back his head and closed the door. He heard the man fumbling with his key a little way down the hall. Poole wandered back to the window and looked down at the parking lot. Half a dozen men dressed in unmatched parts of uniforms and holding beer cans had settled on the hoods and trunks of various automobiles. They looked like they were singing. Poole walked back to the door and waited. As soon as he heard the elevator land once again on his floor, he opened the door and leaned out into the hall.
Tall, agitated Harry Beevers and Conor Linklater turned into the hallway together, a harried-looking Tina Pumo a second later. Conor saw him first – he raised his fist and grinned and called out ‘Mikey baby!’ Unlike the last time Michael Poole had seen him, Conor Linklater was smooth-shaven and his pale reddish hair had been cut almost punkishly short. Conor normally wore baggy blue jeans and plaid shirts, but he had taken unaccustomed pains with his wardrobe. Somewhere he had obtained a black T-shirt with the stenciled legend AGENT ORANGE in big irregular yellow letters, and over this garment he wore a large, loose, many-pocketed black denim vest with conspicuous white stitching.’ There were sharp creases in his black trousers.
‘Conor, you’re a vision of delight,’ Poole said, stepping out into the corridor while holding the door with his outstretched left hand. Half a foot shorter than Michael, Conor Linklater stepped up to him and wrapped his arms around his chest and hugged him tightly.
‘Man,’ he said into Michael’s jawline, and playfully kissed him, ‘what a sight for poor eyes.’
Smirking at this ripe Linklaterism, Harry Beevers sidled up beside Poole and, in a wave of musky cologne, embraced him too, awkwardly. The corner of a briefcase struck Poole’s hip. ‘Michael, a sight for “poor eyes”,’ Beevers whispered into Poole’s ear. Poole gently pulled himself away and got a vivid close-up of Harry Beevers’ large, overlapping discolored teeth.
Tina Pumo bobbed back and forth before them in the corridor, grinning fiercely beneath his heavy moustache. ‘You were asleep?’ Pumo asked. ‘You didn’t get our message?’
‘Okay, shoot me,’ Poole said, smiling at Pumo. Conor and Beevers broke away from him and moved separately toward the door. Pumo ducked his head like Tom Sawyer, all but digging his toes into the carpet, said, ‘Aw, Mikey, I want to hug you too,’ and did it. ‘Good to see you again, man.’
‘You too,’ Michael said.
‘Let’s get inside before we get arrested for having an orgy,’ Harry Beevers said, already standing in the entry to Michael’s room.
‘Don’t get weird, Lieutenant,’ Conor Linklater said, but moved toward the doorway anyhow, glancing sideways at the other two. Pumo laughed and pounded Michael on the back, then let them go.
‘So what have you guys been doing since you got here?’ Michael asked. ‘Apart from swearing at me, that is.’
Wandering around the room, Conor said, ‘Teeny-Tiny’s been sweatin’ out his restaurant.’ Teeny-Tiny was a reference to the origins of Pumo’s nickname, which had begun as Tiny when he was an undersized child in an undersized town in upstate New York, was modulated later to Teeny, and had finally altered to Tina. After a decade of working in restaurants, Pumo now owned one in SoHo that served Vietnamese food and had been lavishly praised some months before in New York magazine. ‘He made two calls already, man. Him and the Health Department are gonna keep me awake all night.’
‘It’s not really anything,’ Tina protested. ‘I picked an awkward time to go away, that’s all. We have to do certain things in the restaurant, and I want to make sure they’re done right.’
‘Health Department?’ Michael asked.
‘Really, it’s nothing serious.’ Pumo grinned fiercely. His moustache bristled, the joyless creases at the corners of his eyes deepened and lengthened. ‘We’re doing great. Booked solid most nights.’ He sat on the edge of the bed. ‘Harry can vouch for me. We do great business.’
‘What can I say?’ Beevers asked. ‘You’re a success story.’
‘You looked around the hotel?’ Poole asked.
‘We checked out the meeting areas downstairs, had a look around,’ Pumo said. ‘It’s a big party. We can do some stuff tonight, if you want,’
‘Some party,’ Beevers said. ‘A lot of guys standing around with their thumbs in their asses.’ He shrugged his jacket over the back of his chair, revealing suspenders on which cherubs romped against a red background. ‘No organization, nada, rien. The only people with their shit together are the First Air Cav. They have a booth, they help you locate other guys from your unit. We looked around, but I don’t think we saw anybody from our whole damn division. Besides that, they put us into a grubby dump of a hall that looks like a high school gym. There’s a Diet Coke stand, if that turns you on.’
‘High school gym, man,’ Conor muttered. He was staring intently at the bedside lamp. Poole smiled at Tina Pumo, who smiled back. Linklater picked up the lamp and examined the inside of the shade, then set it down and ran his fingers along the cord until he found the switch. He turned the lamp on, then off.
‘Sit down, for God’s sake, Conor,’ Beevers said. ‘You make me nervous, messing with everything like that. We’ve got serious business to talk about, if you don’t remember.’
‘I remember, I remember,’ Conor protested, turning away from the lamp. ‘Hey, there’s no place to sit in here on account of you and Mike got the chairs and Tina’s already on the bed.’
Harry Beevers stood up, yanked his jacket off the back of his chair, and made a sweeping gesture toward the empty seat. ‘If it’ll get you to settle down, I’ll gladly surrender my chair. Take it, Conor – I’m giving it to you. Sit down.’ He picked up his glass and sat down next to Pumo on Michael’s bed. ‘You think you can sleep in the same room with this guy? He probably still talks to himself all night.’
‘Everybody in my family talks to themselves, Lieutenant,’ said Conor. He hitched his chair closer to the table. Conor began thumping his fingers on the table, as if playing an imaginary piano. ‘I guess they don’t act like that at Harvard –’
‘I didn’t go to Harvard,’ Beevers wearily said.
‘Mikey!’ Conor beamed at Poole as if seeing him for the first time. ‘It’s great to see you!’ He slapped Poole on the back.
‘Yeah,’ Tina Pumo said. ‘How are things going, Michael? It’s been a while.’
These days Tina was living with a beautiful Chinese girl in her early twenties named Maggie Lah, whose brother was a bartender at Saigon, Tina’s restaurant. Before Maggie there had been a series of girls, each of whom Tina had claimed to love.
‘Well, I’m thinking of making some changes,’ Michael said. ‘I’m busy all day long, but at night I can hardly remember what I did.’
A loud knocking came from the door, and Michael said ‘Room service,’ and stood up. The waiter wheeled in the cart and arranged the glasses and bottles on the table. The atmosphere in the room became more festive as Conor opened a Budweiser and Harry Beevers poured vodka into an empty glass. Michael never explained his half-formed plan of selling his practice in Westerholm and seeing what he might be able to do in some gritty place like the South Bronx where children really needed doctors. Judy usually walked out of the room whenever he began to talk about it.
After the waiter left, Conor stretched out on the bed, rolled on his side, and said, ‘So you saw Dengler’s name? It was right there?’
‘Sure. I got a little surprise, though. Do you know what his full name was?’
‘M. O. Dengler,’ Conor said.
‘Don’t be an idiot,’ Beevers said. ‘It was Mark, I think.’ He looked to Tina for help, but Tina frowned and shrugged.
‘Manuel Orosco Dengler,’ Michael said. ‘I was amazed that I didn’t know that.’
‘Manuel?’ Conor said. ‘Dengler was Mexican?’
‘Michael, you got the wrong Dengler,’ Tina Pumo said, laughing.
‘Nope,’ Michael said. ‘There’s not only one M. O. Dengler, there’s only one Dengler. He’s ours.’
‘A Mexican,’ Conor mused.
‘You ever hear of any Mexicans named Dengler? His parents just gave him Spanish names, I guess. Who knows? Who even cares? He was a hell of a soldier, that’s all I know. I wish –’
Pumo raised his glass to his mouth instead of finishing his sentence, and none of the men spoke for an almost elastically long moment.
Linklater muttered something unintelligible and walked across the room and sat on the floor.
Michael stood up to add fresh ice cubes to his glass and saw Conor Linklater backed up against the far wall like an imp in his black clothes, the brown beer bottle dangling between his knees. The orange writing on his chest was nearly the same shade as his hair. Conor was looking back at him with a small secret smile.
3
Maybe Beans Beevers didn’t go to Harvard or Yale, Conor was thinking, but he had gone someplace like that – someplace where everybody in sight just took it all for granted. To Conor it seemed that about ninety-five percent of the people in the United States did nothing but fret and stew about money – not having enough money made them crazy. They zeroed out on booze, they cranked themselves up to commit robberies: oblivion, tension, oblivion. The other five percent of the population rode above this turmoil like froth on a wave. They went to the schools their fathers had gone to and they married and divorced one another, as Harry had married and divorced Pat Caldwell. They had jobs where you shuffled papers and talked on the telephone. From behind their desks they watched the money stroll in the door, coming home. They even passed out these jobs to each other – Beans Beevers, who spent as much time at the bar in Pumo’s restaurant as he did at his desk, worked in the law firm run by Pat Caldwell’s brother.
When Conor had been a boy in South Norwalk, a kind of wondering and resentful curiosity had made him pedal his old Schwinn up along Route 136 to Mount Avenue in Hampstead. Mount Avenue people were so rich they were nearly invisible, like their enormous houses – from the road all you could see of some of them were occasional sections of brick or stucco walls. Most of these waterfront mansions seemed empty of anybody but servants, yet now and then young Conor would spot an obvious owner-resident. Conor learned from his brief sightings that although these Mount Avenue owner-residents usually wore the same grey suits and blue jackets as everyone else in Hampstead, sometimes they blazoned forth like Harry Beevers in riotous pink and bilious green, in funny-looking bow ties and pale double-breasted suits. It was sort of like the Emperor’s New Clothes – nobody had the balls to tell Protestant millionaires they looked ridiculous. (Conor was certain that none of these people could be Catholic.) Bow ties! Red suspenders with pictures of babies on them!
Conor couldn’t help smiling to himself – here he was, almost flat broke, thinking he ought to pity a rich lawyer. Next week he had a job taping sheetrock in a remodeled kitchen, for which he might earn a couple hundred dollars. Harry Beevers could probably earn double that sitting on a barstool, talking to Jimmy Lah. Conor looked up, his sense of humor painfully sparkling, and saw Michael Poole looking at him as if the same kind of thought had occurred to him.
Beevers had some typical bullshit up his sleeve, Conor thought, but Michael knew better than to fall for it, whatever it was.
Conor smiled to himself, remembering Dengler’s word for people who never experienced dread and took everything for granted: ‘toons,’ as in cartoons. Now the toons were running everything – they were scrambling upward, running over everything in their way. These days it seemed that half the people in Donovan’s, Conor’s favorite South Norwalk bar, had MBAs, put mousse on their hair, and drank blender drinks. Conor had the sense that some enormous change had happened all at once, that all these new people had just popped out of their own television sets. He could almost feel sorry for them, their morality was so fucked up.
Thinking about the toons depressed Conor. He felt like drinking a lot more even though he knew he was getting close to his limit. But wasn’t this a reunion? They were sitting around in a hotel room like a bunch of old men. He drained the last of his beer.
‘Give me some of that vodka, Mikey,’ he said, and lobbed the empty beer bottle into the wastebasket.
‘Attaboy,’ Pumo said, raising his glass to him.
Michael made a drink and came across the room to hand it to Conor.
‘Okay, a toast,’ Conor said, and stood up. ‘Man. It feels good to do this.’ He raised his glass. ‘To M. O. Dengler. Even if he was a Mexican, which I doubt.’
Conor poured ice-cold vodka into his mouth and gulped it down. He felt better instantly, so good that he downed the rest. ‘Man, sometimes I can remember shit that happened over there like it was yesterday, and the stuff that really did happen yesterday, I can’t hardly remember at all. I mean – sometimes I’ll start to think about that guy who ran that club at Camp Crandall, who had that gigantic wall of beer cases –’
‘Manly,’ Tina Pumo said, laughing.
‘Manly. Fucking Manly. And I’ll start to think about how did he manage to get all that beer there, anyway? And then I’ll start to think about little things he did, the way he acted.’
‘Manly belonged behind a counter,’ Beevers said.
‘That’s right! I bet Manly’s got his own little business right now, he’s got everything lined up just right, man, he’s got a good car and his own house, he’s got a wife, kids, he’s got one of those basketball hoops up on his garage…’ Conor stared into space for a second, enjoying his vision of Manly’s life – Manly would be great in suburbia. He thought like a criminal without actually being one, so he was probably making a fortune doing something like installing security systems. Then Conor remembered that in a way Manly had started all their troubles, back in Vietnam…
A day before they came into Ia Thuc, Manly had separated from the column and found himself alone in the jungle. Without even meaning to make noise, he started sounding like a six-foot bumblebee in a panic. Everyone else in the column froze. A sniper known as ‘Elvis’ had been dogging them for two days, and Manly’s commotion was all he needed to improve his luck. Conor knew what he should have done – he had discovered long ago how to make himself melt into the background. It was almost mystical. Conor could virtually become invisible (and he knew it worked, for twice VC patrols had looked right at him without seeing him). Dengler, Poole, Pumo, even Underhill, could do this almost as well as he could, but Manly could not do it all. Conor began silently working through the jungle toward the sound – he was angry enough to kill Manly, if that was what it took to shut him up. Within a minute fraction of a second, he knew as if by telepathy – so silent – that Dengler was following him.
They found Manly bulling through the curtain of green, hacking away with his machete in one hand, his M-16 at his hip in the other. Conor started to glide up to him, half-thinking about slitting his throat, when Dengler simply materialized next to Manly and grabbed his machete arm. For a second they were motionless. Conor crept forward, afraid that Manly would shriek after the numbness wore off. Instead, he heard a single report from off to his right, somewhere up in the canopy, and saw Dengler topple over. He felt shock so deep and sudden his hands and feet went cold.
He and Manly had walked Dengler back to the rest of the column. Even though the impact had knocked him down and he was bleeding steadily, Dengler’s wound was only superficial. A wad of flesh the size of a mouse had been punched out of his left arm. Peters made him lie down on the jungle floor, packed and bandaged the wound, and pronounced him fit to move.
If Dengler had not been wounded even so slightly, Conor thought, Ia Thuc might have been just another empty village. Seeing Dengler in pain had soured everybody. It pumped up their anxiety. Maybe they had all been foolish to believe in Dengler as they had, but seeing him bloodied and wounded on the forest floor had shocked Conor all over again – it was as bad as seeing him hit in the first place. After that, it had been easy to blow it, go over the edge in Ia Thuc. Afterward nothing was the same. Even Dengler changed, maybe because of the publicity and the court martial. Conor himself had stayed so high on drugs that he still could not remember some things that had happened in the months between Ia Thuc and his DEROS – but he knew that just before the court-martials he had cut the ears off a dead North Vietnamese soldier and stuck a Koko card in his mouth.
Conor realized that he was in danger of getting depressed again. He was sorry he had ever mentioned Manly.
‘Refill,’ he said, and went to the table and poured more vodka into his glass. The other three were still looking at him, smiling at their cheerleader – other people always counted on him to provide their good times.
‘Hey, to the Ninth Battalion, 24th Infantry Regiment.’ Conor swallowed another ice-cold bullet of vodka, and the face of Harlan Huebsch popped into his mind. Harlan Huebsch was a kid from Oregon who had tripped a wire and blown himself in half a few days after turning up at Camp Crandall. Conor could remember Huebsch’s death very clearly because an hour or so afterwards, when they had finally reached the other side of the little mined field, Conor had stretched out against a grassy dike and noticed a long tangled strand of wire snagged in the bootlaces on his right foot. The only difference between himself and Huebsch was that Huebsch’s mine had worked the way it was supposed to. Now Harlan Huebsch was a name up on the Memorial – Conor promised himself he’d find it, once they all got there.
Beevers wanted to toast the Tin Man, and though everybody joined him, Linklater knew that only Beans meant it. Mike Poole toasted Si Van Vo, which Conor thought was hilarious. Then Conor made everybody drink to Elvis. And Tina Pumo wound up toasting Dawn Cucchio, who was a whore he met on R&R in Sydney, Australia. Conor laughed so hard at the idea of drinking to Dawn Cucchio that he had to lean against the wall to hold himself up.
But then murkier, darker feelings surfaced in him again. If you wanted to accept the reality of what was going on, he was an unemployed laborer sitting around with a lawyer, a doctor, and a guy who owned a restaurant so fancy there were pictures of it in magazines.
Conor realized that he had been staring at Pumo, who looked like a page out of GQ. Tina always looked good, especially in his restaurant. Conor went there once or twice a year, but spent most of his money at the bar. On his last visit he had seen a juicy little Chinese girl who must have been Maggie. ‘Hey, Tina, what’s the best dish you make, down there in your restaurant?’
Conor slurred a little on best, but he didn’t think the others could hear it.
‘Duck Saigon, probably,’ Tina said. ‘At least, that’s my favorite right now. Marinated roast duck, dried rice noodles. The taste is out of sight.’
‘You put that fish sauce on top of it?’
‘Nuoc mam sauce? Sure.’
‘I don’t know how anybody can eat that gook food,’ Conor said. ‘Remember when we were over there? We all knew you couldn’t eat that shit, man.’
‘We were eighteen years old back then,’ Tina said. ‘Our idea of a great meal was a Whopper and fries.’
Conor did not admit to Tina that a Whopper and fries was still his idea of a great meal. He gulped down another silver bullet of vodka and felt lower than ever.
4
But in a little while it was almost like the old days again. Conor learned that along with all the normal Pumo difficulties, Tina now had to deal with the exciting new complications caused by Maggie being nearly twenty years younger and not only as crazy as he was, but smarter besides. When she moved in with him, Tina began feeling ‘too much pressure.’ This much was absolutely typical. What was different about Maggie was that after a few months she disappeared. Now she was out-Pumoing Pumo. Maggie called him on the telephone, but refused to tell him where she was staying. Sometimes she placed coded messages for him on the back page of the Village Voice.
‘Do you know what it’s like to read the back page of every issue of the Voice when you’re forty-one?’ Pumo asked.
Conor had never read any page of any issue of the Village Voice. He shook his head.
‘Every mistake you ever made with a woman is right there in cold hard print. Falling for someone’s looks – “Beautiful blonde girl in Virginia Woolf T-shirt at Sedutto’s, we almost talked and now I’m kicking myself. I know we could be special. Please call man with backpack. 581-4901.” Romantic idealization – “Suki. You are my shooting star. Cannot live without you. Bill.” Romantic despair – “I haven’t stopped hurting since you left. Forlorn in Yorkville.” Masochism – “Bruiser – No guilt necessary, I forgive you. Puffball.” Cuteness – “Twinky-poo. Twiddles wuvs yum-yum.” Indecision – “Mesquite. Still thinking. Margarita.” Of course there’s a lot of other stuff, too. Prayers to St Jude. Numbers you can call if you want to get off coke. Baldness cures. Lots of Strip-O-Grams. And Jews For Jesus, every single week. But mainly it’s all these broken hearts, this terrible early-twenties agony. Conor, I have to pore over this back page like it was the Rosetta stone. I get the damn paper as soon as it hits the stands on Wednesday morning. I read the page over four or five times because it’s easy to miss clues the first couple of times. See, I have to figure out which messages are hers. Sometimes she calls herself “Type A” – that’s Taipei, where she was born – but other times she’s “Leather Lady.” Or “Half Moon” – that was for a tattoo she got last year.’
‘Where?’ Conor asked. He didn’t feel so bad now, only a little drunk. At least he wasn’t as fucked up as Pumo. ‘On her ass?’
‘Just a little below her navel,’ Tina said. He looked as though he was sorry he had brought up the subject of his girlfriend’s tattoo.
‘Maggie has a half moon tattoed on her pussy?’ Conor asked. He wished he had been in the tattoo parlor when that was going on. Even if Chinese girls weren’t Conor’s thing – they reminded him of the Dragon Lady in ‘Terry and the Pirates’ – he had to admit that Maggie was more than normally good-looking. Everything about Maggie seemed round. She somehow managed to make it seem normal to walk around in chopped-up punk hair and clothes you bought already ripped.
‘No. I told you,’ Pumo said, looking irritated, ‘just a little below her navel. The bottom of a bikini covers most of it.’
‘It’s almost on her pussy!’ Conor said. ‘Is any of it in her hair? Were you there when the guy did it? Did she cry or anything?’
‘You bet I was there. I wanted to make sure he didn’t let his attention wander.’ Pumo took a sip of his drink. ‘Maggie didn’t even blink.’
‘How big is it?’ Conor asked. ‘About half dollar size?’
‘If you’re so curious, ask her to show it to you.’
‘Oh, sure,’ Conor said. ‘I can really see me doing that.’
Then Conor overheard part of the conversation Mike Poole was having with Beans Beevers – something about Ia Thuc and a grunt Poole had talked to during the parade.
Beevers asked, ‘He was an ex-combat soldier?’
‘Looked like he got out of the field about a week ago,’ Mike said, giving his little smile.
‘This vet really remembered all about me, and he said I should get a Medal of Honor?’
‘He said they should have given you a Medal of Honor for what you did, and then taken it away again for shooting off your mouth in front of journalists.’
This was the first time Conor had ever heard Beevers confronted with the opinion, once widely held, that he had been a dope to brag about Ia Thuc to the press. Of course Beevers acted as though he were hearing this opinion for the first time.
‘Ridiculous,’ Beevers said. ‘I can just about go along with him on the Congressional medal idea, but not on that. I’m proud of everything I did there, and I hope all of you are too. If it was up to me, we’d all have Congressional medals.’ He looked down at the front of his shirt, smoothed it, then lifted his chin – stuck it out. ‘But people know we did the right thing. That’s as good as a medal. People agree with the decision of the court-martial, even if they forgot it ever happened.’
Conor wondered how Beans could say these things. He didn’t see how people could know they’d done the right thing at Ia Thuc when even the men who had been there didn’t know exactly what had happened.
‘You’d be surprised how many guys I meet, I’m talking about other lawyers, judges too, who know my name because of that action,’ Beevers said. ‘To tell you the truth, being a sort of a minor league hero has helped me out professionally more than once.’ Beans looked around at all of them with a sweet candor that made Conor want to puke. ‘I’m not ashamed of anything I did in Nam. You have to turn what happens to you into a plus.’
Michael Poole laughed. ‘Spoken from the heart, Harry.’
‘This is important,’ Beevers insisted. For a second he looked both pained and puzzled. ‘I have the impression that you three guys are accusing me of something.’
‘I didn’t accuse you of anything, Harry,’ Poole said.
‘So didn’t I,’ said Conor in exasperation. He pointed at Tina Pumo. ‘So didn’t he!’
‘We were with each other every step of the way,’ Harry said, and it took Conor a moment to figure out that he had gone back to talking about Ia Thuc. ‘We always helped each other out. We were a team, all of us, Spitalny included.’
Conor could restrain himself no longer. ‘I wish that asshole would have got killed there,’ he broke in. ‘I never met anybody as mean as him. Spitalny didn’t like anybody, man. Right? And he claimed he got stung by wasps? In that cave? I don’t think there are any wasps in Nam, man. I saw bugs the size of dogs there, man, but I never saw any wasps.’
Tina interrupted him with a loud groan. ‘Don’t talk to me about wasps. Don’t talk to me about bugs – any kind of bugs!’
‘Is this related to the trouble you’re having?’ Mike asked.
‘The Department of Health has strong feelings on the subject of six-legged creatures,’ Pumo said. ‘I don’t even want to discuss it.’
‘Let’s get back to the subject, if you don’t mind,’ Beevers said, giving Poole a mysteriously loaded glance.
What the hell is the subject? Conor wondered.
Pumo said, ‘How about we have another little blast up here and then go down, get something to eat, see some of the entertainment. Jimmy Stewart’s supposed to be here. I always liked Jimmy Stewart.’
Beevers said, ‘Mike, are you the only one who knows what I was leading up to? Remind them why we’re here. Help me out.’
‘Lieutenant Beevers thinks it’s time to talk about Koko,’ Poole said.
4 The Answering Machine (#ulink_e9bd60e1-75e2-5c9e-9127-1ec2f82b2a02)
1
‘Hand me my briefcase, Tina. It’s somewhere back there against the wall.’ Beevers leaned forward from the side of the bed and extended his arm. Tina groped under the table for the case. ‘Take all day, there’s no rush.’
‘You pushed your chair over it when you got up,’ Pumo said, now invisible beneath the table. He surfaced with the briefcase in both hands, and held it out.
Beevers put the case on his lap and snapped it open.
Poole leaned over and looked in at a stack of reprints of a familiar page from Stars and Stripes. Stapled to it were copies of other newspaper articles. Beevers took out the stack of papers and said, ‘There’s one for each of you. Michael is familiar with some of this material already, but I thought we should all have copies of everything. That way everybody’ll know exactly what we’re talking about.’ He handed the first sheaf of stapled papers to Conor. ‘Settle down and pay attention to this.’
‘Sieg Heil,’ Conor said, and took the chair beside Michael Poole.
Beevers handed stapled pages to Poole and Pumo, placed the final set beside him on the bed, closed his case and set it on the floor.
Pumo said, ‘Take all day, there’s no rush.’
‘Touchy, touchy.’ Beevers put his papers on his lap, picked them up with both hands, squinted at them. He set them back in his lap and reached over to his suit jacket to remove his glasses case from the chest pocket. From the case he took a pair of oversized glasses with thin, oval tortoise-shell frames. Beevers put the empty case on top of his suit jacket, then put the glasses on his nose. Again he inspected the papers.
Poole wondered how often during the day Beevers went through this little charade of lawyerly behavior.
Beevers looked up from his papers. Bow tie, suspenders, big glasses. ‘First of all, mes amis, I want to say that we’ve all had some fun, and we’ll have a lot more before we leave, but’ – a weighty glance at Conor – ‘we’re in this room together because we shared some important experiences. And…we survived these experiences because we could depend on each other.’
Beevers glanced down at the papers in his lap, and Pumo said, ‘Get to the point, Harry.’
‘If you don’t understand how much teamwork is the point, you’re missing everything,’ Beevers said. He looked up again. ‘Please read the articles. There are three of them, one from Stars and Stripes, one from the Straits Times of Singapore, and the third from the Bangkok Post. My brother George, who is a career soldier, knew a little bit about the Koko incidents, and when the name caught his eye in the Stars and Stripes piece, he sent it to me. Then he asked my other, older brother, Sonny – he’s a career sergeant too, over in Manila – to check out all the Asian papers he could locate. George did the same on Okinawa – together they could look at nearly all the English language papers published in the Far East.’
‘You have two brothers who’re lifer sergeants?’ Conor asked. Sonny and George, lifers in Manila and Okinawa? From a Mount Avenue family?
Beevers looked at him impatiently. ‘Eventually these other two pieces turned up in Singapore and Bangkok papers, and that’s it. I did some research on my own, but read this stuff first. As you’ll see, our boy’s been busy.’
Michael Poole took a sip of his drink and scanned the topmost article. On January 28, 1981, the corpse of a fortytwo-year-old English tourist in Singapore, a free-lance writer named Clive McKenna, had been found, his eyes and ears bloodily removed, by a gardener in an overgrown section of the grounds of the Goodwood Park Hotel. A playing card with the word Koko written on its face had been placed in Mr McKenna’s mouth. On February 5, 1982, an appraiser had entered a supposedly empty bungalow just off Orchard Road in the same city to discover lying face-up and side by side on the living room floor the bodies of Mr William Martinson of St Louis, a sixty-one-year-old executive of a heavy equipment company active in Asia, and Mrs Barbara Martinson, fifty-five, also of St Louis, who had been accompanying her husband on a business trip. Mr Martinson lacked his eyes and ears; in his mouth was a playing card with the word Koko scrawled across its face.
The Straits Times piece, dated three days later, added the information that while the bodies of the Martinsons had been discovered less than forty-eight hours after their deaths, Clive McKenna’s body had gone undiscovered for perhaps as long as five days. Roughly ten days separated the two sets of murders. The Singapore police had many leads, and an arrest was considered imminent.
The clipping from the Bangkok Post, dated July 7, 1982, was considerably more emotional than the others. FRENCH WRITERS SLAIN, the headline read. Outrage and dismay were shared by all decent citizens. The provinces of both tourism and literature had been savaged. Unwelcome events of a violent nature were particularly threatening to the hotel industry. The shock to morality – therefore to trade – had potential consequences far beyond the hotel industry, affecting taxicabs, hire-car firms, restaurants, jewelers, massage parlors, museums and temples, tattooists, airport staff and baggage handlers, etc. That the crime was almost certainly the work of undesirable aliens, committed by as well as upon foreigners, had to be not only remembered but reiterated. Police of all districts were engaged in a commendable effort of mutual cooperation designed to root out the whereabouts of the assassins within days. Political hostility to Thailand could not be discounted.
Cocooned within this oddly formal hysteria was the information that Marc Guibert, 48, and Yves Danton, 49, both journalists living in Paris, had been found in their suite at the Sheraton Bangkok by a maid on her normal morning cleaning detail. They were tied to chairs with their throats cut and their eyes and ears removed. The two men had arrived in Thailand the previous afternoon and were not known to have received any messages or guests. Cards from an ordinary deck of Malaysian playing cards, the word, or name, Koko printed by hand on each, had been inserted into the dead men’s mouths.
Tina and Conor continued to read, Tina with an expression of feigned detachment, Conor in deep concentration. Harry Beevers sat upright, tapping a pencil against his front teeth, his eyes out of focus.
Printed by hand. Michael saw exactly how: the letters carved in so deeply you could read the raised grooves on the back of the card. Poole could remember the first time he had seen one of the cards protruding from the mouth of a tiny dead man in black pajamas – point for our side, he’d thought, okay.
Pumo said, ‘The goddamned war still isn’t over, I guess.’
Conor looked up from his copy of the Bangkok clipping. ‘Hey, it could be anybody, man. These guys here say it’s some political thing. To hell with this, anyhow.’
Beevers said. ‘Do you seriously think it’s a coincidence that this murderer writes the name Koko on a playing card which he puts into his victims’ mouths?’
‘Yeah,’ Conor said. ‘Sure it could be. Or it could be politics, like this guy says.’
‘But the fact is, it almost has to be our Koko,’ Pumo said slowly. He spread the three clippings out beside him on the table, as if seeing them all at once made coincidence even more unlikely. ‘These were the only articles your brothers could find? No follow up?’
Beevers shook his head. He then bent over, picked his glass up from the floor, and made a silent, mocking toast to them without drinking.
‘You’re pretty cheerful about this,’ Pumo said.
‘Someday, my friends, this is going to be a hell of a story. I’m serious, I can definitely see book rights in this thing. Beyond that, I can see film rights. But to tell you the truth, I’d settle for a mini-series.’
Conor covered his face with his hands, and Poole said, ‘Now I know you’re nuts.’
Beevers turned to them with an unblinking gaze. ‘Some day I’ll want you to remember who first said that we could all see a lot of money out of this. If we handle it right. Mucho dinero.’
‘Hallelujah,’ Conor said. ‘The Lost Boss is gonna make us rich.’
‘Consider the facts.’ Beevers held up a palm like a stop sign while he sipped from his glass. ‘A law school student who does our data-gathering did some research on my instructions – on the firm’s time, so we don’t get billed for it. He went through a year’s worth of half a dozen major metropolitan papers and the wire services. Net result? Apart of course from St Louis stories about the Martinsons, there has never been any news story in this country about Koko or these murders. And the stories in St Louis papers didn’t mention the playing cards. They didn’t mention Koko.’
Is there any possible connection between the victims?’ Michael asked.
‘Consider the facts. An English tourist in Singapore – our researcher looked up McKenna, and he wrote a travel book about Australia-New Zealand, a couple of thrillers, and a book called Your Dog Can Live Longer! With an exclamation point. Maybe he was doing research in Singapore. Who knows? The Martinsons were a straight Middle-American business couple. His firm sold a load of bulldozers and cranes throughout the Far East. Then we have two print journalists, Frenchmen who work for L’Express. Guibert and Danton went to Bangkok for the massage parlors. They were longtime friends who took a vacance together every couple of years. They weren’t on an assignment in Bangkok, they were just cutting up.’
‘An Englishman, two Frenchmen, and two Americans,’ Michael said.
‘A pretty clear example of random selection,’ Beevers said. ‘I think these people were just in the wrong place at the wrong time. They were shopping or sitting at a bar, and they found themselves talking to a plausible American guy with a lot of stories who eventually took them off somewhere quiet and wasted them. The original Mr Wrong. The All-American psychopath.’
‘He didn’t mutilate Martinson’s wife,’ Michael said.
‘Yeah, he just killed her,’ Beevers said. ‘You want mutilations every time? Maybe he just took men’s ears because he fought against men in Vietnam.’
‘Okay,’ Conor said. ‘Say it’s our Koko. Then what?’ He looked almost unwillingly toward Michael and shrugged. ‘I mean, I ain’t going to no cops or nothing. I got nothing to say to them.’
Beevers leaned forward and fixed Conor with the stare of a man attempting to hypnotize a snake. ‘I agree with you absolutely.’
‘You agree with me?’
‘We have nothing to say to the police. At this point, we don’t even know with absolute certainty that Koko is Tim Underhill.’ He straightened up and looked at Poole with the trace of a smile tugging at his mouth. ‘Celebrated or not-so-celebrated thriller writer and Singapore resident.’
Every man in the room but Beevers all but closed his eyes.
‘Are his books really nuts?’ Conor finally said. ‘You remember all that crazy stuff he used to talk about? That book?’
‘“The Running Grunt”’, Pumo said. ‘I couldn’t believe it when I heard he published a couple novels – he talked about it so much I figured he’d never do it.’
‘He did it, though,’ Poole said. Without wanting to be, he was surprised, even dismayed that Tina had not read any of Underhill’s novels. ‘It was called A Beast in View when it came out.’ Beevers was watching Poole expectantly, his thumbs tucked behind his rosy suspenders.
‘So you really do think it’s Underhill?’ Poole asked.
‘Consider the facts,’ Beevers said. ‘Obviously the same person killed McKenna, the Martinsons, and the two French journalists. So we have a serial murderer who identifies himself by writing the name Koko on a playing card inserted into the mouths of his victims. What does that name mean?’
Pumo said, ‘It’s the name of a volcano in Hawaii. Can we go see Jimmy Stewart now?’
‘Underhill told me “Koko” was the name of a song,’ Conor said.
‘“Koko” is the name of lots of things, among them one of the few pandas in captivity, a Hawaiian volcano, a princess of Thailand, and jazz songs by Duke Ellington and Charlie Parker. There was even a dog named Koko in the Dr Sam Sheppard murder case. But none of that means a thing. Koko means us – it doesn’t mean anything else.’ Beevers crossed his arms over his chest and looked around at all of them. ‘And I wasn’t in Singapore or Thailand last year. Were you, Michael? Consider the facts. McKenna was killed right after the Iranian hostages came back to parades and cover stories – came back as heroes. Did you see that a Vietnam vet in Indiana flipped out and killed some people around the same time? Hey, am I telling you something new? How did you feel?’
The others said nothing.
‘Me too,’ Beevers said. ‘I didn’t want to feel that, but I felt it. I resented what they got for just being hostages. That vet in Indiana had the same feelings, and they pushed him over the edge. What do you suppose happened to Underhill?’
‘Or whoever it was,’ Poole said.
Beevers grinned at him.
‘Look, I think this whole thing is nuts in the first place,’ said Pumo, ‘but did you ever consider the possibility that Victor Spitalny might be Koko? Nobody’s seen him since he deserted Dengler in Bangkok fifteen years ago. He could still be living over there.’
Conor surprised Poole by saying, ‘Spitalny’s gotta be dead. He drank that shit, man.’
Poole kept quiet.
‘And there was one more Koko incident after Spitalny disappeared in Bangkok,’ Beevers said. ‘Even if the original Koko had a copycat, I think good old Victor is in the clear. No matter where he is.’
‘I just wish I could talk to Underhill,’ Pumo said, and Poole silently agreed. ‘I always liked Tim – I liked him a hell of a lot. You know, if I didn’t have to work out that mess in my kitchen, I’d be halfway tempted to get on a plane and see if I could find him. Maybe we could help him out, do something for him.’
‘That’s an amazingly interesting idea,’ Beevers said.
2
‘Request permission to move, sir,’ Conor barked. Beevers glared at him. Conor stood up, clapped Michael on the shoulder, and said, ‘Do you know what time it is when darkness falls, bats fill the air, and wild dogs begin to howl?’
Poole was looking up in friendly amusement, Harry Beevers – pencil frozen halfway to his mouth – with irritation and incredulity.
Conor leaned toward Beevers and winked. ‘Time for another beer.’ He took a dripping bottle from the ice bucket and twisted off the cap. Beevers was still glaring at him. ‘So the lieutenant thinks we ought to send a little search party after Underhill, check him out, see how crazy he is?’
‘Well, Conor, since you ask,’ Beevers said very lightly and quietly, ‘something along those lines might be possible.’
‘Actually go there?’ Pumo asked.
‘You said it first.’
Conor poured nearly half of the beer down his throat in a continuous series of swallows. He smacked his lips. Conor returned to his chair and took another slug of the beer. Things had just gone totally out of control – now he could sit back and relax and wait for everybody else to see it.
If the Lost Boss says that he still considers himself Underhill’s lieutenant, Conor thought, I am gonna puke.
Beevers said, ‘I don’t know if you want to call this a moral responsibility or not, but I think we should handle this situation ourselves. We knew the man, we were there.’
Conor opened his mouth, swallowed air, and let the pressure build on his diaphragm. After a second or two he emitted a resounding burp.
‘I’m not asking you to share my sense of responsibility,’ Beevers said, ‘but it would be nice if you could stop being childish.’
‘How can I go to Singapore, for Chrissakes?’ Conor yelled. ‘I don’t have money in the bank to go around the block! I spent all my money on the fare here, man. I’m sleeping on Tina’s couch because I can’t even afford a room at my own reunion, man. Get serious, okay?’
Conor felt immediately embarrassed at blowing up in front of Mike Poole. This was what happened when he went over his limit and got drunk – he got mad too fast. Without making himself sound like an even bigger fool, he wanted to explain things. ‘I mean – okay, I’m an asshole, I shouldn’t ought to’ve yelled. But I’m not like the rest of you guys, I’m not a doctor or a lawyer or an Indian chief, I’m broke, man, I used to be part of the old poor and now I’m part of the new poor. I’m down at sore heels.’
‘Well, I’m no millionaire,’ Beevers said. ‘In fact, as of several weeks ago I resigned from Caldwell, Moran, Morrissey. There were a lot of complicated factors involved, but the fact is, I’m out of a job.’
‘Your wife’s own brother gave you a pink slip?’ Conor asked.
‘I resigned,’ Beevers said. ‘Pat is my ex-wife. Serious differences of opinion came up between myself and Charles Caldwell. Anyhow, I’m not made of money any more than you are, Conor. But I did negotiate a pretty decent golden handshake for myself, and I’d be more than willing to loan you a couple thousand dollars interest-free, to be repaid at your convenience. That ought to take care of you.’
‘I’d help out too,’ Poole said. ‘I’m not agreeing to anything, Harry, but Underhill shouldn’t be hard to find. He must get advances and royalties from his publisher. Maybe they even forward fan mail to him. I bet we could learn Underbill’s address with one phone call.’
‘I can’t believe this,’ said Pumo. ‘All three of you guys just lost your minds.’
‘You were the first to say you’d go,’ Conor reminded him.
‘I can’t run out on my life for a month. I have a restaurant to run.’
Pumo hadn’t noticed when everything went out of control. Okay, Conor thought, Singapore, what the hell?
‘Tina, we need you.’
‘I need me more than you do. Count me out.’
‘If you stay behind, you’ll be sorry the rest of your life.’
‘Jesus, Harry, in the morning this is going to sound like an Abbott and Costello movie. What the hell do you think you’re going to do if you ever manage to find him?’
Pumo wants to stay around New York and play games with Maggie Lah, Conor thought.
‘Well, we’ll see,’ Beevers said.
Conor lobbed his empty beer bottle toward the wastebasket. The bottle fell three feet short and slanted off under the dresser. He could not remember switching from vodka to beer. Or had he started on beer, then gone to vodka, and switched back to beer again? Conor inspected the glasses on the table and tried to pick out his old one. The other three were giving him that ‘cheerleader’ look again, and he wished he’d made his net shot into the wastebasket. Conor philoso-phically poured several inches of vodka into the nearest glass. He scooped a handful of cubes from the bucket and plopped them in. ‘Give me an S,’ he said, raising the glass in a final toast. He drank. ‘Give an I. Give me an N. Give me a…G. Give me an A.’
Beevers told him to sit down and be quiet, which was fine with Conor. He couldn’t remember what came after A anyhow. Some of the vodka slopped onto his pants as he sat down again beside Mike.
‘Now can we go see Jimmy Stewart?’ he heard Pumo ask.
3
A little while later someone suggested that he lie down and take a nap on Mike’s bed, but Conor refused, no, no, he was fine, he was with his asshole buddies, all he had to do was get moving, anybody who could still spell Singapore wasn’t too bent out of shape…
Without any transition he found himself out in the corridor. He was having trouble with his feet, and Mikey had a firm grip on his left arm. ‘What’s my room number?’ he asked Mikey.
‘You’re staying with Tina.’
‘Good old Tina.’
They turned a corner and good old Tina and Harry Beevers were right in front of them, waiting for the elevator. Beevers was combing his hair in front of a big mirror.
The next thing Conor knew, he was sitting on the floor of the elevator, but he managed to get back on his feet before the doors opened.
‘You’re cute, Harry,’ he said to the back of Beevers’ head.
The elevator door opened and for a long time they moved through long, blank hallways crowded with people. Conor kept bumping into guys who were too impatient to listen to his apologies. He heard people singing ‘Homeward Bound,’ which was the world’s most beautiful song. ‘Homeward Bound’ made him feel like crying.
Poole was making sure he didn’t fall down. Conor wondered if Mike actually knew what a great guy he was, and decided he didn’t – that was what made him so great.
‘I’m really okay,’ he said.
He sat down beside Mike in a darkened hall. A black-haired man with a narrow moustache, wearing what looked like a prize-fighter’s championship belt under his tuxedo, was singing ‘America the Beautiful’ and jumping around onstage in front of a band.
‘We missed Jimmy Stewart,’ Mike whispered to him. ‘This is Wayne Newton.’
‘Wayne Newton?’ Conor asked, then heard that his voice was too loud. People were laughing at what he had said. Conor felt too embarrassed for Mikey to set him straight – Wayne Newton was a fat teenager who sang like a girl. This Las Vegas toughie wasn’t Wayne Newton. Conor closed his eyes and the whole dark hall instantly began to swing him around with it in great zooming circles. Conor found that he was unable to open his eyes. Applause, whistles, shouts of approval filled his ears. He heard his own first snore, and less then a second later fell into unconsciousness.
4
‘We don’t have as many groupies as musicians,’ Harry Beevers said to Poole, ‘but they’re out there. They’re basically earth mothers with a kinky little yen for excitement. Is he getting heavy? Put him on your couch and come back down to the bar with us.’
‘I want to get to bed,’ Poole said. Conor Linklater, a hundred and sixty pounds of dead weight bequeathed to him by Tina Pumo, was draped over his shoulder.
Beevers breathed alcohol at Poole. ‘Nam groupies are complicated, but by now I’ve got them figured out. They get off on, one, the idea of our being soldiers and fighting men but more spiritual somehow than other vets – two, they’ve got a little slug of social worker in them and they want to demonstrate that our country loves us after all – and three, they don’t know what we did over there and it turns them on.’ Beevers glittered at him. ‘This has got to be the place. They’d come thousands of miles in their sleep just to hang out at the bar.’
Poole had the uneasy feeling that, without knowing it, Harry Beevers was describing Pat Caldwell, his ex-wife.
After Michael had rolled Conor onto the side of the bed the maid had not turned down, he pulled off his friend’s black running shoes and undid his belt. Conor moaned; his pale, veined eyelids fluttered. With his cropped red hair and pale skin, Conor Linklater seemed to be about nineteen years old: without his scraggly beard and moustache, he looked very like his Vietnam self. Poole covered Linklater with a spare blanket from the closet; then he switched on the lamp on the other side of the bed and turned off the overhead light. If Conor was to have slept on a couch in Pumo’s room, Pumo must have taken a suite – Poole’s own room did not offer a couch for the comfort of sodden visitors. Undoubtedly Beevers had also taken a suite. (Harry had never considered turning over his own couch to Conor.)
It was a few minutes to twelve. Poole turned on the television and turned down the volume, then sat in the closest chair and removed his own shoes. He draped his jacket over the back of the other chair. Charles Bronson was standing on the grassy verge of a road in a dainty, empty landscape that looked like western Ireland, looking through binoculars at a grey Mercedes-Benz pulled up in the gravel forecourt of a Georgian mansion. For a moment anticipatory silence surrounded the Mercedes, and then a bulging wall of flame obliterated the car.
Michael picked up the telephone and set it on the table beside him. The maid had lined up the bottles, stacked clear plastic glasses, removed the empties, and wrapped the plate of cheese in cellophane. In the bucket, one bottle of beer stood neck-deep in water, surrounded by floating slivers of ice. Michael dipped the topmost glass into the bucket and scooped up ice and water. He took a sip.
Conor muttered ‘googol’ and rolled his face into his pillow.
On impulse Michael picked up the phone and dialed his wife’s private line at home. It was possible that Judy was lying awake in bed, reading something like The One-Minute Manager while successfully ignoring the television program she had turned on to keep her company.
Judy’s telephone rang once, then clicked as if someone had picked it up. Poole heard the mechanical hiss of tape, and knew that his wife had turned on her answering machine with its third-person message:
‘Judy is unable to answer the telephone at this time, but if you leave your name, number, and message after the beep, she will get back to you as soon as possible.’
He waited for the beep.
‘Judy, this is Michael. Are you home?’ Judy’s machine was attached to the telephone in her study, adjacent to the bedroom. If she were awake in her bed, she would hear his voice. Judy did not respond; the tape whirred. Into the waiting machine he uttered a few mechanical sentences, ending by saying, ‘I’ll be home late Sunday night. Bye-bye.’
In bed, Michael read a few pages of the Stephen King novel he had packed. Conor Linklater complained and snuffled on the other side of the bed. Nothing in the novel seemed more than slightly odder or more threatening than events in ordinary life. Improbability and violence overflowed from ordinary life, and Stephen King seemed to know that.
Before Michael could turn off his light, he was dripping with sweat, carrying his copy of The Dead Zone through an army base many times larger than Camp Crandall. All around the camp, twenty or thirty kilometers beyond the barbed-wire perimeter, stood hills once thickly covered by trees, now so perfectly bombed and burned and defoliated that only charred sticks protruded upwards from powdery brown earth. He walked past a row of empty tents and at last heard the silence of the camp – he was alone. The camp had been abandoned, and he had been left behind. A flagless flagpole stood before the company headquarters. He trudged past the deserted building into a stretch of empty land and smelled burning shit. Then he knew that this was no dream, he really was in Vietnam – the rest of his life was the dream. Poole never smelled things in his dreams. He didn’t think he even dreamed in color most of the time. Poole turned around and saw an old Vietnamese woman looking at him expressionlessly from beside an oil drum filled with burning kerosene-soaked excrement. Dense black smoke boiled up from the drum and smudged the sky. His despair was flat and unsurprising.
Wait a second, he thought, if this is reality it’s no later than 1969. He opened The Dead Zone to the page of published information. Deep in his chest, his heart deflated like a punctured balloon. The copyright date was 1965. He had never left Vietnam. Everything since had been only a nineteenyear-old’s wishful dream.
5 Beans Beevers at the Memorial (#ulink_8a1412d4-2f25-5b30-b253-827b078a26c1)
1
Poole awoke with a fading memory of smoke and noise, of artillery fire and uniformed men running in a cartoonish lockstep through a burning village. He pushed this vision into forgetfulness with unconscious expertise. His first real thought was that he would stop off at Walden Books in Westerholm and buy a book for a twelve-year-old patient named Stacy Talbot before visiting her in St Bartholomew’s Hospital. Then he remembered that he was in Washington. His second fully formed thought was to wonder if Tim Underhill was really still alive. He had a brief vision of himself standing in a neat graveyard in Singapore, looking down with both loss and relief at Underbill’s headstone.
Or was Underhill simmering in craziness, still back in the war?
Conor Linklater seemed to have vanished and left behind a crushed pillow and a wildly wrinkled counterpane. Poole crawled across the bed and peered over the far edge. Curled up into himself like a cabbage leaf, his mouth lax and his eyelids stretched unmoving across his eyes, Conor lay asleep on the floor.
Michael pushed himself back across the bed and went quietly into the bathroom to shower.
‘Jeez,’ Conor said when Michael came out of the bathroom. He was sitting in one of the chairs and holding his head in both hands. ‘What time is it, anyhow?’
‘About ten-thirty.’ Poole took underwear and socks from his bag and began dressing.
‘Blackout, man,’ Conor said. ‘Total hangover.’ He peeked out through his fingers at Poole. ‘How’d I end up here, anyhow?’
‘I sort of assisted you.’
‘Thanks, man,’ Linklater groaned. His head sank again into his hands. ‘I gotta turn over a new lease on life. I been partying too much lately, getting old, gotta slow down. Whoo.’ He straightened up and looked around the room as if he were lost. ‘Where’s my clothes?’
‘Pumo’s room,’ Michael said, buttoning his shirt.
‘Well, I don’t know. I left all my shit up there. I sure wish he’d come along with us, man, don’t you? Pumo the Puma. He oughta come along. Hey, Mikey, can I use your bathroom and your shower before I go back upstairs?’
‘Oh dear,’ Poole said. ‘I just got it all cleaned up for the maid.’
Conor left the couch and moved across the room in a fashion that Poole associated with recovering stroke victims in geriatric wards. When Conor got to the bathroom he leaned on the door-knob and coughed. His hair was standing up in little orange spikes. ‘Am I crazy, or did Beans say he’d loan me a couple thousand bucks?’
Poole nodded.
‘Do you think he meant it?’
Poole nodded again.
‘I’ll never figure that guy out, I guess,’ Conor said, and slammed the bathroom door behind him.
After he pushed his feet into his loafers, Poole went to the telephone and dialed Judy’s number. She did not answer, nor did her machine. Poole hung up.
A few minutes later Beevers called down to inform Michael and Conor that he was offering room-service breakfast for everybody in his suite (en suite), commencing in thirty minutes at eleven hundred hours, and that Michael had better get hopping if he wanted more than one Bloody Mary.
‘More than one?’
‘I guess you didn’t get the kind of exercise I had last night.’ Beevers gloated. ‘A lovely lady, the kind I was telling you about, left about an hour or two ago, and I’m as mellow as a month in the country. Michael – try to persuade Pumo that there are more important things in the world than his restaurant, will you?’ He hung up before Poole could respond.
2
Beevers’ suite had not only a long living room with sliding windows onto a substantial balcony but was equipped with a dining room where Michael, Pumo, and Beevers sat at a round table laden with plates of food, baskets of rolls, racks of toast, pitchers of Bloody Marys, chafing dishes holding sausages, bacon, and eggs Benedict.
From the couch in the living room where he sat hunched over a cup of black coffee, Conor said, ‘I’ll eat something later.’
‘Mangia, mangia. Keep your strength up for our trip.’ Beevers waggled a fork dripping egg yolk and Hollandaise sauce. His black hair gleamed and his eyes shone. His white shirt had been fresh from its wrapping when Beevers had rolled up his sleeves and his soberly striped bow tie was perfectly knotted. The dark blue suit jacket draped over the back of his chair had a broad chalky stripe. He looked as though he expected to be standing before the Supreme Court instead of the Vietnam Memorial.
‘You’re still serious about that?’ Pumo asked.
‘Aren’t you? Tina, we need you – how could we do this without you?’
‘You’re going to have to try,’ Pumo said. ‘But isn’t the question academic anyhow?’
‘Not to me, it isn’t,’ Beevers said. ‘How about you, Conor? You think I’m just kidding around?’
The three men at the table looked down the length of the living room toward Conor. Startled at being the object of everyone’s attention, he straightened himself up. ‘Not if you’re loaning me the air fare, you’re not,’ he said. ‘Kidding, that is.’
Beevers was now quizzing Michael with his annoyingly clear, annoyingly amused eyes. ‘And you? Was sagen Sie, Michael?’
‘Do you ever exactly kid around, Harry?’ Michael asked, unwilling to be a counter in Harry Beevers’ newest game.
Beevers was still gleaming at him, waiting for more because he knew he was going to get it.
‘I suppose I’m tempted, Harry,’ he said, and caught Pumo’s sidelong glance.
3
‘Just out of curiosity,’ Harry Beevers leaned forward to say to the cabdriver, ‘how do the four of us strike you? What sort of impression do you have of us as a group?’
‘You serious?’ the cabbie asked, and turned to Poole, seated beside him on the front seat. ‘Is this guy serious?’
Poole nodded, and Beevers said, ‘Go on. Lay it on the line. I’m curious.’
The driver looked at Beevers in the mirror, looked back at the road, then glanced back over his shoulder at Pumo and Linklater. The driver was an unshaven, blubbery man in his mid-fifties. Whenever he made even the smallest movement, Poole caught the mingled odors of dried sweat and burning electrical circuits.
‘You guys don’t fit together at all, no way,’ the driver said. He looked suspiciously over at Poole. ‘Hey, if this is “Candid Camera” or some shit like that, you can get out now.’
‘What do you mean, we don’t fit together?’ Beevers asked. ‘We’re a unit!’
‘Here’s what I see.’ The driver glanced again at his mirror. ‘You look like some kind of bigshot lawyer, maybe a lobbyist or some other kind of guy who starts out in life by stealing from the collection plate. The guy next to you looks like a pimp, and the guy next to him is a working stiff with a hangover. This one here next to me, he looks like he teaches high school.’
‘A pimp!’ Pumo howled.
‘So sue me,’ said the driver. ‘You asked.’
‘I am a working stiff with a hangover.’ Conor said. ‘And face it, Tina, you are a pimp.’
‘I got it right, huh?’ the driver said. ‘What do I win? You guys are from “Wheel of Fortune”, right?’
‘Are you serious?’ Beevers asked.
‘I asked first,’ said the driver.
‘No, I wanted to know –’ Beevers began, but Conor told him to shut up.
The cabdriver smirked to himself the rest of the way to Constitution Avenue. ‘This is close enough,’ Beevers said. ‘Pull over.’
‘I thought you wanted the Memorial.’
‘I said, pull over.’
The cabbie swerved to the side of the road and jerked to a stop. ‘Could you arrange for me to meet Vanna White?’ he asked into the mirror.
‘Get stuffed,’ Beevers said, and jumped out of the cab. ‘Pay him, Tina.’ He held the door until Pumo and Linklater left the car, then slammed it shut. ‘I hope you didn’t tip that asshole,’ he said.
Pumo shrugged.
‘Then you’re an asshole too.’ Beevers turned away and stomped off in the direction of the Memorial.
Poole hurried to catch up with him.
‘So what did I say?’ Beevers asked, almost snarling. ‘I didn’t say anything wrong. The guy was a jerk, that’s all. I should have kicked his teeth in.’
‘Calm down, Harry.’
‘You heard what he said to me, didn’t you?’
‘He called Pumo a pimp,’ Michael said.
‘Tina’s a food pimp,’ Beevers said.
‘Slow down, or we’ll lose the others.’
Beevers whirled about to await Tina and Conor, who were about thirty feet behind. Conor looked up and smiled at them.
Beevers tilted his head toward Michael and half-whispered, ‘Didn’t you ever get tired of baby-sitting those two guys?’ Then he yelled at Pumo, ‘Did you tip that shithead?’
Pumo kept a straight face. ‘A pittance.’
Poole said, ‘The cabdriver I got yesterday wanted to ask me how it felt to kill someone.’
‘“How does it feel to kill someone?”’ Beevers said in a mocking, high-pitched voice. ‘I can’t stand that question. Let them kill somebody, if they really want to find out.’ He felt better already. The other two came up to them. ‘Well, we know we’re a unit anyway, don’t we?’
‘We’re savage killers,’ Pumo said.
Conor asked, ‘Who the fuck is Vanna White?’ and Pumo cracked up.
By the time the four of them got within a hundred yards of the Memorial they were part of a crowd. The men and women streaming from the sidewalk across the grass might have been the same people Poole had seen the day before – vets wearing mismatched parts of uniforms, older men in VFW garrison caps, women Poole’s age gripping the hands of dazed-looking children. Harry Beevers’ chalk-striped lawyer’s suit made him look like a frustrated, rather superior tour guide.
‘What a bunch of losers we are, when you come down to it,’ Beevers spoke into Poole’s ear.
Poole said nothing – he was watching two men make their way across the grass. One, nearly six-five and skinny as a pipestem, leaned against a metal crutch and in wide arcs swung a rigid leg that must also have been metal; his bearded companion, imprisoned in a wooden wheelchair, had to hoist his body off the seat every time he pushed the wheels. The two men were calmly talking and laughing as they moved toward the Memorial.
‘Did you find Cotton’s name yesterday?’ Pumo asked, breaking into his thoughts in a way that seemed to extend them.
Poole shook his head. ‘Let’s find him today.’
‘Hell, let’s find everybody,’ Conor said. ‘What else are we here for?’
4
Pumo listed all the names and their panel locations on the back of an American Express slip. Dengler, 14 West, line 52 – Poole remembered that one. Cotton, 13 West, line 73…Trotman, 13 West, line 18. Peters, 14 West, line 38. And Huebsch, Hannapin, Recht. And Burrage, Washington, Tiano. And Rowley, Thomas Chambers, the only man in their company killed at Ia Thuc. And the victims of Elvis, the swivel-hipped sniper: Lowry, Montegna, Blevins. And more after that. Pumo’s tiny, neat handwriting covered the back of the green American Express slip.
They stood on the stone slabs of the path, looking up together at the names etched into polished black granite. Conor wept before Dengler’s name, and both Conor and Pumo had tears on their faces as they looked at the medic’s name: PETERS, NORMAN CHARLES.
‘Goddamn,’ Conor said. ‘Right now, Peters ought to be on top of a tractor, worried that he ain’t going to get enough rain.’ Peters’ family had worked the same Kansas farmland for four generations, and the medic had let everyone know that while he temporarily enjoyed being their medical corpsman, sometimes in the night he could smell his fields in Kansas. (‘You be smelling Spitalny, not Kansas,’ SP4 Cotton said.) Now his brothers worked Peters’ fields, and whatever was left of Peters, Norman Charles, after the helicopter on which he’d been giving plasma to Recht, Herbert Wilson, had crashed and burned was beneath the doubtless fertile soil of a country cemetery.
‘He’d just be bitching about how the government is giving a royal screwing to him and all the other farmers,’ Beevers said.
Michael Poole saw a huge golden-fringed flag ruffling in the breeze off to his right, and remembered glimpsing the same flag yesterday. A tall wild-haired man held the flag anchored to his wide belt – beside him, nearly obscured by a glistening wreath, stood a round white sign lettered in red: NO GREATER LOVE. Poole thought he’d read that the wild-haired ex-Marine had been standing in the same place for two days straight.
‘You see the story about that guy in the paper this morning?’ Pumo said. ‘He’s holding the flag in honor of POWs and MIAs.’
‘It won’t bring them back any quicker,’ Beevers said.
‘I don’t think that’s the point,’ Pumo told him.
In that instant, the long black length of the Memorial announced itself – to Poole it was as if it had just spoken and taken a step toward him. Michael remembered this from his first visit. He moved very slightly away from the others. The world was a blur. Once Poole had stood for hours up to his waist in water swarming with leeches, holding his M-16 and his Claymores out of the water until his arms ached, turned to lead, died…Rowley, Thomas Chambers was standing beside him, also holding his arsenal out of the stinking water. Swarms of mosquitos buzzed around them, settling on their faces. Every few seconds they had to blow tickling mosquitos out of their noses. Poole could remember being so tired that if Rowley had offered to prop up his arms for him, he would have collapsed into sleep right there. He could remember feeling the leeches attach themselves to his thighs.
‘Oh God,’ Poole said, realizing that he was trembling. He wiped his eyes and looked at the others. Conor was weeping too, and emotion suffused Pumo’s handsome, normally impassive face.
Harry Beevers was watching Poole. He looked about as emotional as a weight-guesser at the state fair. ‘It got you, hmm?’
‘Sure,’ Poole said. Profound irritation at Beevers’ smugness flashed through him. ‘Are you immune?’
Beevers shook his head. ‘Hardly, Michael. I just keep my feelings inside. That’s the way I was raised. But I was thinking that a bunch of names ought to be added to this thing. McKenna. The Martinsons. Danton and Guibert. Remember?’
Poole had no desire to try to explain what he had just experienced. He too could think of at least one name that could be added to those on the wall.
Beevers virtually twinkled at Michael. ‘You know that we’re going to get rich out of this, don’t you?’ And for some Beeversish reason utterly opaque to Michael Poole, he tapped him twice on the chest with an extended index ringer. The finger appeared to have been manicured. Then Beevers turned to Pumo and Linklater, evidently saying something about the Memorial. Michael could still feel Harry’s index finger playfully jabbing at his sternum…Only problem is that it doesn’t have enough names on it, he heard Beevers saying.
A hundred dying mosquitos packed Poole’s nostrils; dying leeches clamped onto his weary, dying legs. It was decided, Poole knew: as if in imitation of their ignorant, terrified, and variously foolhardy nineteen-year-old selves, they really were going to take off for the Far East all over again.
PART TWO Preparations for Takeoff (#ulink_94714635-76d9-52cd-b12e-bcb63d70a37a)
6 Beevers at Rest (#ulink_8b5d9e19-0897-5088-a5ac-eef29ed6a7e1)
1
‘Maggie never comes in here, Maggie had enough,’ said Jimmy Lah, answering Harry’s question as he poured a silvery ribbon of vermouth over the ice and liquid already in the glass. He squeezed a paring of lemon rind around the rim of the glass, then slipped it down into the ice cubes.
‘Enough of life, or enough of Tina?’ Beevers asked.
Jimmy Lah placed on the bar a fresh paper napkin with the word Saigon printed in slanting red letters over the silhouette of a man pulling a rickshaw. He set Harry Beevers’ drink on the napkin and with a sideways sweep of his hand gathered up the damp, torn napkin beside it. ‘Tina’s too normal for Maggie.’
The bartender winked at Harry, then stepped backwards. Harry was startled to find himself looking at the spiteful, jealous faces of demons with cat’s whiskers and long faces, taped to the mirror. Until Jimmy Lah moved away, they had been hidden from view. Harry Beevers felt a surprising familiarity with these demons. He knew that he had seen spiteful faces like these somewhere in I Corps, but could not remember where.
It was four o’clock and Harry was killing time before calling his ex-wife. Jimmy Lah was pouring some soapy blender concoction for the bar’s only customer besides himself, a fruitcake with a roosterish yellow Mohawk and oversized pink eyeglasses.
Harry swiveled around on his stool to face the large rectangular dining room of Pumo’s restaurant. Before him were knobby bamboo chairs at glass-topped bamboo tables. Ceiling fans with blades like polished brown oars revolved slowly overhead. The white walls had been painted with murals of giant fronds and palm leaves. The place looked as if Sidney Greenstreet would walk in at any moment.
Behind a counter at the far end of the restaurant a door swung open, revealing two Vietnamese men in white aprons chopping vegetables. Behind them pots bubbled on a gas range. Harry caught a glimpse, unexpected as a mirage, of a fluttering translucent curtain behind the range. He leaned forward to get a better look and felt a familiar inward flinch as he saw Vinh, Pumo’s head chef, darting toward the open door. Vinh was from An Lat, an I Corps village only a few klicks from Ia Thuc.
Then Harry saw who had opened the door.
Just beneath Harry’s normal field of vision, a small, smiling Vietnamese girl was moving cautiously but swiftly into the restaurant. She had nearly reached the counter when Vinh managed to grab her shoulder. The child’s mouth became an astonished O, and Vinh hauled her back into the kitchen. The doors swung shut on a burst of Vietnamese.
In an eerily perfect auditory hallucination, Harry Beevers could hear M.O. Dengler panting just behind his right shoulder, along with the sounds of distant fires and faraway screams. Pale faces shone dimly at the center of a vast darkness. He remembered where he had seen the demons’ faces before – on small black-haired women, rushing up with their fists raised. You numbah ten! You numbah ten!
An abyss had just yawned before Harry Beevers. For a moment he felt the terror of not existing, a sickening feeling that he had never existed in the way simpler, healthier people existed.
He heard himself asking what a kid was doing in the kitchen.
Jimmy stepped nearer. ‘That’s Vinh’s little girl, Helen. Both of them temporarily staying here. Helen was probably looking for Maggie – they’re old buddies.’
‘Tina must have a lot on his mind,’ Harry said, beginning to feel more in control of himself.
‘You see the Village Voice?’
Harry shook his head. He realized that he had unconsciously pushed his hands into his pockets to hide their shaking. Jimmy searched around behind the bar until he found the paper in a stack of menus beside the cash register and slid it across the bar with the back page up. VOICE BULLETIN BOARD, read the headline above three dense columns of personals in varying type sizes. Harry saw that two of the ads had been circled.
The first message read: Foodcat. Missing damned you. Will be Mike Todd Room 10 Wed. The Wanderer. The second message was in caps. JUST DECIDED UNABLE TO DECIDE. MAY BE MIKE TODD, MAYBE NOT. LA-LA.
‘See what I mean?’ Jimmy asked. He began grabbing glasses from below the bar and vigorously swirling them around in a sink.
‘Your sister placed both these ads?’
‘Sure,’ Jimmy said. ‘Whole family’s crazy.’
‘I feel sorry for Tina.’
Jimmy grinned, then looked up from the sink. ‘How’s the doctor these days? Any change?’
‘You know him,’ Harry said. ‘After his son died, he stopped being fun to hang out with. Totalemente.’
After a second, Jimmy asked. ‘He going on your hunting trip?’
‘I wish you’d call it a mission,’ Harry snapped. ‘Listen, isn’t Tina ever going to come up for air?’
‘Maybe later,’ Jimmy said, looking away.
Pumo had two Vietnamese living in his restaurant, he was tearing his kitchen apart to kill a few bugs, and he was acting like a teenager over Maggie Lah. ‘La-La,’ for sure. Beans Beevers’ old comrade had become just another…for a second he searched for Dengler’s word, then had it: toon.
‘Tell him he ought to show up at the Mike Todd Room with a fucking knife in his belt.’
‘Maggie will get a big kick out of that.’
Harry looked at his watch.
‘You planning to get to Taipei on this mission, Harry?’ asked Jimmy, showing a trace of real interest for the first time.
Beevers felt a premonitory tingle. ‘Aren’t you and Maggie from Taipei?’ A nerve jumped in his temple.
Then he got it! Who was to say that Tim Underhill still lived in Singapore? Harry had been to Taipei on his R & R, and he could easily see Tim Underhill choosing to live in the raunchy amalgam of Chinatown and Dodge City he remembered. He saw that Divine Justice, mistakenly thought to be dozing, had of course been wide awake all along. It was all ordained, everything had been thought out beforehand. God had planned it all.
Harry settled back down on his bar stool, ordered another martini, and put off his confrontation with his ex-wife for another twenty minutes while he listened to Jimmy Lah describe the seamier aspects of night life in the capital city of Taiwan.
Jimmy set a steaming cup of coffee before him. Harry folded the napkin into the inside pocket of his suit and glanced up at the angry demons. He saw a child rushing toward him with an upraised knife, and his heart speeded up. He smiled and scalded his tongue with hot coffee.
2
A short time later Harry stood at the pay telephone next to the men’s room in a narrow downstairs corridor. He first tried finding his ex-wife at the Maria Farr Gallery, which was on the ground floor of a former warehouse on Spring Street in SoHo. Pat Caldwell Beevers had gone to private school with Maria Farr, and when the gallery had seemed to be failing, took it on as one of her pet private charities. (In the early days of his wife’s involvement with the art gallery, Harry had endured dinner parties with artists whose work consisted of rusting pipes strewn randomly across the floor, of a row of neat aluminum slabs stood on end, of pink wartencrusted columns that reminded Harry of giant erections. He still could not believe that the perpetrators of these adolescent japes earned real money.)
Maria Farr herself answered the telephone. This was a bad sign.
He said, ‘Maria, how nice to hear your voice again. It’s me.’ In fact, the sound of her voice, all the consonants hard as pebbles, reminded Harry of how much he disliked her.
‘I have nothing to say to you, Harry,’ Maria said.
‘I’m sure that’s a blessing to both of us,’ Harry said. ‘Is Pat still in the gallery?’
‘I wouldn’t tell you if she were.’ Maria hung up.
Another call, to Information, got him the number of Rilke Street, the literary magazine that was Pat’s other ongoing charity. Its editorial offices were actually the Duane Street loft of William Tharpe, the magazine’s editor. Because Harry had spent fewer evenings with Tharpe and his impoverished contributors than with Maria Farr and her artists, Tharpe had always taken Harry more or less at face value.
‘Rilke Street, William Tharpe speaking.’
‘Billy, my boy, how do you do? This is Harry Beevers, your best flunky’s best ex-husband. I was hoping to find her there.’
‘Harry!’ said Tharpe. ‘You’re in luck. Pat and I are pasting up issue thirty-five right this minute. Going to be a beautiful number. Are you coming down this way?’
‘If invited,’ he said. ‘Do you think I might speak to the dear Patricia?’
In a moment Harry’s ex-wife had taken the telephone. ‘How nice of you to call, Harry. I was just thinking about you. Are you getting on all right?’
So she knew that Charles had sacked him.
‘Fine, fine, everything’s great,’ he said. ‘I find myself in the mood for a celebration. How about a drink or dinner after you’re through tickling old Billy’s balls?’
Pat had a short discussion with William Tharpe, most of it inaudible to Harry, then returned the receiver to her mouth and said, ‘An hour, Harry.’
‘No wonder I’ll always adore you,’ he said, and Pat quickly hung up.
3
When his cab passed a liquor store, Harry asked the driver to wait while he went in and bought a bottle. He jumped out, crossed the sidewalk, his coattails billowing, and entered a barnlike, harshly lighted interior with wide aisles and pastel blue neon signs announcing IMPORTED and BEER and FINE CHAMPAGNES. He started moving toward the FINE CHAMPAGNES, but slowed down when he saw three young women with eggbeater hair and antisocial clothing preceding him up the aisle. Punk girls always excited Harry. The three girls ahead of Harry in the aisle of the liquor store were consulting in whispers and giggles over a bin of inexpensive red wines, their fluffy multicolored heads bobbing like toxic orchids to some private joke.
One of them was blonde-and-pink-haired, and nearly as tall as Harry. She picked up a bottle of burgundy and slowly revolved it in her long fingers.
All three girls were dressed in torn black garments that looked as if they had been picked up off the street. The shortest of them bent over to examine the bottle being caressed by the tallest girl and pointed a round bottom toward Harry. Her skin was a sandy, almost golden shade. For an instant Harry was aware only that he knew who she was. Then Harry saw her profile printed sharply against a blue neon background. The girl was Maggie Lah.
Harry stepped forward, grinning, aware of the contrast between his suit and the girls’ rags.
Maggie broke away from the others and glided to the top of the aisle. The other two hurried after. The tall one reached out and closed a white hand on Maggie’s shoulder. Harry saw a sunken cheek covered with dark stubble. The tall girl was a man. Harry stopped moving and his smile froze on his face. Maggie rubbed the side of her hand against the man’s stubbly cheek. The three of them continued up to the top of the aisle and turned toward FINE CHAMPAGNES without seeing Harry.
Maggie and her friends veered into the side aisle lined with refrigerated cases. The neon sign shed pale blue light over them. Harry remembered that he had entered this store to buy a bottle of champagne as a sweetener for Pat when he saw Maggie open the glass doors of a refrigerated case. On her face was an expression of sweetly concentrated attention. She plucked out a bottle of Dom Perignon and slid it instantly into her clothes, where it disappeared. The theft of the bottle had taken something like a second and a half. Harry had a sudden picture, vividly clear, of the dark, cold bottle of Dom Perignon nestled between Maggie’s breasts.
Without any premeditation of any kind, Harry slammed open the glass door and yanked out another bottle of Dom Perignon. He remembered the mystically smiling face of the Vietnamese girl moving toward him through Saigon’s kitchen door. He shoved the bottle beneath his suit jacket, where it bulged. Maggie Lah and her ratty friends had begun to stroll toward the rank of cash registers at the front of the store. Harry thrust his hand inside his coat, upended the bottle, and jammed its neck into his trousers. Then he buttoned his jacket and coat. The bulge had become only slightly conspicuous. He began following Maggie toward the cash registers.
The clerks at the few working registers punched buttons and pushed wine bottles down the moving belts. Maggie and the others sailed past an empty counter and a uniformed security guard lounging against the plate-glass window. As Harry watched, they vanished through the door.
‘Hey, Maggie!’ he yelled. He trotted past the nearest unattended cash register. ‘Maggie!’
The guard looked up and frowned. Harry pointed toward the door. Now everybody at the front of the store was staring at him. ‘I saw an old friend,’ Harry said to the guard, who looked away without responding and leaned back against the window.
By the time Harry got to the sidewalk, Maggie was gone.
All the way to Duane Street, Harry searched the sidewalks for her. When the cab stopped and Harry stood on the stamped metal walkway before the warehouse that housed William Tharpe’s loft, he thought – where I’m going there are a million girls like that.
4
Harry Beevers presented the chilled bottle of Dom Perignon to an astonished, gratified William Tharpe, and spent five or ten minutes in hypocritical raptures over the forthcoming number of Rilke Street. Then he took plain, greying Pat Caldwell Beevers, who was beginning more than ever to suggest an English sheep-dog that had been mooning around him half his life, out to a TriBeCa restaurant of the sort he had learned from Tim Underhill to call piss-elegant. The walls were red lacquer. Discreet lamps with brass shades sat on each table. Portly waiters hovered. Harry thought of Maggie Lah, of her golden skin, of champagne bottles and other interesting things between her small but undoubtedly affecting breasts. All the while he elaborated various necessary fictions concerning his ‘mission.’ Now and then, although Pat frequently smiled and seemed to enjoy her wine, her soup, her fish, he thought she knew that he was lying. Like Jimmy Lah, she asked him how Michael looked, how he thought he was doing, and Harry answered fine, fine. Her smiles seemed to Harry to be full of regret – whether for him, for herself, for Michael Poole, or the world at large, he could not tell. When the moment came when he asked for money, she said only, ‘How much?’ Around two thousand. She reached into her bag, took out her checkbook and fountain pen, and without expression of any kind on her face wrote out a check for three thousand dollars.
She passed the check across the table. Her face was now flushed in a mottled band from cheekbone to cheekbone, Harry thought unattractively so.
‘Of course I consider this strictly a loan,’ he said. ‘You’re doing a lot of good with this money, Pat. I mean that.’
‘So the government wants you to track down this man to see if he might be a murderer?’
‘In a nutshell. Of course it’s a semi-private operation, which is how I’ll be able to do the book deals, the film deals, and so on. You can appreciate the need for strict confidentiality.’
‘Of course.’
‘Well, I know you could always read between the lines, but…’ He let the sentence complete itself. ‘I’d be kidding you if I said there wasn’t quite a bit of potential danger involved in this.’
‘Oh, yes,’ Pat said, nodding.
‘I shouldn’t even be thinking like this, but if I don’t come back, I think it would be fitting for me to be buried at Arlington.’
She nodded again.
Harry gave up and began looking around the room for the waiter.
Pat startled him by saying, ‘There are still times when I’m sorry that you ever set foot in Vietnam.’
‘What’s the point,’ he asked. ‘I’m me, I always was me, I’ve never been anything but me.’
They parted outside the restaurant.
After Harry had gone a short distance down the sidewalk, he turned around, smiling, knowing that Pat was watching him walk away. But she was moving straight ahead, her shoulders slumped, her overstuffed, lumpy bag swinging at her side.
He went to his bank and let himself into the empty vestibule with his bank card. There he used the cash machine to deposit Pat’s check and one other he had obtained that day and to withdraw four hundred dollars in cash. He bought a copy of Screw at a corner newsstand and folded it under his arm so that no one would be able to identify it. Harry walked back through the cold to West 24th Street and the studio apartment he had found shortly after Pat told him, more forcefully than she had ever said anything in the entire course of their marriage, that she had to have a divorce.
7 Conor at Work (#ulink_f9ab9dc5-4832-5cd7-824c-5e29d25855ed)
1
It was funny, Conor thought, how ever since the reunion things from the old days kept coming back to him, as if Vietnam had been his real life and everything since was just the afterglow. It was hard for him to keep his mind on the present – back then kept breaking in, sometimes even physically. A few days before, an old man had innocently handed him a photograph taken by SP4 Cotton of Tim Underhill with his arm around one of his ‘flowers’.
It was four o’clock in the afternoon, and Conor was lying in bed with his first serious hangover since the dedication of the Memorial. Everybody thought you got better at handling pressure as you got older, but in Conor’s experience everybody had it backwards.
Three days earlier, Conor had been in the middle of the fifth week of a carpentry job that should have paid the rent at least until Poole and Beevers put their Singapore trip together. On Mount Avenue in Hampstead, only ten minutes from Conor’s tiny, almost comically underfurnished apartment in South Norwalk, a millionaire lawyer in his sixties named Charles (‘Call me Charlie!’) Daisy had just remarried for the third time. For the sake of his new wife, Daisy was redoing the entire ground floor of his mansion – kitchen, sitting room, breakfast room, dining room, lounge, morning room, laundry room, and servants’ quarters. Daisy’s contractor, a white-bearded old-timer named Ben Roehm, had hired Conor when his usual crew proved too small. Conor had worked with Ben Roehm three or four times over the years. Like a lot of master carpenters who were geniuses at manipulating wood, Roehm could be moody and unpredictable, but he made carpentry more than just something you did to pay the rent. Working with Roehm was as close to pleasure as work could get, in Conor’s opinion.
And the first day Conor was on the job, Charlie Daisy came home early from the office and walked into the sitting room where Conor and Ben Roehm were laying a new oak floor. He stood watching them for a long time. Conor got a little nervous. He figured maybe the client didn’t like the way he looked. To cut down the inevitable agony of kneeling on hardwood all day, Conor had tied thick rags around his knees. He’d knotted a speckled bandanna around his forehead to keep the sweat out of his eyes. (The bandanna made him think of Underhill, of flowers and flowing talk.) Conor thought he probably looked a little loose for Charlie Daisy. He was not completely surprised when Daisy took a step forward and coughed into his fist. ‘Ahem!’ He and Roehm shot each other a quick glance. Clients, especially Mount Avenue-type clients, did nutty things right out of the blue. ‘You, young man,’ Daisy said. Conor looked up, blinking, painfully aware that he was down on all fours like a raggedy dog in front of this dapper little millionaire. ‘Am I right about something?’ Daisy asked. ‘You were in Vietnam, right?’
‘Yes, sir,’ Conor said, prepared for trouble.
‘Good man,’ Daisy. He reached down to shake Conor’s hand. ‘I knew I was right.’
It turned out that his only son was another name on the wall – killed in Hue during the Tet offensive.
For a couple of weeks it was probably the best job of Conor’s life. Almost every day he learned something new from Ben Roehm, little things that had as much to do with concentration and respect as with technique. A few days after shaking Conor’s hand, Charlie Daisy showed up at the end of the day carrying a grey suede box and a leather photo album. Conor and Roehm were framing a new partition in the kitchen, which looked like a bomb-site – chopped-up floor, dangling wires, jutting pipes. Daisy picked his way toward them, saying, ‘Until I got married again, this was the only heart I had.’ The box turned out to be a case for Daisy’s son’s medals. Laid out on lustrous satin were a Purple Heart, a Bronze Star, and a Silver Star. The album was full of pictures from Nam.
Old Daisy chattered away, pointing at images of muddy M-48 tanks and shirtless teenagers with their arms around one another’s shoulders. Time travel ain’t just made up out of nothing, Conor thought. He was sorry that the perky old lawyer didn’t know enough to shut up and let the pictures talk for themselves.
Because the pictures did talk. Hue was in I Corps, Conor’s Vietnam, and everything Conor looked at was familar.
Here was the A Shau Valley – the mountains folding and folding into themselves, and a line of men climbing uphill in a single winding column, planting their feet in that same old mud. (Dengler: Yea, though I walk through the A Shau Valley, I shall fear no evil, because I’m the craziest son of a bitch in the valley.) Boy soldiers flashing the peace sign in a jungle clearing, one with a filthy strip of gauze around his naked upper arm. Conor saw Dengler’s burning, joyous face in place of the boy’s own.
Conor looked at a haggard, whiskered face trying to grin over the barrel of an M-60 mounted in a big green Huey. Peters and Herb Recht had died in a chopper identical to this one, spilling plasma, ammunition belts, six other men, and themselves over a hillside twenty klicks from Camp Crandall.
Conor found himself staring at the cylindrical rounds in the M-60’s belt.
‘I guess you recognize that copter,’ Daisy said.
Conor nodded.
‘Saw plenty of those in your day.’
It was a question, but again he could do no more than nod.
Two young soldiers so fresh they could not have been more than a week in the field sat on a grassy dike and tilted canteens to their mouths. ‘Those boys were killed alongside my son,’ Daisy said. A wet wind ruffled their short hair. Lean oxen wandered in the blasted field behind them. Conor tasted plastic – that curdled deathlike taste of warm water in a plastic canteen.
With the entranced, innocent voice of a man speaking more to himself than his listeners, Daisy supplied a commentary on men hauling 3.5-inch rocket shells to the roof of a building, a bunch of privates lollygagging in front of a wooden shack soon to become the headquarters of PFC Wilson Manly, soldiers smoking weed, soldiers asleep in a dusty wasteland that looked like the outskirts of LZ Sue, hatless grinning soldiers posing with impassive Vietnamese girls…
‘Here’s some guy, I don’t know who,’ Daisy said. Once Conor saw the face, he was barely able to hear the lawyer’s voice. ‘Big so-and-so, wasn’t he? I can guess what he was up to with that little girl.’
It was an honest mistake. His new wife had jumped-started Daisy’s gonads – why else was he coming home at four-thirty in the afternoon?
Tim Underhill, bandanna around his neck, was the big soldier in the photograph. And the ‘girl’ was one of his flowers – a young man so feminine he might have been an actual girl. Smiling at the photographer, they stood on a narrow street crammed with jeeps and rickshaws in what must have been Da Nang or Hue.
‘Son?’ Daisy was saying. ‘You okay, son?’
For a second Conor wondered if Daisy would give him Underbill’s picture.
‘You look a little white, son,’ Daisy said.
‘Don’t worry,’ Conor said. ‘I’m fine.’
He merely scanned the rest of the photographs.
‘The truth is in the pudding,’ he said. ‘You can’t forget this kind of shit.’
Then Ben Roehm decided he needed another new man to do the taping in the kitchen and hired Victor Spitalny.
Conor had been a few minutes late to work. When he came into the ruined kitchen a stranger with a long streaky-blond ponytail was slouching against the skeletal framing of the new partition. The new man wore a raveled turtleneck under a plaid shirt. A worn toolbelt hung beneath his beerbelly. There was a new scab on the bridge of his nose, old scabs the color of overdone toast on the knuckles of his left hand. Red lines threaded the whites of his eyes. Conor’s memory released a bubble filled with the indelible odor of burning kerosene-soaked shit. Vietnam, a ground-pounder.
Ben Roehm and the other carpenters and painters in the crew sat or sprawled on the floor, drinking morning coffee from their thermoses. ‘Conor, meet Tom Woyzak, your new taping partner,’ Ben said. Woyzak stared at Conor’s outstretched hand for a few beats before grudgingly shaking it.
Drink it down, Conor remembered, boo-koo good for your insides.
All morning they silently taped sheetrock on opposite sides of the kitchen.
After Mrs Daisy had come and gone with a pot of fresh coffee at eleven, Woyzak growled, ‘See how she came on to me? Before this job is over I’ll be up in the bitch’s bedroom, nailing her to the floor.’
‘Sure, sure,’ Conor said, laughing.
Woyzak was instantly across the kitchen, leaving a steaming trail of coffee and a spinning cup on the floor. His teeth showed. He pushed his face up to Conor’s. ‘Don’t get in my way, faggot, or I’ll waste you.’
‘Back off,’ Conor said. He shoved him away. Conor was set to move this lunatic off-center with a head fake, step into him and mash his adam’s apple with a left, but Woyzak dusted his shoulders as though Conor’s touch had dirtied him and backed away.
At the end of the day Woyzak dropped his toolbelt in a corner of the kitchen and silently watched Conor pack his tools away for the night.
‘Ain’t you a neat little fucker,’ he said.
Conor slammed his toolbox shut. ‘Do you have many friends, Woyzak?’
‘Do you think these people are going to adopt you? These people are not going to adopt you.’
‘Forget it.’ Conor stood up.
‘So you were over there too?’ Woyzak asked in a voice that put as little curiosity as possible into the question.
‘Yeah.’
‘Clerk-typist?’
In a rage, Conor shook his head and turned away.
‘What outfit were you in?’
‘Ninth Battalion, Twenty-Fourth Infantry.’
Woyzak’s laugh sounded like wind blowing over a loose grave. Conor kept on walking until he was safely out of the house.
He sat straddling his motorcycle for a long time, looking down at the dark grey stones of the drive, deliberately not thinking. The sky and the air were as dark as the gravel. Cold wind blew against his face. He could feel sharp individual stones digging into the soles of his boots.
For a moment Conor was certain that he was going to fire up his Harley and go, just keep moving in a blur of speed and distance until he had flown without stopping across hundreds of miles. Speed and travel gave him a pleasant, light, kind of empty feeling. Conor saw highways rolling out before him, the neon signs in front of motels, hamburgers sizzling on the griddles of roadside diners.
Perched on his bike in the cold air, he heard doors slamming inside the house. Ben Roehm’s big baritone rang out.
He wished that Mike Poole would call him up and say, We’re on the way, babyface, pack your bags and meet us at the airport.
Ben Roehm opened the door and fixed Conor with his eyes. He stepped outside and pulled on his heavy fleece-lined denim coat. ‘See you tomorrow?’
‘I got nowhere else to go,’ Conor said.
Ben Roehm nodded. Conor kicked his Harley into noisy life and rode off as the rest of the crew came through the door.
For three or four days Woyzak and Conor ignored each other. When Charlie Daisy finally scented another veteran and appeared with his box of medals and his photo album, Conor put down his tools and wandered out. He couldn’t bear to hang around while Thomas Woyzak looked at Underbill’s picture.
The night before what turned out to be his last day, Conor woke up at four from a nightmare about M. O. Dengler and Tim Underhill. At five he got out of bed. He made a pot of coffee and drank nearly all of it before he left for work. Pieces of the dream clung to Conor all morning.
He is cowering in a bunker with Dengler, and they are enduring a firefight. Underhill must be in a dark portion of the same bunker or in another right beside it, for his rich voice, sounding a great deal like Ben Roehm’s, carries over most of the noise.
There had been no bunkers in Dragon Valley.
The lieutenant’s corpse sits upright against the far side of the bunker, its legs splayed out. Blood from a neat slash in the lieutenant’s throat has sheeted down over his trunk, staining his chest solidly red.
‘Dengler!’ Conor says in his dream. ‘Dengler, look at the lieutenant!’ That asshole got us into this mess and now he’s dead!’
Another great light burst in the sky, and Conor sees a Koko card protruding from Lieutenant Beevers’ mouth.
Conor touches Dengler’s shoulder and Dengler’s body rolls over onto his legs and Conor sees Dengler’s mutilated face and the Koko card in his gaping mouth. He screams in both the dream and real life and wakes up.
Conor got to work early and waited outside for the others. A few minutes later Ben Roehm pulled up in his Blazer with the two other members of the crew who lived up in his part of the state. They were men with babies and rent to pay, but too young to have been in Vietnam. As he watched them get out of the cab, Conor realized that he felt surprisingly paternal toward these sturdy young carpenters – they didn’t have enough experience to know the difference between Ben Roehm and most of the other contractors around.
‘Okay this morning, Red?’ Roehm asked.
‘Right as the dew, man.’
Woyzak pulled up a moment later in a long car that had been covered with black primer and stripped of all exterior ornaments, even door handles.
Once they went to work, Conor noticed for the first time that Woyzak, who had covered twice as much ground as he had, had done his taping as if he were working for a contractor rushing to finish a crap job on a row of egg-carton houses. Ben Roehm was exacting, and to satisfy him you had to get your seams flat and smooth. Woyzak’s work looked as crude as his getaway car. In the tape were lumps and bulges and wrinkles that would stay there forever, visible even when the walls had been skimmed with plaster and covered with two coats of paint.
Woyzak saw Conor staring at his work. ‘Something wrong?’
‘Just about all of it’s wrong, man. Did you ever work for Ben before?’
Woyzak put down his tools and stepped toward Conor. ‘You little red-haired fuck, you telling me I can’t do my work? You happen to notice I’m twice as good as you are? I think the only reason you’re still on this job is you went crazy over the old guy’s pictures. The Old Man wants to keep the civilians happy.’
The Old Man? Conor thought. Civilians? Are we back in base camp? ‘Hey, his kid took those pictures, man,’ he said.
‘A nigger named Cotton took the pictures.’
‘Oh, shit,’ Conor felt as if he had to sit down, fast.
‘Cotton was in little Daisy’s platoon. The kid made some arrangement to get copies of his pictures – you asshole.’
‘I knew Cotton,’ Conor said. ‘I was with him when he bought it.’
‘I don’t care who took the pictures – I don’t care if he’s alive or dead or somewhere in between. And I don’t care if everybody around here thinks you’re some kind of hero, because you’re just a fuckin’ nuisance in my eyes, man.’ Woyzak took another step toward him, and Conor saw the overlapping fury and misery in him, laid down so deeply he could not tell them apart. ‘You hear me? I was in a firefight for twenty-one days, man, twenty-one days and twenty-one nights.’
‘We gotta do something about the cat faces in the tape, that’s all –’
Woyzak wasn’t hearing him any more. His eyes looked amazingly like pinwheels.
‘PUSSY!’ he screamed.
‘I thought you liked pussy,’ Conor said.
‘I’m a good taper!’ Woyzak shouted.
Ben Roehm stopped everything by slamming his fist against a sheetrock panel. Coffeepot in her hand, Mrs Daisy hovered behind the contractor.
Woyzak smiled weakly at her.
‘That’s enough,’ Roehm said.
‘I can’t work with this asshole,’ Woyzak said, literally throwing his hands up in the air.
‘This guy was edging me on,’ Conor protested.
‘Charlie would have a fit if he heard bad language in the house,’ Mrs Daisy said nervously. ‘He might not look it, but he’s very old-fashioned.’
‘Who’s the taper, anyhow?’ Woyzak bent down and picked up his blade and brush. His eyes looked normal again. ‘I only want to do my job.’
‘But look how he’s doing it, man!’
Ben Roehm turned a solemn face to Conor and told him they had to talk.
He led Conor down the hall to the demolished morning room. Behind his back, Conor heard Woyzak purr something insinuating to Mrs Daisy, who giggled.
In the morning room, Ben stepped over the holes in the floor and slumped back against a bare wall. ‘That boy is my niece Ellen’s husband. He had a lot of bad experiences overseas, and I’m trying to help him out. You don’t have to tell me he tapes like a sailor on a three-day drunk – I’m doing what I can for him.’ He looked at Conor, but could not meet his eyes for long. ‘I wish I could say something else, Red, but I can’t. You’re a good little worker.’
‘I suppose I was on a picnic the whole time I was in Nam.’ Conor shook his head and clamped his mouth shut.
‘I’ll give you a couple extra days’ pay. There’ll be another job, come this summer.’
Summer was a long time coming but Conor said, ‘Don’t worry about me, I got something else lined up. I’m gonna take a trip.’
Roehm awkwardly waved him away. ‘Stay out of the bars.’
2
When Conor got back to Water Street in South Norwalk, he realized that he could remember nothing that had happened since he had left Ben Roehm. It was as though he had fallen asleep when he mounted the Harley and awakened when he switched it off in front of his apartment building. He felt tired, empty, depressed. Conor didn’t know how he had avoided an accident, driving all the way home in a trance. He didn’t know why he was still alive.
He checked his mailbox out of habit. Among the usual junk mail addressed to ‘Resident’ and appeals from Connecticut politicians was a long, white, hand-addressed envelope bearing a New York postmark.
Conor took his mail upstairs, threw the junk into the wastebasket, and took a beer out of his refrigerator. When he looked into the mirror over the kitchen sink, he saw lines in his forehead and pouches under his eyes. He looked sick – middle-aged and sick. Conor turned on the television, dropped his coat on his only chair, and flopped onto the bed. He tore open the white envelope, having delayed this action as long as possible. Then he peered into the envelope. It contained a long blue rectangle of paper. Conor pulled the check from the envelope and examined it. After a moment of confusion and disbelief, he reread the writing on the face of the check. It was made out for two thousand dollars, payable to Conor Linklater, and had been signed by Harold J. Beevers. Conor picked the envelope up off his chest, looked inside it again, and found a note: All systems go! I’ll be in touch about the flight. Regards, Harry (Beans!)
3
After Conor had gazed at the check for a long, long time, he replaced both it and the note in the envelope and tried to figure out somewhere safe to put it. If he put the envelope on the chair he might sit on it, and if he put it on the bed, he might bundle it up with the sheets when he went to the laundromat. He worried that if he put it on top of the TV he might get drunk and mistake it for garbage. Eventually Conor decided on the refigerator. He got out of bed, bent to open the refrigerator door, and carefully placed the envelope on the empty shelf, directly beneath a six-pack of Molson’s Ale.
He splashed water on his face, flattened his hair across his skull with his brush, and changed into the black denim and corduroy clothing he had worn to Washington.
Conor walked to Donovan’s and drank four boilermakers before anyone else came in. He didn’t know if he was happier over getting the traveling money than miserable about losing his job, or more miserable about losing his job because of that asshole Woyzak than happy about the money. He decided after a while that he was more happy than miserable, which called for another drink.
Eventually the bar filled up. Conor stared at a nice-looking woman until he began to feel like a coward and got off his stool to talk to her. She was in training to do something in computers. (At a certain point in the evening, about sixty percent of the women in Donovan’s were in training to do something in computers.) They had a few drinks together. Conor asked her if she would like to see his funny little apartment. She told him he was a funny little guy and said yes.
‘You’re a real homebody, aren’t you?’ the girl asked Conor when he turned on the light in his apartment.
After they had made love, the girl finally asked him about the lumps spread across his back and over his belly. ‘Agent Orange,’ he said. ‘I sort of wish I could teach them to move around, spell out words, shit like that.’
He woke up alone with a hangover, wishing he could see Mike Poole and talk to him about Agent Orange, wondering about Tim Underhill.
8 Dr Poole at Work and Play (#ulink_6fc07c65-d9b5-5397-ba46-da3cb64c3f80)
1
‘Well, here it is,’ Michael said. ‘There’s a medical conference in Singapore next January, and the organizers are offering reduced fares on the flight over.’
He looked up from his copy of American Physician. Judy’s only response was to tighten her lips and stare at the ‘Today’ show. She was eating her breakfast standing up at the central butcher-block counter while Michael sat alone at the long kitchen table, also of butcher block. Three years before, Judy had declared that their kitchen was obsolete, insulting, useless, and demanded a renovation. Now she ate standing up every morning, separated from him by eight feet of overpriced wood.
‘What’s the topic of the conference?’ She continued to look at the television.
‘“The Pediatrics of Trauma.” Subtitled “The Trauma of Pediatrics.”’
Judy gave him a half-amused, half-derisive glance before taking a crisp bite out of a piece of toast.
‘Everything should work out. If we have any luck, we ought to be able to find Underhill and settle things in a week or two. And an extra week is built into the tickets.’
When Judy kept staring silently at the television set, Michael asked, ‘Did you hear Conor’s message on my machine yesterday?’
‘Why should I start listening to your messages?’
‘Harry Beevers sent Conor a check for two thousand to cover his expenses.’
No response.
‘Conor couldn’t believe it.’
‘Do you think they were right to give Tom Brokaw’s job to Bryant Gumble? I always thought he seemed a little lightweight.’
‘I always liked him.’
‘Well, there you are.’ Judy turned away to place her nearly spotless plate and empty coffee cup into the dishwasher.
‘Is that all you have to say?’
Judy whirled around. She was visibly controlling herself. ‘Oh, I’m sorry. Am I allowed to say more? I miss Tom Brokaw in the mornings. How’s that? In fact, sometimes Old Tom kind of turned me on.’ Judy had ended the physical side of their marriage four years before, in 1978, when their son Robert – Robbie – had died of cancer. ‘The show doesn’t seem as interesting anymore, like a lot of things. But I guess these things happen, don’t they? Strange things happen to forty-one-year-old husbands.’ She looked at her watch, then gave Michael a flat, sizzling glance. ‘I have about twenty minutes to get to school. You know how to pick your moments.’
‘You still haven’t said anything about the trip.’
She sighed. ‘Where do you suppose Harry got the money he sent to Conor? Pat Caldwell called up last week and said Harry gave her some fairy tale about a government mission.’
‘Oh.’ Michael said nothing for a moment. ‘Beevers likes to think of himself as James Bond. But it doesn’t really matter where he got the money.’
‘I wish I knew why it is so important for you to run away to Singapore with a couple of lunatics, in search of another lunatic.’ Judy tugged furiously at the hem of her short brocade jacket and for a second reminded Michael of Pat Caldwell. She wore no makeup, and there were ashy streaks of grey in her short blonde hair.
Then she gave him her first really honest glance of the morning. ‘What about your favorite patient?’
‘We’ll see. I’ll tell her about it this afternoon.’
‘And your partners will cover everybody else, I suppose.’
‘All too gleefully.’
‘And in the meantime, you’re happy about trotting off to Asia.’
‘Not for long.’
Judy looked down and smiled with such bitterness that Michael’s insides twisted.
‘I want to see if Tim Underhill needs help. He’s unfinished business.’
‘Here’s what I understand. In war, you kill people. Children included. That’s what war is about. And when it’s over, it’s over.’
‘I don’t think anything is ever really over in that sense,’ Michael said.
2
Michael Poole had killed a child at Ia Thuc, that was true. The circumstances were ambiguous, but he had shot and killed a small boy standing in a shadow at the back of a hootch. Michael was not superior to Harry Beevers, he was like Harry Beevers. There was Harry Beevers and the naked child, and there was himself and the small boy at the back of the hootch. Everything but the conclusion was different, but the conclusion was what mattered.
Some years ago Michael had read in an otherwise forgotten novel that no story existed without its own past, and the past of a story was what enabled us to understand it. This was true of more than stories in books. He was the person he was at the moment – a forty-one-year-old pediatrician driving through a suburban town with a copy of Jane Eyre beside him on the car seat – in part because of the boy he had killed in Ia Thuc, but more because before he had dropped out of college, he had met and married a pretty education major named Judith Writzmann. After he was drafted, Judy had written to him two or three times a week, and Michael still knew some of those letters by heart. It was in one of those letters that she said she wanted their first child to be a son, and that she wanted to name him Robert. Michael and Judy were themselves because of what they had done. He had married Judy, he had murdered a child, he had drunk it down, drunk it down. Judy had supported him through medical school. Robert – dear tender dull beautiful Robbie – had been born in Westerholm, had lived his uneventful ordinary invaluable child’s life in that suburban town his mother cherished and his father loathed. Robbie had been slow to speak, slow to walk, slow in school. Poole had realized that he did not give a damn if his son went to Harvard after all, or to any other college either. He shed sweetness over Poole’s whole life.
At five, Robbie’s headaches took him into his father’s hospital, where they found his first cancerous tumor. Later there were others – tumors on his spleen, on his liver, on his lungs. Michael bought the boy a white rabbit, and the child named it Ernie after a character on ‘Sesame Street’. When Robbie was in remission he would haul Ernie around the house like a teddy bear. Robbie’s illness endured three years – years that seemed to have had their own time, their own rhythm, unconnected to the world’s time. In retrospect, they had sped past, thirty-six months gone in at most twelve. Within them, each hour lasted a week, each week a year, and those three years had taken all Michael’s youth.
But unlike Robbie he lived through them. He had cradled his son in the hospital room during the quiet struggle for the last breath: at the end, Robbie had given up his life very easily. Michael had put his dear dead boy back down on his bed, and then – again, nearly for the last time – embraced his wife.
‘I don’t want to see that damned rabbit when I get home,’ she said. She meant that she wanted him to kill it.
And kill it he nearly had, even though the command was like that of a vain evil queen in a tale. He shared enough of his wife’s rage to be capable of the act. But instead he took the rabbit to a field at the northern edge of Westerholm, lifted its cage out of his car, swung open the little gate, and let the rabbit hop out. Ernie had looked about with his mild eyes (eyes not unlike Robbie’s own), hopped forward, and then streaked off into the woods.
As Michael turned into the parking lot beside St Bartholomew’s hospital, he realized he had driven from his house on Redcoat Park to Outer Belt Road and the hospital, through virtually all of Westerholm, with tears in his eyes. He had negotiated seven corners, fifteen stop signs, eight traffic lights, and the heavy New York-bound traffic on the Belt Road without properly seeing any of it. He had no memory of having driven through the town. His cheeks were wet and his eyes felt puffy. He pulled his handkerchief from his pocket and wiped his face.
‘Don’t be a jerk, Michael,’ he said to himself, picked up the copy of Jane Eyre, and got out of the car.
A huge irregular structure the color of leaf mold, with turrets, flying buttresses, and hundreds of tiny windows punched into its façade, stood on the other side of the parking lot.
Michael’s first obligation at the hospital was to look over all the babies that had been born during the night. As he had once a week for two months, the period of time Stacy Talbot had been confined to a private room in St Bartholomew’s, he made this duty last as long as he could.
When the last baby had been examined and after a quick tour of the maternity floor to satisfy his curiosity about the mothers of the infants he had just seen, Michael got on the elevator to go up to the ninth floor, or Cancer Gulch, as he had once overheard an intern call it.
The elevator stopped at the third floor, and Sam Stein, an orthopedic surgeon of Michael’s acquaintance, got into the car with him. Stein had a beautiful white beard and hulking shoulders and was five or six inches shorter than Michael. His massive vanity allowed him to convey the impression that he was peering down at Michael from a great height, though he had to tilt his beard upward to do it.
A decade ago, Stein had badly botched a leg operation on a young patient of Michael’s and then irritably dismissed as hysteria the boy’s increasing complaints of pain. Eventually, after disseminating blame amongst every physician who had treated the child, especially Michael Poole, the orthopedist had been forced to operate on the child again. Neither Stein nor Michael had forgotten the episode and Michael had never referred another patient to him.
Stein glanced at the book in Michael’s hand, frowned, then glanced up at the lighted panel above the door to see where he was going.
‘In my experience, Dr Poole, decent medical men rarely have the leisure for fiction.’
‘I don’t have any leisure, period,’ Michael said.
Michael reached Stacy Talbot’s door without encountering another of Westerholm’s approximately seventy doctors. (He figured that about a quarter of these were not presently talking to him. Even some of those who were would think twice about his presence on the Oncology floor. This was just normal medicine.)
Michael supposed that for someone like Sam Stein what was happening to Stacy Talbot was also just normal medicine. For him, it was very much like what had happened to Robbie.
He stepped inside her room and squinted into the darkness. Her eyes were closed. He waited a moment before moving toward her. The blinds were down and the lights were off. Flowers from the shop on the hospital’s ground floor wilted in the dense dark air. Just visible beneath a welter of tubes, Stacy’s chest rose and fell. On the sheet next to her hand lay a copy of Huckleberry Finn. The placement of the bookmark showed that she had nearly finished reading it.
Michael stepped toward her bed, and her eyes opened. It took her a moment to recognize him, and then she grinned.
‘I’m glad it’s you,’ she said.
Stacy was not really his patient at all anymore – as the disease rampaged throughout her brain and body, she had been handed off to one specialist after another.
‘I brought you a new book,’ he said, and put it on her table. Then he sat down next to her and gently took her hand in his.
Stacy’s dehydrated skin emanated heat. Michael could see each brown spike of her eyebrows propped against a pad of red flesh. All of her hair had fallen out, and she wore a brilliantly colored knit cap that made her look vaguely Middle Eastern.
‘Do you think Emmaline Grangerford had cancer?’ she asked him. ‘I suppose not, actually. I keep hoping I’ll read a book some day that has someone like me in it, but I never do.’
‘You’re not exactly an ordinary kid,’ Michael said.
‘Sometimes I think all of this stuff couldn’t really be happening to me – I think I must have just made it all up, and I’m really lying in my bed at home, doing a spectacular job of staying out of school.’
He opened her folder and skimmed through the dry account of her ongoing catastrophe.
‘They found a new one.’
‘So I see.’
‘I guess I’ll get another dent in my head.’ She tried to smile sideways at him, but failed. ‘I sort of like going to the CAT-scan, though. It’s tremendous travel. Past the nurses’ station! All the way down the hall! A ride on the elevator!’
‘Must be highly stimulating.’
‘I get faint all over and have to lie down for days and days.’
‘And women clothed in white minister to your every need.’
‘Unfortunately.’
Then her eyes widened, and for a moment she closed her hot fingers over his. When she relaxed, she said, ‘This is the moment when one of my aunts always tells me that she’ll pray for me.’
Michael smiled and held her hand tightly.
‘At times like that I think that whoever is in charge of listening to prayers must be really sick of hearing my name.’
‘I’ll see if I can get one of the nurses to take you out of your room once in a while. You seem to enjoy elevator travel.’
For a second Stacy looked almost hopeful.
‘I wanted to tell you that I’m going to be doing some traveling myself,’ Michael said. ‘Toward the end of January I’ll be going away for two or three weeks.’ Stacy’s face settled back into the mask of illness. ‘I’m going to Singapore. Maybe Bangkok, too.’
‘Alone?’
‘With a couple of other people.’
‘Very mysterious. I guess I ought to thank you for giving me plenty of warning.’
‘I’ll send you a thousand postcards of men waving snakes in the air and elephants crossing against rickshaw traffic.’
‘Swell. I visit the elevator, and you visit Singapore. Don’t bother.’
‘I’ll bother if I want to.’
‘Don’t do me any favors.’ She turned her head away from him. ‘I mean it. Don’t bother.’
Michael had the feeling that this had happened before, in just this same way. He leaned forward and stroked her forehead. Her face contorted. ‘I’m sorry you’re angry with me, but I’ll see you again next week and we can talk about it some more.’
‘How could you know what I feel? I’m so stupid. You don’t have any idea about what goes on inside me.’
‘Believe it or not, I have some idea,’ he said.
‘Ever see a CAT-scan from the inside, Dr Poole?’
Michael stood up. When he bent over to kiss her, she turned her head away.
She was crying when he left the room. Michael stopped at the nurses’ station before escaping the hospital.
3
That evening Poole called the other men about the charter flight. Conor said, ‘Wild, sign me up, man.’ Harry Beevers said, ‘Outstanding. I was wondering when you were going to come through for us.’ Tina Pumo said, ‘You know what my answer is, Mike. Somebody’s got to mind the store.’
‘You just became my wife’s hero,’ Michael said. ‘Well, anyhow…would you mind trying to find Tim Underhill’s address for us? His paperback publisher is Gladstone House – somebody there ought to know it.’
They agreed to have a drink together before the trip.
4
One night the following week, Michael Poole drove slowly home from New York through a snowstorm. Abandoned cars, many of them dented or wrecked, lay along the side of the parkway like corpses after a battle. A few hundred yards ahead the light bar on top of a police car flashed red-yellow-blue-yellow-red. Cars crawled in single file, dimly visible, past a high white ambulance and policemen waving lighted batons. For a second Poole imagined that he saw Tim Underhill, in the snow very like a giant white rabbit, standing beside his car in the storm, waving a lantern. To stop him? To light his way forward? Poole turned his head and saw that it was a tree heavy with snow. A yellow beam from the police car flashed through his windshield and traveled across the front seat.
9 In Search of Maggie Lah (#ulink_7f798b97-9727-5696-9c07-8caba2e7d6d3)
1
All at once everything seemed to be going wrong, Tina Pumo thought, all at once everything was falling apart. He hated the Palladium and the Mike Todd Room. He also hated Area, the Roxy, CBGB’s, Magique, Danceteria, and the Ritz. Maggie wasn’t going to show up at the Mike Todd Room, and she wasn’t going to be at any of those other places either. He could stand at the bar for hours, drink until he fell down, and all that would happen was that hundreds of little night people would stomp him on the way to their next bottle of Rolling Rock.
The first time he talked his way past the doorman into the vast barnlike room that the Palladium used for publicity parties and private gatherings he had come from a marathon meeting with Saigon’s accountants. He was wearing his only grey flannel suit, purchased before the Vietnam War and small enough to pinch his waist. Pumo wandered through the crowd searching for Maggie. He noticed eventually that nearly everybody looked at him sharply, just once, then stepped away. In an otherwise crowded room, he was surrounded by a sort of DMZ, a cordon sanitaire of empty space. Once he heard laughter behind his back, turned around to see if he could share the joke, and saw everybody turn to stone, staring at him. Finally he went up to the bar and managed to catch the eye of a skinny young bartender with mascara on his face and a tangle of blond hair piled up on top of his head.
‘I was wondering if you knew a girl named Maggie Lah,’ Tina said. ‘I was supposed to meet her here tonight. She’s short, she’s Chinese, good-looking –’
‘I know her,’ the bartender said. ‘She might be in later.’ He retreated to the other end of the bar.
Tina experienced a moment of pure rage at Maggie. May be Mike Todd, Maybe not. La-La. He saw that this message was a trick followed by mocking laughter. He stormed away from the bar and found himself standing in front of a blonde girl who looked about sixteen, had stars painted on both cheeks, and wore a shiny, slinky black chemise. She was exactly his type. ‘I want to take you home with me,’ he said. The girl opened her flowerlike mouth and solved one mystery by saying, ‘I don’t go home with narcs.’
That had been a week after Halloween. For at least two weeks afterward, he kept the city at bay while he tore his kitchen apart. Every time he and the exterminators took down another section of wall, a million bugs scrambled to get out of the light – if you killed them in one place, the next day they surfaced on another. For a long time they seemed to be concentrated behind the Garland range. In order to keep the fumigant from spoiling the food, he and the kitchen staff taped thick sheets of clear plastic between the range and food preparation surfaces and wherever they were trying to exterminate the insects. They pushed all three thousand pounds of the Garland eight feet out into the middle of the kitchen. Vinh, the head chef, complained that he and his daughter couldn’t sleep at night because they heard things moving inside the walls. They had recently moved into the restaurant’s ‘office,’ a little room in the basement, because Vinh’s sister was having another baby and needed their room in her house in Queens. Normally the office was furnished with a desk, a couch, and boxes of files. Now the couch belonged to Goodwill, the desk was jammed into a corner of Pumo’s living room, and Vinh and Helen slept on a mattress on the floor.
This temporary, illegal situation looked as if it was becoming a permanent illegal situation. Helen not only couldn’t sleep, but she wet the bed – the mattress – whenever she did doze off. Vinh claimed that the bed-wetting got worse right after the child saw Harry Beevers sitting at the bar. That Harry Beevers was a devil who put curses on children was mystical Vietnamese hysteria, pure and simple, but they believed it, so for them it was true. Pumo sometimes felt like strangling Vinh, but if he did he’d not only go to jail, he’d never get another chef.
Headache upon headache. Maggie did not call or send word to him for ten days. He began having dreams about Victor Spitalny running out of the cave at Ia Thuc covered with wasps and spiders.
The Health Department issued him a Second Warning, and the inspector muttered about misuse of nonresidential space. The little office reeked of pee.
The day before Maggie put another ad in the Village Voice, Michael Poole called again, asking if he had time to see if anyone at a place called Gladstone House knew where Tim Underhill lived. ‘Oh, sure,’ Tina grumped, ‘I spend all day in bed reading poetry.’ But he looked up the number in the book. The woman who answered referred him to the editorial department. A woman named Corazon Fayre said she knew nothing about an author named Timothy Underwood, and referred him to a woman named Dinah Mellow, who referred him to Sarah Good, who referred him to Betsy Flagg, who claimed at least to have heard of Timothy Underwood, was it? No? Let me transfer you to publicity. In publicity, Jane Boot referred him to May Upshaw who referred him to Marjorie Fan, who disappeared into limbo for fifteen minutes and returned from it with the information that ten years ago Mr Underhill had written requesting that his circumstances and whereabouts be kept secret on pain of serious authorial displeasure, and that all communications, fan mail included, be directed to him through his agent, Mr Fenwick Throng.
‘Fenwick Throng?’ Pumo asked. ‘Is that a real name?’
The next day was Wednesday, and after getting Vinh off to the markets and Helen to school, Tina set out to buy a copy of the Village Voice at the newsstand on the corner of Eighth Street and Sixth Avenue. Many newsstands were closer, but Eighth Street and Sixth Avenue was only a few blocks from La Groceria, a cafe where Pumo could sit in pale sunlight streaming in through long windows, sip two cups of cappuccino while pretty waitresses with white morning faces yawned and stretched like ballerinas, and read every word of the VOICE BULLETIN BOARD.
He found a message from Maggie right above the drawing in the center of the page: Namcat. Try again same place, same time? Bruises and tattoos. You should fly East with the others, taking Type A with. Her brother must have heard about their trip from Harry and then told her.
He thought of what it would be like to go to Singapore with Poole, Linklater, Harry Beevers, and Maggie Lah. Instantly his stomach tightened up and the cappuccino tasted like brass. She would bring too much carry-on luggage, half of it paper bags. Out of principle, she’d insist on changing hotels at least twice. She’d flirt with Poole, pick fights with Beevers, and virtually adopt Conor. Pumo began to sweat. He signaled for the check, paid and left.
Several times during the day he dialed Fenwick Throng’s telephone number, but the agent’s line was always busy.
At eleven o’clock he gave unnecessary instructions about closing the restaurant, then showered and changed clothes and hurried off to the Palladium’s back entrance. For fifteen minutes he stood and froze with half a dozen other people in an area like a dog pound enclosed by a wire fence, and then someone finally recognized him and let him in.
If it hadn’t been for that New York article, he thought, I wouldn’t even be able to get in here.
This time he was dressed in a Giorgio Armani jacket that looked vaguely like chain mail, voluminously pleated black trousers, a grey silk shirt, and a narrow black tie. They might mistake him for a pimp, he thought, but not for a narc.
Clutching a beer bottle, Pumo walked twice up and down the entire length of the bar before he admitted to himself that Maggie had stood him up twice in a row. He wound his way through the mob to the tables. Extravagantly dressed young people, none of them Maggie, leaned toward one another in pools of candlelight.
All of a sudden, everything’s falling apart, Pumo thought. Somewhere along the line, my life stopped making sense.
Young people swirled around him. Synthesizer rock blared from invisible speakers. For a moment Pumo wished he were back home, wearing blue jeans and listening to the Rolling Stones. Maggie was never going to show up, tonight or any other night. One of these days, some hulking new boyfriend would show up at his door to collect the plastic radio, the little yellow Pony Pro hairdryer, and the Bow Wow Wow records she had left behind.
Pumo fought his way up to the bar and ordered a double vodka martini on the rocks. Hold the olives, hold the vermouth, hold the rocks, he remembered Michael Poole saying in Manly’s little club, where there had been no olives, vermouth, or ice, only a jug of suspicious yellow-tinged ‘vodka’ Manly claimed to have obtained from a colonel in the First Air Cav.
‘That’s the happiest you’ve looked all night,’ said a low voice beside him.
Pumo turned and saw a tall, ambiguously sexed apparition in camouflage fatigues beaming at him. Bare shaven skin gleamed above its ears. Aggressive, shiny black hair swept across the top of the apparition’s head and hung down its back. Then Pumo noticed the apparition’s breasts bulging beneath the fatigue shirt. Her hips flared beneath a wide belt. He wondered what it would be like to go to bed with somebody with white sidewalls.
Fifteen minutes later the girl was squeezing herself up against him in the back of a taxi. ‘Bite my ear,’ she said.
‘Here?’
She tilted her head toward him. Pumo put one arm around her shoulder and took her earlobe between his teeth. Fine black stubble covered the side of her head.
‘Harder.’
She squirmed when he bit down on the gristly lobe.
‘You didn’t tell me your name,’ he said.
She slid her hand over his crotch. Her breasts nuzzled his upper arm. He felt pleasantly engulfed. ‘My friends call me Dracula,’ she said. ‘But not because I suck blood.’
She wouldn’t let him turn on the lights in his loft, and he groped his way to the bedroom in the dark. Giggling, she pushed him down on the bed. ‘Just lie there,’ she said, and undid his belt, got rid of his boots, and pulled down his trousers. He got out of the chain-mail jacket and wrenched off his tie. ‘Pretty Tina,’ Dracula said. She bent over and licked his erect cock. ‘I always feel like I’m in church when I do this.’
‘Wow,’ Tina said. ‘Where have you been all my life?’
‘You don’t want to know where I’ve been.’ She lightly scratched his scrotum with a long fingernail. ‘Don’t worry, I don’t have any nasty diseases. I practically live at the doctor’s office.’
‘Why?’
‘I guess I just enjoy being a girl.’
Exhausted, dulled by alcohol, Pumo let her proceed. When she sat up, straddling him, she looked like an Apache warrior with plucked eyebrows. ‘Do you like Dracula?’
‘I think I’ll marry Dracula,’ he said.
She unbuttoned the camouflage shirt and tore it off, exposing firm conical breasts. ‘Bite me,’ she said, pushing them into his face. ‘Hard. Until I tell you to stop.’
He gently bit one of her nipples, and she ground her knuckles into the side of his head. ‘Harder.’ She dug her nails into his cock. Pumo bit down.
‘Harder.’
He increased the pressure.
When he tasted blood, she screamed and moaned and gripped his head in her arms. ‘Good good.’ Her hand left his head and found his cock again. ‘Still hard? Good Tina.’
Finally she let him raise his head. A thin line of blood oozed from the bottom of her breast down her ribcage. ‘Now little Drac goes back to church.’
Pumo laughed and fell back on the pillow. He wondered if Vinh or Helen had heard her scream and decided they probably hadn’t – they were two floors below.
After a long delirious time Pumo’s orgasm sent looping ribbons of semen over her cheeks, into her eyebrows, into the air. She moaned and hitched herself onto his body so that his arms were pinned beneath her legs and astonished him by rubbing his semen into her face with both hands.
‘I haven’t come like that since I was about twenty,’ he said. ‘But you’re sort of hurting my arms.’
‘Poor baby.’ She patted his cheek.
‘I’d really appreciate it if you got off my arms,’ he said.
She looked down at him triumphantly and hit him hard in the temple.
Pumo struggled to get up, but Dracula struck him again. He found himself unable to move for a second. She grinned down at him, her teeth and eyes flashing in the murk, and slammed her fist against the side of his head.
He yelled for help. She struck him again.
‘Murder!’ he yelled, but no one heard.
Just before the twentieth blow to his temples, Pumo’s eyes cleared and he saw Dracula peering impersonally down at him, her mouth pursed and her lipstick smeared.
2
Pumo came to in darkness, he knew not how much later. His lips throbbed and felt the size of steaks. He tasted blood. His whole body ached, the pain radiating out from the twin centers of his head and groin. In sudden panic, he put his hand on his penis, and found it intact. His eyes opened. He held up his hands before his face – they were dark with blood.
Pumo lifted his head to look down his body, and a white-hot band of pain jumped from temple to temple. He fell back on the wet pillow and breathed heavily. Then he lifted his head more cautiously. He was very cold. He saw his naked body sprawled on dark wet sheets. Working its way from ache to ache, a thin hot wire of agony snaked through the middle of his head. Now his lips felt like rough red bricks. He touched his face with wet fingers.
He considered getting out of bed. Then he wondered what time it was. Pumo raised his right arm and looked at his wrist, which no longer wore a watch.
He turned his head sideways. The radio with its digital clock was gone from the bedside table.
He slid himself off the side of the bed, finding the floor first with one foot, then with both his knees. His chest slid across the sheets, and he swallowed a bitter mouthful of vomit. When he stood up, his head swam and his vision darkened. He propped himself up on the headboard with aching arms. A cut on the side of his head beat and beat.
Clutching his head, Pumo slowly made his way into the bathroom. Without turning on the light, he bathed his face in cold water before daring to look at himself in the mirror. A grotesque purple mask, the face of the Elephant Man, stared back at him. His stomach flipped over, and he threw up into the sink and passed out again before he hit the floor.
10 Conversations and Dreams (#ulink_2cc0dd96-d2e2-5ee0-8bf9-41f13cef74a4)
1
‘Yes, I’ve been lying low, and no, I haven’t changed my mind about going,’ Pumo said. He was talking on the telephone to Michael Poole. ‘You should see me, or rather you shouldn’t. I’m hideous. I stay inside most of the time, because when I go out I frighten children.’
‘Is that some new kind of joke?’
‘Don’t I wish. I got beat up by a psychopath. I also got robbed.’
‘You mean you got mugged?’
Pumo hesitated. ‘In a way. I’d explain the circumstances, Mike, but frankly, they’re too embarrassing.’
‘Can’t you even give me a hint?’
‘Well, never pick up anybody who calls herself Dracula.’ After Michael had laughed dutifully, Pumo said, ‘I lost my watch, a clock radio, a brand new pair of lizard-skin boots from McCreedy and Shreiber, my Walkman, my Watchman, a Dunhill lighter that didn’t work anymore, a Giorgio Armani jacket, and all my credit cards and about three hundred in cash. And when the asshole took off, he or she left the downstairs door open and some goddamned bum came in and pissed all over the hallway.’
‘How do you feel about that?’ Michael groaned. ‘Jesus, what a stupid question. I mean, in general how do you feel? I wish you’d called me right away.’
‘In general I feel like committing murder, that’s how I feel in general. This thing shook me up, Mike. The world is full of hurt. I understand that there’s no real safety, not anywhere. Terrible things can happen in an instant, to anyone. That asshole just about made me afraid to go outside. But if you’re smart, you should be afraid to go outside. Listen – I want you guys to be careful when you get over there. Don’t take any risks.’
‘Okay,’ Michael said.
‘The reason I didn’t call you or anybody else is the only good thing that came out of this whole thing. Maggie showed up. I guess I just missed her at the place where I encountered Dracula. The bartender told her he saw me leaving with someone else, so the next day she came around to check up. And found me with my face about twice its normal size. So she moved back in.’
As Conor said, there’s a flaw in every ointment. Or something like that.’
‘But I did talk to Underhill’s agent. His former agent, I should say.’
‘Don’t make me beg.’
‘Basically the word is that our boy did go to Singapore, all right, just like he always said he would. Throng – the agent’s name is Fenwick Throng, believe it or not – didn’t know if he was still there. They have a funny history. Underhill always had his checks deposited in a branch bank down in Chinatown. Throng never even knew his address. He wrote to him in care of a post office box. Every now and then Underhill called up to rant at him, and a couple of times he fired him. I guess over a period of five or six years the calls got more and more abusive, more violent. Throng thought that Tim was usually drunk or stoned or high on something, or all three at once. Then he’d call back in tears a couple of days later and beg Throng to work for him again. Eventually it just got too crazy for Throng, and he told Tim he couldn’t work for him anymore. He thinks that Tim has been agenting his own books ever since.’
‘So he’s probably still out there, but we’ll have to find him for ourselves.’
‘And he’s nuts. He sounds scary as shit to me, Michael. If I were you, I’d stay home too.’
‘So the agent convinced you that Tim Underhill is probably Koko.’
‘I wish I could say he didn’t.’
‘I wish you could too.’
‘So consider this – is he really worth risking your neck for?’ Tina asked.
‘I’d sure as hell rather risk my neck for Underhill than for Lyndon Baines Johnson.’
‘Well, hang on, because here comes the good part,’ Tina said.
2
‘I don’t think adult men actually exist anymore – if they ever did,’ Judy said. ‘They really are just grown up little boys. It’s demeaning. Michael is a caring, intelligent person and he works hard and all that, but what he believes in is ridiculous. After you reach a certain level, his values are completely childish.’
‘At least they’re that mature,’ said Pat Caldwell. This conversation too was conducted over the telephone. ‘Sometimes I’m afraid that Harry’s are just infantile.’
‘Michael still believes in the army. He’d deny that, but it’s the truth. He takes that boy’s game as the real thing. He loved being part of a group.’
‘Harry had the time of his life in Vietnam,’ Pat said.
‘The point is that Michael is going back. He wants to be in the army again. He wants to be part of a unit.’
‘I think Harry just wants something to do.’
‘Something to do? He could get a job! He could start acting like a lawyer again!’
‘Hmm, well, perhaps.’
‘Are you aware that Michael wants to sell his share of the practice? That he wants to move out of Westerholm and work in a slum? He thinks he isn’t doing enough. I mean, he has a little tiny point, you have to be a doctor in a place like this to find out how really political it is, you wouldn’t believe how much infighting goes on, but that’s life, that’s all it is.’
‘So he’s using the trip to give himself time to think about it,’ Pat suggested.
‘He’s using the trip to play army,’ Judy said. ‘Let’s not even mention how he’s guilt-tripping himself about Ia Thuc.’
‘Oh, I think Harry was always proud of Ia Thuc,’ Pat said. ‘Some day, I ought to show you the letters he wrote me.’
3
The night before he flew to Singapore, Michael dreamed that he was walking at night along a mountain trail toward a group of uniformed men sitting around a small fire. When he gets nearer, he sees that they are ghosts, not men – flames show dimly through the bodies in front of the fire. The ghosts turn to watch him approach. Their uniforms are ragged and stiff with dirt. In his dream Michael simply assumes that he had served with these men. Then one of the ghosts, Melvin O. Elvan, stands and steps forward. Don’t mess with Underhill, Elvan says. The world is full of hurt.
On the same night, Tina Pumo dreams that he is lying on his bed while Maggie Lah paces around the bedroom. (In real life, Maggie disappeared again as soon as his face had begun to heal.) You can’t win a catastrophe, Maggie says. You just have to try to keep your head above water. Consider the elephant, his grace and gravity, his innate nobility. Burn down the restaurant and start over.
11 Koko (#ulink_7135909a-b8fe-5ac3-8844-a912ad67c887)
The shutters of the bungalow were closed against the heat. A film of condensation lay over the pink stucco walls, and the air in the room was warm, moist, and pink dark. There was a strong, dark brown smell of excrement. The man in the first of the two heavy chairs now and then grunted and stirred, or pushed his arms against the ropes. The woman did not move, because the woman was dead. Koko was invisible, but the man followed him with his eyes. When you knew you were going to die, you could see the invisible.
If you were in a village, say –
If the smoke from the cookfire wavered and rose straight into the air again. If the chicken lifted one foot and froze. If the sow cocked her head. If you saw these things. If you saw a leaf shaking, if you saw dust hovering –
Then you might see the vein jumping in Koko’s neck. You might see Koko leaning against a hootch, the vein jumping in his neck.
This is one thing Koko knew: there are always empty places. In cities where people sleep on the pavement, in cities so crowded people take shifts in bed, cities so crowded no one single person is ever truly quiet. In these cities especially there are always hollow realms, eternal places, places forgotten. Rich people leave the empty places behind, or the city itself leaves them behind.
The rich people move everything out and forget, and at night eternity quietly breaks in with Koko.
His father had been sitting in one of the two heavy chairs the rich people had left behind. We use everything, his father said. We waste no part of the animal.
We do not waste the chairs.
There was one memory he had seen in the cave, and in memory no part of the animal is wasted.
This is one thing Koko knew: they thought the chairs weren’t good enough for them. Wherever they went had better chairs.
The woman didn’t count, Roberto Ortiz had just brought her along. There weren’t even enough cards for the ones that counted, much less the ones they brought along. When they answered the letters they were supposed to come alone, but the ones like Roberto Ortiz thought where they were going was nothing, who they were going to see was nobody, and it would all be over in ten minutes…They never thought about the cards, no one had leaned over them at night and said: We waste no part of the animal. The woman was half-Indian, half-Chinese, something like that, maybe just a Eurasian, someone Roberto Ortiz had picked up, someone Roberto Ortiz was planning to fuck the way Pumo the Puma fucked the whore Dawn Cucchio in Sydney, Australia, just someone dead in a chair, just someone who wouldn’t even get a card.
In his right jacket pocket he had all five Rearing Elephant cards, all the regimental cards he had left, with the names written lightly, penciled lightly, on four of them. Beevers, Poole, Pumo, Linklater. These were for when he went to America.
In his left jacket pocket he had an ordinary pack of Orchid Boy playing cards, made in Taiwan.
When he had opened the door wearing the big Tim Underhill smile, the hey baby how’s it shakin’ smile, and seen the woman standing next to Roberto Ortiz wearing her own hello don’t mind me! smile, he had understood why there were two chairs.
In the cave there had been no chairs, no chairs for the lords of the earth. The cave made Koko shake, his father and the devil made him shake.
‘Of course it’s okay,’ he had said. ‘There’s not much here, but you have a chair apiece, so come in and sit you down, sit you down, don’t mind that the place is so bare, we’re making changes all the time, I don’t actually work here…’
Oh, I pray here.
But they took the chairs anyhow. Yes, Mr Roberto Ortiz had brought all his documentation, he brought it out, smiling, just beginning to look curious, beginning to notice the dust. The emptiness.
When Koko took the documents from the man’s hand, he switched on the invisibility switch.
It was the same letter for all of them.
Dear (name),
I have decided that it is no longer possible for me to remain silent about the truth of the events which occurred in the I Corps village of Ia Thuc in 1968. Justice must finally be done. You will understand that I myself cannot be the one to bring the truth of these events to the world’s eyes and ears. I was a participant in them, and have besides turned my horror at these events to account in works of fiction. As a representative, past or present, of the world press, as one who visited the scene of a great unknown crime and saw it at first-hand, would you care to discuss this matter further? I myself have no interest whatever in the profits that might be made from publishing the true story of Ia Thuc. You may write to me at (address) if you are interested in coming East to pursue this matter. I ask only, for reasons of my own security, that you refrain from discussing this matter with, or even mentioning it to, anyone until we have had an initial meeting, that you make no notes or diary entries pertaining to myself or Ia Thuc until we meet, and that you come to our first meeting with the following proofs of identity: a) passport, and b) copies of all stories and articles you wrote or to which you contributed, concerning the American action in the I Corps village of Ia Thuc. In my opinion, you will find our meeting more than worth-while.
Yours sincerely,
Timothy Underhill
Koko liked Roberto Ortiz. He liked him very much. I thought I could just show you my passports and drop off my material, he said, Miss Balandran and I had planned to see Lola, it’s getting late for a meeting now, Miss Balandran particularly wanted me to see Lola, it’s a form of entertainment well known in this city, could you come around to my hotel tomorrow for lunch, you’ll have time to look over the material in the file…
Do you know Lola?
No.
Koko liked his smooth olive skin, his glossy hair, and his confident smile. He had the whitest shirt, the glossiest tie, the bluest blazer. He had Miss Balandran, who had long golden legs and dimples and knew about the local culture. He had been going to drop something off and arrange a meeting on his own ground, as the Frenchmen had done.
But the Frenchmen only had each other, they did not have Miss Balandran smiling so prettily, urging him so quietly, so sexily, to agree.
‘Of course,’ Koko said, ‘you must do as your beautiful escort says, you must see all the sights, just stop in for a second, have a drink and let me take an initial look at what you’ve brought…’
Roberto Ortiz never noticed that Miss Balandran flushed when Koko said ‘escort.’
Two passports?
They were sitting in the chairs, smiling up at him with such confidence, such assurance, their clothes so beautiful and their manners so good, knowing that in minutes they would be on their way to the nightclub, to their dinner and their drinks, their pleasures.
‘Dual citizenship,’ Ortiz said, glancing slyly at Miss Balandran. ‘I am Honduran as well as American. You’ll see all the Spanish-language publications in the file, besides the ones you’re familiar with.’
‘Very interesting,’ Koko said. ‘Very interesting, indeed. I’ll just be back in a moment with your drinks, and we can toast the success of our venture as well as your night out on the town.’
He went behind the chairs into the kitchen and turned the cold tap on and off, banged a cabinet closed.
‘I wanted to say how much I’ve enjoyed your books,’ Roberto Ortiz called from the living room.
On the counter beside the sink were a hammer, a cleaver, an automatic pistol, a new roll of strapping tape, and a small brown paper bag. Koko picked up the hammer and the pistol.
‘I think The Divided Man is my favorite,’ Roberto Ortiz called out.
Koko put the pistol in his coat pocket and hefted the hammer. ‘Thank you,’ he said.
They were just sitting in the chairs, looking forward. He came gliding out of the kitchen and he was invisible, he made no noise. They were just waiting for their drinks. He came up behind Roberto Ortiz and he raised his arm and Miss Balandran didn’t even know he was there until she heard the squashy sound of the hammer hitting Roberto Ortiz’s head.
‘Quiet,’ he said. Roberto Ortiz collapsed into himself, unconscious but not dead. A snail trail of blood crawled out of his nose.
Koko dropped the hammer and quickly moved between the chairs.
Miss Balandran gripped the arms of her chair and stared at him with dinner plate eyes.
‘You’re pretty,’ Koko said, and took the pistol from his pocket and shot her in the stomach.
Pain and fear took people in different directions. Anything having to do with eternity made them show you their real selves. No part of the animal was wasted. Remembrance, the whole thing they had been, just sort of took over. Koko figured the girl would get up and come for him, move a couple of steps before she realized half her guts were still back in the chair. She looked like one hell of a fighter, like a scrapper. But she couldn’t even get out of the chair – it never even crossed her mind to get out of the chair. It took her a long time even to move her hands off the arms of the chair, and then she didn’t want to look down. She shit herself, like Lieutenant Beans Beevers, down in Dragon Valley. Her feet went out, and she started shaking her head. She looked about five years old all of a sudden.
‘Jesus Christ,’ Koko said, and shot her in the chest. The noise hurt his ears – it really bounced off those stucco walls. The girl had sort of melted back into the chair, and Koko had the feeling that the sound killed her before the second bullet did.
‘All I got is one rope,’ Koko said. ‘See?’
He got down on his knees and put his arms between Roberto Ortiz’s twisted-up feet to pull the rope out from under the chair.
Roberto Ortiz didn’t as much as groan the whole time Koko was tying him up. When the rope tightened over his chest and clamped his arms, he pushed out a little air that smelled like mouthwash. A red knot the size of a baseball had flowered on the side of his head, and a trickle of blood matted the hair behind the knot in a way that reminded Koko of a road on a map.
From the shelf in the kitchen he fetched the cleaver, the roll of strapping tape, and the brown paper bag. Koko tossed the cleaver on the floor and took a new washcloth out of the bag. He pinched Roberto Ortiz’s nose between his forefinger and thumb, pulled up, and stuffed the washcloth into Ortiz’s mouth. Then he peeled off a length of the tape and wound it three times around the bottom half of Ortiz’s face, sealing in the washcloth.
Koko took both sets of cards out of his pockets and sat cross-legged on the floor. He placed the cards beside him and rested the handle of the cleaver on his thigh. He watched Ortiz’s eyes, waiting for him to wake up.
If you thought there were good parts, if you were a person who thought about the good parts, this was the good part now, coming up.
Ortiz had webby little wrinkles next to his eyes, and they looked dirty, full of dirt, because his skin was that olive color. He had just washed his hair, and it was thick and shiny black, with the sort of waves in it that looked like real waves, one after the other. You thought he was handsome, until you noticed his boxer’s dented little blob of a nose.
Ortiz finally opened his eyes. Give him this much, he got the whole situation right away and tried to jump forward. The ropes caught him short before he even got started, and he wrestled with them for a second before he got that too. He just gave up, sat back and looked from side to side – tried to take everything in. He stopped when he saw Miss Balandran melted into her chair and he really looked at her and then he looked straight at Koko and tried to get out of the chair again but kept on staring at Koko when he realized he couldn’t.
‘Here you are with me, Roberto Ortiz,’ Koko said. He picked up the regimental cards and held the good old Rearing Elephant out toward Ortiz. ‘Recognize this emblem?’
Ortiz shook his head, and Koko could see pain floating in his eyes.
‘You have to tell me the truth about everything,’ Koko said. ‘Don’t go out on a lie, try to remember everything, don’t waste pieces of your own brain. Come on, look at it.’
He saw how Roberto Ortiz was concentrating. The awakening of some little cell way back in his head flared in his eyes.
‘I thought you’d remember,’ Koko said. ‘You showed up with the rest of the hyenas, you must have seen it somewhere. You walked all around, you probably worried about getting your spit-shine boots all dirty – you were there, Roberto. I asked you here because I wanted to talk to you. I wanted to ask you some important questions.’
Roberto Ortiz groaned through the washcloth and tape. He issued a plea with his big soft brown eyes.
‘You won’t have to talk. Just nod your head.’
If you saw a leaf shaking.
If the chicken froze on one foot.
If you saw these things, no part of the animal was wasted.
‘The Elephant stands for the 24th Infantry, right?’
Ortiz nodded.
‘And would you agree that the elephant embodies these traits – nobility, grace, gravity, patience, perseverance, power and reserve in times of peace, power and wrath in times of war?’
Ortiz looked confused, but nodded.
‘And in your opinion, did an atrocity take place in the I Corps village of Ia Thuc?’
Ortiz hesitated, then nodded again.
Koko was not in a darkened room in a pink stucco bungalow on the fringe of a tropical city, but on a frozen tundra under a sky of high hard blue. A constant wind skirled and rippled the thin layer of snow over a layer of ice hundreds of yards deep. Far off to the west sat a range of glaciers like broken teeth. God’s hand hung hugely in the air, pointing at him.
Koko jumped up and rapped the butt of his pistol against the knot on Ortiz’s head. Just like a cartoon, Ortiz’s eyes floated up into his head. His whole body went loose. Koko sat down and waited for him to wake up again.
When Ortiz’s eyelids fluttered, Koko slapped him hard, and Ortiz jerked his head up and stared wildly at him, all attention again.
‘Wrong answer,’ Koko said. ‘Even the court-martials, unfair as they were, couldn’t say there was any atrocity. It was an act of God. A literal act of God. Do you know what that means?’
Ortiz shook his head. The pupils of his eyes looked blurry.
‘It doesn’t matter. I want to see if you remember certain names. Do you remember the name Tina Pumo, Pumo the Puma?’
Ortiz shook his head.
‘Michael Poole?’
Ortiz wearily shook his head again.
‘Conor Linklater?’
Another shake of the head.
‘Harry Beevers?’
Ortiz lifted his head, remembering, and nodded.
‘Yes. He talked to you, didn’t he? And he was pleased with himself. “Children can kill,” he said, didn’t he? “It doesn’t matter what you do to a killer.” And “The Elephant takes care of its own.” He said that, “The Elephant takes care of its own.” Right?’
Ortiz nodded.
‘You sure you don’t remember Tina Pumo?’
Ortiz shook his head.
‘You’re so fucking dumb, Roberto. You remember Harry Beevers, but you forget everybody else. All these people I have to find, have to track down…unless they come to me. Big joke! What do you think I should do after I find them?’
Ortiz cocked his head.
‘I mean, do you think I should talk to them? These people were my brothers. I could step outside of all this shit, I could say, I cleaned up my share of the cesspool, now it’s someone else’s turn, I could say that, I could start all over, let it be someone else’s responsibility. What’s your best opinion on that, Roberto Ortiz?’
Roberto Ortiz communicated by means of mental telepathy that Koko should now let it be someone else’s responsibility to clean up the cesspool.
‘It’s not that easy, Roberto. Poole was married when we were over there, for God’s sake! Don’t you think he told his wife about what happened? Pumo had Dawn Cucchio, don’t you think he has another girlfriend, or a wife, or both, right now? Lieutenant Beevers used to write to a woman named Pat Caldwell! You see how it never stops? That’s what eternity means, Roberto! It means Koko has to go on and on, cleaning up the world…making sure no part is wasted, that what travels from one ear to another ear is rooted out, nothing left over, nothing wasted…’
For a second he actually saw red – a vast sheet of blood washing over everything, carrying everything with it, houses and cows and the engines of trains, washing everything clean.
‘You know why I wanted you to bring copies of your articles?’
Ortiz shook his head.
Koko smiled. He reached out and picked the thick file of articles off the floor and opened it on his lap. ‘Here’s a good headline, Roberto. DID THIRTY CHILDREN DIE? I mean, is that yellow journalism, or what? You can really be proud of yourself Roberto. It’s right up there with BIGFOOT DEVOURS TIBETAN BABY. What’s your answer, anyhow? Did thirty children die?’
Ortiz did not move.
‘It’s cool if you don’t want to say. Satanic beings come in many forms, Roberto, in many, many forms.’ As he spoke, Koko took a pack of matches from his pocket and set the file alight. He fanned it in the air to keep the fire alive.
When the flames neared his fingers, Koko dropped the burning papers and kicked them apart. The small flames left greasy black scorches on the wooden floor.
‘I always liked the smell of fire,’ Koko said. ‘I always liked the smell of gunpowder. I always liked the smell of blood. They’re clean smells, you know?’
I always liked the smell of gunpowder.
I always liked the smell of blood.
He smiled at the little flames guttering out on the floor. ‘I like how you can even smell the dust burning.’ He turned his smile to Ortiz. ‘I wish my work was done. But at least I’ll have two pretty passports to use. And maybe when I’m done in the States, I’ll go to Honduras. That makes a lot of sense, I think. Maybe I’ll go there after I check out all these people I have to check out.’ He closed his eyes and rocked back and forth on the floor. ‘Work never leaves you alone, does it?’ He stopped rocking. ‘Would you like me to untie you now?’
Ortiz looked at him carefully, then nodded very slowly.
‘You’re so stupid,’ Koko said. He shook his head, smiling sadly, took up the automatic pistol, and pointed it at the middle of Roberto Ortiz’s chest. He looked directly into Ortiz’s eyes, then shook his head again, still smiling sadly, braced his wrist with his left hand, and fired.
Then he watched Roberto Ortiz die fighting and twitching and struggling to speak. Blood darkened the pretty blazer, ruined the pretty shirt and the luxurious necktie.
Eternity, jealous and alert, watched with Koko.
When it was done, Koko wrote his name on one of the Orchid Boy playing cards, grasped the cleaver, and pushed himself up off the floor to do the messy part of the job.
PART THREE The Tiger Balm Gardens (#ulink_2266cf90-b703-5b4f-9bb0-a2aea56d9ae0)
12 Men in Motion (#ulink_c29a8a21-98fa-5358-922c-caaa686ec769)
1
‘Just let me keep the books,’ Michael Poole said to the erect little woman, all black shining hair and deep dimples, beside him. Her name tag read PUN YIN. She tilted his carry-on bag toward him, and Poole took the copies of A Beast in View and The Divided Man from the open pouch on the side. The stewardess smiled and began making her way forward through the pediatricians.
The doctors had started to unwind as soon as the plane hit cruising level. On earth, visible to their patients and other laymen, Michael’s colleagues liked to appear knowing, circumspect, and only as juvenile as conventional American ethics permitted; aloft, they acted like fraternity boys. Pediatricians in playclothes, in terrycloth jogging suits and college sweaters, pediatricians in red blazers and plaid trousers roamed the aisles of the big airplane, glad-handing and bawling out bad jokes. Pun Yin got no more than halfway toward the front of the plane with Michael’s bag when a squat, flabby doctor with a leer like a Halloween pumpkin positioned himself before her and did an awkward bump and grind.
‘Hey!’ Beevers said. ‘We’re on our way!’
‘Give me an S,’ Conor said, and lifted his glass.
‘You remember to get the pictures? Or did your brain collapse again?’
‘They’re in my bag,’ Poole said. He had made fifty copies of the author’s photo on the back of Orchid Blood, Underhill’s last book.
All three men were watching the unknown doctor twitch around Pun Yin while a group of medical men yipped encouragement. The pretty stewardess patted the man on the shoulder and squeezed past him, interposing Michael’s bag between the doctor and herself.
‘We’re going to face the elephant,’ Beevers said. ‘Remember?’
‘Could I forget?’ Poole asked. During the Civil War, when their regiment had been founded, ‘facing the elephant’ had been slang for going into battle.
In a loud, blurry voice Conor asked, ‘What traits are embodied in the elephant?’
‘In time of peace or in time of war?’ Beevers asked.
‘Both. Let’s hear the whole shootin’ match.’
Beevers glanced at Poole. ‘The elephant embodies nobility, grace, gravity, patience, perseverance, power, and reserve in times of peace. The elephant embodies power and wrath in times of war.’
A few of the pediatricians nearest stared at him in affable confusion, trying to share the joke.
Beevers and Poole began to laugh.
‘Damn straight,’ Conor said. ‘That’s it, there it is.’
Pun Yin glimmered for a moment far away at the head of the cabin, then switched a curtain before her and was gone.
2
The airplane slowly digested the thousands of miles between Los Angeles and Singapore, where the corpses of Miss Balandran and Roberto Ortiz sat undiscovered in a bungalow on a leafy road; the doctors settled into their seats, overcome by alcohol and the exhaustion of travel. Bland food arrived, considerably less delicious than the smile with which Pun Yin placed it before the passengers. Eventually the stewardess removed their trays, poured out brandy, plumped up pillows for the long night.
‘I never told you what Underhill’s old agent told Tina Pumo,’ Poole said to Beevers across a dozing Conor Linklater.
Shafts of light pierced the long dark cabin of the 747. Soon Savannah Smiles would be shown, to be followed by a second movie which starred Karl Maiden and several Yugoslavians.
‘You mean you didn’t want to tell me,’ Beevers said. ‘It must be pretty good.’
‘Good enough,’ Poole admitted.
Beevers waited. At last he said, ‘I guess we do have about twenty more hours.’
‘I’m just trying to get it all organized.’ Poole cleared his throat. ‘At first, Underhill behaved like any other author. He bitched about the size of his printings, asked where his royalty checks were, things like that. Apparently he was nicer than most writers, or at least no worse than most. He had his odd points, but they didn’t seem serious. He lived in Singapore, and the people at Gladstone House couldn’t write to him directly because even his agent only had a post office box number.’
‘Let me guess. Then things took a turn for the worse.’
‘Very gradually. He wrote a couple of letters to the marketing people and the publicity department. They weren’t spending enough money on him, they weren’t taking him seriously. He didn’t like his paperback jacket. His print run was too small. Okay. Gladstone decided to put a little more effort into his second book, The Divided Man, and the effort paid off. The book made the paperback best-seller list for a month or two and sold very well.’
‘So was our boy happy? Did he send roses to Gladstone’s marketing department?’
‘He went off the rails,’ Poole admitted. ‘He sent them a long crazy letter as soon as the book hit the list – it should have got on higher and sooner, the ad compaign wasn’t good enough, he was sick of being stabbed in the back, on and on. The next day another ranting letter showed up. Gladstone got a letter every day for a week, long letters, five and six pages. The last couple threatened them with physical abuse.’
Beevers grinned.
‘There was a lot of stuff about them shafting him because he was a Vietnam veteran. I guess he even mentioned Ia Thuc.’
‘Hah!’
‘Then after the book dropped off the list he began a long fandango about a lawsuit. Weird letters started turning up at Gladstone House from a Singapore lawyer named Ong Pin. Underhill was suing them for two million dollars, that being the amount the lawyer had calculated had been lost to his client through Gladstone’s incompetence. On the other hand, if Gladstone wished to avoid the expense and publicity of a trial, Ong Pin’s client was willing to settle for a single onetime payment of half a million dollars.’
‘Which they declined to pay.’
‘Especially since they had observed that Ong Pin’s address was the same post office box to which Underhill’s agent, Fenwick Throng, sent his mail and royalty checks.’
‘That’s our boy.’
‘When they wrote back, giving him the option of taking his next book elsewhere if he was not satisfied with their efforts, he seemed to come to his senses. He even wrote to apologize for losing his temper. And he explained that Ong Pin was a lawyer friend of his who had lost his office, and was temporarily living with him.’
‘A flower!’
‘Well, anyway…he made the threat of a two-million-dollar lawsuit sound like a drunken prank. Things settled down. But as soon as he submitted his next book, Orchid Blood, he got crazy again and started threatening lawsuits. Ong Pin wrote some sort of goofy screed in the kind of English you get in Japanese instruction manuals, you know? And when the book came out, Underhill mailed a box with dried-up shit in it to the president of Gladstone, Geoffrey Penmaiden, who I guess everybody knew and revered. It was like sending a turd to Maxwell Perkins. Then the book came out and flopped. Just sank out of sight. They haven’t heard a word from him since, and I don’t think they’re too eager to work with him again.’
‘He sent shit in a box to Geoffrey Penmaiden? The most famous publisher in America?’ Beevers asked.
‘I think it had more to do with self-hatred than craziness,’ Poole said.
‘You think they’re not the same?’ Beevers reached over and patted Michael’s knee. ‘Really.’
When Beevers canted back his seat and closed his eyes, Michael switched on the reading light and picked up his copy of A Beast in View.
At the beginning of Underhill’s first novel, a rich boy named Henry Harper is drafted and sent to basic training in the South. The sort of person who gradually but thoroughly undermines the favorable first impression he creates, Harper is superficially charming, snobbish, selfish. Other people chiefly either disgust or impress him. Of course he detests basic training, and is detested by every other recruit on the base. Eventually he meets Nat Beasley, a black soldier who seems to like him in spite of his faults and who detects a decent person beneath Henry’s snobbery and self-consciousness. Nat Beasley defends Harper and gets him through basic. Much to Harper’s relief, his father, a federal judge in Michigan, is able to fix it that Henry and Beasley are assigned to the same unit in Vietnam. The judge even manages to get Henry and Nat on the same flight from San Francisco to Tan Son Hut. And during the flight, Henry Harper strikes a bargain with Nat Beasley. He says that if Nat continues to protect him, Henry will guarantee him half of all the money he will ever earn or inherit. This is a sum of at least two or three million dollars, and Beasley accepts.
After about a month in the country, the two soldiers get separated from their unit while on patrol. Nat Beasley picks up his M-16 and blows a hole the size of a family Bible in Henry Harper’s chest. Beasley switches dogtags and then destroys Harper’s body so completely that it is utterly unrecognizable. He then takes off cross-country toward Thailand.
Michael read on, flipping pages at the bottom of a shaft of yellow light while an incomprehensible movie played itself out on the small screen before him. Snores and belches from sleeping pediatricians now and then cut across the humming silence of the cabin. Nat Beasley makes a fortune brokering hashish in Bangkok, marries a beautiful whore from Chiang Mai, and flies back to America with a passport made out to Henry Harper. Pun Yin, or one of the other stewardesses, audibly sighed in a last-row seat.
Nat Beasley rents a car at the Detroit airport and drives to Grosse Point with the beautiful Chiang Mai whore beside him. Michael saw him seated at the wheel of the rented car, turning toward his wife as he pointed to Judge Harper’s great white house at the far end of a perfect lawn. Behind these images, accompanying them, arose others – Poole had not spent so many hours in the air since 1967 and moments from his uneasy flight into Vietnam, encased in the self-same uneasiness, twined around the adventures of Nat Beasley, the running grunt.
The strangeness of going to war on a regular commercial flight had stayed with him for the entire day they were in the air. About three-fourths of the passengers were new soldiers like himself, the rest divided between career officers and businessmen. The stewardesses had spoken to him without meeting his eyes, and their smiles had looked as temporary as winces.
Michael remembered looking at his hands and wondering if they would be limp and dead when he returned to America. Why hadn’t he gone to Canada? They didn’t shoot at you in Canada. Why hadn’t he simply stayed in school? What stupid fatalism had ruled his life?
Conor Linklater startled Michael by snapping upright in his seat. He blinked filmy eyes at Michael, said, ‘Hey, you’re poring over that book like it was the Rosetta stone,’ and leaned back, asleep again before his eyes were closed.
Nat Beasley strolls through Judge Harper’s mansion. He muses on the contents of the refrigerator. He stands in the judge’s closet and tries on the judge’s suits. His wife lies across the judge’s bed, flipping through sixty cable channels with the remote-control device.
Pun Yin stood beside Michael with her arms angelically outstretched, floating a blanket down over Conor Linklater’s body. In 1967, a girl with a blonde pageboy tapped his arm to awaken him, grinned brightly over his shoulder, and told him to prepare for descent. His guts felt watery. When the stewardess opened the door, hot moist air invaded the aircraft and Michael’s entire body began to sweat.
Nat Beasley lifts a heavy brown plastic bag from the trunk of a Lincoln town car and drops it into a deep trench between two fir trees. He takes a second, lighter bag from the trunk and drops it on top of the first.
The heat, Michael knew, would rot the shoes right off his feet.
Pun Yin switched off his reading light and closed his book.
3
The General, who was now a storefront preacher in Harlem, had left Tina alone with Maggie for a moment in the clutter of his ornate living room on 125th Street and Broadway. The General had been a friend of Maggie’s father, apparently also a general in the Formosan army, and after General Lah and his wife had been assassinated, the General had brought her to America – and this stuffy apartment in Harlem had been where Maggie had fled! It was a puzzle, a relief, an irritation.
For one thing, his girlfriend turned out to be the daughter of a general. This explained a lot about Maggie: she came by her pride naturally; she was used to getting her own way; she liked to speak in communiques; and she thought she knew all about soldiers.
‘Didn’t you think I was worried about you?’
‘You don’t mean worried about me, you mean jealous.’
‘What’s wrong with that?’
‘Because you don’t own me, Tina. And because it only works when I’m gone and you don’t know where I am. You’re like a little boy, you know?’
He let that one pass.
‘Because when I live with you, Tina, you wind up thinking that I’m this half-crazy little punk who really just gets in the way of thinking about business and hanging out with the guys.’
‘That just says that you’re jealous, Maggie.’
‘Maybe you’re not so dumb after all.’ Maggie said, and smiled at him. ‘But you have too many problems for me.’ She was sitting on an ornately brocaded couch with her legs folded under her, wrapped in some loose flowing dark woolen thing that was as Chinese as the couch. The smile made Tina want to put his arms around her. Her hair was different, less scrappy, more like a smooth thatch. Tina knew how Maggie’s heavy silky hair felt in his hands, and he wished he could ruffle it now.
‘Are you saying you don’t love me?’
‘You don’t stop loving people, Tina,’ she said. ‘But if I moved back in with you, pretty soon you’d be secretly wondering how you could get rid of me – you’re so guilty, you’ll never let yourself get married to anybody. You’ll never even get close.’
‘You want to marry me?’
‘No.’ She watched his suspicious, surprised response. ‘I said, you have too many problems for me. But that’s not the point. How you behave is the point.’
‘Okay, I’m not perfect. Is that what you want me to say? I’d like you to come back downtown with me, and you know it. But I could just as well walk away right now, and you know that too.’
‘Think about this, Tina. When I was putting all those ads in the Voice for you?’
He nodded.
‘Didn’t you like seeing them?’
He nodded again.
‘You looked for them every week?’
Tina nodded yet again.
‘Yet you never even considered putting one in yourself, did you?’
‘Is that what this is about?’
‘Not bad, Tina. I’m glad you didn’t say you were too old for that sort of thing.’
‘Maggie, a lot of things are going wrong right now.’
‘Did the city close Saigon?’
‘I closed it. It was getting to be impossible to cook and kill bugs at the same time. So I decided to concentrate on killing bugs.’
‘As long as you don’t get mixed up and start cooking them.’
Annoyed, he shook his head and said, ‘It’s costing me a ton of money. I’m still paying a lot of salaries.’
‘And you’re sorry you didn’t go to Singapore with the little boys.’
‘Let’s put it this way. I’d be having more fun than I am now.’
‘Right now?’
‘Now in general.’ He looked at her with love and exasperation, and she looked calmly back. ‘I didn’t know you wanted me to put ads in the Voice too – otherwise I would have. It never occurred to me.’
She sighed and raised a hand, then slowly let it fall back to her folded knees. ‘Forget about it. But just remember that I know you a lot better than you’ll ever know me.’ She gave him another calm look. ‘You’re worried about them, aren’t you?’
‘Okay, I’m worried about them. Maybe that’s why I wish I was with them.’
She slowly shook her head. ‘I can’t believe that you get half-killed and think that you should be able to go on the way you did before – like nothing happened.’
‘Plenty happened, I don’t mind admitting it.’
‘You’re scared, you’re scared, you’re scared!’
‘Okay, I’m scared.’ He exhaled noisily. ‘I don’t even like going out alone in the daytime. At night I hear noises. I keep thinking – well, weird shit. About Nam.’
‘All the time, or just at night?’
‘Well, I can catch myself thinking weird shit at any time of the day or night, if that’s what you mean.’
Maggie swung her legs out from beneath her. ‘Okay, I’ll come down and stay with you for a while. As long as you remember that you aren’t the only one who can walk away.’
‘How the hell could I forget that?’
And that was all it took. He did not even have to confess to her that right before he had come uptown, he’d been standing in his kitchen holding a bottle of beer and for a second had known that it was Ba Muy Ba and that the bullet with his name on it, the one that had missed him all those years ago, was still circling the world, homing in on him.
The General who was now a preacher stared at Tina just as if he was still a pissed-off general, and then barked a few words at Maggie in Chinese. Maggie answered with a phrase that sounded sullen and adolescent, and the General proved to Tina once and for all that he would never comprehend the Cantonese language by beaming at Maggie and taking her in his arms and kissing the top of her head. He even shook Tina’s hand and beamed at him too.
‘I think he’s happy to get rid of you,’ Tina said as they waited for the slow-moving, odorous elevator.
‘He’s a Christian, he believes in love.’
He could not tell if she were being sardonic or literal. This was often the case with Maggie. The elevator clanked up to the General’s floor and opened its mouth. A sour stench of urine rolled out. He could not let Maggie see that he was afraid of the elevator. She was already inside, looking at him intently. Tina swallowed and stepped into the reeking mouth of the elevator.
The doors slammed behind him.
He managed to smile at Maggie. Getting inside was the hardest part.
‘What did he say to you, just before we left?’
Maggie patted his hand. ‘He said you were a good old soldier, and I should take care of you and not get too mad at you.’ She glinted up at him. ‘So I told him you were an asshole and I was going back with you only because my English was getting rusty.’
Downstairs, Maggie insisted on taking the subway, and demonstrated that she could still do an old trick of hers.
They had reached the top of the steps and were moving toward the token booth. The wind cut through his heavy coat and lifted the hood against the back of his head. When he looked around for Maggie and did not see her, the moment filled with a bright dazzle of panic.
A noisy knot of boys in black jackets and knit caps, one of them toting a huge radio, were punching the air and bopping along the platform in time to a Kurtis Blow song. Black women in heavy coats leaned against the railing and paid them no attention. Far ahead, a few men and women stared almost aimlessly down the tracks. Tina was suddenly, painfully aware of how high up in the air he was – suspended like a diver on a board. He wished that he was holding onto a railing – it was as if the wind could lift him off the platform and smack him down onto Broadway.
He had automatically fallen into line at the token booth. The boys had collected up at the head of the platform. Tina reached into his pocket, furious with Maggie for disappearing and furious with himself for caring.
Then he heard her giggle, and he snapped his head sideways to see her already past the turnstile and out on the platform beside the impassive women. Her hands were shoved deep in the pockets of her down coat, and she was grinning at him.
He got his token and went through the turnstile. He felt absurdly tangible. ‘How did you do that?’
‘Since you wouldn’t be able to do it anyhow, why should I tell you?’
When the train roared up before them, she took his hand and pulled him into the subway car.
‘Are they in Singapore yet?’ she asked him.
‘They got there three or four days ago, I think.’
‘My brother says they’re going to Taipei too.’
‘I guess it’s possible. They’ll go wherever they have to go to find Underhill.’
Maggie gave him a half-scathing, half-sympathetic look. ‘Poor Tina.’ She took Tina’s hand into her soft, down-padded lap.
He sat beside her in the loud train, his fear now mostly under control. No one was staring at him. His hand rested within both of Maggie’s funny little hands, in her lap.
South they flew beneath Manhattan in the filthy train, Maggie Lah with her large secret feelings and Tina Pumo with his, which ran queerly parallel to those of his friends under the patient gaze of Pun Yin. I love Maggie and I am afraid of that. She’s a kind of original. She leaves me in order to keep me, she’s smart enough to get out before I kick her out, and she proves it by coming back as soon as I really need her. And maybe Underhill is crazy and maybe I’m crazy too, but I hope they find him and bring him back.
Here is Tim Underhill, Tina thought, here is Underhill out in a section of Camp Crandall known familiarly to the madmen of the good old Rearing Elephant as Ozone Park. Ozone Park is a bleak section of wasteland about the size of two city blocks between the rear of Manly’s ‘club’ and the wire perimeter. Its amenities consist of one piss-tube, which provides relief, and a huge pile of empty metal barrels, which offers shade and a pervasive smell of oil. Ozone Park does not officially exist, so it is safe from the incursions of the Tin Man, for whom, in true army fashion, should exactly equals is. Here is Tim Underhill, in the company of a number of comrades wasted in Si Van Vo’s 100s and getting more wasted on a little white powder Underhill has produced from one of his pockets. Here is Underhill recounting to all the others, who include besides myself, M. O. Dengler, Spanky Burrage, Michael Poole, Norman Peters, and Victor Spitalny, who just lurks around the edges of the barrels, now and then tossing little stones toward the others, the tale of the running grunt. A young man of good family, Underhill says, the son of a federal judge, is drafted and sent to good old Fort Sill in beautiful Lawton, Oklahoma…
‘I sure get sick of the sound of your voice,’ sneers Spitalny from off to the side, near the barrels. He flings a stone at Underhill and strikes him in the middle of his chest.
‘You’re still nothing but a fucking queer,’ Spitalny says.
– And you’re still a shithead, Pumo remembers saying eloquently to Spitalny, who returned the favor by throwing a stone at him, too.
It took a long time to adjust to the ‘flowers,’ because it took a long time to understand that Underhill never corrupted anybody, that he could not corrupt anybody because he himself was not corrupt. Though most of the soldiers Puma knew claimed to despise Asian women, nearly all of them used whores and bar girls. The exceptions were Dengler, who clung to his virginity in the belief that it was the talisman that kept him alive, and Underhill, who picked up young men. Pumo wondered if the others knew that Underhill’s flowers were in their early twenties, and that there had been only two of them. Pumo knew this because he had met them both. The first was a one-armed former ARVN with a girl’s face who lived with his mother in Hue and made a living grilling meat at a food stall until Underhill began to support him. The other flower actually worked in the Hue flower market, and Pumo had eaten dinner with the young man, Underhill, the young man’s mother, and his sister. He had seen such a remarkable quantity of tenderness flow among the other four people at the table that he would have been adopted by them if he could. Underhill supported this family, too. And now in an odd way Pumo supported them, for when Underhill’s best-loved flower, Vinh, finally managed to locate him in New York in 1975, Pumo remembered the excellence of the meal as well as the warmth and kindness in the little house, and hired him. Vinh had undergone deep changes – he looked older, harder, less joyous. (He had also fathered a child, lost a wife, and served a long apprenticeship in the kitchen of a Vietnamese restaurant in Paris.) None of the others knew Vinh’s history. Harry Beevers must have seen him once with Underhill and then forgotten the occasion, because for reasons of his own Beevers had convinced himself that Vinh was from An Lat, a village near Ia Thuc – whenever Beevers saw either Vinh or his daughter, he began to look persecuted.
‘You look almost happy now,’ Maggie said to him.
‘Underhill can’t be Koko,’ Tina replied. ‘The son of a bitch was crazy, but he was crazy in the sanest possible way.’
Maggie did not say or do anything, did not change her grip on his hand, did not even blink at him, so he could not tell if she had heard him. Maybe she felt insulted. The noisy subway clattered into their station and came to a jerky stop. The doors whooshed open, and Pumo froze for a second. As the noises outside the car resolved themselves, Maggie pulled him to his feet. When Pumo got out of the train he bent over and hugged Maggie as hard as he could.
‘I love you too,’ she said. ‘But I don’t know if I’m being crazy in a sane way, or vice versa.’
She gasped when they turned into Grand Street.
‘I suppose I should have prepared you,’ Pumo said.
Stacks of bricks, piles of boards, bags of plaster, and sawn lengths of discarded pipe covered the sidewalk outside Saigon. Workmen in green parkas and heavy gloves, heads bent against the wind, wheeled barrows of rubble out of the front door and laboriously dumped them into a skip. Two trucks stood double-parked beside the skip, one marked with the name SCAPELLI CONSTRUCTION CO., the other bearing the stenciled legend MCLENDON EXTERMINATION. Men in hard hats wandered back and forth between the restaurant and the trucks. Maggie saw Vinh talking to a woman holding a wide set of unrolled blueprints, and the chef winked at her, then waved at Pumo. ‘Must talk,’ he called out.
‘What’s it like inside?’ Maggie asked.
‘Not as bad as it looks from here. The whole kitchen is torn apart, of course, and most of the dining room is too. Vinh’s been helping me out, cracking the whip when I’m not around. We had to take down the whole back wall, and then we had to rebuild some of the basement.’ He was fitting his key into the white door next to Saigon’s door, and Vinh shook the architect’s hand and came over in a rush before he could open it.
‘Nice to see you again, Maggie,’ Vinh said, and followed it with something in Vietnamese to Pumo. Tina answered in Vietnamese, groaned, and turned to Maggie with increased worry plain on his face.
‘Floor fall down?’
‘Someone broke in this morning. I haven’t been in since about eight, when I went out to get breakfast and check in with some suppliers. We’re expanding the kitchen, as long as we have to do all this work, and as usual I have to chase around all over the place, which I was doing until I was stopped in my tracks by the back page of the Village Voice.’
‘How could anybody break in with all this going on?’
‘Oh,’ he said. ‘They didn’t break into the restaurant. They broke into my loft. Vinh heard someone moving around upstairs, but he thought it was me. Later he went up to ask me about something, and realized that it must have been an intruder.’
Tina looked almost fearfully up the narrow flight of steps that led to his loft.
‘I don’t suppose Dracula came back to pay a social call,’ she said.
‘No, I don’t suppose so either.’ Tina did not sound convinced of this. ‘The bitch might have remembered some stuff she forgot to steal, though.’
‘It’s just a burglar,’ Maggie protested. ‘Come on, let’s get out of the cold.’ She took a couple of steps up the stairs, then reached down, grasped Tina’s elbows with both hands, and pulled him toward her. ‘You know when most burglaries are committed, white boy? Around ten in the morning, when the bad guys know everybody else is at work.’
‘I know that,’ Tina smiled at her. ‘Honest, I know that.’
‘And if little Dracula comes back for your body, I’ll turn her into…hmm…’ She rolled her eyes up and stuck a forefinger into her cheek. ‘Into egg drop soup.’
‘Into Duck Saigon. Remember where you are.’
‘So let’s go up and get it over with.’
‘Like I said.’
He followed her up the stairs to the door of his loft. Unlike the white door downstairs, it was locked.
‘One better than Dracula,’ Maggie said.
‘It locks when you close it. I’m still not sure it wasn’t goddamned Dracula.’ Pumo unlocked the door and stepped inside ahead of Maggie.
His coats and outerjackets still hung on their hooks, his boots were still lined up beneath them.
‘Okay so far.’
‘Stop being such a coward,’ Maggie said, and gave him a push. A little way along was the door to his bathroom. Nothing in the bathroom was disturbed, but Pumo had a vivid vision of Dracula standing in front of the shaving mirror, bending her knees and fluffing up her Mohawk.
The bedroom was next. Pumo took in the unmade bed and empty television stand – he had left the bed that way, and had not yet replaced the nineteen-inch Sony Dracula had stolen from his room. The closet doors hung open, and a few of his suits drooped from their hangers toward an untidy heap of other clothes.
‘Goddamn, it was Dracula.’ Pumo felt a layer of sweat pop out over what seemed his entire body.
Maggie looked up at him questioningly.
‘The first time she stole my favorite jacket and my favorite pair of cowboy boots. SHIT! She loves my wardrobe!’ Pumo slammed his fist against the sides of his head.
He was instantly across the room, lifting articles of clothing from the closet floor, examining them and putting them back on hangers.
‘Did Vinh call the police? Do you want to call them?’
Pumo looked up at Maggie from an armload of clothes. ‘What’s the point? Even if they find her and by some miracle put her away, she’ll be back outside in about a day and a half. That’s how we do it in this country. In Taipei you probably have an entirely different system.’
Maggie leaned against the doorframe. Her arms hung straight down, parallel to each other, at an angle to her body. She had funny knobbly little hands, Pumo noticed for perhaps the thousandth time. She said, ‘In Taipei, we staple their tongues to their upper lips and hack three fingers off each hand with a dull knife.’
‘Now that’s what I call justice,’ Pumo said.
‘In Taipei, that’s what we call liberalism,’ Maggie said. ‘Is anything missing?’
‘Hang on, hang on.’ Pumo put the last suit on its hanger, the hanger on the rail. ‘We haven’t even gotten to the living room yet. I’m not even sure I want to get to the living room.’
‘I’ll look in there, if you like. As long as we can eventually come back in here and take our clothes off and do all of those things we were originally intending to do.’
He looked at her with undisguised astonishment.
‘I’ll make sure the enemy has retreated from the living room,’ Maggie said in her flat precise voice. She disappeared.
‘GODDAMN IT! DAMN IT!’ Pumo yelled a few seconds later. ‘I KNEW IT!’
Maggie leaned into the bedroom again, looking startled and a little breathless. Her heavy black hair swung, and her lips were parted. ‘You called?’
‘I don’t believe it.’ Pumo was gazing at the empty nightstand beside his bed, and looked palely up at Maggie. ‘How does the living room look?’
‘Well, in the second I had before I was distracted by the screams of a madman, it appeared to be slightly rumpled but otherwise okay.’
‘It was Dracula, all right.’ Pumo did not like the sound of slightly rumpled. ‘I knew it, damn it. She came back and stole all the same stuff all over again.’ He pointed to the nightstand. ‘I had to buy a new clock radio, and that’s gone. I got a new Watchman, and the asshole stole that too.’
Pumo watched beautiful little Maggie come floating into his bedroom in her loose flowing Chinese garment and mentally saw a fearful vision of his living room. He saw the cushions ripped, the books tumbled from the shelves, his desk up-ended, his living room television gone, the answering machine gone, his checkbooks, the ornamental screen he brought back from Vietnam, his VCR, and most of his good liquor, all gone. Pumo did not consider himself immoderately attached to his possessions, but he braced himself for the loss of these things. He would mind most of all about the couch, which Vinh had made and upholstered for him by hand.
Maggie lifted a drooping corner of a blanket with one hovering foot, and uncovered the clock radio and the new Watchman, which had apparently fallen from the nightstand sometime in the morning.
Without a word, she led him into the living room. Pumo admitted to himself that it looked almost exactly as it had when he left it.
The smooth, plump, speckled blue fabric still lay unblemished over Vinh’s long couch, the books still stood, in their customary disorder, on the shelves and, in piles, on the coffee tables; the television stood, stupid as an idol, in its place on the shelf beneath the VCR and the showy stereo. Pumo looked at the records on the shelf beneath and knew immediately that someone had flipped through them.
At the far end of the room two steps led up to a platform, also carpentered by Vinh. Here were shelves stacked with bottles – a couple of shelves crammed with cookbooks, too – a sink, a concealed icebox. An armchair, a lamp. Shoved into a corner of the platform was Pumo’s desk and leather desk chair, which had been pulled out and moved to one side, as if the intruder had wished to spend time at the desk.
‘It doesn’t look too bad,’ he said to Maggie. ‘She came in here and looked around, but she didn’t do any damage I can see.’
He moved more confidently into the room and closely examined the coffee table, the books, the records, and the magazines. Dracula had lingered here – she had moved everything around a little.
‘The Battalion Newsletter,’ he finally said.
‘The what?’
‘She took the Ninth Battalion Newsletter. It comes twice a year – I hardly even look at it, to tell you the truth, but I never throw out the old one until I get the new one.’
‘She’s queer for soldiers.’
Pumo shrugged and went up the steps to the platform. His checkbook and the Saigon checkbook were still on the desk, but had been moved. And there beside them was the missing Newsletter, lying open to a half-page photo of Colonel Emil Ellenbogen, retiring from the second-rate post in Arkansas to which the Tin Man had been sent after his disappointing term in Vietnam.
‘No, the bitch just moved in,’ he called down to Maggie, who was standing in the middle of the room with her arms wrapped about herself.
‘Is everything on your desk?’
‘I don’t know. I think something’s gone, but I can’t tell what it is.’
He surveyed his messy desktop again. Checkbooks. Telephone. Answering machine, message light flashing. Pumo pushed rewind, then playback. Silence played itself back. Had she called first to make sure he was out? The more Pumo looked at the top of his desk, the more he thought something was missing, but he could not attach this feeling to a specific object. Beside the answering machine was a book called Nam which he was certain had been on one of the coffee tables for months – he had given up in the middle of the book, but kept it on the table because to admit that he was never going to finish it felt like opening the door to the worst kind of luck.
Dracula had picked up the Newsletter and the copy of Nam and set them down on the desk while she mused through his checkbooks. Probably she had touched everything on the desk with her long strong fingers. For a second Pumo felt sweaty and dizzy.
In the middle of the night Tina woke up with his heart pounding, a mad terrible dream just disappearing into the darkness. He turned his head and saw Maggie fast asleep on the pillow, her face curled up into itself like the curl of her hand. He could just make out her features. Oh, he loved seeing Maggie Lah asleep. Without the animation of her character her features seemed anonymous and wholly Chinese.
He stretched out again beside her and lightly touched her hand. What were they doing now, his friends? He saw them walking down a wide sidewalk, their arms linked. Tim Underhill could not be Koko, and as soon as they found him they would know it. Then Tina realized that if Underhill was not Koko, someone else was – someone circling in on them, circling in on all of them the way the bullet with his name on it still circled the world, never falling or resting.
In the morning he told Maggie that he had to do something to help the other guys – he wanted to see if he could find out more about Koko’s victims, find out more that way.
‘Now you’re talking,’ Maggie told him.
4
Why questions and answers?
Because they go in a straight line. Because they are a way out. Because they help me to think.
What is there to think about?
The usual wreckage. The running girl.
Do you imagine that she was real?
Exactly. I imagine she was real.
What else is there to think about?
The usual subject, my subject. Koko. More than ever now.
Why more than ever now?
Because he has come back. Because I think I saw him. I know I saw him.
You imagined you saw him?
It is the same thing.
What did he look like?
He looked like a dancing shadow. He looked like death.
Did he appear to you in a dream?
He appeared, if that is the word, on the street. Death appeared on the street, as the girl appeared on the street. Tremendous clamor accompanied the appearance of the girl, ordinary street noise, that earthly clamor, surrounded the shadow. He was covered, though not visibly, with the blood of others. The girl, who was visible only to me, was covered with her own. The Pan-feeling poured from both of them.
What feeling is that?
The feeling that we have only the shakiest hold on the central stories of our lives. Hal Esterhaz in The Divided Man. The girl comes to speak to me with her terror, with her extremity, she runs toward me out of chaos and night, she has chosen me. Because I chose Hal Esterhaz, and because I chose Nat Beasley. Not yet, she says, not yet. The story is not yet over.
Why did Hal Esterhaz kill himself?
Because he could no longer bear what he was only just beginning to know.
Is that where imagination takes you?
If it’s good enough.
Were you terrified when you saw the girl?
I blessed her.
13 Koko (#ulink_8909e21b-ad54-5a67-9f19-64080093e20c)
As soon as the plane took off, Koko too would be a man in motion.
This is one thing Koko knew: all travel is travel in eternity. Thirty thousand feet above the earth, clocks run backward, darkness and light change places freely.
When it got dark, Koko thought, you could lean close to the little window, and if you were ready, if your soul was half in eternity already, you could see God’s tusked grey face leaning toward you in the blackness.
Koko smiled, and the pretty stewardess in first class smiled back at him. She leaned forward, bearing a tray. ‘Sir, would you prefer orange juice or champagne this morning?’
Koko shook his head.
The earth sucked at the feet of the plane, reached up through the body of the plane and tried to pull Koko down into itself, suck suck, the poor earth loved what was eternal and the eternal loved and pitied the earth.
‘Is there a movie on this flight?’
‘Never Say Never Again,’ the stewardess said over her shoulder. ‘The new James Bond movie.’
‘Excellent,’ Koko said, with real inward hilarity. ‘I never say never, myself.’
She laughed dutifully and went on her way.
Other passengers filed down the aisles, carrying suitbags, shopping bags, wicker baskets, books. Two Chinese businessmen took the seats before Koko, who heard them snap open their briefcases as soon as they sat down.
A middle-aged blonde stewardess in a blue coat leaned down and smiled a false machine smile at him.
‘What shall we call you today, hmm?’ She raised a clipboard with a seating chart into his field of vision. Koko slowly lowered his newspaper. ‘You are…?’ She looked at him, waiting for a reply.
What shall we call you today, hmm? Dachau, let’s call you Lady Dachau. ‘Why don’t you call me Bobby?’
‘Well then, call you Bobby is what I’ll do,’ the woman said, and scrawled Bobby in the space marked 4B on the chart.
In his pockets, Roberto Ortiz had carried his passports and a pocketful of cards and ID, as well as six hundred dollars American and three hundred Singapore. Big time! In a pocket of his blazer Koko had found a room key from the Shangri-La, where else would an ambitious young American be staying?
In Miss Balandran’s bag Koko had found a hot comb, a diaphragm, a tube of spermicidal jelly, a little plastic holder containing a tube of Darkie toothpaste and a toothbrush, a fresh pair of underpants and a new pair of tights, a bottle of lip gloss and a lip brush, a vial of mascara, a blush brush, a rat-tailed comb, three inches of a cut-down white plastic straw, a little leather kit ranked with amyl nitrate poppers, a tattered Barbara Cartland paperback, a compact, half a dozen loose Valium, lots of crumpled-up Kleenex, several sets of keys, and a big roll of bills that turned out to be four hundred and fifty-three Singapore dollars.
Koko put the money in his pocket and dropped the rest onto the bathroom floor.
After he had washed his hands and face he took a cab to the Shangri-La.
Roberto Ortiz lived on West End Avenue in New York City.
On West End Avenue, could you feel how the lords of the earth, how God himself, hungered for mortality? Angels flew down West End Avenue, their raincoats billowing in the wind.
When Koko walked out of the Shangri-La he was wearing two pairs of trousers, two shirts, a cotton sweater, and a tweed jacket. In the carry-on bag in his left hand were two rolled-up suits, three more shirts, and a pair of excellent black shoes.
A cab took Koko down leafy Grove Road to Orchard Road and on through clean, orderly Singapore to an empty building on a circular street off Bahru Road, and on this journey he imagined that he stood in an open car going down Fifth Avenue. Ticker tape and confetti rained down upon him and all the other lords of the earth, cheers exploded from the crowds packing the sidewalks.
Beevers and Poole and Pumo and Underhill and Tattoo Tiano and Peters and sweet Spanky B, and everybody else, all the lords of the earth, who may abide the day of their coming? For behold, darkness shall cover the earth. And the lawyer boy, Ted Bundy, and Juan Corona who labored in fields, and he who dressed in Chicago as a clown, John Wayne Gacy, and Son of Sam, and Wayne Williams out of Atlanta, and the Zebra Killer, and they who left their victims on hillsides, and the little guy in the movie Ten Rillington Place, and Lucas, who was probably the greatest of them all. The warriors of heaven, having their day. Marching along with all those never to be caught, all those showing presentable faces to the world, living modestly, moving from town to town, paying their bills, all these deep embodied secrets.
The refiner’s fire.
Koko crawled in through his basement window and saw his father seated impatient and stormy on a packing crate. Goddamned idiot, his father said. You took too much, think they’ll ever give someone like you a parade? We waste no part of the animal.
He spread the money out on the gritty floor, and that did it, the old man smiled and said, There is no substitute for good butter, and Koko closed his eyes and saw a row of elephants trudging past, nodding with grave approval.
On his unrolled sleeping bag he placed Roberto Ortiz’s passports and spread out the five Rearing Elephant cards so he could read the names. Then he rooted in a box of papers and found the copy of the American magazine, New York, which he had picked up in a hotel lobby two days after the hostage parade. Beneath the title, letters of fire spelled out: TEN HOT NEW PLACES.
Ia Thuc, Hue, Da Nang, these were hot places. And Saigon. Here is a hot new place, here is Saigon. The magazine fell open automatically to the picture and the paragraphs about the hot new place. (The Mayor ate there.)
Koko lay sprawled on the floor in his new suit and looked as deeply as he could into the picture of the hot new place. Deep green fronds waved across the white walls. Vietnamese waiters in white shirts whipped between crowded tables, going so fast they were only blurs of light. Koko could hear loud voices, knives and forks clanking against china. Corks popped. In the picture’s foreground, Tina Pumo leaned against his bar and grimaced – Pumo the Puma leaned right out of the frame of the picture and spoke to Koko in a voice that stood out against the clamor of his restaurant the way a saxophone solo stands out against the sound of a big band.
Pumo said: ‘Don’t judge me, Koko.’ Pumo looked shitscared.
This was how they talked when they knew they stood before eternity’s door.
‘I understand, Tina,’ Koko said to the little anxious man in the picture.
The article said that Saigon served some of the most varied and authentic Vietnamese food in New York. The clientele was young, hip, and noisy. The duck was ‘heaven-sent’ and every soup was ‘divine’.
‘Just tell me this, Tina,’ Koko said. ‘What is this shit about “divine”? You think soup can be divine?’
Tina blotted his brow with a crisp white hankerchief and turned back into a picture.
And there it was, the address and the telephone number, in the soft cool whisper of italics.
A man sat down beside Koko in the fourth row of the first-class compartment, glanced sideways, and then buckled himself into his seat. Koko closed his eyes and snow fell from a deep cold heaven onto a layer of ice hundreds of feet deep. Far off, dim in the snowy air, ranged the broken teeth of glaciers. God hovered invisibly over the frozen landscape, panting with impatient rage.
You know what you know. Forty, forty-one years old. Thick fluffy richboy-blond hair, and thin brown glasses, heavy face. Heavy butcher’s hands holding a day-old copy of the New York Times. Six-hundred-dollar suit.
The plane taxied down the runway and lifted itself smoothly into the air, the envious mouths and fingers fell away, and the jet’s nose pointed west, toward San Francisco. The man beside Koko is a rich businessman with butcher’s hands.
A black-naped tern flies across the face of the Singapore one-dollar note. A black band like a burglar’s mask covers its eyes, and behind it hovers a spinning chaos of intertwined circles twisting together like the strands of a cyclone. So the bird agitates its wings in terror, and darkness overtakes the land.
Mr Lucas? Mr Bundy?
Banking, the man says. Investment banking. We do a lot of work in Singapore.
Me too.
Hell of a nice place, Singapore. And if you’re in the money business, it’s hot, and I mean hot.
One of the hot new places.
‘Bobby,’ the stewardess asks. ‘what would you like to drink?’
Vodka, ice-cold.
‘Mr Dickerson?’
Mr Dickerson will have a Miller High Life.
In Nam we used to say: Vodka martini on the rocks, hold the vermouth, hold the olive, hold the rocks.
Oh, you were never in Nam?
Sounds funny, but you missed a real experience. Not that I’d go back, Christ no. You were probably on the other side, weren’t you? No offense, we’re all on the same side now, God works in funny ways. But I did all my demonstrating with an M-16, hah hah.
Bobby Ortiz is the name. I’m in the travel industry.
Bill? Pleased to meet you, Bill. Yes, it’s a long flight, might as well be friends.
Sure, I’ll have another vodka, and give another beer to my old pal Bill here.
Ah, I was in I Corps, near the DMZ, up around Hue.
You want to see a trick I learned in Nam? Good – I’ll save it, though, it’ll be better later, you’ll enjoy it, I’ll do it later.
Bobby and Bill Dickerson ate their meals in companionable silence. Clocks spun in no-time.
‘You ever gamble?’ Koko asked.
Dickerson glanced at him, his fork halfway to his mouth. ‘Now and then. Only a little.’
‘Interested in a little wager?’
‘Depends on the wager.’ Dickerson popped the forkful of chicken into his mouth.
‘Oh, you won’t want to do it. It’s too strange. Let’s forget it.’
‘Come on,’ Dickerson said. ‘You brought this up, don’t chicken out now.’
Oh, Koko liked Billy Dickerson. Nice blue linen suit, nice thin glasses, nice big Rolex. Billy Dickerson played racquet-ball, Billy Dickerson wore a sweatband across his forehead and had a hell of a good backhand, real aggressor.
‘Well, I guess being on a plane reminded me of this. It’s something we used to do in Nam.’
Definite look of interest on good old Billy’s part.
‘When we’d come into an LZ.’
‘Landing Zone?’
‘You got it. LZ’s were all different, see? Some were popping, and some were like dropping into the middle of a church picnic in Nebraska. So we’d make the Fatality Wager.’
‘Like you’d bet on how many people would get killed? Buy the farm, like you guys used to say?’
Buy the farm. Oh, you sweetheart.
‘More on if someone would get killed. How much money you carrying in your wallet?’
‘More than usual,’ Billy said.
‘Five, six hundred?’
‘Less than that.’
‘Let’s make it two hundred. If somebody dies at the San Francisco airport while we’re in the terminal, you pay me two hundred. If not, I’ll give you one hundred.’
‘You’ll give me two to one on someone dying in the terminal while we’re going through customs, getting our bags, stuff like that?’
‘That’s the deal.’
‘I’ve never seen anyone kick off in an airport,’ Billy said, shaking his head, smiling. He was going to take the bet.
‘I have,’ Koko said. ‘Upon occasion.’
‘Well, you got yourself a bet,’ Billy said, and they shook hands.
After a time Lady Dachau pulled down the movie screen. Most of the cabin lights went out, Billy Dickerson closed Megatrends, tilted his seat way back, and went to sleep.
Koko asked Lady Dachau for another vodka and settled back to watch the movie.
The good James Bond saw Koko as soon as he came on the screen. (The bad James Bond was a sleepy Englishman who looked a little bit like Peters, the medic who had been killed in a helicopter crash. The good James Bond looked a little like Tina Pumo.) He walked straight up to the camera and said, ‘You’re fine, you have nothing to worry about, everybody does what they have to do, that’s what war teaches you.’ He gave Koko a little half-smile. ‘You did well with your new friend, son. I noticed that. Remember now –’
Ready on the right? Ready on the left? Lock and load.
Good afternoon, gentlemen, and welcome to the Republic of South Vietnam. It is presently fifteen-twenty, November three, 1967. You will be taken to the Long Binh Replacement Center, where you will receive your individual unit assignments.
Remember the darkness of the tents. Remember the metal lockers. Remember the mosquito netting on the T-bars. Remember the muddy floors. Remember how the tents were like dripping caves.
Gentlemen, you are part of a great killing machine.
This is your weapon. It may save your life.
Nobility, grace, gravity.
Koko saw an elephant striding down a civilized European avenue. The elephant was buttoned into an elegant green suit and tipped his hat to all the charming ladies. Koko smiled at James Bond, who jumped out of his fancy car and looked Koko straight in the eye, and in quiet clear italics said, Time to face the elephant again, Koko.
A long time later they stood in the aisle, holding their carry-on baggage and waiting for Lady Dachau to open the door. At eye level directly before Koko hung the jacket of Billy Dickerson’s blue linen suit, all correctly webbed and criss-crossed with big easy-going, casual-looking wrinkles that made you want to be wrinkled yourself, as easy and casual as that. When Koko glanced up he saw Billy Dickerson’s blond hair ruffling out over the perfect collar of the linen suit. A pleasant smell of soap and aftershave emanated from good old Bill, who had disappeared into the forward toilet for nearly half an hour that morning while no-time turned into San Francisco time.
‘Hey,’ Dickerson, said, looking over his shoulder at Koko, ‘if you want to call off that bet it’s okay with me, Bobby. Pretty crazy.’
‘Indulge me,’ Koko said.
Lady Dachau got the signal she was waiting for and opened the door.
They walked into a corridor of cool fire. Angels with flaming swords waved them forward. Koko heard distant mortar fire, a sign that nothing truly serious was happening: the Tin Man had just sent out a few boys to use up some of this month’s quota of the taxpayers’ money. The cool fire, frozen into patterns like stone, wavered beneath their feet. This was America again. The angels with flaming swords gave flaming smiles.
‘You remember me mentioning that trick?’
Dickerson nodded and lifted an eyebrow, and he and Koko strolled along toward the baggage area. The angels with flaming swords gradually lost their numinosity and became uniformed stewardesses pulling wheeled carts behind them. The flames curling in the stone hardened into stiff cold patterns.
The corridor went straight for perhaps twenty yards, then slanted off to the right.
They turned the corner.
‘A men’s room, thank God,’ Dickerson said, and sped on ahead and shouldered open the door.
Smiling, Koko sauntered after, imagining an empty white-tiled place.
A woman in a bright yellow dress who passed before him exuded the hot, bloody aroma of the eternal world. For a moment a bright sword flickered in her hand. He pushed open the door of the men’s room and had to shift his case to one side to swing open another door almost immediately behind it.
A bald man stood at one of the sinks, washing his hands. Beside him a shirtless man leaned over a sink and scraped lather from his face with a blue plastic razor. Koko’s stomach tightened. Good old Billy was far down a row of urinals, more than half of which were occupied.
Koko saw his tense, haunted-looking face in the mirror. He jumped at himself out of his own eyes.
He went to the first urinal and pretended to pee, waiting for everyone to leave him alone with Dickerson. Something had gotten loose inside him, buzzed under his ribs, made him so lightheaded that he wobbled.
For an instant he thought he was already in Honduras, his work was either completed or ready to be begun all over again. Under an immense sun little brick-colored people milled around a comically provincial airport with tumbledown shacks, lounging policemen, and dozing hounds.
Dickerson zipped up, moved swiftly to the sink, passed his hands through a stream of water and a stream of air, and was gone almost before Koko came back to the men’s room.
He hurried out. The loose thing in his chest buzzed painfully against his ribs.
Dickerson was moving quickly into a huge room where carousels like black volcanos whirred and gouted suitcases down their ribbed flanks. Nearly everyone on their flight was already gathered around the second carousel. Koko watched Dickerson work his way around the edge of the people waiting for their bags. The thing in his chest slipped down into his stomach, where it flew like an angry bee into his intestines.
Sweating now, Koko crept through the people who stood between himself and Dickerson. Lightly, almost reverently, he brushed his fingers over the linen sleeve that held Dickerson’s left arm.
‘Hey, Bobby, I don’t feel right, you know,’ Dickerson said, bending forward and lifting a big Vuitton suitcase off the belt.
Koko knew one thing: a woman had picked out that bag.
‘About the money thing. Let’s eighty-six the whole idea, okay?’
Koko nodded miserably. His own beat-up case was nowhere on the carousel. Everything had gone slightly blurry around the edges, as if a fine mist hung in the air. A tall black-haired woman who was a living sword plucked a tiny case off the belt and – Koko saw through the descending mist – smiled at Dickerson.
‘Take care,’ Dickerson said.
A uniformed man walked unerringly up to Dickerson and passed him through customs with a few questions. Dickerson strode off to a window to have his passport stamped.
Dazed, Koko saw his own suitcase thump down the side of the carousel and glide past him before he thought to lift it off the belt. He watched Dickerson’s steadily dwindling body pass through a door marked EXIT-TRANSPORTATION.
In Customs the inspector called him ‘Mr Ortiz’ and searched the ripped lining of his suitcase for diamonds or heroin.
At Immigration he saw flaming wings sprout from the uniformed shoulders of the man in the booth, and the man stamped his passport and welcomed him back to the country, and Koko grabbed his old case and his carry-on bag and ran to the nearest men’s room. He dropped the bags just inside the door and sprinted into an open toilet. As soon as he sat down his bowels opened, then opened again. Fire dripped and spurted from him. For a moment Koko’s stomach felt as though a long needle had pierced it; then he bent forward and vomited between his shoes. He sat in his own stink for a long time, his bags forgotten, thinking only of what was there before him.
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Peter Straub
Peter Straub’s most acclaimed and biggest-selling novel – a visceral thriller with its roots in Vietnam – now reissued in a different cover style and making its first appearance on the HarperCollins list.‘KOKO… ’ Only four men knew what it meant. Vietnam vets. One was a doctor. One was a lawyer. One was a working stiff. One was a writer. All were as different as men could be – yet all were bound eternally together by a single shattering secret. And now they are joined together again on a quest that could take them from the graveyards and fleshpots of the Far East to the human jungle of New York, hunting an inhuman ghost of the past risen from nightmare darkness to kill and kill…
Koko
Peter Straub
Copyright (#ulink_b9283ec9-f597-587f-9551-41ecefbffa72)
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd.
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk/)
First published in Great Britain by Viking 1988
Copyright © Seafront Corporation 1988
The Author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalgue copy of this book is available from the British Library
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks
HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication
Source ISBN: 9780007103676
Ebook Edition © JUNE 2010 ISBN: 9780007375516
Version: 2016-11-23
Praise (#ulink_b3a0c62d-62cb-5ef1-ada6-3ee5cf0962c6)
KOKO
‘A masterpiece…a crime novel, a suspense novel, a horror novel and a study of human relationships. Fascinating and complex.’
Houston Post
‘Gripping…The characters are realistic and complex, and the story continues to resonate in the mind long after the final page is turned.’
Publishers Weekly
‘Vastly entertaining and brilliantly written…evokes bizarre fevers and brimstone terror…Peter Straub flexes all his muscles…his style is at its peak…Koko is his finest work…with an inspired, wonderfully handled ending…judged as a thriller it deserves to be compared to the best.’
Washington Post
‘Remarkable…an unusual and wonderfully suspenseful thriller…evokes a fascinating and frightening picture of war and its aftermath.’
Boston Herald
Dedication (#u3adbd2c5-20dc-50d1-aba7-1ed05cfe7008)
For Susan Straub and For Lila J. Kalinich, M.D.
Epigraph (#u3adbd2c5-20dc-50d1-aba7-1ed05cfe7008)
I believe it is possible and even recommended to play the blues on everything.
FRANK MORGAN, alto saxophonist
Table of Contents
Cover Page (#ud85ec293-edd0-5f44-9802-bd25cf1d3b20)
Title Page (#u67db81be-21ae-5340-95e4-3beae2cfe324)
Copyright (#u08fe8b18-f444-54fa-9946-773a0f8b1f90)
Praise (#u2f1690c7-02ff-592d-8205-df3ef4d92aba)
Dedication (#u43a2ce6c-1a58-579d-8f9a-78a343e643ea)
Epigraph (#u635e66c0-b4b7-53fc-9089-3750788b0349)
PART ONE The Dedication (#uf9a4a06d-ca60-518a-a900-af566461a3a0)
1 Washington, D.C. (#u15ba07f5-a844-5a50-ab1c-da1abbbd8609)
2 Message (#ue10eb0fa-0d4e-5780-b6bc-90cacb78cf9e)
3 Reunion (#u61cc00c2-d657-5c5f-a232-65989376baa2)
4 The Answering Machine (#ub12a66d6-6e4a-5d3a-8c2f-86ec0d449209)
5 Beans Beevers at the Memorial (#ubbe0ed45-de8c-5851-8d7d-b08980e7ab0e)
PART TWO Preparations for Takeoff (#udc2a6cd7-e17e-5de0-bbf5-071c8240a935)
6 Beevers at Rest (#udec070fb-548f-5522-9b12-234f07894a9a)
7 Conor at Work (#u8549c5d4-8f36-5aca-aab8-15833900feef)
8 Dr Poole at Work and Play (#u87daaac8-e3a9-5d0a-b598-16124cd9d16f)
9 In Search of Maggie Lah (#u247c98a0-b3d6-5ebf-90af-cbd950a778f1)
10 Conversations and Dreams (#u575ff2b7-4503-5c57-976a-b2631fc16546)
11 Koko (#uff721bee-7d43-530f-8d55-0f6aa7586617)
PART THREE The Tiger Balm Gardens (#ue29ee6f3-1424-5a78-a767-80c07d7be532)
12 Men in Motion (#u22cff4cb-4258-5906-9fd3-c6c63e0086cf)
13 Koko (#u4f850afb-dfc1-5c55-9f8a-4bad9681670a)
14 Remembering Dragon Valley (#litres_trial_promo)
15 Meeting Lola in the Park (#litres_trial_promo)
16 The Library (#litres_trial_promo)
17 Koko (#litres_trial_promo)
PART FOUR In the Underground Garage (#litres_trial_promo)
18 The Steps to Heaven (#litres_trial_promo)
19 How Dengler Died (#litres_trial_promo)
20 Telephone (#litres_trial_promo)
21 The Riverside Terrace (#litres_trial_promo)
22 Victor Spitalny (#litres_trial_promo)
PART FIVE The Sea of Forgetfulness (#litres_trial_promo)
23 Robbie, with Lantern (#litres_trial_promo)
24 In the Cave (#litres_trial_promo)
25 Coming Home (#litres_trial_promo)
26 Koko (#litres_trial_promo)
PART SIX The Real Raw Taste (#litres_trial_promo)
27 Pat and Judy (#litres_trial_promo)
28 A Funeral (#litres_trial_promo)
29 The Line-up (#litres_trial_promo)
30 A Second Reunion (#litres_trial_promo)
31 Encounters (#litres_trial_promo)
PART SEVEN The Killing Box (#litres_trial_promo)
32 First Night at the Pforzheimer (#litres_trial_promo)
33 Second Night at the Pforzheimer (#litres_trial_promo)
34 The End of the Search (#litres_trial_promo)
35 The Killing Box (#litres_trial_promo)
PART EIGHT Tim Underhill (#litres_trial_promo)
And then what happened? (#litres_trial_promo)
Keep Reading (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
By Peter Straub (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
PART ONE The Dedication (#ulink_ac3cdc70-e985-5872-86a1-e90c522360c2)
1 Washington, D.C. (#ulink_27edc551-8955-5b35-b8a0-25c8b41c5172)
1
At three o’clock in the afternoon of a grey, blowing mid-November day, a baby doctor named Michael Poole looked down through the windows of his second-floor room into the parking lot of the Sheraton Hotel. A VW van, spray-painted with fuzzy peace symbols and driven by either a drunk or a lunatic, was going for a ninety-eight-point turn in the space between the first parking row and the entrance, trapping a honking line of cars in the single entry lane. As Michael watched, the van completed its turn by grinding its front bumper into the grille and headlights of a dusty little Camaro. The whole front end of the Camaro buckled in. Horns blew. The van now faced a stalled, frustrated line of enemy vehicles. The driver backed up, and Michael thought he was going to escape by reversing down the first row of cars to the exit onto Woodley Road. Instead, the driver nipped the van into an empty space two cars down. ‘Well, damn,’ Michael said to himself – the van’s driver had sacrificed the Camaro for a parking place.
Michael had called down twice for messages, but none of the other three men had checked in yet. Unless Conor Linklater was going to ride a motorcycle all the way from Norwalk, they would almost certainly take the shuttle from New York, but Michael enjoyed the fantasy that while he stood at the window he would see them all step out of the van – Harry ‘Beans’ Beevers, the Lost Boss, the world’s worst lieutenant; Tina Pumo, Pumo the Puma, whom Underhill had called ‘Lady’ Pumo; and wild little Conor Linklater, the only other survivors of their platoon. Of course they would arrive separately, in taxis, at the front of the hotel. But he wished they would get out of the van. He hadn’t known how strongly he wanted them to join him – he wanted to see the Memorial first by himself, but he wanted even more to see it later with them.
Michael Poole watched the doors of the van slide open. There appeared first a hand clamped around the neck of a bottle which Michael immediately recognized as Jack Daniel’s sour mash whiskey.
The Jack Daniel’s was slowly followed by a thick arm, then a head concealed by a floppy jungle hat. The whole man, now slamming the driver’s door, was well over six feet tall and weighed at least two hundred and thirty pounds. He wore tiger-stripe fatigues. Two smaller men similarly dressed left through the sliding door in the side of the van, and a big bearded man in a worn flak jacket closed the van’s passenger door and went around the front to take the bottle. He laughed, shook his head, and upended it into his mouth before passing it to one of the others. Individually and collectively they looked just enough like dozens of soldiers Poole had known for him to lean forward, staring, his forehead pressed against the glass.
Of course he knew none of these men. The resemblance was generic. The big man was not Underhill, and the others were none of the others.
He wanted to see people he had known over there, that was the large simple truth. He wanted a great grand reunion with everyone he had ever seen in Vietnam, living or dead. And he wanted to see the Memorial – in fact Poole wanted to love the Memorial. He was almost afraid to see it. From the pictures he had seen, the Memorial was beautiful, strong and stark, and brooding. That would be a Memorial worth loving. The only memorial he’d ever expected to have was a memorial to separateness, but it belonged to him and to the cowboys out in the parking lot, because they were forever distinct, as the dead were finally distinct. Together they were all so distinct that to Poole they almost felt like a secret country of their own.
There were names he wanted to find on the Memorial, names that stood in place of his own.
The big cowboy had taken a slip of paper from his shirt pocket and was writing, bent halfway over the hood of the van. The others unloaded duffel bags from the back of the van. The Jack Daniel’s bottle circulated until the driver took a last slug and eased it into one of the bags.
Now Michael wanted to be outside, to be moving. According to the schedule he picked up at the registration desk downstairs, the parade up Constitution Avenue had already begun. By the time he had his first look at the Memorial and came back, the others would have checked in.
Unless, that is, Harry Beevers had managed to get drunk at the bar of Tina Pumo’s restaurant and was still asking for one more vodka martini, one more little teeny martooni, we’ll catch the five o’clock shuttle instead of the four o’clock, or the six o’clock, or the seven. Tina Pumo, the only one of the old group Poole saw with anything like regularity, had told him that Beevers sometimes spent all afternoon in his place. Poole’s only contact with Harry Beevers in four or five years had come three months before, when Beevers had called him up to read aloud a Stars and Stripes article, sent to Beevers by his brother, about a series of random murders committed in the Far East by someone who identified himself as Koko.
Poole stepped back from the window. It was not time for Koko, now. The giant in tiger stripes and jungle hat finished putting his note under one of the Camaro’s windshield wipers. What could it say? Sorry I beat up your car, man, come around for a shot of Jack –
Poole sat down on the edge of the bed, picked up the receiver, and after a second of hesitation dialed Judy’s number at school.
When she answered he said, ‘Well, I’m here, but the other guys haven’t checked in yet.’
‘Do you want me to say, “Poor Michael”?’ asked Judy.
‘No, I thought you’d like to know what’s going on.’
‘Look, Michael, is something special on your mind? This conversation has no point. You’re going to spend a couple of days going all drunk and sentimental with your old army buddies. Do I have any place in that? I’d just make you feel guilty.’
‘I still wish you’d have come along.’
‘I think the past is in the past because that’s where it belongs. Does that tell you anything?’
‘I guess it does,’ Michael said. There was a moment of silence that went on too long. She would not speak until he did. ‘Okay,’ Michael finally said. ‘I’ll probably see Beevers and Tina Pumo and Conor tonight, and there are some ceremonies I’d like to take part in tomorrow. I’ll get home Sunday about five or six, I suppose.’
‘Your patients are extremely understanding.’
‘Diaper rash is rarely fatal,’ Michael said, and Judy uttered a smoky exhalation that might have been laughter.
‘Should I call you tomorrow?’
‘Don’t bother. It’s nice, but don’t bother, really.’
‘Really,’ Michael said, and hung up.
2
Michael moved slowly through the Sheraton’s lobby looking at the men lined up at the registration desk, among them the big cowboy in tiger-stripe fatigues and his three buddies, and the groups of people sitting on padded dark green chairs and banquettes. The Sheraton was one of those hotels with no true bar. Women in clinging, filmy dresses brought drinks to the twenty or thirty tables in the sunken lobby. The waitresses all seemed to have descended from the same tall, languid, handsome family. Where these princesses might normally have served gin-and-tonics and Perriers-and-lime to men with dark suits and power haircuts – to men like Michael Poole’s neighbors in Westchester County – now they set down shots of tequila and bottles of beer before wildmen in battle jackets and bush hats, in funky fatigues and funkier khaki ballcaps.
The sulphurous conversation with his wife made Michael want to sit down among the wildmen and order a drink. But if he sat down, he would be drawn into things. Someone would begin to talk to him. He would buy a drink for a man who had been in some of the same places he had been, or had been near the places he had been, or who had a friend who had been near those places. Then the man would buy him a drink. This would lead to stories, memories, theories, introductions, vows of brotherhood. Eventually he would join the parade as part of a gang of strangers and see the Memorial through the thick insulating comfort of alcohol. Michael kept moving.
‘Cavalry all the way!’ shouted a whiskey voice behind his back.
Michael went through a side door out into the parking lot. It was just a little too cold for his tweed jacket and sweater, but he decided not to go back upstairs for his coat. The heavy billowing sky threatened rain, but Michael decided that he didn’t much care if it rained.
Cars streamed up the ramp from the street. Florida license plates, Texas plates, Iowa and Kansas and Alabama, every kind and make of vehicle, from hardcore GM pickups to tinny Japanese imports. The van cowboy and his friends had driven to Washington from New Jersey, the Garden State. Tucked beneath the Camaro’s windshield wiper was the note: You were in my way so FUCK YA!!!
Down on the street, Michael flagged a cab and asked the driver to take him to Constitution Avenue.
‘You gonna walk in the parade?’ the driver immediately asked.
‘That’s right.’
‘You’re a vet, you were over there?’
‘That’s right.’ Michael looked up. From the back, the cabdriver could have been one of the earnest, desperate, slightly crazed students doomed to flunk out of medical school: colorless plastic glasses, dishwater hair, pale youthful skin. His ID plate said that his name was Thomas Strack. Blood from an enormous pimple had dried on the collar of his shirt.
‘You ever in combat? Like in a firefight or something?’
‘Now and then.’
‘There’s somethin’ I always wanted to ask – I hope you don’t take no offense or nothing.’
Michael knew what the cabdriver was going to ask. ‘If you don’t want me to take offense, don’t ask an offensive question.’
‘Okay.’ The driver turned his head to glance at Michael, then looked straight ahead again. ‘Okay, no need to get heavy.’
‘I can’t tell you how it feels to kill someone,’ Michael said.
‘You mean you never did it.’
‘No, I mean I can’t tell you.’
The cabbie drove the rest of the way in boiling silence. You coulda told me something. Gimme a little gore, why don’t you? Lemme see that good old guilt, lemme see that fine old rapture. The past is in the past because that’s where it belongs. Don’t bother, really. You were in my way, so fuck ya.
I’ll take a triple Finlandia martini on the rocks, please, hold the olives, hold the vermouth, please, hold the rocks, please, and get the same thing for my four hundred buddies in here, please, They might look a little funny, but they’re my tribe.
‘This okay?’ the cabbie asked. Beside the car was a wall of people. Michael could see flags and men carrying banners suspended between poles. He paid the driver and left the cab.
Michael could see over the heads of most of the people lining the sidewalk. Here the tribe had gathered, all right. Men who had once been soldiers, most of them dressed as though they were still soldiers, filled the width of Constitution Avenue. In platoon-sized groups interspersed with high school bands, they marched raggedly down the street. Other people stood on the sidewalk and watched them go by because they approved of what they were, what they meant because of what they had done. By standing there the bystanders applauded. Until now, Michael realized, he had resisted fully believing in the reality of this parade.
It was not ticker tape and limousines on Fifth Avenue – the Iranian hostages had been given that one – but in most ways this was better, being more inclusive, less euphoric but more emotional. Michael edged through the people on the sidewalk. He stepped off the curb and fell in behind the nearest large and irregular group. Surprised tears instantly filled his eyes.
The men before him were three-fourths jungle fighters with everything but Claymores and M-16s, and one-fourth pudgy WWII vets who looked like ex-boxers. Michael realized that the sun had come out only when he saw their long shadows stretching out to him on the street.
He could see Tim Underhill, another long shadow, striding along with his belly before him and cigar smoke drifting in his wake. In his mind, Underhill was muttering obscene hilarious remarks about everyone in sight and wearing his summer uniform of a bandanna and blousy fatigue pants. A streak of mosquito blood was smeared across his left shoulder.
In spite of everything, Michael wished that Underhill were beside him now. Michael realized that he had been considering Underhill – not brooding or thinking about him, considering him – since Harry Beevers had called him at the end of October to tell him about the newspaper articles his brother had sent him from Okinawa.
In two separate incidents, three people, an English tourist in his early forties and an older American couple, had been murdered in Singapore just about the time the Iranian hostages had returned to America. The murders were thought to have been committed at least a week to ten days apart. The Englishman’s body was found on the grounds of the Goodwood Park Hotel, those of the American couple in a vacant bungalow in the Orchard Road section of the city. All three bodies had been mutilated, and on two of them had been found playing cards scrawled with an unusual and enigmatic name: Koko. Six months later, in the summer of 1981, two French journalists were found similarly mutilated in their Bangkok hotel room. Playing cards with the same name had been placed on the bodies. The only difference between these killings and those that had happened after Ia Thuc, a decade and a half earlier, was that the cards were not regimental, but ordinary commercial playing cards.
Michael thought Underhill lived in Singapore. At least Underhill had always claimed that he was going to move there after he got out of the army. But Poole could not make the mental leap required to convict Tim Underhill of murder.
Poole had known two extraordinary human beings during his time in Vietnam, two men who had stood out as exceptionally worthy of respect and affection in the half-circus, half-laboratory of human behaviour that a longstanding combat unit becomes. Tim Underhill was one, and a boy from Milwaukee named M.O. Dengler was the other. The bravest people he had ever known, Underhill and little Dengler had seemed perfectly at home in Vietnam.
Tim Underhill had gotten himself back to the Far East as soon as possible after the war and had become a moderately successful crime novelist. M. O. Dengler was killed in a freakish street accident while on R&R in Bangkok with another soldier, named Victor Spitalny, and never returned from Asia at all.
Oh, Michael Poole missed Underhill. He missed them both, Underhill and Dengler.
The group of vets behind Michael, as scattered and varied as those before him, gradually caught up with him. He became aware that he was no longer marching alone, but was moving along between the crowds lining both sides of the street with a couple Dengler-sized boonie-rats, fiercely moustached, and an assortment of polyester-suited VFW types.
As if he had been reading his thoughts, one of the Denglersized boonie-rats walking beside Michael sidled up to him and whispered something. Michael bent down, cupping his ear.
‘I was a hell of a fighter, man,’ the little ex-soldier whispered a shade louder. Tears gleamed in his eyes.
‘To tell you the truth,’ Michael said, ‘you remind me of one of the best soldiers I ever knew.’
‘No shit.’ The man nodded briskly. ‘What outfit was you in?’
Poole named his division and his battalion.
‘What year?’ The man cocked his head to check out Poole’s face.
‘’Sixty-eight, ‘sixty-nine.’
‘Ia Thuc,’ the boonie-rat said immediately. ‘I remember that. That was you guys, right? Time magazine and all that shit?’
Poole nodded.
‘Fuckin’-A. They shoulda give that Lieutenant Beevers a fuckin’ Medal of Honor for what he done, and then took it away again for shootin’ off his mouth in front of fuckin’ journalists,’ the boonie-rat said, sidling away with an easy fluid motion that would have been noiseless if they had been walking over brittle twigs.
Two fat women with short fluffy hair, pastel pantsuits, and placid church-picnic faces were rhythmically waving between them a red banner with the stark black letters POW-MIA. A few paces behind marched two youngish ex-soldiers bearing another banner: COMPENSATE FOR AGENT ORANGE. Agent Orange –
Victor Spitalny had tilted his head and stuck out his tongue, claiming that the stuff tasted good. You motherfuckers, drink it down! This shit’s boo-koo good for your insides! Washington and Spanky Burrage and Trotman, the black soldiers on the detail, cracked up, falling into the thick jungly growth beside the trail, slapping each other on the back and sides, repeating ‘boo-koo good for your insides’ and enraging Spitalny, whom they knew had only been trying, in his stupid way, to be funny. The smell of Agent Orange, halfway between gasoline and industrial solvent, stuck to all of them until sweat and insect repellent and trail grime either covered it up or washed it off.
Poole caught himself wiping the palms of his hands together, but it was too late to wash away the Agent Orange.
How does it feel to kill somebody? I can’t tell you because I can’t tell you. I think maybe I got killed myself, but not before I killed my son. You shit in your pants, man, you laugh so hard.
3
By the time Michael Poole reached the park, the parade had melted down into a wandering crowd, marchers and onlookers moving together across the grass. Loose, ragged groups streamed over the entire landscape, walking through the sparse trees, filling the whole scene. Though he could not see the Memorial, Michael knew where it was. About a hundred yards before him, the crowds were moving down a grade into a natural bowl from which came the psychic flare of too many people. The Memorial stood at the bottom of all those people. Michael’s scalp tingled.
A phalanx of men in wheelchairs were pushing themselves across the long stretch of grass before the bowl. One of the chairs tilted over sideways and a gaunt, black-haired, legless man with a shockingly familiar face spilled out. Michael’s heart froze – the man was Harry Beevers. Michael started to run forward to help. Then he checked himself. The fallen man was surrounded by friends, and in any case he could not be Poole’s old lieutenant. Two others righted the chair. They held it steady as the man braced himself on his stumps. Then he pushed himself up onto the metal footrests. The man reached up, grasped the armrests, and with neat gymnastic skill deposited himself in his own seat.
The men in wheelchairs were gradually overtaken by the crowd. Michael looked around him. All about were familiar faces which at second glance resolved into the faces of strangers. Various large bearded versions of Tim Underhill were moving toward the grassy bowl, also several wiry Denglers and Spitalnys. A beaming, round-faced Spanky Burrage slapped the palm of a black man in a Special Forces hat. Poole wondered what had happened to the dap, the complicated series of handgrips that blacks in Vietnam used to greet one another. There had been a wonderful mixture of seriousness and poker-faced hilarity about daps.
People streamed down into the bowl. Old women and babies clutched tiny flags. To Michael’s right, two young men on crutches were followed by an old gaffer, his bald head factory-white, with a row of medals pinned above the left pocket of his plaid shirt. Beside him a florid septuagenarian in a VFW garrison cap struggled with a shiny four-sided walker. Poole looked into the face of every man roughly his own age, and found most of them looking back at him – a crossfire of frustrated recognitions. He took a step forward across the trampled grass and looked straight ahead.
The Memorial was a long, intermittently visible line of sheer black tying together the heads and bodies of the people before it. Men ranged all along its top, walking along over its crew cut of grass as if pacing it off. Others lay down and leaned over to trace names engraved in the polished stone. Poole moved several steps forward, the crowded bowl in front of him widened and fell away, and the entire scene stood before him.
The huge broken black wing of the Memorial was surrounded by people without being engulfed by them. Poole imagined that it would take a lot to engulf this Memorial. Pictures had not quite conveyed its scale. Its strength came from its mass. Only inches high at the tapered ends, it rose to more than twice the height of a man at its folded center. Separated from it by a foot or so of earth already sprouting little flags, letters pinned to sticks, wreaths, and photographs of the dead, a sloping path of granite blocks ran its length.
The people before this emphatic scar in the earth passed slowly before the increasingly tall panels. Now and then they paused to lean forward and touch a name. Michael saw a lot of embraces. A skinnier version of an unloved basic training sergeant was inserting a handful of small red poppies one by one into the cracks between the panels. From immediately in front of the Memorial, a large wedge-shaped crowd fanned upward into the grassy bowl. A dense impacted wave of emotion came from all of these people.
Here was what was left of the war. The Vietnam War consisted of the names etched into the Memorial and the crowd either passing back and forth before those names or standing looking at them. For Poole, the actual country of Vietnam was now just another place – Vietnam was many thousands of miles distant, with an embattled history and an idiosyncratic and inaccessible culture. Its history and culture had briefly, disastrously intersected ours. But the actual country of Vietnam was not Vietnam; that was here, in these American names and faces.
The ghost-Underhill had appeared beside Michael again, kneading one beefy shoulder with bloody fingers – bright smears of insect blood across his tanned skin. Ah, Lady Michael, they’re all good folks, they just let themselves get messed up by the war, that’s all. A dry chuckle. We didn’t do that, did we, Lady Michael? We tend to be above it all, don’t we? Tell me we do.
I thought I saw you smash in a car to get to a parking space, Poole said to this imaginary Tim Underhill.
I only smash up cars on paper.
Underhill, did you kill those people in Singapore and Bangkok? Did you put the Koko cards on their bodies?
I don’t think you’d better pin that one on me, Lady Michael.
‘Airborne!’ someone shouted.
‘Airborne all the way!’ someone else shouted back.
Poole worked his way closer to the Memorial through the mostly stationary crowd. The sergeant who looked like his old sergeant from Fort Sill was now slipping the tiny red poppies into the crack between the last two tall panels. Protruding from between the panels, the little poppies reflected twice, so that two black shadows lay behind each red dart. A big wild-haired man held up a Texas-sized flag with a waving golden fringe. Poole stepped up beside a Mexican family posted directly beside the granite walk and for the first time saw the reflection in the tall black panel. Mirrored people streamed before him. The reflections of the Mexican family, a man and a woman, a pair of teenage girls, and a small boy holding a flag, all stared at the same spot on the wall. Between them, the reflected parents held a framed photograph of a young Marine. Poole’s own uptilted head seemed, like the others, to be searching for a specific name. Then, as in an optical illusion, the real Poole saw names leap out from the black wall. Donald Z. Pavel, Melvin O. Elvan, Dwight T. Pouncefoot. He looked at the next panel. Art A. McCartney, Cyril P. Downtain, Masters J. Robinson, Billy Lee Barnhart, Paul P. J. Bedrock. Howard X. Hoppe. Bruce G. Hyssop. All the names seemed strange and familiar, in equal measure.
Someone behind him said ‘Alpha Papa Charlie,’ and Michael turned his head, his ears tingling. Now people completely filled the shallow bowl. They covered the rise behind it. Alpha Papa Charlie. Without asking, there was no way of telling which of the men, white-haired, bald, pony-tailed, with faces clear and pockmarked, seamed and scarred, electric with feeling, had spoken. From a huddle of four or five men in jungle hats and green jackets came another, rougher voice saying ‘…lost him outside Da Nang.’
Da Nang. That was in I Corps, his Vietnam. For a moment or two there Poole could not move his arms or legs. Into him streamed place names he had not remembered for fourteen years – Chu Lai, Tarn Ky. Poole saw a narrow dirt alleyway behind a row of huts; he smelled the clumps of drying marijuana hanging from the ceiling of a lean-to where a mamasan with the irresistible name of Si Van Vo lived and prospered. The Dragon Valley, oh God. Phu Bai, LZ Sue, Hue, Quang Tri. Alpha Papa Charlie. On the other side of a collection of thatched huts a line of water buffalos moved across a mud plain toward a mountain trail. Millions of bugs darkened the humid air. Marble Mountain. All those charming little places between the Annamese Cordillera and the South China Sea, where the dead SP4 Cotton, killed by a sniper named Elvis, had lazily spun in frothing pink water. The A Shau Valley: yea, though I walk…
Yea, though I walk through the A Shau Valley, I shall fear no evil. Michael could see M. O. Dengler bouncing along a high narrow trail, grinning over his shoulder at him, blivets and ammunition strung across his back. On the other side of Dengler’s joyous face was a green, unfolding landscape of unbelievable depth and delicacy, plunging thousands of feet into mists, shading into dozens of different shades of green and rolling on all the way to a green, heavenly infinity. You been bad? Dengler had just asked him. If you haven’t, you ain’t got nothin’ to worry about. Yea, though I walk through the A Shau Valley…
Poole finally realized he was weeping.
‘Polish on both sides, yeah,’ said an old woman’s voice quite near him. Poole wiped his eyes, but they filled again, so quickly he saw nothing but colorful blurs. ‘Whole neighborhood was Polish, both sides, up and down. Tom’s father was in the Big One, but the emphysema kept him home today.’ Poole took his handkerchief out of his pocket and pressed it to his eyes and tried to bring his crying under control. ‘I said, old man, you can do what you like but nothin’ is gonna keep me away from DC, come Veteran’s Day. Don’t you worry, son, nobody here minds if you cry your eyes out.’
Poole slowly realized that this last comment had been directed at him. He lowered his handkerchief. An obese white-haired woman in her sixties was looking at him with grand-motherly concern. Next to her stood a black man in a faded Special Forces jacket, an Anzac hat astride an unruly Afro.
‘Thanks,’ Poole said. ‘This thing’ – he gestured behind him at the Memorial – ‘finally got to me.’
The black ex-soldier nodded.
‘Actually, I heard somebody say something, can’t even remember what it was now…’
‘Yeah, me too,’ said the black man. ‘I heard somebody say “about twenty klicks from An Khe,” and I…my damn stomach just disappeared.’
‘I I Corps,’ Michael said. ‘You were a little south of me. Name’s Michael Poole, nice to meet you.’
‘Bill Pierce.’ The two men shook hands. ‘This lady here is Florence Majeski. Her son was in my unit.’
Poole had a strong, sudden desire to put his arms around the old woman, but he knew that he would break down again if he did that. He asked the first question that came to mind: ‘You get that hat off an ARVN?’
Pierce grinned. ‘Snatched it right off, riding by in a jeep. Poor little bastard.’
Then he knew what he really wanted to ask Pierce. ‘How can you find the names you’re looking for, in all this crowd?’
‘There’s Marines at both ends of the Memorial,’ Pierce said, ‘and they have books with all the names and the panels they’re on. Or you could ask one of the yellow caps. They’re just here today, on account of all the extra people.’ Pierce glanced at Mrs Majeski.
‘They had Tom right there in the book,’ the old lady said.
‘I see one over thataway,’ Pierce said, pointing off to Michael’s right. ‘He’ll find it for you.’ In the midst of a little knot of people, a tall, bearded, young white man in a yellow duckbill cap was consulting sheets in a looseleaf binder and then gesturing toward specific panels.
‘God bless you, son,’ said Mrs Majeski. ‘If you’re ever in Ironton, Pennsylvania, I want you to stop in and pay us a visit.’
‘Good luck,’ Pierce said.
‘Same to both of you.’ He smiled and turned away.
‘I mean it now!’ Mrs Majeski yelled. ‘You stop in and see us!’
Michael waved, and moved toward the man in the yellow cap. At least two dozen people had him circled, and all seemed to be leaning toward him. ‘I can only handle one at a time.’ the man with the cap said in a flat Midwestern voice. ‘Please, okay?’
Poole thought. The others ought to be at the hotel by now. This is a ridiculous gesture.
The young man in the yellow cap consulted his pages, indicated panels, wiped moisture from his forehead. Michael soon stood before him. The volunteer was wearing blue jeans and a denim shirt unsnapped halfway down over a damp grey T-shirt. His beard glistened with sweat. ‘Name,’ he said.
‘M. O. Dengler,’ Poole said.
The man riffled through his pages, located the D’s, and ran his finger down a column. ‘Here we go. The only Dengler is Dengler, Manuel Orosco, of Wisconsin. Which happens to be my home state. Panel fourteen west, line fifty-two. Right over there.’ He pointed to the right. Small poppies like red pinpoints dotted the edges of the panel, before which stood a large unmoving crowd. NO MORE VIETNAMS, announced a bright blue banner.
Manuel Orosco Dengler? The Spanish names were a surprise. A sudden thought stopped Michael as he made his way toward the blue banner through the crowd: the guide had given him the wrong Dengler. Then he remembered that the guide had said that this was the only Dengler. And the initials were right. Manuel Orosco had to be his Dengler.
Poole was directly in front of the Memorial once again. His shoulder touched the shoulder of a shaggy-haired, weeping vet with a handlebar moustache. Beside him a woman with white blonde hair to the waist of her blue jeans held the hand of a little girl, also blonde. A child without a father, as he was now forever a father without a child. On the other side of the broken strip of sod, planted with flags and wreaths and photographs of young soldiers stapled to wooden sticks, the four-teenth panel, west, loomed before him. Poole counted down until he reached the fifty-second line. The name of M.O. Dengler, MANUEL OROSCO DENGLER, etched in black polished granite, jumped out at him. Poole admired the surgical dignity of the engraving, the unadorned clarity of the letters. He knew that he had never had any choice about standing in front of Dengler’s name.
Dengler had even liked the C-rations scorned by the others. He claimed the dogfood taste of army turkey loaf, canned in 1945, was better than anything his mother had ever made. Dengler had liked being on patrol. (Hey, I was on patrol the whole time I was a kid.) Heat, cold, and dampness had affected him very little. According to Dengler, rainbows froze to the ground during Milwaukee ice storms and kids ran out of their houses, chipped off pieces of their favorite colors, and licked them until they were white. As for violence and the fear of death, Dengler said that you saw at least as much violence outside the normal Milwaukee tavern as in the average firefight; inside, he claimed, you saw a bit more.
In Dragon Valley, Dengler had fearlessly moved about under fire, dragging the wounded Trotman to Peters, the medic, keeping up a steady, calm, humorous stream of talk. Dengler had known that nothing there would kill him.
Poole stepped forward, careful not to trample on a photograph or a wreath, and ran his fingers over the sharp edges of Dengler’s name, carved into the chill stone.
He had a quick, unhappy, familiar vision of Spitalny and Dengler running together through billowing smoke toward the mouth of the cave at Ia Thuc.
Poole turned away from the wall. His face felt too tight. The blonde woman gave him a sympathetic, wary half-smile and pulled her little girl backwards out of his way.
Poole wanted to see his ex-warriors. Feelings of loneliness and isolation wrapped themselves tightly around him.
2 Message (#ulink_79297092-866f-5474-938b-9a5e69eb3d1a)
1
Michael was so certain that a message from his friends would be waiting for him at the hotel that once he got there he marched straight from the revolving door to the desk. Harry Beevers had assured him that he and the others would arrive ‘sometime in the afternoon.’ It was now just before ten minutes to five.
Poole started to scan the wall behind the desk for his messages as soon as he could read the room numbers beneath the pigeonholes. When he was three-fourths of the way across the lobby, he saw one of the white hotel message forms inserted diagonally into his own rectangular box. He immediately felt much less tired. Beevers and the other two had arrived.
Michael stepped up to the desk and caught the clerk’s eye. ‘There’s a message for me.’ he said. ‘Poole, room 204.’ He took the oversize key from his jacket pocket and showed it to the clerk, who began to inspect the wall behind him with an almost maddening lack of haste. At last the clerk found the correct slot and withdrew the message. He glanced at the form as he handed it to Poole, then smiled.
‘Sir.’
Michael took the form, looked first at the name, and turned his back on the clerk to read the message. Tried to call back. Did you really hang up on me? Judy. The time 3:55 was stamped on the form in purple ink – she had called just after Michael had left his room.
He turned around and found the clerk looking at him blankly. ‘I’d like to know if some people who were supposed to be here by now have checked in yet.’
Poole spelled the names.
The clerk slowly pecked at buttons on a computer terminal, frowned, tilted his head, frowned again, and without changing his posture in any way looked sideways at Michael and said, ‘Mr Beevers and Mr Pumo have not arrived as yet. We have no booking for a Mr Linklater.’
Conor was probably saving money by sleeping in Pumo’s room.
Poole turned away, folded Judy’s message into his jacket pocket, and for the first time since his return saw what had happened to the lobby.
Men in dark suits and striped neckties now occupied the banquettes and tables. Most of them had no facial hair and wore white name tags crowded with print. They were talking quietly, consulting legal pads, punching numbers into pocket computers. During his first surreal eighteen months back from Vietnam, Michael Poole had been able to tell if a man had been in Vietnam just by the way he held his body. His instinct for distinguishing vets from civilians had faded since then, but he knew he could not be mistaken about this group.
‘Hello, sir,’ said a clarion voice at his elbow.
Poole looked down at a beaming young woman with a fanatical face surrounded by a bubble of blonde hair. She held a tray of glasses filled with black liquid.
‘Might I inquire, sir, if you are a veteran of the Vietnam conflict?’
‘I was in Vietnam,’ Poole said.
‘The Coca-Cola Company joins the rest of America in thanking you personally for your efforts during the Vietnam conflict. We wish to take this opportunity to express our gratitude to you, and to introduce you to our newest product, Diet Coke, in the hope that you will enjoy it and will share your pleasure with your friends and fellow veterans.’
Poole looked upward and saw that a long, brilliantly red banner of some material like parachute silk had been suspended far above the lobby. White lettering said: THE COCA-COLA CORPORATION AND DIET COKE SALUTE THE VETERANS OF VIETNAM! He looked back down at the girl.
‘I guess I’ll pass.’
The girl increased the wattage of her smile and looked amazingly like every one of the stewardesses on Poole’s flight into Vietnam from San Francisco. Her eyes shifted away from him, and she was gone.
The desk clerk said, ‘You’ll find your meeting areas downstairs, sir. Perhaps your friends are waiting for you there.’
2
The executives in their blue suits sipped their drinks, pretending not to monitor the girls walking around the lobby with their inhuman smiles and trays of Diet Coke. Michael touched Judy’s note in his jacket pocket. Either it or the tips of his fingers felt hot. If he sat down in the lobby bar to watch the arrivals coming through the door, within minutes he would be asked if he were a veteran of the Vietnam conflict.
Poole went to the bank of elevators and waited while an odd mixture of veterans and Coca-Cola executives, each group pretending the other group did not exist, left the car. Only one other man, a drunken mountainous being in tiger-striped fatigues, entered the elevator with him. The man studied the buttons and pushed SIXTEEN four or five times, then stumbled against the railing at the back of the car. He emitted a foggy bourbon-flavored burp. Poole finally recognized him as the van driver who had smashed into the Camaro.
‘You know this, don’t you?’ the giant asked him. He straightened up and began to bellow out a song Poole and every other veteran knew by heart. ‘Homeward bound, I wish I were homeward bound’…
Poole joined him on the second line, singing softly and tunelessly, and then the car stopped and the door opened. The giant, who had closed his eyes, continued to sing as Poole stepped from brown elevator carpet to green hall carpet. The doors slid shut. The elevator ascended and Poole heard the man’s voice echoing down the shaft.
3 Reunion (#ulink_1f5f80f8-582f-5a34-b29f-87177c0e5445)
1
A North Vietnamese soldier who looked like a twelve-year-old boy stood over Poole, prodding his neck with the barrel of a contraband Swedish machine gun he must have killed someone to get. Poole was pretending he was dead so that the NVA would not shoot him; his eyes were closed, but he had a vivid picture of the soldier’s face. Coarse black hair fell over a broad, unlined forehead. The black eyes and abrupt, almost lipless mouth seemed nearly serene in their lack of expression. When the rifle barrel pushed painfully into his neck, Poole let his head slide fractionally across the greasy earth in what he hoped was a realistic imitation of death. He could not die: he was a father and he had to live. Huge iridescent bugs whirred in the air above his face, their wings clacking like shears.
The tip of the barrel stopped jabbing his neck. An outsized drop of sweat squeezed itself out of Poole’s right eyebrow and trickled into the little depression between the bridge of his nose and the corner of his eye; one of the rusty-sounding insects blundered into his lips. When the N V A did not move on to any of the real corpses near him, Poole knew that he was going to die. His life was over, and he would never know his son, whose name was Robert. Like his love for this unknown son, the knowledge that the soldier was going to blow his head apart here on the narrow field full of dead men was total.
The shot did not come. Another of the rusty insects fell onto his sweat-slick cheek like a spent bullet and took a maddening length of time scrabbling to its legs before it lumbered off.
Then Poole heard a faint click and rustle, as of some object being pulled from a casing. The soldier’s feet moved as he shifted his weight. Poole realized that the man was kneeling beside him. An entirely uncurious hand, the size of a girl’s, pushed his head flat into the smeary earth, then yanked his right ear. His impersonation of a dead man had been too successful – the NVA wanted his ear as a trophy. Poole’s eyes snapped open by themselves, and before them, on the other side of a long grey knife where the sky should have been, hung the motionless black eyes of the other soldier. The North Vietnamese gasped. For a brimming half-second the air filled with the stench of fish sauce.
Poole jackknifed up off his bed and the NVA melted away. The telephone was ringing. The first thing he was fully conscious of was that his son was gone again.
Gone too were the corpses and the lumbering insects. Poole groped for the phone. ‘Mike?’ came tinnily from the receiver. He looked over his shoulder and saw bland pale wallpaper, a painting of a misty Chinese landscape over the bed. He found that he could breathe.
‘This is Michael Poole,’ he said into the receiver.
‘Mikey! How are you? You sound a little weirded-out, man.’ Poole finally recognized the voice of Conor Linklater, who had turned his head away from the telephone and was saying,’ ‘Hey, I got him! He’s in his room! I told you, man, Mike’s just gonna be in his room, remember?’ Then Conor was speaking to him again. ‘Hey, didn’t you get our message, man?’
Conversations with Conor Linklater, Michael was reminded, tended to be more scattered than conversations with most other people. ‘I guess not. What time did you get in?’ He looked at his watch and saw that he had been asleep for half an hour.
‘We got here about four-thirty, man, and we called you right away, and at first they said you weren’t here and Tina made ‘em look twice and then they said you were here, but nobody answered your phone. Okay. How come you didn’t answer our message?’
‘I went out to the Memorial,’ Poole said. ‘I got back a little before five. I was in the middle of a nightmare when you woke me up.’
Conor did not say good-bye and he did not hang up. Speaking more softly than before, he said, ‘Man, you sound like that nightmare really weirded you out.’
A rough hand tugging his ear away from his head; the ground greasy with blood. Poole’s memory gave him the picture of a field where exhausted men carried corpses toward impatient helicopters in the hazy blue light of early morning. Some of the corpses had blood-black holes where they should have had ears. ‘I guess I went back to Dragon Valley,’ Poole said, having just understood this.
‘Be cool,’ Conor Linklater said. ‘We’re already out the door.’ He hung up.
Poole splashed water on his face in the bathroom, roughly used a towel, and examined himself in the mirror. In spite of his nap he looked pale and tired. Megavitamins encased in clear plastic lay on the counter beside his toothbrush, and he peeled one free and swallowed it.
Before he went down the hall to the ice machine, he dialed the number for messages.
The man who answered told him that he had two messages. ‘The first one is stamped 3:55, and reads “Tried to call back –”’
‘I picked that one up at the desk,’ Poole said.
‘The second is stamped 4:50, and reads “We just arrived. Where are you? Call 1315 when you return.” It’s signed “Harry.”’
They had called while he was still downstairs in the lobby.
2
Michael Poole paced back and forth between the window overlooking the parking lot and the door. Whenever he got to the door, he stopped and listened. The elevators whirred in their chutes, carts squeaked past. After a little while he heard the ping! of the elevator, and he cracked the door open to look down the corridor. A trim grey-haired man in a white shirt and a blue suit with a name tag on the lapel was hurrying toward him a few paces ahead of a tall blonde woman wearing a grey flannel suit and a paisley foulard tied in a fussy bow. Poole pulled back his head and closed the door. He heard the man fumbling with his key a little way down the hall. Poole wandered back to the window and looked down at the parking lot. Half a dozen men dressed in unmatched parts of uniforms and holding beer cans had settled on the hoods and trunks of various automobiles. They looked like they were singing. Poole walked back to the door and waited. As soon as he heard the elevator land once again on his floor, he opened the door and leaned out into the hall.
Tall, agitated Harry Beevers and Conor Linklater turned into the hallway together, a harried-looking Tina Pumo a second later. Conor saw him first – he raised his fist and grinned and called out ‘Mikey baby!’ Unlike the last time Michael Poole had seen him, Conor Linklater was smooth-shaven and his pale reddish hair had been cut almost punkishly short. Conor normally wore baggy blue jeans and plaid shirts, but he had taken unaccustomed pains with his wardrobe. Somewhere he had obtained a black T-shirt with the stenciled legend AGENT ORANGE in big irregular yellow letters, and over this garment he wore a large, loose, many-pocketed black denim vest with conspicuous white stitching.’ There were sharp creases in his black trousers.
‘Conor, you’re a vision of delight,’ Poole said, stepping out into the corridor while holding the door with his outstretched left hand. Half a foot shorter than Michael, Conor Linklater stepped up to him and wrapped his arms around his chest and hugged him tightly.
‘Man,’ he said into Michael’s jawline, and playfully kissed him, ‘what a sight for poor eyes.’
Smirking at this ripe Linklaterism, Harry Beevers sidled up beside Poole and, in a wave of musky cologne, embraced him too, awkwardly. The corner of a briefcase struck Poole’s hip. ‘Michael, a sight for “poor eyes”,’ Beevers whispered into Poole’s ear. Poole gently pulled himself away and got a vivid close-up of Harry Beevers’ large, overlapping discolored teeth.
Tina Pumo bobbed back and forth before them in the corridor, grinning fiercely beneath his heavy moustache. ‘You were asleep?’ Pumo asked. ‘You didn’t get our message?’
‘Okay, shoot me,’ Poole said, smiling at Pumo. Conor and Beevers broke away from him and moved separately toward the door. Pumo ducked his head like Tom Sawyer, all but digging his toes into the carpet, said, ‘Aw, Mikey, I want to hug you too,’ and did it. ‘Good to see you again, man.’
‘You too,’ Michael said.
‘Let’s get inside before we get arrested for having an orgy,’ Harry Beevers said, already standing in the entry to Michael’s room.
‘Don’t get weird, Lieutenant,’ Conor Linklater said, but moved toward the doorway anyhow, glancing sideways at the other two. Pumo laughed and pounded Michael on the back, then let them go.
‘So what have you guys been doing since you got here?’ Michael asked. ‘Apart from swearing at me, that is.’
Wandering around the room, Conor said, ‘Teeny-Tiny’s been sweatin’ out his restaurant.’ Teeny-Tiny was a reference to the origins of Pumo’s nickname, which had begun as Tiny when he was an undersized child in an undersized town in upstate New York, was modulated later to Teeny, and had finally altered to Tina. After a decade of working in restaurants, Pumo now owned one in SoHo that served Vietnamese food and had been lavishly praised some months before in New York magazine. ‘He made two calls already, man. Him and the Health Department are gonna keep me awake all night.’
‘It’s not really anything,’ Tina protested. ‘I picked an awkward time to go away, that’s all. We have to do certain things in the restaurant, and I want to make sure they’re done right.’
‘Health Department?’ Michael asked.
‘Really, it’s nothing serious.’ Pumo grinned fiercely. His moustache bristled, the joyless creases at the corners of his eyes deepened and lengthened. ‘We’re doing great. Booked solid most nights.’ He sat on the edge of the bed. ‘Harry can vouch for me. We do great business.’
‘What can I say?’ Beevers asked. ‘You’re a success story.’
‘You looked around the hotel?’ Poole asked.
‘We checked out the meeting areas downstairs, had a look around,’ Pumo said. ‘It’s a big party. We can do some stuff tonight, if you want,’
‘Some party,’ Beevers said. ‘A lot of guys standing around with their thumbs in their asses.’ He shrugged his jacket over the back of his chair, revealing suspenders on which cherubs romped against a red background. ‘No organization, nada, rien. The only people with their shit together are the First Air Cav. They have a booth, they help you locate other guys from your unit. We looked around, but I don’t think we saw anybody from our whole damn division. Besides that, they put us into a grubby dump of a hall that looks like a high school gym. There’s a Diet Coke stand, if that turns you on.’
‘High school gym, man,’ Conor muttered. He was staring intently at the bedside lamp. Poole smiled at Tina Pumo, who smiled back. Linklater picked up the lamp and examined the inside of the shade, then set it down and ran his fingers along the cord until he found the switch. He turned the lamp on, then off.
‘Sit down, for God’s sake, Conor,’ Beevers said. ‘You make me nervous, messing with everything like that. We’ve got serious business to talk about, if you don’t remember.’
‘I remember, I remember,’ Conor protested, turning away from the lamp. ‘Hey, there’s no place to sit in here on account of you and Mike got the chairs and Tina’s already on the bed.’
Harry Beevers stood up, yanked his jacket off the back of his chair, and made a sweeping gesture toward the empty seat. ‘If it’ll get you to settle down, I’ll gladly surrender my chair. Take it, Conor – I’m giving it to you. Sit down.’ He picked up his glass and sat down next to Pumo on Michael’s bed. ‘You think you can sleep in the same room with this guy? He probably still talks to himself all night.’
‘Everybody in my family talks to themselves, Lieutenant,’ said Conor. He hitched his chair closer to the table. Conor began thumping his fingers on the table, as if playing an imaginary piano. ‘I guess they don’t act like that at Harvard –’
‘I didn’t go to Harvard,’ Beevers wearily said.
‘Mikey!’ Conor beamed at Poole as if seeing him for the first time. ‘It’s great to see you!’ He slapped Poole on the back.
‘Yeah,’ Tina Pumo said. ‘How are things going, Michael? It’s been a while.’
These days Tina was living with a beautiful Chinese girl in her early twenties named Maggie Lah, whose brother was a bartender at Saigon, Tina’s restaurant. Before Maggie there had been a series of girls, each of whom Tina had claimed to love.
‘Well, I’m thinking of making some changes,’ Michael said. ‘I’m busy all day long, but at night I can hardly remember what I did.’
A loud knocking came from the door, and Michael said ‘Room service,’ and stood up. The waiter wheeled in the cart and arranged the glasses and bottles on the table. The atmosphere in the room became more festive as Conor opened a Budweiser and Harry Beevers poured vodka into an empty glass. Michael never explained his half-formed plan of selling his practice in Westerholm and seeing what he might be able to do in some gritty place like the South Bronx where children really needed doctors. Judy usually walked out of the room whenever he began to talk about it.
After the waiter left, Conor stretched out on the bed, rolled on his side, and said, ‘So you saw Dengler’s name? It was right there?’
‘Sure. I got a little surprise, though. Do you know what his full name was?’
‘M. O. Dengler,’ Conor said.
‘Don’t be an idiot,’ Beevers said. ‘It was Mark, I think.’ He looked to Tina for help, but Tina frowned and shrugged.
‘Manuel Orosco Dengler,’ Michael said. ‘I was amazed that I didn’t know that.’
‘Manuel?’ Conor said. ‘Dengler was Mexican?’
‘Michael, you got the wrong Dengler,’ Tina Pumo said, laughing.
‘Nope,’ Michael said. ‘There’s not only one M. O. Dengler, there’s only one Dengler. He’s ours.’
‘A Mexican,’ Conor mused.
‘You ever hear of any Mexicans named Dengler? His parents just gave him Spanish names, I guess. Who knows? Who even cares? He was a hell of a soldier, that’s all I know. I wish –’
Pumo raised his glass to his mouth instead of finishing his sentence, and none of the men spoke for an almost elastically long moment.
Linklater muttered something unintelligible and walked across the room and sat on the floor.
Michael stood up to add fresh ice cubes to his glass and saw Conor Linklater backed up against the far wall like an imp in his black clothes, the brown beer bottle dangling between his knees. The orange writing on his chest was nearly the same shade as his hair. Conor was looking back at him with a small secret smile.
3
Maybe Beans Beevers didn’t go to Harvard or Yale, Conor was thinking, but he had gone someplace like that – someplace where everybody in sight just took it all for granted. To Conor it seemed that about ninety-five percent of the people in the United States did nothing but fret and stew about money – not having enough money made them crazy. They zeroed out on booze, they cranked themselves up to commit robberies: oblivion, tension, oblivion. The other five percent of the population rode above this turmoil like froth on a wave. They went to the schools their fathers had gone to and they married and divorced one another, as Harry had married and divorced Pat Caldwell. They had jobs where you shuffled papers and talked on the telephone. From behind their desks they watched the money stroll in the door, coming home. They even passed out these jobs to each other – Beans Beevers, who spent as much time at the bar in Pumo’s restaurant as he did at his desk, worked in the law firm run by Pat Caldwell’s brother.
When Conor had been a boy in South Norwalk, a kind of wondering and resentful curiosity had made him pedal his old Schwinn up along Route 136 to Mount Avenue in Hampstead. Mount Avenue people were so rich they were nearly invisible, like their enormous houses – from the road all you could see of some of them were occasional sections of brick or stucco walls. Most of these waterfront mansions seemed empty of anybody but servants, yet now and then young Conor would spot an obvious owner-resident. Conor learned from his brief sightings that although these Mount Avenue owner-residents usually wore the same grey suits and blue jackets as everyone else in Hampstead, sometimes they blazoned forth like Harry Beevers in riotous pink and bilious green, in funny-looking bow ties and pale double-breasted suits. It was sort of like the Emperor’s New Clothes – nobody had the balls to tell Protestant millionaires they looked ridiculous. (Conor was certain that none of these people could be Catholic.) Bow ties! Red suspenders with pictures of babies on them!
Conor couldn’t help smiling to himself – here he was, almost flat broke, thinking he ought to pity a rich lawyer. Next week he had a job taping sheetrock in a remodeled kitchen, for which he might earn a couple hundred dollars. Harry Beevers could probably earn double that sitting on a barstool, talking to Jimmy Lah. Conor looked up, his sense of humor painfully sparkling, and saw Michael Poole looking at him as if the same kind of thought had occurred to him.
Beevers had some typical bullshit up his sleeve, Conor thought, but Michael knew better than to fall for it, whatever it was.
Conor smiled to himself, remembering Dengler’s word for people who never experienced dread and took everything for granted: ‘toons,’ as in cartoons. Now the toons were running everything – they were scrambling upward, running over everything in their way. These days it seemed that half the people in Donovan’s, Conor’s favorite South Norwalk bar, had MBAs, put mousse on their hair, and drank blender drinks. Conor had the sense that some enormous change had happened all at once, that all these new people had just popped out of their own television sets. He could almost feel sorry for them, their morality was so fucked up.
Thinking about the toons depressed Conor. He felt like drinking a lot more even though he knew he was getting close to his limit. But wasn’t this a reunion? They were sitting around in a hotel room like a bunch of old men. He drained the last of his beer.
‘Give me some of that vodka, Mikey,’ he said, and lobbed the empty beer bottle into the wastebasket.
‘Attaboy,’ Pumo said, raising his glass to him.
Michael made a drink and came across the room to hand it to Conor.
‘Okay, a toast,’ Conor said, and stood up. ‘Man. It feels good to do this.’ He raised his glass. ‘To M. O. Dengler. Even if he was a Mexican, which I doubt.’
Conor poured ice-cold vodka into his mouth and gulped it down. He felt better instantly, so good that he downed the rest. ‘Man, sometimes I can remember shit that happened over there like it was yesterday, and the stuff that really did happen yesterday, I can’t hardly remember at all. I mean – sometimes I’ll start to think about that guy who ran that club at Camp Crandall, who had that gigantic wall of beer cases –’
‘Manly,’ Tina Pumo said, laughing.
‘Manly. Fucking Manly. And I’ll start to think about how did he manage to get all that beer there, anyway? And then I’ll start to think about little things he did, the way he acted.’
‘Manly belonged behind a counter,’ Beevers said.
‘That’s right! I bet Manly’s got his own little business right now, he’s got everything lined up just right, man, he’s got a good car and his own house, he’s got a wife, kids, he’s got one of those basketball hoops up on his garage…’ Conor stared into space for a second, enjoying his vision of Manly’s life – Manly would be great in suburbia. He thought like a criminal without actually being one, so he was probably making a fortune doing something like installing security systems. Then Conor remembered that in a way Manly had started all their troubles, back in Vietnam…
A day before they came into Ia Thuc, Manly had separated from the column and found himself alone in the jungle. Without even meaning to make noise, he started sounding like a six-foot bumblebee in a panic. Everyone else in the column froze. A sniper known as ‘Elvis’ had been dogging them for two days, and Manly’s commotion was all he needed to improve his luck. Conor knew what he should have done – he had discovered long ago how to make himself melt into the background. It was almost mystical. Conor could virtually become invisible (and he knew it worked, for twice VC patrols had looked right at him without seeing him). Dengler, Poole, Pumo, even Underhill, could do this almost as well as he could, but Manly could not do it all. Conor began silently working through the jungle toward the sound – he was angry enough to kill Manly, if that was what it took to shut him up. Within a minute fraction of a second, he knew as if by telepathy – so silent – that Dengler was following him.
They found Manly bulling through the curtain of green, hacking away with his machete in one hand, his M-16 at his hip in the other. Conor started to glide up to him, half-thinking about slitting his throat, when Dengler simply materialized next to Manly and grabbed his machete arm. For a second they were motionless. Conor crept forward, afraid that Manly would shriek after the numbness wore off. Instead, he heard a single report from off to his right, somewhere up in the canopy, and saw Dengler topple over. He felt shock so deep and sudden his hands and feet went cold.
He and Manly had walked Dengler back to the rest of the column. Even though the impact had knocked him down and he was bleeding steadily, Dengler’s wound was only superficial. A wad of flesh the size of a mouse had been punched out of his left arm. Peters made him lie down on the jungle floor, packed and bandaged the wound, and pronounced him fit to move.
If Dengler had not been wounded even so slightly, Conor thought, Ia Thuc might have been just another empty village. Seeing Dengler in pain had soured everybody. It pumped up their anxiety. Maybe they had all been foolish to believe in Dengler as they had, but seeing him bloodied and wounded on the forest floor had shocked Conor all over again – it was as bad as seeing him hit in the first place. After that, it had been easy to blow it, go over the edge in Ia Thuc. Afterward nothing was the same. Even Dengler changed, maybe because of the publicity and the court martial. Conor himself had stayed so high on drugs that he still could not remember some things that had happened in the months between Ia Thuc and his DEROS – but he knew that just before the court-martials he had cut the ears off a dead North Vietnamese soldier and stuck a Koko card in his mouth.
Conor realized that he was in danger of getting depressed again. He was sorry he had ever mentioned Manly.
‘Refill,’ he said, and went to the table and poured more vodka into his glass. The other three were still looking at him, smiling at their cheerleader – other people always counted on him to provide their good times.
‘Hey, to the Ninth Battalion, 24th Infantry Regiment.’ Conor swallowed another ice-cold bullet of vodka, and the face of Harlan Huebsch popped into his mind. Harlan Huebsch was a kid from Oregon who had tripped a wire and blown himself in half a few days after turning up at Camp Crandall. Conor could remember Huebsch’s death very clearly because an hour or so afterwards, when they had finally reached the other side of the little mined field, Conor had stretched out against a grassy dike and noticed a long tangled strand of wire snagged in the bootlaces on his right foot. The only difference between himself and Huebsch was that Huebsch’s mine had worked the way it was supposed to. Now Harlan Huebsch was a name up on the Memorial – Conor promised himself he’d find it, once they all got there.
Beevers wanted to toast the Tin Man, and though everybody joined him, Linklater knew that only Beans meant it. Mike Poole toasted Si Van Vo, which Conor thought was hilarious. Then Conor made everybody drink to Elvis. And Tina Pumo wound up toasting Dawn Cucchio, who was a whore he met on R&R in Sydney, Australia. Conor laughed so hard at the idea of drinking to Dawn Cucchio that he had to lean against the wall to hold himself up.
But then murkier, darker feelings surfaced in him again. If you wanted to accept the reality of what was going on, he was an unemployed laborer sitting around with a lawyer, a doctor, and a guy who owned a restaurant so fancy there were pictures of it in magazines.
Conor realized that he had been staring at Pumo, who looked like a page out of GQ. Tina always looked good, especially in his restaurant. Conor went there once or twice a year, but spent most of his money at the bar. On his last visit he had seen a juicy little Chinese girl who must have been Maggie. ‘Hey, Tina, what’s the best dish you make, down there in your restaurant?’
Conor slurred a little on best, but he didn’t think the others could hear it.
‘Duck Saigon, probably,’ Tina said. ‘At least, that’s my favorite right now. Marinated roast duck, dried rice noodles. The taste is out of sight.’
‘You put that fish sauce on top of it?’
‘Nuoc mam sauce? Sure.’
‘I don’t know how anybody can eat that gook food,’ Conor said. ‘Remember when we were over there? We all knew you couldn’t eat that shit, man.’
‘We were eighteen years old back then,’ Tina said. ‘Our idea of a great meal was a Whopper and fries.’
Conor did not admit to Tina that a Whopper and fries was still his idea of a great meal. He gulped down another silver bullet of vodka and felt lower than ever.
4
But in a little while it was almost like the old days again. Conor learned that along with all the normal Pumo difficulties, Tina now had to deal with the exciting new complications caused by Maggie being nearly twenty years younger and not only as crazy as he was, but smarter besides. When she moved in with him, Tina began feeling ‘too much pressure.’ This much was absolutely typical. What was different about Maggie was that after a few months she disappeared. Now she was out-Pumoing Pumo. Maggie called him on the telephone, but refused to tell him where she was staying. Sometimes she placed coded messages for him on the back page of the Village Voice.
‘Do you know what it’s like to read the back page of every issue of the Voice when you’re forty-one?’ Pumo asked.
Conor had never read any page of any issue of the Village Voice. He shook his head.
‘Every mistake you ever made with a woman is right there in cold hard print. Falling for someone’s looks – “Beautiful blonde girl in Virginia Woolf T-shirt at Sedutto’s, we almost talked and now I’m kicking myself. I know we could be special. Please call man with backpack. 581-4901.” Romantic idealization – “Suki. You are my shooting star. Cannot live without you. Bill.” Romantic despair – “I haven’t stopped hurting since you left. Forlorn in Yorkville.” Masochism – “Bruiser – No guilt necessary, I forgive you. Puffball.” Cuteness – “Twinky-poo. Twiddles wuvs yum-yum.” Indecision – “Mesquite. Still thinking. Margarita.” Of course there’s a lot of other stuff, too. Prayers to St Jude. Numbers you can call if you want to get off coke. Baldness cures. Lots of Strip-O-Grams. And Jews For Jesus, every single week. But mainly it’s all these broken hearts, this terrible early-twenties agony. Conor, I have to pore over this back page like it was the Rosetta stone. I get the damn paper as soon as it hits the stands on Wednesday morning. I read the page over four or five times because it’s easy to miss clues the first couple of times. See, I have to figure out which messages are hers. Sometimes she calls herself “Type A” – that’s Taipei, where she was born – but other times she’s “Leather Lady.” Or “Half Moon” – that was for a tattoo she got last year.’
‘Where?’ Conor asked. He didn’t feel so bad now, only a little drunk. At least he wasn’t as fucked up as Pumo. ‘On her ass?’
‘Just a little below her navel,’ Tina said. He looked as though he was sorry he had brought up the subject of his girlfriend’s tattoo.
‘Maggie has a half moon tattoed on her pussy?’ Conor asked. He wished he had been in the tattoo parlor when that was going on. Even if Chinese girls weren’t Conor’s thing – they reminded him of the Dragon Lady in ‘Terry and the Pirates’ – he had to admit that Maggie was more than normally good-looking. Everything about Maggie seemed round. She somehow managed to make it seem normal to walk around in chopped-up punk hair and clothes you bought already ripped.
‘No. I told you,’ Pumo said, looking irritated, ‘just a little below her navel. The bottom of a bikini covers most of it.’
‘It’s almost on her pussy!’ Conor said. ‘Is any of it in her hair? Were you there when the guy did it? Did she cry or anything?’
‘You bet I was there. I wanted to make sure he didn’t let his attention wander.’ Pumo took a sip of his drink. ‘Maggie didn’t even blink.’
‘How big is it?’ Conor asked. ‘About half dollar size?’
‘If you’re so curious, ask her to show it to you.’
‘Oh, sure,’ Conor said. ‘I can really see me doing that.’
Then Conor overheard part of the conversation Mike Poole was having with Beans Beevers – something about Ia Thuc and a grunt Poole had talked to during the parade.
Beevers asked, ‘He was an ex-combat soldier?’
‘Looked like he got out of the field about a week ago,’ Mike said, giving his little smile.
‘This vet really remembered all about me, and he said I should get a Medal of Honor?’
‘He said they should have given you a Medal of Honor for what you did, and then taken it away again for shooting off your mouth in front of journalists.’
This was the first time Conor had ever heard Beevers confronted with the opinion, once widely held, that he had been a dope to brag about Ia Thuc to the press. Of course Beevers acted as though he were hearing this opinion for the first time.
‘Ridiculous,’ Beevers said. ‘I can just about go along with him on the Congressional medal idea, but not on that. I’m proud of everything I did there, and I hope all of you are too. If it was up to me, we’d all have Congressional medals.’ He looked down at the front of his shirt, smoothed it, then lifted his chin – stuck it out. ‘But people know we did the right thing. That’s as good as a medal. People agree with the decision of the court-martial, even if they forgot it ever happened.’
Conor wondered how Beans could say these things. He didn’t see how people could know they’d done the right thing at Ia Thuc when even the men who had been there didn’t know exactly what had happened.
‘You’d be surprised how many guys I meet, I’m talking about other lawyers, judges too, who know my name because of that action,’ Beevers said. ‘To tell you the truth, being a sort of a minor league hero has helped me out professionally more than once.’ Beans looked around at all of them with a sweet candor that made Conor want to puke. ‘I’m not ashamed of anything I did in Nam. You have to turn what happens to you into a plus.’
Michael Poole laughed. ‘Spoken from the heart, Harry.’
‘This is important,’ Beevers insisted. For a second he looked both pained and puzzled. ‘I have the impression that you three guys are accusing me of something.’
‘I didn’t accuse you of anything, Harry,’ Poole said.
‘So didn’t I,’ said Conor in exasperation. He pointed at Tina Pumo. ‘So didn’t he!’
‘We were with each other every step of the way,’ Harry said, and it took Conor a moment to figure out that he had gone back to talking about Ia Thuc. ‘We always helped each other out. We were a team, all of us, Spitalny included.’
Conor could restrain himself no longer. ‘I wish that asshole would have got killed there,’ he broke in. ‘I never met anybody as mean as him. Spitalny didn’t like anybody, man. Right? And he claimed he got stung by wasps? In that cave? I don’t think there are any wasps in Nam, man. I saw bugs the size of dogs there, man, but I never saw any wasps.’
Tina interrupted him with a loud groan. ‘Don’t talk to me about wasps. Don’t talk to me about bugs – any kind of bugs!’
‘Is this related to the trouble you’re having?’ Mike asked.
‘The Department of Health has strong feelings on the subject of six-legged creatures,’ Pumo said. ‘I don’t even want to discuss it.’
‘Let’s get back to the subject, if you don’t mind,’ Beevers said, giving Poole a mysteriously loaded glance.
What the hell is the subject? Conor wondered.
Pumo said, ‘How about we have another little blast up here and then go down, get something to eat, see some of the entertainment. Jimmy Stewart’s supposed to be here. I always liked Jimmy Stewart.’
Beevers said, ‘Mike, are you the only one who knows what I was leading up to? Remind them why we’re here. Help me out.’
‘Lieutenant Beevers thinks it’s time to talk about Koko,’ Poole said.
4 The Answering Machine (#ulink_e9bd60e1-75e2-5c9e-9127-1ec2f82b2a02)
1
‘Hand me my briefcase, Tina. It’s somewhere back there against the wall.’ Beevers leaned forward from the side of the bed and extended his arm. Tina groped under the table for the case. ‘Take all day, there’s no rush.’
‘You pushed your chair over it when you got up,’ Pumo said, now invisible beneath the table. He surfaced with the briefcase in both hands, and held it out.
Beevers put the case on his lap and snapped it open.
Poole leaned over and looked in at a stack of reprints of a familiar page from Stars and Stripes. Stapled to it were copies of other newspaper articles. Beevers took out the stack of papers and said, ‘There’s one for each of you. Michael is familiar with some of this material already, but I thought we should all have copies of everything. That way everybody’ll know exactly what we’re talking about.’ He handed the first sheaf of stapled papers to Conor. ‘Settle down and pay attention to this.’
‘Sieg Heil,’ Conor said, and took the chair beside Michael Poole.
Beevers handed stapled pages to Poole and Pumo, placed the final set beside him on the bed, closed his case and set it on the floor.
Pumo said, ‘Take all day, there’s no rush.’
‘Touchy, touchy.’ Beevers put his papers on his lap, picked them up with both hands, squinted at them. He set them back in his lap and reached over to his suit jacket to remove his glasses case from the chest pocket. From the case he took a pair of oversized glasses with thin, oval tortoise-shell frames. Beevers put the empty case on top of his suit jacket, then put the glasses on his nose. Again he inspected the papers.
Poole wondered how often during the day Beevers went through this little charade of lawyerly behavior.
Beevers looked up from his papers. Bow tie, suspenders, big glasses. ‘First of all, mes amis, I want to say that we’ve all had some fun, and we’ll have a lot more before we leave, but’ – a weighty glance at Conor – ‘we’re in this room together because we shared some important experiences. And…we survived these experiences because we could depend on each other.’
Beevers glanced down at the papers in his lap, and Pumo said, ‘Get to the point, Harry.’
‘If you don’t understand how much teamwork is the point, you’re missing everything,’ Beevers said. He looked up again. ‘Please read the articles. There are three of them, one from Stars and Stripes, one from the Straits Times of Singapore, and the third from the Bangkok Post. My brother George, who is a career soldier, knew a little bit about the Koko incidents, and when the name caught his eye in the Stars and Stripes piece, he sent it to me. Then he asked my other, older brother, Sonny – he’s a career sergeant too, over in Manila – to check out all the Asian papers he could locate. George did the same on Okinawa – together they could look at nearly all the English language papers published in the Far East.’
‘You have two brothers who’re lifer sergeants?’ Conor asked. Sonny and George, lifers in Manila and Okinawa? From a Mount Avenue family?
Beevers looked at him impatiently. ‘Eventually these other two pieces turned up in Singapore and Bangkok papers, and that’s it. I did some research on my own, but read this stuff first. As you’ll see, our boy’s been busy.’
Michael Poole took a sip of his drink and scanned the topmost article. On January 28, 1981, the corpse of a fortytwo-year-old English tourist in Singapore, a free-lance writer named Clive McKenna, had been found, his eyes and ears bloodily removed, by a gardener in an overgrown section of the grounds of the Goodwood Park Hotel. A playing card with the word Koko written on its face had been placed in Mr McKenna’s mouth. On February 5, 1982, an appraiser had entered a supposedly empty bungalow just off Orchard Road in the same city to discover lying face-up and side by side on the living room floor the bodies of Mr William Martinson of St Louis, a sixty-one-year-old executive of a heavy equipment company active in Asia, and Mrs Barbara Martinson, fifty-five, also of St Louis, who had been accompanying her husband on a business trip. Mr Martinson lacked his eyes and ears; in his mouth was a playing card with the word Koko scrawled across its face.
The Straits Times piece, dated three days later, added the information that while the bodies of the Martinsons had been discovered less than forty-eight hours after their deaths, Clive McKenna’s body had gone undiscovered for perhaps as long as five days. Roughly ten days separated the two sets of murders. The Singapore police had many leads, and an arrest was considered imminent.
The clipping from the Bangkok Post, dated July 7, 1982, was considerably more emotional than the others. FRENCH WRITERS SLAIN, the headline read. Outrage and dismay were shared by all decent citizens. The provinces of both tourism and literature had been savaged. Unwelcome events of a violent nature were particularly threatening to the hotel industry. The shock to morality – therefore to trade – had potential consequences far beyond the hotel industry, affecting taxicabs, hire-car firms, restaurants, jewelers, massage parlors, museums and temples, tattooists, airport staff and baggage handlers, etc. That the crime was almost certainly the work of undesirable aliens, committed by as well as upon foreigners, had to be not only remembered but reiterated. Police of all districts were engaged in a commendable effort of mutual cooperation designed to root out the whereabouts of the assassins within days. Political hostility to Thailand could not be discounted.
Cocooned within this oddly formal hysteria was the information that Marc Guibert, 48, and Yves Danton, 49, both journalists living in Paris, had been found in their suite at the Sheraton Bangkok by a maid on her normal morning cleaning detail. They were tied to chairs with their throats cut and their eyes and ears removed. The two men had arrived in Thailand the previous afternoon and were not known to have received any messages or guests. Cards from an ordinary deck of Malaysian playing cards, the word, or name, Koko printed by hand on each, had been inserted into the dead men’s mouths.
Tina and Conor continued to read, Tina with an expression of feigned detachment, Conor in deep concentration. Harry Beevers sat upright, tapping a pencil against his front teeth, his eyes out of focus.
Printed by hand. Michael saw exactly how: the letters carved in so deeply you could read the raised grooves on the back of the card. Poole could remember the first time he had seen one of the cards protruding from the mouth of a tiny dead man in black pajamas – point for our side, he’d thought, okay.
Pumo said, ‘The goddamned war still isn’t over, I guess.’
Conor looked up from his copy of the Bangkok clipping. ‘Hey, it could be anybody, man. These guys here say it’s some political thing. To hell with this, anyhow.’
Beevers said. ‘Do you seriously think it’s a coincidence that this murderer writes the name Koko on a playing card which he puts into his victims’ mouths?’
‘Yeah,’ Conor said. ‘Sure it could be. Or it could be politics, like this guy says.’
‘But the fact is, it almost has to be our Koko,’ Pumo said slowly. He spread the three clippings out beside him on the table, as if seeing them all at once made coincidence even more unlikely. ‘These were the only articles your brothers could find? No follow up?’
Beevers shook his head. He then bent over, picked his glass up from the floor, and made a silent, mocking toast to them without drinking.
‘You’re pretty cheerful about this,’ Pumo said.
‘Someday, my friends, this is going to be a hell of a story. I’m serious, I can definitely see book rights in this thing. Beyond that, I can see film rights. But to tell you the truth, I’d settle for a mini-series.’
Conor covered his face with his hands, and Poole said, ‘Now I know you’re nuts.’
Beevers turned to them with an unblinking gaze. ‘Some day I’ll want you to remember who first said that we could all see a lot of money out of this. If we handle it right. Mucho dinero.’
‘Hallelujah,’ Conor said. ‘The Lost Boss is gonna make us rich.’
‘Consider the facts.’ Beevers held up a palm like a stop sign while he sipped from his glass. ‘A law school student who does our data-gathering did some research on my instructions – on the firm’s time, so we don’t get billed for it. He went through a year’s worth of half a dozen major metropolitan papers and the wire services. Net result? Apart of course from St Louis stories about the Martinsons, there has never been any news story in this country about Koko or these murders. And the stories in St Louis papers didn’t mention the playing cards. They didn’t mention Koko.’
Is there any possible connection between the victims?’ Michael asked.
‘Consider the facts. An English tourist in Singapore – our researcher looked up McKenna, and he wrote a travel book about Australia-New Zealand, a couple of thrillers, and a book called Your Dog Can Live Longer! With an exclamation point. Maybe he was doing research in Singapore. Who knows? The Martinsons were a straight Middle-American business couple. His firm sold a load of bulldozers and cranes throughout the Far East. Then we have two print journalists, Frenchmen who work for L’Express. Guibert and Danton went to Bangkok for the massage parlors. They were longtime friends who took a vacance together every couple of years. They weren’t on an assignment in Bangkok, they were just cutting up.’
‘An Englishman, two Frenchmen, and two Americans,’ Michael said.
‘A pretty clear example of random selection,’ Beevers said. ‘I think these people were just in the wrong place at the wrong time. They were shopping or sitting at a bar, and they found themselves talking to a plausible American guy with a lot of stories who eventually took them off somewhere quiet and wasted them. The original Mr Wrong. The All-American psychopath.’
‘He didn’t mutilate Martinson’s wife,’ Michael said.
‘Yeah, he just killed her,’ Beevers said. ‘You want mutilations every time? Maybe he just took men’s ears because he fought against men in Vietnam.’
‘Okay,’ Conor said. ‘Say it’s our Koko. Then what?’ He looked almost unwillingly toward Michael and shrugged. ‘I mean, I ain’t going to no cops or nothing. I got nothing to say to them.’
Beevers leaned forward and fixed Conor with the stare of a man attempting to hypnotize a snake. ‘I agree with you absolutely.’
‘You agree with me?’
‘We have nothing to say to the police. At this point, we don’t even know with absolute certainty that Koko is Tim Underhill.’ He straightened up and looked at Poole with the trace of a smile tugging at his mouth. ‘Celebrated or not-so-celebrated thriller writer and Singapore resident.’
Every man in the room but Beevers all but closed his eyes.
‘Are his books really nuts?’ Conor finally said. ‘You remember all that crazy stuff he used to talk about? That book?’
‘“The Running Grunt”’, Pumo said. ‘I couldn’t believe it when I heard he published a couple novels – he talked about it so much I figured he’d never do it.’
‘He did it, though,’ Poole said. Without wanting to be, he was surprised, even dismayed that Tina had not read any of Underhill’s novels. ‘It was called A Beast in View when it came out.’ Beevers was watching Poole expectantly, his thumbs tucked behind his rosy suspenders.
‘So you really do think it’s Underhill?’ Poole asked.
‘Consider the facts,’ Beevers said. ‘Obviously the same person killed McKenna, the Martinsons, and the two French journalists. So we have a serial murderer who identifies himself by writing the name Koko on a playing card inserted into the mouths of his victims. What does that name mean?’
Pumo said, ‘It’s the name of a volcano in Hawaii. Can we go see Jimmy Stewart now?’
‘Underhill told me “Koko” was the name of a song,’ Conor said.
‘“Koko” is the name of lots of things, among them one of the few pandas in captivity, a Hawaiian volcano, a princess of Thailand, and jazz songs by Duke Ellington and Charlie Parker. There was even a dog named Koko in the Dr Sam Sheppard murder case. But none of that means a thing. Koko means us – it doesn’t mean anything else.’ Beevers crossed his arms over his chest and looked around at all of them. ‘And I wasn’t in Singapore or Thailand last year. Were you, Michael? Consider the facts. McKenna was killed right after the Iranian hostages came back to parades and cover stories – came back as heroes. Did you see that a Vietnam vet in Indiana flipped out and killed some people around the same time? Hey, am I telling you something new? How did you feel?’
The others said nothing.
‘Me too,’ Beevers said. ‘I didn’t want to feel that, but I felt it. I resented what they got for just being hostages. That vet in Indiana had the same feelings, and they pushed him over the edge. What do you suppose happened to Underhill?’
‘Or whoever it was,’ Poole said.
Beevers grinned at him.
‘Look, I think this whole thing is nuts in the first place,’ said Pumo, ‘but did you ever consider the possibility that Victor Spitalny might be Koko? Nobody’s seen him since he deserted Dengler in Bangkok fifteen years ago. He could still be living over there.’
Conor surprised Poole by saying, ‘Spitalny’s gotta be dead. He drank that shit, man.’
Poole kept quiet.
‘And there was one more Koko incident after Spitalny disappeared in Bangkok,’ Beevers said. ‘Even if the original Koko had a copycat, I think good old Victor is in the clear. No matter where he is.’
‘I just wish I could talk to Underhill,’ Pumo said, and Poole silently agreed. ‘I always liked Tim – I liked him a hell of a lot. You know, if I didn’t have to work out that mess in my kitchen, I’d be halfway tempted to get on a plane and see if I could find him. Maybe we could help him out, do something for him.’
‘That’s an amazingly interesting idea,’ Beevers said.
2
‘Request permission to move, sir,’ Conor barked. Beevers glared at him. Conor stood up, clapped Michael on the shoulder, and said, ‘Do you know what time it is when darkness falls, bats fill the air, and wild dogs begin to howl?’
Poole was looking up in friendly amusement, Harry Beevers – pencil frozen halfway to his mouth – with irritation and incredulity.
Conor leaned toward Beevers and winked. ‘Time for another beer.’ He took a dripping bottle from the ice bucket and twisted off the cap. Beevers was still glaring at him. ‘So the lieutenant thinks we ought to send a little search party after Underhill, check him out, see how crazy he is?’
‘Well, Conor, since you ask,’ Beevers said very lightly and quietly, ‘something along those lines might be possible.’
‘Actually go there?’ Pumo asked.
‘You said it first.’
Conor poured nearly half of the beer down his throat in a continuous series of swallows. He smacked his lips. Conor returned to his chair and took another slug of the beer. Things had just gone totally out of control – now he could sit back and relax and wait for everybody else to see it.
If the Lost Boss says that he still considers himself Underhill’s lieutenant, Conor thought, I am gonna puke.
Beevers said, ‘I don’t know if you want to call this a moral responsibility or not, but I think we should handle this situation ourselves. We knew the man, we were there.’
Conor opened his mouth, swallowed air, and let the pressure build on his diaphragm. After a second or two he emitted a resounding burp.
‘I’m not asking you to share my sense of responsibility,’ Beevers said, ‘but it would be nice if you could stop being childish.’
‘How can I go to Singapore, for Chrissakes?’ Conor yelled. ‘I don’t have money in the bank to go around the block! I spent all my money on the fare here, man. I’m sleeping on Tina’s couch because I can’t even afford a room at my own reunion, man. Get serious, okay?’
Conor felt immediately embarrassed at blowing up in front of Mike Poole. This was what happened when he went over his limit and got drunk – he got mad too fast. Without making himself sound like an even bigger fool, he wanted to explain things. ‘I mean – okay, I’m an asshole, I shouldn’t ought to’ve yelled. But I’m not like the rest of you guys, I’m not a doctor or a lawyer or an Indian chief, I’m broke, man, I used to be part of the old poor and now I’m part of the new poor. I’m down at sore heels.’
‘Well, I’m no millionaire,’ Beevers said. ‘In fact, as of several weeks ago I resigned from Caldwell, Moran, Morrissey. There were a lot of complicated factors involved, but the fact is, I’m out of a job.’
‘Your wife’s own brother gave you a pink slip?’ Conor asked.
‘I resigned,’ Beevers said. ‘Pat is my ex-wife. Serious differences of opinion came up between myself and Charles Caldwell. Anyhow, I’m not made of money any more than you are, Conor. But I did negotiate a pretty decent golden handshake for myself, and I’d be more than willing to loan you a couple thousand dollars interest-free, to be repaid at your convenience. That ought to take care of you.’
‘I’d help out too,’ Poole said. ‘I’m not agreeing to anything, Harry, but Underhill shouldn’t be hard to find. He must get advances and royalties from his publisher. Maybe they even forward fan mail to him. I bet we could learn Underbill’s address with one phone call.’
‘I can’t believe this,’ said Pumo. ‘All three of you guys just lost your minds.’
‘You were the first to say you’d go,’ Conor reminded him.
‘I can’t run out on my life for a month. I have a restaurant to run.’
Pumo hadn’t noticed when everything went out of control. Okay, Conor thought, Singapore, what the hell?
‘Tina, we need you.’
‘I need me more than you do. Count me out.’
‘If you stay behind, you’ll be sorry the rest of your life.’
‘Jesus, Harry, in the morning this is going to sound like an Abbott and Costello movie. What the hell do you think you’re going to do if you ever manage to find him?’
Pumo wants to stay around New York and play games with Maggie Lah, Conor thought.
‘Well, we’ll see,’ Beevers said.
Conor lobbed his empty beer bottle toward the wastebasket. The bottle fell three feet short and slanted off under the dresser. He could not remember switching from vodka to beer. Or had he started on beer, then gone to vodka, and switched back to beer again? Conor inspected the glasses on the table and tried to pick out his old one. The other three were giving him that ‘cheerleader’ look again, and he wished he’d made his net shot into the wastebasket. Conor philoso-phically poured several inches of vodka into the nearest glass. He scooped a handful of cubes from the bucket and plopped them in. ‘Give me an S,’ he said, raising the glass in a final toast. He drank. ‘Give an I. Give me an N. Give me a…G. Give me an A.’
Beevers told him to sit down and be quiet, which was fine with Conor. He couldn’t remember what came after A anyhow. Some of the vodka slopped onto his pants as he sat down again beside Mike.
‘Now can we go see Jimmy Stewart?’ he heard Pumo ask.
3
A little while later someone suggested that he lie down and take a nap on Mike’s bed, but Conor refused, no, no, he was fine, he was with his asshole buddies, all he had to do was get moving, anybody who could still spell Singapore wasn’t too bent out of shape…
Without any transition he found himself out in the corridor. He was having trouble with his feet, and Mikey had a firm grip on his left arm. ‘What’s my room number?’ he asked Mikey.
‘You’re staying with Tina.’
‘Good old Tina.’
They turned a corner and good old Tina and Harry Beevers were right in front of them, waiting for the elevator. Beevers was combing his hair in front of a big mirror.
The next thing Conor knew, he was sitting on the floor of the elevator, but he managed to get back on his feet before the doors opened.
‘You’re cute, Harry,’ he said to the back of Beevers’ head.
The elevator door opened and for a long time they moved through long, blank hallways crowded with people. Conor kept bumping into guys who were too impatient to listen to his apologies. He heard people singing ‘Homeward Bound,’ which was the world’s most beautiful song. ‘Homeward Bound’ made him feel like crying.
Poole was making sure he didn’t fall down. Conor wondered if Mike actually knew what a great guy he was, and decided he didn’t – that was what made him so great.
‘I’m really okay,’ he said.
He sat down beside Mike in a darkened hall. A black-haired man with a narrow moustache, wearing what looked like a prize-fighter’s championship belt under his tuxedo, was singing ‘America the Beautiful’ and jumping around onstage in front of a band.
‘We missed Jimmy Stewart,’ Mike whispered to him. ‘This is Wayne Newton.’
‘Wayne Newton?’ Conor asked, then heard that his voice was too loud. People were laughing at what he had said. Conor felt too embarrassed for Mikey to set him straight – Wayne Newton was a fat teenager who sang like a girl. This Las Vegas toughie wasn’t Wayne Newton. Conor closed his eyes and the whole dark hall instantly began to swing him around with it in great zooming circles. Conor found that he was unable to open his eyes. Applause, whistles, shouts of approval filled his ears. He heard his own first snore, and less then a second later fell into unconsciousness.
4
‘We don’t have as many groupies as musicians,’ Harry Beevers said to Poole, ‘but they’re out there. They’re basically earth mothers with a kinky little yen for excitement. Is he getting heavy? Put him on your couch and come back down to the bar with us.’
‘I want to get to bed,’ Poole said. Conor Linklater, a hundred and sixty pounds of dead weight bequeathed to him by Tina Pumo, was draped over his shoulder.
Beevers breathed alcohol at Poole. ‘Nam groupies are complicated, but by now I’ve got them figured out. They get off on, one, the idea of our being soldiers and fighting men but more spiritual somehow than other vets – two, they’ve got a little slug of social worker in them and they want to demonstrate that our country loves us after all – and three, they don’t know what we did over there and it turns them on.’ Beevers glittered at him. ‘This has got to be the place. They’d come thousands of miles in their sleep just to hang out at the bar.’
Poole had the uneasy feeling that, without knowing it, Harry Beevers was describing Pat Caldwell, his ex-wife.
After Michael had rolled Conor onto the side of the bed the maid had not turned down, he pulled off his friend’s black running shoes and undid his belt. Conor moaned; his pale, veined eyelids fluttered. With his cropped red hair and pale skin, Conor Linklater seemed to be about nineteen years old: without his scraggly beard and moustache, he looked very like his Vietnam self. Poole covered Linklater with a spare blanket from the closet; then he switched on the lamp on the other side of the bed and turned off the overhead light. If Conor was to have slept on a couch in Pumo’s room, Pumo must have taken a suite – Poole’s own room did not offer a couch for the comfort of sodden visitors. Undoubtedly Beevers had also taken a suite. (Harry had never considered turning over his own couch to Conor.)
It was a few minutes to twelve. Poole turned on the television and turned down the volume, then sat in the closest chair and removed his own shoes. He draped his jacket over the back of the other chair. Charles Bronson was standing on the grassy verge of a road in a dainty, empty landscape that looked like western Ireland, looking through binoculars at a grey Mercedes-Benz pulled up in the gravel forecourt of a Georgian mansion. For a moment anticipatory silence surrounded the Mercedes, and then a bulging wall of flame obliterated the car.
Michael picked up the telephone and set it on the table beside him. The maid had lined up the bottles, stacked clear plastic glasses, removed the empties, and wrapped the plate of cheese in cellophane. In the bucket, one bottle of beer stood neck-deep in water, surrounded by floating slivers of ice. Michael dipped the topmost glass into the bucket and scooped up ice and water. He took a sip.
Conor muttered ‘googol’ and rolled his face into his pillow.
On impulse Michael picked up the phone and dialed his wife’s private line at home. It was possible that Judy was lying awake in bed, reading something like The One-Minute Manager while successfully ignoring the television program she had turned on to keep her company.
Judy’s telephone rang once, then clicked as if someone had picked it up. Poole heard the mechanical hiss of tape, and knew that his wife had turned on her answering machine with its third-person message:
‘Judy is unable to answer the telephone at this time, but if you leave your name, number, and message after the beep, she will get back to you as soon as possible.’
He waited for the beep.
‘Judy, this is Michael. Are you home?’ Judy’s machine was attached to the telephone in her study, adjacent to the bedroom. If she were awake in her bed, she would hear his voice. Judy did not respond; the tape whirred. Into the waiting machine he uttered a few mechanical sentences, ending by saying, ‘I’ll be home late Sunday night. Bye-bye.’
In bed, Michael read a few pages of the Stephen King novel he had packed. Conor Linklater complained and snuffled on the other side of the bed. Nothing in the novel seemed more than slightly odder or more threatening than events in ordinary life. Improbability and violence overflowed from ordinary life, and Stephen King seemed to know that.
Before Michael could turn off his light, he was dripping with sweat, carrying his copy of The Dead Zone through an army base many times larger than Camp Crandall. All around the camp, twenty or thirty kilometers beyond the barbed-wire perimeter, stood hills once thickly covered by trees, now so perfectly bombed and burned and defoliated that only charred sticks protruded upwards from powdery brown earth. He walked past a row of empty tents and at last heard the silence of the camp – he was alone. The camp had been abandoned, and he had been left behind. A flagless flagpole stood before the company headquarters. He trudged past the deserted building into a stretch of empty land and smelled burning shit. Then he knew that this was no dream, he really was in Vietnam – the rest of his life was the dream. Poole never smelled things in his dreams. He didn’t think he even dreamed in color most of the time. Poole turned around and saw an old Vietnamese woman looking at him expressionlessly from beside an oil drum filled with burning kerosene-soaked excrement. Dense black smoke boiled up from the drum and smudged the sky. His despair was flat and unsurprising.
Wait a second, he thought, if this is reality it’s no later than 1969. He opened The Dead Zone to the page of published information. Deep in his chest, his heart deflated like a punctured balloon. The copyright date was 1965. He had never left Vietnam. Everything since had been only a nineteenyear-old’s wishful dream.
5 Beans Beevers at the Memorial (#ulink_8a1412d4-2f25-5b30-b253-827b078a26c1)
1
Poole awoke with a fading memory of smoke and noise, of artillery fire and uniformed men running in a cartoonish lockstep through a burning village. He pushed this vision into forgetfulness with unconscious expertise. His first real thought was that he would stop off at Walden Books in Westerholm and buy a book for a twelve-year-old patient named Stacy Talbot before visiting her in St Bartholomew’s Hospital. Then he remembered that he was in Washington. His second fully formed thought was to wonder if Tim Underhill was really still alive. He had a brief vision of himself standing in a neat graveyard in Singapore, looking down with both loss and relief at Underbill’s headstone.
Or was Underhill simmering in craziness, still back in the war?
Conor Linklater seemed to have vanished and left behind a crushed pillow and a wildly wrinkled counterpane. Poole crawled across the bed and peered over the far edge. Curled up into himself like a cabbage leaf, his mouth lax and his eyelids stretched unmoving across his eyes, Conor lay asleep on the floor.
Michael pushed himself back across the bed and went quietly into the bathroom to shower.
‘Jeez,’ Conor said when Michael came out of the bathroom. He was sitting in one of the chairs and holding his head in both hands. ‘What time is it, anyhow?’
‘About ten-thirty.’ Poole took underwear and socks from his bag and began dressing.
‘Blackout, man,’ Conor said. ‘Total hangover.’ He peeked out through his fingers at Poole. ‘How’d I end up here, anyhow?’
‘I sort of assisted you.’
‘Thanks, man,’ Linklater groaned. His head sank again into his hands. ‘I gotta turn over a new lease on life. I been partying too much lately, getting old, gotta slow down. Whoo.’ He straightened up and looked around the room as if he were lost. ‘Where’s my clothes?’
‘Pumo’s room,’ Michael said, buttoning his shirt.
‘Well, I don’t know. I left all my shit up there. I sure wish he’d come along with us, man, don’t you? Pumo the Puma. He oughta come along. Hey, Mikey, can I use your bathroom and your shower before I go back upstairs?’
‘Oh dear,’ Poole said. ‘I just got it all cleaned up for the maid.’
Conor left the couch and moved across the room in a fashion that Poole associated with recovering stroke victims in geriatric wards. When Conor got to the bathroom he leaned on the door-knob and coughed. His hair was standing up in little orange spikes. ‘Am I crazy, or did Beans say he’d loan me a couple thousand bucks?’
Poole nodded.
‘Do you think he meant it?’
Poole nodded again.
‘I’ll never figure that guy out, I guess,’ Conor said, and slammed the bathroom door behind him.
After he pushed his feet into his loafers, Poole went to the telephone and dialed Judy’s number. She did not answer, nor did her machine. Poole hung up.
A few minutes later Beevers called down to inform Michael and Conor that he was offering room-service breakfast for everybody in his suite (en suite), commencing in thirty minutes at eleven hundred hours, and that Michael had better get hopping if he wanted more than one Bloody Mary.
‘More than one?’
‘I guess you didn’t get the kind of exercise I had last night.’ Beevers gloated. ‘A lovely lady, the kind I was telling you about, left about an hour or two ago, and I’m as mellow as a month in the country. Michael – try to persuade Pumo that there are more important things in the world than his restaurant, will you?’ He hung up before Poole could respond.
2
Beevers’ suite had not only a long living room with sliding windows onto a substantial balcony but was equipped with a dining room where Michael, Pumo, and Beevers sat at a round table laden with plates of food, baskets of rolls, racks of toast, pitchers of Bloody Marys, chafing dishes holding sausages, bacon, and eggs Benedict.
From the couch in the living room where he sat hunched over a cup of black coffee, Conor said, ‘I’ll eat something later.’
‘Mangia, mangia. Keep your strength up for our trip.’ Beevers waggled a fork dripping egg yolk and Hollandaise sauce. His black hair gleamed and his eyes shone. His white shirt had been fresh from its wrapping when Beevers had rolled up his sleeves and his soberly striped bow tie was perfectly knotted. The dark blue suit jacket draped over the back of his chair had a broad chalky stripe. He looked as though he expected to be standing before the Supreme Court instead of the Vietnam Memorial.
‘You’re still serious about that?’ Pumo asked.
‘Aren’t you? Tina, we need you – how could we do this without you?’
‘You’re going to have to try,’ Pumo said. ‘But isn’t the question academic anyhow?’
‘Not to me, it isn’t,’ Beevers said. ‘How about you, Conor? You think I’m just kidding around?’
The three men at the table looked down the length of the living room toward Conor. Startled at being the object of everyone’s attention, he straightened himself up. ‘Not if you’re loaning me the air fare, you’re not,’ he said. ‘Kidding, that is.’
Beevers was now quizzing Michael with his annoyingly clear, annoyingly amused eyes. ‘And you? Was sagen Sie, Michael?’
‘Do you ever exactly kid around, Harry?’ Michael asked, unwilling to be a counter in Harry Beevers’ newest game.
Beevers was still gleaming at him, waiting for more because he knew he was going to get it.
‘I suppose I’m tempted, Harry,’ he said, and caught Pumo’s sidelong glance.
3
‘Just out of curiosity,’ Harry Beevers leaned forward to say to the cabdriver, ‘how do the four of us strike you? What sort of impression do you have of us as a group?’
‘You serious?’ the cabbie asked, and turned to Poole, seated beside him on the front seat. ‘Is this guy serious?’
Poole nodded, and Beevers said, ‘Go on. Lay it on the line. I’m curious.’
The driver looked at Beevers in the mirror, looked back at the road, then glanced back over his shoulder at Pumo and Linklater. The driver was an unshaven, blubbery man in his mid-fifties. Whenever he made even the smallest movement, Poole caught the mingled odors of dried sweat and burning electrical circuits.
‘You guys don’t fit together at all, no way,’ the driver said. He looked suspiciously over at Poole. ‘Hey, if this is “Candid Camera” or some shit like that, you can get out now.’
‘What do you mean, we don’t fit together?’ Beevers asked. ‘We’re a unit!’
‘Here’s what I see.’ The driver glanced again at his mirror. ‘You look like some kind of bigshot lawyer, maybe a lobbyist or some other kind of guy who starts out in life by stealing from the collection plate. The guy next to you looks like a pimp, and the guy next to him is a working stiff with a hangover. This one here next to me, he looks like he teaches high school.’
‘A pimp!’ Pumo howled.
‘So sue me,’ said the driver. ‘You asked.’
‘I am a working stiff with a hangover.’ Conor said. ‘And face it, Tina, you are a pimp.’
‘I got it right, huh?’ the driver said. ‘What do I win? You guys are from “Wheel of Fortune”, right?’
‘Are you serious?’ Beevers asked.
‘I asked first,’ said the driver.
‘No, I wanted to know –’ Beevers began, but Conor told him to shut up.
The cabdriver smirked to himself the rest of the way to Constitution Avenue. ‘This is close enough,’ Beevers said. ‘Pull over.’
‘I thought you wanted the Memorial.’
‘I said, pull over.’
The cabbie swerved to the side of the road and jerked to a stop. ‘Could you arrange for me to meet Vanna White?’ he asked into the mirror.
‘Get stuffed,’ Beevers said, and jumped out of the cab. ‘Pay him, Tina.’ He held the door until Pumo and Linklater left the car, then slammed it shut. ‘I hope you didn’t tip that asshole,’ he said.
Pumo shrugged.
‘Then you’re an asshole too.’ Beevers turned away and stomped off in the direction of the Memorial.
Poole hurried to catch up with him.
‘So what did I say?’ Beevers asked, almost snarling. ‘I didn’t say anything wrong. The guy was a jerk, that’s all. I should have kicked his teeth in.’
‘Calm down, Harry.’
‘You heard what he said to me, didn’t you?’
‘He called Pumo a pimp,’ Michael said.
‘Tina’s a food pimp,’ Beevers said.
‘Slow down, or we’ll lose the others.’
Beevers whirled about to await Tina and Conor, who were about thirty feet behind. Conor looked up and smiled at them.
Beevers tilted his head toward Michael and half-whispered, ‘Didn’t you ever get tired of baby-sitting those two guys?’ Then he yelled at Pumo, ‘Did you tip that shithead?’
Pumo kept a straight face. ‘A pittance.’
Poole said, ‘The cabdriver I got yesterday wanted to ask me how it felt to kill someone.’
‘“How does it feel to kill someone?”’ Beevers said in a mocking, high-pitched voice. ‘I can’t stand that question. Let them kill somebody, if they really want to find out.’ He felt better already. The other two came up to them. ‘Well, we know we’re a unit anyway, don’t we?’
‘We’re savage killers,’ Pumo said.
Conor asked, ‘Who the fuck is Vanna White?’ and Pumo cracked up.
By the time the four of them got within a hundred yards of the Memorial they were part of a crowd. The men and women streaming from the sidewalk across the grass might have been the same people Poole had seen the day before – vets wearing mismatched parts of uniforms, older men in VFW garrison caps, women Poole’s age gripping the hands of dazed-looking children. Harry Beevers’ chalk-striped lawyer’s suit made him look like a frustrated, rather superior tour guide.
‘What a bunch of losers we are, when you come down to it,’ Beevers spoke into Poole’s ear.
Poole said nothing – he was watching two men make their way across the grass. One, nearly six-five and skinny as a pipestem, leaned against a metal crutch and in wide arcs swung a rigid leg that must also have been metal; his bearded companion, imprisoned in a wooden wheelchair, had to hoist his body off the seat every time he pushed the wheels. The two men were calmly talking and laughing as they moved toward the Memorial.
‘Did you find Cotton’s name yesterday?’ Pumo asked, breaking into his thoughts in a way that seemed to extend them.
Poole shook his head. ‘Let’s find him today.’
‘Hell, let’s find everybody,’ Conor said. ‘What else are we here for?’
4
Pumo listed all the names and their panel locations on the back of an American Express slip. Dengler, 14 West, line 52 – Poole remembered that one. Cotton, 13 West, line 73…Trotman, 13 West, line 18. Peters, 14 West, line 38. And Huebsch, Hannapin, Recht. And Burrage, Washington, Tiano. And Rowley, Thomas Chambers, the only man in their company killed at Ia Thuc. And the victims of Elvis, the swivel-hipped sniper: Lowry, Montegna, Blevins. And more after that. Pumo’s tiny, neat handwriting covered the back of the green American Express slip.
They stood on the stone slabs of the path, looking up together at the names etched into polished black granite. Conor wept before Dengler’s name, and both Conor and Pumo had tears on their faces as they looked at the medic’s name: PETERS, NORMAN CHARLES.
‘Goddamn,’ Conor said. ‘Right now, Peters ought to be on top of a tractor, worried that he ain’t going to get enough rain.’ Peters’ family had worked the same Kansas farmland for four generations, and the medic had let everyone know that while he temporarily enjoyed being their medical corpsman, sometimes in the night he could smell his fields in Kansas. (‘You be smelling Spitalny, not Kansas,’ SP4 Cotton said.) Now his brothers worked Peters’ fields, and whatever was left of Peters, Norman Charles, after the helicopter on which he’d been giving plasma to Recht, Herbert Wilson, had crashed and burned was beneath the doubtless fertile soil of a country cemetery.
‘He’d just be bitching about how the government is giving a royal screwing to him and all the other farmers,’ Beevers said.
Michael Poole saw a huge golden-fringed flag ruffling in the breeze off to his right, and remembered glimpsing the same flag yesterday. A tall wild-haired man held the flag anchored to his wide belt – beside him, nearly obscured by a glistening wreath, stood a round white sign lettered in red: NO GREATER LOVE. Poole thought he’d read that the wild-haired ex-Marine had been standing in the same place for two days straight.
‘You see the story about that guy in the paper this morning?’ Pumo said. ‘He’s holding the flag in honor of POWs and MIAs.’
‘It won’t bring them back any quicker,’ Beevers said.
‘I don’t think that’s the point,’ Pumo told him.
In that instant, the long black length of the Memorial announced itself – to Poole it was as if it had just spoken and taken a step toward him. Michael remembered this from his first visit. He moved very slightly away from the others. The world was a blur. Once Poole had stood for hours up to his waist in water swarming with leeches, holding his M-16 and his Claymores out of the water until his arms ached, turned to lead, died…Rowley, Thomas Chambers was standing beside him, also holding his arsenal out of the stinking water. Swarms of mosquitos buzzed around them, settling on their faces. Every few seconds they had to blow tickling mosquitos out of their noses. Poole could remember being so tired that if Rowley had offered to prop up his arms for him, he would have collapsed into sleep right there. He could remember feeling the leeches attach themselves to his thighs.
‘Oh God,’ Poole said, realizing that he was trembling. He wiped his eyes and looked at the others. Conor was weeping too, and emotion suffused Pumo’s handsome, normally impassive face.
Harry Beevers was watching Poole. He looked about as emotional as a weight-guesser at the state fair. ‘It got you, hmm?’
‘Sure,’ Poole said. Profound irritation at Beevers’ smugness flashed through him. ‘Are you immune?’
Beevers shook his head. ‘Hardly, Michael. I just keep my feelings inside. That’s the way I was raised. But I was thinking that a bunch of names ought to be added to this thing. McKenna. The Martinsons. Danton and Guibert. Remember?’
Poole had no desire to try to explain what he had just experienced. He too could think of at least one name that could be added to those on the wall.
Beevers virtually twinkled at Michael. ‘You know that we’re going to get rich out of this, don’t you?’ And for some Beeversish reason utterly opaque to Michael Poole, he tapped him twice on the chest with an extended index ringer. The finger appeared to have been manicured. Then Beevers turned to Pumo and Linklater, evidently saying something about the Memorial. Michael could still feel Harry’s index finger playfully jabbing at his sternum…Only problem is that it doesn’t have enough names on it, he heard Beevers saying.
A hundred dying mosquitos packed Poole’s nostrils; dying leeches clamped onto his weary, dying legs. It was decided, Poole knew: as if in imitation of their ignorant, terrified, and variously foolhardy nineteen-year-old selves, they really were going to take off for the Far East all over again.
PART TWO Preparations for Takeoff (#ulink_94714635-76d9-52cd-b12e-bcb63d70a37a)
6 Beevers at Rest (#ulink_8b5d9e19-0897-5088-a5ac-eef29ed6a7e1)
1
‘Maggie never comes in here, Maggie had enough,’ said Jimmy Lah, answering Harry’s question as he poured a silvery ribbon of vermouth over the ice and liquid already in the glass. He squeezed a paring of lemon rind around the rim of the glass, then slipped it down into the ice cubes.
‘Enough of life, or enough of Tina?’ Beevers asked.
Jimmy Lah placed on the bar a fresh paper napkin with the word Saigon printed in slanting red letters over the silhouette of a man pulling a rickshaw. He set Harry Beevers’ drink on the napkin and with a sideways sweep of his hand gathered up the damp, torn napkin beside it. ‘Tina’s too normal for Maggie.’
The bartender winked at Harry, then stepped backwards. Harry was startled to find himself looking at the spiteful, jealous faces of demons with cat’s whiskers and long faces, taped to the mirror. Until Jimmy Lah moved away, they had been hidden from view. Harry Beevers felt a surprising familiarity with these demons. He knew that he had seen spiteful faces like these somewhere in I Corps, but could not remember where.
It was four o’clock and Harry was killing time before calling his ex-wife. Jimmy Lah was pouring some soapy blender concoction for the bar’s only customer besides himself, a fruitcake with a roosterish yellow Mohawk and oversized pink eyeglasses.
Harry swiveled around on his stool to face the large rectangular dining room of Pumo’s restaurant. Before him were knobby bamboo chairs at glass-topped bamboo tables. Ceiling fans with blades like polished brown oars revolved slowly overhead. The white walls had been painted with murals of giant fronds and palm leaves. The place looked as if Sidney Greenstreet would walk in at any moment.
Behind a counter at the far end of the restaurant a door swung open, revealing two Vietnamese men in white aprons chopping vegetables. Behind them pots bubbled on a gas range. Harry caught a glimpse, unexpected as a mirage, of a fluttering translucent curtain behind the range. He leaned forward to get a better look and felt a familiar inward flinch as he saw Vinh, Pumo’s head chef, darting toward the open door. Vinh was from An Lat, an I Corps village only a few klicks from Ia Thuc.
Then Harry saw who had opened the door.
Just beneath Harry’s normal field of vision, a small, smiling Vietnamese girl was moving cautiously but swiftly into the restaurant. She had nearly reached the counter when Vinh managed to grab her shoulder. The child’s mouth became an astonished O, and Vinh hauled her back into the kitchen. The doors swung shut on a burst of Vietnamese.
In an eerily perfect auditory hallucination, Harry Beevers could hear M.O. Dengler panting just behind his right shoulder, along with the sounds of distant fires and faraway screams. Pale faces shone dimly at the center of a vast darkness. He remembered where he had seen the demons’ faces before – on small black-haired women, rushing up with their fists raised. You numbah ten! You numbah ten!
An abyss had just yawned before Harry Beevers. For a moment he felt the terror of not existing, a sickening feeling that he had never existed in the way simpler, healthier people existed.
He heard himself asking what a kid was doing in the kitchen.
Jimmy stepped nearer. ‘That’s Vinh’s little girl, Helen. Both of them temporarily staying here. Helen was probably looking for Maggie – they’re old buddies.’
‘Tina must have a lot on his mind,’ Harry said, beginning to feel more in control of himself.
‘You see the Village Voice?’
Harry shook his head. He realized that he had unconsciously pushed his hands into his pockets to hide their shaking. Jimmy searched around behind the bar until he found the paper in a stack of menus beside the cash register and slid it across the bar with the back page up. VOICE BULLETIN BOARD, read the headline above three dense columns of personals in varying type sizes. Harry saw that two of the ads had been circled.
The first message read: Foodcat. Missing damned you. Will be Mike Todd Room 10 Wed. The Wanderer. The second message was in caps. JUST DECIDED UNABLE TO DECIDE. MAY BE MIKE TODD, MAYBE NOT. LA-LA.
‘See what I mean?’ Jimmy asked. He began grabbing glasses from below the bar and vigorously swirling them around in a sink.
‘Your sister placed both these ads?’
‘Sure,’ Jimmy said. ‘Whole family’s crazy.’
‘I feel sorry for Tina.’
Jimmy grinned, then looked up from the sink. ‘How’s the doctor these days? Any change?’
‘You know him,’ Harry said. ‘After his son died, he stopped being fun to hang out with. Totalemente.’
After a second, Jimmy asked. ‘He going on your hunting trip?’
‘I wish you’d call it a mission,’ Harry snapped. ‘Listen, isn’t Tina ever going to come up for air?’
‘Maybe later,’ Jimmy said, looking away.
Pumo had two Vietnamese living in his restaurant, he was tearing his kitchen apart to kill a few bugs, and he was acting like a teenager over Maggie Lah. ‘La-La,’ for sure. Beans Beevers’ old comrade had become just another…for a second he searched for Dengler’s word, then had it: toon.
‘Tell him he ought to show up at the Mike Todd Room with a fucking knife in his belt.’
‘Maggie will get a big kick out of that.’
Harry looked at his watch.
‘You planning to get to Taipei on this mission, Harry?’ asked Jimmy, showing a trace of real interest for the first time.
Beevers felt a premonitory tingle. ‘Aren’t you and Maggie from Taipei?’ A nerve jumped in his temple.
Then he got it! Who was to say that Tim Underhill still lived in Singapore? Harry had been to Taipei on his R & R, and he could easily see Tim Underhill choosing to live in the raunchy amalgam of Chinatown and Dodge City he remembered. He saw that Divine Justice, mistakenly thought to be dozing, had of course been wide awake all along. It was all ordained, everything had been thought out beforehand. God had planned it all.
Harry settled back down on his bar stool, ordered another martini, and put off his confrontation with his ex-wife for another twenty minutes while he listened to Jimmy Lah describe the seamier aspects of night life in the capital city of Taiwan.
Jimmy set a steaming cup of coffee before him. Harry folded the napkin into the inside pocket of his suit and glanced up at the angry demons. He saw a child rushing toward him with an upraised knife, and his heart speeded up. He smiled and scalded his tongue with hot coffee.
2
A short time later Harry stood at the pay telephone next to the men’s room in a narrow downstairs corridor. He first tried finding his ex-wife at the Maria Farr Gallery, which was on the ground floor of a former warehouse on Spring Street in SoHo. Pat Caldwell Beevers had gone to private school with Maria Farr, and when the gallery had seemed to be failing, took it on as one of her pet private charities. (In the early days of his wife’s involvement with the art gallery, Harry had endured dinner parties with artists whose work consisted of rusting pipes strewn randomly across the floor, of a row of neat aluminum slabs stood on end, of pink wartencrusted columns that reminded Harry of giant erections. He still could not believe that the perpetrators of these adolescent japes earned real money.)
Maria Farr herself answered the telephone. This was a bad sign.
He said, ‘Maria, how nice to hear your voice again. It’s me.’ In fact, the sound of her voice, all the consonants hard as pebbles, reminded Harry of how much he disliked her.
‘I have nothing to say to you, Harry,’ Maria said.
‘I’m sure that’s a blessing to both of us,’ Harry said. ‘Is Pat still in the gallery?’
‘I wouldn’t tell you if she were.’ Maria hung up.
Another call, to Information, got him the number of Rilke Street, the literary magazine that was Pat’s other ongoing charity. Its editorial offices were actually the Duane Street loft of William Tharpe, the magazine’s editor. Because Harry had spent fewer evenings with Tharpe and his impoverished contributors than with Maria Farr and her artists, Tharpe had always taken Harry more or less at face value.
‘Rilke Street, William Tharpe speaking.’
‘Billy, my boy, how do you do? This is Harry Beevers, your best flunky’s best ex-husband. I was hoping to find her there.’
‘Harry!’ said Tharpe. ‘You’re in luck. Pat and I are pasting up issue thirty-five right this minute. Going to be a beautiful number. Are you coming down this way?’
‘If invited,’ he said. ‘Do you think I might speak to the dear Patricia?’
In a moment Harry’s ex-wife had taken the telephone. ‘How nice of you to call, Harry. I was just thinking about you. Are you getting on all right?’
So she knew that Charles had sacked him.
‘Fine, fine, everything’s great,’ he said. ‘I find myself in the mood for a celebration. How about a drink or dinner after you’re through tickling old Billy’s balls?’
Pat had a short discussion with William Tharpe, most of it inaudible to Harry, then returned the receiver to her mouth and said, ‘An hour, Harry.’
‘No wonder I’ll always adore you,’ he said, and Pat quickly hung up.
3
When his cab passed a liquor store, Harry asked the driver to wait while he went in and bought a bottle. He jumped out, crossed the sidewalk, his coattails billowing, and entered a barnlike, harshly lighted interior with wide aisles and pastel blue neon signs announcing IMPORTED and BEER and FINE CHAMPAGNES. He started moving toward the FINE CHAMPAGNES, but slowed down when he saw three young women with eggbeater hair and antisocial clothing preceding him up the aisle. Punk girls always excited Harry. The three girls ahead of Harry in the aisle of the liquor store were consulting in whispers and giggles over a bin of inexpensive red wines, their fluffy multicolored heads bobbing like toxic orchids to some private joke.
One of them was blonde-and-pink-haired, and nearly as tall as Harry. She picked up a bottle of burgundy and slowly revolved it in her long fingers.
All three girls were dressed in torn black garments that looked as if they had been picked up off the street. The shortest of them bent over to examine the bottle being caressed by the tallest girl and pointed a round bottom toward Harry. Her skin was a sandy, almost golden shade. For an instant Harry was aware only that he knew who she was. Then Harry saw her profile printed sharply against a blue neon background. The girl was Maggie Lah.
Harry stepped forward, grinning, aware of the contrast between his suit and the girls’ rags.
Maggie broke away from the others and glided to the top of the aisle. The other two hurried after. The tall one reached out and closed a white hand on Maggie’s shoulder. Harry saw a sunken cheek covered with dark stubble. The tall girl was a man. Harry stopped moving and his smile froze on his face. Maggie rubbed the side of her hand against the man’s stubbly cheek. The three of them continued up to the top of the aisle and turned toward FINE CHAMPAGNES without seeing Harry.
Maggie and her friends veered into the side aisle lined with refrigerated cases. The neon sign shed pale blue light over them. Harry remembered that he had entered this store to buy a bottle of champagne as a sweetener for Pat when he saw Maggie open the glass doors of a refrigerated case. On her face was an expression of sweetly concentrated attention. She plucked out a bottle of Dom Perignon and slid it instantly into her clothes, where it disappeared. The theft of the bottle had taken something like a second and a half. Harry had a sudden picture, vividly clear, of the dark, cold bottle of Dom Perignon nestled between Maggie’s breasts.
Without any premeditation of any kind, Harry slammed open the glass door and yanked out another bottle of Dom Perignon. He remembered the mystically smiling face of the Vietnamese girl moving toward him through Saigon’s kitchen door. He shoved the bottle beneath his suit jacket, where it bulged. Maggie Lah and her ratty friends had begun to stroll toward the rank of cash registers at the front of the store. Harry thrust his hand inside his coat, upended the bottle, and jammed its neck into his trousers. Then he buttoned his jacket and coat. The bulge had become only slightly conspicuous. He began following Maggie toward the cash registers.
The clerks at the few working registers punched buttons and pushed wine bottles down the moving belts. Maggie and the others sailed past an empty counter and a uniformed security guard lounging against the plate-glass window. As Harry watched, they vanished through the door.
‘Hey, Maggie!’ he yelled. He trotted past the nearest unattended cash register. ‘Maggie!’
The guard looked up and frowned. Harry pointed toward the door. Now everybody at the front of the store was staring at him. ‘I saw an old friend,’ Harry said to the guard, who looked away without responding and leaned back against the window.
By the time Harry got to the sidewalk, Maggie was gone.
All the way to Duane Street, Harry searched the sidewalks for her. When the cab stopped and Harry stood on the stamped metal walkway before the warehouse that housed William Tharpe’s loft, he thought – where I’m going there are a million girls like that.
4
Harry Beevers presented the chilled bottle of Dom Perignon to an astonished, gratified William Tharpe, and spent five or ten minutes in hypocritical raptures over the forthcoming number of Rilke Street. Then he took plain, greying Pat Caldwell Beevers, who was beginning more than ever to suggest an English sheep-dog that had been mooning around him half his life, out to a TriBeCa restaurant of the sort he had learned from Tim Underhill to call piss-elegant. The walls were red lacquer. Discreet lamps with brass shades sat on each table. Portly waiters hovered. Harry thought of Maggie Lah, of her golden skin, of champagne bottles and other interesting things between her small but undoubtedly affecting breasts. All the while he elaborated various necessary fictions concerning his ‘mission.’ Now and then, although Pat frequently smiled and seemed to enjoy her wine, her soup, her fish, he thought she knew that he was lying. Like Jimmy Lah, she asked him how Michael looked, how he thought he was doing, and Harry answered fine, fine. Her smiles seemed to Harry to be full of regret – whether for him, for herself, for Michael Poole, or the world at large, he could not tell. When the moment came when he asked for money, she said only, ‘How much?’ Around two thousand. She reached into her bag, took out her checkbook and fountain pen, and without expression of any kind on her face wrote out a check for three thousand dollars.
She passed the check across the table. Her face was now flushed in a mottled band from cheekbone to cheekbone, Harry thought unattractively so.
‘Of course I consider this strictly a loan,’ he said. ‘You’re doing a lot of good with this money, Pat. I mean that.’
‘So the government wants you to track down this man to see if he might be a murderer?’
‘In a nutshell. Of course it’s a semi-private operation, which is how I’ll be able to do the book deals, the film deals, and so on. You can appreciate the need for strict confidentiality.’
‘Of course.’
‘Well, I know you could always read between the lines, but…’ He let the sentence complete itself. ‘I’d be kidding you if I said there wasn’t quite a bit of potential danger involved in this.’
‘Oh, yes,’ Pat said, nodding.
‘I shouldn’t even be thinking like this, but if I don’t come back, I think it would be fitting for me to be buried at Arlington.’
She nodded again.
Harry gave up and began looking around the room for the waiter.
Pat startled him by saying, ‘There are still times when I’m sorry that you ever set foot in Vietnam.’
‘What’s the point,’ he asked. ‘I’m me, I always was me, I’ve never been anything but me.’
They parted outside the restaurant.
After Harry had gone a short distance down the sidewalk, he turned around, smiling, knowing that Pat was watching him walk away. But she was moving straight ahead, her shoulders slumped, her overstuffed, lumpy bag swinging at her side.
He went to his bank and let himself into the empty vestibule with his bank card. There he used the cash machine to deposit Pat’s check and one other he had obtained that day and to withdraw four hundred dollars in cash. He bought a copy of Screw at a corner newsstand and folded it under his arm so that no one would be able to identify it. Harry walked back through the cold to West 24th Street and the studio apartment he had found shortly after Pat told him, more forcefully than she had ever said anything in the entire course of their marriage, that she had to have a divorce.
7 Conor at Work (#ulink_f9ab9dc5-4832-5cd7-824c-5e29d25855ed)
1
It was funny, Conor thought, how ever since the reunion things from the old days kept coming back to him, as if Vietnam had been his real life and everything since was just the afterglow. It was hard for him to keep his mind on the present – back then kept breaking in, sometimes even physically. A few days before, an old man had innocently handed him a photograph taken by SP4 Cotton of Tim Underhill with his arm around one of his ‘flowers’.
It was four o’clock in the afternoon, and Conor was lying in bed with his first serious hangover since the dedication of the Memorial. Everybody thought you got better at handling pressure as you got older, but in Conor’s experience everybody had it backwards.
Three days earlier, Conor had been in the middle of the fifth week of a carpentry job that should have paid the rent at least until Poole and Beevers put their Singapore trip together. On Mount Avenue in Hampstead, only ten minutes from Conor’s tiny, almost comically underfurnished apartment in South Norwalk, a millionaire lawyer in his sixties named Charles (‘Call me Charlie!’) Daisy had just remarried for the third time. For the sake of his new wife, Daisy was redoing the entire ground floor of his mansion – kitchen, sitting room, breakfast room, dining room, lounge, morning room, laundry room, and servants’ quarters. Daisy’s contractor, a white-bearded old-timer named Ben Roehm, had hired Conor when his usual crew proved too small. Conor had worked with Ben Roehm three or four times over the years. Like a lot of master carpenters who were geniuses at manipulating wood, Roehm could be moody and unpredictable, but he made carpentry more than just something you did to pay the rent. Working with Roehm was as close to pleasure as work could get, in Conor’s opinion.
And the first day Conor was on the job, Charlie Daisy came home early from the office and walked into the sitting room where Conor and Ben Roehm were laying a new oak floor. He stood watching them for a long time. Conor got a little nervous. He figured maybe the client didn’t like the way he looked. To cut down the inevitable agony of kneeling on hardwood all day, Conor had tied thick rags around his knees. He’d knotted a speckled bandanna around his forehead to keep the sweat out of his eyes. (The bandanna made him think of Underhill, of flowers and flowing talk.) Conor thought he probably looked a little loose for Charlie Daisy. He was not completely surprised when Daisy took a step forward and coughed into his fist. ‘Ahem!’ He and Roehm shot each other a quick glance. Clients, especially Mount Avenue-type clients, did nutty things right out of the blue. ‘You, young man,’ Daisy said. Conor looked up, blinking, painfully aware that he was down on all fours like a raggedy dog in front of this dapper little millionaire. ‘Am I right about something?’ Daisy asked. ‘You were in Vietnam, right?’
‘Yes, sir,’ Conor said, prepared for trouble.
‘Good man,’ Daisy. He reached down to shake Conor’s hand. ‘I knew I was right.’
It turned out that his only son was another name on the wall – killed in Hue during the Tet offensive.
For a couple of weeks it was probably the best job of Conor’s life. Almost every day he learned something new from Ben Roehm, little things that had as much to do with concentration and respect as with technique. A few days after shaking Conor’s hand, Charlie Daisy showed up at the end of the day carrying a grey suede box and a leather photo album. Conor and Roehm were framing a new partition in the kitchen, which looked like a bomb-site – chopped-up floor, dangling wires, jutting pipes. Daisy picked his way toward them, saying, ‘Until I got married again, this was the only heart I had.’ The box turned out to be a case for Daisy’s son’s medals. Laid out on lustrous satin were a Purple Heart, a Bronze Star, and a Silver Star. The album was full of pictures from Nam.
Old Daisy chattered away, pointing at images of muddy M-48 tanks and shirtless teenagers with their arms around one another’s shoulders. Time travel ain’t just made up out of nothing, Conor thought. He was sorry that the perky old lawyer didn’t know enough to shut up and let the pictures talk for themselves.
Because the pictures did talk. Hue was in I Corps, Conor’s Vietnam, and everything Conor looked at was familar.
Here was the A Shau Valley – the mountains folding and folding into themselves, and a line of men climbing uphill in a single winding column, planting their feet in that same old mud. (Dengler: Yea, though I walk through the A Shau Valley, I shall fear no evil, because I’m the craziest son of a bitch in the valley.) Boy soldiers flashing the peace sign in a jungle clearing, one with a filthy strip of gauze around his naked upper arm. Conor saw Dengler’s burning, joyous face in place of the boy’s own.
Conor looked at a haggard, whiskered face trying to grin over the barrel of an M-60 mounted in a big green Huey. Peters and Herb Recht had died in a chopper identical to this one, spilling plasma, ammunition belts, six other men, and themselves over a hillside twenty klicks from Camp Crandall.
Conor found himself staring at the cylindrical rounds in the M-60’s belt.
‘I guess you recognize that copter,’ Daisy said.
Conor nodded.
‘Saw plenty of those in your day.’
It was a question, but again he could do no more than nod.
Two young soldiers so fresh they could not have been more than a week in the field sat on a grassy dike and tilted canteens to their mouths. ‘Those boys were killed alongside my son,’ Daisy said. A wet wind ruffled their short hair. Lean oxen wandered in the blasted field behind them. Conor tasted plastic – that curdled deathlike taste of warm water in a plastic canteen.
With the entranced, innocent voice of a man speaking more to himself than his listeners, Daisy supplied a commentary on men hauling 3.5-inch rocket shells to the roof of a building, a bunch of privates lollygagging in front of a wooden shack soon to become the headquarters of PFC Wilson Manly, soldiers smoking weed, soldiers asleep in a dusty wasteland that looked like the outskirts of LZ Sue, hatless grinning soldiers posing with impassive Vietnamese girls…
‘Here’s some guy, I don’t know who,’ Daisy said. Once Conor saw the face, he was barely able to hear the lawyer’s voice. ‘Big so-and-so, wasn’t he? I can guess what he was up to with that little girl.’
It was an honest mistake. His new wife had jumped-started Daisy’s gonads – why else was he coming home at four-thirty in the afternoon?
Tim Underhill, bandanna around his neck, was the big soldier in the photograph. And the ‘girl’ was one of his flowers – a young man so feminine he might have been an actual girl. Smiling at the photographer, they stood on a narrow street crammed with jeeps and rickshaws in what must have been Da Nang or Hue.
‘Son?’ Daisy was saying. ‘You okay, son?’
For a second Conor wondered if Daisy would give him Underbill’s picture.
‘You look a little white, son,’ Daisy said.
‘Don’t worry,’ Conor said. ‘I’m fine.’
He merely scanned the rest of the photographs.
‘The truth is in the pudding,’ he said. ‘You can’t forget this kind of shit.’
Then Ben Roehm decided he needed another new man to do the taping in the kitchen and hired Victor Spitalny.
Conor had been a few minutes late to work. When he came into the ruined kitchen a stranger with a long streaky-blond ponytail was slouching against the skeletal framing of the new partition. The new man wore a raveled turtleneck under a plaid shirt. A worn toolbelt hung beneath his beerbelly. There was a new scab on the bridge of his nose, old scabs the color of overdone toast on the knuckles of his left hand. Red lines threaded the whites of his eyes. Conor’s memory released a bubble filled with the indelible odor of burning kerosene-soaked shit. Vietnam, a ground-pounder.
Ben Roehm and the other carpenters and painters in the crew sat or sprawled on the floor, drinking morning coffee from their thermoses. ‘Conor, meet Tom Woyzak, your new taping partner,’ Ben said. Woyzak stared at Conor’s outstretched hand for a few beats before grudgingly shaking it.
Drink it down, Conor remembered, boo-koo good for your insides.
All morning they silently taped sheetrock on opposite sides of the kitchen.
After Mrs Daisy had come and gone with a pot of fresh coffee at eleven, Woyzak growled, ‘See how she came on to me? Before this job is over I’ll be up in the bitch’s bedroom, nailing her to the floor.’
‘Sure, sure,’ Conor said, laughing.
Woyzak was instantly across the kitchen, leaving a steaming trail of coffee and a spinning cup on the floor. His teeth showed. He pushed his face up to Conor’s. ‘Don’t get in my way, faggot, or I’ll waste you.’
‘Back off,’ Conor said. He shoved him away. Conor was set to move this lunatic off-center with a head fake, step into him and mash his adam’s apple with a left, but Woyzak dusted his shoulders as though Conor’s touch had dirtied him and backed away.
At the end of the day Woyzak dropped his toolbelt in a corner of the kitchen and silently watched Conor pack his tools away for the night.
‘Ain’t you a neat little fucker,’ he said.
Conor slammed his toolbox shut. ‘Do you have many friends, Woyzak?’
‘Do you think these people are going to adopt you? These people are not going to adopt you.’
‘Forget it.’ Conor stood up.
‘So you were over there too?’ Woyzak asked in a voice that put as little curiosity as possible into the question.
‘Yeah.’
‘Clerk-typist?’
In a rage, Conor shook his head and turned away.
‘What outfit were you in?’
‘Ninth Battalion, Twenty-Fourth Infantry.’
Woyzak’s laugh sounded like wind blowing over a loose grave. Conor kept on walking until he was safely out of the house.
He sat straddling his motorcycle for a long time, looking down at the dark grey stones of the drive, deliberately not thinking. The sky and the air were as dark as the gravel. Cold wind blew against his face. He could feel sharp individual stones digging into the soles of his boots.
For a moment Conor was certain that he was going to fire up his Harley and go, just keep moving in a blur of speed and distance until he had flown without stopping across hundreds of miles. Speed and travel gave him a pleasant, light, kind of empty feeling. Conor saw highways rolling out before him, the neon signs in front of motels, hamburgers sizzling on the griddles of roadside diners.
Perched on his bike in the cold air, he heard doors slamming inside the house. Ben Roehm’s big baritone rang out.
He wished that Mike Poole would call him up and say, We’re on the way, babyface, pack your bags and meet us at the airport.
Ben Roehm opened the door and fixed Conor with his eyes. He stepped outside and pulled on his heavy fleece-lined denim coat. ‘See you tomorrow?’
‘I got nowhere else to go,’ Conor said.
Ben Roehm nodded. Conor kicked his Harley into noisy life and rode off as the rest of the crew came through the door.
For three or four days Woyzak and Conor ignored each other. When Charlie Daisy finally scented another veteran and appeared with his box of medals and his photo album, Conor put down his tools and wandered out. He couldn’t bear to hang around while Thomas Woyzak looked at Underbill’s picture.
The night before what turned out to be his last day, Conor woke up at four from a nightmare about M. O. Dengler and Tim Underhill. At five he got out of bed. He made a pot of coffee and drank nearly all of it before he left for work. Pieces of the dream clung to Conor all morning.
He is cowering in a bunker with Dengler, and they are enduring a firefight. Underhill must be in a dark portion of the same bunker or in another right beside it, for his rich voice, sounding a great deal like Ben Roehm’s, carries over most of the noise.
There had been no bunkers in Dragon Valley.
The lieutenant’s corpse sits upright against the far side of the bunker, its legs splayed out. Blood from a neat slash in the lieutenant’s throat has sheeted down over his trunk, staining his chest solidly red.
‘Dengler!’ Conor says in his dream. ‘Dengler, look at the lieutenant!’ That asshole got us into this mess and now he’s dead!’
Another great light burst in the sky, and Conor sees a Koko card protruding from Lieutenant Beevers’ mouth.
Conor touches Dengler’s shoulder and Dengler’s body rolls over onto his legs and Conor sees Dengler’s mutilated face and the Koko card in his gaping mouth. He screams in both the dream and real life and wakes up.
Conor got to work early and waited outside for the others. A few minutes later Ben Roehm pulled up in his Blazer with the two other members of the crew who lived up in his part of the state. They were men with babies and rent to pay, but too young to have been in Vietnam. As he watched them get out of the cab, Conor realized that he felt surprisingly paternal toward these sturdy young carpenters – they didn’t have enough experience to know the difference between Ben Roehm and most of the other contractors around.
‘Okay this morning, Red?’ Roehm asked.
‘Right as the dew, man.’
Woyzak pulled up a moment later in a long car that had been covered with black primer and stripped of all exterior ornaments, even door handles.
Once they went to work, Conor noticed for the first time that Woyzak, who had covered twice as much ground as he had, had done his taping as if he were working for a contractor rushing to finish a crap job on a row of egg-carton houses. Ben Roehm was exacting, and to satisfy him you had to get your seams flat and smooth. Woyzak’s work looked as crude as his getaway car. In the tape were lumps and bulges and wrinkles that would stay there forever, visible even when the walls had been skimmed with plaster and covered with two coats of paint.
Woyzak saw Conor staring at his work. ‘Something wrong?’
‘Just about all of it’s wrong, man. Did you ever work for Ben before?’
Woyzak put down his tools and stepped toward Conor. ‘You little red-haired fuck, you telling me I can’t do my work? You happen to notice I’m twice as good as you are? I think the only reason you’re still on this job is you went crazy over the old guy’s pictures. The Old Man wants to keep the civilians happy.’
The Old Man? Conor thought. Civilians? Are we back in base camp? ‘Hey, his kid took those pictures, man,’ he said.
‘A nigger named Cotton took the pictures.’
‘Oh, shit,’ Conor felt as if he had to sit down, fast.
‘Cotton was in little Daisy’s platoon. The kid made some arrangement to get copies of his pictures – you asshole.’
‘I knew Cotton,’ Conor said. ‘I was with him when he bought it.’
‘I don’t care who took the pictures – I don’t care if he’s alive or dead or somewhere in between. And I don’t care if everybody around here thinks you’re some kind of hero, because you’re just a fuckin’ nuisance in my eyes, man.’ Woyzak took another step toward him, and Conor saw the overlapping fury and misery in him, laid down so deeply he could not tell them apart. ‘You hear me? I was in a firefight for twenty-one days, man, twenty-one days and twenty-one nights.’
‘We gotta do something about the cat faces in the tape, that’s all –’
Woyzak wasn’t hearing him any more. His eyes looked amazingly like pinwheels.
‘PUSSY!’ he screamed.
‘I thought you liked pussy,’ Conor said.
‘I’m a good taper!’ Woyzak shouted.
Ben Roehm stopped everything by slamming his fist against a sheetrock panel. Coffeepot in her hand, Mrs Daisy hovered behind the contractor.
Woyzak smiled weakly at her.
‘That’s enough,’ Roehm said.
‘I can’t work with this asshole,’ Woyzak said, literally throwing his hands up in the air.
‘This guy was edging me on,’ Conor protested.
‘Charlie would have a fit if he heard bad language in the house,’ Mrs Daisy said nervously. ‘He might not look it, but he’s very old-fashioned.’
‘Who’s the taper, anyhow?’ Woyzak bent down and picked up his blade and brush. His eyes looked normal again. ‘I only want to do my job.’
‘But look how he’s doing it, man!’
Ben Roehm turned a solemn face to Conor and told him they had to talk.
He led Conor down the hall to the demolished morning room. Behind his back, Conor heard Woyzak purr something insinuating to Mrs Daisy, who giggled.
In the morning room, Ben stepped over the holes in the floor and slumped back against a bare wall. ‘That boy is my niece Ellen’s husband. He had a lot of bad experiences overseas, and I’m trying to help him out. You don’t have to tell me he tapes like a sailor on a three-day drunk – I’m doing what I can for him.’ He looked at Conor, but could not meet his eyes for long. ‘I wish I could say something else, Red, but I can’t. You’re a good little worker.’
‘I suppose I was on a picnic the whole time I was in Nam.’ Conor shook his head and clamped his mouth shut.
‘I’ll give you a couple extra days’ pay. There’ll be another job, come this summer.’
Summer was a long time coming but Conor said, ‘Don’t worry about me, I got something else lined up. I’m gonna take a trip.’
Roehm awkwardly waved him away. ‘Stay out of the bars.’
2
When Conor got back to Water Street in South Norwalk, he realized that he could remember nothing that had happened since he had left Ben Roehm. It was as though he had fallen asleep when he mounted the Harley and awakened when he switched it off in front of his apartment building. He felt tired, empty, depressed. Conor didn’t know how he had avoided an accident, driving all the way home in a trance. He didn’t know why he was still alive.
He checked his mailbox out of habit. Among the usual junk mail addressed to ‘Resident’ and appeals from Connecticut politicians was a long, white, hand-addressed envelope bearing a New York postmark.
Conor took his mail upstairs, threw the junk into the wastebasket, and took a beer out of his refrigerator. When he looked into the mirror over the kitchen sink, he saw lines in his forehead and pouches under his eyes. He looked sick – middle-aged and sick. Conor turned on the television, dropped his coat on his only chair, and flopped onto the bed. He tore open the white envelope, having delayed this action as long as possible. Then he peered into the envelope. It contained a long blue rectangle of paper. Conor pulled the check from the envelope and examined it. After a moment of confusion and disbelief, he reread the writing on the face of the check. It was made out for two thousand dollars, payable to Conor Linklater, and had been signed by Harold J. Beevers. Conor picked the envelope up off his chest, looked inside it again, and found a note: All systems go! I’ll be in touch about the flight. Regards, Harry (Beans!)
3
After Conor had gazed at the check for a long, long time, he replaced both it and the note in the envelope and tried to figure out somewhere safe to put it. If he put the envelope on the chair he might sit on it, and if he put it on the bed, he might bundle it up with the sheets when he went to the laundromat. He worried that if he put it on top of the TV he might get drunk and mistake it for garbage. Eventually Conor decided on the refigerator. He got out of bed, bent to open the refrigerator door, and carefully placed the envelope on the empty shelf, directly beneath a six-pack of Molson’s Ale.
He splashed water on his face, flattened his hair across his skull with his brush, and changed into the black denim and corduroy clothing he had worn to Washington.
Conor walked to Donovan’s and drank four boilermakers before anyone else came in. He didn’t know if he was happier over getting the traveling money than miserable about losing his job, or more miserable about losing his job because of that asshole Woyzak than happy about the money. He decided after a while that he was more happy than miserable, which called for another drink.
Eventually the bar filled up. Conor stared at a nice-looking woman until he began to feel like a coward and got off his stool to talk to her. She was in training to do something in computers. (At a certain point in the evening, about sixty percent of the women in Donovan’s were in training to do something in computers.) They had a few drinks together. Conor asked her if she would like to see his funny little apartment. She told him he was a funny little guy and said yes.
‘You’re a real homebody, aren’t you?’ the girl asked Conor when he turned on the light in his apartment.
After they had made love, the girl finally asked him about the lumps spread across his back and over his belly. ‘Agent Orange,’ he said. ‘I sort of wish I could teach them to move around, spell out words, shit like that.’
He woke up alone with a hangover, wishing he could see Mike Poole and talk to him about Agent Orange, wondering about Tim Underhill.
8 Dr Poole at Work and Play (#ulink_6fc07c65-d9b5-5397-ba46-da3cb64c3f80)
1
‘Well, here it is,’ Michael said. ‘There’s a medical conference in Singapore next January, and the organizers are offering reduced fares on the flight over.’
He looked up from his copy of American Physician. Judy’s only response was to tighten her lips and stare at the ‘Today’ show. She was eating her breakfast standing up at the central butcher-block counter while Michael sat alone at the long kitchen table, also of butcher block. Three years before, Judy had declared that their kitchen was obsolete, insulting, useless, and demanded a renovation. Now she ate standing up every morning, separated from him by eight feet of overpriced wood.
‘What’s the topic of the conference?’ She continued to look at the television.
‘“The Pediatrics of Trauma.” Subtitled “The Trauma of Pediatrics.”’
Judy gave him a half-amused, half-derisive glance before taking a crisp bite out of a piece of toast.
‘Everything should work out. If we have any luck, we ought to be able to find Underhill and settle things in a week or two. And an extra week is built into the tickets.’
When Judy kept staring silently at the television set, Michael asked, ‘Did you hear Conor’s message on my machine yesterday?’
‘Why should I start listening to your messages?’
‘Harry Beevers sent Conor a check for two thousand to cover his expenses.’
No response.
‘Conor couldn’t believe it.’
‘Do you think they were right to give Tom Brokaw’s job to Bryant Gumble? I always thought he seemed a little lightweight.’
‘I always liked him.’
‘Well, there you are.’ Judy turned away to place her nearly spotless plate and empty coffee cup into the dishwasher.
‘Is that all you have to say?’
Judy whirled around. She was visibly controlling herself. ‘Oh, I’m sorry. Am I allowed to say more? I miss Tom Brokaw in the mornings. How’s that? In fact, sometimes Old Tom kind of turned me on.’ Judy had ended the physical side of their marriage four years before, in 1978, when their son Robert – Robbie – had died of cancer. ‘The show doesn’t seem as interesting anymore, like a lot of things. But I guess these things happen, don’t they? Strange things happen to forty-one-year-old husbands.’ She looked at her watch, then gave Michael a flat, sizzling glance. ‘I have about twenty minutes to get to school. You know how to pick your moments.’
‘You still haven’t said anything about the trip.’
She sighed. ‘Where do you suppose Harry got the money he sent to Conor? Pat Caldwell called up last week and said Harry gave her some fairy tale about a government mission.’
‘Oh.’ Michael said nothing for a moment. ‘Beevers likes to think of himself as James Bond. But it doesn’t really matter where he got the money.’
‘I wish I knew why it is so important for you to run away to Singapore with a couple of lunatics, in search of another lunatic.’ Judy tugged furiously at the hem of her short brocade jacket and for a second reminded Michael of Pat Caldwell. She wore no makeup, and there were ashy streaks of grey in her short blonde hair.
Then she gave him her first really honest glance of the morning. ‘What about your favorite patient?’
‘We’ll see. I’ll tell her about it this afternoon.’
‘And your partners will cover everybody else, I suppose.’
‘All too gleefully.’
‘And in the meantime, you’re happy about trotting off to Asia.’
‘Not for long.’
Judy looked down and smiled with such bitterness that Michael’s insides twisted.
‘I want to see if Tim Underhill needs help. He’s unfinished business.’
‘Here’s what I understand. In war, you kill people. Children included. That’s what war is about. And when it’s over, it’s over.’
‘I don’t think anything is ever really over in that sense,’ Michael said.
2
Michael Poole had killed a child at Ia Thuc, that was true. The circumstances were ambiguous, but he had shot and killed a small boy standing in a shadow at the back of a hootch. Michael was not superior to Harry Beevers, he was like Harry Beevers. There was Harry Beevers and the naked child, and there was himself and the small boy at the back of the hootch. Everything but the conclusion was different, but the conclusion was what mattered.
Some years ago Michael had read in an otherwise forgotten novel that no story existed without its own past, and the past of a story was what enabled us to understand it. This was true of more than stories in books. He was the person he was at the moment – a forty-one-year-old pediatrician driving through a suburban town with a copy of Jane Eyre beside him on the car seat – in part because of the boy he had killed in Ia Thuc, but more because before he had dropped out of college, he had met and married a pretty education major named Judith Writzmann. After he was drafted, Judy had written to him two or three times a week, and Michael still knew some of those letters by heart. It was in one of those letters that she said she wanted their first child to be a son, and that she wanted to name him Robert. Michael and Judy were themselves because of what they had done. He had married Judy, he had murdered a child, he had drunk it down, drunk it down. Judy had supported him through medical school. Robert – dear tender dull beautiful Robbie – had been born in Westerholm, had lived his uneventful ordinary invaluable child’s life in that suburban town his mother cherished and his father loathed. Robbie had been slow to speak, slow to walk, slow in school. Poole had realized that he did not give a damn if his son went to Harvard after all, or to any other college either. He shed sweetness over Poole’s whole life.
At five, Robbie’s headaches took him into his father’s hospital, where they found his first cancerous tumor. Later there were others – tumors on his spleen, on his liver, on his lungs. Michael bought the boy a white rabbit, and the child named it Ernie after a character on ‘Sesame Street’. When Robbie was in remission he would haul Ernie around the house like a teddy bear. Robbie’s illness endured three years – years that seemed to have had their own time, their own rhythm, unconnected to the world’s time. In retrospect, they had sped past, thirty-six months gone in at most twelve. Within them, each hour lasted a week, each week a year, and those three years had taken all Michael’s youth.
But unlike Robbie he lived through them. He had cradled his son in the hospital room during the quiet struggle for the last breath: at the end, Robbie had given up his life very easily. Michael had put his dear dead boy back down on his bed, and then – again, nearly for the last time – embraced his wife.
‘I don’t want to see that damned rabbit when I get home,’ she said. She meant that she wanted him to kill it.
And kill it he nearly had, even though the command was like that of a vain evil queen in a tale. He shared enough of his wife’s rage to be capable of the act. But instead he took the rabbit to a field at the northern edge of Westerholm, lifted its cage out of his car, swung open the little gate, and let the rabbit hop out. Ernie had looked about with his mild eyes (eyes not unlike Robbie’s own), hopped forward, and then streaked off into the woods.
As Michael turned into the parking lot beside St Bartholomew’s hospital, he realized he had driven from his house on Redcoat Park to Outer Belt Road and the hospital, through virtually all of Westerholm, with tears in his eyes. He had negotiated seven corners, fifteen stop signs, eight traffic lights, and the heavy New York-bound traffic on the Belt Road without properly seeing any of it. He had no memory of having driven through the town. His cheeks were wet and his eyes felt puffy. He pulled his handkerchief from his pocket and wiped his face.
‘Don’t be a jerk, Michael,’ he said to himself, picked up the copy of Jane Eyre, and got out of the car.
A huge irregular structure the color of leaf mold, with turrets, flying buttresses, and hundreds of tiny windows punched into its façade, stood on the other side of the parking lot.
Michael’s first obligation at the hospital was to look over all the babies that had been born during the night. As he had once a week for two months, the period of time Stacy Talbot had been confined to a private room in St Bartholomew’s, he made this duty last as long as he could.
When the last baby had been examined and after a quick tour of the maternity floor to satisfy his curiosity about the mothers of the infants he had just seen, Michael got on the elevator to go up to the ninth floor, or Cancer Gulch, as he had once overheard an intern call it.
The elevator stopped at the third floor, and Sam Stein, an orthopedic surgeon of Michael’s acquaintance, got into the car with him. Stein had a beautiful white beard and hulking shoulders and was five or six inches shorter than Michael. His massive vanity allowed him to convey the impression that he was peering down at Michael from a great height, though he had to tilt his beard upward to do it.
A decade ago, Stein had badly botched a leg operation on a young patient of Michael’s and then irritably dismissed as hysteria the boy’s increasing complaints of pain. Eventually, after disseminating blame amongst every physician who had treated the child, especially Michael Poole, the orthopedist had been forced to operate on the child again. Neither Stein nor Michael had forgotten the episode and Michael had never referred another patient to him.
Stein glanced at the book in Michael’s hand, frowned, then glanced up at the lighted panel above the door to see where he was going.
‘In my experience, Dr Poole, decent medical men rarely have the leisure for fiction.’
‘I don’t have any leisure, period,’ Michael said.
Michael reached Stacy Talbot’s door without encountering another of Westerholm’s approximately seventy doctors. (He figured that about a quarter of these were not presently talking to him. Even some of those who were would think twice about his presence on the Oncology floor. This was just normal medicine.)
Michael supposed that for someone like Sam Stein what was happening to Stacy Talbot was also just normal medicine. For him, it was very much like what had happened to Robbie.
He stepped inside her room and squinted into the darkness. Her eyes were closed. He waited a moment before moving toward her. The blinds were down and the lights were off. Flowers from the shop on the hospital’s ground floor wilted in the dense dark air. Just visible beneath a welter of tubes, Stacy’s chest rose and fell. On the sheet next to her hand lay a copy of Huckleberry Finn. The placement of the bookmark showed that she had nearly finished reading it.
Michael stepped toward her bed, and her eyes opened. It took her a moment to recognize him, and then she grinned.
‘I’m glad it’s you,’ she said.
Stacy was not really his patient at all anymore – as the disease rampaged throughout her brain and body, she had been handed off to one specialist after another.
‘I brought you a new book,’ he said, and put it on her table. Then he sat down next to her and gently took her hand in his.
Stacy’s dehydrated skin emanated heat. Michael could see each brown spike of her eyebrows propped against a pad of red flesh. All of her hair had fallen out, and she wore a brilliantly colored knit cap that made her look vaguely Middle Eastern.
‘Do you think Emmaline Grangerford had cancer?’ she asked him. ‘I suppose not, actually. I keep hoping I’ll read a book some day that has someone like me in it, but I never do.’
‘You’re not exactly an ordinary kid,’ Michael said.
‘Sometimes I think all of this stuff couldn’t really be happening to me – I think I must have just made it all up, and I’m really lying in my bed at home, doing a spectacular job of staying out of school.’
He opened her folder and skimmed through the dry account of her ongoing catastrophe.
‘They found a new one.’
‘So I see.’
‘I guess I’ll get another dent in my head.’ She tried to smile sideways at him, but failed. ‘I sort of like going to the CAT-scan, though. It’s tremendous travel. Past the nurses’ station! All the way down the hall! A ride on the elevator!’
‘Must be highly stimulating.’
‘I get faint all over and have to lie down for days and days.’
‘And women clothed in white minister to your every need.’
‘Unfortunately.’
Then her eyes widened, and for a moment she closed her hot fingers over his. When she relaxed, she said, ‘This is the moment when one of my aunts always tells me that she’ll pray for me.’
Michael smiled and held her hand tightly.
‘At times like that I think that whoever is in charge of listening to prayers must be really sick of hearing my name.’
‘I’ll see if I can get one of the nurses to take you out of your room once in a while. You seem to enjoy elevator travel.’
For a second Stacy looked almost hopeful.
‘I wanted to tell you that I’m going to be doing some traveling myself,’ Michael said. ‘Toward the end of January I’ll be going away for two or three weeks.’ Stacy’s face settled back into the mask of illness. ‘I’m going to Singapore. Maybe Bangkok, too.’
‘Alone?’
‘With a couple of other people.’
‘Very mysterious. I guess I ought to thank you for giving me plenty of warning.’
‘I’ll send you a thousand postcards of men waving snakes in the air and elephants crossing against rickshaw traffic.’
‘Swell. I visit the elevator, and you visit Singapore. Don’t bother.’
‘I’ll bother if I want to.’
‘Don’t do me any favors.’ She turned her head away from him. ‘I mean it. Don’t bother.’
Michael had the feeling that this had happened before, in just this same way. He leaned forward and stroked her forehead. Her face contorted. ‘I’m sorry you’re angry with me, but I’ll see you again next week and we can talk about it some more.’
‘How could you know what I feel? I’m so stupid. You don’t have any idea about what goes on inside me.’
‘Believe it or not, I have some idea,’ he said.
‘Ever see a CAT-scan from the inside, Dr Poole?’
Michael stood up. When he bent over to kiss her, she turned her head away.
She was crying when he left the room. Michael stopped at the nurses’ station before escaping the hospital.
3
That evening Poole called the other men about the charter flight. Conor said, ‘Wild, sign me up, man.’ Harry Beevers said, ‘Outstanding. I was wondering when you were going to come through for us.’ Tina Pumo said, ‘You know what my answer is, Mike. Somebody’s got to mind the store.’
‘You just became my wife’s hero,’ Michael said. ‘Well, anyhow…would you mind trying to find Tim Underhill’s address for us? His paperback publisher is Gladstone House – somebody there ought to know it.’
They agreed to have a drink together before the trip.
4
One night the following week, Michael Poole drove slowly home from New York through a snowstorm. Abandoned cars, many of them dented or wrecked, lay along the side of the parkway like corpses after a battle. A few hundred yards ahead the light bar on top of a police car flashed red-yellow-blue-yellow-red. Cars crawled in single file, dimly visible, past a high white ambulance and policemen waving lighted batons. For a second Poole imagined that he saw Tim Underhill, in the snow very like a giant white rabbit, standing beside his car in the storm, waving a lantern. To stop him? To light his way forward? Poole turned his head and saw that it was a tree heavy with snow. A yellow beam from the police car flashed through his windshield and traveled across the front seat.
9 In Search of Maggie Lah (#ulink_7f798b97-9727-5696-9c07-8caba2e7d6d3)
1
All at once everything seemed to be going wrong, Tina Pumo thought, all at once everything was falling apart. He hated the Palladium and the Mike Todd Room. He also hated Area, the Roxy, CBGB’s, Magique, Danceteria, and the Ritz. Maggie wasn’t going to show up at the Mike Todd Room, and she wasn’t going to be at any of those other places either. He could stand at the bar for hours, drink until he fell down, and all that would happen was that hundreds of little night people would stomp him on the way to their next bottle of Rolling Rock.
The first time he talked his way past the doorman into the vast barnlike room that the Palladium used for publicity parties and private gatherings he had come from a marathon meeting with Saigon’s accountants. He was wearing his only grey flannel suit, purchased before the Vietnam War and small enough to pinch his waist. Pumo wandered through the crowd searching for Maggie. He noticed eventually that nearly everybody looked at him sharply, just once, then stepped away. In an otherwise crowded room, he was surrounded by a sort of DMZ, a cordon sanitaire of empty space. Once he heard laughter behind his back, turned around to see if he could share the joke, and saw everybody turn to stone, staring at him. Finally he went up to the bar and managed to catch the eye of a skinny young bartender with mascara on his face and a tangle of blond hair piled up on top of his head.
‘I was wondering if you knew a girl named Maggie Lah,’ Tina said. ‘I was supposed to meet her here tonight. She’s short, she’s Chinese, good-looking –’
‘I know her,’ the bartender said. ‘She might be in later.’ He retreated to the other end of the bar.
Tina experienced a moment of pure rage at Maggie. May be Mike Todd, Maybe not. La-La. He saw that this message was a trick followed by mocking laughter. He stormed away from the bar and found himself standing in front of a blonde girl who looked about sixteen, had stars painted on both cheeks, and wore a shiny, slinky black chemise. She was exactly his type. ‘I want to take you home with me,’ he said. The girl opened her flowerlike mouth and solved one mystery by saying, ‘I don’t go home with narcs.’
That had been a week after Halloween. For at least two weeks afterward, he kept the city at bay while he tore his kitchen apart. Every time he and the exterminators took down another section of wall, a million bugs scrambled to get out of the light – if you killed them in one place, the next day they surfaced on another. For a long time they seemed to be concentrated behind the Garland range. In order to keep the fumigant from spoiling the food, he and the kitchen staff taped thick sheets of clear plastic between the range and food preparation surfaces and wherever they were trying to exterminate the insects. They pushed all three thousand pounds of the Garland eight feet out into the middle of the kitchen. Vinh, the head chef, complained that he and his daughter couldn’t sleep at night because they heard things moving inside the walls. They had recently moved into the restaurant’s ‘office,’ a little room in the basement, because Vinh’s sister was having another baby and needed their room in her house in Queens. Normally the office was furnished with a desk, a couch, and boxes of files. Now the couch belonged to Goodwill, the desk was jammed into a corner of Pumo’s living room, and Vinh and Helen slept on a mattress on the floor.
This temporary, illegal situation looked as if it was becoming a permanent illegal situation. Helen not only couldn’t sleep, but she wet the bed – the mattress – whenever she did doze off. Vinh claimed that the bed-wetting got worse right after the child saw Harry Beevers sitting at the bar. That Harry Beevers was a devil who put curses on children was mystical Vietnamese hysteria, pure and simple, but they believed it, so for them it was true. Pumo sometimes felt like strangling Vinh, but if he did he’d not only go to jail, he’d never get another chef.
Headache upon headache. Maggie did not call or send word to him for ten days. He began having dreams about Victor Spitalny running out of the cave at Ia Thuc covered with wasps and spiders.
The Health Department issued him a Second Warning, and the inspector muttered about misuse of nonresidential space. The little office reeked of pee.
The day before Maggie put another ad in the Village Voice, Michael Poole called again, asking if he had time to see if anyone at a place called Gladstone House knew where Tim Underhill lived. ‘Oh, sure,’ Tina grumped, ‘I spend all day in bed reading poetry.’ But he looked up the number in the book. The woman who answered referred him to the editorial department. A woman named Corazon Fayre said she knew nothing about an author named Timothy Underwood, and referred him to a woman named Dinah Mellow, who referred him to Sarah Good, who referred him to Betsy Flagg, who claimed at least to have heard of Timothy Underwood, was it? No? Let me transfer you to publicity. In publicity, Jane Boot referred him to May Upshaw who referred him to Marjorie Fan, who disappeared into limbo for fifteen minutes and returned from it with the information that ten years ago Mr Underhill had written requesting that his circumstances and whereabouts be kept secret on pain of serious authorial displeasure, and that all communications, fan mail included, be directed to him through his agent, Mr Fenwick Throng.
‘Fenwick Throng?’ Pumo asked. ‘Is that a real name?’
The next day was Wednesday, and after getting Vinh off to the markets and Helen to school, Tina set out to buy a copy of the Village Voice at the newsstand on the corner of Eighth Street and Sixth Avenue. Many newsstands were closer, but Eighth Street and Sixth Avenue was only a few blocks from La Groceria, a cafe where Pumo could sit in pale sunlight streaming in through long windows, sip two cups of cappuccino while pretty waitresses with white morning faces yawned and stretched like ballerinas, and read every word of the VOICE BULLETIN BOARD.
He found a message from Maggie right above the drawing in the center of the page: Namcat. Try again same place, same time? Bruises and tattoos. You should fly East with the others, taking Type A with. Her brother must have heard about their trip from Harry and then told her.
He thought of what it would be like to go to Singapore with Poole, Linklater, Harry Beevers, and Maggie Lah. Instantly his stomach tightened up and the cappuccino tasted like brass. She would bring too much carry-on luggage, half of it paper bags. Out of principle, she’d insist on changing hotels at least twice. She’d flirt with Poole, pick fights with Beevers, and virtually adopt Conor. Pumo began to sweat. He signaled for the check, paid and left.
Several times during the day he dialed Fenwick Throng’s telephone number, but the agent’s line was always busy.
At eleven o’clock he gave unnecessary instructions about closing the restaurant, then showered and changed clothes and hurried off to the Palladium’s back entrance. For fifteen minutes he stood and froze with half a dozen other people in an area like a dog pound enclosed by a wire fence, and then someone finally recognized him and let him in.
If it hadn’t been for that New York article, he thought, I wouldn’t even be able to get in here.
This time he was dressed in a Giorgio Armani jacket that looked vaguely like chain mail, voluminously pleated black trousers, a grey silk shirt, and a narrow black tie. They might mistake him for a pimp, he thought, but not for a narc.
Clutching a beer bottle, Pumo walked twice up and down the entire length of the bar before he admitted to himself that Maggie had stood him up twice in a row. He wound his way through the mob to the tables. Extravagantly dressed young people, none of them Maggie, leaned toward one another in pools of candlelight.
All of a sudden, everything’s falling apart, Pumo thought. Somewhere along the line, my life stopped making sense.
Young people swirled around him. Synthesizer rock blared from invisible speakers. For a moment Pumo wished he were back home, wearing blue jeans and listening to the Rolling Stones. Maggie was never going to show up, tonight or any other night. One of these days, some hulking new boyfriend would show up at his door to collect the plastic radio, the little yellow Pony Pro hairdryer, and the Bow Wow Wow records she had left behind.
Pumo fought his way up to the bar and ordered a double vodka martini on the rocks. Hold the olives, hold the vermouth, hold the rocks, he remembered Michael Poole saying in Manly’s little club, where there had been no olives, vermouth, or ice, only a jug of suspicious yellow-tinged ‘vodka’ Manly claimed to have obtained from a colonel in the First Air Cav.
‘That’s the happiest you’ve looked all night,’ said a low voice beside him.
Pumo turned and saw a tall, ambiguously sexed apparition in camouflage fatigues beaming at him. Bare shaven skin gleamed above its ears. Aggressive, shiny black hair swept across the top of the apparition’s head and hung down its back. Then Pumo noticed the apparition’s breasts bulging beneath the fatigue shirt. Her hips flared beneath a wide belt. He wondered what it would be like to go to bed with somebody with white sidewalls.
Fifteen minutes later the girl was squeezing herself up against him in the back of a taxi. ‘Bite my ear,’ she said.
‘Here?’
She tilted her head toward him. Pumo put one arm around her shoulder and took her earlobe between his teeth. Fine black stubble covered the side of her head.
‘Harder.’
She squirmed when he bit down on the gristly lobe.
‘You didn’t tell me your name,’ he said.
She slid her hand over his crotch. Her breasts nuzzled his upper arm. He felt pleasantly engulfed. ‘My friends call me Dracula,’ she said. ‘But not because I suck blood.’
She wouldn’t let him turn on the lights in his loft, and he groped his way to the bedroom in the dark. Giggling, she pushed him down on the bed. ‘Just lie there,’ she said, and undid his belt, got rid of his boots, and pulled down his trousers. He got out of the chain-mail jacket and wrenched off his tie. ‘Pretty Tina,’ Dracula said. She bent over and licked his erect cock. ‘I always feel like I’m in church when I do this.’
‘Wow,’ Tina said. ‘Where have you been all my life?’
‘You don’t want to know where I’ve been.’ She lightly scratched his scrotum with a long fingernail. ‘Don’t worry, I don’t have any nasty diseases. I practically live at the doctor’s office.’
‘Why?’
‘I guess I just enjoy being a girl.’
Exhausted, dulled by alcohol, Pumo let her proceed. When she sat up, straddling him, she looked like an Apache warrior with plucked eyebrows. ‘Do you like Dracula?’
‘I think I’ll marry Dracula,’ he said.
She unbuttoned the camouflage shirt and tore it off, exposing firm conical breasts. ‘Bite me,’ she said, pushing them into his face. ‘Hard. Until I tell you to stop.’
He gently bit one of her nipples, and she ground her knuckles into the side of his head. ‘Harder.’ She dug her nails into his cock. Pumo bit down.
‘Harder.’
He increased the pressure.
When he tasted blood, she screamed and moaned and gripped his head in her arms. ‘Good good.’ Her hand left his head and found his cock again. ‘Still hard? Good Tina.’
Finally she let him raise his head. A thin line of blood oozed from the bottom of her breast down her ribcage. ‘Now little Drac goes back to church.’
Pumo laughed and fell back on the pillow. He wondered if Vinh or Helen had heard her scream and decided they probably hadn’t – they were two floors below.
After a long delirious time Pumo’s orgasm sent looping ribbons of semen over her cheeks, into her eyebrows, into the air. She moaned and hitched herself onto his body so that his arms were pinned beneath her legs and astonished him by rubbing his semen into her face with both hands.
‘I haven’t come like that since I was about twenty,’ he said. ‘But you’re sort of hurting my arms.’
‘Poor baby.’ She patted his cheek.
‘I’d really appreciate it if you got off my arms,’ he said.
She looked down at him triumphantly and hit him hard in the temple.
Pumo struggled to get up, but Dracula struck him again. He found himself unable to move for a second. She grinned down at him, her teeth and eyes flashing in the murk, and slammed her fist against the side of his head.
He yelled for help. She struck him again.
‘Murder!’ he yelled, but no one heard.
Just before the twentieth blow to his temples, Pumo’s eyes cleared and he saw Dracula peering impersonally down at him, her mouth pursed and her lipstick smeared.
2
Pumo came to in darkness, he knew not how much later. His lips throbbed and felt the size of steaks. He tasted blood. His whole body ached, the pain radiating out from the twin centers of his head and groin. In sudden panic, he put his hand on his penis, and found it intact. His eyes opened. He held up his hands before his face – they were dark with blood.
Pumo lifted his head to look down his body, and a white-hot band of pain jumped from temple to temple. He fell back on the wet pillow and breathed heavily. Then he lifted his head more cautiously. He was very cold. He saw his naked body sprawled on dark wet sheets. Working its way from ache to ache, a thin hot wire of agony snaked through the middle of his head. Now his lips felt like rough red bricks. He touched his face with wet fingers.
He considered getting out of bed. Then he wondered what time it was. Pumo raised his right arm and looked at his wrist, which no longer wore a watch.
He turned his head sideways. The radio with its digital clock was gone from the bedside table.
He slid himself off the side of the bed, finding the floor first with one foot, then with both his knees. His chest slid across the sheets, and he swallowed a bitter mouthful of vomit. When he stood up, his head swam and his vision darkened. He propped himself up on the headboard with aching arms. A cut on the side of his head beat and beat.
Clutching his head, Pumo slowly made his way into the bathroom. Without turning on the light, he bathed his face in cold water before daring to look at himself in the mirror. A grotesque purple mask, the face of the Elephant Man, stared back at him. His stomach flipped over, and he threw up into the sink and passed out again before he hit the floor.
10 Conversations and Dreams (#ulink_2cc0dd96-d2e2-5ee0-8bf9-41f13cef74a4)
1
‘Yes, I’ve been lying low, and no, I haven’t changed my mind about going,’ Pumo said. He was talking on the telephone to Michael Poole. ‘You should see me, or rather you shouldn’t. I’m hideous. I stay inside most of the time, because when I go out I frighten children.’
‘Is that some new kind of joke?’
‘Don’t I wish. I got beat up by a psychopath. I also got robbed.’
‘You mean you got mugged?’
Pumo hesitated. ‘In a way. I’d explain the circumstances, Mike, but frankly, they’re too embarrassing.’
‘Can’t you even give me a hint?’
‘Well, never pick up anybody who calls herself Dracula.’ After Michael had laughed dutifully, Pumo said, ‘I lost my watch, a clock radio, a brand new pair of lizard-skin boots from McCreedy and Shreiber, my Walkman, my Watchman, a Dunhill lighter that didn’t work anymore, a Giorgio Armani jacket, and all my credit cards and about three hundred in cash. And when the asshole took off, he or she left the downstairs door open and some goddamned bum came in and pissed all over the hallway.’
‘How do you feel about that?’ Michael groaned. ‘Jesus, what a stupid question. I mean, in general how do you feel? I wish you’d called me right away.’
‘In general I feel like committing murder, that’s how I feel in general. This thing shook me up, Mike. The world is full of hurt. I understand that there’s no real safety, not anywhere. Terrible things can happen in an instant, to anyone. That asshole just about made me afraid to go outside. But if you’re smart, you should be afraid to go outside. Listen – I want you guys to be careful when you get over there. Don’t take any risks.’
‘Okay,’ Michael said.
‘The reason I didn’t call you or anybody else is the only good thing that came out of this whole thing. Maggie showed up. I guess I just missed her at the place where I encountered Dracula. The bartender told her he saw me leaving with someone else, so the next day she came around to check up. And found me with my face about twice its normal size. So she moved back in.’
As Conor said, there’s a flaw in every ointment. Or something like that.’
‘But I did talk to Underhill’s agent. His former agent, I should say.’
‘Don’t make me beg.’
‘Basically the word is that our boy did go to Singapore, all right, just like he always said he would. Throng – the agent’s name is Fenwick Throng, believe it or not – didn’t know if he was still there. They have a funny history. Underhill always had his checks deposited in a branch bank down in Chinatown. Throng never even knew his address. He wrote to him in care of a post office box. Every now and then Underhill called up to rant at him, and a couple of times he fired him. I guess over a period of five or six years the calls got more and more abusive, more violent. Throng thought that Tim was usually drunk or stoned or high on something, or all three at once. Then he’d call back in tears a couple of days later and beg Throng to work for him again. Eventually it just got too crazy for Throng, and he told Tim he couldn’t work for him anymore. He thinks that Tim has been agenting his own books ever since.’
‘So he’s probably still out there, but we’ll have to find him for ourselves.’
‘And he’s nuts. He sounds scary as shit to me, Michael. If I were you, I’d stay home too.’
‘So the agent convinced you that Tim Underhill is probably Koko.’
‘I wish I could say he didn’t.’
‘I wish you could too.’
‘So consider this – is he really worth risking your neck for?’ Tina asked.
‘I’d sure as hell rather risk my neck for Underhill than for Lyndon Baines Johnson.’
‘Well, hang on, because here comes the good part,’ Tina said.
2
‘I don’t think adult men actually exist anymore – if they ever did,’ Judy said. ‘They really are just grown up little boys. It’s demeaning. Michael is a caring, intelligent person and he works hard and all that, but what he believes in is ridiculous. After you reach a certain level, his values are completely childish.’
‘At least they’re that mature,’ said Pat Caldwell. This conversation too was conducted over the telephone. ‘Sometimes I’m afraid that Harry’s are just infantile.’
‘Michael still believes in the army. He’d deny that, but it’s the truth. He takes that boy’s game as the real thing. He loved being part of a group.’
‘Harry had the time of his life in Vietnam,’ Pat said.
‘The point is that Michael is going back. He wants to be in the army again. He wants to be part of a unit.’
‘I think Harry just wants something to do.’
‘Something to do? He could get a job! He could start acting like a lawyer again!’
‘Hmm, well, perhaps.’
‘Are you aware that Michael wants to sell his share of the practice? That he wants to move out of Westerholm and work in a slum? He thinks he isn’t doing enough. I mean, he has a little tiny point, you have to be a doctor in a place like this to find out how really political it is, you wouldn’t believe how much infighting goes on, but that’s life, that’s all it is.’
‘So he’s using the trip to give himself time to think about it,’ Pat suggested.
‘He’s using the trip to play army,’ Judy said. ‘Let’s not even mention how he’s guilt-tripping himself about Ia Thuc.’
‘Oh, I think Harry was always proud of Ia Thuc,’ Pat said. ‘Some day, I ought to show you the letters he wrote me.’
3
The night before he flew to Singapore, Michael dreamed that he was walking at night along a mountain trail toward a group of uniformed men sitting around a small fire. When he gets nearer, he sees that they are ghosts, not men – flames show dimly through the bodies in front of the fire. The ghosts turn to watch him approach. Their uniforms are ragged and stiff with dirt. In his dream Michael simply assumes that he had served with these men. Then one of the ghosts, Melvin O. Elvan, stands and steps forward. Don’t mess with Underhill, Elvan says. The world is full of hurt.
On the same night, Tina Pumo dreams that he is lying on his bed while Maggie Lah paces around the bedroom. (In real life, Maggie disappeared again as soon as his face had begun to heal.) You can’t win a catastrophe, Maggie says. You just have to try to keep your head above water. Consider the elephant, his grace and gravity, his innate nobility. Burn down the restaurant and start over.
11 Koko (#ulink_7135909a-b8fe-5ac3-8844-a912ad67c887)
The shutters of the bungalow were closed against the heat. A film of condensation lay over the pink stucco walls, and the air in the room was warm, moist, and pink dark. There was a strong, dark brown smell of excrement. The man in the first of the two heavy chairs now and then grunted and stirred, or pushed his arms against the ropes. The woman did not move, because the woman was dead. Koko was invisible, but the man followed him with his eyes. When you knew you were going to die, you could see the invisible.
If you were in a village, say –
If the smoke from the cookfire wavered and rose straight into the air again. If the chicken lifted one foot and froze. If the sow cocked her head. If you saw these things. If you saw a leaf shaking, if you saw dust hovering –
Then you might see the vein jumping in Koko’s neck. You might see Koko leaning against a hootch, the vein jumping in his neck.
This is one thing Koko knew: there are always empty places. In cities where people sleep on the pavement, in cities so crowded people take shifts in bed, cities so crowded no one single person is ever truly quiet. In these cities especially there are always hollow realms, eternal places, places forgotten. Rich people leave the empty places behind, or the city itself leaves them behind.
The rich people move everything out and forget, and at night eternity quietly breaks in with Koko.
His father had been sitting in one of the two heavy chairs the rich people had left behind. We use everything, his father said. We waste no part of the animal.
We do not waste the chairs.
There was one memory he had seen in the cave, and in memory no part of the animal is wasted.
This is one thing Koko knew: they thought the chairs weren’t good enough for them. Wherever they went had better chairs.
The woman didn’t count, Roberto Ortiz had just brought her along. There weren’t even enough cards for the ones that counted, much less the ones they brought along. When they answered the letters they were supposed to come alone, but the ones like Roberto Ortiz thought where they were going was nothing, who they were going to see was nobody, and it would all be over in ten minutes…They never thought about the cards, no one had leaned over them at night and said: We waste no part of the animal. The woman was half-Indian, half-Chinese, something like that, maybe just a Eurasian, someone Roberto Ortiz had picked up, someone Roberto Ortiz was planning to fuck the way Pumo the Puma fucked the whore Dawn Cucchio in Sydney, Australia, just someone dead in a chair, just someone who wouldn’t even get a card.
In his right jacket pocket he had all five Rearing Elephant cards, all the regimental cards he had left, with the names written lightly, penciled lightly, on four of them. Beevers, Poole, Pumo, Linklater. These were for when he went to America.
In his left jacket pocket he had an ordinary pack of Orchid Boy playing cards, made in Taiwan.
When he had opened the door wearing the big Tim Underhill smile, the hey baby how’s it shakin’ smile, and seen the woman standing next to Roberto Ortiz wearing her own hello don’t mind me! smile, he had understood why there were two chairs.
In the cave there had been no chairs, no chairs for the lords of the earth. The cave made Koko shake, his father and the devil made him shake.
‘Of course it’s okay,’ he had said. ‘There’s not much here, but you have a chair apiece, so come in and sit you down, sit you down, don’t mind that the place is so bare, we’re making changes all the time, I don’t actually work here…’
Oh, I pray here.
But they took the chairs anyhow. Yes, Mr Roberto Ortiz had brought all his documentation, he brought it out, smiling, just beginning to look curious, beginning to notice the dust. The emptiness.
When Koko took the documents from the man’s hand, he switched on the invisibility switch.
It was the same letter for all of them.
Dear (name),
I have decided that it is no longer possible for me to remain silent about the truth of the events which occurred in the I Corps village of Ia Thuc in 1968. Justice must finally be done. You will understand that I myself cannot be the one to bring the truth of these events to the world’s eyes and ears. I was a participant in them, and have besides turned my horror at these events to account in works of fiction. As a representative, past or present, of the world press, as one who visited the scene of a great unknown crime and saw it at first-hand, would you care to discuss this matter further? I myself have no interest whatever in the profits that might be made from publishing the true story of Ia Thuc. You may write to me at (address) if you are interested in coming East to pursue this matter. I ask only, for reasons of my own security, that you refrain from discussing this matter with, or even mentioning it to, anyone until we have had an initial meeting, that you make no notes or diary entries pertaining to myself or Ia Thuc until we meet, and that you come to our first meeting with the following proofs of identity: a) passport, and b) copies of all stories and articles you wrote or to which you contributed, concerning the American action in the I Corps village of Ia Thuc. In my opinion, you will find our meeting more than worth-while.
Yours sincerely,
Timothy Underhill
Koko liked Roberto Ortiz. He liked him very much. I thought I could just show you my passports and drop off my material, he said, Miss Balandran and I had planned to see Lola, it’s getting late for a meeting now, Miss Balandran particularly wanted me to see Lola, it’s a form of entertainment well known in this city, could you come around to my hotel tomorrow for lunch, you’ll have time to look over the material in the file…
Do you know Lola?
No.
Koko liked his smooth olive skin, his glossy hair, and his confident smile. He had the whitest shirt, the glossiest tie, the bluest blazer. He had Miss Balandran, who had long golden legs and dimples and knew about the local culture. He had been going to drop something off and arrange a meeting on his own ground, as the Frenchmen had done.
But the Frenchmen only had each other, they did not have Miss Balandran smiling so prettily, urging him so quietly, so sexily, to agree.
‘Of course,’ Koko said, ‘you must do as your beautiful escort says, you must see all the sights, just stop in for a second, have a drink and let me take an initial look at what you’ve brought…’
Roberto Ortiz never noticed that Miss Balandran flushed when Koko said ‘escort.’
Two passports?
They were sitting in the chairs, smiling up at him with such confidence, such assurance, their clothes so beautiful and their manners so good, knowing that in minutes they would be on their way to the nightclub, to their dinner and their drinks, their pleasures.
‘Dual citizenship,’ Ortiz said, glancing slyly at Miss Balandran. ‘I am Honduran as well as American. You’ll see all the Spanish-language publications in the file, besides the ones you’re familiar with.’
‘Very interesting,’ Koko said. ‘Very interesting, indeed. I’ll just be back in a moment with your drinks, and we can toast the success of our venture as well as your night out on the town.’
He went behind the chairs into the kitchen and turned the cold tap on and off, banged a cabinet closed.
‘I wanted to say how much I’ve enjoyed your books,’ Roberto Ortiz called from the living room.
On the counter beside the sink were a hammer, a cleaver, an automatic pistol, a new roll of strapping tape, and a small brown paper bag. Koko picked up the hammer and the pistol.
‘I think The Divided Man is my favorite,’ Roberto Ortiz called out.
Koko put the pistol in his coat pocket and hefted the hammer. ‘Thank you,’ he said.
They were just sitting in the chairs, looking forward. He came gliding out of the kitchen and he was invisible, he made no noise. They were just waiting for their drinks. He came up behind Roberto Ortiz and he raised his arm and Miss Balandran didn’t even know he was there until she heard the squashy sound of the hammer hitting Roberto Ortiz’s head.
‘Quiet,’ he said. Roberto Ortiz collapsed into himself, unconscious but not dead. A snail trail of blood crawled out of his nose.
Koko dropped the hammer and quickly moved between the chairs.
Miss Balandran gripped the arms of her chair and stared at him with dinner plate eyes.
‘You’re pretty,’ Koko said, and took the pistol from his pocket and shot her in the stomach.
Pain and fear took people in different directions. Anything having to do with eternity made them show you their real selves. No part of the animal was wasted. Remembrance, the whole thing they had been, just sort of took over. Koko figured the girl would get up and come for him, move a couple of steps before she realized half her guts were still back in the chair. She looked like one hell of a fighter, like a scrapper. But she couldn’t even get out of the chair – it never even crossed her mind to get out of the chair. It took her a long time even to move her hands off the arms of the chair, and then she didn’t want to look down. She shit herself, like Lieutenant Beans Beevers, down in Dragon Valley. Her feet went out, and she started shaking her head. She looked about five years old all of a sudden.
‘Jesus Christ,’ Koko said, and shot her in the chest. The noise hurt his ears – it really bounced off those stucco walls. The girl had sort of melted back into the chair, and Koko had the feeling that the sound killed her before the second bullet did.
‘All I got is one rope,’ Koko said. ‘See?’
He got down on his knees and put his arms between Roberto Ortiz’s twisted-up feet to pull the rope out from under the chair.
Roberto Ortiz didn’t as much as groan the whole time Koko was tying him up. When the rope tightened over his chest and clamped his arms, he pushed out a little air that smelled like mouthwash. A red knot the size of a baseball had flowered on the side of his head, and a trickle of blood matted the hair behind the knot in a way that reminded Koko of a road on a map.
From the shelf in the kitchen he fetched the cleaver, the roll of strapping tape, and the brown paper bag. Koko tossed the cleaver on the floor and took a new washcloth out of the bag. He pinched Roberto Ortiz’s nose between his forefinger and thumb, pulled up, and stuffed the washcloth into Ortiz’s mouth. Then he peeled off a length of the tape and wound it three times around the bottom half of Ortiz’s face, sealing in the washcloth.
Koko took both sets of cards out of his pockets and sat cross-legged on the floor. He placed the cards beside him and rested the handle of the cleaver on his thigh. He watched Ortiz’s eyes, waiting for him to wake up.
If you thought there were good parts, if you were a person who thought about the good parts, this was the good part now, coming up.
Ortiz had webby little wrinkles next to his eyes, and they looked dirty, full of dirt, because his skin was that olive color. He had just washed his hair, and it was thick and shiny black, with the sort of waves in it that looked like real waves, one after the other. You thought he was handsome, until you noticed his boxer’s dented little blob of a nose.
Ortiz finally opened his eyes. Give him this much, he got the whole situation right away and tried to jump forward. The ropes caught him short before he even got started, and he wrestled with them for a second before he got that too. He just gave up, sat back and looked from side to side – tried to take everything in. He stopped when he saw Miss Balandran melted into her chair and he really looked at her and then he looked straight at Koko and tried to get out of the chair again but kept on staring at Koko when he realized he couldn’t.
‘Here you are with me, Roberto Ortiz,’ Koko said. He picked up the regimental cards and held the good old Rearing Elephant out toward Ortiz. ‘Recognize this emblem?’
Ortiz shook his head, and Koko could see pain floating in his eyes.
‘You have to tell me the truth about everything,’ Koko said. ‘Don’t go out on a lie, try to remember everything, don’t waste pieces of your own brain. Come on, look at it.’
He saw how Roberto Ortiz was concentrating. The awakening of some little cell way back in his head flared in his eyes.
‘I thought you’d remember,’ Koko said. ‘You showed up with the rest of the hyenas, you must have seen it somewhere. You walked all around, you probably worried about getting your spit-shine boots all dirty – you were there, Roberto. I asked you here because I wanted to talk to you. I wanted to ask you some important questions.’
Roberto Ortiz groaned through the washcloth and tape. He issued a plea with his big soft brown eyes.
‘You won’t have to talk. Just nod your head.’
If you saw a leaf shaking.
If the chicken froze on one foot.
If you saw these things, no part of the animal was wasted.
‘The Elephant stands for the 24th Infantry, right?’
Ortiz nodded.
‘And would you agree that the elephant embodies these traits – nobility, grace, gravity, patience, perseverance, power and reserve in times of peace, power and wrath in times of war?’
Ortiz looked confused, but nodded.
‘And in your opinion, did an atrocity take place in the I Corps village of Ia Thuc?’
Ortiz hesitated, then nodded again.
Koko was not in a darkened room in a pink stucco bungalow on the fringe of a tropical city, but on a frozen tundra under a sky of high hard blue. A constant wind skirled and rippled the thin layer of snow over a layer of ice hundreds of yards deep. Far off to the west sat a range of glaciers like broken teeth. God’s hand hung hugely in the air, pointing at him.
Koko jumped up and rapped the butt of his pistol against the knot on Ortiz’s head. Just like a cartoon, Ortiz’s eyes floated up into his head. His whole body went loose. Koko sat down and waited for him to wake up again.
When Ortiz’s eyelids fluttered, Koko slapped him hard, and Ortiz jerked his head up and stared wildly at him, all attention again.
‘Wrong answer,’ Koko said. ‘Even the court-martials, unfair as they were, couldn’t say there was any atrocity. It was an act of God. A literal act of God. Do you know what that means?’
Ortiz shook his head. The pupils of his eyes looked blurry.
‘It doesn’t matter. I want to see if you remember certain names. Do you remember the name Tina Pumo, Pumo the Puma?’
Ortiz shook his head.
‘Michael Poole?’
Ortiz wearily shook his head again.
‘Conor Linklater?’
Another shake of the head.
‘Harry Beevers?’
Ortiz lifted his head, remembering, and nodded.
‘Yes. He talked to you, didn’t he? And he was pleased with himself. “Children can kill,” he said, didn’t he? “It doesn’t matter what you do to a killer.” And “The Elephant takes care of its own.” He said that, “The Elephant takes care of its own.” Right?’
Ortiz nodded.
‘You sure you don’t remember Tina Pumo?’
Ortiz shook his head.
‘You’re so fucking dumb, Roberto. You remember Harry Beevers, but you forget everybody else. All these people I have to find, have to track down…unless they come to me. Big joke! What do you think I should do after I find them?’
Ortiz cocked his head.
‘I mean, do you think I should talk to them? These people were my brothers. I could step outside of all this shit, I could say, I cleaned up my share of the cesspool, now it’s someone else’s turn, I could say that, I could start all over, let it be someone else’s responsibility. What’s your best opinion on that, Roberto Ortiz?’
Roberto Ortiz communicated by means of mental telepathy that Koko should now let it be someone else’s responsibility to clean up the cesspool.
‘It’s not that easy, Roberto. Poole was married when we were over there, for God’s sake! Don’t you think he told his wife about what happened? Pumo had Dawn Cucchio, don’t you think he has another girlfriend, or a wife, or both, right now? Lieutenant Beevers used to write to a woman named Pat Caldwell! You see how it never stops? That’s what eternity means, Roberto! It means Koko has to go on and on, cleaning up the world…making sure no part is wasted, that what travels from one ear to another ear is rooted out, nothing left over, nothing wasted…’
For a second he actually saw red – a vast sheet of blood washing over everything, carrying everything with it, houses and cows and the engines of trains, washing everything clean.
‘You know why I wanted you to bring copies of your articles?’
Ortiz shook his head.
Koko smiled. He reached out and picked the thick file of articles off the floor and opened it on his lap. ‘Here’s a good headline, Roberto. DID THIRTY CHILDREN DIE? I mean, is that yellow journalism, or what? You can really be proud of yourself Roberto. It’s right up there with BIGFOOT DEVOURS TIBETAN BABY. What’s your answer, anyhow? Did thirty children die?’
Ortiz did not move.
‘It’s cool if you don’t want to say. Satanic beings come in many forms, Roberto, in many, many forms.’ As he spoke, Koko took a pack of matches from his pocket and set the file alight. He fanned it in the air to keep the fire alive.
When the flames neared his fingers, Koko dropped the burning papers and kicked them apart. The small flames left greasy black scorches on the wooden floor.
‘I always liked the smell of fire,’ Koko said. ‘I always liked the smell of gunpowder. I always liked the smell of blood. They’re clean smells, you know?’
I always liked the smell of gunpowder.
I always liked the smell of blood.
He smiled at the little flames guttering out on the floor. ‘I like how you can even smell the dust burning.’ He turned his smile to Ortiz. ‘I wish my work was done. But at least I’ll have two pretty passports to use. And maybe when I’m done in the States, I’ll go to Honduras. That makes a lot of sense, I think. Maybe I’ll go there after I check out all these people I have to check out.’ He closed his eyes and rocked back and forth on the floor. ‘Work never leaves you alone, does it?’ He stopped rocking. ‘Would you like me to untie you now?’
Ortiz looked at him carefully, then nodded very slowly.
‘You’re so stupid,’ Koko said. He shook his head, smiling sadly, took up the automatic pistol, and pointed it at the middle of Roberto Ortiz’s chest. He looked directly into Ortiz’s eyes, then shook his head again, still smiling sadly, braced his wrist with his left hand, and fired.
Then he watched Roberto Ortiz die fighting and twitching and struggling to speak. Blood darkened the pretty blazer, ruined the pretty shirt and the luxurious necktie.
Eternity, jealous and alert, watched with Koko.
When it was done, Koko wrote his name on one of the Orchid Boy playing cards, grasped the cleaver, and pushed himself up off the floor to do the messy part of the job.
PART THREE The Tiger Balm Gardens (#ulink_2266cf90-b703-5b4f-9bb0-a2aea56d9ae0)
12 Men in Motion (#ulink_c29a8a21-98fa-5358-922c-caaa686ec769)
1
‘Just let me keep the books,’ Michael Poole said to the erect little woman, all black shining hair and deep dimples, beside him. Her name tag read PUN YIN. She tilted his carry-on bag toward him, and Poole took the copies of A Beast in View and The Divided Man from the open pouch on the side. The stewardess smiled and began making her way forward through the pediatricians.
The doctors had started to unwind as soon as the plane hit cruising level. On earth, visible to their patients and other laymen, Michael’s colleagues liked to appear knowing, circumspect, and only as juvenile as conventional American ethics permitted; aloft, they acted like fraternity boys. Pediatricians in playclothes, in terrycloth jogging suits and college sweaters, pediatricians in red blazers and plaid trousers roamed the aisles of the big airplane, glad-handing and bawling out bad jokes. Pun Yin got no more than halfway toward the front of the plane with Michael’s bag when a squat, flabby doctor with a leer like a Halloween pumpkin positioned himself before her and did an awkward bump and grind.
‘Hey!’ Beevers said. ‘We’re on our way!’
‘Give me an S,’ Conor said, and lifted his glass.
‘You remember to get the pictures? Or did your brain collapse again?’
‘They’re in my bag,’ Poole said. He had made fifty copies of the author’s photo on the back of Orchid Blood, Underhill’s last book.
All three men were watching the unknown doctor twitch around Pun Yin while a group of medical men yipped encouragement. The pretty stewardess patted the man on the shoulder and squeezed past him, interposing Michael’s bag between the doctor and herself.
‘We’re going to face the elephant,’ Beevers said. ‘Remember?’
‘Could I forget?’ Poole asked. During the Civil War, when their regiment had been founded, ‘facing the elephant’ had been slang for going into battle.
In a loud, blurry voice Conor asked, ‘What traits are embodied in the elephant?’
‘In time of peace or in time of war?’ Beevers asked.
‘Both. Let’s hear the whole shootin’ match.’
Beevers glanced at Poole. ‘The elephant embodies nobility, grace, gravity, patience, perseverance, power, and reserve in times of peace. The elephant embodies power and wrath in times of war.’
A few of the pediatricians nearest stared at him in affable confusion, trying to share the joke.
Beevers and Poole began to laugh.
‘Damn straight,’ Conor said. ‘That’s it, there it is.’
Pun Yin glimmered for a moment far away at the head of the cabin, then switched a curtain before her and was gone.
2
The airplane slowly digested the thousands of miles between Los Angeles and Singapore, where the corpses of Miss Balandran and Roberto Ortiz sat undiscovered in a bungalow on a leafy road; the doctors settled into their seats, overcome by alcohol and the exhaustion of travel. Bland food arrived, considerably less delicious than the smile with which Pun Yin placed it before the passengers. Eventually the stewardess removed their trays, poured out brandy, plumped up pillows for the long night.
‘I never told you what Underhill’s old agent told Tina Pumo,’ Poole said to Beevers across a dozing Conor Linklater.
Shafts of light pierced the long dark cabin of the 747. Soon Savannah Smiles would be shown, to be followed by a second movie which starred Karl Maiden and several Yugoslavians.
‘You mean you didn’t want to tell me,’ Beevers said. ‘It must be pretty good.’
‘Good enough,’ Poole admitted.
Beevers waited. At last he said, ‘I guess we do have about twenty more hours.’
‘I’m just trying to get it all organized.’ Poole cleared his throat. ‘At first, Underhill behaved like any other author. He bitched about the size of his printings, asked where his royalty checks were, things like that. Apparently he was nicer than most writers, or at least no worse than most. He had his odd points, but they didn’t seem serious. He lived in Singapore, and the people at Gladstone House couldn’t write to him directly because even his agent only had a post office box number.’
‘Let me guess. Then things took a turn for the worse.’
‘Very gradually. He wrote a couple of letters to the marketing people and the publicity department. They weren’t spending enough money on him, they weren’t taking him seriously. He didn’t like his paperback jacket. His print run was too small. Okay. Gladstone decided to put a little more effort into his second book, The Divided Man, and the effort paid off. The book made the paperback best-seller list for a month or two and sold very well.’
‘So was our boy happy? Did he send roses to Gladstone’s marketing department?’
‘He went off the rails,’ Poole admitted. ‘He sent them a long crazy letter as soon as the book hit the list – it should have got on higher and sooner, the ad compaign wasn’t good enough, he was sick of being stabbed in the back, on and on. The next day another ranting letter showed up. Gladstone got a letter every day for a week, long letters, five and six pages. The last couple threatened them with physical abuse.’
Beevers grinned.
‘There was a lot of stuff about them shafting him because he was a Vietnam veteran. I guess he even mentioned Ia Thuc.’
‘Hah!’
‘Then after the book dropped off the list he began a long fandango about a lawsuit. Weird letters started turning up at Gladstone House from a Singapore lawyer named Ong Pin. Underhill was suing them for two million dollars, that being the amount the lawyer had calculated had been lost to his client through Gladstone’s incompetence. On the other hand, if Gladstone wished to avoid the expense and publicity of a trial, Ong Pin’s client was willing to settle for a single onetime payment of half a million dollars.’
‘Which they declined to pay.’
‘Especially since they had observed that Ong Pin’s address was the same post office box to which Underhill’s agent, Fenwick Throng, sent his mail and royalty checks.’
‘That’s our boy.’
‘When they wrote back, giving him the option of taking his next book elsewhere if he was not satisfied with their efforts, he seemed to come to his senses. He even wrote to apologize for losing his temper. And he explained that Ong Pin was a lawyer friend of his who had lost his office, and was temporarily living with him.’
‘A flower!’
‘Well, anyway…he made the threat of a two-million-dollar lawsuit sound like a drunken prank. Things settled down. But as soon as he submitted his next book, Orchid Blood, he got crazy again and started threatening lawsuits. Ong Pin wrote some sort of goofy screed in the kind of English you get in Japanese instruction manuals, you know? And when the book came out, Underhill mailed a box with dried-up shit in it to the president of Gladstone, Geoffrey Penmaiden, who I guess everybody knew and revered. It was like sending a turd to Maxwell Perkins. Then the book came out and flopped. Just sank out of sight. They haven’t heard a word from him since, and I don’t think they’re too eager to work with him again.’
‘He sent shit in a box to Geoffrey Penmaiden? The most famous publisher in America?’ Beevers asked.
‘I think it had more to do with self-hatred than craziness,’ Poole said.
‘You think they’re not the same?’ Beevers reached over and patted Michael’s knee. ‘Really.’
When Beevers canted back his seat and closed his eyes, Michael switched on the reading light and picked up his copy of A Beast in View.
At the beginning of Underhill’s first novel, a rich boy named Henry Harper is drafted and sent to basic training in the South. The sort of person who gradually but thoroughly undermines the favorable first impression he creates, Harper is superficially charming, snobbish, selfish. Other people chiefly either disgust or impress him. Of course he detests basic training, and is detested by every other recruit on the base. Eventually he meets Nat Beasley, a black soldier who seems to like him in spite of his faults and who detects a decent person beneath Henry’s snobbery and self-consciousness. Nat Beasley defends Harper and gets him through basic. Much to Harper’s relief, his father, a federal judge in Michigan, is able to fix it that Henry and Beasley are assigned to the same unit in Vietnam. The judge even manages to get Henry and Nat on the same flight from San Francisco to Tan Son Hut. And during the flight, Henry Harper strikes a bargain with Nat Beasley. He says that if Nat continues to protect him, Henry will guarantee him half of all the money he will ever earn or inherit. This is a sum of at least two or three million dollars, and Beasley accepts.
After about a month in the country, the two soldiers get separated from their unit while on patrol. Nat Beasley picks up his M-16 and blows a hole the size of a family Bible in Henry Harper’s chest. Beasley switches dogtags and then destroys Harper’s body so completely that it is utterly unrecognizable. He then takes off cross-country toward Thailand.
Michael read on, flipping pages at the bottom of a shaft of yellow light while an incomprehensible movie played itself out on the small screen before him. Snores and belches from sleeping pediatricians now and then cut across the humming silence of the cabin. Nat Beasley makes a fortune brokering hashish in Bangkok, marries a beautiful whore from Chiang Mai, and flies back to America with a passport made out to Henry Harper. Pun Yin, or one of the other stewardesses, audibly sighed in a last-row seat.
Nat Beasley rents a car at the Detroit airport and drives to Grosse Point with the beautiful Chiang Mai whore beside him. Michael saw him seated at the wheel of the rented car, turning toward his wife as he pointed to Judge Harper’s great white house at the far end of a perfect lawn. Behind these images, accompanying them, arose others – Poole had not spent so many hours in the air since 1967 and moments from his uneasy flight into Vietnam, encased in the self-same uneasiness, twined around the adventures of Nat Beasley, the running grunt.
The strangeness of going to war on a regular commercial flight had stayed with him for the entire day they were in the air. About three-fourths of the passengers were new soldiers like himself, the rest divided between career officers and businessmen. The stewardesses had spoken to him without meeting his eyes, and their smiles had looked as temporary as winces.
Michael remembered looking at his hands and wondering if they would be limp and dead when he returned to America. Why hadn’t he gone to Canada? They didn’t shoot at you in Canada. Why hadn’t he simply stayed in school? What stupid fatalism had ruled his life?
Conor Linklater startled Michael by snapping upright in his seat. He blinked filmy eyes at Michael, said, ‘Hey, you’re poring over that book like it was the Rosetta stone,’ and leaned back, asleep again before his eyes were closed.
Nat Beasley strolls through Judge Harper’s mansion. He muses on the contents of the refrigerator. He stands in the judge’s closet and tries on the judge’s suits. His wife lies across the judge’s bed, flipping through sixty cable channels with the remote-control device.
Pun Yin stood beside Michael with her arms angelically outstretched, floating a blanket down over Conor Linklater’s body. In 1967, a girl with a blonde pageboy tapped his arm to awaken him, grinned brightly over his shoulder, and told him to prepare for descent. His guts felt watery. When the stewardess opened the door, hot moist air invaded the aircraft and Michael’s entire body began to sweat.
Nat Beasley lifts a heavy brown plastic bag from the trunk of a Lincoln town car and drops it into a deep trench between two fir trees. He takes a second, lighter bag from the trunk and drops it on top of the first.
The heat, Michael knew, would rot the shoes right off his feet.
Pun Yin switched off his reading light and closed his book.
3
The General, who was now a storefront preacher in Harlem, had left Tina alone with Maggie for a moment in the clutter of his ornate living room on 125th Street and Broadway. The General had been a friend of Maggie’s father, apparently also a general in the Formosan army, and after General Lah and his wife had been assassinated, the General had brought her to America – and this stuffy apartment in Harlem had been where Maggie had fled! It was a puzzle, a relief, an irritation.
For one thing, his girlfriend turned out to be the daughter of a general. This explained a lot about Maggie: she came by her pride naturally; she was used to getting her own way; she liked to speak in communiques; and she thought she knew all about soldiers.
‘Didn’t you think I was worried about you?’
‘You don’t mean worried about me, you mean jealous.’
‘What’s wrong with that?’
‘Because you don’t own me, Tina. And because it only works when I’m gone and you don’t know where I am. You’re like a little boy, you know?’
He let that one pass.
‘Because when I live with you, Tina, you wind up thinking that I’m this half-crazy little punk who really just gets in the way of thinking about business and hanging out with the guys.’
‘That just says that you’re jealous, Maggie.’
‘Maybe you’re not so dumb after all.’ Maggie said, and smiled at him. ‘But you have too many problems for me.’ She was sitting on an ornately brocaded couch with her legs folded under her, wrapped in some loose flowing dark woolen thing that was as Chinese as the couch. The smile made Tina want to put his arms around her. Her hair was different, less scrappy, more like a smooth thatch. Tina knew how Maggie’s heavy silky hair felt in his hands, and he wished he could ruffle it now.
‘Are you saying you don’t love me?’
‘You don’t stop loving people, Tina,’ she said. ‘But if I moved back in with you, pretty soon you’d be secretly wondering how you could get rid of me – you’re so guilty, you’ll never let yourself get married to anybody. You’ll never even get close.’
‘You want to marry me?’
‘No.’ She watched his suspicious, surprised response. ‘I said, you have too many problems for me. But that’s not the point. How you behave is the point.’
‘Okay, I’m not perfect. Is that what you want me to say? I’d like you to come back downtown with me, and you know it. But I could just as well walk away right now, and you know that too.’
‘Think about this, Tina. When I was putting all those ads in the Voice for you?’
He nodded.
‘Didn’t you like seeing them?’
He nodded again.
‘You looked for them every week?’
Tina nodded yet again.
‘Yet you never even considered putting one in yourself, did you?’
‘Is that what this is about?’
‘Not bad, Tina. I’m glad you didn’t say you were too old for that sort of thing.’
‘Maggie, a lot of things are going wrong right now.’
‘Did the city close Saigon?’
‘I closed it. It was getting to be impossible to cook and kill bugs at the same time. So I decided to concentrate on killing bugs.’
‘As long as you don’t get mixed up and start cooking them.’
Annoyed, he shook his head and said, ‘It’s costing me a ton of money. I’m still paying a lot of salaries.’
‘And you’re sorry you didn’t go to Singapore with the little boys.’
‘Let’s put it this way. I’d be having more fun than I am now.’
‘Right now?’
‘Now in general.’ He looked at her with love and exasperation, and she looked calmly back. ‘I didn’t know you wanted me to put ads in the Voice too – otherwise I would have. It never occurred to me.’
She sighed and raised a hand, then slowly let it fall back to her folded knees. ‘Forget about it. But just remember that I know you a lot better than you’ll ever know me.’ She gave him another calm look. ‘You’re worried about them, aren’t you?’
‘Okay, I’m worried about them. Maybe that’s why I wish I was with them.’
She slowly shook her head. ‘I can’t believe that you get half-killed and think that you should be able to go on the way you did before – like nothing happened.’
‘Plenty happened, I don’t mind admitting it.’
‘You’re scared, you’re scared, you’re scared!’
‘Okay, I’m scared.’ He exhaled noisily. ‘I don’t even like going out alone in the daytime. At night I hear noises. I keep thinking – well, weird shit. About Nam.’
‘All the time, or just at night?’
‘Well, I can catch myself thinking weird shit at any time of the day or night, if that’s what you mean.’
Maggie swung her legs out from beneath her. ‘Okay, I’ll come down and stay with you for a while. As long as you remember that you aren’t the only one who can walk away.’
‘How the hell could I forget that?’
And that was all it took. He did not even have to confess to her that right before he had come uptown, he’d been standing in his kitchen holding a bottle of beer and for a second had known that it was Ba Muy Ba and that the bullet with his name on it, the one that had missed him all those years ago, was still circling the world, homing in on him.
The General who was now a preacher stared at Tina just as if he was still a pissed-off general, and then barked a few words at Maggie in Chinese. Maggie answered with a phrase that sounded sullen and adolescent, and the General proved to Tina once and for all that he would never comprehend the Cantonese language by beaming at Maggie and taking her in his arms and kissing the top of her head. He even shook Tina’s hand and beamed at him too.
‘I think he’s happy to get rid of you,’ Tina said as they waited for the slow-moving, odorous elevator.
‘He’s a Christian, he believes in love.’
He could not tell if she were being sardonic or literal. This was often the case with Maggie. The elevator clanked up to the General’s floor and opened its mouth. A sour stench of urine rolled out. He could not let Maggie see that he was afraid of the elevator. She was already inside, looking at him intently. Tina swallowed and stepped into the reeking mouth of the elevator.
The doors slammed behind him.
He managed to smile at Maggie. Getting inside was the hardest part.
‘What did he say to you, just before we left?’
Maggie patted his hand. ‘He said you were a good old soldier, and I should take care of you and not get too mad at you.’ She glinted up at him. ‘So I told him you were an asshole and I was going back with you only because my English was getting rusty.’
Downstairs, Maggie insisted on taking the subway, and demonstrated that she could still do an old trick of hers.
They had reached the top of the steps and were moving toward the token booth. The wind cut through his heavy coat and lifted the hood against the back of his head. When he looked around for Maggie and did not see her, the moment filled with a bright dazzle of panic.
A noisy knot of boys in black jackets and knit caps, one of them toting a huge radio, were punching the air and bopping along the platform in time to a Kurtis Blow song. Black women in heavy coats leaned against the railing and paid them no attention. Far ahead, a few men and women stared almost aimlessly down the tracks. Tina was suddenly, painfully aware of how high up in the air he was – suspended like a diver on a board. He wished that he was holding onto a railing – it was as if the wind could lift him off the platform and smack him down onto Broadway.
He had automatically fallen into line at the token booth. The boys had collected up at the head of the platform. Tina reached into his pocket, furious with Maggie for disappearing and furious with himself for caring.
Then he heard her giggle, and he snapped his head sideways to see her already past the turnstile and out on the platform beside the impassive women. Her hands were shoved deep in the pockets of her down coat, and she was grinning at him.
He got his token and went through the turnstile. He felt absurdly tangible. ‘How did you do that?’
‘Since you wouldn’t be able to do it anyhow, why should I tell you?’
When the train roared up before them, she took his hand and pulled him into the subway car.
‘Are they in Singapore yet?’ she asked him.
‘They got there three or four days ago, I think.’
‘My brother says they’re going to Taipei too.’
‘I guess it’s possible. They’ll go wherever they have to go to find Underhill.’
Maggie gave him a half-scathing, half-sympathetic look. ‘Poor Tina.’ She took Tina’s hand into her soft, down-padded lap.
He sat beside her in the loud train, his fear now mostly under control. No one was staring at him. His hand rested within both of Maggie’s funny little hands, in her lap.
South they flew beneath Manhattan in the filthy train, Maggie Lah with her large secret feelings and Tina Pumo with his, which ran queerly parallel to those of his friends under the patient gaze of Pun Yin. I love Maggie and I am afraid of that. She’s a kind of original. She leaves me in order to keep me, she’s smart enough to get out before I kick her out, and she proves it by coming back as soon as I really need her. And maybe Underhill is crazy and maybe I’m crazy too, but I hope they find him and bring him back.
Here is Tim Underhill, Tina thought, here is Underhill out in a section of Camp Crandall known familiarly to the madmen of the good old Rearing Elephant as Ozone Park. Ozone Park is a bleak section of wasteland about the size of two city blocks between the rear of Manly’s ‘club’ and the wire perimeter. Its amenities consist of one piss-tube, which provides relief, and a huge pile of empty metal barrels, which offers shade and a pervasive smell of oil. Ozone Park does not officially exist, so it is safe from the incursions of the Tin Man, for whom, in true army fashion, should exactly equals is. Here is Tim Underhill, in the company of a number of comrades wasted in Si Van Vo’s 100s and getting more wasted on a little white powder Underhill has produced from one of his pockets. Here is Underhill recounting to all the others, who include besides myself, M. O. Dengler, Spanky Burrage, Michael Poole, Norman Peters, and Victor Spitalny, who just lurks around the edges of the barrels, now and then tossing little stones toward the others, the tale of the running grunt. A young man of good family, Underhill says, the son of a federal judge, is drafted and sent to good old Fort Sill in beautiful Lawton, Oklahoma…
‘I sure get sick of the sound of your voice,’ sneers Spitalny from off to the side, near the barrels. He flings a stone at Underhill and strikes him in the middle of his chest.
‘You’re still nothing but a fucking queer,’ Spitalny says.
– And you’re still a shithead, Pumo remembers saying eloquently to Spitalny, who returned the favor by throwing a stone at him, too.
It took a long time to adjust to the ‘flowers,’ because it took a long time to understand that Underhill never corrupted anybody, that he could not corrupt anybody because he himself was not corrupt. Though most of the soldiers Puma knew claimed to despise Asian women, nearly all of them used whores and bar girls. The exceptions were Dengler, who clung to his virginity in the belief that it was the talisman that kept him alive, and Underhill, who picked up young men. Pumo wondered if the others knew that Underhill’s flowers were in their early twenties, and that there had been only two of them. Pumo knew this because he had met them both. The first was a one-armed former ARVN with a girl’s face who lived with his mother in Hue and made a living grilling meat at a food stall until Underhill began to support him. The other flower actually worked in the Hue flower market, and Pumo had eaten dinner with the young man, Underhill, the young man’s mother, and his sister. He had seen such a remarkable quantity of tenderness flow among the other four people at the table that he would have been adopted by them if he could. Underhill supported this family, too. And now in an odd way Pumo supported them, for when Underhill’s best-loved flower, Vinh, finally managed to locate him in New York in 1975, Pumo remembered the excellence of the meal as well as the warmth and kindness in the little house, and hired him. Vinh had undergone deep changes – he looked older, harder, less joyous. (He had also fathered a child, lost a wife, and served a long apprenticeship in the kitchen of a Vietnamese restaurant in Paris.) None of the others knew Vinh’s history. Harry Beevers must have seen him once with Underhill and then forgotten the occasion, because for reasons of his own Beevers had convinced himself that Vinh was from An Lat, a village near Ia Thuc – whenever Beevers saw either Vinh or his daughter, he began to look persecuted.
‘You look almost happy now,’ Maggie said to him.
‘Underhill can’t be Koko,’ Tina replied. ‘The son of a bitch was crazy, but he was crazy in the sanest possible way.’
Maggie did not say or do anything, did not change her grip on his hand, did not even blink at him, so he could not tell if she had heard him. Maybe she felt insulted. The noisy subway clattered into their station and came to a jerky stop. The doors whooshed open, and Pumo froze for a second. As the noises outside the car resolved themselves, Maggie pulled him to his feet. When Pumo got out of the train he bent over and hugged Maggie as hard as he could.
‘I love you too,’ she said. ‘But I don’t know if I’m being crazy in a sane way, or vice versa.’
She gasped when they turned into Grand Street.
‘I suppose I should have prepared you,’ Pumo said.
Stacks of bricks, piles of boards, bags of plaster, and sawn lengths of discarded pipe covered the sidewalk outside Saigon. Workmen in green parkas and heavy gloves, heads bent against the wind, wheeled barrows of rubble out of the front door and laboriously dumped them into a skip. Two trucks stood double-parked beside the skip, one marked with the name SCAPELLI CONSTRUCTION CO., the other bearing the stenciled legend MCLENDON EXTERMINATION. Men in hard hats wandered back and forth between the restaurant and the trucks. Maggie saw Vinh talking to a woman holding a wide set of unrolled blueprints, and the chef winked at her, then waved at Pumo. ‘Must talk,’ he called out.
‘What’s it like inside?’ Maggie asked.
‘Not as bad as it looks from here. The whole kitchen is torn apart, of course, and most of the dining room is too. Vinh’s been helping me out, cracking the whip when I’m not around. We had to take down the whole back wall, and then we had to rebuild some of the basement.’ He was fitting his key into the white door next to Saigon’s door, and Vinh shook the architect’s hand and came over in a rush before he could open it.
‘Nice to see you again, Maggie,’ Vinh said, and followed it with something in Vietnamese to Pumo. Tina answered in Vietnamese, groaned, and turned to Maggie with increased worry plain on his face.
‘Floor fall down?’
‘Someone broke in this morning. I haven’t been in since about eight, when I went out to get breakfast and check in with some suppliers. We’re expanding the kitchen, as long as we have to do all this work, and as usual I have to chase around all over the place, which I was doing until I was stopped in my tracks by the back page of the Village Voice.’
‘How could anybody break in with all this going on?’
‘Oh,’ he said. ‘They didn’t break into the restaurant. They broke into my loft. Vinh heard someone moving around upstairs, but he thought it was me. Later he went up to ask me about something, and realized that it must have been an intruder.’
Tina looked almost fearfully up the narrow flight of steps that led to his loft.
‘I don’t suppose Dracula came back to pay a social call,’ she said.
‘No, I don’t suppose so either.’ Tina did not sound convinced of this. ‘The bitch might have remembered some stuff she forgot to steal, though.’
‘It’s just a burglar,’ Maggie protested. ‘Come on, let’s get out of the cold.’ She took a couple of steps up the stairs, then reached down, grasped Tina’s elbows with both hands, and pulled him toward her. ‘You know when most burglaries are committed, white boy? Around ten in the morning, when the bad guys know everybody else is at work.’
‘I know that,’ Tina smiled at her. ‘Honest, I know that.’
‘And if little Dracula comes back for your body, I’ll turn her into…hmm…’ She rolled her eyes up and stuck a forefinger into her cheek. ‘Into egg drop soup.’
‘Into Duck Saigon. Remember where you are.’
‘So let’s go up and get it over with.’
‘Like I said.’
He followed her up the stairs to the door of his loft. Unlike the white door downstairs, it was locked.
‘One better than Dracula,’ Maggie said.
‘It locks when you close it. I’m still not sure it wasn’t goddamned Dracula.’ Pumo unlocked the door and stepped inside ahead of Maggie.
His coats and outerjackets still hung on their hooks, his boots were still lined up beneath them.
‘Okay so far.’
‘Stop being such a coward,’ Maggie said, and gave him a push. A little way along was the door to his bathroom. Nothing in the bathroom was disturbed, but Pumo had a vivid vision of Dracula standing in front of the shaving mirror, bending her knees and fluffing up her Mohawk.
The bedroom was next. Pumo took in the unmade bed and empty television stand – he had left the bed that way, and had not yet replaced the nineteen-inch Sony Dracula had stolen from his room. The closet doors hung open, and a few of his suits drooped from their hangers toward an untidy heap of other clothes.
‘Goddamn, it was Dracula.’ Pumo felt a layer of sweat pop out over what seemed his entire body.
Maggie looked up at him questioningly.
‘The first time she stole my favorite jacket and my favorite pair of cowboy boots. SHIT! She loves my wardrobe!’ Pumo slammed his fist against the sides of his head.
He was instantly across the room, lifting articles of clothing from the closet floor, examining them and putting them back on hangers.
‘Did Vinh call the police? Do you want to call them?’
Pumo looked up at Maggie from an armload of clothes. ‘What’s the point? Even if they find her and by some miracle put her away, she’ll be back outside in about a day and a half. That’s how we do it in this country. In Taipei you probably have an entirely different system.’
Maggie leaned against the doorframe. Her arms hung straight down, parallel to each other, at an angle to her body. She had funny knobbly little hands, Pumo noticed for perhaps the thousandth time. She said, ‘In Taipei, we staple their tongues to their upper lips and hack three fingers off each hand with a dull knife.’
‘Now that’s what I call justice,’ Pumo said.
‘In Taipei, that’s what we call liberalism,’ Maggie said. ‘Is anything missing?’
‘Hang on, hang on.’ Pumo put the last suit on its hanger, the hanger on the rail. ‘We haven’t even gotten to the living room yet. I’m not even sure I want to get to the living room.’
‘I’ll look in there, if you like. As long as we can eventually come back in here and take our clothes off and do all of those things we were originally intending to do.’
He looked at her with undisguised astonishment.
‘I’ll make sure the enemy has retreated from the living room,’ Maggie said in her flat precise voice. She disappeared.
‘GODDAMN IT! DAMN IT!’ Pumo yelled a few seconds later. ‘I KNEW IT!’
Maggie leaned into the bedroom again, looking startled and a little breathless. Her heavy black hair swung, and her lips were parted. ‘You called?’
‘I don’t believe it.’ Pumo was gazing at the empty nightstand beside his bed, and looked palely up at Maggie. ‘How does the living room look?’
‘Well, in the second I had before I was distracted by the screams of a madman, it appeared to be slightly rumpled but otherwise okay.’
‘It was Dracula, all right.’ Pumo did not like the sound of slightly rumpled. ‘I knew it, damn it. She came back and stole all the same stuff all over again.’ He pointed to the nightstand. ‘I had to buy a new clock radio, and that’s gone. I got a new Watchman, and the asshole stole that too.’
Pumo watched beautiful little Maggie come floating into his bedroom in her loose flowing Chinese garment and mentally saw a fearful vision of his living room. He saw the cushions ripped, the books tumbled from the shelves, his desk up-ended, his living room television gone, the answering machine gone, his checkbooks, the ornamental screen he brought back from Vietnam, his VCR, and most of his good liquor, all gone. Pumo did not consider himself immoderately attached to his possessions, but he braced himself for the loss of these things. He would mind most of all about the couch, which Vinh had made and upholstered for him by hand.
Maggie lifted a drooping corner of a blanket with one hovering foot, and uncovered the clock radio and the new Watchman, which had apparently fallen from the nightstand sometime in the morning.
Without a word, she led him into the living room. Pumo admitted to himself that it looked almost exactly as it had when he left it.
The smooth, plump, speckled blue fabric still lay unblemished over Vinh’s long couch, the books still stood, in their customary disorder, on the shelves and, in piles, on the coffee tables; the television stood, stupid as an idol, in its place on the shelf beneath the VCR and the showy stereo. Pumo looked at the records on the shelf beneath and knew immediately that someone had flipped through them.
At the far end of the room two steps led up to a platform, also carpentered by Vinh. Here were shelves stacked with bottles – a couple of shelves crammed with cookbooks, too – a sink, a concealed icebox. An armchair, a lamp. Shoved into a corner of the platform was Pumo’s desk and leather desk chair, which had been pulled out and moved to one side, as if the intruder had wished to spend time at the desk.
‘It doesn’t look too bad,’ he said to Maggie. ‘She came in here and looked around, but she didn’t do any damage I can see.’
He moved more confidently into the room and closely examined the coffee table, the books, the records, and the magazines. Dracula had lingered here – she had moved everything around a little.
‘The Battalion Newsletter,’ he finally said.
‘The what?’
‘She took the Ninth Battalion Newsletter. It comes twice a year – I hardly even look at it, to tell you the truth, but I never throw out the old one until I get the new one.’
‘She’s queer for soldiers.’
Pumo shrugged and went up the steps to the platform. His checkbook and the Saigon checkbook were still on the desk, but had been moved. And there beside them was the missing Newsletter, lying open to a half-page photo of Colonel Emil Ellenbogen, retiring from the second-rate post in Arkansas to which the Tin Man had been sent after his disappointing term in Vietnam.
‘No, the bitch just moved in,’ he called down to Maggie, who was standing in the middle of the room with her arms wrapped about herself.
‘Is everything on your desk?’
‘I don’t know. I think something’s gone, but I can’t tell what it is.’
He surveyed his messy desktop again. Checkbooks. Telephone. Answering machine, message light flashing. Pumo pushed rewind, then playback. Silence played itself back. Had she called first to make sure he was out? The more Pumo looked at the top of his desk, the more he thought something was missing, but he could not attach this feeling to a specific object. Beside the answering machine was a book called Nam which he was certain had been on one of the coffee tables for months – he had given up in the middle of the book, but kept it on the table because to admit that he was never going to finish it felt like opening the door to the worst kind of luck.
Dracula had picked up the Newsletter and the copy of Nam and set them down on the desk while she mused through his checkbooks. Probably she had touched everything on the desk with her long strong fingers. For a second Pumo felt sweaty and dizzy.
In the middle of the night Tina woke up with his heart pounding, a mad terrible dream just disappearing into the darkness. He turned his head and saw Maggie fast asleep on the pillow, her face curled up into itself like the curl of her hand. He could just make out her features. Oh, he loved seeing Maggie Lah asleep. Without the animation of her character her features seemed anonymous and wholly Chinese.
He stretched out again beside her and lightly touched her hand. What were they doing now, his friends? He saw them walking down a wide sidewalk, their arms linked. Tim Underhill could not be Koko, and as soon as they found him they would know it. Then Tina realized that if Underhill was not Koko, someone else was – someone circling in on them, circling in on all of them the way the bullet with his name on it still circled the world, never falling or resting.
In the morning he told Maggie that he had to do something to help the other guys – he wanted to see if he could find out more about Koko’s victims, find out more that way.
‘Now you’re talking,’ Maggie told him.
4
Why questions and answers?
Because they go in a straight line. Because they are a way out. Because they help me to think.
What is there to think about?
The usual wreckage. The running girl.
Do you imagine that she was real?
Exactly. I imagine she was real.
What else is there to think about?
The usual subject, my subject. Koko. More than ever now.
Why more than ever now?
Because he has come back. Because I think I saw him. I know I saw him.
You imagined you saw him?
It is the same thing.
What did he look like?
He looked like a dancing shadow. He looked like death.
Did he appear to you in a dream?
He appeared, if that is the word, on the street. Death appeared on the street, as the girl appeared on the street. Tremendous clamor accompanied the appearance of the girl, ordinary street noise, that earthly clamor, surrounded the shadow. He was covered, though not visibly, with the blood of others. The girl, who was visible only to me, was covered with her own. The Pan-feeling poured from both of them.
What feeling is that?
The feeling that we have only the shakiest hold on the central stories of our lives. Hal Esterhaz in The Divided Man. The girl comes to speak to me with her terror, with her extremity, she runs toward me out of chaos and night, she has chosen me. Because I chose Hal Esterhaz, and because I chose Nat Beasley. Not yet, she says, not yet. The story is not yet over.
Why did Hal Esterhaz kill himself?
Because he could no longer bear what he was only just beginning to know.
Is that where imagination takes you?
If it’s good enough.
Were you terrified when you saw the girl?
I blessed her.
13 Koko (#ulink_8909e21b-ad54-5a67-9f19-64080093e20c)
As soon as the plane took off, Koko too would be a man in motion.
This is one thing Koko knew: all travel is travel in eternity. Thirty thousand feet above the earth, clocks run backward, darkness and light change places freely.
When it got dark, Koko thought, you could lean close to the little window, and if you were ready, if your soul was half in eternity already, you could see God’s tusked grey face leaning toward you in the blackness.
Koko smiled, and the pretty stewardess in first class smiled back at him. She leaned forward, bearing a tray. ‘Sir, would you prefer orange juice or champagne this morning?’
Koko shook his head.
The earth sucked at the feet of the plane, reached up through the body of the plane and tried to pull Koko down into itself, suck suck, the poor earth loved what was eternal and the eternal loved and pitied the earth.
‘Is there a movie on this flight?’
‘Never Say Never Again,’ the stewardess said over her shoulder. ‘The new James Bond movie.’
‘Excellent,’ Koko said, with real inward hilarity. ‘I never say never, myself.’
She laughed dutifully and went on her way.
Other passengers filed down the aisles, carrying suitbags, shopping bags, wicker baskets, books. Two Chinese businessmen took the seats before Koko, who heard them snap open their briefcases as soon as they sat down.
A middle-aged blonde stewardess in a blue coat leaned down and smiled a false machine smile at him.
‘What shall we call you today, hmm?’ She raised a clipboard with a seating chart into his field of vision. Koko slowly lowered his newspaper. ‘You are…?’ She looked at him, waiting for a reply.
What shall we call you today, hmm? Dachau, let’s call you Lady Dachau. ‘Why don’t you call me Bobby?’
‘Well then, call you Bobby is what I’ll do,’ the woman said, and scrawled Bobby in the space marked 4B on the chart.
In his pockets, Roberto Ortiz had carried his passports and a pocketful of cards and ID, as well as six hundred dollars American and three hundred Singapore. Big time! In a pocket of his blazer Koko had found a room key from the Shangri-La, where else would an ambitious young American be staying?
In Miss Balandran’s bag Koko had found a hot comb, a diaphragm, a tube of spermicidal jelly, a little plastic holder containing a tube of Darkie toothpaste and a toothbrush, a fresh pair of underpants and a new pair of tights, a bottle of lip gloss and a lip brush, a vial of mascara, a blush brush, a rat-tailed comb, three inches of a cut-down white plastic straw, a little leather kit ranked with amyl nitrate poppers, a tattered Barbara Cartland paperback, a compact, half a dozen loose Valium, lots of crumpled-up Kleenex, several sets of keys, and a big roll of bills that turned out to be four hundred and fifty-three Singapore dollars.
Koko put the money in his pocket and dropped the rest onto the bathroom floor.
After he had washed his hands and face he took a cab to the Shangri-La.
Roberto Ortiz lived on West End Avenue in New York City.
On West End Avenue, could you feel how the lords of the earth, how God himself, hungered for mortality? Angels flew down West End Avenue, their raincoats billowing in the wind.
When Koko walked out of the Shangri-La he was wearing two pairs of trousers, two shirts, a cotton sweater, and a tweed jacket. In the carry-on bag in his left hand were two rolled-up suits, three more shirts, and a pair of excellent black shoes.
A cab took Koko down leafy Grove Road to Orchard Road and on through clean, orderly Singapore to an empty building on a circular street off Bahru Road, and on this journey he imagined that he stood in an open car going down Fifth Avenue. Ticker tape and confetti rained down upon him and all the other lords of the earth, cheers exploded from the crowds packing the sidewalks.
Beevers and Poole and Pumo and Underhill and Tattoo Tiano and Peters and sweet Spanky B, and everybody else, all the lords of the earth, who may abide the day of their coming? For behold, darkness shall cover the earth. And the lawyer boy, Ted Bundy, and Juan Corona who labored in fields, and he who dressed in Chicago as a clown, John Wayne Gacy, and Son of Sam, and Wayne Williams out of Atlanta, and the Zebra Killer, and they who left their victims on hillsides, and the little guy in the movie Ten Rillington Place, and Lucas, who was probably the greatest of them all. The warriors of heaven, having their day. Marching along with all those never to be caught, all those showing presentable faces to the world, living modestly, moving from town to town, paying their bills, all these deep embodied secrets.
The refiner’s fire.
Koko crawled in through his basement window and saw his father seated impatient and stormy on a packing crate. Goddamned idiot, his father said. You took too much, think they’ll ever give someone like you a parade? We waste no part of the animal.
He spread the money out on the gritty floor, and that did it, the old man smiled and said, There is no substitute for good butter, and Koko closed his eyes and saw a row of elephants trudging past, nodding with grave approval.
On his unrolled sleeping bag he placed Roberto Ortiz’s passports and spread out the five Rearing Elephant cards so he could read the names. Then he rooted in a box of papers and found the copy of the American magazine, New York, which he had picked up in a hotel lobby two days after the hostage parade. Beneath the title, letters of fire spelled out: TEN HOT NEW PLACES.
Ia Thuc, Hue, Da Nang, these were hot places. And Saigon. Here is a hot new place, here is Saigon. The magazine fell open automatically to the picture and the paragraphs about the hot new place. (The Mayor ate there.)
Koko lay sprawled on the floor in his new suit and looked as deeply as he could into the picture of the hot new place. Deep green fronds waved across the white walls. Vietnamese waiters in white shirts whipped between crowded tables, going so fast they were only blurs of light. Koko could hear loud voices, knives and forks clanking against china. Corks popped. In the picture’s foreground, Tina Pumo leaned against his bar and grimaced – Pumo the Puma leaned right out of the frame of the picture and spoke to Koko in a voice that stood out against the clamor of his restaurant the way a saxophone solo stands out against the sound of a big band.
Pumo said: ‘Don’t judge me, Koko.’ Pumo looked shitscared.
This was how they talked when they knew they stood before eternity’s door.
‘I understand, Tina,’ Koko said to the little anxious man in the picture.
The article said that Saigon served some of the most varied and authentic Vietnamese food in New York. The clientele was young, hip, and noisy. The duck was ‘heaven-sent’ and every soup was ‘divine’.
‘Just tell me this, Tina,’ Koko said. ‘What is this shit about “divine”? You think soup can be divine?’
Tina blotted his brow with a crisp white hankerchief and turned back into a picture.
And there it was, the address and the telephone number, in the soft cool whisper of italics.
A man sat down beside Koko in the fourth row of the first-class compartment, glanced sideways, and then buckled himself into his seat. Koko closed his eyes and snow fell from a deep cold heaven onto a layer of ice hundreds of feet deep. Far off, dim in the snowy air, ranged the broken teeth of glaciers. God hovered invisibly over the frozen landscape, panting with impatient rage.
You know what you know. Forty, forty-one years old. Thick fluffy richboy-blond hair, and thin brown glasses, heavy face. Heavy butcher’s hands holding a day-old copy of the New York Times. Six-hundred-dollar suit.
The plane taxied down the runway and lifted itself smoothly into the air, the envious mouths and fingers fell away, and the jet’s nose pointed west, toward San Francisco. The man beside Koko is a rich businessman with butcher’s hands.
A black-naped tern flies across the face of the Singapore one-dollar note. A black band like a burglar’s mask covers its eyes, and behind it hovers a spinning chaos of intertwined circles twisting together like the strands of a cyclone. So the bird agitates its wings in terror, and darkness overtakes the land.
Mr Lucas? Mr Bundy?
Banking, the man says. Investment banking. We do a lot of work in Singapore.
Me too.
Hell of a nice place, Singapore. And if you’re in the money business, it’s hot, and I mean hot.
One of the hot new places.
‘Bobby,’ the stewardess asks. ‘what would you like to drink?’
Vodka, ice-cold.
‘Mr Dickerson?’
Mr Dickerson will have a Miller High Life.
In Nam we used to say: Vodka martini on the rocks, hold the vermouth, hold the olive, hold the rocks.
Oh, you were never in Nam?
Sounds funny, but you missed a real experience. Not that I’d go back, Christ no. You were probably on the other side, weren’t you? No offense, we’re all on the same side now, God works in funny ways. But I did all my demonstrating with an M-16, hah hah.
Bobby Ortiz is the name. I’m in the travel industry.
Bill? Pleased to meet you, Bill. Yes, it’s a long flight, might as well be friends.
Sure, I’ll have another vodka, and give another beer to my old pal Bill here.
Ah, I was in I Corps, near the DMZ, up around Hue.
You want to see a trick I learned in Nam? Good – I’ll save it, though, it’ll be better later, you’ll enjoy it, I’ll do it later.
Bobby and Bill Dickerson ate their meals in companionable silence. Clocks spun in no-time.
‘You ever gamble?’ Koko asked.
Dickerson glanced at him, his fork halfway to his mouth. ‘Now and then. Only a little.’
‘Interested in a little wager?’
‘Depends on the wager.’ Dickerson popped the forkful of chicken into his mouth.
‘Oh, you won’t want to do it. It’s too strange. Let’s forget it.’
‘Come on,’ Dickerson said. ‘You brought this up, don’t chicken out now.’
Oh, Koko liked Billy Dickerson. Nice blue linen suit, nice thin glasses, nice big Rolex. Billy Dickerson played racquet-ball, Billy Dickerson wore a sweatband across his forehead and had a hell of a good backhand, real aggressor.
‘Well, I guess being on a plane reminded me of this. It’s something we used to do in Nam.’
Definite look of interest on good old Billy’s part.
‘When we’d come into an LZ.’
‘Landing Zone?’
‘You got it. LZ’s were all different, see? Some were popping, and some were like dropping into the middle of a church picnic in Nebraska. So we’d make the Fatality Wager.’
‘Like you’d bet on how many people would get killed? Buy the farm, like you guys used to say?’
Buy the farm. Oh, you sweetheart.
‘More on if someone would get killed. How much money you carrying in your wallet?’
‘More than usual,’ Billy said.
‘Five, six hundred?’
‘Less than that.’
‘Let’s make it two hundred. If somebody dies at the San Francisco airport while we’re in the terminal, you pay me two hundred. If not, I’ll give you one hundred.’
‘You’ll give me two to one on someone dying in the terminal while we’re going through customs, getting our bags, stuff like that?’
‘That’s the deal.’
‘I’ve never seen anyone kick off in an airport,’ Billy said, shaking his head, smiling. He was going to take the bet.
‘I have,’ Koko said. ‘Upon occasion.’
‘Well, you got yourself a bet,’ Billy said, and they shook hands.
After a time Lady Dachau pulled down the movie screen. Most of the cabin lights went out, Billy Dickerson closed Megatrends, tilted his seat way back, and went to sleep.
Koko asked Lady Dachau for another vodka and settled back to watch the movie.
The good James Bond saw Koko as soon as he came on the screen. (The bad James Bond was a sleepy Englishman who looked a little bit like Peters, the medic who had been killed in a helicopter crash. The good James Bond looked a little like Tina Pumo.) He walked straight up to the camera and said, ‘You’re fine, you have nothing to worry about, everybody does what they have to do, that’s what war teaches you.’ He gave Koko a little half-smile. ‘You did well with your new friend, son. I noticed that. Remember now –’
Ready on the right? Ready on the left? Lock and load.
Good afternoon, gentlemen, and welcome to the Republic of South Vietnam. It is presently fifteen-twenty, November three, 1967. You will be taken to the Long Binh Replacement Center, where you will receive your individual unit assignments.
Remember the darkness of the tents. Remember the metal lockers. Remember the mosquito netting on the T-bars. Remember the muddy floors. Remember how the tents were like dripping caves.
Gentlemen, you are part of a great killing machine.
This is your weapon. It may save your life.
Nobility, grace, gravity.
Koko saw an elephant striding down a civilized European avenue. The elephant was buttoned into an elegant green suit and tipped his hat to all the charming ladies. Koko smiled at James Bond, who jumped out of his fancy car and looked Koko straight in the eye, and in quiet clear italics said, Time to face the elephant again, Koko.
A long time later they stood in the aisle, holding their carry-on baggage and waiting for Lady Dachau to open the door. At eye level directly before Koko hung the jacket of Billy Dickerson’s blue linen suit, all correctly webbed and criss-crossed with big easy-going, casual-looking wrinkles that made you want to be wrinkled yourself, as easy and casual as that. When Koko glanced up he saw Billy Dickerson’s blond hair ruffling out over the perfect collar of the linen suit. A pleasant smell of soap and aftershave emanated from good old Bill, who had disappeared into the forward toilet for nearly half an hour that morning while no-time turned into San Francisco time.
‘Hey,’ Dickerson, said, looking over his shoulder at Koko, ‘if you want to call off that bet it’s okay with me, Bobby. Pretty crazy.’
‘Indulge me,’ Koko said.
Lady Dachau got the signal she was waiting for and opened the door.
They walked into a corridor of cool fire. Angels with flaming swords waved them forward. Koko heard distant mortar fire, a sign that nothing truly serious was happening: the Tin Man had just sent out a few boys to use up some of this month’s quota of the taxpayers’ money. The cool fire, frozen into patterns like stone, wavered beneath their feet. This was America again. The angels with flaming swords gave flaming smiles.
‘You remember me mentioning that trick?’
Dickerson nodded and lifted an eyebrow, and he and Koko strolled along toward the baggage area. The angels with flaming swords gradually lost their numinosity and became uniformed stewardesses pulling wheeled carts behind them. The flames curling in the stone hardened into stiff cold patterns.
The corridor went straight for perhaps twenty yards, then slanted off to the right.
They turned the corner.
‘A men’s room, thank God,’ Dickerson said, and sped on ahead and shouldered open the door.
Smiling, Koko sauntered after, imagining an empty white-tiled place.
A woman in a bright yellow dress who passed before him exuded the hot, bloody aroma of the eternal world. For a moment a bright sword flickered in her hand. He pushed open the door of the men’s room and had to shift his case to one side to swing open another door almost immediately behind it.
A bald man stood at one of the sinks, washing his hands. Beside him a shirtless man leaned over a sink and scraped lather from his face with a blue plastic razor. Koko’s stomach tightened. Good old Billy was far down a row of urinals, more than half of which were occupied.
Koko saw his tense, haunted-looking face in the mirror. He jumped at himself out of his own eyes.
He went to the first urinal and pretended to pee, waiting for everyone to leave him alone with Dickerson. Something had gotten loose inside him, buzzed under his ribs, made him so lightheaded that he wobbled.
For an instant he thought he was already in Honduras, his work was either completed or ready to be begun all over again. Under an immense sun little brick-colored people milled around a comically provincial airport with tumbledown shacks, lounging policemen, and dozing hounds.
Dickerson zipped up, moved swiftly to the sink, passed his hands through a stream of water and a stream of air, and was gone almost before Koko came back to the men’s room.
He hurried out. The loose thing in his chest buzzed painfully against his ribs.
Dickerson was moving quickly into a huge room where carousels like black volcanos whirred and gouted suitcases down their ribbed flanks. Nearly everyone on their flight was already gathered around the second carousel. Koko watched Dickerson work his way around the edge of the people waiting for their bags. The thing in his chest slipped down into his stomach, where it flew like an angry bee into his intestines.
Sweating now, Koko crept through the people who stood between himself and Dickerson. Lightly, almost reverently, he brushed his fingers over the linen sleeve that held Dickerson’s left arm.
‘Hey, Bobby, I don’t feel right, you know,’ Dickerson said, bending forward and lifting a big Vuitton suitcase off the belt.
Koko knew one thing: a woman had picked out that bag.
‘About the money thing. Let’s eighty-six the whole idea, okay?’
Koko nodded miserably. His own beat-up case was nowhere on the carousel. Everything had gone slightly blurry around the edges, as if a fine mist hung in the air. A tall black-haired woman who was a living sword plucked a tiny case off the belt and – Koko saw through the descending mist – smiled at Dickerson.
‘Take care,’ Dickerson said.
A uniformed man walked unerringly up to Dickerson and passed him through customs with a few questions. Dickerson strode off to a window to have his passport stamped.
Dazed, Koko saw his own suitcase thump down the side of the carousel and glide past him before he thought to lift it off the belt. He watched Dickerson’s steadily dwindling body pass through a door marked EXIT-TRANSPORTATION.
In Customs the inspector called him ‘Mr Ortiz’ and searched the ripped lining of his suitcase for diamonds or heroin.
At Immigration he saw flaming wings sprout from the uniformed shoulders of the man in the booth, and the man stamped his passport and welcomed him back to the country, and Koko grabbed his old case and his carry-on bag and ran to the nearest men’s room. He dropped the bags just inside the door and sprinted into an open toilet. As soon as he sat down his bowels opened, then opened again. Fire dripped and spurted from him. For a moment Koko’s stomach felt as though a long needle had pierced it; then he bent forward and vomited between his shoes. He sat in his own stink for a long time, his bags forgotten, thinking only of what was there before him.
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Peter Straub
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Ужасы
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
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О книге: Peter Straub’s most acclaimed and biggest-selling novel – a visceral thriller with its roots in Vietnam – now reissued in a different cover style and making its first appearance on the HarperCollins list.‘KOKO… ’ Only four men knew what it meant. Vietnam vets. One was a doctor. One was a lawyer. One was a working stiff. One was a writer. All were as different as men could be – yet all were bound eternally together by a single shattering secret. And now they are joined together again on a quest that could take them from the graveyards and fleshpots of the Far East to the human jungle of New York, hunting an inhuman ghost of the past risen from nightmare darkness to kill and kill…