Koko

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.