Koko (11 page)

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.

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 sheepdog 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.

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 said. 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 bombsite—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 …