Koko (17 page)

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.

“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 swished a curtain
before her and was gone.

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 Malden 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 campaign
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 one-time
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.”