Koko (31 page)

Journalism?
Pumo thought.
Fuffy?

Successful in Two Careers
, claimed a subhead. William Martinson had majored in journalism at Kenyon College
and earned a Master’s degree at Columbia’s School of Journalism. In 1948 he joined
the staff of the
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
and was soon recognized as a reporter of exceptional talent. In 1964, after holding
several other prestigious journalistic posts, he became a correspondent from Vietnam
for
Newsweek
magazine. Mr. Martinson reported from Vietnam for the magazine until the fall of
Saigon, by which time he had become bureau chief. He still maintained his home and
friendships in St. Louis, and in 1970 was given a celebration dinner at the Athletic
Club for his contributions to the American
understanding of the war, especially his work in reporting what at first had seemed
a massacre at the village of …

But Pumo had stopped reading. For a time he was not conscious of hearing or seeing
anything—Ia Thuc had blindsided him again. He gradually became aware that his hands
were taking the St. Louis microfilm from the machine. “That goddamned Beevers,” he
said to himself. “That goddamned fool.”

“Simmer down, man” said a flat stoned voice from behind him. Pumo tried to whirl around
in his plastic chair and banged himself on the molded back hard enough to give himself
a bruise. He rubbed his thigh and looked up at the boy with the tentative beard. “Puma,
right?”

Pumo sighed and nodded.

“You still want these?” He held out another stack of microfilm containers.

Pumo took them, waved the boy off, and went back to the screen. He did not know what
he was looking at, what he was looking for. He felt as if he had been struck by lightning.
Goddamned Harry Beevers, who had made such a big deal of his research, had not even
scratched the surface of Koko’s murders. Pumo felt another wave of concentrated rage
go through him.

He slammed in the microfilmed London
Times
hard enough to vibrate the desk. Noises of dismay, evident at a low level for some
time, came more loudly through the partition separating him from the next monitor.

Pumo scanned across the text until he found the headline and subhead he wanted,
JOURNALIST-NOVELIST MCKENNA SLAIN IN
S
INGAPORE.
Came to Prominence During Vietnam Era.
Clive McKenna had made the front page of the
Times
of 29 January, 1982, six days after his death and one day after the discovery of
his body. Mr. McKenna had worked for Reuters News Service in Australia and New Zealand
for ten years and was then transferred to Reuters’ Saigon Bureau, where he had quickly
become known as a dashing figure akin to the legendary Sean Flynn. Mr. McKenna had
distinguished himself by being the first English newsman to cover the seige at Khe
Sanh, the My Lai massacre, the fighting in Hue during the Tet offensive of 1968, and
was the only English journalist present immediately after the disputed events in the
hamlet of Ia Thuc which resulted in the court-martials and eventual acquittals of
two American soldiers. Mr. McKenna left the world of print journalism in 1971, when
he returned to England to write the first of a series of international
thrillers that quickly made him one of England’s most prominent and best-selling authors.

“He was on the goddamned helicopter,” Pumo said out loud. Clive McKenna had been on
the helicopter that brought the reporters into Ia Thuc, William Martinson had been
on the helicopter, and no doubt the French reporters had been on it too.

Pumo removed the microfilm and replaced it with that of the microfilm of the French
newspaper. He could not read French, but in the prominent black-bordered article on
the first page of
L’Express
he had no trouble finding the words
Vietnam
and
Ia Thuc
, which were the same in English and French.

A square masculine head with brown eyes behind large grey glasses appeared around
the side of Pumo’s carrel. “Excuse me,” it said. It poked a few inches further past
the divider, exposing a polka dot bow tie. “If you cannot control yourself or your
vocabulary I shall have to ask you to leave.”

Pumo felt like hitting the pompous ass. The bow tie reminded him of Harry Beevers.

With a self-conscious awareness that most of the people in the Microfilm Room were
looking at him, he gathered up his coat and handed the film in at the desk. In a furious
rush he ran down the steps and out through the library’s great front doors. Snow swirled
about him.

Pumo turned downtown on Fifth Avenue and marched along, his hands in his pockets and
a brown tweed cap from Banana Republic on his head. It was very cold, and this helped.
Random violence was much less likely when everybody was trying to get indoors as fast
as possible.

He tried to remember the reporters at Ia Thuc. They had been part of a larger group
that had come to Camp Crandall from further down in Quang Tri province, where the
brass wanted them to see various dread object lessons. After they filed their obligatory
stories, or so army theory went, they could choose less embattled areas for their
follow-up stories. About half of the big contingent said fuck it and went back to
Saigon, where they could get smashed, smoke opium, and make fun of Rolling Thunder
and the so-called “MacNamara Line” that was supposed to replace it. All the television
reporters went to Camp Evans so they could get to Hue easily, stand on a pretty bridge
with a mike up their chops, and say things like “I am speaking to you from the banks
of the Powder River in the centuries-old city of Hue.” A lot of the others had stayed
in Camp Evans, where they could be flown a few klicks north and write stirring stuff
about the helicopters landing at LZ
Sue. A handful had decided to go out into the field and see what was happening in
a village called Ia Thuc.

Pumo’s enduring impression of the reporters was of a crowd of men in very deliberate
almost-uniforms surrounding a ranting Harry Beevers. They had resembled a pack of
dogs, alternately barking and gulping bits of food.

Of the men who had surrounded Harry Beevers on that afternoon, four were now dead.
How many were left alive? Pumo put his head down, walking fast down Fifth Avenue in
a dry swirl of windblown snow, and tried to focus on the number of men standing around
Beevers. They were a numberless pack, remembered that way, and he tried instead to
see them as they left the helicopter.

Spanky Burrage, Trotman, Dengler, and himself had been carrying bags of rice out of
the cave and stacking them beneath the trees. Beevers was jubilant, among other reasons
because they had discovered boxes of Russian weapons underneath the rice, and he was
spinning around like a dancing toy. “Get those children out,” he was shouting, “stack
them next to the rice, and put the weapons right beside them.” He was pointing at
the helicopter, which was flattening out the grass as it settled swaying toward the
earth. “Get ’em out! Get ’em out of here!” Then the men had begun leaving the Huey
Iroquois.

In his mind he saw them jumping out of the Iroquois and bending over as they ran toward
the village. Like all reporters, they were trying to look like John Wayne or Erroll
Flynn, and there had been … five of them? Six?

If Poole and Beevers got to Underhill in time, maybe they could save at least one
life.

Pumo looked up and saw that he had walked all the way to 30th Street. Looking at the
street sign, he at last clearly saw the reporters jumping out of the Huey Iroquois
and running through the grass blown down like cat’s fur rubbed the wrong way. One
man had been followed by a pair of men, then another single man loaded with cameras,
and another who ran as if his legs hurt him, and one bald man. One of the reporters
had spoken in soft, fluent, rattling Spanish to a soldier called La Luz, who had muttered
something that included the word
maricón
and turned away. La Luz had been killed a month later.

Cold shadows were already spilling across the street, and within the shadows layers
of dead snow lifted and spun. He got them all over to Singapore and Bangkok, the reporters,
he figured out a way to pluck their strings and get them to come to him. He’s
a spider. He’s a little smiling child with an outstretched hand. The streetlamps clicked
on, and for a second the middle of Fifth Avenue, crowded with taxis and buses, looked
discolored, bleached. Pumo tasted the bite of vodka on his tongue and turned off on
24th Street.

Until Pumo had finished two drinks, he had taken in only the row of bottles behind
the bartender, the hand giving him the glass, and the beautiful glass itself, filled
with ice and clear liquid. He thought he might even have closed his eyes. Now his
third drink had appeared before him, and he was still coming out of it.

“Yeah, I was in AA,” the man beside him was saying, evidently continuing a conversation
that had been in progress for some time. “But do you know what I said? I said fuck
it. That’s what I said.”

Pumo heard the man saying that he had chosen hell. Like everyone else who had chosen
hell, he recommended it very highly. Hell wasn’t as bad as it was cracked up to be.
His friend’s purple face sagged and his breath stank. Demons jabbed out their little
fists and forks inside his fallen cheeks and lit yellow fires in his eyes. He put
a heavy dirty hand on Pumo’s shoulder. He said he liked his style—he liked a man who
closed his eyes when he drank. The bartender barked and retreated into a smoky cave.

“Did you ever kill anybody?” Pumo’s friend asked. “Pretend you’re on television and
you have to tell me the truth. Ever waste anybody? My money says you did.”

He pushed his hand down hard on Pumo’s shoulder.

“I hope not,” Pumo said, and gulped a third of his new drink.

“So so so so
soooo
,” the man breathed. Inside him, the demons went wildly to work, poking out their
little forks, dancing, stoking their yellow fires. “I recognize that answer, my friend,
it is the answer of a former warrior. Am I right? Or—am I right?”

Pumo pulled himself free of the man’s hand and turned away.

“You think that counts?” the man asked. “It does not. Except in one way. When I ask
you, did you ever kill anyone, that is to say, have you ever taken a life in the way
you take a drink or in the way you take a piss, I am asking if you are a killer. And
everything counts, even if you killed while in the uniform of your country. Because
then technically you’re a killer.”

Pumo forced himself to turn again toward the man’s blazing face and the stench of
his body. “Get away from me. Leave me alone.”

“Or what? You’ll kill me like you killed ’em in Vietnam? Look at this.” The demon-man
held up a fist. It looked like a dented grey garbage can. “When I killed him, I killed
him with this one here.”

Pumo felt the walls of the cave focusing down in on him like the lens of a camera.
Smoke and foulness darkened the air, streaming toward Pumo from the demon-man.

“Wherever you are, see, that’s where you are,” the man said. “You’re not safe. I know.
I’m a killer too. You think you can win, but you can’t win. I know.”

Pumo backed away toward the door.

“Roger,” the man said. “Roger wilco. Wherever you are, get it?”

“I know,” Pumo said, and yanked bills out of his pocket.

When he got out of the cab, the windows on the second floor were full of light. Maggie
was home, oh thank you God. He looked at his watch and was astonished that nine o’clock
was so near. Many hours had disappeared from his day. How long had he spent in the
bar on 24th Street and how many drinks did he have there? Pumo remembered the demon-man
and thought he must have had a lot more than three.

He propped himself against the wall as he worked his way up the narrow white staircase.
Pumo unlocked his door and let himself into warmth and mellow light.

“Maggie?”

No reply.

“Maggie?”

Pumo unbuttoned his heavy coat and tossed it onto one of the pegs. When he reached
for the tweed cap from Banana Republic, he touched his forehead and had a sudden vision
of the cap resting bottom-side up on the seat of a taxi.

He came out of the corridor into the main room of his loft and immediately saw Maggie
sitting up on the platform, behind his desk, with her hands folded over the telephone.
Her eyebrows were a straight line and the ruff of her live lovely hair glowed. Her
mouth was closed so tightly she looked as if she had trapped some small creature within
it.

“You’re drunk,” she said. “I just called three hospitals, and you were in a bar.”

“I know why he killed them,” Pumo said. “I even saw them,
over in Nam. I can remember how they looked jumping out of the helicopter. Did you
know, I mean do you know, that I love you?”

“Nobody needs your kind of love,” Maggie said, but even though Pumo was drunk he could
see that her face had softened. The small thing was no longer trapped in her mouth.
He started to explain about Martinson and McKenna and how he had met a demon in hell,
but Maggie was already coming toward him. Then she was undressing him. When he was
naked she grabbed his penis and towed him like a tugboat down the hall and into the
bedroom.

“I have to call Singapore,” he said. “They don’t even know yet!”

Maggie slipped into bed beside him. “Now let’s make up before I remember everything
I thought could have happened to you while I was waiting for you and get angry again.”
She put her arms out and pulled her whole body into his. Then she jerked her head
back. “Ugh! You have a funny smell. Where were you, in a burning trash can?”

“It was the demon-man,” Pumo said. “His smell soaked through from when he put his
hand on my shoulder. He said hell wasn’t really so bad because you got used to it
after a while.”

“Americans don’t know anything about demons,” Maggie said.