Koko (34 page)

The door below him clicked open. Pumo did not look down until he was at the landing
where the stairs changed direction. He went to the railing and bent over to see the
person who had just come onto the staircase. He could see only the railing and a wedge
of stairs twisting around and around beneath him. Whoever was down there stopped moving.
Pumo could still hear the tall dandy’s steps ticking hollowly upward.

He moved a step away from the railing and looked up.

The footsteps from below began to ascend toward him.

Pumo took the step back to the railing and looked down, but at once the ascending
footsteps stopped again. Whoever was coming toward him had moved back under the protection
of the staircase.

Pumo’s stomach went cold.

Then the third-floor door opened again, and the two Chinese women entered the staircase
enclosure. He saw the tops of their heads and heard their clear emphatic voices, speaking
Cantonese. Above, the door to the fifth floor slammed shut.

Pumo unfroze and left the railing.

He opened the door marked
PERSONNEL ONLY
on the fifth-floor landing and stepped into a vast dark space filled with books.
The tall dandy had disappeared into one of the aisles between the stacks. His quiet
footsteps came as if from everywhere in the enormous room. Tina could not hear any
noises from the other side of the staircase door, but had a sudden, urgent image of
a man creeping up the last few steps.

He stepped quickly into the stacks and found himself in a long empty aisle perhaps
a yard wide between towering steel bookshelves. Far above, low-wattage bulbs beneath
conical shades cast dim but distinct pools of illumination. The tall man’s footsteps
were no longer audible.

Pumo forced himself to move more slowly. Just as he reached a wide middle aisle, he
heard the clicking of the door which opened onto the staircase. Someone slipped inside
and closed the door behind him.

He could virtually
hear
the person who had just entered, wondering which aisle he had gone down. Pumo could
not help feeling a prickle of fear.

Then he heard slow footsteps far off to his left. Pumo began to move toward the dandy,
and heard the person who had just entered the stacks start down one of the narrow
aisles. His feet hushed along in the soft, slow rhythms of the good old Jungle Walk.

Either he was going completely paranoid, Pumo thought, or Koko had followed him into
the stacks. Koko had stolen his address book and discovered that the other men were
out of town, and he was going to begin his excellent work all over again in America
with Tina Pumo. He was all stoked up from reading about Ia Thuc, and Tina was next
on his list.

But of course it would turn out that the person who had just
come into the fifth-floor stacks was a librarian. The door said
PERSONNEL ONLY.
If Pumo turned down an aisle and ran into him, he’d turn out to be a fat little guy
with Hush Puppies and a button-down shirt. Pumo went as noiselessly as possible down
the wide middle aisle, doing a pretty fair Jungle Walk himself. Three aisles from
the end, he stopped to listen.

From off to the left came quick faint footsteps that must have been the dandy’s. If
anyone else moved through the stacks, he was walking too quietly to be heard. Pumo
peeked down a long aisle. Pools of light lay between columns of shelved books. He
ducked into the aisle.

It seemed as long as a football field, narrowing, a tunnel seen through the wrong
end of a telescope. Pumo moved quietly down the long tight aisle. In a queer hallucinatory
trick of vision the spines and titles of books seemed to creep by him as they moved
while he stood still. W.M. Thackeray,
Pendennis
, Vol. 1. W.M. Thackeray,
Pendennis
, Vol. 2. W.M. Thackeray,
The Newcomes. The Virginians. The Yellowplush Papers, ETC.
, bound in pink cloth board with gold lettering and published by Smith, Elder & Co.
Lovel the Widower, ETC.
, in matching pink and gold from Smith, Elder.

Pumo closed his eyes and heard a man cough softly into his fist one aisle away. Tina’s
eyes flew open, and the titles of the books before him melted into a single gorgeous
Arabic scrawl of gold over a pink background. He supposed he nearly fainted.

The man who coughed took an almost silent step forward. Pumo stood still as a statue,
afraid to breathe even though the man in the next aisle could only be the librarian
in Hush Puppies. Whoever it was took three swift, gliding steps down the aisle.

When Pumo thought that the other man had gone far enough up toward the middle aisle,
he began to move toward the door.

In that instant, as if Tina had given a cue, someone whistled the beginning of “Body
and Soul” far away toward the left side of the room—an ornate performance full of
scoops and trills and vibrato.

Pumo heard the man in the next aisle begin to move less cautiously toward the whistler.
Someone off that way slid several books off a shelf—the dandy had found what he had
been looking for when he came into the stacks. The man in the next aisle turned into
the middle aisle. Pumo realized that if he had parted the Thackeray volumes in front
of him, he would have seen the face of the man in the next aisle. His heart began
to pound.

Just as the other man passed before the head of the aisle in
which he had been hiding, Pumo emerged from the stacks and was only a few paces from
the door to the staircase. A dim, shielded light burned above it. He took a step toward
the door.

The knob began to revolve and Pumo’s heart stopped for the space of a single beat.
The knob revolved and the whole door swung abruptly in on a bubble of conversation
and a sudden tide of light.

Dark figures stepped toward him. Pumo stopped moving; they stopped moving too. The
high-pitched conversation abruptly ceased. Then he saw that they were the Chinese
women he had seen in the third-floor corridor.

“Oh!” both women uttered in a whisper.

“Excuse me,” Pumo whispered back. “I guess I got lost or something.”

They waved him forward, grinning now that they were over the surprise of seeing him,
and Pumo went past them through the door and out onto what felt like the safety of
the landing.

Back in his loft that night Pumo told Maggie only that he had not been able to confirm
that the other person looking at material about Ia Thuc had used the murdered journalist’s
name. He did not want to describe what had happened in the stacks, because nothing
really had happened. After a long dinner and a bottle of Bonnes Mares at a good restaurant
across the street, he was too ashamed of his panic. It had been imagination doing
a nasty trick with the materials of his memory, and Maggie was right, he was still
trying to get over his experiences in Vietnam. The bearded man had given him some
name like Roberto Diaz, and everything else was just fantasy. A fellow passenger or
a coked-up airport employee had killed the yuppie at JFK. Maggie looked so beautiful
that even the bored SoHo waiter stared at her, and the wine was full of subtle tastes.
He looked at her face glowing at him across the table and knew that as long as your
health and your money held out, the world was sane.

The next day neither Pumo nor Maggie looked at
The New York Times
, neither of them paused to look at the headlines of the tabloids on the newsstands
they hurried past on their various errands,
LIBRARY CHIEF SLAIN
said the
Post
, with imperfect accuracy. The
News
settled for the Agatha Christie-like touch of
MURDER IN THE LIBRARY.
Both tabloids gave half of their front pages to a portrait shot of Dr. Anton Mayer-Hall,
a tall bearded man in a double-breasted suit. Dr. Mayer-Hall, Director of Projects
for New York Public Libraries and a staff member of the library for twenty-four years,
had been found slain in a section of the fifth-floor stacks reserved for library personnel.
It was speculated that he had used that section of the fifth floor as a shortcut to
his office, where he had been due for an appointment with the library’s publicity
director, Mei-lan Hudson. Ms. Hudson and her assistant Adrien Lo, using the same shortcut,
had stopped and questioned an intruder in the same section of the library where Dr.
Mayer-Hall was murdered a few minutes before their discovery of the body. The intruder,
whose description was now in the hands of the police, was being sought for questioning.
The
Times
offered its readers a smaller photograph and a detailed map with arrows and an
X
where the body was found.

What do you fear?

I fear that I made him up. That I gave him all his best ideas.

You fear that he is an idea come to life?

He is his own idea come to life.

How did Victor Spitalny get to Bangkok?

It was simple. He found a soldier at the airport who was willing to switch his nametag
and travel documents for the sake of going to Honolulu instead of Bangkok. So everything
proved that PFC Spitalny went to Honolulu on Air Pacific Flight 206—not only the tickets,
but also and including check-in lists, passenger rosters, seating charts filled out
in-flight, and boarding passes. A PFC named Victor Spitalny could conclusively be
shown to have stayed in a single room at the Hotel Lanai costing the equivalent of
twenty dollars American per night for six nights, and to have returned on Air Pacific
Flight 207, arriving back in Vietnam at 2100 hours 7 October 1969. It was indisputable
that PFC Spitalny had gone to and returned from Honolulu during the time that he had
disappeared in the middle of a street riot in Bangkok.

Finally, a PFC named Michael Warland who claimed to have lost all his papers admitted
that on the morning of 2 October 1969 he had met and spoken with PFC Victor Spitalny
who had suggested that they exchange places during their R&Rs. When he did not locate
PFC Spitalny in the airport on 8 October, he stored his belongings in a locker and
returned to his unit. When the deception was revealed, PFC Spitalny was listed as
AWOL.

What did all this do for Spitalny?

It bought him weeks of time.

Why did Spitalny want to go to Bangkok with Dengler?

He had already planned it all.

What happened to the girl?

The girl disappeared. She ran through an enraged crowd in Patpong, showing on her
palms blood shed in a cave in Vietnam, and ran invisibly through the world for years
until I saw her. Then I began to understand.

What did you understand?

She was back because he was back.

Then why did you bless her?

Because if I saw her, then I was back too.

On West End Avenue the old lady nodded at him from a window in an apartment building
across the street and he waved up at her. The doorman, in an ornate uniform of blue
and grey with gold epaulettes, was also looking at him, but in a far less friendly
manner. The doorman, who had known Roberto Ortiz, would not let him in, though
inside
was where he had to be. He could still see the Ia Thuc photographs he had looked
at in the library, and the darkness at the center of those photographs, which had
made him shake, pressed him toward the
inside
, the harbor that
inside
was.

You crazy? the doorman said. You outa your mind? You can’t go in there.

I have to go in there.

The world had given him Pumo the Puma, standing in the Microfilm Room like an answered
prayer, and Koko switched on the invisibility switch and followed Pumo-the Puma down
the corridor and up the stairs and into the vast room filled with book
cases in tall rows, and then everything had gone wrong, the world had tricked him,
the Joker jumped out of the pack cackling and dancing—another man died in front of
him, not Pumo the Puma, and it was Bill Dickerson again. The getting away. The escape.
So Koko himself had to hide, the world was slick and savage and it turned its back
on you. On Broadway mad old shapes in rags with bare swollen feet rushed at you, speaking
in tongues, their lips black because they breathed fire. The ragged mad shapes knew
about the Joker because they had seen him too, they knew Koko was going astray, astray,
and they knew about Koko’s mistake in the library. This time he had won the wager
again, but it was the wrong wager because it was the wrong man. Then Puma had melted
away. When the mad ragged bums spoke in tongues they said,
You’re making mistakes! Bad mistakes! You don’t belong here!

I can’t let you in here, the doorman said. You want me to call the cops? Get away
or I’ll call the cops, get your ass out of here.

Koko was standing now on the corner of West End Avenue and West 78th Street, the molten
center of the universe, looking up at the building where Roberto Ortiz had lived.
A vein jumped in his neck, and the cold bit his face.

The old lady could come down and lead him into the building, Koko thought, where he
could ride up and down on the elevators and wear Roberto Ortiz’s clothes forever.
In warmth and safety. Now he was in the wrong world and nothing in the wrong world
was right.