Koko (35 page)

This was one thing Koko knew. He was not supposed to live in a small bare room next
to the crazy man at the Christian’s Association.

He had the address book all laid out on the little table. He had the names and addresses
circled.

But Harry Beevers did not answer his telephone.

But Conor Linklater did not answer his telephone.

Michael Poole’s answering machine spoke in Michael Poole’s voice and gave another
number where a woman answered. This woman had a stern, unforgiving voice.

Koko remembered,
I always liked the smell of blood.

Koko felt the cold tears on his face and turned away from the old woman’s window and
began to walk down West End Avenue.

The crazy man’s hair was ropes and his eyes were red. He lived in the room next to
Koko and he came in and he laughed and said—what all this shit on the walls, boy?
Killin’ is a see-yun. The crazy man was black and wore exhausted black man’s clothes.

Things were going fast and Koko was going fast down West End Avenue. Frozen bushes
burst into flame, and across the street a tall woman with red hair whispered,
Once you kill ’em, they your responsibility forever.

The woman with the hard voice knew that.

On wide crowded 72nd Street he crossed over to Broadway. And behold darkness shall
cover the earth. Yet once a little while, and I will shake the heavens and the earth.

For he is like a refiner’s fire.

If he said that to the woman, would she know how he felt in the toilet after Bill
Dickerson walked away? In the library, when the Joker jumped out of the pack and jigged
and capered between the books?

I didn’t start off in this business to accept substitutes, he said to himself. I can
say that to her.

Time was a needle and at the end was the needle’s eye. When you passed through the
needle—when you pulled the needle through its own eye after you—

a man of sorrow and acquainted with grief were you.

A man in a golden fur coat was staring at Koko and Koko stared right back. I am not
troubled by the hostile stares of strangers, I am a man rejected and despised. “I
am a man rejected and despised,” Koko said to the staring man, who had already turned
his back and was walking away.

Koko walked tense and haunted down Eighth Avenue. Everything between West End Avenue,
twenty blocks north, and Eighth Avenue had passed in a blurred moment. The world glittered
as a cold thing glitters. He was outside not
inside
, and back in his terrible room the black man waited to tell him about sin.

The grinning demons loved the men and women they escorted through eternity—demons
had a great secret, they too were created to love and be loved.

“Are you speaking to me?” asked an old man with a polished face and a dirty black
beret. The old man was not one of the ragged shapes sent to torture him: the old man
spoke in English, not in tongues. A jewel of snot hung from his nose. “My name is
Hansen.”

“I’m a travel agent,” Koko said.

“Well, welcome to New York,” said Hansen. “I guess you’re a visitor here.”

“I’ve been away a long time, but they’re keeping me busy. Keeping me busy in all directions.”

“That’s good!” the old man chortled. He was delighted to have someone talk to him.

Koko asked if he could buy him a drink, and Hansen accepted with a grateful smile.
The two of them went into a Mexican restaurant on Eighth Avenue near 55th Street and
when Koko called for “Mexican drinks!” the bartender placed two fizzy-looking, frothy-looking,
soupy-looking drinks before them. The bartender had frizzy black hair, olive skin,
and a drooping black moustache, and Koko liked him very much. The bar was warm and
dark and Koko liked the silence and the bowls of salty chips placed beside the red
sauce. The old man kept blinking at Koko as if he could not believe his luck.

“I’m a veteran,” Koko said.

“Oh,” the old man said. “I never went.”

The old man asked the bartender what he thought about the guy in the library.

“He was a mistake,” Koko said. “God blinked.”

“What guy?” said the bartender, and the old man wheezed and said, “Newspapers eat
that shit up.”

To the bartender and the old man, Koko said, “I am a man despised and rejected, a
man of sorrow and acquainted with grief.”

“I am the same,” the bartender said.

Old Hansen raised his glass and toasted him. He even winked.

“Do you want to hear the song of the mammoths?” Koko asked.

“I always liked elephants,” Hansen said.

“I am the same,” the bartender said.

So Koko sang the song of the mammoths, the song so ancient even the elephants had
forgotten its meaning, and old Hansen and the Mexican bartender listened in reverent
silence.

Two days earlier, Michael Poole stood at the window of his hotel room, looking down
at Surawong Road, so jammed with trucks, taxicabs, automobiles, and the little covered
motorized carts called ruk-tuks that the traffic formed a seamless body. Across Surawong
Road lay the Patpong District, where the bars and sex shows and massage parlors were
only just beginning to open up. The room’s air conditioner set up a rattling hum beside
Poole, for while the air was so grey as to be nearly grainy, the day was even warmer
and more humid than Singapore had been that morning. Out of sight behind Poole and,
like both the air conditioner and the traffic in full spate, Conor Linklater was walking
around the room, picking up the guest book, looking at all the furniture, inspecting
the postcards in the desk drawer, and all the while talking to himself. He was still
excited by what the cabdriver had said to them.

“Right away,” Conor mumbled. “Can you believe that? I mean, is this place about getting
your rocks off, or what?”

The driver had informed them that this hotel was very convenient, being on the fringe
of the Patpong area, and then had permanently impressed Conor with both himself and
the city of Bangkok by asking if the gentlemen wished to stop at a massage parlor
before reaching their hotel. No ordinary massage parlor, no tank with skinny country
girls who did not know how to behave, but a luxurious place, real sophistication,
porcelain bathtubs, elegant rooms, full body massages, girls so beautiful they made
you come two-three times before you even got going. He had promised girls so pretty
they looked like princesses, movie stars,
Playboy
centerfolds, girls as voluptuous and yielding as the girls in dreams, girls with
the thighs of drum majorettes, the breasts of Indian goddesses, the faces of cover
girls, the silken skin of courtesans, the subtle minds of poet-diplomats, the agility
of gymnasts, the muscle tone of swimmers, the playfulness of monkeys, the stamina
of mountain goats, and best of all …

“Best of all,” Conor mused. “Best of all. No women’s lib. How about that? I mean,
I got nothing against women’s lib. Everybody’s a free man in this world, girls included,
and I know lots of women who are better men than most men. But how much of that stuff
do you have to listen to? Especially in the bedroom? I mean, most of ’em already make
twice as much money as I do, they run computers, they run offices, they run companies,
Donovan’s is full of ’em, they won’t even let you buy ’em drinks, they make a face
if you open the door for ’em, I mean, maybe we shoulda done what the guy said …”

“Umm,” Poole said. Conor himself was hardly paying any attention to his babbling,
and any response was sufficient.

“…  do it later, doesn’t matter, hey, they have two restaurants in this hotel, nice
bar too, I bet it’s nicer here than wherever the Lost Boss is now, goin’ around telling
everybody he’s a cop or a secret agent or the Bishop of New York.”

Poole laughed out loud.

“Right! I mean, one hand feeds the other, but with that guy …”

If by four o’clock all of Bangkok seemed congested, the few square blocks that made
up Patpong were already even more crowded than that. The usual traffic filled the
street, and the sidewalks were so crowded Poole could see very little of the pavement.
People milled around on the sidewalks before the bars and sex clubs, flowed up and
down the stairs and fire escapes. Around
them signs sparkled and flashed: M
ISSISSIPPI, DAISY CHAIN, HOT SEX, WHISKEY
, M
ONTMARTRE, SEX, SEX
, and many others, all crowding together and shouting for attention.

“Dengler died out there,” Conor said, looking down on Phat Pong Road.

“Yes, he did,” Michael answered.

“It looks like the goddamn monkey house.”

Poole laughed. That was what it looked like, all right.

“I think we’re gonna find him, Mikey.”

“I do, too,” Poole said.

After he and Conor returned to the hotel that evening, Michael waited while the Thai
switchboard operator put through his credit card call to Westerholm, New York. He
finally had something positive to say about what Beevers called their “mission.” He
had seen something in a bookstore that confirmed his impression that he and Conor
would find Underhill in Bangkok. If it took two days, they might be coming home two
days after that—with Underhill in tow or not, however it worked out. Michael wanted
to find some detox clinic where Underhill could straighten himself out and get the
rest Poole was sure he needed. Anybody who had survived Bangkok for a long time would
need a good rest. If Underhill had committed murder, Poole would find him a great
lawyer and get him started on the insanity defense that would at least keep him out
of jail. That might not be sufficiently dramatic for a mini-series, but it would be
the best ending for Underhill and anyone who cared about him.

What Poole had seen in Patpong’s most uncharacteristic place of business, a huge bright
bookstore called Patpong Books, had given him indirect proof of Underhill’s innocence
and his presence in Bangkok. Poole and Conor had walked into the bookstore to get
out of the heat and escape the crowds for a moment. Patpong Books was cool and uncrowded,
and Michael was happily surprised to see that the fiction department took up at least
a third of the store. He could get something for himself, and something to give to
Stacy Talbot too. He wandered down the fiction aisles, not realizing that he was looking
for Tim Underhill’s name until he found an entire shelf filled with Underhill’s novels.
There were
four and five copies of every Underhill novel, hardcovers interspersed with paperbacks,
from
A Beast in View
to
Blood Orchid.

Didn’t that mean that he lived here? That he was a customer of Patpong Books? The
shelf of novels reminded Poole of the “Local Authors” shelf at All Booked, Westerholm’s
best bookstore—it was as good as a signed statement that Underhill frequented the
shop. And if he did that, would he also be going out and killing people? Poole could
almost feel Underhill’s presence near his well-stocked shelf. If he did not come in,
would the store stock so many books by a writer so obscure?