Koko (37 page)

“Right,” Poole said. He could remember seeing the North Vietnamese soldiers moving
like ghosts, like deer, along the road. They had not been boys. They were men in their
thirties and forties, lifelong soldiers in a lifelong war. He had wanted very much
to kill them.

“So when it was all over, I went back and did the point man.” A tiny girl in a black
leather bra and black leather microskirt had taken the stool beside Conor, and was
bending over the bar grinning at him to catch his attention. “I mean, I can remember
cutting that dude’s ears off,” Conor said. “It was hard to do, man. An ear is all
like
gristle.
You wind up only cutting off the top part, and it doesn’t look like an ear. It was
like I wasn’t thinking, like I wasn’t even myself. I had to keep on sawing back and
forth. And when I cut through it, his head slapped right down on the mud and I was
holding this ear. Then I had to roll him over and do it all over again.”

The girl, who had listened carefully to this speech, pushed herself away from the
bar and went across the big room to whisper to another bar girl.

“What did you do with the ear?” Poole asked.

“Threw it into the trees. I’m no pervert.”

“Right,” Poole agreed. “It would be pretty sick to save the ears.”

“Damn straight,” Conor said.

The telephone had gone from making a buzzing sound to total dead silence to a high-pitched
whistle. Conor looked up from the pictures of naked girls in the magazine he had bought
at Patpong Books.

“When did you do yours?” Conor said.

“My what?”

“Koko card.”

“About a month after the court-martials were announced. It was after a patrol in the
A Shau Valley.”

“End of September,” Conor said. “I remember that one. I picked up the bodies.”

“Yes, you did.”

“In the tunnel—where the other big cache was. The rice cache.”

“That’s the one,” Poole said.

“Old
Mikey
,” Conor said. “You’re an animal, man.”

“I still don’t know how I did it,” Poole said. “Gave me nightmares for years.”

Then the operator cut through the whistling to say, “We are connecting you to your
party, sir,” and Michael Poole readied himself to talk to his wife while still holding
up before him, fresh from its long internment within him, the memory of using his
K-Bar to saw off the ears of a corpse propped up against a fifty-pound bag of rice.
And the darker memory of using his knife on the dead man’s eyes.

Victor Spitalny had seen the body first, and had come out of the tunnel bawling
Awww Righht!

The silence deepened and changed texture. Two deep thudding clicks came over the line,
like firm but complex linkages made in deep space.

Poole looked at his watch. Seven o’clock
P.M.
in Bangkok, seven in the morning in Westerholm, New York.

After all this time he heard the sound, familiar as a lullaby,
of the American dial tone, which abruptly ceased. More deep-space silence, followed
by the dim ringing of a telephone.

The telephone ceased ringing with a clunk that meant the answering machine was on.
At seven in the morning, Judy was either still in the bedroom or down in the kitchen.

Michael waited through Judy’s message. When the beep came, he said, “Judy? Are you
home? This is Michael.”

He waited three, four, five beats. “Judy?” He was about to hang up where he heard
a loud click and his wife said, “So it’s you,” in a flat, uninflected voice.

“Hello. I’m glad you answered.”

“I guess I’m glad too. Are the children having fun in the sun?”

“Judy—”

“Are they?”

Poole had a quick, guilty flash of the girl rubbing his crotch. “I suppose you could
call it fun. We’re still looking for Tim Underhill.”

“How nice for you.”

“We learned that he left Singapore, so Beevers is in Taipei and Conor and I are in
Bangkok. I think we might find him in the next few days.”

“Dandy. You’re in Bangkok, reliving your venereal youth, and I’m doing my job in Westerholm,
which happens to be the location of your house and your medical practice. You remember,
I hope, if your faulty short-term memory has not already erased it, that I wasn’t
exactly overjoyed when you announced that you were taking this trip of yours?”

“I didn’t exactly announce it in that sense, Judy.”

“Bad short-term memory, what did I tell you?”

“I thought you’d be happy to hear from me.”

“I don’t precisely wish you ill, no matter what you may think.”

“I never thought you did.”

“In a way I’m almost glad you left, because it gives me the space for some long-overdue
thinking about our relationship. I really wonder whether we’re doing either one of
us any good anymore.”

“You want to talk about that now?”

“Just tell me one thing—did you ask one of your little friends to call me up periodically,
to check on whether or not I’m home?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“I am talking about the little gnome who loves the sound of
my voice on the answering machine so much that he calls up two or three times a day.
And by the way, I don’t care if you don’t trust me anymore than that because I am
a person who takes responsibility for herself around here, Michael, and I always have
been.”

“You’re getting anonymous phone calls?” Michael asked, grateful to have discovered
a reason for his wife’s hostility.

“As if you didn’t know.”

“Oh, Judy,” he said, and his pain and regret were very clear in his voice.

“All right,” she said. “Okay.”

“Call the police.”

“What good will that do?”

“If he calls that often, they’ll be able to nail him.”

There was a long silence between them that to Michael seemed almost comfortable, marital.

“This is wasting money,” Judy said.

“It’s probably some student’s idea of a joke. You need to relax a little, Judy.”

She hesitated. “Well, Bob Bunce asked me for dinner tomorrow night. It’ll be nice
to get out of the house.”

“The wasp expert?” Michael said. “Good.”

“What are you talking about?”

Two years before, Michael had told some people at a faculty party about Victor Spitalny
running out of the Ia Thuc cave screaming about being stung by millions of wasps.
This was one part of Ia Thuc that he was able to speak about: it was harmless, and
nobody died in this story. All that happened was that Victor Spitalny tore out of
the cave, scraping his face with his fingernails and screaming until Poole rolled
him up in his groundcloth. When he stopped screaming, Poole unwrapped him. Spitalny’s
face and hands were covered with rapidly disappearing red welts. “Ain’t no wasps in
Vietnam, little brother,” SP4 Cotton said, snapping a picture of Spitalny half-emerged
from the groundcloth. “Every other kind of bug, but ain’t no wasps.”

A six-three English teacher named Bob Bunce, who had floppy blond hair and a thin
patrician face and wore beautiful tweed suits, told Michael that since wasps were
found throughout the northern hemisphere, there must be wasps in Vietnam. Michael
thought that Bunce was a smug self-important know-it-all. He was supposed to come
from a wealthy Main Line family and to be teaching English because he had a priestly
calling to it. Bunce was a liberal’s wet dream. He had gone on to say that because
Vietnam was a semitropical country, wasps would be
rare, and anyhow that most wasps in all parts of the world were solitaries. “And aren’t
there more interesting questions about Ia Thuc than this, Michael?” he had insinuatingly
asked.

“It doesn’t matter,” Michael said now to Judy. “Where are you going to go?”

“He didn’t
tell
me, Michael.
Where
he
takes
me is not so ultra-important. I’m not asking for a four-star dinner, you know, all
I want is a little
company
.”

“Fine.”

“It’s not as though you’re exactly starving for companionship, is it? But I think
there are massage parlors in Westerholm, too.”

“I don’t think so,” Michael laughed.

“I don’t want to talk anymore,” Judy promptly said.

“Okay.”

Another lengthy silence.

“Have a nice dinner with Bunce.”

“You have no right to say that,” Judy told him, and hung up without saying good-bye.

Michael gently replaced the receiver.

Conor was walking around the room, looking out the window, bouncing on the balls of
his feet, avoiding Michael’s eyes. At length he cleared his throat. “Trouble?”

“My life is becoming ridiculous.”

Conor laughed. “My life always was ridiculous. Ridiculous isn’t so bad.”

“Maybe not,” Michael said, and he and Conor shared a smile. “I think I’m going to
bed early tonight. Do you mind being alone? Tomorrow we can make a list of places
to visit and really get down to work.”

Conor took a couple of the photographs of Tim Underhill with him when he left.

Relieved to be alone, Michael ordered a simple meal from room service and stretched
out on his bed with the copy of
The Divided Man
he had purchased that afternoon. He had not read Underhill’s most successful book
in years, and he was surprised by how quickly he was caught up in it again, how thoroughly
it managed to distract him from his worries about Judy.

Hal Esterhaz, the hero of
The Divided Man
, was a homicide detective in Monroe, Illinois, a medium-sized city filled with foundries,
auto-body shops, and vacant lots behind chain-link fences. Esterhaz had served as
a lieutenant in Vietnam, and had returned home to marry and quickly divorce his high
school girlfriend. He drank a lot, but for years had been a respected police officer
with an uncomfortable secret: he was bisexual. His guilt over his sexual longings
for other men accounted not only for his drinking, but also his occasional brutality
with arrested criminals. Esterhaz was careful about this, and let himself beat only
those criminals—rapists and child molesters—most despised by other policemen.

Michael suddenly found himself wondering if Esterhaz had been based on Harry Beevers.
This thought had never occurred to him when he first read the book, but now, although
the detective was tougher and more enigmatic than Beevers, Poole virtually saw the
Lost Boss’s face on his body. Beevers was not bisexual, at least as far as Michael
knew, but Poole would not have been surprised to learn that Beevers had a wide streak
of sadism hidden within him.

Michael also saw another likelihood that had slipped past him when he first read the
book. Monroe, Illinois, the gritty city through which Hal Esterhaz pursued the mystery
at the heart of
The Divided Man
, sounded very much like Milwaukee, Wisconsin, the city M.O. Dengler had described
so often. Monroe had a large Polish population on its south side, a large black ghetto
on its near north side, and a major league ball team. The mansions of the rich stood
along three or four streets near its lakefront. A dark, polluted river ran through
its seedy downtown. There were paper mills and tanneries, adult bookstores, bowling
allies, miserable winters, bars and taverns everywhere, barrel-shaped women in babushkas
waiting at bus stops. This was the landscape of Dengler’s childhood.

Poole was soon so taken up in the novel’s story that it was more than an hour before
a third belated recognition stung him, that
The Divided Man
was virtually a meditation on Koko.

An unemployed piano player is found with his throat slit in his room at a shabby downtown
hotel called the St. Alwyn. Beside the body has been placed a piece of paper with
the words Blue Rose penciled upon it. Hal Esterhaz is assigned to the case, and recognizes
the victim as a regular patron of one of Monroe’s gay bars. He had once had sex with
the man. Of course he suppresses the information about his fugitive relationship with
the victim when he files his report.

A prostitute is the next victim, found with her throat slit in an alley behind the
St. Alwyn, and again there is a note: Blue Rose. Esterhaz learns that she too had
lived in the hotel and was a friend of the piano player; Esterhaz suspects that she
witnessed the murder or knew something that would lead the police to the killer.

A week later, a young doctor is found slaughtered in his Jaguar, parked in the garage
of the lakefront mansion where he lived alone with a housekeeper. Esterhaz reports
to the scene miserably hung over, still wearing yesterday’s clothes, with no real
memory of the night before. He had visited a bar called the House of Correction, he
can remember ordering drinks, talking, he remembers putting on his coat, having trouble
with the sleeves … after that everything is black until the telephone call from his
station, which had awakened him on the couch. What makes him feel far worse than his
hangover is that the young doctor had been his lover for more than a year some five
years before. No one, not even the doctor’s housekeeper, had known. Esterhaz conducts
a competent scene-of-the-crime investigation, discovers a piece of paper with the
words Blue Rose written on it, questions the housekeeper and bags and tags all the
physical evidence, and when the medical examiner has finished and the body is removed,
returns to the House of Correction. Another blackout, another morning on the couch
with a half-empty bottle and a blaring television.

The following week another body is discovered, that of a male hustler and drug addict
who had been one of Esterhaz’s informants.

The next victim is a religious fanatic, a butcher who preaches to a congregation in
a downtown storefront. Esterhaz not only knows this victim, he hates him. The butcher
and his wife had been the most brutal of the series of foster parents who had raised
Esterhaz. They had beaten and abused him almost daily, keeping him home from school
to work out of sight in the back of the butcher shop—he was a sinner, he had to work
until his hands bled, he had to memorize Scripture to save his soul, he was damned
no matter how much Scripture he memorized so he required more beatings. He had been
taken from the butcher’s house only after a social worker had made an unannounced
visit and discovered him covered in bruises and locked in the freezer “to repent.”