Koko (50 page)

“What’s a yuppie?” Underhill asked.

“A young guy with a lot of money,” Poole said.

“A girl in a grey flannel suit and a pair of Reeboks,” Conor said.

“What are Reeboks?” Underhill asked.

“He was killed at JFK after he arrived on a flight from San Francisco?” Poole asked.

The stewardess nodded. She was a tall blonde whose name tag said she was named Marnie,
and she had an eager, playful expression in her eyes. “My friend Lisa said she saw
him a couple of times a month. She and I used to go around together and do all this
crazy stuff, but she moved to New York last year and now we just talk on the phone.
But she told me all about it.” She gave Conor a curious sidelong look.

“Can I tell you something? I want to tell you something.”

Conor nodded. Marnie bent down and whispered into his ear.

Poole heard Conor nearly gasp in astonishment; then he laughed so loudly that the
people in the seats before them stopped talking.

“See you guys later,” Marnie said, and pushed her cart up the aisle.

“What was that about?” Michael asked. Conor’s entire face had turned red. Tim Underhill
flicked a little lizard smile at Poole and looked like William Burroughs, very wise
and dry as a desert.

“Nothing.”

“She came on to you?”

“Not exactly. Lay off.”

“Good old Marnie,” Underhill said.

“Change the subject. Lay off.”

“Okay, listen to this,” Michael said. “Somebody off a San Francisco flight was killed
when he landed in New York. Spitalny could have landed in San Francisco, just as we
are doing, and then connected to a New York flight, as we are also doing.”

“Farfetched,” Underhill said, “but very interesting. What was the name of the stewardess’s
friend? Who knew the dead man?”

“Lisa,” Conor said, still blushing.

“I wonder if Lisa noticed anybody talking to the man who was killed?”

At the beginning of
Never Say Never Again
, James Bond was sent to a health spa. Every ten minutes someone new tried
to kill him. Pretty nurses went to bed with him. A beautiful woman took a snake from
around her neck and threw it into a car window.

When Marnie returned Poole asked her, “What’s your friend Lisa’s last name?”

“Mayo. Like in Ireland. Like in Hellman’s.”

It was farfetched, but so was Bangkok. So was Westerholm. Life in general was farfetched.

“Did you know,” Underhill was saying, “in Bangkok you can give a guy about sixty bucks
and go down into a basement and see a guy kill a girl? First he beats her up. Then
he kills her. You watch her die and you go home.”

Conor had removed his earphones and was staring at Underhill. “I guess you know about
that.”

“What, did you go there?”

Conor said nothing. “Did you?” he finally asked.

Underhill shook his head.

“Come on,” Conor said.

“Never. Just heard about it.”

“Don’t lie to me, man.”

“I’m not lying.”

Conor frowned.

“I have the feeling you met some interesting people,” Underhill said. “I want to tell
you something.”

How Dengler Died (2):

You have to see Captain Batchittarayan, you have to see his desk, his office, his
face …

Everything was hard, pocked, suspicious—everything smelled like death and Lysol. One
light, of dull metal, shone at first down on his neat brown hands on the scarred empty
metal surface of his desk; later, as if by itself, it swung upward, hurting my eyes.

Yes, it was his men who had responded to the near-riot, to call it that, the “near-riot”
in the Patpong area on the day in question, it was he, at that time Sergeant Batchittarayan,
who had supervised the transportation of the mutilated body to the city’s morgue.
It was he who had pulled the tags out of the mush on the
man’s chest. It was distasteful: it
had been
distasteful, and the memory of the white American’s body was still unhappy. And the
man before him was distasteful, with his connection to it, and with his possession
of a secret.

There had been others—other Americans on R&R who had gone mad. Two years before PFC
Dengler’s death, a Sergeant Walter Khoffi had hacked several patrons of the Sex-Sex
bar to death before going outside and killing a massage parlor tout on the street,
and a quiet Bible-quoting boy from Oklahoma named Marvin Springwater had knifed three
little boys to death before the traffic ran him down on Sukhumvit Road.

So the officer’s distaste had some justification.

He was interested in how one knew about the child. The child existed, but had never
been located or identified.

Weren’t you asking about the child?

Questions about the child had attracted the Captain’s attention.

Fortunately she had cried out, this unknown child. The two men and the girl had been
in a narrow alley. Her screams drew attention to them. She did not cease screaming
when she burst out of the alley.

Nobody knew the girl. She was a stranger. That was to be expected, Patpong being the
opposite of a settled residential area. There was agreement on two points, however.
She was not a bar girl or massage parlor employee—that much was clear to all those
who saw her emerge from the narrow alley and run screaming down the street. And she
was not a Thai. She was perhaps a Cambodian child, or Chinese, or Vietnamese.

It was not supposed that the young soldiers knew that. To the young soldiers, it was
supposed, all young Asian women looked alike.

And so the crowd of men who happened to be in that particular block of Phat Pong Road
that afternoon jumped the American soldier—jumped both of them—and one got away and
one was torn to pieces.

Do you know who was innocent? asked the Captain. The girl was innocent. And the crowd
was innocent.

So one soldier fell beneath the innocent crowd, or both did. Witnesses were vague
about this. The witnesses had seen only the running girl, they had not of course participated
in the assault.

A thousand years ago it would have been a great epic, this story (said the Captain).
The innocent girl, her attacker torn to pieces by the righteous mob. Four hundred
years ago it would
have become a legend told in a song, and every child in southern Thailand would have
known the song. The disappearing girl—she could have disappeared into
that.
Now there is not even a novel about her, not even a rock and roll song, not even
a cartoon strip.

A month before this conversation with the Captain, Timothy Underhill had stood on
Phat Pong Road and saw a girl rushing toward him down the middle of the street. He
had been totally clean for something like nine weeks. He had been trying to write—a
novel again at last, something still coming to life in his mind about a boy who had
been raised in a shed behind his house, like an animal. He had been sober for three
months. He heard the screams, which sounded as if she carried a microphone in her
throat. He saw her bloody palms and blood-spattered hair. She came threshing toward
him with her hands out and her mouth open. No one but he saw her.

Underhill wept on the pavement, unnoticed by the men pushing past him. He was
there
again, alive inside himself.

I went home, he told Poole, and I wrote a story called “Blue Rose.” It took six weeks.
After that I wrote a story of the same length called “The Juniper Tree.” It took a
month. I’ve been writing ever since.

Did you really think I’d miss this plane?

After I saw her, then I had to see everything—then I had to follow the story. It wouldn’t
come to me anymore. You were going to come to me, or he was, but not it. I didn’t
know I was waiting for either you or Koko to show up, but that’s what I was doing.

Another movie began, but Poole had closed his eyes before the titles came up on the
screen.

He was driving his car down a long dark road into an emptiness like a desert. He had
been traveling many days; though the means by which he knew this were unclear, he
was in a novel called
Into the Darkness
, written by Tim Underhill. The long road went straight on through the night, and
as he drove Michael realized that he was Hal Esterhaz, a homicide detective, and that
he had been summoned from the scene of one murder to that of another, far distant.
He had been traveling for weeks, going from corpse to corpse, following the killer’s
footsteps without getting
any nearer to him. There had been many bodies, and all of them were those of people
he had known long ago in a dreamlike existence before everything had darkened.

Far ahead in the darkness he saw two dots of yellow light shining out beside the road.

In
Into the Darkness
he would drive through the dark in a gradually emptying world. There would always
be another body, and he would never find the killer, for
Into the Darkness
was like a theme that repeated itself through a thousand variations, circling around
and around the same cycle of chords. There would be no true ending. In
Into the Darkness
one day the killer would retire to raise orchids or turn into smoke, and then all
meaning would be gone; the melody would trickle out in meaningless random sounds.
For his job was to catalogue the killings, and the only truly satisfactory conclusion
to that task would be to enter one of those dripping slum basements and find the killer
waiting for him with a raised knife.

Now he could see that the yellow lights by the roadside were lanterns—little lanterns
sending out beams of light.

Only when he had come directly abreast of the lanterns could he see who held them
up. His son Robbie, whose name was Babar, stood by the roadside holding one of the
lanterns aloft. Exactly his size, gigantic, the rabbit Ernie stood beside him on his
hind legs, holding out the other lantern.

The boy named Babar and the rabbit turned their soft eyes on the man driving past;
their lamps gleamed.

He felt a great spreading peace.

The car pulled past the tender boy and the big upright rabbit, and for a long time
he could see the lights of their lanterns in his rearview mirror. The sense of peace
stayed with him until the road ended at the bank of a great grey rushing river. He
got out of his car and watched the great muscular river move past, rolling up a huge
sinewy shoulder here, a vast thigh there.

Then he knew that he and the killer too were a part of the river’s great rushing body,
and a terrible mingling of pain and joy, deep deep joy and pain, spread through him
and spoke in their loud joined voice, and he cried out and woke up with the river
in his eyes.

The river was gone. “Hey, Mikey,” Conor said, smiling almost shyly at him.

And then he only knew that he knew Koko’s identity. Then the feeling of knowing went
too, and he remembered only that he
had dreamed of looking at a great river and driving a car past Robbie, named Babar,
who held up a lantern.

Into the darkness.

“You okay, Mikey?” Conor asked.

Poole nodded.

“You made a noise.”

“Noise, nothing,” Underhill said. “You practically sang ‘The Star-Spangled Banner.’ ”

Poole rubbed the stubble on his face. The screen had been folded back up into the
bulkhead, and most of the cabin was dark. “I thought I understood something about
Koko, but it went away as soon as I woke up.”

Conor uttered a wordless exclamation full of recognition.

“Those things happen to you?” Underhill asked Conor.

“I can’t really talk about it—I thought I understood something too,” Conor half-mumbled.
“It was real strange.” He tilted his head and looked at Underhill. “You were at that
place, weren’t you? Where they shot the girl?”

“Sometimes I think I must have an evil twin,” Underhill said. “Like the man in the
iron mask.”

They fell silent, and the lost understanding stirred within Michael once again. It
was as if his son’s lantern shone its light on the events in that village fifteen
years ago: he saw a long hillside leading down to a circle of hootches, a woman carrying
water downhill, oxen grazing. Smoke rose in a narrow grey column. Into the darkness,
there it is.

Dengler’s arm was wrapped in gauze and tape, and his face was white and his eyes blurry.
He said he didn’t feel anything, and he refused to lie down and wait for them to come
back for him. Ia Thuc was supposed to be where Elvis the sniper came from, it was
supposed to be the village that sheltered and fed him, and Dengler wanted to be with
the platoon when they got there. Lieutenant Beevers had been leading search-and-avoid
missions since Dragon Valley, playing it very cool, and Ia Thuc was his chance to
shine. Intelligence said that it was a stockpile for food and weapons, and the Tin
Man was eager to make a good haul, boost the body count, move himself a little further
up along the way to full colonel. The Tin Man was always eager to make a good body
count, because only half the lieutenant colonels in Nam ever got promoted, and after
making every cut along the way he did not intend to flunk this one. The Tin Man saw
himself as a future division commander, two stars. He was desperate to move out of
middle management before the war dried up on him.