Koko (55 page)

How did you come to be homeless?

My room was appropriated for other uses by my landlord.

And your possessions?

I carry all I own.

You have no job?

I am a writer, of some small reputation.

The owner extended a fat hand.
I am Chin Wu-Fu.

“Timothy Underhill,” Koko said, taking the man’s hand.

Chin gestured for him to follow. They went outside, Koko shrugging on his knapsack,
to bustle down the block in the cold and turn into Bayard Street. Chin Wu-Fu hustled
on ahead of him, hunching his shoulders against the cold. Koko strode on behind him
for two blocks, and followed him as he turned north into narrow, empty Elizabeth Street.
Halfway up the block, Chin ducked through a curved archway and disappeared. He ducked
back out and waved Koko in through the arch, and then ushered Koko into a small enclosed
brick courtyard that smelled faintly of cooking oil. Koko saw that the court would
always be sunless. Surrounded by tenement walls and fire escapes that clung like giant
mantises to the dingy brown brick, the court was no more than an insulating dead space
between the tenements and Elizabeth Street. It was perfect. The Chinese man in the
dark suit who
had admitted him to this dead still space was pulling at one of the rough doors set
into the tenement’s ground level.

We go downstairs
, the owner said, and plunged into the cold darkness of the stairwell.

Koko followed.

At the bottom of the stairs Chin switched on a bare lightbulb and flipped through
the hundreds of keys on a large ring before unlocking another door. Wordlessly, he
swung it open and with a sweeping gesture motioned Koko inside.

Koko stepped into a clammy absolute blackness. He knew instantly that this was going
to be just what he needed, and in the instant before Chin Wu-Fu groped for the cord
and turned on the light within, he already saw the windowless rectangular chamber,
the walls of a dark flaking green, the stained mattress on the floor, the population
of roaches, the rickety chair, and the rusty sink and rough toilet behind a screen.
He could not talk to the police, but he could find Michael Poole and Michael Poole
was a man who would understand
backwards and forwards.
Harry Beevers was the road backwards, and Michael Poole was the narrow lonely path
leading forward out of his cell. Another bare lightbulb came dimly to life. Down beneath
the surface of Elizabeth Street, he felt on his skin the wind that blew across a frozen
river. Pain was an ill-u-shun.

“As bad as that?” Pat asked.

“You don’t know the half of it.” Judy Poole exhaled loudly, oddly satisfied to have
at last arrived at this stage of their conversation. It was seven-thirty in the evening
of Michael’s third day back home, and the two women had been speaking on the telephone
for perhaps twenty-five minutes.

Judy heard a sigh from Pat Caldwell’s end of the line and quickly asked, “Am I keeping
you from anything?”

“Not really.” She paused. “Harry’s only called me once, so I can’t report anything.
They still plan to talk to the police, do they?”

This point had already been covered within ten minutes of the beginning of this conversation,
and Judy took it up again impatiently. “I told you that—they think they know something
about why Tina was murdered. Do you think they’re daydreaming? I
want
to think they’re daydreaming.”

“All this sounds so familiar,” Pat said. “Harry always knew the inside of a million
stories.”

“Anyhow,” Judy said, reverting to an earlier theme, “you
don’t know the worst. I don’t know what to do anymore. I’m incredibly anxious. I can
hardly get out of bed in the mornings, and when school’s over and it’s time to come
home, I dawdle and dawdle, but I’m hardly even aware of what I’m doing. I go around
the school looking for litter. I check to make sure the classroom doors are locked.
When I get home, it’s like, I don’t know, some kind of bomb went off and everything
got leveled and there’s only this terrible
silence
left.”

Judy paused, less for effect than to accommodate the thought that had just surfaced
within her. “You know what this is really like? It’s like what happened right after
Robbie died. But at least then Michael stayed home, he went to work and he did what
he was supposed to do. He was
around
at night. And I knew what was happening to him, so I knew what to do.”

“And you don’t know what to do now?”

“Obviously. That’s why I can hardly make myself come home at night. Michael and I
have scarcely had a good conversation in … he hasn’t been working, I can tell you
that. You think Harry’s been working? I doubt it.”

“Harry isn’t my problem,” Pat said promptly. “I wish him luck. I hope he sits down
and starts to work. You know he lost his job, don’t you? My brother couldn’t put up
with him any longer and let him go.”

“Your brother sounds like a great man, he always has,” Judy said, for a moment distracted
by the old grievance that she had never met Pat Caldwell’s distinguished older brother.

“Well, I think Charles gave him some money too,” Pat said. “Charles has a good heart,
basically. He doesn’t want Harry to suffer—my brother is what I guess you have to
call a Christian gentleman.”

“A Christian gentleman,” Judy said. Envy made her voice go dull and flat. “Are there
still such creatures?”

“In the ranks of fifty-eight-year-old heads of law firms, I guess.”

“Can I ask you a personal question? I promise you, it’s not just out of curiosity.”
She paused, either for effect or out of curiosity. “I want to know about your divorce.”

“What do you want to know about it?”

“More or less everything.”

“Oh, poor Judy,” Pat said. “I see, I guess. It’s never easy—not even getting divorced
from Harry Beevers was easy.”

“He was unfaithful.”

“Of course he was unfaithful,” Pat said. “Everybody’s unfaithful.” She did not sound
at all cynical, saying this.

“Michael wasn’t.”

“But you were, which I assume is one of the real topics of this conversation. But
if you want to know why I left Harry, I suppose I don’t mind talking about it a little
bit. In a way, Ia Thuc was really the reason.”

“Oh, come on,” Judy said.

“What he did at Ia Thuc. I don’t even know what it was. I don’t think anyone else
knows, either.”

“You mean he killed those children after all?”

“I’m sure he killed the children, Judy, but I’m talking about something else. I don’t
know what, and I don’t want to know, either. After we had been married ten years,
I took a look at him tying his bow tie in the mirror one morning, and I knew that
I couldn’t live with him anymore.”

“Well,
what
?”

“It’s too black. I don’t know. Charles told me he thought that Harry had a demon inside
him.”

“You got divorced because you had this mystical
feeling
about something that happened about ten years before, and for which Harry had already
been put on trial and found innocent?”

“I got divorced because I couldn’t stand the thought that he might touch me again.”
She was silent for a moment. “He wasn’t like Michael. Michael feels he has to atone
for whatever happened over there, but Harry never felt a second of regret.”

Judy could say nothing to this.

“So I looked at him tying his bow tie and I just finally
knew
and before I even knew I was going to say it I told him that he had to move out and
give me a divorce.”

“What did he do?”

“Finally he saw that I really meant it, and in order to protect his job with Charles,
he left without making much of a fuss.” After a second she added, “Of course I felt
that I should give him regular alimony payments, and I have. Harry can live at a decent
level for the rest of his life without working.”

What was a decent level, Judy wondered. Twenty thousand dollars? Fifty thousand? A
hundred thousand?

“I take it that you’re interested in the practicalities of divorce,” Pat eventually
said.

“Can’t fool you, can I?”

“Everybody else has, why not you too,” Pat said, laughing a little theatrically. “Has
Michael said anything?”

“Enough.” Silence. “No.” Silence. “I don’t know. He’s in a kind of daze because of
Tina.”

“So you haven’t talked about it with him.”

“It’s like—he’s just sinking out of sight, and he won’t let me pull him back up on
land.
My
land, with
me
.”

Pat waited until Judy had stopped crying into the telephone, and then said, “Did you
tell him about the man you dated when he was gone?”

“He
asked
me,” Judy wailed, losing control again. “It’s not that I wanted to hide it, it’s
not
that
—it’s the way he asked me. It was like—did you ever find the car keys? He was a lot
more interested in the girl, Stacy Talbot, than he was in me. I know he
hates
Bob.”

“The nice, stable guy who sails and plays tennis.”

“Right.”

“It’s not important, but I didn’t know they knew each other.”

“They met at a faculty Christmas party once, and Michael thought he was conceited.
Maybe Bob
is
a little conceited. But he’s a very dedicated man—he teaches high school English
because he thinks it’s important. He doesn’t have to do it.”

“Sounds like Michael decided he doesn’t ‘have to’ keep his practice.” Or to stay married,
Pat silently added.

“Why doesn’t he have to?” Judy asked in a plaintive voice. “Why did he work so hard
to get it, if he doesn’t have to keep it?”

That was not the question she was really asking, and Pat did not answer it.

“I feel scared,” Judy said. “It’s so humiliating. I hate it.”

“Do you think you have a future with your friend?”

“Bob Bunce doesn’t have much extra room in his life.” Judy now sounded very dry-eyed.
“In spite of seeming to have nothing
but
room in his life. He has his sports car. He has his sailboat and his tennis. He has
his job and his students. He has Henry James. He has his mother. I don’t think he’ll
ever make room for a wife.”

“Ah,” Pat said, “but you didn’t start seeing him with the idea of marrying him.”

“Isn’t that a comfort. Wait a minute …” Judy apparently set down the telephone and
was gone for several minutes. Pat Caldwell could hear what sounded like ice cubes
cracking out of a metal tray. There came the chink of glass against glass. “Mr. Bunce
fancies the whiskey that comes in a little blue bag with a drawstring. So I helped
myself to some of it. Maybe I should have made him come into a little blue bag with
a drawstring.”

Pat heard the ice cubes chinking as Judy raised or lowered her glass.

“Don’t you ever get lonely?” Judy asked.

“Give me a call if you need me,” Pat said. “I’ll come up and keep you company, if
you like.”