Koko (60 page)

“That’s
right
,” Beevers said. He looked carefully at Maggie, then candidly back at Murphy. “We
had a hell of a trip.”

“No luck?”

“The man disappeared.” Beevers’ mouth opened. “Ah. You think this Koko is Tim Underhill?”

“It’s one of the possibilities we’re considering.” He smiled with as much false candor
as Beevers. “He certainly isn’t Wilson Manly or Spanky Burrage. Or any of you.”

Other questions came crowding up, but Harry asked only the most immediate. “Then who’s
the guy who went crazy in Times Square?”

Murphy pushed himself away from the table. “Let’s go find out.”

Murphy stayed close to Michael Poole as they walked toward the stairs. “Our friend
still won’t give his name. He claims to have forgotten it. In fact, he claims to have
been born in New York City at the age of eighteen.” He coughed. “In the back room
of a bar called The Anvil.” He gave Poole an almost human glance. “He drew us a map
of Pumo’s apartment. Then he clammed up and refused to say anything except that he
had a mission to clean up the filth in the world.”

Murphy led them through the big office space on the ground floor, through a door at
the back, and down a wide set of stairs. Over the noise of typewriters clacking in
nearby offices, Poole heard Harry Beevers speaking softly and urgently to Maggie Lah.

“Here we are,” Murphy said, swinging open a broad set of doors that resembled a theater
with its rows of banked seats, raised platform, and overhead lights.

Murphy took them to the second row of seats, where Maggie filed in behind Poole, followed
by Beevers and Conor Linklater. Then he stepped to a podium in the central aisle one
row behind them, and flipped on the stage lights. He picked up a microphone
on a cord, scrutinized it for a switch, and turned it on. “We are here now,” he spoke
into the microphone. “Let’s get the screen in place, and you can send the men out.”
He frowned down at the podium and flipped another switch. A long screen marked with
height registrations rolled out on a track across the stage.

“Ready,” Murphy said. “Each man on his mark. Once they are onstage, I will direct
each man in turn to step forward, tell us a few words about himself, and then step
backward.”

Five men emerged from the left side of the stage and began moving uncertainly toward
what Poole supposed were numbers embedded in the stage. At first glance, the three
short, dark-haired men in the lineup could have been Victor Spitalny. One wore a grey
business suit, one a checked sports jacket, and the third jeans and a denim jacket.
The man in the checked jacket looked most like Spitalny, but his eyes were more widely
spaced and his chin was broader. He looked bored and impatient. The fourth was a heavyset
blond man with a lively cynical Irish face. The fifth man, who was wearing a loose
khaki shirt, fatigue pants, and cowboy boots, had shaved his head some time ago and
then let it grow out to a uniform dark cap still short enough to show the scalp beneath.
He alone smiled at the row of people looking up at him.

Murphy called out their numbers in a toneless voice.

“My name is Bill and I work as a bartender on the Upper East Side.”

“My name is George. I am the leader of the Boy Scout troop in Washington Heights.”

“My name is Franco and I am from Ocean Avenue in Brooklyn.”

“My name is Liam. I am in the security business.”

When number five was called, the last man stepped forward. “I have no name because
I have no past.”

“Oh, my God,” Maggie said. “I don’t believe it.”

Murphy ordered the fifth man to step back, and then asked all five to leave the stage.
When the stage was empty he leaned on the podium and scowled down at Maggie. “Well?”

“The last man, the one in the middle of his sex change, was wearing Tina’s boots.
I’m sure of it. I know who he is.”

“Who is he?”

“I mean—I don’t know his real name, but he called himself Dracula and had a long Mohawk
before he shaved it off. Tina picked him up at a club last year, or was picked up
by him. He was pretending to be a girl. After they got back to the loft, he beat
Tina unconscious and stole a lot of things from him. Including the boots he was wearing
up there. They were Tina’s favorites. I think they cost a lot of money.”

“Dracula,” Murphy said.

“But he isn’t the man I saw in the loft.”

“No,” Murphy said. “I guess he wouldn’t be. Gentlemen, you may leave. I want to thank
you for your cooperation, and I will be speaking to each of you again. Please call
me if you can think of anything I ought to know. Miss Lah, will you come back upstairs
with me, please?”

Maggie stood up slightly before the other three and went out into the central aisle
where Murphy stood waiting for her. She caught Michael’s eye and raised her eyebrows.
Michael nodded, then stood up with the other two.

After seeing the others into a cab and promising to join them at Harry’s apartment
in half an hour, Michael walked back down Tenth Street to wait outside the police
station. The weather was still too cold to be really comfortable, but Michael enjoyed
standing on Tenth Street in the tingling air. The sunlight lay like gilt on the pretty
brownstones across the street. He felt suspended between the end of something and
the beginning of something absolutely new. Stacy Talbot had been his last real tie
to Westerholm—everything else that held him there could be carried away in a suitcase.

He saw how he easy it would be to keep watching the television program that his life
had become. The bright dailyness of his work, the stream of snuffling children and
their worried mothers, Judy and her anxieties, the lax dull partnership of the long
mornings, the nice white house, the walks to the duck pond, Bloody Marys at Sunday
brunch, the numbing details that rushed you forward minute by minute.

The door of the police station opened with a click as decisive as the crack of a bone,
and Michael turned around and straightened up as Maggie Lah came out. Her beautiful
hair caught the sun in a smooth mesh of rich deep lustrous black.

“Oh, good,” she said. “I wasn’t sure you’d still be here. I couldn’t say anything
back in there.”

“I know.”

“I really just wanted to see
you.
Conor is wonderful, but he isn’t too sure about me. And Harry Beevers is a tremendous … distraction.”

“Especially to Harry Beevers.”

“They can spare you for a little while?”

“For as long as you like.”

“Then they may never get you back,” Maggie said, and put her arm through his. “I want
you to help me go someplace. Will you do it?”

“I’m yours.” Poole suddenly, strongly felt that he and this girl were Tina Pumo’s
survivors: as much as Walter and Tommy Pumo, they were the family Tina had left behind.

“It isn’t very far. It isn’t even much of a place, just a little neighborhood restaurant.
Tina and I used to go there—really
he
used to go there, it was
his
place and he shared it with me, and I don’t want to feel like sinking into the sidewalk
everytime I walk past it. Do you mind?”

“I’m very pleased,” Poole said. Maggie’s arm was linked with his and she matched him
stride for stride. “Is there any other place I can take you to after this one?”

She glanced up. “There might be.”

He let her have her own time in which to say whatever she wished to say.

“I want to know you,” Maggie finally said.

“I’m glad.”

“He liked you best of all—of all the men he had been over there with.”

“That’s very nice to know.”

“He was always very pleased when you came into Saigon. Part of Tina was not very secure.
It meant a lot to him that when you came all the way into town, you would pick his
place to come to. That proved to him that you hadn’t forgotten him.”

“I haven’t forgotten him, Maggie,” he said, and she tightened her grip on his arm.

They were walking down Sixth Avenue, and the sunlight seemed warmer here than the
cross streets. Colorful, ordinary street life flowed around them, students and housewives
and businessmen and a few boys in lipstick. At the corner they walked past a hunched,
bearded man in rags whose feet had blackened and swollen like footballs. Just past
him a blurry-looking man of about Michael’s age thrust at him a paper cup containing
a few dimes and quarters. He had a bloody crusty scab on his chin, and in the
slits of his eyes his pupils gleamed feverishly, tigerishly. Vietnam. Michael dropped
a few quarters in the cup.

“Not far now,” Maggie said, and her voice was trembling.

Poole nodded.

“It’s like living with a big—emptiness.” She threw out her free hand. “It’s so hard.
And because I’m afraid, it’s even worse than that. Oh, I’ll tell you about it when
we get there.”

A few minutes later, Maggie led him up the steps into La Groceria. A tall dark-haired
woman in black tights led them to a table by the window. The sunlight drifted in the
big windows and lay across the polished, rippling pattern of the caramel-colored wooden
tabletops. They ordered salads and coffee. “I hate being afraid,” Maggie said. “But
all by itself, grief is too much. Grief gets you when you’re not looking. It comes
up and blindsides you.” She glanced up at him in a way that mingled intelligence and
sympathy. “You were talking to Conor about a patient of yours …?”

Poole nodded. “Just before I drove down here I learned that she died.” He tried to
smile at her, and was glad that he did not have to see the result.

Her face altered, smoothed out, became more inward. “In Taipei my mother used to catch
rats with traps in our garden. The traps didn’t kill the rats, they just held them.
My mother poured boiling water over them. The rats knew exactly what was going to
happen to them. First they fought and jumped at my mother, and then finally everything
left them but fear. They just became fear.” A cloud somewhere east of Sixth Avenue
separated, and the sunlight doubled in color and intensity. She was looking at him
with a troubled but defiant gaze, and Poole experienced her concentrated attention
as an undivided blessing. Right now, in the sudden drenching fall of yellow light,
he became extraordinarly conscious of the smooth roundness of her arms, the beautiful
golden shade of her skin, her small witty sensuous intelligent mouth. Her youth was
deceptive, he understood, seeing her in the blaze of light, and if you judged her
youth as being one of the central facts of her being, you made a great mistake. A
moment ago he had been moved by her sheer prettiness, and now he saw so much more
in the wide unblinking face before him that her prettiness became irrelevant.

“They were the worst things in the world when that happened,” she said. “The most
pathetic. I felt like that when—when it happened. When he almost caught me.” She paused
for a moment,
and her face smoothed out again with the weight of what she was remembering. “I could
see him, but not his face. I suppose I was a little crazy. I felt as though I must
have been covered in blood, and I kept checking myself, but there wasn’t a drop on
me.” Her eyes met his with an electric jolt.

“You want to pour boiling water over him,” Poole said.

“That could be.” Her mouth twisted in an odd little smile. “Could someone like that
ever be afraid?”

When he said nothing, Maggie went on in a rush. “When I was in the loft—during that
time—if you had seen him too—you wouldn’t think so. He talked very smoothly. He was
almost seductive. I don’t mean he wasn’t utterly crazy, because he was, but he was
in control of himself. Confident. He was trying to charm me out of hiding, and if
Tina’s body hadn’t been right in front of me, he might have done it.” Her hands, of
the same golden tan as the rest of her, with long elegant fingers and incongruously
square, sturdy wrists, had begun to tremble. “He was like a—a demon. I thought I’d
never get away.”

Now she looked really stricken, and he took her hands in his. “It sounds funny, but
I think he’s been frightened all his life.”

“You sound like you almost feel sorry for him.”

Poole thought of Underhill’s long labor. “It isn’t that so much—I guess I feel we
have to invent him in order to understand him.”

Maggie slowly drew her hands out from under his. “You must be learning about that
from your friend Timothy Underhill.”

“What?”

Maggie propped her chin in her hand. Wholly fraudulent, wide-eyed innocent incredulity,
comic right down to its core, flashed at him for a perfectly timed beat. “Your friend
Harry Beevers can’t act very well.”

So she knew: she had seen it. “I suppose not,” he said.

“This man Underhill came back with you.”

Poole nodded. “You’re wonderful.”

“Harry Beevers is the one who is wonderful. I suppose he wants the police to waste
time trying to locate Tim Underhill while he actually finds Koko himself.”

“Something like that.”

“You’d better be careful, Doctor.” A multitude of unspoken warnings crowded in behind
this one, and Poole did not know if he had been advised to beware of Koko or Harry
Beevers. “Do you have time to take me to one more place? I don’t want to go there
alone.”

“I suppose I don’t have to ask where it is?”

“Hope not.” She stood up.

They went outside to a Sixth Avenue that seemed to have been darkened by their conversation.
Poole felt that Koko, Victor Spitalny, might be watching them from behind the big
windows across the avenue, or through binoculars from some high hidden vantage point.

“Get a cab,” she said. “There’s one more thing I want to do.”

She picked up something at the newsstand, joined Michael as a cab pulled over, and
climbed into the back seat. He looked down at her lap and saw that what she had bought
was a copy of the
Village Voice.

Michael told the driver to stop first on Grand Street off West Broadway, then to take
him to Twenty-fourth and Tenth.