Koko (65 page)

This was the message left for him on an Orchid Boy playing card:

I HAVE NO NAME I AM ESTERHAZ

DYING IS BEFORE LIFE ETERNAL

BACKWARDS AND FORWARDS

Holding the card by its edges, Michael slipped it into his coat pocket and began walking
out of the woods. He yelled to the men that he was coming out, but the man in the
grey coat had become very excited. As Poole moved toward him, still checking the ground
for tripwires and signs of disturbance, the cemetery official gripped the sleeve of
the taller of his two employees and beat the air with his other arm. Poole could hear
only muffled waves of sound. He waved to show that he was coming out, there was nothing
to worry about, he was unarmed and a good citizen, nothing to get excited about. The
man in the grey suit was paying no attention to him now. A younger man in a dark coat
with square padded shoulders whom Poole recognized as the undertaker’s assistant moved
up beside his boss, who appeared uneasy and even slightly embarrassed by the other
man’s agitation. Michael took another step forward, realizing that he had to give
the playing card in his pocket to the police, and was suddenly stopped cold.

He had caught the smell of the god again, that wonderful clean fragrance of sunshine
and massed flowers. Here it was even stronger than it had been beside Robbie’s grave.
But the air did not darken and there were no trembling flashes of light. The god smell
was natural, not supernatural. A slight meandering breeze took it away, then brought
it to him again. Then Poole saw a rank of lolling blue and white wildflowers off to
his left and knew that they were the source of the magical scent. They had bloomed
in the sudden good weather and had somehow survived the fall in temperature. He could
not identify the flowers, which were as tall as tulips, with wide blue blossoms striped
white toward the center. They grew before a group of oak trees, and their sturdy green
stalks protruded like spears up out of the leaf mold. The powerful scent came to him
again.

When he looked forward, the man in the grey topcoat was leveling his index finger
at him.

“…  want that man out of there right now, Watkins,” Poole heard.

Watkins took a slow step forward, and the cemetery official shoved him in the small
of his back.

“Get a move on!”

Watkins began to half-stumble, half-trot toward Poole. He was shading his eyes to
see into the woods, and Poole knew that his form must have been flickering in and
out of sight, like Koko’s
a few minutes earlier. Watkins’ arms pumped, and his big belly heaved. The pale blob
of his face looked set and unhappy.

“Nothing’s wrong!” Poole yelled, holding out his hand.

Watkins moved to run in on the same wandering path Poole had taken. He ducked to pass
beneath the dark slanting line of the dead ash tree.

“Stop!”
Poole yelled.

The man in the grey coat stepped forward as if he were going to chase after Poole
himself, and Watkins took another heavy, lumbering step into the shade, and toppled
over out of sight.

Poole heard him thud into the ground. He began to run toward him. Watkins’ big fuzzy
head showed above a tangle of crisp vines, and his face turned toward Poole and showed
a round O of mouth. Then the O began to emit ragged screams.

“Shut up,” said his boss.

“He cut me!”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

Watkins held up a hand streaming with blood. “Look, Mr. Del Barca!”

Del Barca squared off in front of Poole and pointed his index finger at him again.
“Stop right there,” he said. “I’m having you arrested. You were trespassing on private
cemetery grounds, and you injured my employee here.”

“Calm down,” Poole said.

“I demand to know what you were doing back there.”

“I was trying to find the man who strung up this booby trap.” Poole moved over the
last bit of ground between himself and the fallen man. Watkins lay on his side with
his left leg out before him. He was red in the face, and his fuzzy hair was matted
with sweat. A widening blurry line of blood had already soaked through his left trouser
leg.

“What booby trap?” Del Barca asked.

“Just relax,” Poole said. “I’m a doctor, and this man needs my help. He ran into a
wire, and it did some damage to his leg.”

“What goddamned
wire
?” Del Barca yelled. “What the hell are you talking about?”

Poole bent down and ran his hand over the ground four or five inches behind Watkins.
There was the wire, shiny and taut. It looked very much like razor wire. He lightly
touched it. “You’re lucky it didn’t cut his leg off. Did you hear me telling him to
stop?”

“You telling him?” Del Barca shouted. “Whose fault is this?”

“Yours, for one. Suppose you see what this line is connected
to at either end. If it’s anything but a rock or a tree trunk, leave it alone.”

“Check it out,” Del Barca told his other employee, a younger man with the face of
a moustached gerbil.

“Don’t touch anything.”

Poole knelt beside the man and gently urged him to lie flat on the ground. “You’re
going to need stitches,” he said, “but we’ll see how bad the damage is.”

“You better be a real doctor, buddy,” Del Barca said.

“John. John,” the undertaker said in a soft, urgent voice. “I know him.”

Poole hooked his fingers into the cut in the fabric and ripped. A big bloody flap
of cloth came away in his hand. “That line might still be hooked up to explosives,”
he said to the young man with the gerbil’s face. The young man jerked his hand away
from the wire as if he had been scalded. There was a deep gash in Watkins’ leg from
which blood pulsed out at a slow steady rate. “You need St. Bart’s emergency ward,”
he said, and looked up at Del Barca. “Give me your necktie.”

“My what?”

“Your tie. Do you want this man to bleed to death?”

La Barca resentfully untied his necktie and handed it to Poole. He turned to the undertaker.
“All right, who is he?”

“I don’t remember his name, but he’s a doctor, all right.”

“My name is Dr. Michael Poole.” He wound Del Barca’s Countess Mara necktie three times
around Watkins’ leg to stop the flow of blood and twisted it tight before knotting
it. “You’ll be okay as soon as you get to St. Bart’s,” he told Watkins, and stood
up. “I’d get him there as soon as you can. You could drive right up here and put him
in your car.”

An almost aesthetic expression of distaste passed over Del Barca’s features. “Wait
a second. Did you set up this … this booby trap?”

“I just recognized it,” Poole said. “From Vietnam.”

Del Barca blinked.

“That wire’s just tied to trees on both ends,” called the rabbit-faced boy. “Cut right
through the bark.”

Watkins whimpered.

“Go on, Traddles,” Del Barca said. “Use your hearse. It’s closer.”

Traddles nodded gloomily and padded away downhill toward his hearse. His assistant
followed him. “I was here for the Talbot funeral,” Poole said to Del Barca. “I walked
over here to look at
my son’s grave, and I saw a man disappearing into these woods. He looked so odd that
I followed him, and when I saw that tripwire I got interested enough to follow him
deeper into the woods. Then you started yelling at me. I guess the man just got away.”

“Musta been parked alongside the expressway,” said the younger man.

They watched Traddles drive toward them along the narrow lane. When he had come as
close as he could, he got out of the cab and waited by the door. The assistant ran
around and opened the back.

“Go on, get him up,” Del Barca said. “You can stand, Watkins. It wasn’t exactly an
amputation.” He turned a sour, suspicious face to Michael. “I’m going to the police
about this.”

“Good idea,” Michael said. “Have them check out that whole area back there, but tell
them to be careful.”

The two men watched the big man limp off toward Traddles’ hearse, leaning on his small
companion and hissing with every step. “Do you know the name of those flowers growing
just inside the woods?” Michael asked Del Barca.

“We don’t plant flowers.” Del Barca gave a grim little smile. “We
sell
flowers.”

“Big blue and white ones,” Poole persisted. “With a strong, carrying scent.”

“Weeds,” Del Barca said. “If it grows back there, we pretty much let it go to hell
by itself.”

When Michael returned to Conor’s empty apartment he looked out of the window down
onto Water Street. He did not expect to see Victor Spitalny looking back up at him,
for Spitalny would have had no trouble melting into his particular form of invisibility
among the crowds of tourists that filled the renovated Water Street all during the
weekends, but he gave the crowd a long look anyhow. He had to assume that Spitalny
knew about the apartment, and that he was staying in it.

Poole had been shaken that afternoon, in more than one way. The appearance of Victor
Spitalny had forced him to delay thinking about it, but something had shown itself
to him—had revealed itself—before Robbie’s grave. Of course it had been a hallucination.
Stress, anxiety, and guilt had pushed him over the edge of
rationality. The wonderful odor that had seemed to accompany the appearance of a supernatural
being had been the scent of early wildflowers. Still it had been a wonderful experience.
In the midst of his pains and troubles he had momentarily seen everything as if for
the first time. The internal weight of every particle of being had
seized
him with its own seriousness and power. He wished that he could describe this experience
to someone who might understand it or have shared it.

He wanted to talk about it with Tim Underhill.

Poole gave a last look down at busy Water Street, and went back into the empty room.
Conor’s jacket was not on the hook inside the front door. Michael went to the dining
table and finally saw what he should have seen as soon as he entered. It was a small
rectangle of paper torn from the pad beneath the phone in Conor’s little galley kitchen
and on it was printed
MIKEY.

Poole smiled and turned it over to read Conor’s message:
Going up to Ellen’s place to be with her a couple days. You understand. Good luck
in Milwaukee. Love, Conor. PS. She liked you. PPS. Here’s the number in case you have
to call.
A 203 number had been scrawled at the bottom of the note.

He took the playing card from his pocket and set it down next to the note on Conor’s
table.
I have no home.
Koko had seen Beevers’ flyers.
I am Esterhaz.
This revealed that Spitalny had read Tim Underhill’s best book, and it also answered
the phrase “We who know your real name.” And maybe it was a declaration that Spitalny
intended to kill himself, as Esterhaz had done. If he felt like Esterhaz, Spitalny
was in torment: like Esterhaz, he had killed too often and was becoming conscious
of what he had done. Poole wanted to believe that Koko’s appearance in the cemetery
had been a kind of farewell gesture, a last look at someone from his old life before
he slit his wrists or put a bullet in his brain and found
life eternal.

Backwards and forwards
was still the locked door of a madman’s private code.

On another of the white message sheets from beneath Conor’s telephone Michael copied
out the three lines of the message. Then he took a plastic baggie from a drawer, inserted
the original with a tweezers, and folded down the flap. The paper fit neatly into
the baggie. He dropped the little pin into the baggie.

He wrote a message to Lieutenant Murphy on another sheet of paper:
I wanted to get this to you as soon as possible. It was pinned to a tree in the woods
behind Memorial Park Cemetery in Westerholm. Koko must have followed me there when
I went
to a patient’s funeral. I am going out of town tomorrow, will call when I return.
This note has been handled only by its edges. Dr. Michael Poole.
He would buy a manila envelope before going to the airport, and mail everything to
Murphy’s precinct.

Next he dialed Saigon’s telephone number to talk to Tim Underhill.

“So you escaped from Harry.”

“It just kind of made sense to move over here,” Underhill said. “There isn’t much
room, but I can get out of Harry’s way, and I can get on with what I’m writing.” He
paused. “And I can see my old friend Vinh, which is pure amazement. I couldn’t even
be sure he was alive anymore. But he got out of Vietnam, made it to Paris, got married,
and came here after a bunch of his relatives who were already living here made it
possible. His wife died giving birth to his daughter, Helen, and he’s been raising
her ever since. She’s a charming kid, and she took to me right away, too. I’m a sort
of uncle, or maybe I should say auntie. She really is a dear little thing. Vinh brings
her over here nearly every day.”

“Vinh isn’t living there with you?”

“Well, I’m just in a little room off the kitchen—the police still haven’t unsealed
Tina’s loft. Vinh moved into the apartment where Helen had been staying. He had been
staying there most nights anyhow, which is why he wasn’t around the night Tina was
killed. One of his sister’s boys got married and moved to Astoria, so there’s an extra
bedroom. Anyhow, I started writing again, and I’m about a hundred pages into a book.”

“You’re still planning to come to Milwaukee?”

“More than ever,” Underhill said. “I gather we will have Maggie’s company.”

“I hope so,” Poole said. “There’s something you ought to know about, which is the
real reason I called.” He told him about seeing Koko and finding the card, and read
its three lines aloud.

“He’s pretty confused. Something got to him. Maybe he regained enough sanity to want
to quit what he’s doing. Being back in America would give him a whole series of shocks,
if I can go by my own example. Anyhow, that mention of Hal Esterhaz makes me all the
more interested in going to Milwaukee.”