Koko (67 page)

“I don’t know if there’s any name for those experiences,” Underhill said. He sat near
the window, Poole on the aisle, Maggie between them. They were somewhere in the air
over Pennsylvania, or Ohio, or Michigan. “You could call them peak experiences, but
that’s a term that covers a lot of ground. Or you might call it ecstasy, since that’s
what it sounds like. You might even call it an Emersonian moment. You know Emerson’s
essay, ‘Nature’? He talks about becoming a transparent eyeball—‘I am nothing; I see
all; the currents of Universal Being circulate through me.’ ”

“Sounds like just another way to face the elephant,” Maggie said in her precise unsentimental
voice. Both Poole and Underhill laughed. “You should not make so much of it. When
you saw your son, you should have expected something like this … 
experience
to follow.”

“I didn’t see my son,” Poole began, and then his objections dried to powder in his
mouth. He had not been certain that he was going to tell Underhill and Maggie about
the “god,” and his uncertainty
had continued even while he described what he had seen, but Maggie’s short sentence
rang within him.

“But you did,” Maggie said. “You saw what he would be like as a man. You saw the real
Robbie.” She looked at him very quizzically. “That’s why you loved the figure you
saw.”

“Are you for hire?” Underhill asked.

“How much money you got?” Maggie asked in the same disinterested voice. “Going to
cost you plenty, if you want me to keep saying the obvious.”

“I liked the theory that it was an angel.”

“I did too,” Maggie said. “Very possible.”

They rode on for a time in silence. Michael knew that Robbie could not have grown
into the man he had seen: but he thought that he had been given a vision of a perfect
Robbie, one in whom all his best instincts had flowered. It would have been some quality
beyond happiness, something like rapture, to have fathered the man he had seen beside
his son’s grave. In a sense he had fathered that man, exactly. No one else had. He
had not hallucinated or imagined the man so much as he had
authored
him.

Poole felt as though with a few simple words Maggie Lah had restored his son to him.
For as long as he lived, that boy was his, that man was his boy. His mourning was
really over.

When at last he could speak again, Poole asked Tim if he had done any research for
The Divided Man.
“I mean, did you consult any guidebooks, anything like that?”

“I don’t think there are any guidebooks to Milwaukee,” Underhill said.

Maggie permitted herself an amused little noise that sounded very like a snicker.

“Most American cities don’t have guidebooks,” Underhill said. “I mainly remembered
what M.O. Dengler used to say about it. After that I turned my imagination loose on
it, and I guess it did a reasonable job.”

“In other words,” Michael said, “you could say that you authored the city.”

“I authored it,” Underhill agreed, looking faintly puzzled.

Maggie Lah turned a gleaming eye upon Poole. She astounded him by lightly patting
his knee, as if in congratulation or commendation.

“Am I missing something?” Underhill asked.

“You’re doing pretty well so far,” Maggie said.

“Well, I have a thought about Victor Spitalny and his parents,” Tim said, trying to
cross his legs and learning that he did
not have enough room. “Imagine how most parents would feel if their child disappeared.
Don’t you think that they would keep telling themselves that the child was still alive,
no matter how long the disappearance lasted? I suppose that Spitalny’s parents are
a little different from most. Remember—they made their kid feel like an adopted orphan,
if my imagination is any good. They turned their kid into the Victor Spitalny we knew,
and he later turned himself into Koko. So I’ll bet that his mother says she knows
he’s dead. She already knows he killed Dengler. But I bet she knows that he’s done
other killings.”

“So what will she think about us and what we’re doing?”

“She might just think we’re fools and humor us along with cups of tea. Or she might
lose her temper and throw us out.”

“Then why are we on this airplane?”

“Because she might be an honest lady who had a cuckoo for a son. There are lots of
different kinds of misfortune, and her son might have been one of the worst. In which
case she’ll share any information she has.”

Underhill saw the expression on Michael’s face and added that the only thing he really
knew about Milwaukee was that it was going to be about thirty degrees colder than
New York.

“I think I can see why they don’t have many tourists,” Maggie said.

At one o’clock in the afternoon, Michael Poole stood at the window of his room in
the Pforzheimer Hotel, looking down at what would have been a four-lane street if
parallel drifts of snow nearly the height of the parking meters had not claimed half
of the first lane on either side. Here and there cars had been submerged beneath the
parallel ranges of old snow, and channels like mountain passes had been cut between
the cars to provide passage to the sidewalk. On the cleared portion of the road, intermittent
cars, most of them crusted with frozen khaki-colored slush, streamed past in single
file. The green of the traffic light on Wisconsin Avenue, at the front of the hotel
and at the very edge of Michael’s vision, gleamed out in the oddly dusky air as if
through twilight. The temperature was zero degrees Fahrenheit. It was like being in
the middle of Moscow. A few men and women bundled in thick coats moved quickly down
the sidewalk toward the light. The light
changed from a gleaming green nimbus to a gleaming red nimbus, and even though no
cars appeared in the intersection, the pedestrians stopped to obey the
DON’T WALK
command.

It really was the city Dengler had described. Poole felt like a Muscovite looking
at Moscow with eyes washed clean. He had finished the long, long process of mourning
his son. What was left of Robbie was within him. He did not even feel that he needed
the
Babar
books, which were still in the trunk of the Audi. The world would never be whole
again, that was that, but when had the world been whole? His grief had flared up,
then subsided again, and his eyes had been
washed clean.

Behind him Tim Underhill and Maggie Lah were laughing at something Tim had drawled.

The lights at the end of the block changed to green, and the command switched to
WALK.
The pedestrians began to move across the street.

Maggie had been put into a single room next to this one, where Poole and Underhill
had placed their bags on the two double beds. It was a high-vaulted room with faded
flocked wallpaper, a threadbare carpet with a floral pattern, and a rococo mirror
in a gilt frame. On the walls hung large nineteenth-century paintings of dogs panting
over mounds of bloody dead pheasants and portraits of smug, big-bellied burghers in
frock coats and striped satin waistcoats. The furniture was nondescript, worn, and
sturdy, and the size of the room made it look small. In the bathroom the taps and
fittings were brass, and the tub stood like a lion on four heavy porcelain paws. The
windows, through which the three of them now looked down onto the street, extended
nearly from floor to ceiling and were hung with dark brown swag curtains drawn back
with worn, heavy velvet ropes. Poole had never been in a hotel room like it. He thought
it was like being in some splendid old hotel in Prague or Budapest—through twenty-foot
windows like these with such a vast, elegant, decaying room at his back, he should
have heard the sounds of sleigh bells and horses’s hooves.

In the Pforzheimer’s lobby, uniformed midgets the size of the numerous ferns had stood
before the polished mahogany of the registration desk; the clerk had worn half-glasses
and a narrow bow tie, and looked out upon a rich landscape of shining brass, yards
of tartan carpet, glowing lamps, and immense paintings so dark that big shapes loomed
out of a general blur. There was of course no computer behind the desk. A wide staircase
curved up toward what a plaque identified as the Balmoral Room, and down
at the far end of the lobby, a corridor led past trees in pots and glass cases filled
with the stuffed heads of animals toward a dimly glowing bar.

“I sort of feel that the Neva is only a pace or two away,” Poole said, looking out
at the snow.

“And police in bearskin hats and leather boots to the knees strut up and down on the
Prospekt,” Underhill said.

“Waiting to apprehend the naked men who have been forced out of the forest by the
extreme cold,” Maggie said.

Yes, that was it. There would be a great forest only a mile or two distant, and at
night if you opened the windows of ballrooms you would hear the cries of wolves.

“Let’s take a look at the telephone book,” Poole said, turning from the window.

“Let’s find the telephone book,” Underhill said.

The telephone itself, an old-fashioned black Bakelite model with a rotary dial but
without the usual instructions for dialing the laundry, room service, the concierge,
and the desk—without even a message light—stood on a military table beside Poole’s
bed.

The two men began opening drawers in the various chests and cabinets against the walls.
In a tall highboy Underhill found a television set that swiveled out on a shelf. Poole
found a Gideon Bible and a booklet entitled “The Pforzheimer Story” in a long drawer
lined with crinkly paper imprinted with Christmas trees. Underhill opened a cabinet
between the tall windows and discovered rows of books. “My God,” he said, “a library.
And what books!
Kitty’s Pretty Muff, Mr. Ticker’s Toenail, Parched Kisses, Historic Residences of
the Malay Peninsula…
Oh!” He pulled out a battered copy of
The Divided Man.
“Does this mean I’m immortal, or does it mean I’m ridiculously obscure?”

“Depends on how you feel about
Kitty’s Pretty Muff
,” Maggie said, taking the book from the shelf. “Isn’t the telephone book in here
somewhere?” She began to root in the lower half of the cabinet.

“Faeries, Tales, and Confusions at Birth,”
Underhill said, removing another book from the shelves.

Maggie pulled a hidden lever, and another shelf moved into view from the back of the
cabinet, carrying a silver cocktail shaker containing a musty collapsed web and a
shriveled spider, a tarnished ice bucket, a nearly empty bottle of gin, a nearly full
bottle of vermouth, and a bottle of rusty-looking olives. “This stuff must have been
here since Prohibition,” Maggie said. “No
telephone book, though.” She stood up, shrugged, and took her book to the couch.

“This isn’t much like traveling with Harry Beevers and Conor Linklater,” Poole said.
“When I asked Conor if he wanted to change his mind about coming along with us, he
said, ‘I got better ways to idolize my time.’ ” He looked out the window and saw big
flakes of snow spinning through the close dark air.

“What’s your book about?” Underhill asked behind him.

“Torture,” Maggie said.

Poole heard car horns blasting, and stepped closer to the window. The heads of horses
appeared at the far right of his vision, gradually pulling into view an empty hansom
cab driven by a man with a fat purple face. The driver steered his cab imperiously
down the center of the street, forcing oncoming cars out of its way.

“So is mine,” Underhill said. “Just kidding, Maggie. Keep your hands off.”

“No pictures in yours. Mine is nothing but pictures.”

“We got the right books.”

Poole turned from the window as Maggie left Underhill grinning on the couch behind
her and marched with a look of mock determination to a low wooden chest beneath the
mirror. Poole walked over and picked up Maggie’s book. On every page was a photograph
of kittens dressed in jackets and hats of the 1920s. The kittens seemed to be held
in place with metal straps and braces concealed beneath their outfits, and had been
posed reading novels, dealing cards, playing tennis, smoking pipes, getting married.…
The kittens’ eyes were glassy with terror, and all of them looked dead.

“Aha!” Maggie said. “The secret of the Pforzheimer!” She was brandishing a green telephone
directory so thick she had to hold it with both hands.

“By George, I think she’s got it,” Underhill said.

Maggie sat on the end of the couch beside Poole and flipped open the book. “I didn’t
think it would have so many
names
in it. What are we looking for? Oh yes, S, that’s right, Sandberg, Samuels, Sbarro …”
She turned a wad of pages, then one other. “Here we are. Sperber. And Spitalny. And
Spitalny and Spitalny and Spitalny, you wouldn’t think there’d be so many.”

Michael looked at the place where Maggie’s slim finger rested on the page. The finger
moved down a column that began with Spitalnik, changed to Spitalny and stayed that
way for something like twenty entries until it became Spitalsky.

He took the book across the expanse of the room to the bed, propped himself up on
the pillows, held the book open on his lap, and moved the phone beside him. Maggie
and Tim watched him from the couch, looking like the kittens in Maggie’s book. “Talk
among yourselves,” Poole said. “ ‘Idolize your time.’ ”

“Did it ever occur to you that Conor Linklater is a genius?” Underhill asked Maggie.

“Mr. Spitalny?” Poole asked. “My name is Michael Poole, and I’m looking for the family
of a man named Victor Spitalny who was in Vietnam with me. I wondered if you were
related to him, or if you knew how I could get in touch with his family … Victor,
that’s right … So nobody in your family was named Victor … Yes, he was from Milwaukee … Thanks
anyhow.”

He depressed the button, dialed the next number, and when there was no answer, the
one beneath that. A man who had been celebrating the snowfall answered and informed
Michael in a slow, slurry voice that no such person as Victor Spitalny had ever existed,
and hung up.