Koko (71 page)

Beevers could see himself slumping out of the alley like some heroic Rambo, heavy-shouldered,
panting, spattered with his enemy’s blood, gesturing a crowd of stupefied officers
toward Spitalny’s body—There’s the man you’re looking for. Jumped me while I was bringing
him in.

He had to buy a good knife, that was one thing he had to do. And a pair of handcuffs.
You could snap a pair of handcuffs on a man before he knew what was happening. Then
you could do what
you liked to him. And unlock the handcuffs before the body hit the floor.

On the corner of Bayard Street he hesitated, then turned east toward Confucius Plaza.
He came to Elizabeth Street, turned in and walked back north a few steps before deciding
it was all wrong—nothing but tenements and murky little Chinese businesses. Koko would
see it for a trap right away—he’d know a killing box when he saw one. Harry went back
to Bayard Street and continued on toward Bowery.

This was a lot more promising.

Across Bowery stood Confucius Plaza, an immense office and apartment complex. On one
corner stood a bank shaped like a modernist pagoda in red lacquer, across the street
a Chinese cinema. Cars swept unendingly around a long traffic island that extended
from Bowery around the corner into Division Street. At the apex of the traffic island
was a tall statue of Confucius.

This was too public for his meeting with Koko. He looked across the street to the
Plaza. A lower building, of perhaps fifteen stories, fronted Bowery, blocking from
view the lower half of the taller residential tower. The buildings had a slightly
molded look that carried the eye along, and behind them, Harry thought, must be a
terrace or a plaza—trees and benches.

And that gave it to him—at least half of it. Into his mind had come the image of the
park bordered by Mulberry and Baxter streets near the western end of Chinatown. Now
this park would be empty, but in the spring and summer the little park was crowded
with lawyers, bailiffs, judges, and policemen taking a break from their duties. This
was Columbus Park, and Harry knew it well from his early days as a litigator—he had
never really connected it to Chinatown in his mind. Columbus Park was an adjunct to
the row of government buildings lined up along Centre Street.

The Criminal Courts building stood between Centre and Baxter at the top end of Columbus
Park; down at the bottom end was the smaller, more prisonlike structure of the Federal
Courthouse; and further south, between Worth and Pearl streets, a block from the park,
was the even more penitential structure, grim and dirty and oozing gloom at all seasons,
of the New York County Courthouse.

Harry instantly discarded the notion of meeting Koko in a restaurant. He would ask
him to meet in Columbus Park. If Koko had moved into Chinatown, he would know the
park by now, and if he had not, the idea of meeting in a park would serve to make
him feel secure. It was perfect. It would look good in the book too, and play beautifully
in the movie, but it would be fiction. The meeting in Columbus Park would be part
of the myth; it did not have to be real to be part of the myth. For Harry intended
only to make Koko think that they would meet in the park. Harry would send him through
somewhere else first, and that would be his killing box.

Harry stood freezing on the corner of Bayard Street and Bowery. A black stretch limousine
pulled up to the curb before him and two short, pudgy Chinese men with glossy tiny
feet got out of the backseat. They wore dark suits and sunglasses, and their hair
was slicked back. They looked like twin dwarfs with zombie faces and stiff, self-important
movements. One of them slammed the door of the limousine, and they strode across the
sidewalk to push their way into one of the restaurants across from Confucius Plaza.
One of them passed within a foot of Harry without in any way registering his presence.
Harry thought that if he had been standing in his path, the little gangster would
have knocked him over and walked across his body the way Elizabeth walked over Raleigh’s
cloak.

He moved across the sidewalk to the car. Harry felt even colder than before—in every
car that sped down Bowery, in every apartment in Confucius Plaza, was a flat-faced
chink who did not care if Harry Beevers lived or died. How had all the little bastards
clawed their way up out of the laundries? He bent over the trunk of the limousine
and looked down at sixteen layers of meticulously applied black lacquer. The skin
of the car looked as deep as a lake. Harry gathered a good gob of phlegm and saliva
in his mouth and spat it onto the trunk of the limousine. It began to slide a bit
toward the fender.

Harry stepped back from the car and began to walk up the block. He was on the verge
of thinking that now he was wasting his time here and that he should be checking out
Bayard Street’s western end when the smooth, unbroken row of Chinese restaurants ceased
and he found himself staring into a cave. His feet stopped moving and his heart thumped
like the kick of a rabbit’s back legs. On both sides the tiles of the buildings folded
in to form a wide passage. Of course it was not a cave. He was standing before an
arcade.

Down in the distance he could see women’s underwear in forlorn shades of pink and
pale blue stretched across forms in a lighted window. Near it a pair of giant’s eyeglasses
stared out
from an optician’s window. Further back a restaurant sign floated in grey air. Harry
walked into the arcade. One old Chinese woman shuffled toward him, in the dimness
of the arcade no more than a wrinkled forehead and a pair of averted eyes.

Harry paused outside Chinatown Opticians and peered through the empty left orb of
the giant’s glasses. Behind the counter in the deserted shop a clerk with a punk crewcut
and cheeks inflamed with acne stared into a Chinese-language edition of
Playboy.

Tattered posters advertising a Chinese opera covered the walls of the arcade. Other
posters concerned rock clubs. A few shops along, the gloom grew thicker and the arcade
angled off toward what must be Elizabeth Street. The ripped posters led toward a shoebox-sized
restaurant called Malay Coffee Shop, which showed a large white
CLOSED
sign on its door. A few feet farther, just before the angle in the arcade, a narrow
tiled staircase led down to another level. A fat arrow had been painted on the side
of the staircase, below it the words
FORTUNE BARBER SHOP.

Harry went slowly down the steps, ducking his head to see how far the lower level
extended. Two grey-haired barbers sat in their own chairs inside the Fortune Barber
Shop while a third barber snipped at an old woman’s hair. Two other shops, one with
a poster in its window of a levitating Ninja with an outflung leg, filled out the
short downstairs level. Harry stopped moving about halfway down the stairs. His eyes
were at the level of the arcade’s tiled floor. Nobody walking in would see him, but
he would have a perfect view of them.

He moved a step up, and in the brighter outside air two short males moved past the
arcade’s entrance. The zombies. As soon as they had passed the entrance, they snapped
back to reappear, looking into the arcade. Their sunglasses were like wide black holes
in their faces. Harry moved quietly down a step and watched the two zombies glance
at each other and take a step into the arcade. Their bodies blurred in the darkness.
They came forward, stocky, almost stumping on their legs like sumo wrestlers. As they
came nearer Harry saw that their hands were balled into fists. They stood three feet
from him, their thick short arms swinging. One of them spoke softly in Chinese, and
Harry understood the words as if they had been in English.
The bastard isn’t here.
The second man grunted.

His life was not like other lives, other people thought the
world was solid and were blind to the great tears and rents in the surface of existence.
Harry’s mind filled with the wingbeats of insects and the cries of children.

The surface of the world almost shredded and allowed his real life to take place.

The two men turned around in perfect unison, like dance partners, and went back outside
the arcade. Harry waited on the steps a minute, two minutes, he did not know how long.
The old woman from the barber shop came slowly up the steps, rapping on the tiles
with a wooden cane. He moved aside to let her pass along the railing, and she wordlessly
pulled herself up past him. He was invisible: no one had seen him. He wiped his wet
palms on the flanks of his coat and went up to the main level of the arcade.

Empty: the world had closed up again.

Harry trotted downstairs to the Ninja shop and spent fifty-six dollars on a gravity
knife and a pair of handcuffs. Then he mounted the stairs again.

At the entrance he bent forward and looked south down Bowery. The limousine was no
longer parked in front of the restaurant. Harry smiled. Inside the chauffeur’s once
doubtless pristine white handkerchief was a fat yellow wad of Harry Beevers.

Someone was staring down from a window high up in Confucius Plaza; someone in a passing
car turned his head to gaze at him. Someone was watching him, for his life was like
a film and he was the hero of that film. “I found it,” he said, knowing that someone
heard him: or that someone watching him had read his lips.

Now all he had to do was wait for the telephone call. Harry began walking up toward
Canal to start looking for a cab. Traffic moved past him in a seamless flow. He no
longer felt cold. He stood on Canal Street and watched the traffic sweep past him,
tasting on his tongue the oil and bite of the icy vodka he had just earned. When the
light changed, he crossed Canal to walk north on Bowery, rejoicing.

Michael Poole came awake in cold darkness, the dream picture of a Chinese schoolgirl
grinning at him from beneath the brim of a white straw skimmer vanishing from his
mind. One of the large radiators clanked again, and Tim Underhill snored gently in
the next bed. Poole picked up his watch and brought its face toward his until the
hands became distinct. A minute to eight became eight o’clock as he watched. The first
tendrils of warmth began to reach him.

Underhill groaned, stretched, wiped his hands over his face. He looked at Poole and
said, “Morning.” He sat up in bed—Underhill’s hair stuck out on both sides of his
head, and his white-blond beard was crunched and flattened on one side. He looked
like a crazed professor in an old movie. “Listen to this,” Underhill said, and Poole
sat up in bed too.

“I’ve been thinking about this all night,” Underhill said. “Here’s where we are at
the moment. We have Dengler spooking
Spitalny, right? He comes up to him and points out that in a combat unit everybody
has to protect everybody else. He takes him into Ozone Park, say, and he tells him
that if he acts toward him in the old way he will mess with the lives of everybody
in the platoon. Maybe he even says that he’ll make sure that Spitalny will never come
back from his first mission—whatever he says, Spitalny agrees to be silent about their
old relationship. But this
is
Spitalny—he can’t take it. He hates Dengler a little more every day. And eventually
Spitalny follows Dengler to Bangkok and kills him. Now what I’m thinking is that Spitalny
never was the original Koko. He just borrowed the name a decade and a half later,
when he really slipped a cog.”

“Who was, then?”

“There never really was an original Koko,” Underhill said. “Not in the way I’ve been
thinking of it.” Excited by his thoughts, Underhill swung his legs over the side of
the bed and stood up. He was wearing a long nightshirt, and his legs looked like pipe
stems with knees. “You get it? It’s like Agatha Christie. Probably everybody who wanted
to support Dengler wrote Koko on a card at least once. Koko was everybody. I was Koko,
you were Koko, Conor was Koko once. Everybody just imitated the first one.”

“But then who was the first one?” Poole asked. “Spitalny? That doesn’t seem very likely.”

“I think it was Beevers,” Underhill said, his eyes glowing. “It was right after the
publicity began, remember? The court-martials began to seem inevitable. Beevers was
stressed out. He knew nobody would support him, but he also knew that he could claim
to share whatever support Dengler had. So he mutilated a dead VC, and wore a word
everybody associated with Dengler on a regimental card. And it worked.”

Someone rapped at the door. “It’s me,” Maggie called. “Aren’t you up yet?”

Underhill moved on scissoring legs toward the door, and Poole pulled on a bathrobe.

Maggie came in smiling, dressed in a black skirt and an oversized black sweater. “Have
you looked outside yet? It snowed again last night. It looks like heaven out there.”

Poole stood up and walked past smiling Maggie toward the window. Maggie seemed to
be appraising him, which made him uncomfortable. Now Poole felt he could not trust
any of his responses to the girl. Underhill began condensing their conversation for
her, and Poole pulled the cord to open the curtains.