Koko (20 page)

He moved more confidently into the room and closely examined the coffee table, the
books, the records, and the magazines. Dracula had lingered here—she had moved everything
around a little.

“The Battalion
Newsletter
,” he finally said.

“The what?”

“She took the Ninth Battalion
Newsletter.
It comes twice a year—I hardly even look at it, to tell you the truth, but I never
throw out the old one until I get the new one.”

“She’s queer for soldiers.”

Pumo shrugged and went up the steps to the platform. His checkbook and the Saigon
checkbook were still on the desk, but had been moved. And there beside them was the
missing
Newsletter
, lying open to a half-page photo of Colonel Emil Ellenbogen, retiring from the second-rate
post in Arkansas to which the Tin Man had been sent after his disappointing term in
Vietnam.

“No, the bitch just moved it,” he called down to Maggie, who was standing in the middle
of the room with her arms wrapped about herself.

“Is everything on your desk?”

“I don’t know. I think something’s gone, but I can’t tell what it is.”

He surveyed his messy desktop again. Checkbooks. Telephone. Answering machine, message
light flashing. Pumo pushed rewind, then playback. Silence played itself back. Had
she called first to make sure he was out? The more Pumo looked at the top of his desk,
the more he thought something was missing, but he could not attach this feeling to
a specific object. Beside the answering machine was a book called
Nam
which he was certain had been on one of the coffeetables for months—he had given
up in the middle of the book, but kept it on the table because to admit that he was
never going to finish it felt like opening the door to the worst kind of luck.

Dracula had picked up the
Newsletter
and the copy of
Nam
and set them down on the desk while she mused through his checkbooks. Probably she
had touched everything on the desk with her long strong fingers. For a second Pumo
felt sweaty and dizzy.

In the middle of the night Tina woke up with his heart pounding, a mad terrible dream
just disappearing into the darkness. He turned his head and saw Maggie fast asleep
on the pillow, her face curled up into itself like the curl of her hand. He could
just make out her features. Oh, he loved seeing Maggie Lah asleep. Without the animation
of her character her features seemed anonymous and wholly Chinese.

He stretched out again beside her and lightly touched her hand. What were they doing
now, his friends? He saw them walking down a wide sidewalk, their arms linked. Tim
Underhill could not be Koko, and as soon as they found him they would know it. Then
Tina realized that if Underhill was not Koko, someone else was—someone circling in
on them, circling in on all of them the way the bullet with his name on it still circled
the world, never falling or resting.

In the morning he told Maggie that he had to do something to help the other guys—he
wanted to see if he could find out more about Koko’s victims, find out more that way.

“Now you’re talking,” Maggie told him.

Why questions and answers?

Because they go in a straight line. Because they are a way out. Because they help
me to think.

What is there to think about?

The usual wreckage. The running girl.

Do you imagine that she was real?

Exactly. I
imagine
she was real.

What else is there to think about?

The usual subject, my subject. Koko. More than ever now.

Why more than ever now?

Because he has come back. Because I think I saw him. I know I saw him.

You imagined you saw him?

It is the same thing.

What did he look like?

He looked like a dancing shadow. He looked like death.

Did he appear to you in a dream?

He appeared, if that is the word, on the street. Death appeared on the street, as
the girl appeared on the street. Tremendous clamor accompanied the appearance of the
girl, ordinary street noise, that earthly clamor, surrounded the shadow. He was covered,
though not visibly, with the blood of others. The girl, who was visible only to me,
was covered with her own. The Pan-feeling poured from both of them.

What feeling is that?

The feeling that we have only the shakiest hold on the central stories of our lives.
Hal Esterhaz in
The Divided Man.
The girl comes to speak to me with her terror, with her extremity, she runs toward
me out of chaos and night, she has chosen me. Because I chose Hal Esterhaz, and because
I chose Nat Beasley. Not yet, she says, not yet. The story is not yet over.

Why did Hal Esterhaz kill himself?

Because he could no longer bear what he was only just beginning to know.

Is that where imagination takes you?

If it’s good enough.

Were you terrified when you saw the girl?

I blessed her.

As soon as the plane took off, Koko too would be a man in motion.

This is one thing Koko knew: all travel is travel in eternity. Thirty thousand feet
above the earth, clocks run backward, darkness and light change places freely.

When it got dark, Koko thought, you could lean close to the little window and if you
were ready, if your soul was half in eternity already, you could see God’s tusked
grey face leaning toward you in the blackness.

Koko smiled, and the pretty stewardess in first class smiled back at him. She leaned
forward, bearing a tray. “Sir, would you prefer orange juice or champagne this morning?”

Koko shook his head.

The earth sucked at the feet of the plane, reached up through the body of the plane
and tried to pull Koko down into itself, suck suck, the poor earth loved what was
eternal and the eternal loved and pitied the earth.

“Is there a movie on this flight?”

“Never Say Never Again,”
the stewardess said over her shoulder. “The new James Bond movie.”

“Excellent,” Koko said, with real inward hilarity. “I never say never, myself.”

She laughed dutifully and went on her way.

Other passengers filed down the aisles, carrying suitbags, shopping bags, wicker baskets,
books. Two Chinese businessmen took the seats before Koko, who heard them snap open
their briefcases as soon as they sat down.

A middle-aged blonde stewardess in a blue coat leaned down and smiled a false machine
smile at him.

“What shall we call you today, hmm?” She raised a clipboard with a seating chart into
his field of vision. Koko slowly lowered his newspaper. “You are …?” She looked at
him, waiting for a reply.

What shall we call you today, hmm?
Dachau
, let’s call you
Lady Dachau.
“Why don’t you call me Bobby?”

“Well then, call you Bobby is what I’ll do,” the woman said, and scrawled
Bobby
in the space marked 4B on the chart.

In his pockets, Roberto Ortiz had carried his passports and a pocketful of cards and
ID, as well as six hundred dollars American and three hundred Singapore. Big time!
In a pocket of his blazer Koko had found a room key from the Shangri-La, where else
would an ambitious young American be staying?

In Miss Balandran’s bag Koko had found a hot comb, a diaphragm, a tube of spermicidal
jelly, a little plastic holder containing a tube of Darkie toothpaste and a toothbrush,
a fresh pair of underpants and a new pair of tights, a bottle of lip gloss and a lip
brush, a vial of mascara, a blush brush, a rat-tailed comb, three inches of a cut-down
white plastic straw, a little leather kit ranked with amyl nitrate poppers, a tattered
Barbara Cartland paperback, a compact, half a dozen loose Valium, lots of crumpled-up
Kleenex, several sets of keys, and a big roll of bills that turned out to be four
hundred and fifty-three Singapore dollars.

Koko put the money in his pocket and dropped the rest onto the bathroom floor.

After he had washed his hands and face he took a cab to the Shangri-La.

Roberto Ortiz lived on West End Avenue in New York City.

On West End Avenue, could you feel how the lords of the earth, how God himself, hungered
for mortality? Angels flew down West End Avenue, their raincoats billowing in the
wind.

When Koko walked out of the Shangri-La he was wearing two pairs of trousers, two shirts,
a cotton sweater, and a tweed
jacket. In the carry-on bag in his left hand were two rolled-up suits, three more
shirts, and a pair of excellent black shoes.

A cab took Koko down leafy Grove Road to Orchard Road and on through clean, orderly
Singapore to an empty building on a circular street off Bahru Road, and on this journey
he imagined that he stood in an open car going down Fifth Avenue. Ticker tape and
confetti rained down upon him and all the other lords of the earth, cheers exploded
from the crowds packing the sidewalks.

Beevers and Poole and Pumo and Underhill and Tattoo Tiano and Peters and sweet Spanky
B, and everybody else, all the lords of the earth, who may abide the day of their
coming? For behold, darkness shall cover the earth. And the lawyer boy, Ted Bundy,
and Juan Corona who labored in fields, and he who dressed in Chicago as a clown, John
Wayne Gacy, and Son of Sam, and Wayne Williams out of Atlanta, and the Zebra Killer,
and they who left their victims on hillsides, and the little guy in the movie
Ten Rillington Place
, and Lucas, who was probably the greatest of them all. The warriors of heaven, having
their day. Marching along with all those never to be caught, all those showing presentable
faces to the world, living modestly, moving from town to town, paying their bills,
all those deep embodied secrets.

The refiner’s fire.

Koko crawled in through his basement window and saw his father seated impatient and
stormy on a packing crate.
Goddamned idiot
, his father said.
You took too much, think they’ll ever give someone like you a parade? We waste no
part of the animal.

He spread the money out on the gritty floor, and that did it, the old man smiled and
said,
There is no substitute for good butter
, and Koko closed his eyes and saw a row of elephants trudging past, nodding with
grave approval.

On his unrolled sleeping bag he placed Roberto Ortiz’s passports and spread out the
five Rearing Elephant cards so he could read the names. Then he rooted in a box of
papers and found the copy of the American magazine,
New York
, which he had picked up in a hotel lobby two days after the hostage parade. Beneath
the title, letters of fire spelled out:
TEN HOT NEW PLACES.

Ia Thuc, Hue, Da Nang, these were hot places. And Saigon. Here is a hot new place,
here is Saigon. The magazine fell open automatically to the picture and the paragraphs
about the hot new place. (The Mayor ate there.)

Koko lay sprawled on the floor in his new suit and looked as deeply as he could into
the picture of the hot new place. Deep
green fronds waved across the white walls. Vietnamese waiters in white shirts whipped
between crowded tables, going so fast they were only blurs of light. Koko could hear
loud voices, knives and forks clanking against china. Corks popped. In the picture’s
foreground, Tina Pumo leaned against his bar and grimaced—Pumo the Puma leaned right
out of the frame of the picture and spoke to Koko in a voice that stood out against
the clamor of his restaurant the way a saxophone solo stands out against the sound
of a big band.

Pumo said: “Don’t judge me, Koko.” Pumo looked shit-scared.

This was how they talked when they knew they stood before eternity’s door.

“I understand, Tina,” Koko said to the little anxious man in the picture.

The article said that Saigon served some of the most varied and authentic Vietnamese
food in New York. The clientele was young, hip, and noisy. The duck was “heaven-sent”
and every soup was “divine.”

“Just tell me this, Tina,” Koko said. “What is this shit about ‘divine’? You think
soup can be
divine
?”

Tina blotted his brow with a crisp white handkerchief and turned back into a picture.

And there it was, the address and the telephone number, in the soft cool whisper of
italics.

A man sat down beside Koko in the fourth row of the first-class compartment, glanced
sideways, and then buckled himself into his seat. Koko closed his eyes and snow fell
from a deep cold heaven onto a layer of ice hundreds of feet deep. Far off, dim in
the snowy air, ranged the broken teeth of glaciers. God hovered invisibly over the
frozen landscape, panting with impatient rage.

You know what you know. Forty, forty-one years old. Thick fluffy richboy-blond hair,
and thin brown glasses, heavy face. Heavy butcher’s hands holding a day-old copy of
the
New York Times.
Six-hundred-dollar suit.

The plane taxied down the runway and lifted itself smoothly into the air, the envious
mouths and fingers fell away, and the jet’s nose pointed west, toward San Francisco.
The man beside Koko is a rich businessman with butcher’s hands.