Koko (30 page)

Poole groaned inwardly. What had happened to Underhill? Maybe the drugs he had taken
had ruined him by making it impossible for him to write well.

As Lola talked, Poole found himself remembering the night
in Washington he had gone with a woman lawyer to see a jazz piano player named Hank
Jones. He had been in town to give testimony at a hearing on Agent Orange. Poole knew
very little about jazz, and now he could remember none of the actual music Hank Jones
had played. But what he did remember was a grace and joy that had seemed abstract
and physical at once. He could remember how Hank Jones, who was a middle-aged black
man with grizzled hair and a handsome, devilish face, had tilted his head over the
keyboard, purely responsive to the flow of his inspirations. The music had gone straight
into Michael Poole. Passion so
light!
Passion so
singing!
Poole had known that by a miracle of sympathy, he was hearing the music as the young
lawyer heard it. And after the set, when Jones was standing next to the piano talking
to his fans, Poole had seen the man’s blazing delight in what he had done. This shone
forth even in the grace of his movements, and Poole had felt as though he were watching
an old lion filled with the essence of lionhood.

And something had struck him then, that of all the people he knew, probably only Tim
Underhill would have known this blazing inner weather.

But Underhill had only had a couple of years of what Hank Jones seemed to have had
for decades. He had cheated himself of the rest of it.

There was a long pause. “You have read his books?”

Poole nodded.

“Are they any good?”

“The first two were very good.”

Lola sniffed. “I thought they would all be terrible books.”

“Where is he now? Do you have any idea?”

“Are you going to kill him?” Lola squinted at Poole. “Well, maybe somebody should
kill him and end his misery before he kills someone else.”

“Is he in Bangkok? Taipei? Back in the States?”

“Someone like him cannot go back to America. He went somewhere else, I’m sure of that—like
a crazy animal crawling off to a safe place. I always thought he would go to Bangkok.
Bangkok would be perfect for him. But he used to talk about Taipei, so maybe he went
there. He never paid me the money he owed me, I can tell you that.” The squint was
now a look of pure malice. “The crazy man he was going to write about—that was him.
He did not even know that much, and people so ignorant about themselves are dangerous.
I used to think I loved him. Loved him! Dr. Poole, if you find your friend, I hope
you will be very careful.”

Michael Poole and Conor Linklater had already been in Bangkok—and Harry Beevers in
Taipei—for two days when Tina Pumo made his discovery, which came in the mundane surroundings
of the Microfilm Room of the main branch of the New York Public Library. He was writing
a book about Vietnam, he had explained to a stocky, sixtyish, bearded man in a handsome
black suit, in particular a book about the Ia Thuc court martials.

Which newspapers did he want? Copies of the daily New York, Washington, Los Angeles,
and St. Louis papers and the national news magazines for the months of November 1968,
and March 1969. And because he wanted to see the obituaries of Koko’s victims, he
requested the London
Times, Guardian
, and
Telegraph
for the week of January 28, 1982, and the St. Louis papers for the week of February
5, 1982, as well as the Paris daily papers for the week of July 7, 1982.

The bearded man told Pumo that it would usually take a great deal of time to locate
and assemble that amount of material, but
that he had both good news and bad news for him. The good news was that the various
microfilms pertaining to the Ia Thuc incident had already been assembled—there were
even a couple of sources, long articles in
Harper’s
, the
Atlantic
, and
American Scholar
, which he had overlooked. The bad news was that this material was still awaiting
redistribution because someone else was also researching Ia Thuc. A journalist named
Roberto Ortiz had requested the same information three days earlier, consulted them
again a day later, and had spent Tuesday afternoon examining them again, today being
Wednesday—
Village Voice
day, Pumo reflexively thought.

Tina had never heard of Roberto Ortiz, and his private emotion at this news was principally
gratitude that he would not have to wait days for the microfilm to be located. He
was just double-checking, Tina told himself, making up for the feeling of having missed
something important by not going along with the others to Singapore. If he discovered
anything they ought to know, he could call them at the Marco Polo.

Before the articles were located and assembled, he read what the news magazines and
the
New York Times
had said about Ia Thuc. He was seated in a plastic chair before a plastic desk; the
chair was not comfortable and the microfilm machine took up so much of the desk that
he had to rest his notebook in his lap. Within minutes, none of this mattered at all.
What happened to Pumo within ten minutes of starting to read a
Newsweek
story entitled “Ia Thuc: Shame or Victory?” was very similar to what happened to
Conor Linklater when Charlie Daisy put an album of SP4 Cotton’s photographs before
him. He had managed to forget how public it all had been.

Here spoke Lt. Harry Beevers according to
Newsweek:
“In this war we are here to kill Charlies, and Charlies come in all shapes and sizes.
My own personal body count is thirty dead VC.”
Children Killer?
asked
Time
, which described the lieutenant as “gaunt, hollow-eyed and -cheeked, desperate, a
man on the edge.”
Were They Innocent?
asked
Newsweek
, which said the lieutenant was “perhaps as much a victim of Vietnam as the children
he is alleged to have killed.”

Tina could remember Harry Beevers at Ia Thuc. “I have a personal body count of thirty
dead gooks! You guys have any balls, pin a medal on me right now.” The lieutenant
was high and babbling, he couldn’t shut up. When you stood next to him, you could
almost feel the blood zooming around his arteries. You knew that you’d burn your fingers
if you touched him. “War
makes everybody the same age!” he had bawled out to the reporters. “You assholes think
there are children in this war, you think children even exist in this war? You know
why you think that way? Because you’re ignorant civilians, that’s why. There are no
children!”

These were the articles that had nearly hanged Beevers, and Dengler with him. In
Time:
“I deserve a goddamned medal!” Funny, Pumo thought, how in Beevers’ recollections
of these events he always said the rest of the platoon deserved goddamned medals too.

Surrounded by a bubble of unearthly stillness, Pumo remembered how crazy and taut
everybody had felt then, how close that boundary was between morality and murder.
They had been nothing but nerves hooked up to trigger fingers. The stink of the fish
sauce, and the smoke rising from the pot. Up on the sloping hillside, a girl lay in
a crumpled blue heap before her wooden yoke. If the village was empty, who the fuck
was doing the cooking? And who were they cooking for? Everything was as still as a
tiger in the grass. The sow grunted and cocked her head, and Pumo remembered whirling
around, weapon ready, and almost blasting a dirty child in half. Because you couldn’t
know, you never knew, and death could be a little smiling child with an outstretched
hand; it zapped your brain, it
fried
it, and you either blasted away at everything in sight or you made yourself melt
into whatever was behind you. Like the tiger in the grass, you could save your life
by becoming invisible.

He looked at the photographs for a long time—Lieutenant Beevers, skinny as a sapling,
with a haggard face and spinning eyes. M.O. Dengler, unidentified, white tired eyes
flashing from beneath his helmet liner. All that green around them, that palpitating,
trembling, simmering green. The mouth of a cave—“like a fist,” Victor Spitalny said
at the court-martial.

Then he remembered Lieutenant Harry Beevers lifting a girl of six or seven out of
a ditch by her ankles, a muddy naked child, with that Vietnamese fragility, those
chicken bones in her neck and arms, and swinging her around like an Indian club. Her
mouth was a downturned curve, and her skin had begun to pucker where the fire had
gotten her.

Pumo’s entire body felt wet and his sides were cold with sweat. He had to stand up
and get away from the machine. He tried to shove his chair back and moved the entire
desk. He swiveled his legs and got up and moved, bolted, out into the center of the
Microfilm Room.

They had crossed over, all right. Koko had been born on the other side of the boundary,
where you met the elephant.

A little smiling child stepped forward from a black immensity, cupping death in its
small hands.

Let the guy with the Spanish name have Ia Thuc, Tina thought, it’ll just be another
book. I’ll give it to Maggie at Christmas, and she’ll be able to tell me what happened
there.

He looked up and the door opened. A boy with a sparse beard and a single dangling
earring stepped in with double handfuls of microfilm spools. “You Puma?”

“Pumo,” Tina said, and accepted the microfilm.

He returned to his little desk, unloaded the microfilm of
Time
magazine, and loaded in the
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
for the month of February 1982. He scrolled across the pages of print until he found
the headline
AREA EXECUTIVE, WIFE, SLAIN IN FAR EAST.

The article contained less information about the deaths than Pumo had already learned
from Beevers. Mr. and Mrs. William Martinson of 3642 Breckinridge Drive, a respectable
upper-middle-class couple, had been mysteriously slain in Singapore. Their bodies
were discovered by a real-estate appraiser entering a supposedly empty bungalow in
a residential section of the city. The motive was presumed to be robbery. Mr. Martinson
had traveled extensively in the Far East in his business as Executive Vice President
and Marketing Director of Martinson Tool & Equipment Ltd., and was frequently accompanied
by his wife, an equally distinguished citizen of St. Louis.

Mr. Martinson, sixty-one, was a graduate of St. Louis Country Day School, Kenyon College,
and Columbia University. His great-grandfather, Andrew Martinson, had founded Martinson
Tool & Equipment in St. Louis in 1890. The deceased’s father, James, had been president
of the company from 1935 to 1952, and had also been president of the St. Louis Founders’
Club, the Union Club, and the Athletic Club as well as serving in prominent positions
on many civic, educational, and religious bodies. Mr. Martinson joined his family’s
business, now under the presidency of his older brother, Kirkby Martinson, in 1970,
using his experience of the Far East and skill as a negotiator to increase Martinson’s
annual revenues by what was reputed to be several hundred million dollars.

Mrs. Martinson, the former Barbara Hartsdale, a graduate of the Academie Française
and Bryn Mawr College, had long taken a prominent role in civic and cultural affairs.
Her grandfather,
Chester Hartsdale, a second cousin of the poet T.S. Eliot, founded the Hartsdale’s
department store chain, for fifty years the leading retail outlet throughout the Midwest,
and served as ambassador to Belgium after the First World War. The Martinsons were
survived by Mr. Martinson’s brother Kirkby and sister, Emma Beech, of Los Angeles;
by Mrs. Martinson’s brothers, Lester and Parker, directors of the interior decoration
firm La Bonne Vie in New York City; and by their children: Spenser, employed by the
Central Intelligence Agency, of Arlington, Va.; Parker, of San Francisco, Ca.; and
Arlette Monaghan, an artist, of Cadaques, Spain. There were no grandchildren.

Tina examined the photographs of these two exemplary citizens. William Martinson had
possessed close-set eyes and a fringe of white hair around a smooth intelligent face.
He had a prosperous, secretive, badgerlike air. Barbara Martinson had been caught
smiling, close-mouthed, almost shyly, while looking sideways. She looked as if she
had just thought of something funny and rather bawdy.

On what would have been the third page was a headline reading M
ARTINSONS RECALLED BY NEIGHBORS, FRIENDS.
Pumo began skimming the small print on the monitor’s screen, wrongly suspecting that
he already knew all the substantial information about the Martinsons that he was ever
going to know. The Martinsons had of course been loved and admired. Of course their
deaths were a tragic loss to the community. They had been handsome and generous and
witty. Less predictably, William Martinson was still known to his oldest friends by
his Country Day nickname, “Fuffy.” It was often remembered that Mr. Martinson had
shown remarkable business ability after his decision to resign from journalism and
join the family firm during a crisis at Martinson Tool & Equipment.