Koko (43 page)

Poole jumped up, but saw no tall grey-haired white man making his way through the
crowds. When his heels hit the pavement again, Poole started running.

Unless Underhill had been swallowed up by the earth, he must have either gone into
a shop or turned down a sidestreet. As Poole ran past all the little businesses he
had passed on his way to the wobbly bridge and the fair, he looked into each window.
Most of the cafés and shops were closed now.

Poole swore to himself. He had managed to lose Underhill; the earth
had
swallowed him up; he had known he was being followed and he had slipped into a secret
cave, a lair. In the lair
he dressed in fur and claws and became Koko—he became what the Martinsons and Clive
McKenna had seen in the last minutes of their lives.

Poole saw a dark cave shaped like a fist opening out in the middle of the impoverished
little shops.

He was running along through the mass of people on the sidewalk, half-pushing people
out of his way, sweating, irrationally convinced that Beevers had been right all along
and that Underhill had gone down into his cave. Budlike horns nestled in his thinning
hair.

A few steps later Poole saw that the buildings separated a block away, and a narrow
street went down toward the river.

Poole hurtled into a narrow passageway lined with stalls and vendors of silk and leather
bags and paintings of elephants marching across fields of blue velvet. The inevitable
tribe of women and children squatted beside the wall to Poole’s left, chipping away
at their eternal trench. Poole saw Tim Underhill almost at once, far ahead of him,
just crossing with a lengthening step a wide empty place where the byway turned up
to the right instead of continuing on the short distance to the river. A low wall
and a white building lay behind the curve in the road, and Underhill strode past these
as he began to move uphill.

Poole hurried down past the vendors and without quite seeing it passed an
ORIENTAL HOTEL
legend stenciled on a wall. When he reached the bottom of the little road, he looked
right and saw Underhill passing through the large glass doors of an immense white
structure which extended all the way down to Poole and all the way up past the entrance
to an only partially visible garage.

Poole hopped onto the sidewalk and ran past the older wing of the hotel toward the
entrance. Large plate-glass windows gave him a view of the entire lobby, and he could
see Underhill making his way past a florist’s window and bookshop, apparently going
toward a cocktail lounge.

He reached the revolving door and was welcomed into the lobby by big smiling Thai
men in grey uniforms and realized that he had followed Underhill to a
hotel.
Three of Koko’s murders had taken place in hotels. Poole slowed down.

Underhill walked past the entrance to the lounge and continued briskly on through
a door marked
EXIT
—Poole saw a flash of darkness distantly illuminated by a lantern on a tall standard.
Underhill passed through the door and went out onto the grounds behind the hotel.

Clive McKenna’s body had been found on the grounds of the Goodwood Park Hotel.

Poole followed his horned monster to the exit and very slowly pushed it open. He was
surprised to find himself on a pebbled walk that led down past tall lanterns and a
poolside garden to a series of descending terraces with candle-lit tables. On the
other side of the tables the river shimmered, reflecting the lights of a restaurant
on its opposite bank and the sidelights of various small craft. Uniformed waiters
and waitresses attended to people eating and drinking at the tables. The scene was
so different from the sordid vista Poole had expected that it took him a moment to
locate Underhill’s tall figure just now making his way down to the lower terraces.

Poole finally took in the presence of a restaurant behind the glowing yellow windows
to his right.

Tim Underhill was making for one of the few empty tables remaining on the long flat
terrace directly before the river. He sat down and began looking around for a waiter.
A trickle of people coming up a sunken walkway beside the pool emerged on the lower
terraces at the far side of the hotel. A young waiter approached Underhill’s table
and took what must have been a drink order. Underhill smiled and talked, and for a
time he put his hand on the young waiter’s arm, and the young waiter smiled and made
a joke.

The sacred monster shriveled away, blushing. Unless he had arranged a meeting with
someone, Underhill came to this elegant place to have a drink in a nice setting and
flirt with the boy waiters. As soon as the waiter left him, Underhill took a paperback
book from one of the pockets of the seersucker jacket, turned his chair to face the
river, propped an elbow on the table, and began to read with an air of habitual concentration.

Here the river did not have the weedy, vegetal stench Poole had caught at the end
of the flower market. This stretch of the river smelled only of
river
, an odor at once brisk and nostalgic, evocative of movement itself, reminding Poole
that he would soon be returning home.

He told a professional young person that he merely wanted a drink on the terrace,
and the professional young person waved him down the torch-lit steps. Poole went all
the way down to the final terrace, and slipped into a seat at the last table in the
row.

Three tables away, his legs crossed at the ankle, Tim Underhill faced the river, occasionally
looking up from his book to gaze at it. Here the river’s odor carried strong overtones
of silt and
something almost spicy. The water rhythmically splashed against the piers. Underhill
sighed contentedly, sipped his drink, and dove back into his book. Poole made out
from three tables away that it was a Raymond Chandler novel.

Poole ordered a glass of white wine from the same young waiter with whom Underhill
had flirted. Conversations flowed and sparkled at the tables strung out along the
terrace. A small white launch periodically ferried guests from the pier below the
terrace to a restaurant on the island halfway across the river. At intervals, bearing
lights fore and aft, wooden boats shaped as oddly as boats in dreams slipped past
on the black water: boats with dragons’ necks, boats with round swollen bellies and
beaks like birds, long flat houseboats hung with washing from the decks of which children
stared at Poole with grave, unseeing faces. The darkness deepened, and the voices
from the other tables grew louder.

When Poole saw Underhill order another drink from the young waiter, again laying his
hand on the boy’s sleeve and saying something that made the boy smile, he took out
his pen and wrote a message on his cocktail napkin.
Aren’t you the famous storyteller of Ozone Park? I’m at the last table to your right.
The boy was now drifting down the row of tables, and Michael, like Underhill, caught
his sleeve.

“Will you please give this note to the man whose order you just took?”

The boy dimpled, having understood this request by his own lights, and promptly moved
back along the row of tables. When he reached Underhill’s table he dropped the napkin,
which he had folded in half, beside Underhill’s elbow.

“Oh?” Underhill said, looking up from Raymond Chandler.

Poole watched him splay the book open on the table and pick up the napkin. For a moment
Underhill’s face betrayed no response except to become remarkably concentrated. The
whole inner man came to attention. He was even more focused than he had been on his
book. Finally he frowned at the little note—a frown of intense mental effort instead
of displeasure. Underhill had been able to keep himself from immediately glancing
to his right until he had fully considered the note. Now he did so, and his eyes quickly
found Poole’s.

Underhill swiveled his chair sideways and let a slow smile spread through his beard.
“Lady Michael, it’s better than you know to see you again,” he said. “For a second
I thought I might be in trouble.”

For a second I thought I might be in trouble.

When Michael Poole heard those words, the horned monster in Underhill’s body shriveled
away for good: Underhill was as innocent of Koko’s murders as any man who feared becoming
the next victim had to be. Michael was on his feet before he knew it, moving forward
past the intervening tables to embrace him under a brightly glowing torch.

A little more than ten hours before the meeting of Dr. Michael Poole and Tim Underhill
on the riverside terrace behind the Oriental Hotel, Tina Pumo awoke in a state of
uncertainty and agitation. He had more to do in one day than anyone sane would ever
attempt. There were meetings not only with Molly Witt and Lowery Hapgood, his architects,
and David Dixon, his lawyer, with whom he hoped to iron out an ironclad way to get
Vinh his naturalization papers, but immediately after lunch he and Dixon were to go
to his bank to negotiate a loan to cover the rest of the construction costs. The inspector
from the Health Department had told Pumo he intended to “reconnoiter ’round about
sixteen-hundred hours” to make sure that the insect problem had finally been “squared
away to base-line acceptability.” The inspector was a Midwestern Vietnam veteran who
spoke in a mixture of military jargon, yuppie lingo, and obsolete slang that could
sound alternately absurd or menacing. After these meetings, all of them either expensive,
frustrating, or intimidating, he had to get down
to his equipment supplier on the fringes of Chinatown and pick up replacements for
what seemed dozens of pots, pans, and utensils which had managed to go astray during
the reconstruction. Sometimes it seemed that only the biggest woks had stayed where
they had been put.

Saigon was scheduled to reopen in three weeks, and in more ways than one Pumo’s ability
to meet this deadline would count heavily with the bankers. The restaurant had to
be running very close to full capacity for a specific number of days before it would
begin to make money again. For Pumo, Saigon was a home, a wife, and a baby too, but
for the bankers it was a questionably efficient machine for turning food into money.
All of this made him feel rushed, anxious, stressed, but it was the presence of Maggie
Lah, still sleeping on the other side of his bed, that was most responsible for his
feeling of uncertainty.

He could not help this; he regretted it, and at some miserable future hour, he knew,
he would hate it, but she irritated him, lying sprawled over half of his bed as if
she owned it. Pumo could not divide his life in two and give half of it away. Just
concentrating on the daily details took so much energy that his eyes started to close
before eleven o’clock. When he woke up in the morning, Maggie was there; when he rushed
through lunch she was there; when he looked at blueprints, scanned a profit and loss
projection, or even read the newspaper, she was there. He had included Maggie in so
many parts of his life that now she had the feeling she belonged in all of them. Maggie
had come to feel that she had a right to be in the lawyer’s office, the architect’s
brownstone, the supplier’s warehouse. Maggie had taken a temporary condition for a
lifelong change and had managed to forget that she was a separate person.

So she took it for granted that she could lie across half his bed every night. So
she put in her two cents with Molly Witt, suggesting changes in the floor tiles and
the hardware on the cabinets. (Molly had agreed with all her suggestions, but that
was beside the point.) So she told him his old menu was no good, and made up some
silly new design she expected him to adopt on the spot. People
liked
those descriptions of the food. Lots of people even needed them.

Pumo could not forget that he loved Maggie, but he no longer needed a nurse, and Maggie
had lulled him into forgetting what he was like when he was normal. She was so lulled
herself she had lost her timing.

He would have to take her with him today. Molly’s partner
would flirt with her. David Dixon, a good lawyer but otherwise a grown-up adolescent
who thought only about money, sex, sports, and antique cars, would amusedly tolerate
her presence and give Tina knowing looks. If the banker got a look at her, he’d think
Tina was a flake and turn down the loan. At Arnold Leung’s, the old Chinese supplier
would cast forlorn, despairing looks at her and start sidelong conversations about
how she was ruining her life with an “old foreigner.”

Maggie’s eyes opened. She looked at Tina’s empty pillow, and then rolled her head
up to weigh and parcel him in one measuring glance. Maggie couldn’t even wake up like
other people. Her face looked smooth and dusky, the whites of her eyes glinted. Even
her round full lips looked smart.

“I see,” she said on a little sigh.

“Do you?” Pumo said.

“Do you mind if I don’t come with you today? I ought to go up to a Hundred-twenty-fifth
Street to see the General. I have been neglecting my duty. He gets very lonely.”