Koko (47 page)

“Look at Maggie skulk, I bet she’s spyin’ on someone.”

She looked over her shoulder and saw Perry, her friend from the East Village, standing
just behind her with a long black portfolio under one arm. Beside him Jules grimaced
at her with an expression that virtually said: Isn’t this terrible, isn’t this deadly?
They had apparently emerged from the office building on the other side of Saigon,
which housed a number of art galleries. Jules and Perry had evidently resolved to
sell out.

“Let’s spy with her,” Jules said. “Anything’d be more fun than bein’ pissed on by
these gallery assholes.” Perry was English, and Jules had long ago begun to sound
like him.

“I believe I’d fancy a bit of spyin’ about now,” said Perry. “Who we havin’ a decco
at, then? Enemy of the state? Ernst Stavro Blofeld? Italian Post-Expressionists?”

“I’m not spying on anybody,” Maggie said. “I’m just waiting for my friend.”

For a moment she considered asking them to come upstairs with her, but she could see
too clearly how Perry would respond
to Pumo’s loft. He would go around knocking things over, drink up all the liquor he
could find, and relentlessly insult Pumo’s taste and politics.

“Funny way you have of waitin’,” Perry said. “Which friend? That old geezer followed
us ‘round the off-license last year? Eyes hangin’ out on bloody stalks?”

“That wasn’t him, that was just someone he knows,” Maggie said.

“Come along with us,” Jules said. It was a gesture toward their old friendship. “After
we take the paintings back, we’ll show you this lovely new club.”

“I can’t.”

“You
can’t
?” Perry lifted an eyebrow. “I’m sure we never killed any Asian babies in any war
or nuffink. Let’s get out of here, Jules.” He turned away from Maggie, and Jules did
not even look at Maggie as he swept past.

Maggie watched them walk down the dark street in the lamplight, their ragged clothing
giving them the air of loutish royalty, and knew that they would never forgive her
for not joining them. People like Jules and Perry knew that they were sane and everybody
else crazy, and Maggie had just stepped over the border into the land of the crazies.

All this reflection took place in a second or two. Maggie pulled Pumo’s door all the
way open and stood in the doorway. Nothing but silence came from the top of the stairs.

Maggie stepped inside and closed the door behind her. Then she gripped the handrail
and began slowly, quietly to mount the stairs.

Koko was in glory, his yoke was easy and his burden was light.

By man came death, and by man came also the resurrection of the dead.

Thirty lives to be paid for. Pumo was ten, and if there was a woman she would be eleven.

No part of the animal was wasted. The Joker had closed his eyes, and slept on in the
pack.

When Pumo the Puma had opened the door and looked into Koko’s face, he had known,
he had seen, he had understood. Angels walked him backwards up the stairs, angels
backed him
into his great glowing cave. Tears spilled from Koko’s eyes, for it was true that
God did all things simultaneously, and Koko’s heart overflowed for Pumo, who
understood
, who
took flight
, even as his soul took flight and sailed off, sailed home.

The eyes, the ears, the Elephant Card in the mouth.

Then Koko heard a great thunderous buzzing, the noise of the impatient world hungering
for immortality, and he quickly moved to the light cord and pulled it down, turning
off all the overhead lights in the room. Now the cave was dark. Koko went quietly
to the hallway and turned that light off too.

Then he went back into the living room to wait.

Outside, traffic roared like the passing of great beasts in a jungle. His father leaned
toward him and said
Work too fast and you’ll never amount to nothing.
The buzzer rang again, clamoring until it found its true voice and became a giant
insect swooping in great circles between the walls. Finally it settled on Pumo’s body
and folded its great strong wings.

Koko picked the knife off a couch and slid into his spot just inside the entrance
to the cave from the hallway. He made himself invisible, still, and silent. His father
and a friendly demon waited with him, silently approving, and Koko slipped into a
nightmare world he had known all his life. His footsteps turned the earth black, and
thirty children went into a cave and never came out, and three soldiers went into
a cave, and two came out.
Gentlemen, you are part of a great killing machine.
Finally Koko saw the elephant stride toward him, his robes ermine and silk, and the
Old Lady said,
Gentlemen, it is time to face the elephant again.

For his ears had taken in the dampened, nearly soundless click of the door and his
body had felt a small slight shift in the air and now he could hear a hand closing
on a handrail and her feet moving with what to a civilian would be most fearful caution
from one tread of the stair to another.

Maggie reached the top of the steps and saw at once that the door to the loft was
unlocked—it looked as though someone had banged it shut with an elbow as he carried
his haul outside. Or by someone going in. She touched the knob and pushed it forward
with her fingertips. Light from the staircase filled Pumo’s entry, with its heaps
of coats and hats on hooks.

Pumo’s entry always looked as if he were having a party.

At the worst, Maggie thought, he had been robbed again, and would have to be coaxed
out of another depression. Any intruder was long gone. Maggie walked through the door,
switched on the light, went down the little hallway. When she reached the bedroom,
she reached in and turned on that light too. Nothing had been disturbed since their
unhappy morning. The bed was still unmade, a sure sign that Tina was in a downswing.

Some pervasive smell filled the loft, but Maggie filed the fact away to be dealt with
as soon as she had satisfied herself either that there had been no break-in, or that
the burglar who had left the doors open had not done a great deal of damage. Maggie
backed out of the bedroom to check the bathroom, again saw nothing out of the ordinary,
and went on into the living room.

She froze about six feet into the room. The dim illumination from the hallway showed
the shadowy outline of a man on one of the little wooden-backed chairs normally arranged
around Tina’s dining table. Her first thought was that she had been trapped by a very
cool-headed burglar, and her heart jumped up into her throat. Then as her eyes continued
to adjust to the darkness, she almost subliminally recognized that the man in the
chair was her lover. She moved forward, in turn ready to scold, then cajole, then
to soothe him. As Maggie opened her mouth to speak his name, she finally identified
the odor filling the loft as the smell of blood. She was still moving forward, and
her next faltering step brought her close enough to see how Tina’s chest was painted
with blood, and how the legs of the chair sat in a wide red pool. Something white
like a tag protruded from Tina’s mouth.

Instead of screaming or whirling around, which would have led almost instantly to
her death, Maggie moved off to her right, into the darkest section of the loft. This
movement of pure reflex felt almost as if it had been done to her, as if some force
had swept her aside to get her out of the rectangle of light which was the entrance
from the hall. She wound up crouching beneath the dining table at the far right of
the room, too scared by what she had seen and too startled by her own movement to
do anything but look out from her vantage point at the rest of the room.

Terror must have kicked her senses open wide. In the first seconds that she found
herself beneath the table, she took in every nuance from the street, the happiness
in the voices calling out to each other, the squeal of a brake drum, even the tap
of a cane on the sidewalk. In the midst of these sounds she heard drops of liquid
landing in the pool at Pumo’s feet. Accompanying these
sounds was a sweet, sick, limping odor: the smell of concentrated mourning.

“Come on out, Dawn,” a man whispered, and Maggie could smell only the blood again.
“I want to talk to you.”

A column of darkness left the door and advanced into the room. Some of the light from
the hall gave the column the shape of a compact man wearing a dark topcoat slightly
too large for him. The man’s face was only a pale blur, and his hair must have been
as black as Maggie’s, for it was entirely invisible against the darkness behind him.

Then the man startled her by giggling. “I made a mistake. You couldn’t still be Dawn.
Don’t be mad at me.”

He advanced another smooth silent yard into the room. There was an ugly black-handled
knife in his hand. He drifted a few feet sideways into shadow and waited.

Maggie began to inch on her hands and knees down under the table, and at the bottom
end of the table she gathered herself to make a rush for the door.

“Come out and talk to me,” he said. “There’s a reason for everything, and there’s
a reason for this. I’m not a lunatic operating in a void, you know. I have come thousands
of miles to stand here right now, in the middle of the world right here. It’s important
for you to understand that.”

He hesitated in the shadows.

“I am a person who always knows when something is going to happen, and this is a thing
that is going to happen. You are going to stand up and walk toward me. You are afraid.
You smell blood. That is from something that already happened a long time ago, and
you are here now and you have to see that what happened then was part of a general
pattern and you are in that pattern too. Worthy, worthy is the lamb that was slain.
He was a warrior, and I was a warrior, and I have been called back.” The man stepped
closer to the center of the room. “So this has to happen. Stand up and walk out toward
me.”

As he spoke, Maggie shrugged her coat off her shoulders and let it silently fold onto
the floor. She crept back up the length of the table, crawled around the chairs at
its far end, and very slowly and quietly moved up onto the platform.

The man startled her by backing a step toward her.

“I know where you are. You are under the table. I could go over to you now and pull
you out. I am not going to do that. I am going to give you the chance to show yourself.
Once you show yourself to me, you can leave. You can see where I am now. I am
at the back of the room. I promise you that I will not move from this spot. I would
like to see your face, I would like to know you.”

Maggie saw him shift the knife in his hand to hold the tip between his thumb and forefinger,
the handle dangling below.

“There is the Elephant,” he said. “Justice does not exist in the world system. Fairness
is a human invention. The world abhors only waste, waste is forbidden, and when waste
is eliminated love is permitted. Behold, I tell you a mystery—I am a man of sorrows
and I loved Pumo the Puma.”

Maggie had begun moving backward with greater care. She was very near the desk, and
when she touched it with one backwards-reaching hand she forced herself to move even
more slowly until she had found the side of the empty clay pot she knew was there.
It had once held a tiny hibiscus tree, a gift from Maggie; when the tree had died
from lack of light and an infestation of mites around the time of the insect problem
in the kitchen, Pumo had dumped the hibiscus and kept the pot, promising Maggie that
they would get another. It had sat empty beside his desk ever since.

“One minute or another, we will meet one another. In this minute, or the next, or
the one after that …”

He stood there, about five feet away from her now, as prepared as ever to throw his
knife into her back. Maggie lifted the big pot off its base, and in one motion stood
up and raised the pot above her head.

The man looked back over his shoulder, already beginning to react, and Maggie stepped
forward and brought the pot down with imperfect accuracy. She was sobbing with terror.
His own reflexes undid him. Ducking sideways, he brought himself directly beneath
the heavy pot, and it connected solidly with the side of his head. There was a dull
heavy thud followed almost immediately by the smashing of the pot on the floor and
the loud crash as Tina’s killer pitched onto the coffee table and snapped it in two
like a sheet of ice.

Maggie jumped down from the platform and skimmed across the floor before Pumo’s killer
had picked himself up out of the wreckage of the table. She threw open the door and
went pell-mell down the stairs. As if with three-hundred-and-sixty-degree vision,
she saw her huge shadow on the wall beside her and a darker shape filling the opening
at the top of the stairs. Even though she was flying, she seemed to be moving with
terrific slowness, as if time were muscle-bound. The man must have dropped his knife,
for he did not throw it. Maggie burst through the street door as she heard the man
thundering down the stairs.

Again she flew, now toward noise, lights, people. She was entirely unaware of the
cold.

Maggie risked a glance over her shoulder just before she reached the corner of West
Broadway. The scene behind her seemed as flat and artificial as a stage set. The door
to the loft hung open, and light spilling out melted into the circular light from
a streetlamp. A few people had turned around on the sidewalk to watch her run past.
In the midst of all the light and activity on Grand Street was a sliding shadow, a
man who melted toward her invisibly, using other people as cover. Maggie snapped her
head forward, her breath freezing in her throat, and did her best to narrow down to
a small black line speeding along above the pavement.

Maggie ran down the block, her arms pumping in the thin sleeves of her shirt, her
knees rising and falling.
“Go
, girl,” a black man urged when she flew by, for her broad smooth face reflected little
of her terror. A red-hot staple fixed itself into her side, and when she began to
run against the rhythm of her breathing she could hear her pursuer’s footsteps smoothly,
evenly hitting the ground behind her. He was gaining on her.