Koko (48 page)

Finally the subway was only a block ahead of her. Her face dripped sweat and the staple
burned in her side, but still her elbows pumped and her knees rose and fell. The boys,
still occupying the middle of the sidewalk, saw her racing toward them and went wild.

“Chinkie!”

“Baby, you came back!”

This wide-grinning boy in a Fila sweatshirt danced in front of her, giving big come-to-me
gestures. A gold chain spelling out a name in letters as large as front teeth bounced
on his chest. Maggie was yelling something, and they made to close on her, but when
she came within a few yards of the boy he saw her face and moved out of the way. “Murder!”
she yelled. “Stop him!”

Without any transition she was flying down the steps, moving as if there were no gravity.
From above she heard shouts and the sound of somebody falling. Before Maggie hit the
bottom of the steps she heard a train pounding into the station, and she hit the ground
running. Perhaps fifteen people were in the station, another fifteen or so on the
platform. Voices still came from the top of the stairs. To her right the train came
to a stop, and its doors squeaked open.

Maggie kept on winding through the people, and when she reached the turnstile she
pretended to drop in her token and passed beneath the motionless bar swiftly and unobserved.
Once past the turnstile she risked another glance over her shoulder and saw a wall
of people advancing toward the train. Then a grey shadow melted away behind a man
in a black topcoat, and she saw the suggestion of a smile as the shadow flowed on
toward her. The being was quietly, gleefully capering toward her, and she sprinted
across the final few yards to the waiting train.

Maggie rushed into the car and darted to the nearest window as the doors closed. The
man in the black topcoat was just now nearing the turnstile, and behind him something
else melted and flowed, passed between the men and women waiting to get to the platform,
grinned at her and danced all but invisibly, seeing her but unseen as the train pulled
away from the station.

Maggie collapsed into a seat. After a time she became aware that she was trembling.
“He killed him,” she said to herself. When she repeated this statement, the few people
around her stood up and moved farther down the length of the car. It seemed to Maggie
that what had killed her lover and pursued her into the station had not been human
but a supernatural force, a grinning evil thing that could change its shape or become
invisible. The only proof she had of its humanity had been the way the pot had connected
to its head, and how it had sprawled onto Pumo’s glass table. A wave of nausea and
of disbelief went through her. Maggie was sobbing now, and she swiped at her eyes.
She bent over and looked at her shoes. They were not bloodstained, not even the soles.
She shuddered again and wept to herself all the rest of the long way uptown. Tears
streamed down her face while she changed trains. She felt like a beaten animal returning
home. Now and then she started and cried out, thinking that she had caught a glimpse
of Tina’s crazy shadowy killer moving behind the backs of people standing at the straps
in front of her, but when the people parted and fled no one was there, he had melted
away again.

At 125th Street she ran down the steps, crossing her arms over her chest for warmth.
Her tears were going to freeze, she thought, and she would be trapped inside the icy
seal over her face.

She parted the doors of the General’s storefront church and slipped inside as quietly
as she could. Warmth and the odor of burning candles immediately surrounded her, and
she nearly collapsed. The General’s congregation sat solidly in their chairs;
Maggie stayed at the back of the church, trembling and gripping her arms, uncertain
of what to do next. Now that she was here, she was uncertain even of why she had returned
to the bright little church. Tears streamed down her face. The General finally caught
sight of her and raised one eyebrow in a kindly, questioning look that did not fail
to contain a portion of alarm.
He doesn’t know
, Maggie thought, hugging herself and shaking, silently crying.
How can he not know?
Then Maggie realized that Tina Pumo still sat dead in his loft and nobody but herself
and his murderer knew of it. She had to call the police.

As yet ignorant of these events which would soon bring him back to New York, Michael
Poole emerged for the second time that day from Bang Luk, the alleyway which housed
the flower market and Tim Underhill’s rooms, and turned north up Charoen Krung Road.
It was just past twelve-thirty at night. The streets were even more congested than
they had been earlier, and under normal circumstances even a passionate walker like
Dr. Poole would unquestioningly have stepped to the curb, raised his arm, and taken
the first vehicle that stopped for him. It was still very hot, his hotel was two or
three miles away, and Bangkok is no city for long walks. But these were not normal
circumstances, and Dr. Poole never considered interring himself in a car for the length
of his journey back to his bed. In any case he was in no hurry to get to bed—he knew
he would be unable to sleep. He had just finished spending a little more than seven
hours with Timothy Underhill, and he needed time to think as much as he needed sheer
thoughtless exercise. By most ways of reckoning, very little had happened during the
seven hours: the two men had talked over their drinks on the terrace; still talking,
they had gone by ruk-tuk to the Golden Dragon on Sukhumvit Road and eaten excellent
Chinese food while they continued their conversation; they had taken another ruk-tuk
back to the little set of rooms above Jimmy Siam and talked, talked, talked. Michael
Poole could still hear Tim Underhill’s voice in his ears—he felt as if he were walking
to the rhythms of the sentences spoken by that voice.

Underhill was a wonderful man. He was a wonderful man with a terrible life, a wonderful
man with terrible habits. He was terrible and he was wonderful. (Michael had had more
to drink
during these seven hours than was his habit, and all the alcohol had warmed and muddled
him.) Poole realized that he was moved, shaken, even in a sense awed by his old companion—awed
by what he had risked and overcome. But more than that, he was persuaded by Underhill.
It was shiningly certain that Underhill was not Koko. All his subsequent conversation
had gone to prove what Poole had felt in Underhill’s first words to him on the terrace.

In all the turmoil of his life, Tim Underhill had virtually never ceased to consider
Koko, to ponder and wonder over that figure of anarchic vengeance—he not only made
Harry Beevers a latecomer to the issue, he demonstrated the shallowness of Beevers’
methods. Poole walked northward in the dark steaming city, hemmed all about by rushing,
indifferent men, and felt how thoroughly he sided with Underhill. Eight hours earlier,
Dr. Poole had crossed over a rickety bridge and felt himself coming into a new accommodation
with his profession, with his marriage, above all with death. It was almost as if
he had finally seen death with enough respect to understand it. He had stood before
it with his spirit wide open, in a very undoctorly way. The awe, the terror were necessary—all
such moments of rapturous understanding fade, leaving only the dew of their passing,
but Poole could remember the sharp, salty, vivid taste of reality, and the humility
he had felt before it. What had persuaded him about Tim Underhill was his sense that
for years, in book after book, Underhill had actually climbed over the railing and
crossed the stream. He had opened his spirit wide. He had done his best to fly, and
Koko had virtually given him his wings.

Underhill had flown as far as he could, and if he had crashed, an abrupt landing might
have been one of the consequences of flight. All the drinking and drugs, all his excesses,
had not been undertaken to aid the flight—as Beevers and people like him would instantly
have assumed—but to numb and distract the man when he had gone as far as he could
and still had fallen short. Underhill had gone farther than Dr. Poole, who had used
his mind and his memory and his love for Stacy Talbot, which was wrapped like a layer
of bandages around his old love for Robbie: Underhill had harnessed up his whole imagination,
and imagination was everything.

This, along with a great deal more, had tumbled out on the terrace, over dinner in
the noisy bright enormous Chinese restaurant, in the unbelievable shambles of Underhill’s
apartment. Almost nothing had been explained in sequence, and the unhappy details
of the author’s life had often dragged Poole’s attention
away from Koko. The outline of Underhill’s life was that of a series of avalanches.
At present, however, he was living quietly and doing his best to work again. “Like
learning to walk again,” he told Poole. “I staggered and then I fell down. All the
muscles shrank, nothing worked right. For eight months, if I wrote one paragraph after
six hours’ work, it was a good day.”

He had written a strange novella called “Blue Rose.” He had written an even stranger
one called “The Juniper Tree.” Now he wrote dialogues with himself, questions and
answers, and he was halfway through another novel. He had twice seen a girl running
up the street toward him covered in blood, making an unearthly noise—the girl was
part of the answer, he said, that was why he had seen her—she announced the nearness
of ultimate things. Koko was Underhill’s way of getting back inside Ia Thuc, and so
was the vision of a girl running in panic down a city street, and so was everything
he had written.

What made everything worse, Underhill said, was that Koko was the lowlife’s lowlife,
Victor Spitalny.

“I worked it all out,” Underhill told him at the Golden Dragon. “I did one of those
Koko numbers, you did one, and I think Conor Linklater did one—”

“He did,” Michael said. “And I did one too—you’re right.”

“No kidding,” Underhill said. “You think you didn’t show it? You’re not exactly the
atrocity type, Michael. I worked out that it could only have been Spitalny. Unless
it was you, of course, or Dengler, both of which were equally unlikely.

“I came to Bangkok to learn what I could about Dengler’s last days, because I thought
maybe that would get me started writing again. And then, my friend, all hell broke
loose. The journalists started dying. As you and Beevers noticed.”

“What do you mean, journalists?” Michael asked innocently.

Underhill had stared at him with his mouth open for a moment, then had burst into
laughter.

Poole reached the wide, jumbled intersection of Charoen Krung Road with Surawong Road
and stood still in the dense hot night for a moment. Using the resources of a few
provincial libraries and bookstores in Bangkok, Underhill had discovered what Harry
Beevers, with a research assistant and a vast library system, had not. It took Poole’s
breath away, that Beevers would have overlooked, even denied, the connection among
the victims.

Because that connection put them all in danger. Underhill was certain that Spitalny
had followed him, in both Singapore and Bangkok.

He had only caught glimpses. He’d had the sensation of being watched and followed.
In the Golden Dragon he told Michael, “A few weeks after the bodies were found in
Singapore, I came down to the street and had this feeling that something really bad,
but something that
belonged
to me, was hiding somewhere and watching me. As if I had a sick, bad brother who
had come back after a long time away, and was going to make my life hell before he
went away again. I looked around, but I didn’t see anything but the flower sellers,
and as soon as I got out onto the road, the feeling went away.” And in his messy room,
with the demon masks nailed up on the wall and a smeary mirror and an ivory straw
before him on the table, he said: “Remember my telling you about the time I walked
outside and had this
feeling
—that something bad had come back for me? I thought it was Spitalny, of course. But
nothing happened. He just melted away. Well, about two days after that, a few days
after the Frenchmen were killed here, I had the same feeling on Phat Pong Road. It
was much stronger this time. I
knew
someone was there. I turned around, almost sure that he was right behind me, and
that I’d see him. I
spun.
He wasn’t behind me—he wasn’t even right behind the people right behind me. I couldn’t
see him anywhere. But you know, I did see something strange. It’s hard to put this
into words, even for me, but it was like, way back down there, way way down the street,
there was something like a moving shadow drifting back and forth behind these people
who were much more visible, no, not drifting because it was much more animated,
dancing
back and forth behind all those people, grinning at me. I just had this little glimpse
of someone moving insolently fast, someone just filled with glee—and then he vanished.
I almost puked.”

“And what do you want to do now?” Poole asked. “Would you come back to America? I’m
almost honor-bound to tell Conor and Beevers that I’ve met you, but I don’t know how
you feel about that either.”

“Do what you want,” Underhill said. “But I feel like you want to drag me out of my
cave by my hair, and I’m not sure I want to leave it.”

“Then don’t!” Michael had cried.

“But maybe we can help each other,” Underhill said.

“Can I see you again tomorrow?”

“You can do anything you like,” Underhill had said.

As Michael Poole walked the last two hundred yards to his hotel, he wondered what
he would do if a madman danced like a moving shadow on the hot crowded street behind
him. Would he
see a vision, as Underhill apparently had? Would he turn and try to run him down?
Victor Spitalny, the lowlife’s lowlife, changed everything. A moment later Michael
realized that Harry Beevers might have his mini-series after all—Spitalny put a few
colorful new wrinkles in Beevers’ story. But was it for that he had come so far from
Westerholm?