Koko (53 page)

“Wasps,” Spitalny insisted. “Man, I’ll bet the Lost Boss is in there, down and out,
man. We gonna get us a new lieutenant.”

He looked at Poole with the sort of expression a dog wears when you are made to realize
that it too can think. “The good part of this is obvious, isn’t it? You can’t court-martial
a dead man.”

Poole watched the poisoned red lumps shrink into Spitalny’s filthy sallow skin.

“There’s one way out of this, and you know what it is as much as I do. We put it all
on the lieutenant. Which is exactly where it oughta be.”

The helicopter was huge in the sky now, descending toward them through the harsh sunlight.
Beneath it the grass flattened out in sealike waves and ripples. Beyond the ruined
village, beyond the ditch, lay the meadow where the oxen grazed. Far to the left,
the forested hillside they had descended appeared to continue the waves and ripples
caused by the helicopter far out beyond the valley.

Then he heard Harry Beevers’ voice, loud and jubilant. “Poole! Underhill! Give me
two men!” When he saw that they were gaping at him, he grinned. “Jackpot!”

He came striding toward them. The man was
up
, Poole saw. The nervous, jittery energy was all octane now. He was like a man who
does not know that the reason he feels so good is that he’s drunk. Sweat flew off
his face and his eyes were liquid. “Where are my two men?”

Poole motioned to Burrage and Pumo, who began to move toward the cave.

“I want everything out of that cave, and I want it piled up right out here where everybody
can see it. Troops, we’re going to make the six o’clock news.”

Troops? Beevers had never seemed more like an alien visitor who had learned earthling
“ways” from television programs.

“You numbah ten!” an old woman shouted at them.

“Number ten on your programs, number one in your hearts,” Lieutenant Beevers said
to Poole, then turned away to greet the reporters running hunched over through the
grass.

And everything else flowed from what came out of Harry Beevers’ mouth.
Newsweek
and
Time
and stories in hundreds of daily newspapers, a blip passing over the screen of what
is seen and read and talked about. Then only a cooling memory, stored in old photographs,
of a mountain of rice and a tall pile of Russian weapons which had been carried out
of a cave by Spanky Burrage and Tina Pumo and the other members of the platoon. Ia
Thuc was a VC village, and everybody in it wanted to kill American soldiers. But there
were no photographs of the bodies of thirty children because the only bodies found
at Ia Thuc were those that had been incinerated in a ditch—three children, two males
and a female, roughly thirteen years of age—and that of a single small boy of perhaps
seven, also incinerated. Later the body of a young woman was found on the hillside.

After the reporters left, the old people were relocated to a refugee camp at An Lo.
The Tin Man and those above him described this action as “penalizing the insurgents
and depriving the VC of a recruiting base.” The crops were poisoned and the people,
Buddhists, taken from their family burial plots. They had seen this coming from the
moment their houses were burned—maybe from the moment Beevers had killed the sow.
They disappeared into An Lo, fifteen old people among thousand of refugees.

When Poole and Tim Underhill had gone deep into the cave a cloud of transparent moths
had filled the air around them, buffeting against them, flattening out over their
mouths and eyes, then beating off again—Poole waved his hands before his face and
moved as quickly as he could, Underhill behind him, into another section of the cave,
which the moths did not enter. This was the chamber where the firing had taken place.
The blood was already disappearing into the bullet-pocked wall the way Spitalny’s
skin eruptions, his yams, leeches, eggs, and almonds had faded back into his body.
The cave folded and unfolded, branching apart like a maze. Farther on they found another
large store of rice, farther
on a little wooden desk and chair—the desk looked as though it had been taken from
one of Poole’s own grade school classrooms in Greenwich, Connecticut. It began to
seem hopeless, they would never find the end of it: it seemed to have no end at all,
but to twist back around in on itself.

They came out again past the chamber where the empty metal casings lay like thrown
coins, and Underhill inhaled deeply and shook his head. Poole smelled it too. The
chamber was filled with a complex odor compounded of terror, blood, gunpowder, and
some other odor Poole could identify only in negatives. It was not piss, it was not
shit, it was not sweat or rot or fungus or even the reeking dew all animals exude
when they are frightened unto death, but something beneath all these. The indefinable
odor in the stone chamber stank of pain to him. It stank like the place where Injun
Joe had made Tom Sawyer watch him rape Becky Thatcher before he killed them both.

He and Underhill finally came back out into the main part of the cave. M.O. Dengler
was saying something to Spitalny as he carried a case of Russian rifles out through
the opening.

“A man of sorrow and acquainted with grief,” Spitalny replied, or more likely, repeated.
“A man of sorrow and acquainted with grief, a man of sorrow and acquainted with dickheads,
Jesus Christ.”

“Calm down, Vic,” Dengler said. “Whatever it was, it was a long time ago.” Then he
wobbled, and his rear end dropped as if a strong hand had suddenly pushed his head
down into his neck. Dengler’s legs folded sideways, and the case of rifles landed
with a loud thud, Dengler nearly soundlessly. Spitalny heard the crash as the box
of rifles landed, turned around, looked down, and continued carrying his box of rifles
toward the stack.

“There are no children!” Beevers was yelling. “Not in war! No children!” Well, he
was right: there were no children. For the first but not the last time, Poole wondered
if the villagers from An Lac had taken more children out through another entrance.

Dengler groaned as Peters unwrapped the final length of gauze. Everybody backed up
for a second. Compact as a puff of cigarette smoke, a deep brown odor floated up from
the exposed wound.

“You’re out of here for a couple of days,” Peters said.

“Where’d the lieutenant go?” Dengler’s eyes moved almost fearfully from side to side
while Peters rewrapped his arm.

“Did you see the bats flying out of his mouth?” Dengler asked.

“I gave him something a little extra,” Peters said. “Tide him over.”

Into the darkness, which tides us over.

Groggy with cognac and too little sleep, they landed in San Francisco at some hour
that seemed like four or five in the morning but was actually noon. In a vast hall
hundreds of passengers milled around a luggage carousel and watched their bags thump
and slide down a metal ramp onto a moving belt. His beard trimmed and his thinning
hair cut short, Tim Underhill looked gaunt and tired. His shoulders were as stooped
as an old scholar’s, and now his questing face was also a scholar’s. Poole wondered
if it had been a mistake to bring him back with them.

As they moved toward Customs and Immigration with their bags, a uniformed man appeared
among them, awarding instant customs clearance to a few of the passengers. The people
he selected to receive this convenience were invariably middle-aged males who looked
like corporate executives. Koko had been here, Poole thought while the official’s
eye rested upon him and moved on. Koko stood on this spot and saw everything I am
seeing. He left a flight from Bangkok or Singapore and changed to a New
York flight where he met a stewardess named Lisa Mayo and an unpleasant young millionaire.
He talked to the unpleasant young man on the flight, and shortly after they landed
at JFK airport, he killed him. I bet he did, I bet he did, I bet, I bet—

He stood right where I’m standing, Poole thought. His skin shivered.

Harry Beevers bounced up off his seat as soon as the others found their departure
gate in the United terminal. He stepped over the semicircle of suitbags and carry-on
luggage arranged before him and began tacking toward them through the rows of seats.

They met before the desk, and Beevers silently braced Poole at arm’s length, then
embraced him, enclosing him in the odors of alcohol, cologne, and airline soap. Poole
supposed he was being commended for actions in the field.

Beevers melodramatically dropped his hands from Michael’s arms and turned to Conor.
But before Beevers could give the French Foreign Legion seal of approval to him too,
Conor stuck out his hand. Beevers gave in and shook it. Finally he turned to Tim Underhill.
“So this is you,” he said.

Underhill almost laughed out loud. “Disappointed?”

Poole had wondered all during their flight how Beevers would handle Underhill’s arrival
among them as an innocent man. There was the small possibility that he would do something
really nutty, such as put handcuffs on him and make a citizen’s arrest. Harry Beevers’
fantasies died hard, and Poole did not expect him to give up this one, which had been
the foundation of many others, without being paid heavily for its loss.

But the good grace, and even the good sense of his response surprised Poole. “Not
if you’re going to help us, I’m not.”

“I want to stop him too, Harry. Of course I’ll help you, however I can.”

“Are you clean?” Beevers asked.

“I’n not doing too bad,” Underhill said.

“Okay. But there’s one more thing. I want your agreement that you won’t use any of
this Koko material in a work of nonfiction. You can write all the fiction you want—I
don’t care about that. But I have to have the nonfiction rights to this.”

“Sure,” Underhill said. “I couldn’t write nonfiction if I tried. And I won’t sue you
if you won’t sue me.”

“We can work together,” Beevers declared. He dragged Underhill too in for a hug and
said he was on the team. “Let’s make some serious money, okay?”

*  *  *

Michael sat next to Beevers on the flight to New York. Conor was in the window seat,
and Tim Underhill sat just ahead of Michael. For a long time Beevers told improbable
stories about his adventures in Taipei—stories about drinking snake’s blood and having
incredible sex with beautiful whores, actresses, and models. Then he leaned toward
Michael and whispered. “We have to be careful with this guy, Michael. We can’t trust
him, that’s the bottom line. Why do you think I’m inviting him to stay with me? I’ll
be able to keep my eye on him.”

Poole nodded wearily.

In a voice loud enough to be overheard, Beevers said, “I want you guys to think about
something. We are going to be seeing the police at some point after we get back, and
that gives us a problem. How much do we tell them?”

Underhill twisted around in his seat to look back with an interested, quizzical expression.

“I think we should consider holding to a certain confidentiality here,” Beevers said.
“We started off on this thing by wanting to find Koko ourselves, and that’s how we
want to finish up. We ought to stay a step ahead of the police all the way.”

“Okay, I guess,” Conor said.

“I hope I have the agreement of the rest of you on this point.”

“We’ll see,” Poole said.

“I don’t suppose we’re exactly talking about obstruction of justice,” Underhill said.

“I don’t care what you call it,” Beevers said. “All I’m saying is that we hold back
on one or two details. Which is what the police do all the time as a matter of course.
We hold back a little. And when we come up with a course of action, we keep it to
ourselves.”

“Course of action?” Conor asked. “What can we do?”

Beevers asked them to consider a few possibilities. “For instance, we have two bits
of information the police do not have. We know that Koko is Victor Spitalny, and we
know that a man named Tim Underhill is in New York—or soon will be—and not back in
Bangkok.”

“You don’t want to tell the cops that we’re looking for Spitalny?” Conor asked.

“We can play a little dumb. They can find out who is missing and who isn’t.” He gave
Michael a superior little smile. “It is the other bit of information that I see being
most useful to us. Spitalny used this man’s name”—he pointed at Underhill—“didn’t
he? To get the reporters to come to him? I think he did, based on
what we found out at Goodwood Park. So I say let’s turn the tables on him.”

“And how would you do that, Harry?” Underhill asked.

“In a way, Pumo gave me the idea when we all met in Washington back in November. He
was talking about his girlfriend, remember?”

“Hey,
I
remember,” Conor said. “He was talking to me. That little Chinese girl was driving
him out of his gourd. She used to put ads in some paper for him. Signed them ‘Half
Moon.’ ”

“Très bon, très, très bon
,” Beevers said.

“You want to put ads in the
Village Voice
?” asked Michael.