Koko (84 page)

“We’re coming,” he said, but his voice was feeble, not his.

Michael pulled himself up the stairs. As soon as he was far enough up into the light
to be able to see clearly, he looked at his side. He had to force himself to remain
standing—an instant later he realized that there had been a deceptive amount of blood.
Koko had meant to hurt him seriously, though not to kill him, but his heavy winter
coat had lessened the degree of his injury. “Dengler killed himself,” he said.

“Yep,” Conor said behind him.

Poole looked over his shoulder and saw Conor coming up after him. Conor’s eyes were
the size of dinner plates. Michael turned back around and kept going up the stairs.

When he reached the top one of the officers asked him if he was all right.

“I’m not too bad, but I’ll need that ambulance too.”

Dalton poked his head into the entry and said, “Help that man out.”

One of the officers put his arm around Poole’s shoulders and assisted him out into
the courtyard. It seemed warmer out in the air, and the gritty brick courtyard seemed
very beautiful to him. Maggie cried out, and he turned toward the sound, barely taking
in Tim’s form slumped into his coat, his head bowed. Maggie and Ellen Woyzak stood
in the far corner of the beautiful little courtyard, framed as formally as by a great
photographer. Both women were beautiful too—overflowingly beautiful, in their different
ways. Poole felt as though his death sentence had been commuted just as the blindfold
had been tied around his head. Ellen’s face ignited as Conor came through the door
behind him.

“Get him to the ambulance,” Murphy growled, lowering the bullhorn. “Beevers and Dengler
are still down there?”

Poole nodded. With a little cry, Maggie jumped forward and threw her arms around his
neck. She was speaking very quickly, and he could not make out the words—they seemed
barely to be in English—but he did not have to know what she was saying to understand
her. He kissed the side of her head.

“What happened?” Maggie asked. “Where’s Dengler?”

“I think he killed himself, I think he’s dead,” he said.

“Get him in the ambulance,” Murphy said. “Put him in the hospital and stay there with
him. Ryan, Peebles, get down there and see what’s left of the other two.”

“Harry?” Maggie asked.

Ellen Woyzak had put her arms around Conor, who stood as motionless as a statue.

“Still alive.”

The thick-necked young officer moved up to Poole with an expression of great stupid
satisfaction on his face, and began to urge him toward the arch that led out onto
Elizabeth Street. Poole glanced at Underhill, who was still slouched against the wall
beside the policeman who must have led him away from the tenement. Underhill did not
look right, differently from the way Conor did not look right. His hat was pulled
down over his forehead, his neck was bent, his collar was turned up.

“Tim?” Poole said.

Underhill moved an inch or two away from the policeman beside him but did not look
up at Poole.

He was
small
, Poole finally saw. He was a little, a pocket-sized Underhill. Of course people did
not shrink. A second before he realized what had happened, Poole saw the flash of
teeth in an almost unearthly smile hidden in the folds of Underhill’s turned-up collar.

His body froze. He wanted to yell, to scream. The wide black river cut him off, and
the dead children wailed.

“Michael?” Maggie asked.

Michael pointed at the figure in Underhill’s hat and coat. “Koko!” he could finally
shout. “Right there! He’s wearing—”

In the hand of the grinning man in Underhill’s coat there had materialized a long
knife, and while Poole shouted, the man sidled around the policeman beside him, clamped
his hand on his arm, and shoved the knife deep into his back.

Poole stopped shouting.

Before anyone could move, the man had vanished through the arch out onto Elizabeth
Street.

The policeman he had stabbed sat down heavily on the bricks, his face stunned and
empty. Murphy exploded into motion, sending four uniformed policemen after Dengler,
then getting the wounded officer carried into the ambulance. He took a last, infuriated
look around the courtyard and then ran out through the arch.

“I can wait,” Michael said when one of the policemen tried to push him toward the
arch and the ambulance bay. “I have to see Underhill.”

The policeman looked at him in confusion.

“For God’s sake, get him out of the basement,” Poole said.

“Michael,” Maggie pleaded, “you have to get to the hospital. I’ll come with you.”

“It’s not as bad as it looks,” Poole said. “I can’t go until I see what happened to
Tim.”

Tim was dead, though. Koko had silently murdered him and taken his coat and hat and
left the basement room in disguise.

“Oh, no,” Maggie said. She made to run for the tenement door, but first Poole took
her arm, and then Dalton restrained her.

Poole said, “Get down there, Dalton. Let go of my girlfriend and go downstairs and
see if you can help Tim, or I’ll pound the living shit out of you.” His side flamed
and pulsed. From out on the street came shouts and the sound of running footsteps.

Dalton turned slowly toward the arch, then changed his mind and moved toward the tenement’s
entrance. “Johnson, let’s see what’s taking them so long.” One of the policemen trotted
after him. Poole heard them clattering down the steps. “I mean that sincerely,” he
said. “I’ll pound … the living shit …”

Ellen and Conor moved across the courtyard toward Poole and Maggie.

“He got away, Mikey,” Conor said in a voice full of disbelief.

“They’ll get him. He can’t be that good.”

“I’m sorry, Mikey.”

“You were great, Conor. You were better than the rest of us.”

Conor shook his head. “Tim didn’t make any
noise.
I don’t—I think—”

Poole nodded. He did not want to say it either.

“He cut you bad?”

“Not too bad,” Poole said. “But I think I’ll sit down.” He put his back against the
tenement wall and slid down onto the bricks, with Maggie holding one elbow and Conor
the other. When he got down he felt very hot so he tried to take off his coat, but
that made his side scream again. He heard himself make a noise.

Maggie knelt down beside him and took his hand.

“Just a twinge. A little mild shock too.”

She squeezed his hand.

“I’m okay, Maggie. Just a little hot.” He leaned forward, and she helped slide his
coat off his shoulders. “Looks a lot worse than it is,” Poole said. “That cop was
hurt bad, though.” He looked around for the policeman Koko had knifed. “Where is he?”

“They took him away a long time ago.”

“Could he walk?”

“He was on a stretcher,” Maggie said. “Do you want to go to the ambulance now? There’s
another one out there.”

Then they both heard the heavy tramp of boots on the staircase.

A moment later two of the officers carried Harry Beevers out of the tenement. He had
a big white cloth taped to the side of his head, and he looked like the victim of
a savage street fight. Unable to stand by himself, Beevers wobbled between two policemen.
“Where’d he go?” Beevers asked in a crushed, painful voice. “Where is that asshole?”

Poole assumed that he meant Koko, and almost smiled—he had a right to ask that question.

But Beevers’ intense unhappy eyes found Poole, and instantly filled with bitterness.
“Asshole,”
Beevers said. “You fucked everything up! What do you think you were trying to do
down there? Get everybody killed?” Unbelievably, he tried to fight free of the policemen
and come toward Poole. “What makes you think you can blame everything on me? You fucked
up, Poole! You fucked up bad! I almost had him, and you let him get away!”

Poole stopped paying attention to Beevers’ ranting. In the entrance to the tenement
appeared Dalton and a tall, burly black policeman holding Tim Underhill between them.
Tim’s face was tinged with blue, and his teeth chattered. The side of his sweater
had been cut open, and a large quantity of blood had stained his entire left side—like
Michael, at first glance he looked as though someone had tried to cut him in half.
“Well, Michael,” Tim said while they carried him through the door.

“Well, Timothy,” Poole said. “Why didn’t you say something down there, when Dengler
was pulling your clothes off?”

“Set me down next to Poole,” Underhill said, and Dalton and the other policeman helped
him across the courtyard and lowered him gently onto the bricks. Another policeman
to whom Dalton had signaled came rushing in from the street with a blanket, which
he wrapped around Underhill’s shoulders.

“He tied something around my mouth,” said Underhill. “I think it was Beevers’ shirt.
Was good old Harry wearing a shirt when he came out?”

“Couldn’t say.”

Lieutenant Murphy burst in through the Elizabeth Street arch, and both men looked
up at him. His face was still purple, but as much with exertion as rage—it was just
one of those Irish faces, Poole saw. By the time Murphy was sixty, his face would
be that color all the time. When the detective saw Poole and
Underhill leaning against the tenement wall with their legs out before them, he closed
his eyes and his mouth became a taut, lipless line. He said, “Do you suppose you could
manage to get another ambulance for these two idiots? This isn’t a convalescent hospital.”

“Dr. Poole wouldn’t leave until Mr. Underhill came out,” Dalton said, “and when Beevers
got into the ambulance he threatened to sue everybody in sight unless they took him
immediately. So—”

Murphy looked at him.

“Sir,” Dalton said, and went out through the arch.

“Did you get him?” Poole asked.

Murphy ignored the question and walked across the courtyard to lean into the tenement
as if he thought that someone else might be down there. Then he looked down into the
window well. “Bag that knife,” he said to one of the uniformed policemen.

“Did you?”

Murphy continued to ignore him.

A few seconds later they heard the wailing of an approaching ambulance draw closer
and closer until it came up alongside the tenement and turned off its siren.

Dalton came back through the arch and asked them if they wanted stretchers.

“No,” Poole said.

“Don’t we?” Underhill asked. “Are stretchers effete these days?”

“What happened to the policeman Dengler stabbed?” Poole asked. Dalton and the black
officer were gently getting him up on his feet, and Maggie fussed around them, patting
and touching.

“He died on the way to the hospital,” Murphy said. “I just heard.”

“I’m sorry,” Poole said.

“Why? You didn’t stab him, did you?” Murphy’s face was blazing again, and he strode
across the bricks to stand before Poole. “We missed your friend Dengler.” His eyebrows
nearly met at the boundary of a deep, angry-looking vertical crease in his forehead.
“He dumped the hat and coat on the corner and took off down Mott Street like a rabbit.
We think he ducked into a building somewhere. We’ll get him, Poole. Don’t worry about
that. He’s not going to get very far.” Murphy turned away, clamping and unclamping
his jaws. “I’ll see you and your buddy in the hospital.”

“I’m sorry that one of your men died, not because I had anything to do with it.”

“Jesus Christ,” Murphy said, turning away to precede them through the arch.

“Some people just don’t understand sympathy,” Underhill said to Poole as they were
being taken toward the waiting ambulance.

Both Poole and Underhill were stitched up in an emergency room by a baby-faced young
resident who pronounced their wounds identical but “all glamour,” meaning that while
they would leave good-sized scars, they represented no serious threat to life or health,
facts that Poole had already ascertained for himself. After their wounds had been
sutured, they were taken upstairs to a double room and told they would be spending
the night by the officer who had ridden with them in the ambulance. This officer’s
name was LeDonne, and he had a neat moustache and kindly eyes.

“I’ll be right outside the door,” LeDonne added.

“There’s no need for us to spend the night in the hospital,” Poole said.

“The lieutenant would really prefer it this way,” said LeDonne, which Michael took
as the officer’s polite way of telling them that they were under orders to spend at
least one night in the hospital.

Maggie Lah appeared with Conor Linklater and Ellen Woyzak three hours after their
installation in the room, and all three visitors described how they had spent the
previous hours with Lieutenant Murphy. The lieutenant had heard the story of how they
had come to the building on Elizabeth Street enough times to conclude that they were
innocent of all crimes except foolhardiness and finally had charged them with none.

Maggie also told Michael and Tim Underhill, who had become slightly groggy from the
effects of painkillers, that Koko had escaped the police in Chinatown, but that Murphy
was certain he would be captured before nightfall.

Maggie stayed on after Conor and Ellen left to go to Grand Central for a Metro North
train. Ellen kissed both men, and nearly had to pull Conor through the door. Poole
thought that Conor almost wished he had been injured himself, so that he could stay
with them.

“Where did they put Beevers?” he asked Maggie.

“He’s three floors up. Do you want to see him?”

“I don’t think I ever really want to see Harry Beevers,” Poole said.

“He lost an ear,” Maggie said.

“He has another one.”

The light in the hospital room grew hazy, and Michael thought of the beautiful grey
nimbus of light at the top of the stairs as he had emerged from Koko’s cell.

A nurse came and gave him another shot although he said he did not want or need it.
“I’m a doctor, you know,” he said.

“Not now, you’re not,” she said, and slammed the needle into his left buttock.