Koko

by Peter Straub

  “Oh,” he said. “They didn’t break into the restaurant. They broke into my loft. Vinh heard someone moving around upstairs, but he thought it was me. Later he went up to ask me about something, and realized that it must have been an intruder.”

  Tina looked almost fearfully up the narrow flight of steps that led to his loft.

  “I don’t suppose Dracula came back to pay a social call,” she said.

  “No, I don’t suppose so either.” Tina did not sound convinced of this. “The bitch might have remembered some stuff she forgot to steal, though.”

  “It’s just a burglar,” Maggie protested. “Come on, let’s get out of the cold.” She took a couple of steps up the stairs, then reached down, grasped Tina’s elbows with both hands, and pulled him toward her. “You know when most burglaries are committed, white boy? Around ten in the morning, when the bad guys know everybody else is at work.”

  “I know that,” Tina smiled at her. “Honest, I know that.”

  “And if little Dracula comes back for your body, I’ll turn her into … hmm …” She rolled her eyes up and stuck a forefinger into her cheek. “Into egg drop soup.”

  “Into Duck Saigon. Remember where you are.”

  “So let’s go up and get it over with.”

  “Like I said.”

  He followed her up the stairs to the door of his loft. Unlike the white door downstairs, it was locked.

  “One better than Dracula,” Maggie said.

  “It locks when you close it. I’m still not sure it wasn’t goddamned Dracula.” Pumo unlocked the door and stepped inside ahead of Maggie.

  His coats and outerjackets still hung on their hooks, his boots were still lined up beneath them.

  “Okay so far.”

  “Stop being such a coward,” Maggie said, and gave him a push. A little way along was the door to his bathroom. Nothing in the bathroom was disturbed, but Pumo had a vivid vision of Dracula standing in front of the shaving mirror, bending her knees and fluffing up her Mohawk.

  The bedroom was next. Pumo took in the unmade bed and empty television stand—he had left the bed that way, and had not yet replaced the nineteen-inch Sony Dracula had stolen from this room. The closet doors hung open, and a few of his suits drooped from their hangers toward an untidy heap of other clothes.

  “Goddamn, it was Dracula.” Pumo felt a layer of sweat pop out over what seemed his entire body.

  Maggie looked up at him questioningly.

  “The first time she stole my favorite jacket and my favorite pair of cowboy boots. SHIT! She loves my wardrobe!” Pumo slammed his fists against the sides of his head.

  He was instantly across the room, lifting articles of clothing from the closet floor, examining them and putting them back on hangers.

  “Did Vinh call the police? Do you want to call them?”

  Pumo looked up at Maggie from an armload of clothes. “What’s the point? Even if they find her and by some miracle put her away, she’ll be back outside in about a day and a half. That’s how we do it in this country. In Taipei you probably have an entirely different system.”

  Maggie leaned against the doorframe. Her arms hung straight down, parallel to each other, at an angle to her body. She had funny knobby little hands, Pumo noticed for perhaps the thousandth time. She said, “In Taipei, we staple their tongues to their upper lips and hack three fingers off each hand with a dull knife.”

  “Now that’s what I call justice,” Pumo said.

  “In Taipei, that’s what we call liberalism,” Maggie said. “Is anything missing?”

  “Hang on, hang on.” Pumo put the last suit on its hanger, the hanger on the rail. “We haven’t even gotten to the living room yet. I’m not even sure I want to get to the living room.”

  “I’ll look in there, if you like. As long as we can eventually come back in here and take our clothes off and do all those things we were originally intending to do.”

  He looked at her with undisguised astonishment.

  “I’ll make sure the enemy has retreated from the living room,” Maggie said in her flat precise voice. She disappeared.

  “GODDAMN IT! DAMN IT!” Pumo yelled a few seconds later. “I KNEW IT!”

  Maggie leaned into the bedroom again, looking startled and a little breathless. Her heavy black hair swung, and her lips were parted. “You called?”

  “I don’t believe it.” Pumo was gazing at the empty night-stand beside his bed, and looked palely up at Maggie. “How does the living room look?”

  “Well, in the second I had before I was distracted by the screams of a madman, it appeared to be slightly rumpled but otherwise okay.”

  “It was Dracula, all right.” Pumo did not like the sound of slightly rumpled. “I knew it, damn it. She came back and stole all the same stuff all over again.” He pointed to the nightstand. “I had to buy a new clock radio, and that’s gone. I got a new Watchman, and the asshole stole that too.”

  Pumo watched beautiful little Maggie come floating into his bedroom in her loose flowing Chinese garment and mentally saw a fearful vision of his living room. He saw the cushions ripped, the books tumbled from the shelves, his desk upended, his living room television gone, the answering machine gone, his checkbooks, the ornamental screen he brought back from Vietnam, his VCR, and most of his good liquor, all gone. Pumo did not consider himself immoderately attached to his possessions, but he braced himself for the loss of these things. He would mind most of all about the couch, which Vinh had made and upholstered for him by hand.

  Maggie lifted a drooping corner of a blanket with one hovering foot, and uncovered the clock radio and the new Watchman, which had apparently fallen from the nightstand sometime in the morning.

  Without a word, she led him into the living room. Pumo admitted to himself that it looked almost exactly as it had when he left it.

  The smooth, plump, speckled blue fabric still lay unblemished over Vinh’s long couch, the books still stood, in their customary disorder, on the shelves and, in piles, on the coffee tables; the television stood, stupid as an idol, in its place on the shelf beneath the VCR and the showy stereo. Pumo looked at the records on the shelf beneath and knew immediately that someone had flipped through them.

  At the far end of the room two steps led up to a platform, also carpentered by Vinh. Here were shelves stacked with bottles—a couple of shelves crammed with cookbooks, too—a sink, a concealed icebox. An armchair, a lamp. Shoved into a corner of the platform was Pumo’s desk and leather desk chair, which had been pulled out and moved to one side, as if the intruder had wished to spend time at the desk.

  “It doesn’t look too bad,” he said to Maggie. “She came in here and looked around, but she didn’t do any damage I can see.”

  He moved more confidently into the room and closely examined the coffee table, the books, the records, and the magazines. Dracula had lingered here—she had moved everything around a little.

  “The Battalion Newsletter,” he finally said.

  “The what?”

  “She took the Ninth Battalion Newsletter. It comes twice a year—I hardly even look at it, to tell you the truth, but I never throw out the old one until I get the new one.”

  “She’s queer for soldiers.”

  Pumo shrugged and went up the steps to the platform. His checkbook and the Saigon checkbook were still on the desk, but had been moved. And there beside them was the missing Newsletter, lying open to a half-page photo of Colonel Emil Ellenbogen, retiring from the second-rate post in Arkansas to which the Tin Man had been sent after his disappointing term in Vietnam.

  “No, the bitch just moved it,” he called down to Maggie, who was standing in the middle of the room with her arms wrapped about herself.

  “Is everything on your desk?”

  “I don’t know. I think something’s gone, but I can’t tell what it is.”

  He surveyed his messy desktop again. Checkbooks. Telephone. Answering machine, message light flashing. Pumo pushed rewind,
then playback. Silence played itself back. Had she called first to make sure he was out? The more Pumo looked at the top of his desk, the more he thought something was missing, but he could not attach this feeling to a specific object. Beside the answering machine was a book called Nam which he was certain had been on one of the coffeetables for months—he had given up in the middle of the book, but kept it on the table because to admit that he was never going to finish it felt like opening the door to the worst kind of luck.

  Dracula had picked up the Newsletter and the copy of Nam and set them down on the desk while she mused through his checkbooks. Probably she had touched everything on the desk with her long strong fingers. For a second Pumo felt sweaty and dizzy.

  In the middle of the night Tina woke up with his heart pounding, a mad terrible dream just disappearing into the darkness. He turned his head and saw Maggie fast asleep on the pillow, her face curled up into itself like the curl of her hand. He could just make out her features. Oh, he loved seeing Maggie Lah asleep. Without the animation of her character her features seemed anonymous and wholly Chinese.

  He stretched out again beside her and lightly touched her hand. What were they doing now, his friends? He saw them walking down a wide sidewalk, their arms linked. Tim Underhill could not be Koko, and as soon as they found him they would know it. Then Tina realized that if Underhill was not Koko, someone else was—someone circling in on them, circling in on all of them the way the bullet with his name on it still circled the world, never falling or resting.

  In the morning he told Maggie that he had to do something to help the other guys—he wanted to see if he could find out more about Koko’s victims, find out more that way.

  “Now you’re talking,” Maggie told him.

  4

  Why questions and answers?

  Because they go in a straight line. Because they are a way out. Because they help me to think.

  What is there to think about?

  The usual wreckage. The running girl.

  Do you imagine that she was real?

  Exactly. I imagine she was real.

  What else is there to think about?

  The usual subject, my subject. Koko. More than ever now.

  Why more than ever now?

  Because he has come back. Because I think I saw him. I know I saw him.

  You imagined you saw him?

  It is the same thing.

  What did he look like?

  He looked like a dancing shadow. He looked like death.

  Did he appear to you in a dream?

  He appeared, if that is the word, on the street. Death appeared on the street, as the girl appeared on the street. Tremendous clamor accompanied the appearance of the girl, ordinary street noise, that earthly clamor, surrounded the shadow. He was covered, though not visibly, with the blood of others. The girl, who was visible only to me, was covered with her own. The Pan-feeling poured from both of them.

  What feeling is that?

  The feeling that we have only the shakiest hold on the central stories of our lives. Hal Esterhaz in The Divided Man. The girl comes to speak to me with her terror, with her extremity, she runs toward me out of chaos and night, she has chosen me. Because I chose Hal Esterhaz, and because I chose Nat Beasley. Not yet, she says, not yet. The story is not yet over.

  Why did Hal Esterhaz kill himself?

  Because he could no longer bear what he was only just beginning to know.

  Is that where imagination takes you?

  If it’s good enough.

  Were you terrified when you saw the girl?

  I blessed her.

  As soon as the plane took off, Koko too would be a man in motion.

  This is one thing Koko knew: all travel is travel in eternity. Thirty thousand feet above the earth, clocks run backward, darkness and light change places freely.

  When it got dark, Koko thought, you could lean close to the little window and if you were ready, if your soul was half in eternity already, you could see God’s tusked grey face leaning toward you in the blackness.

  Koko smiled, and the pretty stewardess in first class smiled back at him. She leaned forward, bearing a tray. “Sir, would you prefer orange juice or champagne this morning?”

  Koko shook his head.

  The earth sucked at the feet of the plane, reached up through the body of the plane and tried to pull Koko down into itself, suck suck, the poor earth loved what was eternal and the eternal loved and pitied the earth.

  “Is there a movie on this flight?”

  “Never Say Never Again,” the stewardess said over her shoulder. “The new James Bond movie.”

  “Excellent,” Koko said, with real inward hilarity. “I never say never, myself.”

  She laughed dutifully and went on her way.

  Other passengers filed down the aisles, carrying suitbags, shopping bags, wicker baskets, books. Two Chinese businessmen took the seats before Koko, who heard them snap open their briefcases as soon as they sat down.

  A middle-aged blonde stewardess in a blue coat leaned down and smiled a false machine smile at him.

  “What shall we call you today, hmm?” She raised a clipboard with a seating chart into his field of vision. Koko slowly lowered his newspaper. “You are …?” She looked at him, waiting for a reply.

  What shall we call you today, hmm? Dachau, let’s call you Lady Dachau. “Why don’t you call me Bobby?”

  “Well then, call you Bobby is what I’ll do,” the woman said, and scrawled Bobby in the space marked 4B on the chart.

  In his pockets, Roberto Ortiz had carried his passports and a pocketful of cards and ID, as well as six hundred dollars American and three hundred Singapore. Big time! In a pocket of his blazer Koko had found a room key from the Shangri-La, where else would an ambitious young American be staying?

  In Miss Balandran’s bag Koko had found a hot comb, a diaphragm, a tube of spermicidal jelly, a little plastic holder containing a tube of Darkie toothpaste and a toothbrush, a fresh pair of underpants and a new pair of tights, a bottle of lip gloss and a lip brush, a vial of mascara, a blush brush, a rat-tailed comb, three inches of a cut-down white plastic straw, a little leather kit ranked with amyl nitrate poppers, a tattered Barbara Cartland paperback, a compact, half a dozen loose Valium, lots of crumpled-up Kleenex, several sets of keys, and a big roll of bills that turned out to be four hundred and fifty-three Singapore dollars.

  Koko put the money in his pocket and dropped the rest onto the bathroom floor.

  After he had washed his hands and face he took a cab to the Shangri-La.

  Roberto Ortiz lived on West End Avenue in New York City.

  On West End Avenue, could you feel how the lords of the earth, how God himself, hungered for mortality? Angels flew down West End Avenue, their raincoats billowing in the wind.

  When Koko walked out of the Shangri-La he was wearing two pairs of trousers, two shirts, a cotton sweater, and a tweed jacket. In the carry-on bag in his left hand were two rolled-up suits, three more shirts, and a pair of excellent black shoes.

  A cab took Koko down leafy Grove Road to Orchard Road and on through clean, orderly Singapore to an empty building on a circular street off Bahru Road, and on this journey he imagined that he stood in an open car going down Fifth Avenue. Ticker tape and confetti rained down upon him and all the other lords of the earth, cheers exploded from the crowds packing the sidewalks.

  Beevers and Poole and Pumo and Underhill and Tattoo Tiano and Peters and sweet Spanky B, and everybody else, all the lords of the earth, who may abide the day of their coming? For behold, darkness shall cover the earth. And the lawyer boy, Ted Bundy, and Juan Corona who labored in fields, and he who dressed in Chicago as a clown, John Wayne Gacy, and Son of Sam, and Wayne Williams out of Atlanta, and the Zebra Killer, and they who left their victims on hillsides, and the little guy in the movie Ten Rillington Place, and Lucas, who was probably the greatest of them all. The warriors of heaven, having their day. Marching along with all
those never to be caught, all those showing presentable faces to the world, living modestly, moving from town to town, paying their bills, all those deep embodied secrets.

  The refiner’s fire.

  Koko crawled in through his basement window and saw his father seated impatient and stormy on a packing crate. Goddamned idiot, his father said. You took too much, think they’ll ever give someone like you a parade? We waste no part of the animal.

  He spread the money out on the gritty floor, and that did it, the old man smiled and said, There is no substitute for good butter, and Koko closed his eyes and saw a row of elephants trudging past, nodding with grave approval.

  On his unrolled sleeping bag he placed Roberto Ortiz’s passports and spread out the five Rearing Elephant cards so he could read the names. Then he rooted in a box of papers and found the copy of the American magazine, New York, which he had picked up in a hotel lobby two days after the hostage parade. Beneath the title, letters of fire spelled out: TEN HOT NEW PLACES.

  Ia Thuc, Hue, Da Nang, these were hot places. And Saigon. Here is a hot new place, here is Saigon. The magazine fell open automatically to the picture and the paragraphs about the hot new place. (The Mayor ate there.)

  Koko lay sprawled on the floor in his new suit and looked as deeply as he could into the picture of the hot new place. Deep green fronds waved across the white walls. Vietnamese waiters in white shirts whipped between crowded tables, going so fast they were only blurs of light. Koko could hear loud voices, knives and forks clanking against china. Corks popped. In the picture’s foreground, Tina Pumo leaned against his bar and grimaced—Pumo the Puma leaned right out of the frame of the picture and spoke to Koko in a voice that stood out against the clamor of his restaurant the way a saxophone solo stands out against the sound of a big band.

  Pumo said: “Don’t judge me, Koko.” Pumo looked shit-scared.

  This was how they talked when they knew they stood before eternity’s door.

  “I understand, Tina,” Koko said to the little anxious man in the picture.

  The article said that Saigon served some of the most varied and authentic Vietnamese food in New York. The clientele was young, hip, and noisy. The duck was “heaven-sent” and every soup was “divine.”