Koko

by Peter Straub

  Surrounded by trees, the villa stood on a little rise in the land. With its red roof tiles, golden plaster, and big windows, it might have been one of the pretty houses Michael had seen from the window of his hotel the previous morning. Nothing about it suggested that two people had been murdered there.

  Poole and Beevers walked through the trees to shade their eyes and peered into a room like a long rectangular cave. In the middle of the wooden floor, thick with balls of dust like dirty cotton, as if someone had pitched brown paint onto the floor and then made a half-hearted attempt to clean it up, was a wide eccentric stain surrounded by dots and splashes.

  Then Poole realized that a third shadowy reflection had fallen between his own and Beevers’, and he jumped, feeling like a child caught stealing. “Please excuse me,” a man said. “I did not mean to startle.”

  He was a massive Chinese in a black silk suit and gleaming black tasseled loafers. “You are interested in the house?”

  “Are you the owner?” Poole asked. He seemed to have appeared from nowhere, like a well-dressed ghost.

  “I am not only the owner, I am the neighbor!” He swept his arm sideways toward another villa just a short distance up the hillside but barely visible through the trees. “When I saw you walk up, I thought to protect against vandalism. Sometimes young people come here to use the empty building—young people same all over, correct?” He laughed in a series of flat hollow barks. “When I see you, I know you are not vandals.”

  “Of course we’re not vandals,” Beevers said a little testily. He looked at Poole and decided not to say that they were New York City detectives. “We were friends of the people who died here, and since we came here on a tour, we decided to take a look at the place where it happened.”

  “Very unfortunate,” the man said. “Your loss is my loss.”

  “Very kind,” Poole said.

  “I am speaking commercially. Since the event, nobody wants to look at the house. And if they did, we could not let them in to show it because the police have sealed it!” He pointed out the rain-spattered yellow notice and the seal on the front door. “We cannot even wash away the bloodstains! Oh, excuse me, please, I did not think! I regret what happened to your friends, and I do sympathize with your grief.” He straightened up, and took a few steps backward in embarrassment. “It is cold in St. Louis now? You are enjoying the Singapore weather?”

  “You didn’t hear anything?” Beevers asked.

  “Not on that night. Otherwise, I heard things many times.”

  “Many times?” Poole asked.

  “Heard him for weeks. A teenager. Never much noise. Just one boy who slipped in and out at night like a shadow. Never caught him.”

  “But you saw him?”

  “Once. From the back. I came down from my house and saw him walking through the hibiscus trees. I called to him, but he did not stop. Would you? He was small—just a boy. I called the police, but they could not find him to keep him out. I locked the place, but he always found a way back in.”

  “He was Chinese?”

  “Of course. At least I assumed he was—I only saw him from the back.”

  “Do you think he committed the murders?” Poole asked.

  “I don’t know. I doubt it, but I don’t know. He seemed so harmless.”

  “What did you mean, you heard him?” Beevers asked.

  “I heard him singing to himself.”

  “What did he sing?” Poole asked.

  “A song in a foreign language,” the man said. “It was not any dialect of Chinese, and it was not French or English—I have often wondered if it was Polish! It went … oh …” He burst out laughing. “It went ‘rip-a-rip-a-rip-a-lo.’ ” He sang the words almost tunelessly and laughed again. “So melancholy. Two or three times I heard the song coming from this house while I sat in my courtyard in the evening. I came down here as quietly as I could, but he always heard me coming and hid until I left.” He paused. “In the end, I accepted him.”

  “You accepted a housebreaker?” Beevers asked.

  “I came to think of the boy as a sort of pet. After all, he lived here like a little animal. He did no damage, and he sang his lonely little song. Rip-a-rip-a-rip-a-lo.”

  He seemed a little forlorn. Poole tried to imagine an American tycoon looking forlorn in a black silk suit and tasseled loafers, but failed.

  “He must have left before the murders.” The man looked at his watch. “Anything else?”

  He waved good-bye as they walked back down to Nassim Hill and was still waving when they turned toward Orchard Road to find a cab.

  They saw where the body of Clive McKenna had been discovered as soon as their cabdriver pointed out the Goodwood Park Hotel. The white hotel stood on a rise that looked down toward the fringes of the city’s business district and the land fell away in a steep green slope. When the cab dropped them off, Poole and Beevers walked through a fringe of shrubbery and looked down the hill. Some tough, dark green plant like myrtle covered it, and low hedges grew at intervals.

  “He lured him here,” Beevers said. “They probably met at the bar. Let’s go out for some fresh air. In goes the knife. Good-bye, Clive. I wonder—I wonder if we can find out anything interesting at the desk.” Beevers sounded very cheerful, almost as if he were celebrating the murder.

  Inside, Beevers asked, “Was a Mr. Underhill registered here around the time Mr. McKenna was killed?” He held a ten-dollar note folded into his palm.

  The clerk bent over and pushed buttons on the computer terminal set beneath the registration desk. He dismayed Michael Poole by reporting that a Mr. Timothy Underhill had been expected six days before the discovery of Clive McKenna’s body, but had not arrived to claim his room.

  “Bingo,” Beevers said, and the desk clerk reached for the bill. Beevers pulled his hand out of reach. “Do you have an address for Underhill?”

  “Sure,” the clerk said. “Fifty-six Grand Street, New York City.”

  “How did he make the reservation?”

  “No record. It must have come in by telephone. We have no credit card number.”

  “No record of where he called from?”

  The clerk shook his head.

  “Not good enough.” Beevers snatched back the note and smirked at Michael.

  They went back out into the sun.

  “Why would he use his real name if he was paying in cash?” Michael asked.

  “Michael, he was so high he thought he could get away with anything. He’s a shake ‘n’ bake, Michael—killing people is not logical behavior. This man is drooling at the mouth and you want to know why he uses his real name! See how I saved ten bucks?” Beevers nodded to the doorman, who whistled to the rank of waiting cabs.

  “You know,” Poole said, “I have the feeling I’ve heard that address, 56 Grand Street, before. It seems so familiar.”

  “Jesus, Michael.”

  “What is it?”

  “Pumo’s restaurant, dumbo. Saigon is at 56 Grand Street. In the City of New York in the State of New York in the United States of America.”

  Plantation Road began with a tall hotel at the corner of a busy six-lane road and almost instantly became a comfortable upper-middle-class enclave of long low bungalows behind wide lawns and locked gates. When they came to number 72, Beevers told the driver to wait and the two men left the cab.

  The bungalow where Roberto Ortiz and the woman had died stood out in the sunlight like a pink cake. Flowering hibiscus trees grew on either side, their shadows floating over the dark lawn. A clean yellow notice had been wired to the gates, announcing that the Singapore Police Department had sealed the house for the purposes of a homicide investigation. Two dark blue police cars were pulled up before the gates, and Poole could see uniforms moving past the windows inside the house.

  “You noticed yet how good-looking the policewomen are in this country?” Beevers asked. “I wonder if they’d let us inside?”

  “Why don’t you tell them that you’re a dete
ctive from New York?” Poole said.

  “I’m an officer of the court, that’s why,” Beevers said.

  Poole turned around to look at the house across the street. A middle-aged Chinese woman stood at a living room window with her arm around the waist of a younger, taller woman with her right hand on her hip. Both women looked very tense. Poole wondered if they had ever heard a young man singing a strange song that sounded like rip-a-rip-a-rip-a-lo.

  Poole and Harry Beevers returned to the Marco Polo and found a frowsy, red-eyed Conor Linklater who reminded Michael of Dwight Frye in Dracula. The hotel had given him the name of a doctor in the building next door, and Poole and Beevers helped him into the elevator and out into the sunlight. “I can come with you tonight, Mikey,” he said. “This is a real temporary thing.”

  “You are staying home tonight,” Poole said.

  “Yeah, count me out too,” Beevers said. “I’m too beat to chase around to another fag bar. I’ll stay home and tell Conor what we did all day.”

  They were moving unsteadily down the sidewalk, Michael and Beevers on either side of Conor, who took little shuffling steps, afraid to risk walking normally.

  Beevers said, “In a couple of years, we’ll be sitting in a screening room, watching ourselves do this. Half the people in the world will know that Conor Linklater had the runs. I wish Sean Connery were twenty years younger. It’s really too bad that all the right actors are too old now.”

  “Olivier really is too old, I guess,” Michael said.

  “I mean guys like Greg Peck, Dick Widmark, guys like that. Paul Newman’s too short, and Robert Redford’s too bland. Maybe they ought to go for the intensity and get James Woods. I could live with that.”

  5

  The taxi wound through Singapore until it struck a belt road and then it went so far that Poole began to wonder if the nightclub was in Malaysia. Before long the only lights close at hand were the arc lamps above the six-lane highway. Dark empty land lay on both sides of the road, here and there punctuated by small isolated clusters of lights. They were nearly alone on the road and the driver was going very fast. It seemed to Poole that the wheels were not actually touching the road.

  “Are we still in Singapore?” he asked. The driver did not respond.

  Eventually the car jerked off the highway onto an access road to a shopping mall that gleamed like a space station in the darkness—longer, taller, and more elaborate than any of the shopping centers on Orchard Road. A vast, nearly empty parking lot surrounded it. Huge vertical posters covered with Chinese letters the size of a man hung down the sides of the mall. A rank of palm trees hung frozen in the white artificial light.

  “Are you sure this is where Peppermint City is?” Poole asked.

  The driver braked to an abrupt halt before the undead palm trees and sat behind the wheel like a statue. When Poole hesitantly repeated his question, the man bawled out something in Chinese.

  “How much?”

  The man yelled the same phrase.

  Poole handed over a bill whose denomination he could not see, received a surprising amount of change, and tipped with another random bill. When the cab took off he was alone.

  The mall seemed to have been constructed of dull grey metal. Through huge windows on the ground floor Poole could see two or three tiny figures wandering past closed shops far down at the mall’s opposite end.

  Glass doors whooshed open and cold air enveloped him. The doors sealed up behind him. Goose bumps rose on his arms.

  Before him a vacant corridor led to a vast high-vaulted space. Poole felt as if he had entered an empty church. Mannequins posed and stretched in the display windows of closed shops. Invisible escalators whirred. God had gone home and the cathedral was as empty as a bomb crater. As Poole passed into the great vault, he saw a few scattered people moving in a waking trance across the mezzanine, past darkened rows of shops.

  Poole wandered through the ground floor of the mall, certain that the driver had taken him to the wrong place. For a long time he could not even find the escalator, and thought he would have to drift all night past Good Fortune Toys, Merlion Furniture, and Mode O’Day, Clothes for Discriminating Women. Finally he turned a corner at a restaurant called Captain Steak and saw the wizened baseball-capped head of an elderly Chinese man floating downwards toward him above the escalator’s steel flank.

  On the third level his feet began to ache—the floor was flat, unyielding stone. Red and orange sweatshirts, trapped birds, hung in a black window. Poole sighed and kept on walking. Could he get a taxi back to town, way out here? He felt that nobody would speak to him and he would never be able to make himself understood. He understood why George Romero had filmed Dawn of the Dead in a shopping mall.

  This was Singapore at its most sterile and perfect. Randomness, dirt, and vitality had been ruthlessly excluded. Michael wished he were back at the Marco Polo, getting drunk with Beevers and watching the finance programs and soap operas that made up Singapore television.

  On the fifth level he walked, disheartened, down corridors even darker and emptier than those on the floors below. Up here, not a single shop or restaurant remained open. He was on the fifth floor of a suburban shopping mall, and he had been stranded miles out of town. Then, at the curve of the corridor, the dark shop windows gave way to walls covered with small white tiles that shone with the light from a row of angled spots. Through an opening in the wall, Poole saw men in suits, girls in tight cocktail dresses, everybody smoking in hazy blue light. A good-looking hostess stood at a desk and smiled at him while speaking into a telephone. Just outside the entrance a pink neon sign flashed PEPPERMINT CITY! beside a leafless tree which had been painted white and hung with tiny white bulbs.

  Poole went through the entrance and the shopping mall disappeared. Fanning out before before and below him was an enormous fantasy that looked like tea time on the grounds of a Mississippi plantation. On the other side of the desk, hostesses led couples down to ranks of round white tables of ornate cast iron, and seated them on white cast-iron ice-cream chairs. The floor and walls had been painted flat black. Other ice-cream chairs and tables sat on the mezzanine and risers on both sides of a busy, crowded bar. In the middle of the floor, surrounded by the tables, a boy in an illuminated fountain spouted water from his mouth.

  The woman at the desk led him to a small white table on a platform beyond the bar. Poole ordered a beer. Young homosexual couples who wore suits and looked like MIT graduate students shuffled around on a small dance floor in front of the stage. Other couples like them occupied most of the seats in the club—boys in round glasses gripping cigarettes and trying not to look self-conscious. Scattered through the club were a few Englishmen and Americans earnestly making conversation with their Chinese and Eurasian escorts. Most of the couples drank champagne, most of the boys, beer.

  A few minutes later the quiet music suddenly ceased. The boys dancing in front of the stage grinned and applauded as they went toward their seats. The telephone rang very loudly, and the cash register went bing!, and a few voices obliviously rose up before they, too, ceased.

  Four chunky Filipinos, one Eurasian, and a slender Chinese boy bounced onto the stage. From the opposite side, a stagehand pushed on a bulky synthesizer and rolled it past the drums. All the musicians but the Chinese were dressed alike in blousy yellow shirts and tight red velvet vest-and-trouser outfits. They carried their instruments onstage with them—two guitars, a conga drum, an electric bass—and began playing a bland, processed version of “Billie Jean” as soon as the drummer and keyboard player had reached their instruments. The Eurasian and the keyboard player had short curly hair and sunglasses like Michael Jackson, and the others had John Lennon’s droopy hair, round glasses, and sly sidelong glances. It was clear that they had been a band long before Lola hired them: Poole imagined that if he came back to Singapore in twenty years, he would see the same musicians grown older and paunchier, no less mechanical, and probably in the same clothes.

&nb
sp; It was Michael Jackson’s year, and Lola too had adopted the mass of curls and sunglasses, as well as a single white glove. He wore glittery Spandex tights, glossy high black boots, and a loose white off-the-shoulder blouse. Heavy earrings glittered in the curly hair, and a clutch of heavy bracelets slithered up and down his arm. The boys at the tables in front of the stage clapped and whistled, and Lola pranced through an energetic but lifeless version of Michael Jackson’s dance moves. From “Billie Jean,” they went into “Maniac,” then into “MacArthur Park.” Lola’s costume changes drew claps and whistles.

  Poole picked up the request card folded at his table, flattened it out and wrote I like your act. Would you be willing to talk to me about an old friend from Bugis Street? He raised his arm and the waitress took the form and went down the steps to wind through the tables to pass the slip up to Lola.

  Still singing “Cross My Heart” and dressed now in a red long-sleeved blouse and a necklace of heavy purple glass beads, Lola snatched the card from the waitress and twiddled it flirtatiously through his fingers before opening it. His face was still for no more than half a second before he spun around, stamped his foot, extended his arms and rattled his bracelets and sang out “Cross my heart!”

  After nearly an hour Lola left the stage bowing and blowing kisses. The MIT boys stood up and applauded. The band took an almost mockingly low bow.

  Poole waited for his check after the lights went up. Some of the young Chinese boys had gathered around a door at the side of the stage, and occasionally someone opened the door and let them in and out.

  When the boys had left or returned to their tables for the second performance, Poole knocked on the flimsy black door. It swung open. Crowded into a small, smoky lounge, the musicians looked up from the floor and the ancient sofa. The room smelled of tobacco, sweat, and makeup. Lola half-turned from the mirror before him and peered out from beneath the towel that covered his head. He held a flat case of black powder in one hand and an eyebrow brush in the other.

  Poole stepped into the room.