Koko

by Peter Straub

  “Close the door behind you,” one of the musicians said.

  “You want to see me?” Lola asked.

  “I enjoyed your performance,” Poole said. He stepped forward. The fat conga player pulled back his legs to permit Poole to move forward another step. Lola smiled and pulled the towel from his head.

  He was smaller and older than he appeared onstage. Beneath the makeup, a network of knifelike little wrinkles had chipped into the girlish face. His eyes were tired and cautious. Sweat still sparkled in his springy hair. He nodded at the compliment and turned back to the mirror.

  “I sent the note about Bugis Street,” Poole said.

  Lola’s hand came away from his eyes and he very slightly turned his head to take in Poole.

  “Do you have a minute?”

  “I don’t remember ever seeing you before.” Lola’s English was nearly accentless.

  “This is my first time in Singapore.”

  “And you have something extremely pressing on your mind.”

  One of the musicians guffawed.

  “I heard about you from a man named Billy,” Poole said. He seemed to be missing something, some secret that the others knew.

  “And what were you doing with Billy? Looking for entertainment? I hope you found some.”

  “I was looking for a writer named Tim Underhill,” Poole said.

  Lola startled him by slamming down the little case of mascara with enough force to raise a dingy cloud of powder. “You know, I thought I was ready for this, but I am not ready for this.”

  He thought he was ready for this? Poole thought. He said, “Billy said you might have known Underhill, or might even know where he is.”

  “Well, he isn’t here.” Lola stepped forward. “I don’t want to talk about this. I have another show to do. Leave me alone.”

  The other musicians watched with good-natured indifference.

  “I need your help,” Poole said.

  “What are you, a cop? Does he owe you money?”

  “My name is Michael Poole. I’m a doctor. I used to be a friend of his.”

  Lola pressed his palms to his forehead. He looked as if he wished that Poole was a dream that would simply go away. He peeled his hands away from his head and rolled his eyes upward. “Oh. God. Well, here it is.” He turned to the conga player. “Did you ever know Tim Underhill?”

  The conga player shook his head.

  “You weren’t on Bugis Street at the start of the seventies?”

  “We were still in Manila,” the conga player said. “We were the Cadillacs in 1970. Played Subic Bay.”

  “Played all those bars,” said the keyboard player. “Great days, man. You got anything you wanted.”

  “Danny Boy,” the keyboard player said.

  “Danny Boy. Sailors got Danny Boy.”

  “Can you tell me where to find him?” Poole asked.

  Lola noticed that his fingers were dusty with black powder, and gave himself a disgusted look in the mirror before plucking a tissue from a box on his table. He deliberately, slowly, wiped his fingers while gazing at himself in the mirror. “I don’t have anything to hide,” he told the mirror. “Quite the reverse, in fact.”

  Then he glanced again at Poole. “What are you going to do when you find him?”

  “Talk to him.”

  “I hope that isn’t all you’re going to do.” Lola exhaled loudly, clouding the mirror’s surface. “I’m really not ready for this yet.”

  “Just name a time and a place.”

  “A time and a place,” sang the keyboard player, “give me the time and the place.”

  “Subic Bay,” said the conga player.

  “Ah, do you know Bras Basah Park?” Lola asked.

  Poole said that he could find it.

  “I’ll meet you there tomorrow at eleven, maybe.” Lola again confronted himself in the mirror. “If I’m not there, forget all about it. Don’t come back. Okay?”

  Poole had no intention of honoring that pledge, but he nodded.

  The conga player began singing “Do you know the way to Bras Basah Park?” and Poole left the room.

  6

  The next morning, half an hour’s walk brought Poole to within sight of a small green triangle of ground set between Orchard Road and Bras Basah Road. He was alone—Conor was too weak from whatever bug had attacked him to have walked the three miles to the park, and Beevers, who had appeared in the coffee shop with bags under his eyes and a red scratch above his right eyebrow, had claimed to think it better for Michael to “feel out” the singer by himself.

  Poole understood why Lola had chosen Bras Basah Park for their meeting. It was probably the most public park he had ever seen. Nothing that happened there would be hidden from the buildings on the other sides of the two wide roads, or from the drivers of the cars that ceaselessly swept past. Bras Basah Park was about as private as a traffic island.

  Three broad, curving paths of amber brick intersected it and converged at the park’s narrow eastern end, where a wider walkway circled an abstract bronze sculpture and led out past a wooden sign.

  Poole walked along Orchard Road until he reached the stoplight that would allow him to cross into the empty park. It was five minutes to eleven.

  When he sat down on one of the benches on the path nearest Orchard Road, he looked around, wondering where Lola was now, and if he was watching him from one of the windows facing the park. He knew the singer would make him wait, and wished that he had thought of carrying a book with him.

  Poole sat on the wooden bench in the warm sun. An old man tottered by on a stick, and took an amazingly long time to pass before Poole. Poole watched him take his tiny steps past all the benches, past the sculpture, past the sign, and finally out into the middle of Orchard Road. Twenty-five minutes had gone by.

  Here he was, sitting alone on a bench on a glorified traffic island in Singapore. He felt, all at once, monumentally alone. He considered the possibility—no, the likelihood—that if he were never to go back to Westerholm the person who would miss him most would be a little girl for whom he could do nothing but buy books.

  That was okay. That was all right. He’d miss Stacy too, just as much, if she were to die while he was gone. It was funny, Poole thought: in medical school you learned one hell of a lot about matters of life and death, but you didn’t learn beans about mourning. They didn’t teach you anything about grief. These days, grief seemed one of the absolutely essential human emotions to Dr. Michael Poole. Grief was right up there with love.

  Poole remembered standing alone in a hotel room in Washington, watching as a gaudy van crunched in the front end of a dusty little car, remembered walking in brisk cold air alongside whiskery veterans accompanied by Dengler’s double and the ghost of Tim Underhill. He remembered Thomas Strack.

  He saw fat ladies waving banners and cold clouds scudding through grey air. He remembered how the names had walked right out of the black wall, and his mouth flooded with the bitter, essential taste of mortality. “Dwight T. Pouncefoot,” he said, and heard the glorious absurdity of that name. His eyes blurred, and he began to giggle uncontrollably.

  For some time he went on laughing and crying at once. An extraordinary mixture of feelings had come steaming up through his chest, filling every crevice, leaping every synapse. He laughed and cried, filled with the taste of mortality and grief, which was both bitter and joyous. When the emotion began to fade, he yanked his handkerchief from his pocket, wiped his eyes, and saw beside him on the bench a scrawny middle-aged man who looked like a Chinese Roddy McDowall. The man was watching him with mingled curiosity and impatience. He was one of those men who look like teenagers into their mid-forties, and then suddenly wrinkle into aged boy-men.

  Michael took in the man’s brown trousers and pink shirt with its collar carefully folded over the collar of the brown plaid sports jacket, the carefully flattened-down hair, and only then realized that this was Lola in his civilian clothes and out of his makeup.

>   “I suppose you’re crazy too,” Lola said in a flat accentless voice. His face twitched into a complicated pattern of chips and wrinkles as he smiled. “Makes sense, if you’re a friend of Underhill’s.”

  “I was just thinking that only a really terrible war would kill a guy named Dwight T. Pouncefoot. Don’t you agree?” The name brought on another spasm of those radically contradictory feelings, and Poole closed his mouth against an onslaught of mad giggling laughter.

  “Sure,” Lola said. Poole let his hands fall into his lap and saw, with a little shock of relief and surprise, that Lola was almost entirely unaffected by his outburst. He had seen worse. “You were in Vietnam with Underhill?”

  Poole nodded. He supposed that was all the explanation Lola needed.

  “You were close friends?”

  Poole said, “He saved a lot of lives in a place called Dragon Valley, just by keeping everybody calm. I guess he was a great soldier. He liked the excitement of combat, he liked being on patrol, he liked that adrenaline rush. He was smart, too.”

  “You have not seen him since the war?”

  Poole shook his head.

  “You know what I think?” Lola asked, and answered his own question as Poole waited. “I think you can’t help Tim Underhill.” He glanced at Poole, then looked away.

  “Where did you meet Underhill?”

  Lola looked straight at Poole again, his mouth working as if to locate and expel an irritating seed. “At the Orient Song. It’s completely different now—they have tour groups, and a few of the Bugis Street people are paid a few dollars to sit in the back and look dissipated.”

  “I was there,” Poole said, remembering the Jaunty Jasmines.

  “I know you were there. I know every place you went. I know everything you and your friends did. Many people called me. I even thought that I knew who you were.”

  Poole just kept silent.

  “He used to talk about the war. He used to talk about you. Michael Poole, right?” When Poole nodded, Lola said, “I think you might be interested in what he used to say about you. He said that you were destined to become a good doctor, marry a perfect bitch, and live in the suburbs.”

  Poole met Lola’s grin with his own.

  “He said you’d eventually begin to hate the job, the wife, and the place where you lived. He said he was interested in how long it would take you to get there, and what you would do after that. He also said he admired you.”

  Poole must have looked startled, because Lola said, “Underhill told me you had the strength to tolerate a second-rate destiny for a long time. He admired that—because he could not, he had to find a tenth-rate destiny, or a twelfth-rate, or a hundredth-rate. After his writing stopped working for him, your friend went in search of the bottom. And people who seek the bottom always find it. Because it’s always there, isn’t it?”

  What sent him there, Poole wanted to ask, but Lola went on talking—fast. “Let me tell you about the Americans who came here during Vietnam. These people could not adjust to life in their own country. They felt more comfortable in the East. A lot of them liked Asian women. Or Asian boys, like your friend.” A bitter smile. “A lot of them wanted to be where they thought drugs were plentiful. Most of the Americans who felt that way went to Bangkok, some bought bars in Patpong or Chiang Mai, others got into the drug trade.” He glanced at Poole again.

  “What did Underhill do?”

  Lola’s face broke into a wilderness of wrinkles. “Underhill was happy with his work. He lived in a tiny room in the old Chinese section, put his typewriter up on a box. Little record player—he spent his money on records, books, Bugis Street, and drugs. But he was a sick person. He loved destruction. You said he was a good soldier. What do you think makes a good soldier? Creativity?”

  “But he was a creative person—nobody could say he wasn’t. He even wrote his best books here.”

  “He wrote his first book in his head in Vietnam,” Lola said. “He only had to put it down. He sat in his little room, typed, went out to Bugis Street, picked up boys, did whatever he did, took whatever he took, the next morning typed some more. Everything was easy. You think I don’t know? I know—I was there. When his book was finished, he had a big party in the Floating Dragon. That’s when a man I know, a friend of mine named Ong Pin, met him. Then he was all set to start his next book. He says to me, he knew all about this crazy man, he knows him from the inside, he has to write a book about him. He has something to figure out—he’s very mysterious. Mysterious in lots of ways. He needs money, but he says he has a scheme that will make him set up for life. But before he can get it, he has to borrow—he needs money to stay afloat. He borrows from everybody. Me included. A lot of money. He will pay me back, of course he will. He is a famous author, isn’t he?”

  “Is that how the lawsuit came about?”

  Lola gave him a sharp look, then a twisted smile. “It seemed like such a good idea to him. He was going to get hundreds of thousands of dollars. Underhill had one big problem—he couldn’t write anything he thought was any good. He started two, three books after The Divided Man. Ripped them all up. He went crazy—so he and Ong Pin threatened the publisher with a lawsuit. Get a lot of money all at once, pay everybody back. When this brilliant idea didn’t work, Underhill got tired of Ong Pin. He threw him out of his place, he sent everybody away. He beat a boy up—crazy stuff. Then he disappeared. Nobody could find him. After that I heard stories about him. Underhill was living in hotels and running out in the middle of the night after running up huge bills. Once I heard he was sleeping under a certain bridge, and some people and I went there to see if we could at least shake a few dollars out of him, maybe beat him up, but he wasn’t there. I heard he was spending whole days in an opium house. Then I heard he was even crazier than before—going around telling people that the world was filthy, and that I was a demon, Billy was a demon, God was going to destroy us. Scared me, Doctor. Who could tell what this crazy man would do? He hated himself, I knew that. People who hate themselves, who cannot stand what they think they are, can do anything, you know. He was blackballed from bars in every part of town. Nobody saw him, but everybody heard stories. He found the bottom, he did that.”

  Poole groaned inwardly. What had happened to Underhill? Maybe the drugs he had taken had ruined him by making it impossible for him to write well.

  As Lola talked, Poole found himself remembering the night in Washington he had gone with a woman lawyer to see a jazz piano player named Hank Jones. He had been in town to give testimony at a hearing on Agent Orange. Poole knew very little about jazz, and now he could remember none of the actual music Hank Jones had played. But what he did remember was a grace and joy that had seemed abstract and physical at once. He could remember how Hank Jones, who was a middle-aged black man with grizzled hair and a handsome, devilish face, had tilted his head over the keyboard, purely responsive to the flow of his inspirations. The music had gone straight into Michael Poole. Passion so light! Passion so singing! Poole had known that by a miracle of sympathy, he was hearing the music as the young lawyer heard it. And after the set, when Jones was standing next to the piano talking to his fans, Poole had seen the man’s blazing delight in what he had done. This shone forth even in the grace of his movements, and Poole had felt as though he were watching an old lion filled with the essence of lionhood.

  And something had struck him then, that of all the people he knew, probably only Tim Underhill would have known this blazing inner weather.

  But Underhill had only had a couple of years of what Hank Jones seemed to have had for decades. He had cheated himself of the rest of it.

  There was a long pause. “You have read his books?”

  Poole nodded.

  “Are they any good?”

  “The first two were very good.”

  Lola sniffed. “I thought they would all be terrible books.”

  “Where is he now? Do you have any idea?”

  “Are you going to kill him?” Lola squ
inted at Poole. “Well, maybe somebody should kill him and end his misery before he kills someone else.”

  “Is he in Bangkok? Taipei? Back in the States?”

  “Someone like him cannot go back to America. He went somewhere else, I’m sure of that—like a crazy animal crawling off to a safe place. I always thought he would go to Bangkok. Bangkok would be perfect for him. But he used to talk about Taipei, so maybe he went there. He never paid me the money he owed me, I can tell you that.” The squint was now a look of pure malice. “The crazy man he was going to write about—that was him. He did not even know that much, and people so ignorant about themselves are dangerous. I used to think I loved him. Loved him! Dr. Poole, if you find your friend, I hope you will be very careful.”

  1

  Michael Poole and Conor Linklater had already been in Bangkok—and Harry Beevers in Taipei—for two days when Tina Pumo made his discovery, which came in the mundane surroundings of the Microfilm Room of the main branch of the New York Public Library. He was writing a book about Vietnam, he had explained to a stocky, sixtyish, bearded man in a handsome black suit, in particular a book about the Ia Thuc court martials.

  Which newspapers did he want? Copies of the daily New York, Washington, Los Angeles, and St. Louis papers and the national news magazines for the months of November 1968, and March 1969. And because he wanted to see the obituaries of Koko’s victims, he requested the London Times, Guardian, and Telegraph for the week of January 28, 1982, and the St. Louis papers for the week of February 5, 1982, as well as the Paris daily papers for the week of July 7, 1982.

  The bearded man told Pumo that it would usually take a great deal of time to locate and assemble that amount of material, but that he had both good news and bad news for him. The good news was that the various microfilms pertaining to the Ia Thuc incident had already been assembled—there were even a couple of sources, long articles in Harper’s, the Atlantic, and American Scholar, which he had overlooked. The bad news was that this material was still awaiting redistribution because someone else was also researching Ia Thuc. A journalist named Roberto Ortiz had requested the same information three days earlier, consulted them again a day later, and had spent Tuesday afternoon examining them again, today being Wednesday—Village Voice day, Pumo reflexively thought.