Koko

by Peter Straub

  The rest of the boys continued following her for nearly a block, making half-intelligible growls and yells. The night had become very cold, and the wind burned Maggie’s face. The street-lamps shed a morbid yellow light.

  She needed time to absorb the General’s offer. She would not reject it without fully considering it, and she might not reject it at all. It was possible that in time the General might accept her training at a medical school in New York, if any such school would take her in. If she were a medical student with her own room up in Washington Heights or over in Brooklyn, if she were busier than any four restaurant owners, if Tina could see that she had her own life … then he couldn’t accuse her of making a meal of his own.

  The worst intimation yet that something had gone wrong interrupted the pleasant pictures this possibility gave her. From the end of the block Maggie had been seeing a sliver of yellow light beside the entrance to Saigon, and had taken for granted that it was a reflection in a pane of glass or a strip of polished metal awaiting storage inside the foyer. Now it struck Maggie that it was at least half an hour too late for the workmen to be around. In this neighborhood, they would never leave anything outside at night.

  As soon as she got closer to the restaurant, Maggie saw that the door itself hung open half an inch, letting the light from the staircase spill out. This was not merely an intimation of trouble, it rang like an alarm bell. Pumo would not have left his street door gaping open in a thousand lifetimes. Maggie jogged toward the shaft of light.

  When she put her hand on the door, she realized that if Pumo had not left it open, some other person had. She was already pressing the buzzer that communicated with the apartment, and snatched her hand away before it gave any more than the dot of Morse code.

  She hung in the doorway a moment, fairly panting with indecision. She moved a few steps to the side and pushed the buzzer for the restaurant, thinking that Vinh might be inside. She pressed it again, and this time held it down, but nothing happened. Vinh was not home.

  There was a pay telephone around the corner on West Broadway, and Maggie moved away to call the police. But maybe Pumo had simply left the door unlocked, and was sitting upstairs in a blue funk.

  Or maybe Dracula had returned to ransack the loft. The memory of how she had found Pumo lying on sheets stiff with drying blood moved her back to the door again and lifted her hand to the buzzer. She pushed, held it down longer than she had the restaurant’s buzzer, and listened to the noise ring out through the loft and down the stairs.

  “Look at Maggie skulk, I bet she’s spyin’ on someone.”

  She looked over her shoulder and saw Perry, her friend from the East Village, standing just behind her with a long black portfolio under one arm. Beside him Jules grimaced at her with an expression that virtually said: Isn’t this terrible, isn’t this deadly? They had apparently emerged from the office building on the other side of Saigon, which housed a number of art galleries. Jules and Perry had evidently resolved to sell out.

  “Let’s spy with her,” Jules said. “Anything’d be more fun than bein’ pissed on by these gallery assholes.” Perry was English, and Jules had long ago begun to sound like him.

  “I believe I’d fancy a bit of spyin’ about now,” said Perry. “Who we havin’ a decco at, then? Enemy of the state? Ernst Stavro Blofeld? Italian Post-Expressionists?”

  “I’m not spying on anybody,” Maggie said. “I’m just waiting for my friend.”

  For a moment she considered asking them to come upstairs with her, but she could see too clearly how Perry would respond to Pumo’s loft. He would go around knocking things over, drink up all the liquor he could find, and relentlessly insult Pumo’s taste and politics.

  “Funny way you have of waitin’,” Perry said. “Which friend? That old geezer followed us ‘round the off-license last year? Eyes hangin’ out on bloody stalks?”

  “That wasn’t him, that was just someone he knows,” Maggie said.

  “Come along with us,” Jules said. It was a gesture toward their old friendship. “After we take the paintings back, we’ll show you this lovely new club.”

  “I can’t.”

  “You can’t?” Perry lifted an eyebrow. “I’m sure we never killed any Asian babies in any war or nuffink. Let’s get out of here, Jules.” He turned away from Maggie, and Jules did not even look at Maggie as he swept past.

  Maggie watched them walk down the dark street in the lamplight, their ragged clothing giving them the air of loutish royalty, and knew that they would never forgive her for not joining them. People like Jules and Perry knew that they were sane and everybody else crazy, and Maggie had just stepped over the border into the land of the crazies.

  All this reflection took place in a second or two. Maggie pulled Pumo’s door all the way open and stood in the doorway. Nothing but silence came from the top of the stairs.

  Maggie stepped inside and closed the door behind her. Then she gripped the handrail and began slowly, quietly to mount the stairs.

  7

  Koko was in glory, his yoke was easy and his burden was light.

  By man came death, and by man came also the resurrection of the dead.

  Thirty lives to be paid for. Pumo was ten, and if there was a woman she would be eleven.

  No part of the animal was wasted. The Joker had closed his eyes, and slept on in the pack.

  When Pumo the Puma had opened the door and looked into Koko’s face, he had known, he had seen, he had understood. Angels walked him backwards up the stairs, angels backed him into his great glowing cave. Tears spilled from Koko’s eyes, for it was true that God did all things simultaneously, and Koko’s heart overflowed for Pumo, who understood, who took flight, even as his soul took flight and sailed off, sailed home.

  The eyes, the ears, the Elephant Card in the mouth.

  Then Koko heard a great thunderous buzzing, the noise of the impatient world hungering for immortality, and he quickly moved to the light cord and pulled it down, turning off all the overhead lights in the room. Now the cave was dark. Koko went quietly to the hallway and turned that light off too.

  Then he went back into the living room to wait.

  Outside, traffic roared like the passing of great beasts in a jungle. His father leaned toward him and said Work too fast and you’ll never amount to nothing. The buzzer rang again, clamoring until it found its true voice and became a giant insect swooping in great circles between the walls. Finally it settled on Pumo’s body and folded its great strong wings.

  Koko picked the knife off a couch and slid into his spot just inside the entrance to the cave from the hallway. He made himself invisible, still, and silent. His father and a friendly demon waited with him, silently approving, and Koko slipped into a nightmare world he had known all his life. His footsteps turned the earth black, and thirty children went into a cave and never came out, and three soldiers went into a cave, and two came out. Gentlemen, you are part of a great killing machine. Finally Koko saw the elephant stride toward him, his robes ermine and silk, and the Old Lady said, Gentlemen, it is time to face the elephant again.

  For his ears had taken in the dampened, nearly soundless click of the door and his body had felt a small slight shift in the air and now he could hear a hand closing on a handrail and her feet moving with what to a civilian would be most fearful caution from one tread of the stair to another.

  8

  Maggie reached the top of the steps and saw at once that the door to the loft was unlocked—it looked as though someone had banged it shut with an elbow as he carried his haul outside. Or by someone going in. She touched the knob and pushed it forward with her fingertips. Light from the staircase filled Pumo’s entry, with its heaps of coats and hats on hooks.

  Pumo’s entry always looked as if he were having a party.

  At the worst, Maggie thought, he had been robbed again, and would have to be coaxed out of another depression. Any intruder was long gone. Maggie walked through the door, switched on the light,
went down the little hallway. When she reached the bedroom, she reached in and turned on that light too. Nothing had been disturbed since their unhappy morning. The bed was still unmade, a sure sign that Tina was in a downswing.

  Some pervasive smell filled the loft, but Maggie filed the fact away to be dealt with as soon as she had satisfied herself either that there had been no break-in, or that the burglar who had left the doors open had not done a great deal of damage. Maggie backed out of the bedroom to check the bathroom, again saw nothing out of the ordinary, and went on into the living room.

  She froze about six feet into the room. The dim illumination from the hallway showed the shadowy outline of a man on one of the little wooden-backed chairs normally arranged around Tina’s dining table. Her first thought was that she had been trapped by a very cool-headed burglar, and her heart jumped up into her throat. Then as her eyes continued to adjust to the darkness, she almost subliminally recognized that the man in the chair was her lover. She moved forward, in turn ready to scold, then cajole, then to soothe him. As Maggie opened her mouth to speak his name, she finally identified the odor filling the loft as the smell of blood. She was still moving forward, and her next faltering step brought her close enough to see how Tina’s chest was painted with blood, and how the legs of the chair sat in a wide red pool. Something white like a tag protruded from Tina’s mouth.

  Instead of screaming or whirling around, which would have led almost instantly to her death, Maggie moved off to her right, into the darkest section of the loft. This movement of pure reflex felt almost as if it had been done to her, as if some force had swept her aside to get her out of the rectangle of light which was the entrance from the hall. She wound up crouching beneath the dining table at the far right of the room, too scared by what she had seen and too startled by her own movement to do anything but look out from her vantage point at the rest of the room.

  Terror must have kicked her senses open wide. In the first seconds that she found herself beneath the table, she took in every nuance from the street, the happiness in the voices calling out to each other, the squeal of a brake drum, even the tap of a cane on the sidewalk. In the midst of these sounds she heard drops of liquid landing in the pool at Pumo’s feet. Accompanying these sounds was a sweet, sick, limping odor: the smell of concentrated mourning.

  “Come on out, Dawn,” a man whispered, and Maggie could smell only the blood again. “I want to talk to you.”

  A column of darkness left the door and advanced into the room. Some of the light from the hall gave the column the shape of a compact man wearing a dark topcoat slightly too large for him. The man’s face was only a pale blur, and his hair must have been as black as Maggie’s, for it was entirely invisible against the darkness behind him.

  Then the man startled her by giggling. “I made a mistake. You couldn’t still be Dawn. Don’t be mad at me.”

  He advanced another smooth silent yard into the room. There was an ugly black-handled knife in his hand. He drifted a few feet sideways into shadow and waited.

  Maggie began to inch on her hands and knees down under the table, and at the bottom end of the table she gathered herself to make a rush for the door.

  “Come out and talk to me,” he said. “There’s a reason for everything, and there’s a reason for this. I’m not a lunatic operating in a void, you know. I have come thousands of miles to stand here right now, in the middle of the world right here. It’s important for you to understand that.”

  He hesitated in the shadows.

  “I am a person who always knows when something is going to happen, and this is a thing that is going to happen. You are going to stand up and walk toward me. You are afraid. You smell blood. That is from something that already happened a long time ago, and you are here now and you have to see that what happened then was part of a general pattern and you are in that pattern too. Worthy, worthy is the lamb that was slain. He was a warrior, and I was a warrior, and I have been called back.” The man stepped closer to the center of the room. “So this has to happen. Stand up and walk out toward me.”

  As he spoke, Maggie shrugged her coat off her shoulders and let it silently fold onto the floor. She crept back up the length of the table, crawled around the chairs at its far end, and very slowly and quietly moved up onto the platform.

  The man startled her by backing a step toward her.

  “I know where you are. You are under the table. I could go over to you now and pull you out. I am not going to do that. I am going to give you the chance to show yourself. Once you show yourself to me, you can leave. You can see where I am now. I am at the back of the room. I promise you that I will not move from this spot. I would like to see your face, I would like to know you.”

  Maggie saw him shift the knife in his hand to hold the tip between his thumb and forefinger, the handle dangling below.

  “There is the Elephant,” he said. “Justice does not exist in the world system. Fairness is a human invention. The world abhors only waste, waste is forbidden, and when waste is eliminated love is permitted. Behold, I tell you a mystery—I am a man of sorrows and I loved Pumo the Puma.”

  Maggie had begun moving backward with greater care. She was very near the desk, and when she touched it with one backwards-reaching hand she forced herself to move even more slowly until she had found the side of the empty clay pot she knew was there. It had once held a tiny hibiscus tree, a gift from Maggie; when the tree had died from lack of light and an infestation of mites around the time of the insect problem in the kitchen, Pumo had dumped the hibiscus and kept the pot, promising Maggie that they would get another. It had sat empty beside his desk ever since.

  “One minute or another, we will meet one another. In this minute, or the next, or the one after that …”

  He stood there, about five feet away from her now, as prepared as ever to throw his knife into her back. Maggie lifted the big pot off its base, and in one motion stood up and raised the pot above her head.

  The man looked back over his shoulder, already beginning to react, and Maggie stepped forward and brought the pot down with imperfect accuracy. She was sobbing with terror. His own reflexes undid him. Ducking sideways, he brought himself directly beneath the heavy pot, and it connected solidly with the side of his head. There was a dull heavy thud followed almost immediately by the smashing of the pot on the floor and the loud crash as Tina’s killer pitched onto the coffee table and snapped it in two like a sheet of ice.

  Maggie jumped down from the platform and skimmed across the floor before Pumo’s killer had picked himself up out of the wreckage of the table. She threw open the door and went pell-mell down the stairs. As if with three-hundred-and-sixty-degree vision, she saw her huge shadow on the wall beside her and a darker shape filling the opening at the top of the stairs. Even though she was flying, she seemed to be moving with terrific slowness, as if time were muscle-bound. The man must have dropped his knife, for he did not throw it. Maggie burst through the street door as she heard the man thundering down the stairs.

  Again she flew, now toward noise, lights, people. She was entirely unaware of the cold.

  Maggie risked a glance over her shoulder just before she reached the corner of West Broadway. The scene behind her seemed as flat and artificial as a stage set. The door to the loft hung open, and light spilling out melted into the circular light from a streetlamp. A few people had turned around on the sidewalk to watch her run past. In the midst of all the light and activity on Grand Street was a sliding shadow, a man who melted toward her invisibly, using other people as cover. Maggie snapped her head forward, her breath freezing in her throat, and did her best to narrow down to a small black line speeding along above the pavement.

  Maggie ran down the block, her arms pumping in the thin sleeves of her shirt, her knees rising and falling. “Go, girl,” a black man urged when she flew by, for her broad smooth face reflected little of her terror. A red-hot staple fixed itself into her side, and when she began to run against the
rhythm of her breathing she could hear her pursuer’s footsteps smoothly, evenly hitting the ground behind her. He was gaining on her.

  Finally the subway was only a block ahead of her. Her face dripped sweat and the staple burned in her side, but still her elbows pumped and her knees rose and fell. The boys, still occupying the middle of the sidewalk, saw her racing toward them and went wild.

  “Chinkie!”

  “Baby, you came back!”

  This wide-grinning boy in a Fila sweatshirt danced in front of her, giving big come-to-me gestures. A gold chain spelling out a name in letters as large as front teeth bounced on his chest. Maggie was yelling something, and they made to close on her, but when she came within a few yards of the boy he saw her face and moved out of the way. “Murder!” she yelled. “Stop him!”

  Without any transition she was flying down the steps, moving as if there were no gravity. From above she heard shouts and the sound of somebody falling. Before Maggie hit the bottom of the steps she heard a train pounding into the station, and she hit the ground running. Perhaps fifteen people were in the station, another fifteen or so on the platform. Voices still came from the top of the stairs. To her right the train came to a stop, and its doors squeaked open.

  Maggie kept on winding through the people, and when she reached the turnstile she pretended to drop in her token and passed beneath the motionless bar swiftly and unobserved. Once past the turnstile she risked another glance over her shoulder and saw a wall of people advancing toward the train. Then a grey shadow melted away behind a man in a black topcoat, and she saw the suggestion of a smile as the shadow flowed on toward her. The being was quietly, gleefully capering toward her, and she sprinted across the final few yards to the waiting train.