by Peter Straub
Their conversation ended soon after.
For a moment Michael Poole saw Victor Spitalny before him, small, slope-shouldered, dark-haired, his dark eyes shifting back and forth beneath his narrow forehead with its widow’s peak, his wet little mouth and his pointed chin. At eighteen years of age, there had been a self-erected psychic wall around Victor Spitalny. If he saw you coming near him, he would stop and wait until you had gotten far enough away to let him feel safe. He had probably decided to kill someone and desert very soon after hearing Tim Underhill’s story of the running grunt.
Perhaps because of something his wife had said, Poole thought for the first time that it might be interesting to go to Milwaukee and see where Victor Spitalny had grown up.
And Milwaukee was Underhill’s Monroe, Illinois, where Hal Esterhaz had been run down by his own destiny. If Underhill ever appeared at the airport, he might want to come along on this fantasy journey and look at the childhood of one of his own characters.
Then he heard Conor gasp, and an instant later all of this went out of his head. He was looking at Tim Underhill loping toward them, carrying a box bound with twine under one arm, a leather satchel in one hand, and a case containing an ancient portable typewriter in the other, which also gripped the handles of a plastic carrying bag. The loose seersucker jacket flapped around his frame. He looked startlingly different—in the next beat Michael saw that Underhill had cut his hair.
“You made it,” he said.
“I’ll be a little short of funds until I finish my book,” Underhill said. “Could one of you gentlemen buy me a Coke?”
Conor jumped up to go to the bar.
2
It was like a parody of their trip out, finally—Tim Underhill in the window seat instead of Harry Beevers, Conor in the middle, Michael on the aisle on a planeful of tourists. Michael missed Pun Yin’s dimples and shining hair: this was an American airline, and the stewardesses were tall women with distracted professional faces. The other passengers were not pediatricians but mainly young people who fell into two categories: the employees of multinational corporations who read Megatrends and The One-Minute Manager and married couples with or without babies, dressed in jeans and shirts. When Michael was their age, they would have been reading Herman Hesse and Carlos Castaneda, but the bulging paperbacks they dug out of their packs were by Judith Krantz and Sidney Sheldon, or were written by ladies with three names and had jacket paintings of misty castles and yearning unicorns. In 1983, bohemia, if that was what these people represented, was not very literary. That was okay, Michael thought. He read airplane books too. Conor didn’t read at all. Underhill had placed on his tray a fat paperback that looked as if three people had read it before him.
Michael took from his carry-on bag a copy of The Ambassadors, a Henry James novel Judy had pressed on him. He had been enjoying it, back in Westerholm, but when he held it in his hands he realized that he did not feel like reading. Now that they were actually in the air, he could not imagine what he was returning to.
The sky outside the little windows was black, shot with violent, unearthly streaks of red and purple. Such a sky was suitable: it seemed to draw them into Koko’s world, where no gesture could be ordinary, where angels sang and demons fled down long corridors.
Conor asked the stewardess if they got a movie.
“As soon as we clear the dinner things. It’s Never Say Never Again—the new James Bond movie.”
The stewardess looked offended when Conor grinned.
“It’s because of this guy we know,” Poole explained. He did not feel like calling Beevers a friend, not even to a stewardess who would never meet him.
“Hey,” Conor said mockingly, “I’m a homicide detective from New York, I’m a big deal, I’m another double-oh-seven.”
“Your friend is a homicide detective in New York?” the girl asked. “He must be a busy man these days. There was a guy stabbed to death at JFK a week or two ago.” She noticed the sudden attention being paid to what she was saying, and added, “Some wheeler-dealer who was on one of our flights. A girlfriend of mine works in first class on the San Francisco-New York run a lot, and she said he was one of her people—a regular.” She paused. “I guess he was a real jerk.” Another pause. “The newspapers said he was a yuppie, but they just called him that because he was a young guy with a lot of money.”
“What’s a yuppie?” Underhill asked.
“A young guy with a lot of money,” Poole said.
“A girl in a grey flannel suit and a pair of Reeboks,” Conor said.
“What are Reeboks?” Underhill asked.
“He was killed at JFK after he arrived on a flight from San Francisco?” Poole asked.
The stewardess nodded. She was a tall blonde whose name tag said she was named Marnie, and she had an eager, playful expression in her eyes. “My friend Lisa said she saw him a couple of times a month. She and I used to go around together and do all this crazy stuff, but she moved to New York last year and now we just talk on the phone. But she told me all about it.” She gave Conor a curious sidelong look.
“Can I tell you something? I want to tell you something.”
Conor nodded. Marnie bent down and whispered into his ear.
Poole heard Conor nearly gasp in astonishment; then he laughed so loudly that the people in the seats before them stopped talking.
“See you guys later,” Marnie said, and pushed her cart up the aisle.
“What was that about?” Michael asked. Conor’s entire face had turned red. Tim Underhill flicked a little lizard smile at Poole and looked like William Burroughs, very wise and dry as a desert.
“Nothing.”
“She came on to you?”
“Not exactly. Lay off.”
“Good old Marnie,” Underhill said.
“Change the subject. Lay off.”
“Okay, listen to this,” Michael said. “Somebody off a San Francisco flight was killed when he landed in New York. Spitalny could have landed in San Francisco, just as we are doing, and then connected to a New York flight, as we are also doing.”
“Farfetched,” Underhill said, “but very interesting. What was the name of the stewardess’s friend? Who knew the dead man?”
“Lisa,” Conor said, still blushing.
“I wonder if Lisa noticed anybody talking to the man who was killed?”
At the beginning of Never Say Never Again, James Bond was sent to a health spa. Every ten minutes someone new tried to kill him. Pretty nurses went to bed with him. A beautiful woman took a snake from around her neck and threw it into a car window.
When Marnie returned Poole asked her, “What’s your friend Lisa’s last name?”
“Mayo. Like in Ireland. Like in Hellman’s.”
It was farfetched, but so was Bangkok. So was Westerholm. Life in general was farfetched.
“Did you know,” Underhill was saying, “in Bangkok you can give a guy about sixty bucks and go down into a basement and see a guy kill a girl? First he beats her up. Then he kills her. You watch her die and you go home.”
Conor had removed his earphones and was staring at Underhill. “I guess you know about that.”
“What, did you go there?”
Conor said nothing. “Did you?” he finally asked.
Underhill shook his head.
“Come on,” Conor said.
“Never. Just heard about it.”
“Don’t lie to me, man.”
“I’m not lying.”
Conor frowned.
“I have the feeling you met some interesting people,” Underhill said. “I want to tell you something.”
3
How Dengler Died (2):
You have to see Captain Batchittarayan, you have to see his desk, his office, his face …
Everything was hard, pocked, suspicious—everything smelled like death and Lysol. One light, of dull metal, shone at first down on his neat brown hands on the scarred empty metal surface of his desk; later, as if by
itself, it swung upward, hurting my eyes.
Yes, it was his men who had responded to the near-riot, to call it that, the “near-riot” in the Patpong area on the day in question, it was he, at that time Sergeant Batchittarayan, who had supervised the transportation of the mutilated body to the city’s morgue. It was he who had pulled the tags out of the mush on the man’s chest. It was distasteful: it had been distasteful, and the memory of the white American’s body was still unhappy. And the man before him was distasteful, with his connection to it, and with his possession of a secret.
There had been others—other Americans on R&R who had gone mad. Two years before PFC Dengler’s death, a Sergeant Walter Khoffi had hacked several patrons of the Sex-Sex bar to death before going outside and killing a massage parlor tout on the street, and a quiet Bible-quoting boy from Oklahoma named Marvin Springwater had knifed three little boys to death before the traffic ran him down on Sukhumvit Road.
So the officer’s distaste had some justification.
He was interested in how one knew about the child. The child existed, but had never been located or identified.
Weren’t you asking about the child?
Questions about the child had attracted the Captain’s attention.
Fortunately she had cried out, this unknown child. The two men and the girl had been in a narrow alley. Her screams drew attention to them. She did not cease screaming when she burst out of the alley.
Nobody knew the girl. She was a stranger. That was to be expected, Patpong being the opposite of a settled residential area. There was agreement on two points, however. She was not a bar girl or massage parlor employee—that much was clear to all those who saw her emerge from the narrow alley and run screaming down the street. And she was not a Thai. She was perhaps a Cambodian child, or Chinese, or Vietnamese.
It was not supposed that the young soldiers knew that. To the young soldiers, it was supposed, all young Asian women looked alike.
And so the crowd of men who happened to be in that particular block of Phat Pong Road that afternoon jumped the American soldier—jumped both of them—and one got away and one was torn to pieces.
Do you know who was innocent? asked the Captain. The girl was innocent. And the crowd was innocent.
So one soldier fell beneath the innocent crowd, or both did. Witnesses were vague about this. The witnesses had seen only the running girl, they had not of course participated in the assault.
A thousand years ago it would have been a great epic, this story (said the Captain). The innocent girl, her attacker torn to pieces by the righteous mob. Four hundred years ago it would have become a legend told in a song, and every child in southern Thailand would have known the song. The disappearing girl—she could have disappeared into that. Now there is not even a novel about her, not even a rock and roll song, not even a cartoon strip.
A month before this conversation with the Captain, Timothy Underhill had stood on Phat Pong Road and saw a girl rushing toward him down the middle of the street. He had been totally clean for something like nine weeks. He had been trying to write—a novel again at last, something still coming to life in his mind about a boy who had been raised in a shed behind his house, like an animal. He had been sober for three months. He heard the screams, which sounded as if she carried a microphone in her throat. He saw her bloody palms and blood-spattered hair. She came threshing toward him with her hands out and her mouth open. No one but he saw her.
Underhill wept on the pavement, unnoticed by the men pushing past him. He was there again, alive inside himself.
I went home, he told Poole, and I wrote a story called “Blue Rose.” It took six weeks. After that I wrote a story of the same length called “The Juniper Tree.” It took a month. I’ve been writing ever since.
Did you really think I’d miss this plane?
After I saw her, then I had to see everything—then I had to follow the story. It wouldn’t come to me anymore. You were going to come to me, or he was, but not it. I didn’t know I was waiting for either you or Koko to show up, but that’s what I was doing.
4
Another movie began, but Poole had closed his eyes before the titles came up on the screen.
He was driving his car down a long dark road into an emptiness like a desert. He had been traveling many days; though the means by which he knew this were unclear, he was in a novel called Into the Darkness, written by Tim Underhill. The long road went straight on through the night, and as he drove Michael realized that he was Hal Esterhaz, a homicide detective, and that he had been summoned from the scene of one murder to that of another, far distant. He had been traveling for weeks, going from corpse to corpse, following the killer’s footsteps without getting any nearer to him. There had been many bodies, and all of them were those of people he had known long ago in a dreamlike existence before everything had darkened.
Far ahead in the darkness he saw two dots of yellow light shining out beside the road.
In Into the Darkness he would drive through the dark in a gradually emptying world. There would always be another body, and he would never find the killer, for Into the Darkness was like a theme that repeated itself through a thousand variations, circling around and around the same cycle of chords. There would be no true ending. In Into the Darkness one day the killer would retire to raise orchids or turn into smoke, and then all meaning would be gone; the melody would trickle out in meaningless random sounds. For his job was to catalogue the killings, and the only truly satisfactory conclusion to that task would be to enter one of those dripping slum basements and find the killer waiting for him with a raised knife.
Now he could see that the yellow lights by the roadside were lanterns—little lanterns sending out beams of light.
Only when he had come directly abreast of the lanterns could he see who held them up. His son Robbie, whose name was Babar, stood by the roadside holding one of the lanterns aloft. Exactly his size, gigantic, the rabbit Ernie stood beside him on his hind legs, holding out the other lantern.
The boy named Babar and the rabbit turned their soft eyes on the man driving past; their lamps gleamed.
He felt a great spreading peace.
The car pulled past the tender boy and the big upright rabbit, and for a long time he could see the lights of their lanterns in his rearview mirror. The sense of peace stayed with him until the road ended at the bank of a great grey rushing river. He got out of his car and watched the great muscular river move past, rolling up a huge sinewy shoulder here, a vast thigh there.
Then he knew that he and the killer too were a part of the river’s great rushing body, and a terrible mingling of pain and joy, deep deep joy and pain, spread through him and spoke in their loud joined voice, and he cried out and woke up with the river in his eyes.
The river was gone. “Hey, Mikey,” Conor said, smiling almost shyly at him.
And then he only knew that he knew Koko’s identity. Then the feeling of knowing went too, and he remembered only that he had dreamed of looking at a great river and driving a car past Robbie, named Babar, who held up a lantern.
Into the darkness.
“You okay, Mikey?” Conor asked.
Poole nodded.
“You made a noise.”
“Noise, nothing,” Underhill said. “You practically sang ‘The Star-Spangled Banner.’ ”
Poole rubbed the stubble on his face. The screen had been folded back up into the bulkhead, and most of the cabin was dark. “I thought I understood something about Koko, but it went away as soon as I woke up.”
Conor uttered a wordless exclamation full of recognition.
“Those things happen to you?” Underhill asked Conor.
“I can’t really talk about it—I thought I understood something too,” Conor half-mumbled. “It was real strange.” He tilted his head and looked at Underhill. “You were at that place, weren’t you? Where they shot the girl?”
“Sometimes I think I must have an evil twin,” Underhill said. �
��Like the man in the iron mask.”
They fell silent, and the lost understanding stirred within Michael once again. It was as if his son’s lantern shone its light on the events in that village fifteen years ago: he saw a long hillside leading down to a circle of hootches, a woman carrying water downhill, oxen grazing. Smoke rose in a narrow grey column. Into the darkness, there it is.
1
Dengler’s arm was wrapped in gauze and tape, and his face was white and his eyes blurry. He said he didn’t feel anything, and he refused to lie down and wait for them to come back for him. Ia Thuc was supposed to be where Elvis the sniper came from, it was supposed to be the village that sheltered and fed him, and Dengler wanted to be with the platoon when they got there. Lieutenant Beevers had been leading search-and-avoid missions since Dragon Valley, playing it very cool, and Ia Thuc was his chance to shine. Intelligence said that it was a stockpile for food and weapons, and the Tin Man was eager to make a good haul, boost the body count, move himself a little further up along the way to full colonel. The Tin Man was always eager to make a good body count, because only half the lieutenant colonels in Nam ever got promoted, and after making every cut along the way he did not intend to flunk this one. The Tin Man saw himself as a future division commander, two stars. He was desperate to move out of middle management before the war dried up on him.
Did Lieutenant Beevers know this? You bet your ass the lieutenant knew it.
The woman was running down the hillside as they came out of the trees. The water splashed out of the pails at the ends of her yoke each time her feet hit the ground, but she had made a computation—the pails would still be better than half full when she got to the village. Poole did not know why she was running. Running was a serious error.
“Waste her before she gets to the village,” Beevers said.