Koko

by Peter Straub

  Warning signals went off all through his body. If Koko had rigged another booby trap, this was where it would be. He gave the men another semaphore and carefully inspected the ground around his feet. This close to the ravine, the earth seemed softer and damper.

  “Come out … out …” came to him.

  “Wait!” Poole bawled, inspecting the earth that lay between his feet and the maple tree. No silver wires glinted in the grey-green leaf mulch, no indentations or depressions cut through the patchwork surface of the ground. Grey leaves lay on top of green leaves on top of red leaves on top of silver leaves. Each leaf fitted smoothly into its part of the jigsaw puzzle, all the colors exposed to the sun and rain were uniformly weathered, there were no sharp lines of demarcation where a busy hand slid some long-hidden maple leaf out from under the others as it worked away, concealing the marks of its passage the way a broom would sweep away footprints in sand … the way, it occurred to him, some unseen hand had concealed the work done by Harry Beevers in that stone egg underneath the earth. Some little boy.

  Poole stepped onto the multi-colored patchwork of moidering leaves. His foot came down onto the smooth mulch of leaves he had so carefully inspected, and—

  —kept on going, breaking through the constructed surface and kept going down, past the ankle past the knee in a flash, and then his whole body had become unbalanced and he was helplessly falling forward into the deep hole uncovered by the shredding leaves, he threw his arms out too late and saw before him the long spears pointing up at his chest, his neck, his groin—

  —and the ground held his weight, yielding only that springy half-inch.

  “… AN ORDER!” a man yelled.

  Poole saw nothing on the card at first. It was an Ace of Hearts. Then he saw faint slanting pencil lines on the white of the card between the heart in its center and the top left center.

  He moved a step forward and put his face right up before the card. The faint markings resolved into words. Poole read the words, then breathed in and read them again. He exhaled. Very delicately he raised his hand to the card and touched its smooth surface. It had been affixed to the tree with a tiny pin like those that come in a new shirt. Michael tugged the pin out of the tree as he held the edges of the card. He looked at the words on the card again, then dropped the pin in his pocket. He turned the card over. On its back was the image in black and white of a plump bare-chested little boy with round eyes and curly hair holding out a basket overflowing with lavish orchids.

  4

  This was the message left for him on an Orchid Boy playing card:

  I HAVE NO NAME I AM ESTERHAZ

  DYING IS BEFORE LIFE ETERNAL

  BACKWARDS AND FORWARDS

  5

  Holding the card by its edges, Michael slipped it into his coat pocket and began walking out of the woods. He yelled to the men that he was coming out, but the man in the grey coat had become very excited. As Poole moved toward him, still checking the ground for tripwires and signs of disturbance, the cemetery official gripped the sleeve of the taller of his two employees and beat the air with his other arm. Poole could hear only muffled waves of sound. He waved to show that he was coming out, there was nothing to worry about, he was unarmed and a good citizen, nothing to get excited about. The man in the grey suit was paying no attention to him now. A younger man in a dark coat with square padded shoulders whom Poole recognized as the undertaker’s assistant moved up beside his boss, who appeared uneasy and even slightly embarrassed by the other man’s agitation. Michael took another step forward, realizing that he had to give the playing card in his pocket to the police, and was suddenly stopped cold.

  He had caught the smell of the god again, that wonderful clean fragrance of sunshine and massed flowers. Here it was even stronger than it had been beside Robbie’s grave. But the air did not darken and there were no trembling flashes of light. The god smell was natural, not supernatural. A slight meandering breeze took it away, then brought it to him again. Then Poole saw a rank of lolling blue and white wildflowers off to his left and knew that they were the source of the magical scent. They had bloomed in the sudden good weather and had somehow survived the fall in temperature. He could not identify the flowers, which were as tall as tulips, with wide blue blossoms striped white toward the center. They grew before a group of oak trees, and their sturdy green stalks protruded like spears up out of the leaf mold. The powerful scent came to him again.

  When he looked forward, the man in the grey topcoat was leveling his index finger at him.

  “… want that man out of there right now, Watkins,” Poole heard.

  Watkins took a slow step forward, and the cemetery official shoved him in the small of his back.

  “Get a move on!”

  Watkins began to half-stumble, half-trot toward Poole. He was shading his eyes to see into the woods, and Poole knew that his form must have been flickering in and out of sight, like Koko’s a few minutes earlier. Watkins’ arms pumped, and his big belly heaved. The pale blob of his face looked set and unhappy.

  “Nothing’s wrong!” Poole yelled, holding out his hand.

  Watkins moved to run in on the same wandering path Poole had taken. He ducked to pass beneath the dark slanting line of the dead ash tree.

  “Stop!” Poole yelled.

  The man in the grey coat stepped forward as if he were going to chase after Poole himself, and Watkins took another heavy, lumbering step into the shade, and toppled over out of sight.

  Poole heard him thud into the ground. He began to run toward him. Watkins’ big fuzzy head showed above a tangle of crisp vines, and his face turned toward Poole and showed a round O of mouth. Then the O began to emit ragged screams.

  “Shut up,” said his boss.

  “He cut me!”

  “What the hell are you talking about?”

  Watkins held up a hand streaming with blood. “Look, Mr. Del Barca!”

  Del Barca squared off in front of Poole and pointed his index finger at him again. “Stop right there,” he said. “I’m having you arrested. You were trespassing on private cemetery grounds, and you injured my employee here.”

  “Calm down,” Poole said.

  “I demand to know what you were doing back there.”

  “I was trying to find the man who strung up this booby trap.” Poole moved over the last bit of ground between himself and the fallen man. Watkins lay on his side with his left leg out before him. He was red in the face, and his fuzzy hair was matted with sweat. A widening blurry line of blood had already soaked through his left trouser leg.

  “What booby trap?” Del Barca asked.

  “Just relax,” Poole said. “I’m a doctor, and this man needs my help. He ran into a wire, and it did some damage to his leg.”

  “What goddamned wire?” Del Barca yelled. “What the hell are you talking about?”

  Poole bent down and ran his hand over the ground four or five inches behind Watkins. There was the wire, shiny and taut. It looked very much like razor wire. He lightly touched it. “You’re lucky it didn’t cut his leg off. Did you hear me telling him to stop?”

  “You telling him?” Del Barca shouted. “Whose fault is this?”

  “Yours, for one. Suppose you see what this line is connected to at either end. If it’s anything but a rock or a tree trunk, leave it alone.”

  “Check it out,” Del Barca told his other employee, a younger man with the face of a moustached gerbil.

  “Don’t touch anything.”

  Poole knelt beside the man and gently urged him to lie flat on the ground. “You’re going to need stitches,” he said, “but we’ll see how bad the damage is.”

  “You better be a real doctor, buddy,” Del Barca said.

  “John. John,” the undertaker said in a soft, urgent voice. “I know him.”

  Poole hooked his fingers into the cut in the fabric and ripped. A big bloody flap of cloth came away in his hand. “That line might still be hooked up to explosives,” he said to th
e young man with the gerbil’s face. The young man jerked his hand away from the wire as if he had been scalded. There was a deep gash in Watkins’ leg from which blood pulsed out at a slow steady rate. “You need St. Bart’s emergency ward,” he said, and looked up at Del Barca. “Give me your necktie.”

  “My what?”

  “Your tie. Do you want this man to bleed to death?”

  La Barca resentfully untied his necktie and handed it to Poole. He turned to the undertaker. “All right, who is he?”

  “I don’t remember his name, but he’s a doctor, all right.”

  “My name is Dr. Michael Poole.” He wound Del Barca’s Countess Mara necktie three times around Watkins’ leg to stop the flow of blood and twisted it tight before knotting it. “You’ll be okay as soon as you get to St. Bart’s,” he told Watkins, and stood up. “I’d get him there as soon as you can. You could drive right up here and put him in your car.”

  An almost aesthetic expression of distaste passed over Del Barca’s features. “Wait a second. Did you set up this … this booby trap?”

  “I just recognized it,” Poole said. “From Vietnam.”

  Del Barca blinked.

  “That wire’s just tied to trees on both ends,” called the rabbit-faced boy. “Cut right through the bark.”

  Watkins whimpered.

  “Go on, Traddles,” Del Barca said. “Use your hearse. It’s closer.”

  Traddles nodded gloomily and padded away downhill toward his hearse. His assistant followed him. “I was here for the Talbot funeral,” Poole said to Del Barca. “I walked over here to look at my son’s grave, and I saw a man disappearing into these woods. He looked so odd that I followed him, and when I saw that tripwire I got interested enough to follow him deeper into the woods. Then you started yelling at me. I guess the man just got away.”

  “Musta been parked alongside the expressway,” said the younger man.

  They watched Traddles drive toward them along the narrow lane. When he had come as close as he could, he got out of the cab and waited by the door. The assistant ran around and opened the back.

  “Go on, get him up,” Del Barca said. “You can stand, Watkins. It wasn’t exactly an amputation.” He turned a sour, suspicious face to Michael. “I’m going to the police about this.”

  “Good idea,” Michael said. “Have them check out that whole area back there, but tell them to be careful.”

  The two men watched the big man limp off toward Traddles’ hearse, leaning on his small companion and hissing with every step. “Do you know the name of those flowers growing just inside the woods?” Michael asked Del Barca.

  “We don’t plant flowers.” Del Barca gave a grim little smile. “We sell flowers.”

  “Big blue and white ones,” Poole persisted. “With a strong, carrying scent.”

  “Weeds,” Del Barca said. “If it grows back there, we pretty much let it go to hell by itself.”

  6

  When Michael returned to Conor’s empty apartment he looked out of the window down onto Water Street. He did not expect to see Victor Spitalny looking back up at him, for Spitalny would have had no trouble melting into his particular form of invisibility among the crowds of tourists that filled the renovated Water Street all during the weekends, but he gave the crowd a long look anyhow. He had to assume that Spitalny knew about the apartment, and that he was staying in it.

  Poole had been shaken that afternoon, in more than one way. The appearance of Victor Spitalny had forced him to delay thinking about it, but something had shown itself to him—had revealed itself—before Robbie’s grave. Of course it had been a hallucination. Stress, anxiety, and guilt had pushed him over the edge of rationality. The wonderful odor that had seemed to accompany the appearance of a supernatural being had been the scent of early wildflowers. Still it had been a wonderful experience. In the midst of his pains and troubles he had momentarily seen everything as if for the first time. The internal weight of every particle of being had seized him with its own seriousness and power. He wished that he could describe this experience to someone who might understand it or have shared it.

  He wanted to talk about it with Tim Underhill.

  Poole gave a last look down at busy Water Street, and went back into the empty room. Conor’s jacket was not on the hook inside the front door. Michael went to the dining table and finally saw what he should have seen as soon as he entered. It was a small rectangle of paper torn from the pad beneath the phone in Conor’s little galley kitchen and on it was printed MIKEY.

  Poole smiled and turned it over to read Conor’s message: Going up to Ellen’s place to be with her a couple days. You understand. Good luck in Milwaukee. Love, Conor. PS. She liked you. PPS. Here’s the number in case you have to call. A 203 number had been scrawled at the bottom of the note.

  He took the playing card from his pocket and set it down next to the note on Conor’s table. I have no home. Koko had seen Beevers’ flyers. I am Esterhaz. This revealed that Spitalny had read Tim Underhill’s best book, and it also answered the phrase “We who know your real name.” And maybe it was a declaration that Spitalny intended to kill himself, as Esterhaz had done. If he felt like Esterhaz, Spitalny was in torment: like Esterhaz, he had killed too often and was becoming conscious of what he had done. Poole wanted to believe that Koko’s appearance in the cemetery had been a kind of farewell gesture, a last look at someone from his old life before he slit his wrists or put a bullet in his brain and found life eternal.

  Backwards and forwards was still the locked door of a madman’s private code.

  On another of the white message sheets from beneath Conor’s telephone Michael copied out the three lines of the message. Then he took a plastic baggie from a drawer, inserted the original with a tweezers, and folded down the flap. The paper fit neatly into the baggie. He dropped the little pin into the baggie.

  He wrote a message to Lieutenant Murphy on another sheet of paper: I wanted to get this to you as soon as possible. It was pinned to a tree in the woods behind Memorial Park Cemetery in Westerholm. Koko must have followed me there when I went to a patient’s funeral. I am going out of town tomorrow, will call when I return. This note has been handled only by its edges. Dr. Michael Poole. He would buy a manila envelope before going to the airport, and mail everything to Murphy’s precinct.

  Next he dialed Saigon’s telephone number to talk to Tim Underhill.

  7

  “So you escaped from Harry.”

  “It just kind of made sense to move over here,” Underhill said. “There isn’t much room, but I can get out of Harry’s way, and I can get on with what I’m writing.” He paused. “And I can see my old friend Vinh, which is pure amazement. I couldn’t even be sure he was alive anymore. But he got out of Vietnam, made it to Paris, got married, and came here after a bunch of his relatives who were already living here made it possible. His wife died giving birth to his daughter, Helen, and he’s been raising her ever since. She’s a charming kid, and she took to me right away, too. I’m a sort of uncle, or maybe I should say auntie. She really is a dear little thing. Vinh brings her over here nearly every day.”

  “Vinh isn’t living there with you?”

  “Well, I’m just in a little room off the kitchen—the police still haven’t unsealed Tina’s loft. Vinh moved into the apartment where Helen had been staying. He had been staying there most nights anyhow, which is why he wasn’t around the night Tina was killed. One of his sister’s boys got married and moved to Astoria, so there’s an extra bedroom. Anyhow, I started writing again, and I’m about a hundred pages into a book.”

  “You’re still planning to come to Milwaukee?”

  “More than ever,” Underhill said. “I gather we will have Maggie’s company.”

  “I hope so,” Poole said. “There’s something you ought to know about, which is the real reason I called.” He told him about seeing Koko and finding the card, and read its three lines aloud.

  “He’s pretty confus
ed. Something got to him. Maybe he regained enough sanity to want to quit what he’s doing. Being back in America would give him a whole series of shocks, if I can go by my own example. Anyhow, that mention of Hal Esterhaz makes me all the more interested in going to Milwaukee.”

  Poole arranged to meet Tim at the airport at ten-thirty the next morning.

  Then he called Conor, told him about seeing Koko, and advised him to stay at Ellen Woyzak’s house until their party returned from Milwaukee. Before he hung up he gave Conor the telephone number of the hotel where he had booked rooms for the next three nights.

  “The Pforzheimer?” Conor asked. “Sounds like a brand of beer.”

  He called Westerholm, but Judy was still refusing to speak to him. Michael told Pat Caldwell to switch on the elaborate yard lights he had installed the year after Robbie’s death and to be sure to call the police if she saw anyone near the house or heard any noises. He did not think that Koko would go after the women, but he wanted them to be prepared. He also told Pat about a shotgun he had taken down into his basement about the time he had stopped switching on the arc lights around his house every night, and gave her the number of the Pforzheimer Hotel. Pat asked him if all this was related to the man they had tried to find in Singapore, and Michael told her that it was not as simple as that, but that she was more right than wrong. Yes, he was going to Milwaukee to try to search for the man, and yes, he thought everything would be over soon.

  When he hung up he walked to the window, looked again at the parade of people passing between the ice cream stores and the restaurants, then left the window and packed a couple of days’ clothing into a suitcase. Then he called his house again. Pat answered immediately.

  “Are you sitting next to the phone?”

  “Well, you didn’t exactly reassure me the last time you called.”

  “I probably over-reacted,” Poole said. “This guy isn’t going to come out to my house. He has never attacked women alone. It’s people like Harry and me that he wants. Did you turn on those yard lights?”