Koko

by Peter Straub

  “I’m a doctor. A baby doctor, outside New York City.”

  “A baby doctor.” Simroe grinned. He liked that. “No cop, no FBI, no Intelligence or Military Police, no goddamned CIA—no nothing.”

  “No nothing.”

  Simroe was still grinning. “But there’s something, isn’t there? You think the man’s alive. You want to find him.”

  “I do want to find him.”

  “He must owe you a hell of a lot of money, or you heard something about the guy—something bad. He’s involved in something, and you want to stop him.”

  “That’s about it,” Poole admitted.

  “So Vic is alive after all. I’ll be damned.”

  “Most people who deserted are still alive. That’s why they deserted.”

  “Okay,” Simroe said. “Nobody who went into that war came back exactly the same way. You sort of think you know how far certain people will go—and maybe you don’t. Maybe you never do.” He downed a huge quantity of beer in one swallow. “Let me tell you how I got to know Vic. Back at Rufus King, I was kind of a half-assed hood. I had a big Harley, boots, evil tattoos—I still got those, but I hide ’em these days—and I tried to be a real badass. I didn’t know what else to do. I was never a real hood, I just liked riding around on that big old bike. Anyhow, Vic started hanging around me. Vic thought the whole biker bit was cool as shit. I couldn’t shake him off, and after a while I just gave up trying.”

  Poole thought of Spacemaker Ortega, Spitalny’s only real friend in the service and the leader of the Devilfuckers—Spitalny had simply transferred his affection for Simroe to Ortega.

  “And then I sort of got to like him. I got to thinking—here’s this kid, kind of dumb, his old man’s always breathing down his neck. I tried to give him advice. You gotta take care of yourself, you little asshole, I used to tell him. I even tried to get him to lay off Manny Dengler, ‘cause there was a guy who had real problems, I mean who was in shit up to his neck all day every day. I mean, I used to worry about that little cat!”

  “I saw his mother this afternoon.”

  Simroe shook his shaggy head. “I never met the lady. But the old man, Karl—man, he was something. Out there on those corners every morning, every night, yellin’ into his little mike—little Manny singin’ some stuff, hymns or shit, top of his lungs, and passin’ the hat. And the old man would cuff him right there on the street. It was a show, man, a real show. Anyhow, right after I dropped out of school Vic dropped out too—I tried to argue him back in, but he just wouldn’t go. I knew I wasn’t goin’ anywhere but the Valley, and I kind of wanted to get into uniform first, be a hero with an M-16, do my part. You know. And you were there—you know what happened. I saw good guys getting blown away for no reason at all. Fucked me up pretty good.”

  Simroe had been in Bravo Company, Fourth Battalion, 31st Infantry, the American Division, and he had spent a year fighting in 120-degree heat in the Hiep Due Valley, wounded twice.

  “Did you have any contact with Vic once you were both in country?”

  “Just a couple letters—we were going to get together, but it never worked out.”

  “Did he write to you after he deserted?”

  “I knew you were going to ask that. And I oughta dump this beer over your head, baby doctor, because I already told you I never heard from him. He just cut himself off from everybody, I guess.”

  “What do you think happened to him?”

  Simroe pushed his glass through the puddles on the wet table. He looked up at Poole, testing his judgment, then back down at his glass. “I suppose I could ask you the same. But I’ll tell you what I think, Doctor. I think he stayed alive about a month, tops. I think he ran out of money and tried to get into some action, and whoever he was with killed him. Because that’s about what Vic Spitalny was good for. He was good for screwing up. I don’t think he lasted six weeks, once he cut out on his own. At least I didn’t think so until you showed up.”

  “Do you think he killed Dengler?”

  “No way,” said Simroe, looking up sharply. “Do you?”

  “I’m afraid I do,” Poole said.

  Simroe hesitated and opened his mouth to say something, but then an uproar broke out at the bar and both men turned to see what had caused it. A group of young men in their twenties and early thirties had surrounded an older man with curly hair and the pudgy beatific face of a village fool. “Cob,” they were yelling, “Go, Cob!”

  “Catch this,” Simroe said.

  The younger men milled around the one called Cob, punching his shoulder, whispering into his ear. Poole became aware of some bitter, familiar odor—cordite? napalm? Neither of those, but an odor from that world. Cob, they said, come on, you fucker.

  The one called Cob grinned and ducked his head, pleased to be the object of so much attention. He looked like a janitor, a broom pusher for Glax or Dux or Fluegelhorn Brothers. His skin had an odd greyish tinge and in the curls of his hair were caught what looked like pencil shavings. Come on, you dumbass motherfucker. Cob! Do it!

  “There are guys in here,” Simroe said, leaning across the table, “who claim they once saw Cob lift himself a foot and a half off the floor and just hang there for thirty-forty seconds.”

  Poole looked dubiously at Simroe, and heard a loud metallic noise like a series of backfires, or a burst from a machine gun, a BRRRRAAAAPPPP! that did not sound at all like a noise any human being could have produced. He looked sideways in time to see a torpedo-shaped sheet of flame four feet long shoot out toward the middle of the bar and disappear into itself. The cordite-and-napalm stench became much stronger, then disappeared.

  “Clears the air, doesn’t it?” Simroe said.

  The younger men were banging Cob on the back, handing him bills. Cob staggered back a step, but caught himself before he fell. One of the men put a glass of beer in his hand, and he poured it down his throat as if dumping it into a well.

  “That’s Cob’s trick,” Simroe said. “He can do that two, maybe three times a night. Don’t ask me how. Don’t ask him either. He can’t tell you. Can’t talk—no tongue. You know what I think? I think the poor bastard fills his mouth up with lighter fluid before he comes in here, and stands around waiting for someone to ask for his trick.”

  “But did you ever see him light a match?”

  “Never.” Simroe winked at Michael, then poured another beer. “Another guy in here will eat his beer glass if he gets drunk enough.” He swallowed beer. “You met Dengler’s mother, you said? She tell you anything about old Karl’s going off to jail?”

  Poole’s eyes widened.

  “No, I don’t suppose she did. Old Karl was arrested during our freshman year. A social worker came around to check on the kid and found him locked in the meat locker in the butcher shop, pretty well beat up. The old man got a little rougher with him than usual, and put him in the meat locker to get him out of the way until he calmed down. She called the cops, and the kid told them everything.”

  “What everything?”

  And Mack Simroe told him. “How his old man, old Karl, used to—well, abuse him. A couple of times a week, starting from the time he was five or six. Used to tell him he’d cut his pecker off if he caught him messing with girls. Manny had to go to trial and testify against the old man. The judge sent him away for twenty years, but after he did a couple years he got killed in jail. I think he made a move on the wrong kid.”

  After what they said, Poole remembered. Everyone lied about us.

  And: We kept that boy busy.

  And: He had to be put in chains. No matter what anybody said.

  And: We closed the butcher shop a little bit before that.

  Michael saw Dengler’s face glowing at him, uttering nonsense about the Valley of the Shadow of Death.

  She said: We didn’t know what would happen to us.

  And: Imagination has to be stopped. You have to put an end to that.

  He had ignored or misinterpreted all these things. At the bar
, the man called Cob was smiling slackly upwards, his eyes unfocused and his skin some color between light purple and the grey of iron filings. After what they said. If a man could float up into the air and hang there for thirty minutes, that was what he would look like. Levitation took a toll. You had to pay a price. Not to mention what fire-breathing took out of you.

  He made things up. Isn’t that part of the original trouble?

  It was the levitation that really did it to old Cob, Poole thought. One of the young men touched Cob’s shoulders and revolved him so that he could see a number of shot glasses—Poole could not see how many, six, eight, ten—lined up on the bar in his honor. Cob began pouring the contents of the shot glasses into his mouth in a way that reminded Poole of a wild animal eating something it had killed.

  “I guess that’s news to you, isn’t it?” Simroe said. “Manny Dengler stayed out of school for a year, and when he came back he had to repeat his freshman year. Of course he was treated even worse than before.”

  And Poole remembered: Calm down, Vic. Whatever it was …

  “It was a long time ago,” he said, finishing the phrase.

  “Yep,” said Simroe, “but I’ll tell you what gets me. He was adopted by those people. Anybody could see Karl Dengler was crazy, but they still let them take him. And even after everything came out and Karl got sent to Waupun where some kid damn near took off his head with a homemade knife, Manny still lived in that house on Muffin Street. With that old lady.”

  “He started going back to school …” Poole said, his eyes still on Cob.

  “Yep.”

  “And he went home every night.”

  “He closed the door behind him,” Simroe said, “but who knows what went on behind that door? What did she talk about with him? I think he must have been damn happy when the army finally drafted him.”

  4

  All this Tim Underhill had discovered in two hours at the library, going over microfilm of the two Milwaukee newspapers—he had read about Karl Dengler’s trial and conviction, and about his murder in the state prison. “Sex Crime Minister,” read the captions beneath photographs of wild-eyed Karl Dengler. “Sex Crime Minister and Wife Arrive for Tenth Day of Trial” beneath a photograph of Karl Dengler, grey felt hat on his head and staring straight into the middle distance while a younger, slimmer Helga Dengler, thick blond braids twisted around her head, blew the camera apart with one flat glare of her pale eyes. There had been a photograph of the house on Muffin Street, its porch empty and the shades down. Beside it Dengler’s Lamb of God Butcher Shop already looked dispossessed. In the next few days, children would throw bricks through the shop’s window. By the next day, as a Sentinel photograph showed, the city had boarded up the window.

  SOCIAL WORKER PLEADS FOR FOSTER HOME, ran a subhead from the last day of the trial—forty-four-year-old Miss Phyllis Green, the woman who had discovered the child in the meat locker, severely bruised, half-conscious, and clutching his favorite book, had requested that the court find a new home for Manuel Orosco Dengler. A “spokesman” for Mrs. Dengler “vigorously opposed” the request, claiming that the Dengler family had already experienced enough pain, FOSTER CARE PLEA DENIED, announced the Journal a week after the verdict: in a separate hearing, a judge decided that the boy should be “returned to normal life as quickly as possible.” The child was to be returned to his classes on the first day of the new term. The second judge advised that “this unfortunate history be put behind us,” and that Helga and Manuel Dengler “get on with the business of living.” It was “a time for healing.” And the two of them left the courthouse, rode the bus to the South Side and Muffin Street, and closed the door behind them.

  Everybody lied about us.

  Timothy Underhill learned all this, and one thing more: Manuel Orosco Dengler’s father was Manuel Orosco Dengler’s father.

  “Karl Dengler was his real father?” Poole asked.

  He and Underhill were driving back to the Pforzheimer at seven-thirty that evening. On Wisconsin Avenue the lighted display windows of department stores slipped past like dioramas in a museum—lovers on a porch swing, men in loose, garish Perry Como sweaters and caps stiffly gathered on a golf course green.

  “Who was his mother?” Poole asked, momentarily disoriented.

  “Rosita Orosco, just the way Helga Dengler said. Rosita named him Manuel, and abandoned him in the hospital. But when she filled out the admission forms, she listed Karl Dengler as the baby’s father. And he never challenged that, because his name is on Dengler’s birth certificate.”

  “Are birth certificates on file in the library?” Poole asked.

  “I went a couple of blocks to the Hall of Records. Something finally struck me—that the Denglers seemed to adopt this abandoned baby without going through any red tape. This Nicaraguan woman, a prostitute, comes into the labor ward off the street, has a child and disappears, and fifteen days later the Denglers have adopted the child. I think it was all arranged beforehand.”

  Underhill rubbed his hands together, his knees propped up before him in the little car. “I bet Rosita told Karl she was pregnant, and he reassured her that he would adopt the child, everything would be legal and above-board. Maybe he told her he’d marry her! We’ll never know. Maybe Rosita wasn’t even a prostitute. On the hospital form, she called herself a dressmaker. I’ve been thinking that maybe Rosita wandered into the Lamb of God church or temple or whatever Karl called it when it wasn’t a butcher shop, and maybe Dengler came up to her as soon as he saw her and talked her into coming to private services. Because he didn’t want his wife to see her.”

  Horns blared behind Poole, and he realized that the light had changed. He shot through the intersection before the arrow could fade and pulled up alongside the entrance of the hotel.

  Poole and Underhill walked through the thick artificial light beneath the marquee toward the glass doors, which whooshed open before them. Out of the swarm of questions going through his mind, he asked only the most immediate. “Did Helga know that Karl was her son’s father?”

  “It was on the birth certificate.” They moved into the lobby, and the desk clerk nodded at them. The lobby was almost opulently warm, and the big drooping ferns seemed to bulge with health, as if they could slide out of their pots and eat small animals.

  “I think she didn’t want to know,” Underhill said. “And that made her even crazier. Dengler was the proof that her husband had been unfaithful to her, and with a woman who belonged to what she considered an inferior race.”

  They got into the elevator. “Where did they find Rosita’s body?” Poole asked, pushing the button for the fifth floor.

  “Beside the Milwaukee River, a block or two south of Wisconsin Avenue. It was the middle of winter—about now, in fact. She was naked, and her neck was broken. The police assumed that a customer had killed her.”

  “Two weeks after the birth of a baby?”

  “I think they assumed she was desperate,” Underhill said. The elevator stopped, and the doors clanked open. “I don’t think they gave a damn about what happened to some Mexican hooker.”

  “Nicaraguan,” Poole said.

  5

  Then they had to tell it all to Maggie, who said, “How do the Babar books come in?”

  “It looks like Karl Dengler just took them from the rummage box, or whatever they called it, inside his shop and gave them to Rosita. She must have asked him for something to give the child, and he just picked up the first thing he saw.”

  The painted dogs stood guard over the bloody game, and the self-satisfied fat men looked out at them as if immensely pleased to be frozen in time.

  “And he kept them until he was drafted.”

  “Babar is about a peaceful world,” Poole said. “I suppose that was what he loved in it.”

  “Not that peaceful,” Maggie said. “In the first pages of Babar, Babar’s mother is shot and killed by a hunter. It’s no wonder your friend Dengler kept the books.”

  “Is
that right?” Underhill sat upright in surprise.

  “Of course,” Maggie said. “And here’s something else. At the end of Babar the King, flying elephants labeled Courage, Patience, Learning, I don’t know what else—Joy and Intelligence—drive away bad evil creatures labeled Stupidity and Anger and Fear, and a lot of other wicked things. Don’t you suppose that meant a lot to him? Because from what I heard about Dengler, he was able to do that in his own life—to banish all the terrible things that had happened to him. And there’s something else too, but I don’t know what you’ll think about this. When I was a child I loved a page in that book that depicted some of the citizens of the elephants’ city. Dr. Capoulosse, and Tapitor the shoemaker, and a sculptor named Podular, Poutifour the farmer, Hatchimbombitar, a big strong street-sweeper … and a clown named Coco.”

  “Koko?” Underhill asked.

  “Spelled differently. C-o-c-o.”

  Some realization almost moved into view between them.

  Poole threw up his hands. “The only really important thing we learned here is that Spitalny knew Dengler back in high school. We’re not any closer to finding him. I think we ought to go back to New York. It’s about time we stopped humoring Harry Beevers and told that detective, Murphy, everything we know. The police can stop him. We can’t.”

  He looked directly at Maggie. “It’s time to do other things.”

  She nodded.

  “Then let’s go back to New York,” he heard Underhill say. He either could not or did not want to take his eyes off Maggie Lah. “I miss Vinh. I miss working in the mornings and having him poke his head into that little room to ask me if I want another cup of tea.”

  Poole turned to smile at Tim, who was looking at him slyly, tapping his pencil against his front teeth. “Well, somebody has to take care of Vinh,” he said. “The poor boy never stops working.”

  “So you’re going to settle down and raise a family,” Maggie said.

  “Something like that.”

  “Lead a regular, moderate life.”