Koko brt-1

by Peter Straub

  “The wasp expert?” Michael said. “Good.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  Two years before, Michael had told some people at a faculty party about Victor Spitalny running out of the Ia Thuc cave screaming about being stung by millions of wasps. This was one part of Ia Thuc that he was able to speak about: it was harmless, and nobody died in this story. All that happened was that Victor Spitalny tore out of the cave, scraping his face with his fingernails and screaming until Poole rolled him up in his groundcloth. When he stopped screaming, Poole unwrapped him. Spitalny’s face and hands were covered with rapidly disappearing red welts. “Ain’t no wasps in Vietnam, little brother,” SP4 Cotton said, snapping a picture of Spitalny half-emerged from the groundcloth. “Every other kind of bug, but ain’t no wasps.”

  A six-three English teacher named Bob Bunce, who had floppy blond hair and a thin patrician face and wore beautiful tweed suits, told Michael that since wasps were found throughout the northern hemisphere, there must be wasps in Vietnam. Michael thought that Bunce was a smug self-important know-it-all. He was supposed to come from a wealthy Main Line family and to be teaching English because he had a priestly calling to it. Bunce was a liberal’s wet dream. He had gone on to say that because Vietnam was a semitropical country, wasps would be rare, and anyhow that most wasps in all parts of the world were solitaries. “And aren’t there more interesting questions about Ia Thuc than this, Michael?” he had insinuatingly asked.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Michael said now to Judy. “Where are you going to go?”

  “He didn’t tell me, Michael. Where he takes me is not so ultra-important. I’m not asking for a four-star dinner, you know, all I want is a little company.”

  “Fine.”

  “It’s not as though you’re exactly starving for companionship, is it? But I think there are massage parlors in Westerholm, too.”

  “I don’t think so,” Michael laughed.

  “I don’t want to talk anymore,” Judy promptly said.

  “Okay.”

  Another lengthy silence.

  “Have a nice dinner with Bunce.”

  “You have no right to say that,” Judy told him, and hung up without saying good-bye.

  Michael gently replaced the receiver.

  Conor was walking around the room, looking out the window, bouncing on the balls of his feet, avoiding Michael’s eyes. At length he cleared his throat. “Trouble?”

  “My life is becoming ridiculous.”

  Conor laughed. “My life always was ridiculous. Ridiculous isn’t so bad.”

  “Maybe not,” Michael said, and he and Conor shared a smile. “I think I’m going to bed early tonight. Do you mind being alone? Tomorrow we can make a list of places to visit and really get down to work.”

  Conor took a couple of the photographs of Tim Underhill with him when he left.

  4

  Relieved to be alone, Michael ordered a simple meal from room service and stretched out on his bed with the copy of The Divided Man he had purchased that afternoon. He had not read Underhill’s most successful book in years, and he was surprised by how quickly he was caught up in it again, how thoroughly it managed to distract him from his worries about Judy.

  Hal Esterhaz, the hero of The Divided Man, was a homicide detective in Monroe, Illinois, a medium-sized city filled with foundries, auto-body shops, and vacant lots behind chain-link fences. Esterhaz had served as a lieutenant in Vietnam, and had returned home to marry and quickly divorce his high school girlfriend. He drank a lot, but for years had been a respected police officer with an uncomfortable secret: he was bisexual. His guilt over his sexual longings for other men accounted not only for his drinking, but also his occasional brutality with arrested criminals. Esterhaz was careful about this, and let himself beat only those criminals—rapists and child molesters—most despised by other policemen.

  Michael suddenly found himself wondering if Esterhaz had been based on Harry Beevers. This thought had never occurred to him when he first read the book, but now, although the detective was tougher and more enigmatic than Beevers, Poole virtually saw the Lost Boss’s face on his body. Beevers was not bisexual, at least as far as Michael knew, but Poole would not have been surprised to learn that Beevers had a wide streak of sadism hidden within him.

  Michael also saw another likelihood that had slipped past him when he first read the book. Monroe, Illinois, the gritty city through which Hal Esterhaz pursued the mystery at the heart of The Divided Man, sounded very much like Milwaukee, Wisconsin, the city M.O. Dengler had described so often. Monroe had a large Polish population on its south side, a large black ghetto on its near north side, and a major league ball team. The mansions of the rich stood along three or four streets near its lakefront. A dark, polluted river ran through its seedy downtown. There were paper mills and tanneries, adult bookstores, bowling allies, miserable winters, bars and taverns everywhere, barrel-shaped women in babushkas waiting at bus stops. This was the landscape of Dengler’s childhood.

  Poole was soon so taken up in the novel’s story that it was more than an hour before a third belated recognition stung him, that The Divided Man was virtually a meditation on Koko.

  An unemployed piano player is found with his throat slit in his room at a shabby downtown hotel called the St. Alwyn. Beside the body has been placed a piece of paper with the words Blue Rose penciled upon it. Hal Esterhaz is assigned to the case, and recognizes the victim as a regular patron of one of Monroe’s gay bars. He had once had sex with the man. Of course he suppresses the information about his fugitive relationship with the victim when he files his report.

  A prostitute is the next victim, found with her throat slit in an alley behind the St. Alwyn, and again there is a note: Blue Rose. Esterhaz learns that she too had lived in the hotel and was a friend of the piano player; Esterhaz suspects that she witnessed the murder or knew something that would lead the police to the killer.

  A week later, a young doctor is found slaughtered in his Jaguar, parked in the garage of the lakefront mansion where he lived alone with a housekeeper. Esterhaz reports to the scene miserably hung over, still wearing yesterday’s clothes, with no real memory of the night before. He had visited a bar called the House of Correction, he can remember ordering drinks, talking, he remembers putting on his coat, having trouble with the sleeves … after that everything is black until the telephone call from his station, which had awakened him on the couch. What makes him feel far worse than his hangover is that the young doctor had been his lover for more than a year some five years before. No one, not even the doctor’s housekeeper, had known. Esterhaz conducts a competent scene-of-the-crime investigation, discovers a piece of paper with the words Blue Rose written on it, questions the housekeeper and bags and tags all the physical evidence, and when the medical examiner has finished and the body is removed, returns to the House of Correction. Another blackout, another morning on the couch with a half-empty bottle and a blaring television.

  The following week another body is discovered, that of a male hustler and drug addict who had been one of Esterhaz’s informants.

  The next victim is a religious fanatic, a butcher who preaches to a congregation in a downtown storefront. Esterhaz not only knows this victim, he hates him. The butcher and his wife had been the most brutal of the series of foster parents who had raised Esterhaz. They had beaten and abused him almost daily, keeping him home from school to work out of sight in the back of the butcher shop—he was a sinner, he had to work until his hands bled, he had to memorize Scripture to save his soul, he was damned no matter how much Scripture he memorized so he required more beatings. He had been taken from the butcher’s house only after a social worker had made an unannounced visit and discovered him covered in bruises and locked in the freezer “to repent.”

  In fact Hal Esterhaz is not even his real name, but had been given to him by social workers: his identity and parentage, even his exact age, are mysterious. All he knows of his
origins is that he was found at the age of three or four, covered with frozen mud, wandering the downtown streets near the river in the middle of December. He had known no language; he had been starved nearly to death.

  Even now, Esterhaz could not remember long stretches of his wretched childhood, and could remember none of his life before he was found wandering naked and starved on a street beside the Monroe River. His dreams of that time were of a golden world where giants petted him, fed him, and called him by a name that was never audible.

  Hal Esterhaz had twice dropped out of school, been in trouble with the law, had spent his adolescence in a steamy obliterating hatred of everything about him. He had joined the army in a fit of drunken self-loathing, and the army had saved him. All his most decent, most dependable memories virtually began with basic training. It was, he thought, as if he had been three times born: once into the golden world, then into frozen, bitter Monroe, finally into uniform. His superiors had soon recognized his innate abilities and eventually recommended him for OCS. In exchange for another four years of service he would happily have served anyhow, he received the training that sent him to his second tour in Vietnam as a lieutenant.

  After the murder of the butcher, Esterhaz begins to dream of washing blood from his hands, of standing sweaty and fearful at his sink, holding his bloodied hands under the steaming water, his shirt off, his chest dappled with red … he dreams of opening a door onto a garden of sick roses, roses of an unnatural, bright, chemical blue. He dreams that he is driving his car into deep darkness, with a familiar corpse on the seat beside him.

  A second recognition came to Michael at this point, that surely he remembered M.O. Dengler once inserting into his tales of a fabulous Milwaukee—tales of finding a sick angel in a packing case and feeding him Cracker Jacks until he could fly again, of the man who made ice burn by breathing on it, of the famous Milwaukee criminal from whose mouth rats and insects flew instead of words—something about his parents being only half his parents, whatever that had meant.

  Poole fell asleep with the book on his chest, no more than a hundred yards or so from the spot on Phat Pong Road where Dengler had bled to death.

  1

  According to the Army of the United States of America, Private First Class Dengler was the victim of a homicidal attack by person or persons unknown. Said attack occurred during Private Dengler’s Rest and Recreation tour in the city of Bangkok, Thailand. Private Dengler suffered multiple cranial fractures, compound fractures of right and left tibia and fibula, fracture of the sacrum, rupture of the spleen, rupture of the right kidney, and puncture wounds in the upper portions of both lungs. Eight of Private Dengler’s fingers had been severed, and both arms were dislocated. The nose and jaw had been splintered by multiple fractures. The skin of the deceased had been severely abraded, and much of the face torn away by the assailants. Identification had been secured through the victim’s dogtags.

  The Army found it unwise or unnecessary to speculate on the reasons for the attack on Private First Class Dengler, restricting its comments in this regard to a consideration of the tensions that grew up between members of the American Armed Forces and native populations.

  2

  In the light of the Sergeant Khoffi (1967) and Private First Class Springwater (1968) incidents in Bangkok, the formation of a commission to recommend on the advisability of restricting Rest and Recreation tours in the city of Bangkok to officer rank personnel was advised. (Attention was also drawn to less severe incidents in Honolulu and Hong Kong, and to the military-civilian-police triangle pertaining in these cities.)

  Give us data, the Army pleaded, give us a Commission. (The recommendation was noted, considered, and shelved.) We advise an on-site study. (Also shelved.) Good liaison with local police being imperative, we suggest an assignment of officers with police training to police departments in Rest and Recreation areas where incidents such as above have been proven to be likely. (This recommendation, offered as a sop to the Police Department of the City of Bangkok, was never taken any further.) It was recommended that Military Police in Bangkok liaise with the Bangkok Police Department to seek out and locate local witnesses to the attack on PFC Dengler, identify and apprehend the soldier who had been seen in PFC Dengler’s company just before the incident, and seek to apprehend and prosecute all those responsible for the homicide of PFC Dengler. The unidentified soldier who had been seen with PFC Dengler was finally named three weeks later as PFC Victor Spitalny, who had been sent to Honolulu for his R&R.

  3

  In PFC Dengler’s medical files, cause of death was given as loss of blood due to gross physical trauma.

  His parents were informed that he had died bravely and would be very much missed by his fellow soldiers—Beevers wrote this letter half-resentfully, loaded on popskull vodka from Manly’s private stock.

  Then the Army held its breath. Victor Spitalny was not pulled out of the Heaven Massage Parlor or the Mississippi Queen by the Bangkok police, and the American MPs in Bangkok did not pull him out of a Patpong gutter. Police in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, which rather surprisingly turned out to be the birthplace of PFC Spitalny, did not locate the missing soldier, charged by now with the crime of desertion, at his parents’ house, the house of his former girlfriend, or at the Sports Tavern, Sam ‘N’ Aggie’s, or the Polka Dot Lounge, where the deserter had sought diversion and entertainment before entering military service.

  No one in Bangkok, Camp Crandall, or the Pentagon mentioned a little girl who had run bleeding down Phat Pong Road, no one alluded to the shouts and cries that disappeared into the polluted air. The little girl disappeared into rumor and fiction, then disappeared altogether, like the thirty children in the cave at Ia Thuc, and eventually the army, having moved on to other cases and other problems, forgot that it was holding its breath.

  4

  What was it like to go on R&R?

  It was like being on another planet. Like being from another planet.

  Why was it like being from another planet?

  Because not even time was the same. Everybody moved with great unconscious slowness, everybody talked slow and smiled slow and thought slow.

  Was that the only difference?

  The people were the biggest difference. What they thought was important, what made them happy.

  Was that the only difference?

  Everybody’s making money and you’re not. Everybody’s spending money, and you’re not. Everybody’s got a girl. Everybody’s got dry feet and they all eat real food.

  What did you miss?

  I missed the real world. I missed Nam. Where there’s a whole different top ten.

  Top ten?

  Sounds that make you feel sick with excitement. You want the songs from your own planet.

  Will you tell me about the girl?

  She came out of the screams the way birds come out of clouds. She was an image—that was the first thing I thought. That she had to be seen, that she had to present herself. She was from my world. She was loose. The way Koko got loose.

  Why did you think she was screaming?

  I thought she was screaming because of the nearness of ultimate things.

  How old was she?

  She might have been ten or eleven.

  What did she look like?

  She was half-naked, and her upper body was covered with blood. There was blood even in her hair. Her hands were outstretched in front of her, and they were red with blood too. She might have been a Thai. She might have been Chinese.

  What did you do?

  I stood on the sidewalk and watched her run past me.

  Did anybody else see her?

  No. One old man blinked and looked troubled. Nothing else.

  Why didn’t you stop her?

  She was an image. She was uncanny. She’d have died if you stopped her. Maybe you’d die too. I just stood there in the midst of the crowd and watched her run past me.

  How did you feel when you saw her?

  I lov
ed her.

  I felt I saw everything that was the truth in her face—in her eyes. Nothing is sane, that’s what I saw, nothing is safe, terror and pain are beneath everything—I think God sees things that way, only most of the time He doesn’t want us to see it too.

  I had the Pan-feeling. I felt like she had burned my brain. I felt like my eyes had been scorched. She thrashed down the bright street in the midst of all her commotion, showing her bloody palms to the world, and she was gone. Pan-ic. The nearness of ultimate things.

  What did you do?

  I went home and wrote. I went home and wept. Then I wrote some more.

  What did you write?

  I wrote a story about Lieutenant Harry Beevers, which I called “Blue Rose.”

  1

  Michael Poole and Conor Linklater separated on their second day in Bangkok. Conor went through a dozen gay bars in Patpong 3, asking his question about Tim Underhill to baffled but kindly Japanese tourists who usually offered to buy him a drink, to jumpy-looking Americans who usually pretended that they could not see or hear him, and to various smiling Thai men, who assumed that he was looking for his lover and offered the services of decorative young men who would soon heal his broken heart. Conor had forgotten his stack of photographs in his hotel room. He looked at small, pretty boys in dresses and thought of Tim Underhill while wishing that these frothy creatures were the girls they so much resembled. The bartender in a transvestite bar called Mama’s made Conor stop breathing for a few seconds when he blinked at Underhill’s name and stood looking at him, smiling and stroking his chin. But at last he giggled and said, “Never saw him in here.”

  Conor smiled at the man, who appeared to be melting a lump of some delicious substance, chocolate or butter, on his tongue. “You acted like you knew him.”

  “Can’t be sure,” the bartender said.

  Conor sighed, took a twenty-baht note from the pocket of his jeans, and slid it across the bar.