Koko brt-1

by Peter Straub

  “Aha!” Maggie said. “The secret of the Pforzheimer!” She was brandishing a green telephone directory so thick she had to hold it with both hands.

  “By George, I think she’s got it,” Underhill said.

  Maggie sat on the end of the couch beside Poole and flipped open the book. “I didn’t think it would have so many names in it. What are we looking for? Oh yes, S, that’s right, Sandberg, Samuels, Sbarro …” She turned a wad of pages, then one other. “Here we are. Sperber. And Spitalny. And Spitalny and Spitalny and Spitalny, you wouldn’t think there’d be so many.”

  Michael looked at the place where Maggie’s slim finger rested on the page. The finger moved down a column that began with Spitalnik, changed to Spitalny and stayed that way for something like twenty entries until it became Spitalsky.

  He took the book across the expanse of the room to the bed, propped himself up on the pillows, held the book open on his lap, and moved the phone beside him. Maggie and Tim watched him from the couch, looking like the kittens in Maggie’s book. “Talk among yourselves,” Poole said. “ ‘Idolize your time.’ ”

  “Did it ever occur to you that Conor Linklater is a genius?” Underhill asked Maggie.

  “Mr. Spitalny?” Poole asked. “My name is Michael Poole, and I’m looking for the family of a man named Victor Spitalny who was in Vietnam with me. I wondered if you were related to him, or if you knew how I could get in touch with his family … Victor, that’s right … So nobody in your family was named Victor … Yes, he was from Milwaukee … Thanks anyhow.”

  He depressed the button, dialed the next number, and when there was no answer, the one beneath that. A man who had been celebrating the snowfall answered and informed Michael in a slow, slurry voice that no such person as Victor Spitalny had ever existed, and hung up.

  On the seventh listing, for E. Spitalny on South Mogrom Street, Poole had better luck. “You were in Vietnam with Victor?” a young woman asked him. “My goodness. All that seems a long time ago.”

  Poole signaled to the two on the couch for writing paper. Underhill found a pad of hotel stationery and tossed it to Michael.

  “He is in your family?”

  “Oh, my goodness,” the girl said. “Vic was my cousin. You mean he’s still alive? You don’t know what this does to me.”

  “There is a chance he’s still alive. Can you give me his parents’ telephone number? Are they both still living?”

  “If you call it living. I don’t have their number right here, but you can find it in the book. George and Margaret, Uncle George and Aunt Margaret. Look, didn’t something funny happen to Vic? I thought he was in a hospital overseas, I guess I thought he must have died there.”

  Poole scanned down the listings until he found Spitalny, George, 6835 S. Winnebago St., and circled it with his pen.

  “It’s your impression he was hospitalized?”

  “Well, I thought Uncle George … it was a long time ago.”

  “You haven’t heard anything from him since the war?”

  “Well, no. Even if he was alive, he’d hardly write to me, would he? We weren’t exactly buddies. Who did you say you were again?”

  Michael repeated his name and that he and Victor were in the same unit in Vietnam. The girl said that her name was Evvie.

  “I’m here with some friends from New York, Evvie, and we wanted to learn if anyone in his family had heard from Victor recently.”

  “Not that I know about.”

  “Can you tell me the names of any of your cousin’s friends? Names of girls he went out with? Or any of the places he used to go?”

  “Gee, I don’t know,” said Evvie. “Vic was the sort of a guy who was kind of a loner. He did go to Rufus King, I know that. And for a while he went out with a girl named Debbie. I met her once, when I was a little kid. Debbie Maczik. She was so cute, I thought. And I think he used to go to a place called The Polka Dot. But mainly he used to work on his car, stuff like that, you know?”

  “Can you remember the names of his friends?”

  “One guy was named Bill, one guy was named Mack—that’s all I ever knew. I was only ten when Vic got drafted. My aunt and uncle will know all that stuff.”

  “Would your uncle be home now?”

  “You wanna call him? Probably not, he’s probably at work. I ought to be at work, I’m a secretary at the gas company, but I just couldn’t face it today, so I decided to stay home and watch the soap operas. Aunt Margaret ought to be home, though. She never goes anywhere.” Evvie Spitalny paused. “I guess I don’t have to tell you, this feels real strange. Talking about my cousin Vic. It’s funny. It’s like—you think you forgot all about a certain person, you know, and then bang, you get reminded all over again. My cousin wasn’t a real nice guy, you know.”

  “No,” Poole said. “I guess he wasn’t.”

  After Evvie had hung up, he dialed the number on Winnebago Street. An older woman with a flat nasal voice answered.

  “Is this Mrs. Spitalny? Margaret Spitalny?”

  “Yes, it is.”

  “Mrs. Spitalny, you don’t know me, but I was in Vietnam with your son. We served together in the same unit for a year. My name is Michael Poole—Dr. Poole, now.”

  “Oh, my goodness. Say what?”

  He repeated most of what he had said.

  “What did you say your name was?”

  He repeated his name. “I’m in Milwaukee with Tim Underhill, another member of our unit, and a friend of ours. We’d very much like to see you and your husband, if that is at all possible.”

  “See us?” Mrs. Spitalny seemed to speak only in questions.

  “We’d like to come over and meet you, if we could. We arrived this morning from New York, and I found your name in the telephone book.”

  “You came all the way from New York to see me and George?”

  “We very much wanted to talk to you about Victor. I hope this isn’t too much of a nuisance, and I apologize for the suddenness of it, but do you think we could come out either this afternoon or tonight? We’d be interested in hearing anything you have to say about Victor, looking at photographs, that kind of thing.”

  “You want to come to our house? Tonight?”

  “If we can. Please don’t feel you have to feed us. We are just very interested in learning whatever we could about Victor.”

  “Well, there isn’t that much to learn. I can tell you that right away.… You aren’t from the police, are you?”

  Poole’s blood began to move a little faster. “No. I am a doctor, and Mr. Underhill is a writer.”

  “The other one is a writer? This isn’t anything about the police? You promise?”

  “Of course.”

  “ ’Cause otherwise it would just kill my husband.”

  “We are just old friends of Victor’s. There’s no need to worry.”

  “I’d better call George at the Glax plant, that’s where he works. I’d better check with George. He has to know about this, or I’m in Dutch. It sounds so funny. Tell me where you are and I’ll call you back after I talk to George.”

  Poole gave her the number and then, on impulse, asked, “Have you heard anything from Victor lately? We were very interested in knowing where we might be able to find him.”

  “Heard from him lately? Nobody’s heard from Vic for more than ten years, Dr. Poole. I’ll call you back.”

  Poole hung up. “Looks like you’re going to be right about his parents,” he said to Underhill.

  “She’ll call back?” Maggie asked.

  “After she talks to George.”

  “What if George says no?”

  “Then they probably have something to hide, and we’ll work on them until we talk them into letting us in the door.”

  “And we’ll know everything they know in an hour,” Underhill said. “If they play it like that, they’ll be dying to get it off their chests.”

  “So you’re hoping she will call back and say no?”

  Underhill smi
led and went back to reading his book.

  After half an hour of reading and pacing the room, Poole looked out the windows again. Outside in Moscow, a small black car, turned the color of dead skin by winter filth, had burrowed head first into one of the mountain ranges of snow. The traffic had narrowed down to a single line in order to squeeze past it.

  “Cards were invented for times like this,” he said.

  “Mah-jongg was invented for times like this,” Maggie said. “Not to mention drugs and television.”

  The telephone rang, and Poole snatched it up. “Hello?”

  “This is George Spitalny,” said an aggressive male voice. “My wife said you called her up with some kind of cockamamy story.”

  “I’m glad you called, Mr. Spitalny. My name is Dr. Michael Poole, and I was in your son’s unit in Vietnam—”

  “Look, I only got a fifteen-minute break. Suppose you tell me what’s on your mind.”

  “I was hoping that I could come over with another old friend of Victor’s tonight, to talk to you.”

  “I don’t get it. What’s the point?”

  “We’d like to know more about him. Victor was an important member of our unit, and we have a lot of memories of him.”

  “I don’t like it. I don’t have to let you and your friend walk into my house.”

  “No, you don’t, Mr. Spitalny. And I apologize for doing all this on such short notice, but my friends and I came from New York this morning, we don’t know anybody in Milwaukee, and we were just interested in hearing anything you had to say about Victor.”

  “Damn. Who are these friends?”

  “The man I mentioned, Tim Underhill, and a friend of ours named Maggie Lah.”

  “She over there too?”

  “No, she wasn’t. She came along to help us.”

  “You say Victor was an important member of your unit? How so?”

  “He was a good combat soldier. Victor was very reliable under fire.”

  “Jeez, what horseshit,” Spitalny said. “I knew Vic better than you did, mister.”

  “Well, that’s exactly why we wanted to talk to you. We do want to know more about him.”

  Spitalny hummed to himself for a second. “You told my wife you wasn’t cops.”

  “That’s right.”

  “You just come out here to see us? In the middle of winter?”

  “Last year we had a kind of reunion in Washington. There aren’t many of us left. We were interested in seeing what we could learn about Victor and another guy in our unit from Milwaukee. This is the time we had free.”

  “Okay, you just wanta talk about Vic, I guess you could come out. Around five. I gotta get back to work.”

  He gave directions to his house, and hung up.

  Poole said, “He doesn’t want us there, but he gave in anyhow. He was nervous, and he doesn’t sound like the kind of man who gets rattled easily.”

  “Now I think I’m nervous,” Maggie said.

  Poole wandered back to the window. The black car was still stuck in the drift, and its rear wheels spun so hard that smoke lifted up from the road.

  “Let’s look for Dengler’s parents,” Underhill said behind him.

  Poole heard Underhill stand up and walk across the room to the telephone book. A yellow city bus was making its way up the street. Tired-looking people wrapped in coats and scarves sat like museum exhibits in the lighted windows. For a time the bus waited for the black car to get out of the snowbank. The driver cracked open his window and shouted something. The driver of the black car opened his door, stood on the ledge, and yelled to the bus driver. He was wearing a small tweed cap. Go around, he motioned. The driver shouted again, then disappeared into his car. The bus moved forward until it touched the right rear bumper of the black car. The car shuddered.

  “Only one Dengler,” Underhill said. “On something called Muffin Street.”

  The driver hopped out of the black car. The bus ground forward, and the car shuddered another few feet into the snow. The man in the cap was screaming at the bus—he made a rush at it and pounded at its side. His car slid another slanting inch or two into the bank. One of the parking meters began to tilt backwards in the snow. The man in the cap ran to his car, opened the trunk, and took out a tire iron. He whanged the front of the bus, then closed his trunk with the other hand. He went around to the side of the bus and began to slam the tire iron against the silver metal as the bus methodically pushed his car deeper into the snowbank. The head of the parking meter gradually sank out of sight. Then the bus swerved out into the center of the street. Car horns blasted. The man in the tweed cap ran after the bus as it toiled up the icy street, slamming the tire iron against the bus’s rear bumper. Each time he swung he took a little jump to clear the L’eggs advertisement on its back end. He looked like a furious little wind-up toy as he chased after the bus. The passengers in the back seat had turned around and were staring down with round rubbery faces that reminded Poole of the faces of newborn babies.

  3

  As they turned onto a wide long bridge Poole looked out of the window of their cab, expecting to see a river beneath them. Far beneath in a wide valley, smokestacks pushed out grey clouds like wings that froze and hung in the black air. Small red fires burned and danced at the tops of columns, and red lights shone far down at the heads of trains that clanked slowly forward, showering sparks.

  “What’s that called?” Poole asked the cabdriver.

  “Nothing.” The driver was an ageless being who smelled like curdled milk and must have weighed three hundred pounds. Tattoos covered the backs of both his hands.

  “It doesn’t have a name?”

  “We call it the Valley.”

  “What’s down there?”

  “Local companies. Glax. Dux. Muffinberg. Firms like that. Fluegelhorn Brothers.”

  “Instrument makers?” Underhill asked.

  “Ditching equipment, garbage bags, stuff like that.”

  The Valley’s resemblance to a surrealist hell increased as they progressed over the bridge. The frozen grey wings mutated to slabs of stone, the flames became more numerous. Sudden spasmodic illuminations revealed, as if by lightning bolt, crooked streets, stalled trains, long factories with broken and boarded windows. What seemed like half a mile down a tiny red sign winked MARGE ‘N’ AL’S … MARGE ‘N’ AL’S.

  “There are bars down there?”

  “There’s everything down there.”

  “Do people live in the Valley? Are there houses down there too?”

  “Look,” the driver said. “You’re an asshole, that’s okay with me. If you don’t like it, you can get outa this cab. All right? I don’t need your shit.”

  “I didn’t mean—”

  “Just shut up and I’ll take you where you wanna go. Okay with you?”

  “Okay with me,” Poole said. “Sure. You bet.”

  Maggie put her hands over her mouth. Her shoulders were shaking.

  “Driver, is there a bar called The House of Correction in this town?” Underhill asked.

  “I hearda that one,” the driver said.

  The cab hit a patch of ice at the end of the bridge, skidded nearly halfway around, then straightened out again. The smell of chocolate momentarily filled the cab.

  “What’s that from?” Underhill asked. “The smell.”

  “Chocolate factory.”

  Now they drove endlessly on streets both broad and narrow bordered by two-story houses with tiny porches. Every block had its own bar named something like Pete ‘N’ Bill’s and covered with the same peeling brickface or asphalt siding as the little houses. Some blocks had two bars, one on each corner. Tall chain fences blocked off vacant lots heaped with snow that looked blue and cancerous beneath the streetlamps. Every now and then a beer sign burned in the window of what otherwise looked like a private house. On the brightly lighted corner before SAM ‘N’ ANNIE’S GOOD TIMES LOUNGE, a fat man in a wolfskin parka was braced before a big black dog. The cab stop
ped at the traffic light. The man struck the dog with his left hand, slapping it hard enough to rock it to its side. Then he struck it with his right hand. Poole could see the man grinning, showing his teeth inside the parka. He hit the dog again, and the animal backed up, crinkling its lip away from its long teeth. Again the man smashed his hand against the dog’s head. This time the dog slipped, and skittered on the ice pavement before it got its footing again. The dog lowered its shoulders and inched backward. Poole was staring at the man and the dog—the man owned the dog, this was how he played with it. The light changed, and the cab moved ahead through the empty intersection just as the dog charged. Both Poole and Underhill craned their necks to look through the rear window. All they could see was the man’s pale furry back, broad as a tractor, jerking from side to side as he and the dog engaged.

  Ten minutes later the cab pulled up before one of the two-story frame houses. The numbers 6 8 3 5 had been nailed to the top of the porch. Poole opened the door and began paying the driver. The air instantly burned his cheeks, his forehead, his nose. His fingers had turned clumsy in the cold. “Were you in Vietnam?” he asked. “I saw the Airborne insignia on your hands.”

  The driver shook his head. “I’m only twenty years old, pop.”

  They hurried up the icy concrete walk. The steps sagged, and the porch tilted to the right. Over the original surface of the house, green pebbly asphalt paper had been applied, and flaps had begun to peel away from the door and windows. Poole pushed the bell. The smell of chocolate surprised him again.

  “Just a sweet and sour kind of town,” Underhill said.

  “Sweet ‘n’ sour,” Maggie said.

  The door opened, and a short stocky man with thinning black hair plastered straight back against his skull frowned through the storm door. He was wearing khaki trousers and a clean, starched khaki work shirt with double front pockets. His hard little eyes scanned the two men and stopped moving when they reached Maggie. He had not expected anything like her, and he did not really recover until she smiled at him. He gave Poole a dark look, then broke down and cracked the storm door open a few inches.