Koko brt-1

by Peter Straub

  Now all he had to do was wait for the telephone call. Harry began walking up toward Canal to start looking for a cab. Traffic moved past him in a seamless flow. He no longer felt cold. He stood on Canal Street and watched the traffic sweep past him, tasting on his tongue the oil and bite of the icy vodka he had just earned. When the light changed, he crossed Canal to walk north on Bowery, rejoicing.

  1

  Michael Poole came awake in cold darkness, the dream picture of a Chinese schoolgirl grinning at him from beneath the brim of a white straw skimmer vanishing from his mind. One of the large radiators clanked again, and Tim Underhill snored gently in the next bed. Poole picked up his watch and brought its face toward his until the hands became distinct. A minute to eight became eight o’clock as he watched. The first tendrils of warmth began to reach him.

  Underhill groaned, stretched, wiped his hands over his face. He looked at Poole and said, “Morning.” He sat up in bed—Underhill’s hair stuck out on both sides of his head, and his white-blond beard was crunched and flattened on one side. He looked like a crazed professor in an old movie. “Listen to this,” Underhill said, and Poole sat up in bed too.

  “I’ve been thinking about this all night,” Underhill said. “Here’s where we are at the moment. We have Dengler spooking Spitalny, right? He comes up to him and points out that in a combat unit everybody has to protect everybody else. He takes him into Ozone Park, say, and he tells him that if he acts toward him in the old way he will mess with the lives of everybody in the platoon. Maybe he even says that he’ll make sure that Spitalny will never come back from his first mission—whatever he says, Spitalny agrees to be silent about their old relationship. But this is Spitalny—he can’t take it. He hates Dengler a little more every day. And eventually Spitalny follows Dengler to Bangkok and kills him. Now what I’m thinking is that Spitalny never was the original Koko. He just borrowed the name a decade and a half later, when he really slipped a cog.”

  “Who was, then?”

  “There never really was an original Koko,” Underhill said. “Not in the way I’ve been thinking of it.” Excited by his thoughts, Underhill swung his legs over the side of the bed and stood up. He was wearing a long nightshirt, and his legs looked like pipe stems with knees. “You get it? It’s like Agatha Christie. Probably everybody who wanted to support Dengler wrote Koko on a card at least once. Koko was everybody. I was Koko, you were Koko, Conor was Koko once. Everybody just imitated the first one.”

  “But then who was the first one?” Poole asked. “Spitalny? That doesn’t seem very likely.”

  “I think it was Beevers,” Underhill said, his eyes glowing. “It was right after the publicity began, remember? The court-martials began to seem inevitable. Beevers was stressed out. He knew nobody would support him, but he also knew that he could claim to share whatever support Dengler had. So he mutilated a dead VC, and wore a word everybody associated with Dengler on a regimental card. And it worked.”

  Someone rapped at the door. “It’s me,” Maggie called. “Aren’t you up yet?”

  Underhill moved on scissoring legs toward the door, and Poole pulled on a bathrobe.

  Maggie came in smiling, dressed in a black skirt and an oversized black sweater. “Have you looked outside yet? It snowed again last night. It looks like heaven out there.”

  Poole stood up and walked past smiling Maggie toward the window. Maggie seemed to be appraising him, which made him uncomfortable. Now Poole felt he could not trust any of his responses to the girl. Underhill began condensing their conversation for her, and Poole pulled the cord to open the curtains.

  Cold bluish light slanted in the window and down on the white street beneath him, pristine with the new snow and nearly unmarked. The snow looked like a good thick linen napkin. On the sidewalk a few deep footsteps showed where one person had mushed to work.

  “So Harry Beevers is really Koko,” Maggie said. “I wonder why I find that so easy to believe?”

  Poole turned away from the window. “Does the word Koko mean anything to you?”

  “Kaka,” Maggie said. “Or coo-coo, meaning crazy. Who knows? Cocoa, as in the warm bedtime drink. But if Victor Spitalny knew that Harry Beevers had been the first to use it wouldn’t he have an above-average interest in Harry?”

  Poole looked at her wonderingly.

  “Isn’t it possible that he might want to eliminate Harry next, or before he retires or gives himself up or whatever he is going to do?”

  In fact, Maggie said, Tina had probably been killed only because he had stayed at home. Tina was killed because he was there. She came to the window and stood beside Michael. “Koko even broke into 56 Grand Street, on the day Tina came uptown to fetch me back from where I stayed when I was not with him.” A flicker of a glance toward Michael, who was frowning out at the dimpled snowscape of Maggie’s heaven. And that, she said, was how Spitalny learned everything he wanted to learn.

  “What was that?” Poole asked.

  “Where everybody lived.”

  Poole still did not get it. Koko learned where everybody lived because Tina Pumo stayed at home?

  It was a night he still liked me, Maggie said—and then told him about Tina leaving the bed and finding that his address book had been stolen.

  A night he still liked her?

  “A few days later, it was all happening again,” she said. “You knew Tina. He was never going to change. It was very sad. I came down to see just if he would talk to me. And that was how I nearly got killed.”

  “How did you escape?” Poole asked.

  “By using a silly old trick.” And would say no more about it. Saved by an old trick, like the heroine of a story.

  “Koko knows how to find Conor, then,” Tim said.

  “Conor’s staying with his lady love,” Poole said. “So he’ll be safe. But Beevers had better watch out for himself.”

  Aren’t you people ever going to get dressed, Maggie wanted to know, all this middle-aged male beauty in disarray is making my stomach rumble. At least I think it’s my stomach. What are we going to do today?

  2

  What they did, once they had breakfasted in the Grill Room, was check out some of Victor Spitalny’s old hangouts before rewarding themselves by visiting M.O. Dengler’s childhood home and telling the Vietnam stories they had already told once, this time accurately. Stories and storytelling too had their gods, and it would be an act of homage to those gods to set the narrative record straight before Dengler’s parents.

  So they had begun with a round of the bars, or taverns, as these bars were known, in which Spitalny had spent his time waiting for his call-up—The Sports Lounge, The Polka Dot, Sam ‘N’ Aggie’s, located within half a mile of one another, two of them a block apart on Mitchell Street and the other, The Polka Dot, five blocks further north, on the edge of the Valley. Poole had agreed to meet Mack Simroe there after work at five-thirty. Debbie Tusa had arranged to meet them for lunch at the Tick Tock restaurant, a block off Mitchell on Psalm Street. In Milwaukee bars opened early and were seldom without customers, but by noon Poole had become discouraged by the reception they had found in them. None of the people in either of the first two taverns had been interested in talking about an army deserter.

  In 1969 army investigators had come to these same bars, looking for hints as to where Victor might be hiding himself, and Poole thought that the army’s men had probably spoken to the same barflies and bartenders that he and Maggie and Tim had met. The taverns would not have changed at all since 1969 except for minor adjustments to the jukeboxes. Nestled in among the hundreds of Elvis Presley songs and hundreds more polkas—Joe Schott and the Hot Schotts?—had been a rare survivor of that era, Barry Sadler’s “The Ballad of the Green Berets.” In these taverns harsh light bounced off the Formica, the bartenders were pasty overweight men with tattoos and pre-modern crewcuts, and yellowbellies who deserted from the armed forces might as well go out and hang themselves from the oak tree in the backyard so as not to
put someone else to the trouble. And you drank Pforzheimer’s—you didn’t mess around with lightweight stuff like Budweiser, Coors, Olympia, Stroh’s, Rolling Rock, Pabst, Schlitz, or Hamm’s. Taped to the mirror in The Sports Lounge were printed signs reading PFORZHEIMER’S—BREAKFAST OF CHAMPIONS and PFORZHEIMER’S—THE NATIONAL DRINK OF THE VALLEY.

  “We don’t export most of it,” said Tattoo and Crewcut, getting yuk-yuk-yuk from his regulars. “We pretty much like to keep it to ourselves.”

  “Well, I can see why,” Poole said, tasting the thin flat yellow stuff. Behind him E.P. groaned about chapels and momma and the difficulties of love.

  “That Spitalny kid wasn’t any kind of a man,” Tattoo and Crewcut declared, “but I never thought he’d turn out as crummy as he did.”

  In Sam ‘N’ Aggie’s the bartender, being Aggie, had neither crewcut nor tattoos, and instead of Elvis, Jim Reeves moaned about chapels and momma and the love that defied the grave, but the content of their visit was otherwise very similar. Pforzheimer’s. Dark looks at Maggie Lah. You’re asking about who is that? Oh, him. More dark looks. His dad’s a regular guy, but the kid sure went wrong, didn’t he? Another glowering glance toward Maggie. Around here, see, we’re real Americans.

  So the three of them marched in silence toward the Tick Tock, each with their own preoccupations.

  When Poole pushed open the door and followed Maggie and Underhill into the small crowded restaurant half a dozen men had turned on the bar stools to gape at Maggie. “Yellow Peril strikes again,” Maggie whispered.

  A thin woman with frosted hair and deep lines in her face was giving the three newcomers a tentative wave from a booth at the side of the restaurant.

  Debbie Tusa recommended the Salisbury steak; she chattered about the weather and how much she had enjoyed New York; she was having a little Seabreeze, that’s vodka, grapefruit juice, and cranberry juice, would they want one? It was really a summer drink, she supposed, but you could drink it all year long. They made good drinks at the Tick Tock, everybody knew that, and was it true they were all from New York, or were some of them really from Washington?

  “Are you nervous about something, Debbie?” Tim asked.

  “Well, the last ones were from Washington.”

  The waitress came in her tight white uniform and checked apron, and everybody ordered Salisbury steak, except for Maggie, who asked for a club sandwich. Debbie drank from her Seabreeze and said to Maggie, “You could have a Cape Codder, that’s vodka and clam juice?”

  “Tonic water,” Maggie said, and the waitress said, “Tonic water? Like tonic?”

  “Like gin and tonic without the gin,” Maggie said.

  “A lot of people are talking about you, you know.” Debbie inserted the tiny straw in her mouth and looked up at them as she sipped. “A lot of people think you people are from the government. And some aren’t sure which government.”

  “We’re private citizens,” Poole said.

  “Well, maybe Vic is doing something bad now, and you’re trying to catch him, like he’s a spy. I think George and Margaret are afraid Vic is gonna come back, and the news is gonna be just terrible, and George will lose his job before he gets his retirement—if Vic turns out to be a spy or anything.”

  “He’s not a spy,” Poole said. “And George’s job would be safe anyway.”

  “That’s what you think. My husband, Nick, he—well, that’s not important. But you don’t know what they do.”

  The waitress eventually set their food down before them, and Poole was immediately sorry that he had not ordered a sandwich.

  “I know Salisbury Steak’s no big deal,” Debbie said, “but it’s better than it looks. And anyhow, you don’t know what a treat it is to eat someone else’s cooking. So even if you’re all secret agents or whatever—thanks!”

  The steak did taste slightly better than it looked.

  “You didn’t know that Vic and Manny Dengler were in the same class at Rufus King?”

  “It was a surprise,” Poole said. “There’s a Dengler listed in the phone book on Muffin Street. Is that his parents?”

  “I think his mom’s still there. His mom was a real quiet lady, I think. She’ll never go anywhere.” A bite of steak, a swallow of the Seabreeze. “Never did. She didn’t even go out when the old man was doing his preaching.”

  “Dengler’s father was a preacher?” Underhill asked. “With a congregation and a church?”

  “ ‘Course not,” she said, with a glance toward Maggie—as if Maggie already knew all about it. “Dengler’s dad was a butcher.” Another glance at Maggie. “Was that sandwich any good?”

  “Yum,” Maggie said. “Mr. Dengler was a butcher-preacher?”

  “He was one of those crazy preachers. He had little services in the butcher shop next to his house sometimes, but lots of times he’d just get out on the street and start yellin’ away. Manny had to go out with him. Could be as cold as this, and they’d be out on the corner with the old man yellin’ about sin and the devil and Manny singin’ and passin’ the hat.”

  “What was his church called?” Maggie asked.

  “The Church of the Messiah.” She smiled. “Didn’t you ever hear Manny sing? He used to sing that—The Messiah. Well, not the whole thing, but his dad used to make him sing things from it.”

  “ ‘All we like sheep,’ ” Maggie said.

  “Yep. See? Everybody thought he was goofy as batshit.” Her eyes flew open. “Excuse me!”

  “I heard him quote The Messiah once,” Poole said. “Victor was there too, and Vic sort of mocked him as soon as he spoke.”

  “That sounds like Vic.”

  “ ‘A man of sorrow and acquainted with grief,’ ” Underhill said. “Then Spitalny said it twice, and said “‘A man of sorrow and acquainted with dickheads.’ ”

  Debbie Tusa silently raised her glass.

  “And Dengler said, ‘Whatever it was, it was a long time ago.’ ”

  “But what was it?,” Poole asked. “A man of sorrow and acquainted with grief?”

  “Well, they had a lot of trouble,” Debbie said. “The Denglers had a lot of trouble.” She looked down at her plate. “I guess I’m done. You ever notice how you never feel like shopping for dinner after you eat a big lunch?”

  “I never feel like shopping for dinner,” Maggie said.

  “Where do you suppose Vic is now? You guys don’t think he’s dead, do you?”

  “Well, we were hoping to find out where he is from you,” Poole said.

  Debbie laughed. “I wish my ex-husband could see me right now. Screw you, Nicky, wherever you are. You deserved what you got when they sent your terrible old man to Waupun. Any of you guys want to change your mind about a drink?”

  None of them did.

  “You want to hear the worst? The worst thing? I said his butcher shop was next to the house on Muffin Street? You want to guess what the name of the butcher shop was?”

  “The Blood of the Lamb Butcher Shop,” Maggie said.

  “Wow,” Debbie said. “So close. Any other tries?”

  “Lamb of God,” Poole said. “The Lamb of God Butcher Shop.”

  “Dengler’s Lamb of God Butcher Shop,” Debbie said. “How did you know?”

  “The Messiah,” Poole said. “ ‘Behold the lamb of God, that taketh away the sins of the world.’ ”

  “ ‘All we like sheep have gone astray,’ ” Maggie said.

  “My husband sure did.” She gave Poole a grim little smile. “I guess old Vic probably did too, didn’t he?”

  Poole asked for the check. Debbie Tusa took a compact out of her bag and inspected herself in its mirror.

  “Did you ever hear Vic or anybody else sing something like rip-a-rip-a-rip-a-lo or pompo, pompo, polo, polo …?”

  Debbie was staring at him over the top of her compact. “Is that the song of the pink elephants? Honestly. I gotta get back home. You guys feel like coming over to my place?”

  Poole said that they had other app
ointments. Debbie struggled into her coat, hugged each of them, and told Maggie that she was so cute, it was no wonder she was lucky too. She waved good-bye from the door of the restaurant.

  “If there’s nothing to do now, I could go back to the hotel and work on some notes,” Underhill said.

  Maggie suggested that they try to call Dengler’s mother.

  3

  “I said we just wanted to talk to her,” Poole said, turning into Muffin Street. It was two shabby blocks long, the Old Log Cabin Tavern at one end, the Up ‘N’ Under at the other. Half of the buildings were small businesses; in half of these the windows had been boarded up and the signs had faded into blurs. A peeling frame building with a small front porch, like the Spitalny house, but listing to one side and so grimy it seemed almost to have been draped in cobwebs, number 53 leaned against a square smaller building with a sheet of plywood where it had once had a window. The Reverend Dengler had located the Lamb of God Butcher Shop two blocks away from the nearest shopping street, and like the TV repair shop two blocks away and Irma’s Dress Shop it had quietly gone out of business.

  “Nice,” Maggie said as she got out of the car. “Very romantic.”

  They had to pick their way through the snow. Muffin Street had been plowed, but few of the sidewalks had been shoveled clean. The steps sagged and complained as they went up onto the porch. The front door opened before Poole could push the bell.

  “Hello, Mrs. Dengler,” Tim said.

  A pale white-haired woman in a blue wool dress was looking out through the crack in the door, squinting because of the cold and the brightness of the fresh snow. Her hair was in tight tiny curls that had been dusted with powder.

  “Mrs. Dengler?” Poole asked.

  She nodded. Her face was square and private, white as a paper cup. The only color was in the almost transparent pale blue of her wide-set eyes, as odd in a human face as the eyes of a dog. They appeared slightly magnified behind a pair of round old-fashioned glasses. “I’m Helga Dengler,” she said in a voice that struggled to be welcoming. For a second, Poole thought her voice was his wife’s. “You’d better get in out of the cold.” She moved no more than two or three inches out of the way and as Poole squeezed past her he saw the white flecks of powder in her hair sift down to the white scalp.