Koko

1

‘Maggie never comes in here, Maggie had enough,’ said Jimmy Lah, answering Harry’s question as he poured a silvery ribbon of vermouth over the ice and liquid already in the glass. He squeezed a paring of lemon rind around the rim of the glass, then slipped it down into the ice cubes.

‘Enough of life, or enough of Tina?’ Beevers asked.

Jimmy Lah placed on the bar a fresh paper napkin with the word Saigon printed in slanting red letters over the silhouette of a man pulling a rickshaw. He set Harry Beevers’ drink on the napkin and with a sideways sweep of his hand gathered up the damp, torn napkin beside it. ‘Tina’s too normal for Maggie.’

The bartender winked at Harry, then stepped backwards. Harry was startled to find himself looking at the spiteful, jealous faces of demons with cat’s whiskers and long faces, taped to the mirror. Until Jimmy Lah moved away, they had been hidden from view. Harry Beevers felt a surprising familiarity with these demons. He knew that he had seen spiteful faces like these somewhere in I Corps, but could not remember where.

It was four o’clock and Harry was killing time before calling his ex-wife. Jimmy Lah was pouring some soapy blender concoction for the bar’s only customer besides himself, a fruitcake with a roosterish yellow Mohawk and oversized pink eyeglasses.

Harry swiveled around on his stool to face the large rectangular dining room of Pumo’s restaurant. Before him were knobby bamboo chairs at glass-topped bamboo tables. Ceiling fans with blades like polished brown oars revolved slowly overhead. The white walls had been painted with murals of giant fronds and palm leaves. The place looked as if Sidney Greenstreet would walk in at any moment.

Behind a counter at the far end of the restaurant a door swung open, revealing two Vietnamese men in white aprons chopping vegetables. Behind them pots bubbled on a gas range. Harry caught a glimpse, unexpected as a mirage, of a fluttering translucent curtain behind the range. He leaned forward to get a better look and felt a familiar inward flinch as he saw Vinh, Pumo’s head chef, darting toward the open door. Vinh was from An Lat, an I Corps village only a few klicks from Ia Thuc.

Then Harry saw who had opened the door.

Just beneath Harry’s normal field of vision, a small, smiling Vietnamese girl was moving cautiously but swiftly into the restaurant. She had nearly reached the counter when Vinh managed to grab her shoulder. The child’s mouth became an astonished O, and Vinh hauled her back into the kitchen. The doors swung shut on a burst of Vietnamese.

In an eerily perfect auditory hallucination, Harry Beevers could hear M.O. Dengler panting just behind his right shoulder, along with the sounds of distant fires and faraway screams. Pale faces shone dimly at the center of a vast darkness. He remembered where he had seen the demons’ faces before – on small black-haired women, rushing up with their fists raised. You numbah ten! You numbah ten!

An abyss had just yawned before Harry Beevers. For a moment he felt the terror of not existing, a sickening feeling that he had never existed in the way simpler, healthier people existed.

He heard himself asking what a kid was doing in the kitchen.

Jimmy stepped nearer. ‘That’s Vinh’s little girl, Helen. Both of them temporarily staying here. Helen was probably looking for Maggie – they’re old buddies.’

‘Tina must have a lot on his mind,’ Harry said, beginning to feel more in control of himself.

‘You see the Village Voice?’

Harry shook his head. He realized that he had unconsciously pushed his hands into his pockets to hide their shaking. Jimmy searched around behind the bar until he found the paper in a stack of menus beside the cash register and slid it across the bar with the back page up. VOICE BULLETIN BOARD, read the headline above three dense columns of personals in varying type sizes. Harry saw that two of the ads had been circled.

The first message read: Foodcat. Missing damned you. Will be Mike Todd Room 10 Wed. The Wanderer. The second message was in caps. JUST DECIDED UNABLE TO DECIDE. MAY BE MIKE TODD, MAYBE NOT. LA-LA.

‘See what I mean?’ Jimmy asked. He began grabbing glasses from below the bar and vigorously swirling them around in a sink.

‘Your sister placed both these ads?’

‘Sure,’ Jimmy said. ‘Whole family’s crazy.’

‘I feel sorry for Tina.’

Jimmy grinned, then looked up from the sink. ‘How’s the doctor these days? Any change?’

‘You know him,’ Harry said. ‘After his son died, he stopped being fun to hang out with. Totalemente.’

After a second, Jimmy asked. ‘He going on your hunting trip?’

‘I wish you’d call it a mission,’ Harry snapped. ‘Listen, isn’t Tina ever going to come up for air?’

‘Maybe later,’ Jimmy said, looking away.

Pumo had two Vietnamese living in his restaurant, he was tearing his kitchen apart to kill a few bugs, and he was acting like a teenager over Maggie Lah. ‘La-La,’ for sure. Beans Beevers’ old comrade had become just another…for a second he searched for Dengler’s word, then had it: toon.

‘Tell him he ought to show up at the Mike Todd Room with a fucking knife in his belt.’

‘Maggie will get a big kick out of that.’

Harry looked at his watch.

‘You planning to get to Taipei on this mission, Harry?’ asked Jimmy, showing a trace of real interest for the first time.

Beevers felt a premonitory tingle. ‘Aren’t you and Maggie from Taipei?’ A nerve jumped in his temple.

Then he got it! Who was to say that Tim Underhill still lived in Singapore? Harry had been to Taipei on his R & R, and he could easily see Tim Underhill choosing to live in the raunchy amalgam of Chinatown and Dodge City he remembered. He saw that Divine Justice, mistakenly thought to be dozing, had of course been wide awake all along. It was all ordained, everything had been thought out beforehand. God had planned it all.

Harry settled back down on his bar stool, ordered another martini, and put off his confrontation with his ex-wife for another twenty minutes while he listened to Jimmy Lah describe the seamier aspects of night life in the capital city of Taiwan.

Jimmy set a steaming cup of coffee before him. Harry folded the napkin into the inside pocket of his suit and glanced up at the angry demons. He saw a child rushing toward him with an upraised knife, and his heart speeded up. He smiled and scalded his tongue with hot coffee.

2

A short time later Harry stood at the pay telephone next to the men’s room in a narrow downstairs corridor. He first tried finding his ex-wife at the Maria Farr Gallery, which was on the ground floor of a former warehouse on Spring Street in SoHo. Pat Caldwell Beevers had gone to private school with Maria Farr, and when the gallery had seemed to be failing, took it on as one of her pet private charities. (In the early days of his wife’s involvement with the art gallery, Harry had endured dinner parties with artists whose work consisted of rusting pipes strewn randomly across the floor, of a row of neat aluminum slabs stood on end, of pink wartencrusted columns that reminded Harry of giant erections. He still could not believe that the perpetrators of these adolescent japes earned real money.)

Maria Farr herself answered the telephone. This was a bad sign.

He said, ‘Maria, how nice to hear your voice again. It’s me.’ In fact, the sound of her voice, all the consonants hard as pebbles, reminded Harry of how much he disliked her.

‘I have nothing to say to you, Harry,’ Maria said.

‘I’m sure that’s a blessing to both of us,’ Harry said. ‘Is Pat still in the gallery?’

‘I wouldn’t tell you if she were.’ Maria hung up.

Another call, to Information, got him the number of Rilke Street, the literary magazine that was Pat’s other ongoing charity. Its editorial offices were actually the Duane Street loft of William Tharpe, the magazine’s editor. Because Harry had spent fewer evenings with Tharpe and his impoverished contributors than with Maria Farr and her artists, Tharpe had always taken Harry more or less at face value.

‘Rilke Street, William Tharpe speaking.’

‘Billy, my boy, how do you do? This is Harry Beevers, your best flunky’s best ex-husband. I was hoping to find her there.’

‘Harry!’ said Tharpe. ‘You’re in luck. Pat and I are pasting up issue thirty-five right this minute. Going to be a beautiful number. Are you coming down this way?’

‘If invited,’ he said. ‘Do you think I might speak to the dear Patricia?’

In a moment Harry’s ex-wife had taken the telephone. ‘How nice of you to call, Harry. I was just thinking about you. Are you getting on all right?’

So she knew that Charles had sacked him.