Koko

A cab took Koko down leafy Grove Road to Orchard Road and on through clean, orderly Singapore to an empty building on a circular street off Bahru Road, and on this journey he imagined that he stood in an open car going down Fifth Avenue. Ticker tape and confetti rained down upon him and all the other lords of the earth, cheers exploded from the crowds packing the sidewalks.

Beevers and Poole and Pumo and Underhill and Tattoo Tiano and Peters and sweet Spanky B, and everybody else, all the lords of the earth, who may abide the day of their coming? For behold, darkness shall cover the earth. And the lawyer boy, Ted Bundy, and Juan Corona who labored in fields, and he who dressed in Chicago as a clown, John Wayne Gacy, and Son of Sam, and Wayne Williams out of Atlanta, and the Zebra Killer, and they who left their victims on hillsides, and the little guy in the movie Ten Rillington Place, and Lucas, who was probably the greatest of them all. The warriors of heaven, having their day. Marching along with all those never to be caught, all those showing presentable faces to the world, living modestly, moving from town to town, paying their bills, all these deep embodied secrets.

The refiner’s fire.

Koko crawled in through his basement window and saw his father seated impatient and stormy on a packing crate. Goddamned idiot, his father said. You took too much, think they’ll ever give someone like you a parade? We waste no part of the animal.

He spread the money out on the gritty floor, and that did it, the old man smiled and said, There is no substitute for good butter, and Koko closed his eyes and saw a row of elephants trudging past, nodding with grave approval.

On his unrolled sleeping bag he placed Roberto Ortiz’s passports and spread out the five Rearing Elephant cards so he could read the names. Then he rooted in a box of papers and found the copy of the American magazine, New York, which he had picked up in a hotel lobby two days after the hostage parade. Beneath the title, letters of fire spelled out: TEN HOT NEW PLACES.

Ia Thuc, Hue, Da Nang, these were hot places. And Saigon. Here is a hot new place, here is Saigon. The magazine fell open automatically to the picture and the paragraphs about the hot new place. (The Mayor ate there.)

Koko lay sprawled on the floor in his new suit and looked as deeply as he could into the picture of the hot new place. Deep green fronds waved across the white walls. Vietnamese waiters in white shirts whipped between crowded tables, going so fast they were only blurs of light. Koko could hear loud voices, knives and forks clanking against china. Corks popped. In the picture’s foreground, Tina Pumo leaned against his bar and grimaced – Pumo the Puma leaned right out of the frame of the picture and spoke to Koko in a voice that stood out against the clamor of his restaurant the way a saxophone solo stands out against the sound of a big band.

Pumo said: ‘Don’t judge me, Koko.’ Pumo looked shitscared.

This was how they talked when they knew they stood before eternity’s door.

‘I understand, Tina,’ Koko said to the little anxious man in the picture.

The article said that Saigon served some of the most varied and authentic Vietnamese food in New York. The clientele was young, hip, and noisy. The duck was ‘heaven-sent’ and every soup was ‘divine’.

‘Just tell me this, Tina,’ Koko said. ‘What is this shit about “divine”? You think soup can be divine?’

Tina blotted his brow with a crisp white hankerchief and turned back into a picture.

And there it was, the address and the telephone number, in the soft cool whisper of italics.

A man sat down beside Koko in the fourth row of the first-class compartment, glanced sideways, and then buckled himself into his seat. Koko closed his eyes and snow fell from a deep cold heaven onto a layer of ice hundreds of feet deep. Far off, dim in the snowy air, ranged the broken teeth of glaciers. God hovered invisibly over the frozen landscape, panting with impatient rage.

You know what you know. Forty, forty-one years old. Thick fluffy richboy-blond hair, and thin brown glasses, heavy face. Heavy butcher’s hands holding a day-old copy of the New York Times. Six-hundred-dollar suit.

The plane taxied down the runway and lifted itself smoothly into the air, the envious mouths and fingers fell away, and the jet’s nose pointed west, toward San Francisco. The man beside Koko is a rich businessman with butcher’s hands.

A black-naped tern flies across the face of the Singapore one-dollar note. A black band like a burglar’s mask covers its eyes, and behind it hovers a spinning chaos of intertwined circles twisting together like the strands of a cyclone. So the bird agitates its wings in terror, and darkness overtakes the land.

Mr Lucas? Mr Bundy?

Banking, the man says. Investment banking. We do a lot of work in Singapore.

Me too.

Hell of a nice place, Singapore. And if you’re in the money business, it’s hot, and I mean hot.

One of the hot new places.

‘Bobby,’ the stewardess asks. ‘what would you like to drink?’

Vodka, ice-cold.

‘Mr Dickerson?’

Mr Dickerson will have a Miller High Life.

In Nam we used to say: Vodka martini on the rocks, hold the vermouth, hold the olive, hold the rocks.

Oh, you were never in Nam?

Sounds funny, but you missed a real experience. Not that I’d go back, Christ no. You were probably on the other side, weren’t you? No offense, we’re all on the same side now, God works in funny ways. But I did all my demonstrating with an M-16, hah hah.

Bobby Ortiz is the name. I’m in the travel industry.

Bill? Pleased to meet you, Bill. Yes, it’s a long flight, might as well be friends.

Sure, I’ll have another vodka, and give another beer to my old pal Bill here.

Ah, I was in I Corps, near the DMZ, up around Hue.

You want to see a trick I learned in Nam? Good – I’ll save it, though, it’ll be better later, you’ll enjoy it, I’ll do it later.

Bobby and Bill Dickerson ate their meals in companionable silence. Clocks spun in no-time.

‘You ever gamble?’ Koko asked.

Dickerson glanced at him, his fork halfway to his mouth. ‘Now and then. Only a little.’

‘Interested in a little wager?’

‘Depends on the wager.’ Dickerson popped the forkful of chicken into his mouth.

‘Oh, you won’t want to do it. It’s too strange. Let’s forget it.’

‘Come on,’ Dickerson said. ‘You brought this up, don’t chicken out now.’

Oh, Koko liked Billy Dickerson. Nice blue linen suit, nice thin glasses, nice big Rolex. Billy Dickerson played racquet-ball, Billy Dickerson wore a sweatband across his forehead and had a hell of a good backhand, real aggressor.

‘Well, I guess being on a plane reminded me of this. It’s something we used to do in Nam.’

Definite look of interest on good old Billy’s part.

‘When we’d come into an LZ.’

‘Landing Zone?’

‘You got it. LZ’s were all different, see? Some were popping, and some were like dropping into the middle of a church picnic in Nebraska. So we’d make the Fatality Wager.’

‘Like you’d bet on how many people would get killed? Buy the farm, like you guys used to say?’