Koko

‘It’s almost on her pussy!’ Conor said. ‘Is any of it in her hair? Were you there when the guy did it? Did she cry or anything?’

‘You bet I was there. I wanted to make sure he didn’t let his attention wander.’ Pumo took a sip of his drink. ‘Maggie didn’t even blink.’

‘How big is it?’ Conor asked. ‘About half dollar size?’

‘If you’re so curious, ask her to show it to you.’

‘Oh, sure,’ Conor said. ‘I can really see me doing that.’

Then Conor overheard part of the conversation Mike Poole was having with Beans Beevers – something about Ia Thuc and a grunt Poole had talked to during the parade.

Beevers asked, ‘He was an ex-combat soldier?’

‘Looked like he got out of the field about a week ago,’ Mike said, giving his little smile.

‘This vet really remembered all about me, and he said I should get a Medal of Honor?’

‘He said they should have given you a Medal of Honor for what you did, and then taken it away again for shooting off your mouth in front of journalists.’

This was the first time Conor had ever heard Beevers confronted with the opinion, once widely held, that he had been a dope to brag about Ia Thuc to the press. Of course Beevers acted as though he were hearing this opinion for the first time.

‘Ridiculous,’ Beevers said. ‘I can just about go along with him on the Congressional medal idea, but not on that. I’m proud of everything I did there, and I hope all of you are too. If it was up to me, we’d all have Congressional medals.’ He looked down at the front of his shirt, smoothed it, then lifted his chin – stuck it out. ‘But people know we did the right thing. That’s as good as a medal. People agree with the decision of the court-martial, even if they forgot it ever happened.’

Conor wondered how Beans could say these things. He didn’t see how people could know they’d done the right thing at Ia Thuc when even the men who had been there didn’t know exactly what had happened.

‘You’d be surprised how many guys I meet, I’m talking about other lawyers, judges too, who know my name because of that action,’ Beevers said. ‘To tell you the truth, being a sort of a minor league hero has helped me out professionally more than once.’ Beans looked around at all of them with a sweet candor that made Conor want to puke. ‘I’m not ashamed of anything I did in Nam. You have to turn what happens to you into a plus.’

Michael Poole laughed. ‘Spoken from the heart, Harry.’

‘This is important,’ Beevers insisted. For a second he looked both pained and puzzled. ‘I have the impression that you three guys are accusing me of something.’

‘I didn’t accuse you of anything, Harry,’ Poole said.

‘So didn’t I,’ said Conor in exasperation. He pointed at Tina Pumo. ‘So didn’t he!’

‘We were with each other every step of the way,’ Harry said, and it took Conor a moment to figure out that he had gone back to talking about Ia Thuc. ‘We always helped each other out. We were a team, all of us, Spitalny included.’

Conor could restrain himself no longer. ‘I wish that asshole would have got killed there,’ he broke in. ‘I never met anybody as mean as him. Spitalny didn’t like anybody, man. Right? And he claimed he got stung by wasps? In that cave? I don’t think there are any wasps in Nam, man. I saw bugs the size of dogs there, man, but I never saw any wasps.’

Tina interrupted him with a loud groan. ‘Don’t talk to me about wasps. Don’t talk to me about bugs – any kind of bugs!’

‘Is this related to the trouble you’re having?’ Mike asked.

‘The Department of Health has strong feelings on the subject of six-legged creatures,’ Pumo said. ‘I don’t even want to discuss it.’

‘Let’s get back to the subject, if you don’t mind,’ Beevers said, giving Poole a mysteriously loaded glance.

What the hell is the subject? Conor wondered.

Pumo said, ‘How about we have another little blast up here and then go down, get something to eat, see some of the entertainment. Jimmy Stewart’s supposed to be here. I always liked Jimmy Stewart.’

Beevers said, ‘Mike, are you the only one who knows what I was leading up to? Remind them why we’re here. Help me out.’

‘Lieutenant Beevers thinks it’s time to talk about Koko,’ Poole said.

4 The Answering Machine (#ulink_e9bd60e1-75e2-5c9e-9127-1ec2f82b2a02)

1

‘Hand me my briefcase, Tina. It’s somewhere back there against the wall.’ Beevers leaned forward from the side of the bed and extended his arm. Tina groped under the table for the case. ‘Take all day, there’s no rush.’

‘You pushed your chair over it when you got up,’ Pumo said, now invisible beneath the table. He surfaced with the briefcase in both hands, and held it out.

Beevers put the case on his lap and snapped it open.

Poole leaned over and looked in at a stack of reprints of a familiar page from Stars and Stripes. Stapled to it were copies of other newspaper articles. Beevers took out the stack of papers and said, ‘There’s one for each of you. Michael is familiar with some of this material already, but I thought we should all have copies of everything. That way everybody’ll know exactly what we’re talking about.’ He handed the first sheaf of stapled papers to Conor. ‘Settle down and pay attention to this.’

‘Sieg Heil,’ Conor said, and took the chair beside Michael Poole.

Beevers handed stapled pages to Poole and Pumo, placed the final set beside him on the bed, closed his case and set it on the floor.

Pumo said, ‘Take all day, there’s no rush.’

‘Touchy, touchy.’ Beevers put his papers on his lap, picked them up with both hands, squinted at them. He set them back in his lap and reached over to his suit jacket to remove his glasses case from the chest pocket. From the case he took a pair of oversized glasses with thin, oval tortoise-shell frames. Beevers put the empty case on top of his suit jacket, then put the glasses on his nose. Again he inspected the papers.

Poole wondered how often during the day Beevers went through this little charade of lawyerly behavior.

Beevers looked up from his papers. Bow tie, suspenders, big glasses. ‘First of all, mes amis, I want to say that we’ve all had some fun, and we’ll have a lot more before we leave, but’ – a weighty glance at Conor – ‘we’re in this room together because we shared some important experiences. And…we survived these experiences because we could depend on each other.’

Beevers glanced down at the papers in his lap, and Pumo said, ‘Get to the point, Harry.’

‘If you don’t understand how much teamwork is the point, you’re missing everything,’ Beevers said. He looked up again. ‘Please read the articles. There are three of them, one from Stars and Stripes, one from the Straits Times of Singapore, and the third from the Bangkok Post. My brother George, who is a career soldier, knew a little bit about the Koko incidents, and when the name caught his eye in the Stars and Stripes piece, he sent it to me. Then he asked my other, older brother, Sonny – he’s a career sergeant too, over in Manila – to check out all the Asian papers he could locate. George did the same on Okinawa – together they could look at nearly all the English language papers published in the Far East.’

‘You have two brothers who’re lifer sergeants?’ Conor asked. Sonny and George, lifers in Manila and Okinawa? From a Mount Avenue family?

Beevers looked at him impatiently. ‘Eventually these other two pieces turned up in Singapore and Bangkok papers, and that’s it. I did some research on my own, but read this stuff first. As you’ll see, our boy’s been busy.’

Michael Poole took a sip of his drink and scanned the topmost article. On January 28, 1981, the corpse of a fortytwo-year-old English tourist in Singapore, a free-lance writer named Clive McKenna, had been found, his eyes and ears bloodily removed, by a gardener in an overgrown section of the grounds of the Goodwood Park Hotel. A playing card with the word Koko written on its face had been placed in Mr McKenna’s mouth. On February 5, 1982, an appraiser had entered a supposedly empty bungalow just off Orchard Road in the same city to discover lying face-up and side by side on the living room floor the bodies of Mr William Martinson of St Louis, a sixty-one-year-old executive of a heavy equipment company active in Asia, and Mrs Barbara Martinson, fifty-five, also of St Louis, who had been accompanying her husband on a business trip. Mr Martinson lacked his eyes and ears; in his mouth was a playing card with the word Koko scrawled across its face.

The Straits Times piece, dated three days later, added the information that while the bodies of the Martinsons had been discovered less than forty-eight hours after their deaths, Clive McKenna’s body had gone undiscovered for perhaps as long as five days. Roughly ten days separated the two sets of murders. The Singapore police had many leads, and an arrest was considered imminent.

The clipping from the Bangkok Post, dated July 7, 1982, was considerably more emotional than the others. FRENCH WRITERS SLAIN, the headline read. Outrage and dismay were shared by all decent citizens. The provinces of both tourism and literature had been savaged. Unwelcome events of a violent nature were particularly threatening to the hotel industry. The shock to morality – therefore to trade – had potential consequences far beyond the hotel industry, affecting taxicabs, hire-car firms, restaurants, jewelers, massage parlors, museums and temples, tattooists, airport staff and baggage handlers, etc. That the crime was almost certainly the work of undesirable aliens, committed by as well as upon foreigners, had to be not only remembered but reiterated. Police of all districts were engaged in a commendable effort of mutual cooperation designed to root out the whereabouts of the assassins within days. Political hostility to Thailand could not be discounted.

Cocooned within this oddly formal hysteria was the information that Marc Guibert, 48, and Yves Danton, 49, both journalists living in Paris, had been found in their suite at the Sheraton Bangkok by a maid on her normal morning cleaning detail. They were tied to chairs with their throats cut and their eyes and ears removed. The two men had arrived in Thailand the previous afternoon and were not known to have received any messages or guests. Cards from an ordinary deck of Malaysian playing cards, the word, or name, Koko printed by hand on each, had been inserted into the dead men’s mouths.

Tina and Conor continued to read, Tina with an expression of feigned detachment, Conor in deep concentration. Harry Beevers sat upright, tapping a pencil against his front teeth, his eyes out of focus.

Printed by hand. Michael saw exactly how: the letters carved in so deeply you could read the raised grooves on the back of the card. Poole could remember the first time he had seen one of the cards protruding from the mouth of a tiny dead man in black pajamas – point for our side, he’d thought, okay.