Koko

spiderweb gleaming up at him above the pulpy leaves and twigs on the floor of the forest. If he had been running normally he would never have seen it. Instincts he did not know he still had almost literally kicked into place, and as his right ankle moved forward to trip the wire, Poole sprang forward, lifting both feet off the ground, and sailed over the wire without touching it. For a moment that lasted long enough for him to feel proud of himself his whole body stretched out in the air parallel to the ground; then he thudded into the ground with a jolt that rattled all his bones. He pulled up his knees and kneaded his shoulder, greasy with leaf mold.

Poole got up, rubbing his shoulder, and trotted a few steps deeper into the woods. Spitalny appeared briefly in a vertical mesh of birch trunks, then vanished again. Michael knew he could not catch him. By the time he got halfway down into the ravine, Spitalny could be in a car and a couple of miles south.

Michael took another step forward, scanning the ground for indications of work. Tripwire usually meant mines or homemade explosives. Even a madman like Victor Spitalny could probably buy explosives in New York, once he had learned where to look. He wouldn’t be able to find any bouncing bettys or cluster bombs any more than he could find a LAW anti-tank rocket, but probably all sorts of automatic and semi-automatic weapons, plastic explosives, and grenades were for sale in underground weapons markets. Maybe crates of old M-14 plastic mines went up on the block.

Poole moved cautiously through the leaf mold, placing feet carefully, examining every inch of the ground before him. He moved forward another step, then another, feeling the earth yield beneath the soles of his shoes.

The flat, cynical laughter of a raven jeered at him from overhead. Poole looked up into the thick dark weave of branches. Sunlight penetrated about halfway down, then split and fractured to pick out a squirrel’s nest and a huge hairy black bole like a tumor. He continued to walk slowly toward the ravine. Wherever they were, Koko would rig his booby traps well, and they would stay in place, still armed, until they were tripped. Spitalny had been soldier enough for that. Poole wanted to find what he had set up and disarm it before some child went running through the woods.

Some little boy.

Poole shook his head, then made himself move forward, one step at a time, mapping every inch of territory in his head. Ahead of him something gleamed on the trunk of a slender maple: it caught his eye, and he heard voices calling out. He turned to see five men—the gravediggers, the undertaker and his assistant, and one other man in a grey coat and dark tie—standing in the sunlight at the edge of the woods on the dead grass of the unused section of the cemetery.

“Keep out!” he yelled, and motioned them back.

The man in the grey coat raised his hands to his mouth, and Poole heard him shout something that included the word trespassing.

“…  police!” the man yelled.

Poole waved, and looked ahead of him again. He had nearly reached the ravine. If Spitalny had planted more booby traps, he thought he would have seen them.

“I’m coming,” he shouted back to the men, who huddled closer to one another, having probably heard him no better than he had heard them. The man in the grey coat was pointing at Poole, yelling again.

“…  out now … police …”

“Don’t move!” Poole shouted. “I’ll be out in a second. Stay there!” He waved and tried to find what he had seen a moment before. It had been something incongruous: a flash of color? He scanned a rank of trees and saw nothing but a squirrel circling around the trunk of an oak. Beyond the squirrel’s head, grey brush reared up in the ravine. Spitalny had cut through that impenetrable-looking stuff in something like forty seconds—he was a better jungle fighter now than he had been in Vietnam. Michael shifted his eyes and saw it at last, a white rectangle on a maple’s thin dark trunk.

For a moment it looked like a scrap of white fur pinned to the bark; then he saw that what was pinned to the tree was a playing card.

He gave a flapping wave of his hand to the men at the edge of the woods and yelled, “Don’t come in! Danger!”

He hoped they heard him. “Danger!” he yelled one more time, waving his arms over his head in and out of an X, and walked backwards, still semaphoring, until he sensed he was near the maple tree with the playing card attached to its trunk.

The tree stood perhaps a yard behind him, slightly off to his right.

Warning signals went off all through his body. If Koko had rigged another booby trap, this was where it would be. He gave the men another semaphore and carefully inspected the ground around his feet. This close to the ravine, the earth seemed softer and damper.

“Come out … out …” came to him.

“Wait!” Poole bawled, inspecting the earth that lay between his feet and the maple tree. No silver wires glinted in the grey-green leaf mulch, no indentations or depressions cut through the patchwork surface of the ground. Grey leaves lay on top of green leaves on top of red leaves on top of silver leaves. Each leaf fitted smoothly into its part of the jigsaw puzzle, all the colors exposed to the sun and rain were uniformly weathered, there were no sharp lines of demarcation where a busy hand slid some long-hidden maple leaf out from under the others as it worked away, concealing the marks of its passage the way a broom would sweep away footprints in sand … the way, it occurred to him, some unseen hand had concealed the work done by Harry Beevers in that stone egg underneath the earth. Some little boy.

Poole stepped onto the multi-colored patchwork of moidering leaves. His foot came down onto the smooth mulch of leaves he had so carefully inspected, and—

—kept on going, breaking through the constructed surface and kept going down, past the ankle past the knee in a flash, and then his whole body had become unbalanced and he was helplessly falling forward into the deep hole uncovered by the shredding leaves, he threw his arms out too late and saw before him the long spears pointing up at his chest, his neck, his groin—

—and the ground held his weight, yielding only that springy half-inch.

“…  AN ORDER!” a man yelled.

Poole saw nothing on the card at first. It was an Ace of Hearts. Then he saw faint slanting pencil lines on the white of the card between the heart in its center and the top left center.

He moved a step forward and put his face right up before the card. The faint markings resolved into words. Poole read the words, then breathed in and read them again. He exhaled. Very delicately he raised his hand to the card and touched its smooth surface. It had been affixed to the tree with a tiny pin like those that come in a new shirt. Michael tugged the pin out of the tree as he held the edges of the card. He looked at the words on the card again, then dropped the pin in his pocket. He turned the card over. On its back was the image in black and white of a plump bare-chested little boy with round eyes and curly hair holding out a basket overflowing with lavish orchids.

4

This was the message left for him on an Orchid Boy playing card:

I HAVE NO NAME I AM ESTERHAZ

DYING IS BEFORE LIFE ETERNAL

BACKWARDS AND FORWARDS

5

Holding the card by its edges, Michael slipped it into his coat pocket and began walking out of the woods. He yelled to the men that he was coming out, but the man in the grey coat had become very excited. As Poole moved toward him, still checking the ground for tripwires and signs of disturbance, the cemetery official gripped the sleeve of the taller of his two employees and beat the air with his other arm. Poole could hear only muffled waves of sound. He waved to show that he was coming out, there was nothing to worry about, he was unarmed and a good citizen, nothing to get excited about. The man in the grey suit was paying no attention to him now. A younger man in a dark coat with square padded shoulders whom Poole recognized as the undertaker’s assistant moved up beside his boss, who appeared uneasy and even slightly embarrassed by the other man’s agitation. Michael took another step forward, realizing that he had to give the playing card in his pocket to the police, and was suddenly stopped