Koko

“What was it like?”

“Well, it was kinda strange. Like nonsense words—like a foreign language. But you could tell it wasn’t any real language. It was like … ‘pompo-po, pompo-po, polo, polo, pompo-po,’ something like that.”

The goosebumps were back on Poole’s arms. “Yes,” he said. “Thank you.”

“Is that all you wanted?”

“ ‘Pompo-po, pompo-po …’ or like ‘rip-a-rip-a-rip-a-lo’?”

“Pretty close,” the girl said.

PART

SEVEN

THE

KILLING

BOX

1

“I don’t know if there’s any name for those experiences,” Underhill said. He sat near the window, Poole on the aisle, Maggie between them. They were somewhere in the air over Pennsylvania, or Ohio, or Michigan. “You could call them peak experiences, but that’s a term that covers a lot of ground. Or you might call it ecstasy, since that’s what it sounds like. You might even call it an Emersonian moment. You know Emerson’s essay, ‘Nature’? He talks about becoming a transparent eyeball—‘I am nothing; I see all; the currents of Universal Being circulate through me.’ ”

“Sounds like just another way to face the elephant,” Maggie said in her precise unsentimental voice. Both Poole and Underhill laughed. “You should not make so much of it. When you saw your son, you should have expected something like this … experience to follow.”

“I didn’t see my son,” Poole began, and then his objections dried to powder in his mouth. He had not been certain that he was going to tell Underhill and Maggie about the “god,” and his uncertainty had continued even while he described what he had seen, but Maggie’s short sentence rang within him.

“But you did,” Maggie said. “You saw what he would be like as a man. You saw the real Robbie.” She looked at him very quizzically. “That’s why you loved the figure you saw.”

“Are you for hire?” Underhill asked.

“How much money you got?” Maggie asked in the same disinterested voice. “Going to cost you plenty, if you want me to keep saying the obvious.”

“I liked the theory that it was an angel.”

“I did too,” Maggie said. “Very possible.”

They rode on for a time in silence. Michael knew that Robbie could not have grown into the man he had seen: but he thought that he had been given a vision of a perfect Robbie, one in whom all his best instincts had flowered. It would have been some quality beyond happiness, something like rapture, to have fathered the man he had seen beside his son’s grave. In a sense he had fathered that man, exactly. No one else had. He had not hallucinated or imagined the man so much as he had authored him.

Poole felt as though with a few simple words Maggie Lah had restored his son to him. For as long as he lived, that boy was his, that man was his boy. His mourning was really over.

When at last he could speak again, Poole asked Tim if he had done any research for The Divided Man. “I mean, did you consult any guidebooks, anything like that?”

“I don’t think there are any guidebooks to Milwaukee,” Underhill said.

Maggie permitted herself an amused little noise that sounded very like a snicker.

“Most American cities don’t have guidebooks,” Underhill said. “I mainly remembered what M.O. Dengler used to say about it. After that I turned my imagination loose on it, and I guess it did a reasonable job.”

“In other words,” Michael said, “you could say that you authored the city.”

“I authored it,” Underhill agreed, looking faintly puzzled.

Maggie Lah turned a gleaming eye upon Poole. She astounded him by lightly patting his knee, as if in congratulation or commendation.

“Am I missing something?” Underhill asked.

“You’re doing pretty well so far,” Maggie said.

“Well, I have a thought about Victor Spitalny and his parents,” Tim said, trying to cross his legs and learning that he did not have enough room. “Imagine how most parents would feel if their child disappeared. Don’t you think that they would keep telling themselves that the child was still alive, no matter how long the disappearance lasted? I suppose that Spitalny’s parents are a little different from most. Remember—they made their kid feel like an adopted orphan, if my imagination is any good. They turned their kid into the Victor Spitalny we knew, and he later turned himself into Koko. So I’ll bet that his mother says she knows he’s dead. She already knows he killed Dengler. But I bet she knows that he’s done other killings.”

“So what will she think about us and what we’re doing?”

“She might just think we’re fools and humor us along with cups of tea. Or she might lose her temper and throw us out.”

“Then why are we on this airplane?”

“Because she might be an honest lady who had a cuckoo for a son. There are lots of different kinds of misfortune, and her son might have been one of the worst. In which case she’ll share any information she has.”

Underhill saw the expression on Michael’s face and added that the only thing he really knew about Milwaukee was that it was going to be about thirty degrees colder than New York.

“I think I can see why they don’t have many tourists,” Maggie said.

2

At one o’clock in the afternoon, Michael Poole stood at the window of his room in the Pforzheimer Hotel, looking down at what would have been a four-lane street if parallel drifts of snow nearly the height of the parking meters had not claimed half of the first lane on either side. Here and there cars had been submerged beneath the parallel ranges of old snow, and channels like mountain passes had been cut between the cars to provide passage to the sidewalk. On the cleared portion of the road, intermittent cars, most of them crusted with frozen khaki- colored slush, streamed past in single file. The green of the traffic light on Wisconsin Avenue, at the front of the hotel and at the very edge of Michael’s vision, gleamed out in the oddly dusky air as if through twilight. The temperature was zero degrees Fahrenheit. It was like being in the middle of Moscow. A few men and women