Koko

“He is in your family?”

“Oh, my goodness,” the girl said. “Vic was my cousin. You mean he’s still alive? You don’t know what this does to me.”

“There is a chance he’s still alive. Can you give me his parents’ telephone number? Are they both still living?”

“If you call it living. I don’t have their number right here, but you can find it in the book. George and Margaret, Uncle George and Aunt Margaret. Look, didn’t something funny happen to Vic? I thought he was in a hospital overseas, I guess I thought he must have died there.”

Poole scanned down the listings until he found Spitalny, George, 6835 S. Winnebago St., and circled it with his pen.

“It’s your impression he was hospitalized?”

“Well, I thought Uncle George … it was a long time ago.”

“You haven’t heard anything from him since the war?”

“Well, no. Even if he was alive, he’d hardly write to me, would he? We weren’t exactly buddies. Who did you say you were again?”

Michael repeated his name and that he and Victor were in the same unit in Vietnam. The girl said that her name was Evvie.

“I’m here with some friends from New York, Evvie, and we wanted to learn if anyone in his family had heard from Victor recently.”

“Not that I know about.”

“Can you tell me the names of any of your cousin’s friends? Names of girls he went out with? Or any of the places he used to go?”

“Gee, I don’t know,” said Evvie. “Vic was the sort of a guy who was kind of a loner. He did go to Rufus King, I know that. And for a while he went out with a girl named Debbie. I met her once, when I was a little kid. Debbie Maczik. She was so cute, I thought. And I think he used to go to a place called The Polka Dot. But mainly he used to work on his car, stuff like that, you know?”

“Can you remember the names of his friends?”

“One guy was named Bill, one guy was named Mack—that’s all I ever knew. I was only ten when Vic got drafted. My aunt and uncle will know all that stuff.”

“Would your uncle be home now?”

“You wanna call him? Probably not, he’s probably at work. I ought to be at work, I’m a secretary at the gas company, but I just couldn’t face it today, so I decided to stay home and watch the soap operas. Aunt Margaret ought to be home, though. She never goes anywhere.” Evvie Spitalny paused. “I guess I don’t have to tell you, this feels real strange. Talking about my cousin Vic. It’s funny. It’s like—you think you forgot all about a certain person, you know, and then bang, you get reminded all over again. My cousin wasn’t a real nice guy, you know.”

“No,” Poole said. “I guess he wasn’t.”

After Evvie had hung up, he dialed the number on Winnebago Street. An older woman with a flat nasal voice answered.

“Is this Mrs. Spitalny? Margaret Spitalny?”

“Yes, it is.”

“Mrs. Spitalny, you don’t know me, but I was in Vietnam with your son. We served together in the same unit for a year. My name is Michael Poole—Dr. Poole, now.”

“Oh, my goodness. Say what?”

He repeated most of what he had said.

“What did you say your name was?”

He repeated his name. “I’m in Milwaukee with Tim Underhill, another member of our unit, and a friend of ours. We’d very much like to see you and your husband, if that is at all possible.”

“See us?” Mrs. Spitalny seemed to speak only in questions.

“We’d like to come over and meet you, if we could. We arrived this morning from New York, and I found your name in the telephone book.”

“You came all the way from New York to see me and George?”

“We very much wanted to talk to you about Victor. I hope this isn’t too much of a nuisance, and I apologize for the suddenness of it, but do you think we could come out either this afternoon or tonight? We’d be interested in hearing anything you have to say about Victor, looking at photographs, that kind of thing.”

“You want to come to our house? Tonight?”

“If we can. Please don’t feel you have to feed us. We are just very interested in learning whatever we could about Victor.”

“Well, there isn’t that much to learn. I can tell you that right away.… You aren’t from the police, are you?”

Poole’s blood began to move a little faster. “No. I am a doctor, and Mr. Underhill is a writer.”

“The other one is a writer? This isn’t anything about the police? You promise?”

“Of course.”

“ ’Cause otherwise it would just kill my husband.”

“We are just old friends of Victor’s. There’s no need to worry.”

“I’d better call George at the Glax plant, that’s where he works. I’d better check with George. He has to know about this, or I’m in Dutch. It sounds so funny. Tell me where you are and I’ll call you back after I talk to George.”

Poole gave her the number and then, on impulse, asked, “Have you heard anything from Victor lately? We were very interested in knowing where we might be able to find him.”

“Heard from him lately? Nobody’s heard from Vic for more than ten years, Dr. Poole. I’ll call you back.”

Poole hung up. “Looks like you’re going to be right about his parents,” he said to Underhill.

“She’ll call back?” Maggie asked.

“After she talks to George.”

“What if George says no?”

“Then they probably have something to hide, and we’ll work on them until we talk them into letting us in the door.”

“And we’ll know everything they know in an hour,” Underhill said. “If they play it like that, they’ll be dying to get it off their chests.”

“So you’re hoping she will call back and say no?”

Underhill smiled and went back to reading his book.

After half an hour of reading and pacing the room, Poole looked out the windows again. Outside in Moscow, a small black car, turned the color of dead skin by winter filth, had burrowed head first into one of the mountain ranges of snow. The traffic had narrowed down to a single line in order to squeeze past it.

“Cards were invented for times like this,” he said.

“Mah-jongg was invented for times like this,” Maggie said. “Not to mention drugs and television.”

The telephone rang, and Poole snatched it up. “Hello?”

“This is George Spitalny,” said an aggressive male voice. “My wife said you called her up with some kind of cockamamy story.”

“I’m glad you called, Mr. Spitalny. My name is Dr. Michael Poole, and I was in your son’s unit in Vietnam —”

“Look, I only got a fifteen-minute break. Suppose you tell me what’s on your mind.”

“I was hoping that I could come over with another old friend of Victor’s tonight, to talk to you.”

“I don’t get it. What’s the point?”

“We’d like to know more about him. Victor was an important member of our unit, and we have a lot of memories of him.”

“I don’t like it. I don’t have to let you and your friend walk into my house.”

“No, you don’t, Mr. Spitalny. And I apologize for doing all this on such short notice, but my friends and I came