Koko

the movie, but it would be fiction. The meeting in Columbus Park would be part of the myth; it did not have to be real to be part of the myth. For Harry intended only to make Koko think that they would meet in the park. Harry would send him through somewhere else first, and that would be his killing box.

Harry stood freezing on the corner of Bayard Street and Bowery. A black stretch limousine pulled up to the curb before him and two short, pudgy Chinese men with glossy tiny feet got out of the backseat. They wore dark suits and sunglasses, and their hair was slicked back. They looked like twin dwarfs with zombie faces and stiff, self- important movements. One of them slammed the door of the limousine, and they strode across the sidewalk to push their way into one of the restaurants across from Confucius Plaza. One of them passed within a foot of Harry without in any way registering his presence. Harry thought that if he had been standing in his path, the little gangster would have knocked him over and walked across his body the way Elizabeth walked over Raleigh’s cloak.

He moved across the sidewalk to the car. Harry felt even colder than before—in every car that sped down Bowery, in every apartment in Confucius Plaza, was a flat-faced chink who did not care if Harry Beevers lived or died. How had all the little bastards clawed their way up out of the laundries? He bent over the trunk of the limousine and looked down at sixteen layers of meticulously applied black lacquer. The skin of the car looked as deep as a lake. Harry gathered a good gob of phlegm and saliva in his mouth and spat it onto the trunk of the limousine. It began to slide a bit toward the fender.

Harry stepped back from the car and began to walk up the block. He was on the verge of thinking that now he was wasting his time here and that he should be checking out Bayard Street’s western end when the smooth, unbroken row of Chinese restaurants ceased and he found himself staring into a cave. His feet stopped moving and his heart thumped like the kick of a rabbit’s back legs. On both sides the tiles of the buildings folded in to form a wide passage. Of course it was not a cave. He was standing before an arcade.

Down in the distance he could see women’s underwear in forlorn shades of pink and pale blue stretched across forms in a lighted window. Near it a pair of giant’s eyeglasses stared out from an optician’s window. Further back a restaurant sign floated in grey air. Harry walked into the arcade. One old Chinese woman shuffled toward him, in the dimness of the arcade no more than a wrinkled forehead and a pair of averted eyes.

Harry paused outside Chinatown Opticians and peered through the empty left orb of the giant’s glasses. Behind the counter in the deserted shop a clerk with a punk crewcut and cheeks inflamed with acne stared into a Chinese-language edition of Playboy.

Tattered posters advertising a Chinese opera covered the walls of the arcade. Other posters concerned rock clubs. A few shops along, the gloom grew thicker and the arcade angled off toward what must be Elizabeth Street. The ripped posters led toward a shoebox-sized restaurant called Malay Coffee Shop, which showed a large white CLOSED sign on its door. A few feet farther, just before the angle in the arcade, a narrow tiled staircase led down to another level. A fat arrow had been painted on the side of the staircase, below it the words FORTUNE BARBER SHOP.

Harry went slowly down the steps, ducking his head to see how far the lower level extended. Two grey- haired barbers sat in their own chairs inside the Fortune Barber Shop while a third barber snipped at an old woman’s hair. Two other shops, one with a poster in its window of a levitating Ninja with an outflung leg, filled out the short downstairs level. Harry stopped moving about halfway down the stairs. His eyes were at the level of the arcade’s tiled floor. Nobody walking in would see him, but he would have a perfect view of them.

He moved a step up, and in the brighter outside air two short males moved past the arcade’s entrance. The zombies. As soon as they had passed the entrance, they snapped back to reappear, looking into the arcade. Their sunglasses were like wide black holes in their faces. Harry moved quietly down a step and watched the two zombies glance at each other and take a step into the arcade. Their bodies blurred in the darkness. They came forward, stocky, almost stumping on their legs like sumo wrestlers. As they came nearer Harry saw that their hands were balled into fists. They stood three feet from him, their thick short arms swinging. One of them spoke softly in Chinese, and Harry understood the words as if they had been in English. The bastard isn’t here. The second man grunted.

His life was not like other lives, other people thought the world was solid and were blind to the great tears and rents in the surface of existence. Harry’s mind filled with the wingbeats of insects and the cries of children.

The surface of the world almost shredded and allowed his real life to take place.

The two men turned around in perfect unison, like dance partners, and went back outside the arcade. Harry waited on the steps a minute, two minutes, he did not know how long. The old woman from the barber shop came slowly up the steps, rapping on the tiles with a wooden cane. He moved aside to let her pass along the railing, and she wordlessly pulled herself up past him. He was invisible: no one had seen him. He wiped his wet palms on the flanks of his coat and went up to the main level of the arcade.

Empty: the world had closed up again.

Harry trotted downstairs to the Ninja shop and spent fifty-six dollars on a gravity knife and a pair of handcuffs. Then he mounted the stairs again.

At the entrance he bent forward and looked south down Bowery. The limousine was no longer parked in front of the restaurant. Harry smiled. Inside the chauffeur’s once doubtless pristine white handkerchief was a fat yellow wad of Harry Beevers.

Someone was staring down from a window high up in Confucius Plaza; someone in a passing car turned his head to gaze at him. Someone was watching him, for his life was like a film and he was the hero of that film. “I found it,” he said, knowing that someone heard him: or that someone watching him had read his lips.

Now all he had to do was wait for the telephone call. Harry began walking up toward Canal to start looking for a cab. Traffic moved past him in a seamless flow. He no longer felt cold. He stood on Canal Street and watched the traffic sweep past him, tasting on his tongue the oil and bite of the icy vodka he had just earned. When the light changed, he crossed Canal to walk north on Bowery, rejoicing.

1

Michael Poole came awake in cold darkness, the dream picture of a Chinese schoolgirl grinning at him from beneath the brim of a white straw skimmer vanishing from his mind. One of the large radiators clanked again, and Tim Underhill snored gently in the next bed. Poole picked up his watch and brought its face toward his until the hands became distinct. A minute to eight became eight o’clock as he watched. The first tendrils of warmth began to reach him.

Underhill groaned, stretched, wiped his hands over his face. He looked at Poole and said, “Morning.” He sat up in bed—Underhill’s hair stuck out on both sides of his head, and his white-blond beard was crunched and flattened on one side. He looked like a crazed professor in an old movie. “Listen to this,” Underhill said, and Poole sat up in bed too.

“I’ve been thinking about this all night,” Underhill said. “Here’s where we are at the moment. We have Dengler spooking Spitalny, right? He comes up to him and points out that in a combat unit everybody has to protect everybody else. He takes him into Ozone Park, say, and he tells him that if he acts toward him in the old way he will mess with the lives of everybody in the platoon. Maybe he even says that he’ll make sure that Spitalny will never come back from his first mission—whatever he says, Spitalny agrees to be silent about their old relationship. But this is Spitalny—he can’t take it. He hates Dengler a little more every day. And eventually Spitalny follows Dengler to Bangkok and kills him. Now what I’m thinking is that Spitalny never was the original Koko. He just borrowed the name a decade and a half later, when he really slipped a cog.”

“Who was, then?”

“There never really was an original Koko,” Underhill said. “Not in the way I’ve been thinking of it.” Excited by his thoughts, Underhill swung his legs over the side of the bed and stood up. He was wearing a long nightshirt, and his legs looked like pipe stems with knees. “You get it? It’s like Agatha Christie. Probably everybody who wanted to support Dengler wrote Koko on a card at least once. Koko was everybody. I was Koko, you were Koko, Conor was Koko once. Everybody just imitated the first one.”