Koko

“But then who was the first one?” Poole asked. “Spitalny? That doesn’t seem very likely.”

“I think it was Beevers,” Underhill said, his eyes glowing. “It was right after the publicity began, remember? The court-martials began to seem inevitable. Beevers was stressed out. He knew nobody would support him, but he also knew that he could claim to share whatever support Dengler had. So he mutilated a dead VC, and wore a word everybody associated with Dengler on a regimental card. And it worked.”

Someone rapped at the door. “It’s me,” Maggie called. “Aren’t you up yet?”

Underhill moved on scissoring legs toward the door, and Poole pulled on a bathrobe.

Maggie came in smiling, dressed in a black skirt and an oversized black sweater. “Have you looked outside yet? It snowed again last night. It looks like heaven out there.”

Poole stood up and walked past smiling Maggie toward the window. Maggie seemed to be appraising him, which made him uncomfortable. Now Poole felt he could not trust any of his responses to the girl. Underhill began condensing their conversation for her, and Poole pulled the cord to open the curtains.

Cold bluish light slanted in the window and down on the white street beneath him, pristine with the new snow and nearly unmarked. The snow looked like a good thick linen napkin. On the sidewalk a few deep footsteps showed where one person had mushed to work.

“So Harry Beevers is really Koko,” Maggie said. “I wonder why I find that so easy to believe?”

Poole turned away from the window. “Does the word Koko mean anything to you?”

“Kaka,” Maggie said. “Or coo-coo, meaning crazy. Who knows? Cocoa, as in the warm bedtime drink. But if Victor Spitalny knew that Harry Beevers had been the first to use it wouldn’t he have an above-average interest in Harry?”

Poole looked at her wonderingly.

“Isn’t it possible that he might want to eliminate Harry next, or before he retires or gives himself up or whatever he is going to do?”

In fact, Maggie said, Tina had probably been killed only because he had stayed at home. Tina was killed because he was there. She came to the window and stood beside Michael. “Koko even broke into 56 Grand Street, on the day Tina came uptown to fetch me back from where I stayed when I was not with him.” A flicker of a glance toward Michael, who was frowning out at the dimpled snowscape of Maggie’s heaven. And that, she said, was how Spitalny learned everything he wanted to learn.

“What was that?” Poole asked.

“Where everybody lived.”

Poole still did not get it. Koko learned where everybody lived because Tina Pumo stayed at home?

It was a night he still liked me, Maggie said—and then told him about Tina leaving the bed and finding that his address book had been stolen.

A night he still liked her?

“A few days later, it was all happening again,” she said. “You knew Tina. He was never going to change. It was very sad. I came down to see just if he would talk to me. And that was how I nearly got killed.”

“How did you escape?” Poole asked.

“By using a silly old trick.” And would say no more about it. Saved by an old trick, like the heroine of a story.

“Koko knows how to find Conor, then,” Tim said.

“Conor’s staying with his lady love,” Poole said. “So he’ll be safe. But Beevers had better watch out for himself.”

Aren’t you people ever going to get dressed, Maggie wanted to know, all this middle-aged male beauty in disarray is making my stomach rumble. At least I think it’s my stomach. What are we going to do today?

2

What they did, once they had breakfasted in the Grill Room, was check out some of Victor Spitalny’s old hangouts before rewarding themselves by visiting M.O. Dengler’s childhood home and telling the Vietnam stories they had already told once, this time accurately. Stories and storytelling too had their gods, and it would be an act of homage to those gods to set the narrative record straight before Dengler’s parents.

So they had begun with a round of the bars, or taverns, as these bars were known, in which Spitalny had spent his time waiting for his call-up—The Sports Lounge, The Polka Dot, Sam ‘N’ Aggie’s, located within half a mile of one another, two of them a block apart on Mitchell Street and the other, The Polka Dot, five blocks further north, on the edge of the Valley. Poole had agreed to meet Mack Simroe there after work at five-thirty. Debbie Tusa had arranged to meet them for lunch at the Tick Tock restaurant, a block off Mitchell on Psalm Street. In Milwaukee bars opened early and were seldom without customers, but by noon Poole had become discouraged by the reception they had found in them. None of the people in either of the first two taverns had been interested in talking about an army deserter.

In 1969 army investigators had come to these same bars, looking for hints as to where Victor might be hiding himself, and Poole thought that the army’s men had probably spoken to the same barflies and bartenders that he and Maggie and Tim had met. The taverns would not have changed at all since 1969 except for minor adjustments to the jukeboxes. Nestled in among the hundreds of Elvis Presley songs and hundreds more polkas—Joe Schott and the Hot Schotts?—had been a rare survivor of that era, Barry Sadler’s “The Ballad of the Green Berets.” In these taverns harsh light bounced off the Formica, the bartenders were pasty overweight men with tattoos and pre- modern crewcuts, and yellowbellies who deserted from the armed forces might as well go out and hang themselves from the oak tree in the backyard so as not to put someone else to the trouble. And you drank Pforzheimer’s—you didn’t mess around with lightweight stuff like Budweiser, Coors, Olympia, Stroh’s, Rolling Rock, Pabst, Schlitz, or Hamm’s. Taped to the mirror in The Sports Lounge were printed signs reading PFORZHEIMER’S—BREAKFAST OF CHAMPIONS and PFORZHEIMER’S—THE NATIONAL DRINK OF THE VALLEY.

“We don’t export most of it,” said Tattoo and Crewcut, getting yuk-yuk-yuk from his regulars. “We pretty much like to keep it to ourselves.”

“Well, I can see why,” Poole said, tasting the thin flat yellow stuff. Behind him E.P. groaned about chapels and momma and the difficulties of love.

“That Spitalny kid wasn’t any kind of a man,” Tattoo and Crewcut declared, “but I never thought he’d turn out as crummy as he did.”

In Sam ‘N’ Aggie’s the bartender, being Aggie, had neither crewcut nor tattoos, and instead of Elvis, Jim Reeves moaned about chapels and momma and the love that defied the grave, but the content of their visit was otherwise very similar. Pforzheimer’s. Dark looks at Maggie Lah. You’re asking about who is that? Oh, him. More dark looks. His dad’s a regular guy, but the kid sure went wrong, didn’t he? Another glowering glance toward Maggie. Around here, see, we’re real Americans.

So the three of them marched in silence toward the Tick Tock, each with their own preoccupations.

When Poole pushed open the door and followed Maggie and Underhill into the small crowded restaurant half a dozen men had turned on the bar stools to gape at Maggie. “Yellow Peril strikes again,” Maggie whispered.

A thin woman with frosted hair and deep lines in her face was giving the three newcomers a tentative wave from a booth at the side of the restaurant.

Debbie Tusa recommended the Salisbury steak; she chattered about the weather and how much she had enjoyed New York; she was having a little Seabreeze, that’s vodka, grapefruit juice, and cranberry juice, would they want one? It was really a summer drink, she supposed, but you could drink it all year long. They made good drinks at the Tick Tock, everybody knew that, and was it true they were all from New York, or were some of them really from Washington?

“Are you nervous about something, Debbie?” Tim asked.

“Well, the last ones were from Washington.”

The waitress came in her tight white uniform and checked apron, and everybody ordered Salisbury steak, except for Maggie, who asked for a club sandwich. Debbie drank from her Seabreeze and said to Maggie, “You could have a Cape Codder, that’s vodka and clam juice?”

“Tonic water,” Maggie said, and the waitress said, “Tonic water? Like tonic?”

“Like gin and tonic without the gin,” Maggie said.