start to turn his way, a movement as slow and clumsy as that of a large machine, and he flew the final yards across the pavement and into the protection of the arch.
“He might have seen me,” Poole gasped. “What is it?”
Underhill wordlessly moved through the arch into a narrow brick courtyard surrounded on all sides by the dingy high walls of the tenement. A smell of grease and sweat, odd and dislocating in the cold, hung in the air. “We saw it by accident, really,” Underhill said. He was moving toward one of the entrances. Beside the rough peeling door to the ground floor and the staircase was a semi-circular well that allowed for at least one window in a room beneath ground level.
It was in that well, Poole knew. Tim Underhill had stationed himself beside the tenement door. He grimly looked down at whatever was in the well. Poole hoped that it was not Beevers’ dead body. But that was what would be in the well. Koko had yanked Harry Beevers out of the arcade, dragged him through the arch, and then slit his throat. After he had performed the operations that were his usual signature, he had dumped Beevers’ body into the window well. Then he had melted away.
For the first time, Poole really feared for his own life. He moved up to the well and looked down.
His certainty about what he had been going to see was so great that at first he saw nothing at all. The back wall descended seven or eight feet down to a dirty concrete floor before a window that had been painted black. Yellowed bits of paper and old beer cans lay on the dirty concrete. There was no body. He looked up at Underhill’s face, then at Maggie’s. Both of them were regarding him with a wild impatience. Finally Maggie pointed down at one of the corners where the curved brick wall met the tenement wall.
A shiny steel knife lay on top of a nest of old papers. A smear of bright blood lay across the blade.
Poole looked up and saw Conor and Ellen coming toward them through another arch set in the west wall of the tenement. They had circled around the block onto Mott Street and ducked into the first entrance they had seen.
“I think Lieutenant Murphy is probably right behind us,” he said. “I want to go inside the building.”
“Don’t,” Maggie said. “Michael—”
“I know Dengler. Murphy doesn’t. Maybe Beevers is still alive.”
“You might know Dengler,” Maggie said, “but what about Koko?”
This was an excellent question, and the response that came immediately to Michael Poole’s mind made so little rational sense that he stifled it before it was born. Koko’s mine, was what he almost said—he belongs to me.
“He probably left hours ago, Maggie,” Tim said in his low calm voice. “I’ll come with you, Michael.”
“If Murphy shows up before we come back, tell him where we went,” Poole said, and pulled open the rough, sagging wooden door that was the tenement’s entrance. Poole stepped inside and found himself before an iron staircase, painted dark green, which ascended up into the tenement; on its far side another section of the staircase went into the darkness beneath ground level. To his left was a door to one of the rooms. Poole rapped on the door, thinking that the tenant might have heard what had happened just outside his door. He rapped again, but no one came.
“Let’s start taking a look through the building,” he said to Underhill.
“I’m here too,” Conor said from behind him.
Poole looked back and saw Conor pulling Ellen’s fingers off his arm. “We’ll be safer if we all go together.”
Maggie put her arm around the taller woman.
Poole moved toward the staircase. For a moment he paused and looked up toward the six or seven flights through which the staircase turned; then he continued around the front of the staircase and took the downstairs steps.
As soon as his head passed beneath ground level, the staircase became as dark as a grave. The walls were cold and damp. Just behind him, Conor and Tim were moving so quietly he could still hear Maggie and Ellen Woyzak shuffling their feet on the floor above. Poole slowly groped down the steps. The air grew colder around him. Underhill had to be right: Koko, who had once loved Babar, had fled hours before, and somewhere down here in a cold shabby room, they would discover the dead body of Harry Beevers. Poole wanted to find it before the police did. He knew it would make no difference to Beevers, but he thought he owed him at least that much.
At last Poole saw yellow light outlining a door at the bottom of the stairs. He leaned over the railing and looked up. A milky nimbus of light hovered over the top of the stairs.
He came down onto the landing. Through the crack in the door he could see a fragment of wall painted the same green as the staircase. It was splashed with red and black.
Either Conor or Tim squeezed his shoulder again. Poole noticed a dark smear of blood on the section of landing before the door.
Poole gently pushed open the door. The chill inside the room, colder than the staircase, drifted out toward him. In the thick motionless light within the room, Harry Beevers sat strapped into a wooden chair facing the door. His body leaned against thick straps. Blood had run down the side of his face, over the white rags that gagged him, and down into his sweater. At first Poole saw that Beevers’ left ear had been cut off, and he knew that Beevers was dead. Then Beevers’ eyes snapped open, bright with pain and terror.
Spatters of blood lay on the floor around Harry Beevers. The walls were covered with waves and writing, and a slender man sat cross-legged on the floor with his back to them, gazing in rapt concentration at the painted walls. Directly before him was the crude representation of a small, black-haired Vietnamese girl, stepping forward with her hands outstretched, smiling or screaming.
Poole scarcely knew what he felt, or why—there was too much sadness in all this. Koko, who was M.O. Dengler, or was the person who had once been M.O. Dengler, seemed like a child himself. Poole did not know that he was going to speak, but he said, “Manny.”
M.O. Dengler swiveled his head and looked at him.
4
Poole stepped forward into the cold green room. Until this moment, some part of him had resisted believing that Dengler really was Koko. Despite everything he had said to Maggie and Lieutenant Murphy, Poole felt as if the wind had been knocked out of him. He did not have even the beginning of an idea of what he was going to do now. It was still hard to accept the idea that Dengler could wish to do him harm. Harry Beevers uttered a keening sound through his bloody gag. Poole heard Conor and Tim pad in behind him and spread out on either side.
Dengler seemed not to have aged at all. He made Poole feel old and out of shape and almost corrupt with experience. He felt almost shamed before Dengler.
Over Dengler’s alert nineteen-year-old face, Poole saw that what he had taken for a pattern of waves was a row of children’s heads. Their bodies had only partially been painted in. Some held their hands upraised, others reached out with sticklike arms. Red paint wound through them like a skein. Dengler’s young face tilted up toward Poole, his lips slightly parted as if he were going to say—
On the side wall had been painted, in large black letters, the same slogan Poole had seen in the police Polaroids: A DROWSY STIFLED UNIMPASSIONED GRIEF. And beneath that, in the same large letters: PAIN IS AN ILL-U-SHUN.
Poole took in all this in less time than it took to blink. He understood. He was in no-place, all right. He was back there. This was where Koko lived all the time, in that underground chamber he and Underhill had visited twice.
I’m here to help you, Poole wanted to say.
Dengler smiled up at him from the center of his uncannily preserved youth.
Harry Beevers squealed again, and his eyes rolled up into his head.
“I’m here to help—” Poole started to say, and the words seemed almost dragged out of him, as if he were in one of those dreams where every step requires immense effort.
“Come out with us, Dengler,” Conor said, very simply. “It’s what you want to do.”
The smiling child with outstretched empty hands seemed to step out toward Poole as if from the back of a
