Koko

him. Then he was all set to start his next book. He says to me, he knew all about this crazy man, he knows him from the inside, he has to write a book about him. He has something to figure out—he’s very mysterious. Mysterious in lots of ways. He needs money, but he says he has a scheme that will make him set up for life. But before he can get it, he has to borrow—he needs money to stay afloat. He borrows from everybody. Me included. A lot of money. He will pay me back, of course he will. He is a famous author, isn’t he?”

“Is that how the lawsuit came about?”

Lola gave him a sharp look, then a twisted smile. “It seemed like such a good idea to him. He was going to get hundreds of thousands of dollars. Underhill had one big problem—he couldn’t write anything he thought was any good. He started two, three books after The Divided Man. Ripped them all up. He went crazy—so he and Ong Pin threatened the publisher with a lawsuit. Get a lot of money all at once, pay everybody back. When this brilliant idea didn’t work, Underhill got tired of Ong Pin. He threw him out of his place, he sent everybody away. He beat a boy up—crazy stuff. Then he disappeared. Nobody could find him. After that I heard stories about him. Underhill was living in hotels and running out in the middle of the night after running up huge bills. Once I heard he was sleeping under a certain bridge, and some people and I went there to see if we could at least shake a few dollars out of him, maybe beat him up, but he wasn’t there. I heard he was spending whole days in an opium house. Then I heard he was even crazier than before—going around telling people that the world was filthy, and that I was a demon, Billy was a demon, God was going to destroy us. Scared me, Doctor. Who could tell what this crazy man would do? He hated himself, I knew that. People who hate themselves, who cannot stand what they think they are, can do anything, you know. He was blackballed from bars in every part of town. Nobody saw him, but everybody heard stories. He found the bottom, he did that.”

Poole groaned inwardly. What had happened to Underhill? Maybe the drugs he had taken had ruined him by making it impossible for him to write well.

As Lola talked, Poole found himself remembering the night in Washington he had gone with a woman lawyer to see a jazz piano player named Hank Jones. He had been in town to give testimony at a hearing on Agent Orange. Poole knew very little about jazz, and now he could remember none of the actual music Hank Jones had played. But what he did remember was a grace and joy that had seemed abstract and physical at once. He could remember how Hank Jones, who was a middle-aged black man with grizzled hair and a handsome, devilish face, had tilted his head over the keyboard, purely responsive to the flow of his inspirations. The music had gone straight into Michael Poole. Passion so light! Passion so singing! Poole had known that by a miracle of sympathy, he was hearing the music as the young lawyer heard it. And after the set, when Jones was standing next to the piano talking to his fans, Poole had seen the man’s blazing delight in what he had done. This shone forth even in the grace of his movements, and Poole had felt as though he were watching an old lion filled with the essence of lionhood.

And something had struck him then, that of all the people he knew, probably only Tim Underhill would have known this blazing inner weather.

But Underhill had only had a couple of years of what Hank Jones seemed to have had for decades. He had cheated himself of the rest of it.

There was a long pause. “You have read his books?”

Poole nodded.

“Are they any good?”

“The first two were very good.”

Lola sniffed. “I thought they would all be terrible books.”

“Where is he now? Do you have any idea?”

“Are you going to kill him?” Lola squinted at Poole. “Well, maybe somebody should kill him and end his misery before he kills someone else.”

“Is he in Bangkok? Taipei? Back in the States?”

“Someone like him cannot go back to America. He went somewhere else, I’m sure of that—like a crazy animal crawling off to a safe place. I always thought he would go to Bangkok. Bangkok would be perfect for him. But he used to talk about Taipei, so maybe he went there. He never paid me the money he owed me, I can tell you that.” The squint was now a look of pure malice. “The crazy man he was going to write about—that was him. He did not even know that much, and people so ignorant about themselves are dangerous. I used to think I loved him. Loved him! Dr. Poole, if you find your friend, I hope you will be very careful.”

1

Michael Poole and Conor Linklater had already been in Bangkok—and Harry Beevers in Taipei—for two days when Tina Pumo made his discovery, which came in the mundane surroundings of the Microfilm Room of the main branch of the New York Public Library. He was writing a book about Vietnam, he had explained to a stocky, sixtyish, bearded man in a handsome black suit, in particular a book about the Ia Thuc court martials.

Which newspapers did he want? Copies of the daily New York, Washington, Los Angeles, and St. Louis papers and the national news magazines for the months of November 1968, and March 1969. And because he wanted to see the obituaries of Koko’s victims, he requested the London Times, Guardian, and Telegraph for the week of January 28, 1982, and the St. Louis papers for the week of February 5, 1982, as well as the Paris daily papers for the week of July 7, 1982.

The bearded man told Pumo that it would usually take a great deal of time to locate and assemble that amount of material, but that he had both good news and bad news for him. The good news was that the various microfilms pertaining to the Ia Thuc incident had already been assembled—there were even a couple of sources, long articles in Harper’s, the Atlantic, and American Scholar, which he had overlooked. The bad news was that this material was still awaiting redistribution because someone else was also researching Ia Thuc. A journalist named Roberto Ortiz had requested the same information three days earlier, consulted them again a day later, and had spent Tuesday afternoon examining them again, today being Wednesday—Village Voice day, Pumo reflexively thought.

Tina had never heard of Roberto Ortiz, and his private emotion at this news was principally gratitude that he would not have to wait days for the microfilm to be located. He was just double-checking, Tina told himself, making up for the feeling of having missed something important by not going along with the others to Singapore. If he discovered anything they ought to know, he could call them at the Marco Polo.

Before the articles were located and assembled, he read what the news magazines and the New York Times had said about Ia Thuc. He was seated in a plastic chair before a plastic desk; the chair was not comfortable and the microfilm machine took up so much of the desk that he had to rest his notebook in his lap. Within minutes, none of this mattered at all. What happened to Pumo within ten minutes of starting to read a Newsweek story entitled “Ia Thuc: Shame or Victory?” was very similar to what happened to Conor Linklater when Charlie Daisy put an album of SP4 Cotton’s photographs before him. He had managed to forget how public it all had been.

Here spoke Lt. Harry Beevers according to Newsweek: “In this war we are here to kill Charlies, and Charlies come in all shapes and sizes. My own personal body count is thirty dead VC.” Children Killer? asked Time, which described the lieutenant as “gaunt, hollow-eyed and -cheeked, desperate, a man on the edge.” Were They Innocent? asked Newsweek, which said the lieutenant was “perhaps as much a victim of Vietnam as the children he is alleged to have killed.”

Tina could remember Harry Beevers at Ia Thuc. “I have a personal body count of thirty dead gooks! You guys have any balls, pin a medal on me right now.” The lieutenant was high and babbling, he couldn’t shut up. When you stood next to him, you could almost feel the blood zooming around his arteries. You knew that you’d burn your fingers if you touched him. “War makes everybody the same age!” he had bawled out to the reporters. “You assholes think there are children in this war, you think children even exist in this war? You know why you think that