Koko

copy of The Divided Man he had purchased that afternoon. He had not read Underhill’s most successful book in years, and he was surprised by how quickly he was caught up in it again, how thoroughly it managed to distract him from his worries about Judy.

Hal Esterhaz, the hero of The Divided Man, was a homicide detective in Monroe, Illinois, a medium-sized city filled with foundries, auto-body shops, and vacant lots behind chain-link fences. Esterhaz had served as a lieutenant in Vietnam, and had returned home to marry and quickly divorce his high school girlfriend. He drank a lot, but for years had been a respected police officer with an uncomfortable secret: he was bisexual. His guilt over his sexual longings for other men accounted not only for his drinking, but also his occasional brutality with arrested criminals. Esterhaz was careful about this, and let himself beat only those criminals—rapists and child molesters—most despised by other policemen.

Michael suddenly found himself wondering if Esterhaz had been based on Harry Beevers. This thought had never occurred to him when he first read the book, but now, although the detective was tougher and more enigmatic than Beevers, Poole virtually saw the Lost Boss’s face on his body. Beevers was not bisexual, at least as far as Michael knew, but Poole would not have been surprised to learn that Beevers had a wide streak of sadism hidden within him.

Michael also saw another likelihood that had slipped past him when he first read the book. Monroe, Illinois, the gritty city through which Hal Esterhaz pursued the mystery at the heart of The Divided Man, sounded very much like Milwaukee, Wisconsin, the city M.O. Dengler had described so often. Monroe had a large Polish population on its south side, a large black ghetto on its near north side, and a major league ball team. The mansions of the rich stood along three or four streets near its lakefront. A dark, polluted river ran through its seedy downtown. There were paper mills and tanneries, adult bookstores, bowling allies, miserable winters, bars and taverns everywhere, barrel-shaped women in babushkas waiting at bus stops. This was the landscape of Dengler’s childhood.

Poole was soon so taken up in the novel’s story that it was more than an hour before a third belated recognition stung him, that The Divided Man was virtually a meditation on Koko.

An unemployed piano player is found with his throat slit in his room at a shabby downtown hotel called the St. Alwyn. Beside the body has been placed a piece of paper with the words Blue Rose penciled upon it. Hal Esterhaz is assigned to the case, and recognizes the victim as a regular patron of one of Monroe’s gay bars. He had once had sex with the man. Of course he suppresses the information about his fugitive relationship with the victim when he files his report.

A prostitute is the next victim, found with her throat slit in an alley behind the St. Alwyn, and again there is a note: Blue Rose. Esterhaz learns that she too had lived in the hotel and was a friend of the piano player; Esterhaz suspects that she witnessed the murder or knew something that would lead the police to the killer.

A week later, a young doctor is found slaughtered in his Jaguar, parked in the garage of the lakefront mansion where he lived alone with a housekeeper. Esterhaz reports to the scene miserably hung over, still wearing yesterday’s clothes, with no real memory of the night before. He had visited a bar called the House of Correction, he can remember ordering drinks, talking, he remembers putting on his coat, having trouble with the sleeves … after that everything is black until the telephone call from his station, which had awakened him on the couch. What makes him feel far worse than his hangover is that the young doctor had been his lover for more than a year some five years before. No one, not even the doctor’s housekeeper, had known. Esterhaz conducts a competent scene- of-the-crime investigation, discovers a piece of paper with the words Blue Rose written on it, questions the housekeeper and bags and tags all the physical evidence, and when the medical examiner has finished and the body is removed, returns to the House of Correction. Another blackout, another morning on the couch with a half-empty bottle and a blaring television.

The following week another body is discovered, that of a male hustler and drug addict who had been one of Esterhaz’s informants.

The next victim is a religious fanatic, a butcher who preaches to a congregation in a downtown storefront. Esterhaz not only knows this victim, he hates him. The butcher and his wife had been the most brutal of the series of foster parents who had raised Esterhaz. They had beaten and abused him almost daily, keeping him home from school to work out of sight in the back of the butcher shop—he was a sinner, he had to work until his hands bled, he had to memorize Scripture to save his soul, he was damned no matter how much Scripture he memorized so he required more beatings. He had been taken from the butcher’s house only after a social worker had made an unannounced visit and discovered him covered in bruises and locked in the freezer “to repent.”

In fact Hal Esterhaz is not even his real name, but had been given to him by social workers: his identity and parentage, even his exact age, are mysterious. All he knows of his origins is that he was found at the age of three or four, covered with frozen mud, wandering the downtown streets near the river in the middle of December. He had known no language; he had been starved nearly to death.

Even now, Esterhaz could not remember long stretches of his wretched childhood, and could remember none of his life before he was found wandering naked and starved on a street beside the Monroe River. His dreams of that time were of a golden world where giants petted him, fed him, and called him by a name that was never audible.

Hal Esterhaz had twice dropped out of school, been in trouble with the law, had spent his adolescence in a steamy obliterating hatred of everything about him. He had joined the army in a fit of drunken self-loathing, and the army had saved him. All his most decent, most dependable memories virtually began with basic training. It was, he thought, as if he had been three times born: once into the golden world, then into frozen, bitter Monroe, finally into uniform. His superiors had soon recognized his innate abilities and eventually recommended him for OCS. In exchange for another four years of service he would happily have served anyhow, he received the training that sent him to his second tour in Vietnam as a lieutenant.

After the murder of the butcher, Esterhaz begins to dream of washing blood from his hands, of standing sweaty and fearful at his sink, holding his bloodied hands under the steaming water, his shirt off, his chest dappled with red … he dreams of opening a door onto a garden of sick roses, roses of an unnatural, bright, chemical blue. He dreams that he is driving his car into deep darkness, with a familiar corpse on the seat beside him.

A second recognition came to Michael at this point, that surely he remembered M.O. Dengler once inserting into his tales of a fabulous Milwaukee—tales of finding a sick angel in a packing case and feeding him Cracker Jacks until he could fly again, of the man who made ice burn by breathing on it, of the famous Milwaukee criminal from whose mouth rats and insects flew instead of words—something about his parents being only half his parents, whatever that had meant.

Poole fell asleep with the book on his chest, no more than a hundred yards or so from the spot on Phat Pong Road where Dengler had bled to death.

1

According to the Army of the United States of America, Private First Class Dengler was the victim of a homicidal attack by person or persons unknown. Said attack occurred during Private Dengler’s Rest and Recreation tour in the city of Bangkok, Thailand. Private Dengler suffered multiple cranial fractures, compound fractures of right and left tibia and fibula, fracture of the sacrum, rupture of the spleen, rupture of the right kidney, and puncture wounds in the upper portions of both lungs. Eight of Private Dengler’s fingers had been severed, and both arms were dislocated. The nose and jaw had been splintered by multiple fractures. The skin of the deceased had been severely abraded, and much of the face torn away by the assailants. Identification had been secured through the victim’s dogtags.

The Army found it unwise or unnecessary to speculate on the reasons for the attack on Private First Class Dengler, restricting its comments in this regard to a consideration of the tensions that grew up between members of the American Armed Forces and native populations.

2

In the light of the Sergeant Khoffi (1967) and Private First Class