Koko

She looked over her shoulder and saw Perry, her friend from the East Village, standing just behind her with a long black portfolio under one arm. Beside him Jules grimaced at her with an expression that virtually said: Isn’t this terrible, isn’t this deadly? They had apparently emerged from the office building on the other side of Saigon, which housed a number of art galleries. Jules and Perry had evidently resolved to sell out.

“Let’s spy with her,” Jules said. “Anything’d be more fun than bein’ pissed on by these gallery assholes.” Perry was English, and Jules had long ago begun to sound like him.

“I believe I’d fancy a bit of spyin’ about now,” said Perry. “Who we havin’ a decco at, then? Enemy of the state? Ernst Stavro Blofeld? Italian Post-Expressionists?”

“I’m not spying on anybody,” Maggie said. “I’m just waiting for my friend.”

For a moment she considered asking them to come upstairs with her, but she could see too clearly how Perry would respond to Pumo’s loft. He would go around knocking things over, drink up all the liquor he could find, and relentlessly insult Pumo’s taste and politics.

“Funny way you have of waitin’,” Perry said. “Which friend? That old geezer followed us ‘round the off-license last year? Eyes hangin’ out on bloody stalks?”

“That wasn’t him, that was just someone he knows,” Maggie said.

“Come along with us,” Jules said. It was a gesture toward their old friendship. “After we take the paintings back, we’ll show you this lovely new club.”

“I can’t.”

“You can’t?” Perry lifted an eyebrow. “I’m sure we never killed any Asian babies in any war or nuffink. Let’s get out of here, Jules.” He turned away from Maggie, and Jules did not even look at Maggie as he swept past.

Maggie watched them walk down the dark street in the lamplight, their ragged clothing giving them the air of loutish royalty, and knew that they would never forgive her for not joining them. People like Jules and Perry knew that they were sane and everybody else crazy, and Maggie had just stepped over the border into the land of the crazies.

All this reflection took place in a second or two. Maggie pulled Pumo’s door all the way open and stood in the doorway. Nothing but silence came from the top of the stairs.

Maggie stepped inside and closed the door behind her. Then she gripped the handrail and began slowly, quietly to mount the stairs.

7

Koko was in glory, his yoke was easy and his burden was light.

By man came death, and by man came also the resurrection of the dead.

Thirty lives to be paid for. Pumo was ten, and if there was a woman she would be eleven.

No part of the animal was wasted. The Joker had closed his eyes, and slept on in the pack.

When Pumo the Puma had opened the door and looked into Koko’s face, he had known, he had seen, he had understood. Angels walked him backwards up the stairs, angels backed him into his great glowing cave. Tears spilled from Koko’s eyes, for it was true that God did all things simultaneously, and Koko’s heart overflowed for Pumo, who understood, who took flight, even as his soul took flight and sailed off, sailed home.

The eyes, the ears, the Elephant Card in the mouth.

Then Koko heard a great thunderous buzzing, the noise of the impatient world hungering for immortality, and he quickly moved to the light cord and pulled it down, turning off all the overhead lights in the room. Now the cave was dark. Koko went quietly to the hallway and turned that light off too.

Then he went back into the living room to wait.

Outside, traffic roared like the passing of great beasts in a jungle. His father leaned toward him and said Work too fast and you’ll never amount to nothing. The buzzer rang again, clamoring until it found its true voice and became a giant insect swooping in great circles between the walls. Finally it settled on Pumo’s body and folded its great strong wings.

Koko picked the knife off a couch and slid into his spot just inside the entrance to the cave from the hallway. He made himself invisible, still, and silent. His father and a friendly demon waited with him, silently approving, and Koko slipped into a nightmare world he had known all his life. His footsteps turned the earth black, and thirty children went into a cave and never came out, and three soldiers went into a cave, and two came out. Gentlemen, you are part of a great killing machine. Finally Koko saw the elephant stride toward him, his robes ermine and silk, and the Old Lady said, Gentlemen, it is time to face the elephant again.

For his ears had taken in the dampened, nearly soundless click of the door and his body had felt a small slight shift in the air and now he could hear a hand closing on a handrail and her feet moving with what to a civilian would be most fearful caution from one tread of the stair to another.

8

Maggie reached the top of the steps and saw at once that the door to the loft was unlocked—it looked as though someone had banged it shut with an elbow as he carried his haul outside. Or by someone going in. She touched the knob and pushed it forward with her fingertips. Light from the staircase filled Pumo’s entry, with its heaps of coats and hats on hooks.

Pumo’s entry always looked as if he were having a party.

At the worst, Maggie thought, he had been robbed again, and would have to be coaxed out of another depression. Any intruder was long gone. Maggie walked through the door, switched on the light, went down the little hallway. When she reached the bedroom, she reached in and turned on that light too. Nothing had been disturbed since their unhappy morning. The bed was still unmade, a sure sign that Tina was in a downswing.

Some pervasive smell filled the loft, but Maggie filed the fact away to be dealt with as soon as she had satisfied herself either that there had been no break-in, or that the burglar who had left the doors open had not done a great deal of damage. Maggie backed out of the bedroom to check the bathroom, again saw nothing out of the ordinary, and went on into the living room.

She froze about six feet into the room. The dim illumination from the hallway showed the shadowy outline of a man on one of the little wooden-backed chairs normally arranged around Tina’s dining table. Her first thought was that she had been trapped by a very cool-headed burglar, and her heart jumped up into her throat. Then as her eyes continued to adjust to the darkness, she almost subliminally recognized that the man in the chair was her lover. She moved forward, in turn ready to scold, then cajole, then to soothe him. As Maggie opened her mouth to speak his name, she finally identified the odor filling the loft as the smell of blood. She was still moving forward, and her next faltering step brought her close enough to see how Tina’s chest was painted with blood, and how the legs of the chair sat in a wide red pool. Something white like a tag protruded from Tina’s mouth.

Instead of screaming or whirling around, which would have led almost instantly to her death, Maggie moved off to her right, into the darkest section of the loft. This movement of pure reflex felt almost as if it had been done to her, as if some force had swept her aside to get her out of the rectangle of light which was the entrance from the hall. She wound up crouching beneath the dining table at the far right of the room, too scared by what she had seen and too startled by her own movement to do anything but look out from her vantage point at the rest of the room.

Terror must have kicked her senses open wide. In the first seconds that she found herself beneath the table, she took in every nuance from the street, the happiness in the voices calling out to each other, the squeal of a brake drum, even the tap of a cane on the sidewalk. In the midst of these sounds she heard drops of liquid landing in the pool at Pumo’s feet. Accompanying these sounds was a sweet, sick, limping odor: the smell of concentrated mourning.

“Come on out, Dawn,” a man whispered, and Maggie could smell only the blood again. “I want to talk to you.”

A column of darkness left the door and advanced into the room. Some of the light from the hall gave the column the shape of a compact man wearing a dark topcoat slightly too large for him. The man’s face was only a pale blur, and his hair must have been as black as Maggie’s, for it was entirely invisible against the darkness behind him.