Koko

and the odor of burning candles immediately surrounded her, and she nearly collapsed. The General’s congregation sat solidly in their chairs; Maggie stayed at the back of the church, trembling and gripping her arms, uncertain of what to do next. Now that she was here, she was uncertain even of why she had returned to the bright little church. Tears streamed down her face. The General finally caught sight of her and raised one eyebrow in a kindly, questioning look that did not fail to contain a portion of alarm. He doesn’t know, Maggie thought, hugging herself and shaking, silently crying. How can he not know? Then Maggie realized that Tina Pumo still sat dead in his loft and nobody but herself and his murderer knew of it. She had to call the police.

9

As yet ignorant of these events which would soon bring him back to New York, Michael Poole emerged for the second time that day from Bang Luk, the alleyway which housed the flower market and Tim Underhill’s rooms, and turned north up Charoen Krung Road. It was just past twelve-thirty at night. The streets were even more congested than they had been earlier, and under normal circumstances even a passionate walker like Dr. Poole would unquestioningly have stepped to the curb, raised his arm, and taken the first vehicle that stopped for him. It was still very hot, his hotel was two or three miles away, and Bangkok is no city for long walks. But these were not normal circumstances, and Dr. Poole never considered interring himself in a car for the length of his journey back to his bed. In any case he was in no hurry to get to bed—he knew he would be unable to sleep. He had just finished spending a little more than seven hours with Timothy Underhill, and he needed time to think as much as he needed sheer thoughtless exercise. By most ways of reckoning, very little had happened during the seven hours: the two men had talked over their drinks on the terrace; still talking, they had gone by ruk-tuk to the Golden Dragon on Sukhumvit Road and eaten excellent Chinese food while they continued their conversation; they had taken another ruk-tuk back to the little set of rooms above Jimmy Siam and talked, talked, talked. Michael Poole could still hear Tim Underhill’s voice in his ears—he felt as if he were walking to the rhythms of the sentences spoken by that voice.

Underhill was a wonderful man. He was a wonderful man with a terrible life, a wonderful man with terrible habits. He was terrible and he was wonderful. (Michael had had more to drink during these seven hours than was his habit, and all the alcohol had warmed and muddled him.) Poole realized that he was moved, shaken, even in a sense awed by his old companion—awed by what he had risked and overcome. But more than that, he was persuaded by Underhill. It was shiningly certain that Underhill was not Koko. All his subsequent conversation had gone to prove what Poole had felt in Underhill’s first words to him on the terrace.

In all the turmoil of his life, Tim Underhill had virtually never ceased to consider Koko, to ponder and wonder over that figure of anarchic vengeance—he not only made Harry Beevers a latecomer to the issue, he demonstrated the shallowness of Beevers’ methods. Poole walked northward in the dark steaming city, hemmed all about by rushing, indifferent men, and felt how thoroughly he sided with Underhill. Eight hours earlier, Dr. Poole had crossed over a rickety bridge and felt himself coming into a new accommodation with his profession, with his marriage, above all with death. It was almost as if he had finally seen death with enough respect to understand it. He had stood before it with his spirit wide open, in a very undoctorly way. The awe, the terror were necessary—all such moments of rapturous understanding fade, leaving only the dew of their passing, but Poole could remember the sharp, salty, vivid taste of reality, and the humility he had felt before it. What had persuaded him about Tim Underhill was his sense that for years, in book after book, Underhill had actually climbed over the railing and crossed the stream. He had opened his spirit wide. He had done his best to fly, and Koko had virtually given him his wings.

Underhill had flown as far as he could, and if he had crashed, an abrupt landing might have been one of the consequences of flight. All the drinking and drugs, all his excesses, had not been undertaken to aid the flight—as Beevers and people like him would instantly have assumed—but to numb and distract the man when he had gone as far as he could and still had fallen short. Underhill had gone farther than Dr. Poole, who had used his mind and his memory and his love for Stacy Talbot, which was wrapped like a layer of bandages around his old love for Robbie: Underhill had harnessed up his whole imagination, and imagination was everything.

This, along with a great deal more, had tumbled out on the terrace, over dinner in the noisy bright enormous Chinese restaurant, in the unbelievable shambles of Underhill’s apartment. Almost nothing had been explained in sequence, and the unhappy details of the author’s life had often dragged Poole’s attention away from Koko. The outline of Underhill’s life was that of a series of avalanches. At present, however, he was living quietly and doing his best to work again. “Like learning to walk again,” he told Poole. “I staggered and then I fell down. All the muscles shrank, nothing worked right. For eight months, if I wrote one paragraph after six hours’ work, it was a good day.”

He had written a strange novella called “Blue Rose.” He had written an even stranger one called “The Juniper Tree.” Now he wrote dialogues with himself, questions and answers, and he was halfway through another novel. He had twice seen a girl running up the street toward him covered in blood, making an unearthly noise—the girl was part of the answer, he said, that was why he had seen her—she announced the nearness of ultimate things. Koko was Underhill’s way of getting back inside Ia Thuc, and so was the vision of a girl running in panic down a city street, and so was everything he had written.

What made everything worse, Underhill said, was that Koko was the lowlife’s lowlife, Victor Spitalny.

“I worked it all out,” Underhill told him at the Golden Dragon. “I did one of those Koko numbers, you did one, and I think Conor Linklater did one—”

“He did,” Michael said. “And I did one too—you’re right.”

“No kidding,” Underhill said. “You think you didn’t show it? You’re not exactly the atrocity type, Michael. I worked out that it could only have been Spitalny. Unless it was you, of course, or Dengler, both of which were equally unlikely.

“I came to Bangkok to learn what I could about Dengler’s last days, because I thought maybe that would get me started writing again. And then, my friend, all hell broke loose. The journalists started dying. As you and Beevers noticed.”

“What do you mean, journalists?” Michael asked innocently.

Underhill had stared at him with his mouth open for a moment, then had burst into laughter.

Poole reached the wide, jumbled intersection of Charoen Krung Road with Surawong Road and stood still in the dense hot night for a moment. Using the resources of a few provincial libraries and bookstores in Bangkok, Underhill had discovered what Harry Beevers, with a research assistant and a vast library system, had not. It took Poole’s breath away, that Beevers would have overlooked, even denied, the connection among the victims.

Because that connection put them all in danger. Underhill was certain that Spitalny had followed him, in both Singapore and Bangkok.

He had only caught glimpses. He’d had the sensation of being watched and followed. In the Golden Dragon he told Michael, “A few weeks after the bodies were found in Singapore, I came down to the street and had this feeling that something really bad, but something that belonged to me, was hiding somewhere and watching me. As if I had a sick, bad brother who had come back after a long time away, and was going to make my life hell before he went away again. I looked around, but I didn’t see anything but the flower sellers, and as soon as I got out onto the road, the feeling went away.” And in his messy room, with the demon masks nailed up on the wall and a smeary mirror and an ivory straw before him on the table, he said: “Remember my telling you about the time I walked outside and had this feeling—that something bad had come back for me? I thought it was Spitalny, of course. But nothing happened. He just melted away. Well, about two days after that, a few days after the Frenchmen were killed here, I had the same feeling on Phat Pong Road. It was much stronger this time. I knew someone was there. I turned around, almost sure that he was right behind me, and that I’d see him. I spun. He wasn’t behind me—he wasn’t even right behind the people right behind me. I couldn’t see him anywhere. But you know, I did see something strange. It’s hard to put this into words, even for me, but it was like, way back down there, way way down the street, there was something like a moving shadow drifting back and forth behind these people who were much more visible, no, not drifting because it was much more animated, dancing back and forth behind all those people, grinning at me. I just had this little glimpse of someone moving insolently fast, someone just filled with glee—and then he vanished. I almost puked.”

“And what do you want to do now?” Poole asked. “Would you come back to America? I’m almost honor-