Koko

“Why do they think it’s the same guy?”

“There were two Chinese women who saw Tina in the stacks a few minutes before they discovered the body. They recognized his picture when they saw the papers this morning. It’s all on the news. Tina was the suspect they were looking for—these women saw him coming out of the stacks. It’s obvious what happened.”

“What happened?”

“Tina got lost in the stacks, God only knows what he was doing in the library, and he happened to see this crazy man kill the librarian. He got away, but the man tracked him down and killed him. It’s obvious.” She paused. “I’m sorry to cut your fun short.”

He asked if she were still getting the anonymous calls.

“Lately he has been saying that there is no substitute for butter, or something like that. I just erase the tapes as soon as he says his piece. When this guy was a kid, somebody drummed nonsense into his head from morning to night. I bet he was an abused kid.”

Their conversation ended soon after.

For a moment Michael Poole saw Victor Spitalny before him, small, slope-shouldered, dark-haired, his dark eyes shifting back and forth beneath his narrow forehead with its widow’s peak, his wet little mouth and his pointed chin. At eighteen years of age, there had been a self-erected psychic wall around Victor Spitalny. If he saw you coming near him, he would stop and wait until you had gotten far enough away to let him feel safe. He had probably decided to kill someone and desert very soon after hearing Tim Underhill’s story of the running grunt.

Perhaps because of something his wife had said, Poole thought for the first time that it might be interesting to go to Milwaukee and see where Victor Spitalny had grown up.

And Milwaukee was Underhill’s Monroe, Illinois, where Hal Esterhaz had been run down by his own destiny. If Underhill ever appeared at the airport, he might want to come along on this fantasy journey and look at the childhood of one of his own characters.

Then he heard Conor gasp, and an instant later all of this went out of his head. He was looking at Tim Underhill loping toward them, carrying a box bound with twine under one arm, a leather satchel in one hand, and a case containing an ancient portable typewriter in the other, which also gripped the handles of a plastic carrying bag. The loose seersucker jacket flapped around his frame. He looked startlingly different—in the next beat Michael saw that Underhill had cut his hair.

“You made it,” he said.

“I’ll be a little short of funds until I finish my book,” Underhill said. “Could one of you gentlemen buy me a Coke?”

Conor jumped up to go to the bar.

2

It was like a parody of their trip out, finally—Tim Underhill in the window seat instead of Harry Beevers, Conor in the middle, Michael on the aisle on a planeful of tourists. Michael missed Pun Yin’s dimples and shining hair: this was an American airline, and the stewardesses were tall women with distracted professional faces. The other passengers were not pediatricians but mainly young people who fell into two categories: the employees of multinational corporations who read Megatrends and The One-Minute Manager and married couples with or without babies, dressed in jeans and shirts. When Michael was their age, they would have been reading Herman Hesse and Carlos Castaneda, but the bulging paperbacks they dug out of their packs were by Judith Krantz and Sidney Sheldon, or were written by ladies with three names and had jacket paintings of misty castles and yearning unicorns. In 1983, bohemia, if that was what these people represented, was not very literary. That was okay, Michael thought. He read airplane books too. Conor didn’t read at all. Underhill had placed on his tray a fat paperback that looked as if three people had read it before him.

Michael took from his carry-on bag a copy of The Ambassadors, a Henry James novel Judy had pressed on him. He had been enjoying it, back in Westerholm, but when he held it in his hands he realized that he did not feel like reading. Now that they were actually in the air, he could not imagine what he was returning to.

The sky outside the little windows was black, shot with violent, unearthly streaks of red and purple. Such a sky was suitable: it seemed to draw them into Koko’s world, where no gesture could be ordinary, where angels sang and demons fled down long corridors.

Conor asked the stewardess if they got a movie.

“As soon as we clear the dinner things. It’s Never Say Never Again—the new James Bond movie.”

The stewardess looked offended when Conor grinned.

“It’s because of this guy we know,” Poole explained. He did not feel like calling Beevers a friend, not even to a stewardess who would never meet him.

“Hey,” Conor said mockingly, “I’m a homicide detective from New York, I’m a big deal, I’m another double- oh-seven.”

“Your friend is a homicide detective in New York?” the girl asked. “He must be a busy man these days. There was a guy stabbed to death at JFK a week or two ago.” She noticed the sudden attention being paid to what she was saying, and added, “Some wheeler-dealer who was on one of our flights. A girlfriend of mine works in first class on the San Francisco-New York run a lot, and she said he was one of her people—a regular.” She paused. “I guess he was a real jerk.” Another pause. “The newspapers said he was a yuppie, but they just called him that because he was a young guy with a lot of money.”

“What’s a yuppie?” Underhill asked.

“A young guy with a lot of money,” Poole said.

“A girl in a grey flannel suit and a pair of Reeboks,” Conor said.

“What are Reeboks?” Underhill asked.

“He was killed at JFK after he arrived on a flight from San Francisco?” Poole asked.

The stewardess nodded. She was a tall blonde whose name tag said she was named Marnie, and she had an eager, playful expression in her eyes. “My friend Lisa said she saw him a couple of times a month. She and I used to go around together and do all this crazy stuff, but she moved to New York last year and now we just talk on the phone. But she told me all about it.” She gave Conor a curious sidelong look.

“Can I tell you something? I want to tell you something.”

Conor nodded. Marnie bent down and whispered into his ear.

Poole heard Conor nearly gasp in astonishment; then he laughed so loudly that the people in the seats before them stopped talking.

“See you guys later,” Marnie said, and pushed her cart up the aisle.

“What was that about?” Michael asked. Conor’s entire face had turned red. Tim Underhill flicked a little lizard smile at Poole and looked like William Burroughs, very wise and dry as a desert.

“Nothing.”

“She came on to you?”

“Not exactly. Lay off.”

“Good old Marnie,” Underhill said.

“Change the subject. Lay off.”

“Okay, listen to this,” Michael said. “Somebody off a San Francisco flight was killed when he landed in New York. Spitalny could have landed in San Francisco, just as we are doing, and then connected to a New York flight, as we are also doing.”

“Farfetched,” Underhill said, “but very interesting. What was the name of the stewardess’s friend? Who knew the dead man?”

“Lisa,” Conor said, still blushing.

“I wonder if Lisa noticed anybody talking to the man who was killed?”

At the beginning of Never Say Never Again, James Bond was sent to a health spa. Every ten minutes someone new tried to kill him. Pretty nurses went to bed with him. A beautiful woman took a snake from around her neck and threw it into a car window.

When Marnie returned Poole asked her, “What’s your friend Lisa’s last name?”

“Mayo. Like in Ireland. Like in Hellman’s.”