Koko

It was farfetched, but so was Bangkok. So was Westerholm. Life in general was farfetched.

“Did you know,” Underhill was saying, “in Bangkok you can give a guy about sixty bucks and go down into a basement and see a guy kill a girl? First he beats her up. Then he kills her. You watch her die and you go home.”

Conor had removed his earphones and was staring at Underhill. “I guess you know about that.”

“What, did you go there?”

Conor said nothing. “Did you?” he finally asked.

Underhill shook his head.

“Come on,” Conor said.

“Never. Just heard about it.”

“Don’t lie to me, man.”

“I’m not lying.”

Conor frowned.

“I have the feeling you met some interesting people,” Underhill said. “I want to tell you something.”

3

How Dengler Died (2):

You have to see Captain Batchittarayan, you have to see his desk, his office, his face …

Everything was hard, pocked, suspicious—everything smelled like death and Lysol. One light, of dull metal, shone at first down on his neat brown hands on the scarred empty metal surface of his desk; later, as if by itself, it swung upward, hurting my eyes.

Yes, it was his men who had responded to the near-riot, to call it that, the “near-riot” in the Patpong area on the day in question, it was he, at that time Sergeant Batchittarayan, who had supervised the transportation of the mutilated body to the city’s morgue. It was he who had pulled the tags out of the mush on the man’s chest. It was distasteful: it had been distasteful, and the memory of the white American’s body was still unhappy. And the man before him was distasteful, with his connection to it, and with his possession of a secret.

There had been others—other Americans on R&R who had gone mad. Two years before PFC Dengler’s death, a Sergeant Walter Khoffi had hacked several patrons of the Sex-Sex bar to death before going outside and killing a massage parlor tout on the street, and a quiet Bible-quoting boy from Oklahoma named Marvin Springwater had knifed three little boys to death before the traffic ran him down on Sukhumvit Road.

So the officer’s distaste had some justification.

He was interested in how one knew about the child. The child existed, but had never been located or identified.

Weren’t you asking about the child?

Questions about the child had attracted the Captain’s attention.

Fortunately she had cried out, this unknown child. The two men and the girl had been in a narrow alley. Her screams drew attention to them. She did not cease screaming when she burst out of the alley.

Nobody knew the girl. She was a stranger. That was to be expected, Patpong being the opposite of a settled residential area. There was agreement on two points, however. She was not a bar girl or massage parlor employee—that much was clear to all those who saw her emerge from the narrow alley and run screaming down the street. And she was not a Thai. She was perhaps a Cambodian child, or Chinese, or Vietnamese.

It was not supposed that the young soldiers knew that. To the young soldiers, it was supposed, all young Asian women looked alike.

And so the crowd of men who happened to be in that particular block of Phat Pong Road that afternoon jumped the American soldier—jumped both of them—and one got away and one was torn to pieces.

Do you know who was innocent? asked the Captain. The girl was innocent. And the crowd was innocent.

So one soldier fell beneath the innocent crowd, or both did. Witnesses were vague about this. The witnesses had seen only the running girl, they had not of course participated in the assault.

A thousand years ago it would have been a great epic, this story (said the Captain). The innocent girl, her attacker torn to pieces by the righteous mob. Four hundred years ago it would have become a legend told in a song, and every child in southern Thailand would have known the song. The disappearing girl—she could have disappeared into that. Now there is not even a novel about her, not even a rock and roll song, not even a cartoon strip.

A month before this conversation with the Captain, Timothy Underhill had stood on Phat Pong Road and saw a girl rushing toward him down the middle of the street. He had been totally clean for something like nine weeks. He had been trying to write—a novel again at last, something still coming to life in his mind about a boy who had been raised in a shed behind his house, like an animal. He had been sober for three months. He heard the screams, which sounded as if she carried a microphone in her throat. He saw her bloody palms and blood-spattered hair. She came threshing toward him with her hands out and her mouth open. No one but he saw her.

Underhill wept on the pavement, unnoticed by the men pushing past him. He was there again, alive inside himself.

I went home, he told Poole, and I wrote a story called “Blue Rose.” It took six weeks. After that I wrote a story of the same length called “The Juniper Tree.” It took a month. I’ve been writing ever since.

Did you really think I’d miss this plane?

After I saw her, then I had to see everything—then I had to follow the story. It wouldn’t come to me anymore. You were going to come to me, or he was, but not it. I didn’t know I was waiting for either you or Koko to show up, but that’s what I was doing.

4

Another movie began, but Poole had closed his eyes before the titles came up on the screen.

He was driving his car down a long dark road into an emptiness like a desert. He had been traveling many days; though the means by which he knew this were unclear, he was in a novel called Into the Darkness, written by Tim Underhill. The long road went straight on through the night, and as he drove Michael realized that he was Hal Esterhaz, a homicide detective, and that he had been summoned from the scene of one murder to that of another, far distant. He had been traveling for weeks, going from corpse to corpse, following the killer’s footsteps without getting any nearer to him. There had been many bodies, and all of them were those of people he had known long ago in a dreamlike existence before everything had darkened.

Far ahead in the darkness he saw two dots of yellow light shining out beside the road.

In Into the Darkness he would drive through the dark in a gradually emptying world. There would always be another body, and he would never find the killer, for Into the Darkness was like a theme that repeated itself through a thousand variations, circling around and around the same cycle of chords. There would be no true ending. In Into the Darkness one day the killer would retire to raise orchids or turn into smoke, and then all meaning would be gone; the melody would trickle out in meaningless random sounds. For his job was to catalogue the killings, and the only truly satisfactory conclusion to that task would be to enter one of those dripping slum basements and find the killer waiting for him with a raised knife.

Now he could see that the yellow lights by the roadside were lanterns—little lanterns sending out beams of light.

Only when he had come directly abreast of the lanterns could he see who held them up. His son Robbie, whose name was Babar, stood by the roadside holding one of the lanterns aloft. Exactly his size, gigantic, the rabbit Ernie stood beside him on his hind legs, holding out the other lantern.

The boy named Babar and the rabbit turned their soft eyes on the man driving past; their lamps gleamed.

He felt a great spreading peace.

The car pulled past the tender boy and the big upright rabbit, and for a long time he could see the lights of their lanterns in his rearview mirror. The sense of peace stayed with him until the road ended at the bank of a great grey rushing river. He got out of his car and watched the great muscular river move past, rolling up a huge sinewy