Koko

away to greet the reporters running hunched over through the grass.

5

And everything else flowed from what came out of Harry Beevers’ mouth. Newsweek and Time and stories in hundreds of daily newspapers, a blip passing over the screen of what is seen and read and talked about. Then only a cooling memory, stored in old photographs, of a mountain of rice and a tall pile of Russian weapons which had been carried out of a cave by Spanky Burrage and Tina Pumo and the other members of the platoon. Ia Thuc was a VC village, and everybody in it wanted to kill American soldiers. But there were no photographs of the bodies of thirty children because the only bodies found at Ia Thuc were those that had been incinerated in a ditch—three children, two males and a female, roughly thirteen years of age—and that of a single small boy of perhaps seven, also incinerated. Later the body of a young woman was found on the hillside.

After the reporters left, the old people were relocated to a refugee camp at An Lo. The Tin Man and those above him described this action as “penalizing the insurgents and depriving the VC of a recruiting base.” The crops were poisoned and the people, Buddhists, taken from their family burial plots. They had seen this coming from the moment their houses were burned—maybe from the moment Beevers had killed the sow. They disappeared into An Lo, fifteen old people among thousand of refugees.

When Poole and Tim Underhill had gone deep into the cave a cloud of transparent moths had filled the air around them, buffeting against them, flattening out over their mouths and eyes, then beating off again—Poole waved his hands before his face and moved as quickly as he could, Underhill behind him, into another section of the cave, which the moths did not enter. This was the chamber where the firing had taken place. The blood was already disappearing into the bullet-pocked wall the way Spitalny’s skin eruptions, his yams, leeches, eggs, and almonds had faded back into his body. The cave folded and unfolded, branching apart like a maze. Farther on they found another large store of rice, farther on a little wooden desk and chair—the desk looked as though it had been taken from one of Poole’s own grade school classrooms in Greenwich, Connecticut. It began to seem hopeless, they would never find the end of it: it seemed to have no end at all, but to twist back around in on itself.

They came out again past the chamber where the empty metal casings lay like thrown coins, and Underhill inhaled deeply and shook his head. Poole smelled it too. The chamber was filled with a complex odor compounded of terror, blood, gunpowder, and some other odor Poole could identify only in negatives. It was not piss, it was not shit, it was not sweat or rot or fungus or even the reeking dew all animals exude when they are frightened unto death, but something beneath all these. The indefinable odor in the stone chamber stank of pain to him. It stank like the place where Injun Joe had made Tom Sawyer watch him rape Becky Thatcher before he killed them both.

He and Underhill finally came back out into the main part of the cave. M.O. Dengler was saying something to Spitalny as he carried a case of Russian rifles out through the opening.

“A man of sorrow and acquainted with grief,” Spitalny replied, or more likely, repeated. “A man of sorrow and acquainted with grief, a man of sorrow and acquainted with dickheads, Jesus Christ.”

“Calm down, Vic,” Dengler said. “Whatever it was, it was a long time ago.” Then he wobbled, and his rear end dropped as if a strong hand had suddenly pushed his head down into his neck. Dengler’s legs folded sideways, and the case of rifles landed with a loud thud, Dengler nearly soundlessly. Spitalny heard the crash as the box of rifles landed, turned around, looked down, and continued carrying his box of rifles toward the stack.

“There are no children!” Beevers was yelling. “Not in war! No children!” Well, he was right: there were no children. For the first but not the last time, Poole wondered if the villagers from An Lac had taken more children out through another entrance.

Dengler groaned as Peters unwrapped the final length of gauze. Everybody backed up for a second. Compact as a puff of cigarette smoke, a deep brown odor floated up from the exposed wound.

“You’re out of here for a couple of days,” Peters said.

“Where’d the lieutenant go?” Dengler’s eyes moved almost fearfully from side to side while Peters rewrapped his arm.

“Did you see the bats flying out of his mouth?” Dengler asked.

“I gave him something a little extra,” Peters said. “Tide him over.”

Into the darkness, which tides us over.

1

Groggy with cognac and too little sleep, they landed in San Francisco at some hour that seemed like four or five in the morning but was actually noon. In a vast hall hundreds of passengers milled around a luggage carousel and watched their bags thump and slide down a metal ramp onto a moving belt. His beard trimmed and his thinning hair cut short, Tim Underhill looked gaunt and tired. His shoulders were as stooped as an old scholar’s, and now his questing face was also a scholar’s. Poole wondered if it had been a mistake to bring him back with them.

As they moved toward Customs and Immigration with their bags, a uniformed man appeared among them, awarding instant customs clearance to a few of the passengers. The people he selected to receive this convenience were invariably middle-aged males who looked like corporate executives. Koko had been here, Poole thought while the official’s eye rested upon him and moved on. Koko stood on this spot and saw everything I am seeing. He left a flight from Bangkok or Singapore and changed to a New York flight where he met a stewardess named Lisa Mayo and an unpleasant young millionaire. He talked to the unpleasant young man on the flight, and shortly after they landed at JFK airport, he killed him. I bet he did, I bet he did, I bet, I bet—

He stood right where I’m standing, Poole thought. His skin shivered.

Harry Beevers bounced up off his seat as soon as the others found their departure gate in the United terminal. He stepped over the semicircle of suitbags and carry-on luggage arranged before him and began tacking toward them through the rows of seats.

They met before the desk, and Beevers silently braced Poole at arm’s length, then embraced him, enclosing him in the odors of alcohol, cologne, and airline soap. Poole supposed he was being commended for actions in the field.

Beevers melodramatically dropped his hands from Michael’s arms and turned to Conor. But before Beevers could give the French Foreign Legion seal of approval to him too, Conor stuck out his hand. Beevers gave in and shook it. Finally he turned to Tim Underhill. “So this is you,” he said.

Underhill almost laughed out loud. “Disappointed?”

Poole had wondered all during their flight how Beevers would handle Underhill’s arrival among them as an innocent man. There was the small possibility that he would do something really nutty, such as put handcuffs on him and make a citizen’s arrest. Harry Beevers’ fantasies died hard, and Poole did not expect him to give up this one, which had been the foundation of many others, without being paid heavily for its loss.

But the good grace, and even the good sense of his response surprised Poole. “Not if you’re going to help us, I’m not.”

“I want to stop him too, Harry. Of course I’ll help you, however I can.”

“Are you clean?” Beevers asked.

“I’n not doing too bad,” Underhill said.

“Okay. But there’s one more thing. I want your agreement that you won’t use any of this Koko material in a work of nonfiction. You can write all the fiction you want—I don’t care about that. But I have to have the nonfiction rights to this.”

“Sure,” Underhill said. “I couldn’t write nonfiction if I tried. And I won’t sue you if you won’t sue me.”

“We can work together,” Beevers declared. He dragged Underhill too in for a hug and said he was on the team. “Let’s make some serious money, okay?”

*  *  *

Michael sat next to Beevers on the flight to New York. Conor was in the window seat, and Tim Underhill sat just ahead of Michael. For a long time Beevers told improbable stories about his adventures in Taipei—stories about