Koko

drinking snake’s blood and having incredible sex with beautiful whores, actresses, and models. Then he leaned toward Michael and whispered. “We have to be careful with this guy, Michael. We can’t trust him, that’s the bottom line. Why do you think I’m inviting him to stay with me? I’ll be able to keep my eye on him.”

Poole nodded wearily.

In a voice loud enough to be overheard, Beevers said, “I want you guys to think about something. We are going to be seeing the police at some point after we get back, and that gives us a problem. How much do we tell them?”

Underhill twisted around in his seat to look back with an interested, quizzical expression.

“I think we should consider holding to a certain confidentiality here,” Beevers said. “We started off on this thing by wanting to find Koko ourselves, and that’s how we want to finish up. We ought to stay a step ahead of the police all the way.”

“Okay, I guess,” Conor said.

“I hope I have the agreement of the rest of you on this point.”

“We’ll see,” Poole said.

“I don’t suppose we’re exactly talking about obstruction of justice,” Underhill said.

“I don’t care what you call it,” Beevers said. “All I’m saying is that we hold back on one or two details. Which is what the police do all the time as a matter of course. We hold back a little. And when we come up with a course of action, we keep it to ourselves.”

“Course of action?” Conor asked. “What can we do?”

Beevers asked them to consider a few possibilities. “For instance, we have two bits of information the police do not have. We know that Koko is Victor Spitalny, and we know that a man named Tim Underhill is in New York—or soon will be—and not back in Bangkok.”

“You don’t want to tell the cops that we’re looking for Spitalny?” Conor asked.

“We can play a little dumb. They can find out who is missing and who isn’t.” He gave Michael a superior little smile. “It is the other bit of information that I see being most useful to us. Spitalny used this man’s name”—he pointed at Underhill—“didn’t he? To get the reporters to come to him? I think he did, based on what we found out at Goodwood Park. So I say let’s turn the tables on him.”

“And how would you do that, Harry?” Underhill asked.

“In a way, Pumo gave me the idea when we all met in Washington back in November. He was talking about his girlfriend, remember?”

“Hey, I remember,” Conor said. “He was talking to me. That little Chinese girl was driving him out of his gourd. She used to put ads in some paper for him. Signed them ‘Half Moon.’ ”

“Tres bon, tres, tres bon,” Beevers said.

“You want to put ads in the Village Voice?” asked Michael.

“This is America,” Beevers said. “Let’s advertise. Let’s put Tim Underhill’s name up all over town. If anybody asks about it, we can say that we’re looking for someone who used to be in our old unit. And that way we never use Koko’s real name. I think we’ll shake a couple of peaches out of the tree.”

2

The Star Limousine was actually a van with three rows of seats and a luggage rack on the roof. Even inside the van the air was very cold, and Poole pulled his coat tightly around himself and wished that he had packed a sweater. He felt isolated and strange, and the country outside the windows of the van seemed as foreign as it was familiar. He seemed to have been gone a long time.

Buttoned up against the cold, ugly row houses huddled on the desolate land on either side of the highway. The air had already turned dark. Nobody in the van spoke, not even the married couples.

Michael remembered seeing Robbie in a dream, holding up a lantern.

Coming home was always the same. Coming home, there was always the fear factor. Blood and Marbles were always home. You had to make straight in the desert a highway, yet once a little while, and then you could shake the heavens and the earth, the sea and the dry land. Make straight in the desert, for who shall abide the day of his coming?

You came home to what was undone and rebuked you, to what had been badly or ill done, which spat you out of its mouth, and to that which had been done which should not have been done, which came at you with a board, a strap, a brick.

All this was in a book, even Blood and Marbles were in a book.

In this book the cave was a river where a small naked boy walked smeared with frozen mud. (But it was a woman’s blood, it was.) He had read this book backwards and forwards. That was one thing they said at home— backwards and forwards. Koko remembered buying that book because once in another life he had known the author and soon the book revolved and grew in his hands and became a book about himself. Koko had felt as if he were in free fall—as if someone had thrown him out of a helicopter. His body had left itself, in familiar total fear his body had stood up and walked out into the book in his hands.

Fear total and familiar.

He had remembered the most terrible thing in the world. This was true—there was a most terrible thing. The most terrible thing was how his body had learned to leave itself. It was Blood opening the bedroom door at night and sidling into the little room. The hot wet smell of the eternal world on his body. His blond hair almost silver in the darkness.

Are you awake?

Anyone awake could see the police cars, anyone awake could see what was happening. Koko stood on the corner looking at the two cars pulled up before the YMCA. They expected him to just walk in there.

It was the black man, who said, Killin’ is a see-yun. He had gone and told Mr. Partridge, who sat at a desk downstairs, about the room. Mr. Partridge had walked into Koko’s room and Koko’s body had walked out of his body.

—What is the meaning of this? Mr. Partridge had said. You crazies always end up here, don’t you have anywhere else to go?

—This is my place, not yours, Koko said.

—We’ll see about that, said Mr. Partridge, and walked out, not before taking another long look at the walls.

The children turned and cried after him.

—You ain’t no travel agent, the black man said. You ain’t got but a one-way ticket yourself.

Koko turned away and began walking downtown toward the subway. He carried everything essential with him in the knapsack now, and there were always empty places.

Then he remembered that he had lost the Rearing Elephant cards, and he stopped walking and put his hand over his stomach. Blood towered up before him, his hair silvery and his voice flat and cold and crazy with rage.

You lost them?

His entire life seemed as heavy as an anvil he carried in his arms. He wanted to drop the anvil. Someone else could take up the job now—after all he had done, it would be easy for someone else to finish up. He could quit. He could turn himself in, or he could flee.

Koko knew one thing—he could get on an airplane right now and go anywhere. For Honduras, you went to New Orleans. He had looked it up. You went to New Orleans and there was your plane. Bird = Freedom.

An image from the book that had so surprised him floated up into his mind, and he saw himself as a lost child streaked with frozen mud wandering beside a cold, dirty river in the middle of a city. Dogs and wolves turned their sharpened teeth toward him, the door cracked open, through the frozen mud emerged the tips of fingers turning green with putrefaction. Feelings of loss and terror swarmed at him, and Koko staggered toward the shelter of a doorway.

The dead children held their spindly hands up before their faces.