Koko

The owner extended a fat hand. I am Chin Wu-Fu.

“Timothy Underhill,” Koko said, taking the man’s hand.

Chin gestured for him to follow. They went outside, Koko shrugging on his knapsack, to bustle down the block in the cold and turn into Bayard Street. Chin Wu-Fu hustled on ahead of him, hunching his shoulders against the cold. Koko strode on behind him for two blocks, and followed him as he turned north into narrow, empty Elizabeth Street. Halfway up the block, Chin ducked through a curved archway and disappeared. He ducked back out and waved Koko in through the arch, and then ushered Koko into a small enclosed brick courtyard that smelled faintly of cooking oil. Koko saw that the court would always be sunless. Surrounded by tenement walls and fire escapes that clung like giant mantises to the dingy brown brick, the court was no more than an insulating dead space between the tenements and Elizabeth Street. It was perfect. The Chinese man in the dark suit who had admitted him to this dead still space was pulling at one of the rough doors set into the tenement’s ground level.

We go downstairs, the owner said, and plunged into the cold darkness of the stairwell.

Koko followed.

At the bottom of the stairs Chin switched on a bare lightbulb and flipped through the hundreds of keys on a large ring before unlocking another door. Wordlessly, he swung it open and with a sweeping gesture motioned Koko inside.

Koko stepped into a clammy absolute blackness. He knew instantly that this was going to be just what he needed, and in the instant before Chin Wu-Fu groped for the cord and turned on the light within, he already saw the windowless rectangular chamber, the walls of a dark flaking green, the stained mattress on the floor, the population of roaches, the rickety chair, and the rusty sink and rough toilet behind a screen. He could not talk to the police, but he could find Michael Poole and Michael Poole was a man who would understand backwards and forwards. Harry Beevers was the road backwards, and Michael Poole was the narrow lonely path leading forward out of his cell. Another bare lightbulb came dimly to life. Down beneath the surface of Elizabeth Street, he felt on his skin the wind that blew across a frozen river. Pain was an ill-u-shun.

PART

SIX

THE REAL

RAW TASTE

“As bad as that?” Pat asked.

“You don’t know the half of it.” Judy Poole exhaled loudly, oddly satisfied to have at last arrived at this stage of their conversation. It was seven-thirty in the evening of Michael’s third day back home, and the two women had been speaking on the telephone for perhaps twenty-five minutes.

Judy heard a sigh from Pat Caldwell’s end of the line and quickly asked, “Am I keeping you from anything?”

“Not really.” She paused. “Harry’s only called me once, so I can’t report anything. They still plan to talk to the police, do they?”

This point had already been covered within ten minutes of the beginning of this conversation, and Judy took it up again impatiently. “I told you that—they think they know something about why Tina was murdered. Do you think they’re daydreaming? I want to think they’re daydreaming.”

“All this sounds so familiar,” Pat said. “Harry always knew the inside of a million stories.”

“Anyhow,” Judy said, reverting to an earlier theme, “you don’t know the worst. I don’t know what to do anymore. I’m incredibly anxious. I can hardly get out of bed in the mornings, and when school’s over and it’s time to come home, I dawdle and dawdle, but I’m hardly even aware of what I’m doing. I go around the school looking for litter. I check to make sure the classroom doors are locked. When I get home, it’s like, I don’t know, some kind of bomb went off and everything got leveled and there’s only this terrible silence left.”

Judy paused, less for effect than to accommodate the thought that had just surfaced within her. “You know what this is really like? It’s like what happened right after Robbie died. But at least then Michael stayed home, he went to work and he did what he was supposed to do. He was around at night. And I knew what was happening to him, so I knew what to do.”

“And you don’t know what to do now?”

“Obviously. That’s why I can hardly make myself come home at night. Michael and I have scarcely had a good conversation in … he hasn’t been working, I can tell you that. You think Harry’s been working? I doubt it.”

“Harry isn’t my problem,” Pat said promptly. “I wish him luck. I hope he sits down and starts to work. You know he lost his job, don’t you? My brother couldn’t put up with him any longer and let him go.”

“Your brother sounds like a great man, he always has,” Judy said, for a moment distracted by the old grievance that she had never met Pat Caldwell’s distinguished older brother.

“Well, I think Charles gave him some money too,” Pat said. “Charles has a good heart, basically. He doesn’t want Harry to suffer—my brother is what I guess you have to call a Christian gentleman.”

“A Christian gentleman,” Judy said. Envy made her voice go dull and flat. “Are there still such creatures?”

“In the ranks of fifty-eight-year-old heads of law firms, I guess.”

“Can I ask you a personal question? I promise you, it’s not just out of curiosity.” She paused, either for effect or out of curiosity. “I want to know about your divorce.”

“What do you want to know about it?”

“More or less everything.”

“Oh, poor Judy,” Pat said. “I see, I guess. It’s never easy—not even getting divorced from Harry Beevers was easy.”

“He was unfaithful.”

“Of course he was unfaithful,” Pat said. “Everybody’s unfaithful.” She did not sound at all cynical, saying this.

“Michael wasn’t.”

“But you were, which I assume is one of the real topics of this conversation. But if you want to know why I left Harry, I suppose I don’t mind talking about it a little bit. In a way, Ia Thuc was really the reason.”

“Oh, come on,” Judy said.

“What he did at Ia Thuc. I don’t even know what it was. I don’t think anyone else knows, either.”

“You mean he killed those children after all?”

“I’m sure he killed the children, Judy, but I’m talking about something else. I don’t know what, and I don’t want to know, either. After we had been married ten years, I took a look at him tying his bow tie in the mirror one