Koko
The bartender winked at Harry, then stepped backwards. Harry was startled to find himself looking at the spiteful, jealous faces of demons with cat’s whiskers and long faces, taped to the mirror. Until Jimmy Lah moved away, they had been hidden from view. Harry Beevers felt a surprising familiarity with these demons. He knew that he had seen spiteful faces like these somewhere in I Corps, but could not remember where.
It was four o’clock and Harry was killing time before calling his ex-wife. Jimmy Lah was pouring some soapy blender concoction for the bar’s only customer besides himself, a fruitcake with a roosterish yellow Mohawk and oversized pink eyeglasses.
Harry swiveled around on his stool to face the large rectangular dining room of Pumo’s restaurant. Before him were knobby bamboo chairs at glass-topped bamboo tables. Ceiling fans with blades like polished brown oars revolved slowly overhead. The white walls had been painted with murals of giant fronds and palm leaves. The place looked as if Sidney Greenstreet would walk in at any moment.
Behind a counter at the far end of the restaurant a door swung open, revealing two Vietnamese men in white aprons chopping vegetables. Behind them pots bubbled on a gas range. Harry caught a glimpse, unexpected as a mirage, of a fluttering translucent curtain behind the range. He leaned forward to get a better look and felt a familiar inward flinch as he saw Vinh, Pumo’s head chef, darting toward the open door. Vinh was from An Lat, an I Corps village only a few klicks from Ia Thuc.
Then Harry saw who had opened the door.
Just beneath Harry’s normal field of vision, a small, smiling Vietnamese girl was moving cautiously but swiftly into the restaurant. She had nearly reached the counter when Vinh managed to grab her shoulder. The child’s mouth became an astonished O, and Vinh hauled her back into the kitchen. The doors swung shut on a burst of Vietnamese.
In an eerily perfect auditory hallucination, Harry Beevers could hear M.O. Dengler panting just behind his right shoulder, along with the sounds of distant fires and faraway screams. Pale faces shone dimly at the center of a vast darkness. He remembered where he had seen the demons’ faces before – on small black-haired women, rushing up with their fists raised. You numbah ten! You numbah ten!
An abyss had just yawned before Harry Beevers. For a moment he felt the terror of not existing, a sickening feeling that he had never existed in the way simpler, healthier people existed.
He heard himself asking what a kid was doing in the kitchen.
Jimmy stepped nearer. ‘That’s Vinh’s little girl, Helen. Both of them temporarily staying here. Helen was probably looking for Maggie – they’re old buddies.’
‘Tina must have a lot on his mind,’ Harry said, beginning to feel more in control of himself.
‘You see the Village Voice?’
Harry shook his head. He realized that he had unconsciously pushed his hands into his pockets to hide their shaking. Jimmy searched around behind the bar until he found the paper in a stack of menus beside the cash register and slid it across the bar with the back page up. VOICE BULLETIN BOARD, read the headline above three dense columns of personals in varying type sizes. Harry saw that two of the ads had been circled.
The first message read: Foodcat. Missing damned you. Will be Mike Todd Room 10 Wed. The Wanderer. The second message was in caps. JUST DECIDED UNABLE TO DECIDE. MAY BE MIKE TODD, MAYBE NOT. LA-LA.
‘See what I mean?’ Jimmy asked. He began grabbing glasses from below the bar and vigorously swirling them around in a sink.
‘Your sister placed both these ads?’
‘Sure,’ Jimmy said. ‘Whole family’s crazy.’
‘I feel sorry for Tina.’
Jimmy grinned, then looked up from the sink. ‘How’s the doctor these days? Any change?’
‘You know him,’ Harry said. ‘After his son died, he stopped being fun to hang out with. Totalemente.’
After a second, Jimmy asked. ‘He going on your hunting trip?’
‘I wish you’d call it a mission,’ Harry snapped. ‘Listen, isn’t Tina ever going to come up for air?’
‘Maybe later,’ Jimmy said, looking away.
Pumo had two Vietnamese living in his restaurant, he was tearing his kitchen apart to kill a few bugs, and he was acting like a teenager over Maggie Lah. ‘La-La,’ for sure. Beans Beevers’ old comrade had become just another…for a second he searched for Dengler’s word, then had it: toon.
‘Tell him he ought to show up at the Mike Todd Room with a fucking knife in his belt.’
‘Maggie will get a big kick out of that.’
Harry looked at his watch.
‘You planning to get to Taipei on this mission, Harry?’ asked Jimmy, showing a trace of real interest for the first time.
Beevers felt a premonitory tingle. ‘Aren’t you and Maggie from Taipei?’ A nerve jumped in his temple.
Then he got it! Who was to say that Tim Underhill still lived in Singapore? Harry had been to Taipei on his R & R, and he could easily see Tim Underhill choosing to live in the raunchy amalgam of Chinatown and Dodge City he remembered. He saw that Divine Justice, mistakenly thought to be dozing, had of course been wide awake all along. It was all ordained, everything had been thought out beforehand. God had planned it all.
Harry settled back down on his bar stool, ordered another martini, and put off his confrontation with his ex-wife for another twenty minutes while he listened to Jimmy Lah describe the seamier aspects of night life in the capital city of Taiwan.
Jimmy set a steaming cup of coffee before him. Harry folded the napkin into the inside pocket of his suit and glanced up at the angry demons. He saw a child rushing toward him with an upraised knife, and his heart speeded up. He smiled and scalded his tongue with hot coffee.
2
A short time later Harry stood at the pay telephone next to the men’s room in a narrow downstairs corridor. He first tried finding his ex-wife at the Maria Farr Gallery, which was on the ground floor of a former warehouse on Spring Street in SoHo. Pat Caldwell Beevers had gone to private school with Maria Farr, and when the gallery had seemed to be failing, took it on as one of her pet private charities. (In the early days of his wife’s involvement with the art gallery, Harry had endured dinner parties with artists whose work consisted of rusting pipes strewn randomly across the floor, of a row of neat aluminum slabs stood on end, of pink wartencrusted columns that reminded Harry of giant erections. He still could not believe that the perpetrators of these adolescent japes earned real money.)
Maria Farr herself answered the telephone. This was a bad sign.
He said, ‘Maria, how nice to hear your voice again. It’s me.’ In fact, the sound of her voice, all the consonants hard as pebbles, reminded Harry of how much he disliked her.
‘I have nothing to say to you, Harry,’ Maria said.
‘I’m sure that’s a blessing to both of us,’ Harry said. ‘Is Pat still in the gallery?’
‘I wouldn’t tell you if she were.’ Maria hung up.
Another call, to Information, got him the number of Rilke Street, the literary magazine that was Pat’s other ongoing charity. Its editorial offices were actually the Duane Street loft of William Tharpe, the magazine’s editor. Because Harry had spent fewer evenings with Tharpe and his impoverished contributors than with Maria Farr and her artists, Tharpe had always taken Harry more or less at face value.
‘Rilke Street, William Tharpe speaking.’
‘Billy, my boy, how do you do? This is Harry Beevers, your best flunky’s best ex-husband. I was hoping to find her there.’
‘Harry!’ said Tharpe. ‘You’re in luck. Pat and I are pasting up issue thirty-five right this minute. Going to be a beautiful number. Are you coming down this way?’
‘If invited,’ he said. ‘Do you think I might speak to the dear Patricia?’
In a moment Harry’s ex-wife had taken the telephone. ‘How nice of you to call, Harry. I was just thinking about you. Are you getting on all right?’
So she knew that Charles had sacked him.
‘Fine, fine, everything’s great,’ he said. ‘I find myself in the mood for a celebration. How about a drink or dinner after you’re through tickling old Billy’s balls?’
Pat had a short discussion with William Tharpe, most of it inaudible to Harry, then returned the receiver to her mouth and said, ‘An hour, Harry.’
‘No wonder I’ll always adore you,’ he said, and Pat quickly hung up.
3
When his cab passed a liquor store, Harry asked the driver to wait while he went in and bought a bottle. He jumped out, crossed the sidewalk, his coattails billowing, and entered a barnlike, harshly lighted interior with wide aisles and pastel blue neon signs announcing IMPORTED and BEER and FINE CHAMPAGNES. He started moving toward the FINE CHAMPAGNES, but slowed down when he saw three young women with eggbeater hair and antisocial clothing preceding him up the aisle. Punk girls always excited Harry. The three girls ahead of Harry in the aisle of the liquor store were consulting in whispers and giggles over a bin of inexpensive red wines, their fluffy multicolored heads bobbing like toxic orchids to some private joke.
One of them was blonde-and-pink-haired, and nearly as tall as Harry. She picked up a bottle of burgundy and slowly revolved it in her long fingers.
All three girls were dressed in torn black garments that looked as if they had been picked up off the street. The shortest of them bent over to examine the bottle being caressed by the tallest girl and pointed a round bottom toward Harry. Her skin was a sandy, almost golden shade. For an instant Harry was aware only that he knew who she was. Then Harry saw her profile printed sharply against a blue neon background. The girl was Maggie Lah.
Harry stepped forward, grinning, aware of the contrast between his suit and the girls’ rags.
Maggie broke away from the others and glided to the top of the aisle. The other two hurried after. The tall one reached out and closed a white hand on Maggie’s shoulder. Harry saw a sunken cheek covered with dark stubble. The tall girl was a man. Harry stopped moving and his smile froze on his face. Maggie rubbed the side of her hand against the man’s stubbly cheek. The three of them continued up to the top of the aisle and turned toward FINE CHAMPAGNES without seeing Harry.
Maggie and her friends veered into the side aisle lined with refrigerated cases. The neon sign shed pale blue light over them. Harry remembered that he had entered this store to buy a bottle of champagne as a sweetener for Pat when he saw Maggie open the glass doors of a refrigerated case. On her face was an expression of sweetly concentrated attention. She plucked out a bottle of Dom Perignon and slid it instantly into her clothes, where it disappeared. The theft of the bottle had taken something like a second and a half. Harry had a sudden picture, vividly clear, of the dark, cold bottle of Dom Perignon nestled between Maggie’s breasts.
Without any premeditation of any kind, Harry slammed open the glass door and yanked out another bottle of Dom Perignon. He remembered the mystically smiling face of the Vietnamese girl moving toward him through Saigon’s kitchen door. He shoved the bottle beneath his suit jacket, where it bulged. Maggie Lah and her ratty friends had begun to stroll toward the rank of cash registers at the front of the store. Harry thrust his hand inside his coat, upended the bottle, and jammed its neck into his trousers. Then he buttoned his jacket and coat. The bulge had become only slightly conspicuous. He began following Maggie toward the cash registers.
The clerks at the few working registers punched buttons and pushed wine bottles down the moving belts. Maggie and the others sailed past an empty counter and a uniformed security guard lounging against the plate-glass window. As Harry watched, they vanished through the door.
‘Hey, Maggie!’ he yelled. He trotted past the nearest unattended cash register. ‘Maggie!’
The guard looked up and frowned. Harry pointed toward the door. Now everybody at the front of the store was staring at him. ‘I saw an old friend,’ Harry said to the guard, who looked away without responding and leaned back against the window.
By the time Harry got to the sidewalk, Maggie was gone.
All the way to Duane Street, Harry searched the sidewalks for her. When the cab stopped and Harry stood on the stamped metal walkway before the warehouse that housed William Tharpe’s loft, he thought – where I’m going there are a million girls like that.
4
Harry Beevers presented the chilled bottle of Dom Perignon to an astonished, gratified William Tharpe, and spent five or ten minutes in hypocritical raptures over the forthcoming number of Rilke Street. Then he took plain, greying Pat Caldwell Beevers, who was beginning more than ever to suggest an English sheep-dog that had been mooning around him half his life, out to a TriBeCa restaurant of the sort he had learned from Tim Underhill to call piss-elegant. The walls were red lacquer. Discreet lamps with brass shades sat on each table. Portly waiters hovered. Harry thought of Maggie Lah, of her golden skin, of champagne bottles and other interesting things between her small but undoubtedly affecting breasts. All the while he elaborated various necessary fictions concerning his ‘mission.’ Now and then, although Pat frequently smiled and seemed to enjoy her wine, her soup, her fish, he thought she knew that he was lying. Like Jimmy Lah, she asked him how Michael looked, how he thought he was doing, and Harry answered fine, fine. Her smiles seemed to Harry to be full of regret – whether for him, for herself, for Michael Poole, or the world at large, he could not tell. When the moment came when he asked for money, she said only, ‘How much?’ Around two thousand. She reached into her bag, took out her checkbook and fountain pen, and without expression of any kind on her face wrote out a check for three thousand dollars.
She passed the check across the table. Her face was now flushed in a mottled band from cheekbone to cheekbone, Harry thought unattractively so.
‘Of course I consider this strictly a loan,’ he said. ‘You’re doing a lot of good with this money, Pat. I mean that.’
‘So the government wants you to track down this man to see if he might be a murderer?’
‘In a nutshell. Of course it’s a semi-private operation, which is how I’ll be able to do the book deals, the film deals, and so on. You can appreciate the need for strict confidentiality.’
‘Of course.’
‘Well, I know you could always read between the lines, but…’ He let the sentence complete itself. ‘I’d be kidding you if I said there wasn’t quite a bit of potential danger involved in this.’
‘Oh, yes,’ Pat said, nodding.
‘I shouldn’t even be thinking like this, but if I don’t come back, I think it would be fitting for me to be buried at Arlington.’
She nodded again.
Harry gave up and began looking around the room for the waiter.
Pat startled him by saying, ‘There are still times when I’m sorry that you ever set foot in Vietnam.’
‘What’s the point,’ he asked. ‘I’m me, I always was me, I’ve never been anything but me.’
They parted outside the restaurant.
After Harry had gone a short distance down the sidewalk, he turned around, smiling, knowing that Pat was watching him walk away. But she was moving straight ahead, her shoulders slumped, her overstuffed, lumpy bag swinging at her side.
He went to his bank and let himself into the empty vestibule with his bank card. There he used the cash machine to deposit Pat’s check and one other he had obtained that day and to withdraw four hundred dollars in cash. He bought a copy of Screw at a corner newsstand and folded it under his arm so that no one would be able to identify it. Harry walked back through the cold to West 24th Street and the studio apartment he had found shortly after Pat told him, more forcefully than she had ever said anything in the entire course of their marriage, that she had to have a divorce.
7 Conor at Work
1
It was funny, Conor thought, how ever since the reunion things from the old days kept coming back to him, as if Vietnam had been his real life and everything since was just the afterglow. It was hard for him to keep his mind on the present – back then kept breaking in, sometimes even physically. A few days before, an old man had innocently handed him a photograph taken by SP4 Cotton of Tim Underhill with his arm around one of his ‘flowers’.
It was four o’clock in the afternoon, and Conor was lying in bed with his first serious hangover since the dedication of the Memorial. Everybody thought you got better at handling pressure as you got older, but in Conor’s experience everybody had it backwards.
Three days earlier, Conor had been in the middle of the fifth week of a carpentry job that should have paid the rent at least until Poole and Beevers put their Singapore trip together. On Mount Avenue in Hampstead, only ten minutes from Conor’s tiny, almost comically underfurnished apartment in South Norwalk, a millionaire lawyer in his sixties named Charles (‘Call me Charlie!’) Daisy had just remarried for the third time. For the sake of his new wife, Daisy was redoing the entire ground floor of his mansion – kitchen, sitting room, breakfast room, dining room, lounge, morning room, laundry room, and servants’ quarters. Daisy’s contractor, a white-bearded old-timer named Ben Roehm, had hired Conor when his usual crew proved too small. Conor had worked with Ben Roehm three or four times over the years. Like a lot of master carpenters who were geniuses at manipulating wood, Roehm could be moody and unpredictable, but he made carpentry more than just something you did to pay the rent. Working with Roehm was as close to pleasure as work could get, in Conor’s opinion.
And the first day Conor was on the job, Charlie Daisy came home early from the office and walked into the sitting room where Conor and Ben Roehm were laying a new oak floor. He stood watching them for a long time. Conor got a little nervous. He figured maybe the client didn’t like the way he looked. To cut down the inevitable agony of kneeling on hardwood all day, Conor had tied thick rags around his knees. He’d knotted a speckled bandanna around his forehead to keep the sweat out of his eyes. (The bandanna made him think of Underhill, of flowers and flowing talk.) Conor thought he probably looked a little loose for Charlie Daisy. He was not completely surprised when Daisy took a step forward and coughed into his fist. ‘Ahem!’ He and Roehm shot each other a quick glance. Clients, especially Mount Avenue-type clients, did nutty things right out of the blue. ‘You, young man,’ Daisy said. Conor looked up, blinking, painfully aware that he was down on all fours like a raggedy dog in front of this dapper little millionaire. ‘Am I right about something?’ Daisy asked. ‘You were in Vietnam, right?’
‘Yes, sir,’ Conor said, prepared for trouble.
‘Good man,’ Daisy. He reached down to shake Conor’s hand. ‘I knew I was right.’
It turned out that his only son was another name on the wall – killed in Hue during the Tet offensive.
For a couple of weeks it was probably the best job of Conor’s life. Almost every day he learned something new from Ben Roehm, little things that had as much to do with concentration and respect as with technique. A few days after shaking Conor’s hand, Charlie Daisy showed up at the end of the day carrying a grey suede box and a leather photo album. Conor and Roehm were framing a new partition in the kitchen, which looked like a bomb-site – chopped-up floor, dangling wires, jutting pipes. Daisy picked his way toward them, saying, ‘Until I got married again, this was the only heart I had.’ The box turned out to be a case for Daisy’s son’s medals. Laid out on lustrous satin were a Purple Heart, a Bronze Star, and a Silver Star. The album was full of pictures from Nam.
Old Daisy chattered away, pointing at images of muddy M-48 tanks and shirtless teenagers with their arms around one another’s shoulders. Time travel ain’t just made up out of nothing, Conor thought. He was sorry that the perky old lawyer didn’t know enough to shut up and let the pictures talk for themselves.
Because the pictures did talk. Hue was in I Corps, Conor’s Vietnam, and everything Conor looked at was familar.
Here was the A Shau Valley – the mountains folding and folding into themselves, and a line of men climbing uphill in a single winding column, planting their feet in that same old mud. (Dengler: Yea, though I walk through the A Shau Valley, I shall fear no evil, because I’m the craziest son of a bitch in the valley.) Boy soldiers flashing the peace sign in a jungle clearing, one with a filthy strip of gauze around his naked upper arm. Conor saw Dengler’s burning, joyous face in place of the boy’s own.
Conor looked at a haggard, whiskered face trying to grin over the barrel of an M-60 mounted in a big green Huey. Peters and Herb Recht had died in a chopper identical to this one, spilling plasma, ammunition belts, six other men, and themselves over a hillside twenty klicks from Camp Crandall.
Conor found himself staring at the cylindrical rounds in the M-60’s belt.
‘I guess you recognize that copter,’ Daisy said.
Conor nodded.
‘Saw plenty of those in your day.’
It was a question, but again he could do no more than nod.
Two young soldiers so fresh they could not have been more than a week in the field sat on a grassy dike and tilted canteens to their mouths. ‘Those boys were killed alongside my son,’ Daisy said. A wet wind ruffled their short hair. Lean oxen wandered in the blasted field behind them. Conor tasted plastic – that curdled deathlike taste of warm water in a plastic canteen.
With the entranced, innocent voice of a man speaking more to himself than his listeners, Daisy supplied a commentary on men hauling 3.5-inch rocket shells to the roof of a building, a bunch of privates lollygagging in front of a wooden shack soon to become the headquarters of PFC Wilson Manly, soldiers smoking weed, soldiers asleep in a dusty wasteland that looked like the outskirts of LZ Sue, hatless grinning soldiers posing with impassive Vietnamese girls…
‘Here’s some guy, I don’t know who,’ Daisy said. Once Conor saw the face, he was barely able to hear the lawyer’s voice. ‘Big so-and-so, wasn’t he? I can guess what he was up to with that little girl.’
It was an honest mistake. His new wife had jumped-started Daisy’s gonads – why else was he coming home at four-thirty in the afternoon?
Tim Underhill, bandanna around his neck, was the big soldier in the photograph. And the ‘girl’ was one of his flowers – a young man so feminine he might have been an actual girl. Smiling at the photographer, they stood on a narrow street crammed with jeeps and rickshaws in what must have been Da Nang or Hue.
‘Son?’ Daisy was saying. ‘You okay, son?’
For a second Conor wondered if Daisy would give him Underbill’s picture.
‘You look a little white, son,’ Daisy said.
‘Don’t worry,’ Conor said. ‘I’m fine.’
He merely scanned the rest of the photographs.
‘The truth is in the pudding,’ he said. ‘You can’t forget this kind of shit.’
Then Ben Roehm decided he needed another new man to do the taping in the kitchen and hired Victor Spitalny.
Conor had been a few minutes late to work. When he came into the ruined kitchen a stranger with a long streaky-blond ponytail was slouching against the skeletal framing of the new partition. The new man wore a raveled turtleneck under a plaid shirt. A worn toolbelt hung beneath his beerbelly. There was a new scab on the bridge of his nose, old scabs the color of overdone toast on the knuckles of his left hand. Red lines threaded the whites of his eyes. Conor’s memory released a bubble filled with the indelible odor of burning kerosene-soaked shit. Vietnam, a ground-pounder.