Koko. Peter Straub

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СКАЧАТЬ I mean I can’t tell you.’

      The cabbie drove the rest of the way in boiling silence. You coulda told me something. Gimme a little gore, why don’t you? Lemme see that good old guilt, lemme see that fine old rapture. The past is in the past because that’s where it belongs. Don’t bother, really. You were in my way, so fuck ya.

      I’ll take a triple Finlandia martini on the rocks, please, hold the olives, hold the vermouth, please, hold the rocks, please, and get the same thing for my four hundred buddies in here, please, They might look a little funny, but they’re my tribe.

      ‘This okay?’ the cabbie asked. Beside the car was a wall of people. Michael could see flags and men carrying banners suspended between poles. He paid the driver and left the cab.

      Michael could see over the heads of most of the people lining the sidewalk. Here the tribe had gathered, all right. Men who had once been soldiers, most of them dressed as though they were still soldiers, filled the width of Constitution Avenue. In platoon-sized groups interspersed with high school bands, they marched raggedly down the street. Other people stood on the sidewalk and watched them go by because they approved of what they were, what they meant because of what they had done. By standing there the bystanders applauded. Until now, Michael realized, he had resisted fully believing in the reality of this parade.

      It was not ticker tape and limousines on Fifth Avenue – the Iranian hostages had been given that one – but in most ways this was better, being more inclusive, less euphoric but more emotional. Michael edged through the people on the sidewalk. He stepped off the curb and fell in behind the nearest large and irregular group. Surprised tears instantly filled his eyes.

      The men before him were three-fourths jungle fighters with everything but Claymores and M-16s, and one-fourth pudgy WWII vets who looked like ex-boxers. Michael realized that the sun had come out only when he saw their long shadows stretching out to him on the street.

      He could see Tim Underhill, another long shadow, striding along with his belly before him and cigar smoke drifting in his wake. In his mind, Underhill was muttering obscene hilarious remarks about everyone in sight and wearing his summer uniform of a bandanna and blousy fatigue pants. A streak of mosquito blood was smeared across his left shoulder.

      In spite of everything, Michael wished that Underhill were beside him now. Michael realized that he had been considering Underhill – not brooding or thinking about him, considering him – since Harry Beevers had called him at the end of October to tell him about the newspaper articles his brother had sent him from Okinawa.

      In two separate incidents, three people, an English tourist in his early forties and an older American couple, had been murdered in Singapore just about the time the Iranian hostages had returned to America. The murders were thought to have been committed at least a week to ten days apart. The Englishman’s body was found on the grounds of the Goodwood Park Hotel, those of the American couple in a vacant bungalow in the Orchard Road section of the city. All three bodies had been mutilated, and on two of them had been found playing cards scrawled with an unusual and enigmatic name: Koko. Six months later, in the summer of 1981, two French journalists were found similarly mutilated in their Bangkok hotel room. Playing cards with the same name had been placed on the bodies. The only difference between these killings and those that had happened after Ia Thuc, a decade and a half earlier, was that the cards were not regimental, but ordinary commercial playing cards.

      Michael thought Underhill lived in Singapore. At least Underhill had always claimed that he was going to move there after he got out of the army. But Poole could not make the mental leap required to convict Tim Underhill of murder.

      Poole had known two extraordinary human beings during his time in Vietnam, two men who had stood out as exceptionally worthy of respect and affection in the half-circus, half-laboratory of human behaviour that a longstanding combat unit becomes. Tim Underhill was one, and a boy from Milwaukee named M.O. Dengler was the other. The bravest people he had ever known, Underhill and little Dengler had seemed perfectly at home in Vietnam.

      Tim Underhill had gotten himself back to the Far East as soon as possible after the war and had become a moderately successful crime novelist. M. O. Dengler was killed in a freakish street accident while on R&R in Bangkok with another soldier, named Victor Spitalny, and never returned from Asia at all.

      Oh, Michael Poole missed Underhill. He missed them both, Underhill and Dengler.

      The group of vets behind Michael, as scattered and varied as those before him, gradually caught up with him. He became aware that he was no longer marching alone, but was moving along between the crowds lining both sides of the street with a couple Dengler-sized boonie-rats, fiercely moustached, and an assortment of polyester-suited VFW types.

      As if he had been reading his thoughts, one of the Denglersized boonie-rats walking beside Michael sidled up to him and whispered something. Michael bent down, cupping his ear.

      ‘I was a hell of a fighter, man,’ the little ex-soldier whispered a shade louder. Tears gleamed in his eyes.

      ‘To tell you the truth,’ Michael said, ‘you remind me of one of the best soldiers I ever knew.’

      ‘No shit.’ The man nodded briskly. ‘What outfit was you in?’

      Poole named his division and his battalion.

      ‘What year?’ The man cocked his head to check out Poole’s face.

      ‘’Sixty-eight, ‘sixty-nine.’

      ‘Ia Thuc,’ the boonie-rat said immediately. ‘I remember that. That was you guys, right? Time magazine and all that shit?’

      Poole nodded.

      ‘Fuckin’-A. They shoulda give that Lieutenant Beevers a fuckin’ Medal of Honor for what he done, and then took it away again for shootin’ off his mouth in front of fuckin’ journalists,’ the boonie-rat said, sidling away with an easy fluid motion that would have been noiseless if they had been walking over brittle twigs.

      Two fat women with short fluffy hair, pastel pantsuits, and placid church-picnic faces were rhythmically waving between them a red banner with the stark black letters POW-MIA. A few paces behind marched two youngish ex-soldiers bearing another banner: COMPENSATE FOR AGENT ORANGE. Agent Orange –

      Victor Spitalny had tilted his head and stuck out his tongue, claiming that the stuff tasted good. You motherfuckers, drink it down! This shit’s boo-koo good for your insides! Washington and Spanky Burrage and Trotman, the black soldiers on the detail, cracked up, falling into the thick jungly growth beside the trail, slapping each other on the back and sides, repeating ‘boo-koo good for your insides’ and enraging Spitalny, whom they knew had only been trying, in his stupid way, to be funny. The smell of Agent Orange, halfway between gasoline and industrial solvent, stuck to all of them until sweat and insect repellent and trail grime either covered it up or washed it off.

      Poole caught himself wiping the palms of his hands together, but it was too late to wash away the Agent Orange.

      How does it feel to kill somebody? I can’t tell you because I can’t tell you. I think maybe I got killed myself, but not before I killed my son. You shit in your pants, man, you laugh so hard.

      3

      By the time Michael Poole reached the park, the parade had melted down into a wandering crowd, marchers and onlookers СКАЧАТЬ