Koko (49 page)

It was one of the easiest questions Poole had ever asked himself, and by the time
he was going up the stairs into his hotel, he had decided to keep quiet for a little
while about having found Tim Underhill. He would give himself a day before speaking
to Conor and summoning Beevers. In any case, he discovered as he passed the desk,
Conor was still out. Poole hoped that he was enjoying himself.

Two days later, it was as if the world had flipped inside-out. The suddenness of events
and the haste of Poole’s preparations had left him so breathless that he could still
not be certain, carrying two bottles of Singha beer toward the table in the airport
bar where Conor sat blinking at his progress, what he made of it at all.

Underhill was supposed to come with them on their flight, and part of Conor’s look
at Michael as he came toward him from the crowded passengers-only bar was a gathering
doubt that the writer would make it to the airport on time. Conor said nothing as
Michael set down his beer and took the seat beside him. He bent forward as if to examine
the floor, and his face was still white with the shock of what had happened back in
New York while they had been making their separate tours of Bangkok. Conor still looked
as if a loud noise had just awakened him.

Michael contented himself with a sip of the strong, cold, bitter Thai beer. Something
had
befallen
Conor two nights earlier, but
he would not discuss it. He too looked as if he were remembering some of the sentences
Underhill had written in his dialogues with himself. Poole guessed that these questions
and answers were a way of kicking a disused engine back into life: Underhill was teaching
himself to work again. Along the way he had described what he called the Pan-feeling.
According to Underhill, this had to do with “the nearness of ultimate things.”

“What are you thinking about, Mikey?” Conor asked.

Poole just shook his head.

“Stretch my legs,” Conor said, and jumped up and wandered toward the gates through
which the passengers came for their own and other international flights. It was fifty
minutes before the scheduled flight time, which an airline official had informed them
had been delayed an hour. Conor bounced on his heels and scrutinized the people streaming
through the gate until Underhill’s failure to arrive made him so nervous that he had
to spin off and take a quick tour of the gift shop windows. At the entrance to the
racks of duty-free liquor he checked his watch, shot another glance at the new arrivals,
and dodged inside.

Ten minutes later he emerged with a yellow plastic shopping bag and dropped into his
old seat beside Poole. “I thought if I went in there, he’d show up.”

Conor forlornly examined the Thais, Americans, Japanese, and Europeans pushing into
the International departures lounge. “Hope Beevers made his plane.”

Harry Beevers was supposed to have taken a flight from Taipei to Tokyo, where he was
to connect with a JAL flight that would bring him to the San Francisco airport an
hour after their own arrival. They were all to take the same flight to New York from
San Francisco. Beevers’ immediate reaction to the news of Pumo’s death had been the
observation that the asshole would still be alive if he had come with them instead
of staying behind to run around after his girlfriend. He asked clipped impatient questions
about just when they were going to be in San Francisco, and why they couldn’t wait
for him to come back to Bangkok. He was pissed off, he thought it was unfair that
Poole and Linklater had found Tim Underhill: it was his idea,
he
should have been the one. “Make sure he gets on that plane,” he said. “And don’t
let him lie to you.”

Poole had pointed out that Underhill could not have killed Tina Pumo.

“Tina lived in So Ho,” Beevers said. “Open your eyes, will
you? He was in the
restaurant
business. How many coke dealers do you think live in SoHo? Not everything is the
way it looks.”

Conor finished off his beer, jumped up again to inspect the incoming passengers, and
returned. By now all the seats in the departure lounge were occupied, and the new
arrivals either sat on the floor or wandered the wide aisles before the duty-free
shops. As it filled, the lounge had gradually come to resemble Bangkok itself: people
sat in chairs and sprawled over empty sections of the floor, the air seemed hot and
smoky, voices cried out “Crap crap crop crop!”

After a long crackling burst of Thai from the loudspeaker, in which Poole thought
he heard the words San Francisco, Conor again jumped up to check the board on which
departures were listed. Their flight had been rescheduled to take off in fifty-five
minutes. Unless they delayed it further, they would land in San Francisco at the same
time as Beevers, who would never forgive them for having been duped. Beevers would
insist on going back to Bangkok on the spot. He’d stage a chase through the streets,
with police sirens and dashes across rooftops, concluding with the triumphant handcuffing
of the villain and an astonishing explanation of how Underhill had killed the journalists
and arranged Pumo’s murder. Beevers saw things in the terms rendered by car chases
and lockstep summations.

Poole was very tired. He had slept little last night. He had called Judy, and she
had curtly given him the news of Tina’s death. “Whoever did it is supposed to be the
same person who killed the man in the library. Oh, you haven’t heard about that yet?”
Unable to keep the satisfaction from her voice, she explained the circumstances of
the death of Dr. Mayer-Hall.

“Why do they think it’s the same guy?”

“There were two Chinese women who saw Tina in the stacks a few minutes before they
discovered the body. They recognized his picture when they saw the papers this morning.
It’s all on the news. Tina was the suspect they were looking for—these women saw him
coming out of the stacks. It’s obvious what happened.”

“What happened?”

“Tina got lost in the stacks, God only knows what he was doing in the library, and
he happened to see this crazy man kill the librarian. He got away, but the man tracked
him down and killed him. It’s obvious.” She paused. “I’m sorry to cut your fun short.”

He asked if she were still getting the anonymous calls.

“Lately he has been saying that there is no substitute for
butter, or something like that. I just erase the tapes as soon as he says his piece.
When this guy was a kid, somebody drummed nonsense into his head from morning to night.
I bet he was an abused kid.”

Their conversation ended soon after.

For a moment Michael Poole saw Victor Spitalny before him, small, slope-shouldered,
dark-haired, his dark eyes shifting back and forth beneath his narrow forehead with
its widow’s peak, his wet little mouth and his pointed chin. At eighteen years of
age, there had been a self-erected psychic wall around Victor Spitalny. If he saw
you coming near him, he would stop and wait until you had gotten far enough away to
let him feel safe. He had probably decided to kill someone and desert very soon after
hearing Tim Underhill’s story of the running grunt.

Perhaps because of something his wife had said, Poole thought for the first time that
it might be interesting to go to Milwaukee and see where Victor Spitalny had grown
up.

And Milwaukee was Underhill’s Monroe, Illinois, where Hal Esterhaz had been run down
by his own destiny. If Underhill ever appeared at the airport, he might want to come
along on this fantasy journey and look at the childhood of one of his own characters.

Then he heard Conor gasp, and an instant later all of this went out of his head. He
was looking at Tim Underhill loping toward them, carrying a box bound with twine under
one arm, a leather satchel in one hand, and a case containing an ancient portable
typewriter in the other, which also gripped the handles of a plastic carrying bag.
The loose seersucker jacket flapped around his frame. He looked startlingly different—in
the next beat Michael saw that Underhill had cut his hair.

“You made it,” he said.

“I’ll be a little short of funds until I finish my book,” Underhill said. “Could one
of you gentlemen buy me a Coke?”

Conor jumped up to go to the bar.

It was like a parody of their trip out, finally—Tim Underhill in the window seat instead
of Harry Beevers, Conor in the middle, Michael on the aisle on a planeful of tourists.
Michael missed Pun Yin’s dimples and shining hair: this was an American airline, and
the stewardesses were tall women with distracted professional faces. The other passengers
were not pediatricians but mainly young people who fell into two categories: the employees
of multinational corporations who read
Megatrends
and
The One-Minute Manager
and married couples with or without babies, dressed in jeans and shirts. When Michael
was their age, they would have been reading Herman Hesse and Carlos Castaneda, but
the bulging paperbacks they dug out of their packs were by Judith Krantz and Sidney
Sheldon, or were written by ladies with three names and had jacket paintings of misty
castles and yearning unicorns. In 1983, bohemia, if that was what these people represented,
was not very literary. That was okay, Michael thought. He read airplane books too.
Conor didn’t read at all. Underhill had placed on his tray a fat paperback that looked
as if three people had read it before him.

Michael took from his carry-on bag a copy of
The Ambassadors
, a Henry James novel Judy had pressed on him. He had been enjoying it, back in Westerholm,
but when he held it in his hands he realized that he did not feel like reading. Now
that they were actually in the air, he could not imagine what he was returning to.

The sky outside the little windows was black, shot with violent, unearthly streaks
of red and purple. Such a sky was suitable: it seemed to draw them into Koko’s world,
where no gesture could be ordinary, where angels sang and demons fled down long corridors.

Conor asked the stewardess if they got a movie.

“As soon as we clear the dinner things. It’s
Never Say Never Again
—the new James Bond movie.”

The stewardess looked offended when Conor grinned.

“It’s because of this guy we know,” Poole explained. He did not feel like calling
Beevers a friend, not even to a stewardess who would never meet him.

“Hey,” Conor said mockingly, “I’m a homicide detective from New York, I’m a big deal,
I’m another double-oh-seven.”

“Your friend is a homicide detective in New York?” the girl asked. “He must be a busy
man these days. There was a guy stabbed to death at JFK a week or two ago.” She noticed
the sudden attention being paid to what she was saying, and added, “Some wheeler-dealer
who was on one of our flights. A girlfriend of mine works in first class on the San
Francisco-New York run a lot, and she said he was one of her people—a regular.” She
paused. “I guess he was a real jerk.” Another pause. “The newspapers
said he was a yuppie, but they just called him that because he was a young guy with
a lot of money.”