Koko (79 page)

Sitting on his couch and holding the warm mug of coffee, Harry envisioned the sweep
of the tiled floor toward the wide entrance. Harry would see everyone who passed by
illuminated by the natural light of the street—when they turned toward the entrance
and faced him, it would be as if a spotlight had been turned on them. Victor Spitalny
would be burned a little brown
from years of living under the Singapore sun, there would be deep lines in his face,
but his hair would still be black, and in his close-set brown eyes would still be
the expression of baffled grievance he had worn throughout his tour of duty.

Harry saw himself moving silently up the stairs as soon as Spitalny had passed him,
treading softly over the tiles to come up behind him. He would slip the gravity knife
out of his pocket. Spitalny would hesitate before leaving the arcade, as he would
hesitate before entering it. Stringy and ungainly inside his ugly clothes, inside
his madness, he would stand exposed for a second: and Harry would clamp his left arm
around his neck and drag him out of the light back into the arcade.

Harry brought his coffee to his lips and was startled to find that it had gone cold.
Then he grinned—the terrible creatures had come for Victor Spitalny.

When he could no longer ignore his hunger, Harry went out to a deli on Ninth Avenue
and bought a chicken salad sandwich and a can of Pepsi. Back in his apartment, he
could only eat half the sandwich—his throat closed, and his body would not allow him
another bite. Harry wrapped up the other half of the sandwich and put it in the refrigerator.

Everything he did seemed italicized, drenched in significance, like a series of scenes
from a film.

When Harry came out of his kitchen, the framed magazine covers blared out at him like
loud music. His face, his name. It took the breath right out of his body.

Before going downstairs for the cab, he poured himself a shot of Absolut. It was treacly
from the freezer, and slid into his throat like a bullet made of mercury. The bullet
froze whatever it touched, and evaporated into warmth and confidence as soon as it
touched his stomach. Harry capped the bottle and returned it to the freezer.

Alone inside the elevator, Harry took out his pocket comb and ran it through his hair.

Outside on Ninth Avenue he raised his arm, and a cab swooped across two lanes and
came to rest before him. The door locks floated up with an audible
pop!
Everything now was a sequence
of smooth, powerful actions. Harry climbed into the back seat and gave the directions
to the driver.

Down Ninth Avenue the taxi went, everything clear, everything seen in the frame of
the moment. A tall window reflected a sky filled with heavy clouds. Above the roof
of the cab Harry heard sudden wing beats, swift and loud.

He stepped out of the cab onto an empty sidewalk and looked south across busy Canal
Street to the block that contained the arcade. A crowd of people carrying shopping
bags and small children turned off Canal down Bowery. While Harry stood watching another
small group composed of young Chinese men in suits and topcoats walked out of the
Manhattan Savings Bank and also turned down Bowery. In a few seconds the second group
had overtaken the first, and walked past the arcade without even glancing in. Suddenly
all of Harry’s plans and precautions seemed unnecessary—he was an hour early, all
he had to do was go into the arcade and hide on the staircase.

He hunched his shoulders against this heresy as much as against the cold. Visualizing
an action helped bring it into being. The preparations were themselves a stage in
Koko’s capture, an essential aspect of the flow of events.

Harry trotted through a break in the traffic and jumped up onto Stage Two of his preparations,
the traffic island north of Confucius Plaza. He could see the entire block between
Canal and Bayard, but he was exposed to anyone who would happen to look across the
street. Harry backed away toward the far side of the island. The Chinese businessmen
were waiting to cross Bayard, and the family with the babies and shopping bags was
just straggling past the arcade. Nobody stood pretending to read the menus in the
restaurant doorways, no faces were visible in the windows.

When the light changed Harry ran back across Bowery and ducked into the arcade for
Stage Three.

It was even better than he remembered it—darker, so quiet it was hushed. One old lady
dawdled between the shops. Today there were even fewer customers than he had seen
two days before. The staircase to the lower level was nearly invisible, and when Harry
glanced down it he saw joyfully that the bulb at the bottom of the staircase had burned
out, and no one had replaced it. The lower level of the arcade was illuminated only
by the weak light from the barbershop’s windows.

He gave a quick check to the arcade’s far end. A skinny
Chinese in pajamas stared at him from the stoop of a tenement before retreating back
inside.

Stage Four began at the base of Confucius Plaza. A few Chinese in padded coats came
across the wide plaza and were admitted into the office building at Harry’s back.
They paid no attention to him. Half a dozen concrete benches sat among the trees and
planters on the plaza. Harry chose one that gave him an uninterrupted view.

Now and then a truck stopped directly before him and blocked his view; once a delivery
van parked directly in front of the arcade. Harry checked his watch as he waited for
the van to pull away, and saw that it was two-twenty.

He felt for the knife in his coat pocket. The pocket seemed to be empty. Harry groped
more industriously. The knife still eluded him. Sweat began to drip down into his
eyebrows. He tore off his right glove and thrust his hand into the pocket—the knife
was gone.

People passing in cars were pointing at him, laughing, leaving him behind as they
swept by on their ways to parties, receptions, interviews.…

He poked his fingers to the bottom of the pocket and found a rip in the lining. Of
course
his pockets were ripped, the coat was eight years old, what did you expect? The knife
lay inside the hem, useless as a toothbrush. Harry worked it up the lining, and gradually
got it near enough to the rip so that he could thrust his fingers through and feel
for it. A row of stitches popped, and the rip widened. He found the knife and drew
it up and transferred it to his left pocket.

An eight-year-old coat! He had nearly lost everything because of an eight-year-old
coat!

Harry sat down heavily on the bench and immediately put his left hand into the coat
pocket and folded it around the knife. He had lost his focus. Harry wiped his forehead,
put his glove back on, and folded his hands in his lap.

Trucks, cars, and taxicabs streamed past on Bowery. A large group of well-dressed
Chinese men moved past the arcade. Watching them, Harry realized with a spurt of panic
that anyone could have slipped inside from Elizabeth Street while he watched this
end.

But Koko was a soldier, and he would follow orders.

The Chinese men reached Bayard Street and scattered with waves and smiles.

It came to Harry that he was sitting on a stone bench with
a knife in his pocket, waiting not to capture someone but to kill him, and that he
thought he could become famous for doing this. This idea seemed as cruelly barren
as the rest of his life. For a moment Harry Beevers contemplated himself as just one
man among a million men, a lonely figure on a bench. He could stand up, drop the knife
into a planter, and go off and do—what?

He looked down at his body clad in loose dark uncharacteristic clothes, the clothing
of an active man, and this simple proof of his uniqueness allowed him back into the
heart of his fantasy. His rich destiny again embraced him.

At two-thirty Harry decided to alter his plan and wait out the time remaining on the
staircase. It never hurt to be in position early, and being in position would mean
that he would also see anyone who entered the arcade from the far end.

Harry stood up. His body was very straight, his head erect, his expression carefully
neutral. Harry Beevers was
locked in.
The man was
wrapped tight.
He reached the curb, and his nerves reached out to every human being and every vehicle
moving past. High heels clicked toward him, and a young Chinese woman joined him at
the crosswalk. When she glanced at him—a pretty young woman, that silky Chinese hair,
sunglasses even on a day like this—she was attracted to him, she found him interesting.
The light changed, and they set off the curb together. In the middle of the street
she gave him a rueful, questioning look. On the other side of the street the girl
turned toward Bayard Street, stretching out the particular nerve that he fastened
to her, drawing it out further and further like an unbreakable thread.

Harry moved quickly into the darkness of the arcade. From its far end came the sound
of low voices and moving bodies, three bodies, and Harry casually moved nearer the
wall and pretended to be interested in a large poster glued to the wall.
X-RAY SPECS. THE BLASTERS.
Three overweight teenage girls in duffel coats came slouching past the angle in the
arcade. He recorded their brief acknowledgment of him, the way their eyes flicked
sideways, and how they silently commented on him to each other. They carried knapsacks
and wore scuffed brown loafers. The girls moved slowly down the length of the arcade
and finally walked out into the lighter air, still pretending not to have noticed
him.

Harry checked both ways—the arcade was empty, and the Bowery end gaped bright and
grey—and crossed to the staircase. The burned-out bulb had of course not been replaced.
He quickly went down half a dozen steps, checked back toward the Elizabeth Street
entrance, and then went down the rest of the way. Harry
unbuttoned his coat. He peeled off his gloves and shoved them into his pockets. The
railing dug unpleasantly into his hip when he leaned against the side of the staircase.

At once an arm emerged out of the blackness behind him and clamped around his neck.
Someone standing at his back pulled him off-balance and pushed a thick cloth into
his mouth. Harry reached for the knife, but his hand tangled in a glove. Then he remembered
it was the wrong pocket anyway, but in that second he was falling back and it was
too late for the knife. He heard his handcuffs clatter onto the staircase.

Maggie saw the policemen first, and asked Michael what he thought had happened. They
were halfway down the ramp to the terminal, and the two officers had appeared in the
lighted square where the jetway ended. “I don’t know,” Michael said. “Probably—” He
looked over his shoulder and saw Tim Underhill just emerging through the door of the
plane, half a dozen people back. Maggie took his elbow and stopped moving. Michael
looked ahead again and saw the big homicide detective, Lieutenant Murphy, staring
at him with a set, furious face beside the two uniformed men. “Take it easy,” Murphy
said, and the policemen beside him braced themselves but did not draw their guns.
“Keep on coming, people,” Murphy said. The people ahead of Maggie and Poole had stopped
short, and now the jetway was crowded with passengers. Murphy motioned the passengers
in front toward him, and everyone began shuffling toward the terminal. Maggie was
holding tightly onto Poole’s hand.

“Everybody keep moving,” Murphy said. “Keep moving and keep calm.”

For a second there had been a shocked silence. Now a bubble of questioning, demanding
voices filled the tunnel.

“Just proceed through the terminal normally,” Murphy said. Poole glanced back at Underhill,
who had gone pale but was moving forward with the other passengers behind them. A
woman somewhere in their midst shrieked at the sight of the policemen.

Murphy was watching Underhill, and when Poole and Maggie finally reached the terminal
he spoke without looking at them. “Take them aside.”

One of the policemen took Michael by the arm Maggie was not holding, and pulled him
off toward the window beside the gate. Another tried to separate Maggie, but she would
not let go of Poole’s arm, and so Poole, Maggie, and the two policemen moved crabwise
to an empty space in front of the window. The gate had been roped off, and a wall
of people stood at the rope looking in at them. Two uniformed policemen with rifles
stood off to the side behind Murphy, out of sight of the passengers in the jetway.

When Tim Underhill came through, Murphy stepped forward, charged him with the murder
of Anthony Pumo, and read him his rights from a white card he had taken from his pocket.
The policeman who had taken Maggie aside patted Underhill’s chest and sides, then
patted down each leg. Underhill managed to smile.

“We were going to call you as soon as we got here,” Michael said. Murphy ignored him.

The other passengers on the flight moved slowly toward the ropes. Most of them were
walking backward, not to miss anything. The flight crew had clustered at the end of
the ramp and were whispering to each other. Nearly all the passengers stopped moving
once they reached the rope, set down their luggage, and stared.