Peter Straub - Koko

Michael Poole took a sip of his drink and scanned the topmost article. On January 28, 1981, the corpse of a fortytwo-year-old English tourist in Singapore, a free-lance writer named Clive McKenna, had been found, his eyes and ears bloodily removed, by a gardener in an overgrown section of the grounds of the Goodwood Park Hotel. A playing card with the word Koko written on its face had been placed in Mr McKenna’s mouth. On February 5, 1982, an appraiser had entered a supposedly empty bungalow just off Orchard Road in the same city to discover lying face-up and side by side on the living room floor the bodies of Mr William Martinson of St Louis, a sixty-one-year-old executive of a heavy equipment company active in Asia, and Mrs Barbara Martinson, fifty-five, also of St Louis, who had been accompanying her husband on a business trip. Mr Martinson lacked his eyes and ears; in his mouth was a playing card with the word Koko scrawled across its face.

The Straits Times piece, dated three days later, added the information that while the bodies of the Martinsons had been discovered less than forty-eight hours after their deaths, Clive McKenna’s body had gone undiscovered for perhaps as long as five days. Roughly ten days separated the two sets of murders. The Singapore police had many leads, and an arrest was considered imminent.

The clipping from the Bangkok Post, dated July 7, 1982, was considerably more emotional than the others. FRENCH WRITERS SLAIN, the headline read. Outrage and dismay were shared by all decent citizens. The provinces of both tourism and literature had been savaged. Unwelcome events of a violent nature were particularly threatening to the hotel industry. The shock to morality – therefore to trade – had potential consequences far beyond the hotel industry, affecting taxicabs, hire-car firms, restaurants, jewelers, massage parlors, museums and temples, tattooists, airport staff and baggage handlers, etc. That the crime was almost certainly the work of undesirable aliens, committed by as well as upon foreigners, had to be not only remembered but reiterated. Police of all districts were engaged in a commendable effort of mutual cooperation designed to root out the whereabouts of the assassins within days. Political hostility to Thailand could not be discounted.

Cocooned within this oddly formal hysteria was the information that Marc Guibert, 48, and Yves Danton, 49, both journalists living in Paris, had been found in their suite at the Sheraton Bangkok by a maid on her normal morning cleaning detail. They were tied to chairs with their throats cut and their eyes and ears removed. The two men had arrived in Thailand the previous afternoon and were not known to have received any messages or guests. Cards from an ordinary deck of Malaysian playing cards, the word, or name, Koko printed by hand on each, had been inserted into the dead men’s mouths.

Tina and Conor continued to read, Tina with an expression of feigned detachment, Conor in deep concentration. Harry Beevers sat upright, tapping a pencil against his front teeth, his eyes out of focus.

Printed by hand. Michael saw exactly how: the letters carved in so deeply you could read the raised grooves on the back of the card. Poole could remember the first time he had seen one of the cards protruding from the mouth of a tiny dead man in black pajamas – point for our side, he’d thought, okay.

Pumo said, ‘The goddamned war still isn’t over, I guess.’

Conor looked up from his copy of the Bangkok clipping. ‘Hey, it could be anybody, man. These guys here say it’s some political thing. To hell with this, anyhow.’

Beevers said. ‘Do you seriously think it’s a coincidence that this murderer writes the name Koko on a playing card which he puts into his victims’ mouths?’

‘Yeah,’ Conor said. ‘Sure it could be. Or it could be politics, like this guy says.’

‘But the fact is, it almost has to be our Koko,’ Pumo said slowly. He spread the three clippings out beside him on the table, as if seeing them all at once made coincidence even more unlikely. ‘These were the only articles your brothers could find? No follow up?’

Beevers shook his head. He then bent over, picked his glass up from the floor, and made a silent, mocking toast to them without drinking.

‘You’re pretty cheerful about this,’ Pumo said.

‘Someday, my friends, this is going to be a hell of a story. I’m serious, I can definitely see book rights in this thing. Beyond that, I can see film rights. But to tell you the truth, I’d settle for a mini-series.’

Conor covered his face with his hands, and Poole said, ‘Now I know you’re nuts.’

Beevers turned to them with an unblinking gaze. ‘Some day I’ll want you to remember who first said that we could all see a lot of money out of this. If we handle it right. Mucho dinero. ’

‘Hallelujah,’ Conor said. ‘The Lost Boss is gonna make us rich.’

‘Consider the facts. ’ Beevers held up a palm like a stop sign while he sipped from his glass. ‘A law school student who does our data-gathering did some research on my instructions – on the firm’s time, so we don’t get billed for it. He went through a year’s worth of half a dozen major metropolitan papers and the wire services. Net result? Apart of course from St Louis stories about the Martinsons, there has never been any news story in this country about Koko or these murders. And the stories in St Louis papers didn’t mention the playing cards. They didn’t mention Koko.’

Is there any possible connection between the victims?’ Michael asked.

‘ Consider the facts. An English tourist in Singapore – our researcher looked up McKenna, and he wrote a travel book about Australia-New Zealand, a couple of thrillers, and a book called Your Dog Can Live Longer! With an exclamation point. Maybe he was doing research in Singapore. Who knows? The Martinsons were a straight Middle-American business couple. His firm sold a load of bulldozers and cranes throughout the Far East. Then we have two print journalists, Frenchmen who work for L’Express. Guibert and Danton went to Bangkok for the massage parlors. They were longtime friends who took a vacance together every couple of years. They weren’t on an assignment in Bangkok, they were just cutting up.’

‘An Englishman, two Frenchmen, and two Americans,’ Michael said.

‘A pretty clear example of random selection,’ Beevers said. ‘I think these people were just in the wrong place at the wrong time. They were shopping or sitting at a bar, and they found themselves talking to a plausible American guy with a lot of stories who eventually took them off somewhere quiet and wasted them. The original Mr Wrong. The All-American psychopath.’

‘He didn’t mutilate Martinson’s wife,’ Michael said.

‘Yeah, he just killed her,’ Beevers said. ‘You want mutilations every time? Maybe he just took men’s ears because he fought against men in Vietnam.’

‘Okay,’ Conor said. ‘Say it’s our Koko. Then what?’ He looked almost unwillingly toward Michael and shrugged. ‘I mean, I ain’t going to no cops or nothing. I got nothing to say to them.’

Beevers leaned forward and fixed Conor with the stare of a man attempting to hypnotize a snake. ‘I agree with you absolutely.’

‘You agree with me?’

‘We have nothing to say to the police. At this point, we don’t even know with absolute certainty that Koko is Tim Underhill.’ He straightened up and looked at Poole with the trace of a smile tugging at his mouth. ‘Celebrated or not-so-celebrated thriller writer and Singapore resident.’

Every man in the room but Beevers all but closed his eyes.

‘Are his books really nuts?’ Conor finally said. ‘You remember all that crazy stuff he used to talk about? That book?’