Peter Straub - Koko

Pumo looked up at Maggie from an armload of clothes. ‘What’s the point? Even if they find her and by some miracle put her away, she’ll be back outside in about a day and a half. That’s how we do it in this country. In Taipei you probably have an entirely different system.’

Maggie leaned against the doorframe. Her arms hung straight down, parallel to each other, at an angle to her body. She had funny knobbly little hands, Pumo noticed for perhaps the thousandth time. She said, ‘In Taipei, we staple their tongues to their upper lips and hack three fingers off each hand with a dull knife.’

‘Now that’s what I call justice,’ Pumo said.

‘In Taipei, that’s what we call liberalism,’ Maggie said. ‘Is anything missing?’

‘Hang on, hang on.’ Pumo put the last suit on its hanger, the hanger on the rail. ‘We haven’t even gotten to the living room yet. I’m not even sure I want to get to the living room.’

‘I’ll look in there, if you like. As long as we can eventually come back in here and take our clothes off and do all of those things we were originally intending to do.’

He looked at her with undisguised astonishment.

‘I’ll make sure the enemy has retreated from the living room,’ Maggie said in her flat precise voice. She disappeared.

‘GODDAMN IT! DAMN IT!’ Pumo yelled a few seconds later. ‘I KNEW IT!’

Maggie leaned into the bedroom again, looking startled and a little breathless. Her heavy black hair swung, and her lips were parted. ‘You called?’

‘I don’t believe it.’ Pumo was gazing at the empty nightstand beside his bed, and looked palely up at Maggie. ‘How does the living room look?’

‘Well, in the second I had before I was distracted by the screams of a madman, it appeared to be slightly rumpled but otherwise okay.’

‘It was Dracula, all right.’ Pumo did not like the sound of slightly rumpled. ‘I knew it, damn it. She came back and stole all the same stuff all over again.’ He pointed to the nightstand. ‘I had to buy a new clock radio, and that’s gone. I got a new Watchman, and the asshole stole that too.’

Pumo watched beautiful little Maggie come floating into his bedroom in her loose flowing Chinese garment and mentally saw a fearful vision of his living room. He saw the cushions ripped, the books tumbled from the shelves, his desk up-ended, his living room television gone, the answering machine gone, his checkbooks, the ornamental screen he brought back from Vietnam, his VCR, and most of his good liquor, all gone. Pumo did not consider himself immoderately attached to his possessions, but he braced himself for the loss of these things. He would mind most of all about the couch, which Vinh had made and upholstered for him by hand.

Maggie lifted a drooping corner of a blanket with one hovering foot, and uncovered the clock radio and the new Watchman, which had apparently fallen from the nightstand sometime in the morning.

Without a word, she led him into the living room. Pumo admitted to himself that it looked almost exactly as it had when he left it.

The smooth, plump, speckled blue fabric still lay unblemished over Vinh’s long couch, the books still stood, in their customary disorder, on the shelves and, in piles, on the coffee tables; the television stood, stupid as an idol, in its place on the shelf beneath the VCR and the showy stereo. Pumo looked at the records on the shelf beneath and knew immediately that someone had flipped through them.

At the far end of the room two steps led up to a platform, also carpentered by Vinh. Here were shelves stacked with bottles – a couple of shelves crammed with cookbooks, too – a sink, a concealed icebox. An armchair, a lamp. Shoved into a corner of the platform was Pumo’s desk and leather desk chair, which had been pulled out and moved to one side, as if the intruder had wished to spend time at the desk.

‘It doesn’t look too bad,’ he said to Maggie. ‘She came in here and looked around, but she didn’t do any damage I can see.’

He moved more confidently into the room and closely examined the coffee table, the books, the records, and the magazines. Dracula had lingered here – she had moved everything around a little.

‘The Battalion Newsletter ,’ he finally said.

‘The what?’

‘She took the Ninth Battalion Newsletter. It comes twice a year – I hardly even look at it, to tell you the truth, but I never throw out the old one until I get the new one.’

‘She’s queer for soldiers.’

Pumo shrugged and went up the steps to the platform. His checkbook and the Saigon checkbook were still on the desk, but had been moved. And there beside them was the missing Newsletter , lying open to a half-page photo of Colonel Emil Ellenbogen, retiring from the second-rate post in Arkansas to which the Tin Man had been sent after his disappointing term in Vietnam.

‘No, the bitch just moved in,’ he called down to Maggie, who was standing in the middle of the room with her arms wrapped about herself.

‘Is everything on your desk?’

‘I don’t know. I think something’s gone, but I can’t tell what it is.’

He surveyed his messy desktop again. Checkbooks. Telephone. Answering machine, message light flashing. Pumo pushed rewind, then playback. Silence played itself back. Had she called first to make sure he was out? The more Pumo looked at the top of his desk, the more he thought something was missing, but he could not attach this feeling to a specific object. Beside the answering machine was a book called Nam which he was certain had been on one of the coffee tables for months – he had given up in the middle of the book, but kept it on the table because to admit that he was never going to finish it felt like opening the door to the worst kind of luck.

Dracula had picked up the Newsletter and the copy of Nam and set them down on the desk while she mused through his checkbooks. Probably she had touched everything on the desk with her long strong fingers. For a second Pumo felt sweaty and dizzy.

In the middle of the night Tina woke up with his heart pounding, a mad terrible dream just disappearing into the darkness. He turned his head and saw Maggie fast asleep on the pillow, her face curled up into itself like the curl of her hand. He could just make out her features. Oh, he loved seeing Maggie Lah asleep. Without the animation of her character her features seemed anonymous and wholly Chinese.

He stretched out again beside her and lightly touched her hand. What were they doing now, his friends? He saw them walking down a wide sidewalk, their arms linked. Tim Underhill could not be Koko, and as soon as they found him they would know it. Then Tina realized that if Underhill was not Koko, someone else was – someone circling in on them, circling in on all of them the way the bullet with his name on it still circled the world, never falling or resting.

In the morning he told Maggie that he had to do something to help the other guys – he wanted to see if he could find out more about Koko’s victims, find out more that way.

‘Now you’re talking,’ Maggie told him.

Why questions and answers?

Because they go in a straight line. Because they are a way out. Because they help me to think.

What is there to think about?

The usual wreckage. The running girl.

Do you imagine that she was real?

Exactly. I imagine she was real.

What else is there to think about?

The usual subject, my subject. Koko. More than ever now.

Why more than ever now?

Because he has come back. Because I think I saw him. I know I saw him.

You imagined you saw him?

It is the same thing.