Peter Straub - Koko

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by Viking 1988

Copyright © Seafront Corporation 1988

The Author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalgue copy of this book is available from the British Library

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks

HarperCollins Publishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication

Source ISBN: 9780007103676

Ebook Edition © JUNE 2010 ISBN: 9780007375516

Version: 2016-11-23

‘A masterpiece…a crime novel, a suspense novel, a horror novel and a study of human relationships. Fascinating and complex.’

Houston Post

‘Gripping…The characters are realistic and complex, and the story continues to resonate in the mind long after the final page is turned.’

Publishers Weekly

‘Vastly entertaining and brilliantly written…evokes bizarre fevers and brimstone terror…Peter Straub flexes all his muscles…his style is at its peak… Koko is his finest work…with an inspired, wonderfully handled ending…judged as a thriller it deserves to be compared to the best.’

Washington Post

‘Remarkable…an unusual and wonderfully suspenseful thriller…evokes a fascinating and frightening picture of war and its aftermath.’

Boston Herald

For Susan Straub and For Lila J. Kalinich, M.D.

I believe it is possible and even recommended to play the blues on everything.

FRANK MORGAN, alto saxophonist

Cover Page

Title Page

Copyright

Praise

Dedication

Epigraph

PART ONE The Dedication

1 Washington, D.C.

2 Message

3 Reunion

4 The Answering Machine

5 Beans Beevers at the Memorial

PART TWO Preparations for Takeoff

6 Beevers at Rest

7 Conor at Work

8 Dr Poole at Work and Play

9 In Search of Maggie Lah

10 Conversations and Dreams

11 Koko

PART THREE The Tiger Balm Gardens

12 Men in Motion

13 Koko

14 Remembering Dragon Valley

15 Meeting Lola in the Park

16 The Library

17 Koko

PART FOUR In the Underground Garage

18 The Steps to Heaven

19 How Dengler Died

20 Telephone

21 The Riverside Terrace

22 Victor Spitalny

PART FIVE The Sea of Forgetfulness

23 Robbie, with Lantern

24 In the Cave

25 Coming Home

26 Koko

PART SIX The Real Raw Taste

27 Pat and Judy

28 A Funeral

29 The Line-up

30 A Second Reunion

31 Encounters

PART SEVEN The Killing Box

32 First Night at the Pforzheimer

33 Second Night at the Pforzheimer

34 The End of the Search

35 The Killing Box

PART EIGHT Tim Underhill

And then what happened?

Keep Reading

About the Author

By Peter Straub

About the Publisher

At three o’clock in the afternoon of a grey, blowing mid-November day, a baby doctor named Michael Poole looked down through the windows of his second-floor room into the parking lot of the Sheraton Hotel. A VW van, spray-painted with fuzzy peace symbols and driven by either a drunk or a lunatic, was going for a ninety-eight-point turn in the space between the first parking row and the entrance, trapping a honking line of cars in the single entry lane. As Michael watched, the van completed its turn by grinding its front bumper into the grille and headlights of a dusty little Camaro. The whole front end of the Camaro buckled in. Horns blew. The van now faced a stalled, frustrated line of enemy vehicles. The driver backed up, and Michael thought he was going to escape by reversing down the first row of cars to the exit onto Woodley Road. Instead, the driver nipped the van into an empty space two cars down. ‘Well, damn,’ Michael said to himself – the van’s driver had sacrificed the Camaro for a parking place.

Michael had called down twice for messages, but none of the other three men had checked in yet. Unless Conor Linklater was going to ride a motorcycle all the way from Norwalk, they would almost certainly take the shuttle from New York, but Michael enjoyed the fantasy that while he stood at the window he would see them all step out of the van – Harry ‘Beans’ Beevers, the Lost Boss, the world’s worst lieutenant; Tina Pumo, Pumo the Puma, whom Underhill had called ‘Lady’ Pumo; and wild little Conor Linklater, the only other survivors of their platoon. Of course they would arrive separately, in taxis, at the front of the hotel. But he wished they would get out of the van. He hadn’t known how strongly he wanted them to join him – he wanted to see the Memorial first by himself, but he wanted even more to see it later with them.

Michael Poole watched the doors of the van slide open. There appeared first a hand clamped around the neck of a bottle which Michael immediately recognized as Jack Daniel’s sour mash whiskey.

The Jack Daniel’s was slowly followed by a thick arm, then a head concealed by a floppy jungle hat. The whole man, now slamming the driver’s door, was well over six feet tall and weighed at least two hundred and thirty pounds. He wore tiger-stripe fatigues. Two smaller men similarly dressed left through the sliding door in the side of the van, and a big bearded man in a worn flak jacket closed the van’s passenger door and went around the front to take the bottle. He laughed, shook his head, and upended it into his mouth before passing it to one of the others. Individually and collectively they looked just enough like dozens of soldiers Poole had known for him to lean forward, staring, his forehead pressed against the glass.

Of course he knew none of these men. The resemblance was generic. The big man was not Underhill, and the others were none of the others.

He wanted to see people he had known over there, that was the large simple truth. He wanted a great grand reunion with everyone he had ever seen in Vietnam, living or dead. And he wanted to see the Memorial – in fact Poole wanted to love the Memorial. He was almost afraid to see it. From the pictures he had seen, the Memorial was beautiful, strong and stark, and brooding. That would be a Memorial worth loving. The only memorial he’d ever expected to have was a memorial to separateness, but it belonged to him and to the cowboys out in the parking lot, because they were forever distinct, as the dead were finally distinct. Together they were all so distinct that to Poole they almost felt like a secret country of their own.