Koko. Peter Straub
The doors swung shut on a burst of Vietnamese.
In an eerily perfect auditory hallucination, Harry Beevers could hear M.O. Dengler panting just behind his right shoulder, along with the sounds of distant fires and faraway screams. Pale faces shone dimly at the center of a vast darkness. He remembered where he had seen the demons’ faces before – on small black-haired women, rushing up with their fists raised. You numbah ten! You numbah ten!
An abyss had just yawned before Harry Beevers. For a moment he felt the terror of not existing, a sickening feeling that he had never existed in the way simpler, healthier people existed.
He heard himself asking what a kid was doing in the kitchen.
Jimmy stepped nearer. ‘That’s Vinh’s little girl, Helen. Both of them temporarily staying here. Helen was probably looking for Maggie – they’re old buddies.’
‘Tina must have a lot on his mind,’ Harry said, beginning to feel more in control of himself.
‘You see the Village Voice?’
Harry shook his head. He realized that he had unconsciously pushed his hands into his pockets to hide their shaking. Jimmy searched around behind the bar until he found the paper in a stack of menus beside the cash register and slid it across the bar with the back page up. VOICE BULLETIN BOARD, read the headline above three dense columns of personals in varying type sizes. Harry saw that two of the ads had been circled.
The first message read: Foodcat. Missing damned you. Will be Mike Todd Room 10 Wed. The Wanderer. The second message was in caps. JUST DECIDED UNABLE TO DECIDE. MAY BE MIKE TODD, MAYBE NOT. LA-LA.
‘See what I mean?’ Jimmy asked. He began grabbing glasses from below the bar and vigorously swirling them around in a sink.
‘Your sister placed both these ads?’
‘Sure,’ Jimmy said. ‘Whole family’s crazy.’
‘I feel sorry for Tina.’
Jimmy grinned, then looked up from the sink. ‘How’s the doctor these days? Any change?’
‘You know him,’ Harry said. ‘After his son died, he stopped being fun to hang out with. Totalemente.’
After a second, Jimmy asked. ‘He going on your hunting trip?’
‘I wish you’d call it a mission,’ Harry snapped. ‘Listen, isn’t Tina ever going to come up for air?’
‘Maybe later,’ Jimmy said, looking away.
Pumo had two Vietnamese living in his restaurant, he was tearing his kitchen apart to kill a few bugs, and he was acting like a teenager over Maggie Lah. ‘La-La,’ for sure. Beans Beevers’ old comrade had become just another…for a second he searched for Dengler’s word, then had it: toon.
‘Tell him he ought to show up at the Mike Todd Room with a fucking knife in his belt.’
‘Maggie will get a big kick out of that.’
Harry looked at his watch.
‘You planning to get to Taipei on this mission, Harry?’ asked Jimmy, showing a trace of real interest for the first time.
Beevers felt a premonitory tingle. ‘Aren’t you and Maggie from Taipei?’ A nerve jumped in his temple.
Then he got it! Who was to say that Tim Underhill still lived in Singapore? Harry had been to Taipei on his R & R, and he could easily see Tim Underhill choosing to live in the raunchy amalgam of Chinatown and Dodge City he remembered. He saw that Divine Justice, mistakenly thought to be dozing, had of course been wide awake all along. It was all ordained, everything had been thought out beforehand. God had planned it all.
Harry settled back down on his bar stool, ordered another martini, and put off his confrontation with his ex-wife for another twenty minutes while he listened to Jimmy Lah describe the seamier aspects of night life in the capital city of Taiwan.
Jimmy set a steaming cup of coffee before him. Harry folded the napkin into the inside pocket of his suit and glanced up at the angry demons. He saw a child rushing toward him with an upraised knife, and his heart speeded up. He smiled and scalded his tongue with hot coffee.
2
A short time later Harry stood at the pay telephone next to the men’s room in a narrow downstairs corridor. He first tried finding his ex-wife at the Maria Farr Gallery, which was on the ground floor of a former warehouse on Spring Street in SoHo. Pat Caldwell Beevers had gone to private school with Maria Farr, and when the gallery had seemed to be failing, took it on as one of her pet private charities. (In the early days of his wife’s involvement with the art gallery, Harry had endured dinner parties with artists whose work consisted of rusting pipes strewn randomly across the floor, of a row of neat aluminum slabs stood on end, of pink wartencrusted columns that reminded Harry of giant erections. He still could not believe that the perpetrators of these adolescent japes earned real money.)
Maria Farr herself answered the telephone. This was a bad sign.
He said, ‘Maria, how nice to hear your voice again. It’s me.’ In fact, the sound of her voice, all the consonants hard as pebbles, reminded Harry of how much he disliked her.
‘I have nothing to say to you, Harry,’ Maria said.
‘I’m sure that’s a blessing to both of us,’ Harry said. ‘Is Pat still in the gallery?’
‘I wouldn’t tell you if she were.’ Maria hung up.
Another call, to Information, got him the number of Rilke Street, the literary magazine that was Pat’s other ongoing charity. Its editorial offices were actually the Duane Street loft of William Tharpe, the magazine’s editor. Because Harry had spent fewer evenings with Tharpe and his impoverished contributors than with Maria Farr and her artists, Tharpe had always taken Harry more or less at face value.
‘Rilke Street, William Tharpe speaking.’
‘Billy, my boy, how do you do? This is Harry Beevers, your best flunky’s best ex-husband. I was hoping to find her there.’
‘Harry!’ said Tharpe. ‘You’re in luck. Pat and I are pasting up issue thirty-five right this minute. Going to be a beautiful number. Are you coming down this way?’
‘If invited,’ he said. ‘Do you think I might speak to the dear Patricia?’
In a moment Harry’s ex-wife had taken the telephone. ‘How nice of you to call, Harry. I was just thinking about you. Are you getting on all right?’
So she knew that Charles had sacked him.
‘Fine, fine, everything’s great,’ he said. ‘I find myself in the mood for a celebration. How about a drink or dinner after you’re through tickling old Billy’s balls?’
Pat had a short discussion with William Tharpe, most of it inaudible to Harry, then returned the receiver to her mouth and said, ‘An hour, Harry.’
‘No wonder I’ll always adore you,’ he said, and Pat quickly hung up.
3
When his cab passed a liquor store, Harry asked the driver to wait while he went in and bought a bottle. He jumped out, crossed the sidewalk, his coattails billowing, and entered a barnlike, harshly lighted interior with wide aisles and pastel blue neon signs announcing IMPORTED and BEER and FINE CHAMPAGNES. He started moving toward the FINE CHAMPAGNES, but slowed down when he saw three young women with eggbeater hair and antisocial clothing preceding him up the aisle. Punk girls always excited Harry. The three girls ahead of Harry in the aisle of the liquor store were consulting in whispers and giggles over a bin of inexpensive red wines, their fluffy multicolored heads bobbing like toxic orchids to some private joke.
One