Koko
Peter Straub’s most acclaimed and biggest-selling novel – a visceral thriller with its roots in Vietnam – now reissued in a different cover style and making its first appearance on the HarperCollins list.‘KOKO… ’ Only four men knew what it meant. Vietnam vets. One was a doctor. One was a lawyer. One was a working stiff. One was a writer. All were as different as men could be – yet all were bound eternally together by a single shattering secret. And now they are joined together again on a quest that could take them from the graveyards and fleshpots of the Far East to the human jungle of New York, hunting an inhuman ghost of the past risen from nightmare darkness to kill and kill…
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Koko
Peter Straub
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.
HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd.
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
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
HarperCollinsPublishers 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
KOKO
‘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
Table of Contents
5 Beans Beevers at the Memorial
PART TWO Preparations for Takeoff
PART THREE The Tiger Balm Gardens
PART FOUR In the Underground Garage
PART FIVE The Sea of Forgetfulness
32 First Night at the Pforzheimer
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.
