Читать книгу Koko - Peter Straub - Страница 12

2 Message

1

Michael was so certain that a message from his friends would be waiting for him at the hotel that once he got there he marched straight from the revolving door to the desk. Harry Beevers had assured him that he and the others would arrive ‘sometime in the afternoon.’ It was now just before ten minutes to five.

Poole started to scan the wall behind the desk for his messages as soon as he could read the room numbers beneath the pigeonholes. When he was three-fourths of the way across the lobby, he saw one of the white hotel message forms inserted diagonally into his own rectangular box. He immediately felt much less tired. Beevers and the other two had arrived.

Michael stepped up to the desk and caught the clerk’s eye. ‘There’s a message for me.’ he said. ‘Poole, room 204.’ He took the oversize key from his jacket pocket and showed it to the clerk, who began to inspect the wall behind him with an almost maddening lack of haste. At last the clerk found the correct slot and withdrew the message. He glanced at the form as he handed it to Poole, then smiled.

‘Sir.’

Michael took the form, looked first at the name, and turned his back on the clerk to read the message. Tried to call back. Did you really hang up on me? Judy. The time 3:55 was stamped on the form in purple ink – she had called just after Michael had left his room.

He turned around and found the clerk looking at him blankly. ‘I’d like to know if some people who were supposed to be here by now have checked in yet.’

Poole spelled the names.

The clerk slowly pecked at buttons on a computer terminal, frowned, tilted his head, frowned again, and without changing his posture in any way looked sideways at Michael and said, ‘Mr Beevers and Mr Pumo have not arrived as yet. We have no booking for a Mr Linklater.’

Conor was probably saving money by sleeping in Pumo’s room.

Poole turned away, folded Judy’s message into his jacket pocket, and for the first time since his return saw what had happened to the lobby.

Men in dark suits and striped neckties now occupied the banquettes and tables. Most of them had no facial hair and wore white name tags crowded with print. They were talking quietly, consulting legal pads, punching numbers into pocket computers. During his first surreal eighteen months back from Vietnam, Michael Poole had been able to tell if a man had been in Vietnam just by the way he held his body. His instinct for distinguishing vets from civilians had faded since then, but he knew he could not be mistaken about this group.

‘Hello, sir,’ said a clarion voice at his elbow.

Poole looked down at a beaming young woman with a fanatical face surrounded by a bubble of blonde hair. She held a tray of glasses filled with black liquid.

‘Might I inquire, sir, if you are a veteran of the Vietnam conflict?’

‘I was in Vietnam,’ Poole said.

‘The Coca-Cola Company joins the rest of America in thanking you personally for your efforts during the Vietnam conflict. We wish to take this opportunity to express our gratitude to you, and to introduce you to our newest product, Diet Coke, in the hope that you will enjoy it and will share your pleasure with your friends and fellow veterans.’

Poole looked upward and saw that a long, brilliantly red banner of some material like parachute silk had been suspended far above the lobby. White lettering said: THE COCA-COLA CORPORATION AND DIET COKE SALUTE THE VETERANS OF VIETNAM! He looked back down at the girl.

‘I guess I’ll pass.’

The girl increased the wattage of her smile and looked amazingly like every one of the stewardesses on Poole’s flight into Vietnam from San Francisco. Her eyes shifted away from him, and she was gone.

The desk clerk said, ‘You’ll find your meeting areas downstairs, sir. Perhaps your friends are waiting for you there.’

2

The executives in their blue suits sipped their drinks, pretending not to monitor the girls walking around the lobby with their inhuman smiles and trays of Diet Coke. Michael touched Judy’s note in his jacket pocket. Either it or the tips of his fingers felt hot. If he sat down in the lobby bar to watch the arrivals coming through the door, within minutes he would be asked if he were a veteran of the Vietnam conflict.

Poole went to the bank of elevators and waited while an odd mixture of veterans and Coca-Cola executives, each group pretending the other group did not exist, left the car. Only one other man, a drunken mountainous being in tiger-striped fatigues, entered the elevator with him. The man studied the buttons and pushed SIXTEEN four or five times, then stumbled against the railing at the back of the car. He emitted a foggy bourbon-flavored burp. Poole finally recognized him as the van driver who had smashed into the Camaro.

‘You know this, don’t you?’ the giant asked him. He straightened up and began to bellow out a song Poole and every other veteran knew by heart. ‘Homeward bound, I wish I were homeward bound’…

Poole joined him on the second line, singing softly and tunelessly, and then the car stopped and the door opened. The giant, who had closed his eyes, continued to sing as Poole stepped from brown elevator carpet to green hall carpet. The doors slid shut. The elevator ascended and Poole heard the man’s voice echoing down the shaft.