“Just let me hear it again.”
So the technician ran the tape back to the beginning, and once again they heard Koo say, “This is—what’s left of—Koo Davis—speaking to you—from inside the whale—I wanna say hello—to Lily and my sons—Barry and Frank—and especially—Gilbert Freeman—my favorite host—in all the world—and now I—”
“Stop,” she said, and the technician hit the button, and the grainy voice broke off.
Jock Cayzer said, “Did you get it?”
“Gilbert Freeman,” she said. “Why would Koo talk about Gilbert Freeman?”
“Who is he?”
Lynsey was astonished; you didn’t have to get very far from your own field to discover that fame was relative. “Gilbert?” she said. “He’s one of the most famous directors in the world. He did Chattanooga Chop.”
Wiskiel said, “A movie director. So what’s the problem?”
“Koo scarcely knows the man,” she explained. “They’ve met three or four times, at parties or dinners, but that’s all. Why would Koo talk about him now?”
Jock Cayzer said, “Koo Davis has been in a lot of movies. This fellow Freeman ever direct any of them?”
“Oh, no. Gilbert is an entirely different sort from Koo, very trendy and hip-artistic. Improvisational. Tricky sound tracks, indirect story lines. Pauline Kael loves him.”
It was clear that Pauline Kael was another name that rang no bells with either man. Nevertheless, Wiskiel said, “So you’re saying there’s no real link.”
Lynsey said, “He might as well have talked about the weekend in Reno he spent with Simone de Beauvoir.”
Wiskiel said, “Okay, I’ve got the idea. Now, what does he say about this fellow?”
She quoted from memory. “Gilbert Freeman, my favorite host in all the world.”
“Favorite host.”
Jock Cayzer said, “Let me see do I follow this. Gilbert Freeman never was Koo Davis’ host.”
“That’s right,” Lynsey said.
Cayzer scratched his head with big-knuckled fingers. “I don’t get it. Does he mean Gilbert Freeman is one of the kidnappers?”
“Oh, he can’t,” Lynsey said. “No, that’s just too silly.”
“He means something,” Mike Wiskiel said, “that’s for sure. And let me say, that’s beautiful work he did there. He’s sick and he’s hurt, and still he threw a curve ball right past them.”
“That’s right,” Lynsey said. “And it’s up to us to be up to him, to be as good as he is. He got that out to us, and now we have to do the rest.”
15
Koo is listening to a talk on tribal problems in Africa. I don’t believe this, says his internal monologue. I don’t believe this is happening.
It’s been an hour since Mark dropped his bombshell statement and walked out of here, and Koo’s mind is still reeling. On the other hand, his physical condition has improved steadily, leaving now only a residue of deep weariness, a drained feeling as though the knots of all his muscles have been untied. What he mostly feels like is a flat tire.
Earnest Larry is saying, “So you see, Koo, the national boundaries are all wrong. Here’s the Luanda tribe, they’re spread over parts of Zaire and Zambia and Angola, and their loyalty isn’t to any of those nations, it’s to their own tribe. Is there any greater proof of the continuing dominance of the imperial powers? The African nations have boundary lines drawn according to which European nation colonized where, when the lines ought to be drawn according to tribal and linguistic groupings. Every single war and revolution in Africa in the last twenty years has been inter-tribaclass="underline" tribes with no sensible relationship jammed willy-nilly into the same so-called nation. Who profits from that, Koo? Well, let’s look at it.”
But what Koo is looking at is his memory of Mark’s face, in those climactic few seconds before he left the room; all those emotions crowding by, furious and bitter and speciously calm, ironical. What in Christ’s name did Mark mean? “You fathered me. I’m your son.” Then he ran out, while Koo was still too stunned to ask him anything, and now the question grows with every second. Is it some lamebrain political credo? Larry here might build some idiotic family-of-man allegory into that ultimate statement—“You fathered me. I’m your son.”—but is that Mark’s style? What is Mark’s style anyway, other than simple brutality?
Does Larry know what Mark had in mind? If Koo could develop some sort of conversation with Larry, he might be able to ask the question in some indirect way, but the problem is, he can’t think of anything to say. Even without the enigma of Mark distracting his brain it’d be tough chatting with Larry; how do you respond to such half-baked bullshit? Larry knows all these facts and figures, he’s got these set-pieces about African tribes, value-for-labor, child mortality, community responsibility, you name it, but the connections he makes and the conclusions he draws are completely weird. He obviously possesses great sincerity and a strong moral sense, but he’s trying to make virtue take the place of brains. What Larry’s doing, he’s making a pearl necklace using some real pearls, some fake pearls, and imaginary string.
Jesus Christ, it suddenly comes to him; ever since Larry started talking to him, in the back of Koo’s mind there’s been this feeling, this sense of familiarity, of being reminded of something out of the past, but he’s been ignoring it because it’s ridiculous. How could there have been anything like this before?
Well, there was something, and the memory has just popped into Koo’s mind, complete and entire, and he’s astounded by it. How long ago did that happen? Jesus, it’s over twenty years, it’s almost a quarter of a century ago. Jesus...
The place was Korea, January of ’53, Koo’s annual Christmas tour. Korea: that was the good war, maybe the best. For one thing, you could tell the good guys from the bad; also, there was never any chance of the American mainland being involved (Koo still remembers the ongoing silent panic along the Pacific Coast during World War Two, expecting the little yellow men to land at any moment); and besides that the whole damn war was taking place along the same small peninsula. Little danger, no ambiguity and only minor travel; that’s the way to run a war.
Or almost. Nothing in life is perfect, and in Korea the imperfection was that nobody was supposed to go all-out. America wasn’t used to pulling its punches in a war—who is?—so there was a certain amount of frustration, particularly after American defeats. Inchon Reservoir, for instance. That was where the rule-changes started; fighting a war without giving it your total effort, and in fact never even admitting it was a war: a police action, that was what everybody was supposed to call it. “I didn’t raise my boy to be a policeman.” You could still joke about such things then; nobody knew they were serious.
But that was where everything started, and now Koo remembers seeing a bit of it: the beginning. The place was called Campok, a crossroads village in a fold among low steep hills. Damn little of the village was left, and for that matter damn little of the roads; everything in the area had been bombed, shelled, mined and fought over for three years. The hills were like the unshaven cheeks of giants, pocked with shellholes and stubbled with tree trunks and bits of underbrush, all smeared with a scum of wet cold snow. The world was in black and white and olive drab, with the shit-brown herringbone lines of jeep tracks quickly obscured by more of that same endless, wet, drifting, cold, goddamn unpleasant snow. It wasn’t like Christmas snow, deep and soft and somehow friendly and comfortable. It was war snow, tiny glittering wet flakes like bits of ground glass swirling among the low steep hills in the never-ending wet wind, ramming snowflakes in your ears and down your neck, giving the skin of your face the look and texture of dead fish. Your bones ached from it, and for the first time you could actually feel your skeleton, this twisted clumsy trestle inside your skin.