KOKO [antikvár]

Washington, D.C.t 'IAt 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 Link-later 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 Underbill had called