Koko

Saigon was scheduled to reopen in three weeks, and in more ways than one Pumo’s ability to meet this deadline would count heavily with the bankers. The restaurant had to be running very close to full capacity for a specific number of days before it would begin to make money again. For Pumo, Saigon was a home, a wife, and a baby too, but for the bankers it was a questionably efficient machine for turning food into money. All of this made him feel rushed, anxious, stressed, but it was the presence of Maggie Lah, still sleeping on the other side of his bed, that was most responsible for his feeling of uncertainty.

He could not help this; he regretted it, and at some miserable future hour, he knew, he would hate it, but she irritated him, lying sprawled over half of his bed as if she owned it. Pumo could not divide his life in two and give half of it away. Just concentrating on the daily details took so much energy that his eyes started to close before eleven o’clock. When he woke up in the morning, Maggie was there; when he rushed through lunch she was there; when he looked at blueprints, scanned a profit and loss projection, or even read the newspaper, she was there. He had included Maggie in so many parts of his life that now she had the feeling she belonged in all of them. Maggie had come to feel that she had a right to be in the lawyer’s office, the architect’s brownstone, the supplier’s warehouse. Maggie had taken a temporary condition for a lifelong change and had managed to forget that she was a separate person.

So she took it for granted that she could lie across half his bed every night. So she put in her two cents with Molly Witt, suggesting changes in the floor tiles and the hardware on the cabinets. (Molly had agreed with all her suggestions, but that was beside the point.) So she told him his old menu was no good, and made up some silly new design she expected him to adopt on the spot. People liked those descriptions of the food. Lots of people even needed them.

Pumo could not forget that he loved Maggie, but he no longer needed a nurse, and Maggie had lulled him into forgetting what he was like when he was normal. She was so lulled herself she had lost her timing.

He would have to take her with him today. Molly’s partner would flirt with her. David Dixon, a good lawyer but otherwise a grown-up adolescent who thought only about money, sex, sports, and antique cars, would amusedly tolerate her presence and give Tina knowing looks. If the banker got a look at her, he’d think Tina was a flake and turn down the loan. At Arnold Leung’s, the old Chinese supplier would cast forlorn, despairing looks at her and start sidelong conversations about how she was ruining her life with an “old foreigner.”

Maggie’s eyes opened. She looked at Tina’s empty pillow, and then rolled her head up to weigh and parcel him in one measuring glance. Maggie couldn’t even wake up like other people. Her face looked smooth and dusky, the whites of her eyes glinted. Even her round full lips looked smart.

“I see,” she said on a little sigh.

“Do you?” Pumo said.

“Do you mind if I don’t come with you today? I ought to go up to a Hundred-twenty-fifth Street to see the General. I have been neglecting my duty. He gets very lonely.”

“Oh.”

“Besides, you look grumpy today.”

“I’m … not … grumpy,” Pumo said.

Maggie gave him another slow, measuring look and sat up in bed. Her skin seemed very dark in the half light. “He hasn’t been well lately. He’s worried about losing the lease on the storefront.”

She jumped out of bed and skimmed over the floor to the bathroom. For a moment the bed seemed astoundingly empty. The toilet flushed, water pounded through the overhead pipes. He could feel Maggie vigorously brushing her teeth, using up all the energy and air in the bathroom, draining the power from the shaver’s socket and the light fixtures, making the towels wilt on the rack.

“You don’t mind, do you?” she called out brightly. Her voice was slushy with toothpaste. “Tina?”

“I don’t mind,” he said in a voice carefully calculated to be almost too low for her to hear.

She came out of the bathroom and gave him another considering look. “Oh, Tina,” she said, and moved past him to the closet and began to dress.

“I have to be alone for a while.”

“You don’t have to tell me. Should I come back tonight?”

“Do what you like.”

“I’ll do what I like, then.” Maggie dressed quickly in the dark woolen garment she had worn when he had fetched her from the General’s apartment.

Maggie and Pumo spoke very little between then and the time they both left the loft to walk down the staircase to Grand Street. Dressed in their heavy winter coats, they stood together in the cold. A garbage truck down at the end of the street noisily crunched up some wooden object that cracked and split like human bones.

Maggie looked so misleadingly small, standing next to him in her padded coat—she might have been a girl going off to high school. It occurred to Pumo that they would not have any problems if they never had to get out of bed. A recollection of Judy Poole’s caustic voice on the telephone made him say, “When Mike Poole and the other guys get back here …”

Maggie tilted her head expectantly, and Tina wondered if what he was going to say was more complicated than he wished. Maggie did not flinch.

“I guess we ought to see more of him, that’s all.”

Maggie gave him a grim, sad smile. “I’ll always be nice to your friends, Tina.”

She gave a wave of her gloved hand as sad as her smile, and turned to walk to the subway station. He watched, but she did not look back.

2

In most ways, Pumo’s morning and early afternoon went more easily than he had imagined. Molly Witt and Lowery Hapgood gave him two strong cups of coffee and showed him their latest innovations, which were, he saw, clever adaptations of the ideas Maggie had advanced a few days earlier. These changes could be painlessly incorporated into the small amount of work remaining to be done, the only hitch being that the cabinet hardware would have to be reordered. But since even the old hardware had not arrived yet … and didn’t he think that everything “keyed together” this way? It did, and he did. And it wasn’t their concern, but if he rethought the menu in the light of these changes and brought the whole look more up to date … in short, adopted most of Maggie’s ideas about the menu too, not excluding “streamlining” Pumo’s beloved descriptions of the food. After the meeting, David Dixon juggled a handful of legal balls in the brisk, cheery air of his offices and lamented that Pumo’s “cute little squeeze” had not accompanied him. At lunch he returned to this theme.

“You’re not going to screw this one up too, are you, buddy?” the lawyer asked him, his eyes twinkling in his ruddy ex-athlete’s face as he looked over the menu at Smith & Wollensky’s. “I’d hate to see you lose that beautiful little Chink.”

“Why don’t you marry her, David?” Pumo said sourly.

“My family would kill me if I brought home a Chink. What could I tell them, that our kids’ll be great in math?” Dixon continued to twinkle at him, secure in the certainty of his charm.

“You’re not smart enough for her, anyhow.” Pumo only partially mollified Dixon by adding, “We have that much in common.”

Downtown, the meeting at the bank was conducted with a certain cold formality that seemed to distress the banker, who appeared to expect more of Dixon’s usual jocularity—they had been in the same class at Princeton and were happy boyish bachelors of forty. Dixon and the banker had not of course gone to Vietnam. They were real Americans. (That was how they would see it.)

“Don’t worry, it’s in the bag,” Dixon said once they were back out on the street. “But let me give you a hint, old pal. You’ve gotta lighten up. The world is full of that particular brand of real estate, man, you can’t be dragged down by one little Oriental pussy just ’cause it walked out the door.” He guffawed, and a big white scarf of steam flew from his mouth. “Can you? Hell, you threw her out!”

“I’ll let you know in a week or two,” Tina said, and made himself smile and shake Dixon’s hand. In the pressure of the lawyer’s hand on his, he could tell that Dixon was as happy as he was to be parting.

Dixon strode away, red-faced, smiling his charming, lopsided old Princetonian smile, perfect in his gleaming shirtfront, his striped tie, his neat dark bush of hair, his neat dark topcoat, and for a moment Pumo watched him go as he had watched Maggie go earlier that day. What was wrong with him, that he was driving people away from him? Tina did not have much in common with Dixon, but the man was a rogue, and rogues were usually good company.

Like Maggie, Dixon did not look back. His arm shot up, a taxi rolled to a stop, and he slid inside. Rogues had a talent for flagging down cabs. Tina watched his lawyer’s cab roll down Broad Street in a yellow tide of occupied taxis. All at once he felt that, just as he was watching Dixon’s getaway, someone was watching him. The hair on the back of his neck actually rose, and he whirled around to see who was looking at him. Of course no one was. Pumo scanned the crowd of brokers and bankers hurrying down Broad Street in the cold. Some of them were the grey-haired old foxes he still associated with these professions, but many more were men of his and Dixon’s age, and as many were in their twenties and early thirties. They looked both flawless and humorless, human adding machines. Rogues like Dixon would take them in hand and humor them along, and he would feed them and watch them get drunk. Pumo saw that the tribe moving along Broad Street did not even give him a curious glance. They were the focused people. Or maybe he was transparent. The day seemed even colder, and the sky above the sidewalk lamps grew darker, and Pumo moved to the curb and raised his arm.

It took him fifteen minutes to get a cab, and he arrived back at Grand Street at sixteen-hundred hours plus ten minutes. He let himself into the restaurant and found the inspector, Brian Mecklenberg, pacing around the kitchen, tapping his ballpoint against his front teeth, and making little checks on a sheet inserted in his clipboard. “You’ve gained a few yards since the last time I saw you, Mr. Pumo,” he said.

“We have a way to go, too,” Pumo said, dropping his coat on a chair. He still had to get down to Arnold Leung’s that day.

“Oh?” Mecklenberg regarded him with as much interest as any health inspector ever gave any of his victims. “Would you say that our target has been reached?”

“Getting rid of the bugs?”

“Affirmative—zapping the infestation. What else would I mean?”

Mecklenberg looked a little bit like a target himself in a hideous yellow-black-and-olive plaid sports jacket and a brown knit tie firmly locked into place with a conspicuous tie pin.

“Getting the kitchen finished, opening for business, staying open, getting the people to come in off the street, that kind of thing,” Pumo said. “Having a peaceful, orderly, satisfying life that also manages to be interesting. Getting my love life in order.”

He remembered David Dixon’s ruddy face and lopsided smile and a crazy light went on in his brain. “You want to talk about targets, Mecklenberg? Abolishing nuclear weapons and establishing world peace. Getting everybody to see that Vietnamese food is as good as French food. Establishing a Vietnam War memorial in every major city. Finding a safe way to get rid of all toxic waste.” He paused for breath, aware the Mecklenberg was staring at him with his mouth open.

“Hey, about nuclear power, hey—” Mecklenberg began.

“Scrapping all that ridiculous Star Wars bullshit. Upgrading public schools. Putting religion back in churches, where it belongs.”

“I’m with you there,” Mecklenberg said.

Pumo’s voice rose a notch. “Taking goddamned guns away from civilians.” Mecklenberg tried to interrupt, but Pumo began to shout. The crazy light was burning very brightly now. Mecklenberg hadn’t heard half the targets he was going to hear. “Trying to elect officials who actually know what they’re doing instead of ones who just look good while pretending that they know what they’re doing! Taking the radio away from goddamned teenagers and having decent music on again! Abolishing television for five years! Cutting one finger off every public official who is caught telling even one public lie, and cutting off another finger every time he’s caught after that! Imagine what that would have done for us in Vietnam! Hey, Mecklenberg, can you get your head around that?”

“Are you in some kind of trouble, are you sure you’re okay, I mean …” Mecklenberg had put his ballpoint pen in his shirt pocket, where a fuzzy blue stain was blossoming out. He bent down, popped open his briefcase, and shoved the clipboard inside it. “I think—”

“You have to widen your horizons, Mecklenberg! Let’s see about abolishing bureaucratic red tape! Reducing waste in government! Let’s have fair taxation! Let’s get rid of executions once and for all! Reform the prison system! Let’s realize that abortions are here to stay and have a little sanity about that! And how about drugs? Let’s figure out a policy that makes sense instead of pretending that Prohibition worked, shall we?” Pumo shot out his arm and leveled his index finger at poor Mecklenberg. He had thought of a wonderful new target.

“I have a great idea, Mecklenberg. Instead of executing him, let’s take a guy like this Ted Bundy and put him in a glass cage in the middle of Epcot Center. You get me? Your basic ordinary American families can stop in for a little talk with Ted, one family every fifteen minutes. See? Here’s one of those, we say, here’s what one looks like, here’s what one sounds like, here’s how he brushes his teeth and blows his nose. Get a good, close-up gander. You want to see evil? Here the son of a bitch is!”

Mecklenberg had struggled into his overcoat and was backing away toward the swinging doors to the dining room, where a dozen workmen had set down their tools in order to overhear Pumo’s rant. Someone out there shouted, “Yeah, baby!” and someone else laughed.

“You think bugs are evil, Mecklenberg?” Pumo boomed. “For God’s sake, just—” He clamped his hands to the sides of his head and looked around for a place to sit down.

Mecklenberg bolted toward the swinging doors. Pumo’s neck was bent, and for that reason he saw an insect cautiously emerging from beneath the side of the Garland range. It was enormous. He had never seen an insect like it, not even at the height of his “infestation,” when it seemed that creepy-crawlies of all descriptions occupied every centimeter of his walls. By the time the thing had finished coming out from beneath the range, it was nearly the size of Pumo’s foot.

Mecklenberg slammed the front door, and a loud cheer came up from the workmen in the restaurant.

Pumo felt like fainting—or as if he had already fainted, and this creature had appeared in a fever-dream. It was long and sleek, with feelers of copper wire. The whole brown body resembled an artillery shell. It looked polished, almost burnished. Its feet clacked audibly on the tile floor.

Pumo told himself: this is not happening. There were no monsters, and cockroaches had no King Kong.

The monster roach suddenly saw him. It froze. Then it quickly fled back under the range. For a second or two Pumo heard its little hooves tapping away on the tiles, and then there was silence.

For a moment Pumo stood in the silence, afraid to bend down and look under the range. The creature might be waiting to attack him. What could you use against a bug that size? You couldn’t step on it. You almost had to shoot it, like a wolverine. Pumo thought of the gallons and gallons of fluid the exterminator had sprayed behind the walls, soaking into the wooden joists and the cement foundations.

Pumo went down on his knees to look beneath the stove. Because the floor was still only half-finished, there was not even an accumulation of dust beneath the range, only a snipped-off curl of electrical cable one of the electricians had thrown away.

The antennae? Pumo wondered. He had expected to see, if not the Kong of roaches, at least a hole the size of a man’s head in the baseboard; not only was there no hole, there was no baseboard—fire regulations had demanded that a seamless sheet of steel be installed behind the range.

The world seemed full of gaps and stony chasms. Pumo went out of the kitchen and the workmen clapped and shouted.

3

For decades Arnold Leung had maintained his immense, dim warehouses at the easternmost end of Prince Street, where Little Italy, Chinatown, and SoHo melted together, and now he had the aura of a pioneer—the neighborhood had not yet been completely subsumed into Chinatown, but in the past five years several Italian bakeries had been replaced by shops with Chinese characters painted on the windows and Chinese produce wholesalers. Restaurants named Golden Fortune and Soon Luck had taken over other sites. Late on a cold dark February afternoon the only people Pumo saw making their way down the narrow street were two well-padded Chinese women with broad muffin faces partially concealed behind thick dark head scarves. Pumo turned into the narrow alley that led to Arnold Leung’s warehouses.

Leung was one of Pumo’s great discoveries. His prices were twenty percent lower than any of the midtown suppliers, and he delivered instantly—his son-in-law’s pickup would drop at your front door, no farther, the carton you had paid for, whether or not you happened to be present to carry it inside. The price and the speed of delivery made the surliness and the son-in-law more than acceptable to Pumo.

At the end of the alley was one of the city’s anomalies, an empty lot a block long and ringed with the backs of buildings. In summers the lot was fragrant with garbage, and during the winter the wind whirling around the backs of the tenements rattled bits of debris like buckshot against Leung’s tin warehouses. Tina had only been inside the first warehouse, where Leung kept his office. The only window in all four sheds was above Leung’s desk.

Pumo rattled open the door and slipped inside the main building. Wind or air pressure took the flimsy aluminum door out of his hands and violently slammed it shut. Pumo could hear Leung carrying on a one-way conversation in Chinese, presumably on the telephone, which ceased the moment the door noisily struck the frame. The head and body of the proprietor, clad in what looked like several layers of sweat suits, leaned out of the office door to peek at him and then retreated back inside. At the far end of the shed, four men seated on packing cases around a board looked up at Pumo and returned to their game. Except for the office enclosure, the whole interior of the vast shed was a maze of cases and boxes mounted to the ceiling, through which Leung’s employees threaded motorized carts. Bare, low-wattage bulbs on cords provided the only illumination.

Pumo waved to the men, who ignored him, and turned toward the office door. Pumo rapped his knuckles against it, and Leung cracked it open, frowned out at him, uttered a few words into the phone, and opened the door just wide enough for Pumo to slip through.

When Leung finally put the receiver down, he said, “So what do you want today?”

Pumo produced his list.

“Too much,” Leung said after a glance. “Can’t fill it all now. You know what’s happening? Empire Szechuan, that is what’s happening. New branches every week, haven’t you noticed? Three new ones on Upper West Side, one in Village. I have stuff on order two-three months, just to keep in stock. I say, open one across street from me so I can at least send out for good food.”

“Send what you can,” Pumo said. “I need everything in two weeks.”

“You dreaming,” Leung said. “What you need this stuff for, anyway? You already got all this stuff!”

“I used to have it. Quote me some prices.”

All of a sudden, Pumo once again had the feeling of being watched. Here it made even less sense than on Broad Street, for the only person looking at him, and that one with a certain reluctance, was Arnold Leung.

“You look nervous,” Leung said. “You ought to look nervous. All these knives listed here gonna cost you hundred-fifty, hundred-sixty dollars. Maybe more, depending on what I got in stock.”

Okay, Pumo said to himself. Now I get it. Leung was going to hold him up. Leung may even have been punishing him for bringing Maggie Lah to this place once, on the occasion when Tina had heard Leung refer to him as a lo fang. He didn’t know what a lo fang was, but it was probably pretty close to “old foreigner.”

Pumo moved to look out of Leung’s grimy window. He could see all the way down the cold windy alley to the street, a slash of brightness filled with a moving blur of traffic. Leung’s window was not even glass, but of some irregularly transparent film of plastic which had darkened here and there with age. One whole side of the alley was only a brownish wash, a smear of color.

“Let’s talk about cast-iron pans,” Pumo said, and was about to turn around to watch the expression on Leung’s face as he reached for his trusty abacus when he noticed the approach of a little black-tipped blur up the smeary side of the alley. Instantly he felt two absolutely opposed feelings, a surge of relief that Maggie had learned where he was from Vinh and had come down to be with him, and a counterbalanced feeling of deep annoyance that no matter what he said or did, he could not get rid of her.

When Leung saw her, his prices would probably go up another five percent.

“No problem,” Leung said. “You want to talk about iron pans? Let’s talk about iron pans.” When Pumo did not respond, he said, “You want to buy my window too?”

The moving blur stopped moving, and its whole general posture and attitude told Pumo that this was not Maggie Lah after all. It was a man. The man in the alley began shifting backwards in a way that reminded Tina of the giant roach ducking back beneath the range.

“Hold on a minute, Arnold,” Tina said. He shot him a placating look that met implacable Chinese indifference. So much for old customers. Business is business.

“You know about iron pans?” Leung asked. “Production everywhere is way down, no matter where you look.”

Tina had turned back to the window. The man had moved out closer to the middle of the alley, and was moving backwards very slowly.

“You ever have the feeling someone is following you?” Pumo asked.

“All the time,” Leung said. “You too?”

The man in the alley stepped back into the brightness of the street.

“You’ll get used to it,” Leung said. “No big deal.”

Pumo saw a blurry face, a shock of black hair, a slim body in nondescript clothes. He was aware for a second that this was someone he knew: and then he knew. For a moment he felt lightheaded. He turned around.

“Just deliver the stuff and send me the bill,” he said.

Leung shrugged.

The man in the alley was Victor Spitalny, and Pumo knew now that his feelings of having been watched and followed had not been mistaken. Spitalny had probably been following him for days. He had even loitered outside the restaurant, where Vinh had seen him.

“I might be able to get you a little deal on those iron pans,” Leung said. Normally Tina would now have begun the negotiating Leung expected, but instead he buttoned his coat and muttered some apology to the astonished wholesaler and hurried out of his office. A moment later he was shutting the aluminum door behind him in the cold.

He saw a small, dark-haired man slipping around the end of the alley. Pumo made himself walk at a moderate pace down toward the street—Spitalny would not know that he had been seen, and Pumo did not want to alarm him. First of all, he had to assure himself that the man watching him really had been Victor Spitalny—he’d had only a blurry glimpse of his face. Pumo sickeningly realized that it was Victor Spitalny who had broken into his loft.

Spitalny had nearly trapped him in the library, and he would continue to track him down until he killed him. Spitalny had killed Dengler, or at best left him to die, and now he was on a worldwide hunting trip.

Pumo reached the end of the alley, and turned against the raw wind in the direction Spitalny had gone. Of course Spitalny was now nowhere in sight. Pumo’s world now seemed very close and dark. Spitalny had not died, he had not succumbed to drugs or disease, he had not straightened out and become a decent guy after all. He had bided his time and ticked away.

The whole long expanse of the street and sidewalk was almost empty. A few Chinese women padded toward their apartments, a long way up the block a man in a long black coat mounted a set of stairs and entered a building. Pumo wandered down the street in the cold, fearing that his lunatic nemesis hid behind every shop door.

He reached the end of the block before he began to doubt himself. No one was following him now, and if anyone were going to jump at him out of a doorway, he’d had ample opportunity. A moment’s conviction based on a glimpse through a greasy window was his only evidence that Victor Spitalny was following him. It was hard to picture an oaf like Spitalny carrying off the pretense of being a journalist in the Microfilm Room—maybe Maggie was right, and the Spanish name was just a coincidence. An hour earlier he would have sworn that he had seen a giant cockroach. He looked up and down the empty street again, and his body began to relax.

Tina decided to go home and call Judy Poole again. If she had spoken to Michael, he would already be on the way home.

Pumo returned to Grand Street just past five-thirty, when the workmen were packing up their tools and loading their trucks. The foreman told him that Vinh had left half an hour earlier—during the construction, Vinh’s daughter was staying with yet another of his relatives, a cousin who lived in a Canal Street apartment. Vinh himself spent half the night there. After the workmen’s vans and pickups rolled off toward West Broadway, Pumo gave a long look up and down the street.

Grand Street was never empty, and at this hour the sidewalks were still crowded with the successful, middle-aged populace of New Jersey or Long Island who liked to spend their money in SoHo. Through the tourists strolled the residents of Grand Street and West Broadway, of Spring Street and Broome Street. Some of these waved at Pumo, and he waved back. A painter he knew, making his way up the steps to La Gamal for a drink, waved and yelled across the street the question of how soon he would be opening again. “Couple of weeks,” Pumo yelled back, praying that it was true.

The painter went up into La Gamal and Pumo let himself into Saigon. The bar where Harry Beevers had spent so many of the hours he should have given to Caldwell, Moran, Morrissey had been extended and topped with the most beautiful sheet of black walnut Pumo had ever seen; beyond this lay the empty, still barren dining room. Pumo picked his way across the floor in the darkness and let himself into the kitchen. Here there were lights, and Pumo threw them on. Then he went down on his hands and knees and looked under the range and refrigerator, behind the freezers and the storage shelves, and at every inch of floor in the place. He saw no insect of any kind.

Pumo went into Vinh’s little room. The bed was neatly made. Vinh’s books—poetry, novels, histories, and cookbooks in French, English, and Vietnamese—stood in ranks on the shelves he had made. Pumo looked under the bed and the little chest of drawers without seeing any giant bugs.

He heard no little hooves rapping against his new tiles.

Pumo locked up and went upstairs to his loft. There he finally took off his coat and walked into his bedroom and, without turning on any lights, looked down onto Grand Street. More people were going up the stairs to La Gamal, some of them people who otherwise would be coming to Saigon with their stomachs empty and their wallets out. Everybody was moving swiftly up and down the street, nobody loitered or lingered, nobody was staring up at his window. Maggie would decide whether or not she would come down tonight. Probably she would stay uptown. All of this seemed very familiar. Maggie would not call for days, he’d start to go crazy, there’d be enigmatic little ads in the Voice, the whole thing would start up all over again. Foodcat misses Half Moon. Maybe this time he would not have to get half killed to bring her back—maybe this time he would have some sense. But for tonight, Maggie would be better off uptown. Pumo knew his old need to be alone, where he could not contaminate any other human being with his troubles.

He made himself a drink at the bar behind his desk and carried it down to the couch to wait for Vinh to return.

When the downstairs buzzer rang, Pumo thought that his chef must have gone off to Canal Street without his keys, and he nearly pushed the little button to let him in without speaking into the little grille that let him interview his callers. But he thought twice, and leaned toward the grille and asked, “Who is it?”

A voice said, “Delivery.”

The son-in-law, with a van full of cast-iron kitchenware and two or three boxes of knives. If Leung had sent them without waiting for Tina’s instructions, he must have given him the old price. Tina said, “I’ll be right there,” and pushed the button to unlock the door and admit his caller.

4

“So you think I ought to go back to him tonight?” Maggie trailed after the General as if clinging close to his broad military back for warmth and strength—she was not levitating now.

“I didn’t say that.” The General darted into one of the aisles of his impromptu church to align a chair. Everything around them, the red vinyl of the seats, the yellow walls with the garish oils of a pigtailed Jesus confronting demons in a misty Chinese landscape, the cheap blond wood of the altar, gleamed and sparkled and shone in the harsh bright light the General and his congregation preferred to any other sort of lighting. And he and Maggie spoke in the Cantonese, similarly hard and brilliant, in which he conducted his services.

Standing by herself before the shuttered Harlem window, Maggie looked nearly bereft. “Then I apologize. I didn’t understand.”

The General straightened up and nodded approvingly. He went back to the aisle, stepped around her, and proceeded up the side of the church to the altar rail and the altar.

Maggie followed him as far as the rail. The General made minute adjustments to the white cloth on the altar, and at length looked at her again.

“You have always been an intelligent girl. You just have never understood yourself. But the things you do! The way you live!”

“I do not live badly,” Maggie said. This looked like another replay of an old, old argument, and she suddenly wanted to leave, to go downtown and stay with Jules and Perry in one of their rickety East Village tenements, to escape into their mindless club-hopping and their mindless acceptance of her.

“I mean—living in such ignorance of yourself,” the General said mildly.

“What shall I do, then?” she asked, unable to keep the irony out of her voice.

“You are a caretaker,” the General said. “You are a person who goes where she is needed. Your friend was in great need of your help. You brought him back to health so successfully that he no longer required your assistance, your caretaking, and all his usual problems returned to him. I know men like him. It will be years before he gets to the end of what combat did to him.”

“Do you think Americans are too sentimental to be good soldiers?” Maggie asked, really curious to know if he did think this.

“I am not a philosopher,” the General said. He went into a storeroom behind the altar and returned carrying a stack of hymnals. Knowing what was expected of her, Maggie came forward and took the hymnals from him. “But you would perhaps be a better soldier than your friend. I have known some caretakers who were excellent officers. Your father had a great deal of the caretaker in him.”

“Did he go where he was needed?”

“He often went where I needed him,” the General said.

They were walking side by side down parallel aisles, placing hymnals face up on the chairs.

“And now I suppose you want me to go somewhere,” she said at last.

“You are doing nothing now, Maggie. You help me out here in my church. You live with your old soldier. I am sure you do a great many things for his restaurant.”

“I try,” Maggie said.

“And if you lived with a painter, you would find the best brushes in the city, you would prepare the canvases as they were never prepared before, and you would end up getting him into famous galleries and museums.”

“That’s right,” she said, struck by this vision.

“So either you marry some man here and live his life by proxy, being his partner if he will let you, or you have your own life by yourself.”

“In Taiwan,” she said, for eventually they would come to this point.

“It is as good as anywhere else, and better for you. I will forget about your brother. Jimmy would be the same anywhere, so he might as well stay here. But you could go to college in Taipei now, and then train for a career.”

“What career?”

“Medicine,” he said, and looked at her fully and frankly. “I can pay for your tuition.”

She nearly laughed out loud in astonishment, and then tried to make a joke of it. “Well, at least you didn’t say nursing!”

“I thought about that, too.” He went on setting down the hymnals. “It would take less time, and cost much less money. But wouldn’t you rather be a doctor?”

She thought of Pumo and said, “Maybe I ought to be a psychiatrist!”

“Maybe you ought,” he said, and she saw that he knew exactly what she was thinking.

“Always the caretaker,” he said. “Do you remember your mother reading Babar to you? The book about the elephant?”

“The books,” she said, for her memory of the French children’s books, which both parents had read to Maggie during her early childhood, was very clear.

“I was remembering a sentence from one of them—something King Babar says. ‘Truly it is not easy to bring up a family.’ ”

“Oh, you did all right,” Maggie said.

“I wish I had done better.”

“Well, I was only the tiniest of families.” Maggie smiled over the rank of intervening chairs and patted his thick old hand. “I haven’t thought of those books in years. Where are they?”

“I have them.”

“I’d like them someday.” Now they were both smiling. “I always liked the Old Lady.”

“See? Another caretaker.”

Maggie laughed out loud, and if Pumo had seen her at that moment, he would have said that she had begun to levitate again.

“I would never insist you follow any design of mine,” the General said. “If you decide to marry your old soldier, I would be happy for you. I would just want you to know that you were his caretaker as well as his wife.”

This was too much for Maggie, and she turned them back onto safer ground. “I could sing him the song of the elephants. Do you remember that?”

He cocked his close-shaven authoritative head. Maggie was very grateful that he had at least met Tina Pumo, and promised herself that she would bring whatever man or men became important to her up before the General’s inspection.

“All I remember is that it was supposed to be very old.” He smiled and said, “From the days of the mammoths,” as if he were old enough to have seen them himself.

Maggie sang the song from Babar the King: “ ‘Patali di rapato/Cromda cromda ripalo/Pata pata/Ko ko ko.’

“That’s the first verse. I can’t remember the other two, but they end the same way—‘Pata pata/Ko ko ko.’ ”

As soon as she had sung the words again she knew that she was going to go back down to Grand Street.

5

About the same time that Tina Pumo pressed the button to unlock his street door and Maggie Lah went up the steps to the 125th Street subway stop, wondering if Tina would still be in his infantile mood, Judy Poole called up Pat Caldwell to have a serious conversation. Judy imagined that Pat Caldwell was very likely the most satisfactory person in the world with whom to have a serious conversation. She did not judge other people in the way that most people of Judy’s acquaintance, and Judy herself, judged others. Judy attributed this to the liberating effect of having been born into a great fortune and grown up to be a kind of displaced princess who went around pretending to be poor. Pat Caldwell had been born far richer than even Bob Bunce, and Judy imagined that if she had been born with such an enormous silver spoon in her mouth, she, too, might have learned to be so artless about concealing it. Really rich people made the only convincing liberals. And Pat Caldwell had known Judy Poole for more than ten years, ever since Michael and Harry Beevers had left the army—they had made a perfect foursome, Judy thought. Or would have, if Harry Beevers had not been so insecure. Harry had nearly ruined their friendship. Even Michael hadn’t liked him.

“It’s all because of Ia Thuc,” she said to Pat, once they were talking. “You know what they remind me of? The men who dropped the bomb on Hiroshima, the ones who fell apart and turned into drunks. They let it become too much for them—almost as if they expected to be punished for it.”

“Harry never expected to be punished for it,” Pat said. “But Harry never expected to be punished for anything. Don’t be too hard on Michael.”

“I used to try not to be,” Judy said. “I’m not sure it’s worth the trouble anymore.”

“Oh dear.”

“Well, you got divorced.”

“Well, I had reasons,” Pat said. “Reasons on top of reasons. Reasons inside reasons. You don’t want to know about all that.”

Judy did want to know—Michael had told her that he thought Beevers was a wife beater—but felt that she could not come out and ask.

“Michael called from Bangkok,” she said after a pause, “and I was terrible to him. I don’t like myself when I’m like that. I even told him I was going out with someone else.”

“I see,” Pat said. “When the cat’s away?”

“Bob is a very nice, very dedicated, very stable man,” Judy said, somewhat defensively. “Michael and I haven’t really been close since Robbie died.”

“I see,” Pat repeated. “Do you mean you’re serious about your friend?”

“I could be. He’s healthy. He never shot anybody. He sails. He plays tennis. He doesn’t have nightmares. He isn’t carrying poison and disease around inside him.…” Judy astonished herself by beginning to cry. “I’m lonely—Michael makes me lonely. All I want is to be an ordinary person and to have an ordinary middle-class life.” She began to cry again, and took a moment to steady her voice. “Is that a lot to ask for?”

“Depends on who’s asking,” Pat said reasonably. “But clearly you don’t think so.”

“I don’t,” Judy fairly wailed. “I’ve worked hard all my life! I wasn’t born in Westerholm, you know. I’m proud of my home and my accomplishments, my achievements, the whole way we live! That counts! I’ve never asked for a handout, I never took anybody’s charity. I made a good place for myself in one of the most exclusive, expensive towns in the entire country. That means something.”

“No one would dispute that,” Pat soothed.

“You don’t know Michael,” Judy said. “He’s perfectly willing to throw it all away. I think he hates Westerholm. He wants to throw everything away and go live in a slum, it’s like he wants to cover himself with ashes, he can’t stand anything nice …”

“Is he sick?” Pat asked. “You said something about poison and disease.…”

“The war got inside him, he carried death around inside him, he sees everything upside-down, I think the only person he really likes here is a girl who’s dying of cancer, he dotes on her, he gives her books to read and he finds excuses to see her, it’s awful, it’s because she’s dying, she’s like Robbie, she’s a smart Robbie.…” Now Judy was in tears again. “Ah, I loved that poor kid. But when he died I put all his things away, I was determined to put it all behind me and get on with things.… Oh, I suppose you’ll never forgive me for getting so emotional.”

“Of course I forgive you, there’s nothing to forgive. You’re upset. But are you implying that Michael is suffering from an Agent Orange-related illness?”

“Have you ever lived with a doctor?” Judy laughed unpleasantly. “Do you know how hard it is to get a doctor to go to a doctor? Michael’s not healthy, I know that much. He won’t go for a checkup, he’s like some primitive old man, he’s waiting for it to go away—but I know what it is! It’s Vietnam, it’s Ia Thuc! He swallowed Ia Thuc, he ate the whole thing up, he drank it the way you’d drink some poison, and it’s eating him up. For all I know, he blames me for all his problems.” She paused, and collected herself. “Then, as if all that wasn’t enough, there’s my anonymous caller. You ever have one of those?”

“I’ve had a few obscene telephone calls,” Pat said. “And Harry used to call me up, after I made him move out of my apartment. He never admitted it, but he’d stay on the phone, just sort of breathing, hoping I’d get scared or feel sorry for him or something.”

“Maybe Harry’s calling me up!” Judy uttered a muffled sound that might have been laughter.

6

Intimations that something had gone wrong followed Maggie all the way to Pumo’s door. A crowd of boys at the subway’s exit surrounded her as soon as she came up the steps, dancing in close to her and calling her “little Chinkie.” “I show you a good time, little Chinkie.” They were just aimless, bored adolescents, too frightened of women to approach them individually, but Maggie suddenly felt too scared of them to risk doing anything but shoving her hands into her pockets, averting her head, and walking straight ahead. The odor of marijuana surrounded the boys like a cloud. Where was Pumo? Why didn’t he answer his phone? “Look at me, look at me, look at me,” one of the boys begged, and Maggie lifted her chin and gave him a look so powerful that he fell back on the spot.

The rest of the boys continued following her for nearly a block, making half-intelligible growls and yells. The night had become very cold, and the wind burned Maggie’s face. The street-lamps shed a morbid yellow light.

She needed time to absorb the General’s offer. She would not reject it without fully considering it, and she might not reject it at all. It was possible that in time the General might accept her training at a medical school in New York, if any such school would take her in. If she were a medical student with her own room up in Washington Heights or over in Brooklyn, if she were busier than any four restaurant owners, if Tina could see that she had her own life … then he couldn’t accuse her of making a meal of his own.

The worst intimation yet that something had gone wrong interrupted the pleasant pictures this possibility gave her. From the end of the block Maggie had been seeing a sliver of yellow light beside the entrance to Saigon, and had taken for granted that it was a reflection in a pane of glass or a strip of polished metal awaiting storage inside the foyer. Now it struck Maggie that it was at least half an hour too late for the workmen to be around. In this neighborhood, they would never leave anything outside at night.

As soon as she got closer to the restaurant, Maggie saw that the door itself hung open half an inch, letting the light from the staircase spill out. This was not merely an intimation of trouble, it rang like an alarm bell. Pumo would not have left his street door gaping open in a thousand lifetimes. Maggie jogged toward the shaft of light.

When she put her hand on the door, she realized that if Pumo had not left it open, some other person had. She was already pressing the buzzer that communicated with the apartment, and snatched her hand away before it gave any more than the dot of Morse code.

She hung in the doorway a moment, fairly panting with indecision. She moved a few steps to the side and pushed the buzzer for the restaurant, thinking that Vinh might be inside. She pressed it again, and this time held it down, but nothing happened. Vinh was not home.

There was a pay telephone around the corner on West Broadway, and Maggie moved away to call the police. But maybe Pumo had simply left the door unlocked, and was sitting upstairs in a blue funk.

Or maybe Dracula had returned to ransack the loft. The memory of how she had found Pumo lying on sheets stiff with drying blood moved her back to the door again and lifted her hand to the buzzer. She pushed, held it down longer than she had the restaurant’s buzzer, and listened to the noise ring out through the loft and down the stairs.

“Look at Maggie skulk, I bet she’s spyin’ on someone.”

She looked over her shoulder and saw Perry, her friend from the East Village, standing just behind her with a long black portfolio under one arm. Beside him Jules grimaced at her with an expression that virtually said: Isn’t this terrible, isn’t this deadly? They had apparently emerged from the office building on the other side of Saigon, which housed a number of art galleries. Jules and Perry had evidently resolved to sell out.

“Let’s spy with her,” Jules said. “Anything’d be more fun than bein’ pissed on by these gallery assholes.” Perry was English, and Jules had long ago begun to sound like him.

“I believe I’d fancy a bit of spyin’ about now,” said Perry. “Who we havin’ a decco at, then? Enemy of the state? Ernst Stavro Blofeld? Italian Post-Expressionists?”

“I’m not spying on anybody,” Maggie said. “I’m just waiting for my friend.”

For a moment she considered asking them to come upstairs with her, but she could see too clearly how Perry would respond to Pumo’s loft. He would go around knocking things over, drink up all the liquor he could find, and relentlessly insult Pumo’s taste and politics.

“Funny way you have of waitin’,” Perry said. “Which friend? That old geezer followed us ‘round the off-license last year? Eyes hangin’ out on bloody stalks?”

“That wasn’t him, that was just someone he knows,” Maggie said.

“Come along with us,” Jules said. It was a gesture toward their old friendship. “After we take the paintings back, we’ll show you this lovely new club.”

“I can’t.”

“You can’t?” Perry lifted an eyebrow. “I’m sure we never killed any Asian babies in any war or nuffink. Let’s get out of here, Jules.” He turned away from Maggie, and Jules did not even look at Maggie as he swept past.

Maggie watched them walk down the dark street in the lamplight, their ragged clothing giving them the air of loutish royalty, and knew that they would never forgive her for not joining them. People like Jules and Perry knew that they were sane and everybody else crazy, and Maggie had just stepped over the border into the land of the crazies.

All this reflection took place in a second or two. Maggie pulled Pumo’s door all the way open and stood in the doorway. Nothing but silence came from the top of the stairs.

Maggie stepped inside and closed the door behind her. Then she gripped the handrail and began slowly, quietly to mount the stairs.

7

Koko was in glory, his yoke was easy and his burden was light.

By man came death, and by man came also the resurrection of the dead.

Thirty lives to be paid for. Pumo was ten, and if there was a woman she would be eleven.

No part of the animal was wasted. The Joker had closed his eyes, and slept on in the pack.

When Pumo the Puma had opened the door and looked into Koko’s face, he had known, he had seen, he had understood. Angels walked him backwards up the stairs, angels backed him into his great glowing cave. Tears spilled from Koko’s eyes, for it was true that God did all things simultaneously, and Koko’s heart overflowed for Pumo, who understood, who took flight, even as his soul took flight and sailed off, sailed home.

The eyes, the ears, the Elephant Card in the mouth.

Then Koko heard a great thunderous buzzing, the noise of the impatient world hungering for immortality, and he quickly moved to the light cord and pulled it down, turning off all the overhead lights in the room. Now the cave was dark. Koko went quietly to the hallway and turned that light off too.

Then he went back into the living room to wait.

Outside, traffic roared like the passing of great beasts in a jungle. His father leaned toward him and said Work too fast and you’ll never amount to nothing. The buzzer rang again, clamoring until it found its true voice and became a giant insect swooping in great circles between the walls. Finally it settled on Pumo’s body and folded its great strong wings.

Koko picked the knife off a couch and slid into his spot just inside the entrance to the cave from the hallway. He made himself invisible, still, and silent. His father and a friendly demon waited with him, silently approving, and Koko slipped into a nightmare world he had known all his life. His footsteps turned the earth black, and thirty children went into a cave and never came out, and three soldiers went into a cave, and two came out. Gentlemen, you are part of a great killing machine. Finally Koko saw the elephant stride toward him, his robes ermine and silk, and the Old Lady said, Gentlemen, it is time to face the elephant again.

For his ears had taken in the dampened, nearly soundless click of the door and his body had felt a small slight shift in the air and now he could hear a hand closing on a handrail and her feet moving with what to a civilian would be most fearful caution from one tread of the stair to another.

8

Maggie reached the top of the steps and saw at once that the door to the loft was unlocked—it looked as though someone had banged it shut with an elbow as he carried his haul outside. Or by someone going in. She touched the knob and pushed it forward with her fingertips. Light from the staircase filled Pumo’s entry, with its heaps of coats and hats on hooks.

Pumo’s entry always looked as if he were having a party.

At the worst, Maggie thought, he had been robbed again, and would have to be coaxed out of another depression. Any intruder was long gone. Maggie walked through the door, switched on the light, went down the little hallway. When she reached the bedroom, she reached in and turned on that light too. Nothing had been disturbed since their unhappy morning. The bed was still unmade, a sure sign that Tina was in a downswing.

Some pervasive smell filled the loft, but Maggie filed the fact away to be dealt with as soon as she had satisfied herself either that there had been no break-in, or that the burglar who had left the doors open had not done a great deal of damage. Maggie backed out of the bedroom to check the bathroom, again saw nothing out of the ordinary, and went on into the living room.

She froze about six feet into the room. The dim illumination from the hallway showed the shadowy outline of a man on one of the little wooden-backed chairs normally arranged around Tina’s dining table. Her first thought was that she had been trapped by a very cool-headed burglar, and her heart jumped up into her throat. Then as her eyes continued to adjust to the darkness, she almost subliminally recognized that the man in the chair was her lover. She moved forward, in turn ready to scold, then cajole, then to soothe him. As Maggie opened her mouth to speak his name, she finally identified the odor filling the loft as the smell of blood. She was still moving forward, and her next faltering step brought her close enough to see how Tina’s chest was painted with blood, and how the legs of the chair sat in a wide red pool. Something white like a tag protruded from Tina’s mouth.

Instead of screaming or whirling around, which would have led almost instantly to her death, Maggie moved off to her right, into the darkest section of the loft. This movement of pure reflex felt almost as if it had been done to her, as if some force had swept her aside to get her out of the rectangle of light which was the entrance from the hall. She wound up crouching beneath the dining table at the far right of the room, too scared by what she had seen and too startled by her own movement to do anything but look out from her vantage point at the rest of the room.

Terror must have kicked her senses open wide. In the first seconds that she found herself beneath the table, she took in every nuance from the street, the happiness in the voices calling out to each other, the squeal of a brake drum, even the tap of a cane on the sidewalk. In the midst of these sounds she heard drops of liquid landing in the pool at Pumo’s feet. Accompanying these sounds was a sweet, sick, limping odor: the smell of concentrated mourning.

“Come on out, Dawn,” a man whispered, and Maggie could smell only the blood again. “I want to talk to you.”

A column of darkness left the door and advanced into the room. Some of the light from the hall gave the column the shape of a compact man wearing a dark topcoat slightly too large for him. The man’s face was only a pale blur, and his hair must have been as black as Maggie’s, for it was entirely invisible against the darkness behind him.

Then the man startled her by giggling. “I made a mistake. You couldn’t still be Dawn. Don’t be mad at me.”

He advanced another smooth silent yard into the room. There was an ugly black-handled knife in his hand. He drifted a few feet sideways into shadow and waited.

Maggie began to inch on her hands and knees down under the table, and at the bottom end of the table she gathered herself to make a rush for the door.

“Come out and talk to me,” he said. “There’s a reason for everything, and there’s a reason for this. I’m not a lunatic operating in a void, you know. I have come thousands of miles to stand here right now, in the middle of the world right here. It’s important for you to understand that.”

He hesitated in the shadows.

“I am a person who always knows when something is going to happen, and this is a thing that is going to happen. You are going to stand up and walk toward me. You are afraid. You smell blood. That is from something that already happened a long time ago, and you are here now and you have to see that what happened then was part of a general pattern and you are in that pattern too. Worthy, worthy is the lamb that was slain. He was a warrior, and I was a warrior, and I have been called back.” The man stepped closer to the center of the room. “So this has to happen. Stand up and walk out toward me.”

As he spoke, Maggie shrugged her coat off her shoulders and let it silently fold onto the floor. She crept back up the length of the table, crawled around the chairs at its far end, and very slowly and quietly moved up onto the platform.

The man startled her by backing a step toward her.

“I know where you are. You are under the table. I could go over to you now and pull you out. I am not going to do that. I am going to give you the chance to show yourself. Once you show yourself to me, you can leave. You can see where I am now. I am at the back of the room. I promise you that I will not move from this spot. I would like to see your face, I would like to know you.”

Maggie saw him shift the knife in his hand to hold the tip between his thumb and forefinger, the handle dangling below.

“There is the Elephant,” he said. “Justice does not exist in the world system. Fairness is a human invention. The world abhors only waste, waste is forbidden, and when waste is eliminated love is permitted. Behold, I tell you a mystery—I am a man of sorrows and I loved Pumo the Puma.”

Maggie had begun moving backward with greater care. She was very near the desk, and when she touched it with one backwards-reaching hand she forced herself to move even more slowly until she had found the side of the empty clay pot she knew was there. It had once held a tiny hibscus tree, a gift from Maggie; when the tree had died from lack of light and an infestation of mites around the time of the insect problem in the kitchen, Pumo had dumped the hibiscus and kept the pot, promising Maggie that they would get another. It had sat empty beside his desk ever since.

“One minute or another, we will meet one another. In this minute, or the next, or the one after that …”

He stood there, about five feet away from her now, as prepared as ever to throw his knife into her back. Maggie lifted the big pot off its base, and in one motion stood up and raised the pot above her head.

The man looked back over his shoulder, already beginning to react, and Maggie stepped forward and brought the pot down with imperfect accuracy. She was sobbing with terror. His own reflexes undid him. Ducking sideways, he brought himself directly beneath the heavy pot, and it connected solidly with the side of his head. There was a dull heavy thud followed almost immediately by the smashing of the pot on the floor and the loud crash as Tina’s killer pitched onto the coffee table and snapped it in two like a sheet of ice.

Maggie jumped down from the platform and skimmed across the floor before Pumo’s killer had picked himself up out of the wreckage of the table. She threw open the door and went pell-mell down the stairs. As if with three-hundred-and-sixty-degree vision, she saw her huge shadow on the wall beside her and a darker shape filling the opening at the top of the stairs. Even though she was flying, she seemed to be moving with terrific slowness, as if time were muscle-bound. The man must have dropped his knife, for he did not throw it. Maggie burst through the street door as she heard the man thundering down the stairs.

Again she flew, now toward noise, lights, people. She was entirely unaware of the cold.

Maggie risked a glance over her shoulder just before she reached the corner of West Broadway. The scene behind her seemed as flat and artificial as a stage set. The door to the loft hung open, and light spilling out melted into the circular light from a streetlamp. A few people had turned around on the sidewalk to watch her run past. In the midst of all the light and activity on Grand Street was a sliding shadow, a man who melted toward her invisibly, using other people as cover. Maggie snapped her head forward, her breath freezing in her throat, and did her best to narrow down to a small black line speeding along above the pavement.

Maggie ran down the block, her arms pumping in the thin sleeves of her shirt, her knees rising and falling. “Go, girl,” a black man urged when she flew by, for her broad smooth face reflected little of her terror. A red-hot staple fixed itself into her side, and when she began to run against the rhythm of her breathing she could hear her pursuer’s footsteps smoothly, evenly hitting the ground behind her. He was gaining on her.

Finally the subway was only a block ahead of her. Her face dripped sweat and the staple burned in her side, but still her elbows pumped and her knees rose and fell. The boys, still occupying the middle of the sidewalk, saw her racing toward them and went wild.

“Chinkie!”

“Baby, you came back!”

This wide-grinning boy in a Fila sweatshirt danced in front of her, giving big come-to-me gestures. A gold chain spelling out a name in letters as large as front teeth bounced on his chest. Maggie was yelling something, and they made to close on her, but when she came within a few yards of the boy he saw her face and moved out of the way. “Murder!” she yelled. “Stop him!”

Without any transition she was flying down the steps, moving as if there were no gravity. From above she heard shouts and the sound of somebody falling. Before Maggie hit the bottom of the steps she heard a train pounding into the station, and she hit the ground running. Perhaps fifteen people were in the station, another fifteen or so on the platform. Voices still came from the top of the stairs. To her right the train came to a stop, and its doors squeaked open.

Maggie kept on winding through the people, and when she reached the turnstile she pretended to drop in her token and passed beneath the motionless bar swiftly and unobserved. Once past the turnstile she risked another glance over her shoulder and saw a wall of people advancing toward the train. Then a grey shadow melted away behind a man in a black topcoat, and she saw the suggestion of a smile as the shadow flowed on toward her. The being was quietly, gleefully capering toward her, and she sprinted across the final few yards to the waiting train.

Maggie rushed into the car and darted to the nearest window as the doors closed. The man in the black topcoat was just now nearing the turnstile, and behind him something else melted and flowed, passed between the men and women waiting to get to the platform, grinned at her and danced all but invisibly, seeing her but unseen as the train pulled away from the station.

Maggie collapsed into a seat. After a time she became aware that she was trembling. “He killed him,” she said to herself. When she repeated this statement, the few people around her stood up and moved farther down the length of the car. It seemed to Maggie that what had killed her lover and pursued her into the station had not been human but a supernatural force, a grinning evil thing that could change its shape or become invisible. The only proof she had of its humanity had been the way the pot had connected to its head, and how it had sprawled onto Pumo’s glass table. A wave of nausea and of disbelief went through her. Maggie was sobbing now, and she swiped at her eyes. She bent over and looked at her shoes. They were not bloodstained, not even the soles. She shuddered again and wept to herself all the rest of the long way uptown. Tears streamed down her face while she changed trains. She felt like a beaten animal returning home. Now and then she started and cried out, thinking that she had caught a glimpse of Tina’s crazy shadowy killer moving behind the backs of people standing at the straps in front of her, but when the people parted and fled no one was there, he had melted away again.

At 125th Street she ran down the steps, crossing her arms over her chest for warmth. Her tears were going to freeze, she thought, and she would be trapped inside the icy seal over her face.

She parted the doors of the General’s storefront church and slipped inside as quietly as she could. Warmth and the odor of burning candles immediately surrounded her, and she nearly collapsed. The General’s congregation sat solidly in their chairs; Maggie stayed at the back of the church, trembling and gripping her arms, uncertain of what to do next. Now that she was here, she was uncertain even of why she had returned to the bright little church. Tears streamed down her face. The General finally caught sight of her and raised one eyebrow in a kindly, questioning look that did not fail to contain a portion of alarm. He doesn’t know, Maggie thought, hugging herself and shaking, silently crying. How can he not know? Then Maggie realized that Tina Pumo still sat dead in his loft and nobody but herself and his murderer knew of it. She had to call the police.

9

As yet ignorant of these events which would soon bring him back to New York, Michael Poole emerged for the second time that day from Bang Luk, the alleyway which housed the flower market and Tim Underhill’s rooms, and turned north up Charoen Krung Road. It was just past twelve-thirty at night. The streets were even more congested than they had been earlier, and under normal circumstances even a passionate walker like Dr. Poole would unquestioningly have stepped to the curb, raised his arm, and taken the first vehicle that stopped for him. It was still very hot, his hotel was two or three miles away, and Bangkok is no city for long walks. But these were not normal circumstances, and Dr. Poole never considered interring himself in a car for the length of his journey back to his bed. In any case he was in no hurry to get to bed—he knew he would be unable to sleep. He had just finished spending a little more than seven hours with Timothy Underhill, and he needed time to think as much as he needed sheer thoughtless exercise. By most ways of reckoning, very little had happened during the seven hours: the two men had talked over their drinks on the terrace; still talking, they had gone by ruk-tuk to the Golden Dragon on Sukhumvit Road and eaten excellent Chinese food while they continued their conversation; they had taken another ruk-tuk back to the little set of rooms above Jimmy Siam and talked, talked, talked. Michael Poole could still hear Tim Underhill’s voice in his ears—he felt as if he were walking to the rhythms of the sentences spoken by that voice.

Underhill was a wonderful man. He was a wonderful man with a terrible life, a wonderful man with terrible habits. He was terrible and he was wonderful. (Michael had had more to drink during these seven hours than was his habit, and all the alcohol had warmed and muddled him.) Poole realized that he was moved, shaken, even in a sense awed by his old companion—awed by what he had risked and overcome. But more than that, he was persuaded by Underhill. It was shiningly certain that Underhill was not Koko. All his subsequent conversation had gone to prove what Poole had felt in Underhill’s first words to him on the terrace.

In all the turmoil of his life, Tim Underhill had virtually never ceased to consider Koko, to ponder and wonder over that figure of anarchic vengeance—he not only made Harry Beevers a latecomer to the issue, he demonstrated the shallowness of Beevers’ methods. Poole walked northward in the dark steaming city, hemmed all about by rushing, indifferent men, and felt how thoroughly he sided with Underhill. Eight hours earlier, Dr. Poole had crossed over a rickety bridge and felt himself coming into a new accommodation with his profession, with his marriage, above all with death. It was almost as if he had finally seen death with enough respect to understand it. He had stood before it with his spirit wide open, in a very undoctorly way. The awe, the terror were necessary—all such moments of rapturous understanding fade, leaving only the dew of their passing, but Poole could remember the sharp, salty, vivid taste of reality, and the humility he had felt before it. What had persuaded him about Tim Underhill was his sense that for years, in book after book, Underhill had actually climbed over the railing and crossed the stream. He had opened his spirit wide. He had done his best to fly, and Koko had virtually given him his wings.

Underhill had flown as far as he could, and if he had crashed, an abrupt landing might have been one of the consequences of flight. All the drinking and drugs, all his excesses, had not been undertaken to aid the flight—as Beevers and people like him would instantly have assumed—but to numb and distract the man when he had gone as far as he could and still had fallen short. Underhill had gone farther than Dr. Poole, who had used his mind and his memory and his love for Stacy Talbot, which was wrapped like a layer of bandages around his old love for Robbie: Underhill had harnessed up his whole imagination, and imagination was everything.

This, along with a great deal more, had tumbled out on the terrace, over dinner in the noisy bright enormous Chinese restaurant, in the unbelievable shambles of Underhill’s apartment. Almost nothing had been explained in sequence, and the unhappy details of the author’s life had often dragged Poole’s attention away from Koko. The outline of Underhill’s life was that of a series of avalanches. At present, however, he was living quietly and doing his best to work again. “Like learning to walk again,” he told Poole. “I staggered and then I fell down. All the muscles shrank, nothing worked right. For eight months, if I wrote one paragraph after six hours’ work, it was a good day.”

He had written a strange novella called “Blue Rose.” He had written an even stranger one called “The Juniper Tree.” Now he wrote dialogues with himself, questions and answers, and he was halfway through another novel. He had twice seen a girl running up the street toward him covered in blood, making an unearthly noise—the girl was part of the answer, he said, that was why he had seen her—she announced the nearness of ultimate things. Koko was Underhill’s way of getting back inside Ia Thuc, and so was the vision of a girl running in panic down a city street, and so was everything he had written.

What made everything worse, Underhill said, was that Koko was the lowlife’s lowlife, Victor Spitalny.

“I worked it all out,” Underhill told him at the Golden Dragon. “I did one of those Koko numbers, you did one, and I think Conor Linklater did one—”

“He did,” Michael said. “And I did one too—you’re right.”

“No kidding,” Underhill said. “You think you didn’t show it? You’re not exactly the atrocity type, Michael. I worked out that it could only have been Spitalny. Unless it was you, of course, or Dengler, both of which were equally unlikely.

“I came to Bangkok to learn what I could about Dengler’s last days, because I thought maybe that would get me started writing again. And then, my friend, all hell broke loose. The journalists started dying. As you and Beevers noticed.”

“What do you mean, journalists?” Michael asked innocently.

Underhill had stared at him with his mouth open for a moment, then had burst into laughter.

Poole reached the wide, jumbled intersection of Charoen Krung Road with Surawong Road and stood still in the dense hot night for a moment. Using the resources of a few provincial libraries and bookstores in Bangkok, Underhill had discovered what Harry Beevers, with a research assistant and a vast library system, had not. It took Poole’s breath away, that Beevers would have overlooked, even denied, the connection among the victims.

Because that connection put them all in danger. Underhill was certain that Spitalny had followed him, in both Singapore and Bangkok.

He had only caught glimpses. He’d had the sensation of being watched and followed. In the Golden Dragon he told Michael, “A few weeks after the bodies were found in Singapore, I came down to the street and had this feeling that something really bad, but something that belonged to me, was hiding somewhere and watching me. As if I had a sick, bad brother who had come back after a long time away, and was going to make my life hell before he went away again. I looked around, but I didn’t see anything but the flower sellers, and as soon as I got out onto the road, the feeling went away.” And in his messy room, with the demon masks nailed up on the wall and a smeary mirror and an ivory straw before him on the table, he said: “Remember my telling you about the time I walked outside and had this feeling—that something bad had come back for me? I thought it was Spitalny, of course. But nothing happened. He just melted away. Well, about two days after that, a few days after the Frenchmen were killed here, I had the same feeling on Phat Pong Road. It was much stronger this time. I knew someone was there. I turned around, almost sure that he was right behind me, and that I’d see him. I spun. He wasn’t behind me—he wasn’t even right behind the people right behind me. I couldn’t see him anywhere. But you know, I did see something strange. It’s hard to put this into words, even for me, but it was like, way back down there, way way down the street, there was something like a moving shadow drifting back and forth behind these people who were much more visible, no, not drifting because it was much more animated, dancing back and forth behind all those people, grinning at me. I just had this little glimpse of someone moving insolently fast, someone just filled with glee—and then he vanished. I almost puked.”

“And what do you want to do now?” Poole asked. “Would you come back to America? I’m almost honor-bound to tell Conor and Beevers that I’ve met you, but I don’t know how you feel about that either.”

“Do what you want,” Underhill said. “But I feel like you want to drag me out of my cave by my hair, and I’m not sure I want to leave it.”

“Then don’t!” Michael had cried.

“But maybe we can help each other,” Underhill said.

“Can I see you again tomorrow?”

“You can do anything you like,” Underhill had said.

As Michael Poole walked the last two hundred yards to his hotel, he wondered what he would do if a madman danced like a moving shadow on the hot crowded street behind him. Would he see a vision, as Underhill apparently had? Would he turn and try to run him down? Victor Spitalny, the lowlife’s lowlife, changed everything. A moment later Michael realized that Harry Beevers might have his mini-series after all—Spitalny put a few colorful new wrinkles in Beevers’ story. But was it for that he had come so far from Westerholm?

It was one of the easiest questions Poole had ever asked himself, and by the time he was going up the stairs into his hotel, he had decided to keep quiet for a little while about having found Tim Underhill. He would give himself a day before speaking to Conor and summoning Beevers. In any case, he discovered as he passed the desk, Conor was still out. Poole hoped that he was enjoying himself.

PART

FIVE

THE SEA

OF

FORGETFULNESS

1

Two days later, it was as if the world had flipped inside-out. The suddenness of events and the haste of Poole’s preparations had left him so breathless that he could still not be certain, carrying two bottles of Singha beer toward the table in the airport bar where Conor sat blinking at his progress, what he made of it at all.

Underhill was supposed to come with them on their flight, and part of Conor’s look at Michael as he came toward him from the crowded passengers-only bar was a gathering doubt that the writer would make it to the airport on time. Conor said nothing as Michael set down his beer and took the seat beside him. He bent forward as if to examine the floor, and his face was still white with the shock of what had happened back in New York while they had been making their separate tours of Bangkok. Conor still looked as if a loud noise had just awakened him.

Michael contented himself with a sip of the strong, cold, bitter Thai beer. Something had befallen Conor two nights earlier, but he would not discuss it. He too looked as if he were remembering some of the sentences Underhill had written in his dialogues with himself. Poole guessed that these questions and answers were a way of kicking a disused engine back into life: Underhill was teaching himself to work again. Along the way he had described what he called the Pan-feeling. According to Underhill, this had to do with “the nearness of ultimate things.”

“What are you thinking about, Mikey?” Conor asked.

Poole just shook his head.

“Stretch my legs,” Conor said, and jumped up and wandered toward the gates through which the passengers came for their own and other international flights. It was fifty minutes before the scheduled flight time, which an airline officiai had informed them had been delayed an hour. Conor bounced on his heels and scrutinized the people streaming through the gate until Underhill’s failure to arrive made him so nervous that he had to spin off and take a quick tour of the gift shop windows. At the entrance to the racks of duty-free liquor he checked his watch, shot another glance at the new arrivals, and dodged inside.

Ten minutes later he emerged with a yellow plastic shopping bag and dropped into his old seat beside Poole. “I thought if I went in there, he’d show up.”

Conor forlornly examined the Thais, Americans, Japanese, and Europeans pushing into the International departures lounge. “Hope Beevers made his plane.”

Harry Beevers was supposed to have taken a flight from Taipei to Tokyo, where he was to connect with a JAL flight that would bring him to the San Francisco airport an hour after their own arrival. They were all to take the same flight to New York from San Francisco. Beevers’ immediate reaction to the news of Pumo’s death had been the observation that the asshole would still be alive if he had come with them instead of staying behind to run around after his girlfriend. He asked clipped impatient questions about just when they were going to be in San Francisco, and why they couldn’t wait for him to come back to Bangkok. He was pissed off, he thought it was unfair that Poole and Linklater had found Tim Underhill: it was his idea, he should have been the one. “Make sure he gets on that plane,” he said. “And don’t let him lie to you.”

Poole had pointed out that Underhill could not have killed Tina Pumo.

“Tina lived in So Ho,” Beevers said. “Open your eyes, will you? He was in the restaurant business. How many coke dealers do you think live in SoHo? Not everything is the way it looks.”

Conor finished off his beer, jumped up again to inspect the incoming passengers, and returned. By now all the seats in the departure lounge were occupied, and the new arrivals either sat on the floor or wandered the wide aisles before the duty-free shops. As it filled, the lounge had gradually come to resemble Bangkok itself: people sat in chairs and sprawled over empty sections of the floor, the air seemed hot and smoky, voices cried out “Crap crap crop crop!”

After a long crackling burst of Thai from the loudspeaker, in which Poole thought he heard the words San Francisco, Conor again jumped up to check the board on which departures were listed. Their flight had been rescheduled to take off in fifty-five minutes. Unless they delayed it further, they would land in San Francisco at the same time as Beevers, who would never forgive them for having been duped. Beevers would insist on going back to Bangkok on the spot. He’d stage a chase through the streets, with police sirens and dashes across rooftops, concluding with the triumphant handcuffing of the villain and an astonishing explanation of how Underhill had killed the journalists and arranged Pumo’s murder. Beevers saw things in the terms rendered by car chases and lockstep summations.

Poole was very tired. He had slept little last night. He had called Judy, and she had curtly given him the news of Tina’s death. “Whoever did it is supposed to be the same person who killed the man in the library. Oh, you haven’t heard about that yet?” Unable to keep the satisfaction from her voice, she explained the circumstances of the death of Dr. Mayer-Hall.

“Why do they think it’s the same guy?”

“There were two Chinese women who saw Tina in the stacks a few minutes before they discovered the body. They recognized his picture when they saw the papers this morning. It’s all on the news. Tina was the suspect they were looking for—these women saw him coming out of the stacks. It’s obvious what happened.”

“What happened?”

“Tina got lost in the stacks, God only knows what he was doing in the library, and he happened to see this crazy man kill the librarian. He got away, but the man tracked him down and killed him. It’s obvious.” She paused. “I’m sorry to cut your fun short.”

He asked if she were still getting the anonymous calls.

“Lately he has been saying that there is no substitute for butter, or something like that. I just erase the tapes as soon as he says his piece. When this guy was a kid, somebody drummed nonsense into his head from morning to night. I bet he was an abused kid.”

Their conversation ended soon after.

For a moment Michael Poole saw Victor Spitalny before him, small, slope-shouldered, dark-haired, his dark eyes shifting back and forth beneath his narrow forehead with its widow’s peak, his wet little mouth and his pointed chin. At eighteen years of age, there had been a self-erected psychic wall around Victor Spitalny. If he saw you coming near him, he would stop and wait until you had gotten far enough away to let him feel safe. He had probably decided to kill someone and desert very soon after hearing Tim Underhill’s story of the running grunt.

Perhaps because of something his wife had said, Poole thought for the first time that it might be interesting to go to Milwaukee and see where Victor Spitalny had grown up.

And Milwaukee was Underhill’s Monroe, Illinois, where Hal Esterhaz had been run down by his own destiny. If Underhill ever appeared at the airport, he might want to come along on this fantasy journey and look at the childhood of one of his own characters.

Then he heard Conor gasp, and an instant later all of this went out of his head. He was looking at Tim Underhill loping toward them, carrying a box bound with twine under one arm, a leather satchel in one hand, and a case containing an ancient portable typewriter in the other, which also gripped the handles of a plastic carrying bag. The loose seersucker jacket flapped around his frame. He looked startlingly different—in the next beat Michael saw that Underhill had cut his hair.

“You made it,” he said.

“I’ll be a little short of funds until I finish my book,” Underhill said. “Could one of you gentlemen buy me a Coke?”

Conor jumped up to go to the bar.

2

It was like a parody of their trip out, finally—Tim Underhill in the window seat instead of Harry Beevers, Conor in the middle, Michael on the aisle on a planeful of tourists. Michael missed Pun Yin’s dimples and shining hair: this was an American airline, and the stewardesses were tall women with distracted professional faces. The other passengers were not pediatricians but mainly young people who fell into two categories: the employees of multinational corporations who read Megatrends and The One-Minute Manager and married couples with or without babies, dressed in jeans and shirts. When Michael was their age, they would have been reading Herman Hesse and Carlos Castaneda, but the bulging paperbacks they dug out of their packs were by Judith Krantz and Sidney Sheldon, or were written by ladies with three names and had jacket paintings of misty castles and yearning unicorns. In 1983, bohemia, if that was what these people represented, was not very literary. That was okay, Michael thought. He read airplane books too. Conor didn’t read at all. Underhill had placed on his tray a fat paperback that looked as if three people had read it before him.

Michael took from his carry-on bag a copy of The Ambassadors, a Henry James novel Judy had pressed on him. He had been enjoying it, back in Westerholm, but when he held it in his hands he realized that he did not feel like reading. Now that they were actually in the air, he could not imagine what he was returning to.

The sky outside the little windows was black, shot with violent, unearthly streaks of red and purple. Such a sky was suitable: it seemed to draw them into Koko’s world, where no gesture could be ordinary, where angels sang and demons fled down long corridors.

Conor asked the stewardess if they got a movie.

“As soon as we clear the dinner things. It’s Never Say Never Again—the new James Bond movie.”

The stewardess looked offended when Conor grinned.

“It’s because of this guy we know,” Poole explained. He did not feel like calling Beevers a friend, not even to a stewardess who would never meet him.

“Hey,” Conor said mockingly, “I’m a homicide detective from New York, I’m a big deal, I’m another double-oh-seven.”

“Your friend is a homicide detective in New York?” the girl asked. “He must be a busy man these days. There was a guy stabbed to death at JFK a week or two ago.” She noticed the sudden attention being paid to what she was saying, and added, “Some wheeler-dealer who was on one of our flights. A girlfriend of mine works in first class on the San Francisco-New York run a lot, and she said he was one of her people—a regular.” She paused. “I guess he was a real jerk.” Another pause. “The newspapers said he was a yuppie, but they just called him that because he was a young guy with a lot of money.”

“What’s a yuppie?” Underhill asked.

“A young guy with a lot of money,” Poole said.

“A girl in a grey flannel suit and a pair of Reeboks,” Conor said.

“What are Reeboks?” Underhill asked.

“He was killed at JFK after he arrived on a flight from San Francisco?” Poole asked.

The stewardess nodded. She was a tall blonde whose name tag said she was named Marnie, and she had an eager, playful expression in her eyes. “My friend Lisa said she saw him a couple of times a month. She and I used to go around together and do all this crazy stuff, but she moved to New York last year and now we just talk on the phone. But she told me all about it.” She gave Conor a curious sidelong look.

“Can I tell you something? I want to tell you something.”

Conor nodded. Marnie bent down and whispered into his ear.

Poole heard Conor nearly gasp in astonishment; then he laughed so loudly that the people in the seats before them stopped talking.

“See you guys later,” Marnie said, and pushed her cart up the aisle.

“What was that about?” Michael asked. Conor’s entire face had turned red. Tim Underhill flicked a little lizard smile at Poole and looked like William Burroughs, very wise and dry as a desert.

“Nothing.”

“She came on to you?”

“Not exactly. Lay off.”

“Good old Marnie,” Underhill said.

“Change the subject. Lay off.”

“Okay, listen to this,” Michael said. “Somebody off a San Francisco flight was killed when he landed in New York. Spitalny could have landed in San Francisco, just as we are doing, and then connected to a New York flight, as we are also doing.”

“Farfetched,” Underhill said, “but very interesting. What was the name of the stewardess’s friend? Who knew the dead man?”

“Lisa,” Conor said, still blushing.

“I wonder if Lisa noticed anybody talking to the man who was killed?”

At the beginning of Never Say Never Again, James Bond was sent to a health spa. Every ten minutes someone new tried to kill him. Pretty nurses went to bed with him. A beautiful woman took a snake from around her neck and threw it into a car window.

When Marnie returned Poole asked her, “What’s your friend Lisa’s last name?”

“Mayo. Like in Ireland. Like in Hellman’s.”

It was farfetched, but so was Bangkok. So was Westerholm. Life in general was farfetched.

“Did you know,” Underhill was saying, “in Bangkok you can give a guy about sixty bucks and go down into a basement and see a guy kill a girl? First he beats her up. Then he kills her. You watch her die and you go home.”

Conor had removed his earphones and was staring at Underhill. “I guess you know about that.”

“What, did you go there?”

Conor said nothing. “Did you?” he finally asked.

Underhill shook his head.

“Come on,” Conor said.

“Never. Just heard about it.”

“Don’t lie to me, man.”

“I’m not lying.”

Conor frowned.

“I have the feeling you met some interesting people,” Underhill said. “I want to tell you something.”

3

How Dengler Died (2):

You have to see Captain Batchittarayan, you have to see his desk, his office, his face …

Everything was hard, pocked, suspicious—everything smelled like death and Lysol. One light, of dull metal, shone at first down on his neat brown hands on the scarred empty metal surface of his desk; later, as if by itself, it swung upward, hurting my eyes.

Yes, it was his men who had responded to the near-riot, to call it that, the “near-riot” in the Patpong area on the day in question, it was he, at that time Sergeant Batchittarayan, who had supervised the transportation of the mutilated body to the city’s morgue. It was he who had pulled the tags out of the mush on the man’s chest. It was distasteful: it had been distasteful, and the memory of the white American’s body was still unhappy. And the man before him was distasteful, with his connection to it, and with his possession of a secret.

There had been others—other Americans on R&R who had gone mad. Two years before PFC Dengler’s death, a Sergeant Walter Khoffi had hacked several patrons of the Sex-Sex bar to death before going outside and killing a massage parlor tout on the street, and a quiet Bible-quoting boy from Oklahoma named Marvin Springwater had knifed three little boys to death before the traffic ran him down on Sukhumvit Road.

So the officer’s distaste had some justification.

He was interested in how one knew about the child. The child existed, but had never been located or identified.

Weren’t you asking about the child?

Questions about the child had attracted the Captain’s attention.

Fortunately she had cried out, this unknown child. The two men and the girl had been in a narrow alley. Her screams drew attention to them. She did not cease screaming when she burst out of the alley.

Nobody knew the girl. She was a stranger. That was to be expected, Patpong being the opposite of a settled residential area. There was agreement on two points, however. She was not a bar girl or massage parlor employee—that much was clear to all those who saw her emerge from the narrow alley and run screaming down the street. And she was not a Thai. She was perhaps a Cambodian child, or Chinese, or Vietnamese.

It was not supposed that the young soldiers knew that. To the young soldiers, it was supposed, all young Asian women looked alike.

And so the crowd of men who happened to be in that particular block of Phat Pong Road that afternoon jumped the American soldier—jumped both of them—and one got away and one was torn to pieces.

Do you know who was innocent? asked the Captain. The girl was innocent. And the crowd was innocent.

So one soldier fell beneath the innocent crowd, or both did. Witnesses were vague about this. The witnesses had seen only the running girl, they had not of course participated in the assault.

A thousand years ago it would have been a great epic, this story (said the Captain). The innocent girl, her attacker torn to pieces by the righteous mob. Four hundred years ago it would have become a legend told in a song, and every child in southern Thailand would have known the song. The disappearing girl—she could have disappeared into that. Now there is not even a novel about her, not even a rock and roll song, not even a cartoon strip.

A month before this conversation with the Captain, Timothy Underhill had stood on Phat Pong Road and saw a girl rushing toward him down the middle of the street. He had been totally clean for something like nine weeks. He had been trying to write—a novel again at last, something still coming to life in his mind about a boy who had been raised in a shed behind his house, like an animal. He had been sober for three months. He heard the screams, which sounded as if she carried a microphone in her throat. He saw her bloody palms and blood-spattered hair. She came threshing toward him with her hands out and her mouth open. No one but he saw her.

Underhill wept on the pavement, unnoticed by the men pushing past him. He was there again, alive inside himself.

I went home, he told Poole, and I wrote a story called “Blue Rose.” It took six weeks. After that I wrote a story of the same length called “The Juniper Tree.” It took a month. I’ve been writing ever since.

Did you really think I’d miss this plane?

After I saw her, then I had to see everything—then I had to follow the story. It wouldn’t come to me anymore. You were going to come to me, or he was, but not it. I didn’t know I was waiting for either you or Koko to show up, but that’s what I was doing.

4

Another movie began, but Poole had closed his eyes before the titles came up on the screen.

He was driving his car down a long dark road into an emptiness like a desert. He had been traveling many days; though the means by which he knew this were unclear, he was in a novel called Into the Darkness, written by Tim Underhill. The long road went straight on through the night, and as he drove Michael realized that he was Hal Esterhaz, a homicide detective, and that he had been summoned from the scene of one murder to that of another, far distant. He had been traveling for weeks, going from corpse to corpse, following the killer’s footsteps without getting any nearer to him. There had been many bodies, and all of them were those of people he had known long ago in a dreamlike existence before everything had darkened.

Far ahead in the darkness he saw two dots of yellow light shining out beside the road.

In Into the Darkness he would drive through the dark in a gradually emptying world. There would always be another body, and he would never find the killer, for Into the Darkness was like a theme that repeated itself through a thousand variations, circling around and around the same cycle of chords. There would be no true ending. In Into the Darkness one day the killer would retire to raise orchids or turn into smoke, and then all meaning would be gone; the melody would trickle out in meaningless random sounds. For his job was to catalogue the killings, and the only truly satisfactory conclusion to that task would be to enter one of those dripping slum basements and find the killer waiting for him with a raised knife.

Now he could see that the yellow lights by the roadside were lanterns—little lanterns sending out beams of light.

Only when he had come directly abreast of the lanterns could he see who held them up. His son Robbie, whose name was Babar, stood by the roadside holding one of the lanterns aloft. Exactly his size, gigantic, the rabbit Ernie stood beside him on his hind legs, holding out the other lantern.

The boy named Babar and the rabbit turned their soft eyes on the man driving past; their lamps gleamed.

He felt a great spreading peace.

The car pulled past the tender boy and the big upright rabbit, and for a long time he could see the lights of their lanterns in his rearview mirror. The sense of peace stayed with him until the road ended at the bank of a great grey rushing river. He got out of his car and watched the great muscular river move past, rolling up a huge sinewy shoulder here, a vast thigh there.

Then he knew that he and the killer too were a part of the river’s great rushing body, and a terrible mingling of pain and joy, deep deep joy and pain, spread through him and spoke in their loud joined voice, and he cried out and woke up with the river in his eyes.

The river was gone. “Hey, Mikey,” Conor said, smiling almost shyly at him.

And then he only knew that he knew Koko’s identity. Then the feeling of knowing went too, and he remembered only that he had dreamed of looking at a great river and driving a car past Robbie, named Babar, who held up a lantern.

Into the darkness.

“You okay, Mikey?” Conor asked.

Poole nodded.

“You made a noise.”

“Noise, nothing,” Underhill said. “You practically sang ‘The Star-Spangled Banner.’ ”

Poole rubbed the stubble on his face. The screen had been folded back up into the bulkhead, and most of the cabin was dark. “I thought I understood something about Koko, but it went away as soon as I woke up.”

Conor uttered a wordless exclamation full of recognition.

“Those things happen to you?” Underhill asked Conor.

“I can’t really talk about it—I thought I understood something too,” Conor half-mumbled. “It was real strange.” He tilted his head and looked at Underhill. “You were at that place, weren’t you? Where they shot the girl?”

“Sometimes I think I must have an evil twin,” Underhill said. “Like the man in the iron mask.”

They fell silent, and the lost understanding stirred within Michael once again. It was as if his son’s lantern shone its light on the events in that village fifteen years ago: he saw a long hillside leading down to a circle of hootches, a woman carrying water downhill, oxen grazing. Smoke rose in a narrow grey column. Into the darkness, there it is.

1

Dengler’s arm was wrapped in gauze and tape, and his face was white and his eyes blurry. He said he didn’t feel anything, and he refused to lie down and wait for them to come back for him. Ia Thuc was supposed to be where Elvis the sniper came from, it was supposed to be the village that sheltered and fed him, and Dengler wanted to be with the platoon when they got there. Lieutenant Beevers had been leading search-and-avoid missions since Dragon Valley, playing it very cool, and Ia Thuc was his chance to shine. Intelligence said that it was a stockpile for food and weapons, and the Tin Man was eager to make a good haul, boost the body count, move himself a little further up along the way to full colonel. The Tin Man was always eager to make a good body count, because only half the lieutenant colonels in Nam ever got promoted, and after making every cut along the way he did not intend to flunk this one. The Tin Man saw himself as a future division commander, two stars. He was desperate to move out of middle management before the war dried up on him.

Did Lieutenant Beevers know this? You bet your ass the lieutenant knew it.

The woman was running down the hillside as they came out of the trees. The water splashed out of the pails at the ends of her yoke each time her feet hit the ground, but she had made a computation—the pails would still be better than half full when she got to the village. Poole did not know why she was running. Running was a serious error.

“Waste her before she gets to the village,” Beevers said.

“Lieutenant—” Poole said.

“Waste her,” Beevers said.

Spitalny was already aiming, and Poole saw him smile against the stock of his rifle. Behind them, just coming out of the trees, a few men watched it happen: the woman racing downhill, Spitalny with his weapon to his shoulder.

“Don’t lead her much, Spit,” someone said. It was a joke. Spitalny was a joke.

He fired, and the girl lifted up and skimmed along for a yard or two before collapsing and rolling down the hill.

When Poole walked past the girl’s body he remembered the card called “Nine Rule,” which he had been given along with another called “The Enemy in Your Hands” when he had been processed into his unit. “Nine Rule” said of the VC: You can defeat them at every turn by the strength, understanding, and generosity you display with the people.

The third of the nine rules was: Treat women with politeness and respect.

And the fourth was: Make personal friends among the soldiers and the common people.

Oh, it got funnier and funnier. Rule five was: Always give the Vietnamese the right of way.

Down in that village, he thought, they were going to make some personal friends. Dengler stumbled along, making a visible effort to look as if he were not exhausted and in pain. Peters had given him a shot, “a cool one,” he said, enough to keep him moving since he refused to be left behind. The sniper was still back in the jungle behind them, and the platoon was strung out, checking both directions, ready to blast at anything they saw move back in the jungle.

“Peters, are you sure that Dengler is gonna make this?” Poole asked.

“M.O. Dengler could walk from here to Hanoi,” Peters said.

“But could he walk back?” Poole asked.

“I’m okay,” Dengler said. “Let’s check out this village. Let’s grab those maps. Let’s raid that rice. Let’s orient those armaments. Let’s put the whole damn place in an evidential killing box.”

Beevers’ platoon had successfully taken part in a killing box the week before, when one of the Tin Man’s reports of North Vietnamese troop movements had turned out to be accurate. A company-sized detachment was reported to be moving down a trail called Striker Tiger, and the captain sent out platoons Alpha and Bravo to position themselves on Striker Tiger in advance of the detachment to eliminate it. They had arranged themselves above Striker Tiger, which was a trail about a yard wide through thick wooded jungle, so that all in all they had a mostly unobstructed view of maybe thirty feet of the trail. They held their weapons sighted down on the open stretch of Striker Tiger and waited.

For once, a prearranged concept worked the way it was supposed to. One lone NVR soldier, a lean, worn-looking man who appeared to be in his early thirties, strolled into the killing box. Poole nearly fell out of the tree. The NVR simply kept mooching along. Behind him, loosely bunched, followed what looked to Poole like fifty or sixty men. They too were not boy soldiers—they were real ones. They made about as much noise as a pack of grazing deer. Poole wanted very much to kill them all. For an instant, every soldier on the road was visible to Poole. A bird yammered above them in a harsh feminine voice, and the lead man looked upward with an expression for a moment almost wistful. Then everybody in the trees and up above the trail on the slope began firing at once, and the air was obliterated, rent to shreds, destroyed, and the men on Striker Tiger flopped and jittered and spun and shuddered. Then there was a total silence. The trail glistened with a bright, brilliant red.

When they had counted the bodies, they learned that they had killed thirty-two men. By counting separate arms, legs, heads, and weapons, they were able to report a total body count of one hundred and five.

Lieutenant Harry Beevers loved the killing box.

“What that boy say?” asked Spanky Burrage.

Beevers looked at Dengler as if he expected mockery. Evidential, he would have thought, was more his vocabulary than any grunt’s. Beevers was tensed up, and Poole saw how close to the edge he was already. Poole saw only trouble in the new Beevers. Triumph had made him lose his grip—a few days ago he had said something about his days at Harvard, a college Poole was certain Beevers had never seen, much less attended.

For a second Poole looked out across the plain on the other side of the village. Two oxen that had bolted when Spitalny shot the water bearer were cropping at the grass, their noses buried deep in wet, electrified green. Nothing moved. In the village before them everything was as still as a photograph. Poole hoped that the people who lived in the scatter of hootches had heard that the round-eyes were coming and fled, leaving behind trophies of bags of rice and maybe an underground hole full of grenades and ammunition clips.

Elvis didn’t have a village, Poole thought: Elvis lived in the jungle like a monkey, and he ate rats and bugs. Elvis wasn’t really human anymore. He could see in the dark and he levitated in his sleep.

Underhill faded off to the right side of the village with half the men, while Poole took the other half off to the left.

The only noise was that made by their feet moving through the vibrant grass. A strap creaked, something rattled in a pot; that was all. Manly was breathing hard: Poole thought he could just about hear Manly sweat. The men began spacing themselves out. Spitalny began shadowing after Dengler and Conor as they faded toward the quiet hootches.

A chicken went buk-buk-buk, and a sow grunted in a pen.

A wooden stick popped in the fire, and Poole heard sparks and ash hissing down. Make them be gone, he thought. Make them all be in An Lat, two or three klicks through the forest.

Off to his right, someone’s hand slapped the plastic stock of an M-16, and the sow, not yet alarmed, grunted a question.

Poole came up alongside a hootch and had a clear sightline across the center of the hamlet to Tim Underhill, who was moving silently alongside another hootch. Off to Poole’s left, twenty or thirty yards beyond the perimeter of the village, the sparsely wooded forest, a hanger from the wooded slope, took over again, and for a second Poole had the ghastly fantasy that a hundred North Vietnamese soldiers crouched among the trees, aiming their weapons at them. He shot a panicky look into the woods and saw no soldiers, only a tall half-concealed mound. It caught his eye for a moment, looking almost manmade, of painted concrete and plaster, like a hill at Disneyland.

But it was too ugly for Disneyland, not picturesquely ugly like a haunted castle or a romantic crag, but naturally ugly, like a wart or a skin eruption.

Across the clearing Tim Underhill held his back against the hootch and looked at him; between them a big black pot sat on a communal fire. A column of smoke wisped up into the air. Two hootches down from Underhill, Lieutenant Beevers silently worked his mouth in a question or command. Poole nodded at Underhill, who immediately shouted “Come out!” in Vietnamese.

“Out!”

No one moved, but Poole heard whispers in the hootch beside him, and the other whispers of bare feet on the hootch’s wooden floor.

Underhill fired a round into the air.

“Now!”

Poole trotted around to the front of the hootch, and nearly knocked down an old woman with sparse white hair and a toothless smile who was just emerging from the opening. An old man with a sunken sun-dried face hobbled after her. Poole jabbed his rifle toward the low fire in the center of the village. From the other hootches came people with their hands in the air, most of them women in their fifties and sixties. “Hello, GI,” said an old man scuttling beside his old woman, and bowed with his hands still in the air.

Spitalny yelled at the man, and clouted him in the hip with the butt of his rifle.

“Stop!” Underhill yelled. Then, in Vietnamese, “Drop to your knees!” and all the old people went down on their knees in the trampled grass around the cooking fire.

Beevers went up to the pot, peered inside, and with his boot gave it a push that sent it rolling off the fire.

The sow began to squeal, and Beevers whirled around and shot it in its pen. An old woman yelled at him. “Poole, get your men to check out these hootches! I want everybody out of here!”

“They say there are children, Lieutenant,” Underhill said.

Beevers spotted something in the ashes where the big pot had been, and he darted forward and thrust his hand almost into the fire, jabbing at whatever he had seen, and finally pulled out a charred piece of paper that looked as if it had been torn from a notebook. “Ask them what this is!” Instead of waiting for a response, he danced up to one of the old men who had been watching him and said, “What’s this? What’s this writing here?”

“No bik,” said the old man.

“Is this a list?” Beevers shouted. “This looks like a list!”

“No bik.”

Poole also thought it looked like a list. He signaled Dengler, Blevins, Burrage, and Pumo into the hootches nearest them.

A wave of noisy protest came up from the old people kneeling near the guttering fire and the toppled pot.

Poole heard a child begin to scream in one of the other hootches, and jumped into the one the old couple had left. The interior was murky, and he gritted his teeth with tension.

“He says it’s a list of names,” he heard Underhill explain to the lieutenant.

Poole stepped into the center of the hootch. He tested the floor for a trap door, jabbed the mats with the barrel of his rifle, and stepped outside to go on to the next hootch.

“Ask them about the sniper!” Beevers was shouting. “Let’s get it out of them.” He saw Poole. “Get everything!” he shouted.

“Yes, sir,” Poole said.

Pumo was hauling a screaming child of five or six toward the center of the village, and an old woman leaped up and took the little boy from him. Dengler stood slumped in the sun, listlessly watching.

A feeling of utter waste and emptiness went through Michael Poole, and he turned to enter the hootch on his left. He heard crying from the meadow side of the village and saw Beevers send Spitalny and Spanky Burrage in that direction with an impatient gesture. He stepped into the hootch, and something moved in the gloom at its far end. A furtive shape came toward him.

There was a burst of machine-gun fire from outside the village, and Poole instinctively fired on the figure advancing toward him, knowing that it was too late. He was already dead.

2

Loud terrible moans came from just outside the hootch’s entrance. Miraculously not dead but knowing that the hootch was seconds from blowing up along with the grenade in the enemy’s hand, Poole threw himself outside and saw Thomas Rowley on the ground, most of his stomach blown away and his purple and silver guts looped all over the grass. Rowley’s face was very white and his mouth was opening and closing. No sounds came out. Poole crawled over the ground. People were firing everywhere. At first Poole thought that all the old people had been killed, but as he crawled away from the hootch he saw that they were huddling together, trying to stay under the fire.

The hootch behind him did not blow up.

Beevers ordered Dengler to check out the woods to the left of the village. Dengler began to trot toward the narrow trees. Another burst of fire came from the woods, and Dengler flopped into the grass and signaled that he was unhurt. He began firing into the woods.

“Elvis!” Beevers yelled, but Poole knew this was nonsense because Elvis did not use a machine gun. Then Beevers saw Poole and yelled, “Air support! Heavy contact!” He turned to the other soldiers and yelled, “Get them all out of the hootches! This is it! This is it!”

After a time there was no more firing. Rowley lay dead before the hootch where Poole had killed the VC. Poole wondered what Beevers had meant by “This is it,” and stood up to see what was going on. He caught Pumo’s eye as Pumo came out of another hootch. Pumo looked like a man who simply did not know what to do, and Poole could not tell him because he did not know either.

The Vietnamese were crying, screaming, shouting.

“Heavy contact!” Beevers was still yelling, and Poole called it in.

“Burn the village!” Beevers yelled at Underhill, and Underhill shrugged.

Spitalny shot a blast of flame into a ditch and burst out laughing when the ditch began to shriek.

Beevers yelled something and ran over to see what was in the ditch. All around Poole men were running between the hootches, setting them on fire. It was hell now, Poole thought. Beevers was reaching down into the ditch. He pulled out a naked pink girl. They hid the children, Poole thought, that’s why it was so quiet, they heard us coming and sent the children into hiding. All around Poole, rising up like the screeches and yells of protest from the old people, were the fireplace smells of burning wood and the choking smells of burning grass and the flat dead odor of burned earth. Poole could hear fire snapping at the dry hootches. Beevers held up the pink squirming girl like a fisherman holding up a particularly good catch. He was screaming something, but Poole could not hear the words. Beevers began to move toward the village, now holding the girl out in front of him with both hands. Her skin was beginning to shrivel. When Beevers came to a tree with a vast fleshy head and a winding mazy trunk made of many trunks combined, he swung the girl by her heels and struck her head against the tree.

“This is it!” he screamed. “This is it, okay?”

Spitalny fired a flamethrower blast into a pen and incinerated two hens and a rooster.

Beevers swung the little girl around once more and this time split open her head against the mazy tree. He threw down her body and came raging toward the center of the village. “Now ask these people about Elvis,” he yelled. “Let’s get the truth out of these motherfuckers for once.”

Underhill spoke to the old man, who was now trembling with mingled terror and rage, and got back a rapid tirade that made him shake his head.

“You want to see how to do this? Watch.” Beevers stormed into the circle of cowering Vietnamese and pulled to his feet the little boy Pumo had taken from a hootch. The little boy was too frightened to speak, but the old woman who had been clutching him began to wail. Beevers clipped her in the forehead with the butt of his .45, and she toppled. Beevers clutched the child’s throat, pointed the .45 at his head, and said, “Elvis? Elvis?”

The little boy gargled something.

“You know him. Where is he?”

Layers and curls of smoke drifted around them, carrying odors of burning straw and singed meat. Spitalny was training his flamethrower on whatever was left in the ditch. The hootches crackled around the lieutenant, the little boy, and the old people. Underhill knelt beside the child and spoke to him in soft Vietnamese. The child did not look as though he understood anything Underhill was saying. Poole saw Trotman approach the hootch where he had killed the VC, and waved him off. Trotman went on to the next hootch in the circle. A second later yellow flame grew along the roofline.

“I want his head!” Beevers yelled.

Poole began to trudge through the smoke toward the hootch where he had killed the VC. He wanted to drag him outside before the hootch was fired. Everything was all fucked up anyway. None of the hootches had been properly searched—Beevers had gone crazy when he had been fired on. Where was that list, anyhow? Poole thought that after the hootches burned down, they could still check beneath them for secret compartments—maybe it would not be a total loss. He saw Dengler, dazed and covered in dust, walking back toward the ditch to see what Spitalny was doing.

The problem was going to be to keep Beevers from killing all the old people. If he found Elvis back in that hootch, which Michael had begun to think might be very likely, Beevers would want to execute the whole village as VC. Then they’d double or triple the body count, and the Tin Man would be another little step along the way to his brigade.

For the first and only time in his military career, Michael Poole asked himself what it was that the army wanted him to do—what America wanted him to do. His radio popped and sizzled, and he ignored it. He stepped over Rowley’s body and went into the hootch.

The hootch was full of smoke and the smell of gunpowder.

Poole took another step through the smoke and saw the body kneeling before the far wall of the hootch. A small black head, a brown shirt now wet with blood. The body seemed to be all trunk—“main housing unit,” Beevers would have said. Poole saw no grenade. Then he finally took in the size of the body curled up before the wall and knew that he had not killed Elvis—he had killed a dwarf. He took another look around for the dud grenade, breathing hard now without knowing why. He looked at the dwarf’s hands, which were small and dirty. They were not a dwarf’s hands: they were not any adult’s hands, being very delicate as well as crusted with dirt. Poole shook his head, sweating, and lifted the shoulder of the VC’s body to get a look at his face.

The shoulder gave him almost no resistance at all, and the small body rolled over to expose the face of a small boy of nine or ten. Poole allowed the boy’s body to relax back down onto the floor. “Where’s that grenade?” he asked himself in a voice that sounded normal. He kicked over a little table, scattering pins and combs and a pair of round sunglasses. He tossed everything that was in the hootch upside-down—the pallets, the tin cups, straw baskets, a few old photographs. He realized that he was doing this to keep himself from fully understanding what he had done. There was no grenade. He stood very still for a moment. The radio sizzled again, and Beevers yelled his name.

Poole bent down and picked up the child’s corpse. It was about as heavy as the body of a dog. He turned around and walked through the smoke to the hootch’s entrance. The shrieking went up a notch when he came out.

Underhill blinked when Poole came toward him carrying the dead child, but said nothing. A woman jumped up with her arms outstretched and her face broken into craziness by grief. Poole moved up to her and gave her the dead child. She sank down into the circle of old people, crooning to the child.

Then at last the Phantom jets came wailing in over the village, their noise drowning out the sounds of fire and human voices. The old people huddled close to the earth, and the big jets screamed over the village and turned in the air. Off to the left the forest around the cave became a single huge fireball. The forest made a noise like a thousand wind machines all going at once.

I shot a little boy, Poole said to himself.

In the next instant he realized that absolutely nothing was going to happen to him because of what he had done. Lieutenant Beevers had smashed a girl’s head against a tree. Spitalny had burned children to death in a ditch. Unless the entire platoon was court-martialed nothing was going to happen. This too was terrible. There were no consequences. Actions that took place in a void were eternal actions, and that was terrible. Everything that surrounded Poole, the burning hootches, the curling smoke, the earth beneath his boots, and the huddled old men and women, for a moment seemed utterly unreal. He felt as if he could float up off the ground, if he wanted to.

He decided not to float up off the ground. That was some serious shit. If you did something like that, you’d be like Elvis, you couldn’t be sure you could ever get back down.

He looked to his left and was surprised to see most of the men in the platoon standing at the fringe of the village, watching the incineration of the forest. When had they left the hootches? It seemed to him that there had been a break in time, an irrational space, an area of blockage in which everything had changed positions without his knowing or seeing it. The unreality of everything around him was much clearer now—the burning forest was a kind of movie on a screen, and the burning hootches were places where people lived in a story. It was an ugly story, and if you told it backwards by burning down the little houses it would disappear. Totally. It would never have been. Things were much better that way—the way in which the story got pulled backwards out of the world through its own asshole and disappeared. He should have levitated while he had the chance, because it no longer made any difference if he got back to earth or not. Because it was not the real earth anymore, it was a movie. What they were watching now was the unhappening of the story.

The whole village was going to unhappen.

Poole could see the ugly purple hill very clearly now. At the base of the hill, like a fold in the rock, lay the entrance to a cave.

“That’s where everything is,” he heard Lieutenant Beevers say.

3

Poole almost called out when M.O. Dengler began to run toward the cave after the lieutenant. Lieutenant Beevers was a human unhappening—nobody should follow him into a cave, but especially not M.O. Dengler.

Poole wanted to yell, to keep Dengler from going into that place as Harry Beevers’ shield. Then he noticed Victor Spitalny sprinting after M.O. Dengler and Lieutenant Beevers. Spitalny wanted to go in there with them. Spitalny was a soldier today, Spitalny was red hot.

Pumo yelled Spitalny’s name, but Spitalny only turned his head and kept on running. Running with his head turned, he looked like an image on a frieze.

The three men disappeared into the cave.

Poole turned back to the village and saw Tim Underhill trudging toward him through the smoke.

Both men heard a muffled rattle of fire come from the cave. It died with such swiftness it seemed never to have been. Behind them came the snapping and crunching of a hootch falling in on itself. The villagers continued wailing. From the cave came again the muffled sound of an M-16 firing in bursts. Poole’s mind and body unfroze, and he began to run through the smoke toward the cave. He dimly saw the old man who must have been the village chief stand up in the middle of the circle. He held the charred piece of paper in his hands, and was yelling something in a squeaky high-pitched voice.

The brush still burned, sending runners of sparks along the blackened stalks. Here and there the ground itself was burning. Trees had keeled over and collapsed into themselves like cigarette ash. A cloud of smoke blocked the narrow entrance of the cave, and as Poole ran toward it, he heard enraged painful screams coming from behind the unmoving cloud.

A second later Victor Spitalny came windmilling through the smoke. His face was bright red and he was screaming as if he had been tortured. Spitalny moved in an irregular series of agitated, aimless hops and jumps, like a man being given a series of powerful electrical shocks. He must have been hit somewhere, but there was no blood on him. He was uttering a series of high-pitched syllables which at length resolved themselves into “Kill ’em! Kill ’em!” Then he lost his footing and fell into the ash near the mouth of the cave. He began to thrash around, incapable of controlling himself enough to get back on his feet. Poole pulled his groundcloth out of his pack, flipped it open, and bent over Spitalny to roll him up inside it. Raised red welts covered Spitalny’s face and neck. His eyes were swollen shut.

“Wasps!” Spitalny shrieked. “All over me!”

Through the smudges where the hootches had been, Poole could see all the villagers standing up, straining to look toward them.

He yelled a question about the lieutenant and Dengler, but Spitalny kept shaking and jerking. Spanky Burrage had knelt down and was pounding the groundcloth all over Spitalny’s chest, flipped him over and began beating on his back. Then he burst out laughing. “Fool, there ain’t nothin’ in there but you.”

“Look inside here and count all the dead wasps,” Spitalny said.

Poole stood up just as Dengler emerged through the cave’s narrow opening. He looked whiter than ever, almost grey under the dirt. His rifle dangled from his right hand, and his eyes seemed blurry with shock or exhaustion.

“Koko,” Dengler said, and half a dozen men looked at each other.

“What?” Poole asked. “What happened?”

“Nothing.”

“You waste Elvis?” asked Spanky Burrage.

“Nothing happened,” Dengler said. He took a few steps, stirring up sparks and ashes with his boots, and looked over the expanse of destroyed earth to the old people, all of them now standing in the center of what had been their village and looking straight back at him.

Poole heard the villagers shouting something, but it took him a moment to separate the voices enough to make out the words. What they were yelling was “Numbah ten!”

“Who was firing?”

“The good guys,” Dengler said, giving a faint smile to the reeking, smoke-filled air between himself and the village.

“Is the lieutenant okay?” Poole wondered what he really hoped the answer to that question would be.

Dengler shrugged.

“You numbah ten!” came from the villagers, repeated in a ragged random chaos of high-pitched voices.

Poole realized that at some point he would no longer be able to delay going into that opening in the rock. He would go in and a child would stand before him holding out its hand in the darkness.

“You know something?” Dengler spoke in a monotone. “I was right.”

“You were right about what?”

“I was right about God.”

Now Spitalny stood in the sunlight with his shirt off, breathing hard. Red swellings puffed out his shoulders, arms, and back, and his face was a collection of large, red, angry-looking lumps. He looked like a plateful of yams. Norm Peters had begun to spread a greasy white ointment over Spitalny’s shoulders.

Poole turned away from Burrage and walked across the smoking ground toward the medic and Spitalny. After a second Burrage came too, as unwilling as Poole to go into the cave.

Poole had taken only a few steps when he heard the approaching helicopter and looked up toward a gnat-sized black dot in the sky. Wrong, he thought, go away, go back.

4

“I can’t figure this out,” Peters was saying. “Will you look at this? It doesn’t make sense, not to me it doesn’t.”

“Is Dengler out?” Spitalny asked.

Poole nodded. “What doesn’t make sense?” But as soon as he had asked the question, he saw. Spitalny’s narrow sharp-featured face had begun to reappear as the swellings sank down into it. His eyes were visible now, and his forehead no longer bulged out in a series of lumpy corrugations but ascended almost smoothly through eruptions like undeclared pimples to his black widow’s peak.

“These aren’t wasp stings,” Peters said. “They’re hives.”

“Fuck you, they ain’t wasp stings,” said Spitalny. “The lieutenant ain’t outa there yet. You better wrap yourself up in something and drag him out.”

“Even if they were wasp stings, the stuff I’m putting on wouldn’t reduce the swelling, it’d just reduce the pain. You see how these things are going down?”

“Suck my dick,” Spitalny said. He held out his skinny arms and examined them—the swellings had shrunk to the size and shape of leeches.

“You tell me,” Poole said. The helicopter had grown in the distance to the size of a housefly.

“Wasps,” Spitalny insisted. “Man, I’ll bet the Lost Boss is in there, down and out, man. We gonna get us a new lieutenant.”

He looked at Poole with the sort of expression a dog wears when you are made to realize that it too can think. “The good part of this is obvious, isn’t it? You can’t court-martial a dead man.”

Poole watched the poisoned red lumps shrink into Spitalny’s filthy sallow skin.

“There’s one way out of this, and you know what it is as much as I do. We put it all on the lieutenant. Which is exactly where it oughta be.”

The helicopter was huge in the sky now, descending toward them through the harsh sunlight. Beneath it the grass flattened out in sealike waves and ripples. Beyond the ruined village, beyond the ditch, lay the meadow where the oxen grazed. Far to the left, the forested hillside they had descended appeared to continue the waves and ripples caused by the helicopter far out beyond the valley.

Then he heard Harry Beevers’ voice, loud and jubilant. “Poole! Underhill! Give me two men!” When he saw that they were gaping at him, he grinned. “Jackpot!”

He came striding toward them. The man was up, Poole saw. The nervous, jittery energy was all octane now. He was like a man who does not know that the reason he feels so good is that he’s drunk. Sweat flew off his face and his eyes were liquid. “Where are my two men?”

Poole motioned to Burrage and Pumo, who began to move toward the cave.

“I want everything out of that cave, and I want it piled up right out here where everybody can see it. Troops, we’re going to make the six o’clock news.”

Troops? Beevers had never seemed more like an alien visitor who had learned earthling “ways” from television programs.

“You numbah ten!” an old woman shouted at them.

“Number ten on your programs, number one in your hearts,” Lieutenant Beevers said to Poole, then turned away to greet the reporters running hunched over through the grass.

5

And everything else flowed from what came out of Harry Beevers’ mouth. Newsweek and Time and stories in hundreds of daily newspapers, a blip passing over the screen of what is seen and read and talked about. Then only a cooling memory, stored in old photographs, of a mountain of rice and a tall pile of Russian weapons which had been carried out of a cave by Spanky Burrage and Tina Pumo and the other members of the platoon. Ia Thuc was a VC village, and everybody in it wanted to kill American soldiers. But there were no photographs of the bodies of thirty children because the only bodies found at Ia Thuc were those that had been incinerated in a ditch—three children, two males and a female, roughly thirteen years of age—and that of a single small boy of perhaps seven, also incinerated. Later the body of a young woman was found on the hillside.

After the reporters left, the old people were relocated to a refugee camp at An Lo. The Tin Man and those above him described this action as “penalizing the insurgents and depriving the VC of a recruiting base.” The crops were poisoned and the people, Buddhists, taken from their family burial plots. They had seen this coming from the moment their houses were burned—maybe from the moment Beevers had killed the sow. They disappeared into An Lo, fifteen old people among thousand of refugees.

When Poole and Tim Underhill had gone deep into the cave a cloud of transparent moths had filled the air around them, buffeting against them, flattening out over their mouths and eyes, then beating off again—Poole waved his hands before his face and moved as quickly as he could, Underhill behind him, into another section of the cave, which the moths did not enter. This was the chamber where the firing had taken place. The blood was already disappearing into the bullet-pocked wall the way Spitalny’s skin eruptions, his yams, leeches, eggs, and almonds had faded back into his body. The cave folded and unfolded, branching apart like a maze. Farther on they found another large store of rice, farther on a little wooden desk and chair—the desk looked as though it had been taken from one of Poole’s own grade school classrooms in Greenwich, Connecticut. It began to seem hopeless, they would never find the end of it: it seemed to have no end at all, but to twist back around in on itself.

They came out again past the chamber where the empty metal casings lay like thrown coins, and Underhill inhaled deeply and shook his head. Poole smelled it too. The chamber was filled with a complex odor compounded of terror, blood, gunpowder, and some other odor Poole could identify only in negatives. It was not piss, it was not shit, it was not sweat or rot or fungus or even the reeking dew all animals exude when they are frightened unto death, but something beneath all these. The indefinable odor in the stone chamber stank of pain to him. It stank like the place where Injun Joe had made Tom Sawyer watch him rape Becky Thatcher before he killed them both.

He and Underhill finally came back out into the main part of the cave. M.O. Dengler was saying something to Spitalny as he carried a case of Russian rifles out through the opening.

“A man of sorrow and acquainted with grief,” Spitalny replied, or more likely, repeated. “A man of sorrow and acquainted with grief, a man of sorrow and acquainted with dickheads, Jesus Christ.”

“Calm down, Vic,” Dengler said. “Whatever it was, it was a long time ago.” Then he wobbled, and his rear end dropped as if a strong hand had suddenly pushed his head down into his neck. Dengler’s legs folded sideways, and the case of rifles landed with a loud thud, Dengler nearly soundlessly. Spitalny heard the crash as the box of rifles landed, turned around, looked down, and continued carrying his box of rifles toward the stack.

“There are no children!” Beevers was yelling. “Not in war! No children!” Well, he was right: there were no children. For the first but not the last time, Poole wondered if the villagers from An Lac had taken more children out through another entrance.

Dengler groaned as Peters unwrapped the final length of gauze. Everybody backed up for a second. Compact as a puff of cigarette smoke, a deep brown odor floated up from the exposed wound.

“You’re out of here for a couple of days,” Peters said.

“Where’d the lieutenant go?” Dengler’s eyes moved almost fearfully from side to side while Peters rewrapped his arm.

“Did you see the bats flying out of his mouth?” Dengler asked.

“I gave him something a little extra,” Peters said. “Tide him over.”

Into the darkness, which tides us over.

1

Groggy with cognac and too little sleep, they landed in San Francisco at some hour that seemed like four or five in the morning but was actually noon. In a vast hall hundreds of passengers milled around a luggage carousel and watched their bags thump and slide down a metal ramp onto a moving belt. His beard trimmed and his thinning hair cut short, Tim Underhill looked gaunt and tired. His shoulders were as stooped as an old scholar’s, and now his questing face was also a scholar’s. Poole wondered if it had been a mistake to bring him back with them.

As they moved toward Customs and Immigration with their bags, a uniformed man appeared among them, awarding instant customs clearance to a few of the passengers. The people he selected to receive this convenience were invariably middle-aged males who looked like corporate executives. Koko had been here, Poole thought while the official’s eye rested upon him and moved on. Koko stood on this spot and saw everything I am seeing. He left a flight from Bangkok or Singapore and changed to a New York flight where he met a stewardess named Lisa Mayo and an unpleasant young millionaire. He talked to the unpleasant young man on the flight, and shortly after they landed at JFK airport, he killed him. I bet he did, I bet he did, I bet, I bet—

He stood right where I’m standing, Poole thought. His skin shivered.

Harry Beevers bounced up off his seat as soon as the others found their departure gate in the United terminal. He stepped over the semicircle of suitbags and carry-on luggage arranged before him and began tacking toward them through the rows of seats.

They met before the desk, and Beevers silently braced Poole at arm’s length, then embraced him, enclosing him in the odors of alcohol, cologne, and airline soap. Poole supposed he was being commended for actions in the field.

Beevers melodramatically dropped his hands from Michael’s arms and turned to Conor. But before Beevers could give the French Foreign Legion seal of approval to him too, Conor stuck out his hand. Beevers gave in and shook it. Finally he turned to Tim Underhill. “So this is you,” he said.

Underhill almost laughed out loud. “Disappointed?”

Poole had wondered all during their flight how Beevers would handle Underhill’s arrival among them as an innocent man. There was the small possibility that he would do something really nutty, such as put handcuffs on him and make a citizen’s arrest. Harry Beevers’ fantasies died hard, and Poole did not expect him to give up this one, which had been the foundation of many others, without being paid heavily for its loss.

But the good grace, and even the good sense of his response surprised Poole. “Not if you’re going to help us, I’m not.”

“I want to stop him too, Harry. Of course I’ll help you, however I can.”

“Are you clean?” Beevers asked.

“I’n not doing too bad,” Underhill said.

“Okay. But there’s one more thing. I want your agreement that you won’t use any of this Koko material in a work of nonfiction. You can write all the fiction you want—I don’t care about that. But I have to have the nonfiction rights to this.”

“Sure,” Underhill said. “I couldn’t write nonfiction if I tried. And I won’t sue you if you won’t sue me.”

“We can work together,” Beevers declared. He dragged Underhill too in for a hug and said he was on the team. “Let’s make some serious money, okay?”

* * *

Michael sat next to Beevers on the flight to New York. Conor was in the window seat, and Tim Underhill sat just ahead of Michael. For a long time Beevers told improbable stories about his adventures in Taipei—stories about drinking snake’s blood and having incredible sex with beautiful whores, actresses, and models. Then he leaned toward Michael and whispered. “We have to be careful with this guy, Michael. We can’t trust him, that’s the bottom line. Why do you think I’m inviting him to stay with me? I’ll be able to keep my eye on him.”

Poole nodded wearily.

In a voice loud enough to be overheard, Beevers said, “I want you guys to think about something. We are going to be seeing the police at some point after we get back, and that gives us a problem. How much do we tell them?”

Underhill twisted around in his seat to look back with an interested, quizzical expression.

“I think we should consider holding to a certain confidentiality here,” Beevers said. “We started off on this thing by wanting to find Koko ourselves, and that’s how we want to finish up. We ought to stay a step ahead of the police all the way.”

“Okay, I guess,” Conor said.

“I hope I have the agreement of the rest of you on this point.”

“We’ll see,” Poole said.

“I don’t suppose we’re exactly talking about obstruction of justice,” Underhill said.

“I don’t care what you call it,” Beevers said. “All I’m saying is that we hold back on one or two details. Which is what the police do all the time as a matter of course. We hold back a little. And when we come up with a course of action, we keep it to ourselves.”

“Course of action?” Conor asked. “What can we do?”

Beevers asked them to consider a few possibilities. “For instance, we have two bits of information the police do not have. We know that Koko is Victor Spitalny, and we know that a man named Tim Underhill is in New York—or soon will be—and not back in Bangkok.”

“You don’t want to tell the cops that we’re looking for Spitalny?” Conor asked.

“We can play a little dumb. They can find out who is missing and who isn’t.” He gave Michael a superior little smile. “It is the other bit of information that I see being most useful to us. Spitalny used this man’s name”—he pointed at Underhill—“didn’t he? To get the reporters to come to him? I think he did, based on what we found out at Goodwood Park. So I say let’s turn the tables on him.”

“And how would you do that, Harry?” Underhill asked.

“In a way, Pumo gave me the idea when we all met in Washington back in November. He was talking about his girlfriend, remember?”

“Hey, I remember,” Conor said. “He was talking to me. That little Chinese girl was driving him out of his gourd. She used to put ads in some paper for him. Signed them ‘Half Moon.’ ”

“Très bon, très, très bon,” Beevers said.

“You want to put ads in the Village Voice?” asked Michael.

“This is America,” Beevers said. “Let’s advertise. Let’s put Tim Underhill’s name up all over town. If anybody asks about it, we can say that we’re looking for someone who used to be in our old unit. And that way we never use Koko’s real name. I think we’ll shake a couple of peaches out of the tree.”

2

The Star Limousine was actually a van with three rows of seats and a luggage rack on the roof. Even inside the van the air was very cold, and Poole pulled his coat tightly around himself and wished that he had packed a sweater. He felt isolated and strange, and the country outside the windows of the van seemed as foreign as it was familiar. He seemed to have been gone a long time.

Buttoned up against the cold, ugly row houses huddled on the desolate land on either side of the highway. The air had already turned dark. Nobody in the van spoke, not even the married couples.

Michael remembered seeing Robbie in a dream, holding up a lantern.

Coming home was always the same. Coming home, there was always the fear factor. Blood and Marbles were always home. You had to make straight in the desert a highway, yet once a little while, and then you could shake the heavens and the earth, the sea and the dry land. Make straight in the desert, for who shall abide the day of his coming?

You came home to what was undone and rebuked you, to what had been badly or ill done, which spat you out of its mouth, and to that which had been done which should not have been done, which came at you with a board, a strap, a brick.

All this was in a book, even Blood and Marbles were in a book.

In this book the cave was a river where a small naked boy walked smeared with frozen mud. (But it was a woman’s blood, it was.) He had read this book backwards and forwards. That was one thing they said at home—backwards and forwards. Koko remembered buying that book because once in another life he had known the author and soon the book revolved and grew in his hands and became a book about himself. Koko had felt as if he were in free fall—as if someone had thrown him out of a helicopter. His body had left itself, in familiar total fear his body had stood up and walked out into the book in his hands.

Fear total and familiar.

He had remembered the most terrible thing in the world. This was true—there was a most terrible thing. The most terrible thing was how his body had learned to leave itself. It was Blood opening the bedroom door at night and sidling into the little room. The hot wet smell of the eternal world on his body. His blond hair almost silver in the darkness.

Are you awake?

Anyone awake could see the police cars, anyone awake could see what was happening. Koko stood on the corner looking at the two cars pulled up before the YMCA. They expected him to just walk in there.

It was the black man, who said, Killin’ is a see-yun. He had gone and told Mr. Partridge, who sat at a desk downstairs, about the room. Mr. Partridge had walked into Koko’s room and Koko’s body had walked out of his body.

—What is the meaning of this? Mr. Partridge had said. You crazies always end up here, don’t you have anywhere else to go?

—This is my place, not yours, Koko said.

—We’ll see about that, said Mr. Partridge, and walked out, not before taking another long look at the walls.

The children turned and cried after him.

—You ain’t no travel agent, the black man said. You ain’t got but a one-way ticket yourself.

Koko turned away and began walking downtown toward the subway. He carried everything essential with him in the knapsack now, and there were always empty places.

Then he remembered that he had lost the Rearing Elephant cards, and he stopped walking and put his hand over his stomach. Blood towered up before him, his hair silvery and his voice flat and cold and crazy with rage.

You lost them?

His entire life seemed as heavy as an anvil he carried in his arms. He wanted to drop the anvil. Someone else could take up the job now—after all he had done, it would be easy for someone else to finish up. He could quit. He could turn himself in, or he could flee.

Koko knew one thing—he could get on an airplane right now and go anywhere. For Honduras, you went to New Orleans. He had looked it up. You went to New Orleans and there was your plane. Bird = Freedom.

An image from the book that had so surprised him floated up into his mind, and he saw himself as a lost child streaked with frozen mud wandering beside a cold, dirty river in the middle of a city. Dogs and wolves turned their sharpened teeth toward him, the door cracked open, through the frozen mud emerged the tips of fingers turning green with putrefaction. Feelings of loss and terror swarmed at him, and Koko staggered toward the shelter of a doorway.

The dead children held their spindly hands up before their faces.

He had no home, and he could quit.

Trying not to sob or at least not to show that he was sobbing, he sat down in the doorway. On the other side of the great glass door, an empty marble hallway led toward a row of elevators. He saw the cartoon policemen strutting around his room. He saw the jackets on their hangers, the shirts in the drawers. (The cards on the dresser.) Tears spilled over his cheeks. His razor, his toothbrush. Things taken away, things lost, things raped and left dazed, dying, dead.…

Koko saw Harry Beevers in the close darkness at the back of a cave. His father whispered his question. Harry Beevers leaned toward him with his eyes gleaming, his teeth, his whole face shining and sweating and gleaming. Get the fuck out of here, troop, he said, and a bat flew out of his mouth. Or share the glory. In the mess on the ground on the other side of the lieutenant he saw in the narrow beam one little outflung hand with fingers curling toward the palm. Koko’s body had walked out of itself. Right under the stench of eternity hovered the smells of powder, piss, shit. Beevers turned and Koko saw his long erection straining out of his trousers. His history slammed together—he met himself, he was traveling backwards and forwards.

He looked up from his place within the shelter of the doorway and saw a blue and white police car roll past, followed closely by another. They had left his room. Maybe one would be left. Maybe he could go there and talk about the lieutenant.

Koko stood up and hugged himself tight. In his room would be one man to whom he could talk, and this thought was like an unaccustomed substance in his blood. Once he talked, everything would be different and he would be free, for after he talked the man would understand backwards and forwards.

For the space of several seconds Koko saw himself as if from a great distance, a man standing in a doorway with his arms wrapped around himself because he was oppressed by a great grief. Flat, even daylight, the light of ordinary reality, lay over everything before him. During these seconds Koko saw his own terror, and what he saw both astonished and frightened him deeply. He could go back and say: I made a mistake. No demons or angels surrounded him; the drama of supernatural redemption in which he had been so long enfolded had fled away down the long street crowded with taxicabs, and he was an ordinary man, out in the cold by himself.

He was trembling, but he was not crying anymore, anymore. Then he remembered the face of the girl in Tina Pumo’s living room, and the face suggested to him the one neighborhood in all the city where he might feel most at home.

He would carry the anvil a little further, and see what happened.

And when he left the subway at Canal Street his whole body told him that he had been right. The subway had taken him someplace absolutely out of America. He was in an Asian world again. Even the smells were at once subtler and denser.

Koko had to force himself to walk slowly and breathe normally. With a pounding heart he passed beneath a sign in Chinese characters and turned south into Mulberry Street. It seemed to him that he was hungry as he had not been in a week. The last meal he could actually remember eating had been served by a stewardess.

Suddenly Koko was so attacked by hunger that he could have opened his mouth and let slide into him every store, every brick, every blaring yellow sign, every teapot and chopstick, every duck and eel, and every man and woman on the street along with the stop signs and traffic lights and mailboxes and telephone booths.

He paused only long enough to buy a Times, a Post, and a Village Voice at a newsstand before turning into the first restaurant where a row of ducks the color of buckwheat honey hung above pots of brown soup and white sticky porridge.

When the food came, the world melted, time melted, and as he ate he was back in the times when he had lived within the elephant and every time he drew breath he drew in the elephant.

In the papers today a bus driver had won nearly two million dollars in something called Lotto. A ten-year-old boy named Alton Cedarquist had been thrown off a roof in a part of town called Inwood. A block of buildings in the Bronx had burned down. In Angola, a man named Jonas Savimbi posed with an ugly Swedish machine gun and promised to fight through eternity; in Nicaragua, a priest and two nuns had been killed and beheaded in a tiny village. Backward and forward, yes indeedy. In Honduras, the government of the United States had claimed two hundred acres of land as a training site—it used to be theirs and now it was ours. We issued the usual heartfelt promises that one day soon it would be theirs again. In the meantime our mouths were open and two hundred acres had disappeared down our throats. Koko could smell the grease in which weapons were packed; he could hear the sound of crunching boots, of hands slapping the stocks of rifles.

The lords of the earth turned to him with a question on their faces.

But the real estate pages, in which he had hoped to find a good cheap room for rent, were written in code, most of which he did not understand, and showed almost no rentals at all in Chinatown. The only space available down here appeared to be a two-bedroom apartment at Confucius Plaza, at a price so high that at first he thought it must be a misprint.

Anything more? the waiter asked in Cantonese, the language in which Koko had ordered his meal.

I have finished, thank you, Koko said, and the waiter scribbled on a slip, tore it off and placed it on the table beside his plate. A grease spot instantly blossomed in the center of the green piece of paper.

Koko watched the grease spot swell out another two centimeters in diameter. He counted out money and placed it on the table. He looked up at the waiter, who was moving slowly toward the back of the restaurant.

They took my home from me, he said.

The waiter turned around and blinked.

I have no home now.

The waiter nodded.

Where is your home?

My home is in Hong Kong, the waiter said.

Do you know of some place where I might live?

The waiter shook his head. Then he said, You should live with your own kind. He turned his back on Koko and proceeded to the front of the restaurant, where he leaned on the cash register and in a loud complaining whine began to speak to another man.

Koko flipped over to the back page of the Village Voice and found himself reading the words, at first as meaningless as the code in the real estate ads, TWIDDLE: UR BEAST I EVER SCENE, PAIN IS ILL-U-SHUN. SURVE-LIVE. LUMINOUS DIAL. Beneath this one was another addressed to the universe at large and perhaps one other like himself, whirling loose within it. A STIFLED DROWSY UNIMPASSIONED GRIEF. WEYOUI MUST FIND THAT WHICH WAS LOST. Koko felt his tension breaking deep within him, just as if this ad really had been placed for him by someone who knew and understood him.

But in the meantime the other man at the front of the restaurant, more prosperous and managerial than the waiter, was looking at him with a cocked head and a light in his eye that only the promise of money could have put there. Koko folded his paper and stood up to approach him. He already knew that he had found a room for himself.

There came the customary formalities, including the customary expressions of surprise at Koko’s facility with Cantonese.

I have a great love for all things Chinese, Koko said. It is a great shame that my purse is not as large as my heart.

The avaricious gleam in the restaurant owner’s eye suffered a slight diminution.

But I will happily give a fair price for whatever you may be good enough to make available to me, and you will also earn my everlasting gratitude.

How did you come to be homeless?

My room was appropriated for other uses by my landlord.

And your possessions?

I carry all I own.

You have no job?

I am a writer, of some small reputation.

The owner extended a fat hand. I am Chin Wu-Fu.

“Timothy Underhill,” Koko said, taking the man’s hand.

Chin gestured for him to follow. They went outside, Koko shrugging on his knapsack, to bustle down the block in the cold and turn into Bayard Street. Chin Wu-Fu hustled on ahead of him, hunching his shoulders against the cold. Koko strode on behind him for two blocks, and followed him as he turned north into narrow, empty Elizabeth Street. Halfway up the block, Chin ducked through a curved archway and disappeared. He ducked back out and waved Koko in through the arch, and then ushered Koko into a small enclosed brick courtyard that smelled faintly of cooking oil. Koko saw that the court would always be sunless. Surrounded by tenement walls and fire escapes that clung like giant mantises to the dingy brown brick, the court was no more than an insulating dead space between the tenements and Elizabeth Street. It was perfect. The Chinese man in the dark suit who had admitted him to this dead still space was pulling at one of the rough doors set into the tenement’s ground level.

We go downstairs, the owner said, and plunged into the cold darkness of the stairwell.

Koko followed.

At the bottom of the stairs Chin switched on a bare lightbulb and flipped through the hundreds of keys on a large ring before unlocking another door. Wordlessly, he swung it open and with a sweeping gesture motioned Koko inside.

Koko stepped into a clammy absolute blackness. He knew instantly that this was going to be just what he needed, and in the instant before Chin Wu-Fu groped for the cord and turned on the light within, he already saw the windowless rectangular chamber, the walls of a dark flaking green, the stained mattress on the floor, the population of roaches, the rickety chair, and the rusty sink and rough toilet behind a screen. He could not talk to the police, but he could find Michael Poole and Michael Poole was a man who would understand backwards and forwards. Harry Beevers was the road backwards, and Michael Poole was the narrow lonely path leading forward out of his cell. Another bare lightbulb came dimly to life. Down beneath the surface of Elizabeth Street, he felt on his skin the wind that blew across a frozen river. Pain was an ill-u-shun.

PART

SIX

THE REAL

RAW TASTE

“As bad as that?” Pat asked.

“You don’t know the half of it.” Judy Poole exhaled loudly, oddly satisfied to have at last arrived at this stage of their conversation. It was seven-thirty in the evening of Michael’s third day back home, and the two women had been speaking on the telephone for perhaps twenty-five minutes.

Judy heard a sigh from Pat Caldwell’s end of the line and quickly asked, “Am I keeping you from anything?”

“Not really.” She paused. “Harry’s only called me once, so I can’t report anything. They still plan to talk to the police, do they?”

This point had already been covered within ten minutes of the beginning of this conversation, and Judy took it up again impatiently. “I told you that—they think they know something about why Tina was murdered. Do you think they’re daydreaming? I want to think they’re daydreaming.”

“All this sounds so familiar,” Pat said. “Harry always knew the inside of a million stories.”

“Anyhow,” Judy said, reverting to an earlier theme, “you don’t know the worst. I don’t know what to do anymore. I’m incredibly anxious. I can hardly get out of bed in the mornings, and when school’s over and it’s time to come home, I dawdle and dawdle, but I’m hardly even aware of what I’m doing. I go around the school looking for litter. I check to make sure the classroom doors are locked. When I get home, it’s like, I don’t know, some kind of bomb went off and everything got leveled and there’s only this terrible silence left.”

Judy paused, less for effect than to accommodate the thought that had just surfaced within her. “You know what this is really like? It’s like what happened right after Robbie died. But at least then Michael stayed home, he went to work and he did what he was supposed to do. He was around at night. And I knew what was happening to him, so I knew what to do.”

“And you don’t know what to do now?”

“Obviously. That’s why I can hardly make myself come home at night. Michael and I have scarcely had a good conversation in … he hasn’t been working, I can tell you that. You think Harry’s been working? I doubt it.”

“Harry isn’t my problem,” Pat said promptly. “I wish him luck. I hope he sits down and starts to work. You know he lost his job, don’t you? My brother couldn’t put up with him any longer and let him go.”

“Your brother sounds like a great man, he always has,” Judy said, for a moment distracted by the old grievance that she had never met Pat Caldwell’s distinguished older brother.

“Well, I think Charles gave him some money too,” Pat said. “Charles has a good heart, basically. He doesn’t want Harry to suffer—my brother is what I guess you have to call a Christian gentleman.”

“A Christian gentleman,” Judy said. Envy made her voice go dull and flat. “Are there still such creatures?”

“In the ranks of fifty-eight-year-old heads of law firms, I guess.”

“Can I ask you a personal question? I promise you, it’s not just out of curiosity.” She paused, either for effect or out of curiosity. “I want to know about your divorce.”

“What do you want to know about it?”

“More or less everything.”

“Oh, poor Judy,” Pat said. “I see, I guess. It’s never easy—not even getting divorced from Harry Beevers was easy.”

“He was unfaithful.”

“Of course he was unfaithful,” Pat said. “Everybody’s unfaithful.” She did not sound at all cynical, saying this.

“Michael wasn’t.”

“But you were, which I assume is one of the real topics of this conversation. But if you want to know why I left Harry, I suppose I don’t mind talking about it a little bit. In a way, Ia Thuc was really the reason.”

“Oh, come on,” Judy said.

“What he did at Ia Thuc. I don’t even know what it was. I don’t think anyone else knows, either.”

“You mean he killed those children after all?”

“I’m sure he killed the children, Judy, but I’m talking about something else. I don’t know what, and I don’t want to know, either. After we had been married ten years, I took a look at him tying his bow tie in the mirror one morning, and I knew that I couldn’t live with him anymore.”

“Well, what?”

“It’s too black. I don’t know. Charles told me he thought that Harry had a demon inside him.”

“You got divorced because you had this mystical feeling about something that happened about ten years before, and for which Harry had already been put on trial and found innocent?”

“I got divorced because I couldn’t stand the thought that he might touch me again.” She was silent for a moment. “He wasn’t like Michael. Michael feels he has to atone for whatever happened over there, but Harry never felt a second of regret.”

Judy could say nothing to this.

“So I looked at him tying his bow tie and I just finally knew and before I even knew I was going to say it I told him that he had to move out and give me a divorce.”

“What did he do?”

“Finally he saw that I really meant it, and in order to protect his job with Charles, he left without making much of a fuss.” After a second she added, “Of course I felt that I should give him regular alimony payments, and I have. Harry can live at a decent level for the rest of his life without working.”

What was a decent level, Judy wondered. Twenty thousand dollars? Fifty thousand? A hundred thousand?

“I take it that you’re interested in the practicalities of divorce,” Pat eventually said.

“Can’t fool you, can I?”

“Everybody else has, why not you too,” Pat said, laughing a little theatrically. “Has Michael said anything?”

“Enough.” Silence. “No.” Silence. “I don’t know. He’s in a kind of daze because of Tina.”

“So you haven’t talked about it with him.”

“It’s like—he’s just sinking out of sight, and he won’t let me pull him back up on land. My land, with me.”

Pat waited until Judy had stopped crying into the telephone, and then said, “Did you tell him about the man you dated when he was gone?”

“He asked me,” Judy wailed, losing control again. “It’s not that I wanted to hide it, it’s not that—it’s the way he asked me. It was like—did you ever find the car keys? He was a lot more interested in the girl, Stacy Talbot, than he was in me. I know he hates Bob.”

“The nice, stable guy who sails and plays tennis.”

“Right.”

“It’s not important, but I didn’t know they knew each other.”

“They met at a faculty Christmas party once, and Michael thought he was conceited. Maybe Bob is a little conceited. But he’s a very dedicated man—he teaches high school English because he thinks it’s important. He doesn’t have to do it.”

“Sounds like Michael decided he doesn’t ‘have to’ keep his practice.” Or to stay married, Pat silently added.

“Why doesn’t he have to?” Judy asked in a plaintive voice. “Why did he work so hard to get it, if he doesn’t have to keep it?”

That was not the question she was really asking, and Pat did not answer it.

“I feel scared,” Judy said. “It’s so humiliating. I hate it.”

“Do you think you have a future with your friend?”

“Bob Bunce doesn’t have much extra room in his life.” Judy now sounded very dry-eyed. “In spite of seeming to have nothing but room in his life. He has his sports car. He has his sailboat and his tennis. He has his job and his students. He has Henry James. He has his mother. I don’t think he’ll ever make room for a wife.”

“Ah,” Pat said, “but you didn’t start seeing him with the idea of marrying him.”

“Isn’t that a comfort. Wait a minute …” Judy apparently set down the telephone and was gone for several minutes. Pat Caldwell could hear what sounded like ice cubes cracking out of a metal tray. There came the chink of glass against glass. “Mr. Bunce fancies the whiskey that comes in a little blue bag with a drawstring. So I helped myself to some of it. Maybe I should have made him come into a little blue bag with a drawstring.”

Pat heard the ice cubes chinking as Judy raised or lowered her glass.

“Don’t you ever get lonely?” Judy asked.

“Give me a call if you need me,” Pat said. “I’ll come up and keep you company, if you like.”

1

“What do you mean, the police will be there?” Judy asked. “I think that’s completely ridiculous.”

It was ten o’clock the next morning, and the Pooles were driving Harry Beevers and Conor Linklater north to the small town of Milburn, New York, for Tina Pumo’s funeral. They had been driving for two hours and, thanks to Harry’s directions, had managed to lose their way in search of a shortcut. Harry now sat with empty hands in the front passenger seat of Michael’s Audi, fiddling with the digital dial of the radio; Judy sat in back with Conor and the unfolded map.

“You don’t understand the first thing about police work,” Harry said. “Are you always this aggressive about your ignorance?”

Judy opened both her eyes and her mouth, and Harry hurriedly added, “I apologize, I’m sorry, I should not have said that. Pardon, pardon. I take Tina’s death very personally, and I’m also a little touchy. Honest, Judy—I’m sorry.”

“Follow the signs to Binghamton,” Conor said. “We’re about forty-fifty miles away now, the way I figure it. Can you find something besides that noise?”

“This is a murder case,” Harry said, ignoring Conor but changing the station anyhow. “It’s big business. Whoever is in charge of the case will be at the funeral, looking us and everybody else over. This is his chance to meet the cast of characters. And he’s thinking that whoever killed Tina might show up to see him buried. Cops always come to things like this.”

“I wish Pat could have come with us,” Judy said. “And I hate big bands, all that phony nostalgia.”

Harry switched off the radio.

For a time they drove on in silence past a landscape of snowy empty fields and dark stands of trees straight as soldiers in formation. Slashes of grey and black stood out starkly in the snow. Now and then a farmhouse stood like a mirage between the fields and the woods. The map rattled in Conor’s hands, and Judy made a series of little sniffling noises. The past had died, Michael thought, died as part of the present so that now it was really just the past.

When he had arrived back in Westerholm, a nervous Judy had welcomed him with a kiss in which he could taste resentment. Home. She had asked about Singapore, about Bangkok, about traveling with Harry Beevers; she poured out measures of an expensive whiskey that she must have bought for this moment and which, he saw, she had generously sampled in his absence. She followed him upstairs and watched him unpack. She followed him into the bathroom while he ran a tub. She was still sitting in the bathroom, listening to his edited version of the trip, when he asked her if she had enjoyed her meal with Bob Bunce.

She gave a jerky nod.

He had merely remembered to ask, but he felt as though she had shrieked at him, or thrown something at him. She raised her glass and took a swallow of the expensive whiskey.

He asked the question to which he already knew the answer, and she gave him a prompt, flat denial.

“Okay,” he said, but he knew, and she knew that he did. She gulped at her drink and walked out of the bathroom.

“It’s hard to believe that Tina Pumo could have come from a place like this,” Judy said. “He seemed so urbane. Didn’t Tina always seem urbane?”

That’s right, Michael realized with a shock: Tina would have seemed urbane to Judy.

“Look good on his tombstone,” Conor said. “ ‘This was one urbane motherfucker.’ ”

2

St. Michael’s Cathedral, surprisingly imposing for so small a town, dwarfed the little congregation that had gathered for Anthony Francis Pumo’s funeral. From where the pallbearers stood Michael could see a handful of old women, half a dozen men with weather-roughened faces who must have gone to school with Tina, a few younger couples, single old men and women beautiful in their unreflective dignity, and a gaunt Asian man holding the hand of a beautiful child. Vinh and his daughter. At the back of the church stood a tall moustached man in a handsome suit, and another, younger man in an even handsomer suit whose roguish face looked vaguely familiar. Among the other pallbearers were a stocky, brusque man with a wider, less interesting version of Tina’s face, and a short powerful old man with heavy shoulders and hands like scoops: Tina’s brother, who managed a muffler shop, and his father, a retired farmer.

An angular old priest with shining white hair described a shy, eager schoolboy who had served “with great honor and distinction in Vietnam” and “proved his inner strength by triumphing in the turbulent waters of the restaurant business in the city that eventually claimed his life.” That was how it looked from here—one of their children had wandered into the forest of New York City and fallen prey to savage animals.

Out at the cemetery, Pleasant Hill, Michael stood alongside Judy, Beevers, and Conor while the priest read the service. Now and then he looked up at the dull grey granite clouds. He was aware of Tommy Pumo, Tina’s brother, staring at Vinh with outright hostility. Tommy was evidently a difficult character.

First the father and brother, then all in turn dropped clods of earth onto the lowered coffin.

As Poole stepped back from the edge of the grave he heard a loud voice coming from further down the hill. Near the row of parked cars, Tommy Pumo was waving his arms at the well-dressed man whose face had seemed familiar in the cathedral. Pumo’s brother took a furious, almost swaggering step forward. The other man smiled and spoke, and Tommy Pumo’s face twisted, and he stepped forward again.

“Let’s see what’s going on,” Beevers said. He began to move downhill toward the little group of people frozen near the cars.

“Excuse me, sir,” came a voice from just behind him, and Poole looked back to see the tall moustached man who had been in the congregation. Close up, his moustache was thick and lustrous, but the man conveyed no impression of vanity—he seemed easily authoritative, calm and commanding. He was an inch taller than Michael and very solidly built. “You are Dr. Poole? Mrs. Poole?”

Harry had stopped moving downhill, and was standing still, looking back up at the man.

“And you are Mr. Beevers?”

Beevers’ face went very smooth, as if he had just been paid some tremendous compliment.

“My name is Lieutenant Murphy, and I am the detective conducting the investigation of your friend’s death.”

“Aha,” Beevers said to Judy.

Murphy raised his thick eyebrows.

“We were wondering when we would meet you.”

Murphy took it in slowly, easily. “I’d like to have a short talk with you back at the father’s house. You were going there before you left to go back to the city?”

“We are at your disposal, Lieutenant,” Harry said.

Smiling, Murphy turned away and walked down the hill.

Beevers raised his eyebrows and tilted his head in Judy’s direction, wordlessly asking if Poole had told her about Underhill. Poole shook his head. They watched the detective reach the bottom of the hill and say a few words to Pumo’s father.

“Murphy,” Beevers said. “Isn’t that perfect? Talk about type-casting.”

“Why does he want to talk to you?” Judy asked.

“Background checks, filling in the blank spaces, getting the complete picture.” Beevers shoved his hands in his coat pockets and swiveled around to look back at the gravesite. Now only a few of the older people still lingered there. “That little Maggie didn’t show up, damn it. I wonder what she told Murphy about our little jaunt.”

Beevers intended to say more, but he closed his mouth as another mourner approached them. It was the man at whom Tommy Pumo had shouted.

“Good cop, bad cop,” Beevers whispered, and turned away, all but whistling.

The man turned a lopsided grin on Poole and Judy and introduced himself as David Dixon, Tina’s lawyer. “You must be his old service friends. It’s nice to meet you. But haven’t we met before?” He and Michael worked out that they had met at Saigon several years ago.

Beevers had turned back to the group and Michael introduced everybody. “It’s nice of you to come,” Beevers said.

“Tina and I spent a lot of time together, working on various little things. I’d like to think we were friends, and not just lawyer and client.”

“The best clients do become friends,” Harry said, instantly adopting the professional pose Poole had seen in Washington. “I’m a fellow attorney, by the way.”

Dixon paid no attention to these statements. “I tried to get Maggie Lah to drive up here with me, but she didn’t think she could handle it. And she didn’t know if Tina’s family would know how to take her.”

“You have Maggie’s number?” Harry asked. “I’d like to get in touch with her, so if you do have it—”

“Not this second,” Dixon said.

Michael filled the silence by asking about the Vietnamese chef. He wondered if the man had gone back to the house with the other mourners.

Dixon guffawed. “He wouldn’t be very welcome at the house. Didn’t you see Tommy Pumo going nuts down there?”

“He must be taking his brother’s death very hard,” Judy said.

“It’s more greed than grief,” Dixon said. “Tina left everything, including the restaurant and his loft, to the person he felt had done the most to help him make his place a success.”

They were all attentive now.

“Who happened to be Vinh, of course. He’s going to keep the restaurant going. We ought to be open again just about on schedule.”

“The brother wanted the restaurant?”

“Tommy wanted the money. Years back, Tina borrowed money from his father to buy the first two floors of his building. You can imagine what happened to the value of the real estate. Tommy thought he was going to get rich, and he’s hopping mad.”

Down at the bottom of the hill, one of the two old couples who had lingered at the grave shyly approached Michael and said that they would guide him to the Pumo house.

As they drove up a long unpaved drive past thick old oaks toward a neat two-story farmhouse with a wraparound porch, the old woman, an aunt of Tina’s, said, “Just pull up next to the house alongside the drive. Everybody does it. Ed and I always do it, anyhow.” She turned to Conor, who held Judy on his lap. “You’re not married, are you, young man?”

“Nope.”

“Well, I want you to meet my daughter—she’ll be inside the house helping out with the food and the coffee, I’m sure. Good-looking girl, and named after me. Grace Hallet. You be sure to have a nice talk with her.”

“Grace.”

“I’d be happy to help your daughter dispense the mead and sweet potato pie,” Harry said. “How about me?”

“Oh, you’re too famous, but this fellow here is just good folks. You work with your hands, don’t you?”

“Carpenter,” Conor said.

“Anybody can plainly see,” said Grace.

3

Almost as soon as they got through the door, Walter Pumo, Tina’s father, took Michael and Beevers aside and said he wanted to talk to them in private. In the dining room, the table had been heaped with food—a sliced ham, a turkey ready to be carved, vessels nearly the size of rowboats filled with potato salad, platters of coldcuts and pots of mustard, doughy little muffins and slabs of butter. A crowd circled the table, carrying plates and talking. The rest of the room seemed filled with women. Conor had been taken by the hand and introduced to a very pretty young blonde woman who had a bright distracted manner that was like a welded carapace.

“I know where we can find a little open space,” Walter Pumo told them, “at least I hope I do. Your friend seems like he’s busy with young Grace.”

He was leading them down the hallway that led to the back of the farmhouse. “If they come into this room, we’ll just heave ’em out.” He was a head shorter than both men, and as wide as the two of them together. His shoulders nearly filled the hall.

The old man poked his head through a doorway, then said, “Come in, boys.”

Michael and Beevers entered a small room crowded with an old leather sofa, a round table stacked with farming magazines, a metal filing cabinet, and an untidy desk with a kitchen chair before it. Clippings, framed photographs and certificates covered the walls. “My late wife used to call this my den. I always hated the word den. Bears have dens, badgers have dens. Call it my office, I used to say, but whenever I came in here, she’d say, ‘Going off to hide in your den?’ ” He was talking the edge off his nervousness.

Tina’s father straddled the kitchen chair backwards and waved the two younger men toward the couch. He smiled at them, and Michael found himself liking the old man very much.

“Everything changes on you, doesn’t it?” he said. “Time was, I’d be certain I knew more about my boy than anyone else in the world. Both my boys. Now I don’t even know where to begin. You met Tommy?”

Michael nodded. He could almost smell Harry’s impatience.

“Tom’s my son and I love him, but I couldn’t say I like him very much. Tommy doesn’t care if you like him or not. He’s one of those people who mainly wants what’s coming to him. But Tina—Tina went out and away, the way sons are supposed to, I guess. You two young men knew him better than I did, and that’s why I wanted to see you alone for a second.”

Michael felt uncomfortable now. Harry Beevers crossed and uncrossed his legs.

“I want to see him,” the old man said. “Help me to see him. I won’t be shocked by anything you say. I’m ready to hear anything.”

“He was a good soldier,” Harry said.

The old man looked down, struggling with his feelings. “Look,” he said, “in the end, everything’s a kind of mystery. Listen to me, Lieutenant. This land here—my grandfather plowed it and fertilized it and watched what the weather did to it all his life, and my father did the same, and I did too, nearly fifty years. Tommy didn’t have the kind of love for it you have to have to do that kind of work, and Tina never even saw the farm at all—he was always looking out toward the world. The last time my name was in the Milburn paper they called me a real estate developer. I’m no real estate developer, but I’m not a farmer either. I’m the son of a farmer, is what I am. That’s a goddamned good thing to be.” He looked straight at Michael, and Michael felt a current of feeling go through him. “They drafted Tina. Tommy was too young to get called up, but Tina went away to that war. He was a boy—a beautiful boy. I don’t think he was a good soldier. He was ready for life. When he came back he didn’t know who he was anymore.”

“I still say he was a good soldier,” Beevers said. “He was a man. You can be proud of him.”

“You know what tells me Tina was a man? He left his property to someone who deserved it. Tommy was rarin’ up to sue, but I talked him out of it. And I talked to that girl on the phone. Maggie. I liked her. She knew what was going through my mind before I even said anything—a man might meet a woman like that in his life, if he’s lucky. She almost got killed too, you know.” He shook his head. “I’m not letting you boys talk.”

“Tina was a good person,” Michael said. “He was responsible and generous. He didn’t like bullshit and he loved his work. The war touched everybody who was in it, but Tina came out better than most.”

“Was he going to marry that Maggie?”

“He might have,” Poole said.

“I hope she would have married him.”

Michael said nothing, seeing that the old man was full of another question.

“What happened to him over there? Why did he have to be afraid?”

“He was just there,” Michael said.

“It was like—like he knew something was coming for him. He was braced for it.” He looked straight at Poole again. “My grandfather would have bribed the cop in there, taken the killer out into a field, and beaten him to death. Or at least he would have thought about it for a long while. I don’t even have a field anymore.”

“It’s a little early to bribe Lieutenant Murphy,” Beevers said.

The old man put his hands on his knees. “I thought Murphy talked to you, out at Pleasant Hill.”

“Excuse me,” said Beevers. “Pit stop.”

Pumo’s father leaned back on the seat of the chair and watched Beevers leave the room. Both men heard him turn left toward the living room. “Tina didn’t like that fella much.”

Michael smiled.

“He did like you, Doctor. Can I call you Michael?”

“I hope you will.”

“The police picked up a man this morning—Murphy told me as soon as he got here. He hasn’t been identified yet. Anyhow, they think he’s the one who killed my boy.”

Soon after they left the office and returned to the living room. A crowd of relatives surrounded Walter Pumo and began cross-talking at him. Judy frowned at Michael from across the room, where she was talking with a slightly older man.

Harry Beevers grabbed his elbow and pulled him sideways toward the arch of the entrance. In his attempt to conceal his distress he had become so stiff he hardly seemed able to bend. He hissed in Michael’s ear. “It’s terrible, Michael. They got him! He confessed!”

Over Harry’s blue pin-striped shoulder Michael saw Lieutenant Murphy bearing down on them from across the room. “Spitalny?”

“Who the fuck else?”

Lieutenant Murphy had come close enough to give them both a confidential, almost conspiratorial glance that was as good as a command.

“Calm down,” Michael said.

The big policeman stepped up beside them. “I wanted to tell you our good news. Unless you’ve already heard it from Mr. Beevers.”

“I didn’t say anything,” Beevers said.

Murphy gave him an indulgent look. “We had what looks like a good confession this morning. I haven’t seen the suspect yet, because I was on my way up here when he was apprehended on another charge. He confessed during questioning.”

“What other charge? What’s his name?”

“The man is not quite in this world, I gather, and he won’t give his real name. I hope the two of you would be willing to have a look at him for us.”

“Why do you want us to see him?” Beevers asked. “He already confessed.”

“Well, we think you might have known him in Vietnam. It’s possible he doesn’t even remember his real name. I want to be sure about who this character is, and I’d like you to help me out.”

Poole and Beevers agreed to come to a line-up at a precinct-house in Greenwich Village the following Monday.

“We arrested this guy on various charges of attempted murder and assault with a deadly weapon, and assault with intent to kill,” Murphy said. “The story is a little strange. This character flipped out in a Times Square movie house during a showing of Bloodsucking Freaks or some such masterpiece. He whipped out a knife and started to saw the head off a guy who put his hand on his crotch. When he pretty well accomplished that, he started in on the people in front of him. Apparently they never noticed that someone was being decapitated right behind them. Anyhow, the people in front raised enough of a ruckus for the bouncer to jump the guy. The bouncer got a knife in one lung for his troubles, and by this time our hero is making a speech about how the sinners of the world have degraded him long enough, and now he’s going to set things straight. Starting with Forty-second Street.”

Conor Linklater and young Grace had wandered up to listen to the detective’s story. Young Grace had entwined Conor’s hand into her own.

“You’ve got one punctured bouncer, one man bleeding to death, two people with less serious stab wounds, and the whole theater is going nuts.”

Murphy was an entertainer, and he enjoyed the spotlight. His eyebrows arched, his eyes gleamed.

“Anyhow, this guy finally creates so much commotion that he has to run out into the lobby. Somebody called us by then, and four patrolmen jumped him by the popcorn counter. We take him to the station and get statements from a dozen witnesses. The funny thing is, as soon as we get our guy into the station he is perfectly calm. He says he didn’t want to cause so much trouble. Things have been bothering him lately, and they just got too much for him. He hopes he will not be kept too long because he has important things to do for the Lord. After we book him and tell him that he will have to stay with us for a while, he says, oh yeah, I guess you ought to know that I killed that man Pumo last week, upstairs in a loft over a restaurant in Grand Street.”

Conor looked down and shook his head; Harry Beevers pursed his lips and blinked.

“The man can describe the loft perfectly, but there are a couple of points we’re not satisfied on. So after the line-up there are some things I’d like to go over with the three of you.”

After Murphy left them, Judy walked in from the dining room. “Have you spoken to that detective? Everybody’s saying that they caught the man who killed Tina.”

“It looks like they did,” Michael said. He told her about being asked to appear at the line-up.

4

All Sunday the Pooles behaved toward each other with a conscious courtesy that would have suggested to an onlooker that they were comparative, slightly unfriendly, strangers in a neutral setting. It was the first full day they had spent together since Michael’s return from Bangkok, and the surface of their life together felt eggshell-thin. Michael saw that Judy wished to “put the past behind them,” which for the two of them meant to live exactly as they had for the four years since their son’s death. If he could forgive her affair—forgive it by wrapping it in layers of silence—she would make it not have happened.

Judy brought a cup of coffee and the Sunday Times to the bedside. Feeling oddly more dutiful than she, Michael drank the coffee and leafed through the magazine section while Judy sat beside him and talked brightly about what had happened in her school over the last few weeks. This is an ordinary life, she was saying; this is how we live. Don’t you remember this? Isn’t it good?

Together they limped through the day. They ate brunch at the General Washington Inn: Bloody Marys and pickled okra and blackened red snapper, for it was “Cajun Festival.” They took a long walk through the neighborhood past brown winter lawns dotted with FOR SALE signs and new houses rising like fantasies of glass and chrome on lots rutted with tire tracks. The walk ended at a long duck pond in the middle of little Thurlow Park. Mallards paddled sedately in pairs, each green-headed male insistently driving off the other males who approached his mate. Michael sat on the bench beside the pond and for a moment wished he was back in Singapore.

“What was it like, having sex again after all that time?” he asked.

“Dangerous,” she said.

That was a better answer than he had expected.

After a little while, she said, “Michael, this place is where we belong.”

“I don’t know where I belong,” he said.

She told him he was feeling sorry for himself: behind these words was the assumption that their life was fixed, unavoidable; their life was life.

To Michael the entire day seemed to be happening to someone else. Actors must feel this way, he thought, and only then realized that all day he had been acting the part of a husband.

He went to bed early, leaving Judy watching “Masterpiece Theatre” in apparent contentment. He undressed, put on his pajamas, and began brushing his teeth while he read Newgate Callendar’s reviews in the book section of the Times.

Judy amazed him by easing around the bathroom door and twinkling at his reflection in the mirror. Also amazing was that she was wearing a pink satin nightie and clearly intended to go to bed before the end of “Masterpiece Theatre.” “Surprise!” she said.

The person whose role he was acting said, “Hi.”

“Mind if I join you?” Judy plucked her own toothbrush from the rack and nudged him an inch to the side. She ran water over the brush, squeezed on a fat curl of toothpaste, and raised the brush to her mouth. Before she inserted it, just as he was swishing water in his mouth, she asked his face in the mirror, “You’re surprised, aren’t you?”

Then he got it: she was acting too. That was deeply comforting. Any reality in a scene like this would have made him lose his mind with pain and fear.

When he edged around her and left the bathroom, she waved with her free hand. “Bye.”

Michael walked to his side of the bed on someone else’s feet, switched on the bedside lamp with someone else’s fingers, and pushed his stranger’s legs down into the stranger’s bed. Then he picked up The Ambassadors and was disproportionately relieved to discover that it was really himself and not the person he was pretending to be who was reading it.

The Ambassadors was about about a man named Strether who had been sent to Paris to fetch back a young man suspected of dissipation. Strether soon found that Chad Newsome, the boy, had been enhanced instead of corrupted by the experience of Paris, and was not at all sure that he ought to go back. Strether himself put off his own return for weeks, discovering newer, subtler, better flavors and refinements of manners and feeling—he was alive and at home in himself, and he did not want to go home either.