Koko

As soon as Michael began reading, he realized that he felt he had a lot in common with Strether. They too had gone out to find a corrupt man and had found him a different, better man than they had expected. Poole wondered if Strether was ever going to bite the bullet and go home. This was a very interesting question.

Judy slid into her side of the bed and advanced nearer to him than was usual.

“This is a great book,” he said. The statement was nearly not acting, but it was acting.

“You’re certainly engrossed in it.”

He put down the book just to make sure that Judy was still acting and he saw instantly that she was.

“I think you’re mistaking me for Tom Brokaw,” he said.

“I don’t want to lose you, Michael.” She was acting her head off, but she was serious about it. “Put down the book.”

He placed the book on the bedside table and let Judy come into his arms. She kissed him. He play-acted kissing her. Judy slipped her hand past the waistband of his pajamas and fondled him.

“Are you really doing this?”

“Michael,” she said. In a second she had tossed the pink nightie aside.

He kissed her back with real play-actor’s fervor. For an instant his penis stirred as she rubbed and squeezed it, but his penis could not act, and it did no more.

Her arms tightened around him and she hoisted herself up onto his body. The humor in all this play-acting melted away, and all that was left was the sorrow. Judy squirmed on top of him for a time, frantically kissing his face and his neck.

Judy lapped at him with her tongue and pushed her breasts into his face. He had forgotten how Judy’s nipples felt in his mouth, round and sly. For an instant filled with danger and violence he remembered how her breasts had swelled early in her pregnancy, and his cock stiffened in her hand. But she shifted, and he felt how her real emotions turned her body to steel and balsa wood, and his cock went back to sleep. Judy labored over him for a long time, and then she gave up and merely hugged him. Her arms were trembling.

“You hated doing that,” he said. “Let’s tell the truth. You detested it.”

She uttered a low, feral sound, like a thick fold of silk being ripped in half, hoisted herself up onto her knees and struck him very hard in the middle of his chest. Her face was distorted by passion and her eyes were wild, glowing with hatred and disgust. Then she scrambled off the bed and her solid little body flashed through the room. He wondered how many times in the past four years he had, with increasing tentativeness and foreknowledge of failure, tried to have sexual intercourse with that body. Maybe a hundred times—not at all in the past year. Judy snatched up her nightgown and slipped it unceremoniously over her head. She slammed the bedroom door.

Michael heard her stamping across her dressing room. The chair creaked beneath her. She dialed a local number on her telephone. Then she slammed the receiver down so forcefully that the telephone clanged like a bell. Michael’s body began to relax and became his own body again. Judy dialed a local number again, presumably the same one. He heard her inhale, and knew that her face was rigid as a mask. The receiver clanged down once more. He heard her say “Shit.” Then she dialed a nine-digit number, probably Pat Caldwell’s. After a few suspended seconds, she began to speak in a low, choked, barely recognizable whisper.

Michael picked up the James novel and found that he could not read it—the words seemed to have come alive, and to squirm around on the page. Michael wiped his eyes and the page cleared.

Strether was at a party in the city garden of a sculptor named Gloriani. Brilliant beautiful people drifted through the garden, lanterns glowed. Strether was talking to a young American named Little Bilham, whom he rather cherished. Michael wished he were there in the garden, holding a glass of champagne beside Little Bilham, listening to Strether. Had other people read this book in this way, or was it just him? “What one loses, one loses, make no mistake about that,” Strether said. He could hear Judy muttering and mumbling, and her voice was that of some destructive ghost.

He realized what he was thinking just as Judy hung up the telephone and padded across the dressing room, opened the door, and flashed through again, her head turned away from him. She went out into the upstairs hall. He heard her descending the stairs. A series of taps and rattles came from the kitchen. Whatever had happened, Poole was back in his real life. His body felt like his own real body again, not an actor’s. He closed his book and got out of bed.

In Judy’s little dressing room, the telephone rang. Michael thought to pick it up; then he remembered that the answering machine would get it. He moved to the door of the dressing room. Then a male voice spoke.

“The world goes backward and forward at the same time, and is there any sorrow like unto my sorrow? I will wait, I am waiting now. I need your help. The narrow path vanishes beneath my feet.”

This voice too, it struck Michael, was the voice of a ghost.

When he walked into the kitchen Judy backed away from the stove, where a kettle had been put on to boil, and stood with her back against the window and her arms dangling at her sides. She stared at him as if he were a savage animal who might attack her.

If she had smiled or said anything conventional, he would at once have felt again like an actor in a role, but she did not smile or speak.

Michael circled around the butcher block counter and leaned on its far side. Judy seemed smaller and older than the fierce wild-eyed woman who had hit him.

“Your crazy man called.”

Judy shook her head and walked back to the stove.

“Seems he can’t find his way. I know what he means.”

“Stop it.” She raised her fists.

The kettle began to whistle. Judy put her fists down and poured hot water over instant coffee. She stirred it with short choppy strokes.

Finally she said, “I’m not going to lose everything I have. You might have lost your mind, but I don’t have to give up everything I care about. Pat says I should just calm down, but then Pat never had to worry about anything, did she?”

“Didn’t she?”

“You know she didn’t.” She sipped her coffee and made a face. “I’m surprised you managed to put down your stupid book.”

“If you thought it was stupid, why did you give it to me?”

Her eyes flew sideways, like those of a child caught in a lie. “You give books to your little girlfriend all the time. Somebody gave that one to me. I thought it might help you settle down again.”

He leaned on the butcher block counter and looked at her.

“I’m not leaving this house,” she said.

“You don’t have to.”

“I’m not going to do without anything just because you’re sick.” Her whole face blazed at him for a moment, then shrank back into itself. “Pat was telling me about Harry the other day. She said he repelled her—she couldn’t stand the thought of his touching her. You’re that way about me.”

“It’s the other way around. You feel that way about me.”

“We’ve been married for fourteen years, I ought to know how I feel.”

“I should too,” he said. “I’d tell you how I feel, how you make me feel, but you wouldn’t believe it.”

“You should never have gone on that crazy trip,” she said. “We should have stayed at home instead of going up to Milburn with Harry. That just made things worse.”

“You never want me to go anywhere,” he said. “You think I killed Robbie, and you want me to stay here and keep on paying for it.”

“Forget Robbie!” she shrieked. “Forget him! He’s dead!”

“I’ll go into therapy with you,” he said. “Are you listening to this? Both of us. Together.”

“You know who should have therapy! You! You’re the sick one! Not me! Our marriage was fine before you went away.”

“Went away where?” Michael turned away, left the room, and went up the stairs in silence.

He lay in bed a long time, listening in the dark. Chinks and rattles and the opening and closing of cabinets came from the kitchen. Eventually Judy came up the stairs. To Michael’s surprise, her footsteps came toward the bedroom door. She leaned in. “I just want to say this even though I know you won’t believe it. I wanted this day to be special for you. I wanted to make it special for you.”

“I know.”

Even in the darkness he could see rage, disgust, and a kind of disbelief go through her body.

“I’m going to sleep in the guest room. I’m not sure we’re married anymore, Michael.”

Michael lay awake with his eyes closed another half hour, then gave up, switched on his light, and picked up the Henry James novel. The book was a perfect little garden glimpsed far down at the bottom of a landfill. Seagulls screeched over the landfill’s great mountains of garbage, rats prowled through it, and right at the bottom, safe within the page, men and women clothed in an intellectual radiance moved in a beautiful, inexorable dance. Poole went cautiously down the hills of garbage toward the perfect garden, but it receded backward with every step he took.

5

He woke to the sounds of Judy showering. A few minutes later she came into the bedroom wrapped in a long pink towel. “Well,” she said, “I have to go to work. Are you still going to insist on going to New York this morning?”

“I have to,” he said.

She took a dress from the closet and shook her head, as if at some hopeless case. “I imagine that you won’t have time to go to either your office or the hospital this morning, then.”

“I might drop in at the hospital.”

“You might drop in at the hospital and then drive to New York.”

“That’s right.”

“I hope you remember what I said last night.” She tore the dress off the hanger and slammed through the door to the dressing room.

Michael got out of bed. He felt tired and depressed, but he did not feel like an actor or that he had been placed in an unfamiliar body. Both the body and the unhappiness were his own. He decided to bring Stacy Talbot another book, and searched his shelves until he found an old underlined copy of Wuthering Heights.

Before he left home he went down into his basement to open a trunk where he had placed a few things after Robbie’s death. He had not told Judy that he was doing this, because Judy had insisted that they give away or destroy everything their son had owned. The trunk was an awkward relic from the days when Michael’s parents had taken cruises, and Michael and Judy had filled it with books and clothes when they had moved to Westerholm. Michael knelt down before the open trunk. Here was a baseball, a short-sleeve shirt with a pattern of horses, a worn green Dimetrodon and a whole set of smaller plastic dinosaurs. At the bottom of these things were two books, Babar and Babar the King. Poole took out the books and closed the trunk.

1

An hour and a half later, driving as if on automatic pilot toward Manhattan, Michael finally noticed the worn old Riverside Edition of Wuthering Heights on the other seat and realized that he had held it in his hand during the whole of his visit to the hospital. Like glasses their owner searches for while wearing, the book had become transparent and weightless. Now, as if to make up for its earlier tact, the novel seemed denser than a brick, nearly heavy enough to tilt the car on its springs. At first he felt like pitching the book out the window, then like pulling up at a gas station and calling Murphy to tell him that he could not make the line-up. Beevers and Linklater could identify Victor Spitalny, Maggie would say that he was the man who had tried to kill her, and that would be that.

His next thought was that he needed something to fill up his day with reality, and driving to New York to attend a line-up was as good as anything else.

* * *

He put the car in a garage on University Place and walked to the precinct house. The weather had brightened in the past few days, and though the temperature was still under forty, warmth had begun to awaken within the air. On both sides of the narrow Greenwich Village streets, people of the generation just younger than Poole’s walked coatless, smiling, looking as if they had been released from prison.

His idea of police stations had been formed by movies, and the flat modern façade surprised him when he came upon it. Lieutenant Murphy’s precinct building looked like a grade school. Only the steel letters on the pale façade and the police cars drawn up before it declared the identity of the building.

The interior was another surprise. Instead of a tall desk and a bald veteran frowning down, Poole first saw an American flag beside a case of awards, then a uniformed young man, leaning toward him from the other side of an open window.

“I’m supposed to meet Lieutenant Murphy for a line-up at eleven,” he said.

The young man disappeared from the window; a buzzer went off. Poole opened the door beside the window, and the young man looked up from a clipboard. “The others are on the second floor. I’ll get someone to take you up.” Behind him plainclothes officers glanced at Poole, then away. There was an impression of busyness, conversation, male company. It reminded Poole of the doctors’ lounge at St. Bart’s.

Another, even younger, policeman in uniform led Poole down a corridor hung with bulletin boards. The second policeman was breathing loudly through his mouth. He had a lazy, fleshy, unintelligent face, olive skin, and a fat neck. He would not meet Poole’s eyes. “Up da stairs,” he said when they arrived at a staircase. Then he labored up beside Poole and slouched off through another school corridor. Soon he stopped at a door marked B.

Poole opened the door, and Beevers said, “My man.” He was leaning against the wall with his arms crossed over his chest, talking to a small round-faced Chinese woman. Poole greeted Beevers and said hello to Maggie, whom he had met two or three times at Saigon. A little ironic breeze seemed to blow about her, separating her from Harry Beevers. She shook his hand with a surprisingly firm, competent grip. One side of her face dimpled in a lopsided smile. She was extraordinarily pretty—the impression of her intelligence had momentarily filtered out her good looks.

“It’s nice of you to come in all the way from Westchester County,” she said in a flat accentless voice that sounded almost English in the precision of its consonants.

“He had to join all us plebs in the dirty city,” Beevers said.

Poole thanked Maggie, ignored Beevers, and sat down at a board room table beside Conor. Conor said, “Hey.” The resemblance to a grade school persisted. Room B was like a classroom without a teacher’s desk. Directly before Michael and Conor, on the other side of the room, was a long green blackboard. Beevers went on saying something about film rights.

“Are you okay, Mikey?” Conor asked. “You look kinda down.”

Poole saw the copy of Wuthering Heights on the passenger seat of his car.

Beevers glared down at them. “Use the brains God gave you, man! Of course the man is down. He had to leave a beautiful town where the air is clean and they don’t even have sidewalks, they have hedges, and spend hours on a stinking highway. Where he came from, Conor, they have partridges and pheasants instead of pigeons. They have Airedales and deer instead of rats. Wouldn’t you be down? Give the man some understanding.”

“Hey, I’m from South Norwalk,” Conor said. “We don’t have pigeons either. We got seagulls.”

“Garbage birds,” Beevers said.

“Calm down, Harry,” Poole said.

“We can still come out of this okay,” Beevers said. “We just don’t say any more than we have to.”

“So what happened?” Conor whispered to Michael.

“A patient died this morning.”

“A kid?”

Michael nodded. “A little girl.” He felt impelled to speak her name. “Named Stacy Talbot.” The act of putting his loss into these specific words had an unexpected and nearly physical effect on him. His grief did not shrink, but became more concrete: Stacy’s death took physical form as a leaden casketlike form located deep in his chest. He, Michael Poole, was intact and whole around this dense, leaden weight within him. He realized that Conor was the first person to whom he had spoken of her death.

Stacy had been feverish and exhausted when he had last seen her. The lights had hurt her eyes; her usual gallantry was at low ebb. But she had seemed interested in his little fund of stories, and had held his hand and told him that she loved the beginning of Jane Eyre, especially the first sentence.

Poole opened the book to read the sentence. “There was no possibility of taking a walk that day.”

Stacy was grinning at him.

This morning one of the nurses had tried to head him off as he walked past their station, but he had barely noticed her. He had been intent on some words Sam Stein had spoken to him in the first-floor corridor. Stein, who had evaded responsibility for a surgical error with a combination of cowardice and superiority Michael found repulsive, had said that he was sorry his medical group had not made more progress with Michael’s “boys”—the other doctors of his own group practice. Stein was assuming that Michael would be familiar with the background of this remark, but Michael could fill it in with informed guesswork. Stein’s own “boys” were building a new medical center in Westerholm, and wanted to make it the most important in the county. To do that they needed a good pediatric practice. Michael himself was the stumbling block to the effective union of their practices, and in his grumpy, conceited way Stein had been asking him to spare him the trouble and implied insult of having to go after a second-rung pediatric group. A brand new facility like the one Stein was planning would draw about fifty percent of all the new people in Westerholm, and maybe a quarter of the houses in Westerholm changed hands every year. Michael’s partners had been talking things over with Stein while he had been gone.

Michael had sailed past the gesturing nurse, the germ of a brilliant idea beginning to form in his mind, and opened the door to Stacy’s room.

He strode into a room where a bald middle-aged man with a grey moustache and a double chin lay asleep with an IV in his arm and the Wall Street Journal open on his chest. The man did not awaken and wink at him like an actor in a farce, he slept on noiselessly, but Michael felt a change in his inner weather like the sudden hot airlessness that precedes a tornado. He ducked outside and checked the number of the room. Of course it was the right room. He ducked back again and looked at the drugged tycoon. This time he even recognized him. The man was a housing contractor named Pohlmann whose teenage children went to Judy’s school and whose imitation chateau with a red tile roof and a five-car garage was located a mile and a half from Poole’s own house. Michael backed out of Pohlmann’s room.

For an instant only he became aware of the soft old green book in his hand, and it weighed twenty or thirty pounds. He saw the nurse watching him as she spoke into her telephone. He knew what had happened as soon as he saw her eyes. He knew it by the way she put down her telephone. But he walked up to the station and said, “Where is she?”

“I was afraid you didn’t know, Doctor,” the nurse had said. He had felt as if he were in an elevator falling through a long shaft, just falling and falling.

“I’m sorry, man,” Conor said. “Must remind you of your own kid.”

“The man is a doctor, Conor,” Beevers said. “He sees things like this all the time. The man knows how to be detached.”

Detached was just how Dr. Poole felt, though not at all as Beevers imagined.

“Speaking of the man,” Beevers said.

Lieutenant Murphy’s big aggressive-looking head appeared in the meshed window set into the door. He grinned at them through the window, his mouth set around a pipe, and opened the door.

“Glad you could all make it,” he said. “Sorry I’m a little late.” He looked like an athletic college professor in a tweed jacket and fawn trousers. “We’re all set for the line-up and we will be going down there in a minute, but I wanted to talk to you about some things before we do that.”

Beevers caught Poole’s eye and coughed into his fist.

Murphy sat opposite them. He took the pipe from his mouth and held it balanced in his fingertips as if offering it for inspection. It was a big curved black sandblasted Peterson, with a tarnished silver band around the top of the neck. A plug of grey tobacco filled the bowl. “We didn’t really have a chance to speak to each other up in Milburn, though there were some things I was curious about, and at the time it looked as if we had this case pretty well sewn up.” He looked at each of them in turn. “I was happy about that, and I guess it showed. But this wasn’t an ordinary case, not by a long shot, not even an ordinary murder case, if there is such an animal. There have been some changes since then.”

Murphy looked down at the heavy pipe balanced in his fingers, and Beevers spoke into the silence. “Are you implying that the man you are holding has given a false confession?”

“Why do you sound hopeful?” Murphy asked him. “Don’t you want us to nail this guy?”

“I didn’t mean to sound hopeful. Of course I want the man apprehended.”

Murphy regarded him steadily for a moment. “There’s a lot of information pertinent to these cases that has not reached the public. And that should not reach the public, if we don’t want our investigation to be compromised. Or actually interfered with, to give you the worst case. I want to go over some of this information with you people before we go to the line-up, and Miss Lah, if you know something too, I’d like you to please speak up.”

Maggie nodded.

“Miss Lah has already been very helpful to us.”

“Thank you,” she said very softly.

“You gentlemen all met Mr. Pumo as members of the same platoon in Vietnam? And you were the lieutenant of that unit, Mr. Beevers?”

“Correct,” Beevers said, smiling with his mouth but glaring at Maggie.

“How many members of that unit besides yourselves are still living, do you know?”

Beevers pursed his lips and cocked his head.

“Dr. Poole?”

“I don’t know, really,” Poole said. “Not many of us are left alive.”

“Do you really not know?” Murphy asked in a level voice. Poole shook his head. “None of you?”

“I guess we’d be grateful for whatever you can tell us,” Beevers said. “But I’m afraid I don’t really follow your train of thought.”

Murphy raised his expressive eyebrows. He stuck the pipe in his mouth and puffed. The dead-looking tobacco glowed red, and the detective let smoke escape his mouth.

“You are familiar with the nickname Koko, however,” he said.

Beevers frowned at Maggie.

“Miss Lah passed on some background information to us. Do you think she was wrong in doing so?”

Beevers coughed. “Of course not.”

“I’m glad you feel that way.” Murphy’s mouth twitched in a smile. “Besides the three of you, there seem to be only four survivors of the platoon that took part in the action at Ia Thuc. A PFC named Wilson Manly is living in Arizona—”

“Manly’s alive?” Conor asked. “Goddamn.”

Poole too was surprised. Like Conor, he had last seen Manly being carried to a stretcher—he had lost a leg and a lot of blood, and Poole had thought that he would never survive.

“Wilson Manly is disabled, but he owns a security business in Tucson.”

“Security systems?” Conor asked, and Murphy nodded. “Goddamn.”

“Who else?” Poole asked.

“George Burrage is working as a drug counselor in Los Angeles.”

“Spanky,” Conor and Poole said more or less in unison. He too had been carried away after a firefight, and since nothing more had been heard of him, he too had been presumed dead.

“They both send their regards to you, and remembered Mr. Pumo very well and were sorry to hear about what happened to him.”

“Of course,” said Beevers. “You were in the service, weren’t you, Lieutenant? Weren’t you in Vietnam?”

“I was too young for Vietnam,” Murphy said. “Both Mr. Manly and Mr. Burrage have an extremely good recall of various incidents involving the use of the name Koko.”

“I bet they do,” said Beevers.

“A PFC named Victor Spitalny might be presumed to be living,” said Murphy. “There has been no record of him since he went AWOL back in Bangkok in 1969. But given the circumstances under which he disappeared, I don’t think it’s very likely that he would suddenly take it into his head to kill journalists and members of his old unit, do you?”

“Couldn’t say,” Beevers said. “What do you mean, journalists?”

“Whoever calls himself Koko has been killing the foreign and American journalists who covered the Ia Thuc atrocity story. He’s been very thorough, too.” He regarded Beevers with a steady detached gaze, and then looked at Poole in the same way. “This man has killed at least eight people. There is a possibility he killed one other man.”

“Who’s that?” Beevers asked.

“A businessman named Irwin, out at JFK a few weeks ago. We’ve just managed to put all the information together, using sources from all over the world. It’s hard to get different police departments to cooperate when they’re right next door to each other, but we’re proud of ourselves on this one. We’re getting ready, and we’re going to take our man. But in order to do that, we need your full cooperation. And I have a feeling I’m not really getting it.”

But before anybody could protest, he took an envelope out of his jacket pocket, opened the flap, and removed three playing cards encased in separate clear plastic bags. “Take a look at these, please.”

He used a pencil to separate the cards on the surface of the table. Poole looked at the three cards. Every blood vessel in his body seemed to constrict. There was the Rearing Elephant, reproduced three times. “A Legacy of Honor,” read a slogan beneath the emblem. Poole had not seen a regimental playing card since he had left Vietnam. The elephant looked angrier than he had remembered.

“Where’d you find these, man?” Conor asked.

Murphy flipped each of the cards face up. There it was, scrawled in the old manner. KOKO, three times. Before Beevers was an eight of clubs; before Conor a two of hearts; before Poole a six of spades. With a bang of his heart Poole saw the faint penciling of his name at the top of the card before him.

“Mr. Pumo had one of these, with his name on it, in his mouth,” Murphy said.

LINKLATER and BEEVERS, Poole saw, had been lightly penciled on the other cards.

The line-up was a pretext to get the four of them together for questioning. They had been summoned not to identify a killer, but to be frightened into saying more than they wished.

Beevers and Conor spoke at the same time: “Where did you get these?”

“You must have gotten pretty close to him.”

Murphy nodded. “We learned where he had been staying through a tip. Unfortunately, we didn’t find him, so he must have learned somehow—we probably missed him by a couple of minutes. But we never get as close as that without getting him in the end.”

Murphy used his pencil to nudge the cards back into the envelope. “There was one other survivor from your unit.”

For a moment Poole could not remember who this was.

“You all remember Timothy Underhill.”

“Sure,” Conor said, and the other two nodded.

“What can you tell me about him?”

There was silence for a moment or two.

“I can’t figure you characters out,” Murphy said.

Poole remembered Judy talking about Bob Bunce: lies of denial always transparent. “We looked for Underhill in Singapore,” he said. Then he stopped talking, because Harry Beevers’ well-shod foot had come down heavily on his.

“It was what you’d call a lark,” Beevers said. “We were in this interesting part of the world, on a vacation, and we thought maybe we could locate him. All we found were traces. People that used to know him, things like that. We went hither and yon in three countries. Had a ball.”

“You went to a lot of trouble to find an old army buddy,” Murphy said.

“That’s right,” Beevers said. He looked carefully at Maggie, then candidly back at Murphy. “We had a hell of a trip.”

“No luck?”

“The man disappeared.” Beevers’ mouth opened. “Ah. You think this Koko is Tim Underhill?”

“It’s one of the possibilities we’re considering.” He smiled with as much false candor as Beevers. “He certainly isn’t Wilson Manly or Spanky Burrage. Or any of you.”

Other questions came crowding up, but Harry asked only the most immediate. “Then who’s the guy who went crazy in Times Square?”

Murphy pushed himself away from the table. “Let’s go find out.”

2

Murphy stayed close to Michael Poole as they walked toward the stairs. “Our friend still won’t give his name. He claims to have forgotten it. In fact, he claims to have been born in New York City at the age of eighteen.” He coughed. “In the back room of a bar called The Anvil.” He gave Poole an almost human glance. “He drew us a map of Pumo’s apartment. Then he clammed up and refused to say anything except that he had a mission to clean up the filth in the world.”

Murphy led them through the big office space on the ground floor, through a door at the back, and down a wide set of stairs. Over the noise of typewriters clacking in nearby offices, Poole heard Harry Beevers speaking softly and urgently to Maggie Lah.

“Here we are,” Murphy said, swinging open a broad set of doors that resembled a theater with its rows of banked seats, raised platform, and overhead lights.

Murphy took them to the second row of seats, where Maggie filed in behind Poole, followed by Beevers and Conor Linklater. Then he stepped to a podium in the central aisle one row behind them, and flipped on the stage lights. He picked up a microphone on a cord, scrutinized it for a switch, and turned it on. “We are here now,” he spoke into the microphone. “Let’s get the screen in place, and you can send the men out.” He frowned down at the podium and flipped another switch. A long screen marked with height registrations rolled out on a track across the stage.

“Ready,” Murphy said. “Each man on his mark. Once they are onstage, I will direct each man in turn to step forward, tell us a few words about himself, and then step backward.”

Five men emerged from the left side of the stage and began moving uncertainly toward what Poole supposed were numbers embedded in the stage. At first glance, the three short, dark-haired men in the lineup could have been Victor Spitalny. One wore a grey business suit, one a checked sports jacket, and the third jeans and a denim jacket. The man in the checked jacket looked most like Spitalny, but his eyes were more widely spaced and his chin was broader. He looked bored and impatient. The fourth was a heavyset blond man with a lively cynical Irish face. The fifth man, who was wearing a loose khaki shirt, fatigue pants, and cowboy boots, had shaved his head some time ago and then let it grow out to a uniform dark cap still short enough to show the scalp beneath. He alone smiled at the row of people looking up at him.

Murphy called out their numbers in a toneless voice.

“My name is Bill and I work as a bartender on the Upper East Side.”

“My name is George. I am the leader of the Boy Scout troop in Washington Heights.”

“My name is Franco and I am from Ocean Avenue in Brooklyn.”

“My name is Liam. I am in the security business.”

When number five was called, the last man stepped forward. “I have no name because I have no past.”

“Oh, my God,” Maggie said. “I don’t believe it.”

Murphy ordered the fifth man to step back, and then asked all five to leave the stage. When the stage was empty he leaned on the podium and scowled down at Maggie. “Well?”

“The last man, the one in the middle of his sex change, was wearing Tina’s boots. I’m sure of it. I know who he is.”

“Who is he?”

“I mean—I don’t know his real name, but he called himself Dracula and had a long Mohawk before he shaved it off. Tina picked him up at a club last year, or was picked up by him. He was pretending to be a girl. After they got back to the loft, he beat Tina unconscious and stole a lot of things from him. Including the boots he was wearing up there. They were Tina’s favorites. I think they cost a lot of money.”

“Dracula,” Murphy said.

“But he isn’t the man I saw in the loft.”

“No,” Murphy said. “I guess he wouldn’t be. Gentlemen, you may leave. I want to thank you for your cooperation, and I will be speaking to each of you again. Please call me if you can think of anything I ought to know. Miss Lah, will you come back upstairs with me, please?”

Maggie stood up slightly before the other three and went out into the central aisle where Murphy stood waiting for her. She caught Michael’s eye and raised her eyebrows. Michael nodded, then stood up with the other two.

3

After seeing the others into a cab and promising to join them at Harry’s apartment in half an hour, Michael walked back down Tenth Street to wait outside the police station. The weather was still too cold to be really comfortable, but Michael enjoyed standing on Tenth Street in the tingling air. The sunlight lay like gilt on the pretty brownstones across the street. He felt suspended between the end of something and the beginning of something absolutely new. Stacy Talbot had been his last real tie to Westerholm—everything else that held him there could be carried away in a suitcase.

He saw how he easy it would be to keep watching the television program that his life had become. The bright dailyness of his work, the stream of snuffling children and their worried mothers, Judy and her anxieties, the lax dull partnership of the long mornings, the nice white house, the walks to the duck pond, Bloody Marys at Sunday brunch, the numbing details that rushed you forward minute by minute.

The door of the police station opened with a click as decisive as the crack of a bone, and Michael turned around and straightened up as Maggie Lah came out. Her beautiful hair caught the sun in a smooth mesh of rich deep lustrous black.

“Oh, good,” she said. “I wasn’t sure you’d still be here. I couldn’t say anything back in there.”

“I know.”

“I really just wanted to see you. Conor is wonderful, but he isn’t too sure about me. And Harry Beevers is a tremendous … distraction.”

“Especially to Harry Beevers.”

“They can spare you for a little while?”

“For as long as you like.”

“Then they may never get you back,” Maggie said, and put her arm through his. “I want you to help me go someplace. Will you do it?”

“I’m yours.” Poole suddenly, strongly felt that he and this girl were Tina Pumo’s survivors: as much as Walter and Tommy Pumo, they were the family Tina had left behind.

“It isn’t very far. It isn’t even much of a place, just a little neighborhood restaurant. Tina and I used to go there—really he used to go there, it was his place and he shared it with me, and I don’t want to feel like sinking into the sidewalk everytime I walk past it. Do you mind?”

“I’m very pleased,” Poole said. Maggie’s arm was linked with his and she matched him stride for stride. “Is there any other place I can take you to after this one?”

She glanced up. “There might be.”

He let her have her own time in which to say whatever she wished to say.

“I want to know you,” Maggie finally said.

“I’m glad.”

“He liked you best of all—of all the men he had been over there with.”

“That’s very nice to know.”

“He was always very pleased when you came into Saigon. Part of Tina was not very secure. It meant a lot to him that when you came all the way into town, you would pick his place to come to. That proved to him that you hadn’t forgotten him.”

“I haven’t forgotten him, Maggie,” he said, and she tightened her grip on his arm.

They were walking down Sixth Avenue, and the sunlight seemed warmer here than the cross streets. Colorful, ordinary street life flowed around them, students and housewives and businessmen and a few boys in lipstick. At the corner they walked past a hunched, bearded man in rags whose feet had blackened and swollen like footballs. Just past him a blurry-looking man of about Michael’s age thrust at him a paper cup containing a few dimes and quarters. He had a bloody crusty scab on his chin, and in the slits of his eyes his pupils gleamed feverishly, tigerishly. Vietnam. Michael dropped a few quarters in the cup.

“Not far now,” Maggie said, and her voice was trembling.

Poole nodded.

“It’s like living with a big—emptiness.” She threw out her free hand. “It’s so hard. And because I’m afraid, it’s even worse than that. Oh, I’ll tell you about it when we get there.”

A few minutes later, Maggie led him up the steps into La Groceria. A tall dark-haired woman in black tights led them to a table by the window. The sunlight drifted in the big windows and lay across the polished, rippling pattern of the caramel-colored wooden tabletops. They ordered salads and coffee. “I hate being afraid,” Maggie said. “But all by itself, grief is too much. Grief gets you when you’re not looking. It comes up and blindsides you.” She glanced up at him in a way that mingled intelligence and sympathy. “You were talking to Conor about a patient of yours …?”

Poole nodded. “Just before I drove down here I learned that she died.” He tried to smile at her, and was glad that he did not have to see the result.

Her face altered, smoothed out, became more inward. “In Taipei my mother used to catch rats with traps in our garden. The traps didn’t kill the rats, they just held them. My mother poured boiling water over them. The rats knew exactly what was going to happen to them. First they fought and jumped at my mother, and then finally everything left them but fear. They just became fear.” A cloud somewhere east of Sixth Avenue separated, and the sunlight doubled in color and intensity. She was looking at him with a troubled but defiant gaze, and Poole experienced her concentrated attention as an undivided blessing. Right now, in the sudden drenching fall of yellow light, he became extraordinarly conscious of the smooth roundness of her arms, the beautiful golden shade of her skin, her small witty sensuous intelligent mouth. Her youth was deceptive, he understood, seeing her in the blaze of light, and if you judged her youth as being one of the central facts of her being, you made a great mistake. A moment ago he had been moved by her sheer prettiness, and now he saw so much more in the wide unblinking face before him that her prettiness became irrelevant.

“They were the worst things in the world when that happened,” she said. “The most pathetic. I felt like that when—when it happened. When he almost caught me.” She paused for a moment, and her face smoothed out again with the weight of what she was remembering. “I could see him, but not his face. I suppose I was a little crazy. I felt as though I must have been covered in blood, and I kept checking myself, but there wasn’t a drop on me.” Her eyes met his with an electric jolt.

“You want to pour boiling water over him,” Poole said.

“That could be.” Her mouth twisted in an odd little smile. “Could someone like that ever be afraid?”

When he said nothing, Maggie went on in a rush. “When I was in the loft—during that time—if you had seen him too—you wouldn’t think so. He talked very smoothly. He was almost seductive. I don’t mean he wasn’t utterly crazy, because he was, but he was in control of himself. Confident. He was trying to charm me out of hiding, and if Tina’s body hadn’t been right in front of me, he might have done it.” Her hands, of the same golden tan as the rest of her, with long elegant fingers and incongruously square, sturdy wrists, had begun to tremble. “He was like a—a demon. I thought I’d never get away.”

Now she looked really stricken, and he took her hands in his. “It sounds funny, but I think he’s been frightened all his life.”

“You sound like you almost feel sorry for him.”

Poole thought of Underhill’s long labor. “It isn’t that so much—I guess I feel we have to invent him in order to understand him.”

Maggie slowly drew her hands out from under his. “You must be learning about that from your friend Timothy Underhill.”

“What?”

Maggie propped her chin in her hand. Wholly fraudulent, wide-eyed innocent incredulity, comic right down to its core, flashed at him for a perfectly timed beat. “Your friend Harry Beevers can’t act very well.”

So she knew: she had seen it. “I suppose not,” he said.

“This man Underhill came back with you.”

Poole nodded. “You’re wonderful.”

“Harry Beevers is the one who is wonderful. I suppose he wants the police to waste time trying to locate Tim Underhill while he actually finds Koko himself.”

“Something like that.”

“You’d better be careful, Doctor.” A multitude of unspoken warnings crowded in behind this one, and Poole did not know if he had been advised to beware of Koko or Harry Beevers. “Do you have time to take me to one more place? I don’t want to go there alone.”

“I suppose I don’t have to ask where it is?”

“Hope not.” She stood up.

They went outside to a Sixth Avenue that seemed to have been darkened by their conversation. Poole felt that Koko, Victor Spitalny, might be watching them from behind the big windows across the avenue, or through binoculars from some high hidden vantage point.

“Get a cab,” she said. “There’s one more thing I want to do.”

She picked up something at the newsstand, joined Michael as a cab pulled over, and climbed into the back seat. He looked down at her lap and saw that what she had bought was a copy of the Village Voice.

Michael told the driver to stop first on Grand Street off West Broadway, then to take him to Twenty-fourth and Tenth.

“This is a present for buying me lunch.” She moved the thick tabloid onto Michael’s lap, and then took a pair of large, round, wire-rimmed sunglasses from her bag and put them on. For a moment she appeared to be reading the yellow DRIVER ALLERGIC—DO NOT SMOKE and DRIVER NOT REQUIRED TO CHANGE BILLS OVER TWENTY signs applied here and there to the grimy plastic window before them.

“Are you sure you want to go to Saigon?”

“I want to see Vinh,” she said. “I like Vinh. Vinh and I have long confidential talks. We agree that white Americans are an incomprehensible and exotic people.”

“Have you been there since that night?”

“Don’t you know the answer to that?” She removed the sunglasses and gave him an almost sullen look.

“I’m glad we could talk,” he said.

At this she unself-consciously took his hand. Michael could feel the pulse beating in her warm dry hand.

At Grand Street Michael was surprised to see a brass-bound case displaying a menu and a small sign in the restaurant window.

“Doesn’t it look great?” she asked him in her flat crisp voice. “We’ll open as soon as the court lets us. Vinh asked me to help him out. Of course I’m grateful to have the work. It means that I don’t have the feeling that I lost quite all of him.”

When the cab stopped, she swung the door open, and said, “Maybe I shouldn’t say this, but you seem very unsettled. There’s room for you in here”—she nodded toward the building—“if you need a place to stay.” She waited for him to say something.

“I’ll come in and see you before long,” he finally said. “Are you planning to stay here now?”

She shook her head. “Call me at the General’s.” Then she smiled in the face of his mystification and left the cab.

“Who is the General?”

Maggie glanced down at the paper in his lap.

He looked at the front page, where she had somehow managed to write a telephone number. When he looked back up, she was already opening the door of the restaurant.

1

“Is this really your idea of half an hour?” Beevers scowled as he let Poole into his messy dark studio apartment. Conor smiled enigmatically at him from a chair, and Tim Underhill, dressed in worn jeans and an old hooded sweatshirt, waved at him from another. Even in the dim light, Tim looked far more like his old self than he had in Bangkok—broader, healthier, less wasted. Shaking his hand and grinning, Tim was nothing like a criminal, nothing like a madman, nothing like the person Poole had thought he had been searching for.

“We ordered a pizza,” Beevers said. “There’s some left.”

On the table, dark with grease, sat a curdled slice of pizza in a cardboard box.

Poole refused, and Beevers snapped the lid down over the remains and took the box into the kitchen.

Conor winked at Poole.

“Now that he’s here,” Beevers called from the kitchen, “does anybody want a drink?”

“Sure,” Conor said.

“Coffee,” said Underhill, and Poole said, “Me too.”

They heard cabinet doors popping open, glasses slamming down on a counter, the refrigerator opening, ice cubes cracking from the tray. “So what the hell took you so long?” Beevers shouted. “You think we’re playing a game here? I got news for you—you’d better begin to take this seriously.”

Underhill grinned at Poole from his seat by the main window in Beevers’ apartment. Beside him on the little table that held a telephone was a thick stack of papers.

“Writing something?” Michael asked.

Underhill nodded, and Beevers yelled again, “Sometimes I think I’m the only person here who really takes this whole project seriously.”

He appeared with two short squat glasses filled with ice and a clear liquid, one of which he set down before Conor. Then he walked brusquely around Poole to get to the other side of the table, where he had evidently been sitting before Michael’s arrival. “You can make your own coffee, you live here too,” he said to Underhill.

Underhill immediately stood up and went into the kitchen.

“I suppose I had better fill in Dr. Poole on what we have been discussing in his absence,” Harry said. He sounded grumpy and pleased with himself at the same time. “But I want to settle something first.” Beevers raised his glass and squinted unpleasantly over the rim. “I don’t suppose that you waited for the rest of us to leave so that you could go running back to Murphy and tell him everything you know. I don’t really suppose that, Michael. Or do I?”

“Why would you?” Michael had to suppress both his surprise and the desire to laugh. Beevers had become very taut.

“You might want to destroy the work we’ve been doing. To get in good with Murphy. You might just think you have to become a sort of double agent in order to cover your ass.”

“Double agent,” Conor said.

“Keep quiet,” Harry snapped. “I want to know about this, Michael.”

Poole suddenly understood from the way they were looking at him that both Conor and Underhill knew that he had spent the past hour with Maggie Lah. “Of course I didn’t go back to Murphy. He was busy with Maggie, anyhow.”

“So what did you do?”

“I had to pick up some things for Judy.”

Underhill smiled.

“I don’t know why all you guys are against me,” Beevers said. “I am working, night and day, on something that ought to make you all rich.” Another suspicious look at Poole. “And if Judy wanted some things, I don’t know why she didn’t just ask Pat to bring them up to her.”

“Pat’s going to Westerholm?”

“This afternoon. She told me this morning. You didn’t know?”

“I left in kind of a rush.” Poole folded the newspaper on his lap.

Underhill brought him his cup of coffee, and Michael sipped, grateful for the interruption. He had never been in Beevers’ apartment, and his curiosity at last made him take a good look at his surroundings.

His second impression, like his first, was of a mess so pervasive it could nearly be called squalor. On the table between Beevers and Conor stood a small stack of plates topped with dirty silverware. Underhill’s cases and bags sat behind his chair beside a disorderly heap of newspapers and magazines. Beevers still read Playboy and Penthouse, Poole saw. What most gave the room its air of utter disorder were the videotapes that lay heaped and scattered on the floor. There were hundreds of them, in and out of their boxes, tossed on the carpet as though a small child had been playing with them. Dirty shirts, underwear, and khaki trousers lay on the far side of the grey convertible couch where Tim must have slept. To one blank space of wall had been taped a long photograph of the actress Nastassia Kinski entwined with a snake. Beside this hung two framed covers of national news magazines, each showing Lieutenant Harry Beevers’ haggard face. In a little L-shaped alcove was a small bed like a child’s with a pillow in a black pillowcase and black sheets visible beneath a rumpled duvet. The entire apartment smelled of pizza and unwashed laundry.

In his immaculate suits, his braces and his bow ties, Harry came back every night to this depressing sty. The one purposeful, orderly corner of the apartment, Poole saw, was the little island Underhill had made of his chair and the table with its stack of typed pages.

“I know the place is a little messy,” Harry said. “What do you think happens when you put a couple of bachelors together? I’m really going to clean it up pretty soon.” He looked around energetically, as if ready to begin now, but his eye stopped on Conor Linklater, who stirred uneasily.

“I’m not going to clean your apartment for you,” Conor said.

“Tell him what we were talking about,” Beevers said.

2

“Harry wants us to do a few things for him,” Conor said, resenting the way Beevers got his kicks by ordering everybody around.

“For me? Me?”

“Okay, you can explain it yourself if you don’t like the way I do it, Harry.”

“I have my reasons.”

With Beevers you never reached the end of these little games.

“Well,” Conor began, “when we were just sort of shooting the breeze in here we found something out.”

And there Mikey was—he heard it and he was tuned in, all of him.

“It was something I didn’t tell you about, back in Bangkok. I figured I wanted to think about it myself, and then, you know, Tina got killed and we came back, and all that.”

Poole nodded.

“Remember when we were talking about that place where you go—where a bunch of rich guys watch somebody kill a girl?”

“I remember.”

“Well, I figured Tim was lying when he said he never went there. Because I got in by using his name. That’s the reason I got in. Tim’s name was like a kind of code, like a password or something.”

“Exactly,” Underhill said.

“So when he dodged around it on the plane, I figured he didn’t want to admit he went in for this sick little death trip, you know?”

“But I had never been there,” Underhill said.

“And a lot of other things. He didn’t know anybody named Cham, and the Cham I met knew all about him. And he was never blackballed from all the bars and places I went to, but the guy who took me around heard that Tim Underhill had been kicked out of at least half of them.”

“I thought you had a picture,” Poole said.

“Well, I forgot it that day. But everybody knew his name, so I thought it must be Tim. But—”

Mikey got it right away.

“It was another man,” Mike said.

“Bingo.”

“Truth is,” said Tim, “in Bangkok I pretty much laid low. I was busy getting myself together. Mainly I was trying to get back to work. In the two years I lived in Bangkok, I don’t think I set foot in Patpong more than twice.”

“So,” Beevers said, unable to be silent any longer, “remember the time we went to Goodwood Park?”

“He used Tim’s name.”

“He always used Tim’s name. Everywhere he went. Even when they were in the same city.”

“Which explains why my reputation was even worse than my own efforts should have made it,” Tim said. “The amazing Victor Spitalny was going around telling people he was me.”

“So it’s perfect that Murphy is looking for Underhill,” Beevers said. “And what I have been suggesting to our friends while we were waiting for you is the next logical step. It’s what we were talking about on the plane. We look for him too.”

“Just the way we did in Singapore and everywhere else.”

Very pleased with himself, he took a big swallow of his drink. “We do exactly what we did before. With this difference. Now we know who we’re really looking for. I think we have a better chance of finding him than the police do. Where do you think he would be most at home?”

Nobody spoke.

“Where in New York City?”

Conor could not stand this anymore, and said, “Go on, tell us.”

Beevers smirked. “Chinatown. I think he’d roll down to Mott Street the way a stone rolls downhill. The man has not been in this country in fifteen years! How does it look to him? Like a foreign country! It is a foreign country to him.”

“You want us to go around Chinatown looking for him, like instant replay?” Conor asked. “I don’t know.”

“We’re five yards from the end zone, Conor. Do you want to quit now?”

Poole asked if Beevers really wanted Tim Underhill to go around Chinatown looking for himself.

“I have a couple of other ideas for you and Tim. What I’m talking about isn’t just walking around Chinatown talking to waiters and bartenders. That part of it I’m willing to take on myself. But do you remember my mentioning advertising? I want to put Tim’s name where Koko will see it every time he goes outside. Let’s surround him with it. And when he’s feeling totally hemmed in, let’s give him an out. And run him straight into a trap.”

“A killing box,” Mikey said.

“A trap. We capture him. We hear whatever he has to say. And then we turn him over to the police.”

He looked around as if he expected disagreement and was prepared to face it down. “We’ve spent too much time and money to settle for anything less. Spitalny killed Tina Pumo. He is out there right now, trying to figure out how to kill us. Three of us, anyhow—he doesn’t know Tim is here any more than the police do.” He sipped from his drink. “Michael, I’m in the telephone book. I’m sure that by now he knows where I live. I have every reason to want this lunatic put out of the way. I don’t want to spend the rest of my life wondering if a madman is going to come up behind me and cut my throat.”

Sometimes Conor could almost admire Harry Beevers.

“So I’m talking about putting up flyers on windows, on lampposts, bus shelters, anywhere he might notice them. And I worked out a couple of ads for the Village Voice. It’s an outside chance, but one worth taking. And there’s another idea Tim was interested in—I’d like you to consider this seriously, Michael. You two could go out to Milwaukee to see Spitalny’s parents and his old girlfriends or his what have you. You might be able to learn something crucial out there. It’s not impossible that he has written, called them, something. Anything!”

Beevers’ eyes shone with his satisfaction in this scheme. For one thing, it got Tim Underhill out of his hair for a couple of days. Beevers had already asked Conor if he wanted to go to Milwaukee too, but he had refused. Ben Roehm needed a second carpenter for a small renovation job, and he had told Conor that Tom Woyzak “wasn’t a problem anymore.” His niece Ellen had filed for divorce in December. Woyzak had beaten her up once too often, and was now in a drug and alcohol treatment center.

Mikey surprised Conor by saying, “I’ve been thinking along those lines myself. Do you want to give it a try, Tim?”

“It could be interesting,” Underhill said.

“Tell me what you think of the newspaper ads first.” Beevers handed Poole the sheet of paper on which he had printed the messages for the back page of the Voice:

TIM UNDERHILL—END THE WAR AND COME HOME. CALL HARRY BEEVERS 555-0033.

UNDERHILL—THE GRUNT CAN STOP RUNNING. 555-0033.

“And here’s one of the flyers I had run off.” Beevers stood up and removed the top sheet from a stack of papers on a bookshelf above his head. “I had three hundred of these made up at a print shop around the corner. I can put one on every lamppost—he’ll see it, don’t worry about that.”

On the flyer’s yellow paper was a message in large black letters:TIM UNDERHILL

YOU WHO WERE AT IA THUC

AND LAST SEEN IN BANGKOK

COME HOME WE

WHO KNOW YOUR REAL NAME

NEED YOUR NOBILITY

AND PATIENCE NOW

CALL THE LIEUTENANT

555-00333

3

Mike Poole nodded at the flyer, said something agreeable, and put it down.

“Think it’ll work?” Conor asked him.

“It might,” Poole said. He looked only half awake. Conor wondered what had happened between Mike and Judy since Tina’s funeral, but he didn’t really have to know the particulars to know that it was coming apart. Back in Washington those few months ago, he would never have seen these signs or put them together in this way. Back in Washington, the only loser in a club of successful men, self-pity had made him drink himself into a stupor. He looked at the glass in his hand and carefully set it down on the table. There was no need for it now. He hoped Mikey would come out of it all right, would do something. Doing something was pretty much the only way out of a situation like Mike’s. It almost didn’t matter what you did.

For a moment Conor considered the idea of inviting Mike to stay with him in South Norwalk and trying to get a job as a kind of unpaid assistant to Ben Roehm—banging on nails and carrying sheetrock would be great therapy. But that was as impossible as it would be for him to go on hospital rounds alongside Mike. Anyhow, Conor hoped that Mike would go along with Beevers’ plan and spend a day or two out in the Midwest looking for Spitalny’s tracks. Anything he did would help him.

“As of now,” Beevers was saying, “this is my full-time job. Once the ads run and the flyers are up, I’m staying here to man the phone. Tim can go to Milwaukee—I think that’s an essential part of our strategy. The three of you should get going on that as soon as possible, and I’m the logical man to stay here.”

“You’re planning to tell us when anything happens, aren’t you, Boss?” Conor asked.

“Absolutely.” Beevers put one hand over his face and shook his head. Then he pointed at Mike with his glass. “What did he do? Ask yourself that. Did he call me right after he found Tim?” He turned to Underhill. “Did he even give me a chance to talk to you? When you guys ask questions, make sure you’re asking the right person.”

“I arranged things so that we could all arrive back in America as quickly as possible,” Mike said. “I’m sorry that you feel cheated of something.”

“Sometimes I wonder what would have happened if you had seen me first, instead of Michael,” Tim said.

“The same thing would have happened,” Harry said. His face had turned a hot, unpleasant shade of red. “I’m just making a point, that’s all. Don’t get paranoid.”

When Mikey decided that he’d had enough and stood up to go, Conor got up too.

“We’ll do some of the flyers this afternoon,” Beevers said. His voice was tight and unhappy. “You guys get to go back to fresh air and clean streets, but there’s work to do here. I’ll let you know if anything happens, but I think he’ll chew on it for a week or so before he makes his move.”

“And I’ll arrange tickets to Milwaukee,” Poole said. “We’ll go as soon as I can get away.”

Conor hated to leave Tim Underhill in that apartment.

They went outside into air that seemed surprisingly springlike, and the warmth of the day as well as what he had been thinking prompted Conor to risk making a fool of himself. “Look, I don’t know why I should say this, Mikey, but if you need a place to stay or anything, just give me a call, you know? You can always stay with me if you need a place.”

Mike didn’t laugh at him—he stuck out his hand and gave him a good handshake. “Why don’t you come along on this trip to Milwaukee?”

“Bread, you know,” Conor said. “Gotta get that bread. I wish I could, though. But really … this whole thing … don’t you think it’s time to hang it up and tell everything to that cop? We’re just following Beevers around, and that’s no good, man.”

“It’ll only be a couple more days, Conor. I’m in a funny period anyhow, and this gives me something to do.”

Conor nodded, wishing he knew what to say or the way to say it, and they parted. After a few steps toward the subway, Conor turned around and watched Mikey walking in the sunlight toward Ninth Avenue. He wondered if he knew where he was going, or if he was really going anywhere at all, and for a second felt like rushing after him.

4

Poole realized that he could walk to the garage on University Place. It would be an enjoyable way to delay his arrival back in Westerholm, a free zone given him by the unseasonal weather. Right now a free zone seemed welcome.

He crossed Ninth Avenue and turned right toward 23rd Street. It occurred to him that he could walk down through the Village, cross Houston Street, and go to SoHo. Maggie Lah was probably still at Saigon. It would be interesting to see what she and Vinh were doing with the restaurant. Poole decided against doing this, but wondered if Maggie would be interested in going to Milwaukee with Underhill and himself. She might be able to identify Spitalny from photographs at his parents’ house. A positive identification from Maggie would be helpful when they made their case to the police. His thoughts drifted along pleasantly as he walked down Ninth Avenue toward Greenwich Village.

5

Maggie, in the meantime, had decided in the middle of a conversation to tell Vinh that the writer Timothy Underhill, Tina’s friend in Vietnam, had secretly come back to America and was now staying in Harry Beevers’ apartment. As far as Maggie was concerned, this information was another proof of Beevers’ instability. She knew that Vinh detested Beevers, and assumed that he would feel as she did about his attempting to continue his private efforts to find the man who had murdered Tina. She also knew that Vinh could be trusted with any secret told him. But his response startled her—he stared at her for a long time, then asked her to repeat what she had just said. All the rest of the afternoon he worked in silence, and around five o’clock, just before Maggie left, said, “I must call him,” and put down his blueprints and went to the telephone in the kitchen.

6

Michael rolled up his windows, put into the tape deck a cassette of Murray Perahia playing Mozart piano concertos, and rolled out onto University Place. Music of great delicacy and melancholy began to come through the speakers. It was the wrong music. Michael ejected the tape, put it back in its case, opened another, and fed it to the machine. The first bars of Don Giovanni filled the car. The opera would get him home.

On the expressway into Westchester County he remembered the Babar books in his trunk—why had he put them there?

Because he wanted to have them with him if he did not go back to Westerholm. He had not wanted to lose them, and if Judy found them she would throw them out.

But an hour later here he was, home again, the good Dr. Poole, turning off at the Westerholm exit, winding in his little car through streets without signs or lights and lined with hedges, beneath branches that would soon begin to bud, across Westerholm’s Main Street with its branches of Laura Ashley and Baskin Robbins, the garage where the proprietor “dialogued” with you about Scientology while he filled your tank, then past the General Washington Inn and the duck pond, “O misery misery, Lascia le donne? Pazzo!” Don Giovanni bawled, “Leave women alone? You’re mad—why I need them more than the bread I eat, than the air I breathe.” On impulse Michael did not turn into his street but kept on going until he had come to the site of Sam Stein’s new medical center.

A large sign announcing WESTERHOLM MEDICAL CENTER in tasteful, almost unreadable green on brown stood before a large lot. Behind the lot was a nature preserve. As soon as spring came, this lot would be filled with bulldozers and excavators. This was the future kingdom of Dr. Sam Stein.

Michael got back into his car and drove home. He had lost track of what was going on in Don Giovanni, and the big voices boomed and cajoled, fighting for air and space. He turned into his driveway, and the gravel crunched beneath his tires. This was home, he was safe. Zerlina sang, “In happiness and joy let’s pass our days and nights.” Like a magic light that could pass through stone, brick, lead, wood, and skin, music streamed through the world, on its way to somewhere else. Michael drew up before his garage and switched off the engine. The tape cut off and leaped noisily up into the slot. Michael picked up the novel beside him and got out of the car. For a moment he saw his wife and Pat Caldwell looking at him from the living room window. They broke apart as he began to walk toward the front door.

1

“The thing is, I like her,” Conor said. “I can hardly believe I’m saying this, but I not only like her, I think about her a lot. You know what she told me? She said she likes the way I talk.”

“No kids?” Poole asked.

“Thank God, no. This Woyzak guy never wanted ’em. Kids drove him crazy. But this Woyzak guy, everything drove him crazy. Didn’t I ever tell you about him?”

Poole shook his head, and Conor ordered another round of drinks and began describing how he had been reminded of Victor Spitalny as soon as he had met Tom Woyzak. They were in Donovan’s on the Friday night following Michael’s return from New York on Monday. On Tuesday night Michael had brought a jumble of clothes in a suitcase to Conor’s apartment. Every day he drove to his office, where he saw patients and tried to settle his affairs before returning to South Norwalk.

“What I mean is, nothing really ever disappears. We should have known it’d turn out to be Spitalny. He was there. He was there in everything.” Conor’s eyes were shining with uncharacteristic inspiration. “We even talked about him in Washington, remember?”

“I remember. But Beevers was so positive. And I guess I thought Spitalny was dead. I certainly couldn’t see him calling himself Koko and going out and murdering a bunch of people.”

Conor nodded. “Well, at least now we’re that far ahead. Beevers says he didn’t get any responses to his ads yet.”

Poole too had spoken to Beevers, who had spent ten minutes complaining about the way Tim Underhill had deserted him.

“He’s all pissed off at us, man.”

“He’s pissed off at everybody.”

“I didn’t know about Vinh, though.”

“I guess we didn’t know Vinh.”

Beevers was still furious that Poole had told Maggie Lah about Underhill, for Maggie had told Vinh.

“So what are they doing?” Conor asked. “Are Underhill and Vinh and Vinh’s kid all living in the restaurant?”

“I don’t think so. I think Vinh and his daughter live with relatives. I guess Underhill used to help Vinh’s family, back in the old days, and Vinh is repaying the favor.”

“I hope your thing works out all right, man,” Conor said.

As soon as Michael had seen Pat Caldwell standing beside Judy in his window, he had known that his marriage had reached its final stages. Judy had hardly been able to speak to him, and had soon retreated to her bedroom. Pat, grimacing with the difficulty of her position and managing by her very sympathy to suggest that she would speak privately with him later, had said that Judy felt hurt and betrayed by something that had happened between them. She no longer wanted to stay alone in the house with him. Pat was there to supply moral courage and womanly support—and to be witness to what Judy perceived as her humiliation.

“Of course you can tell me to get out, and if you do I’ll go,” Pat said. “I have only the most general idea of what this is all about, Michael. I like both of you. Judy asked me to come here, and so I did.”

Michael had spent the night on the couch in his little office downstairs, Pat in the guestroom; when Judy had told him that she would never be able to forgive him for the way he had treated her—a statement she appeared to believe—Michael had moved out to the George Washington, which had a few rooms it let out to boyfriends and grandparents. The following night he had gone to Conor’s. Now he spent hours each day talking to Max Atlas, his lawyer, who had visible difficulty keeping himself from showing that he thought his client had lost his mind. Max Atlas never smiled anyhow, his big fleshy face naturally expressed gloom and doubt, but during the hours Michael spent with him his dewlaps sagged and even his ears seemed to droop. It was not Michael’s marital difficulties that depressed him, but that a client of his should voluntarily leave a business just before it began to mint money.

“She came to the job one day,” Conor was saying. “In a Blazer. The Blazer was beautiful, man. I saw her get out, and she looked good. The woman looked real good, let’s face it. In spite of the fact you could see that she was down on account of her old man being put away. Ben Roehm hauls me out from where I’m working and says, ‘Well, Conor, I guess you ought to meet my niece Ellen.’ Right away I think I don’t have a chance with this woman. But it turns out that her father was a carpenter, her grandfather was a capenter, Ben Roehm is her uncle, and even her husband, who was bughouse ever since he came back from the war, was a sort of a half-assed carpenter. Guess what she likes?”

“I think I got it,” Michael said.

“No—guess what she likes to do?”

“The same things you do,” Poole said.

An expression of blissful amazement spread across Conor’s face. “She likes sitting around the apartment and talking. She likes coming in here to the bar and having a drink. We have great times. She claims she gets a big kick out of me. She wants to have a little house up in Vermont. She wants to have a man to hang out with. She wants kids. That asshole wouldn’t let her have kids, which was really okay seeing what a rat in the grass he turned out to be. I’d like to have kids, Mikey, I really would. You get tired of living by yourself.”

“How many times have you gone out with Ellen?”

“Fourteen and a half times. Once we just had time for a couple of beers before her parents took her out. They’re concerned about her.” He revolved his beer glass on the bar. “Ellen gets a little money from Ben Roehm, but she’s about as strapped as I am.”

“I ought to get out of your way,” Poole said. “You don’t want me sleeping in your place, Conor. You should have told me when I called you. I can go somewhere else.”

“No, her mother’s down with something, and Ellen’s taking care of her. So we wouldn’t be together anyhow, for a couple days. And besides, I wanted to tell you about her.” Conor looked away for a moment. “But I was wondering when you were planning to make that trip to Milwaukee. Her mother is getting up and around a little more these days.”

“I could do it the day after tomorrow,” Poole said, laughing. “I have to go to another funeral. That patient of mine I told you about.”

“Mikey, would you mind if I, if I, you know …”

“Of course not.”

“You’ll like her,” Conor said, and slid off the stool to go to the pay phones.

Ten minutes later he returned with a big grin on his face. “She’ll be here in fifteen minutes.” He kept on grinning. “It’s a funny thing. I feel like I’m joining up with the world again—like I was floating around in space, and I finally came back to earth. It took a long time, man.”

“Yes,” Poole said.

“That whole time we were on that trip, when I look back, it was like I wasn’t really there. Everything was like swimming underwater with your eyes open. It was like I was in a dream and nothing was real. I was a human blur. And now I’m not anymore.”

Conor gulped down his beer and set the glass on the bar. “Did I say that right?”

“I’m like Ellen,” Poole said. “I like listening to you talk.”

2

A little while later Poole too went to the telephone, thinking that it was not so very different for him. During their time in Singapore and Bangkok, everything had seemed very sharp and clear—he had been reminded of what it had been like in Vietnam. But in a short time everything had switched around. Singapore and Bangkok felt like peacetime, and what was around him now felt like Vietnam. Another version of Elvis was following them. Like Conor, Poole had not thought that he was asleep and dreaming when he had walked through the Tiger Balm Gardens and Bugis Street; but maybe his first moment of real awakening had come on the rickety bridge beside the cardboard shacks. That was where he had started to give things up.

He dropped in coins and dialed his wife’s number. He expected to hear her message, but someone lifted the receiver after the first ring.

Silence.

“Hello, who is this?” he asked.

“Who is this?” asked a strange female voice.

Then he knew who it was. “Hello, Pat. This is Michael. I’d like to speak to Judy.”

“I’ll do what I can.”

“Please.” Poole waited for long minutes while he watched Conor look at the door whenever someone walked in. He would have to leave Conor’s apartment and check into a hotel that night—it was not fair to keep him from his girlfriend.

Pat’s mild voice came back on the line. “She won’t, Michael. I’m sorry. She just won’t talk to you.”

“Try again. Please.”

“One more try,” she said.

This time Judy came to the telephone almost immediately.

“Don’t you think we ought to get together and talk about things?”

“I’m not under the impression we have anything to talk about,” Judy said.

“We have a lot to talk about. Do you really want the lawyers to take over?”

“Just stay away from here,” Judy said. “I don’t want to see you, I don’t want you sleeping on the couch, and I don’t want to talk to you now.”

It was all a game—sooner or later Judy would want everything back the way it used to be. For now she wanted him to suffer. He had kept her from doing something she had been pretending with all her heart to want to do.

“Have it your way,” he said, but she had already hung up.

Poole wandered back to the bar. Conor took one look at him and said, “Hey man, Ellen and me can always stay at her place, you know. The only reason we use mine is that she lives over in Bethel and it’d take me a little longer to get to work, but the real main reason is that Woyzak’s got all his stuff all over the walls, pictures of himself in uniform and a bunch of medals all framed, everywhere you look there’s Tom Woyzak sighting down on you. It gets to you after a while.”

Poole excused himself and went back to the telephone. By now the bar was full of people, and he could barely hear the mechanical voice instructing him in the use of his credit card.

A man answered, asked for his name, and said that he would bring Maggie to the telephone. He sounded very paternal.

In a moment Maggie was on the line. “Well, well, Dr. Poole. How did you know I wanted to talk to you?”

“I have an idea that might be interesting to you.”

“Sounds interesting already,” she said.

“Has Tim Underhill mentioned our trip to Milwaukee to you?”

He had not.

“It hasn’t been too definite yet. We’re going to look up Victor Spitalny’s parents and spend a little time seeing if we can pick up some new information on him. He might have sent a postcard, there might be someone who’s heard something—it’s a long shot, but it’s worth trying.”

“And?”

“And I thought that maybe you should come along. You might be able to identify Spitalny from a photograph. And you’re a part of what’s going on. You’re already involved.”

“When will you be going?”

Michael said that he would book tickets that night for Sunday, and that he expected to be gone only a couple of days.

“We’re opening the restaurant in a week.”

“It might only take a day or two. We might find out that it’s just a cold trail.”

“So why should I come along?”

“I’d like you to,” Michael said.

“Then I will. Call me back with the flight times, and I’ll meet you at the airport. I’ll give you a check for my ticket.”

Michael hung up smiling.

He turned to face the bar and saw Conor standing face to face with a woman who was perhaps an inch taller than he. She had long, unruly brown hair and wore a plaid shirt, a tan sleeveless down jacket, and tight faded jeans. Conor nodded in his direction, and the woman turned to watch him approach them. She had a high, deeply lined forehead, firm eyebrows, and a strong intelligent face. She was not at all what Michael had expected.

“This is the guy I was telling you about,” Conor said. “Dr. Michael Poole, known as Mike. This is Ellen.”

“Hello, Dr. Poole.” She gripped his hand in hers.

“I hope you’ll call me Michael,” he said. “I’ve been hearing about you too, and I’m glad to meet you.”

“I had to get away for a little while so I could check up on my sweetie,” Ellen said.

“If you guys ever have babies, you’d better ask me to be their doctor,” Poole said, and for a time they all stood in the noisy bar grinning at each other.

3

When Michael slid into the last pew at St. Robert’s on the village square the service had already begun. Two pews near the front had been filled with children who must have been Stacy’s classmates. All of them looked taller, older, and at once more worldly and more innocent than she. Stacy’s parents, William and Mary, “like the college,” they said to those who met them for the first time, sat with a small group of relatives on the other side of the church. William turned around and gave Michael a grateful glance as he sat down. Light streamed in through the stained glass windows on both sides of the church. Michael felt like a ghost—he felt as if bit by bit he were becoming invisible, sitting in the bright optimistic church as an Episcopalian priest uttered heartfelt commonplaces about death.

He and the Talbots met at the church door at the end of the service. William Talbot was a beefy good-hearted man who had made a fortune with various investment banking firms. “I’m happy you came, Michael.”

“We heard you’re leaving your practice.” There was a question in Mary Talbot’s statement, and Michael thought he heard a criticism too. In the world of Westerholm, doctors were not supposed to leave their posts until they retired or dropped dead.

“I’m thinking about it.”

“Are you coming out to Memorial Park?”

Mary Talbot had begun to look oddly worried and doubtful.

“Of course,” Michael said.

There were two cemeteries in Westerholm, located at opposite ends of the town. The older of the two, Burr Grove, had filled up shortly before World War II, and was a leafy, hilly, shady place with rows of pitted old eighteenth-century tombstones. Burr Grove was known locally as “the graveyard.” Memorial Park, a straightforward modern cemetery, occupied a long level field bordered by woods near the expressway on the north end of town. It was neat, very well tended, and without charm or character of any kind. In Memorial Park there were no tilting tombstones, no statuary of angels or dogs or wailing women with dripping hair, no stone bungalows testifying to the fortunes of merchant families—only straight rows of small white headstones and long, level stretches of unbroken ground.

Stacy Talbot’s grave lay at the far end of the occupied section. The mounds of excavated earth had been covered with strips of imitation grass of an unearthly, chemical green. The young priest from St. Robert’s stood beneath a canopy and performed with what looked to Poole like fussy satisfaction in his own elegance. The schoolchildren, presumably considered too young for an actual burial, were not present. William and Mary Talbot stood with bowed heads among their relatives and neighbors. Poole knew better than half of the crowd of neighbors, who appeared more numerous outside in the cemetery than inside St. Robert’s. They were parents of his patients, some of them his own neighbors. Poole stood a little distance away from these people. He had really only been a doctor here: none of these people were his friends. Judy had been too busy and too anxious to invite people to their house; she had been secretly scornful of their lives and their ambitions. During the service Poole saw a few of them notice him—a little outburst of whispers, a few glances and smiles.

Because this was a child’s burial, Poole found himself remembering Robbie’s. He felt drained by too much recent grief: an era, in many ways the calmest and most productive of his life, seemed to be sliding into the ground with Stacy Talbot’s coffin. His heart ached for William and Mary Talbot, who had no other children and whose daughter had been so bright and brave. For an instant this grief pierced him like an arrow, and Stacy Talbot’s death was an abyss—a monster had taken her, whittled at her body, killed her inch by inch. Poole wished he had someone to hold, someone with whom he could cry, but he stood at the edge of the mourners and cried by himself.

It was over soon, and the people who had known Stacy turned away toward their cars. William Talbot came up to Michael and put his arms around him and then backed away, too moved to speak. Mary Talbot put her patrician face beside his and embraced him. “Oh, I miss her,” Michael said. “Thank you,” Mary Talbot whispered.

Into the darkness, Poole thought, for the moment forgetting where he had seen or heard the phrase.

Poole said good-bye to the Talbots and turned away to walk deeper into the cemetery on one of the narrow paths that ran between the neat rows of stones.

In other years he had come here every week. Judy had come with him twice, then ceased to come—she said the visits were morbid. Maybe it was morbid: Poole did not care, because they were necessary. Eventually they had ceased to be so necessary. His last visit had been the day before he had gone to Washington to meet Beevers, Conor, and Tina.

Behind him he heard the slamming of car doors as Stacy Talbot’s mourners began to leave.

Poole wished that Tim Underhill was beside him—his was the company he most wanted now. Underhill could make sense of what was happening, he could do justice to sorrow. Poole felt that he had gone through the funeral in an unfeeling daze from which he had awakened at only the last possible minute. Poole left the path and began to walk a narrow invisible line between individual graves in the direction of the woods that bordered the cemetery.

Into the darkness, Poole thought again, and then remembered the dream of the boy, the rabbit, and the cold grey rushing river.

A wave of dizziness went through him, and the air went very dark, then very light before the dizziness left him.

The scent of strong sunlight and massed flowers had suddenly filled the cooling air, a scent so powerful and beautiful that it nearly lifted Poole off the ground, and in another quick white dazzle of light Poole saw a man who must have been six and a half feet tall standing between himself and Robbie’s grave. The man was smiling at him. He had curly light brown hair and was a slim muscular man who looked as though he could move very quickly. Poole felt an instantaneous love for this man, and then realized that this was not a man at all. Time had stopped. Poole and the being were encased in a bubble of silence, and the being moved gracefully to one side to allow Poole the sight of Robbie’s headstone …

… and a car door slammed, and a few quiet voices murmured back at Stacy’s gravesite, and a tribe of sparrows wheeled over his head and settled onto the ground for an instant only before shooting off again toward the woods. Poole still felt light-headed, and his eyes hurt. He stepped forward again and found himself wrapped in the last traces of a strong clear scent of sunshine and flowers. The being was gone.

There was Robbie’s white stone before him: Robbie’s full name, which now seemed so formal, Robbie’s dates.

The unearthly odor was gone, but it seemed to Poole that as if in compensation all the natural earthly odors around him had doubled or tripled in intensity. He was inundated with the odors of the grass, the life and freshness of the soil, the fragrance of roses in one of the cemetery’s vases beside the next headstone, ALICE ALISON LEAF 1952–1978, even the clean strong slightly dusty smell of the gravel on the cemetery paths, the colors of all things about him boomed and snapped and sizzled. For a moment the world had split open like a peach to reveal an overpowering sweetness and goodness.

Who had appeared before him? What? A god?

The charged radiance was slipping away. Poole felt the priest’s eyes on him, and he turned around and found himself looking at an indifferent landscape. The last cars had nearly reached the cemetery gates, and only his Audi and the hearse were still drawn up on the narrow drive. The funeral director and one of his assistants busily dismantled the electronic scaffold that had lowered Stacy’s coffin. Two men in green pants and donkey jackets, cemetery employees, lifted the grassy carpet off the mounds of raw earth and made ready to fill the grave. A yellow earth-moving machine had appeared from behind a screen of bushes. Poole felt as if he had just passed through some kind of extraordinary psychic bubble that still had the power to invest these homely activities with its ebbing power, as if what Poole saw before him were only the visible traces of a great glory.

Certain that he was still being watched, Poole turned around again and sensed more than saw a quick, surprised movement at the edge of the woods. He looked up toward it just in time to see a shadowy figure melting back between the trees. Poole’s whole body felt a jolt. He was about thirty yards from the edge of the woods. The extraordinary feeling of well-being that had surrounded him until a few seconds ago completely vanished into its own afterglow. Whatever had withdrawn into the trees seemed to vanish back even further, flickering between the trunks of trees. Poole stepped forward between his son’s grave and Alice Alison Leaf’s.

This time Michael knew that he had seen Koko. Koko had somehow followed him to the cemetery, which meant that he had followed him to Conor’s apartment.

Poole walked between the graves until he reached the empty part of the graveyard and then walked over brown winter grass toward the trees. Far back in the darkness of the woods he thought he could see a still pale figure watching him from beside a tree. “Come on out!” Poole yelled. The figure far back in the woods did not move.

“Come on out and talk to me!” Poole shouted.

He heard the funeral director and the cemetery workmen stop whatever they were doing to look at him.

The figure in the woods wavered like a match flame. Poole moved closer to the first bare trees, and the figure disappeared backward to flicker out behind a massive trunk deep in the woods. “Come out here!” Poole yelled.

“You okay?” a voice called out, and Poole turned around to see a man as heavy as a professional wrestler standing on the bulldozer, his hands cupped around his mouth.

Poole waved him off and began to trot toward the woods. The figure had disappeared. The woods, of heavily overgrown birch, oak, and maple, home to several families of foxes and raccoons, ran for another fifty yards down into a ravine and up over a crest, and down to the expressway.

A dim shape, dark now instead of pale, moved like a deer between two oaks.

Poole yelled for him to stop and passed between the first of the trees. Ahead of him was a low bristling tangle of brush, the grey diagonal line of a dead toppled ash tree, the rough accidental suggestion of a path that led around the tangle of brush, beneath the toppled ash, and on between the trees until it split apart into a hundred narrow byways of fallen leaves and spangles of light. The little shadow was inching almost provocatively backward toward the ravine, coaxing him forward.

Poole glanced again over his shoulder and saw all four men around Stacy’s grave, including the beefy gravedigger on the bulldozer, staring at him.

He ran around the dry tangle of brush, thinking that a god standing by his son’s grave had beckoned him forward, ducked to pass beneath the slanting line of the fallen ash, and saw a silver wire thin as a strand from a spiderweb gleaming up at him above the pulpy leaves and twigs on the floor of the forest. If he had been running normally he would never have seen it. Instincts he did not know he still had almost literally kicked into place, and as his right ankle moved forward to trip the wire, Poole sprang forward, lifting both feet off the ground, and sailed over the wire without touching it. For a moment that lasted long enough for him to feel proud of himself his whole body stretched out in the air parallel to the ground; then he thudded into the ground with a jolt that rattled all his bones. He pulled up his knees and kneaded his shoulder, greasy with leaf mold.

Poole got up, rubbing his shoulder, and trotted a few steps deeper into the woods. Spitalny appeared briefly in a vertical mesh of birch trunks, then vanished again. Michael knew he could not catch him. By the time he got halfway down into the ravine, Spitalny could be in a car and a couple of miles south.

Michael took another step forward, scanning the ground for indications of work. Tripwire usually meant mines or homemade explosives. Even a madman like Victor Spitalny could probably buy explosives in New York, once he had learned where to look. He wouldn’t be able to find any bouncing bettys or cluster bombs any more than he could find a LAW anti-tank rocket, but probably all sorts of automatic and semi-automatic weapons, plastic explosives, and grenades were for sale in underground weapons markets. Maybe crates of old M-14 plastic mines went up on the block.

Poole moved cautiously through the leaf mold, placing feet carefully, examining every inch of the ground before him. He moved forward another step, then another, feeling the earth yield beneath the soles of his shoes.

The flat, cynical laughter of a raven jeered at him from overhead. Poole looked up into the thick dark weave of branches. Sunlight penetrated about halfway down, then split and fractured to pick out a squirrel’s nest and a huge hairy black bole like a tumor. He continued to walk slowly toward the ravine. Wherever they were, Koko would rig his booby traps well, and they would stay in place, still armed, until they were tripped. Spitalny had been soldier enough for that. Poole wanted to find what he had set up and disarm it before some child went running through the woods.

Some little boy.

Poole shook his head, then made himself move forward, one step at a time, mapping every inch of territory in his head. Ahead of him something gleamed on the trunk of a slender maple: it caught his eye, and he heard voices calling out. He turned to see five men—the gravediggers, the undertaker and his assistant, and one other man in a grey coat and dark tie—standing in the sunlight at the edge of the woods on the dead grass of the unused section of the cemetery.

“Keep out!” he yelled, and motioned them back.

The man in the grey coat raised his hands to his mouth, and Poole heard him shout something that included the word trespassing.

“… police!” the man yelled.

Poole waved, and looked ahead of him again. He had nearly reached the ravine. If Spitalny had planted more booby traps, he thought he would have seen them.

“I’m coming,” he shouted back to the men, who huddled closer to one another, having probably heard him no better than he had heard them. The man in the grey coat was pointing at Poole, yelling again.

“… out now … police …”

“Don’t move!” Poole shouted. “I’ll be out in a second. Stay there!” He waved and tried to find what he had seen a moment before. It had been something incongruous: a flash of color? He scanned a rank of trees and saw nothing but a squirrel circling around the trunk of an oak. Beyond the squirrel’s head, grey brush reared up in the ravine. Spitalny had cut through that impenetrable-looking stuff in something like forty seconds—he was a better jungle fighter now than he had been in Vietnam. Michael shifted his eyes and saw it at last, a white rectangle on a maple’s thin dark trunk.

For a moment it looked like a scrap of white fur pinned to the bark; then he saw that what was pinned to the tree was a playing card.

He gave a flapping wave of his hand to the men at the edge of the woods and yelled, “Don’t come in! Danger!”

He hoped they heard him. “Danger!” he yelled one more time, waving his arms over his head in and out of an X, and walked backwards, still semaphoring, until he sensed he was near the maple tree with the playing card attached to its trunk.

The tree stood perhaps a yard behind him, slightly off to his right.

Warning signals went off all through his body. If Koko had rigged another booby trap, this was where it would be. He gave the men another semaphore and carefully inspected the ground around his feet. This close to the ravine, the earth seemed softer and damper.

“Come out … out …” came to him.

“Wait!” Poole bawled, inspecting the earth that lay between his feet and the maple tree. No silver wires glinted in the grey-green leaf mulch, no indentations or depressions cut through the patchwork surface of the ground. Grey leaves lay on top of green leaves on top of red leaves on top of silver leaves. Each leaf fitted smoothly into its part of the jigsaw puzzle, all the colors exposed to the sun and rain were uniformly weathered, there were no sharp lines of demarcation where a busy hand slid some long-hidden maple leaf out from under the others as it worked away, concealing the marks of its passage the way a broom would sweep away footprints in sand … the way, it occurred to him, some unseen hand had concealed the work done by Harry Beevers in that stone egg underneath the earth. Some little boy.

Poole stepped onto the multi-colored patchwork of moidering leaves. His foot came down onto the smooth mulch of leaves he had so carefully inspected, and—

—kept on going, breaking through the constructed surface and kept going down, past the ankle past the knee in a flash, and then his whole body had become unbalanced and he was helplessly falling forward into the deep hole uncovered by the shredding leaves, he threw his arms out too late and saw before him the long spears pointing up at his chest, his neck, his groin—

—and the ground held his weight, yielding only that springy half-inch.

“… AN ORDER!” a man yelled.

Poole saw nothing on the card at first. It was an Ace of Hearts. Then he saw faint slanting pencil lines on the white of the card between the heart in its center and the top left center.

He moved a step forward and put his face right up before the card. The faint markings resolved into words. Poole read the words, then breathed in and read them again. He exhaled. Very delicately he raised his hand to the card and touched its smooth surface. It had been affixed to the tree with a tiny pin like those that come in a new shirt. Michael tugged the pin out of the tree as he held the edges of the card. He looked at the words on the card again, then dropped the pin in his pocket. He turned the card over. On its back was the image in black and white of a plump bare-chested little boy with round eyes and curly hair holding out a basket overflowing with lavish orchids.

4

This was the message left for him on an Orchid Boy playing card:

I HAVE NO NAME I AM ESTERHAZ

DYING IS BEFORE LIFE ETERNAL

BACKWARDS AND FORWARDS

5

Holding the card by its edges, Michael slipped it into his coat pocket and began walking out of the woods. He yelled to the men that he was coming out, but the man in the grey coat had become very excited. As Poole moved toward him, still checking the ground for tripwires and signs of disturbance, the cemetery official gripped the sleeve of the taller of his two employees and beat the air with his other arm. Poole could hear only muffled waves of sound. He waved to show that he was coming out, there was nothing to worry about, he was unarmed and a good citizen, nothing to get excited about. The man in the grey suit was paying no attention to him now. A younger man in a dark coat with square padded shoulders whom Poole recognized as the undertaker’s assistant moved up beside his boss, who appeared uneasy and even slightly embarrassed by the other man’s agitation. Michael took another step forward, realizing that he had to give the playing card in his pocket to the police, and was suddenly stopped cold.

He had caught the smell of the god again, that wonderful clean fragrance of sunshine and massed flowers. Here it was even stronger than it had been beside Robbie’s grave. But the air did not darken and there were no trembling flashes of light. The god smell was natural, not supernatural. A slight meandering breeze took it away, then brought it to him again. Then Poole saw a rank of lolling blue and white wildflowers off to his left and knew that they were the source of the magical scent. They had bloomed in the sudden good weather and had somehow survived the fall in temperature. He could not identify the flowers, which were as tall as tulips, with wide blue blossoms striped white toward the center. They grew before a group of oak trees, and their sturdy green stalks protruded like spears up out of the leaf mold. The powerful scent came to him again.

When he looked forward, the man in the grey topcoat was leveling his index finger at him.

“… want that man out of there right now, Watkins,” Poole heard.

Watkins took a slow step forward, and the cemetery official shoved him in the small of his back.

“Get a move on!”

Watkins began to half-stumble, half-trot toward Poole. He was shading his eyes to see into the woods, and Poole knew that his form must have been flickering in and out of sight, like Koko’s a few minutes earlier. Watkins’ arms pumped, and his big belly heaved. The pale blob of his face looked set and unhappy.

“Nothing’s wrong!” Poole yelled, holding out his hand.

Watkins moved to run in on the same wandering path Poole had taken. He ducked to pass beneath the dark slanting line of the dead ash tree.

“Stop!” Poole yelled.

The man in the grey coat stepped forward as if he were going to chase after Poole himself, and Watkins took another heavy, lumbering step into the shade, and toppled over out of sight.

Poole heard him thud into the ground. He began to run toward him. Watkins’ big fuzzy head showed above a tangle of crisp vines, and his face turned toward Poole and showed a round O of mouth. Then the O began to emit ragged screams.

“Shut up,” said his boss.

“He cut me!”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

Watkins held up a hand streaming with blood. “Look, Mr. Del Barca!”

Del Barca squared off in front of Poole and pointed his index finger at him again. “Stop right there,” he said. “I’m having you arrested. You were trespassing on private cemetery grounds, and you injured my employee here.”

“Calm down,” Poole said.

“I demand to know what you were doing back there.”

“I was trying to find the man who strung up this booby trap.” Poole moved over the last bit of ground between himself and the fallen man. Watkins lay on his side with his left leg out before him. He was red in the face, and his fuzzy hair was matted with sweat. A widening blurry line of blood had already soaked through his left trouser leg.

“What booby trap?” Del Barca asked.

“Just relax,” Poole said. “I’m a doctor, and this man needs my help. He ran into a wire, and it did some damage to his leg.”

“What goddamned wire?” Del Barca yelled. “What the hell are you talking about?”

Poole bent down and ran his hand over the ground four or five inches behind Watkins. There was the wire, shiny and taut. It looked very much like razor wire. He lightly touched it. “You’re lucky it didn’t cut his leg off. Did you hear me telling him to stop?”

“You telling him?” Del Barca shouted. “Whose fault is this?”

“Yours, for one. Suppose you see what this line is connected to at either end. If it’s anything but a rock or a tree trunk, leave it alone.”

“Check it out,” Del Barca told his other employee, a younger man with the face of a moustached gerbil.

“Don’t touch anything.”

Poole knelt beside the man and gently urged him to lie flat on the ground. “You’re going to need stitches,” he said, “but we’ll see how bad the damage is.”

“You better be a real doctor, buddy,” Del Barca said.

“John. John,” the undertaker said in a soft, urgent voice. “I know him.”

Poole hooked his fingers into the cut in the fabric and ripped. A big bloody flap of cloth came away in his hand. “That line might still be hooked up to explosives,” he said to the young man with the gerbil’s face. The young man jerked his hand away from the wire as if he had been scalded. There was a deep gash in Watkins’ leg from which blood pulsed out at a slow steady rate. “You need St. Bart’s emergency ward,” he said, and looked up at Del Barca. “Give me your necktie.”

“My what?”

“Your tie. Do you want this man to bleed to death?”

La Barca resentfully untied his necktie and handed it to Poole. He turned to the undertaker. “All right, who is he?”

“I don’t remember his name, but he’s a doctor, all right.”

“My name is Dr. Michael Poole.” He wound Del Barca’s Countess Mara necktie three times around Watkins’ leg to stop the flow of blood and twisted it tight before knotting it. “You’ll be okay as soon as you get to St. Bart’s,” he told Watkins, and stood up. “I’d get him there as soon as you can. You could drive right up here and put him in your car.”

An almost aesthetic expression of distaste passed over Del Barca’s features. “Wait a second. Did you set up this … this booby trap?”

“I just recognized it,” Poole said. “From Vietnam.”

Del Barca blinked.

“That wire’s just tied to trees on both ends,” called the rabbit-faced boy. “Cut right through the bark.”

Watkins whimpered.

“Go on, Traddles,” Del Barca said. “Use your hearse. It’s closer.”

Traddles nodded gloomily and padded away downhill toward his hearse. His assistant followed him. “I was here for the Talbot funeral,” Poole said to Del Barca. “I walked over here to look at my son’s grave, and I saw a man disappearing into these woods. He looked so odd that I followed him, and when I saw that tripwire I got interested enough to follow him deeper into the woods. Then you started yelling at me. I guess the man just got away.”

“Musta been parked alongside the expressway,” said the younger man.

They watched Traddles drive toward them along the narrow lane. When he had come as close as he could, he got out of the cab and waited by the door. The assistant ran around and opened the back.

“Go on, get him up,” Del Barca said. “You can stand, Watkins. It wasn’t exactly an amputation.” He turned a sour, suspicious face to Michael. “I’m going to the police about this.”

“Good idea,” Michael said. “Have them check out that whole area back there, but tell them to be careful.”

The two men watched the big man limp off toward Traddles’ hearse, leaning on his small companion and hissing with every step. “Do you know the name of those flowers growing just inside the woods?” Michael asked Del Barca.

“We don’t plant flowers.” Del Barca gave a grim little smile. “We sell flowers.”

“Big blue and white ones,” Poole persisted. “With a strong, carrying scent.”

“Weeds,” Del Barca said. “If it grows back there, we pretty much let it go to hell by itself.”

6

When Michael returned to Conor’s empty apartment he looked out of the window down onto Water Street. He did not expect to see Victor Spitalny looking back up at him, for Spitalny would have had no trouble melting into his particular form of invisibility among the crowds of tourists that filled the renovated Water Street all during the weekends, but he gave the crowd a long look anyhow. He had to assume that Spitalny knew about the apartment, and that he was staying in it.

Poole had been shaken that afternoon, in more than one way. The appearance of Victor Spitalny had forced him to delay thinking about it, but something had shown itself to him—had revealed itself—before Robbie’s grave. Of course it had been a hallucination. Stress, anxiety, and guilt had pushed him over the edge of rationality. The wonderful odor that had seemed to accompany the appearance of a supernatural being had been the scent of early wildflowers. Still it had been a wonderful experience. In the midst of his pains and troubles he had momentarily seen everything as if for the first time. The internal weight of every particle of being had seized him with its own seriousness and power. He wished that he could describe this experience to someone who might understand it or have shared it.

He wanted to talk about it with Tim Underhill.

Poole gave a last look down at busy Water Street, and went back into the empty room. Conor’s jacket was not on the hook inside the front door. Michael went to the dining table and finally saw what he should have seen as soon as he entered. It was a small rectangle of paper torn from the pad beneath the phone in Conor’s little galley kitchen and on it was printed MIKEY.

Poole smiled and turned it over to read Conor’s message: Going up to Ellen’s place to be with her a couple days. You understand. Good luck in Milwaukee. Love, Conor. PS. She liked you. PPS. Here’s the number in case you have to call. A 203 number had been scrawled at the bottom of the note.

He took the playing card from his pocket and set it down next to the note on Conor’s table. I have no home. Koko had seen Beevers’ flyers. I am Esterhaz. This revealed that Spitalny had read Tim Underhill’s best book, and it also answered the phrase “We who know your real name.” And maybe it was a declaration that Spitalny intended to kill himself, as Esterhaz had done. If he felt like Esterhaz, Spitalny was in torment: like Esterhaz, he had killed too often and was becoming conscious of what he had done. Poole wanted to believe that Koko’s appearance in the cemetery had been a kind of farewell gesture, a last look at someone from his old life before he slit his wrists or put a bullet in his brain and found life eternal.

Backwards and forwards was still the locked door of a madman’s private code.

On another of the white message sheets from beneath Conor’s telephone Michael copied out the three lines of the message. Then he took a plastic baggie from a drawer, inserted the original with a tweezers, and folded down the flap. The paper fit neatly into the baggie. He dropped the little pin into the baggie.

He wrote a message to Lieutenant Murphy on another sheet of paper: I wanted to get this to you as soon as possible. It was pinned to a tree in the woods behind Memorial Park Cemetery in Westerholm. Koko must have followed me there when I went to a patient’s funeral. I am going out of town tomorrow, will call when I return. This note has been handled only by its edges. Dr. Michael Poole. He would buy a manila envelope before going to the airport, and mail everything to Murphy’s precinct.

Next he dialed Saigon’s telephone number to talk to Tim Underhill.

7

“So you escaped from Harry.”

“It just kind of made sense to move over here,” Underhill said. “There isn’t much room, but I can get out of Harry’s way, and I can get on with what I’m writing.” He paused. “And I can see my old friend Vinh, which is pure amazement. I couldn’t even be sure he was alive anymore. But he got out of Vietnam, made it to Paris, got married, and came here after a bunch of his relatives who were already living here made it possible. His wife died giving birth to his daughter, Helen, and he’s been raising her ever since. She’s a charming kid, and she took to me right away, too. I’m a sort of uncle, or maybe I should say auntie. She really is a dear little thing. Vinh brings her over here nearly every day.”

“Vinh isn’t living there with you?”

“Well, I’m just in a little room off the kitchen—the police still haven’t unsealed Tina’s loft. Vinh moved into the apartment where Helen had been staying. He had been staying there most nights anyhow, which is why he wasn’t around the night Tina was killed. One of his sister’s boys got married and moved to Astoria, so there’s an extra bedroom. Anyhow, I started writing again, and I’m about a hundred pages into a book.”

“You’re still planning to come to Milwaukee?”

“More than ever,” Underhill said. “I gather we will have Maggie’s company.”

“I hope so,” Poole said. “There’s something you ought to know about, which is the real reason I called.” He told him about seeing Koko and finding the card, and read its three lines aloud.

“He’s pretty confused. Something got to him. Maybe he regained enough sanity to want to quit what he’s doing. Being back in America would give him a whole series of shocks, if I can go by my own example. Anyhow, that mention of Hal Esterhaz makes me all the more interested in going to Milwaukee.”

Poole arranged to meet Tim at the airport at ten-thirty the next morning.

Then he called Conor, told him about seeing Koko, and advised him to stay at Ellen Woyzak’s house until their party returned from Milwaukee. Before he hung up he gave Conor the telephone number of the hotel where he had booked rooms for the next three nights.

“The Pforzheimer?” Conor asked. “Sounds like a brand of beer.”

He called Westerholm, but Judy was still refusing to speak to him. Michael told Pat Caldwell to switch on the elaborate yard lights he had installed the year after Robbie’s death and to be sure to call the police if she saw anyone near the house or heard any noises. He did not think that Koko would go after the women, but he wanted them to be prepared. He also told Pat about a shotgun he had taken down into his basement about the time he had stopped switching on the arc lights around his house every night, and gave her the number of the Pforzheimer Hotel. Pat asked him if all this was related to the man they had tried to find in Singapore, and Michael told her that it was not as simple as that, but that she was more right than wrong. Yes, he was going to Milwaukee to try to search for the man, and yes, he thought everything would be over soon.

When he hung up he walked to the window, looked again at the parade of people passing between the ice cream stores and the restaurants, then left the window and packed a couple of days’ clothing into a suitcase. Then he called his house again. Pat answered immediately.

“Are you sitting next to the phone?”

“Well, you didn’t exactly reassure me the last time you called.”

“I probably over-reacted,” Poole said. “This guy isn’t going to come out to my house. He has never attacked women alone. It’s people like Harry and me that he wants. Did you turn on those yard lights?”

“It looks like we’re opening a gas station.”

“When I put them in, I wanted to make everything as bright as possible. No hiding places.”

“I see what you mean. Haven’t the neighbors ever complained?”

“I kept them on for a few months a couple of years ago, and they never said anything about it. I think the trees screen everything pretty well. How’s Judy?”

“She’s okay—I told her I was humoring you.”

Judy still would not speak to him, so he and Pat said goodbye.

Finally he telephoned Harry Beevers.

“I’m here,” Beevers answered.

“It’s Michael, Harry.”

“Oh. You. Something on your mind? You’re still going, aren’t you?”

“Tomorrow morning.”

“Okay. Just checking. You hear about Underhill? What he did to me? The man moved out. It wasn’t enough for him that I gave him room and board and totally respected his privacy—it wasn’t enough that while he was here that crazy junkie was able to write whenever he wanted—I’m telling you, be careful around that guy. You can’t trust him. What I think—”

“Hold on, Harry. I know about that, but—”

“You know about that, huh?” Beevers’ voice had gone small and cold.

“Yes, Harry.”

“You should know about it, Michael. Who opened his mouth to a little girl, and told her that a certain person was in New York? I don’t think I did that, Michael. I’m pretty sure Conor didn’t do it. Somebody compromised our mission, Michael, and I’m afraid it’s you.”

“I’m sorry you feel that way about it.”

“I’m sorry you did what you did.” Beevers drew in another long breath. “I don’t suppose you even remember all the things I’ve done for you and this mission. I’ve done nothing but give, give, give all the way through this thing, Michael. I was court-martialed for you, Michael, I sat in a Quonset hut and waited for a verdict, I hope you never have to go through that—”

“I have something to tell you,” Poole broke in.

“I guess I better brace myself.”

Michael told him about the incident in the cemetery.

“You had an unconfirmed sighting? I suppose you’d better tell me everything.”

“I just did.”

“Okay, we’re into endgame. That’s all that means. He saw my stuff. Everything is working. I hope you did not call Murphy with this information.”

“I didn’t,” Poole said, not telling Beevers that he intended to mail the card to the policeman.

“I suppose I ought to be grateful for small favors,” Beevers said. “Give me the name and number of your hotel. If he’s at the stage of following us around and leaving notes, things are going to pop pretty soon. I might have to get in touch with you.”

Poole read in the little apartment for an hour or two, but felt so unsettled that he kept losing himself in the long sentences. At seven he realized that he had grown very hungry, and went out to eat. On the street he saw his car parked before the ice cream shop and remembered that Robbie’s Babar books were still in the trunk. He promised himself that he would remember to bring them up into the apartment after he had eaten.

8

He ate dinner in a little Italian restaurant and again immersed himself in The Ambassadors. The next day, he told himself, he would fly off into Koko’s childhood. He felt poised on the brink of some great change, but ready for it. The Health and Hospitals Corporation of New York gave fifty-thousand-dollar grants to doctors to set up storefront offices in places where people needed medical care, and after that loaned you money at the prime rate which you did not have to start repaying for two years. Two, three, four more days at the most, Poole thought; then he could finally get off the bridge and go into the places where he was needed. His whole body warmed.

9

When Poole got back to Conor’s apartment he turned on all the lights and sat down on a kitchen chair to read until he could go to bed. A feeling of unfinished business nagged at him until he remembered the Babar books and nearly decided to put on his coat and fetch them from the car. He stood up, walked past the telephone, and remembered something else.

He had never called the stewardess who had known Clement W. Irwin, Koko’s first American victim. Poole was surprised that he had remembered the man’s name.

But what was the name of the stewardess? He tried to remember the name of their own stewardess. Her name had been something like his. Mikey. Marsha. Michaela, Minnie, Mona. No—it had reminded him of an Alfred Hitchcock movie. Grace Kelly. A blonde … Tippi Hedren, the actress who had been in The Birds. Then he remembered the name as easily as if the name tag was still in front of him: Marnie. And Marnie’s friend had been named … Lisa. He groped for her last name. How could he have been stupid enough not to write it down. What’s your friend’s last name, he had asked her. “———–,” she had said. Something about Ireland. Lisa Dublin. Lisa Galway. That was close. Lisa Ulster. Like in Hellman’s, Marnie had said. Lisa Mayo.

Poole rushed to the phone and dialed information in New York City. She would not have a listed number, of course, nothing was that easy, and he would have to work out a way to get a stewardess’s telephone number from the airline that employed her. He asked for the listing, and the line went silent with an electronic clunk. That’s it, Poole thought, no listing, but a robot’s voice immediately came on the line, saying “The number you have requested is” and gave him seven digits, then repeated them.

Poole dialed, hoping it was the same Lisa Mayo. If it was, she was probably thirty thousand feet in the air, on her way back to San Francisco.

The telephone rang four, five times, and was picked up a second before Poole hung up.

A young woman said, “Yes.”

“My name is Dr. Michael Poole, and I am looking for the Lisa Mayo who is a friend of Marnie’s.”

“Marnie Richardson! Where did you meet her?”

“In an airplane coming back from Bangkok.”

“Marnie’s pretty wild. Uh, I gave up doing a lot of stuff when I moved out of San Francisco. It’s nice of you to call, but—”

“Excuse me,” Poole said. “I think you have the wrong idea. I’m calling about the man who was killed at JFK about three weeks ago, and Miss Richardson said that you knew him.”

“You’re calling about Mr. Irwin?”

“In part,” Poole said. “You did see him on the flight just before he was killed?”

“You bet I did. I saw him maybe a dozen times a year. He went back and forth to San Francisco almost as often as I do.” She hesitated. “I was shocked when I read about what happened to him, but I can’t say I was real sorry. He wasn’t a very nice man. Oh, I shouldn’t have said that. Mr. Irwin wasn’t popular with any of the crews, that’s all, he was a very demanding man. But what business is it of yours, anyway? Did you know Mr. Irwin?”

“I am primarily interested in the man who sat beside Mr. Irwin on the flight to New York. I wondered if you could remember anything about him.”

“Him? This is very mysterious. Besides, it’s getting late and I have an early call tomorrow. Are you a cop?”

The implications of that “him?” put goose bumps on Poole’s arms. “No, I’m a doctor, but I do have some connection with the police investigation of Mr. Irwin’s murder.”

“ ‘Some’ connection?”

“I’m sorry it’s so vague.”

“Well, if you think that guy who sat next to Mr. Irwin had anything to do with it, you’re really barking up the wrong tree.”

“Why?”

“Because he couldn’t have had anything to do with it. He couldn’t. I see a lot of people in the work I do, and that guy was one of the nicest, shyest … I felt sorry for him, having to sit next to the Beast. That’s what we called Mr. Irwin. Well, come to think of it, he even sort of charmed the Beast—he got Mr. Irwin to talk to him, and he got him to make a bet on something or other.”

“Do you remember his name?”

“It was some kind of Spanish name—Gomez, maybe? Cortez?”

There you are, Poole thought, and drew in a sharp breath.

“What?”

“Does Ortiz sound right? Roberto Ortiz?”

She laughed. “How did you know that? That’s right—and he said to call him Bobby. Bobby seemed just right, you know, he was just like a Bobby.”

“Is there anything specific you can remember about him? Anything he said, or talked about, or anything in particular?”

“It’s funny—when I look back on him, all I get is this blur with a smile in the middle of it. The whole crew liked him, I remember. But as for anything he said … wait … wait.”

“Yes?” Poole asked.

“I can remember something funny he did. He kind of sang. I mean, he didn’t sing a song, you know, a song with words, but he sang this kind of weird little thing.”

“What was it like?”

“Well, it was kinda strange. Like nonsense words—like a foreign language. But you could tell it wasn’t any real language. It was like … ‘pompo-po, pompo-po, polo, polo, pompo-po,’ something like that.”

The goosebumps were back on Poole’s arms. “Yes,” he said. “Thank you.”

“Is that all you wanted?”

“ ‘Pompo-po, pompo-po …’ or like ‘rip-a-rip-a-rip-a-lo’?”

“Pretty close,” the girl said.

PART

SEVEN

THE

KILLING

BOX

1

“I don’t know if there’s any name for those experiences,” Underhill said. He sat near the window, Poole on the aisle, Maggie between them. They were somewhere in the air over Pennsylvania, or Ohio, or Michigan. “You could call them peak experiences, but that’s a term that covers a lot of ground. Or you might call it ecstasy, since that’s what it sounds like. You might even call it an Emersonian moment. You know Emerson’s essay, ‘Nature’? He talks about becoming a transparent eyeball—‘I am nothing; I see all; the currents of Universal Being circulate through me.’ ”

“Sounds like just another way to face the elephant,” Maggie said in her precise unsentimental voice. Both Poole and Underhill laughed. “You should not make so much of it. When you saw your son, you should have expected something like this … experience to follow.”

“I didn’t see my son,” Poole began, and then his objections dried to powder in his mouth. He had not been certain that he was going to tell Underhill and Maggie about the “god,” and his uncertainty had continued even while he described what he had seen, but Maggie’s short sentence rang within him.

“But you did,” Maggie said. “You saw what he would be like as a man. You saw the real Robbie.” She looked at him very quizzically. “That’s why you loved the figure you saw.”

“Are you for hire?” Underhill asked.

“How much money you got?” Maggie asked in the same disinterested voice. “Going to cost you plenty, if you want me to keep saying the obvious.”

“I liked the theory that it was an angel.”

“I did too,” Maggie said. “Very possible.”

They rode on for a time in silence. Michael knew that Robbie could not have grown into the man he had seen: but he thought that he had been given a vision of a perfect Robbie, one in whom all his best instincts had flowered. It would have been some quality beyond happiness, something like rapture, to have fathered the man he had seen beside his son’s grave. In a sense he had fathered that man, exactly. No one else had. He had not hallucinated or imagined the man so much as he had authored him.

Poole felt as though with a few simple words Maggie Lah had restored his son to him. For as long as he lived, that boy was his, that man was his boy. His mourning was really over.

When at last he could speak again, Poole asked Tim if he had done any research for The Divided Man. “I mean, did you consult any guidebooks, anything like that?”

“I don’t think there are any guidebooks to Milwaukee,” Underhill said.

Maggie permitted herself an amused little noise that sounded very like a snicker.

“Most American cities don’t have guidebooks,” Underhill said. “I mainly remembered what M.O. Dengler used to say about it. After that I turned my imagination loose on it, and I guess it did a reasonable job.”

“In other words,” Michael said, “you could say that you authored the city.”

“I authored it,” Underhill agreed, looking faintly puzzled.

Maggie Lah turned a gleaming eye upon Poole. She astounded him by lightly patting his knee, as if in congratulation or commendation.

“Am I missing something?” Underhill asked.

“You’re doing pretty well so far,” Maggie said.

“Well, I have a thought about Victor Spitalny and his parents,” Tim said, trying to cross his legs and learning that he did not have enough room. “Imagine how most parents would feel if their child disappeared. Don’t you think that they would keep telling themselves that the child was still alive, no matter how long the disappearance lasted? I suppose that Spitalny’s parents are a little different from most. Remember—they made their kid feel like an adopted orphan, if my imagination is any good. They turned their kid into the Victor Spitalny we knew, and he later turned himself into Koko. So I’ll bet that his mother says she knows he’s dead. She already knows he killed Dengler. But I bet she knows that he’s done other killings.”

“So what will she think about us and what we’re doing?”

“She might just think we’re fools and humor us along with cups of tea. Or she might lose her temper and throw us out.”

“Then why are we on this airplane?”

“Because she might be an honest lady who had a cuckoo for a son. There are lots of different kinds of misfortune, and her son might have been one of the worst. In which case she’ll share any information she has.”

Underhill saw the expression on Michael’s face and added that the only thing he really knew about Milwaukee was that it was going to be about thirty degrees colder than New York.

“I think I can see why they don’t have many tourists,” Maggie said.

2

At one o’clock in the afternoon, Michael Poole stood at the window of his room in the Pforzheimer Hotel, looking down at what would have been a four-lane street if parallel drifts of snow nearly the height of the parking meters had not claimed half of the first lane on either side. Here and there cars had been submerged beneath the parallel ranges of old snow, and channels like mountain passes had been cut between the cars to provide passage to the sidewalk. On the cleared portion of the road, intermittent cars, most of them crusted with frozen khaki-colored slush, streamed past in single file. The green of the traffic light on Wisconsin Avenue, at the front of the hotel and at the very edge of Michael’s vision, gleamed out in the oddly dusky air as if through twilight. The temperature was zero degrees Fahrenheit. It was like being in the middle of Moscow. A few men and women bundled in thick coats moved quickly down the sidewalk toward the light. The light changed from a gleaming green nimbus to a gleaming red nimbus, and even though no cars appeared in the intersection, the pedestrians stopped to obey the DON’T WALK command.

It really was the city Dengler had described. Poole felt like a Muscovite looking at Moscow with eyes washed clean. He had finished the long, long process of mourning his son. What was left of Robbie was within him. He did not even feel that he needed the Babar books, which were still in the trunk of the Audi. The world would never be whole again, that was that, but when had the world been whole? His grief had flared up, then subsided again, and his eyes had been washed clean.

Behind him Tim Underhill and Maggie Lah were laughing at something Tim had drawled.

The lights at the end of the block changed to green, and the command switched to WALK. The pedestrians began to move across the street.

Maggie had been put into a single room next to this one, where Poole and Underhill had placed their bags on the two double beds. It was a high-vaulted room with faded flocked wallpaper, a threadbare carpet with a floral pattern, and a rococo mirror in a gilt frame. On the walls hung large nineteenth-century paintings of dogs panting over mounds of bloody dead pheasants and portraits of smug, big-bellied burghers in frock coats and striped satin waistcoats. The furniture was nondescript, worn, and sturdy, and the size of the room made it look small. In the bathroom the taps and fittings were brass, and the tub stood like a lion on four heavy porcelain paws. The windows, through which the three of them now looked down onto the street, extended nearly from floor to ceiling and were hung with dark brown swag curtains drawn back with worn, heavy velvet ropes. Poole had never been in a hotel room like it. He thought it was like being in some splendid old hotel in Prague or Budapest—through twenty-foot windows like these with such a vast, elegant, decaying room at his back, he should have heard the sounds of sleigh bells and horses’s hooves.

In the Pforzheimer’s lobby, uniformed midgets the size of the numerous ferns had stood before the polished mahogany of the registration desk; the clerk had worn half-glasses and a narrow bow tie, and looked out upon a rich landscape of shining brass, yards of tartan carpet, glowing lamps, and immense paintings so dark that big shapes loomed out of a general blur. There was of course no computer behind the desk. A wide staircase curved up toward what a plaque identified as the Balmoral Room, and down at the far end of the lobby, a corridor led past trees in pots and glass cases filled with the stuffed heads of animals toward a dimly glowing bar.

“I sort of feel that the Neva is only a pace or two away,” Poole said, looking out at the snow.

“And police in bearskin hats and leather boots to the knees strut up and down on the Prospekt,” Underhill said.

“Waiting to apprehend the naked men who have been forced out of the forest by the extreme cold,” Maggie said.

Yes, that was it. There would be a great forest only a mile or two distant, and at night if you opened the windows of ballrooms you would hear the cries of wolves.

“Let’s take a look at the telephone book,” Poole said, turning from the window.

“Let’s find the telephone book,” Underhill said.

The telephone itself, an old-fashioned black Bakelite model with a rotary dial but without the usual instructions for dialing the laundry, room service, the concierge, and the desk—without even a message light—stood on a military table beside Poole’s bed.

The two men began opening drawers in the various chests and cabinets against the walls. In a tall highboy Underhill found a television set that swiveled out on a shelf. Poole found a Gideon Bible and a booklet entitled “The Pforzheimer Story” in a long drawer lined with crinkly paper imprinted with Christmas trees. Underhill opened a cabinet between the tall windows and discovered rows of books. “My God,” he said, “a library. And what books! Kitty’s Pretty Muff, Mr. Ticker’s Toenail, Parched Kisses, Historic Residences of the Malay Peninsula… Oh!” He pulled out a battered copy of The Divided Man. “Does this mean I’m immortal, or does it mean I’m ridiculously obscure?”

“Depends on how you feel about Kitty’s Pretty Muff,” Maggie said, taking the book from the shelf. “Isn’t the telephone book in here somewhere?” She began to root in the lower half of the cabinet.

“Faeries, Tales, and Confusions at Birth,” Underhill said, removing another book from the shelves.

Maggie pulled a hidden lever, and another shelf moved into view from the back of the cabinet, carrying a silver cocktail shaker containing a musty collapsed web and a shriveled spider, a tarnished ice bucket, a nearly empty bottle of gin, a nearly full bottle of vermouth, and a bottle of rusty-looking olives. “This stuff must have been here since Prohibition,” Maggie said. “No telephone book, though.” She stood up, shrugged, and took her book to the couch.

“This isn’t much like traveling with Harry Beevers and Conor Linklater,” Poole said. “When I asked Conor if he wanted to change his mind about coming along with us, he said, ‘I got better ways to idolize my time.’ ” He looked out the window and saw big flakes of snow spinning through the close dark air.

“What’s your book about?” Underhill asked behind him.

“Torture,” Maggie said.

Poole heard car horns blasting, and stepped closer to the window. The heads of horses appeared at the far right of his vision, gradually pulling into view an empty hansom cab driven by a man with a fat purple face. The driver steered his cab imperiously down the center of the street, forcing oncoming cars out of its way.

“So is mine,” Underhill said. “Just kidding, Maggie. Keep your hands off.”

“No pictures in yours. Mine is nothing but pictures.”

“We got the right books.”

Poole turned from the window as Maggie left Underhill grinning on the couch behind her and marched with a look of mock determination to a low wooden chest beneath the mirror. Poole walked over and picked up Maggie’s book. On every page was a photograph of kittens dressed in jackets and hats of the 1920s. The kittens seemed to be held in place with metal straps and braces concealed beneath their outfits, and had been posed reading novels, dealing cards, playing tennis, smoking pipes, getting married.… The kittens’ eyes were glassy with terror, and all of them looked dead.

“Aha!” Maggie said. “The secret of the Pforzheimer!” She was brandishing a green telephone directory so thick she had to hold it with both hands.

“By George, I think she’s got it,” Underhill said.

Maggie sat on the end of the couch beside Poole and flipped open the book. “I didn’t think it would have so many names in it. What are we looking for? Oh yes, S, that’s right, Sandberg, Samuels, Sbarro …” She turned a wad of pages, then one other. “Here we are. Sperber. And Spitalny. And Spitalny and Spitalny and Spitalny, you wouldn’t think there’d be so many.”

Michael looked at the place where Maggie’s slim finger rested on the page. The finger moved down a column that began with Spitalnik, changed to Spitalny and stayed that way for something like twenty entries until it became Spitalsky.

He took the book across the expanse of the room to the bed, propped himself up on the pillows, held the book open on his lap, and moved the phone beside him. Maggie and Tim watched him from the couch, looking like the kittens in Maggie’s book. “Talk among yourselves,” Poole said. “ ‘Idolize your time.’ ”

“Did it ever occur to you that Conor Linklater is a genius?” Underhill asked Maggie.

“Mr. Spitalny?” Poole asked. “My name is Michael Poole, and I’m looking for the family of a man named Victor Spitalny who was in Vietnam with me. I wondered if you were related to him, or if you knew how I could get in touch with his family … Victor, that’s right … So nobody in your family was named Victor … Yes, he was from Milwaukee … Thanks anyhow.”

He depressed the button, dialed the next number, and when there was no answer, the one beneath that. A man who had been celebrating the snowfall answered and informed Michael in a slow, slurry voice that no such person as Victor Spitalny had ever existed, and hung up.

On the seventh listing, for E. Spitalny on South Mogrom Street, Poole had better luck. “You were in Vietnam with Victor?” a young woman asked him. “My goodness. All that seems a long time ago.”

Poole signaled to the two on the couch for writing paper. Underhill found a pad of hotel stationery and tossed it to Michael.

“He is in your family?”

“Oh, my goodness,” the girl said. “Vic was my cousin. You mean he’s still alive? You don’t know what this does to me.”

“There is a chance he’s still alive. Can you give me his parents’ telephone number? Are they both still living?”

“If you call it living. I don’t have their number right here, but you can find it in the book. George and Margaret, Uncle George and Aunt Margaret. Look, didn’t something funny happen to Vic? I thought he was in a hospital overseas, I guess I thought he must have died there.”

Poole scanned down the listings until he found Spitalny, George, 6835 S. Winnebago St., and circled it with his pen.

“It’s your impression he was hospitalized?”

“Well, I thought Uncle George … it was a long time ago.”

“You haven’t heard anything from him since the war?”

“Well, no. Even if he was alive, he’d hardly write to me, would he? We weren’t exactly buddies. Who did you say you were again?”

Michael repeated his name and that he and Victor were in the same unit in Vietnam. The girl said that her name was Evvie.

“I’m here with some friends from New York, Evvie, and we wanted to learn if anyone in his family had heard from Victor recently.”

“Not that I know about.”

“Can you tell me the names of any of your cousin’s friends? Names of girls he went out with? Or any of the places he used to go?”

“Gee, I don’t know,” said Evvie. “Vic was the sort of a guy who was kind of a loner. He did go to Rufus King, I know that. And for a while he went out with a girl named Debbie. I met her once, when I was a little kid. Debbie Maczik. She was so cute, I thought. And I think he used to go to a place called The Polka Dot. But mainly he used to work on his car, stuff like that, you know?”

“Can you remember the names of his friends?”

“One guy was named Bill, one guy was named Mack—that’s all I ever knew. I was only ten when Vic got drafted. My aunt and uncle will know all that stuff.”

“Would your uncle be home now?”

“You wanna call him? Probably not, he’s probably at work. I ought to be at work, I’m a secretary at the gas company, but I just couldn’t face it today, so I decided to stay home and watch the soap operas. Aunt Margaret ought to be home, though. She never goes anywhere.” Evvie Spitalny paused. “I guess I don’t have to tell you, this feels real strange. Talking about my cousin Vic. It’s funny. It’s like—you think you forgot all about a certain person, you know, and then bang, you get reminded all over again. My cousin wasn’t a real nice guy, you know.”

“No,” Poole said. “I guess he wasn’t.”

After Evvie had hung up, he dialed the number on Winnebago Street. An older woman with a flat nasal voice answered.

“Is this Mrs. Spitalny? Margaret Spitalny?”

“Yes, it is.”

“Mrs. Spitalny, you don’t know me, but I was in Vietnam with your son. We served together in the same unit for a year. My name is Michael Poole—Dr. Poole, now.”

“Oh, my goodness. Say what?”

He repeated most of what he had said.

“What did you say your name was?”

He repeated his name. “I’m in Milwaukee with Tim Underhill, another member of our unit, and a friend of ours. We’d very much like to see you and your husband, if that is at all possible.”

“See us?” Mrs. Spitalny seemed to speak only in questions.

“We’d like to come over and meet you, if we could. We arrived this morning from New York, and I found your name in the telephone book.”

“You came all the way from New York to see me and George?”

“We very much wanted to talk to you about Victor. I hope this isn’t too much of a nuisance, and I apologize for the suddenness of it, but do you think we could come out either this afternoon or tonight? We’d be interested in hearing anything you have to say about Victor, looking at photographs, that kind of thing.”

“You want to come to our house? Tonight?”

“If we can. Please don’t feel you have to feed us. We are just very interested in learning whatever we could about Victor.”

“Well, there isn’t that much to learn. I can tell you that right away.… You aren’t from the police, are you?”

Poole’s blood began to move a little faster. “No. I am a doctor, and Mr. Underhill is a writer.”

“The other one is a writer? This isn’t anything about the police? You promise?”

“Of course.”

“ ’Cause otherwise it would just kill my husband.”

“We are just old friends of Victor’s. There’s no need to worry.”

“I’d better call George at the Glax plant, that’s where he works. I’d better check with George. He has to know about this, or I’m in Dutch. It sounds so funny. Tell me where you are and I’ll call you back after I talk to George.”

Poole gave her the number and then, on impulse, asked, “Have you heard anything from Victor lately? We were very interested in knowing where we might be able to find him.”

“Heard from him lately? Nobody’s heard from Vic for more than ten years, Dr. Poole. I’ll call you back.”

Poole hung up. “Looks like you’re going to be right about his parents,” he said to Underhill.

“She’ll call back?” Maggie asked.

“After she talks to George.”

“What if George says no?”

“Then they probably have something to hide, and we’ll work on them until we talk them into letting us in the door.”

“And we’ll know everything they know in an hour,” Underhill said. “If they play it like that, they’ll be dying to get it off their chests.”

“So you’re hoping she will call back and say no?”

Underhill smiled and went back to reading his book.

After half an hour of reading and pacing the room, Poole looked out the windows again. Outside in Moscow, a small black car, turned the color of dead skin by winter filth, had burrowed head first into one of the mountain ranges of snow. The traffic had narrowed down to a single line in order to squeeze past it.

“Cards were invented for times like this,” he said.

“Mah-jongg was invented for times like this,” Maggie said. “Not to mention drugs and television.”

The telephone rang, and Poole snatched it up. “Hello?”

“This is George Spitalny,” said an aggressive male voice. “My wife said you called her up with some kind of cockamamy story.”

“I’m glad you called, Mr. Spitalny. My name is Dr. Michael Poole, and I was in your son’s unit in Vietnam—”

“Look, I only got a fifteen-minute break. Suppose you tell me what’s on your mind.”

“I was hoping that I could come over with another old friend of Victor’s tonight, to talk to you.”

“I don’t get it. What’s the point?”

“We’d like to know more about him. Victor was an important member of our unit, and we have a lot of memories of him.”

“I don’t like it. I don’t have to let you and your friend walk into my house.”

“No, you don’t, Mr. Spitalny. And I apologize for doing all this on such short notice, but my friends and I came from New York this morning, we don’t know anybody in Milwaukee, and we were just interested in hearing anything you had to say about Victor.”

“Damn. Who are these friends?”

“The man I mentioned, Tim Underhill, and a friend of ours named Maggie Lah.”

“She over there too?”

“No, she wasn’t. She came along to help us.”

“You say Victor was an important member of your unit? How so?”

“He was a good combat soldier. Victor was very reliable under fire.”

“Jeez, what horseshit,” Spitalny said. “I knew Vic better than you did, mister.”

“Well, that’s exactly why we wanted to talk to you. We do want to know more about him.”

Spitalny hummed to himself for a second. “You told my wife you wasn’t cops.”

“That’s right.”

“You just come out here to see us? In the middle of winter?”

“Last year we had a kind of reunion in Washington. There aren’t many of us left. We were interested in seeing what we could learn about Victor and another guy in our unit from Milwaukee. This is the time we had free.”

“Okay, you just wanta talk about Vic, I guess you could come out. Around five. I gotta get back to work.”

He gave directions to his house, and hung up.

Poole said, “He doesn’t want us there, but he gave in anyhow. He was nervous, and he doesn’t sound like the kind of man who gets rattled easily.”

“Now I think I’m nervous,” Maggie said.

Poole wandered back to the window. The black car was still stuck in the drift, and its rear wheels spun so hard that smoke lifted up from the road.

“Let’s look for Dengler’s parents,” Underhill said behind him.

Poole heard Underhill stand up and walk across the room to the telephone book. A yellow city bus was making its way up the street. Tired-looking people wrapped in coats and scarves sat like museum exhibits in the lighted windows. For a time the bus waited for the black car to get out of the snowbank. The driver cracked open his window and shouted something. The driver of the black car opened his door, stood on the ledge, and yelled to the bus driver. He was wearing a small tweed cap. Go around, he motioned. The driver shouted again, then disappeared into his car. The bus moved forward until it touched the right rear bumper of the black car. The car shuddered.

“Only one Dengler,” Underhill said. “On something called Muffin Street.”

The driver hopped out of the black car. The bus ground forward, and the car shuddered another few feet into the snow. The man in the cap was screaming at the bus—he made a rush at it and pounded at its side. His car slid another slanting inch or two into the bank. One of the parking meters began to tilt backwards in the snow. The man in the cap ran to his car, opened the trunk, and took out a tire iron. He whanged the front of the bus, then closed his trunk with the other hand. He went around to the side of the bus and began to slam the tire iron against the silver metal as the bus methodically pushed his car deeper into the snowbank. The head of the parking meter gradually sank out of sight. Then the bus swerved out into the center of the street. Car horns blasted. The man in the tweed cap ran after the bus as it toiled up the icy street, slamming the tire iron against the bus’s rear bumper. Each time he swung he took a little jump to clear the L’eggs advertisement on its back end. He looked like a furious little wind-up toy as he chased after the bus. The passengers in the back seat had turned around and were staring down with round rubbery faces that reminded Poole of the faces of newborn babies.

3

As they turned onto a wide long bridge Poole looked out of the window of their cab, expecting to see a river beneath them. Far beneath in a wide valley, smokestacks pushed out grey clouds like wings that froze and hung in the black air. Small red fires burned and danced at the tops of columns, and red lights shone far down at the heads of trains that clanked slowly forward, showering sparks.

“What’s that called?” Poole asked the cabdriver.

“Nothing.” The driver was an ageless being who smelled like curdled milk and must have weighed three hundred pounds. Tattoos covered the backs of both his hands.

“It doesn’t have a name?”

“We call it the Valley.”

“What’s down there?”

“Local companies. Glax. Dux. Muffinberg. Firms like that. Fluegelhorn Brothers.”

“Instrument makers?” Underhill asked.

“Ditching equipment, garbage bags, stuff like that.”

The Valley’s resemblance to a surrealist hell increased as they progressed over the bridge. The frozen grey wings mutated to slabs of stone, the flames became more numerous. Sudden spasmodic illuminations revealed, as if by lightning bolt, crooked streets, stalled trains, long factories with broken and boarded windows. What seemed like half a mile down a tiny red sign winked MARGE ‘N’ AL’S … MARGE ‘N’ AL’S.

“There are bars down there?”

“There’s everything down there.”

“Do people live in the Valley? Are there houses down there too?”

“Look,” the driver said. “You’re an asshole, that’s okay with me. If you don’t like it, you can get outa this cab. All right? I don’t need your shit.”

“I didn’t mean—”

“Just shut up and I’ll take you where you wanna go. Okay with you?”

“Okay with me,” Poole said. “Sure. You bet.”

Maggie put her hands over her mouth. Her shoulders were shaking.

“Driver, is there a bar called The House of Correction in this town?” Underhill asked.

“I hearda that one,” the driver said.

The cab hit a patch of ice at the end of the bridge, skidded nearly halfway around, then straightened out again. The smell of chocolate momentarily filled the cab.

“What’s that from?” Underhill asked. “The smell.”

“Chocolate factory.”

Now they drove endlessly on streets both broad and narrow bordered by two-story houses with tiny porches. Every block had its own bar named something like Pete ‘N’ Bill’s and covered with the same peeling brickface or asphalt siding as the little houses. Some blocks had two bars, one on each corner. Tall chain fences blocked off vacant lots heaped with snow that looked blue and cancerous beneath the streetlamps. Every now and then a beer sign burned in the window of what otherwise looked like a private house. On the brightly lighted corner before SAM ‘N’ ANNIE’S GOOD TIMES LOUNGE, a fat man in a wolfskin parka was braced before a big black dog. The cab stopped at the traffic light. The man struck the dog with his left hand, slapping it hard enough to rock it to its side. Then he struck it with his right hand. Poole could see the man grinning, showing his teeth inside the parka. He hit the dog again, and the animal backed up, crinkling its lip away from its long teeth. Again the man smashed his hand against the dog’s head. This time the dog slipped, and skittered on the ice pavement before it got its footing again. The dog lowered its shoulders and inched backward. Poole was staring at the man and the dog—the man owned the dog, this was how he played with it. The light changed, and the cab moved ahead through the empty intersection just as the dog charged. Both Poole and Underhill craned their necks to look through the rear window. All they could see was the man’s pale furry back, broad as a tractor, jerking from side to side as he and the dog engaged.

Ten minutes later the cab pulled up before one of the two-story frame houses. The numbers 6 8 3 5 had been nailed to the top of the porch. Poole opened the door and began paying the driver. The air instantly burned his cheeks, his forehead, his nose. His fingers had turned clumsy in the cold. “Were you in Vietnam?” he asked. “I saw the Airborne insignia on your hands.”

The driver shook his head. “I’m only twenty years old, pop.”

They hurried up the icy concrete walk. The steps sagged, and the porch tilted to the right. Over the original surface of the house, green pebbly asphalt paper had been applied, and flaps had begun to peel away from the door and windows. Poole pushed the bell. The smell of chocolate surprised him again.

“Just a sweet and sour kind of town,” Underhill said.

“Sweet ‘n’ sour,” Maggie said.

The door opened, and a short stocky man with thinning black hair plastered straight back against his skull frowned through the storm door. He was wearing khaki trousers and a clean, starched khaki work shirt with double front pockets. His hard little eyes scanned the two men and stopped moving when they reached Maggie. He had not expected anything like her, and he did not really recover until she smiled at him. He gave Poole a dark look, then broke down and cracked the storm door open a few inches.

“You the people who called?”

“Mr. Spitalny?” Poole asked. “May we come in?”

George Spitalny pushed open the storm door and stood there propping it open and scowling until the three visitors had edged around him into the entry. Poole smelled sausage and boiled cabbage. “Go on,” Spitalny’s father said, “I gotta close the door.” Everybody jostled together to allow it to swing closed. “In there.”

Poole followed Maggie and Underhill through a doorway into a living room where an anxious-looking woman in a flowered housedress stood clutching her hands before a sofa covered in plastic. Her face froze when she saw Maggie, and her eyes darted toward her husband. George Spitalny stayed in the entrance, unwilling to help. It was clear that both of them had been sitting on the sofa, staring out the window, waiting for a car to pull up, and now that the company had come neither one of them knew what to do.

Maggie stepped forward and held out her hand to Mrs. Spitalny. She introduced the two men, who also stepped forward.

Mr. Spitalny hurriedly shook the hands of the men, and said, “Well, I guess you better take a pew.” He moved to a large green recliner and hitched up his trouser legs before he sat down. Maggie, still smiling for all she was worth, sat down next to Mrs. Spitalny.

“Well,” George Spitalny said.

“You have a beautiful home, Mrs. Spitalny,” said Maggie.

“It suits us. What did you say your name was?”

“Maggie Lah.”

Margaret Spitalny tentatively held out her hand toward Maggie, then realized that she had already shaken her hand, and snatched her hand back.

“Still snowing, is it?” she asked.

Her husband looked out the window. “Stopped.”

“Oh. My.”

“Couple hours back.”

Poole realized that he was looking at a photograph of Governor George Wallace, beaming from his wheelchair in the midst of a crowd. Porcelain deer, gnomes, and dairy maids stood on a round table beside him. The floor had been covered with green linoleum. Everything was very clean.

George Spitalny took another shuttered look at Maggie, then frowned down at his shoes on the bright linoleum.

These people had no idea of how to act when other people were in their house, Poole realized. If it had not been for Maggie, they would all still be standing inside the door.

“So you people knew Victor,” George Spitalny said. He looked at Poole, then gave another doubtful glance at Maggie.

“Dr. Poole and I served with him,” Underhill said.

“Doctor, are you?”

“Pediatrician.”

“Umm.” George pursed his lips. “Well. I still don’t know what you people expect to find. I think all this is a big waste of your time. We got nothing to say on the subject of Victor.”

“Oh, George.”

“Maybe you got something to say. I don’t know what.”

“Maybe these men would like a beer, George?”

“Got some Hamm’s,” George said.

“Please,” they said, and George walked through the door, relieved to have something to do.

“I hope you don’t think we’re wasting our time, Mrs. Spitalny,” Underhill said, leaning forward and smiling at her. In his bulky sweater and blue jeans, Underhill looked utterly at ease, and for as long as she could focus on him, Mrs. Spitalny relaxed.

“I don’t know why George said that. He’s still upset about Vic, I guess. He’s proud, you know—very proud.”

She closed her mouth and threw her eyes out of focus again as her husband returned to the room carrying three bottles of beer with water glasses upended on their necks. He held them out toward Michael, who gingerly took the first from his fingers. The second beer went to Underhill, and he kept the third for himself. Maggie gave Mrs. Spitalny another bright smile.

George Spitalny sat down and poured his beer. “Bet you don’t get this where you come from, huh? Most people around here won’t drink nothing but the local brews. It’s all Pforzheimer’s with most of your people here. They don’t know what they’re missing. And I’ve tried your New York beer. Swill, I thought. Plain swill.”

“George.”

“Wait till they try this. It’s the water that makes the difference. I always say that, it’s the water.”

“Sure it’s the water,” Underhill said. “You bet it’s the water.”

“What else could it be?”

“Did Vic have friends?” Margaret Spitalny broke in, speaking directly to Tim Underhill. “Did you people like him?”

“Well, sure he had friends,” Underhill said. “He was very close to Tony Ortega. And a lot of other people. Isn’t that true, Mike?”

“Sure,” said Poole, trying not to see Victor Spitalny attempting to saw the ear off Anthony Ortega’s corpse with his K-bar. “We were his friends. We went out on a lot of missions with Victor.”

“Victor saved their lives,” Maggie said with a smile so forced that Poole could feel its strain. “Why don’t you tell the Spitalnys about that?” Poole and Underhill looked at each other for a moment, and Maggie chimed in, “In Dragon Valley. Well, maybe he didn’t save your lives exactly, but he kept everybody calm and he followed the medic around.…”

“Oh,” Poole said. Both George and Margaret Spitalny were staring at Poole, and with a silent apology to Dengler’s ghost, he began, “Well, on Lieutenant Beevers’ first day in the field, he got lost and led us into an ambush …”

When he had finished, Margaret Spitalny said, “Vic never told us anything like that.”

“Vic never bragged about himself,” Underhill said.

“Anything else like that ever happen?” George asked.

“Did he ever tell you about the time he carried a wounded soldier named Hannapin on his back about three or four miles?”

Both Spitalnys shook their heads, absolutely riveted, and Poole told another Dengler story.

“Well, maybe the service made a man of him after all,” his father said, looking sideways at George Wallace in his wheelchair. “I believe I’ll have another beer.” He stood up and left the room again.

“God bless you, boys,” said Margaret Spitalny. “And you too, miss. Do you all work for the army?”

“No, we don’t,” said Poole. “Mrs. Spitalny, do you have any letters or postcards, or anything at all from Victor? Any photographs of him?”

“After—you know, after we heard, George took everything of Vic’s from the service and burned it. Every little scrap.” She closed her eyes for a moment. “I have all the pictures from when he was little and some from high school.”

“Has he been in touch with you at all since he left the army?”

“Of course not,” she said. “Vic’s dead.”

Mr. Spitalny came through the door with more beer bottles, this time with one for Maggie. “I forgot a glass,” he told her. “Can you drink it out of the bottle?”

“No, George, she’s a lady, she needs a glass,” his wife said, and, after distributing the other bottles of Hamm’s, he left the room again. “George won’t admit it, but I know. Vic’s been dead a long time.”

“It seemed to us that he might be alive,” Michael said. “We—”

George Spitalny returned with a glass and gave it to Maggie with a long look. “Where’d a girl like you pick up such good English?”

“New York City.”

Blink.

“I came here when I was six.”

“Born over there in Vietnam, were you?”

“I was born in Formosa.”

Blink.

“I am Chinese.” Maggie was smiling so broadly Poole thought her cheek muscles must hurt.

“But you knew Victor.”

“I only heard about him.”

“Oh.” He was deterred for only a moment. “Think you’re ready for one of our good old Milwaukee suppers?”

“Not yet, George,” said his wife.

“You ever hear of the Glax Corporation, honey? One of the biggest outfits in the States. You ever hear about it over in China?”

Maggie’s expression of rapt interest did not waver.

“Circuit breakers. Big plant in the Valley. You probably saw it on the way over here. If you’re in town long enough, you oughta pay a visit, I’ll show you around, introduce you to everybody. How about that?”

“Very exciting,” Maggie said.

“Lots of good places around there, too—lots of surprises in this little old town.”

Poole watched George Spitalny leaning forward in his reclining chair, eating up Maggie Lah with his eyes. He had forgotten his wife and the two men. He felt great—he had heard unexpectedly good news about his son, he had a beer in one hand, and a girl who looked like Sex Incarnate was sitting on his living room couch. He was an awful man. He had burned Victor’s effects because of wounded narcissism. Poole felt an unexpected stab of pity for Victor Spitalny, growing up under the thumb of this vain, arrogant, inadequate man.

“What was Victor like as a boy?” he asked.

George Spitalny turned his face heavily, almost warningly toward Poole. Don’t mess with my action, sonny. Before he answered, he chugged down his beer and nearly winked at Maggie. “He didn’t amount to much, that’s the sad truth. Vic was kind of an unhappy kid. Cried a lot, didn’t he?”

A look of pure cold indifference for his wife.

“Oh, Vic cried. All babies cry.”

“He was a big disappointment. Never had friends until he got to high school. Never made his grades. He wasn’t even any good at sports, like I thought he was gonna be. Here, I got something to show you.” He gave Maggie a tight, almost shy smile and stood up again and left the room. They could hear him rapidly climbing the stairs.

“You said that Vic might be alive?” Margaret Spitalny asked Poole.

“We think it might be a possibility.”

“There’s no record of his death,” Underhill said in a gentle voice. “He just disappeared. And he was in Thailand, so he could have just stayed there—or gone any of a dozen different places. He could have bought a new identity. You really haven’t had even a postcard from him since his disappearance?”

Heavy footsteps came thumping back down the stairs, and Margaret Spitalny shook her head and glanced at the door. Her hands had begun to tremble. “I don’t think—” She stopped speaking when her husband burst into the room, this time carrying a photograph in an old silver frame.

“Take a look at that, Maggie.” He thrust it at her. Margaret looked sidelong at Poole, then looked down into her lap.

“Better see to the supper.” She stood up and without looking at him moved around her husband, who was still grinning down at Maggie and breathing a little hard from his exertions on the stairs.

Poole moved closer to Maggie to look at the photograph. It was an old studio picture of a young man in a baseball uniform, posing with a bat in his hands. At eighteen or nineteen, George Spitalny had looked much like the son he would father—the same narrow head and widow’s peak. He was more muscular than Victor had been, however, sturdier, more forceful: the face was that of a young man as unpleasant as Victor, but in a completely different way.

“Not bad, huh? That was me, 1938. What do you think of that?”

Maggie made no comment, and Spitalny took her silence as an inability to find adequate words. “I don’t think I look too different now, even though it’s about fifty years later. Next year I hit my retirement, and I’m still in damn good shape.” He angled the photograph toward Michael for a moment, then toward Underhill before turning it back to Maggie. “That’s the way a young man ought to look. Right? Well, when I looked at my kid—I mean the day Vic was born, when they brought him out to me so I could see him, I looked down at this little baby, and I got this tremendous shock. Here I was thinking I would just love this kid, love him to death. Isn’t that supposed to be automatic? I thought that was supposed to be automatic. But I couldn’t feel anything, really. I couldn’t get over how goddamned ugly the kid was. Right away, I saw he was never gonna measure up to me. And you might call that psychic, or whatever, but I was right—he never did. Never. Not once. When he had that girlfriend in high school, that Debbie Maczik, I couldn’t figure out how he could hold onto a girl cute like that. Tell you the truth, I used to think she used to come around here to see me, more than she liked to see him.”

“Ready,” Margaret called from somewhere in the rear of the house.

George Spitalny let Maggie feast a while longer on the photograph, then set it down on top of the television. “You guys go on back to the kitchen and sit down. I gotta go to the little boy’s room.”

4

“And what happened when we finally saw the pictures?” Tim asked, smiling at Maggie in the backseat of the cab during their ride back to the hotel.

Michael too had been waiting to ask this question.

After their dinner—“Put some of the ketchup on your kielbasa, Maggie, it’s what we have here instead of soy sauce”—Mrs. Spitalny had finally gone upstairs and brought back from wherever they had been cached her pictures of Victor. Both Spitalnys had resisted showing these photographs, but when they had arrived George had taken charge, declaring some of them useless, others ridiculous, a few too ugly to be shown. In the end, they had been shown three photographs: one of a confused-looking boy of eight or nine on a bicycle, one of a teenage Victor leaning against the hood of an old black Dodge, and the third the standard end-of-basic-training yearbook photograph.

None of these precisely had resembled the Victor Spitalny remembered by Poole and Underhill. It was something of a shock that Victor Spitalny had ever looked as innocent as the boy in the warrior photograph. Leaning against the car with his arms crossed over his T-shirt, he looked surly but proud, for once in control of himself. In his pose was a long history of Elvis-worship. Oddly, it was the picture of the little boy that had most evoked the Victor Spitalny of Vietnam.

“Could you recognize him?” Michael asked.

Maggie nodded, but very slowly. “It had to be him. It was very dark in the loft, and the face in my memory has been getting vaguer and vaguer—but I’m pretty sure it was him. Also, the man I saw was crazy, and the boy in the pictures didn’t look crazy. But if I were a boy and had that man for a father, I’d be crazy too. He thought the worst thing about his son’s being a deserter was the injury it gave to his own ego.”

“You have those telephone numbers?” Underhill asked.

She nodded again. George and Margaret Spitalny had looked up the numbers of Bill Hopper and Mack Simroe, both of them now married, living in their old neighborhood and working in the Valley, and of Deborah Maczik Tusa. Tomorrow they would rent a car to go back to the South Side. Poole remembered the unfocused, inward-gazing expression of the unattractive little boy on his bicycle. Desperate, someone had said (probably Maggie): that was why the photo of the eight-year-old Victor Spitalny looked more like the man they had known than the more adult photographs they had been shown. Only in the face of the boy on the bicycle, with his protruding ears and big adult front teeth in his child’s face, could you see his desperation.

5

Back in the double room, Underhill took off the black wide-brimmed hat and long black coat he must have picked up on Canal Street, and Poole called downstairs and ordered what looked like the best red wine on the Pforzheimer’s list, a 1974 Chateau Talbot, and a Sprite for Underhill. They all wanted something to take the taste of their dinner from their mouths.

“You even put ketchup on your cabbage,” Maggie said to Tim.

“I just asked myself, what would Conor Linklater do if he were here?”

“Who do we call first?” Michael asked. “Debbie, or one of the boys?”

“Would he have written to her?”

“Possible,” Poole said, and dialed Debbie Tusa’s number.

A teenage boy answered the phone and said, “You want my mom? Hey, Mom! Mom! A guy on the phone!”

“Who’s this?” asked a tired voice a moment later. Poole could hear a television set bellowing in the background.

He introduced himself and briefly explained what he was doing.

“Who?”

“Vic Spitalny. I believe you used to go out with him when you both attended Rufus King High School.”

She said nothing for a moment. “Oh, my God. Who are you again?”

Poole again recited his name and history.

“And where did you learn my name?”

“I’ve just been with Victor’s parents.”

“Vic’s parents,” she said. “George and Margaret. Well, well. I haven’t thought about that poor guy in about ten years, I bet.”

“So you haven’t heard anything from him since he went into the service.”

“Since long before that, Doctor. He dropped out of school in our senior year, and I had been going out with Nick, that’s the guy I married, for a year already. Nick and I split up three years ago. How come you’re interested in Vic Spitalny?”

“He kind of slipped out of sight. I’m interested in what happened to him. Why did you call him ‘that poor guy’ just now?”

“I guess that’s pretty much what he was. I went out with him, after all, so I never thought he was as bad as the other kids did. In fact I thought he was kind of sweet, but … Vic wasn’t what you’d call a real oddball, there was at least one guy who was worse off than what he was, it was just, nobody would give him a chance. He was kind of shy—he loved working on his car. But I hated going to his house.”

“Why?”

“Old George’s tongue used to drop out of his mouth the second I set foot on the sidewalk—he was always touching me. Ugh. I could see what he was doing to Vic—he just cut him down, all the time. I just couldn’t take it anymore, eventually. Then Vic dropped out of school. He was flunking a lot of courses, anyway. And he got drafted.”

“You never heard from him after that?”

“I just heard about him,” she said. “It was in all the papers, when he deserted. Pictures and everything. Right before Nick and me got married. There was Vic on the front page of the Sentinel. Second section. All that stuff about his running away when that Dengler guy was killed—everything about that was weird. It was even on TV that night, but I still didn’t believe it. Vic wouldn’t do anything like that. It all seemed so mixed up to me. When the army guys came around after that—you know, investigating—I said, you guys made a mistake. You got it wrong.”

“What do you think happened, then?”

“I don’t know. I guess I think he’s dead.”

Room service arrived. Underhill let Maggie taste and approve the wine, tipped the waiter, and brought Michael a glass just as he finished his conversation with Debbie Tusa. The wine immediately dissolved the greasy taste of the sausage.

“Cheers,” Maggie said.

“She doesn’t even think he deserted.”

“His mother doesn’t either,” Maggie said. Poole looked at her in surprise. She must have picked up this information on her Maggie-radar.

Bill Hopper, one of Spitalny’s high school friends, said in the course of Michael’s short conversation with him that he knew nothing about Victor Spitalny, had never liked him, and didn’t want to know anything about him. Vic Spitalny was a disgrace to his parents and to Milwaukee. Bill Hopper was of the opinion that George Spitalny, with whom he worked at the Glax Corporation, was one hell of a good man who had deserved a better son than that. He went on for a time, then told Poole to get off his case, and hung up.

“Bill Hopper says our boy was a sicko, and nobody normal liked him.”

“You didn’t have to be normal to dislike Spitalny,” Underhill said.

Poole sipped the wine. His body suddenly felt limp as a sack. “I wonder if there’s any point in my calling this other guy. I already know what he’s going to say.”

“Aren’t you going on the theory that Spitalny will eventually turn to someone for help?” Maggie asked innocently. “And here we are in Milwaukee.”

Poole picked up the phone and dialed the last number.

“Simroe.”

Poole began speaking. He felt as though he were reading lines.

“Oh, Vic Spitalny,” Mack Simroe said. “No, I can’t help you find him. I don’t know anything about him. He just went away, didn’t he? Got drafted. Well, you know that, right? You were there with him. Umm, how did you get my name?”

“From his parents. I had the impression they thought he was dead.”

“They would,” Simroe said. Poole could hear him smiling. “Look, I think it’s nice you’re looking for him—I mean, it’s nice somebody’s looking for him, but I never even got a postcard from the guy. Have you talked to Debbie Maczik? Debbie Tusa, she is now?”

Poole said that she had not heard from him either.

“Well, maybe that’s not too surprising.” Simroe’s laugh sounded almost embarrassed. “Considering, I mean.”

“You think he’d still be that guilty about his desertion?”

“Well, not only that. I mean, I don’t think the whole story ever came out, do you?”

Poole agreed that it had not, and wondered where all this was going.

“Who’s going to go check up on a thing like that? You’d have to go to Bangkok, wouldn’t you?”

You would, and he had, Poole said.

“So was it just coincidence, or what? It sure seemed funny at the time. The only guy worse off than he was—the only guy who was as much of a loser as he was, actually more so.”

“I’m not sure I’m following you,” Poole said.

“Well, Dengler,” Simroe said. “It sure looked funny. I guess I thought he must have killed him over there.”

“Spitalny knew Dengler before they got to Vietnam?”

“Well, sure. Everybody knew Dengler. All the kids did. You know how everybody knows the one kid who just can’t get it together, whose clothes are all raggy—Dengler was a basket case.”

“Not in Vietnam, he wasn’t,” Poole said.

“Well, naturally Spitalny hated Dengler. When you’re down low, you hate whatever’s beneath you, right?”

Poole felt as though he had just stuck his finger in a socket.

“So when I saw in the paper about Manny Dengler dying over there and Vic running away, I thought there must be more to it. So did most people, most people who knew Manny Dengler, anyhow. But nobody expected to get any postcards from him. I mean …”

When Poole hung up, Underhill was staring at him with eyes like lanterns.

“They knew each other,” Poole said. “They went to school together. According to Mack Simroe, Dengler was the only kid who was even more out of it than Spitalny.”

Underhill shook his head in wonder. “I never even saw them talk to each other, except that once.”

“Spitalny arranged to meet Dengler in Bangkok. He set it up in advance. He was planning to kill him—they worked out a place to meet, just the way he did with the journalists fourteen years later.”

“It was the first Koko murder.”

“Without the card.”

“Because it was supposed to look like mob violence,” Underhill said.

“Goddamn,” Poole said. He dialed Debbie Tusa’s number again, and the same teenage boy yelled, “HEY, MOM! WHO IS THIS GUY?”

“I give up, who are you?” she said when she picked up.

Poole explained who he was and why he was calling again.

“Well, sure Vic knew Manny Dengler. Everybody did. Not to speak to, but to see. I think Vic used to tease him now and then—it was sort of cruel, and I didn’t like it. I thought you knew all about it! That’s why it seemed so mixed up to me. I couldn’t figure out what they were doing together. Nicky, my husband, thought Vic stabbed Manny or something, but that has to be crazy. Because Vic wouldn’t have done anything like that.”

Poole arranged to meet her for lunch the next day.

“Spitalny came into our unit and found Dengler there,” Underhill was saying to Maggie. “But everything has changed about Dengler—he’s loved by everybody. Did he talk to him? Did he make fun of him? What did he do?”

“Dengler talked to him,” Poole said. “He said, a lot of things have changed since high school. Let’s just make like we never met until now. And in a way, they never had met—Spitalny had never met our Dengler before.”

“When they came out of the cave,” Underhill said, “didn’t Dengler say something like ‘Don’t worry about it? Whatever it was, it was a long time ago.’ I thought he meant—”

“I did too—whatever Beevers did in there. I thought he was telling Spitalny to cut himself loose from it.”

“But he was saying it was a long time since Milwaukee,” Underhill said.

“He meant both,” Maggie said. “Backwards and forwards, remember? And he knew that Spitalny wouldn’t be able to handle whatever happened to all of them in there. He knew who Koko was right from the start.” Suddenly Maggie yawned, and closed her eyes like a cat. “Excuse me. Too much excitement. I think I’ll go next door and go to bed.”

“See you in the morning, Maggie,” Underhill said.

Poole walked Maggie to the door, opened it for her, and said “Goodnight.” On impulse he stepped out into the hallway after her.

Maggie raised her eyebrows. “Walking me home?”

“I guess I am.”

Maggie moved down the hallway to her own door. The corridor was noticeably colder than the rooms.

“Tomorrow the Denglers,” Maggie said, putting the key in the lock. She seemed very small, standing in the immense dim corridor. He nodded. The look she gave him deepened and changed in quality. Poole suddenly knew how it would feel to put his arms around Maggie Lah, how her body would fit into his. Then he felt like George Spitalny, drooling over Maggie.

“Tomorrow the Denglers,” he said.

She looked up at him oddly: he could not tell if what he thought he had just seen, the increase in weight and gravity, had been real. It had been like being touched. Poole thought that he wanted Maggie to touch him so badly that he had probably invented everything.

“Want to come in?” she asked.

“I don’t want to keep you up,” Poole said.

She smiled and disappeared around her door.

6

Harry Beevers stood on Mott Street, looking around and thinking that he needed a killing box: someplace where he could watch Koko until it was time to either capture him or kill him. Spitalny would have to be led into a trap where Harry controlled the only way in or out. Harry considered that he was good at setting up killing boxes. Killing boxes were a proven skill. Like Koko, he had to pick his own battleground—draw his victim out into the territory he had chosen.

Some of Harry’s flyers had been ripped off and thrown away, but most of them still called out from lampposts and shop windows. He began to walk south down Mott Street, sharing it on this cold day with only a few hurtling Chinese, heavily bundled and chalky with the cold. All he had to do was find a restaurant that looked quiet enough for his initial rendezvous with Spitalny—he would soothe him with food—and then work out where to take him afterwards. His apartment was out, though in some ways its seclusion was perfect. But he had to take Koko someplace which would in itself constitute an alibi. A dark alley behind a police station would be just about perfect.

Beevers could see himself slumping out of the alley like some heroic Rambo, heavy-shouldered, panting, spattered with his enemy’s blood, gesturing a crowd of stupefied officers toward Spitalny’s body—There’s the man you’re looking for. Jumped me while I was bringing him in.

He had to buy a good knife, that was one thing he had to do. And a pair of handcuffs. You could snap a pair of handcuffs on a man before he knew what was happening. Then you could do what you liked to him. And unlock the handcuffs before the body hit the floor.

On the corner of Bayard Street he hesitated, then turned east toward Confucius Plaza. He came to Elizabeth Street, turned in and walked back north a few steps before deciding it was all wrong—nothing but tenements and murky little Chinese businesses. Koko would see it for a trap right away—he’d know a killing box when he saw one. Harry went back to Bayard Street and continued on toward Bowery.

This was a lot more promising.

Across Bowery stood Confucius Plaza, an immense office and apartment complex. On one corner stood a bank shaped like a modernist pagoda in red lacquer, across the street a Chinese cinema. Cars swept unendingly around a long traffic island that extended from Bowery around the corner into Division Street. At the apex of the traffic island was a tall statue of Confucius.

This was too public for his meeting with Koko. He looked across the street to the Plaza. A lower building, of perhaps fifteen stories, fronted Bowery, blocking from view the lower half of the taller residential tower. The buildings had a slightly molded look that carried the eye along, and behind them, Harry thought, must be a terrace or a plaza—trees and benches.

And that gave it to him—at least half of it. Into his mind had come the image of the park bordered by Mulberry and Baxter streets near the western end of Chinatown. Now this park would be empty, but in the spring and summer the little park was crowded with lawyers, bailiffs, judges, and policemen taking a break from their duties. This was Columbus Park, and Harry knew it well from his early days as a litigator—he had never really connected it to Chinatown in his mind. Columbus Park was an adjunct to the row of government buildings lined up along Centre Street.

The Criminal Courts building stood between Centre and Baxter at the top end of Columbus Park; down at the bottom end was the smaller, more prisonlike structure of the Federal Courthouse; and further south, between Worth and Pearl streets, a block from the park, was the even more penitential structure, grim and dirty and oozing gloom at all seasons, of the New York County Courthouse.

Harry instantly discarded the notion of meeting Koko in a restaurant. He would ask him to meet in Columbus Park. If Koko had moved into Chinatown, he would know the park by now, and if he had not, the idea of meeting in a park would serve to make him feel secure. It was perfect. It would look good in the book too, and play beautifully in the movie, but it would be fiction. The meeting in Columbus Park would be part of the myth; it did not have to be real to be part of the myth. For Harry intended only to make Koko think that they would meet in the park. Harry would send him through somewhere else first, and that would be his killing box.

Harry stood freezing on the corner of Bayard Street and Bowery. A black stretch limousine pulled up to the curb before him and two short, pudgy Chinese men with glossy tiny feet got out of the backseat. They wore dark suits and sunglasses, and their hair was slicked back. They looked like twin dwarfs with zombie faces and stiff, self-important movements. One of them slammed the door of the limousine, and they strode across the sidewalk to push their way into one of the restaurants across from Confucius Plaza. One of them passed within a foot of Harry without in any way registering his presence. Harry thought that if he had been standing in his path, the little gangster would have knocked him over and walked across his body the way Elizabeth walked over Raleigh’s cloak.

He moved across the sidewalk to the car. Harry felt even colder than before—in every car that sped down Bowery, in every apartment in Confucius Plaza, was a flat-faced chink who did not care if Harry Beevers lived or died. How had all the little bastards clawed their way up out of the laundries? He bent over the trunk of the limousine and looked down at sixteen layers of meticulously applied black lacquer. The skin of the car looked as deep as a lake. Harry gathered a good gob of phlegm and saliva in his mouth and spat it onto the trunk of the limousine. It began to slide a bit toward the fender.

Harry stepped back from the car and began to walk up the block. He was on the verge of thinking that now he was wasting his time here and that he should be checking out Bayard Street’s western end when the smooth, unbroken row of Chinese restaurants ceased and he found himself staring into a cave. His feet stopped moving and his heart thumped like the kick of a rabbit’s back legs. On both sides the tiles of the buildings folded in to form a wide passage. Of course it was not a cave. He was standing before an arcade.

Down in the distance he could see women’s underwear in forlorn shades of pink and pale blue stretched across forms in a lighted window. Near it a pair of giant’s eyeglasses stared out from an optician’s window. Further back a restaurant sign floated in grey air. Harry walked into the arcade. One old Chinese woman shuffled toward him, in the dimness of the arcade no more than a wrinkled forehead and a pair of averted eyes.

Harry paused outside Chinatown Opticians and peered through the empty left orb of the giant’s glasses. Behind the counter in the deserted shop a clerk with a punk crewcut and cheeks inflamed with acne stared into a Chinese-language edition of Playboy.

Tattered posters advertising a Chinese opera covered the walls of the arcade. Other posters concerned rock clubs. A few shops along, the gloom grew thicker and the arcade angled off toward what must be Elizabeth Street. The ripped posters led toward a shoebox-sized restaurant called Malay Coffee Shop, which showed a large white CLOSED sign on its door. A few feet farther, just before the angle in the arcade, a narrow tiled staircase led down to another level. A fat arrow had been painted on the side of the staircase, below it the words FORTUNE BARBER SHOP.

Harry went slowly down the steps, ducking his head to see how far the lower level extended. Two grey-haired barbers sat in their own chairs inside the Fortune Barber Shop while a third barber snipped at an old woman’s hair. Two other shops, one with a poster in its window of a levitating Ninja with an outflung leg, filled out the short downstairs level. Harry stopped moving about halfway down the stairs. His eyes were at the level of the arcade’s tiled floor. Nobody walking in would see him, but he would have a perfect view of them.

He moved a step up, and in the brighter outside air two short males moved past the arcade’s entrance. The zombies. As soon as they had passed the entrance, they snapped back to reappear, looking into the arcade. Their sunglasses were like wide black holes in their faces. Harry moved quietly down a step and watched the two zombies glance at each other and take a step into the arcade. Their bodies blurred in the darkness. They came forward, stocky, almost stumping on their legs like sumo wrestlers. As they came nearer Harry saw that their hands were balled into fists. They stood three feet from him, their thick short arms swinging. One of them spoke softly in Chinese, and Harry understood the words as if they had been in English. The bastard isn’t here. The second man grunted.