Koko

His life was not like other lives, other people thought the world was solid and were blind to the great tears and rents in the surface of existence. Harry’s mind filled with the wingbeats of insects and the cries of children.

The surface of the world almost shredded and allowed his real life to take place.

The two men turned around in perfect unison, like dance partners, and went back outside the arcade. Harry waited on the steps a minute, two minutes, he did not know how long. The old woman from the barber shop came slowly up the steps, rapping on the tiles with a wooden cane. He moved aside to let her pass along the railing, and she wordlessly pulled herself up past him. He was invisible: no one had seen him. He wiped his wet palms on the flanks of his coat and went up to the main level of the arcade.

Empty: the world had closed up again.

Harry trotted downstairs to the Ninja shop and spent fifty-six dollars on a gravity knife and a pair of handcuffs. Then he mounted the stairs again.

At the entrance he bent forward and looked south down Bowery. The limousine was no longer parked in front of the restaurant. Harry smiled. Inside the chauffeur’s once doubtless pristine white handkerchief was a fat yellow wad of Harry Beevers.

Someone was staring down from a window high up in Confucius Plaza; someone in a passing car turned his head to gaze at him. Someone was watching him, for his life was like a film and he was the hero of that film. “I found it,” he said, knowing that someone heard him: or that someone watching him had read his lips.

Now all he had to do was wait for the telephone call. Harry began walking up toward Canal to start looking for a cab. Traffic moved past him in a seamless flow. He no longer felt cold. He stood on Canal Street and watched the traffic sweep past him, tasting on his tongue the oil and bite of the icy vodka he had just earned. When the light changed, he crossed Canal to walk north on Bowery, rejoicing.

1

Michael Poole came awake in cold darkness, the dream picture of a Chinese schoolgirl grinning at him from beneath the brim of a white straw skimmer vanishing from his mind. One of the large radiators clanked again, and Tim Underhill snored gently in the next bed. Poole picked up his watch and brought its face toward his until the hands became distinct. A minute to eight became eight o’clock as he watched. The first tendrils of warmth began to reach him.

Underhill groaned, stretched, wiped his hands over his face. He looked at Poole and said, “Morning.” He sat up in bed—Underhill’s hair stuck out on both sides of his head, and his white-blond beard was crunched and flattened on one side. He looked like a crazed professor in an old movie. “Listen to this,” Underhill said, and Poole sat up in bed too.

“I’ve been thinking about this all night,” Underhill said. “Here’s where we are at the moment. We have Dengler spooking Spitalny, right? He comes up to him and points out that in a combat unit everybody has to protect everybody else. He takes him into Ozone Park, say, and he tells him that if he acts toward him in the old way he will mess with the lives of everybody in the platoon. Maybe he even says that he’ll make sure that Spitalny will never come back from his first mission—whatever he says, Spitalny agrees to be silent about their old relationship. But this is Spitalny—he can’t take it. He hates Dengler a little more every day. And eventually Spitalny follows Dengler to Bangkok and kills him. Now what I’m thinking is that Spitalny never was the original Koko. He just borrowed the name a decade and a half later, when he really slipped a cog.”

“Who was, then?”

“There never really was an original Koko,” Underhill said. “Not in the way I’ve been thinking of it.” Excited by his thoughts, Underhill swung his legs over the side of the bed and stood up. He was wearing a long nightshirt, and his legs looked like pipe stems with knees. “You get it? It’s like Agatha Christie. Probably everybody who wanted to support Dengler wrote Koko on a card at least once. Koko was everybody. I was Koko, you were Koko, Conor was Koko once. Everybody just imitated the first one.”

“But then who was the first one?” Poole asked. “Spitalny? That doesn’t seem very likely.”

“I think it was Beevers,” Underhill said, his eyes glowing. “It was right after the publicity began, remember? The court-martials began to seem inevitable. Beevers was stressed out. He knew nobody would support him, but he also knew that he could claim to share whatever support Dengler had. So he mutilated a dead VC, and wore a word everybody associated with Dengler on a regimental card. And it worked.”

Someone rapped at the door. “It’s me,” Maggie called. “Aren’t you up yet?”

Underhill moved on scissoring legs toward the door, and Poole pulled on a bathrobe.

Maggie came in smiling, dressed in a black skirt and an oversized black sweater. “Have you looked outside yet? It snowed again last night. It looks like heaven out there.”

Poole stood up and walked past smiling Maggie toward the window. Maggie seemed to be appraising him, which made him uncomfortable. Now Poole felt he could not trust any of his responses to the girl. Underhill began condensing their conversation for her, and Poole pulled the cord to open the curtains.

Cold bluish light slanted in the window and down on the white street beneath him, pristine with the new snow and nearly unmarked. The snow looked like a good thick linen napkin. On the sidewalk a few deep footsteps showed where one person had mushed to work.

“So Harry Beevers is really Koko,” Maggie said. “I wonder why I find that so easy to believe?”

Poole turned away from the window. “Does the word Koko mean anything to you?”

“Kaka,” Maggie said. “Or coo-coo, meaning crazy. Who knows? Cocoa, as in the warm bedtime drink. But if Victor Spitalny knew that Harry Beevers had been the first to use it wouldn’t he have an above-average interest in Harry?”

Poole looked at her wonderingly.

“Isn’t it possible that he might want to eliminate Harry next, or before he retires or gives himself up or whatever he is going to do?”

In fact, Maggie said, Tina had probably been killed only because he had stayed at home. Tina was killed because he was there. She came to the window and stood beside Michael. “Koko even broke into 56 Grand Street, on the day Tina came uptown to fetch me back from where I stayed when I was not with him.” A flicker of a glance toward Michael, who was frowning out at the dimpled snowscape of Maggie’s heaven. And that, she said, was how Spitalny learned everything he wanted to learn.

“What was that?” Poole asked.

“Where everybody lived.”

Poole still did not get it. Koko learned where everybody lived because Tina Pumo stayed at home?

It was a night he still liked me, Maggie said—and then told him about Tina leaving the bed and finding that his address book had been stolen.

A night he still liked her?

“A few days later, it was all happening again,” she said. “You knew Tina. He was never going to change. It was very sad. I came down to see just if he would talk to me. And that was how I nearly got killed.”

“How did you escape?” Poole asked.

“By using a silly old trick.” And would say no more about it. Saved by an old trick, like the heroine of a story.

“Koko knows how to find Conor, then,” Tim said.

“Conor’s staying with his lady love,” Poole said. “So he’ll be safe. But Beevers had better watch out for himself.”

Aren’t you people ever going to get dressed, Maggie wanted to know, all this middle-aged male beauty in disarray is making my stomach rumble. At least I think it’s my stomach. What are we going to do today?

2

What they did, once they had breakfasted in the Grill Room, was check out some of Victor Spitalny’s old hangouts before rewarding themselves by visiting M.O. Dengler’s childhood home and telling the Vietnam stories they had already told once, this time accurately. Stories and storytelling too had their gods, and it would be an act of homage to those gods to set the narrative record straight before Dengler’s parents.

So they had begun with a round of the bars, or taverns, as these bars were known, in which Spitalny had spent his time waiting for his call-up—The Sports Lounge, The Polka Dot, Sam ‘N’ Aggie’s, located within half a mile of one another, two of them a block apart on Mitchell Street and the other, The Polka Dot, five blocks further north, on the edge of the Valley. Poole had agreed to meet Mack Simroe there after work at five-thirty. Debbie Tusa had arranged to meet them for lunch at the Tick Tock restaurant, a block off Mitchell on Psalm Street. In Milwaukee bars opened early and were seldom without customers, but by noon Poole had become discouraged by the reception they had found in them. None of the people in either of the first two taverns had been interested in talking about an army deserter.

In 1969 army investigators had come to these same bars, looking for hints as to where Victor might be hiding himself, and Poole thought that the army’s men had probably spoken to the same barflies and bartenders that he and Maggie and Tim had met. The taverns would not have changed at all since 1969 except for minor adjustments to the jukeboxes. Nestled in among the hundreds of Elvis Presley songs and hundreds more polkas—Joe Schott and the Hot Schotts?—had been a rare survivor of that era, Barry Sadler’s “The Ballad of the Green Berets.” In these taverns harsh light bounced off the Formica, the bartenders were pasty overweight men with tattoos and pre-modern crewcuts, and yellowbellies who deserted from the armed forces might as well go out and hang themselves from the oak tree in the backyard so as not to put someone else to the trouble. And you drank Pforzheimer’s—you didn’t mess around with lightweight stuff like Budweiser, Coors, Olympia, Stroh’s, Rolling Rock, Pabst, Schlitz, or Hamm’s. Taped to the mirror in The Sports Lounge were printed signs reading PFORZHEIMER’S—BREAKFAST OF CHAMPIONS and PFORZHEIMER’S—THE NATIONAL DRINK OF THE VALLEY.

“We don’t export most of it,” said Tattoo and Crewcut, getting yuk-yuk-yuk from his regulars. “We pretty much like to keep it to ourselves.”

“Well, I can see why,” Poole said, tasting the thin flat yellow stuff. Behind him E.P. groaned about chapels and momma and the difficulties of love.

“That Spitalny kid wasn’t any kind of a man,” Tattoo and Crewcut declared, “but I never thought he’d turn out as crummy as he did.”

In Sam ‘N’ Aggie’s the bartender, being Aggie, had neither crewcut nor tattoos, and instead of Elvis, Jim Reeves moaned about chapels and momma and the love that defied the grave, but the content of their visit was otherwise very similar. Pforzheimer’s. Dark looks at Maggie Lah. You’re asking about who is that? Oh, him. More dark looks. His dad’s a regular guy, but the kid sure went wrong, didn’t he? Another glowering glance toward Maggie. Around here, see, we’re real Americans.

So the three of them marched in silence toward the Tick Tock, each with their own preoccupations.

When Poole pushed open the door and followed Maggie and Underhill into the small crowded restaurant half a dozen men had turned on the bar stools to gape at Maggie. “Yellow Peril strikes again,” Maggie whispered.

A thin woman with frosted hair and deep lines in her face was giving the three newcomers a tentative wave from a booth at the side of the restaurant.

Debbie Tusa recommended the Salisbury steak; she chattered about the weather and how much she had enjoyed New York; she was having a little Seabreeze, that’s vodka, grapefruit juice, and cranberry juice, would they want one? It was really a summer drink, she supposed, but you could drink it all year long. They made good drinks at the Tick Tock, everybody knew that, and was it true they were all from New York, or were some of them really from Washington?

“Are you nervous about something, Debbie?” Tim asked.

“Well, the last ones were from Washington.”

The waitress came in her tight white uniform and checked apron, and everybody ordered Salisbury steak, except for Maggie, who asked for a club sandwich. Debbie drank from her Seabreeze and said to Maggie, “You could have a Cape Codder, that’s vodka and clam juice?”

“Tonic water,” Maggie said, and the waitress said, “Tonic water? Like tonic?”

“Like gin and tonic without the gin,” Maggie said.

“A lot of people are talking about you, you know.” Debbie inserted the tiny straw in her mouth and looked up at them as she sipped. “A lot of people think you people are from the government. And some aren’t sure which government.”

“We’re private citizens,” Poole said.

“Well, maybe Vic is doing something bad now, and you’re trying to catch him, like he’s a spy. I think George and Margaret are afraid Vic is gonna come back, and the news is gonna be just terrible, and George will lose his job before he gets his retirement—if Vic turns out to be a spy or anything.”

“He’s not a spy,” Poole said. “And George’s job would be safe anyway.”

“That’s what you think. My husband, Nick, he—well, that’s not important. But you don’t know what they do.”

The waitress eventually set their food down before them, and Poole was immediately sorry that he had not ordered a sandwich.

“I know Salisbury Steak’s no big deal,” Debbie said, “but it’s better than it looks. And anyhow, you don’t know what a treat it is to eat someone else’s cooking. So even if you’re all secret agents or whatever—thanks!”

The steak did taste slightly better than it looked.

“You didn’t know that Vic and Manny Dengler were in the same class at Rufus King?”

“It was a surprise,” Poole said. “There’s a Dengler listed in the phone book on Muffin Street. Is that his parents?”

“I think his mom’s still there. His mom was a real quiet lady, I think. She’ll never go anywhere.” A bite of steak, a swallow of the Seabreeze. “Never did. She didn’t even go out when the old man was doing his preaching.”

“Dengler’s father was a preacher?” Underhill asked. “With a congregation and a church?”

“ ‘Course not,” she said, with a glance toward Maggie—as if Maggie already knew all about it. “Dengler’s dad was a butcher.” Another glance at Maggie. “Was that sandwich any good?”

“Yum,” Maggie said. “Mr. Dengler was a butcher-preacher?”

“He was one of those crazy preachers. He had little services in the butcher shop next to his house sometimes, but lots of times he’d just get out on the street and start yellin’ away. Manny had to go out with him. Could be as cold as this, and they’d be out on the corner with the old man yellin’ about sin and the devil and Manny singin’ and passin’ the hat.”

“What was his church called?” Maggie asked.

“The Church of the Messiah.” She smiled. “Didn’t you ever hear Manny sing? He used to sing that—The Messiah. Well, not the whole thing, but his dad used to make him sing things from it.”

“ ‘All we like sheep,’ ” Maggie said.

“Yep. See? Everybody thought he was goofy as batshit.” Her eyes flew open. “Excuse me!”

“I heard him quote The Messiah once,” Poole said. “Victor was there too, and Vic sort of mocked him as soon as he spoke.”

“That sounds like Vic.”

“ ‘A man of sorrow and acquainted with grief,’ ” Underhill said. “Then Spitalny said it twice, and said “‘A man of sorrow and acquainted with dickheads.’ ”

Debbie Tusa silently raised her glass.

“And Dengler said, ‘Whatever it was, it was a long time ago.’ ”

“But what was it?,” Poole asked. “A man of sorrow and acquainted with grief?”

“Well, they had a lot of trouble,” Debbie said. “The Denglers had a lot of trouble.” She looked down at her plate. “I guess I’m done. You ever notice how you never feel like shopping for dinner after you eat a big lunch?”

“I never feel like shopping for dinner,” Maggie said.

“Where do you suppose Vic is now? You guys don’t think he’s dead, do you?”

“Well, we were hoping to find out where he is from you,” Poole said.

Debbie laughed. “I wish my ex-husband could see me right now. Screw you, Nicky, wherever you are. You deserved what you got when they sent your terrible old man to Waupun. Any of you guys want to change your mind about a drink?”

None of them did.

“You want to hear the worst? The worst thing? I said his butcher shop was next to the house on Muffin Street? You want to guess what the name of the butcher shop was?”

“The Blood of the Lamb Butcher Shop,” Maggie said.

“Wow,” Debbie said. “So close. Any other tries?”

“Lamb of God,” Poole said. “The Lamb of God Butcher Shop.”

“Dengler’s Lamb of God Butcher Shop,” Debbie said. “How did you know?”

“The Messiah,” Poole said. “ ‘Behold the lamb of God, that taketh away the sins of the world.’ ”

“ ‘All we like sheep have gone astray,’ ” Maggie said.

“My husband sure did.” She gave Poole a grim little smile. “I guess old Vic probably did too, didn’t he?”

Poole asked for the check. Debbie Tusa took a compact out of her bag and inspected herself in its mirror.

“Did you ever hear Vic or anybody else sing something like rip-a-rip-a-rip-a-lo or pompo, pompo, polo, polo …?”

Debbie was staring at him over the top of her compact. “Is that the song of the pink elephants? Honestly. I gotta get back home. You guys feel like coming over to my place?”

Poole said that they had other appointments. Debbie struggled into her coat, hugged each of them, and told Maggie that she was so cute, it was no wonder she was lucky too. She waved good-bye from the door of the restaurant.

“If there’s nothing to do now, I could go back to the hotel and work on some notes,” Underhill said.

Maggie suggested that they try to call Dengler’s mother.

3

“I said we just wanted to talk to her,” Poole said, turning into Muffin Street. It was two shabby blocks long, the Old Log Cabin Tavern at one end, the Up ‘N’ Under at the other. Half of the buildings were small businesses; in half of these the windows had been boarded up and the signs had faded into blurs. A peeling frame building with a small front porch, like the Spitalny house, but listing to one side and so grimy it seemed almost to have been draped in cobwebs, number 53 leaned against a square smaller building with a sheet of plywood where it had once had a window. The Reverend Dengler had located the Lamb of God Butcher Shop two blocks away from the nearest shopping street, and like the TV repair shop two blocks away and Irma’s Dress Shop it had quietly gone out of business.

“Nice,” Maggie said as she got out of the car. “Very romantic.”

They had to pick their way through the snow. Muffin Street had been plowed, but few of the sidewalks had been shoveled clean. The steps sagged and complained as they went up onto the porch. The front door opened before Poole could push the bell.

“Hello, Mrs. Dengler,” Tim said.

A pale white-haired woman in a blue wool dress was looking out through the crack in the door, squinting because of the cold and the brightness of the fresh snow. Her hair was in tight tiny curls that had been dusted with powder.

“Mrs. Dengler?” Poole asked.

She nodded. Her face was square and private, white as a paper cup. The only color was in the almost transparent pale blue of her wide-set eyes, as odd in a human face as the eyes of a dog. They appeared slightly magnified behind a pair of round old-fashioned glasses. “I’m Helga Dengler,” she said in a voice that struggled to be welcoming. For a second, Poole thought her voice was his wife’s. “You’d better get in out of the cold.” She moved no more than two or three inches out of the way and as Poole squeezed past her he saw the white flecks of powder in her hair sift down to the white scalp.

“You’re the one who called? Dr. Poole?”

“Yes, and—”

“Who’s that one? You didn’t tell me about that one.”

“Maggie Lah. She is a close friend of ours.”

The odd pale dog’s eyes inspected him. Poole had become aware of a close, dank, musty smell as soon as the door closed. Mrs. Dengler’s nose was upturned and very broad, with three deep creases across its top just beneath the bridge of the old-fashioned glasses. She had virtually no lips, and her neck was very thick. Her shoulders too were thick, sturdy, and bent forward in a permanent stoop.

“I’m just an old woman who lives alone, that’s all I am. Now, now. Yes. Come along.” With little phrases she motioned them toward a coat rack and stood rubbing her hands over her wide upper arms. In the darkness of the hallway Mrs. Dengler’s large square face seemed to shine, as if it drew all the light in the house to it.

Helga Dengler’s pale eyes moved from Poole to Maggie to Underhill and back to Maggie. There was a sense of heavy shapelessness about her, as if she were far heavier than she looked. “So,” she said. A staircase, in the darkness no more than an impression of a wooden handrail and newel posts, rose into the gloom at her back. The floor was slightly gritty underfoot. Dim light came through a half-open door down the hall.

“You’re very kind to have invited us, Mrs. Dengler,” Poole said, and Maggie and Tim Underhill said similar things that tangled together in the air and then broke off.

As if their words had reached her after a delay, for a moment she merely gleamed at them. Then: “Well, the Bible tells us to be kind, doesn’t it? You men knew my son?”

“He was a wonderful person,” Poole said.

“We loved your son,” Underhill said at the same moment, and their sentences also tangled together.

“Well,” she said. Poole thought that he could look all the way through her eyes and see nothing but the clear blue color of blue jeans washed a thousand times. Then he thought that their queer awkwardness was forced on them by her: that she had wished it upon them.

“Manny tried to be a good boy,” she said. “He had to be trained to it, like all boys.”

Again Poole had the sense of a missed beat, of a second that fell either into Helga Dengler or out of the world altogether.

“You’ll want to sit down,” she said. “I guess the living room is where you’ll want to go. This way. I’m busy, you see. An old woman who lives alone has to keep herself busy.”

“Have we interrupted something?” Poole asked. She smiled her hard twitch of a smile and motioned for them to follow her down the hall and through the door.

One low-wattage bulb burned beneath an ornate lampshade. The single bar of an electrical heater glowed red in the corner of the crowded room. Here the musty odor was not so noticeable. The furniture seemed to glow and ripple. Purple stained-glass tiger’s eyes shone down from little shelves and from a table beside a couch of worn plush. “You can all sit there, it used to be my mother’s.” The rippling glow was reflected light streaking across stiff clear plastic covers which creaked when they sat down.

Poole looked sideways at the tiger’s eyes on the round table and saw that they were marbles, cracked on the inside in such a way that they caught the yellow light. There were dozens of them fixed in an arrangement on a piece of black cloth.

“That’s my work,” the woman said. She was standing in the center of the room. On the wall behind her was a framed photograph of a uniformed man who in the general darkness resembled a Boy Scout leader. Other pictures, of puppies tumbled together and kittens entangled in yarn, had been placed in random positions on the walls.

“You can have your opinion, and I’ll have mine,” Mrs. Dengler said. She took a half-step forward, and her eyes seemed to swell behind the round lenses. “Everybody’s entitled to their opinion, that’s what we told them over and over again.”

“Excuse me?” Michael said. Underhill was smiling either at Mrs. Dengler or at the pictures only half-visible behind her. “You said … your work?”

She visibly relaxed, and stepped backwards again. “My grape clusters. You were looking.”

“Oh,” Poole said. That was what they were. The purple marbles, he saw, had been glued to the black fabric in the shape of a cluster of grapes. “Very nice.”

“Everybody always thought so. When my husband had his church, some of the congregation used to buy my grape clusters. Everybody always said they were beautiful. The way they catch the light.”

“Beautiful,” Poole said.

“How do you make them?” Maggie asked.

This time her smile seemed genuine, almost delicate, as if she knew she took an immodest amount of pride in her grape clusters. “You could do it yourself,” she said, and finally sat down on a footstool. “It’s in a pan. I always use Wesson oil. You use butter, it spatters. And it burns. My husband would use butter for everything, but he had the feeling for meat, you see. You use that Wesson oil, little girl, and you’ll always get your marbles to crack in the right way. That’s what nobody understands—especially in these times. You must do things right.”

“So you fry the marbles,” Maggie said.

“Well … yes. You use your pan and your Wesson oil. And you use low heat. That way they crack all the same way. That’s the good part of it. They all turn out just right. Then you turn them out of the pan and run cold water over them for a second or two, that seems to set them somehow, and after they cool down you glue them to your form. A dot of glue, that’s it. And then you’ve got your cluster, a beautiful thing for all eternity.” She beamed at Maggie, all the light concentrated in the heavy, thick center of her face. “For … all … eternity. Like the Word of God. Each one takes twenty-four marbles. To come out exactly right and lifelike too. Well. Better than lifelike, in some ways.”

“Being all alike,” Maggie said.

“All just alike. That’s the beauty part. With boys, you know, you can just try and try. You can do what you will, but they will resist.” Her face closed up for a moment, and the center of her face seemed to dim. “Nothing in life comes out the way you expect, not even for Christians. You’re a Christian, aren’t you, little girl?”

Maggie blinked and said oh yes, of course.

“These men pretend, but they haven’t fooled me. I can smell the beer on them. A Christian man doesn’t drink beer. My Karl never touched a drop of liquor, and my Manny never did either. At least not until he got away, into the service.” She glared at Poole as if she held him personally responsible for her son’s lapses. “And never mixed with bad women, either. We beat that into him. He was a good boy, as good as we could make him. And considering where and what he came from.” Another sullen look at Poole, as if he knew all about that. “We got that boy to work, and work he did until the day the army took him. School is school, we said, but your work is your life. Butcher-work came from God, but man made schoolwork and reading any book but one.”

“Was he happy as a child?” Poole asked.

“The Devil worries about happiness,” she said, and the weird pale light went on in her face and eyes again. “Do you think Karl thought about such as that? Do you think I did? Those are the questions the other ones asked. Now you tell me something, Dr. Poole, and I’ll rely on you to tell me the truth. Did that boy drink liquor in the service over there? And did he waste himself with women? Because in your answer I’ll know what sort of man he was, and what sort you are too. The bad marbles crack all wrong, oh yes. The bad marble falls to pieces in the fire. The mother was one of those. Tell me—answer my question, or you can leave this house. I let you in, you’re not a policeman or a judge. My opinions are as good as yours, in case they’re not a lot better.”

“Of course,” Poole said. “No, I don’t think I can remember your son ever taking a drink. And he remained … what you would call pure.”

“Well. Yes. Yes, he did. This one thing I know. Manny stayed pure. What I would call pure,” she added, with a blast of ice straight from her eyes into Poole’s heart.

Poole wondered how she could have known that before he told her, and if she had known why she had asked. “We’d like to tell you some things about your son,” he said, and his words sounded clumsy and ill-chosen.

“Go on,” the woman said, and again used her peculiar psychic strength to alter both herself and the atmosphere in the room. She seemed to sigh inaudibly: both her thick body and the air grew heavier, as if filled up with dull unexpectant waiting. “You want to tell your story, so tell it.”

“Did we interrupt your work, Mrs. Dengler?” Maggie asked.

A gleam of satisfaction. “I turned off my stove. It can wait. You people are here. You know what I think? We trained him more than most would, and some didn’t care for what we did. You can’t put your faith in what others say. Muffin Street is a world like many others. Muffin Street is real. You go ahead now.”

“Mrs. Dengler,” Tim said, “your son was a wonderful human being. He was a hero under fire, and more than that, he was compassionate and inventive—”

“You think backwards,” she broke in. “Oh, my. Backwards. Inventive? You mean he made things up. Isn’t that part of the original trouble? Would there have been a trial, if he hadn’t made things up?”

“I would never defend his being court-martialed,” Tim said, “but I don’t think you can blame it on him, either.”

“Imagination has to be stopped. You’re talking about imagination. You have to put an end to that. That’s one thing I know. And Karl knew it, up until the day he passed away.” She turned almost in agitation to look at the rows of identical grape clusters, each grape with its identical flare of light within. “Well. Go on. You want to. You came all the way to do it.”

Underhill talked about Dragon Valley, and the stories that had eased George Spitalny at first left her unmoved, then seemed to distress her. Pink crept into the whiteness of her face: her eyes zapped into Poole’s, and he saw that it was not distress that made her flush, but anger.

So much for the gods of storytelling, he thought.

“Manny’s behavior was fantastic, and he mocked his officer. Behavior should never be fantastic, and he should have respected the officer.”

“The whole situation was a little fantastic,” Underhill said.

“That is what people say when they try to excuse themselves. Wherever the boy was, he should have acted as if he were on Muffin Street. Pride is a sin. We would have punished him.”

Poole could feel Tim’s anger and sorrow even through Maggie Lah, who sat between them.

“Mrs. Dengler,” Maggie said, “a moment ago you said that Manny was a good boy, considering where he came from.”

The old woman lifted her head like an animal sniffing the wind. Unmistakable pleasure shone through her round eyeglasses. “Little girls can listen, can’t they?”

“You didn’t mean Muffin Street, did you?”

“Manny didn’t come from Muffin Street. So.”

Maggie waited for what was to come next, and Poole wondered what it would be. Mars? Russia? Heaven?

“Manny came from the gutter,” Mrs. Dengler said. “We took that boy out of the gutter and we gave him a home. We gave him our name. We gave him our religion. We fed him and we clothed him. Does that sound like the work of bad people? Do you think bad people would have done that for an abandoned little boy?”

“You adopted him?”

Underhill was leaning backwards against the stiff plastic, staring intently at Helga Dengler.

“We adopted that poor abandoned child and we gave him new life. Do you think his mother could have had my coloring? Are you such fools? Karl was blond too, before he went grey. Karl was an angel of God, with his yellow hair and his flowing beard! Yes! I will show you.”

She all but hopped to her feet, glowered down at them with her X-ray eyes, and left the room. It was like a grotesque parody of their evening with the Spitalnys. “Did he ever say anything to you about being adopted?” Poole asked.

Underhill shook his head.

“Manuel Orosco Dengler,” Maggie said. “You must have known something was going on.”

“We never called him that,” Poole said.

Mrs. Dengler opened the door, admitting a whiff of the odor of damp wood along with herself. She was clutching an old photograph album made of pressed cardboard treated to resemble leather. The corners and edges had frayed, showing the blunted grey edges of the layers of compressed paper. She came forward eagerly, open-mouthed, like a wronged defendant to the judge. “Now you see my Karl,” she said, opening the album to an early page and turning it around to face them.

The photograph took up nearly the entire page. It might have been taken a hundred years earlier. A tall man with lank pale hair that hung past his ears and a pale unruly beard glared at the camera. He was thin but broad-shouldered and wore a dark suit that hung on him like a sack. He looked driven, haunted, intense. The nature of this man’s religion rose off the photograph like steam. Where his wife’s eyes looked through you to another world, dismissing everything between herself and it, his looked straight into hell and condemned you to it.

“Karl was a man of God,” Helga said. “You can see that plainly. He was chosen. My Karl was not a lazy man. You can see that too. He was not soft. He never shirked his duty, not even when his duty was to stand on a street corner in below zero weather. The News would not wait for fine weather, and it needed a hard, dedicated man to tell it, and that was my Karl. So we needed help. Someday we would be old. But we didn’t know what was going to happen to us!” She was panting, and her eyes bulged behind the round glasses. Again Poole felt that her body was gathering density, pulling into it all the air in the room and along with it all that ever was or ever would be right or moral, leaving them forever in the wrong.

“Who were his parents?” Poole heard Underhill ask, and knew that she would misunderstand.

“Fine people. Who would have had such a son? Strong people. Karl’s father was also a butcher, he taught him the trade, and Karl taught Manny the trade so that Manny could work for us while we did the Lord’s own work. We raised him from the gutter and gave him eternal life, so. He was to work for us and provide for our old age.”

“I see,” said Underhill, bending forward slightly to glance at Michael. “We’d also like to know something about your son’s parents.”

Mrs. Dengler folded the photograph album shut and laid it across her lap. Some of the musty smell had permeated the cardboard, and for a moment the odor eddied about them.

“He didn’t have parents.” She gleamed at them, self-satisfaction personified. “Not the way real people do, not like Karl and me. Manny was born out of wedlock. His mother, Rosita, sold her body. One of those women. She delivered the baby in Mount Sinai Hospital and abandoned him there, just walked out as fancy as you please, and the baby had a viral infection—he nearly died. Many did, but did he? My husband and I prayed for him, and he did not die. Rosita Orosco died a few weeks later. Beaten to death. Do you think the boy’s father killed her? Manny was Spanish only on his mother’s side, that’s what Karl and I always thought. So you see what I mean. He had neither mother nor father.”

“Was Manny’s father one of his mother’s customers?” Underhill asked.

“We did not think about it.”

“But you said that you did not think the father was Spanish … Latin American.”

“Well.” Helga Dengler shifted on the stool, and her eyes changed weather. “He had a good side to balance the bad.”

“How did you come to adopt him?”

“Karl heard about the poor baby.”

“How did he hear? Had you gone to adoption agencies?”

“Of course not. I think the woman came to him. Rosita Orosco. My husband’s church work brought many low, unhappy people to us, begging for their souls to be saved.”

“Did you see Rosita Orosco at the church services?”

Now she planted both feet on the floor and stared at him. She seemed to be breathing through her skin. Nobody spoke for an excruciating time.

“I didn’t mean to offend you, Mrs. Dengler,” Underhill finally said.

“We had white people at our services,” she said in a low, slow, even voice. “Sometimes we had Catholics. But they were always good people. Polishers. They can be as good as anyone else.”

“I see,” Underhill said. “You never saw Manny’s mother at your services.”

“Manny did not have a mother,” she said in the same slow, evenly paced voice. “He had no mother, no father.”

Underhill asked if the police had ever arrested the person who beat Rosita Orosco to death.

She shook her head very slowly, like a child vowing never to tell a secret. “Nobody cared who did that. That woman being what she was and all. Whosoever did it could come to the Lord. He is the eternal court of justice.”

With hallucinatory clarity, Poole remembered the torture chamber in the Tiger Balm Gardens, the distorted half-human shapes kneeling before an imperious judge.

“And so they never found him.”

“I don’t recall that they did.”

“Your husband had no interest in the matter?”

“Of course not,” she said. “We had already done all we could.”

She had closed her eyes, and Poole changed the direction of the questions. “When did your husband die, Mrs. Dengler?”

Her eyes opened and flashed at him. “My husband died in the year 1960.”

“And you closed the butcher shop and the church in that year?”

The weird intimidating light had gone on in her face again. “A little bit before that. Manny was too young to be a butcher.”

Couldn’t you see him? Poole wanted to ask. Couldn’t you see what a gift he was to you, no matter where he came from?

“Manny didn’t have friends,” she said, speaking almost as if she had heard Poole’s thoughts. Some emotion swelling in her voice caught in Poole’s inner ear, and it was not until her next sentence that he identified it as pride. “He had too much to do, he followed Karl that way. We kept the boy busy, you must keep your children at their tasks. Yes. At their tasks. For that is how they will learn. When Karl was a boy, he had no friends. I kept Manny away from other boys and raised him in the way we knew was right. And when he was bad we did what Scripture says to do.” She raised her head and looked straight at Maggie. “We had to thrash his mother out of him. Well. Yes. We could have changed his name, you know. We could have given him a good German name. But he had to know he was half Manuel Orosco, even if the other half could become Dengler. And Manuel Orosco had to be tamed and put in chains. No matter what anybody said. You do this out of love and you do it because you have to. Let me show you how it worked. Look at this, now.”

She flipped through pages of photographs, staring down at them with a rapt, abstracted face. Poole wished he could see all the photographs in that book. From where he sat, he thought he caught glimpses of bonfires and big flags, but he saw only blurred fragments of images.

“Yes,” she said. “There. You see this, you know. A boy doing a man’s job.”

She held up a newspaper clipping preserved behind the transparent sheet the way her furniture was preserved beneath the plastic covers.

Milwaukee Journal, September 20, 1958 was written in ink at the top of the page. Beneath the photograph was the caption: BUTCHER’S BOY: Little eight-year-old Manny Dengler helping out in Dad’s Muffin Street shop. Dresses deer all by himself! This is believed to be a record.

And there, in between, occupying half a page in the old album, was the photograph of a small black-haired boy facing the camera in a bloody apron so much too big for him that it laps around him twice and encases him like a sausage skin. In his raised right hand, attached to his skinny angular eight-year-old’s arm, is a massive cleaver. The photographer has told him to hold up the cleaver, for the instrument is too large for both his hand and the job spread out neatly before him. It is the headless body of a deer, stripped of its skin and cut neatly into sections, shoulders, the long graceful ribcage, the curved flanks, the wide wet haunches like a woman’s. The little boy’s face is Dengler’s, and it wears a piercing expression which mingles sweetness and doubt.

“He could be good,” his mother said. “Here is the proof. Youngest boy in the State of Wisconsin to dress a deer all by himself.” Her face flickered for a moment, and Poole wondered if she were experiencing or even just remembering grief. He felt scorched: as if he had been swallowing fire.

“If they let him stay at home instead of taking him away to be with you and fight a war with—” A blast of ice at Maggie. “If not for that, he could be working in the shop right now, and I could have the old age I earned. Instead of this. This pauper’s existence. The government stole him. Didn’t they know why we got him in the first place?”

Now they were all included in her scorn. Her eyes snapped, and the color came up into her face and faded out again, like an optical illusion. “After what they said,” she said, almost to herself. “That’s the beauty part. After what they said, they were the ones who killed him.”

“What did they say?” Poole asked.

She froze him now with a blast from her eyes.

Poole stood up and learned that his knees were shaking. The fire he had swallowed still burned all the way down his throat.

Before he could speak, Underhill asked if they could see the boy’s room.

The old woman rose. “They stole him,” she said, still glaring at Maggie. “Everyone lied about us.”

“The army lied when Manny was drafted?” Poole asked.

Her gaze moved to him, filled with scorn and illumination. “It wasn’t just the army,” she said.

“Manny’s room?” Underhill asked again into the strange cold frost the woman created about her.

“Of course,” she said, actually smiling down. “You’ll see. None of the others did. Come this way.”

She turned around and stumped out of the room. Poole imagined spiders fleeing back up into the corners of their webs, rats scurrying into their holes, as her footsteps thumped toward them.

“We go upstairs, so,” she said, and led them out into the hall and toward the staircase. The odor of must and wood rot was much stronger in the hallway. Every stair creaked, and brown irregular rust stains spread out from the heads of the nails that fastened the linoleum to the treads.

“He had his own room, he had everything the best,” she said. “Down the hall from us. We could have put him in the basement, and we could have put him in the back of the butcher shop. But the child’s place is near his parents. This is one thing I know: the child’s place is near his parents. You see. The apple was near the tree. Karl could see the boy at any time. Every healthy child must be punished as well as praised.”

The roofline narrowed the upper corridor to a walkway where Poole and Underhill had to bend their necks. At the end of the narrow corridor a single window, grey with dust and watermarks, gave a view of telephone lines capped with runners of snow. Mrs. Dengler opened the second of the two wooden doors. “This was Manny’s,” she said, and stood by the door like a museum guide as they entered.

It was like walking into a closet. The room was perhaps eight feet by ten feet, much darker than the rest of the house. Poole reached out for the switch and flipped it, but no light came on. Then he saw the cord and empty socket dangling from the ceiling. The window had been boarded up with two-by-fours, and looked like a rectangular wooden box. For a mad second Poole thought that Dengler’s mother was going to slam the door and lock the three of them inside the windowless little chamber—then they would be truly inside Dengler’s childhood. But Helga Dengler was standing beside the open door, looking down with pursed lips, indifferent to what they saw or what they thought.

The room could have changed only very little since Dengler had left it. There was a narrow bed covered with an army surplus blanket. A child’s desk stood against the wall, a child’s bookshelf beside it with a few volumes leaning on its shelves. Poole bent over the books and grunted with surprise. Red-bound copies of Babar and Babar the King, identical to the ones in the trunk of his car, stood on the top shelf. Maggie came up to him and said “Oh!” when she saw the books.

“We didn’t stop the boy from reading, don’t think we did,” said Mrs. Dengler.

The shelves provided a graph of his reading—from Grimm’s Fairy Tales and Babar to Robert Heinlein and Isaac Asimov. Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. A toy car sat beside these books, two of its wheels gone and most of its paint worn off with handling. Books on fossils, birds, and snakes. A small number of religious tracts, and a pocket-sized Bible.

“He spent all day up here, when we let him,” said the old woman. “Lazy, he was. Or would have been, if we had let him be that way.”

The little room seemed unbearably claustrophobic to Poole. He wished he could put his arms around the little boy who had escaped into this windowless chamber and tell him that he was not bad, not lazy, not damned.

“My son loved Babar too,” he said.

“No substitute for Scripture,” she said. “As you can plainly tell by where these came from.” In response to Poole’s look, she said, “His mother. She bought those elephant books. Stole them, more likely. As if a baby could ever read such a big book. Had them right with her, right there in the hospital, and she left them behind with the baby when she took off. Throw them out, I said, they’re garbage garbage garbage, just like where they came from, but Karl said no, let the boy have something of his natural mother—”unnatural mother, “I said, and the sour will soon spoil the sweet, but Karl wanted it and so it was. Books like those vanished from the church’s rummage box, but they were different copies—Karl knew.”

Poole wondered if she really took him in at all, or if she saw purple marbles ready to be cracked in the pan and glued into endless repetitions of the same pattern. Then he saw that she would not enter the room. She wanted to come in and pull them out, but her legs would not carry her inside, her feet would not move across the threshold.

“… looked and looked at those books, the boy did. Won’t find anything in there, I told him. That’s foolishness. Elephants can’t help you, I said, that’s trash, and trash ends up in the gutter, I told him. And he knew what I was talking about. Yes. He knew.”

“I think we could leave now,” Underhill said. Maggie muttered something Poole did not catch—he realized that he had just been staring at Helga Dengler, who was facing him but looking at a scene visible only to her.

“He was just a little cuckoo we took in,” she said. “We brought him into our nest, we were godly people, we gave the boy what we had, his own room, plenty of food, everything, and he laid it to waste.” She stepped back to let the three of them come out of her son’s room and then stood looking at them. “I was not surprised by what happened to Manny,” she said at what seemed the last possible moment. “He died in the gutter too, didn’t he, just like his mother? Karl was always too good.”

They made their way down the stairs.

“You’ll be going now,” she said, and shuffled past them toward the door.

Frigid air rolled down the hallway as they buttoned up their coats. When she smiled, her white cheeks shifted like floured slabs. “I wish we could talk more, but I have to get back to my work. Take care now, get all buttoned up nice.”

They stepped outside into the cold clean air.

“Bye-bye,” she called softly from the door as they went down the porch steps. “Bye-bye now. Yes. Bye-bye.”

When they got back into the car, Maggie said she felt sick, and wanted to go back to the Pforzheimer to lie down while the other two met Victor Spitalny’s friend at The Polka Dot Lounge. “I need time to recover.” Poole knew what she meant.

“So that was how Dengler grew up,” Underhill said as they drove north on the frozen streets.

“His parents bought him,” Maggie said. “He was supposed to be their slave. That poor little boy and his Babar books.”

“What was all that stuff about ‘them’? About lying? She never explained it.”

“I have a feeling I’m going to regret this,” Underhill said, “but after we drop Maggie off at the hotel, I’d like you to take me to the main branch of the Milwaukee library. It’s probably downtown somewhere, fairly close to our hotel. I want to look up some things in the Milwaukee papers. There were a lot of things that woman never explained.”

Fifteen minutes early for his meeting, Poole pulled into the crowded parking lot beside The Polka Dot Lounge. It was a long, low gabled building that looked as if it should have been covered with ivy and placed in a German forest instead of on this steep gritty street leading down into the darkness of the Valley. Overhead, the long bridge the three of them had crossed on their way to the Spitalny house resounded with traffic. Oval lead-colored clouds that looked as solid as battleships hung motionless in the air further down, and bright red flames wavered at the tops of columns. Neon beer signs glowed in the tavern’s small side windows.

Poole pushed open the door and entered a long, hazy barroom. Cigarette smoke and loud rock music eddied about him. Men in workshirts and caps already stood two deep at the bar. A blonde waitress in tight jeans and a down vest carried pitchers of beer and bowls of popcorn through the tables on a platter. Booths, most of them empty, stood along the walls. The floor was covered with sawdust, popcorn, peanut shells. The Polka Dot was a workingman’s bar, not a puritanical neighborhood tavern with too many lights and lachrymose music. Most of the men at the bar Poole’s age would have been in Vietnam—no college deferments here. Poole felt more at home in his first few minutes inside the Polka Dot than at any other time during his visit to the Midwest.

He managed to squeeze into an empty place at the far end of the bar. “Pforzheimer’s,” he said. “I’m supposed to meet Mack Simroe here. Has he come in yet?”

“Still a little early for Mack,” the bartender said. “Take a booth, I’ll tell him you’re here.”

Poole took a booth and sat facing the door. After fifteen minutes a huge bearded man in a ripped down jacket and a jungle hat came through the door. The man began to scan the booths, and Poole knew instantly that this was Mack Simroe. The giant’s eyes found Poole, and the giant gave him a wide toothy smile from the center of his beard. Poole stood up. The big man striding toward him was congenial and puzzled and open for anything, all of which was visible in his face. Simroe engulfed his hand and said, “I guess you’re Dr. Poole, Let’s get a pitcher and make Jenny’s life a little easier, what do you say, this stuff is better on draft anyway.…”

And then they were facing each other in the booth with a pitcher of beer and a bowl of popcorn between them. After being in the Dengler house, Michael felt peculiarly sensitive to odors, and from Mack Simroe came what must have been the undiluted breath of the Valley: a smell of machine oil and metal shavings. It would be the smell inside one of those leaden clouds of frozen smoke. Simroe was a fitter at the Dux Company, which manufactured ball bearings and engine parts, and he usually stopped in here at the end of his day.

“You knocked the pins out from under me,” Simroe said, “asking about Vic Spitalny and all that. Sorta brought back a lot of stuff.”

“I hope you don’t mind talking a little bit more about it.”

“Hey, I’d be here anyhow. Who else you been talking to?”

“His parents.”

“They heard from him?”

Poole shook his head.

“George went off the rails when Vic got in all that trouble. Started drinking too much, and on the job too, way I heard it. Got in a lot of fights. Glax put him on leave for a month, I guess he discovered George Wallace in all his greatness around then. He started doing some work for Wallace and that got him back on the track. George still won’t hear a word against Wallace. Who else you talk to? Debbie Maczik? What’s her name now—Tusa?”

“I did.”

“Nice kid. Always liked Debbie.”

“Did you like Victor, too?” Poole asked.

Simroe leaned forward, and Poole was acutely aware of bulging forearms and his huge head. “You know, I can’t help wondering what all this is about. I don’t mind talking to you, buddy, not at all, but first I’d just kinda like to know the background. You were in the same unit as Vic?”

“All the way,” Poole said.

“Dragon Valley? Ia Thuc?”

“Every step.”

“And you’re a civilian these days?”

“I’m a doctor. A baby doctor, outside New York City.”

“A baby doctor.” Simroe grinned. He liked that. “No cop, no FBI, no Intelligence or Military Police, no goddamned CIA—no nothing.”

“No nothing.”

Simroe was still grinning. “But there’s something, isn’t there? You think the man’s alive. You want to find him.”

“I do want to find him.”

“He must owe you a hell of a lot of money, or you heard something about the guy—something bad. He’s involved in something, and you want to stop him.”

“That’s about it,” Poole admitted.

“So Vic is alive after all. I’ll be damned.”

“Most people who deserted are still alive. That’s why they deserted.”

“Okay,” Simroe said. “Nobody who went into that war came back exactly the same way. You sort of think you know how far certain people will go—and maybe you don’t. Maybe you never do.” He downed a huge quantity of beer in one swallow. “Let me tell you how I got to know Vic. Back at Rufus King, I was kind of a half-assed hood. I had a big Harley, boots, evil tattoos—I still got those, but I hide ’em these days—and I tried to be a real badass. I didn’t know what else to do. I was never a real hood, I just liked riding around on that big old bike. Anyhow, Vic started hanging around me. Vic thought the whole biker bit was cool as shit. I couldn’t shake him off, and after a while I just gave up trying.”

Poole thought of Spacemaker Ortega, Spitalny’s only real friend in the service and the leader of the Devilfuckers—Spitalny had simply transferred his affection for Simroe to Ortega.

“And then I sort of got to like him. I got to thinking—here’s this kid, kind of dumb, his old man’s always breathing down his neck. I tried to give him advice. You gotta take care of yourself, you little asshole, I used to tell him. I even tried to get him to lay off Manny Dengler, ‘cause there was a guy who had real problems, I mean who was in shit up to his neck all day every day. I mean, I used to worry about that little cat!”

“I saw his mother this afternoon.”

Simroe shook his shaggy head. “I never met the lady. But the old man, Karl—man, he was something. Out there on those corners every morning, every night, yellin’ into his little mike—little Manny singin’ some stuff, hymns or shit, top of his lungs, and passin’ the hat. And the old man would cuff him right there on the street. It was a show, man, a real show. Anyhow, right after I dropped out of school Vic dropped out too—I tried to argue him back in, but he just wouldn’t go. I knew I wasn’t goin’ anywhere but the Valley, and I kind of wanted to get into uniform first, be a hero with an M-16, do my part. You know. And you were there—you know what happened. I saw good guys getting blown away for no reason at all. Fucked me up pretty good.”

Simroe had been in Bravo Company, Fourth Battalion, 31st Infantry, the American Division, and he had spent a year fighting in 120-degree heat in the Hiep Due Valley, wounded twice.

“Did you have any contact with Vic once you were both in country?”

“Just a couple letters—we were going to get together, but it never worked out.”

“Did he write to you after he deserted?”

“I knew you were going to ask that. And I oughta dump this beer over your head, baby doctor, because I already told you I never heard from him. He just cut himself off from everybody, I guess.”

“What do you think happened to him?”

Simroe pushed his glass through the puddles on the wet table. He looked up at Poole, testing his judgment, then back down at his glass. “I suppose I could ask you the same. But I’ll tell you what I think, Doctor. I think he stayed alive about a month, tops. I think he ran out of money and tried to get into some action, and whoever he was with killed him. Because that’s about what Vic Spitalny was good for. He was good for screwing up. I don’t think he lasted six weeks, once he cut out on his own. At least I didn’t think so until you showed up.”

“Do you think he killed Dengler?”

“No way,” said Simroe, looking up sharply. “Do you?”

“I’m afraid I do,” Poole said.

Simroe hesitated and opened his mouth to say something, but then an uproar broke out at the bar and both men turned to see what had caused it. A group of young men in their twenties and early thirties had surrounded an older man with curly hair and the pudgy beatific face of a village fool. “Cob,” they were yelling, “Go, Cob!”

“Catch this,” Simroe said.

The younger men milled around the one called Cob, punching his shoulder, whispering into his ear. Poole became aware of some bitter, familiar odor—cordite? napalm? Neither of those, but an odor from that world. Cob, they said, come on, you fucker.

The one called Cob grinned and ducked his head, pleased to be the object of so much attention. He looked like a janitor, a broom pusher for Glax or Dux or Fluegelhorn Brothers. His skin had an odd greyish tinge and in the curls of his hair were caught what looked like pencil shavings. Come on, you dumbass motherfucker. Cob! Do it!

“There are guys in here,” Simroe said, leaning across the table, “who claim they once saw Cob lift himself a foot and a half off the floor and just hang there for thirty-forty seconds.”

Poole looked dubiously at Simroe, and heard a loud metallic noise like a series of backfires, or a burst from a machine gun, a BRRRRAAAAPPPP! that did not sound at all like a noise any human being could have produced. He looked sideways in time to see a torpedo-shaped sheet of flame four feet long shoot out toward the middle of the bar and disappear into itself. The cordite-and-napalm stench became much stronger, then disappeared.

“Clears the air, doesn’t it?” Simroe said.

The younger men were banging Cob on the back, handing him bills. Cob staggered back a step, but caught himself before he fell. One of the men put a glass of beer in his hand, and he poured it down his throat as if dumping it into a well.

“That’s Cob’s trick,” Simroe said. “He can do that two, maybe three times a night. Don’t ask me how. Don’t ask him either. He can’t tell you. Can’t talk—no tongue. You know what I think? I think the poor bastard fills his mouth up with lighter fluid before he comes in here, and stands around waiting for someone to ask for his trick.”

“But did you ever see him light a match?”

“Never.” Simroe winked at Michael, then poured another beer. “Another guy in here will eat his beer glass if he gets drunk enough.” He swallowed beer. “You met Dengler’s mother, you said? She tell you anything about old Karl’s going off to jail?”

Poole’s eyes widened.

“No, I don’t suppose she did. Old Karl was arrested during our freshman year. A social worker came around to check on the kid and found him locked in the meat locker in the butcher shop, pretty well beat up. The old man got a little rougher with him than usual, and put him in the meat locker to get him out of the way until he calmed down. She called the cops, and the kid told them everything.”

“What everything?”

And Mack Simroe told him. “How his old man, old Karl, used to—well, abuse him. A couple of times a week, starting from the time he was five or six. Used to tell him he’d cut his pecker off if he caught him messing with girls. Manny had to go to trial and testify against the old man. The judge sent him away for twenty years, but after he did a couple years he got killed in jail. I think he made a move on the wrong kid.”

After what they said, Poole remembered. Everyone lied about us.

And: We kept that boy busy.

And: He had to be put in chains. No matter what anybody said.

And: We closed the butcher shop a little bit before that.

Michael saw Dengler’s face glowing at him, uttering nonsense about the Valley of the Shadow of Death.

She said: We didn’t know what would happen to us.

And: Imagination has to be stopped. You have to put an end to that.

He had ignored or misinterpreted all these things. At the bar, the man called Cob was smiling slackly upwards, his eyes unfocused and his skin some color between light purple and the grey of iron filings. After what they said. If a man could float up into the air and hang there for thirty minutes, that was what he would look like. Levitation took a toll. You had to pay a price. Not to mention what fire-breathing took out of you.

He made things up. Isn’t that part of the original trouble?

It was the levitation that really did it to old Cob, Poole thought. One of the young men touched Cob’s shoulders and revolved him so that he could see a number of shot glasses—Poole could not see how many, six, eight, ten—lined up on the bar in his honor. Cob began pouring the contents of the shot glasses into his mouth in a way that reminded Poole of a wild animal eating something it had killed.

“I guess that’s news to you, isn’t it?” Simroe said. “Manny Dengler stayed out of school for a year, and when he came back he had to repeat his freshman year. Of course he was treated even worse than before.”

And Poole remembered: Calm down, Vic. Whatever it was …

“It was a long time ago,” he said, finishing the phrase.

“Yep,” said Simroe, “but I’ll tell you what gets me. He was adopted by those people. Anybody could see Karl Dengler was crazy, but they still let them take him. And even after everything came out and Karl got sent to Waupun where some kid damn near took off his head with a homemade knife, Manny still lived in that house on Muffin Street. With that old lady.”

“He started going back to school …” Poole said, his eyes still on Cob.

“Yep.”

“And he went home every night.”

“He closed the door behind him,” Simroe said, “but who knows what went on behind that door? What did she talk about with him? I think he must have been damn happy when the army finally drafted him.”

4

All this Tim Underhill had discovered in two hours at the library, going over microfilm of the two Milwaukee newspapers—he had read about Karl Dengler’s trial and conviction, and about his murder in the state prison. “Sex Crime Minister,” read the captions beneath photographs of wild-eyed Karl Dengler. “Sex Crime Minister and Wife Arrive for Tenth Day of Trial” beneath a photograph of Karl Dengler, grey felt hat on his head and staring straight into the middle distance while a younger, slimmer Helga Dengler, thick blond braids twisted around her head, blew the camera apart with one flat glare of her pale eyes. There had been a photograph of the house on Muffin Street, its porch empty and the shades down. Beside it Dengler’s Lamb of God Butcher Shop already looked dispossessed. In the next few days, children would throw bricks through the shop’s window. By the next day, as a Sentinel photograph showed, the city had boarded up the window.

SOCIAL WORKER PLEADS FOR FOSTER HOME, ran a subhead from the last day of the trial—forty-four-year-old Miss Phyllis Green, the woman who had discovered the child in the meat locker, severely bruised, half-conscious, and clutching his favorite book, had requested that the court find a new home for Manuel Orosco Dengler. A “spokesman” for Mrs. Dengler “vigorously opposed” the request, claiming that the Dengler family had already experienced enough pain, FOSTER CARE PLEA DENIED, announced the Journal a week after the verdict: in a separate hearing, a judge decided that the boy should be “returned to normal life as quickly as possible.” The child was to be returned to his classes on the first day of the new term. The second judge advised that “this unfortunate history be put behind us,” and that Helga and Manuel Dengler “get on with the business of living.” It was “a time for healing.” And the two of them left the courthouse, rode the bus to the South Side and Muffin Street, and closed the door behind them.

Everybody lied about us.

Timothy Underhill learned all this, and one thing more: Manuel Orosco Dengler’s father was Manuel Orosco Dengler’s father.

“Karl Dengler was his real father?” Poole asked.

He and Underhill were driving back to the Pforzheimer at seven-thirty that evening. On Wisconsin Avenue the lighted display windows of department stores slipped past like dioramas in a museum—lovers on a porch swing, men in loose, garish Perry Como sweaters and caps stiffly gathered on a golf course green.

“Who was his mother?” Poole asked, momentarily disoriented.

“Rosita Orosco, just the way Helga Dengler said. Rosita named him Manuel, and abandoned him in the hospital. But when she filled out the admission forms, she listed Karl Dengler as the baby’s father. And he never challenged that, because his name is on Dengler’s birth certificate.”

“Are birth certificates on file in the library?” Poole asked.

“I went a couple of blocks to the Hall of Records. Something finally struck me—that the Denglers seemed to adopt this abandoned baby without going through any red tape. This Nicaraguan woman, a prostitute, comes into the labor ward off the street, has a child and disappears, and fifteen days later the Denglers have adopted the child. I think it was all arranged beforehand.”

Underhill rubbed his hands together, his knees propped up before him in the little car. “I bet Rosita told Karl she was pregnant, and he reassured her that he would adopt the child, everything would be legal and above-board. Maybe he told her he’d marry her! We’ll never know. Maybe Rosita wasn’t even a prostitute. On the hospital form, she called herself a dressmaker. I’ve been thinking that maybe Rosita wandered into the Lamb of God church or temple or whatever Karl called it when it wasn’t a butcher shop, and maybe Dengler came up to her as soon as he saw her and talked her into coming to private services. Because he didn’t want his wife to see her.”

Horns blared behind Poole, and he realized that the light had changed. He shot through the intersection before the arrow could fade and pulled up alongside the entrance of the hotel.

Poole and Underhill walked through the thick artificial light beneath the marquee toward the glass doors, which whooshed open before them. Out of the swarm of questions going through his mind, he asked only the most immediate. “Did Helga know that Karl was her son’s father?”

“It was on the birth certificate.” They moved into the lobby, and the desk clerk nodded at them. The lobby was almost opulently warm, and the big drooping ferns seemed to bulge with health, as if they could slide out of their pots and eat small animals.

“I think she didn’t want to know,” Underhill said. “And that made her even crazier. Dengler was the proof that her husband had been unfaithful to her, and with a woman who belonged to what she considered an inferior race.”

They got into the elevator. “Where did they find Rosita’s body?” Poole asked, pushing the button for the fifth floor.

“Beside the Milwaukee River, a block or two south of Wisconsin Avenue. It was the middle of winter—about now, in fact. She was naked, and her neck was broken. The police assumed that a customer had killed her.”

“Two weeks after the birth of a baby?”

“I think they assumed she was desperate,” Underhill said. The elevator stopped, and the doors clanked open. “I don’t think they gave a damn about what happened to some Mexican hooker.”

“Nicaraguan,” Poole said.

5

Then they had to tell it all to Maggie, who said, “How do the Babar books come in?”

“It looks like Karl Dengler just took them from the rummage box, or whatever they called it, inside his shop and gave them to Rosita. She must have asked him for something to give the child, and he just picked up the first thing he saw.”

The painted dogs stood guard over the bloody game, and the self-satisfied fat men looked out at them as if immensely pleased to be frozen in time.

“And he kept them until he was drafted.”

“Babar is about a peaceful world,” Poole said. “I suppose that was what he loved in it.”

“Not that peaceful,” Maggie said. “In the first pages of Babar, Babar’s mother is shot and killed by a hunter. It’s no wonder your friend Dengler kept the books.”

“Is that right?” Underhill sat upright in surprise.

“Of course,” Maggie said. “And here’s something else. At the end of Babar the King, flying elephants labeled Courage, Patience, Learning, I don’t know what else—Joy and Intelligence—drive away bad evil creatures labeled Stupidity and Anger and Fear, and a lot of other wicked things. Don’t you suppose that meant a lot to him? Because from what I heard about Dengler, he was able to do that in his own life—to banish all the terrible things that had happened to him. And there’s something else too, but I don’t know what you’ll think about this. When I was a child I loved a page in that book that depicted some of the citizens of the elephants’ city. Dr. Capoulosse, and Tapitor the shoemaker, and a sculptor named Podular, Poutifour the farmer, Hatchimbombitar, a big strong street-sweeper … and a clown named Coco.”

“Koko?” Underhill asked.

“Spelled differently. C-o-c-o.”

Some realization almost moved into view between them.

Poole threw up his hands. “The only really important thing we learned here is that Spitalny knew Dengler back in high school. We’re not any closer to finding him. I think we ought to go back to New York. It’s about time we stopped humoring Harry Beevers and told that detective, Murphy, everything we know. The police can stop him. We can’t.”

He looked directly at Maggie. “It’s time to do other things.”

She nodded.

“Then let’s go back to New York,” he heard Underhill say. He either could not or did not want to take his eyes off Maggie Lah. “I miss Vinh. I miss working in the mornings and having him poke his head into that little room to ask me if I want another cup of tea.”

Poole turned to smile at Tim, who was looking at him slyly, tapping his pencil against his front teeth. “Well, somebody has to take care of Vinh,” he said. “The poor boy never stops working.”

“So you’re going to settle down and raise a family,” Maggie said.

“Something like that.”

“Lead a regular, moderate life.”

“I have a book to write. I’ve been thinking of giving old Fenwick Throng a call, just to tell him I’m back from the dead. I hear Geoffrey Penmaiden isn’t at Gladstone House anymore, so maybe I can even go back to my old publishers.”

“Did you really mail him a turd in a box?” Poole asked. “Tina told me—”

“If you knew him, you’d understand. He was a lot like Harry Beevers.”

“My hero,” Poole said. He picked up the telephone and made reservations on the next flight to New York, which left at ten-thirty the following morning. Then he put down the telephone and looked at Maggie again.

“What are you thinking about?” she asked him.

“If I should call Harry now.”

“Sure,” she said.

He got Beevers’ answering machine. “Harry, this is Michael,” he said. “We’re coming back tomorrow, arriving at La-Guardia around two o’clock on the Republic flight. No leads, but we found out a few things. I think it’s time we went to the police with everything we know, Harry. I’ll talk to you before I do anything, but Tim and I are going to see Murphy.”

After that he called Conor at Ellen Woyzak’s house and told him what time they would be arriving at the airport. Ellen came on the line and said that she and Conor would meet them at the airport.

They had a subdued meal in the hotel dining room. Maggie and Poole split a bottle of wine, and Underhill drank club soda. In the middle of the meal he announced that he had realized that it was a kind of anniversary—he had been sober for a little more than two years. They toasted him, but apart from that the meal was so subdued Michael feared that he had infected the others with his mood. Underhill spoke a little about the book he had begun in Bangkok after he had cleaned out his system and written “Blue Rose” and “The Juniper Tree”—something about a child made to live in a wooden hut at the back of his house, and the same child twenty years later—but Poole felt empty and alone, as cut off from life as an astronaut floating in deep space. He envied Tim Underhill his occupation. Underhill was itching to write: he had continued his work on the plane, in the mornings, and at night in their room. Poole had always imagined that writers needed isolation, but it seemed that all Underhill needed were legal pads and a supply of Blackwing pencils—and those, it turned out, had been Tina Pumo’s. Tina had always been obsessive about his tools, and there was still nearly a gross of the Blackwings at the restaurant. Maggie had given four boxes to Underhill, who had promised to finish his book with them. They were fast, he said. With those pencils, you could glide. Underhill was already gliding, far away inside himself, soaring on a carpet of words he was impatient to set down.

When they went back upstairs in the elevator, Poole decided that as soon as he got back inside the room, he would let Underhill sail away on his imagination and his Blackwing pencils, and he would get into bed with The Ambassadors. Strether had just taken a short trip out of Paris for a day or two, and in the French countryside was enjoying what Henry James called “the general amiability of the day.” At the moment he was eating lunch on a terrace overlooking a river. Everything seemed beautifully, luxuriantly suspended. Riding up five floors in a walnut-paneled elevator with Maggie Lah was about as close as Poole thought he would get to luxurious suspension—that, and reading his book.

The elevator stopped. They moved out into the wide cold corridor and turned toward their rooms. Underhill already had his key in his hand—he hardly knew they were there anymore.

Poole waited near Underhill’s back as he opened the door, expecting Maggie to do no more than to smile or nod as she went into her own room. She walked past them, and then stopped moving as soon as Underhill had clicked the door open. “Would you join me for a little while, Michael?” she asked. Her voice was light and penetrating, the sort of voice that could pass through a concrete wall in spite of its softness. “Tim isn’t going to pay any attention to you tonight.”

Poole patted Tim’s back, told him he would see him later, and followed Maggie. She was leaning out of her room on one leg, smiling at him with the same forced, powerfully focused smile she had turned on George Spitalny.

Her room was no more than a long box with one of the immense floor-to-ceiling windows at its far end. The walls were a dusty pinkish rose; there was a chair, a desk, a double bed. Poole saw the copy of Kitty’s Pretty Muff on the folded coverlet.

Maggie made him laugh with a joke that was not really a joke but a sentence turned inside out—some piece of wit that flashed in the air like the swipe of a sword and made him think he ought to remember that way of putting things just before he forgot it. She whirled around and grinned at him with a face so wry and lovely that it, unlike her clever phrase, passed instantaneously into his permanent memory. She was still talking. She sat down on the bed, Poole said something—he scarcely knew what. He could smell a fresh, peppery odor that seemed to lift off her hair and arms.

“I wish you’d kiss me, Michael,” she said.

And so he did.

Maggie’s lips felt surpassingly cushiony, and the shock of being met with such welcoming softness went right through his body. Her round slim arms came up and pulled his whole leaning body toward her so that they fell back together on her bed. Her lips seemed enormous. Michael put his arms under her back, and together they hitched themselves further onto the bed.

At length, with real sweetness, she moved her head away from him and smiled. Her face was as enormous as a moon. He had never seen a face like it. Maggie’s eyes were so quick and alive they looked defensive. “Good,” she said. “You don’t look so sad anymore. At dinner you looked wretched.”

“I was just thinking about going back to the room and reading Henry James.”

Maggie’s face floated up toward him again, and her pointed pink tongue slid into his mouth.

Their clothes seemed to melt off their bodies, and they were clasped together like spoons in a drawer, like ordinary lovers in an ordinary bed. Maggie’s skin was astonishingly smooth. It had no pores, it was all silken sheen. Her whole body seemed to expand and accept him. He kissed the palms of her hands, crisscrossed with a thousand tiny aimless lines. She tasted of salt and honey. He put his face deep into the smooth bend of her neck and inhaled her: whatever she had smelled of before, now she smelled of fresh bread.

“Oh, you beautiful man,” she said.

He slid into a warm wet opening in her body that felt like home. He was home: Maggie almost instantly moved and trembled with an orgasm: and his entire body felt blessed. He was home.

Later Michael lay stunned, spent, and grateful, entwined in sleeping Maggie. It felt like travel: like a journey to a place that was not merely a country, but country-ness itself. Maggie Lah, the flag of her own nation, the treasure and the key to the treasure. Michael’s happiness passed effortlessly into sleep.

1

He could hardly sit still, he was certain that today everything was going down, that today would decide the whole rest of his life. He kept looking at the telephone, telling it to ring: now. He jumped up from the chair before the window and went to the telephone and touched the receiver with his fingertips, so that if the call came at that moment he could answer it almost before it rang.

Yesterday his telephone had rung, and when he had picked it up, not thinking, or stupidly thinking about something else the way you always do when the really important things happen to you, he had said hello and waited, his brain kind of on hold for a second while the person hesitated, and after a second or two he felt himself come into focus: all his nerves woke up because the person at the other end was still not speaking, and that person was Koko. Oh God, what a moment. He had felt Koko’s hesitation, Koko’s need to talk to him, and the fear that kept him from talking. It was like the moment when you feel a firm tug on your fishing line, and you know that something big and necessary is down there, making up its mind. “I want to talk to you,” Harry had said, and felt the whole atmosphere charge with excitement and need. If there had been anything wrong with his heart, it would have blown itself out like an old tire right then. And Koko had gently, almost unwillingly, set down his telephone—Harry could hear the need and the regret, for at such times you hear everything, everything speaks, and had set down his own telephone with the knowledge that Koko would call again. Now Harry was like a drug he could not resist.

And the circumstances were perfect. Michael Poole and Tim Underhill, who in Harry’s opinion had turned out to be a pure type of fifth wheel, were safely off in the Midwest, looking for Victor Spitalny’s high school yearbook or something—and he was here at the center, ground zero.

Today he would lead Koko into the killing box.

He had showered and dressed in loose comfortable clothes—his only pair of jeans, a black turtleneck sweater, black Reeboks. The handcuffs went over his belt, hidden by the sweater. The gravity knife rested like a small cold sleeping animal in his side pocket.

Harry wandered over to his television set and switched on NBC. He jiggled his knee. Jane Pauley and Bryant Gumble were smiling at each other, sharing some joke—in a year, they would be pronouncing his name, smiling at him, looking at him with wonder and admiration.… They switched to the good-looking girl who read the local news. Dark eyebrows, wet full lips, that intense sexy look, intellectually sexy in that New York way. Harry put his hand on his groin and leaned toward the screen, imagining what the girl would say if she knew about him, what he was going to do.…

He walked to his window and looked down at the wage slaves leaving his building in groups of two and three. One girl slipped out of the building and turned toward Tenth Avenue in the cold wind. Ring, telephone. The girl moved toward Tenth Avenue, foreshortened by Harry’s perspective but still walking on a good pair of legs, a good ass shifting back and forth under her coat—That Channel Four girl, Jane Hanson, a million guys daydreamed about meeting someone like that, but when all this was over, she would be talking about him. Before long, he would be in the studio, he would be sitting in Rockefeller Center—the trick was not in knowing where it was, the trick was in getting yourself invited in. Above the world of wage slaves was a world like a big party filled with famous people who knew each other. Once you were invited in, you were in the party. You finally had the family you deserved. Doors opened before you, opportunities came your way—you were where you belonged.

When he was twenty years old, his picture had been on the cover of Time and Newsweek!

Harry went into the bathroom and smoothed down his hair in front of the mirror.

He ate a cup of cherry yogurt and an old cheese danish he found in his refrigerator. Around ten-thirty, watching CNN now, he ate a Mounds bar and a chocolate chip cookie from the stash of goodies he kept in his desk drawer. He had this crazy yen to have a drink, but felt nothing but contempt for a man who would take a drink before an important mission.

Later he turned back to one of the regular networks, muted the sound, and turned his radio to a news station.

Around twelve-thirty Harry called a restaurant, Big Wok, right across Tenth Avenue, and asked for an order of sesame noodles and double-sautéed pork to be delivered to his apartment.

The programs ground on, one after the other, barely distinguishable. Harry barely tasted the Chinese food he put in his mouth.

At two-thirty he jumped up from his chair and switched on his answering machine.

The afternoon wore on. Nothing happened: a child drowned in the Harlem River, another child was severely beaten by his stepfather and then put into the oven and burned to death, thirty children in California claimed to have been sexually abused in nursery school—lying little bastards, Harry thought, next day there’d be another twenty kids yelling that their teacher had taken out their weenies or that he had taken out his weenie. Half of them probably wanted him to do it, they probably asked if they could play with it. Little California girls, already wearing makeup, earrings dangling from their pierced ears, tight little asses in their little-girl designer jeans.…

An earthquake, a fire, a train wreck, an avalanche … How many dead, altogether? A thousand? Two thousand?

At four-thirty he could stand it no longer, checked his machine to make sure it was still on, put on a coat and a hat, and went outside for a walk. It was a real end-of-February day, with that dampness in the air that found its way through your clothing and went right down into your bones. Still Harry felt liberated. Let the crazy bastard call back! What choice did he have?

Harry was moving very quickly up Ninth Avenue, walking much faster than anyone else on the street. Now and then he caught someone staring at him with alarm or worry on their innocent faces and realized that he had been talking out loud to himself. “It’s about time we talked. We have a lot to say to each other. I want to help you. This is the whole meaning of both of our lives.”

“We need each other,” Harry said to a startled man putting a girl into a taxi at 28th Street. “You could even call it love.”

On the corner of 30th Street he darted into a little deli and bought a Mars bar. In the artificial warmth of the shop he felt dizzy for a moment. Sweat streamed down his forehead. He needed to be outside, he needed to be moving! Harry thrust two quarters at the fat man behind the register and waited, sweat pouring from his scalp, for his change. The fat man frowned at him—the pouches under his eyes actually seemed to darken and swell, as if they might burst—and Harry remembered that he had given the man the exact amount, that candy bars no longer cost a dime, or fifteen cents, or whatever he had thought—and he had actually known this, for hadn’t he given the creep the right amount? He whirled away back out into the cold, healthy air.

You came running out of the cave, Harry said to himself.

All his life fate had sparkled just over his shoulder, singling him out as one of the special ones who had been invited in. Why else had other people so envied and resented him, tried to hold him back?

You came running out of the cave to find us. You’ve been trying to get back ever since.

You wanted to be a part of it.

Harry felt his blood beating, his skin heating, his whole body steaming like a healthy young stallion’s.

You saw, you heard, you felt it, and you knew you were at the center of your life.

You need me to get back there.

Harry stopped moving on the corner of Hudson and something, a car blared at him, and electricity coursed through his body. The long vertical sign of the White Horse Tavern blazed in the darkness just across the street. To get back there.

Harry remembered the electricity pouring through his body as he stood with his weapon pointed at all those silent children the villagers from An Lat must have taken out later through the cave’s back entrance. He remembered: in the phosphorous glare. Their big eyes, their hands held out to him. And him there, twice their size, an adult American male. Knowing what he knew. That he could do anything, really anything he wanted to, at this one golden godlike point in his life. The sexual thing blasting through him.

Let someone say it was bad—they had not been there. If your body spoke that loudly, how could it be bad?

Sometimes a man was blessed, that was what it came down to. Sometimes a man touched pure original power and felt it take over his whole body—sometimes, maybe once in your life, you knew whole worlds were coming out of your cock because at that moment nothing you did could be wrong.

His life was finally coming full circle. I almost laughed out loud, Harry thought, and then did laugh out loud. He and Koko were going to go back there again, to the hot center of their lives. When he came out of the cave this time, he was going to come out a hero.

Exultant, Harry turned back toward his apartment.

2

But by six Harry felt his energy finally begin to consume itself and turn into anger and doubt. Why was he sitting here, in the middle of this messy apartment, in these ridiculous Action Man clothes? Who was he trying to kid? He had finally lived long enough to be able to see what happened to his best, highest moments when their goals were suspended. The world turned black. Harry knew this had nothing to do with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder or anything else undergone by weaker, shallower people than he. The blackness was simply him, part of what had always set him apart. At such times whatever it was that he wanted and needed and knew he was going to get faded away into a vaguer and vaguer future, and his whole character seemed no more than a façade of competence and stability over a spinning chaos. Once he had been on trial, accused of murdering civilians, and the world had come close to judging him a madman—what had been filled with blazing Tightness was coldly evaluated as the act of a criminal. The demons had come in very close that time, he had heard them snicker and seen the red glitter of their eyes, felt the terror and emptiness they brought with them.

The demons had known his secret.

If Koko called him back, the world itself was in its proper shape: the center was the center, which was the secret, and the power of what Harry Beevers had felt and done radiated out through the rest of his life and took him where he had to be. Why else had Koko appeared?

Koko had appeared again in the world to give himself to Harry Beevers, he thought, writing this sentence in his mind as he half-heartedly watched a man turned dusty brown by makeup predict the weather for the next five days.

At ten o’clock he heard the radio repeating the same news—the earthquake, the flood, the dead children, disaster skimming over the planet like a great black bird that touched down with a claw here and toppled buildings with a wingbeat there, unseen, always moving.

Half an hour later one of its great wings seemed to flap directly over his head. He had given in and made a drink—his only one, to calm his nerves. Harry was pouring vodka into a glass when the telephone rang, and he sloshed some of the liquid onto the counter. He hurried into the living room just as Michael Poole identified himself.

Stay there another two days, Harry silently said, but heard Poole’s voice telling him of arriving the next day on a certain flight at a certain hour. Then Poole spoke of going to the police. Poole’s voice was earnest and concerned and kindly, and in its cadences Harry Beevers could hear the collapse of all his designs.

Later in the evening Harry got hungry, but could not stomach the thought of eating more Chinese food. Also nauseating was the idea of Michael Poole and Tim Underhill, both of whom had seemed to give up on sex, being with Maggie Lah—only he would really know what to do with a girl like that. This was so funny it hurt. He went to his refrigerator, thinking almost angrily about Maggie Lah, and found within it a couple of apples, a few carrots, a wedge of cheese already beginning to go dry and hard.

Resentfully Harry dropped most of these things on a plate and carried it into the living room. If nothing happened—if his instincts had been so entirely wrong—he would have to go out to the airport and try to muzzle Poole. Maybe he could send him somewhere else for a day or two.

Late at night Harry sat in the dark with the telephone and answering machine before him, sipping his drink and watching the red message light on the machine. In the silver city light coming through the window, everything looked poised. Countless times Harry had waited like this in the jungle, not moving, the world suspended around him.

Then the telephone rang, and the message light began to blink. Harry extended his hand and waited for the caller to identify himself. The tape switched on, and a second of silence hissed through the speaker. Harry lifted the receiver and said, “I’m here.”

It was not until then that he knew: he heard Koko waiting for him to say more.

“Talk to me,” Harry said.

Tape hiss came through the little speaker in the answering machine.

“Backwards and forwards, isn’t that right? You wrote that? I know what you mean. I know—you want to go back to the beginning.”

He thought he heard a soft slow intake of breath.

“This is how we’re going to do it. I want you to meet me in a certain place, a safe place. Called Columbus Park, right on the edge of Chinatown. From there we can cross the street and go into the Criminal Court building, where you will also be safe. I know people there. These people trust me. They will do whatever I say. I will take you into a private room. You’ll be able to sit down. Everything will be over. Do you hear me?”

Hissing silence.

“But I want to be certain that I will be safe too. I want to see that you will do what I ask you to do. So I want you to take a certain route to Columbus Park, and I will be watching you all along this route. I want to see you follow my orders exactly. I want to see that you do exactly what I ask you to do.”

When no words came from Koko, Harry said, “Tomorrow afternoon at ten minutes to three, I want you to start on Bowery, across from the north end of Confucius Plaza. Enter an arcade in the middle of the block between Canal and Bayard and walk through the arcade to Elizabeth Street. Turn left and go to Bayard Street. Walk west on Bayard until you come to Mulberry Street. Across the street is Columbus Park. Go across and enter the park. Go down the path and sit on the first bench. In exactly two minutes I will enter the park from the southern end and join you on the bench. Then it will all be over.”

Harry took a deep breath. He could feel his whole upper body sweating into the turtleneck. He wanted to say something else—something like we both need to do this—but the other end of the line clicked down, and the dial tone began.

Harry sat for a long time in the dark. Then he switched on the desk lamp and called the Tenth Precinct. Without giving his name, he left a message for Lieutenant Murphy that Timothy Underhill would be arriving at La Guardia airport at two o’clock the next afternoon on a Republic flight from Milwaukee.

That night he lay awake in bed a long time, indifferent to sleep.

3

Crime and death surrounded the elephant, crime and death were the atmosphere through which he moved, the air he pulled into his lungs through his long grey trunk. And this is one thing Koko knew: though you move through the city the jungle stares at you, every step. There is no jungle but the jungle, and it grows beneath the sidewalks, behind the windows, on the other sides of the doors. Birds cry out in the midst of traffic.

If he could have gone up to the old lady on West End Avenue, she would have dressed him in fine clothes and tamed him by easing his heart. But Pilophage the Doorman had turned him away, and the mad beasts had growled and shown their teeth, and his heart had not been eased.

The door opened, and—

The door opened, and Blood the Butcher slid into the room. Here was the demon Misfortune, and with the demon came the wire-haired bat, Fear.

Koko sat alone in his room, his cell, his egg, his cave. The light burned, and the egg the cell the cave caged all the light and reflected it from wall to wall, let none escape for Koko needed it every bit.

Flames jumped from the floor of Koko’s room but did not sear him. Dead children clustered round him, crying out, and the others cried out from the walls. Their mouths open, their elbows pressed close to their sides. The children exhaled the reeking breath of lions, for they lived in the cave as he lived in the cave, backwards and forwards.

The door opened, and—

A fire sprang up and a wind sprang up.

Spare my life, a child cried out in bat language.

Pilophage the General posed for his portrait before Justinen, the painter. The General looked grand and good, with his plumed hat beneath his arm. The Lieutenant stood in the dark cave, not good or grand, with his surfboard out before him. His shovel. And the girl in the alley off Phat Pong Road looked at him and knew.

Do you want to know what’s dark?

The Devil’s arsehole is dark. Koko went into the cave and into the Devil’s arsehole and there met the Lieutenant, Harry Beevers, his surfboard his shovel his weapon out before him, being fingered, being fluted, being shot—shooting. You want a piece of this? The Lieutenant with his cock sticking out and his eyes glowing. Then the Devil closed his nose and closed his eyes and stuck his fingers in his ears and eternity came in a thunderclap, eternity happened all at once, backwards and forwards. The woman crawled up from Nicaragua and gave birth and died in a black cloud, naked and covered in frozen mud.

At the thought of Harry Beevers the children quailed and threw their arms around each other, and their stink doubled and redoubled.

Good afternoon, gentlemen, and welcome to the Devil’s Arse-hole. It is presently no time no date no year. You will presently take yourself to the Bowery Arcade, and there you will once again face the elephant.

4

And when Babar went to bed he could not sleep. Discord and misfortune had come to Celesteville. Outside Babar’s window demons chattered. When Pilophage the General opened his massy mouth, snakes and bats flew out.

We have turned every one to his own way, every one to his own way.

Tapitor, Capoulosse, Barbacol. Podular. Pilophage. Justinen. Doulamor. Poutifor. Sturdy Hatchibombitar, whom the stunned child within Babar the King had loved best, with his red shirt and checked cap, his sturdy shoulders and broad back—the street sweeper, a man of no ambition but to keep the streets clean, a kind man, honest, sweeping and sweeping away the filth.

5

At the cusp of the night he heard outside his window the wingbeats not of birds, as at first it seemed, but of dark terrible creatures twice the size of bats. These creatures had come out of the earth in order to find him, and they would torment themselves at the window for a long time before wheeling away and returning to the earth. No other person would see or hear them, for no other person could. Harry himself had never seen them. The position of his bed in the little alcove beside the bathroom did not give him a view of the window. Harry lay in the dark for a long time, listening to the feathery, insistent sound of the wings. Eventually the din began to lessen. One by one the creatures flew back to their hole in the earth, where they huddled together squeaking and biting, dreamily licking the drops of blood from one another’s bodies. Harry listened in the dark as their number shrank to a final two or three that actually thumped against the glass in their desperation. Eventually these too flapped off. Morning was only a few hours away.

He finally slept an hour or two, and when he woke up he faced the old problem of the reality of the creatures. In the light of morning it was too easy to dismiss them as imaginary. On the nights they came, four or five nights since he had been out of uniform, they were real. He would have seen them, he had known, if he had dared to look.

But they had failed again, and at nine he got out of bed feeling both tired and invigorated. He showered carefully and long, scrubbing and soaping and fondling, sliding his hand up and down the shaft of his penis, cupping his balls, rubbing and pulling.

He dressed in the same jeans and sweater he had worn the previous day, but beneath the sweater wore a fresh shirt, stiff with starch.

When he looked at himself in the mirror beside his bed, he thought he looked like a commando—like a Green Beret. He drank two cups of coffee and remembered how he had felt on certain mornings in Camp Crandall before going out on patrol. The bitter coffee, the weight of the automatic pistol on his hip. On some of those mornings his heart had felt as hard and tight as a walnut, his skin had tingled, it had seemed to him that he saw and heard like an eagle. The colors of the tents, the red dust in the roadway, the wire glinting on the perimeter. The slight hazy dullness of the air. Beneath all the other odors of men and machinery had been a live green scent, delicate and sharp as the edge of a razor. For Harry, this had been the basic smell of Vietnam. In Ia Thuc he had grabbed an old woman’s shoulder and pulled her harshly toward him, shouting some question he could not recall, and beneath the coarse smell of wood smoke the green razor of this scent had sliced out toward him from her body.

If a woman smelled like that, Harry thought, she’d put a hook in you that you’d never get out.

He drank another cup of coffee on the fold-out couch and tried to visualize in sequence every action that would bring him together with Koko in the Bowery Arcade. At one forty-five he would take a cab to the northeast corner of Bowery and Canal. It would then be about two o’clock and Lieutenant Murphy and two or three uniformed policemen would just be meeting the Republic flight from Milwaukee at La Guardia. In Chinatown the day would be cold, grey, wintry, and few people would be on the street. Harry planned to walk across Bowery and station himself on the wide traffic island just north of Confucius Plaza for a fast look at the block containing the arcade. He visualized the long block, the tiled façades of the restaurants with their plate-glass windows. A few men and women moving quickly in heavy coats. If Spitalny had decided to conceal himself in a doorway or behind a restaurant window, Harry would see him, and immediately disappear into Confucius Plaza and wait for Spitalny to panic when he realized that something had gone wrong. When Spitalny came out of hiding, Harry could follow him and finish him off as soon as they were alone. If he did not see Spitalny waiting to ambush him—and he did not think he would—Harry planned to recross Bowery and make a quick pass through the arcade just to make sure that the staircase had not been closed or blocked. If anything unusual were going on in the arcade, he would have to follow Spitalny out onto Elizabeth Street and get up close behind him before he got to Bayard Street. Elizabeth Street was Harry’s fallback—few restaurants, gloomy tenements. But if everything went as he imagined it would, Harry planned to go back across Bowery and conceal himself among the trees and benches at the base of Confucius Plaza. There he would wait until fifteen minutes before the time he had given Koko—until twenty-five to three—then he would cross Bowery one final time, make a final pass through the arcade to see that all was clear at the Elizabeth Street end, and then wait for Koko on the staircase.

Sitting on his couch and holding the warm mug of coffee, Harry envisioned the sweep of the tiled floor toward the wide entrance. Harry would see everyone who passed by illuminated by the natural light of the street—when they turned toward the entrance and faced him, it would be as if a spotlight had been turned on them. Victor Spitalny would be burned a little brown from years of living under the Singapore sun, there would be deep lines in his face, but his hair would still be black, and in his close-set brown eyes would still be the expression of baffled grievance he had worn throughout his tour of duty.

Harry saw himself moving silently up the stairs as soon as Spitalny had passed him, treading softly over the tiles to come up behind him. He would slip the gravity knife out of his pocket. Spitalny would hesitate before leaving the arcade, as he would hesitate before entering it. Stringy and ungainly inside his ugly clothes, inside his madness, he would stand exposed for a second: and Harry would clamp his left arm around his neck and drag him out of the light back into the arcade.

Harry brought his coffee to his lips and was startled to find that it had gone cold. Then he grinned—the terrible creatures had come for Victor Spitalny.

When he could no longer ignore his hunger, Harry went out to a deli on Ninth Avenue and bought a chicken salad sandwich and a can of Pepsi. Back in his apartment, he could only eat half the sandwich—his throat closed, and his body would not allow him another bite. Harry wrapped up the other half of the sandwich and put it in the refrigerator.

Everything he did seemed italicized, drenched in significance, like a series of scenes from a film.

When Harry came out of his kitchen, the framed magazine covers blared out at him like loud music. His face, his name. It took the breath right out of his body.

6

Before going downstairs for the cab, he poured himself a shot of Absolut. It was treacly from the freezer, and slid into his throat like a bullet made of mercury. The bullet froze whatever it touched, and evaporated into warmth and confidence as soon as it touched his stomach. Harry capped the bottle and returned it to the freezer.

Alone inside the elevator, Harry took out his pocket comb and ran it through his hair.

Outside on Ninth Avenue he raised his arm, and a cab swooped across two lanes and came to rest before him. The door locks floated up with an audible pop! Everything now was a sequence of smooth, powerful actions. Harry climbed into the back seat and gave the directions to the driver.

Down Ninth Avenue the taxi went, everything clear, everything seen in the frame of the moment. A tall window reflected a sky filled with heavy clouds. Above the roof of the cab Harry heard sudden wing beats, swift and loud.

He stepped out of the cab onto an empty sidewalk and looked south across busy Canal Street to the block that contained the arcade. A crowd of people carrying shopping bags and small children turned off Canal down Bowery. While Harry stood watching another small group composed of young Chinese men in suits and topcoats walked out of the Manhattan Savings Bank and also turned down Bowery. In a few seconds the second group had overtaken the first, and walked past the arcade without even glancing in. Suddenly all of Harry’s plans and precautions seemed unnecessary—he was an hour early, all he had to do was go into the arcade and hide on the staircase.

He hunched his shoulders against this heresy as much as against the cold. Visualizing an action helped bring it into being. The preparations were themselves a stage in Koko’s capture, an essential aspect of the flow of events.

Harry trotted through a break in the traffic and jumped up onto Stage Two of his preparations, the traffic island north of Confucius Plaza. He could see the entire block between Canal and Bayard, but he was exposed to anyone who would happen to look across the street. Harry backed away toward the far side of the island. The Chinese businessmen were waiting to cross Bayard, and the family with the babies and shopping bags was just straggling past the arcade. Nobody stood pretending to read the menus in the restaurant doorways, no faces were visible in the windows.

When the light changed Harry ran back across Bowery and ducked into the arcade for Stage Three.

It was even better than he remembered it—darker, so quiet it was hushed. One old lady dawdled between the shops. Today there were even fewer customers than he had seen two days before. The staircase to the lower level was nearly invisible, and when Harry glanced down it he saw joyfully that the bulb at the bottom of the staircase had burned out, and no one had replaced it. The lower level of the arcade was illuminated only by the weak light from the barbershop’s windows.

He gave a quick check to the arcade’s far end. A skinny Chinese in pajamas stared at him from the stoop of a tenement before retreating back inside.

Stage Four began at the base of Confucius Plaza. A few Chinese in padded coats came across the wide plaza and were admitted into the office building at Harry’s back. They paid no attention to him. Half a dozen concrete benches sat among the trees and planters on the plaza. Harry chose one that gave him an uninterrupted view.

Now and then a truck stopped directly before him and blocked his view; once a delivery van parked directly in front of the arcade. Harry checked his watch as he waited for the van to pull away, and saw that it was two-twenty.

He felt for the knife in his coat pocket. The pocket seemed to be empty. Harry groped more industriously. The knife still eluded him. Sweat began to drip down into his eyebrows. He tore off his right glove and thrust his hand into the pocket—the knife was gone.

People passing in cars were pointing at him, laughing, leaving him behind as they swept by on their ways to parties, receptions, interviews.…

He poked his fingers to the bottom of the pocket and found a rip in the lining. Of course his pockets were ripped, the coat was eight years old, what did you expect? The knife lay inside the hem, useless as a toothbrush. Harry worked it up the lining, and gradually got it near enough to the rip so that he could thrust his fingers through and feel for it. A row of stitches popped, and the rip widened. He found the knife and drew it up and transferred it to his left pocket.

An eight-year-old coat! He had nearly lost everything because of an eight-year-old coat!

Harry sat down heavily on the bench and immediately put his left hand into the coat pocket and folded it around the knife. He had lost his focus. Harry wiped his forehead, put his glove back on, and folded his hands in his lap.

Trucks, cars, and taxicabs streamed past on Bowery. A large group of well-dressed Chinese men moved past the arcade. Watching them, Harry realized with a spurt of panic that anyone could have slipped inside from Elizabeth Street while he watched this end.

But Koko was a soldier, and he would follow orders.

The Chinese men reached Bayard Street and scattered with waves and smiles.

It came to Harry that he was sitting on a stone bench with a knife in his pocket, waiting not to capture someone but to kill him, and that he thought he could become famous for doing this. This idea seemed as cruelly barren as the rest of his life. For a moment Harry Beevers contemplated himself as just one man among a million men, a lonely figure on a bench. He could stand up, drop the knife into a planter, and go off and do—what?

He looked down at his body clad in loose dark uncharacteristic clothes, the clothing of an active man, and this simple proof of his uniqueness allowed him back into the heart of his fantasy. His rich destiny again embraced him.

At two-thirty Harry decided to alter his plan and wait out the time remaining on the staircase. It never hurt to be in position early, and being in position would mean that he would also see anyone who entered the arcade from the far end.

Harry stood up. His body was very straight, his head erect, his expression carefully neutral. Harry Beevers was locked in. The man was wrapped tight. He reached the curb, and his nerves reached out to every human being and every vehicle moving past. High heels clicked toward him, and a young Chinese woman joined him at the crosswalk. When she glanced at him—a pretty young woman, that silky Chinese hair, sunglasses even on a day like this—she was attracted to him, she found him interesting. The light changed, and they set off the curb together. In the middle of the street she gave him a rueful, questioning look. On the other side of the street the girl turned toward Bayard Street, stretching out the particular nerve that he fastened to her, drawing it out further and further like an unbreakable thread.

Harry moved quickly into the darkness of the arcade. From its far end came the sound of low voices and moving bodies, three bodies, and Harry casually moved nearer the wall and pretended to be interested in a large poster glued to the wall. X-RAY SPECS. THE BLASTERS. Three overweight teenage girls in duffel coats came slouching past the angle in the arcade. He recorded their brief acknowledgment of him, the way their eyes flicked sideways, and how they silently commented on him to each other. They carried knapsacks and wore scuffed brown loafers. The girls moved slowly down the length of the arcade and finally walked out into the lighter air, still pretending not to have noticed him.

Harry checked both ways—the arcade was empty, and the Bowery end gaped bright and grey—and crossed to the staircase. The burned-out bulb had of course not been replaced. He quickly went down half a dozen steps, checked back toward the Elizabeth Street entrance, and then went down the rest of the way. Harry unbuttoned his coat. He peeled off his gloves and shoved them into his pockets. The railing dug unpleasantly into his hip when he leaned against the side of the staircase.

At once an arm emerged out of the blackness behind him and clamped around his neck. Someone standing at his back pulled him off-balance and pushed a thick cloth into his mouth. Harry reached for the knife, but his hand tangled in a glove. Then he remembered it was the wrong pocket anyway, but in that second he was falling back and it was too late for the knife. He heard his handcuffs clatter onto the staircase.

1

Maggie saw the policemen first, and asked Michael what he thought had happened. They were halfway down the ramp to the terminal, and the two officers had appeared in the lighted square where the jetway ended. “I don’t know,” Michael said. “Probably—” He looked over his shoulder and saw Tim Underhill just emerging through the door of the plane, half a dozen people back. Maggie took his elbow and stopped moving. Michael looked ahead again and saw the big homicide detective, Lieutenant Murphy, staring at him with a set, furious face beside the two uniformed men. “Take it easy,” Murphy said, and the policemen beside him braced themselves but did not draw their guns. “Keep on coming, people,” Murphy said. The people ahead of Maggie and Poole had stopped short, and now the jetway was crowded with passengers. Murphy motioned the passengers in front toward him, and everyone began shuffling toward the terminal. Maggie was holding tightly onto Poole’s hand.

“Everybody keep moving,” Murphy said. “Keep moving and keep calm.”

For a second there had been a shocked silence. Now a bubble of questioning, demanding voices filled the tunnel.

“Just proceed through the terminal normally,” Murphy said. Poole glanced back at Underhill, who had gone pale but was moving forward with the other passengers behind them. A woman somewhere in their midst shrieked at the sight of the policemen.

Murphy was watching Underhill, and when Poole and Maggie finally reached the terminal he spoke without looking at them. “Take them aside.”

One of the policemen took Michael by the arm Maggie was not holding, and pulled him off toward the window beside the gate. Another tried to separate Maggie, but she would not let go of Poole’s arm, and so Poole, Maggie, and the two policemen moved crabwise to an empty space in front of the window. The gate had been roped off, and a wall of people stood at the rope looking in at them. Two uniformed policemen with rifles stood off to the side behind Murphy, out of sight of the passengers in the jetway.

When Tim Underhill came through, Murphy stepped forward, charged him with the murder of Anthony Pumo, and read him his rights from a white card he had taken from his pocket. The policeman who had taken Maggie aside patted Underhill’s chest and sides, then patted down each leg. Underhill managed to smile.

“We were going to call you as soon as we got here,” Michael said. Murphy ignored him.

The other passengers on the flight moved slowly toward the ropes. Most of them were walking backward, not to miss anything. The flight crew had clustered at the end of the ramp and were whispering to each other. Nearly all the passengers stopped moving once they reached the rope, set down their luggage, and stared.

Murphy’s face flushed a dark red. He turned around and shouted, “Will you clear the area? Will you please get this area clear?” It was not clear if he was shouting at the policemen or the gaping passengers.

“Please move to the other side of the rope,” said a young detective, a police dandy in a dark blue coat and soft wide-brimmed hat that made an unintentional contrast to Underhill’s own big shabby coat and wide hat. Most of the passengers picked up their carry-on bags and moved toward the opening in the ropes. The entire terminal sounded like a cocktail party.

“Lieutenant,” Poole said. Maggie glanced up at him, and he nodded.

“Keep your mouth shut, Dr. Poole,” Murphy said. “I’m arresting you and the girl too. There’ll be plenty of time for you to say whatever you want to say.”

“What do you think we were doing in Milwaukee? Could you tell me that?”

“I hate to think what you people were doing, anywhere.”

“Do you think Maggie Lah would go anywhere or have anything to do with Tina Pumo’s murderer? Does that seem reasonable to you?”

Murphy nodded to the dandy, who stepped behind Underhill and handcuffed him.

“Tim Underhill was still in Bangkok when Tina Pumo was killed—check the flight records.”

Maggie was unable to stay quiet any longer. “I saw the man who killed Tina. He did not look anything like Timothy Underhill, Lieutenant. Somebody is making a fool of you. How did you learn that we were on this flight?”

“We had an anonymous tip.” Murphy’s face was still the same ugly purple it had turned just before his explosion.

“Harry Beevers,” Poole said, looking down at Maggie.

“Look at my passport, Lieutenant,” Underhill said in a quiet, reasonable voice. “I carry it with me. It’s in my coat pocket.”

“Get his passport,” Murphy said to the dandy, who reached down into the nearest pocket of Underhill’s long shapeless coat and found the small dark green booklet that was his passport.

“Open it up,” Murphy said.

The young detective moved closer to Underhill. He opened the passport and riffled through the pages. There appeared to be a great many entries in Underhill’s passport. The dandy found the last page of entries, examined it for a moment, then handed the passport to Murphy.

“I came back with Beevers and Dr. Poole,” Tim said. “Mass murder was one of the mistakes I managed to avoid.”

“Mass murder! Mass murder!” echoed through the crowd jammed against the rope.

Murphy’s flush deepened as he stared at Underhill’s passport. He leafed backwards from the last entry, looking for an earlier arrival in America. At length he dropped his hands, moved his feet, and turned to look at the scene in the terminal. People were pressing against the rope, and the police marksmen stood among the empty plastic chairs. Murphy said nothing for a long time. A flash went off as a tourist took a picture.

“You people have a lot of explaining to do,” he finally said. He put the passport in his own coat pocket. “Cuff the other two.”

The two uniformed policemen snapped handcuffs on Poole and Maggie.

“Did this man Underhill come back from Bangkok on the same flight with you and Beevers and Linklater?”

Poole nodded.

“And you chose not to let me know that. You sat in my office and decided to let me chase after the wrong man.”

“I regret that,” Poole said.

“But still you people put up those posters all over Chinatown?”

“Koko had used Underhill’s name.”

“You wanted to find him yourself?” Murphy asked, seeming just now to have understood this point.

“Harry Beevers wanted to do something like that. The rest of us went along with him.”

“You went along with him,” Murphy said, shaking his head. “Where is Beevers now?”

“Mikey!” a voice called from behind the crowd at the ropes.

“Conor Linklater was going to meet us here.”

Murphy turned to one of the uniformed policemen and said, “Bring that man here.” The policeman trotted off toward the gap in the rope, and reached it at about the same time that Conor and Ellen Woyzak appeared at the front of the crowd.

“Bring them along,” Murphy said, walking off toward the crowd, which began moving away from him.

“We were in Milwaukee to see if we could learn where Koko is,” Poole called to him. “Instead we found out who he is. If you’ll let me get some stuff out of the trunk of my car, I could show you what I mean.”

Murphy turned around and glowered at Michael and Maggie, then, with even deeper distaste, at Tim Underhill.

“Hey, you can’t arrest these people,” Conor started to say. “You want a guy named Victor Spitalny—he’s the one they were checking up on—”

“No,” Poole said. “Conor, it’s not Spitalny.”

Conor stopped talking for a wide-eyed moment, and then stepped toward Murphy, holding his hands out. “Cuff me.” Ellen Woyzak uttered a noise that combined a screech and a growl. “Put ’em on,” Conor said. “I’m not gonna rest on my morals. I did everything these guys did—the buck passes here. Come on.”

“Shut up, Conor,” Ellen said.

Murphy looked as though he wanted to cover his face with his hands. All the policemen watched him as they would a dangerous animal.

Finally Murphy pointed at Maggie, Poole, and Underhill. “Put these three with me,” he said, and charged toward the crowd like a bull in a bullring. More flashes of light exploded. As soon as he reached the gap in the rope, the crowd broke apart before him.

“Put them in the lieutenant’s car,” said the dandy. “I’ll take Harry Truman with me.”

Still red-faced but calmer than he had been in the terminal, Murphy had removed their handcuffs before they finally got into the backseat of his car. One of the young policemen was driving them across the Whitestone Bridge, and Murphy had twisted sideways to listen to them. Every few minutes his radio crackled, and cold air poured in through the imperfectly sealed windows. Another policeman was driving Michael’s car, which they had taken from the airport parking lot and brought alongside Murphy’s, back to the precinct house.

“On the plane?” Murphy asked. He was no longer as angry as he had been inside the terminal, but he was still suspicious.

“That’s right,” Poole said. “I suppose that right up until then Maggie and I had been thinking that we were still looking for Victor Spitalny. I guess I knew the truth, but I couldn’t see it—I didn’t want to see it. We had all the evidence we needed, all the pieces, but they just hadn’t been put together.”

“Until I mentioned Babar,” Maggie said. “Then we both remembered.”

Poole nodded. He was not about to tell the policeman about his dream of Robbie holding up a lantern beside a dark road.

“What did you remember?”

“The song,” Maggie said. “Michael told me what the man in Singapore and the stewardess said to him, and I—I knew what they had heard.”

“The man in Singapore? The stewardess?”

Poole explained about Lisa Mayo and the owner of the bungalow where the Martinsons had been killed. “The man in Singapore had heard Koko singing something that sounded to him like rip-a rip-a-rip-a-lo. Lisa Mayo heard the passenger sitting next to Clement Irwin singing something very similar. They both heard the same thing, but they both heard it wrong.”

“And I knew what it was,” Maggie said. “The song of the elephants. From Babar the King. Here—take a look at it.”

Poole passed the book he had taken from the back of his car over the top of the seat.

“What the hell is this?” Murphy asked.

“It’s how Koko got his name,” Underhill said. “I think there were other meanings, but this is the first one. The most important one.”

Murphy looked at the page to which the book had been opened. “This is how he got the name?”

“Read the words,” Poole said, and pointed to the place on the page where the song was printed.“Patali Di Rapata

Cromda Cromda Ripalo

Pata Pata

Ko Ko Ko”

Murphy read from the yellow songsheet printed on the page.

“And then we knew,” Poole said. “It was Dengler. Probably we knew long before that. We might have known as soon as we went into his mother’s house.”

“There is a serious drawback to that theory,” Murphy said. “Private First Class Manuel Orosco Dengler has been dead since 1969. The army positively identified his body. And after the army identified the body, it was shipped back home for burial. Do you think his parents would have accepted someone else’s body?”

“His father was dead, and his mother was crazy enough to have accepted the body of a monkey, if that’s what they sent her. But because of the extensive mutilation the body had undergone, the army would have strongly advised her to accept their identification,” Poole said. “She never looked at the body.”

“So whose body was it?” Murphy asked. “The goddamn Unknown Soldier?”

“Victor Spitalny,” Underhill said. “Koko’s first victim. I wrote the whole scenario in advance—I explained what to do and how to do it. It was a story I used to call ‘The Running Grunt.’ Dengler got Spitalny to join him in Bangkok, killed him, switched dogtags and papers, made sure he was so mutilated nobody could tell who he was, and then took off in the middle of the confusion.”

“You mean, you put the idea in his head?” Murphy asked.

“He would have worked out something else if I hadn’t told that story,” Underhill said. “But I think that he used my name because he took the idea of killing Spitalny and deserting from me. He called himself by my name in various places after that, and he caused a lot of rumors that went around about me.”

“But why did he do it?” Murphy asked. “Why do you think he killed this Spitalny character—in order to desert under another identity?”

Poole and Underhill glanced at each other. “Well, that’s part of it,” Underhill said.

“That’s most of it, probably,” Poole said. “We don’t really know about the rest.”

“What rest?”

“Something that happened in the war,” Poole said. “Only three people were there—Dengler, Spitalny, and Harry Beevers.”

“Tell me about the running grunt,” Murphy said.

2

A man with deep broken wrinkles in his forehead and an air of aggrieved self-righteousness jumped up from a chair in the hallway outside the lieutenant’s office as soon as Poole, Underhill, Maggie, and Murphy reached the top of the stairs. A cold cigar was screwed into the side of his mouth. He stared at them, plucked the cigar from his mouth, and stepped sideways to look behind them. The sound of the next group came up the stairs, and the man thrust his hands in his pockets and nodded at Murphy as he waited with visible impatience for the others to appear.

Ellen Woyzak, Conor Linklater, and the young detective in the blue coat and hat reached the top of the steps and turned toward Murphy’s office. The man said, “Hey!” and bent over the railing to see if anyone else was coming. “Where is he?”

Murphy let the others into his office and motioned for the man to join them. “Mr. Partridge? Come in here, please?”

Poole had thought the man was another policeman, but saw now that he was not. The man looked angry, as if someone had picked his pocket.

“What’s the point? You said he was gonna be here, but he ain’t here.”

Murphy stepped out and held open his door. Partridge shrugged and came slowly down the hall. When he walked into the office he scowled at Poole and the others as if he had found them in his own living room. His clothes were wrinkled and his unpleasant blue-green eyes bulged out of his loose, large-featured face. “So now what?” He shrugged again.

“Please sit down,” Murphy said. The young detective took some folding chairs from behind a filing cabinet and began opening them up. When everyone was seated, Murphy perched on the edge of his desk and said, “This gentleman is Mr. Bill Partridge. He is one of the managers of a YMCA men’s residence, and I asked him to join us here this afternoon.”

“Yeah, and now I gotta leave,” Partridge said. “You got nothing for me. I got work to do.”

“One of the rooms under Mr. Partridge’s management was rented to a gentleman calling himself Timothy Underhill,” Murphy said, with more patience than he had displayed at the airport.

“Who skipped out,” said Partridge. “And who ruined his room. I don’t know who, but one of you people owes me back rent and a paint job.”

“Mr. Partridge,” Murphy said, “do you see the YMCA tenant who called himself Timothy Underhill anywhere in this room?”

“You know I don’t.”

“Thank you for coming in, Mr. Partridge,” said Murphy. “I am sorry we took you away from your duties, but I’d like you to see our artist downstairs to work on a composite portrait. If you feel that the department owes you money, you can try submitting a bill to us.”

“You’re doin’ a great job,” Partridge said, and turned to leave the room.

Poole called out to him. “Mr. Partridge, what did the man do to his room?”

Partridge did a half-turn and frowned at Poole. “Let the cop tell you.” He went through the door without closing it behind him.

The young detective moved to the door and closed it. He grinned at Maggie as he went back to his place beside the desk. He had a broad handsome face, and his teeth shone very white beneath his thick moustache. It occurred to Poole that both Murphy and the younger officer looked like Keith Hernandez, the Met’s first baseman.

Murphy looked gloomily at Underhill, who sat in the folds of his big coat, holding his hat in his lap. “He was here to give us an identification, of course. Timothy Underhill checked into the YMCA on the Upper West Side on the evening of the day that Clement Irwin was killed at the airport. There is, by the way, no record of anyone named Timothy Underhill passing through Customs to get back into the country at any time during the month of January, so we know that he traveled under another name. We stopped examining the records before the three of you and Mr. Beevers came back, of course, because we knew our man was with us by then.” He shook his head. “Partridge called us as soon as he looked inside Underhill’s room. Once we got in there, we knew we had him. All we had to do was wait.” He took a manila folder out of the middle drawer of the desk. “But after we waited all night, we thought he must have come back just after we showed up and saw our patrol cars. Which means that we missed him by no more than a couple of minutes. Take a look at the pictures of the room.”

He took a handful of Polaroids from the envelope and passed them to the young detective. Grinning again, the man went straight to Maggie and handed the photographs to her.

Maggie smiled at him and passed the photographs to Michael without looking at them.

The walls of the room looked chaotic, with clippings and photographs taped up above a wandering wavelike pattern that rose and fell through gouts of red paint. Another photograph showed a black and white picture of Tina, torn from a newspaper. In the third photograph, the undulating wave pattern finally came into focus. Poole swallowed. It was a crudely drawn mural of the heads and bodies of a lot of children. Chests had been exploded open, heads lolled on lifeless necks. Several of the children were naked, and the photograph clearly showed entry wounds in their trunks and stomachs.

Painted on another wall were the slogans A DROWSY STIFLED UNIMPASSIONED GRIEF and A MAN OF SORROW AND ACQUAINTED WITH GRIEF.

Poole passed the photographs to Underhill.

“I’ll show you the other half of why I met you at the airport,” Murphy said. He took a copy of a typewritten letter from the envelope and gave it to the young detective. “This time give it to Dr. Poole, Dalton.”

Dalton smiled handsomely at Maggie and handed the sheet of paper to Michael.

“St. Louis police found it in his desk.”

So this was how he had persuaded the journalists to come to him—Harry Beevers had been right. Poole read the letter very slowly:

Dear Mr. Martinson,

I have decided that it is no longer possible for me to remain silent about the truth of the events which occurred in the I Corps village of Ia Thuc …

He became aware that Murphy was saying something about Roberto Ortiz’s apartment. The detective was holding up another typed sheet of paper. “It’s identical to the one addressed to Mr. Martinson, except that the writer instructs Mr. Ortiz to reach him at an address on something called”—he glanced at the sheet—“called Plantation Road, in Singapore. Which is where his body was found.”

“Only these two letters were found?”

Murphy nodded. “Some of the others must have done as he asked, and destroyed the letters. Anyhow, these letters and the room at the Y were the reason we were so interested in you, Mr. Underhill.”

“Do you have any idea who placed the anonymous call?”

“Do you?” Murphy asked.

“Michael and Connor and I feel it must have been Harry Beevers.”

“But if he got your friends to lie to me about your whereabouts, why would he send me out to arrest you?”

“You know why that asshole called the police,” Conor said to Poole. “He was going to meet Koko, and he wanted you out of the way.”

“So where is Mr. Beevers now? Trying to capture this man by himself?”

Nobody spoke.

“Get Beevers on the telephone,” Murphy said, and with a final look at Maggie, Dalton hurried out of the room.

“If you people are hiding anything more from me, I promise you, you’ll spend a lot of time wishing you hadn’t.”

They sat in silence until Dalton returned. “Beevers isn’t answering his phone. I left a message for him to call you as soon as he got back, and I sent a car over to his place in case he’s there.”

“I think our business is over for the moment,” Murphy said. “I really do hope that I am through with you people. All of you are lucky not to be in jail. Now I want you to get out of my way and let me do my job.”

“Are you going down to Chinatown?” Michael asked.

“That is none of your business. You’ll find your car out in front, Mr. Poole.”

“Are there any caves in Chinatown?” Underhill asked. “Anything that might look like a cave?”

“New York is full of caves,” Murphy said. “Get out of here. Go home and stay there. If you hear from this man Dengler, call me immediately.”

“I don’t know what’s going on,” Conor said. “Dengler? Will somebody sort of fill me in on what I missed?”

Underhill pulled Conor toward him and whispered something in his ear.

“I want to suggest something to you before you go,” Murphy said. He stood up behind his desk, and his face mottled with the force of the anger he did not allow himself to show. “In the future, when you come across something important to this case, do not mail it to me. Now please let me do my work.”

He walked out of the office, and Dalton trailed behind him. Conor said, “Mikey, what is this? Dengler?”

A uniformed policeman appeared in the door and politely told them to go away.

3

“I have to call Judy,” Poole said when they got outside. “We have a lot of things to get straight.”

Maggie suggested that he make the call from Saigon. Poole looked at his watch—four o’clock.

“Harry loved that bar,” Conor told Ellen. “I think he spent most of his afternoons there.”

“You’re talking about him as though he was dead,” Ellen said.

“I think we’re all afraid of that,” said Tim Underhill. “Michael told him our plane was getting in at two, and I bet he somehow managed to arrange a meeting with Koko around then. So it’s been two hours—if Dengler called Harry in order to turn himself in and Harry tried anything tricky, which would be impossible for Harry not to do, probably nobody could save him now.”

“Can you explain all this stuff about Dengler now?” Conor asked.

“That will require a drink,” Tim said. “For you, not for me.”

Poole opened his car, and Maggie stepped beside him. “There’s someone uptown I want you to meet. My godfather.” He looked at her curiously, but she merely smiled and said, “Can all of us really squeeze into your car?”

They all could.

As Michael drove off, Underhill began describing their visit to Milwaukee. Underhill had always been a good describer, and while Poole drove down Seventh Avenue he saw the Spitalnys’ sad kitchen, and George Spitalny’s attempt to seduce Maggie with an old photograph; he saw an enraged man pounding a tire iron against the back of a bus, and snowdrifts like little mountain ranges. Kitty’s Pretty Muff, and the gas flares in the Valley. The smell of sizzling Wesson oil, Helga Dengler’s dog’s eyes. Little M.O. Dengler standing behind the body of a deer he had skinned and gutted.

“Michael!” Maggie screamed.

He twirled the wheel just in time to avoid ramming a taxicab. “Sorry. My mind was back there in that terrible house. And I hate the idea of giving up when there’s some chance that Harry is still alive.”

“And Dengler too,” Underhill said. “Murphy said that New York is full of caves. Maggie, I don’t suppose that you can think of anything in Chinatown that might even faintly resemble a cave?”

“No,” Maggie said. “Well, not really. I used to go to this place with Pumo that was in an arcade. I suppose it was as close to a cave as you can get in Chinatown.”

Poole asked where it was.

“Off Bowery, near Confucius Plaza.”

“Let’s go take a look at it,” Underhill said.

“Do you want to?” Poole asked.

“Don’t you?”

“Well,” Poole said.

“You can’t give up now, Poole,” Maggie said. “You ate bad kielbasa in George Spitalny’s kitchen. You waded through Salisbury steak at the Tick Tock Restaurant.”

“I’m the explorer type,” Poole said. “Conor? Ellen?”

“Do it, Michael,” Ellen said. “We might as well try.”

“You can tell she never met Harry Beevers,” Conor said.

When Michael drove past Mulberry Street in the thick traffic on Canal Street, Underhill peered past the upturned collar of his huge coat and said, “Our friends are out in force. Take a look.”

Poole glanced through the side window into Chinatown. Down on Mulberry Street, red lights spun on top of police cars drawn up to the curb; other red lights bounced off shop windows on Bayard Street. Poole glimpsed a group of policemen trotting diagonally across the street in a cluster, like a platoon.

“They’ll find him,” Conor said, sounding as if he wanted to make himself believe it. “Look at all those cops. And we don’t know Beevers tried anything funny with Koko, not really.”

Now they were passing the entrance to Mott Street. “I don’t see anything down there,” Poole said.

“It looks like two cops are going door to door,” Underhill said. “But we really don’t have any proof that Harry is down here, do we, or that he tried to double-cross us and Dengler?”

“He wanted Murphy to stop us before we got any further than the airport,” Poole said. He looked sideways into Elizabeth Street, which was emptier than the others. “That’s proof of something. He wanted us out of the way.”

Poole turned with the traffic toward the tall white towers of Confucius Plaza.

“There it is,” Maggie said, gesturing to the far side of the street. Poole looked sideways and saw an opening in the row of shops and restaurants along Bowery. Light penetrated the opening for about five feet, then melted into shadow. Maggie was right. It did look like a cave.

Poole found a parking spot in front of a fish market on Division Street. When he got out of the car, he saw frozen fish guts and shiny puddles of ice on the sidewalk. “Let’s just try to stay out of Murphy’s way. After we check out the arcade we can go to Saigon, and I can begin figuring out where I’m going to live.”

They began moving up Bowery in the stiff cold wind that came around the curved towers. A single policeman emerged from Bayard Street onto Bowery, and Michael realized that he did not at all want the policeman to walk into the arcade. Murphy and the rest of the policemen had Mulberry Street, Mott Street, Pell Street—all Poole wanted was the arcade.

The policeman swiveled toward them, and Poole recognized him—he was the fat-necked young officer who had led Michael upstairs to the meeting on the morning of the line-up. The man looked idly at Poole, then glanced down at Maggie’s legs. He turned his back on them and walked down Bayard Street.

“Oink,” Maggie whispered.

Poole watched the young policeman waddle down Bayard Street toward a patrol car beside which a band of uniformed men gazed into the windows of a grocery store while they stood around looking vaguely official.

Seconds later the five of them stood before the arcade. Maggie took the first step, and as they walked in they fanned out to cover both sides.

“I wish we were looking for something specific,” Underhill said. He was moving forward slowly, trying to take in every inch of the floor.

“There’s another level downstairs,” said Conor, who was with Ellen on the arcade’s right side. “Let’s check that out when we’re done up here.”

“I don’t understand why we’re doing this,” Ellen said. “Don’t you think your friend would have arranged to meet Koko—this Dengler—in a park, or on a corner someplace? Or in an office?”

Poole nodded, looking at a dusty display of women’s underwear. “If he just planned to meet him, that’s what he would do. But this is Harry Beevers we’re talking about.” He moved past posters for a rock club, and looked back at Conor, who was leaning on the railing of the stairs with his arm around Ellen Woyzak’s shoulders.

“And the Lost Boss wouldn’t do anything simple,” Conor said. “He’d cook up some plan. He’d tell him to meet him somewhere and plan to meet him somewhere else. He’d want to take him by surprise.”

They went past the angle in the arcade and stood for a moment looking at cold grey Elizabeth Street.

“Let’s say Koko finally answered his ads,” Poole said. “It’s not impossible.”

“Tina always answered my ads.”

“That’s probably where he got the idea,” Poole said.

“Okay, but why would he want to meet Koko in a cave?” Ellen asked. “That’s why we’re here, isn’t it? Because this is the only place Maggie could think of in Chinatown that looks like a cave?” She looked at each of the three men, who did not answer her. “I mean, wouldn’t it make more sense to get him to walk past a certain building and jump out at him? Or something like that?”

“Harry Beevers once had the time of his life in a cave,” Underhill said. “He went inside it, and when he came out he was a famous person. His whole life had changed.”

“Let’s check out the stairs,” Conor said. “Afterward we can go back to Saigon and wait for Murphy to tell us what happened.”

Poole nodded. He had lost heart. Murphy would eventually come across Beevers’ corpse in some tenement room. He would have a card in his mouth, and his face would be mutilated.

“Shouldn’t there be another light down there?” Maggie asked.

They were at the top of the stairs, looking down into the darkness.

“Burned out,” Conor said.

Weak light came out into the lower level of the arcade from the barber shop. Further back, the light from another shop cast a fan-shaped gleam out onto the tiles.

“No, it was taken out,” Maggie said. “Look.” She pointed at the empty socket set into the ceiling at the bottom of the stairs.

“Took it out because it was burned out,” Conor said.

“Then what’s that?” Maggie asked. In a corner of the bottom step, a nub of brass was just visible to them.

“Looks like the bottom of a light bulb to me,” Ellen Woyzack said. “So somebody—”

“Not somebody. Harry,” Poole said. “He unscrewed the bulb to conceal himself. Let’s go down and have a look.”

Strung out along the top step, they began to move down the stairs in unison. Harry Beevers had hidden on these steps, after having arranged a police reception for them at the airport. What had happened then?

“It’s the whole bulb,” Maggie said. She held it to her ear and shook it. “Nothing rattles in there.”

“Well, looky here,” Conor said.

Poole took his eyes from the light bulb and saw Conor holding out toward him a shiny pair of handcuffs.

“Now I believe all this,” Ellen said. “Let’s take the handcuffs to Murphy and get him to come back here with us.” She wrapped her arms around herself and stepped closer to Conor.

“I think he’d toss us all in the slammer if he saw us down here,” Conor said. “Beevers bought these, right?”

Poole and Underhill nodded.

“I want to see about something,” Maggie said, and went down the rest of the way, still clutching the light bulb. Poole watched her go into the barber shop.

“I think Dengler took out the light bulb,” Conor said. “I bet Dengler was waiting for him when he got here. And he took him somewhere, which means they aren’t too far away.”

Maggie came out of the barber shop looking very excited. “They saw him. The barbers noticed that the bulb was gone—burned out, they thought—early this afternoon. Later they saw a white man standing on the stairs. They thought he was a policeman.”

“That’s funny,” Poole said. “Harry always wanted people to think he was a cop.”

“It wasn’t Harry,” said Underhill. “They saw Dengler.”

“Did they say anything else about him?”

“Not really. They said he stood there a long time, and then they forgot about him, and when they looked the next time, he was gone. They didn’t see a struggle or anything.”

“I don’t suppose they would have,” Poole said. “If you were going to take somebody quietly out of the arcade, which way would you go?”

“That way,” Ellen said, pointing toward Elizabeth Street.

“Me too.” Poole went up the steps ahead of the others.

“What are you going to do, Michael?” Ellen called after him.

“Take another look,” Poole said. “If Dengler hustled Beevers out onto the street, maybe something else fell out of his pockets. Maybe Beevers was bleeding. Harry wouldn’t have come unarmed, given what he intended to do. There has to be something out there.”

It was almost hopeless, he knew. Koko could simply have shoved a knife into Beevers and dragged his body outside to a car. Anything Beevers would have dropped—a paper, a matchbook, a scarf—would have been blown away by the wind.

“What are we looking for?” Maggie asked as they walked out onto the Elizabeth Street sidewalk.

“Anything Beevers might have dropped.” Poole began moving down the sidewalk, looking at the pavement and the curb. “Conor, will you take the middle of the street? Tim, maybe there’s something on the other sidewalk.”

“Conor,” said Ellen.

Tim nodded, hunched himself against the wind in his big coat and hat, and crossed the street. He began making slow side-to-side sweeps up the opposite sidewalk. Maggie floated across the street to join him.

“Conor?” Ellen repeated.

Conor put his finger to his lips and walked out into the middle of the street. Poole moved slowly back and forth across the sidewalk, hoping to find anything at all that might tell him what had become of Beevers. Looking down for something he was not finding, he heard Maggie saying something to Underhill in her precise comedie voice, and then heard her giggle.

“Oh, hell,” Ellen said, and went out into the middle of the street after him. “I suppose if we find any severed fingers or other body parts you won’t object to my yelling my head off.”

All Poole had seen on the sidewalk were two pennies, a punctured nitrous oxide capsule, and a tiny unstoppered vial which he failed to recognize as the former container of ten dollars’ worth of crack. Ahead of him on the pavement were a discarded black rubber child’s boot and something that looked like a damp ball of fluff but which Poole was certain would turn out to be a dead sparrow. More than two hours ago, Koko had caught Beevers in his own killing box. It was likely that Beevers was dead by now. What he was forcing the others to do was quixotic. Yet his body still felt a spurious excitement. They had been right about the arcade; they were standing on ground that M.O. Dengler and Beevers had crossed only an hour or two before. He had traveled thousands of miles to come this close to Koko. His whole body balked at the idea of yelling for Lieutenant Murphy and the fat-necked young policeman.

“Michael?” Maggie said softly from the other side of the street.

“I know, I know,” Poole said. He wanted to throw himself down on the sidewalk and tear through the pavement with his fingernails, to rip through the concrete until he reached Koko and Harry Beevers.

If he did that, if he could do that, if he knew where to dig and had the strength and tenacity to do it, maybe he could save Harry Beevers’ ridiculous life.

“Michael?” Ellen echoed Maggie.

He balled his hands into fists and held them before his face. He could barely see them. He turned around and through blurry eyes looked down Elizabeth Street and saw a stocky body dressed in a long blue coat swing into view like a wandering ox.

“Get back, hide, don’t rush but get out of sight,” he said.

“What—” Ellen began, but Conor grabbed her hand and began walking her up the street. Poole ducked his head and moved into the shelter of the arcade’s entrance, trying to look like a preoccupied citizen on his way home. He felt the policeman’s eyes on him as he slipped into the arcade. He heard a wobbly, unearthly sound and realized that Conor was actually whistling. As soon as he got into the arcade Poole flattened out against the side and peeked out. The stocky young policeman was still looking in his direction. He seemed puzzled. Poole looked across the street, but Maggie and Underhill had disappeared into one of the tenements.

The policeman put his hands on his hips—something had disturbed him. Probably, Poole thought, he had just gotten around to recognizing Maggie and Conor and himself. He looked as if he was trying to work out what they could all be doing on Elizabeth, Street. He looked back down Bayard Street at the other policemen, then took a step up toward the arcade. Poole stopped breathing and looked up toward the other end of the street. Conor and Ellen Woyzak were now doing a better imitation of a tourist couple who had wandered into unpromising territory. The young policeman looked behind him, then back toward the other officers. He stepped backwards and began motioning toward the policemen around the patrol car.

“Oh, shit,” Poole said.

He heard a short, sharp whistle and thought that Conor had relapsed into his Gary Cooper imitation. Poole looked across the street and saw Tim Underhill, like a scarecrow in the voluminous coat and droopy-brimmed hat, just inside the arched entrance of one of the tenement buildings. Maggie Lah was standing slightly behind him, and behind her Poole saw a portion of a little courtyard. Maggie’s eyes seemed very wide. Underhill was gesturing for Poole to join them, waving his arms like a traffic cop.

The young policeman stood down at the end of the street, waiting for someone—he was as impatient as Tim Underhill. Then the young policeman straightened up, and Dalton sauntered into view.

Poole glanced up the block: Conor and Ellen had disappeared around the corner. Dalton could see nothing but an empty street.

For a moment the young policeman spoke to Dalton. Dalton’s only movement was to look once up Elizabeth Street.

Michael wished he could hear everything they said.

Are you sure you saw them? The same ones?

Sure I am. Dey were up dere.

Then did Dalton say I’ll be right back with Lieutenant Murphy, or did he say Keep an eye on things until we finish with Mulberry Street?

Whichever it was, Dalton strolled back out of sight, either leaving Thick-Neck by himself or on his way to get Murphy. Thick-Neck turned his back to stare down at the crowds of Chinese on Bayard Street, and sighed so hugely Poole could almost hear it.

Poole looked back across the street. Underhill was practically exploding, and Maggie stared at him with wide eyes he could not read. The brooding young policeman did not shift his stance as Poole advanced out onto the street. Now Elizabeth Street seemed very wide. Poole moved as fast as he could, trusting that he would not hit a stone or make any noise. The wind seemed to roar around him. Finally he came up onto the opposite sidewalk. Underhill’s whole face was blazing at him. Down at the end of the street, he thought he saw Thick-Neck’s shoulders start to turn his way, a movement as slow and clumsy as that of a large machine, and he flew the final yards across the pavement and into the protection of the arch.

“He might have seen me,” Poole gasped. “What is it?”

Underhill wordlessly moved through the arch into a narrow brick courtyard surrounded on all sides by the dingy high walls of the tenement. A smell of grease and sweat, odd and dislocating in the cold, hung in the air. “We saw it by accident, really,” Underhill said. He was moving toward one of the entrances. Beside the rough peeling door to the ground floor and the staircase was a semi-circular well that allowed for at least one window in a room beneath ground level.

It was in that well, Poole knew. Tim Underhill had stationed himself beside the tenement door. He grimly looked down at whatever was in the well. Poole hoped that it was not Beevers’ dead body. But that was what would be in the well. Koko had yanked Harry Beevers out of the arcade, dragged him through the arch, and then slit his throat. After he had performed the operations that were his usual signature, he had dumped Beevers’ body into the window well. Then he had melted away.

For the first time, Poole really feared for his own life. He moved up to the well and looked down.

His certainty about what he had been going to see was so great that at first he saw nothing at all. The back wall descended seven or eight feet down to a dirty concrete floor before a window that had been painted black. Yellowed bits of paper and old beer cans lay on the dirty concrete. There was no body. He looked up at Underhill’s face, then at Maggie’s. Both of them were regarding him with a wild impatience. Finally Maggie pointed down at one of the corners where the curved brick wall met the tenement wall.

A shiny steel knife lay on top of a nest of old papers. A smear of bright blood lay across the blade.

Poole looked up and saw Conor and Ellen coming toward them through another arch set in the west wall of the tenement. They had circled around the block onto Mott Street and ducked into the first entrance they had seen.

“I think Lieutenant Murphy is probably right behind us,” he said. “I want to go inside the building.”

“Don’t,” Maggie said. “Michael—”

“I know Dengler. Murphy doesn’t. Maybe Beevers is still alive.”

“You might know Dengler,” Maggie said, “but what about Koko?”

This was an excellent question, and the response that came immediately to Michael Poole’s mind made so little rational sense that he stifled it before it was born. Koko’s mine, was what he almost said—he belongs to me.

“He probably left hours ago, Maggie,” Tim said in his low calm voice. “I’ll come with you, Michael.”

“If Murphy shows up before we come back, tell him where we went,” Poole said, and pulled open the rough, sagging wooden door that was the tenement’s entrance. Poole stepped inside and found himself before an iron staircase, painted dark green, which ascended up into the tenement; on its far side another section of the staircase went into the darkness beneath ground level. To his left was a door to one of the rooms. Poole rapped on the door, thinking that the tenant might have heard what had happened just outside his door. He rapped again, but no one came.

“Let’s start taking a look through the building,” he said to Underhill.

“I’m here too,” Conor said from behind him.

Poole looked back and saw Conor pulling Ellen’s fingers off his arm. “We’ll be safer if we all go together.”

Maggie put her arm around the taller woman.

Poole moved toward the staircase. For a moment he paused and looked up toward the six or seven flights through which the staircase turned; then he continued around the front of the staircase and took the downstairs steps.

As soon as his head passed beneath ground level, the staircase became as dark as a grave. The walls were cold and damp. Just behind him, Conor and Tim were moving so quietly he could still hear Maggie and Ellen Woyzak shuffling their feet on the floor above. Poole slowly groped down the steps. The air grew colder around him. Underhill had to be right: Koko, who had once loved Babar, had fled hours before, and somewhere down here in a cold shabby room, they would discover the dead body of Harry Beevers. Poole wanted to find it before the police did. He knew it would make no difference to Beevers, but he thought he owed him at least that much.

At last Poole saw yellow light outlining a door at the bottom of the stairs. He leaned over the railing and looked up. A milky nimbus of light hovered over the top of the stairs.

He came down onto the landing. Through the crack in the door he could see a fragment of wall painted the same green as the staircase. It was splashed with red and black.

Either Conor or Tim squeezed his shoulder again. Poole noticed a dark smear of blood on the section of landing before the door.

Poole gently pushed open the door. The chill inside the room, colder than the staircase, drifted out toward him. In the thick motionless light within the room, Harry Beevers sat strapped into a wooden chair facing the door. His body leaned against thick straps. Blood had run down the side of his face, over the white rags that gagged him, and down into his sweater. At first Poole saw that Beevers’ left ear had been cut off, and he knew that Beevers was dead. Then Beevers’ eyes snapped open, bright with pain and terror.

Spatters of blood lay on the floor around Harry Beevers. The walls were covered with waves and writing, and a slender man sat cross-legged on the floor with his back to them, gazing in rapt concentration at the painted walls. Directly before him was the crude representation of a small, black-haired Vietnamese girl, stepping forward with her hands outstretched, smiling or screaming.

Poole scarcely knew what he felt, or why—there was too much sadness in all this. Koko, who was M.O. Dengler, or was the person who had once been M.O. Dengler, seemed like a child himself. Poole did not know that he was going to speak, but he said, “Manny.”

M.O. Dengler swiveled his head and looked at him.

4

Poole stepped forward into the cold green room. Until this moment, some part of him had resisted believing that Dengler really was Koko. Despite everything he had said to Maggie and Lieutenant Murphy, Poole felt as if the wind had been knocked out of him. He did not have even the beginning of an idea of what he was going to do now. It was still hard to accept the idea that Dengler could wish to do him harm. Harry Beevers uttered a keening sound through his bloody gag. Poole heard Conor and Tim pad in behind him and spread out on either side.

Dengler seemed not to have aged at all. He made Poole feel old and out of shape and almost corrupt with experience. He felt almost shamed before Dengler.

Over Dengler’s alert nineteen-year-old face, Poole saw that what he had taken for a pattern of waves was a row of children’s heads. Their bodies had only partially been painted in. Some held their hands upraised, others reached out with sticklike arms. Red paint wound through them like a skein. Dengler’s young face tilted up toward Poole, his lips slightly parted as if he were going to say—I was right about God. Or—Whatever it was, it was a long time ago.

On the side wall had been painted, in large black letters, the same slogan Poole had seen in the police Polaroids: A DROWSY STIFLED UNIMPASSIONED GRIEF. And beneath that, in the same large letters: PAIN IS AN ILL-U-SHUN.

Poole took in all this in less time than it took to blink. He understood. He was in no-place, all right. He was back there. This was where Koko lived all the time, in that underground chamber he and Underhill had visited twice.

I’m here to help you, Poole wanted to say.

Dengler smiled up at him from the center of his uncannily preserved youth.

You been bad? Dengler seemed to ask him. If you haven’t…

Harry Beevers squealed again, and his eyes rolled up into his head.

“I’m here to help—” Poole started to say, and the words seemed almost dragged out of him, as if he were in one of those dreams where every step requires immense effort.

“Come out with us, Dengler,” Conor said, very simply. “It’s what you want to do.”

The smiling child with outstretched empty hands seemed to step out toward Poole as if from the back of a shadowy hootch, and for a second he thought he heard wingbeats in the cold air above his head.

“Stand up and come toward us,” Conor said, taking a step forward with his own hand held out.

Beevers squealed in pain or outrage.

Then Poole heard the sound of men thudding down the iron staircase. He looked at Dengler’s calm empty face in horror. “Stop!” he yelled. “We’re all alive! Don’t come any further!”

Almost before he stopped shouting at the policemen, Poole saw Dengler move up off the floor in a fluid, uncoiling motion. In his hand was a long knife.

“Dengler, put the knife down,” Underhill said.

As Dengler stood and moved closer to the light bulb, the startling innocence and youthfulness of his face disappeared like a mirage. He smashed the bulb with the handle of his knife, and the room went dark as a mineshaft. Poole instinctively crouched.

“Are you okay in there?” called a voice from the stairs.

“Dengler, where are you?” Underhill whispered. “Let’s all get out of this alive, all right?”

“I have work to do,” came a voice that Michael did not immediately recognize. The voice seemed to come from everywhere in the room.

“Who’s inside that room?” shouted Lieutenant Murphy. “I want to know who’s in there, and I want to hear everybody’s voice.”

“Poole,” called Poole.

“Underhill.”

“Linklater. And Beevers is in here, but he’s injured and gagged.”

“Anybody else?” the lieutenant yelled.

“Oh, yes,” came a quiet voice.

“Lieutenant,” Poole called out, “if you come in here shooting, we’ll all die. Go back up the steps and let us come out. We’ll need an ambulance for Beevers.”

“I want each man to come out alone. He will be met by an officer and escorted up the steps. I can offer the services of a hostage negotiator, if the man holding you will deal with one.”

Poole steadied himself by putting his hand on the floor. That too was cold and wet, even sticky, and Michael realized that he was touching Harry Beevers’ blood.

A high-pitched terrified squeal came to him from everywhere, bouncing from wall to wall.

“We’re not hostages,” Poole said. “We’re just standing around in the dark.”

“Poole, I’m sick of talking to you,” Murphy yelled. “I want to hear from this Koko. After we get you out of there, Doctor Poole, that’s when I’m going to be interested in talking to you. Then I’ll have a lot to say to you.” His voice grew louder as he bawled out the next words. “Mister Dengler! You are in no danger as long as you do exactly what I say. I want you to release the other men in the room one at a time. Then I want you to surrender yourself. Are you clear about that?”

Dengler repeated what he had said when he had put them in darkness. “I have work to do.”

“That’s fine,” Murphy said. Then Poole heard Murphy say to some other policeman, “I have work to do. What the hell does that mean?”

A voice whispered into Poole’s ear, so close and unexpected it made him jump. “Tell him to go all the way up the stairs.”

“He says he wants you to go all the way up the stairs,” Poole shouted.

“Who’s that?”

“Poole.”

“I should have known,” Murphy said in a quieter voice. “If we go back up the stairs, will he release all of you?”

“Yes,” the voice whispered in Poole’s other ear.

“Yes!” Poole shouted. He had not heard the faintest sound as Dengler moved around him. Now he could hear the sound of wingbeats again, which was really the sound of ceaseless movement, as of a large group of people moving all about him, whispering to one another. He could smell blood.

“Any other requests?” Murphy shouted, sounding sarcastic.

“All the police in the courtyard,” the voice whispered directly into Michael’s face.

“He wants all the police in the courtyard.”

“While the hostages are being released,” Murphy said. “He’s got that.”

“Conor, are you okay?” Poole asked.

There was no answer. The others were dead, and he was alone in the no-place with Koko. He was in a pool of his friends’ blood and Koko was fluttering around him like a hundred birds, or bats.

“Conor!”

“Yo,” came Conor’s voice, quieting his dread.

“Tim?”

Again, no answer.

“Tim!”

“He’s fine,” came the whisper. “He’s just not speaking at the moment.”

“Tim, can you hear me?”

Something painful and red hot happened to Michael’s right side. He clapped his hand over the pain. He felt no blood, but there was a long clean cut in the fabric of his coat.

“I went to Muffin Street,” he said. “I talked to your mother. Helga Dengler.”

“We call her Marbles,” came a whisper from somewhere off to his right.

“I know about your father—I know what he did.”

“We call him Blood,” came the whisper from where he had last seen Conor.

Poole still held his hand to his side. Now he could feel the blood soaking through his coat. “Sing me the song of the elephants.”

From different parts of the room Poole heard snatches of unmelodic wordless song, the music of nothing on earth, the music of no-place. Sometimes it sounded as if children were speaking or crying out a great distance away. These were the dead children painted on the walls. Again Poole knew that no matter what he might hear in this room, he was alone with Koko, and the rest of the world was on the opposite side of a river no man could cross alive.

As Koko’s song flew through the dark, Poole could also hear the sound of the policemen retreating up the iron steps. His side flamed and burned, and he could feel blood soaking into his clothes. The room had widened out to the size of the world, and he was alone in it with Koko and the dead children.

Finally Murphy’s voice came crackling through a bullhorn. “We are in the courtyard. We will remain here until the three men with you have come out through the door. What do you want to do next?”

“We waste no part of the animal,” came the hissing voice.

The dying children wailed and sobbed. No, the children were dead, Poole remembered: that was Harry Beevers.

“Do you want me to tell him you waste no part of the animal?” Poole asked. “He can’t hear me anyhow.”

“He can hear you fine,” came the icy whisper.

Then Poole understood. “It was the motto of the butcher shop, wasn’t it? Dengler’s Lamb of God Butcher Shop. I bet it was painted right under the name, WE WASTE NO PART OF THE ANIMAL.”

The voices all stopped, the nonsense song and the cries of the dead children. For an instant Poole felt violence gather in the cold dead air about him, and his heart nearly froze. He heard the rustle of heavy clothing—Underhill must have moved toward the door. Koko was going to stab him again, he knew, and this time Koko would kill him and tear his face from his skull, as he had done with Victor Spitalny.

“Do you think he killed your real mother?” Poole whispered. “Do you think he arranged to meet Rosita Orosco on the river-bank, and murdered her there? I do. I think that’s what he did.”

A low voice whispered a wordless exhalation from far off to Poole’s left.

“Conor?”

“Yo.”

“You knew it too, didn’t you?” Poole said. He felt like crying now, but not from fear. “Nobody told you, but you always knew it.” Poole felt his heart unfreeze. Before Koko killed all of them, or before the police ran in and shot them all, he had to say these things.

“Ten days after you were born, Karl Dengler met Rosita Orosco on the riverbank. It was the middle of winter. He stabbed her, and then he undressed her body and left her there. Did he rape her body, after he killed her? Or just before he killed her? Then he came into your bedroom, when you were a little boy, and did to you what he had done to her. Night after night.”

“What’s going on?” came Murphy’s distorted, amplified voice.

“Night after night,” Poole repeated. “Tim knew it all in some way—without really knowing anything about what had actually happened, he felt it, he felt everything. Your whole life was about the stuff that Underhill knew just by looking at you.”

“Underhill goes out first,” Koko whispered from behind Poole. A knife slid under Poole’s ear, and the children wailed and begged for life. “First Underhill. Then you. Then Linklater. I’ll come out last.”

“I’m right, aren’t I?” Poole said. His voice was shaking, and he knew that Koko would not answer him—because he did not have to answer. “Underhill is coming out first!” he yelled.

And a second later he heard Murphy’s voice come crackling to him from the other side of the great rushing river. Murphy did not know about the river that surrounded the no-place and cut it off from every human place.

“Send him out,” Murphy called.

Harry Beevers made a noise like a trapped animal, and creaked against his straps.

If Underhill were alive, Poole thought, Dengler was sending him out because he wanted Poole to go on with his excellent story. Maggie Lah was on the other side of the river, and he would never see her again, for on this side of the river was the bleak little island of the dead.

“Go, Underhill,” Poole said. “Get up those stairs.” His voice sounded stranger than ever.

The door opened a crack and an amazed Poole saw Tim Underhill’s back slipping out onto the landing. The door slowly closed behind him. Slow footsteps went up the stairs.

“Hallelujah,” Poole said. “Now who?”

He heard only the creaking and moaning that sounded like the cries of faraway dead children.

“It was whatever happened in the cave, wasn’t it?” he said. “God help Harry Beevers.”

“Send the next man,” crackled Murphy’s voice.

“Who’s next?” Poole asked.

“It’s different in here now,” Conor whispered.

As soon as Conor spoke, Poole felt the truth of what he had said. The sense of prowling movement no longer surrounded him: the cold air seemed very empty. Poole stood in a lightless basement room—there were no faraway children and there was no river. “Let’s go out together,” he said.

“You first,” Conor said. “Right, Dengler?”

Beevers protested with squeals and grunts.

“I’ll be right behind you,” Conor said. “Dengler, we’re going.”

Poole began moving toward the dim outline of the door. It was as if he had to unlock his arms and legs. Every step made the wound in his side screech. He could feel the blood sliding out of his body, and the floor seemed to be covered with blood.

Then Poole knew what had happened—Dengler had slit his own throat. That was why the voices had stopped. Dengler had killed himself, and his corpse was lying on the floor of his little cell in the dark.

“Someone will be down very soon to help you, Harry,” he said. “I’m sorry I ever listened to anything you ever said.”

Creaks and moans.

Poole attained the door. He pulled it toward him and a lesser degree of darkness enveloped him. He stepped out onto the landing. This had seemed like darkness when they had come down the stairs. He looked up toward the hazy nimbus at the top of the stairs and saw two uniformed policemen staring down at him. He thought of poor crazy Dengler, lying dead or dying back inside the room, and of Harry Beevers. He never wanted to see Harry Beevers again.

“We’re coming,” he said, but his voice was feeble, not his.

Michael pulled himself up the stairs. As soon as he was far enough up into the light to be able to see clearly, he looked at his side. He had to force himself to remain standing—an instant later he realized that there had been a deceptive amount of blood. Koko had meant to hurt him seriously, though not to kill him, but his heavy winter coat had lessened the degree of his injury. “Dengler killed himself,” he said.

“Yep,” Conor said behind him.

Poole looked over his shoulder and saw Conor coming up after him. Conor’s eyes were the size of dinner plates. Michael turned back around and kept going up the stairs.

When he reached the top one of the officers asked him if he was all right.

“I’m not too bad, but I’ll need that ambulance too.”

Dalton poked his head into the entry and said, “Help that man out.”

One of the officers put his arm around Poole’s shoulders and assisted him out into the courtyard. It seemed warmer out in the air, and the gritty brick courtyard seemed very beautiful to him. Maggie cried out, and he turned toward the sound, barely taking in Tim’s form slumped into his coat, his head bowed. Maggie and Ellen Woyzak stood in the far corner of the beautiful little courtyard, framed as formally as by a great photographer. Both women were beautiful too—overflowingly beautiful, in their different ways. Poole felt as though his death sentence had been commuted just as the blindfold had been tied around his head. Ellen’s face ignited as Conor came through the door behind him.

“Get him to the ambulance,” Murphy growled, lowering the bullhorn. “Beevers and Dengler are still down there?”

Poole nodded. With a little cry, Maggie jumped forward and threw her arms around his neck. She was speaking very quickly, and he could not make out the words—they seemed barely to be in English—but he did not have to know what she was saying to understand her. He kissed the side of her head.

“What happened?” Maggie asked. “Where’s Dengler?”

“I think he killed himself, I think he’s dead,” he said.

“Get him in the ambulance,” Murphy said. “Put him in the hospital and stay there with him. Ryan, Peebles, get down there and see what’s left of the other two.”

“Harry?” Maggie asked.

Ellen Woyzak had put her arms around Conor, who stood as motionless as a statue.

“Still alive.”

The thick-necked young officer moved up to Poole with an expression of great stupid satisfaction on his face, and began to urge him toward the arch that led out onto Elizabeth Street. Poole glanced at Underhill, who was still slouched against the wall beside the policeman who must have led him away from the tenement. Underhill did not look right, differently from the way Conor did not look right. His hat was pulled down over his forehead, his neck was bent, his collar was turned up.

“Tim?” Poole said.

Underhill moved an inch or two away from the policeman beside him but did not look up at Poole.

He was small, Poole finally saw. He was a little, a pocket-sized Underhill. Of course people did not shrink. A second before he realized what had happened, Poole saw the flash of teeth in an almost unearthly smile hidden in the folds of Underhill’s turned-up collar.

His body froze. He wanted to yell, to scream. The wide black river cut him off, and the dead children wailed.

“Michael?” Maggie asked.

Michael pointed at the figure in Underhill’s hat and coat. “Koko!” he could finally shout. “Right there! He’s wearing—”

In the hand of the grinning man in Underhill’s coat there had materialized a long knife, and while Poole shouted, the man sidled around the policeman beside him, clamped his hand on his arm, and shoved the knife deep into his back.

Poole stopped shouting.

Before anyone could move, the man had vanished through the arch out onto Elizabeth Street.

The policeman he had stabbed sat down heavily on the bricks, his face stunned and empty. Murphy exploded into motion, sending four uniformed policemen after Dengler, then getting the wounded officer carried into the ambulance. He took a last, infuriated look around the courtyard and then ran out through the arch.

“I can wait,” Michael said when one of the policemen tried to push him toward the arch and the ambulance bay. “I have to see Underhill.”

The policeman looked at him in confusion.

“For God’s sake, get him out of the basement,” Poole said.

“Michael,” Maggie pleaded, “you have to get to the hospital. I’ll come with you.”

“It’s not as bad as it looks,” Poole said. “I can’t go until I see what happened to Tim.”

Tim was dead, though. Koko had silently murdered him and taken his coat and hat and left the basement room in disguise.

“Oh, no,” Maggie said. She made to run for the tenement door, but first Poole took her arm, and then Dalton restrained her.

Poole said, “Get down there, Dalton. Let go of my girlfriend and go downstairs and see if you can help Tim, or I’ll pound the living shit out of you.” His side flamed and pulsed. From out on the street came shouts and the sound of running footsteps.

Dalton turned slowly toward the arch, then changed his mind and moved toward the tenement’s entrance. “Johnson, let’s see what’s taking them so long.” One of the policemen trotted after him. Poole heard them clattering down the steps. “I mean that sincerely,” he said. “I’ll pound … the living shit …”

Ellen and Conor moved across the courtyard toward Poole and Maggie.

“He got away, Mikey,” Conor said in a voice full of disbelief.

“They’ll get him. He can’t be that good.”

“I’m sorry, Mikey.”

“You were great, Conor. You were better than the rest of us.”

Conor shook his head. “Tim didn’t make any noise. I don’t—I think—”

Poole nodded. He did not want to say it either.

“He cut you bad?”

“Not too bad,” Poole said. “But I think I’ll sit down.” He put his back against the tenement wall and slid down onto the bricks, with Maggie holding one elbow and Conor the other. When he got down he felt very hot so he tried to take off his coat, but that made his side scream again. He heard himself make a noise.

Maggie knelt down beside him and took his hand.

“Just a twinge. A little mild shock too.”

She squeezed his hand.

“I’m okay, Maggie. Just a little hot.” He leaned forward, and she helped slide his coat off his shoulders. “Looks a lot worse than it is,” Poole said. “That cop was hurt bad, though.” He looked around for the policeman Koko had knifed. “Where is he?”

“They took him away a long time ago.”

“Could he walk?”

“He was on a stretcher,” Maggie said. “Do you want to go to the ambulance now? There’s another one out there.”

Then they both heard the heavy tramp of boots on the staircase.

A moment later two of the officers carried Harry Beevers out of the tenement. He had a big white cloth taped to the side of his head, and he looked like the victim of a savage street fight. Unable to stand by himself, Beevers wobbled between two policemen. “Where’d he go?” Beevers asked in a crushed, painful voice. “Where is that asshole?”

Poole assumed that he meant Koko, and almost smiled—he had a right to ask that question.

But Beevers’ intense unhappy eyes found Poole, and instantly filled with bitterness. “Asshole,” Beevers said. “You fucked everything up! What do you think you were trying to do down there? Get everybody killed?” Unbelievably, he tried to fight free of the policemen and come toward Poole. “What makes you think you can blame everything on me? You fucked up, Poole! You fucked up bad! I almost had him, and you let him get away!”

Poole stopped paying attention to Beevers’ ranting. In the entrance to the tenement appeared Dalton and a tall, burly black policeman holding Tim Underhill between them. Tim’s face was tinged with blue, and his teeth chattered. The side of his sweater had been cut open, and a large quantity of blood had stained his entire left side—like Michael, at first glance he looked as though someone had tried to cut him in half. “Well, Michael,” Tim said while they carried him through the door.

“Well, Timothy,” Poole said. “Why didn’t you say something down there, when Dengler was pulling your clothes off?”

“Set me down next to Poole,” Underhill said, and Dalton and the other policeman helped him across the courtyard and lowered him gently onto the bricks. Another policeman to whom Dalton had signaled came rushing in from the street with a blanket, which he wrapped around Underhill’s shoulders.

“He tied something around my mouth,” said Underhill. “I think it was Beevers’ shirt. Was good old Harry wearing a shirt when he came out?”

“Couldn’t say.”

Lieutenant Murphy burst in through the Elizabeth Street arch, and both men looked up at him. His face was still purple, but as much with exertion as rage—it was just one of those Irish faces, Poole saw. By the time Murphy was sixty, his face would be that color all the time. When the detective saw Poole and Underhill leaning against the tenement wall with their legs out before them, he closed his eyes and his mouth became a taut, lipless line. He said, “Do you suppose you could manage to get another ambulance for these two idiots? This isn’t a convalescent hospital.”

“Dr. Poole wouldn’t leave until Mr. Underhill came out,” Dalton said, “and when Beevers got into the ambulance he threatened to sue everybody in sight unless they took him immediately. So—”

Murphy looked at him.

“Sir,” Dalton said, and went out through the arch.

“Did you get him?” Poole asked.

Murphy ignored the question and walked across the courtyard to lean into the tenement as if he thought that someone else might be down there. Then he looked down into the window well. “Bag that knife,” he said to one of the uniformed policemen.

“Did you?”

Murphy continued to ignore him.

A few seconds later they heard the wailing of an approaching ambulance draw closer and closer until it came up alongside the tenement and turned off its siren.

Dalton came back through the arch and asked them if they wanted stretchers.

“No,” Poole said.

“Don’t we?” Underhill asked. “Are stretchers effete these days?”

“What happened to the policeman Dengler stabbed?” Poole asked. Dalton and the black officer were gently getting him up on his feet, and Maggie fussed around them, patting and touching.

“He died on the way to the hospital,” Murphy said. “I just heard.”

“I’m sorry,” Poole said.

“Why? You didn’t stab him, did you?” Murphy’s face was blazing again, and he strode across the bricks to stand before Poole. “We missed your friend Dengler.” His eyebrows nearly met at the boundary of a deep, angry-looking vertical crease in his forehead. “He dumped the hat and coat on the corner and took off down Mott Street like a rabbit. We think he ducked into a building somewhere. We’ll get him, Poole. Don’t worry about that. He’s not going to get very far.” Murphy turned away, clamping and unclamping his jaws. “I’ll see you and your buddy in the hospital.”

“I’m sorry that one of your men died, not because I had anything to do with it.”

“Jesus Christ,” Murphy said, turning away to precede them through the arch.

“Some people just don’t understand sympathy,” Underhill said to Poole as they were being taken toward the waiting ambulance.

5

Both Poole and Underhill were stitched up in an emergency room by a baby-faced young resident who pronounced their wounds identical but “all glamour,” meaning that while they would leave good-sized scars, they represented no serious threat to life or health, facts that Poole had already ascertained for himself. After their wounds had been sutured, they were taken upstairs to a double room and told they would be spending the night by the officer who had ridden with them in the ambulance. This officer’s name was LeDonne, and he had a neat moustache and kindly eyes.

“I’ll be right outside the door,” LeDonne added.

“There’s no need for us to spend the night in the hospital,” Poole said.

“The lieutenant would really prefer it this way,” said LeDonne, which Michael took as the officer’s polite way of telling them that they were under orders to spend at least one night in the hospital.

Maggie Lah appeared with Conor Linklater and Ellen Woyzak three hours after their installation in the room, and all three visitors described how they had spent the previous hours with Lieutenant Murphy. The lieutenant had heard the story of how they had come to the building on Elizabeth Street enough times to conclude that they were innocent of all crimes except foolhardiness and finally had charged them with none.

Maggie also told Michael and Tim Underhill, who had become slightly groggy from the effects of painkillers, that Koko had escaped the police in Chinatown, but that Murphy was certain he would be captured before nightfall.

Maggie stayed on after Conor and Ellen left to go to Grand Central for a Metro North train. Ellen kissed both men, and nearly had to pull Conor through the door. Poole thought that Conor almost wished he had been injured himself, so that he could stay with them.

“Where did they put Beevers?” he asked Maggie.

“He’s three floors up. Do you want to see him?”

“I don’t think I ever really want to see Harry Beevers,” Poole said.

“He lost an ear,” Maggie said.

“He has another one.”

The light in the hospital room grew hazy, and Michael thought of the beautiful grey nimbus of light at the top of the stairs as he had emerged from Koko’s cell.

A nurse came and gave him another shot although he said he did not want or need it. “I’m a doctor, you know,” he said.

“Not now, you’re not,” she said, and slammed the needle into his left buttock.

After that he and Tim Underhill had a long conversation about Henry James. Later all that Poole could remember of this woozy conversation was that Tim had described a dream James had had as an old man—something about a terrifying figure trying to break into the writer’s room, and the writer eventually attacking his own attacker and driving him away.

That day or the next, for Murphy had ordered them held over for at least another twenty-four hours, Judy Poole appeared on the threshold of the room just before the end of visiting hours. Michael could see Pat Caldwell standing behind his wife. He had always liked Pat Caldwell. Now he could not remember if he had always liked his wife.

“I’m not coming in unless that person comes out,” Judy said. That person was Maggie Lah, who immediately began picking up her things.

Michael motioned her to stay. “In that case, you’re not coming in,” he said. “But I think it’s a pity.”

“Won’t you see Harry?” Pat called to him. “He says he has a lot of things to talk about with the two of you.”