bundled in thick coats moved quickly down the sidewalk toward the light. The light changed from a gleaming green nimbus to a gleaming red nimbus, and even though no cars appeared in the intersection, the pedestrians stopped to obey the DON’T WALK command.
It really was the city Dengler had described. Poole felt like a Muscovite looking at Moscow with eyes washed clean. He had finished the long, long process of mourning his son. What was left of Robbie was within him. He did not even feel that he needed the
Behind him Tim Underhill and Maggie Lah were laughing at something Tim had drawled.
The lights at the end of the block changed to green, and the command switched to WALK. The pedestrians began to move across the street.
Maggie had been put into a single room next to this one, where Poole and Underhill had placed their bags on the two double beds. It was a high-vaulted room with faded flocked wallpaper, a threadbare carpet with a floral pattern, and a rococo mirror in a gilt frame. On the walls hung large nineteenth-century paintings of dogs panting over mounds of bloody dead pheasants and portraits of smug, big-bellied burghers in frock coats and striped satin waistcoats. The furniture was nondescript, worn, and sturdy, and the size of the room made it look small. In the bathroom the taps and fittings were brass, and the tub stood like a lion on four heavy porcelain paws. The windows, through which the three of them now looked down onto the street, extended nearly from floor to ceiling and were hung with dark brown swag curtains drawn back with worn, heavy velvet ropes. Poole had never been in a hotel room like it. He thought it was like being in some splendid old hotel in Prague or Budapest—through twenty-foot windows like these with such a vast, elegant, decaying room at his back, he should have heard the sounds of sleigh bells and horses’s hooves.
In the Pforzheimer’s lobby, uniformed midgets the size of the numerous ferns had stood before the polished mahogany of the registration desk; the clerk had worn half-glasses and a narrow bow tie, and looked out upon a rich landscape of shining brass, yards of tartan carpet, glowing lamps, and immense paintings so dark that big shapes loomed out of a general blur. There was of course no computer behind the desk. A wide staircase curved up toward what a plaque identified as the Balmoral Room, and down at the far end of the lobby, a corridor led past trees in pots and glass cases filled with the stuffed heads of animals toward a dimly glowing bar.
“I sort of feel that the Neva is only a pace or two away,” Poole said, looking out at the snow.
“And police in bearskin hats and leather boots to the knees strut up and down on the Prospekt,” Underhill said.
“Waiting to apprehend the naked men who have been forced out of the forest by the extreme cold,” Maggie said.
Yes, that was it. There would be a great forest only a mile or two distant, and at night if you opened the windows of ballrooms you would hear the cries of wolves.
“Let’s take a look at the telephone book,” Poole said, turning from the window.
“Let’s find the telephone book,” Underhill said.
The telephone itself, an old-fashioned black Bakelite model with a rotary dial but without the usual instructions for dialing the laundry, room service, the concierge, and the desk—without even a message light—stood on a military table beside Poole’s bed.
The two men began opening drawers in the various chests and cabinets against the walls. In a tall highboy Underhill found a television set that swiveled out on a shelf. Poole found a Gideon Bible and a booklet entitled “The Pforzheimer Story” in a long drawer lined with crinkly paper imprinted with Christmas trees. Underhill opened a cabinet between the tall windows and discovered rows of books. “My God,” he said, “a library. And what books!
“Depends on how you feel about
Maggie pulled a hidden lever, and another shelf moved into view from the back of the cabinet, carrying a silver cocktail shaker containing a musty collapsed web and a shriveled spider, a tarnished ice bucket, a nearly empty bottle of gin, a nearly full bottle of vermouth, and a bottle of rusty-looking olives. “This stuff must have been here since Prohibition,” Maggie said. “No telephone book, though.” She stood up, shrugged, and took her book to the couch.
“This isn’t much like traveling with Harry Beevers and Conor Linklater,” Poole said. “When I asked Conor if he wanted to change his mind about coming along with us, he said, ‘I got better ways to idolize my time.’ ” He looked out the window and saw big flakes of snow spinning through the close dark air.
“What’s your book about?” Underhill asked behind him.
“Torture,” Maggie said.
Poole heard car horns blasting, and stepped closer to the window. The heads of horses appeared at the far right of his vision, gradually pulling into view an empty hansom cab driven by a man with a fat purple face. The driver steered his cab imperiously down the center of the street, forcing oncoming cars out of its way.
“So is mine,” Underhill said. “Just kidding, Maggie. Keep your hands off.”
“No pictures in yours. Mine is nothing but pictures.”
“We got the right books.”
Poole turned from the window as Maggie left Underhill grinning on the couch behind her and marched with a look of mock determination to a low wooden chest beneath the mirror. Poole walked over and picked up Maggie’s book. On every page was a photograph of kittens dressed in jackets and hats of the 1920s. The kittens seemed to be held in place with metal straps and braces concealed beneath their outfits, and had been posed reading novels, dealing cards, playing tennis, smoking pipes, getting married.… The kittens’ eyes were glassy with terror, and all of them looked dead.
“Aha!” Maggie said. “The secret of the Pforzheimer!” She was brandishing a green telephone directory so thick she had to hold it with both hands.
“By George, I think she’s got it,” Underhill said.
Maggie sat on the end of the couch beside Poole and flipped open the book. “I didn’t think it would have so many
Michael looked at the place where Maggie’s slim finger rested on the page. The finger moved down a column that began with Spitalnik, changed to Spitalny and stayed that way for something like twenty entries until it became Spitalsky.
He took the book across the expanse of the room to the bed, propped himself up on the pillows, held the book open on his lap, and moved the phone beside him. Maggie and Tim watched him from the couch, looking like the kittens in Maggie’s book. “Talk among yourselves,” Poole said. “ ‘Idolize your time.’ ”
“Did it ever occur to you that Conor Linklater is a genius?” Underhill asked Maggie.
“Mr. Spitalny?” Poole asked. “My name is Michael Poole, and I’m looking for the family of a man named Victor Spitalny who was in Vietnam with me. I wondered if you were related to him, or if you knew how I could get in touch with his family … Victor, that’s right … So nobody in your family was named Victor … Yes, he was from Milwaukee … Thanks anyhow.”
He depressed the button, dialed the next number, and when there was no answer, the one beneath that. A man who had been celebrating the snowfall answered and informed Michael in a slow, slurry voice that no such person as Victor Spitalny had ever existed, and hung up.
On the seventh listing, for E. Spitalny on South Mogrom Street, Poole had better luck. “You were in Vietnam with Victor?” a young woman asked him. “My goodness. All that seems a long time ago.”
Poole signaled to the two on the couch for writing paper. Underhill found a pad of hotel stationery and tossed it to Michael.
