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—”
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.”
