Koko

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