Koko

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.