Koko

back against the window.

By the time Harry got to the sidewalk, Maggie was gone.

All the way to Duane Street, Harry searched the sidewalks for her. When the cab stopped and Harry stood on the stamped metal walkway before the warehouse that housed William Tharpe’s loft, he thought—where I’m going there are a million girls like that.

4

Harry Beevers presented the chilled bottle of Dom Perignon to an astonished, gratified William Tharpe, and spent five or ten minutes in hypocritical raptures over the forthcoming number of Rilke Street. Then he took plain, greying Pat Caldwell Beevers, who was beginning more than ever to suggest an English sheepdog that had been mooning around him half his life, out to a TriBeCa restaurant of the sort he had learned from Tim Underhill to call piss-elegant. The walls were red lacquer. Discreet lamps with brass shades sat on each table. Portly waiters hovered. Harry thought of Maggie Lah, of her golden skin, of champagne bottles and other interesting things between her small but undoubtedly affecting breasts. All the while he elaborated various necessary fictions concerning his “mission.” Now and then, although Pat frequently smiled and seemed to enjoy her wine, her soup, her fish, he thought she knew that he was lying. Like Jimmy Lah, she asked him how Michael looked, how he thought he was doing, and Harry answered fine, fine. Her smiles seemed to Harry to be full of regret—whether for him, for herself, for Michael Poole, or the world at large, he could not tell. When the moment came when he asked for money, she said only, “How much?” Around two thousand. She reached into her bag, took out her checkbook and fountain pen, and without expression of any kind on her face wrote out a check for three thousand dollars.

She passed the check across the table. Her face was now flushed in a mottled band from cheekbone to cheekbone, Harry thought unattractively so.

“Of course I consider this strictly a loan,” he said. “You’re doing a lot of good with this money, Pat. I mean that.”

“So the government wants you to track down this man to see if he might be a murderer?”

“In a nutshell. Of course it’s a semi-private operation, which is how I’ll be able to do the book deals, the film deals, and so on. You can appreciate the need for strict confidentiality.”

“Of course.”

“Well, I know you could always read between the lines, but …” He let the sentence complete itself. “I’d be kidding you if I said there wasn’t quite a bit of potential danger involved in this.”

“Oh, yes,” Pat said, nodding.

“I shouldn’t even be thinking like this, but if I don’t come back, I think it would be fitting for me to be buried at Arlington.”

She nodded again.

Harry gave up and began looking around the room for the waiter.

Pat startled him by saying, “There are still times when I’m sorry that you ever set foot in Vietnam.”

“What’s the point,” he asked. “I’m me, I always was me, I’ve never been anything but me.”

They parted outside the restaurant.

After Harry had gone a short distance down the sidewalk, he turned around, smiling, knowing that Pat was watching him walk away. But she was moving straight ahead, her shoulders slumped, her overstuffed, lumpy bag swinging at her side.

He went to his bank and let himself into the empty vestibule with his bank card. There he used the cash machine to deposit Pat’s check and one other he had obtained that day and to withdraw four hundred dollars in cash. He bought a copy of Screw at a corner newsstand and folded it under his arm so that no one would be able to identify it. Harry walked back through the cold to West 24th Street and the studio apartment he had found shortly after Pat told him, more forcefully than she had ever said anything in the entire course of their marriage, that she had to have a divorce.

1

It was funny, Conor thought, how ever since the reunion things from the old days kept coming back to him, as if Vietnam had been his real life and everything since was just the afterglow. It was hard for him to keep his mind on the present—back then kept breaking in, sometimes even physically. A few days before, an old man had innocently handed him a photograph taken by SP4 Cotton of Tim Underhill with his arm around one of his “flowers.”

It was four o’clock in the afternoon, and Conor was lying in bed with his first serious hangover since the dedication of the Memorial. Everybody thought you got better at handling pressure as you got older, but in Conor’s experience everybody had it backwards.

Three days earlier, Conor had been in the middle of the fifth week of a carpentry job that should have paid the rent at least until Poole and Beevers put their Singapore trip together. On Mount Avenue in Hampstead, only ten minutes from Conor’s tiny, almost comically underfurnished apartment in South Norwalk, a millionaire lawyer in his sixties named Charles (“Call me Charlie!”) Daisy had just remarried for the third time. For the sake of his new wife, Daisy was redoing the entire ground floor of his mansion—kitchen, sitting room, breakfast room, dining room, lounge, morning room, laundry room, and servants quarters. Daisy’s contractor, a white-bearded old-timer named Ben Roehm, had hired Conor when his usual crew proved too small. Conor had worked with Ben Roehm three or four times over the years. Like a lot of master carpenters who were geniuses at manipulating wood, Roehm could be moody and unpredictable, but he made carpentry more than just something you did to pay the rent. Working with Roehm was as close to pleasure as work could get, in Conor’s opinion.

And the first day Conor was on the job, Charlie Daisy came home early from the office and walked into the sitting room where Conor and Ben Roehm were laying a new oak floor. He stood watching them for a long time. Conor got a little nervous. He figured maybe the client didn’t like the way he looked. To cut down the inevitable agony of kneeling on hardwood all day, Conor had tied thick rags around his knees. He’d knotted a speckled bandanna around his forehead to keep the sweat out of his eyes. (The bandanna made him think of Underhill, of flowers and flowing talk.) Conor thought he probably looked a little loose for Charlie Daisy. He was not completely surprised when Daisy took a step forward and coughed into his fist. “Ahem!” He and Roehm shot each other a quick glance. Clients, especially Mount Avenue-type clients, did nutty things right out of the blue. “You, young man,” Daisy said. Conor looked up, blinking, painfully aware that he was down on all fours like a raggedy dog in front of this dapper little millionaire. “Am I right about something?” Daisy asked. “You were in Vietnam, right?”

“Yes, sir,” Conor said, prepared for trouble.

“Good man,” Daisy said. He reached down to shake Conor’s hand. “I knew I was right.”

It turned out that his only son was another name on the wall—killed in Hue during the Tet offensive.

For a couple of weeks it was probably the best job of Conor’s life. Almost every day he learned something new from Ben Roehm, little things that had as much to do with concentration and respect as with technique. A few days after shaking Conor’s hand, Charlie Daisy showed up at the end of the day carrying a grey suede box and a leather photo album. Conor and Roehm were framing a new partition in the kitchen, which looked like a bombsite— chopped-up floor, dangling wires, jutting pipes. Daisy picked his way toward them, saying, “Until I got married again, this was the only heart I had.” The box turned out to be a case for Daisy’s son’s medals. Laid out on lustrous satin were a Purple Heart, a Bronze Star, and a Silver Star. The album was full of pictures from Nam.

Old Daisy chattered away, pointing at images of muddy M-48 tanks and shirtless teenagers with their arms around one another’s shoulders. Time travel ain’t just made up out of nothing, Conor thought. He was sorry that the perky old lawyer didn’t know enough to shut up and let the pictures talk for themselves.

Because the pictures did talk. Hue was in I Corps, Conor’s Vietnam, and everything Conor looked at was familar.

Here was the A Shau Valley—the mountains folding and folding into themselves, and a line of men climbing