Koko

3

That evening Poole called the other men about the charter flight. Conor said, “Wild, sign me up, man.” Harry Beevers said, “Outstanding. I was wondering when you were going to come through for us.” Tina Pumo said, “You know what my answer is, Mike. Somebody’s got to mind the store.”

“You just became my wife’s hero,” Michael said. “Well, anyhow … would you mind trying to find Tim Underhill’s address for us? His paperback publisher is Gladstone House—somebody there ought to know it.”

They agreed to have a drink together before the trip.

4

One night the following week, Michael Poole drove slowly home from New York through a snowstorm. Abandoned cars, many of them dented or wrecked, lay along the side of the parkway like corpses after a battle. A few hundred yards ahead the light bar on top of a police car flashed red-yellow-blue-yellow-red. Cars crawled in single file, dimly visible, past a high white ambulance and policemen waving lighted batons. For a second Poole imagined that he saw Tim Underhill, in the snow very like a giant white rabbit, standing beside his car in the storm, waving a lantern. To stop him? To light his way forward? Poole turned his head and saw that it was a tree heavy with snow. A yellow beam from the police car flashed through his windshield and traveled across the front seat.

1

All at once everything seemed to be going wrong, Tina Pumo thought, all at once everything was falling apart. He hated the Palladium and the Mike Todd Room. He also hated Area, the Roxy, CBGB’s, Magique, Danceteria, and the Ritz. Maggie wasn’t going to show up at the Mike Todd Room, and she wasn’t going to be at any of those other places either. He could stand at the bar for hours, drink until he fell down, and all that would happen was that hundreds of little night people would stomp him on the way to their next bottle of Rolling Rock.

The first time he talked his way past the doorman into the vast barnlike room that the Palladium used for publicity parties and private gatherings he had come from a marathon meeting with Saigon’s accountants. He was wearing his only grey flannel suit, purchased before the Vietnam War and small enough to pinch his waist. Pumo wandered through the crowd searching for Maggie. He noticed eventually that nearly everybody looked at him sharply, just once, then stepped away. In an otherwise crowded room, he was surrounded by a sort of DMZ, a cordon sanitaire of empty space. Once he heard laughter behind his back, turned around to see if he could share the joke, and saw everybody turn to stone, staring at him. Finally he went up to the bar and managed to catch the eye of a skinny young bartender with mascara on his face and a tangle of blond hair piled up on top of his head.

“I was wondering if you knew a girl named Maggie Lah,” Tina said. “I was supposed to meet her here tonight. She’s short, she’s Chinese, good-looking—”

“I know her,” the bartender said. “She might be in later.” He retreated to the other end of the bar.

Tina experienced a moment of pure rage at Maggie. May be Mike Todd, Maybe not. La La. He saw that this message was a trick followed by mocking laughter. He stormed away from the bar and found himself standing in front of a blonde girl who looked about sixteen, had stars painted on both cheeks, and wore a shiny, slinky black chemise. She was exactly his type. “I want to take you home with me,” he said. The girl opened her flowerlike mouth and solved one mystery by saying, “I don’t go home with narcs.”

That had been a week after Halloween. For at least two weeks afterward, he kept the city at bay while he tore his kitchen apart. Every time he and the exterminators took down another section of wall, a million bugs scrambled to get out of the light—if you killed them in one place, the next day they surfaced in another. For a long time they seemed to be concentrated behind the Garland range. In order to keep the fumigant from spoiling the food, he and the kitchen staff taped thick sheets of clear plastic between the range and food preparation surfaces and wherever they were trying to exterminate the insects. They pushed all three thousand pounds of the Garland eight feet out into the middle of the kitchen. Vinh, the head chef, complained that he and his daughter couldn’t sleep at night because they heard things moving inside the walls. They had recently moved into the restaurant’s “office,” a little room in the basement, because Vinh’s sister was having another baby and needed their room in her house in Queens. Normally the office was furnished with a desk, a couch, and boxes of files. Now the couch belonged to Goodwill, the desk was jammed into a corner of Pumo’s living room, and Vinh and Helen slept on a mattress on the floor.

This temporary, illegal situation looked as if it was becoming a permanent illegal situation. Helen not only couldn’t sleep, but she wet the bed—the mattress—whenever she did doze off. Vinh claimed that the bed-wetting got worse right after the child saw Harry Beevers sitting at the bar. That Harry Beevers was a devil who put curses on children was mystical Vietnamese hysteria, pure and simple, but they believed it, so for them it was true. Pumo sometimes felt like strangling Vinh, but if he did he’d not only go to jail, he’d never get another chef.

Headache upon headache. Maggie did not call or send word to him for ten days. He began having dreams about Victor Spitalny running out of the cave at Ia Thuc covered with wasps and spiders.

The Health Department issued him a Second Warning, and the inspector muttered about misuse of nonresidential space. The little office reeked of pee.

The day before Maggie put another ad in the Village Voice, Michael Poole called again, asking if he had time to see if anyone at a place called Gladstone House knew where Tim Underhill lived. “Oh, sure,” Tina grumped, “I spend all day in bed reading poetry.” But he looked up the number in the book. The woman who answered referred him to the editorial department. A woman named Corazon Fayre said she knew nothing about an author named Timothy Underwood, and referred him to a woman named Dinah Mellow, who referred him to Sarah Good, who referred him to Betsy Flagg, who claimed at least to have heard of Timothy Underwood, was it? No? Let me transfer you to publicity. In publicity, Jane Boot referred him to May Upshaw who referred him to Marjorie Fan, who disappeared into limbo for fifteen minutes and returned from it with the information that ten years ago Mr. Underhill had written requesting that his circumstances and whereabouts be kept secret on pain of serious authorial displeasure, and that all communications, fan mail included, be directed to him through his agent, Mr. Fenwick Throng.

“Fenwick Throng?” Pumo asked. “Is that a real name?”

The next day was Wednesday, and after getting Vinh off to the markets and Helen to school, Tina set out to buy a copy of the Village Voice at the newsstand on the corner of Eighth Street and Sixth Avenue. Many newsstands were closer, but Eighth Street and Sixth Avenue was only a few blocks from La Groceria, a cafe where Pumo could sit in pale sunlight streaming in through long windows, sip two cups of cappuccino while pretty waitresses with white morning faces yawned and stretched like ballerinas, and read every word of the VOICE BULLETIN BOARD.

He found a message from Maggie right above the drawing in the center of the page: Namcat. Try again same place, same time? Bruises and tattoos. You should fly East with the others, taking Type A with. Her brother must have heard about their trip from Harry and then told her.

He thought of what it would be like to go to Singapore with Poole, Linklater, Harry Beevers, and Maggie Lah. Instantly his stomach tightened up and the cappuccino tasted like brass. She would bring too much carry-on luggage, half of it paper bags. Out of principle, she’d insist on changing hotels at least twice. She’d flirt with Poole, pick fights with Beevers, and virtually adopt Conor. Pumo began to sweat. He signaled for the check, paid, and left.

Several times during the day he dialed Fenwick Throng’s telephone number, but the agent’s line was always busy.

At eleven o’clock he gave unnecessary instructions about closing the restaurant, then showered and changed clothes and hurried off to the Palladium’s back entrance. For fifteen minutes he stood and froze with half a dozen other people in an area like a dog pound enclosed by a wire fence, and then someone finally recognized him and let him in.