“Do you know this person?” Beevers asked. “Can you recall ever having seen him prior to now?”
“I never see this person prior to now,” said the tailor. “It would be honor to meet this person, but he could not pay even rock-bottom price.”
“Why not?” Michael asked.
“Too artistic,” the tailor said.
Michael smiled and began to slide the picture back into the envelope when the tailor bent forward and grasped the print.
“You give me picture? Have plenty more?”
“He’s lying,” Beevers said. “You’re lying. Where is this man? Can you lead us to him?”
“Celebrity picture,” the tailor said.
“He just wants the picture,” Michael said to Beevers.
Conor slapped the tailor on the back and laughed out loud.
“What do you mean, he just wants the picture?”
“Hang on wall,” the tailor said.
Michael handed him the photograph.
The tailor tucked it under his arm and bowed, giggling. “Thank you very much.” He turned around to walk back up the broad mall. Well-dressed Chinese men and women strolled toward them beneath the overhanging trees. The men wore blue suits, neat ties, and sunglasses and looked like the banker on the banner. The women were slim and good-looking and wore dresses. Poole realized that he, Beevers, and Conor were a racial minority of three. A long way down the mall, beside a poster that surrounded Chuck Norris’s scowl with leaping flames and a lot of Chinese characters, a teenage Chinese girl idled along, looking absently into shop windows. She wore what must have been a school uniform of flat white skimmer, white middy blouse with a black tie, and loose black skirt. Then an entire pack of such girls, neat as a row of ducks, swung into view behind her. Across the street next to a poster advertising McDonald’s hamburgers a square white sign advised SPEAK MANDARIN—ASSIST YOUR GOVERNMENT. Suddenly Poole could smell the perfume in the air, as if some invisible, exotic flower bloomed all around him. He felt unreasonably happy.
“If we’re looking for the Boogey Street Underhill used to talk about, why don’t we just take a cab?” Poole said. “This is a civilized country.”
2
Stung by a recognition, Tina Pumo woke up in what at first seemed utter darkness. His heart was beating very loudly. He imagined that he must have cried out, made at least some sound, before he awakened, but Maggie slept on undisturbed beside him. He raised his arm and looked at the luminous hands on the face of his watch. It was three twenty-five.
Tina knew what had been stolen from his desk. If Dracula had not moved everything around, he would have noticed its loss immediately, and if the two days since the break-in had been normal working days, he would have noticed its absence as soon as he sat down. But these two days had been anything but normal—he had spent at least half of each working day downstairs with the builders, contractors, carpenters, and exterminators. They finally seemed to have rid Saigon’s kitchen of all its insects, but the exterminator was still in a state closely resembling euphoria at the number, variety, and hardiness of the bugs he had had to kill. At least a few hours a day had to be spent convincing Molly Witt, his architect, that she was designing a kitchen and an enlarged dining room, not a high-tech operating room. The rest of the time he had spent with Maggie, talking as he had never talked in his life about himself.
Tina felt almost as if Maggie had unlocked him. In two days she had gone a long way toward drawing him out of a shell he had barely known he was in.
In a way he was still only beginning to understand, that shell had been formed in Vietnam. Pumo felt humbled by this new knowledge—Dracula had terrorized him by awakening feelings that Pumo had fondly, even proudly, imagined he had put away with his uniform. Pumo had imagined that it was only other people who had allowed themselves to be scarred by Vietnam. He used to feel at a safe emotional distance from all that had happened to him there. He had left the Army and got on with his life. Like virtually every other veteran, he’d gone through a period of aimlessness and dislocation when he coasted just alongside life, but that time had come to an end six years earlier, when he made his move with Saigon. He had, it was true, continued to go from girl to girl, and as he grew older, the girls had gotten younger by staying the same age. He fell in love with the shape of their mouths or the shape of their forearms or the eloquence of the relationship between their calves and their thighs; he fell in love with the way their hair swung or their eyes took him in. Until Maggie Lah had stopped him dead, he thought now, he had fallen in love with everything there was about a person except the actual person.
“Do you think there is a real point where
It had crossed his mind that she might think this way because she was Chinese, but he had kept silent about this theory.
“Nobody can walk away from things the way you think you walked away from Vietnam,” she told him. “You saw your friends get killed, and you were just a boy. Now, after a relatively minor beating, you’re afraid of elevators and you’re afraid of subways and dark streets and God knows what else. Don’t you think there’s some connection?”
“I guess,” he admitted. “How do you know about it though, Maggie?”
Now Pumo carefully left his bed. Maggie did not stir, and her breathing went on quietly and steadily. He had to look at his desk to see if he was right about what had been stolen. Pumo’s heart was still pounding, and his own breathing sounded very loud to him. He proceeded cautiously across the bedroom in the dark. When he put his hand on the doorknob, he was visited by the sudden image of Dracula standing just on the other side of the door. Sweat broke out on his face.
“Tina?” Maggie’s crystalline voice floated on a dead-level current of breath from the bedroom.
Pumo stood in the dark empty hallway. No one was there—as if Maggie had helped dispel the threat.
“I know what’s missing,” he said. “I have to check it out. Sorry I woke you up.”
“It’s okay,” Maggie said.
His head pounded, and he could still feel little tremors in his knees. If he stood in that spot any longer, Maggie would know something was wrong. She might even feel that she had to get out of bed to help him. Pumo moved down the hall into the loft’s living room and pulled the cord that switched on the overhead lights. Like most rooms used almost entirely in the daytime, when seen this late at night Pumo’s living room had an eerie quality, as if everything in it had been replaced by an exact replica of itself. Pumo went across the room, up the steps to the platform, and sat down at his desk.
He could not see it. He looked beneath the telephone and the answering machine. He moved the checkbooks to one side and lifted stacks of invoices and receipts. He checked behind a box of rubber bands and moved a box of tissues. Nothing. It could not have been hidden by the bottles of vitamins beside the electric pencil sharpener, nor by the two boxes of Blackwing pencils beside that. He was right: it wasn’t there. It had been stolen.
To be certain, Pumo looked under his desk, leaned over the top and looked behind it, and then poked through his wastebasket. The wastebasket contained lots of balled-up tissues, an old copy of the
Crouching beside the wastebasket, Pumo looked up and saw Maggie standing in the entrance to the living room. Her arms dangled at her sides and her face still seemed full of sleep.
“I know I look a little crazy,” he said, “but I was right.”
“What is missing?”
“I’ll tell you after I think about it for a couple of seconds.”
“That bad?”
