way? Because you’re ignorant civilians, that’s why. There are no children!”
These were the articles that had nearly hanged Beevers, and Dengler with him. In
Surrounded by a bubble of unearthly stillness, Pumo remembered how crazy and taut everybody had felt then, how close that boundary was between morality and murder. They had been nothing but nerves hooked up to trigger fingers. The stink of the fish sauce, and the smoke rising from the pot. Up on the sloping hillside, a girl lay in a crumpled blue heap before her wooden yoke. If the village was empty, who the fuck was doing the cooking? And who were they cooking for? Everything was as still as a tiger in the grass. The sow grunted and cocked her head, and Pumo remembered whirling around, weapon ready, and almost blasting a dirty child in half. Because you couldn’t know, you never knew, and death could be a little smiling child with an outstretched hand; it zapped your brain, it
He looked at the photographs for a long time—Lieutenant Beevers, skinny as a sapling, with a haggard face and spinning eyes. M.O. Dengler, unidentified, white tired eyes flashing from beneath his helmet liner. All that green around them, that palpitating, trembling, simmering green. The mouth of a cave—“like a fist,” Victor Spitalny said at the court-martial.
Then he remembered Lieutenant Harry Beevers lifting a girl of six or seven out of a ditch by her ankles, a muddy naked child, with that Vietnamese fragility, those chicken bones in her neck and arms, and swinging her around like an Indian club. Her mouth was a downturned curve, and her skin had begun to pucker where the fire had gotten her.
Pumo’s entire body felt wet and his sides were cold with sweat. He had to stand up and get away from the machine. He tried to shove his chair back and moved the entire desk. He swiveled his legs and got up and moved, bolted, out into the center of the Microfilm Room.
They had crossed over, all right. Koko had been born on the other side of the boundary, where you met the elephant.
A little smiling child stepped forward from a black immensity, cupping death in its small hands.
Let the guy with the Spanish name have Ia Thuc, Tina thought, it’ll just be another book. I’ll give it to Maggie at Christmas, and she’ll be able to tell me what happened there.
He looked up and the door opened. A boy with a sparse beard and a single dangling earring stepped in with double handfuls of microfilm spools. “You Puma?”
“Pumo,” Tina said, and accepted the microfilm.
He returned to his little desk, unloaded the microfilm of
The article contained less information about the deaths than Pumo had already learned from Beevers. Mr. and Mrs. William Martinson of 3642 Breckinridge Drive, a respectable upper-middle-class couple, had been mysteriously slain in Singapore. Their bodies were discovered by a real-estate appraiser entering a supposedly empty bungalow in a residential section of the city. The motive was presumed to be robbery. Mr. Martinson had traveled extensively in the Far East in his business as Executive Vice President and Marketing Director of Martinson Tool & Equipment Ltd., and was frequently accompanied by his wife, an equally distinguished citizen of St. Louis.
Mr. Martinson, sixty-one, was a graduate of St. Louis Country Day School, Kenyon College, and Columbia University. His great-grandfather, Andrew Martinson, had founded Martinson Tool & Equipment in St. Louis in 1890. The deceased’s father, James, had been president of the company from 1935 to 1952, and had also been president of the St. Louis Founders’ Club, the Union Club, and the Athletic Club as well as serving in prominent positions on many civic, educational, and religious bodies. Mr. Martinson joined his family’s business, now under the presidency of his older brother, Kirkby Martinson, in 1970, using his experience of the Far East and skill as a negotiator to increase Martinson’s annual revenues by what was reputed to be several hundred million dollars.
Mrs. Martinson, the former Barbara Hartsdale, a graduate of the Academie Francaise and Bryn Mawr College, had long taken a prominent role in civic and cultural affairs. Her grandfather, Chester Hartsdale, a second cousin of the poet T.S. Eliot, founded the Hartsdale’s department store chain, for fifty years the leading retail outlet throughout the Midwest, and served as ambassador to Belgium after the First World War. The Martinsons were survived by Mr. Martinson’s brother Kirkby and sister, Emma Beech, of Los Angeles; by Mrs. Martinson’s brothers, Lester and Parker, directors of the interior decoration firm La Bonne Vie in New York City; and by their children: Spenser, employed by the Central Intelligence Agency, of Arlington, Va.; Parker, of San Francisco, Ca.; and Arlette Monaghan, an artist, of Cadaques, Spain. There were no grandchildren.
Tina examined the photographs of these two exemplary citizens. William Martinson had possessed close-set eyes and a fringe of white hair around a smooth intelligent face. He had a prosperous, secretive, badgerlike air. Barbara Martinson had been caught smiling, close-mouthed, almost shyly, while looking sideways. She looked as if she had just thought of something funny and rather bawdy.
On what would have been the third page was a headline reading MARTINSONS RECALLED BY NEIGHBORS, FRIENDS. Pumo began skimming the small print on the monitor’s screen, wrongly suspecting that he already knew all the substantial information about the Martinsons that he was ever going to know. The Martinsons had of course been loved and admired. Of course their deaths were a tragic loss to the community. They had been handsome and generous and witty. Less predictably, William Martinson was still known to his oldest friends by his Country Day nickname, “Fuffy.” It was often remembered that Mr. Martinson had shown remarkable business ability after his decision to resign from journalism and join the family firm during a crisis at Martinson Tool & Equipment.
But Pumo had stopped reading. For a time he was not conscious of hearing or seeing anything—Ia Thuc had blindsided him again. He gradually became aware that his hands were taking the St. Louis microfilm from the machine. “That goddamned Beevers,” he said to himself. “That goddamned fool.”
“Simmer down, man” said a flat stoned voice from behind him. Pumo tried to whirl around in his plastic chair and banged himself on the molded back hard enough to give himself a bruise. He rubbed his thigh and looked up at the boy with the tentative beard. “Puma, right?”
Pumo sighed and nodded.
“You still want these?” He held out another stack of microfilm containers.
Pumo took them, waved the boy off, and went back to the screen. He did not know what he was looking at, what he was looking for. He felt as if he had been struck by lightning. Goddamned Harry Beevers, who had made such a big deal of his research, had not even scratched the surface of Koko’s murders. Pumo felt another wave of concentrated rage go through him.
He slammed in the microfilmed London
Pumo scanned across the text until he found the headline and subhead he wanted, JOURNALIST-NOVELIST MCKENNA SLAIN IN SINGAPORE.
