Koko

“What I know about married couples is, she’s out,” he said.

Soon Tina began to think that Maggie might be right after all. Both of the Pooles had demanding jobs that involved appointments and emergencies, and it was logical that they might have separate telephone lines. He had resisted the idea because it was not his own. But the next morning as he badgered the carpenters and morbidly inspected every new hole in the walls for signs of roaches and spiders, he still could find no grounds to question his certainty that Judy Poole had not been home on the night he called. People usually had their answering machines where they could hear them—especially if they turned the machines on while they were home. That was why they turned them on. Therefore he could excuse his immediate rejection of Maggie’s ideas—if they had a dozen telephone lines and he had called every one the results would have been identical.

When Maggie asked him if he intended to see if there was a separate listing for Judy, and Pumo said, “Maybe. I have a lot to do today, I guess it can wait.”

Maggie smiled and flicked her eyes slyly upward. She knew she had won, and was too smart to ask him a second time.

Until seven o’clock in the evening, the day after Pumo’s discovery that Koko’s victims had been the journalists at Ia Thuc, time went by almost normally. He and Maggie had spent the day in cabs and subways, in other restaurants, and in an office with lithographs by David Salle and Robert Rauschenberg where Lowery Hapgood, Molly Witt’s partner, flirted with Maggie while he explained a new shelving system. They did not get back to Tina’s loft until just before seven. Maggie asked him if he felt like eating anything and lay down on the long couch, and Tina dropped into a chair at the table and said he supposed so.

“What are we going to do about it, then?”

Tina picked up the morning’s Times, which he had tossed onto the table. “I understand that many women delight in creating meals.”

“Let’s get a little bit stoned and go to Chinatown and get duck feet. Yum.”

“That’s the first time you wanted to get high since you started living here.”

Maggie yawned, flinging out her arms. “I know. I’m getting so boring. I said it just now out of nostalgia for when I was interesting.”

“Hold on,” Pumo said, staring at a small article on the third page of the first section.

He was looking at a headline that read: ORTIZ, JOURNALIST, SLAIN IN SINGAPORE. The body of Roberto Ortiz, 47, a prominent member of the press corps, had been discovered the day before by police in an empty house located in a residential section of Singapore. Mr. Ortiz and an unidentified woman had died of gunshot wounds. Robbery was not assumed to be the motive. Roberto Ortiz, born in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, educated privately and at the University of California at Berkeley, was born into an influential Central American newspaper family and became a freelance reporter contributing to many Spanish- and English-language periodicals. Mr. Ortiz had spent the years 1964–1971 in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, covering the Vietnam War for a variety of journals, and out of this experience had come his book Vietnam: A Personal Journey. Mr. Ortiz was well known for his wit, flamboyance, and personal courage. Singapore police had released the information that the death of Mr. Ortiz appeared to be related to several unsolved killings in the city.

“Something has stolen your attention from your teenage drug addict mistress,” Maggie said.

“Read this.” Pumo walked to the couch and handed her the paper. She read half of it lying down, but sat up to finish it. “You think he was another one of them?”

Pumo shrugged—suddenly he wished that Maggie were somewhere else, making her smart remarks about drugs. “I don’t know. There’s something about this—there’s something about him. The man who was killed.”

“Roberto Ortiz.”

He nodded.

“Did you ever meet him?”

“There was a Spanish-speaking reporter who came to Ia Thuc.” Dark feelings churned within Pumo. He could not stand this, any of it—his nice loft, the mess downstairs in the restaurant, and right now he could not stand Maggie either.

“He got the last one,” Pumo said with what felt like the last fragments of his restraint. From now on he was running on empty. “There were five reporters who came into Ia Thuc, and now they’re all dead.”

“You look awful, Tina. What do you want to do?”

“Leave me alone.” Pumo stood up and leaned against the wall. Without volition, as if his hand had chosen to close itself, he made a fist. Quietly at first and then with growing force, he began hitting the wall.

“Tina?”

“I said, leave me alone.”

“Why are you hitting the wall?”

“Shut up!”

Maggie was silent for a long time while Pumo continued to beat his fist against the wall. Eventually he changed to his left fist.

“They’re over there, and you’re over here.”

“Brilliant.”

“Do you think they know about this Ortiz?”

“Of course they know about it!” Pumo shouted. He turned around so that he could yell better. Both of his hands felt raw and swollen. “They were in the same city!” Pumo felt murderous. Maggie was sitting on the couch staring at him with big kitten eyes. “What do you know about anything? How old are you? You think I need you? I don’t need you around me!”

“Good,” Maggie said. “Then I don’t have to be your nurse.”

A wave of pure blackness went through Tina Pumo. He remembered the demon-man who had smelled like burning garbage putting a grey hand on his shoulder and telling him he was a killer. Hell was pretty nice, Pumo thought. He found himself going toward the kitchen cabinets Vinh had hung. Look what you can do in hell. He opened the first cabinet and was almost surprised to see dishes stacked on the shelves. The neat dishes looked absolutely foreign to him. He hated the dishes. Pumo picked up the topmost dish and hefted it in both hands for a moment before dropping it. It smashed into half a dozen sections when it struck the floor. See what you could do when you lived in hell? He took another plate and threw it down. Pieces of china flew out and skidded beneath his dining table. He worked down the stack, sometimes dropping just one dish, at other times two or three. He dropped the last plate with great deliberation, as if he were conducting a scientific experiment.

“You poor bastard,” Maggie said.

“Okay, okay.” Pumo pressed his hands to his eyes.

“Do you want to go to Bangkok to see if you can find them? It couldn’t be that hard to do.”

“I don’t know,” Pumo said.

“If being here makes you feel so bad, you ought to go. I could even book the tickets for you.”

“I don’t feel so bad anymore,” Pumo said. He went across the room to an armchair and sat down. “But maybe I’ll go. Does the restaurant really need me?”

“Does it?”

He thought. “Yes. That’s why I didn’t go in the first place.” He looked over the rubble of the plates. “Whoever made that mess ought to be executed.” When he grinned his face looked ghastly. “I retract that.”

“Let’s go to Chinatown and get soup,” Maggie said. “You are a person in great need of soup.”

“Would you go to Bangkok with me if I decide to go?”

“I hate Bangkok,” Maggie said. “Let’s go to Chinatown instead.”

They found a cab on West Broadway, and Maggie gave directions to the Bowery Arcade, between Canal and Bayard streets.

Fifteen minutes later Maggie was speaking Cantonese to a waiter in a small shabby room papered with handwritten menus like scrolls. The waiter was about sixty and wore a filthy yellow uniform that had once been white. The waiter said something that made Maggie smile.

“What was that?”

“He called you an old foreigner.”

Pumo looked at the shuffling waiter’s bent back and the iron-grey stubble covering his head.

“It’s an expression.”