Vinh. No, Vinh had not seen anyone hanging around outside the building during the past few days. Of course with all the workmen he might have missed something. No, he could not remember any unusual telephone calls.
“Were there any calls from people who hung up as soon as you answered?”
“Of course,” Vinh said, and looked at Pumo as if he had lost his mind. “We get those calls all the time. Where do you think you are? This is New York!”
After he left Vinh, Pumo took a cab up to the 42nd Street library. He went up the wide steps, through the doors, past the guards, and returned to the desk where he had begun his research. The stocky bearded man was nowhere in sight, and a blond man half a foot taller than Pumo stood behind the desk holding a telephone up to his ear. He glanced at Pumo, then turned his back to continue his conversation. When he set down the telephone he came slowly toward the desk. “May I help you?”
“I was doing some research here two days ago, and I’d like to check on something,” Pumo said. “Do you know the man who was on duty then?”
“I was here two days ago,” the blond man said.
“Well, the man I spoke to was older, maybe sixty, about my height, with a beard.”
“That could be a million people in here.”
“Well, could you ask someone?”
The blond man raised his eyebrows. “Do you see anyone here besides me? I can’t leave this desk, you know.”
“Okay,” Pumo said. “Then maybe you could give me the information I was looking for.”
“If you want a particular microfilm and you’ve been here before, then you know how to fill out the forms.”
“It’s not that kind of information,” Pumo persisted. “When I requested some articles on a certain subject, the man who was working here told me that someone else had recently requested the same information. I’d like the name of that man.”
“I can’t possibly give you that information.” The blond man arched his back and looked down at Poole as if he were standing above him, on a ledge.
“The other man did, though. It was a Spanish name.”
The blond man was already shaking his head. “Not possible. It’s not like the old slip in the back of the book business.”
“You don’t recognize the description of the other clerk?”
“I am not a clerk.” There was now a straight red line across each of the blond man’s cheekbones. “If you do not wish to request microfilms, sir, you are wasting the time of several people who do.”
He looked pointedly over Pumo’s shoulder, and Pumo, who for some time had experienced the sensation that someone was staring at him, looked back too. Four people stood behind him, none of them looking anywhere in particular.
“Sir?” the librarian said, and tilted the tip of his chin like a baton at the man immediately behind Pumo.
Pumo wandered away toward the carrels to see if the bearded man would appear. For twenty minutes, the blond man either attended to researchers, talked on the telephone, or preened at the desk. He did not once look at Pumo. At twenty minutes past eleven he consulted his watch, raised a flap in the desk, and strode out of the room. A young woman in a black wool sweater took his place, and Pumo returned to the desk.
“Gee, I don’t really know anyone here,” she said to Pumo. “This is my first day—I only passed my internship two weeks ago, and I spent most of the time since then in Incunabula.” She lowered her voice. “I loved Incunabula.”
“You don’t know the names of any well-dressed sixty-year-old men with beards in this library?”
“Well, there’s Mr. Vartanian,” she said with a smile. “But I don’t think you could have seen
Pumo thanked her and left the room. He thought he might see the bearded man if he wandered through the library and poked his head into offices.
He set off down the corridor, looking at the people who filled the upper floors of the great library. Men in cardigan sweaters, men in sports jackets, moved from the elevators to office doors, women in sweaters and jeans or in dresses hurried down the wide corridor. A wonderful dandy in a resplendent suit, a bristling beard, and gleaming eyeglasses swept through a door, and all the other staff members nodded or said hello. He was taller than the librarian Pumo had spoken to, and his beard was glossy red-brown, not salt-and-peppery black.
The visitors to the library carried their coats like Pumo and looked less certain of their destinations. The dandy passed through them like a steamship pushing through a crowd of row-boats and strode down the corridor and turned a corner.
Just as Pumo reached the corner he had the same sensation of being watched he’d had in the Microfilm Room. He looked over his shoulder and saw the crowd of visitors dispersing, some going into the Microfilm Room, others into other rooms. Still others boarded the elevator. The library staff had all gone through office doors, except for two women on their way to the ladies room. Pumo turned the corner and thought he had lost the tall dandy before he had quite realized that he’d decided to follow him. Then he saw a glossy black shoe flicking around another corner.
Pumo jogged down the hallway, hearing the soles of his shoes click against the brown marble. When he came walking fast around the corner the dandy was nowhere in sight, but a door marked STAIRS was just closing halfway down the otherwise empty hallway before him. Then from down at the far end of this corridor came a pair of young Chinese women, each carrying two or three books bristling with marker slips. As he watched them come gliding toward him across the marble floor, one of the women glanced up at him and smiled.
Pumo opened the door to the stairs and stepped onto the landing. A large red numeral 3 was painted on the wall before him. As soon as the door closed behind him, he heard footsteps, softer than his own, coming down the corridor from the same direction he had taken. The dandy’s footsteps sounded on the cement stairs above. Pumo began to go up the stairs. It seemed to him that the footsteps in the corridor paused at the staircase door, but he could be certain only that he heard them no more. Footsteps climbed the stairs toward the fifth floor.
The door below him clicked open. Pumo did not look down until he was at the landing where the stairs changed direction. He went to the railing and bent over to see the person who had just come onto the staircase. He could see only the railing and a wedge of stairs twisting around and around beneath him. Whoever was down there stopped moving. Pumo could still hear the tall dandy’s steps ticking hollowly upward.
He moved a step away from the railing and looked up.
The footsteps from below began to ascend toward him.
Pumo took the step back to the railing and looked down, but at once the ascending footsteps stopped again. Whoever was coming toward him had moved back under the protection of the staircase.
Pumo’s stomach went cold.
Then the third-floor door opened again, and the two Chinese women entered the staircase enclosure. He saw the tops of their heads and heard their clear emphatic voices, speaking Cantonese. Above, the door to the fifth floor slammed shut.
Pumo unfroze and left the railing.
He opened the door marked PERSONNEL ONLY on the fifth-floor landing and stepped into a vast dark space filled with books. The tall dandy had disappeared into one of the aisles between the stacks. His quiet footsteps came as if from everywhere in the enormous room. Tina could not hear any noises from the other side of the staircase door, but had a sudden, urgent image of a man creeping up the last few steps.
He stepped quickly into the stacks and found himself in a long empty aisle perhaps a yard wide between towering steel bookshelves. Far above, low-wattage bulbs beneath conical shades cast dim but distinct pools of illumination. The tall man’s footsteps were no longer audible.
Pumo forced himself to move more slowly. Just as he reached a wide middle aisle, he heard the clicking of the door which opened onto the staircase. Someone slipped inside and closed the door behind him.
He could virtually
Then he heard slow footsteps far off to his left. Pumo began to move toward the dandy, and heard the person who had just entered the stacks start down one of the narrow aisles. His feet hushed along in the soft, slow
