Koko

rhythms of the good old Jungle Walk.

Either he was going completely paranoid, Pumo thought, or Koko had followed him into the stacks. Koko had stolen his address book and discovered that the other men were out of town, and he was going to begin his excellent work all over again in America with Tina Pumo. He was all stoked up from reading about Ia Thuc, and Tina was next on his list.

But of course it would turn out that the person who had just come into the fifth-floor stacks was a librarian. The door said PERSONNEL ONLY. If Pumo turned down an aisle and ran into him, he’d turn out to be a fat little guy with Hush Puppies and a button-down shirt. Pumo went as noiselessly as possible down the wide middle aisle, doing a pretty fair Jungle Walk himself. Three aisles from the end, he stopped to listen.

From off to the left came quick faint footsteps that must have been the dandy’s. If anyone else moved through the stacks, he was walking too quietly to be heard. Pumo peeked down a long aisle. Pools of light lay between columns of shelved books. He ducked into the aisle.

It seemed as long as a football field, narrowing, a tunnel seen through the wrong end of a telescope. Pumo moved quietly down the long tight aisle. In a queer hallucinatory trick of vision the spines and titles of books seemed to creep by him as they moved while he stood still. W.M. Thackeray, Pendennis, Vol. 1. W.M. Thackeray, Pendennis, Vol. 2. W.M. Thackeray, The Newcomes. The Virginians. The Yellowplush Papers, ETC., bound in pink cloth board with gold lettering and published by Smith, Elder & Co. Lovel the Widower, ETC., in matching pink and gold from Smith, Elder.

Pumo closed his eyes and heard a man cough softly into his fist one aisle away. Tina’s eyes flew open, and the titles of the books before him melted into a single gorgeous Arabic scrawl of gold over a pink background. He supposed he nearly fainted.

The man who coughed took an almost silent step forward. Pumo stood still as a statue, afraid to breathe even though the man in the next aisle could only be the librarian in Hush Puppies. Whoever it was took three swift, gliding steps down the aisle.

When Pumo thought that the other man had gone far enough up toward the middle aisle, he began to move toward the door.

In that instant, as if Tina had given a cue, someone whistled the beginning of “Body and Soul” far away toward the left side of the room—an ornate performance full of scoops and trills and vibrato.

Pumo heard the man in the next aisle begin to move less cautiously toward the whistler. Someone off that way slid several books off a shelf—the dandy had found what he had been looking for when he came into the stacks. The man in the next aisle turned into the middle aisle. Pumo realized that if he had parted the Thackeray volumes in front of him, he would have seen the face of the man in the next aisle. His heart began to pound.

Just as the other man passed before the head of the aisle in which he had been hiding, Pumo emerged from the stacks and was only a few paces from the door to the staircase. A dim, shielded light burned above it. He took a step toward the door.

The knob began to revolve and Pumo’s heart stopped for the space of a single beat. The knob revolved and the whole door swung abruptly in on a bubble of conversation and a sudden tide of light.

Dark figures stepped toward him. Pumo stopped moving; they stopped moving too. The high-pitched conversation abruptly ceased. Then he saw that they were the Chinese women he had seen in the third-floor corridor.

“Oh!” both women uttered in a whisper.

“Excuse me,” Pumo whispered back. “I guess I got lost or something.”

They waved him forward, grinning now that they were over the surprise of seeing him, and Pumo went past them through the door and out onto what felt like the safety of the landing.

Back in his loft that night Pumo told Maggie only that he had not been able to confirm that the other person looking at material about Ia Thuc had used the murdered journalist’s name. He did not want to describe what had happened in the stacks, because nothing really had happened. After a long dinner and a bottle of Bonnes Mares at a good restaurant across the street, he was too ashamed of his panic. It had been imagination doing a nasty trick with the materials of his memory, and Maggie was right, he was still trying to get over his experiences in Vietnam. The bearded man had given him some name like Roberto Diaz, and everything else was just fantasy. A fellow passenger or a coked-up airport employee had killed the yuppie at JFK. Maggie looked so beautiful that even the bored SoHo waiter stared at her, and the wine was full of subtle tastes. He looked at her face glowing at him across the table and knew that as long as your health and your money held out, the world was sane.

The next day neither Pumo nor Maggie looked at The New York Times, neither of them paused to look at the headlines of the tabloids on the newsstands they hurried past on their various errands, LIBRARY CHIEF SLAIN said the Post, with imperfect accuracy. The News settled for the Agatha Christie-like touch of MURDER IN THE LIBRARY. Both tabloids gave half of their front pages to a portrait shot of Dr. Anton Mayer-Hall, a tall bearded man in a double- breasted suit. Dr. Mayer-Hall, Director of Projects for New York Public Libraries and a staff member of the library for twenty-four years, had been found slain in a section of the fifth-floor stacks reserved for library personnel. It was speculated that he had used that section of the fifth floor as a shortcut to his office, where he had been due for an appointment with the library’s publicity director, Mei-lan Hudson. Ms. Hudson and her assistant Adrien Lo, using the same shortcut, had stopped and questioned an intruder in the same section of the library where Dr. Mayer-Hall was murdered a few minutes before their discovery of the body. The intruder, whose description was now in the hands of the police, was being sought for questioning. The Times offered its readers a smaller photograph and a detailed map with arrows and an X where the body was found.

4

What do you fear?

I fear that I made him up. That I gave him all his best ideas.

You fear that he is an idea come to life?

He is his own idea come to life.

How did Victor Spitalny get to Bangkok?

It was simple. He found a soldier at the airport who was willing to switch his nametag and travel documents for the sake of going to Honolulu instead of Bangkok. So everything proved that PFC Spitalny went to Honolulu on Air Pacific Flight 206—not only the tickets, but also and including check-in lists, passenger rosters, seating charts filled out in-flight, and boarding passes. A PFC named Victor Spitalny could conclusively be shown to have stayed in a single room at the Hotel Lanai costing the equivalent of twenty dollars American per night for six nights, and to have returned on Air Pacific Flight 207, arriving back in Vietnam at 2100 hours 7 October 1969. It was indisputable that PFC Spitalny had gone to and returned from Honolulu during the time that he had disappeared in the middle of a street riot in Bangkok.

Finally, a PFC named Michael Warland who claimed to have lost all his papers admitted that on the morning of 2 October 1969 he had met and spoken with PFC Victor Spitalny who had suggested that they exchange places during their R&Rs. When he did not locate PFC Spitalny in the airport on 8 October, he stored his belongings in a locker and returned to his unit. When the deception was revealed, PFC Spitalny was listed as AWOL.

What did all this do for Spitalny?

It bought him weeks of time.

Why did Spitalny want to go to Bangkok with Dengler?

He had already planned it all.

What happened to the girl?

The girl disappeared. She ran through an enraged crowd in Patpong, showing on her palms blood shed in a cave in Vietnam, and ran invisibly through the world for years until I saw her. Then I began to understand.

What did you understand?

She was back because he was back.

Then why did you bless her?

Because if I saw her, then I was back too.