“I still don’t know how I did it,” Poole said. “Gave me nightmares for years.”
Then the operator cut through the whistling to say, “We are connecting you to your party, sir,” and Michael Poole readied himself to talk to his wife while still holding up before him, fresh from its long internment within him, the memory of using his K-Bar to saw off the ears of a corpse propped up against a fifty-pound bag of rice. And the darker memory of using his knife on the dead man’s eyes.
Victor Spitalny had seen the body first, and had come out of the tunnel bawling
The silence deepened and changed texture. Two deep thudding clicks came over the line, like firm but complex linkages made in deep space.
Poole looked at his watch. Seven o’clock P.M. in Bangkok, seven in the morning in Westerholm, New York.
After all this time he heard the sound, familiar as a lullaby, of the American dial tone, which abruptly ceased. More deep-space silence, followed by the dim ringing of a telephone.
The telephone ceased ringing with a clunk that meant the answering machine was on. At seven in the morning, Judy was either still in the bedroom or down in the kitchen.
Michael waited through Judy’s message. When the beep came, he said, “Judy? Are you home? This is Michael.”
He waited three, four, five beats. “Judy?” He was about to hang up where he heard a loud click and his wife said, “So it’s you,” in a flat, uninflected voice.
“Hello. I’m glad you answered.”
“I guess I’m glad too. Are the children having fun in the sun?”
“Judy—”
“Are they?”
Poole had a quick, guilty flash of the girl rubbing his crotch. “I suppose you could call it fun. We’re still looking for Tim Underhill.”
“How nice for you.”
“We learned that he left Singapore, so Beevers is in Taipei and Conor and I are in Bangkok. I think we might find him in the next few days.”
“Dandy. You’re in Bangkok, reliving your venereal youth, and I’m doing my job in Westerholm, which happens to be the location of your house and your medical practice. You remember, I hope, if your faulty short-term memory has not already erased it, that I wasn’t exactly overjoyed when you announced that you were taking this trip of yours?”
“I didn’t exactly announce it in that sense, Judy.”
“Bad short-term memory, what did I tell you?”
“I thought you’d be happy to hear from me.”
“I don’t precisely wish you ill, no matter what you may think.”
“I never thought you did.”
“In a way I’m almost glad you left, because it gives me the space for some long-overdue thinking about our relationship. I really wonder whether we’re doing either one of us any good anymore.”
“You want to talk about that now?”
“Just tell me one thing—did you ask one of your little friends to call me up periodically, to check on whether or not I’m home?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I am talking about the little gnome who loves the sound of my voice on the answering machine so much that he calls up two or three times a day. And by the way, I don’t care if you don’t trust me anymore than that because I am a person who takes responsibility for herself around here, Michael, and I always have been.”
“You’re getting anonymous phone calls?” Michael asked, grateful to have discovered a reason for his wife’s hostility.
“As if you didn’t know.”
“Oh, Judy,” he said, and his pain and regret were very clear in his voice.
“All right,” she said. “Okay.”
“Call the police.”
“What good will that do?”
“If he calls that often, they’ll be able to nail him.”
There was a long silence between them that to Michael seemed almost comfortable, marital.
“This is wasting money,” Judy said.
“It’s probably some student’s idea of a joke. You need to relax a little, Judy.”
She hesitated. “Well, Bob Bunce asked me for dinner tomorrow night. It’ll be nice to get out of the house.”
“The wasp expert?” Michael said. “Good.”
“What are you talking about?”
Two years before, Michael had told some people at a faculty party about Victor Spitalny running out of the Ia Thuc cave screaming about being stung by millions of wasps. This was one part of Ia Thuc that he was able to speak about: it was harmless, and nobody died in this story. All that happened was that Victor Spitalny tore out of the cave, scraping his face with his fingernails and screaming until Poole rolled him up in his groundcloth. When he stopped screaming, Poole unwrapped him. Spitalny’s face and hands were covered with rapidly disappearing red welts. “Ain’t no wasps in Vietnam, little brother,” SP4 Cotton said, snapping a picture of Spitalny half-emerged from the groundcloth. “Every other kind of bug, but ain’t no wasps.”
A six-three English teacher named Bob Bunce, who had floppy blond hair and a thin patrician face and wore beautiful tweed suits, told Michael that since wasps were found throughout the northern hemisphere, there must be wasps in Vietnam. Michael thought that Bunce was a smug self-important know-it-all. He was supposed to come from a wealthy Main Line family and to be teaching English because he had a priestly calling to it. Bunce was a liberal’s wet dream. He had gone on to say that because Vietnam was a semitropical country, wasps would be rare, and anyhow that most wasps in all parts of the world were solitaries. “And aren’t there more interesting questions about Ia Thuc than this, Michael?” he had insinuatingly asked.
“It doesn’t matter,” Michael said now to Judy. “Where are you going to go?”
“He didn’t
“Fine.”
“It’s not as though you’re exactly starving for companionship, is it? But I think there are massage parlors in Westerholm, too.”
“I don’t think so,” Michael laughed.
“I don’t want to talk anymore,” Judy promptly said.
“Okay.”
Another lengthy silence.
“Have a nice dinner with Bunce.”
“You have no right to say that,” Judy told him, and hung up without saying good-bye.
Michael gently replaced the receiver.
Conor was walking around the room, looking out the window, bouncing on the balls of his feet, avoiding Michael’s eyes. At length he cleared his throat. “Trouble?”
“My life is becoming ridiculous.”
Conor laughed. “My life always was ridiculous. Ridiculous isn’t so bad.”
“Maybe not,” Michael said, and he and Conor shared a smile. “I think I’m going to bed early tonight. Do you mind being alone? Tomorrow we can make a list of places to visit and really get down to work.”
Conor took a couple of the photographs of Tim Underhill with him when he left.
4
Relieved to be alone, Michael ordered a simple meal from room service and stretched out on his bed with the
