Poole finally took in the presence of a restaurant behind the glowing yellow windows to his right.
Tim Underhill was making for one of the few empty tables remaining on the long flat terrace directly before the river. He sat down and began looking around for a waiter. A trickle of people coming up a sunken walkway beside the pool emerged on the lower terraces at the far side of the hotel. A young waiter approached Underhill’s table and took what must have been a drink order. Underhill smiled and talked, and for a time he put his hand on the young waiter’s arm, and the young waiter smiled and made a joke.
The sacred monster shriveled away, blushing. Unless he had arranged a meeting with someone, Underhill came to this elegant place to have a drink in a nice setting and flirt with the boy waiters. As soon as the waiter left him, Underhill took a paperback book from one of the pockets of the seersucker jacket, turned his chair to face the river, propped an elbow on the table, and began to read with an air of habitual concentration.
Here the river did not have the weedy, vegetal stench Poole had caught at the end of the flower market. This stretch of the river smelled only of
He told a professional young person that he merely wanted a drink on the terrace, and the professional young person waved him down the torch-lit steps. Poole went all the way down to the final terrace, and slipped into a seat at the last table in the row.
Three tables away, his legs crossed at the ankle, Tim Underhill faced the river, occasionally looking up from his book to gaze at it. Here the river’s odor carried strong overtones of silt and something almost spicy. The water rhythmically splashed against the piers. Underhill sighed contentedly, sipped his drink, and dove back into his book. Poole made out from three tables away that it was a Raymond Chandler novel.
Poole ordered a glass of white wine from the same young waiter with whom Underhill had flirted. Conversations flowed and sparkled at the tables strung out along the terrace. A small white launch periodically ferried guests from the pier below the terrace to a restaurant on the island halfway across the river. At intervals, bearing lights fore and aft, wooden boats shaped as oddly as boats in dreams slipped past on the black water: boats with dragons’ necks, boats with round swollen bellies and beaks like birds, long flat houseboats hung with washing from the decks of which children stared at Poole with grave, unseeing faces. The darkness deepened, and the voices from the other tables grew louder.
When Poole saw Underhill order another drink from the young waiter, again laying his hand on the boy’s sleeve and saying something that made the boy smile, he took out his pen and wrote a message on his cocktail napkin.
“Will you please give this note to the man whose order you just took?”
The boy dimpled, having understood this request by his own lights, and promptly moved back along the row of tables. When he reached Underhill’s table he dropped the napkin, which he had folded in half, beside Underhill’s elbow.
“Oh?” Underhill said, looking up from Raymond Chandler.
Poole watched him splay the book open on the table and pick up the napkin. For a moment Underhill’s face betrayed no response except to become remarkably concentrated. The whole inner man came to attention. He was even more focused than he had been on his book. Finally he frowned at the little note—a frown of intense mental effort instead of displeasure. Underhill had been able to keep himself from immediately glancing to his right until he had fully considered the note. Now he did so, and his eyes quickly found Poole’s.
Underhill swiveled his chair sideways and let a slow smile spread through his beard. “Lady Michael, it’s better than you know to see you again,” he said. “For a second I thought I might be in trouble.”
When Michael Poole heard those words, the horned monster in Underhill’s body shriveled away for good: Underhill was as innocent of Koko’s murders as any man who feared becoming the next victim had to be. Michael was on his feet before he knew it, moving forward past the intervening tables to embrace him under a brightly glowing torch.
1
A little more than ten hours before the meeting of Dr. Michael Poole and Tim Underhill on the riverside terrace behind the Oriental Hotel, Tina Pumo awoke in a state of uncertainty and agitation. He had more to do in one day than anyone sane would ever attempt. There were meetings not only with Molly Witt and Lowery Hapgood, his architects, and David Dixon, his lawyer, with whom he hoped to iron out an ironclad way to get Vinh his naturalization papers, but immediately after lunch he and Dixon were to go to his bank to negotiate a loan to cover the rest of the construction costs. The inspector from the Health Department had told Pumo he intended to “reconnoiter ’round about sixteen-hundred hours” to make sure that the insect problem had finally been “squared away to base-line acceptability.” The inspector was a Midwestern Vietnam veteran who spoke in a mixture of military jargon, yuppie lingo, and obsolete slang that could sound alternately absurd or menacing. After these meetings, all of them either expensive, frustrating, or intimidating, he had to get down to his equipment supplier on the fringes of Chinatown and pick up replacements for what seemed dozens of pots, pans, and utensils which had managed to go astray during the reconstruction. Sometimes it seemed that only the biggest woks had stayed where they had been put.
Saigon was scheduled to reopen in three weeks, and in more ways than one Pumo’s ability to meet this deadline would count heavily with the bankers. The restaurant had to be running very close to full capacity for a specific number of days before it would begin to make money again. For Pumo, Saigon was a home, a wife, and a baby too, but for the bankers it was a questionably efficient machine for turning food into money. All of this made him feel rushed, anxious, stressed, but it was the presence of Maggie Lah, still sleeping on the other side of his bed, that was most responsible for his feeling of uncertainty.
He could not help this; he regretted it, and at some miserable future hour, he knew, he would hate it, but she irritated him, lying sprawled over half of his bed as if she owned it. Pumo could not divide his life in two and give half of it away. Just concentrating on the daily details took so much energy that his eyes started to close before eleven o’clock. When he woke up in the morning, Maggie was there; when he rushed through lunch she was there; when he looked at blueprints, scanned a profit and loss projection, or even read the newspaper, she was there. He had included Maggie in so many parts of his life that now she had the feeling she belonged in all of them. Maggie had come to feel that she had a right to be in the lawyer’s office, the architect’s brownstone, the supplier’s warehouse. Maggie had taken a temporary condition for a lifelong change and had managed to forget that she was a separate person.
So she took it for granted that she could lie across half his bed every night. So she put in her two cents with Molly Witt, suggesting changes in the floor tiles and the hardware on the cabinets. (Molly had agreed with all her suggestions, but that was beside the point.) So she told him his old menu was no good, and made up some silly new design she expected him to adopt on the spot. People
Pumo could not forget that he loved Maggie, but he no longer needed a nurse, and Maggie had lulled him into forgetting what he was like when he was normal. She was so lulled herself she had lost her timing.
He would have to take her with him today. Molly’s partner would flirt with her. David Dixon, a good lawyer but otherwise a grown-up adolescent who thought only about money, sex, sports, and antique cars, would amusedly tolerate her presence and give Tina knowing looks. If the banker got a look at her, he’d think Tina was a flake and turn down the loan. At Arnold Leung’s, the old Chinese supplier would cast forlorn, despairing looks at her and start sidelong conversations about how she was ruining her life with an “old foreigner.”
Maggie’s eyes opened. She looked at Tina’s empty pillow, and then rolled her head up to weigh and parcel him in one measuring glance. Maggie couldn’t even wake up like other people. Her face looked smooth and dusky, the whites of her eyes glinted. Even her round full lips looked smart.
“I see,” she said on a little sigh.
