“Do you?” Pumo said.
“Do you mind if I don’t come with you today? I ought to go up to a Hundred-twenty-fifth Street to see the General. I have been neglecting my duty. He gets very lonely.”
“Oh.”
“Besides, you look grumpy today.”
Maggie gave him another slow, measuring look and sat up in bed. Her skin seemed very dark in the half light. “He hasn’t been well lately. He’s worried about losing the lease on the storefront.”
She jumped out of bed and skimmed over the floor to the bathroom. For a moment the bed seemed astoundingly empty. The toilet flushed, water pounded through the overhead pipes. He could feel Maggie vigorously brushing her teeth, using up all the energy and air in the bathroom, draining the power from the shaver’s socket and the light fixtures, making the towels wilt on the rack.
“You don’t mind, do you?” she called out brightly. Her voice was slushy with toothpaste. “Tina?”
“I don’t
She came out of the bathroom and gave him another considering look. “Oh, Tina,” she said, and moved past him to the closet and began to dress.
“I have to be alone for a while.”
“You don’t have to tell me. Should I come back tonight?”
“Do what you like.”
“I’ll do what I like, then.” Maggie dressed quickly in the dark woolen garment she had worn when he had fetched her from the General’s apartment.
Maggie and Pumo spoke very little between then and the time they both left the loft to walk down the staircase to Grand Street. Dressed in their heavy winter coats, they stood together in the cold. A garbage truck down at the end of the street noisily crunched up some wooden object that cracked and split like human bones.
Maggie looked so misleadingly small, standing next to him in her padded coat—she might have been a girl going off to high school. It occurred to Pumo that they would not have any problems if they never had to get out of bed. A recollection of Judy Poole’s caustic voice on the telephone made him say, “When Mike Poole and the other guys get back here …”
Maggie tilted her head expectantly, and Tina wondered if what he was going to say was more complicated than he wished. Maggie did not flinch.
“I guess we ought to see more of him, that’s all.”
Maggie gave him a grim, sad smile. “I’ll always be nice to your friends, Tina.”
She gave a wave of her gloved hand as sad as her smile, and turned to walk to the subway station. He watched, but she did not look back.
2
In most ways, Pumo’s morning and early afternoon went more easily than he had imagined. Molly Witt and Lowery Hapgood gave him two strong cups of coffee and showed him their latest innovations, which were, he saw, clever adaptations of the ideas Maggie had advanced a few days earlier. These changes could be painlessly incorporated into the small amount of work remaining to be done, the only hitch being that the cabinet hardware would have to be reordered. But since even the old hardware had not arrived yet … and didn’t he think that everything “keyed together” this way? It did, and he did. And it wasn’t their concern, but if he rethought the menu in the light of these changes and brought the whole look more up to date … in short, adopted most of Maggie’s ideas about the menu too, not excluding “streamlining” Pumo’s beloved descriptions of the food. After the meeting, David Dixon juggled a handful of legal balls in the brisk, cheery air of his offices and lamented that Pumo’s “cute little squeeze” had not accompanied him. At lunch he returned to this theme.
“You’re not going to screw this one up too, are you, buddy?” the lawyer asked him, his eyes twinkling in his ruddy ex-athlete’s face as he looked over the menu at Smith & Wollensky’s. “I’d hate to see you lose that beautiful little Chink.”
“Why don’t
“My family would kill me if I brought home a Chink. What could I tell them, that our kids’ll be great in math?” Dixon continued to twinkle at him, secure in the certainty of his charm.
“You’re not smart enough for her, anyhow.” Pumo only partially mollified Dixon by adding, “We have that much in common.”
Downtown, the meeting at the bank was conducted with a certain cold formality that seemed to distress the banker, who appeared to expect more of Dixon’s usual jocularity—they had been in the same class at Princeton and were happy boyish bachelors of forty. Dixon and the banker had not of course gone to Vietnam. They were
“Don’t worry, it’s in the bag,” Dixon said once they were back out on the street. “But let me give you a hint, old pal. You’ve gotta lighten up. The world is full of that particular brand of real estate, man, you can’t be dragged down by one little Oriental pussy just ’cause it walked out the door.” He guffawed, and a big white scarf of steam flew from his mouth. “Can you? Hell, you threw her out!”
“I’ll let you know in a week or two,” Tina said, and made himself smile and shake Dixon’s hand. In the pressure of the lawyer’s hand on his, he could tell that Dixon was as happy as he was to be parting.
Dixon strode away, red-faced, smiling his charming, lopsided old Princetonian smile, perfect in his gleaming shirtfront, his striped tie, his neat dark bush of hair, his neat dark topcoat, and for a moment Pumo watched him go as he had watched Maggie go earlier that day. What was wrong with him, that he was driving people away from him? Tina did not have much in common with Dixon, but the man was a rogue, and rogues were usually good company.
Like Maggie, Dixon did not look back. His arm shot up, a taxi rolled to a stop, and he slid inside. Rogues had a talent for flagging down cabs. Tina watched his lawyer’s cab roll down Broad Street in a yellow tide of occupied taxis. All at once he felt that, just as he was watching Dixon’s getaway, someone was watching him. The hair on the back of his neck actually rose, and he whirled around to see who was looking at him. Of course no one was. Pumo scanned the crowd of brokers and bankers hurrying down Broad Street in the cold. Some of them were the grey-haired old foxes he still associated with these professions, but many more were men of his and Dixon’s age, and as many were in their twenties and early thirties. They looked both flawless and humorless, human adding machines. Rogues like Dixon would take them in hand and humor them along, and he would feed them and watch them get drunk. Pumo saw that the tribe moving along Broad Street did not even give him a curious glance. They were the focused people. Or maybe he was transparent. The day seemed even colder, and the sky above the sidewalk lamps grew darker, and Pumo moved to the curb and raised his arm.
It took him fifteen minutes to get a cab, and he arrived back at Grand Street at sixteen-hundred hours plus ten minutes. He let himself into the restaurant and found the inspector, Brian Mecklenberg, pacing around the kitchen, tapping his ballpoint against his front teeth, and making little checks on a sheet inserted in his clipboard. “You’ve gained a few yards since the last time I saw you, Mr. Pumo,” he said.
“We have a way to go, too,” Pumo said, dropping his coat on a chair. He still had to get down to Arnold Leung’s that day.
“Oh?” Mecklenberg regarded him with as much interest as any health inspector ever gave any of his victims. “Would you say that our target has been reached?”
“Getting rid of the bugs?”
“Affirmative—zapping the infestation. What else would I mean?”
Mecklenberg looked a little bit like a target himself in a hideous yellow-black-and-olive plaid sports jacket and a brown knit tie firmly locked into place with a conspicuous tie pin.
“Getting the kitchen finished, opening for business,
He remembered David Dixon’s ruddy face and lopsided smile and a crazy light went on in his brain. “You want to talk about targets, Mecklenberg? Abolishing nuclear weapons and establishing world peace. Getting everybody to
