Koko

see that Vietnamese food is as good as French food. Establishing a Vietnam War memorial in every major city. Finding a safe way to get rid of all toxic waste.” He paused for breath, aware the Mecklenberg was staring at him with his mouth open.

“Hey, about nuclear power, hey—” Mecklenberg began.

“Scrapping all that ridiculous Star Wars bullshit. Upgrading public schools. Putting religion back in churches, where it belongs.”

“I’m with you there,” Mecklenberg said.

Pumo’s voice rose a notch. “Taking goddamned guns away from civilians.” Mecklenberg tried to interrupt, but Pumo began to shout. The crazy light was burning very brightly now. Mecklenberg hadn’t heard half the targets he was going to hear. “Trying to elect officials who actually know what they’re doing instead of ones who just look good while pretending that they know what they’re doing! Taking the radio away from goddamned teenagers and having decent music on again! Abolishing television for five years! Cutting one finger off every public official who is caught telling even one public lie, and cutting off another finger every time he’s caught after that! Imagine what that would have done for us in Vietnam! Hey, Mecklenberg, can you get your head around that?”

“Are you in some kind of trouble, are you sure you’re okay, I mean …” Mecklenberg had put his ballpoint pen in his shirt pocket, where a fuzzy blue stain was blossoming out. He bent down, popped open his briefcase, and shoved the clipboard inside it. “I think—”

“You have to widen your horizons, Mecklenberg! Let’s see about abolishing bureaucratic red tape! Reducing waste in government! Let’s have fair taxation! Let’s get rid of executions once and for all! Reform the prison system! Let’s realize that abortions are here to stay and have a little sanity about that! And how about drugs? Let’s figure out a policy that makes sense instead of pretending that Prohibition worked, shall we?” Pumo shot out his arm and leveled his index finger at poor Mecklenberg. He had thought of a wonderful new target.

“I have a great idea, Mecklenberg. Instead of executing him, let’s take a guy like this Ted Bundy and put him in a glass cage in the middle of Epcot Center. You get me? Your basic ordinary American families can stop in for a little talk with Ted, one family every fifteen minutes. See? Here’s one of those, we say, here’s what one looks like, here’s what one sounds like, here’s how he brushes his teeth and blows his nose. Get a good, close-up gander. You want to see evil? Here the son of a bitch is!”

Mecklenberg had struggled into his overcoat and was backing away toward the swinging doors to the dining room, where a dozen workmen had set down their tools in order to overhear Pumo’s rant. Someone out there shouted, “Yeah, baby!” and someone else laughed.

“You think bugs are evil, Mecklenberg?” Pumo boomed. “For God’s sake, just—” He clamped his hands to the sides of his head and looked around for a place to sit down.

Mecklenberg bolted toward the swinging doors. Pumo’s neck was bent, and for that reason he saw an insect cautiously emerging from beneath the side of the Garland range. It was enormous. He had never seen an insect like it, not even at the height of his “infestation,” when it seemed that creepy-crawlies of all descriptions occupied every centimeter of his walls. By the time the thing had finished coming out from beneath the range, it was nearly the size of Pumo’s foot.

Mecklenberg slammed the front door, and a loud cheer came up from the workmen in the restaurant.

Pumo felt like fainting—or as if he had already fainted, and this creature had appeared in a fever-dream. It was long and sleek, with feelers of copper wire. The whole brown body resembled an artillery shell. It looked polished, almost burnished. Its feet clacked audibly on the tile floor.

Pumo told himself: this is not happening. There were no monsters, and cockroaches had no King Kong.

The monster roach suddenly saw him. It froze. Then it quickly fled back under the range. For a second or two Pumo heard its little hooves tapping away on the tiles, and then there was silence.

For a moment Pumo stood in the silence, afraid to bend down and look under the range. The creature might be waiting to attack him. What could you use against a bug that size? You couldn’t step on it. You almost had to shoot it, like a wolverine. Pumo thought of the gallons and gallons of fluid the exterminator had sprayed behind the walls, soaking into the wooden joists and the cement foundations.

Pumo went down on his knees to look beneath the stove. Because the floor was still only half-finished, there was not even an accumulation of dust beneath the range, only a snipped-off curl of electrical cable one of the electricians had thrown away.

The antennae? Pumo wondered. He had expected to see, if not the Kong of roaches, at least a hole the size of a man’s head in the baseboard; not only was there no hole, there was no baseboard—fire regulations had demanded that a seamless sheet of steel be installed behind the range.

The world seemed full of gaps and stony chasms. Pumo went out of the kitchen and the workmen clapped and shouted.

3

For decades Arnold Leung had maintained his immense, dim warehouses at the easternmost end of Prince Street, where Little Italy, Chinatown, and SoHo melted together, and now he had the aura of a pioneer—the neighborhood had not yet been completely subsumed into Chinatown, but in the past five years several Italian bakeries had been replaced by shops with Chinese characters painted on the windows and Chinese produce wholesalers. Restaurants named Golden Fortune and Soon Luck had taken over other sites. Late on a cold dark February afternoon the only people Pumo saw making their way down the narrow street were two well-padded Chinese women with broad muffin faces partially concealed behind thick dark head scarves. Pumo turned into the narrow alley that led to Arnold Leung’s warehouses.

Leung was one of Pumo’s great discoveries. His prices were twenty percent lower than any of the midtown suppliers, and he delivered instantly—his son-in-law’s pickup would drop at your front door, no farther, the carton you had paid for, whether or not you happened to be present to carry it inside. The price and the speed of delivery made the surliness and the son-in-law more than acceptable to Pumo.

At the end of the alley was one of the city’s anomalies, an empty lot a block long and ringed with the backs of buildings. In summers the lot was fragrant with garbage, and during the winter the wind whirling around the backs of the tenements rattled bits of debris like buckshot against Leung’s tin warehouses. Tina had only been inside the first warehouse, where Leung kept his office. The only window in all four sheds was above Leung’s desk.

Pumo rattled open the door and slipped inside the main building. Wind or air pressure took the flimsy aluminum door out of his hands and violently slammed it shut. Pumo could hear Leung carrying on a one-way conversation in Chinese, presumably on the telephone, which ceased the moment the door noisily struck the frame. The head and body of the proprietor, clad in what looked like several layers of sweat suits, leaned out of the office door to peek at him and then retreated back inside. At the far end of the shed, four men seated on packing cases around a board looked up at Pumo and returned to their game. Except for the office enclosure, the whole interior of the vast shed was a maze of cases and boxes mounted to the ceiling, through which Leung’s employees threaded motorized carts. Bare, low-wattage bulbs on cords provided the only illumination.

Pumo waved to the men, who ignored him, and turned toward the office door. Pumo rapped his knuckles against it, and Leung cracked it open, frowned out at him, uttered a few words into the phone, and opened the door just wide enough for Pumo to slip through.

When Leung finally put the receiver down, he said, “So what do you want today?”

Pumo produced his list.

“Too much,” Leung said after a glance. “Can’t fill it all now. You know what’s happening? Empire Szechuan, that is what’s happening. New branches every week, haven’t you noticed? Three new ones on Upper West Side, one in Village. I have stuff on order two-three months, just to keep in stock. I say, open one across street from me so I can at least send out for good food.”

“Send what you can,” Pumo said. “I need everything in two weeks.”

“You dreaming,” Leung said. “What you need this stuff for, anyway? You already got all this stuff!”

“I used to have it. Quote me some prices.”

All of a sudden, Pumo once again had the feeling of being watched. Here it made even less sense than on Broad Street, for the only person looking at him, and that one with a certain reluctance, was Arnold Leung.

“You look nervous,” Leung said. “You ought to look nervous. All these knives listed here gonna cost you hundred-fifty, hundred-sixty dollars. Maybe more, depending on what I got in stock.”