Okay, Pumo said to himself. Now I get it. Leung was going to hold him up. Leung may even have been punishing him for bringing Maggie Lah to this place once, on the occasion when Tina had heard Leung refer to him as a
Pumo moved to look out of Leung’s grimy window. He could see all the way down the cold windy alley to the street, a slash of brightness filled with a moving blur of traffic. Leung’s window was not even glass, but of some irregularly transparent film of plastic which had darkened here and there with age. One whole side of the alley was only a brownish wash, a smear of color.
“Let’s talk about cast-iron pans,” Pumo said, and was about to turn around to watch the expression on Leung’s face as he reached for his trusty abacus when he noticed the approach of a little black-tipped blur up the smeary side of the alley. Instantly he felt two absolutely opposed feelings, a surge of relief that Maggie had learned where he was from Vinh and had come down to be with him, and a counterbalanced feeling of deep annoyance that no matter what he said or did, he could not get rid of her.
When Leung saw her, his prices would probably go up another five percent.
“No problem,” Leung said. “You want to talk about iron pans? Let’s talk about iron pans.” When Pumo did not respond, he said, “You want to buy my window too?”
The moving blur stopped moving, and its whole general posture and attitude told Pumo that this was not Maggie Lah after all. It was a man. The man in the alley began shifting backwards in a way that reminded Tina of the giant roach ducking back beneath the range.
“Hold on a minute, Arnold,” Tina said. He shot him a placating look that met implacable Chinese indifference. So much for old customers. Business is business.
“You know about iron pans?” Leung asked. “Production everywhere is way down, no matter where you look.”
Tina had turned back to the window. The man had moved out closer to the middle of the alley, and was moving backwards very slowly.
“You ever have the feeling someone is following you?” Pumo asked.
“All the time,” Leung said. “You too?”
The man in the alley stepped back into the brightness of the street.
“You’ll get used to it,” Leung said. “No big deal.”
Pumo saw a blurry face, a shock of black hair, a slim body in nondescript clothes. He was aware for a second that this was someone he knew: and then he knew. For a moment he felt lightheaded. He turned around.
“Just deliver the stuff and send me the bill,” he said.
Leung shrugged.
The man in the alley was Victor Spitalny, and Pumo knew now that his feelings of having been watched and followed had not been mistaken. Spitalny had probably been following him for days. He had even loitered outside the restaurant, where Vinh had seen him.
“I might be able to get you a little deal on those iron pans,” Leung said. Normally Tina would now have begun the negotiating Leung expected, but instead he buttoned his coat and muttered some apology to the astonished wholesaler and hurried out of his office. A moment later he was shutting the aluminum door behind him in the cold.
He saw a small, dark-haired man slipping around the end of the alley. Pumo made himself walk at a moderate pace down toward the street—Spitalny would not know that he had been seen, and Pumo did not want to alarm him. First of all, he had to assure himself that the man watching him really had been Victor Spitalny—he’d had only a blurry glimpse of his face. Pumo sickeningly realized that it was Victor Spitalny who had broken into his loft.
Spitalny had nearly trapped him in the library, and he would continue to track him down until he killed him. Spitalny had killed Dengler, or at best left him to die, and now he was on a worldwide hunting trip.
Pumo reached the end of the alley, and turned against the raw wind in the direction Spitalny had gone. Of course Spitalny was now nowhere in sight. Pumo’s world now seemed very close and dark. Spitalny had not died, he had not succumbed to drugs or disease, he had not straightened out and become a decent guy after all. He had bided his time and ticked away.
The whole long expanse of the street and sidewalk was almost empty. A few Chinese women padded toward their apartments, a long way up the block a man in a long black coat mounted a set of stairs and entered a building. Pumo wandered down the street in the cold, fearing that his lunatic nemesis hid behind every shop door.
He reached the end of the block before he began to doubt himself. No one was following him now, and if anyone were going to jump at him out of a doorway, he’d had ample opportunity. A moment’s conviction based on a glimpse through a greasy window was his only evidence that Victor Spitalny was following him. It was hard to picture an oaf like Spitalny carrying off the pretense of being a journalist in the Microfilm Room—maybe Maggie was right, and the Spanish name was just a coincidence. An hour earlier he would have sworn that he had seen a giant cockroach. He looked up and down the empty street again, and his body began to relax.
Tina decided to go home and call Judy Poole again. If she had spoken to Michael, he would already be on the way home.
Pumo returned to Grand Street just past five-thirty, when the workmen were packing up their tools and loading their trucks. The foreman told him that Vinh had left half an hour earlier—during the construction, Vinh’s daughter was staying with yet another of his relatives, a cousin who lived in a Canal Street apartment. Vinh himself spent half the night there. After the workmen’s vans and pickups rolled off toward West Broadway, Pumo gave a long look up and down the street.
Grand Street was never empty, and at this hour the sidewalks were still crowded with the successful, middle-aged populace of New Jersey or Long Island who liked to spend their money in SoHo. Through the tourists strolled the residents of Grand Street and West Broadway, of Spring Street and Broome Street. Some of these waved at Pumo, and he waved back. A painter he knew, making his way up the steps to La Gamal for a drink, waved and yelled across the street the question of how soon he would be opening again. “Couple of weeks,” Pumo yelled back, praying that it was true.
The painter went up into La Gamal and Pumo let himself into Saigon. The bar where Harry Beevers had spent so many of the hours he should have given to Caldwell, Moran, Morrissey had been extended and topped with the most beautiful sheet of black walnut Pumo had ever seen; beyond this lay the empty, still barren dining room. Pumo picked his way across the floor in the darkness and let himself into the kitchen. Here there were lights, and Pumo threw them on. Then he went down on his hands and knees and looked under the range and refrigerator, behind the freezers and the storage shelves, and at every inch of floor in the place. He saw no insect of any kind.
Pumo went into Vinh’s little room. The bed was neatly made. Vinh’s books—poetry, novels, histories, and cookbooks in French, English, and Vietnamese—stood in ranks on the shelves he had made. Pumo looked under the bed and the little chest of drawers without seeing any giant bugs.
He heard no little hooves rapping against his new tiles.
Pumo locked up and went upstairs to his loft. There he finally took off his coat and walked into his bedroom and, without turning on any lights, looked down onto Grand Street. More people were going up the stairs to La Gamal, some of them people who otherwise would be coming to Saigon with their stomachs empty and their wallets out. Everybody was moving swiftly up and down the street, nobody loitered or lingered, nobody was staring up at his window. Maggie would decide whether or not she would come down tonight. Probably she would stay uptown. All of this seemed very familiar. Maggie would not call for days, he’d start to go crazy, there’d be enigmatic little ads in the
He made himself a drink at the bar behind his desk and carried it down to the couch to wait for Vinh to return.
When the downstairs buzzer rang, Pumo thought that his chef must have gone off to Canal Street without his keys, and he nearly pushed the little button to let him in without speaking into the little grille that let him interview his callers. But he thought twice, and leaned toward the grille and asked, “Who is it?”
A voice said, “Delivery.”
The son-in-law, with a van full of cast-iron kitchenware and two or three boxes of knives. If Leung had sent
