“Oh, good,” she said. “I wasn’t sure you’d still be here. I couldn’t say anything back in there.”
“I know.”
“I really just wanted to see
“Especially to Harry Beevers.”
“They can spare you for a little while?”
“For as long as you like.”
“Then they may never get you back,” Maggie said, and put her arm through his. “I want you to help me go someplace. Will you do it?”
“I’m yours.” Poole suddenly, strongly felt that he and this girl were Tina Pumo’s survivors: as much as Walter and Tommy Pumo, they were the family Tina had left behind.
“It isn’t very far. It isn’t even much of a place, just a little neighborhood restaurant. Tina and I used to go there—really
“I’m very pleased,” Poole said. Maggie’s arm was linked with his and she matched him stride for stride. “Is there any other place I can take you to after this one?”
She glanced up. “There might be.”
He let her have her own time in which to say whatever she wished to say.
“I want to know you,” Maggie finally said.
“I’m glad.”
“He liked you best of all—of all the men he had been over there with.”
“That’s very nice to know.”
“He was always very pleased when you came into Saigon. Part of Tina was not very secure. It meant a lot to him that when you came all the way into town, you would pick his place to come to. That proved to him that you hadn’t forgotten him.”
“I haven’t forgotten him, Maggie,” he said, and she tightened her grip on his arm.
They were walking down Sixth Avenue, and the sunlight seemed warmer here than the cross streets. Colorful, ordinary street life flowed around them, students and housewives and businessmen and a few boys in lipstick. At the corner they walked past a hunched, bearded man in rags whose feet had blackened and swollen like footballs. Just past him a blurry-looking man of about Michael’s age thrust at him a paper cup containing a few dimes and quarters. He had a bloody crusty scab on his chin, and in the slits of his eyes his pupils gleamed feverishly, tigerishly. Vietnam. Michael dropped a few quarters in the cup.
“Not far now,” Maggie said, and her voice was trembling.
Poole nodded.
“It’s like living with a big—emptiness.” She threw out her free hand. “It’s so hard. And because I’m afraid, it’s even worse than that. Oh, I’ll tell you about it when we get there.”
A few minutes later, Maggie led him up the steps into La Groceria. A tall dark-haired woman in black tights led them to a table by the window. The sunlight drifted in the big windows and lay across the polished, rippling pattern of the caramel-colored wooden tabletops. They ordered salads and coffee. “I hate being afraid,” Maggie said. “But all by itself, grief is too much. Grief gets you when you’re not looking. It comes up and blindsides you.” She glanced up at him in a way that mingled intelligence and sympathy. “You were talking to Conor about a patient of yours …?”
Poole nodded. “Just before I drove down here I learned that she died.” He tried to smile at her, and was glad that he did not have to see the result.
Her face altered, smoothed out, became more inward. “In Taipei my mother used to catch rats with traps in our garden. The traps didn’t kill the rats, they just held them. My mother poured boiling water over them. The rats knew exactly what was going to happen to them. First they fought and jumped at my mother, and then finally everything left them but fear. They just became fear.” A cloud somewhere east of Sixth Avenue separated, and the sunlight doubled in color and intensity. She was looking at him with a troubled but defiant gaze, and Poole experienced her concentrated attention as an undivided blessing. Right now, in the sudden drenching fall of yellow light, he became extraordinarly conscious of the smooth roundness of her arms, the beautiful golden shade of her skin, her small witty sensuous intelligent mouth. Her youth was deceptive, he understood, seeing her in the blaze of light, and if you judged her youth as being one of the central facts of her being, you made a great mistake. A moment ago he had been moved by her sheer prettiness, and now he saw so much more in the wide unblinking face before him that her prettiness became irrelevant.
“They were the worst things in the world when that happened,” she said. “The most pathetic. I felt like that when—when it happened. When he almost caught me.” She paused for a moment, and her face smoothed out again with the weight of what she was remembering. “I could see him, but not his face. I suppose I was a little crazy. I felt as though I must have been covered in blood, and I kept checking myself, but there wasn’t a drop on me.” Her eyes met his with an electric jolt.
“You want to pour boiling water over him,” Poole said.
“That could be.” Her mouth twisted in an odd little smile. “Could someone like that ever be afraid?”
When he said nothing, Maggie went on in a rush. “When I was in the loft—during that time—if you had seen him too—you wouldn’t think so. He talked very smoothly. He was almost seductive. I don’t mean he wasn’t utterly crazy, because he was, but he was in control of himself. Confident. He was trying to charm me out of hiding, and if Tina’s body hadn’t been right in front of me, he might have done it.” Her hands, of the same golden tan as the rest of her, with long elegant fingers and incongruously square, sturdy wrists, had begun to tremble. “He was like a—a demon. I thought I’d never get away.”
Now she looked really stricken, and he took her hands in his. “It sounds funny, but I think he’s been frightened all his life.”
“You sound like you almost feel sorry for him.”
Poole thought of Underhill’s long labor. “It isn’t that so much—I guess I feel we have to invent him in order to understand him.”
Maggie slowly drew her hands out from under his. “You must be learning about that from your friend Timothy Underhill.”
“What?”
Maggie propped her chin in her hand. Wholly fraudulent, wide-eyed innocent incredulity, comic right down to its core, flashed at him for a perfectly timed beat. “Your friend Harry Beevers can’t act very well.”
So she knew: she had seen it. “I suppose not,” he said.
“This man Underhill came back with you.”
Poole nodded. “You’re wonderful.”
“Harry Beevers is the one who is wonderful. I suppose he wants the police to waste time trying to locate Tim Underhill while he actually finds Koko himself.”
“Something like that.”
“You’d better be careful, Doctor.” A multitude of unspoken warnings crowded in behind this one, and Poole did not know if he had been advised to beware of Koko or Harry Beevers. “Do you have time to take me to one more place? I don’t want to go there alone.”
“I suppose I don’t have to ask where it is?”
“Hope not.” She stood up.
They went outside to a Sixth Avenue that seemed to have been darkened by their conversation. Poole felt that Koko, Victor Spitalny, might be watching them from behind the big windows across the avenue, or through binoculars from some high hidden vantage point.
“Get a cab,” she said. “There’s one more thing I want to do.”
She picked up something at the newsstand, joined Michael as a cab pulled over, and climbed into the back seat. He looked down at her lap and saw that what she had bought was a copy of the
Michael told the driver to stop first on Grand Street off West Broadway, then to take him to Twenty-fourth and Tenth.
