“This is a present for buying me lunch.” She moved the thick tabloid onto Michael’s lap, and then took a pair of large, round, wire-rimmed sunglasses from her bag and put them on. For a moment she appeared to be reading the yellow DRIVER ALLERGIC—DO NOT SMOKE and DRIVER NOT REQUIRED TO CHANGE BILLS OVER TWENTY signs applied here and there to the grimy plastic window before them.
“Are you sure you want to go to Saigon?”
“I want to see Vinh,” she said. “I like Vinh. Vinh and I have long confidential talks. We agree that white Americans are an incomprehensible and exotic people.”
“Have you been there since that night?”
“Don’t you know the answer to that?” She removed the sunglasses and gave him an almost sullen look.
“I’m glad we could talk,” he said.
At this she unself-consciously took his hand. Michael could feel the pulse beating in her warm dry hand.
At Grand Street Michael was surprised to see a brass-bound case displaying a menu and a small sign in the restaurant window.
“Doesn’t it look great?” she asked him in her flat crisp voice. “We’ll open as soon as the court lets us. Vinh asked me to help him out. Of course I’m grateful to have the work. It means that I don’t have the feeling that I lost quite all of him.”
When the cab stopped, she swung the door open, and said, “Maybe I shouldn’t say this, but you seem very unsettled. There’s room for you in here”—she nodded toward the building—“if you need a place to stay.” She waited for him to say something.
“I’ll come in and see you before long,” he finally said. “Are you planning to stay here now?”
She shook her head. “Call me at the General’s.” Then she smiled in the face of his mystification and left the cab.
“Who is the General?”
Maggie glanced down at the paper in his lap.
He looked at the front page, where she had somehow managed to write a telephone number. When he looked back up, she was already opening the door of the restaurant.
1
“Is this really your idea of half an hour?” Beevers scowled as he let Poole into his messy dark studio apartment. Conor smiled enigmatically at him from a chair, and Tim Underhill, dressed in worn jeans and an old hooded sweatshirt, waved at him from another. Even in the dim light, Tim looked far more like his old self than he had in Bangkok—broader, healthier, less wasted. Shaking his hand and grinning, Tim was nothing like a criminal, nothing like a madman, nothing like the person Poole had thought he had been searching for.
“We ordered a pizza,” Beevers said. “There’s some left.”
On the table, dark with grease, sat a curdled slice of pizza in a cardboard box.
Poole refused, and Beevers snapped the lid down over the remains and took the box into the kitchen.
Conor winked at Poole.
“Now that he’s here,” Beevers called from the kitchen, “does anybody want a drink?”
“Sure,” Conor said.
“Coffee,” said Underhill, and Poole said, “Me too.”
They heard cabinet doors popping open, glasses slamming down on a counter, the refrigerator opening, ice cubes cracking from the tray. “So what the hell took you so long?” Beevers shouted. “You think we’re playing a game here? I got news for you—you’d better begin to take this seriously.”
Underhill grinned at Poole from his seat by the main window in Beevers’ apartment. Beside him on the little table that held a telephone was a thick stack of papers.
“Writing something?” Michael asked.
Underhill nodded, and Beevers yelled again, “Sometimes I think I’m the only person here who really takes this whole project seriously.”
He appeared with two short squat glasses filled with ice and a clear liquid, one of which he set down before Conor. Then he walked brusquely around Poole to get to the other side of the table, where he had evidently been sitting before Michael’s arrival. “You can make your own coffee, you live here too,” he said to Underhill.
Underhill immediately stood up and went into the kitchen.
“I suppose I had better fill in Dr. Poole on what we have been discussing in his absence,” Harry said. He sounded grumpy and pleased with himself at the same time. “But I want to settle something first.” Beevers raised his glass and squinted unpleasantly over the rim. “I don’t suppose that you waited for the rest of us to leave so that you could go running back to Murphy and tell him everything you know. I don’t really suppose that, Michael. Or do I?”
“Why would you?” Michael had to suppress both his surprise and the desire to laugh. Beevers had become very taut.
“You might want to destroy the work we’ve been doing. To get in good with Murphy. You might just think you have to become a sort of double agent in order to cover your ass.”
“Double agent,” Conor said.
“Keep quiet,” Harry snapped. “I want to know about this, Michael.”
Poole suddenly understood from the way they were looking at him that both Conor and Underhill knew that he had spent the past hour with Maggie Lah. “Of course I didn’t go back to Murphy. He was busy with Maggie, anyhow.”
“So what did you do?”
“I had to pick up some things for Judy.”
Underhill smiled.
“I don’t know why all you guys are against me,” Beevers said. “I am working, night and day, on something that ought to make you all rich.” Another suspicious look at Poole. “And if Judy wanted some things, I don’t know why she didn’t just ask Pat to bring them up to her.”
“Pat’s going to Westerholm?”
“This afternoon. She told me this morning. You didn’t know?”
“I left in kind of a rush.” Poole folded the newspaper on his lap.
Underhill brought him his cup of coffee, and Michael sipped, grateful for the interruption. He had never been in Beevers’ apartment, and his curiosity at last made him take a good look at his surroundings.
His second impression, like his first, was of a mess so pervasive it could nearly be called squalor. On the table between Beevers and Conor stood a small stack of plates topped with dirty silverware. Underhill’s cases and bags sat behind his chair beside a disorderly heap of newspapers and magazines. Beevers still read
In his immaculate suits, his braces and his bow ties, Harry came back every night to this depressing sty. The one purposeful, orderly corner of the apartment, Poole saw, was the little island Underhill had made of his chair and the table with its stack of typed pages.
“I know the place is a little messy,” Harry said. “What do you think happens when you put a couple of bachelors together? I’m really going to clean it up pretty soon.” He looked around energetically, as if ready to begin now, but his eye stopped on Conor Linklater, who stirred uneasily.
“I’m not going to clean your apartment for you,” Conor said.
