The Throat

'Should we go to the police now?' David asked.

'We must,' said Theresa. 'If he's still alive, it isn't too late.'

I turned away from the window, able to look at Theresa Sunchana now without disintegrating. 'Thank you,' I said.

She slid her hand across the table again. I put mine on top of it, and she neatly revolved her hand to give me another squeeze before she took her hand back. 'He was such a completely terrible human being. He even sent away that adorable little boy. He banished him.'

'The boy was better off,' David said.

'What little boy was that?' I thought they must have been talking about some boy from the neighborhood, some Pigtown boy like me.

'Fee,' she said. 'Don't you know about Fee?'

I blinked at her.

'Mr. Bandolier banished him, he cast out his own son,' she said.

'His son?' I asked, stupidly.

'Fielding,' said David. 'We called him Fee—a sweet child.'

'I loved that little boy,' Theresa told me. 'I felt so sorry for him. I wish David and I could have taken him.'

Theresa looked down into her cup when the inevitable objection came from David. When he had finished listing the reasons why adopting the child had been an impossibility, she raised her head again. 'Sometimes I would see him sitting on the step in front of the house. He looked so cold and abandoned. His father made him go to the movies alone—a five-year-old boy! Sending him to the movies by himself!'

All I wanted to do was to get out of the coffee shop. A number of distressing symptoms had decided to attack simultaneously. I felt hot and slightly dizzy. My breath was caught in my throat.

I looked across the table, but instead of the reassuring figure of Theresa Sunchana, saw the boy from the Green Woman Taproom, the imagined boy who was fighting to come into this world. Behind every figure stood another, insisting on being seen.

9

Allerton, I remembered. Or Allingham, on the side of a stalled truck. Where I dip my buckets, where I fill my pen. David Sunchana's polite, unswervably gentle voice brought me back to the table. 'The insurance men. And we have so many things to take from the house.'

'Oh, we have a thousand things to do. We'll do them.' She was still sitting across from me, and the sun still fell on the scene across the street, where a boy carried a big kite shaped like a dragon uphill.

Theresa Sunchana had not taken her eyes from me. 'I'm glad you found us,' she said. 'You needed to know.'

I looked around for the waitress, and John said, 'I already paid.' He looked a little smug about it.

We stood up from the table and, with the awkwardness and hesitancies of a party of four, moved toward the door.

When I pulled back out of the lot, I found Theresa's eyes in the rearview mirror again. 'You said Bandolier sent Fee away. Do you know where he sent him?'

'Yes,' she said. 'I asked him. He said that Fee went to live with Anna's sister Judy in some little town in Iowa, or somewhere like that.'

'Can you remember the name of the town?'

'Is that of any importance, at this point?' David asked.

We drove around the pretty little pond. A boy barely old enough to walk clapped his hands at a foot-high sailboat. We followed the meandering curves of Bayberry Lane. 'I don't think it was Iowa,' she said. 'Give me a minute, I'll remember it.'

'This woman remembers everything,' said David. 'She is a phenomenon of memory.'

From this end of Bayberry Lane, their house looked like a photograph from London after the blitz. A long length of glinting rubble led into a room without an exterior wall. Both of the Sunchanas fell silent as soon as it came into view, and they did not speak until I pulled up behind the station wagon. David opened the door on his side, and Theresa leaned forward and patted my shoulder. 'I knew I'd remember. It was Ohio—Azure, Ohio. And the name of Anna's sister was Judy Leatherwood.'

'Theresa, you amaze me.'

'Who could forget a name like Leatherwood?' She got out of the car and waved at us as David put his fingers in his wiry hair and walked toward what was left of his house.

11

'Bob Bandolier?' John said. 'That asshole, Bob Bandolier?'

'Exactly,' I said. 'That asshole, Bob Bandolier.'

'I met him a couple of times when I was a little boy. The guy was completely phony. You know how when you're a kid you can sometimes see things really clearly? I was in my father's office, and a guy with a waxy little mustache and slicked-down hair comes in. Meet the most important man in this hotel, my father says to me. I just do my job, young man, he says to me— and I can see that he does think he's the most important man in the hotel. He thinks my father's a fool.'

'All killers can't be as congenial as Walter Dragonette.'

'That guy,' John said again. 'Anyhow, you were brilliant, coming up with that sister.'

'I was telling them the truth. He murdered my sister first.'

'And you never told me?'

'John, it just never—'

He muttered something and moved away from me to lean against the door, indications that he was about to descend into the same wrathful silence of the journey out to the suburbs.

'Why should you be upset?' I asked. 'I came here from New York to help you with a problem—'

'No. You came here to help yourself. You can't concentrate on the problems of another person for longer than five seconds, unless you have some personal interest in the matter. What you're doing has nothing to do with me. It's all about that book you're writing.'

I waited until my impatience with him died down. 'I suppose I should have told you about my sister when you first called. I wasn't hiding it from you, John. Even I couldn't really be sure that the man who had killed her had done the other murders.'

'And now you know.'

'Now I know,' I said, and felt a return of that enormous relief, the satisfaction of being able to put down a weight I had carried for four decades.

'So you're done, and you might as well go back home.'

He flicked his eyes in my direction before looking expressionlessly out the car window again.

'I want to know who killed your wife. And I think it might be safer if I stay with you for a while.'

He shrugged. 'What are you going to do, be my bodyguard?'

'I don't think anybody is going to try to take me to the Green Woman and tie me up in a chair. I can protect myself from Bob Bandolier. I know what he looks like, remember?'

'I'd like to see what else I can turn up,' I said.

'I guess you're pretty much free to do whatever you want.'

'Then I'd like to use your car this evening.'