Koko (44 page)

“Oh.”

“Besides, you look grumpy today.”

“I’m … not … grumpy,”
Pumo said.

Maggie gave him another slow, measuring look and sat up in bed. Her skin seemed very
dark in the half light. “He hasn’t been well lately. He’s worried about losing the
lease on the storefront.”

She jumped out of bed and skimmed over the floor to the bathroom. For a moment the
bed seemed astoundingly empty. The toilet flushed, water pounded through the overhead
pipes. He could feel Maggie vigorously brushing her teeth, using up all the energy
and air in the bathroom, draining the power from the shaver’s socket and the light
fixtures, making the towels wilt on the rack.

“You don’t mind, do you?” she called out brightly. Her voice was slushy with toothpaste.
“Tina?”

“I don’t
mind
,” he said in a voice carefully calculated to be almost too low for her to hear.

She came out of the bathroom and gave him another considering look. “Oh, Tina,” she
said, and moved past him to the closet and began to dress.

“I have to be alone for a while.”

“You don’t have to tell me. Should I come back tonight?”

“Do what you like.”

“I’ll do what I like, then.” Maggie dressed quickly in the dark
woolen garment she had worn when he had fetched her from the General’s apartment.

Maggie and Pumo spoke very little between then and the time they both left the loft
to walk down the staircase to Grand Street. Dressed in their heavy winter coats, they
stood together in the cold. A garbage truck down at the end of the street noisily
crunched up some wooden object that cracked and split like human bones.

Maggie looked so misleadingly small, standing next to him in her padded coat—she might
have been a girl going off to high school. It occurred to Pumo that they would not
have any problems if they never had to get out of bed. A recollection of Judy Poole’s
caustic voice on the telephone made him say, “When Mike Poole and the other guys get
back here …”

Maggie tilted her head expectantly, and Tina wondered if what he was going to say
was more complicated than he wished. Maggie did not flinch.

“I guess we ought to see more of him, that’s all.”

Maggie gave him a grim, sad smile. “I’ll always be nice to your friends, Tina.”

She gave a wave of her gloved hand as sad as her smile, and turned to walk to the
subway station. He watched, but she did not look back.

In most ways, Pumo’s morning and early afternoon went more easily than he had imagined.
Molly Witt and Lowery Hapgood gave him two strong cups of coffee and showed him their
latest innovations, which were, he saw, clever adaptations of the ideas Maggie had
advanced a few days earlier. These changes could be painlessly incorporated into the
small amount of work remaining to be done, the only hitch being that the cabinet hardware
would have to be reordered. But since even the old hardware had not arrived yet … and
didn’t he think that everything “keyed together” this way? It did, and he did. And
it wasn’t their concern, but if he rethought the menu in the light of these changes
and brought the whole look more up to date … in short, adopted most of Maggie’s ideas
about the menu too, not excluding “streamlining” Pumo’s beloved descriptions of the
food. After the meeting, David Dixon juggled a handful of legal balls in the brisk,
cheery
air of his offices and lamented that Pumo’s “cute little squeeze” had not accompanied
him. At lunch he returned to this theme.

“You’re not going to screw this one up too, are you, buddy?” the lawyer asked him,
his eyes twinkling in his ruddy ex-athlete’s face as he looked over the menu at Smith
& Wollensky’s. “I’d hate to see you lose that beautiful little Chink.”

“Why don’t
you
marry her, David?” Pumo said sourly.

“My family would kill me if I brought home a Chink. What could I tell them, that our
kids’ll be great in math?” Dixon continued to twinkle at him, secure in the certainty
of his charm.

“You’re not smart enough for her, anyhow.” Pumo only partially mollified Dixon by
adding, “We have that much in common.”

Downtown, the meeting at the bank was conducted with a certain cold formality that
seemed to distress the banker, who appeared to expect more of Dixon’s usual jocularity—they
had been in the same class at Princeton and were happy boyish bachelors of forty.
Dixon and the banker had not of course gone to Vietnam. They were
real
Americans. (That was how they would see it.)

“Don’t worry, it’s in the bag,” Dixon said once they were back out on the street.
“But let me give you a hint, old pal. You’ve gotta lighten up. The world is full of
that particular brand of real estate, man, you can’t be dragged down by one little
Oriental pussy just ’cause it walked out the door.” He guffawed, and a big white scarf
of steam flew from his mouth. “Can you? Hell, you threw her out!”

“I’ll let you know in a week or two,” Tina said, and made himself smile and shake
Dixon’s hand. In the pressure of the lawyer’s hand on his, he could tell that Dixon
was as happy as he was to be parting.

Dixon strode away, red-faced, smiling his charming, lopsided old Princetonian smile,
perfect in his gleaming shirtfront, his striped tie, his neat dark bush of hair, his
neat dark topcoat, and for a moment Pumo watched him go as he had watched Maggie go
earlier that day. What was wrong with him, that he was driving people away from him?
Tina did not have much in common with Dixon, but the man was a rogue, and rogues were
usually good company.

Like Maggie, Dixon did not look back. His arm shot up, a taxi rolled to a stop, and
he slid inside. Rogues had a talent for flagging down cabs. Tina watched his lawyer’s
cab roll down Broad Street in a yellow tide of occupied taxis. All at once he felt
that, just as he was watching Dixon’s getaway, someone was watching him.
The hair on the back of his neck actually rose, and he whirled around to see who was
looking at him. Of course no one was. Pumo scanned the crowd of brokers and bankers
hurrying down Broad Street in the cold. Some of them were the grey-haired old foxes
he still associated with these professions, but many more were men of his and Dixon’s
age, and as many were in their twenties and early thirties. They looked both flawless
and humorless, human adding machines. Rogues like Dixon would take them in hand and
humor them along, and he would feed them and watch them get drunk. Pumo saw that the
tribe moving along Broad Street did not even give him a curious glance. They were
the focused people. Or maybe he was transparent. The day seemed even colder, and the
sky above the sidewalk lamps grew darker, and Pumo moved to the curb and raised his
arm.

It took him fifteen minutes to get a cab, and he arrived back at Grand Street at sixteen-hundred
hours plus ten minutes. He let himself into the restaurant and found the inspector,
Brian Mecklenberg, pacing around the kitchen, tapping his ballpoint against his front
teeth, and making little checks on a sheet inserted in his clipboard. “You’ve gained
a few yards since the last time I saw you, Mr. Pumo,” he said.

“We have a way to go, too,” Pumo said, dropping his coat on a chair. He still had
to get down to Arnold Leung’s that day.

“Oh?” Mecklenberg regarded him with as much interest as any health inspector ever
gave any of his victims. “Would you say that our target has been reached?”

“Getting rid of the bugs?”

“Affirmative—zapping the infestation. What else would I mean?”

Mecklenberg looked a little bit like a target himself in a hideous yellow-black-and-olive
plaid sports jacket and a brown knit tie firmly locked into place with a conspicuous
tie pin.

“Getting the kitchen finished, opening for business,
staying
open, getting the people to come in off the street, that kind of thing,” Pumo said.
“Having a peaceful, orderly, satisfying life that also manages to be interesting.
Getting my love life in order.”

He remembered David Dixon’s ruddy face and lopsided smile and a crazy light went on
in his brain. “You want to talk about targets, Mecklenberg? Abolishing nuclear weapons
and establishing world peace. Getting everybody to 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.

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.