Koko (45 page)

Leung was one of Pumo’s great discoveries. His prices were twenty percent lower than
any of the midtown suppliers, and he delivered instantly—his son-in-law’s pickup would
drop at your front door, no farther, the carton you had paid for, whether or not you
happened to be present to carry it inside. The price and the speed of delivery made
the surliness and the son-in-law more than acceptable to Pumo.

At the end of the alley was one of the city’s anomalies, an empty lot a block long
and ringed with the backs of buildings. In summers the lot was fragrant with garbage,
and during the winter the wind whirling around the backs of the tenements rattled
bits of debris like buckshot against Leung’s tin warehouses. Tina had only been inside
the first warehouse, where Leung kept his office. The only window in all four sheds
was above Leung’s desk.

Pumo rattled open the door and slipped inside the main building. Wind or air pressure
took the flimsy aluminum door out of his hands and violently slammed it shut. Pumo
could hear Leung carrying on a one-way conversation in Chinese, presumably on the
telephone, which ceased the moment the door noisily struck the frame. The head and
body of the proprietor, clad in what looked
like several layers of sweat suits, leaned out of the office door to peek at him and
then retreated back inside. At the far end of the shed, four men seated on packing
cases around a board looked up at Pumo and returned to their game. Except for the
office enclosure, the whole interior of the vast shed was a maze of cases and boxes
mounted to the ceiling, through which Leung’s employees threaded motorized carts.
Bare, low-wattage bulbs on cords provided the only illumination.

Pumo waved to the men, who ignored him, and turned toward the office door. Pumo rapped
his knuckles against it, and Leung cracked it open, frowned out at him, uttered a
few words into the phone, and opened the door just wide enough for Pumo to slip through.

When Leung finally put the receiver down, he said, “So what do you want today?”

Pumo produced his list.

“Too much,” Leung said after a glance. “Can’t fill it all now. You know what’s happening?
Empire Szechuan, that is what’s happening. New branches every week, haven’t you noticed?
Three new ones on Upper West Side, one in Village. I have stuff on order two-three
months, just to keep in stock. I say, open one across street from me so I can at least
send out for good food.”

“Send what you can,” Pumo said. “I need everything in two weeks.”

“You dreaming,” Leung said. “What you need this stuff for, anyway? You already got
all this stuff!”

“I used to have it. Quote me some prices.”

All of a sudden, Pumo once again had the feeling of being watched. Here it made even
less sense than on Broad Street, for the only person looking at him, and that one
with a certain reluctance, was Arnold Leung.

“You look nervous,” Leung said. “You ought to look nervous. All these knives listed
here gonna cost you hundred-fifty, hundred-sixty dollars. Maybe more, depending on
what I got in stock.”

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
lo fang.
He didn’t know what a
lo fang
was, but it was probably pretty close to “old foreigner.”

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
Voice
, the whole thing would start up all over again.
Foodcat misses Half Moon.
Maybe this time he would not have to get half killed to bring her back—maybe this
time he would have some sense. But for tonight, Maggie would be better off uptown.
Pumo knew his old need to be alone, where he could not contaminate any other human
being with his troubles.

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 them without waiting for Tina’s instructions, he must have
given him the old price. Tina said, “I’ll be right there,” and pushed the button to
unlock the door and admit his caller.

“So you think I ought to go back to him tonight?” Maggie trailed after the General
as if clinging close to his broad military back for warmth and strength—she was not
levitating now.

“I didn’t say that.” The General darted into one of the aisles of his impromptu church
to align a chair. Everything around them, the red vinyl of the seats, the yellow walls
with the garish oils of a pigtailed Jesus confronting demons in a misty Chinese landscape,
the cheap blond wood of the altar, gleamed and sparkled and shone in the harsh bright
light the General and his congregation preferred to any other sort of lighting. And
he and
Maggie spoke in the Cantonese, similarly hard and brilliant, in which he conducted
his services.

Standing by herself before the shuttered Harlem window, Maggie looked nearly bereft.
“Then I apologize. I didn’t understand.”

The General straightened up and nodded approvingly. He went back to the aisle, stepped
around her, and proceeded up the side of the church to the altar rail and the altar.

Maggie followed him as far as the rail. The General made minute adjustments to the
white cloth on the altar, and at length looked at her again.

“You have always been an intelligent girl. You just have never understood yourself.
But the things you do! The way you live!”

“I do not live badly,” Maggie said. This looked like another replay of an old, old
argument, and she suddenly wanted to leave, to go downtown and stay with Jules and
Perry in one of their rickety East Village tenements, to escape into their mindless
club-hopping and their mindless acceptance of her.

“I mean—living in such ignorance of yourself,” the General said mildly.