Koko brt-1

by Peter Straub

  “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.

  3

  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.

  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.