All three girls were dressed in torn black garments that looked as if they had been picked up off the street. The shortest of them bent over to examine the bottle being caressed by the tallest girl and pointed a round bottom toward Harry. Her skin was a sandy, almost golden shade. For an instant Harry was aware only that he knew who she was. Then Harry saw her profile printed sharply against a blue neon background. The girl was Maggie Lah.
Harry stepped forward, grinning, aware of the contrast between his suit and the girls’ rags.
Maggie broke away from the others and glided to the top of the aisle. The other two hurried after. The tall one reached out and closed a white hand on Maggie’s shoulder. Harry saw a sunken cheek covered with dark stubble. The tall girl was a man. Harry stopped moving and his smile froze on his face. Maggie rubbed the side of her hand against the man’s stubbly cheek. The three of them continued up to the top of the aisle and turned toward FINE CHAMPAGNES without seeing Harry.
Maggie and her friends veered into the side aisle lined with refrigerated cases. The neon sign shed pale blue light over them. Harry remembered that he had entered this store to buy a bottle of champagne as a sweetener for Pat when he saw Maggie open the glass doors of a refrigerated case. On her face was an expression of sweetly concentrated attention. She plucked out a bottle of Dom Perignon and slid it instantly into her clothes, where it disappeared. The theft of the bottle had taken something like a second and a half. Harry had a sudden picture, vividly clear, of the dark, cold bottle of Dom Perignon nestled between Maggie’s breasts.
Without any premeditation of any kind, Harry slammed open the glass door and yanked out another bottle of Dom Perignon. He remembered the mystically smiling face of the Vietnamese girl moving toward him through Saigon’s kitchen door. He shoved the bottle beneath his suit jacket, where it bulged. Maggie Lah and her ratty friends had begun to stroll toward the rank of cash registers at the front of the store. Harry thrust his hand inside his coat, upended the bottle, and jammed its neck into his trousers. Then he buttoned his jacket and coat. The bulge had become only slightly conspicuous. He began following Maggie toward the cash registers.
The clerks at the few working registers punched buttons and pushed wine bottles down the moving belts. Maggie and the others sailed past an empty counter and a uniformed security guard lounging against the plate-glass window. As Harry watched, they vanished through the door.
‘Hey, Maggie!’ he yelled. He trotted past the nearest unattended cash register. ‘Maggie!’
The guard looked up and frowned. Harry pointed toward the door. Now everybody at the front of the store was staring at him. ‘I saw an old friend,’ Harry said to the guard, who looked away without responding and leaned back against the window.
By the time Harry got to the sidewalk, Maggie was gone.
All the way to Duane Street, Harry searched the sidewalks for her. When the cab stopped and Harry stood on the stamped metal walkway before the warehouse that housed William Tharpe’s loft, he thought – where I’m going there are a million girls like that.
4
Harry Beevers presented the chilled bottle of Dom Perignon to an astonished, gratified William Tharpe, and spent five or ten minutes in hypocritical raptures over the forthcoming number of Rilke Street. Then he took plain, greying Pat Caldwell Beevers, who was beginning more than ever to suggest an English sheep-dog that had been mooning around him half his life, out to a TriBeCa restaurant of the sort he had learned from Tim Underhill to call piss-elegant. The walls were red lacquer. Discreet lamps with brass shades sat on each table. Portly waiters hovered. Harry thought of Maggie Lah, of her golden skin, of champagne bottles and other interesting things between her small but undoubtedly affecting breasts. All the while he elaborated various necessary fictions concerning his ‘mission.’ Now and then, although Pat frequently smiled and seemed to enjoy her wine, her soup, her fish, he thought she knew that he was lying. Like Jimmy Lah, she asked him how Michael looked, how he thought he was doing, and Harry answered fine, fine. Her smiles seemed to Harry to be full of regret – whether for him, for herself, for Michael Poole, or the world at large, he could not tell. When the moment came when he asked for money, she said only, ‘How much?’ Around two thousand. She reached into her bag, took out her checkbook and fountain pen, and without expression of any kind on her face wrote out a check for three thousand dollars.
She passed the check across the table. Her face was now flushed in a mottled band from cheekbone to cheekbone, Harry thought unattractively so.
‘Of course I consider this strictly a loan,’ he said. ‘You’re doing a lot of good with this money, Pat. I mean that.’
‘So the government wants you to track down this man to see if he might be a murderer?’
‘In a nutshell. Of course it’s a semi-private operation, which is how I’ll be able to do the book deals, the film deals, and so on. You can appreciate the need for strict confidentiality.’
‘Of course.’
‘Well, I know you could always read between the lines, but…’ He let the sentence complete itself. ‘I’d be kidding you if I said there wasn’t quite a bit of potential danger involved in this.’
‘Oh, yes,’ Pat said, nodding.
‘I shouldn’t even be thinking like this, but if I don’t come back, I think it would be fitting for me to be buried at Arlington.’
She nodded again.
Harry gave up and began looking around the room for the waiter.
Pat startled him by saying, ‘There are still times when I’m sorry that you ever set foot in Vietnam.’
‘What’s the point,’ he asked. ‘I’m me, I always was me, I’ve never been anything but me.’
They parted outside the restaurant.
After Harry had gone a short distance down the sidewalk, he turned around, smiling, knowing that Pat was watching him walk away. But she was moving straight ahead, her shoulders slumped, her overstuffed, lumpy bag swinging at her side.
He went to his bank and let himself into the empty vestibule with his bank card. There he used the cash machine to deposit Pat’s check and one other he had obtained that day and to withdraw four hundred dollars in cash. He bought a copy of Screw at a corner newsstand and folded it under his arm so that no one would be able to identify it. Harry walked back through the cold to West 24th Street and the studio apartment he had found shortly after Pat told him, more forcefully than she had ever said anything in the entire course of their marriage, that she had to have a divorce.
1
It was funny, Conor thought, how ever since the reunion things from the old days kept coming back to him, as if Vietnam had been his real life and everything since was just the afterglow. It was hard for him to keep his mind on the present – back then kept breaking in, sometimes even physically. A few days before, an old man had innocently handed him a photograph taken by SP4 Cotton of Tim Underhill with his arm around one of his ‘flowers’.
It was four o’clock in the afternoon, and Conor was lying in bed with his first serious hangover since the dedication of the Memorial. Everybody thought you got better at handling pressure as you got older, but in Conor’s experience everybody had it backwards.
Three days earlier, Conor had been in the middle of the fifth week of a carpentry job that should have paid the rent at least until Poole and Beevers put their Singapore trip together. On Mount Avenue in Hampstead, only ten minutes from Conor’s tiny, almost comically underfurnished apartment in South Norwalk, a millionaire lawyer in his sixties named Charles (‘Call me Charlie!’) Daisy