“I sure get sick of the sound of your voice,” sneers Spitalny from off to the side, near the barrels. He flings a stone at Underhill and strikes him in the middle of his chest.
“You’re still nothing but a fucking queer,” Spitalny says.
—And you’re still a shithead, Pumo remembers saying eloquently to Spitalny, who returned the favor by throwing a stone at him, too.
It took a long time to adjust to the “flowers,” because it took a long time to understand that Underhill never corrupted anybody, that he could not corrupt anybody because he himself was not corrupt. Though most of the soldiers Puma knew claimed to despise Asian women, nearly all of them used whores and bar girls. The exceptions were Dengler, who clung to his virginity in the belief that it was the talisman that kept him alive, and Underhill, who picked up young men. Pumo wondered if the others knew that Underhill’s flowers were in their early twenties, and that there had been only two of them. Pumo knew this because he had met them both. The first was a one-armed former ARVN with a girl’s face who lived with his mother in Hue and made a living grilling meat at a food stall until Underhill began to support him. The other flower actually worked in the Hue flower market, and Pumo had eaten dinner with the young man, Underhill, the young man’s mother, and his sister. He had seen such a remarkable quantity of tenderness flow among the other four people at the table that he would have been adopted by them if he could. Underhill supported this family, too. And now in an odd way Pumo supported them, for when Underhill’s best-loved flower, Vinh, finally managed to locate him in New York in 1975, Pumo remembered the excellence of the meal as well as the warmth and kindness in the little house, and hired him. Vinh had undergone deep changes—he looked older, harder, less joyous. (He had also fathered a child, lost a wife, and served a long apprenticeship in the kitchen of a Vietnamese restaurant in Paris.) None of the others knew Vinh’s history. Harry Beevers must have seen him once with Underhill and then forgotten the occasion, because for reasons of his own Beevers had convinced himself that Vinh was from An Lat, a village near Ia Thuc—whenever Beevers saw either Vinh or his daughter, he began to look persecuted.
“You look almost happy now,” Maggie said to him.
“Underhill can’t be Koko,” Tina replied. “The son of a bitch was crazy, but he was crazy in the sanest possible way.”
Maggie did not say or do anything, did not change her grip on his hand, did not even blink at him, so he could not tell if she had heard him. Maybe she felt insulted. The noisy subway clattered into their station and came to a jerky stop. The doors whooshed open, and Pumo froze for a second. As the noises outside the car resolved themselves, Maggie pulled him to his feet. When Pumo got out of the train he bent over and hugged Maggie as hard as he could.
“I love you too,” she said. “But I don’t know if I’m being crazy in a sane way, or vice versa.”
She gasped when they turned into Grand Street.
“I suppose I should have prepared you,” Pumo said.
Stacks of bricks, piles of boards, bags of plaster, and sawn lengths of discarded pipe covered the sidewalk outside Saigon. Workmen in green parkas and heavy gloves, heads bent against the wind, wheeled barrows of rubble out of the front door and laboriously dumped them into a skip. Two trucks stood double-parked beside the skip, one marked with the name SCAPELLI CONSTRUCTION CO., the other bearing the stenciled legend MCLENDON EXTERMINATION. Men in hard hats wandered back and forth between the restaurant and the trucks. Maggie saw Vinh talking to a woman holding a wide set of unrolled blueprints, and the chef winked at her, then waved at Pumo. “Must talk,” he called out.
“What’s it like inside?” Maggie asked.
“Not as bad as it looks from here. The whole kitchen is torn apart, of course, and most of the dining room is too. Vinh’s been helping me out, cracking the whip when I’m not around. We had to take down the whole back wall, and then we had to rebuild some of the basement.” He was fitting his key into the white door next to Saigon’s door, and Vinh shook the architect’s hand and came over in a rush before he could open it.
“Nice to see you again, Maggie,” Vinh said, and followed it with something in Vietnamese to Pumo. Tina answered in Vietnamese, groaned, and turned to Maggie with increased worry plain on his face.
“Floor fall down?”
“Someone broke in this morning. I haven’t been in since about eight, when I went out to get breakfast and check in with some suppliers. We’re expanding the kitchen, as long as we have to do all this work, and as usual I have to chase around all over the place, which I was doing until I was stopped in my tracks by the back page of the Village Voice.”
“How could anybody break in with all this going on?”
“Oh,” he said. “They didn’t break into the restaurant. They broke into my loft. Vinh heard someone moving around upstairs, but he thought it was me. Later he went up to ask me about something, and realized that it must have been an intruder.”
Tina looked almost fearfully up the narrow flight of steps that led to his loft.
“I don’t suppose Dracula came back to pay a social call,” she said.
“No, I don’t suppose so either.” Tina did not sound convinced of this. “The bitch might have remembered some stuff she forgot to steal, though.”
“It’s just a burglar,” Maggie protested. “Come on, let’s get out of the cold.” She took a couple of steps up the stairs, then reached down, grasped Tina’s elbows with both hands, and pulled him toward her. “You know when most burglaries are committed, white boy? Around ten in the morning, when the bad guys know everybody else is at work.”
“I know that,” Tina smiled at her. “Honest, I know that.”
“And if little Dracula comes back for your body, I’ll turn her into … hmm …” She rolled her eyes up and stuck a forefinger into her cheek. “Into egg drop soup.”
“Into Duck Saigon. Remember where you are.”
“So let’s go up and get it over with.”
“Like I said.”
He followed her up the stairs to the door of his loft. Unlike the white door downstairs, it was locked.
“One better than Dracula,” Maggie said.
“It locks when you close it. I’m still not sure it wasn’t goddamned Dracula.” Pumo unlocked the door and stepped inside ahead of Maggie.
His coats and outerjackets still hung on their hooks, his boots were still lined up beneath them.
“Okay so far.”
“Stop being such a coward,” Maggie said, and gave him a push. A little way along was the door to his bathroom. Nothing in the bathroom was disturbed, but Pumo had a vivid vision of Dracula standing in front of the shaving mirror, bending her knees and fluffing up her Mohawk.
The bedroom was next. Pumo took in the unmade bed and empty television stand—he had left the bed that way, and had not yet replaced the nineteen-inch Sony Dracula had stolen from this room. The closet doors hung open, and a few of his suits drooped from their hangers toward an untidy heap of other clothes.
“Goddamn, it was Dracula.” Pumo felt a layer of sweat pop out over what seemed his entire body.