I am to meet with Grace and Pete.
I keep making false sightings of them through the day. In one, they appear to me in baby form, wrapped in saris of pearl-hued silk and winged. They hover about the downtown streets of Flushing, spying out usable souls. All the while Pete keeps trying to rub up against Grace when she isn’t looking, but he is an infant and he doesn’t have the equipment yet and ends up just peeing on her leg and her wing. She pats him on the head, kisses his cheek. One way or another, Pete always gets what he wants.
Lelia swears she does not see them. I nod toward the end of the street, across the subway platform. She strains to look, but of course it’s strangers, just another couple combing their way through the city. We move on. There is enough to worry us in the real world, she says. She knows that tonight I will be handing over the member listing of the ggeh, my remaining official duty before I leave them all forever: Hoagland, and Jack, and even John Kwang.
I don’t tell Lelia who is behind the bombing. In another time, if I felt it unavoidable, I would have presented the fact solely to mitigate the ill sweep of my own activities. Perhaps I will tell her in a future day, but presently this is dangerous knowledge, capital material, which can only serve to place her within the reach of hazard, even more than she is now. In exchange for the list and — if necessary — myself as sacrifice, I have already made Jack and Hoagland agree to keep her clear of any action or trouble. In the old narratives that Dennis practices, he might well involve a wife or lover to use against a troublesome operative; but with me he understands that he can forever count on my Confucian upbringing, press it to my brow like a tribal lodestone, a signet of the culture, which he knows can burn deeper than even love or fear.
But Dennis, I have promised myself, will not learn of the crime from me. This is my final honoring to Kwang, my last offering, which is the sole way of giving I have known in my life: an omission, solemn and prone. So let Dennis hear the words from someone else. Let another mole push up blind from the depths and speak. I have always known it possible that he could have many minions and pawns surrounding a case, a swarm invisible even to the spy. How else could Dennis have tolerated my writing almost nothing in the weeks before the bombing? Or given me any assignment after my debacle with Luzan, much less one with a man like John Kwang, with whom I might so easily identify? I could regard events in such a way as to see that Dennis has been patiently availing me of the elements with which I might effect my own undoing, all along contriving to witness and test my discipline and loyalty. As if his design were to watch me steadily unravel from the inside out, to record in my fraying mesh of self the hidden hazard of all traitors and spies. For even Dennis Hoagland understands that in every betrayal dwells a self-betrayal, which brings you that much closer to a reckoning.
* * *
It is raining tonight, again. The springtime won’t end. Queens has minor flooding. Some of the sewers are clogged, spitting up refuse from the grates. The air is almost tropical. I think the soaked concrete of the borough must smell a little of Venice, or what I imagine of Venice, a redolence consumptive, intestinal. I go anyway through the ankle-deep water of flooded street corners, the brown pools slicked with spectral emulsions of engine oil and cooking grease, soot and sweat.
The Korean noodle shop is near 41st and Parsons. I am to meet them here sometime after midnight. We don’t have to be exact. The restaurant is part of a whole block of Korean businesses lodged in converted row apartments dating from the fifties, when the population was still Italian and Irish and Jewish. Now the signs are all in Korean. The only English words in the windows are SALE and DISCOUNT and SHOPLIFTERS BEWARE. The walls of the restaurant are papered with legal-sized sheets with the house specials in Korean characters. The woman with the kindly face brings me a glass of water, a spoon, and chopsticks. I come here enough that she recognizes me. She thinks I am Chinese or Japanese because I always order in English or by number or by pointing to what I want on another table.
There are other regulars here tonight, sitting in their customary places. There is the vegetable store worker in the fatigue jacket, the call car driver, the delivery men. Everyone eats alone. The waitress brings me a bonus: two silver-dollar patties of beef and pork, dipped in egg and fried. “Korean ham-bah-gah,” she says, smiling, offering it with a small bowl of flavored soy. “Sauce-su.” She seems to want to stay and watch me taste it but she hurries back to her work in the open kitchen preparing the bahn-chahn, the savory half dishes of vegetables and fish. She peers over the stainless-steel counter. I bow my head low to her. I want to thank her, too, with a surprise of saying something in our language, but there is nothing in my throat to call up. I am half afraid of disappointing her with some fumble of poorly accented words. If I had the sentence, the right words, I would ask her about her family and she could tell me about her daughter and her son. If I were able with my speech, maybe her feeling would turn and she could confide in hushed tones that her husband who brought them here too late in his life died one morning of a heart attack and was simply gone, that that’s why she was here and not at home, sound asleep near her good children.
Grace and Pete arrive, shaking the rain from their coats in the doorway. The woman greets them in English and Pete immediately points and answers in fine Korean that they’ll sit with me. She smiles at him. He is a prodigy with languages. He orders two bowls of on myun and some barley tea and asks for the bathroom. Grace comes over and kisses me on the cheek.
“Harry! Long time no see!”
“You look healthy,” I say.
“Do I?” she answers, sitting across from me, squeezing the water from her dark hair. “I’ve been working too much.”
“You’re tan.”
She looks slyly around for signs of an enemy. She whispers, “The Bahamas. The story is this. We’re buyers of precious stones. Pete’s the Japanese dealer, I’m his translator. The client wants a who’s who of the island’s middlemen and suppliers. You know, we make the list, check it twice. As usual, nothing special. But you don’t really want to know, do you?”
“No,” I say. “What I want to know is how you fended off Pete.”
“Don’t ask.”
“But I’m asking.”
“Badly,” she answers.
“You’re kidding.”
She looks at me like the dead. “Okay. Very badly.”
Pete sits down next to her, having heard everything.
“Hiya, Harry.”
“I’ve never seen you this dark,” I tell him. For some reason I want him to feel vulnerable, laid open, though I know it will be completely useless. I say to him anyway, “You do well in the sun. It’s nice. Now you’re almost the color of concrete.”
“He doesn’t tan,” Grace says. “He tarnishes.”
“What color do you get?” Pete says to me, whittling off fine splinters from the ends of his chopsticks.