Charles decided to start some friendly—for the moment— chatter with Bulmer and maybe find out what this real doctor was made of. He nudged him and nodded toward Ba's retreating form.
"Big fellow, what?"
Bulmer nodded. "Reminds me of Lurch from The Addams Family."
"Lurch? Oh, you mean that show on the telly… the butler. Yes, does remind one of him a bit, although I do believe Lurch's face was more expressive."
"Possibly," Buhner said with a smile. "I imagine Ba's height gave him some rough times as a kid. I mean, the average Vietnamese male is five-three, and Ba's got to be at least a foot over that."
"Pituitary giant, wouldn't you say?"
Bulmer's reply was immediate. "Uh-huh. Arrested in his mid-teens, I'd guess. Certainly doesn't show any acromegalic stigmata."
Five points to you, Doc, Charles thought with a rueful mental grin. The bloke already had a diagnosis filed away and waiting. Sharp for a G.P.
"Is that English you two are speaking?" Sylvia was saying.
"Doctor talk, Love," Charles said. "We use it to befuddle the masses."
"But it was about Ba. What were you saying?" She seemed genuinely concerned.
"We were saying that he probably had an overactive pituitary as a kid, maybe even a pituitary tumor. Made him a good foot taller than the average Vietnamese."
Bulmer chimed in. "But his pituitary must have slowed down to normal when he reached adulthood because he doesn't have any of the facial and hand deformities you see with adult hyperpituitism."
"Lucky for him it stopped on its own. It's eventually fatal if untreated."
"But doesn't he ever smile?" Bulmer asked. "I've known him all these years but never once seen him smile."
Sylvia was silent a moment. "I have a picture of him smiling."
"I've seen that picture," Charles said. "It answers the old Pepsodent question about where the yellow went."
Sylvia was studiously ignoring him. Her eyes were on Bulmer, and they glowed in a way he had never seen.
"Want to see the picture?"
Bulmer shrugged. "Sure."
"Good," Sylvia said with a smile and a lascivious wink. "It's upstairs in my bedroom… with my erotic Japanese etchings."
Charles bit his lip to keep from laughing as he watched Bulmer almost drop his glass and begin to stutter. "I… well… I don't really know—"
Sylvia turned to Charles and looked him squarely in the eyes. Her gaze was intense. "Charles, why don't you show Virginia and Adelle around the ground floor. You know it almost as well as I do."
Charles resented the twinge of jealousy that stabbed through him. "Sure, Love," he said as nonchalantly as he could. "Be glad to."
As he guided the two women away, he noticed Bulmer's wife looking over her shoulder with a puzzled expression as Sylvia linked an arm through her husband's and led him up the wide, winding stairway.
Charles watched, too.
There was something going on between those two, but bloody-damned if he could figure it out just yet.
Does she fancy him, I wonder?
Alan felt like a lamb led to slaughter. If she had been sly and sneaky about getting him up here he would have backed straight out, no problem. But she had been so open about it, dragging him away right in front of Ginny. What could he do?
She led him down the hall as she had Tuesday night, but this time they passed Jeffy's room and traveled farther on, farther away from the party downstairs. And tonight she wasn't swathed chin to toe in flannel. She wore a filmy black something that exposed the nearly flawless skin of her back and shoulders just inches away from him.
A turn of a corner and they were in her bedroom. Thank God it wasn't dark—there was a light on in the corner. A nice bedroom, stylishly furnished with a king-size bed flanked by sleek, low night tables, long satiny curtains framing the windows. Feminine without being too frilly. And no Japanese erotica on the walls. Just mirrors. Lots of mirrors. At one point in the room, the mirrors reflected each other back and forth, and he saw an infinite number of Alans standing next to an endless line of Sylvias in an infinity of bedrooms.
She went over to a dresser and picked up a Lucite-framed eight-by-ten color photo. She said nothing as she handed it to him.
There was Ba—a much younger Ba—in a jungle setting, standing next to a shorter, redheaded American soldier. Both were in fatigues, each with an arm around the other's shoulder, and grinning from ear to ear. Obviously somebody had said, "Smile!" and they were complying with a vengeance. Ba's teeth were indeed yellow. And very crooked. Small wonder he didn't smile.
"Who's the soldier?"
"The late Gregory Nash. That was taken in 1969, somewhere outside Saigon."
"Sorry. Never knew him."
"Don't apologize." She took the picture from his hands, gave it a lingering look, then replaced it on the dresser.
Alan wondered if she thought of him often.
"And I didn't realize they had known each other. I mean, Ba—"
"Right. Ba didn't arrive until four years after Greg died. It turned out to be pure chance. I happened to be watching the evening news one night years back when they were doing all those stories on the continuous flow of Boat People from Nam. They showed some film from the Philippines about this fellow who had just piloted a fishing boat full of his friends and neighbors across the South China Sea. I recognized him at once. It was Ba."
"You brought them back here?"
"Sure," she said offhandedly. "They said his wife was ill. I flew out there and got them. I figured what good was Greg's blood money if I couldn't use it to help out one of his friends? You know the rest… about Nhung Thi and all that."
Alan knew about Ba's wife. She had been sicker than anyone had guessed. He wanted to move the conversation to a lighter level. He glanced out the window into the floodlit yard and saw two trees in full blossom.
"Are those new?"
Sylvia moved up close behind him. "Only one—the one on the right."
Alan was surprised. "I would have guessed this one here— that other one has so many more blossoms."
"Some secret root food Ba is trying. Whatever it is, the new tree is really responding to it."
She was so close. Too close. Her perfume was making him giddy. Without saying anything more, Alan eased out into the hall and waited for Sylvia there. She caught up and they strolled back toward the party. She was more subdued than he could ever remember.
At Jeffy's door he stopped and waited in the hall while she tiptoed in to check on him.
"All's well?" he said as she returned.
She nodded and smiled. "Sleeping like a baby."
They walked on and stopped at the banister overlooking the front foyer. A glittering crowd swirled in conflicting, intermingling currents below, eddying into side pools of conversation in its ceaseless flow from one room to another. He recognized the bulky form of one of the Jets' better-known defensive backs as he passed through. The familiar face of a longtime New York TV weatherman was there, and Alan swore he recognized the voice of his favorite morning disk jockey but couldn't find the face.
That friend of Sylvia's, Charles Axford, passed through below. He wondered what Axford was to Sylvia. Her current lover, no doubt. She probably had a lot of lovers.
Then he saw a face he recognized from the newspapers.
"Isn't that Andrew Cunningham?"
"Right. I told you there'd be a few politicos here. Congressman Switzer is somewhere around, too."
"You know Mike?"
"I contributed to his campaign last year. I hope he won't be too disappointed when he doesn't get any money from me this time around."
Alan smiled. "Was he a bad boy in Washington?"