Koko. Peter Straub
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 his 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.
Maggie looked up at him questioningly.
‘The first time she stole my favorite jacket and my favorite pair of cowboy boots. SHIT! She loves my wardrobe!’ Pumo slammed his fist against the sides of his head.
He was instantly across the room, lifting articles of clothing from the closet floor, examining them and putting them back on hangers.
‘Did Vinh call the police? Do you want to call them?’
Pumo looked up at Maggie from an armload of clothes. ‘What’s the point? Even if they find her and by some miracle put her away, she’ll be back outside in about a day and a half. That’s how we do it in this country. In Taipei you probably have an entirely different system.’
Maggie leaned against the doorframe. Her arms hung straight down, parallel to each other, at an angle to her body. She had funny knobbly little hands, Pumo noticed for perhaps the thousandth time. She said, ‘In Taipei, we staple their tongues to their upper lips and hack three fingers off each hand with a dull knife.’
‘Now that’s what I call justice,’ Pumo said.
‘In Taipei, that’s what we call liberalism,’ Maggie said. ‘Is anything missing?’
‘Hang on, hang on.’ Pumo put the last suit on its hanger, the hanger on the rail. ‘We haven’t even gotten to the living room yet. I’m not even sure I want to get to the living room.’
‘I’ll look in there, if you like. As long as we can eventually come back in here and take our clothes off and do all of those things we were originally intending to do.’
He looked at her with undisguised astonishment.
‘I’ll make sure the enemy has retreated from the living room,’ Maggie said in her flat precise voice. She disappeared.
‘GODDAMN IT! DAMN IT!’ Pumo yelled a few seconds later. ‘I KNEW IT!’
Maggie leaned into the bedroom again, looking startled and a little breathless. Her heavy black hair swung, and her lips were parted. ‘You called?’
‘I don’t believe it.’ Pumo was gazing at the empty nightstand beside his bed, and looked palely up at Maggie. ‘How does the living room look?’
‘Well, in the second I had before I was distracted by the screams of a madman, it appeared to be slightly rumpled but otherwise okay.’
‘It was Dracula, all right.’ Pumo did not like the sound of slightly rumpled. ‘I knew it, damn it. She came back and stole all the same stuff all over again.’ He pointed to the nightstand. ‘I had to buy a new clock radio, and that’s gone. I got a new Watchman, and the asshole stole that too.’
Pumo watched