gesture.
The young man in the yellow cap consulted his pages, indicated panels, wiped moisture from his forehead. Michael soon stood before him. The volunteer was wearing blue jeans and a denim shirt unsnapped halfway down over a damp grey T-shirt. His beard glistened with sweat. ‘Name,’ he said.
‘M. O. Dengler,’ Poole said.
The man riffled through his pages, located the D’s, and ran his finger down a column. ‘Here we go. The only Dengler is Dengler, Manuel Orosco, of Wisconsin. Which happens to be my home state. Panel fourteen west, line fifty-two. Right over there.’ He pointed to the right. Small poppies like red pinpoints dotted the edges of the panel, before which stood a large unmoving crowd. NO MORE VIETNAMS, announced a bright blue banner.
Manuel Orosco Dengler? The Spanish names were a surprise. A sudden thought stopped Michael as he made his way toward the blue banner through the crowd: the guide had given him the wrong Dengler. Then he remembered that the guide had said that this was the only Dengler. And the initials were right. Manuel Orosco had to be his Dengler.
Poole was directly in front of the Memorial once again. His shoulder touched the shoulder of a shaggy-haired, weeping vet with a handlebar moustache. Beside him a woman with white blonde hair to the waist of her blue jeans held the hand of a little girl, also blonde. A child without a father, as he was now forever a father without a child. On the other side of the broken strip of sod, planted with flags and wreaths and photographs of young soldiers stapled to wooden sticks, the four-teenth panel, west, loomed before him. Poole counted down until he reached the fifty-second line. The name of M.O. Dengler, MANUEL OROSCO DENGLER, etched in black polished granite, jumped out at him. Poole admired the surgical dignity of the engraving, the unadorned clarity of the letters. He knew that he had never had any choice about standing in front of Dengler’s name.
Dengler had even liked the C-rations scorned by the others. He claimed the dogfood taste of army turkey loaf, canned in 1945, was better than anything his mother had ever made. Dengler had liked being on patrol. (Hey, I was on patrol the whole time I was a kid.) Heat, cold, and dampness had affected him very little. According to Dengler, rainbows froze to the ground during Milwaukee ice storms and kids ran out of their houses, chipped off pieces of their favorite colors, and licked them until they were white. As for violence and the fear of death, Dengler said that you saw at least as much violence outside the normal Milwaukee tavern as in the average firefight; inside, he claimed, you saw a bit more.
In Dragon Valley, Dengler had fearlessly moved about under fire, dragging the wounded Trotman to Peters, the medic, keeping up a steady, calm, humorous stream of talk. Dengler had known that nothing there would kill him.
Poole stepped forward, careful not to trample on a photograph or a wreath, and ran his fingers over the sharp edges of Dengler’s name, carved into the chill stone.
He had a quick, unhappy, familiar vision of Spitalny and Dengler running together through billowing smoke toward the mouth of the cave at Ia Thuc.
Poole turned away from the wall. His face felt too tight. The blonde woman gave him a sympathetic, wary half-smile and pulled her little girl backwards out of his way.
Poole wanted to see his ex-warriors. Feelings of loneliness and isolation wrapped themselves tightly around him.
1
Michael was so certain that a message from his friends would be waiting for him at the hotel that once he got there he marched straight from the revolving door to the desk. Harry Beevers had assured him that he and the others would arrive ‘sometime in the afternoon.’ It was now just before ten minutes to five.
Poole started to scan the wall behind the desk for his messages as soon as he could read the room numbers beneath the pigeonholes. When he was three-fourths of the way across the lobby, he saw one of the white hotel message forms inserted diagonally into his own rectangular box. He immediately felt much less tired. Beevers and the other two had arrived.
Michael stepped up to the desk and caught the clerk’s eye. ‘There’s a message for me.’ he said. ‘Poole, room 204.’ He took the oversize key from his jacket pocket and showed it to the clerk, who began to inspect the wall behind him with an almost maddening lack of haste. At last the clerk found the correct slot and withdrew the message. He glanced at the form as he handed it to Poole, then smiled.
‘Sir.’
Michael took the form, looked first at the name, and turned his back on the clerk to read the message. Tried to call back. Did you really hang up on me? Judy. The time 3:55 was stamped on the form in purple ink – she had called just after Michael had left his room.
He turned around and found the clerk looking at him blankly. ‘I’d like to know if some people who were supposed to be here by now have checked in yet.’
Poole spelled the names.
The clerk slowly pecked at buttons on a computer terminal, frowned, tilted his head, frowned again, and without changing his posture in any way looked sideways at Michael and said, ‘Mr Beevers and Mr Pumo have not arrived as yet. We have no booking for a Mr Linklater.’
Conor was probably saving money by sleeping in Pumo’s room.
Poole turned away, folded Judy’s message into his jacket pocket, and for the first time since his return saw what had happened to the lobby.
Men in dark suits and striped neckties now occupied the banquettes and tables. Most of them had no facial hair and wore white name tags crowded with print. They were talking quietly, consulting legal pads, punching numbers into pocket computers. During his first surreal eighteen months back from Vietnam, Michael Poole had been able to tell if a man had been in Vietnam just by the way he held his body. His instinct for distinguishing vets from civilians had faded since then, but he knew he could not be mistaken about this group.
‘Hello, sir,’ said a clarion voice at his elbow.
Poole looked down at a beaming young woman with a fanatical face surrounded by a bubble of blonde hair. She held a tray of glasses filled with black liquid.
‘Might I inquire, sir, if you are a veteran of the Vietnam conflict?’
‘I was in Vietnam,’ Poole said.
‘The Coca-Cola Company joins the rest of America in thanking you personally for your efforts during the Vietnam conflict. We wish to take this opportunity to express our gratitude to you, and to introduce you to our newest product, Diet Coke, in the hope that you will enjoy it and will share your pleasure with your friends and fellow veterans.’
Poole looked upward and saw that a long, brilliantly red banner of some material like parachute silk had been suspended far above the lobby. White lettering said: THE COCA-COLA CORPORATION AND DIET COKE SALUTE THE VETERANS OF VIETNAM! He looked back down at the girl.
‘I guess I’ll pass.’
The girl increased the wattage of her smile and looked amazingly like every one of the stewardesses on Poole’s flight into Vietnam from San Francisco. Her eyes shifted away from him, and she was gone.
The desk clerk said, ‘You’ll find your meeting areas downstairs, sir. Perhaps your friends are waiting for you there.’
2
The executives in their blue suits sipped their drinks, pretending not to monitor the girls walking around the lobby with their inhuman smiles and trays of Diet Coke. Michael touched Judy’s note in his jacket pocket. Either it or the tips of his fingers felt hot. If he sat down in the lobby bar to watch the arrivals coming through the door, within minutes he would be asked if he were a veteran of the Vietnam conflict.
Poole went to the bank of elevators and waited while an odd mixture