sight for “poor eyes”,’ Beevers whispered into Poole’s ear. Poole gently pulled himself away and got a vivid close-up of Harry Beevers’ large, overlapping discolored teeth.
Tina Pumo bobbed back and forth before them in the corridor, grinning fiercely beneath his heavy moustache. ‘You were asleep?’ Pumo asked. ‘You didn’t get our message?’
‘Okay, shoot me,’ Poole said, smiling at Pumo. Conor and Beevers broke away from him and moved separately toward the door. Pumo ducked his head like Tom Sawyer, all but digging his toes into the carpet, said, ‘Aw, Mikey, I want to hug you too,’ and did it. ‘Good to see you again, man.’
‘You too,’ Michael said.
‘Let’s get inside before we get arrested for having an orgy,’ Harry Beevers said, already standing in the entry to Michael’s room.
‘Don’t get weird, Lieutenant,’ Conor Linklater said, but moved toward the doorway anyhow, glancing sideways at the other two. Pumo laughed and pounded Michael on the back, then let them go.
‘So what have you guys been doing since you got here?’ Michael asked. ‘Apart from swearing at me, that is.’
Wandering around the room, Conor said, ‘Teeny-Tiny’s been sweatin’ out his restaurant.’ Teeny-Tiny was a reference to the origins of Pumo’s nickname, which had begun as Tiny when he was an undersized child in an undersized town in upstate New York, was modulated later to Teeny, and had finally altered to Tina. After a decade of working in restaurants, Pumo now owned one in SoHo that served Vietnamese food and had been lavishly praised some months before in New York magazine. ‘He made two calls already, man. Him and the Health Department are gonna keep me awake all night.’
‘It’s not really anything,’ Tina protested. ‘I picked an awkward time to go away, that’s all. We have to do certain things in the restaurant, and I want to make sure they’re done right.’
‘Health Department?’ Michael asked.
‘Really, it’s nothing serious.’ Pumo grinned fiercely. His moustache bristled, the joyless creases at the corners of his eyes deepened and lengthened. ‘We’re doing great. Booked solid most nights.’ He sat on the edge of the bed. ‘Harry can vouch for me. We do great business.’
‘What can I say?’ Beevers asked. ‘You’re a success story.’
‘You looked around the hotel?’ Poole asked.
‘We checked out the meeting areas downstairs, had a look around,’ Pumo said. ‘It’s a big party. We can do some stuff tonight, if you want,’
‘Some party,’ Beevers said. ‘A lot of guys standing around with their thumbs in their asses.’ He shrugged his jacket over the back of his chair, revealing suspenders on which cherubs romped against a red background. ‘No organization, nada, rien. The only people with their shit together are the First Air Cav. They have a booth, they help you locate other guys from your unit. We looked around, but I don’t think we saw anybody from our whole damn division. Besides that, they put us into a grubby dump of a hall that looks like a high school gym. There’s a Diet Coke stand, if that turns you on.’
‘High school gym, man,’ Conor muttered. He was staring intently at the bedside lamp. Poole smiled at Tina Pumo, who smiled back. Linklater picked up the lamp and examined the inside of the shade, then set it down and ran his fingers along the cord until he found the switch. He turned the lamp on, then off.
‘Sit down, for God’s sake, Conor,’ Beevers said. ‘You make me nervous, messing with everything like that. We’ve got serious business to talk about, if you don’t remember.’
‘I remember, I remember,’ Conor protested, turning away from the lamp. ‘Hey, there’s no place to sit in here on account of you and Mike got the chairs and Tina’s already on the bed.’
Harry Beevers stood up, yanked his jacket off the back of his chair, and made a sweeping gesture toward the empty seat. ‘If it’ll get you to settle down, I’ll gladly surrender my chair. Take it, Conor – I’m giving it to you. Sit down.’ He picked up his glass and sat down next to Pumo on Michael’s bed. ‘You think you can sleep in the same room with this guy? He probably still talks to himself all night.’
‘Everybody in my family talks to themselves, Lieutenant,’ said Conor. He hitched his chair closer to the table. Conor began thumping his fingers on the table, as if playing an imaginary piano. ‘I guess they don’t act like that at Harvard –’
‘I didn’t go to Harvard,’ Beevers wearily said.
‘Mikey!’ Conor beamed at Poole as if seeing him for the first time. ‘It’s great to see you!’ He slapped Poole on the back.
‘Yeah,’ Tina Pumo said. ‘How are things going, Michael? It’s been a while.’
These days Tina was living with a beautiful Chinese girl in her early twenties named Maggie Lah, whose brother was a bartender at Saigon, Tina’s restaurant. Before Maggie there had been a series of girls, each of whom Tina had claimed to love.
‘Well, I’m thinking of making some changes,’ Michael said. ‘I’m busy all day long, but at night I can hardly remember what I did.’
A loud knocking came from the door, and Michael said ‘Room service,’ and stood up. The waiter wheeled in the cart and arranged the glasses and bottles on the table. The atmosphere in the room became more festive as Conor opened a Budweiser and Harry Beevers poured vodka into an empty glass. Michael never explained his half-formed plan of selling his practice in Westerholm and seeing what he might be able to do in some gritty place like the South Bronx where children really needed doctors. Judy usually walked out of the room whenever he began to talk about it.
After the waiter left, Conor stretched out on the bed, rolled on his side, and said, ‘So you saw Dengler’s name? It was right there?’
‘Sure. I got a little surprise, though. Do you know what his full name was?’
‘M. O. Dengler,’ Conor said.
‘Don’t be an idiot,’ Beevers said. ‘It was Mark, I think.’ He looked to Tina for help, but Tina frowned and shrugged.
‘Manuel Orosco Dengler,’ Michael said. ‘I was amazed that I didn’t know that.’
‘Manuel?’ Conor said. ‘Dengler was Mexican?’
‘Michael, you got the wrong Dengler,’ Tina Pumo said, laughing.
‘Nope,’ Michael said. ‘There’s not only one M. O. Dengler, there’s only one Dengler. He’s ours.’
‘A Mexican,’ Conor mused.
‘You ever hear of any Mexicans named Dengler? His parents just gave him Spanish names, I guess. Who knows? Who even cares? He was a hell of a soldier, that’s all I know. I wish –’
Pumo raised his glass to his mouth instead of finishing his sentence, and none of the men spoke for an almost elastically long moment.
Linklater muttered something unintelligible and walked across the room and sat on the floor.
Michael stood up to add fresh ice cubes to his glass and saw Conor Linklater backed up against the far wall like an imp in his black clothes, the brown beer bottle dangling between his knees. The orange writing on his chest was nearly the same shade as his hair. Conor was looking back at him with a small secret smile.
3
Maybe Beans Beevers didn’t go to Harvard or Yale, Conor was thinking, but he had gone someplace like that – someplace where everybody in sight just took it all for granted. To Conor it seemed that about ninety-five percent of the people in the United States did nothing but fret and stew about money – not having enough money made them crazy. They zeroed out on booze,