Eventually I went up to the guest room. It looked like a room in a forty-dollar-a-night hotel. I hung my clothes in the closet beside the door. Then I brought two books back downstairs, The Nag Hammadi Library and a paperback Sue Grafton novel. I picked a chair facing the fireplace and opened the book of gnostic texts and read for a long time, waiting for John Ransom to bring good news home from the hospital.
Around eleven I decided to call New York and see if I could talk to a man named An Vinh, whom I had first met in Vietnam.
Six years ago, when my old friend Tina Pumo was killed, he left Saigon, his restaurant, to Vinh, who had been both chef and assistant manager. Vinh eventually gave half of the restaurant to Maggie Lah, Tina's old girlfriend, who had taken over its management while she began work on her Philosophy M.A. at NYU. We all lived above the restaurant, in various lofts.
I hadn't seen Vinh for two or three days, and I missed his cool unsentimental common sense.
It was eleven o'clock in Millhaven, midnight in New York. With any luck, Vinh would have turned the restaurant over to the staff and gone upstairs for an hour or so, until it was time to close up and balance the day's receipts. I went into the foyer and dialed Vinh's number on the telephone next to the blinking answering machine. After two rings, I got the clunk of another machine picking up and heard Vinh's terse message: Not home. Buzzing silence, and the chime of the tone. "Me," I said. "Having wonderful time, wish you were here. I'll try you downstairs."
Maggie Lah answered the telephone in the restaurant office and burst into laughter at the sound of my voice. "You couldn't take your hometown for even half a day? Why don't you come back here, where you belong?"
"I'll probably come back soon."
"You found everything out in one day?" Maggie laughed again. "You're better than Tom Pasmore, you're better than Lamont von Heilitz"
"I didn't find anything out," I said. "But April Ransom seems to be getting better."
"You can't come home until you find something out," she said. "Too humiliating. I suppose you want Vinh. He's standing right here, hold on."
In a second I heard Vinh's voice saying my name, and at once I felt more at peace with myself and the world I was in. I began telling him what had happened during the day, leaving nothing out—someone like Vinh is not upset by the appearance of a familiar ghost.
"Your sister is hungry," he said. "That's why she shows herself to you. Hungry. Bring her to the restaurant, we take care of that."
"I know what she wants, and it isn't food," I said, but his words had suddenly reminded me of John Ransom seated in the front seat of a muddy jeep.
"You in a circus," Vinh said. "Too old for the circus. When you were twenty-one, twenty-two, you love circuses. Now you completely different, you know. Better."
"You think so?" I asked, a little startled.
"Totally," Vinh said, using the approximate English that served him so well. "You don't need the circus anymore." He laughed. "I think you should go away from Millhaven. Nothing there for you anymore, that's for sure."
"What brought all this on?" I asked.
"Remember how you used to be? Loud and rough. Now you don't puff your chest out. Don't get high, go crazy, either."
I had that twinge of pain you feel when someone confronts you with the young idiot you used to be. "Well, I was a soldier then."
"You were a circus bear," Vinh said, and laughed. "Now you a soldier."
After a little more conversation, Vinh gave the phone to Maggie, and she gave me a little more trouble, and then we hung up. It was nearly twelve. I left one of the lights burning and took the Sue Grafton novel upstairs with me.
17
The front door slammed shut and woke me up. I sat up in an unfamiliar bed. What hotel was this, in what city? I could hear someone climbing the stairs. The sneering face of the gray-haired man with the ponytail swam onto my inner screen. I could identify him, and he was going to try to kill me as he had tried to kill April Ransom. The heavy footsteps reached the landing. I rolled off the bed. My mouth was dry and my head pounded. Adrenaline sparkled through my body. I stationed myself behind the door and braced myself.
The footsteps thudded toward my door and went past it without even hesitating. A second later, another door opened and closed.
And then I remembered where I was. I heard John Ransom groan as he fell onto his bed. I unpeeled myself from the wall.
It was a few minutes past eight o'clock in the morning.
I knocked on Ransom's bedroom door. A barely audible voice told me to come in.
I pushed open the door and stepped inside the dark room. It was more than three times the size of the guest room. Beyond the bed, on the opposite side of the room, a wall of mirrors on closet doors dimly reflected the opening door and my shadowy face. His suit jacket lay crumpled on the floor next to the bed. Ransom lay face-down across the mattress. Garish suspenders made a bright Y across his back.
"How is she doing?" I asked. "Is she out of the coma?"
Ransom rolled onto his side and blinked at me as if he were not quite sure who I was. He pursed his lips and exhaled, then pushed himself upright. "God, what a night." He bent forward and pulled off his soft brown wingtips. He tossed them toward the closet, and they thudded onto the carpet. "April's doing a lot better, but she's not out of the woods yet." He shrugged his shoulders from beneath his suspenders and let them droop to his sides.
Ransom smiled up at me, and I realized how tired he looked when he was not smiling. "But things look good, according to the doctor." He untied his tie and threw it toward a sofa. The tie fell short and fluttered onto the rose-colored carpet. "I'm going to get a few hours' sleep and then go back to Shady Mount." He grunted and pushed himself to the bottom end of the bed.
Two enormous paintings hung on facing walls, a male nude lying on lush grass, a female nude leaning forward against a tree on outstretched arms, both figures outlined in the Nabis manner. They were the most sensual Nabis paintings I had ever seen. John Ransom saw me looking back and forth from one to the other, and he cleared his throat as he unbuttoned his shirt.
"You like those?"
I nodded.
"April bought them from a local kid last year. I thought he was kind of a hustler." He threw his shirt onto the floor, dropped his keys, change, and bills onto an end table, unbuckled his belt, undid his trousers and pushed them down. He pulled his legs out of them, yanked off his socks, and half-scooted, half-crawled up the bed. A sour, sweaty odor came from his body. "I'm sorry, but I'm really out."
He began to scoot under the light blanket and the top sheet. Then he stopped moving, kneeling on the bed and holding up the covers. His belly bulged over the top of his boxer shorts. "You want to use the car? You could look around in Pigtown, see if it looks any—"
He flopped onto his sheets and smacked his hand on his forehead. "I'm sorry, Tim. I'm even more tired than I thought."
"It's okay," I said. "Even the people who live there call it Pigtown."
This was not strictly true—the people who lived in my old neighborhood had always resented the name—but it seemed to help him. "Good for them," he said. He groped for the pulled-back sheet and tugged it up. Then he rolled his head on the pillow and looked at me with bloodshot eyes. "White Pontiac."
"I guess I will take a look around," I said.
Ransom closed his eyes, shuddered, and fell asleep.
PART FOUR
WALTER DRAGONETTE