kitchen was mainly fish. She’d read in one of the old man’s books that most fish trophies were replicas, so she thought these were probably also fakes. They shone with an unnatural flare and their colors had the high-contrast brightness of plastic. There were the usual suspects, a trout, a bass, a marlin, but there were also odd-looking specimens with peeling labels beneath them that read like poetry—a deep pink fish with large eyes labeled BLACKBELLY ROSEFISH, an evil-looking dark creature with white eyes labeled GOLDEN POMFRET, a tiger grouper and a bowfin. She read beneath them with a bottle of wine at her elbow. The more she drank, the more dazzled she was whenever she looked up. The wallpaper was red and white and the fish on the walls were gray and blue and a lurid peach; their lines of contrast vibrated . . . in spidery writing on the back of a cruise-ship postcard from 1948 she read the words Lil and I are having a swell time. On a card from the Lincoln Memorial, The hotest place Ive ever been.
Now and then she had to get up, pacing with a letter in one hand and her wineglass in the other. The letters were impenetrable somehow; they gave her almost no information about the old man. But one of them she wanted to keep for herself anyway. It was written on delicate yellowing stationery and was from a diplomat in Indochina, marked Hanoi October 29 1945. The diplomat described a cocktail party for Ho Chi Minh.
Ho is a seasoned old professional revolutionary, has done time for agitation in French, Chinese and even Hongkong jails. He is amazingly pleasant and gives the impression of being a Chinese scholar type . . .
Further down the letter writer described a person called the Emperor of Annam, who had also attended the party. The Emperor is a very sophisticated gent, about 40 or 43, and looks much like what you’d expect of a modern Rajah. He is said to be interested mainly in sports, chiefly hunting. There is wonderful shooting a couple of hundred miles from here. A hint, she thought, a clue, a piece, but then it went nowhere, for there was no further mention of hunting. She forgot what she was looking for, in the wine and on her empty stomach, and only wished that she was in that time, long gone, when there were those habits of politeness and a person might reasonably write much like what you’d expect of a modern Rajah.
Then she was finished with the bundle of letters and there was nothing left but money. In a water-damaged register she found electricity and gas bills, even milk bills from the days when you could have it delivered, but most of the entries were illegible. There were a few invoices from travel agencies, which might have led somewhere if there had been enough of them, but in the end they yielded nothing of interest and she threw them away. The old man must have had photo albums, at least a box of curling old snapshots, she thought next, and started to search the library. But the task was too daunting.
Still she was stubborn and for a while at least she had nothing better to do, so she drained the wine bottle and combed the dusty shelves, pulling out one oversized book after another, flipping them open, then sliding them back into place. She lost track of time. There were volumes on coats of arms, on the children’s crusades and the history of war, biographies of Napoleon and Douglas MacArthur. In a corner there was a small, primitive television and a pile of old movies: Lion of the Desert, Little Big Man, The Bridge on the River Kwai.
She would hire a cleaning woman, she decided, trudging upstairs at three in the morning with the dim old wall sconces lighting her way. People with big houses had cleaning women. Those people were not her, which she never forgot: rich people were not her. She looked at the sconces as she passed. Full of moths, hundreds of off-white moth bodies piled in the yellowing basins like pencil shavings. Were they a fire hazard? A cleaning woman could search the library. Or maybe a student could do it. With money, you could pay.
At the landing was an open window, its gauzy curtains blowing inward in the mild night breeze. Standing at windows had become a pastime. If she could, she would