by Mark Fishman
Pohl tried it again with a man who was twice his size. It was almost a head-on collision. He looked up at him, and the man’s face had a broad mouth that told him to apologize and the thick lips didn’t move and the weight of the demand was in his eyes. Pohl didn’t intend to offer one, but he opened his mouth just the same and nothing came out of it. The big man smiled, with a good natured look in his eyes. Pohl wasn’t expecting that.
Now there was definitely something wrong with the expression on Pohl’s face. He looked more like a crazy dog than a man. The big man, who was almost fat, took a step backward. His mouth was stiff and tight but the corners went up just a little. It wasn’t really a smile now, but a calculating look filled with uncertainty. He was trying to figure the odds. It didn’t last long, but a smile from Pohl that wasn’t really a smile went floating across the sidewalk to the man, and made him shrink into himself.
Pohl took a few steps backward, away from the target, and lowered his head like a goat. He ran straight at the man’s belly and butted him, then bounced backward off the protruding stomach, straining his own neck. The stomach was not fat, it was packed solid. The big man looked uncomprehendingly at him. Pohl was busy rubbing the back of his neck, he wasn’t paying attention to anything while he was doing it. The fist of the man crashed into the side of his head and sent him staggering sideways. It hit him again, he was he seeing colored sparks from an uppercut to his outstretched chin.
Pohl fell back against the legs of a bystander, his own legs stretched out in front of him. The bystander kept him from going down until he moved, and Pohl found himself prone on the sidewalk. The big man pulled him off the ground and put him on his feet. Pohl got his balance and the man let go of him and stepped back.
“Fat clown,” Pohl said, a thin ribbon of red going down his chin.
“Here?” the man asked.
“Right here,” Pohl said, pointing his finger at the left side of his face.
The big man hit him with a short right to the jaw and caught him before he went down.
When he came to he was walking, or being dragged along the sidewalk by the big man. They came to an all-night café. He was put in a booth, and he sat upright with his head tilted back against the imitation red leather seat. A waiter came with a towel packed with ice and pressed it against his jaw. Pain shot upward through his head and played behind his eyes. Through the pain and involuntary tears he saw the big man standing behind the waiter with a fat hand on the booth. The big man looked worried.
Pohl forced a smile that hurt him. He didn’t want the big man to feel guilty because he himself had forced the beating. There was a clock on the wall behind the waiter. He couldn’t read it. He moved his head to get a look at it. The hands of the clock quivered in a veil of water that washed his eyes. Pohl took the towel from the waiter and thanked him. He held it against his own bruised chin. He asked for an iced soft drink and a straw.
The big man squeezed himself into the booth opposite Pohl and stared at his swollen face. He said he was sorry. He folded his hands on the tabletop and entwined his thick fingers. Pohl forced another smile. The big man kept his hands in front of him. The waiter came with Pohl’s drink, the big man asked the waiter for a glass of beer. When the glass arrived he wrapped his big hands around it and swallowed several mouthfuls. He wiped the foam from his lips with the back of his hand. Pohl sipped his iced drink, he didn’t hurry. It was sweet. The straw made it easier for him. The muscles of his face were sore. He’d got what he wanted. He thought of Angela only briefly between long periods of throbbing pain.
[ 24 ]
Violet reached up to the kitchen shelf for the box of powdered chocolate. She stood on tiptoe and the muscles of her calves stretched and rounded into a nice shape. She felt the muscles pulling all the way up her legs to her thighs and buttocks. She wanted to see what she looked like from behind. She knew it was a view that held them and spun them and made them dizzy, and there was no way around it. She used it whenever she got the chance because sooner or later she knew it would get her what she wanted and take her where she wanted to go.
She had thought that Burnett was it, that he was the destination. But she’d thought the same thing with several others. The box of powdered chocolate slipped out of her hand and tumbled off the shelf and she caught it. She took a carton of milk out of the refrigerator, the pan was already on the stove. She poured milk in it and lit the stove and waited for steam to rise up out of the lake of milk. Violet put two spoonfuls of chocolate in a cup, poured hot milk after them and stirred until it was cocoa-brown.
She took the cocoa to her bedroom, sat on the edge of the bed with her bare legs hanging down, her bare feet dangling above the floor. She switched on a lamp that was on the small bedside table and looked at the alarm clock. It was two-forty. She drank the hot chocolate, switched off the light. She tried to sleep but it didn’t come because of the sugar in the cocoa and the thoughts in her head. She might not get what she wanted out of Burnett, and she needed the money. It was quiet in the room except for the ticking of the clock. Violet stretched herself and turned slowly in the bed and began a meditative scratching along the top of her head.
All the thinking in the world wasn’t going to make any difference now. It wouldn’t change a thing. She shut her eyes. She was on the fifth floor and she walked down the stairs very slowly, enjoying the feeling of going down one step at a time, lower and lower, no effort at all. Then she was asleep.
[ 25 ]
Burnett finished his whisky, the sky was growing dark beyond the windows of Angela’s apartment while the big town lights came on and some of them winked at him through the Venetian blinds. Angela got up from her chair. She didn’t have anything more to say to him. What came next was exactly what she knew he wanted her to do, and what she was going to do was what they’d agreed upon, and she breathed a sigh of relief because it was going to be her last performance. She left the living room and went to her bedroom to undress. She looked at herself in the mirror. She forced a smile and tossed her clothes on the bed. She was happy, if that was the word for it, that it was the last time she’d have to pretend that she wanted to play any game at all with Burnett. She might have enjoyed it with someone else, but it was just a means to an end with him.
[ 26 ]
Shimura looked through the stack of photographs Frankie Lundquist had left on his desk. They didn’t tell him very much. Just that Burnett was looking at a lot of real estate in a lot of different locations with a city map in his hand and a handful of papers from a real estate agency. The photographs were crisp and clear, and the expensive lens Kawamura bought recently was evidently worth the price he’d paid. Still, he didn’t see the point of pursuing Burnett, there was nothing unusual in his behavior, and he was losing interest in going after him for a woman like Violet, who he knew was hiding an ugly motive behind her request for an investigation into Burnett’s comings and goings.
On the other hand, he was certain now that the man Violet was paying him to investigate and the man Pohl wanted to know more about were the same man. What was the connection? If there was a connection, what did it mean? The last print in the stack of photos was a shot of the street that ran in front of Burnett’s building. It was night, and Shimura saw a woman’s figure in a phone booth with the beams of a pair of headlights lighting her up.
Shimura searched his desk drawers for a loupe which, when he’d found it, he moved around on the photo in the area of the booth to get a better look at the figure inside it. Violet’s features came into focus, but it didn’t confirm a thing, he’d known all along that she would go on chasing Burnett because there was something big she wanted from him and she wasn’t going to give up until she had it.
[ 27 ]
There was no wind at all and the rain falling from the sky had ceased to fall and the mists were rising from the warm earth. On his first day of going out to purposely observe the excesses of others, Aoyama made his way through a neglected garden strewn with rubbish, hea
ding for the back door of a house he’d only just decided to enter when he made the decision to use it to get to the asphalt road on the other side. It was a technique he’d developed when he wanted to appear to others as if he had just left his own house by the front door so that it didn’t look like he was snooping around a neighborhood he didn’t belong to.
He wore a dreary gray sun hat and a holly-green, lightweight water-repellant coat. His brown leather boots crushed wet perennial grass, weeds, clover and wildflowers and patches of a kind of plant that spread by creeping rhizomes, scraps of plastic and pieces of paper with advertisements on them, rusted nails and tools, spent brass shells of ammunition, and the bent frame of a bicycle without handlebars.
He caught one of the heels of his boots in the bent, rusted spokes of a wheel and staggered clumsily forward until he regained his balance. Aoyama was short, with a flattish full face, thin lips, and a head covered by sparse black hair, crew cut, a scratchy voice.
He blinked, looking up at the two-story house divided into apartments like the other houses in the neighborhood that hadn’t been torn down and replaced by soulless buildings. He climbed the ordinary wooden stairs, reached for the doorknob, turned it, and leaned weightlessly with his shoulder against the frame until it opened. He went in, shut the door noiselessly behind him. He stood for a moment, his eyes full of the damp gray morning.
He was in the kitchen. Coffee brewed in an automatic drip machine. His eyes followed the length of the horizontal countertop, went up the vertical line of the refrigerator, moved horizontally again along the rows of shelves with bright-hued cereal boxes and small packages closed with rubber bands, transparent and opaque bottles of olive oil and syrup and vinegar, powders and grains and spices that were ground, whole or pulverized. The slightly scuffed linoleum floor, red as a beet, wore signs of recent polishing. He gave everything the professional once-over without moving from the spot, then smiled.
Aoyama shut his eyes and breathed in the smell of coffee. A drop of sweat rolled down his nose and hung perilously at the tip. It tickled him. He wiped it away. The tickling sensation crept into his nose. He inhaled sharply, trying to stifle the sneeze he felt was coming. He pushed his tongue against the roof of his mouth. He shook his head, frowning. He looked up at the ceiling, concentrating on its pleasant whiteness. It’s not the time, he told himself. The hairs in his nose trembled. He sneezed. Three times, and loud enough for anyone in the house to hear.
The phone rang. He heard footfalls coming toward the kitchen, didn’t move an inch, and obeyed the steady-nerved signaling of his well-trained mind. He always kept a spare disguise in his pockets. He reached into one of them and pinched the molded plastic nose made by an expert and quickly fit it over his own nose. His other hand went to another pocket for a pair of black-framed glasses. He put them on the bridge of his plastic nose, shoved his sun hat into an empty pocket. His fingers found the flexible, rubberlike scalp with long, reddish hair and he fit it on his head, brushing strands of hair forward above his ears and backward on the top of his head. He wasn’t working for the agency today, it was a day off, but he had his mind on the job at hand, and was always ready to refine his technique. His eyes purposely became shifting and beady, his expression falsely sinister, but relaxed.
A woman came into the kitchen, without seeing him, and went straight to the ringing phone. She answered it. She wore a floral-patterned dressing gown that looked like a worn-out satin bedcover. Aoyama looked at her bare feet and painted toenails. His eyes climbed the length of her body. She held the receiver between her tilted head and raised shoulder. She was slender, taller than Aoyama, like a stalk of tall treelike semi-tropical grass slightly bent, straining in the wind, and she was younger than him. She stood with her feet together, her eyes staring moodily at the floor, her lips firmly set, listening, with an impatient air, sighing heavily and just as heavily lifting her eyes, gazing off into space.
Aoyama couldn’t breathe. It felt like cotton was packed tightly far down his throat, and that he was lying on his back under the rippling water of a river looking up at the woman’s face. He shook his head to loosen himself from the grip of a kind of warning. He shut his eyes, the feeling went away. When he opened them, the woman was reaching out to shut off the coffeemaker.
She saw him when she turned her head, and she didn’t look surprised. His face was hot. Her face was oval, pretty and pale. Her shoulder-length hair was neatly brushed and black, and she had a long neck. He thought: She must have a body that’s not hard to look at poured into whatever she’s wearing under that spread.
She waved the receiver at him, indicating a chair at the kitchen table. He took a few steps back, keeping his narrowed eyes on her, and sat down, crossing his legs like a dandy. He drew a pack of cigarettes out of a pocket. He lit up, exhaling a pleasant cloud of smoke and watched her through it. She gave him an exquisite smile. A drop of sweat as cold as mercury toiled down the nape of his neck, blotted itself into his collar.
She didn’t remind him of any woman in particular except all the women he desired. She looked at him affectionately, returned to concentrate on whoever it was on the other end of the line. But he didn’t trust her. It won’t be long until she goes against me, he told himself. I’m just a clown that can smoke a cigarette. I don’t belong here.
“No, Newton’s not here,” the woman said at last into the phone. “You really are observant, I’ve got to give you that.”
Aoyama reached out for a grass-green ashtray and pulled it toward him, rolled the burning end of the cigarette gently on the rim, and a bit of ash came off. The woman listened to the voice on the other end of the phone.
“No, he couldn’t. Because Newton’s client didn’t show up. He wasn’t there. And you’re right back where you started.” She replied to words he couldn’t hear. Her tone was aggressive. “Well, they were always afraid of everything, weren’t they?” she went on. “What use have they ever been to him?”
Aoyama cleared his throat, the woman looked at him. He smiled apologetically, made a gesture with his hand at the pot of coffee. She nodded. Aoyama got up, looked around for a cup, the woman shook her head, cradled the receiver again, then opened a cupboard behind which half a dozen cups stood neatly in a row. She took hold of one of them and gave it to him.
He smiled weakly from the smell of her skin, an earthy humidity had seeped into his nostrils. He adjusted the glasses on his counterfeit nose. The cigarette hung loosely from a corner of his mouth and the smoke drifted upward past his eyes. He poured himself a cup of coffee, swallowed a mouthful and scalded his throat. It tasted so good that he almost forgot why he’d come to this house in the first place. The coffee gave him a feeling of kinship for the woman.
“When he gets back, I’ll tell him. But don’t waste your time calling here every ten minutes,” she insisted. “Be patient. As far as it’s within human capacity to be patient.” She hung up.
Aoyama put his cigarette out, folded his hands on the tabletop. The chair was comfortable. He looked at the cigarette stub in the ashtray, then up at the woman, who steamily ran her tongue along her lips. She was playing a role, but he didn’t laugh at her. Temptation, thought Aoyama. The skin tautened across her jaw and her face looked like a piece of pure, white marble, radiating a force that froze him in the chair. A chill crawled straight up his back and into the roots of his hair. She opened her mouth, her long white teeth sparkled.
She poured herself a cup of coffee, stirred three spoonfuls of sugar in it, making a tinkling sound with the spoon. His head bent low over the tabletop. The tinkling sound became a screaming noise and he shut his eyes. His brain turned a volume lever and made the noise many times softer than it really was. She stopped stirring. He raised his head, opened his eyes, and saw the woman put her cup down near his folded hands. She shrugged her shoulders, encouraging the dressing gown to slide down her back. She caught it with her slender fingers and draped it over the back of the chair opposite him. She gave Aoyama a bright smile
.
She wore a sliplike undergarment made of silk that hung to the middle of her thighs. She sat down. Her arms were muscular. She turned her head slowly, forcefully to the left as far as she could, visibly straining her neck, and with the motion, the thin straps of the chemise rolled appealingly on her collarbone. She brushed her hand across her chest, wiping away invisible particles of dust, and her nipples almost pierced the plum-colored silk that clung to her pale skin. Aoyama’s scalp started to itch beneath the latex stretched across his head.
“I don’t know you,” she stated flatly. She sipped from her cup, holding it steadily with both hands. “If you’re looking for Newton, which I doubt, you’re out of luck, and you already know he’s not here. Unless you’re deaf. In which case I’ve got to shout.” She paused. “There’s no one here but me. And that makes it convenient for you.”
Aoyama swallowed another mouthful of coffee. He listened to her. He listened to people doing the talking because that’s how he got the kind of information he needed for his job. He smiled sincerely at her. It’s a good pitch, and I let her make it, he thought. But what she doesn’t know would fill the Sea of Japan.
“I’m not here for Newton. I don’t even know him. And I don’t want to know him,” he said calmly.
“No, maybe it’s not convenient,” she said. “I mean, not quite. It all depends on what you have in mind. I’m alone, attractive. Okay. Well, that leaves me on the spot. If you’ve got the nerve.” She hesitated, leaning forward. “Have you got any?”
“Nerve? No use asking me,” Aoyama said, twisting uncomfortably in his chair.
“If you try something, I won’t yell. Not at all. If that’s what’s worrying you,” she said contemptuously. “At least not until you’re at it. And then it’ll be strictly because I’m enjoying it. Just pleasure, that’s me.” She winked. “I want it, plenty.”