No. 22 Pleasure City

by Mark Fishman

  “You want another?”

  “No, thank you,” Pohl said. He lit a cigarette.

  Shimura ordered another Virgin Mary.

  “You’re my friend,” he said.

  “I know that.”

  “I’m thinking about Angela.”

  “So am I.”

  “Not like that. I mean, what are you doing?”

  “What do you mean, what am I doing?”

  “She’s not for you. She may be your type, but she’s not for you. If it’s sex — ”

  “Listen — ”

  “No, you listen. What are you thinking?”

  “That’s a lot of questions you’re asking me.”

  “I’m a detective.” Shimura suppressed a smile.

  “Funny.”

  “Okay. What I’m going to do now is find her for you, then it’s up to you how to handle it.”

  The waiter put the glass of tomato juice in front of Shimura, who stirred the concoction of Worcestershire and Tabasco sauce and celery salt with a spoon, fished out the lemon slice, put it in his mouth and sucked on it. The waiter replaced the used ashtray with a clean one. Pohl stubbed his cigarette out in it.

  “If you want to marry her,” Shimura said, “I’ll fix it so that you can ask her to marry you because I’ll find her.”

  “I’m in love with her.”

  “You’re infatuated. A crazy, one-sided infatuation. That’s what it is, and you know it.”

  “You want me to change my mind? Why do you want me to do that?” Pohl threw his arms out in a confused, somewhat frantic gesture.

  “I’m trying to tell you how it really is,” Shimura said solemnly.

  “I don’t even hear you.”

  “You hear me and you know it’s the truth. You have no argument. But I promised you and you can hold me to it.”

  Pohl didn’t answer, he lit another cigarette and moved the idea of Angela around in different parts of his mind looking for a place where she really fit in and when his doubts about her rose like a black storm cloud, he waved them off. He gave Shimura a slow smile.

  “I know I’ve got it coming, what you’re telling me,” Pohl said, “and I know that you’re saying it for my own good, but I’m not going to give up just like that.” He looked at Shimura and didn’t have to force a smile.

  “What you want from her isn’t something you’re going to get, but you’ll have to find that out for yourself.” Shimura drank from his glass of tomato juice.

  Pohl took a long drag at the cigarette. As the smoke came from his lips, he said: “What can I do?”

  “Nothing. Leave it to me.”

  Pohl waved at the waiter, who took his time making his way through the restaurant to their booth, and when he got there he took Pohl’s order, poured the contents of the half-empty bottle into Pohl’s glass. Pohl drank it down. When the waiter returned with another full bottle of ice-cold beer Pohl didn’t touch it.

  “I know her, and I don’t know her,” Pohl said at last. “I haven’t figured it out. Maybe I can’t see it because I’m in love with her.”

  “Maybe I can’t see anything without an angle if that’s what I’m looking for,” Shimura said.

  “We’ll find out.”

  “Do you think she’s in trouble?”

  “No.” Pohl raised his glass of beer to his lips.

  “That’s what I think, too.”

  “Then what is it?” Pohl asked helplessly.

  “If I knew that, well, it’d be a lot easier for both of us.”

  [ 40 ]

  Rand Hadley crossed the park away from its western edge bordered by the river, on freshly mowed grass, and the short green blades wet with dew moistened his shoes. Shimura sat on a wooden bench at the edge of the park facing the parkway, reading the morning edition. The sun shone brightly from a cloudless sky. The flow of cars on the parkway was like a soft-distant murmur in Shimura’s ears.

  Hadley swung wide and came to the bench on Shimura’s right so as not to startle him by coming up to him from behind. Shimura folded the paper on his lap, wiped the bench seat with his handkerchief, and Hadley sat down.

  “Any news from your ex-wife?” Shimura asked.

  “I had her on the phone the night before last and we’ve worked it out. I’ll add something to the monthly payment, and she’ll get some overtime.”

  “You’re lucky, Rand. Even divorced, you’re lucky.”

  “You don’t have to tell me.”

  Hadley took a pack of gum out of his pocket, offered a stick to Shimura, who refused it with a smile.

  “Disgusting habit,” Hadley said, then unwrapped a stick and put it in his mouth.

  “There are times I wish for a special kind of surgery, like an operation that would get rid of emotions.”

  “You’re wrong. It’s just the thing that gives you an edge if you don’t let it get to you,” Hadley said, chewing slowly with his mouth shut.

  “Pohl’s acting just like a kid by chasing after a woman who’s about as well-balanced as somebody falling off a building. I wonder if finding her is really doing him a favor.”

  “If you lose your head over that — ”

  “I won’t lose my head, Rand. And I’m going to find her. That’s what’s bothering me.”

  “Part of a day’s work.”

  “He’ll be worse off with her around.”

  “You can’t please everybody. Especially when you’re a cop.”

  “You’re telling me. It’s the same with detectives at the agency.”

  “When you’re a cop, you’ll be criticized, no matter what you do. My advice to you is to stop cracking yourself on the head, take off the brass knuckles and go easy. You’ll get enough to sweat about from everybody else.”

  “And then I think of all the cases I’ve worked on, and I get very tired.”

  “We all get tired.”

  “I guess I’m making a big thing out of nothing.”

  “You’re doing what you can do for a friend.”

  [ 41 ]

  Shimura stretched out his legs and crossed his ankles. The television was on with the sound switched off and the remote control lay next to him on the small sofa. He held a glass of sparkling water against his chin, staring at nothing, then put it to his open mouth and swallowed a mouthful of water and chips of ice banged against his teeth. A breeze came in through the window.

  The sun wasn’t all the way down, a salmon-colored glow lit the sky. Shimura watched the sky as it grew dark and it was growing dark very fast. Now there was just the fading light outside and the movement and colors from the television. He didn’t look at the screen, the sky was always more interesting, and he stared out the windows at twilight drinking the last of the water in his glass. He was tired of the blur of the television and he shut it off with the remote control before he got up from the sofa.

  He switched on a standing lamp, looked at his own living room as if he hadn’t seen it in a long time, turned around and went into the kitchenette. He started opening cabinets looking for something to eat even though he knew perfectly well what he had in the cabinets and refrigerator. He took a package of white and wild rice from a shelf. He turned on one of the electric burners, found a small pot in which to boil water, filled it with hot water from the tap and put it on the burner. He took a handful of salt and dumped it in the water, waited for it to boil.

  There was a window above the sink and he stared out of it at the nighttime sky. The sky was sprinkled heavily with stars and there was a quarter moon. Between the stars and the moon his eyes followed an imaginary thread that lead him to Kawamura and Asami, and the thread went on moving until it was attached to Angela and Pohl. But it didn’t take him further than the designation of two couples because the thread was beginning to stretch, it got very thin and it was too weak, and then it broke, leaving only the gap between the two pairs since one of the couples made about as much sense to him as a flying pig.

  Now there was no connection whatsoever between the co
uples, the thread disappeared entirely, and what was left was the notion of desire that in one case was solid and real, and in the other wasn’t anything at all no matter how hard Pohl tried to make it happen with or without Shimura’s help. He thought of what Hadley had told him in the park, then smiled.

  He heard the water boiling and snapped his head away from the sky to look at the electric burner and fix his gaze on a point in the kitchenette to take his mind off Angela and Pohl. He poured a handful of rice into the boiling water, turned down the heat. In the refrigerator he found a piece of chicken wrapped in aluminum foil. He separated the breast from the wing and pulled strands of white meat off the bone. He laid out the strands on a clean plate. It would take eleven minutes for the rice to cook.

  Shimura went back to the living room and sat down on the sofa. He picked up the newspaper, unfolded it, turned to the page with the rest of the article about the mayor and the corruption charges and the presence of a lawyer he’d worked with on an embezzlement case.

  He looked at his wristwatch. When he’d finished reading the article he shook his head. The newspaper really had nothing to tell him that he didn’t already know since all there was to know was that everything was constantly in a mess. He let the newspaper down slowly in his lap. He looked again at his wristwatch. Eleven minutes had passed.

  [ 42 ]

  Fitch stood above Angela in the glaring light of the unshaded bulb. She looked past him at the bulb and couldn’t understand why the light wasn’t bothering her eyes after she’d been asleep and her eyes had been shut and now her eyes were open for the first time in six hours. She didn’t know his real name if in fact the name he’d given her wasn’t his own. She didn’t want to know it. As long as he did his job he could be whoever he wanted to be. When she’d hired him to kidnap her, he said his name was Fitch.

  Fitch looked mildly down at her. His eyes shone. She liked what she saw in his eyes. She liked it when she saw him for the first time just before he’d injected her with a tranquilizer. He gazed past her and his eyes went up the wall and saw the torn wallpaper across the bathroom. She tried to follow his gaze but the ropes kept her from moving enough to see what he was looking at.

  She stayed with that other moment, the moment she’d looked up at him from the bench painted green, when she’d seen Fitch standing above her about to give her a shot, and she thought about how she’d had to trust him then and that she really trusted him now because the whole thing, the kidnapping, had gone without a hitch so far, and he’d done exactly what she’d told him to do with the efficiency of a man paid to do a job.

  She took it that far and for now she couldn’t take it further. From this point on she thought about the bigger thing, the arrangement she’d made with Fitch, from beginning to end, and whether or not it was going to be big enough to change her. She had to find out if it was going to work. The solution seemed far away and right now there was nothing but the light in his eyes.

  “What is it you want more than anything else?” Fitch asked, lighting a cigarette.

  She shook her head at him. She didn’t know what he was talking about.

  “I mean, what would make you happy?”

  “I like things the way they are,” she answered. “But maybe you don’t believe it.”

  “I believe whatever you tell me.”

  Fitch closed the toilet lid and sat down on it, crossed his legs, went on smoking. Angela struggled a bit with the ropes. She opened her mouth but didn’t say anything. He nodded very slowly.

  “Too tight?”

  “No, not too tight.”

  “I’m listening,” he said.

  “A glass of water.”

  Without getting up, he swung around and turned on the faucet and ran cold water into a glass. He bent down, held it for her while she drank eagerly, and when she was finished drinking he wiped her chin with a handkerchief, then tucked it back into his pocket. He was careful with her because she was paying him a lot of money to do what she told him to do, and he was always fastidious with the things he did when he was being paid to do them.

  “I’m still listening,” he said gently. He took a drag at the cigarette. “I know you’ve got something to say that you didn’t think you had to say when you first came out of the clouds from the dope I pumped into you.”

  “I want you to blindfold me,” she said.

  “What’s that going to prove?”

  “Just blindfold me, will you?”

  “You’ve already seen us, the guy behind the wheel and me, what’s the point?”

  “Okay. Here’s the point. But here it is because I trust you. Don’t ask me why. Just know it and take my word for it. It’s important. I want to be sure it’s handled right.”

  Fitch pulled in some smoke and let it out. “I’m listening, for Christ’s sake.”

  “Do you want to know why I’m doing what I’m doing here?”

  “No.”

  “But you’ll do what I ask you to do?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re going to blindfold me, and instead of lying on my back looking up at the ceiling with my thoughts floating around up there, I’ll be in the dark and they’ll float around in here.” She nodded her head. “I’ll hear what you say, I’ll understand the words, I’ll talk to you. I’ll do it automatically, without having to think of what I’m saying. Just like that.”

  “I’m no psychoanalyst,” Fitch said.

  He ran water from the tap, put the cigarette out in it and tossed the butt in the wastebasket under the sink. He looked down at her from his seat on the toilet lid.

  “You don’t have to be,” she said, craning her neck. “Do you trust me?”

  Fitch sighed. “A wonderful thing, trust. When you’ve got it with someone, you’ve got everything.”

  “I want to get out of the habit of doing something I’ve been in the habit of doing for a long time,” she said. “I won’t tell you all of it because that’s not the point to know what I’ve been doing. But I’ll tell you this much, I’ve been hating myself for it.”

  “It sounds serious.”

  “You bet it’s serious.”

  “You’ve got it bad, whatever it is.”

  “I don’t feel right anymore, something’s not working like it ought to be. I’ve got to sort things out now because it’s going to be a lot more difficult doing it later and then maybe I won’t be able to do it at all. And you’re going to help me. I’ve given myself everything that’s possible to give except the thing I want more than anything else.”

  “And what’s that?”

  “I want to be in love.”

  “Jesus Christ,” Fitch said.

  [ 43 ]

  The first thing Kawamura did when he got to the agency that morning was to go through the papers on his desk until he found the stack of receipts he was looking for that were held together by a large red plastic paperclip. There was enough money paid out on them for gas and food, film and developing, overtime for Lundquist and Aoyama, and Eto working as an extra man on nighttime surveillance that Kawamura wondered what Shimura was up to and if he wasn’t trying to ruin him financially before his wedding. It would come sooner than later and he wanted to save as much money as he could until then.

  Kawamura called Asami on the intercom and asked her if Shimura was in the office. He tried to sound businesslike but what came out of his mouth was more a stumbling for words than a sentence. He asked her to tell Shimura to be in his office at five-fifteen. She told him he wasn’t in the building but she’d let him know as soon as he came in, and she started to giggle. He got excited when he talked to her. He turned red but she couldn’t see him.

  He was proud of what he’d accomplished with the agency, he loved Asami, and she loved him. But once they were married she’d have to quit working at the agency and he knew that she wouldn’t like that arrangement because she’d already said that it meant a lot to her to earn money. But he didn’t approve of his wife working. Not here or anywhere else.

/>   Rand Hadley wore a jacket, tie and white oxford shirt with buttondown collar tucked into neatly pressed trousers. The tie was a burntred color to give the sober outfit and his pale complexion a bit of life. It was one o’clock. He stood with his hands folded behind his back rocking forward and backward on his heels as if he were a patrolman walking a beat.

  The elevator squeezed out a ding, the doors opened and Shimura appeared behind a couple of women wearing business suits that went past Hadley into the lobby. Hadley stuck his hand out and Shimura shook it, bowed slightly, then smiled at Hadley.

  “It’s a habit with the boss,” he explained. “A bit of respect never hurts anybody.”

  “I’ve got plenty of respect for any kind of respect. Where are we going for lunch?”

  “A minute, Rand, I’ve got to make a call.”

  Shimura excused himself and stepped out of the flow of office workers that were pouring from the elevators into the lobby and out through the doors on their lunch break. Hadley followed him to a quiet corner away from the exit. Shimura stopped at a pay phone, lifted the receiver, dialed, pressed the phone to his ear.

  “That’s right,” he said. “I’ll let him know. Yes. Files and bank statements. He’ll have it ready. I’ll see to it. The usual hour. Okay.” He set the phone on the cradle, looked at Hadley and said: “Let’s get something to eat.”

  The parking lot alongside the building was filled with cars, a row of bicycles filled racks placed immediately to the right of the building’s entrance, a few motorcycles were parked in an area set aside for them at the front of the parking lot. Shimura waved at the parking lot guard, lit a cigarette, and Hadley waited for him.

  They walked a block in silence until they came to a short bridge that crossed the river. Hadley looked around at the downtown streets, the tall buildings that cast shadows along them, the sun shining on the river and the groups of people looking down at the river as it flowed southeast with a police patrol boat quickly skimming along the smooth surface of the water.