No. 22 Pleasure City

by Mark Fishman

“A clean city,” he said, waving his hand broadly at everything in front of him. “That’s impossible, I know — but as clean as humanity allows.”

  “You did your share of the work to get us there.”

  “We all did our best.”

  “A public servant’s got to be made of big stuff — selflessness, determined honesty and decency. That was you, Rand, and you know it. And those qualities were shared by other men and women in the sheriff’s department — plenty of good men and women, really. But there were more than a few flawed ones, too.”

  “You find them in any organization, at any time,” Hadley said philosophically. “In every walk of life.”

  “Nothing and nobody’s all bad, is that it?”

  “Yes, something like that.”

  “And the politicos and bureaucrats?”

  “That’s something else because the Big City boys give off a lot of gas, as usual.”

  Shimura laughed. “They stink.”

  “Rotten fish smell better than they do.”

  The more they talked about the situation the less they liked it. On the other side of the bridge Shimura took Hadley’s arm, they turned right on South Franklin Street and went into a restaurant near the Stock Exchange. As it was lunch hour, they had to wait for a table.

  When they’d finished eating lunch and were having coffee, Hadley stirred the sugar in his cup and looked closely at Shimura.

  “What’s worrying you?”

  “I’ve got to give Kawamura an explanation. I’ve got to tell him something, but I don’t want to give up Pohl’s private life doing it.”

  “What kind of an explanation do you owe him?”

  “I’ve spent a lot of his money on a case for a friend who hasn’t taken a contract with the agency. Okay, so I’m working for myself on Kawamura’s dollar — three operatives, but not me because I’m not going to take a cent while I’m doing it.”

  “You aren’t obligated to say anything about Pohl.”

  “Kawamura likes to dig at things until he gets to the bottom. Now and then it takes a lot of time. With this, it’s a cinch. He’ll ask questions, and I don’t want to have to lie to him.”

  “He knows you, that counts for something, doesn’t it?”

  “It counts for something, sure. I’ve been with Kawamura a long time. I know how the agency works.”

  “Then I think you’ve got an answer, don’t you?”

  Shimura was stretched out on the linen sheet thrown over the futon, his hands clasped behind his head, staring at the ceiling of his favorite hideaway, the six-tatami-mat storage room at the end of the hall past offices that were busy in the late afternoon, trying to keep his mind off wanting a cigarette. He listened to the sounds of the agency as operatives rummaged through papers and spoke into voice recorders, finished daily reports and put them in folders, shoved files into cabinets and slammed them shut, shouted down the phone at a client or informer.

  He wiggled the sleepy fingers of his hands, crossed one leg over the other, and rocked gently to the left and right on his hips. He exhaled slowly with one leg over the other and heard a popping sound that came from his lower back. He looked at his watch. It was almost five o’clock.

  He thought of the conversation he’d had with Hadley at lunch. He’d given Hadley all the truth he could sort out of this situation. Hadley was the best mirror he had and he’d got a good glimpse of himself in the reflection and a better idea of what to say to Kawamura by listening to what Hadley told him. The solution was there if he handled it like a regular case on a standard contract and was as honest as he could be without giving anything away about Pohl.

  And it wasn’t easy for him with Pohl either. The last time he’d talked to him he’d given him a couple of possible explanations for Angela’s disappearance, but none of them satisfied either of them, and so he’d said they would have to wait and hear the story from Angela herself since they were going to pick her up in forty-eight hours. Pohl had sighed heavily. He’d sounded almost unenthusiastic at first but Shimura knew that Pohl was relieved and relief was all that he’d hoped he could give him.

  Afternoon light came through the drawn blinds into the room and gave it a soulful atmosphere. Shimura went on staring at the ceiling. He’d feel a lot better when he straightened things out with Kawamura, and then got Angela out of the mess she was in because he’d have kept his promise to find her and hand her over to Pohl, if she’d let him, and then he could go back to his life and the regular contracts of the agency.

  Shimura looked at his watch. Asami had told him that Kawamura wanted him in his office at a quarter after five. Forty-five minutes remained before Kawamura came back from his appointment with the catering company for the wedding. Shimura wanted to take advantage of the time to find the right voice for his explanation of the expenses the agency had incurred on the Angela Mason investigation and if that explanation didn’t satisfy Kawamura, he was sure he wasn’t going to lose his job because of it seeing that what he’d done was what a friend was supposed to do and Kawamura knew it.

  He shut his eyes and his mind wandered. There wasn’t anything in Kawamura’s upcoming marriage that he wanted for himself. He didn’t envy anyone. He liked his independence, and from his point of view marriage was a constraint. When he added up everything in his life today, including his girlfriend, Tomiko, he came out better than even, and that was good enough for him.

  What he’d seen of humanity from the people who passed through the doors of the Kawamura Agency told him that there was very little to be envied about anybody and that what was behind what looked like a decent setup, either money or a soft-heart routine, was everything human that always involved pain and worry and confusion, and the measure of happiness that came to a person now and then. The setup was a front that protected the truth from getting tossed around out in the open by the wind, what people called privacy, and more often than not, if they’d just admit it, it was a truth that wasn’t half-bad no matter what it was.

  Shimura got up from the futon and straightened the room and shut the door behind him as he went out. Too much thinking always gave him a headache. He went to his office and took an aspirin, opened a couple of letters on his desk, one from his bank, the other a sheet advertising low rates for a phone network. He tossed the low rates in the wastebasket, swung his chair around and stared out the window at the gradually darkening sky.

  Kawamura was satisfied with the arrangements he’d made with the caterer, and the wedding plans were going forward without a hitch. He was back at the agency, standing next to Asami. He let go of her hand and whispered in her ear, went to his office and shut the door. He used the intercom to tell her to hold his calls. It was ten past five.

  Shimura walked down the hall with determination, and as he got to Kawamura’s door he turned and nodded at Asami, knocked twice and opened the door without waiting for an answer. It was five-fifteen.

  Kawamura stood up, bowed. Shimura bowed, sat down. He faced Kawamura who stared down at him from the other side of the desk. Kawamura held a bunch of papers clipped together. He sat down in his chair and put a worried expression on his face. Shimura held his breath. Through the windows behind Kawamura he saw the elongated clouds in the sky streaked with reddish-yellow.

  It started with the worried expression giving way to a look of disappointment and then the disappointment became a plain standard dose of controlled anger. Kawamura had been practicing it like a piece of music.

  “Do you have any idea what this is going to cost?”

  Kawamura waved the receipts in front of him.

  “Who’s going to pay for it? You? On your salary? Have you gone crazy?”

  Shimura didn’t say anything, he looked straight at him.

  “Well?”

  “I’ll pay for it if it doesn’t pay for itself,” Shimura said calmly.

  “And how’s it going to pay for itself?” He leaned back in his chair, frowning. “You don’t have an answer, do you?”

  “It�
��s more complicated than it looks.”

  “You know that you couldn’t have picked a worse time.”

  “Let me explain.”

  “The wedding, the honeymoon, and now I’ll have to pay for an investigation out of my own pocket. I thought it was over when Violet Archer said she didn’t want to go on with it.”

  “Extenuating circumstances.”

  “What? No, I don’t want to hear it.”

  “Don’t go off half-cocked.”

  “It’s my business, my agency, and I’ve got plenty to worry about until you convince me there’s nothing to worry about.”

  “Here’s how I think it’ll work,” Shimura said. “I was working for Violet Archer when her investigation pulled somebody in by chance who turned out to be the guy a friend of mine wanted a line on, and so when I got the line on him — and I got it pretty fast — it looked good for my friend, and when the Archer woman told me to drop her investigation, I kept at the second investigation, a lost-and-found job, and when it broke wide open and I found out where she was, it started to look really interesting except that we don’t know what makes it tick. But I think we’ll know that when we interview her — not today, but soon. Because it’s the woman herself that’s in the middle of it. And she’s got money. And that’s where your worries are over. If it’s about what I think it’s about, and I’m pretty sure I’m right, she’ll pay to keep it quiet.”

  Shimura wasn’t going to take any money from Angela Mason, it wasn’t the money that interested him, but he had to say something to Kawamura before he figured out for himself what he was going to do.

  “And if she doesn’t?”

  Shimura was puzzled and sat lost in thought.

  “Then I’ll work for you for nothing until it’s paid off,” he said at last.

  “You won’t make a living doing that.”

  “I don’t think I’ll have to do it. Anyway, I like gambling,” he lied.

  Kawamura opened a drawer in his desk, shoved the receipts in and shut the drawer quietly. Shimura got up, bowed. Kawamura halfstood with his hands flat on the desk and bowed his head, eyed Shimura as he turned around and walked out of the office.

  Shimura shut the door behind him, walked past Asami and out of the corner of his eye caught her watching him.

  [ 44 ]

  The Midwestern city’s mayor was interviewed for two hours by federal investigators, looking into corruption at City Hall. They asked him questions related to city policies and procedures for hiring, promotion and certain city programs. The sky was still bright with afternoon sunlight when the investigators left City Hall in two sedans with darkened windows.

  The hiring scheme allegedly involved sham job interviews and falsified documents and spanned the last twelve years, touching at least four of the largest City Hall departments. Prosecutors charged that the city administration illegally gave out jobs and promotions to reward campaign workers for the mayor and pro-mayoral candidates.

  The accusations of rigged personnel decisions followed thirty-two indictments on bribery and other corruption charges in the city’s Hired Truck Program. Twenty-three defendants, including twelve city employees, were convicted. The federal corruption probe began with the Hired Truck scandal but has since widened to take in the system of hiring and promotion at City Hall, which prosecutors claimed has been thoroughly tainted by politics and cronyism.

  It was alleged that hiring fraud in the administration defied longstanding federal civil court decrees that forbid politics from affecting most City Hall job placement. A defense lawyer suggested that prosecutors were making a crime out of political patronage.

  After sixteen years leading city government, the mayor himself refused to say whether he would run for re-election.

  “Things like this, you get embarrassed,” he said. “Things like this, you get mad. Things like this, you get disappointed, but then you do something about it.”

  One of the sedans went south on Water Street, near the river, taking one of the prosecutors in the direction of the airport; the other sedan, with a couple of lawyers in the backseat, turned at the corner of Water and Wells Street going east toward the lake and a hotel.

  [ 45 ]

  Pohl walked up and down in front of the telephone that refused to ring no matter how hard he prayed for it to ring while concentrating solely on a mental picture of Angela until he’d made himself break out in a sweat. He’d lost track of how many days he’d been waiting for Angela to answer just one of the messages he’d left with her service.

  He stood in front of the phone, his eyes dull, and he had the helpless look of an animal caught in a trap. He wanted to take a walk somewhere but he was afraid that the minute he left the apartment the phone would ring and he’d be out walking around when he could have been talking to Angela. He was fooling himself. She might as well have been all the way out of his life.

  Pohl walked out of the living room and into the bathroom, ran cold water in the sink and cupped his hands under the flow, then drenched his face. It startled him. He unbuttoned his trousers and urinated in the toilet, flushed, washed his hands in hot water and dried them. He didn’t dry his face. Not one ritual he’d used had helped him out of his obsession with Angela. His shirt was spotted with water. He went to the bedroom to change his shirt.

  He had to leave the apartment even if it twisted his guts into another knot in a long succession of knots that had been tied and untied in his stomach for the past week. The night air was good for him. To be out there in the street with the neon and fluorescent and mercury vapor lights, the people and the cars and buses meant a temporary respite from the overwhelming truth that he was not going to see Angela again.

  He’d go out there to relax because there was only so much he could take of the long-term panic that set in when he waited for the phone to ring. He switched off the lights and it was as if a force he didn’t know he had in him shoved him out the door.

  There were a lot of lights on lower Jackson Street, rich and garish and flooding the darkness with the all-night glow of restaurants and bars and cut-rate shops and throwing off-beat colors in the doorways and on the faces of passersby. Up ahead, where Jackson turned away from him, the colored lights turned away too, and the street made its way down to where there weren’t any lights at all, only the bulky shapes of cheap, two-story apartment houses and an occasional dull streetlight and a block-long, three-story parking garage at the corner of Jackson and Whitfield Terrace. Down there it was all sadness and he knew the way by heart and he knew also that he was going to stay right here in the neighborhood where the rich-colored lights kept him company and gave his eyes a fast-dyed break.

  The action on the street was blurry in front of his tired eyes, and it was the sort of action that formed a wispy curtain and he couldn’t see through it very well and he had the feeling that it wasn’t real. He was biting the inside of his mouth. He saw restaurant customers and bar clients and pedestrians doing nothing but walk up and down the sidewalk on both sides of the street. The noise was just noise that he didn’t hear at first because he was concentrating on the special kind of night frenzy that had nothing to do with the earnestness of daylight. Then he heard the singular sound of a driver leaning hard on the horn of his car. He saw a couple walk out of the entrance to the Black-and-Tan Bar and into the lurid glow pouring thickly from a neon sign. Pohl told himself that they weren’t really there.

  He automatically made a move to conceal his face, but he looked up at them through his fingers. He recognized Burnett’s face from the photograph Shimura had shown him at the Kawamura Agency. They didn’t see him even though the entrance wasn’t far away. He didn’t know the woman, he couldn’t see her face, but she was drunk and having trouble walking, Burnett was holding her up, and he tightened his hold on her to keep her on her feet.

  Burnett propped her against the outside wall of the bar, standing just below the neon sign. Her chin was low, almost resting on her chest, and she looked tired and not interested in
anything more than taking a break from everything. She was drunk, and she was leaning now against the wall with Burnett keeping her from falling down. She started to raise her head. Pohl caught his breath. The thought that it might be Angela struck him as impossible.

  Pohl stepped sideways very quickly and he was in the shadow of an adjacent doorway. He waited, listening to the sound of his own heartbeat. His mouth was dry. His right hand fidgeted with the fabric of his trousers. His skin itched. Maybe he was wrong, maybe it was Angela, and then maybe he was going crazy.

  He wanted a cigarette but he didn’t make a move. He wished he had something he could use to smash in Burnett’s skull because if it was Angela standing there drunk and depending on him to keep her upright, he was going to kill him. He didn’t know if it was Angela, he didn’t see her face when they came out of the bar, but in some twisted way he was telling himself he wanted it to be Angela because then he was going to see the contents of Burnett’s skull splatter onto the expensive material of his suit with his own eyes.

  Let it rest where it is, Pohl thought. You’ve got nothing to do here but wait until they’ve gone.

  He considered it for a moment, then nodded slowly.

  Do yourself a favor. Don’t underestimate your lack of brains. If it’s her, if it’s really Angela, you’re going to kill him. But have you thought for a minute about what’s going to happen to you after that? No, you aren’t thinking, that’s the problem. You’re making plans without thinking, and you’re all too ready to do something without weighing the consequences which are definitely going to take you somewhere you don’t want to go. Shimura said he’d take care of it.

  Pohl grimaced. His mind kept him on a short leash. He wanted to break Burnett’s head, and so he tried to change the channel or switch it off altogether. But his body was just feeling the agitation that went along with his anger.

  He inhaled and held his breath. With his eyes open wide he stepped out of the doorway to face Burnett. Pohl had to jump out of the way of a couple that hadn’t seen him coming. Then he looked up at the neon sign above the bar entrance, his eyes gave it a good hard look to keep him from having to see what really interested him, and when he couldn’t take the delay and waiting his eyes went down and to the right along the wall and kept on going down until they got to the point where the wall met the sidewalk and the empty place where Burnett had been standing with the woman.