No. 22 Pleasure City

by Mark Fishman

  Aoyama reached into the pocket of his raincoat and found the crumpled pack of cigarettes wedged between parts of his disguise. The pack was almost empty. He decided to wait for another smoke until after dessert.

  The fat man appeared with a dessert tray and a pitcher of sparkling water with ice. He walked cautiously, as always paying close attention to where he was going, and he glanced up from time to time at the table. When a single stride separated him from his goal, the fat man looked proudly at Aoyama. He set the tray down, put the glass of water in front of his guest, and then made a sweeping gesture at the dessert.

  “Plum and star anise fool,” the fat man said. “I made them myself.”

  “They’re wonderful,” Aoyama said genuinely.

  “You know what a fool is?”

  Aoyama grinned but didn’t answer him.

  “Beat two egg yolks in cream, then fold in puréed plum infused with star anise,” the fat man explained. He handed Aoyama a dessert spoon and napkin from the tray.

  Aoyama looked at the fat man with a great deal of respect, congratulated him. The fat man accepted the praise. Aoyama lifted the dessert spoon and plunged it into a layer of the fool and tasted it. The fat man sat down.

  “That’s something, it’s really delicious,” he told the fat man. “You’re a genius in the kitchen.”

  “It’s not the only kind of fool there is,” the fat man replied with a businesslike voice. “You can use all sorts of fruit.”

  Aoyama took another spoonful, and the creamy, refreshing fruitflavored dessert rolled down his throat.

  “That’s poetry,” he said.

  “Now you’re exaggerating.”

  The fat man put the tip of his spoon into the fool and turned it slowly, taking his time, until he had a dollop that he put in his mouth where his alert taste buds evaluated the flavors.

  “Maybe you’re not,” the fat man said.

  When they finished, the fat man poured coffee for them, handed Aoyama the sugar bowl. Aoyama put a lump of cane sugar in his cup and stirred it. The fat man put three sugar cubes in his coffee, stirred it and drank it down in a gulp.

  [ 47 ]

  They were walking quickly now, several blocks away from Jackson, and Pohl followed them when they turned onto Winthrop, a narrow street resembling an alley because of its cobblestones and high walls of apartment buildings on either side. They were close to the river and he could smell the blend of dampness and pollution in the mild night air. The woman’s heels clattered against the sidewalk.

  It was all very calm on the surface but the undercurrent was an unpleasant rushing of noise on the order of a profound disequilibrium in the thinking process of Pohl’s mind. And then his mind was a lens focused on time and he was seeing through a tunnel packed tightly with the urgency of minutes that separated him from this woman who might be Angela, staggering alongside Burnett on Winthrop Street.

  Pohl stopped in his tracks. He felt pressure in his chest that had the weight of a bus behind it. It wasn’t the pressure of a heart attack but the breaking down of the machine that pushed him forward to follow Burnett and the woman because he was afraid of what he’d find out if he caught up with them and he was afraid of how he’d feel if he didn’t. His determination to know whether or not it was Angela drove him on.

  The couple slowed down and stopped at the end of Winthrop at the intersection of Winthrop and Front Street, which ran parallel to the river, and it looked as though Burnett was trying to convince the woman not to move, to stay put, and he laid his hands on her shoulders, standing so close to her that she couldn’t turn away from him.

  There was a single streetlight on the far side of Front throwing light in a wide arc on the concrete footpath above the river and down below it on the surface of water slapping against the embankment. The light didn’t quite reach them, they were silhouetted by the glow behind them on the opposite side of the street. And since the light didn’t reach them, the light didn’t fall anywhere near Pohl, and he knew he was just another part of the darkness at this end of Winthrop and that they couldn’t see him.

  Burnett’s silhouette lit a cigarette and Pohl saw his face, but the woman’s face was in profile the brief instant the lighter was lit and he couldn’t make out more than the shape of her nose. It might have been Angela. But it didn’t make sense to see her drunk. As long as he’d known her she’d never had more to drink than she could handle.

  The woman was leaning against the wall near the dark side entrance of a building that overlooked the river. The wall kept her from falling down. Burnett pressed his lower body against her belly, keeping her from moving in any direction. The hand holding the cigarette waved slowly over her head. Pohl watched the glowing end of it move in wide circles in the darkness.

  A tugboat or a city fireboat went by with its engine running almost silent on the river flowing perpendicular to Winthrop and a bright light mounted in the forward part of it, very near the upper end of the bow, swept the two opposite sides of land. The beam of light also swept the two figures at the end of Winthrop, and Pohl saw Burnett’s hand lifting the hem of the woman’s skirt, baring her thigh, and she raised her leg to complement the motion and pressed her knee against him. The spotlight went past them and disappeared to shine on the other side of the river. Pohl blinked and saw nothing but orangeyellow spots before his eyes.

  This time he was waiting for the light, concentrating at the place where the light would shine, and when it was shining there he saw Burnett leaning against the woman and gripping her neck with his hand and pushing her head uncomfortably backward against the brick wall of the building.

  The light kept moving until it was on its way to the other side of the river, and at the same time that it left them he heard the woman’s muffled scream and saw the silhouette of Burnett’s hand and the glowing tip of the cigarette and the woman, using her last ounce of strength, shoving the hand holding the cigarette so that it flew away from her face.

  But he was already going forward and his legs were moving quickly and his arms swinging at his sides and his hands clenched into fists and his feet sailing over the cobblestones.

  Then he’d knocked Burnett down and was on top of him and he was pummeling his face with his fists until he felt the blood and heard the cracking noise that was the sound of Burnett’s nose breaking. The blood he felt on his own skin but couldn’t see drove him to throw a roundhouse right hand and it caught Burnett full on the jaw and Pohl felt the jaw give way and then he put another punch into the side of Burnett’s face just below the ear.

  The boat’s spotlight was out of reach of the place where Pohl stood with his legs apart on either side of Burnett who was lying on his back moaning and rocking to and fro and gripping his face with his hands. Pohl wasn’t completely awake, and he wasn’t really asleep, the feeling was on the order of being a live high-voltage line full of rage, with consciousness and reason gone until the hemoglobin cells got charged with oxygen and increased sharply and reached his brain to relieve the staggering pressure inside his skull.

  Now the elementary agony, the dizziness and nausea of anger was gone and he felt the weight of his body and the soles of his feet standing on the damp cobblestones. With an important part of consciousness coming back to him, he looked around for the woman.

  She was standing in the same place, with her back against the brick wall and her hands covering her face. She wasn’t covering her face because she was scared, she just didn’t want to see what was happening, and now that the only sound she heard was Burnett groaning and no punches being thrown and someone breathing hard she moved her hands away from her face and looked at Burnett’s assailant, the man who’d helped her.

  Pohl didn’t recognize her. She was pretty and well-dressed and slim and she’d really had too much to drink. She wasn’t Angela. But what he’d just done to Burnett wasn’t dependent on whether or not the woman was going to be Angela. It didn’t matter one way or another to Pohl because smashing his fist into Burnett wa
s something he’d wanted to do for a long time and it was joined to a real hatred of any torture as a form of violence. It was a great pleasure to smash Burnett’s face in.

  Now the woman’s slanted green eyes were blank and not focused on anything. The sound that came from her was the clicking sound of her chattering teeth. The shivering was driven by something other than the temperature because it wasn’t winter and it was mild, and Pohl knew that it wasn’t because she was frightened. Maybe it was the alcohol and sugar racing through her blood or the excitement of watching a man beat Burnett up and the hunger for more of it. Pohl took a step forward, moving slowly toward her.

  “My name is Violet Archer,” she said, trembling with a smile.

  Pohl took her gently by the arm.

  [ 48 ]

  It was after seven in the evening when Violet left the man with the messy blonde hair in the hotel on upper Jackson Street, and instead of going straight home to shower and change her clothes, she went to the phone booth on East Olive that stood across from Burnett’s apartment. She watched the entrance.

  At eight-forty a beautiful black woman left the building, walking stiffly and favoring her left leg, and Violet saw Burnett watching the woman from his window as she made her way down the street to the bus stop. As she waited for the bus, Violet saw her rubbing the inside of her right leg through the fabric of her skirt. And the sight of her doing the same thing she herself had done to ease the pain was enough to tell her that this woman had been with Burnett and Burnett had played the game with the cigarette and that she and the black woman shared the same hurt because now they both had a scar between their legs.

  Violet was very angry and she was angry on behalf of herself and the young woman standing at the bus stop and any woman who was a victim of Burnett’s sadistic play. She wanted to twist a scarf around his neck and pull it tight until he turned blue and his tongue stuck out and he stopped breathing forever. But there was a tingling between her legs that told her she was turned on in a sick sort of way by the pain the other woman was feeling now. She shook her head, lifted the phone from the cradle and pressed Burnett’s number. It rang five times and he picked it up.

  “I want to come up. Can I come up?” she asked him.

  “I’m worn out,” Burnett said.

  “It’ll only be for a couple of minutes.”

  “Promise?”

  “Promise.”

  [ 49 ]

  Aoyama said goodbye to the fat man and thanked him for the food he’d enjoyed and started to climb over the fence when the fat man took him by the arm and led him around to a gate at the side of the house.

  “I couldn’t do it,” the fat man said, pointing at the fence. “And you’ve just finished a big meal.”

  “You’ve got a point.”

  “So long.” The fat man waved a thick hand.

  The afternoon was beginning to show in the changing color of the sky. There was still plenty of sun but the way it lit the sky tinted everything with amber. Aoyama felt sleepy but he knew the sleepiness would wear off and the strong coffee and good meal would keep him going until nightfall. The streets were busy with cars that came up close one behind the other and the drivers’ impatience gave way to a lot of sounding horns that no one paid attention to.

  He arrived at the corner of Barton Road and Hartrey Avenue and turned right on Hartrey and kept on going at a good pace toward the liquor store sandwiched between a market and a Laundromat. In the liquor store he bought a pack of cigarettes and stood just outside the entrance smoking, eyeing the customers entering the market emptyhanded and leaving loaded down with groceries. A kid on a skateboard sailed past him, threading his way between the people coming and going.

  Aoyama sat down on a bench a few feet away from the bus stop, pulled the photo of Angela Mason out of his jacket again, stared at it, but didn’t see her face because his mind was elsewhere, going over the lunch he’d had with the fat man. He dropped his cigarette to the sidewalk, crushed the butt with his heel, put the photo back in his pocket. He was going to meet Eto at eight forty-five.

  He left the bench and walked along the sidewalk the length of Hartrey away from Barton Road. When he came to the entrance of the card club called Four Aces, after a brand of Sri Lankan cigarettes, he rang the bell that brought a familiar, skinny little man with a pockmarked face to the door.

  “Who is it?” the man asked.

  “Aoyama, 301.”

  “Come on in,” the skinny man said. “It’s been a long time.”

  “I haven’t been in the mood to lose money lately,” Aoyama said, stepping past him into the vestibule. “Or, I really haven’t had the money to lose.”

  “I’ve heard that one a hundred times,” the man said, smiling. “Follow me.”

  Aoyama walked behind him down the hallway dimly lit by shaded lights from dull sconces evenly spaced along the cheap paneled walls.

  The hallway led them to three doors, the door on the left led to a nicely furnished private room, behind the door on the right was the kitchen. The man with the pockmarked face swung open the door in the middle and Aoyama saw the five familiar card tables with five lights hanging down above them from the high ceiling and a lot of cigarette and cigar smoke hovering above the players. Black shades were drawn over the rectangular windows at the opposite side of the room.

  He knew a few of the players as regulars and he recognized some of the weathered faces of those he’d seen before but didn’t know very well. Some of the regular players looked up at him, but only for an instant. He sat down at a table of four to make it five hands, and the man they called Walter fanned a pack of cards on the table, scooped them up, riffled them as he watched Aoyama put money on the table, turned them over, smacked them down and indicated them for a cut.

  Aoyama cut the cards.

  “Closed poker,” Walter said. “Fifty cents up and a dollar to open.”

  They’d been playing for more than two hours, and on the next play a man named Parker called Aoyama on what appeared to be a bluff and Aoyama showed him a third ace that beat his three kings. Aoyama told them that he’d had enough and he thanked them and gathered his meager winnings.

  He shut the door behind him, stood in the hallway and lit a cigarette, then he heard a scuffle coming from behind the door of the private room. There was a slurred curse, a raised voice and someone shouting and the shout was followed by a loud crash. Aoyama listened to the fight over money that he was used to hearing in the private room of the Four Aces.

  He walked slowly down the hallway and when he got to the vestibule he tipped the skinny man who’d got up from the stool near the wall where he’d been reading an evening paper. He opened the door for Aoyama and said goodnight.

  He threw his cigarette away standing next to the entrance of the club and looked cautiously up and down the street. At this end of Hartrey there wasn’t much going on after seven-forty. A wind had come up but it wasn’t very strong. It blew away the paper trash in the gutter and freshened the air.

  Aoyama took his time walking to the end of Hartrey, then turned left without looking up at the sign. A few cars cruised along the winding path of the drive. The mild evening embraced him. He was in a neighborhood that he knew very well. He counted his steps and when he got to eighteen he turned right on Delaplaine Road and from here all he had to do was follow this road and it would take him to Lavergne Terrace where he was going to meet Eto.

  [ 50 ]

  Five men in worn and filthy clothes stood below a viaduct with disused railroad tracks built over a ravine, warming themselves around a fire that crept past the rim of a rusty barrel three feet high. Traffic ran smoothly along West Samuel Drive, perpendicular to the track, and the five men paid no attention to the sounds of the nightly flow of cars and the human beings in them. One of them bent over to pick up a bottle tucked in an overcoat folded to cradle it from rolling the rest of the way down the ravine.

  They passed the bottle around, each taking a judicious swallow after wipin
g away the saliva where the previous man’s lips had sucked at the open end like a baby’s bottle of milk. Most of them weren’t drunks, they drank just to keep away their cold-death isolation from the rest of the world which no longer thought of them as human beings. The heat from the cheap wine let them feel the blood in their veins. Three out of five men were laid off from work two years ago without hope for a new job, no health insurance, no savings, and it didn’t take long before they’d ended up on the street. The fourth man was mentally disturbed and the fifth, permanently on the sauce.

  The mental institution was shut down two years ago and the patients were let loose on the city without shelter, follow-up or any direction to follow. The number of employees at the factory where three of the men had worked was drastically reduced after the owners found it more profitable to have their products assembled in another country with ill-paid labor. The drunk liked to drink. The lights from West Samuel at the intersection with the railway tracks threw shadows of a series of arches down on them from the viaduct.

  [ 51 ]

  Burnett had made a few phone calls and two visits with a man named Fitch during the period Shimura was having him tailed. Frankie followed Burnett when he’d gone out to meet Fitch on a Wednesday afternoon. Burnett picked him up at the intersection of Paulina and 34th not far from the south branch of the river. They rode in Burnett’s car to a restaurant. She wrote everything down, called Shimura from a pay phone, and he sent Eto to the restaurant. Burnett and Fitch sat opposite one another in a booth and drank coffee and talked in whispers except when the waitress refilled their cups and then they talked in normal voices about baseball. Eto sat in a booth with his back to them and heard more than a few words without knowing the context. Later, relying on a very good memory, he put on paper what he’d been able to catch from their whispered conversation.