No. 22 Pleasure City

by Mark Fishman

  Frankie photographed them entering the restaurant, sitting in the booth, leaving the restaurant, from behind and beside them at a few red traffic lights. The shape and details of Fitch’s ears were clearly visible in four of the photos.

  At the second meeting on the following Sunday morning, Burnett’s car pulled over to the curb in a drab neighborhood on the Westside and another sedan drove up five minutes later with Fitch in it. Fitch got out, went to the driver’s side of Burnett’s car and received an envelope from Burnett’s hands. Frankie called it in. Shimura identified Fitch from the photos and the shape and details of his ears.

  [ 52 ]

  Eto stood out of reach of the glow of a streetlamp with his arms folded across his chest and his shoulder pressed against the supporting wall of a house under renovation on Lavergne Terrace. He’d been watching the streets since seven o’clock when Shimura had given him the go-ahead.

  Frankie had followed Fitch from his apartment. He went on various errands in the late afternoon that included a visit to a stationary store and a light meal in a diner, then to this neighborhood where he’d parked his car at Lavergne Terrace. Now Fitch was two blocks away with his notebook and pen in the small, four-room house at 4 Nightingale Lane. Before Frankie went off the job she gave Shimura the information and he’d passed it on to Eto, who’d been working on a divorce case. Eto went directly to Lavergne Terrace. He hadn’t been getting much sleep and needed some rest. The total for this tailing and surveillance business came to three days and two nights plus the overtime he was putting in on gathering evidence for the legal dissolution of a marriage that was heading straight for court.

  He looked at his wristwatch. It was eight-fifteen. Aoyama had said he’d meet him to get an update on the situation. The neighborhood was quiet, windows were lit by lamps and the light that filtered through drawn shades glowed faintly at the street without really reaching it. Eto chewed gum. There was a cool, soft breeze. He took a deep breath of night air.

  Each time Fitch went to Pigsville and the house on Nightingale Lane, he stayed no less than an hour. Eto had marked the time with his watch and kept the dates and times in a file in his head until he found a minute to put them down in a book for Shimura. He did nothing more than wait for Fitch to come and go to the house, he didn’t try to look through the windows whose blinds were always drawn, he didn’t listen at the door because it was a thick, solid door. But he did see that Fitch carried a hardcover notebook whenever he went in and out of the house.

  Eto had been at the Kawamura Agency for three years. Now it was the beginning of his fourth year. He worked with Aoyama directly under Shimura, and Shimura had told him to clock Fitch, nothing more than that, so that was what he’d been doing.

  He chewed his gum and began to reconstruct in his mind the last encounter he’d had with his father when his father visited him in a city in the Southwest. They were riding together on a train called the Texas Eagle to a Midwestern city in the region of the Great Lakes.

  Eto’s father was reading a local newspaper, Eto stared out the window at the scenery. The train slowed on the tracks, coming to a stop. It was the fourth time the train had stopped. Eto frowned. They’d stopped because it was another freight train and freight trains had the right-of-way over passenger trains and this freight train, at least a mile long, moved very slowly with its more than eighty cars trailing behind two engines and all of it curving away from the waiting passenger train into the distance of the plain that spread out toward the horizon.

  Eto calculated with his eyes shut that if there were eighty-five cars with 70-foot hoppers and a conservative five feet between them the length of the mixed merchandise freight train was more than 6000 feet long. He opened his eyes and sighed.

  When the Texas Eagle lurched forward and the train was on its way northeast again, Eto’s father set the newspaper in his lap and looked at his son, and beyond him, the landscape changed from broad, pleasant pastures, grassy flatland and trees to a used car lot and a warehouse at the outskirts of a town. Behind a pair of glasses with thick lenses his enlarged eyes followed Eto’s gaze and fell into the passing street of the small Midwestern town as the train went by the offices of the Great Lakes Excavating Company and the cream-colored brick two-story building of Allied Insulation.

  “Another small town,” he said unimaginatively to his son. “That makes a half-dozen since we left the big city.”

  Eto turned, looked at his father and smiled faintly.

  He started to tell his father to knock it off, small talk wasn’t interesting to anybody, especially to him, saw kindness in his father’s expression and heard himself say: “The Midwest is the sum of its small towns,” with a voice that told of the years he’d lived in America.

  A man the size of three men got up from his seat and went past them. He wore a pair of black, knee-length shorts and a black, sleeveless T-shirt and his exposed, large belly hung over the waistband of his shorts. He wore his long hair in a ponytail and had a trimmed Vandyke beard and mustache. His flabby white arms were covered in tattoos. He might’ve been the biggest man they’d ever seen if they hadn’t come from a country of sumo wrestlers.

  He was downstairs in the toilet for five minutes. They heard him breathing hard as he climbed the narrow stairs from the lower level of the train car, their eyes followed him when he heaved past using the luggage rack on either side as support on the journey back to his seat.

  “A man that size — ” Eto’s father said.

  “Yes,” Eto said. “They eat a lot.”

  They looked at each other.

  “Let’s get some rest,” Eto said, reaching out to put his hand on his father’s arm.

  “There are blank pages in the book,” Eto’s father said. “I’d like to fill them in.”

  “You mean you want to tell me something?”

  “I’m not going to be greedy.”

  “I know that.” Eto straightened himself in the seat. “That’s why we’re going where we’re going. The accountant, then straight to the bank.”

  “I thought it was settled,” Eto’s father said.

  “It will be.”

  “That accountant hasn’t done anything stupid, has he?”

  Eto’s father gripped the edge of the newspaper in his lap.

  “Nothing’s wrong,” Eto assured him.

  “The money I’ve been sending — ”

  “We’re going to figure it out.” Eto squeezed his father’s arm. “What you want for yourself and what I want for myself make up a single item we can work on together.”

  “You want the same thing I want, don’t you?”

  “That’s right.”

  Eto’s father let go of the newspaper and it fell to the floor beneath the seat in front of him. The Texas Eagle kept on its tracks going northeast. Eto bent down and picked up the paper and put it in his father’s hands.

  “There’s nothing to worry about,” Eto said. “I want you to meet the accountant. So he can put a face to the transfers you’ve been sending. He’s been asking questions and he’s talking about the tax people. I don’t want him to get the wrong idea.”

  “Taxes,” Eto’s father said, swallowing the word after it’d made a lump in his throat.

  Two days later they learned that the accountant, with the help of a woman at the bank, had cooked the books and a certain amount of money got lost and it amounted to a lot of money. A large part of it disappeared without a trace and what was left of it had been diverted to where Eto and his father couldn’t touch it and the two crooks could profit by it. In the meantime the accountant had put the government in the picture on taxes due in order to muddy the whole thing, and what money remained for Eto and his father was just enough to pay them. Because the money Eto’s father was funneling into the account was itself embezzled from the company he worked for in Japan, they couldn’t do anything about it.

  His father went back to his job as an accounts manager for an investment firm in the fifty-four-story main tower
in Roppongi, a vast office, residential and cultural complex of concrete and steel developed by Mori Building at the center of Tokyo, while Eto, with no money of his own, had to make a living right away, so he stayed in the Midwestern city and went to work at the Kawamura Agency.

  Eto yawned, shook his head. He stared at the small garden in the middle of Lavergne Terrace. He looked at his wristwatch. It was eight forty-five. He left the supporting wall and crept to a nearby doorway. The faint glow of a streetlamp lit his face. He heard footsteps coming from the direction of Delaplaine Road. It was Aoyama. They walked silently together along Lavergne Terrace toward Nightingale Lane.

  [ 53 ]

  It was a quarter to eight, but the agency wasn’t empty. Kawamura was still in his office with the door closed. Asami, just outside his door, switched off the desk lamp and got up and went through the agency and turned off all the lights that other employees left on because they didn’t listen to Kawamura when he told them he wanted to save as much money as he could on electricity because there was so much energy wasted in the office that they didn’t have any to spare.

  The blue evening light and the stray clouds and the end of the working day hung like a veil over the agency, the building, the neighborhood streets and the city. And that veil kept a natural warmth from drifting out of all the inhabitants and the buildings and made the city a particularly comfortable place for the night. Asami went quietly to Kawamura’s door and knocked once and went in as if she were floating on air.

  Kawamura looked up from the handwritten notes on the yellow notepad in his left hand and broke into a smile. Asami blushed, smiling. There was a long silence and the room was so quiet that the noises from the huge city gradually grew more audible. A car backfired. Kawamura looked down at his scribbling on the yellow sheet of paper.

  Finally he observed, as if talking to himself: “If I could just figure an angle to cover Shimura so he doesn’t lose face and I don’t lose too much money.” He looked up again. “Please, sit down.”

  “I don’t want to disturb you.”

  “You won’t ever disturb me.”

  Asami sat down in the chair opposite him.

  “You were angry with him, weren’t you?” she said.

  “I made him think I was. But I know what it’s like to have friends and want to help them.”

  There was a short pause and taxis hooted in the stillness. Asami had nothing to say to the kindness Kawamura had inside him even though he tried to hide it. She was happy she was going to marry him. The difference in their age didn’t matter. Nothing mattered but the fact that she loved him. And she was sure of that.

  “Do you want to have dinner with me, Kawamura-san?”

  He tore the top sheet from the notebook and crumpled it slowly and dropped it in the wastebasket. A large neon sign on the roof of the building opposite blinked on as true night fell soundly on the Midwestern city.

  Shimura edged his car forward in heavy traffic away from downtown. He switched off the music and thought about what Kawamura had said to him and didn’t worry too much about it because he’d known him for such a long time and was used to hearing him go on about the costs of running the agency. And Kawamura was soft under the cold surface of a man running a business. But Shimura wanted to make it right for his own sake. He figured he’d be working for months without pay.

  Then because he was a human being he started to worry about the money. The worry was more or less along practical lines. He couldn’t ask Fitch for money because he wasn’t looking for a payoff, in fact he even saw the possibility that he might have to give Fitch something since he’d have to get him to agree to his side of it. He’d have to convince him it was the right thing to do and Fitch wasn’t some kid who accepted candy for payment and if he didn’t go along with it he might make things difficult for them. A struggle wasn’t what they needed to get him to give her up. And what he knew about Fitch didn’t give him a lot of confidence in the setup. He’d have to play it as it lay.

  Shimura turned right onto Ruby Avenue and parked at the curb. He walked over to the market on 12th. A plump young woman with dingy-blonde hair walked through the narrow aisles gathering items that she held in her arms. Shimura picked out a couple of bottles of sparkling water from the refrigerator. He wanted to ignore her but found himself sneaking a look as she bent down to pick up an item placed on the lower shelf. She wore a jean jacket and beneath it a tight-fitting dress made of some stretchy material that spread out across her round bottom and gave him a good picture of the shape of her buttocks and the space between them.

  The man who owned the market gave him a smile and the way Shimura interpreted the smile, what he thought it meant, left him cold. He was just looking at her and didn’t want to do anything more than that because it was enough of a pleasure to look at all women. But that quickly changed. He took a chocolate bar from the display in front of the cash register. The plump blonde was standing behind him. He could smell the perfume she wore and it was a good smell and it wasn’t cheap. He paid for the water and chocolate bar.

  Standing on the sidewalk, he tried to shake off her smell and turn the dizziness he felt into a picture of his girlfriend. The picture didn’t develop because Tomiko was out of town for a few days working flights going east and west. He hadn’t thought of getting mixed up with another woman, it just came to him when he saw the blonde. He didn’t even think about whether or not she might accept an invitation because thinking wasn’t what it was about when he was under the influence of a hard-on. He saw his tongue run up and down the space between her buttocks leaving a snail’s trail of saliva on fine blonde hairs. He blinked, lit a cigarette, took a drag, tossed it in the street and walked home.

  In the kitchen he poured a glass of sparkling water, squeezed lemon in it and added ice. He drank it down and felt the icy cold hit his erection, but that didn’t make it go away. The dingy-blonde’s buttocks shook before his eyes and his eyes watered as if he were slicing an onion.

  He threw off his jacket, unbuttoned his shirt but left it on, went into his bedroom and dropped his trousers. He lay on his back in bed, shut his eyes and masturbated until he came on the back of his hand. He hadn’t felt such a strong urge in a long time. He got up, washed his hands, buttoned his shirt, walked around the apartment in his boxer shorts with the shirttail over the elastic waistband and his feet in a pair of lavender socks.

  At this point, he wondered what it was about her that had switched him on and made him crazy for sex. He hadn’t felt like this in a long time. He wished that Tomiko wasn’t out of town. He paced back and forth in the living room with an unlit cigarette between his lips. He wasn’t nervous but so intensely focused that he couldn’t stop moving. Then he snapped his fingers, lit the cigarette and sat at his desk.

  People in the city indulged themselves in anything and everything and the need to gratify their appetites was so concentrated and fine that it seeped into the smallest cracks of the mind and left something like biochemical grains there which sprouted desire and that desire grew until it broke sooner or later through the skin. They did whatever they had to do to get themselves a dose of pleasure. The city had got to him. Knowing this, it was as though someone had moved in and lifted a burning weight from his shoulders.

  Shimura put out the cigarette and went to the full-length mirror in the bedroom, stripped off his boxer shorts and socks and shirt. He stared at himself but didn’t see anything except his naked body. There were the usual sparse black hairs on his thighs and chest, a patch of pubic hair and his cock was no longer erect. His skin was masculine, muscular and white.

  He felt a little weary. He wasn’t the man he’d been a few short weeks ago, and he knew it. The search for Angela Mason had made him ask more questions than he’d had answers to, and when those questions were about himself and how he spent his time trying to solve other people’s problems without solving any of his own he became morose.

  But that reflection lasted a few seconds and he recognized the think
ing for what it was which wasn’t anything special except a way to make himself feel bad.

  He didn’t know what he wanted now, but he knew he had to do something to change his mind because standing in front of the mirror looking at himself was making him really crazy. He wasn’t going to waste time figuring out what the biochemical grains were up to, he had to get out of there.

  He threw his discarded clothes in the hamper and got dressed in clean clothes, picked up money and keys to his car, put on a lightweight coat, turned off the lights and left the apartment.

  Standing next to his car on Ruby Street, he hesitated and looked to the left at the corner market. It was still open. He walked slowly toward it.

  [ 54 ]

  Burnett looked at his wristwatch. It was nine o’clock.

  “So, you’ve got a new girl,” Violet said, sitting on the sofa. She narrowed her eyes at him.

  He sat down opposite her, covering himself carefully with the hem of the bathrobe because beneath it he was wearing the dark-blue panty briefs Cathy Jones had worn while they were fucking. Just before she’d left he told her to leave them behind.

  “What’s it to you?” Burnett said, leaning forward to pick up his glass of whisky. The bathrobe parted slightly, he drew it over his knees.

  “Drop it. I’m just warning you,” Violet said firmly.

  “Drop what?” His eyes flickered warily. “What on earth are you talking about?”

  “Don’t play innocent with me, Lew. I saw her. I saw the way she was walking. Limping, really. You’ve done it again. You must’ve done to her what you did to me.”

  “Now listen, Violet — ”

  “No, you listen. If you’ve done any damage to her like you’ve done to me I’ll make sure you’re fucked up permanently by somebody who knows how to do the job.”

  “Don’t threaten me, sister.”

  “You’d better wake up to yourself, Lew.” She stood up. “And don’t call me sister.”