Mark Fishman - No. 22 Pleasure City

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.

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.

He spun around, looked up and down and left and right and didn’t see them. He didn’t see Burnett. He didn’t see the woman. He wanted to shout Angela’s name at the crowd moving along the sidewalk. He wanted to smash Burnett’s face with his fists. He wanted all of it to be finished. Finally, he wanted a cigarette.

He lit a cigarette, all the time looking at the faces of the people walking past him. He took a slow pull at the cigarette. The smoke seeped from the corners of his mouth. He smiled dimly and thought: There’s nothing like tobacco to steady the nerves. He stood there with the cigarette in his hand and all of a sudden he didn’t feel anything. He flung the cigarette to the pavement.