Mark Fishman - No. 22 Pleasure City

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.

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 wiping 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.

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.

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.

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.