Mark Fishman - No. 22 Pleasure City

“Look, I’m finished with you. I don’t want anything. No money, nothing. I met somebody and I like him and I think he’s for me.”

“I’m sure he is.”

“I mean it. I don’t hold anything against you. Just the scar between my legs. And I’m trying to forget it. Promise me you won’t hurt anybody else.”

“Okay, I promise you I’ll knock it off with the cigarettes.” Burnett gave her an insincere smile. His fingers were crossed behind his back.

“What do you say we go out for a drink?”

“How about that place on lower Jackson, the Black-and-Tan Bar?” Burnett said.

“You always did like the cheap places, Lew.”

Fitch got out of his car with the hardcover notebook in one hand, reached his arm out and put the keys in the lock in the car door, turned the key and heard the lock fall into place and saw the button going down with it, then walked to the back entrance of the house where Angela was tied with rope to the plumbing under the bathroom sink.

It was his eighth session with her. He counted each one of them and put a number at the top of the page before he started setting down everything Angela said in the notebook. She was making progress and he felt at last that he was doing something with his life more than chasing after money and taking kidnapping contracts. He hadn’t studied anything like what he was in the process of doing with her. He’d seen movies and read enough books to know that listening was a more important part of a thing like this than asking questions until, at least, he had the right question to ask. Listening was eighty percent, paying attention was essential. It was hard work. That’s why he was so tired when he left the house on Nightingale Lane after a session with Angela Mason.

The notebook was already half-filled with words she’d said and thoughts he’d had during each session while Angela was talking to him from her place on the floor. Fitch scribbled in the margins what sorts of facial expressions she made as she told him her story. At moments he felt sorry for her, but he dropped the emotional line for a more scientific approach and listened quietly, directing her thoughts on a path with a few well-placed words.

Whether or not she’d ever fall in love wasn’t what his job was really about because his job was to wake her up to a pattern she’d been stuck in for a long time, and that pattern involved a lot of manipulation with her sex.

He admitted to himself that he liked what he was doing and sometimes the details she gave him made his cock hard. But there was more to it than that, he’d started to understand something about her that gave him a hint about his own life. She looked very good sprawled out helpless on the floor. He wondered if she’d fall in love with him. He’d read about that possibility.

He unlocked the door at the back entrance, shut and locked it behind him. There was a light on in the hallway, the house was quiet. Then Angela called his name. He left his jacket over the cold radiator in the living room, made his way through the hallway to the bathroom where a low-watt bulb burned in the ceiling. She was upright and leaning with her shoulder against the wall beneath the sink. She looked worn out. There were circles under her sea-blue eyes and the deep color of those eyes was washed out.

“You look tired,” Fitch said.

“I didn’t sleep, not really.”

He sat on the closed toilet seat. “What is it? You worried about something?”

“Give me a cigarette, will you?”

Fitch reached up, moved the blindfold from the towel and pulled the towel off the towel rack, ran cold water on a part of it and wiped Angela’s face for her. He went to get his jacket from the living room. When he came back he snapped a cigarette out of the pack, lit it for her and put it between her lips.

Angela took a long pull at it, exhaled, then blinked her eyes, indicating that he ought to take it out of her mouth.

“Thanks,” she said. “Can you loosen these ropes? They’re cutting into my skin. I moved a lot last night. Trying to sleep.”

“Okay.”

When the ropes were loosened a bit, Fitch took up his notebook and pen, remembered the cigarette and picked it off the edge of the sink and took a drag, offered it to her, put it between her lips until she’d had a puff, then put it out under the running tap.

“What were you thinking about while you couldn’t sleep?”

“You.”

It was Violet’s turn to take Pohl’s arm to keep her balance as she walked alongside him a block away from Winthrop and Front Street as they headed back in the direction of Jackson, winding through streets she didn’t recognize. She was still drunk from the time she’d spent in the Black-and-Tan Bar, but the confrontation between Pohl and Burnett had sobered her up a little and even though she didn’t know where she was going she knew enough to keep quiet and hold on to Pohl’s arm.

As they got to the corner of Jackson and Norwood Street, Pohl took her around the corner and straight to a bar on lower Jackson opposite the Black-and-Tan. The doors swung shut behind them. It wasn’t very busy. Pohl found an empty booth, pushed Violet in first and then got in on the same side, next to her.

Violet lowered her head, covered her eyes with her hands. She cried without making a sound. Pohl put his arm around her shoulders, her hands fell into her lap, she leaned her head against him. He looked down at her hands. The hem of her tight skirt stretched across her white thighs.

She reached out toward his hand, but Pohl withdrew it before she’d got hold of it. The woman was drunk and vulnerable and Burt Pohl wasn’t going to take advantage of it. He was just beginning to calm down after smashing Burnett in the face and enjoying it. He ordered drinks to celebrate. She excused herself to go to the toilet to fix her face. He looked around at the bar.

It was shabbily elegant, a third-rate joint filled with small-timers of all varieties and a few slumming high rollers that came in for the atmosphere. Pohl hadn’t been in here before, but he liked what he saw, especially the ruby-red decoration, the lush overstuffed furniture with vinyl-coated fabric made to look like leather and the fake mahogany bar.

His eyes came to a tall man at the bar with a swarthy aquiline face and greasy hair, wearing a tight-fitting dark suit. The man was holding a drink in his left hand and smiling. He was drunk. He leaned over the bar, told the bartender something and the bartender laughed loudly and Pohl saw the tall man’s mouthful of teeth as he laughed along with the bartender.

Violet returned from the toilet, Pohl got up, she slid in past him, he sat down next to her. The waiter brought two cocktails to the table.

“To Burnett’s broken up face,” Pohl said, raising his glass.

“You know his name?” Violet asked, her eyes narrowed.

Pohl didn’t know what to say, then he thought of something and tried it on her: “You said it in front of me.”

“Oh, that’s right.”

Pohl took a swallow of his drink and so did Violet Archer. They looked at each other and smiled. Pohl’s eyes came to rest on the hem of her skirt. He caught himself eyeing her, looked up and straight ahead.

“I don’t even know your name,” Violet said.

“Burt,” he said. “Burt Pohl.”

They shook hands.

Violet picked up her drink, sipped it, looked around at the bar and didn’t seem to recognize it.

He wondered if she was still drunk.

“Ever been here before?” she asked.

“First time.”

“For me, too. Didn’t know it existed.”

“You were just across—” Pohl stopped himself.