Mark Fishman - No. 22 Pleasure City

Pohl sat in a chair and sipped from his cup of tea. His head started to ache as the cocktails wore off and he got up to take an aspirin. He liked Violet — who wouldn’t like a woman like that? — she attracted him in a cheap sort of way, but he didn’t ever want to see her again because he knew if he saw her again she’d bring some sort of disaster with her.

And she’d always make him think of Burnett and the thought of Burnett would drag him down to the picture he kept in his head of Angela with a ball-gag in her mouth and under other circumstances that picture might’ve made his cock hard if it wasn’t that Burnett was a part of it.

The tea settled him down. He called Shimura at home. Shimura told him that there had been a development, that he’d have news in forty-eight hours. Pohl put the receiver in the cradle, sighed. He was excited, but not hopeful, and while he wanted more than anything to see Angela, he felt sick in his stomach because he didn’t know what to expect from her when Shimura brought her to the surface.

Pohl got into bed exhausted, shut his eyes right away but couldn’t sleep. His mind scratched at the details of what he’d seen a few nights before and how he’d felt since Angela disappeared and even though he came up with almost nothing to hold on to what he did have in front of him was enough to keep him awake for another hour.

The owner of the market at Ruby and 12th lived on the second floor of the building next door and he’d known Shimura for years, but he didn’t know what Shimura did for a living because nothing personal passed between them, only small talk, and as long as his customers paid their bills the shop owner never asked questions. A voice in his head told him from the start that the best thing to do with a quiet man like Shimura was to keep his mouth buttoned up on private matters. It wasn’t just with Shimura that he was discreet, he respected everyone’s privacy, especially when it belonged to a client.

Stankovitch was a Slav, and his friends called him Stanky. He was honest, worked hard and earned enough money to provide for himself and his wife and to send his daughter to a local university. He read true-crime books, Slavic-language newspapers and the local city edition, and he took his family to the movies an average of once a week. His cousin looked after the store with him and managed on his own whenever Stankovitch took a day off work.

Now he walked out from behind the counter and went up one of the narrow aisles, down another, up the third and down the fourth, looking at all the products he stocked until he’d made the rounds, admiring what he’d built up by himself with the help of his cousin since he moved to the Midwestern city like other Slavic-speaking people who’d come from a shattered and disappointed country.

The door swung open. Shimura came in followed by a breath of fresh night air, Stankovitch gave him a smile, went behind the counter and stood in front of the cash register with his hands flat on the countertop.

“Well, hello again.”

“Hello, Stankovitch. How are you?” Shimura said.

Shimura wasn’t secretive but selective about who he’d give his confidence to and he’d never had a reason until now to say anything more than a few words about the weather or the price of an item or to ask after Stankovitch’s family. The dingy-blonde had made a big impression on him and the erection that went with it wanted to know more about her.

He looked around as if he were trying to remember what he’d come in there for. The palms of his hands were moist. He rubbed them together, bit his lip hard, then forced a smile to maintain dignity and pride in front of Stankovitch. It wasn’t in his nature to ask anyone a question that might reveal something about his personal life just by asking it.

“Stankovitch,” he began hesitantly, “I want to know if you can tell me who the young woman is that was in here when I was in here an hour ago.”

“Why, yes.” Stankovitch cleared his throat. “My daughter, Gracie.”

Fitch straightened his tie, smoothed the front of his shirt and put on the wrinkled linen jacket he’d draped over the back of the chair. He buttoned the top and middle button of the jacket and looked at himself in the mirror. He looked like a proper therapist except that he’d used gel to slick his hair back and eyeliner to put an accent to his eyes.

Now he had two and a half notebooks filled with the words she’d said and the notes he’d taken and they were held together by a thick rubber band. He took his time finishing a cup of coffee with the notebooks and evening paper in front of him at the small kitchen table tucked in a corner next to the window overlooking the alleyway.

Fitch picked up the half-filled notebook, checked his pocket for his pen, folded the newspaper, got up from the table, and dropped it into a paper sack with the other newspapers he recycled every week. He grabbed a chocolate bar for when he got hungry midway in the session with Angela since he wasn’t going to order anything for himself tonight, and he went out to his car.

On Fitch’s way to the house on Nightingale Lane a vague uneasiness began to grow on him. He gripped the steering wheel tight as he thought about her unhealthy attachment to him. It was a clear-cut case of transference, he was sure of that, but it didn’t make him any more comfortable now that he could put a name on it.

She’d already volunteered a number of sexual favors as she lay tied up on the floor beneath the sink. Last night she’d offered to suck his cock while she knelt in front of him with her hands behind her back. He wasn’t in the mood to take her up on the favor.

The fact that she wanted to do it was part of the habit she was trying to break and breaking it was the reason she’d hired him to kidnap her in the first place. He had nothing to gain but momentary pleasure and everything to lose. His job was to work with her on a so-called problem and not enjoy himself at her expense while she went on mixing up sex with love when she wasn’t really in love at all. He wanted the money she’d promised him.

Fitch swung the car onto Delaplaine Road, then slowed down as he saw the turning for Lavergne Terrace and a blur of two figures huddled together leaping swiftly out of the beam of the headlights.

It could’ve been any couple of figures in the shadows lit up by a pair of headlights but something told Fitch that these figures meant trouble and it was the sort of trouble that might wreck his chances of laying hands on the money he was expecting from Angela.

He listened to his intuition and experience. Lavergne Terrace had been practically deserted every night until now. The two figures disappeared without being lit up by a light from an open door, which meant that a door wasn’t opened, they didn’t go into a house, and if they didn’t go into a house he didn’t know where they were because they couldn’t just disappear unless they were hiding themselves from someone and maybe that someone was him.

Fitch was suspicious. He kept the car going into the turn and left Delaplaine Road behind, cleared Lavergne Terrace by making a right onto a dingy, narrow side-street and drove between grimy brick buildings, avoiding 4 Nightingale Lane all together. He didn’t know who they were but if they were watching him he wasn’t going to lead them straight to Angela. He’d make his way back to Nightingale Lane on foot from another direction than the one he’d been using up until tonight.

He parked the car under the outstretched branches of a tree around the twenty-four-hundred block of West Balmoral Avenue, a block north of Summerdale, with a big cemetery between him and the lake and he started back on foot in the direction of Nightingale Lane with a chocolate bar in his pocket and the notebook tucked under his arm.