Pohl forced a smile that hurt him. He didn’t want the big man to feel guilty because he himself had forced the beating. There was a clock on the wall behind the waiter. He couldn’t read it. He moved his head to get a look at it. The hands of the clock quivered in a veil of water that washed his eyes. Pohl took the towel from the waiter and thanked him. He held it against his own bruised chin. He asked for an iced soft drink and a straw.
The big man squeezed himself into the booth opposite Pohl and stared at his swollen face. He said he was sorry. He folded his hands on the tabletop and entwined his thick fingers. Pohl forced another smile. The big man kept his hands in front of him. The waiter came with Pohl’s drink, the big man asked the waiter for a glass of beer. When the glass arrived he wrapped his big hands around it and swallowed several mouthfuls. He wiped the foam from his lips with the back of his hand. Pohl sipped his iced drink, he didn’t hurry. It was sweet. The straw made it easier for him. The muscles of his face were sore. He’d got what he wanted. He thought of Angela only briefly between long periods of throbbing pain.
[ 24 ]
Violet reached up to the kitchen shelf for the box of powdered chocolate. She stood on tiptoe and the muscles of her calves stretched and rounded into a nice shape. She felt the muscles pulling all the way up her legs to her thighs and buttocks. She wanted to see what she looked like from behind. She knew it was a view that held them and spun them and made them dizzy, and there was no way around it. She used it whenever she got the chance because sooner or later she knew it would get her what she wanted and take her where she wanted to go.
She had thought that Burnett was it, that he was the destination. But she’d thought the same thing with several others. The box of powdered chocolate slipped out of her hand and tumbled off the shelf and she caught it. She took a carton of milk out of the refrigerator, the pan was already on the stove. She poured milk in it and lit the stove and waited for steam to rise up out of the lake of milk. Violet put two spoonfuls of chocolate in a cup, poured hot milk after them and stirred until it was cocoa-brown.
She took the cocoa to her bedroom, sat on the edge of the bed with her bare legs hanging down, her bare feet dangling above the floor. She switched on a lamp that was on the small bedside table and looked at the alarm clock. It was two-forty. She drank the hot chocolate, switched off the light. She tried to sleep but it didn’t come because of the sugar in the cocoa and the thoughts in her head. She might not get what she wanted out of Burnett, and she needed the money. It was quiet in the room except for the ticking of the clock. Violet stretched herself and turned slowly in the bed and began a meditative scratching along the top of her head.
All the thinking in the world wasn’t going to make any difference now. It wouldn’t change a thing. She shut her eyes. She was on the fifth floor and she walked down the stairs very slowly, enjoying the feeling of going down one step at a time, lower and lower, no effort at all. Then she was asleep.
[ 25 ]
Burnett finished his whisky, the sky was growing dark beyond the windows of Angela’s apartment while the big town lights came on and some of them winked at him through the Venetian blinds. Angela got up from her chair. She didn’t have anything more to say to him. What came next was exactly what she knew he wanted her to do, and what she was going to do was what they’d agreed upon, and she breathed a sigh of relief because it was going to be her last performance. She left the living room and went to her bedroom to undress. She looked at herself in the mirror. She forced a smile and tossed her clothes on the bed. She was happy, if that was the word for it, that it was the last time she’d have to pretend that she wanted to play any game at all with Burnett. She might have enjoyed it with someone else, but it was just a means to an end with him.
[ 26 ]
Shimura looked through the stack of photographs Frankie Lundquist had left on his desk. They didn’t tell him very much. Just that Burnett was looking at a lot of real estate in a lot of different locations with a city map in his hand and a handful of papers from a real estate agency. The photographs were crisp and clear, and the expensive lens Kawamura bought recently was evidently worth the price he’d paid. Still, he didn’t see the point of pursuing Burnett, there was nothing unusual in his behavior, and he was losing interest in going after him for a woman like Violet, who he knew was hiding an ugly motive behind her request for an investigation into Burnett’s comings and goings.
On the other hand, he was certain now that the man Violet was paying him to investigate and the man Pohl wanted to know more about were the same man. What was the connection? If there was a connection, what did it mean? The last print in the stack of photos was a shot of the street that ran in front of Burnett’s building. It was night, and Shimura saw a woman’s figure in a phone booth with the beams of a pair of headlights lighting her up.
Shimura searched his desk drawers for a loupe which, when he’d found it, he moved around on the photo in the area of the booth to get a better look at the figure inside it. Violet’s features came into focus, but it didn’t confirm a thing, he’d known all along that she would go on chasing Burnett because there was something big she wanted from him and she wasn’t going to give up until she had it.
[ 27 ]
There was no wind at all and the rain falling from the sky had ceased to fall and the mists were rising from the warm earth. On his first day of going out to purposely observe the excesses of others, Aoyama made his way through a neglected garden strewn with rubbish, heading for the back door of a house he’d only just decided to enter when he made the decision to use it to get to the asphalt road on the other side. It was a technique he’d developed when he wanted to appear to others as if he had just left his own house by the front door so that it didn’t look like he was snooping around a neighborhood he didn’t belong to.
He wore a dreary gray sun hat and a holly-green, lightweight water-repellant coat. His brown leather boots crushed wet perennial grass, weeds, clover and wildflowers and patches of a kind of plant that spread by creeping rhizomes, scraps of plastic and pieces of paper with advertisements on them, rusted nails and tools, spent brass shells of ammunition, and the bent frame of a bicycle without handlebars.
He caught one of the heels of his boots in the bent, rusted spokes of a wheel and staggered clumsily forward until he regained his balance. Aoyama was short, with a flattish full face, thin lips, and a head covered by sparse black hair, crew cut, a scratchy voice.
He blinked, looking up at the two-story house divided into apartments like the other houses in the neighborhood that hadn’t been torn down and replaced by soulless buildings. He climbed the ordinary wooden stairs, reached for the doorknob, turned it, and leaned weightlessly with his shoulder against the frame until it opened. He went in, shut the door noiselessly behind him. He stood for a moment, his eyes full of the damp gray morning.
He was in the kitchen. Coffee brewed in an automatic drip machine. His eyes followed the length of the horizontal countertop, went up the vertical line of the refrigerator, moved horizontally again along the rows of shelves with bright-hued cereal boxes and small packages closed with rubber bands, transparent and opaque bottles of olive oil and syrup and vinegar, powders and grains and spices that were ground, whole or pulverized. The slightly scuffed linoleum floor, red as a beet, wore signs of recent polishing. He gave everything the professional once-over without moving from the spot, then smiled.