“You’re adding it up backward.” She eased herself down taking the weight off her bruised elbows. Flat on her back, she stared at the ceiling.
“I know when I’m being kidded.”
She said very quietly, “I want to keep you with me.”
His eyes were dull, gazing past her. “You think you know me?”
She shook her head slowly. “You’ll find what you’re looking for but it won’t be what you expected.”
“Fortune-teller.”
She didn’t say anything.
Aoyama took a few steps backward without taking his eyes off her, then hurried out of the kitchen. He went quickly down the hallway toward the front door thinking about the road on the other side of it. It was the only reason he’d gone into this house in the first place, and it seemed now like one of the worst ideas he’d ever had. But the location was right for what he had to do. He wanted the anonymity it gave him.
No sound came from the kitchen to interrupt him. The woman had exhausted him and he felt how much his body was beat up. She’d given him a painful erection. He wasn’t far from the door but he could have been a mile away. The hallway kept its low-ceilinged tunnel-like shape. He felt like an insect slowly being crushed between the pages of a book. His knees almost gave out. He groaned. He didn’t know if he was going to make it. At last he pressed his hand against the smooth surface of the door, peered through the curtained window. The sun shone brightly between clouds from a distant patch of blue sky.
He grasped the handle and turned it and partly opened the door. He poked his head around it to check out Loomis Street for anything unusual, and he breathed in the fresh odor of the damp greens and fairways of a golf course a few blocks away.
“Good-bye!” the woman shouted grudgingly from the kitchen. “Stay alive and wait for me.”
Aoyama jumped, he fumbled with the glasses and plastic nose and latex scalp. The disguise went into his pockets. He massaged his head, rubbed life back into his face, felt his heart bouncing around in his chest. He put the sun hat back on his head, swung the door open, and stepped out onto the porch. He looked like an ordinary resident of the neighborhood.
The door clicked shut behind Aoyama. He stood on the wooden porch and leaned against one of the stone pillars looking at the sidewalk and Loomis Street that shone with needless brilliance. His muscles tensed up. He looked sideways up and down the street past the wooden stairs a few feet in front of him. He looked at the sky where clouds refused to crowd out the sun. He squinted at the sunlight and at the reflection of sunlight in the upper windows of a house at the corner.
People came and went in a dreamy procession, walking in both directions along the sidewalk. Aoyama yawned, his jaw made a pleasant click in his head. Men dragged their feet in worn-out shoes, women held children’s hands and mothers carried smaller children in their arms. Some people gathered at the bus stop, others went on walking on Loomis to the next intersecting street, turning there and following it to wherever they were going.
He lit a cigarette and exhaled a cloud of smoke that quickly blew away. He looked at the fronts of apartment houses that used to be plain, single family houses and the filthy doorways and the entrances scrubbed clean, windows open wide and shutters closed, a couple of air conditioning units that stuck out of a couple of lucky windows.
There was a four-story brick building up the street. A man stood framed in a window with a cup of coffee in his hand, looking at the morning sky and daydreaming and between sips he rubbed sleep from his eyes with a soft, barely awakened fist. In another window a woman studied her fingernails, then looked down at Loomis Street. In the window above her a man drank from a slim, half-pint bottle clasped in his hand. He wore a blank expression on his sleep-lined face.
The rearing outlines of roofs and chimneys slanted up against the sky. Television antennas and a few satellite dishes perched precariously on the roofs. A ruined two-story house leaned unhappily on its foundation like a block of Swiss cheese, with drill holes punched in the wood and pieces of plaster and brick cracked out of its ground floor walls.
Aoyama kept his head up, smoked indifferently while watching the street, looked like he was forming a mental picture of nothing. He squinted as a thread of smoke went into his eyes. He pinched the cigarette with his fingers and snapped it out in front of him. Okay, he said to himself.
He went down the wooden steps to the sidewalk, stretched, and looked up and down Loomis Street. A man came out of a dingy restaurant wiping eggs and coffee off his lips with his sleeve, then started whistling. Aoyama hated people who whistled as much as he hated people who sang to themselves. He wanted to kick the guy around the block. When they could see each other’s face, the man gave him a warm and generous smile. Aoyama didn’t hold the whistling against him.
He looked up at the few clouds that hung in the sky, weighty and confident like downy, feminine, lily-white buttocks. He wanted to squeeze them, but they were way out of reach like the pure, uninterrupted peacock-blue silkiness of sky spread out behind them. Aoyama brushed cigarette ashes off the sleeve of his raincoat, then started walking up Loomis past the two-story half-decaying house the color of broom-weed that showed plenty of partly exposed rusted iron rods in the fissures where crumbling walls had once been firmly joined.
[ 28 ]
The Venetian blinds in Shimura’s office were raised on the garish neon of nighttime at twenty minutes after ten. Humidity streamed through the open windows on a breeze that ruffled a stack of papers on his desk.
Pohl sat in a chair facing Shimura, nervously tapping his fingers on the armrest. He puffed on a cigarette, turning its coal into an angry glow. A trail of smoke climbed in front of his eyes. Shimura put the phone receiver down, leaned back in his chair. He had an unlit cigar in his mouth.
“Another night, same thing. He’s doing what he’s done every night. Anyway, I’ve got someone following him until he goes home,” Shimura said, trying to sound positive.
Pohl wasn’t listening to him because the only thing he heard was a nagging voice in his own head that told him he’d never have a chance to tell Angela how much he loved her and that he might as well throw himself out of a window.
“She hasn’t answered the phone for a week,” he said, putting a whine into his voice. “I want to marry her, Shimura. I want the same thing Kawamura’s got with Asami. Just like you told me. Why can’t I have what Kawamura has?” He pulled at the cigarette. “You’ve got to find her.”
“There’s nothing on Burnett that puts him with Angela, not now, not anymore,” Shimura explained.
“Tell me, again.”
“A witness, a woman who lives in the same building as Angela, saw Burnett on more than one occasion enter the building and climb the stairs to Angela’s floor. We showed her two photographs of Burnett. The woman confirmed it. She lives on the floor below Angela, and she crossed him on the stairs going up, she waited, looked through the banister, saw him at her door, heard him knock at the door and saw Angela open it.”
Pohl nodded, crushed his cigarette in the ashtray. The breeze blew smoke back in his face. He got up, paced back and forth in the small office spending more time avoiding furniture than walking in a straight line. He stopped behind the chair he’d been sitting in. He gripped the glistening black wood.
Nothing happened. Pohl just stood there, his face pale and expressionless in the glow of lamplight.
Shimura forced a smile. He didn’t know what to tell him because there was nothing to say that would ease the pain. He wanted to help Pohl, they’d been friends for a long time. He wasn’t going to argue about whether or not Pohl’s idea of marrying Angela was a good idea or had anything to do with reality, or if Angela, on her side of it, was even considering marriage.