Angela had her hands on her hips.
Burnett sat down again in the chair.
“Where do we start?” Angela asked, hitching up her skirt as she sat opposite him on the arm of a chair.
He looked at her, then quickly looked away. Something in her eyes told him she might not be the amateur he thought she was. Or that there was something else going on and that it was so far away from him that he’d never find out what it was. “Don’t we get something to drink?” he asked confidently, looking at her again.
“Take a good look,” she said, moving her hand between her legs and pushing her skirt up. She wasn’t wearing anything under her skirt. “Enjoying it?”
Burnett shrugged. He looked away from the sparse red hair between her legs and examined his boots, rubbing his knees vigorously with the palms of his hands, then looked up at her.
“I thought so,” she said, straightening her skirt. She left the room to fix them a drink.
Burnett sighed. His eyes wandered to the windows. A few apartments across the street were lit up. An occupant of one of them came into view, a man in his late forties, and he looked out the window at Burnett, and then didn’t stop looking at him. Burnett responded by getting up and lowering the blinds in front of each of the windows, then giggled. Angela came back with two glasses of whisky with ice.
She handed him a glass. “To our success, yours and mine,” she said, raising the glass out in front of her.
Burnett downed his in a gulp.
“I’ll get you another. You look like you need it.”
He shook his head, and gazed at the face of his white-gold wristwatch. “No,” he said. He looked properly solemn.
“Now, where were we?” Angela said, taking a sip of whisky and fidgeting with the hem of her skirt.
[ 7 ]
Pohl stood at the service entrance on the Birch Street side of Angela’s building a few feet and around the corner from the main entrance on Lake Street, with a handkerchief in his hand, wiping the perspiration from his forehead and breathing hard after coming down five flights of stairs two at a time. He couldn’t vomit properly. There was a strand of bitter, greenish bile dangling like a fish line from his mouth.
He went over it in his mind. He saw what he thought he’d seen but he had a hard time accepting it. Angela squirming on a vibrator for a man in a neat dark suit that he didn’t know and had never seen before. A man whose head he’d like to kick through the goalposts. He brushed away the strand of bile with the back of his hand, then dried it with the handkerchief. He straightened himself enough to walk without looking like a drunk. He shook his head. Angela crawling on her hands and knees with the thing inside her. The picture hit him hard.
He walked sharp on Birch away from Lake to the corner, turned without looking back, and made his way home, a twenty-minute walk heading southwest, clutching his stomach. A block before he got there, on Jackson Street, he ran into a short, middle-aged man, wearing a lightweight off-white linen suit, smoking a cigar, who wasn’t looking where he was going. They collided without mishap, but the man snapped his mouth shut and broke the cigar in two.
“No objection, my fault,” the man said.
“I think so,” Pohl answered, nodding.
“Sorry. Any idea why?” the man said with a smile.
“Not interested,” Pohl said impatiently.
Nausea came up to his throat like a rope from a knot in his belly. Pohl took a forward step and the man didn’t move. He took another forward step and the man didn’t move and Pohl bumped into him. He stepped back and tried to walk around him but the man’s bulk was a short wall on the sidewalk.
“Let’s not play innocent,” the man said, grinning.
“Save it. I don’t want to know.”
“I was just fucking. I’m not thinking about where I’m going because where I’ve been is more interesting.” He tossed his bent cigar into the street.
[ 8 ]
Angela stood for a long time under the shower because she didn’t like the smell of sex when the smell of it was connected to someone like Lew Burnett. She soaped herself and smiled at the method she’d used to trap him into doing what she wanted him to do for her, but she didn’t like the price she’d paid even though it wasn’t the first time she’d done something like it. She hadn’t learned it in any book, it was a natural gift she’d found in herself.
She shut off the flow of water and dried herself with a thick, fluffy towel. She wasn’t worried about Pohl, he’d come sniffing around again, because any man who wanted her as much as he wanted her knew what to do about it. She was sure it made her more attractive to him to have seen her like that free of charge. It gave him something to think about in bed.
She would rather have done it with Pohl instead of Burnett, but she wanted something Burnett could give her and Pohl didn’t have it to give and that was what made the difference between them. She smiled, drying her milky skin, the texture of flower petals. She looked at herself in the mirror. The woman looking back at her without any clothes on was strictly ethereal perfection.
Angela went to the bedroom and put on a pair of pajamas. It was almost daylight. She threw herself on the bed, lying on her stomach with the pajama trousers bunched up at her knees, and flipped through the pages of a book. She found the bent corner of a page, eyed it, then leafed through the rest of the book until she got to the last page.
The telephone rang. It was Burnett.
“What are you doing?” he asked.
“Why?”
“In bed already?”
“Where else?” she said indifferently. Burnett meant nothing to her. “Enjoy your evening?”
“What do you think?”
“I don’t have to think about it.”
“Well, I’ve been thinking.”
“Don’t. Just do what I asked you to do. The way I explained it to you. Make yourself useful, I’ll let you wear my underwear.” She laughed. “Don’t complicate things by trying to use your head.”
Burnett sighed heavily. “Okay, goodbye.”
Angela switched off the light. Her head fell gently to the pillow. She shut her eyes.
The telephone rang again. She frowned. She picked up the receiver. It was Pohl. It couldn’t have been anyone else but him. He didn’t say a word, just a repeated soft, choking sound, a kind of sob, and the line went dead.
[ 9 ]
Burnett didn’t sleep but his eyes were shut. Why would he go to sleep when he was waiting for the morning sunlight to creep in through the blinds so that he could get out of bed? He thought about Angela, and at the same time he thought that he ought to do something to keep his mind off her, but nothing he came up with worked, and anything he thought about just made him more conscious of the fact that he was trying not to think about her. What he was going to do when he got out of bed had everything to do with Angela. He’d agreed to help her pull off some stunt by looking for a deserted building, a run-down apartment house, a small two-storied shack, an empty Polish flat, a place in Pigsville, it didn’t matter, and then getting the information to her in trade for sex, and it was the kind of sex he liked so he was hooked.
He sat up and swung his legs over the side of the bed, pulled a pack of cigarettes from the night table drawer, jabbed one between his tightened lips and struck a match. He leaned back against the mashed feather pillows, gazing at nothing and taking deep drags off the cigarette. His eyes focused on the smoke coming slowly out of his mouth. Burnett put the cigarette out.