Shimura looked at him, squinting, and shook his head.
“Right.” Fitch opened the door and tossed his cigarette out into the lane. He got out of the car.
“Fitch, there’s always the police. You didn’t forget that?”
“It works both ways. Quit threatening me.”
[ 67 ]
It was almost closing time, the clock on the wall behind the bar said one forty-five. The bar wasn’t empty, the customers were finishing their drinks, and Violet, sitting awkwardly on a bar stool, tipped back her glass of vodka and swallowed what was left of it and the ice cubes banged against her front teeth.
The bartender watched her as he cleaned and dried glasses, wiped down the bar and organized the bottles in neat rows one behind the other. She sat self-consciously straight on the bar stool and her eyes opened and closed regularly without staying shut more than a couple of seconds. Her charcoal-gray jacket hung from the back of the stool, her deep-blue shirt was unbuttoned at the neck and when she leaned forward he saw her breasts. Her shiny knees seemed to wink at him each time she swung around on the bar stool as he went past her going to and from the cash register.
Violet didn’t hear anything from behind the curtain of vodka because there was no sound where she was, there was nothing but thick quiet, and she saw the bartender moving around behind the bar with his feet not touching the floor picking things up and setting them down and wiping the cheap imitation mahogany bar with a rag.
The bartender had his back to Violet for some moments, then he shut the cash register drawer and turned to look at her, and while he was looking he took a few steps until he was standing across the bar from her.
He said: “Since the other night I’ve been carrying a lot of weight. In here.” He tapped his chest with a couple of fingers but kept on looking into her bleary green eyes. “I remember you, and I remember the guy that was with you.” He leaned forward against the bar. “Tonight that weight got too heavy for me to carry. I got to find a way to get rid of it. I’m in love with you.” He kept a straight face when he said it, but she couldn’t make out any part of his expression.
Violet was focused on a point above the bartender’s eyes because the eyes themselves were dancing from left to right and right to left in front of her and she couldn’t catch them long enough to look him straight in the face. His voice floated out of some faraway room and into her head and she heard the words but couldn’t figure out what they meant.
The bartender stood up straight and now her eyes connected with his eyes and she saw a sparkling light in them that hadn’t been there earlier and the light drew her in and kept drawing her in and suddenly it didn’t matter what his words were telling her because the glow in his eyes said everything. The light seemed to move around in a slow circle and the circle held her and she couldn’t move.
Words gathered in her mind and formed at the back of her throat and came out of her mouth slurred: “You got any money?”
“What?”
“Are you rich?”
“You’re drunk.”
“Maybe I am. But it’s a question.”
“I’m not asking you if you’re drunk. I’m telling you.”
“You don’t have to tell me, I know I’m drunk.”
“You want to know if I’m rich?”
“That’s right.”
“Fuck you.”
“I’m considering it, but you’ve got to tell me if you’ve got money.”
The sparkling light in his eyes went out and the circle that kept her from moving let her go suddenly and she slipped off the bar stool and landed on the floor among crushed cigarette butts with her skirt twisted up around her waist.
[ 68 ]
“There’s no happily-ever-after, it doesn’t exist, and it’s ridiculous to think it might exist because you’d be encouraging a completely crazy thought to become reality and there’s no chance of that happening. None,” Fitch said.
He shut the notebook, put the pen in his pocket, took out a handkerchief and wiped his mouth after he said this and hoped that by saying it he didn’t leave any room for her to keep on imagining that she loved him and he loved her and they’d spend their lives together doing what people did when they believed in something as close to a lie as this complete, undiluted bullshit. Fitch was exhausted.
“I don’t love you,” he added.
Angela stared at him from her tied-up position on the bathroom floor. The bare bulb gave her pale complexion a yellow hue.
“You’ve got to get it right in your head,” Fitch said.
“You’re breaking my heart,” she said quietly. “I’m in love with you.”
Angela meant what she said, he saw that much in her eyes and heard it in her voice, but he wasn’t going to give up trying to get through to her before he let her go. It was a promise he’d made to himself and he wasn’t going to back down on it. But he felt the pressure of the quiet as she looked sadly at him, as though the lack of sound were something heavier than any sound.
“I’ve been doing my job too well,” he said. “Don’t you see that? It’s a clinical thing.”
“I don’t see anything. I know that what I’m saying is right.”
“I’m trying to help you.”
And then the quiet was heavier.
“I can’t do it alone.”
She went on staring up at him from the floor without saying a word, and then a very small voice said: “Count me out.”
[ 69 ]
Shimura pulled his car alongside the agency car standing in the shadows on Delaplaine Road with its headlights out and its motor running and Aoyama behind the wheel with Eto sitting next to him in the passenger seat while together they were smoking cigarettes and listening to the radio and watching his car glide toward them and come to a halt in the night.
“It’s fixed,” Shimura said to Aoyama through the open window. “For tomorrow afternoon.”
Aoyama turned toward Eto, asked him if he’d heard Shimura. Eto nodded his head and tossed the end of the cigarette out in the street.
“Go get some sleep,” Shimura said.
The agency car drove away with its headlights on and turned left at Hartrey Avenue, and as he watched the taillights go around the corner he thought of Tomiko who was waiting for him at his apartment because her flight had come in at eight and now it was nearly ten o’clock.
Lying in bed next to Tomiko was the single most important thing Shimura had in mind as he swung the car around and headed towards Hartrey and turned right and kept on going without seeing much of the road except what was absolutely necessary to see so he didn’t get into an accident because an accident would slow him down and he didn’t want anything to stop him now. He was waiting to press his mouth between Tomiko’s legs, taste her, and feel her lips against his own when they kissed.
[ 70 ]
Pohl sat in a chair at his desk in front of the phone waiting for it to ring. It seemed to him that it was the only thing he’d been doing for days and that the rest of his life would be spent waiting for one thing or another. Shimura had told him he’d call at eleven to let him know what he’d learned from Fitch, whose name he didn’t use since it was against the rules Shimura’d made for himself, and so he referred to him instead as just another source of information.
Pohl felt the terrible slowness of passing time. It was only tenfifteen. It seemed like he was bolted to the chair, and then suddenly, somehow he was a long way off from the grief and everything because he was working to keep his thoughts as far from the telephone as he could by stretching them like rubber bands until they were taut and thin and might snap. It was a risk, and he knew that once they snapped he’d come back to where he was, which wasn’t a comfortable place to be.