by Mark Fishman
[ 59 ]
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.”
[ 60 ]
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.
Summerdale was not so quiet as Lavergne Terrace. His eyes pointed downward as he walked along avoiding the gaze of the aimlessly wandering people who lived on the streets, the stragglers and bums and drunks standing in groups, and the individuals sitting on the ground staring at a dismal future or staring at nothing at all.
He didn’t like being here with people that reminded him how narrow the margin was between those who had more than something or just enough, and the part of the population that had nothing at all. What really gave him a jolt wasn’t the expression on the faces he’d see if he looked up at them, but the fact that he might’ve been one of them if it wasn’t for some luck and hard work that had kept him off the streets. Fitch wasn’t born with more than average intelligence and ambition, but he’d kept a healthy fear of ending up in a dead-end street.
Summerdale didn’t have any streetlights, the electric bulbs that lit windows in rundown houses made the stragglers look more like ghosts. The moon glowed through sparse clouds, the sky was pitch-black and filled with stars but he couldn’t see the stars because they were washed out by the city’s lights.
Fitch stopped to light a cigarette and straighten his tie and look around at the street to see if the threatening shadow of a man lurked somewhere behind him using the trunk of a ravaged oak as cover. He thought of the two figures he’d seen and wondered if he wasn’t just worrying himself over nothing, but he knew better than that and went with his gut instinct.
Lavergne Terrace came up in front of him like an oasis out of the unwholesome and dangerous street he’d left behind, and he let out a sigh, shoved his hands in his suit jacket pockets wishing he’d brought his gun with him. He kept on in the direction of Nightingale Lane with his eyes scanning every darkened doorway for the two figures. The garden was in front
of him, he passed under a streetlamp, looked right and left. He concentrated on the atmosphere of the place. There was something that didn’t smell right and he couldn’t shake it off.
He’d left the light of the streetlamp and moved into a patch of pitch-black night washed by the faint glow of lamp light when he heard scuffling feet on the sidewalk. Fitch swung around. A stray dog scraped its hind paws on the cement. A newspaper swirled in the air on a breeze.
He tossed his cigarette away, then looked up. Out of the corner of his eye he saw a pair of trouser legs in a doorway opposite him on the other side of the garden. He considered shouting something on the order of: “What kind of a spy do you think you are, satchel foot?” at the trouser legs, but it wasn’t worth the effort and so he just kept on walking with his mouth shut.
Fitch acted like he hadn’t seen a thing, started down the sidewalk moving past the garden toward the intersection of Delaplaine and Lavergne Terrace not intending to go to Nightingale Lane now that there was somebody hanging around in a doorway who might’ve been the police or a detective or just a guy from the neighborhood who didn’t want to go home to his wife and kids. Fitch didn’t want any witnesses. He decided to take a walk.
The small garden in the center of Lavergne Terrace was behind him as he followed Delaplaine for a short distance, then turned right on Eastview, a one-way street, and sniffed the air which smelled of cigar smoke. He descended Eastview’s mildly sloping hill. Streetlights lit both sides of the street and threw light and shadows on the small front yards of dilapidated houses and beat-up cars were parked one after the other facing downhill. He listened for footsteps and didn’t hear them.
Fitch decided to cross diagonally to the other side of the street, and he used the move to look left and right before he crossed it. There wasn’t anybody following him. He went past a healthy-looking car that didn’t resemble any of the other heaps that passed for cars on Eastview. He joined the sidewalk and kept moving at a leisurely pace. A car door opened and slammed shut behind him.
He wasn’t going to turn around to see who had got out of the car, but he was pretty sure that whoever it was had climbed out of the recent model parked behind him since he’d got a glimpse of a human shadow in the passenger seat as he went by. He heard footsteps hurrying to catch up with him. He didn’t like it. Fitch told himself to keep moving along the sidewalk, told himself not to lose his temper before he knew what it was all about.
The footsteps were very close now, he heard a man’s labored breathing, then he felt a hand on his shoulder. He counted silently to three and turned around to face a middle-aged Japanese smoking a cigar, then turned his head at the sound of other footsteps. A similar but younger man came down the opposite side of the street and crossed diagonally, heading toward them. He was smoking a cigarette.
[ 61 ]
Shimura and Aoyama introduced themselves to Fitch and then invited him to join them in the car for a smoke. Fitch sat with the hardcover notebook on his lap in the back seat with Shimura, Aoyama was at the wheel but had turned around to face them. Shimura’s cigar end glowed in the darkness of the car and a streetlight cast a long shadow of the car onto the street. Aoyama took a small softcover notebook out of his jacket pocket.
Fitch didn’t grasp the meaning of it right away, but he knew he was in a spot, and it wasn’t until Aoyama started reading from his notebook in a voice that sounded almost synthetic that he got an idea of what was going on. Then they showed him photographs. He’d been tailed for many days, every move he’d made was put into words, he’d been photographed going in and out of the run-down house on Nightingale Lane, each move was timed to the minute because he’d been implicated in the kidnapping of Angela Mason.
Fitch tossed his cigarette out the open window. It was nothing but the truth and there wasn’t a thing for him to say and now he waited for Shimura to put him in the picture. Aoyama closed his notebook and put it back in his pocket, lit another cigarette. A car turned the corner onto Eastview and its headlights swept the parked car with the three of them sitting in it.
Shimura started out slow, explaining to Fitch that they represented no one but themselves, not even the agency they worked for, they didn’t want money, they just wanted to straighten out a problem, and he told Fitch what he wanted him to do and how it was going to be done. There might even be something in it for him. And there wasn’t going to be any trouble for Angela, what they were going to do was in her best interest, in everyone’s best interests, and it’d pay to do what he told him to do because there was always the police.
Fitch shook his head, frowning.
“You agree it’s the right thing to do?” Shimura said, smoking his cigar.
“It’s not what you think it is,” Fitch protested. “I haven’t kidnapped her, not really.”
“Then what do you call it?” Aoyama demanded.
“I can’t talk about it.” Fitch looked past Aoyama’s face through the windshield at the lampposts.
“All we’re doing here is having a little discussion, but the police will call it kidnapping,” Shimura said. “Why don’t you just let her go?”
“She can go any time she wants to,” Fitch said.
“Then how about right now?” Aoyama said.
“It’s more complicated than that.”
“All you’ve got to do is let her go,” Shimura said.
“She trusts me now.”
“There’ll be money in it for you,” Aoyama reminded him.
“And it’s because she trusts you that it’s going to be okay,” Shimura said.
“I don’t like breaking up that sort of thing,” Fitch said.
He chose his words carefully, they were informal and solemn because he was defending himself even though he didn’t like having to defend himself, but they’d put him neatly in a corner and now he was having a bout with his conscience.
“What sort of thing?” Aoyama said.
“Trust.”
“Be practical.”
“Of course, trust. I understand that,” Shimura said. “I wouldn’t betray someone’s trust either.”
“Then you’ve got my point. I’m spending considerable time with her, listening. I want to help her, now it’s important to me. She asked me to — ”
“You don’t have to explain yourself,” Shimura interrupted him. “Just hear what we’ve got to say. You abducted her.”
“But — ”
“If she has confidence in you, then all you’ve got to do is convince her that it’s the right thing to do to let her go,” Aoyama reasoned.
“Therapy,” Fitch said.
“What?”
“What she’s asked me to do for her, it’s a sort of therapy.”
He’d betrayed Angela with a singular confidence and now Fitch felt sick and he asked Aoyama for another cigarette because he didn’t want to reach abruptly into his own pocket and then he sat there smoking it without moving his eyes from the quiet street beyond the window. No one said a word.
“Then she’s got to go home, to give herself up if that’s what it’s about, and to keep it out of the papers — she’ll have to pay you for that,” Aoyama said at last. “She’ll be glad to pay whatever you ask.” He paused. “Maybe there’ll even be some left over for the agency.” He looked at Shimura, who wasn’t looking at him.
Fitch turned his head sharply around to stare at Aoyama, his face contorted with anger, then he faced Shimura.
“As far as we’re concerned, we don’t want anything but her safe return,” Shimura said calmly, trying to reassure him.
“I’ll take the salary she’s offered me, nothing more. And you won’t get anything out of it,” Fitch said. “At this stage of the treatment, I can’t stop. I won’t change a thing.”
“Okay, Fitch, suit yourself.” Aoyama flicked his cigarette out the window and gave Fitch a threatening look.
“What are you going to do about it?” Fitch asked firmly.
“What do you think we’re going to do?”
“Hold on a minute,” Shimura said to Aoyama, playing his role as they’d arranged it. “It’s better to reason with him than to have to turn him over to the police.”
“Maybe it is, but he isn’t doing us any favors.”
“Why should I?”
“What do you suggest?” Shimura said.
“I’ll let you know. But right now I’ve got to get over to 4 Nightingale Lane,” Fitch said, reaching for the door handle.
“Wait a minute,” Shimura said.
“I’m late,” Fitch said, letting go the door handle, turning toward Shimura. “She won’t know what time it is because she doesn’t have a watch, but she’ll know that I’m late and it’ll work against what’s taken a week to accomplish.”
“You’re a responsible man, Fitch.” Aoyama faced the windshield and the night beyond it.
Fitch ignored him, reached again for the handle. As he got out of the car Shimura gave him a card with a phone number on it. Fitch turned around, stuck his head through the open window and said: “It may take a bit of time but we’ll do our best.”
“Hurry it up, Fitch. We’ll give you twenty-four hours,” Aoyama said.
The two men in the car wore satisfied expressions on their faces as they watched Fitch walk away, then looked at each other and smiled because what they knew about Fitch was that he was one of the few men in that line of work who played it straight.
[ 62 ]
Violet rubbed the sleep from her eyes. It was a late morning for her, already midday, and she’d just got out of bed. She stared at the clock on the wall next to the refrigerator. It was twelve-thirty. She made herself a cup of coffee, then sat at the kitchen table and stared out the window at the trees in the adjacent yard, a red pine and two eastern red cedar trees with sturdy branches.
