Small Town

Pattern, that was what he was looking for. Not the pattern of Gerald Pankow’s days, that was evident enough, but the pattern that he himself was creating, had been creating since his wife and son and daughter and son-in-law had sacrificed themselves for the city.

Too long a sacrifice can make a stone of the heart...

The line came to him and he knew he’d read it somewhere once but didn’t know where or when. Did he have a heart of stone? He put the tips of his fingers to his chest, as if to palpate the heart within, to determine by touch if it had calcified.

The three bars Pankow swept out each morning were possibilities, but, once he’d managed to determine the nature of the premises on Twenty-eighth Street, it was clear to him where he ought to direct his efforts. He stopped following Pankow and began spending his waking hours on Twenty-eighth Street.

The building was five stories tall, with a Korean nail shop on the parlor floor and a locksmith a floor below, several steps down from street level. The top three floors were residential, but the third floor was the one Pankow cleaned every morning. He’d known that from the first; the lights went on moments after the young man entered the building, and went off shortly before he left.

Watching the traffic in and out of the building, watching lights go on and off, he learned the nature of the business conducted on the third floor and the schedule on which they operated. After Pankow left, there was no activity for a couple of hours. Then, somewhere between ten-thirty and eleven, a middle-aged woman appeared and let herself in with a key. Over the next hour, five or six considerably younger women came and buzzed to be admitted.

Starting at noon, men came to the door, buzzed, went inside, and reappeared anywhere between twenty minutes and an hour later. Around ten in the evening, two or three of the girls would leave. At midnight or a few minutes after the hour, the lights would go out, and shortly thereafter the remaining girls and the older woman would leave the building and go their separate ways.

Three days ago he’d got the suit out of storage, shaved, put it on. He’d found out the telephone number — it wasn’t difficult when you knew the address and knew how to use a computer at an Internet café — and he called it. He made an appointment, saying a friend had recommended the establishment. He was going to give his friend’s name as George Strong, and his own as Herbert Asbury, but the woman who answered hadn’t asked for names.

Instead she’d supplied one. When he rang the bell, he was to say his name was Mr. Flood.

He’d said he would come at ten that evening, and from nine o’clock he waited across the street, and at ten he rang downstairs, gave his name as Mr. Flood, and was admitted. There were two girls in abbreviated costumes in what he guessed you’d call the parlor, and the older woman who brought him there told him they were both available. To pick one was to reject the other, which bothered him until he realized how unlikely it was that it bothered them. One girl reminded him faintly of his wife as a young girl, and so he chose the other.

He hadn’t had sex since well before the bombing. He and his wife had still had relations, but it had become an infrequent event. Sometime in July or August, he supposed, and it was July now, so it might have been a year since he’d had sex, or wanted to.

He still didn’t want to, but when he and the girl were both undressed he found he was able to perform. He became detached during the act, and observed, disembodied, as his body did what it was supposed to do. She had put the condom on for him and she removed it and disposed of it, returning with a washcloth to sponge him clean.

He paid the madam a hundred dollars, tipped the girl twenty. He went straight to his hotel, and when the hall shower was empty he stood under the spray for a long time, washing her scent from his body.

Now, three days later, he’d shaved again and put on the suit again, and he’d called and made an appointment for eleven-thirty. “Don’t be late,” the madam told him. “On account of we close up at midnight.”

At ten minutes past ten the door opened, and three of the girls came out and walked off together toward Third Avenue. He felt a stab of sorrow when he noted that the girl he’d been with on his previous visit was not among them. Of course she might not have come in at all that day, that was entirely possible, but he had a feeling he’d find her in the parlor when he went upstairs.

And he was right. “I know you had a good time with Clara the other night,” the madam said, “so you could see her again, or Debra here’s a very sweet girl herself, if you’re a man who likes a change.”