Pohl looked down at the dozen cigarette butts at his feet. He pushed them with the edge of his shoe, stepped out of the doorway to the sidewalk and started down the street. He looked over his shoulder at the entrance to Angela’s building. A taxi pulled up, a man got out and went into the building. There had been no sign of Angela. A van delivering dry cleaning turned the corner in front of Pohl. He thought about sleep. At last he was looking forward to going home.
A battered red car was parked every night in front of his apartment building on Fourteenth Street and he saw it now as he wearily rounded the corner. At the same time he spotted the car he saw the man he’d collided with the night he’d seen Angela perform for Burnett.
The man walked along the sidewalk on the opposite side of the street. Pohl crossed the street, moved slowly toward him. The early morning light poured lavender into a yellowish-gray sky. The man was smoking a cigar. He came to a stop in front of Pohl, who stared at him. The man wore a loose, turquoise-blue silk shirt that hung over the waistband of his wide trousers. He looked Pohl up and down, smiled at him as he chewed on the end of the cigar. Thick smoke swirled up in front of his face. Pohl couldn’t swallow the coincidence.
“This tickles me,” the man said. “It’s really funny.”
“I don’t want to know anything.” Pohl was cautious.
“So, we meet again,” the man stated flatly.
“No objection?” Pohl remembered the words the man had said the first time they’d met.
“Know where I’ve been?”
“Not again. Don’t tell me,” Pohl said.
“It’s what I like to do.”
“I asked you politely.”
“I work a lot,” he confided. “I spend my money the way I want to spend it.”
“That’s not my business.”
“Fucking is the best thing I can think of doing.” The man exhaled a cloud of smoke, grinning. “I’ve got the right to do it because I’ve got the money to pay for it.”
Pohl turned away from him, crossed the street, heading for the battered red car. He leaned against the fender, stared at nothing. The man followed him, stood in front of him, waved his hand in front of Pohl’s face.
“I was just fucking,” the man said. “Nobody’s going to bite you. We’re having a conversation. Do you hear me?”
Pohl snapped out of it, his gaze with a parade of questions in his eyes returned to the man in front of him.
The man’s face glowed with a healthy complexion, the cigar stuck straight out of his mouth between thick, pinkish lips. A smile worked its way onto the lips, a perceptive smile that narrowed his eyes.
“Let me answer one of them.”
“One of them, what?” Pohl asked.
“Questions.”
Pohl blinked, folded his arms across his chest and stared straight ahead.
“I’m here to tell you all your worrying is for nothing,” the man said. “Fucking is what you want. It’s the solution to everything.”
Pohl opened his mouth to say something, and his mouth stayed open, but no sound came out. The man reached out, put a warm, human hand on Pohl’s shoulder, then turned and walked away. A cloud of cigar smoke trailed up over the man’s head. Pohl looked at it, and it told him there would be trouble if he didn’t find Angela because she was the fire that got him going and he was the smoldering smoke that came from it, and without her he didn’t exist. He pushed away from the red car, went to the entrance of his building, opened the door and let it swing shut behind him.