Walking Shadow

CHAPTER 1

The last time I'd worked in Port City had been in 1989 when an important software tycoon had hired me to retrieve his wife, who had run off with a fisherman named Costa. Her name was, incredibly, Minerva, and I found her okay. She was living in a shack on the waterfront with Costa, who, when the fish weren't biting, which was mostly, worked as a collector for a local loan shark. This led Costa to believe that he was tougher than he actually was, a point he finally forced me to make. He spent a couple of days in the hospital afterward, and while he was in there Minerva refused to leave his side. I finally concluded that, despite his shortcomings, she was better off with him than she was with the important software tycoon, and I bowed out. The tycoon refused to pay me.

And when I wouldn't tell him where his wife was, he attempted to get my license revoked. I heard that he went down to Port City himself after that and got booted out of town by the Police Chief, an ex-state cop named DeSpain, who as far as I could see ran the town, despite the official presence of a Mayor and a board of Aldermen. I called Minerva a couple of years later to see how she was, and they were gone. I never knew where.

Now, driving with Susan through a hard, cold rain that slanted in steadily against the windshield, nothing much had changed. The city was in a punch bowl, with the land sloping harshly down to the harbor. It had always been a fishing port, and once it had been a textile manufacturing city as well. But after the war, the mills had moved South in search of cheap labor. Now there was nothing but fish processing, and the smell of it hung over the town. In the time of the mills' flourishing, the Yankees who owned them had lived in handsome federalist houses up on Cabot Hill above the town, away from the smell offish, and well clear of the fishermen and mill workers, and fish cutters living below them along the waterfront.

They had founded a small liberal arts college, with a handsome endowment for the education of their children. They had played golf and tennis and ridden horseback and sailed twelve-meter sloops out of their yacht club at Sippican Point north of the city, where the water was still blue, and on clear days the sunlight skipped blithely along the crests of small waves.

When the mills moved out, Cabot Hill society staggered but didn't go down. It tightened in on itself, bought into the fish business, continued to be rich, added the Cabot academics to its ranks, and clustered around the college like survivors of a capsized boat clinging to a channel buoy. There was a neighborhood school on Cabot Hill and a brick-and-clapboard shopping center, where you could buy imported Brie and Armani suits. There were two liquor stores, a movie theater, and a private security patrol with blue-and-yellow prowl cars. Who could ask for anything more.

The only reason to go downtown was the Port City Theater Company, of which Susan was a board member. The theater was connected in various ways to Cabot College. Its Artistic Director was on the Cabot faculty. The college subsidized it. And Cabot Hill was the prime source of its audience. The theater, which was in its fifteenth season of putting on plays too hard for me, flourished inscrutably amid the boarded-up store fronts, and the abandoned cars, near the waterfront. Which is where we were heading.

"How'd you end up on the board of a theater up here?" I said.

"Closest one that would have me," Susan said.

"And you want to be on the board because…?"

"You know I love theater," Susan said.

"It was a way to be involved."

"You're not contemplating a career change," I said.

"No. It may be a little late for that, and I love being a shrink.

But it is a great treat for me to be involved, even peripherally, in the theater."

The rain was driven by a wind from the northeast, off the water.

I had always speculated that the conjunction of hills and oceans produced more rain in Port City than anyplace else in Massachusetts. I had never gotten any support on that theory, but I stuck to it. Coming steadily in at us, staying slightly ahead of the wipers, the rain made the windows shimmer between wiper sweeps, and the oncoming traffic seemed a mirage through the sheeted rain water.

"What do you do?" I said.

"As a board member? Give money, raise money, and lend high seriousness to the administrative proceedings of the theater."

"You don't make policy."

Susan smiled.

"This is true."

We were on the downtown side of Cabot Hill, the city itself below us, packed in along the waterfront looking prettier in the rain than I knew it to be. We passed a Cabot Hill Security vehicle parked at an intersection. I grinned.

"Beyond here there be monsters," I said.

"The line of demarcation is clear, isn't it," Susan said.

"Is it safe coming here to the theater at night?"

"There are always some of those private security people around.

If you're really timid, you can park up on the hill in the shopping center, and the college provides a bus to bring people down from the hill."

"You probably don't park up on the hill and take the bus," I said.

"No."

"How did I know that?"

"As a…" she lowered her voice importantly… "board member…" her voice returned to normal… "I get to park next to the theater."

"This is a tough town," I said.

Susan shrugged.

Across the intersection the other Port City began. Three-decker houses lined the streets, so close together that you could barely squeeze down the tiny alley between them. On the steep hills the water in the gutters tumbled garbage along before it. Where the hills eased, the gutters were clogged and the rain water made deep puddles in the street, which overflowed onto the sidewalk. The rain had people off the streets, though occasionally I could see elderly Chinese people sitting on a roofed front porch, bundled in gray clothing, smoking and staring at the rain. We passed one of the empty mills, surrounded by gnarled and rusty chain link, the loading platforms sagging with decay, fork-lift pallets rotting on the frost-broken parking lot, surrounded with broken beer bottles and empty beer cans whose labels had faded into a uniformly faint yellow. There had been attempts to transform the vast brick hulks into other uses. The money had come from the hill, and the investors had put their money into things they would have liked if they had lived downtown. The peeling signs of artisan shops and blouse boutiques and yogurt shops and stores that sold antiques hung lopsided with age and weather, over the dysfunctional doorways. The mills remained empty.

"Isn't it ghastly," Susan said.

"Where late the sweet birds sang," I said.

Every few blocks there was a tiny store, dimly lit, with Chinese characters in the window. On another corner an old man in black pajamas huddled under an umbrella, selling something from a cardboard box between his feet. He had no customers as we passed.

There were no dogs on the street. No toys in evidence. No children. No school buses. No automobiles parked by the curb.

Once in a while a vacant lot, occasionally the rusting skeleton of an abandoned car, stripped of anything saleable. Everything sodden, under the downpour, narrow, bitter, and wet. Everything cooking sullenly with the slow fire of decay.

"Why such a big Chinese population?" Susan said.

"I don't know how it started, but they began to arrive here to work the fish plants. And others followed, and it grew like that.

They work hard. A lot of them are illegal, so they don't complain about anything. They're suspicious of labor organizers and safety inspectors, and they take the wage you give them."

"A factory owner's dream," Susan said.

At the waterfront we turned left onto Ocean Street. Here there were no Chinese. Here the fishermen lived. There were more one-story homes, more room between them. But here too there was no sense that the rain was engendering. That it would bring forth fresh life. Here too the rain seemed almost pestilent as it bore down on the cluttered and makeshift homes that crowded against the slick ocean, where the greasy waves swelled against the waterlogged timbers of the fish piers. Almost the only color I had seen since I left the hill was the jewel-red stop lights gleaming through the murk at irregular intervals.