'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.
CHAPTER 2
Demetrius Christopholous, the Artistic Director of the Port City Theater Company, was waiting for us, nursing a Manhattan, in the lounge of a Chinese restaurant called Wu's, a block from the theater. Susan introduced us. Christopholous glanced around the lounge, which featured a miniature bridge over a minuscule pond in the middle of the room. Muralled on the back wall was a painting of a volcano.
'The owner is on our board,' he said.
'Is that a Chinese volcano painted on the wall?' I said.
Christopholous smiled.
'I think that's Mount Vesuvius,' he said.
'This used to be a pizzeria.'
'Thrift,' I said.
A disinterested waiter brought me a beer and Susan a glass of red wine.
'You're joining us tonight?' Christopholous said.
'Yes,' I said.
'Susan tells me you're being followed.'
'Yes, of course, right down to business. It's quite distasteful, but that is why you're here, isn't it.'
'I'm here because Susan asked me to come.'
'Well, it's been a couple of weeks,' Christopholous said.
'At first I thought it just hypersensitivity on my part. One reads so much in the papers about these perilous times. But it soon became apparent that a person was stalking me.'
'Can you describe him?'
'Always in black, at night, some distance away. He appeared to be medium height, medium build. Face was always shadowed by a hat.'
'What kind of hat?'
