The Unquiet

Chapter XXVII

The interior of the bar wasn’t nearly as bad as its façade might have led a casual observer to expect. On the other hand, the façade suggested that the interior would be occupied by intoxicated twelve-year-olds and frustrated firebugs, so it didn’t have to do much to exceed those expectations. It was dark, lit only by a series of flickering lamps on the walls, as the windows facing the street were masked by thick red drapes on the inside. A bartender in a startlingly white shirt prowled the long bar to the right, three or four of its stools occupied by the usual assortment of daytime rummies blinking indignantly at the unwelcome shaft of sunlight from the open door. The bar was strangely ornate, and behind it, reflecting the rows of liquor bottles, were tarnished mirrors bearing the names of whiskeys and beers that had long since ceased to exist. The floor was made of exposed boards, scuffed by decades of traffic, and burned here and there by the discarded butts of dead smokers, but clean and, it seemed, freshly varnished. The brass work on the stools, the footrests at the bar, the coat hooks gleamed, and every table had been dusted and bore fresh beer coasters. It was as though the exterior had been deliberately designed to discourage casual custom, while retaining a degree of sophistication within that spoke of a once noble past.

A series of booths took up the wall to the left, with a scattering of round tables and old chairs between the booths and the bar. Three of the booths were occupied by office workers eating what looked like good salads and club sandwiches. There seemed to be an unspoken divide between the bar crew and the others, with the circular tables and chairs in between representing a kind of no-man’s-land that might as well have been littered with barbed wire and tank traps.

Ahead of me, the Collector was picking his way carefully toward a booth at the back of the bar. A waitress emerged from the kitchens nearby, a huge tray of food balanced on her left shoulder. She didn’t look at the Collector, but she gave him a wide berth, moving left in the direction of the bar as he came and effectively traversing two sides of a triangle to reach the booth nearest the door. In fact, at no point did anyone in the room even glance at him as he made his way down its entire length, and although it made no sense to me, had I been asked, I would have said that their decision to ignore him was an unconscious one. Some part of them was aware of his presence; after all, he had a drink before him in the booth, and someone must have served it to him. His cash would end up in the register. A faint smell of nicotine would hang around the booth for a time even after he was gone. Yet, I suspected that one minute after he left, if asked about him, every person in that bar would have had difficulty remembering him. That part of their brains that had been aware of his presence would also have registered even the memory of him as a threat-no, not a threat, but a kind of pollutant of the soul-and would quickly and efficiently have set about erasing all traces of him from itself.

He was sitting in the booth, waiting for me to draw near, and I had to fight my urge to turn away, to retreat from him into the sunlight. Foul. The word forced itself up like bile. I could almost feel it forming on my lips. Foul thing.

And as I reached the booth, the Collector spoke that word to me.

“Foul,” he said. He seemed to be testing it, tasting it like an unfamiliar food, uncertain as to whether he found it to his liking or not. In the end, he touched his stained tongue with those yellowed fingers and picked a piece of tobacco from it, as though he had given form to the word and chosen to expel it. There was a mirror behind him, and I could see the bald patch at the back of his head. It was slightly flattened, suggesting that at some point in the distant past he had received a blow heavy enough to impact upon the skull and fracture it. I wondered how long ago it might have occurred; in childhood, perhaps, while the skull was still soft. Then I tried to imagine this creature as a child and found that I could not.

He gestured to the seat across from him, indicating that I should sit, then raised his left hand and allowed his fingers to pluck gently at the air, like a fisherman testing the lure at the end of his line. It summoned the waitress, and she approached the booth slowly and reluctantly, her face already trying to form a smile that the muscles seemed unwilling to support. She did not look at the Collector. Instead, she tried to keep her eyes fixed firmly on me, even turning her back on him slightly so as to exclude him from her peripheral vision.

“What can I get ya?” she asked. Her nostrils twitched. The tips of her fingers were white where they gripped the pen. As she waited for me to answer, her eyes and head shifted slightly to the right. The smile, already struggling to survive, entered its death throes. The Collector stared at the back of her head. He gri

Whore.

The waitress’s lips moved too, forming the same word. Whore. Now she shook her head, trying to dislodge the insult like an insect that had crawled into her ear.

“No,” she said. “That’s-”

“Coffee,” I said, a little too loudly. “Just coffee will be fine.”

It brought her back. For a moment, she seemed about to continue, to protest at what she had heard, or thought she had heard. Instead, she swallowed the words. The effort made her eyes water.

“Coffee,” she repeated. She wrote it on her pad, her hand trembling as the pen moved. She looked to be on the verge of tears. “Sure, I’ll be right back with it.”

But I knew she would not be back. I saw her go to the bar and whisper something to the bartender. She began untying her apron and headed for the kitchen. There was probably a staff bathroom in back. She would stay there, I figured, until the crying and the shaking stopped, until she felt that it was safe to come out. She might try to light a cigarette, but the smell of it would remind her of the man in the booth, the one who was both there and not there, present and absent, a raggedy man trying just too hard to be unremarkable.

And as she reached the kitchen door, she found it within herself to look straight at the man in the booth, and her eyes were bright with fear and anger and shame before she vanished from sight.

“What did you do to her?” I asked.

“Do?” He sounded genuinely surprised. His voice was surprisingly soft. “I did nothing. She is what she is. Her morals are lax. I merely reminded her of it.”

“And how do you know that?”

“Ways and means.”

“She’d done you no harm.”

The Collector pursed his lips in disapproval.

“I’m disappointed in you. Perhaps your morals are as lax as hers. Whether she had done me harm or not is irrelevant. The fact remains that she is a whore, and she will be judged as such.”

“By you? I don’t think you’re fit to judge anyone.”

“I don’t pretend to be. Unlike you,” he added, with just a hint of malice. “I am not the judge, but the application of judgment. I do not sentence, but I carry out the punishment.”

“And keep souvenirs of your victims.”

The Collector spread his hands before me.

“What victims? Show them to me. Display for me the bones.”

Now, although we had spoken before, I noticed for the first time the careful way in which he expressed himself, and the occasional strange locutions that emerged when he did. Display for me the bones. There was a trace of something foreign to his accent, but it was impossible to place. It seemed to come from anywhere and nowhere, just like him.