The city was growing, throwing tendrils up and down the coast until every ocean view would be within its sphere, but for all that William Fitzgerald knew every street and storefront. He stroked his knowledge of the hidden ways of the city like a cat, and drew sparks to flash in his muddy, unfocused eyes.

He left the squalid tenement where he had found a desperate woman for her abusive, manipulative husband with five hundred dollars in his pocket, and began picking his way through the refuse and effluvia back to the wider, cleaner ways of the commercial center. The woman’s friends, though unwilling to beard the husband, followed his small, sideways figure with vengeance in their hearts. He hunched his shoulders and scuttled between the smeared and sticky buildings. The way opened before him and closed after, and between two dumpsters he disappeared from the slums.

His righteous pursuers pawed at the walls and kicked the trashcans. He watched them from two stories up, and fleered at them. Two blocks over the woman was shrieking mindlessly. Her howls were cut off. The noise and the silence were wine to him, and below her friends cursed ineffectually and turned away.

On Sundays he sat in the bright stained-glass puddle that filled the nave of the stone church down from his office. He sang the songs with biting cynicism, his brittle voice strained by the pot and a half of thick black coffee he’d swallowed acidly; cynical not because he disbelieved but because the idea of humanity lifting its voice and lauding revolted him. He bore the sermon with angry affectation. He sat in an empty space within the row, though squeezed on both sides by fellow parishioners. He shook hands obliquely, a mask of a man, the distant eyes of a woodwife never quite meeting the moist eyes of the men and the women who pressed his hand and greeted him formally in Christ’s name.

He took no part in the greater mysteries of the faith. William Fitzgerald did not attend weddings or funerals, and held himself aloof from the communion, passing the bread and the wine silently, untasted, along the row. His hands were steady as he handed the host to his neighbour. He donated little, just enough so as not to lose entirely his place within the congregation. These weekly rituals confirmed and highlighted the righteousness of his misanthropy.

It was a risk in the businesss, William Fitzgerald knew that. Even if you played things close to your vest and didn’t draw any attention to yourself, even if you were as cagey as Odysseus and as sly as Autolycus, it was still a risk. He salvaged what he could of his pride, as their fists smashed into the face he didn’t even bother to guard.

He wasn’t sure why he was being beaten up (he crumpled to the ground, and the five men began to kick him with heavy boots. He curled into a ball, instinctively, and their feet crashed into his back again and again. He worried about his kidneys.) because he wasn’t just then working, but doubtless there was some reason for it. He had offered the men money and his watch in the professionally frightened manner that he adopted when he was robbed, but they had only laughed and closed in on him.

A particularly vicious kick crashed into the back of his head and he passed out.

When he woke, William Fitzgerald was lying in a crisp white hospital bed. He was covered in bandages. No casts, though. He approved of the professionalism of the men. There were no flowers in the room — which was good, as he loathed flowers. Smog yellow sunlight filled the room. There was a cream colored card on the table next to him, with his name is calligraphy on the front. He reached an arm swaddled in gauze painfully over for it.

Inside, the card said, ‘With My Compliments.’ It was unsigned. A hundred dollar bill was taped to it.

He was just finishing off a bottle of scotch which made it as near as he could figure about ten pee em. He wasn’t as drunk as he was going to be o no not so drunk as all that but he was as drunk as he needed to be. It was time to close the office lock it down for the night draw the blinds turn off the lights there will be no more clients no more dirty people no more horrid faces wanting and waiting and hating.

(His misanthropy was legion; it multiplied, self-generated, reincarnated. His drinking fueled his bile as it calmed him physically; his posture, diction, and self-control all improved while his social outlook soured.)

He moved through the darkened office from window to window closing Venetian blinds by twisting the little rods that hung from the windows and watching the city narrow and disappear behind the turning plastic. Light from the city below travelled up his body and over his face as the blinds rotated up leaving a thin oily film that he would feel even as he crawled into his cold bed tonight with another half bottle of scotch inside him. To sleep without dreaming. A blank space of nonconsciousness when all the lines on his face relaxed and his arms curled around his head and the smell of cigarettes coffee and alcohol rose steaming from the mattress he couldn’t be bothered to clean.

(His walk was noiseless upon the wooden floorboards of his office. He stood tallest in these hours between the end of his working day and the end of his waking day, as tall as he would have been, perhaps, had he been someone else, in a different city, in a different time, in a different life.)

She was a crabbed woman, bent and hunched forward over her knobby hands as she sat on the scarred leather chair in William Fitzgerald’s office. Her lips were pursed tight; deep, seamed lines radiated from her mouth like Van Allen belts of bitterness. She held a maroon chequebook in her hands, fingers curled defensively around it. William Fitzgerald offered her some coffee, not expecting her to take any. She didn’t.

What was the trouble, William Fitzgerald wanted to know. It was her no-account son-in-law, said the crabbed woman, whose name was Opal MacIntyre; she didn’t trust him. He was fooling around on her poppet, her own daughter, she knew it. William Fitzgerald made the noise he made when he wanted people to think he was being sympathetic. He saw the righteous vindication lurking within Opal MacIntyre and it fed him. Such things could of course be looked into, and surety was worth something, indeed, but everything these days had a very concrete price, he observed.

Opal sniffed, nostrils pinched as her mouth. He needn’t have any concerns about her, she said, she knew the value of knowledge, she said. She was willing to pay. She swiped the chequebook through the air at his head, knuckles white on the maroon cover lest it slip inadvertently from her fingers.

Well, then, said William Fitzgerald. Yes, indeed.