William Fitzgerald was following someone. He wasn’t being paid to, which, under normal circumstances, would have meant that he was in his office, meeting with a client, working a little blackmail, or drinking indifferently either scotch or coffee. He had just this instant run out of both scotch and coffee, and was therefore compelled to venture unpaid out into the city, and had fallen by habit behind someone. He followed without noticing or looking at the person he was following. Eyes are noticeable, and attention more so.

He hated exercise as he hated fresh air, clinically, but hating people more (and assistants in particular) he was forced to perform his own errands and legwork. The someone he was following was heading in the right direction — that direction being toward the grocery and liquor store that carried the brands of undrinkable coffee and unpoisonous scotch that he preferred — and he was most comfortable sneaking along behind someone else.

He was thinking of nothing, mind blank with unfocused loathing and ill will. Important thoughts, too, attract interest, and trivial thoughts trivial interest, and both were unpleasant for William Fitzgerald, so he had by long practice learned to think of nothing at all. He filled negative space. People veered away for him imperceptibly, mood soured. The someone he was following moved with similar ease through the busy five o’clock crowd.

William Fitzgerald and the someone came to the liquor store. The someone kept moving past the store, and as William Fitzgerald turned to enter the store, he saw that the someone had no face. None at all. It was unusual, but it didn’t matter to him. His hatred for the someone was nor lessened nor increased; besides that, there was scotch to buy, and scotch to drink.

His name was William Fitzgerald, and he was a private detective. He wasn’t a good private detective, but then he didn’t really need to be. He was a greasy, slimy little man, but those were his strengths. He was nondescriptely unpleasant; if you met him — which was likely, as he was as ubiquitous as a bill collector — you would have only a memory of an unpleasant man in a loud tie. No one remembered his face, and seldom his name. His clients would forget his name in the middle of signing their checks. It didn’t bother Fitzgerald. He hated humanity, in the mass and in the individual. He took a silent, odious, gleeful pleasure in destroying marriages, ruining careers, swamping lives, discovering the disappeared poor.

He drank a pot and a half of violent coffee in the morning, and an equal amount of cheap Midwestern scotch every evening. In this manner he kept his youth and what there were of his looks, forever poised between the haggard sharpness of the tea-addict and the veinous swelling of the alcoholic. His mental state was paranoid, confidential, brazen, sly, and wicked. He would have been just over five feet tall if he ever stood up straight. He walked with a constant slump, hunched sideways into himself. From a distance he looked like an ugly child. Sometimes that came in handy.

It was afternoon, with the sunlight the colour of weak beer pouring in through his windows. He was at equipoise, as far from his coffee as from his scotch, and he was pleased with himself. He had just displeased a senator — but displeased him in the way that meant he got paid, for he had taken several lewd and pornographic pictures of the senator’s daughter, featuring an assortment of stoned and strung-out young men and women. He’d also taken the names of the young men and women in the photographs, and was busy entering them, in code, in the little leatherette book he kept for such things. He wasn’t above a little blackmail or extortion or vicious exposure, when the mood was on him. The senator would disown his daughter, he thought, and stretched, sanguine and replete with malice. She would be thrown from the college she had gotten into on the strength of his name; maybe there would be jail time, as well. It didn’t really matter. Her life was over, in either case. It might stretch on for a few increasingly tenuous years, but he’d seen her eyes as he’d sold her the junk the senator had given him, seen the trembling fingers and the pocked and scarred arms. Without aid, without money… her life was over.

There was a picture of an angel on the wall next to the door, not a Saturday supplement angel, but a ball of fire and eyes and wings against a windswept and overcast moor. The wind from its wings had flattened the grass in a wide circle around it, like the footprint of a helicopter. He slipped the leatherette book into the back of the painting, and went to stand before the window overlooking the street. The weak-beer light was reflected from chimneys, airducts, high-rise windows from downtown, the bright metal of the cars in the street. He spread his arms wide, in ownership. His city. His.