He went to a numismatics show and assembled a collection of gold coins. He went to antique shops and bought a set of ivory carvings and a silver tea set. He spent a day on the South Side searching secondhand stores, buying similar items that might be as old and didn’t look any worse but cost practically nothing. For three days, Prescott shopped. He walked through the stores pretending they were houses. If he could imagine an item as the one that would catch the eye of a thief, he bought it. He packed all of his purchases in boxes, shipped them to his apartment in St. Louis, and drove back to meet them.
He spent the next few days refining his identity by rehearsing his anecdotes, inventing and memorizing names, places, and dates, and compiling documents using the computer scanners and printers he had picked up in Chicago.
He spent a few evenings establishing himself as a regular at the Paddock Club. He would arrive there at around eight, go in, and sit at the bar. The man with glasses who had met with the two traveling couriers from Cincinnati returned from his dinner break between eight-thirty and nine, and presided at the bar.
Prescott watched him for an evening and confirmed his theory about him. There were two younger bartenders who did the heavy lifting and all the routine fetching of the endless bottles of beer. This man seldom waited on a customer except during the frantically busy period from nine to one, when all three were pouring drinks with both hands, shoving them onto the wet surface of the bar, snatching up money, and dispensing change on the way to the next customer. The rest of the time, he leaned on the wooden surface behind the bar, usually with his arms folded across his chest. Prescott could see that his eyes flitted to the cash register whenever one of the bartenders approached it, then surveyed the customers ranged around the room at small, round tables and along the bar, then focused for a moment on the front door, where he seemed to be counting the ones leaving and the ones coming in, and finally, went to the woman on the stage.
The women were the constant—hypothetically, the center of attention. But they existed on the edge of the huge room, in the world of the bar but not part of it. The place was like a water hole on a veldt, where two different species were side by side but had very little to do with each other.
The men drank and talked, sometimes laughing and then suddenly tense with anger, the sinews in their necks standing out and their faces acquiring the blank stare that wasn’t really seeing. About once a night, two of them would go outside, each accompanied by a companion or two, and then one set of men would return and the other vanish into the night. But the rest of the time, the men slouched in their chairs, now and then staring wistfully at the woman on the stage for a time, but then returning their attention to their friends, or going to join the crowd waiting at the bar for another drink.
Each of the women was alone. A number of the women seemed to have been doing this for a long time. The music would begin, and from behind a small black curtain at the side, a woman in her late thirties or early forties would appear, and she would dance. She would be preoccupied, her thoughts not on the men. When Prescott studied the faces of these women for thoughts, he imagined a compendium of the mundane. This one seemed to be thinking about the things she was going to buy on the way home: milk and bread, of course, and she was almost out of shampoo—had forgotten it the last two trips—plus some Ziploc bags, laundry detergent. Was she out of dishwashing detergent, too? Might as well get some just in case.
The woman Prescott was watching danced, completing the turns and gyrations far below the level of conscious thought, and when the music reached the point where she had taken off her top the last hundred times, her hands performed the practiced gesture, and that was done. She stripped without interest in the process, having thoroughly explored it for implications and possibilities so long ago that it could no longer hold her attention.
She already knew that it wasn’t a personal communication, or a step in a career, or a way to start a relationship with a man. The men didn’t know who she was, or have any curiosity about her. They looked at her breasts, her buttocks, the space between her legs, in that order, as she bared her body, but what they saw was not she. It was all female bodies, of which this happened to be the one example that was here at the moment, a symbol. What had been advertised as seduction had descended to the level of art.
The weekends were amateur nights. For the young women who competed, this had not yet worn down into a job that was a whole lot duller than checking out groceries at a cashier’s stand. They were still up there actually stripping in front of men—not a man, but a whole bunch of them at once—and they couldn’t get over it. This was wild, risky behavior, and they did it as though on a dare, took the money slipped into the waistbands of their G-strings like love notes from billionaires.
The customers on the weekend nights were perfectly suited to them. They were boys in their twenties who’d had too much liquor before the shows started, and subscribed to the same illusion that this was a form of communication between this woman and themselves about sex, and that the edge of the stage just might not be an impossible boundary—not for them.
Prescott spent his evenings here, becoming familiar. He always sat at the bar or at a table near it, and gave the bartender a five-dollar tip for each five-dollar drink. He always kept away from the customers who he could see were probably going to cause trouble. He spoke little, and when he’d had two drinks, he left. He kept this up for nine nights, then left town to search for the perfect piece of real estate.
He had a fairly clear idea of where such a place could be found, so he took a flight there. Once he had arrived in the right region, finding the exact spot and obtaining a lease took him only a few days. He spent three weeks getting the place ready, and then returned to St. Louis prepared to change his hours at the Paddock Club. He found that the effect he had anticipated had taken place. His presence, beginning over a month ago, had been noticed, and his absence for the past three weeks had been noticed too.
Prescott walked into the bar at eleven-thirty in the morning, as the proprietor was busy supervising the unloading of supplies. There were two men from a liquor distributor bringing cases into the building with two-wheeled carts, and two bartenders opening them to restock shelves behind the bar while the proprietor counted boxes and checked them off an invoice on a clipboard. Now and then the swinging door to the left of the bar would open, and Prescott would see waitresses hurrying back and forth to prepare the small round tables for the businessmen’s lunch.
The proprietor saw Prescott come in, smiled at him, and nodded. “How you been?”
“Fine,” said Prescott. He stepped closer as the proprietor signed the sheet and handed it to one of the deliverymen. “How about you?” He glanced at the pyramid of liquor cases. “Looks like you haven’t done too badly.”
“Nope,” said the proprietor. “Been pretty fair.” He went around the bar. “What are you drinking?”
“How about a beer and a shot?” said Prescott. He got out his wallet.
The proprietor put the draft beer and shot glass on the bar, and held his free hand up as he poured the whiskey from the silver spout on the bottle. “It’s on me,” he said.
“Well, thanks,” said Prescott. He held out his hand. “I’m Bob Greene, with an e. Three of them, come to think of it. You’re Mr. Nolan?”