The Informer by Craig Nova

office, and when Armina came to talk to him, he tied flies, small ones with a cloud of hackle, upright wings, and a gray body, a tail as fine as a baby’s eyelashes.
    “So,” he said. “You’ve got a woman’s shop and that’s it?”
    “Yes,” said Armina.
    “And what about the dates,” he said.
    Armina read the dates from her notebook. Then she sat with the leather-bound thing in her lap.
    “Are you worried about your job?” said Michael.
    “I’m worried that I can’t do it,” she said. “That this is beyond me.”
    Michael asked her to repeat the dates. He wrote them down and asked her to go through them again before he reached to the shelf where he kept his fishing diaries. He turned the pages, looked at a map, then went back to his notebooks. The women had been found in May and June.
    “He must be a fisherman,” he said. “The hatches of mayflies come at regular times. Not far from here, in Spreeland, for instance, the peaks of various hatches correspond with these dates.”
    “So,” said Armina. “This is how he gets the time? He says he is going fishing?”
    “Yes,” said Michael.
    “He follows a woman from the shop, finds where she lives, and then when he has an excuse, he follows her and takes her into the park.”
    Michael looked in his fishing diaries, the blue ink of his entries in neat lines, the margins with drawings of mayflies—the next hatch,
Potamanthus distinctus
, was coming at the end of the month. It was a white mayfly, like an apple blossom.
    “Week after next,” said Michael. “I think you’re going to find another.”
    Armina finished her drink and sat while Michael tied another pattern, and as he used his gray thread, on a bobbin, as he spun some fur for a body, as he set the wings upright, she kept an eye on the certainty of his movements, the precision of his work, just like an engineer making a drawing. It was as though she were watching him make a blueprint for a fly.
    At the lingerie shop Armina talked her way through the disdain of the saleswomen, and when they condescended to speak to her, she found that men occasionally were customers, too. These men looked through the displays of underthings and asked about sizes by saying that a girlfriend had the shape and was the height of one of the women who worked in the shop. Armina explained again about what she had seen in the park, and after going through the details, the saleswomen agreed to say to these men that they were interested in fishing, and that they had always wanted to catch a big, cold trout. In the next week, a man who had come in and browsed through the things on display, said that he was a fisherman and he would be happy to teach a saleswoman how to catch a trout. It was all about presentation, he said, about stalking a fish, of trying not to be seen, of being absorbed by the landscape, and, above everything else, not to frighten the fish before the moment came. He left his card with the saleswoman.
    Armina watched the man’s apartment near the dates when
Potamanthus distinctus
was going to appear on a stream in the Spreeland. The man left his apartment with some leather cases, one of them a leather tube for a fishing rod, and a large gladstone that was just the thing to hold a fishing vest, waders, and a net. But he only went by taxi to the center of the city, where he checked into a hotel. Then he went to the bar, where he had a drink before he went out to a small park, opposite an apartment building, where he waited like a fisherman on a bank who is trying to see a fish.
    Everything about his posture, his lack of movement, was mesmerizing—he hardly seemed to breathe, and he didn’t flinch at the sounds of a backfire in the street or react to children who chased a ball or a woman who wheeled a baby in a perambulator. Instead, his silent immobility suggested something that coiled, that put itself in a position to gather strength for a strike. He moved his head once to follow the path of a couple, a