“Daddy, where are you, where are you?” She realized tears were running down her cheeks. “Babies cry; you aren’t a baby,” she scolded herself out loud.
She came on a drinking fountain and stopped to drink and to run her head under the stream of water. Other people came up and pushed her out of the way, but she was cooler now and could move again.
For over an hour she pushed her way through the mob. It was like swimming in giant waves in Lake Michigan: you worked hard, but you couldn’t move very far. Every time she came to a cop, she tried to ask about Tony Warshawski. Sometimes the man would take time to shake his head, no, he didn’t know Tony. Once, someone knew Tony but hadn’t seen him. More often, the overheated officers brushed her aside.
A cherry bomb exploded near her, filling her eyes with smoke. A rumor swept through the mob: someone had knocked King down with a rock.
“One down, eleven million to go,” a woman cackled.
“King Nigger’s on his feet, they’re treating him like he’s royalty while we have to suffer in the heat,” a man growled.
Victoria saw the golf course on her right. It looked green, refreshing, and almost empty of people. She wrestled her way through the mob and made it onto the course. She climbed the short hill around one of the holes and came on the road that threaded the greens. To her amazement, Uncle Tomasz’s white convertible stood there. Neither Tomasz nor Boom-Boom was in it, only the stranger who’d been with Uncle Tomasz back at Western Avenue. He was driving slowly, looking at the bushes.
Victoria was too exhausted to run; she limped up to the car and started pounding on the door. “What happened to Uncle Tomasz? Where’s Boom-Boom? Where’s my dad?”
“Who are you?” the stranger demanded. “Tomasz doesn’t have any kids!”
“My dad, Officer Warshawski,” she screamed. “Uncle Tomasz said he was going to teach Tony a lesson. Where is he?”
The stranger looked at her and then burst into a manic laugh. “Believe me, little girl, Tomasz is never going to teach anyone a lesson.”
The stranger opened the door. The look on his face was terrifying. For some reason, the girl held up her camera, almost as a protection against his huge angry face, and took his picture. He yanked at the camera strap, almost choking Victoria; the strap broke and he flung the camera onto the grass. As she bent to pick it up, he grabbed her. She bit him and kicked at him, but she couldn’t make him let go.
3
The battle between the cops and the protestors went on for many hours after Dr. King and his fellow marchers left the park. As sunset approached, every cop felt too limp and too numb to care about the cars that were still burning, or those that were overturned or dumped into the lagoons ringing the park. Firefighters were working on burning cars, but they were moving slowly, too.
Patrolmen returning to their squad cars couldn’t get far: women had poured sugar into the gas tanks. After going a few hundred feet, their fuel filters clogged and the cars died. When a firefighter came on the body shoved under a bush, he called over to a cop uselessly fiddling with the carburetor of his dead squad car.
The policeman walked over on heat-swollen legs and knelt, grunting in pain as he bent his hamstrings for the first time in nine hours. The man under the bush was around forty, blond, sunburnt. And dead. The cop grunted again and lifted him by the shoulders. The back of the man’s head was a pulpy mess. Not dead from heatstroke, as the officer had first assumed, but from a well-placed blunt instrument.
A small crowd of firefighters and police gathered. The cop who’d first examined the body sat heavily on his butt. His eyelids were puffy from the sun.
“You guys know the drill. Keep back, don’t mess the site up any more’n it already is.” His voice, like all his brother officers’, was raspy from heat and strain.
“Guy here says he knows something, Bobby,” a man at the edge of the ragtag group said.
Bobby groaned, but got to his feet when the other cop brought over a civilian in a Hawaiian print shirt. “I’m Sergeant Mallory. You know the dead man, sir?”
The civilian shook his head. “Nope. Just saw one of the niggers hit him. Right after we got King, one of them said he’d do in the first whitey crossed his path, and I saw him take a Coke bottle and wham it into this guy.”
The police looked at each other; Bobby returned to the civilian. “That would have been about when, sir?”
“Maybe three, maybe four hours ago.”
“And you waited this long to come forward?”
“Now just a minute, officer. Number one, I didn’t know the guy was dead, and number two, I tried getting some cop’s attention and he told me to bug off and mind my own business. Only he didn’t put it that polite, if you get my drift.”
“How far away were you? Close enough to see the man with the Coke bottle clearly?”
The civilian squinted in thought. “Maybe ten feet. Hard to say. People were passing back and forth, everyone doing their own thing, like the kids are saying these days, no one paying much attention, me neither, but I could make a stab at describing the nigger who hit him.”
Bobby sighed. “Okay. We’re waiting for a squad car that works to come for us. We’ll drive you to the Chicago Lawn station, you can make a statement there, give us a description of the Negro you say you saw, and the time and all that good stuff. . . . Boys, you’re as beat as me, but let’s see if we can find that Coke bottle anywhere near here.”
Turning to the man next to him, he muttered, “I hope to Jesus this guy can’t make an ID. The whole town will explode if we arrest some Negro for killing a white guy today.”
As they picked through the litter of cups and bottles and car jacks that the rioters had dropped, looking for anything with hair or blood on it, a squad car drove up near them. The uniformed driver came over, followed by a civilian man.
“Mallory! We’re looking for Tony Warshawski. Seen him?”
Bobby looked up. “We weren’t on the same detail. I think he’s over by Homan—oh—” He suddenly recognized the civilian: Tony’s brother Bernie.
Bobby Mallory had been Tony Warshawski’s protégé when he joined the force. Thirteen years later, he’d moved beyond Tony with promotions the older man no longer applied for, but the two remained faithful friends. Bobby had spent enough time with Tony and Gabriella that he knew Bernie and Marie as well; Bobby was an enthusiastic supporter of Boom-Boom’s ambition to supplant the Golden Jet with the Blackhawks. He wished he could also support the freedom Tony and Gabriella gave their own only child, but he hated the way they let Vicki run around with Boom-Boom, like a little hooligan. Thank God Eileen was raising his own girls to be proper young ladies.
“We’re falling down, we’re that tired, Warshawski,” Bobby said. “What’s up?”
“Boom-Boom and Victoria,” Bernie said. “Marie’s brother, Tomasz, he stormed out of the house saying he was heading over here. The kids are missing, and one of the neighbors says Boom-Boom drove off in the car with Tomasz and then Victoria, she followed after them on her bike maybe five minutes later. I—I watched all this on TV, I know it’s World War Three in here—but the kids, Jesus—”
Bobby interrupted him as an ambulance threaded its way through the garbage and the remaining rioters. “Gotta get a body outta here, back in a minute, Warshawski.”
Bernie followed him. As the ambulance crew picked up the dead man, he gave a strangled cry.
“That’s Tomasz. Marie’s brother! What happened to him?”
He shoved past Bobby Mallory to kneel next to Tomasz. “Come on, man, get up. You’ve had your fun, now get on your feet!” He shook Tomasz’s shoulder roughly. “Where the fuck is my son? What kind of asshole are—”
He dropped the shoulder in horror as he saw the battered side of his brother-in-law’s head. “What happened to him, Mallory? Did he crack his head on a rock?”
“Someone cracked his head with a rock, more likely.”
“Boom-Boom. Where’s my boy?” Bernie’s vo
ice was breaking. He began clawing around the underbrush where Tomasz had been lying. He saw a sneaker with the number 9 painted in red on the back. Bobby Hull’s number: Boom-Boom had painted it on his ice skates, his sneakers, and even his lace-up church shoes.
“This here is his shoe. Find my boy, God damn you, Mallory, find my boy!”
Bobby didn’t say anything. Even though the sun was setting, the park was still seething. Knots of fifteen or twenty rioters kept passing the area where Tomasz had been killed, screaming abuse at Mallory and the rest of the force. A troop of cops, so weary they could barely put one leg in front of the other, arrived to help secure the crime scene.
“Traitors! Traitors to your race and your neighborhood!” a woman screamed. “Tell your precious archbishop we’re never coming back to Mass. All that money he’s spending, he can get it from the niggers!”
Bernie Warshawski stared at her in shock: it was a woman from his own parish, and near her was the St. Eloy priest, Father Gribac. The woman took a rock out of her pocket, but Bernie reached her and held her arm before she could throw it.
“Bertha! Bertha Djiak, what would your children say if they saw you doing this?”
“Out of my way, High-and-mighty Warshawski. Because your brother is a cop, you turn traitor, too?”
Still holding her arm, Bernie turned to the priest. “Father—it’s my boy! He’s disappeared. Someone murdered Marie’s brother, right here in the park, and I can’t find Boom-Boom.”
4
It was completely black inside the trunk, and very hot. For a few minutes, Victoria screamed and kicked as the car bounced along. When they stopped, the man yelled, “No one will hear you.” His voice was muffled, but he was bending over, close to the edge of the trunk.
He was right. The screams from the mob were so loud, Victoria could barely hear the police and fire sirens above them. She would suffocate in here. No one would ever find her; Mama would be heartbroken. Papa, too, but it was chiefly of her mother that Victoria was thinking.
Now she knew how Mama had felt when she was hiding from the Fascists in a cave in the mountains. Thinking of Gabriella made her stop crying. Mama had been seventeen in 1944. Her papa, Nonno Sestieri, had been arrested almost a year earlier and sent by the Germans to their death camp in Poland. At three in the morning, a neighbor came into the room where Gabriella and her mother were living. The neighbor’s brother worked for the police in the town of Pitigliano and he had told the neighbor to warn Gabriella’s mother that she would be arrested for Jewish activities.
Gabriella had a cardboard suitcase under her bed, ready for her to leave at a second’s notice. Underwear, a heavy sweater, and eight red Venetian wineglasses, part of Papa’s family for two hundred years: she had a duty to keep them safe. Gabriella went to the home of another neighbor, who had offered to hide her in the basement, only to learn that this neighbor had been arrested earlier that night. And so Gabriella fled on foot into the mountains.
“How did you live, Mama?” Victoria asked.
“By my wits,” Gabriella said. “There are three laws to survive: keep calm, think, and be lucky. You can’t control luck, but you can stay calm and think.”
In the trunk of Uncle Tomasz’s car, Victoria stopped crying. Stay calm. Think. Pray for luck.
One night at dinner Papa had talked about stopping a car for missing a taillight. “The driver was so nervous, I went to look more closely at the missing light. He had twenty M14 rifles in the trunk and one of them had broken out the light—the barrel was sticking out.”
If she could find the inside of one of the taillights, Victoria could break it and stick her arm out. Maybe someone would see her. Anyway, she would have air, she wouldn’t choke to death in this horrible hot trunk. She needed to scooch down so she could pull up the carpet that covered the bottom of the trunk.
The car was new and the carpet was glued down firmly. Victoria couldn’t find anyplace to stick a finger and start ripping. A sob shuddered through her.
“Stop!” she ordered herself. “Keep calm and think.”
The spare tire was punching into her back. And under the spare tire there would be tools. The jack, the wrench for taking off bolts.
Slowly, sweating so badly in the oven of the trunk that her body was sliding inside her skirt and torn blouse, she turned over. She found the hooks that held the carpet over the tire. Undid them. She was thirsty and sleepy.
Sleep would kill her. Stay alert, that is what Mama did. If she slept, the Fascist patrols might sneak up.
She stuck an arm under the carpet but couldn’t move the tire to get at the jack beneath it. Are you going to start crying again? A voice seemed to come from outside her head. Don’t. I have no use for babies.
She maneuvered her arm and then her shoulders and head under the carpet. Her trembling fingers bumped into a set of wires. She didn’t know what they were for, but she pulled on them, pulled with all her might. They cut into her palms and she pulled harder.
Suddenly she saw light through the thick carpet, felt cooler air on her bare legs. She was near the end of her strength, had just enough left to move out from under the carpet. The wires she’d pulled were connected to the trunk release. She blinked, blinded by the light of the setting sun, and managed to crawl over the lip of the trunk and roll onto the grass.
5
Boom-Boom had been all over the park, trying to find Uncle Tony. At first, when Uncle Tomasz roared up Route 41 to Seventy-first Street, he’d been having a great time. He knew his cousin was watching from the attic. He could picture his mother rushing to the sidewalk, yelling after him, and then trying to get his father to chase after him. In their old Ford, like to see him try to catch the Wildcat.
They stopped at a barbershop at Seventy-first and Euclid, where Uncle Tomasz knew the owner. He made a phone call and fidgeted around, joking with the barbers, but tense underneath. He kept looking out the window. After about fifteen minutes, a man with thinning blond hair came in. He looked around, saw Uncle Tomasz, and jerked his head toward the door.
Boom-Boom was following his uncle to the street, but the man stared at him with the meanest eyes Boom-Boom had ever seen. “You stay in the shop and wait for your uncle there,” he said in a voice so cold Boom-Boom turned around and went back in.
He asked Uncle Tomasz’s friend who the man was, but the barber only shook his head and gave Boom-Boom a dime for the Coke machine. The machine was next to the front door. As Boom-Boom bought his soda, he saw the stranger get behind the steering wheel. Uncle Tomasz was letting this complete stranger drive his car, while he sat stiffly in the passenger seat.
When they took off, Boom-Boom ran after, the Coke bottle still in hand. He almost caught up with the Wildcat at the stoplight on Stony Island, but as soon as the light turned green, the car was gone. A westbound bus lumbered into view and Boom-Boom boarded it by darting in through the back door as passengers were exiting.
When the traffic gummed up near Marquette Park, Boom-Boom jumped off. He jogged along the street and caught a break: he saw the Wildcat make its way around the sawhorses, although he wasn’t close enough to see money change hands. If he’d been looking for her, he would have seen his cousin before she was swept up in the crowds entering the park, but in his imagination, she was still leaning out his attic window.
He hadn’t known how hot and tired he could get, pushing and shoving his way through mobs in the park, looking for the Wildcat. It wasn’t that there were so many cars—almost no one except cops, firefighters, and journalists had been allowed to bring a car in—but the waves of people, yelling, charging in different directions, “Hunting niggers,” as many of them shouted.
In the back of his mind, away from his fatigue and his fear for what the man with the mean face would do to Uncle Tomasz, Boom-Boom thought his cousin and Aunt Gabriella were right: those ugly words were worse than swearing. They turned ordinary faces into something monstrous, made them nonhuman.
At one point he saw peo
ple from his own neighborhood. Bertha Djiak, who poked him during Mass if he talked to one of his buddies, there she was, her hair clumped with sweat, her face redder than ketchup from the sun, her lips flecked white. He ducked behind some thick shrubbery. And saw the mean stranger.
Uncle Tomasz lay on the ground, so still he might have been asleep. Boom-Boom looked from his uncle to the stranger, and the stranger lunged for him.
“Oh, yes, the nephew, the up-and-coming Golden Jet. I think you and I need to talk about your hockey future, boy.”
Boom-Boom turned to flee, tripped over a root in the shrubbery, and fell flat. The stranger lunged for him and grabbed his left foot. Boom-Boom kicked, wriggled, and felt his sneaker pop off. He jumped to his feet and ran.
After ducking and weaving through the shifting crowds, Boom-Boom stopped to breathe. The sun was setting, but the air was still thick and hot. His throat was raw from running. He needed water and started to look for a drinking fountain. As he scrambled to the top of a knoll, hoping for a fountain and to check on his pursuer, he saw the Wildcat, its trunk standing open. It was pointing nose-down at one of the lagoons. In fact, it would have gone in except someone had rolled a squad car into the water—the Wildcat’s front left tire had caught on the squad car.
He stumbled down the hill to the car. He began to wonder if he’d died, if he was in heaven seeing visions, because his cousin Victoria was lying in the grass next to the trunk.
6
It was dark by the time the cousins and their fathers found each other. When Victoria saw Tony, she burst into tears.
“Pepaiola, cara mia, cuore mio,” Tony crooned, the only Italian he’d picked up from Gabriella—my little pepper pot, he called his daughter. “What’s to cry about now, huh?”
“Uncle Tomasz said he would kill you because he lost his job,” she sobbed. “I wanted to warn you, but this man, this friend of Uncle Tomasz’s, he picked me up and put me in the trunk. I was scared, Papa, I’m sorry, but I was scared, I didn’t want you to die and I couldn’t tell you, and I didn’t want me to die, either.”
Love & Other Crimes Page 26