And finds the House.
Floorboards instead of bones. Walls instead of flesh.
He can pull it back. Start again. Undo this. The heat of the flames and the choking smoke and the howling fury.
It’s not so much a possession as an infection.
The House was always his.
Always him.
Kirby
13 JUNE 1993
The room is getting hot. The smoke gets in through the sobs, catches in her lungs. She could just die here. Keep her eyes closed. Not get up ever again. It would be easy. Asphyxiation would kill her before the flames reached her. She could just breathe deep. Let it go. It’s done.
Something is pawing at her hand, insistently. Like a dog.
She doesn’t want to, but she opens her eyes to see Dan, squeezing her hand. He’s on his knees, hunched over. His fingers are slick with blood.
‘Little help?’ he rasps.
‘Oh God.’ She’s still shaking, crying and coughing. She throws her arms around him and he winces.
‘Ow.’
‘Hang on. I need your jacket.’ She helps him out of it and ties it around his waist as tightly as she can against the wound. It starts soaking through even before she’s finished. She can’t think about that. She crawls under his arm, braces against the floor and hefts up. He’s too heavy, she can’t lift him. Her boot skids in his blood.
‘Careful, fuck.’ He’s gone horribly pale.
‘Okay.’ She says. ‘Like this,’ she rounds her shoulders so she takes on most of his weight, holding him up and shuffling forward. The fire crackles at their backs, jumping up the walls hungrily. The paper blackens and warps, wisps of smoke curling upwards.
And God help her, she can still feel him here.
They half-crawl, half-fall towards the doorway. She balances precariously and sweeps her foot out to kick the door closed on the ice and snow outside.
‘What are you doing?’
‘Trying to get home.’ She helps him onto all fours. ‘Hold on for another second. One more second.’
‘I liked kissing you,’ Dan says, his voice cracking.
‘Don’t talk.’
‘I don’t know if I’m as strong as you.’
‘If you want to kiss me again, then shut the fuck up and stop bleeding to death,’ she snaps.
‘Okay,’ Dan gasps, smiling weakly, and then more steadily, ‘Okay.’
Kirby takes a breath and opens the door onto a summer’s night full of police sirens and flashing lights.
POSTSCRIPT
Bartek
3 DECEMBER 1929
The Polish engineer pulls the car over two blocks away and sits with the engine running, thinking about what he’s seen. A bad scene, that much he knows. He couldn’t make out exactly what was happening. The man lying in the middle of the street bleeding in the snow. That shocked him. He nearly ran him over. He wasn’t really concentrating on the road. Steering the car through the streets by rote equation that equals home, all the way from Cicero.
He’s a little drunk, Bartek admits to himself. A lot drunk. When he starts losing, the gin comes easier to hand. And Louis kept the drinks flowing all night and into the small hours of the morning, long after he’d spent the last of his coin. And gave him credit on top of it. Enough to sink himself utterly. Now he owes Cowen $2,000.
The ugly truth is that he was lucky to be able to drive away in his car at all. They’ll be coming for it Sunday morning right before church if he doesn’t find a way to raise the money by the weekend. Better than coming for him, but that’s next. Diamond Lou Cowen does not fuck around.
Gambling with known gangsters. Chumming around with personal friends of Mr Capone. What was he thinking? He has enough problems on his plate without getting in the middle of a bloody altercation at five o’clock in the morning.
But he’s intrigued. At the glow spilling out onto the street from the ruined house and the improbable sumptuousness he spied through the open door. He should go back and help, he tells himself. Or just go and have a look-see. He can always call the police if it’s serious.
He turns the car around, circling back to the house.
The key is waiting for him on the front porch, barely on the threshold of the closed door, spattered with snow and bloodstained.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Thanks to everyone who helped make this book what it is.
I had a crack team of researchers digging up information, out-ofprint books, videos, photographs and personal histories on everything from illegal abortion groups to real-life radium dancing girls, the evolution of forensics, ’30s restaurant reviews and the history of ’80s toys. My dedicated researcher Zara Trafford, as well as Adam Maxwell and Christopher Holtorf of research and game design company SkywardStar, all found me strange and amazing things, elaborated on by Liam Kruger and Louisa Betteridge, and also Matthew Brown, who was always on call by dint of being married to me. Thank you.
In Chicago, Katherine and Kendaa Fitzpatrick were the best possible hosts, although it was a little weird taking Katherine’s two-year-old daughter along on a murder scene playdate to Montrose Beach. Kate’s husband Dr Geoff Lowrey provided medical advice and fact-checking, as did ENT surgeon Simon Gane. Any gruesome errors are mine.
Twitter friend Alan Nazerian (@gammacounter) drove me round, accompanied me to Wrigley Field and introduced me to helpful people, including Ava George Stewart, who gave me invaluable insight into criminal law over the best Chinese food in the city at Lao Hunan, and Claudia Mendelson, who walked me through Architecture 101 over coffee at Intelligentsia. Claudia put me on to Ward Miller who talked about the city’s most amazing buildings over dinner at Buona Terra. (Chicago is a foodie kind of town.)
Ghost tour guide, historian and YA fiction novelist Adam Selzer took me to the creepiest places in the city, including the back corridors of the Congress Hotel, and filled me in on intriguing Chicago history and the ’20s and ’30s in particular, much of which I couldn’t fit into the book, and treated me to that Chicago institution: Al’s Beef.
Longtime Chicago PD detective Commander Joe O’Sullivan (@joethecop, now retired) ran me through the inner workings of police procedure at the Niles police station, where he took me through some startling boxes of old evidence with haunting photographs. (Also: bacon and bourbon cocktails at divey bars.)
Jim deRogatis gave me the inside scoop on working at the Chicago Sun-Times, the paper’s librarians, ink in the air, the editors and cranks and stories from the frontlines. I have taken liberties. He also provided in-depth intel on the ’90s music scene, and sent me a copy of his brilliant, hilarious book, Milk It: Collected Musings on the Alternative Music Explosion of the 90s
I’m grateful to sports reporter Keith Jackson and The Tribune’s Jimmy Greenfield who talked about the ins and outs of sports journalism with me, as well as philosophies of baseball.
Ed Swanson, a volunteer at the Chicago History Museum, offered to read the novel for me, fact-checking the history, Americana and El (or L as it was previously known) routes with an eagle-eye. Any mistakes are mine and some minor ones, like the actual release date of The Maxx or the presence of any African-American workers at the Chicago Bridge And Iron Company in Seneca, are intentional nudges in service to the story.
The newspaper article on the murder of Jeanette Klara owes much to a real piece of journalism about a real-life radium dancer, ‘In New York She Is Dancing To Her Death’ by Paul Harrison, published in the July 25 1935 edition of the Milwaukee Journal. Thanks to the Milwaukee Sentinel Journal for permission to quote some of the great lines from the original.
Pablo Defendini, Margaret Armstrong and TJ Tallie were very helpful with excellent Puerto Rican swear words while Tomek Suwalksi and Ania Rokita translated and double-checked the Polish dialogue, also obscenity-laden.
Mutant-protein-wrangling scientist Dr Kerry Gordon at the University of Cape Town advised me on Mysha Pathan’s research.
Nell Taylor at the Read/Write
Library gave me a deep history of Chicago zines, while Daniel X O’Neil talked me through the ’90s punk and alt theatre scenes as well as Club Dreamerz and sent me off with original flyers. Thanks also to Harper Reed and Adrian Holovaty for hanging out at the Green Mill listening to ’30s-inspired gypsy jazz band Swing Gitan.
Helen Westcott loaned me all her criminology textbooks and serial killer reading matter, and Dale Halvorsen kept me supplied with great true crime podcasts he found. My studio mates Adam Hill, Emma Cook, Jordan Metcalf, Jade Klara and Daniel Ting Chong kept me grounded with funny YouTube videos and daily merciless teasing. And thanks to all at animation company Sea Monster, for letting me hide out there to work when our building was being renovated.
Thanks to my friends and family and strangers on Twitter who leaped to help with useful suggestions or translations or medical advice or Chicago recommendations, and anyone I have neglected to mention.
I’m not going to list the full bibliography of my research, but some of the most useful and entertaining reference works included: Chicago Confidential by Jack Lait and Lee Mortimer, an amazing, sexy, fun guide to the seedier places and people of the city published in 1950; the wonderfully accessible Chicago: A Biography by Dominic A Pacyga; Slumming: Sexual and Racial Encounters In American Nightlife 1885–1940 by Chad Heap; Girl Show: Into The Canvas World of Bump and Grind by AW Stencell; Red Scare: Memories of the American Inquisition by Griffin Fariello; the Chicago Women’s Liberation Union’s Herstory resources on Jane at The University of Illinois Chicago’s website, including transcriptions of personal histories; Doomsday Men by PD Smith, about the history of the atom bomb (and extracts Peter emailed me from his new book, City: A Guidebook for the Urban Age); Perfect Victims by Bill James; Whoever Fights Monsters by Robert K Ressler and Tom Schachtman; Gang Leader for A Day by Sudhir Venkatesh; Jack Clark’s Nobody’s Angel; The Wagon And Other Stories From The City by Martin Preib; Wilson Miner’s talk on how cars shaped the world in a tectonic way at Webstock 2012; Chicago Neighbourhoods and Suburbs by Ann Durkin Keating; as well as The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold; I Have Life: Alison’s Journey as told to Marianne Thamm; and Antony Altbeker’s Fruit of a Poisoned Tree, which all gave me devastating insight into what real victims of violence and their families endure. Studs Terkel’s oral histories were invaluable for conveying real people’s stories in their own voices.
First readers Sarah Lotz, Helen Moffett, Anne Perry, Jared Shurin, Alan Nazerian, Laurent Philibert-Caillat, Ed Swanson, Oliver Munson and time-travel plot advisor genius Sam Wilson all made great suggestions on making the novel better and more interesting.
The book wouldn’t have made it into the world without super-agent Oli Munson. Thanks also to everyone at Blake Friedmann and their international co-agents. I’m especially grateful to the editors and publishers who believed in it right off the bat, especially John Schoenfelder, Josh Kendall, Julia Wisdom, Kate Elton, Shona Martyn, Anna Valdinger, Frederik de Jager, Fourie Botha, Michael Pietsch, Miriam Parker and Wes Miller.
I wouldn’t have been able to write it without the love and support of my husband, Matthew, who played single dad for weeks at a time to our daughter, while I was away on research trips or in lockdown behind my desk writing and editing and is always first among first readers. Thank you. I love you.
EASY TOUCH
A short story by Lauren Beukes
Dearly beloved
is a good way to start.
So is:
Hello my friend
Or:
Greetings to you and your family
Or even an exotic:
Salut
In the end, it doesn’t matter how you address them. You don’t even need a name. They will give you everything. Roll over to show you their bellies like dogs, their tails still wagging. Money talks, you see. It roars like a stadium of soccer fans, drowning out that little voice of doubt.
Laryea has never had any doubt: people are greedy and stupid; they get what’s coming to them. People like Hilda Varone, whose name is printed in big block capitals on his cardboard sign, so she can’t miss him in the clog of people waiting in the arrivals hall of OR Tambo International. Not that she could miss him anyway. He is a big man, more fat than muscle these days, if he is honest, but still good-looking, in a button-up shirt and chinos and a flattop you could stand a glass on. He likes to look professional for his clients.
He knows from experience that Hilda will be feeling anxious, that all those hours and hours on a plane from Mexico City via New York will have given her too much time to think. And it’s her first time without Oscar. In these kinds of circumstances, it’s important to stick to routine. People like routine. It makes the world seem safe and predictable.
The glass doors to baggage claim glide open and spit out a flurry of people armed with suitcases and backpacks and wheelie carryons. Hilda looks rumpled and tired, dragging her big grey suitcase with the dodgy wheel that veers out capriciously. He has chosen a spot right in front of the doors, but her eyes skid over him and his neatly lettered sign, searching the crowd as if she is expecting someone else.
He’s always thought of her as chubby, but she’s lost weight since he last saw her. Now, she’s just chub, a short compact package of a woman with over-plucked brows and a frizz of dark hair that doesn’t like being told what to do. Much like Hilda herself.
Laryea has always found Oscar easier to deal with. For an ambulance driver, Oscar is a meek man, as if all the shout has been drained out of him by the yawl of the sirens as he navigates the sprawl of Mexico City with his arthritic hands clamped on the wheel, wishing for power steering. He should retire, but how can he, considering the circumstances?
The couple has been to Johannesburg three times since they first made contact eighteen months ago. But Oscar opted to stay home in sunny Me-hi-co this time round. It gets expensive, all these flights, all these meetings, all the administration. Supposedly, this is the last trip. A mere formality and it will all be done.
Laryea knows better.
‘Ms Varone!’ he calls out to Hilda. ‘Over here.’
‘Laryea,’ she says, noticing him at last, but she sounds less than thrilled. Jetlag is a bitch. He moves forward to welcome her with a kiss on both cheeks.
‘You still dragging this old thing around?’ he says, taking the suitcase from her. ‘Don’t worry, soon you’ll be able to afford Louis Vuitton. A matching set for you and Oscar!’
‘I think we have mas importante things to spend the money on, no?’ she says, sharply.
‘Of course. Forgive me, señora. How is Gael?’
‘The same,’ she says, bleakly.
Life can change in an instant. One moment your six-year-old son is stepping out of a bodega, the next he is on his back under a car, with the axle pressing down on his stomach, crushing his spine, his spleen, his pelvis, so the doctors say he will probably never walk again. A burst tyre. A freak accident.
It’s not that Laryrea doesn’t feel sorry for Hilda and Oscar. But the world is full of tragedy.
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Hilda is quiet on the drive to the restaurant. But the question still lurks in the tension of her shoulders, the clench of her jaw. When?
‘You have to be patient,’ Laryea soothes her. ‘These things take time.’ ‘These things take time. These things take time,’ she parrots angrily. ‘This is what you always say, Laryea.’
He imagines her telling off her water-cooler clients in the same tone, more fluently perhaps in her native Spanish, but no less bolshy. He imagines entire office complexes living in fear
of Hilda Varone, employees willing to risk drinking Mexico City tap water rather than face her wrath.
‘This is the way third-world governments work,’ he says, ‘This is what makes it all possible. You know that. Your mother—’
‘Leave my mamá alone.’ She glares out the windscreen at the hawkers selling superglue at the traffic lights.
‘You know what I’m saying, Hilda, if Pinochet hadn’t—’
‘I said to leave it. It was different in Chile. There was none of this … lawyers.’ She spits the word out.
‘Of course not. She didn’t have time to set anything up when she fled the country.’
‘She leaves everything. Just pack up and go.’
‘Imagine if she had managed to hide her money away before she left; how hard it would be to get it out of the country? This is par for the course. You shouldn’t expect it to be easy. Have patience, seÒora. This is the last time, I promise.’
He suspects it will have to be. They have taken her for $47 453 so far and he can’t see how they will squeeze any more juice from her.
The secret is in not using round numbers. Round numbers are too much like a bribe, a ransom. All those gaping zeros like holes in a story. To short-circuit suspicion you need the kind of numbers beloved by bureaucrats and auditors. Numbers that suggest 14% tax or built-in administration charges or adjustments for the exchange rate. Official numbers. Numbers that can keep clicking up, because there is always another cost, another agency fee, another unforeseen surcharge.
‘I can’t do this again,’ she says, staring out the window as if the sweep of trees lining Jan Smuts Avenue requires her fullest concentration. ‘No puedo más.’ Laryea pretends not to notice her dabbing angrily at her eyes.
‘The last time. I promise. Mr Shaik is waiting for us at the restaurant. In half an hour, less, the last of the paperwork will be signed and sealed. If you want, we don’t even have to check in to the hotel. You can get straight back on the plane and go home to Oscar and Gael. Si?’
The Shining Girls Page 30