Chicago

by David Mamet

  And now Mike’s life had been corrupted by the death of his girl. “What kind of men,” he wondered, “would kill an innocent girl?” The answer, of course, was “bad men,” and he was back where he started, his perseverative thoughts themselves becoming overused, and leaving him with incathectable rage, and loss. “Bad men,” and he was, of course, one of them.

  For he had truly loved the Irish girl. “Who wouldn’t love her? There was no merit in it,” he thought. “She was an angel.”

  He returned, as often as he dared, to memories of their meeting—rationing them in concern that overuse might render them stale.

  The compact of their love-at-first-sight had been concluded, as all are, on the instant, leaving Mike dazed. He’d once had that bright idea the boys at the Port referred to as an appersoo—that gangdom could be charted through observation of its florists—and followed the flag. The flag, in this case, was the florist’s tag, Walsh’s The Beautiful, adorning the larger and more lavish gangland tributes.

  Mike had opened the glass door giving on Clark Street.

  On his first visit Mike had prepared no story to explain his presence, feeling, as he always did, that to concoct an improvisation in advance was cheating. He would, as always, trust to his inspiration and his luck.

  But the various, and obvious, possibilities: My aunt died, I am planning a wedding, or, in extremis, I write for the Trib, and we’re doing a feature about holiday arrangements, these and their mundane like fled from Mike. He did not remark their flight, but stood tongue-tied, looking at the girl behind the counter, who was looking back at him.

  Some time passed and neither he nor the girl had moved. It was the strangest impulse he was ever to feel in life: to walk behind the counter and have her; and she slowly turned, and he saw that she knew it. She lowered her eyes in the most primal gesture of modesty and acquiescence. He began to move toward her. The bell over the door jingled as a customer entered the shop.

  Mike turned to the owner. “I’m a reporter,” he said, “and I’m doing a story about out-of-season flowers.”

  The girl smiled.

  The elevated train ran close to the second-floor windows of his flat. On her first visit she’d started at the noise. Afterward, she, like the residents, ceased to notice it.

  In his reverie it was always winter. His grief did not run to the real memories of swimming at Rainbow Beach, or of fall walks along the Lake, out to the North Avenue breakwater, where they, like everyone else, always stopped to look back at the city, now revealed as beautiful.

  He thought of her, unceasingly, naked, and huddled beneath the blankets much too rough for her Irish skin. Of her white body, wrapped in his dressing gown, nestling with him in the bed. She could not do so anymore, as she was dead.

  The cycle of regret, self-pity, longing, and guilt could be interrupted only by alcohol; the alcohol was killing him, and he was grateful.

  Chapter 21

  By a disposition matured by experience, Parlow had come to distrust everything.

  The ancient sign displayed in the City Room could still be made out. It read, Believe little that you see and nothing that you hear. It was the declaration of his faith; and like any truly embraced faith, its pursuit exacted a price and rewarded devotion. The price was not only that the acolyte acknowledged life as an exercise in folly, wickedness, and deceit, but that this perception did not debar him from participation in that evil world—and that a true knowledge of the world must involve doubt not only of his fellows, but of his own mental processes and reason.

  Mike was long past remarking the hypocrisy and folly of others, but increasingly aware of it in himself. What was there to say at the speaks, at the crime scenes, the lockup, the morgue, the gravesite, the mourner’s flat? There was nothing to say. There was drink, and the darkest humor, and there was silence; and if there indeed was a God, the only possible relation to Him, for the reporters, was through the aforementioned observances.

  But, as with any strict religious observance, there was a reward. And the reward, for the reporter, was this: that occasionally, he might discover the truth.

  Occasionally, through a diligence or intuition always dismissed as luck, he might find out the murderer, the hidden bank account, the absconded husband or wife, the one piece which would make the otherwise random collection of unfortunate facts cohere into a finally human narrative.

  The constant practice of doubt as to the material, and disbelief of all human testimony, created, in reporters, as in the judges, the cops, the nurses, and others of the tribe of the night, various instincts.

  Having seen lies almost exclusively, the rare instance of the truth was, to them, easily identifiable. Their lives were founded on doubt, but they were not given to denial; their one unassailable devotion was to the truth independent of its acceptability, or in fact, utility. It was to them the One Good. Put on the scent of truth, they proceeded fairly oblivious to blandishment, intimidation, or distraction.

  Parlow spoke, now and again, of his old friend “likelihood.”

  “Mr. Parlow,” a cub might attempt, “how did you know to question X rather than Y,” or “What inspired you to call the marina in addition to the auto rental garage?”

  “Son,” he would say, “there’s two things: Probability. And likelihood. Is it probable the reverend clergyman screwed and killed this young parishioner? You bet it is. Now, had he done so, what is it likely he did next? He says he didn’t do it. He says he was home alone, in prayer. If so, is it likely that he’d fixed himself a snack? I’d think so. What do you think? Five hours of an evening, all alone? A fellow makes himself a light repast.

  “We’re in the kitchen. No dishes in the sink. No dishes in the dish rack. Or on the shelf, no trace of water. No scraps of food, tea bags, empty cans, in the kitchen wastebasket?”

  “It’s possible,” the cub said.

  “Good for you,” Parlow said. “However, this: Fellow’s a smoker. Wire-to-wire. Five hours at home. No butts in the ashtrays. He emptied the ashtrays? No butts in the wastebasket. This man was not home.

  “Not being home is no crime. But not being home and lying about it means he’s covering something up. Is it likely, the evening this young parishioner of his, who had been ‘receiving instruction,’ was killed, coincidentally, our man’s out doing something else, unrelated, that he needs to lie about? It ain’t likely. It’s impossible.

  “And a man went to the chair because, when he constructed his lie, he forgot to fill his ashtrays. And,” Parlow said, “we asked: as he was not home, where was it likely he was?”

  And now he asked himself the same question of Mike Hodge.

  Mike was not to be found in his apartment, nor in the apartment of Yuniko, nor in the haunts of the Tribune.

  It was most likely, Parlow determined, he had gone to ground, as will any wounded animal, where he might find safety and comfort.

  So Parlow went to the Ace of Spades.

  “I have not seen him,” Peekaboo said, “but if you find him, you tell him, they ain’t no shame to fall off the wagon, and that, spirit moves him, he knows he can come in here, and either be here, as he wants, or drink himself to death, either one. He knows he’s welcome here.”

  Parlow then tried the Golden Dragon. And Hop Li said that, yes, Mike had come in.

  “To score?” Parlow said.

  “I think he kick that shit,” Hop Li said. “He came in to borrow money.”

  “You help him?” Parlow said.

  Hop Li shrugged. “And then he left,” he said.

  “What do I owe you?” Parlow said; but Hop Li shook his head. Parlow turned to go; then, in an inspired moment, turned and asked, “Where was he going?”

  “I ast him.”

  “What did he say?”

  Hop Li shrugged. “He just made this gesture.”

  Hop Li swung a forefinger around the horizon. Parlow had seen the gesture before.

  Chapter 22

  Parlow found Mike in the Hunt C
lub cabin on Fox River.

  Parlow tried the door, it was unlocked. He opened it and the stink of the room hit him. Mike sat at the dirty kitchen table. There were three full and two empty bottles in front of him, a dirty glass, cigarettes, and the Luger pistol.

  “What the fuck,” Parlow said, “is your idea of cleanliness?”

  Parlow took a chair to the table. He sat down.

  “It, apparently,” Parlow said, “is a delicate mechanism.”

  Mike said nothing.

  “Did you hear me?” Parlow said. “It’s a delicate mechanism. You say something.”

  “What is that?” Mike said. “‘The mind’?”

  “Yes, the mind, yes,” Parlow said.

  The Luger pistol lay on a spread red bandanna, on the table, next to Mike’s chair. The bandanna was stiff with gun oil. A rusty oil bottle and two bore brushes sat on the table. Parlow tried the cap of the oil bottle and found it caked shut. The pistol was coated with dust. A new box of cartridges covered a corner of the bandanna. Parlow opened it.

  “Oh, very funny,” Parlow said, “accidentally shot while cleaning his gun.”

  Mike shrugged.

  Parlow dropped the magazine out of the gun. The magazine was empty. He pinched back the bolt, and saw the single cartridge in the chamber. The toggle bolt was unoiled, and rasped as he drew it back. “Gun’s filthy,” he said.

  “We all have our little ways,” Mike said.

  “That’s sweet,” Parlow said. “How they will miss me, who, even in death, assuaged their feelings, by providing an alternative solution. No, he did not take his own life, thereby depriving us of his diverting presence; he would not have done that, no. He shot himself ‘by accident,’ cleaning a gun he did not get around to cleaning, with a cartridge which, curiously, was shiny-new.” Parlow racked the bolt all the way back and the ejected cartridge fell on the cabin floor.

  “So my question to you is: given the evidence, what the hell are you doing?”

  Mike took a drink.

  “You wanted to kill yourself, you would have done it,” Parlow said, “without all this ‘pantomime.’” He picked up the corner of the bandanna. “Thus, by induction, you did not want to ‘end it all.’”

  Parlow picked up the ejected shell and dropped it, the extracted magazine, and the gun into his overcoat pocket.

  “What if I want to later?” Mike said.

  “You want to later? You, you fucken coward,” Parlow said. “I never thought I’d use the word. There is no later. You had your chance, you were in the throes of grief. You want to later, it would be out of some stupid feeling of consistency. Where’s the glory in that?”

  “Fuck you,” Mike said.

  “‘I didn’t kill myself, consumed by grief, now I’m going to do it from a sense of fitness.’ If,” Parlow said, “excuse me, if, and this is brilliant, ‘it all’ was your life. No. You wanted, and I must assume this is what all the alienists get paid for, listening to unloved, rich, fat women, ‘You Wanted to End the Suffering!’ Is that what you wanted to do? ’Cause your husband no longer wants to fuck you?

  “Sitting here? In your grief. With your German pistol. Your dilemma, then, was not that you wanted to die, but that ‘dying,’ and here I impress even myself, was the sole escape you, in your state, could imagine from that sorrow you had, at this advanced age, discovered is an inescapable part of life. How am I doing?”

  “I wanted nothing more, in my life, than to go outside, and sit against the tree, and blow my brains out,” Mike said.

  “That is an untruth,” Parlow said. “For, had it been true, truly, you would have done it. Show me the error in my logic. You wanted, more than anything in life, to imagine some end to your pain other than that. That’s obvious.”

  Mike poured two drinks, and pushed a glass toward Parlow.

  “There are times,” Parlow said, “when a fellow has to sober up.”

  “Why?” Mike said.

  “Because the only alternatives are blowing your brains out, which you did not do, and dying of alcohol poisoning, sitting in your own shit and terrified of the bugs on the wall.”

  On the table were several sheets of paper. The paper was covered with handwritten notes. Parlow began to read: “He wanted, more than anything in life, to imagine some end to his pain other than the end of life.” He read on. “Is ‘non-coterminous’ a word?” he said.

  “It is if you want it to be,” Mike said. “Read Walt Whitman.”

  “I can’t. It makes me sick with envy,” Parlow said.

  “I want you to go away,” Mike said. “I don’t feel good.”

  “Of course you don’t,” Parlow said. “Come on.” He took Mike by the arm.

  “You forgot the part about where you have to convince me,” Mike said.

  “Come on,” Parlow said. “The room stinks.”

  Mike didn’t move.

  “I got the girl killed,” Mike said.

  “So fucking what?” Parlow said. “What? Was she going to live forever? She’s dead. You’re not dead: what’s your problem? Put differently, other than the workings of that great healer, Time, what do you want to do? What is your problem?”

  “My problem is, I don’t know who to kill,” Mike said.

  “Whom,” Parlow said. “P.S.: you’ve been brought low. And I would say I grieve with you, but, of course, I don’t. As we’ve each got to do it alone. Just like the adolescent boy and sex. The gods have spoken: this is what they said. And now, you’re not only twelve days drunk but content in the undoubted revelation of your nothingness in the Great Scheme.”

  “I loved her,” Mike said.

  “You were humbled by your love,” Parlow said, “you were humbled by her slim white body, you are humbled by death, but real humility is nothing to be proud of. And you, full stop, stink.”

  “I’ve been drinking,” Mike said. “And have neglected to eat.”

  The cabin had a pump over the kitchen sink. Parlow pumped water into the coffeepot. “Come over here,” he said. Mike levered himself up and walked to the sink. Parlow took a chipped navy mug from the sink, rinsed it out, and filled it with cold water. He handed it to Mike. “Drink it,” he said.

  Mike choked it down. Parlow said, “Now put your head under the pump.” But Mike had begun retching. He worked his way to the door, opened it, and stood on the porch, vomiting into the snow. Parlow threw coffee grounds into the pot, and put the pot on the stove. He came up behind Mike.

  “There’s this to say for a broken heart, it keeps your weight down. And it makes you pale and interesting to the opposite sex. Those of them who might be attracted to a drunk, staring madman. And it’s true. I notice—ever the observer—that love or grief—these states which, au fond, seem to be like madness. Are they like madness?”

  “Fuck you,” Mike said.

  “Grief appears like madness,” Parlow said, “which we saw in the haunted visages, and the demeanors of those returned from the horror of the trenches.”

  “You never saw any such thing,” Mike said, “in the railway depot of Vesy-le-Duc.”

  “Vesy-le-Duc,” Parlow said, “was the second-most-important railway nexus in France, the key and the lock to the movement of men and matériel from Le Havre to the Front. I don’t care for your attitude and I’m tired of playing ‘fetch.’ Let’s get out of here.”

  Chapter 23

  They drove back through the cold Wisconsin night. The frost crusted the windshield, and Parlow scraped it periodically, clearing a small opening with the edge of a box of matches.

  Down toward the Illinois border the box began to decay into wet cardboard. Parlow used his fingernails.

  “We got to fucking get warm,” Mike said.

  Parlow stopped at the small guard station at the state line. He turned the car off. “Gimme a minute,” he said.

  Mike stared at him.

  The guard hut held three Illinois state policemen in shirt-sleeves, clustered around the coal-fired stove. They looked up at Par
low. “Good evening,” he said.

  “Who the fuck are you?” one said.

  Parlow took out his press card. “We’re up here covering a story,” he said. “My paper assigned me. To write. On the subject of the roadblock. And its effectiveness. My question is: would it help, or hinder you, professionally, to be mentioned by name as aiding our investigation?”

  The hut was full of smoke. The stove gave off that best of heat, like a blanket.

  Under the table were five wooden cases. Four unopened, and the fifth with the top pried off. A cop leaned under the table and took a bottle of scotch from the open case.

  Mike lay on a cot in the corner; Parlow sat, drinking, at the table, with the three cops, his notebook open before him as he entertained them.

  Investigating an arson-murder, he said, an unnamed detective had spied a curious bulge in the paneling of the still-smoldering ruin. One wall panel was slightly bowed outward. The detective had taken his knife and pried around the edges, and the panel had fallen free, to reveal, behind it, a small wall safe.

  The safe’s door was cracked open, the metal still dull purple from heat. Nestled in the safe were several banded packets of high-denomination bills.

  The apartment’s two occupants would never be more dead, and the detective understood it correctly, so Parlow said, as criminally wasteful to leave the money to the firemen.

  The safe was too hot to admit his hand so he pried the bills out, packet by packet, with his knife. He was laying them on the desk when he heard voices approaching, and scorched his hands as he stuffed the money into his coat pockets.

  Unfortunately, he had just been cleaning his service revolver, and called away from his desk, had stuffed the oily cleaning rag into his overcoat. The rag caught fire, the coat caught fire, the rounds in the service revolver cooked off and blew his leg off at the thigh.