by Scott Simon
One day, Linas Slavinskas of the 12th discovered an old city ordinance that said anyone found within the city limits with less than a dollar in his pockets could be arrested for vagrancy. Linas stood up from his seat near the end of the first row of the council floor, to wave the regulation and point to the mayor. “Arrest that man!” he commanded the sergeant-at-arms. “City ordinance 91-5!” The mayor stood up from his high-backed burgundy leather seat, laughing as he turned out his pockets and pulled them out from his trousers, like a zookeeper demonstrating the wingspread of a bat.
“That man is asking you to approve a budget that's larger than Mongolia,” roared Linas. “And he doesn't have a dime in his pants! He knows as much about budgets as I know about mapping the genome of a fruit fly! Arrest him for his own protection! And ours!”
John Wu of the 15th Ward, who owned the Big Bad Buddha gift store on Cermak, Tommy Mitrovic of the 21st, who sold insurance, and Jesus Flores Suarez of the 22nd, who owned a travel agency (“Jesus Saves—On All Fares!”) pulled out plump money clips from their seats in the center of the second row and began to ball up dollar bills and throw them to the mayor. Miles Sparrow of the 7th, who owned Pedro's Blues Room on Cottage Grove, Dorothy Fisher of the 3rd, who ran a luggage delivery service at Midway Airport, and Arty Agras of the 1st scuttled under the balled-up bills as they unfurled in flight, and lunged to intercept them.
“Turn awaaay from temptation, aldermen!” the mayor exhorted, his arms splayed to suggest a figure on a cross. “Reee-ject these antediluvian moneylenders!”
“Credit cards? Driver's license?” the paramedic continued.
“I doubt he had a driver's license,” the security chief said. The guards smiled at the thought of the mayor fulminating behind the wheel of a car at the antediluvian buses and trucks slowing his progress along the Kennedy Expressway.
“Credit cards?” another guard said, as if the paramedic had asked if the mayor kept a bowling ball in his pocket. The mayor had well-publicized financial difficulties—a record of uncollected debts and questionable tax returns—that not even two terms' incumbency could altogether improve.
“We carried whatever he needed,” said the guard with growing irritation. “Are you paramedics or Woodward and Bernstein?”
“We just have to account for these things,” another paramedic rushed to explain. “We don't want the family to think anyone took his personal effects.”
“There is no family” Mrs. Bacon said quietly. “Every now and then, we'd hear from a cousin somewhere. Georgia, Jamaica. We'd send them an autographed picture. There are no personal effects,” she said, her last words catching, and she finally put her hands over her eyes and turned into a corner of the room, her elbows holding her up against the wall while she shuddered.
Four uniformed officers who had been summoned to the fifth floor walked alongside the ambulance trundle bearing the mayor, down a windowless hallway that buzzed with a weak light. The wheels on the cart squeaked beneath the mayor's weight, at a piercing pitch above the slow, grave footsteps. The paramedics sensed the police were observing a ritual; wordlessly, they consented to walk behind the blue uniforms. The chief of security took hold of the trundle railing just above the mayor's head, and steered the cart. When the police and paramedics had all tramped into a service elevator, he spoke in low tones to the officers, who had all turned around to stand at attention over the mayor's body.
“Nothing gets out yet. Please.”
The officers muttered yes, sir, as the fourth and third floors blinked by. At the stroke of the second floor, they could feel the elevator begin to brake.
“No sirens,” said the chief, turning to take the paramedics into his sight, too. “Okay? A nice, quiet, last ride.” He paused until the three men and one woman officer had all nodded.
“Hell of a guy. We had some times together.”
The chief blinked his eyes dry as the silver doors in front of the trundle began to roll open. One of the paramedics reached a rubber-gloved hand quickly down to the mayor's chin.
“I'm sorry,” she said with detectable alarm, “but there's some kind of green discharge here.”
The chief pulled back on the cart before it could be rolled through the open doors. The officers surrounding the trundle stiffened, and mechanically dropped their hands to steady the cart. Then the chief let out a breath and seemed to smile. Then, he really did smile—a laugh even snuck into his voice as the paramedic held the bewildering green secretion on the end of her thumb, finally returning his smile.
“Artichoke,” the chief announced. “You take him from here.”
Sunny Roopini heard his phone warble through his sleep, raised his head, but couldn't reach it without upsetting Sheldon. His head was tucked just below Sunny's shoulder, and Sunny could feel Sheldon's breaths tug across his ear; he decided to keep his arm in place below his head.
Sunny had been astonished when Sheldon had first crept onto his collarbone. For months he had simply sat on the foot of the bed, peering over the top of the blanket's folds, as if surveying the Somme from a trench. Sunny's daughters understood why their mother was no longer around. After all, they were teenagers of their times. They had seen spacecraft fall apart, infants starve, subways burst, and skyscrapers smashed. They had already heard so much about lung, skin, thyroid, testicular, uterine, prostate and pancreatic cancers, treacherous car suspensions, trans fats, lasers blinding airplanes, AIDS blighting continents, sporadic bone spurs, swine flu, Christmas tree electrocutions, cholesterol, high-speed car chases, category five hurricanes, and mad cow disease that they must have wondered how any human being grew to be as old as their father. Sunny had just turned forty-eight.
But how to explain to Sheldon—it had been the one challenge of being a widower about which no book or counselor had cautioned— that the shoulder on which he slept was now cold and gone? Sheldon's trust was unswerving, stirring, and slightly unnerving. For months, he struck what Sunny and his daughters came to call his British Museum pose at the end of the bed, splayed on his stomach, front paws extended straight as train rails, his gray face impassive, his blue cat's eyes looking out from his small head with vast certitude: she'll be back, she always has, I'll just keep watch.
Sunny would wait until his daughters had shut their door and tried to drown out the sound of a late-night newscast with the blare of music to splay out on his forearms and speak softly to Sheldon: I'm sorry, old boy, but Mummy is not coming back (under no circumstances did he want his daughters hear him refer to Elana as Mummy to their cat). We love you, Sheldon. She'd be here if she could. She just can't. But Daddy (he dropped his voice even lower—he would rather his daughters overhear him booking a high-priced call girl than refer to himself as Daddy to Sheldon), Rula, and Rita will take care of you.
Sheldon's blue-rimmed eyes barely broke their gaze as he blinked. He looked back at Sunny with utter, unchanged certitude: She'll be here. Lose faith if you must. I never will.
Then one night, Sheldon just came crawling across the covers and rammed his small gray head into Sunny's chin. Then he burrowed his nose into Sunny's armpit, not demonstrative so much as desperate. Sunny stayed in place, essentially pinned, hearing Sheldon's breathing finally begin to slow to something that his slight chest could contain, until the sky lightened and Sunny could hear the grind of buses begin along Broadway.
“How did you manage it, Pappaji?” his daughters asked when he shared the story that night—brandished it, really, recounting it several times with newly remembered details. “How did you ever convince Sheldon to come over?”
“Nothing,” he told them finally, surprising even himself with his own reflection. “He just had to decide that it was his idea.”
So Sunny slowly rotated his free arm over his chest and around to the night table just beyond Sheldon's head. A woman's voice—an unfamiliar voice—was there.
“Mr. Roopini,” she said. “I'm Sergeant Maureen Gallaher.” She waited while she heard fumbling and throat clea
ring on Sunny's end. “I'm with City Hall's security detail. I have instructions to bring you downtown to the mayor's office. If you have no other commitments, of course.” She heard another fusillade of phone fumbling.
“That last line was a joke, right?” But Sunny kept his voice sociable.
“I guess so, sir.”
“Later than usual for this sort of thing. It must be—” Sunny tried to twist himself to see the unblinking green numbers on his bedside alarm.
“A little after midnight, sir,” said Sgt. Gallaher.
“Mrs. Bacon usually calls,” said Sunny.
“It might be too late even for her.”
“Is something wrong?” he asked.
“I wouldn't know, sir,” said Sgt. Gallaher quickly, and then understood the point of the question. “No, sir. No alerts. Subways and skyscrapers are fine,” she said finally. “All I hear on the radio is a warehouse fire in Lawndale and a shooting in Pilsen.”
She heard Sunny hold his hand over the phone and clear his throat. She thought she recognized the phlegm midnight coughs of a cognac drinker. The racket of clearing his throat seemed to remind Sunny to speak more softly.
“My daughters. Teenage girls. I am always available to the mayor, but it's the middle of the night, and, you know, we're alone now.”
Sgt. Gallaher seemed to remember. “It's a quiet night, sir,” she said after a pause. “I'll see if the Twentieth District can send over a car to sit on the street for a while.”
“Do I have time to shower?”
“Your choice, sir. I'm passing Fullerton now. I'll be on the Lawrence Avenue side of your building in six minutes.”
“Not five?”
“I didn't figure to use the siren, sir.”
Sunny jumped in quickly. “I was kidding, Sergeant,” he assured her. “I was just intimidated by your precision.”
“It'll be five now, sir,” she said without perceptible reaction. “Whenever you're ready, we'll be on Lawrence.”
Sheldon had opened his eyes and yawned, so Sunny left him in the folds of the pink sheets and flowered covers. He showered and chose his clothes carefully, quietly sliding back closet doors and snapping on lights. A pale violet shirt worn open at the collar, he decided, so that the mayor would not forget they were working after-hours; a light gray sport coat, to suggest seriousness; tan pants, brown suede shoes, a white linen pocket square onto which he dabbed some Vetiver after splashing two jots onto his cheeks. Sunny snapped on a small reading light to appraise the results in a mirror: he was dressed like the lawyers and brokers you could see on television sitting in the front six rows of professional basketball games, cell phones set to stun-only but dealing out business cards. Just one of the boys tonight, but don't forget who I am tomorrow.
Rita was up. She shuffled in on bare feet, wearing a man's—or at least a boy's, he hoped—red candy-striped shirt.
“Something wrong?” She rubbed her eyes with the tips of her fingers, as her mother had when the girls would totter into their room to tug on their sheets and demand milk and songs.
“No. The mayor wants me downtown.”
“To watch TV?”
“Nehru listened to the radio with Gandhi. Same idea. You'll be okay?”
Rita rubbed the back of her neck with the palm of her hand, black hair shaking in a waterfall over her shoulders (she was the younger of his daughters, in her second year of high school; he was startled to see such a gesture of mature fatigue).
“We'll call our dope dealer as soon as you close the door,” she assured him. Sunny had turned his face down to examine his watch in the low light: it was nearly 12:30.
“You need money?” he asked.
“We give him your best cuff links and have unprotected sex.” Sunny reeled back from her joke and smiled.
“We'd never refuse an extra twenty,” she said.
Sunny slipped two out from a thick clip and put them in his daughter's hands.
“This won't go far with the dealer,” he said. “But River Kwai delivers until one. Tip well, they know us. I've got my phone. There's some beer in the fridge, and I won't mind so long as you leave one. There should be a cop car outside on Lawrence …”
Sunny's daughters were the ones who usually stepped into his embraces these days. It spared him the adolescent anxiety of wondering if his arms would be welcome, but also made him feel pitied. As Rita brought herself close, Sunny placed his lips softly against her smooth cheek.
“Nice shirt,” he told her.
“An old one of Mama's,” she said. “Wasn't it yours?”
Sunny stepped back and beheld his daughter at the end of his arms.
“Oh, good Christ, I think so,” he said. “So long ago. I wore it on a Valentine's Day we spent in Boston and never really got it back.” He squeezed his daughter's shoulders. “Back before you get up. To try to sleep a little, too.” Sunny reached back into a pocket to find his clip and left a last twenty on the bedroom bureau.
Sgt. Gallaher was a tall, bony, boyish woman in her mid-thirties, wearing a crisp white shirt, blue pantsuit, and black topcoat. Her squawking black brick of a radio hung on the front of her belt, and her service badge was pinned over a floral pink pocket square. She was standing by the dark blue cruiser when Sunny came out onto the street, and had to stoop down to pull open the back door for him. He saw wispy strands of long, raven hair stray from the bun she had tucked behind her head and tried to hold back with a drugstore clip. Sgt. Gallaher slid into the front seat of the cruiser, alongside a young uniformed officer—Officer Mayer was the name Sunny picked up—with a pale neck.
“Sergeant Gallaher, have we met?” asked Sunny. She turned around in her seat to smile.
“Good memory, sir. I used to work out of Foster Avenue. I came to your restaurant a few times.”
“And now?”
“First District.”
“You never go back home for dinner?”
“Long trip for chicken vindaloo, sir.”
“You won't find better,” he said, and Sgt. Gallaher laughed. She had wide shoulders under the blazer—Sunny guessed, from the way she sat, that her gun was holstered under her right arm—and broad blue eyes.
“Actually, I remember the polenta alla Sarda. My mother's side is Italian.”
“We've added a little more Italian. Come any time, we'll take care of you. That used to mean: cops eat free. Now it means free toothpicks. Well, nothing prevents the owner from sending a couple of cannolis or mango barfis over to his friends.”
“I'll come by some night, sir.”
“You too, Officer Mayer,” said Sunny, lightly clapping his shoulder.
As the patrolman pulled onto the Outer Drive, Sunny noted that they had left his ward and crossed into Jane Siegel's 46th. Puffs of smoke, burped from car exhausts and brilliant as small clouds in the frigid night, scurried across the highways. The people who lived in those glass houses along the lake never had to draw their shades. Who would see them—Peeping Toms flying into O'Hare? Lake Michigan ore boats miles beyond the beaches that frosted the eastern face of the city? So what you could see from the street after midnight looked like campfires dwindling down on a hillside: small yellow hall lights, slivers of bright bathroom lights from where someone left the door ajar, aquarium lights, kitchen lights, or a lone table lamp somebody left on to find the bathroom.
The people who lived there had to be up early to get to the gym by seven, a breakfast meeting by seven-thirty or the trading pits by eight.
They watched the news and went to bed. Perhaps they stayed up late enough to hear the first few jokes of a late show monologue while they brushed their teeth—after all, they were concerned about issues.
But just a few blocks west, past Broadway, people lived in apartments that could not look above the towers to the blank blue waters of the lake. They had to look out on each other—close the curtains, shut the doors, worry about what people might see across the way. The people who boiled eggs and brewed coffee for breakfas
t meetings might be just getting up when the people who cleared dishes and served late-night specials were just getting home, aching for sleep. Sunny was convinced that the critical differences in his constituency weren't between blacks, whites, browns, and Asians, or Jews, Gentiles, and Muslims. It was between those people who get enough sleep and those who never can.
Sunny stretched back slightly in the back of the cruiser, careful not to catch his suede brogues below the seat.
“May I ask, sergeant—where are you from?”
“Beverly, sir,” Sgt. Gallaher answered without turning back. She had escorted a fair number of politicians. None dozed or read in the back. They all seemed to feel that it was vital to leave the sergeant with an impression of their personal concern. They asked where she had grown up, gone to school, and whom she had met in her duties, until they heard something they could match from their own lives.
At the mention of Beverly, Sunny sat forward, putting his chin above the front seat.
“East or west of Western?”
Sgt. Gallaher held her reply for just a moment.
“I'm surprised you had to ask a Gallaher,” was how she finally put her answer.
“The Nineteenth!” Sunny cried. “My friend Mit Volkov.”
“But I live right across from Curie High now,” the sergeant added.
“The Fourteenth!” cried Sunny. “My friend Collie Kerrigan.”
The 14th Ward alderman was an outlandish little turnip of a man— even the gray suits that he wore seemed to acquire a stale greenish cast encasing Collie's pasty neck—who unfailingly approached Sunny in the minutes before the mayor rapped the council to order.
“Come on, Sunny,” he'd say, flicking a hand up toward the gallery. “The folks came to see an Indian. Give 'em at least a little war whoop. A rain dance.”
Collie was one of the south side votes that Sunny routinely needed to approve the Parks and Recreation budget. So he would whisper back, “This one's for you, Collie,” and pat his open mouth three times. Whoop, whoop, whoop.