Windy City

by Scott Simon

  Sunny began to sense an amiable challenge from the sergeant, and readjusted the crisp white points of his pocket square.

  “So: you went to Curie?”

  “No. No sir.”

  When Sgt. Gallaher turned around, her blue eyes blinked with triumph.

  “Mother McAuley” she announced quietly, and Sunny sat back, fairly slapping his knees.

  “My gosh. From parochial school plaids to police blues. Mother McAuley,” he repeated, as if he had heard the most unexpected answer to a crossword clue. “Did you have a problem with boys?”

  “That's why my parents sent me there,” said Sgt. Gallaher, determinedly looking straight ahead to the towers along the lake looming before them. “So I wouldn't. But when we played hospital, I was always the cop who brought in the gunshot victim,” the sergeant added. “Never the nurse or doctor.”

  The car clipped past North Avenue, into Sidney Wineman's 42nd. Sunny spoke before any silence could fall.

  “Is security interesting?”

  “Yes. But I don't see the mayor much. My detail precedes him to appearances. I do get to work with international delegations. That's an education, really,” said the sergeant. “I've learned that all Mounties don't wear red tunics. British security people don't wear Sherlock Holmes capes, and they do carry guns. No Chinese policeman I've ever met knows any more about kung fu than what he's seen in the movies. And there aren't any she Chinese police. Polish policemen all have relatives in Jefferson Park. Anyway, they get discounts on Milwaukee Avenue by saying they do. And, you don't win any points with a Pakistani cop by saying, ‘I've always wanted to see the Taj Mahal.' Sometimes, it's a short course in international relations.”

  “A lot of people think aldermen don't have to worry about international relations,” Sunny observed. “But I don't think a politician can afford such an impoverished imagination.”

  Sgt. Gallaher noted Sunny's choice of words. Most of the pols she took down to City Hall called themselves public servants or legislators, but almost never a politician. Politician was a word, like sodomist, that was perfectly accurate, but had connotations.

  “When I first started in politics,” said Sunny, “the best way to draw applause was to say, ‘Thank you. And in conclusion, I just want to say, up with Walesa, free Nelson Mandela, and hands off of central America!’ You don't get ovations like that for vowing to extend commercial zoning on the forty-three hundred block of Sheridan Road.”

  The mayor, in fact, had been Sunny's tutor on the utility of foreign policy in local politics. He remembered one of their late night meetings, with the mayor hunched over a bourbon glass like a sly cat protecting a nibble, taking his voice down to a greatly jowly growl.

  “You think that all we have to worry about here is picking up trash, plowing the snow, and keeping Al Capone in his grave? My God, man. There are a hundred languages spoken here. Assyrian, Lakota, Urdu, and Yiddish. The Yoo-nited Nations doesn't have to worry about how to say ‘beans’ in as many languages as any diner on Western Avenue. All of these folks with five-day beards and black head scarves who are going for each other's throats over in Snowdonia? They send their kids to the same school here and tell them, ‘Now behave!’ This nation kicks a little ass some place, and soon we got thousands of them living in basements on Halsted Street. Next day, you're in the back of their cab while they're on their phones, plotting a coup. We've got nuclear physicists from the Poon-jab and goatherds from Namibia. We've got brain surgeons from Ogbomoso—that's in Nigeria, if you were too embarrassed to ask—and rocket scientists from Petropavlovsk—that's in Kazakhstan, as I'm sure you knew—working as doormen. One day, after they find life on Mars, we'll have bug-eyed, green-ass Martian-Americans bussing tables on Clark Street. This great heaving mass of diversity is united by a single, momentous desire: They expect you to get the snow off their street.”

  Their car looped left along the older stone towers along the lake. The car wheels threaded into a high-pitched whimper against the smooth new pavement. The blast from the car heater started to make Sgt. Gallaher woozy so she wordlessly inched down the window on her side until a chute of cold air cleared her head.

  “But foreign policy has pitfalls,” Sunny added. “One night I was in Andersonville for a zoning meeting. Someone said that a new preschool in a basement would be named after Pope John Paul. I saw my chance and said, ‘Pope John Paul, who did so much to help so many throw off the chains of oppression.’ Notice that I didn't say communism. Over on Lincoln Avenue, there are still storefronts where people burn a candle for communism. And anarchism, syndicalism, and probably fetishism. Call them nuts. But a politician never forgets: Nuts vote. All the Nobel laureates teaching at the University of Chicago don't have any more votes than people who believe they've had sex with space aliens. So I drop the pope's name, softly, like a ten-dollar bill in the collection plate. Suddenly, angry women get up all over the basement. ‘The Pope is a pig!’ they shout. ‘The Pope oppresses women!’ That was one night,” said Sunny, shaking his head, “when I should have stuck to zoning.”

  Officer Mayer had threaded the cruiser into the complex of streets below the Loop. Fringes of snow, which had been blown in by a storm but concealed by the streets overhead from the day's sunlight, looked like grimy gray rails lining the roads. The policeman steered the car into a landing alongside three other cruisers in the Daley Center garage. A gray iron door rocked open from the wall, revealing another blue uniform on the other side.

  “Thank you, Sergeant,” said Sunny. “I enjoyed our conversation.”

  “Me too, sir. That detail will take you up to the mayor's office. We'll be down here when you're through. Whenever.”

  Maureen Gallaher sat back down alongside Officer Mayer, leaving the door on her side open to let in some of the numbing night air. She inhaled a bite of the frozen river, and ashy, misty warm exhaust from trash trucks whining nearby. Officer Mayer patted his pockets for a cigarette lighter. City police cruisers were no longer so equipped. Radios and laptop computers had pointedly been mounted in their place.

  “Nice guy, Alderman Roopini,” she told the young officer. “But conversation? I don't think we got in ten words, do you?”

  Three blue suits briskly showed Sunny into a service elevator and whisked him to the fifth floor. The officers seemed distinctly more sullen than Sgt. Gallaher—Sunny decided that this unexpected meeting must have necessitated an extra shift—and were silent on the short ride up. A gray suit took him through a gray-walled and wired equipment room, and another iron door swung open into the mayor's official waiting room.

  Three sat in the mayor's outsized emerald-upholstered waiting chairs. Artemus Agras of the 1st Ward, whose brown potato shoes just touched the top of the thick maroon rug; Vera Barrow of the 5th, whose stockings brushed silkily as she rose in her pink sherbet suit to extend her hand to Sunny; and Linas Slavinskas of the 12th, who flicked a speck of something unseen from the smooth sleeve of his buttery chocolate-colored cashmere sport coat and stepped up to Sunny to take his hand into both of his own.

  “Your lordship,” said Linas. It was his nickname for Sunny, prompted by the clipped British school accent of Sunny's boyhood.

  “Linas, I'm surprised they could find you at home.”

  “They don't look for me at home, milord.”

  “If I was your wife, Linas, I'd have them staple a tag in your ear to track you,” said Vera Barrow. “Like they tag grizzly bears in mating season.”

  “That's not where she'd tag me, darling,” said Linas.

  Sunny brushed his lips against Alderman Barrow's smooth copper cheek.

  “Resplendent as always,” he told her. “Whatever the hour. Whatever the weather.” He put his hand out to Arty Agras.

  “We've been trying to figure out to what we owe this honor,” said Arty. “It's a little late for this pajama party.” Arty had pulled on his hairpiece with apparent haste, so that it rode up on the left side of his head, like a picnic blanket flipped over b
y a breeze.

  Linas Slavinskas was chairman of the city Finance Committee, the council's most powerful. Artemus Agras was head of Budget and Government Operations, which theoretically employed the most city workers, and Vera Barrow was the mayor's floor leader and chairman of Police and Fire.

  Sunny chaired the Parks and Recreation committee. The budget his committee set was not nearly as large as many other city agencies. But the money employed between four and nine thousand city workers, depending on the season: grass cutters, baseball coaches, bridge tenders, lifeguards, and trash pickers, in more than five hundred parks, sixteen lagoons, nine museums, ten bird and wildlife gardens, nine lakefront harbors, eight golf courses, two arboretums, and baseball diamonds, soccer fields, swimming pools, rec centers, fountains, band shells, and plazas.

  Sunny was also vice mayor. The position was more a title than an actual office, a name to imprint near the bottom of brass plaques. Sunny understood, without awkwardness or apology, that his appointment was seen as a gesture to the position East Indian immigrants had won in the city. They spoke English, often quite lyrically, and had grown up, like the Irish immigrants of a century ago, with boisterous and combative politics (“So many parties!” Sunny once told a delegation of visiting Indian legislators. “Indian National Congress! Bharatiya Janata Party! National People's Party! Here in Chicago, we find that just one party can be as chaotic as you like.”).

  In politics, ethnicity was just one of the immutable facts of a man's biography. A politician learned to make use of it, as he might guiltlessly exploit his brains, looks, or wealth.

  Arty Agras and Vera Barrow resumed their seats on one side of the room, sinking into the cushions against a bare cream wall (the mayor enjoyed watching security cameras shots of people on those cushions, squirming and flailing; they were disheveled and exhausted by the time they were brought into his office). Sunny took the one seat left, which was on the other side of a lamp table from Linas Slavinskas. Linas twisted his head slightly and caught Sunny's look as he comically turned his head and pretended to shield his eyes from the blazing dazzle of Arty's diamond stickpin. Linas was convinced it was a glittering fake.

  “You see ads for these tchotchkes all the time,” he once told Sunny behind his hand during a break in a zoning committee meeting.

  “It's not as if he can't afford a real one, Linas,” Sunny pointed out, but Linas snorted. His suspicion of the stickpin reflected his dubiety about Arty's political reputation. Arty took lunch (moussaka, a lettuce wedge, a kourambie cookie, and coffee) every day in the front booth of Thessalonica on LaSalle, a simple steel, ceramic, and cream-pie diner just across from City Hall. His conspicuous companions were men identified in newspapers as Jimmy Glad Bags, Sally Snake Eyes, and Larry Lizard Skin (inspiring Linas to call Arty Squid for Brains). Arte-mus Agras was somewhere between “allegedly” and “reportedly” organized crime's unofficial emissary in the city council. He was a full-time alderman whose annual financial statements reported ever-changing investments in 1st Ward restaurant linen services, a car park company, and, in recent years, trash recycling businesses (inspiring Linas to also refer to him as Eco Arty).

  Arty did not decry rumors about such ties. In fact, he jovially advanced them. He'd pull up to the urinal next to Patrick Tierney of the 33rd, who owned a rug cleaning service, and mutter, “Can I show you something in a concrete overshoe?” Or he'd hail tall, bald, Wandy Rodriguez of the 30th, a retired high school basketball coach, at budget committee meetings by saying, “I don't care how big you are, amigo. You can still fit into the trunk of a car.” But Linas Slavinskas thought Arty's jokes betrayed him as a small, mild man with wise guy aspirations.

  “Total con,” he often told Sunny. “He's not a made man. He's a putz. At best, he knows a couple of cheap goombahs that could tie your shoelaces together. You know how the outfit works. They need lawyers, they hire the best Jews on LaSalle Street. They want a suit, they get the best Italian on Oak Street. So if the outfit wants a man in City Hall, do you really think they'd have to settle for a half-spiced plate of pastitsio like Arty Agras?”

  Sunny picked up a copy of the city's Cultural Affairs newsletter from the low lamp table between him and Linas. There were stacks piled in Sunny's district office. Occasionally, the office ran short of tax forms, liquor license forms, taxi complaint forms, and zoning applications. But never Cultural Affairs newsletters. No matter how freely dispensed, there was always a pile or two to be disposed by the time the next was delivered.

  Sunny couldn't remember the last time he had opened one that he hadn't used as a placemat for a sandwich. On those few occasions that he opened the newsletter as mental refreshment of last resort, Sunny was always astonished at the astounding display the city provided in public spaces and parks.

  There were films, lectures, and mariachi bands, symphonies, puppet shows, gallery opening, and lectures about the linguistics of Augustine of Hippo. Sunny drew Linas's attention to a small box that read, Creation of the Sacred Mandala. “Something for you,” he said, and ran a finger across the text as he read: “The public is invited to observe Tibetan Buddhist monks from the Drepung Gomang Monastery as they meticulously lay fine, colorful sand into beautiful patterns created as prayers for peace and healing.”

  “Oh, that's just what we've been missing,” said Linas. “Sacred sand. Sure has done the job for Tibet.”

  “You're more sophisticated than you let on, Linas.”

  The newsletter said that when summer came, the Grant Park Orchestra would perform Mendelssohn's “Midsummer Night's Dream,” Elgar's “Sea Symphony” and “Cockaigne,” and selections from Mozart and Mahler.

  “Look at that,” said Linas, pointing his finger as if he had noticed a rooftop sniper.

  “Estrogen Fest,” Sunny read aloud. “Live music, theater, dance, visual art, poetry, and performance art.”

  “Estrogen Fest,” exclaimed Linas. “Estrogen Fest! Parks should have softball games, hot dog and taco stands. High school bands playing “Stars and Stripes Forever.” Maybe polka and Motown. But Estrogen Fest?”

  “It's just a weekend next August, Linas.”

  “Estrogen Fest! That's what's wrong with this city now. Every goddamn loopy group has their own fest. What about Colostomy Patient Fest? What about Falling Down Drunk Fest? Don't they deserve recognition? When is Shoe Fetish Fest? I really want to try to make that one. Estrogen Fest!”

  “Should be a great place to meet girls, Linas,” Sunny said with a smile.

  “I'm sure the kind of girls who go to Estrogen Fest think so, too,” Linas replied.

  Vera Barrow looked up from her newspaper and flung a smile from across the room, like the queen of Spain flinging a brooch from her throne.

  “They just haven't met you yet, Linas.”

  Linas broke into the yellow-toothed grin that he knew made him look like the conniving wolf in a child's fairy tale and said only, “Natch.”

  Two more blue suits appeared in the waiting room and showed the aldermen down a bright, buzzing hallway into a conference room. They sat for another moment in silent, almost silly expectation around a shiny golden oak conference table.

  “Oooh,” moaned Linas. “Principal's office.” He rubbed a palm ostentatiously over the glossy table. “You know they make these at a federal pen,” he said. “I wonder if I can commission the warden to make me a dining set.”

  “Build your own when you get there, Linas,” said Vera Barrow. “Service for twelve. One a year, twelve to twenty.”

  “Naw, babe,” said Linas, “I'm a lover—” he began, but Collins Jenkins, the mayor's chief of staff, came suddenly into the room, his brown tweed coat flapping as if he'd been running after a bus, a creamy, hairy Nordic scarf—Linas was sure it had been knitted by nationalist Laplanders—looped around his neck.

  “For chrissakes, Collins.” It was Arty. “For the love of God, if he got us down here just to have you ream our …” Arty Agras tucked down his chin as he looked over at Alderma
n Barrow and let his observation stop short.

  “Give us the two-minute scolding,” said Linas Slavinskas. “And let us get back wherever.”

  Collins Jenkins took the seat at one end of the conference table. Stuart Cohn, the corporation counsel, an aging eagle with his smooth head and sharp face, stood behind him to take a snip of any question before Collins would risk doing so. Collins Jenkins had a peculiar gesture of lifting his reading glasses onto the top of his head. The precious little prop seemed to suggest that he could see things far above that were lost on others.

  Collins flicked his tongue over his lips, clicked it against the back of his teeth, and thrummed his fingers three times before speaking.

  “The mayor of Chicago is dead,” he announced. Sunny heard a gasp from Vera Barrow—a sound as unexpected as a yodel from a woman of her incomparable composure. Linas dropped a gold lighter that had suddenly come into his fingers, and Artemus Agras let his mouth drop so far he needed his right hand to push it back.

  “He died at his desk,” said Collins. “Working late at night for the people of this city. Alone. It seems to be some kind of heart arrest. He's at Rush Medical Center now. I am awaiting the call from the doctors to confirm …” Collins voice caught “…. whatever happened.”

  It was Linas Slavinskas who finally spoke, softly.

  “Well, God rest his soul.”

  “You didn't give him much peace while he was here,” snapped Collins.

  “He gave it back pretty well himself,” said Linas a little more sharply. But Collins Jenkins resettled the glasses on his head and went on.

  “You aldermen chair the most vital committees. I wanted to inform you before I make a formal announcement. I want to have the medical report in hand. These days, there are always questions. I'm planning to call in the chihuahuas at six this morning.”

  The chihuahuas were the mayor's name for the City Hall press corps, and for reporters generally (he made no distinction between the gossip tout of a free weekly passed out in bars, and the religion editor of the Christian Science Monitor). Reporters were silly, smelly, noisome, and inconsequential entities that yapped and snapped against the ankles of the great and worthy. They had brains as small as walnuts, and soiled sofas and rugs. They cared only about eating, mating, and scratching themselves.