by Scott Simon
“If the mayor is on a slab over on West Harrison,” Arty Agras admonished Collins, “some orderly has already told his girlfriend, and she's called chihuahuas. Or it's on somebody's computer bog some-wheres.”
Collins turned to face Sunny Roopini.
“You are vice mayor,” he began softly. “You now become the acting interim mayor. I've checked with Stuart here.” Collins actually raised the glasses off his forehead and gestured over his shoulder to the counsel. “As you know, your legal duty is to preside over the special session we'll hold tomorrow,” and here he cast a glance down at his watch, then corrected himself. “Later today. To memorialize the mayor. At the regular meeting on Monday, you preside to elect a new mayor. Then of course there are regular elections next year. But although you hold office for just a few days, Sunny, your portrait will hang on the fifth floor here permanently, alongside the mayor and all of his predecessors. Harrison, Medill, Daley, Washington, Daley—and Roopini.”
“Hell of a firm, your lordship.” said Linas Slavinskas. Even Collins Jenkins permitted a small smile.
“The mayor was my friend,” said Sunny. “For just a few days—it's an honor I don't deserve. I'll try to serve him well.”
But before their smiles could fall, a door behind them was thrown open so roughly it whacked the back of a chair and banged like a shot. Blue uniforms trooped in, two, four, then six. Sgt. Gallaher strode in quickly, bending her head to the black brick of a squawking radio she had drawn from her belt.
“I'm sorry, you have to clear this area,” she announced. Maureen Gallaher looked flushed and breathless, her blue eyes batting hugely. “This whole floor, in fact. Now. Now, please. The fifth floor of city hall is a crime scene.”
A blue uniform was suddenly behind Sunny, taking each of his shoulders as he stood. Alderman Barrow had already reached her feet, and was stepping back to squirm out of the clasp of another uniform. “What the hell,” she began. “What's this shit?” asked Arty Agras. Blue uniforms surged into the room and surrounded the aldermen, and the aldermen and Collins Jenkins turned so that their backs and shoulder blades suddenly bounced off each other as they shouted, “Hey! Hey? Hey?”
“Something's happened, right?” said Linas Slavinskas. “What the hell has happened?”
A shorter man in a more splendid blue uniform, with gold stripes and squared shoulders, stepped through the doorway. Sunny knew Matt Martinez, the police chief, just well enough to nod if they encountered one another at the same holiday parade.
“I'm sorry about the upset, aldermen,” he said. “And Alderwoman Barrow.” The title was alderman by statute, and Vera usually insisted on being so addressed; she could be withering with city functionaries who thought they flattered her by revising the phrase. But she did not correct the police chief.
“I'm afraid you'll have to leave right now,” he said. “The entire floor is a crime scene.”
“What have you got, Matt?” asked Linas, speaking gently. “This wasn't just a sixty-seven-year-old fat man who put too much cheddar on his cheese fries?”
“The mayor was poisoned,” said the chief flatly. “That's what the doctors say. I am not at liberty to share any more information.” Chief Martinez seemed to recharge his voice. “Clear this area. Clear this entire floor. Go to your offices on two. Or go home—there are cars downstairs. Get a drink, go to church, go to Lake Geneva. But get off this floor. The mayor of Chicago has been murdered in his office, and we don't know what the hell is going on.”
Sgt. Gallaher had moved to Sunny's side and whispered that she and Officer Mayer would drive him home. As Sunny was stepping around a ragged line of chairs, he could hear Collins Jenkins remonstrate with the police chief.
“I have to stay, Matt. Decisions have to be made.”
The chief only had to shake his head two or three times before Cohn stepped forward. When he spoke it was to the police chief, not Collins Jenkins.
“Chief Martinez, Mr. Roopini is the only one who has any legal authority right now.”
Collins's head snapped around as if he had been slapped.
“Mr. Roopini has no experience. I say that with respect, Sunny,” he added, but too late to keep Sunny from raising his left hand to Sgt. Gallaher and turning his feet pointedly to the center of the conference room.
“I've been in City Hall for nine years. I've been the mayor's chief assistant since he was a ward committeeman. Where were you then, Matt—getting flat feet on a beat in San Jo-Nowhere? I know every precinct commander by name. I can get the president of the United States, the queen of the Netherlands, the head of Scotland Yard, Bill Gates, or the cardinal of Chicago on this phone”—Collins brandished his own small silver mobile only an inch under the police chief's nose—“right now, right now, right now,” he said, boiling and scowling. “Can you? Can Sunny?”
“That's not germane,” Cohn told Collins Jenkins, more shakily. “Mr. Roopini is the acting interim mayor.”
But Matt Martinez had already cast his vote with his broad, black, boat-heavy service shoes. He turned away from Collins Jenkins and fixed his red-rimmed eyes on Sunny.
“Mr. Roopini—”
“Sunny, please.”
“Mr. Roopini,” he repeated. “Let me have Sergeant—” and here he looked over at Maureen Gallaher's brass nameplate—“Gallaher take you to your office downstairs.” Then he turned around to face Collins Jenkins.
“And Collins—I need your help. My officers need to run a few things by you.”
“Question me? Question me?” Collins's face had switched into red as rapidly as a traffic light. He bopped between his right and left foot, sputtering and spitting, like some mad cartoon duck in tweeds.
“Question me! Question me! What the fuck, Matt. The mayor has been assassinated! Do you know what could be going on? Do you know what kind of world we have? What the fuck, Matt? What the fuck! This city needs direction now, Matt, not amateur hour.”
But two blues had gotten a nod from their chief and had taken Collins's elbows gently into their huge gloved hands. They had already lifted him from his feet like a cranky toddler. Collins noticed suddenly that his heels were no longer in contact with the floor, and he looked down, confused and startled, as if the law of gravity had been suspended and a water glass had floated by.
“Just help us out, Collins,” Matt Martinez said soothingly. “Thank you.” The chief turned around to face Sunny again.
“And perhaps you should stay in your office, sir, so we know where to reach you. Please give me about fifteen minutes to see to things here.”
Sunny felt his face flush and swell. He thought he should sit down; then he decided that he should be seen on his feet. He could see the back of Collins Jenkins's shoulders duck through the doorway between two blue arms.
“Do I need to take an oath?” he asked. There was a pause before the corporation counsel answered.
“Not technically,” he said. “You were acting interim mayor from the moment the mayor drew his last breath.”
“But maybe under the circumstances,” said Alderman Barrow. “So there is no doubt.”
Sunny stood up stiffly, reflexively raising his right hand.
“Should we have a Bible or something?” asked Linas Slavinskas.
“What is it that you swear on, Sunny?” Arty Agras asked solemnly. “The Kama Sutra? Whatever they call it …”
Sunny turned to Arty with a wide grin; the warmth of it surprised him.
“I'll take that pledge,” Linas declared. Even Alderman Barrow couldn't restrain a smile.
“I swear on nothing, Arty,” Sunny explained genially. “I don't know when I was last in a Hindu temple. I haven't been to a synagogue since we said goodbye to my wife. I've only been to a church for political meetings in the basement. You know how it is.” Sunny turned back to Stuart Cohn. “Is there some kind of legal requirement?”
“No sir,” said the counsel. It was the first time Sunny could recall Cohn addressing him with the honorific.
“Is there any book that means a lot to you, Sunny?” asked Vera Barrow. Titles reeled by in his mind as if they were spilling visibly from the top of a shelf. A Bible was packed with poetry, narrative sweep, and heroic depictions. The Bhagavad Gîtâ might be a nice touch that would be widely and approvingly reported. But Sunny wouldn't know where to find a copy of the huge Hindu holy book at this hour, and besides—there were too many rabbis and Hindus in the city to attest that Sunny was a stranger to them except during campaign season. War and Peace? Ulysses? Sunny had never really finished them. Midnight's Children? Sunny found the ending depressing. Leaves of Grass? Sandburg's Chicago Poems? Lincoln's Gettysburg Address?
Sunny finally asked, “Is there a subway map around here?”
Vera Barrow unclasped the gold snap on her soft black purse. She dug a delicate hand down, past crumpled tissues, scuffed emery boards, sugarless breath mints, mini-Cooper keys, crimped parking stubs, castaway combs, and smiling snapshots of 5th Ward children who were now in high school or the army.
“Exactly right,” she said, waving the map, a spaghetti swirl of red, blue, green, orange, pink, and purple strands.
It was folded along the Green Line on the city's south side, between Cermak and Garfield Boulevard. Sunny took the slick map from her hand and unfurled it so that all folds flapped down over Vera's two hands. She held the map lightly, like a bowl of water that might spill. Sunny placed his left palm down, the tips of his fingers all the way north at Howard Street, the base of his palm south, along the Indiana line. He heard an ensemble of breaths in the room, and recognized his own. He picked up the shriek outside of a lonely late-night El car, spitting steel sparks into the cold as it leaned into the Lake Street turn, as he raised his right hand as he'd seen men in browning old photographs do. “I, Sundaran Roopini …” he began.
“What do you want, Sunny?”
The mayor kept the thick walnut-clad television set in his office burning constantly, like a peat fire in a cottage in Galway. He told visitors that the low din camouflaged all conversation from a wide, indiscriminate inventory of sinister interests.
“What? Who?” Sunny finally asked one night. “Who would possibly bug this place?”
The mayor rolled his eyes and held a finger to his lips. “CIA,” he finally mouthed softly. “KGB. Russians, Chinese, and Israelis. Oil companies, pharmaceutical firms, Cosa Nostra, al-Qaeda, and the House of Saud. The IRA, IRS, and FBI. Prosecutors, Martians, and Klingons.”
Sunny was suspicious of the mayor's avowals, but admiring. His warning had the effect of making his visitors hem, haw, and stutter; the mayor's replies could be efficiently embroidered and oblique.
“What do you want, Sunny?” he repeated, raising his volume as he slid the control on the television screen up another three digits. The late-night news had ended, and a wild-eyed man onscreen bellowed the letters and names of each vitamin he had been able to excavate from carrot pulp. “A! B! B6! C! D! E!”
“To die in my bed at one hundred, beautiful women sobbing and massaging my toes,” said Sunny, pausing between his delusions. “The girl who wouldn't go to the junior prom with me, shrieking that she was wrong. My daughters bereft and sniveling. Lance Armstrong wail- ing that I was the only guy who could keep up with him on the hill climbs. Much general weeping and lamentation.”
The mayor snorted cigar smoke from his nostrils like a dragon toy in Chinatown. “Besides,” he finally grunted.
“I don't know,” replied Sunny. “At least, I don't want to tell you. That's—intimate. Something you tell a spouse, a lover. Something you put in a prayer.”
“I can do things for you those others can't.” The mayor slapped his lap loudly with the palm of his hands. “Want isn't a weakness, Sunny,” he announced. “We'd still be trailing our tails if one of our ancestors hadn't decided he was tired of getting sand up his ass and came out of the water to walk. Want is the wind that spins the world around,” the mayor declared slowly and musically. “Nothing shameful about that.”
Sunny sat back on the sofa, so that the mayor would have to twist his shoulder and waist around to look into his face. He thought he could hear the mayor's lungs groan like a bus starting up as he twisted around to meet Sunny's eyes.
“Telling someone what you want—it makes you vulnerable,” Sunny said. “You divulge your dreams, and you show someone the best place to hurt you.”
The mayor held Sunny's gaze for a moment, looking back at him with new interest. “I'll show you mine, you show me yours,” he said finally. “I want to be mayor of Chicago. Forever. Not senator, not president of the United States, or Coca Cola. Not the king of Monaco, the Aga Khan, or even Steven Spielberg. I can't imagine—I don't fantasize—about anything else. No women, no money, no boys, no goats. This is what I want. I'll do anything to stay here. Anything. Do you know how much that is? I would lie, cheat, steal—murder, if I knew how to get away with it. I get away with plenty as it is.
“I am useful to my friends and strike fear in my enemies. I get my name on schools. I don't stop for red lights. The owner always sends over dessert. Everyone laughs at my jokes. People who wouldn't hire me with my night school degree now beg me to give jobs to their sons. People ponder the significance of me clearing my throat. People compete to make me smile, like I was a two-year-old. I bestow a wink or a wave, and they tell the story till they die. It's a nice life. I don't want to live any other way.”
The mayor sat back heavily, the plush cushion behind him sighing deeply.
“So, what do you want, Sunny?”
“Nothing that—elaborate,” he said finally. “I'll run for re-election next year. If I win—”
“If if if—”the mayor grunted.
“It's my last term. Enough. I'll get serious about the restaurant. Out of office, I'll finally be able to get a liquor license. Maybe open a classy place in Lincoln Park. Finally make some money for my daughters.”
“Nobody from the Forty-eighth can run for mayor, you know,” the mayor observed as he stood up slowly and shook out his right leg. “It's a piece of jagged glass. Sikhs, Koreans, bearded Jews, Bible-thumpers, hillbillies, Pashtuns, Oaxacans, Menominee, Jamaicans, Nigerians— and I'm just getting started.
“Everybody brags on being the most aggrieved,” the mayor explained as he settled uncertainly onto the edge of the sofa table. “The Chicanos think the Cambodians have had it easier. The Cubans think the Haitians get breaks they never did. The Chinese say you can't tell the Vietnamese from the Thais. The blacks say Koreans are pushing them out. The Koreans say blacks are pushing them around. Whites say they pulled themselves up by their bootstraps. Blacks remind them: at least you were born with boots. African-Americans get huffy because the Jamaicans, the Nigerians, and that's right, Sunny, the Hindus all get off the boats, the planes, the buses, with your cute little British accents, holding advanced degrees from provincial universities in your hands like fresh bouquets. A man who wins elections up in your neck of the city is like the astronaut who jumps twenty feet on the moon. Up there, he's Baryshnikov. But back on earth …”
The mayor stood, listing slightly to walk back behind his desk, settled into his chair, and leveled his cigar at Sunny like a nautical glass.
“But I'm not telling you anything you haven't figured out on your own, am I?”
“I always learn from you, Mr. Mayor.”
There was another smoky snort. “I can't be flattered, Sunny. I have too high an opinion of myself.” The mayor let the cigar cloud lift before he gave Sunny a long, appraising pause.
“Stan Hamel is seventy-five,” he said.
“Seventy-six.”
“I hear the congressman gets tired.”
“I heard he played two hours of squash at the University Club this weekend,” countered Sunny. “I always ask Stan, ‘Why do you hang out in places like that? Those people wouldn't let your father in the dining room. We have beautiful park district courts.’”
“Well, Stan might be enjoying pub
lic recreation facilities again real soon,” the mayor said quietly and paused. “Okay, I'll show you mine first. An inch or two, anyway.”
“I'm sure you have it to spare,” answered Sunny.
“Stan has a terminal disease,” the mayor announced.
“I'm sorry.”
“An interminable investigation.”
“Then there really is no cure.”
“Taking free chips and trips at the Forest County Pottawatomie Casino,” the mayor explained.
“Stan has always been interested in the welfare of native peoples.”
“Casino and Dog Track,” the mayor stressed with amazement. “A man who makes speeches about the government paying too much for toilet seats in submarines and subsidies for soybean farmers has been betting money on dogs chasing their tails.”
“At least not his money,” Sunny pointed out.
“Somebody in the Wisconsin prosecutor's office turned somebody in the tribe,” the mayor explained. “Stan's scalp fell onto the table. He wants to see his granddaughter graduate from Northwestern. They're willing to take his plea.”
The mayor tapped a blunt gray ash into a green glass dish on his desk. “Women, boys, money, I understand,” he said softly. “Even drugs. But dogs running around in circles …” The mayor shook his head gravely as he reached into a small black slipcase on his desk and rolled a cigar over to Sunny. It had a mossy green tint and felt smooth and squishy between Sunny's fingers.
“Jack Mirelowitz has been getting ready to succeed Stan in Congress since.…” Sunny finished the sentence as the mayor paused to let him draw in a puff.
“Since Cro-Magnon succeeded Neanderthal.”