by Scott Simon
Vera turned her head down.
“I hope you don't mind me tracking you,” she said. “I think my police guard always knows where your police guard is.”
She inclined her head over her shoulder where a hefty-shouldered man in a blue coat was standing next to Sgt. Gallaher along the red radiator in the restaurant window.
“It's a long, sad night,” Vera Barrow said simply. Sunny muttered something in return.
“You've got a busy few days ahead.”
“Not like you,” said Sunny. “Or Linas, Arty, or from what I hear, Daryl Lloyd.”
“I hope you won't think it's inappro—” she began, but Sunny held her off with a mild right hand.
“I'm with you, Vera. No other choice. The presiding officer casts his vote last—that's traditional. If Anders can get you to twenty-four …” Anders Berggren, a business consultant, was the 49th Ward alderman, who had grown a long gray ponytail down his neck to enhance his appeal among young constituents and business contacts. In fact, they were only reminded of the sort of men who talked to themselves on the subway. “I would have the honor to put you over. And Jaco might move to make it by acclamation.” Jacobo Rapoport Sefran of the 50th, and an orthodox rabbi.
“All good things are possible,” she said. The waitress had approached softly with a shiny dented pot. Vera nodded gratitude and held out a chipped beige mug. She sipped the coffee carefully, like a cat testing cream.
“Jesus, Sunny, this is unbelievable. I thought he had another ten years. I thought somebody, somewhere, might take a shot at him. But this …”
“Best way to a man's heart is through his stomach,” Sunny said quietly. “I can't imagine it was personal. He had no personal life. No kids, no golf, no—” Sunny adjusted his phrasing for Vera—“sword-swallowing interns under the desk.”
“Everyone has a personal life, Sunny,” she said gently. “Sometimes, they just don't know it. What the mayor promised you about the Ninth,” she announced in a brisker voice. “That's my promise, too. Anything he said, I say. Tell me what it was, and I'll agree.”
“He promised me nothing,” said Sunny. “It wasn't his way.”
“He showed you a treasure map.”
“I haven't starting digging.”
Vera ran her sharp oval coral nail over the rim of her coffee mug.
“Your daughters like the idea?” she ventured. He nodded.
“They don't mind going to Washington?” she asked.
“They don't mind me going. Leaving them here.”
Vera brushed aside his joke by placing a hand on Sunny's forearm.
“You'd go back and forth,” she consoled him.
“Yes. Out of my mind.” He sat back on the slick brown seat. Vera leaned forward over her mug to smile.
“Two pretty teenage girls. Traveling Dad. Two-bedroom apartment right off Broadway? You've got the makings of a comedy there.” When she saw Sunny shudder, she added soothingly, “You can hire a housekeeper.”
“I'd prefer a regiment of Gurkha soldiers,” said Sunny. He cast a glance at the brunette on the beach blanket on the beer clock. The long black hand passed slowly over her ruby smile. It was just about five, and Sunny began to shake out his feet.
“I just might get more serious about the restaurant business,” he told Vera.
“Not a good way to see more of your family.”
“But the best way I have of providing for them,” Sunny replied, and paused. “Honestly. I talked to Linas,” he added, after a pause.
“That's what my guard said. That your guard said you were in conference.”
Sunny looked over at Sgt. Gallaher and Vera's guard, both standing with their backs against the wall above the radiator, their heads turning toward the door each time a cook tapped the bell on the stainless steel counter where heavy brown plates of huevos and chorizo thudded and clinked.
“There's nothing you can offer,” Sunny told her. “He says he has to run now because if you win now you're smart enough to figure out how to stay there for twenty years. He said he didn't mind me telling you.”
Vera absorbed this without flinching or being flattered.
“Rod Abboud called,” she said finally. “Linas called him. He's certainly open to suggestion.”
“The lake is always east,” said Sunny. “You could suggest vice mayor to him.”
“When you run for Stan's seat?”
“When, if, if I don't. It doesn't matter. A new mayor gets to pick. That's traditional,” and with this, Sunny leaned forward. “Don't give away a nice title for nothing.”
Vera pulled back in her seat at Sunny's bluntness, as if the booth had accelerated through a traffic light.
“You know my policy, Sunny,” she told him “A job should go to the person who is best qualified.”
“You're not putting his finger on the nuclear trigger. Just his name right under yours on the cornerstone of the next water treatment plant. It's a nonsense job, Vera. Rod qualifies.”
Vera listened, a smile moving over her face like a parting of clouds.
“And you should get with Janet Watanabe,” Sunny went on. “She wants a police station.”
“I know. I can't,” Vera said smoothly. She was chairman of the Police and Fire Committee. “We had to put one in the Nineteenth—all the gangs. And we already need an annex because the gang units need Russian and Ukrainian interpreters.”
“What about one of those miniature ones?” Sunny suggested. “A couple of uniforms behind the desk. Move one in the next time a nail salon on Sixty-sixth shuts down.”
“Cop-in-a-Box? Janet won't be fooled,” said Vera. “She won't be satisfied.”
“You don't have to satisfy her, Vera,” said Sunny. “Just pleasure her a little.”
“I pity your wife,” said Vera, who suddenly thrust her hand out, as if she might spear the phrase before it could bite and bring it back. But Sunny took her hand and pressed his lips, softly and quickly, against her smooth knuckles.
“I'm so—”
“It's okay. Sometimes I slip too,” he told her.
Vera sat back, blinking moisture, kitchen smoke, or a speck from her napkin out of her eyes.
“I think Dr. Lloyd would do fine with the Parks and Recreation Committee,” Sunny said in a pointedly firmer voice.
“And what if he wants to be vice mayor?”
“Another south sider? Then he doesn't know politics. Don't worry about him.” Of course there were white, Hispanic, and Asian south side aldermen, too, but Sunny and Vera understood that this was not what Sunny meant.
“Parks and Rec has a budget and jobs,” he reminded her.
“Nine thousand in summer?” Vera asked. “And he knew them all, Adams to Zebrauskas. Kids' names, birthdays, and their favorite ice creams.” Her voice suddenly toughened. “Why should I do that for Daryl?”
“It's a deal, not an endowment. You'll owe each other. But you'll be mayor, Vera. You can live with that.”
Sunny turned his face up into the room and began to smile for their check. Vera dabbed her napkin against her mouth and tapped the band of a plain braided gold ring against her coffee mug, once, twice, and a third time before she asked a last question.
“Do you want to take a swing yourself?”
“That was never the deal, Vera,” he said in a low voice. “You were always next.”
“Only because he thought I'd grow old waiting.”
“He made me vice mayor because he needed a north sider,” said Sunny. “You couldn't have both the mayor and vice mayor be south siders.”
Vera turned her face up slightly and snuck a look into Sunny's eyes.
“You can say ‘black’ in front of me, Sunny,” she said, and Sunny felt his face grow hot.
“I read the fine print before I signed,” he rushed on. “Being mayor never made it into my dreams. Besides, dreams scare me now. I try to stay out of them.”
Sunny let an instant of silence seep across the table while pans banged and mu
gs clinked. Vera Barrow wound a paper napkin three times around a spoon, as if dressing a small doll, before speaking.
“Never been through an election like this one, Sunny,” she said finally. “Just fifty people. No strangers. No ghost voters, payrollers, precinct captains, or hanging chads. It's like voting for Homecoming queen.”
“In an insane asylum,” Sunny observed, and after he had stripped another twenty from his clip and handed it to their waitress, he stood and offered a hand to lift Vera up from their booth.
“It's still politics, Vera.”
She laughed more loudly than she expected to and patted a hand over her mouth.
“My God, Sunny,” said Vera Barrow. “I feel like our parents have gone to bed and we're still up, playing house. But all we can do is imitate them. Do we really know what we're doing here?”
A mommy and daddy named Charles and Deborah from the Grand Crossing district drew the duty to take home Collins Jenkins, who was feeling angry disrespected, and dismissed, to his one-bedroom, one-cat apartment on North State Parkway (though a co-worker at City Hall had convinced Collins that he kept such impossible hours, it was better for her to take possession of the oleaginous brown-and-orange patched cat, Richard J).
Deborah drove, choosing a route along local streets that would slow them in the snow and afford more time to engage Collins in conversation. Charles sat on the gray vinyl seat in the back of their black Buick alongside Collins, who recognized instantly that he was not being chauffeured so much as kept in mobile observation.
Deborah's part of the play was to be interested and nurturing: “This must be a terrible shock to you, Mr. Jenkins. You've lost your best friend. How bad do you feel?” Whereas the role of Charles, who was also an ordained Jehovah's Witness minister, was to be unimpressed and provocative: “The amount of shit you and the mayor must have had on each other! Mind if I ask—what did it for him? Boys? Shoes? Bicycle seats?”
But instead of crumpling and crying or losing his grip on some incriminating revelation of the kind powerful men sometimes made to impress the Lilliputian police, Collins Jenkins became truculent. He taunted them.
“Oh please. Milk-and-cookies from Mommy? The back of the hairbrush from Dad? Shouldn't you folks reverse that?” he sneered. “Isn't that what you're trained to do for us faggots? Dominate me, Debbie! Squat on my face!”
Charles and Deborah looked at each other wearily across the interior of the cruiser. They wished they had laid out a shorter route.
It had been easy to confirm that Mrs. Bacon had called Collins on his mobile phone at 10:37 p.m., within five minutes of finding the mayor slumped over in his office, and perhaps a minute since overhearing the paramedics mutter, “Nothing. Nothing,” and hearing a shrill, unnervingly unwavering hum from one of their medical monitors. Collins was at home. He had fallen asleep on the same old gold tasseled brocade sofa he had inherited from his family for his first apartment after Antioch and hadn't had the time or taste for comfort to replace after twenty-six years. The left-hand arm of the sofa had developed a melon-sized smudge from where Collins had fallen asleep about a thousand nights previously, his phone injected into the chest pocket of his white button-down shirt.
It had taken Collins roughly twelve minutes to rinse his face, re-knot a slumping red-knit tie, send a brief, mournful message to Vera Barrow, and scramble into the brass elevator cage of his building to descend nine floors that clicked by with excruciating slowness; and just under a minute for him to flag down the American United Cab #510, which pulled a U-turn at North and delivered Collins to City Hall's central entrance on LaSalle at 11:02 pm, where he was admitted by a security team that had just begun their shift at the top of the hour. He was standing over the mayor by 11:06, wiping tears with the back of his hands.
Charles and Deborah saw Collins into his apartment. Warrants that had been signed by an insomniac circuit court judge whom the mayor, in his wisdom, had promoted for appointment with post-midnight complicities in mind, had already been executed to tap Collins's phone line (which they discovered had been disconnected thirty-one months before for non-payment), his mobile number, and his computer accounts. Walt Green had stressed to Charles and Deborah that they should try to encourage Collins to invite the officers to stay; it was paid companionship from a grateful city. Deborah plucked up some of the newspaper broadsheets that were tented and turning tan on the living room floor—some were so old they had baseball scores from the previous season—and Charles tried to entice Collins with the prospect of food.
“I make some really superior fluffy scrambled eggs,” he volunteered, and after Deborah made a point of fairly shivering in appreciation of her partner's talents, Collins cut them off coldly.
“I would rather share a dead rat with a swarm of maggots than scrambled eggs with the two of you,” he told them. After so complete and categorical rejection, there was not much more the two of them could do than sit in front of Collins's building until and if any of the taps turned up something that would give them license to storm through his door.
Collins used the bathroom, washed his hands, splashed his face, and stretched out on his sofa, his head high up on the armrest so that he could see the TV screen as he scrolled through a hundred channels. His set looked implausibly small in a time when screens filled walls.
(Once the mayor had dropped in on Collins's apartment after he had appeared at a fund-raising reception on an upper floor. The mayor brushed aside the litter of cups, take-out cartons, shirt cardboards, folding chairs, and unopened envelopes scrawled with phone numbers to regard Collins's television as if it were a working Colonial cotton loom.
“My God man, where do they still make these, North Korea? The news on this screen must still be in black and white! Leonid Brezhnev is still watching missiles roll through Red Square on Channel Two! I'll bet they're still singing “Love Grows Where Rosemary Goes” on this set!”)
Collins found skipping through the channels now unnerving and reassuring. The world he saw onscreen was spinning on as previously recorded. A man vacuumed blue-steel nails off a kitchen floor. A silver-haired man, eyes rolled shut like rocks over a cave, beseeched the Lord for health and prosperity. A woman pulled unsightly hair from below her nose with what looked like refrigerator tape. Collins lingered for a moment on that; it must have been excruciating; she smiled on. Basketball and hockey plays—which Collins did not follow, his only interest in sports being to determine whatever Dominican athletes were starring for the White Sox, so that the mayor could send them encouraging notes—showed men leaping high toward hoops, and scudding across bright, white ice to flail after one another with curved sticks. Four men cast lines for trout in a brown Colorado river, chuckling, joshing, and chuckling. A Hollywood couple was divorcing because the wife had become involved with a witches' coven. Men in tight blue or red shorts ran after a ball and tripped one another in a language that Collins deduced to be Portuguese. Hugh Grant fluttered his eyes at wedding number three. A man roasted a chicken, which browned and sputtered behind a glass. Set it and forget it! Quick and easy cleanup! A man dried apple slices into leathery strips under plastic. Easy nutritious, and fun for the entire family! Great for snacking, car trips, and camping!
Collins left the set on a low burn and crossed over into his kitchen, suddenly hungry. The light in his refrigerator had burned out a few weeks before, and Collins had to stick his head over tawny, crusted cartons of two percent milk, stir-fried bitter melon, sag paneer, and white rice, turning chewy. He felt the foil top of a half-full box of chocolate-covered cherries sent to him by the Teamsters Local 714 Machinery, Scrap Iron, Metal and Steel, Chauffeurs, Warehousemen, Freight Handlers, Helpers, Alloy Fabricators, Pharmacists, Theatrical, Exposition, Convention and Trade Show Employees. He felt the tin lid of a barely touched jar of red chile peanut butter that had been buried in a gift basket from State Senator Raul Rico of the 20th District. Collins closed the refrigerator door, as if it were a dark closet holding the clothes of a dead
stranger.
Thoughts about the mayor kept breaking through. Collins swatted them away, like swinging a broom at bats in an attic. He remembered the night the mayor had been elected, defeating a nominal Republican who owned a string of high-ticket organic fruit and vegetable stores. (The party had persuaded him to squander his own money on a foredoomed campaign on the promise that the next Republican president would make him an ambassador, and so he did—to Liechtenstein. The mayor was slighted. “Don't my vanquished adversaries deserve at least the solace of someplace warm? Grenada?”)
On the gilded roster of a Hilton ballroom, the mayor had spread his arms as wide as the girders that held up the El trains and declared, “I open my arms in love and respect to every living soul in this city!” On that night it seemed as if six million souls could easily cling to his linebacker's girth, with room left over for Los Angeles.
Collins banished the memory by masturbating. He slipped his hands under the flap of his undershorts. Against all expectation, Collins found that he could make himself hard. He closed his eyes, and thought about Ralph Fiennes, Dirk Bogarde in For King and Country, and the hands of a blondish stockbroker who used to live on the top floor of his apartment building on Belden. He thought about a man with sea blue eyes who wore a scuffed brown jacket when he looked across at him for all of six blocks, a year or so ago on the LaSalle Street bus. He remembered the soft brown hair enveloping the ears of Chris Siewers, the tall boy who sat behind him in the fourth grade; brain cancer killed him when they were thirteen. He recalled the back of the legs of a Brazilian man he had met while changing planes in Dallas. Collins soothed and squeezed himself for about a quarter of an hour, but to no result, and no pleasure; his eyes hurt slightly from sustained squinting.
He stood up, stepped out of his pants, and crossed to his computer terminal. Sunny Roopini needed his help. The interim mayor was a reasonably well-spoken man, but he had never had to address an audience more noteworthy than the Andersonville Kiwanis Club. In a few hours, he would speak to the whole city; for a few moments, even the nation. His statement would have to reassure them that the city would continue to be guided by the mayor's genius.