by Scott Simon
Collins typed smoothly, without reverses or deletions; a sign of inspiration, he was sure. He suggested to Sunny that he begin:
The greatest leader in our city's history has been struck down by the foulest deed in our history, and I who cannot fill his shoes must occupy his desk …
(Sunny would stop reading after that first sentence. He did not want to begin by ranking the mayor's death above the Chicago Fire, the St. Valentine's Day Massacre, or indeed, as he reread the middle of the sentence, the Holocaust. And the phrase, “I who cannot fill his shoes,” smacked too much of a grinning, obsequious Hindu caricature.)
Collins clicked to send Sunny the draft of his remarks and crossed to his apartment's one large French window, overlooking an alley between Dearborn and Clark. From nine floors above, he could see blue trash bags, nestled under the new snow like fresh-cut logs in a bundle under the small bugle lights behind the popcorn shop. The gray terrier with a lopsided left ear that bedded down in Esther Kim's beauty shop was on patrol in her back window, alerted by unaccustomed quiet as snow began to seal the slit under the door against the wind.
The charcoal sky behind the pipes and rails along the roofs turned smoky with suddenly discernible clouds. Collins heard the first gassy grinding of the LaSalle Street bus, nosing slowly over the snow past Goethe. He heard the low hum of a radio from a neighbor: a deep, quiet voice talking between bars of piano music. He remembered his mother holding the back of his head as he peered over the kitchen counter to see his small face in the gleam of a waffle iron. With a toe, he pushed hard against a bar to unbolt the large window. If it wouldn't work, he would go back to the sofa and watch the hens turn brown and drip fat into the easy-clean tray. But Collins's toe pushed down the latch and the heavy windows blew back slowly onto his chest. Collins could taste glints of snow in his teeth. He remembered his little brother sitting smack in the middle of Astor Street in his small red snowsuit, adamantly refusing to move until Collins took him over his shoulder; he felt his brother's sweet tiny breath against his ear. The Dan Ryan was clear; he could make out from voices he heard through the walls. The Stevenson has a small backup at Harlem. The cold air, filling with light, perfused his lungs and seemed to open his chest as he reached out as wide as the girders that held up the El trains.
It's nineteen degrees at O'Hare. There are short delays for wing de-icing. The pipes and rails on the roofs across the way began to burn along the top with a thin scarlet stripe. Use only as directed. Come to our web site. Twenty-one convenient locations all over Chicagoland. Collins could see his arms and hands suddenly alight, and felt the glow in his bones. His toes lifted him above the thin white ledge at his waist, and then above his knees. He blinked snow from his eyes as he reached out to grab the sun and tried to ride it through the air and down to the ground.
FRIDAY MORNING
“Mummyji?”
Eldad had begun to place his calls, taking care to use his mobile phone so that not so much as a scintilla of conversation with a sliver of political implication could be charged to the city's taxpayers. Sunny heard him murmuring reassurance from a corner of their office.
Sunny had called Peter Mansfield and then three other people of means who had supported his campaigns. Each conversation began, “Something has happened, and we wanted you to be the first to know.…”
It was 5:37 by the time he had punched through the call to London. He imagined the low, slate mid-morning sky strained with sun, the beaded curtains swishing and clacking in his mother's room in the large apartment of his brother's family on Lambeth Road.
“Mummyji,” he repeated, “it's Sundaran.”
It was not a time that he and his daughters would usually call. He heard gurgling water, a cabinet clicking shut, and guessed she was carrying the phone out of the bathroom.
“Are you alright?” Her voice electrified the phrase.
“I'm fine. But something terrible has happened. Not the girls,” he added quickly. “Not Sheldon. Mummyji, the mayor has died.”
She took a moment to turn over images and memories of her visit last year.
“That delightful man?” she finally asked. “Who kissed my hand? Who said—I found out later he was right—that curry is taken from the Tamil word, kari? He told me you were strong, that he would take care of you. He asked me if you had been an Eisenhower as a child.”
“Wisenheimer, I think.” Sunny chuckled softly. “A cheeky boy” he explained again.
“Goodness gracious. He was old?”
“Not particularly. Sixties.”
“He took care of himself?”
“Not especially. It looks like—a terrible thing—that he was murdered.”
“Oh bloody hell,” said his mother. “Bloody Americans and their guns. I had not heard. They're playing Andrzej Panufnik on BBC now, and I doubt they'd break in for that.”
“It wasn't a gun, Mummyji. Besides—we're just going to announce it. I do that, in fact. In fact, Mummyji, you might recall that I'm the vice mayor—”
“Of course, yes—”
“I've already been sworn to duty and all. I will be mayor for a few days. Until we elect someone else on Monday,” said Sunny, rushing on, “I guess you can call me the mayor of Chicago.”
Sunny heard the squeak of a drawer, the snap of a purse, a low, steady male voice being turned lower. Friday was already in progress in London, and it was his mother's day to take lunch with friends at a tapas bar on Kennington.
“That's wonderful dear,” she said. “You know, there are more than twenty Indians in the House of Lords now. Isn't that amazing?”
Sunny told his mother he hoped she would like the escabeche de gambas, explained that he was busy, and had to go. For a moment, he snapped the two ends of the phone together, like an alligator puppet, to gnaw on his index finger. Sgt. Gallaher shifted her weight in the seat behind Sunny's table.
“Mummyji. Your mother?” she guessed.
“Yes. In London with my brother, Vendan, and his family.”
“Does he run a restaurant, too?”
“I hope not.” Sunny smiled shyly at the sentence ahead. “He's a urologist.”
Sgt. Gallaher let her head slip back onto the wall while she laughed. Sunny had not seen her excuse herself since being assigned responsibility for him more than five hours ago. But the color in her cheeks seemed fresh, even as more unbundled long black whisps of hair splayed over her shoulders.
“My mother stayed with us for a while last year,” he explained. “After what happened. But …” The tail Sunny left on his words seemed to invite the sergeant to pick up the thought.
“I'm sure it was tough.”
“It was February,” said Sunny. “My mother must be the only person who now lives in England for the weather.”
It was a quarter to six. Sunny had written some words out in large block letters on an index card, if not quite the back of an envelope. He looked at them every few moments, as if looking to catch something that had changed. Eldad talked away in his corner. They could hear shoes trudge by, worn by men and women on their way to bathrooms at the end of the hall. Sgt. Gallaher spoke up.
“Almost six, sir.”
“In the real world,” smiled Sunny. “In politics, six means six-fifteen. For something like this, you don't want people straggling in breathless. Let's let the snowflakes pile up a little longer.”
“Six meant seven with the mayor,” said Sgt. Gallaher.
Sunny held the index card out at the end of his arm; nothing on it had changed.
“There is something I have wanted to say since you got into our car last night, sir,” Sgt. Gallaher said quietly. “There just wasn't the opportunity. Oh, what a silly goddamn word.” She reddened and stammered but went on. “I remember your wife a little from the restaurant. Honestly, I remember her more than I remember you.” She ducked her head slightly. “Beautiful, funny. Gracious. I'm—sorry. It must be—I can't imagine.”
Sunny looked up from his toes and into the s
ergeant's face, but more into the bridge of her nose and the bloom of her mouth; he didn't want to get caught by her eyes.
“Thank you,” he said, simply and finally.
“And—may I ask—the two guys?”
“They took a plea,” said Sunny. “There must have been a dozen witnesses. But half had already slipped out onto Devon and couldn't be found. The time, the money—the chance that they might walk on some technicality … So they're in Stateville for the rest of their lives. Well, my life anyway. Just as well. I don't like the death penalty.”
“I don't either,” said Sgt. Gallaher in a stronger voice. “But I believe in it. I've seen evil.”
“You're a cop.” Sunny seized on the obvious.
“I'm a good Catholic girl,” she replied, which was just as obvious to her. “Eye for an eye.”
“That's not what the bishops say,” Sunny reminded her.
“It's what the nuns taught us,” and when Sgt. Gallaher saw the alderman sit back, smile, and slap a hand softly on a pocket of his soft gray sport coat, she decided to try another question that might not pierce so personally.
“Does Hinduism teach anything about the death penalty?”
Sunny paused as he took in the clock overhead.
“Only how to be as hypocritical as anyone else,” he said. “There are Hindus who won't eat an egg because that kills a budding chicken. But they're happy to see a rapist hang because a rapist is guilty and an egg is innocent. And there are Hindus who guiltlessly slit the throat of a goat to make guthi mutton pulav—goat with coconut milk and ginger; not one of my favorites—because the goat isn't human. But they think that a killer who slits the throat of a child is.”
Sunny shrugged and held up his hands, as if to show them both how gauzy any argument could be to enfold a belief.
“But jumping on hypocrisy is just a way to score high school debates. How do you expect anyone to get along without a little hypocrisy?”
Sunny stood up slowly, as if stepping out of a car after an overnight drive. Sgt. Gallaher bolted upright directly across the way, and found their faces at about the same height.
“I want those two to be tortured every day for eternity,” he told her quietly. “That's why I don't like the death penalty.”
It was six o'clock in the morning. In Sunny's office window, the sky was brightening around the streetlights. There was a hum of muted coughs and voices in the hallway. Eldad began to press the keys for his last call, and so Sunny stood against his window, turned to face the glass, and fumbled for his phone. He was grateful for the smothered racket of a snowplow, rumbling and rasping up LaSalle Street toward the Board of Trade.
Rula answered. She was left-handed and quicker on the turn to answer the phone between their beds. Sunny was reassured to hear her throat thick with what sounded like a few hours slumber.
“Darling. Is your sister there too? Good morning.”
“Of course,” she snapped. Sunny was glad not to hear his daughter have to splutter some deception.
“And Sheldon?” He received a languorous groan.
“He slept in your bloody bed, actually. What the bloody hell. Is the mayor just letting you bloody go?”
“You're going to have to learn more than one adjective. Even to get into reform school,” he told her. It was a current joke between them. “Turn on the television,” Sunny said, and Rula caught herself in mid-mutter.
“Bloo—why? What station?” Sunny heard the rustle of pillows and sheets as his daughter reached for the remote, and the sounds of unspecified protests from Rita's side of their room.
“Any,” he said. “Not the one with animal rescue stories. We have an announcement coming up.”
“You and the mayor?” He paused.
“The mayor is dead,” Sunny said flatly. He heard his daughter gasp and bobble the phone in the heel of her hand—and felt rewarded. His daughters, like most youngsters of their age, could be as self-absorbed as quicksand. (When they had seen Hopper's Nighthawks at the Art Institute, Sunny thought he caught them peering deeply into the diner's lifelike window glass only to search for their own reflections.)
Sunny took Rula's gasp as a sign that he had not lost all of his old power to surprise them.
“What happened?”
“They don't know. It looks like poison. He was in his office.”
“Oh bloody hell,” said Rula. “Oh bloody goddamn.” Sunny did not correct her language.
“You may remember that for the next few days, I serve as mayor.”
“Of course. What do we do?”
“School like any other day. Well, it's hardly like any other day. This will be the talk of things. People may ask if I know what's going on. I don't. Go to the restaurant,” he advised. “Wilmer and Oscar will have coffee. Matina will be along. She can make toast or dosas for you. I should be done here by 6:50.” Sunny had the trait of a man who had to carefully observe cooking times. He did not say forty-five or sixty minutes when he meant fifty. “I can try to hurry and meet you both there.”
“I have to leave before that,” said Rula, as automatically, thought Sunny, as if he had pulled a bowstring. “You always forget. Mrs. Miller's class is 7:45. Rita doesn't have to be in until second period, but—”
Sunny could hear Rita make fierce, breathless protests, and her sister keep her away with swats from a pillow.
“I can get a ride,” he said, catching a nod from Sgt. Gallaher.
“Well we can't stay. We have things to do too.”
“Of course. I know. Leave when you need to.” He heard the chorus of a carpet cleaning commercial from the television coming up behind his daughter, and blurted as artlessly as a sixth grader, “I love you.”
“We know. Good luck. Take care.”
Sunny despised the drip of self-pity he heard in his voice. “It's just a good thing to say today, okay? Tell Sheldon I love him, too.”
“Sheldon loves you, Pappaji,” he heard Rita shout across from her bed.
“And bloody hell,” Rula added on, “if he does, so do we.”
Eldad Delaney had finished his conversations in the corner and come back to Sunny's table. He tapped two fingers across his wrist, although he wore no watch, and then raised a full hand in front of his face.
“Five minutes,” he said loudly enough for whomsoever was on with Sunny to hear him and feel hurried.
Sunny felt his pink shirt crease and stick to the small of his back. He slid his white card into the right-hand pocket of his gray sport coat. He took out his linen pocket square and drew it across his forehead, then took in a breath of last night's squirts of cologne before settling it back in, this time tucking the edges just slightly above the line of his pocket.
Sgt. Gallaher, rolling slightly as she strode, led him past open doors and upturned faces. Three blue uniforms fell in with their steps. The sergeant held up slightly before they could turn into the large walnut room just outside the council chambers that stirred with lights and men and women standing in small knots of mutters and whispers. Sunny stood behind a thicket of black-headed microphones. Bright lights gushed over his shoulders. A swarm of cameras began to chatter, pop, and whine. Blood, feathers, and bones shone in the large oil painting behind him. Oh God, Sunny remembered, it's the Ft. Dearborn Massacre. Sunny reached into his right-hand pocket, but kept his hand inside as he drew back a breath and began to speak.
“Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. I'm afraid that we begin the day with sad and shocking news.…”
Collins Jenkins fell to earth without a sound, or with a sound that only his neighbors on the backside of his building on North State Parkway heard and sleepily dismissed as some damn idiot slinging a couch or refrigerator into the alley. In fact, it was the crew of one of the city's blue sanitation trucks that saw Collins's right foot from a block away, and the brown buckskin that the velocity of his descent had shorn from that foot. They ran ahead and found Collins in sections, his wallet sticking from the right hip pocket of his blac
k woolen slacks, which trailed from his torso, pressed chest down onto the top of a green Dumpster, as if he had been trying to scale it.
The first uniforms that arrived from the 18th District removed the wallet with their gloved fingers and squeezed out Collins's driver's license, credit cards, his Northwestern Hospital medical card, and an appointment card for next Monday with Tomas at Truefitt and Hill.
“No cash?” asked the ranking sergeant. The garbage men began to get busy behind their truck.
“Many people keep a little money in their wallets,” the sergeant explained, as if trying to describe the behavior of puffins to a class of sixth graders. “For coffee, a bagel, a half-caff skinny latte. This guy's wallet doesn't have any.”
“Maybe where he worked, they brought in bagels and coffee,” one of the garbage crew suggested. The officers walked around to the back of their truck, where their heads were bent down as if they had suddenly decided to scrape sludge from a bumper.
“Look, fellas. I don't begrudge any man—especially in your line of work—who sees a chance to nick a few bills off a man who—I don't want to be an insensitive prick here—wouldn't know it's missing,” said the sergeant. “But this is a crime scene. There are penalties for tampering with crime scenes. Anything in his pockets could contain clues— fingerprints, traces of drugs, telltale stuff that only the lab guys know about. Understand what I'm saying? Unless this guy had just won the lottery, there couldn't be enough in his skinny-ass lizard wallet to make twenty years in prison a smart move for you. So I'm going to turn my back now. We've got work to do for the next minute or so. It would really help us if, when I turn back, anything missing from the pockets of the deceased—or his wrists and fingers; I didn't notice a watch—was laid out right by the son of a bitch's head.”
A minute later, four twenty-dollar bills, two singles, a stainless steel Omega with a blue face, a gray star sapphire ring, and two blue Viagra lay on top of the Dumpster, in memoriam.