Windy City

by Scott Simon

  “It is the purpose of this meeting to pay tribute to the mayor of Chicago,” he began. “He died last night in his office just above this chamber. We recognize the loss of the mayor's chief of staff, too, who also rendered many years of service. But with the council's consent, I am going to ask aldermen to speak about the mayor this morning. For millions, in and out of our city, he was a singular and irreplaceable part of our skyline. As a great man might say, ‘The loss is positively antediluvian.’”

  Laughter flickered over the chamber, and there was a squeaking of seats as aldermen sat back.

  “I will also respectfully suggest that some of those aldermen who knew the mayor longest—the alderman of the Fifth Ward, Ms. Barrow; the alderman of the Second Ward, Mrs. Washington; and the alderman of the Forty-fourth Ward, Mr. Walker—speak for five or ten minutes each. I am sure that the rest of us will so closely identify with their eloquent memorials that we can express a small portion of our own grief in two or three minutes, which should take us to about one p.m.”

  Sunny tried to add up those numbers as he spoke: the math was hopeful to impossible.

  “The chair recognizes the alderman of the 1st Ward,” he directed, and Arty punctiliously buttoned the middle button of his gray jacket as he bowed to Vera on his left.

  “I will certainly excess myself later,” he said. “But first I yield to the distinguished alderman of the 5th Ward.”

  Vera bowed slightly in return and walked around to the front of her desk. In the shawl collar of her smart navy suit, she had pinned a rose of dark crimson. As Vera began in a low, sober tone, Eldad leaned down into Sunny's left ear.

  “The president of the United States,” he said. “On the phone in the conference room.”

  Sunny held still for a moment, thinking that Eldad had chosen a poor moment in which to spring a prank. Then he understood that he was serious. Sunny motioned for Donald Stubbs, the bull-chested courtroom bailiff who represented the 27th Ward, to leave his seat in the second row on the council floor to come up to the rostrum and preside. He walked out between the sergeant at arms and Sgt. McNulty his brown suede shoes whimpering with each step. I look like such an alderman.

  Sunny put his shoes below the conference table while the president, his voice twanging like wire fencing, reassured Sunny that help was already dispatched from the FBI, CIA, and DOJ, which Sunny had scrawled down beside a question mark. Claudia McCarthy, the faun-eyed assistant whom Sunny had noticed from the mayor's secretarial corps, had been sent down to the conference room, saw the scrawl and whispered to Sunny, “Justice. Justice.”

  The president offered regrets that he could not be present at services for the mayor. He would be busy all weekend with meetings on nuclear proliferation. But the vice president (whose ideas on nuclear issues were apparently disposable), and the secretary of Health and Human Services (who had been the mayor of Houston and was visibly African-American), would represent his administration.

  “You just call the White House, Mr. Interim Mayor, if your investigation needs something. I enjoyed the mayor, you know, differences be damned. We talked barbeque.”

  “He told us.”

  “The mayor sent a whole mess of things once, overnight. Pork ribs, beef ribs, wings, Memphis rub, St. Louis sauce. A Secret Service guy runs up to me, real serious, holding a card out like it was a list of kidnapper's demands. The mayor had written, ‘Gnaw on these instead of the federal money we need to resurface the Kennedy Expressway.’”

  “Must have worked. Sir,” Sunny amended. He remembered that the funds had been restored.

  “Smart gift sixty days before an election,” the president agreed.

  A call from the governor of Illinois was put through next. In the dry flinty voice of a conductor on a commuter train, the governor took a couple of minutes to certify that he and Sunny had never met.

  “St. Patrick's Day parade?” Sunny tenuously suggested.

  “The mayor's show. Awkward for my party, unless you're Irish.”

  “Mexican Independence Day?”

  “I go to the one in Des Plaines. Do you go to the Gay Pride parade?” asked the governor.

  “Never miss it.”

  “I send a note,” he explained. “Cordial but noncommittal.”

  The governor assured Sunny that the state police were at his disposal, but when he scratched “ISP” on a pad in front of Claudia, she held her nose and Eldad whispered, “Amateurs.”

  Claudia had a crawl of other names scrawled on her small secretarial pad. There were messages of concern from the Vatican secretary of state, his eminence the cardinal of Chicago, the mayors of New York, Boston, Milwaukee, and Iowa City, six U.S. senators, nine congressmen, Donald Trump, the owner of the Chicago White Sox, the Illinois secretary of state, the presidents of the University of Chicago and Notre Dame, Helmut Jahn, the Cook County sheriff, the owner of the Chicago Bears, a member of the U.S. Olympic Relay team, the Czech who conducted the Chicago Symphony, and the managing director of Skidmore Owings & Merrill.

  “Just the ones we think we recognize,” Eldad explained. “Hundreds more are coming in.” He looked down at his own pad. “John and Catherine from Brighton Park. Rick and Leilani from Roscoe Village. Claire from West Englewood.”

  Of the names before him, Sunny had only so much as shaken hands with the mayor of New York. In fact, it was not much more than a nod, at an Urban Issues Conference in Vancouver a few years before, where Sunny had spent three days shuttling between symposia about Noise Pollution, Light Pollution, Sprawl, and the Urban Heat Island Effect. The mayor of New York had flown in to accept a plaque for opening neighborhood farmer's markets. Sunny encountered him, surrounded by a retinue of sharply creased assistants, by a bank of elevators and pointed to a tan hemp briefcase in the arms of an aide.

  “Are you keeping that, sir?” he asked. Every delegate had received a case. Green letters along the side said, THE 21ST CENTURY CITY: GOVERNANCE, SUSTAINABLE ENERGIES, A CIVIL SOCIETY. The mayor cast a quick glance.

  “Doubtful. My grandson wants something with a Mountie on it.”

  “Sundaran Roopini from the Chicago City Council, sir. I have two daughters, but only one briefcase.”

  The mayor of New York nodded to his aide.

  “Sold.”

  Sunny brought a beige conference room phone closer to him from across the table. Each light seemed to be blinking. When one winked off, he stabbed his finger down and tapped out the 212 number on Claudia's pad.

  “Sundaran Roopini at City Hall in Chicago,” he said. “Returning the mayor's call.”

  Eldad nodded approval.

  When the mayor of New York came on the line, he remembered that he and the mayor had bet competing pizzas, deep dish against thin crust, on the outcome of various sports championship series.

  “Jesus Fucking Christ,” said the mayor of New York.“Knicks-Bulls, Yanks-Sox. Every time we won, your mayor sent those fat, artery-choking motherfuckers to us. Same place, right?”

  “Probably.”

  “Now I know what the mayor's real agenda was,” the mayor of New York announced. “I just popped them open for my staff. Staff is expendable. You'll see. Oh fuck me dead,” said the mayor. “I didn't mean that guy who just jumped onto the street. My deepest fucking condolences on that, too.”

  “We appreciate that, sir.”

  Sunny, who had lived in three of the world's great cities and was generally adjudged to have a keen sense of humor, still found it difficult to tell when a New Yorker was joking.

  “Are those Scientologists putting their fingers up your ass?” Sunny understood this much.

  “The FBI is doing everything they can to help.”

  “If you can use anything from our people, you let my people know. The service?”

  Sunny had to pause to remind himself of the day.

  “Saturday, sir. Tomorrow.”

  “Our comptroller is going.” Sunny remembered—an African-American businessman from Brooklyn. “He and the may
or were friends. I've got to be on a plane, or else…. Christ, mayors' conferences are going to be duller. I like Vera. Beautiful gal. But you knew the mayor. Once we had to sit through a whole morning seminar on composting programs. The chairman of the conference that year was from Austin or Madison—some place where composting is the pastime. The mayor looked over at me and whispered, ‘I do believe I have heard all the pig shit about pig shit that I can bear. Why don't we run out on these pygmies and see if some place in this burg'—we were in Des Moines or Dayton; I can't keep them straight—'can manage a decent penne alla San Giovanni?’”

  The one with the sage and walnuts, Sunny remembered.

  “And he found some place, wouldn't you know? Fuck me dead. Wasn't half-bad.”

  “Well, that was fun,” Sunny announced after the line from New York had clicked off. Claudia McCarthy held out a new sheet of paper with the U.S. Attorney's number. The sergeant at arms had returned to the room with a harder step, and Eldad Delaney received a whispered report in the doorway from Wandy Rodriguez, who had to stoop down to reach Eldad's ear.

  “Alderman Stubbs might need some relief,” said Eldad. “Alderman Lloyd is in full flight.”

  Wandy stayed down in his confidential crouch, even as Eldad began to sweep up pads of paper and prepared to move back onto the council floor.

  “It's getting ugly,” Wandy reported. “Daryl just said that the oil companies, Latin drug kingpins, Judas Iscariot, and the Chicago police killed the mayor.”

  “Can't keep a secret from Alderman Lloyd,” said Sunny, but he was already rising and moving swiftly to the doorway. Sgt. McNulty had stepped into the hallway and held up his hands, should someone else be moving toward the chamber.

  “And I may have left out a few,” Wandy added, as Sunny wiped the palm of his hand across a hair that had fallen onto his forehead and prepared to step back under the bare, blaring light of the rostrum.

  Donald Stubbs turned around to Sunny from the mayor's chair, unfurling his large, black-suited arms in despair. Sunny could hear Daryl Lloyd call for the police department to be indicted, “for what they did in conspiring to assist in the murder of our mayor.” Jesus Flores Suarez had leapt to his feet in the middle of the council floor to pump his fist like a piston and shout, “Bullshit. Bullshit! Bullshit. Bullshit!” and more, while Luis Zamora of the 31st, sitting on the far side of the chamber, scrambled onto his desk, his knees slipping on the slanted surface.

  “I'm sorry, Sunny,” Donald whispered. “It was his turn. And you know—Daryl.”

  “Exactly right. I'll let you get ready for your remarks,” said Sunny smoothly, and when Alderman Lloyd heard steps on the rostrum, he turned around from his microphone position in the first row and saw Sunny and a passel of uniforms.

  “I see that word of my comments has run priests out of the inner temple,” he declared. When Sunny heard Dorothy Fisher of the 3rd, John Reginald of the 8th, and Sanford Booker of the 24th bark with laughter—like Daryl, they had supported the mayor, but often felt excluded from his circle—he decided to draw out his response, as if wringing wet laundry.

  “I regret that city business called me away. I usually try to follow Alderman Lloyd's appearances with the devotion of a Grateful Dead groupie. I think that Commander Green was explicit this morning. The investigation into the mayor's death is—” Sunny paused slightly for a choice of words, then made a politician's judgment to include all—“intense, wide-ranging, and unrelenting. It extends from those who have been closest to him,” an unmistakable reference, he thought, to Collins Jenkins, and the mayor's own police detail, “to parties presently unknown who may be involved. In these times, no possibility—no possibility—can be ruled out. But it is important not to rush to judgment. It is not my desire to restrict any alderman's powers of imagination,” he went on. “I simply want our mayor to have a proper remembrance today.”

  But as soon as Sunny had rounded into the last few words, Daryl Lloyd was on top of his microphone, holding the slender stand in a markedly tightening fist.

  “What better memorial than the truth?” he sang out. Sunny could see Dorothy Fisher of the 3rd, John Reginald of the 8th, Gerry White of the 29th, and Rod Abboud all stand to applaud, and could even hear teenagers thumping gloved hands through the windows of the visitors' balcony.

  “I appreciate what the alderman has done to put these issues before this chamber,” Sunny said more loudly, and inclined his head toward the dozen television cameras blinking alongside the aldermen's seats. “And before the people of this city and beyond. But timeliness is a virtue, too. The members of this assembly will be unable to go about their important work until we have memorialized our late mayor. May I ask the alderman if he is near his conclusion? He must be as eager as I am to hear what our colleagues have to say.”

  For the first time, Sunny heard small squirts of applause for his own remarks, from Alfredo Sandoval, sitting just two desks down from Daryl Lloyd, John Wu in the second row, Mitya Volkov, and Wandy Rodriguez.

  “I concur with the chair,” Alderman Lloyd said after a pause. “These are emotional times,” he said in a quieter key. “I apologize if the loss I feel today makes me uncharitable. I do not envy the chair his duties. I thank him for his courtesy. There are times, I'm sure, when he would like to be able to use a whip and a chair,” and as the glad sound of gentle laughter began to roll from row to row in the chamber, Dr. Lloyd reached his right hand under one of the violet silk stripes that adorned his glossy Yoruba robe and pulled out a gun.

  Sunny had heard that gun barrels gleamed. But this revolver had a grim, gray snub barrel, and a dull green grip, which Sgt. McNulty who had instantly taken down Sunny from behind, as if he were folding a picnic chair, recognized as a Walther P99 with a green polymer frame, a red-painted striker tip, four internal safeties, and an ambidextrous magazine release in the trigger guard. He carried one himself.

  There were gasps, then silence. Daryl laid the gun down, almost daintily, on the top of his desk (which Sunny couldn't see; McNulty had him pressed flat, from head to toe, against the spongy mauve carpet of the rostrum; which Sunny thought smelled of rubber and glue and tasted like a fuzzy balloon). Sunny heard several sets of steps spring across the chamber. He felt McNulty's knees pin his shoulders, one of his hands press the back of his head while another—the right one, Sunny guessed—bristled with the switch and slide of his own Walther. A score of aldermanic asses plopped on the floor behind their desks. Joints snapped, shoes thudded, chair wheels squealed, seats banged into the desks behind.

  Daryl Lloyd shouted: “This is how the Chicago Police Department serves and protects! Any fool can walk in to City Hall with a lethal weapon!”

  Four uniforms had sprinted down from their posts to advance on Daryl, one in front of where he stood behind his desk, but three others behind his back. Their guns were holstered. The police held their arms out, visibly empty, at the height of a man's neck. Daryl's gun was flat on his desk, but within his arm's grasp. Department training taught them that putting a gun down within reach was a sleight of hand, not surrender. The sergeant who was in front of Daryl leaned carefully toward his desk and gently said, “I'm just going to pick that up now, Alderman.” But before the three uniforms behind him could hurtle into Daryl's shoulders, twist his spine, and wrench his arms behind his back, Alderman Lloyd reached into the right pocket of his trousers and extracted something with a high metal gleam and a black handle.

  The uniforms froze in their crouches. From atop Sunny's shoulders, Sgt. McNulty called out excitedly—there was no mistaking his exhilaration—“I've got him.” Then a more humdrum voice, as if pointing to a fly trapped in a corner: “Got him.”

  A voice arose from the second row of the chamber.

  “Hold your fire!”

  It was Tommy Mitrovic of the 21st, bellowing from below his desk, wrapping his arms around his head like a boy hiding under a bed. “Hold your fire!” he repeated, and then, on the chance that this was just a phrase fro
m American war movies, Tommy rasped, “Don't shoot! There are eee-no-scent people here!”

  “Innocent?” cried Linas Slavinskas. “We're aldermen!”

  Astrid Lindstrom of the 28th ward put her head above the edge of her desk, or at least the top half of the chunky blond wig she had worn for the past nine months of chemotherapy on thirteen little nits of cancer in her left lung. She and Daryl got along. Astrid was chesty, feisty, and represented a ward that, at a hundred blocks north of his, was practically Nunavik to Daryl. He called her Momma. She was the mother of four boys and three girls, and accepted the name as factual and genially flirtatious. Astrid and Daryl served on the Committee on Health. Shortly after she had begun to lose her hair, Daryl had put a small gold foil box of Belgian chocolates and a Cubs cap at Astrid's place at the committee table; she was touched.

  “Where the hell did you find a Cubs cap, Daryl?” she asked. “So far south on Cottage Grove.”

  “Salvation Army,” he glared.

  So now Alderman Lindstrom risked raising her head just high enough for her mouth to clear the lip of her desk and implored, with the matchless moral authority of a mother of seven, three-term alderman, and battler against terminal disease, “Don't be a dick, Daryl.”

  Four uniforms hit him at once. The officer in front drove his head into Alderman Lloyd's solar plexus, sending the alderman back onto the hard slab top of Alderman Alonzo Guttierez's desk. Another officer took hold of Daryl Lloyd's left hand and pulled down from his shoulder, as if trying to pump the first cough of water from a well. Another hooked his elbow below Daryl's chin, and began to pull, as intently as a four-year-old trying to disconnect a doll's head from its neck. The fourth officer brought a knee down on Daryl's right arm, slamming, smashing, and cracking it against the edge of the desk.

  The gleaming object in Daryl Lloyd's hand slipped to the ground with disconcerting slightness. It was a Cook County deputy sheriff's badge.

  Newspapers would report the next day that Cook County Sheriff Elroy Mitchell had issued deputy sheriff's badges (the final number would turn out to be more than a hundred) to contributors, friends, and supporters, including Alderman Lloyd. The badge gave them license to carry a gun. Daryl often carried large sums of cash in his car between his south side dental offices and worried that he was prey for armed robbers.