Windy City

by Scott Simon

  Alderman Lloyd disdained the city's law prohibiting private citizens from owning handguns. He denounced it as the Anti-African-American Self-Defense Act and used to thunder at Kiera Malek of the 43rd, “Well maybe when you call the police in Lincoln Park, they pull up in ninety seconds. But down on Dr. Martin Luther King Drive, they don't come at all! You don't like cheap handguns? Well I don't like that cheap Navajo jewelry you wear, Kiera. A cheap handgun is a home security system. My folks can't afford to get their apartments wired like a Paris art museum, like folks in Lincoln Park do.” When Kiera would wearily point out someone's statistics that a gun in the home was more likely to cause an accident than deter a crime, Daryl would become most aroused. “Why don't you let us worry about that? What is it, Kiera—you just don't trust poor black folks with guns? You think we're coming for you and your Mercedes?”

  (Daryl owned a Range Rover and several pieces of jewelry that were each more luxurious than the doddering and temperamental Toyota that Kiera drove to teach her law school classes.)

  The officers loosened their grip on Alderman Lloyd; after a moment, they propped him up on Alderman Guttierez's desk (Alonzo, who ran currency exchanges on Harrison, Roosevelt, and 16th Street, had seen plenty of guns waved in his face, but usually behind thick plate glass. He stayed flat on his ass below his desk). A paramedic crew dashed onto the council floor and certified for Commander Green that Daryl had to be taken to a hospital for treatment of his bruised and maimed right arm. Commander Green would have preferred to have the alderman taken out in handcuffs, if not chains—heavy chains, that would bite huge crimson welts into his chest—but agreed because Daryl held up that right arm with heroic flourish to announce that bearing up under ruthless and vicious assault was the special fate of prophets and truth tellers, from Jesus to George Jackson to Martin Luther King.

  “Don't forget Meir Kehane!” Jacobo Rapoport Sefran shouted from the last row in the chamber. Commander Green told the paramedics to quickly strap Alderman Lloyd onto a trundle and deliver him to Northwestern Memorial; squad cars would follow. Daryl waved to the gallery from his stretcher; cheers and whoof-whoofs rang out, as at a basketball game.

  Alderman Lindstrom thought that Daryl had been a dick. But she also knew that his last two wives had left him, his children called him only when they needed money, and that she couldn't recall him seeing a woman for more than three dates. So she slung her deep canvas bag over her shoulder and followed Daryl's stretcher.

  Christa Landgraf came down from the rostrum and whispered grimly to Commander Green that the corporation counsel had called even as they took shelter under their desks. He reminded her that under an 1872 statute aldermen were designated as peace officers.

  “You don't mean,” Green began more loudly than he wanted, “I mean really, seriously, that the son of a bitch can't be charged for walking onto the City Council floor and waving a gun?”

  Christa turned up her hands in a gesture of helplessness.

  “Apparently, he's a peace officer.”

  “Piece of something,” said Commander Green.

  Meanwhile Sunny had been let up from the floor by Sgt. McNulty who dusted him off without comment, as if Sunny had only walked under a painter's scaffold. Aldermen began to get up on their haunches, scratch their heads, shake out their shoulders, and walk in groups. The council floor looked like a natural history museum diorama of hunters and gatherers. Sunny moved back toward the mayor's massive mogul's chair, ran a palm over his hair, and cleared his throat.

  “The council will please come to order,” he said.

  Sunny looked down on the third row and saw Keith Horn of the 36th, who had sclerosis and was in a wheelchair, and Vernetta Hynes Griffin of the 37th turn around and look back at him in the rostrum; they just went on talking to each other.

  “The council will please come to order,” Sunny repeated, stressing the appeal but not, he hoped, making it a plea. Vera Barrow caught his eye from the first row, or at least caught something in his face. She turned side to side, speaking in soft undertones to Dorothy Fisher of the 3rd, Wanda Jackson of the 4th, and Grace Brown of the 6th, and as if on Vera's signal, they sat down, queens slipping back to their thrones. Sunny ahhhemmed into his microphone once more as John Wu of the 15th, Shirley Watson of the 16th, and Evelyn Lee of the 16th sat down in the second row, and then Emil Wagner of the 32nd, Patrick Tierney of the 33rd, and Regina Gregory of the 34th in the third tier of seats.

  “The council will please come to order,” he said in sudden silence.

  “I see that the aldermen of the Ninth Ward and the Twenty-eighth Ward have left the chamber,” he continued in a level voice. “I think that Alderman Lloyd had reached his conclusion in any case,” and at this, Sunny pretended to begin a new sentence but let it be turned back by the abrupt exhale of laughter.

  “The chair … the chair … will reserve the right of both aldermen to address the council when they become available.” And then, as if turning the page of a familiar menu to look for the everyday list of desserts, Sunny said, “The chair recognizes the alderman of the Tenth Ward.”

  J. P. Mulroy had a doughy, unbaked face and dark raisin eyes that suddenly widened in surprise. He owned a real estate agency in Hegewisch, where the belly of the city's south side began to flop over the Indiana beltline. Months passed without Alderman Mulroy uttering anything beyond aye, nay, or present from the council floor; even that could be delayed by the need to look two seats down for a signal from Linas Slavinskas. Alderman Mulroy knew only one speech, but he knew it well. Every May he read the poem he had composed as a student at St. Francis de Sales commemorating Molly Weston and the Irish women patriots of 1798. “Molly rode at the English, swathed in outlawed green/ barefoot farmers following the sword of Colleen.” By now, most aldermen could recite along.

  When J. P. was taken aback, Jaco Sefran's voice rose up from the last row.

  “Mr. Chairman,” he called out. “Mr. President Interim Mayor. What's happened—I think many of us just feel the need to talk about this. Perhaps we need a break. Call our families. Let them know we're fine. Are we fine? I don't know.”

  “The alderman is right,” Arty Agras volunteered from the first seat in the chamber. “Some of us could suffer from post-dramatic stress syndrome.”

  “I think we are fine,” Sunny said after a pause. “Aldermen are certainly free to leave the floor and call their families. I will do so soon.” He nodded his head gently toward the cameras in the chamber, taking care not to move his shoulders. “But I'm pretty sure they already know that we are unharmed. I feel the need to let the city know that we are at work.”

  Over a moment, Sunny could hear pens scratch against pads of paper, stifled coughs, and chair springs squeak. J. P. Mulroy rose slowly, tucking his black tie under the middle button of his gray suit.

  “May I have the floor, Mr. President?” His voice quavered, but he was standing, hands folded at his waist, rubbing his thumbs, as if to crank a small engine.

  “The chair recognizes the alderman of the Tenth Ward,” said Sunny, and J. P. Mulroy kept his eyes locked on Sunny as he began.

  “A great—another great—patriot, Brian Boru, a Knight of Munster, led the Irish against the Norse invaders. And in so many ways was the mayor a knight among men.…”

  Sunny saw J. P. through his remarks, then Fred Sandoval. He sat through Linas's comments—he had been less stilted, and more plausible in private—and then Brock Lucchesi, before recognizing Collie Kerrigan, summoning Don Stubbs back to the rostrum to preside, and slipping back to the conference room, borne between sergeants McNulty and Butler, to make some calls.

  “I'm fine,” Sunny declared when Rita's mobile phone rang through to her mailbox. “Really, darlings, just fine. I'm here. I love you.” He envisioned her phone, trilling some Anil Kapoor song inside her beige school locker, asphyxiated by the babel of a thousand teenage voices and the tweeting of their rubber soles squishing past.

  Vera Barrow waited just in fr
ont of him, tapping a sleek black ball pen on the pointed toe of a silk shoe. Eldad hovered with more names on a pad, and the voice of the president of Malcolm X College squeaking in the earpiece of a phone he held against Sunny's ear. “And Alderman Wu,” he murmured behind his head. “On his way back.” On the council floor, Mitya Volkov acclaimed the mayor as a rare gem, and Janet Wantanabe cleared her throat in preparation for her own praise and despair. Sunny slid his phone into the waist of his pants.

  Rula called back while Sunny was on the phone with a federal judge who had recessed a major tax fraud case to return his call. His Honor was detailing features of what made the trial complicated and important when Sunny heard the small beep, saw his daughter's name flash across the small screen, and waited for a pause—even a semicolon's worth of an intake of breath—to ask the judge to excuse him while he spoke with his daughter. But the judge's articulation was dauntless. By the time Sunny could make apologies, his daughter had been switched into his mailbox. By the time he heard another beep advising him of a message, he was on the phone with an expensive defense attorney. Wandy Rodriguez was rolling his hands, like a referee trying to speed up a game, and whispered urgently to Sunny, something he couldn't quite understand. By the time Sunny could hold up his hand to Eldad to say that he had to check his messages, the universal digital voice told him that he had twelve. Sunny had his eye on a screen showing the proceedings in the chamber. Ivan Becker of the 41st was comparing the death of the mayor to Abraham Lincoln's assassination. Lincoln had died trying to preserve the Union, Ivan informed the council, and the mayor had always supported unions. For that and a dozen other reasons, Sunny groaned.

  He got back onto the rostrum at one-twenty just as Jacobo Sefran of the 50th, in a resourceful flight of lamentation to prolong the memorials until Sunny could return, pledged to scrawl the mayor's name into a crevice of Jerusalem's Western Wall.

  “What a fitting remembrance,” he said. “For this man who loved his city. This man who loved his party. This man who loved all partiers. Democrats, Independents, Perotists, or even Republicans, and the privileged few they so ably represent. This man who loved his neighborhood. This man who loved all neighborhoods. This man who loved all voters, living and deceased, those who voted for him, and those who didn't—that tiny minority, really, though he loved minorities, too. This man who loved his White Sox,” said Jaco, who knew he was beginning to flail, and was glad to see Sunny slip back into the mammoth chair.

  “This man who loved our beloved Israel,” he said, finally, sincerely, and solemnly. “And who believed that the lion should lie down with the lamb, the goat with the chicken, the Arab with the Jew, although of course only Israel should get to lie down with Jerusalem. ‘He who creates peace in His celestial heights, may He create peace for us and for all Israel; and say, Amen,’”

  “Amen,” Linas Slavinskas echoed, and caught Sunny's eye with a wink. Sunny rose from the chair, and began quietly.

  “I thank Alderman Sefran, and all aldermen, for a dignified memorial for our mayor. Finally, I would like to share my own thoughts.” Sunny paused as he ran his fingers around the edges of another index card.

  “I remember an afternoon about three or four years ago. A few of us had accompanied the mayor to the regional transit board. The commissioners had decided to reduce service times for the number twenty bus on West Madison. Ridership was down, and they decreed that instead of having a bus depart that route every twenty minutes after midnight, it should be every forty-five.

  “I see Aldermen Lee, Kowalski, and Guttierez shaking their heads now; you remember this, too. When the mayor spoke, he took a last look at the service report, then flung his reading glasses aside, as if he could bear no more. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, I have been poring over some of these findings,’ he said. ‘I wonder if any of these numbers can tell you the story I see herein.’”

  Sunny was a gifted mimic. He had grown up imitating unctuous teachers with clipped British tones, BBC World Service announcers whirling regal rrr's, Sean Connery's rolling brrr's, the cricket clicks inside the Tamil language, and the cadenced chime of Punjabi. So when he recalled the mayor's monologues, he borrowed his unfiltered bourbon baritone.

  “‘Who's riding your suburban commuter trains late at night?’ the mayor asked. ‘Senior partners who may have imbibed a tad too much at a dinner they charge to a client. Vice presidents giving dic-tation to their secretaries’—the mayor drew out the emphasis—‘late unto the night.’”

  Sunny let the little flares of laughter flicker and fall before going on.

  “‘Do you know who's taking the twenty bus after midnight?’ the mayor asked. ‘Cleaning ladies and maintenance men. Ladies from Haiti who swam an ocean brimming with sharks just to wash up on a beach here. Grandfathers from Poland who stared down Communist tanks to get out. Salvadorans, Koreans, and folks from the hollers of Kentucky.

  I know about these folks, ladies and gentlemen,’ he said. ‘My mother was a cleaning lady. She scrubbed your floors and toilets with the hands that fed me. She saw your walnut-framed degrees and Florida vacation pictures and said, “I want that for my son. He's as good as they are.” And I sit among you today.’

  “And here, the mayor began to tear. Anyway, he held his shirt cuff up to his eyes. And then he said, ‘My momma's gone now. But gentlemen: I don't believe that anyone's momma should have to wait more than twenty minutes in the cold, snow, and peril of the streets to catch a bus. Do you?’”

  Sunny rocked back on his feet, to suggest pinstriped commissioners getting thrown back in their plush leather chairs. When he resumed speaking, it was in his own softer soprano.

  “A few days later, we met about something else. I suddenly remembered—I said to him, ‘Wait, Mr. Mayor. I thought your mother left home when you were nine. I thought your aunt raised you. The schoolteacher.’ The mayor lifted his eyebrows and asked, ‘Where'd you hear that?’ I said, ‘From you. It's what you told a hearing of the state Children and Family Services department.’”

  “And the mayor looked up from his desk and said,”—and here Sunny coated his voice with gravel again—” ‘A good memory can be a curse, Sunny. You'll find my mother did a number of things in this city of boundless opportunities. I think the Chinatown Civic Association believes she worked a cart at the Maxwell Street Market. I believe the governors of the Chicago Board of Trade have the definite impression that she hauled carcasses in a packing plant. I believe I even left the president of Ukraine with the definite notion that she may have hailed from Kirovograd. I don't know a blessed thing about my mother, Sunny. But thanks to me, she has had a valuable career in public service.’”

  Flabbergasted laughter burst out in the chamber, like spray from a fractured water pipe. Sunny let it run. He turned his chin down, almost prayerfully. But quiet was quickly reasserted as aldermen reminded themselves to be solemn.

  “That voice,” Sunny concluded. “That wit. Such fun. The utter audacity. His loss is incalculable.

  “I am informed by the corporation counsel,” he moved on with just the slightest hastening, “that as presiding officer, I have the privilege of offering legislation. I ask the council to suspend the rules to immediately approve a commission to investigate the mayor's death and any and all related issues.”

  Sunny saw Linas Slavinskas sit forward suddenly with unflustered attention, John Wu release a slow, subtle smile, and Vera Barrow hunch below the collar of her black suit as Sunny drew another index card from his pocket.

  “I propose that the commission be chaired by Peter Mansfield, the distinguished professor of international law from DePaul. His co-chair will be U.S. District Judge Emmett Sullivan. The other members will be Dr. Ellen Watkins, the president of Malcolm X College; Professor Carlos Nieto of the Northwestern Law School; and Paul Freeman, a former federal prosecutor.” Sunny hesitated as he contemplated adding, “whom you may remember from prosecuting several members of this council,” but decided to go on before the name could register too
deeply. “He is now a partner at Altgeld, Ogilvie, and Stevenson. I would suggest that this commission receive a million dollars to begin their inquiry immediately and deliver a preliminary report—six months from today.”

  “I move for immediate consideration,”Vera called from the first row before a chorus of confused, sputtering voices began to shoot up from the floor. Sunny brought the heel of his hand smack down onto the lectern to declare, “Evidently a sufficient number. I hear a motion to adjourn,” and Sgt. McNulty and three uniforms stood at Sunny's arms as he left the rostrum and dumbfounded aldermen scrambled to their feet, shouting and waving for recognition like shipwrecks.

  He slipped out to meet Peter Mansfield for lunch at Fannie's on Jefferson, just before they closed at three. Surgically bright lights screamed down over steam tables groaning with ruddy rumps of smoked meats, peppery and dripping. The men and women in white smocks behind the counter took care of Sunny—a couple were Guatemalans from the 48th, and a couple more lived in Adam Wojcik's 45th, but were from Kerela—and winked as they put a chicken pot pie on his tray, the top crust blistered with crisp brown bubbles. They carved corned beef thin enough to read baseball scores through the slice, but piled it high and dredged his onion roll in the warm drippings, softening the white bread into a kind of oniony cake.

  “I like this place,” said Peter Mansfield, who flicked the four glistening strips of crisp bacon off of his spinach salad as if they were caravans of ants. “It's so authentic.”

  “As coronary blockage,” Sunny agreed. He had a superfluously dietetic celery tonic fizzing alongside. They sat at a plastic table scoured by spills of sugar, salt, and the scrapes of trays. Sgt. McNulty pulled up just behind them. Two uniforms joined him, never so much as unbuttoning the top button on their blue leather service jackets. Sunny's security detail looked about as inconspicuous as rhinos in a fragrance shop.