Windy City

by Scott Simon

  Sunny began to believe that the ceaseless drip of demands were what made many aldermen amenable to bribes. They began to think that a few bills taped under the bar to assist a small change in a zoning ordinance were a fair gratuity for all the uncompensated hours politics took from them.

  Sunny knew about epochal corruptions. But few aldermen could award the kind of favor that would warrant a wire transfer into a Cayman Islands bank account. Most of the bribes to which he had seen his colleagues succumb were embarrassingly small change: box seats to a Cubs or Bulls game, a set of snow tires, or, as with old Hatcher Gutchess of the 25th, a couple of hundreds in an envelope that he didn't use to buy drugs, play horses, or pay hookers, but buy basketball shoes for his grandson.

  Reformers were Sunny's natural allies on many issues. But he often felt uncomfortable around their meticulous righteousness. They forbade their housekeepers to shop at chain stores. They wore blue wristbands to stop global warming. At least people who left room for a little corruption in their souls could be modest about their virtues. Sunny found them easier to be around.

  Sunny had never taken a bribe. He had never really been offered one and wouldn't even quite know how to ask. So he wore his virtue lightly, like a man in a clean white T-shirt at a spaghetti dinner.

  Besides, how could people trust someone who was incorruptible? It was impossible to tell what was in the person's heart.

  Despite his exhaustion, Sunny still had occasions that made him glad for his seat in the council's back row. Just a few months before, Sunny and the other aldermen had filed into their chamber for a morning session and saw a photo of a young policeman sprayed onto the white marble space above the mayor's high-backed chair. It was Vicente Romo, who had been twenty-six, and a patrolman in the Wentworth Avenue district. They knew that Officer Romo had been off duty one morning and brought his daughter to school when people came running over from Twenty-third Street to say that an apartment house was burning.

  Officer Romo put the soft left hand of his little girl, Vanessa, into the hand of a teacher on the playground and ran toward the building. Children on the playground began to cry and shout, “Vanessa's poppy is going to the fire!”

  When Officer Romo pulled up on foot, Chinese families stood in the street, pointing and spilling out words he could not understand. One young woman took hold of his arms and said, “Ye-ye, base-men! Ye-ye, base-men!” He hitched his sweater over his nose and mouth and ran into the building's open door. Blue clouds already boiled out of the windows.

  By the time fire trucks arrived, Vicente Romo had staggered out of the building with an elderly man in his arms and laid him gently onto the hard black tar of 23rd Street. The man was sixty-seven-year-old Wen Wuan Cheng. But when Officer Romo tried to stand, he fell back. His head hit with a gruesome splat that was buried under the sound of sirens.

  Heroic is a word often thoughtlessly applied. For Vicente Romo, no other word was apt.

  At the time of Officer Romo's death, construction crews rushed to complete a new public library on Wentworth, on the side of Cermak Road where Spanish-speaking families lived. The city had piled ballots in churches and convenience stores, inviting the public to choose the name of the new library from an extensive list that, in a mishmash of inclu-siveness, ranged from Minnie Minoso to Che Guevera to Raquel Welch.

  A small local group, El Frente Popular por Lolita LeBron, got organized. Their ten members found the mounds of ballots as they were distributed, loaded sheaves into their arms, and marked them for their namesake. When the ballots were totaled, Lolita LeBron was the choice of about 6 percent. No other name won more.

  “Lolita LeBron?” the mayor inquired from the couple of aldermen he called to his office.

  “A figure from history,” Jesus Flores Suarez of the 22nd explained, shifting from side to side. “She won beauty contests in Puerto Rico in the forties, then became a nationalist.”

  “I am a student of history, Jesus. I know who Lolita LeBron is. I just don't want to name a library after someone who opened fire on the U.S. Congress.”

  Harry Walker, who was chairman of the Cultural Affairs Committee, held the wedge of his beard judiciously.

  “She felt they were imperialists assisting the continued occupation of her homeland.”

  “She shot three Democrats!” the mayor thundered.

  “She was let out of prison by Jimmy Carter,” Alderman Suarez pointed out, but the mayor snorted.

  “I don't have a peanut farm to go home to, Jesus.” He pawed the top of his vast desk. “Every time del pueblo votes down there, the independence line can't get four percentage points. You chuckleheads put Lolita LeBron on the ballot up here and she gets six, 'cause people think she must be a porn star. Why didn't you put John Wilkes Booth's name on the ballot, too, Harry? Folks know that name.”

  The meeting continued in that mood for a few more minutes, with both aldermen squirming as if the mayor had installed gas burners below their chairs. An ordinary leader might shrug and concede that the same democratic processes that elected him now had him backed into a corner. But the mayor was a man of vision. He could see, where others could not, how disconnected events could be realigned.

  As the council session opened, the Romo and Cheng families occupied honored seats on the council floor. Little Vanessa was an especially affecting sight, a black lace scarf stretched across her head to match her mother's. Her tiny hand flashed small, pink, freshly painted nails, enfolded with her mother's, reminding all that a little girl could no longer hold her father's hand.

  The mayor began his remarks slowly, gravely, like a great train pulling a great load.

  “This was a young man,” he said, “who got up on his day off, expecting just to take his little girl to school. And later, tuck her into bed.”

  His voice had become soft, but had a charge of magnetism in it. The aldermen lifted themselves forward to hear.

  “Maybe to read Goodnight, Moon. ‘Good night, bunny. Good night, light.’ But God gave him an emergency call. This fine, young, strong man,” the mayor said, and raised his voice in measured steps as his words gathered steam. “And when humanity called, he didn't walk. When du-ty called, he didn't stroll,” and here the mayor put his two huge hands to his hips with exaggerated daintiness. “He ran into a burning building. He didn't say, ‘Sor-ree, I'm off duty.’”

  The mayor turned his great, weighty jowls toward the Romo family. Vanessa and her mother tightened their hold of one another.

  “The name of your husband,” he said and paused so his voice could catch. “Your daddy, will rest forever in our hearts.” Then his face softened, as if beholding a new grandchild.

  “A new public library is being built on Wentworth Avenue,” he said. “Generations will grow up with the name of that library on their lips. I propose that when that library opens, the name incised above the entrance will be—” He drew in breath, then barked each syllable: “Vi-cen-tay-Ro-mo-Pub-lic-Li-brary.”

  Explosions of applause burst on the council floor. Sunny found his eyes brimming and his hands stinging. About thirty voices shouted out, “Call the question, Mr. President.”

  “The motion has been moved,” the mayor declared solemnly, as if he were a disinterested witness. “The question has been called. All in favor?”

  A thunder of, “Aye! Aye! Aye!” pealed through the chamber.

  “Do I hear—” the mayor began, and then Jesus Flores Suarez, who saw that he had better not be the last man clinging on to Lolita LeBron, called out, “I move to make the motion unanimous.”

  The mayor brought down his gavel hard.

  “Without objection,” he stressed. “I ask aldermen to come to the front of the chamber and offer thanks to the Romo family.”

  Mrs. Romo was short, sweet-faced, astonished, and sad. Her eyes were dewy under her black shawl as she nestled Vanessa against her knee and mouthed “Thank you,” as Sunny passed. He raised his hands in front of his face, and touched his thumbs and fingers lightly.


  “Ñamaste,” he told them from behind steepled fingers. He could hear his voice struggling to speak above a whisper. “In Hindi, it means, ‘I am humble before you.’”

  The Cheng family stood several feet away. They looked respectful, thankful, and deeply moved. But awkwardness was apparent, too, in the way they held their eyes down. Their grandfather was alive. Yet the life of a fine young man—a father, a husband, a protector of his city— had been lost to save him. What grandfather wouldn't say that the sacrifice had gone in the wrong direction?

  Council members drifted over to offer their hands. Their grandfather nodded feebly. One of his grandchildren, a girl of about ten, stood at his shoulder to translate as he stooped forward to hear soft words from the aldermen. Sunny pointedly took the old gentleman's hand and spoke into his face.

  “Your family is also making great contributions to this city,” Sunny told him. “We're glad you're here.”

  The mayor had come down from the rostrum to oversee the city's expression of grief. Jesus Flores Suarez tried to slink inconspicuously back into his seat in the second row, but the mayor beckoned him over with his arms. He took Jesus by his shoulders and said in a forceful voice that carried into the chamber's galleries, “Thank you for your statesmanship, Jesus.”

  Then the mayor drew him into an embrace, and administered three manly pats on his back. When Jesus' left ear was over the mayor's shoulder, he uttered private words of counsel.

  “Be careful going home tonight, Jesus. Those folks in the Lolita Le-Bron Society don't take disappointment lightly.”

  The aldermen filed back into their seats, heads still bowed. The mayor moved back onto the rostrum.

  “The wife is pretty,” Luis Zamora, who sat just in front of Sunny's row of seats, remarked in a loud whisper. “The daughter's cute. I say the widow Romo remarries in a year.”

  “Another cop,” suggested Jacobo Sefran, sitting to Sunny's left. “Some ‘friend’ of Vicente's who's probably always had his eye on her.”

  “In the meantime,” said Luis Zamora, “I believe señora could use some comforting.”

  Wandy Rodriguez of the 30th turned and said in a low murmur, “She's Puerto Rican, Luis. Stick to your own kind.”

  And when she could hear low laughs in their throats beginning to break through, Jane Siegel hissed from the third row behind them, “Be respectful, will you? Shut the fuck up.”

  SATURDAY MORNING

  By the time Sunny made it to his restaurant's kitchen the next morning, the staff was already setting up for lunch. Oscar and Wilmer had filled the small steel tubs near the door with brick-red tomato chutney burgundy tamarind, white cucumber sauce flecked with green, and the beaming emerald mint sauce. From around the corner, he could hear Matina and his daughters laughing with a visitor.

  Only Sgt. Gallaher stood when he turned the corner into the kitchen, tugging a long black whip of hair behind her neck. Her hair was pulled more tightly behind her head than yesterday, and tied with a small white scarf. She wore a red rose on her left lapel—over the heart—of her long black coat.

  “We've been getting acquainted,” she explained. Rula turned her head around from the small steel table where they sat.

  “Sergeant McNulty mentioned the tall, pretty one.”

  “Sergeant McNulty is awfully pretty,” Maureen Gallaher pointed out.

  “But not so tall. And he told us that he doesn't have girlfriends.”

  “You did become friends.”

  “Do you have boyfriends?” Rita asked, and before Sunny could interpose himself in the conversation, he thought he could see the sergeant's face bloom.

  “I work strange hours. I wear flat shoes,” she explained.

  “But you have such beautiful eyes,” Matina told her.

  “And you're armed and dangerous,” said Rula. “Men must find that interesting.” She hesitated over the last word, as if trying to identify an ingredient in a stew.

  Sgt. Gallaher widened her smile and let out a schoolgirl's giggle.

  “I've been proposed to three times,” she said. “By men I was cuffing. Putting into handcuffs,” she explained, when she saw Rula's eyes swell. “And I once got flowers from a man named Nick who held up a donut shop on Thorndale. I laid him out with my service flashlight when he ran out of the store, waving a piece. ‘He saw stars,’ is how we put it.”

  The sergeant turned down her chin, so that only the huge, blue lamps in her face could be seen across the table. Sunny decided to step in with a distracting observation.

  “It won't get above twenty today,” he told them. “But the flurries will stop. I heard it on the news, which is all about the mayor. The Bulls signed that guard from Argentina. Some French guy is swimming the English Channel and towing a trash barge by his teeth. O'Hare was ahead of Hartsfield in departures last year, but it was close. The Reverend Jackson will give the mayor's eulogy. It should be historic.”

  “It must be, Pappaji,” Rula said, casting an eye and taking a slurp over the wide blue edge of a coffee mug. “You're not wearing your clown shoes.”

  Matina leaned over with more coffee and embraced Sunny wordlessly. He was wearing a blue blazer, his darkest charcoal slacks that still possessed the semblance of a crease, another silver tie, a white pocket square, and black brogues. Sunny's grassy cologne cut through the morning smells of coffee cooking against the side of the pot and white rice flour fermenting in a steel tub near the back.

  “Has everyone had breakfast?” he asked.

  “Mango ice cream and cold bondas from last night,” said Rita. They were fried dough balls filled with potatoes, onions, ginger, chiles, and coriander leaves.

  “Those dough things were delicious,” said Sgt. Gallaher.

  “I'll make you a dosa,” Matina informed Sunny, pushing back her chair.

  “Coffee is fine,” he protested, but stayed seated as she moved over to the griddle. Sgt. Gallaher stood up again, too, and began pacing and guessing the ingredients in white bins along the kitchen's wall, touching the edge of her long index finger along the rims.

  “Raisins, cloves, cardamom seeds. These green ones?” she asked.

  “Fennell,” said Sunny, who didn't need to raise his head from his coffee.

  “The orange one has to be chili pepper. The dull green is cumin. I used to wait tables in a Mexican place. But these two …”

  “Tumeric and coriander powder. You'll never guess the bottom shelf. No one does.”

  There were white powders, bright white and dull bone.

  “They sure look like the kind of stuff you stop at Customs.”

  “Moong dal and lentil dal,” Sunny revealed after a pause. The griddle behind Matina hissed as she splashed a handful of water onto the top, and the bubbles skipped and sizzled.

  “Be nice to Sgt. Gallaher,” said Rita. “She took us across the street to get phone cards this morning. We told her you weren't up yet and that you never let us do it alone.”

  Sgt. Gallaher truly blushed now and waggled the finger she had once used to wield a flashlight on the skull of a man who robbed a donut shop.

  “I left my post. I shouldn't. But I made a judgment. The phone cards are important, I know.”

  Sunny said only, “Thank you, sergeant,” as Matina sprinkled chopped onions and potatoes into the soft center of Sunny's dosa, where they hit the small, winking bubbles with a squashy plop.

  The mayor's memorial service was the largest outpouring in the history of the city.

  A million and a half people pressed into Millennium Park, surged over into Grant Park, and filled Michigan Avenue from the bridges along Wacker Drive, which were raised for a minute in tribute, down to Monroe and Adams. Tugboats, fireboats, and police boats plied along the river, shooting sprays in salute. All cars stopped as the hour of the mayor's memorial service approached, making the city harshly quiet. A hundred thousand people stood in the gloom and gripping chill to look up at huge screens raised in front of Picasso's ambiguously Trojan D
aley Center sculpture and spilled out into Randolph, Washington, Dearborn, and Clark, their breath seeding a low sky of clouds across the streets and plaza. Another hundred thousand people huddled under the elevated tracks of the Green Line to look for the special silvery transit car that would convey the urn holding the mayor's embers from the platform at Lake Street, south to 63rd Street, where a convoy of motorcycle police would receive his cinders and escort them to the Jackson Park lagoon.

  Doris Bacon would scatter his ashes into the water (the Parks and Recreation Department had turned tall heaters onto the lagoon overnight, so that the mayor's powdered remains would not simply skip across ice and blow away), as Buddy Guy sang “Sweet Home Chicago” as a dirge.

  The mayor's memorial was held in the city's ornate old Cultural Center, formerly the public library. The gray light of the grim day toned down the dazzle of the green, gold, and turquoise tiles of the dome and surrounding skylight. Sprays and wreaths of white carnations, plump as children's heads, and yellow-eyed daisies were piled onto a small stage, flanked by the flags of the City of Chicago and the United States.

  The most striking display was a white heart of daisies, slashed by a sash of red roses. The card was signed, “Mr. and Mrs. Linas Slavinskas.”

  A small table held the onion-shaped bronze urn that contained the mayor's ashes. Engravers had hastily inscribed it overnight with the refrain that Mrs. Bacon remembered from the mayor's favorite hymn: “Take Me As I Am.” Linas, who sat in the second row of seats alongside Aldermen Barrow, Agras, and Sunny, put a hand gently on Vera's shoulder and leaned over to whisper, “On the other side it says, ‘Or Else.’”

  Rita and Rula, reflecting Sunny's fleeting new status, were seated to Sunny's left, Rita in a high-collared gray sweater and black coat, Rula in a black pinstripe jacket. Sunny knocked his heels together softly. His daughters looked down, risking mild smiles of endorsement at his black shoes. Sgt. Gallaher stood at a kind of attention at the front of their row of seats, her hands at her side and her long, black coat parted to reveal, for those who knew where to look, the polished leather holster that held her radio at her belt and her gun under her left arm.