by Scott Simon
The chief shook his head, like a parent beholding the scrawls of a six-year-old on white walls.
“Brazen. Blatant. And of course as we now know, the U.S. Attorney practically co-signed his tax returns.”
“Then how did he even spend twenty-three thousand dollars?” asked Sunny.
“Tips,” the chief explained after a pause. “Near as we can tell. He'd let the owner—expect the owner—to pick up a thousand-dollar dinner check for four. Smoked Irish salmon, sixty-four ounce porterhouse, garlic sautéed spinach, macadamia turtle pie, a fine cabernet. Then he'd leave five hundred dollars in cash for the wait staff—and walk out to applause.”
“A man of the people,” said Sunny, who then added quietly, “I had the porterhouse.”
“Chicken and peppers for me,” said Chief Martinez.
“Hard to hate a man like that,” said Sunny.
“Well, somebody managed,” the chief reminded him.
The splat and trill of traffic whistles outside reminded Sunny to turn to his wrist: It was just a few minutes before four.
“It was good to see Frank Conklin with the mayor. He really did love him. And the mayor loved him. Remember? ‘My Irish Wolfhound.’ I gather everything with Frankie is in order?”
“For us. Not at home, though,” and when Sunny arched his eyebrows Chief Martinez understood that the acting interim mayor did not want to be spared any seamy details.
“Let's put it this way,” he began. “Frankie won the Claudia McCarthy Open.”
“No! The dog. The cad. The lucky bastard. His wife?”
“He left home a few weeks ago. Wife and kids.”
“Then I'm sorry for everyone,” said Sunny.
“They're trying to do it as honorably as these things are done,” said the chief. “We had to speak to Frank's wife, of course. There were a few phone messages and emails. ‘I want to cut off your balls, I want to wring her fucking neck.’ Nothing you wouldn't expect. And nothing that gets to the mayor.”
“Frankie fucking Conklin!” Sunny rolled the words out like the bark of a football cheer.
“She had a boyfriend, too. A barista somewhere on Wells.”
Sunny held his hands up in mocking incredulity.
“But there's something about a man in a CPD uniform,” said the police chief, straightening himself into a parade stance. “Even plain clothes.”
The chief had seen Sunny sneak a glimpse of his watch and began to fasten the six brass buttons on his heavy coat. Sunny drew near and put a light hand on the gold stripes that ran across his arm.
“I'm glad you're here, Matt. These next few days are critical.”
The police chief reached his third button. “Well, for a little while,” he amended, and resettled the coat along his shoulders.
“But you can be confident about your future, Matt,” Sunny went on in a low, level voice. “You're just a month away from blue waters, sugary beaches, and enough zeroes in the bank to send your kids to Harvard. What you've just laid out: it could be nasty. The chance of a racial assassination. A couple of immigrants—from places like that, too—in custody but not charged.” Sunny shuddered willfully. “That's why we need to get ahead of rumors. You can afford to have absolute autonomy, Matt. No politician, newsman, or prosecutor can touch you. Observe all the rules, chief,” Sunny advised him. “But remember the stakes.”
“Utterly clear, alderman,” the chief said, with a small, stiff, nod of his head under his heavy cap, and departed the conference room, blue uniforms in snow-slick coats in tow.
Sgt. Gallaher stood up to tell Sunny she would be right outside the door. Her blue eyes were unblinking; she kept her hands thrust deep into her pockets.
“Are we going to pretend that you didn't hear any of that?” he asked.
“Yes sir. Unless you ask me a direct question,” she smiled, and went on to spare him the silly discomfiture. “From what I heard, it could be significant. Or it could be nothing.”
Sunny had returned to his chair and ran a hand over an arm, kneading something every few inches.
“You've learned how to talk like a pol, sergeant,” he told her. “We arrange sentences like paint and tile swatches, any way you want. ‘We must not negotiate out of fear, but we must never fear to negotiate. ‘We must abandon the old and worn, but embrace the tried and true.’ ‘Observe the rules, but remember the stakes.’” Sunny put his hands on his knees and began to rub his palms along the pinstripes.
When the sergeant chuckled so unexpectedly that she put a gloved hand to her mouth, Sunny chanced to tell her, “Thank you for taking the girls to get phone cards.”
“I knew they're important.”
“You can't imagine.”
“I can only imagine,” said the sergeant; and when Sunny just sat back, turning up the souls of his shoes, she added softly, “You know, sir, anyone assigned to your watch reads the case file.”
Sunny slid back into his chair—more resigned than relieved, thought the sergeant.
“Then you know about as much as I do,” he said. “Dusk on a November afternoon. Santa Clauses and red-nosed reindeer in the windows of all the Indian and Kosher delis. Two guys on the street, who had records from the age of twelve. It was getting late in the day and they needed to score. So they went to where they thought people kept money. It could have been a donut shop; it wound up being that currency exchange. They waved their guns. Mr. Yawar, who runs the place, told them all the cash now goes directly down a hole. Into a safe that only opens on the other end in Mongolia. That's what everybody does nowadays. Everybody knows that—but those two. Crackheads. Crap-heads. They fired into the glass. But that kind of glass is thick, you know? They couldn't score. Their blood was boiling. They couldn't pull off an everyday stickup. Then, they couldn't even make a crack in a pane of glass with a gun …”
Sunny caught his voice as it snagged; when he spoke, it was if he had to steer his words up a hill.
“The Yawars said they thought she said something. They couldn't hear from behind the glass. Elana was on her feet. She opened her hands—twelve dollars and six phone cards. The two guys said they didn't remember what she said. On advice of counsel, I assume. She must have begged them to throw away the guns. Walk out while they still could. She must have said—maybe this was a mistake—‘Let me help you.’ She helped people sleeping on the street. She helped dogs and cats cringing under Dumpsters. She helped me. They said they remembered nothing. Can you imagine? Her last words …”
Sunny turned away in his chair, and then when he couldn't bring his arm down across the rest, he twisted his seat around in three small rasps against the carpet. The legs of the chair creaked like shinbones.
“You ask yourself what anyone might have done. That's a delusion, isn't it? A little guilt makes you feel less helpless. If we had run the Saturday buffet to two instead of three, she might have run that errand an hour earlier. If it had been Sunday. If there was a parallel universe. Ifs are superstitions—like saying it would have made some difference if you had worn red socks or a lucky hat. There are what, five hundred murders a year here? How many of them really have a why? Why does someone kill someone they don't hate—that they don't even know? No storm, no lightning, just out of the blue, some thunderbolt, some meteorite, comes down on the person who least deserves it. Sick and crazy can wipe out beautiful and worthy. Of all the things I ever wanted my daughters to learn, I wish they could have missed that.”
A long police whistle trilled outside. The lights of the conference room seemed to buzz under the sudden, white-walled stillness. They heard an isolated shout from an alley. They heard the chuffs of a LaSalle Street bus, and the slick frizzle of tires crackling over melting snow. Sgt. Gallaher brought the ends of her coat around her, so that the short collar covered her chin.
“Yes sir,” she began, then decided just to shrink down against the cold wall.
Sunny left the copies of city legislation, signed and unsigned, on Claudia McCarthy's desk. He and a flan
king of uniforms, lead by Sgt. Gal-laher, moved at a five-o'clock clip through the halls when they passed the glass-paned door stenciled PRESS ROOM. He held himself up for a step. Reporters were working on their stories about the mayor's funeral, summarizing his legacy, and speculating, with no specific or particular knowledge, about the succession. Sunny lingered for a moment; he wondered if he should pay a call.
Sunny had once been with the mayor when he decided to drop in early one afternoon, no warning to reporters or advance word to his guards.
“We'll catch the chihuahuas unawares,” he told Sunny. “Pat their heads, give them a treat. Let them know you're coming, and they can look up who the president of Slovenia is, just before you walk in the door. Then they ridicule you for not knowing.”
When the mayor had walked in, the midmorning babble of desultory phone calls into desks and editors, the strident reassurance that nothing of consequence was—or ever was—afoot, the raindrop spatter of fingers tapping keyboards, and the exploratory calls for lunch orders—“Wanna go Greek? A little Mex?”—had subsided at the first sight of the mayor's famous purple dinosaur silhouette materializing in such an unfamiliar place. The two men from the Tribune stood up in silent astonishment. A woman from the Sun-Times, the nominal dean of the City Hall regulars, stepped forward with an apologetic sweep of her arm at the tumble of decrepit desks, the birdcage litter of curling old newspapers, and the cemetery landscape of cold, old coffee cups.
“Good morning, ladies and gentlemen,” said the mayor in a low, courtly voice. He stood in front of a boxy old television set that Arty Agras had cadged from the auctioneers overseeing a sale of used furniture from the Bismarck Hotel. The reporters watched it during afternoon Cub games, and on the morning the World Trade Center had been cut down.
“I've just come to pass along my regards in a neighborly fashion. Here we are, just three floors away, and we never get together for a cup of coffee and a plate of cookies, do we?”
“Would you like some coffee, Mr. Mayor?”
He took a sniff and launched a face of distaste in the direction of that morning's brew, which was beginning to bubble like road repair tar.
“No thank you. I appreciate the offer.” The mayor turned his head and instructed an aide, “Send a pound down here of the Tanzanian peaberry that the Austrian consul general sends us.”
The reporter from the Sun-Times wrung her hands.
“We had a tin of Christmas cookies somewhere,” she remembered, “but I haven't seen it for a few weeks.”
The mayor turned his head once more.
“And add some of those fine golden biscuit beurre that Audrey Tatou brought along for lunch last week.” He turned his face back to the reporters.
“She's making a film here, you know. I meant to invite you folks in. But we were fussing about something that day.”
The man from the Daily Southtown began to remember the fuss (a functionary in the City Clerk's office had told the jury at his bribery trial that he had been personally recommended for his position by the mayor), but the other reporters shrank back from their colleague, as if he had just put his hands on an electric fence.
It was then that the mayor's brown eyes grew suddenly flinty, and his smile hardened like a tire chain across his chin. One of his campaign posters had been taped to the wall. It proclaimed CHICAGO'S OWN in bold red capital letters across the top, bordered by the four blue stars of the city's flag, all above a classic, smiling portrait of the mayor (from six years ago, to be sure) looking vigorous, warm, and indomitable.
Five darts had been thrown into his picture, three in his cheekbones, one in his chin, and one in his scalp.
The woman from the Polish Daily News finally announced, “We do that for every mayor, Mr. Mayor.”
“Actually,” murmured someone behind her, “it's a mark of respect.”
The mayor let a pause grow large in the room.
“Clearly,” he finally said.
The reporters urgently examined every inch and fissure of the tops of their shoes.
“Let's throw a few,” the mayor suddenly declared.
It took the reporters a few moments to absorb their amazement. The lady from the Sun-Times at last stepped forward to begin pulling darts out of the mayor's face.
“There was a time, when I spent more time in bars,” he said affably as she worked. “I made sort of a study of this divertissement and was reasonably good at it.”
The mayor unbuttoned his smooth gray jacket while the woman from the Sun-Times handed the darts to him in a bundle. He beheld their tips, counted them carefully, and appeared to blow dust from their points before drawing back his left arm and throwing the first dart with a quick, surprisingly smart flip (the mayor had been a star high school third baseman, and sometimes startled onlookers with his residue of physical grace—“like a polar bear diving underwater,” Linas Slavinskas once said). The dart dipped at the end of its flight, piercing the iconic mayoral chin.
“Good throw, sir!” the reporters shouted a little hesitantly, and clapped with the insecurity of people at a modern jazz recital who weren't quite certain when a set was done.
“Merely a shaving cut,” the mayor growled.
The second hit just an inch to the right. The third dart was slightly wide, so that it clipped his right cheek. The mayor grunted softly, then drew his arm back, just over his shoulder. The fourth dart shot out, straight as the flight of a bullet, into the tip of his nose.
“Way to go! Way to go!” The reporters churned their arms above their heads and barked like fevered dogs.
The mayor whistled his last shot down, on a line below his nose, striking a few feet below the bottom edge of the poster. There was awkward silence as the reporters wondered why his last throw had gone so badly off course. Then they just as suddenly understood: The mayor had thrown the last dart into that unseen territory that, if the campaign poster had been full-size, would have been the mayoral groin.
Hoots and shouts rang against the large windowpanes looking down over LaSalle Street. The mayor shouted into the swell of sound, “I am impervious there! I am impervious!”
The mayor rearranged his jacket, settled it on his shoulders, removed his pink silk pocket square, and puffed it afresh into his lapel pocket as he waited for the din to decline.
“Well, we've had a delightful time in your clubhouse,” the mayor began. “A welcome distraction from my momentous duties. But regretfully, I have to take my leave. I'm going back upstairs to my office now. I'm going to appoint a few city officials. I'm going to sign a few slips of paper that will spend a few million dollars of your tax money—fixing roads, repairing bridges, building six new schools. I've got phone calls to return. The head of the Board of Trade, the Chinese trade commissioner, the president of the United States. I've got to clear time to have a heart-to-heart with Roman Abramovich. Nothing like a rich Russian who wants to see his name in the sky. He sold a couple of soccer players to buy that site over on west Monroe. Now Helmut Jahn has designed him a one-hundred-and-eighty-story building. Tallest in the world. It was going to be a hundred-and sixty, but someone in Shanghai said they wanted to build something bigger. I said, ‘Roman, oh Roman, do we want the world to think that a bunch of slave labor gangs in China can build taller than our minority-owned contractors and union construction crews in Chicago?’ Well, Roman laughed and laughed. ‘Right-inski you are, Mr. Mayor,’ he said. So it's going to be one hundred and eighty stories. The tallest building in the world is coming back home. It'll cost two billion dollars. Maybe three. But as many people are going to be in that building every day as live in San Francisco. That building is going to be on postcards, calendars, snow globes, key chains, prophylactic foils, and movie screens. It will have the most recognizable profile since Rudolph Valentino. It'll be a symbol of the century. Your children will grow up pointing to it in the sky,” the mayor told them softly. “Right next to the moon.”
He had turned in the frame of the doorway to deliver his d
eparting words.
“You boys and girls have a good time, too,” the mayor told them as gently as he might read a nap time story to a class of third graders. “Writing your little stories.”
Sunny decided just to keep walking.
SATURDAY NIGHT
Sunny asked to be taken to a small strip mall on a block of Racine Avenue in which painted signs seemed to scream back and forth as streetlights snapped on. ASIA QUAKE EMERGENCY FUND commanded one. ISLAM: MEDICINE FOR ALL EVILS bellowed another, while ADAM'S
APPLE HEAD SHOP, KOLLEL TORAS CHESED, and 2,000 SONGS IN
TAGALOG; 5,000 SONGS IN MANDARIN howled across the block.
One of the uniforms in Sunny's traveling crew pulled open the door of a storefront with windows that seemed to be covered with the slick white backs of posters.
“Don't like this,” said Sgt. Gallaher, who for the first time thrust out an arm to hold Sunny back from a step. “Are you sure?”
“It's a restaurant,” Sunny said as the sizzle of garlic began to reach them through the frigid air.
“A secret restaurant?”
“A Korean restaurant,” he explained. “They believe that eating is private. Strangers shouldn't see strangers eating.”
A bell on the door jangled as it snapped shut on a whoosh of wind. Edges of the posters fluttered as squirts of wind rippled the smiles of Korean film stars, models, and headstone-sized pictures of glimmering bottles of Green Soju, Jinro Gold, and Xozu.
“Alderman Roopini,” Evelyn Lee called out from a center table. She swayed slightly in coming to her feet, a silvery woman on slender legs whose center of gravity had migrated. She held a cheek against Sunny and blew a kiss across his ear. A Mexican man carrying a small bucket of hot coals poured half a dozen orange, ashy rocks into a small hole in the center of their table and snapped a grill across the top. Sunny flattened his hands against the table.