by Scott Simon
“Fantastic beadwork,” she announced, as if it were under glass in a museum—or a gift shop that sold handicrafts made in village cooperatives in Chittagong. Then she turned around.
“Sunny, Congress never made sense for you. Roland”—it was the first time in years Sunny had heard anyone refer to the mayor by his first name—“wanted a way to let you raise money. He wanted us to pour more money into the party. He couldn't stand me, above my legs and ass. He thought Peter was a blessed fool. He loved you. So he figured out a scheme to milk us and make something nice happen for you—after your loss. He wanted you to have options, a future. The job itself? It never made sense. Aldermen don't become congressmen in this day and age. You've got to know something about butanol, Vanuatu, derived fuels, and proliferation. Not just potholes.”
Sunny took a long time to reply. In fact, he liked Dolores Carroll. She could be generous and funny. He overlooked loutishness among aldermen the way you pardoned children for throwing a toy car at a playmate. Dolores Carroll was far more desirable and sophisticated company. Yet her expansive catalog of causes and certainties suddenly annoyed Sunny. He didn't understand how someone who had spent so much time in politics could feel so sure about everything.
“I wish more congressmen knew how to fill a pothole,” Sunny finally told her. “It would give them something useful to do with their hands. You know,” he continued, “I could win that seat. That's the hell of it. You get points for timing in this game, too. Forget what I don't know. Timing is on my side. Due to a terrible loss, as much as any”— he hesitated before realizing that she could not take issue with her own word—“poise. Three years from now, who knows how the table will be set? The music stops and you run for the open seat.”
Dolores Carroll's eyes stayed steady and may have even grown a shade softer. She sat back and held a finger gently against her full coral lips as she spoke.
“We can spend five dollars for every one you'd have to raise, Sunny. More, if you force us. And when it's over, we'll owe no one, much less the friends that the mayor tried to shake down for you. A million dollars? Two? I'm sure we can both find better things to do with it.”
“At the moment,” said Sunny so softly he had to sit forward, “I don't think I can.”
“I hope you'll let that moment pass,” said Dolores Carroll gently. “And realize—”
But Sunny decided to interrupt her. He was an elected official and thought there had to be a limit to the admonition he could be expected to endure from someone who had risked only her money in politics. Sunny put his hands on a fifty-cent blue stick ballpoint, bitten on the far end, which said CHICAGO DEPARTMENT OF ANIMAL CARE AND CONTROL. He wrapped his hand around the lettering.
“I've had my name on a ballot six times,” said Sunny. “In the end, you know, for all our bluster, we're not really in charge. A bunch of people with hands dirty from filling potholes and scrubbing toilets can snap their fingers, and—”
Sunny snapped his, flattened his hand, and blew across his palm.
“—make us go away.”
About three-quarters of the way through Sunny's oration it occurred to him that Dolores Carroll had no doubt been both praised and decried by virtuosos. He couldn't keep his face stern. Dolores Carroll leaned across the table, close enough for Sunny to take in whiffs of amber, lavender, and snow drying on soft wool.
“I'm suggesting a way to win a real life, Sunny,” she said softly. “Not just another election. Look at Roland—the mayor,” she amended when she saw how invoking his mortal name again seemed to sting. “How many people have you heard say, ‘Face down at his desk? That's what he would have wanted.’ What nonsense. He was trapped. He couldn't stop running. Master of his domain? He didn't even own a hole in a log. He knew that the day he stopped being mayor, so did the free desserts. The ‘Get Out of Jail Free’ cards, too. He'd have nothing to give his friends, nothing to frighten his enemies, and nothing to trade for protection.”
Dolores sat back, pushing her fingers delicately back from Sunny's pad. He could hear voices rising and bouncing in the hallway—Torey del Raso and Harry Walker, Emil Wagner and Patrick Tierney Dolores Carroll flipped the sides of her coat back across her lap. They fell with a soft swish and a plush plop.
“We'd be good partners, Sunny,” she said. “A golden age. Let's have dinner.”
“Of course.”
“I don't mean, ‘sometime.’” Her dusky eyes seemed to narrow into hard, dark prongs. “Tomorrow.”
Sunny nodded slowly. He could hear his daughters in the small office outside, crinkling bags and giggling.
Dolores Carroll stepped off with a sharp click of her black Tuscan boots, and Sgt. Gallaher raised a hand to hold off Rita and Rula so that Harry Walker III and Salvatore del Raso could step in to Sunny's office. Torey turned his large pale hands over and over, as if wringing a washcloth. Harry ran his fingers through the underbrush of his great white beard, as if calming a small animal.
“We're here on behalf of the Gay Caucus,” said Harry.
“I didn't know—”
“I joined this morning,” Torey explained. “Arty inspired me.”
“Something amazing has been going on,” Harry added. Sunny sat up straight. He could feel his jaw grind and tighten.
“I've been in conference,” he said simply. Harry began to draw one of his toes back and forth in front of him.
“I told Vera that I'd vote for her,” he said. “But I didn't promise. You can't promise in politics, Sunny. You know that. Shit transpires. Fate intervenes. I told Vera I'd vote for her, and I will. Just maybe not immediately.”
Sunny felt static electricity prickle his scalp and singe the back of his neck. He had learned that half the time he had felt such palpable pangs of anxiety, nothing happened—and half the time that he felt nothing, the world caved in. He kept his response pointedly short, to be sure of his voice.
“You've decided …”
“Not decided, Sunny,” Harry rushed on. “Something has called me. I know you're not a spiritual man. I respect that. This thing with Arty—”
“Outrageous,” Sunny assured him. “Outrageous.”
“Exactly, exactly. And Sunny, the outpouring of support—”
“The feeling that enough's enough,” chimed in Torey del Raso, rubbing his hands in excitement now. “That it's time to show the prying bastards.”
“Arty Agras will be an indispensable partner in Vera's administration,” Sunny said smoothly, but Harry was already shaking his head and rolling his fingers across his woolly white Inuit vest.
“That's why we're here, Sunny,” he said with rising excitement. “The phone calls—the messages—Sunny, Sunny. I reached Arty. I think he's trying to reach you.”
Indeed, Sunny's phone quivered on the yellow pad on his small white table.
“A gay man, Sunny!” Harry flapped his arms and shined his face upward. “A proud, gay, humble, patriotic, man-loving family man!” Harry's icy blue eyes beamed. “A man who cherishes his wife, his children, his community, his church, and his boyfriends!” The Reverend Walker stretched his arms to embrace multitudes and thundered, “He could actually be mayor, Sunny! I can't turn my back on that! Out of the closet and onto the fifth floor!”
Sunny's phone danced over the yellow pad until it dropped onto the small white table and made a sound like a rattlesnake set loose in the room.
Just a few hours before, shortly after six in the morning, three black cruisers and a van with COMVAD! and a fleet red arrow painted across the side had pulled up in front of the old redbrick filling station that was now police headquarters for Highwood, Illinois, twenty-five miles north of the city.
(There was no such thing as Comvad. The department's chief of investigations had created the name to embellish a police van for surveillance operations with a name to suggest some new communications company that would dig up the streets and appropriate parking spots. The chief was delighted to read case reports that noted that passersby woul
d sometimes bang on the parked van and cry, “Assholes!”)
The Highwood police chief, Roy Geraci, had sounded unimpressed and snappish when Commander Green had awakened him shortly after five. But he shook his head and whistled softly after reading through the sheaf of papers presented by Commander Siobhan Kearney.
“Whooo,” he said, handing it back. “Wow.” And then, so that Kearney wouldn't think that he had spent his whole career in the crabgrass-and-barbeque belt, answering complaints about boozy parties thrown by teenagers when their parents were in Florida, Chief Geraci informed her, “I was in Milwaukee for seven years.”
“Tough break,” she said. “You know the building?”
Chief Geraci nodded. He had scarcely had time to splash his face since being awakened and felt a lick of his dark hair spring up, like a coil from a sofa, from the back of his head.
“Smack on Prairie Avenue. The middle unit of three studios above the Talk of the Town salon. Look commander, I can get a tac unit over from Highland Park. They can put a team on the roof, come in through the window, and take him in bed.”
Commander Kearney ran a freckled hand through the red bangs above her brown glasses and shook her head forcefully.
“A tac team to take down one skinny barista? We'd be embarrassed. Besides, we don't want any lights, cameras, and action. Besides …” She thumped the City of Chicago patch of stars and bars on the left arm of her uniform. Chief Geraci nodded.
“All yours then,” he said.
Shortly after seven, the entire day watch of a dozen Highwood police officers surrounded the building at 225 Prairie. Charles and Deborah, Alex and Megan, Peter and Jessica, and Fred and Linda crouched in the dim, still hallway. Charles knocked on the door, softly at first, like a high school boy in a movie tapping on the window of a girlfriend at midnight. His knocks grew sharper, louder. Deborah called out, “Mr. Meadows! Mr. Meadows! Chicago police! We'd like a word!” No response; nothing stirred. “Mr. Meadows!” called out Megan. Her eyebrows rose as they heard something—a drinking glass, a candy dish, a small window—break and scatter over a hard floor. Eight radios crackled on thick, creaking police belts.
“He's on the roof,” Chief Geraci announced.
Clifford Meadows had heard the knocking, scrambled into his bathroom, stood on the rim of the washbasin, cracked the skylight—which, Siobhan Kearney complained later, had not been shown on any blueprints—pushed it out with bloody fingers, and clambered onto the roof. He got to his knees. He had thrown a blue plaid woolen shirt on over a white T-shirt. His blue jeans were already sodden. He had plunged his feet, without socks, into unlaced running shoes. He crawled forward. Pools of pink from the heels of his hand spread in the snow. Clifford Meadows got to his feet and shouted.
“Shit. Shit.”
Prairie Avenue wasn't Broadway: 225 Prairie was at least thirty feet away from the nearest lot, 240 Prairie, the Oakwood Elementary School. Clifford Meadows couldn't leap to another roof. He couldn't jump to the ground without going splat in front of a Highwood police officer with a cocked assault rifle. He came to the edge of the roof and cupped bloody dripping hands around his mouth.
“It's the corn people against the rice people!” he shouted. “You're drinking fish genes in your orange juice!”
Charles, Deborah, Alex, Megan, Peter, Jessica, Fred, and Linda surged in through Meadows's door and up the hole in the skylight like birds up a chimney. They stumbled, stopped, and kept going. Alex, Megan, Peter and Jessica had their Walthers drawn. Charles stayed down when he fell, flipped back on his ass, cocked the slide of his M-16 so that Meadows could hear it, and drew a bead on the back of his head.
“Down. Down!” Peter shouted.
Meadows flopped face first in the snow and slush. He turned his head to shout.
“It's cold! Fuck!”
The cops wore slick-soled shoes and had to clomp slowly. When they stood in a circle around Clifford Meadows, they trained the snouts of their guns on his head. He blubbered as he sank into the snow. Blood from his slashed hands and fingers seeped into the slush around him and made a pale pink silhouette. Meadows began to twitch. Megan put the cold nose of her revolver against the back of his left leg, wrenched off his shoes, and flung them over the side of the roof. They thudded into snow with a pffft. Meadows’ toes were pink, and his heels white with old skin and flinty calluses.
“Fuck! It's cold!” he shouted.
“Freeze! Die! Fuck!” Peter screamed—the last so loudly that children in the play lot of the Oakwood School left their games and ran to the link fence across from the building.
Peter put the barrel of his Walter P99 against Meadows's neck, where he knew its fifteen ounces would feel as immense as a cannon. He pressed down until he could see a white outline of the barrel on Meadows’ red skin.
“Want a new asshole?” asked Peter.
Alex put his right foot over the base of Meadows's spine and pressed down to pin him against the grimy roof like an old museum specimen in a display case. Meadows gasped, but didn't shout.
“Stay down,” Peter told him. “Fuck you, food Nazi crackpot fuck-ball.”
But it was Jessica who holstered her revolver and leaned down, shaking snowflakes from her curls as she bent over Meadows and slapped one half of a Peerless chain-link cuff around his right wrist, then wrenched his arm around his back to grab and cuff his left. She had been running and slipping and had to catch her breath. She planted her feet and lifted Clifford Meadows by the back of his blue plaid shirt until he was on his knees in the slush and snow. Alex and Peter stood back. Charles crawled forward. Fred and Linda stepped to the edge of the roof and slapped their forearms with their wrists three and four times to signal Commander Kearney and two Highwood cops with M-16s pointing pointlessly into the gray sky. Megan turned up the crackle of the radio on her hip and turned her head to speak. Jessica's eyes were bleary and red as she blinked out snow.
“Clifford Meadows,” she told him. Her long neck quavered, and her voice was thick. “You are under arrest for the murder of the mayor of Chicago.”
Sgt. Gallaher brought Sunny up to the mayor's office on five in a procession of blue uniforms. The silence was uncommon and arresting. He heard the feet of the officers squish softly into thick maroon carpet. The immaculate cream walls of the outer office blotted breaths and stomach grumbles. They turned into the mayor's office, and Sunny stopped. The walnut walls were smooth, brown, and bare. The Eakins, the Lautrecs, and the Hoppers had been taken down; the Art Institute didn't presume to anticipate the preferences of the new mayor who would move in within hours.
The mayor's massive old groaning slab of a beech bridge-tender's desk had been removed. Sunny thought that it must have been like pulling a boulder out of a front yard. Something old, oaken, and imposing had been trucked in. The glossy surface was golden and empty. There were no crystal or silver ashtrays holding gray gobs of ash, no slick drink glasses with crackling ice, no creased newspapers (items and quotations rounded in red, with exclamation points screaming and slashing arrows pointing to howls of SHIT! ASSHOLE! and ANTEDILUVIAN!). No Fannie's sandwich wrappers, dribbling gravy over the most critical clauses of legislation, no cinnamon rolls shedding sugar glaze over official memoranda, and no serried ranks of silver and leather frames displaying the mayor smiling alongside the last two popes at Soldier Field; or the mayor, implausibly adorned in a skullcap, squeezing his eyes in solemn prayer at Jerusalem's Western Wall; the mayor spinning a basketball under the Chinatown gate; the mayor fixing a kiss on Aretha Franklin's outstretched arm (her coral nails extended, like dragons’ tongues, from under the folds of a massive red fox robe) at the Praise Temple of Restoration on West Madison; the mayor making Jennifer Lopez laugh between takes on west Lawrence; and the mayor on Columbus Drive, taking the hand of flaxen-haired Gina Marie Heenan as she was anointed by Journeyman Plumbers Union Local 130 as Queen of the St. Patrick's Day Parade.
Sunny turned around on his heels and took in the blank walls, the ba
re desk, and the gray windows. The sound of chants from groups gathered in the surrounding streets outside reached up; their words fell away against the glass and snow.
“I'll be right outside, sir,” Sgt. Gallaher said softly, and closed the door just as Sunny had to wipe his eyes and turn away to look at the snow freezing into frosty, wavy shapes over the LaSalle Street windows.
A dozen aldermen were shown in: Vera, Linas, and Arty, Rod Abboud of the 26th, Donny Stubbs of the 27th, and Daryl Lloyd of the 9th, John Wu, Evelyn Lee, Astrid Lindstrom of the 28th, Wandy Rodriguez of the 30th, Kiera Malek, and Jaco Rapoport Sefran. They circled the mammoth space that used to hold the mayor's desk, clasping hands, joshing about ties and shoes, cuffing shoulders, squeezing elbows, and exchanging insincerities before facing Sunny. Linas Slavinskas cleared his throat conspicuously.
“Ahhhem, Arty,” he announced. “I would have guessed goats. Or whips and chains. But a couple of guys? Chicago's finest? Geez, Arty, how can I scandalize anybody now? I could slip the plátano to the Mother Superior of Our Lady of Vilna and people would just say, ‘Yeah, but didn't you hear about Alderman Agras?’”
Laughs and shrieks smacked off the walnut walls. John Wu's stout, grave face cracked open as he bawled and guffawed. Vera slipped a lace hanky from her sleeve, daubed her eyes, then Evelyn Lee's. Wandy Rodriguez waited for the gush to ebb slightly then said, “I applaud your interest in Latin culture, Alderman Slavinskas,” which sat off another round. Arty Agras turned slightly toward the others, and the laughter faded. His eyes were wet and full.
“I got a lot of calls and messages. They mean … more than I can say. Sofia says thanks, too.”