by Scott Simon
“The clerk could call you to cast your vote,” he began. “You could pass, you could vote for Alderman Barrow, you could vote for Mickey Mouse.”
“There's an idea,” said Linas, but Vera Barrow held out a hand to hold off another jest.
“The specific vote doesn't matter,” said Stuart Cohn. “But once you cast it, it has to be counted at the end of this ballot. So you could write out your resignation from the council, and present it to yourself as acting interim mayor. You could accept it. You could tell yourself what an honor it has been to serve with yourself. But you would remain acting interim mayor until the roll call we're in now is over and the results have been declared. So on the same sheet of paper, Acting Interim Mayor Roopini could appoint Dr. Taber John Palmer to succeed Alderman Roopini as alderman of the Forty-eighth Ward. Then one of the fifty aldermen could rise, ask if they are recorded on this vote, and cast their vote for Dr. Palmer. The stampede of popular support would be free to proceed.”
Cohn looked over to Christa Landgraf, who had folded her glasses into her palm; as if she couldn't bear to watch.
“The registration problem is real,” he conceded directly to her, then looked down the table toward Sunny. “So you should establish an address for Dr. Palmer in the Forty-eighth right now. A spare bedroom, somebody's sofa. Wait—a motel room. You can book it and get a printed confirmation back by email. An alderman must be a registered voter of his ward, and you can't be a registered voter unless you've lived in the precinct for thirty days. But if the council elects him mayor, it would take thirty days for a challenge to reach the courts. I can practically guarantee such a delay,” he said softly. “By the time any case was heard, Dr. Palmer would have been freely elected mayor by a duly constituted City Council. And I can't see any court overturning an open democratic election that millions of people have followed, vote by vote. Especially if it leads to Taber Palmer.”
Cohn sat back and tossed his gold pen into the open pages of the city code. The aldermen sat back, waiting in unspoken consent for a first reaction.
“My God, Stuart,” Vera Barrow said finally. “That's breathtaking.”
Arty Agras put his head against the smooth oak table, turned his head to the side, then sat back up to speak.
“My God yes. No offense to you, Vera. Or Linas. Or you either, Miss Landgraf. But Jewish lawyers …” Arty shook his head with reverence, the way some people paid homage to Cuban cigars, continental cuisine, or Nazi storm troopers.
Linas shifted in his seat, impressed but unconvinced.
“When you want to head back into private practice, Stu, give me a call. But that may be too much of a trick shot, even for me.”
“Taber John Palmer is a man of quality,” Sunny said in a subdued tone just above a whisper; for the first time, it conveyed a note of pleading. “The city deserves a little of that now. I've spoken with him a little. He says he is eager to serve the city he says gave him a chance when Itta Bena, Mississippi, didn't. It's getting ugly out there on the floor, all laughs aside. All the back and forth over Lewie Karp's incredible performing tongue came too close to breaking out into clan warfare. I don't want to give tired people more opportunity to say things we'll all regret tomorrow—and hurt this city.”
“Silly, scattered, late night arguments, your lordship,” said Linas.
“Like most homicides,” said Sunny. They heard the satiny swoosh of Vera Barrow stretching her legs again.
“I like it,” she said. “Extraordinary developments call for an extraordinary solution. And he's retired—not likely to run next year. We all get extra time to sharpen our knives. Or class up our acts.”
Sunny held a hand over Alfredo Sandoval's elbow and clutched it just lightly. Fred ran his tongue over his lips and finally let out a sigh. Sunny could see Fred's chest constrict under his plaid coat.
“I can live with it,” he said.
“What does the professor teach?” asked Daryl Lloyd.
“History. Political science,” said Sunny, and the aldermen could hear Daryl run the back of a hand back and forth over the bristles on his cheeks that had grown back over twelve hours.
“Maybe he'll find out that politics isn't as easy as it looks in the books,” he said.
“Hear, hear,” Arty chimed.
All the aldermen looked away from Linas so that Sunny, at the end of the table, was the only set of fretful, imploring eyes.
“You have your votes,” Linas told him flatly.
“I want your opinion, Linas,” said Sunny. “Anyway. Regardless. No one's voted yet.”
Linas uncrossed and stretched his own long legs and sat forward. There was a debonair creak of leather from the heels of his slim Italian boots. He found a tissue from his breast pocket, pressed it to his forehead, and spent a moment looking for something in the folds.
“People always look for someone above the battle,” Linas finally told them. “No mud on their shoes, blood on their hands. The Immaculate Contender. Well, I think the battle teaches you something. Every single scar.”
He sat back and moved the heel of his hand slowly across his chin, until it sounded like the edge of a steel door scraping a sidewalk.
“Will he help my daughters with their homework?” he asked.
Eldad Delaney had entered softly through the door behind Sunny. As the aldermen broke into a last round of worn-out laughter, and he whispered something. Sunny looked down the table at Christa Land-graf.
“Let's put the pieces in place,” he said. “Mr. Delaney will call Dr. Palmer. Let's book him a room at the Argyle House.” It was a bed and breakfast in the Forty-eighth that won four stars in many gay travel guides. “They have fresh poppy seed muffins in the morning. And I'll enjoy watching you and Professor Palmer do best by this city over the next year.
“Chief Martinez is outside,” he added. “Under the circumstances, I suggest that he speak to us all.”
Matt Martinez had not changed from the blue leather service jacket he had worn to preside at the booking of Clifford Meadows in a holding cell on south State Street twelve hours earlier. The creak of his jacket's blue sleeves in the cold had irritated him for at least the last four hours. The chief felt gray, as if his skin had grown a top layer of scales. Sunny surrendered his own chair, and the police chief sat down heavily.
“God's Good Earth Warriors,” he began. “They are—I don't know. Activists. Concerned citizens. Militants. Terrorists. Shits. Shits,” he finally pronounced.
“They say they wanted to dramatize the dangers of unknown substances creeping into food supplies. So they slipped a toxic substance into the mayor's food supply. The mayor? He was just unlucky enough to be a target of opportunity. If Meadows had met a monk with the Dalai Lama, or Oprah's hairstylist, there might have been a different victim. Claudia McCarthy stopped in for coffee every morning when she got off the Brown Line. Men notice her, right? Meadows worked behind the counter, and he noticed her. Noticed that she used soymilk. Found out—maybe he overheard—that she worked for the mayor. His mind began to work. I mean, if you're going to penetrate the mayor's inner circle, what better way than Claudia?”
Matt Martinez finally took off his checker-brimmed hat and laid it in his lap. He quickly ran his fingers through his hair to lift it from his scalp.
“Between all the frothing and sprinkling, Claudia told Meadows about the mayor's routines. His habits. His appetites. She didn't realize it, of course. She was just making conversation. Maybe trying to impress Meadows a little with her job. Meadows probably didn't have to ask very much. After a while, Claudia realized that they never went to his place. He said it was being renovated. He said he had roommates. He said he had dirty dishes. He never answered his phone. He said it was his brother, and they didn't get along. Which seems to be true, by the way. After a while, Claudia figured out that she was being used. She just thought it was in the traditional manner. Six weeks ago, she stopped seeing him. By then, Meadows had gotten all he wanted. All the information that was
necessary to plant the poison and kill the mayor to make …” Chief Martinez fairly spat the last words, “their point.”
Arty Agras was the first alderman to speak. His words were slow, and tinged with incomprehension, as if he were trying to read words in a book in a dream.
“So, Matt. The people who killed the mayor. They—they're— orgasmic food nuts?”
Linas Slavinskas caught Sunny's eye. They both fought down grins. Chief Martinez ignored, or didn't catch, Arty's phrasing.
“What did you expect, alderman? Mafiosi? Hit teams from the KGB? Nuts do the job just fine.”
Vera Barrow had reached over to see some of the sheets from police reports.
“They're protesting transgenic life forms,” she reported with a rare tone of wonder.
“What the hell,” said Daryl Lloyd. “Martians?”
“Scientists putting fish genes in tomatoes,” the chief explained. “Genes from a flounder being put in tomatoes to keep them from freezing. Rat genes being put into cattle so that cows reproduce like rats.”
“What the hell?” said Fred Sandoval. “Here? Not on Mars? Not even California? I never heard …”
“Now you will,” said Sunny. “For a couple of days. These people are against it.”
Arty stood up from the table. He began to take short, stumbling, teetering steps, like a clubbed boxer trying to stagger to the ropes.
“Christ, I think I am, too. Fish crap in tomatoes!” said Arty. “What the hell, what the hell. But Sunny, what did the mayor have to do with that? How could anyone possibly think that something like this helps whatever the hell they're for or against? Killing a good man …” Soft, fat tears began to bubble in Arty's eyes. “A man who looked his enemies in the face.” Yes, thought Sunny. Only his friends had to worry. “It's indecent. It's stupid. It's barbaric.”
Sunny let silence take over the room. They heard a lone cry from a late-night elevated train, the click of a door nearby and low, muttering voices of police shifts coming and going as clock hands began sweeping up toward midnight. Sunny rose and put his arms around Arty and guided him into a seat.
“That's what they count on, my friend,” he said gently. “That's what they believe in. Nothing gets attention like a shot, a blast, a satchel going off in the subway. People don't have to know what you stand for, just what you're willing to do. Are you willing to rig bombs in a school? Drop a rocket on a hospital? Strap a bomb to your guts on the bus? Fly head first into a city? That's what makes a mark. That's how thugs make smart people cower. Blow up babies, behead bystanders, send old ladies crawling, and little girls screaming and crying like sirens—that's when crowns change heads, talking heads blather, and armies march. How does something as drab as politics compete? And the way we behave—why should anyone think that politics could even change a man's socks? So people try to capture history with a single shot, a draught of poison, or stealing planes in the sky. Politics? Ridiculous. You might as well throw pebbles under a train. How tiresome. How compromising. How square.”
Sunny settled Arty into a seat, and Vera Barrow took his hands.
Arty began to shudder, like a small boy with blue lips, wet beside a swimming pool. Linas Slavinskas rose and put his hands on Arty's shoulders. Sunny turned around to the chief of police.
“Thank you, Matt. Chief. Let's take a moment, aldermen,” he said. “I have a couple of short notes to write. Then let's finish the roll call.”
They could hear Lewie Karp in the hallway outside. He drummed the top of a tin popcorn can with his knuckles and called out, “Does anyone here want to play this game?”
The conference room door sprang open with a bang of the door against a chair. Rula and Rita burst in, eyes brimming, noses running, wiping their fingers over their eyes and onto the bottoms of their sweaters. Eldad had told them … something.
“Oh, Pappaji, are you sure? Are you sure?” said Rula.
“You'll be bored, you'll be angry,” Rita sniffled. “You'll blame us. You'll just sit around with Sheldon, scratching.”
“She never wanted this, you know,” said Rula. A thick tuft of her sable hair had fallen over an eye. When Rula clamped a hand over the tears in her other eye, she couldn't see what was in front of her; her legs began to crumple. Sunny took her into his arms. She was so convincingly independent that Sunny had to remind himself that their older daughter felt responsible for everything—bird flu, Great Lakes pollution, the valuation of the yuan—and registered hurt like a thermometer.
“Mammaji would say stay,” Rula burbled and rasped. “She loved you. She was proud of you. She used to say, ‘It's a dirty job but someone has to do it? My husband does.’”
“I'll count on you to keep life interesting,” said Sunny.
“Bloody hell,” snapped Rita through a slick of tears. Then she laughed. “Not that, too.”
Eldad stepped back into the room and tentatively approached their giggling embrace. His face was full, red, and beginning to break.
“It's terrible, alderman,” he said. “A terrible, irrecoverable, magnificent loss.”
“You gush to my face now, Eldad,” Sunny told him. “But the next alderman you work for, you'll tell how I pick my teeth with my fingernails and sneak a nap after lunch. How I don't always digest asparagus.”
Sunny's daughters parted partway from their embrace, so their father could face Eldad.
“You're opening a new restaurant?” Eldad asked. “All my life, I've heard that I'm supercilious enough to be a great headwaiter.”
“You have all the tools,” Sunny agreed. “But you've got important work to do. Aldermen to paper train. Maybe you can help the new mayor. I can write you a letter of recommendation now, you know, once I'm a civilian. Just come by our place for dinner now and then.”
Eldad held on to Sunny and Sunny squeezed back, gripping his shoulders and patting his back. Each man tried to croak, “Thank you, thank you,” through his clotted throat. They clasped each other so tightly that Sunny's daughters stepped around them and pretended to look at the maps and photos on the wall. Their father had become so ridiculous to them: scratching, drinking, curling up with their cat, and falling asleep in front of old cops-and-robbers, next to a bottle on the nightstand. But they had to heed, even as they couldn't quite decipher, the devotion of an outsider. It gave a glimpse of a part of their father that their mother must have once seen. It was like finding a forgotten family photograph lost in the back of an old book and thinking, “My father? Are you sure?”
Sunny wrote his notes and reached the rostrum a little after nine. Word had passed around the chamber. He could see chihuahuas chatter in the press seats and look toward him more than usual; he even caught one pointing to Rula and Rita. He caught a glimpse of a monitor, and saw that television trucks had turned stadium lights on Taber John Palmer's home on west Sixteenth Street (which was indeed in the 2nd Ward). An excited voice announced that the professor had flashed a quick wave from a second-story window, then drew his curtains. Another agreed that his books were judged to be extremely distinguished by those who had read them.
“The council will please come to order,” Sunny announced. “Welcome to the late show.”
The laughter was much larger than such a meager line deserved; even reporters laughed. Sunny knew that he was being flattered.
He looked down into the second row, to the first desk in that cluster of five seats, and nodded at Donald Stubbs. “The chair will ask the alderman of the Twenty-seventh Ward to preside.” Sunny came down to the floor from the right side of the rostrum, landing just as Don reached the four-step stairs. Don took Sunny's right hand into his own and then threw his left arm around Sunny's shoulders.
“My man,” said Don Stubbs.
Sunny had to tilt his chin to look into Don's face; it made his neck twinge as if he were trying to see the top of a tall building from the street.
“I'd like to go out in my seat,” he told Don.
Sunny walked past Collie Kerrigan of the 14th, w
ho reached out for his hand, and Luis Zamora of the 31st, who patted the small of his back. He turned left past Jacobo Sefran and Anders Berggren, finally pulling out the back of the blue leather chair and sitting down beside Anders and Cassie Katsoulis.
“Missed you,” said Anders. Jaco blew him a kiss from two seats away and laughed. Cassie leaned over and smacked her lips loudly against his cheek. “Love you madly,” she said. Wandy Astrid, and Gerry White turned around in their seats from their desks and extended their hands to Sunny. Astrid let her hand linger on Sunny's for a moment and squeezed. They heard Lew Karp call out, “Wojcik, Forty-five!”and Adam, just three seats down, call back, “Art Agras.” Sunny's note on the single sheet of paper rested under Lewie's elbow. He had had to clutch his right wrist to steady and strengthen his hand as he wrote his name. Should the note wind up in a plastic sleeve in a library some day, he wanted whoever tried to decipher it to be able to make out at least his name.
Sunny was so absorbed that he didn't hear Lew call Jane Siegel's name. But Jane's snap-crackling whip of a voice brushed his ears when she called back, “Barrow!” Sunny ran his hands over the stubby leather arms of his blue chair. He had known aldermen who had bought their chairs when they left the council (in fact old Stefano Tripoli of the 11th, who objected on principle to paying for what a man could have for free, had been caught trying to roll his chair into the trunk of a cab on Clark Street). You'd see their old aldermanic chairs appear thereafter in a basement or alcove, tagged with a brass plaque, like a hunting trophy for the desk-bound. Sunny didn't think he'd do that. His chair would only be in the way among the tubs of onions, cloves, moong dal, cumin, and cardamom seeds.
“Katsoulis, Forty-seven!”
“Agras,” she said, and patted Sunny's arm. Lew Karp seemed to pause, then rang out, “Rrrooo-peee-kneee, Forty-eight!”
There were ripples of laughter; no objections. Sunny decided to stay in his seat, but swiveled slightly to his right to be able to catch the look of his daughters. Rula and Rita beamed back, eyes brimming. He turned his seat back toward the rostrum and announced, “Very proudly, for Vera Barrow.” Several handclaps burst out in the gallery. Don Stubbs let them be.