by Ray Celestin
As they walked toward the address, around the puddles and ruts that blotched the street, Ida could see why Coulton had picked it; the whole area felt abandoned, suffused with vacancy, and the desolation must only have increased after dark. She imagined what it must have been like for Gwen to go there on the night she disappeared.
When they reached the address, they saw it was on a run-down, low-rent kind of street, nothing much more than a mud track, that dwindled out into a hinterland of warehouses and machine-shops. Despite the night’s rain, the air was heavy with the smell of the slaughter yards just beyond.
They reached the building and checked the front doors: locked. Ida bent down and peered through the keyhole – an empty hallway, dusty and neglected. They checked the labels by the buzzer but all the names had faded. They buzzed the apartments but no one answered. Then Michael looked up and down the deserted street and shrugged.
‘No one around,’ he said. ‘Ida?’
She kneeled in front of the keyhole, took the picks from her pocket and got to work on the door. After a few minutes the lock clicked open and Michael and Ida stepped inside. They had agreed that the two of them would go in and search, while Jacob kept watch. They checked the mailboxes in the lobby: all of them empty and caked in a layer of dust weeks in the making.
Then they took the stairs to a lightless corridor, came to the apartment and Ida got to work with the picks once more. When she got through the door they saw the rooms inside were large and sparsely furnished, with the eerie emptiness of a theater set. They went through every room, checking no one was home and the place was free of traps, and while Michael made a last sweep in one of the bedrooms, Ida stood guard at the living-room windows.
She saw Jacob in the street below, smoking a cigarette in the drizzle that had started up. On the opposite side of the street stood a row of factories, and beyond them the Stockyards. Ida had never looked down on them from a height before, and from this new angle she could really take in their immensity: the endless abattoirs, the canals and railroads, the sidings where the animals were unloaded; and closest of all, on the very edge of the Yards, the pens where the animals were held before being taken off to the killing floors.
Each pen was constructed of wooden fences arranged into a perfect square, and made up part of a grid that covered hundreds of acres of ground. The geometry of it all was so structured and planned that Ida was reminded of city blocks.
Michael returned to the living room and nodded at her and they got to work turning the place over. They did it systematically, sifting through rooms and corridors, wardrobes and closets. They ran their hands along the tops of lamps, the undersides of sinks, the backs of sofas, the box-springs of beds, the seams of the suits hanging in wardrobes. Like blind men they groped every surface, sculpted every void.
Ida had expected to find something useful in the apartment, something to help her figure out Coulton’s whereabouts, or Severyn’s, or some clue as to what they’d done with Gwendolyn, or discover details of their plan to set the city on fire.
Instead, nothing.
They finished and looked at each other in exasperation.
‘It’s a bust,’ she said.
Michael nodded, looking equally frustrated by this latest dead end.
They returned to the front door and Ida went into the bathroom quickly to wash the grime from her hands. As she was about to turn on the faucet, she noticed something in the sink, a thin line of residue creeping toward the plughole. She called Michael and he came in to look at it, too – a sticky tar of dried black particles.
‘Mud?’ he said, frowning, and Ida thought of the morning’s rain. Had someone been in there just now? Had they, by a fraction, missed someone come in off the streets, washing the mud from his hands or boots? Michael peered at her, and they made their way back to the front door, pressed an ear against it, waited.
Silence, except for the rain outside.
They left the apartment to see the drizzle had turned into a rain shower which had sent Jacob off to the awning of a building on the opposite side of the street.
‘What did you find?’ he asked when they’d joined him.
But before they could answer, a man sauntered round the corner, an Hispanic in his early twenties, and Ida thought of the tramp’s description of the two men that had dumped the girl off the bridge. The man looked up and saw the three of them huddling under the awning, and a surprised look crossed his face, and he slowed to a stop, turned and ran.
‘You two follow him,’ said Michael. ‘I’ll get the car.’
Ida and Jacob sprinted after the boy. As they ran, she heard a car behind her, too quick to be Michael. Her pulse skittered and she turned to see a coupe screeching toward them, its wheels splaying mud. She caught a glimpse of the men inside raising tommy guns to the windows and realized they’d been caught in an ambush.
Just as the sound of gunfire split the air behind them, they ducked down an alleyway on the Stockyards side of the street. But they’d turned into a dead end, a chain-link fence stretching across the alley’s other end. Beyond the fence, Ida could see the grid of wooden animal pens.
‘Come on,’ said Jacob. And they ran down the alley and climbed the fence, which was slick with the rain, praying they could get over it in time. Ida heard the coupe screech to a halt behind them and turned to see three men enter the alley. She and Jacob clambered over the top of the fence and dropped into the animal pens on the other side. They landed in a mire of mud and manure, and Jacob winced as pain coursed through his bad leg. Then the guns roared, setting the animals off squealing and jostling.
She nodded to Jacob, and they burst into a run, keeping low, hopping out of the pen and running along the mud track beside it. Behind them, the men were still spraying the space with bullets and as Ida and Jacob ran through the haze of machine-gun fire and rain mist, she caught glimpses of blood, of trapped animals ripped apart, sending a horrific squealing into the air.
They reached the last of the pens, dropped down behind it and took a moment to get their breath back. Ahead of them was an empty space, the muddy no man’s land between the pens and the dozens of railroad tracks and telegraph wires running all the way to the slaughterhouses beyond. On the other side of the tracks were some sidings, packed with boxcars and cargo containers, then further on the station, where there were people, and public spaces, and safety.
Behind them the shooting stopped and they turned to see that the three men had shouldered their guns and were climbing the chain-link fence. One of them was tall and thin, with black hair slicked back, but from that distance, Ida couldn’t tell if he had scars on his neck or not.
‘How’s your leg?’ she asked Jacob.
‘Hurting like hell, but I can run on it if I have to.’
‘Except we don’t have time to run,’ she said.
‘I know.’
Either they stayed where they were and engaged the men in a gunfight, which they were sure to lose, or they ran across the open space and got mowed down.
Then one of the cows inside the pen they were leaning against kicked a post and it rocked violently, causing Jacob to frown.
‘Shoot your gun a couple of times at the men,’ he said.
‘I can’t waste bullets.’
‘Trust me.’
She frowned, got her Colt out, got it steady in her hands, then jumped up, spun about, sighted the three men through the rain, and let off two shots. The men saw her and the place erupted with the roar of gunfire once more and at the sound of it the cattle became even more overwrought.
Ida ducked back down behind the fence and Jacob ran along the edge of the pens, opening up their latches as he went. Cattle burst from them in all directions. He’d started a stampede. A rampage. Cover.
He ran back, grabbed her hand and they sprinted out into the wasteland, running for the railroad tracks on its far side. And then they were hopping over the tracks, heading toward the siding. They reached the first of the boxcars, and got onto
its far side.
Safety. For now.
They got their breath back and looked at each other, then peered through the space in the boxcar back to the carnage on the other side of the tracks. The cattle must have smashed into other pens and freed more animals because now there were dozens of cows and pigs running about the space, and there were dozens of others lying prostrate on the ground. And through the shifting bodies they could see the men approaching, the fire spitting from their guns, all the more orange for the heavy blue rain. Soon they would be in range, and the bullets would be pinging against the iron of the boxcars.
Then the shooting stopped, and there was just the distant bleat and whine of the animals, the sharp violin of the wind across the telegraph wires, the raindrops hitting the mud.
They heard the sound of someone running, scurrying along the far side of the boxcars. Then they made their way down the track, peering into each boxcar they passed, each one delineating a perfect cube of emptiness. Until the fourth one, where they found the source of the noise, a cadre of hobos, homeless men who had made the rolling tenements of the trains their home, disturbed by the chaos as they waited for the boxcars to be linked to locomotives and whisked across the continent. The men looked up at them through the gloom, cowering in the darkness.
Then the world behind them exploded in a salvo of bullets and the air was filled with the rapid anger of the guns pinging off the boxcar walls. They crouched and ran, rolled under one of the boxcars, stayed there in the darkness as shots bloomed in the mud around them, clanking off the rails.
Eventually the gunshots stopped, and Ida heard footsteps, and she turned to look at Jacob. But Jacob wasn’t there. She was alone under the boxcar. Her heart pounded, pulsing with dread. She had felt his hand in hers as they ran. Now he was alone without a gun, and someone was approaching.
Then she realized she had made tracks in the mud. Tracks anyone with a brain could follow. She got onto her elbows and crawled along the underneath of the car. And then she saw a pair of muddy boots approach, stop, kneel down to inspect the tracks. She looked at the puddles of water in the mud. On the surfaces of the puddles were reflected the last of the clouds in the sky, and the face of the man just a few feet away from her. A long face, thin and drawn, and underneath it, scars all across the man’s neck.
Severyn.
All he had to do was look under the boxcar and he’d find her. Then, bizarrely, Severyn looked up and smiled, a smile as hard as white marble. He stood and turned in the other direction, and Ida couldn’t see what was going on.
‘Out,’ he said, issuing a command in that whisper she’d heard so much about, gravelly and cut up, as if filtered through broken glass. Then there were footsteps and a single burst of gunfire and someone collapsed into the mud in front of her, just inches from her face, and she realized with a sickening sensation it was Jacob.
Reality unspooled and Ida’s heart whirred and she wanted to scream. Jacob turned to look at her, and he smiled, but she could see he was already delirious, blood pouring from a hole in his chest. He coughed up blood and shuddered and then a second round of gunfire burst through the air right next to her and she closed her eyes. And when she opened them she knew Jacob would never move again.
Her world cleaved away and pins of fear avalanched down her spine, and then an unholy anger took hold of her. She scurried out from the other side of the car, walked back around to its corner, raised her gun, took a breath, and wheeled about, ready to shoot Severyn dead.
But he wasn’t there; the space was empty save for Jacob’s body. Her heart sank and she had to force herself not to look down at him. But she couldn’t help herself, and the rage sparked her spirits once more. She looked around and saw a dozen or so boxcars being shunted along toward the station, moaning and creaking, moving as slowly as a herd of elephants. She walked along them, her hands tense as they held her Colt, arms straight, muscles straining, like she was stretching to keep the gun as far away from her heart as she could.
As each boxcar passed, a half a second gap appeared between its end and the start of the next car, a gap through which she could see what was on the other side of the tracks. After the fifth car passed, she caught a glimpse of one of the men through the shuttering gap. His back was to her, but she knew it wasn’t Severyn.
She had a couple of seconds till the next gap appeared. She eased back the hammer. The gap appeared. The man was facing her now. She shot him on instinct – twice in the forehead. The gap closed. A boxcar went past. The gap reappeared. Empty sky. Then another boxcar. Then the herd of rusting mammoths was gone, moving off toward the station, and there was the dead man lying on the other side of the rails.
She stepped over to him and pulled the tommy gun from his grip. It felt heavy in her hand after her own much smaller .45. She checked that the gun was working, had rounds in it, was ready to fire. She holstered her Colt, and for a moment inspected the man she had killed.
Then she walked over to the cargo stacks, put her back against one of them and looked about for any signs of movement. She heard the sound of sirens in the distance, the animals close by, the rain. And then footsteps.
She followed the sound with her gaze, and saw Severyn, halfway across the no man’s land, heading back toward the pens. She grimaced and squeezed the trigger and the tommy burst into life, and the force of it smacked her back against the crates, the bullets spraying crazily. She eased her finger off the trigger and was about to run after him when she heard a voice.
‘Put the gun down.’
Ida turned to see him, the third man, in amongst the maze of cargo stacks behind her. He’d found her by the sound of the gun going off, by her stupidly giving away her location. He was a tall man, with a close-cropped brown beard, wearing a suit and bow tie and heavy boots.
‘Put the gun down,’ he repeated flatly.
Her spirits sank and she tossed the tommy to the ground, leaving it to the suction of the mud. He grinned at her, revealing yellow teeth, one of them snapped in half, a rough edge where it had cracked away, the grooves clotted with nicotine tar. He raised his tommy to his shoulder and closed one eye and a delta of wrinkles rose up on the side of his face. Ida’s heart thumped out of her chest and in the distance she heard the low of a cow.
Then two red flowers bloomed on the man’s forehead, and there was the crack of gunshots, and with a surprised expression, the man fell backwards, squeezed the trigger, and a spray of bullets arced through the air, and clanged against the cargo stack to Ida’s side. Then the bullets ran out, and as the rain landed on the gun’s burning-hot nozzle, the raindrops turned instantly to vapor, and wisps of steam sashayed into the air.
Ida turned to see Michael standing behind her, frozen, battered by the rain, his arms still raised, his Colt still pointed at the man he’d shot. Michael looked at her, then she looked at the dead man, lying in a puddle, blood streaming from his forehead into his open mouth, over those yellow teeth. Then she was crying into Michael’s chest, and he drew her in and hugged her, and they stayed like that till the police arrived. And when she eventually opened her eyes, her view was of the space over Michael’s shoulder, the space where Severyn had disappeared, the muddy field where animal corpses lay, steam rising from their spilled insides, the emptied pens, the great city beyond them, the buildings pale in the haze of rain.
She tried her hardest to stare at the view, and not the image in her head of Jacob lying dead in the mud. But she couldn’t do it, and her sense of loss increased, and she sobbed all the more.
PART SEVEN
IMPROVISATION
‘For the first time, instruction on the Thompson Sub-Machine Gun was given to a number of Detective Division Squads. This instruction embraced the nomenclature of the weapon; dismounting and assembling; carrying and handling the weapon, as well as firing same.’
CITY OF CHICAGO POLICE DEPARTMENT
ANNUAL REPORT, 1928
48
Michael sat in the holding room in the 18th Dist
rict station, picked up the phone and dialed.
‘Hello, Provident Hospital.’
‘Hello, ma’am, I’d like to speak to Annette Talbot, please. She’s a nurse on the burns ward.’
‘Who’s calling, please?’
‘It’s her husband.’
‘One moment, I’ll put you through to the ward phone.’
As Michael waited, the silence was disturbed only by the ticking of the clock on the wall. He turned to look at it: five seventeen p.m. Only a few hours since the shoot-out, but it felt like a lifetime.
‘Hello. Burns ward.’
‘Hello, ma’am. My name’s Michael Talbot. I’d like to speak to my wife Annette, please. She’s a nurse on the ward.’
‘I’m sorry, sir, this line’s not for personal staff calls.’
‘I understand that, ma’am, but there’s been a family emergency. I need to speak to her urgently.’
There was silence on the other end of the line as the woman decided.
‘One moment, please,’ she said eventually. ‘She’s out on the ward. I’ll need to go fetch her.’
He heard the phone at the other end being put down and footsteps against a floor, receding into the distance, and then a few seconds later more footsteps, getting louder.
‘Michael,’ said Annette, her voice rustling down the line. ‘What’s happened?’
‘Nothing. Everything’s okay . . . I’m really sorry, but . . . you’re going to have to leave.’
‘Leave town?’
‘Yeah.’
There was silence. She knew what it meant. They’d already had to do it once before, three years earlier. Ever since then they’d been prepared: there were money stashes in the house, and in the bank; there were bags of clothes at one of Annette’s friends; there was another friend in Detroit who ran a guest-house; there were excuses already prepared for their absence. Annette had the sense not to ask Michael what the danger was, but he knew when they saw each other next they would have the argument, and he already felt terrible about it.