Big Silence

by Stuart M. Kaminsky

  “He’s not reasonable when it comes to Iris,” Hanrahan said. “He’d have me killed on the street tomorrow if I weren’t a cop and he thought it would win him Iris. He’s old enough to be her father.”

  “If he started young,” said Lieberman.

  At that moment the coffee was brought in by one of Woo’s two young men. He wore a perfectly pressed dark suit and conservative tie. He placed the tray between the two policemen on a solid, dark small table. There were little cookies on a plate on the tray.

  “Thanks,” said Lieberman.

  The young man stared. The man was considerably younger than his employer and far less able to hide his feelings, not that he wanted to. He definitely did not like the gray-haired policeman. The young man left without a word. The two detectives drank strong coffee and ate cookies.

  “He loves her, Abe. I think that old man really damn loves her. Can you imagine the two of them together? I’d —”

  “And I used to be in love with Cyd Charisse.”

  “But you got over it, Rabbi.”

  “Who says? Let’s go home, Father Murph. I’ve got a daughter to say good-bye to and a science project I promised to work on with Melisa.”

  “You came here to help me and you wind up almost agreeing with Woo.”

  “I like him,” said Lieberman. “I also know he can have bad things done. Now, after he has six or seven men cut you into forty or fifty pieces, I promise I’ll come here and shoot him right in the face, but that won’t do you and Iris any good. Besides, Murph, I think he’s right.”

  “Maybe, Rabbi,” Hanrahan said with a deep sigh. “I’ll think about it.”

  “If you don’t, you just prove to him that he was right about your being reckless, suicidal, and unwilling to learn the game of gin rummy. Back away from it, partner. I got a feeling the Unitarian Universalist minister may well have an opening after you live up to your agreement.”

  “Damn it, Abe.” Hanrahan clenched his fist.

  “Damn it, indeed,” said Lieberman. “One more cookie. Let’s go. Our soup is getting cold.”

  They left their empty cups and went back through the door leading to the shop. It seemed to be empty. They were out on the street when Woo stepped back into the shop with both of the young men who protected him.

  “I like the Jewish policeman,” said Woo.

  Both of the young men wanted to ask what they should do about the two detectives, about Iris, about her father, but they had learned long ago to initiate nothing unless it was absolutely necessary. This was not such a case. They would do what they were told.

  CHAPTER 12

  THAT NIGHT TWO POLICE officers in uniform in an official vehicle drove to O’Hare Airport, met a man with a bulging blue carry-on. The man was named Carlo. He was short, bald, fat in a tight-fitting suit. Carlo handed the carry-on to one of the officers and, without a word, wheezed toward the crowded moving walkway to retrieve his luggage. The two policemen, one very young, the other no more than forty, took the bag to their illegally parked car, placed it in the backseat, and drove to a far-north suburb to personally deliver the bag containing over a million dollars skimmed from Vegas gambling houses. The two policemen had no idea what, if anything, their reward for the delivery would be. They both hoped and assumed it would be generous. The younger man had a very pregnant wife and very heavy debts.

  That night a drunken man named Suede Nichols put on his gloves and got in the car parked in front of the bar on Ashland Avenue. Suede tried to drive carefully and thought he was succeeding. He definitely did not want to be stopped. Suede Nichols did not own the car. He was a burglar who had stolen the neat little Mazda for the night. His tools and the goods he had collected from the house in Winnetka were in the backseat. Suede did not have a driver’s license. In addition to two short sentences for breaking and entering, he had three times been nailed on DUI charges.

  Traffic wasn’t heavy that late at night, especially not on Ashland. Suede sang, a wordless song with no melody that simply came to him. He would drive home with his goods, hide them, and dump the car about four or five blocks away. The take had been good, very good. Suede would make a nice profit from Wasko the fence. They had a good relationship. Wasko would cheat him only a little bit. Suede told himself as he sang “Bum biddle bee, now, now” that he would send some of the money to his daughter in Bakersfield. He would give her a call and say she was getting a present. He imagined her asking him to come for a visit, see his grandchildren, but he knew she wouldn’t. Oh hell, Suede liked living alone, at night, when honest people were sleeping.

  When he made the left turn on Leland, he saw the woman crossing the street at the corner. She seemed to be crying. She was crossing slowly. Suede’s plan was to let her get across and go behind her. He stepped on the brake to slow down, but hit the gas instead. When the car struck the woman, she went flying straight up about five feet in the air and landed on his hood as he tried to find the brake. She looked directly at him, blood oozing from her nose and mouth, a look of surprise on her face. She was young, younger than his daughter. Suede hit the gas again, this time on purpose, and the young woman, who looked dark and foreign, slid from the hood into the street. Suede’s car bounced off a pickup truck and then he straightened it out. He didn’t want to look in the rearview mirror, but he couldn’t stop himself. She was lying in the street not moving. She kept getting smaller and smaller.

  He pulled himself together, drove home, got the tools and goods from the backseat, and took them into the apartment. He went out quickly and drove four blocks to Leavitt, where he parked next to the Ravenswood El tracks. When he got out, he tore off his gloves, threw them into some bushes, and pushed the door closed. His left handprint on the window was clear enough for any moderately intelligent person to notice. Suede had no little finger on his left hand, never mind the fingerprints.

  On that night, a nineteen-year-old black drug dealer named Butchie Courts stood on his usual corner with a couple of friends waiting for customers. It was getting cold. Butchie and his friends weren’t worried about the police. There were dealers all around, and it wasn’t worth picking them up for the little they had in their pockets. The dealers with brains had a spot where they stashed and went to, from time to time. People came and went, bought and pleaded. One of Butchie’s friends, who was fourteen but big for his age, kept his hand on the nine millimeter in his pocket. It was a heavy two pounds and the love of his short life. The three of them talked shit, mostly about people they were going to get even with and girls they were going to get or had already gotten. Tisa Lings, hands in pockets, crossed the street and headed for Butchie Courts. The three saw her coming and Butchie grinned. Tisa was young. Tisa was light-skinned and pretty and she had a body. You could tell that even with the jacket she was wearing. She didn’t need money to collect a bag, a good bag.

  “Tisa,” Butchie said. “I’ll tell you what I can do for you and you tell me what you can do for — ”

  Butchie never finished. The kitchen knife had come out from behind Tisa’s back and she plunged it deeply into Butchie’s neck. The fourteen-year-old with the gun and his friend turned and ran down the street. Butchie staggered to the brick wall of the housing project in front of which he had been dealing for four years. Tisa watched him try to get the knife out of his neck, but his hands wouldn’t listen to his need. His lips moved forming a word “Why?”

  “I’m going to college” was Tisa’s answer.

  She turned and walked away. Butchie finally got his hands on the knife, thus covering Tisa’s fingerprints. Then he slid down the wall and died, a very puzzled look on his face.

  On that night, two homeless men in their fifties but looking at least eighty had an argument where they lived over a warm-air exhaust behind a Thai restaurant on Clark Street. Both men, strange as it seemed, even to them, were named Tom Evans. One was black. One white. Other homeless people they knew and the people at the Salvation Army had taken to calling both of them Long Tom. Now the two o
f them were arguing loudly over who deserved the nickname.

  “I’m taller,” said white Tom.

  “I’m thinner,” said black Tom.

  They were in each other’s face now. They kept repeating “I’m taller.” “I’m thinner.” Their noses almost touched. Since they both had the same terrible breath, they didn’t notice the smell. White Tom had spent much of his life in state mental hospitals. Black Tom had owned a successful used car lot on the South Side. A black gang, which he felt should support black businesses, had started extorting money from him. Soon there were no profits. Soon there was no business. Black Tom had gone into a terrible depression and wandered, winding up in this alley.

  White Tom threw the first punch. It caught Black Tom on the forehead, breaking two knuckles on White Tom’s right hand. It also gave Black Tom a terrible headache. He threw his punch and caught White Tom in the stomach when he wasn’t ready. White Tom bent over. Even in the dim light Black Tom could see that his friend and enemy was spitting blood. He could hear him moan.

  “Oh, shit,” said Black Tom. “Sit down. I’ll get some help. Don’t die. You’re Long Tom. You got respect. Don’t die.”

  When Black Tom ran down the alley, White Tom repeated, “I’m Long Tom, dammit,” and smiled.

  His stomach cancer was far advanced, and the punch had done him no good. He sat down still smiling.

  That night the dog with no name stood in the shadows and watched the two men who smelled of human excrement shout and fight. When one of the men fell down, the dog smelled the blood. It was not the good blood smell but the smell of something bad.

  The dog watched the other man run down the alley, and then the dog ran past the fallen man whose eyes were closed. He ran silently. Something inside told him to go to the place where the man had talked to him like a person and had given him food.

  That man was a puzzle, something curious. Maybe he would talk again, give him food. But those weren’t the only reasons the dog was running silently through alleys for miles.

  The man had smelled of, sounded of, something the dog had never known, something that made him feel calm, even safe. The dog wanted to feel that again.

  On that night Dr. Mustapha Aziz sat in the one-bedroom condo he had bought a month after his wife and daughter had been killed. The house and all its possessions had been sold at a significant loss.

  The condo was in an old building in Evanston right past the turn on Sheridan Road beyond the cemetery. It was rumored that Marlon Brando and Wally Cox had once shared the large third-floor apartment two buildings down. That apartment, like Dr. Aziz’s, faced Lake Michigan. Even in the darkness, with his lights out Aziz could see occasional whitecaps along the waves that hit the rocks. He could also hear the lazy powerful whoosh of the waves as they rolled and crashed.

  There were nights when he would sit till two or three in the morning listening, watching. There were nights when he would fall asleep in his chair. The chair was deep and comfortable. Most of the furniture had been picked up by a cousin in the Oriental rug business who had connections with furniture dealers in the Arab Moslem community.

  Aziz’s pleasures were few. He had given away his collection of classical CDs and records. His family had died coming home from a concert. Any classical music was a reminder. Now he watched old movies on television, read articles and books on psychiatric treatment, had an occasional evening and meal with relatives and friends, and listened to the lake.

  Since the accident, Aziz had begun to get more and more referrals of patients suffering from extreme grief. The assumption was that these patients would be more willing to talk to someone who had also suffered and that he would be more capable of dealing with their problems because of what they had suffered.

  In a sense, they had been right. Aziz had more referrals than he could handle. The rich, the old, the young, the nearly poor came to him with a pain he recognized even when it was masked with anger or defiance. Many of them dared him to help. Others came in the hope of getting something that he knew he might not be able to deliver.

  As his specialty as a grief therapist grew, Aziz feared it would lead him into an even deeper depression, but he gradually realized that the opposite had happened. He wanted to help. He had returned to his religion in a cautious manner and begun to have some life, had even thought, with the urging of his family, that he might some day consider marrying again. He was a young man.

  With his return to religion had come an interest in his culture and the food of his culture. He had begun to collect art work — vases, paintings, furniture — made by Israeli Moslem artists. Gradually, he knew, these acquisitions would replace all the furnishings with which his cousin had decorated his apartment. The culture in which he had grown and to which he had paid scant attention in his hope of escaping from it now interested him as few things did.

  Although he was not a happy man, Dr. Mustapha Aziz had taught himself how to be a man reasonably at peace with himself. It was the goal he set for his patients.

  A particularly large wave crashed against the shore below him.

  Aziz smiled and closed his eyes.

  The heavy, homely sad face of Lieberman’s brother came to him as he quickly moved into sleep. There, Mustapha Aziz was sure, was someone whom he might be able to help.

  On that night, 106 babies were born in Chicago hospitals and who knows how many in bedrooms, washrooms, and alleys. Five adults and teens died as a result of homicide. Births still outnumbered the deaths. Television and fear made a bad problem seem worse. Less than 1 percent of the deaths in Chicago each year were results of homicides. It wasn’t even close statistically to other causes, and that night was no different.

  Agnes Sheffer was a fifty-two-year-old African American nurse at Michael Reese Hospital. That night she helped deliver a baby, and the mother, who was rich and white, said she wanted to name the baby Agnes. Agnes had saved her tears till she was alone in the women’s room. Agnes had been through this before.

  In the morning, free from drugs and after a talk with her husband, the woman whose baby she had helped to deliver would apologize to Agnes and say that she had been carried away by the nurse’s kindness and the baby had to be named after a grandmother or someone. Agnes understood. Over the years, though, there had been three girls named Agnes born and named. Now Agnes cleaned up, checked the clock, got into her street clothes, and went to the OB desk to be sure her replacement had come. She had. It was a little after five and still dark when Agnes left the hospital and crossed the parking lot. She could have asked for an escort. She should have asked for an escort. But she didn’t and nothing happened to her. She would work for a dozen more years and then retire to Mobile where she had family.

  That night Lieberman walked through the door of his house prepared to eat quickly and work with his granddaughter on her science project. The child had chosen causes of death in the United States, a subject about which Bess had worried and which Lieberman found not in the least bit morbid.

  “People die,” said Lieberman.

  “God knows,” Bess had said.

  “And so do I,” Lieberman had said as they sat in the kitchen one night almost two weeks earlier having tea and some hard, toasted bagels. “We’ll take her to the library, get some poster board. She’s got crayons. The other kids in her class will love it. They must be sick of seeing sprouting potatoes and two plastic bottles taped together with water inside them. Morbidity is not morbid. It’s life.”

  “She’s eight,” said Bess.

  “If she wants this to be the time she knows, let it be,” said Lieberman.

  Now, Lieberman walked through the door prepared to say good-bye to his daughter if she were still there, have a quick dinner, and work with Melisa, but it was not to be.

  The dining room table was alive with people, and the smell of kosher food was beautifully overwhelming.

  “You’re late, Abe, but we waited,” Bess said, sitting at the far end of the table.

  He had for
gotten. It was Friday, Shabbat.

  There were the kids, Maish and Yetta, Lisa and her husband, Marvin.

  “Maish brought the food,” Yetta said.

  Maish always brought food when he came to the Sabbath dinner. It was always prepared with special care by Terrell.

  The men and Barry were all wearing kepuhs. There was one at Lieberman’s plate. Lieberman recognized it. It was one of the purple satin ones given out at some wedding at the temple last year. For the moment, Lieberman couldn’t remember who it was who got married. He would check inside the little cap where the names and date were written.

  “I’ll wash my hands,” he said, and Bess knew that meant he would put his gun in the drawer and take off his holster. “Maish, did you? …”

  “I did,” Maish said looking normally glum.

  “Later we’ll talk,” Lieberman said, heading for his and Bess’s bedroom.

  In three minutes, he was back at his place across from his wife. He put on the purple kepuh and Bess started immediately with the blessing over the candles. The women covered their eyes, held out their hands, and prayed. The loudest was Melisa. Then came the blessing over the wine. Lieberman didn’t bother to ask his brother if he wanted to say the blessing. In the past, before David died, Maish had always shrugged and said, “Why not?” and said the blessing. He hadn’t said the blessing since. So Lieberman said it, holding up the kiddish cup, pouring the wine, a bottle of the good kosher California red, not the sweet, sweet kosher of his childhood. The cup was passed, everyone drank. Maish hesitated and drank and the cup came back to Lieberman empty.

  Melisa said the hammotzeh, the blessing over the challah, and proceeded with great gusto to tear the bread into pieces, sprinkling a little salt on each piece and passing the pieces around.

  Only then did Abe pass the wine bottle while Yetta and Bess brought in the food from the kitchen. Matzoh ball soup, chicken in the pot, noodle kugel.