She had ridden her bike the three miles to Seventy-first and Stony, where she’d chained it to a streetlight. A number 71 bus was just coming along, and she climbed thankfully on board. Her torn shirt was soaked with sweat; her throat was hoarse and dry. She had eighty-two cents in her pockets. If she used thirty cents on the round-trip fare, she’d have plenty to buy a Coke when she found a vending machine.
Seventy-first Street was blocked off half a mile from Marquette Park. Cops in riot gear were diverting all traffic, even CTA buses, in a wide loop around the park. Traffic was jammed on Western Avenue in both directions. The cops told the bus driver that no one was allowed off the bus until it got to the far side of the park, but while they were stuck in the intersection, Victoria forced open the back door and jumped out.
When the cops at Western Avenue yelled at her, she was afraid one of them was a friend of her dad’s who’d recognized her. She didn’t realize that every face was a blur to these hot, edgy men, but she couldn’t help turning around, to see if they were calling her by name. When she did, she saw something shocking.
Uncle Tomas’s white convertible pulled into the intersection. Uncle Tomas was at the wheel; another man, a stranger to Victoria, sat next to him. He was blond, like Tomas, and riding in the open car had boiled both their faces bright red, as red as the wild shirt the stranger was wearing. At first the officer tried to stop the car, but Uncle Tomas pulled out his wallet. The cop looked around, as if checking to see who was watching. He took a bill out of Tomas’s wallet, then moved two sawhorses so the Wildcat could drive through.
The uniformed man was taking a bribe. This was terrible! Tony Warshawski talked about this over and over again, the people who tried to give him money to get out of traffic tickets, and how wrong it was—it gave everyone on the force a bad name.
Victoria took a picture of the cop moving the sawhorses and then of Uncle Tomas and the stranger. Tomas must have gotten someone to help him find her father. The two men would gang up on Tony and kill him, and then some evil cop would take a bribe to pretend not to see that it had happened.
Victoria started running. She couldn’t beat the convertible to the park, but she had to get there as fast as she could, to find her father before Tomas and his partner did. When she got to the park, she saw this was going to be nearly impossible. The crowds were so thick that a child, even a girl like Victoria who was tall for her age, couldn’t see around them. She had to fight her way through them.
People were holding up signs with horrible words on them. One said KING WOULD LOOK GOOD WITH A KNIFE IN HIS BACK, but the others! They said things that you were never supposed to say about anyone.
Victoria used her elbows the way Boom-Boom had taught her at hockey practice and pushed her way through a massive wedge of people. They were yelling and screaming and waving Confederate flags. Some of them had sewn swastikas to their clothes, or painted them on their faces. This was also very bad: Gabriella had to leave her mother and father forever and come to America because of people in Italy who wore swastikas. Even as she looked for her father, Victoria realized she couldn’t tell her mother the things she was seeing—swastikas, people calling Martin Luther King by a name worse than a swear word. She hoped Tony wouldn’t say anything, either. It would upset Gabriella terribly, and she and Tony had a duty to protect Gabriella from any further unhappiness in this life.
As she moved farther west into the park, she saw a group of teenagers turn a car over and set fire to it. The people near them cheered. Six policemen in riot helmets ran to the teenagers, who spat at them and started throwing rocks and bottles.
Victoria pushed through the cheering mob to where the policemen were using their billy clubs, trying to arrest the boys who’d set the fire.
She tugged on one officer’s arm. ‘‘Please, I’m lookingfor Officer Warshawski, do you know him, have you seen him?’’
‘‘Get back, get out of the way. This is no place for a kid like you. Go home to your mommy and daddy.’’ The man pushed her out of the way.
‘‘Tony Warshawski,’’ she cried. ‘‘He’s my dad, he’s working here, he’s a cop, I need to find him.’’
This time the men ignored her completely. They couldn’t pay attention to her—the crowd was protecting the boys, throwing rocks and cans of Coke at the officers. One can hit an officer in the head; the crowd roared with laughter when the soda spilled into his eyes, blinding him.
‘‘The niggers are on Homan,’’ someone shrieked. The whole mob swerved west, chanting, ‘‘Find the niggers, kill the niggers!’’
Victoria followed them, her legs aching, a stitch in her side making her gasp for breath. She couldn’t pay attention to her pain, it would only get in her way. She had to find Tony. She elbowed her way past the screaming adults. One of them put out a hand and grabbed her, so hard she couldn’t wriggle free.
‘‘And where are you going?’’
It was Father Gielczowski. With him were half a dozen people she recognized from her own neighborhood, two of them women carrying bags of sugar.
‘‘I’m looking for my dad. Have you seen him?’’
‘‘Have you seen him, Father. Doesn’t your Jew mother teach you to respect your elders?’’
‘‘You’re not my father!’’ Victoria kicked him hard on the shin; he let go of her shoulder, swearing at her in Polish.
Victoria slithered away. The crowd was so thick that the priest couldn’t move fast enough to catch up with her.
‘‘Daddy, where are you, where are you?’’ She realized tears were running down her cheeks. Babies cry; you aren’t a baby.
She passed a drinking fountain and stopped to drink and to run her head under the stream of water. Other people came up and pushed her out of the way, but she was cooler now and could move faster.
For over an hour she pushed her way through the mob. It was like swimming in giant waves in Lake Michigan: you worked hard, but you couldn’t move very far. Every time she came to a cop, she tried to ask about Tony Warshawski. Sometimes the man would take time to shake his head—no, he didn’t know Tony. Once, someone knew Tony but hadn’t seen him. More often, the overheated officers brushed her aside.
People were throwing cans and stones and cherry bombs. One exploded near her, filling her eyes with smoke. A rumor swept through the mob: someone had knocked King down with a rock.
‘‘One down, eleven million to go,’’ a woman cackled.
‘‘King Nigger’s on his feet, they’re treating him like he’s royalty while we have to suffer in the heat,’’ a man growled.
Victoria saw the golf course on her right. It looked green, refreshing, and almost empty of people. She shoved her way through the mob and made it onto the course. She climbed the short hill around one of the holes and came on the road that threaded the greens. To her amazement, Uncle Tomas’s white convertible stood there. Tomas wasn’t in it, only the stranger who’d been with him back at Western Avenue. He was driving slowly, looking at the bushes.
Victoria was too exhausted to run; she limped up to the car and started pounding on the door. ‘‘What happened to Tomas? Where’s my dad? What have you done with him?’’
‘‘Who are you?’’ the stranger demanded. ‘‘Tomas doesn’t have any kids!’’
‘‘My dad, Officer Warshawski!’’ she screamed. ‘‘Tomas said he was going to kill Tony, where is he?’’
The stranger opened the door. The look on his face was terrifying. For some reason, the girl held up her camera, almost as a protection against his huge angry face, and took his picture. He yanked at the camera strap, almost choking Victoria; the strap broke and he flung the camera onto the grass. As she bent to pick it up, he grabbed her. She bit him and kicked at him, but she couldn’t make him let go.
III
The battle between the cops and the protestors went on for five hours after Dr. King and his fellow marchers left the park. By the end of the day, every cop felt too limp and too numb to care about the cars that
were still burning, or those that were overturned or dumped into the lagoons ringing the park. Firefighters were working on burning cars, but they were moving slowly, too.
Some patrolmen returning to their squad cars couldn’t get far: women had poured sugar into the gas tanks. After going a few hundred feet, the fuel filters clogged and the cars died. When a fireman came on the body shoved under a bush, he called over to a cop uselessly fiddling with the carburetor of his dead squad car.
The policeman walked over on heat-swollen legs and knelt, grunting in pain as his hamstrings bent for the first time in nine hours. The man under the bush was around forty, blond, sunburnt. And dead. The cop grunted again and lifted him by the shoulders. The back of the man’s head was a pulpy mess. Not dead from a heat stroke, as the officer had first assumed, but from the well-placed blow of a blunt instrument.
A small crowd of firefighters and police gathered. The cop who’d first examined the body sat heavily on his butt. His eyelids were puffy from the sun.
‘‘You guys know the drill. Keep back, don’t mess the site up any more’n it already is.’’ His voice, like all his brother officers’, was raspy from heat and strain.
‘‘Guy here says he knows something, Bobby,’’ a man at the edge of the ragtag group said.
Bobby groaned, but got to his feet when the other cop brought over a civilian in a Hawaiian print shirt. ‘‘I’m Officer Mallory. You know the dead man, sir?’’
The civilian shook his head. ‘‘Nope. Just saw one of the niggers hit him. Right after we got King, one of them said he’d do in the first whitey crossed his path, and I saw him take a Coke bottle and wham it into this guy.’’
The police looked at each other; Bobby returned to the civilian. ‘‘That would have been about when, sir?’’
‘‘Maybe five, maybe six hours ago.’’
‘‘And you waited this long to come forward?’’
‘‘Now just a minute, Officer. Number one, I didn’t know the guy was dead, and number two, I tried getting some cop’s attention and he told me to bug off and mind my own business. Only he didn’t put it that polite, if you get my drift.’’
‘‘How far away were you? Close enough to see the man with the Coke bottle clearly?’’
The civilian squinted in thought. ‘‘Maybe ten feet. Hard to say. People were passing back and forth, everyone doing their own thing, like the kids are saying these days, no one paying much attention—me neither, but I could make a stab at describing the nigger who hit him.’’
Bobby sighed. ‘‘Okay. We’re waiting for a squad car that works to come for us. We’ll drive you to the Chicago Lawn station. You can make a statement there, give us a description of the Negro you say you saw, and the time and all that good stuff. . . . Boys, you’re as beat as me, but let’s see if we can find that Coke bottle anywhere near here.’’
Turning to the man next to him, he muttered, ‘‘I hope to Jesus this guy can’t make an ID. The whole town will explode if we arrest some Negro for killing a white guy today.’’
As they picked through the litter of cups and bottles and car jacks that the rioters had dropped, looking for anything with hair or blood on it, a squad car drove up near them. The uniformed driver came over, followed by a civilian man with his son.
‘‘Mallory! We’re looking for Tony Warshawski. Seen him?’’
Bobby looked up. ‘‘We weren’t on the same detail. I think he’s over by Homan—oh—’’ He suddenly recognized the civilian: Tony’s brother Bernie.
Bobby Mallory had been Tony Warshawski’s protégé when he joined the force. Fifteen years later, he’d moved beyond Tony with promotions the older man no longer applied for, but the two remained close friends. Bobby had spent enough weekends with Tony and Gabriella that he knew Bernie and Marie as well; Bobby was an enthusiastic supporter of Boom-Boom’s ambition to supplant the Golden Jet with the Blackhawks. He wished he could also support the freedom Tony and Gabriella gave their own only child, but he hated the way they let her run around with Boom-Boom, like a little hooligan. Thank God Eileen was raising his own girls to be proper young ladies.
‘‘We’re falling down, we’re that tired, Warshawski,’’ Bobby said. ‘‘What’s up?’’
Bernie shook his son’s shoulder and Boom-Boom said, ‘‘It’s my cousin, Tori, Officer Mallory. Victoria. She—my uncle Tomas—after lunch we heard him say he was going to kill Tony because of Wujek Tomas losing his job and he thought it was Tony’s fault, except he also blamed it on the ni—Negroes—so Victoria took off for the park here to warn Uncle Tony and she didn’t come home and we saw it on TV, the fight, and I told my dad and he said we should come here and try to find her, or anyway, find Uncle Tony, and then Dad and I, we saw you, and maybe you know, like, is she okay?’’
Bobby Mallory rubbed his sunburnt forehead. ‘‘Vicki came here? God damn it, who let her do such a stupid dangerous thing?’’
‘‘She took off, sir, and my ma, she had ahold of me, so I couldn’t follow.’’
‘‘Which is the only good news of the day,’’ Bernie Warshawski said. ‘‘Otherwise we’d be looking for both of you. We saw where Tori chained up her bike at the Seventy-first and Stony bus—’’
He caught sight of the body under the shrub. ‘‘But—that’s Tomas. Marie’s brother! What happened to him? He come with the St. Czeslaw crowd and pass out?’’
He moved over to kneel next to Tomas. ‘‘Come on, man, get up. You’ve had your fun, now get on your feet—’’
Bernie dropped the shoulder in horror: Tomas was never going to get up again. When Boom-Boom started to join his father at his uncle’s body, Bobby grabbed him and pulled him back.
‘‘We gotta get a meat wagon for this guy. Bernie, give his name and particulars to one of the officers here while I get on the squawk box in the squad car. And let’s see if you recognize our helpful witness. . . . Lionel!’’
One of the uniformed men limped forward. Bobby introduced him to Bernie Warshawski, but when they went to look for the man in the Hawaiian shirt who claimed to have seen Tomas’s assailant, he had disappeared. Just like a damned civilian—don’t get involved! Or maybe he didn’t want to have to explain what he’d been doing in the park all afternoon. Maybe he’d thrown the brick that hit Martin Luther King hard enough to knock him to the ground. Jesus! They’d been lucky King hadn’t needed medical help.
Bobby used the squad car radio to summon a detective. When a man arrived to look after Tomas Wojcek’s body and to organize a search of the grass around him, he turned his own aching body and numbed mind to the task of finding Tony Warshawski.
This morning he wouldn’t have taken an overheard death threat against a cop seriously, but that was beforesomeone had bounced a rock off his own riot helmet and squirted a can of Coke into the eyes of one of the men in his detail. If Tomas Wojcek thought he could use the cover of the Marquette Park massacre to kill Tony—but had Tony, the most peaceable man on the force, whacked Tomas in the head hard enough to kill him? Bobby couldn’t picture it, unless Tony’d become as crazed by the heat and the ugliness of the mob as the rest of the cops in the park.
He got into the squad car Bernie and Boom-Boom arrived in and directed the driver to do a sweep of the park. Using the car loudspeaker, he kept calling Tony’s name, or calling out to clumps of cops as he passed to see if any of them had seen Warshawski. At Homan he was directed to the north end of the park, where Bobby finally ran Tony to earth. He was pushing a last bunch of rioters into the back of a paddy wagon when Mallory and Bernie went over to him.
Tony Warshawski was a big man, close to six-four. Like everyone else today, his face was red up to the circle cut into his forehead by the riot helmet he’d worn all day: above it, his skin looked almost dead white, but when Bobby and Bernie explained the situation to him, his whole face turned ashen beneath its burn.
‘‘Victoria? She came into this war zone hunting for me? Oh, my God, where is she? Bobby, I need a squad, I need to fin
d her. How can I face Gabriella?’’
‘‘Tony, I’ll look. You’re too tired.’’ Bernie put an arm around his brother’s shoulders. ‘‘You get home, stay with Gabriella. She’s just about out of her mind, worrying about you and Tori both. And Marie, oh, my God, what a day—Tomas is dead, someone killed him over on the other side of the park. How will I tell her that? Boom-Boom, did your cousin say anything that—Boom-Boom? Bernard! Bernard Warshawski, come back here this minute! Now!’’
The three men looked around. Twilight was settling in; it was hard to see more than fifteen or twenty feet, and Boom-Boom had faded into the shrubbery around the lagoon.
IV
As soon as his dad was occupied with Uncle Tony, Boom-Boom slipped off into the park. If Tori was still here, she’d be hunting for Tony. If she’d left for home, well, then she was safe, and he, Boom-Boom, could find out what was so mysterious about Wujek Tomas’s death. Tomas was his least favorite uncle, mean-spirited, prone to pinching Boom-Boom or Victoria so hard that he left bruises on their arms or bottoms, but it was still unsettling to see him like that, dead under a bush. And Mama! She would cry like the world was coming to an end. And somehow blame Victoria for it.
When Bernie had come home from his afternoon shift at the plant and Boom-Boom told him what had happened, Marie said, ‘‘Headstrong, how Gabriella spoils her. No daughter of mine would run off like that, not even a thank-you for lunch. No manners, of course, Italian, a Jew, they don’t know manners.’’
She hadn’t wanted Bernie to drive over to the park—they’d all seen the reports on television, the violence, white people fighting the police—but Gabriella had telephoned, asking for Victoria to come home; Marie had been forced to say that she’d run off.
Gabriella arrived two minutes later, still in the silk print dress she wore to give lessons, her dark eyes two large coals in her pale face. She had looked Marie in the eye, spat, and turned on her heel. She announced that she was leaving for Marquette Park at once, but of course, Bernie told her to stay home, that he’d drive to the park and find Tony and Victoria.
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