Hope Rides Again

by Andrew Shaffer

  The top fifty percent.

  We helped Steve onto the massage bed. His skin was pale and clammy. Not because of the sauna. Pale and clammy was his natural state. He was always going on about “sweating out the toxins,” which left him in a perpetually disgusting condition as far as his pores were concerned.

  Barack rubbed his own chin. I guessed his mind was covering the same ground as mine: Do we call an ambulance or take Steve to the hospital ourselves? What he needed was fluids to replace all the sweat. And toxins. A man needs toxins in his bloodstream. It’s not good to sweat them all out.

  The masseur was back with a fifth of vodka—either for himself or for Steve, I had no idea.

  “He’ll be A-OK,” the man said. He had an Eastern European accent, and his English was as broken as the European Union these days. “One hour rest. He’s a little guy, so maybe longer.”

  I slipped my red bracelet onto Steve’s wrist. “He can have my massage.”

  Barack’s eyebrows peaked. I held my breath, waiting for him to remind me it hadn’t been five minutes of quiet time yet. Instead, he said, “That’s very generous of you.”

  “It might help him get back on his feet sooner.”

  Barack crouched down next to Rahm. “Hey, can you watch over our friend here for a while? We’ll be right back.”

  “Where are you going?” Rahm asked, his voice muffled by the pillow. The masseur was pounding his back like a drum.

  “Joe and I are going out for ice cream.”

  25

  Barack Obama is a goshdarned liar.

  How do I know? Because he admitted as much to me. After we dressed and snuck out the back door, I asked him where we were going to get ice cream. According to my phone there was a Jeni’s Splendid Ice Cream within walking distance.

  “Put that away,” Barack said, looking left and then right as we hurried down the alley. There were no Secret Service agents guarding him. It had just been Steve and him, and now it was Barack and me.

  “You know where it’s at?” I said. “Great. I can never follow the maps on this damned thing. It tells you to go north, but how do you know which way north is? Sometimes it points you there, other times it spins you in circles and you end up walking round and round until you say forget it, forget the whole damn thing, modern technology isn’t for me. Don’t you think your life was easier before?”

  “Before cellphones? On the one hand, yes. On the other hand, I don’t think I would have given up my BlackBerry for Lent if I didn’t always have the Secret Service or Michelle or my kids with me with their phones. What if there’s a medical emergency? What if you need the police?”

  “That’s a lot of what ifs,” I said.

  Barack thrust his hands into his pockets. I had to race to keep up with him—the man has long legs, and everybody knows that gives you an unfair advantage in a footrace. We weren’t racing, but he was still moving as fast as he could without bending his knees. A mall-walker’s pace.

  “What happened to your windbreaker? We can’t go into Jeni’s looking like ourselves,” I said. “We’ll be mobbed by fans. Or I will be, because that’s my go-to ice cream joint.”

  “We’re not going to Jeni’s.”

  “You know someplace with better ice cream? It’s not that I don’t believe you, it’s just that it’s an allegation I can’t buy without seeing the underlying science.”

  “We’re not getting ice cream, Joe.”

  That’s how he said it: just like that. A statement of fact, as if I should have known the whole time. Barack never intended to get ice cream. It was a ruse all along.

  “If we’re not getting ice cream, then may I ask where we’re going?”

  “You can ask,” Barack said.

  “Consider this me asking.”

  “We’re going to find some answers,” he said without slowing. “Can you keep up?”

  “Can I—?” I jogged after him.

  “It’s not far. We’ll stick to the back alleys.”

  He seemed fine to leave it at that. To leave me—his supposed best friend, his pal, his brother—in the dark, if not in the dust.

  We ducked behind an overflowing trash bin that hadn’t been emptied since the Daley administration. The first one. A gaggle of young folks stumbled past on the sidewalk. They turned into a bar on the corner, even though they already seemed plenty inebriated. This whole “going from one bar to another” made no sense to me. Didn’t they serve the same beer at every bar? What were they chasing?

  Barack looked both ways for traffic and then waved me on across the street. I followed him down another alley between two rows of brownstones. There were more signs posted warning us not to feed the rats. It might have been my imagination, but I swore the clip-art rats were getting bigger.

  “Maybe we should turn around,” I said.

  “You don’t think we owe it to Shaun to find him justice? This was your idea, Joe.”

  “I’m worried about Steve.”

  “You’re worried. About Steve.”

  “Physically he’s tough as nails,” I said, “but he has some trust issues.” This wasn’t the first time we’d ditched him.

  “So you’re not worried about his health, you’re worried about his feelings.”

  “There’s only so far you can push a man before he breaks.”

  I was talking about me, if that wasn’t clear. Barack knew it. He wasn’t a master at picking up on subtext, but we shared a bond. Unfortunately, we were building walls between us. I hadn’t told him about visiting the Red Door; he hadn’t told me he was going to the Russian baths. My cabbie had told me the snakes would be coming out as the temperature climbed. For the first time, I wondered if we weren’t a couple of snakes ourselves.

  We crossed over into a mostly residential neighborhood with a smattering of high-end boutiques, restaurants, and art studios. Wicker Park, according to Barack. There were thick steel bars on the lower-level windows of every residence. It seemed like a nightmare way to live your life, always peering out from behind bars like you were a prisoner in your own home. The houses couldn’t have been cheap, but each one was a prison. A multimillion-dollar prison.

  Halfway down a block of retail establishments, Barack stopped so abruptly that I bumped into him. He looked a four-story brick building up and down. THE RECORD STORE, a faded sign in the first-floor window announced. What drew my ire, however, were the signs for “smoking accessories,” whatever those were. Lighters, I assumed. If Barack had marched me a quarter of a mile from the Russian baths to grab a pack of smokes, I was going to lose it. He had quit. I didn’t want to be part of his falling off the wagon.

  “We don’t have time for ice cream but we have time for this?” I said. “That’s why you didn’t want to tell me where we were headed, because you knew I’d say no.”

  “I’m going to need you to stay outside, act as a lookout.”

  “So you can buy a pack of smokes?”

  “It’s a record store. You ever been to a record store?”

  “Sure,” I said. “They used to carry 45s at Danny Eaton’s dime store in Scranton. Me and my brothers—”

  Barack went inside, leaving me behind on the sidewalk.

  He was in the shop for less than a minute before I followed him.

  26

  Inside, the Record Store was dingy and damp. Sunlight hadn’t come through the poster-covered front windows in years. Every footstep released some new, awful smell from the carpet. A biologist studying funguses and spores could have spent a lifetime cataloging new growths, provided they were brave enough to don a hazmat suit and rip up the carpeting.

  The man behind the register had a long beard and an even longer ponytail. He was smoking a cigarette, pricing records and paying no attention as I scooted past him. You weren’t supposed to smoke inside any retail business these days, as far as I knew. Chicagoans didn’t seem to care much what you were and weren’t supposed to do. At one time, the city had been the springboard for western expansion. I
t still had a bit of that Wild West attitude. Barack and his Chicago crew—including Rahm and Axe—had ridden into Washington like they were gunslingers in a Clint Eastwood western. Behind the scenes, I had to play the killjoy sheriff, letting them know from time to time that they weren’t half as clever as they thought.

  Barack was flipping through vinyl records with a grin on his face, nodding along to a rap song overhead. I crept up beside him. There were a couple stacks of CDs here and there, but the majority of the stock was devoted to vinyl. We were the only two customers.

  “I thought we were here for a reason,” I said.

  “Mmmmm-hmmmm.”

  “A reason related to the case.”

  “Mmmmm-hmmmm.”

  “You’re just going to keep saying that until I give up, aren’t you?”

  “Mmmmm-hmmmm.”

  He started humming along to the chorus of the song. Hip-hop wasn’t my bowl of chili, so I couldn’t tell you the artist’s name. I still remember the first hip-hop song I’d ever heard. Tipper Gore had played it for me on a Walkman. She was shaking her head the whole time, and then afterward asked if I wasn’t moved to do something about it. I’m moved to turn it off, I joked. Wasn’t I offended, she wanted to know? Didn’t I want to do something? I told her that I hadn’t understood a damn word but that the First Amendment covered a multitude of sins.

  I later found out the cassette tape in question had been Al’s.

  “Doesn’t it stink in here?” I whispered to Barack. “Do you smell that?”

  He drew in a deep breath through his nose, eyes closed. “It smells like a record store, Joe. I used to spend hours in here—not at this location, but when it was in Hyde Park.”

  “Did that one smell as bad as this one?”

  “Worse.”

  He picked out a record and flipped it over, reading the track list. I poked my head over his shoulder to get a glimpse. I was hovering like my agents used to when I would make an unscheduled stop at a Dairy Queen in small-town America.

  “Why don’t you go ask how much this one is?” he said, handing the record to me.

  I looked it over. Tha Drilluminati. Caruso. The rapper was shirtless on the cover, his body covered in skull-and-cross-bones tats. So different from his older self. What shocked me the most was that vinyl had outlived eight-tracks and cassette tapes. Live long enough, and everything old will become new again. Not that I ever paid much attention to music formats. If a tune came on the radio that I liked, I would turn it up a notch. I enjoyed music, but I didn’t feel the need to blow my money on it. In contrast, Barack often boasted of his record collection in mixed company, like he’d written and performed the songs himself. He didn’t have a favorite Marvin Gaye song—he had a list of his top fifty Marvin Gaye songs.

  I slapped the record down on the glass countertop to get Mr. Ponytail’s attention. He looked up from his stack. When his eyes met mine, he did a double take. More like a triple take: confusion, recognition, confusion.

  “My friend wants to know how much this is,” I said.

  Mr. Ponytail slowly turned his head toward Barack. When he realized who “my friend” was, the cigarette fell from his lips into a pile of ash on the counter.

  27

  Mr. Ponytail had a name. Morrison. He’d been managing the Record Store for over forty years—first in Hyde Park and then at the current location. Rents were rising across the city, he explained. How long they’d last here was anyone’s guess. It was the same story I’d been hearing in medium to large cities across the country. Residents and businesses were being pushed out in the name of progress.

  “Doesn’t sound very progressive to me,” I said. The three of us had retired to the back room.

  “Woke Joe Biden,” Morrison said. “I love it.”

  I watched him carefully, trying to determine if he was making fun of me. He looked like he was trying to suppress a smile. Or maybe he was just high on the pot.

  “As much as I’d love to continue this discussion,” Barack said, “we’re not here to talk neoliberal policies and their effects on the urban retail landscape.”

  “No, no, of course not,” Morrison said.

  I peeked into the store through the curtains. It was empty, same as we’d left it.

  “Did you hear something?” Barack asked.

  I shook my head. “The front door is locked. You’re sure?”

  Morrison nodded. He was looking at me like I was being paranoid.

  I probably was. Nobody had followed us from the Russian baths. I’d been looking over my shoulder half the time, so much that I kept bumping into telephone poles. But somebody had to keep an eye out. The leprechaun hadn’t been some figment of my imagination—I wasn’t that imaginative. Steve had seen him. I had every right to be paranoid. Perhaps Barack was right, though. He’d told me Rahm was just concerned about my safety. But if he’d been concerned enough to put that leprechaun on my trail, what would he do when he realized Barack was wandering around Chicago sans Secret Service.

  “Are you expecting visitors?” Morrison said.

  “There was a shooting today in Englewood,” Barack said. “A boy is in the hospital. The police ran a database search on the ballistics and traced the gun. It was reported stolen from a shipping container in the freight yard—the same place the shooting took place. A couple weeks back.”

  “This town, man.”

  “We’re looking for information on the robbery,” Barack said. I nodded along, as if I had any idea where he was going with this.

  Morrison lit up another smoke. “How is it you think I can help? I mean, I’ll do anything, but I’m not following what it is you want.”

  Barack cleared his throat. “Morrie. C’mon, man.”

  The hippie wiped his eyeglasses with his shirt. He peered through them at the fluorescent ceiling light—the storage room was better lit than the front—and, unsatisfied with his cleaning job, wiped them again.

  “You know I don’t mess with no guns,” Morrison said.

  “Neither do I,” Barack said. “But you’re selling more than records. You always have. This neighborhood isn’t where most people displaced by gentrification end up. You’ve got to be paying more than you were in Hyde Park.”

  “Are you wearing wires? If this is a sting, you have to tell me.”

  Barack waved his hand to clear the smoke. “The federal government did not send the president and vice president into a record store to entrap somebody. The federal government has better things to do than waste time on low-level dealers.”

  “Like aliens,” Morrison said.

  “Wait—” I said, trying to interject some sense of normalcy into the conversation.

  Morrison jumped right back in. “Roswell. You know what really happened. Tell me and I’ll help you however I can.”

  “The official story is that, in 1947, a military surveillance balloon crashed on a ranch outside Roswell, New Mexico,” Barack said. “If, hypothetically, the United States government recovered evidence of extraterrestrial life from a flying saucer at the crash site, that would be top secret. Only the president and a few others would have that type of clearance. Joe doesn’t even have access to information like that.”

  I nodded. “He won’t even tell me if aliens are real or not. You really expect President Obama to tell you—”

  Barack held up an arm to cut me off. “It’s OK, Joe. Let me handle this.” He turned back to Morrison. “If I tell you the truth, you’ll give us what we want?”

  Morrison’s eyes were wandering. He must have been high—not that I’d know what that was like, but his pupils were enlarged, his eyes were pink as pink elephants, and he was tuned to a station I couldn’t pick up.

  “What do you have to trade?” Barack asked.

  “I know people,” Morrison said, suddenly lucid. “I’m not in the black market anymore—I’m being straight with you, man—but I know people.”

  “I know people, too,” Barack said.

  I rubbed my
temples. The cigarette smoke was getting to me. Either that or I was about to have another aneurysm on account of this guy trying to weasel his way out of providing us anything of value.

  Morrison cleared his throat. “You’re looking to trace this gun, right? But it’s not that easy. Black market dealers don’t keep track of the serial numbers on the guns they sell. Trying to pinpoint a single gun is like trying to find a needle in a halfway house. If that’s your only lead, even if you can trace it back to who stole this shipment, the trail’s going to go cold fast. Unless…”

  “Unless?” Barack said.

  “How long ago was this cargo hold knocked off?”

  “About three weeks ago.”

  Morrison nodded. “I think I heard about that. Half a million in firearms. If the thieves were local, there’s no way they could fence that many weapons on the street all at once. Not by themselves.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “It was all there in the Sun-Times. If it’s the same one I’m thinking of, they hit three different containers, stealing stuff left and right. On the third one, they hit the mother lode. They weren’t expecting them guns to be there, see? They were after whatever they could get. They’re probably still sitting on the guns, selling one or two here and there, but they can’t pawn them. They definitely don’t have an organization across state lines to distribute them because that would mean going back up the food chain. My guess is it was a local crew who hit the freight yard. Happens all the time. They wouldn’t know what to do with them, so they’re just sitting on them.”

  “You don’t know for sure,” Barack said.

  “If the guns had hit the streets all at once, word would have gotten out, prices would have been driven down temporarily. Gangs are businesses. Some of the leaders these days have MBAs. They’re the scariest of all—they’ve got the smarts, they’re ruthless.” He paused. “But the guys on the bottom rung are sloppy. Overaggressive. They’re kids, so what do you expect? Whoever shot your friend probably did it in the heat of the moment. The gang leaders don’t like shootings—they’re bad for business. Leaving evidence behind that ballistics can trace? Your shooter could have just put their entire weapons cache at risk. If you can nail down the gang who committed the burglary, the leadership will do the legwork for you and find the shooter. Especially if he’s one of their own.”