Because the Rain (16 page)

Today, he started the afternoon shift for a week, the four to midnight, where come eight
PM
the late-working investment bankers raced their Land Rovers down side streets. The cops called it the Viagra 5K because anytime they made reckless driving stops, they found the individually wrapped blue pills in their pockets. Some of these guys aren’t even thirty-five, Sergeant Olszewski said. It’s a shame worse than letting your buddy jump your sister.

After eight, the night became a great movement of eighty-thousand-dollar vehicles the men bought to drive between the parking structures downtown and the garages included in the price of their condos. Overpriced metal, living rooms on wheels, the feeling of command. They took their moving violations like movie tickets, treating Mike with the same sarcastic politeness they used on the West Africans who valeted their cars. But there would never be a partner-of-the-day on afternoons. If the calls were slack, Mike could get away without smelling anybody for a straight four hours. When he turned on Lincoln, the streetlight was dry like the pavement.

He drove the wagon and looked at the black trees. Annie had needed the illusion of stealth to leave his apartment, and he didn’t understand why. She’d known he was awake—her ear had been trained on his breath as if trying to translate a code—but she’d taken her chest off his back by degrees. He looked away, but his eyes never closed. She dressed in her wet silk without standing up. He then heard her bare feet on the oak floor. When she was gone, he felt the change immediately and Susan returned upon two legs.

Annie might tell him a sad story about herself, but she’d never let him use it to know her. Take her only when she comes, he reminded himself.

Mike went two blocks, past sports bar guys spilled onto sidewalks with crooked cigarettes, a Starbucks going into an old hot dog stand, then hit his blue lights so he could make a U-turn and head back northwest. In the end, he thought, a cop drove and looked around a lot. For him, the color of night was never different.

He suddenly stopped the wagon in traffic and put on the blue lights. The Audis and the BMWs passed him like basketball players who threw elbows when the referee turned away.

The man came running bearded and bald from the alley. He was naked and his legs were all white. He had a picture duct-taped to his chest, a large black and white print. When he ran across the sidewalk, his skin a blur in the light from the shop windows, he dangled his arms as if he’d been told to keep them a certain way. Mike thought he was going to run straight into the traffic and die naked. He’d expire with his arms spread affectedly, killed by the grill of a Lexus R620 with cattle guards and floodlights. But the guy stopped inside the line of parked cars, and checked to see if his arms were hanging the right way. Mike would have bet he was going toward the street.

He radioed and got out, then walked along the rowed cars. The guy stood checking his arms. He ran in place. His top teeth hit his lower ones. He kept dangling his arms.

“Go easy,” Mike said. “You can slow it down to a stand.”

“I got to run the road,” he said. “My arms like this. I was told.”

Mike figured he’d been reduced to this in less than a minute.

“Who told you?” he said.

“American planes didn’t napalm this village in the picture. He told me that. He said, ‘We can’t have this girl anymore.’”

“The village?” Mike said.

“In the picture.”

The print taped to his chest was Kim Luc Phu running from the napalm and the humid wind that spread the flames from the village to the paddy docks. Her arms held a perfect seven and five o’clock, and so did the man’s. The print was laminated enough to turn the rain. From memory, Mike knew the Vietnamese girl was naked, but he couldn’t tell in the darkness. Suddenly he smelled Annie’s rain scent and wondered if she ever ran from a burning village.

“We used these pictures wrongly,” the guy said. “I know that now. We pissed all over what our brothers had died for.”

“Go slower.”

“I’ve got miles left to run. He told me to make like Paul Revere and tell the city what I know.”

The guy had spat while he talked. His lips were blue. Mike watched his eyes and never saw him blink, then ripped the picture from his chest.

“Who taped this picture?”

“There are men watching. He told me I must run until everybody knows what he told me.”

The man took off and ran headlong into traffic, past the twirling wagon lights, the tree shadows left by the streetlamps. He got hit fast: a restored Jeep Wagoneer with the original wood took him out at the knees, and he flew left, landing on an Audi hood. The guy had gone up with his arms down. The Jeep had stopped, the driver still a dark shape, but the traffic kept moving. Mike waved for the cars to slow, then stared past their headlights, trying to see if the guy was a mess. When he started into the street, he watched the man lying on the car hood, and tried to remember if Grant Hospital was closer than Illinois Masonic.

He walked and pushed the picture down into his pocket, feeling it wrinkle, and swore Dilger was lying about the Jiffy Lubes. He was on Lexapro or something. This killer was saying that humiliation never goes away, and if he will trouble himself to prove it with the old pictures that turned people against his war, it would be nothing for Dilger to lie about the Jiffy Lubes.

Mike took a breath before approaching the man, as if to keep Annie’s rain smell in his nose.

19

The agency never called back about Annie. Four days now. Goetzler couldn’t get Nick on the phone.

He sat in his Grand Cherokee, parked between twin Explorers, watching the cop buy a chicken sandwich from the Greek’s. The
Tribune
was folded on the seat beside him, and he put his finger on the guy’s picture in the Metro section: Mike Spence, dark-eyed in a police hat, his mouth tight like a closed tobacco pouch.

Goetzler knew this was the cop who beat the yuppie; he remembered the eyeballs that didn’t move when he threw punches. That night, in the headlights, this cop had hit a man because he used hair gel the rain couldn’t melt, and Goetzler loved him for it. He’d swung hard, as if he was fighting to remain himself and stay in uniform.
Honor and pride gets you detailed on the paddy wagon every time.

He’d read about the cop saving Will Avers’s life while he ate two scones and pushed the crumbs into the newspaper seam. The cop used a tourniquet above Avers’s knee and saved his leg. He performed CPR on a car hood, beating Avers back to life with a fist against his heart. He took him to Grant Hospital himself, and again administered CPR outside the emergency room. Goetzler left the bookstore and drove Lincoln Park looking for the cop’s wagon in the headlit dark—the article said he was the paddy driver, though never explained how he’d messed up to draw the detail. But he found the cop in three hours, double-parking in front of the Athenian Room (chicken on pita with fries: six bucks). From his picture, he thought the guy was a good shot, but a bad listener, the kind of man who only needed his own ideas.

Ecco Homo, Goetzler thought. Here is the man.

He bet the cop hadn’t slipped on the sidewalk carrying Avers. It snowed that afternoon, then warmed, so the pavement was half sleet. He hoped Avers kept his hands spread like he’d been told, and his likeness to the girl in the picture made the cop laugh. The old hippie had a slouch from sleeping afternoons while hiding thirteen years from the FBI, and he ran in the way of people who don’t run.

Goetzler had hid in Avers’s garage for five hours, wearing a Henry Kissinger mask, the eyes cut larger for his glasses. He pulled the .38 while Avers stepped from his green Passat with two Whole Foods bags full of shiitake mushrooms and lemongrass. When Avers saw the pistol, his eyes went like wind, and he did what he was told: strip down and stand there. Goetzler taped the picture to his chest, using duct tape against the gray hair. Avers let him do his work. Goetzler then pointed to the girl in the picture, her open mouth, her tight face, and said, “None of us liked doing these things. They’d always send away the guys who did.”

Avers kept quiet and lifted his foot off the cold cement.

“You need to know that. Men are there and things always go the wrong way. In Vietnam, nobody ever meant to do anything.”

The man wasn’t talking.

“Look down at the picture,” Goetzler said.

Avers’s eyes were like wiggling fingers. He’d been scared thoughtless.

“Your movement used this girl to make the world hate us, and we had no choice but to be in Vietnam. We were not lucky enough to stay behind.”

Goetzler pointed the gun at the girl in the picture while Avers panted with calmed eyes.

“Do you understand your crime?”

Avers nodded. Goetzler knew the man could not speak.

“There are men with me,” Goetzler lied. “They will have rifles trained on the route you must run while you mimic this picture. There are many of us who seek revenge, and we will always watch you. If you don’t mime the little girl exactly, you’ll also be shot.”

When Goetzler opened the garage door, Avers started his route by sprinting, his arms dangling while his bare feet slapped the alley. This was a good night.

In the old days, he knew Uncle Kerm would comb his hair at the Drake and laugh big laughs over this gag. He’d want to hear the story a few times. No shit, he’d say. You made him run bare-ass naked.

Goetzler could never meet the cop, but he wondered what the picture of the running girl meant to him. This cop, he knew, hated the men he protected, and seeing Avers probably made him laugh. Goetzler imagined him keeping the picture and showing it to his cop buddies over Harp pints at Simpson’s on Western Avenue. The guys would all want to buy Goetzler double Jamesons and shake his hand for giving them something to laugh about.

Later, when the cop left the Greek’s, walking slow for the paddy wagon, Goetzler sat up, then cut NPR’s local pledge drive off the radio. The cop held the sandwich in a white bag and stopped by the wagon door. He was tall and Spartan lean, and stared over the hood at the street. Goetzler rolled down the window, looking with the cop to see. The asphalt was wet enough to show the brake lights, and the alley went black and white for a mile.

20

Annie’s last date was an Arab electronics salesman who wore Brut 33 and talked about doing big business in the new Iraq. CD burners, iPods, Discmans. Inside two years, he told Annie, every Iraqi would have something Sony in their ears. Hip-hop will be big, he said. When you break it down, Baghdad is no different than the Bronx. He lingered inside the doorway, asking for her cell number with swimming eyes.

“Mr. Di Franzo doesn’t like us to do that,” she said.

The Arab, like most men aware of Joey Di Franzo and his mad-rabbit face made famous by the
Sun-Times,
always disappeared when understanding Annie’s agency kicked up to an Outfit guy. For the suburban johns,
The Sopranos
filled in their lapsed street experience, and mentioning an Italian name was enough to create colon spasms.

She didn’t know if Nick kicked up to anybody, but Joey Di Franzo was the only Chicago mob name she’d heard. She paged through many newspapers doing day in-calls, and the reporters were forever claiming he ran the Outfit.

After the Arab left, Annie showered with Ivory soap and hot hotel water for fifteen minutes before the Arab’s cologne washed off. She sat on the Holiday Inn bed, drying herself, officially between clients. On the chair the guy’s
Tribune
reeked of Brut 33, but the Metro section insert lay on top, and she saw the cop’s picture.

The towel fell away from her breasts when she reached for the paper. Annie fanned the cologne off the newsprint while reading about the cop saving a john’s life by taking him to Grant Hospital in the front seat of his paddy wagon. The cop even gave the john CPR at the last red light before the emergency room cul-de-sac.

Annie let her eyes bounce over the two words of his name like she was glancing at the license plate number on a parked car.

In the photo, the cop was again the runner from the window, not the sad man who needed her smell to sleep. Tonight, she decided he’d come to her because they were not together last night, and she’d watched him leave and return from a second run. She saw his TV light in the glass until dawn. The cop was a man who could only sedate his anger by exhaustion. But lying together, he was a thoughtless person, a man sleeping between her shows.

She dressed and walked out of the hotel room, ditching her next appointment. She was done washing their Walgreen’s cologne off her breasts and stomach. She’d create an exclusive arrangement with Goetzler, though delay clarifying for him his confusion about Vietnam, and keep the sleepy cop for sex. If needed, she could always find another Nick.

*   *   *

The cop dripped in Annie’s doorway, his leather jacket soaked to a glow, and the water spots dried black on the oak floor. His pistol was snapped into a holster and his radio drowned low. He looked like the cop in the
Tribune
picture, his cheekbones more definite, his lips thin. Annie suddenly felt cold. He didn’t care about forgetting with her stomach.

Off the street, his eyes were still coplike, that look gotten from having let other men freeze his dreams about true love, and the more Annie searched them for softness, looking for a crack between the eye corner and the ball, she only noticed how his shirt pockets bore the ruin of a starch crease. She knew he liked starting his afternoon shift without wrinkles, hoping vaguely that he might move through the hours as a full participant without breaking starch.

Neither of us can admit we are of this world, she thought.

After the cop closed the door, the hall light disappeared from his wet leather jacket.

Annie turned off her cell and Nick’s calling number left the screen. The cop was looking for a light switch, wall by wall, his eyes drawn like he was aiming. When he found it, the night turned on, and he took two pictures from his coat, holding up the prints left and right. Nguyen Ngoc Loan shooting the Viet Cong. Kim Luc Phu escaping fire from the sky. For the first time, she felt him disgusted over her being a hooker. He had the look of a transformed john who’d pay for the hour to try talking her from the life.