Chicago Stories: West of Western (3 page)

The men glanced at each other, at her, shook their heads and looked away, embarrassed and unsure what to think about this woman, so unlike any woman they'd known. Except Gus, who nodded.

“One leatherneck to another, Pelligrini,” he said after a moment, stepping forward with a grin and his hand out to shake, “where the hell do you want those effing supply lines to come in? The drawing I got ain't exactly what's there.”

It didn't take long for the word to spread to other contractors. By the end of that year, ‘Miss Pelligrini’ had become plain ‘Pelligrini,’ and found herself on after-work beer runs, and sometimes invited to join Friday poker nights. Occasionally one or another of the single men would ask her out, but after a while everyone knew she'd refuse and stopped asking. Pelligrini settled in. Now she'd pay the men the going rate, no problem with that, but that wasn't why she knew they'd come through for her. Pelligrini was one of them.

If everybody showed as scheduled, supplies arrived as promised, the weather held, and the city left them alone, her home would be habitable in a miraculous ten days. Well, sort of, ready enough for her to camp out there. It wouldn't be the first time she'd slept rough. Basic shelter, all she could afford: roof, windows, electrical supply, plumbing, heating/air conditioning. The rest—creature comforts like kitchen cabinets and dishwasher—and finishing—stripping the oak woodwork in the former offices, tuck-pointing the brick, cleaning and painting the bathroom, among other things—would come later.

Ellie had been right, no bank would give her a mortgage on a decrepit industrial building now zoned residential. She scraped together cash for the building, but after she paid the contractors she'd have about seventy-three dollars left in her checking account, and her Visa was more or less tapped out after a visit to Home Depot for appliances and lighting fixtures. She was broke, and didn't give a damn.

Finished reviewing the estimates and schedules, Seraphy took a moment to watch the three old ladies across the street. Bundled up and watching her, as they had every day since she had first come to see the building, she wondered what they were thinking. Come to think of it, she hadn't met any of her neighbors, odd. Maybe they were waiting for her to make the first move? She rolled down the window.

“
Hola!
” she shouted and waved. Three pairs of black eyes stared at her, three faces unmoving. Okay, maybe not yet.

A sudden movement on her right, seen out of the corner of her eye, brought her out of the car for a better look. Twenty feet away across the alley, four very young teenagers in black hoodies swaggered and smirked, oozing adolescent bravado. Dressed in matching purple sweat pants worn at half-mast and sideways baseball caps, they had copied both costumes and gestures from rap videos.

“
Hola
,” she waved. The boys hesitated, unsure how to react. Trying to project urban disdain, they looked down and away as she gazed directly at them. They shifted their feet, squirmed, shoved hands deeper into pockets. They looked ready to flee if she approached. Wanna-be toughs, maybe twelve or thirteen?

Smiling to herself and on a roll, Seraphy turned back to wave at the watcher she sensed behind the curtains in the second floor apartment across the street. As if in response to her gaze, the edge of the curtain moved a quarter of an inch. So much for meeting the neighbors. Maybe later. She had plans for tonight.

At
Home Depot, she used her American Express card to buy an industrial extension cord, work light on a stand, mortar mix, tuck-pointing tools, a plastic bucket and a large blue plastic tarp. While she waited for permits she'd spent some time learning the basics of tuck-pointing from a friendly mason.

Back at the loft, the Chicago common bricks glowed pinkish-gold under halogen light. A little mortar here and there and the walls would be perfect. At first most of the mortar splatted onto the tarp, but gradually she fell into a satisfying rhythm, moving smoothly along a line of bricks, singing old Waylon Jennings songs while sliding mortar from the hod to fill gaps and holes. Behind her, the finished wall gleamed warm and smooth.

She was on her knees under the first bank of windows when bricks thrown through the window sent shards of glass down into her hair and falling glass grazed her arms. Old instincts took over, propelling her to cover in the bathroom, where she listened, each splintered pane registering in her own flesh, her stomach roiling. She seethed and dug bits of glass out of her palms as more bricks took out windows along the front of the building.

When sudden silence announced the attack over, adrenaline propelled her across a floor covered with splintered glass and downstairs to the street, where she prowled the pavement, her mind seething and her eyes searching for targets. Rockwell Street stretched empty north and south. Only fallen leaves and trash moved along the gutters with the bitter late fall wind. Around the corner, the alley lay blue-white and silent under bright security lights. Trucks growled in the distance, closer by, tires screeched as a car took off west on Thomas. Furious, Seraphy paced the block, searching shadows for huddled figures or tell-tale movement, but found nothing, not even a stray cat. Only a small pile of bricks abandoned on the sidewalk near the alley and shattered glass under the windows remained as witness to the violence.

Seraphy couldn't remember being this angry before. Even in Iraq, she'd kept a certain emotional distance from events around her. She had made herself into the military professional, performing in dangerous foreign terrain. This was different, on home ground and completely personal, intimate and more devastating. Telling herself they were just windows and the vandals probably kids like those she'd seen on the corner didn't help.

She found no easy answers to her questions. She didn't know anyone in the neighborhood and it was hard to see a personal motive. Teenage punks? Random violence? Or was something more? Some people hated rehabbers, she knew that. But surely she was hardly a yuppie. She didn't own a single designer shoe or drive a Beemer and would never be old enough to shop at Ann Taylor.

She ignored cuts and scratches that had mostly stopped bleeding and hunted through the garage for a broom. By the time she finished sweeping and seething, she still had no idea who her attackers were, but had devised in lurid detail six unique, satisfyingly painful punishments for use when she caught the punks. Of course, first she'd have to shanghai them and smuggle them out to the Mohave Desert for privacy to carry out her plans. No problem, they'd stack like cordwood in the back of the Jeep. Her anger eventually faded, replaced by a sense of violation that left her shaking and determined. The windows were your eyes, she thought, her hand caressing the stair rail, fingertips alert to the faintest of heartbeats. Those bastards put out your eyes. It won't happen again. Ever.

There must be something she could do to guarantee that, she thought, pacing the length of the empty loft. All those years in a war zone, there must be something she could use. Fragments of memory, sights and smells and sounds of attacks experienced and those only heard about, defense protocols, security systems, spec sheets and drawings. There. She recognized something, a flicker of something, something she'd seen just before she left Anbar for Jerusalem. The memory teased, but wouldn't come clear. She shook her head. It would come eventually. In the meantime, broken windows left her feeling too vulnerable and keeping busy might let that fugitive memory surface.

And it did, as the last screw secured plywood over the final broken window. She saw bullets ping off the windows of her Humvee, heard men cough in acrid smoke and hot metal, winced at the flash of the explosion—a split-second escape from ambush. Yes. Bullets had pinged off the glass. She wanted that glass.

Back upstairs in a room bare but for an antique drafting board rescued from an abandoned factory, Seraphy calculated the number of windows and square inches she'd need, wrote a requisition ready to fax, and picked up the phone. Her new windows had to be proof against another attack. Maalon had saved her life in Iraq. A new, top-secret, bulletproof transparent ceramic material, Maalon was not available, or even known to civilian contractors and she'd need serious help to get it, but she'd get it. She dialed a desk on a campus just outside Washington D. C.

Mason, her old Darkpool controller, picked up on the first ring.

“Little late for a call, isn't it? What're you up to, Pelligrini?” Mason rasped, and she could hear his laughter underneath. “Miss the old man, do you? Got your own little war going out there in the wilds of Chicago?”

“Not really,” she said, wondering just how much he'd kept tabs on her and if he had his usual stinking cigar in hand. “That is, no war that I know of. I might miss you all, sometimes. But I could use a little help and you're the only one I know who could do it.”

“Hmm?”

“I bought a building over west of Western and I'm rehabbing it, or trying to. Asshole punks threw bricks through my windows tonight.” She stopped to breathe. “Look, sir, I don't want to waste time playing around with these fuckers. I just want windows they can't compromise. Maalon windows.”

“I can believe that, but you know we have an anti-proliferation treaty,” Mason chuckled at his own wit, then hacked and coughed. Seraphy waited, her elbows on the drafting board, picking at her cuticles to keep her hands busy. When the attack subsided, he rasped, “Rocks or bullets?”

“Just bricks, at least so far.”

“Serious?”

“Eleven windows. Big expensive windows.”

“Umm . . . . What did you do this time?”

“I'm not sure. Just bought the place a few weeks ago, haven't even moved in yet or met any of the neighbors. I can't see how it could be personal. No clue who it was.”

“Sure about that? You're not making waves?”

“Umm . . . the neighborhood's a little iffy. But I don't even know my neighbors. Or they me.”

“Um-hmm. A little iffy, you say. Ha.” His breath hissed as he sucked in a bushel of air and smoke. “West of Western, figures you'd find a place there. I know the neighborhood. From what I hear, it's the dregs of just about every wave of immigrants to hit Chicago. And more recently, lousy with artist types moving in. And now you. The poor bastards don't have any idea who they're messing with, do they?”

“The artists or the immigrants? I'm just an architect trying to rehab an old building so I can have a studio and home.” Muscles in her shoulders she hadn't known were tight began to relax. His voice had told her he would help her get the Maalon, and she liked the idea of living in an artists’ community. She pushed the fax button to send the requisition. “I'm sending the specs now.”

The old man snorted into the phone and started coughing again, then chuckled, which set off another coughing spell. “Right. That's you. Just another yuppie architect chick.” Papers rustled as he pawed for the fax on his rat's nest of a desktop.

She waited, silent, her nose twitching from remembered cigar fumes. Maybe the artists would be friendlier than the old ladies and wanna-be gangbangers.

“Uh, I'm looking at this requisition you faxed. Maalon, huh? Isn't that a bit of overkill? . . . Je-sus Christ, you really need fifty-six windows? Thought you said eleven. And this big? What the hell kind of place is this? . . . By Monday? That'll cost you.”

“No problem on the cost—I took your disability payout, remember?” she said, trying to remember if she had enough in her bank account to cover the bill. Nah. Have to go through Visa. Shit, not enough there either. American Express, then, and figure out how to pay it when the bill came in next month. Maybe one of her brothers could lend her the money. “I've got banks of windows, seven in each bank, two banks each side each floor, that makes fifty-six, of which eleven were broken last night, and if I put standard Thermopanes in they'll just do it again.”

“Probably. Yeah. What kind of building did you say?”

“An old drapery workshop I'm converting, loft above and garage/workshop downstairs. I'll email you a plan. Fifty-six is right, and Monday if you can make it happen.” Seraphy paused. “I'll owe you one.”

“I can make anything happen . . . . Okay, remember you owe me, okay?” He chuckled again and she could see him gloat. Hell. He was way too happy about this. What was he up to?

“The address of the manufacturer is on the requisition. They'll have the frames ready to go as soon as they get the Maalon. Uhh, Amex all right?”

“No problem, my friend, for you all is possible. Monday it is,” Mason purred, then paused. “Mmm, how about this? We'll cover it for you and you can owe me.” He chuckled, she heard his chair squeak and imagined him tilting back, his big feet thudding on the desk. “I don't want to think of you being homeless. Ah . . . hmm. You do know Maalon is good for anything up to and including rocket fire? Like I said, isn't this a bit of overkill?”

“It's my home and I need to feel safe.” He'd understand that. Shit. Mason was actually gloating. He probably had tabs on her, probably knew she was broke, too. She hated to owe the old fox, but how could she turn this down? Indentured servitude, worse than a juice loan. He must have something nasty coming up, hopefully not soon. Not Albania, she prayed. She hated Albania.

“Um. I don't suppose you'd consider coming back to work for us full time for a while?”

“Can't. I'm not strong enough, muscle damage, too much shrapnel from the bomb. Medical said no way, and besides, I took that disability bonus. Can't afford to give it back.” She stroked her arm and thought this was the first time she'd ever been thankful for her wounds.

“Fuck Medical, it's your brains I want. Who said anything about giving back? I need you. I got plans.”

“Sorry, sir, I've got a job and I'm supporting a building. But I mean it when I say I owe you one. Just not yet and not a long-term contract . . . please.” Mason had plans? She didn't want to know, not now.

“Yeah, yeah. Forget the ‘sir’ stuff, never worked with me anyway. You got stuff, I hear you. Consulting, all right? Hmm. Maybe some Homeland Security stuff? You'll hear when I figure it out.” A phone rang, a door slammed in the background. “You need anything, or you change your mind, you call, okay?”