Nine Fingers (25 page)
Authors: Thom August
Akiko put down her teacup and knelt in front of Laura, holding her hand, the one pressed to her chest.
“Laura, do you know one of these men?” she asked.
Laura turned slowly and looked at her, and nodded slowly, swallowing.
I picked up the four pictures and riffled through them. “Which one, Laura,” I asked. “Which one do you know?”
She glanced past the Beard, past A, looked for a minute at B. When her eyes settled on C, her hand went back up to her chest
again, and the rest of the color drained from her face.
“He looks much older,” she said, “but I guess he would. And there used to be a scar through the middle of his left eyebrow,
but I guess it grew in or he had it fixed or…” her voice trailed off, almost wistfully.
“Laura,” I asked. “Who is he? How do you know him?”
Se looked at the picture again, then turned to look at Akiko.
“It’s over, baby. I’m so sorry. He’s going to kill us all.”
At Headquarters
Friday, January 24
You would think I just figured after all these years out how the Chicago Fire really started. Not just how it starts but who
starts it. Not just who starts it but why. Not just why but with which match. The whole HQ mobilizes to handle the witnesses
on the bus, the way we do. A Red Ball. A Full-Court Press. An All-Hands. Different people call it different things. It’s a
routine, and we fall into it like a bone-tired man into a soft feather bed.
Me? I am pissed. If I really stay with Landreau, back at the lot, work him, give him some room, get him to talk, maybe I nail
this guy. Maybe I crack open a couple dozen of unsolveds. Maybe I get back to where I was, once. But no. I have to play the
hero. Pull out the gun. Scan the area. One minute of quiet conversation, he tells me. Maybe. But I couldn’t give him ten seconds.
Now Landreau is all tucked away. Babysitters. Safe house. Even found him one with a piano. A baby grand no less. So you know
he’s gonna find his way back into
his
comfort zone. He’s already halfway there, all clammed up, nothing to say. You tell him he freaked out, he says, “Did I? Hunh
…”You ask him about the guy he sees, he just looks at you, shakes his head. Like that. Nothing. It was all there, right
on the surface. Now the waves have washed over whatever it was and it’s back at the bottom of the ocean. Under pressure. Where
he keeps it.
The whole thing backfires. Now our guy knows we are onto him. Now he’s more cautious. If it’s me? I go to ground. Wait until
we get lazy again and move on to something else. Which we always do.
They always tell you this—think like the criminal. Put yourself in his place. You can’t, really. He’s in his place. You’re
in your place. If you could think like a criminal, you’d get every one of them. And if they could think like us, we’d never
catch a single one of them.
Lieutenant Ali? Yeah, he gets all involved again. He gets a whiff of anything, he’s all over it. He thinks he’s a detective
again, the poor guy. Comes in, heart pumping a mile a minute. He’s “concerned,” there’s a word for you. That’s code for “pissed
off.” He can’t tell me he’s “pissed off,” because I broke a major lead. He can’t chew me out because we’re standing in the
bull pen and every five seconds someone comes up and pats me on the back.
So he says he is “concerned.” Concerned that maybe I am not keeping him and the captain in the loop. “It’s not just the result,
it’s the process,” he says. His face is all beagle-eyed, his forehead is creased, the body language is something he must practice
in front of the mirror.
But I swear to him he is in the loop, this just kind of happens, you know the way things sometimes just happen, Loot? I always
call for my backup as soon as it is feasible. At the time, I’m not wanting to spook the perp.
Are we allowed to say “spook”? Not that I mean anything like that by it.
He wants to know about the next opportunity, the next time the band will be in public. He gets all sensitive when I mention
tomorrow, at the Nickelodeon. More puppy-dog eyes. On my way back into the force, they gave me the same training, and I could
never get it right. I either looked the way I felt or I looked like I felt nothing at all, which sometimes I guess I don’t.
But Ali must have aced it. I feel his concern. Don’t I trust him, he asks?
Don’t make me answer that. Not on the record. Not to a so-called superior officer.
I look him dead in the eye. This is something I know how to do, training or no training. I say I have it rated as an improbable
target. This place, the Nickelodeon? It’s not really advertised here in town. It doesn’t fit with the kind of joints the band
plays. It’s an out-of-the-way place. So out-of-the-way it’s over in Indiana, and that means jurisdictional disputes, and that
means—
He cuts me off.
“And that means, Ken, that you
need
me even more than you would if it were in-state.”
“If it
were
in-state”? Where do they manufacture these guys? Is there a kit you can buy?
“I can get jurisdiction, if I hurry. You, alone, you’re just some guy with a gun. You’re not even a police officer to them
down there.”
I nod. That’s stretching it. But it’s what he’s supposed to say. Now he has to do what he’s supposed to do. He rushes off
to “get on the horn.” He’ll have to get back to me, “coordinate the operational aspect.”
Jeez. I mean, we always talked cop talk, but when did it stop being English?
As he is striding away I’m shaking my head back and forth. We’re going to have Chicago cops, plainclothes mostly. But the
uniforms can smell something like this like they can smell a doughnut shop two miles away. They’ll be crawling all over it.
We’re gonna have the Indiana Staties. Because we have them we’re gonna have our own Staties. And the Calumet City locals—that’s
gonna be their price for letting us operate on their turf. I’d be surprised if we don’t have the Park Service Smokies in this
before we’re done.
It is going to be a royal snafu. It is going to be cops looking at cops. A real patron gets in the club? It’ll be an accident.
I feel like I should call Powell, tell him to start working on our arrangements of “Oh, Danny Boy.”
And the perp? Are you going to tell me he doesn’t see this from a mile away? The guy we’re looking for? Saw it the minute
he got on that bus. Knows what’s going to go down. He’s home making himself a new beard, in a different color, or a new mustache,
thicker or thinner. He’s growing his hair out, or cutting it short. He’s putting on a few pounds, or he’s on a diet. Before
this, I make the Nickelodeon as a high-probability site, for all the same reasons I’m telling Ali it is a low probability—out
of the way, out of the profile, out of the state. We could have baited him, could have sent him in feeling confident. Now?
Now it’s going to be poison.
By now he’s laying low. And if he knows about Calumet City? He wants no part of it after yesterday. He’s too smart. He knows
too much about us, about the way we have to do this kind of thing. He will be sitting on his ass and drinking a cold one and
watching the Bulls while a hundred cops in a hundred uniforms will be freezing their balls off in the snow.
He won’t come. He wouldn’t dare.
Would he?
On the Way to Indiana
Friday, January 24
I picked Akiko up in my car at her place, and we drove toward Indiana and the Nickelodeon. We were both silent for about a
mile, until one of us couldn’t stand it anymore. That, of course, would have been me.
“So, what did Laura say after I left?”
She paused. I waited.
“She thinks…Oh shit. She thinks Jack Landreau is, like, her father, and they’re trying to kill
him,
not me.”
“Her father?” I said, my clueless brain trying to sort through it. “How could Jack be her father? Jack’s never even been to
Chicago until a couple of weeks ago, remember?”
The light turned green and I slid forward.
“Vince, think about it,” she said. “He says his home base is like three hours west of here, in Iowa, right? And he’s like
the best goddamn musician any of us have ever heard anywhere. Any tune, any style, any key. He plays Detroit, he plays Cleveland,
St. Louis, Cincinnati, even Rock Island, and he never plays Chicago? Aside from maybe New York, where else would anyone
want
to play? I mean, especially this kind of music, the old stuff, you know?”
She had a point there. Facts are one thing, logic is another.
“The only reason not to play here is if he’s scared of coming here. And the only reason he’d be scared would be if he had,
like, a history or something, you know?”
She looked at me.
“Laura thinks she’s that history.”
I was trying to sort it out but it wasn’t parsing at all.
“But Akiko, we’ve been over this with Ridlin, remember? This whole thing started
before
Jack got into town. I’m the one who picked him up at the airport, a couple hours
after
Roger What’s-His-Name got shot, remember?”
“I know, Vince, I know. I tried to tell Laura that, but she wasn’t listening. And she wouldn’t say why she thinks he’s her
father. She can be, like, stubborn, you know?”
“I guess.”
“But she sounded so sure of it. And she’s usually not like that. I mean, she doesn’t make stuff up, she’s not, you know, melodramatic
or anything. Believe me, that’s like one of my requirements, you know?”
Two plus two were somehow adding up to 1003; we were missing an exponent somewhere. I was trying to think linearly but it
kept slipping away from me laterally.
So I slipped sideways with it and changed the subject.
“Akiko,” I said, “did she say any more about the guy in the parking lot? Number C?”
She looked straight ahead.
“Well,” I asked, “did she?”
She turned toward me, her face half in profile. “Every now and then she would glance at that picture, like she couldn’t stay
away from it, and every time she did her face would turn all white and she would, like, shiver. I kept asking her who it was,
did she know him, did she recognize anything about him…?”
“And?”
“She’s like, ‘Yes, I know him. He’s not even going to spare me, we’re all going to die.’ ”
“That’s it?”
“That’s enough, isn’t it?”
It was, but it also wasn’t. This is my problem: I need to know the “why” to believe in the “what,” and I didn’t know anything
about the “why” of it.
We finally broke free of the traffic when we merged onto Lake Shore Drive. My shoulders were knotted tight. As we were slingshotting around Soldier Field she must have noticed this. She reached behind me and started to knead the spot where the neck
flares out and that wedge of muscle angles down. At first, her fingers felt like knives going in, but she backed off a notch
and I relaxed enough to let her in. She had some serious skills. I let my head rock back, put my right hand on her leg, steering
with my cast propped up against the wheel, and we cruised south that way. There was a sudden sense of peace, of quiet within
the chaos. The stop-and-go noise of brakes and horns was behind us, lost in the high-pitched wind-noise of the highway. For
just a moment, there were no words, there was no thinking, there were no reasons, just two people trying to comfort each other
in small ways.
If only for a moment.
At the Nickelodeon
Friday, January 24
It felt like we drove for hours and hours, as if we were going to India, not Indiana. The weather had turned colder, the sky
the color of concrete. After we got off the expressway, we turned right and left and left and right, weaving slowly and steadily.
We never seemed to go slower than thirty, we never seemed to go faster than forty. It was monotonous, but I could feel my
pulse pounding in the throbbing of my hand.
I was in the lead in my old Jetta. We had picked up Paul at his place on 47th and Sidney at his place farther south. Akiko
sat next to me, her hand resting on my leg. Sidney was instantly snoring in the back right corner, while Paul leaned up against
my seat as he quietly called out the directions.
I knew that we had been to this club before, a couple of years ago, but I didn’t have any memory of it. Someone else must
have driven; I was like the passive rat, pulled through the maze in all those Intro Psych experiments who has no memory of
how to get back to the cheese. So Paul navigated and I drove. It was all I could do.
We entered an industrial area, the faceless stucco buildings matching the gray of the darkening sky. Everything was painted
in nameless colors, dozens of layers thick. The horizon was crowded with buildings, two and three stories tall, with faceless
names like QuanTech, DyPro, Questronix, RoMac, places where they could have been making absolutely anything in the world,
or nothing at all, where there could have been hundreds of workers scurrying around or one solitary watchman snoozing in a
chair. The rights followed the lefts, and we never seemed to go straight for more than a couple of blocks. Every now and then
I would glance in the rearview mirror, and see Ridlin’s Crown Vic behind us. When I glanced at the parked cars lining the
road I did a double take. Cop cars. Lots of cop cars, of all kinds. Ridlin must have called in the cavalry. And there they
were, in force, parked by the side of the road, sitting in pairs at the bus stops, walking up and down the sidewalks.
Ahead of us was an empty space with overgrown grass three feet high in the abandoned lots along the side. You could see the
wind, blowing the grass almost sideways in sinuous waves. We slid slowly forward until a narrow street parted the grass and
we saw a building straight ahead, with a large neon sign that said “Nickelodeon.”
It was a large squat structure, a rambling mess that had seen better days. There was a porch around three sides and an awning
out the side, facing a parking lot occupied by fifty or sixty cars. The whole building looked as if it was listing slightly
to the left.
We parked near the building. The cars were mostly busted-out old Detroit iron with Bondo and duct tape on the side panels,
except for one gleaming black Cadillac limo with Wisconsin plates and smoked windows.
I looked beyond the building and there was nothing. We had reached the end of the road.
We were on some kind of promontory, jutting east into the lake. Off to the north you could see the lights along the shore
poking out of the haze. On a clear night you could probably see the bright lights of downtown. Now it was just clouds and
haze and a dim orange glow.
We walked in through the side door under a sign that said EMPLOYEE ENTRANCE. I helped Akiko unload her drum kit, grabbing
the big bass drum with my one good hand and tucking her largest Zildjian cymbal under my left armpit.
Paul opened the door and we walked into a blast of heat and light and aroma; it was the kitchen. It was as bright as the surface
of the sun, and I squinted in the glare. Dozens of Hispanic men in spattered white jackets and sweaty red baseball caps were
scurrying around. The smell that assaulted my nostrils was grease, in all its forms—burgers, fries, pork, melting cheese.
I usually like it greasy, but this was too much even for me, and I could feel my throat starting to close. I reached up to
wipe the sweat off my forehead and dropped the cymbal onto the floor with a deafening crash. The six of us stopped in our
tracks, every neck in our little conga line craned toward me, but none of the kitchen workers missed a beat; it was as if
it was a sound they heard every day, all day long, and they were used to it. I set down the bass drum, scooped up the cymbal,
wedged it back under my arm, then picked up the bass and moved forward.
As we stepped out of the kitchen, my eyes blinked again to adjust to the dark, and I stopped in my tracks, unsure of my footing.
The song playing in the background was coming through a tinny sound system with way too much treble; it was Louis Armstrong
scat-singing “The Heebie Jeebies,” a classic. Whatever medium it was on must have been a classic as well; there was more static
than sound. Then someone bumped into me from behind, then someone bumped into them, sending them ramming up against me again,
and I staggered. And dropped the fucking cymbal again, sending it to the floor with another loud crash. It spun around and
around in ever tighter circles and rang at an ever-increasing pitch, getting right up to the fingernails-on-a-blackboard
level before sizzling to a stop.
The sound silenced the crowd. And then, in the same instant, the lights came on, the music on the sound system was cut off
in mid-phrase, and a torrent of strange sounds came at us from everywhere.
Finally able to see, I looked around. The room was hexagonal, and in the middle was a circular stage, rotating slowly in a
clockwise direction. And arrayed around the outside of the hexagon was a collection of every kind of old-style player-instrument
you could conceive of, and some I couldn’t, all running off electric current: player pianos; player violins, their bows sawing
across the strings and building up little cones of dry rosin underneath them; player saxophones and clarinets, their mouthpieces
hooked up to mechanical bellows rising and falling in a cyclic rhythm; player trumpets and trombones and baritone horns; player
drums of all kinds, and off in the northeast corner, an enormous player organ, pumping away. They were all playing “When the
Saints Go Marching In,” they were all playing out of tune with each other, and they were all playing at slightly different
tempos. It was cacophony, and it was all coming back to me now.
I looked around: Akiko looked stunned. Sidney was cackling loudly, his hairy face thrown back so far you could see his molars.
Paul was smiling a faint little smile. Landreau had dropped his case at his feet and was frozen, his head down and his hands
covering his ears, his mouth open in a silent scream. Ridlin was into his scanning mode, checking every patron.
We stumbled up onto the bandstand. Some folding metal chairs, bent and bruised, were set up for us. It took a minute to get
all of Akiko—a drum kit in one place, and once we had, she held up a hand, politely asking us all to back away. I stretched
up to a standing position and as soon as I heard Landreau play a C-major chord on the chipped hulk of a spinet piano, I groaned.
To say it was out of tune would be putting it mildly; it was nowhere near the key of C, but hovered in a different universe
of sound altogether. He looked at me plaintively; I reached into my jacket, found my star wrench and brandished it over my
head.
“Sir Vincent to the rescue with his mighty scepter,” he said.
Paul looked over at me. “We don’t have a lot of time,” he muttered.
I looked at Jack, looked inside the up right’s lid, and said, “I can maybe give you three octaves, right in the middle. No
deep bass, and don’t go reaching for any high notes.”
He seemed to grimace for a second, then nodded.
So I set to it. Because it was an upright, I could reach right inside and do what I needed to do. I had left my tuning fork
in the car and didn’t want to take the time to run out and get it, so I started struggling to find an A in my head, wandering
around the pitch. Landreau tapped me on the shoulder, and said “Just a bit higher.” I turned the wrench a quarter turn. “Keep
going just a little more,” he said. Another quarter turn and he said, “A little too far, down a hair,” then, “Wait. Stop.
That’s it.” From there it was a straightforward process. But there was one note, a high F, that wouldn’t seem to hold. I—d
adjust it and it would slip back down. If I couldn’t get this one, the whole job would be fucked.
I looked inside; the gear looked stripped, all shiny amid the dust balls.
I looked around in desperation, then turned to Akiko and said, “No gum-chewing in class, young lady.” She eyed me quizzically.
I put my hand out, made a “gimme, gimme” motion, and she took her gum out and dropped it into my palm. I reached into the
guts of the piano, screwed the F to where it needed to be, left the wrench on, and wadded the gum against the gear, holding
it there until it dried out a bit. Then I slowly wiggled the wrench off, stood back, counted to ten, and tried an F-major
chord. It had held.
“My work here is done,” I said to no one in particular, and headed toward the edge.
I was stopped by Paul’s voice, saying, “Well, not entirely.” He was standing holding a microphone in his right hand, keeping
it at arm’s length in obvious distaste.
Of course, I thought, how could you play on a rotating circular stage without amplification? A big guy with a curly blond
beard and a ponytail waddled up onto the stand, and walked over to where I was crouching.
“I’m Egon,” he said. “I’m the manager here.” We shook hands.
“Help me out, Egon,” I said. “Where is the sound system?”
In the middle of the stage, by a large pole, was a tarpaulin that looked like someone had just dumped it on the floor. Egon
lifted the tarp and a cloud of dust wafted up. Below it was an ancient soundboard. He pointed to the side, where the power
switch was. I leaned down and blew on the board, and another cloud floated up. Next to it was a small block of wood, obviously
handmade, bolted to the pole. There were two rusty toggle-switches on it, and a popsicle stick was taped to the bottom of
the right one, limiting how far you could throw the switch. I looked up at Egon.
“What’s the popsicle stick for?” I asked.
“That there’s the switch that controls the stage’s rotation. There’s your regular speed, like now, and your OFF, which is
up, and your high speed, which is down. We rigged it so that stick blocks you from high speed. Trust me—you don’t want to
go there,” he repeated. “The one on the left is for all the player pianos and shit,” and turned his back and hopped off the
stage.
I looked at Paul. He made a point of looking at his watch. I looked at my own; we had maybe five minutes before we were scheduled
to start. “I know you’ll do what you can,” he said. “Maybe we can make some adjustments between sets.”
I did what I could to get the levels right, to bring the piano up and the trumpet down, to clear some of the mud out of the
bass, and to round off the tinny treble. Paul usually carried a small mike that clipped onto the bell of his horn. I rooted
around in his case and found it, praying that it would connect up. I held out the connector of the little mic, and brought
it closer and closer to the cord coming from the board, my arms out straight and pointing inward, like Dr. Frankenstein preparing
to summon the lightning into his laboratory.
“Please,” Paul said, “I can’t stand the suspense.”
With a flourish, I brought the two together. I made myself shake for a few seconds, then dropped the connection to the floor
and headed to the bar.
There’s no way I was going to sit there listening to them play without me while I was stone-cold sober.
The bar wrapped all the way around the north third of the hexagon, between the entrance and the kitchen door, and it was magnificent—an
old mahogany-and-brass classic that had felt the weight of a million elbows perched on its edge. A heavyset barkeep came up
to me, I said “Jack on the rocks and an Old Style draft,” as I settled into a rickety red vinyl barstool.
Akiko was busy with her drums. Paul was blowing into his horn to warm it up. Sidney was playing trills, of all things, on
the tuba. Landreau was touching the piano tentatively, the way a man might reach out to touch a leper. Ridlin’s reed was in
his mouth, getting moist, but he was turning his head, sweeping the room.
I decided to take a peek myself, and it was a motley crowd indeed. It looked as if everyone already had a half a dozen drinks
in them. Most of them were males, most of them were obscenely fat, most of them were wearing greasy ball caps with a sharp
break in the bill, and all of them were loud, laughing, slapping each other on the back. There were maybe a dozen women in
the room, and they all seemed to be smoking as if this would be their last one for a month, taking long slow concentrated
drags, barely letting any out, then taking the next ones, as if they felt they had to inhale smoke with every breath of air
they took.
I lit one myself, and self-consciously coughed. I found an ashtray on the bar, already full, nudged some dead butts out of
the way, and set my own carefully down. As I started to turn away, the barkeep set down my shot-and-a-beer and swept the ashtray
off the bar, freshly lit cigarette and all, dumped it somewhere behind the bar, and banged it down empty front of me.
I thumbed another one from the pack, lit it, and held onto it.
I went back to looking around the room, checking out all the player instruments, when I saw her. She was sitting in one of
the hexagon’s corners, in a dark space, out of the light, a glass of red wine sitting in front of her. She was wearing a long
black dress, closed all the way to her neck, with a string of dark gray pearls in the front. She looked fabulous: rich, slim,
elegant, sexy, sophisticated, demure. In a place like this, she stuck out.
No, not Laura; her mother, Amelia Della Chiesa. She was almost as tall as Laura, but less voluptuous, with a little less flesh
in the bust and the hips, as if time had carved the excess off her. Her cheekbones were sharper, her hair more severely styled.
Her skin was that same flawless olive tone, and polished smooth. She was holding a cigarette, cocked at an angle. Every now
and then she would reach out and flick it over the ashtray, but I didn’t see her actually inhale it. She was sitting very
still, her right leg crossed over her left, not moving a muscle. And she was staring, but wasn’t making any attempt to hide
it. It was a bold, frank stare, unwavering, unblinking.
