Nate Rosen Investigates

by Ron Levitsky

  Rosen said, “I didn’t picture you as such a traditionalist.”

  “Some people think I’m ass-backwards on just about everything.” He tapped the legal pad. “Like this follow-up to my editorial yesterday concerning the Denae Tyler case.”

  Rosen’s stomach tightened. Whatever Hermes wanted from him must have something to do with that case.

  Hermes continued, “There’s a real division in the African-American community over the verdict.”

  “I can understand why.”

  “Of course. Who wants to see two murdering rapists get acquitted? But the larger issue—they’ve got to understand the larger issue. Tell me what you think of this.”

  Hermes read from the page, “In his autobiographical novel, Night, Elie Wiesel recounts the story of the Holocaust, which took his father’s life and put Wiesel in a concentration camp. He writes, ‘We were without strength, without illusions.’ Today, many people within the African-American community feel the same way—that we are a people without strength, without illusions. In that sense, others would do to us what the Nazis did to the Jews. Not content with a physical ghetto, they would create a ghetto of the mind.”

  Hermes looked up. “Well?”

  “I don’t quite follow where you’re going with it.”

  “I want to use the Denae Tyler case to differentiate between those fighting for a level playing field versus all those gimmegimme crybabies.”

  “I still don’t—”

  “The police fucked up—right?”

  “Yes.”

  “And they fucked up because they rousted two young black men as just a couple niggers instead of following proper police procedure. So what do we do about it?”

  Rosen cocked his head slightly. The way Hermes phrased it—like a Talmudic question.

  The publisher continued, “We can demand that the police treat us fairly and kick-ass until they do, or we can blubber about the city hiring 15.5 percent more African-Americans as cops. Which would you do?”

  “I don’t think it’s really an either-or question. Can’t you do both?”

  Hermes shook his head. “I say no. You can’t stand like a man and whine like a child at the same time.”

  Staring at Rosen, his eyes grew hard. This wasn’t merely another editorial position; something had touched Hermes deeply.

  Rosen cleared his throat. “You’re obviously not planning to run for office in the near future.”

  “No. I’ve been called lots of names by my own people, but like somebody once told me, it’s what you call yourself that’s important.”

  “That somebody sounds like a wise man.”

  A smile spread like butter over Hermes’ face, and he nodded at the portrait behind him. “My grandfather, Oliver Jones.”

  “You resemble him a great deal.”

  “You’ve probably seen him a dozen times without realizing it.”

  Rosen studied the portrait, then shrugged.

  Hermes laughed. “Ever see Gone With the Wind?”

  “Sure. You mean . . . he was in it?”

  “That and Birth of a Nation among others. You’ve seen him shuffle, tug at his hair, ‘yowsa,’ and roll his eyes in dozens of movies—and never knew his name. ‘Bug-Eyes’ is what they called him. That and ‘coon’ and ‘nigger.’ But he endured without a whimper. Whenever we young’uns would complain about something, he’d say, ‘Do what the Bible tells you—clap your hand over your mouth.’ That’s what he did.”

  “‘Thus the Lord blessed the latter years of Job’s life more than the former,’” Rosen replied.

  “Yeah, from the Book of Job. That isn’t a very popular attitude either. You know what Richard Wright said in Black Boy: ‘The white South said that it knew “niggers,” . . . Well, the white South had never known me.’” Well, nobody knew my grandfather—not the white filmmakers who cheated and debased him, or the civil rights groups that called him an Uncle Tom. Nobody knew that he supported thirteen people, organized free theatrical performances for black people throughout the country, or that he gave money to help establish the very civil rights groups that later attacked him.”

  Rosen asked, “How would your grandfather feel about your views?”

  Hermes’ eyes hardened once again. “He said being black was like wearing God’s brand. You should wear it with pride, but it’s a brand just the same. He didn’t think things could ever really change. In that respect he was wrong. In fact, that’s why I asked you here. A group of civic organizations has formed a citizens’ committee to monitor the police departments of Chicago and its suburbs. I’ve been asked to chair the committee.”

  “By ‘monitor,’ you mean—”

  “Keep track of police harassment, put pressure on government bodies to end it, offer legal assistance to those who’ve been harassed—that sort of thing.”

  “And you want my opinion as to its feasibility.”

  “No, I want you to be its chief counsel.”

  Rosen leaned forward. “What?”

  “Don’t act so surprised—you’ll make me want to rethink the offer. This is important work, Nate. As important as what you’re doing for the Committee to Defend the Constitution.”

  “There must be a few hundred attorneys right here in Chicago who’d do a good job. Why me?”

  Hermes tapped his pen on the legal pad, as if ticking off reasons. “The very fact that you’re not involved in local politics—nobody’s got a grudge against you. Also, you’re smart, tough, and have a moral quality refreshing in a lawyer. There’s something else, something harder to explain.” He nodded at his grandfather’s portrait. “The way you acted in court—the way you felt for the victim’s family, even though they were on the other side. Like I said, it’s hard to explain, but I think you carry God’s brand, just like my grandfather did. You’ll do an excellent job for us.”

  Rosen rubbed his eyes. “I don’t know. I’ve been with the CDC a long time.”

  “The longer in one place, the harder to change. You’re not getting any younger. Stay at the CDC a few more years, and you won’t ever be able to leave. This job in Chicago will give you lots of exposure and a lot more money. Maybe your last chance to really make something of yourself. Besides, you’d be with your daughter. Shouldn’t you be thinking of her?”

  “Sarah,” he half whispered. Hermes was right. Rosen shouldn’t be thinking about anyone except her.

  “I need a favor.”

  The other man nodded. “If it involves facilitating your move to Chicago—”

  “Not that. What can you tell me about Byron Ellsworth?”

  “You mean Ellsworth-Leary Investments? Already planning to invest the extra salary we’re going to pay you?”

  Maybe he’d meant it as a joke, but Hermes wasn’t smiling. His pen beat a tattoo on the yellow pad, while he waited for Rosen to explain himself.

  “I know it’s a big company.”

  The other man snorted. “Like a dinosaur was a big animal.”

  “You know much about it?”

  “Not so much the international sphere, but we ran a series on Chicago development over the past few years, and EL has played a big part. It’s gentrified several neighborhoods, displacing quite a number of ‘poor folk,’ as my grandfather would’ve said. Its name has come up during discussions about a new stadium, a third airport, casino gambling—just about every big project that’s considered for the city. You’ve seen its logo?”

  “The sun symbol?”

  “One of our writers described it more accurately as an octopus. Not just because its tentacles seem to reach everywhere, but that it covers all its questionable dealings with a heavy supply of ink.”

  Rosen had figured as much. Corporations like EL kept their dealings well hidden from the public eye. And what was true for a business was even truer for its owners. He’d been lucky to see Byron Ellsworth once. He might never have that chance again.

  He asked, “What do you know about the Ellsworths—I mean their personal
lives?”

  “The same thing you’d know by reading the business section and society page. Ellsworth constantly surprises people—they don’t expect a tennis pretty boy to be so sharp and tough.”

  “And his wife?”

  “Big money, big heart. Into art and charity. I’ve seen her at lots of functions.” He leaned back and slowly rubbed his jaw. “She’s got that way about her.”

  “What way?”

  “The way certain rich people have—people who’ve been rich all their lives, so they don’t think about it. So they can have breakfast with the Queen of England, then eat lunch with some welfare mother, and treat them both the same. You know what I’m talking about?”

  Rosen remembered the way she’d spoken to Esther Melendez in the principal’s office. “Yes, I know exactly what you mean. How do the Ellsworths get along?”

  “How the hell would I know? One thing for sure, he doesn’t sit around the house in his undershirt drinking beer.” Hermes leaned forward, his hands clasped together. “What’s this all about?”

  Rosen told him about Nina’s death and her mother’s suspicion about Martin Bixby.

  He concluded by saying, “Bixby’s a friend of Kate Ellsworth. Then there’s the negative publicity a murder in Arbor Shore would cause—her husband wouldn’t like that.”

  “No he wouldn’t. Is that why you’re asking about their personal life—trying to pressure them to keep the case open?”

  “Not just that. Something’s strange about that house. After all, Nina was a beautiful, vulnerable girl. And Ellsworth—I don’t think he and his wife are close.”

  Laughing, Hermes slapped his desk.

  Rosen asked, “You don’t believe something could be going on in that house?”

  The other man shook his head slowly. “I was in journalism school with a guy from Arbor Shore. He told me that, at cocktail parties, car keys were thrown into a hat, and the wives would go home with whoever’s keys they pulled out. Of course I believe something’s going on—I’d be surprised if there wasn’t.”

  “Then why—”

  “I laughed, because you think you can get something on them. It’s been tried. Believe me, to block some of Ellsworth’s real estate deals, I’ve tried. No luck. The dirty laundry’s hanging safely behind that big wall of their estate.”

  “Did you have no luck because of Soldier?”

  Hermes’ eyes narrowed. He held perfectly still, even after the pencil in his hand cracked. “What do you know about Masaryk?”

  Rosen wanted to say, “Not half as much as you just told me,” but instead replied, “That’s part of the favor I need.”

  Staring at his broken pencil for a long time, Hermes finally pressed his intercom. “Sherry, please come in here.”

  His tall secretary stood in the doorway. “Yes, sir?”

  “Nate, you’ve met my secretary. She’s also my daughter-in-law. Going to give me my first grandchild in about three months. Don’t you think she should be home resting?”

  Sherry laughed. “You’d be helpless without me.”

  “Well, that’s the truth. Punch up our file on Edward Masaryk. You know how this damn machine hates me.”

  She worked over his shoulder, putting in a series of access codes. “There. You know how to scroll the screen.”

  “Once it’s up, I’m fine. Thanks.”

  Hermes waited for his secretary to close the door behind her. Tapping his broken pencil on the edge of his desk, he studied the screen.

  “Masaryk was a Green Beret, first in Vietnam and then in Latin America. Rumored to have been with the Bolivians who killed Che Guevara in ’67. A few years later he was reported to have been in Uruguay advising government troops in counterinsurgency.”

  “That’s where he must’ve learned his Spanish.”

  “We don’t know anything about him during the next ten years, before he helped Ellsworth deal with the kidnapping of his executives.”

  “I heard about that.”

  “Did you also hear that a few months after Ellsworth’s men were returned, one of the suspected kidnappers was killed in Egypt? Of course, the Israelis were suspected, but they denied it.”

  “You think Masaryk was involved?”

  Hermes nodded and, for a moment, looked down at his desk. “Now Masaryk’s head of security for EL and reports directly to Ellsworth. The two of them are very close. He even lives on the estate, like part of the family.”

  He switched off the computer, and the two men sat quietly. Rosen grew uneasy, not because of what Hermes had said, but because the editor himself was afraid. Behind him the portrait of his grandfather looked down with calm assurance, the way Hermes himself had always appeared. Until now.

  Rosen asked, “What about Masaryk’s personal relationship with the Ellsworth family?”

  “I was only interested in EL’s business dealings.”

  “Would you look into it?”

  Hermes rubbed his jaw. “You haven’t told me if you’re interested in my offer.”

  “Chief counsel? I don’t know. It’s something I’ll have to think about.”

  “You think about my offer, and I”ll look into Masaryk and the Ellsworths. Call me at the end of the week. I’d like your acceptance covered in the Sunday papers.”

  “If I accept.”

  “You will. It’s too good an offer to pass up. I’ll have the package ready for you on Friday—job description, salary, the works. I can tell you, with perks it’ll be about $90,000. That might not be much to a corporate attorney, but for someone in civil liberties—.”

  “It’s a very civil figure.”

  Chuckling, Hermes stood and extended his hand. “I’m looking forward to working with you, Nate. Talk to you soon.”

  Back on the street, Rosen walked toward the “L” station vaguely dissatisfied. Hermes had promised to help, but as a parent might reluctantly agree to “think about something” to assuage a petulant child.

  Then there was Hermes’ offer. Rosen’s present job with the CDC was more a way of life, one he’d chosen even over his marriage. It was important work, but maybe not any more important than what he’d be doing in Chicago. And he’d be with Sarah, especially now. After all these years, could he really change?

  He should’ve taken the underground Howard Street line straight north to Evanston and the Nahagians’ condo. But it was still early. Instead he climbed up the clanging metal steps above the street to ride the Ravenswood “L.” It clattered through the Loop—past the State of Illinois Building, shiny as tinfoil; the huge Merchandise Mart; and the red brick beehive ghetto of Cabrini Green—then jogged northwest in successive right angles that took him into his old neighborhood. Kimball and Lawrence Avenues, the end of the line, intersected a few miles directly north of Lucila’s Logan Square, but the two neighborhoods were worlds apart.

  He walked west on Lawrence Avenue where, as a little boy, he had held his mother’s hand while she shopped. The kosher butcher, the kosher baker, the fresh fruit and vegetable stands, old women wearing babushkas chattering in Yiddish to one another were all gone, buried with his mother years ago. Now the shop signs were written in Greek, Spanish and, most of all, Korean. The old Jewish delicatessen had been renamed Aristotle’s.

  Turning up Pulaski, he passed a series of well-kept apartment buildings and two flats, all with front porches and neat postage stamp—sized lawns. As a boy leaving heder, he’d walked these same streets dozens of times while struggling to balance the books under his arms. The times he should’ve gone straight home, but his father was working at the tailor shop, and his mother wouldn’t tell.

  He crossed Foster Avenue and walked into Gompers Park, a gently rolling green expanse with a branch of the Chicago River meandering through. As others had done so many years ago, young boys on their way home from school played catch or stood on the bridge talking to the wizened fishermen who came every day to catch their catfish dinner. Older boys walked with their girlfriends, stopping under a tree to kis
s. Back then, he’d watch them shyly—knowing that for a boy to be alone with a girl was wrong and that his having stolen the time from his studies to watch them made him equally a sinner. Yet he could never stop looking, or lying to his father about where he’d been. He’d watch them, inhale the aroma of freshly mown grass, hear the splashing water, and remember the Song of Songs:

  A garden locked

  Is my own, my bride,

  A fountain locked,

  A sealed-up spring.

  Your limbs are an orchard of pomegranates

  And of all luscious fruits . . .

  It was the place, years later, where he’d first kissed Bess.

  An old man sat on a bench. Nearly bald and peering through thick glasses, he wore an old gray suit with large lapels. When the old man swiped at a fly, the thumb and forefinger of his right hand pressed together as if holding a needle, and Rosen remembered. It was Hyman, another tailor who had sometimes worked for his father.

  “May I join you?” Rosen asked.

  Hyman squinted, then smiled and patted the bench seat. “It’s nice to have company besides these farshtinkener flies. You from around here?”

  “I know someone who used to live here.”

  “Then I know him too. Who is he?”

  Rosen hesitated. “Aaron—Aaron Rosen.”

  The old man nodded deeply. “Of course, Isaac’s son—the great doctor. No, Aaron doesn’t live around here no more. He’s up in the suburbs. That’s what happened to all the Jews around here. Either they moved to the suburbs or to the cemetery.”

  “Not my . . . not his father.”

  “Old Isaac—no. The Angel of Death wouldn’t bother, for fear of getting into an argument with him.”

  “Is he all right?”

  “All right? At our age, if you look in the paper and don’t see your name in the obituaries, you’re all right. He comes here sometimes with Aaron and the grandchildren.”

  “Aaron wasn’t his only son.”

  Hyman ran a hand over his bald pate. “No. There was another son . . . David . . . that’s right, he has the same name as my boy. David. He went to Israel. I think maybe he’s a rabbi. That’s what Isaac wanted—his boys to be rabbis. He never became one himself, though he was a real Talmud Torah man. He was hard though, harder than God. Oh look.” He pointed to a fisherman. “He caught a big one. Mazel tov!”