Dead Land

by Sara Paretsky

  She stopped and eyed me narrowly. “What’s your interest in this?”

  “Just a curious bystander. I grew up in South Chicago and I vaguely remember SLICK from when U.S. Steel was closing the South Works plant. SLICK had a plan for repurposing the site, but I don’t think they ever got funding for it.”

  The woman grimaced. “Name of the song for getting the city to invest in the South Side. Big plans and nothing ever comes of them. The same thing may happen to this little beach proposal, but Coop—the guy who got hustled out just now—seems to think it’s more than that. Or maybe he resents any change to the lakefront. Some people do.”

  “Who is Coop?”

  “You could say he’s a professional protestor, except that would imply someone’s paying him. But no one really knows who he is. He showed up a year or so ago with a big dog. He seems to spend his life walking up and down the lakefront with it. He apparently spends a lot of time in the library studying up on the history of the lakefront parks—he knows more about Burnham than I do. Than Mona and her cronies do, for that matter.”

  “The meeting seemed chaotic,” I said. “Is Leo in charge of SLICK’s planning? Is that why he was making the presentation?”

  She pulled a face. “Oh, no. It’s typical chaos where SLICK is concerned. They got some kind of grant to digitize their maps and so on, which Leo did for them. Mona tried making the presentation, but she couldn’t figure out how to run PowerPoint or to match her remarks with the slides. It would have been funny if it hadn’t been so pathetic, but they had to ask the young man to take over.”

  I was just as glad I hadn’t been in the room for that part of the meeting. I wondered about the woman’s interest—she apparently knew a lot about Park District plans.

  “I’m just a local resident. Tired of SLICK being a mouthpiece for the Park District without taking the neighborhood wishes into account. The landfill may be a good idea, but it’s like everything else in this town—no transparency. Decisions made in private meetings where money changes hands. I’ve lived here for fifty-three years. I’m tired of it.”

  She spelled her name for me, Nashita Lyndes. I handed her one of my cards, which identifies me as an investigator.

  “An investigator?” She brightened. “Were you here to dig up information on the city’s plans?”

  “Sorry, Ms. Lyndes: I was here with the soccer players. Anyway, trying to find information on anything this city is planning would require a nuclear-powered shovel. A mere steam-powered machine couldn’t handle the job.”

  2

  Savages

  Bernie had come back into the room, not looking for me, but to talk to Leo. She seemed to be pleading with him about something; he looked at the SLICK officers and shook his head regretfully.

  “Some people are born without spine,” she said as she joined me at the back of the room.

  “And it’s your job to inject a few bone cells to stimulate growth?” I said sardonically.

  “If it would work!”

  Bernie ran to catch up with her team, which was heading to the parking lot of a large strip mall on Forty-seventh Street. I followed more slowly: she had to make sure her girls were leaving with a responsible adult.

  When she’d finished, her mouth and her shoulders drooped. “These girls, they were my whole life for nine weeks and now, poof! It’s over, they’re gone, as if it had never happened.”

  “You start another segment next week, right?” I asked.

  “At a West Side park. I begged to stay with these girls, but the Park District has no more money for programs in this neighborhood.”

  I shared her outrage: the city can come up with funds for landfill and a new beach but not for a group of African-American and Latinx girls.

  “Aren’t they going out for pizza? Why don’t you join them—they adore you, they’d love to have you there.”

  “It’s not organized. Some will go with their families tonight, but others are saving their coupons for later.”

  “Peter’s buying me a birthday drink at Sal’s before dinner. Want to join us?”

  Peter was Peter Sansen, the archaeologist I’d been going out with for the last few months. Sal’s was the Golden Glow, the bar owned by an old friend of mine.

  “Your birthday! Ma foi—je suis crétin! I forgot. Of course I will come.” She grinned roguishly. “And I will be very tactful and let him take you to dinner alone. Anyway, later on, Angela and I are going roller-skating with the rest of our group.”

  Angela Creedy, one of Northwestern’s basketball stars, was sharing an apartment in a rickety Victorian house with Bernie and two other student athletes.

  As we walked to the car, Bernie enthralled me with her shrewd decisions in today’s game.

  Time was when Forty-seventh Street mostly held bars and tiny shops that catered to Bronzeville, back when the Loop banks gouged African-Americans and the downtown shops barred them from the premises—except, of course, as janitors. Now there were blocks of new housing, big impersonal chain stores, gyms, and a giant liquor outlet, which had hastened the death of the old bars.

  Houses and shops ended at the Illinois Central railroad tracks, the eastern boundary of the neighborhood, but the street itself continued east under the tracks, feeding into Lake Shore Drive. Between the Drive and the railway embankment was a narrow strip of land being returned to prairie; the parking lot I’d used lay there.

  As we headed under the tracks, we heard the kind of hollow tinkling made by a xylophone, discordant, disturbing.

  At six o’clock, runners, cyclists, picnickers were thick on the ground, heading through the viaduct to a footbridge that crossed the Drive. Someone wearing headphones and pushing a runner’s baby buggy bumped into me and swore at me. I moved closer to a pillar and finally saw where the music was coming from: a figure shrouded in gray, bent over a red plastic piano, like the one Schroeder plays in Peanuts. Like Schroeder, the figure was getting an amazing amount of sound out of the toy.

  I hadn’t heard her when I walked under the viaduct earlier in the afternoon, but she clearly had set up housekeeping there. If she’d been asleep earlier, I suppose her gray rags had blended into the gray underpass.

  I was trying to push Bernie along, but she was listening wide-eyed to an ominous rhythm the pianist was producing in the instrument’s lowest octave.

  “Do you hear that?” she demanded. “It’s ‘Savage.’”

  I shook my head, uncomprehending.

  “How are you not knowing it? It’s the greatest song of the last ten years, about this woman Indian chief. Her name was Anacaona, and the Spanish murdered her when she wouldn’t be their whore. My whole high school sang it for First Nations Day, but it’s so much more than that. Like, for women, when we have a march, to protest rape or the horrible incel bastards, we drum and we sing it. Who is playing this song in this place? Is there a protest? Should we be joining?”

  Bernie tried to sing, but she couldn’t find her way to the pitch or the rhythm. All I could make out from her tuneless chanting were the words “savage” and “cruel.”

  The pianist suddenly brought the tempo down. The music shifted from an Afro-pop beat to a heavy three-two meter. After a few measures, I made out what sounded like the lament from Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas. I began to sing, “‘Remember me, remember me, but forget my fate—’” Bernie cut me off. “No, no, that’s not how it goes: it’s ‘Remember me, and announce my fate.’”

  “Sorry,” I said meekly. “I was singing Purcell’s version. Who wrote the one you know?”

  “Lydia Zamir. First she was an ordinary musician, but then she started writing songs about women, you know, like for #MeToo. She was in love with this man, and they traveled around to different rallies, and then they were shot and killed at one of these horrible mass murders. Some crétin with too many guns opened fire on them.”

  Bernie glared at me, as though demanding that I deal with the problem of idiots with too many guns. When I didn’t say anythin
g, she said, “It’s very strange to hear Zamir’s music like this, under a railway track in Chicago.”

  I walked slowly toward the shrouded figure—I assumed it was a woman, because the body was so slight, but I couldn’t tell. I got close enough to see that the instrument was a miniature upright, the pint-size keyboard about eighteen inches from the ground. The red plastic case was chipped and scuffed. When I squatted, hoping to ask about the music, the figure scuttled toward the back of the viaduct, clutching the piano.

  Bernie’s fingers went to her mouth. “Oh, no—she’s scared. I wanted to ask how she knows this music. Maybe she was a friend of Zamir’s—that would be totally amazing!”

  She moved cautiously, as if she were approaching a squirrel in a forest, but the woman howled, turning her back to us.

  A cyclist stopped next to us. “This isn’t a zoo where you can stare at the animals. This is a woman who is entitled to her privacy.”

  “But she is out here, in public,” Bernie objected. “I am not treating her like a specimen, but she knows an important song. Why cannot I ask her how she knows it?”

  “Because she doesn’t want to talk to you. Surely her body language makes that clear.” The cyclist positioned herself between the woman and Bernie and me.

  “You know her?” I asked. “She seems very vulnerable here. Shouldn’t we try to get her help—a doctor, a bed?”

  The cyclist curled her lip. “Are you a mobile social worker? She doesn’t want to be in an institution.”

  “Are you a mobile psychic?” I asked. “You channel this person’s thoughts and wishes to the larger world?”

  Her nostrils flared. “You may think you’re being funny, but you don’t know what you’re talking about. People who know her, know to leave her alone. The fact that you want to bother her means you don’t know her.”

  “What’s going on here, Judith?” A man had appeared from the lake side of the viaduct, a dog trotting at his heels. The man was wearing khaki shorts and a T-shirt with a faded sunflower outlined on it. When he stopped to talk to the cyclist, the dog sat, staring up at me with wide sad eyes.

  “These are two busybodies.” Judith jerked her head at Bernie and me. “Well-meaning, perhaps, but not respectful.”

  “We are not busybodies,” Bernie cried. “We are respecting the piano player, but this Judith, she thinks it is her job to keep all the world from knowing about this music. And as for you, I know you from the meeting just now, when you were attacking Leo. Maybe it is time you yourself minded your own business!”

  “Yes,” I said. “Didn’t the police escort you from the SLICK meeting an hour or so ago?”

  He smacked a fist into his palm. The dog watched him, hackles stiff. “Don’t tell me you’re one of Mona Borsa’s stooges. What she do, hire you to follow me—”

  “You’re not important enough for me to follow. You’re barely important enough to talk to,” I snapped. “There’s a talented musician living here in squalor and your buddy Judith has appointed herself spokeswoman. I want to ask if she wants medical attention—”

  “And me, I am wanting to know how she learned the song ‘Savage,’” Bernie interrupted.

  “And neither of you has any right to disturb her. We look after her!” Coop cried.

  “You’re doing a heck of a job,” I said. “For starters, she needs food, clothes, a bath, and a proper bed. She also deserves access to a proper piano: only a real artist could get sound like that from a dinky plastic job.”

  “And that’s your business because of what? You’re some music talent scout?” Coop jeered.

  Judith said, “The city seems to be filled with social workers who think they know what’s best for people without asking them. Whenever anyone forces this woman into a shelter or a hospital, she runs away.”

  “Does she have a name?” I asked.

  “If she does, that’s none of your business. All you need to know is that she’s allergic to most people, especially to strangers. She lets Coop bring her food, she trusts Bear. Sometimes she trusts me, as well. You can set your mind at rest and go help people who want your assistance.”

  Presumably Bear was the dog.

  “We are not social workers,” Bernie bristled. “Me, I am a hockey player and a soccer coach and Vic, she is a detective. If the police—”

  “Detective?” Coop shouted. “Then Mona Borsa did cross a big red line! She knew the police couldn’t arrest me for speaking up in the meeting, so she hired you to be a provocateur—”

  “Enough!” I cried. “You can ask me any question about who I am and what I’m doing here, but don’t jump down my throat without facts. I’m not that inexperienced kid you attacked in the SLICK meeting, so back off.”

  Bear, the dog, was looking from Coop to me, not sure whether he needed to intervene. He got to his feet and stood between us. I took a few steps back.

  “You weren’t arrested?” Bernie said to Coop. “Why not?”

  “First Amendment,” I said tersely. “He only spoke, even if he was yelling: he didn’t touch anyone.”

  “At least you’re a cop who knows the law, but what the fuck were you doing at that meeting, if Mona Borsa didn’t hire you to bird-dog me?”

  “Guess what? My world doesn’t revolve around you. But your anger is disturbing the one person you claim to be protecting.”

  Although some passersby were keeping well clear of us, we were attracting a crowd. Whether it was Coop’s and my argument, or the people staring at her, the pianist had backed as far into the wall as she could, clutching her piano and whimpering.

  “Yes, and she knows important music,” Bernie said. “Which is the only reason I want to talk to her.”

  “Don’t.” The woman Judith had been silent while Coop and I were arguing, but she turned now to Bernie. “She’s been badly wounded and she can’t tell the difference between a stranger who wants to support her and a stranger who wants to hurt her.”

  Her tone was still arrogant, but her words made sense; I put my arm across Bernie’s shoulders. “It’s a good point, piccola. Too many people are here, and we’re all getting in each other’s hair. Let’s get up to the Glow.”

  Bernie let me escort her through the underpass, but her feet dragged. She paused on the far side to look back. Coop and Bear were squatting next to the pianist, who slowly returned to her nest of blankets and crates.

  Judith waited on the sidelines while the woman adjusted her piano’s legs until it seemed stable. When the woman began to play again, Judith resumed her ride; the rest of the crowd dissolved. Bernie was listening intently to the playing.

  “That song I also know!” she finally said. “At least, I think so.”

  She began singing in her tuneless way,

  “The art of loving

  is the art of death

  Love’s opposite isn’t hate, not hate

  Love’s opposite is lonesome

  One lone swan.”

  “That song is beautiful, but so—so mélancolique, Vic, is it not?”

  “Very,” I agreed, but I was listening to the piano: mixed in with the banging in the bottom octave, the pianist was weaving the melody from Grieg’s “Swan,” one of the lieder my mother used to sing.

  3

  Trader’s Folly

  Bernie left me outside the Glow. She’d brooded over the episode all during the drive, not so much over the homeless singer, but over Judith and Coop’s high-handedness.

  “And you—why didn’t you help me get past him to talk to her? She is not his property, enfin. Have you become too cautious in your old age to stand up for the right thing to do?”

  “Maybe so. Old, covered with barnacles, or maybe mildew, which makes my joints creak too much to move fast. But please remember that I took an afternoon from work to watch you coach your South Side Sisters. I’d like a word of thanks, instead of an attack for not intervening with a woman who howled with pain when I tried to approach her.”

  “I do thank you, Vic,” Bernie
said in a wooden tone. “My girls played hard; they were worth watching. Still, I am not much in the mood for sociability with you and your friends. They will all agree with you and then I will become really cross and we will have a big fight, which should not happen on your birthday.”

  “We elderly don’t have enough energy to fight you, Bernie, but go on home. Say hi to Angela.”

  Bernie kissed me lightly on the cheek to show no lasting ill will and headed toward the L.

  Peter Sansen was already standing at the bar, talking to the owner, Sal Barthele, when I came in. His face lit up when he saw me, which took away my grumpiness.

  “Happy birthday, beautiful. Sal has created a cocktail just for you.”

  Sal nodded at Erica, her head bartender. While Sal turned her back to me and poured and stirred from a collection of bottles, Erica went to the sound system. Sal handed me a glass just as Piaf’s throaty voice came on singing, “Je ne regrette rien.”

  “Seems like a good way to start a new year, Warshawski: regret nothing.”

  I leaned across the mahogany bar to kiss her and saw she’d been working with bourbon. I don’t usually like it, but the cocktail was a perfect balance of sweet, sour, and bitter.

  “Patent it, quickly,” I said. “It’s mind altering. You don’t want one of your enterprising traders to steal the recipe and license it.”

  The Golden Glow is two blocks from the Board of Trade, and for the hour or two after the closing bell, it’s usually packed with traders celebrating victories or drowning sorrows. We’d arrived between that crush, and the smaller crowd that comes in when the theaters close. Peter was drinking another of Sal’s signature cocktails, Trader’s Folly, which has powered more than one stupid investment decision.