Dead Land

by Sara Paretsky

  “Bernie acquitted herself well as a coach?” Sal asked.

  “Impressively,” I said. “Ardor and smarts—an unbeatable combo. The hard part came afterward.”

  While I was describing the wild community meeting, Murray Ryerson came in. Sal stocks Dark Lord beer just for him; she had a bottle open by the time he reached the bar.

  “What happened at the SLICK meeting?” Murray asked. “Something the boy reporter needs to know about?”

  “Don’t think it will be a blip on Global’s radar,” I said.

  Murray used to be one of the top investigative reporters in the Midwest, writing for the Herald-Star, until Global Entertainment bought the Star. He still sort of covers Illinois politics, when the editors don’t think the story will threaten any of their pals in power, but he mostly does Chicago fluff on Global’s cable station.

  “The Park District wants to fill in part of the lake at Forty-seventh to create a beach there,” I added. “A highly inflamed guy named Coop made the usual tedium interesting, but the part of the day that’s stuck with me is this pianist Bernie and I encountered. She was banging on a toy piano as if it were a drum, but she could get it to make music. The unusual part was the way she cut well-known bits of the classical repertoire into an R and B sound. Purcell and Grieg were the two I recognized.”

  “Come on,” Murray scoffed. “You say she did this on a Peanuts piano? You were under a viaduct at a busy intersection. You heard what Bernie persuaded you to hear, not what some homeless woman was banging on a piece of plastic.”

  I flushed. “Don’t act ignorant in public, Murray. Yo-Yo Ma could play Bach on a washtub bass on the floor of the Board of Trade and everyone would recognize it. But Bernie knew the words to one of the songs, about a woman murdered by the Spanish in the fifteenth century. She was the head of one of the nations that the Spanish encountered when they arrived. Sad to say, I hadn’t heard of her, but her name was something like Ancona.”

  “Anacaona,” Sal said. “From Hispaniola. Where they were so primitive before European arrival that women could be leaders of the nation. My sisters and I grew up on her story. The Spanish wanted her gold and her land. When she fought back and lost, they offered her a choice between being a whore or death. She chose death.”

  Sal and her sisters had been born in Chicago, but their parents were Haitian émigrés.

  “If you go there today, you see hardly any trace of the original inhabitants,” she added. “It’s hard to imagine them because people are either like me, descended from Africans who didn’t exist there in 1492, or from the Europeans. It’s disturbing, as though one is always walking on the feet of a ghost.”

  Murray had been scrolling through his phone while Sal was talking. “Looks like Lydia Zamir wrote the song Bernie recognized today.”

  He handed his phone to Sal, who took it to her sound system at the back of the bar. “The Albatross Song” from Patricia Barber’s Higher was playing. At the end of the cut, Sal stuck Murray’s phone into the dock and turned up the volume. The sound of a grand piano filled the bar, ominous chords rumbling from the bottom of the bass clef. From the high treble came darting notes like a hummingbird diving into a flower and quickly pulling back. And then a contralto began the song that Bernie hadn’t been able to sing:

  “Anacaona, queen and chief,

  You were a savage

  Yes, a savage.

  You couldn’t comprehend

  Why the Spanish took your land

  You were too savage

  For European law and rule.

  To a savage we seem cruel

  We landed on your shore,

  Cried, ‘Choose death or be our whore!’

  We killed because

  We are so savage.”

  At the end of the chorus, the piano segued, just as the woman under the viaduct had done with her plastic upright, to the funereal meter of Purcell. The vocal line took up “Remember me, but announce my fate” for a few measures, and then, while the piano stuck to “Dido’s Lament,” the singer began wailing the single word “savage” over and over.

  The volume and the intensity of the music brought conversations in the room to a halt. A couple of tables signaled for their bills. One woman clicked to the exit on stilettos and said, “I come to a bar for a drink, not for political indoctrination. I won’t be back.”

  Sal swallowed a scowl and nodded to her bartender. Erica began moving among the tables with samples of Trader’s Folly on a tray. After a few minutes, people were talking and laughing again.

  At the bar, Peter read over my shoulder as I scrolled through the highlights of Lydia Zamir’s life. Bernie’s passionate summary had skimped on some of the facts. Zamir had grown up in Kansas, where her gifts as a pianist were recognized early. After study at the New England Conservatory of Music, she’d played with some regional symphonies and summer festivals. At a festival in Santa Fe, she met and apparently fell in love with a Chilean-American writer named Hector Palurdo.

  Over the course of a few years, Zamir stopped performing the classical repertoire. She taught herself guitar—“Really, a piano with six strings instead of eighty-eight,” she said in an interview—and began setting Palurdo’s poetry to music, along with that of Mistral and Neruda, two earlier Chilean poets.

  Then, four years ago, Zamir and Palurdo were performing at a fund-raiser at an outdoor venue in Kansas when the shooting occurred. Someone opened fire from a hilltop. Seventeen people were killed, including Palurdo. Fifty-two were wounded. Zamir apparently survived. She’d held a concert in Hector’s memory, with proceeds going to the families of the dead, and then she’d stopped singing.

  “She grew up in Kansas and he was killed there. Jealous lover?” Murray, who’d retrieved his phone from Sal, was hunting the same information. “She’s from some map-dot called Eudora and the murders were near Salina, a bigger map-dot. . . . About three hours from her hometown—no distance for an angry lover to cover.”

  He scrolled further, reading aloud under his breath. “Palurdo grew up in Chicago, but his father was an immigrant from Chile. He came here in the seventies, worked as a welder, died about eighteen months before his son was murdered. Hector wrote poetry, short stories based on folk stories of indigenous people, but he was mostly an essayist, covering human rights in the Americas. North and South.”

  Murray drained his bottle. “You stumbled on a genuine mystery, Warshawski.” He changed his tone to sound like an old-time radio announcer. “Who is this homeless woman and how come she’s playing Zamir’s music?”

  I made a face. “You want me to say she’s Lydia Zamir.”

  Murray grinned wolfishly. “Great story, if she is.”

  “She could be, I suppose, but—how did she end up here?”

  “Her lover’s home was Chicago,” Peter said.

  “I suppose,” I agreed. “The music is so idiosyncratic, it’s not something that a random street person would—would inhabit, the way this woman under the viaduct seems to. But how could a gifted musician be so lacking in supports that she ended up in a pile of rags on Forty-seventh Street?”

  “Hey, Vic, you know how this goes,” Sal said. “No one is immune.”

  Sal and I sit on the board of a shelter for refugees from domestic violence—she’s right: family disconnect covers all levels of talent and economics.

  Murray rolled the empty bottle of Dark Lord between his fingers. “Falls from the heights always make good stories. Grammy for ‘Savage,’ shared a stage with Beyoncé, known as the star-crossed lover of a South American revolutionary, ends up on Chicago’s streets.”

  “Was Palurdo a revolutionary?” Peter asked, going through the screens on his own phone. “It sounds as though he covered the same kind of territory as Luis Urrea and Isabel Allende.”

  “South American writers are always revolutionaries, at least in Hollywood’s imagination. I see a winning series here: How do our overachievers tumble from Mount Everest to Death Valley?” Murray sketched so
mething careering down a mountainside in the air.

  “Right,” I snapped. “Washed-up basketball stars loading UPS trucks, former Pulitzer Prize winners reduced to preening on cable.”

  I regretted those toads as soon as they hopped out of my mouth. I put a conciliatory hand on Murray’s arm. “That was below the belt: sorry.”

  He gave a perfunctory nod but took off soon after without saying anything else.

  “He won a Pulitzer?” Sansen’s sandy eyebrows went up.

  “Yep. It was an important story and he did a great job with it, about a group of aldermen who owned a shell company that was using school grounds on the West Side as hazmat dumping grounds. The story brought a flurry of federal interest to City Hall for a few short months, but then Global bought the paper, and it was clear Global management wanted to be good old boys together with the perps. The follow-up story was killed.”

  “It was a hard business,” Sal agreed, “but Murray didn’t have to sign whatever he signed to agree to kill the follow-up. Could’ve taken it to an indie outlet and given up that Merc convertible he drives.”

  The talk shifted. Sansen and I left soon after to go dancing at Colibri, a hot new venue on Lake Street. When we got back to my place, I looked up “Savage,” the first track on Zamir’s album Continental Requiem (in D minor).

  YouTube had a recording of Zamir and Palurdo singing “Savage,” not a video, but one of those recordings where still images of the singers flash on the screen: Zamir bent over her guitar, strong fingers on the strings, Zamir looking at Palurdo, love and daring in her face, teeth gleaming white, dark hair falling in waves below her shoulders. Palurdo’s teeth were crooked and cigarette stained. In one photo, Palurdo held up a sign, i can’t sing, while Zamir held one reading, he says he can write.

  I felt a contraction below my diaphragm. They’d been vibrant, in love. I don’t think I’d ever felt that deep joy, not in my youth when those feelings are so intense they pierce you. And then—murder. Carnage. Seeing her lover die with all those others killed and wounded. Small wonder if PTSD had driven her to live below a train track with a toy piano.

  Sansen took my hand and held it gently. “Do you think the woman you saw today is Lydia Zamir?”

  “You can’t tell from these pictures, but it’s the sound, the splicing of Grieg with her own rhythms for ‘Swan Song.’ Same here in ‘Savage,’ where she’s interwoven Purcell with that Haitian kompa beat. It would have been fun to see where she would have gone next with her music, but I’m guessing the carnage she witnessed silenced her voice.”

  Sansen nodded. “I’ve worked with people in Iraq and Afghanistan who’ve experienced mass slaughter. It’s not something you recover from easily, or really, at all—it’s like shrapnel in the heart that can’t be extracted. I know the pair you encountered outside her hideout rubbed you the wrong way, but they may well be right—that she’s too allergic to people to be in a facility where she could get help.”

  “The music matters to me, too,” I said.

  “Of course it does. I was forgetting—” Sansen pulled me to him.

  My mother had been a musician, a singer with a great voice, but war, poverty, family responsibilities—me, the only child to survive after a series of miscarriages—derailed her career. She’d wanted me, or at any rate, she’d wanted her child, but her music had suffered.

  4

  Jailhouse Blues

  I had my pain dream that night, where my mother was encased inside a thicket of tubes. I cut the tubes away, trying to reach her, but each time, a new forest of them sprang up. My own cry of her name woke Sansen as well as me.

  I was lying in the dark, clutching Peter’s hand, willing my heartbeat to slow, when my phone rang.

  “Ms. Warshawski? I mean Vic? I—it’s Angela. Angela Creedy, and I’m sorry to wake you but Bernie’s in trouble.”

  I sat up, trying to move my mind to the present. “She’s been hurt?”

  “I don’t think so, ma’am. Vic. But we’re at a police station. She told me not to tell you, but honestly, I don’t know what to do.”

  My brain had that lurching feeling you get after a mere two hours of sleep. Or from the news that your goddaughter has been arrested. I found a pair of jeans on the back of a chair and started dressing while Angela told me where Bernie was being held—the Second District, Fifty-first Street just off the Ryan. Two miles, more or less, from the homeless piano player.

  Peter blinked at me as I sorted through my wallet, checking for the card that proves I’m a member of the Illinois bar.

  “What’s up?”

  “Bernie’s in trouble.”

  “You want me to come with you?” He started to get up.

  I bent to kiss him. “You’d be a witness to murder and you wouldn’t like that.”

  “Depends on who you’re killing.”

  “Bernie. She’s at a police station near the piano-playing homeless woman.”

  “You sure you’re okay on your own?”

  “One of us needs to be alert tomorrow. Later today, I guess. You’re meeting donors, but I don’t have anything going on until late morning.”

  I pulled on my soft leather boots and headed into the night. On the side streets, no one was out and I made good time to the expressway, but traffic on the Ryan was heavy and moving fast, requiring a level of concentration that I had trouble maintaining. It was a relief when I reached the Fifty-first Street exit without hitting anything.

  Angela was sitting on a bench inside the entrance, but she jumped up when she saw me. Six-foot-two guard, she made my five-eight feel short when she bent to hug me.

  “Oh, ma’am, thank you for getting here so fast! They wouldn’t let me go into the back with her; I don’t know what they’re doing to her.” Angela came from Louisiana, with the kind of manners we northerners imagine are commonplace in the South. It was hard for her to use my first name.

  We weren’t the only people in the station in the middle of the night. Wentworth district is a lively one, lots of aggravated battery and assault, plenty of arson and car theft, the occasional homicide.

  A couple about my age, looking as tired as I felt, was vying for attention from the desk sergeant with a pair of patrol officers who’d brought in a man so drunk he couldn’t stand on his own. A woman near us was having a very loud argument on her phone with someone who wasn’t taking responsibility for whatever Damian had done.

  I took Angela to the far end of the room. “What happened? Did Bernie go to the Forty-seventh Street viaduct?”

  Angela nodded miserably. “We went roller-skating with our two other roommates. Everyone was having a good time, Bernie, too, at least mostly, but she kept talking about this lady, the piano player, how even though she was homeless, she knew all of Lydia Zamir’s songs, but that you were too chicken to help her. She said this guy had frightened you away.”

  She bit her lips and looked at me. “I told her that was BS—who ever frightened you away from doing what you know is right? But Bernie said, well, never mind what she said.”

  “She said I was getting old and didn’t want to admit it,” I said.

  Angela’s dark face turned a shade deeper with embarrassment. “Something like that. Of course, kids my age, we all know Lydia Zamir, especially ‘Savage’—sometimes that’s what our team sings in the locker room to build team spirit before a game. Bernie said Lydia Zamir was dead, but Latisha, one of our other roommates, said no, she hadn’t been killed. So then Bernie decided this lady was really Lydia Zamir because who else would know her music?

  “Finally, about midnight when the other two went back to the house, Bernie said she was going to take the L down and see, was this really Lydia and did she need help. She said this would be the perfect time because the guy wouldn’t be around. I tried to talk her out of it, ma’am, honest, but—”

  “Not to worry,” I said when she broke off. “We all know what Bernie’s like when she thinks she’s driving a puck to the net.”

 
Angela produced a small smile. “So she hopped on the L and I—it’s not the safest ride, you know, not at night, so even though I thought it was a mistake, I went with her. It took forever—it was almost two when we finally got to the viaduct. We walked from the L—we had no idea it was two miles! Anyway, the lady was sleeping in this bundle of smelly old blankets. Bernie went right up to her. I kept telling her not to, but she called her ‘Lydia,’ and the lady woke up.

  “At first it kind of seemed okay. Bernie had downloaded a Lydia Zamir playlist. She put on ‘Savage,’ and the lady unwrapped her piano and picked out a few notes. But then, Bernie put on ‘Swan Song,’ which is about how swans mate for life, and the lady practically began screaming, then she started pounding on the piano keys.

  “Then this guy showed up with a big dog. Bernie and he, they started going at it. Bernie acted like she was in the middle of some fight on the ice. The guy was super angry and he slugged Bernie, and the woman was screaming.”

  She wrung her hands. “I know I could have helped her out, but I don’t believe in fighting, and besides, you know how it is, if the cops find an African-American in the middle of a street fight! I was begging her to just come away with me, but then the cops did show up. Even though this man hit Bernie, he somehow made it seem like Bernie had attacked the lady. Of course she didn’t—but she did punch the guy. As soon as the cop cars appeared, though, the guy stopped fighting and went around to the lady, so it looked like it was just Bernie making a disturbance.”

  Her voice trailed away.

  I gave her a quick hug, told her I’d take it from here, that I’d order a Lyft car for her if she didn’t want to wait for me to drive her back. I joined the queue at the desk, waited my turn behind distraught friends and family to ask for Bernadine Fouchard. I wasn’t distressed myself—too tired and, frankly, too angry with Bernie.

  The officer said, “You the mother?”

  “Family friend. And lawyer.” I started to pull out my Illinois bar card but the desk officer shook his head.

  “I believe you. We’re cooling her off in one of the cells.” He spoke into his lapel mike; after a moment a sergeant came through the locked doors at the end of the corridor, a lanky woman with fine mousy hair that had escaped from the hair claws she used.