The City Beautiful

by Aden Polydoros

  I swiveled around, half expected to find flames crawling up the walls. Yet there was only the muted hiss of the gas jets, safely enclosed within their milk glass cradles. No burning. No screams. But it had felt so real only seconds ago.

  I trembled, my limbs locked in place. Everyone in the row was staring at me, and I couldn’t make a sound.

  These thoughts were not my own. But the terror they instilled in me had possession over my body and soul.

  * * *

  For months after my father’s death, long after I had arrived in Chicago and found a home in the stained brick and wharfs of the Levee, I had imagined my father still underwater. Sometimes, I’d envisioned him deep below Lake Michigan, scattered in the sand, lost amid the snail shells and algae. Or I’d be walking along the shoreline with the others, and I’d spot him wading up to his waist through the shallows, impossibly thin and pale, as though his time at sea had eroded him.

  On one of those walks, I had found a pair of spectacles among the tumbled pebbles. My father had worn spectacles with rolled-gold rims, while these were tortoiseshell. It had seemed like proof nonetheless.

  I carried the glasses with me for weeks, until one evening I crushed them underfoot in rage and despair, shattering the glass into splinters, because he wasn’t coming back. He never would come back. Somewhere out there in the Atlantic, he was sinking, and sinking, and sinking, forever, and he had left me here alone.

  I sensed that these strange new visions came from the same overwhelming grief that had led me to spot my father everywhere during those months. Because seeing my father as he had been in his final moments, over and over again when I least expected it, was better than accepting the fact that I would never see him again.

  Back then, as the seasons had changed, I imagined my father less and less, until his face blurred in my mind like a reflection cast on restless waters. It comforted me to know that these visions, too, would go away with time. They had to.

  After prayers, I followed the rest of the congregation into the courtyard, where refreshments waited for us, courtesy of generous and well-off members of our community. Rugelach and mandelbrot sat on one table, several jugs of grape juice on another.

  I helped myself to some of the treats. As I searched for a place to sit, I spotted another volunteer at the chevra kadisha. Sender watched me warily as I approached, perhaps still a bit sore over the mikveh incident. I certainly wouldn’t be forgetting it anytime soon.

  I offered him a small smile. “Gut Shabbos.”

  “Gut Shabbos,” he said unenthusiastically.

  “There’s something I need to know.” Glancing around to make sure we were alone, I lowered my voice. “Have there been any bodies that have been found with unusual bruises or wounds? Or bodies that were unable to be washed. Someone my age or younger.”

  Sender pondered in silence. The victims of violence were buried unwashed in the clothes they had died in, as a cry for vengeance. When a body was found decayed or with devastating injuries, we would dress it in burial shrouds but not wash it.

  “There was something,” Sender said at last.

  “Really?”

  “Two weeks ago. There was a worker whose body was found at a kosher slaughterhouse down in the Yards. Lev and Gavril took care of tahara on their own.”

  “Why?” I asked, baffled. Normally, washing and preparing the body required four volunteers.

  “It had to do with the condition of the boy’s body. They wouldn’t say.” He gave it more thought. “I think...something about how there was blood on him, but it was not his own.”

  “That makes no sense.”

  “I’m just telling you what I heard.”

  “If they washed him, that means there weren’t any deep wounds. How do you die in a slaughterhouse?”

  “Drowning,” Sender said.

  “Drowning?” I repeated, certain I had misheard him. “That’s...”

  “Lev said something about drowning or suffocating, and something about blood. That’s all I know.” Sender frowned, glancing across the courtyard where Lev was engaged in deep conversation with other stiff old men. “Listen, don’t tell him I told you this. The parents asked for privacy.”

  Sender walked away before I could ask him more. I mulled over his answer as I finished my rugelach. Drowning and blood. It seemed impossible, unless the boy had collapsed face-first into a cow’s spraying jugular. If I couldn’t ask Lev or Gavril for information, there was one other person I knew who might be able to find out more.

  Across the courtyard, Raizel stood next to her mother, studying a rugelach as though concerned it might crawl off her plate. I caught her attention and nodded around the side of the building, where the latrine was located. She lifted her eyebrows.

  It’s important, I mouthed.

  Sighing, she nodded and set her plate aside.

  The latrine was a simple wooden structure only large enough for one person, with scarcely the room to sit. I closed the door behind me, breathing through my mouth to keep out the stench of raw sewage wafting from the toilet’s open hole. Tiny flies swarmed around my face. I waited for a knock before opening the door a crack.

  “Is it really necessary for you to hide in the toilet, Alter?” Raizel asked, peeking through the door. “I thought we were past this.”

  “I don’t want anyone to overhear us. Besides, if we’re not careful, Mrs. Brenner might arrange another date for us.”

  “Point taken,” she conceded, then gagged as I opened the door a bit wider to let in fresh air. “That smells terrible. Close the door, close the door!”

  “Sorry.” I eased it shut again.

  “So, what is this about?”

  “I just spoke with another volunteer at the chevra kadisha. He said that there was a body found at a kosher slaughterhouse two weeks ago. The way he described it, it doesn’t sound like it was a regular accident.”

  “Josef Loew worked at a tannery down in the Stockyards,” Raizel said grimly. “With all the strikes that are going on, I was planning to interview him for the Arbeiter-Zeitung.”

  I hadn’t known he’d worked there. It seemed like too much to be a mere coincidence.

  “You’re involved in labor,” I said. “You must have friends at the Stockyards.”

  “Of course I do. I’ll see what I can find out.”

  Gravel crunched under her feet. I waited a moment longer before opening the door. When I returned to the courtyard, Raizel had already taken up her post by her mother. She ignored me completely as I crossed the pavestones.

  Already, the other members of the congregation were beginning to disperse. There was nothing else for me here. I snagged another rugelach to save for tomorrow and returned home.

  16

  Yakov’s bed was still as he had left it, untouched, the blanket folded back. On his bedside table were loose matches, unused stationery, a penny dreadful left facedown at the page he had stopped reading. After stowing the rugelach in the icebox, I ran my hand over the sheet to smooth out the wrinkles, thinking of the night Yakov had come to live with us.

  He arrived in the midst of an uncharacteristic April snowstorm, a sudden downpour of small icy flakes that scratched against the windows like fingernails.

  Dovid and Haskel hadn’t yet returned from the saloon. When Yakov knocked, I opened the door, thinking it was them.

  He stood at the threshold, snow caught in his windblown hair and sooty lashes, his face flushed from the cold. He carried no trunk, only a carpetbag that was fraying apart at the seams.

  For a long moment, he merely regarded me thoughtfully. Then the corner of his mouth quirked in a brief smile. “Haskel Lehr?”

  I chuckled. “Good guess, but Alter Rosen.”

  “Alter Rosen,” he murmured, as though to commit my name to memory.

  “And you are?”

  “Yakov
. Yakov Kogan. I was told that you have a spare bed.”

  Before any of us had come to Chicago, a family of six had lived in our garret room. After they had left, the furnishings remained.

  “I’m afraid it’s not much of a bed,” I admitted, stepping aside so that he could enter the room.

  He set his bag on the floor and looked around in silence, no longer smiling.

  “I hope you weren’t expecting something better,” I said apologetically, moving my trunk against my bed to make the floor space seem larger.

  “No, this is pretty much the way I pictured it.” He walked over to the stripped cot, which had been propped on its side and pushed out of the way. “I suppose this one is mine?”

  “Here, let me help you.”

  Together, we wrangled the cot onto its casters. As he smoothed out the lumps in the straw mattress, I sat on my own bed.

  “Where are you from?” I asked. His dialect was Eastern, but without the musical cadence I associated with Litvaks like Frankie. Instead, his voice held a low resonating quality, a certain flat and steady intonation I found appealing, like the rumble of distant thunder.

  “I grew up near Kiev, but it’s been years since I’ve been back there. I lived with my uncle for some time, and we traveled a lot.”

  “How did you end up in Chicago?”

  His smile returned, but it never reached his eyes. His brilliant blue eyes were as dark as the sea, and carried its same loneliness. “It’s a long story.”

  Sighing, I stripped the blanket and sheet from the bed. Yakov wasn’t coming back. He wouldn’t sleep here again. Still, it hurt to fold the linen and set it aside, and hurt even more to drag the mattress from the frame so that I could dismantle it. As I rested the mattress against the wall, I noticed a small cardboard box nestled in the ledge between the frame’s headboard and side.

  I picked up the box. It was surprisingly heavy, filled with contents that rolled against each other. Faded letters were printed on the lid.

  “Rim-fire,” I read to myself. “Cart...cartridges. Tsvey un draysik—no, thirty-two cal...”

  What in the world did cal. mean? Calendar?

  I opened the box.

  Brass cylinders gleamed in the shallow light. I picked one up, rolled it in my palm. Bullets. A slip of paper was wedged into the corner of the box. I unfolded it. It was a handwritten receipt dated April 10, a week after Yakov had arrived in Chicago.

  I settled back on my haunches, the box slipping from my hand. My head ached as though I had been struck a blow.

  From our first meeting, I had felt a certain solidarity toward Yakov. He wasn’t like Frankie, who crackled with excited energy and thundered by like a comet in whose blaze I could only follow. Yakov, in comparison, had been like a mountain lake, its stillness a guise for its cold and vast depth. He had seemed in perfect equilibrium. Not once had I seen him shout for the sheer glee of it or kick over milk crates just to watch them break. Predictable. That was how I had seen Yakov. His rhythm was as steady and reliable as clockwork. He went to work, he disappeared for many hours at a time, he came home, he slept.

  He had come here for a reason. He had bought a gun.

  I realized now that I had been wrong all along. Yakov hadn’t been untouchable; he had been broken to shards inside. Though he had carried himself with a certain chill and proud bearing, his demeanor had been a shield to hide the profound sadness I had only caught a glimpse of that first night.

  And he had been hiding something worse than sadness. Rage? Hatred? The potential to kill, certainly. No one bought a gun unless they intended to use it.

  17

  In daylight, the Levee was just as gritty as it had been at dusk. Wagons and carriages rumbled down the streets, stirring up clouds of flies from the manure left to broil in the July sun.

  On the rooftop to the old hideaway, I found a small huddle of teens playing marbles. Bailey was the first one to notice me as I ascended the fire escape’s ladder. Before I even reached solid ground, she had risen to her feet. She scowled at me from under the brim of her mariner’s cap. “Not you again!”

  The others stopped playing and turned to me. All but one I knew by name and recognized in an instant. There was Andy with his frizz of wooly black hair, and Harry who had lost his right thumb to a sweathouse loom, and Joe, who could slip a ring from your very finger and you wouldn’t even feel a thing.

  “I can’t believe it,” Andy whispered, spilling marbles from his hands. “Alex?”

  I couldn’t help but grin. “It’s Alter now. It’s been a while, Andy.”

  “We ought to hurl you from the roof for leaving the way you did,” Harry said, but then he came forward and pulled me into a bear hug.

  Around his neck, Harry wore a brass Star of David pendant, a gift from a long-dead sister about whom he’d spoken only briefly. In the past, he’d had the necklace tucked into his shirt, but now it swung freely. I wondered if that meant he was working over Jewish neighborhoods now. Frankie had once mused about sending us into the wealthier Reform shuls over in Kenwood and South Shore, taking an almost perverse satisfaction in the idea of robbing people in prayer.

  Once Harry released me, the others surged forward, greeting me with hugs and slaps on the back. I caught Joe with his hand in my waistcoat, and snagged his wrist just as he began to take my pocket watch.

  “You’ve lost your touch, Joe,” I teased as he handed my watch back with a sheepish grin.

  “If I was really trying, your watch would already be in my pocket.”

  “Do you know where Frankie is?” I asked, once the boys finished crowding me.

  “He’s down there.” Bailey nodded toward the skylight that led into the attic below.

  Some things never changed. Frankie had always spent his Saturday evenings taking the week’s earnings to various fences throughout Chicago. In the afternoon, he would prepare the goods, keeping careful tally of what we had found and who had retrieved what.

  I descended the ladder into the space below. The ladder groaned beneath my weight but held, and within moments my feet were on worn floorboards.

  Dusty fingers of sunlight reached through the skylight and the narrow slates of a gable vent at the opposite end of the room. It was so dim that I could only discern the shapes of things. Cast-iron bedposts, saggy mattresses, the old stove in the corner.

  Frankie sat cross-legged across the room, working in the glow of an oil lamp. He had a small jeweler’s scale on the floor beside him along with tidy piles of gold and silver. A third pile of leather goods lay not too far away.

  He glanced up as I descended, but looked down right away.

  “I see that you’ve now advanced to Fagin,” I said.

  “Very funny,” he said dully, jotting an entry into his journal. “Things have changed since you left. That old fence was giving us pennies on the dollar. Now, I’ve made new contacts through the Masthead, and when I want to sell stuff, I go in with a list and a number.”

  “Impressive.”

  “No one takes advantage of us now,” Frankie boasted, jotting another entry into his ledger. “I get a fair value for what I sell, and I take a fair cut. And five percent of everything they bring in, I invest. I don’t gamble. I invest. Just like the men at the stock exchange. You know that man from the Whitechapel Club, Mr. Whitby? He’s in real estate. He gambles at the Masthead—a ‘real high roller,’ as the Americans would say—and he told me all about it. Real estate. That’s the way to go. More than sixty million dollars’ worth of real estate was built here last year, he said, and it’s all because of the World’s Fair. It’s only going to get better once the elevated railroad is expanded. Mr. Whitby says that after the Fair, there’ll be such a rush for people to live here, even places like Maxwell Street will be in high demand. It’ll just be expanded into another part of Prairie Avenue.”

  Prairie Avenue sat l
ess than four kilometers from my tenement, on the other side of the Chicago River. Mansions bordered its attractive tree-lined streets. Compared to Maxwell Street, the Prairie Avenue District seemed as though it belonged to a different place and time, untouched by the coal smoke and ruin.

  “Not another Prairie Avenue.” I groaned. “I can hardly afford rent as it is.”

  “I can tell. You look like you’ve been skipping meals. Once I’m done with this, we can grab a bite to eat.” He set aside a silver book-chain necklace. “Anyway, I’m guessing you didn’t schlep all the way out here just to listen to me talk business. What are you doing here?”

  “Well, I was going to start by telling you that Raizel is investigating a lead down in the Stockyards.”

  “A better one than the Whitechapel Club?”

  “I don’t know yet. It has to do with a worker who died there.”

  “That all?”

  “No, there’s something else.” I took the box of ammunition from my coat pocket and passed it over. “I found this hidden under Yakov’s mattress. There’s a receipt in there, but I can’t read the handwriting.”

  Frankie slid open the box and unfolded the receipt tucked inside. He read it carefully, tracing his finger over the letters. “It’s for the bullets and the gun that goes with them. A revolver. I don’t recognize the dealer.”

  “Why would Yakov want a gun?” I asked.

  “I’m not the person you should be asking.”

  “Isn’t this your kind of business?”

  “Only if he was planning to commit a crime with it.” Frankie turned his attention back to the ledger, but by the way he tapped the fountain pen’s cap against his palm, I could tell he was mulling the situation over. “You said Yakov had bruises around his throat, right?”

  “Yes, as if someone had strangled him.”

  “There’s another possibility,” Frankie said.

  “Which is?”

  He glanced over. “Suicide.”

  The word jarred me to the bone. Suicide. I recalled how Yakov had looked on the night he died, his features bathed in the garish glow of fireworks. His bright blue eyes. The smoke trailing from his lips, as though he was burning up inside. These last few weeks, he had become tense and reclusive, but that night, he had been at ease. Teasing. His demeanor had radiated an inner calm and resolution, as if he had finally made a decision he would never be able to go back on.