Kalijero paced within a small invisible cage, very jittery as he mulled things over. His hands moved back and forth from his face to his hair, scratching, rubbing, squeezing, pinching, until he suddenly stopped and looked at me.
“Okay,” he said. “We sit on this for now, start staking things out for the next—”
“Tomorrow night!” I said. “We can end the whole thing tomorrow night—”
“Goddamn it, Landau! This isn’t a bunch of sailboats at Montrose Harbor! It’s a giant commercial port with barges and cargo ships! You’ve got to get people down there watching, taking pictures, seeing patterns.” Kalijero stopped, breathed in deeply then exhaled. “We want to do this right,” he continued calmly. “It’s worth waiting to make sure we get it right.”
“What’s so complicated? They bring the women in on a tugboat—”
“It’s a huge port,” Kalijero said, struggling to keep his voice even. “You need time to get the lay of the land, see where people are hanging out, when they leave, when they return—”
“Pier twenty-four! Gigi gave us the information in his appointment book! Ten o’clock delivery at pier twenty-four. It’s a fucking gift, Jimmy! What are you afraid of?”
Kalijero shook his head. “You think you can just go down there and be a hero, huh?”
“Give me the tiniest bit of credit. If they catch me, I’m dead. Done. Fish food. I know that. That’s why you have to help me. Just think if you’re there and you see Elon inspecting women he just helped illegally smuggle into the country so they could be forced into prostitution. Imagine testifying that the deputy director of the city’s Department of Revenue looked them over like dogs at the kennel club, then took one away for a quick fuck? C’mon, how awesome would it be to wrap up your career with that?”
Kalijero started pacing again. I wanted to believe if I could get through to him just the slightest bit, he might picture himself easing into retirement, immortalized by one final epic bust.
“I’ll go down tomorrow,” I said. “I’ll find pier twenty-four. I’ll email you a few pictures of the setup. I promise to follow your lead. If you say forget it, I go home and we live to fight another day.”
Kalijero stopped pacing but didn’t look at me. After staring into the distance awhile, he quietly said, “Fine. Now do me a favor and leave me alone.”
Something ate at Kalijero’s insides, but I didn’t dare ask what. His beleaguered expression reminded me of the contradiction that made up this hardened, sixty-something police veteran; like it or not, the man responsible for putting my father in prison had sentimental roots intertwined with my family. Knowing I was determined to confront Elon and those he worked with must have brought up complicated feelings.
“Before I leave you alone,” I said, “where the hell is the Port of Chicago?”
49
I went for a walk along the shoreline, an activity on a gloomy autumn day guaranteed to encourage depressive, self-defeating thoughts. Robertson’s pathetic image kept flashing in my brain, his face distorted by pain after I had driven my knee into his gut and twisted his wrist into an agonizing posture. What had I become?
It was dark when I got home. A restless night awaited me. I lay in bed staring at the ceiling, wondering why Izzy viewed the world allegorically and had chosen me to portray his protagonist in a morality play. He knew the reasons. I knew he paid me.
The phone rang just after midnight, arousing me from a semi-conscious slumber barely qualifying as sleep.
“Landau?” Kalijero said.
“Jimmy?”
“Responsibility for civilians, Landau. Remember?”
I struggled to clear a lingering cobweb from my brain. “What do you want, Jimmy?”
“Before you showed up at Area B today, I found out your editor buddy washed up along Navy Pier. The back of his head caved in.”
A meteor swung around Earth a few times in its elliptical orbit before crashing into me and dispersing my particles around Palmer’s round face. An intense ache filled my belly, a pain that throbbed from allowing a kind, helpless man to end up floating lifeless in a cold lake. Frownie’s disapproving mug came into view. What about the newspaper editor? he said. Don’t tell me he’s already dead. Frownie faded away shaking his head, thoroughly disgusted. It’s for your own good you should feel such pain.
I heard myself say, “You’re sure it’s Palmer?”
“His wallet had a driver’s license and Republic ID. Wilbert J. Palmer. We’re still looking for his next of kin.”
“It’s my fault.”
“Shut up! He was a grown-up, Landau, and he knew you were investigating a murder. You can’t tell me this guy was just some babe in the woods.”
But he had been protected, I wanted to say, groomed to see only what the privileged owners of media saw. To Palmer, neutralizing threats of financial exposure was just a cliché of Gotham.
“Did you hear what I said about staying clearheaded?”
I heard him, but his words had no effect. I hadn’t yet hardened enough to do what Kalijero advised. Maybe I never would. Then what was I doing in the murder business? I let the phone drop to the floor and lay awake thinking about my last conversation with Palmer, when he told me not to fret, when he told me that he took pride in his ability to remain inconspicuous.
—
Saturday morning arrived barely distinguishable from the previous night’s quasi-sleep chaos. Palmer’s death wrenched my guts. Lying low to deal with my turmoil was out of the question. I told myself that I needed to proceed as planned, if only because that’s what Palmer would’ve wanted. Having no appetite for breakfast, I sat on the couch stupefied—as if drugged—watching Punim gorge herself on a pre-mixed combination of muscles, organs, brains, and bones. Kalijero could’ve waited until Sunday to tell me about Palmer. Maybe he hoped the news would discourage me from going to the port.
Soon after finishing breakfast, Punim’s inner wildcat showed up. Her pupils the size of nickels, her ears unnaturally askance, she batted a yellow crunched up Post-it note around the living room, occasionally stopping for a quick, intense groom and then an equally brief glance at me, before carrying on. I usually took great delight in watching her so thoroughly amused, but this morning her antics appeared ordinary, barely registering as novelty behavior for which cats expected exaltation. So absorbed was I in Palmer’s death and my mission at the Port of Chicago, I didn’t notice the show had ended until I caught sight of her sitting at the end of the couch, staring at me. When I reached to give her a scratch behind the ears, she bolted then disappeared down the hall. In a matter of minutes, she would be dead asleep. Somewhere, a metaphor lurked in Punim’s lifestyle, meant for my spiritual growth.
I called Tamar and asked her to meet me somewhere. Since her shift started in a couple of hours, she suggested the bakery. “You don’t sound so good,” she said.
“I’ll see you shortly,” I said.
—
Late-morning pastry mania engulfed the counter. Tamar had not yet arrived. I took a table in the back, away from the clamor. Six teenagers occupied one of the booths, none of them speaking, all transfixed by some kind of computer screen, be it phone or laptop. Their varying shades of brown and tan temporarily lessened my pain over Palmer. I hoped nobody would hassle them for sitting in a booth.
A guy wheeled in a stack of The Partisan and began loading them on the magazine rack near the front door. So much news, corruption, entertainment, so many crooks and characters, a paper like The Partisan needed to be semi-weekly if only to fill in the holes left by a daily corporate shill like the Republic. I walked over and grabbed a copy. One of the kids did the same, returning with a paper for each friend. Below the fold: “THE CRACKHEAD AND THE SCHIZO” with a subhead, “Meter Maid and Scofflaw—Both Expired.”
Ellis Knight asked what a guy named Gelashvili and a guy named Jones had in common with a guy named Baxter. Two of the three needed drugs to survive, two of the three lived in the same building on
Farragut Avenue, two of the three were parking officers, two of the three knew the third—and three of the three were dead.
“Anonymous Sources” in bold letters prefaced the next paragraph, followed by “Wassup B? My aces say things ain’t aight, three sidewalk outlines without a fight, but nothin’ an AK couldn’t set right. Them wangstas think they all that, but they ain’t nothin’ but a hood rat…booya!”
Without an interpreter, I could only read the article assuming that my vague understanding of ghetto slang was accurate. The project quickly became tiresome. To the kids in the booth as well as those younger faces sitting at surrounding tables, Knight’s style was familiar and customary. Many read quotes aloud from the article, eliciting sympathetic laughter and cynical comments relating to social injustices.
Boris and Vlad appeared, each carrying a pastry and a cup of coffee. They took their customary booth at the end of the row. Tamar walked in soon after. On the way over to me, she looked at the vagrant passed out at his usual table. Something about her demeanor told me she was all business this morning.
“Are you okay?” she asked as she took a seat.
I told her about being arrested, my conversation with Konigson, and my staunch belief Elon was behind her cousin’s murder. “Other than that, I’m fine.”
“You sound terrible.”
“Okay, you got me.” I explained who Palmer was and told her about his murder.
“That’s terrible. Horrible. But you can’t blame yourself—”
“Yeah, yeah, he had to have known how cruel the world was, et cetera and so on. But listen, I figured out what Gigi’s twenty-four is. It’s at the Port of Chicago; that’s where the girls are brought in. The number twenty-four in Gigi’s appointment book must mean pier twenty-four. A reliable source told me Elon uses the occasion to pick out his new girlfriend. This means we can actually catch Elon and Gigi in the act of smuggling women into the country to be prostitutes.”
“That’s tonight, remember. The next delivery.”
“I’m going down there today to find pier twenty-four. Then I’ll call Kalijero and give him the lay of the land. If Kalijero thinks he’s got a good chance of catching Elon involved in human trafficking or prostitution, he’ll respond—or I hope he will.”
“Gigi, Elon, and probably those two clowns will be there,” Tamar said, nodding toward Boris and Vlad. “God!” she said. “I’d do anything for this to be my last shift with Gigi.” I sensed a chilling undercurrent in her voice.
“Try to stay cool,” I said. “You can’t let Gigi know you’re on to something. Trust me, we’ll get his ass in prison but you gotta be patient.”
Tamar was anything but cool as she sat with those dark eyes intently fixed on Boris and Vlad as they casually sipped coffee and nibbled pastries. She radiated anger like heat shimmering off blacktop. Despite the seriousness of our endeavor, I found myself fascinated by this fiery side of her and, unexpectedly, more than a little turned on.
“Look at those two morons,” Tamar said. “They just sit here all day, waiting to cause pain in someone’s life as soon as they get instructions from Big Bunny, or whoever they take orders from.”
I thought I was hearing things. “Did you say ‘Big Bun’—?”
Tamar jumped out of her chair, climbed on top of the gangsters’ table, then began pounding her fists on Boris’s head. Running over just as Vlad grabbed the back of Tamar’s neck, I drove my shoulder into his ribs, knocking him sideways over the seat. From behind, I bear-hugged Tamar, trying to pull her off the guy, but this made things worse since Tamar now had two fistfuls of hair, eliciting horrifying screams. I put my hands around her wrists and shouted in her ear, “Let go! Just let him go!”
Movement from my periphery convinced me I should let go first, then swivel around to plant a foot into Vlad’s stomach. This time, Vlad made it all the way to the floor, where he would remain. Gigi was now on the scene taking his turn at trying to get Tamar to relinquish her grip. I put a hand on each side of her face and spoke calmly into her ear. She had stopped shouting but tears streamed down her cheeks.
“Please,” I said. “Just let go.” I kissed her then repeated, “Please, Tamar, let go,” and kissed her again. Gradually, she loosened her grip enough for Boris to pull away. Gigi and I grabbed her, practically carrying her out the front door, as an astonished crowd of pastry patrons watched.
“My god!” Gigi said, sounding more concerned than angry. “What’s happened to you? What’s going on?”
Keep it simple, I wanted to say, fearing Tamar might let her anger give away our newfound knowledge.
“I’m tired of those two stupid idiots sitting there all day making nasty comments, insulting our heritage,” Tamar said, making up the story on the spot. “The one I attacked called me a little Georgian whore. Tell them this isn’t Russia and they need to respect me.”
Gigi stared wide eyed at Tamar as if a spiraling horn had just popped out of her forehead. “Why didn’t you say something before?” Gigi said. “Of course they should respect you. You’re one of us, my child!”
Gigi reentered the bakery then stormed up to the gangsters’ table. Through the glass, we watched him stand defiantly with hands on hips, as he dispensed a tongue-lashing to the bewildered tough guys.
“See if you can skip this shift and go home,” I said.
“No. I’d rather work. If there’s a delivery tonight, I’ll watch closely what goes on here.”
“Just be careful not to give yourself away. I’m sure Gigi’s compassion has its limits.”
“Gigi and I are blood. He wouldn’t hurt me no matter what—if that’s what you mean.”
“A white slaver with a heart of gold.”
“Stalin was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.” Her ironic comeback only added to the intensity of my attraction.
“I better get ready for my shift,” Tamar said. “The Port of Chicago. Be careful. I mean it! I’m going to call you around five or six. You better answer and tell me what’s up.” Tamar took hold of my jacket collar, pulled me toward her into a kiss, then walked back into the bakery.
50
Southbound on the Chicago Skyway, I exited at 95th Street, then parked on Avenue M, a quiet block of small ranch-style cottages and frame houses. From there, I walked to an industrial canal known as the Calumet River; it wound its way through a post-apocalyptic landscape of abandoned steel mills, oil refineries, and dark mounds of their toxic by-products.
From the way Kalijero had described the port, I expected a logjam of vessels moving through a gauntlet of longshoremen operating enormous cranes, forklifts, and grain sifters. But apart from a single freighter being nudged along by a tug, the only other reminders of nautical activity were a mostly submerged sailboat and a rusted ship lying on its side near an abandoned silo.
I was hoping to simply ask someone where pier twenty-four was located, but not much in the way of sentient life could be observed on this sad October landscape. Walking east a block, Lake Michigan’s sparkly beauty held my gaze long enough for me to notice two men fishing from a jetty. A little local flavor seemed in order.
It only took a few minutes to reach the lakeshore. The fishermen looked to be in their seventies. They used live bait from a white bucket and had their poles lying on the concrete while they relaxed, resting their arms on generous bellies rounding nicely from their arrangement in folding chairs. The men were engaged in animated conversation but quickly stopped talking when I came within about ten feet of them.
“Hello,” I said then sat down dangling my feet over the edge, quite aware of my presumptuous behavior. “Largemouth bass?”
“That’s the idea,” one of them said with the slightest Hispanic accent.
“Probably too sunny, though,” the other said in blue-collar South Side. He wore a baseball cap that said “U.S. Merchant Marine.” “Them bass don’t like sunny. They hang out in da’ shady parts.”
I nodded as if I knew well this very dilemma. “Yeah, but
what’s the difference?” I said. “It’s still a beautiful day, right?” Both men smiled politely and grunted. “You guys lived around here a long time?”
Neither made a sound, just nodded with a kind of pained expression while continuing to stare out over the lake. As I formulated my next question, the Hispanic man said, “Almost sixty years now.”
“I was born here,” the seaman said.
“A lot’s changed in that time, I bet,” I said. They grunted in the affirmative. “This port must’ve been a lot busier, right?”
Both men laughed. “Used to see barges all day long,” the Hispanic man said.
“Lot of them freighters, too,” the seaman said.
“I’ve seen a few tugboats,” I said.
“It ain’t safe to navigate the channel without tugs.”
“Do you know where pier twenty-four is by any chance?”
I wasn’t sure the seaman heard me, but then he nodded his head. “Yeah. It ain’t really a pier, though. Just a dock in the turning basin near the 95th Street bridge, next to that boat storage joint.” He shrugged then spit into the lake. “I don’t know anymore what the hell they’re doin’.”
The Hispanic man sighed loudly. The ambience had shifted. I sensed the freshness of my presence had worn off. I bid the gentlemen farewell and wished them luck on catching bass. They both nodded and waved the way people do when they’re glad you’re leaving.
I followed 95th Street back to the canal then cut through the lot of the boat storage place and immediately saw the masts of three tugboats moored to a small dock in a wider part of the river. A sign on a modular office trailer about thirty yards in front of the dock said “Pier 24.” It seemed too easy. Everything Elon needed to quickly conduct business was right there. The white van could drive right up to the edge of the water, pick up its cargo, then disappear onto busy 95th Street.
51
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