Chicago

by David Mamet

  Mike had first heard about the baths in Marcus’s story of the lipstick stain. It was odd that a man of means would hie himself out to the Kedzie. The address did not suggest luxury. It must, then, he thought, offer some unusual depravity, or accommodation. But the baths, simply, had, from the first, been the resort of the Irish; they went when they were poor, and when wealthy continued their patronage.

  Marcus Blaine had been directed to enlist the nightman, George White, in the lipstick scheme. The Ace of Spades, thus, endorsed the man as trustworthy, which was not to say he might not betray or hustle a customer, but that he might be true to the request of a friend.

  Mike had taken Parlow there at the end of one shift. They liked the place, and each returned regularly. The position of nightman, Mike observed, was like that of the sergeant major. The culture of a Western army had evolved the perfect mediator between obedience and command. It was the soldier’s job to obey. He was recompensed, in part, by his prerogative of bitching; and, more beneficially, by his exemption from thought. He would have to do as commanded, even unto death, but he held no responsibility beyond that. He was, Mike often thought, free.

  It was the officer’s job both to obey and to command. The orders he received were generally ambiguous; when not ambiguous they were oftentimes contradictory, incapable of execution, or actually absurd.

  He was charged, then, with fulfilling what he understood to be the spirit of these orders, knowing that success would be attributed to his superiors, and failure (even in the case of the absurd or impossible task) to himself.

  But Mike had read Darwin, and so congratulated himself that he, thus, might comprehend All Things by applying the theory of natural selection.

  An army needed officers, it needed soldiers. The objective of the first was, generally, advancement; of the latter, preservation of life.

  Each held examples of the brave, the dedicated, and the self-respecting; and, as with all humankind, a majority who would, in any situation, take the easiest way consistent with not getting blamed. But the wars must still be fought, objectives must be taken, men’s lives preserved or expended with some degree of morality and reason.

  What was the mechanism, which, then, must exist, to mitigate toward survival of the race? For the race, in war, was, and must be, defined not by genetics, but by nationality.

  The naturally occurring mechanism was the sergeant major. He was risen from, and accessible to, the ranks. He was at the complete command of his superiors. But all, officer and soldier, knew that both the officer’s objectives and the enlisted men’s lives depended on his ability to weigh the absurd against the possible, to correct his superiors without the appearance of insubordination, and to supply to the ranks some promise of consideration in the risk of their lives.

  The army functioned, Mike saw, as did the divine right of kings, through the principle of legitimacy. Those above could rejoice that they were not, as those below, slaves; those below could find what happiness they might in resignation, and its attendant lack of anxiety. The system worked to the extent that all accepted it, making the most of whatever benefits they might find.

  In what was the system rooted? In culture and human nature? The Bolsheviks had killed their tsar, and installed a new tsar. And would there not arise a new and inevitable class of middlemen, mediating between the excesses of the powerful and the rancor of the mass?

  The Sicilians of the South Side had imported their thousand-year-old system of the secret government. The padrone, now Capone, had been the second-in-command to Johnny Torrio, whom he had deposed; and of course, Capone, himself, must be deposed or killed, and, odds on, could only be deposed or killed by one he had trusted—by his own minister.

  The weakness in the Mafia was the absence of legitimacy. Anyone with sufficient ambition could rise through obedience and violence; but there was, culturally, nothing to check his rise. And, so, the leader, as in Sicily, as in Calabria, as in Corsica, was always in danger from those—and, in the main, only from those—he trusted. And they were always in danger from him. A misunderstanding, a rumor, a lie, or a whim might mean their death at any time, any suspicion suggesting, to each and all, preemptive violence.

  What of the Irish? Ah, the Irish, Mike thought. They benefited from the Eternal Tyrant, England. They were slaves at home, and as free men abroad maintained their unity through loathing of the oppressor, loyalty to their new land, and the construction of networks within the host democracy.

  These networks were both overt—hegemony in the civic services, the attendant patronage, and, thus, hegemony in politics—and subterranean: in participation in crime in collusion with, or as a perquisite of, the police. The North and the South Sides, then, ran under two different systems. They could conjoin in Chicago no more easily than they might if Limerick and Messina were put under one government, and separated, as in Chicago, merely by a stream. The Irish and Capone met only in battle, and that, of course, only over their mutual interests: booze, drugs, prostitution, and extortion.

  The pool of customers and resources was exploitable by both sides, the Chicago River was a most handy dividing line, but advancement and wealth in crime, as in most any other endeavor, came from blurring the boundaries of mine and thine.

  The depredations originated, in the main, from the South Side. There underlings might rise through initiative, bringing, as it were, the head or booty, unrequested, to their chief, and saying, “Behold.”

  The Irish held more to party obedience and unity. Uncommanded skirmishing and the raid might be viewed as youthful exuberance, but would be censured; and the principle of legitimacy, much as it came from oppression by the hated English, was part of the Irish blood. The ward boss had replaced the clan chief in name, but the principle held: he could not be replaced by clan violence against him, as to do so would be to rebel against the legitimacy of the clan. And, so, there was no violence directed against him; the Irish ruled through the imposition of order: in the wards, at the polls, through the police and fire departments, through the patronage of all city jobs, and through their function as courts of the people.

  The Italians ruled through the imposition of terror and uncertainty, and, thus, the extraction of obedience in return for protection.

  “The Irish,” Mike said, “must win.”

  “Alright,” Parlow said. “Would you tell me why?”

  “Because their system,” Mike said, “is more suited to their environment. And the nightman is a phenomenon of Western development.”

  “Alright,” Parlow said.

  “He is that sergeant major of an organization based upon legitimacy, and it goes back to Greece.”

  “That’s wonderful,” Parlow said.

  “The position is a necessary aspect of the system, which might be inferred, from its very existence.”

  “What might be inferred from what’s very existence?” Parlow said.

  “Like those jokers in Montana,” Mike said, “who found this fifty-foot-long dinosaur bone, and some pencil neck in New York claims to’ve deduced from it an entire dinosaur.”

  “Well, the bone had to come from somewhere,” Parlow said.

  “I will be god-damned,” Mike said, “if I wouldn’t have been some sort of a good archaeologist.”

  “Well, if you want to start,” Parlow said, “start now, as those bones aren’t getting any younger.”

  Now Mike sat in the cooling-off room of the baths. George White, the nightman, was at the counter, talking to the cook. Five other men lay on the beach chairs, beneath the Turkish towels. Four were sleeping; one was propped on a pillow, his eyes closed, smoking a cigar.

  Mike watched George White, who turned from the counter and looked at Mike. Mike got up, knotting his towel around his hips. He took another from the rack on the wall, and draped it over his shoulders.

  Mike had spent two hours in the baths. He had steamed some of the fatigue out of his system. He had showered, and was in the locker room, combing his hair in front of the long
mirror. The nightman appeared, carrying Mike’s fresh-pressed suit on a hanger.

  “Here you are, sir,” George White said. He hooked the hanger over the back of Mike’s open locker.

  “Thank you,” Mike said. “I’ll hit you when I retrieve my valuables.”

  “Yes, sir,” George White said. “I’ll be in there.” And he pointed to a small cubby off the locker room.

  Mike dressed and went to settle up at the front desk. He took his valuables from the small wire basket and loaded them into his pockets. He paid his bill and walked back toward the locker room.

  George White was in his cubicle, at the pressing bench. He looked up as Mike entered. He nodded, raised the presser, and wiped his brow with a red kerchief.

  “Yes, sir,” he said. “One moment.” He took the pants from the press and threaded them through a hanger. The small room smelled of pressed and steamed wool. It held an ironing board, a valet stand, and a laundry table.

  On the laundry table were various bottles of cleaner, labeled Naptha, Water, Alcohol. Making a corner with the laundry table was a small desk. On the desk were a telephone and a notepad marked Kedzie Baths, Since 1898. 2434 North Kedzie, Call Belmont Five Five Two, and an old studio photograph. It showed several half-naked young girls, posing in front of a vaguely Greek or Roman backdrop.

  The girls were naked from the waist up. One dark-complexioned girl had a black wig, cut straight across the bottom; she wore an Egyptian cobra headdress and carried a flail. Another wore culottes, a fez, and curved-toe Turkish slippers. She carried a scimitar.

  A light-complected girl with wide, trusting eyes was got up in a grass skirt, and carried a ukulele. There was a Nubian princess, stark naked, covering her genitals with one hand, the other holding a musket, her face covered by a veil. The photographer had titled the piece “At the House of All Nations.”

  “Yes, sir, I hope you enjoyed your stay,” George White said.

  “George,” Mike said, “why’d they frame your brother?”

  Chapter 30

  Mike had gotten no information from George. That George was withholding information they both knew well: he was a black man talking to a white, and he was, even at second hand, in the orbit and so subject to the ire of O’Banion’s Irish.

  Mike had offered to trade a half column on his brother’s railroading; but George, with all the guile and talent in the world, could not cleanse or concoct information—even if he had it—that would not, he assumed correctly, redound to his misfortune.

  Mike, nonetheless, wrote the half column on William White, “convicted not upon scant evidence, but on no evidence at all, save the district attorney’s late-appearing taste for law and order, and upon White’s unfortunate proximity to the theft.”

  He tore the paper from the typewriter and said, “And so on.”

  “That’s certainly true,” Parlow said.

  “Fucking case, is like the ’lectionary cycle, it keeps going around.”

  Parlow filled his pipe. “What are we talking about?” he said.

  “Jackie Weiss,” Mike said.

  “Well, that takes us back,” Parlow said.

  “Why don’t he go for it?”

  “Yes, start with what you know. Now, that’s philosophy.”

  “He’s at the Chez, they barge in, he’s done, and he knows it: he’s got to fight.”

  “The cornered rabbit, itself, screams at the attacking fox,” Parlow said.

  “Yeah. But he doesn’t fight,” Mike said. “Why not?”

  “Maybe,” Parlow said, “he doesn’t recognize the jamokes.”

  “Yeah, yeah, sure,” Mike said. “And where’s the girl?”

  “What girl?” Parlow said.

  “Lita Grey.”

  “The fuck do I know,” Parlow said.

  “. . . Hiding the truer question, perhaps,” Mike said.

  “Which is?”

  “Why is no one looking for her? Which means someone knows that she is dead.”

  “I believe I will have a drink,” Parlow said. He unlocked the bottom drawer, took the bottle, and shouted, “Copyboy!”

  Mike saw his Luger pistol in the bottom of Parlow’s drawer. He pointed. “Gimme back the gun.” Parlow gave him his gun back.

  “Lita Grey’s dead, maid’s dead, we follow the bread crumbs back, who do we come to?”

  “Jackie Weiss,” Parlow said. “Morris Teitelbaum, and Jackie Weiss.”

  “Jackie Weiss,” Mike said, “he’s done some things, or knows something, or has taken something ‘they’ want. Who is ‘they’?”

  “Who are they,” Parlow said.

  “Go write for a small magazine,” Mike said.

  “I would,” Parlow said, “but the only good-looking girls there are the men.”

  “It takes all kinds,” Mike said. The boy brought the Dixie Cups.

  “Alright, Jackie Weiss,” Mike said. “Assume it was just an internecine squabble.”

  Mike poured the drinks and Parlow downed his. “Speak respectfully,” he said, “of our beloved crime wave. Many people are killed, and it pays the rent.”

  Mike’s face fell.

  “Aw, hell,” Parlow said. “I’m sorry.”

  “Nah, the girl’s dead,” Mike said. “She’s not getting any deader.”

  But the afternoon, also, was dead. Mike left the paper and went to a businessman’s speak on Wabash, where he would know no one.

  Mike drank himself sick and returned to the one-room flat. The flat was cold, it seemed the flat was always cold. It was, of course, sweltering hot in the Chicago summers, and Mike, along with the rest of the building, slept out, August nights, on the fire escape or on the roof. But he always considered the heat, though it held sway for half the year, as the exception.

  Mike sat in the kitchen. He had removed his shoes and propped his feet up on the kitchen table, but kept the overcoat on against the chill. In an hour, at five p.m., the landlord was required to restore the heat. Sometimes it happened. And sometimes it did not—if the janitor was sick, or absent, or had been instructed to save on coal.

  The smell of the gas from the oven filled the room.

  The grief he felt was not that of the War. His friends had died, and there was little time to mourn. Their absence struck him as part of a cycle. The cycle ran between shock, sadness, anger, and philosophy. The process continued as one “got on with it”; and the passage of time, consumed in saving one’s own life, attenuated the bitterness of one’s comrades’ deaths, which deaths were now memories.

  But his loss of the girl was anguish, and though his attacks of grief became, over time, less frequent, they seemed to increase in intensity. “The problem with death,” Crouch had said, “is not that they are dead, but that they stay dead.”

  So Mike sat, recalling the Bible verse that had terrified him as a child, “In the morning you will say, ‘If only it were evening,’ and, at evening, ‘If only it were morning.’” He found it, now, the truest thing he had ever read.

  He knew that, at some point, he would form attachments with other women; and he reasoned that it was theoretically possible one might replace the Irish girl in his affections. He found the thought repulsive, but did not know whom or what to curse. Her killer, of course, whoever he might be, but he had, months ago, concluded he would never know—an act of will, the conclusion adopted in the attempt to substitute resolution for insanity.

  He sat in the freezing room, welcoming the cold as a counterirritant or a legitimate, by which he meant sane, cause for complaint.

  Through the evening hours, his fugue state lessened to the extent that he found himself, by association, puzzling, again, over what Parlow had said was “their own private crime wave,” the murder of Jackie Weiss.

  Jackie Weiss had been killed. His partner had been killed. His mistress, it would seem, had been disappeared; and her maid tortured and shot.

  Crouch had taught him, “Look for the unresolved chord. It’s like Wagner,” he said, “the fucking th
ing goes on and on, I can’t follow it. There are Norse gods and goddesses, and faery spirits of Valhalla, and somesuch, and the thing goes on ’til half the audience is dead, but at the end, so they say, there is one final chord, which resolves the entire Teutonic mess.

  “Look for the unresolved,” Crouch said. “Any idiot can see what fits; look for what doesn’t fit.”

  “Who made the call?” Mike said. “Who called the insurance company?”

  He lowered his feet to the freezing floor. He reached down to lace his shoes onto his swollen feet, and he began to pace the small apartment.

  Somebody made the claim. Somebody in the know.

  What did they know?

  They knew the porter didn’t steal the brooch; they knew Jackie had given it to his girl. Who knew that?

  Whoever it was shot Jackie and put the girl on the run, broke. They knew she would have to pawn the brooch, and so, they called in the insurance claim to track her down. And they killed her. And the maid. And they tortured the maid. Why? To learn something. What?

  Mike took out his notebook, and began to write, Mid-Continental Insurance Company. Then he wrote, . . . the contents of the safe.

  Then he stopped walking.

  Perhaps something was in the safe, he thought, or had been there. But: could the two girls get in the safe? The flat was his hidey-hole. Jackie Weiss. He hid the girl there, he hid the safe there. He’s not going to tell the girl the combination, why would he?

  Mike sat at the kitchen table and shook his head. He took the clean sheet from the typewriter, and began to write.

  There was a knock on Parlow’s door near nine a.m.

  “Who is it?” Parlow said.

  “It’s the Rose of No Man’s Land,” Mike said.

  Parlow opened the door. Mike came in, carrying two white paper containers of coffee. He put them down on the kitchen table and sat. Parlow locked the door.