Dirty Fire

by Earl Merkel

  “No kidding,” I said over my shoulder. “What kind of calls do you catch here?”

  “You know how it is—the Commander said your father used to be a Chicago cop.” I twisted in my seat to look at Sozcka, hard; but his face was open and guileless and looked genuinely puzzled at the unexpected expression on my face.

  After a moment, he resumed speaking.

  “You have your better-off individuals living around the corner from people who are not too far off the poverty line,” Sozcka replied. “Nothing new about that in Chicago. We get our share of burglaries, purse snatching, the occasional mugging—the usual stuff, though the area tends more toward property crimes than violent ones. Weekends, we field some interesting drunk and disorderly beefs, the occasional domestic. Nothing all that out of the usual, really. The big concern these days is coming out of OCU.”

  This time it was Terry who turned, her interest obvious. Chicago’s Organized Crime Unit was considered one of the best informed in the nation, and its concerns were seldom unfounded.

  “They’re seeing signs that the Russian Mafiya is establishing itself pretty strongly among the émigré population,” Sozcka said. “That’s M-A-F-I-Y-A, no relation to our Sicilian friends. Except these Russians are following the same pattern the old Mustache Petes did when they were getting started way back when.”

  His hand waved at the storefronts outside. “Past few years, they’ve been hitting up local businesses for protection, extorting money from illegal immigrants, all your garden-variety strong-arm stuff. But OCU says that now they’re moving heavy into the traditional big-ticket stuff—drugs, hookers, games—and even some pretty sophisticated computer fraud and shit.” Sozcka blushed, surprisingly. “Pardon me, miss.”

  Terry winked at him in the mirror; the gesture only deepened the spots of color on Sozcka’s cheeks.

  I rescued him. “We appreciate your help, Sozcka. How is it you speak the language?”

  “My mother. Her people were ethnic Russians who lived in the western part of Estonia,” he said. “Most of the folks there spoke either Russian or German. Usually both—I guess so they could understand the words ‘hands up’ whenever they got invaded.”

  Sozcka had a healthy laugh.

  “She was a DP after the war, talked her way into a job with the U.S. Army as a translator. Then she married a Polish-American sergeant from Chicago—hey, where else?—and came back with him. He died when I was a kid, so it was just the two of us. When I was growing up, Ma was the only person on our block who spoke Rooski. I think she made me speak it at home just so she’d have somebody to talk to.”

  He leaned forward and peered up through the windshield at a street sign. “It’s just up on the next block,” he said. “Now there’s seven Russian-language newspapers in the city and a radio station that broadcasts full-time in Russian. All the schools in the neighborhood have to have teacher’s aides who know Russian and the YMCA over on Pielmar Street has night classes that teach ESL—that’s ‘English as a Second Language’—for the new arrivals.”

  Sozcka tapped Posson on the shoulder and pointed to a space being vacated by a rusting Buick. Terry pulled the car in expertly.

  “I guess these days, Ma would have felt right at home,” said Sozcka, “except she didn’t particularly like Russians. Or Germans, for that matter. She never told me any of the details, but she had her reasons. Your address is just a little ways up—we can walk from here.”

  The entryway was next to the Interbook, a Russian-language bookstore. Its expansive window displayed stacks of what looked like Russian paperback mysteries, computer textbooks in Russian and a wide range of Russian-English dictionaries.

  A wooden door, with peeling strips of gray paint fringing the old brass of the doorknob, opened to a stairway leading upward. There were six mailboxes on the right wall, four of them with names printed in ink or pencil in the small recesses. None of them were the name of the man we sought.

  “We’ll try a few doors and see if anybody’s home,” Sozcka said. He squinted up into the half light at the top of the stairs. “Sonnenberg, you said?”

  “Sonnenberg,” Terry replied. “First name Paul. Nickname of Sonny.”

  The first door was on the left-hand side of a corridor lit by a naked bulb. Traffic sounds rose muted up the stairway and the air smelled of scorched onions and the tang of hot metal. Somewhere on the floor, a television was on, tuned to what sounded like a child’s cartoon program. Automatically, Sozcka stepped out of the direct line in front of the doorway, and Posson moved to the right of it. The Chicago officer reached around and rapped loudly, shaking the door in its frame.

  The door opened to a two-inch slit, and a balding man with a gray-flecked mustache looked out. His eyes flickered between Terry and Sozcka.

  “Shto eta?”

  “Dobriy dyen. Ya Chicago Police,” Sozcka growled in a low voice, holding up the photo Terry had collected along with Sonnenberg’s rap sheet. “Kto etat ‘Sonnenberg?’ On doma?”

  “Nyet.” The voice had a petulance tinged with suspicion that was evident despite the abruptness of the answer. “A chyom vi gavareetye? Chicago balshoy gorat.”

  Sozcka gestured down the corridor and said something in a tone between a question and a demand. It brought a swift reply.

  “Nyet, eeh soo’kin sin nyet doma!” What they could see of the man’s lip curled in annoyance. “Ya nye ochyen lyooblyoo.” The door slammed in the policeman’s face.

  “Balshoye spaseeba,” Sozcka said to the closed door, and despite the language barrier I could hear the sarcasm heavy in the policeman’s voice.

  Sozcka turned to Terry.

  “He says he doesn’t know any son of a—anybody by that name,” Sozcka said, his voice a stage whisper. “And he doesn’t know if his neighbors—who, incidentally, he, uh, doesn’t seem to think highly of—are home.

  “Let’s keep trying. Our guy may have moved on, but let’s make sure.”

  “Right,” said Sozcka. He stepped to the next door and lifted his hand to knock. But before he could, from inside the apartment we heard the sounds of a sudden scuffle, of a woman’s voice rising and cut short, punctuated with the sound of what might have been a hard slap against flesh. Then there was a crash, like a table loaded with glassware had collapsed.

  Sozcka looked at me.

  “Kick it,” I said. “Let’s go!”

  Sozcka pulled his sidearm and sucked in a deep breath. On the far side of the door, Terry had her pistol out—a 9mm Beretta that looked too large for her hand—and I could see her tense in preparation.

  “Police!” Sozcka bellowed, and the flat of his heavy shoe hit the door just below the knob. The jamb splintered and the door slammed against the wall, bouncing back on its hinges.

  Before it could swing closed, the Chicago cop had shouldered past it, his chromed .357 revolver at arm’s length sweeping the room right to left. Terry was right behind him in a similar stance, her pistol moving in a left to right arc. “Everybody fuckin’ freeze!” Sozcka screamed. “Freeze, goddamit!”

  From where I stood in the hallway, I could just see between them, marking the drapes of a window blowing in the draft from a broken, empty frame; on the floor, a woman in tight black jeans and a loose sweater held both hands to her mouth, blood dripping between her fingers. Her eyes were squeezed tight, either in pain or in terror at the violent maelstrom of which she suddenly found herself the center.

  “Room’s clear! Window!” Terry shouted to Sozcka. He jumped to the open frame, flattened himself against the wall next to it, and in a smooth, rapid movement shot a fast look down the grated fire stairs outside. “Asshole’s heading east!” he yelled to her and thumbed the radio microphone that was clipped to a loop on his left shoulder.

  And then I was running down the stairs to the street, bursting into the dazzling sunlight.

  I hit the pavement at a dead run, turning left and sprinting, weaving, jostling, brushing through the astounded pedestrians. I hurdled a two-
wheeled shopping basket being pulled by a tiny woman with white hair and a long black coat, and bumped hard against a man in a denim jacket. The collision spun him into a storefront’s wall. I could hear his curses follow me as my legs pumped hard. I ran for all I was worth—swerving now to avoid a startled man holding his young daughter’s hand, then tightroping along the curb to find an open pathway through the crowd.

  At the corner, I grabbed the upright pole of a street sign with my left hand, spinning half around it to maintain my momentum as I changed direction ninety degrees. Ahead of me was the alley that ran behind the buildings and bisected the block. I had almost reached it when a man skidded out, flat-footed, as he prepared to change his own direction of escape. He was facing me, still skidding sideways. His eyes only had time to open wide before I lowered my shoulder and ran through his chest at full speed. All the anger and frustration I had stored for so many months exploded in the force I threw behind the collision. There was an impact that I felt all the way into my heels: a confused cacophony of sound that was loud but distant filled my ears.

  I must have closed my eyes at the instant of collision, because when I opened them I was half lying on top of the man. Both of us were jammed against the base of a parking meter where we had skidded. My arms were wrapped around him, hard under his armpits and locked behind his back. The man’s body had taken the brunt of the force when we smashed into the cement of the sidewalk. He was twisting in pain, his mouth open wide as he tried to replace air that had been slammed from his lungs.

  I unwrapped my arms and was pushing myself to my knees just as Terry Posson slid to a halt above me. Her gun was out, and it was pointed in a two-handed grip at the man writhing on the ground. I looked down at my hands, where blood was beginning to well. Grit was imbedded in the abrasions on several fingers.

  “Son-of-a-bitch was listening at the door when we talked to the first guy,” she said to me, breathless from her own sprint. “He must have heard Sozcka mention his name. When the woman tried to come to the door, he slugged her and went through the glass.”

  I sat back on the sidewalk as Terry began to pat down the man beside me. His eyelids had opened to slits now, and he watched her pull out her handcuffs while she held the pistol steady at his forehead. His eyes swiveled to where I sat, rasping hard to deal with an oxygen debt that was, like most of what I owed, far beyond my present ability to pay.

  I felt happier than I had in months.

  “Hey,” I said between breaths, addressing the man whose mug shot I had handed Sozcka just a little while ago. “So—how’re you doing, Mr. Sonnenberg?”

  • • •

  We were in the interview room at the same district station where we had picked up Phil Sozcka earlier in the day. Two ambulances had been dispatched along with three tactical units. Despite my protestations, I had been taken to Riverside Memorial’s emergency room along with Sonnenberg and the woman who lived in the Devon Avenue apartment.

  Katya Butenkova, a native of what was once again being called St. Petersburg by the time she had left it to immigrate here, was not seriously injured. It was neither the swollen lip nor the chipped tooth that kept her responses to Terry’s questions short and uninformative.

  When told she had the option, she had declined to press assault charges.

  Sonnenberg’s condition was even less serious. I had held high hopes that I had broken at least one of his ribs, or even caused moderate internal injuries.

  “You’re getting old and infirm, officer,” the emergency room resident had chided me. He cleaned and bandaged the two abraded fingers on my left hand. “The guy you tackled is in better condition than you are.”

  The injured had all been treated and released; Katya declined a trip back to either the station house or her apartment in a CPD squad car, and left in a cab. With the Lake Tower material-witness warrant now formally, if somewhat spectacularly, served on him, the option was not open for Sonnenberg.

  It did not start cordially. He had had his rights read to him when he was lying on his back around the corner from Devon Avenue. I placed my Sony tape recorder on the table between us, set to voice activation, and leaned back. Then, out of habit, I repeated the Miranda warning while Terry paced back and forth behind Sonnenberg.

  He leaned back insolently, balancing on the rear legs of a hard aluminum chair. I settled across from him at the table and informed Sonnenberg that he was being held as a material witness in a police investigation.

  “So, you get up to Lake Tower much, Paul?” I asked. “Or do you prefer ‘Sonny?’”

  Paul “Sonny” Sonnenberg shrugged, and my leg lashed out under the table in a hard, vicious movement. It swept Sonnenberg’s chair hard sideways, and only his wildly windmilling arms kept Sonny from tumbling out of it. The front legs hit the floor with a loud metallic crash.

  From behind Sonnenberg, Terry’s eyes had snapped open at the unexpected maneuver. She glared, and for an instant I thought she would explode at me. Instead, she turned her anger at Sonnenberg.

  “You want to pay attention,” she suggested, leaning forward so that her face and his were inches apart. “We’re talking about your future.”

  “Jesus, what’s your damn problem?” Sonnenberg rubbed his elbow where it had smashed against the tabletop as his arms flailed. He looked warily at me. “What is this? If you’re the ‘bad cop,’ what the fuck does that make her?”

  “I’m not bad, Sonny,” I said. “I’m the one picking gravel out of my hand because some turd wanted to play rabbit. Puts me in a bit of a mood, Sonny. So if I was you, I’d listen to her.”

  “Look,” he said, “I’m sorry I took off like that. I didn’t know you were cops. And I’m sorry I hit Katya—I’m going to make it up to her. You know. People in love, they get into little tiffs sometimes.”

  “Katya says you hit her when she started to go to the door. How come?”

  Sonnenberg tried to look embarrassed. “Look, she’s a Russki, okay? Maybe she knew what you guys were saying out in the hall, I dunno. All I heard was a bunch of Russian monkey talk with my name attached. Maybe I’ve got some Russki friends who think I owe ‘em a few rubles, okay? Whatever. I just didn’t want her to open the door, so I tried to stop her. Then you busted in with guns, and I bugged out.”

  Terry was looking at him like she might have looked at a particularly nasty clump of bathroom mold.

  “Uh-huh. Here’s the way it reads,” Posson said. “We have you on a domestic assault with injuries. Obstruction of justice. Flight to avoid arrest—“

  “All bullshit,” Sonnenberg said, “piss-ant stuff.”

  “—and felonious assault on a public official during the aforementioned flight.” She smiled chillingly. “That one can put you away for five years, minimum. No early out, either.”

  Sonnenberg had a look of outraged incredulity on his face. “No way! What the hell ‘public official’ am I supposed to have assaulted?”

  I raised my hand close to the man’s face, and involuntarily Sonnenberg flinched. Without guile, I smiled and waggled the fingers the emergency room had wrapped in gauze. “That would be me. And I am inclined to press charges to the, uh…fullest extent.”

  Sonnenberg shook his head in disgust. “Bullshit,” he muttered.

  “So let’s you work hard to make friends here, okay?” Terry said, leaning next to his face again. “Let’s have a little conversation. I’ll go first. We’re interested in art. Some nice paintings—I dunno, maybe a statue or two. Now you tell me where we can find some really nice items along those lines, okay?”

  Sonnenberg stared at her for a long moment, then shook his head hard. “Nope. You’re so wrong on this, we ain’t even in the same time zone. I handle contracting, roofing work, general repair. And you haven’t heard anything else because there’s nothing else to hear. Am I being clear here?”

  I doodled on the notepad. Without looking up, I asked, “What do you hear from Sam Lichtman, Sonny?”

  Sonnenberg looked startl
ed, then alarmed. “That shithead? Nothing. Why would I?”

  “He’s heard about you, Sonny,” I said. “He says to tell you hello. He mentioned you just the other day. He was just thinking back on some business you two did together once. You know, memory lane stuff. What was it, Terry? Elgin or Aurora?”

  She picked up the ball without missing a beat, though she must have been as puzzled as Sonnenberg.

  “Elgin,” she said, challenging Sonnenberg with a hard, steady stare.

  “Right, Elgin.” I nodded solemnly. “Well, Sam heard I was going to look you up; said I should say ‘hi’ for him. He says he hears you’re doing real good these days.”

  Sonnenberg had regained some of his composure.

  “Elgin,” he said, making it sound like a dirty word. “Sam Lichtman never told you anything about Elgin or anything else. Whatever else the guy is, he’s stand-up.”

  “One of his best qualities,” I agreed. “Still, you know how it is when a guy is dying—oh, you knew that, right? That Lichtman’s got a tumor in his brain, and that he knows he’s only got a few weeks to live? Anyway, you know how some people get, times like that.”

  I looked him dead in the eyes. “I don’t care about Elgin, Sonny. Whatever happened there is between you and…refresh my memory, Sonny. Was it the Garcia’s warehouse you helped rip off? No? Maybe it was the Tripetti family, right?” I put admiration in my voice. “Man, you must have big brass ones, Sonny. I don’t know many people who would skank either one of those crews. Me, I’d be scared to death—even if by some mistake my name ended up getting mentioned in the same sentence with the Elgin gig.”

  I looked benevolently at Sonny Sonnenberg, who was now staring at me with something akin to hatred.

  “Well, I guess you’re safe,” I said. “You don’t know anything about Elgin. But are you sure you didn’t hear something about an art collection up in Lake Tower? Just a rumor? A hint, maybe?”

  “I ain’t talking to you,” he said flatly. “I remember you now. You’re the guy who got caught in that sting op. Yeah, and you ain’t a cop no more, neither.”