Dirty Fire

by Earl Merkel

  It had only been three weeks since my last visit, but in that time Sam Lichtman had traveled far along a path that he knew went on only a little way farther before it dipped into woods dark and trackless.

  Orval Kellogg had told me that Lichtman had been sent to Stateville’s hospital ward a week before and transferred into the intensive care unit two days later. “They rolled him in on a wheelchair,” the guard said, as once more I went through the prison’s rituals of entry. “Ain’t nobody expectin’ to see him come out of there ‘cept in a bag.”

  Even prepared, the difference from my last visit was jarring.

  This time, the invader inside Lichtman’s brain had mutated into a far more malevolent presence, insinuating its tentacles throughout the living tissue in a manner both merciless and inexorable. It had leached his complexion to that of plumber’s putty, carved away the flesh under his skin to leave him a grey, hollow-eyed wraith. Every few seconds, an involuntary shudder would ripple the left side of his face as the cancer short-circuited doomed synapses somewhere within. His once-thick hair, which had thinned noticeably, was spiky and dull, disheveled from the pillow against which it pressed. Only his eyes were still Sam Lichtman’s—the blue of arctic ice, afire with an almost inhuman intensity.

  A clear liquid dripped steadily through a tube, terminating in the back of a hand mottled with the bruises of previous IV lines. Various other conduits and connections led to arrays of electronic monitors, breathing-gas manifolds, micro-pumps and waste-removal filters—all the technology that makes the modern ICU an impassively cruel place that too often prolongs rather than sustains life. The chain that looped from his ankle to a ring on the bed frame seemed an afterthought, redundant in its mission. Lichtman looked like prey held immobile in a spider’s web carelessly spun, but nonetheless inescapable.

  “Can you believe it? They won’t even let me have a smoke,” Lichtman rasped, the arrogance of his smirk an obvious effort. “Guess they’re worried it might become a habit, huh?” He eyed me clinically. “You look like hell, Davey-boy. You give up sleeping or something?”

  I said nothing. A nurse pulled aside the curtain around Sam’s bed and stepped in. She was Hispanic and solidly plain-featured, her hair dark and pulled back in a thick tail. She smiled fleetingly at me, and I noticed a faint lacework of old scar tissue below the left corner of her mouth. As the nurse checked the various tubes and wires, she did not look at Lichtman. But his eyes carefully, almost warily, followed her orbit around his hospital bed. Then she left, not having said a word—realizing, perhaps, there was little she could say that the object of her ministrations didn’t already know much too well.

  “Shit.” Lichtman breathed rather than spoke the word. His eyes found mine. “You think I’m already dead, and this is hell?” He did not make the question sound rhetorical.

  “Sonnenberg,” I said. “I busted him, he got himself sprung, and now he’s missing. A Russian woman he was living with is dead—messy dead, Sam. Someone enjoyed putting blood spots on the ceiling. I need to find Sonnenberg, or what’s left of him.”

  Somehow, my words seemed to give Lichtman a focus, as if the act of concentrating energized a part of him unravaged so far by his disease. I didn’t care to know from what experience he drew to flesh out the imagery.

  “Where?” he asked. “Where did all this go down?”

  “He was hanging out with some Russians up on Devon. I got the impression he’d rather not meet up with them for the time being.”

  “If old Sonny has got Russians mixed up in this, he’s a bigger goddam fool than I thought he was. If he’s trying to screw them, they’ll skin the little dickhead,” Lichtman said. He stiffened suddenly, and I saw the pain turn his face the shade of parchment.

  Then it passed, and he let out the breath he had been holding.

  “Russians. I never fucked with them and they never fucked with me. But I hear they’ve been getting hungrier out there, so maybe they invited themselves into Sonny’s deal. Could’ve happened.”

  He grinned, a sickly effort compared to his former self. “Hell, a couple of million bucks worth of artwork, just sitting there? Like I told you the first time, if I had been on the outside when I heard about it, I might have wanted a taste myself. I still can’t figure how even an fuck-up like Sonny could’ve blown this one.”

  “Sam,” I said, “I need to know who’s flying top-cover for Sonnenberg. When I hauled him up to Lake Tower, he just about came out and bragged that he was tight with somebody up in the high branches. He even warned me I could expect to get pissed on.”

  Lichtman’s eyes had closed, and his mouth was a thin smile of amusement.

  “Well, nobody ever claimed that Sonny was the sharpest pencil in the box,” Lichtman said, and his voice was less weak now. “I don’t suppose he was stupid enough to name any names?”

  I took a chance. “I’m guessing Nederlander,” I said. “If the idea was to sell the artwork back to the owner, that ties all this to insurance. We have some indications that Nederlander might have been involved in a car-insurance scam at least a couple of years back. One idea might be that he’s caught a dose of ambition and decided to move up a little.”

  “Could be,” Lichtman said. “You’d love to put Nederlander in the crapper, wouldn’t you? He do something recently to smoke your ass all over again?”

  “I have the tax man crawling all over me, Sam. Unreported ‘bribe’ income. Nederlander is probably the bastard who sic’ed him on me.” I noted Lichtman’s reaction. “It’s not as funny as it sounds, trust me.”

  “Wow—just when you think you’re all clear, somebody calls the IRS,” he said, shaking his head more in amusement than sympathy. “Hey, you don’t know how much I feel for ya. That’s cold, man. That’s downright brutal.”

  He chuckled, despite the pain it cost him.

  “Sonny’s mother used to live in the county, unincorporated ‘burb out past O’Hare. I dunno exactly where, but I know he got his ass busted there this one time. Dumb fuck—you remember the blizzard five or six years back? The big one, three-and-a-half feet in twelve hours? Took days to plow out the streets.

  “Old Sonny, he’s looking for a parking space that wasn’t under a ton of snow. Gets lucky—couple of doors down from his mother’s, there’s this nice spot somebody dug out. Wide open, ‘cept for a damn kitchen chair.” He laughed. “You getting the picture here?”

  I nodded; in a Chicago winter, few commodities are more valuable than a parking space painstakingly cleared of snow. By sacred tradition, the act constitutes an uncontestable claim, staked out by placement of a card table, a sawhorse, an ironing board. Or a kitchen chair.

  “Sonny pulls in anyway, goes up to the old lady’s place. Hour later, he looks out the window and sees some guy beating the hell out of his car with a tire iron. Broke out the windows, smashed off the door handles—even beat in the trunk and threw all the shit into the street.”

  Had it not been for the pain, Lichtman might have been convulsing in laughter; as it was, tears of mirth marked his cheeks.

  “By the time Sonny gets down there, a Cook County deputy had already stopped. What do you know? He finds a half-dozen cases of liquor, some of ‘em still in the trunk and some of ‘em sticking out of the damn snowbanks where the citizen had thrown ‘em. Problem was, none of the bottles had a state tax sticker on ‘em.”

  This time, the mixture of laughs and pained groans took a few minutes to subside. Finally, after a fit of coughing, Lichtman’s eyes swiveled to look directly at me. “I know Sonny’s old lady died a year or two back. But last I heard, he still has the place.”

  “What else can you give me, Sam?“

  “That’s all I can come up with, Davey-boy. Least, for right now.”

  I made my voice impatient.

  “Come on, Sam,” I said. “How about Nederlander? You either know or you don’t, and I don’t have time to screw around playing games.”

  “I do, huh?” he retorted, and fell sil
ent. “Man, I wish I had a smoke.”

  He stared at the ceiling for what seemed like a long time, looking like a man doing long division in his head.

  “I’ll tell you this for free,” he said, finally. “You’ve got some bad boys in this thing. Sure, maybe Nederlander’s a player, okay? But, there’s shit going down that’s a lot bigger than he ever was.”

  Lichtman shifted on the bed, a white-knuckled movement that that appeared to cost more in pain than it bought in relief. I half rose to help, then stopped at the warning in his cold blue eyes. His chest heaved deeply several times before he could continue.

  “Tell you a little story,” he said, and the smile on his face was condescending through the residual pain. “Once upon a time, there was this fuckin’ bear—a tough little turnip-eater goes by the name of Mikhail, no last name. This Mikhail, he’s only been in from the old country for a little while but he’s already got the local Russkies sweating bullets whenever he walks into a room. He hooks up with a local Mafiya hood, hires him to hold the pliers when he goes to sweat an old Jew name of Stan Levinstein. With me so far, Davey?”

  I stared at him. “What might we call the hired muscle?”

  “Let’s call him ‘Vladimir Kolchenk,’ long as we’re agreed this is a fairy tale. So Mikhail and Vlad are outside Levinstein’s waiting for him to show up—when all of a sudden they see this other guy going in the place.”

  He shook his head, a tentative movement meant to mock.

  “Terrible crime problem we got in America, ain’t it? I mean, all of a sudden these two Russians are witnessing a burglary go down. Or maybe not; see, in my story the guy comes out again in a couple of minutes, empty-handed. Little while later, maybe, Levinstein and his wife show up and our two boys go in for their little chat. Next day, newspaper’s printing two obits and a picture where the house used to be.”

  “Sam, are you telling me it was a hit? This Mikhail came all the way from Russia to whack a building supply dealer?”

  “Davey, Davey—this is just a story I’m pulling out of my ass, remember? But say, just for the sake of argument, that Levinstein was hiding something they wanted back. They’d need to use a little persuasion first, right?”

  I said nothing, remembering the description of how Katya had looked.

  “So Mikhail maybe starts to work on the wife, figuring what the hell, it might make one or the other talk. Instead, Levinstein goes on the attack.” He smirked. “Here the good part, Davey—the old Jew gets his brains blown out by Kolchenk, since our boy Mikhail was distracted by the noise the wife was making. That leaves Kathleen—who, as it turns out, knows nothin’ about nothin’. Tough luck all around, wasn’t it?”

  “Who is this Mikhail, Sam?” I asked. “Where can I find him?”

  “I can’t help you on that one, man.” It sounded final, but in a way as if Lichtman had reached some line he had drawn rather than some limit to his knowledge.

  He studied my face and I saw him make a decision.

  “But maybe I have something else for you. Little advice on your tax problem.”

  I frowned, taken aback.

  “Past few years, I’ve been kind of busy trying to get back in court, you know? Had my lawyer talk to a few people in law enforcement, hint around that maybe I’d be open to a little tit-for-tat action. So, like a year or so ago, I found myself talking to the Feds. The fuckin’ Eff-Bee-Eye, okay? They sent two of ‘em here with some numb-nut from Justice to take notes and make sure the coffee’s hot.”

  Sam’s eye twitched in what might have been a wink.

  “So I’m playing kinda coy, letting my lawyer sketch in the…uh, outline of what I might be willing to deal. This one FBI shithead was leaning against the wall the whole time, givin’ me the smile and the hard eye, you know? So all of a sudden, he decides to get in my face. He leans up close and asks me how I’d like to have a tax rap thrown at me instead of a deal. Says it’s real easy to arrange, and he’d be happy to do the honors if I wanted to be a hard guy. My fuckin’ lawyer went ballistic, finally, and the discussion moved on to other areas.”

  Lichtman pulled a face, and again shifted uncomfortably on the hospital bed. His eyelids fluttered, and he forced them open again only with effort. The strength I had heard in his voice a few moments earlier was fading fast.

  “Okay—you want to point the finger at Nederlander, maybe you’re not all that far off target,” Sam Lichtman said. “But you’re screwing around with the Feds on this, Davey-boy. Like I said, I been there. You ask me, that tax shit is a lot more their style.”

  I tried hard not to look too interested. “You remember any names?” I asked, with as much nonchalance as I could muster. It was a wasted effort, for Sam Lichtman was no longer interested in me or my problems. His eyes were again closed, and he looked suddenly like a very old man.

  “Tax Man had some wop name,” he said, his voice once more sounding nearly drained. “Santini, Santorelli, I dunno. Dressed real sharp. Nice haircut.”

  • • •

  “If he was busted when they found the liquor, it will be on his rap sheet,” I told Gil, speaking low into the telephone in an assistant warden’s office. “That will at least give us the street where it happened. If we get real lucky, Sonnenberg may have given his mother’s address as his residence.”

  Cieloczki’s voice came through the receiver clear and calm.

  “Terry Posson’s still across the hall in the police office,” he said. “I’ll get her on it right away.”

  “Tell Terry I’ll can be there in ninety minutes, maybe a little more.”

  Gil’s voice was firm.

  “Terry can handle it,” he said. “You’ve been on this thing for two days without a break. I want you to go home and get some rest. She can call Bird, take him along.”

  I started to object, but Gil’s voice was flat and final. “No arguments, Davey—look, I know a guy named Erlich, heads up Major Crimes in the Sheriff’s office. Posson and Bird can work with him. Maybe Sonnenberg is hiding out in his mother’s old place, maybe not.”

  “I want to be there,” I said stubbornly.

  “Go home. Davey, this thing is getting hotter and hotter. Bird thinks he may have a handle on the insurance angle of all this, and it could even lead back to that car-theft ring. Get some sleep. I want you to be in a condition where you can help me make sense of it all.”

  There was a pointed silence, and I understood Cieloczki had made an astute guess about my choice of self-medication.

  “I’ll be fine,” I said, and hated the defensive tone in my own voice.

  “Go home and go to bed,” Gil repeated. “Anything comes up that we need tonight, I have your home number.”

  • • •

  I left Stateville in the gathering dusk. Sundown moves quickly in the early springtime, feinting with an orange-red skyscape that is spectacular in its brevity, then falling back with the speed of an electric lamp suddenly switched off.

  I drove north, the display a panorama over my left shoulder. Before the dark red disk drowned itself somewhere over the far side of the horizon, it had flared on the windshields of the oncoming traffic and tinged the cars in my rearview mirror with the color of flame. By the time I reached the outskirts of Lake Tower, the stars were bright pinpoints in the inky blackness of the cosmos.

  I pulled into the parking lot of a Seven-Eleven and stopped near a pay phone bolted to the outside wall.

  Three youths, all in the pseudo-gangbanger costumes made by Hilfiger and marketed extensively to the children of the affluent, looked at me like I was trespassing. They smoked with an inexpert awkwardness they no doubt hoped passed for style and moved down the curb as I stepped to the telephone. One looked back at me over his shoulder with a dead-eye expression that may have been meant as a challenge. None of them was more than fifteen years of age, and their aura of nonspecific hostility made me feel very old.

  The coins rattled loudly as I thumbed them into the slot and punched in a number I
had called enough to remember without effort.

  The phone rang at the other end once, twice. Then a familiar voice said “Yeah?” in my ear.

  I had noticed the car in my rearview mirror just after I had pulled away from the prison grounds. It had kept pace on the drive north, closing up when the highway became thick with rush-hour commuters and falling back casually when the traffic thinned. The car was now parked well back from the blue-white circle carved into the dark by the streetlamp. It was too dark to see the two men in the front seats, but I could still recognize the shape of the vehicle.

  “Your people still use Fords on surveillance, Ronnie?” I asked, turning my body away from the street.

  There was a moment of dead air on the line.

  “This who I think it is?” Ron Santori asked, careful to sound nonchalant.

  “I want to know if you’ve got a tail on me,” I said. “Two men, green Taurus, front license plate masked by a muddy smear. Which is just a little odd, since the rest of the car looks so nice and clean.”

  “Why would I have you followed?” Santori’s voice sounded calm, mildly puzzled, reasonable. “I know where you’ve been. Hell, I called down there to get you cleared to visit our sick friend.”

  I shifted the phone to my other hand. “By the way, he said to say hello.”

  Again, a pause.

  “Who did?” Santori asked, bemusement in his voice.

  “Our ‘friend.’ He said you helped him out with a tax problem last year.”

  “He must have me confused with somebody else,” the FBI agent said. “I’ve never met the gentleman. Not in person.”

  I turned, trying to make it look casual. The car that had followed me into Lake Tower was no longer parked at the curb. It was nowhere in sight now, a fact that did little to ease my growing awareness that I was no longer sure of what role I had been assigned to play.

  “They seem to have driven away,” I said. “What do you make of that?”

  Santori sighed. “Maybe you’re just a little overwrought, my friend. But if you’re sure you’re being followed, get me a plate number and we’ll do what we can about it.”