Windy City

by Scott Simon

  “The honorable state senator Miriam Gilpin feels she's due.” As soon as the mayor had uttered the name he waved it away, as if erasing a chalkboard.

  “There's that DePaul law professor who's on TV all the time. He wrote the new constitution for Na-u-ru.” The mayor enjoyed drawing out the nation's name in his mouth so that it rhymed with kangaroo. “In the Pacific.”

  “Peter Mansfield. Yes, he sent me a copy—signed. It must have been a hundred pages. There are fewer people in Nauru than in the Eleventh Ward. He gave them a constitution that's longer than Don Quixote.”

  “A clause for each coconut,” the mayor suggested. “The professor is vitally interested in public service, you know. Most academics, you give 'em a peck on the cheek and show them out. However, the professor has been wise in love.”

  “Fortunate, I'd say.”

  “Emphasize fortune,” agreed the mayor.

  “Dolores Carroll is not only a real beauty, but a civic asset,” said Sunny.

  “Asset-sss,” the mayor emphasized. “The professor tells me he's interested in public service. I don't tell him, ‘You may write constitutions, but you've got to fill potholes and work a precinct before you can take a turn in our game.’ A man like that can make significant contributions to the democratic process.”

  “The Democratic party,”proposed Sunny.

  “Democracy is held together by an intricate system of checks and balances, Sunny,” the mayor advised. “Personal checks and bank balances.”

  Sunny beheld his cigar at arm's length for a moment; it conspicuously lacked the manufacturer's band.

  “These aren't legal, you know,” he told the mayor, who looked at the fat, prominent ash on the end of his own cigar, and shook it to emphasize its solidity.

  “An act of civil disobedience,” the mayor declared. “To protest an inane, depraved, and antediluvian trade embargo.” The mayor slashed his cigar like a cutlass through the bluish haze.

  “There could be half a dozen others running up there, you know,” he went on. “Nobody up in your slice of town suffers from lack of self-importance. Could be nine or ten candidates, between the lawyers in their town homes on Dearborn, the academics in their brownstones on Clark, the well-heeled along Astor, and all the libertarians, vegetarians, and antediluvians.”

  “Republicans?” guessed Sunny, and the mayor flashed an affirming grin.

  “Sounds like there's no room for anyone else,” said Sunny.

  “Or in a field that packed—just the right someone else. A familiar name. International appeal.” The mayor let his silence finish the sentence for Sunny in his mind.

  “I've never thought about running for Congress,” Sunny asserted flatly, and the mayor coughed out so much smoke with his laugh that Sunny had to flail through it with his hands.

  “We've all thought about what it would be like to be president, win the last game of the World Series, drown to death, or sleep with twin blonds. Come on, Sunny. You can't be asleep for your own dreams.”

  Sunny indulged in a prolonged pause before replying, watching the smoke from his cigar snake up to the ceiling.

  “The U.S. Congress,” he said finally. “It's no way to live. Washington—a small company town. People think they're still in summer camp. They wear baggy khakis and squeaky rubber shoes. Name tags on their blazers instead of their underwear. Right down the road from New York—but no one can make a good bagel. They never learn. That's Washington.”

  “But you can come and go, you know,” the mayor reminded him.

  “That's the problem,” Sunny replied. “Tuesday through Friday you're there, working and voting. Friday through Monday you've got to be here, telling people how much you hate being there, where you asked people to send you. You wind up stacking clean shirts in a bookcase in your office, next to mail and magazines you'll never open. Night after night, you eat General Tso's chicken from a bucket while you watch the news, drink a beer, and fall asleep on a couch. You wake up wearing yesterday's underwear and tasting moss on your teeth. Day after day, year after year, you beg for money more times a day than a bum on the street. What kind of bum does that make you? And for what? Just to hold on. To be one of four-hundred something that gets to vote on a thousand things you can't remember.”

  Sunny shook his head and shoulders theatrically. “No thanks,” he said, flattening his hands above the edge of the mayor's desk.

  The mayor wordlessly slipped a hand into a coat pocket and came out with a white handkerchief, neatly creased into thirds and fragrant with dabs of peppery cologne. He held it out to Sunny solemnly.

  “But it sure would make your daughters proud,” he said, pausing to affix the emphasis: “Congressman.”

  Sunny got out of his chair and walked over to the long window overlooking LaSalle Street. The mayor followed softly behind him.

  “Did I say the magic words?” he asked. “I served a term myself, remember. Nice title, nice office. They got a dentist, a barber, and a restaurant right there in the building. You get to hire Harvard PhDs to pick up your dry cleaning. For the experience. You earn less than a high-priced call girl. But you get a future. Congressmen become ambassadors, commentators, lobbyists.” Then the mayor twinkled in Sunny's direction. “Free hors d'oeuvres, every night of the week,” he added, while winking over his cigar.

  “I'm not hungry,” said Sunny simply.

  “Every now and then, any man can use a nice snack,” the mayor reminded him.

  Sunny stepped back from the window and moved to tap his next ash into the green glass in front of the mayor.

  “You can't make anyone a congressman,” he told him. “First District, yes. Second and Seventh, it helps. But not the Ninth.”

  “Indubitably correct. Which is what I will tell Professor Mansfield when I endorse him.”

  Sunny shifted slightly from one foot to the next, choosing to make the mayor go on.

  “An endorsement like that elevates me,” he said finally. “People say, ‘The old warhorse has world vision.’ Some of those folks along the lake know more about Micronesia than Montrose Avenue. So I can let the professor expound on Comoros and East Timor, while I tend to Morgan Park and Canaryville. He speaks seven languages, you know, including basic politics: you scratch my palm, I'll scratch your back.”

  “Is that in Nauru's constitution?” asked Sunny

  The mayor put the stumpy end of his cigar into the green glass.

  “I'll say, ‘Peter, you have my unqualified endorsement. You are a stellar candidate who distinguishes our party. I'll be proud to raise your hand alongside mine. Just invite me to your lovely home some time when Angelina Jolie is there. Her causes, past and future, have my passionate approval. But you know what a disappointing mess democracy can be. You can't rely on my endorsement to deliver votes. In fact, you can't rely on it at all. Our citizens are independent-minded, especially in the Ninth. Isn't that what we revere about them? In fact, I'm not sure my endorsement doesn't risk harming you, in the teeniest way. Folks up there can resent it if they think some politician—even a popular and beloved one, if I may say—is trying to dictate to them …’”

  “Put a ‘Perhaps I'm being modest’ somewhere in there,” Sunny suggested.

  “A deft touch,” the mayor agreed. “I'd have to say, ‘Peter, get out there and campaign! Educate the public! Don't talk down to them! Let them know how vital it is to reduce the proliferation of nuclear weapons, relieve world debt, and reduce our wasteful habits of energy consumption. By increasing fuel taxes.’”

  “Quite a platform next winter,” said Sunny. “When people are breaking icicles off their shower curtains.”

  “Someone has to have the courage to tell voters the truth,” the mayor declared with imperturbable sincerity.

  “I'm told the professor also thinks Jerusalem should be the capital of Palestine.”

  “So do I,” said the mayor. “In my part of town, Israel is the wicked landlord. But I never got my picture taken French-kissing Yasser Ara
fat.”

  “It was years ago. A conference of legal scholars. Arafat kissed them all.”

  “Sunny, in your district a man could probably explain away a picture of him fondling a twelve-year-old boy. He could say he was drunk. The boy looked sixteen. He could promise to get therapy. But playing smoochie with Yasser Arafat…” The mayor made a face as if he had bitten a sour pickle and moved quickly on.

  “I will make strong, clear, urgent personal appeals to Norm Krumholtz at Title and Trust, Warren Williams at Prairie Construction, Gigi Winstead, and Devi Ardalan at Imagine Industries. I will inform them that Professor Mansfield has my heartfelt, unqualified, warm, and effusive endorsement, and I hope they'll support him generously. Even though I realize his campaign has staked out some bold and challenging positions.”

  “I'm sure they'll do as you bid.”

  “No dictating to people like that, Sunny. It's a free country, when you're rich. It's a great country when you're that rich.”

  “There are limits on campaign contributions,” Sunny pointed out.

  “There was a wall in Berlin,” the mayor said unflinchingly. “There were levees in New Orleans. Nature finds a way.”

  Sunny walked softly back to the far end of the mayor's office and thumped his hands softly on the back of one of the unremarkable visitor's chairs from along the walls. As he spoke, Sunny drew himself back and inclined his chin, as if looking just over the earth's curve.

  “But if I ran and won—that would help you, wouldn't it? You'd get your hands into the Carroll purse. But their busybody son-in-law would be chastened. He'd learn that getting elected is harder than writing constitutions. But the Carrolls would be in your debt. Or think they were.”

  “Senate seat coming up in four years,” said the mayor.

  “And we can play this game all over again, can't we?” said Sunny. “Unless they catch on.”

  The mayor grunted, unimpressed.

  “The professor wants a career in politics. I intend to give it to him. Know how the Carrolls made their fortune?” he asked suddenly.

  “Insurance.”

  “Selling dollar policies to poor black and Latin folks. People who were paid just pennies an hour for washing floors on their knees, and hauling shit out of sewers managed to pinch out a few pennies each month for the Carroll In-shoo-rance man, ‘cause he said, 'You can leave your family with $100,000!’ When the time came, most of those policies weren't worth more than a few pesos. But the Carrolls made out.”

  “Like bandits,” Sunny suggested.

  “Like billionaires,” said the mayor.

  “Behind every great fortune …” Sunny began. “So now their children give it all away.”

  “Just enough to start a foundation. They purify their treasure by letting a little of the interest dribble over orphans and endangered wetlands. Bono, Nelson Mandela, and the Dalai Lama show up at their parties. A smile from them sanctifies each cent. That's where we can lend our hands, too.”

  The mayor clasped his hands prayerfully and cocked his head to the side like a stained glass saint. Sunny took his time to reply, finally speaking in a cold, steely voice scorched of all jesting or veneration.

  “My God you're shrewd,” he said. “Dazzling, really. But you're like one of those greedy industrialists who pays a gang fifty million dollars to steal a Vermeer from a museum. You can't hang it anywhere. You can't show it to anyone. So you call in a few select souls late at night into your small, creepy chamber so they can marvel at how craven you are. What a fat, lonely, broke, smart, powerful, impotent, pitiable old fuck you are. I wonder how good you've been for anyone other than yourself.”

  The mayor had heard variations of Sunny's declamation. Being called a pitiable old fuck by an ally was no more unnerving to him than hearing a six-year-old scream “I hate you! I hate you!” at his father. It was how men who owed the mayor their jobs, reputations, and prosperity preserved a morsel of self-respect. The mayor had self-respect to spare. So his answer was gentle.

  “I hope I haven't done bad by you, Sunny.”

  Sunny walked out from behind the chair. He absently slapped his thighs to wake up his circulation and placed a hand behind his neck.

  “Stan Hamel.” Sunny shook his head in sorrow. “I thought he was incorruptible.”

  “Don't be hard on Stan, Sunny,” the mayor admonished. “Don't call anyone incorruptible. It's like saying that they don't get hungry, thirsty, or lonely. It's like saying that gravity doesn't apply.”

  The mayor had returned to mashing the channel changer. One animated man vacuumed sugar off a concrete floor. “Isn't that amazing!” Another ran a notched key over the glossy chassis of a bright red car; the audience gasped at the long scar, as if one more skyscraper had been struck from the sky. Sunny exercised the effrontery to walk over to a dark cabinet and began to unthread the cap off a bottle of the mayor's Remy Martin.

  “Glasses over here,” the mayor rumbled as he stooped down to pull back on one of his small drawers. On the next channel a woman poured hot fat from a hamburger into a clear cup to cheers and adulation. At the roar of clapping, the mayor squeezed up the volume.

  “Let me see,” said Sunny. “I should run for Congress. But you won't help me. In fact, you'll endorse someone else. In fact, you'll urge your wealthiest supporters to help someone else. But you expect me to win. And when I do, you expect me to be grateful.”

  “Sunny?”

  He had the cognac positioned over two short glasses the mayor had plunked onto his green desk blotter and was just beginning to aim the first shot into the rounded bottom when Sunny felt the mayor's hand grasp his wrist and tighten, fiercely, suddenly, like a man who had lost balance and was trying to keep from falling down a staircase. When he spoke, the mayor's voice was hoarse, thick, and sounded slightly strangled.

  “You're one of the few people who understand me.”

  “Who would want to kill the mayor?” Chief Martinez asked aloud, after all politicians had been safely removed from the premises. The mayor's office brimmed with brass-buttoned district commanders, blue-suited security cops, and investigators wearing gloomy gray suits. A growing parade of police technicians in blue windbreakers loudly stretched yellow crime scene tape across the length of the mayor's office, unsnapped equipment cases, and hailed patrolmen to hold this, hold that, and use their investigative acumen to discover where to get coffee at this hour.

  “I mean, who would want to kill the mayor?” Chief Martinez repeated. After a mute moment, at least twenty hands shot up around the room.

  “Let me rephrase that,” the chief added in the general laughter. “I mean, which son of a bitch actually went ahead and did it?”

  The mayor had been at once the most popular man in the city and the most despised. He was the most powerful and the most desperate for approval. No one else knew quite so many people. Between handshakes, winks, and waves cast out from podiums like blessings; between staffers, allies, adversaries, police, teachers, bus drivers, CEOs, parish priests, brokers, bakers, beauticians, street people, storefront reverends, and all forty players on the current roster of the Chicago White Sox (whom the mayor had made it his business to meet), Chief Martinez figured that at least fifty thousand people had the impression they knew the mayor personally.

  The police had compiled an inventory of 1,476 people described, in the parlance of the times, as persons of concern. They had personally, if usually indirectly, threatened to kill the mayor of Chicago, either in a letter, a phone call, or increasingly, by e-mail. Of this accumulated number, 617 had said that they wanted to “kick your fat ass,” “break your fucking neck,” or apply some other force that, while technically short of homicide, was nevertheless regarded as threatening to the mayor's person.

  Other correspondents obligingly listed the kind of details that experts found signals of forethought and sincerity: 349 said someone should shoot the mayor—“Shoot you in your big black head” was a common expression; 320 avowed that they would be gra
tified to see someone “blow up your fat black ass.” A much smaller number, 89, said that the mayor should be slashed or stabbed, while 64 said that the mayor should be hanged.

  (Of that number, 13 were so explicit as to specify “by his balls,” rather than his neck. Department psychologists suggested that this desire was so precise as to merit its own category.)

  Another minority of 9 said that they wanted to fuck the mayor's brains out, fuck him up the ass, or otherwise desired to hasten his demise with ferocious sex. When Chief Martinez once suggested that some of those correspondents might be more carnal than murderous, department psychologists pointedly asked the chief to recall his days on foot patrol: how many husbands' and wives' heads had he seen cracked by a beer bottle an hour after a couple had been in bed? Desire and murder, they reminded him, were compatible passions.

  Then there were other, utterly distinct threats that were imagined with almost breathtaking intricacy. Twenty-eight (a number so unexpected that authorities wondered if it was the product of an organized campaign) said that they longed to pour honey over the mayor's private parts and sprinkle fire ants over the spill (which sounded excruciating; but arthropod experts at the Lincoln Park Zoo had evaluated the possibility and said that the bites would not prove fatal).

  The overwhelming number of threats, 843, made mention of the mayor's race. Some 217 seemed to believe that the mayor was a closeted gay; 209 assumed that the mayor had to be some kind of furtive Jew, a covert convert, or in the thrall of Jews; and 107 blamed the mayor for not hiring them for a city job, for causing them to be fired from a city job, or for the fact that they couldn't seem to find or keep any kind of job as long as he was mayor. They implied that in his city only blacks, gays, or Jews got jobs.

  Interestingly, most of the threatening messages did not express themselves in the conventional vocabulary of racial invective. They might threaten to kill the mayor for being black, a closeted gay, or secret Jew; but not for being a coon, a fag, or a kike. A generation of enlightened instruction had managed to adjust the language—if not much more than the language—of bigotry.