Windy City

by Scott Simon

  “Break?” asked Sunny. “Look, Matt, if this is some kind of union rule …”

  “Our own, sir. Six hours of sleep for people in custody. If we get anything out of them, the last thing we want is—”

  “Absolutely right, chief,” said Sunny. “Put mints on their pillows if you have to.”

  “As a matter of fact, we ordered in for them,” said Chief Martinez. “Thin crust from Marino's. A competitor, I know, but they ate heartily.”

  “You know some judges, Matt,” said Sunny. “They'll only say, ‘What, no cannolis?’”

  Sunny was splayed on his bed when Rula came to find him. He had kicked one shoe from a foot, but the second refused to fall and gripped his toes like a window washer who had slipped on the platform. His trousers had been pulled nearly up to his knees in little corrugated rumples, and Sheldon had burrowed into a ridge of the blanket between his pinstriped thighs, blinking and dozing while Sunny played his thumb over the channel changer.

  Rula sat down on the side of the bed to scratch Sheldon's gray head. His older daughter's eyes were glassy like the surface of a dark lake.

  “You've had a beer,” remarked Sunny.

  “Two, bloody hell. Isn't that alright?”

  “Of course.”

  “Diego?” she demanded.

  “He seems nice.”

  “Oh, great, bloody hell.” She bit off her words. “That's a rice flour comment. Why not just call him an ass?”

  “I liked him,” Sunny insisted. “We didn't really have a chance.…”

  “Yes. Always a phone call. Always something.”

  “Darling,” he tried to say gently, “you know what's going on now.”

  “Now?”

  Rula had pulled back her hair, so that when she wrenched her head suddenly around the black tail snapped in Sunny's face. He looked at her heavily and tried to reply lightly.

  “I know. All of our lives. But I made dosas for you most days—until you started leaving early to avoid them. Or me.”

  “You noticed? Seriously? How? You were always everywhere else.”

  “We're in the service business,” he said softly. “You have to serve uthappam at seven p.m., when most people have dinner. You have to have community meetings at eight, when most people are home from work. When you and your sister want to go to Northwestern or Columbia, they ask for money, not whether or not I was there every time you fell off your tricycles. I tried to be at the places I could.”

  “Only if you ran out of other places to be. Is that why they call it running for office? Running away?”

  “Why would you ever—”

  “I know I was a mistake. Mammaji told me. It slipped out. She was angry, she had a third glass of wine, you weren't around—as usual— and she tried to take it back. But—”

  “You were a surprise,” said Sunny. “That's different.”

  “Rita?” She practically spat her sister's name. “You wanted someone else to ignore?”

  Sunny hesitated in reply, and then realized any hesitation would envenom any words he might try.

  “We loved you so much, we wanted to be surprised again,” he said. Rula shoved his words back, like burnt toast.

  “You have to be around to see a surprise,” she said. “You were closing the restaurant, sitting through a stupid bloody fucking ward meeting, making sure you were seen out with the snowplows, swapping lies with the mayor….” She swished three quick circles with a hand, to suggest an infinity of insincerities. Then Rula turned away, showing Sunny her neck: the supple, tawny limb that was Elana's neck, too.

  Sunny tried to touch her with just a thumb; she arched her back, as if his very touch were some kind of excruciating live wire. She finally let Sunny put two fingers of his hand lightly on her left shoulder, as if he were touching the skin of a cobra.

  “Why would you have wanted me around more if you hate me so much?”

  Rula stood up instantly. The bedsprings whimpered, Sheldon jerked awake, and red from the neon lights of the Riviera Theater rippled over the bedroom curtains.

  “I don't hate you, Pappaji. I'm just bored by you. Like our mother was.”

  A century seemed to pass between them. Pages flipped and fell into history. Steamships pulled out and airplanes landed. Sheldon tucked his head into Sunny's knee. Sunny heard his shoe finally plop onto the floor. They both heard the squeak of a spigot and the rush of water: Rita brushing her teeth—or just running water to let them know she was listening, or trying to blot out the sound of a late-night phone call. Rula sat back on the bed, a bottom's length farther from Sunny than she had been before.

  “She never told you?”

  “Of course. She said that I bored her, that she couldn't stand me, that she didn't like my friends, that I watched too much football. We loved each other.”

  His daughter dawdled a toe under the bed, a few inches closer. Finally, Rula offered a few inches of her face to Sunny, her almond skin flushed with pink.

  “Why did you bring more children into this world anyway?” she asked. “All the wars and lies.”

  “That's why,” said Sunny. “A new chance.”

  “That's all? That's bloody it?”

  “Nothing is harder to come by. You should know that,” Sunny shot back without reserve. When he saw Rula's shoulders sink like a doll's being put back on a shelf, he knew that he had finally gained something back.

  “I'm sorry.”

  “You bloody well should be,” said Sunny. “There's lots and lots of other things in the world to blame me for.”

  Rula held her hand behind her back and opened it in front of Sunny. Long fingers, quivering slightly, three long lifelines slashed deep across her palm, a small purple bandage swathed over her thumb. Sunny rubbed it gently.

  “Kitchen cut,” she offered. “Mincing chilis.”

  “The unkindest cut,” said Sunny. He laced his fingers lightly into hers and squeezed softly. He put the palm of his other hand onto Sheldon's head and rubbed it back and forth, slowly, until he could see the cat's eyes begin to blink and close. Rula sat forward, an elbow on her knee, as her voice got softer.

  “Diego says it's all over the place that you're leaving the council.”

  “Probably.”

  “You could have told us.”

  “If I knew for sure myself. Right now, it's an idea I try out.”

  “Eldad says you could be secretary of state.”

  “Not the one with a plane, who goes to Geneva and Paris. The Illinois one goes to a fish fry every Friday night in Rantoul or Blooming-ton. I'm not so fond of fried fish. Or Bloomington.”

  “Congress?” Rula sat back and held the back of her hand to an eye, while Sunny squirmed and resettled himself against a twisted pillow, taking care to put Sheldon's head back against his knee.

  “I'd like to get elected,” he said. “I'm not sure I'd like the job. All the back and forth, like a ball bouncing around in a stairwell. All the votes going nowhere. Running again every two years—like never getting out of high school. I'm thinking—your mother and I used to talk about this—of getting some partners and financing while my name means something. Opening a classy place. There's an old bus garage on Clark, right off Devon. Something might open up on Lincoln.”

  “Bloody hell, we'd never see you,” she said.

  “Isn't that what you want?”

  “We could help, you know,” said Rula. “We've grown up ass deep in masala.”

  “Yes. Yes. It could even be fun,” said Sunny. “But I don't want you to miss out on all the things you should be doing.” He held up for a moment to offer a smile and waited for Rula to flash one back.

  “Temple meetings and youth groups,” she said.

  “Book clubs and sewing circles, yes,” Sunny added.

  “You'd miss politics, Pappaji.”

  “Now and then. The St. Patrick's Day parade, for sure. I'd miss election nights.”

  “Not me,” said Rula. She reached back for the elastic loop behind
her head and pulled, shaking her hair across her shoulders.

  Sunny recalled the last election night that he had taken his daughters along on his circuit of ward offices. They had yawned, squirmed, and traded tart observations over dreary buffets of pygmy carrots and limp bell pepper slices guarding puddles of desiccated hummus (in deference to the age and cholesterol of most precinct workers). City precincts reported first, with dramatic Democratic majorities. But then the returns from suburbs began to come in. Then, those from farther down the pie slice shape of Illinois. Totals changed. Margins tightened. Leads deflated. By ten p.m., the incumbent Democratic governor had been defeated, along with the Democratic attorney general, whose campaign had never recovered from his cosmopolitan explanation of his relationship with seventeen-year-old interns. “Anytime you have to say, ‘This would never be a scandal in France,’” the mayor told Sunny, “you know you've got a problem in Peoria.”

  “There's no drama,” Rula countered now from the bed. “All the polls tell people what they think and what's going to happen.”

  “Still everything is at stake,” said Sunny. “There's something majestic about that. For a few hours, everything that self-important people hope is in the hands of a lot of people who fill coffee mugs. It may hurt me just to sit and watch. But if I stay much longer …” Sunny made a churning motion around his head. “… my brain will turn to rice flour.”

  Rula put down a hand against one of Sheldon's whiskers, then her head against Sunny's shoulder, and then her chin against his chest. She tried to rest against him the way she had when she was six. But the parts no longer fit. Their knees knocked against each other, her chin ground into his collarbone.

  “Maybe I'm too big for this,” she said. She giggled and burped a few dainty, beery bubbles into his shoulder.

  The rippling red lights from the Riviera marquee had stopped rolling over the bedroom curtains. They could hear paper cups blow over the Lawrence Avenue El platform, scurrying and popping. Rula's hair smelled flowery. Sunny put his palm softly on Elana's slender birch neck. It filled his hand.

  “Baby,” he called out softly, so as not to wake her. “Baby.”

  SUNDAY MORNING

  “We've got an oon-yun problem,” Matina announced.

  Sunny, in a gray suit and nursery blue tie, had just slipped down to his restaurant's kitchen where Sgt. Gallaher was already on-duty standing with her backside grazing a stainless steel prep table and sipping from a coffee mug. Rula and Rita were still showering and fussing. The sergeant had drawn her hair tightly behind her head; it played up an almost perfect roundness in her face, the leanness of her neck.

  “No onions Friday—the funeral, everybody take off, remember?”

  “How many?” he asked, and Matina took one from her smock and held it up between them, as if they might want to memorize its appearance.

  “Two-hunnert I'd say. Mebbe.”

  Between all the dosa and uthappam on the menu, Sunny could expect the kitchen to use about three hundred onions on a Sunday in late January. He took a cup of tea in his hands and sat down at the small round table in front of their grill.

  “Tell Oscar and Wilmer to recommend the special rava masala dosa.”

  Sunny noticed a small, teasing smile flash across Sgt. Gallaher's face.

  “We go through a lot of onions here,” he explained. “Onion masala dosa, rava dosa, butter masala dosa—even the tomato and pea uthappam has chopped onions. But the special rava dosa has so many chilis, a slight reduction might go unnoticed. Does that violate a city ordinance?”

  The sergeant held her chin for a moment as she pondered an official reply.

  “Our orders are to protect you and your family, sir. Not count onions. Unless someone threatens you with one.”

  “You show a flair for politics,” Sunny told her.

  Sunny noticed how the flat, white edges of the sergeant's teeth tended to lightly bite her lip when she laughed; she licked her tongue over her teeth to wipe away any smudges of lipstick.

  “Anyway, sir, it all smells delicious to me.”

  “Onions, chilis, and garlic—the trinity of south Indian food.”

  “Then we're all set for church, sir,” said the sergeant, but Sunny held up his hand. Alderman Slavinskas was about to begin his press conference, and the three of them turned their heads up to the screen just above the long steel service table.

  “Good morning, ladies and gentlemen,” Linas began.

  He spoke comfortably, firmly, and insistently, his glossy fingertips lightly gripping the top of a small lectern.

  “I thank you for being here so early. I am sure we can conclude our business in plenty of time for you to make ten o’ clock mass at Saint Maria Addolorata.”

  There was chuckling, quickly hushed, and a shuffling of feet from reporters in folding chairs. Linas waited for silence to return.

  “I absolutely deny the charges made last night by a television channel whose call letters I will not dignify, and a group that has the impudence to call themselves the Good Government Association of Illinois,” he said, and stood back to allow them to take in the tall man in police blues to his right.

  “Many of you will recognize Commander Walter Green.”

  The commander nodded unsmilingly down at the reporters while Linas went on.

  “As those of us who care about law and order and our men and women in uniform know, Commander Green is a man of towering integrity. I don't know as he would say the same thing about me,” Linas added in the same, sharp tone, and the sheer, insolent shock of his remark caused reporters to gasp and laugh. “The commander is here to take any questions you may have that relate to the police in this matter.

  “About ten days ago,” said Linas, “I noticed that a new bar called the Oasis had opened in our ward on Western Avenue. I stopped in to introduce myself, and asked if, as their representative to city government, there was any way I could be helpful. This is usually code for, ‘Can I leave some campaign brochures here?’”

  Snickers and titters ran around the room.

  “That woman—Ms. Belle—was quite personable. In fact she was so personable, I suspected at once that it was probably not entirely in response to my famous killer charm.”

  In his restaurant's kitchen, Sunny turned to see Sgt. Gallaher break into a smile even as she kept her eyes locked determinedly on the chained back door.

  “She told me that my drink was on the house. I don't like people to do that. I also don't like to make gracious people feel like they've done something wrong. So I finished my drink—Oban, a West Highland single malt, I'm impressed that they had it; like they knew I was coming—and left a tip that more than compensated.

  “Fifty dollars, to anticipate your question,” Linas said, as the feet of several folding chairs squeaked as they dug into the mauve carpet. “My tax returns are public record. Every citizen of Chicago can find out what I'm worth. I can't leave the kind of cheap tip that you gentlemen and ladies do.”

  “My God, he has them going,” Sunny told Matina and Sgt. Gallaher. Oscar and Wilmer arrived through the back door, stamped their boots, and looked up at the screen as laughter flared up again.

  Linas contrived to look disappointed and grim as he went on.

  “Ms. Belle informed me that the owners—whom she identified only as Jed and Julia—were worried because a city inspector had threatened to close their place until they could bring the tavern's ventilation and water pumping system into compliance with code,” he said. “She said the owners needed to stay open to make a little money before they could afford such extensive repairs, which were estimated at fifteen thousand dollars.

  “I told her that we had a soft drink cooler installed for our kids that costs twice that.

  “She said that the owners would be grateful if I could intervene in their behalf. I replied—and notice, Channel Who and the Good Government Association didn't show you this—that city inspectors protect our citizens. Ms. Belle said—and I'll just bet that
the Good Government Association won't show you the video of this—‘But ahlder-man, ah heauh that heauh in Chi-town’—a big tip-off because honestly, do you know anyone in Chicago who says Chi-town? That's straight out of Dogpatch—‘folks is accommodating. We'all would be sooo grateful. What's a po’, honest businessman to do? I'm sure we could work out something. Just between you and me. I would be sooo grateful. Personal grateful, Mr. Ahlder-man.’”

  Linas's impersonation had the reporters catching their breath and wiping their eyes. He tamped down their laughs with his hands, like some masterful old comic who has unexpectedly shown up at open mic night in a cellar club.

  “I'm sorry,” he said. “Every Australian actor does a better southern accent than she does. That woman—Ms. Belle—knew there was a camera on her. Maybe she wants a shot on the Grand Ole’ Opry.”

  “He's utterly hilarious,” Sgt. Gallaher offered from her perch against the tall steel table.

  “Like my first husband,” Matina volunteered, unimpressed.

  “I'd pay a cover charge to see him,” said Sgt. Gallaher. “Still, the charges, the video, the envelope …”

  Linas settled the knot of his pink silk tie and went on soberly.

  “I contacted Commander Green. I informed him that I had received what transparently seemed to be the offer of a bribe. The commander and I agreed that to protect the citizens of Chicago, and my own family, I should pretend to comply with their requests. Once the crime was on record, warrants could be issued. The conspiracy could be traced. Arrests could be made.”

  Walter Green held up a black wire, a beetle-black microphone smaller than the nail of a child's thumb, and a small, shiny disc.

  “The alderman agreed to return to the Oasis wired last Thursday night,” he said. “These recordings are being held as evidence.”