Chicago Noir

by Neal Pollack

  I've been a wild rover for many a year

  And I spent all my money on whiskey and beer,

  And now I'm returning with gold in great store

  And I never will play the wild rover no more.

  And it's no, nay, never,

  No nay never no more,

  Will I play the wild rover

  No never no more.

  The song made no sense to Carlos, but as the men sang, it was obvious that it moved them deeply. When they reached each chorus, he could barely make out the words over their blubbering. This made Carlos very uncomfortable. Men in his family didn't show emotion like this, not even in private after midnight. The song, mercifully, came to its final verse.

  I'll go home to my parents, confess what I've done,

  And I'll ask them to pardon their prodigal son.

  And if they forgive me as oft-times before,

  Sure I never will play the wild rover no more.

  And it's no, nay, never,

  No nay never no more,

  Will I play the wild rover

  No never no more.

  They unlocked arms and Francis just kept talking.

  "Boys," he said, "Johnny Quinn is forgiven all his sins, if he ever committed any. I only hope that you will have the same mercy on me. For I can't imagine my tenure on this soil will last much longer. I can feel myself fading even now."

  "Blow it out your hole, Ahab," said the ponytailed guy.

  "I grow old, I grow old," said Francis. "I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled. With your indulgence, I'm going to play one more record. As you all know, I was once a featured performer at the Hanging Moon on North Avenue, back in the time when songs had lyrics you could understand. The great Moses Asch himself, of Folkways Records, recognized my talents, and I made this recording. When you hear it, I want you to remember the words, and remember me by them."

  "Do we have to?" said the monkey man.

  "You do," said Francis. "I'd like to think it was Marty's inspiration for our club."

  He put the record on. Carlos heard tinny banjo music and a voice that sounded nearly forty years younger. But it was definitely Francis. The song went:

  Play that banjo long and loud

  And raise your glasses high,

  Sing about the life I loved

  And how I chose to die,

  Praise me like the king I was

  And not the rook or pawn,

  Embrace your sin and drink your gin

  And remember that I'm gone.

  Even over the music, Francis talked. "It's a particularly melancholy moment for me," he said. "So many friends lost. So many millions of words. So much profundity. And now I alone remain of that first generation as the final distillation of a way of life. When will it end? One doesn't know. But one does know that young Carlos here has borne witness to our ritual."

  "Indeed!" said the monkey man.

  "As such, in our tradition, we should nominate him to take Johnny's place."

  No way, Carlos thought. This wasn't even something he wanted to understand.

  "But," said Francis Carmody, "Carlos has shown us nothing to indicate that he possesses the intellectual integrity to fulfill the bylaws of Marty's Drink or Die Club. Agreed?"

  "Agreed!" said the other members.

  "Therefore," Francis said, "as is our tradition, we offer young Carlos a choice: Maintain silence about what he knows, or die."

  Carlos slowly backed away from them, toward the door.

  Francis held up his glass. He indicated to the others that they should stand. "Do you accept our terms, young man?"

  "I gotta go," Carlos said.

  He ran for the door and flung it open, and as he escaped, he heard Francis Carmody say, "Do not betray us, Carlos! We'll find you!"

  It was early November. The night felt crisp and cutting. Carlos's head should have been a fog, but as he ran out of Francis Carmody's backyard and down the side streets toward Clark, he felt nothing but clarity. Maybe he'd go back to Truman College after all, get that two-year degree and then see what was possible. But he'd never go back to Marty's again.

  The digital bank clock said 1:15. Just then, the Number 22 came, as if sent by the bus fairy. Carlos got on and slid his card through the reader. His Uncle German's place was just fifteen blocks up in Rogers Park; he'd get there by closing time no matter how slow the bus ran. German always had a pot of menudo going this time of night. Carlos could already feel it, warm and fresh and greasy, in his stomach.

  He couldn't wait to get sober.

  BOBBY KAGAN KNOWS EVERYTHING

  BY ADAM LANGER

  Albion & Whipple

  One morning in the summer of 1978, Mom's Jim said he couldn't take it anymore and moved out on her for the third and last time, with the intention of finding his first wife. Shelah went away for the summer to Camp Chi, where I had contracted something like dysentery two years earlier and my mother wouldn't let me go back. So I was stuck with Grandpa and his nurse Hallie at the house on Whipple Street, where Mom said we would stay until she'd saved enough money from her job at Crawford's Department Store so that we could have our own place again.

  My mother had grown up on Whipple with her sister and her folks. Now, Grandpa still slept in his bedroom, I slept in my Aunt Evelyn's old room, Hallie slept in Mom's old room, and Mom slept downstairs on the couch. The place hadn't been fixed up in years; the paint on the canopy was peeling, the basement moldy, the linoleum floor warped and cracked. There was an overgrown garden full of weeds and a garage packed with boxes, tires, rusted hoes, broken rakes, and Grandpa's white Lincoln Continental. No one had driven the car in a decade. The garage was locked, and Grandpa had long since lost the key.

  The first I heard of the robberies came from Mr. Klein, a retired contractor who lived with his wife Fran directly across the street from Grandpa's in a little red-brick house with chartreuse shutters and a lawn jockey out front. It had started at the Bells's house on Richmond. The thieves hadn't gotten much, Mr. Klein said, just a Mixmaster and a color television. They'd fared better at Mrs. Kutler's on Richmond, scoring not only the TV and radio, but also all her heirloom jewelry. What impressed Mr. Klein most was how professional the burglars were; there was never any sign of a break-in and they always seemed to know exactly what they were looking for. Even though they hadn't gotten anything from the Singers's house on Francisco, somehow they had known that Mr. Singer kept his cash under the bedroom carpet. But nothing like that would happen on Whipple Street, Mr. Klein assured me. All summer long, he would be sitting on his porch, watching.

  Inside the house on Whipple Street, when Mom still wasn't home from work, and Hallie read Agatha Christie mysteries while my grandfather slept, I'd wonder when the burglars would hit our house. It was full of antiques and my late grandmother's jewels. It seemed as if it would only be a matter of time. Who would put up a fight? My grandfather needed help getting in and out of the bathroom. Hallie was sixty-three. My only hope was that the burglars would wait until Mom and I moved into our own place again. I had never liked Mom's Jim much. When he was out late drinking at Alibi's, I'd imagine that he was in my bedroom staring down at me. But whenever I turned on the nightlight, no one would be there. Now I wished he would come back.

  Mr. Klein's tales of burglaries didn't impress Jason Rubinstein. He and his uncle, Bobby Kagan, had just moved to Albion Street from Albany Park, where, to hear Jason tell it, the streets were becoming overrun with Korean gangs; every night he fell asleep to the sounds of gunfire.

  Jason and I met at Beginners Woodshop at the JCC. Though he and I were in the same grade, he was a year and a half older, more than six inches taller, and probably fifty pounds heavier than me. He claimed to have fingered Robyn Rosen in the nocturnal mammal house at Lincoln Park Zoo and to have lit off firecrackers during the Elton John show at the Chicago Stadium. If you jammed your thumbs into someone's temples, he said, their heart would stop.

  When the JCC canceled Woodshop due to
overall lack of interest, Jason and I took the opportunity to start walking our bikes alongside the Chicago River drainage canal on the rubble-strewn site of the old Kiddieland amusement park. Jason showed me what a used condom looked like. He also pointed out an empty Ziploc bag, which he said had probably contained marijuana. Sometimes we'd bike past the Lincoln Avenue motels.

  "That's where the hookers take their johns," Jason said.

  I nodded, needing but not asking for further explanation.

  Jason said he'd learned everything he knew from his uncle, Bobby Kagan. Bobby was slim, with a full head of black curls. He walked with his shoulders hunched forward, his hands dangling down in front of him. He wore bracelets, necklaces, and pastel shirts opened at least three buttons. Before he started speaking, something he always did quickly and breathlessly, he'd swipe an index finger across his nostrils, blink his eyes, and swallow hard. He said he worked for the White Sox, but I figured he was lying. One time, he said he was in charge of concessions. Another time he was a scout. Once he said he'd done color commentary for the Sox farm team, the Iowa Oaks.

  Still, he managed to get good seats for Jason and me. And not only for Sox games. During the first half of that summer, we saw the Sox three times at Comiskey Park and sat on the third base side during Bat Day. We also got to sit behind the visitors' dugout for Cubs games at Wrigley Field. Bobby Kagan always drove us to and from the games in his red Cadillac DeVille with whitewall tires. He'd buy our Cokes and hot dogs with one of the hundred-dollar bills that he peeled off a roll he kept in his right front pocket. But he'd leave before batting practice and wouldn't return until the ninth inning, when he'd say he'd met an old friend or had some business to take care of. Whenever I spoke, he'd cut me off. I sensed that he never listened to what I was saying.

  One night, though, in Bobby's car, after the White Sox had taken a twi-night doubleheader from the Twins, I said that I was glad we were coming home late because Mr. Klein had told me that the burglars had never struck after 10:00. And for the first time that I could recall, Bobby seemed genuinely interested. What robberies, he wanted to know, what had they taken, who had told me all this, who was this Mr. Klein, what did he do for a living, and which house was his?

  I told him what I knew about the robberies. The most recent one had taken place at a retired policeman's house on Tripp. They had taken his collections of clocks and belt buckles, as well as his framed Colt .45s. Bobby Kagan seemed impressed with my attention to detail.

  "You oughta be a cop," he kept saying.

  On this drive from 35th and Shields all the way north to West Rogers Park, I felt more comfortable than I had ever been with Bobby Kagan, and the most comfortable I would ever feel. Before the drive, I don't recall him ever looking me in the eye. Not long afterward, he started dating my mother.

  During the second week of July, the night of my thirteenth birthday party—we had played .500 and had a picnic in Warren Park— Jason and I slept in sleeping bags on the floor of Shelah's room. The following morning, when we came downstairs, Bobby was in the kitchen with my mother. He opened the refrigerator and pulled out a carton of half-and-half. Two days later, mom handed me a five-dollar bill and told me to buy dinner for myself from Brown's Chicken because "Bob" was taking her to the Sox game. I started to protest.

  "What?" she said. "You think you're the only one in this house allowed to have fun?"

  Jason and I were sharing the five-piece chicken dinner in Chippewa Park when we saw two squad cars speeding west on Touhy. Their blue lights were going, but their sirens were off, which meant, Jason said, that they were trying to break up a crime in progress. Before finishing our drumsticks, we were back on our bikes, following the cops to Maplewood Avenue, where four squad cars had double-parked in front of a bungalow. A white-haired lady in a housedress and slippers was standing on her lawn, while police officers walked toward her with flashlights in their right hands, left hands poised over their holsters. As Jason and I leaned against our bikes and watched, one of the cops asked what we were looking at. Jason just stared straight back at the cop.

  "I ain't looking at nothin'," he said.

  When we got to Mr. Klein's house, Klein inexplicably already knew more than we did; he said he'd heard the news over his police radio. The victim was Mrs. Ruttu. They'd gotten her TV and her hi-fi. The most "brazen" aspect of the crime was that the burglars had taken everything while Mrs. Ruttu slept in her front room, and Klein now had theories about the culprits.

  "Probably Arabs or Mexicans," he said. "Someone new to the neighborhood."

  I listened intently, but Jason kept sniggering as if he doubted either the facts or Mr. Klein's sanity. Whenever Jason laughed, Mr. Klein would stop for a moment, stare sternly at Jason, then continue. But when Mr. Klein said it was a wonder poor Mrs. Ruttu hadn't died of a heart attack and Jason laughed again, Mr. Klein stood up and said he'd tell me the rest of the story when my friend had gone home.

  "Fran," he shouted to his wife, as he opened his screen door, "I'm comin' in!" And then he slammed the door.

  I told Jason it didn't seem right to laugh about a woman nearly having a heart attack, but he told me he wasn't laughing at that. He was just laughing at the idea of somebody sleeping while someone else carted off a TV. Burglaries didn't happen like that. Half of the time when thefts were reported and there was no sign of forced entry, it meant that the victim knew the robber and had planned the crime, hoping to collect insurance. That's what Bobby had told him, anyway.

  "How does he know so much about it?" I asked.

  "Bobby knows everything," he said.

  In early August, armed with information provided by Mr. Klein, Jason and I sat down at a back table of the Nortown Library with a Xeroxed map of West Rogers Park, and plotted the robberies, searching for an overall pattern in the dates and times when they had happened, but found nothing. The robberies had taken place during mornings and evenings, in houses and apartments, on Tuesdays, on Thursdays, on weekends. They'd happened on Farwell, on Fairfield, on Granville, Bell, and Washtenaw. Not on Whipple Street, though, Mr. Klein was always quick to point out.

  We read the accounts in the Nortown Leader newspaper, in the police blotter and particularly in the front-page story of the Metro section that ran the week of August 3 ("Police Still at a Loss"). With my father's old army binoculars, a Polaroid camera, and a portable tape recorder, we'd case out houses and apartment buildings on blocks that hadn't been hit yet. But after Mr. Isaac Mermelstein approached us wearing an Israeli army jacket and a yellow hardhat and told us to get off his sidewalk, after Mrs. Weinberg called the cops on us, after my mother honked her horn and told us to stop loitering in alleys like a "couple of hoodlums," we went back to the drainage canal and the Lincoln Village Theater, where we would sneak into movies we had already seen, then go to Jason's apartment and listen to his Led Zeppelin and Yes tapes.

  On the night that Jason tried to get me stoned, we were sitting in his front room, and he was already pretty high from the half a joint he'd smoked. Mom and Bobby were at Park West at a Boz Scaggs concert, and Jason and I were watching Saturday Night Live with the volume turned down and "Roundabout" playing loud. The actors' lips were moving perfectly in synch with the music, Jason said, handing me a lit joint. I told him I wasn't interested, but he gave it to me anyway. It dropped on my shirt, burning a hole by the left shoulder, at which point I panicked, ran to the bathroom, and dumped about a quart of water on myself to make sure the fire was out. When I got back to the front room, Jason was laughing.

  "Go get yourself another shirt from the dresser, dork," he said.

  I'm sure he meant his dresser and not Uncle Bobby's, but both rooms were dark and I couldn't figure out which was which. I rummaged through Bobby Kagan's dresser. While grabbing for an undershirt, I saw a wad of cash, all hundred-dollar bills. As I lay in bed that night, listening to my grandfather breathing, I considered everything I knew about Bobby Kagan, how he had thousands of dollars in cash, how he lied about
his job, how he seemed so interested in what I knew about the robberies, how he always disappeared for hours during ballgames. I thought of what Mr. Klein had said: Someone new to the neighborhood was committing the robberies. Bobby Kagan and Jason had only lived on Albion since May.

  I had already made vague plans to try to follow Bobby, but when my mother got home at 2:00 in the morning and I told her of my suspicions, she couldn't stop laughing.

  The next day, Mom was working and Hallie was taking my grandfather to the hospital for a checkup. I'd planned to spend the day tailing Bobby Kagan. But when Jason called to ask me what I would be doing, I couldn't tell him the truth, so we spent the day biking through Caldwell Woods, where invariably every summer the bodies of two or three teenage runaways would be dumped, and then went to Superdawg and ate cheese fries.

  When I got home, there were two squad cars in front of my grandfather's house. Mr. Klein was standing on his porch, squinting, until his wife came out and said, "You watched enough, Joe. Later you'll watch more."

  Hallie was talking to two cops on the stoop as my grandfather looked at the ground. I let my bike fall on the front lawn and made my way up the stairs.

  My mother was sitting at the kitchen table, talking to two male police officers. She was smoking, but when she saw me, she suddenly stood up, put out her cigarette, and grabbed my hands. "I have to tell him what happened," she told the officers.

  She told me not to get upset, that we had been robbed. Then she led me upstairs where all the bedrooms were in complete disarray. Dresser drawers were turned upside down, file cabinets lay on the floor, the carpet in my grandfather's room was slit open, everywhere were clothes and books and towels. My grandfather's bedroom didn't smell like urine as it usually did. The thief had thrown everything to the floor, and the room was pungent with mouthwash and aftershave.