Hope Rides Again

by Andrew Shaffer

  “Uh-huh,” he said. He turned back around and looked at me in the rearview, wearing a smarmy grin. That was sort of his default expression.

  I’d never been a good liar, but now I was going to have to pull a rabbit the size of the Easter Bunny out of my rear. A painful metaphor that made me shift uncomfortably.

  He laughed. “I’m kidding you, man.” He spread an arm, gesturing out the passenger window to the Norfolk Southern yards. “This is where the magic happens.”

  “The magic?”

  “Chicago is the country’s number-one hub for rail traffic. Always has been, always will be. Thirteen hundred trains a day. If you’re into trains, like I am—and I know you are, Joe—this is your Disneyland.”

  Rahm was beaming now, gazing lazily out the window as we rolled past block after block of shipping containers waiting to be loaded onto new boxcars.

  “The size of the rail yard is something else, I’ll give you that,” I admitted.

  “Sometimes, size does matter, Joe.”

  At that I managed a slight guffaw. A very slight guffaw.

  Rahm received a call, and he excused himself from our one-sided conversation. He rolled up the tinted glass divider between the front and back seats. It was soundproof. I could guess what his end of the call sounded like, though. Eff this and eff that. Words I generally saved for big occasions and hot mics.

  I caught Polaski staring at me. His presence was making me uncomfortable. He had a nickname—“Bento Box”—that I’d thought was a joke. Now, I wasn’t so sure. The rumor was that his nickname didn’t come from his love of sushi, but from his unique skill set: he could twist an opponent so out of shape that they would fit into a Japanese bento box.

  “How much longer are we going to be driving around?” I asked. I should have had an ice pick—not only to break the ice between us, but for self-defense.

  “Your flight doesn’t leave until nine. You got someplace else to be?”

  Bento Box had clearly progressed from bodyguarding politicians to doing their dirty work. He knew my schedule. It wasn’t a leap to imagine he’d been tailing me from the moment he’d gotten wind I was in the Windy City. I’d been a fool to assume I could swing through town without the mayor’s office knowing about it.

  How much did Rahm know about what his fixer was doing behind his back? It seemed a little too convenient that he’d gotten an important call just as he’d picked me up. If I kicked out the divider between us, would I catch him listening in on Bento Box grilling me?

  I decided to test the waters. “You were following me the whole time.”

  “I’ve been with the mayor all morning.”

  “I heard footsteps.”

  “This is a city of three million people. That’s a lot of feet.”

  “So you didn’t have somebody trailing me?”

  Bento Box looked out the window. “If we did, it was for your benefit. You don’t know this city. You don’t know these neighborhoods.”

  “I’m a bad tourist.”

  “You want to be the next body, Joe?” Bento Box shook his head. “C’mon. You’re smarter than that.”

  “My mama didn’t raise no dummy.”

  He snorted. “Could have surprised me. I heard you were pretending to be an FBI agent. Really? I thought. Is that true? No way Joe Biden could be that stupid.”

  I could feel my heart speeding up, my blood pressure creeping into territory my doctor didn’t like to see. But my doctor wasn’t here now.

  Through clenched teeth I said, “If you want to know what I’m doing here, you could at least ask without badmouthing my mother. All I told that cop was that I was with the federal government. If she assumed I meant the FBI, that’s on her, not me.”

  “You used to be with the federal government,” Bento Box said. “Right now you’ve got about as much power in Washington as a garbage collector.”

  “An honest profession,” I said. “Unlike some.”

  The fixer rolled his eyes. “You were in the Senate for almost four decades. Your record isn’t spotless.” He showed me a photo on his phone. “You ever seen this kid before?”

  A mugshot. Shaun Denton was younger, with bloodshot eyes and that same sheepish grin I’d seen before. I tried not to think about him on that gurney.

  “Don’t know him.”

  “This is the thug that got popped back there,” Bento Box said. “Deshaun Denton. Age sixteen. His record reads like video-game stats. Half a dozen arrests for petty theft. Four arrests for grand theft auto. Assault with an aggravated weapon—a charge dropped when the victim wouldn’t testify.”

  I lowered my head. He couldn’t have been talking about the young man I’d met today. There had to be a mix-up.

  Bento Box continued, “He told the cops he didn’t see who shot him, you believe that? If he’s lucky, he’ll die on the way to the hospital. If you don’t bleed out from an injury like that, you could go into septic shock. Nobody wants to go through that.”

  I noticed we were on a freeway now. The driver had slapped a red emergency light on the roof. Cars were pulling over to let us pass. Where were they taking me? More important, what did they intend to do with me once we got there?

  Everyone knew about the Rahmfather sending a dead fish in the mail to a pollster. That was one way to send a message. His fixer surely had other ways of getting through to people. Bento Box scooted closer. He was so wide that he took up two full seats. “I’m going to give you one chance here, Joe. Tell me the truth.”

  “I—”

  “And think about it before you answer. Think about it real hard. I’m not sure what kind of game you’re playing, but I’ll find out. I don’t buy the stuff about trains. Rahm might, but I don’t.”

  “I’m not sure what you want me to say.”

  “Tell me what you were doing in Englewood. What you were really doing.”

  The decorated ivory handle of a pistol was poking out of a holster inside his jacket. It would have been so easy to tell him the truth. To tell him that I thought Shaun had stolen Barack’s BlackBerry, and that I had taken it upon myself to give the kid a stern talking-to, and dang it, I was in over my head. But first I had to talk things over with Barack. This was his town, not mine.

  Bento Box put an arm around my shoulders. “We can do this the easy way, or we can do this the hard way.”

  My only chance to escape was to try the door. We were on a freeway, but only going fifteen or twenty miles an hour due to the traffic. Survivable, as long as I didn’t land on my noggin and split it open like an egg.

  Joe Biden: sunny-side up

  I didn’t like the sound of that. I didn’t like it at all.

  Before Bento Box could go to work on me, the window partition rolled down. The big man scooted back in his seat, as if he hadn’t been crowding me the entire time. Not that he’d said what would happen if I didn’t tell him the truth. When you were the size of a grain-fed bull, you didn’t need to be explicit with your threats.

  “Sorry about that,” Rahm said. Whether he was talking about the phone call or the unpleasant business with Bento Box, he didn’t clarify. “Listen, Joe. I meant what I said about us. You and I. Let’s start over. Let bygones be bygones and all that. You’re going to need a friend in this town.”

  “I’ve got one.”

  “Barry isn’t around much these days. You may have noticed, he isn’t exactly the most popular guy in town anymore.”

  “They think he left them, that he forgot about them.”

  “They don’t think that—they know it. And they don’t want this, this library—”

  “Community center.”

  “—this community center he’s proposed in Hyde Park. You know what’s going to happen to rent? To property taxes? To parking? The people are tired of it. They’re tired of the millionaires, the billionaires. They’re tired of the one percent picking winners and losers.”

  “You’re part of the one percent.”

  “They hate me more than a
nyone.”

  “You won a second term.”

  “Chicago, baby,” he said, without the slightest hint of irony.

  “You want something from me.”

  “If a former vice president catches a lead shower in my city, the Feds really are going to step in. And once they set up camp, they’re not going to leave. You’ve seen it.”

  He was talking about the race riots that had torn Wilmington apart in the wake of Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination. The city was in flames. The country was in flames. The National Guard was mobilized to keep the peace where the local law couldn’t handle it, which was pretty much everywhere. Within a month, calm returned to much of the country. In Wilmington, however, the Guard camped out for a full nine months.

  “What are you asking me for?”

  He handed me his business card. “I’m asking for you to trust me. That’s it. If you run into trouble—if you need anything in this town—give me a call. This is my private line.”

  I started to say something but bit my tongue. Mirror-windowed buildings towered around us. We were back in the Loop, in time for Rahm to bully his way to the front of the parade. The driver cut through traffic like a hot knife through butter. We pulled up to the entrance to Navy Pier, Chicago’s flashy tourist mecca on the lake.

  I stepped out without saying goodbye. The pier was practically deserted, what with the parade about to begin any moment farther downtown. There were traces of the morning’s crowds everywhere: a puddle of green beer here, a shamrock necklace there. Any other day, I would have loved to take advantage of the calm in the storm to ride on the pier’s iconic Ferris wheel, which I’d eyed this morning on our way into town. It was a tourist trap, but dang if I didn’t love me a good tourist trap.

  I wasn’t in a touristy mood right now.

  Bento Box held out a fist. If he was waiting for a fist bump, he was going to have to keep waiting. But he wasn’t looking to bury the hatchet. He was holding what was left of my sunglasses. “I think you dropped these,” he said with a knowing nod.

  “Not mine,” I said, reaching inside my jacket and pulling out my backup pair. Ray-Ban aviators were among the top-selling sunglasses in America. A modern classic, as ubiquitous as AR-15s. He’d have to dust for prints if he wanted to connect them to me—not worth the time and trouble.

  The smirk on his face slid off like he was melting in the high-noon sun. The SUV limo pulled back into traffic, leaving me in a cloud of exhaust. I could feel Chicago in my pores. It was going to take a good long shower to wash her off me, but there was no time to shower. I held up a hand for a taxi.

  9

  The Obamas’ Chicago home was in Hyde Park. I knew approximately where the house was—not the address, but the nearest cross streets. All you needed to know was the general location. The Secret Service would let you know when you were getting hot.

  The agent stationed on the perimeter of their block nodded as I passed. I rang the doorbell and took a step back. In all the years I’d known the Obamas, I’d never set foot inside their Hyde Park residence. It was their home away from Washington, a little respite from DC and its insular political scene. Whether I liked it or not, a part of Barack would always associate me with the swamp. No matter how close we’d grown, I wasn’t part of his inner circle of friends from back in the day, the guys he used to shoot hoops with. He was a man who drew boundaries, and I didn’t belong in this part of his life.

  I was about to cross that boundary now.

  “Oh!” A middle-aged Indian woman answered the door. Her eyes traced me from head to toe and back again. “Mr. Vice President.”

  “You can call me Joe,” I said with a grin. Over the years, I’d become aware that I had a particular effect on women of a certain age. (Eighteen to ninety-one, in case you’re wondering.) “Is President Obama home?”

  “Oh, yes,” she said, ushering me inside. Then: “Shoes off, please. Their rule, not mine.”

  I bent down and undid my laces. A twinge of pain shot through my lower back. I’d never had back problems, but the endless parade of airplane seats was getting to me.

  “The president said you might be dropping by,” she said.

  “He did?” This was news to me. I’d gone back to the Tribune Tower to look for Barack, but the Secret Service told me he’d gone home for the day and wasn’t scheduled to return for several hours. “I’m sorry, I didn’t catch your name.”

  “Suleikha,” she said, shaking my hand.

  “You’re their…housekeeper?”

  “Live-in house sitter. Their housekeeper only comes on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays.” She paused. “And every other Sunday.”

  “Must be nice,” I muttered. I’d had a housekeeper at the VP residence. Now that I was out of office, Jill kept threatening to hire somebody to tidy up our home if I didn’t pick up after myself. We had a housecleaner who stopped in at our vacation home once every two weeks, but that was different. At least that’s what I told myself.

  Suleikha led me to the back porch. I don’t know what I’d been expecting, but the house was as ordinary as a loaf of white bread. Their Washington house had come fully furnished. It was a sight to behold—a house staged by a realtor. This house had more of a lived-in feel. The beige shag carpeting was worn down by the years, and the walls were in need of repainting. The framed photos were all pre-2009, from the last time the Obamas lived here full time.

  We stepped out onto the back porch. Barack was shooting hoops in the driveway. He shielded his eyes to get a look at his visitor and waved me down when he recognized me. No shock on his face.

  He wiped sweat from his brow but turned and shot another basket. The ball bounced off the backboard and ricocheted down the alley.

  “You want to get that?” Barack asked the Service agent standing on the edge of the court. The agent darted after the ball like a dog for a Frisbee. Unlike Steve, this guy could take a hint when he wasn’t wanted.

  “I went looking for your BlackBerry,” I said once the guy was out of earshot.

  Barack raised an eyebrow. It was too deliberate to be a natural reaction.

  “Didn’t find the phone. I’ve got a lead on the thief, though.”

  “Shaun Denton,” he said.

  “Rahm talked to you.”

  He shook his head. “Shaun was volunteering at the conference. Michelle brought him into the green room to meet me. We shook hands, that was it; I was busy going over my notes for the keynote introduction. Later on, when I saw where my phone was, I put two and two together. I remembered reading his application when it came through the center and thinking the freight yard was an awfully grown-up job for a kid that age.”

  “When I was sixteen, I was slinging papers at doorsteps from my bike.”

  Barack didn’t say what he was doing at sixteen.

  “You suspected him,” I said. “Why didn’t you go after him?”

  “I don’t think he knew whose phone he’d taken. I’d left it on a table, he had sticky fingers. Compared to everything else the kid had been through, if I’m remembering correctly, boosting a phone wouldn’t even rate. What did he say when you confronted him?”

  “I didn’t get the chance,” I said. “He’d been shot.”

  This time Barack’s look of surprise was genuine.

  The agent returned, bouncing the basketball, out of breath. He looked back and forth from Barack to me. “I’ll wait on the porch,” he said, setting the ball down.

  I caught Barack up on everything I’d learned about the shooting. He listened, his face a stone mask. His jaw was clenched. When I finished, he asked, “What did the police say when you told them about the BlackBerry?”

  “Nothing.”

  He squinted in the sun. “Nothing?”

  “I didn’t mention it to them,” I said. “Guess I forgot. Now, before you go and tell me why that wasn’t smart of me—”

  “That wasn’t smart of you.”

  “—let me explain. I wasn’t sure if you wanted me t
o drop your name into the middle of this business. Whoever has your phone either shot Shaun Denton or was a witness. Either way, that places the thief in the green room at some point this morning. Do you really want the police to descend on the Tribune Tower and start interviewing people? What’s it going to look like if your conference guests get dragged down to the station to give statements because the president’s phone is missing?”

  “It’s not about my phone anymore. Somebody was shot.”

  “True, but can you imagine the blowback? Not only on the building security, but for the Secret Service. For our dear friend Steve.”

  “I don’t believe this happened because of a lapse in security,” Barack said.

  “I don’t believe so, either. All we have to do is compile a list of every person who was in the green room this morning before your phone went missing—”

  “You’re suggesting we do this on our own, without involving the police.”

  “That’s what I’m suggesting.”

  “Just wanted to be clear. Continue.”

  “Nobody’s a bigger believer in the boys in blue than Joe Biden,” I said. This was my standard speech—Barack had heard it before, but it bore repeating, if only so that I could remind myself who I was. “Nobody’s a bigger supporter of the men and women in uniform. But I also can’t ignore the facts, which is that they’ve got their hands full today. Not only is it St. Paddy’s weekend, it’s also the first nice weekend of the year. The snakes are going to be out in full force.”

  “Snakes?”

  “Criminals. Bad guys. Mobsters.”

  “Did Rahm tell you this? He could have been trying to scare you away from Englewood. Which would have been well within his rights to do.”

  I shook my head. “A bluebird could have told me, for all it matters. It wouldn’t make it any less true. Besides, you should have been there—if you could have heard how the cops on the scene were talking about this thing. Like it was just another gang shooting. I met the kid. You did, too. He was no gang member.”

  “You can’t tell by looking at someone if they’re in a gang, Joe.”

  “But—”

  “Forget whatever you’ve seen on Law and Order.”