Hope Rides Again

by Andrew Shaffer

  I would have to get in touch with Barack sooner rather than later. I didn’t want him worrying about me. If I waited too long, I would hear the whirring blades of a helicopter overhead, circling the South Side in search of an elderly man with white hair who had wandered into the “wrong” part of town on his own, like I was some escapee from an old folks’ home.

  I needed something solid, though. If I got on the horn with Barack right now, I was liable to spill my crackpot theory before it was ready for primetime. I’d never been what you would call a good liar. I was the kind of guy who shot from the hip. Who spoke what was on his mind. Barack would know if I tried to slip one past him. He was like Jill in that regard.

  I had to ask myself why I was playing things so close to the chest. I’d seen the way Barack took the news that Shaun Denton had been shot. He’d bottled up his anger. Neither of us had known Shaun, not really, but Barack’s feelings about gun violence were well documented. Right now, he was a ticking time bomb. What would happen if I let him know I suspected the pastor of wrongdoing? Would he recuse himself and ask that I step back and hand over what I had to the police? Would he give me the silent treatment? You’d have thought that after all the years we’d spent together, I would know what was going on between those big ears of his. Truth was, I had only the vaguest idea what he was thinking at any given moment. Meanwhile, I was an open book—what you see is what you get with Uncle Joe. For better or for worse.

  We’d gotten nowhere asking questions and knocking on doors. It was time to change up our strategy. Or, rather, it was time to change up my strategy. Barack was out of the equation now. I was on my own. It was time to turn over some rocks and watch the snakes scatter.

  22

  I knew every snake den in DC, from the murkiest watering holes to the grandest five-star hotels. I knew which steak houses you were likely to run into Republican lawmakers, and which farmers markets the Dems frequented. But I wasn’t in DC.

  Furthermore, I didn’t know who I was even looking for. A crooked alderman? A muckraking journalist? Somebody who could shed some light on the pastor and his operation. The trick was finding the right somebody. I knew one person in the city who could point me in the right direction. Whether or not he would help me, I didn’t know.

  I rang up the number on the card Rahm had given me. His private number.

  After four rings, a recording kicked in. “Thank you for calling Chicago 3-1-1. If this is an emergency, please press ‘one’ to be transferred—”

  So much for that.

  An old yellow-and-black cab rolled past me with its light on. I half-expected another Ditka clone, but this cabbie was older, Middle Eastern. He rolled down the passenger window and asked where I was headed. Before I could answer that I hadn’t the slightest idea, my phone rang.

  It was Rahm. “Sorry about that. Screening my calls. Everything OK, Joe?”

  “We need to talk. In person.”

  He gave me an address on Division Street. I got into the cab and handed the scrap of paper to the driver.

  “The Russian baths,” the man said with a knowing nod.

  “A bathhouse?”

  “Like a spa, with massages. But for men.”

  “How is it…for men?”

  “They buck nekkid.” He glanced at me in the rearview. “You still want to go?”

  Although part of me thought Rahm might be pulling some sort of prank, I grunted an affirmation. If he wasn’t there, I’d stick around for a massage. Sleeping in a different hotel bed every two or three nights had taken its toll on me. Even the most expensive luxury-hotel mattress in the world was no match for one in your home. The one with your bedside table. The one with your reading light.

  The one with your wife.

  I was dropped off in front of a two-story concrete building across the river. It was so utilitarian it might as well have been built in postwar Germany. In a city known for its architecture, you didn’t expect to find such a hostile-looking structure, built more to withstand an aerial bombing than for aesthetics. There was no obvious signage with the name or hours. This was getting to be a frustrating trend.

  Inside, the smell of hot coal was overpowering. The air, moist as a swamp. Fitting, since Chicago was built on swampland (unlike Washington, where the “swamp” had always been metaphorical). There were undertones of sweat, body odor, and gym socks as well.

  A fair-skinned woman with a buzz cut greeted me. She was dressed all in white, like an orderly. “Can I help you?” she asked in a Russian accent so thick that I was sure she’d copied it from The Bullwinkle Show.

  “I’m meeting someone,” I said.

  She passed a laminated rate card across the marble counter.

  “Can I just poke my head in or…”

  She tapped the card with one of her long fingernails. “Pay first.”

  I scanned the card quickly and pointed out the most economically priced service with the word “massage” in it. Birch massage.

  I paid up, and she handed me a towel and a white felt cap. “For your hair,” she said, as if caps were worn on elbows in Mother Russia. She slipped a red bracelet around my wrist, which I took to indicate the service I’d purchased, and pointed me in the direction of the locker room. To my surprise, there were separate men’s and women’s rooms. Perhaps it wouldn’t be the nudist free-for-all that I’d been warned about.

  I stashed my clothes into a locker and wrapped the towel around my waist. The cap was oddly shaped, like an upside-down tugboat. I left it behind.

  The locker room exited into a small common area. Three wrinkled men were climbing out of a whirlpool, gabbing away. They were wearing the house caps, and nothing else. A masseur with hands the size of catcher’s mitts was digging into a man’s back on a towel-covered bed. Too wide to be Rahm. The masseur nodded at me, and I followed his eyes to the sauna, where I was apparently supposed to wait my turn.

  When I opened the glass door, heat rolled out in great waves like smoke from a burning building. A dozen or so men in varying stages of undress were packed close together on a long, three-tiered cedar bench. Nobody was talking. Rahm might have been among them, but I didn’t look too closely. I’d already gotten my eyeful of man-flesh for the day.

  I took the first empty spot on the bottom-most bench. To my immediate left, two dark feet dangled dangerously close to my head. They were attached to a pair of impossibly long, skinny legs that I would have recognized anywhere.

  “You’re not going to say hi?” Barack Obama asked.

  23

  Barack invited me to sit next to him on the upper tier, where it was so hot, I could feel my hair begin to sweat. Rahm, sitting on the other side of Barack, had a smirk on his face.

  I started to back in beside them when Barack screamed, “Joe! Where’s your towel?”

  “I hung it up outside the room,” I said.

  “Go get it,” he said.

  I was turning to leave when I heard a sharp SNAP! It took a millisecond for the pain on my right butt cheek to register, but once it did, I yelped like a puppy chasing a mailman. Rahm was swinging a wet rolled-up towel with a sly smile.

  “Very funny,” I said, stomping out to grab my towel—not to cover myself, but for retribution should he snap his towel at me again. As I reached for the door, Rahm and Barack broke out in laughter that didn’t die down until I’d returned.

  “We have to quit running into each other like this,” I said.

  Barack cocked an eyebrow. He didn’t know if I was addressing him or Rahm or both of them, and, frankly, neither did I. I was trying to break the ice. Easier said than done.

  The Russian baths weren’t anything special. Just another good ol’ boys club. I’d never been a good ol’ boy. I’d never had the time. I’d always had a family back in Delaware who I went home to every night on the Amtrak. That didn’t leave a lot of time after work for closing down the bars on Capitol Hill with my colleagues. I’d never played the game. Yet I’d won—I’d won plenty.
/>   Right now I was questioning what Barack’s game was, and what he was doing here with Rahm. I’d come to kick over rocks. Barack had gotten here first, and instead of interrogating the snakes, he was soaking up the heat with them.

  The three of us sat in silence. This wasn’t a bad thing, necessarily—it was how many men preferred to spend their time when in the company of other men. The only things missing were a couple of cigars and a college football game on a big-screen TV.

  The door opened. It was the masseur. I started to stand, but he shook his head. It wasn’t my time yet. I had to marinate some more.

  “See you ladies later,” Rahm said, following the big guy out.

  Once Barack and I were alone, I turned to him. “What are you doing here?” I hissed through clenched teeth.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “I needed a massage.”

  “So did I.”

  I wiped the sweat off my brow. It was beginning to drip into my eyes. “Where’s your Service detail?”

  “Right here, Mr. Biden,” a voice called from the far end of the room. A man dressed in a full suit was sitting on the bottom bench. There was a towel hanging over his head, but I would have recognized that whiny voice anywhere.

  Barack cleared his throat. “Steve had some car trouble. Didn’t you, Steve?” No answer from the agent at the other end of the sauna. “You wouldn’t know anything about that, would you, Joe?”

  I shook my head. “It was running fine when I parked it. Legally. When I parked it legally, is what I’m trying to say.”

  Barack nodded but didn’t press me on it. Steve didn’t say anything, either. He was in another one of his “moods.” Steve sulked more than a grounded teenager during summer break. A side effect of his chronic carb deficiency.

  Barack dropped his voice a few notches: “I don’t know where you ran off to during my speech—”

  “I didn’t—”

  He held a hand up to stop me. “We’re both here for the same reason: to pump Rahm for everything he knows about this police investigation into the Denton shooting. He says the Chicago PD is focused on the parades and whatnot. The shooting at the freight yard is only one of several shootings so far. You were right about the weather, Joe. When the sun goes down, they’re planning for all hell to break loose. They don’t have anyone to spare on detective work on a day like this. Gangland shootings—”

  “You believe that? That he was in a gang? Because Pastor Brown didn’t seem to think so.”

  “It doesn’t matter what I believe. It matters what the police believe. They looked at his iPhone. No texts or calls this morning to suggest he was meeting somebody at the freight yard. They have one lead right now, and that’s the gun used in the shooting.”

  “They found it,” I said.

  “They found a spent casing. They entered its unique identifier into a ballistics database that tracks guns used in violent crimes and found a match: a Glock used in a shooting in Los Angeles several years ago. The serial number, plugged into a different database, gave them the owner’s name and address. A dealer. That’s where the trail went cold. The Glock had been on a shipment from Kansas City to Philadelphia when it went missing.”

  My hope began to fade. “Missing.”

  Barack nodded. “Three weeks ago, thieves broke into a couple different cargo containers at Norfolk Southern. They made off with half a million dollars in firearms, which have slowly been turning up on the streets. This is the first one used in a crime. It won’t be the last.”

  “Jesus.” Chicago could ban handgun sales within its borders, but everybody knew you couldn’t stop the influx of guns on your own. You needed cooperation—from neighboring states, from the Feds. Cooperation that we all knew would never happen. “I take it they haven’t found the thieves.”

  “The investigation was stalled out,” Barack said. “This could be the break they’ve been waiting for.”

  “I don’t follow.”

  “Rahm thinks Shaun was involved in the cargo burglary. It’s too much of a coincidence, otherwise. One of the missing guns shows up at the same freight yard it was stolen from? I have to admit, from where Rahm is sitting, I’d draw the same conclusion.”

  “What about from where you’re sitting?”

  “I’m trying to be objective,” he said. “I told him about the stolen BlackBerry, and how you were only trying to help me out by going after it. Rahm said to check back on Monday, see where things settle.”

  The bottom of my stomach dropped out. Rahm already looked at me like I was a schmuck.

  “You didn’t have to tell him about your connection,” I said.

  “No, you’re right. I didn’t have to. But I wanted to. What’s more important: my reputation or seeing justice served?”

  “Your reputation? What about mine?”

  “Same question.”

  I grumbled under my breath. Words I won’t repeat. The gist was that he was right—it didn’t matter if it was his reputation, mine, or the man in the moon’s. If it helped bring the perpetrator to justice, then it was worth it. In the end, it was worth it.

  The Secret Service had finished their review of the video from the Tribune Tower security cameras. They knew the names and faces of everyone who was supposed to be in the building—the conference, the newsroom employees upstairs. The office tenants who leased space in the building.

  “Bottom line is, nobody unknown to the Secret Service slipped into that building,” Barack said. “If Shaun didn’t steal my phone…”

  “It could have been anyone, practically.”

  Barack explained that the Service’s investigators were cross-referencing the list of everyone who had building access with multiple criminal databases. They’d already completed this step before the conference but were double-checking now in case there had been a security lapse on their part. I didn’t think so. Half the volunteers from Pastor Brown’s church would have thrown up red flags but had been approved by Barack personally. If it was a lapse on anyone’s part, it wasn’t the Secret Service’s.

  “We all make mistakes,” I said.

  Barack raised an eyebrow.

  “I wasn’t talking about you,” I said. “I was talking about those kids in Pastor Brown’s congregation. You weren’t wrong to place your trust in them. It’s possible to screw up and turn things around.”

  “You’re right,” he said, his eyes focused on some spot on the floor. He’d spoken about his teenage years many times. Written about them. I couldn’t wrap my mind around the stuff he’d done—the drugs. The drinking. But he’d grown up. He was a different man now. He didn’t need to be reminded that the penalty for such behavior wasn’t getting shot in the back and left for dead.

  The door opened again. Another large man. He nodded to me. There was a bundle of birch branches in his right hand. What sort of massage was this?

  I rose to my feet and went light-headed. I’d forgotten all the warning signs they post about spending too much time in saunas and steam rooms. Especially if you’re on the backside of fifty.

  “We’re not through talking,” I told Barack once I’d steadied myself. “You’re not going to run off on me, are you?”

  “You’re the one who ran off on me.”

  “I can see how it might look that way.”

  “Don’t try to pull that ‘fake news’ bull on me, Joe. It looks that way because that’s what you did. When I went onstage, you snuck out to do a little digging around on your own.”

  “I would have asked you to come with, but…” I nodded in the direction of Steve. Our erstwhile babysitter, whose shoulders were slumping.

  “How you doin’ down there, Steve?” Barack shouted.

  The masseur who’d come for me followed our eyes to Steve, who, as if on cue, collapsed on the bench in a puddle of his own sweat. It took us all a moment to react. We should have seen it coming, though. Nobody wears a full suit into a sauna. I knew why he hadn’t wanted to undress: he was concerned that President
Obama’s abs would be more numerous and defined than his own. It was also possible that he had wanted to keep his government-issued firearm hidden, preferring not to walk through the baths with a shoulder holster. He was right to be wary about leaving his weapon and phone in the locker room. Even under lock and key. You couldn’t be too careful around Russians these days.

  24

  Steve’s breathing was shallow and ragged as we helped the masseur carry him out. And when I say “helped,” I mean “watched him carry Steve like a sack of beans.” The brute hauled his limp body to one of the massage beds in the middle of the room. Rahm was facedown on the next bed, getting worked over like a raw steak. His pink cheeks were sticking up in the air. There was no privacy in the Russian baths—every man and woman was equal, wearing nothing but his or her own skin. And, sometimes, a towel.

  “Help me out, Joe?” Barack asked.

  He was busy removing Steve’s jacket. Steve was mumbling incoherently. We had to cool him down. The fastest way to do that was to strip him to his skivvies. You ever try to take off another man’s pants? It’s not as easy as it sounds.

  “This reminds me of this one time at Archmere,” I said, struggling to get Steve out of his slacks. One of his knees—they were very bony—kept catching.

  “Joe,” Barack said, “if I hear one more story about your weird 1930s all-boys prep school, I’m going to lose it. We’re going to have quiet time. Whoever can stay silent the longest gets two scoops of chocolate-chip ice cream.”

  “And a waffle cone?”

  “And a waffle cone,” he said. “We start now.”

  “If you think I can’t shut up for five minutes, then—”

  “You’re still talking.”

  Five minutes. I could shut up for five minutes. It’s not like I was some motor mouth, narrating my own story and diving off on tangents. Not like that Joe Biden caricature in that hack’s mystery novel. Gadzooks, what a fool he’d made me out to be! A one-dimensional clown. I’d graduated at the top of my class.