Aldermen were considered the comic relief of politics. Chicagoans liked their mayors to be pugnacious and effective. They rarely cared if a mayor rewarded his or her allies, as long as those enriched could build the buildings, run the trains, sweep the snow, haul the trash, catch the muggers, and stand back to let people make money. They could even tolerate officials who ached to be statesmen; they had put up with the likes of Lincoln and Stevenson, if a long time ago.
Most people recognized only a few aldermen by name, but tended to associate almost all of them with a series of traits. Aldermen mangled language. Unless disciplined, they behaved like four-year-olds trying to catch candy spilling out of a piñata. They would tell a blind newsstand clerk that a five-dollar bill was a twenty. They might be occasionally entertaining, in the way that Roman emperors kept young children at their banquet tables for amusement. But you wouldn't want your sister, your daughter, or nowadays, your son, to marry an alderman.
Sunny knew that he benefited by contrast. He was well spoken and immaculate (he was especially careful to attend to his hands; slapping dough onto the rough clay side of tandoori ovens made him scarred and hairless on the back of his hands). He knew that his faint English accent conveyed a note of sophistication to Americans, and he worked to keep it, after more than thirty years in the city. Once, a reporter caught Sunny carrying a copy of The Economist under his arm. He reacted with exaggerated surprise, as if he'd just seen an orangutan wearing velvet slippers. It was enough to earn Sunny a reputation in the council for being some kind of Disraeli or Vaclav Havel.
In fact, Sunny was probably less well educated than most aldermen. He had left Truman City College in his second year after the death of his father, Sidhan. His brother, Vendan, was already a premed major, so the future of his family's restaurant fell on Sunny. He buried his father with remorse, but ended his academic career with relief.
Yet two decades in the chamber convinced Sunny that there were as many certifiably smart aldermen as those who were embarrassingly stupid. Linas Slavinskas was not only an astute lawyer. He surprised Sunny with cosmopolitan observations about opera, literature, and art. (Linas explained away such fluency by telling Sunny, “You don't impress the girls who work the makeup counter at Saks by talking about our sewer rebate program.”)
Vera Barrow and Kiera Malek were poised and informed on weekend interview shows. The mayor usually dispatched them to represent the city at international conferences that wanted a look at a real Chicago alderman. Vera would return and report, “They kept waiting for me to drool.”
Once the mayor had posted Arty Agras to an urban land use conference in Athens. “I'm so glad to be in the land of my forefathers, who have given so much to civilization,” Artie told his hosts. “The Acropolis, the Coliseum, and the right of affectional preference among men.”
But even Arty, who was certainly more what the delegates had in mind, had spare moments of such lucidity in reading the small, numbing print in a city budget that Sunny had wondered if his malaprops were part of some prolonged act. “You see, Sunny,” he would say as he drew back one of the blue vinyl covers and let the pages fall, “a printed budget is a little like a fan dance. The small part that shows makes you think you're seeing more than you are.”
Cyril Murphy of the 40th was the Irish Republican Army's legal counsel in Chicago and could draw the minute lines of a redistricted ward as if he were deveining shrimp. Rod Abboud was an ass, but no fool. He had been to the University of Chicago's law school with Linas Slavinskas (but unlike Linas, couldn't seem to make an observation about parking restrictions along Western Avenue without quoting “the distinguished scholar, my fellow Maroon …”). Evelyn Washington was a second-grade teacher at the Cyrus Colter School. Reasoning with seven-year-olds, she said, prepared her to mediate with aldermen.
Sunny didn't want to devote too much of his life listening to Arty Agras retell old goodfellas stories, or swallowing a grimace that could be confused with a smile at one of Collie Kerrigan's jokes. But he didn't regard the time he spent with his colleagues as personally disagreeable, and certainly not beneath him. Politicians tended to be friendly, aldermen especially so. They collected funny stories. They wanted to be liked. Hell, they wanted to be loved and asserted themselves desperately and gracelessly like ducks trying to make love to a football.
The Roopini name had been the object of joking (“Dark as you are, you must be from Calabria,”) since the family arrived in Chicago in the first great wave of East Indian emergency room doctors and grad students. One day Sunny found an Italian cookbook left in a booth. He thumbed through it and began to think. Within a few weeks, he offered spaghetti with lamb meatballs on the menu, mostly to feature something for Chicago children who still wrinkled their noses at the idea of lentil dal and sag paneer. Within a few more weeks, a neighborhood newspaper made admiring, humorous mention of Sunny Roopini's Italian specialties—and Sunny was obliged to concoct several more. Sidhan had opened the restaurant to Indian community meetings on flat Sunday afternoons, when football and baseball games usually made business slow. Sunny reached out to bring in Dante Alighieri clubs, Kiwanians, synagogue groups, realtors, undertakers, and a swinger's club (for, as Sunny reasoned, people who favored orgies would certainly enjoy their three-course buffet). Within months, there were wedding rehearsal dinners, bat mitzvah luncheons, and happy hours with samosas and cha-patis. For greeting the disparate groups of people, Sunny began to perfect witty little speeches about being an Indian in America, but not an American Indian. Looking back, it was his beginning in politics.
But after twenty years in the council, Sunny Roopini felt increasingly spent and dull. All the irrecoverable hours he had spent at meetings, rallies, and citizen forums, absorbing breathless banalities and policy babble like a sponge at the bottom of a pail. All the cynical courtesies he had awarded uncaring adversaries, all the tinny excuses he had offered disappointed friends.
There were times that even as Sunny opened his mouth to make some pledge—to balance a budget, slash taxes, or keep Chicago clean!—he mentally prepared to explain, a few months hence, why it was not possible. The state legislature blocked it; the federal government wouldn't fund it; powerful antediluvian forces crushed the will of the people like a paper cup in the street. The next campaign came, and politicians would still send new promises into the sky, like balloons, to drift away.
The predictable rotation of promises and excuses made people cynical. But Sunny sometimes told friends, “A campaign promise is like shouting out ‘I love you’ during orgasm. You mean it. You mean it absolutely in that moment. But any adult should know that you might not be able to mean it next week.”
Increasingly and uselessly, Sunny imagined ways that he might have made more money, seen more of his daughters, met Salma Hayek, or at least have been the best at some craft or business. The issues with which he was identified—gay rights, school reforms, and immigrant issues—had mostly prevailed. Sunny didn't fool himself that he had made the difference. But there were times when he wondered why, if the goals had been gained, he was still on the field?
But a politician wasn't a priest. A professional had to find new things to believe in.
Sunny found that he still enjoyed the chance to accomplish something actual and concrete—to make a call and get a dead tree cut down, a traffic light put up, or a parking ticket dismissed for a senior citizen who had confused Tuesday and Thursday. He was glad that the right note or phone call—the right small joke in the ear of an overburdened city bureaucrat—might get an autistic child into a good program. He took pleasure in writing a recommendation for the Alferez girl to get into Annapolis, or for the father of the Schweppe boy to get early parole. He was happy to hear people say, “All that snow, but I could get to work because the thirty-six was running. Alderman Roopini makes sure the plows are out before the first flake.”
Sunny hadn't had a serious opponent for years. But he was still surprised by the number of people so eager to compete for a prize that was so widely mocked.
Some still saw the chance for financial reward in a council seat. “Never take a dime,” Linas had famously advised. “Just hand them your business card.” But forty years of reforms had heartlessly curtailed the ways in which an alderman could avail himself of opportunities.
Some who ran hoped the council might confer enough fame to help them run for higher office. But Sunny thought it was an undependable stepping stone. A voter might forgive a congressman for voting for or against war in Iraq, the medicinal use of marijuana, or expanding gun controls; but never an alderman who had opposed installing a traffic light on the corner of Ashland and Wrightwood.
Yet running for the city council was still an affordable exercise of citizenship and ego. The excessive number of wards meant that the city's political map was broken down into fifty accessible enclaves; Sunny could walk the length of the 48th in fifteen minutes. An alder-manic candidate could forgo the spectacular costs of buying television ads to charm, scare, or intoxicate millions.
One night, the mayor had asked Sunny to watch a reel of his political commercials. Horns soared; strings swelled. The camera swept quickly over glossy skyscrapers glowing in the morn. A female African-American crossing guard in an orange belt warmly waved on a waddling flock of six-year-olds in a multiplicity of hues. Office workers strode purposefully over bridges, their faces intent on the future. Wellproportioned construction workers struck poses of casual prowess against a pile of red girders and construction cranes. A man with a handlebar moustache (he could be Greek, Italian, Mexican, Lebanese—he could be Icelandic—but in fact was an Australian actor of Scottish ancestry) playfully pummeled dough in his beautifully bricked restaurant kitchen. Ola! Opa! Mangia! A white woman in a pinstripe suit toting a portfolio against a slender hip talked on her mobile phone as she stalked a busy street. A diversely complexioned crowd in short-sleeved shirts rose from ivy-walled bleachers. A chorus sang:
Chicago breaks new ground! Chicago reaches for the sky! It's the city that astounds! On that you can rely!
The camera finally settled on the mayor in Daley Plaza, his broad shoulders admiringly encircled by nine photogenic youngsters in various heights and hues.
“I remember when you could get by with just four kids,” the mayor told Sunny. “Black, brown, white, and yellow. Now, they got to add a beige one. Could be Indian, Assyrian, or Brazilian. Soon you'll have to add a kid in pink socks, so you think he's gay. Good ad?” he asked as the screen blinked back into the dark.
“Jewish guy from LA?” Sunny asked. The mayor shook his head.
“Jew in Sydney,” he explained. “We wanted something fresh. Know how much that cost? To make, to run?”
“A million.” Sunny blurted the first round number that occurred to him.
“Try seven,” said the mayor.
“And gone before you can get up for the bathroom,” said Sunny.
“That's the idea,” the mayor explained. “I asked the consultants if we could make one that runs sixty seconds. Say a little something about issues.”
“And they said?”
“‘Do you want to run for reelection, Mr. Mayor, or make movies?’”
“Seven million dollars,” Sunny said slowly.
“That's why you hire consultants, isn't it? To keep you from doing the right thing. Plus I'm buying radio, polls, newspapers, phone trees, popup screens, pooper scoopers with my name on the handle, and enough window signs to cover the moon. And I'm running eighty points ahead of a bunch of dented bean cans.”
The mayor meant the assortment of Prohibitionists, Trotskyites, and people named George Washington who managed enough signatures to appear on the ballot.
“Seven million dollars,” Sunny repeated. “How many phone calls does it take to raise that kind of money, two thousand dollars at a time?”
Silently, both men tried to do the math. They burst out laughing.
“Too fucking many,” said the mayor.
The natural orbit of aldermen around the city's mayor had been in ebb since the disco era. Hiring laws had become so depressingly sincere that the mayor had once exclaimed, “What's this city coming to when you can get a job for a total stranger more easily than for an alderman's brother-in-law?”
Mayors and senators met with the French ambassador, the head of the World Food Program, or Bill and Melinda Gates. But aldermen were considered household appliances. People expected them to work at the touch of a fingertip. No one believed that an alderman had anything more urgent in life (no excuse short of kidney dialysis would do) than to sit through a community meeting about making Buena a one-way street between Broadway and Marine. And if Sunny spent two hours absorbing the anxieties and gripes of the Andersonville Neighbors Association, how could he tell the Edgewater Council that he was too busy on Tuesday?
If heavy rains in the middle of the night made a gutter overflow along Ridge Road, the phone in Sunny's pocket would warble like a trapped bird.
Sunny began to believe that the ceaseless drip of demands were what made many aldermen amenable to bribes. They began to think that a few bills taped under the bar to assist a small change in a zoning ordinance were a fair gratuity for all the uncompensated hours politics took from them.
Sunny knew about epochal corruptions. But few aldermen could award the kind of favor that would warrant a wire transfer into a Cayman Islands bank account. Most of the bribes to which he had seen his colleagues succumb were embarrassingly small change: box seats to a Cubs or Bulls game, a set of snow tires, or, as with old Hatcher Gutchess of the 25th, a couple of hundreds in an envelope that he didn't use to buy drugs, play horses, or pay hookers, but buy basketball shoes for his grandson.
Reformers were Sunny's natural allies on many issues. But he often felt uncomfortable around their meticulous righteousness. They forbade their housekeepers to shop at chain stores. They wore blue wristbands to stop global warming. At least people who left room for a little corruption in their souls could be modest about their virtues. Sunny found them easier to be around.
Sunny had never taken a bribe. He had never really been offered one and wouldn't even quite know how to ask. So he wore his virtue lightly, like a man in a clean white T-shirt at a spaghetti dinner.
Besides, how could people trust someone who was incorruptible? It was impossible to tell what was in the person's heart.
Despite his exhaustion, Sunny still had occasions that made him glad for his seat in the council's back row. Just a few months before, Sunny and the other aldermen had filed into their chamber for a morning session and saw a photo of a young policeman sprayed onto the white marble space above the mayor's high-backed chair. It was Vicente Romo, who had been twenty-six, and a patrolman in the Wentworth Avenue district. They knew that Officer Romo had been off duty one morning and brought his daughter to school when people came running over from Twenty-third Street to say that an apartment house was burning.
Officer Romo put the soft left hand of his little girl, Vanessa, into the hand of a teacher on the playground and ran toward the building. Children on the playground began to cry and shout, “Vanessa's poppy is going to the fire!”
When Officer Romo pulled up on foot, Chinese families stood in the street, pointing and spilling out words he could not understand. One young woman took hold of his arms and said, “Ye-ye, base-men! Ye-ye, base-men!” He hitched his sweater over his nose and mouth and ran into the building's open door. Blue clouds already boiled out of the windows.
By the time fire trucks arrived, Vicente Romo had staggered out of the building with an elderly man in his arms and laid him gently onto the hard black tar of 23rd Street. The man was sixty-seven-year-old Wen Wuan Cheng. But when Officer Romo tried to stand, he fell back. His head hit with a gruesome splat that was buried under the sound of sirens.
Heroic is a word often thoughtlessly applied. For Vicente Romo, no other word was apt.
At the time of Officer Romo's death, construction crews rushed to complete a new public library on Wentworth, on the side of Cermak Road where Spanish-speaking families lived. The city had piled ballots in churches and convenience stores, inviting the public to choose the name of the new library from an extensive list that, in a mishmash of inclu-siveness, ranged from Minnie Minoso to Che Guevera to Raquel Welch.
A small local group, El Frente Popular por Lolita LeBron, got organized. Their ten members found the mounds of ballots as they were distributed, loaded sheaves into their arms, and marked them for their namesake. When the ballots were totaled, Lolita LeBron was the choice of about 6 percent. No other name won more.
“Lolita LeBron?” the mayor inquired from the couple of aldermen he called to his office.
“A figure from history,” Jesus Flores Suarez of the 22nd explained, shifting from side to side. “She won beauty contests in Puerto Rico in the forties, then became a nationalist.”
“I am a student of history, Jesus. I know who Lolita LeBron is. I just don't want to name a library after someone who opened fire on the U.S. Congress.”
Harry Walker, who was chairman of the Cultural Affairs Committee, held the wedge of his beard judiciously.
“She felt they were imperialists assisting the continued occupation of her homeland.”
“She shot three Democrats!” the mayor thundered.
“She was let out of prison by Jimmy Carter,” Alderman Suarez pointed out, but the mayor snorted.
“I don't have a peanut farm to go home to, Jesus.” He pawed the top of his vast desk. “Every time del pueblo votes down there, the independence line can't get four percentage points. You chuckleheads put Lolita LeBron on the ballot up here and she gets six, 'cause people think she must be a porn star. Why didn't you put John Wilkes Booth's name on the ballot, too, Harry? Folks know that name.”
The meeting continued in that mood for a few more minutes, with both aldermen squirming as if the mayor had installed gas burners below their chairs. An ordinary leader might shrug and concede that the same democratic processes that elected him now had him backed into a corner. But the mayor was a man of vision. He could see, where others could not, how disconnected events could be realigned.
As the council session opened, the Romo and Cheng families occupied honored seats on the council floor. Little Vanessa was an especially affecting sight, a black lace scarf stretched across her head to match her mother's. Her tiny hand flashed small, pink, freshly painted nails, enfolded with her mother's, reminding all that a little girl could no longer hold her father's hand.
The mayor began his remarks slowly, gravely, like a great train pulling a great load.
“This was a young man,” he said, “who got up on his day off, expecting just to take his little girl to school. And later, tuck her into bed.”
His voice had become soft, but had a charge of magnetism in it. The aldermen lifted themselves forward to hear.
“Maybe to read Goodnight, Moon. ‘Good night, bunny. Good night, light.’ But God gave him an emergency call. This fine, young, strong man,” the mayor said, and raised his voice in measured steps as his words gathered steam. “And when humanity called, he didn't walk. When du-ty called, he didn't stroll,” and here the mayor put his two huge hands to his hips with exaggerated daintiness. “He ran into a burning building. He didn't say, ‘Sor-ree, I'm off duty.’”
The mayor turned his great, weighty jowls toward the Romo family. Vanessa and her mother tightened their hold of one another.
“The name of your husband,” he said and paused so his voice could catch. “Your daddy, will rest forever in our hearts.” Then his face softened, as if beholding a new grandchild.
“A new public library is being built on Wentworth Avenue,” he said. “Generations will grow up with the name of that library on their lips. I propose that when that library opens, the name incised above the entrance will be—” He drew in breath, then barked each syllable: “Vi-cen-tay-Ro-mo-Pub-lic-Li-brary.”
Explosions of applause burst on the council floor. Sunny found his eyes brimming and his hands stinging. About thirty voices shouted out, “Call the question, Mr. President.”
“The motion has been moved,” the mayor declared solemnly, as if he were a disinterested witness. “The question has been called. All in favor?”
A thunder of, “Aye! Aye! Aye!” pealed through the chamber.
“Do I hear—” the mayor began, and then Jesus Flores Suarez, who saw that he had better not be the last man clinging on to Lolita LeBron, called out, “I move to make the motion unanimous.”
The mayor brought down his gavel hard.
“Without objection,” he stressed. “I ask aldermen to come to the front of the chamber and offer thanks to the Romo family.”
Mrs. Romo was short, sweet-faced, astonished, and sad. Her eyes were dewy under her black shawl as she nestled Vanessa against her knee and mouthed “Thank you,” as Sunny passed. He raised his hands in front of his face, and touched his thumbs and fingers lightly.
“Ñamaste,” he told them from behind steepled fingers. He could hear his voice struggling to speak above a whisper. “In Hindi, it means, ‘I am humble before you.’”
The Cheng family stood several feet away. They looked respectful, thankful, and deeply moved. But awkwardness was apparent, too, in the way they held their eyes down. Their grandfather was alive. Yet the life of a fine young man—a father, a husband, a protector of his city— had been lost to save him. What grandfather wouldn't say that the sacrifice had gone in the wrong direction?
Council members drifted over to offer their hands. Their grandfather nodded feebly. One of his grandchildren, a girl of about ten, stood at his shoulder to translate as he stooped forward to hear soft words from the aldermen. Sunny pointedly took the old gentleman's hand and spoke into his face.
“Your family is also making great contributions to this city,” Sunny told him. “We're glad you're here.”
The mayor had come down from the rostrum to oversee the city's expression of grief. Jesus Flores Suarez tried to slink inconspicuously back into his seat in the second row, but the mayor beckoned him over with his arms. He took Jesus by his shoulders and said in a forceful voice that carried into the chamber's galleries, “Thank you for your statesmanship, Jesus.”
Then the mayor drew him into an embrace, and administered three manly pats on his back. When Jesus' left ear was over the mayor's shoulder, he uttered private words of counsel.
“Be careful going home tonight, Jesus. Those folks in the Lolita Le-Bron Society don't take disappointment lightly.”
The aldermen filed back into their seats, heads still bowed. The mayor moved back onto the rostrum.
“The wife is pretty,” Luis Zamora, who sat just in front of Sunny's row of seats, remarked in a loud whisper. “The daughter's cute. I say the widow Romo remarries in a year.”
“Another cop,” suggested Jacobo Sefran, sitting to Sunny's left. “Some ‘friend’ of Vicente's who's probably always had his eye on her.”
“In the meantime,” said Luis Zamora, “I believe señora could use some comforting.”
Wandy Rodriguez of the 30th turned and said in a low murmur, “She's Puerto Rican, Luis. Stick to your own kind.”
And when she could hear low laughs in their throats beginning to break through, Jane Siegel hissed from the third row behind them, “Be respectful, will you? Shut the fuck up.”