“As a kid, James got caught up in South Side Insane Popes,” Vera continued. She had taken a puff from her cigarette and passed it over to Sunny so that he might start up his own without fumbling for the lighter.
“He was in prison before he had to shave every day,” she said. “By the time I heard of him, he was at Menard, and coming up for parole— again. He was not innocent. He was the lookout for a team that beat down some El Rukn in an alley near a school. So they could deal. This girl with three kids looped with chains and diamonds and everything black and gold got in to see someone at the firm. Flash around a few— more than a few—hundreds, and the drawbridges on LaSalle street snap off salutes. The girl said that James was a changed man. If he didn't get out, he'd be crushed. I guessed her money convinced us. Nobody asked, ‘Did you win the lottery? Invest in Microsoft at just the right time?’”
She shook her head and expelled a cloud of smoke and frost.
“Our car service brought me down to Menard. ‘When I heard the call was for you, Ms. Barrow,’ the driver said, ‘I thought we'd be going to Bloomingdales.’ Two hours later, we were at the prison. The gates clanked. I had to clamp a tissue over my mouth and nose, daubed with Jean Patou. People piss and cum on every corner in that place, like it's the only way they have to chip away at it. But finally there was James in a conference room, beaming, like some kind of buff carnation. Shaved head like some wise walrus. Beautiful manners. ‘Please. Thank you. Pardon.’ He smelled—I'm not sure how he managed it in there— like tangerines.
“Sunny, I got to know James,” she said with a shiver. “Respect him. He'd cleaned up. He'd read. He was trying to make peace inside between the Almighty Vice Lords, the Gangster Disciples, and the Popes. He'd been jumped, thrashed, and cut plenty—gave a little of it back, too—until those wild kids with electric eyes began to get what he was. The warden called him Mahatma. Third or fourth time I saw him, I noticed that he always had bandages around his wrist. I worried. Carefully, I asked how they got there. He said they covered his tattoos—the IP with the bloody sword piercing down. From then on, I started looking when they brought me through any common areas. Every fourth or fifth prisoner had bandages over their wrists. I thought, ‘That's James. That's his power.’ Sunny, what kind of man gets thrown into a hellhole and figures out a way to make it better? Have you known anyone in politics who'd done something that bold? That worthwhile?”
Sunny shook his head and shrugged his shoulders; the cold sharpened and leached into his bones.
“So I made a good argument,” said Vera. “The warden was eloquent. James got parole. Moved in with his sister and began to work in our mailroom. Eighteen months, sterling record. People would leave packages with him—Macy's, Tiffany, Bloomies, never a problem. People would leave their children with him for the afternoon. One of our partners offered to put him through school. But James was already forty.
“I agreed to help get him a job on the outside. A man that noble shouldn't have to spend his adult life fetching coffee and steering a cart.”
Vera shook her head as if just the right words might come out on top.
“But you know, Sunny, companies don't jump to hire someone like that. It's much easier to buy a table for a dinner for an ex-offender rehabilitation group. You get a tax deduction and rosemary garlic chicken.
“So I asked for his help,” said Vera. “The mayor's,” she added, unnecessarily. “There were maintenance openings in Chicago Park District field houses. James was good with his hands.”
Sunny thought that he could see Vera's face flush slightly even in the cold.
“It wasn't commodities trading. But a solid job. The mayor wrote Lucy Julian,” said Vera. Sunny knew the name; she was in charge of Facilities Management for the South Region. “James was hired.”
“Good Christ,” said Sunny. “And James was the one.…”
“Yes,” said Vera quietly. “Last November. Arrested for running drugs out of an equipment shed in the Douglas Nature Sanctuary.”
“Old habits die hard?” he asked softly.
“Old friends don't let go.”
“He needed the money?” asked Sunny. “The friends?”
“He needed to be free of me.”
Vera clinched her collar against her throat as a tendril of wind slipped under the hot glare of the heat lamp.
“Sunny, there's something I left out,” she said, looking over the edge of the Hall toward a bank building on Clark Street. “James and I. We were involved.”
Sunny paused and smiled gently.
“Once or twice?”
“A week,” she smiled back. “I told you once, Sunny. Everyone has a personal life. Whether they know it or not.”
Sunny clasped his arms over his chest. He stretched his legs, and rocked back and forth on his heels for warmth as Vera went on.
“Always my place,” she explained. “Of course—I'm sorry if that sounds smug. I had the cab downstairs to take him away at six because, after all, I had to go to the gym. I had a breakfast meeting. He began to feel humiliated. We never went out. Never a movie, never a restaurant. I was always getting bean and tofu pancakes delivered, because prison food fouls your guts. Sunny, what could I do? I was at the right hand of the mayor. I go to China, climb the Great Wall, and there are always a few tourists who wave, ‘Hey, Alderman Barrow! We're from Glencoe!’ I represent the Archdiocese of Chicago. I'm on the Harvard Board of Overseers. I couldn't bring a man covering up gang tats on his forearms into the University Club. I'm sorry if that sounds cold. If we took the Olympic committee to the Lyric Opera, I had to tell him he could stay home and watch TV in bed—like some kind of four-year-old.”
The wind had begun to blow icy white grains from the top of the encrusted piles on the roof. The snow made Sunny rub the back of his hand over his eyes.
“You didn't ask me if I loved him,” said Vera, and Sunny just shook his head. “I've been thinking how I'd answer when you did.”
“That's a question for teenagers, Vera,” he told her. “People who think love can make everything right.”
“People will do things out of loneliness they wouldn't for love,” said Vera, and Sunny drew his toe into a small pile of snow.
“Yes,” he said simply. Vera's eyes seemed to scrunch against the snow, too.
“The mayor wrote the letter, Vera,” Sunny pointed out. “It's on his hands. His cold, dead hands.”
By the time she turned to Sunny, real tears simmered in her eyes; she held them back like gobs of spit.
“He wrote the letter, Sunny. It said, ‘My good friend, Alderman Barrow, highly recommends Mr. James Masterson. I have misgivings.’”
“Black ink?” Sunny asked softly.
“Of course. Granted me my favor, and gave me away.”
“Bastard.”
“No need for a blood test for that, is there Sunny?”
He blew burps of steam through his hands.
“The mayor could put your foot in a bear trap and make you think it was a glass slipper,” he told Vera. “I just didn't think he'd do it to you. To us.”
Vera laced an arm through Sunny's and put her chin against his shoulder.
“Roland wanted to be mayor forever, Sunny. He didn't want anyone else to be mayor, ever. Not me, not Linas, not some Kennedy or Jesse Jackson IX. He thought he'd just be buried in that big leather chair and they'd never roll in another. The more times I got mentioned as his successor, the more he worried that I wouldn't wait around. He made sure to bury a land mine for me.”
For the first time in their talk, Vera sat back on the bench and smiled without hurt and strain. She even opened the top of her coat at the collar.
“James took a plea,” she went on. “We got a junior partner to handle it. I said I was too busy with council work. Everybody thought it was because I felt let down by him. It was a little more complicated, wasn't it? James is back in Menard. Happy, too, in a way, that he never was out here. In there, he has image. Authority. He counts. Out here, he's an ex-con—a middle-aged man pushing a cart down the hall. In there, he's the Mahatma.”
She put a hand on his knee, squeezing lightly, as if touching a child's hand. She brought her polished bronze profile close to his mouth and chin.
“I'm radioactive, Sunny,” she told him. “You can't see it yet. But …”
She shook her hands under her chin and flashed out her fingers, as if sending off sparks. “Weeks, months from now, it'll come out,” she said. “It's not the story, but the headline, right? ‘Alderman Uses Clout to Put Drug Dealer in Park’ ‘Wise Old Mayor Issued Warning’ ‘Ex-Con Dealt Drugs from Alderman's Love Nest.’”
Vera splayed her nails like a thousand sharp rays pinging through the night.
“You don't think some people won't be happy?” she asked. “Uppity colored girl brought low.…”
Sunny took Vera's hand, placed it softly under his chin, and gravely kissed her palm. True tears began to roll. Vera shuddered and squeezed her ribs to recover her breath. She began to turn around, left and right, flailing for a handbag, and realized that she hadn't brought it, only her cigarettes and lighter. Sunny drew the white linen from his lapel pocket, and Vera pressed it, folds and all, against her eyes and nose.
“What do I do now? Right now.”
“Nothing,” Sunny said after a small pause. “Make them play the game all the way through. See if something occurs. You've got votes in your pocket, and the sale is on. There's always the unexpected.”
“Collins sent me a message Thursday night,” she said. “Seems years ago, doesn't it? Within minutes, I'd guess. Something like, ‘Dear Vera: We've lost our best friend. My heart feels so inky black.’”
“Oh good Christ,” said Sunny. “That was supposed to be some sort of clever code?”
“I imagine,” she said. “That rock will get turned over, too.”
They both sat back on the bench. Fat flakes zipped over their heads, floated toward the hot light, then dropped wetly onto their hair and hands.
“I got to go with Arty over Fred,” said Vera. “He's a clown and a fool but there's something there, somewhere.”
She held a closed fist against her chest, but Sunny waved it off with the last glowing inch of his cigarette.
“Well no need to go diving into the earth's molten core just yet,” he told her. “Let me try a few names first.”
He saw Sgt. Gallaher wave from the groaning iron door, and Eldad Delaney trying to clop around the snowy clumps of bins and planters.
“Vera. Vera dear. Is there anything else I should know?”
She smiled and then buried it in her palms, raised her eyes to Sunny but put her fingers across her face, like slats in a fence.
“Linas and me,” she said. “A three-day weekend in Aspen at a conference on ‘restoring and rehabilitating urban ecosystems.’ Never left the hotel room. Croque monsieur sandwiches, strawberries, and sparkling wine.”
“A shame,” said Sunny. “Aspen is lovely. I've seen postcards.”
Vera shook her head.
“Altitude makes you do crazy things.”
“Things you regret?” he asked, and Vera took her fingers down, one by one, before answering.
“Things you decide not to do again,” she said softly.
From below, they could hear police whistles cheep and twitter as they turned back rush-hour traffic on LaSalle.
“Vera,” said Sunny suddenly, “I thought we could do things right this time. I loved the mayor. Even—even now. But I thought this was our chance to do things right. Not always winking and scheming, begging and money grubbing, jiving and conniving. I thought we could do it right.”
Eldad steadied himself on his smooth heels as he pulled up within a respectful distance of Sunny and Vera. He stayed silent, but Vera smiled back, and replied to Sunny in a low, hoarse voice.
“Sunny, maybe we just waited too long.”