HARRIET WASN’T USUALLY home so early in the evening. Client meetings, discovery, consultations with her senior partner Leigh Wilton, usually carried her workday past seven, often later. Lack of sleep and worry about Mara sent her home early today.
She’d had another hysterical call from Gian Palmetto after lunch. The president of the Hotel Pleiades wanted to know what steps she was taking to guarantee that her sister wouldn’t create a disturbance again outside the garage.
“I don’t know, Gian,” she said, trying to fight back fatigue and irritation, to speak with calm attentiveness. “Let’s take a look at this wall and see what your options are.”
Her afternoons were usually scheduled so solidly that it was hard to find time to eat. It was part of her pleasure in her skills that she could turn from a sanitary engineer at two-thirty to a ballerina at three-fifteen, and show the same clarity in understanding the problems of both. Today she was having trouble remembering who she was speaking to at any given moment, let alone what troubles brought them into their lawyer’s office.
Everything about the day had been difficult, starting with the phone call that summoned her to the police department, but the hardest part had been saying “no” to Grand-père, that she wouldn’t find an apartment for Mara. And then Mara gave her no thanks of any kind for this support. Now here was Gian Palmetto howling in her ear, as if Harriet had sent Mara there on purpose to harass him.
She smacked the phone with the flat of her hand, wishing it were Gian’s face, no, really Mara’s face, and told her secretary to reschedule her remaining appointments; she was going over to the Pleiades to get a handle on their crisis, and then home.
“I’m too ill today to do my clients justice. If anyone’s desperate, ask one of the other associates to see them.”
Her secretary paused fractionally before agreeing: competitive young lawyers like Harriet normally guard their client lists with the ferocity of junkyard dogs. Either Harriet was ill, or she’d lost her fighting edge. In the latter case, the secretary would look for a new assignment: Harriet’s only grace as a boss was that she was a winner, which meant she brought glory to her overworked, underthanked staff. If she’d lost her will to win, there was no reason to stay with her.
Once on the street, Harriet started to get into a cab, then waved the driver away. Maybe if she walked the mile to the hotel her head would clear.
The July air was warm. In her office, the seasons passed in reverse: the building’s heating system made the rooms so toasty in winter that woolen clothes chafed her skin, while in summer she had to wear long sleeves and jackets against the cold. Outside, her dress, with its suggestion of a military cape in the back and long epauletted sleeves, clung to her like a plastic glove. Not for her tennis shoes on the street, that sloppy look that turned women into unprofessional slatterns. As she walked east her toes began to hurt inside her high heels.
Her route took her along the Chicago River, and she stopped near one of the bridges to rest her feet. A lake-bound boat, packed with tourists, passed below her. She couldn’t imagine finding pleasure in such an outing, crammed among strangers, breathing diesel fumes mixed with stale grease from frying food in the galley. And yet her own vacations, passed in solitude at ski resorts or remote islands, did they bring her greater pleasure than these people experienced?
Was Mara right? Was she a cold person who lived in fear of Grandfather? Well, maybe she did fear him, but Mara didn’t understand the nature of Harriet’s dread: not that he would bellow at her, as he did at his students or Mara, but that Harriet would somehow be reduced in his eyes, that he would see her as less, and lose his affection for her. She called him “Grand-père” and often spoke to him in French to bolster his opinion of himself as a cosmopolitan man—setting herself further apart from Mara, who refused to learn the language.
Since the time he and Mephers took her in, Harriet knew she had to be as different from Beatrix as possible if she was going to be allowed to stay there. After the arrival of the baby, that little sister she feared might unseat her in the throne of Grand-père affections, she had tried harder still to attain perfection. If she wasn’t the best in an activity, such as tennis or horseback riding, she gave it up. Failure was too risky.
The tour boat hooted a warning to a smaller craft. Harriet looked at her watch in alarm: she’d dawdled there at the bridge for seven minutes without once thinking of her client’s legal problems. She shoved her feet back into her shoes and hurried over to the hotel.
By the time she reached the Pleiades, her feet were swollen and her hair was clinging to her neck in limp, sticky strands. The melancholy insights she’d had at the river vanished as her sore feet dominated her mind. She was demeaning herself in front of Gian Palmetto, leaving her office to meet him at his tiresome garage wall; damn Mara, anyway, for being so self-centered, so volatile, as to create last night’s scene.
The air-conditioning in the lobby blew through the wet armpits of her dress; she was shivering when she reached Palmetto’s office. His secretary gave her a cardigan and a cup of coffee with the bright promise that Mr. Palmetto would be with her soon.
Harriet’s irritation deepened: she hated feeling like a supplicant in a client’s office. It was typical that clients waited for her as she whirled from meeting to meeting, not for her to sit looking as bedraggled as an immigrant from a cleaning service while Palmetto made her dangle her heels.
She pulled her mobile phone from her purse and began making calls. When Palmetto finally emerged she was too engrossed to notice him. After a lengthy discussion of the exact meaning of paragraph seven, section two, of the Illinois Commerce Commission’s opinion on waste haulers’ liability for road contamination, she put the phone away, and affected to see him for the first time.
“Gian! Been waiting long? I’m sorry—but I had to shunt a lot of people to one side to come here, and everyone seems to be feeling the same urgency about their problems today. Must be the weather, making us all edgy…. Now, what’s the story on this garage wall? Why has it become such a focal point for action?”
“Damned if I know. We’ll get Brian Cassidy to meet us down there. He’s the night manager at the garage, but he should be over in the operations room—he usually gets here at three-thirty for a briefing before his shift.”
Brian Cassidy was glad to meet Harriet, hoped she’d be able to get this problem resolved. God knew he wasn’t eager to attack women, even crazy bag ladies, but this broad—excuse me, Ms. Stonds, this—gal—was seriously getting under his skin.
Like Hector, Harriet noticed Cassidy’s muscles straining his jacket sleeves. Mara had said this morning that Cassidy knocked her over, slammed her head into the wall; thinking of that, Harriet’s mood toward her sister veered again. Poor baby sister, getting beaten up by a monster. Mara was big for a woman, but no match for a gorilla, which is what Cassidy looked like, short forehead over small blue eyes, snub nose lost in the expanse of round red face.
“My paralegal tells me you’ve been hosing the wall down every night. That isn’t discouraging the woman?”
Her voice was crisp and cold, like shaved ice, and the garage manager fingered his tie, wondering if it was crooked. “She runs away until we’re done, then she’s right back there, lighting candles, carrying on like she thinks she’s in church. All these homeless people down there get on my nerves, they watch you from the shadows like spooks, but this crazy one is the worst. It’s hard to run a garage down there with that kind of shit—excuse me—disturbance going on all the time. Women hate it most—we had a major complaint last week from one of our best customers.”
“Madeleine Carter is loitering,” Harriet said calmly. “We ought to be able to get her picked up any time she camps out here.”
“But that doctor who was here last week, he—I guess he was trying to give her an injection and get her to leave—but at the same time he said the sidewalk was public property, we didn’t have any authority over her if she was on the sidewalk.”
Harriet smiled. “I wonder who this doctor is. Would he want me giving his patients medical advice? The sidewalk is not hotel property, that’s true. But Carter is still loitering, and can be made to leave. Let’s go take a look at the space, while she’s still in jail.”
Harriet had called the state’s attorney before leaving her office: they were letting Madeleine and Luisa cool their heels for a few days. Luisa had been slugged by a sister prisoner sick of listening to “Sempre libera” echoing down the corridors outside the holding cells. The state was trying to have Madeleine admitted to County, but might not be able to swing it. Harriet didn’t bother her client with this information—if the state’s attorney couldn’t force Madeleine to accept hospitalization, Palmetto would spend the rest of the summer wanting to know why Harriet didn’t do something about it.
Brian Cassidy led the way to the service elevator. When they reached the street outside the garage entrance Harriet suddenly felt nervous, wondering if Mara might have returned to the garage. Her sister would think Harriet was spying on her; her cheeks would puff out in that ugly swollen way and she would create a scene in front of a client. To Harriet’s relief, there was no one at the wall, neither Mara nor any homeless women.
From Brian Cassidy’s words, Harriet had pictured a little enclave of people in cardboard houses and sleeping bags. Instead, the sidewalk was filled with homebound commuters. Harriet was surprised—she lived in a world of limos and taxis and never thought about how most people got to work. Brian Cassidy pointed at the bus stop on the corner: three city routes started there.
When she asked where all the homeless people were, he took Harriet down an alley near the east end of the garage. They walked underneath an entrance ramp for Lake Shore Drive. An old wooden crate, slats torn randomly from its surface, was wedged between a pair of low-lying pylons.
“Our woman sleeps there some of the time. And there are some of the others.”
Cassidy flicked his flashlight on a heap of blankets, like a zoo curator showing a snakepit to a visitor. After a moment Harriet saw the rags move, and realized that what she’d mistaken for an extra rag was actually a human head. She turned sharply and walked back to the garage.
The roadbed overhead seemed to press down on her. The street wasn’t dirty, not in the sense of being filled with garbage, but the gray walks and walls, the absence of daylight, made her feel as though she were walking through grime. A dull buzzing seemed to fill her head. She spoke loudly, trying to assert herself against the pressure of the underground world.
“Can you show me exactly where this woman comes? Is it to the same place every day?”
Brian Cassidy went over near the crack. “I think it’s about here.”
He shone a flashlight around the area; Harriet saw bits of wax on the sidewalk, the residue of the woman’s little altar. The smell of urine made her blench. She pictured Mara on that filthy ground, singing her idiotic chant, and backed away in distaste.
“Is there something about this area that makes it attractive to Madeleine Carter? Does the proximity to the garage give her greater access to lucrative panhandling? Or is it a feeling of greater security?”
Brian Cassidy said it was probably a good spot to beg, but Nicolo, the garage attendant, who was hovering in the background said, “No, boss. She never beg for money or nothing. She sit here because this—this hole. She think hole special, blood of Mother of God come out this hole.”
Harriet hadn’t noticed the crack in the wall. She took Brian Cassidy’s flashlight to see it better. It was just a break in the concrete where rusty water oozed out.
“How do you know?” the hotel president asked Nicolo.
“When we taking people’s cars, or now, when boss telling us, wash this wall, she cry. She put fingers so”—he stuck his hand into the crack—“then into mouth, and tell everybody, here is blood of Mother of God.”
Harriet recoiled from the red on Nicolo’s hands. “That isn’t blood, is it?”
Brian Cassidy laughed. “No, ma’am. Probably rust. Must be some pipe in there leaking a bit.”
“Cement it over,” Harriet said. “The wall is your property: you don’t have to leave it open like that if that’s what’s attracting her. Break up the box she sleeps in. There are plenty of shelters in the city to give her a bed: you don’t have to. Keep someone from your security force down here to escort her away if she comes back. If she persists, call the city and have her arrested.”
“And you guarantee your sister won’t come back to create a bigger disturbance?” Gian Palmetto said.
Harriet’s shoulders sagged. “I can’t guarantee anything about Mara. But if she’s loitering here or creating a disturbance, you don’t need—the fact that she’s my sister—” She couldn’t get the words out and finally settled for saying, “She needs to learn that her actions have measurable consequences.”
“As long as she doesn’t bring the media in,” Palmetto said. “I can’t afford the negative publicity of looking like I’m harassing homeless people.”
“I thought you couldn’t afford the negative publicity of this woman worshiping the Virgin Mary down here. Your choices are somewhat limited. Cover up this crack, since that’s the attraction that draws her, and make it unpleasant for her to come around. Or tolerate her sitting there with her candles, howling about the Mother of God.”
Gian Palmetto wanted something else, something magical, the woman wafted away by Harriet’s chanting sections of the Illinois Criminal Code that would bring the gods of justice to life here on Underground Wacker. He spent twenty minutes trying to argue her into some other suggestions. In the cab going home she phoned the firm’s word processing center to dictate a report, along with her billable hours for the Pleiades time sheet. In her irritation she charged Palmetto for the seven minutes she’d spent watching the tourist boat.