The Winter Family (21 page)

He left Burns then, ostensibly to return to Reiman’s saloon, but instead he headed back to the Michigan Avenue Hotel. Archie opened the door for him and ushered him into a small office behind the hotel desk. Noah waited inside along with a lawyer and a stenographer.

“Well?” Noah said. “What happened?”

Jan dutifully related the day’s events: the ceremony at the judge’s house, the funerals, the meeting with Corky, the courthouse, and the fighting.

“Widening State Street?” Noah cried out, looking over at the lawyer.

“Yes,” Jan said. “That is what he said.”

“Well,” Noah said. “I do believe that will allow us to identify the spy who advised the Democrats of your arrival.”

“Amazing,” the lawyer rumbled, as he carefully took notes.

“Go on then,” Noah said.

But that was all, except for the assorted acts of philanthropy, which interested Noah and the lawyer not at all.

“I should be going,” Jan said. “They will be expecting me at the saloon.”

“You can’t go back to Burns,” Noah said. “This won’t make the papers tomorrow morning, but I think this is enough to lay charges.”

“More than enough!” the lawyer said.

“And then they’ll be looking for an informant. Stay here. You’ve done well.”

“It was luck,” Jan said. “Only luck.”

To his surprise, Jan found that he regretted that he would not be returning to Reiman’s saloon. To hear the German language, to have proper beer and food, to be surrounded by honest workingmen, men who did not need to lie about who they were or what they had done, men who could trick themselves into being proud about what they did, even if they worked for a thief.

“There was some luck, but you did well,” Noah said. “I’m glad to see that at least some of my brother’s men can show a little discretion. I hardly dared hope that they’d have the sense to stay indoors until the election, but I’m a little shocked at the amount of trouble they’ve managed to stir up.”

This snapped Jan from his reverie.

“I am sorry, Mister Ross,” Jan said. “Quentin, he has very little patience.”

Noah smiled sourly. He motioned for the lawyer and the stenographer to leave, and they did, promising to return with a final version of Jan’s statement for him to review before it was notarized.

“You don’t have to tell me about Quentin’s failings,” Noah said as he checked his watch and packed up his bags. “He never changed, not really. I remember him as a boy, what a terror he was. Wetting the bed, torturing the cat, and lying, lying all the time, about trivial things, silly things, without any reason. And yes, always impatient. When he behaves well it only makes me nervous. I always find myself wondering what he’s really thinking about.”

Jan looked very uncomfortable.

“However,” Noah said. “We need only make it a few more days. What you’ve given us here will win us the election for sure.”

Jan furrowed his brow. “Forgive me,” he said. “But I am not sure you are correct.”

“Hmm?” Noah said.

“I was only with Mister Burns one day, but I do not believe the people who vote for him are concerned that he is corrupt.”

“He’s stealing from the city,” Noah said. “It’s their money. That money could be going to help them and make their lives better.”

“It could be, yes,” Jan said. “But they do not believe it would be. They do not believe that if the Republicans were in power, things would be any better.”

“Burns is a common thief,” Noah said. “He makes three dollars a session for serving in council but he lives in a house worth fifty thousand and he owns three saloons.”

“Of course,” Jan said. “It is obvious he is a thief, but he is generous with what he steals. To them, it’s better than the alternative.”

“We’ve run this city fairly since its inception. Chicago’s made hundreds of men into millionaires. This is the greatest city in the world. Burns is nothing but a leech, sucking the blood from this city. Don’t tell me that a day of watching him hand out nickels has turned you into a Democrat.”

Jan’s face went blank with astonishment, and when he spoke again his voice was high and loud.

“Don’t you call me that! Don’t you dare! No one knows what these men do more than me! The Democrats sold me into the Union Army when I had just stepped off the boat and could not speak English! If it wasn’t for those crooks I would never have—”

“I am sorry,” Noah said. “I did not think you would take it so ill to be called a Democrat.”

“You don’t understand!” Jan said. “You sent me to spy on Burns, but you should study instead the men who voted for him. If you don’t know them, you’ll never win this election.”

“Jan,” Noah said. “Thank you for your advice. But here are the facts: the man is a thief and if our institutions mean anything, our democratic institutions, including the courts and our free press, we need only make sure the voters are informed and then keep the election free of outside interference, and we will surely win.”

“Well said, my brother! Well said!”

Quentin had appeared in the doorway.

Quentin said, “I trust everything went well?”

“Quite,” Noah said. “If you can avoid doing anything dreadful for the next little while, this may work out after all.”

“Wonderful,” Quentin said. “Simply wonderful.”

Noah left, and Quentin disappeared upstairs, after congratulating Jan warmly again. Jan went to the dining room. He found Bill at the bar and sat down next to him for a drink. Archie poured them both stiff glasses of whiskey. Bill was so drunk he could only squint.

“I have been thinking about my uncle, Sarge,” he said. “About the days before all of this.”

Jan drank.

That night, well after midnight, Mickey Burns sat on a wooden crate on the rocky shore of Lake Michigan and admired all the dark water. It smelled better. Not good, precisely. But nothing like it used to in the old days. The stench of the water then had been like nothing on earth. Seemed like progress. Still, where was all that shit? Those hog parts and the human filth? Just washed the other way down the river, that’s all. The shit always had to go somewhere. It was nice for it to be somewhere else; there was no doubt about that. But it hadn’t vanished just because you didn’t see it. That was the truth most men didn’t like to think about.

The shore was deserted at this hour and so the footsteps of the approaching police officers were very loud. The man they were dragging cried out as he was hurled to the ground, but he fell silent quickly enough when Mickey Burns turned to face him.

“Mister Burns,” Archie said.

“Shut up, you black bastard,” Burns said, his Irish accent making the words sound like a song. “When I tell you it’s time to talk, we’ll talk. Until then, shut up.”

“Mister Burns,” Archie said, “I can explain. I was gonna see Mister McDonald tomorrow morning. I didn’t—”

Burns’s hand snapped forward and caught Archie’s testicles, and he squeezed and twisted. The air in Archie’s lungs exploded out in a noiseless burst and then he could not inhale. Burns’s eyes were vibrating, jumping rapidly back and forth. “I said shut up.”

He let go of Archie’s balls and Archie collapsed to the ground and began to whoop and weep.

Burns looked him over with a critical eye. Archie had been beaten pretty effectively, but nothing on the face or the hands or anywhere it would show. Good. Burns motioned to the towering cops and they took a few steps back. Once they were out of earshot, Burns looked back over the dark, choppy water.

“Luck,” Burns said. “You work hard, you struggle. Perhaps God gave you some talent, some brains, some nerve. But everything’s just luck, Archie my lad. The men who built this city believed it would be a great city, the greatest in America. And they were right. But do you know why they believed it would be great? Do you?”

Archie said nothing. Burns grinned.

“They said you were a clever lad,” Burns said. “You’re right. Keep your trap shut.”

The water lapped up against the rocky shore.

“They said this city would be great because of the waterways,” Burns continued. “The water. You see? Chicago was built here because it’s close to a portage between the Great Lakes and the Mississippi River watershed. A few little canals, and boats could travel from the Atlantic Ocean, down the St. Lawrence, through Buffalo and Detroit, and then Chicago, and finally all the way down to New Orleans. Steamships, do you see? Riverboats. My father came here to dig the canal in the thirties. But it wasn’t canals that made this city great at all. It was the railways.”

Burns laughed.

“You can’t predict the future,” he said. “The race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, nor bread to the wise, nor riches to men of understanding, nor favor to men of skill. Time and chance happeneth to them all.”

He slapped his knees and leaned back.

“Just look at me. I had a productive day, I thought, getting ready for the election, and then my man in the courthouse tells me that the Republicans are getting all set to put me under arrest. Next I hear the newspapers will soon be running lurid stories of how I allegedly stabbed a fellow alderman in a dispute over whose bribes we ought to be taking. As you can imagine, I went to bed a man concerned. But then I was awoken by the police, who had come to tell me that tonight a young lady had been cut up, a young lady who worked in an establishment that operates under what you might call my aegis. Now, I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, What kind of men would do such a thing? Cut up a lady? Well, no one knew who these men were. No one had ever seen these men until quite recently, when they started their late night depredations, which have gradually
escalated until this sad point. But they did know the man acting as their tour guide. Oh, yes, they most certainly did.”

Archie frantically gestured toward his mouth, but Burns only smiled and continued on.

“Poor old Archie. Archibald Patterson, isn’t it? Such a clever boy, they tell me. Doesn’t miss a trick, they say. And a brave one, too, distinguishing himself in the war. But what does it profit a man to be too brave and too clever for his station in life? In the end, not much.”

Burns’s friendly, dangerous eyes flicked back to the dark water.

“But what were we talking about? Luck? How quickly it can turn? No one could identify those men, who were so rough where they ought to have been gentle, but they could certainly describe them. Oh yes. Those big lunkhead brothers who called each other Charlie and Johnny. The little one with the big eyes. They described them very well. And it seems perhaps that my luck has turned. Just as yours might. Because, Archie my lad, you’re in need of some luck right now. It’s you that King Conor would normally hold responsible for this little contretemps. The world is full of bad men but he expects better from clever, brave boys like you, who know how this city works, who bring clientele to the establishments with which he, and therefore I, am affiliated. We expect you to act as a gatekeeper, and in this regard, you have let us down. I don’t normally concern myself with these matters. I’m not what you’d call a details man. But I daresay in ordinary circumstances King Conor would have cut your pecker off and left you here to feed the fish as a warning to every other clever boy out there. But you’re in luck, just as I am. That is, of course, if you are willing to assist me.”

Archie’s expression made it abundantly clear that he was at Burns’s service. Still, he did not speak.

“Now is the time for you to talk,” Burns said.

When Noah Ross arrived at Burns’s house the next morning the police and the reporter were already there. It was very cold and their exhalations were clearly visible, like little yellow ghosts in the lamplight.

“You look nervous,” Noah said.

Deputy Brown smiled. His face was red and hardened, like the shell of a boiled lobster. He had been a police officer in Chicago for seventeen years. The two officers with him were no more than boys. The newspaper reporter from the
Journal
was smoking a cigarette and his eyeglasses flashed opaque in the cold light.

“It’s my only job,” Brown said. “I’ve got a family to feed.”

“They know you’re a Republican,” Noah said. “If they win you’ll lose your job anyway.”

“Everyone takes care of their own in this city,” Brown said.

Noah walked up to the door and seized the brass knocker. Before he could let go the door opened inward, revealing Mickey Burns’s thirteen-year-old daughter, smiling at him.

“Are you looking for my father?” she said.

Noah nodded.

“He’s expecting you. There’s breakfast if you’d like it.”

The police officers and the reporter took their shoes off. Noah hesitated and then did the same. They walked over the soft carpet until they came into the dining room, where Mickey Burns, Honest Jim Plunkett, King Conor McDonald, and Burns’s lawyer were eating eggs and sausage.

“Noah Ross,” Burns said. “How’d you do?”

Deputy Brown stepped forward.

“Good morning, Mister Burns. I’ve come to tell you that you’re under arrest.”

“Warrant?” the lawyer asked, his tone friendly.

Deputy Brown took a folded paper out of his pocket and handed it over.

“Two hundred thousand dollars?” the lawyer exclaimed as he read the warrant.

“The man your client stabbed has died,” Noah said.

“Who’s the judge?” Burns asked, his mouth full.

“Robinson,” the lawyer replied, as his eyes flicked back and forth over the warrant.

Burns nodded. “Well, I’ve got me bail ready, so’s we can draw up the papers. Don’t think you’ll need to stick around, Ross. You’re time’s rather valuable, after all.”

“You think you’ve finished us, do you?” Honest Jim said to Noah.

“Now Mister Plunkett …,” the lawyer said.

“It’s all right,” Honest Jim said, but there was a dangerous glint in his eyes. “We’re just talking.”

“I think it will be rather difficult for you to win an election under the circumstances, yes,” Noah said.

“Well, that shows how much you know about politics, doesn’t it?” Honest Jim said. “Tweed won a seat in the state senate after he was arrested, and they had a lot more on him than you do on Mister Burns.”