Sara Paretsky - V.I. Warshawski 10 (2 page)

“We can’t do that, Michael!” Agnes snapped. “That’s
Max’s dinner party for Carl and you.”

Michael played cello with the Cellini Chamber
Ensemble, the London group started back in the forties by Max and Lotty’s
friend Carl Tisov. The Cellini was in Chicago to kick off their biannual
international tour. Michael was also scheduled to play some concerts with the
Chicago Symphony.

Agnes gave Calia a quick hug. “Victoria, thank you a
million times. Please, though, no television. She only gets an hour a week and
I don’t think American shows are suitable for her.” She darted back into the
drawing room, where we could hear her furiously tossing cushions from the
couch. Calia grimaced and clutched my hand.

It was Max who actually got Calia into her jacket and
saw that her dog, her doll, and her “favoritest story” were in her day pack.
“So much chaos,” he grunted. “You’d think they were trying to launch the space
shuttle, wouldn’t you. Lotty tells me you have an evening appointment on the
South Side. Perhaps you could meet me in the Pleiades lobby at four-thirty. I
should be able to finish up by then so I can collect this whirling dervish from
you. If you have a crisis, my secretary will be able to reach me. Victoria, we
are grateful.” He walked outside with us, kissing Calia lightly on the head and
me on the hand.

“I hope your panel isn’t too painful an outing,” I
said.

He smiled. “Lotty’s fears? She’s allergic to the past.
I don’t like wallowing in it, but I think it can be healthy for people to
understand it.”

I strapped Calia into the backseat of the Mustang. The
Birnbaum Foundation, which often underwrites communications issues, had decided
to hold a conference on “Christians and Jews: a New Millennium, a New
Dialogue.” They came up with the program after Southern Baptists announced
plans to send a hundred thousand missionaries to Chicago this past summer to
convert the Jews. The Baptist drive fizzled out; only about a thousand stalwart
evangelizers showed up. It cost the Baptists something in cancelation fees at
the hotels, too, but by then the planning for the Birnbaum conference was well
under way.

Max was taking part in the bank-account panel, which
infuriated Lotty: he was going to describe his postwar experiences in trying to
track down his relatives and their assets. Lotty said he was going to expose
his misery for the world at large to stare at. She said it only reinforced a
stereotype of Jews as victims. Besides, she would add, dwelling on missing
assets only gave people fuel for the second popular stereotype, that all Jews
cared about was money. To which Max invariably replied, Who cares about money
here, really? The Jews? Or the Swiss who refuse to return it to the people who
earned it and deposited it? And the fight went on from there. It had been an
exhausting summer, being around them.

In the seat behind me, Calia was chattering happily.
The private eye as baby-sitter: it wasn’t the first image you got from pulp
fiction. I don’t think Race Williams or Philip Marlowe ever did baby-sitting,
but by the end of the morning I decided that was because they were too weak to
take on a five-year-old.

I started at the zoo, thinking trudging around for an
hour would make Calia eager to rest while I did some work in my office, but
that proved to be an optimism born of ignorance. She colored for ten minutes,
needed to go to the bathroom, wanted to call Grandpapa, thought we should play
tag in the hall that runs the length of the warehouse where I lease space, was
“terrifically” hungry despite the sandwiches we’d eaten at the zoo, and finally
jammed one of my picklocks into the back of the photocopier.

At that point I gave up and took her to my apartment,
where the dogs and my downstairs neighbor gave me a merciful respite. Mr. Contreras,
a retired machinist, was delighted to let her ride horseback on him in the
garden. The dogs joined in. I left them to it while I went up to the third
floor to make some calls. I sat at the kitchen table with the back door open so
I could keep an ear cocked for when Mr. Contreras’s patience waned, but I did
manage to get an hour of work in. After that Calia consented to sit in my
living room with Peppy and Mitch while I read her “favoritest” story,
The
Faithful Dog and the Princess.

“I have a dog, too, Aunt Vicory,” she announced,
pulling a blue stuffed one from her day pack. “His name is Ninshubur, like in
the book. See, it says,
Ninshubur means ‘faithful friend’ in the language of
the princess’s people
.”

“Vicory” was the closest Calia could get to Victoria
when we met almost three years ago. We’d both been stuck with it ever since.

Calia couldn’t read yet, but she knew the story by
heart, chanting “For far rather would I die than lose my liberty” when the
princess flung herself into a waterfall to escape an evil enchantress. “Then
Ninshubur, the faithful hound, leapt from rock to rock, heedless of any
danger.” He jumped into the river and carried the princess to safety.

Calia pushed her blue plush dog deep into the book,
then threw him on the floor to demonstrate his leap into the waterfall. Peppy,
well-bred golden retriever that she was, sat on the alert, waiting for a
command to fetch, but her son immediately bounded after the toy. Calia
screamed, running after Mitch. Both dogs began to bark. By the time I rescued
Ninshubur, all of us were on the brink of tears. “I hate Mitch, he is a bad
dog, I am most annoyed at his behavior,” Calia announced.

I was thankful to see that it was three-thirty.
Despite Agnes’s prohibition, I plunked Calia in front of the television while I
went down the hall to shower and change. Even in the era of casual dress, new
clients respond better to professionalism: I put on a sage rayon suit with a
rose silk sweater.

When I got back to the living room, Calia was lying
with her head on Mitch’s back, blue Ninshubur between his paws. She bitterly
resisted restoring Mitch and Peppy to Mr. Contreras.

“Mitch will miss me, he will cry,” she wailed, so
tired herself that nothing made sense to her.

“Tell you what, baby: we’ll get Mitch to give
Ninshubur one of his dog tags. That way Ninshubur will remember Mitch when he
can’t see him.” I went into my storage closet, where I found one of the small
collars we’d used when Mitch had been a puppy. Calia stopped crying long enough
to help buckle it in place around Ninshubur. I attached a set of Peppy’s old
tags, which looked absurdly big on the small blue neck but brought Calia
enormous satisfaction.

I stuffed her day pack and Ninshubur into my own
briefcase and scooped her up to carry her to my car. “I’m not a baby, I don’t
get carried,” she sobbed, clinging to me. In the car she fell asleep almost at
once.

My plan had been to leave my car with the Pleiades
Hotel valet for fifteen minutes while I took Calia in to find Max, but when I
pulled off Lake Shore Drive at Wacker, I saw this wasn’t going to be possible.
A major crowd was blocking the entrance to the Pleiades driveway. I craned my
head, trying to see. A demonstration, apparently, with pickets and bullhorns.
Television crews added to the chaos. Cops were furiously whistling cars away,
but the traffic was so snarled I had to sit for some minutes in mounting
frustration, wondering where I would find Max and what to do with Calia,
heavily asleep behind me.

I pulled my cell phone out of my briefcase, but the
battery was dead. And I couldn’t find the in-car charger. Of course not: I’d
left it in Morrell’s car when he and I went to the country for a day last week.
I pounded the steering wheel in useless frustration.

As I sat fuming, I watched the picketers, who belonged
to conflicting causes. One group, all white, was carrying signs demanding
passage of the Illinois Holocaust Asset Recovery Act. “No deals with thieves,”
they were chanting, and “Banks, insurers, where is our money?”

The man with the bullhorn was Joseph Posner. He’d been
on the news so many times lately I could have picked him out in a bigger crowd
than this. He was dressed in the long coat and bowler hat of the
ultra-Orthodox. The son of a Holocaust survivor, he had become ostentatiously
religious in a way that made Lotty grind her teeth. He could be seen picketing
everything from X-rated movies, with the support of Christian fundamentalists,
to Jewish-owned stores like Neiman Marcus that were open on Saturday. His
followers, who seemed to be a cross between a yeshiva and the Jewish Defense
League, accompanied him everywhere. They called themselves the Maccabees and
seemed to think their protests should be modeled on the original Maccabees’
military prowess. Like a growing number of fanatics in America, they were proud
of their arrest records.

Posner’s most recent cause was an effort to get
Illinois to pass the Illinois Holocaust Asset Recovery Act. The IHARA,
suggested by legislation in Florida and California, would bar insurance companies
from doing business in the state unless they proved that they weren’t sitting
on any life or property claims from Holocaust victims. It also had clauses
dealing with banks and with firms that benefited from use of forced labor
during the Second World War. Posner had been able to generate enough publicity
that the bill was being debated in committee.

The second group outside the Pleiades, mostly black,
was carrying signs with a large red slash through
Pass the IHARA
. NO
DEALS WITH SLAVE OWNERS and ECONOMIC JUSTICE FOR ALL, their signs proclaimed.
The guy leading this group was also easy to recognize: Alderman Louis “Bull”
Durham. Durham had been looking for a long time for a cause that would turn him
into a high-profile opponent to the mayor, but opposition to the IHARA didn’t
strike me as a citywide issue.

If Posner had his Maccabees, Durham had his own
militant followers. He’d set up Empower Youth Energy teams, first in his own
ward and then around town, as a way of getting young men off the streets and
into job-training programs. But some of the EYE teams, as they were called, had
a shadier side. There were whispers on the street of extortion and beatings for
store owners who didn’t contribute to the alderman’s political campaigns. And
Durham himself always had his own group of EYE-team bodyguards, who surrounded
him in their signature navy blazers whenever he appeared in public. If the
Maccabees and the EYE team were going head to head, I was glad I was a private
detective trying to make my way through traffic, not one of the policemen
hoping to keep them apart.

The traffic finally inched me past the hotel entrance.
I turned east onto Randolph Street, where it perches over Grant Park. All the
meters there were taken, but I figured the cops were too busy at the Pleiades
to spare time for ticketing.

I locked my briefcase in the trunk and pulled Calia
from the backseat. She woke briefly, then slumped against my shoulder. She
wasn’t going to manage the walk to the hotel. I gritted my teeth. Making the
best load I could of her forty-pound deadweight, I staggered down the stairs
leading to the lower level of Columbus Drive, where the hotel’s service
entrance lay. It was already almost five: I hoped I’d find Max without too much
trouble.

As I’d hoped, no one was blocking the lower entrance.
I walked past the attendants with Calia and rode the elevator up to the lobby
level. The crowd here was as thick as the mob outside, if quieter. Hotel guests
and Birnbaum conference participants were wedged around the doors, anxiously
wondering what was going on and what to do about it.

I was despairing of finding Max in this mob when I
spotted a face I knew: Al Judson, the Pleiades security chief, was near the
revolving doors, talking on a two-way radio.

I elbowed my way to him. “What’s up, Al?”

Judson was a small black man, unobtrusive in crowds,
an ex-cop who’d learned how to keep an eye on volatile groups from patrolling
Grant Park with my dad forty years ago. When he saw me he gave a smile of
genuine pleasure. “Vic! Which side of the door are you here for?”

I laughed, but with some embarrassment: my dad and I
had argued about my joining antiwar protesters in Grant Park when he was
assigned to riot control duty. I’d been a teenager with a dying mother and
emotions so tangled I hadn’t known what I wanted. So I’d run wild with the
Yippies for a night.

“I need to find this small person’s grandfather.
Should I take to the streets instead?”

“Then you’d have to choose between Durham and Posner.”

“I know about Posner’s crusade on the life-insurance
payments, but what’s Durham’s?”

Judson hunched a shoulder. “He wants the state to make
it illegal for a company to do business here if they profited from slavery in
the U.S. Unless they pay restitution to the descendants of slaves, that is. So
he says, Don’t pass the IHARA unless you add that clause to it.”

I gave a little whistle of respect: the Chicago City
Council had passed a resolution demanding reparations for descendants of
slaves. Resolutions are a nice gesture—nods to constituencies without costing
businesses anything. The mayor might be in an awkward spot if he fought Durham
publicly over turning the resolution into a law with teeth in it.

It was an interesting political problem, but not as
immediate a one for me as Calia, who was making my arms feel as though they
were on fire. One of Judson’s subordinates was hovering, ready to snatch his
attention. I quickly explained my need to find Max. Judson spoke into his lapel
radio. Within a few minutes, a young woman from hotel security appeared with
Max, who took Calia from me. She stirred and began to cry. He and I had time
for a few flustered words, about his panel, the melee outside, Calia’s day,
before I left him the unenviable task of soothing Calia and getting her to his
car.