The Holy Terror (24 page)

“They just don’t see it,” The American Dream said. “The world is in a state of constant change. My uniform will be my shroud as the next generation builds from my bones.”

“Cool down, Evan. Let me finish.”

“Sure, Reve. Sorry.” He came short of hanging his head.

“Slappy also told me that Vic came up with the same ideas you had on decoys.”

“Victor is back downtown?”

‘“No, this was a few days ago or something. Slappy said that Mike was still out of it on Christmas morning.”

“You know,” The American Dream said, looking off into space for a moment. “I could get in touch with Ben Murdy. He has friends with polio. He’ll know where we can pick up some used chairs.”

“Think Vic will go along?”

“We both had the same idea, right?”

“Yea.” Reve never gave any thought that Shustak was talking about the two men going out on decoy without telling the police. She was more excited about what she told him next.

“Listen, this is what I found at the library.” She beamed as she pulled a sheaf of photocopies out of her bag. “Check this out. It’s from
LIFE
magazine, the week after.”

The American Dream looked down at the Dec. 15, 1958 issue of the tabloid magazine. A black and white photograph dominated the page. A fireman cradling a boy in his arms.

The boy could have been alive or dead. His hair was almost completely burned away. The fireman looked like a medic in a war, his face twisted in pain.

The caption read: His face twisted in grief, Fireman Thomas Schmidt, himself the father of two, carries Francis Haid, age 9, from the still-burning fire.

Francis Haid.

CHICAGO SCHOOL FIRE TAKES 98 LIVES

ANGUISH THE NATION SHARES

Francis Haid.

The American Dream hurriedly told Reve, like a stoolie blurting out a confession before the brass knuckles are swung, about what he had seen on Christmas Eve. The man at the Tooker Place apartment, the exchanged glances, the conversation with the newswoman.

“I’ve seen his face around State Street, too.” He added.

Reve would remember later how she was thinking things were going too fast when Rizzi and Morisette came through the front doors.

“Figured we’d see one of you here,” Rizzi did the talking. “We got a call from D.D. Latent prints on that wheelchair out by the Opera House.”

“Matched through Army records,” Morisette finished. “Reve, Evan. The prints matched those of Michael Surles.”

* * *

They all felt the dead space in their bones. Twenty minutes had passed when Victor Tremulis stormed through the doors. Mike Surfer’s name was on every radio newsbreak by now.

“...can’t believe.. .wouldn’t KNOW THE MAN WASN’T AROUND FOR CHRIST SAKES!” Shouting like a psycho on a bank heist.

“Vic,” Reve ran up to touch his shoulders. “No one noticed he was gone. Everybody here was thinking he was in his room, like he had been for two weeks. Didn’t answer the door when he was in there.”

“Had been.”

“What?”

“Had been for two weeks.” Tremulis backed away from her. “Reve, Mike Surfer’s dead. The Painkiller got him.”

Reve winced.

No one talked. No one shot pool. Etch and Szasz and Karl sat on the couch like those three monkeys that saw, heard, and spoke no evil. Colin Nutman wiped imaginary dust from the front desk.

* * *

The three of them sat in Loudon’s Dog Days, drinking large Cokes. Tremulis had just told the others that, since there was no body, maybe Mike Surfer wasn’t dead.

“We talked to Morisette,” Reve said. “Said as far as he knew from the preliminaries in Forensics, none of that acid compound was found.” He pulled the dog-eared C.A.P. report from his pocket after Tremulis gave him a questioning look.

“What…what if Mike just wanted to be left alone and went off by himself?” Reve knew there was no chance of that.

“He wasn’t going to crawl, that’s for sure.” A teenager behind him was playing a Walkman too loud and he wanted to tell her to turn the fucking thing down because he’d never have the satisfaction of seeing her go deaf at an early age.

“Mike’s dead, Reve.” The American Dream said. “We know it and he knows it.”

Tremulis wanted to ask him if, when he said he, did he mean the Painkiller, or Mike Surfer.

Reve was thinking that Evan had meant that God knew that Mike Surfer was dead.

They were both right...

Father Dennis finished reciting his breviary and walked out to the pulpit. None of the other Franciscans spoke to him much these days, not even the newest of the flock, Father Gary. Even Gary—ah! his innocence, like a freshman in college, eager to believe chapter-for-worse that Moby Dick and The Scarlet Letter were the two finest pieces of literature written past, present, and future.

They all knew his heart wasn’t in it anymore. His mannerisms, his comparisons, well, may God help him. No exclamation point, just a half-hearted attempt at a period. His breviary lacked soul.

And the silence disturbed him. Silence in the pews, because people were staying off the streets. The people who needed the church for shelter, that is. Father Dennis fully expected each winter’s headlines to be brimming—sometimes sensational, most times as filler—with items about frozen carcasses, vagrants who allowed alcohol to thin their blood a bit too much. Vagrants who then found themselves dead, with the police finding them propped up like bookends on Grant Park benches. He also thought about bag ladies at St. Anthony’s, praying that only half their blackened fingers need be amputated.

Now that entire mess was overshadowed by a greater evil, one he felt kin to. Who didn’t want to end suffering in this profession? What had he become? Pray that their suffering was quick.

Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.

He looked at the upcoming January First prayer.

EPIPHANY

OPENING PRAYER

Let us pray

(that we will be guided by the light of faith)

Father,

you revealed your Son to the nations

by the guidance of a star.

ALTERNATIVE OPENING PRAYER

Let us pray

(grateful for the glory revealed today through God made man)

Father Dennis wished he could weep.

* * *

Nick Desmond was sitting at the door of Murdy’s, his tired face washed in holiday colors, the front window being lighted with bulbs that were mostly the color of chili peppers. The bartender’s eyes were pinned by the off-red light. Still, it was the most festive atmosphere on the entire block, the entire neighborhood. Maybe things were different on the Gold Coast and thirty stories upward, but this was North Wabash, and the temperature outside was ball-shriveling. The entire month there had been little snow for what little sun there was to reflect heat off of. Maybe, with the Seeberg juke playing the same lonely drunks’ lonely songs again and again, maybe Nick Desmond’s heart was shriveled up as well.

Unlike owner Ben’s sister bar, M.C.’s, up near Diversey Parkway, Murdy’s was a straight bar that catered to the encyclopedia salesmen or conventioneers that often invaded the Allerton or the Delaware Towers.

Dion was singing if anybody here had seen his old friend John when the three of them came in, Tremulis holding the door open for Reve and looking like a happy puppy. Reve was wearing cream-colored leg warmers over her jeans, yet there were no whistles from the tables, no turned heads at the bar. One guy in a polyester suit did try bobbing for cheese curls, though. It was that kind of night.

Dion, evidently out of touch for quite some time now, asked if anybody here had seen his old friend Bobby. Tremulis wondered what pair of eyes in the Christmas-colored shadows had played the song. The whole time they talked to Desmond, with Shustak strangely silent through it all, he kept thinking about how large the bartender’s nose was. Maybe he did coke.

Seems Murdy was out of town, the diminutive man had left for sunny L.A. to test shoot a Jay Tarses pilot. Dabney Coleman running a collection agency in Miami, with Murdy as a process server. When Desmond returned to the bar to serve a customer and Shustak excused himself to go to the bathroom, it was then that Tremulis had his only real talk with Reve Towne for the duration of their relationship.

Chuck Berry lamented for Nadine. A beer glass overturned to a smattering of applause.

“There but for the grace...” Reve said. “That’s why Evan is so quiet. He hates drunks. And junkies. The only pain they’ll ever feel, physically, is from withdrawal.”

“He makes me feel guilty,” Tremulis said.

“Why?”

“Reve, I just feel that I can’t possibly live up to what he is. And I can’t help but blame myself, I know that sounds stupid, will sound stupid, I mean, that Mike is gone, and, like how I have this shitty attitude sometimes—”

“Lot of people hold things in all the time, Vic.” Reve’s brow was creased. “I do. You’re in the majority.” She touched his hands then. Her flesh weighed down upon him like concrete. The girl with the concrete hands.

“Wish my folks would understand that,” he snorted. “Yea, that’s me, living at home”.

They both stopped talking as their companion returned. Shustak sat down, fumbled in his coat pocket for a pill capsule and rolled it into his mouth on his tongue. Trernulis thought of a kid from when he was in high school caught smoking a doobie in the guy’s john, and how he was able to conceal the fact. Shustak informed them that he didn’t want to chance dropping the pill on the dirty tiles of the bathroom.

“Tylenol,” he explained further.

There was an awkward silence for a moment. Tremulis thought of how his mother dry-swallowed three Excedrins first thing every morning. For the caffeine kick, ever since he was a kid. Then bitch at him after she took another three during
Search For Tomorrow
, or the weekend installment of
Lamp Unto My Feet
. Then he thought of how little he knew of Reve, how little she knew of him.

They would have to remain strangers, run the road of their days together in parallel lanes, as would the killer to the girl next door. To collide would be paralytic. What would she think, what could she think, if he described her imaginary deformities. Neck tumors to be lapped at when a more skillful suitor would settle for a hickey.

What would she think of the self-mutilations that gave him succor in the cold nights?

Gene Vincent sang on about the man who shot Liberty Valance, and that lawman, the bravest of them all, was evidently in the bar.

Someone cheered at the chorus, at any rate.

Tremulis noticed that Shustak’s eyes looked jellied as he slapped his fingers against his pant leg. The cold stiffened his joints as well. Looking at Reve—What the hell was he doing still here in Chicago? Living like the fugitive. In a Quinn-Martin production. Roll the commercial about the laxative.

Or let Victor Tremulis AKA Vic Tremble just keep on running.

Surely Reve saw Shustak’s vacant stare. Understood the concentration behind it, as the man dug with spastic care into his pocket for that elusive other Tylenol. Tremulis read a sign for a comedy team that called themselves Mitch Flotsam & Max Jetsam, playing The Funny Firm that same night, the 29th of December. Behind the bar, he saw something that looked like a revolving ferris wheel. Wilted hot dogs hung from metal prongs like bloated condoms. He was vaguely aware that Reve had asked him something.

“—can’t your family accept your problems.” He missed the first part and couldn’t tell if she had asked a question or made a statement.

Shustak was making a sucking sound as he dry-swallowed his bitter pill and why didn’t he just get something to drink? Because it was better discipline. Like masturbating with a gym sock on was better discipline. Or nicking his eyelids with a razor blade. He had done that the night of his tenth high school reunion. “They know I have spasms,” he said, diving in and hoping it made sense. “They just try to ignore them, thinking that I could do that—put them out of my mind—if it was what I truly wanted.”

The grin of pain was great as he said this, and Reve would remember that Cheshire cat grin for as long as she lived, especially after what happened later. It was a smile you got by merely thinking of where it hurt, the sensation, like how she flinched at a girl getting her breasts kneaded in a horror film whose ending was apparent even as the opening credits rolled.

Thirtysomething and living at home with his parents because he felt himself a prisoner of his own body. They both thought of this simultaneously, and both with a different degree of conviction to their emotion.

Reve saw so much in the men she’d met this past year and a half. Trying not to smile, because it would certainly be misconstrued, Reve thought of an old song by Mike Douglas, the talk show host, of all people. “The Men In My Little Girl’s Life.”

Dad, there’s a boy outside, his name is Rod.

He wants to play in our backyard. Can he, Daddy?

Shustak, saner than most, but driven by the pain to the fringe. Tremulis’s own guilt at not living up to the pain threshold others have expected of him. Mike Surfer, as cyclothymic as the rest. Dead or alive, how did the human race get to the point where they could be so intimate and yet distant in the same breath? Everyone at the Marclinn had accepted Mike’s disappearance like a gaggle of clinicians at Our Lady of Lost Causes.