The building was secluded, good for privacy, good, too, for thieves, but all the right security devices were in place: cameras, laser gates, manual locks to override the electronic ones. Very sensible if Zukos’s Japanese art collection was valuable.
“Yes? What do you want?”
A man was calling down from the balcony. I squinted at him but couldn’t make out his face against the sun.
“I’m V. I. Warshawski. Are you Rafael Zukos? Melba Minsky suggested I talk to you.”
“Rafe!” the man called, turning away.
A few minutes went by. I practiced my scales: I was terribly breathy still, but getting firmer through the diaphragm.
A man appeared around the corner of the building. He was short, stocky, balding, wearing a kind of Japanese jacket over khaki pants.
“I’m Rafe Zukos. Ken didn’t get your name.”
“V. I. Warshawski. Melba Minsky suggested I talk to you.”
“Melba,” he repeated softly. “I haven’t heard from her in years, didn’t know she was still alive. Harold?”
“Frail but mobile,” I said. “I don’t really know them—we met this morning in South Chicago.”
“So they stayed south when the rest of us fled to a new reservation. They were braver than their rabbi.”
“Your father was a coward, you think?” I asked.
“Jews stayed in Minsk and Slonim during pogroms, but a black family buying a house next door? You’d think a whole regiment of Cossacks was sweeping through the neighborhood. Rabbi Zukos wasn’t very brave, but then, neither was I. Why did Melba send you to me?”
I gave him my story, the truth. Not the whole truth, not Frank’s and my history, but Annie’s murder, my cousin, trying to find out what happened at the criminal courts all those years ago.
“Melba thought you might know why Mr. Mandel assigned the case to Joel,” I finished. “She thought Joel might have talked to you about the trial.”
Rafe stepped back a few paces. “She did? She was wrong. I don’t know what either of you hoped to gain by her sending you here.”
Ken, the man who’d called down to me from the balcony. Joel. Rafe’s belief he’d been a coward. These old stories, these old dramas, they wore me out. I sat on a boulder and spoke tonelessly.
“You and Joel were lovers, or at least the people at your dad’s synagogue thought you were. You didn’t come out directly to your father, so you think you were a coward.”
“How do you know?” Rafe said fiercely.
“It’s what I do for a living, Mr. Zukos, put fragments of stories together into a narrative that makes sense. I’m not always right, but I need a narrative to work with. Lies, secrets and silence. Everyone’s clutching them to their chests as if there were some value in being tightly bound and fearful.”
“Don’t preach to me. You don’t know what it was like growing up down there. The hypocrisy, the fear, not knowing who was part of what clique, who might beat you up after school because you were Jewish, or black, or a nerd who liked Japanese art.”
I looked up. “I grew up near Ninetieth and Commercial, Mr. Zukos. You can’t tell me much I don’t know about being a child down there. My middle name is Iphigenia. Kids used to dance around me shrieking ‘Iffy Genius’ at me because my mother had college ambitions for me.”
“It’s not like being beaten up because the other boys think you’re a pansy or a sissy,” he said, his voice low, shaking with passion.
“Maybe not. I’m afraid my reaction was to do as much damage as possible as fast as possible to anyone mocking me, instead of following my mother’s advice, which was to hold my head high and pretend it wasn’t happening. And she had her share of violent bullying in Mussolini’s Italy, so believe me, everyone has a hard story buried in them. Right now, today, I don’t care about your private life, what you did with Joel, or didn’t do. You seem to have made a good life for yourself.” I waved an arm at his building. “Joel’s a sad case; he lives inside a bottle, not a private art gallery.”
“Joel.” Zukos’s lips tightened in a bitter line. “Joel didn’t know who he was or what he wanted. Maybe he turned to me because he was unsure and was testing the water, although I thought he was trying to shock his father and mother: he had to be the role model for African-Americans, so that the people in the congregation who muttered against Eunice wouldn’t have any grounds for saying they’d been right all along, black people were rude or dirty or criminals. He had to be a model Jew in the black world so the goyim couldn’t say Jews were cheats or obsessed with money.”
“Heavy load.”
“I never knew what Joel wanted and he couldn’t figure it out, either. I don’t know what Joel looks like today, but back then he was pudgy, flabby. He was bright but the kids today would call him a geek. Girls didn’t respond to him. The only reason I did—all those years ago—I needed someone. And I hated being the rabbi’s model son; I could relate to Joel hating having to live up to Ira Previn’s halo.”
“He couldn’t do what you did,” I said. “Break away from the South Side, I mean—he went to Mandel & McClelland out of law school and he’s still down there, working for his father. But why did he get stuck with Stella Guzzo’s defense?”
A wind was starting to rise off the lake. Rafe pulled his silk jacket across his bare chest. “Joel thought Sol made him defend Stella as a punishment for being queer, although I thought it was because Joel had a crush on Annie and Sol wanted her to himself.”
That startled me so much I lost my balance on the boulder and slid onto the sidewalk. “Annie was having sex with Sol Mandel?”
Zukos hunched a shoulder. “I don’t know. Joel thought she was. Or he thought Mandel was a predator trying to seduce her.”
“I thought your family had moved to the North Shore years before Annie was murdered. He talked to you during the trial?” I picked myself up from the sidewalk and dusted the seat of my jeans.
“Joel and I stayed in touch. For a while. Force of habit.” Rafe was speaking slowly, as if the words were being squeezed from his diaphragm. “We were in the same bar mitzvah class, our parents sent us out of the neighborhood to the U of C lab school, we went off to Swarthmore together. I was doing an MFA in curatorship at the Art Institute when Joel was in law school. We’d meet for dinner and he’d whine how much he hated the law.”
The wind was getting stronger. Clouds blew in, like a conjuror’s trick: in an instant, the sky, which had been cornflower blue over Ira Previn’s office, turned gray.
“Rafe!” Ken was leaning over the side of the balcony again. “Are you coming in or do you want me to bring down a pullover?”
Rafe looked at the sky, at me shivering—the wind was coming straight in across the water. “Come in and see the art,” he offered unexpectedly.
BRUSH WORK
I followed him around the lake side of the building to the entrance, which opened into a living area that seemed part museum, a gold kimono dominating it from one wall, a scroll of geese taking flight on another, and in between stands holding lacquer or pottery.
The furniture was severely modern, which seemed to suit the art. I recognized an Eames chair, and supposed that the sofa, thin tan leather with chrome tube arms and legs, was also designer work. How had a rabbi’s son come by the money for this?
As if he’d read my thoughts, Rafe said, “Ken’s an artist—you’ll see his work upstairs. I was a curator and a collector and a wannabe—it was hard to admit that my only talent lay in admiring it in others. Anyway, I was working at the Field Museum, they were doing a special exhibit on the history of calligraphy as art, and two of Ken’s pieces were included. And then I had an incredible piece of luck: I recognized a raku pottery cup at a garage sale. Seventeenth-century work, very rare,” he explained, seeing my blank expression. “I bought it for a dollar and sold it for—let’s just say enough to buy this building and start collecting and selling.”