Lotty was protecting me, I could rest, I could relax and be safe. I drifted off to sleep, riding on a field of violets. A saber-toothed tiger prowled through the violets. I crouched low, but it smelled me. My flesh was burned. I smelled like steak on Mr. Contreras’s grill. I tried to scream, but my throat was swollen, and no sound came out.
I struggled back to consciousness and lay panting in the dark. I felt my hands. They were wrapped in gauze, and the pressure was painful because they were still swollen. I tentatively felt my blistered eyelids. They, too, were padded in gauze.
A nurse came in and asked me to rate my pain on a scale of one to ten. “I’ve hurt worse, I think,” I whispered. “Maybe a nine. Is it day or night?”
“It’s afternoon. You’ve slept for five hours, and I can give you some more pain medication now.”
“How is the nun? How is Sister Frankie?”
I could feel her moving near me. “I don’t know. I just came on shift. The doctor will tell be able to tell you.”
“Dr. Herschel?” I asked. But I was already drifting back to the fractured lines and colors of morphic sleep.
A baseball sat on the kitchen table, rocking back and forth from a passing freight train that shook the house. It was Christmas, and Papà had gone to the ballpark without telling me. He and Mama and a strange man had been arguing in the middle of the night, their loud voices waking me up.
“I can’t do it!” Papà shouted.
And then Mama heard me on the stairs and called to me in Italian to go back to bed. The men’s voices dropped to whispers, until the man shouted, “I’m tired of you preaching to me, Warshawski! You’re not the cardinal, let alone a saint, so get off your plastic crucifix.”
The front door slammed, and the baseball started to roll off the table. It was a cannonball now and rolling toward my head, its fuse blowing sparks, and I woke again to darkness, drenched in sweat. I fumbled on the nightstand for water. There was a pitcher and a cup, and as I poured I spilled water on myself, but that felt good.
Someone came in with a cup of broth. It was strangely hard to find my mouth with my eyes bandaged, as if loss of sight meant loss of balance, loss of feeling. A nurse arrived to take my temperature and ask me my pain level.
“I’m crappy,” I rasped, “but no more morphine. I can’t take the dreams.”
I wanted to wash my hair, but that was out of the question until the bandages came off. The nurse sent in someone to sponge me off, and I dozed fitfully until Lotty arrived.
“The police want to question you, Victoria. I see you’ve discontinued your morphine. How much pain are you in?”
“Enough to make me know I was in a fire, but not so much I want to scream about it. How is Sister Frankie?”
Lotty put a hand on my shoulder. “That’s why they want to talk you, Vic. She didn’t make it.”
“No!” I whispered. “No!”
Sister Frankie had marched with Ella Baker at Selma. She stood with King in Marquette Park. She sat with men on death row. She housed Guatemalan asylum seekers and testified for immigrants. No harm came to her until she talked to me.
Lotty offered me Vicodin or Percocet to help me through the interview, but I welcomed the pain in my arms and the burning in my eyes where my useless tears leaked out. By some fluke, I was alive when I should also be dead. V. I. Warshawski, death dealer. The least that should happen was that I feel a little pain.
I could sense bodies filling the room. Two men from Bomb and Arson identified themselves, but I could tell there were others, and I demanded to know who was with them. There was a shuffling of feet and muttering, and then they went around the room, giving their names.
I didn’t recognize any of them: a man and a woman from the Office of Emergency Management, our local branch of Homeland Security, tagged along; a field agent from the FBI.
Lotty had cranked up the bed so that I was more or less sitting. I had my arms in front of me on the sheet. The IV tube going up to the bag that was giving me antibiotics and fluids swung against my shoulder. My little plastic friend and Lotty: my team against the police, the Bureau, and Homeland Security.
The Bomb and Arson men announced that they were taping the session. One of them asked if I was ready to make a statement.
“I’m ready to answer questions but not to make a formal statement, not until I can see well enough to read any document you ask me to sign.”
One of the group, I think the man from OEM, was wearing a kind of musky aftershave that made me feel sick to my stomach. The CPD’s Bomb and Arson team was leading the inquiry. It was one of them who had me state my name for the record.
“V. I. Warshawski.” As I spelled Warshawski, I remembered Petra’s a warrior in a rickshaw on a ski and had that horrible impulse to laugh that seizes us at moments of grief and fear.
“What were you doing at Sister Frances’s apartment?” a member of the Bomb team asked.
“We were meeting to discuss a forty-year-old murder.”
A murmur went through the room, and the woman from OEM asked whose murder.
“Harmony Newsome. Sister Frankie-Sister Frances-had been with Ms. Newsome when she died.”
“Why are you interested in this old murder… Vicki, is it?”
“Vicki, it isn’t,” I said. “You may call me Ms. Warshawski.”
There was a shifting and more muttering, and the temperature in the room went up a few degrees. Good. Why should I be the only one feeling burned?
“Why are you interested in this old murder?” the FBI’s Lyle Torgeson asked.
“I’m not… very.” I started to explain my search for Lamont Gadsden and suddenly felt so tired that I thought I might go to sleep midsentence. It seemed to me that I had been looking for Lamont Gadsden and Steve Sawyer my whole life.
“Why did you go to Sister Frances’s apartment?” Torgeson again.
“That was where she asked to meet me,” I said. “She wanted to talk to me. She said she’d been troubled for forty years by the verdict against Steve Sawyer.”
“And why was that?” said one of the detectives, truculent: We in the Chicago Police Department do not bring innocent people into court.
“I don’t know. We got three sentences out before the bombs fell.”
“What did she say?” Torgeson asked.
“She said Iowa was depressing.”
“We were warned that you think you’re funny,” the man from OEM said, “but this isn’t the time or place.”
“Do I look to you like someone in the throes of merriment?” I said. “I’m in pain, I’m in shock, and I would love to think you’ve got a really active crime scene unit going over every square inch of the Freedom Center and the sisters’ building. I’m also mildly curious about why the OEM and the FBI are here. Do you think a terrorist was after Sister Frankie?”
A sucking in of breath and another buzz around the interrogation circle. “Anytime someone starts throwing bombs around, we’re curious,” Torgeson finally said. “As a citizen, you have an obligation to help us in our investigation.”
“As a human being, I am deeply grieved that Sister Frankie died and that I couldn’t do anything to keep that from happening.”
“So tell us, as a human being, what Sister Frankie said.” Torgeson’s voice was heavy with sarcasm.
“Sister Frankie said Iowa was depressing. She’d just come back from trying to help the families of the people your buddies in INS scooped up and arrested for the crime of working in a meat-packing plant. She said it was… Oh, I get it.” I leaned back against the egg-carton hospital mattress. “Sister Frankie was helping people who were in this country illegally. That’s why you’re all here, panting like badly trained bloodhounds.”
Lotty’s fingers gripped my shoulder: Steady there, Vic. Keep your temper under control.
“Do you think her death is connected to her work in Iowa?” I said.