I walked to the El stop, not bothering to look around, and rode the train into the Loop. I got off at Washington Street and walked through the underground tunnel into the basement of the Daley Center, where traffic court and a bunch of other civil courts sit. Since I had my gun on me, I couldn’t do the safest thing, go through security and watch who came in after me, so I followed the maze of corridors and came on the underground entrance to a trendy Loop restaurant.
The staff were just gathering for the day, the Hispanic stockmakers and cleaning crew. They looked at me narrowly but didn’t try to stop me. I went through the doors into the kitchen and found an exit that took me into a parking garage. I walked up the ramp and out onto the street and made my way back to the El, where I rode the red line north to Howard Street.
It was a long ride, and I could watch all the changing characters who got on and off. By the time we reached the Evanston border, I was reasonably confident that I was clear. I changed to the Evanston train and rode it three stops. No one was with me when I got off. No bicycles circled around me, no cars passed and then repassed me.
Morrell and I had broken up in Italy, but I still had the keys to his condo. And I knew where he had hung the spare key to his Honda Civic. I couldn’t afford to use the phone to call anyone I knew, but I could spend the night, drive the city, even change my underwear. When I let myself in, I found my favorite rose-stenciled bra still hanging in his bathroom. I thought I’d lost it in Italy.
40
THE SHOEMAKER’S TALE
MORRELL’S HONDA STARTED ON THE FIRST TRY, WHICH was a relief. I’d worried that the battery might have run down after sitting in the garage for three months.
Going to Morrell’s place had left me melancholy. Little traces of my life surfaced wherever I looked-a pot of my moisturizer in the bathroom; Sleeping Arrangements, which I’d read aloud to him when he was recuperating from his bullet wounds, next to the bed. When I put away the juice I’d bought, I found a container of Mr. Contreras’s homemade tomato sauce in the freezer.
Morrell and I had spent two years together. He had put me back together when I’d been tortured and left for dead on the Kennedy Expressway, I’d helped him when he’d been left for dead in Afghanistan. Maybe that was the only time we could really help each other, when we were near death. When we were near life, we couldn’t sustain the relationship.
The tomato sauce made me realize I needed to notify Mr. Contreras, as well as Lotty and Max, about where I’d vanished to. The easiest person to tell would be Max because I could slip into Beth Israel through a side door and get to his office. If anyone was tracking me, they’d be keeping an eye on Lotty’s clinic, on Damen Avenue, as well as her condo on Lake Shore Drive. Since Max lived in Evanston, if my friends wanted to reach me Max could slip a note under Morrell’s door on his way home.
It felt queer to be alone in an apartment and to know I couldn’t use the phone. It was like being in an isolation tank. I quickly wrote a note to Max, telling him where I was, how to reach me in this age of the Internet, and asking him to get word to Lotty and Mr. Contreras.
I picked Morrell’s car keys from the top dresser drawer in his bedroom. Morrell’s extreme tidiness, which had been a source of friction between us-or maybe it was my extreme messiness that bothered him-was useful when it came to finding anything in a hurry. In my apartment, a team of skilled searchers had torn the place apart without finding what they wanted.
As soon as I pulled out of Morrell’s garage, I felt nervous and exposed. Morrell had been out of my life all summer. I didn’t think anyone hunting me would know about him, but I could be wrong. When all this was over and I had found Petra safe and sound, I would have to invest in a GPS jammer. That would force anyone tracking me to follow me physically instead of doing it the lazy electronic way.
Situations like this usually key me up. I get just nervous enough to be sharp while remaining confident about my ability to deal with whatever comes along. It was Petra’s disappearance, coupled with Sister Frankie’s death, that made me so skittish.
Deep breaths, V.I., I admonished myself, deep yoga/singer breaths. You and the breath are one. After a near miss with a Herald-Star delivery van, I decided meditation and driving weren’t an ideal mix and returned to skittishness. I forced myself to believe I was in the clear, got off the side streets and took the main ones to Beth Israel. When I got there, I circled until I found street parking. At the emergency-room entrance, I went in, head up, a confident walk; security didn’t try to stop me even though I didn’t have a badge on.
I’ve known Max’s secretary, Cynthia Dowling, for years. She had stopped by my room when I’d been laid up the previous week. Today, she congratulated me on my quick recovery. Max was in a meeting, she said. Naturally. Executive directors are always in meetings.
I gave her the note I’d written. “You haven’t seen me since I was released from the hospital, have you, Cynthia?”
She smiled, but her eyes were worried. “I don’t even know your name, so I can’t say that I’ve seen you today. I’ll see that Max gets this when he’s alone. Do you know anything about your cousin?”
I shook my head. “Not enough of a whisper to even have a direction to follow. But I’m talking to people who can talk to people, and maybe one of them will finally start giving me real news.”
I left by a side door and jogged back to Morrell’s car. I drove down Damen Avenue as the closest route to the expressway. The light at Addison turned yellow just as I got to the intersection. Without a driver’s license, without an insurance card for the Honda-Morrell kept his in his wallet-I was being very law-abiding. I came to a virtuous halt. The car behind me honked in annoyance.
“Roscoe, Belmont, Wellington.” I counted off the streets out loud, nervous about needing to get to the South Side ahead of Dornick. “Roscoe!” I shouted.
The car behind me honked again, this time because the light was green, and then zoomed around me, almost colliding with the northbound traffic. Roscoe. Brian Krumas had told Peter he could stay in the Roscoe Street apartment. The contractors who had shown up at the Freedom Center were owned by a guy with offices on West Roscoe. I made a U-turn just as the light was turning yellow again, forgetting my need to be utterly obedient to traffic signals and having my own near miss with an oncoming bus. Stupid, stupid. What had been his name? The exact address? The nuns at the Freedom Center could tell me.
I’d almost reached Irving Park Road when I realized that if I drove to the Freedom Center, I’d show up on Homeland Security cameras. I needed a phone or a computer. Therefore, I needed to find an Internet café. I drove along Addison toward the lake. Just before Wrigley Field, I found what I needed.
I paid cash for a card that I could stick into one of their machines. Compared to my Mac Pro, the Windows machine they had was painfully cumbersome to use, but I logged on to one of my search engines and hunted contractors on Roscoe Street. Rodenko, that was it, 300 West Roscoe. Harvey Krumas had an unlisted phone number, but I found him, too, through my best search engine, Lifestory. The house in Barrington Hills, a place in Palm Springs, a flat in London. And the pied-à-terre in Chicago. At 300 West Roscoe.
Three hundred West Roscoe? I stared at the address. Harvey Krumas was Ernie Rodenko? He owned Ernie Rodenko? Either way, he had quickly mustered a couple of small-time contractors to clean up Sister Frankie’s apartment and used his home address for the holding company. However it had been worked, when Petra looked up the subcontractors, broadcasting the news all over the office in her loud, cheerful voice, Les Strangwell heard her. Les was protecting Harvey. Or was it Brian? Did it matter?