He walked comfortably to the refrigerator, opened it, and looked for something to eat while we talked. Merle reached over his head, standing on tiptoe to pull down a box of cookies and hand it to him.
“Need any help?” he said.
“Maybe later,” I told him, “but not while they might be able to link your cab with me.”
We sat around eating cookies and sneezing, swapping stories about the good new days, listening to Narducy’s imitations of Herbert Marshall and Lum Abner. Merle yawned. I said I was tired. Narducy ate cookies and drank a quart of milk. Merle went to bed, and I told Narducy I had to get up early. He said he did too and stayed twenty minutes more, giving me the plot of the last episode of “Lights Out.”
When he left, I flew back into the bed with a grunt and a wheeze.
“Asleep?” I whispered.
“No,” she said. She leaned over in the dark and kissed me. “But I’ve had enough action for the night, on top of a fever. Let’s sleep on our memories.”
I dreamed something, but I don’t know what. When I woke up in the early morning light I held it in the palm of my memory, but it flittered away on dusty moth wings. Merle was still asleep, snoring through a congested nose. The room was full of romance and germs. I got dressed, shaved in the kitchen sink to be quiet, and left a note saying I’d contact her that night. Then I went out in the snow to find a phone. I found one at a lunch counter, where I ate Choco-nuts cereal and had two cups of coffee. It was about nine on Sunday morning, and the place was empty except for me and a guy with a kid he kept patting on the head everytime the kid said anything. Since the kid was only about two, he had a lot to say, but not much of it was clear. I listened for a while and watched. Something like nostalgia or longing started to get to me. I knew I’d have to pull away, or go through some somber hours envying that man with the kid.
Kleinhans wasn’t at the Maxwell Street Station, but he had left a message for me to call him at home. They gave me his home number, and I heard the now familiar but fuzzy voiced Sergeant Chuck Kleinhans.
“What time is it?”
“After nine,” I said. “What have you got for me?”
“A large, heavy chair given to me by my grandfather when he came to this country. There’s still enough strength in these old arms of mine to lift it above my head and bring it down on yours.”
“I’ve offended you,” I said sadly.
He tried to hold back a laugh.
“I’d say you have Peters, and you can ill afford to lose what little patience I have left. When we were in the State Street station a few hundred years ago, you called Indianapolis.”
“Is that a question or a statement?” I said, looking back at the dad and kid who were cutting each other’s waffles.
“It is a warning. Besides owing the City of Chicago a dollar and sixty cents, you played me for a sap.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I couldn’t resist it. Cops bring out the trickster in me.”
His yawn was enormous.
“I checked on the Canetta kid. He has a Chicago record three sheets long.”
“You have an address for him?”
“Yeah,” said Kleinhans with a sigh, “and not that old Ainslie junk the Indiana cops had. He’s on probation and living at 4038 West Nineteenth Street. You wanna check him, go ahead. I don’t think he’s connected.”
“What about my little old man?”
“Forget it. You didn’t give me enough to frame a nigger newsman.”
“How about a sheeny grocer?”
“Yeah,” chortled Kleinhans, exhausting his range of over-the-phone emotions, “know one?”
“My old man. Stay in touch, Kraut.”
I hung up, knowing Kleinhans would forgive and forget, or hold it against me for turning his words against him. If he was a normal respectable human being, he’d remember.
The snow was an inch thick outside. I looked into the grey sky and into the coffee shop window at the father-son team. The kid had spilled chocolate milk, and the father was cleaning it up with a proud smile. I felt like shit and wondered why I had missed Christmas.
7
My cash supply was down, and I didn’t have time to call Louis B. or Warren Hoff. There was also a chance that if I did, they’d tell me I was fired. That wouldn’t stop me from what I was doing, but it would cut into my fraying pocket. As long as they didn’t fire me, they owed me for each day I worked.
I got on a streetcar, where a thin conductor with gloves and a blue uniform gave me a transfer and told me to go to the Loop and take a Douglas Park train to Pulaski Road. The ride to the Loop was short, and the straw mat seats of the streetcar cold, but I kept my mind off Chicago’s environment by making entries in my little book of expenses. The book was growing thick with breakfasts, cabs, phone calls, cold tablets, hotel bills, Kleenex, gambling losses, and top coats.
Downtown, I climbed the steps to the El trains at State and Lake and waited for a Douglas Park train. The wait was long and cold. Trains didn’t run very often on Sunday. A Negro woman waited with me and some loud teenage kids with big city bluster. The kids were about thirteen, too old to be cute and too young to smash in the mouth. I tried to get past the fear of pneumonia by remembering the small, soft body and warm mouth of Merle G. It helped.
When the one-car train pulled in, the loud kids pushed ahead and ran to the front. The old woman moved to the back and so did I. There weren’t many people on the train, and the car was cold and noisy as it rattled and teetered around the Loop and headed west on tracks thirty feet above the ground. Out the window on my side I couldn’t see the tracks, just the street below and the houses a few feet away. A nagging worry about the body of Leonard Bistolfi and the possible reasons why he was killed in my hotel room intruded on my fear of falling to my death. Each turn gave me a shiver of panic, and I had to tell myself that these trains had been running in Chicago for more than forty years. My old man had mentioned them once when I was a kid, after he had visited his sister in the Windy City.
Neighborhoods shot by outside the iced window. Churches, old and heavy. Wind went wild down narrow streets, lifting sheets of snow in jerky dances. I shivered through a few dozen stops at wooden platforms. A family got on at someplace called Ashland, sat in front of me, and overlapped around me. The parents-dark, pale and serious-spoke in a European language that wasn’t German, French, Spanish, or anything like them. It was deep and slushy, a language spoken in the back of the mouth and deep in the throat, a language to keep the cold out-Russian or Polish maybe. Three dark, pale kids, two boys, one girl, pushed their noses to the cold windows and chattered in their language and in English. Every once in a while one of them moved near their talking parents, who would touch the child’s face or hair absently and lovingly.
It made me try to remember how my brother’s two kids looked-David and Nate. I couldn’t remember, probably because I hardly ever went to see them. I decided to bring them a present from Chicago when I went back home, but I didn’t know what a Chicago present might be.
The conductor called out “Crawford Avenue, Pulaski Road,” and I got out with the happy family and went down a flight of rusty metal steps to the street. At a newsstand outside the station door, a chunky old man shifted from foot to foot in front of a metal garbage can with a fire going inside it. The Sunday Chicago papers were fat, and I couldn’t carry one, so I just asked him which way Nineteenth Street was. He told me to head north two blocks and there I’d be. I hustled through the snow past a storefront hot dog place named Vic’s, with a cartoon of a guy eating a sandwich on the window. The steamy smell of red hots and onions came through the closed door. I thought of stopping by, but went on past a closed candy store, a cleaning store, a Polish meat market with a sign in the window for blood soup, and a corner tavern called Mac’s.