Chicago Noir

The Great Billik by Claire Zulkey

19TH & Sacramento

The new neighbors moved in the winter of 1905 to a small place a few houses down. We’d come by to say hello to Mary, who was frightened and intrigued by the additions to the area. She sat in the front room, peering through the curtains to see if she could monitor the family’s activities. She seemed jumpy and skittish as usual, but also excited.

Our poor sour cousin Mary. Ginny and I didn’t mean to make fun of her as much as we did. We probably had some leftover resentment from when our mothers told us to look after her when we were younger. It was hard not to mock someone who took herself so seriously. Granted, she didn’t have all the opportunities in the world for excitement; she’d been appointed caretaker of the house when her mother died. But she acted like an old maid, so it was hard not to have fun at her expense sometimes, especially as life grew brighter and the city grew more exciting, while she grew more determined to stay away from it. So we tried to stay kind, because without us around, she’d have nobody to talk to other than that old clammed-up father of hers.

“I hear they’re Bohemians,” she said. “Come from Cleveland.”

“Wouldn’t they be coming from Bohemia?” asked Ginny, sipping her tea. Mary looked at her sharply.

“Mrs. Vzral says that he’s got three kids,” Mary continued, “but I haven’t seen any yet. Just his wife. She looks like a horrid woman.”

We gasped when the neighbors’ front door opened, as if the aforementioned wife were going to come out and berate us after somehow hearing what Mary had said. Instead, out came a man. He was stout, with pale skin and short ginger hair, with black eyes that Mary called “piercing.” I found them beady and ratlike, but she never listened to me. I preferred blue eyes anyway.

The man stepped out in front of the house, carrying a sign. He took a hammer from his pocket and tacked it onto the front of the house. The sound carried into Mary’s front room. The man looked at his sign brusquely, straightened it, and turned and walked back into the house.

“For sale already?” asked Ginny again.

“Shush,” Mary said. “I wonder what that really is.”

“Well, we can’t walk right up right now and look at it,” I said, “or else he’ll know we’ve been spying on him. Let’s wait and have another cup and then we can walk by.” I was just trying to torture Mary. She seemed like she wanted to run out the door. I found her small life irritating. Rushing into the street to see a sign tacked onto a little old house was the highlight of her day.

After about twenty minutes, we got up. Ginny and I pretended to make a great deal about properly putting on our coats to stay warm, even though it was a mild day. Finally, we strolled outside, acting as if we were chatting about the weather.

The sign was painted brown, with neat red and green lettering. It said:

Mary’s mouth hung open in a mystified gape.

“Black magic,” I said.

“Rubbish,” said Ginny.

We tried to keep walking but Mary lingered, stupidly mouthing the words on the sign.

For the next few days, Mary couldn’t be budged from her home. She claimed she had housework to do but we knew she was keeping an eye on that strange man’s house. I assumed she still believed what they had told us in Sunday School, that black magic was the devil’s work, and she would keep the devil locked out of the house.

Ginny rushed over one day. “You won’t believe it,” she said, and before I had a chance to respond, she told me.

“My second cousin Ruth was downtown yesterday and she ran into her friend Sophia, who told her that she heard something unusual from Emma Vzral. Seems like Mary’s gentleman friend is even stranger than we thought. Emma’s father was delivering the milk to Billik and Billik stops him and gives him a strange look, and then says, ‘Your enemy is trying to destroy you.’”

“So the seer has seen something!” I said. “I hope the Vzrals got a good laugh out of it.”

“No,” said Ginny. “Apparently they’re quite frightened. You know how superstitious they are.”

“But I didn’t think they’d fall for a shyster. I wonder if Mary knows more about this,” I said, and we went to her house. When we told her, we realized that she hadn’t heard the news, and was quite peeved that we’d found out information about him before she did.

She was still infuriated a few days later. “I have walked back and forth in front of that house several times and even said hello, as new neighbors, and I don’t know what is wrong with that man or that family,” she said. “He won’t acknowledge me at all.” Apparently she was more intrigued by the magician than afraid.

“So you have no enemy, let alone one that’s trying to destroy you?” I asked.

“No,” said Mary, ignoring my joke. “But did you smell that foul odor yesterday?”

“Was it Billik?” Ginny asked.

“It was coming from Henry Reynolds’s house, I found out. I just followed my nose,” she said, proudly. “But do you know what Reynolds does for a living?”

We looked at her blankly.

“He’s a milkman. Like Vzral! That’s his enemy!”

“So?”

“I asked around, and one of the neighbors said that they saw Billik stride up to the Reynolds’s house and pour a pail of some mysterious liquid on the front steps. He was cursing them!”

“Mary, it doesn’t seem terribly magical to me. A foul-smelling house is certainly a curse, but I don’t think it’s a mysterious one. What’s wrong with you? I think you’re a bit too caught up with this Billik person. Forget about him. Why don’t you—”

“No, thank you,” Mary cut me off.

A week later, Mary came over, looking smug. “Have you seen Mrs. Vzral lately?”

“No, I haven’t,” I said, wanting to point out that I had better things to do than keep a watchful eye on all my neighbors.

“Well, she’s worn new dresses three days so far this week. And you know what that means.”

“Time for laundry?”

“No, it means that the milk business is doing well. And you know why.”

“More cows?”

“It was Billik! I told you, that man had powers!”

I stared at Mary. “Have you spoken with this lunatic?”

“Yes, I have,” she said firmly. “And he was quite a gentleman. Anyway, he told me he had nothing to say to me.”

“So there you have it,” I replied. “He’s a charlatan, Mary, he’s practically admitting it. Why don’t you come back to us in the real world? Aren’t you concerned at all about his intentions? Maybe this business is just a lure for gullible young women.”

Her face reddened and briefly crumpled.

“Are you in love with him?”

She was silent.

“Mary, he’s married. He’s an immigrant. He’s old. He’s insane. He’s ugly. Come on. You’re almost twenty. Don’t you want a man your own age?”

“I have to go, I’m sorry,” said Mary.

And Mary didn’t speak to us for several months. I’d see her in church, and she’d ignore me, but she’d stare venomously at the Vzral family, who appeared to Mass less and less frequently, looking worse and worse for the wear each time.

Eventually curiosity got the better of me as well, and since Mary wasn’t speaking to me, in spring I went up to Emma, the oldest of the Vzral children, after services one day. She and I had been in class together in elementary school, so it wasn’t completely inappropriate, even though it was admittedly none of my business.

“Is everything all right?” I asked, trying to seem casual. I couldn’t tell if Emma recognized me or not but she looked pale and very thin, very tired.

“My sisters Catherine, Elizabeth, and June are all working for that man,” she said bitterly.

“Billik?”

“It’s not enough that my parents have paid for his trips, new clothes, but now my sisters are working as maids and giving the money to him,” she spat out.

“But why?”

“I see your friend creeping around him,” she said, ignoring my questions. “You tell her to stay away from him.”

“Mary?”

“Tell her to stay away,” Emma said, and walked off.

I went straight to Mary’s house after Mass. She looked at me coolly when I answered the door but I ignored her expression.

“Mary, have you been talking to Billik?”

“Why do you care?”

“Mary, I spoke with Emma Vzral at church—”

“You did? What did she say? Did she tell you anything about Herman?”

“Herman?”

Mary fell silent.

“Mary, what have you been doing?”

“I don’t know why he won’t talk to me,” she said.

“Mary, honestly, are you in love with this man?”

“No!” she shouted, loudly enough to make me jump. “No, I am not,” she whispered. “I just wanted to know if maybe... he could tell me things.”

“You don’t actually believe—”

“A mystic! I know it’s silly but how often do you encounter something like that? I wanted to see if he could tell me about my future, about my father, about falling in love...”

“And?”

“He tells me he has nothing for me. To go away and leave him alone. And I blame the Vzral’s, really, I do. They are hogging him all to themselves and I don’t know why. They’re selfish. He’s helped them with their problems and they should just help themselves now.”

“You go over to his house often?”

“I just wanted to get to know him better... I thought that maybe if he knew more about me, he could tell me things. Or even just tell me about his travels, about his old home and his family. His mother was a witch, you know,” she said, so matter-of-factly that I laughed out loud.

“Mary, you’re going to be burned for being a heretic. What’s next, making offerings to the gods?”

But she gazed out the window, eyes narrowing as she saw Mrs. Vzral hurry down the steps of Billik’s house, something in her hand, her breath steaming in the cold April weather. Spring came late in Chicago, and briefly.

“Mary, you are going to come out of town this weekend with Ginny and me,” I said firmly.

“What about father?” she asked dreamily, still looking out the window.

“Ask one of the neighbors to take care of him. Ask my mother. No, you know what? Tell him to take care of himself.”

Mary let us drag her up to Detroit for the weekend. We stayed in a women’s house, went to the theater and even a Tigers game, which was a little frightening but exciting to attend unescorted, although Mary kept wincing every time she heard the crack of the bat. Mary was quiet for the first half of the trip, but on Saturday she brightened and genuinely seemed excited by the city. By the time we returned, she was giddy and chatty, almost like we’d never seen her before.

We returned Sunday night. Monday morning, we heard that Martin Vzral was dead.

Mary was alarmed and unusually remorseful when we told her. It wasn’t as if she’d been that familiar with Mr. Vzral. So I was surprised when Mary asked me to attend the funeral with her.

You wouldn’t know that it was a funeral if it weren’t for the casket. I was surprised by how sparse the ceremony was. The Vzrals did well for themselves, I had thought, yet their clothes looked threadbare, there were no flowers, and the coffin looked as if it were made of plywood. I saw a hint of smugness in Mary’s face as she took in the scene.

“I always thought that family put on airs,” she whispered to me, as we left the parish.

The weather warmed up, and Mary proposed that we take a trip north to Riverview. Everyone was talking about the new amusement park and Ginny and I were surprised by Mary’s proposal. It seemed too frivolous for her, but we attributed it to spring high spirits kicking in. Plus, we were excited to get a look at the new park.

It was a wonderful day, much warmer than usual for May. We ate ice cream and rode around on a giant carousel and screamed down a toboggan ride. Tired, we strolled down the Midway, cheery German music pumping out from one of the tents, when Mary casually asked to stop by one.

Set up under a dark purple tent was Billik, dressed impeccably in a new suit, with the sign reading the old words, “The Great Billik, Card-Reader and Seer.”

“Mary...”

“For goodness sake, he’s got a tent here at the amusement park,” she said. “He wants people to come see him. He wouldn’t be out here in the open if there was something wrong, would he?”

“All right,” I said. “Let’s go. I want to get a look at him up close and personal.”

“No,” she said forcefully.

“You don’t want to see him?”

“No, I do... just, not, all together.”

I looked at Billik, who stared straight ahead at the fair, as if he were alone in his home, looking out the window.

“Fine, Mary. But I’m going to see him first.”

She made as if to protest, but then thought better of it. “Good,” she said sweetly. “I hope he has some good news for you.”

I strode up to the booth, but my heart was pounding. I wasn’t sure why. Billik ignored me until I stood in front of his table and cleared my throat. He looked up and nodded at me to sit down, without saying a word. He began flipping some cards around.

“She bring some friends?” he asked.

“Who?”

Billik jerked his head in Mary’s direction. “She bring you along?” His English wasn’t completely right, but he spoke with hardly any accent. His skin burst out of his collar, but was clean and smooth, pale and shiny like a baby’s. He barely seemed to look at the oversized cards that he was handling, as they made a slapping sound. A breeze started blowing and it began feeling more like May in Chicago.

“Tell her to stay away,” he said. “She waste my time.”

“I tried telling her to stay away. She thinks you have powers.”

He stopped and looked up at me with the blackest eyes I have ever seen. “I do have powers. She has nothing for me to tell her.”

“She thinks you do, or you will,” I said.

“Stupid girl.” He looked up at me and grinned. “You want fortune?”

“No, I—”

“Give me your hand.” He grabbed toward my arm.

“No.”

“Who are your parents? Where do they work? You have nice house?”

I hurried away. Before I could even talk to her, Mary practically ran into the tent.

“What did he say?” asked Ginny, as we saw Mary eagerly sit down in the chair in front of Billik, who looked supremely uninterested.

“He says that Mary’s bothering him. He seems like a complete farce. He’s mean. You go up there and you’ll see.”

“No, I’m not. My parents would send me to a convent if they heard I was meeting with a mystic or a seer or whatever it is he calls himself.”

Mary looked on with great interest at the cards that Billik was flipping around carelessly, and she eagerly held out her hand, which Billik pretended to study with poorly concealed boredom. He accepted the nickel she offered him like it was soiled linen.

I received some good news a few weeks later. My family was able to put some money together and I was going to go up to Milwaukee to attend Alverno, a women’s college. Fall of ‘06, I packed my things, said goodbye to my family, and took the train to Wisconsin to begin classes. I wrote home frequently, and tried Mary several times, telling her about school and my classmates and the city, in hopes of getting her to speak with me again, but she gave me no answer.

I came home for Christmas, excited to see my family.All the aunts and uncles and cousins met at our house, and Ginny and I took a walk around the neighborhood to see if anyone else was out celebrating. All the houses looked lit up and warm, but as we came to the Vzral house, it was dark, with a wretched little black wreath on the door.

“What happened?” I asked.

“That poor family,” whispered Ginny, who was becoming like her mother, more pious and maternal, as she grew older. “Tillie died the day before you came home,” she said, referring to one of the younger sisters.

“Oh! That’s so sad. First their father, then Tillie...”

“Actually,” said Ginny, “Susie passed away right after you left for Milwaukee. They’ve lost two sisters.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?” I said.

“I didn’t find out about it until much later,” she said. “You know that family better than I do. I forgot, I suppose.”

“What happened?”

“They say stomach trouble. For all of them. I hope it’s not contagious.”

We came home just as Mary had stopped by to say hello to my parents. She looked gaunt, much older than when I had last seen her. She seemed happy, though, and was cordial to me.

“How is your father, Mary?”

“Oh, he’s fine, on death’s door as he always is. But I’ve been working, and it’s good to get out of the house.”

“That’s good news,” I said. “Where are you working?”

“Some housekeeping here and there,” she said lightly, trailing off. “Some bookkeeping too.”

“Where?”

“Neighbors,” she said, and abruptly changed the subject.

I hadn’t seen Edward, my neighborhood boy, for a while and it was good to spend time with him again, away from my family and my classmates. I enjoyed school but being around so many other girls was tiring. The night before I left to go back, he asked if I would marry him. I said I’d think about it but of course I knew that I would.

Back in Milwaukee, Mary deigned to write to me again. I found out that she was working for Billik. She really, truly seemed happy, though, and told me stories of their fine house, his dusty cases of fortune-telling equipment that she wasn’t allowed to touch, and the large sums of money that she kept track of, but knew nothing about.

“Is he paying you well, at least?” I wrote back.

“My payment comes in watching him work,” she wrote me. “And his knowledge. He says that he’s starting to see some good luck for me in the future. And love! I hope it’s true.”

“What’s his wife like?” I responded, and she ignored this question in her next letter. She did congratulate me when I told her I was going to marry Edward.

I came back to Chicago for good that summer in 1907. We were hoping to marry in the winter, so we went to the parish to discuss the date with the Father and were surprised to see a coffin inside.

“Rose Vzral,” he said, sighing and looking sad. “Only fourteen years old. If I believed in such things, I would think that family had a curse on it.” I wanted to ask him if he believed in curses later when Rose’s sister Ella died that fall. Stomach problems as well.

A month before the wedding, I had lunch with Ginny and Mary. A few years previous I would have expected Mary to be drawn and bitter at any wedding news, spinster-to-be that she was, but she actually seemed haughty, although perhaps she kept tossing her head to show off the new earrings she was wearing.

“Those are beautiful, Mary,” Ginny obliged.

“Aren’t they?” she breathed. “They were a gift from my employer.”

“Billik?” I said. “He makes that much money off fortune-telling?”

“The man has a gift,” she said. “He helps people, and they reward him in return.”

“Really? How so?”

“You remember how Martin Vzral was going to suffer from a competitor...”

“Yes, but he’s dead now.”

“That’s beside the point. That family has made its own problems. The mother is a fool. She’s holding onto that house of theirs. She would be better off to sell it to Herman. She can’t rattle around in there like the crazy old bat she is. It’s too bad, what happened to her family, but for goodness’ sake.”

“You’re trying to drive the Vzrals out of their home?” said Ginny. “What does Billik have to do with it?”

“I just keep records of finances,” Mary said. “The Vzrals owe everything they have to Herman. If it wasn’t for him, they’d all be dead, or worse.”

“Or worse, such as what?”

Mary just raised her eyebrows mysteriously and said she had to go. “I’m keeping house for him while he travels.”

Although it rarely starts snowing in earnest until January or February here, God granted us a beautiful coating of snow for the wedding. The ceremony was lovely and we were giddy with the prospect of the future. Before we returned to my house for dinner and gifts and music, we had to pay Father Vincent his honorarium. As we were meeting with him and about to invite him over to the house, one of the Sisters rushed in and whispered in his ear. He frowned.

“What is it, Father?” asked Edward.

He crossed himself. “Poor Mrs. Vzral,” he said.

Though I said a small prayer for her and the family, I soon forgot about it, until Mary, who seemed rather stoic throughout the wedding and the party, excused herself early, saying that she had to meet with her employer, who had come back to town.

“Mary, it’s my wedding day,” I said.

“I don’t want to upset him,” she said unapologetically, and slid out.

A few weeks later, Edward and I moved to St. Louis so he could set up his law firm with his friends from school. I tried staying at home for some time but got bored quickly, so Edward let me come work for the firm as a typewriter.

I received some good news from Ginny. She’d been rescued from contemplation of the convent when her shy admirer George from down the block finally proposed to her.

“No more excitement for me,” she joked in her letter. “Except right now. The whole neighborhood is buzzing. Everyone is suspicious of Mary’s friend.”

“I’m not surprised that everyone is suspicious of him,” I wrote back. “He’s a very strange person. What does everyone suspect him of?”

I received a telegram from Ginny before I even sent my letter.

“VZRAL’S MURDERED,” was all it said.

She filled me in via letters. Based on some neighborhood suspicion, Mrs. Vzral had been dug up and poison was found in her stomach, and how we did not guess that to begin with, I’m ashamed to even speculate. Billik was picked up a few days later.

Ginny sent me clippings from the newspapers. The city seemed more enthralled than horrified. Reporters kept comparing Billik to a previous murderer, Holmes, who was executed while we were still children.

I felt relieved that the strange man was behind bars, but I felt sorry for my cousin, that this man who she so admired, who didn’t even seem to reciprocate, was now so disgraced.

“It’s not true,” she wrote to me.

I stopped paying attention to neighborhood gossip for a while after that, until in June ‘08, when I received a telegram from my mother saying that my uncle, Mary’s father, had finally passed away. It was difficult to feel sorrowful, as nobody had ever really known him other than as an invalid that Mary was forced to tend to her whole life. I wondered if she felt relief or complete despondency.

I came home for the funeral. Ginny was starting to get big with her first baby and it was good to see her. Mary seemed rather unemotional at the funeral. Afterwards, I embraced her and said, “What are you going to do now?”

“I’m free,” she whispered.

I smiled. “So what are you going to do with your newfound freedom? Go to school? Move? Get married?”

“I’m selling the house,” she said, “But I’m moving to a smaller apartment in the city.”

“I don’t blame you,” I said. “You’ve been in that house all your life. It’s a shame that your father didn’t leave you more to get a little house for yourself.”

“No,” she said. “I did get the money. Herman told me to do it. He told me that that house is cursed, and that I should move.”

“Isn’t he in jail?”

“We write letters,” she said. “It’s time, Helen. It’s a terrible thing that he’s in prison but now that my father’s dead, he’s told me that his spirit isn’t in the way anymore. He can see my future!”

I couldn’t do anything.

I went back to St. Louis and did not return to Chicago for almost a year, as Edward and I found out that I was expecting my first. I hadn’t heard from Mary since I wrote to tell her. She wrote me, requesting a donation for a fund she was organizing to release Billik from prison. I wrote a rather forceful decline.

She did respond though when I sent her the announcement of our son early in 1909. She congratulated us, sent a rattle, and slipped it into her letter that Billik was granted life in prison, not the death penalty. I sent her a thank you note but didn’t comment on the latter. I was sick of hearing about him. After that, our letters were terse, when they existed at all.

In June of the new decade, I got the bad news that my mother was quite ill, so we took the children (now two of them) and went back down to Chicago to see her one last time. I managed to speak with her right before she slipped away. We stayed for the funeral.

It was good to be with Ginny, and I saw Mary for the first time in a couple of years. She looked even older and her clothes seemed threadbare, which was surprising. I’d heard that the sum her father had left behind for her was unexpectedly generous, and she was never a spendthrift. We embraced but did not speak beyond the formalities. She excused herself after the services.

“You’re not coming back to our house?” I asked.

“No,” she said quietly, but with an excited look in her eyes. “Her—... Billik? You remember him? He’s been released from prison.”

“Good news,” I said.

“I promised him I’d go meet him. I’m so sorry to leave,” she said, not seeming sorry at all.

I spent the rest of the day in a fury. Getting back home to St. Louis, I wrote to Ginny, “I’ve had it with Mary. She couldn’t even be there as family after Mother died.” I spent the next several days going about my business, but I could not stop thinking about how angry I was with my cousin, how she’d grown too selfish and foolish for even her own family.

“I’m sure she’s sorry,” Ginny wrote back. “I’ll tell her you say hello and maybe she’ll say something nice in return. I’m off to go visit her now, actually. It’ll be the first time I see this apartment of hers. She says that she’s not feeling well.”

I looked up from my letter and stared at the wall for a few moments and then picked up the pen. I changed my mind, put it down, and rushed to the telephone, although I had a feeling I knew what I’d hear when I reached Ginny.

“Her stomach’s been bothering her,” Ginny said. “Possibly a cold or something she ate.”