Hardball

25

IT WAS THE DEAD OF NIGHT, AND MY FATHER WAS STILL out on patrol, still facing rioters someplace in the midnight city. People were throwing Molotov cocktails at him. I could see the bottles flying at his head, and I cried out, trying to warn him, which was stupid because he was miles away and couldn’t hear me. My mother mustn’t know I was frightened. It only made her worries harder when she had to comfort me as well as herself.

Our house was never truly dark. Flares from the mills created a ghostly light even at two in the morning, and the sky, always yellow from the sulfur vapors, gleamed dully all night long. Light seeped through the curtains and made my eyes hurt. My arms ached and my throat was sore. I had the flu. And, somewhere in the background, my mother was talking. A doctor had come to the house and was asking me how I felt.

“I’m fine.” I couldn’t complain about being sick, not with Papà out fighting a riot.

“What’s your name?” the doctor wanted to know.

“Victoria,” I croaked obediently.

“Who is the president?” the doctor asked.

I couldn’t remember who the president was and I started to panic. “Is this school? Is this a test?”

“You’re in the hospital, Victoria. Do you remember coming to the hospital?”

It was a woman’s voice, not my mother, but someone I knew. I struggled to come up with her name. “Lotty?”

“Yes, Liebchen.” Relief flooded her voice. “Lotty. You’re in my hospital.”

“Beth Israel,” I whispered. “I can’t see.”

“We’ve bandaged your eyes to protect them from light for a few days. You got a bit scorched.”

Fire. The Molotov cocktails hadn’t been flung at my dad but at Sister Frankie.

“The nun… Is she… How is she?”

“She’s in intensive care right now. You saved her life.” Lotty’s voice quavered.

“My arms hurt.”

“They were burned. But you got medical help fast, and there are only a few patches where the underlayer of skin was compromised. You’ll be fine in a few days. Now I want you to rest.”

A man was speaking in the background, loud, demanding that I answer questions. Lotty answered in the voice that made Max bow and call her Eure Hoheit, “Your Highness” in German. The surgeon, as Princess of Austria, telling the man that I would answer no official questions until she was sure I wasn’t still in shock.

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.

“We’re asking the questions this afternoon, Warshawski.” That was the woman from OEM, determined to be as tough as the men around her.

I smiled tightly. “So you do think her death is connected to her work in Iowa.”

“We don’t know,” Torgeson said. “We don’t know if Sister Frances was the target or another member of the Freedom Center. It might even have been you. You’ve made yourself plenty unpopular with some people in this town.”

The accusation was so ruthless, so unsettling, that I almost missed the woman from OEM saying, “We thought the target could also be one of the families who live in the building. Some are illegals. Some are dealing drugs.”

“You know a lot about them,” I said. “Fast work.”

It’s an amazing thing about lack of sight: you feel people’s emotions more than when you can see them. I could feel Torgeson withdraw into himself, as if a glass wall had slipped between him and the room.

“You know about them because you’ve had the Freedom Center women under surveillance,” I said. “You’ve been watching them, tapping their phones. America is facing international terror threats, and you’re following a bunch of nuns.”

“We are not at liberty to discuss our actions, nor are we required to do so,” the OEM woman snapped.

I ignored her. “You’re dogging the sisters and you couldn’t stop a fire bombing.”

“We moved as fast as we could,” Torgeson protested. “We were undercover. It didn’t look like a serious attack at first, not until we saw the flames in the windows.”

“What in the name of sweet Fanny Adams did you think it was?” I cried.

The room became completely quiet. I could hear the hospital noises, the pages, the squeaking of rubber soles on worn linoleum.

One of the Bomb men cleared his throat. “Tell us what happened inside the apartment.”

I shook my head, exhausted. “We heard the window break. For five seconds, I thought it was street noise. Kids had been setting off firecrackers in the alley. I thought it was an M-80 that had misfired.”

Behind my bandages, I shut my eyes, trying to remember the few minutes I’d spent with Sister Frankie. “Then I saw a bottle come in through the window. I saw the rag, I knew it was a fire bomb. I screamed at Sister Frances to get down, but she went to pick it up. And then another one came through and… and…”

She was on fire. With my eyes shut, I could see the flames engulf her wiry hair, her skin turn white beneath the yellow flames. I was shaking and heaving, and Lotty was telling everyone they had to leave.

“We need to know what Sister Frances told Warshawski here about Harmony Newsome.”

“You are in my hospital by my sufferance only,” Lotty said coldly. “I have told you the time has come for you to leave and you will leave.”

“Doctor, you may mean well,” the woman from OEM said, “but we have powers here from the Department of Homeland Security. That means we talk to Warshawski until we’re ready to leave.”

I could smell Lotty’s fury. I felt my plastic tube move, and suddenly I had slid out of the room, down the waterslide at Wolf Lake, with Boom-Boom yelling my name. He was trying to dunk me in the lake, but Gabriella pulled him away from me, and I started to breathe again.