Hardball

37

THE OLD MAN AND THE DOGS HELPED ME SEARCH MY apartment for any obvious intruders or bombs. Mr. Contreras offered to feed me, but I was too tired to eat. As soon as they left, I went to bed and fell deeply asleep. I was so tired, none of my anxieties had the power to disturb me. But when my phone rang at one in the morning, I was instantly awake.

“Petra?” I cried into the mouthpiece.

“Ms. Warshawski, is that you?” The voice on the other end was diffident.

“Who is this?” I choked out.

“I woke you again. I’m sorry. It seems like it’s only in the middle of the night that I have the courage to talk to you.”

I’d been so sure the call would be from Petra, or a ransom demand, that I couldn’t think of anyone else, any other context. I lay back in the bed, trying to calm my pounding heart enough that I could think.

“I saw about your cousin on the news. It’s a terrible worry, when someone you love disappears on you.” The hesitant voice was flat.

Behind the speaker came the sound of hospital pages. Rose Hebert! My skin crawled. She had snatched Petra so that I could understand how bereft she’d been at losing Lamont Gadsden.

“Knowing how you must be suffering, I’ve been feeling guilty that I haven’t been wholly truthful with you.” She took a breath, the way she had the last time she called in the middle of the night, when she launched into the painful admission of her love for Lamont Gadsden.

“When you asked if I knew another name Steve Sawyer might be using, I said no. But back in the sixties, the Anacondas, they all took African names. Lamont, his code name in the gang was Lumumba.”

There was a long silence, during which I thought I might break into hysterical laughter. Petra had disappeared, perhaps been kidnapped, and the only thing Rose could think of was her long-vanished lover. It was hard to think of a response, but, in the end, I asked what Steve Sawyer’s gang name had been.

“I don’t know, but it was probably African. Like I told you, Johnny Merton, he gave his girl an African name. Johnny was big on all those African independence movements. He made Lamont study up on Lumumba, and Lamont talked to me about Lumumba and the Congo that summer, the summer before he disappeared, when he was trying to persuade me to be liberated with him…”

Her voice trailed off, into the confusion of memories of adolescence, where liberation meant sex as well as politics. I wondered why Rose hadn’t told me earlier; what about me would have made her think I would find African nationalism shocking.

She answered in her half-dead voice, “I guess I was afraid if I told you about Lamont and Lumumba, you might be, well, like some folks, like my daddy even, who thought if you called yourself after an African national hero you were next door to being a Communist. And then you’d stop looking for Lamont.”

I managed to thank her, and to tell her not to worry, that I’d see whether I could find Lamont under his nom de guerre. “Is there anything else it would be good for me to know? Something we could cover tonight? It may be hard to reach me for the next week or so.”

She thought about it seriously but decided she didn’t have any more secrets to reveal, at least not this morning. After she hung up, I lay back down, but I couldn’t get back to sleep. My brain started jumping around again among all the confused ideas I’d had yesterday afternoon. Lumumba. I tried to think about Patrice Lumumba, but it wasn’t a good meditation. Instead, visions of his torture and death blended with my images of Sister Frankie’s death, my fears about Petra, my fears for my own safety.

I sat up. I’d heard the name Lumumba recently. It was connected in my mind to my father, which didn’t make any sense at all. It was my mother, not my father, who cared about international politics. She would have talked about Lumumba’s murder. But I would have been too young at the time for the name to stay with me.

I went into the living room and plugged in my laptop. Sitting cross-legged on the couch, I looked up Lumumba. He had died in 1961. I couldn’t possibly be remembering a conversation about him that went that far back into my childhood. Since I was awake and alert, I searched for Lumumba in the databases I use for background checks. I found a singer with the name and a doctor in New York, but deeper looks at them showed that both were too young to be Lamont Gadsden under a new name.

It was two in the morning, the heart of darkness, the time of deepest loneliness. I thought of Morrell, in Mazär-i-Sharif and wondered if he, too, was awake and lonely or if his old friend Marcie Love was keeping him company. Or perhaps a new friend more in tune with his mind than I had been.

These were such strange times we were living through, the Age of Fear, with endless war around the world, never knowing who we could trust, with our bank accounts and our e-mails an open book to any garden-variety hacker. Even though I use the Web constantly, I’m an old-fashioned detective. I do better on foot and in person than through the ether.

Someone had gone after Petra the old-fashioned way, breaking into her apartment. Had they made off with her laptop, or had she taken it with her? I looked again at the rudimentary surveillance footage from my office camera that I’d e-mailed myself. It didn’t look to me as though any of the office breakers-Petra or her two companions-were carrying a backpack or anything big enough to be holding her laptop. So someone had gone after that, looking for… her e-mails, I supposed… or to see whether she’d been looking up African national heroes.

Spy software. Of course, Petra had used my office computer, my big Mac Pro, one night at the beginning of the summer. That was how she’d known my keypad code. I wasn’t a high-tech wizard, but I knew enough to see which websites she’d been looking at. They might tell me something. And it was better, anyway, than sitting in the dark, feeling the Age of Fear close in on me.

I started to get dressed again, but I paused while zipping my jeans. I had to assume from now on that whatever I did, wherever I went, I’d have some shadow from Homeland Security, or Mountain Hawk, or maybe both, and I’d just as soon not be caught alone on the streets in the middle of the night. Even if I could sneak out to my car, it was possible-perhaps probable-that they’d installed some kind of GPS tracker in it, some little gizmo I wouldn’t be able to find easily. They wouldn’t have to stay with me on the streets to keep tabs on me. They could use their hotshot triangulation software to watch me online.

A thump on the back stairs made my heart jump again. I took the Smith & Wesson and slipped into the kitchen, tiptoeing on the tile. I laid my head against the door and squinted out through the glass. And felt another bubble of hysteria rise in me. The sound was Jake Thibaut, hauling his double bass up the back stairs to the third floor.

I put the gun down and unlocked the kitchen door. When Thibaut reached the upper landing, he jumped almost as much as I had on hearing him.

“V. I. Warshawski! Don’t sneak up on me like that! I don’t have insurance that covers dropping bass down stairs when surprised by detectives.”

“Sorry,” I said. “I’m so edgy these days that, when I heard you, I thought it was my housewreckers on their way back. Where were you playing?”

“Ravinia. And then we went out for a drink or three. What are you doing up at this hour? Any word on your cousin?” He drew the bass up next to him.

“If anyone has heard about my cousin, they’re not telling me.” I measured myself against the bass’s case, an idea coming to me. “How drunk are you?”

“Bass players don’t get drunk. It’s one of our hallmarks. Long, tall instruments give their players hollow legs. Why, you want me to bow a perfect fourth for you?”

“I want you to smuggle me in your case out to someplace where I can catch a cab and not be seen.”

He was quiet for a minute, and then said, “How drunk are you?”

“Not drunk. Terrified.”

He rested the bass against his back door. “You don’t seem like the terrifiable type.”

“No, of course not. We PI’s thrive on death and danger. We don’t have the feelings ordinary people do. I’m a disgrace to the club, letting trifles like a missing cousin and a murdered nun rattle me.”

In the dim light coming from my kitchen window, I saw him give me a speculative look. “Anyone going to shoot at me or set me on fire if I wheel you out to Belmont Avenue?”

“Anything is possible. You ever been held up by a junkie who thinks he can sell your fiddle for a fix?”

Thibaut laughed softly. “One advantage of playing a really big instrument: people know they can’t race off down the street with it. Let me put Bessie to rest, and I’ll be with you. I hope you’re clean. I don’t want sweat and grease or anything on the inside of the case.”

I went back into my place and carefully wiped all the protective cream from my face and arms. I realized I was hungry; I hadn’t eaten since breakfast yesterday morning. Fatigue and anxiety had kept me from thinking about food, but I was suddenly ravenous. Thibaut came into my kitchen as I was hastily putting together a cheese sandwich.

“You can’t eat inside the case,” he said. “Probably you won’t be able to breathe in it, either. The old guy downstairs is going to sue me if you suffocate?”

“Nah. He’ll just let the dogs chew on your bass.”

Thibaut helped himself to a chunk of the pecorino I was eating. “I can’t carry you down the stairs. I’m not sure the case would hold your weight, but I’m sure I can’t.”

“I’ll come down the front stairs and get out to the garden through the basement door. When you’re at the bottom of the back stairs, I’ll try to creep along in your shadow. I’ll wait to climb into the case until you’re at the back gate. You can wheel me down the alley to your car.”

I went into my bathroom to rub mascara on my cheekbones so they wouldn’t reflect light back from the streetlamps; I hoped it wouldn’t come off in Thibaut’s case. I put on a navy windbreaker and stuck my keys and my new wallet, with cash and passport inside, in my hip pocket. I checked that the safety on the Smith & Wesson was on, pulled a Cubs cap low over my forehead, and ran as lightly as I could down the front stairs.

The only difficult moment came as I passed Mr. Contreras’s front door. Mitch let out a sharp bark and a whine, demanding to join me. Once I went past him and into the basement, he quieted down.

When I slid back the bolt on the basement exit, Thibaut was just bumping his case down the last flight of back-porch steps. I waited for him to reach the walk, then slipped into his shadow. He worked the move like a pro, not looking over his shoulder for me but pulling out his phone and complaining to someone he addressed as Lily, “You must be stoned as well as drunk to want to practice the Schulhoff piece this hour of the night. But, my little chickadee, to hear is to obey. I’m on my way.”

At the back gate, I managed to stuff my sixty-eight-inch frame into the fifty-six-inch case. As Thibaut had warned, I could barely breathe. The few minutes where he bumped along the broken concrete into the alley and, panting and wheezing, laid the case across the flattened-out entrance to the backseat were an agony for my spine and neck. Once I was on the seat, he unhooked the case’s hinges. I pushed the lid up a few inches with my knees so that I could straighten out my spine.

Again without looking over his shoulder, Thibaut asked for my office address. I told him he could drop me on Belmont, where I’d flag a cab.

“V. I. Warshawski, I didn’t seriously risk the life of this twenty-two-hundred-dollar case to drive you four blocks. Tell me where you’re going.”

I didn’t put up a serious fight. I was glad of the offer. I sent him on a route up past Wrigley Field, turning onto side streets until he was sure no one was following him. Finally we drove to an intersection a block north and east of my office. If the office was under surveillance, I didn’t want anyone registering Thibaut’s car in a database.

I flexed my spine and did a few neck stretches before leaning into the driver’s window to thank him. “Who’s Lily?”

“The fox terrier we had when I was a kid. When all this is over, I’ll play a concert for you. The Schulhoff concertino, to commemorate my most exciting performance since my Marlborough Festival debut.”

He squeezed my fingers where they rested on his open window. The warmth of his hand stayed with me as I slipped into the shadow of the buildings on Oakley.