Sisters on the Case

I

The heat in the attic room was so heavy that not even the flies on the screens had the energy to move. The two children lay on the floor. Sweat rose on their skin, gluing their clothes to the linoleum.

Normally on a hot August Sunday, they’d be at the beach, but Marie Warshawski had decreed that her son must remain close to home today. Normally the cousins would have disregarded such an edict, but today Victoria-Tori to her cousin-was nervous, wanting to hear as much of the grown-up gossip as possible.

She and Boom-Boom-Bernard to his mother- often spent Sundays together: that was when Tori’s mother gave music lessons all afternoon in the minute front room of their South Chicago bungalow; Tori either had to read upstairs, ‘‘Taci, taci, carissima’’-or, worse, sit primly in the front room learning from Gabriella’s few good students.

In the winters, Tori followed Boom-Boom to the makeshift ice rinks where he played a rough brand of pickup hockey. No girls allowed, period, which caused a few fights between the cousins-away from the boys, Boom-Boom made Tori help him perfect the slap shot of his idol, Boom-Boom Geoffrion.

In the summers, though, the cousins spent every Sunday together: they pooled their coins to take bus and train up to Wrigley Field, where they would climb up over the backs of the bleachers and sneak into the park without paying. Or they dared each other to jump off the breakwater into Lake Calumet, or rode their bikes past the irate guards at the South Works, playing a complicated hide-and-seek among the mountains of slag.

This Sunday, Tori was too worried about her father to violate Ciocia Marie’s edict. Officer Warshawski had been assigned to Marquette Park: Martin Luther King was leading a march with Al Raby and other Negroes to protest housing segregation in Chicago. There’d been so many marches and riots already this summer, where Tony Warshawski had been away from home for three days, working treble shifts along with every other beat cop on the South Side. Today was going to be worse; he’d told his wife and daughter that before he left for work on Friday.

White people on the South Side had vowed to do everything they could this summer of 1966 to show King and the other agitators he’d brought with him that they should stay in Mississippi or Georgia, where they belonged.

That was how Boom-Boom’s mother put it. She was furious that the cardinal made every priest read a letter to the parish on brotherhood and open housing.

‘‘Our Chicago Negroes always knew their place before these Communists came in to stir them up,’’ she fumed.

Her own parish priest at St. Czeslaw’s read Cardinal Cody’s letter, since he was a good soldier in Christ’s army, but he also preached a thundering sermon, telling his congregation that Christians had a duty to fight Communists and look after their families.

Aunt Marie repeated the gist of Father Gielczowski’sremarks when she dropped in on Gabriella earlier in the week. ‘‘If we don’t stop them in Marquette Park, they’ll be here in South Chicago next. Father Gielczowski says he’s tired of the cardinal sitting in his mansion like God on a throne, not caring about white people in this city. We’re the ones who built these churches, but Cardinal Cody wants to let those ni-’’

‘‘Not that word in my house, Marie,’’ Gabriella had said sharply.

‘‘Oh, you can be as high-and-mighty as you like, Gabriella, but what about us? What about the lives we worked so hard to make here?’’

‘‘Mama Warshawski, she tells me always how hard it is to be Polish in this city in 1920,’’ Gabriella said. ‘‘The Germans were here first, next the Irish, and they want no Poles taking their jobs away. She tells me how they call Papa Warshawski names when he looks for work. And Antoni, he has to do many hard jobs at the police, they are Irish, they aren’t liking Polish people at first. It is always the way, Marie, it is sad, but it is always the way, the ones that come first want to keep out the ones who come second.’’

Marie made a noise like the engine on the truck her brother Tomas drove for Metzger’s Meats; she pursed her lips and leaned over to ask Gabriella how she would feel if her precious Victoria brought home one of them as a husband.

All Gabriella and Marie had in common was the fact that their husbands were brothers. On politics, on child-rearing, even on religion, they were forever in each other’s hair. Maybe especially on religion. Marie had an icon of the Virgin in every room in her house. The Sacred Heart of Jesus inside her front door was a sight that shocked and fascinated Tori-the large red heart, with flames shooting out the top and barbed wire crushed around its throbbing middle (‘‘Those are thorns,’’ Ciocia Marie snapped. ‘‘If your mother cared about your immortal soul, you’d go to catechism like Bernard and learn about Jesus and his crown of thorns.’’)

Gabriella wouldn’t allow such images in her home and she told Victoria it was pagan to worship the heart of your god: ‘‘almost a cannibal, to want to display the heart-barbarica!’’ Gabriella didn’t think like this because her father was a Jew: after all, her mother and her Aunt Rosa-who like Gabriella had migrated to Chicago from Italy-were Catholics. It was more that Gabriella openly scorned religion.

When Father Gielczowski from St. Czeslaw’s came to visit Gabriella, to demand that she get Victoria baptized to save her daughter from eternal torment, Gabriella told him, ‘‘Religion is responsible for most of the torments people suffer here in this life. If there is a God, he won’t demand a few drops of water on my daughter’s head as proof of her character. She should be honest, she should always work her hardest, do her best work, and when she says, ‘I will do this thing,’ she must do that thing. If she cannot live in such a way, no water will change her.’’

The priest had been furious. He tried to talk to Tony Warshawski about Gabriella.

Peace-loving Tony put up his big hands and backed away. ‘‘I don’t try to come between my wife and my daughter. If you were a married man, Father, you’d know that a mother tiger protecting her young looks tame next to a mother human. No, I’m not lecturing my wife for you.’’

After that, Father Gielczowski glowered at Victoria whenever he saw her on the street. He tried to tell Marie to keep her own son away from the den of unbelievers, but Bernard Warshawski-who was usually as placid as his brother Tony-told the priest not to meddle in his family.

Besides, the sisters-in-law only lived four blocks apart; they needed each other’s help in keeping an eye on two of the most enterprising children in a wild neighborhood. Tony and Bernard suspected, too, that Gabriella and Marie also needed the drama of their arguments. True, Gabriella gave music lessons, Marie worked in the Guild of St. Mary, but both led lives of hard work; they needed excitement, and recounting each other’s monstrous deeds or words gave their lives a running drama.

Right now, the excitement was a little too much for everyone. The mayor, the cardinal, Police Superintendent Wilson, they’d all agreed that Martin Luther King and Al Raby had the right to march in Marquette Park. They’d also agreed that the ensuing violence might be horrific. And Tony Warshawski was one of the officers assigned to the park.

Tony hadn’t been home for thirty-six hours already. Gabriella was worried for his safety; she and Marie had argued about it Saturday night.

‘‘Me, I have seen those photographs from Birmingham and Little Rock. The hatred in those faces- I thought I was looking at Fascists from the war!’’

‘‘Oh, the press, the press,’’ Marie said. ‘‘They want to make good Christians look bad. They try to make the police look bad, too, when they’re just trying to protect property.’’

‘‘But in Birmingham, the police, they are going against little black girls. Is that right, to send a large dog onto a small child? Besides, here in Chicago, Antoni, he tells me the police have the strictest orders to protect Dr. King and all the marchers.’’

‘‘Yes, I heard Tony say that, and I can’t believe it!’’ Little flecks of spit covered Marie’s mouth. ‘‘The police! They’re collaborating with these outside agitators, instead of looking after the community. They should know that the community isn’t going to take that betrayal sitting down!’’

‘‘Marie!’’ Gabriella’s voice was quiet with fury. ‘‘What happens if this community attacks my husband, who is, after all, your own husband’s brother? What then? What will Bernard do if Antoni is injured in such a way?’’

Marie stalked away in a huff, dragging Boom-Boom with her. Gabriella sighed and took her daughter into her arms. ‘‘Mia cara, cuore mio, you must not let this hatred poison you. I must send you to your Zia Maria tomorrow, because tomorrow come the girls to study their music with me. These lessons, they bring the money for your education, if you are ever to go to a university, which you must, carissima, devi studiare all’università, devi avere una vita all’esterno di queste fabbriche e questa ignoranza!’’

A life outside the steel mills and the ignorance of the neighborhood: Gabriella’s goal for her daughter. But meanwhile, this adored daughter had to live in the neighborhood, and that meant, perforce, spending Sundays with la regina dell’ignoranza, Zia Maria!

‘‘And do not run off to make some difficult or dangerous exploit with your cousin, Victoria, you must promise me that! I know Marie believes you are Eve in the Garden of Eden, leading her precious weak boy into danger, and me, I see him leading you too often, but truly, one must agree that together you each lead the other where no sane person would travel. On this weekend you must be like a good girl who knits and bakes and stays at home for Papa, do you hear me, Victoria? On this weekend, I give you a commandment! Promettimelo, cara!’’

Gabriella repeated her adjuration the next day when Boom-Boom came to collect his cousin after mass. Victoria looked her mother in the eyes and promised.

They rode their bikes the four blocks to Boom-Boom’s house, while Gabriella made tea and readied her front room for her students. Victoria took her new Brownie, the special present for her tenth birthday a week earlier. She had photographed her father in his uniform, her mother tending her rhododendron, her cousin in a Blackhawks jersey. Today she snapped an angry Ciocia Marie sweating in her hot kitchen.

Marie served Sunday dinner, roast pork loin and boiled potatoes, that no one felt like eating in the heat. She fussed over Boom-Boom when he picked at the heavy food: was he coming down with something? Marie’s brother Tomas, who was also at dinner, said that Boom-Boom was healthy as a hog.

‘‘Stop pretending that the boy is some kind of weakling-he’s playing ice hockey with sixteen-year-olds.’’

‘‘Only because you encourage him, Tomas!’’ Marie snapped, her thin cheeks flushed pink. She had suffered eleven miscarriages before and after Boom-Boom’s birth and could never believe her only child wasn’t a frail scrap that the Lord might snatch from her at any second.

Boom-Boom’s father, Uncle Bernie, had to work the afternoon shift at the docks this Sunday, so he missed dinner. Another of Marie’s brothers, Karl, was there with his wife, who quickly changed the subject. Since she insisted on talking about the impending march in Marquette Park, it didn’t help the atmosphere at the table.

Finally the children were permitted to make their escape up the steep stairs to Boom-Boom’s room. The cousins lived in identical houses: four downstairs rooms, attics that had been turned into their bedrooms, unfinished basements that the fathers kept planning to fix up as family rooms on their days off.

In the small houses of South Chicago, no conversation was ever private. After squabbling halfheartedly over Tori’s refusal to sneak out the window and head for the beach, the cousins lay on the floor, where it was coolest, and dozily listened to the adults in the dining room below.

With the children gone, the conversation became franker and coarser. Tomas had been fired from his job at Metzger’s Meats last week, and he blamed it on the Negroes.

‘‘But he was stealing from the company,’’ Tori whisperedto Boom-Boom. ‘‘How could that be Martin Luther King’s fault?’’

‘‘He was not!’’ Boom-Boom fired back. ‘‘Wujek Tomas was framed by the janitor, and he’s a nigger like King and all those other Commies.’’

‘‘Boom-Boom! Gabriella says that’s the worst word to say, worse than ‘God damn it,’ or any other swear word.’’

For a moment, the cousins forgot the argument downstairs in their own fight, which degenerated quickly to punches. Although Boom-Boom was a year older and bigger, he was also the one who’d taught Tori to defend herself, which she was ready to do at a moment’s notice. It was only when he tore her shirt at the collar that they stopped, looking at each other with dismay: what would Gabriella say when she saw the torn shirt, or Marie when she saw the bruise on Boom-Boom’s shoulder?

In the silence that followed their fistfight, Wujek Tomas’s loud angry voice came up the attic stairs. ‘‘All I’m saying is, I’m going to kill Tony.’’

The front door slammed. Tori ran to the window and saw Tomas get into his car. It was a Buick Wildcat convertible, nicer and more expensive than anything anyone else in the family could afford. Where had he got the money for it, everyone asked; it was Gabriella who told Tony, while Tori was in her own attic bedroom listening to her parents, that Wujek Tomas stole meat from Metzger’s and sold it to supper clubs in Wisconsin. Tony told Gabriella that was all hearsay, so why would Wujek Tomas want to kill Tony?

Downstairs, Marie was demanding that Karl follow Tomas and stop him, but Uncle Bernard said Tomas would cool off in time, and Uncle Karl added that no one could catch Tomas in his Wildcat, anyway.

‘‘But he said he would kill my dad,’’ Tori whispered to Boom-Boom, her eyes wide with terror. ‘‘I have to find my dad, I have to warn him.’’

‘‘Tori, you can’t go to Marquette Park. You promised Zia Gabriella you would stay here at my house all afternoon.’’

It was part of the ongoing battle between Gabriella and Marie that Boom-Boom had to use Italian when addressing his aunt and uncle: Zia Gabriella, Zio Tony, while Tori had to address Boom-Boom’s parents in Polish: Ciocia Marie, Wujek Bernie.

‘‘I don’t care. If your stupid wujek hurts my dad, Mama’s heart will break in half, way worse than that throbbing heart of Jesus in your doorway.’’

Before Boom-Boom could stop her, Tori had run to the back window. She opened the screen, lowered herself so that she was hanging by her arms over the roof to the kitchen lean-to a few feet below, and dropped. She rolled down the shingles and jumped to the ground. She ran to the front of the house, where she’d left her bike, and took off.

Boom-Boom waited an instant too long to follow her. His mother had run to the front door to screech at her niece to come back this minute, right now! and not to lead Bernard into danger. A moment later, she ran up the attic stairs and grabbed her son’s arm as he was following his cousin out the back window.

II

Even half a mile from the park, Victoria could hear the screaming: ten thousand throats open in hate. The cops at the intersection, uniforms wet under the hot sun, were so tense that they shouted at everyone-old women asking what the trouble was, even a priest riding up on a bicycle-the cops shouted at them all, including Victoria Warshawski darting under the sawhorses that blocked Seventy-first Street.

She had ridden her bike the three miles to Seventy-first and Stony, where she’d chained it to a streetlight. A number 71 bus was just coming along, and she climbed thankfully on board. Her torn shirt was soaked with sweat; her throat was hoarse and dry. She had eighty-two cents in her pockets. If she used thirty cents on the round-trip fare, she’d have plenty to buy a Coke when she found a vending machine.

Seventy-first Street was blocked off half a mile from Marquette Park. Cops in riot gear were diverting all traffic, even CTA buses, in a wide loop around the park. Traffic was jammed on Western Avenue in both directions. The cops told the bus driver that no one was allowed off the bus until it got to the far side of the park, but while they were stuck in the intersection, Victoria forced open the back door and jumped out.

When the cops at Western Avenue yelled at her, she was afraid one of them was a friend of her dad’s who’d recognized her. She didn’t realize that every face was a blur to these hot, edgy men, but she couldn’t help turning around, to see if they were calling her by name. When she did, she saw something shocking.

Uncle Tomas’s white convertible pulled into the intersection. Uncle Tomas was at the wheel; another man, a stranger to Victoria, sat next to him. He was blond, like Tomas, and riding in the open car had boiled both their faces bright red, as red as the wild shirt the stranger was wearing. At first the officer tried to stop the car, but Uncle Tomas pulled out his wallet. The cop looked around, as if checking to see who was watching. He took a bill out of Tomas’s wallet, then moved two sawhorses so the Wildcat could drive through.

The uniformed man was taking a bribe. This was terrible! Tony Warshawski talked about this over and over again, the people who tried to give him money to get out of traffic tickets, and how wrong it was-it gave everyone on the force a bad name.

Victoria took a picture of the cop moving the sawhorses and then of Uncle Tomas and the stranger. Tomas must have gotten someone to help him find her father. The two men would gang up on Tony and kill him, and then some evil cop would take a bribe to pretend not to see that it had happened.

Victoria started running. She couldn’t beat the convertible to the park, but she had to get there as fast as she could, to find her father before Tomas and his partner did. When she got to the park, she saw this was going to be nearly impossible. The crowds were so thick that a child, even a girl like Victoria who was tall for her age, couldn’t see around them. She had to fight her way through them.

People were holding up signs with horrible words on them. One said KING WOULD LOOK GOOD WITH A KNIFE IN HIS BACK, but the others! They said things that you were never supposed to say about anyone.

Victoria used her elbows the way Boom-Boom had taught her at hockey practice and pushed her way through a massive wedge of people. They were yelling and screaming and waving Confederate flags. Some of them had sewn swastikas to their clothes, or painted them on their faces. This was also very bad: Gabriella had to leave her mother and father forever and come to America because of people in Italy who wore swastikas. Even as she looked for her father, Victoria realized she couldn’t tell her mother the things she was seeing-swastikas, people calling Martin Luther King by a name worse than a swear word. She hoped Tony wouldn’t say anything, either. It would upset Gabriella terribly, and she and Tony had a duty to protect Gabriella from any further unhappiness in this life.

As she moved farther west into the park, she saw a group of teenagers turn a car over and set fire to it. The people near them cheered. Six policemen in riot helmets ran to the teenagers, who spat at them and started throwing rocks and bottles.

Victoria pushed through the cheering mob to where the policemen were using their billy clubs, trying to arrest the boys who’d set the fire.

She tugged on one officer’s arm. ‘‘Please, I’m lookingfor Officer Warshawski, do you know him, have you seen him?’’

‘‘Get back, get out of the way. This is no place for a kid like you. Go home to your mommy and daddy.’’ The man pushed her out of the way.

‘‘Tony Warshawski,’’ she cried. ‘‘He’s my dad, he’s working here, he’s a cop, I need to find him.’’

This time the men ignored her completely. They couldn’t pay attention to her-the crowd was protecting the boys, throwing rocks and cans of Coke at the officers. One can hit an officer in the head; the crowd roared with laughter when the soda spilled into his eyes, blinding him.

‘‘The niggers are on Homan,’’ someone shrieked. The whole mob swerved west, chanting, ‘‘Find the niggers, kill the niggers!’’

Victoria followed them, her legs aching, a stitch in her side making her gasp for breath. She couldn’t pay attention to her pain, it would only get in her way. She had to find Tony. She elbowed her way past the screaming adults. One of them put out a hand and grabbed her, so hard she couldn’t wriggle free.

‘‘And where are you going?’’

It was Father Gielczowski. With him were half a dozen people she recognized from her own neighborhood, two of them women carrying bags of sugar.

‘‘I’m looking for my dad. Have you seen him?’’

‘‘Have you seen him, Father. Doesn’t your Jew mother teach you to respect your elders?’’

‘‘You’re not my father!’’ Victoria kicked him hard on the shin; he let go of her shoulder, swearing at her in Polish.

Victoria slithered away. The crowd was so thick that the priest couldn’t move fast enough to catch up with her.

‘‘Daddy, where are you, where are you?’’ She realized tears were running down her cheeks. Babies cry; you aren’t a baby.

She passed a drinking fountain and stopped to drink and to run her head under the stream of water. Other people came up and pushed her out of the way, but she was cooler now and could move faster.

For over an hour she pushed her way through the mob. It was like swimming in giant waves in Lake Michigan: you worked hard, but you couldn’t move very far. Every time she came to a cop, she tried to ask about Tony Warshawski. Sometimes the man would take time to shake his head-no, he didn’t know Tony. Once, someone knew Tony but hadn’t seen him. More often, the overheated officers brushed her aside.

People were throwing cans and stones and cherry bombs. One exploded near her, filling her eyes with smoke. A rumor swept through the mob: someone had knocked King down with a rock.

‘‘One down, eleven million to go,’’ a woman cackled.

‘‘King Nigger’s on his feet, they’re treating him like he’s royalty while we have to suffer in the heat,’’ a man growled.

Victoria saw the golf course on her right. It looked green, refreshing, and almost empty of people. She shoved her way through the mob and made it onto the course. She climbed the short hill around one of the holes and came on the road that threaded the greens. To her amazement, Uncle Tomas’s white convertible stood there. Tomas wasn’t in it, only the stranger who’d been with him back at Western Avenue. He was driving slowly, looking at the bushes.

Victoria was too exhausted to run; she limped up to the car and started pounding on the door. ‘‘What happened to Tomas? Where’s my dad? What have you done with him?’’

‘‘Who are you?’’ the stranger demanded. ‘‘Tomas doesn’t have any kids!’’

‘‘My dad, Officer Warshawski!’’ she screamed. ‘‘Tomas said he was going to kill Tony, where is he?’’

The stranger opened the door. The look on his face was terrifying. For some reason, the girl held up her camera, almost as a protection against his huge angry face, and took his picture. He yanked at the camera strap, almost choking Victoria; the strap broke and he flung the camera onto the grass. As she bent to pick it up, he grabbed her. She bit him and kicked at him, but she couldn’t make him let go.

III

The battle between the cops and the protestors went on for five hours after Dr. King and his fellow marchers left the park. By the end of the day, every cop felt too limp and too numb to care about the cars that were still burning, or those that were overturned or dumped into the lagoons ringing the park. Firefighters were working on burning cars, but they were moving slowly, too.

Some patrolmen returning to their squad cars couldn’t get far: women had poured sugar into the gas tanks. After going a few hundred feet, the fuel filters clogged and the cars died. When a fireman came on the body shoved under a bush, he called over to a cop uselessly fiddling with the carburetor of his dead squad car.

The policeman walked over on heat-swollen legs and knelt, grunting in pain as his hamstrings bent for the first time in nine hours. The man under the bush was around forty, blond, sunburnt. And dead. The cop grunted again and lifted him by the shoulders. The back of the man’s head was a pulpy mess. Not dead from a heat stroke, as the officer had first assumed, but from the well-placed blow of a blunt instrument.

A small crowd of firefighters and police gathered. The cop who’d first examined the body sat heavily on his butt. His eyelids were puffy from the sun.

‘‘You guys know the drill. Keep back, don’t mess the site up any more’n it already is.’’ His voice, like all his brother officers’, was raspy from heat and strain.

‘‘Guy here says he knows something, Bobby,’’ a man at the edge of the ragtag group said.

Bobby groaned, but got to his feet when the other cop brought over a civilian in a Hawaiian print shirt. ‘‘I’m Officer Mallory. You know the dead man, sir?’’

The civilian shook his head. ‘‘Nope. Just saw one of the niggers hit him. Right after we got King, one of them said he’d do in the first whitey crossed his path, and I saw him take a Coke bottle and wham it into this guy.’’

The police looked at each other; Bobby returned to the civilian. ‘‘That would have been about when, sir?’’

‘‘Maybe five, maybe six hours ago.’’

‘‘And you waited this long to come forward?’’

‘‘Now just a minute, Officer. Number one, I didn’t know the guy was dead, and number two, I tried getting some cop’s attention and he told me to bug off and mind my own business. Only he didn’t put it that polite, if you get my drift.’’

‘‘How far away were you? Close enough to see the man with the Coke bottle clearly?’’

The civilian squinted in thought. ‘‘Maybe ten feet. Hard to say. People were passing back and forth, everyone doing their own thing, like the kids are saying these days, no one paying much attention-me neither, but I could make a stab at describing the nigger who hit him.’’

Bobby sighed. ‘‘Okay. We’re waiting for a squad car that works to come for us. We’ll drive you to the Chicago Lawn station. You can make a statement there, give us a description of the Negro you say you saw, and the time and all that good stuff… Boys, you’re as beat as me, but let’s see if we can find that Coke bottle anywhere near here.’’

Turning to the man next to him, he muttered, ‘‘I hope to Jesus this guy can’t make an ID. The whole town will explode if we arrest some Negro for killing a white guy today.’’

As they picked through the litter of cups and bottles and car jacks that the rioters had dropped, looking for anything with hair or blood on it, a squad car drove up near them. The uniformed driver came over, followed by a civilian man with his son.

‘‘Mallory! We’re looking for Tony Warshawski. Seen him?’’

Bobby looked up. ‘‘We weren’t on the same detail. I think he’s over by Homan-oh-’’ He suddenly recognized the civilian: Tony’s brother Bernie.

Bobby Mallory had been Tony Warshawski’s protégé when he joined the force. Fifteen years later, he’d moved beyond Tony with promotions the older man no longer applied for, but the two remained close friends. Bobby had spent enough weekends with Tony and Gabriella that he knew Bernie and Marie as well; Bobby was an enthusiastic supporter of Boom-Boom’s ambition to supplant the Golden Jet with the Blackhawks. He wished he could also support the freedom Tony and Gabriella gave their own only child, but he hated the way they let her run around with Boom-Boom, like a little hooligan. Thank God Eileen was raising his own girls to be proper young ladies.

‘‘We’re falling down, we’re that tired, Warshawski,’’ Bobby said. ‘‘What’s up?’’

Bernie shook his son’s shoulder and Boom-Boom said, ‘‘It’s my cousin, Tori, Officer Mallory. Victoria. She-my uncle Tomas-after lunch we heard him say he was going to kill Tony because of Wujek Tomas losing his job and he thought it was Tony’s fault, except he also blamed it on the ni-Negroes-so Victoria took off for the park here to warn Uncle Tony and she didn’t come home and we saw it on TV, the fight, and I told my dad and he said we should come here and try to find her, or anyway, find Uncle Tony, and then Dad and I, we saw you, and maybe you know, like, is she okay?’’

Bobby Mallory rubbed his sunburnt forehead. ‘‘Vicki came here? God damn it, who let her do such a stupid dangerous thing?’’

‘‘She took off, sir, and my ma, she had ahold of me, so I couldn’t follow.’’

‘‘Which is the only good news of the day,’’ Bernie Warshawski said. ‘‘Otherwise we’d be looking for both of you. We saw where Tori chained up her bike at the Seventy-first and Stony bus-’’

He caught sight of the body under the shrub. ‘‘But-that’s Tomas. Marie’s brother! What happened to him? He come with the St. Czeslaw crowd and pass out?’’

He moved over to kneel next to Tomas. ‘‘Come on, man, get up. You’ve had your fun, now get on your feet-’’

Bernie dropped the shoulder in horror: Tomas was never going to get up again. When Boom-Boom started to join his father at his uncle’s body, Bobby grabbed him and pulled him back.

‘‘We gotta get a meat wagon for this guy. Bernie, give his name and particulars to one of the officers here while I get on the squawk box in the squad car. And let’s see if you recognize our helpful witness… Lionel!’’

One of the uniformed men limped forward. Bobby introduced him to Bernie Warshawski, but when they went to look for the man in the Hawaiian shirt who claimed to have seen Tomas’s assailant, he had disappeared. Just like a damned civilian-don’t get involved! Or maybe he didn’t want to have to explain what he’d been doing in the park all afternoon. Maybe he’d thrown the brick that hit Martin Luther King hard enough to knock him to the ground. Jesus! They’d been lucky King hadn’t needed medical help.

Bobby used the squad car radio to summon a detective. When a man arrived to look after Tomas Wojcek’s body and to organize a search of the grass around him, he turned his own aching body and numbed mind to the task of finding Tony Warshawski.

This morning he wouldn’t have taken an overheard death threat against a cop seriously, but that was beforesomeone had bounced a rock off his own riot helmet and squirted a can of Coke into the eyes of one of the men in his detail. If Tomas Wojcek thought he could use the cover of the Marquette Park massacre to kill Tony-but had Tony, the most peaceable man on the force, whacked Tomas in the head hard enough to kill him? Bobby couldn’t picture it, unless Tony’d become as crazed by the heat and the ugliness of the mob as the rest of the cops in the park.

He got into the squad car Bernie and Boom-Boom arrived in and directed the driver to do a sweep of the park. Using the car loudspeaker, he kept calling Tony’s name, or calling out to clumps of cops as he passed to see if any of them had seen Warshawski. At Homan he was directed to the north end of the park, where Bobby finally ran Tony to earth. He was pushing a last bunch of rioters into the back of a paddy wagon when Mallory and Bernie went over to him.

Tony Warshawski was a big man, close to six-four. Like everyone else today, his face was red up to the circle cut into his forehead by the riot helmet he’d worn all day: above it, his skin looked almost dead white, but when Bobby and Bernie explained the situation to him, his whole face turned ashen beneath its burn.

‘‘Victoria? She came into this war zone hunting for me? Oh, my God, where is she? Bobby, I need a squad, I need to find her. How can I face Gabriella?’’

‘‘Tony, I’ll look. You’re too tired.’’ Bernie put an arm around his brother’s shoulders. ‘‘You get home, stay with Gabriella. She’s just about out of her mind, worrying about you and Tori both. And Marie, oh, my God, what a day-Tomas is dead, someone killed him over on the other side of the park. How will I tell her that? Boom-Boom, did your cousin say anything that-Boom-Boom? Bernard! Bernard Warshawski, come back here this minute! Now!’’

The three men looked around. Twilight was settling in; it was hard to see more than fifteen or twenty feet, and Boom-Boom had faded into the shrubbery around the lagoon.

IV

As soon as his dad was occupied with Uncle Tony, Boom-Boom slipped off into the park. If Tori was still here, she’d be hunting for Tony. If she’d left for home, well, then she was safe, and he, Boom-Boom, could find out what was so mysterious about Wujek Tomas’s death. Tomas was his least favorite uncle, mean-spirited, prone to pinching Boom-Boom or Victoria so hard that he left bruises on their arms or bottoms, but it was still unsettling to see him like that, dead under a bush. And Mama! She would cry like the world was coming to an end. And somehow blame Victoria for it.

When Bernie had come home from his afternoon shift at the plant and Boom-Boom told him what had happened, Marie said, ‘‘Headstrong, how Gabriella spoils her. No daughter of mine would run off like that, not even a thank-you for lunch. No manners, of course, Italian, a Jew, they don’t know manners.’’

She hadn’t wanted Bernie to drive over to the park-they’d all seen the reports on television, the violence, white people fighting the police-but Gabriella had telephoned, asking for Victoria to come home; Marie had been forced to say that she’d run off.

Gabriella arrived two minutes later, still in the silk print dress she wore to give lessons, her dark eyes two large coals in her pale face. She had looked Marie in the eye, spat, and turned on her heel. She announced that she was leaving for Marquette Park at once, but of course, Bernie told her to stay home, that he’d drive to the park and find Tony and Victoria.

Boom-Boom headed for the center of the park, away from the knots of cops who still lingered, keeping out sightseers, or waiting for working squad cars to arrive if their own had been disabled. Many of the men were lying on the grass, helmets at their sides. Others were using their riot helmets as canteens, filling them at the fire hydrants and pouring the water over their sweaty bodies.

At the lagoons that ringed the interior of the park, Boom-Boom was startled to see how many cars had been pushed into the water. Some had been rolled in so they were upside down. He tried to guess how many men it would take to roll a car over and over like that. He wondered if the guys he played hockey with could do it.

As he continued east, toward the park entrance on Sacramento-since that’s where his cousin would have entered the park-he came on a white convertible whose front end was submerged, leaving the back sticking up in the air, almost. That looked like Wujek Tomas’s car. His body was over near Seventy-first Street. This didn’t make sense. If he’d been driving, he’d have drowned in the car. Why was the car here and Tomas half a mile away?

Boom-Boom stood next to the Wildcat, trying to decide if it was his uncle’s. He didn’t know the license plate number, but there was a little red scratch near the bottom of the driver’s door. If he could get into the water, he might be able to see it.

He was starting to untie his sneakers when a thumping from inside the trunk startled him. ‘‘If that’s your ghost, Wujek, don’t worry: I’m not here to hurt your car,’’ he called loudly to cover a moment’s fright.

‘‘Boom-Boom?’’

It was his cousin’s voice, faint, tremulous.

‘‘Tori! What are you doing in the trunk?’’

‘‘He put me there. Get me out, get me out before I die.’’

‘‘Hang on, I’ve got to get the trunk open. Don’t go anywhere, I need to find some way to smash the lock.’’

‘‘I’m not moving, dodo, but hurry, I’m fried alive and I’ve been sick in here.’’ Her voice ended in a gulp that sounded close to tears.

Boom-Boom looked frantically around the grounds. He’d seen guys break into cars plenty of times-also into trunks. He needed something like a chisel and a hammer to break the lock, or- In the massive amount of junk tossed by the rioters, he found a tire iron.

He ran back to the Wildcat and managed to pry open the trunk. His cousin was clinging to the spare tire. Her feet were damp from the lagoon water seeping into the trunk from the backseat, and the shirt he’d torn earlier in the day was covered with blood and mud and her own vomit. She was shaking from head to filthy toe; it was all Boom-Boom could do to help her crawl out.

V

It was dark by the time the cousins and their fathers found each other. When Victoria saw Tony, she burst into tears.

‘‘Pepaiola, mia cara, cuore mio,’’ Tony crooned, the only Italian he’d picked up from Gabriella-my little pepperpot, he called his daughter. ‘‘What’s to cry about now, huh?’’

‘‘Uncle Tomas said he would kill you because he lost his job,’’ she sobbed. ‘‘I wanted to warn you, but this man, this friend of Uncle Tomas’s, he picked me up and put me in the trunk. I was scared, Papa, I’m sorry, but I was scared, I didn’t want you to die and I couldn’t tell you, and I didn’t want me to die, either.’’

‘‘No, sweetheart, and neither of us is dead, so it all worked out. Let’s get you home so your mama can stop crying her eyes out and give you a bath.’’

‘‘What man, Vicki?’’ Bobby asked-the only person who ever used a nickname that Gabriella hated.

‘‘The man with Uncle Tomas. I saw them when they-Daddy, they gave money to the cop at the intersection and he let them into the park. I took his picture-oh! my camera, he broke the strap and threw my camera away, my special camera you gave me, Papa, I’m sorry, I didn’t look after it like you made me promise.’’

Victoria started to cry harder, but Bobby told her to dry her eyes and pay attention. ‘‘We need you to help us, Vicki. We need to see if your camera is still here, if no one stole it. So you be a big girl and stop crying and show your uncle Bobby where you were when this man picked you up.’’

‘‘It’s dark,’’ Tony protested. ‘‘She’s all in, Bobby.’’

Victoria frowned in the dark. ‘‘It was where you come into the golf course. One of the hills where the holes are on the Seventy-first Street side of the park. I know, there was a statue near me, I don’t know whose.’’

With this much information, Bobby set up searchlights near the statue of the Lithuanian aviators, Darius and Girenas, although none of the cops believed they’d find one small Brownie camera in the detritus left in the park.

When Boom-Boom whispered to his cousin the news that Tomas was dead and the cops needed to find the man who’d been with him, Victoria miraculously found some reserve of energy from childhood’s inexhaustible reservoir. She tried to remember in her body how slowly she’d moved, where she’d twisted and turned on the walking paths, and finally cut across the grass to the golf course. Boom-Boom stayed with her; within another five minutes, they found the Brownie.

Bobby took custody of it, promising on his honor as a policeman that he’d give the camera back the instant the pictures were developed, and the cousins finally got into their fathers’ separate cars. At home, they received varying receptions from their mothers: both women frantic, both doting on their only children, each showing it with tears, and then a slap for being foolhardy and disobedient. But Gabriella instantly repented of the slap and took her daughter into the bathroom to shampoo her rough mass of curls herself.

‘‘Carissima, when will you learn to think first, to act next after thinking? This Tomas, this brother of Marie’s, he was a-mafioso-un ladro-he stole from Metzger’s Meats and sold on his own, sold the meat to restaurants in Wisconsin. He blamed the janitor, who is a Negro man, for losing his job, because the janitor reported seeing him. But your papa is telling me, Tomas also cheated his capo in the mafia, and this was a man also named Antoni. It is not such a rare name, Victoria. If you asked me, I would tell you this thing, that your papa is in danger from the calca in the park, but not from this brother of Marie, and then you do not get the most biggest frightening of your life. And also, then you are not giving me the same gigantic frightening.’’

And of course, as it turned out, when Bobby got the pictures developed, the man who abducted Victoria, who flung her into the trunk of the Wildcat, which he got several spirited youths to push into the lagoon, was the Tony who worked in Don Pasquale’s organization. Tomas had been stealing meat from Metzger’s and selling it in Wisconsin for the mob, but he’d taken more than his share of the profits. Don Pasquale sent Tony in his red Hawaiian shirt to Marquette Park to kill Tomas under cover of the riots. The don wasn’t happy with Tony for letting a little girl with a camera get the best of him: he refused to post bail for his henchman.

‘‘So you see, carissima, è molto importante, ask, ask, think, think, before you leap on your bicycle and turn my hair white,’’ Gabriella finished. ‘‘Promise me, cuore mio, promise me this is the last time, that from now on you are turning over a fresh page, you will become more careful, more prudente! Promettimelo, Victoria!’’

‘‘Si, Mamma: te lo prometto,’’ Victoria said.