Blacklist (24 page)

CHAPTER 29

Back to the Briar Patch

So it’s you, my girl, is it? Been long enough since you showed your face around here. Come to serve early mass for me?” Father Lou stood at the rectory door in T-shirt and trousers, his face still red from shaving.

As I’d driven along Ogden Avenue into the city, I figured if I didn’t get to the rectory before Father Lou started robing, I could slip into the church with the handful of neighborhood people who came for the six A.M. service. As it was, even taking the long slow route, I managed to pull around to the back of the building by five-thirty.

Benjamin had fallen asleep before we reached Warrenville Road. I kept my window open, needing cold air on my face to keep my own longing for sleep from overpowering me, but I ran the heater so that the vents pointed on the young man. His book fell from his slackened hand; I leaned over at a stoplight and put it in his lap so he wouldn’t wake up distressed. He’d dropped it while we were in the ditch and revealed-in a defiant gasp, as if he expected me to strike him or abandon him on the spot-that it was the Koran, his father’s own copy, he could not lose it.

“In that case, we’d better hang on to it,” was all I said.

When I had us both strapped into the Jaguar, a wave of fatigue crested over me, pulling me under. I only woke a few minutes later because a

helicopter thundered directly over us, heading east. I blinked at it, hoping it was taking a teenager to a hospital, not to a morgue.

I put the car in gear and drove slowly past the guard station. The man in the booth nodded at the car: he was there to keep the world out. It didn’t matter who left the complex.

I bypassed the tollway, preferring to take Ogden Avenue. If Schorr decided to issue an APB on me, they’d stake out the expressways first. They wouldn’t know what car I was driving, but they might guess I’d taken someone else’s when I didn’t show up at the Mustang.

Even forty miles out, Ogden is not a beautiful street. Every town along its route had decided this was the place for car dealerships, for fast-food joints, for gas stations and junkyards. Once the street crosses the city limits, it goes from tacky to grim, finishing its life near the Cabrini Green housing project. A number of Cabrini’s towers have been torn down as the Gold Coast oozes west, but those that remain, with their broken windows and bullet-pocked playgrounds, still present an ominous face to the city.

As we drove in, a fair amount of traffic already filled the road-early commuters pulling into the endless strip malls for the day’s first coffee, people coming off the night shift stopping for a burger. At one point I dozed off again at a traffic light. The hydraulic honk from the truck behind me scared me awake-I thought I’d heard another shot, I thought we were surrounded. The adrenaline from that kept me alert for the rest of the route.

The Jaguar engine was quiet as a feather dropping on a leaf, and the power inside made me itch to swoop in and out of lanes, or go sixty on roads posted for forty. On an impulse, waiting for a light at Austin, just before crossing the border into Chicago, I called Murray Ryerson on my cell phone. He was grumpy about being woken up, but became alert, even aggressive, when I told him I’d met sheriff’s deputies out at Larchmont.

“They were going nuts, thinking they had some Arab terrorist in their sights. They shot someone. I didn’t feel like hanging around-they were being mean to me-but I have a queasy feeling about the shooting.”

“What about killing a terrorist makes you queasy?” he demanded.

“I don’t think that’s who they shot. I think they may have hit a member of the Bayard family. Perhaps even Calvin Bayard’s granddaughter. And if that’s the case, they will try to keep it very, very quiet.”

“You actually see the body? Is that the basis of your feeling?” Murray was truculent-he’s known me too many years.

“I was there in the early evening, looking for clues about Marcus Whitby in the Larchmont mansion pond. I found his pocket organizer, by the way” That seemed like an unconnected time and place to where I was now. “Anyway, two of the Bayards came by then, and from their conversation I had a feeling they might be back. That’s all.”

“That’s not enough. Not nearly enough. Tell me about Whitby’s gizmo. Was there anything suggestive in it?”

“Yeah-four days of pond scum. I’m taking it to a forensic lab so they can dry it out and take it apart.”

Another honk goosed me into remembering I was driving. I hung up hastily on Murray’s indignant squawk. I turned off my phone-if Murray wanted to call back, the ringer would wake Benjamin. Besides, I didn’t want to tell Murray anything else right now: I just wanted to make sure Lieutenant Schorr couldn’t sit on it if he’d shot Catherine.

At Western Avenue, Ogden turns northeast, angling past the juvenile detention center. “You are not going there, my friend, if I can help it,” I said to the sleeping boy. He muttered something guttural, probably in Arabic, and shifted in his seat.

I turned north onto Western and drove four miles through the drab hindquarters of the city’s industrial zone. The lights from factories and trucks made it hard to tell whether the night sky was starting to lighten; the air was gray and gritty both day and night around here.

We were also close to the criminal courts and Cook County jail, so there was a heavy squad car presence. I tried to keep my mind on the traffic, not on the possibility that someone might be looking for a borrowed Jaguar’s plates. I breathed easier when I’d moved out of the area.

At North Avenue, I was only two blocks from my office, but I turned west again, into Humboldt Park, where gentrification hasn’t yet touched the Hispanic neighborhoods. If someone was hunting me, they’d have my

office staked out, but I didn’t think anyone would look for me in a Mexican church. I parked on a small side street behind.

It was a job to rouse Benjamin, and a bigger job to make him come with me to a Christian church. “I know what priests doing with boys in church. I know they hurting boys, doing bad things with boys.”

“Not in this church,” I said, pulling him up the walk like a recalcitrant mule. “This is the one building in Chicago that I know where you can be warm, where you can get something to eat and where you can be safe. This priest is a boxer-” I let go of him long enough to mime boxing-“this priest has harbored fugitives. He will look out for you.”

“He will try to turn me from my believing, my-my-” he hunted for a word-“from the truth.”

“No. He won’t do that. He believes in his truth as much as you believe in yours, but he will not disrespect your belief. He doesn’t disrespect my beliefs, which are different again from both yours and his.”

“And Catterine, she cannot see me here, and how can I know she is not shotted? Shot?”

“Catherine will be able to see you here, if it’s safe for both of you-it may not be. This really is the best place for you right now, Benjamin.”

He didn’t believe me, but he was old enough to know when he was out of options. And maybe, too, he figured I’d kept him safe this long, I might be trusted to keep him safe a bit longer. Or maybe he was just so tired he couldn’t fight anything going on around him. Whatever the reason, when Father Lou answered my anxious pushing on the rectory bell, Benjamin stayed at my side.

Father Lou’s T-shirt exposed the formidable muscles in his neck and forearms that he’d developed in his boxing years. His frown as he took in Benjamin’s and my bedraggled appearance made him look like a menacing Popeye. I hoped he didn’t frighten Benjamin into running.

“This someone Morrell sent you?” the priest growled.

My stomach felt queer at Morrell’s name; the night’s labors had kept me from thinking about him and now it came back to me in a rush, that he was missing, or missing anyway to me. “I’ve lost track of Morrell. Never mind that now: this young man has been hiding in an abandoned house out in the western suburbs. I found him moments before sheriff’s deputies

surrounded the place. He needs to be warm, he needs to eat and he needs to be in a place where the county cops and the city cops and John Ashcroft’s cops aren’t going to find him.”

“They have a good reason to look for him?” Father Lou pulled back the heavy door far enough that we could come in.

“Yeah, they don’t like his race, creed or place of national origin.” “That a fact. You got a name, kid?” His faded blue eyes looked directly at the boy, who didn’t withdraw, as I’d feared-I’d forgotten the priest had dealt with generations of frightened boys.

“Benjamin,” the youth whispered. “Benjamin Sadawi.”

“Mass in seven minutes,” Father Lou said. “Got to get to church. Ben, you go with Victoria to the kitchen, she’ll make you tea and eggs, fix you up with a bed. Unless it’s been so long since you’ve been here, my girl, you don’t remember where anything is.”

“I do not go to Christian church,” Benjamin said.

“Not asking you to. Got other rules you have to follow if you stay here: no drugs, no weapons, no cigarettes. Say your prayers however you want. Special intention for Morrell;’ he added to me. “For the kid, too. Jesus doesn’t care if he prays in Arabic.”

He stumped off down a dark corridor connecting the rectory to St. Remigio’s church. I took Benjamin down a different unlit hallway to the kitchen. Father Lou saves money in his financially strapped parish by not keeping lights in the halls. I had to switch on my headlamp again to guide us to the kitchen. The batteries were wearing out; the light was feeble, like my legs at this point.

In the kitchen, I found the matches to light a burner on the heavy old stove. I was surprised, in a way, that Father Lou even had spent the money on a gas stove instead of keeping a coal burner, or whatever had been in the rectory when the church was built in the 1880s.

In the refrigerator, I found the eggs that were the staple of the priest’s diet. He had margarine and a big block of cheese, as well. I scrambled them all together in a cast-iron skillet. Father Lou ate a lot of bacon, but I remembered not to offer that to a Muslim youth.

While the margarine was melting, I switched on a transistor radio perched on top of the refrigerator. It was the wrong time for news

highlights: I got ads and sports reports. The Bulls had lost again, along with the Blackhawks. It’s no easier to be a Chicago fan in the winter than in the summer.

Benjamin had removed his sweatshirt to fold it carefully on the cracked linoleum. He knelt down on it to recite his morning prayers, but when the radio came on, he looked up, his thin face anxious.

“No news,” I said. “I’ll turn it back on when you’re done.”

I cleared space on the enamel kitchen table. Budget figures, the sports pages from a week’s worth of papers, school essays and advertising catalogs were all jumbled together. I swept them into a pile without trying to organize them-if he needed to find something, Father Lou would sort through the stack. I’d seen him do it a number of times, looking for old sermon notes. He’s the only person I know more disorganized than I am.

I set down eggs, tortillas and cambric tea-a little tea and a lot of hot sweetened milk-for Benjamin and me. We both needed our blood sugar raised about now. I took a couple of aspirin from the bottle in my day pack and swallowed them with the tea. Maybe they would persuade my sore shoulder to calm down.

Benjamin finished his prayers with a defensive glance at me. His prayer schedule must have anchored him during his long days alone, given him something to rely on. His father’s Koran, his father’s prayer schedule, like my mother’s vocal exercises: the routine of the beloved makes you feel that the beloved is with you.

“News now?” he said. “Please you are finding out of Catterine.” “About Catherine,” I corrected him absently.

“About Catherine,” he echoed.

I turned the radio back on. Finally, at half past the hour, we got the local news.

Responding to a complaint from neighbors, DuPage County Sheriffs deputies raided an abandoned house in unincorporated New Solway early this morning. According to Sheriff Rick Salvi, an Arab man wanted for questioning in connection with the September 11 attacks had been hiding in the house. The man made his escape through a third-story window as deputies were storming the house. As they combed thegrounds, a local girl was injured by a gun shot. The sheriff’s office refused to confirm reports that one of the deputies fired the gun, but the injured girl is Catherine Bayard, who was taking a late walk through the fields behind the home of hergrandfather, Chicago publisher Calvin Bayard. Sheriff Salvi has said it’s possible Ms. Bayard was shot by the wanted man; he will issue a full report after he has inspected his deputies’ weapons. Ms. Bayard is in an area hospital in serious but stable condition.

The wanted man was in the same house where Chicago investigator VI. Warshawski found a dead body on Sunday night. Warshawski was actually in the house when sheriff’s deputies arrived on the scene, but left while they were still searching the grounds. Whether she has a connection to the missing man is unknown at this time, but Sheriff Salvi is anxious to talk to her.

“And I to you, Sheriff” I switched off the radio, turning to Benjamin. “How much of that did you understand?”

He shook his head. “Too quickly talking. Catterine, they talk of her, about her, they talk about September 11, about Arabs, but what they are saying?”

“Catherine was shot, but she will recover-she will get well. They didn’t say where she was hit, but they did say `serious but stable,’ which means a bad injury, but not one that will kill her.”

“That is true?” His eyes were painfully large in his thin face. “You-” His lips moved as he went through a vocabulary list in his head. “You swearing that is true?”

I swore to him that I was telling the truth about Catherine. I added that I would find out what hospital she was in and exactly how she’d been hurt, but that I needed to sleep first. I left out the rest of the story, the manhunt for him. He probably guessed it, but putting it into words would make it too stark; we both needed sleep, not anxiety, now.

I was too exhausted to think, or talk. When I got up to carry the plates to the sink, tears spurted down my face, involuntary, the body’s protest against further effort. No heartening slogans from the basketball court, no remembered lectures of my mother’s, could make me stop crying. Weeping, I led Benjamin to the second floor, where a series of narrow bedrooms stood, left over from the days when the Catholic Church was awash with priests and a parish like St. Remigio had five or six on its roster. Army blankets were folded at the foot of the beds, and thin down pillows, as ancient as the building, stood at the heads. The most elaborate furnishing was the wooden crucifix over each bed, carved so realistically that Benjamin looked at his in horror. I removed it from the wall over his bed and put it in the linen closet.