50
Phew! Around the Sal Corner
I didn’t feel very Rock-like crossing the Loop. Rainier Cowles and Kystarnik had me so spooked that I stopped in my bank to cash a large check; I didn’t want to take the chance that they might be able to track my credit card or ATM transactions. That’s the trouble with the Age of Paranoia—you know people can trace you, given the resources, but you don’t know if they are actually doing so, not unless you’re a whiz like NCIS’s Abby Sciuto, who can back-trace anyone who’s looking at her records.
When I finally reached the Glow, it was half an hour after the closing bell, and the traders were packed three-deep around Sal’s famous mahogany bar. Sal saw me, nodding as she directed traffic. Within two minutes, a minion appeared with a glass of Johnnie Walker Black. I left the drink on the bar, not wanting alcohol to take the edge off my awareness. I also resisted the temptation to pull out my cell phone and reconnect to the world. I was anxious about Chad Vishneski’s safety as well as the Guaman family’s, but I couldn’t take any chances right now.
When the traders, exhausted by a day from hell in the markets, had finally drunk themselves into enough oblivion to manage a commute home, Sal came over to my perch at the end of the bar.
“I hear Olympia’s had to close the Gouge,” she said. “Bad fire in there.”
I shrugged. “Not that bad. She needs to redo her stage and her electrics, but the structure’s okay. Question is, where she’ll find the money, since she’s already in way over her botoxed forehead to Anton Kystarnik.”
Sal’s lips rounded in a soundless whistle. “So the rumors were right this time. I couldn’t believe anyone would be such a complete idiot. Still, as my mother says, a fool and her wits are soon parted.”
She paused, measuring me. “You’d probably better know there’s another story running around the club scene. Some people say you started Olympia’s fire.”
“People will say anything, won’t they? Especially Olympia Koilada. I did threaten her with legal action if she kept slandering me, but she probably knows I don’t have the time or patience for a civil suit.”
“So how did the fire start?”
“Actually, I sort of did start it.”
Sal threw up her hands. “Oh, Vic, why? I’m sure it wasn’t the kind of pedestrian reason most of us would have: she dissed your cousin, she kicked your dog, or, in my case, the last time I had a fire here some idiot had left her curling iron on a stack of towels in the women’s toilet.”
“I didn’t do it on purpose. It was sort of collateral damage.”
I described the night at the Club Gouge, with Kystarnik’s thugs beating up the Body Artist and Olympia because they couldn’t run their message board on the Artist’s body.
“So where is Buckley doing her show now?” Sal asked.
I shook my head. “She hightailed it. No one knows where to find her, but she’s a woman with more than one identity. I know two of them, and wouldn’t be surprised if she had a third to use as a bolt-hole in a situation like this.”
Sal’s shaved and painted brows lifted so high they looked like cathedral arches. “You looking for her? What’s Kystarnik going to do if you find her?”
“That, my dear friend, is the question of the hour. They have history, Anton and the Artist. The Artist and Zina, Anton’s only kid, were so close, they OD’d together. Zina Kystarnik died, but the Artist pulled through and then disappeared. Where she spent the next thirteen years is a total mystery, at least to me, but Kystarnik apparently knew. At least, he knew she was doing her act at Olympia’s. He’s been using her, I just learned, but does he hate her or love her? Will he kill her or protect her? I’m betting the first, but he’s a psychopath and they are like tornadoes, you don’t know where they’ll go.”
“Kind of like you, Warshawski,” Sal said. “Is anyone paying you to look for the chick?”
“Not exactly. Someone is paying me to show that Chad Vishneski didn’t kill Nadia Guaman. Kystarnik and the Body Artist don’t connect the dots, but they sure have enough dots on them to look like a measles epidemic. Kystarnik wouldn’t have wanted a spotlight on Club Gouge and the Artist, so I don’t think he was behind Nadia’s murder. I’m convinced the killer was hired by Tintrey. Or maybe even Rainier Cowles himself.”
I stopped to count on my fingers. “So many parties to this horror show. Besides Cowles and his pals at Tintrey, there are four others: Nadia, Chad, the Body Artist, and Kystarnik. When a fifth party blocked [http://embodiedart.com] embodiedart.com, Kystarnik was beside himself. He roughed up the Artist and slapped Olympia around. He wanted that communications network up and running.”
I brooded over my drink. “I’m sure it was Tintrey that blocked the site. Only now they seem to be happily doing business with Kystarnik. It was Anton’s thugs who were parked outside the Guaman house this afternoon, but a week ago they didn’t know each other’s names. I don’t know how it happened, although I’m wondering if Olympia brokered that marriage. And how it happened isn’t important—it’s what they’ll do next that scares me.”
“You may make sense to yourself, but it’s gibberish to me.”
Sal went over to talk to a couple of new arrivals whom she knew. Erica, Sal’s bartender, came around with the Black Label bottle.
“You okay, Vic? You haven’t touched your drink.”
“One of those days, Erica. Just not in the mood.” I’d never be able to prove I was right, not unless I found a way to make Prince Rainier speak. I laughed to myself, thinking of Darraugh calling me after his mongrel terrier. Speak, Prince Rainier! Or I will sink my teeth into your calf.
However it had come about, Kystarnik and Tintrey had joined forces. Rainier Cowles didn’t want to beat up the Guamans in person, so he hired Kystarnik’s muscle to force the family to turn over their copy of Captain Walker’s autopsy report. Cowles, or the Tintrey executives, thought this would end their problems. Apparently it never occurred to them that the Guamans might have made other copies. Or maybe they thought beating up Clara would persuade the bereft parents to keep Tintrey’s dirty secrets to themselves. Or maybe they planned to kill all the Guamans once they had the report.
When Sal finally returned to my end of the bar, I spoke without preamble. “Have I ever put your life or your bar at risk?”
“Nope. And you’re not about to start now, Warshawski.”
I looked around the Glow, at the Tiffany lamps on the tables and the racks of glassware hanging over the horseshoe bar. Erica was polishing the glasses methodically before putting them up in the manner of bartenders all over the world when business is slow. Each glass wiped obsessively until it reflects the light in the room.
“You’d want to put the lamps somewhere safe,” I said, “and maybe move those racks of glassware out of fighting range. You could rearrange the tables, create an open space for a performance. And if you let me cover the windows with sheets, they’d do nicely as projection screens.”
“V. I. Warshawski, I don’t care if you are on a Carry Nation mission to torch the nightspots of Chicago as long as you leave the Glow off your list.”
I tilted my glass, watching the surface of the whisky retain its flat surface while changing shape. Gravity was amazing.
“For one night, Sal, one night only, I need to resurrect the Body Artist.”
“Rent the Art Institute. They have better insurance than I do. And a real stage.”
“What’s your deadest night of the week? Sunday? If I publicize this right, with a cover charge of twenty bucks, or even thirty, you could make your week’s profit in two hours.”
“Are you listening?” Sal said. “The answer is no. Any profit would vanish in two minutes if Kystarnik came in here in an ugly mood. Which, what I know of the boy, is the only mood he’s got, the question being is it mean ugly tonight or plain vanilla.”
“Sal, let me tell you the story of three sisters. Call them Alexandra, Nadia, and Clara.”
I told her the story, as much as I knew, starting with Alexandra’s journal, her journey to Iraq, the Guamans, Chad, the Body Artist’s disappearance, ending with my own flight.
“Clara’s sixteen. She got her nose broken last night, and that was after burying her two sisters and watching her brother live in the nightmare of a badly damaged brain. I’m not asking you to do this for me, you know.”
“Oh, I know, Warshawski. All I want is to run my bar in peace and maybe die in my bed, not from a stray bullet. But you always have some cause that’s bigger than the rest of us.”
My face turned hot, but I tried to keep my temper under control. “That comes mighty strangely from you, my sister, being as you’re the one who dragged me onto the Arcadia House board.”
Sal chairs the board. It was because I’m on the board and known to be Sal’s friend that Arcadia squeezed in Ernest Guaman along with his sister, his mother, and his grandmother.
“Yeah, I chair the Arcadia board, and I give money to causes I care about. But with you, it’s always different, it’s always some damned crusade or other. It’s like you want the rest of us to think that, next to you, we’re a bunch of worthless slackers.”
“Most of my work is for corporate clients who pay me with money they get from grinding the faces of the poor in the dirt. Does that make me acceptable as a human being, that I’m just as much a part of the system as everyone else who comes into your bar?”
Sal drummed her long fingers on the bar, still watching the room under her curling lashes. Something was in the balance here, I wasn’t sure what—my sense of myself as a person, my friendship with Sal maybe. If I survived Kystarnik and Rainier Cowles, maybe I’d find a place in the country where Mr. Contreras and the dogs and I could live a simple life, growing our own vegetables and offering shelter to runaway farm animals. No more spikes in the hand or boots in the belly.
Sal twisted on her stool to look at the fake Gothic windows that fronted Van Buren Street. Snow was starting to fall again, creating a furry glow that almost blotted out the blackened fronts of the old buildings across the street.
“It’s not such a great view, is it?” she said. “The L tracks, that OTB shop over there, and all the paper and chicken dinners and whatnot. I guess I’m so used to it, I never notice how tawdry it is. Maybe if I close the shutters for an evening, it’ll cheer the place up. Better tell me what you’re up to, and why.”
I felt sweat drip between my shoulder blades. Whatever dire outcome I’d been fearing, it wasn’t going to happen tonight.
Even though Sal raised a dozen objections, about everything from not having a dressing room to where to set up the Body Artist’s webcams, she was on board. When I held my strategy meeting at Darraugh’s the next day, Sal helped me push the project forward.