52
The Naked and the Dead
Under the bright spotlights, the thick foundation stripped the Artist’s face of expression. The cream paint covered her completely, obliterating her race, her age. Her hair was pulled back from her face, lacquered heavily so that it stood straight up like a small shrub. Peering out from the middle of its leaves were a couple of Barbie dolls. Their plastic high heels bit into the Artist’s scalp.
The crowd on the other side of the lights whistled and catcalled. The Artist turned slowly. She felt exposed, powerless, and it took all her concentration to hold herself upright, to pretend that if she noticed the audience at all, she disdained it.
Behind her, two giant television screens kept changing slides. One zoomed in on a pink-and-gray fleur-de-lis on her left breast, another showed her shoulder with Alexandra Guaman’s face, surrounded in flames, as Nadia had painted it.
Off to one side, the Raving Renaissance Raven played her amplified hurdy-gurdy. The words were so out of harmony with the Purcellinspired melody that it took some time for the audience to realize what they were hearing:
Little girl, little girl
What’s your sister?
A toy
Played with by big boys
Until she’s broken
Little boy, little boy
Where’s your brother?
Dead
Blown up by big boys
Into small pieces
As the Raven sang, the images on the screen began to change from the pictures painted on the Artist’s body to shots of soldiers’ bodies, maimed and charred, in a desert; a woman clutching a torn dress around her bleeding body; a group of men, roaring with laughter, toasting one another at a black-tie dinner.
Text replaced the images.
Will a Change of Owner Change Achilles’ Fortunes?
Someone in the audience yelled, “Get to the show, get to the show,” but at a table near the stage three men stopped drinking and began looking around the room, as if checking for anyone who recognized them.
The Artist—a giant doll, really, not a woman at all—perched on a high stool in the middle of the jerry-rigged stage and sucked in a breath. The Raven wound her hurdy-gurdy more slowly, and after another few seconds fell silent. The Body Artist’s program began.
It’s story hour, boys and girls, girls and boys. And everyone’s stories come together through the Body Artist. She is the blank canvas where your dreams come to life. Your dreams may be nightmares, but you’ll realize them all in the Artist’s body.
The screens began flashing images from [http://embodiedart.com] embodiedart.com, first the Body Artist’s original Pieces of Flesh, the field of lilies growing from her vagina, the tiger mask, the winking eye. They switched to the more disturbing images of the woman-faced deer being savaged by dogs, the crucified woman with a spike through her vulva. A horrified murmur ran through part of the crowd, but others began yelling explicit sexual commands. At me. At my body.
“For the Body Artist’s final Chicago appearance, I’m going to treat you to a fairy tale. It begins, as all good stories do:”
Once upon a time, there was a Chicago boy who loved to play football, loved to fool around with his buddies, loved beer. But, above all, he loved his country. So when his country invaded Iraq, he dropped football and a college scholarship and went off to war.
The screens showed pictures of Chad as a small boy splashing in a wading pool, then in his Lane Tech football uniform, finally as a soldier heading for Iraq.
He served cheerfully through his first two deployments, but the third time he was sent, his squad came under fire, and every one of them died except for him. They’d all worn body armor, but the armor had failed them.
Losing all his buddies at once, that was hard. Our hero served yet a fourth deployment before he was finally released, but he was never the same happy-go-lucky guy he’d been before. He was angry. Odd things set him off.
One of the odd things that set him off was seeing someone paint the logo of the body armor that he and his squad had worn across the Body Artist’s back.
I got up and began slowly revolving as Sanford Rieff followed with a spotlight. Rivka had covered my body with the logo for Tintrey’s Achilles shield, using a paint that showed up under an infrared light. There was a ripple of amazement at the display, while someone who had been to the shows where Nadia did her paintings cried in surprise, “That’s what that dead woman was painting over at the other club, remember?”
My soldier was so angry that he took out his old body armor and shot it. And that was when he saw his armor could no more stop a bullet than—my bare hand. This so enraged him that he wrote about it in his blog.
Man, there’s something I gotta get off my chest. There’s something I gotta get off your chests. All you out there, look at your armor. If it’s got that funny logo that looks like an ear of corn sprouting, get yourself new armor ASAP. My whole squad was killed on the road to Kufah because our armor wasn’t worth shit, and we all wore those corn shields. They’re made by Achilles. So go get yourself Ajax or any other brand and GET RID OF THE SPROUTING CORN!
The blog posting had taken a lot of work. I’d written out what I wanted it to say, and then John Vishneski and Marty Jepson kept rewriting it until they thought it sounded the way Chad would have written it.
I paused, hoping for an outcry from Rainier Cowles or Jarvis MacLean, but they were holding themselves still. Squinting through the spotlight, I saw Gilbert Scalia half start to his feet, but Cowles pulled him back down.
I took a deep breath to steady myself. Off to one side, I saw my cousin’s unmistakable spiked hair. She was helping wait tables.
Well, boys and girls, you can imagine how happy—or not—the sprouting-corn company was to see this story going round the blogosphere. The company was making out like bandits, selling the Army sand-filled armor instead of the real deal. They began having corporate meetings, the kind where they muttered, “Can no one rid us of this meddlesome vet?” They didn’t know what to do. Then Fate intervened and played a rotten trick on the soldier.
You see, once upon the same time that our soldier was serving his country, there were three sisters who all shared a bedroom in a bungalow on Chicago’s South Side. Unlike Cinderella, or other fairy tales about sisters, these girls loved each another. Sure, they argued, as sisters do, but each was more beautiful than the other, and each worked hard to help the other two. They had one brother who laughed with them and kidded them and made them feel special the way a good brother can. The oldest sister was called Alexandra, the middle sister was named Nadia, and the baby, we’ll call her Clara, the bright one.
The Guaman sisters’ faces were flashing on the giant TV screens.
The eldest sister led the way for the younger two, going to a good prep school and off to college. She took a job at the same company that made the Achilles shield.
The world should have been golden to Alexandra, but she had a secret that weighed heavily on her, and that was the secret of her sexuality. Her priest told her to go to Iraq because her company had high-paying jobs in the war zone. She could start a new life there, a life untroubled by what her priest told her were her sinful desires.
Alexandra obeyed him, but, for better or worse, she made friends with an Iraqi woman, who found a small room, with a date tree outside the window, where they could leave the atmosphere of war and occupation behind and sometimes just rest and pretend they lived in peace.
But Alexandra’s coworkers harassed her over her friendship with a local woman. And her boss, who tried to assault her, was furious that she turned him down.
The day came when men in her office took Alexandra away and raped her. Perhaps their assault got out of control, or perhaps they thought they needed to silence her. Whatever the reason, they strangled her. They then set her on fire so they could pretend to her bereaved parents that she had been killed by an Iraqi bomb.
The company sent her home and told her parents she was so badly damaged by fire that they should not look at their dead daughter’s body. But a military pathologist had seen Alexandra after her death, and he could read the story of her murder by the marks on her body. His conscience gave him no rest until he wrote her parents. You can imagine their shock. You can imagine the phone calls they made to the people for whom their daughter had worked. And these people told the parents that they would pay them a lot of money if they never mentioned Alexandra’s name again in public.
The screens were showing battle scenes and then a drawing Rivka had made of Alexandra and Amani, sitting under a date tree. On the left screen, Captain Walker’s autopsy report was displayed, slowly, paragraph by paragraph.
“No!” Lazar Guaman was on his feet. “You cannot speak like this about Allie. She was not that kind of girl. She was a saint on this earth!”
Tim Radke was at his side, arguing with him, but Lazar was frantic.
“They murdered her—yes, it’s true, the Tintrey people murdered her—but this woman, this whore, standing in front of you, she is telling you lies—all lies—about our blessed one.”
A hubbub broke out in the audience. People began repeating Lazar’s words, began realizing they were hearing a true story. Beth Blacksin from Global Entertainment tried to get a mike in front of Lazar’s face. Murray Ryerson had spotted Rainier Cowles with the Tintrey execs. He leaned over them with his cell phone.
“But what happened?” a woman cried from one of the side tables. “What happened to the soldier?”
In the shadows, the Raving Raven began playing “He Had It Comin’,” from Chicago. She sang at full volume until the uproar subsided to a buzz. When I began speaking again, she lowered her sound so that it became part of the background.
My naked body under a spotlight, a perfect target, nothing between my heart and a bullet but a layer of paint. My palms turned wet, and sweat began to seep down my neck from my lacquered scalp.
Nadia, the second sister, and the angry soldier ended up at the same nightclub, the nightclub where the Body Artist was performing. Poor things: each thought the other was spying. The sister thought the soldier was a spy from the company, checking to see if she’d violated their order not to talk about Alexandra in public. The soldier thought the sister was a spy for the armor maker, checking to see what he was saying about their body armor.
Ever since our soldier wrote in his blog about the defective body armor his outfit had been given, the manufacturer had kept track of him. Because they had the highest level of clearance, they had access to the Defense Department’s most advanced technology. It was a piece of cake for them to go into people’s computers and erase their websites or their blogs. That’s what they did to our soldier: erased his blog.
The company heard how enraged our soldier became every time Nadia painted their logo on the Body Artist. So they worked out a sweet plan: Kill the sister, frame the angry soldier, give him roofies, and make it look like he committed suicide out of remorse.
And where do you get roofies when you need them? You go to your local drug dealer, to the Body Artist. The Artist was working for a notorious mobster, letting him use her body to send messages to his team of thugs. She’d made a name for herself years ago on the North Shore as drug dealer to the rich and famous, the rich and notorious. When someone came to her asking for Rohypnol, the date rape drug, she knew just where to send them.
“No, you ignorant bitch!” The shout came from the back of the room. “I never gave anyone drugs. You know nothing about me. If they wanted drugs, they wouldn’t come to me, they’d go to the source. They’d go to Anton. Ask him! Ask him how he treated his own daughter!”
The room was briefly silent, and Rivka’s voice rose from somewhere near the bar, “Karen! Karen! It’s me, Rivka. Where are you, oh, don’t go away!”
The audience erupted into noise. I shielded my eyes from the spotlight, but could make out only shadows of people rising from their seats, necks craning. I saw Murray’s unmistakable bulk trying to carve a path through the crowd toward where Karen had been standing. I hoped one of the Streeter brothers would make sure she stayed in the bar until I could talk to her.
Above the roar, I heard a louder roar, the unmistakable sound of a gun, and glass shattering. A second shot, and then screams. In the small space the sounds echoed and bounced from the glassware hanging over the bar; I couldn’t tell where the shots had been fired, but the screams had come from the back of the room, where I’d heard Karen’s voice. Rodney or Anton, they must have tried to kill her. I forgot I was naked. I ran into the crowd, tried to muscle my way toward where Karen/ Frannie had been standing, but my painted body was slippery, and I couldn’t make any headway.
Another shot sounded, so close to me I knew at once it had come from my left. I whipped around and saw a cloud of smoke rising near where the group from Tintrey had been sitting. I managed to push through to their table.
Rainier Cowles was slumped in his chair, blood pouring down his back. His tablemates sat frozen, their eyes on Lazar Guaman, who was pointing a gun at Jarvis MacLean.
“Enough!” I shouted. “Enough bloodshed. Put your gun down, Lazar.”
“They killed my girl,” Lazar said to me, his voice calm, just explaining the situation. “They killed my princess.”
I stepped behind him and chopped my hand down on his arm, hitting the nerve hard enough that he dropped the gun.
“One of you, call 911!” I cried. “Don’t sit there like stuffed frogs!”
I shoved the gun out of reach with my bare foot. “You’re such war heroes when kids are dying far away, do something now! Fold a napkin into a pad for the wound. Call an ambulance.”
Neither of the men seemed able to move. They stared at me glassy-eyed. I put a finger to Cowles’s neck. He still had a faint pulse. The bullet had gone through the side of his head and come out through his jaw. I grabbed a couple of napkins from the table, made pads, and started pushing them against the two wounds. It was a nightmare, a repeat of the scene in the alley when Nadia died. I kept screaming for someone to call 911.
Behind me, I heard John Vishneski come up to Lazar. “Man, it isn’t worth it,” Vishneski said, “spending your life in prison for these scum. You go back to your wife. She’s been through enough, okay?”
Out of the corner of my eye, I watched him ease Lazar away from the table.
Marty Jepson materialized next to me. “Vic, what do you need?”
“Call 911. Get a medical team here. Page Dr. Herschel over the loudspeaker. Get me more linen.”
Jepson took out his cell phone. He started to explain our emergency to a 911 dispatcher, then I heard the phone drop.
“That man,” Jepson said. “He was outside Plotzky’s that night. Chad left early, and I saw that man come over and start talking to him.”
I looked up. “Which one?” I demanded.
Jepson pointed at Scalia. “And what the f*ck are you doing with an Iraq service medal?”
Vishneski stared from Jepson to Scalia. It took him a moment to realize what Jepson meant, but he suddenly roared with anger and flung himself across the table. Glassware crashed, and bourbon spilled across my bare thighs.
“Was that you?” Vishneski grabbed Scalia’s neck. “Was that you who killed that gal and tried to kill my boy? You chicken shit, you f*cking coward, you send my boy and his friends to war without protection so you can make a few extra bucks and then you flaunt a medal?”
I was struggling to my feet when a welcome voice bellowed through the room.
“This is the police. We have closed the doors. Return to your seats. And one of you people behind the bar, turn up the lights.”
It was Terry Finchley, standing under the spotlight on the stage with a bullhorn. Officer Milkova was behind Vishneski, pulling his hands from Scalia’s throat. Terry tossed the horn to the floor and came to our table.
“An ambulance is on its way, Warshawski. Go put on some clothes. And then you’d better be prepared to tell me all about it.”