“A dried-up cougar? Is that a step up from a bitch or a step down?” I wondered. “Anyway, so far you and your pal are oh for nothing, so let me explain where we’re going.”
We had reached Lake Shore Drive and were heading south, passing the enormous exhibition halls that made up McCormick Place. “You know those high-rise projects the city’s been tearing down? They were home to old-line gangs like the Vice Lords. The city’s relocated a lot of the residents to South Chicago, and the gangs who are coming in have unsettled all the power relationships on the Southeast Side. It’s not a good place for strangers, especially white strangers, to wander around after dark.”
All the time I was talking, both their cell phones kept sounding. I wondered if Anton was trying to reach them, trying to find out if they’d killed me.
“When we get to Ninety-first Street,” I said, “take a right. We’ll drop these creeps off at Houston—that’s where I grew up. Ludwig and Konstantin can see who will drive them north again. Maybe they can flash a bankroll and hire a ride. But maybe that wouldn’t be so smart. Because a bankroll—”
“We don’t know.” That was Ludwig. “Rodney, he calls us, texts us, tells us we are looking for you. Someone is tracking your GPS in your phone. They—”
“Shut up!” Konstantin cried.
I pulled my cell phone from my pocket and removed the battery. We’d reached the north end of Hyde Park, the toney neighborhood around the University of Chicago where Barack Obama has his home. If someone was tracking my GPS, with any luck they wouldn’t have a tail in place already.
“Tim,” I said. “Just in case Anton cares enough about these two to track them, pull out their cell phones and remove the batteries.”
I covered the pair with my gun, while Tim carefully stuck an arm across each man and found their phones. We were riding close to the lake now, close enough to see the desolate, ice-covered surface stretch to the horizon under the pale starlight.
“You guys were at the nightclub last night,” I said. “What did Anton Kystarnik hear me say, or where did he see me go, that has him so interested in me?”
“We not knowing,” the talkative thug said. “We following orders only.”
“Order followers—the lowest of the low.” I turned around to face front. “Let’s get this pond scum down to South Chicago and go home. I’ve had it.”
“I can pull over, ma’am,” Staff Sergeant Jepson said. “Tim and me, we can beat the truth out of them.”
I thought of Anton’s threat to me, that he could torture me into talking. “You can beat them into saying something,” I said, “but who knows if it will be the truth? Let’s just drop them in the middle of Latin Kings turf. Let them get home as best they can.”
I switched on the radio and stumbled on Nina Simone covering “Strange Fruit.” Her voice, pausing on the beat, cracking, brought a heart-wrenching vividness to the lyrics.
Outside the truck’s dirty windows, the lake had disappeared. The expressway had ended; we were on city streets. We passed shabby houses and boarded-over apartment buildings, the ominous empty lots of a neighborhood that had gone past decay into ruin. Jepson hit a hidden pothole, and we bounced so hard that I couldn’t hold back a cry of pain as my abdomen shook. In the backseat, our duo conferred in Ukrainian.
Finally, Konstantin said, his voice sullen, “We telling what we are knowing.”
Here is fruit for the crows to pluck, Nina Simone was singing.
“And what are you knowing?” I asked. “About the Body Artist, or why Anton doesn’t care about her website anymore, or about what he thinks I have?”
“Anton, he says you have special papers, but we not knowing what they are. We knowing only about Body Artist.”
Jepson kept driving, following Route 41 as it twisted past the weed-filled land where U.S. Steel used to operate. I turned off the radio.
“So . . . tell me about the Body Artist.”
“Everyone is paying attention to Anton. The police, the FBI, everyone. Anton can’t move, we can’t move, without the police, the FBI, the Secret Service, moving with us.
“How did he manage it tonight?” I asked.
“Oh, there’s always a way. With Owen.” He pronounced it O-ven. “We switch cars—back, forth, back, forth—until we know we’re clear. But Anton knows they are also watching computer, e-mail, telephone. So he talks to Rodney. And Rodney paints Anton’s words on the Body Artist. And then all our friends overseas can read Anton’s wishes.”