“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.