I didn’t speak much for the rest of the ride. We were going about a hundred miles around the big U of Lake Michigan’s southern end; I let the rhythm of car and road fill my mind.
Morrell had booked a room at a rambling stone inn overlooking Lake Michigan. After checking in we took a walk along the beach. It was hard to believe that this was the same lake that Chicago bordered—the long stretches of dunes, empty of everything but birds and prairie grasses, were a different world than the relentless noise and grime of the city.
Three weeks after Labor Day we had the lakefront to ourselves. Feeling the wind from the lake in my hair, making the crystalline sand along the shore sing by rubbing it with my bare heel, gave me a cocoon of peace. I felt the tension lines smooth out of my cheeks and forehead.
“Morrell—it will be very hard for me to live without you these next few months. I know this trip is exciting and that you’re eager to go. I don’t grudge it to you. But it will be hard—especially right now—not to have you here.”
He pulled me to him. “It will be hard for me to be away from you, too, pepaiola. You keep me stirred up, sneezing, with your vigorous remarks.”
I’d told Morrell once that my father used to call my mother and me that—one of the few Italian words he’d picked up from my mother. Pepper mill. My two pepaiole, he’d say, pretending to sneeze when we were haranguing him over something. You’re making my nose red, okay, okay, we’ll do it your way just to protect my nose. When I was a little girl he could make me burst out laughing with his fake sneezes.
“Pepaiola, huh—sneeze at this!” I tossed a little sand at Morrell and sprinted away from him down the beach. He chased after me, which he normally wouldn’t do—he doesn’t like to run, and anyway, I’m faster. I slowed so he could catch me. We spent the rest of the day avoiding all difficult topics, including his imminent departure. The air was chilly, but the lake was still warm: we swam naked in the dark, then huddled in a blanket on the beach, making love with Andromeda overhead and Orion the hunter, my talisman, rising in the east, his belt so close it seemed we might pluck it from the sky. Sunday at noon we changed reluctantly into our dress clothes and drove back into the city for the Cellini’s final Chicago concert.
When we stopped for gas near the entrance to the tollway, the weekend felt officially over, so I bought the Sunday papers. Durham’s protest led both the news and the op-ed sections in the Herald-Star. I was glad to see that my interview with Blacksin and Murray had made Durham cool his jets about me.
Mr. Durham has dropped one of his complaints, that Chicago private investigator V I Warshawski confronted a bereaved woman in the middle of her husband’s funeral. “My sources in the community were understandably devastated by the terrible inhumanity of an insurance company failing to keep its promise to pay to bury a loved one; in their agitation they may have misspoken Ms. Warshawski’s role in the case.”
“May have misspoken? Can’t he come right out and say he was wrong?” I snarled at Morrell.
Murray had added a few sentences saying that my investigation was raising troubling questions about the role of both the Midway Insurance Agency and the Ajax Insurance company. Midway owner Howard Fepple had not returned phone calls. An Ajax spokesperson said the company had uncovered a fraudulent death claim submitted ten years ago; they were trying to see how that could have occurred.
The op-ed page had an article by the president of the Illinois Insurance Institute. I read it aloud to Morrell.
Imagine that you go into Berlin, the capital of Germany, and find a large museum dedicated to the horrors of three centuries of African slavery in the United States. Then imagine that Frankfurt, Munich, Cologne, Bonn all have smaller versions of American slavery museums. That’s what it’s like for America to put up Holocaust museums while completely ignoring atrocities committed here against Africans and Native Americans.
Now suppose Germany passed a law saying that any American company which benefited from slavery couldn’t do business in Europe. That’s what Illinois wants to do with German companies. The past is a tangled country. No one’s hands are clean, but if we have to stop every ten minutes to wash them before we can sell cars, or chemicals, or even insurance, commerce will grind to a halt.
“And so on. Lotty isn’t alone in wanting the past to stay good and buried. Pretty slick, in a superficial kind of way.”
Morrell grimaced. “Yes. It makes him sound like a warmhearted liberal, worrying about African-Americans and Indians, when all he really wants to do is keep anyone from inspecting life-insurance records to see how many policies were sold which Illinois insurers don’t want to pay out.”