Wildcat Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Wildcat

  About V.I.

  An Excerpt from Fallout Chapter 1: Playing the Sap—Again

  Chapter 2: Fit for Life

  About the Author

  Also by Sara Paretsky

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Wildcat

  I

  The heat in the attic was so heavy that not even the flies had enough energy to move. The two children lay on the floor. Sweat rose on their skin, gluing their clothes to the linoleum.

  Normally on a hot August Friday, they’d be at the beach, but Marie Warshawski had decreed that her son must remain close to home today. Normally the cousins would have disregarded this edict, but today Victoria was nervous, wanting to hear as much of the grown-up gossip as possible.

  She and Boom-Boom—Bernard to his mother—often spent afternoons together: that was when Victoria’s mother gave music lessons in the minute front room of her own South Chicago bungalow. If Victoria stayed home, she either had to read quietly in her attic room or sit primly in the front room to watch and learn from her mother’s few good singers.

  Just as a student was starting to warm up, Victoria would announce glibly that she would visit Aunt Marie, choosing not to notice her mother’s prohibition against running wild with her cousin.

  In the winters, Victoria followed Boom-Boom to the makeshift ice rinks where he played a rough brand of pick-up hockey. No girls allowed, period, which caused some fights between the cousins—away from the other boys, Boom-Boom wanted Victoria to help him perfect the slapshot of his idol, Boom-Boom Geoffrion.

  “Tough,” she’d say before skating to the other side of the rink. “Girls can’t play hockey, remember?” He’d skate after her, they’d argue and even wrestle, until he went down on one knee and said, “Victoria, please help me. When I’m a star with the Blackhawks, I’ll get you free tickets to every game.”

  In the summers, the cousins spent hours together. With the rest of the neighborhood, they played pick-up baseball in Calumet Park. Or they pooled their coins to take bus and train up to Wrigley Field, where they climbed over the wall behind the bleachers and sneaked into the park. Or they dared each other to jump off the breakwater into Lake Calumet, or rode their bikes past the irate guards at the South Works, playing a complicated hide-and-seek among the mountains of slag.

  This Friday, Victoria was too worried about her father to stray from Aunt Marie’s home. Tony Warshawski was a police officer. Along with every other cop on the South Side, Officer Warshawski had been ordered to Marquette Park to help keep the peace.

  Martin Luther King had come to Chicago in January 1966. He was living in an apartment, a slum, the newspapers called it. All summer long, there had been marches in different parts of the city, with Negroes and their white supporters demanding open housing, an end to real estate covenants, access to Lake Michigan beaches, access to city jobs.

  “What are real estate covenants?” Victoria had asked her mother.

  “White people who own apartment buildings or houses made a law that Negro people can only rent apartments in one part of the city,” Gabriella said. “They cannot be our neighbors here in South Chicago, for example.”

  “And they don’t want to be!” Aunt Marie exclaimed. “They know their place, or they did, until that commie King showed up here. And we’re supposed to call him a doctor and a reverend? He’s just a trouble-maker who can’t live without seeing his face on TV or his picture in the paper. We don’t need him here in Chicago, stirring people up, causing trouble.”

  And trouble there’d been, by the truckload. Everywhere the marchers went—Negroes along with their white supporters—including nuns and priests, to Aunt Marie’s fury—riots had followed. White people, who’d only ever seen Negroes on public transportation or cleaning the bathrooms in their office buildings, were furious at the thought that Negroes might become their next-door neighbors, swim at the same beaches, even become bus drivers. They threw bricks and bottles and cherry bombs while the police tried to keep order. Tony Warshawski had been away from home for three days at a time, working treble shifts along with every other cop in the city.

  Today would be worse, Tony had told his wife and daughter Friday morning before he left for work: everyone’s nerves were on edge. Nothing Mayor Daley said could stop the marchers, and nothing Dr. King said could get the real estate board to change their laws against open housing.

  Anger in the Lithuanian and Irish and Polish neighborhoods grew when the city’s new archbishop made every priest read a letter to the parish on open housing as part of a Christ-like life.

  “They kicked the archbishop out of New Orleans,” Marie fumed. “He made the Catholic schools take in colored children, but the people hated him for doing it and made him leave. I don’t know why the pope thought we need him here! When he left New Orleans, the priests sang a thanksgiving hymn as soon as they saw him get on the plane. He’s been here a year and he thinks he knows better than us what we should be doing? We’re the ones who built the church here! Why doesn’t he listen to his priests?”

  Her own parish priest at St. Eloy’s read Archbishop Cody’s letter, since he was a good soldier in Christ’s army, but Father Gribac also preached a thundering sermon, telling his congregation that Christians had a duty to fight Communists and look after their families.

  Aunt Marie repeated the gist of Father Gribac’s remarks when she dropped in on Gabriella earlier in the week. “Everybody knows this King person is a Communist.”

  “He is a pastor. He cannot be a Communist,” Gabriella objected.

  “They chose to make him a preacher as a cover, that’s how the Communists operate,” Marie rebutted. “Father Gribac says he’s tired of the archbishop sitting in his mansion like God on a throne, not caring about white people in this city. We’re the ones who built these churches, but Archbishop Cody wants to let those ni—”

  “Not that word in my house, Marie,” Gabriella said sharply.

  “Oh, you can be as high-and-mighty as you like, Gabriella, but what about us? What about the lives we worked so hard to make here?”

  “Mama Warshawski, she tells me always how hard it is to be Polish in this city in 1925,” Gabriella said. “The Germans have been coming here first, next the Irish. They want no Poles taking their jobs away. Mama tells me how they call Papa Warshawski names when he looks for work. And Anthony, he has to do many hard jobs at the police, they are Irish, they aren’t liking Polish people at first. It is always the way, Marie. It is sad, but it is always the way, the ones that come first want to keep out the ones who come second.”

  Marie made a noise like the engine on the truck her brother Tomasz drove for Metzger’s Meats; she pursed her lips and leaned over to ask Gabriella how she would feel if her precious Victoria brought home one of them as a husband.

  All Gabriella and Marie had in common was the fact that their husbands were brothers. On politics, on child-rearing, even on religion, they were forever twanging each other’s last nerve. Maybe especially on religion. Marie had a painting or statue of the Virgin in every room in her house. The Sacred Heart of Jesus inside her front door was a sight that shocked and fascinated Victoria, the large red heart, with flames shooting out the top and barbed wire crushed around its throbbing middle (“Those are thorns,” Aunt Marie snapped. “If your mother cared about your immortal soul, you’d go to catechism like Bernard and learn about Jesus and his Crown of Thorns.”).

  Gabriella wouldn’t allow such images in her home. She told Victoria it was pagan to worship the heart of your god: “almost a cannibal, to want display the heart—barberica!” Gabriella didn’t think like this because her father was a Jew; after all, her mother an
d her aunt Rosa, who, like Gabriella, had migrated to Chicago from Italy, were Catholics. It was more that Gabriella despised all religion.

  When Father Gribac from St. Eloy’s came to visit Gabriella, to demand that she have Victoria baptized to save her daughter from eternal torment, Gabriella told him, “Religion is responsible for too many torments people suffer here in this life. If there is a God, he won’t demand a few drops of water on my daughter’s head as proof of her character. She should be honest, she should always work her hardest, do her best work, and when she says, ‘I will do this thing,’ she must do that thing. If she cannot live in such a way, no water will change her.”

  The priest had been furious. He tried to talk to Tony Warshawski about Gabriella.

  Peace-loving Tony put up his big hands and backed away. “I don’t try to come between my wife and my daughter. If you were a married man, Father, you’d know that a mother tiger protecting her young looks tame next to a mother human. No, I’m not lecturing my wife for you.”

  After that, Father Gribac glowered at Victoria whenever he saw her on the street. He tried to tell Marie to keep her own son away from the den of unbelievers, but Bernie Warshawski—who was usually as placid as his brother Tony—told the priest not to meddle in his family.

  Besides, the sisters-in-law only lived four blocks apart; they needed each other’s help in keeping an eye on two of the most enterprising children in a wild neighborhood. Tony and Bernie suspected, too, that Gabriella and Marie also needed the drama of their arguments. True, Gabriella gave music lessons, Marie worked in the Guild of St. Mary, but both led lives of hard work; they needed excitement, and recounting each other’s monstrous deeds or words gave their lives a running drama.

  The summer of 1966, there’d been too much excitement for anyone’s comfort. Although today’s riots were almost ten miles away, on this sticky August Friday, all the mothers had cancelled their children’s lessons with Gabriella: better keep them locked inside than run the risk of a stray cherry bomb flying in. At five o’clock, Gabriella walked to Marie’s house to collect Victoria.

  Marie was chopping onions for stew: even on a hot day she made a cooked meal for her husband and son. “Bernie works on the docks, he needs to keep up his strength,” Marie said when Gabriella recoiled from the steaming kitchen.

  In the attic, Boom-Boom and Victoria moved to the top of the steep staircase to listen to their mothers.

  “Antony needs to keep up his strength, too, but not with roasted pork when it’s ninety degrees outside. They are big men, Bernard and Antony. Oh, if only he does not get hurt today!” The last sentence came out as an anguished plea.

  “Our people will protect him,” Marie said. “Father Gribac is going to the park with some of the members of the church, to show solidarity.”

  “They are the ones I worry about!” Gabriella cried. “I have seen those faces this summer, the hatred, the words on the signs! I thought I was back in Italy watching the Fascists attack my father, when I saw the photographs in the paper.”

  “Oh, the press, the press,” Marie said. “They just want to make good Christians look bad. They try to make the police look bad, too, when they’re just trying to protect property.”

  “But in Birmingham, the police, they are going against little black girls. Is that right, to send a large dog onto a small child? Besides, here in Chicago, Antony, he tells me the police have the strictest orders to protect Dr. King and all the marchers.”

  “Yes, I heard Tony say that, and I can’t believe it!” Little flecks of spit covered Marie’s mouth. “The police! They’re collaborating with these outside agitators instead of looking after the community. They should know that the community isn’t going to take that betrayal sitting down!”

  “Marie!” Gabriella’s voice was quiet with fury. “What happens if this community attacks my husband, who is, after all, your own husband’s brother, what then? What will Bernard do if Anthony is injured in such a way?”

  The smell from the kitchen, roast pork and onions, came up the stairwell with their mothers’ voices.

  “That smell makes me sick to my stomach,” Victoria said.

  She got up from the floor and went to the window, her Brownie camera dangling from her wrist on its leather strap. She had turned ten a week earlier, and the camera was a special present from her parents; she took it with her everywhere.

  Boom-Boom started to argue with her about the smell, just to be arguing, but Victoria cut him short.

  “Your uncle Tomasz just drove up. Have you seen his car? White convertible, red leather. He’s got the top down.” She opened the screen to stick her head all the way out the window. “What is it? A Thunderbird?”

  “Buick Wildcat,” Boom-Boom joined her. “He talked about it last Sunday at dinner.”

  Tomasz got out of the car, stroking the steering wheel as if it were a dog or some other living creature. The cousins watched him disappear around the side of the house.

  “How could he afford it?” Victoria asked. “Metzger’s fired him last week.”

  “That was a crock,” Boom-Boom said. “It never would have happened if Commie King hadn’t come to town.”

  “But Uncle Tomasz was stealing from Metzger’s,” Victoria argued. “It’s what Papa said. How could that be Martin Luther King’s fault?”

  “He was not stealing!” Boom-Boom fired back. “Uncle Tomasz was framed by the janitor, and he’s a nigger like King and all those other commies. Now that King is in town they think they own everything.”

  “Boom-Boom! Mama says that’s the worst word to say, worse than goddamn it, or any other swear word.”

  For a moment, the cousins forgot the argument downstairs in their own fight, which degenerated quickly to punches. Although Boom-Boom was a year older and bigger, he was also the one who’d taught Victoria to defend herself, which she was ready to do at a moment’s notice. It was only when he tore her shirt at the collar that they stopped, looking at each other in dismay: what would Gabriella say when she saw the torn shirt, or Marie when she saw the bruise on Boom-Boom’s shoulder?

  Over their sudden silence, they heard Uncle Tomasz say to Aunt Marie, “Better enjoy that pork roast, sis. Won’t be more where that came from for a while.”

  “See?” Victoria hissed. “What did I tell you?”

  “Nothing. You told me nothing! Everyone at Metzger’s got cheap meat for their families; it was a . . . a . . . I can’t think of the word, but Dad told me it was like an extra job benefit. I’m going down to look at the car. Uncle Tomasz will let me drive it around the block, you just watch. But no girls allowed!”

  “No girl wants to ride in a stinky stolen car,” Victoria shouted as her cousin thundered down the stairs.

  She stayed at the window, watching her cousin jump over the door into the driver’s seat. She wanted to ride in that car so bad, almost bad enough to make up with Boom-Boom. But Mama had explained why the words of hate were wrong and dangerous.

  “Carissima, you will never know Nonno and Nonna Sestieri because the Fascists arrest them, send them to prison for no crime, only for being Jews. My mother, your nonna, she was born as a Christian but after my papa was arrested, she started lighting lights on Friday night, as Jews do everywhere. We had no money, no candles, nothing, but she found axel grease and rubbed it on old cardboard circles and set them to light, to say to the neighbors and the Fascists, I will not bend to your hate-filled laws.

  “She sent me into hiding the day before they came for her. Both of them, they were sent to Germany to die. And it all started with hateful words and spitting and throwing rocks and making people drink a bottle of oil in the night. It starts with name calling and ends with death, always. That is why we do not use ugly words when we talk about the Negroes, or Dr. King, because our own family was murdered, and it started with ugly names.”

  “I will not bend to hate,” Victoria said, loudly enough for her cousin to hear her.

  Boom-Boom didn’t look up but honk
ed the horn and turned the steering wheel, twiddling the radio dial, even though the engine wasn’t on and he couldn’t make it play. He pushed a button somewhere on the dashboard and the trunk popped open. Victoria wanted more than ever to go down and see how the magic trunk worked.

  Uncle Bernie came up the walk just then and stopped to talk to Boom-Boom. Victoria couldn’t hear what they said, but she thought her uncle looked worried, maybe even a bit angry. He slammed the trunk shut and went around the back and in through the kitchen, which is how they all came and went in the neighborhood.

  Victoria heard him greet her mother and her aunt, and then tell Tomasz that they needed to talk. He took his brother-in-law out into the tiny hall that connected kitchen to front room. Victoria went back to the stairwell and lay flat to listen to them.

  “That car, Tomasz, that set you back more than a buck, didn’t it? I ran into Lucco on the bus this morning: he said Tony is very unhappy with you.”

  I bet he is, Victoria thought. Her father hated people like Uncle Tomasz stealing and acting like they were kings of the mountain instead of working hard and being honest.

  “What’s Tony got to do with it?” Tomasz tried to sound brave, but Victoria could tell from his voice that he was nervous.

  “He thinks you got rid of more meat than just the roasts you brought home to Marie,” Uncle Bernie said. “He thinks you owe him something. That car is going to be a red flag to him. If I were you, I’d return the car before Boom-Boom gets a scratch on it, and I’d make nice with Tony.”

  “Why should I be afraid of Tony?” Tomasz said. “Did he stand up for me when that nigger janitor ratted on me? I’m going over to Marquette Park, which is where he said he’d be, and I’ll teach him a lesson about loyalty he won’t forget in a hurry.”

  Tomasz’s feet pounded through the downstairs and out the front door. Victoria heard the door slam and ran back to the window, in time to see Tomasz shove Boom-Boom over to the passenger seat and take off.