Wildcat Page 2

  “Vittoria! Vieni! Usciamo!” Gabriella called up the stairs. Come, we’re leaving.

  If she stayed to argue with her mother, Gabriella would order her point-blank to stay home, in which case, even if Papa was in danger, Victoria would have to stay home. But you didn’t grow up in South Chicago without knowing exactly what a grown man meant when he said he was going to teach another man a lesson. Victoria needed to get to Marquette Park and warn her father.

  She slid her legs over the windowsill, lowered herself so that she was hanging over the tiny roof that covered the front doorway, and dropped. She shinnied down the pillar to the ground, ran to the side of the house where she’d left her bike, and took off.

  II

  Even half a mile from the park, Victoria could hear the screaming: ten thousand throats open in hate. The cops at the intersection, uniforms damp under the hot sun, were so tense that they shouted at everyone—old women asking what the trouble was, even a priest riding up on a bicycle. The cops shouted at them all, including Victoria Warshawski darting under the sawhorses that blocked Seventy-first Street.

  She had ridden her bike the three miles to Seventy-first and Stony, where she’d chained it to a streetlight. A number 71 bus was just coming along, and she climbed thankfully on board. Her torn shirt was soaked with sweat; her throat was hoarse and dry. She had eighty-two cents in her pockets. If she used thirty cents on the round-trip fare, she’d have plenty to buy a Coke when she found a vending machine.

  Seventy-first Street was blocked off half a mile from Marquette Park. Cops in riot gear were diverting all traffic, even CTA buses, in a wide loop around the park. Traffic was jammed on Western Avenue in both directions. The cops told the bus driver that no one was allowed off the bus until it got to the far side of the park, but while they were stuck in the intersection, Victoria forced open the back door and jumped out.

  When the cops at Western Avenue yelled at her, she was afraid one of them was a friend of her dad’s who had recognized her and would make her leave the area before she found him. Still, she couldn’t help turning around, to see if they were calling her by name. When she did, she saw something shocking.

  Uncle Tomasz’s white convertible pulled into the intersection. Uncle Tomasz was at the wheel; another man, a stranger to Victoria, sat next to him. She stood on tiptoe, trying to look into the backseat, but her cousin wasn’t in the car.

  The stranger was blond, like Tomasz, and riding in the open car had boiled both their faces bright red, as red as the wild shirt the stranger was wearing. At first the officer tried to stop the car, but the stranger pulled out his wallet. The cop looked around, as if checking to see who was watching. He took a bill out of the stranger’s wallet, then moved two sawhorses so the Wildcat could drive through.

  The uniformed man was taking a bribe. This was terrible! Tony Warshawski talked about this over and over again, the people who tried to give him money to get out of traffic tickets, and how wrong it was, it gave everyone on the force a bad name.

  Victoria took a picture of the cop moving the sawhorses and then of Uncle Tomasz and the stranger. Tomasz must have gotten someone to help him find her father. The two men would gang up on Tony and kill him, and then some evil cop would take a bribe to pretend not to see that it had happened.

  Victoria started running. She couldn’t beat the convertible to the park, but she had to get there as fast as she could, to find her father before Tomasz and his partner did. Even before she entered the park, she realized this was going to be nearly impossible. The crowds were so thick that a child, even a girl like Victoria who was tall for her age, couldn’t see around them. She had to fight her way through them.

  People were holding up signs with horrible words on them. One said, King would look good with a knife in his back, but the others! They said things that you were never supposed to say about anyone.

  Victoria used her elbows the way Boom-Boom had taught her and pushed her way through a massive wedge of people. They were yelling and screaming and waving Confederate flags. Some of them had sewn swastikas to their clothes, or painted them on their faces. This was also very bad: people with swastikas had killed Nonno and Nonna Sestieri.

  Even as she looked for her father, Victoria realized she couldn’t tell her mother the things she was seeing—swastikas, people calling Martin Luther King by a name worse than a swear word. She hoped Tony wouldn’t say anything, either. It would upset Gabriella terribly, and Victoria and Tony had a duty to protect Gabriella from any further unhappiness in this life.

  As she moved further west into the park, Victoria saw a group of teenagers turn a car over and set fire to it. The people near them cheered. Six policemen in riot helmets ran to the teenagers, who spat at them and started throwing rocks and bottles.

  Victoria pushed through the cheering mob to where the policemen were using their billy clubs, trying to arrest the boys who’d set the fire.

  She tugged on one officer’s arm. “Please, I’m looking for Officer Warshawski, do you know him, have you seen him?”

  “Get back, get out of the way. This is no place for a kid like you, go home to your mommy and daddy.” The man pushed her out of the way.

  “Tony Warshawski,” she cried. “He’s my dad, he’s working here, he’s a cop, I need to find him.”

  This time the men ignored her completely. They couldn’t pay attention to her—the crowd was protecting the boys, throwing rocks and cans of Coke at the officers. One can hit an officer in the head; the crowd roared with laughter when the soda spilled into his eyes, blinding him.

  “The niggers are on Homan,” someone shrieked. The whole mob swerved west, chanting, “Find the niggers, kill the niggers!”

  Victoria followed them, her legs aching, a stitch in her side making her gasp for breath. She couldn’t pay attention to her pain, it would only get in her way. She had to find Tony. She elbowed her way past the screaming adults. One of them put out a hand and grabbed her, so hard she couldn’t wriggle free.

  “And where are you going?”

  It was Father Gribac. With him were half a dozen people she recognized from her own neighborhood, two of them women carrying bags of sugar.

  “I’m looking for my dad. Have you seen him?”

  “Have you seen him, Father. Doesn’t your Jew mother teach you to respect your elders?”

  “You’re not my father!” Victoria kicked him hard on the shin; he let go of her shoulder, swearing at her in Polish.

  Victoria slithered away. The crowd was so thick that the priest couldn’t move quickly enough to catch up with her.

  “Daddy, where are you, where are you?” She realized tears were running down her cheeks. “Babies cry; you aren’t a baby.”

  She came on a drinking fountain and stopped to drink and to run her head under the stream of water. Other people came up and pushed her out of the way, but she was cooler now and could move again.

  For over an hour she pushed her way through the mob. It was like swimming in giant waves in Lake Michigan: you worked hard, but you couldn’t move very far. Every time she came to a cop, she tried to ask about Tony Warshawski. Sometimes the man would take time to shake his head, no, he didn’t know Tony. Once, someone knew Tony but hadn’t seen him. More often, the overheated officers brushed her aside.

  A cherry bomb exploded near her, filling her eyes with smoke. A rumor swept through the mob: someone had knocked King down with a rock.

  “One down, eleven million to go,” a woman cackled.

  “King Nigger’s on his feet, they’re treating him like he’s royalty while we have to suffer in the heat,” a man growled.

  Victoria saw the golf course on her right. It looked green, refreshing, and almost empty of people. She wrestled her way through the mob and made it onto the course. She climbed the short hill around one of the holes and came on the road that threaded the greens. To her amazement, Uncle Tomasz’s white convertible stood there. Neither Tomasz nor Boom-Boom was in it, only the stranger
who’d been with Uncle Tomasz back at Western Avenue. He was driving slowly, looking at the bushes.

  Victoria was too exhausted to run; she limped up to the car and started pounding on the door. “What happened to Uncle Tomasz? Where’s Boom-Boom? Where’s my dad?”

  “Who are you?” the stranger demanded. “Tomasz doesn’t have any kids!”

  “My dad, Officer Warshawski,” she screamed. “Uncle Tomasz said he was going to teach Tony a lesson. Where is he?”

  The stranger looked at her and then burst into a manic laugh. “Believe me, little girl, Tomasz is never going to teach anyone a lesson.”

  The stranger opened the door. The look on his face was terrifying. For some reason, the girl held up her camera, almost as a protection against his huge, angry face, and took his picture. He yanked at the camera strap, almost choking Victoria; the strap broke and he flung the camera onto the grass. As she bent to pick it up, he grabbed her. She bit him and kicked at him, but she couldn’t make him let go.

  III

  The battle between the cops and the protestors went on for many hours after Dr. King and his fellow marchers left the park. As sunset approached, every cop felt too limp and too numb to care about the cars that were still burning, or those that were overturned or dumped into the lagoons ringing the park. Firefighters were working on burning cars, but they were moving slowly, too.

  Patrolmen returning to their squad cars couldn’t get far: women had poured sugar into the gas tanks. After going a few hundred feet, their fuel filters clogged and the cars died. When a fireman came on a body shoved under a bush, he called over to a cop uselessly fiddling with the carburetor of his dead squad car.

  The policeman walked over on heat-swollen legs and knelt, grunting in pain as he bent his hamstrings for the first time in nine hours. The man under the bush was around forty, blond, sunburnt. And dead. The cop grunted again and lifted him by the shoulders. The back of the man’s head was a pulpy mess. Not dead from a heat stroke, as the officer had first assumed, but from a well-placed blunt instrument.

  A small crowd of firefighters and police gathered. The cop who’d first examined the body sat heavily on his butt. His eyelids were puffy from the sun.

  “You guys know the drill. Keep back, don’t mess the site up any more’n it already is.” His voice, like all his brother officers’, was raspy from heat and strain.

  “Guy here says he knows something, Bobby,” a man at the edge of the ragtag group said.

  Bobby groaned, but got to his feet when the other cop brought over a civilian in a Hawaiian print shirt. “I’m Sergeant Mallory. You know the dead man, sir?”

  The civilian shook his head. “Nope. Just saw one of the niggers hit him. Right after we got King, one of them said he’d do in the first whitey crossed his path, and I saw him take a Coke bottle and wham it into this guy.”

  The police looked at each other; Bobby returned to the civilian. “That would have been about when, sir?”

  “Maybe three, maybe four hours ago.”

  “And you waited this long to come forward?”

  “Now just a minute, Officer. Number one, I didn’t know the guy was dead, and number two, I tried getting some cop’s attention and he told me to bug off and mind my own business. Only he didn’t put it that polite, if you get my drift.”

  “How far away were you? Close enough to see the man with the Coke bottle clearly?”

  The civilian squinted in thought. “Maybe ten feet. Hard to say. People were passing back and forth, everyone doing their own thing, like the kids are saying these days, no one paying much attention, me neither, but I could make a stab at describing the nigger who hit him.”

  Bobby sighed. “Okay. We’re waiting for a squad car that works to come for us. We’ll drive you to the Chicago Lawn station, you can make a statement there, give us a description of the Negro you say you saw, and the time and all that good stuff. . . . Boys, you’re as beat as me, but let’s see if we can find that Coke bottle anywhere near here.”

  Turning to the man next to him, he muttered, “I hope to Jesus this guy can’t make an ID. The whole town will explode if we arrest some Negro for killing a white guy today.”

  As they picked through the litter of cups and bottles and car jacks that the rioters had dropped, looking for anything with hair or blood on it, a squad car drove up near them. The uniformed driver came over, followed by a civilian man.

  “Mallory! We’re looking for Tony Warshawski. Seen him?”

  Bobby looked up. “We weren’t on the same detail. I think he’s over by Homan—oh—” He suddenly recognized the civilian: Tony’s brother Bernie.

  Bobby Mallory had been Tony Warshawski’s protégé when he joined the force. Thirteen years later, he’d moved beyond Tony with promotions the older man no longer applied for, but the two remained faithful friends. Bobby had spent enough time with Tony and Gabriella that he knew Bernie and Marie as well; Bobby was an enthusiastic supporter of Boom-Boom’s ambition to supplant Golden Jet with the Blackhawks. He wished he could also support the freedom Tony and Gabriella gave their own only child, but he hated the way they let Vicki run around with Boom-Boom, like a little hooligan. Thank God Eileen was raising his own girls to be proper young ladies.

  “We’re falling down, we’re that tired, Warshawski,” Bobby said. “What’s up?”

  “Boom-Boom and Victoria,” Bernie said. “Marie’s brother, Tomasz, he stormed out of the house saying he was heading over here. The kids are missing, and one of the neighbors says Boom-Boom drove off in the car with Tomasz and then Victoria, she followed after them on her bike maybe five minutes later. I—I watched all this on TV, I know it’s World War Three in here—but the kids, Jesus—”

  Bobby interrupted him as an ambulance threaded its way through the garbage and the remaining rioters. “Gotta get a body outta here, back in a minute, Warshawski.”

  Bernie followed him. As the ambulance crew picked up the dead man, he gave a strangled cry.

  “That’s Tomasz. Marie’s brother! What happened to him?”

  He shoved past Bobby Mallory to kneel next to Tomasz. “Come on, man, get up. You’ve had your fun, now get on your feet!” He shook Tomasz’s shoulder roughly. “Where the fuck is my son? What kind of asshole are—”

  He dropped the shoulder in horror as he saw the battered side of his brother-in-law’s head. “What happened to him, Mallory? Did he crack his head on a rock?”

  “Someone cracked his head with a rock, more likely.”

  “Boom-Boom. Where’s my boy?” Bernie’s voice was cracking, and he began clawing around the underbrush where Tomasz had been lying. He saw a sneaker with the number 9 painted in red on the back. Bobby Hull’s number: Boom-Boom had painted it on his ice skates, his sneakers, and even his lace-up church shoes.

  “This here is his shoe. Find my boy, goddamn you, Mallory, find my boy!”

  Bobby didn’t say anything. Even though the sun was setting, the park was still seething. Knots of fifteen or twenty rioters kept passing the area where Tomasz had been killed, screaming abuse at Mallory and the rest of the force. A troop of cops, so exhausted they could barely put one leg in front of the other, arrived to help secure the crime scene.

  “Traitors! Traitors to your race and your neighborhood!” a woman screamed. “Tell your precious archbishop we’re never coming back to Mass. All that money he’s spending, he can get it from the niggers!”

  Bernie Warshawski stared at her in shock: it was a woman from his own parish, and near her was the St. Eloy priest, Father Gribac. The woman took a rock out of her pocket, but Bernie reached her and held her arm before she could throw it.

  “Bertha! Bertha Djiak, what would your children say if they saw you doing this?”

  “Out of my way, High-and-mighty Warshawski. Because your brother is a cop, you turn traitor, too?”

  Still holding her arm, Bernie turned to the priest. “Father—it’s my boy! He’s disappeared. Someone murdered Marie’s brother, righ
t here in the park, and I can’t find Boom-Boom.”

  IV

  It was completely black inside the trunk, and very hot. For a few minutes, Victoria screamed and kicked as the car bounced along. When they stopped, the man yelled, “No one will hear you.” His voice was muffled, but he was bending over, close to the edge of the trunk.

  He was right. The screams from the mob were so loud, Victoria could barely hear the police and fire sirens above them. She would suffocate in here. No one would ever find her; Mama would be heartbroken. Papa, too, but it was chiefly of her mother that Victoria was thinking.

  Now she knew how Mama had felt when she was hiding in a cave in the mountains. Thinking of Gabriella made Victoria stop crying. Mama had been seventeen in 1944. Her papa had been arrested almost a year earlier and sent by the Germans to their death camp in Poland. At three in the morning, a neighbor came into the room where Gabriella and her mother were living. The neighbor’s brother worked for the police in the town of Pitigliano, and he had told the neighbor to warn Gabriella’s mother that she would be arrested for Jewish activities.

  Gabriella had a cardboard suitcase under her bed, ready for her to leave at a second’s notice. Underwear, a heavy sweater, and eight red Venetian wineglasses, part of Papa’s family for two hundred years: she had a duty to keep them safe. Gabriella went to the home of another neighbor, who had offered to hide her in the basement, only to learn that this neighbor had been arrested earlier that night. And so Gabriella fled on foot into the mountains.

  “How did you live, Mama?” Victoria asked.

  “By my wits,” Gabriella said. “There are three laws to survive: keep calm, think, and be lucky. You can’t control luck, but you can stay calm and think.”

  In the trunk of Uncle Tomasz’s car, Victoria stopped crying. Stay calm. Think. Pray for luck.

  One night at dinner Papa had talked about stopping a car for missing a taillight. “The driver was so nervous, I went to look more closely at the missing light. He had twenty M14 rifles in the trunk, and one of them had broken out the light—the barrel was sticking out.”