Wildcat Read online

  If she could find the inside of one of the taillights, Victoria could break it and stick her arm out. Maybe someone would see her. Anyway, she would have air; she wouldn’t choke to death in this horrible hot trunk. She needed to scooch down so she could pull up the carpet that covered the bottom of the trunk.

  The car was new, and the carpet was glued down firmly. Victoria couldn’t find any place to stick a finger and start ripping. A sob shuddered through her.

  “Stop!” she ordered herself. “Keep calm and think.”

  The spare tire was punching into her back. And under the spare tire there would be tools. The jack, the wrench for taking off bolts.

  Slowly, sweating so badly in the oven of the trunk that her body was sliding inside her skirt and torn blouse, she turned over. She found the hooks that held the carpet over the tire. Undid them. She was thirsty and sleepy.

  Sleep would kill her. Stay alert, that is what Mama did. If she slept, the Fascist patrols might sneak up.

  She stuck an arm under the carpet but couldn’t move the tire to get at the jack beneath it. Are you going to start crying again? a voice seemed to come from outside her head. Don’t. I have no use for babies.

  She maneuvered her arm and then her shoulders and head under the carpet. Her trembling fingers bumped into a set of wires. She didn’t know what they were for, but she pulled on them, pulled with all her might. They cut into her palms, and she pulled harder.

  Suddenly she saw light through the thick carpet, felt cooler air on her bare legs. She was near the end of her strength, had just enough left to move out from under the carpet. The wires she’d pulled were connected to the trunk release. She blinked, blinded by the light of the setting sun, and managed to crawl over the lip of the trunk and roll onto the grass.

  V

  Boom-Boom had been all over the park, trying to find Uncle Tony. At first, when Uncle Tomasz roared up Route 41 to Seventy-first Street, he was having a great time. He knew his cousin had been watching from the attic. He could picture his mother rushing to the sidewalk, yelling after him, and then trying to get his father to chase after him. In their old Ford—like to see him try to catch the Wildcat.

  They stopped at a barbershop at Seventy-first and Euclid, where Uncle Tomasz knew the owner. He made a phone call and fidgeted around, joking with the barbers, but kind of tense underneath. He kept looking out the window. After about fifteen minutes, a man with thinning blond hair came in. He looked around, saw Uncle Tomasz, and jerked his head toward the door.

  Boom-Boom was following his uncle to the street, but the man stared at him with the meanest eyes Boom-Boom had ever seen. “You stay in the shop and wait for your uncle there,” he said in a voice so cold Boom-Boom turned around and went back in.

  He asked Uncle Tomasz’s friend who the man was, but the barber only shook his head and gave Boom-Boom a dime for the Coke machine. The machine was next to the front door. As Boom-Boom bought his soda, he saw the stranger get behind the steering wheel. Uncle Tomasz was letting this complete stranger drive his car, while he sat stiffly in the passenger seat.

  When they took off, Boom-Boom ran after, the Coke bottle still in hand. He almost caught up with the Wildcat at the stoplight on Stony Island, but as soon as the light turned green, the car was gone. A westbound bus lumbered into view and Boom-Boom boarded it by darting in through the back door as passengers were exiting.

  When the traffic gummed up near Marquette Park, Boom-Boom jumped off. He jogged along the street and caught a break: he saw the Wildcat make its way around the sawhorses, although he wasn’t close enough to see money change hands. If he’d been looking for her, he would have seen his cousin before she was swept up in the crowds entering the park, but in his imagination, she was still leaning out his attic window.

  He hadn’t known how hot and tired he could get, pushing and shoving his way through mobs in the park, looking for the Wildcat. It wasn’t that there were so many cars—almost no one except cops, firefighters, and journalists had been allowed to bring a car in—but the waves of people, yelling, charging in different directions, “Hunting niggers,” as many of them shouted.

  In the back of his mind, away from his fatigue and his fear for what the man with the mean face would do to Uncle Tomasz, Boom-Boom thought his cousin and her mother were right: those ugly words were worse than swearing. They turned ordinary faces into something monstrous, not quite human.

  At one point he saw people from his own neighborhood. Bertha Djiak, who poked him during Mass if he talked to one of his buddies, there she was, her hair clumped with sweat, her face redder than ketchup from the sun, her lips flecked white. He ducked behind some thick shrubbery. And saw the mean stranger.

  Uncle Tomasz lay on the ground, so still he might have been asleep. Boom-Boom looked from his uncle to the stranger, and the stranger lunged for him.

  “Oh, yes, the nephew, the up-and-coming Golden Jet. I think you and I need to talk about your hockey future, boy.”

  Boom-Boom turned to flee, tripped over a root in the shrubbery, and fell flat. The stranger lunged for him and grabbed his left foot. Boom-Boom kicked, wriggled, and felt his sneaker pop off. He jumped to his feet and ran.

  After ducking and weaving through the shifting crowds, Boom-Boom stopped to breathe. The sun was setting, but the air was still thick and hot. His throat was raw from running. He needed water and started looking for a drinking fountain. As he scrambled to the top of a knoll to look for a fountain and check on his pursuer, he saw the Wildcat, its trunk standing open. It was pointing nose-down at one of the lagoons. In fact, it would have gone in except someone had rolled a squad car into the water—the Wildcat’s front left tire had caught on the squad car.

  He stumbled down the hill to the car. He began to wonder if he’d died, if he was in heaven seeing visions, because his cousin Victoria was lying in the grass next to the trunk.

  VI

  It was dark by the time the cousins and their fathers found each other. When Victoria saw Tony, she burst into tears.

  “Pepaiola, cara mia, cuore mio,” Tony crooned, the only Italian he’d picked up from Gabriella—my little pepperpot, he called his daughter. “What’s to cry about now, huh?”

  “Uncle Tomasz said he would kill you because he lost his job,” she sobbed. “I wanted to warn you, but this man, this friend of Uncle Tomasz’s, he picked me up and put me in the trunk. I was scared, Papa, I’m sorry, but I was scared, I didn’t want you to die and I couldn’t tell you, and I didn’t want me to die, either.”

  “No, sweetheart, and neither of us is dead, so it all worked out. Let’s get you home so your mama can stop crying her eyes out and give you a bath.”

  “What man, Vicki?” Bobby asked—the only person who ever used a nickname that Gabriella hated.

  “The man with Uncle Tomasz. I saw them when they—Papa, they gave money to the cop at the intersection and he let them into the park. I took his picture—Oh! my camera, he broke the strap and threw my camera away, my special camera you gave me, Papa, I’m sorry, I didn’t look after it like you made me promise.”

  Victoria started to cry harder, but Bobby told her to dry her eyes and pay attention. “We need you to help us, Vicki. We need to see if your camera is still here, if no one stole it. So you be a big girl and stop crying and show your Uncle Bobby where you were when this man picked you up.”

  “It’s dark,” Tony protested. “She’s all in, Bobby.”

  Victoria frowned in the dark. “It was where you come into the golf course. One of the hills where the holes are on the Seventy-first Street side of the park. I know, there was a statue near me, I don’t know whose.”

  With this much information, Bobby set up searchlights near the statue of the Lithuanian aviators Darius and Girenas, although none of the cops believed they’d find one small Brownie camera in the detritus left in the park.

  When Boom-Boom whispered to his cousin the news that Tomasz was dead and the cops needed to find the man who’d been
with him, Victoria miraculously found some reserve of energy from childhood’s reservoir. She tried to remember in her body how slowly she’d moved, where she’d twisted and turned on the walking paths, and finally cut across the grass to one of the knolls. Boom-Boom stayed with her; within another five minutes, they found the Brownie.

  Bobby took custody of it, promising on his honor as a policeman that he’d give the camera back the instant the pictures were developed. The cousins finally got into their fathers’ cars.

  At home, they received varying receptions from their mothers: both women frantic, both doting on their only children, each showing it with tears, and then a slap for being foolhardy and disobedient. Gabriella instantly repented the slap and took her daughter into the bathroom to personally shampoo Victoria’s rough mass of curls.

  “When I was locked in the trunk, Mama, I thought I would die. And then I remembered you hiding in the cave in the mountains, and you made me brave. Stay calm and think, you said that, and be lucky. I stayed calm, and I was lucky.”

  Victoria showed her mother the welts in her palm from where she’d tugged on the cable that miraculously released the trunk lock.

  Gabriella hugged her more tightly. “I’m happy, I’m happy that I can protect you even when I’m not with you, because I cannot always be with you. But, carissima, when will you learn to think first, before you run headlong into danger? This Tomasz, this brother of Marie’s, he was a . . . mafioso—un ladro, a thief—he stole from Metzger’s Meats for the mafia, and sold the meat to supper clubs in Wisconsin. He blamed the janitor, who is a Negro man, for losing his job, because the janitor reported seeing him taking all that meat out of the truck.

  “But your papa is telling me, Tomasz also cheated his capo in the mafia, and this was a man also named Antony. It is not such a rare name, Victoria. If you asked me, I would tell you this thing, that your papa is in danger from the calca—the . . . the mob, that is the word—in the park, but not from this brother of Marie, and then you do not get the most biggest frightening of your life. And also, then you are not giving me the same gigantic frightening.”

  And of course, as it turned out, when Bobby got the pictures developed, the man who abducted Victoria, who flung her into the trunk of the Wildcat—which he got several spirited youths to push into the lagoon—was the Tony who worked in Don Pasquale’s organization.

  Tomasz had been stealing meat from Metzger’s and selling it in Wisconsin for the mob, but he’d taken more than his share of the profits. Don Pasquale sent Tony in his red Hawaiian shirt to Marquette Park to kill Tomasz under cover of the riots. The Don wasn’t happy with his hit man for letting a little girl with a camera get the best of him: he refused to post his bail.

  When Tony Warshawski reported the successful arrest of Tony-the-thief, he brought a red rose to his daughter, to thank her for her share in the rescue.

  “No, Antony, no,” Gabriella protested. “I do not want her to think she is a heroine, who can go saving people in danger. She will only be in danger herself, she will be injured, she will break my heart. Victoria, you must promise me: you are going to study at a university, no? You can be a doctor, or—I don’t know, anything, you can do anything in your life that you wish, perhaps you can even become a judge or the first woman president, but do not be putting yourself in front of killers and mafiosi. Promise me this!”

  Victoria looked up at the dark eyes filled with tears and love. She clung to her mother’s thin body. “Of course, Mama, of course I promise you.”

  About V.I.

  V.I. Warshawski was born on July 27. The year is under dispute, but she was born with the sun in Leo and Gemini rising. Her chart reads: “Extremely active by nature, you like to get around and meet people. Very restless, you can’t seem to stay put. Because of the high nervous tension you always have, athletic activity would be a good way for you to burn off energy.”

  Private detective is a perfect occupation for a woman with that kind of personality. These days, V.I. often complains about how the Internet has changed detective work. She used to be out and about, going through public records or tailing people to get information that now is best found online. For someone with her active nature, sitting in front of a computer is a kind of torment.

  V.I. grew up under the shadow of the old steel mills on Chicago’s South Side. Her father was a cop; her mother a refugee from Mussolini’s Italy. Her mother had aspired to an operatic career but ended up giving music lessons to neighbors’ children. She died of ovarian cancer when V.I. was in her teens, a loss that still haunts the detective. The eight red Venetian wineglasses that her mother brought with her from her home town near Orvieto are V.I.’s most prized possession. V.I. keeps cracking or breaking them, which terrifies me as much as it does the fictional character.

  V.I., as her horoscope says, is impatient and restless; she doesn’t stay home long enough to keep house. Although she likes good food, she often eats on the run, spilling chili down her favorite silk blouses because she’s eating while driving. She drinks Johnnie Walker Black Label whisky and loves red wine, especially from Torgiano, the hill country where her mother grew up.

  V.I. Warshawski attended the University of Chicago on an athletic scholarship. She played basketball for the Division III Maroons. She went to law school there as well, something of an anomaly as a progressive blue-collar young woman in a school that where Antonin Scalia taught. She worked for several years in the Cook County Public Defender’s office before becoming a private investigator in 1982.

  V.I. was married once as a young woman. The marriage lasted about eighteen months, when she found her husband only admired independent women from a distance. These days, she’s a serial monogamist. She lives alone, but shares two dogs with her neighbor, Mr. Contreras, a retired machinist whose main hobby is V.I. herself.

  V.I.’s chart adds that “you are stubborn about your right to live your life according to your own principles. You appreciate truth and honesty;you practice it yourself and expect it of others.” I couldn’t have put it better.

  An Excerpt from Fallout

  Chapter 1

  Playing the Sap—Again

  “The police say it was drug-related, ma’am. They think August was stealing to deal.” Angela Creedy spoke so softly I had to lean forward to hear her.

  “That is a bêtise—a . . . a lie, a stupidity.” Bernadine Fouchard stomped her foot for emphasis.

  “Bernie, my little volcano, you could be right, but I have no idea what, or even who, you’re talking about. Can you start at the beginning?”

  Angela had been looking at her clasped hands, her face tight with worry, but that made her give a brief smile. “You are a little volcano, Bernie. Maybe that’s what we’ll start calling you at the training table. The thing is, August is missing, and when this break-in happened—”

  “They had to pick on someone,” Bernie interrupted. “And because he is black—”

  Angela put a hand over Bernie’s mouth. “August is my cousin, ma’am. I don’t really know him—I’m from Shreveport, and he grew up in Chicago. We don’t have the kind of family that stages big reunions. I haven’t seen him since he was about eight or nine and came down with his mama to visit. Anyway, when I connected with him, after I moved up here, it turned out he’s trying to be a filmmaker, but he works as a personal trainer to support himself. He also videos parties—weddings, kids’ birthdays, things like that. It just seemed like the perfect combo.”

  The southern lilt in her soft voice made it hard for me to understand her. “Perfect for what?” I asked.

  Bernie flung up her hands. “But to help us train and video us when we play, naturellement, so we can see where we must improve!”

  Bernadine Fouchard was a rising hockey player. Her father had been my cousin Boom-Boom’s closest friend on the Blackhawks, and he’d asked Boom-Boom to be Bernie’s godfather. Now that she was a first-year student and athletic star at Northwestern, I had sort of inherited her.

  �
��Angela is also an athlete?” I asked.

  “Can’t you tell? She is like a . . . a giraffe. She plays basketball and plays very well.”

  Angela looked at her in annoyance but went back to her narrative. “Anyway, Bernie and I, we’re both freshmen, we have a lot to prove before we can be starters, so we started going to the Six-Points Gym, because that’s where my cousin works and it’s not far from campus.”

  “When this gym was broken into two nights ago, the police, at first they thought it was a prank, because of Halloween, but then today they said it must have been August, which is a scandale,” Bernie put in. “So I told Angela about you, and we agreed you are the exact person for proving he never did this thing.”

  Bernie favored me with a brilliant smile, as if she were the queen bestowing an important medal on me. I felt more as though the queen’s horse was kicking me in the stomach.

  “What does August say about it?”

  “He’s disappeared,” Bernie said. “I think he’s hiding—”

  “Bernie, I’m going to call you a volcanic kangaroo, you jump around so much.” Angela warned, her voice rising in exasperation. “The gym manager says August told her he was going away for a week but he didn’t say where, just that it was a confidential project. He’s a contract employee, so he doesn’t get vacation time—he takes unpaid leave if he wants to go.”

  “He didn’t tell you?” I asked.

  Angela shook her head. “We’re not that close, ma’am. I mean, I like him, but, you know how it is when you play college ball—Bernie told me you played basketball for the University of Chicago—you’re training, you’re practicing, you’re fitting in your classes. Girls’ ball isn’t like boys’: we have to graduate, we have to take our courses seriously. Not that I don’t want to—I love everything I’m studying—but there isn’t time left over for family. And August is pretty private anyway. He’s never even invited me to his home.”