Dirty Fire (20 page)

Kay Cieloczki stood at the doorway to the converted downstairs bedroom that served as Gil’s den. These days, it was also serving as a makeshift home office for the work her husband was bringing from the downtown office he saw only infrequently.

It was now late morning, hours since the shootout. Gil had called from the hospital, the concern for the two wounded officers weighing down his words. One man—a Cook County officer named Erlich, with whom Gil had recently met—was dead; two Lake Tower officers were wounded, one of them critically.

Gil did not know when he would be home, he told his wife. In the interim, Kay was not to worry. Right.

She needed to calm her mind—
no,
she told herself,
to
fill
it
. She walked through her home, looking for labor that would block out her concern. And so she found herself outside Gil’s home office.

This was, she recognized, a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for her.

By nature, Gil was a neat person—so well organized, in fact, that it sometimes exasperated Kay, who considered herself no slouch when it came to the neatness department. Typically, Gil would enter a room—say, the kitchen—on one errand or another. There, he would notice a spoon or bowl on a counter, and thoughtfully return it to its assigned space and designated cupboard. Or he would enter the living room, note that it was empty, and innocently press the button that turned the TV off.

Never mind that in both cases Kay—herself perfectly capable of clearing counters and powering down electronic devices—might only have stepped out of the room momentarily.

Early in their marriage, it had been a source of occasional domestic friction that startled, then puzzled, a consistently contrite Gil. Now it was usually relegated to the status of an inside joke between them, one that Kay had taught herself to accept with grace. Still, bowls she had set out moments before continued to fly back to cupboards, television screens mysteriously were blank upon her return to whatever room through which her husband had passed in her absence.

It could be, Kay occasionally admitted to herself, maddeningly to the extreme. It brought a kind of
Odd Couple
aspect to their relationship.

Ironically, Gil’s deep preoccupation with the Levinstein arson was almost a relief to Kay. The demands of the case, combined with the fire department’s administrative workload with which Gil routinely dealt, had an impact in the Cieloczki household. For virtually the first time since in their marriage, the roles were reversed.

Kay surveyed the low coffee table next to Gil’s favorite chair with some measure of satisfaction. File folders, computer printouts, stacks of loose paper covered the tabletop—left where they lay when the call summoning Gil to the hospital had come early this morning.

It’s my turn to be Felix,
Kay thought, and smiled to herself.
And he can find out how it feels to play Oscar.

Kay moved toward the clutter and almost stepped on the plastic box half hidden on the floor beneath the table. It was the case to a videotape, but there was no label or marking to identify it or the cassette inside. She frowned;
that
was unusual in the Cieloczki household, unless the tape was blank. And if it was blank, why would it be in Gil’s stack of take-home work?

Kay shrugged and put the videotape on Gil’s chair. She began to straighten the table, starting with the tallest stack of folders.

Maybe,
she thought to herself,
I’ll pop it in the VCR later. Then I’ll paste on a label—handwritten, so he’ll notice who’s picking up after him.

It was a satisfying thought, one that almost made her chuckle out loud.

“I have to see you,” Ellen said to me. “I think I’m being followed.”

Then she giggled, as if she had told an off-color joke.

She had called from the cell phone she had taken to carrying, telephoning the Lake County Fire Department and catching me at the desk Gil’s secretary had found for me. I sat on the periphery of the fire department’s cramped administrative work area, hard against a waist-high railing that marked the Lake Tower Sanitation department’s turf. I tried not to think of it as a metaphor for my current circumstances.

Around me, clerical workers whose names I did not know typed and filed and checked yellow work orders against plat maps. It was not the most private place to discuss whatever pursuit fantasies might have motivated my former spouse to call.

“Davey? Are you there?”

In the background, I could hear the ambient sounds of automotive traffic, the muted hum made by a multitude of conversations and, incongruously, the strains of what sounded like a
mariachi
band.

“Where are you, Ellen?”

“Where am I?” she repeated, and for an instant I thought she was asking me for the information. “Downtown, at a darling little sidewalk cantina. I don’t know the name of it—oh. It’s
Hermosita’s,
just off Michigan on Erie. I took an early lunch, Davey. I can do that, you know.”

“Have you been drinking?”

“I won’t dignify that with an answer.” Then she giggled again; this time, it sounded decidedly tipsy. “Besides, it’s almost noon anyway.”

“Ellen, I can’t talk right—”

“Don’t hang up! I’m serious, Davey—I think somebody’s been watching me. I saw him when I left the house this morning, and I just saw him walk past my table.”

“What does he look like? Give me a description.”

There was a pause.

“He’s…tall. Maybe your height. Dark hair, I think.” Her voice brightened. “And he was wearing glasses. Or…sunglasses.”

I had picked up a pencil, which I now placed back on the desk.

“I’ll call the Chicago police; they’ll send an officer to help. What’s the cross street nearest you?”

“Oh, don’t do that, Davey. Could you come?”

I frowned.

“Ellen, I—”

“Please. When you get here, we can talk.”

And then, before I could analyze her motives or even phrase my response, she broke the connection. I sat at my borrowed desk among people I did not know, a dead telephone in my hand and a sudden, disquieting sensation in my gut. Throughout my marriage to Ellen, I had felt it often—usually, when she was about to do something that anyone else would see as cruel.

I wanted to call it curiosity, but I was fairly certain it felt like suspicion.

• • •

Ellen was not at the restaurant called
Hermosita’s
when I arrived from Lake Tower almost forty minutes later.

She had not returned to work, either, as I discovered when I called there from the cantina’s office. In fact, nobody at Ellen’s office had seen her that day; she had called in sick before eight o’clock, telling her supervisor she intended to spend the day in bed. But when I dialed the house where she and I had once lived together, there was no answer.

Of course, she might have been telling the truth, in her own way.

The telephone rang for a long time before I hung up.

Chicago has always been one of the great newspaper towns, a place where the term “journalist” has never really replaced “reporter” as the preferred descriptive for the majority of the men and women who ply that trade here.

The difference is significant, a point of hard-edged pride any one of them would have fought over. More than a few, on occasion, did. But most kept their brawling both metaphorical and internecine; Chicago is a city whose tradition of thumb-in-the-eye competition is fiercely waged each morning between its two surviving major daily newspapers.

Not surprisingly, each claims leadership in the market they share. Impartial observers credit the
Chicago Sun-Times
—considered the grittier of the two papers—with providing its largely urban readership a slightly stronger coverage of both crime and the omnipresent City Hall political machinations, two staples the city delivers in ample supply. In the area of state and national issues—two areas of substantial concern to its somewhat more affluent and much more suburban readership—
The Chicago Tribune
is given a slight edge.

But there is one area where
The Trib
is acknowledged the hands-down winner—not just locally but arguably among every other newspaper in North America. In a day when bean counters manage most aspects of news coverage in every medium—thereby holding a vast leverage on what is seen, thought and believed about issues critical in a global context—
The Chicago Tribune
still fields its own expert, expensive corps of foreign correspondents. Other newspapers may fall back on the penny-wise solution of relying on wire services, local stringers or CNN to uncover and interpret the world at large—but in the words of The Colonel, founder Robert McCormick,
The Chicago Tribune
is the World’s Greatest Newspaper, with the accent on ‘world.’

As a result, the newspaper remains home to an unexcelled syndicate of experienced reporters and columnists who know as much about the world stage as anyone alive today. Many of them are legends like Kathy O’Banion, who had spent her career filing exclusive reports from trouble spots around the world and who now sat at the Formica table across from me.

It was midafternoon, though no evidence of the sunlight bathing Michigan Avenue filtered down to the plate window near our table. Florescent tubes and beer company promotional fixtures provide the light in The Billy Goat, a subterranean hangout for generations of Chicago newspaper reporters. Until the place was turned into a campy sort of legend by a cadre of expatriate
Second City
alumni, they had rubbed elbows here in relative obscurity with pressmen and typesetters and delivery truck drivers.

The phrase “Cheeseboiger, cheeseboiger” altered that dimly lighted universe forever—and although it had made owner Sam Siannis a far more prosperous man, long-time regulars of the tavern still pine for Sam’s heirs to return to their senses, and for Billy Goat’s to return to its true roots.

There was a Cubs game on the television, a tribute to Sam’s legacy. Decades ago, he had smuggled his trademark pet goat into the ballpark, had been summarily banned by the club ownership, and in response had called down an Olympian curse on what henceforth had become known as the “hapless” Cubs. Subsequent removal of the curse had not had a noticeable effect on the team’s ill fortunes, which continued unabated to the present.

At least, that was one explanation; on the screen, a bobbled grounder to third made the score Houston 5, Cubs 1. But it was still early in the season.

I sat beside Leonard G. Washburn—“Lenny” to the police, court officials, crime-beat reporters and assorted crooks and criminals about whom he wrote, and “Mr. Washburn” to just about everybody else. This category included the various representatives of his publisher. These functionaries did whatever was necessary to keep rights to the latest of his true-crime books, knowing it was destined for a slot on the best-seller lists.

When I had called Washburn, I had been greeted like a long lost friend. Neither of us made any reference to how I had blown him off almost two weeks before, on the night when Washburn had waited outside my apartment.

Lenny looked around approvingly, a strong-featured black man clearly in his element.

“
Love
this place,” he crooned. “It’s about the only place I know where I can walk in with an accused multiple-murderer, wave hello to the cops who busted him, and have the prosecutor on the case send us over a free beer. In fact, that’s just what happened last week. Swear to God.”

He bit into the sandwich the Greek at the grill had paper-plated and passed to him with a disdain bestowed only on favored regulars. “And the cheeseburgers are still the best in town. So, Kath—how long did you spend in Moscow this time?”

“Two months, this trip,” Kathy O’Banion said, “and I’ve never been so happy to get out of a place in my life. Every day is a new crisis over there.”

She looked at me. I saw her eyes flicker over my face and take in the still-raw scrapes on my hand. I got the distinctly uncomfortable feeling she didn’t miss much. Almost in self-defense, I studied her in turn.

O’Banion had a disarming smile—an attractive woman in her mid-fifties who at first impression could have been mistaken for a high school principal. When you looked closer, particularly at her eyes, you might imagine it was a particularly tough high school, a place where the staff learned far more than the students as they obtained an education in subjects not on any civilized curriculum. Then you looked again, saw the strength, and knew that among the lessons she had learned was how to achieve the difficult, delicate balance between hope and disillusionment.

“Lenny says you got the smelly end of a faked-up bribery stick in Lake Tower. My guess is that makes you the subject of his next book, am I right?”

Washburn answered for him. “That may depend on what you can tell us, Kathy. Davey’s got a
lot
of problems”—he winked at me, taking part of the sting from the comment—“and he needs to consult a few people who are in the know. That’s why I called you, love.”

O’Banion opened her shoulder bag, pulled out a pack of cigarettes and lit one with what looked like a very old and battered outsized Zippo.

“I don’t know why you want to know about the Russian Mafiya, but I guess I’ll be reading about it on a plane soon,” she said. “Lenny’s books are always so good at making a long flight feel shorter. That’s a compliment, kiddo.”

She took a deep drag on her cigarette. “Okay. I’ve filed stories on this for the past four years, so I’m not exactly telling you any secrets. You tune into
Meet The Press
or
McLaughlin
, and you hear about how the Russian Mafiya poses one of the biggest threats to the Russian government, right? That’s crap, children; they have it all wrong. In just about every important way, the Mafiya
is
the Russian government today.”

“Putin’s a former KGB thug,” I frowned, “but I have a hard time picturing him as a Russian gangster.”

“Look, you’ve heard the term ‘narco-state?’” O’Banion asked. “Columbia, some of the Caribbean island countries, and probably pretty soon even Mexico—countries that are so tight with the drug cartels that their national policies genuinely reflect the interests of the bad guys. The government and the dopers are in bed together, the two of ‘em.

“Well, here’s the difference: Russia is in bed with
itself
. It’s the first modern instance of a major nation that has become completely criminalized. They’ve turned capitalism into a blood sport over there. You have an oligarchy of new-money billionaires—crooks, all of ‘em—pulling the strings of the government at the same time people are starving on the streets.”

She peered at me intently, willing me to understand. “Look,” she said, “I’m South Side Irish, and a little hanky-panky was an accepted part of doing business when I was growing up here. Hell, still is—that’s Chicago, you gotta love it.

“But in Russia, everything is connected—everything! You want to start a business, make an investment, open a franchise; you’ll pay extortion money up front, or more likely you’ll agree to take on a ‘partner.’ The concept is, ‘either you deal with us or we deal with your replacement.’ Simple, but they’ve found it uncommonly effective.”

“Just like the Capone era,” Lenny interjected, “real icepick-in-the-eye stuff.”

“Right, but Capone never got this big,” she said. “Think Citicorp, BankAmerica, Chase Manhattan—hell, just make a list of the ten largest financial institutions in the U.S. Now imagine if eight of them were owned by the Cosa Nostra. That’s Russia today, kiddo.”

“I imagine they’d loot my Christmas Club account, right?” Washburn said.

She barked a harsh laugh.

“Embezzlement, money laundering, any of that sort of small-potatoes stuff—that’s just hit-and-run stuff. You do it if you’re in a country where you know the bank regulators are going to catch on to you sooner or later,” she said. “In this case, imagine GM, IBM, Exxon and the rest of the Fortune 500 being forced to come to you when they want to borrow money. Think about the leverage you have—in every aspect of the economy.”

“As Marx used to say,” Len observed, “capital drives the capitalist system.”

“Yeah, well—that goes double for economies that are in a transition
to
a capitalist system,” the reporter said. “But it’s not as simple as it once was, either. Today, ‘developing’ countries like Russia have to cope with the realities of a global investment community. The rules are all changed.”

She took a deep draw on her cigarette.

“Okay, you have the big players—the major investment funds, the international banks and brokerages in New York, London, Hong Kong and so on,” she said. “Used to be, they brought a kind of stability to the whole game, long as a country stuck to what was deemed the ‘proper’ fiscal path.”

O’Banion’s face screwed up in a disdainful scowl.

“Today, global investment is schizophrenic as hell. A couple of rumors, a bad headline or two—all it takes is one major investor to get cold feet and pull out its money. Everybody else follows suit, and bingo! The abrupt withdrawal of credit causes an economy to collapse.”

“I remember the crisis a couple years back,” Washburn nodded, his expression dour. “Sent stock market into the crapper around the world. Even worse, my little mutual fund got burned bad.”

“I saw you listed in that
Fortune
Magazine
profile of successful authors last month,” Kathy grinned. “So don’t expect sympathy from me. But, yeah—that set the pattern for the Russians since then. They lurch from crisis to crisis, and the IMF or World Bank jumps on their butts.” O’Banion shrugged. “A few cosmetic changes, and we send ‘em just enough money to keep the Russian economy from imploding.”

“And that
works
?” I asked. It sounded like a confidence game writ large, and the thought outraged my policeman’s sensitivities. “Enough to send them billions of dollars?”

“Now you’ve asked the really big question,” she said. “‘Can the Russian government be trusted?’ The first time they had a chance to cheat, back in ‘99, they did. They tinkered with the books they used to sweet-talk the IMF and got caught misrepresenting their cash reserves. A couple of months later, they got caught laundering money through a New York bank. All it cost them was a good tongue-lashing.”

O’Bannion frowned in thought. “Trust? On the surface, the IMF is saying ‘yes.’ Or at least, ‘maybe.’ Given the mess Russia’s in, socially as well as economically, that’s the only thing that’s kept the rest of the Western investment community from bolting. And that would completely sink the Russian economy.”

“But the Russians don’t seem all that worried about bucking the United States,” I said. “They’ve even rubbed our noses in the fact that they’re selling arms and nuclear reactor technology to—what? Places like Iran and Iraq.”

“You don’t understand how international power diplomacy works,” she retorted. “Putin could be photographed pushing a hand dolly to deliver a nuclear bomb to Saddam, and unless the American public finds out—and gets outraged about it—the international community can cover it up, in the name of maintaining ‘stability.’ It’s an old story, my friend.”

“Ah, for the good old days,” Washburn said, mock-nostalgia in his voice.

O’Banion smiled. “Ya gotta miss ‘em. The Berlin Wall came down in ‘89. The whole system collapsed in 1993 and the Soviet Union officially ceased to exist. But that was at the end of a long decline, including a ten-year war that they lost to what they had thought was a ragtag band of turban-wearing peasants.”

“Afghanistan,” I said, and Kathy O’Banion nodded.

“The Seven Tribes of the Afghan whipped their butts, and how. Remember what Vietnam did to us? Afghanistan was their Vietnam. In a way, the
mujahedeen
actually won the Cold War for us.”

“Ronald Reagan won the Cold War,” Lenny broke in, more confident than combative. “He upped the ante on the arms race so high that the other guy had to fold.”

“The Soviet Union was doomed long before Reagan used Star Wars to spend them into bankruptcy,” O’Banion retorted. “Back in the ‘50s and ‘60s, they weren’t faking it—Soviet Communists really believed they had the philosophy that would save the world. They were like Jesuits with nuclear missiles. The whole damn country was based on that belief, and it died because its people lost the faith.

“I interviewed some of the old timers—veterans of their ‘Great Patriotic War’ against the Nazis, even a few people who remember back to the ‘20s and ‘30s. They said that as far back as the late ‘70s, the writing was on the wall…and I don’t mean the Berlin Wall. The younger people didn’t believe in the Marxist philosophy. They preferred listening to Western rock music and wearing secondhand Levi’s and pretending to understand
Doonesbury
—all smuggled into the country by what the Soviets liked to call the ‘antisocial criminal element.’ You can’t maintain a system based on an ideology if nobody believes in the ideology anymore.”

O’Banion wiped her fingers with a paper napkin and carefully picked a potato chip from Washburn’s paper plate.