Body Work Part 34

"But I also know what it's like to be powerless when someone's beating on you. No girl should have to walk the streets in fear. Let me know where to pick her up, and I'll do my best."

I found I'd been holding my breath and let out an audible sigh. Before we hung up, I told her about the meeting I wanted to hold in Darraugh's office the following afternoon, and she promised to arrange her lunch break so she could attend.

I got up and thanked Caroline for her help. "Although 'thanks' is a pretty feeble word, for all you've done."

She smiled, her brisk, corporate smile. "All in a day's work, Vic. But if we need to reach you, where will you be?"

I shook my head. "I don't know yet. I'll try to get a room at the Trefoil Hotel, using my mother's birth name, Gabriella Sestieri, but I can't afford more than a couple of nights there."

Caroline thought for a moment. "I'll check with Darraugh, but we keep an efficiency apartment in the Hanc.o.c.k building for overseas staff who have to spend more than a few nights in Chicago. It's free now. I can book you in as Ms. Sestieri."

I felt my eyes grow wide. "It's extremely generous. But, Caroline, it's not just beyond the call, it could expose you to danger, too."

She shook her head. "My sister's only son was killed in Iraq, blown up in Fallujah. He was a reservist, and he had a new baby he never even saw. I can't stand the thought that companies like Tintrey have been making money on his body."

She looked at the console on Darraugh's desk, saw that he'd finished his video conference, and took me into the boardroom so she could explain what she proposed. Darraugh grunted an agreement, and Caroline told me to stop back by in the morning to pick up a key and a photo ID for Gabriella Sestieri.

Darraugh escorted me to the elevator; he believes in old-fashioned etiquette and decorum. As I was getting into the car, he let out an unexpected bark of laughter and brushed a finger across my cheek.

"You are Rock to the life. I don't know why I never thought of that before."

50.

Phew! Around the Sal Corner.

I didn't feel very Rock-like crossing the Loop. Rainier Cowles and Kystarnik had me so spooked that I stopped in my bank to cash a large check; I didn't want to take the chance that they might be able to track my credit card or ATM transactions. That's the trouble with the Age of Paranoia-you know people can trace you, given the resources, but you don't know if they are actually doing so, not unless you're a whiz like NCIS's Abby Sciuto, who can back-trace anyone who's looking at her records. didn't feel very Rock-like crossing the Loop. Rainier Cowles and Kystarnik had me so spooked that I stopped in my bank to cash a large check; I didn't want to take the chance that they might be able to track my credit card or ATM transactions. That's the trouble with the Age of Paranoia-you know people can trace you, given the resources, but you don't know if they are actually doing so, not unless you're a whiz like NCIS's Abby Sciuto, who can back-trace anyone who's looking at her records.

When I finally reached the Glow, it was half an hour after the closing bell, and the traders were packed three-deep around Sal's famous mahogany bar. Sal saw me, nodding as she directed traffic. Within two minutes, a minion appeared with a gla.s.s of Johnnie Walker Black. I left the drink on the bar, not wanting alcohol to take the edge off my awareness. I also resisted the temptation to pull out my cell phone and reconnect to the world. I was anxious about Chad Vishneski's safety as well as the Guaman family's, but I couldn't take any chances right now.

When the traders, exhausted by a day from h.e.l.l in the markets, had finally drunk themselves into enough oblivion to manage a commute home, Sal came over to my perch at the end of the bar.

"I hear Olympia's had to close the Gouge," she said. "Bad fire in there."

I shrugged. "Not that bad. She needs to redo her stage and her electrics, but the structure's okay. Question is, where she'll find the money, since she's already in way over her botoxed forehead to Anton Kystarnik."

Sal's lips rounded in a soundless whistle. "So the rumors were right this time. I couldn't believe anyone would be such a complete idiot. Still, as my mother says, a fool and her wits are soon parted."

She paused, measuring me. "You'd probably better know there's another story running around the club scene. Some people say you started Olympia's fire."

"People will say anything, won't they? Especially Olympia Koilada. I did threaten her with legal action if she kept slandering me, but she probably knows I don't have the time or patience for a civil suit."

"So how did the fire start?"

"Actually, I sort of did did start it." start it."

Sal threw up her hands. "Oh, Vic, why? I'm sure it wasn't the kind of pedestrian reason most of us would have: she dissed your cousin, she kicked your dog, or, in my case, the last time I had a fire here some idiot had left her curling iron on a stack of towels in the women's toilet."

"I didn't do it on purpose. It was sort of collateral damage."

I described the night at the Club Gouge, with Kystarnik's thugs beating up the Body Artist and Olympia because they couldn't run their message board on the Artist's body.

"So where is Buckley doing her show now?" Sal asked.

I shook my head. "She hightailed it. No one knows where to find her, but she's a woman with more than one ident.i.ty. I know two of them, and wouldn't be surprised if she had a third to use as a bolt-hole in a situation like this."

Sal's shaved and painted brows lifted so high they looked like cathedral arches. "You looking for her? What's Kystarnik going to do if you find her?"

"That, my dear friend, is the question of the hour. They have history, Anton and the Artist. The Artist and Zina, Anton's only kid, were so close, they OD'd together. Zina Kystarnik died, but the Artist pulled through and then disappeared. Where she spent the next thirteen years is a total mystery, at least to me, but Kystarnik apparently knew. At least, he knew she was doing her act at Olympia's. He's been using her, I just learned, but does he hate her or love her? Will he kill her or protect her? I'm betting the first, but he's a psychopath and they are like tornadoes, you don't know where they'll go."

"Kind of like you, Warshawski," Sal said. "Is anyone paying you to look for the chick?"

"Not exactly. Someone is paying me to show that Chad Vishneski didn't kill Nadia Guaman. Kystarnik and the Body Artist don't connect the dots, but they sure have enough dots on them to look like a measles epidemic. Kystarnik wouldn't have wanted a spotlight on Club Gouge and the Artist, so I don't think he was behind Nadia's murder. I'm convinced the killer was hired by Tintrey. Or maybe even Rainier Cowles himself."

I stopped to count on my fingers. "So many parties to this horror show. Besides Cowles and his pals at Tintrey, there are four others: Nadia, Chad, the Body Artist, and Kystarnik. When a fifth party blocked [http://embodiedart.com] embodiedart.com, Kystarnik was beside himself. He roughed up the Artist and slapped Olympia around. He wanted that communications network up and running."

I brooded over my drink. "I'm sure it was Tintrey that blocked the site. Only now they seem to be happily doing business with Kystarnik. It was Anton's thugs who were parked outside the Guaman house this afternoon, but a week ago they didn't know each other's names. I don't know how it happened, although I'm wondering if Olympia brokered that marriage. And how it happened isn't important-it's what they'll do next that scares me."

"You may make sense to yourself, but it's gibberish to me."

Sal went over to talk to a couple of new arrivals whom she knew. Erica, Sal's bartender, came around with the Black Label bottle.

"You okay, Vic? You haven't touched your drink."

"One of those days, Erica. Just not in the mood." I'd never be able to prove I was right, not unless I found a way to make Prince Rainier speak. I laughed to myself, thinking of Darraugh calling me after his mongrel terrier. Speak, Prince Rainier! Or I will sink my teeth into your calf. Speak, Prince Rainier! Or I will sink my teeth into your calf.

However it had come about, Kystarnik and Tintrey had joined forces. Rainier Cowles didn't want to beat up the Guamans in person, so he hired Kystarnik's muscle to force the family to turn over their copy of Captain Walker's autopsy report. Cowles, or the Tintrey executives, thought this would end their problems. Apparently it never occurred to them that the Guamans might have made other copies. Or maybe they thought beating up Clara would persuade the bereft parents to keep Tintrey's dirty secrets to themselves. Or maybe they planned to kill all the Guamans once they had the report.

When Sal finally returned to my end of the bar, I spoke without preamble. "Have I ever put your life or your bar at risk?"

"Nope. And you're not about to start now, Warshawski."

I looked around the Glow, at the Tiffany lamps on the tables and the racks of gla.s.sware hanging over the horseshoe bar. Erica was polishing the gla.s.ses methodically before putting them up in the manner of bartenders all over the world when business is slow. Each gla.s.s wiped obsessively until it reflects the light in the room.

"You'd want to put the lamps somewhere safe," I said, "and maybe move those racks of gla.s.sware out of fighting range. You could rearrange the tables, create an open s.p.a.ce for a performance. And if you let me cover the windows with sheets, they'd do nicely as projection screens."

"V. I. Warshawski, I don't care if you are on a Carry Nation mission to torch the nightspots of Chicago as long as you leave the Glow off your list."

I tilted my gla.s.s, watching the surface of the whisky retain its flat surface while changing shape. Gravity was amazing.

"For one night, Sal, one night only, I need to resurrect the Body Artist."

"Rent the Art Inst.i.tute. They have better insurance than I do. And a real stage."

"What's your deadest night of the week? Sunday? If I publicize this right, with a cover charge of twenty bucks, or even thirty, you could make your week's profit in two hours."

"Are you listening?" Sal said. "The answer is no. Any profit would vanish in two minutes if Kystarnik came in here in an ugly mood. Which, what I know of the boy, is the only mood he's got, the question being is it mean ugly tonight or plain vanilla."

"Sal, let me tell you the story of three sisters. Call them Alexandra, Nadia, and Clara."

I told her the story, as much as I knew, starting with Alexandra's journal, her journey to Iraq, the Guamans, Chad, the Body Artist's disappearance, ending with my own flight.

"Clara's sixteen. She got her nose broken last night, and that was after burying her two sisters and watching her brother live in the nightmare of a badly damaged brain. I'm not asking you to do this for me, you know."

"Oh, I know, Warshawski. All I want is to run my bar in peace and maybe die in my bed, not from a stray bullet. But you always have some cause that's bigger than the rest of us."

My face turned hot, but I tried to keep my temper under control. "That comes mighty strangely from you, my sister, being as you're the one who dragged me onto the Arcadia House board."

Sal chairs the board. It was because I'm on the board and known to be Sal's friend that Arcadia squeezed in Ernest Guaman along with his sister, his mother, and his grandmother.

"Yeah, I chair the Arcadia board, and I give money to causes I care about. But with you, it's always different, it's always some d.a.m.ned crusade or other. It's like you want the rest of us to think that, next to you, we're a bunch of worthless slackers."

"Most of my work is for corporate clients who pay me with money they get from grinding the faces of the poor in the dirt. Does that make me acceptable as a human being, that I'm just as much a part of the system as everyone else who comes into your bar?"

Sal drummed her long fingers on the bar, still watching the room under her curling lashes. Something was in the balance here, I wasn't sure what-my sense of myself as a person, my friendship with Sal maybe. If I survived Kystarnik and Rainier Cowles, maybe I'd find a place in the country where Mr. Contreras and the dogs and I could live a simple life, growing our own vegetables and offering shelter to runaway farm animals. No more spikes in the hand or boots in the belly.

Sal twisted on her stool to look at the fake Gothic windows that fronted Van Buren Street. Snow was starting to fall again, creating a furry glow that almost blotted out the blackened fronts of the old buildings across the street.

"It's not such a great view, is it?" she said. "The L tracks, that OTB shop over there, and all the paper and chicken dinners and whatnot. I guess I'm so used to it, I never notice how tawdry it is. Maybe if I close the shutters for an evening, it'll cheer the place up. Better tell me what you're up to, and why."

I felt sweat drip between my shoulder blades. Whatever dire outcome I'd been fearing, it wasn't going to happen tonight.

Even though Sal raised a dozen objections, about everything from not having a dressing room to where to set up the Body Artist's webcams, she was on board. When I held my strategy meeting at Darraugh's the next day, Sal helped me push the project forward.

51.

Mad Preparations-Then What?

Looking back, that meeting with Sal in her bar seemed to be the only time I sat still for a week. Organizing the performance, keeping Clara and her family safe, watching my own back, trying to stay in touch with my regular clients while doing business on the fly at Internet cafes, I felt like a hamster on a jet-propelled treadmill.

For our initial meeting, Darraugh's a.s.sistant, Caroline, supplied us with food and drink and sat in for several long stretches to help move us along when we got bogged down. Darraugh himself wisely steered clear. He was going out on a very long limb letting us use his corporate headquarters. If his directors learned about it, they might have a few words with him.

Petra thought it was all a great game. Staying at Tim Radke's place made her feel safe and therefore c.o.c.ky.

"Don't worry, Vic," she a.s.sured me. "Me and Tim, we'll take care of publicity. We'll Tweet and network and get this all over town. I still have some media contacts left over from when I worked on the campaign last summer."

"Let's take this a step at a time," I said. "We need to figure out who we want to reach out to. We aren't selling Wheaties here, hoping everyone in the world gets our message."

"The Glow holds a hundred thirty-seven, tops," Sal added. "And I need serious crowd-management help if it gets up to that many."

Tim Radke a.s.sured me that his and Marty's friends would turn up in good numbers to make sure no one got too violent.

"We don't want a free-for-all," I said, "with arrests and broken heads. The whole purpose of getting the Body Artist back onstage is to stop the torment of the Guaman and Vishneski families."

"How can you be sure she'll come?" Rivka said. "You haven't been able to find her. I don't think you've even been looking."

"I've been searching like mad," I a.s.sured Rivka. "I even found her apartment."

Rivka's face lit up. "What did she say?"

"She'd fled before I got there, but she'll show up Sunday night. No artist wants to be plagiarized or have her work attributed to someone else."

I spoke with a confidence that I was far from feeling, but the whole scheme wouldn't work without someone like Rivka, who was both talented enough and experienced enough to re-create the Artist's images.

Most anxious was John Vishneski, who felt I was giving his son short shrift. "I'm the client here, the one paying your bills. And it's my boy who's still on the critical list at the hospital-my boy, who someone tried to kill two days ago. But this seems to be all about that gal who died in Iraq."

I nodded sympathetically. "There are two halves to the story, your son and Nadia Guaman. I need the real killer to make a move in public, and focusing on the Guamans seems to me the best way to force the murderer out into the open. But if you have a better plan, please, let's hear it now. No Monday-morning quarterbacking. Too much is at stake."

Mona patted her ex-husband's arm. "John, you know you don't mean to be selfish. That poor family, losing two daughters. And who knows what will happen to the third girl!"

The Guamans' situation had me badly worried. The day of our first meeting in Darraugh's offices, Tom Streeter had called to say that Lazar Guaman had come to St. Teresa's and insisted that his daughter and wife return home.

I took a cab to the school and found Lazar in the princ.i.p.al's office with Clara. Dr. Hausman seemed worried, even frightened, when she introduced us.

"Perhaps you mean well, Ms. Detective-I can't say," Lazar Guaman said. "Clara seems to think that you do. We won't try to stop you. But we do belong under our own roof."

"Why not let her be safe with your wife and mother?" I suggested. "For just a few days. All this should end on Sunday."

"We are a broken family," he said, "I know that. My girls have been killed, I could not protect Clara when those men beat her up. But I won't cower in my cousin's home while she's in danger here in the city."

I tried to argue with him, but his mind was made up. He insisted that Clara call the unlisted number at Arcadia House so he could speak with his wife, and the family returned home. My one hope was that Rainier Cowles would leave the family alone now that he knew they didn't have Alexandra's autopsy report. Caroline told me at the meeting that Darraugh's agent in Beirut had duly delivered the message. Still, I had to take Vesta off bodyguard duty. It was just too much to ask of an amateur in case Cowles-or, even worse, Kystarnik-wanted to attack the family.

I bought several disposable phones for my outgoing calls while my answering service was fielding all incoming ones. As long as no one could find me, they couldn't deliver threats. Turn over the report or we will hurt Petra- Turn over the report or we will hurt Petra-or Clara- Clara-or Lotty- Lotty-or Mr. Contreras- Mr. Contreras-or the dogs. the dogs. I was a Swiss cheese of vulnerability, thankful that Jake was on the other side of the world. I was a Swiss cheese of vulnerability, thankful that Jake was on the other side of the world.

Although I didn't hear from the Body Artist, I knew word about the performance was getting out around town. For one thing, we had a lot of hits on our website. For another, I got a call from Olympia. Actually, I got many calls from her. After her third, and most emphatic, message, I called her back, sitting in a window seat in Darraugh's Hanc.o.c.k Center apartment.

"What are you doing?" she said. "Advertising the Body Artist's final Chicago appearance?"

"Olympia! How are you? How are repairs to Club Gouge coming along?"

"Never mind the club. What the h.e.l.l is the meaning of this announcement I saw?"

"I don't know what you see or where you look," I said, "so you'd better give me a hint."

I thought I could hear her teeth grinding on the other side of the ether.

"I've seen the advertis.e.m.e.nts that the Body Artist is going to be at Sal Barthele's joint on Sunday. What is the meaning of this?"