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 damned 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 cafés, I felt like a hamster on a jet-propelled treadmill.
For our initial meeting, Darraugh’s assistant, 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 cocky.
“Don’t worry, Vic,” she assured me. “Me and Tim,