Big Silence Read online

  “What?”

  “This Salt and Pepper shit.”

  The young man on the sofa shrugged, started unwrapping his second sandwich, and kept his eyes on the television where Michael J. Fox stood with a perplexed look on his face while the sound track gave off laughter.

  “This show ain’t funny,” the young man on the couch said.

  The man on the couch was named Irwin Saviello — Jewish mother, Italian father. Irwin was big and burly — heredity, but he also worked out. The papers and the television had been calling them Salt and Pepper for the last two months. Irwin, who was thirty-one and had a baby face, sort of liked it. His partner, Antoine Dodson, Pepper, was black, his head shaven. He shared Michael Jordan’s birthday and wanted to look like the superstar. The truth was he looked more like a bald, nervous version of Richard Pryor on crack, which Antoine used as well as whatever he could get.

  Saviello, on the other hand, was clean, always had been.

  The two men had met in prison. Dodson had been doing time for breaking and entering. Saviello had been sitting in his cell for manslaughter, a fight in a supermarket in which he had thrown a man into the frozen fish display. The man had died. At the time, Irwin had not quite remembered what the fight had been about. His appointed attorney had told him and then had plea-bargained down to manslaughter.

  There was no doubt about who was the brains of the duo. It was Dodson, who had not only graduated from high school but had gone to the University of Illinois at Chicago Circle for a semester. Saviello had not quite made it through Austin High. Neither man had ever had an I.Q. test, but there was a note on each man’s record saying that Dodson probably had a high I.Q. and was definitely a sociopath. The note on Saviello was that he was at least slightly below the low end of normal in intelligence.

  Something had brought the two together. Saviello normally didn’t like niggers, but he had met some decent ones in jail. None of them had messed with Irwin. Irwin was big. Irwin was strong. Irwin didn’t mind fighting and didn’t seem to mind getting hurt. He had once taken a makeshift knife in the back and kept fighting the two Mexicans who had attacked him on a clean-up detail. When the fight was over, Antoine had removed the knife, wiped it clean, and stuffed it in his shoe. Irwin had stoically gone to Doc Mirron, an inmate and a veterinarian on the outside, who took care of the wound.

  Irwin’s rep had gone up. He hadn’t gone to the infirmary. He hadn’t complained, and though he should have been in pain, he was working and looking normal the next day.

  The fact that Antoine and Irwin got out on the same day made it easy for the two of them to just drift into a partnership. It was Antoine who hit on the idea of knocking off convenience stores. The clerks there were told to turn over their money, not fight back, and pray that they didn’t get killed.

  The two would enter a 7-Eleven or something late when no other customers were there. Irwin would go in first, walk over to the counter, reach over, grab the clerk and hit him, hard, not hard enough to kill him, but hard enough to break a nose or a jaw. Antoine would follow, show his junk gun, a Raven MP-25 he had picked up on the street for forty-five dollars, and tell the reeling clerk to put all the money in a bag and give it to him fast or die. Since the weapon was so small, Antoine sometimes had to fire a shot into the ceiling or through a glass refrigerator window to convince the clerk to cooperate.

  While the clerk was moving, Irwin would climb up to the video camera and rip it out. Then he would go in the back room where the tape was recording and remove the tape and stuff it in the bag in his pocket. Later, he would throw the tape away.

  It had worked eight times. The money wasn’t bad. The furnished room in Uptown wasn’t bad, though the neighborhood stunk with druggies and drunks looking for small action or trouble. The television worked fine. The two men visited their parole officers regularly, each not saying that he was rooming with a former convict, and went out on job interviews when they were told to do so. Each man had a job, but they both knew they would be fired. It was what they wanted.

  “The system is so up to its ass in paper, bodies, and bullshit,” Antoine said, “that they’re letting assholes who rape kids out in two years for good behavior. Shit, sure they behave. There ain’t any kids behind the bars. They’re not gonna send us back ’cause we can’t hold down a job.”

  That was all right with Irwin. Let Antoine do the thinking. Irwin sat in front of the television whenever he could. Now he was on his second sandwich. He had taken five from the store they had robbed that night. Irwin liked the tuna best. He always took Twinkies, Little Debbie cakes, and anything sweet and wrapped he had time to grab. He liked unwrapping the cellophane. It was like getting a present.

  “Will you turn that shit off?” Antoine said, pacing the floor behind the sofa.

  While chewing on his sandwich in one hand, Irwin reached over and pushed a button on the remote. He didn’t much care what he watched. Something that looked like it might be The X-Files came on.

  “Salt and Pepper,” Antoine said, sitting in the chair near the sofa and draping one leg over it. “Shit, can’t they come up with something halfway original? Racist bastards.”

  Irwin shrugged and watched the screen where a woman was turning into something that looked like a big white worm.

  “I’m goin’ out,” Antoine said.

  “Okay,” Irwin said as the white thing slithered behind an unsuspecting security guard in a blue uniform. The guard was sitting at a desk with a night-light reading a book. Irwin had never been able to finish a book. He didn’t think the guard was going to finish this one.

  The door closed. Antoine was gone. Irwin finished his sandwich and reached for the fourth one on the sofa next to him.

  He was a mongrel with no name, born in an alley, the only one of the litter of four to survive. He had no memory of how he survived. He never thought about it. For him, life was simply staying alive. There were no dreams, no goals. He did have a small territory in two alleys that he protected. One was behind a rundown transient hotel off of Lawrence Avenue. It had once been a respectable place to stay, even a nearly prestigious place. But that was decades ago, long before the dog was born. Now there was the remnants of discarded meals in the alley at night, put out by an indifferent staff. The dog protected his right to the garbage from homeless cats, large rats, and, occasionally, another dog. Sometimes, though, when the humans were more careful with their garbage, he would have to roam for dark miles with cautious eyes.

  The dog’s other main territory was behind an abandoned and boarded-up bread factory on Damen Avenue. It had been closed for years, and the neighborhood was so rundown that no one had any interest in bothering to spend the money to tear it down. There was a loose board in the building’s basement. The dog knew how to push it away so he could get inside and out of the worst of the winter cold. There were corners inside, small rooms, that were almost warm.

  The dog without a name slept during the day and roamed for food at night. He did not seek fights, but he did not hold back when he felt there was food or a female worth fighting for. He lived alone and had no instinct to find a permanent mate.

  He was a gray and black creature, a bit scrawny, and about average for dog height. One ear was almost gone, the result of a battle with a larger dog over a piece of hamburger. Were he ever brought in to the Humane Society, they would find it impossible to guess the many breeds that had gone into his creation, and there would be no chance that anyone would want the ugly creature.

  He saw humans abuse and steal from each other. He had seen them kill each other. They were the breed that ruled all space and time and were definitely to be avoided. On the two occasions when he couldn’t avoid them, when they had trapped him for sport or possibly to eat him, the dog without a name had attacked. He had badly injured a man with foul-smelling clothes, had bitten his face and neck. The man had run bleeding and screaming. The dog had never gone back to that place again. His other encounter with a human had been more dangerous. This
creature trapped him in a dead-end alley and held something in his hand and that had made a cracking sound and had spit something small, hard, and fast at the dog. The dog did not know how to cower. He had attacked the surprised man, leaped on him, knocked him down, and bitten at the hand and the spitting thing it held.

  The man screamed. Others were coming. The dog stopped his attack on the bloody mass that had been the man’s hand. The man punched and tried to crawl away. The dog ran.

  People, the animals that ruled without sense or understanding, were to be avoided and hidden from during the day. That was the dog’s rule, and it had helped keep him alive. And now, in darkness, a chill October wind ruffling his fur, he wandered.

  It was nearly midnight when Rita Bliss, whose real name was Rita Blitzstein, cruised up and down Lunt in East Rogers Park just off Sheridan Road. She was tired. She was irritable, and someone had parked in the space for which she paid forty dollars a month. Parking in the neighborhood of six-and ten-story apartment buildings and older courtyard buildings three or four stories high was never good. At night it was nearly impossible. Rita had once spent an hour cruising for a space and finally parked in the gas station two blocks away and left a note on her windshield saying she’d be back early in the morning and pay for having parked there. The gas station proprietor, a Croatian immigrant, had charged her twenty dollars. He had a family to bring over, he explained, and he had been cheated on the price of the gas station, a price that would take him three years instead of two to pay back with the advance he had borrowed from a fellow Croatian loan shark.

  Rita was forty-one, a dark, thin, well-groomed woman with very short hair and a reputation among others she worked with and for as a television producer at Channel 5 as a no-nonsense, unflappable career woman. It was agreed that it was only a matter of time before she was grabbed by the NBC network or another network to produce a national talk or investigation show.

  Meanwhile, she lived alone in a comfortable apartment in what had once been class and was now on the fringe of respectability. She had a reasonable grip on herself when she left the station after calmly doing take after endless take with Cliff Swenson, the director of Investigative Eye, the show she produced and which had taken off well and had been picked up by twenty-seven stations. The problem was the star, Betina Young, who was neither young nor named Betina. Her real name was Alice Birdsell. She was older than Rita, but still a beauty with or without the makeup. However, time to be discovered nationally had run out on Betina Young. The clamor for beautiful black anchors and talk show hosts had passed. This made Betina less than a bundle of fun to work with. Betina kept demanding retakes, different dialogue. One of Rita’s primary jobs was to keep Betina calm and happy. Happy wasn’t possible. Calm wasn’t either, but the semblance of calm was.

  Tonight had been one of the worst. And after driving around for more than half an hour looking for a space, Rita decided she had enough of staying in this apartment and waiting for her call from the network. She would get an appreciably more expensive, if smaller, apartment in Lincoln Park nearer the studio. Life would be easier.

  The space wasn’t a miracle. It wasn’t legal, too small and too close to a fire hydrant a block from her apartment. A small car pulled out of the illegal space. Rita took it. It took her five or six moves forward and back to make it in, and she wasn’t sure the red car behind her could get out, but she was in. Maybe she’d be out in the morning before she got a ticket. Even if she got a ticket, it would, at this point, be worth it.

  She got out, locked the car, put her keys away, picked up her leather briefcase, and headed across the street trying to decide which of the “investigative” reports to feature for next week’s show, probably the one about the landlord on Diversey who was extracting sexual favors from his welfare mother tenants in addition to rent.

  There was almost no traffic on the street. Every two or three minutes another late lost soul like Rita would roll slowly down the street praying some driver would pull out and let him park and get home to bed.

  She was walking almost in the middle of the street when she heard the sound. Metal against …? Metal? Concrete? It was ahead of her in the shadows between two cars. There were streetlights, but there was more than enough darkness for the neighborhood muggers. Rita hurried and was about to cross between two parked cars half a block from her apartment building when the monster appeared.

  He was suddenly there, hovering over her, arms extended over his head, something big and catching spots of light in his hands. Rita froze. She should have run. She could have done other things. She was a woman with a strong head on her shoulders, a woman who remained calm in a crisis and was the rock of her crew. But not now.

  She recognized him, had seen him in the neighborhood. He had approached others. Once she had even glimpsed such an encounter, but this was the first time he had approached her and it was night and the street was empty.

  Rita wanted to say, with the authority she had learned, “What do you want?” But she didn’t speak. The man holding a metal garbage can over his head took another step toward her. He was close enough now that he could, by reaching out, have brought it down on her head.

  “Son of a bitch,” the huge black man said. “Whore. Dirty piece of ass. Shit. Fuck. Cock.”

  He was growing more angry. Rita looked around for help, anything. She would have flung herself on the hood of any passing car, but there were none and most of the windows in the nearby apartments were dark. She should have screamed, but she couldn’t.

  The huge man suddenly spun around, garbage can over his head. He looked down the street. He looked at parked cars. He looked at darkened windows and he looked at Rita Blitzstein. And then he turned and threw the garbage can down the street toward Sheridan Road, which it would never reach though it was rolling quickly and noisily, clattering and scraping. He had thrown the can at least three car lengths.

  “Shit,” he shouted, turning back to her.

  Rita tried not to but she backed up. She was determined not to shake or cry but she couldn’t stop doing both. In the light of a nearby streetlamp she could see the man’s black shining face, his eyes madly open, his knit sweater with a ragged hole about the size of a cassette in the chest.

  “You know whose street this is?” he shouted, looking around at the windows.

  She wasn’t even sure he was talking to her, that he wanted an answer.

  “Nobody’s,” he said, looking down the street at the garbage can that was just coming to a halt against a Toyota’s fender. “I do what I want. See what I want. I live on the cats, dogs, and rats and the water from the fountain in the park. These are dangerous streets. You’d best be careful.”

  His face was inches from hers now and she tried to do something … answer, run, scream, hit him, though she feared hitting him would do little good. Finally, as he stood over her, his head suddenly cocked to one side like a curious bird looking at an unfamiliar object, she ran. Rita ran expecting two huge hands to grab her, lift her in the air, and throw her down the street.

  She wasn’t sure if she heard footsteps behind her. Her low wooden heels clacked against the cracked sidewalk. She made it to her lobby door. She had rumbled for her keys as she ran and found them. She went into the lobby and glanced back. Was that a bush? Was it him? She pushed all the bells and panted to the inner door. No one opened. She forced herself to insert the key quickly, turn it, and go inside, closing the door behind her. But what was such a door to a monster like that? It was glass and thin wood from another era. He could burst through it with a lunge.

  Rita went up the stairs two at a time till she was so exhausted she had to pull herself up by the wooden railing. She heard nothing behind her, but she would not feel safe till she was behind her apartment door. She was on the third floor. She got inside, closed the door behind her and locked it, throwing the bolt. There was a light on her desk, one of those cheap table lamps with the green glass that you see in all the movies. She left it on all the time, day
and night.

  Rita took her briefcase and moved to her bedroom, where she switched on the light and sat panting and then she did something she hadn’t done in almost ten years. She called her parents because she needed them. She needed them badly.

  CHAPTER 2

  LIEBERMAN DIDN’T HEAR ABOUT his partner’s troubles until Abe reported in to the Clark Street station about five hours after the event.

  Detective Abraham Lieberman was tired. No one could tell, of course, because Abe always looked tired though once in a while he could simply manage to look weary. Lieberman was a little over sixty and looked more than seventy. On a good day, he weighed about 145 pounds. He told everyone that he was five seven as it said in his personnel record, but every day he felt as if he were growing imperceptibly shorter. Today the face in the mirror looked like that of a basset hound with curly white hair and a little white mustache. Abe had learned to live with that face and marvel at the clear evidence that his wife, Bess, who was nearly his age, looked about two decades younger. She thought her husband looked distinguished and wise.

  This morning Abe felt neither distinguished nor wise. The night before had been a series of family confrontations, though it had started peacefully enough.

  Lieberman’s grandchildren were now pretty much at home in the house on Jarvis in West Rogers Park. Barry was twelve, into baseball and the Cubs almost to the degree of his grandfather, who still snuck away to home games during the season and remembered fondly the long slow swing of Hank Sauer, the peppy blasts and lightning moves of Ernie Banks, and even the lanky lunges at shortstop of Roy Smalley who would have been right up there with the best of them if he only had been able to hit. Barry’s Cubs memory went only as far back as Rick Sutcliffe and Andre Dawson.

  There was a tape of a last-season Cubs-Atlanta game on the night before. Neither Abe nor Barry remembered who had won though they had their suspicions that it wasn’t their team. Even Abe’s eight-year-old granddaughter Melisa had curled up in his lap in her pajamas clutching her stuffed bear and trying to understand the game.