"Where'd it happen?"

  "Well, not here. Not last Friday night, I can tell you that."

  "Do me a favor, Denny?"

  "Anything in reason, Mr. Flannery, you know that," trying to make over me again.

  "Tell me this. Any of the people in the back room have any trouble with any of the customers out here that night?"

  "You mean, with the queers?"

  "That's what I mean."

  "Hell, no, we're used to them, ain't we? I mean, there's none of us is strangers to these people. What's the big news?"

  "The big news is you get all upset at the mention. So I want you should tell me if any of your friends had words with any of the fags."

  "What gives you the idea?"

  "I spoke to Calcazone. Rosenquist, and Trebova," I say, telling the lie without a blink, "and they tell me."

  "Ah, Christ, there was some little thing happened just before I go home."

  "What little thing?"

  "Willie Dobbin comes back from the piss-house fit to be tied. Claimed some faggot was staring at his pecker while he was shaking it," he says, and laughs.

  "How mad was he?"

  "He yells and screams like he does, you know? Then we kid him a little. We all have a laugh and he gets over it. We start playing a little cards again, and before I know it, it's two o'clock. Me, I go home to catch hell from the wife." He laughs again, sounding like a crow.

  "Have another, Denny?"

  "No, thanks, Mr. Flannery," he says, slipping off the stool. "I just stopped in on the way home. I don't want I should catch any more hell." He takes a step, then turns back. "Hey, Mr. Flannery, Calcazone and them others really tell you about Dobbin's pecker?"

  "Oh, sure. Why shouldn't they? It was nothing, wasn't it?"

  He grins with relief that he wasn't fooled into letting the cat out of the bag and hurries off like a weasel.

  "My mouth is as dry as a bone. I know it's from the anger I still feel about how that poor creature, Harry Wills, was done. The adrenaline's dried up my spit. I look at the whiskey and the beer. I got no taste for them. I order a glass of ginger ale, and when the bartender sets me up, I drink it down in one go.

  "Thirsty, was you?" a voice says at my shoulder.

  I turn around and there's Ginger, one of Velletri's people, grinning at me from under a mustache like a line drawn with a pen. I can see myself in his dark glasses.

  "Go away," I say, still feeling raw and mad at the world.

  Finks, his other half, lays a heavy hand on my upper arm and squeezes like he wants to shut off the circulation.

  "We ain't going to fuck around with you like we usually do, Flannery."

  Without even thinking about it, my elbow drives backward into his gut like a hammer. He lets out a grunt and doubles over. I step off the stool. All I want to do is get away so I can face them and tell them I got no objection to calling on Velletri, but I'll be goddamned if I'll take any of their snotty manners. Ginger misunderstands the move, and the next thing I know there's a leather sap in his hand and it's on the way to the side of my jaw.

  I got no idea where Mabel Halstead comes from. All I see is a swirl of some chiffon, a white face, and a slash of scarlet lipstick on a mouth twisted into a snarl. A red high-heeled shoe clips Ginger one alongside the head and he goes down like he was pole-axed.

  I go for Finks, not throwing punches. But moving in close and grappling so he can't throw any.

  "What the hell," he says as he relaxes and lets me hold him off. I cop a sneak over my shoulder as Ginger starts up out of a crouch, bringing a punch from the floor guaranteed to knock Halstead's wig off. But it never lands. Halstead sidesteps and cracks the side of her hand down on Ginger's wrist, who lets out a yell and sits down on his ass, looking up at Halstead as though he can't believe what just happened to him.

  "It's okay, Milton," I say. "Just a small misunderstanding."

  "Have I made a boo-boo?" Halstead says in a high sweet voice what is not even winded.

  "I think these gentlemen was extending an invitation for me to visit with their boss. That one on the floor grabbed me. I mean, how could he know I was in no mood to be grabbed?"

  "Well, if anyone wants to grab anyone they should always ask first. Are you out on the town, Jimmy?"

  "I was just having a glass of ginger ale."

  "Well, all right, then. Have a nice evening," Halstead says. He puts the red shoe back on his foot and sashays away over to a table filled with persons of many sexes.

  I take a minute to wonder if there's a reason for Mabel Halstead, Canarias' right-hand woman, since Spencer and Frye was killed, to be in the Canals of Venice. Or was she just out for a little entertainment and relaxation?

  TWENTY-THREE

  Every time I'm ushered into Velletri's office—which is not often, and always at his request—the heavy velvet drapes and cool shadows reminds me of the office of someone high in the Church.

  His big desk ain't got nothing on it but a clean blotter in a leather holder, a pen set with a clock set in black marble, and three pictures in silver frames. One looks very old-fashioned because it's printed in that brown color what was popular twenty-five years ago. It's of a stout woman, maybe forty, with beautiful dark eyes and dark hair parted in the middle and caught in a bun at the back of her neck. When I first see it a long time ago, I think it's his dead mother because there's black crepe draped on it. But later I find out it's his first wife, the mother of the four children in the second picture frame. Velletri's kids ain't kids anymore. They're all grown up, but he still keeps their picture when they was little on his desk. Frame number three has got the picture of a much different-looking woman in it. She's younger, skinnier, prettier, and newer. The only thing nearly the same is the same kind of big black eyes with heavy eyebrows the first wife had. Gina Velletri's his second wife of twelve, maybe thirteen years. She's practically a recluse. He's got no kids by her. Nobody ever sees very much of her.

  Velletri's office looks like it should be in a church mansion and he's got the smooth manners of a high churchman, soft-spoken, but very sure of just how much power he's got in his white hands.

  When he promises to deliver the Twenty-fifth to Dick Daley, Jr., in the eighty-three primary, he fails politically for maybe the first time in his life. The black candidate gets it, having quietly registered and consolidated his constituents while Velletri was lapping cream, thinking he's got it won. He's over seventy and could lay down the burden of power if he wanted to, but that's hard to do. There's them what say there's nothing else can keep a person so young and so long out of the grave.

  He compromises and accommodates. He admits the Machine don't run the Twenty-fifth anymore, but he lets it be known that Velletri still runs the Twenty-fifth. Rumors of mob connections, which may be more than half-true, help his cause. But it's the way he gets everybody to share and share alike, while he takes the lion's piece, what impresses the city with his statesmanship.

  That ain't to say he's breaking bread with the blacks, or anybody else who threatens his power in the Twenty-fifth, even though I'm wondering if he ain't being forced to at least take a meal or two with the mayor and his people, who are getting hungrier and hungrier and growing the stripes of the tiger.

  He smiles very sweetly at me and says. "What is it you're trying to do to me in my old age, Mr. Flannery? Why are you always prowling around my ward interfering in matters that don't concern you?"

  "It looks that way don't it, Mr. Velletri but I'm not looking for reasons to come into the Twenty-fifth"

  "You're not?"

  "It just looks that way. Maybe it's because there's so much action in your ward what slops over into my ward."

  "Like what?"

  "Like meetings in the back room of the Canals of Venice between political forces what think they can decide who's going to run for alderman in the Twenty-seventh."

  He shakes his head as though listening to the wild fairy tales of a child. "Mr. Flannery, Mr. Flannery, I wish I knew what you were talking about. You think are smart politician gives a rat's ass anymore about who's alderman from this or that neighborhood?"

  "If they don't care, all I got to say is there's more people running for the office all over the city for no reason than I ever saw before."

  "Oh, yes, I give you that. That's the public face of politics. What I mean is, the council's never been where the power's at. The city's run and the pies are cut elsewhere by people not so much in evidence."

  "I'm trying to find out if these people, 'not so much in evidence,' decide to close out the Gay Liberation Front altogether and beat up a couple of this Canarias woman's top aides to make the point."

  Velletri's face gets very tight. It looks like it was dipped in wax all of a sudden, and white lines show up around his mouth and nose.

  "This Canarias is not a woman. She's a pervert. A thing."

  The heat of his reaction is something I don't expect. "You know her?" I say.

  "We've met. She lays the snare with her lip stick and her long hair and her legs showing behind a skirt slit front and back all the way up to her cunt."

  I flinch. I never hear him use such language.

  Good Christ. I wonder does Canarias act friendly toward this old man for the power he can exercise to her benefit if he so desires? Does this old man read the signals wrong and think she's ready to trade herself as a playmate for his endorsement? Does he make a pass out of the mistaken—but powerful—belief that power is potency no matter if the man looks like he wears the makeup of the grave?

  "I didn't think you made judgments like that," I say.

  "Like what?"

  "Like color. Like religion. Like nationality. Like—"

  "We're talking about the sin called the sin with no name by the Bible." He raises his voice only a little, but it's like a shout.

  I don't try to correct him about that. From what I remember, the Bible's got plenty of names for it and plenty of righteous anger, too.

  So maybe it ain't that she turned down his proposition. Maybe it's that he's a bigot about this, just like nearly everybody in the world is a bigot about something.

  "That's all I got to say, Mr. Flannery. I just want you to stop sticking your nose into my places of business and into my ward."

  "Why do you act so formal with me, Mr. Velletri? It's right I should show you respect, but you know my father for years and you know me since I'm a kid. You used to call me Jimmy."

  "That's before you grew up and got old enough to be a pain in the ass, Mr. Flannery."

  I know it's time to go.

  "I'll give you this much, Flannery," he says as if he's making it up to me for losing his temper. "If I were you, I'd go talk to Jefferson and tell him about his car sitting out in front of my place. I wasn't there, but I was told that."

  "About the Canals of Venice, Mr. Velletri," I say.

  "What about it?"

  "How come you run a place what caters to queers, dykes, whores, pimps, and perverts of every description?"

  "I don't run it, Flannery, I own it. And business is business."

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Barker Jefferson has got a flat what takes up the whole top floor of an apartment house over on the border of the Twenty-seventh and Old Town. The door looks like it's made out of a slab of pure oak. There's a Judas door with a brass grate on it instead of one of them little scope things. When I push the bell button it's like Louis Armstrong blasts out a riff on his trumpet inside the flat. The Judas door opens and this eye looks me over. The Judas door shuts and I wait. After maybe three minutes the big door opens up.

  I tip the hat, and smile at Huron, but he don't crack a nickel's worth. He never smiles, and never speaks unless he's told to. He has a way about him that reminds me of a big cat. He could kill you without using up a drop more of the energy it should take, and go cook an egg for lunch right after. Men like that have a life in their heads I don't want to think about.

  Jefferson's in a sunken living room what's done up all in black and white except for some splashy colored rugs on the walls. He's wearing one of them things what's like a big piece of cloth with a hole for the neck and some laces catching up the sides and making sleeves. He's barefoot and trying to do the boogaloo or whatever on an acre of cream-colored rug. The trumpets I started when I punched the bell are still tooting. Then they stop.

  "You like my door chimes. Flannery?" he says, grinning at me like a happy clam and nearly stumbling to a stop.

  "They're surprising."

  "But suitable, don't you know? Us blacks got rhythm. What do you think? Do you think us blacks got rhythm?"

  He's sucking me in to be familiar the way people do what want to get an edge on you. I say black back just one time and I expect the ice will come down over Jefferson's face and he'll let me know he didn't give me that privilege. So he's on top of me before we start.

  "I don't think you got rhythm."

  He laughs. "You're so right. Sit down. What can Huron get you?"

  I shake my head and sit down on one of them sectional couches that runs the length of the room, then rounds the corner. So, I'm looking out a picture window at the skyline of Chicago.

  "That's right you don't drink, do you?" Jefferson says, sitting down in the angle. He's almost facing me. He shakes his head at Huron, who leaves the room. "I notice that. You always got a drink in front of you, but you just wet your lips."

  "I don't like the taste."

  "Hell, you sure you're Irish?"

  "Well, you ain't got rhythm and I don't drink. We're both lapsed stereotypes."

  He looks at me like he's got a jeweler's loupe in his eye and I'm a piece of pawn he's trying to find out is genuine or fake. "You got a good act," he says.

  "What one is that?"

  "The common asshole. Every once in a while you forget and give it away. You say something like 'lapsed stereotype' and let everybody know you can read."

  "Well, sometimes you forget to shuffle."

  So he laughs again. "What can I do you for, Flannery?"

  "You can tell me why you got an extra key cut for the padlock you put on the dry room at the Paradise."

  He looks at me like I'm nuts. "What the hell's that supposed to mean?"

  "It probably don't mean anything, but I get to wondering about was there more than the two keys what come with the lock. You gave one to No-Nose Riley, one to Shimmy and Princess Grace, and I have a feeling there could be another."

  "Which I give to whoever took Spencer and Frye over to the Paradise to beat them up in case they couldn't get their hands on the keys what gave to that drunk gorilla keeper and the faggots?"

  "Something like that."

  "You hit a very long ball, Flannery."

  "Well, I found the place where Huron had the key made."

  "Which was the same place where he bought a lock for cheap because it only had one key. Sometimes Huron has an idea."

  "All that trouble to save a buck and then he has to get a key made which probably costs a buck and a half? Give me a break."

  "No, you give me a break, Flannery. You tell me what you nosing around my little bits of business for."

  "Why did you offer to withdraw from the race for alderman in the Twenty-seventh and hand the entry to me?"

  "'Cause I got other fish to fry."

  "You didn't decide to do it on your own."

  "No, I didn't. The mayor's helping me fry my fish."

  "When did Calcazone, Rosenquist, and Trebova agree to step aside for me?"

  "When they was asked."

  "Over to the Canals of Venice the night Spencer and Frye was killed?"

  "I told you I arranged it on the phone. Why don't you believe me?"

  "Because I've got witnesses put you and them in the Canals of Venice."

  "All right. Now you know. I was there cutting the deal what put you in the race if you decide to run."

  "What are you keeping it secret for?"

  "When I ask you, I don't know if you going to accept the offer. I don't know if you don't run to the state's attorney yelling, 'Conspiracy.' I still don't know."

  "I ain't made up my mind. What time did Calcazone and the other candidates leave?"

  "I got no idea. I don't keep their books."

  "Anything happen after Willie Dobbin got mad about the queer looking at his pecker in the men's room?"

  "I got no idea. Either I was gone by that time or I don't have the time to listen to stories about Willie Dobbin's pecker. So, there you go, Flannery. I'm getting your drift. You trying to make out that me or any of mine had to do with killing two sweet peas should make me very angry with you. But I ain't. I'm smiling, as you can see. Come again sometime. . .when I invite you. Meanwhile, make up your goddamn mind about the offer. Smarten up."

  "You're right. Tell whoever I respectfully decline to run and will not serve if drafted."

  Huron appears from the hall and opens the front door just as I get to it. I notice his knuckles is clean.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  "I saw it crack," I say at the Sunday dinner table, more to myself than to Mike, Mary or Canarias, who's come for some more of Mary's cooking after I ask Mary to invite her.

  "What's that?" Mike says.

  "The whatayoocallit on Velletri's face."

  "Veneer," Mary says.

  I notice lately it's getting so that when I can't find a word, even a word I know, Mary's so used to me she fills it in. I hope it don't get so she finishes my sentences for me. I know married couples like that. Sooner or later, one or the other never talks no more, just sits and smiles or frowns or nods their head like one of them dolls in the back window of a car.

  "Yeah, veneer. Velletri don't like blacks. . ."

  "That come as any news to you?" Mike says.

  ". . .and hates gays and lesbians."

  "Ditto."

  I glance at Canarias sideways. She's got her eyes on her plate. She's acting like the conversation ain't got much interest for her.

  "I see him at the rallies shaking black hands and letting gay men hug him like they was old friends."

 

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