Dan O'Shea - Penance

Now David was dead. Worse, he was a dead homosexual. Eight years wasted.

Clarke looked back at the bodies. Stosh Stefanski, head of Chicago’s Streets and Sanitation Department, the mother-lode of clout, was sprawled in the middle of the floor, naked except for a sleeveless T-shirt. The T-shirt was a mess because Stefanski had been shot in the chest. A lot. David Hurley was slumped in an armchair across the room wearing only his boxers, a bullet hole in his right temple and a bigger, messier hole a little higher up on the left side. Hurley’s gun was on the floor next to the chair.

“You did the right thing, kid, calling me,” said Riley. “What’s your name again? Hasty?”

Clarke could hear the ridicule in his voice, the alpha-male bullshit, Riley having to mark his territory, make sure the east-coast punk knew who was sucking hind tit.

“Hastings.”

“Right, Hastings. What is that, some kind of family thing?”

“Something like that,” said Clarke.

Riley was over by the far wall, turning off the thermostat. “You wanna open those windows for me, Hastings?”

“Why? It must be ten degrees outside.” Almost 10.00pm, and the temperature had been dropping all night.

“Time of death, kid. Stuff happens with stiffs. Don’t ask me the particulars, I don’t know. But whatever it is, it happens slower if they’re cold. Gives us more time to work out what happened here.”

Clarke looked at the mostly naked corpses, sniffed the smell of sex in the air. “Don’t we know what happened here?”

“Looks like Junior was a rump ranger. Stosh here, well, Stosh’d fuck a toasted cheese sandwich — especially if the sandwich was just working out which way its bread was buttered. Especially if the sandwich wasn’t really sure it wanted to get fucked yet. Stosh liked em hurt and confused, liked fucking them, liked fucking them up even better. That way, he’d have em on a string, and he could pull it whenever he wanted. Looks like maybe he pulled a little too hard. Looks like Junior got pissed. That’s the rough draft, anyway.”

“Rough draft?”

“First shit happens, then history gets written down. Got a guy on his way’s gonna look things over, decide what history is.”

“He who controls the present,” Clarke said.

“Yeah, well, you, me, and Orwell, we’re gonna go see the old man.” Riley looked over, saw Clarke looking at him. “What, you think I can’t read?”

Clarke was thinking, if they put the fix in, I may still have a play here.

Mayor Hurley stood looking out the window of his spacious, spartan office on the fifth floor of City Hall, facing the plaza to the east, where the new Picasso sculpture stood. The wind drove small, scattered flecks of snow through the spotlights that lit the sculpture.

The mayor was so different from the son. Junior had been tall, lean, dark Irish. The mayor was short, stocky, ruddy, yet emanated power like a scent. Clarke had never understood the relationship between father and son. The son was devoted to ending the corrupt politics for which his father was practically the Platonic form. No real emotional connection between them that Clarke could see — no real emotional connection between the mayor and anyone. But the mayor put the full force of his machine behind the son, and the son had an intense personal loyalty to his father.

“Fucking statue, still don’t get it,” said Hurley.

“Pardon?”

“The Picasso. Junior’s idea, you know. Public art, he says, so we can be a great city, like New York or Paris. Like we ain’t a great city already. Like I gotta put a fucking steel monkey in the middle of the Loop so we can be a great city.”

“Picasso is genius. Subjective as individual works may be, to have his work on so prominent a stage.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah. Make all the art critics in the world gush about us. Course you could move all the art critics in the world into the same damn place and you wouldn’t have a city, you’d have a village, cause there’s maybe a couple hundred of em, and the village wouldn’t need an idiot. And then they’d all starve cause they don’t know how to do nothing. What I like about it? The Picasso? I look out on a nice day in the summer, and I see the kids climbing up that slanty part at the bottom and sliding down. Got the parents standing there, trying to figure out is it a baboon or what, and their kids play on it. I like that. Some guy from the Art Institute came to tell me I gotta keep them kids off it, that it was sacrilege or some shit. Scrawny atheist fuck in my office talking about sacrilege. Told him that Picasso might be a drunk and can’t keep his pants zipped, but at least he makes a decent slide.”

The mayor didn’t move, hands clasped in the small of his back, still facing the window, silent again. Clarke couldn’t stand the silence any longer.

“I’m very sorry, sir,” he said, “about David.”

The mayor nodded. “You was his friend, Junior always said that. Said you did good work for him. Said you was loyal to him. You and me, we got our differences. But you were good to my boy. I ain’t gonna forget that.”

Clarke didn’t buy the personal emotions, he knew he was being handled. The mayor was as close to a sociopath as anyone Clarke had ever known. “Thank you, sir. He was a great man. I am proud of what I’ve been able to do with him.”

“Still proud, after tonight?”

“I, eh, I didn’t know…”

“About the queer thing? Yeah, I know. I thought about it, maybe over the years. Seen this and that made me think. I wondered should I have said something. But there’s things you don’t wanna think, not about your own boy. Then he got married, and with the wife and the kid on the way and all, I thought maybe he’d be OK.”

“It shouldn’t define him, a single weakness. It shouldn’t become all he was. It shouldn’t be used to tarnish what he stood for.”

He could see the mayor nodding.

“It ain’t gonna. Nobody’s gonna know. Not ever. You understand that?”

“Riley told me.”

“I’m not asking did Riley tell you. I’m asking do you understand that nobody’s ever gonna know?”

“Yes, sir. I understand.”

Another long silence. The mayor spoke first this time.

“Junior was right, you know, about me, about how I run things. Not the way it oughta be. It was different times I come up in. You got your Hitlers and such, and nobody’s worrying too much how do you beat the son of a bitch. You do what you gotta do. And then I get this job, and see so much that needs doin’ and everybody wantin’ to chinwag everything to death. And so maybe I find some corners to cut and strings to pull, and pretty soon, I look back and I got sick fucks like Stosh running things just cause he’s got half the city by the balls. And now I gotta live with did I get my own kid killed.”

“It does need to change, sir.” Clarke was being probed, he could feel it. Hurley could write history any way he wanted, but Clarke would always have the rough draft, so Hurley needed him.

“Such a waste. He was our chance. Move away from all this crap, reach out to the next generation. There’s Billy, of course, but he ain’t got it, not like Junior did.” Billy was the mayor’s other son, just finishing college.

Careful here, thought Clarke. “It doesn’t need to be a waste, sir.”

Hurley finally turned away from the window. “You got something to say, spit it out.”

“You need a bridge to the new generation, and you need a placeholder until Billy is ready to take the stage.”

Hurley’s eyes glinted, almost the hint of a smile, seeing right through to Clarke’s play. “You think you’re the solution.”

Clarke nodded. “You’ve never really gotten to know me. You saw the Ivy League polish, and you wrote me off as some pantywaist. But you and I have the same ideology.”