After Kawasaki dropped me and Bear at my car in the university’s garage, I drove up to Elisa’s home on the Northwest Side. She didn’t answer my ring, but her dog growled convincingly behind the door.
I smiled winsomely and spoke to the security camera. “I’d like to talk to you about my conversation with Sergeant Pizzello.”
When there was no response, I wondered if she was out. I texted: I didn’t mention the document you took from the apartment, but I’d like to know what it was. I’m taking Bear to the forest preserve; we can meet you at the library or back here at your house.
She still didn’t answer. I drove to the nearby forest preserve. Mosquitoes whined around my ears; planes on the final approach to O’Hare roared overhead, but the setting itself was lush with midsummer foliage. Jogging along the Des Plaines River path was like being in the country—except for the planes. And the traffic on the Kennedy, hidden by the dense woods but still loud. Mitch and Peppy would have been in the underbrush, flushing smaller animals, but Bear stuck close to my left side.
Palurdo still hadn’t answered when I got back to my car. I drove to her house, worried about what might have happened to her. I left Bear in the car with the windows open and a pan of water, but as I went up the walk, a man came out, closing the door behind him. He was heavy-set, middle-aged, his gut straining the waistband of his jeans. His face was so deeply creased it wasn’t possible to read his expression.
“I’m Jesse. Friend of Elisa and Jacobo.”
“I’m V.I. Warshawski.”
He asked for ID, I gave it, he opened the door. Palurdo’s dog appeared. It was an Akita, famed for their fierce loyalty. This one seemed to be measuring my fat content for roasting. Jesse gave the dog a command in Spanish, and it curled its lip at me.
“For Elisa to see that murdered man, it brought back the horror of seeing her son’s dead body. She will talk to you, but I will be there.”
He led me down a short hall to a small room that overlooked the backyard. Elisa was sitting there in a chaise longue, wearing a man’s flannel shirt over sweatpants: shock had left her cold, and her face still had a waxy pallor. Her hands were wrapped around a mug of hot liquid.
“Do you ever stop?” she said to me. “Do you ever stop running, asking questions, prying at people’s lives? Do you take time to think about the damage you do?”
“Did I damage your life by asking you to let me look at Lydia’s apartment?” I said. “I didn’t plant Simon Lensky’s body there. I didn’t kill him. It distressed me to see him, too.”
“But if you’ve never seen the dead body of someone you love—”
“The cousin who was the companion of my childhood was murdered,” I cut her off. “His body was torn up by the screw of a Great Lakes freighter. I was distraught, so I did what I do when I’m distressed: I ran around asking questions until I found his killer, and the people who betrayed him into his killer’s hands. What else would you like to know about me?”
It was unfair, I guess, to play the dead Boom-Boom card. Elisa was suffering, acutely, and really, what business did I have asking questions of her?
The silence built, like a scene from a spaghetti western—camera on Jesse, looking anxiously at Elisa; camera on Elisa, eyes on the mug she was holding; camera on me, eyes on Elisa’s small garden, avoiding a look at more misery.
I was turning to leave when Elisa said, “Grief is a selfish bitch. She wants you to shut out the rest of the world, including other people’s suffering. Sit. I’ll tell you about the photograph.”
Jesse perched on the arm of a couch next to Elisa. I pulled up a hassock.
Elisa nodded at Jesse, who went to a side table and returned with an old black-and-white picture of two youths, perhaps sixteen years old, both in cutoff jeans and T-shirts. Both were handsome, one dark, with a chipped front tooth, the other fairer. Their arms were linked across their shoulders, and they were grinning for the camera, as if happy to be alive and together.
“Jesse was with us—with Hector and me—when we found this,” Elisa said. “The man on the left is Jacobo. I don’t know who the other man is. Jacobo never spoke of him, but the inscription on the back—”
I turned the photo over to see an inscription in a sprawling adolescent hand, Hermanos y compañeros por siempre.
“Brothers and companions forever?” I ventured.
“Brothers and comrades is probably more accurate,” Elisa said.
“This was on its own? No envelope, no name?”
“It was in a manila envelope,” Jesse said, “but not labeled.”
“Jacobo had hidden this in his toolbox,” Elisa explained. “After his death, Hector and I wanted Jesse to choose among Jacobo’s tools. When we emptied the box, a kind of false bottom came out. The photo was underneath. Jesse knew Jacobo longer than anyone—they started at the company at almost the same time, but even he had never seen this before.”
I looked at Jesse, who nodded solemnly.
“Anyway, Hector became obsessed with the picture,” Elisa said. “He took it away with him, he took it with him to Chile—he wanted to learn his father’s history and he thought perhaps someone would recognize the photo, although it must be from the late sixties or early seventies—Jacobo was born in 1953. I don’t know who would recognize two barrio boys forty years or more after the fact. If the friend is even still alive, he would look different—life in the mines changed everyone. That much Jacobo said, the rare times he talked about his life in Tocopilla.”
“How did you cope with so much secrecy?” I blurted out. “Didn’t you ask him about his life, why he left Chile?”
Her waxen skin turned faintly pink. “Of course I asked. I wanted to know for myself, but more important, I thought our son deserved to know his father’s background. Jacobo would say only that the past was too painful for him to discuss. All he ever told me was that he was an orphan and his only sister had been murdered. It was after her death that he came to America.”
“Did he talk about the murder?” I asked. “How it happened, whether the murderer was caught and tried?”
Elisa said, “The country was in chaos then—the Pinochet years—so many deaths and disappearances, Jacobo said one individual death couldn’t rouse police interest.
“Hector went to Chile, to Tocopilla, where Jacobo was born: he’d told us that much. It’s a small mining town on the coast. But the church where his parents were married and where he and Filomena—his sister—were baptized had collapsed in an earthquake. All the records had been destroyed.
“Jacobo always said the Palurdos were an insignificant family, and I guess that was true. His father worked in the mine, his mother cleaned houses for the wealthy in the town. Hector couldn’t find anyone who remembered them. He couldn’t find anyone with our surname, but when he came home, he was furious. He wanted to know what Jacobo had told me about the mines, the conditions, the lives of the workers. And I could tell him nothing. He had already started seeing Lydia, but he and she became a tighter couple and seemed to feel a missionary fervor for uncovering the history of injustices in the Americas. It was exhausting to be with them.”