Her tone was still arrogant, but her words made sense; I put my arm across Bernie’s shoulders. “It’s a good point, piccola. Too many people are here, and we’re all getting in each other’s hair. Let’s get up to the Glow.”
Bernie let me escort her through the underpass, but her feet dragged. She paused on the far side to look back. Coop and Bear were squatting next to the pianist, who slowly returned to her nest of blankets and crates.
Judith waited on the sidelines while the woman adjusted her piano’s legs until it seemed stable. When the woman began to play again, Judith resumed her ride; the rest of the crowd dissolved. Bernie was listening intently to the playing.
“That song I also know!” she finally said. “At least, I think so.”
She began singing in her tuneless way,
“The art of loving
is the art of death
Love’s opposite isn’t hate, not hate
Love’s opposite is lonesome
One lone swan.”
“That song is beautiful, but so—so mélancolique, Vic, is it not?”
“Very,” I agreed, but I was listening to the piano: mixed in with the banging in the bottom octave, the pianist was weaving the melody from Grieg’s “Swan,” one of the lieder my mother used to sing.
3
Trader’s Folly
Bernie left me outside the Glow. She’d brooded over the episode all during the drive, not so much over the homeless singer, but over Judith and Coop’s high-handedness.
“And you—why didn’t you help me get past him to talk to her? She is not his property, enfin. Have you become too cautious in your old age to stand up for the right thing to do?”
“Maybe so. Old, covered with barnacles, or maybe mildew, which makes my joints creak too much to move fast. But please remember that I took an afternoon from work to watch you coach your South Side Sisters. I’d like a word of thanks, instead of an attack for not intervening with a woman who howled with pain when I tried to approach her.”
“I do thank you, Vic,” Bernie said in a wooden tone. “My girls played hard; they were worth watching. Still, I am not much in the mood for sociability with you and your friends. They will all agree with you and then I will become really cross and we will have a big fight, which should not happen on your birthday.”
“We elderly don’t have enough energy to fight you, Bernie, but go on home. Say hi to Angela.”
Bernie kissed me lightly on the cheek to show no lasting ill will and headed toward the L.
Peter Sansen was already standing at the bar, talking to the owner, Sal Barthele, when I came in. His face lit up when he saw me, which took away my grumpiness.
“Happy birthday, beautiful. Sal has created a cocktail just for you.”
Sal nodded at Erica, her head bartender. While Sal turned her back to me and poured and stirred from a collection of bottles, Erica went to the sound system. Sal handed me a glass just as Piaf’s throaty voice came on singing, “Je ne regrette rien.”
“Seems like a good way to start a new year, Warshawski: regret nothing.”
I leaned across the mahogany bar to kiss her and saw she’d been working with bourbon. I don’t usually like it, but the cocktail was a perfect balance of sweet, sour, and bitter.
“Patent it, quickly,” I said. “It’s mind altering. You don’t want one of your enterprising traders to steal the recipe and license it.”
The Golden Glow is two blocks from the Board of Trade, and for the hour or two after the closing bell, it’s usually packed with traders celebrating victories or drowning sorrows. We’d arrived between that crush, and the smaller crowd that comes in when the theaters close. Peter was drinking another of Sal’s signature cocktails, Trader’s Folly, which has powered more than one stupid investment decision.
“Bernie acquitted herself well as a coach?” Sal asked.
“Impressively,” I said. “Ardor and smarts—an unbeatable combo. The hard part came afterward.”
While I was describing the wild community meeting, Murray Ryerson came in. Sal stocks Dark Lord beer just for him; she had a bottle open by the time he reached the bar.
“What happened at the SLICK meeting?” Murray asked. “Something the boy reporter needs to know about?”
“Don’t think it will be a blip on Global’s radar,” I said.
Murray used to be one of the top investigative reporters in the Midwest, writing for the Herald-Star, until Global Entertainment bought the Star. He still sort of covers Illinois politics, when the editors don’t think the story will threaten any of their pals in power, but he mostly does Chicago fluff on Global’s cable station.
“The Park District wants to fill in part of the lake at Forty-seventh to create a beach there,” I added. “A highly inflamed guy named Coop made the usual tedium interesting, but the part of the day that’s stuck with me is this pianist Bernie and I encountered. She was banging on a toy piano as if it were a drum, but she could get it to make music. The unusual part was the way she cut well-known bits of the classical repertoire into an R and B sound. Purcell and Grieg were the two I recognized.”
“Come on,” Murray scoffed. “You say she did this on a Peanuts piano? You were under a viaduct at a busy intersection. You heard what Bernie persuaded you to hear, not what some homeless woman was banging on a piece of plastic.”
I flushed. “Don’t act ignorant in public, Murray. Yo-Yo Ma could play Bach on a washtub bass on the floor of the Board of Trade and everyone would recognize it. But Bernie knew the words to one of the songs, about a woman murdered by the Spanish in the fifteenth century. She was the head of one of the nations that the Spanish encountered when they arrived. Sad to say, I hadn’t heard of her, but her name was something like Ancona.”
“Anacaona,” Sal said. “From Hispaniola. Where they were so primitive before European arrival that women could be leaders of the nation. My sisters and I grew up on her story. The Spanish wanted her gold and her land. When she fought back and lost, they offered her a choice between being a whore or death. She chose death.”
Sal and her sisters had been born in Chicago, but their parents were Haitian émigrés.
“If you go there today, you see hardly any trace of the original inhabitants,” she added. “It’s hard to imagine them because people are either like me, descended from Africans who didn’t exist there in 1492, or from the Europeans. It’s disturbing, as though one is always walking on the feet of a ghost.”
Murray had been scrolling through his phone while Sal was talking. “Looks like Lydia Zamir wrote the song Bernie recognized today.”
He handed his phone to Sal, who took it to her sound system at the back of the bar. “The Albatross Song” from Patricia Barber’s Higher was playing. At the end of the cut, Sal stuck Murray’s phone into the dock and turned up the volume. The sound of a grand piano filled the bar, ominous chords rumbling from the bottom of the bass clef. From the high treble came darting notes like a hummingbird diving into a flower and quickly pulling back. And then a contralto began the song that Bernie hadn’t been able to sing:
“Anacaona, queen and chief,