“What are you doing down here?” he demanded.
“I have a passport,” I assured him. “It’s all legal.”
“Not if you’re bothering her, it isn’t.” He jerked his head toward the piano player.
Mitch, my big black lab mix, didn’t like Coop’s tone. He wedged himself between us and made an ugly noise in his throat.
“You looking after your person?” Coop bent over Mitch, his voice suddenly soft and cajoling.
His whole affect changed along with his voice: he looked willowy, not sinewy, and Mitch responded by letting Coop scratch his ears. Bear and Peppy, my golden, shoved up against Coop’s legs, demanding their share of attention.
“You two are a couple of turncoats, aren’t you?” I said severely to my dogs, who grinned.
Coop stood back up. “If you have dogs like these, you can’t be all bad. Just don’t go interfering in business you don’t understand. We don’t like outsiders prying into our lives down here. No social workers, no do-gooders.”
“Fortunately, I’m neither. On the other hand, I’m someone who doesn’t react well to threats, so try dialing it down a decibel or two. Pretend I’m a dog that you want to be on good terms with.”
That forced a laugh out of him. “What breed?”
“Half Rottweiler, half pit dog. I’m loyal but fierce. And one of the people in my network of concern is the young woman you let the cops drag off early this morning. How did you happen on the scene so patly? And why didn’t you take responsibility for your part in the skirmish?”
“My part was to make sure no one, including your ‘network of concern,’ distresses her.” He jerked his head toward the pianist. “She’s had enough disturbance for three lifetimes. When people like you or that kid come around, it pulls the skin off her wounds and starts them bleeding again.”
“All the more reason to get her help.”
“All the more reason for you to fucking mind your own business.” His tone had turned ugly again.
I was getting whiplash trying to follow the switches between Nice Coop and Nasty Coop. Using a tone of exaggerated meekness, I said, “Tell me how to get in touch with you, Coop, so that I can check in advance whether I’m planning activities that will alarm you.”
He studied my face for a moment, then replied with surprising calmness, “I don’t know who you are, just what you say you do. I don’t know who you’re loyal to or who’s paying you. If I don’t know those things, I can’t trust you. When your kid showed up in the middle of the night, that scared the bejesus out of me. It would be typical—”
He bit off the sentence. I tried to ask him “typical” of what or whom, but he shook his head and refused to say anything else.
I took the dogs and drove slowly back to my office. If Lydia was a target of some malign person, she wasn’t at all hard to find. The most sense I could make of the situation was that Coop himself straddled some line between delusion and reality, and that Lydia was a bit player in his fantasy world. Which Bernie and I now inhabited as well.
When I was at my desk, I checked with Bernie, to reenforce the police injunction that she stay clear of Lydia Zamir. She was still subdued and in a compliant frame of mind.
“I promise, Vic. Anyway, I have one week to learn softball. That is my new coaching assignment, can you believe? At least soccer is like hockey, moving up and down the field, but softball—standing around chewing gum. How can you motivate team spirit while you’re waiting around like in a doctor’s office for something to happen?”
“Get them all singing ‘Savage,’” I suggested. “It will pump everyone up while they’re waiting.”
Right before hanging up, Bernie said in an offhand voice, “Vic, you remember Leo? Leo Prinz?”
“I don’t think so,” I said.
“He made the speech about the Lake Michigan beach, and the crazy man tried to attack him. You were there.”
“So I was,” I agreed: the excitement over Zamir, Coop, and Bernie’s night in the police station had pushed the SLICK meeting from my mind. “What about him?”
“They want him to finish his talk. Apparently some community person made the SLICK woman realize she couldn’t act like a dictator, so he has to make the whole speech. I told him I’d go. I thought you might like to come. You know, in case anyone attacks him again.”
“Bring your hockey stick,” I suggested. “You’re much fiercer than either Leo or me.”
“No, please, Vic. Angela has to take her girls to Blue Island that day. I want someone I know.”
“You know Leo,” I said.
“I’ll text you the details,” she said, as if I’d agreed.
“Bernie!” I expostulated, but she had hung up.
Five minutes later, I got her text with the details of the SLICK meeting, scheduled a few days from now. I deleted the text, but at dinner that night with Peter, I whined about Bernie’s exigency.
“And why someone as forceful as a whirlwind is interested in this young man is beyond me. He’s not a very rugged specimen.”
Peter laughed. “She’s got enough ferocity for two or three. As you do, yourself, Vic. But in you, there’s the extra dimension of wanting to heal the world, which means you’re constantly trying to look after strays even while you complain about them.”
“Is that a compliment or a complaint?” I said.
“It’s why I love you,” he said quietly. “And why I worry when your compassion drives you into the path of danger.”
My throat tightened; I couldn’t speak, but leaned across the table to squeeze his fingers.
The next day I had a client meeting in the South Loop, just a ten-minute drive from the viaduct where Zamir camped out. She wasn’t playing, and it took a moment or two for me to see her in her nest; her rags blended almost seamlessly into the filthy concrete wall. That was why I’d missed her when I walked past yesterday. I stood looking at her for too long a time—she became aware of me, whimpered, and clutched the piano, which had been buried under a blanket.
Peter’s description of me felt too grand—that I was trying to heal the world—but it’s true that someone as hurt and needy as this woman made me want to intervene. I couldn’t think of anything more to do than I’d already done, but on an impulse, I scribbled my home address and landline on the back of one of my cards and left it on the edge of her blanket.
“Please call me, or come to me, if you ever feel you can trust me to help you.”
At least Coop didn’t appear on this visit, but two days later he erupted into my life with a vengeance. I returned from an early run with the dogs to find him and Bear in front of my apartment building. As soon as Coop saw me he bounded down the walk, a newspaper crumpled in his hand.
“Did you do this? After I warned you to stay away?”
“Did I do what?” I asked. “Leave a newspaper on your lawn? I don’t know where you live, and even if I did, I wouldn’t erupt into your life like Mount Etna.”
“Damn you, don’t play innocent bystander with me.” He was shaking with fury, so much that he dropped the paper as he tried to shove it against my face.