Lieberman's Law (20 page)

His plan was simple. The group had grown, allied itself with whoever could help attain his ends, the Klan, militias, even Arabs who would eventually have to go. The Jews would go. The niggers would go. The Spies would go. The slants would go. This would be a white country like it was supposed to be. Berk was no fool. It probably wouldn't happen in his lifetime, but the movement would grow and the skinheads would be the most visible part of it. He imagined his photograph on the wall of meetings in the future. Meanwhile, he would make deals with the devil if it moved them toward a new America. He would also make deals with the devil if it meant making William Stanley Berk rich.

He thought briefly of Mr. Grits. Looked around the room and meeting eyes as if seeking dissent or a traitor. Berk, in fact, didn't know where the stolen weapons were, where the stolen religious scroll was, but he knew who had them.

“One more big rampage with the Arabs,” he said. “And then we go quiet. We let the cops know. We let the Jews and niggers know we did it and then we go under and let them shit in their pants for maybe a year wondering what we'll do next.”

“Right,” the crowd shouted. Pig Sticker shouted loudest of all.

Berk smiled and folded his arms. He had seen pictures of Mussolini with his arms crossed. He wanted to look like that. Mussolini was a martyr to the cause even if he was a wop. Berk smiled. When it was all over, he planned to rape the Arab bitch with the big mouth. Maybe they'd all rape her. What could she do about it? Complain to the cops? She had a big mouth and she was too smart.

“Now,” said Berk, “I'll tell you what we're gonna do next.”

Pig Sticker sat forward to listen. He was sweating right on top of his shaved head. He looked around. No one else was sweating. He was afraid of what he was going to hear, afraid he'd have to tell it to the Irish cop. Maybe Pig Sticker would pack his bag, take a bus, and let his hair grow out. Maybe. But goddamn it, he believed in Berk, admired Berk, had never met anyone like Berk. Berk was the big brother who would stand up for him. Berk was the leader who would pat him on the back for a job well done. And what Berk said was right. But Berk could never find out that Pig Sticker was part Jew. To Berk there was no such thing as part anything. You were all or nothing.

Charles Kenneth Leary listened and wondered if he had enough money in his apartment to buy a bus ticket and rent a room in some town far away if he had to. It almost brought tears to his eyes. He did not want to leave Berk or the Mongers. It might be better to kill the cop, but if the Irish cop knew then maybe other cops knew too and would come after him.

It was too much for Pig Sticker to think about. He wanted to remain Pig Sticker. He liked it when Berk called him Pig Sticker. Shit. He leaned forward and listened, and since he was sitting in the back of the room, he waited for a moment when no one was looking back to lean forward and wipe the sweat from his head with the sleeve of his jacket. When he straightened up, Berk was looking directly at him.

Hanrahan was not very good at the game, but he promised Iris's father, Chi Huang, that he would work on it. It was simply that Hanrahan did not have that kind of memory, not even for his own painful football career; much less, movies. It wasn't that Hanrahan didn't like movies. He loved them. He had a battered VCR that played but didn't record, but mostly he would watch old movies on AMC. He just couldn't remember the details the way Lieberman could.

“They wept when I read my paper,” Mr. Huang had said solemnly, sitting at his favorite booth in the empty Black Moon Restaurant. Iris sat across from her father at Hanrahan's side, touching his hand.

“I don't know,” said Hanrahan.
“The Prize?”

“Good movie. Good lines,” said Mr. Huang. “Wrong movie.
Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
Original version. Kevin McCarthy came in here one time. I could not get myself to talk to him. I should have.” Mr. Huang looked at the door of the restaurant as if hoping the actor would pay him a return visit. “Your Jew friend is much better at the game,” he added thoughtfully.

“He has insomnia, watches old movies at night, and has a good memory,” said Hanrahan.

“You bring him next time,” said Chi Huang.

“I'll bring him for lunch soon,” said Hanrahan.

“Wedding in three months,” said Mr. Huang, returning his look to his future son-in-law and his daughter. “Mr. Woo has said that he would arrange.”

Iris's father sat with his hands folded on the table. He was still wearing his apron. Perhaps a couple or two or a late-night party would still come. It was half an hour till closing. Iris would wait with him.

They sat in silence for a few minutes drinking coffee.

Chi Huang was not a tea drinker. Neither was Hanrahan. It made no difference to Iris, for whom it was just something social to do and she was pleased that her father and William were doing it. They finished their coffee and Huang said, “Confound it, man. I shall never be able to tell that story again.”

It was another movie question. Hanrahan had no idea. Better to admit it than make a mistake. “No idea,” he said.

“Four Feathers,”
said Chi Huang. “C. Aubrey Smith at very end. Next time you bring Lieberman.”

Huang stood up and offered his hand to Hanrahan. Hanrahan also rose and took the hand. Iris's father had a firm grip in his small hand, a grip developed from more than half a century in the kitchens of Chinese restaurants.

Iris and Bill waited while her father moved toward the kitchen. Iris said her father was over eighty. It made sense. Though Iris could easily be taken for thirty-five, she was actually a few years older than Hanrahan. She was also, Hanrahan thought, quite beautiful.

When the swinging door closed behind Mr. Huang, Hanrahan leaned down to give Iris a kiss, a quick one. He knew she did not feel comfortable kissing in public.

“That was the longest conversation I've ever had with your father,” Hanrahan said as he stood away from the booth.

“I think he is beginning to like you,” she said.

“Now that I have Mr. Woo's approval,” said Hanrahan, “my not being Chinese and being an alcoholic are not quite as important.”

Iris stood, took his hand. “My father likes to hold on to some tradition,” she said. “If you wish to make him truly happy, you might learn to speak a little Cantonese.”

“I'm fifty-one years old, Iris,” Hanrahan said with a grin, kissing her hand.

“My father is learning Spanish,” she said. “Takes lessons every Thursday night at the Senior Learning Center. I think he is quite good.”

“So,” said Hanrahan with a shrug. “I learn Chinese.”

“Cantonese,” Iris corrected gently. “Not Mandarin. We cannot understand Mandarin.”

“It's going to look a little silly for a big oaf of an Irish cop to be speaking Chinese,” he said. “But for you …” He touched her cheek.

“Tomorrow,” she said.

“Without a doubt,” he said and left the Black Moon Restaurant, feeling the slight night breeze and the possibility of a drizzle.

He had parked his car quite illegally on Sheridan Road, a few doors down from the restaurant, and had pulled down his visor to show a passing cop who might be below his ticket quota that he should pass this one by. Normally, he would have driven straight down Sheridan to Foster, turned right and gone down to Western and then turned left for the drive to his house in Ravenswood, but this time he took the turn at Hollywood and went South on the Outer Drive. Then he turned at Lawrence and went a few blocks past the Weiss University of Chicago Hospital and made a left into some street. When he had gone two blocks, he was dead certain. He was being followed, had been followed from the moment he pulled away from the curb near the restaurant. He had seen the lights come on in the car parked about six car lengths back, behind a line of illegally parked vehicles, and watched it keep pace behind him.

He checked the weapon in his holster, a 9mm Luger automatic. It was fully loaded and he had more than forty rounds in a box inside the television set in his living room. He also reached down to slightly loosen the tape around the S&W Short Forty just above his right ankle.

Ever since an attack that had sent Hanrahan to the hospital for more than a month and had nearly cost his life, he had never left his house unarmed, though no weapon could have protected him from the attacker who had come on him from behind and struck him before he could react. He also had to admit to himself that when he was in the house he had needed the solace of a nearby weapon ever since he had killed Frankie Kraylaw right inside the front door.

It was the only subject over which he and Iris had nearly quarreled. She had been in bed in the living room in his house and found it difficult to make love with a large handgun within reach. She understood that he was a policeman, but she preferred not seeing the weapon. He had relented and placed it in the drawer next to the sofa bed in the living room where they were lying. Hanrahan couldn't bring himself to take Iris to the bed and bedroom he had shared with Maureen. He, himself, frequently slept on the sofa bed, leaving the bedroom exactly as it had been when Maureen left him. However, he had begun to sleep more and more nights in the bedroom upstairs since he had murdered Frankie Kraylaw in the living room. The boys' rooms had been used several times, the last by Frankie Kraylaw's wife and little boy before Hanrahan had lured crazy Frankie into the house and killed him. Hanrahan had confessed his sin to Father Parker, but the Whiz had given him too light a penance and had been too understanding. If there were a God in a heaven somewhere, he and William Hanrahan were destined for a long talk about good and evil. Hanrahan had also hinted to Lieberman about what had happened. Lieberman had refused to use the word “murder,” instead he had said “accident” and once he had said “execution.”

Father Parker had given his view on the matter after Hanrahan had confronted the priest with what he viewed each day of his life, each torture and murder of a small child, often by the child's own parents, each rape of an old woman. Why didn't God save them? What did it prove or accomplish? Why was there a Frankie Kraylaw?

“The way I figure it,” Parker had said in his office, actually holding a football in his hands, a football full of the names of teammates Parker had played with on a winning Rose Bowl team, “God gives us free will, otherwise we're just puppets. He gives us free will and choices. We can do good. We can do evil. The ones who do evil may not know that what they are doing is wrong, is evil. They may say, and some have to me, that they killed the innocent wife or child to send them to a better life in heaven at God's side. They may say that they have no choice, that something inside them, childhood abuse, a horrible, uncontrollable impulse, bad genes, whatever, made them do it. Some greater good, the saving of America, made them plant the bomb.”

Hanrahan had looked up at that one.

“No, no one has confessed a bombing to me,” Parker had said, throwing the ball to Hanrahan seated across the desk. “But I've seen as you have and I've heard. God created us and stands back, watching us make choices, exercising our will, often to do wrong or evil. We can make up excuses, blame others, say we are acting for an ultimate greater good, but one day we'll stand in front of our savior and have to explain.”

“And he'll send the sinner to hell?” asked Hanrahan throwing the ball back.

“I don't know if there is a hell or what it might be,” said Father Parker. “I believe there is judgment, on earth and after death. If I didn't believe that, I wouldn't be wearing a tight collar on Sunday, conducting masses, visiting the dying, blessing the newborn, listening to confessions, and talking to friends and parishioners over this table.”

“And giving absolution,” Hanrahan reminded him.

“Ultimately, I think that's God's business,” said the priest. “I do it and then He has the power to overrule me. Like the Supreme Court.”

Hanrahan wasn't sure that he felt better after that conversation. When God gave man free will, why did he also give it to monsters and madmen like Frankie Kraylaw? But, then again, what was free will if it was not a choice between right and wrong, good and evil. It was too much for Hanrahan. He had decided that he was going to go on being a cop, going after the bad guys—for he firmly believed in bad—and giving God a helping hand whether he asked for it or not. William Hanrahan had free will, didn't he?

There were a lot of ways to handle the situation he was now facing. He could park, go into a random alley or passageway, find a place to hide, and step behind whoever was following him if the person or people in the car decided to come after him. He could drive to the station, see if they parked, get some help, and confront his pursuer or pursuers. What he did was drive home, inside the speed limit, down main streets, checking his rearview mirror. But the guy stayed back. He could tell that the driver was a man. By the time he parked in front of his house he could tell that the driver was alone. There were plenty of spaces. The overflow from Ravenswood Hospital didn't spill as far as Hanrahan's house, though the hospital was expanding. A parking lot had gone up. Hanrahan had a garage in back, but he rarely used it except for winter nights when there wasn't much or any snow and the temperature dipped below 15.

The follower parked ahead and turned off his lights. Hanrahan picked up his mail from the box, opened his gate, and went up to his door. The nightlight was on. It was always on. The rest of the house was dark. Still, no one got out of the car, which he could now see was probably a Mazda. Hanrahan went inside, dropped the mail on the table next to the door, and took off his jacket. He turned the rocker toward the front door and sat in it with his gun in his lap.

He sat, gently rocking in the dark, listening, amazed that he didn't want a drink, frightened because he wanted whoever it was—some ex-con he had sent away, some gang member he had slighted, someone a cop offends and forgets—to come through the door as Frankie Kraylaw had. God help him, Hanrahan felt a little mad, as if he could shoot another bad guy coming through his door. He would understand, understand that God had chosen his fate, God had decided that William Hanrahan, planning a wedding, drinking no more, would have to kill, the very thing he no longer wanted to do, the very thing that had almost caused him to leave the force. But where would he go? What would he do? Be a security guard with a brown uniform? Or, if he was lucky, no uniform at all, sitting up all night at the desk in the lobby of some big company, watching surveillance monitors, and picking up a check every week?