Victoria followed them, her legs aching, a stitch in her side making her gasp for breath. She couldn’t pay attention to her pain, it would only get in her way. She had to find Tony. She elbowed her way past the screaming adults. One of them put out a hand and grabbed her, so hard she couldn’t wriggle free.
‘‘And where are you going?’’
It was Father Gielczowski. With him were half a dozen people she recognized from her own neighborhood, two of them women carrying bags of sugar.
‘‘I’m looking for my dad. Have you seen him?’’
‘‘Have you seen him, Father. Doesn’t your Jew mother teach you to respect your elders?’’
‘‘You’re not my father!’’ Victoria kicked him hard on the shin; he let go of her shoulder, swearing at her in Polish.
Victoria slithered away. The crowd was so thick that the priest couldn’t move fast enough to catch up with her.
‘‘Daddy, where are you, where are you?’’ She realized tears were running down her cheeks. Babies cry; you aren’t a baby.
She passed a drinking fountain and stopped to drink and to run her head under the stream of water. Other people came up and pushed her out of the way, but she was cooler now and could move faster.
For over an hour she pushed her way through the mob. It was like swimming in giant waves in Lake Michigan: you worked hard, but you couldn’t move very far. Every time she came to a cop, she tried to ask about Tony Warshawski. Sometimes the man would take time to shake his head-no, he didn’t know Tony. Once, someone knew Tony but hadn’t seen him. More often, the overheated officers brushed her aside.
People were throwing cans and stones and cherry bombs. One exploded near her, filling her eyes with smoke. A rumor swept through the mob: someone had knocked King down with a rock.
‘‘One down, eleven million to go,’’ a woman cackled.
‘‘King Nigger’s on his feet, they’re treating him like he’s royalty while we have to suffer in the heat,’’ a man growled.
Victoria saw the golf course on her right. It looked green, refreshing, and almost empty of people. She shoved her way through the mob and made it onto the course. She climbed the short hill around one of the holes and came on the road that threaded the greens. To her amazement, Uncle Tomas’s white convertible stood there. Tomas wasn’t in it, only the stranger who’d been with him back at Western Avenue. He was driving slowly, looking at the bushes.
Victoria was too exhausted to run; she limped up to the car and started pounding on the door. ‘‘What happened to Tomas? Where’s my dad? What have you done with him?’’
‘‘Who are you?’’ the stranger demanded. ‘‘Tomas doesn’t have any kids!’’
‘‘My dad, Officer Warshawski!’’ she screamed. ‘‘Tomas said he was going to kill Tony, where is he?’’
The stranger opened the door. The look on his face was terrifying. For some reason, the girl held up her camera, almost as a protection against his huge angry face, and took his picture. He yanked at the camera strap, almost choking Victoria; the strap broke and he flung the camera onto the grass. As she bent to pick it up, he grabbed her. She bit him and kicked at him, but she couldn’t make him let go.
III
The battle between the cops and the protestors went on for five hours after Dr. King and his fellow marchers left the park. By the end of the day, every cop felt too limp and too numb to care about the cars that were still burning, or those that were overturned or dumped into the lagoons ringing the park. Firefighters were working on burning cars, but they were moving slowly, too.
Some patrolmen returning to their squad cars couldn’t get far: women had poured sugar into the gas tanks. After going a few hundred feet, the fuel filters clogged and the cars died. When a fireman came on the body shoved under a bush, he called over to a cop uselessly fiddling with the carburetor of his dead squad car.
The policeman walked over on heat-swollen legs and knelt, grunting in pain as his hamstrings bent for the first time in nine hours. The man under the bush was around forty, blond, sunburnt. And dead. The cop grunted again and lifted him by the shoulders. The back of the man’s head was a pulpy mess. Not dead from a heat stroke, as the officer had first assumed, but from the well-placed blow of a blunt instrument.
A small crowd of firefighters and police gathered. The cop who’d first examined the body sat heavily on his butt. His eyelids were puffy from the sun.
‘‘You guys know the drill. Keep back, don’t mess the site up any more’n it already is.’’ His voice, like all his brother officers’, was raspy from heat and strain.
‘‘Guy here says he knows something, Bobby,’’ a man at the edge of the ragtag group said.
Bobby groaned, but got to his feet when the other cop brought over a civilian in a Hawaiian print shirt. ‘‘I’m Officer Mallory. You know the dead man, sir?’’
The civilian shook his head. ‘‘Nope. Just saw one of the niggers hit him. Right after we got King, one of them said he’d do in the first whitey crossed his path, and I saw him take a Coke bottle and wham it into this guy.’’
The police looked at each other; Bobby returned to the civilian. ‘‘That would have been about when, sir?’’
‘‘Maybe five, maybe six hours ago.’’
‘‘And you waited this long to come forward?’’
‘‘Now just a minute, Officer. Number one, I didn’t know the guy was dead, and number two, I tried getting some cop’s attention and he told me to bug off and mind my own business. Only he didn’t put it that polite, if you get my drift.’’
‘‘How far away were you? Close enough to see the man with the Coke bottle clearly?’’
The civilian squinted in thought. ‘‘Maybe ten feet. Hard to say. People were passing back and forth, everyone doing their own thing, like the kids are saying these days, no one paying much attention-me neither, but I could make a stab at describing the nigger who hit him.’’
Bobby sighed. ‘‘Okay. We’re waiting for a squad car that works to come for us. We’ll drive you to the Chicago Lawn station. You can make a statement there, give us a description of the Negro you say you saw, and the time and all that good stuff… Boys, you’re as beat as me, but let’s see if we can find that Coke bottle anywhere near here.’’
Turning to the man next to him, he muttered, ‘‘I hope to Jesus this guy can’t make an ID. The whole town will explode if we arrest some Negro for killing a white guy today.’’
As they picked through the litter of cups and bottles and car jacks that the rioters had dropped, looking for anything with hair or blood on it, a squad car drove up near them. The uniformed driver came over, followed by a civilian man with his son.
‘‘Mallory! We’re looking for Tony Warshawski. Seen him?’’
Bobby looked up. ‘‘We weren’t on the same detail. I think he’s over by Homan-oh-’’ He suddenly recognized the civilian: Tony’s brother Bernie.
Bobby Mallory had been Tony Warshawski’s protégé when he joined the force. Fifteen years later, he’d moved beyond Tony with promotions the older man no longer applied for, but the two remained close friends. Bobby had spent enough weekends with Tony and Gabriella that he knew Bernie and Marie as well; Bobby was an enthusiastic supporter of Boom-Boom’s ambition to supplant the Golden Jet with the Blackhawks. He wished he could also support the freedom Tony and Gabriella gave their own only child, but he hated the way they let her run around with Boom-Boom, like a little hooligan. Thank God Eileen was raising his own girls to be proper young ladies.
‘‘We’re falling down, we’re that tired, Warshawski,’’ Bobby said. ‘‘What’s up?’’