“And to Fly the Flag.”
That was a random guess, but Andrés looked nervously over his shoulder. The man he’d been handling pipe with was watching him with a worried expression.
“I will not be tricked into disclosing confidences. What do you know about Fly the Flag?”
“Frank Zamar had just signed a big contract to deliver sheets and towels to By-Smart, not long before his plant burned down. That sounds like good news, not the desperation that would make a man blow up his own plant with himself inside it. So someone was annoyed with him.”
I slapped my head, the caricature of someone struck by a hot idea. “Come to think of it, you yourself were at Fly the Flag a couple of days before the fire. You had some kind of issue with Frank Zamar. You’re an electrician. You’d know just how to set up something that could start a fire while you were long gone. Maybe you put it in place that Tuesday when I saw you at the factory.”
“You should be careful about making such accusations.” He tried to speak angrily but his lips were stiff; I had the feeling that if he relaxed they might start trembling. “I would do nothing to risk the life of a man, especially not Frank Zamar, who was not wicked, just troubled.”
“But, Roberto,” his coworker said, “we all know-”
Andrés interrupted him to tell him in Spanish to be careful with what he said-I was not a friend.
“I’m not your enemy,” I said in English. “What do we all know?”
With another reproving look at his coworker, Andrés said stiffly, “As you said, Zamar signed a new deal, to make sheets for the Bysens, sheets and towels with the American flag. Only-he signs in a panic, because he has lost so much business, and the bills for the new machines don’t stop just because the machines have stopped. And Zamar says he will make these sheets, but for so little money he cannot pay his workers in Chicago. So he has to do it in Nicaragua, or China, or someplace where people will work for a dollar a day, not thirteen dollars an hour. And I went to warn him, he could lose everything if he takes his jobs out of the neighborhood, and not only takes them out but pays people so bad they are no better than slaves.”
“And he wouldn’t listen?” I said. “So you put rats in his heating ducts, and he still didn’t agree so you torched the factory?”
“No!” Andrés roared, then said in a more level voice, “He promised me he would go back to By-Smart, tell them he changed his mind, and I even told him I would help him if he did go. And young Billy said Frank did go, he did see the woman in charge of sheets, and also Patrick Grobian, whom we all know, but-then I think he changed his mind.”
“Did he tell you he had opened his second plant? Did Rose Dorrado tell you she was supervising the night shift for him in it?”
“What?” He was thunderstruck. “She was doing that and she said nothing to me, to her pastor, about this important thing in the life of the neighborhood?”
“But wasn’t that good?” I was genuinely bewildered now. “That meant he was keeping jobs in the community.”
“He lied to me!” Andrés’s color rose. “And so did she. Or worse, she did not look me in the face and tell me the truth!”
“About what?”
“About-Frank Zamar’s financial situation.”
I didn’t think that was what he meant, and from the look on the other electrician’s face he didn’t think so, either, but I couldn’t get Andrés to budge, and I couldn’t get his coworker to talk. We’d been at it for about ten minutes when a man came in and spoke to Andrés in Spanish-they needed the work in the kitchen finished so that the floor could be something-closed up, I think. Andrés told me I had to leave, he had nothing further to say to me.
I pushed myself to my feet. My hamstrings were stiff from squatting so long. “Okay. Just so you know, though, this morning people broke into the apartment where Ms. Love has been staying. They took her computer: they don’t want whatever she knows about the South Side to be made public. Bron Czernin was killed in a very ugly way. If she survives, Ms. Love will face many surgeries before she recovers. Whoever attacked them is ruthless. If they think you know whatever secrets she and Bron shared, you could be the next target.”
Andrés straightened himself; his face took on a rapt expression. “Jesús se humillo así mismo, haciendose obediente, hasta la muerte. Jesus became obedient to death upon the cross. I will not show fear to go where my Master went before me.”
“And it’s okay with you if they attack Billy and Josie as well?”
Andrés frowned. “You have given me no reason to believe that the death of Bron Czernin has anything to do with Billy Bysen and his family. Perhaps even Mrs. Czernin organized this attack herself. Have you spoken with her? A woman who is betrayed, who feels angry, she can well commit murder, especially a woman like Mrs. Czernin, who now has a daughter gravely ill, she will not be the most reasoning person. She can well do something terrible to her husband and his lover in her anger and her grief.”
“It’s not impossible,” I conceded. “It took a lot of strength to heft those bodies around. If Ms. Czernin had knocked them out, she could have moved them with a forklift, if she had one, into whatever truck that took them to the pit. It’s all possible, but not very believable.”
The man who’d told Andrés to finish the kitchen made a great show of looking at his watch.
“I’m leaving,” I said. “But, Pastor, if Billy calls you again, tell him to talk to me, or to Conrad Rawlings in the Fourth District, if his worries about his family include knowledge of some kind of crime. There’s an awfully big tiger out there for a nineteen-year-old to grab by his tail. Thanks, by the way, for the information about Fly the Flag.”
That startled him out of his detached demeanor. “I told you nothing! And if you say otherwise, you are committing a terrible sin by bearing false witness.”
“So long.” I smiled and turned on my heel.
I left the house slowly, hoping he might change his mind and come after me with more information. A couple of men taking a cigarette break out front gave me a cheerful greeting as I passed, but Andrés remained in the kitchen.
I walked to the Czernins’ house from the jobsite, since it was only three blocks away. The day continued cold, the sky filled with clouds that rolled and twisted over the lake. Despite the bitter weather, I went slowly, not eager to face Sandra Czernin and her unpredictable rages. And wondering, too, about Andrés.
I wanted to hang him upside down from the roof joists and shake him until whatever he knew about Billy and his family and Fly the Flag came tumbling out of his head. I found it impossible to believe Andrés had set the fire at the factory, but he was an electrician. He would know where the wiring came into the plant and how to use it to cause maximum devastation. But I didn’t think he would engineer a man’s death, and I couldn’t imagine any reason he’d shut down a business that provided good jobs to the community.
Since I couldn’t get Andrés to talk, it was even more important that I find Billy. The Kid had run away right after his grandfather insulted Pastor Andrés at the church service, so it didn’t seem as though his quarrel with his family had anything to do with Bron and Marcena. The next day, he’d gone to work in the usual way: it wasn’t until he got to work that something happened to make him disappear altogether. That sounded like Billy’s problems lay in the warehouse, not around Fly the Flag. That meant, presumably, something his Aunt Jacqui was doing, since she was the one family member who showed up regularly at the warehouse. So the warehouse had to be my next port of call, once I’d gotten past Sandy Zoltak. Sandra Czernin.
Despite my foot-dragging, I’d reached the Czernin house, a bungalow near the corner of Ninety-first and Green Bay Avenue, catty-corner to the six-hundred-acre wasteland that used to be the USX South Works.