“Right. I went to talk to Sister Frances about Steve Sawyer.”

“We know about that,” the man from Homeland Security said.

“You have bugs planted in her room?” I asked. “They’re good quality, I guess, if they survived the fire and you retrieved them. Not like the crap weapons you buy from China and sell to Afghanistan.”

“You were bugging the room?” the white Bomb and Arson detective said, turning to the feds. “Why the fuck were you doing that?”

“National security,” the Homeland Security man said. “I can’t say any more.”

“Beautiful umbrella,” I murmured. “From now on, whenever I do anything particularly embarrassing, I’ll just cry ‘National security!’ and refuse to say anything else.”

“That’s enough,” Torgeson snapped. “What were you doing in Sister Frances’s apartment?”

“National security,” I said.

The two Bomb and Arson squad detectives swallowed smiles. Harmony did not reign supreme between the federal and local law enforcers. I let them bicker with one another for a few minutes.

“I have a question for you,” I said. “You know why I went to see Sister Frances, to discuss the case of the man who’d been convicted of killing Harmony Newsome in Marquette Park forty years ago. Sister Frances was marching with Ms. Newsome that hot summer day and said she didn’t think it was possible that Steve Sawyer killed Ms. Newsome. Are you reopening the case?”

“He was tried, convicted, did his time. We’re not interested.” That was the Latino cop.

“Then why was that the last question OEM asked me in the hospital, why did I care what Sister Frances had to say about that old murder?”

“I think you misheard. You were drugged, in a lot of pain,” Torgeson said.

“You’re the ones with the tape recorders.” I looked at my fingertips. “Go listen to the conversation. I don’t have anything else for you.”

The crowded room was momentarily quiet. Then the Bomb and Arson team started asking me questions that I could answer, to lead them step-by-step through my brief time with Sister Frances. It wasn’t meaningful or helpful, but I was the only witness.

The more times I recounted the Molotov cocktails sailing in on us, the less real they became. It was easy to describe them glibly, as if they were a plot detail in a thriller and not a death-dealing event.

When I finished, I asked what residue they’d found in the bottles: gasoline? rocket fuel? jellied bomb accelerant?

“We can’t answer questions like that,” the Homeland Security man said. “They’re in connection with an investigation linked to our national security.”

It was my turn to remember I needed to keep a leash on my temper. “What about the perps? You must have pictures of them, time-stamped and everything, right? Anything you can show on the street for an ID?”

“We can’t comment. It’s an investigation linked to our national security.”

“But these pictures aren’t?” I picked up the stills of me at the entrance to the Freedom Center building. “That’s good. I’ll show them to Sister Carolyn, see if she knows who this might be. Given that someone was in Sister Frances’s apartment that night, she might recognize who.”

“If you weren’t there, how do you know someone was in the dead nun’s apartment?” Torgeson pounced.

“You just told me.” I got to my feet, holding the stills. The woman from OEM leaned over, spraying me with her fetid breath, and grabbed the pictures.

“These are government property and are highly classified.”

“I know,” I said. “‘An investigation linked to our national security. ’ ”

She glared at me. “I’d strongly advise you not to suggest to a nun that she take a bolt cutter to a room that’s been secured by the police.”

I smiled at her. We were playing a game where the person who keeps her temper longest wins. “You know, we live in a county where patronage workers get paid a hundred thousand dollars a year not to work. So it cheers me no end to see that you really are earning the salary my tax dollars pay for. You’ve been hard at it, and I’ll see you get a note stuck in your personnel file.”

30

EVEN THOUGH I’D WALKED AWAY TRIUMPHANT FROM THAT skirmish, there was no way I could win a larger battle with the law. The real question, if I could get my tired brain to return to duty, was why they cared so much. Their questions, their whole attitude, seemed more about Sister Frances’s and my conversation than her murder.

I had to be honest enough to admit my arrival at the murder scene two days later warranted investigation. But why did they have such an elaborate stakeout on the building in the first place?

The interrogation had worn me out. I tried to make some notes, in big block capitals with a felt-tipped marker, but the effort put me to sleep. When I woke, it was because the doorman was calling on the house phone: Sister Carolyn Zabinska had arrived.

“You don’t look well. Are you up to talking?” she greeted me.

Her own face was pinched and gray with grief. She was tall and sturdily built, but her shoulders were bent forward with pain.

“It’s just my hair,” I said, steering myself away from self-pity. “I tried to trim it with sewing shears and was singularly inept. The FBI was ruder. They said I looked like the losing end of a catfight.”

“Yes, the FBI. That’s what I want to talk about… One of the things, anyway.”

She followed me onto the balcony off the living room, where Lotty has a little table and chairs in the summer. I offered refreshments, and left her standing there, looking out over Lake Michigan, while I burrowed in Lotty’s kitchen. She practically survives on Viennese coffee, but I found some German herbal infusions in the back of a drawer. When I returned to the balcony with a tray, precariously balanced between my bandaged palms, Sister Carolyn sat down and asked how I knew the FBI was watching the Freedom Center building.

“I don’t know if the FBI is involved. Homeland Security took the pictures.” I explained what I’d learned from today’s interview, including the news that the feds photographed everyone entering and leaving.

“That’s so outrageous. Why on earth?”

“I don’t know. When they questioned me in the hospital, they were dancing like rhinos around the subject. They implied it could be because of your tenants. You’re the one who knows if you’re treading on their toes.”

“Treading on their toes? It’s true we protest at the School of the Americas. We work with poor immigrants, with refugees, with people on death row. We’re involved in affordable housing. And peace. But we don’t do anything clandestine or immoral. We don’t sell drugs or weapons or spy on people.”

“You know darned well you’re rocking the whole aircraft carrier with those issues. America as armed camp is the status quo. Peace, letting in immigrants, ending torture, ending the death penalty: no wonder they think you’re a threat. There must be a whole floor of that building on the Potomac dedicated to your Freedom Center.”

“But that means we’re endangering the other tenants,” Zabinska said, worried. “We don’t own the building, but the management company that does has been pretty generous. They let us run the Freedom Center out of the ground-floor apartments. Five of us sisters attached to the center rent there, and we’ve ended up working with a lot of the other tenants because so many are either refugees or are trying to figure out how to get health care or housing vouchers. Maybe we should see about moving the ones who’re most at risk for deportation. Everyone’s pretty scared as it is because of the fire bombs.”

“You’d better be very careful where and how you talk about it,” I warned her. “They probably are listening to all your conversations, not just your phones.”