IV

I never really lost consciousness. The football players saw me stagger down the sidewalk and came trooping over. In their concern for me they failed to tackle the gunman, but they got me to a hospital, where a young intern eagerly set about removing the slug from my shoulder; the winter coat had protected me from major damage. Between my cold and the gunshot, I was just as happy to let him incarcerate me for a few days.

They tucked me into bed, and I fell into a heavy, uneasy sleep. I had jumped into the black waters of Lake Michigan in search of Alicia, trying to reach her ahead of a shark. She was lurking just out of reach. She didn’t know that her oxygen tank ran out at noon.

When I finally woke, soaked with sweat, it was dark outside. The room was Ht faindy by a fluorescent light over the sink. A lean man in a brown wool business suit was sitting next to the bed. When he saw me looking at him, he reached into his coat.

If he was going to shoot me, there wasn’t a thing I could do about it-I was too limp from my heavy sleep to move. Instead of a gun, though, he pulled out an I.D. case.

“Miss Warshawski? Peter Carlton, Federal Bureau of Investigation. I know you’re not feeling well, but I need to talk to you about Alicia Dauphine.”

“So the shark ate her,” I said.

“What?” he demanded sharply. “What does that mean?”

“Nothing. Where is she?”

“We don’t know. That’s what we want to talk to you about. She went home with you after the swimming meet yesterday. Correct?”

“Gosh, Mr. Carlton. I love watching my tax dollars at work. If you’ve been following her, you must have a better fix on her whereabouts than I do. I last saw her around two-thirty this morning. If it’s still today, that is.”

“What did she talk to you about?”

My mind was starting to unfog. “Why is the bureau interested in Ms. Dauphine?”

He didn’t want to tell me. All he wanted was every word Alicia had said to me. When I wouldn’t budge, he started in on why I was in her house and what I had noticed there.

Finally I said, “Mr. Carlton, if you can’t tell me why you’re interested in Ms. Dauphine, there’s no way I can respond to your questions. I don’t believe the bureau-or the police-or anyone, come to that-has any right to pry into the affairs of citizens in the hopes of turning up some scandal. You tell me why you’re interested, and I’ll tell you if I know anything relevant to that interest.”

With an ill grace he said, “We believe she has been selling Defense Department secrets to the Chinese.”

“No,” I said flatly. “She wouldn’t.”

“Some wing designs she was working on have disappeared. She’s disappeared. And a Chinese functionary in St. Charles has disappeared.”

“Sounds pretty circumstantial to me. The wing designs might be in her home. They could easily be on a disk someplace-she did all her drafting on computer.”

They’d been through her computer files at home and at work and found nothing. Her boss did not have copies of the latest design, only of the early stuff. I thought about the heavy voice on the phone demanding money, but loyalty to Alicia made me keep it to myself-give her a chance to tell her story first.

I did give him everything Alicia had said, her nervousness and her sudden departure. That I was worried about her and went to see if she was in her house. And was shot by an intruder hiding in the crawl space. Who might have taken her designs. Although nothing looked pilfered.

He didn’t believe me. I don’t know if he thought I knew something I wasn’t telling, or if he thought I had joined Alicia in selling secrets to the Chinese. But he kept at me for so long that I finally pushed my call button. When the nurse arrived, I explained that I was worn out and could she please show my visitor out? He left but promised me that he would return.

Cursing my weakness, I fell asleep again. When I next awoke it was morning, and both my cold and my shoulder were much improved. When the doctors came by on their morning visit, I got their agreement to a discharge. Before I bathed and left, the Warrenville police sent out a man who took a detailed statement.

I called my answering service from a phone in the lobby. Ernesto had been in touch. I reached him at Torfino’s.

“Saw about your accident in the papers, Warshawski. How you feeling?… About Dauphine. Apparently she’s signed a note for seven hundred fifty thousand dollars to Art Smollensk. Can’t do anything to help you out. The don sends his best wishes for your recovery.”

Art Smollensk, gambling king. When I worked for the public defender, I’d had to defend some of his small-time employees-people at the level of smashing someone’s fingers in a car door. The ones who did hits and arson usually could afford their own attorneys.

Alicia as a gambler made no sense to me-but we hadn’t been close for over a decade. There were lots of things I didn’t know about her.

At home for a change of clothes I stopped in the basement, where I store useless mementos in a locked stall. After fifteen minutes of shifting boxes around, I was sweating and my left shoulder was throbbing and oozing stickily, but I’d located my high school yearbook. I took it upstairs with me and thumbed through it, trying to gain inspiration on where Alicia might have gone to earth.

None came. I was about to leave again when the phone rang. It was Alicia, talking against a background of noise. “Thank God you’re safe, Vic. I saw about the shooting in the paper. Please don’t worry about me. I’m okay. Stay away and don’t worry.”

She hung up before I could ask her anything. I concentrated, not on what she’d said, but what had been in the background. Metal doors banging open and shut. Lots of loud, wild talking. Not an airport-the talking was too loud for that, and there weren’t any intercom announcements in the background. I knew what it was. If I’d just let my mind relax, it would come to me.

Idly flipping through the yearbook, I looked for faces Alicia might trust. I found my own staring from a group photo of the girls’ basketball team. I’d been a guard-Victoria the protectress from way back. On the next page, Alicia smiled fiercely, holding a swimming trophy. Her coach, who also taught Latin, had desperately wanted Alicia to train for the Olympics, but Alicia had had her heart set on the U of I and engineering.

Suddenly I knew what the clanking was, where Alicia was. No other sound like that exists anywhere on earth.

V

Alicia and I grew up under the shadow of the steel mills in South Chicago. Nowhere else has the deterioration of American industry shown up more clearly. Wisconsin Steel is padlocked shut. The South Works are a fragment of their former monstrous grandeur. Unemployment is over 30 percent, and the number of jobless youths lounging in the bars and on the streets had grown from the days when I hurried past them to the safety of my mother’s house.

The high school was more derelict than I remembered. Many windows were boarded over. The asphalt playground was cracked and covered with litter, and the bleachers around the football field were badly weathered.

The guard at the doorway demanded my business. I showed her my P.I. license and said I needed to talk to the women’s gym teacher on confidential business. After some dickering-hostile on her side, snuffly on mine-she gave me a pass. I didn’t need directions down the scuffed corridors, past the battered lockers, past the smell of rancid oil coming from the cafeteria, to the noise and life of the gym.

Teenage girls in gold shirts and black shorts-the school colors-were shrieking, jumping, wailing in pursuit of Volleyballs. I watched the pandemonium until the buzzer ended the period, then walked up to the instructor.

She was panting and sweating and gave me an incurious glance, looking only briefly at the pass I held out for her. “Yes?”