Ghost Country

Ghost Country by Sara Paretsky Page B

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Authors: Sara Paretsky
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Warlocks or whoever she was, forced Luisa to leave, the two homeless women followed her to the door. The black one wrote down directions to a makeshift shelter they sometimes used on Underground Wacker.
    A canceled engagement, was that it? Harry and Karen not home, was that it? For some reason she was in Chicago without a place to stay. She’d had a room, some wretched hovel that Harry shoved her into, always jealous of her, she couldn’t even remember why, it went back so far into their childhood, and then something went wrong with the room. She was locked out, the ugly man at the desk demanding money for her to stay on. She explained that she never handled money, her manager did that, gave him Leo’s number in New York, but he refused to call. Said he wasn’t going to rack up a long-distance bill that she couldn’t pay, but when she got her social security check on Tuesday she could come back, payup, he’d hang on to her clothes until then. As if she would ever darken his doorstep again!
    After that, she couldn’t remember what happened. Needing a drink to steady her, not true that she was a drunk as that prissass Bible thumper was saying tonight, obviously listening to the gossip Cesarini and Donatelli were spreading about her, doesn’t make you a drunk just because you want a little brandy when some oily Brown Shirt locks you out of your own room.
    Finding a man who would part with some cash … No, cunt, I didn’t pay to hear you sing, spread your legs, she must have seen that in a movie someplace, that hadn’t happened to her, but she got the price of a quart. The woman at the liquor store was so rude, had to see her money before she’d even bring a bottle down from the shelf. Fat with three hairs on her chin, shave before you touch my bottle, Luisa said, I don’t want to catch lice from you, and the woman so hostile, you’re lucky I don’t touch you over the head with this bottle, you drunken whore.
    Chicago was a horrible city. Why had she come back here? Harry sold her beautiful little apartment in Campania, just because her account at Banco di Roma was the teeniest bit overdrawn, and she told the manager her brother was rich, he’d take care of the problem. And then Harry showed up in Italy, bellowing, not helpful at all. He was like all men, greedy, wanting money more than anything, how terrible for Becca to be growing up with a father like that, And now here was this revolting taxi driver swearing at her. “My good man, it’s been your privilege to carry the world’s greatest soprano in your car. It is something you can tell your grandchildren, if any woman would ever come close enough to your ugly body to allow you to procreate.” And then he was chasing her down the street.
    She had to laugh when the door came off his cab, serve him right for swearing at her. When the cop came over, she should have gone and explained why the man deserved to be arrested…. But some survival instinct made her scuttle underground instead.When she got to the bottom of the stairs she was supposed to go straight ahead along Wacker, then turn right at the second roadway. The black woman had written it all down for her on a napkin, so kind, even in Chicago you could still find enormous love for opera among the common people. Not like in Copenhagen or Berlin, of course, but heartening when the world seemed bent on burying her alive.
    Turning into the second entryway she stopped, rage flooding her brain. A woman was waiting for her. Humiliating her. A mock stage set for
Otello.
Candles lit, a portrait of the Madonna between them, the woman kneeling before the portrait in ecstasy, no doubt singing
“Ave Maria, nell’ora della morte.”
    Luisa lunged forward. “Who sent you here? Was it Leo or that stupid tenor, couldn’t stand being upstaged, badmouthed me to the
New York Times?
Did those two homeless bitches set me up?”
    She assumed a mock bass that bounced off the high concrete overpass. “Don’t go down below

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