Chicago Stories: West of Western (35 page)

“It was Barbara who saved us. She'd been a nurse and soon had a sort of clinic running where she did what she could for the sick and injured. It wasn't much without supplies, but it was more than the people had ever had before. When we finally got a message out, she got us some basic supplies like aspirin and disinfectants and bandages and even better, made contact with a flying medical mission and got a once-every-other-month doctor. That made us popular and the people were incredibly kind. For several months.

”We had barely moved into our school, just concrete walls and a thatched roof, when the troops came. We'd been warned and hid in the fields. They found and killed two men and took a young girl with them, after setting fire to the school. I still remember the smell from the burning thatch.

“I think that's what started Ann off. She'd been learning Spanish from one of the villagers and had become fond of him and his young daughter. She saw her friend cut almost in two by automatic weapons fire and his daughter hauled off screaming. We had to hold her down to keep her from trying to stop the soldiers. They'd have shot her and maybe us as well. Ann cried all that night, and when the insurgents came the next day, she was ready to listen.” Bennie stopped and got up again. I'm sorry, it's my hip. I have to move a little.” She walked back and forth until her limp disappeared, then sat again.

“I wasn't surprised when Ann and Magdalene left the school and joined the insurgents. The men were grubby but strong and healthy and very dedicated, very macho. And we were really just young girls raised on John Wayne stories and all that. Most of us were only eighteen or nineteen, raised in affluent Catholic families, products of girls’ parochial schools. We didn't have a clue.

“The rebel leaders knew just what to say. They talked a great deal about honor and sacrifice and saving the people and it all sounded heroic and exciting. So when they left, we cried and gave Ann and Magdalene our extra underwear and toothpaste and blankets, wishing we were brave enough to go with them.

“We stayed on at the school and tried to teach reading. Reading a language we hardly understood in a school without walls or desks or books. We all got parasites and a nasty fungus on our arms and legs and had constant diarrhea. We had to cut our hair, all our hair, to the skin to keep down the lice.”

Seraphy shuddered.

“But I would have stayed if that was all,” said Bennie, her eyes distant. “All of those things were only the same things our people suffered as well, and made us more certain we were doing something holy.”

“What happened?”

“Maggie came back. She was hugely pregnant and sick and they dumped her from a truck as they went through the village, dumped her like a bag of garbage.” Benedicta's eyes were sad now, and angry. “It seems those so-called revolutionary heroes had different ideas than we had about a woman's role in the revolution. Maggie and Ann had gone to fight as compatriots. I don't know what Maggie thought she would be doing—she couldn't fight and didn't know one end of a gun from the other. I suspect she thought she'd be nursing wounded heroes, reading to them, writing tracts, maybe cooking, something like that. But she almost immediately found that in the revolution, women were common property, not fellow soldiers.

“Maggie cooked and washed the men's clothes, when she wasn't forced to serve as camp whore. Sometimes it would be only one man, sometimes several. Gang rape. The men liked it best when she struggled, she said. She only got away when she became obviously pregnant and unattractive. One of the men dumped her along a road near the village.”

“And Ann?”

“It was different for Ann.” Benedicta sighed. “You have to understand. Ann had never been pretty, like Maggie. She was awkward and plain and heavy, and had bad skin. Never a physically attractive woman, she didn't appeal to most of the men, even men long away from their women and families. Ann earned her place in the revolution in other ways. She became a crack shot, especially with the Uzis the group favored. She was also willing to use her Caritas Sister credentials to infiltrate a village and identify government sympathizers, and to wangle drugs from medical missionaries. Maggie suspected Ann rather liked what sex she was offered. Remember, she'd never had any romantic experience before that, so she had nothing to compare that to. Ann joined the insurgents.”

“And?”

“And then I came back to the United States. After nearly a year there I looked around and couldn't see that we were accomplishing anything. We were being used by both sides in a war I never understood, and I realized the order had been incredibly naïve. People who just wanted to live in peace were being slaughtered by both sides and I couldn't do anything to help. Maggie's story finished off any romantic illusions I still had about the insurgents.

“One day a Jeep with American advisors came through the village and offered us a lift to a nearby village and money for a bus to the capital. There a Canadian consul managed to get us on a plane to the U.S.”

“Wow.” Seraphy looked at her aunt, speechless. “You should write a book.” Bennie smiled faintly, shook her head.

“Not I. I spent the next few months at Caritas House, trying to tell the sisters there what it was really like at our missions, but they refused to listen. None of them had ever been south of the Rio Grande, and so easily believed I'd been brainwashed by the American advisors. Finally I left the order. I couldn't stay when they were preaching all this liberation theology crap that I knew from experience was crap.”

“Where did you go?”

“Back home to my parents on the South Side for a month while I tried to figure out what was next. I knew I was still a religious at heart and looked into several orders. Finally, the Benedictines accepted me as a novice. A good fit, I thought, and it was. For some years.”

Seraphy couldn't think of anything to say, caught up in the story. Benedicta carried their empty cups to the kitchen and returned to sit quietly, waiting for her guest to speak.

“I don't know what to say. It's an amazing story.” Seraphy turned to watch her aunt, who was up and walking again. “I'm sorry I haven't gotten to know you before.”

“And I you, but we have time,” said her aunt. “All this, interesting as you may find it, isn't really why I asked you to come. I told you Ann's story so you'd believe me when I tell you that you're in grave danger.”

“Me? Why? Because of a few threats?” Seraphy repressed the urge to look around for enemies lurking behind the furniture.

“Because you know her and because I believe Ann's mentally ill. A few years after I left the order, I heard that Sister Ann, as she calls herself, had left Nicaragua secretly with a price on her head. This was after her lover, the leader of the insurgents, was ambushed and killed by government troops.”

“I may have seen his picture on sister Ann's mantel.”

“Probably. Ann had never officially left the order and the Caritas Sisters took her back with the proviso that she stay at the mother house in retreat until the abbess felt she was ready to rejoin their activities. I was gone by then, of course, so this is all hearsay from a friend who stayed. Apparently Ann didn't like solitude and certainly wasn't repentant of her former life. She had violent tantrums when crossed, and ranted about the violence of men and the way women were treated. Most of her time was spent writing long, jargon-filled political diatribes. Obsessed with the nuns who'd been raped and murdered, she insisted the killers should be hunted down and shot like the dogs they were.

“My friend told me the sisters came to realize Ann wasn't entirely sane, and was possibly dangerous. Then something happened, something very bad. There's reason to believe that Ann got out and killed a gardener who had made a pass at one of the novices, maybe even molested her. Whatever happened, his death was ruled an accident and hushed up. Ann left the order, but not willingly. The order itself was in decline by then, and soon after was dissolved.” Bennie shifted restlessly in her chair.

“How did she live, do you know?”

“I understood she applied to teach at several parochial schools, but no one would hire a Caritas Sister. Same thing with the Catholic charities. The public schools refused her after a security check.”

“So how did she live?”

“She cleaned offices for one of those companies that pay in cash and ask no questions.”

“Those usually pay almost nothing.”

“Ann was used to poverty. She wasn't used to being nobody, though.”

“I've seen her act bizarrely at times.” Seraphy thought of Sister Ann's rants at her—well, at almost everybody. “But I know she houses the homeless, and she's caring for a girl dying of AIDS. Why would I be in danger?”

“If you get between her and someone she sees as an enemy, or if for some reason, she decides you are an enemy—wait, let me think,” Benny leaned back and stared at the window, thinking. Finally she turned back to Seraphy. “Ann's never attacked a woman that I know of, always men, men associated with rape or abuse of women.”

“Lets me out, I guess.”

“Nevertheless, be careful. Who can say what she might do? What time is it?”

“Nearly three-thirty.”

“Damn! I have a meeting downtown at four. I've got to run, I'm afraid. It's been good to meet you at last.” She gathered up her coat and bag and headed for the door, shooing Seraphy in front of her. “Remember, Ann's insane and she's killed before.”

Chapter 31

Benedicta took off
south down the street to pick up Lake Shore Drive, leaving Seraphy staring after her car. After hearing Aunt Bennie's story, she had no doubts that Sister Ann had shot Tito, Cholo, Juan, Hector and Manny. Men who abused women. The clues were there all along. Why hadn't she seen it earlier? But then, no one had. They were all so sure the shootings were gang-related. Besides, who would suspect a nutty old lady who called herself Sister Ann and took in strays?

Now she knew, she felt a terrible sense of urgency. She had to find Markowicz and Terreno, but when she reached for her cell phone, her pocket was empty. Shit. She left the phone in the charger at home. Her mind skittered over possibilities as she ran for the Jeep. No problem, she'd call from home. And Mario, she'd get Mario to help. Once he knew the Lobos hadn't killed Tito and the other three, he could short-circuit the run-up to a gang war. There should be time for that when she got home. Nobody would start anything much until after dark, then they'd probably be driving around for a while, pumping themselves up like they did last night.

At the Kennedy Expressway on-ramp, she found the highway had turned into a mobile parking lot and switched over to Milwaukee Avenue. She tried to picture Sister Ann as a young revolutionary, a crack shot, finding both a cause and first love with a guerilla leader. Fighting with the rebels, avenging women, nuns like her, who'd been raped and murdered by government troops. Then later, rejected by the rebels after her lover's death, sent back home, only to be incarcerated in the convent. Confronting a molesting gardener. Sister Ann, who loved Maria and knew Tito. Who saw Cholo and his friends attack Seraphy and swear to kill her. Who was herself attacked by Chico, Berto and Bobo, whom Seraphy had seen later lurking at the scene of Manny's murder. Had the homeless man died trying to stop Sister Ann that night?

Sister Ann? Nobody took her seriously. Well, almost nobody, maybe Brother Edwin did. But a killer? The idea worked its way around her mind as she tried to fit it with her image of the old woman. The ranting so full of violent images, the tired phrases she parroted that everybody had heard so many times they'd lost their meaning. No one listened. A crack shot. A neighborhood joke. A crazy old woman. A clown.

A clown. Hell, Seraphy thought, we should have known. All those old stories about the evil behind the painted smile. John Wayne Gacy loved clowns.

And Tito—who gave HIV to Maria, then abused and abandoned her when she told him she was carrying his child. Sister Ann's bond with the child, part frustrated mother, part religious duty, had reverberated with old wrongs and awakened the old need for revenge that had roots in her South American experiences thirty years before. Her Sisters. The girl she loved. A man who preyed on women.

Cholo, Juan and Hector? She saw them threaten Seraphy in the alley. She had seen the old woman watching. Those morons bragged they'd kill her, signing their own death warrants.

But what about Manny? Sweet, gentle, loser Manny, one of Sister Ann's rescued, surely Manny was no predator. Living upstairs from Sister Ann with the other homeless men she sheltered, he had seemed on close terms with his landlady. Why would she kill Manny?

Unless her intended victims were Chico, Berto and Bobo, the Lobos leader and his cohorts who attacked her the day before. Especially Chico. Why Manny, not Chico? Chico, Berto and Bobo. Maybe Manny had followed the old woman that night? Got between her and her quarry? All three punks were around that night. She'd seen them, back in the shadows at the edge of the crowd, watching Sister Ann identify Manny.

Sister Ann had arrived rather quickly. Or had she been there all the time? How long had Chico and his followers been there? What if she'd lured them to the lot and Manny followed and tried to stop her from shooting? Or maybe she'd been patrolling, looking for the gang members, and Manny followed her? Too many maybes.

Coming
upon a St. Luke's ambulance at Cortez and Western, Seraphy followed it to Sister Ann's. Maria must have fallen into her final coma. Seraphy jumped out of her car in front of her loft and ran upstairs to grab her phone, punching in Markowicz's number on the way down.

At the door she glanced down the street. Shit. This was it.

“Markowicz.”

“Seraphy Pelligrini. I know who killed Tito and the others, you need to get here now.”

Chico was leaning on the fender of the old car, his followers squeezed in around him, waiting to open fire the moment El Duque set foot on their territory.

“What? No way. I'm downtown, at a conference, the mayor's here, and a whole lotta hoo-haws. Can it wait?” As she watched, two ambulance attendants wheeled a gurney up Sister Ann's walk.