The Shining Girls

Harper

29 April 1988

It is the noise that bothers Harper the most – worse than being huddled in the sucking black mud of the trenches, dreading the high whine that precipitated the next round of artillery fire, the dull thud of distant bombs, tanks grating and rumbling. The future is not as loud as war, but it is relentless with a terrible fury all its own.

The sheer density is unexpected. Houses and buildings and people all crammed on top of each other. And cars. The city has been reshaped around them. There are entire buildings built to park them in, rising layer on layer. They rush past, too fast and too loud. The railroad tracks that brought the whole world to Chicago are quiet, subdued by the roar of the expressway (a word he will only learn later). The churning river of vehicles just keeps coming, from where he can’t imagine.

As he walks, he catches glimpses of the shadow of the old city underneath. Painted signs that have faded. An abandoned house that has turned into an apartment block, also boarded up. An overgrown lot where a warehouse stood. Decay, but also renewal. A cluster of storefronts sprung up where an empty lot used to be.

The shop windows are baffling. The prices are absurd. He wanders into a convenience store and retreats again, disturbed by the white aisles and fluorescent lights and the glut of food in cans and boxes with color photographs that scream the contents. It makes him feel nauseous.

It’s all strange, but not unimaginable. Everything extrapolates. If you can catch a concert hall in a gramophone, you can contain a bioscope in a screen playing in a store window, something so ordinary it doesn’t even attract an audience. But some things are wholly unexpected. He stands entranced by the whirling and flaying brush strips of a car wash.

The people remain the same. Hustlers and shit-heels, like the homeless boy with the bulging eyes who mistook him for an easy mark. He saw him off, but not before he was able to confirm some of Harper’s suppositions about the dates on money or where he is. Or when. He fingers the key in his pocket. His way back. If he wants to go.

He takes the boy’s advice and gets on the Ravenswood El, which is practically the same as in 1931, only faster and more reckless. The train skelters through the corners so that Harper clings to the pole, even sitting down. Mostly, the other passengers avert their eyes. Sometimes they move away from him. Two girls dressed like whores giggle and point. It’s his clothes, he realizes. The others are wearing brighter colors and fabrics that are somehow shinier and tackier, like their lace-up shoes. But when he starts moving across the carriage towards them, their smiles wither and they get off at the next stop, muttering to each other. He has no interest in them anyway.

He ascends the stairs onto the street, his crutch clanging against the metal, drawing a pitying look from a uniformed colored woman who nevertheless does not offer him assistance.

Standing under the metal pylons of the railroad, he sees that the neon of the Loop has intensified ten-fold. Look here, no, here, those flashing lights say. Distraction is the order and the way.

It takes only a minute to figure out how the lights work at the crosswalk. The green man and the red. Signals designed for children. And aren’t all these people exactly that with their toys and noise and haste?

He sees that the city has changed its color, from dirty whites and creams to a hundred shades of brown. Like rust. Like shit. He walks down to the park to see for himself that the Hooverville has indeed gone, leaving no trace.

The view of the city from here is unnerving. The profile of the buildings against the sky is wrong, shining towers so high the clouds swallow them up. Like a vista of hell.

The cars and the crush of people makes him think of woodborer beetles eating their way through a tree. Trees riddled with those wormy scars die. As this whole pestilential place will, collapsing in on itself as the rot sets in. Perhaps he’ll see it fall. Wouldn’t that be something?

But now he has a purpose. The object burns in his head. He knows where to go, as if he has been this way before.

He gets on another train, descending into the bowels of the city. The clattering of the tracks is louder in the tunnels. Artificial lights slice past the windows, shearing people’s faces into fragmented moments.

It leads him, ultimately, to Hyde Park, where the university has created a pocket of pink-faced wealth among the working-class rubes, who are overwhelmingly black. He feels edgy with anticipation.

He gets a coffee from the Greek diner on the corner, black, three sugars. Then he walks up past the residences until he finds a bench to sit on. She’s here, somewhere. As it is meant to be.

He slits his eyes and tilts his face as if he is enjoying the sunshine, so that it doesn’t seem that he is examining the faces of all the girls who pass him. Glossy hair and bright eyes under heavy make-up and fluffy hairstyles. They wear their privilege like it’s something they pull on with their socks in the morning. It blunts them, Harper thinks.

And then he sees her, getting out of a boxy white car with a dent in the door, which has pulled up at the entrance to a residence barely ten feet from his bench. The shock of recognition goes all the way through to his bones. Like love at first sight.

She’s tiny. Chinese or Korean, in mottled blue-and-white jeans with black hair that has been fussed up like cotton candy. She pops the trunk and starts unloading cardboard boxes onto the ground, while her mother laboriously clambers out of the car and comes round to help. But it is obvious, even as she struggles, laughing in exasperation, with a box that is splitting at the bottom under the weight of books, that she is a different species to the empty husks of girls he’s seen. Full of life, that lashes out like a whip.

Harper has never limited his appetites to one particular kind of woman or another. Some men prefer girls with wasp waists or red hair or heavy buttocks you can dig your fingers into, but he has always taken whatever he could get, whenever he could get it, paying for it most of the time. The House demands more. It wants potential – to claim the fire in their eyes and snuff it out. Harper knows how to do that. He will need to buy a knife. Sharp as a bayonet.

He leans back and starts rolling a cigarette, pretending to watch the pigeons fighting the seagulls for a scrap of sandwich yanked from a dustbin, every bird for himself. He doesn’t look at the girl and her mother fussing and fretting as they carry the boxes inside. But he can hear everything, and if he stares down contemplatively at his shoes while he’s rolling, he can see them out the side of his eye.

‘Okay, that’s the last one,’ the girl – Harper’s girl – says, lugging a half-open box out of the back of the car. She spots something inside and reaches in to pull out a doll, shockingly naked, holding it by the ankle. ‘Omma!’

‘What now?’ her mother says.

‘Omma, I told you to drop this off at the Salvation Army. What am I supposed to do with all this junk?’

‘You love that doll,’ her mother reprimands her. ‘You should keep it. For my grandkids. But not yet. You find a nice boy first. A doctor or a lawyer, seeing as you are studying sociopathy.’

‘Sociology, Omma.’

‘And that’s another thing. Going into these bad places. You’re looking for trouble.’

‘You’re overreacting. It’s where people live.’

‘Sure. Bad people, with guns. Why can’t you study opera singers? Or waiters? Or doctors. Good way to meet a nice doctor, I think. Aren’t they interesting enough for your degree? Instead of these housing projects?’

‘Maybe I should study the similarities between Korean mothers and Jewish ones?’ She tangles her fingers absently in the doll’s long blonde hair.

‘Maybe I should slap your face for being rude to the woman who raised you! If your grandmother heard you talking like this …’

‘Sorry, Omma,’ the girl says, sheepish. She examines the doll’s locks twirled around her fingers. ‘Remember that time I tried to dye my Barbie’s hair black?’

‘With shoe polish! We had to throw that one away.’

‘Doesn’t that bother you? The homogeneity of aspiration?’

Her mother waves her hand impatiently. ‘Your big college words. It bothers you so much, you take the kids you working with in the projects black Barbies, then.’

The girl tosses the doll back in the box. ‘That’s not a bad idea, Omma.’

‘But don’t use shoe polish!’

‘Don’t even joke.’ She leans over the box in her arms to kiss the older woman on the cheek. Her mother bats her away, embarrassed by the show of affection.

‘Be good,’ she says, climbing into the car. ‘You study hard. No boys. Unless they’re doctors.’

‘Or lawyers. I got it. Bye, Omma. Thanks for your help.’

The girl waves and waves as the woman drives off, up towards the park, then drops her arm as the car executes a reckless U-turn to come all the way back. Her mother rolls down the window.

‘I nearly forgot,’ she says. ‘Lots of important things. Remember dinner on Friday night. And drink your Hahn-Yahk. And call your grandmother to let her know you’re all moved in. You’ll remember all that, Jin-Sook?’

‘Yes, okay, I got it. Bye, Omma. Seriously. Go. Please.’

She waits for the car to leave. Once it turns the corner, she looks helplessly at the box in her arms and then sets it down next to the trash can before disappearing into the residence.

Jin-Sook. Her name sends a flush of heat through Harper. He could take her now. Strangle her in the hallway. But there are witnesses. And, he knows this deep down, there are rules. Now is not the time.

‘Hey, man,’ a sandy-haired young man says, in a not quite friendly way, standing over him with the casual overconfidence of his size. He’s wearing a T-shirt with a number on it, and shorts that have been cut off at the knee, leaving white fraying threads. ‘You gonna be here all day?’

‘Finishing my cigarette,’ Harper says, dropping his hand to his lap to hide his half-erection.

‘Think you better hurry it up. Campus security don’t like people hanging around.’

‘Free city,’ he says, although he has no idea if that’s true.

‘Yeah? Well don’t be here when I get back.’

‘I’m going.’ Harper takes a long drag, as if to prove it, without moving an inch. It’s enough to placate the young bull. He jerks his head in acknowledgement and strolls off towards the strip of shops, glancing back once, over his shoulder. Harper drops the cigarette to the ground and ambles up the way, as if he’s leaving. But he stops at the trash can where Jin-Sook left the box.

He crouches down beside it and starts pawing through the jumble of toys. It’s why he’s here. He is following a map. All the pieces must be put into place.

He finds the pony with the yellow hair as Jin-Sook (the name sings in his head) emerges from the building, hurrying back to the box, looking guilty.

‘Hey, sorry, um, I changed my mind,’ she starts apologizing, then cocks her head, confused. Up close, he can see that she’s wearing a single earring, a dangly shower of blue and yellow stars on silver chains. The motion makes the stars shiver. ‘That’s my stuff,’ she says, accusing.

‘I know.’ He gives her a mocking little salute as he starts limping away on his crutch. ‘I’ll bring you something else instead.’

He does, but only in 1993, when she is a fully fledged social worker for the Chicago Housing Authority. She will be his second kill. And the police won’t find the gift he leaves her. Or notice the baseball card he takes away.

Dan

10 February 1992

The Chicago Sun-Times’ typeface is ugly. So is the building it sits on, a low-rise eyesore that squats on the bank of the Chicago River on Wabash, surrounded by soaring towers. It is, in fact, a shithole. The desks are all still heavy old metal things from World War II with wells for typewriters that have been plugged with computers. There is aerated ink caked in the air vents from the printing presses that shake the whole building when they run. Some reporters have ink in their veins. The Sun-Times staff have ink in their lungs. Once in a while someone will complain to OSHA.

There’s a pride in the ugliness. Especially in comparison to the Tribune Tower across the way with its neo-Gothic turrets and buttresses, like some cathedral of news. The Sun-Times has an open sprawling office with all the desks butting up against one another, arranged around the city editor. Features and sports are shunted off to the side. It’s messy, it’s noisy. People are shouting over each other and the squawking police radio. There are televisions going and phones ringing and the fax machines bleeping as they churn out incoming stories. The Tribune has cubicles.

The Sun-Times is the working-class paper, the cop’s paper, the garbage collector’s paper. The Tribune is the broadsheet of millionaires and professors and the suburbs. It’s South Side vs. North Side, and never the twain shall meet – until the start of intern season, when the rich college brats with connections descend.

‘Incoming!’ Matt Harrison yells in a sing-song, marching between the desks with the bright-eyed young people following in his wake like baby ducks behind their momma. ‘Warm up the copy machine! Get your messy filing prepped! Have your coffee orders ready!’

Dan Velasquez grunts and slumps down deeper behind his computer, ignoring the little ducklings quack-quacking in excitement at being in a real live newsroom. He shouldn’t even be here. There is no reason for him to come into the office. Ever.

But his editor wants a face-to-face about plans for covering the coming season, before he jets off to Arizona for spring training. Like that’s going to make a difference. Being a Cubs fan is about being an optimist against all odds or rationale. True believer stuff. Maybe he can say that. Get away with a bit of editorializing. He’s been nagging for Harrison to let him write a column instead of gamers all the time. That’s where great writing is: opinion pieces. You can use sports (or, heck, movies) as an allegory for the state of the world. You can add meaningful insight to the cultural discourse. Dan searches himself for meaningful insight. Or at least an opinion. He finds himself lacking.

‘Yo, Velasquez, I’m talking to you,’ Harrison says. ‘You got your coffee order ready?’

‘What?’ He peers over his glasses, new bifocals that confound him as much as the new word processor does. What was wrong with Atex? He liked Atex. Hell, he liked his Olivetti typewriter. And his old fucking glasses.

‘For your intern,’ Harrison makes a ta-da gesture at a girl barely out of kindergarten, surely, with crazy kindergarten hair sticking up all over the place, a multicolored striped scarf looped around her neck with matching fingerless gloves, a black jacket with more zips than is conceivably practical, and worse, an earring in her nose. She irritates him on principle.

‘Oh no. Nuh-uh. I don’t do interns.’

‘She asked for you. By name.’

‘All the more reason not to. Look at her, she doesn’t even like sports.’

‘It’s a real pleasure to meet you,’ says the girl. ‘I’m Kirby.’

‘That’s not relevant to me because I’m never going to talk to you again. I’m not even supposed to be here. Pretend I’m not.’

‘Nice try, Velasquez.’ Harrison winks. ‘She’s all yours. Don’t do anything litigiously offensive.’ He walks away to drop off the other interns with various reporters eminently more qualified and willing to have them.

‘Sadist!’ Dan yells after him and then turns grudgingly to the girl. ‘Great. Welcome. Pull up a chair, I guess. I don’t suppose you happen to have an opinion on the Cubs line-up this year?’

‘Sorry. I don’t really do sports. No offense.’

‘I knew it.’ Velasquez glares at the blinking cursor on his screen. It’s mocking him. At least with paper you could doodle on it or write notes or crumple it up and toss it at your editor’s head. His computer screen is unassailable. So is his editor’s head.

‘I’m much more interested in crime.’

He spins slowly in his wheelie chair to face her. ‘Is that so? Well, I got real bad news for you. I cover baseball.’

‘But you used to be on homicide,’ the girl insists.

‘Yeah, like I used to be able to smoke and drink and eat bacon and not have a fucking stent in my chest. All a direct result of working the homicide beat. You should forget about it. It’s no place for a nice wannabe hardcore punk girl like you.’

‘They don’t offer internship positions on homicide.’

‘For a very good reason. Can you imagine you kids running around a crime scene? Christ!’

‘So you’re the closest I can get.’ She shrugs. ‘Besides. You covered my murder.’

He is thrown, but only for a moment. ‘All right, kid, if you’re serious about covering crime, the first thing you gotta do is get the terminology right. You would have been an “attempted murder”. As in, not successful. Right?’

‘That’s not the way it feels.’

‘Qué cruz.’ He mimes pulling out his hair. Not that he has much left. ‘Remind me again which of Chicago’s very many homicides you’re supposed to be?’

‘Kirby Mazrachi,’ she replies, and it all comes back to him, even as she’s unwinding her scarf to reveal the raw ridge across her throat where the maniac cut her, nicking the carotid, but not severing it, if he recalls the ME’s report.

‘With the dog,’ he says. He’d interviewed the witness, a Cuban fisherman whose hands shook the whole way through the interview, although, Dan thought cynically, he pulled himself together by the time the TV news people got to him.

He described how he saw her stumble out of the woods with blood pulsing from her throat, a loop of gray-pink intestine protruding under the ripped remains of her T-shirt, carrying her dog in her arms. Everyone thought she was going to die for sure. Some of the papers even reported it that way.

‘Huh,’ he says, impressed. ‘So, you want to crack the case? Bring the killer to justice? You want a sneak peek at your files?’

‘No. I want to see the others.’

He leans back, his chair creaking precariously, very impressed. And not a little intrigued.

‘Tell you what, kiddo. You phone Jim Lefebvre for a quote about these rumors that they’re going to fly Bell from the Cubs line-up, and I’ll see what I can do about these others.’

Harper

28 December 1931

Chicago Star

GLOW GIRL CAUGHT IN DEATH’S DANCE

By Edwin Swanson

CHICAGO, IL. – At this writing, the police are scouring the city for the murderer of Miss Jeanette Klara, also known as the Glow Girl. The little French dancer gained a level of notoriety in the city for cavorting unclad behind feathered fans, diaphanous veils, over-sized balloons and other trifles. She was found in the early hours of Sunday morning, gruesomely dispatched in an alleyway at the back of Kansas Joe’s, one of several specialty theaters catering to patrons of dubious moral tastes.

Her untimely death might nonetheless be a mercy, compared to the inevitable alternative of a slow and painful one. Miss Klara was under observation by doctors who suspected that she was a victim of radium poisoning from the powder that lit her up like a firefly, anointed before every feature performance.

‘I am tired of hearing about zee radium girls,’ she said in an interview with the press conducted from her hospital bed last week, cheerfully dismissing the story she’s been regaled with scores of times, of the young women who were poisoned by radioactive substances while painting luminous undark watch dials in a New Jersey factory. Five young women who were destroyed by the irradiation infecting first their blood and then their bones sued US Radium for $1,250,000. They were paid out a settlement of $10,000 each and a $600 yearly pension. But they died, one by one, and there is no record to show that any of them considered that she was well paid for dying.

‘Razz-ber-eeees,’ sniffed Miss Klara, tapping her pearly whites with one red nail. ‘Do my teeth look like zey are falling out to you? I am not dyeeing. I am not even seeck.’

She did cop to getting ‘leetle bleesters’ that would come up on her arms and legs, and told her maid to hurry with her bath after every show, because of the sensation that her skin was ‘on fire’.

But she did not want to talk about ‘such theengs’ when I visited her in her private ward filled with bouquets of winter blooms, apparently from admirers. She’d paid for the best medical care (and, rumors in the ward persisted, some of the bouquets too) with her earnings from shimmying on stage.

Instead she showed me a pair of gossamer butterfly wings she had sewn with sequins and painted with radium as part of a new costume and a new routine she was working on.

To understand her, you must know her species. The ambition of every performer is to originate a specialty, something that is impregnable against the legions of imitators, or at least, that will be deferred to you as being the first of its kind. For Miss Klara, becoming the Glow Girl was a way of rising above the competitive mediocrity that confounds even the most lithe and harmonized of dancers. ‘And now I will be zee Glow Butterfly,’ she said.

She bemoaned the lack of a boyfriend. ‘Zey hear zees stories about ze paint and they theenk I will poison them. You tell zem, please, in your newspaper zat I am only intox-zicating, not poisonous.’

Despite being warned by doctors that the radiation had penetrated her blood and her bones and that she might even lose a leg, the petite provocateur who once performed at Folies Bergère in Paris and (somewhat more clothed) at the Windmill in London before coming to take America by storm, said she would ‘keep danceeng until the day I die’.

Her words proved miserably prophetic. The Glow Girl capered her last on Saturday night at Kansas Joe’s, returning for one encore. The last anyone saw of the unfortunate girl was when she blew her traditional farewell kiss to Ben Staples, the club’s bouncer, who guarded the back door against overly enthusiastic fans.

Her body was found in the early hours of Sunday morning by a machinist, Tammy Hirst, on her way home after the night shift, who said she was attracted by a strange glow in the alleyway. On seeing the mutilated corpse of the little dancer, still wearing her paint under her coat, Miss Hirst fled to the nearest police precinct, where she tearfully reported the body’s location.

There were plenty of witnesses who saw him at the bar that night. But Harper is not surprised at the fickleness of people. They were largely high society folk slumming it for the night. They had a bored off-duty cop with them, earning a little on the side to play minder, show them the sights, give them a taste of sin and debauchery in the Black and Tan belt. Funny how that didn’t make the papers.

It was easy for him to be unobtrusive in that crowd, but he left the crutch outside. He’d found it was a good prop. People’s eyes slid away from it. They underestimated him. But inside the bar, it would have been a detail to hang your memory on.

He stood at the back, nursing what passed for gin under the Volstead Act, served in a porcelain teacup so the bar could claim innocence in a raid.

The rich folk clustered around the stage, thrilled to be rubbing shoulders with the hoi polloi, as long as they didn’t rub too close, or not without express permission. That’s what the cop was for. They were whooping and hollering for the show to start already and only got more aggressive when, instead of Miss Jeanette Klara – Radiant Wonder Of The Night, Brightest Star In The Firmament, Luminous Mistress Of Delight, This Week Only, a small Chinese girl in modest embroidered silk pajamas stepped out from the wings and sat down, cross-legged on the edge of the stage, behind a wood and wire instrument. But when the lights dimmed, even the most drunk and boisterous of the fancy folk hushed up in anticipation.