Fire Sale

I nodded.

“So the guy in Matagalpa, he was saying they should send Frank Zamar to this one guy, this local jefe here in South Chicago, and he’d see Frank got a stream of Central American illegals desperate for work. And Pat Grobian kind of told Frank, do it or else.”

“But Frank started to run that sweatshop,” I objected. “Josie’s mother was working there. That was two days before the plant burned down.”

“Yeah, but, see, Frank was so bitter and ashamed he didn’t tell Aunt Jacqui or my father that he’d started making these things. He was taking the finished ones to his own home, waiting until he had a full load. Then he was going to deliver it, but he didn’t want to talk about it.” Billy looked at me with his wide, guileless eyes. “If he’d told them! But they thought he was still holding out, so they wanted more sabotage.”

I remembered the cartons I’d seen being loaded into a panel truck the last time I was at the plant before the fire. That must have been the partial load Zamar was taking home.

“Your family sent in Freddy,” I supplied. “How did Bron get involved?”

“Oh, you don’t know anything!” he cried out. “Bron was the person doing it! Only he hired Freddy to do the actual dirty work. They’d just tell Bron, do something to the plant, they wouldn’t spell it out, and he’d get Freddy Pacheco to collect all those dead rats, or-or take that frog dish and put it on the wires.”

My phone rang. Morrell, saying they’d had a look around and hadn’t found anything, meaning Marcena’s recording pen, and he was going to bed.

“Mary A

“I think so,” I said; I remembered in time not to blurt out the news that Billy and Josie were there, just said there were a few things that I needed to take care of since I hadn’t been here for a week.

I turned back to Billy. “How long have you known about the frog? Why didn’t you go to the cops?”

“I couldn’t.” The words came out in a whisper. He was staring fixedly at the tabletop, as if trying to fall into it and disappear, and I had to prod him for some minutes before the rest of the story emerged.

On Monday, he said he’d drive Bron to the warehouse in time for Bron to pick up his rig. Billy was pla

On their way to the warehouse, Billy asked Bron what his plan was for getting the money for April’s heart surgery, and Bron said he had an extra insurance policy that Grobian had signed up for, and he showed Billy the frog picture, the same one I’d been carrying around. Billy asked what it was, and Bron said part of his policy, Billy didn’t have to know more than that, he was too nice a kid.

“I get tired of that, all the time being told I’m too i

“Then I guess Bron showed him the frog picture, and Pat said, that proved jack shit-” Billy turned crimson as he repeated the phrase; he looked at me fleetingly to see whether I was shocked. “And Bron said, oh, he had a recording of it all, on account of Marcena Love had been with him when Pat asked him to do the dirty work, and she had everything on tape, she recorded everybody’s conversations so she’d have an accurate record. So then Pat told him to wait outside for a minute. And he made a phone call and repeated the conversation, and then he called Bron back in and said, okay, he thought he could help him out after all. He said Bron should bring the truck over to Fly the Flag after he made his Crown Point drop-off-that he wanted to inspect that first load of sheets Zamar had made to see if they could be salvaged, and someone from the family would be there with a check, that it couldn’t be, like, out in public, because the family didn’t want to be involved. So I decided to go to Fly the Flag and see who showed up from the family.”

“Where was Josie while all this was going on?” I asked.

“Oh, I was waiting in the Miata.” It was the first time Josie had spoken-it was almost as though she hadn’t been there.

“In the Miata? It’s a tiny two-seater!”

“We had the top down.” Josie’s eyes were shining with pleasure at the memory. “I crouched behind the seats. It was so fun, I loved it.”

On a cold November afternoon, yes, fifteen, close to death and to love at the same moment-that was fun.

“How did Marcena get into the car, then?” I asked, trying to figure out how all these people had ended up together.

“Bron picked her up in the truck. She was interviewing someone, or looking at something, I don’t know what, but he told me he was going to get her, and he wanted to know was it okay if she drove my car. See, before I heard Grobian and Bron talking, we-Josie and I-were pla

“But then I decided I had to go back to Fly the Flag first-I had to see who from my family would be there, and I didn’t want Bron to know I was doing that. If I had known what they were going to do, I’d never have brought Josie, you have to believe that, Ms. War-sha-sky, because it was the most awful-” His shoulders started shaking; he was trying not to sob out loud.

“Who came?” I asked in a matter-of-fact voice.

“It was Mr. William,” Josie said softly after a minute, when Billy couldn’t speak. “The English lady, she drove up in Billy’s car. Mr. Czernin dropped us, see, over at the train station on Ninety-first Street. The factory is only, like, six blocks from the station. Billy carried my backpack, and we walked up, we picked up a pizza and stuff, and then we just went into the factory.”

She kept talking in the same soft voice, as if she didn’t want to startle Billy. “The big room where Ma used to sew, it smelled from the fire, but the front was still okay, you know, if you didn’t know the back was gone, you’d think it was still okay. So we waited, it was, like, I don’t know, three hours. It got kind of cold. And then suddenly I heard Mr. Grobian’s voice, and he and Mr. William came in. We hid under one of the worktables-the electricity was off because of the fire, and they had this big, portable work light they turned on, but they couldn’t see us.

“And then April’s dad came in with the English reporter. They talked back and forth, about April’s surgery, and what Mr. Czernin had done for Mrs. Jacqui and Mr. Grobian, and Mr. William, he said to the English lady, Mr. Czernin say you have-I mean, Mr. Czernin, he says you have a recording of all this?

“And the English lady, she said she had a tape recording, but she was just going to read them the-I can’t remember the word, but she’d written it all down, copied it from the tape recording, I mean. Because she said they couldn’t have her tape recorder, she knew what would happen to it if she let them at it.

“So she read this whole thing where Mr. Grobian was telling Mr. Czernin to wreck up the factory, wreck up Fly the Flag, I mean. Billy’s aunt, she was at the meeting, not in the factory, but the one where they told April’s father to wreck up the factory. So the English lady read about what they all said, and how Mr. William himself said this would prove to the old man-he meant Billy’s grandpa-that he knew how to take strong action.