Pleading Guilty

three sentences and are bristling already.

The bottom line, then: I didn't find Bert this afternoon. I tried. The cab got me to the right place and I stood outside the Bath, looking over the run-down commercial street, one of DuSable's many played-out neighborhoods, with the gritty restaurants and taverns, storefronts and tenements, windows dulled by dust. The brick buildings are permanently darkened from the years when this city burned coal. The masonry seemed to gather weight against the sky, which had been galvanized by winter, heavy-bellied clouds, gray and lusterless as zinc.

I actually grew up not far from here on the West End of the city, near the Callison Street Bridge, a phenomenal structure of enormous brownish stones and concrete filigree, designed, I believe, by H. H. Richardson himself. A mighty thing, it cast a shadow for blocks over our gloomy little Irish village, a neighborhood really, but a place as closed off as if there were a drawbridge and walls. The dads were all firemen, like my father, or policemen or public-payroll hacks or guys who worked in factories. A tavern on every corner and two lovely large churches, St Joe's and St Viator's, where the parish, to my ma's constant regret, was half Italian. Lace curtains. Rosary beads. Until I was twelve, I did not know a kid who went to public school. My mother named me for John McCormack, the famous Irish tenor, whose sad ballads and perfect diction left her trembling over the sadness of life and the forlorn hope of love.

'Seedy' is not the word for the Russian Bath; better 'prehistoric'. Inside, the place was vintage Joe McCarthy — exposed pipes overhead, with the greenish lacquered walls darkened by oil and soot, and split by an old mahogany chair rail. The motif here was Land That Time Forgot, where was and would-be were the same, an Ur region of male voices, intense heat, and swinging dicks. Time would wear it down but ne'er destroy it: the sort of atmosphere that the Irish perpetuate in every bar. I paid fourteen dollars to an immigrant Russian behind a cage, who gave me a towel, a sheet, a locker key, and a pair of rubber shoes I purchased as an afterthought to shield my tootsies. The narrow corridor back was lined with photos in cheap black frames, all the great ones — sports stars, opera singers, politicians, and gangsters, a few of whom fit in more than one of these categories. In the locker room where I undressed, the carpet was the gray of dead fish and smelled of chlorine and mildew.

This Russian Bath is a notorious spot in Kindle County. I'd never set foot inside before, but when I was working Financial Crimes, the FBI always had somebody sitting on a surveillance here. Pols, union types, various heavy-browed heavyweights like to take a meet in this place to talk their dirty business, because even the Feebies can't hide a transmitter under a wet sheet. Bert is down here, relishing the unsavory atmosphere, whenever he can break free — lunchtime, after work, even for an hour after court when he's in trial.

Inside his head, Bert seems to live in his own Boys Town. Most of my partners are men and women with fancy degrees — Harvard, Yale, and Easton — intellectuals for a few minutes in their lives, the types who keep The New York Review of Books in business, reading all those carping articles to put themselves to sleep. But Bert is sort of the way people figure me, smart but basic. He'd been law review at the U, and before that an Air Force Academy grad and a combat pilot in Nam in the last desperate year of war, but the events of his later life don't seem to penetrate. He's caught up in the fantasies that preoccupied him at age eleven. Bert thinks it's nifty to hang out with guys who hint about hits and scores, who can give you the line on tomorrow's game before they've seen the papers. What these fellas are actually doing, I suspect, is the same thing as Bert — talking trash and feeling dangerous. After their steam bath, they sit around card tables in the locker room in their sheets, eating pickled herring served at a little stand-up bar and telling each other stories about scores they've settled, jerks that they've set straight. For a grown-up, this sort of macho make-believe is silly. For a guy whose daytime life is devoted to making the world safe for airlines, banks, and insurance companies, it is, frankly, delusional.

The bath was down the stairs and I held tight to the rail, full of the usual doubts about exactly what I was up to, including going someplace I didn't know without my clothes on, but it proved to be a spot of well-worn grace, full of steam and smoke, a breath of heat that rushed to meet you. The men sat about, young guys shamelessly naked, with their dongs hanging out, and older fellas, fat and withered, who'd slopped a sheet across their middles or slung it toga-like over their shoulders.

The bath was a wood construction, not your light color like a sauna that reminds you of Scandinavian furniture, but dark planks, blackened by moisture. A large room rising fifteen feet or more, its scent was like a wet forest floor. Tiers of planked benches stepped up in ranks on all sides and in the center was the old iron oven, jacketed in cement, indomitable and somehow insolent, like a 300-pound mother-in-law. At night the fires burned there, scalding the rocks that sit within the oven's belly, a brood of dinosaur eggs, granite boulders scraped from the bottoms of the Great Lakes, now scarred white from the heat.

Every now and then some brave veteran struggled to his feet with a heavy, indigenous grunt and shoved a pitcher of hot water in there. The oven sizzled and spit back in fury; the steam rose at once. The higher up you sat, the more you felt, so that even after a few minutes at the third level you could feel your noggin cooking. Sitting, steaming, the men spoke episodically, talking gruff half-sentences to one another, then stood and poured a bucket of icy water, drained from flowing spigots in the boards, over their heads. Watching this routine, I wondered how many guys the paramedics have carried out. Occasionally someone lay down on the benches and another fella, in a bizarre ceremony, soaped him from head to toe, front and back, with callus sponges and sheaves of oak leaves frothing heavy soap.

These days, of course, a bunch of naked men rubbing each other leads to a thought or two, and frankly, exactly what gives with Bert is not a matter I'd put money on. But these guys looked pretty convincing — big-bellied old-world types, fellas like Bert who've been coming here since they were kids, ethnics with a capital E. Slavs. Jews. Russians. Mexicans. People steeped in peasant pleasures, their allegiance to the past in their sweat.

From time to time I could catch the sideward glances. Many gay blades, I suspected, had to be stomped into recognizing that Kindle County isn't San Francisco. This crowd looked like they made fast judgments about newcomers.

'Friend of Bert Kamin's,' I muttered, trying to explain myself to a solid old lump who sat in his sheet across from me. His graying hair was soapy and deviled up, going off in three or four different directions so he looked mostly like a hood ornament. 'He's always talked about it. Had to give it a try.'

The fella made a sound. 'Who's that?' he asked.

'Bert,' I said.

'Oh, Bert,' he said. 'What's with him? Big trial or some-thin? Where all's he gone to?'

I took a beat with that. I had figured that would be my line. I could feel the heat now, agitating my blood and drying my nostrils, and I moved down a level. Where does a fellow go with five and a half million dollars? I wondered. What are the logical alternatives? Plastic surgery? The jungles of Brazil? Or just a small town where nobody you'd know would ever appear? You'd think it's easy, but try the question on yourself. Personally, I figured I'd favor a simple agenda. Swim a lot. Read good books. Play some golf. Find one of those women looking for a fellow who's honest and true.

'Maybe he's got someplace with Archie and them,' said the old lump. 'I ain't seen him too much neither.'

'Archie?'

'Don't you know Archie? He's a character for you. Got a big position. Whosiewhasit. Whadda they call it. Hey. Lucien. Whatta you call what Archie does with that insurance company?' He addressed a guy sitting near the oven, a man who looked more or less like him, with a sloping belly and fleshy breasts pink from the heat.

'Actuary,' answered Lucien.

'There you go,' said the guy, sending suds flying as he gestured. He went on talking about Archie. He was here every day, the guy said. Clockwork. Five o'clock. Him and Bert always together, two professional fellas.

‘I bet that's where-all he's gone, Bert. Hey, Lucien. Bert and Archie, they together or what?'

This time Lucien moved. 'Who's asking?'

'This guy.'

I made some demurrer that they both ignored.

'Name of?' asked Lucien, and squinted in the steam. He'd come in without his glasses and he stepped down to get a better look at me, clearly sizing me up, one of these guys too old to apologize anymore for anything. I gave my name and offered a hand, which Lucien limply grabbed backhanded, his right paw holding fast to the bedsheet around his middle. He took a breath or two through his open mouth, red as a pomegranate.

'You lookin for Kam Roberts, too?' he asked finally.

Kam Roberts. Robert Kamin. I was sure it was a joke.

'Yeah,' I said, and brought out some blarney smile. 'Yeah, Kam Roberts,' I repeated. Don't ask me why I do