The Barn House (20 page)

The Chief had two salient characteristics. The first was an inexhaustible ability to talk. Subject matter was incidental to these discussions. If the Chief had been held in a sensory deprivation tank for a week, he would afterward be able to spend two hours describing the fluctuations in his pulse. The second characteristic, which was closely tied to the first, was that he couldn't be rushed. If the Chief were talking and a ticking bomb thirty seconds short of doomsday were left in his lap, you could run in frantic circles begging and pleading all you wanted, and his only response would be to acknowledge the urgency of the situation and proceed as before.

The plus side of this was that the Chief never got flustered. He didn't always know the right thing to do, but he would approach a crisis in the same methodical manner that he approached everything, and at such times he could be very calming. In all the years I'd known him I'd never seen him at a loss.

The Chief had a vast fund of information on useful subjects, and many valuable skills. Provided there were no great hurry, he could rebuild an auto engine, repair a garage door opener, or remodel a bathroom. He took particular pride in being able to procure hard-to-obtain items. When we'd been working on the reunion and needed to find a caterer or a bartender or some such thing, the Chief always knew somebody. Every commercial establishment in North America seemed to have an outlet within ten minutes of his house, and if you needed some obscure part or product, he was happy to make the rounds and shop for it, presenting you in a couple days' time with a long list of possibilities neatly written on a sheet of yellow legal paper, complete with model number, availability, and price.

Notwithstanding the fact that he had no regular employment, the Chief contrived at all times to be busy. I never called him that I didn't find him in the middle of some project, which always took longer than planned and entailed numerous setbacks and complications, all of which he patiently overcame, and all of which he described to me in meticulous detail. The first ten minutes of any conversation with him consisted of a detailed status report on tasks completed, work in progress, and prospects for the days ahead. The agenda was always long. But he had a good heart, and would help you with anything, especially if the project interested him.

I called him late in the day. I was in the dining room. The house was cold and dark, the only illumination provided by a bare bulb suspended overhead. I was feeling bleak. I looked at the ruined parquet floor. I had no idea how I was going to fix it. I explained my manifold problems to the Chief. “Chief,” I concluded plaintively, “you gotta help me.” I attempted to maintain my composure, but finished on what was closer than I would have liked to a wail.

There was silence on the line. Probably this was the Chief puffing on a cigarette. I wasn't an advocate of smoking, but there were times when the introduction of nicotine into the situation provided a certain baseline solace. “When I was out there I said this is a huge project,” the Chief said finally—he had put in some time on the demolition crew. “Ed's never going to be able to finish it on his own. He's going to need some help.” Another pause. “I got a couple things to do. But I can give you a hand.”

Relief washed through me like some turbulent cleansing drug. There were a great many things I wanted the Chief's help with, and a great many other things I didn't yet realize I needed help with where his assistance would prove decisive. But all that lay ahead. Right now I wanted him to perform an essential comradely function: I needed him to buy tools.

The Chief knew about tools. These days not everyone does. Some years ago
Esquire
magazine, which has taken upon itself the formidable task of teaching the men of America how to be manly, ran a short primer on tools. Among the featured tools were—I'm not making this up—the hammer, the handsaw, and the electric drill. As one might expect of an article in
Esquire
, the focus was not so much on what one might do with these mysterious implements as on which brands to buy.
⁵⁸
I was initially taken aback, wondering what sort of ninnies the editors of
Esquire
felt they were addressing that needed such matters explained. At the time I decided it was preppies—endearing tousled-hair youth with names such as Jock and Reggie and Tripp, whom I imagined earnestly studying up on hammers, in the manner of Boy Scouts learning the Morse code, in case Muffy wanted a towel rack hung in the bathroom on the super's day off. (Less the detail about Muffy, this was the example given in the article.) This was unfair, I now realize. The truth was that if you were born into the upper middle class, even in an old working-class town like Chicago, an introduction to tools didn't constitute an essential part of your upbringing, and it was possible to arrive at adulthood with no more thorough acquaintance with a pair of Channellocks
⁵⁹
than you or I might have with the harpoon.

The Chief didn't have that problem. He wasn't, strictly speaking, a blue-collar guy—all his formal employment had been in office jobs—but he had the basic reservoir of tool knowledge that modern man doesn't perhaps require but could certainly stand to have. He owned a fair selection of tools, all bought for some project or other—the Chief wasn't one of those people who bought tools in the frivolous hope that a task requiring them might eventually arise.
⁶⁰
That's not to say that he didn't enjoy buying a good tool when he had the excuse—he was, after all, a guy, heir to 3 million years of accumulated mitochondria, whose Paleolithic predecessor had spotted an intriguing configuration of stone and thought,
Whoa, ax
, while the female of the species (you'll excuse the sexism, but one must call a spade a spade) mused,
Here is something for the knickknack shelf.

I felt the same way myself. Already I'd purchased a reciprocating saw. A reciprocating saw—commonly but incorrectly called a Sawzall, a trade name of the Milwaukee Tool Company—is the machine pistol of power tools. It's unsuited to precision work, but rather is used chiefly to cut large irregular holes in things, or chop hunks off the end. I'd purchased it to help with demolition, in particular the cutting up of old pipes, with which the Barn House was crammed. (Each of the old apartments had been equipped with a sink, long since removed, but the pipes remained in the walls.) Mine, which I had purchased at the home improvement store on sale for $145, was a jaunty number with a yellow plastic housing, and I was as proud of it as my primordial ancestors had surely been of their clubs and spears.

Now I needed another tool—specifically, a right-angle drill, which would let me fit a bit into the narrow space between the joists and drill the holes. It was a specialized tool. The local home improvement store didn't carry it. Not a problem, said the Chief. A few minutes from his house was an establishment called Berland's House of Tools. Berland's was open late. He would go there and see what they had.

A half hour later he called back. “I'm calling from my cell phone,” announced the Chief. Cell phones were not then common. “I'm in the parking lot in front of Berland's. This is an amazing place. They got all kinda tools here.”

“That's probably why they call it Berland's House of Tools, as opposed to Berland's House of Pancakes,” I said.

The Chief ignored this. “Get a piece of paper,” he said.

“What do I need a piece of paper for?”

“Just get one.”

“Chief. Tell me why I need to get a piece of paper.”

The Chief sighed, as if dealing with a dim child. “I'm going to read you a list,” he said. “You have to write it down.”

“Why do I have to write it down? Just tell me if they have a right-angle drill.”

“They got different kinds. You have to tell me which one you want.”

“Tell me what they have.”

“Get a piece of paper.”

I'd been through discussions like this before. The Chief was perfectly willing to spend half an hour sparring over procedural details—he'd have made an ideal peace conference negotiator for the North Vietnamese. I got a piece of paper. Chief dictated model numbers, prices, and specifications. After some discussion I decided to get a unit with a three-eighths-inch chuck. (A mistake, as it turned out; the drill proved to be too fragile and was eventually replaced with a more substantial model.)

“You going to be there a while?” the Chief asked.

“Yeah, why?”

“I'll buy the drill right now and bring it out. You can pay me back later.”

An hour and a half later Chief arrived at the Barn House with the drill. It was now close to ten p.m., and my only ambition was to go home, take a shower, and go to bed. The Chief, however, was just getting warmed up. I inserted a bit into the drill and got up on the ladder. The drill fit between the joists easily. In a few minutes I'd drilled a pair of holes, and in a few minutes more had fitted a couple additional lengths of pipe. We were on our way.

O
ne cold Monday morning in mid-December I got a call from Tony. Bad news: The Barn House had been burglarized over the weekend.

I was annoyed but not surprised. Thefts from construction sites were common; tools and building supplies were easily fenced. The brazenness of these crimes was often astonishing. One night, Tony told me, thieves had stolen two gas furnaces from a two-flat he was renovating in Chicago's Humboldt Park neighborhood—and mind, the furnaces weren't just sitting in cardboard boxes on the job site; they had been
installed
, one of them on the second floor, with all the ducts, pipes, and wires connected. On another occasion one of Tony's men had been up on a ladder on the side of a house when he saw a van pull up next to his own vehicle on the street below. A man hopped out and began pulling tools out of the worker's vehicle and loading them into the van. When the worker began climbing down the ladder to put a stop to this, a second thief began shaking the base of the ladder, obliging the worker to hang on for dear life till the first thief was done.

Having your tools stolen was bad enough, but in the city you faced the additional risk that in the process you might get killed. Once robbers armed with handguns had entered a house where one of Jerry's crews was working, lined the men up against a wall, and taken their wallets and tools.

Now it was my turn to be a victim. I drove to the house and inspected the crime scene. I had secured one of the dingy rooms in the basement with an inexpensive lock and latch—the thief had probably needed all of five seconds to force it open. The room had contained such valuables as I had on the premises. The thieves had taken some copper pipe, the reciprocating saw—I had owned it for just five months—and a few other odds and ends. I guessed that the loss amounted to five or six hundred dollars. I went upstairs to dial 911.

The telephone at the time was located in the dining room; we had strung a long extension wire along the outside of the house from the interface box. As I waited for the call to go through I glanced at the fireplace. I noticed there was an outline on the wall where the paint ended. The shade beneath was darker and dirtier, making a scruffy silhouette. It took a moment for the significance of this to register. A carved oak mantelpiece had been bolted to the wall where the outline was. Now it was gone.

On hanging up after relating the essential details to the emergency dispatcher I was struck by a thought. There had been another mantelpiece upstairs in the front bedroom. It wasn't as elaborate as the one in the dining room; the wood was painted rather than stained. The mantel was of unusual though not unique design, with a full-length mirror along one side; I was to see a similar one at James's house in Kenwood a few weeks later. We'd removed it and stacked it with other salvaged woodwork in a room at the rear of the second floor.

I went upstairs for a look. The other mantelpiece was gone, too.

This discovery lent matters a different color. We'd been visited not by derelicts looking for drug money but by professional thieves who knew what they were after. The first mantelpiece had been displayed in a prominent place in the house; it had carved wooden pillars and a mirror, and was clearly an object of value. The second wasn't. It was covered with multiple coats of paint, the latest of which was a dingy salmon hue; there was little to distinguish it from the other jumbled woodwork with which it had been heaped. Yet these burglars had known that even relatively simple mantels commanded prices in the thousands of dollars at salvage dealers; they were by far the most valuable items then in the house.

The police when they arrived were efficient but unencouraging. They indicated a few additional points of interest. The burglars had yanked the electric meter out of its receptacle on the rear wall of the house; it lay a few feet away in the dirt. I puzzled about this at the time—if the house had been equipped with a typical burglar alarm with a battery backup, cutting the power would have automatically tripped it. But later it occurred to me that if the burglars were well schooled in their craft, they might have parked their vehicle (given the size of the haul, one assumed it was a truck) a block or two away, approached the house, pulled the meter, and strolled off. Had a siren sounded—generally there was a delay of a minute or two, to give the home owner time to disarm the system in the event of an ordinary power outage—they'd simply have kept walking. Since nothing had happened, they could be reasonably confident that the house was unprotected and return to conduct their business in peace.

The job must have taken quite a while. The cops deduced that the burglars had entered the house through a broken basement window but exited by the front door, since there was no other way to leave the building when encumbered with swag—the back steps had been demolished. The front door had been secured by a locked steel security door of the type designed to resemble wrought iron and look impregnable. Alas, this door was a fraud.