It must have been that random thought that brought the punk I’d seen on the street when I was talking to Pastor Andrés back into mind, the “chavo banda” Andrés chewed out for showing up at his construction site.

Of course I’d seen him before: he’d been in Fly the Flag last Tuesday morning. “A punk one sees around, taking from jobsites, or even doing little jobs,” Andrés had said.

Someone had hired him to vandalize Fly the Flag. Was it Andrés, or Zamar, or someone Andrés knew? It was four in the morning. I wasn’t going to go all the way down to South Chicago to see if the chavo was trying for a repeat attack against Fly the Flag. But the thought stayed with me through the rest of my uneasy sleep. All day Tuesday, when I had a heavy schedule at my agency, I kept wondering about this chavo and the flag factory, about the cartons they’d been taking out of the plant that they hadn’t wanted me to see the last time I was there.

In the evening, when I’d finished my real work, I couldn’t resist going back down to Fly the Flag to see for myself what was going on. And while I was creeping around the plant in the dark, I watched it blow up.

16

Command Performance

That was the tale I told Conrad, mostly warts, mostly all.

When I finished talking, it was late afternoon. The anesthesia in my system kept pulling me under, and I drifted off to sleep from time to time. Once when I woke up, Conrad was stretched out asleep on the floor. Mr. Contreras had been compassionate enough to put a pillow under his head, I saw with some amusement; my neighbor had left while we were both asleep, but came back half an hour or so later with a big bowl of spaghetti.

At first, Conrad kept challenging me; interviewing me had him off balance, and he was jumpy, aggressive, interrupting every few sentences. I was too tired and too sore to fight. Whenever he broke in, I would only wait for him to finish, and then just start the previous sentence again from the beginning. Finally, he settled down, not even barking at me when I took phone calls—although my long conversation with Morrell made him leave the room. Of course, Conrad had calls of his own, from the medical examiner’s office, from his secretary, from the Tenth Ward alderman, and a couple of newspaper and TV stations.

While he was dealing with the media, I bathed and put on clean clothes, a tough job with the pain stabbing from my shoulder down my left arm. I risked wetting the dressing by washing my hair, which stank of smoke, and felt better for getting all the grime off my body.