Bitter Business

another week.
    “I did, but it’s never enough,” I replied, taking the pins from my hair and rubbing my scalp where it ached from the weight of my French twist. “It doesn’t help that I’m burning all sorts of time on this Cavanaugh thing.”
    “You never told me what the funeral was like.”
    “It was awful. The worst part is that Dagny was the reasonable one in the family—the peacemaker. With her out of the picture, the Cavanaugh family is like a big driverless bus. I have no idea where it’s headed.” I went on to tell him in mortifying detail about the rapid disintegration of the Cavanaugh family meeting and how I’d resorted to climbing on a chair to restore order.
    “Sounds like a load of laughs,” Stephen remarked dryly, turning off of State Street onto Cermak.
    “It was so awful I’m seriously considering giving up the practice of law,” I said, groping in my purse for a rubber band and slipping my hair into a loose ponytail. “I’ve decided to work as a ticket taker at Disneyland for a year in order to restore my belief in the essential goodness of human nature.”
    “I’m sure your mother has some suggestions about what you could do with your time if you wanted to quit your job.”
    I stuck my tongue out at him, but I don’t know if he could see it in the dark.
     
    Chinatown is just two miles south of my office, but to drive there is a lesson in the strange physics that governs the city of Chicago. Offices, lofts, town houses, and rundown but still respectable businesses give way to block after block of abandoned real estate—crack houses, junkyards, and vacant lots that after dark become open-air drug markets. Turning west onto Cermak takes you through some of the meaner streets of this city.
    When it was built, the Hilliard Center Public Housing Project was heralded as a model of urban planning and contemporary architecture. But it’s a good bet that none of the dignitaries who traded self-congratulatory smiles at the ribbon cutting have been anywhere near the place since.
    Now the concrete walls have been spray-painted with graffiti and most of the windows shot out and boarded over. The little balconies that once had been lauded as a suburbanizing luxury were now covered over with chicken wire in an effort to channel traffic in and out of each building through the metal detectors at the single street-level entry.
    This stretch of Cermak is one of the city’s most shameful islands of hopelessness. A place where children play in the dirt in which some idealistic bureaucrat once dreamed of seeing grass, a place where violence is a more commonplace occurrence than employment, and even the most trivial of disagreements is settled by the exchange of gunfire.
    Once you pass under the Twenty-third Street viaduct, everything about the landscape changes. At the comer of Cermak and Wentworth, an ornately carved and painted archway canopies the street and welcomes you to Chinatown. The signs are in English letters and Chinese characters and the language spoken in the shops is the same nasal patter you’d hear on the streets of Hong Kong or Beijing. It is a neighborhood known for its hard work and prosperity, a place for the newly arrived and the newly affluent as well as the shopping center for the city’s burgeoning Asian population.
    Crime is not tolerated here, at least not the kind that is so flagrantly apparent at the Hilliard Center four blocks away. By tradition, the Chinese gangs concern themselves primarily with gambling and protection. Yuppy round-eyes like Stephen and me, who come for the food, are safe as long as we stay on the right side of the viaduct.
    While I was in law school a Canadian physician attending a professional meeting at McCormack Place, the city’s enormous convention center, had grown impatient trying to flag down a cab in Chinatown and had decided to walk the ten blocks back to his hotel. The city that woke up to read about his murder in their Sunday papers the next morning was shocked but not surprised. Chicago neighborhoods form a checkerboard of anarchy and gentrification, well-known to residents, but seldom spoken of in any tourist guide.
    Stephen and I always went to a restaurant called the Divine Palace. It was on the second floor, up a precipitously steep and narrow set of stairs in violation of every known fire and safety ordinance. Indeed, the whole place had been gutted in a fire a few years before. Fortunately no one had been hurt and the