Keeper Of The Gate

He marched with amazing briskness and agility for a ninety-four-year-old man. His shoes clicked along the walkway, beside the freshly mowed grass and the white stone balustrade that bordered AT & T Plaza. In moments he was mere yards away from the shining and immense blob of mirrored surface that was officially called Cloud Gate. His steps slowed, he halted, he twisted one corner of his thin mouth, his pale blue eyes narrowed.

He didn’t know why his wife of sixty years demanded that they meet after church, over there in the archway under the Cloud Gate’s brilliant liquid-like folds. Nothing modern or avant-garde had ever interested her before.

He tugged at his impeccable, pinstriped double-breasted wool Anderson and Sheppard jacket, bent slightly and whisked away the smallest spots of dust from his perfectly creased trousers. His white hair caught a brief breeze and he expertly flattened it back down with the side of a hand. He resumed his approach, studying the massive curvature of the city skyline, the way the intense blue of the sky seemed to penetrate to the core of the sculpture. He climbed the three shallow steps of the cream-colored pavers that formed the surface of the plaza. As he drew closer to the mirrored skin of “the bean,” he saw himself, turned upside down and outward as if he were going in another direction entirely. He stopped once again.

It was Sunday, eleven a.m., and too many people were drifting and strolling, with their incessant babbling. He hated Chicago. He and his wife had moved here from Argentina only two years before. Like all American cities, Chicago was raw, dirty, filled with violence and energy, and a mix of races; he battled the urge to form his hands into a pantomime tommy-gun and make them all go away like the gangsters did, in the old Hollywood movies he had seen as a boy in Bavaria.

“There you are, Otto,” he heard the lilting, accented English of his wife behind him. “I’m sorry to be late. There were a few things I had to take care of.” He hesitated at the sound of the name. He had been “Otto Kopp” for the last couple of years. He’d spent the longest time as “Ricardo.” There had been brief stints as “Manuel,” and “Eduardo.” When he looked at his reflection above him, he saw Albrecht Müller. He tore his eyes away from his duplicate, and turned to reach an arm towards his wife.

“Why are we meeting here, Maria?” he asked her, but not unkindly.

His wife, the former Maria Elizabeth Countess von Schaumburg, now Maria Kopp, was seventy-nine years old. She still had a fine and elegant figure. She was dressed in a lilac-colored wool suit, the skirt of which hung below her knees. She sported a white-orchid corsage over her heart. Her soft white hair was coiffed neatly, curling slightly under a lilac hat. She carried a small, white leather handbag. “Well dear,” she answered, taking his left arm with her right, prompting him to start walking with her under the archway, “I thought it would be an interesting place for you to hear what I have to tell you.”

To read the rest of this story, click here.