IT WAS CLOSE to three when I threaded my way to my office in the South Loop. It’s in the Pulteney Building, which is of the right vintage to be a national historic landmark, I sometimes think it might even qualify if it ever acquired a management interested in looking after it. Buildings around there don’t fare well. They’re too close to the city lockup, the slums, the peepshows and the cheap bars, so they attract clients like me: detectives on shoestring budgets, bail bondsmen, inept secretarial services.
I put the car into a lot on Adams and walked the block north to the Pulteney. The snow, or rain, or whatever it was had stopped. While the skies were still sullen, the pavement was almost dry and my beloved Magli pumps were free from further insults.
Someone had left a bourbon bottle in the lobby. I picked it up and carried it with me to throw out in my office. My long-awaited oil-tanker billionaire might show up and be put off by empty whiskey bottles in the lobby. Especially if he saw the brand.
The elevator, working for a change, clanked lugubriously down from the sixteenth floor. I stuck the bottle under one arm and slid open an ancient brass grille with the other. If I never worked out I’d stay in shape just by coming to the office every day-between running the elevator, repairing the toilet in the ladies’ room on the seventh floor, and walking up and down the stairs between my fourth-floor office and the bathroom.
The elevator grudgingly stopped at the fourth floor. My office was at the east end of the corridor, the end where low rents sank even further because of the noise of the Dan Ryan L running directly underneath it. A train was clattering by as I unlocked the door.
I spend so little time in my office that I’ve never put much into furnishing it. The old wooden desk I’d bought at a police auction. That was it, except for two straight-backed chairs for clients, my chair, and an army-green filing cabinet. My one concession to grace was an engraving of the Uffizi over the filing cabinet.
I picked up a week’s accumulation of mail from the floor and started opening it while I called my answering service. Two messages. I didn’t need to get in touch with Hatfield; he’d called me and would see me in his office at nine the next morning.
I looked at a bill from a stationery company. Two hundred dollars for letterhead and envelopes? I put it in the trash and dialed the FBI. Hatfield wasn’t in, of course. I got his secretary. “Yes, please tell Derek I won’t be free tomorrow morning but three tomorrow afternoon will be fine.” She put me on hold while she checked his calendar. I continued through the mail. The Society of Young Women Business Executives urged me to join. Among their many benefits was a group life and health insurance plan. Derek’s secretary came back on the line and we dickered, compromising on two-thirty.
My second message was more of a surprise and much more welcome. Roger Ferrant had called. He was an Englishman, a reinsurance broker whom I’d met the previous spring. His London firm had underwritten a ship that blew up in the Great Lakes. I was investigating the disaster; his firm was protecting its fifty-million-dollar investment. We hadn’t seen each other since a night when I’d fallen asleep-to put it politely-across from him at a posh steakhouse.
I reached him at his firm’s apartment in the Hancock Building. “Roger! What are you doing in Chicago?”
“Hello, Vic. Scupperfield, Plouder sent me over here for a few weeks. Can we have dinner?”
“Is this my second chance? Or did you like my act the first time so well you want an encore?”
He laughed. “Neither. How about it? Are you free this week anytime?”
I told him I was free that very night and agreed to meet him at the Hancock Building for a drink at seven-thirty. I hung up in much better spirits-I deserved a reward for messing around in Rosa ’s affairs.
I quickly sorted through the rest of my mail. None of it needed answering. One envelope actually contained a check for three hundred fifty dollars. Way to pick your clients, Vic, I cheered silently. Before leaving, I typed out a few bills on the old Olivetti that had been my mother’s. She subscribed firmly to the belief that IBM had stolen both the Executive and Selectric designs from Olivetti and would have been ashamed of me if I’d owned one of the Itsy-Bitsy Machine Company’s models.
I quickly finished the bills, stuffed them in envelopes, turned out the lights, and locked up. Outside the street was jammed with rush-hour crowds. I jostled and darted my way through them with the ease of long experience and retrieved the Omega for another long slow drive through stop-and-go traffic.
I bore the delays meekly, swooping off the Kennedy at Belmont and detouring around to my bank with the check before going home. In a sudden burst of energy I washed the dishes before changing clothes. I kept on the yellow silk top, found a pair of black velvet slacks in the closet, and put on a black-and-orange scarf. Eye-catching but not vulgar.
Ferrant seemed to think so, too. He greeted me enthusiastically in the Scupperfield, Plouder apartment at the Hancock. “I remembered you were tough and funny, Vic, but I’d forgotten how attractive you are.”
If you like thin men, which I do, Ferrant looked good himself. He had on well-tailored casual slacks with tiny pleats at the waist, and a dark green sweater over a pale yellow shirt. His dark hair, which had been carefully combed when he opened the door, fell into his eyes when I returned his hug. He pushed it back with a characteristic gesture.
I asked what brought him to Chicago.
“Business with Ajax, of course.” He led me into the living room, a modernistically furnished square overlooking the lake.
A large orange couch with a glass-and-chrome coffee table in front of it was flanked by chrome chairs with black fabric seats.
I winced slightly.
“Hideous, isn’t it?” he said cheerfully. “If I have to stay in Chicago more than a month, I’m going to make them let me get my own apartment. Or at least my own furniture… Do you drink anything besides Chateau St. Georges? We have a complete liquor cabinet.”
He swept open a blond-and-glass cabinet in one corner to display an impressive array of bottles. I laughed: I’d drunk two bottles of Chateau St. Georges when we went to dinner together last May. “Johnny Walker Black if they have it.” He rummaged through the cupboard, found a half-used bottle, and poured each of us a modest drink.
“They must hate you in London to send you to Chicago in January. And if you have to stay through February you’ll know you’re really on their hit list.”
He grimaced. “I’ve been here before in winter. It must 4explain why you American girls are so tough. Are they as hardboiled as you in South?”
“Worse,” I assured him. “They’re tougher but they hide it under this veneer of soft manners, so you don’t know you’ve been hit until you start coming to.”
I sat at one end of the orange couch; he pulled up one of the chrome chairs close to me and leaned storklike over his drink, his hair falling into his eyes again. He explained that Scupperfield, Plouder, his London firm, owned three percent of Ajax. “We’re not the largest stockholder, but we’re an important one. So we keep a finger in the Ajax pie. We send our young fellows here for training and take some Ajax people and teach them the London market. Believe it or not, I was a young fellow once myself.” Like many people in English insurance, Ferrant had started to work right after high school, or what we think of as high school. So at thirty-seven he had close to twenty years of experience in the topsy-turvy reinsurance business.
“I’m telling you that so you won’t be so startled to hear I’m now a corporate officer pro tem.” He grinned. “A lot of people at Ajax feel their noses bent because I’m so young, but by the time they have my experience, they’ll be six or eight years older.”
Aaron Carter, the head of Ajax ’s reinsurance division, had died suddenly last month of a heart attack. His most likely successor had left in September to join a rival company. “I’m just filling in until they can find someone with the right qualifications. They need a good manager, but they must find someone who knows the London market upside down.”
He asked me what I was working on. I had a few routine cases going, but nothing interesting, so I told him about my aunt Rosa and the counterfeit securities. “I’d love to see her put away for securities fraud, but I’m afraid she’s just an innocent bystander.” On second thought, no one who ever met Rosa would think of her as innocent. Crime-free might be a better adjective.
I declined a second scotch, and we put on our coats to go into the winter night. A strong wind was blowing across the lake, driving away the clouds but dropping the temperature down to the teens. We held hands and half ran into its face to an Italian restaurant four blocks away on Seneca.
Despite its location in the convention district, the Caffe Firenze had a cheerful unpretentious interior. “I didn’t know you were part Italian when I made the reservation, or I might have hesitated,” Ferrant said as we turned our coats over to a plump young girl. “Do you know this place? Is the food authentic?”
“I’ve never heard of it, but I don’t eat in this part of town too often. As long as they make their own pasta we should be fine.”
I followed the maître d’ to a booth against the far wall. Firenze avoided the red-checked cloth and Chianti bottles so many Italian restaurants display in Chicago. The polished wood table had linen placemats on it and a flower stuck in a Tuscan pottery vase.
We ordered a bottle of Ruffino and some pasticcini di spinaci, enchanting the waiter by speaking Italian. It turned out Ferrant had visited the country numerous times and spoke Italian passably well. He asked if I’d ever seen my mother’s family there.
I shook my head. “My mother’s from Florence, but her family was half Jewish-her mother came from a family of scholars in Pitigliano. They scattered widely at the outbreak of the war-my mother came here, her brother went to Africa, and the cousins went every which way. My grandmother died during the war. Gabriella went back once in 1955 to see her father, but it was depressing. He was the only member of her immediate family left in Florence and she said he couldn’t deal with the war or the changes it brought; he kept pretending it was 1936 and the family still together. I think he’s still alive but – “ I made a gesture of distaste. “My dad wrote him when my mother died and we got back a very unsettling letter inviting us to hear her sing. I’ve never felt like dealing with him.”
“Was your mother a singer, then?”
“She’d trained as one. She’d hoped to sing opera. Then, when she had to flee the country, she couldn’t afford to continue her lessons. She taught instead. She taught me. She hoped I’d pick it up and have her career for her. But I don’t have a big enough voice. And I don’t really like opera all that well.”
Ferrant said apologetically that he always had tickets for the Royal Opera and enjoyed it thoroughly.
I laughed. “I enjoy the staging and the sheer-virtuosity, I guess it is-of putting an opera together. It’s very strenuous work, you know. But the singing is too violent. I prefer Lieder. My mother always saved enough money from the music lessons to take the two of us to a couple of Lyric Opera performances every fall. Then in the summer my dad would take me to see the Cubs four or five times. The Lyric Opera is better than the Chicago Cubs, but I have to admit I’ve always gotten more pleasure from baseball.”
We ordered dinner-fried artichoke and polio in galantina for me, veal kidneys for Ferrant. The talk moved from baseball to cricket, which Ferrant played, to his own childhood in Highgate, and finally to his career in Scupperfield, Plouder.
As I was finishing my second cup of espresso, he asked me idly if I followed the stock market at all.
I shook my head. “I don’t have anything to invest. Why?”
He shrugged. “I’ve only been here a week, but I noticed in The Wall Street Journal that Ajax’s volume seems quite heavy compared to the other stock-insurance companies, and the price seems to be going up.”
“Great. Looks like your firm picked a winner.”
He signaled for the check. “We’re not doing anything spectacular in the way of earnings. Not buying any companies or selling off any properties. What else makes a share price go up?”
“Sometimes institutional investors take a whimsical fancy to a stock. Insurance companies fared better during the last depression or recession or whatever than most businesses. Ajax is one of the biggest-maybe the funds and the other big investors are just playing it safe.. If you want, I could give you the name of a broker I know; she might have some other information.”
“Maybe so.”
We collected our coats and headed back into the wind. It was blowing harder, but fried artichokes and half a bottle of wine made it seem less penetrating. Ferrant invited me up for a brandy.
He turned the lamp by the bar on a low switch. We could see the bottles but the garish furniture was mercifully muted. I stood at the window looking down at the lake. Ice reflected the streetlights on Lake Shore Drive. By squinting I could make out the promontories farther south, which held Navy Pier and McCormick Place. In the clear winter air the South Works twelve miles away glowed red. I used to live there in an ill-built wooden row house, made distinctive by my mother’s artistry.
Ferrant put his left arm around me and handed me a snifter of Martell with the right. I leaned back against him, then turned and put both arms around him, carefully holding the snifter away from his sweater. It felt like cashmere and might not take kindly to brandy. He was thin but wiry, not just an opera-loving beanpole. He slid his hand under my silk top and stroked my back, then began fumbling for the bra strap.
“It opens in front.” I was having a hard time maintaining my balance and the snifter at the same time, so I put the brandy down on the window ledge behind me. Ferrant had found the front hook. I fumbled with the buttons on his pleated trousers. Making love standing up is not as easy as they make it look in the movies. We slid down onto the thick orange carpet together.