"It's okay, Dad," I say. "I'm just glad to see you."
"Really?"
"Of course."
"It's not too late for you to be out? Isn't it an hour later here?"
"Where, Dad? We're home."
"Doesn't feel like home." He holds out his hand and we shake. As I start walking away, he calls out, "Say hello to your mother. Tell her I'm sorry I can't make it tonight."
"What about Daniel?"
"Who?"
On my way out, I stop at Chicago Fire's paddock and there he is, safe and sound, munching an apple.
"Where was he?" I ask his trainer.
"I don't know," the trainer says. He's a big man, strong-looking, wearing safety boots and a hard hat. "He won't tell me a thing."
"He cost me a bundle."
"It was your dad that bet," the man says.
"It was my money."
"Who told you to mix in?"
"He's my father," I say.
"Mix out of other people's business," the man says. "Sooner you learn that, the better."
"Goddamn horse," I say.
"Up yours," the horse replies, spitting bits of apple in my face.
"Watch your mouth," I say.
The horse laughs, showing me yellow teeth. "Make me," he snorts, and more bits of apple spray into my face.
PART TWO
"If you owe the bank $100, that's your problem. If you owe the bank $100 million, that's the bank's problem."
CHAPTER 27
Check-in time at the Chicago Hilton wasn't until three o'clock, so I stowed my luggage with the concierge and bought two coffees from a Starbucks concession for me and Avi Stern. "I wish I had time for lunch," Avi said. "Kitty O'Shea's has a great shepherd's pie."
"How far is it?"
"Other end of the lobby," he said with a laugh.
We drank our coffee in club chairs in a naturally lit alcove off the main lobby. He dispensed some lawyerly doubts about my case against Simon Birk-"We have this concept here known as the burden of proof"-but he at least agreed to call a friend who practised real estate law to find out what he could about Birk's recent dealings.
"I know there have been lawsuits against him, but they've all been civil cases," he said. "He's pissed off a lot of people in his time. Business partners. The banks, when real estate swooned in the nineties. But he's won more civil suits than he's lost and there have never been any criminal charges that I recall."
"What about the fatalities on his job site?" I asked.
"He'll pay for those," Avi said. "But in dollars, not jail time. Unless someone can prove he knew that crane was going to tip over and did nothing to prevent it."
He checked his watch and said, "I have to get back to the office. You have dinner plans tonight?"
"No."
"You do now," he said.
"You sure?"
"You're in my town. What am I supposed to do, let you eat alone in a hotel?"
"Your wife won't mind?"
"Let me worry about her." There was a story in the news a while back about some young men who taunted a tiger at a zoo, throwing bottles and sticks at it until it became so enraged that it leaped over the fence and meted out some jungle justice.
Not the best way to deal with a tiger but better than no way at all.
Armed with a fold-out map and directions from the concierge, I walked north on South Michigan until it became North Michigan.
The city splits its north-south addresses at Madison, east-west addresses at State.
Avi had drilled me on it before leaving.
Even the most mundane businesses on Michigan-Radio Shacks, 7-Elevens, sub shops and T-shirt emporia-were housed in magnificent stone buildings. Many a fluted column, many a looming gargoyle, heroic figures on straining beasts, all free of graffiti and litter. And this wasn't even the Magnificent Mile yet. On my right were the green expanses of Grant Park and beyond it the hard bright water of Lake Michigan. At Monroe, after a stretch of streets named after largely mediocre presidents-Polk, Harrison, Van Buren-I turned into Millennium Park.
It was the perfect example of what Chicago does right and Toronto does wrong. The entire Chicago waterfront was easily accessible, from the southern complex that housed Soldier Field, the Field Museum and a planetarium, to the northern end, past the restored Navy Pier to Oak Street Beach.
Granted, Millennium Park opened four years late, but it looked like it was worth all the time and money spent on it. Toronto's waterfront is cut off from downtown by the Gardiner Expressway, neglected and hamstrung by a hodgepodge of commissions and different levels of government that want the glory that would go with a revitalized harbour without committing a nickel.
I walked up the Chase Promenade to the Cloud Gate sculpture, a giant blob of highly polished chrome shaped like a huge molar resting on two edges. Like a drop of mercury being pulled into two by surface tension. Buildings reflected in its surface looked like they were listing dangerously to one side. Closer up, it was the people themselves who looked warped. There was space enough beneath the sculpture to walk between the supports and gape up at my reflection. A funhouse of sorts. When I craned my neck, I saw a version of myself I didn't much care for. Distorted face, stretched-out head, much too wide for its body.
Another in a long line of selves I had issues with.
I continued up toward the great lawn, past a music pavilion that looked like someone had blown up a campy sixties spaceship from the inside. Every once in a while I stopped as if to get my bearings, read a plaque, take in a sight, all the while looking for goons, gunmen, leg breakers. Didn't see any. Didn't relax either.
There were already a few great buildings that faced the north end of the park: One and Two Prudential and the Aon Centre. The Birkshire Millennium Skyline was going up on a prized lot next to them, much higher now than it had been in the promotional video Jenn and I had watched. An awesome sight looking up from ground level. All glass on the south side. More rounded than the severe Aon Centre, tapering as it went up, the highest floors like the bridge of a great ship setting forth into the lake. The tower appeared to have risen to its full height of eighty-six storeys, the first seventy-five or so fully clad in glass. Through a pair of field glasses, I could see a dozen floors above in different stages of completion. Six with all-concrete floors, copper plumbing set into their undersides. Three more had temporary flooring made of corrugated plastic or metal sheets. The top two or three were nothing but the central column and a bit of flooring and then bare girders meeting at the extremities. And still men walked up there as casually as if stepping out for a smoke. Granted, they had harnesses, but you had the sense they'd walk up there just as easily without them.
I watched a tower crane lift a girder high into the sky and ease it alongside the frame. Workmen hundreds of feet in the air guided it into position, silhouetted by the sun as they hammered rivets into place with heavy mauls. Through my binoculars, I could see hard hats covered in decals-American flags and union symbols-dusty clothes and tool belts hung on hips like gunfighters' holsters. About half the men looked Mohawk. They were legends in the business, had been since tall buildings and bridges first started to rise out of the North American landscape: men from Six Nations, Kahnawake and other reserves who were said to have no fear of heights, who could walk the high iron as if strolling down a garden path. One man, his long black hair in a braid halfway down his back, shimmied down a vertical girder, gripping it with his gloved hands and pressing his workboots against it to control his descent.
Give me terra firma any day.