I started at the top, sawing and pulling, until all of its brittle upper branches lay on the ground. But as I reset the ladder to cut off one of its two main limbs, I spotted the tiniest tendril of green, no longer than an inchworm, protruding from the bark. I don’t know trees but I know trying, and I left that ash as I’d butchered it: a dinosaur-sized wishbone, thrust upright in defiance against the sky.
Several years had passed since then, and it was still slow going for me, and for the ash. Yet once again, in this new spring, the tree was unfurling tiny new leaves like little flags of hope. It was only the end of March, too soon to know how many would come, but I kept count as I had in previous springs, as an act of faith. That night, a fresh sprout brought the new spring’s total up to twenty-six.
I take my positive omens wherever I can find them.
I spent two hours on the Internet that evening and found nothing to counter what the Trib and the Bohemian’s ear had concluded. There had been nothing premeditated about the deaths of Benno Barberi, Jim Whitman or Grant Carson. Still, I planned to give the deaths a long, last mull on the plane west to San Francisco the next day, before calling Wendell to tell him I’d be refunding almost all of his money. Though with that, painfully, would go my hopes to replace my leaking refrigerator.
I took a flashlight into the kitchen, laid it in the refrigerator, shut the door and turned off the lights. A pinpoint sparkled next to where the handle was coming loose; air was leaking out there. As I’d told Jenny, such a small rust-through would be easily contained by a Golden Gate Bridge refrigerator magnet.
Happy times – seeing Jenny, and acquiring a magnet – seemed just around the corner as I reclined in the electric-blue La-Z-Boy, also salvaged from an alley, to watch the start of the ten o’clock news.
And then the Bohemian called.
His voice did not resonate with its usual optimism. ‘I started on the list of names at six o’clock. It was fairly straightforward to establish who our prominent businesspeople are, and I was done by seven o’clock. There are forty-six,’ he said, then paused. ‘No,’ he corrected, ‘there were forty-six, before the three deaths.’
‘This afternoon you guessed fifty. Pretty close, Anton.’
‘Life is not so much about numbers as it is about percentages, Vlodek. That’s why the three deaths are troubling.’
I shifted the La-Z-Boy to full upright and silenced the four-inch television balanced on my lap. ‘Percentages?’
‘Three is too many.’
‘Two of the three were men in their sixties, and ill,’ I said. ‘The third was fifty-five, not that it matters, and the victim of a hit-and- run. All three deaths seem easily explainable.’
‘Remember the heavy cream?’
‘You said all three were among the top fifty business people in Chicago.’
‘I misspoke. I meant to use the term more narrowly, to define Barberi, Whitman and Carson as being among the very top of the city’s leaders, in the heaviest of the cream, so to speak.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘I just told you there were forty-six top-flight business leaders in Chicago, right?’
‘With Barberi, Whitman, and Carson among them.’
‘The forty-six was a simple ranking of business prominence. I then filtered that list to include only those individuals prominent in civic, political and charitable endeavors as well.’
‘Only those are in the heavy cream,’ I said.
‘Exactly. I got down to sixteen names.’
‘Of which three are now dead?’
‘That’s troubling. Nineteen per cent of the most influential people in Chicago – three of only sixteen – died in the last four months. Mathematically, that’s beyond reason.’
Anton Chernek never indulged false alarm. He was too level-headed, too grounded. And almost always too well informed.
‘I’ll say again, Anton: two were older and ill. The third, Carson, got whacked by a passing car.’
‘Yes, and I was inclined to accept it as an anomaly, an explainable oddity.’
‘Exactly-’
He cut me off. ‘Arthur Lamm has gone missing.’
‘Arthur Lamm, as in head of Lamm Enterprises?’ Lamm headed a conglomerate of real estate sales, management, and insurance brokerages. He was very prominent: a political player and a close friend of the mayor. There was no doubt he was in the heavy cream.
‘A vice-president of his insurance company told me he’s not called in for four days. Do you see what this means?’
I barely heard his voice. My mind was forming the word that I knew he wanted.
‘Vlodek?’ he asked after a minute.
‘Percentages,’ I said, giving it to him.
‘Arthur’s only fifty-one and, from all accounts, he’s in peak condition. A marathoner, in fact. If he’s met a bad end, he increases your list to four out of sixteen.’
‘That’s twenty-five per cent.’
He murmured something about emailing me his list of names in the morning and hung up.
I needed fresher air in which to think. I went outside to sit on the bench by the river. A small speck lay on the ground, almost colorless in the pale white light of the lamp along the crumbling asphalt river walk.
It was one of the would-be leaves from the purple ash, curled up, stillborn and dry.
Sometimes I don’t like omens at all.
SIX
I woke at five-thirty in the morning, remembering the Bohemian’s anxiety about percentages too much to go back to sleep. I put on jeans, a sweatshirt and my Nikes and, stepping around the duffel that lay on the floor, still to be packed for California, I went downstairs.
The Bohemian wasn’t having a good night either. He’d emailed me his list two hours earlier.
I printed his list, put on my pea coat and took a travel mug of yesterday’s cold coffee up the stairs and then the ladders to the fifth floor and the roof. I like to believe I think best on top of the turret. Even when I don’t, the dawn likely as not serves up a spectacular sunrise, and that’s a good enough reason to go up on any roof at the end of the dark. I leaned against the balustrade, sipped coffee and looked out across the spit of land at Rivertown, waiting for the cold caffeine and the chilled, pre-dawn air to rouse me from a sleep that never much was.
The town was softly shutting down. The tonks along Thompson Avenue were switching off their flickering neon lights, discharging their last, hardiest customers into the night. The slow-walking girls who smiled into the headlights of the slow-cruising gentlemen were shuffling away too, alone at last. And from somewhere down by the river, the sound of shattering glass rose above the rasping staccato of automobile tires hitting the rub strips on the tollway; a trembling hand had let go of an empty pint. Rivertown was twitching itself to sleep.
The thin hint of orange rising over Lake Michigan was bright enough to read what the Bohemian had sent. He’d drawn a simple grid, labeled it ‘H.C.’ for Heavy Cream – a wit, that Bohemian, even when troubled. On the left side of the sheet he’d listed the sixteen primo shakers of Chicago in alphabetical order. Across the page he’d made columns for the criteria he’d used to select them: business affiliations, political access, social and civic relationships. He’d assigned letter grades for each person, for each category, like a report card. Almost all of the boxes were filled with an ‘A.’
All but two on the list were men. The Bohemian’s Chicago, that world of vast money coupled to political and social influence, was still very much a boys’ club. The names seemed vaguely familiar in the way that names captioned under society news photographs often seem familiar. Yet if asked, I couldn’t have said what most of the primos in the heavy cream had done to achieve their prominence. My own world existed farther down, in the muck stuck to the bottom of what was Chicagoland.