High Chicago

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.

One route up the east side of the building had not been glassed in but was covered in plywood. A crane was bolted to the bare concrete of every floor and on it ran the workmen's elevator-more of a hoist really, sliding patiently down the side of the building while a counterweight went up the other side. When it came to rest on the ground, a dozen or so ironworkers exited, then the weight began to descend and the hoist started its slow return run up.

As the men walked through the gate in the hurricane fence that surrounded the site, heading toward a canteen truck parked at the curb, I asked one of them who the site manager was. He shaded his eyes, scanning the site, then pointed at a burly man who wore a shirt and tie under a windbreaker, a canary-yellow hard hat barely covering his skull, talking on a cellphone as he scanned a set of plans spread over a sheet of plywood that was balanced on two sawhorses. When he closed the phone, I slipped through a gap in the fence and approached him with a notebook and pen in hand.

Time to throw the first stick at the tiger.

"Got a minute?" I asked.

He looked like he could play centre for the Bears in nothing more than his street clothes. "Who are you?" he asked, looking at my bare head and then down at my feet. "And where's your hard hat and safety boots?"

"My name's Jonah Geller."

"Good for you. Now get off this site."

I showed him my ID. "I'm a licensed investigator and-"

"I don't care if you're a registered nurse. No one gets on this site without a proper lid and boots."

"I'm already on the site," I said.

"Then get off. Now."

"Just answer a couple of questions about Simon Birk." It didn't really matter whether he answered them. I just wanted Birk to hear that I'd been asking.

"Call his publicist. I'm sure he has one." He thrust his chin out at me. It was a hell of a chin. Hit it with a crowbar and call it a draw.

"He's in a world of trouble," I said.

"What are you talking about?"

"Simon Birk. His Canadian project? It's all based on a fraud."

"What are you, nuts? He's one of the richest guys in town. In the goddamn country, for Chrissakes."

"Cops there are looking at him for three counts of murder."

"Bullshit," he said. "It woulda been in the Sun-Times if that was true."

"It hasn't made the news yet."

"'Cause it's all in your head, whackjob." He moved in on me until I could smell his sour breath. "Simon Birk might be a rich bastard but right now he is our rich bastard. He's putting up this building and paying our wages, which means nobody fucks with him till the job is done. So get off the site before you get curb-stomped." He stepped on my right foot, his steel-toed boot trying to mash my running shoe flat and not doing a bad job of it.

"See what happens when you come in here without boots? Without a hard hat, bud, plenty worse can happen." He pointed up to the top of the unfinished steel tower. "Someone drops a penny from that height, it would put a hole in your head. They drop something bigger, like a bolt, your head splits like a melon."

I could have argued the point-could have stuck stiff fingers up under his ribs and rearranged his organs-but I had done what I'd set out to do. I was pretty sure he'd be on the phone as soon as I was gone, my name burning up a line that would lead to Birk's ears. And if this little action didn't do it, the next one would. Or the one after that.

I said, "I think I'll be going now."

"Fuckin' A," he said.

I've never been sure of the origin of that expression. I didn't think it was time to ask.