Total Recall

XIII Secret Agent

Family spokesman Andy Birnbaum, great-grandson of the patriarch who parlayed a scrap-metal pushcart into one of America ’s great fortunes, said the family is bewildered by Durham ’s accusations. The Birnbaum Foundation has supported inner-city education, arts, and economic development for four decades. Birnbaum added that relations of the African-American community with both the Birnbaum Corporation and its foundation have been mutually supportive, and he is sure that if Alderman Durham sits down to talk, the alderman will realize there has been a misunderstanding.”

I got that sound bite on the radio as I was riding back into the city. The inbound traffic was heavy but moving fast, so I didn’t pay close attention until my own name jumped out at me.

“Investigator V I Warshawski said in a written statement that Durham ’s accusations that she had interrupted Aaron Sommers’s funeral with demands for money are a complete fabrication. Joseph Posner, who is lobbying hard for Illinois to pass the Holocaust Asset Recovery Act, said that Durham ’s charges against Ajax were a red herring to keep the legislature from considering the act. He said Durham ’s anti-Semitic comments were a disgrace to the memory of the dead, but that as the Sabbath started in a few hours he would not violate its peace by appearing in public to confront the alderman.”

Thank heavens we were at least spared Joseph Posner joining the fray just now. I couldn’t absorb any more news; I turned to music. One of the classical stations was soothing the commuter’s savage breast with something very modern and spiky. The other was running a high-voltage ad for Internet access. I turned off the radio altogether and followed the lake south, back to Hyde Park.

Given Howard Fepple’s lackadaisical attitude toward his business, there was only an outside chance that I’d find him still in his office at four-thirty on Friday. Still, when you’re a pinball, you bounce off all the levers in the hopes of landing in the money. And this time I had a bit of luck-or whatever you’d call the chance to talk to Fepple again. He was not only in but he’d installed fresh lightbulbs, so that the torn linoleum, the grime, and his eager expression when I opened the door all showed up clearly.

“Mr. Fepple,” I said heartily. “Glad to see you haven’t given up on the business yet.”

He turned away from me, his eager look replaced by a scowl. It obviously wasn’t the hope of seeing me that had led him to put on a suit and tie.

“You know, an amazing thought occurred to me when I was driving back from seeing Isaiah Sommers this afternoon. Bull Durham knew about me. He knew about the Birnbaums. He knew about Ajax. But even though he went on for days about the injustice to the Sommers family, he didn’t seem to know about you.”

“You don’t have an appointment,” he muttered, still not looking at me. “You can leave now.”

“Walk-in business,” I chirped brightly. “You need to cultivate it. So let’s talk about that policy you sold Aaron Sommers.”

“I told you, it wasn’t me, it was Rick Hoffman.”

“Same difference. Your agency. Your legal liability for any wrongdoing. My client isn’t interested in dragging this out in court for years, although he could sue you for a bundle under ERISA-you had a fiduciary responsibility to his uncle, which you violated. He’d be happy if you’d cut him a check for the ten thousand that the policy was worth.”

“He’s not your-” he blurted, then stopped.

“My, my, Howard. Who has been talking to you? Was it Mr. Sommers himself? No, that can’t be right, or you’d know he’d brought me back in to finish the investigation. So it must have been Alderman Durham. If that’s the case, you are going to have so much publicity you’ll be turning business away. I have an interview with Channel Thirteen in a little bit, and they will be salivating when they hear that your agency has been tipping off Bull Durham about your own customers’ affairs.”

“You’re all wet,” he said, curling his lip. “I couldn’t talk to Durham -he’s made it clear he doesn’t have any use for whites.”

“Now I’m really curious.” I settled myself in the rickety chair in front of his desk. “I’m dying to see who you’re all dolled up for.”

“I have a date. I do have a social life that has nothing to do with insurance. I want you to leave so I can close up my office.”

“In a little bit. As soon as you answer some questions. I want to see the file on Aaron Sommers.”

His carpet of freckles turned a deeper orange. “You have a helluva nerve. Those are private papers, none of your damned business.”

“They are my client’s business. One way or another, either by you cooperating now or by my getting a court order, you’re going to show me the file. So let’s do it now.”

“Go get your court order if you can. My father trusted me with his business; I am not going to let him down.”

It was a strange and rather sad attempt at bravado. “Okay. I’ll get a court order. One other thing. Rick Hoffman’s notebook. That little black book he carried around with him, ticking off his clients’ payments. I want to see it.”

“Join the crowd,” he snapped. “Everyone in Chicago wants to see his notebook, but I don’t have it. He took it home with him every night like it was the secret of the atom bomb. And when he died it was at his home. If I knew where his son was, maybe I’d know where the damned notebook was. But that creep is probably in an insane asylum someplace. He’s not in Chicago, at any rate.”

His phone rang. He jumped on it so fast it might have been a hundred-dollar bill on the sidewalk.

“There’s someone with me right now,” he blurted into the mouthpiece. “Right, the woman detective.” He listened for a minute, said, “Okay, okay,” jotted what looked like numbers on a scrap of paper, and hung up.

He turned off his desk lamp and made a big show of locking his filing cabinets. When he came around to open the door, I had no choice but to get up, as well. We rode the elevator down to the lobby, where he surprised me by going up to the guard.

“See this lady, Collins? She’s been coming around my office, making threats. Can you make sure she doesn’t get into the building again tonight?”

The guard looked me up and down before saying, “Sure thing, Mr. Fepple,” without much enthusiasm. Fepple went outside with me. When I congratulated him on a successful tactic, he smirked before striding off down the street. I watched him go into the pizza restaurant on the corner. They had a phone in the entryway, which he stopped to use.

I joined a couple of drunks outside a convenience store across the street. They were arguing about a man named Clive and what Clive’s sister had said about one of them, but they broke off to try to cadge the price of a bottle from me. I moved away from them, still watching Fepple.

After about five minutes he came out, looked around cautiously, saw me, and darted toward a shopping center on the north side of the street. I started after him, but one of the drunks grabbed me, telling me not to be such a stuck-up bitch. I stuck a knee in his stomach and jerked my arm free. While he shouted obscenities I ran north, but I was still in my pumps. This time the left heel gave and I tumbled to the concrete. By the time I got myself collected, Fepple had disappeared.

I cursed myself, Fepple, and the drunks with equal ferocity. By a miracle, damage was limited to the shreds in my panty hose and a bloody scrape on my left leg and thigh. In the fading daylight I couldn’t tell if I’d ruined my skirt, a silky black number that I was rather fond of. I limped back to my car, where I used part of my bottle of water to clean the blood from my leg. The skirt had some dirt ground into it, fraying the fabric surface. I picked at the gravel bits disconsolately. Maybe when it was cleaned the torn threads wouldn’t show.

Leaning back in the front seat with my eyes shut, I wondered whether it was worthwhile trying to get back into the Hyde Park Bank building. Even if I could charm my way past the guard in my current disarray, if I took anything, Fepple would know it had been me. That project could wait until Monday.

I still had over an hour before I was due to meet Beth Blacksin-I should just go home and clean up properly for my interview. On the other hand, Amy Blount, Ph.D., the young woman who’d written Ajax ’s history, lived only three blocks from the bank. I called the number Mary Louise had dug up for me.

Ms. Blount was home. In her polite, aloof way she acknowledged that we’d met. When I explained that I wanted to ask some questions about Ajax, she turned from aloof to frosty.

“Mr. Rossy’s secretary has already asked me those questions. I find them offensive. I won’t answer them from you any more than from him.”

“Sorry, Ms. Blount, I wasn’t very clear. Ajax didn’t send me to you. I don’t know what questions Rossy wants to ask you, but they’re probably different from mine. Mine come from a client who’s trying to find out what happened to a life-insurance policy. I don’t think you know the answer, but I’d like to talk to you because-” Because of what? Because I was so frustrated at being stiffed by Fepple, defamed by Durham, that I was clutching at any straw? “Because I cannot figure out what’s going on and I’d like to talk to someone who understands Ajax. I’m in the neighborhood; I could stop by now for ten minutes if you can spare the time.”

After a pause, she said coldly she would hear what I had to say but couldn’t promise she’d answer any questions.

She lived in a shabby courtyard building on Cornell, the kind of haphazardly maintained property that students can afford. Even so, as I knew from the plaint of an old friend whose son was starting medical school down here, Blount probably paid six or seven hundred a month for the broken glass on the sidewalk, her badly hung lobby door, and the hole in the stairwell wall.

Blount stood in the open door to her studio apartment, watching while I climbed the third flight of stairs. Here at home, her dreadlocks hung loosely about her face. Instead of the prim tweed suit she’d worn to Ajax, she had on jeans and a big shirt. She ushered me in politely but without cordiality, waving a hand at a hardwood chair while seating herself in the swivel desk chair at her work station.

Except for a futon with a bright kente cover and a print of a woman squatting behind a basket, the room was furnished with monastic severity. It was lined on all sides by white pasteboard bookshelves. Even the tiny eating alcove had shelves fitted around a clock.

“Ralph Devereux told me you had a degree in economic history. Is that how you came to be involved with writing the Ajax history?”

She nodded without speaking.

“What did you do your dissertation on?”

“Is this relevant to your client’s story, Ms. Warshawski?”

I raised my brows. “Polite conversation, Ms. Blount. But that’s right, you said you wouldn’t answer any questions. You said you had already heard from Bertrand Rossy, so you know that Alderman Durham has had Ajax under-”

“His secretary,” she corrected me. “Mr. Rossy is too important to call me himself.”

Her voice was so toneless that I couldn’t be sure whether her intent was ironic. “Still, he made the questions take place. So you know Durham ’s picketing the Ajax building, claiming that Ajax and the Birnbaums owe restitution to the African-American community for the money they both made from slavery. I suppose Rossy accused you of supplying Durham the information out of the Ajax archives.”

She nodded fractionally, her eyes wary.

“The other piece of Durham ’s protest concerns me personally. Have you encountered the Midway Insurance Agency over in the bank building? Howard Fepple is the rather ineffectual present owner, but thirty years ago one of his father’s agents sold a policy to a man named Sommers.” I outlined the Sommers family problem. “Now Durham has hold of the story. Based on your work at Ajax, I’m wondering if you have any ideas on who might give the alderman such detailed inside information about both the company history and this current claim. Sommers complained to the alderman, but the Durham protest had one detail that I don’t think Sommers would have known: the fact that Ajax insured the Birnbaum Corporation in the years before the Civil War. I’m assuming that information is accurate, or Rossy wouldn’t have called you. Had his secretary call you.”

When I paused, Blount said, “It is, sort of. That is, the original Birnbaum, the one who started the family fortune, was insured by Ajax in the 1850’s.”

“What do you mean, sort of?” I asked.

“In 1858, Mordecai Birnbaum lost a load of steel plows he was sending to Mississippi when the steamship blew up on the Illinois River. Ajax paid for it. I suppose that’s what Alderman Durham is referring to.” She spoke in a rapid monotone. I hoped when she lectured to students she had more animation, or they’d all be asleep.

“Steel plows?” I repeated, my attention diverted. “They existed before the Civil War?”

She smiled primly. “John Deere invented the steel plow in 1830. In 1847 he set up his first major plant and retail store here in Illinois.”

“So the Birnbaums were already an economic power in 1858.”

“I don’t think so. I think it was the Civil War that made the family fortune, but the Ajax archives didn’t include a lot of specifics-I was guessing from the list of assets being insured. The Birnbaum plows were only a small part of the ship’s cargo.”

“In your opinion, who could have told Durham about Birnbaum’s plow shipment?”

“Is this a subtle way to get me to confess?”

She could have asked the question in a humorous vein-but she didn’t. I made an effort not to lose my own temper in return. “I’m open to all possibilities, but I have to consider the available facts. You had access to the archives. Perhaps you shared the data with Durham. But if you didn’t, perhaps you have some ideas on who did.”

“So you did come here to accuse me.” She set her jaw in an uncompromising line.

I sank my face into my hands, suddenly tired of the matter. “I came here hoping to get better information than I have. But let it be. I have an interview with Channel Thirteen to discuss the whole sorry business; I need to go home to change.”

She tightened her lips. “Do you plan to accuse me on air?”

“I actually didn’t come here to accuse you of anything at all, but you’re so suspicious of me and my motives that I can’t imagine you’d believe any assurances I gave you. I came here hoping that a trained observer like you would have seen something that would give me a new way to think about what’s going on.”

She looked at me uncertainly. “If I told you I didn’t give Durham the files, would you believe me?”

I spread my hands. “Try me.”

She took a breath, then spoke rapidly, looking at the books over her computer. “I happen not to support Mr. Durham’s ideas. I am fully cognizant of the racial injustices that still exist in this country. I have researched and written about black economic and commercial history, so I am more familiar with the history of these injustices than most: they run deep, and they run wide. I took the job of writing that Ajax history, for instance, because I’m having a hard time getting academic history or economics programs to pay attention to me, outside of African-American studies, which are too often marginalized for me to find interesting. I need to earn something while I’m job-hunting. Also, the Ajax archives will make an interesting monograph. But I don’t believe in focusing on African-Americans as victims: it makes us seem pitiable to white America, and as long as we are pitiable we will not be respected.” She flushed, as if embarrassed to reveal her beliefs to a stranger.

I thought of Lotty’s angry vehemence with Max on the subject of Jews as victims. I nodded slowly and told Blount that I could believe her.

“Besides,” she added, her color still deepened, “it would seem immoral to me to make the Ajax files available to an outsider, when they had trusted me with their private documents.”

“Since you didn’t feed inside Ajax information to the alderman, can you think who might have?”

She shook her head. “It’s such a big company. And the files aren’t exactly secret, at least they weren’t when I was doing my research. They keep all of the old material in their company library, in boxes. Hundreds of boxes, as a matter of fact. Recent material they guarded carefully, but the first hundred years-it was more a question of having the patience to wade through it than any particular difficulty gaining access to it. Although you do have to ask the librarian to see it-still, anyone who wanted to study those papers could probably get around that difficulty.”

“So it might be an employee, someone with a grudge, or someone who could be bribed? Or perhaps a zealous member of Alderman Durham’s organization?”

“Any or all of those could be reasonable possibilities, but I have no names to put forward. Still, thirty-seven hundred people of color hold low-level clerical or manual-laboring positions in the company. They are underpaid, underrepresented in supervisory positions, and often are treated to overt racial slurs. Any of them could become angry enough to undertake an act of passive sabotage.”

I stood up, wondering if someone in the Sommers extended family was among the low-level clerks at Ajax. I thanked Amy Blount for being willing to talk to me and left her one of my cards, in case anything else occurred to her. As she walked me to the door I stopped to admire the picture of the squatting woman. Her head was bent over the basket in front of her; you didn’t see her face.

“It’s by Lois Mailou Jones,” Ms. Blount said. “She also refused to be a victim.”