Chapter 6 - The Council on the Lower River
At eight o’clock the following morning, the lower reach of the Chicago River—where the scrap yards and the salt storage domes lean against the rusted iron trusses of the railway bridges—smelled of wet coal and diesel exhaust.
Alexander Moretti stood on the timber apron of a private wharf behind a cement batching plant.
He wore a dark charcoal overcoat of heavy Melton wool, unbuttoned despite the twenty-eight-degree chill that was sending thin plates of grease-ice drifting down the canal from the turning basin. His hands were thrust deep into his pockets, his shoulders hunched slightly against the wind that came howling off the lake through the gaps between the grain elevators.
Beside him stood Gianni, holding a thick manila folder tied with red legal tape.
Three yards away, idling with a low, hydraulic rumble that sent small vibrations through the timber planks beneath their boots, sat a black Lincoln Town Car. The rear door was open.
Inside the car sat Arthur Vance.
He was sixty-eight, with the heavy, jowly face of an old Irish ward boss who had traded his street corner for an office in the Loop thirty years ago. His overcoat was vicuña, the color of wet sand, with a collar of sheared beaver that nestled against three distinct folds of fat at the base of his neck. In his lap rested an ivory-handled walking stick that had belonged to his father—the former president of the sanitary district.
"You're making a mistake, Alex," Arthur Vance said. His voice was thick with phlegm and forty years of three-cigar lunches at the Chicago Club. "A significant, expensive mistake."
Alexander didn't look at the car. He watched a tugboat with a yellow funnel struggle to push a barge of crushed limestone against the current.
"Derek is an idiot," Arthur continued, waving a gloved hand dismissively. "I know he’s an idiot. He’s my son, but he has the temperament of his mother’s people—all nerves and vanity. He shouldn't have gone into your private room. He shouldn't have raised his voice. I’ve already spoken to him. He’s sitting in my library right now with an ice pack on his cheek and three stitches in his lip from that ape you keep on your door."
Alexander took his left hand out of his pocket.
He looked at the platinum signet ring on his pinky, turning it half an inch until the three-towered fortress caught the gray morning light.
"He left four marks on her arm, Arthur," Alexander said softly.
"She’s his wife!" Arthur snapped, his voice rising above the drone of the tugboat engine. "They had an argument! People in that tax bracket have arguments every Thursday! She’s an unstable girl, Alex. Her father was a high school principal in Joliet who died owing eighty thousand dollars to the teachers' credit union. We took her out of a walk-up in Pilsen where she was living on canned beans and painting pictures that nobody bought. We gave her a house on Webster Avenue. We gave her an allowance that would keep three families in Bridgeport in beef for a year!"
"She was hiding under my desk," Alexander said.
"Because she’s dramatic!"
Alexander turned around slowly.
He took two steps toward the open door of the Lincoln. He didn't hurry. He moved with that loose, rhythmic, predatory balance that made Arthur Vance’s driver—an ex-detective from the CPD who had spent fifteen years in the homicide division—slide his right hand an inch closer to the butt of the Glock resting between the front buckets.
Alexander stopped eighteen inches from Arthur’s beaver-skin collar.
He leaned down until his eyes were level with the old man’s.
"Arthur," he said.
The old man’s throat worked once, his jowls trembling slightly against the fur. "What?"
"Do you remember 2018?" Alexander asked.
Arthur’s eyes narrowed, the small, watery blue pupils darting toward the river before returning to Alexander’s face. "That was business, Alex. That had nothing to do with—"
"Your firm was underwriting the municipal bond issue for the new runway at O'Hare," Alexander said, his voice flat, conversational, completely empty of drama. "You had sixteen million dollars in short-term commercial paper that was maturing on the fifteenth of October. The city comptroller was going to delay the certification because three of the concrete subcontractors didn't have their minority business enterprise certificates in order."
Arthur didn't answer. His fingers tightened around the ivory handle of the stick.
"My father spent three days in the back room of a bakery on 26th Street," Alexander continued. "He made four phone calls. The certification went through at two o’clock on the fourteenth. Your paper was cleared. You made three million two hundred thousand dollars, and you bought that house in Lake Geneva with the stone boathouse."
"I paid the fee," Arthur muttered. "Two hundred and fifty thousand in cash to the holding company in Delaware."
"You paid the fee," Alexander agreed. "And when my father was buried at Mount Carmel three years later, you sent a wreath of white lilies that was six feet tall. It had a card that said: 'To a man of honor from a grateful friend.'"
Alexander reached out.
His right hand—the one with the white scar across the second knuckle—descended slowly and rested on the ivory head of Arthur Vance’s cane. He didn't pull it; he simply pressed down with forty pounds of leverage, forcing the rubber tip of the stick half an inch into the carpeted floor of the limousine.
"The debt is old, Arthur," Alexander whispered. "But the ledger is still in the safe on Prairie Avenue. On page forty-eight, there are three names: your brother, the commissioner of water reclamation, and the judge who signed the probate decree for your mother’s estate."
Arthur’s face turned the dull, grayish-yellow of lard that had been left in a skillet overnight.
"What do you want?" the old man asked, his voice suddenly small, hollowed out by the realization that the ground beneath his twenty-thousand-dollar vicuña coat had just turned to river silt.
Alexander took the manila folder from Gianni’s hand.
He dropped it onto Arthur Vance’s knees. It hit the expensive wool with a heavy, administrative thud.
"That’s a quitclaim deed for the house on Webster Avenue," Alexander said. "And an uncontested dissolution of marriage under the irreconcilable differences statute. No alimony. No division of assets. She doesn't want your money, Arthur. She doesn't want Derek’s watch. She wants her sketchbooks from the attic, her winter coat from the hall closet, and her maiden name back on her driver’s license."
Arthur stared at the red legal tape.
"And if Derek won't sign?"
Alexander leaned in two inches closer.
His breath smelled of black coffee and the wintergreen ointment Rosa had been using in the house on Prairie Avenue.
"If Derek is in this county at five o’clock this evening," Alexander said, "Gianni will take him to the third floor of the cold storage plant on 14th Street. He will sit on a salt barrel until he understands how to hold a pen with eight broken fingers. And then you will sign the papers as his legal guardian because he won't be able to feed himself with a spoon for six months."
Alexander straightened up.
May you like
He tapped the roof of the Lincoln twice with his knuckles.
"Give my regards to your wife, Arthur," he said, turning back toward the river. "Tell her the lilies at Mount Carmel were very pretty, but the frost took them before the week was out."
