Six-thirty here, one-thirty in the morning in Rome, where Morrell would be just about landing. He’d spend tomorrow in Rome with the Humane Medicine team, fly to Islamabad on Thursday, and travel by land into Afghanistan. For a moment I felt bowed down by desolation: my fatigue, Max’s worries, Lotty’s turmoil-and Morrell, half a world away. I was too alone in this big city.
A homeless man selling copies of Streetwise danced over to me, hawking his paper. What he saw in my face made him change his pitch.
“Honey, whatever’s happening to you, it can’t be that bad. You got a roof over your head, right? You got three squares a day when you take the time to eat them? Even if your mama’s dead you know she loved you-so cheer up.”
“Ah, the kindness of strangers,” I said, fishing a single out of my jacket pocket.
“That’s right. Nothing kinder than strangers, nothing stranger than kindness. You heard it here first. You have a blessed evening, and keep that pretty smile coming.”
I won’t say he sent me on my way laughing with delight, but I did manage to whistle “Whenever I feel afraid” as I walked down the steps to the garage.
I took Lake Shore Drive north to Belmont, where I got off and started nosing around for a parking place. Lotty lived half a mile up the road, but street parking is at such a premium here that I grabbed the first space I saw. It turned out to be a lucky opening, only half a block from the Rossys’ front door.
I had kept deferring phoning Lotty on my way north: I wouldn’t do it from the street downtown because I didn’t want background noise interfering. I wouldn’t do it from the car because it’s dangerous to drive and dial. Now-I’d do it as soon as I’d shut my eyes for five minutes, emptied my mind, gotten the illusion of rest so I could be strong enough for whatever emotional fastballs Lotty pitched at me.
I pulled the lever so that the front seat was stretched almost horizontal. As I leaned back, I saw a limo pull up in front of Rossy’s building. I watched idly, wondering if it was Rossy, being dropped at home by Ajax ’s chairman, ecstatic over today’s favorable vote in Springfield. Janoff and Rossy would take a limo back from Meigs Field, sharing a drink and a merry laugh in the backseat. When no one got out after several minutes, I lost interest-the car was waiting to pick up someone from the building.
Rossy must be pretty ecstatic himself over today’s vote: Edelweiss Re had acquired Ajax to serve as their U.S. beachhead. They wouldn’t have been pleased at all if Illinois had voted that they had to scour their records hunting out policies sold to people who were murdered in Europe-a search like that would have cost a tidy bundle. Ajax must have tossed a fair amount of cash at the legislature to get the vote to go their way-but I suppose they figured that was cheaper than opening up their life-insurance book to public scrutiny.
Of course, it wasn’t likely that Ajax had sold many policies in central or eastern Europe in the 1930’s, unless they had a subsidiary that had done a lot of business there, which I didn’t think was the case. Insurance, like most business, had been regional before the Second World War. Still, Edelweiss itself might have had a Holocaust exposure. But as Ajax chairman Janoff had contended today, waving Amy Blount’s history at the legislature, Edelweiss had only been a small regional player before the war.
I wondered idly how they’d turned into the international giant they were today. Maybe they’d made out like bandits during the war itself-there must have been a lot of money to be made, insuring all the chemicals and optics and crap the Swiss produced for the German war effort. Not that it was relevant to the bill that the state was considering, which only dealt with life insurance, but people vote emotions, not facts. If someone showed that Edelweiss had gotten rich on the Third Reich’s war machine, the legislature would punish them by making them open their life-insurance files.
The limo driver opened his door and stood up. I blinked: it was a Chicago cop. Someone from the city on official business was up here. When the building door swung open, I sat up, looking to see if the mayor was coming out. The man who actually emerged made my jaw drop. I’d seen that bullet head and perfectly tailored navy jacket downtown only two hours ago. Alderman Louis “Bull” Durham. A lot of powerful people lived on this stretch of Lake Shore Drive, but I was betting it was Bertrand Rossy he’d been visiting.
While I was still staring at the front of Rossy’s building, wondering who was paying off whom, I got a second jolt: a figure in a bowler hat, tassels visible under his open coat, rose like a jack-in-the-box from the bushes and marched into the lobby. I got out of my car and moved down the street so I could see into the front door. Joseph Posner was gesticulating at the doorman. What on earth was going on?
XXX Party Time?
When I jogged, panting, into the Rossys’ foyer an hour later, I’d temporarily forgotten Durham and Posner. My mind was mostly on Lotty, whom I’d once again left in distress-but I was also very aware that I was late, despite running the half mile down the street from her apartment. I’d stopped, breathless, at my car to trade my turtleneck and crepe-soled shoes for the rose silk camisole and pumps. I stood still while I carefully put on my mother’s earrings, then combed my hair as I ran across the street. I tried to apply a little makeup in the elevator on my way to the eleventh floor. Even so, I felt disheveled when I got off-and worse when my hostess left her other guests to greet me.
Fillida Rossy was a woman in her early thirties, almost as tall as me. Her raw-silk palazzo pants, with a nubby sweater in the same dull gold hugging her chest, emphasized both her slenderness and her wealth. Her dark-blond curls were pulled back from her face with a couple of diamond clips, and another larger diamond nestled in the hollow above her breastbone.
She took my outstretched hand in both of hers and almost caressed it. “My husband has made me so interested in meeting you, signora,” she said in Italian. “Your talk to him was so full of entertaining surprises: he told me how you read his palm.”
She led me forward by the hand to greet the other guests, who included the Italian cultural attaché and his wife-a dark, vivacious woman around Fillida’s age-a Swiss banking executive and his wife-both much older-and an American novelist who had lived for many years in Sorrento.
“This is the detective about whom Bertrand has been speaking, the one who conducts her business among the palm readers.”
Fillida patted my own palm encouragingly, like a mother presenting a shy child to strangers. Uncomfortable, I withdrew my hand and asked where Signor Rossy was.
“Mio marito si comparta scandalosamente,” she announced with a vivid smile. “He has adopted American business habits and is on the telephone instead of greeting his guests, which is scandalous, but he will join us shortly.”
I murmured “piacere” to the other guests and tried to switch my thinking from English, and my conversation with Lotty, to Italian and the rival merits of Swiss, French, and Italian ski slopes, which was apparently what they had been discussing when I arrived. The attaché’s wife exclaimed enthusiastically over Utah and said that of course for Fillida, the more dangerous the slope the better she liked it.
“When you invited me to your grandfather’s place in Switzerland our last year in school, I stayed in the lodge while you went down the most terrifying run I have ever seen-without even getting your hair out of place, as I remember it. Your grandfather puffed out through his moustache and pretended to be nonchalant, but he was incredibly proud. Is your little Marguerita growing up similarly fearless?”