Nobody did.

CHAPTER 19 – CHICAGO

Present Day

Lynch dropped nearly a grand on some damn comfortable loafers, toffee-colored slacks made out of some lightweight wool that Lynch couldn’t pronounce, a black silk crewneck top that was almost like a hologram – it had this subtle pattern that looked different every time you switched angles – and a lean, three-button jacket, faint check, little olive, little black, lot of the toffee color from the slacks. Waiting for the jacket and slacks to get back from alterations. The Andre guy even had them letting out the side seam in the jacket along the hip, make room for Lynch’s gun. Have to get a dress gun, Lynch thought, flat little .380 or something.

“How about some underwear, detective?” This Andre guy, he didn’t quit.

“That’s OK, Andre. Got plenty of shorts.”

“Not like these.” Andre holding up some silk boxers, fifty bucks a pop.

Lynch laughed. “I’m not dropping fifty bucks on something nobody can see.”

Andre tilting his head a little. “I don’t know detective, you came to see me looking like that, I’d want to see your shorts.”

Lynch laughing again. Liked this Andre guy, couldn’t help it.

Lynch got to Johnson’s place at five after seven, Wrigleyville, Pine Grove and Addison, just off the Inner Drive. He had a Sonata in the garage back at his building, but also a British Racing Green Triumph TR6 he’d bought with some of his dough when he’d been drafted. Didn’t drive it much, but he kept it pristine. Temperature had gone up all day, seventy right now, supposed to stay up in the mid-Sixties all night. Lynch figured what the hell, cruise the Drive with the top down, dressed like movie star, why not?

Johnson answered the door wearing leather pants that fit like a tattoo and a metallic silver top that draped like water, sweater tied loose around her neck. Deep scoop in the top. With her heels, she was Lynch’s height.

“Wow, look at you,” she said.

“Rather look at you. No dress? Thought I was supposed to help you with your zipper.”

She grabbed his hand and ran it up the front of her pants. “These have a zipper, see? Some detective you are.”

Lynch headed south on the Drive, swung through Grant Park on Columbus, cut south of the Loop and took Taylor Street west out toward the UIC Circle campus to a little Italian place in an old brownstone set back from the street, patio in the front behind a wrought iron gate. Only ten tables in the place. Lynch knew the owner and had called ahead. Got the little booth in the corner, tucked into a nook next to the fireplace. Expensive, but once you’ve dropped a week’s pay on clothes, Lynch thought, what’s a couple hundred for dinner?

They talked easily all through dinner, Lynch telling her stories he hadn’t told anyone in years. Even talked about his mom a little, Johnson putting her hand on his during that just right, like a balm. Her telling him about doing a year as the TV weather bunny in a station in Duluth just out of school, how the sports guy used to grab her ass and she’d finally broken his nose. Lynch couldn’t believe it when they’d finished the wine and he looked at his watch and it was almost 11.00.

Lynch waved down the waiter.

“If we could get our check please? Thanks.”

The waiter smiled. “No check tonight, sir, compliments of Mr Wang.”

Lynch looked back over his shoulder. Paddy Fucking Wang. Must have been in the private room in the back. Lynch hadn’t seen him on the way in.

Johnson’s eyebrows went up. “You know Paddy Wang?”

“Everybody knows Paddy Wang,” said Lynch. “Thing is, he knows me. We better go say hi.”

Paddy Wang looked like an understuffed children’s toy. Chinese, though he claimed to be part Irish, barely five feet tall, shaved head, wispy white goatee, always dressed in green, sort of a Mao suit this time, but only if Mao had had his handmade from a couple grand worth of watermarked silk. What looked like brocaded scarlet slippers on feet about the right size for a Barbie. Two of his interchangeable minions with him, Chinese guys in black suits, white shirts, black ties.

“Paddy,” Lynch said, putting out his hand.

“Johnny,” said Wang, a broad smile. “Too long. Too long. You never come see me.”

“I know you’re a busy man, Paddy.”

“A man so rich in business as to be poor in friends is a poor man indeed,” said Wang. Wang looked expectantly at Johnson.

“Paddy, this is Liz Johnson. She’s a reporter with the Tribune.”

“Intimate dinners with the press, Johnny? You are full of surprises.”

“John and I are also friends, Mr Wang,” said Johnson, putting out her hand.

Wang took it, bowed, kissed it gently, then covered it with his other hand. “Then you have been twice blessed by the gods, my dear. First with this celestial beauty, and then with Mr Lynch’s friendship. Neither are gifts to be taken lightly.”

A smile from Johnson. “Mr Wang, I see your reputation for charm is well-deserved.”

“Christ, Paddy,” said Lynch. “A little thick isn’t it, even for you?”

Wang with his inscrutable smile.

“Johnny,” said Wang. “You will come to the ball this year.” The Connemara Ball, Paddy’s annual St Patrick’s Day shindig. Lynch got his invite every year, but he’d only gone twice, couldn’t even say why, except that the air there just never felt right in his lungs.

“I dunno, Paddy. You know I’m not really part of that crowd.”

Wang shook his head. “I’m afraid I must insist, Johnny. It is the year of the horse. Your sign, and your father’s as well. And please do bring Ms Johnson. She shall be a new star in our firmament.” A short bow from Wang, then his minions formed up at his sides.

“Jesus,” said Johnson as they set out in step through the restaurant and out the door. “Paddy Wang.”

“Long story,” said Lynch. And then he told her.

Anybody used to the Newtonian physics of democracy, even the rough and tumble kind, found out the normal rules didn’t apply in the Windy City. There was the usual interlocking web of favors and debts and racial algebra and ethnic loyalty and clout, but everything was relative and relatives. Chicago politics was a world unto itself. And Paddy Wang was the big ball of magma at the center of that world.

You didn’t see him. He didn’t loom over the landscape like the Hurleys – Senior, Junior, or the Third – the divine right of kings by way of the Chicago mayor’s office. But Paddy Wang made the Hurleys. He moved all the continents around.

Lynch’s first memory of Paddy Wang went back to his eleventh birthday, his first after his father was killed. Uncle Rusty coming to the house, loading the family into his car. Lynch’s birthday falling on Chinese New Year, Uncle Rusty taking them down to Chinatown for the parade, telling Lynch he had a surprise for him.

Not real cold for February, sunny day, lots of people on sidewalks. Rusty driving right down Wentworth, past the police barricades, pulling up to the parking lot next to the Emerald Pagoda, Wang’s restaurant that soared over Chinatown on the east side of the street at 23rd Place. The entrance to the lot was blocked by a line of young Chinese men in period costumes, green silk mandarin jackets and black pants. Rusty leaning out the window, waving to them, the line of men parting, letting the Impala through, a simultaneous slight bow.

Outside the restaurant’s front door was a line half a block long of people hoping to get in. Rusty marched Lynch’s family right to the front of it and in the door, another bow from the young Chinese woman there, the one with the fine black hair down to her ass and the green Suzy Wong dress.

The inside of the Emerald Pagoda completely redefined young Lynch’s sense of the possible. Reds, greens, yellows, seemingly no straight line in the place, everything curving away, always the sense of something fantastic just out of sight. Lanterns everywhere. Silk banners a hundred feet long and hand-painted with fantastic scenes hanging from the ceiling in the central atrium. A two-story waterfall tumbling into a stone pond full of large, colorful fish with billowing fins. What seemed like a thousand tables on a thousand levels, the place looking like a cross between an Escher drawing and something by Dali.