I quickly finished the bills, stuffed them in envelopes, turned out the lights, and locked up. Outside the street was jammed with rush-hour crowds. I jostled and darted my way through them with the ease of long experience and retrieved the Omega for another long slow drive through stop-and-go traffic.
I bore the delays meekly, swooping off the Kennedy at Belmont and detouring around to my bank with the check before going home. In a sudden burst of energy I washed the dishes before changing clothes. I kept on the yellow silk top, found a pair of black velvet slacks in the closet, and put on a black-and-orange scarf. Eye-catching but not vulgar.
Ferrant seemed to think so, too. He greeted me enthusiastically in the Scupperfield, Plouder apartment at the Hancock. “I remembered you were tough and funny, Vic, but I’d forgotten how attractive you are.”
If you like thin men, which I do, Ferrant looked good himself. He had on well-tailored casual slacks with tiny pleats at the waist, and a dark green sweater over a pale yellow shirt. His dark hair, which had been carefully combed when he opened the door, fell into his eyes when I returned his hug. He pushed it back with a characteristic gesture.
I asked what brought him to Chicago.
“Business with Ajax, of course.” He led me into the living room, a modernistically furnished square overlooking the lake.
A large orange couch with a glass-and-chrome coffee table in front of it was flanked by chrome chairs with black fabric seats.
I winced slightly.
“Hideous, isn’t it?” he said cheerfully. “If I have to stay in Chicago more than a month, I’m going to make them let me get my own apartment. Or at least my own furniture… Do you drink anything besides Chateau St. Georges? We have a complete liquor cabinet.”
He swept open a blond-and-glass cabinet in one corner to display an impressive array of bottles. I laughed: I’d drunk two bottles of Chateau St. Georges when we went to dinner together last May. “Johnny Walker Black if they have it.” He rummaged through the cupboard, found a half-used bottle, and poured each of us a modest drink.
“They must hate you in London to send you to Chicago in January. And if you have to stay through February you’ll know you’re really on their hit list.”
He grimaced. “I’ve been here before in winter. It must 4explain why you American girls are so tough. Are they as hardboiled as you in South?”
“Worse,” I assured him. “They’re tougher but they hide it under this veneer of soft manners, so you don’t know you’ve been hit until you start coming to.”
I sat at one end of the orange couch; he pulled up one of the chrome chairs close to me and leaned storklike over his drink, his hair falling into his eyes again. He explained that Scupperfield, Plouder, his London firm, owned three percent of Ajax. “We’re not the largest stockholder, but we’re an important one. So we keep a finger in the Ajax pie. We send our young fellows here for training and take some Ajax people and teach them the London market. Believe it or not, I was a young fellow once myself.” Like many people in English insurance, Ferrant had started to work right after high school, or what we think of as high school. So at thirty-seven he had close to twenty years of experience in the topsy-turvy reinsurance business.
“I’m telling you that so you won’t be so startled to hear I’m now a corporate officer pro tem.” He grinned. “A lot of people at Ajax feel their noses bent because I’m so young, but by the time they have my experience, they’ll be six or eight years older.”
Aaron Carter, the head of Ajax ’s reinsurance division, had died suddenly last month of a heart attack. His most likely successor had left in September to join a rival company. “I’m just filling in until they can find someone with the right qualifications. They need a good manager, but they must find someone who knows the London market upside down.”
He asked me what I was working on. I had a few routine cases going, but nothing interesting, so I told him about my aunt Rosa and the counterfeit securities. “I’d love to see her put away for securities fraud, but I’m afraid she’s just an innocent bystander.” On second thought, no one who ever met Rosa would think of her as innocent. Crime-free might be a better adjective.
I declined a second scotch, and we put on our coats to go into the winter night. A strong wind was blowing across the lake, driving away the clouds but dropping the temperature down to the teens. We held hands and half ran into its face to an Italian restaurant four blocks away on Seneca.
Despite its location in the convention district, the Caffe Firenze had a cheerful unpretentious interior. “I didn’t know you were part Italian when I made the reservation, or I might have hesitated,” Ferrant said as we turned our coats over to a plump young girl. “Do you know this place? Is the food authentic?”
“I’ve never heard of it, but I don’t eat in this part of town too often. As long as they make their own pasta we should be fine.”
I followed the maître d’ to a booth against the far wall. Firenze avoided the red-checked cloth and Chianti bottles so many Italian restaurants display in Chicago. The polished wood table had linen placemats on it and a flower stuck in a Tuscan pottery vase.
We ordered a bottle of Ruffino and some pasticcini di spinaci, enchanting the waiter by speaking Italian. It turned out Ferrant had visited the country numerous times and spoke Italian passably well. He asked if I’d ever seen my mother’s family there.
I shook my head. “My mother’s from Florence, but her family was half Jewish-her mother came from a family of scholars in Pitigliano. They scattered widely at the outbreak of the war-my mother came here, her brother went to Africa, and the cousins went every which way. My grandmother died during the war. Gabriella went back once in 1955 to see her father, but it was depressing. He was the only member of her immediate family left in Florence and she said he couldn’t deal with the war or the changes it brought; he kept pretending it was 1936 and the family still together. I think he’s still alive but – “ I made a gesture of distaste. “My dad wrote him when my mother died and we got back a very unsettling letter inviting us to hear her sing. I’ve never felt like dealing with him.”
“Was your mother a singer, then?”
“She’d trained as one. She’d hoped to sing opera. Then, when she had to flee the country, she couldn’t afford to continue her lessons. She taught instead. She taught me. She hoped I’d pick it up and have her career for her. But I don’t have a big enough voice. And I don’t really like opera all that well.”
Ferrant said apologetically that he always had tickets for the Royal Opera and enjoyed it thoroughly.
I laughed. “I enjoy the staging and the sheer-virtuosity, I guess it is-of putting an opera together. It’s very strenuous work, you know. But the singing is too violent. I prefer Lieder. My mother always saved enough money from the music lessons to take the two of us to a couple of Lyric Opera performances every fall. Then in the summer my dad would take me to see the Cubs four or five times. The Lyric Opera is better than the Chicago Cubs, but I have to admit I’ve always gotten more pleasure from baseball.”
We ordered dinner-fried artichoke and polio in galantina for me, veal kidneys for Ferrant. The talk moved from baseball to cricket, which Ferrant played, to his own childhood in Highgate, and finally to his career in Scupperfield, Plouder.
As I was finishing my second cup of espresso, he asked me idly if I followed the stock market at all.
I shook my head. “I don’t have anything to invest. Why?”
He shrugged. “I’ve only been here a week, but I noticed in The Wall Street Journal that Ajax’s volume seems quite heavy compared to the other stock-insurance companies, and the price seems to be going up.”