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I booked a black Range Rover. Lawrence from the hire company meets me at the baggage carousels in the O’Hare arrivals area. He’s dapper, with a lovely blue suit, a movie-star two-day beard, and a delicious twinkle.
Courteously, he insists on taking my bags to the car, which he’s parked outside.
Driving through the traffic and into the city, I play some old Springsteen and enjoy the sense of control. Assert my position on the road. Weave and dance through heavy morning traffic, toward the hazy, spiky skyline.
It feels good. Liberating. It makes me think I don’t drive enough. Maybe when I get back to Seattle, I’ll look around for a new car.
The meeting ahead — I’m here to ask one question and I think I already know the answer I’ll get. I need to know if Jerry had the backing of the big boys back in Chicago when he came to Seattle.
If I ask directly, they’re bound to say that he does. They’ll stick together. We would do the same. I need a way to frame the question or I’m wasting my time and theirs. And making myself look like an idiot to boot.
The villa I rented on the lakeshore is big and sprawling. Low white wings and big windows under terracotta tiles, all around pools and fountains, with pretty manicures lawns and planting.
It’s a lot for what I need, which is basically a place to change and relax, before the meeting and after, but I’m expecting it to serve another purpose.
Ester texts me with a confirmation. I retrieve the details from an email dead-drop. She and I share a Hotmail address. We both have the password. The address has a few subscriptions, it’s on a number of mailing lists and it receives a lot of spam, too.
When we need to communicate with reasonable security, one of us logs into the account with a burner phone, through a VPN, and writes a message, then saves it as draft. we let the other person know with a text. They log in and read it, then delete it.
The message never gets sent, it’s read and erased almost immediately. It’s not military-grade security, but it’s pretty solid.
Her draft message gives me a location and a time. The location is a jetty on a remote stretch of Lakeshore Drive, and the time is 11:30pm.
I trust Ester completely, but the time and location look like the kind of place the vulnerable heroine in a movie sneaks off to on tippy toes, while the audience is yelling, ‘Don’t go THERE!’
A cold wind slaps across the jetty. I’m a solitary figure in black denims, boots and a Helly Hansen jacket.
Hazy blue light makes a halo on the saw-toothed rim of the horizon under the heavy sky. Traffic drifts by on the road, but I’m freezing and I feel totally exposed, alone out on the jetty here. I wonder if I should have waited in the car, but the instructions were clear.
The jetty is about twenty feet above the water. From somewhere way out on the lake, a boat makes a low, muffled buzz in its slow arc toward me. Calculating, I reckon that if this were a hit, there are plenty of simpler ways to set it up, and they’d have a more secure approach and getaway if they came from the road.
Still. As Mikey says, I’m making mistakes.
A formidable older man pilots the boat. Two henchmen stand at the stern with long guns in low ready positions. Looking distinguished in a puffy leather jacket, the man at the helm steers effortlessly with his fingers flat against the wheel.
When he pulls up by the jetty, he knots the rope himself and springs up the thin steel ladder.
“Donnas Fortuna? I’m Don Amato. Call me Tommy. Welcome to Chicago. I’m here to take you out to the yacht.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
As we approach the streamlined hull, it’s hard to tell whether the yacht, Persephone, is a super-yacht or a mega-yacht. She’s probably somewhere on the edge between the two. She’s certainly big.
I’m welcomed aboard not only by Don Amato, but Don Cappoci and Don Vitelli who are waiting as well. Three heads of the Chicago mob, famous or notorious, depending on your point of view.
All three men are courteous. Hospitable and considerate. Charming in fact.
As we settle into the forward lounge, They offer refreshments and put me at as much at ease as I can be under the circumstances.
I accept a cognac, which Don Vitelli pours generously. I would prefer to keep a cool head but a lot of old-school guys won’t trust anyone who doesn’t trust themselves with a drink.
Don Cappoci asks, “Do you mind if we smoke?” and he shows me a box of Cuban corona cigars.
“Not at all.” I shake my head.
“You sure?” Don Amato takes one from the box and snips off the end with a cutter from his pocket. “We can take them out on deck.”
“No, it’s fine,” I insist. I want them to be as comfortable as possible. And living with my father got me well used to cigar smoke.
