Little pause after that, not the kind of comment that invited a response.
“Didn’t you used to be with MacMillian?” Bernstein asked.
“Yeah. Up until 2004.”
“Kind of a change of pace,” Bernstein said.
“Always did some immigration stuff to help the firm hit its pro bono targets. I mean the pro bono stuff in a firm like that, mostly it’s a joke. Something we use to numb the consciences on the new associates until the work and the money suck out their souls. But I was a proper North Shore liberal. Had a couple million bucks worth of house up in Lake Forest, condo in Aspen, garage full of Beemers. Had a son. Then 9/11 happened, and my son decided to sign up for Bush’s jihad, probably mostly to rebel against me and my bullshit. And he got blown up. And my wife turned into one of these America-as-a-fetish Palin worshipers because it was the only way she had for his death to make sense. And I just couldn’t go into the office anymore and help another CFO find ways to run circles around the SEC. Because it occurred to me that my son, misguided as he was, stuck his ass out further for something than I ever had. So my wife got the house and condo and the Beemers and the money, and I got this.”
“Fair trade?” Lynch asked.
“Screw fair,” Telling said.
“This Membe Saturday looks like a dead end,” Bernstein said, him and Lynch back in the car.
“Something screwy, though. I mean, why shoot the guy? Because he saw the car? You got people parked all over there every game night. There’s no reason for the shooter to think anybody’d be looking at him.”
“But if it’s not about the shooter, then it’s about Stein. So now you’re wondering what some refugee has in common with Stein,” Bernstein said.
“And I feel kind of stupid wondering that,” Lynch said. They drove for a few moments. “Do me a favor, though, OK? We ever get a call out back to Telling’s office, let’s punt on it. Guy’s gonna eat a gun someday. I don’t need to see it.”
Bernstein’s phone went off, some kind of hip-hop crap.
“What the fuck is that?” Lynch asked.
“New ringtone,” Bernstein said. “Little Kanye. Upping my street cred.”
“Well, answer the damn thing before I put a round through it.”
CHAPTER 12
Hardin dumped the room service tray from breakfast outside his door. He’d been staying in the hotel room as much as possible, keeping his head down. He’d taken the underground tunnel from the hotel over to the Macy’s on State Street, picked up some clothes. Everything he had he’d bought in Africa, and most of it came from Europe. He couldn’t put his finger on it exactly, but over here everybody else’s clothes looked just a little different. Different wasn’t what he needed just now. Macy’s had been a shock. Marshall Field’s was gone. He remembered when he was a kid, the Field’s out at Fox Valley Mall. Not where he shopped, of course. Sears was splurging in his family. But he remembered hanging around in Field’s, the rich people carrying around those dark green bags with the script on them, bags he always figured would smell like money. Field’s was the sort of thing that felt permanent when you were a kid, like Pluto being a planet. People liked to switch that shit out on you when you weren’t looking, remind you that nothing stuck, that the whole world and everything in it was circling the drain one way or the other.
He fired up his laptop, checked his e-mail. Nothing he needed. Reached for the remote. He’d watched more TV in the last day and a half than he had in the previous twenty years.
And there was that fucker Fenn, some Oprah special, tears in his eyes, running through that child abuse crap he started peddling a few years back. And then Oprah had to cue up the tape – the cell phone video from the damn Darfur party that had had a short run on YouTube back in the day.
“That’s really when I knew something was wrong with me,” said Fenn. “I’ve been doing the work in therapy, and I’ve been trying to make it right with people I’ve gone off on. But I look back at this, and I think of all the damage I did to the good work that Jerry Mooney was trying to do. And I worry about Nick Hardin – he’s the guy I’m taking the swing at here. I mean, this cost him his gig with Jerry, and who knows what else a guy like that has.”
Hardin noticed they’d cut the tape right after Fenn took his swing and Hardin took his fall. Didn’t show Hardin busting Fenn up.
Just great. All Hardin wanted to do was to keep his head down for a few days while Fouche put a deal together. Then he and his $10 million would find some place nice to live out their days. Now his face and his name were on Oprah.
Hardin suddenly remembered bivouacking in some pissant village in the ass-end of Benin maybe fifteen years ago, back in his Legion days. This old jou-jou insisted on throwing the bones for them. She threw Hardin’s, and her eyes got big, and she grabbed Hardin by the arm. “Beware the black woman with a million eyes. She will be your downfall.” It creeped Hardin out a little at the time, but he hadn’t thought about it in years. He never figured she meant Oprah.
Too many people had seen him at the Hyatt. If the bad guys didn’t have a line on him already, they would soon enough. Time to move. And time to find a fucking gun.
Beans Garbanzo and Snakes DeGetano were two hours into their second morning sitting on Hardin’s car when Snakes took a look down at his picture and nudged Beans. “Here he comes. Make the call and pull up behind him.”
Garbanzo pulled out his cell.
“Yeah?” the voice answered.
“It’s Beans. I’m working that thing for Tony Corsco. Kill the camera.”
“OK, you got ten minutes max. Ping me when you’re clear .Just remember, I don’t need anybody getting curious about convenient camera outages, so grab him and run. Don’t leave a mess there, give anybody a reason to start checking for pictures.”
CHAPTER 13
Dr Atash Javadi walked along the shore of Lake Michigan on the Northwestern University campus with a slight, olive-skinned man. Javadi had been a youth of twenty in 1979, the year the Shah fell. He had been the intellectual playboy scion of one of Iran’s wealthiest families. Now, with degrees from Cambridge, Yale, and Dartmouth, he was one of the West’s leading scholars on the Islamic world and the professor of Middle Eastern studies at Northwestern University. An ardent and frequent critic of Islam, he was a regular guest on various news programs and a long-time favorite of the American right.
He was also a devout Shiite and had, for his entire life in America, been an agent for MOIS, the Iranian Ministry of Intelligence and National Security.
“The things that they hoard shall be tied to their necks like a collar on the day of resurrection,” said Javadi. “So sayeth the Holy Koran. Cling not to greed, my friend.”
“He must pay their wages in full,” replied the olive-skinned man, “and give them even more out of his grace. So also sayeth the Holy Koran. And my wages are late. Stein is dead. Heinz is dead. I have your devices. Yet Tehran has my money and I do not.”
Javadi smiled an ironic smile. “You quibble over money? Now? On the brink of a triumph that will forever secure in legend the name of Husam al Din?”
Al Din scowled. He had no use for legends and less for names.
He’d only been a few weeks old in 1978 when the Israelis bombed the refugee camp in Lebanon. His parents were killed, and he was just another orphan raised by the PLO. In the camp, they called him Ahmad, but his parents must have called him something. So far as Husam was concerned, Ahmad was just his first cover. A name was just another tool. In New Mexico, he had been Ricardo Orendain. Since arriving in Chicago, he had been Marco Pelligrino and then Dmitri Stavapopolus. With his fine features, light olive skin, and brown eyes, he could pass for everything from a Spaniard to an Indian.