High Chicago (19 page)

T
o call it an elevator was an insult to other elevators. It wasn’t even a lift. A hoist, pure and simple, a technology that dated back to the building of pyramids, one weight descending to pull another upward. The higher we went, the harder the wind blew, waves of it rocking the hoist. The view was probably magnificent but obscured by walls of Plexiglas smeared with months’ worth of dirt, handprints, dried drops of rain. Maybe even tears.

The car bucked harder as we rose past sixty, seventy floors, the pitch of the wind moaning like a grieving old woman as it whistled through unfinished floors of the building.

When the hoist reached the very top, Curry stepped back and took out a pistol. “You can get out first,” he said. “Slowly, if I were you. Not that there’s anywhere to run out there.”

There was no flooring beyond twenty feet in any direction. Nothing to walk on but sheets of corrugated plastic, bridged here and there by plywood. After that it was girders only.

I stepped out as Curry directed, stopping halfway across the flooring. Not much I could do with my hands cuffed behind me.

“A little farther,” Simon Birk said, and Curry waved his pistol to encourage me. I moved two steps farther out.

No walls, no ceiling. Just girders, the steel skeleton of a
rising giant, through which the wind was truly whipping. My pant legs were flapping against my legs, my hair blowing straight back.

Birk said, “I wanted you to see first-hand what I’m building, since you seem so determined to bring it to a halt.”

“Okay,” I said. “I’ve seen it.”

“Isn’t it magnificent?”

Curry was staying well back of me so there was nothing for me to do but agree.

“Walk,” Birk said, nodding his head toward the edge of the ribbed plastic floor. The surface seemed solid enough under my feet. I assumed heavier men than me had trod it. I walked. The wind got stronger with every step out.

Below us, traffic rushed through the streets. Cars, buses, trucks and subway trains, all carrying people to their destinations. To better places than I was in.

“It sways more than you’d expect, doesn’t it?” Birk asked. “Up to two feet from its vertical axis. All skyscrapers do, of course. There has to be some give in them. If they don’t bend, they might break. Some of the sway will be reduced when it’s finished and the cladding is in place. The tenants will never really feel it. But you do, don’t you? You feel you’re not entirely on solid ground, am I right?”

I saw no point in disagreeing.

“There’s a lesson in there, Geller. When someone gives you a chance to bend, you should take it. It beats the hell out of breaking, doesn’t it?”

“I get your point,” I said.

“You should have done that when it counted.”

“Boss,” Curry said. I turned around to see Curry’s hand on Birk’s arm, stopping him from moving or speaking, then pointing out ahead of us.

At the end of a girder that extended out into the blackness was the figure of a man, seated with his back to us. Curry moved
over to me and stuck the barrel of his gun in my back. He slipped a key out of his pocket and undid my cuffs. “You say a word,” he said, “or make any fancy moves and you’ll be dead. And so will he.”

“Got it,” I said. “No moves.”

“Be smart.”

“Excuse me?” Birk called out. “What are you doing here?”

The man rose up on the girder in one effortless move, as if the girder beneath him was twelve feet wide instead of twelve inches. He turned to face us. “I work here,” he said.

“Well, I own the damn thing,” Birk said. “Come on in.”

He walked toward us along the girder. No harness. No hard hat. Thick black hair in a braid down his back. When he reached a perpendicular beam, he stopped. “Mr. Birk,” he said.

“And you are?”

“Told you. I work here.”

“Your name, please?”

“Cross,” he said. “Gabriel Cross.”

“And what were you doing out there? Your shift was over hours ago.”

“Watching.”

“Watching what?”

“The night,” Cross said. “It’s a good place to be when it’s quiet. Watch the lights. Stars. Clouds. Can’t do that during the day. Too much light. Too many people.”

“You don’t have a harness on.”

Cross shrugged.

“You’re Mohawk?”

He nodded.

“Mohawks aren’t afraid of heights,” Birk said to Curry. “Did you know that?”

“I’ve heard.”

“Gabriel,” he said. “I wonder if you’d do something for me.”

He said, “Sure.”

“Walk back out to the end of that girder.”

“The one I was on?”

“Yes.”

I tensed, wondering if Birk was setting the man up to fall. Get rid of a potential witness to whatever was going to happen to me. Curry must have felt me tense up because he jammed the gun into my back hard enough to send a sharp pain through my kidney.

I felt bad for the kid I had punched earlier, then went back to feeling bad for myself.

Cross turned and walked to the end of the girder. He never looked down. He could have been on a paved road for all the care he showed.

“Now turn around and walk back, please,” Birk said.

He did a little pirouette and walked back.

“Amazing, isn’t it?” Birk said to me.

“Yes,” I said.

“Thank you, Gabriel,” Birk said.

He shrugged.

“I’m going to ask you to leave now,” Birk said.

“Okay.” He came off the girder and crossed the plywood sheet and went over to a spot on the metal floor where his hard hat and lunch box were. He put on the hard hat, picked up the lunch box. Curry moved directly behind me, so Cross couldn’t see the gun at my back.

I moved my left hand onto my belt and used my thumb and first two fingers to form a W. Turned it sideways. Implored Cross silently to see it. It was a sign taught to me last year by a Tyendinaga Mohawk, after I stepped in to even up a fight three drunken white boys had picked with him behind a beer store in Belleville when I was working undercover on the Ensign Tobacco case. A warrior greeting of sorts. But Cross turned away and got into the elevator. Either he hadn’t seen my sign, hadn’t recognized it or didn’t give a shit.

I was on my own. Once Cross was gone, I thought, I’d be left to whatever end Birk and Curry had planned for me.

Before he closed the door, Cross said, “Mr. Birk? That thing about Mohawks—that we aren’t afraid of heights?”

“Yes?”

“It’s a myth. It’s bullshit. We are afraid of heights,” he said. “As much as you or anyone else. It’s just ironwork pays better than anything else we can get.”

“W
Well, that was disappointing,” Birk said. “I always believed that about Mohawks, that they had no fear of heights. I suppose I should respect them all the more if they are afraid and still walk out on beams as if they weren’t, but the bottom line is, I don’t like being fooled. Getting bad intelligence or information I can’t trust.” He was wearing a tan overcoat and he shivered slightly in the wind then tucked his hands in his pockets. “You, on the other hand, haven’t fooled anyone, have you, Geller? You’ve been as transparent as a soap bubble ever since you got here. Even before that.”

I wondered if Jericho Hale had sold me out—if the invitation for a meal had been a ruse to draw me into the open—or if they had simply tailed me from the Hilton.

“You like pirate movies?” Birk asked.

“What?”

“Pirate movies. Not the
Pirates of the Caribbean
crap—although they did make a lot of money for Disney, which I have to respect. The old ones. The classics.
The Sea Hawk. Captain Blood. Treasure Island. Captain Kidd. The Black Swan
with Tyrone Power. I watched them all as a kid. Not you, huh?”

“I saw
Wall Street
,” I said.

“Wiseass,” Curry muttered.

“Let him have his fun, Francis,” Birk said. “What did you think,” he said to me, “watching our Indian friend walk out on that beam? Think you could do it? Think you could hold yourself together a thousand feet above pavement?”

I said, “Maybe.”

“Maybe. Hardly a vote of confidence in yourself. And confidence, I’m told, is everything in that situation. So let’s give it a try, shall we?” He held out his hand as if inviting me into his parlour. “Go on.”

I didn’t move.

Birk grinned. Whoever had capped his teeth had done a good job. They gleamed brighter than any star in the night sky behind him. “Not so keen? Well, this is where we get to the pirate part. Walking the plank. Francis, would you mind pointing your pistol at Geller’s head? That’s it. Nicely done. So here’s your choice, Geller. Walk the beam. Or take a bullet. More than one if need be.”

I looked at the beam stretching out in front of me. I knew I could walk out and back without falling. I was a martial artist. I had good balance—better than good. I had the ability to focus my mind. When I worked on
katas
I often challenged myself to begin and end them on the same spot, like a gymnast nailing a landing.

“As an added incentive,” Birk said, “I give you my word. If you can walk out to the end of the beam and back, you’ll be free to go.”

“Like that’s worth anything.”

Birk gave me an aggrieved look, drawing his chin in and arching his thick brows. “I’ve closed billion-dollar deals on my word,” he said.

“And had people killed with it.”

“You keep saying that, but if you had one shred of proof—”

“What do you call this? Having Francis put a gun on me?”

“Ripping entertainment.”

“And the little escapade in the park today?”

“What escapade? Which park?”

“Grant Park. The guy who tried to shoot me in the head. The guy you sent with Tom Barnett.”

“Detective Barnett? I haven’t seen him in years, not since he led the investigation into the robbery of my home.”

“So capably too. Never caught anyone or found anything.”

“At any rate,” Birk said. “I’m getting chilly. Wind pressure increases with height, of course, but nothing quite prepares you for it eighty-plus storeys up. So what’s it going to be, Geller? Come on, it’s only twenty feet long. Well, twenty each way, assuming you make it back.”

Only forty feet. Only eighty-five storeys to fall. Seven times the height Maya Cantor fell and her body had been virtually destroyed on impact.

“You can’t say I’m not sporting,” Birk said.

I stepped out onto the beam—Birk watching me like a wolf who’d found a stray lamb trapped in a bed of mint—and immediately had to adjust to a gust of sudden wind funnelled through neighbouring towers. Maybe Mohawks were afraid of heights, maybe they weren’t; this Jew was fucking terrified. Look ahead, I told myself. Never down. One foot in front of the other. I was glad I had running shoes on, not loafers with a slick sole. The studded surface of the beam gave some grip. Halfway out, another gust almost sheared me off into the darkness. I put out my hands, wavering like a tightrope walker; heard Curry laugh until I had regained my balance.

“Bravo,” Birk shouted. “All that was missing was a drum roll.”

I reached the end of the beam, where it joined an I-beam.

“Now let’s see the turn,” Birk said. “A little tricky, if you’re not used to it. But you’re doing very well, so far.”

“Beats
American Idol
,” Curry said.

“Maybe the early rounds,” Birk said.

The beam was wide enough, I told myself. Looked to be twelve inches across. I visualized a move that occurs about a third of the way through a
tensho kata
, where the fighter pivots around from front to back. I had done it hundreds, if not thousands, of times. I tried to feel it in my body, how it would take my feet, my legs, my core right around, and did it, breathing out, using the traditional hand movements to keep my balance.

“You learn that in ballet class?” Curry said.

If only he’d been close enough to hit.

I walked back along the beam, watching Curry more than Birk, but so far he was keeping the gun pointed down. I reached the end of the beam and stepped back onto the temporary flooring.

“Well done,” Birk said. “You might be short on strategy, Geller, but you have nerve and everyone knows I like that in a man. And so I am going to surprise you, my Canadian friend, by keeping my word. You’re free to go. The game is no longer afoot.”

I kept watching Curry’s gun hand.

“Go on,” Birk said. “About your business. Chop-chop.”

I started toward the elevator.

Birk said, “Francis.”

Curry’s gun came up.

“I said you could go,” Birk said with a cold grin. “I didn’t say you could take the elevator.”

“Y
ou were watching the workers here yesterday,” Birk said. “You must have seen how it’s done. Like a monkey shimmying down a palm tree.”

I had watched a man climb down a girder wearing work gloves and boots. Wearing a harness that would stop his fall if he lost his grip.

I said, “If I don’t?”

“Francis will shoot you. He won’t need much provocation either. I don’t think he likes you.”

“Too many people know why I’m here. If I’m found with a bullet wound, they’ll come after you.”

“They who? The police? Chicago averages five hundred murders a year.”

“So I’ve heard.”

“Your body will be found in an area known for gang activity. They’ll chalk it up to misadventure on your part. The naive Canadian who wandered into the baddest part of town and was shot for whatever was in his wallet.”

“No one will buy that.”

“People have been buying what I sell all my life. Francis will swear I never left my apartment. I’ll swear he was with me all night. Tom Barnett will swear I’m Elvis Presley if I tell him
to. Anyway, it’s a moot point because I don’t think you’re going to stand there and meekly take a bullet. Be a sport, Geller. I’m giving you a chance to walk away.”

“Some chance.”

“Come on!” he cried. “Where’s your sense of adventure? You’re young. You’re fit. You’ve shown us some moves. You certainly have a knack for survival. You climb down four floors, you’ll be back on concrete and you can make it to a stairwell from there. It’s not inconceivable you could make it.”

Not inconceivable. Just the kind of odds you want.

“I’m giving you more of a chance than, say, Basil Rathbone would have given Errol Flynn. More than George Sanders would have given Tyrone Power. There are no sharks in these waters. Your hands are no longer tied.”

“Can we move this along?” Curry said.

“Poor Francis,” Birk said. “Francis doesn’t care for classic movies the way I do.”

“I liked
Kiss of Death
,” he said.

He would, the hairless fucking waxwork.

“And if I fall?” I said. “How are you going to explain that?”

“Very easily. You’ve made your little obsession with me quite public. Your scene at the Department of Buildings. Harassing my site manager here. The scenario would be obvious, I think. Having been ejected earlier, you broke into the site, commandeered the elevator, came up here looking for some evidence to support your outlandish theories about me. And fell. Ouch. The end.”

“They’re not that outlandish,” I said. “You did have them killed, didn’t you?”

“On the off chance you make it down in one piece, I think I’ll decline to comment.”

“And the home invasion? You engineered it, didn’t you?”

“Quit whistling out your ass,” Curry said.

“On the advice of my director of security, I think I’ll duck that one too. Now start climbing.” His voice had lost the playful
singsong tone he’d been using, sounding more like the balls-to-the-wall negotiator he was supposed to be.

I walked back out along the twenty-foot beam until I reached the beam to which it connected. I squatted down, gripped the sides of the girder and hugged it close to my body, thinking of the workman I’d watched through binoculars, gripping with his feet, shimmying down, as Birk had said, like a monkey down a tree. Except a monkey was made for climbing: exquisitely muscled with feet that gripped like hands and a prehensile tail. I started inching down, keeping my eyes fixed on the pale clock face of the Wrigley Building across the ribbon of river that ran in from the lake. It took several minutes to make it down to the next horizontal beam, where I thought I could rest. But as soon as my feet touched it, something slammed into my right shoulder. The shock of it made me lose my grip for a moment. I slid down hard, felt skin tearing off my palms as I gripped the girder trying to stop my fall. I thought I’d been shot. But then something clanged off a girder far below, and I knew that someone above me, Birk or Curry, had thrown something down. A long bolt.

“Just keeping you honest,” Birk called.

I swung my body to the outside of the girder and started down the next length. My hands were cramping around the girder. My quads were stiffening. My collarbone where the bolt had hit felt like it was broken. The muscle that connected it to the scapula was going into spasm. I kept going. Six inches, a foot. Stopped to wrap my arms around the girder and flex my hands. But as soon as I did, more bolts rained down. One hit my right forearm. Another just missed my head. I gripped the girder and renewed my descent.

Thought, “This is what you get for trying.” A former colleague, the late François Paradis, once told me, “No good deed goes unpunished.” Is that how it really is? Is this how it ends? The fall itself would be over in seconds. I wouldn’t feel a thing.
I’d be dead a millisecond after I hit the ground, before the pain impulses could travel to my shattered brain.

I descended another few feet. My hands were being rubbed raw by rough steel. My right arm was on fire from my wrist up to the base of my neck. When I got to the next horizontal beam I stopped to rest again, hugging the girder tight to present the smallest possible target. It didn’t help. Another bolt hit my right leg just above the knee. I howled in pain.

“Sorry about that,” Birk yelled.

“You are not,” I heard Curry say.

I wasn’t going to make it. They would find me at the bottom. Ship what was left of me home. My mother would be devastated. Jenn would cry her heart out. Hollinger would probably regret the way things had gone. My brother—what would he feel? I had no idea, and somehow that made me feel sadder than anything else.

I felt tears in my eyes. From the wind, the pain, the rage throttling my heart.

I started down again. Two more floors, I told myself. A dozen more cramps. A hundred more breaths. Breathe into your hands, Geller. Into your quads, your knee, your shoulder, your arm. Fill your chest, your head with air. Sharp, cold nighttime Chicago air. Air off the lake. Air whistling through these towers around you. Breathe it. Climb down through it.

Two more bolts came down. Both missed, clanged off the girder. Maybe I was getting harder to see from up there.

I reached another horizontal beam, changed my position so all that was exposed was my hands and feet.

Another bolt hit my left hand. “Fuck!” I yelled. I felt blood spill through my straining fingers but didn’t let go. Wasn’t going to let go.

What if I just stay here? I thought. What if they find me in the morning, clinging to this post, stuck to it with dried blood, a twisted figurehead on the good ship Millennium Skyline?

Explain that, Mr. Birk.

But my left hand was starting to give way. My right was barely holding on.

What if I just let go? Would a good coroner be able to tell anything about ante-mortem injuries?
“Hmm. These welts on his hand, his collarbone, his knee. Not consistent with a fall from a great height.”

Would it matter? Birk could probably buy off a coroner. He had at least one cop in his pocket. Plenty of room for a coroner—or did Illinois have medical examiners? Didn’t matter. Birk could afford either one.

Nearly a thousand feet to fall. A few seconds at most. My entire body was begging to let go. My hands wanted to. My feet did too. My mind, my heart, my will—the pain was sapping them all.

And then I heard a hum—more than a hum, a mechanical whine—something moving off to my right, on the other side of the building.

The hoist was coming back up.

Why would Birk and Curry have summoned it? They weren’t through with me yet. The game wasn’t over. Unless it meant they couldn’t see me from above anymore and would come to the floor I was on and finish me; or go down to ground level and wait for me to fall.

No more bolts were falling from above, which gave me a chance to climb freely. If I made it down one more floor, I’d be on concrete. But I’d also be right where they expected me to be. They’d be standing in the elevator or stairwell entrance and finish it. But there was another choice. Do the horizontal beam walk again. Come in on an unfinished floor above where they’d be waiting. If the wind didn’t blow me off, maybe I could find a weapon—the kind of bolts they had been throwing—or a section of rebar or chunk of concrete to drop on Curry’s head from above.

My muscles were still cramping and both palms were bleeding. My feet felt frozen inside my shoes. But three floors down from the top, I inched out onto a beam and moved slowly along, summoning every ounce of my training in movement and fighting, staying steady and balanced, getting closer to the corrugated floor: fifteen feet, ten feet, five. When I was close enough I launched myself forward and landed on my side. Pain shot through my shoulder where the first bolt had hit. But I was back on firm ground of sorts, in a place with a fighting chance. I sprinted toward the elevator. It would have to pass me on the way up to fetch Birk and Curry then come back down. I hunted for a weapon, spied a wrench that had fallen between two sections of flooring, hefted it. It was the best chance I had to take Curry out. Break his gun arm, stave in his shiny skull.

And then take Simon Birk apart.

The elevator ground slowly up the side. I could see light inside it, a bare bulb that made the smears in its Plexiglas surface look ghostly, as if it had been wiped by a spectral hand. I’m left-handed but shifted the wrench to my right, which didn’t hurt as badly. I breathed in as deeply as I could without sending more spasms through my side. I had two, maybe three minutes to get ready. I looked for a shadowed place to hide, to make them come to me, to shift the game to my terms.

The game. I had enough to hate Birk for already, but turning my life, my death into a game for his amusement, an entertainment of sorts? I wanted to entertain the living shit out of him. I had to focus my anger, not let it get the better of me, at least not until Curry was down.

But the elevator never went up to their floor. It stopped at mine. And when the doors opened the only person in it was Gabriel Cross.

I stumbled into it and fell onto the floor. I would have shaken his hand but I doubted he wanted any part of my blood-smeared lumps of meat.

“You got my message,” I said.

“No,” he said. “I got Mr. Birk’s.” And he surprised me by doing a note-perfect impression of Birk. “‘Gabriel, I wonder if you’d do something for me. Walk back out to the end of that girder.’ Like he’s the organ grinder and I’m the monkey. I could tell they were up to no good with you. When I got to my truck, I took a look up through my binocs. And there you were, doing Spiderman. Figured you might need a lift.”

He started the hoist back down. They could throw all the bolts they wanted. I was safe inside it.

“You work for a man,” Cross said, “that’s all it means. Doesn’t mean he owns you. Used to, maybe. Not today. Not with all these buildings going up. Not when you’re a Mohawk who’s not afraid of heights.”