The Fifth Floor (6 page)

Lawrence Randolph blinked three times, picked up the files I had been looking at, and left. Tired from my lecture, I sat back in the green leather reading chair and rested my eyes. My Sheehan’s hit the floor with a definite thud. I started, swore, and went to pick up the book. Beside it was a folder the curator had left behind. It was labeled theories on the fire’s cause and origin. I picked it up and started to read. Three articles deep, I found the first feather in what I was certain would be a wild-goose chase. Still, I couldn’t resist and began to take notes.

W hat do we know about this?”

I had made my way back to Randolph’s office. Inside I found a shapeless collection of wood and leather covered in books and papers. Behind a large desk was the shapeless man himself, eating lunch from a brown paper sack and not especially happy to see me darkening his door.

“About what?” he said.

“This Sun-Times article.”

Randolph put down a pretty nice-looking banana, picked up the clippings file I had dropped on his desk, and gave it a look. Then he put the file down, picked up the yellow fruit again, and slowly began to peel.

“Rubbish,” he said.

“Really?”

“Really.”

The article was written by a reporter named Rawlings Smith. It was a weekend magazine piece from 1978, speculating on who might have actually started the fire.

“Did you notice the day the piece ran, Mr. Kelly?”

It wasn’t included on the copy I had read.

“April first,” Randolph said, and took a delicate bite of his banana.

“April Fool’s Day,” I said.

“Precisely, Mr. Kelly. April Fool’s Day. This article was a joke, played on the city and two of its most illustrious families.”

“So you don’t believe a word of it?”

“Not a word.”

“You sure?”

Randolph offered a look to the heavens, as if in silent prayer for the small tortures sent his way each and every day. Then he steeled himself and returned to schooling the great unwashed. Also known as yours truly.

“There are any number of theories as to how the fire started,” Randolph said. “There’s O’Leary’s neighbor, Peg Leg Sullivan. Alleged to have started the fire with his pipe and an errant bit of lit tobacco. There’s O’Leary’s drunk tenants, the McLaughlins. Had a party that night. Supposedly a couple got, shall we say, amorous in the barn, knocked something over, and started the fire. Then there’s the supernatural: a meteor hit Chicago. Lit the whole place up like a Christmas tree.”

“You believe any of those?”

“Who knows, Mr. Kelly? Who really knows?” Randolph threw the remains of his banana in the trash, folded his lunch bag up into a neat brown square, and slid it inside the pocket of his jacket. Probably made of tweed.

“In my business, you are now talking about one of the Holy Grails: exploding the O’Leary myth. Finding out, definitively, who or what started the fire. It’s the dream of every curator who’s ever sat in this chair.”

Randolph leaned back in said chair and arched his eyebrows to the right, sort of like Groucho Marx. “You see that?”

I could only assume he was talking about the painting hanging on the wall. It showed an afterthought of a man from a bygone era, captured in thin oil and what appeared to be an even thinner light. His mouth was curved in a small smile, as if he knew the joke was on him, even in the nineteenth century.

“That’s Josiah Randolph. My great-granduncle. Original curator of the society. Wrote the book for this job.”

“Big shoes to fill.”

“Indeed. Josiah was curator at the time of the fire.”

Randolph swiveled in his chair and gestured to a small leather-bound volume in a glass case behind his desk.

“I donated his diary to the historical society. It describes how the building that housed this institution burned to the ground. Josiah was the last man out and tried desperately to save a copy of the Emancipation Proclamation. Lincoln’s final version, handwritten by the great man himself and the only one of its kind. Alas, Josiah failed.”

We had a moment of silence for Lincoln’s lost Proclamation. Then I pushed us back to the present.

“Let’s say, just for kicks, that you solved the mystery. Proved beyond a doubt who started the Chicago Fire.”

“Then, Mr. Kelly, I believe I might rate a painting of my own.” Randolph picked up the clipping file again. “This article, however, is a joke. John Julius Wilson was our mayor’s great-great-grandfather, not to mention his namesake. Charles Hume was publisher of the old Chicago Times and helped to rebuild this town. Two of Chicago’s giants. The idea that they conspired to actually start the fire-”

“According to this article, it was part of a land swindle. Maybe a mile or so worth of city real estate.”

“I can read, Mr. Kelly. The idea is pure fantasy.” Randolph dropped the clip file on his desk. “If it were possibly true, even a shred of it, don’t you think someone such as myself would have put it together by now?”

“Have you ever talked to the reporter who wrote the article?” I took a look at my notes. “Rawlings Smith.”

“No, I haven’t,” Randolph said, and got up to go.

“Might be worth a phone call,” I said, and got up with him.

The curator opened the door to his office and stood aside.

“As you might imagine, Mr. Kelly, I’m an exceedingly busy man. Now, if you don’t mind.”

I walked out the door, Lawrence Randolph close behind.

“You think this is all crazy, don’t you, Randolph?”

I walked quickly and spoke softly, allowing the words to drowse back over my shoulder. The curator struggled to keep up. Not really wanting to listen, but even more afraid of what he might miss.

“A waste of time might be a more apt description.”

I stopped and turned. Ready to set the hook a final time.

“But what if it were true?”

“The article?”

“Yeah. What if it were. What if you discovered who really started the Chicago Fire. And what if it was our mayor’s great-great-grandfather. Make you pretty famous, wouldn’t it?”

The curator shook his head and continued walking toward the front. But not before I saw the gleam again. The bite I was looking for. Ambition, fame, fortune. The lure was universal. The flame burned hot. Even down the hallowed hallways of history.

TWO MINUTES LATER, I was standing in front of the historical society, a copy of the old Sun-Times article in my pocket. I wasn’t especially hopeful. In fact, I wasn’t hopeful at all. Timothy Sheehan’s history was just that: a history; the Sun-Times article, as Randolph put it, pure fantasy. Still, there was no bigger, no more smug lion in the zoo than the right honorable mayor of Chicago. And I, for one, could never pass up the opportunity to reach between the bars and poke a stick in his well-insulated ribs.

I grabbed the Red Line downtown. Got off at Lake and walked a handful of blocks to the corner of Clark and Randolph. Some people would call the pile of bricks you find there City Hall. Others might call it the County Building. Only in Chicago could they both be right. And wrong.

The east side of the building carried a Clark Street address. Inside, it was tastefully lit and quiet, full of dignified men and women in business suits, smiling and nodding, walking down mostly empty hallways. This was the center of business for Cook County, also known as the County Building.

The west side got its mail delivered to a LaSalle Street address. Inside, it was full of garish light and noise, lawyers in cheap suits with a lot of hair gel and even more cologne, entire families camped out on benches, children screaming, women arguing, hustlers hustling, the mayor’s men on the muscle, a bit of shaving cream still peeking out from under the occasional ear, ducking into an elevator and retreating upstairs. This was John J. Wilson’s domain, also known as City Hall.

I entered the building on the county side. An old man in a blue security guard uniform and a plastic-looking white shirt was slouched just inside the door. He had an unlit cigarette in his mouth, a gun on his hip, and was snoring lightly.

“Land Records,” I said.

“Staircase on the left, two flights down.”

The man talked around the cigarette without opening an eye. I tipped a hat I didn’t have and headed in. The hallway was deep and quiet, the staircase made of cold cracked marble. Everything felt old, nothing more so than the county’s Bureau of Land Records. It was actually three stories underground and had, as best I could tell, avoided that bane of society called the computer. For the most part, that is. There were two or three crowded up against a wall. Other than that, it was large canvas-covered books, row after row of them, documenting the comings and goings of every parcel of property in the great city of Chicago, not to mention the rest of Cook County. I wandered down one aisle, then up the next.

“They are cross-divided by section and parcel number, then organized by year. Do you have a parcel number?”

The man who spoke to me was slightly built with thin shoulders, tapered fingers bordering on delicate, and a face that looked too fragile for its own good. He had black hair with a vein of pink running through it. He wore black jeans and a shirt that fit my vague notion of turquoise. He had a gold earring in each ear and a tattoo of a yellow star on the side of his neck. He was twenty years younger than everyone else in the place and wore his air of bored indulgence like a badge of honor.

“Actually, no, I don’t have a parcel number.”

“Have to get a parcel number before we can help you,” my soon-to-be friend said. “Top of the stairs, two doors down. Room 206. Give them the address. They’ll get you a parcel number.”

“I’m thinking this piece of property is not going to be in your system. At least not with a parcel number.”

“All property in Cook County has a parcel number.”

“I believe you,” I said. “It’s more a matter of when. What’s your name?”

“Hubert.” He said it with an edge, daring anyone to comment.

“Hello, Hubert.”

I sidled him a bit out of the aisle so his boss couldn’t see us. She had blue hair, gold mascara, and gold glasses on a string around her neck. She wore nothing less than a muumuu and was snapping gum and pretending to index property books two aisles away. She wasn’t fooling me, however. Hubert and I were up to no good and she was determined to find out exactly what kind of no good it might be.

“Listen,” I said, dropping my voice just enough to get him interested without being scared. “The listing I’m looking for is old.”

Hubert was nonplussed. “Our records cover the entire twentieth century.”

“Eighteen hundred sort of old.”

“Before the fire?” I caught the ghost of a gleam in the young man’s eye. This was sexy stuff. Relatively speaking, that is.

“Exactly.”

“What did you say your name was?”

“I didn’t.”

For Hubert, that was even better. He pushed me down the aisle toward a gray door in the back. The last thing I saw was the lady with the blue hair, looking our way and picking up the phone.

T hrough the doorway was a set of black iron stairs climbing two flights up and back, to another door of government gray. Hubert found the key and opened it. The air was like the inside of a closed coffin-if the inside of a closed coffin had any air, that is.

“This is our historical section, 1890 and before. Don’t come in here too often.”

Hubert found a switch and pulled it. Pale light dropped down from a single forty-watt bulb. I tried to get my bearings. Hubert was already whipping into the darkness.

“Come on. The bitch out front will wonder what we’re about in here.”

It was like the main room but even older. Shelf after shelf of property books, creaky and yellow. We took two lefts, a right, and then straight into a wall.

“Sorry,” Hubert said. “Back this way.”

We backtracked down one aisle and then across to a sagging set of shelves that ran from the floor to just below the ceiling. Above that was a long thin window, covered in wire mesh and set at what I figured to be about sidewalk level. Dirty light filtered in from the street, along with the smell of what I could only imagine to be Panda Express on a very bad day.

“Sorry. Chinese takeout has their Dumpster in the alley right outside.”

I ran my finger down one of the bindings. It was covered with spider scrawl in what appeared to be quill ink.

“Not a problem,” I said. “At least we can see. What does this say?”

Hubert bent down and took a closer look. “It says Shortall and Hoard. Then it gives a plat number and date.”

“Who is Shortall and Hoard?”

“John Shortall,” Hubert said. “Basically saved Chicago’s property record system.”

“Really?”

“Sure. The fire destroyed all of Cook County’s official real estate records.”

“Everything?”

Hubert snapped his fingers. “Gone. Shortall ran a title abstract company. Kept copies of almost all Cook County conveyances in his office.”

“Convenient.”

“Yeah. As the fire approached, Shortall commandeered a wagon at gunpoint, loaded up his records, and got them out of town.”

“If he hadn’t?”

“No one would have legally owned anything.” Hubert shrugged. “Chaos.”

“And these are the records?”

“This is them.”

I pulled out a book and opened it up. Felt the creak of time as pages and ink pulled apart.

“Careful.” It was Hubert, peeking over my shoulder.

“I got it, Hubert.”

“Yes, but the ink is brittle. And these are the only copies.”

Hubert slid the book from my hands and started peeling the long pages apart. I caught the flash of a date: 1858.

“Sorry, Hubert. This is too early for me, anyway.”