half hour goes by before the city gets its fire engines where they need to be. By then-hell, it was too late, wasn’t it?”
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.
CHAPTER 12
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.
