He turned to face me. His blue eyes looked like diamond chips: cold, hard, glittering. He wore a grey suit and a powder-blue shirt and a dark blue tie. Understated and seriously expensive. I could probably have paid half a year's rent with the money he'd spent on the outfit, and that wasn't counting the chunky Rolex on his hairy left wrist.
There were two low-slung club chairs in front of Birk's desk, much lower than the leather chair behind it. 'Please,' he said, pointing to one of them. I sat in it. Curry remained standing, leaving me the lowest person in the room.
'You've been asking about me,' Birk said. 'First in Toronto, and now here. My job site, the Department of Buildings, the Tribune. Even probing legal circles. Making quite a lot of noise, and all on your first day in town.'
Birk was supposed to know I'd been at the Skyline site and the DOB. How did he know I'd been at the Tribune, or when I had arrived in Chicago? How had he known about the lawyers Avi called?
'It's my job to know things that concern me,' he said, reading my mind. 'And to be frank, Mr. Geller, one thing that's beginning to concern me is you. My work, you have to understand, is highly complex. It requires great attention to detail-from the ground up, so to speak. I'm a very hands-on guy, which means I am involved in every aspect: site procurement and preparation, design and construction, right through to the final fittings and fixtures in every building. I choose the stone, the glass, the lights, the rugs, the fabrics and flooring. I even decide the temperature of the swimming pools. I monitor labour contracts, currency exchanges, legal files, requests for proposals and quotations, gambling statutes, food and beverage trends. The point I'm making, and I do hope I'm making it clearly, is that I have enough on my plate without some pissant private investigator making public scenes and dragging my name through the mud.'
'I've inconvenienced you?'
'Yes.'
'Not a good idea?'
'No.'
'Because you're busy and important and lord of all you survey.'
'You should take what I'm telling you seriously,' he said.
'Or what? I'll end up like Martin Glenn? Like Will Sterling?'
Birk did a nice job of furrowing his bushy eyebrows as if the names meant nothing. 'And who might they be?'
'Corpses now,' I said. 'Before that, one of them was an engineer on the Harbourview job, and the other found evidence of how polluted that land is.'
'And you think I had something to do with their deaths?'
'You said it yourself, you're a hands-on guy.'
Birk set his cup down on its saucer and leaned across his desk. I could see a bend in his nose where the home invaders had broken it. 'I'll admit I'm not completely up on Canadian law,' he said, 'but the U.S. system offers people like me considerable protection against libel and slander. Make one more unfounded accusation about me in any public forum, and I'll bury you under a ton of legal paper.'
'Isn't truth a defence down here?'
'There is no truth to it!' he said. 'None.'
'You didn't tell Rob Cantor you'd take care of Glenn and Sterling?'
'What I tell Cantor or anyone else is none of your business, understand?' His face was growing dark with anger. He wasn't used to people talking back to him-suing him, maybe, or playing hardball in negotiations, but not giving him lip in his own office. 'None of this is your business. You're a nobody, Geller. Especially in Chicago. You have no standing of any kind here. You're a pipsqueak. You're a shit stain on a sidewalk. I've got six thousand people working for me. I've got enough lawyers to ruin you, your partner, your brother and anyone else who crosses me. So here's the plan. Francis will take you back to your hotel,' he said, indicating the man who called himself Curry. 'He'll wait while you pack your things and he'll drive you to O'Hare. You'll get on the first plane back to Toronto. You'll stop poking your nose into my affairs and quit making bizarre accusations.'
'You haven't even heard them all,' I said. 'In fact, forget Will Sterling. Forget Martin Glenn. Some of my best accusations are yet to come.'
'What does that mean?'
'It means poking holes in your bullshit home invasion story.'
He slammed his fist down on his desk, rattling his cup and saucer, spilling droplets of coffee. His hands formed fists and his jacket bunched around his thick arms and shoulders. Francis Curry walked languidly toward me. I think he was trying to look menacing. It might have worked better if he used an eyebrow pencil.
I said, 'Don't try me.'
'Wouldn't dream of it,' he said. He reached into his pocket and dangled his keys. 'But you'll need these to get back to ground level. Unless you want to save everyone some trouble and jump out a window.'
'Like Maya Cantor?'
He said, 'Who?'
Cut from the same cloth as his boss.
On the ride down, I said, 'You're not just a driver.'
'No.'
'Ex-cop?'
'Ex a lot of things,' he said.
I said, 'I think I'll walk back to my hotel, Francis. Every-thing's walking distance here, right? Got to love that about a city.'
He said, 'You not going to take Mr. Birk's advice?'
'No.'
'You should.'
'What can I say? Chicago is too great a town. It's everything they say it is. I am having far too much fun to go home.'
'What's that?' he said. 'You giving me your Bill Murray? Having a little fun with me? Okay. Have as much fun as you want. Rack up the laughs. Whoop it up on the streets of Chicago.'
'And while I am doing that?'
'I'll be covering Simon Birk's ass,' he said. 'Who'll be covering yours?'
CHAPTER 33
Eye-Con Security's offices were at the corner of Dearborn and Harrison in the neighbourhood known as Printers' Row, where century-old brick buildings had been converted to offices and lofts. The president, Joe Konerko, was a morbidly obese man with thick rubbery ears whose lobes rested against his jowls. He held out his hand, which looked like a glove that had been inflated, and showed me to a chair opposite his cluttered desk.
He said, 'Normally, I wouldn't tell you squat about a client but Birk's not a client anymore. And there were always a few things about that job that bugged me.'
'Such as?'
'We pride ourselves on our work. We're not the biggest outfit in town, right? We're not going to compete with your ADTs, your Brinks, in terms of volume. So we specialize in offering the best there is to high-end clients. Your multi-camera closed-circuit systems, complete with interactive video, night vision capability, weatherproofing. The whole enchilada. And Birk went for the best. We had him wired up with eight high-resolution colour cameras outside, plus a hidden dome camera inside, all hooked up to a digital recorder. I'm talking about thirty grand worth of equipment and that doesn't include the installation or monitoring fees. When a client buys a package like that, and still gets cleaned out by thieves, we don't look too good. We look like horseshit, in fact. Especially because of what happened to Mrs. Birk. We felt terrible about that.'
'So how did they do it?'
'A security system is like a chain,' Konerko said. 'Only as strong as its weakest link. The way the cameras were set up, there's no way anyone shoulda got into that house. In addition to our monitors here'-he waved an arm
