The interview was clearly over.

CHAPTER 46

Hamster on a Wheel

Llewellyn’s children were waiting outside their father’s office. When I emerged, the sons hustled me into an elevator which they’d kept waiting, then muscled me outside with more force than the situation really warranted. They watched until I turned the corner onto Franklin.

The sky was dark; the area restaurants and nightspots were just starting to fill up. I passed knots of eagerly chattering thirty-somethings on their way to jazz bars and dinner. Was there a Geraldine among them, escaping from an impotent husband and an overbearing mother into the city’s nightlife? Or an Armand Pelletier, brilliant, impetuous, trying to organize them all to act?

I walked slowly, hunched over, my hands in my pockets. Llewellyn was yet another player from that old New Solway team with old secrets to keep. He said he didn’t care if people thought he’d been a Communist, but that could be a sophisticated bluff it’s always the best strategy to scoff at threats, not to cower before them. What made him furious was the suggestion that he’d cost Kylie her career. If Marc thought he’d found evidence proving Llewellyn had betrayed her to Olin Taverner, maybe Llewellyn would have silenced his star reporter.

Those muscular sons of his were-strong enough to carry someone from

his car to a pond and hold him under until he drowned to death. And they would pretty much do whatever their daddy wanted.

The Merchandise Mart loomed in front of me, its mass ominous in the dark. I skirted it to Wells Street. When I reached the river, I didn’t cross over, but walked east alongside it, picking my way through construction rubble, passing homeless men in makeshift shelters who froze at my passing. Rats skittered across my path.

The walkway narrowed and the concrete bank on my left grew steeper. Struts for the bridges loomed over me. Between the fathomless black of the water and the iron towering above me, I felt small and fragile. A chill wind cut down the river from the lake. I pulled my torn jacket tightly across my chest and plodded ahead.

I needed Benjamin Sadawi to reveal what he’d seen from the attic last Sunday night. He was afraid to tell me or Father Lou, but there was one person he would talk to: Catherine Bayard. It might be hard to persuade her to dig the information out of him, but I couldn’t see any other road to pursue. She was supposed to come home from the hospital today. Maybe Renee would let me into the apartment to talk to her.

I took out my cell phone, but the ironwork around me blocked the signal. When I reached Michigan Avenue, I climbed the two flights of stairs to the street. I blinked as the lights of the night city hit me. Suddenly, instead of the solitary rustling of rats or homeless men and women, I was in the middle of crowds: tourists, students taking night classes at a nearby university, people shopping on their way home from work, swarmed around . me. A mass of buses and cars crept up the avenue, honking irritably at each other. I picked my way along the street until I came to a hotel where the glass wall would block enough noise to let me use my phone.