“So you didn’t want him to know. And Nancy didn’t want her friends to know about you, either. Same reason?”

He squirmed again. “I don’t think so. I think—she was a little bit older than me, you know. Only ten years. Well, almost eleven. But I think she was afraid people would laugh at her if they knew she was seeing someone so young.”

“Okay. So it was a big secret. Then she came to you three weeks ago to see if Art was opposed to the recycling plant. What happened then?”

He reached nervously for the wine bottle and poured the last of the Barolo into his glass. When he’d gulped most of it down he started spitting out the story, a bit at a time. He knew Art was against the recycling plant. His dad was working hard to bring new industry to South Chicago, and he was afraid a recycling plant would put some companies off—that they wouldn’t want to operate in a community where they had to go to the extra trouble of putting their wastes in drums for recycling instead of just dumping them into lagoons.

He’d told Nancy that and she had insisted on seeing any files about the project. Apparently, like me, she’d figured it wasn’t worth arguing whether Art, Sr.’s, professed reasons were the real ones.

Young Art hadn’t wanted to do it, but she’d pushed hard. They went back to the insurance office late one night and she went through Art’s desk. It was horrible, the most horrible night he’d ever spent, worrying about his father or his father’s secretary coming in on them, or one of the beat cops seeing a light and surprising them.

“I understand. The first time you break and enter is always the hardest. But why did Nancy choose this insurance file over something about recycling?”

He shook his head. “I don’t know. She was looking for anything with the names of any of the companies involved in the recycling plant on it. And then she saw these papers and said she didn’t know we—my dad’s agency—handled Xerxes’s insurance, and then she read through them and said this was hot stuff, she’d better copy it and take it along. So she went down the hall to use the machine. And Big Art came in.”

“Your father saw her?” I gasped.

He nodded miserably. “He had Steve Dresberg with him. Nancy ran, but she scattered the originals all over the floor. So they knew she was copying them.”

“And what did you do?”

His face disappeared into a little ball of such abject shame that I felt almost sorry for him. “They never knew I was there. I hid in my own office with the lights off.”

I didn’t know what to say. That he could have abandoned Nancy to her fate. That he knew Dresberg had been there with his old man. And at the same time the logical part of my mind began worrying about the problem: Was it the insurance papers or was it the fact that Nancy had seen Art with Dresberg? It wasn’t surprising that the alderman had ties to the Garbage King. But it was understandable that he kept them quiet.