It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a private investigator in blue jeans to see the chairman of a major U.S. corporation. I reached Ajax Insurance headquarters in the south Loop a little after five—traffic had been heavy all the way into the city. I was figuring on it being late enough for me to avoid the phalanx of secretaries who pave the entrance to a CEO’s office, but I’d forgotten Ajax’s security system.

Guards in the marble lobby of the sixty-story skyscraper demanded an employee identification card from me. I obviously didn’t have one. They wanted to know whom I was visiting—they would issue me a visitor’s pass if the person I wanted to see approved my visit.

When I told them Gordon Firth, they were appalled. They had a list of the chairman’s visitors. I wasn’t on it, and they suspected me of being an assassin from Aetna, hired to bump off the competition.

“I’m a private investigator,” I explained, pulling the photostat of my license from my wallet to show them. “I’m looking into a fifty-million-dollar loss Ajax sustained last week. It’s true I don’t have an appointment with Gordon Firth, but it’s important I see him or whomever he’s designating to handle this loss. It may affect Ajax’s ultimate liability.”

I argued with them some more and finally persuaded them if Ajax had to pay for the Lucella’s hull because they had kept me out of Firth’s office I’d remember their names and see that the money came out of their hides.

These arguments did not get me to Firth—as I say, it’s easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle—but they did bring me to a man in their Special Risks Department who was handling the loss. His name was Jack Hogarth and he came down to the lobby for me.

He walked briskly up to the guard station to meet me, his shirtsleeves pushed up to the elbows, his tie hanging loosely around his neck. He was about thirty-five or forty, dark, slight, with humorous brown-black eyes just now circles with heavy shadows.

“V. I. Warshawski, is it?” he asked, studying my card. “Come on up. If you’ve got some information on the Lucella you’re more welcome than a heat wave in January.”

I had to trot to keep up with him on the way to the elevator. We were carried quickly to the fifty-third floor; I yawned a couple of times to clear my ears. He barely waited for the elevator to open before plunging down the hall again, through double glass doors enclosing the elevator bank, and on to a walnut and crimson suite in the southeast corner of the building.