The words hung in the air. For a moment, Harvey looked like a stuffed bear on a mantelpiece. And then Dornick laughed, and said, “Lucky guess. Fox was the household god in your grandfather’s family for everyone except your renegade father. Pete, let me give you a lift up to the Drake. Vic, listen to your uncle and stay the hell away from searching for Petra.”

36 - WHAT ON EARTH IS GOING ON?

36

WHAT ON EARTH IS GOING ON?

I LEFT THE MEN HAILING CABS ON MICHIGAN AVENUE. I wanted to see all three of them out of sight before reclaiming my car, but even then I took a roundabout route, catching a bus down Michigan to the south end of Grant Park, where only a handful of tourists passed the homeless guys lying on the grass, and it would be easier to see if I had company.

Everything in the meeting I’d just left was setting off warning bells. When Peter should have been with his wife, or talking to cops, or even talking to me, why was he huddled with Harvey Krumas and George Dornick in a meeting in the office of Chicago’s most feared political op? And then there were the repeated injunctions for me to stay away from Petra, as if they knew where she was or maybe had received some kind of threat or even a ransom note.

It wasn’t until I sat at the foot of a statue on a shallow flight of stairs that I realized how tired I was. Using the red sweatshirt from my briefcase as a pillow, I leaned back against the crumbling concrete steps and shut my eyes.

The Nellie Fox baseball meant something important, even devastating, to Peter. Harvey Krumas and Dornick both knew about the ball; that was clear from their reactions. Petra had been ordered to get it from me. That was why she had behaved so oddly about it, with her clumsy story about wanting it for a surprise present for her father. Dornick or Krumas, or even Les Strangwell, had learned that I had the ball probably because Petra had burbled away about it at the office.

I could almost hear her gusty laugh as she informed her pod mates in the NetSquad: “Can you believe I thought the White Sox had played a woman at second? Daddy would disown me if he learned I didn’t know about Nellie Fox! My cousin says he was, like, a big star a hundred years ago.”

All the Millen Gen interns texted or Twittered constantly. Nellie Fox, transgender ballplayer, would become part of Twitter that day. That part was easy to imagine. Word filtered up to … Whom? The candidate? The Chicago Strangler? The candidate’s father? One of them told Petra she had to get the baseball from me.