CHICAGO, ILLINOIS — JULY 1980
Tadashi Morimoto read the papers in the morning, at the table in his suite at the Executive House. The ones from home came a few days late and he read them first. Then the Tribune.
The Bushwood Country Club story was inside the first section. An assistant greenskeeper had taken things too far. Explosives on the course. The eighteenth fairway and the irrigation under it. Significant damage, no one hurt. The man was in custody. Bail had been set, the figure was in the story, and nobody had posted it.
He had played the course at Bushwood earlier in the week. He had gone out to look at the condo site next door, which the company had a piece of, along with the developer, Al Czervik, who was also the contractor. Czervik suggested the round afterward. Both men liked golf. Czervik had ideas about the properties around his site, and Bushwood was one of them, and he wanted Mori to see it. Mori saw it. It checked out. Since then he had been thinking about how to corral Czervik’s imagination into something he could put in front of the people at home.
He read the figure a second time. It was manageable.
He took the camera out onto the balcony. He looked down at the street, then up the river and down it, and his eyes landed where they usually landed, on the Sun-Times building across the water. Trucks came and went at its dock day and night, and he knew the schedule of it by now. People came and went too, most of them in a hurry. Everyone in a big city was in a hurry, but these had a different flavor of it. Something was usually going on down there. There were hours when there wasn’t, and this was one of them. He looked at his watch. It was.
He came back in with the camera and called Czervik.
“Hello, Al. It’s Mori.”
“Mori who? Mori Amsterdam?”
“Moe, Al.”
Two of the many things he had learned about Americans. They liked a name short, whether from impatience or something else. And they put every Asian face in one country. Which country depended on the American.
The Americans had made Morimoto into Mori, and that had been his own doing, once he saw the other choice was Tad. He had made his peace with Mori. Czervik had cut it again and added something to it, and Mori was hoping not to hear it.
“Oh. Wang. How are things on Wacker Drive this morning?”
“I read about the explosion.”
Czervik started with the bet. There had been a match, and money on the match, and the money had grown as the day went on. Czervik and Webb against the Judge and a doctor named Beeper. The Judge’s side had lost and had not paid. Czervik had sent Moose and Rocko after it. “You should have seen him run,” Czervik said. The money was no great matter. He’d wanted to poke the Judge, and he had.
The Judge was Judge Smails. Mori had met him at the club earlier in the week. He had been a member longer than anyone and spoke of the place as his. He had founded it, he said, with Webb’s father. From the little Mori had heard, the father had done most of the work.
Mori waited until Czervik was done.
“The explosion may make the course easier to buy,” he said. “Or it may not. Either way, the Judge will be looking for someone to put next to the man who did it. Investigators work the who and the what and the where. Then they want the why. You are next door, and you have said in his hearing that you want the place. That may be a stretch. The other thing is not. You have been poking the Judge. To him it was not poking.”
“Huh?” Czervik said. “Yeah.”
“It was closer to a war.”
“War? Come on, Moe. I’m having a little fun with the guy.”
Mori said nothing. He let the line stay open.
“Okay,” Czervik said. “Okay. Maybe. So what do we do?”
“This greenskeeper. The one in the jail. Have you met him? Do you know him?”
“Maybe. What’s his name?”
“Spackler. Carl.”
“No. Well, maybe. I don’t know. I talk to a hundred people a day. Let’s just fix this thing. What do we need to do?”
“The man is in a cell. Anyone can talk to him there. The Judge can. We get him out of town and far away, until we know what this is.”
“Whatever it takes. You handle it.”
Mori ran the names back to him and had him say which side each was on. Webb was on theirs. An interesting guy, Czervik said. Not much of a talker.
Mori called Webb.
Webb answered on the fourth ring and listened. Czervik would cover the bail and Webb would post it. Webb’s name on the paper was nothing. Czervik’s would be the first thing anybody found. The man needed somewhere far away, with somebody at the other end.
“Far away,” Webb said. “Give me a minute.”
The receiver went down on something hard. Mori heard a drawer, then another. Paper. A long quiet. Then Webb, from across the room: “I had a Rolodex card for him. I don’t have the card.” More paper. The receiver came back up.
“Found a Christmas card. My cousin’s wife sends them. Eddie. Albany, New York.” He read the return address off the envelope. It was one of a stack, and it had not been opened. “He’s on the same frequency as your man, if that’s a help.”
“It is.”
Mori wrote the address down and hung up.
The case was on the table by the window. He opened it and took out the masking tape, the marker and the scissors. He took out pieces, one at a time, and cut a strip of tape for each and wrote on the tape and pressed it on. CZERVIK. SMAILS. WEBB. SPACKLER. BEEPER. EDDIE. He took out two rooks and wrote BUSHWOOD on one and CONDO on the other.
He opened the board and set them. He looked at it once. Then he went to work.
The man Spackler came through the jail door the next morning with nothing in his hands.
Mori gave him the envelope. Inside it: a train ticket, a card with a name and an address in Albany, and cash. He told him what each was for, once.
The man listened.
“Eddie,” the man said.
“Eddie,” Mori said.
A cab was waiting at the curb. Mori walked him to it and held the door while he got in. “Have a safe trip,” he said. Then, to the driver: “Union Station.” He closed the door.
The call came after eleven. Webb.
He had it from the Judge’s niece, Lacey, who was in the house for the summer. Men had been at the course. Federal men. They had found grass growing in the ground in more than one form, and the things that went with it. More charges were likely.
It was one thing to walk away from a county court’s bail. It was another to have the federal government looking for the man.
Mori thanked him and hung up and dialed Albany.
Eddie answered on the second ring. Mori told him the plan had changed. He would not be having a guest. The man had to keep moving, north, and Eddie’s part was to see that he did. Eddie said he had it, and said a good deal more, and Mori let him finish.
He hung up.
He took one more piece out of the case and wrote LACEY on a strip of tape and set it on the board beside SMAILS. Then he moved one piece.
