Chapter 2 #2
“Found ’em,” he said again. The slightest stubbornness in it.
The thing in his face that had been folded over a few times in the last however many years it had been, but was still there at the centre, the thing that decided what he gave and to whom.
“Wasn’t using ’em. They got holes in the thumbs anyway. ”
They didn’t have holes in the thumbs. I could see the thumbs from here. The thumbs were intact.
“Mr. Wendell.”
He put them down on the cardboard between us. He took his hands back. He picked up his coffee and looked across State Street at a pigeon that had taken an interest in a hot dog wrapper, as though the gloves had been a thing that had happened by themselves and were no longer his concern.
I picked them up.
They were warm from being inside his coat.
“Thank you,” I said, and my went a little tight at the back. I corrected it. I made my face do what my face did.
“Put ’em on,” he said, not looking at me.
I put them on. They went almost to my elbows. I made my hands into fists inside them. The wool was thick and slightly scratchy and the warmth was immediate and ridiculous, like being given a second body.
“There you go,” he said.
I sat with him for a few more minutes, because to leave any faster would have been to admit that something had happened. We talked about Mosley. He told me which book to read next when I got the chance, and I told him I would, and we both pretended that I had a chance.
When I stood up to go, he raised the coffee cup at me, a small private salute.
I walked half a block before I let myself look at my hands again. The grey wool, ridiculous, warm. I curled my fingers inside the gloves and felt them work.
I kept walking.
The Intelligentsia on Randolph was my eleven o’clock.
I had three cafés in rotation. I had been to the Intelligentsia six times in three weeks.
The barista with the septum ring had started saying hi in a way that was already too much, and after today I was going to have to retire it and switch to the Sawada Coffee on Lake for the next month.
I went because the wifi was clean. No portal page, no captive sign-in.
You connected and you were on, and you were on as anyone you wanted to be.
I went because the back booth had a sightline on the front door and a second sightline on the side exit through the corridor by the bathrooms, and you could see the kitchen pass from where you sat, which meant you could see anyone the staff was looking at.
I went because the small drip coffee was two-fifty and you could nurse it for two hours if you topped it up with water from the carafe.
I ordered the small drip. The barista with the septum ring said hi like I was a regular. I gave her a smile that was friendly enough to register as a person and bland enough not to be remembered.
I took the back booth. I opened the laptop.
The laptop was a four-year-old refurbished ThinkPad I had paid cash for in Madison eight days into my run, and it had a piece of black electrical tape over the camera and a privacy filter on the screen that made it unreadable from any angle but mine.
I logged into the VPN. I logged into the Tor browser inside the VPN, which was unnecessary and slow and made my coffee go cold faster, but I did it anyway, because eight years at a hedge fund had taught me that there was no such thing as too much precaution.
I ran my searches.
Angela Baggio. My name—my real one.
I checked for variations. Misspellings.
Then I moved onto the case number for United States v.
Halberd Capital Partners. The name of the senior partner I had testified against. The name of the junior partner I had testified against. The name of the senior partner’s wife, who had appeared in a society magazine in 2019 in a column about charity galas and who I had decided, after extensive analysis, was probably the more dangerous of the two of them.
Nothing.
Nothing about me. Nothing about the case, beyond the same six articles that had been online since the verdict and that had not been updated.
Nothing in the small-town papers I checked, the local crime blotters I had bookmarked, the obscure Italian-language news site out of Brooklyn that had once mentioned Enzo Valenti’s hospitality investments in a single throwaway paragraph and that I checked every day because in this life you went where the trail had been and you watched for movement.
Nothing.
I sat back. I drank my coffee, which had gone the kind of lukewarm that was not refreshing in either direction.
The nothing was relief, because if my name had surfaced anywhere it would have meant the contract had been formalized.
But the nothing was also the worst kind of silence, because it meant that if they had decided to hunt me down—and I was becoming more and more certain that they had—that they had decided to do it the other way.
The way that did not leave a trail. The way that just arrived.
I closed the search tabs. I opened a real estate listing I had been pretending to look at for two weeks, in case anyone over my shoulder happened to glance.
Two-bed in Andersonville, hardwood floors, exposed brick.
Two thousand four hundred a month. Yes, yes, very nice, it could be just perfect for me.
I had been there ninety minutes when I decided to leave.
I closed the laptop with the unhurried, slightly bored movements of a woman who was wrapping up a productive morning of remote work. I slid it into my bag. I drank the last cold inch of the coffee in one swallow because waste was a thing I no longer allowed myself. I reached for my coat.
And I looked up.
He was sitting two tables to my right, against the front window, three-quarters turned away.
Brown coat. Dark hair, cut short, with the slight curl at the nape of the neck of a man who had been a week overdue for a trim.
He was looking at his phone. He was holding it the way a person held a phone when they were reading something on it, except that his thumb was not moving. He was still.
Fuck.
I knew his face.
Ninety minutes ago he had been on the second floor of the Harold Washington Library, standing at the magazine rack, holding open an issue of Bloomberg Businessweek that he had also not been reading.
My stomach went cold. Not the dramatic cold of fear. The administrative cold of the body deciding to redirect resources. Blood out of the extremities, into the core, into the legs. My pulse did not speed up. It steadied. The training that had outlived the career, again. Useful.
I did not look at him a second time.
I picked up my coat. I put it on with the unhurried care of a woman who had nowhere to be.
I lifted my bag onto my shoulder. I checked my phone— actually checked it, made my face do the small flicker of attention a check produced—and put it in my pocket.
I smiled vaguely at the septum-ring barista as I passed.
I walked out the front door.
Don’t show him you’ve seen him, I thought. Don’t show him anything.
Iwalked north.
I did not look back.
When the trial had been ongoing, and I had been paranoid about everything, I had researched how to lose a tail.
Found some guide someone on reddit had written, a bunch of rules.
Six blocks, the rule said. Six blocks of straight unconcerned walking before you allowed yourself to verify.
Six blocks gave him time to commit to the follow, and gave you time to find a reflective surface that would not be obvious.
I counted them. State. Lake. Randolph. Washington. Madison. Monroe.
The morning was thin and bright in the way mornings could be in the city in winter, the kind of light that flattened everything, made the buildings look two-dimensional, made the people on the street look as if they had been pasted on.
I had been walking long enough that my coat had warmed against me.
I had been walking long enough to no longer feel my feet inside my boots.
At Michigan and Ohio there was a hotel with mirrored gold panels along the lower facade—the kind of architectural decision that had probably looked good in a 1987 brochure and had been quietly hated ever since by everyone who worked nearby.
I crossed the street toward it. I paused at the corner like a woman waiting for the light. I let my eyes go where my face did not.
He was there. Half a block back. Same brown coat. Same too-casual stride. He had closed the distance by about ten yards since the café.
The light changed. I crossed.
I turned east. Toward the lake. The lake was a bad choice in one direction—it gave him a closed corridor—and a good choice in another, because the lake meant the Magnificent Mile, which meant tourists, foot traffic, hotel lobbies, lobbies with multiple exits, the urban camouflage of crowds.
I cut through the lobby of the InterContinental.
I did it the way the forums said. I walked in like a guest. I made eye contact with the concierge as I passed the desk, gave her the small distracted smile of a woman returning to her room from a meeting.
I walked through the lobby at the same pace I had walked in from the street, neither faster nor slower.
I took the corridor past the elevators. I went out the side door onto a quiet stretch of Erie that fed back toward the river.
I did not look behind me at the side door. Looking behind me at the side door would have told the concierge something, and the concierge would have remembered it.
I walked half a block on Erie. I cut into the alley behind the parking garage.
The alley smelled like wet cardboard and old grease and the underside of a hotel kitchen.
There was a delivery van idling at the far end with its hazards on, the driver inside on his phone, paying me no attention.
I walked past him at the same pace. I came out onto Rush Street.
I doubled back south.