by Jean Heller
He sounded surprised. “Saudi Arabian?”
“Yes.”
“Can you tell me why?”
“Not yet. But I will. And it’s important.”
“I’ll flag that,” Donato said.
Strike two.
Screw it. I had a column to write; and as mundane as it might be, it would be more satisfying than all this beating my head against a wall.
When I finished the column, I sat and thought for a while about my frustration. When I looked up, it was nearly dark outside and Eric Ryland was approaching my desk.
“What are you doing here so late?”
“Thinking about striking out,” I said.
“Is the story going that badly?”
“Close.”
“Well, if it helps at all, I like your column. Your perspective on finding a new police chief makes a lot of sense.”
“Thank you.”
“Nothing about the Saudis showing up in the Washington Post?”
“Not yet,” I said. I looked at the wall clock. It was nearly eight-thirty. “I usually check later at night after most of the next day’s paper is up on the Web, but I could check now.”
“Well, let me know if you find anything,” Eric said. “I’m going home to a very dry martini.” Then he turned and walked away.
I checked the web site.
Strike three.
Perfect.
37
Mark called as I was driving home.
“I drove by the house, and there were no lights on. You still working?”
“Uh, no,” I said. “I’m about ten minutes away. Where are you?”
“Parked across from Bacchanalia, thinking about a late lasagna feast.”
“Go on in,” I said. “I’ll be there as soon as I can.”
The dinner crowd had mostly cleared out when I got to the neighborhood, but I still didn’t see a parking space. So I drove home, put the Explorer on the street near my house, and hiked the three blocks back to the restaurant.
Mark was entertaining a Birra Moretti and a couple seated to his left. The bartender of the night, whose name was Frankie, was one of the owners of the place. He was an affable man with a crooked smile whose twin passions for the Chicago Blackhawks and the Chicago White Sox were unsurpassed in the city.
“How ya doin’, Deuce?” Frankie asked with a grin, setting a glass of water in front of the place set for me at the bar to Mark’s right. “Ain’t seen yuz in awhile. Mark sez you’ve been busy with that thing down at Ryan Woods. Terrible stuff.”
“It is,” I said. “How’re you? Last time we were in, you were in Vegas.”
“I been good. Real good. Gettin’ old, but nuttin’ I can do about it. If I wake up in the morning and see the sky, I know it’s gonna be a good day.”
It was Frankie’s standard shtick, but it was a good one.
“You gonna say hello to me, too?” Mark asked as he leaned over and put a kiss on my cheek. “I’ve been sittin’ here waiting for hours. Isn’t that true, Frankie?”
“I ain’t gettin’ in this,” Frankie said with a smile. “How about a drink, Deuce?”
“Black Label on the rocks,” I said.
“Oooh, it has been a tough day,” Frankie said as he left to get my Scotch.
“The kitchen’s gonna close soon, Deuce,” he called from the end of the bar. “You wanna put in an order?”
“How about some grilled salmon, medium, and whatever green vegetable looks good back there tonight.”
Frankie brought my drink, a very generous pour as usual, then ambled back into the kitchen to place my order.”
“What are you getting?” I asked Mark.
“Lasagna, like I said. I have a taste for it.”
Hard not to. Bacchanalia made the best lasagna in Chicago, and each portion was enough for a small Italian family.
Mark introduced me to the couple on his left, Marie and Dominick Something from Naperville. I had seen them in Bacchanalia before. I said I remembered them. I refrained from adding “just barely.” Marie asked me an innocuous question about the Ryan Woods investigation. I gave her a noncommittal answer that could boast in length what it lacked in substance. Then I turned to my drink.
I was savoring the first sip when Frankie returned with a beautiful tossed salad for Mark, creamy garlic dressing on the side. He also brought a small platter of pasta shells in vodka sauce, another of our favorites.
“On the house,” Frankie said of the shells. “Buon appetito!”
“Thanks, Frankie,” Mark said. He stabbed a couple of shells and turned to me.
“So what did you find out about the kid?”
“Charles?” I asked. “Remarkably, he’s good. CPS isn’t pressing charges, and he’s going to be allowed to go back to Faulkner. He got off lucky.”
“Let’s hope he makes the most of it.”
I knew Mark wanted to ask me about Ryan Woods, but with the Somethings from Naperville listening in on our conversation, he knew better than to bring it up. About half an hour later the Somethings paid their bill and left, shaking our hands, clapping Mark on the back, and promising to see everyone soon.
Mark left his truck on the street across from Bacchanalia, but he rescued Murphy from his bed in the back. We all walked back to my house. The street spots on Oakley weren’t metered, permitted, or time-limited, and he would be gone well before the local businesses needed his spot for customers the next morning. As I think I’ve said before, South Oakley Avenue is a pretty laid-back street.
We fixed a nightcap and sat down for a while to catch up on each other’s lives. When we got around to Ryan Woods, I started to tell Mark about the Saudi connection and how I learned of it. He shushed me and cocked his head toward the back of the house. He walked out the back door and onto the deck, then down into the grass. I followed.
“I don’t mean to sound paranoid,” he said in a whisper when he finally stopped in the middle of the yard. “But after what those goons put you through when they grabbed you at the front door, I wouldn’t be shocked to learn they had bugged your house while you were lying unconscious on the floor.”
“That’s paranoid, all right,” I said.
“I can look in the lamps and ceiling fixtures for you and under all the tables and chairs. But you’d be better off having the whole house swept by a pro.”
“And where would I find one of those?”
“In my address book.”
“Really? You have your place swept often?”
“Never. Though since our relationship isn’t a secret, it’s not such a bad idea.”
“Then how do you know . . . ?”
“He’s a friend. He used to be a fire marshal. Then he quit to form his own security business and became a millionaire. Everybody these days thinks their neighbors are ISIS terrorists. So while we’re out here, bring me up to date.”
I did.
“If some Saudi bastard is responsible for Ryan Woods, it wouldn’t shock me.”
“Why?” I asked. “Why them especially?”
“Because members of the ruling family are spoiled rotten, richer than God, and hypocrites,” he said. “They amass wealth by stealing from their own people and use those poison gains to pay for inexcusable extravagance. When those boys leave home, they go wild in ways that aren’t approved in the Koran. They don’t have “off” switches. It wouldn’t surprise me if there were a few pedophiles in the bunch.”
I shivered. I wasn’t sure if it was the outside temperature or the conversation.
“Let’s go in,” I said. “I think you’re about up-to-date on everything.”
“But let’s not talk about this inside,” Mark said. “I’ll call Seth in the morning and get him out here ASAP to sweep for bugs.”
He turned toward the house, but I put a hand on his arm.
“I’ve got to look up something on the computer. You think it’s safe?”
“Your desktop, no. Your laptop, maybe, since you have it with you
all the time. Although the goons who chloroformed you could have tampered with that, too. You should probably use mine.”
I did. It was my late-night check on the Washington Post site. I didn’t expect anything to have changed since I looked a couple of hours earlier at the office, but you never knew.
There was nothing of interest on the home page.
There was nothing when I went to the site map and clicked on “World.”
So I refined the search further and clicked on “Middle East.”
And halfway down the page, there it was:
“Saudi Royal Family Members to Visit U.S.”
With my heart suddenly racing, I opened the story. It was brief and boring. The Saudi government had announced that seven members of the ruling family would visit the U.S. on a combination diplomatic mission and vacation the following month. The story did not identify them or say where they would visit though Washington was one obvious stop.
I was betting Chicago would be another.
38
I got to the office early the next morning and started researching the Saudi royal family. It wasn’t pretty.
By one estimate, the House of Saud was worth $14 trillion. That’s fourteen with twelve zeros after it. At a salary of $45.8 million a year, basketball star LeBron James would need to work nearly 306,000 years to earn $14 trillion.
Of course it’s no crime to be filthy rich. But while more than four million Saudis—fifteen percent of the total population—lived below the nation’s poverty line, Saudi Arabia had more households worth more than $75 million than any other country on earth.
The Saudis condone police torture to extract confessions from dissenters to crimes they might or might not have committed. Dissent simply isn’t tolerated. It was reported that in 2013 a website builder was sentenced to six hundred lashes and seven years in prison for criticizing his nation’s religious police on Facebook.
Alleged crimes like theft are punishable by amputations of hands and feet.
It was reported that seventy-nine people were beheaded in 2013, and another fifty-nine killed the same way in the first nine months of 2014. Among the charges that doomed them were converting away from Islam, and “sorcery,” whatever that is.
And, yes, Mark had been right. I found a number of Google stories about one prince or another getting entangled in sordid scandals that included sexual slavery. Many of the alleged crimes happened in the United States.
There was only one king at the top. But there were at least two hundred powerful princes and, as best I could learn, 20,000 assorted members of the royal family. While most of the family wealth was at the top, that’s still a pretty big haystack. Finding the names of the seven “needles” headed to the United States would be impossible if our government or theirs didn’t release them.
If any or all of them planned a trip to Chicago, finding out about it would be even more difficult. Diplomacy was doubtful. There had been a Saudi mission in my city at one time, but it closed. I couldn’t find out why. That left a myriad of other reasons the delegation might want to visit here: the wonderful theater, shopping the Magnificent Mile, strolling the lakefront, and, oh yeah, the sexual abuse and murder of children.
Given what I believed to be the option they had chosen, I wasn’t expecting them to announce their arrival.
So how would I know when they got here?
I could think of only one option. Gina Brodsky.
Gina had been my roommate at Northwestern. She was a life-long resident of the South Side until she married and had children and moved to a posh suburb northwest of the city. Her grandfather was a Czech butcher who came to America to work in Chicago’s stockyards. Her mother’s family name was Cermak, same as of one of the main east-west streets across the South Side and through the Pilsen neighborhood where I lived.
I knew as a freshman at Northwestern what I wanted to be when I grew up. Gina had no clue. She changed majors the way I changed socks. So I wasn’t a bit surprised when she walked into our small apartment one Friday night with an armload of new books and announced she had changed her major away from theatrical costume design.
“Uh-huh,” I said, not lifting my head from Hunter S. Thompson’s scathing treatise on the 1972 Nixon-McGovern presidential election, Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail. My aspirations at the time were to be the next Hunter S. Thompson.
“Aren’t you going to ask me what I switched to?” Gina prompted.
“Sure,” I said.
“Mechanical engineering,” she said.
“That’s nice,” I replied.
“Deuce, are you listening to me?”
I raised my eyes. “No,” I said honestly. “Repeat, please.”
She did, and I was astonished but not surprised.
“What are you going to do with a degree in mechanical engineering?”
“I’m going to be an airline pilot.”
This time I laughed out loud.
“Gina, you get sweaty palms on the second rung of a ladder.”
“I know,” she said. “But in a plane you’re enclosed. On a ladder you’re out in the open, you know, hanging there waiting to fall.”
“And that’s different from hanging in an airplane at 35,000 feet how, exactly?”
“Oh, it just is,” she said. “Anyhow, I’ll find out. I also signed up for flying lessons. My free introductory flight is tomorrow.”
Gina never changed her major again.
After graduating she went to Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Daytona Beach, Florida and got a masters degree in aerospace engineering. She also got her commercial pilot’s license, her instrument rating, and qualified to fly some very complex aircraft.
One stormy day, while ferrying a Cessna Citation from Fort Lauderdale to Houston, something when horribly wrong with the plane’s flight controls. Gina called in a Mayday and guided the jet to a very difficult crash landing in the Gulf of Mexico. She got out as the plane sank, inflated the escape raft, and climbed aboard to wait for the Coast Guard to pinpoint her emergency locator beacon.
She knew she was losing a lot of blood from a mangled leg. Yet she found the strength to row away from the site lest her blood in the water attract sharks that could rip through her raft in seconds. She survived, but she never flew again.
Instead, she became an air traffic controller, and she excelled. She bid a position at O’Hare International Airport in Chicago, one of the toughest posts in the system, and got her wish. She had already risen to shift supervisor. While she would never make the kind of money she would have pulled in as an airline pilot, Gina was a happy woman as the wife of an airline pilot. They had two darling children.
If anyone would be able to keep watch for a big private jet belonging to the Saudi royal family landing at O’Hare, it was Gina Brodsky.
“Well, hello, stranger,” Gina said when she answered her cell. “If it wasn’t for your column, I wouldn’t know you’re still alive.”
“It has been a while,” I said. “Maybe you forgot that your phone can dial out, too. So I’m not the only one at fault here.”
We hadn’t talked since after the Vinnie Colangelo story broke the previous fall, and I couldn’t remember who called whom that day.
“How are Tom and the kids?” I asked.
“All great. Really great. Tom’s flying Triple-7s to London now, and he says it’s nothing like work. He loves it. Maddie’s in kindergarten, and Colin’s in first grade. They are at such cute ages. If you’ve got time, maybe you could come out to Schaumburg for dinner one night and bring that hunk of a boyfriend of yours. You are still together, I hope.”
“We are.”
“Good. You can stay the night, and we’ll schedule it when Tom has a few days off so nobody has to worry about how much they drink.”
I smiled. That would be a fun evening. Gina mistook my pause in the conversation for reluctance.
“Is something wrong?” she asked.
“Oh, no, nothing,” I said.
“I was remembering Tom and Mark getting blitzed together. It was pretty funny the last time.”
We chatted another minute, then Gina said she had been on a break and had to get back to the radar room.
“Give me one more minute,” I asked. “I need a huge favor.”
“Is it legal?”
“I think so.”
“Then try me.”
“I will. But I need to call you from another phone, from a number you won’t recognize. Please pick it up.”
“Okay,” she said, but already I heard doubt in her voice.
I used the burner, knowing full well if the feds were monitoring my cell phone calls they would now have Gina’s cell number and could get my burner phone number by checking her log of incoming calls. Oh, well, nothing’s perfect. I’d ditch this burner for a new one and give the new number to Gina and Carl Cribben.
When Gina picked up my second call, I explained what I needed.
“This is very cloak-and-dagger,” she said.
“It is, and I’m sorry.”
“Actually, it’s kind of exciting. International intrigue and all that.”
“Gina, it’s deadly serious. You can’t tell anyone. Not even Tom.”
“Wow. Okay. You want to know when a private flight flying the Saudi flag comes into ORD. That’s all.”
“That’s all. It would be nice to have some advance warning, if that’s possible.”
“You know Saudi Arabia Airlines doesn’t fly into ORD, right? So it has no gates of its own. It would be directed to parking in the remote hangar area, northwest of the main terminals. Customs would meet the flight out there.”
“The plane will be coming in from Washington, D.C.,” I said. “So no Customs.”
“That’s helpful to know,” she said. “Still, since it’s a private flight, ground control will direct it to parking in the hangar area.”
“I don’t much care where they park,” I said. “I just want to be damned sure I’m in the right place to follow these bastards when they head into the city.”