Into the Whirlwind Read Online Free PDF Page A

brought him praise, but it wasn’t until the incident with the fish that Louis Hartman decided to pay him a visit.
    In addition to the department store, Hartman’s operated the best restaurants in Chicago. Zack had gotten wind that one of Hartman’s merchants was substituting cheap trout for genuine white perch, and Zack was incensed. Zack barged into the merchant’s genteel office, grimy and sweaty from the docks, hauling a huge basket of trout over one shoulder. Dumping a hundred pounds of dead fish onto the merchant’s hand-carved desk, he made his position clear.
    “That’s what cheap trout looks like. Don’t mistake it again.” He dropped the dripping basket on the silk rug and returned to the docks.

    Zack was only a twenty-year-old longshoreman, but a clever one who had already saved Hartman considerable sums by negotiating deals with the Irish labor unions who shipped their goods. Hartman prized loyalty above all else, and when word of the fish incident reached him, he saw long-term potential in the brash longshoreman. Louis Hartman offered to sponsor Zack to attend college, then bring him into management of the Hartman empire. He needed a lawyer whose allegiance was unquestioned but had the raw, aggressive spirit to tackle the burgeoning industrial world of Chicago.
    Growing up, Zack lived with two other Polish families in a tenement apartment amidst the network of warehouses and stockyards that lined the docks. Louis came to the tenement to meet Zack’s parents and assure them he would not only pay Zack’s expenses at Yale, but also would provide a small stipend to the Kazmareks to compensate for the loss of Zack’s wages. His parents had been too proud to accept the stipend, but Zack pounced on the chance to attend college. After college, it was understood Zack would return to Chicago and work for Hartman.
    With his new wealth, Zack was able to buy a fine townhouse where he invited his parents to live with him. They accepted his offer, even though his father refused to quit working on the docks.
    “Can I loan you a carriage?” Louis asked. “It might be difficult to get a streetcar this late in the evening.”
    It was true. They could probably still catch the last of the streetcars to the jail, but by the time Zack had secured his father’s release, they would be facing a long walk home. “I would appreciate that,” Zack said.

3
    M ollie lived in a three-room apartment above a greengrocer. It was a cozy home with two bedrooms, a parlor, and a sticky alcove window overlooking the city she loved. There was a pump in the main room to bring up fresh water, but no kitchen. Who needed a kitchen in a city where every street corner had vendors selling piping hot sausage rolls, fresh pretzels, and sauerkraut just as good as that made in Berlin? Anytime Mollie was hungry for fresh food, she could sprint downstairs and buy something from the greengrocer on the first floor.
    It had been three years since her father had passed away, and his bedroom remained untouched. All his clothing, his papers, everything was exactly as it had been on that terrible morning she discovered him dead in his bed. Her valiant, brave father who’d founded a company, employed hundreds of men over the decades, and fought in the Civil War had died quietly in his sleep.
    On the evening of Mr. Kazmarek’s stunning offer, Mollie entered her father’s untouched bedroom and began hauling out boxes of old papers, receipts, and records from over thirty years of the watch business. Frank lived in an apartment across the hall, but he joined her at the small parlor table while Mollie sorted through the paper work, reading aloud the first fewsentences of each document. Frank set up a system for organizing the papers into financial accounts, records of sale, and original cost basis.
    “Do you think we can trust them?” Mollie asked. For a blind man, Frank had an astounding knack for reading people. Maybe it was his ability to sense tension