This wasn’t one of those parts.
Cooper, a military brat before he became military himself, had never really put down roots—at least not geographical ones—and so looked at every place fifteen-degrees askew as a perpetual outsider. He had a theory going about cities, that the dominant industry of the town filtered into every level of the place, from the architecture to the discourse. Thus in LA, a city built on entertainment and fantasy, there were houses in the clouds and dinner conversation about cosmetic labioplasty. In Manhattan, the business of finance reduced everything, at some level, to money; the skyline was a stock chart and the streets pulsed with currency.
Chicago had been born as a working town, a meatpacking town, and no matter how many chic restaurants opened, no matter the lakefront harbors and the green spaces, its most honest parts would always be covered in rust. They would crowd the banks of the sludge-brown river and huddle in the windowless warehouses of industrial districts.
The building he was looking for was three stories of grim cinderblock. A loading dock ran the length of the face; above it, someone had painted the words VALENTINO AND SONS, LAUNDRY AND DRY CLEANING in five-foot letters. Years of Chicago winters had faded and peeled the paint. Cooper parked the car under a streetlight, though there wasn’t much point; no one lived nearby. He popped the trunk and pulled out the duffel bag.
“Dirty laundry?” Shannon asked.
“About six months worth.”
The machinery was audible as they approached the loading dock. A faint sweet humidity radiated from the place. Inside, the room was huge and hot and noisy. Beneath humming fluorescent lights, massive washing machines spun and clanked, men and women moving between them to load the drums or collect clean clothes. The air was soupy and chemical. Although the perchlorethylene used in dry cleaning was supposed to be locked in a contained system, the machines here were old, the fittings bad, and traces of the toxic cleanser were venting into the air. All of the workers had a smallness to them, the mark of people who had spent decades maneuvering narrow aisles and bending beneath heavy loads. Cooper started down the row, pausing to make room for a withered woman pushing a basket piled with suits. It had been chilly outside, but now he could feel sweat gathering in his armpits and the small of his back.
No one paid any attention as he led Shannon to a narrow staircase at the back. The second floor was hotter than the first, and noisier; here were the massive washing machines and enormous presses used for laundry on an industrial scale, napkins and sheets and towels from a hundred hotels and restaurants. There was a brief snatched glimpse of heavy machinery moving with insectile precision, a trace of music, something Mexican and discordantly upbeat, and then they were heading upward.
Steamiest of all, the top floor was a harshly bright hive of narrow desks jammed together. Scores of people were packed in around them, each squinting into a sewing machine or cutting lengths from fabric bolts. The sound was a hundred woodpeckers at once. Most of the men had stripped off their shirts and worked bare-chested or in wifebeaters, their skin glistening. A fan the size of an airplane turbine spun sluggishly, stirring air that reeked of chemicals and cigarettes and body odor.
Cooper started down the aisle, heading for the office in the back. Shannon followed. “Weird,” she said.
“It’s a sweatshop.”
“I know. It’s just, it’s like the United Nations. I’ve seen sweatshops full of West Africans, Guatemalans, Koreans, but I’ve never seen them all at the same place.”
“Yeah,” Cooper said. “Schneider’s an innovator.”
“An equal opportunity oppressor?”
“Not really. It’s still pretty much one subculture being exploited.”
“What do you mean?”
“They’re all abnorms. All of them.”