I accelerated around a couple of triple-trailer semis, impatient to start gathering any kind of information. Right now I was building a house from cards; I needed facts, good hard mortar and cement. Turning onto Jackson Boulevard, heading east into the Loop, I drummed my fingers on the steering wheel in an agony of impatience at every stoplight. Just west of the river, under the shadow of Union Station and its disreputable surrounding bars, I found an empty meter. I jammed in a fistful of quarters and ran the four blocks east to the Insurance Exchange.
The exchange is a tired old building near the southwest corner of the Loop, and the Illinois Insurance Institute proved to be one of the tireder offices in it. Old-fashioned hanging lights held a couple of malfunctioning fluorescent bulbs, which blinked in an irritating way on the woman who sat inside the entrance. She squinted up at me from a mailing she was assembling, like an owl who isn’t used to seeing strangers in its neck of the forest. When I explained that I was trying to find out how big Edelweiss Insurance had been in the 1930’s and whether they’d had an office in Vienna, she sighed and put down the sheaf of papers she was folding.
“I don’t know that kind of thing. You can look in the library if you want, but I’m afraid I can’t take time to help you.”
She pushed back her chair and opened the door to a murky room in the back. It was stuffed beyond the fire-code limit with shelves of books and papers.
“Things are kind of in chronological order,” she said, waving an arm vaguely toward the left corner. “The further back you go in time the more likely they are to be in order—most people only come here to consult current documents, and it’s hard for me to find the time to keep them organized. It would be a real help if you’d leave everything in the same shape you find it. If you want copies of anything, you can use my machine, but it’s a dime a page.”
The ringing phone sent her scurrying back to the front room. I went to the corner she’d waved at. For such a small space, it held a depressing amount of material—shelves of National Underwriter and Insurance Blue Books; speeches to the American Insurance Institute; addresses to international insurance congresses; hearings before the U.S. Congress to see whether ships sunk in the Spanish–American War had to be covered under marine policies.
I moved along as fast as I could, using a set of rolling stairs to climb up and down, until I found the section with documents dating to the 1920’s and ’30’s. I flipped through them. More speeches, more congressional hearings, this time on insurance benefits for World War I veterans. My hands were black with dust when I suddenly found it: a squat fat book, whose blue cover had faded to grey. Le Registre des Bureaux des Compagnies d’Assurance Européennes, printed in Genève in 1936.
I don’t read French well—unlike Spanish, it’s not close enough to Italian for me to follow a novel—but a list of European insurance-company offices didn’t demand a linguist. I was almost holding my breath when I took it underneath the dim lamp in the middle of the room, where I squinted painfully at the tiny print. The book’s organization was difficult to figure out in bad light, in a language I didn’t know, but I finally saw they had grouped offices by country and then by asset size.
In Switzerland the biggest company in 1935 had been Nesthorn, followed by Swiss Re, Zurich Life, Winterer, and a bunch of others. Edelweiss was far down on the list, but it had a footnote, which was in even smaller type than the body of the report. Even tilting the page to see it under different light, holding it so close to my nose I sneezed a half dozen times, I couldn’t make out the tiny print. I looked toward the front room. The overworked factotum was apparently still stuffing letters into envelopes; it would be a shame to disturb her by asking to borrow the book. I tucked it into my briefcase, thanked her for her help, and told her I’d probably be back in the morning.
“What time do you open up?”
“Usually not until ten, but Mr. Irvine, he’s the executive director, he sometimes comes in in the mornings. . . .Oh, my, look at your lovely jacket. I’m sorry, everything in there is so filthy, but it’s just me; I don’t have time to dust all those old books.”
“That’s okay,” I said heartily. “It will clean.” I hoped: my lovely silk–wool herringbone now looked as though it had been dyed grey by an inexpert hand.