The Shah of Chicago: A Novel

Chapter One

Jack King, better known in some circles as Jacob Lord, or just plain Jake, stepped outdoors for the first time in more than four years. He felt he might float away, he was so happy. His worldly possessions (a tiny green Bic lighter, a Swiss army knife with five blades, seven dollars and eighty -five cents) jumbled up in the bottom of his front pant’s pocket, were his only ballast. He glanced at the recently renovated front entrance of the Pontiac Correctional Center, which looked like your typical suburban ranch house: low-hung roof of artificial tile, petunias in neatly tended beds tucked up against a lush rectangle of brilliant lawn. The prison guard glowering at Jack from behind the plate-glass window looked like your typical ornery suburban neighbor. For a moment Jack returned the guard’s gaze, savouring his freedom. The realisation that he was no longer on the other side of the wall soaked slowly into him, like a warm bath into chilly bones. Counting this latest stretch, he had spent a total of ten years three months and sixteen days behind various bars of the United States Prison Service. Enough was enough. Taking a deep breath of the thick May air Jack promised himself: never again.

The prison parking lot was packed with vehicles, mostly rust buckets and old model pickups. Always was on release day. Kids played tag among the cars, shrieking with delight at not being in school, while their mothers, dolled up in freshly permed hair and tight jeans, smoked cigarettes and waited anxiously for their men. Jack took a second to survey the parking lot until he spotted a newish Seville with a faded bronze finish. Inside, gripping the wheel like a rodeo roughrider, sat a short man with hunched shoulders and an anxious brow. ‘Thanks for coming,’ Jack muttered as he slid into the front seat.

The man, his uncle, started the car and headed towards the freeway but didn’t say a word. When Jack had called from prison the week before, Uncle Jalal had said he could stay for a few days, but no more than a week. Nasreen, Jack’s ex-wife and Uncle Jalal’s only child, was in California visiting her cousin until Saturday. And when she got back, she would definitely not want to see Jack around the house.

Cool, Jack had said. No problemo.

Jack, or Jacob Lord as most people used to call him, had dealt a bit of coke in the pool halls and bars on Chicago’s West side but after a second short stint in Cook County jail in the late eighties he moved up to St Paul and tried to renounce the old ways. It took him a couple of rehab sessions--Uncle Jalal gladly coughed up the dough for those--but by the early nineties Jack had a nice little thing going up in the Twin Cities. A taxi license and a small shop near the university selling magazines and cigarettes. Jack began warming to the straight life. For a while, anyway. The magazine shop did a steady business when the university was in session and the taxi, on the street twenty-four hours a day, brought in five hundred bucks a week easy.

He gave up the nosecandy completely and got his drinking pretty much under control too. Within a couple of years Jack was looking at selling his taxi license to an Egyptian named Mo, and using the proceeds as a down payment on a small superette. He’d been watching the papers; there was one out in Coon Rapids going for a song. But then life hit the skids again. Winters always got Jack down, and right around the butt end of January, in the middle of one of those polar mid-western winters, he got a call from Chicago. Some guy talking about a ripe piece of fruit just waiting to be plucked. A real easy deal. They both stood to make at least fifteen ‘gees’ a piece ‘Me, and you, Jake.’

Apparently a couple of punk Nicaraguans, still wet behind the ears, were looking to offload six kilos of Cali cocaine of the finest grade. Jack, pretending to be an interested buyer, would set up an appointment at a motel on the Midway strip: the Forty Winks Lodge. Just when negotiations were going real good, Jack’s partner was to walk in, flash a badge and act like he was leading a genuine, honest-to-God, Yankee drug bust. Fifteen thousand dollars for an hour’s work. Not bad at all. There was almost no way the deal could go wrong, and in fact, they almost pulled it off, but just as Jack’s buddy was transferring the coke from the Nicaraguans’ gym bag to his briefcase the real cops busted through the door. The Nicaraguans were deported. During the pre-trial paper work his partner mysteriously disappeared. By St. Paddy’s Day Jack was a guest of the Pontiac Correctional Center.

‘What will you do now?’ Uncle Jalal broke his silence at last.

The world outside the Seville looked like heaven. Clusters of yellow dandelions danced in the over-grown strips of emerald grass by the side of the highway. The sky was wider, bluer, bigger than Jack had ever dreamed. The spring sun hurt Jack’s squinting eyes. ‘Steer clear of prison, one thing’s for sure,’ he said.

‘I will believe that when I see it.’ Uncle Jalal may have been talking but he was in no mood to look at this nephew. Jack had betrayed the family honour too many times for Uncle Jalal to offer sympathy. A ride back to the city and five nights in the spare bed was the limit of family understanding.

Unlike his previous stints in prison Jack had kept pretty much to himself in Pontiac. Of course, the ‘brothers’ protected him, but for the most part Jack had been a loner. The Lone Ranger. Another name to add to all the others he’d used since coming to America. So many names, sometimes it was hard to remember exactly who he was. Jacob, when he first arrived. Then Jake, when he began dealing nosecandy. After he got busted in Gary trying to off load a garbage bag of Hawaiian weed, the ‘brothers’ in Cook County took to calling him Five-Oh: as in Hawaii 5-0.

At a time when the ‘brothers’ were taking names like Mohammad and Shakeel, Jack toyed with the idea of using his real name too. He could see the advantage it would bring him while he was Inside, but Jack wasn’t planning on staying in prison any longer than he had to. The Black Muslim brothers, they’d probably never see life on the streets again; they needed some sort of identity to cling to. But not Jack. Man, he’d tell himself, that’s the whole point you came to this country. To put that stuff behind you. Not be proud of it. So Jack never told anyone his real name. People knew him as that fast-talking, baldy guy from Chicago. Jake, Jacob, or Five-Oh. But as his release date from Pontiac came closer he decided he needed a new name for his new life of freedom and after some thought settled on Jack King. He liked the tone of that: simple yet majestic.

‘I been thinking Uncle Jalal,’ Jack said.

His uncle made an indistinct sound but demonstrated no curiosity. Jack looked at the old man then shrugged and started to read the billboards out loud as they flew past the car window. ‘Take a Finger Lickin’ Break. Left four miles.’ ‘Troubled? Try prayer. Livingstone Church of Christ. The friendly congregation on I-55.’ Uncle Jalal tapped the radio and covered Jack’s voice with an all-news station. Neither man acknowledged the other, lost in his own thoughts.

Thinking was about all Jack had done in Pontiac. There was no doubt that he had been set up in the Nicaraguan coke deal. How else could you explain his partner’s miraculous disappearance? It took months for the rage to stop swirling around inside Jack’s gut, but eventually he was able to think straight and come to a few conclusions. For one thing, he realised that even if he got lucky and copped an early release date he’d be almost forty by the time he got out. Middle age was coming on strong. Secondly, he admitted that he’d been hanging out with losers for altogether too long. For too many years he had been running other people’s scams and what did he have to show for it? Diddly. From now on he was going to be the boss. The time had come to wield the stick, not take another beating. So finally, he promised himself, once he got out of Pontiac he was going to establish himself as a real player, someone everyone would respect. Like a king.

He wasn’t going to go straight exactly; there was no way to sustain the sort of lifestyle Jack enjoyed as a straight arrow. But he certainly was going to find a new set of business associates. And he was never going to spend another night Inside. Not one. So during those long boring days in Pontiac Jack conducted a survey of all the possible business opportunities he might invest in once he got out. One eye was cocked at the long-term future, the other scanned the horizon for mountains of cash. It didn’t take very long to see that more than any other, one business stood out above the rest: heroin. Like sweet wine and wingtip shoes, heroin was always stylish. Always sexy. Forever in demand.

One day in the prison library he was flipping through a National Geographic article on Afghanistan when the penny dropped. Like a bolt of lightening right down his spine, the idea left him tingling for weeks. Most of the world’s heroin, the article said, was being processed in factories along the border of Pakistan and Afghanistan. The illicit trade in drugs accounted for more money than the real economy of both countries put together. There was even a beautiful pullout photo of red poppy fields stretching to kingdom come. For the first time in his life Jack felt like he might have the inside track. The empire I could build. Every night for two years his sleep was disturbed as he tossed and turned and flipped around like a fish on the shore, just thinking about it. Jack ripped the photo out of the magazine and taped it to his cell wall, right above his pillow. Every morning and night it reminded him of the beautiful future just waiting for him on the other side of the wall.

‘Like I said,’ Jack turned down the volume on the radio. Uncle Jalal shot a quick glance at his nephew as if this was another insult. ‘I been thinking.’

‘At least thinking is not illegal.’ Uncle Jalal clipped each word; the ‘T’s as sharp as knives. Thirty years of life in America had done nothing to soften his accent.

‘I’ll need some money,’ Jack said.

‘Badtameez!’ snapped the older man. ‘Have you no manners? Asking for money after all the offers we have made to help you, and the thousands of dollars you have wasted in your...your...your filthy life.’

Jack had expected something like this but persevered nonetheless. ‘Things are different now. I was young then.’

‘Still you are immature. Nearly forty but what can you show for your life? Bolo! At your age I had the restaurant and grocery plus three apartment buildings.’

Jack liked his uncle, always had, but he wasn’t in the mood to listen to the usual you’ve-shamed-the-family-because-you’re-not-a-mil lionaire speech. ‘Not a lot. Just fifteen hundred, maybe two grand if you can afford it.’

‘Who can afford to burn his money year after year taking care of a lafanga like you? Tell me? Even fifteen dollars is too much to expect from my side. Those days are over. Completely.’ For the first time he faced his nephew to emphasise that he meant what he said. There would be no more forgiveness. Over the years, as Jack, or whatever he called himself, stumbled from one disaster to another, the older man had always felt it his responsibility to make sure his nephew survived. He had offered his daughter to the boy to marry, found him job after job. He had stopped calculating how many thousands he’d loaned him since he had brought the boy over. It was a question of duty and responsibility to his older brother, Jack’s father. But this latest humiliation was too much even for Jalal to bear. ‘You must no longer consider yourself a member of this family.’

‘Will you listen to me?’ Jack whined as he swung his head around to get a better glimpse of the billboard advertising Eldorado Table Top Dancers. ‘Have fun this weekend. Up Close and Personal,’ Jack read aloud then whistled long and lustily. Four years been too long.

‘To what should I listen? More lies? More broken promises?’ The Seville was doing nearly ninety. Jack told his uncle to cool it and get in the right lane before the cops forced him to. ‘Don’t want to see another cop in my life. You dig, right?’

Uncle Jalal had a habit of sweating when stressed and even though the air conditioner had been on high since leaving the house, he could feel the small wet beads tickling his tummy. He slowed down, but his knuckles remained white as he strangled the wheel.

‘Will you purchase more narcotics? Or waste each cent on wine and beer?’

‘I want to go back to Pakistan.’ Jack could see the skyline getting bigger now. Man, no place like Chicago in the world. The Sears Tower, all those swanky high rises and yachts along the lakefront. Wrigley Field, the Bulls, Soldier Field. ‘That’s what I’ve been thinking.’

‘Kya bola? What did you say?’ Uncle Jalal’s foot fell off the accelerator altogether; cars tooted and swung around him, flashing their lights.

‘That’s why I need money. To buy me a ticket.’