"You're my first phone call. Now, what does Woods do on the fifth?"
Jacobs nodded, bit into his second burger, and talked with his mouth full.
"If you looked him up on the payroll, he'd be some PR flack. Probably pulling a hundred K a year. Wilson's got half a dozen of 'em stashed there."
"And what does Johnny really do?"
The reporter spread a smile across his face. "He's what we call a fixer."
"A fixer?"
"Yeah, a guy who fixes problems for the Fifth Floor. Makes things go away. And greases the machinery. All at the same time."
Jacobs' cell phone chirped. He held up a hand and flipped the phone open. "Yeah." He listened, grunted a few times, and began to scribble furiously on a napkin.
When he finished with one napkin, Jacobs gestured to me. I pushed a pile more over to his side of the table; the reporter continued to write. I finished my burger, then my beer. Jacobs snapped the cell shut and stood up.
"You want to know what Woods does?"
I nodded.
"Let's go."
Jacobs headed to the door. I followed. A primer, apparently, was in the offing. On how problems got fixed in Chicago.
Stranger than fiction, blending tragedy and farce, How to Create the Perfect Wife is an engrossing tale of the radicalism, and deep contradictions, at the heart of the Enlightenment.
Z, the novel about the life of Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald is at points charming and; like another reviewer, I kept thinking of the movie, "Midnight...
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