The rain that night fell for three whole days, just like Oscar's luck — it would eventually stop, but you never knew when. I was sitting in a bar on South State Street in Chicago, the kind of bar that existed in the space between respectability and ruin, with neon signs that flickered like dying fireflies and a jukebox that played songs about heartbreak and whiskey and the kind of loneliness that doesn't go away no matter how much you drink. I was thirty-five years old and I had seen too much war and not enough peace, and I was sitting there with an empty whiskey glass and a story that nobody wanted to hear, which is to say I was having a perfectly normal Tuesday.

I met Oscar Black in 1938. Back then he was just a tall skinny guy loading cargo at the docks, with shoulders like a mule and eyes like — I don't know how to describe Oscar's eyes. They weren't ambitious. Ambitious people's eyes burn. They weren't hungry. Hungry people's eyes dart. Oscar's eyes were still. They were the kind of eyes that look at a thing and know it — not after the fact, not in hindsight, but before. Before it happens. Before you even know it's coming.

"He's not smart," I told a stranger at the bar that night — the stranger being you, reader, whoever picked up this story and decided to read it, which means you're either drunk or desperate or both, and I don't judge. "Smart people figure things out after they happen. Oscar is different. He knows before things happen. He knows which ship will arrive and when. He knows which buyer will offer what price. He knows which union rep will betray him and which one won't. He knows things, and nobody knows how."

Oscar's rise was not dramatic. It was methodical. He went from dock worker to foreman to contractor to owner of a small transportation company, and from there to a larger transportation company, and from there to a network of transportation companies that stretched from Chicago to Detroit to Milwaukee, and from there to banks and political connections and union contracts and everything else that makes a man powerful in a city like Chicago in the late 1930s and early 1940s. He wove a web like a spider — not a flashy web, not a web of gold and jewels, but a web of information, of connections, of favours owed and favours given, of secrets kept and secrets traded. He wove it slowly and carefully and without anyone noticing, and by the time anyone noticed, it was too late. Oscar was already at the centre of it, and the web was already holding him up, and there was no way down.

Some said he had inside sources. Some said he had intelligence from the government — he was always good at predicting government contracts and military orders, and in 1941 when the war started, Oscar's transportation empire grew overnight, because the war needed transportation and Oscar knew exactly what was needed and where and when. Some said he was connected to the mob — and maybe he was, maybe he wasn't, I never knew, and I never asked, because the things you don't ask about in Chicago are the things that keep you alive.

I was the only one who knew — or thought I knew — the truth about Oscar's ability. And the truth was this: in 1935, a woman appeared in Oscar's life. She was tall and dark-haired and spoke with an accent I couldn't place — not European, not American, something in between, something that suggested she had lived in many places and belonged to none of them. She warned Oscar about things. Not big things, not world-shaking things, but small things — things that mattered. She told him not to sign a contract on a certain date. She told him to avoid a certain buyer. She told him to invest in a certain route. And Oscar did everything she said, and everything she said came true, and Oscar began to understand that the woman was not just lucky — she was something more, something that he could not name and could not explain and could not live without.

Her name was Rita. Rita was the key to Oscar's ability. Or rather, Rita was the source. I don't know how Rita knew the things she knew. I don't know if she was intelligent — truly intelligent, the kind of intelligent that comes from reading and studying and thinking and connecting dots that other people can't see — or if she was connected to people who were intelligent, or if she was something else entirely. I never found out. Because in 1936, Rita disappeared. Some said she died. Some said she ran. Some said Oscar had her killed. I never knew which was true. I only knew that after Rita disappeared, Oscar changed. He became harder. Colder. More willing to do things that he had refused to do before. He became a man who could not afford to lose, and a man who cannot afford to lose is a dangerous man, not just to his enemies but to his friends.

Detective O'Connor started investigating Oscar in 1943. O'Connor was a good detective — not the kind of good that wins medals and promotions, but the kind of good that keeps you up at night because he's the kind of man who doesn't give up and doesn't forget and doesn't accept the answers that other people give him. He had been investigating Oscar for two years, and he had found nothing — no evidence of corruption, no proof of mob connections, no smoking gun that would bring Oscar down. But he kept looking, and Oscar kept feeling the pressure, and Oscar's responses to the pressure became more and more extreme.

He betrayed allies. He manipulated markets. He used information that he shouldn't have had — information that came from somewhere, and I never asked where, because I was afraid of the answer. And then Rita died.

Rita didn't die in 1936. She died in 1943. She was in a car accident on a rainy night in December, on a road outside Chicago, and the car went off the road and into a ditch and Rita was killed, and Oscar was not in the car, and I was not in the car, and nobody knew why Rita had been driving alone on a road outside Chicago on a rainy night in December, and nobody asked, because in Chicago, when a woman dies in a car accident on a rainy night, the question is not why but who benefits, and the answer was always Oscar.

I tried to stop him. I sat across from him in his office — a corner office in a building on LaSalle Street, with a view of the river and the bridges and the trains and the city that he had helped build and that now existed because of him — and I told him that he was going too far, that he was hurting people, that he was becoming the kind of man that he had once despised, and Oscar looked at me with those still, terrible eyes and he said, "Jack, I'm not making the future happen. I'm just watching it happen. You think I choose these things? You think I decide who lives and who dies? I don't decide anything. I just see it. I see it before it happens, and I can't stop it, and I can't unsee it, and I can't —"

He stopped. He looked away. He looked back at the river. And he said nothing more. Because there was nothing more to say. Oscar Black could see everything. He could see the contracts that would be signed and the deals that would be made and the alliances that would be formed and the betrayals that would come. He could see the rain and the bridges and the trains and the city. He could see Rita in the car on the road outside Chicago. He could see the ditch and the rain and the dark and the end. He could see it all.

But he could not stop it.

He could not save Rita. He could not save his allies. He could not save himself. He could see everything except the one thing that mattered: that every future he saw led him deeper into loneliness, that every victory cost him a friendship, that every success was purchased with a betrayal, that the web he had woven was not holding him up but pulling him down, and that he was at the centre of it all, alone, with nothing but the seeing and the knowing and the terrible, inescapable knowledge that he had brought all of this upon himself.

O'Connor's investigation closed in. Not with a bang. Not with a raid or an arrest or a scandal that filled the newspapers. It closed with a whisper. A whisper that reached the right ears at the right time, and the whispers that reach the right ears in Chicago are more dangerous than any raid, because they don't announce themselves, they don't announce their intentions, they don't give you time to prepare or defend or fight. They just come, and they do their work, and they leave you with nothing.

Oscar's empire collapsed. Not defeated by enemies. Not defeated by O'Connor. Defeated by himself — by every "foreseen" future that led him deeper into isolation, by every betrayal that eroded the alliances he had built, by every act of self-preservation that destroyed the connections that kept him alive. He had seen it all coming. He had seen it all. And he had been unable to stop it. Because the one thing he could not see — the one thing that his ability could not show him — was himself.

I sat in the same bar on South State Street. The rain had stopped. The neon sign flickered. The jukebox played a song about rain and heartbreak and the kind of loneliness that doesn't go away. I finished my last drink. I looked at the empty glass. I thought about Oscar. I thought about Rita. I thought about the web. I thought about the seeing. And I said, to the glass and to the stranger and to the empty bar and to the rain that had finally stopped:

"He could see everything. Except himself."

I stood up. I walked out of the bar. I walked into the rain — not the rain from three days ago, but a new rain, a cold rain, a clean rain, a rain that washed the streets and the sidewalks and the neon signs and the jukebox and the whiskey glass and the story and the man who told the story, and I walked, and I did not look back, and I did not know where I was going, and it didn't matter, because in Chicago, when you're walking in the rain at midnight, you're not walking toward anything. You're just walking. And that's enough. That's all any of us can do. We just walk. We just carry the story. We just remember. We just —

The rain kept falling. The city kept breathing. And I kept walking, into a night that had no beginning and no end and no destination, carrying a story that nobody wanted to hear and a memory that nobody asked for and a truth that nobody could change, because in Chicago, the truth is just another kind of rain — it falls on everyone, rich and poor, guilty and innocent, and it washes nothing away, it just makes everything wetter than it was before.