by Gina LaManna
“Yeah, yeah, and if you look on your computer, you’ll find out this car is stolen.” Meg grinned. “So? We’re ready.” She held out her hands, waiting for the cuffs to appear.
“Uh….” The cop glanced over in my direction.
I shrugged. “What about it?”
“Is this vehicle really stolen?”
“It’s more like it’s borrowed. But the report will probably say stolen. Technicalities.” I glanced out the window and saw a few of the black cars that I could’ve sworn I’d seen before passing us. Were they circling the block? “How about if we make this easy and come back to the car with you?”
“Uh…” The cop glanced at Meg.
My best friend leaned over to the poor guy and hissed in a loud whisper. “I used to be a cop. You should arrest us. It’ll look good on you, bringing us in all grand theft auto and shit, during your first week on the job.”
“How’d you know it as my first week?” he asked.
“Baby, it’s written all over your face.” Meg leaned over and grabbed the cuffs that were dangling around the kid’s waist.
He lunged for them, but Meg had already snapped a metal ring around her wrist. “Always secure your handcuffs to your belt, honey.”
“But…” The poor cop looked helpless, and I felt bad for a hot second. Then that feeling disappeared as another black car passed us by.
“Just take us in already,” I said, reaching over and snapping the free cuff to my wrist. Meg and I were now attached.
“Call Chuckie,” Meg said. “He’s a supervisor. You tell him that you’ve got a Meg arrested here in a stolen van. He’ll know what to do. He’ll give you a gold star, I promise.”
“Chuckie….You mean Chuck Daniels? My supervisor?”
Meg winked at me. “How fortunate are we! He’s your boss?”
“Alright, if you say…” He opened the driver’s side door and gestured for Meg to get out.
She shifted both feet onto the ground, standing up much too fast for me to squeeze in a protest. Meg was fully out of the car before she realized that I was still attached to her arm. In the meantime, I’d been dragged across the middle seat, landing in an awkward position with a parking shifter wedged in a location where the sun rarely shines. It was not comfortable.
“Ow, god. Ow. Pointy. Help me out.” I groaned as Meg lifted her arm.
“Oh, turd buckets,” she said. “Sorry about that.”
She reached for my other hand and tried to help me out gently, but by the time I was on two feet standing next to her, my hair was a rat’s nest, my butt was sore, and I had scratch marks from my ribs to my belly button.
“I never want to be Siamese twins with you,” I said. “Just for the record.”
“Me neither. Your taste in men is questionable. I couldn’t stand to talk to some of them, let alone kiss them.”
“Hey – you’re not exactly Miss Good Judgment on the male front.”
“Ladies, are you coming?” Baby Cop cleared his throat. He looked like he wanted to take some semblance of control over the situation.
“Sure, after we solve this,” Meg retorted. “Who do you think has the better taste in men? We need to know in case we become Siamese twins and one of us needs to pick who we sleep with.”
The cop had tomatoes for cheeks.
“Don’t answer that,” I snapped. I took a few steps forward to try and drag Meg towards the squad car, but I was yanked right back as she put her hands on her hips.
“I control the walking,” she said, lifting her chin high and marching forward.
I followed obediently, biting back an argument. I was trying to be the bigger Siamese twin, at least in spirit, on account of how badly I wanted to stay alive. The circling black cars were a constant reminder of danger, making me feel like a surfer in a sea of hungry sharks.
We loaded into the cruiser and the cop started driving us away.
“So, do you ladies normally get arrested?” He glanced back in the mirror.
“Never—” I said.
“Sometimes—” Meg said. “I like handcuffs.”
Another wink from her and a groan from me.
“And what about stealing cars?” he followed up.
“Never—”
“Sometimes—”
“You guys don’t make great Siamese twins,” he said, as if that were the greatest observation since Newton discovered gravity.
“No, really,” I drawled.
“’Cause I do all the work on a tandem bike,” Meg said.
“I’m going to call Chuck now,” the cop said with false authority. “If you guys are pulling my leg, I’m going to be really peeved.”
“Whoa, now,” Meg said, with a head roll in my direction. “Tough guy, over here.”
Baby Cop shot daggers at her with his eyes in the rearview mirror but refrained from commenting as he dialed.
“Hey, Sergeant Daniels.” He glanced back at us. “I’ve got two ladies here in the back of my car… yeah, they claimed they stole a van when I pulled them over for reckless driving. One of them is named Meg, and she said to call you. You know anything about them?”
The phone was not set to speaker, but the cuss words that came over the airwaves didn’t need to be amplified. And the sigh that followed cemented Chuckie’s frustration. It was finished with a ‘bring them in’ that I didn’t necessarily like the sound of.
Baby Cop hung up and turned to relay the conversation.
“We heard,” Meg and I said in unison before he could speak.
Then we smiled at each other.
Maybe this whole ‘twins’ thing would improve with time.
** **
After an hour of waiting at the police station, we’d filled out bogus paperwork, we’d asked for a cup of coffee and been promptly denied, and we’d been successfully de-siamesed and moved into an interrogation room for questioning.
Chuckie walked in as Meg and I were finishing a glare-off (I’d had one last mint in my pocket from the trip to Marinello’s bathroom. She’d snagged it, even though my stomach was grumbling louder than hers).
Chuckie gave another long, loud and very dramatic sigh as he plopped down on the other side of the table. “What’s going on now?”
“Can we get a cup of coffee around here?” Meg asked.
“Tell me what’s going on, then I’ll decide.”
“That’s cruelty to humans,” Meg said.
Another sigh from the cop. “The faster you talk, the faster I decide.”
Meg started speed talking through the events of the hour since he’d left us in front of Shotz. Chuckie’s eyes narrowed at the sign of the two thugs in the bar. He harrumphed at the mention of an army of black cars. And then he’d outright chuckled when I said they were following us.
“Are you sure of this?” He looked at me to either negate or affirm Meg’s story.
“Yah,” I said. “It’s all true. I don’t know what any of this means… or who my family could be.”
“Did the man you were meeting have anything to say?”
“No, he left to distract the two suits before…” I paused and slipped my hand into the pocket of my pants. “Actually, he gave me this. Slipped it into my hand before he left, but I haven’t had a chance to look yet.”
I splayed the wrinkled slip of paper on the table before us.
We all leaned over to look at the cramped handwriting on the page before us. In all caps, it said:
MUSEUM OF HISTORY
PORTRAIT 49 HOLDS THE ANSWER TO YOUR FAMILY NAME.
“How did he know?” I asked. “Even I don’t know my family name.”
“You said you met the guy at Marinello’s?” Chuckie asked. “Who were you meeting?”
“Enrico,” I said.
“If he’s the guy I’m thinking of – the gelato scooper – he’s been around forever. If you look anything like your parents, he’d be able to piece it together. Enrico’s a good guy. In fact, all them over at Marinello’s treat us
cops real nice.”
“What’s the Museum of History?” Meg asked.
“What’s Portrait 49?” I asked.
Chuckie shrugged. “They move stuff around over there all the time, I’ve got no idea.”
“Are we booked here? Or can I go find out?” I stood up. “I’m getting real impatient to find out what’s going on.”
“What car are you going to drive?” Chuckie crossed his arms.
“Oh, crap. Gosh dang it.” I sat back down and pounded my head against the table. But only lightly, since I didn’t have a whole ton of extra brain cells to lose now that mine were all caught up in this mystery. Not to mention, there was a solid chance I was still concussed.
“You’re lucky.” Chuckie grinned. “My curiosity is piqued. I’ll accompany you two criminals over there. After, I’ll bring ya back here, and you ladies spend the night in jail. Then we’ll call it good. No more stealing.”
“Dealio,” I said.
“I might sneak off at some point during the museum tour,” Meg said.
“I expect so.” Chuckie turned towards the door. “Let’s go.”
** **
The three of us parked in an illegal spot outside of the museum, thanks to our escort service (the police) and cop car (not stolen this time). Things were looking up. The cops were on our side, we were not in possession of a stolen vehicle, nobody was shooting Nerf guns at us… I smiled as Chuckie led the two of us through the front doors.
“Admission?” An overly cheerful, overly bouncy woman asked at the gate. “Thirty dollars, please.”
“Police business,” Chuckie flashed his badge and waved the two of us through. I had a minor stare down with the woman, as she skeptically watched us flounce through the entrance free of charge.
“Can you tell me where Portrait 49 is?” Chuckie puffed out his chest as he spoke to a pimply teenager, who looked pretty bored holding a broom. I smelled an entire brownie’s worth of marijuana essence on him. Meg leaned forward and sniffed.
“Uh, huh. The photos are in order. Go up that flight, down and over, and then over some more. And, um, am I in trouble?” The kid’s lip twitched.
“Should you be?” Chuckie raised an eyebrow.
Meg grinned. “He should not be in trouble. Or he shouldn’t, at least, if I can get some of what he’s smoking.”
The kid turned and darted into a mummy exhibit.
We headed in the vague direction of the teen’s formerly pointed finger. We passed a room full of woolly mammoths and another full of Pharaohs. The next room looked like a jungle and the one after it a spaceship. I couldn’t make sense of how the portraits were ordered, but we seemed to be getting close. The last portrait in the spaceship room had the number fifty above it.
“Are you ready?” Meg paused looking at me. “I’m not great at math, but I expect the next number to be forty-nine.”
I took a deep breath. “I don’t know.”
“I’ll go first. I can handle it.” Chuckie rotated his shoulders once and strode forward. Apparently the sight was a shocking one: the cop, who must have seen a lot in his years on the force, paled and stumbled backwards. “I, er, wish I hadn’t’a seen that.”
“That bad?” I gulped.
“Jus’… look for yourself.” He wiped his brow.
“You go.” I gave Meg a little push from behind and put a hand over my eyes.
“Welp,” Meg said as she stepped forward. She glanced at the portrait. I couldn’t read her expression.
I put a hand over my eyes.
Meg drew my fingers away from my face. “I’d like to say congratulations to you and your male family members.” Meg chuckled. Then, she turned serious. “But honestly, does this man have a brother? Or a grandson maybe?”
I opened my eyes and let Meg pull me into the next room. I hesitated before looking up.
I’m not sure what I’d expected, but it wasn’t this: a large, granite statue of a grumpy-looking man, posed and twisted like a contortionist. He was also completely naked with the largest package of stone junk I’d ever seen in my life. Not that I saw many stone ding dongs, but still. The thing could’ve been glued onto an elephant and it wouldn’t have looked out of place.
“Oh, ah. Wow. Wonder how this is supposed to be a clue.” I averted my eyes. I wasn’t sure if the statue was of a family member or a cruel joke by Enrico. I felt quite perverted staring at it, however, in case it was the former. Nobody wants to see their Uncle Larry’s junk carved in stone and displayed for the world to see.
Or touch, in Meg’s case.
“Get your hands off that!” I pulled her hand back.
“I’m lookin’ for clues. Hold your horses,” Meg retorted. “I believe penises are like snowflakes. They’re all unique and different, and maybe if I can get a good feel…”
She cupped her hand lightly over the man’s family jewels. Possibly my family jewels. “Nope, not familiar.”
I rolled my eyes as Chuckie was suddenly overcome with a severe coughing fit.
“Maybe if I read the caption—” I took a step forward. And then I whirled back around. “You guys.”
“What?” Meg was staring the stone dong straight into the eyeball. If it had one, that is. “I can’t even count the lines on here like I can on tree trunks. I’m not sure how to tell the age of this man, ‘cept that he’s not quite wrinkly enough to be above the age of fifty. I once slept with a fif—”
“This is sixty,” I said.
“No, honey. I draw the line at fifty-eight. I don’t do sixty, if you get my drift.” Meg winked, while Chuckie’s coughing fit sounded like it was in danger of landing him in the ER.
“No, this sculpture is number sixty.” I gestured behind me. “It wasn’t counting down. The numbers jumped up. Forty-nine is somewhere else.”
“Huh. So I did all this inspectin’ for nothin’?”
“Don’t pretend that you didn’t like it.”
“I wasn’t pretending nothin’,” Meg grumped as she followed me.
I waltzed far away from the naked porno star of the middle ages, in search for the real number forty-nine.
“You know, what with your stripper history, I wouldn’t have been totally surprised if that was the real deal,” Meg murmured.
Chuckie grunted a laugh.
I glared at them both. “Shut up.”
After pounding up and down three flights of stairs and innumerable hallways, we reached the forties. As we came to a stop in front of forty-nine, I couldn’t bring myself to look away from the tiles on the floor. I’d come this far, but for what? What if this was a dead end? What if it told me everything I needed to know, but it turned out to be everything I didn’t want to know?
What had my mom been hiding from me?
Chuckie’s arm came up and landed around my shoulder as he exhaled. “For crying out loud-”
“Crikey,” Meg said.
“What is it?” I stared at my shoes.
Ever so gently, Meg tipped my chin upwards until my line of sight hit the framed portrait on the wall, the small plaque hanging over it reading “49.”
“Oh, oh. Oh, no.” I gasped and backed away from the wall. “Impossible.”
** **
Hanging above the plaque were the words “Most Infamous Mobster Family of the Twentieth Century.”
The man in the photo was the same man in the pictures with my mom. The similarities between my mother’s eyes and his were impossible to mistake. And as I read the caption below the header, it explained that the man in the photo was Vincenzo Luzzi, head of the Italian Mafia in Chicago. He had six sons and four daughters. One of his sons was currently alive and well in St. Paul, Minnesota. That would be Carlos Luzzi, my grandfather.
“You don’t think?” I asked.
“Luzzi blood. Wowzers.” Chuckie said. “Enrico was good friends with the Luzzi’s – there’s no way he’d steer you wrong. If anyone could recognize a Luzzi, it’s him.”
“Yikes,” Meg said again. “That�
��s interesting. We cops have a unique relationship with the Luzzi clan.”
“Lacey Luzzi,” I tried the name on for size. Ironically, it seemed to fit. “Lacey Luzzi.”
“That’d explain why your mom wanted to hide you from the family,” Meg said. “She probably wanted to go straight, and she prolly wanted you to, as well.”
“Oh, man,” I said. A rush of emotions flooded my stomach, and I couldn’t decipher them amidst a bout of acid reflux. I was one big ball of confused. “Okay, well I have some thinking to do. Are you going to take me back to jail now?”
I held up my wrist, but Chuckie glanced at it as if I were holding the detonator to an atomic bomb.
“Absolutely not,” he said. “I’m not arresting you in case you do have Luzzi blood. I don’t have a death wish.”
I opened my mouth, shocked, as Chuckie took off.
I turned to Meg, who was looking at me oddly. Almost proud, a little skeptical, a little…
“Are you okay?” I asked.
“A Luzzi,” she said. “Who woulda thunk?”
** **
The maze to get out of the museum was a blurry kaleidoscope of moose antlers and constellations and a variety of hieroglyphics painted on a wall. Bubbles floated and copters whirred and beeps sounded, but it was all white noise to me.
A Luzzi?
I wasn’t badass. I could barely walk in heels. I didn’t speak a lick of Italian, and my pasta noodles turned out burnt at least fifty percent of the time, don’t ask me how. I wasn’t cut out for the mobster life.
“You don’t have to say anything,” Meg said, as if reading my thoughts. “Just because you know, doesn’t mean they have to know about you. Your mom made that possible. She left you with the choice.”
“Yeah, but I don’t know for sure,” I said.
“But do you want to know for sure?”
I paused at the front gate. That was a very good question. One I wasn’t quite ready to answer.
“Do you know where they live, by any chance?” I looked at Meg. “Just to do a quick drive by. I wouldn’t do anything stupid.”
“No, of course not.” Meg shook her head at me, her eyes twinkling behind her badly disguised smirk. “You’d never do anything stupid.”
“Uh, how are we getting home, or… anywhere?” The two of us stood on the front steps of the museum. “I’m all biked out, I can’t possibly handle another grand theft auto arrest, and my feet are killing me…”