I looked over. A potbellied man in an unbuttoned hunter’s shirt, dago tee and gold necklace underneath, stood looking down at me with no small measure of scorn.
“There’s nothing you can help me with. This is my nephew. These kids are leaving with me now and they aren’t coming back.”
“That so?”
I stepped toward him, pulling Johnny in behind me. “That’s so,” I said.
He made a slow move toward his waistband. A man inside cut him off. “Get in here, Carlo. And put your hands down, you idiot.” Then the man called out, “Is that you, Buonomo?”
That caught me off guard. After an unsuccessful moment trying to figure out who it was, I replied, “Who wants to know?”
A familiar killer grin came swimming toward me from the darkness inside. Vinnie Bo’palazzo leaned against the door frame in a smart powder-blue suit, smirking like he’d invented the look. “How’d you know we were looking for you?”
“You’re not looking for me; you’re looking for what I used to be.”
He shook his head, smiling at no one in particular. “No,” he said, “I’m pretty sure the boss wants the you of today, not the relic.”
He held up a finger. “Wait right here, please,” he said, then swam back into the murk.
Grabbing the kids by their jacket lapels, I pulled them in close. “You two, get home now or there will be hell to pay. Mi capiscono?”
“Sì. Benissimo,” Johnny said.
He and his running mate slunk off. I watched them until they made the corner, then I turned to face the social club, contemplating just what affliction my past was conjuring for me now.
There was nothing inside that club that I gave a rat’s ass about. But I knew that whatever this “boss” guy wanted had to be refused straightaway so there wouldn’t be any lingering idea that we were going to be chummy.
Bo’palazzo came back to the door a minute later and motioned me into the club. A clutch of brutish guys gave me the once-over when I walked in. Carlo, the dumb guy, frisked me. After that, Vinnie led me through the dim room past a table where the guys were playing cards.
When we reached the back of the room, Vinnie knocked on a shabby door, said, “He’s here.”
A deep voice rumbled back through the wood, “Send ’im in.”
Bo’palazzo swung the door open. Out of habit I checked behind me, then entered. My eyes flared when I saw the man inside. It was the flower guy who’d been pestering Claudia the night before, the one I’d cut in on by asking her to dance.
“You’re the guy in charge?” I said, scanning the rest of the room.
“Carpaccio. Fiorello Carpaccio. Come on in, siddown,” he said, waving Bo’palazzo out with his hand.
“You’re Carpaccio?”
“Didya maybe mistake me for Marcello Mastroianni?”
“Uh . . . no.”
“Have a seat,” he offered.
The door closed behind me. “I’m good standing. I won’t be here long.”
“Ahh, come on, sit. Let’s tawk a bit. Don’t worry, dis ain’t about dat little fracas with my guy yesterday.”
Carpaccio’s voice rumbled like a locomotive gathering speed, his Chicagoese so thick it practically broke off in slabs. He gestured at a chair. That was the first time I noticed how big his hands were. Big and gnarled like a pug boxer’s—or a guy who’d worked heavy labor for a long time.
I took a seat in the office chair across from his desk, the floorboards creaking beneath me as I lowered my weight into it. The room stank of sweat and cigarettes.
The guy across from me was definitely no movie star. Overall he was large, but maybe gone to seed a little of late, though plenty of avoirdupois still bulged through his rayon shirt along with a forest of black hair at the collar. The mane tapered off just a bit into beard stubble that looked like it had made it to five o’clock by midmorning. He had no neck whatsoever, and the head that sat atop that missing neck was too round and filled out with large, mushy features that came together like a three-car pileup. Cold, flat eyes gazed out at me from below the rim of a tired brown porkpie pulled low on his forehead.
Looking at him, I got that same vague tinge of recognition I had the night before. I’d seen this guy somewhere before. Long, long ago.
Carpaccio shook a Marlboro out of a pack, stuck it between his dark lips. “Want one?” he mumbled as he tossed the pack down on the desktop.
I shook my head.
He grabbed a large cut-glass lighter with a brass top and thumbed the switch several times until a little flame sprouted from the wick. Then he scorched his smoke and sucked in a healthy dose, our eyes never wavering from the other’s the entire time. He pushed himself back from the desk with his feet a few inches, then leaned back in his chair and exhaled a grayish plume from the side of his purplish mouth.
“Dey tell me you used to be some kinda hero.”
I scratched my ear.
“Dey tell me you were one of dem fighter pilots.”
“Still got the wings in a closet somewhere.”
“Dey tell me you knew Butch O’Hare.”
“Me and two thousand other guys aboard ship.”
I started to look around the little room out of boredom, taking note of the bricked-in windows peeking out behind peeling wallpaper.
He jabbed two fingers toward me, slinging off the nascent nub of cigarette ash on the desk. “Cut the crap. You knew him.”
I was over the whole stupid game already. “So what? Is that why I’m in here, to tell you Victory at Sea stories? He was a guy I knew during the war. Now he’s dead. It’s been twenty years. What the hell do you want?”
“Ten million dollars.”
I could feel the double take as I made it.
His brutal face cracked into a grin, cigarette-stained teeth glimmering as his lips receded. “Ha ha! Thought that would get your attention. You wanna hear a little story, flyboy?”
“Sure, I’ll bite, church has already let out.”
I grabbed a smoke of my own, snatched his tchotchke of a lighter, and flamed it.
Carpaccio belched out some more smog, and then he really started blowing smoke.
“Gino said you came unglued when he insulted O’Hare da other day. How many guys would bum-rush a member of a crew over something like dat? Dat’s interesting, dat got me to t’inking.”
“That must’ve been when I saw the lights dimming last night.”
He took the barb. “Stay wit’ me here, huh? So last night, I hear you tawkin’ wit’ Mr. Giancana, him sayin’ he used to see Mr. Capone drivin’ around wit’ O’Hare’s old man—a guy everybody knew worked for us.”
“Until he caught a hundred stray bullets at the track.”
Light danced in his dark pupils. “Exactly!” He sat up, leaned forward, his mouth cracking open like a panting bulldog. “And why do you suppose dat happened?”
“Maybe he kept banging in sick after St. Patty’s day. C’mon, Carpaccio, I don’t know. Get to the point here, would ya?”
But he didn’t. Instead, he launched into a rambling story that covered more ground than the Union Stockyards—with twice as much bullshit. It began with some basic truths: Easy Eddie O’Hare had started out as Capone’s business partner in some Chicago racetracks in the ’20s, eventually becoming one of his lawyers and financial advisers. After Capone drew his famous eleven-year hitch in prison for tax evasion, he eventually determined that O’Hare was the insider who had sold him to the feds. That doomed Easy Eddie, who was gunned down after leaving his office at Sportsman’s Park just one week before Capone was released from prison in 1939. All of this had been well covered by the Chicago papers in its day.
But then Carpaccio ventured into muddier terrain, alleging that O’Hare had hidden much of Capone’s money throughout the city in various caches while Scarface’s ap
peals played out, purportedly filching millions for himself in the process. He further averred that O’Hare’s own secretary, Toni Cavaretta, was acting Outfit boss Frank Nitti’s lover, and that she tipped the mob off to the time O’Hare would be driving home the night he died. With O’Hare out of the way and Capone mentally incapacitated by venereal disease, Nitti then had a clear path to any of the former boss’s spoils.
With Cavaretta’s help, Nitti may have been able to find some of it over time, but there was only so much she could have known. When Nitti drew a long prison stretch of his own, he took a “suicide” bullet through the brain in March of 1943 along the Illinois Central tracks. Butch’s death in combat later that year ended any possible leads to the treasure. Many had searched since, but no one had ever struck paydirt.
I think that was supposed to be the big revelation, the Eureka! moment where I saw it all, where all the tumblers lined up and the great big vault door just swung wide open.
Maybe I was dense.
“So the money’s gone, right? How much could there have been anyhow?”
“No!” thundered Carpaccio. “For Christ’s sake, do you understand what I’m tawkin’ about here? Do you know how many millions of dollars Capone stashed before he went up? Da guy had houses from Peoria to St. Paul,” he said, highlighting the geography for me with a sweeping gesture of his nonsmoking hand. “Dey say Johnny Torrio took bags of money—millions—when he quit da rackets. Believe me, Big Al learned from dat. Sam Giancana once told me he saw one of Capone’s joints up in Wisconsin dat had a safe full of fuckin’ gold bullion and escape tunnels dug out underground. Dis guy was da greatest operator anybody ever saw, God rest his gangster’s soul.”
Some of the tumblers were starting to line up for me now. Tales of Capone’s largesse were legion when I was kid. I’d seen him get out of a car once on Taylor Street when I was eight or nine. The older boys were jumping and pointing, the way the bobbysoxers did a decade later for Sinatra at the Paramount. The guy had that kind of star power. He controlled the entire city, and there was no doubting he’d acquired vast sums of money in his vicious surge to the top. I remember him handing dollar bills to neighborhood kids as they flooded the street, nearly stampeding me in the crush before I found sanctuary on a lightpole. That was a memory I hadn’t recalled for the better part of thirty years, but it came to me then as Carpaccio spun his web.
“Hey, you listenin’ to me?”
To my chagrin, I realized then that I’d been sucked in, my cigarette burned halfway down to my knuckle. I should’ve known better.
“Yeah, I’m listening,” I said, “but it’s all bunk. I’m sure Capone’s boys found every penny he squirreled away, especially after he came out of the pen in a diaper.”
“Dat why you was daydreamin’ there, Buonomo?” His grin was all-encompassing now. “Come on, you know you wanna believe it.”
“I believed in La Befana once, too. If your ‘treasure’ is so big, then why doesn’t your overlord, Giancana, have any interest? Maybe because he already cadged it all?”
His head shook vigorously. “Nah, I tawked to Sam about dis last night; he thinks it’s all gone, too. He said he looked on and off for a long time before givin’ up.”
“Well, there you go,” I scoffed.
“But Sam doesn’t have what I have.”
“And just what in hell is that?”
He flicked his cigarette onto the floor and mashed it with a hoof then pointed a beefy finger at me. “You.”
I stood up. “I’ll be leaving now. Don’t worry, I’ll see myself out.”
Carpaccio unleashed a simpering laugh. “You don’t remember me, do you?”
“Not before last night.”
He grinned, raising a hand to the weathered hat on his head. “It took me a while, too. First, da t’ing with Gino—dat didn’t mean too much. Then I see you wit’ Sam, hear some guys whispering your name. I kinda thought I knew you, but it still didn’t connect. Den you get loud with Mr. Giancana and bird-dog my date and I ask myself, what kind of coglione is dis guy packin’ here? Finally, one of my guys shows me your name in the paper today, and as I’m reading the words ‘war hero,’ it hits me all at once—so to speak.”
He slowly tipped his hat back, revealing his massive forehead. High up in his balding hairline there was a pinkish slit. It ran jaggedly downhill toward his eyebrow, darker and uglier where the sun had weathered it. A battle scar—the kind you might get from getting hit with a beer bottle in a brawl.
I felt a chill growing deep inside me.
“O’Hare,” he continued, “some local guy, a bar . . . way back during the war . . .”
He rubbed those massive hands together then, stared straight across at me.
I froze as the recognition swept in. The Vernon Park Tap.
He broke into a big, broad grin. “Now you got it.”
I could feel my cheeks flushing. “You were the guy at the bar,” I whispered.
“Been a long time, pal,” he growled. “And dat’s how come I know you was tight wit’ O’Hare.” He flipped a digit up to his temple. “’Cuz I heard youse two tawkin’ da night you gave me dis.”
His eyes were burning, nostrils flaring wide as he relived the beaning.
He had me way back on my heels. I sat down again, began playing for time. “Okay, so that was me. What of it? You guys got tough, we defended ourselves.”
“Fair enough . . . We can make that part right some other time. Right now, I’m more concerned with discussin’ how O’Hare was tawkin’ about how he used to come up here in the summers and hang out with the old man, go fishing and sailing on the lake, take in some ball games—shit like that. Like that dog-track hustler was da father of da year or somethin’.”
“A real mensch, I’m sure. And you want to go from Boy’s Life stories to Butch telling me how his father stole millions of dollars from the most feared man in America?”
Carpaccio spun his hand around in the air several times. “You guys was reminiscin’ about his dad, and you was . . . whaddya call it . . . comrades? Who’s to say he didn’t confide in you? Who better to trust with a secret like dat?”
I was incredulous. “And because we spent a few weeks together, he’d tell me about something that outrageous? If he even knew himself, which I doubt very highly. He was no fan of his father’s business life, I can tell you that.”
“See, he told ya dat much. I bet there’s more.”
I held my palms up, shook them. “Are you pulling my chain here? What do you want from me? I’ve got nothing for you on this.”
He stared across at me, breathed heavily through his mouth, licked his dark lips. “All right, it’s a long shot. But just t’ink about it, huh? Capone’s dead. O’Hare—da bot’ of ’em—dead. Nitti, Cavaretta, dat greasy pig Guzik, anyone connected to Capone—dey’re all dead. You may be the last link to da money. If you remember anyt’ing, anyt’ing at all dat helps me find it, you’ll be very handsomely rewarded. Be a nice way for you to square yourself for dis, too,” he said, gesturing toward the gouge on his scalp.
I scoffed at him. “Count me out. I never heard of a partnership with you guys that didn’t get notarized with an ice pick anyway. You wanna look for the lost gold of the Incas, go right ahead—but leave me out of it.” I sat straight up, pushed my chair back. “I’ve enjoyed this trip down memory lane. Now I’m going to see that my nephew got home and let his father know where he was so he never sets foot in this place again.”
“Nice kid, isn’t he?” he said, breaking into a smile. “Be a shame to lose him.”
His grin was three degrees beyond the pale. I could feel my pulse quickening and my face ratcheting down, but I didn’t give in to the anger that was building inside me. Across the desk, the big gangster stared at me, his slit-smirk revealing his pleasure at successfully pushing one of my buttons.
“My off
er stands,” he said. “You can reach me here.” He ginned up a particularly malicious leer. “And don’t worry, I know where you can be reached too.”
My hands went to his desk. Leaning forward on them, I said very quietly, “You just crossed the line right there. Leave my family out of this—all of us.”
Carpaccio sneered back at me silently, his gaze fixed, his eyes unblinking.
I stood up. “Don’t think that because I’ve been away I’ve forgotten how things work here. I was raised in these streets, Carpaccio . . . the Chicago way.”
I turned around, opened the door, stopped, looked back at him. “Sorry about your face.”
Then I left, walking wordlessly past the room full of felons and out into the cool quiet of the Taylor Street night.
24
I processed things out on the way back. There was no good way to spin Carpaccio’s connection to Claudia or his innuendo about my family. On the other hand, both of us had made it patently clear we wanted nothing whatsoever to do with him, something even his simian brain would have to acknowledge. And I had just emphatically rejected his fool’s-gold fantasy as well. Like a nearby hornet, he warranted a wary eye, but as long as we all kept our distance, things would probably be okay. I was only in town a few days anyhow.
Sufficiently assuaged for the time being, I had a bit of a chuckle at myself. Only I could go for a simple reminiscence walk in the old ’hood and get invited on an archaeological dig with the Outfit.
Francesca was waiting in the front room when I came back. She didn’t actually have a candle in her hand, but it was nice to know there was a light in the window for me just the same.
We sat together at the kitchen table awhile and talked. One of the bulbs in the overhead fixture was burned out, same as always, but the dim glow was nice, almost a made-to-order sepia. It cast a pleasant hue over us as we tried to fill in all the empty spaces, wishing through the years and her tears that things had gone differently.
Just before she went up to bed, she said, “By the way, I dug out an old keepsake earlier. You gave it to me when I was a girl. I hadn’t seen it in years.”
My Kind of Town Page 8