I threw my hands over my head, then bit a knuckle. I started to curse him.
Then I froze in place.
As I looked at Sal across the room, I caught the water intake pipe in my peripheral vision. Behind it, underneath the lip of the overhanging floor, I saw . . . something. I started forward slowly as if entranced, then faster.
Sal cocked his head, cheek sticking out to one side with a mouth full of ground pork. “Whu izz id?” he mumbled.
There was a ladder on the side of the water pipe. I followed it down with my eyes, to the narrow slit behind it.
Claudia saw it on my face. “Ma che fai?” she asked excitedly.
I didn’t say a word, just smiled dumbly. Some things you suspect, some things you guess at, and some things you just know.
Hopping over the rail, I called for one of the lanterns. “C’mon, c’mon!” I urged as Claudia ran it over.
I took it, climbed down several rungs, hung the light into the dark space behind the pipe. You might’ve built Soldier Field in the time it took my eyes to adjust.
But then there it was. Not a door, but a passageway. I swung around off the ladder, stepped onto the crosshatched steel flooring, my heel clicks echoing in the tight space. I leaned back, looked up. The faces above me were alive with curiosity.
“What is it? What do you see? Is there a keyhole?”
“Let you know in a sec. Hang tight.”
I shined the lantern down the passageway. Yellow light fell on a rusty iron surface twenty feet down. I walked toward it.
It was a door. The door had no handle, but it did have a pair of inch-long holes in the center.
In the middle of the letters CWW.
Senses afire, fingers tingling, I withdrew the key from my pocket, placed it against the door, pushed it in.
The teeth fit.
I held my breath, twisted my wrist. The big lock opener turned, each of its two shafts rotating in the curved channels next to their respective holes. Tumblers clicked inside with a pronounced thunk. The door cracked open almost imperceptibly.
My heart skipped.
I took a very deep breath, pulled back on the key, the iron door swinging open on rusty hinges that might not have been opened in thirty years.
The others were yelling above me. “What is it?” they cried.
“I heard something click, Joe!”
“For God’s sake, tell us!”
“Ten more seconds,” I shouted.
I waved the light into the inky space, stepped inside, the smells of mildewing cardboard, corroding metal, and the inland sea suffusing my nostrils. As my eyes adapted, I began to make out shapes in the room: sections of pipe, canvas bags, scattered crib detritus. So far I was ice cold.
I stepped inside, brought the light to bear on the objects beyond the installation gear. Suddenly, I got a lot warmer.
The light fell on stacks and stacks of Canadian whiskey boxes, leather ledger books piled on a wooden bench, a roulette wheel—Prohibition bric-a-brac all, but none of it terribly valuable except to the Chicago Historical Society.
I pivoted again, aiming the lantern into the very back of the room, swinging it left then right. The light hit an off-white shape about the size of a barrel. I stepped forward, training the beam on it. I realized then that the object was a burlap cloth, and that it was covering something. Something worth covering even in a hidden locker.
My senses crackled.
I closed in, breathing heavier, grinning crazily, a wild rush of excitement pulsing through me. Greedily, I ripped off the cloth, pinpointing the light in the dank air, my mouth open wide in anticipation as I beheld:
Bocce balls.
Whole sets of them, stacked up like twelve-pound shot on a brass monkey, eight to a rack, ten racks total.
Lawn bowling sets. Like the ones Vernon told me Capone’s boys had used.
I’d bet my life on this gamble.
And I’d gotten bocce balls.
83
I’d been sitting on the floor several minutes before Claudia finally entered the room.
“Ha-loooo?” she called out.
“Here,” I replied dejectedly.
“What did you find? Why didn’t you answer us?”
I made a wry face, held up a green ball, adjusted the light so she could look at it.
She took it, turned it over several times, made a puzzled glance. “Bocce.” She sighed. “Heavy, no?”
“Maybe Capone exercised with them,” I said, smirking. “Well, maybe there’s something else in here worth a buck or two. Let me know if you find any mummified heads.”
We began to rummage through the junk, Claudia singing softly in Italian while I ruminated on my looming problems with Carpaccio, wondering how things could possibly get any worse.
Then they did.
A shout arose upstairs from the intake room followed by the report of a large pistol. A man groaned then fell.
“Stay here—don’t move!” I whispered.
For want of a better weapon, I grabbed a bocce ball then rushed down the narrow passage, clambering up the ladder steps by twos.
I stuck my head up at the top just high enough to see, scanned the room. When I saw my childhood pal lying near the catwalk clutching his chest, I forgot myself.
“Sal!” I cried, standing upright on the top step. “Sal!”
He looked over at me, tried to shake me off. But he was too late.
A large man stood in the brick entryway, smoking weapon pointed my way, dark eyes glowering in the half-light of the crib.
Like a bad penny, Fiorello Carpaccio had turned up yet again.
“Buonomo!” he shouted in glee. “I knew I saw you in dat boat. Good t’ing Vinnie told me you said somet’in’ about Monroe Harbor on the phone—got dere just in time to see youse go by.”
He advanced through the archway, gun first, stopped twenty feet away. For the first time, I noticed a red sheen on his jacket sleeve. I realized then that he was the one who’d called out in pain in the tunnel; he was the one I’d winged. There wasn’t a lot of blood, and it was too high up to be serious, but it was something.
Across the room, Sal groaned weakly. His head sagged to the floor, his hand falling limp.
“Sal!” I shouted again. He didn’t move.
White rage flooded through me, clouding all reason. I reared back, whipped the bocce ball full force at Carpaccio’s head. As I did, I saw an orange blip from his gun, felt a quick jolt in my gut and a ringing reverberation in my hand.
The hurled ball struck the bricks above his head, dropped straight down, and wobbled crookedly away across the floor.
I looked down for a hole in my entrails, saw nothing. It took a second, but I realized the bullet had struck the steel ladder that I was leaning upon, the impact causing the zing and the vibration I’d felt. I’d been spared, but only for another second.
Carpaccio came forward, incredulous. “Jesus Christ, dat missed? I’ve never had to work so hard in my life just to kill someone.”
He lurched toward me, the big automatic in his hand. He stopped ten feet away, almost drooling, eyes hungry with hate. “I’m gonna shoot you in dose oversize balls of yours, den I’m gonna dress you out with my knife,” he seethed. “Any last words?”
“Yeah,” I murmured through my amazement, “I know where the treasure is.”
He snickered. “Dat’s good. You are consistent, aren’t ya?”
“I’m looking at it, Carpaccio.”
He blinked, lowered his head. “Come again?”
“At your feet, Blin
d Lemon. Take a look.”
And there, just a yard away from the mob boss, lay the fractured bocce. The casing had cracked when it struck the wall, a good chunk of it splitting off. A shiny, half-moon dome pushed up from the broken ball, like a chick’s head peeking out of an egg.
But it was no chicken inside that ball.
It was the solid gold core.
84
We both stared in awe at it, everything now clear as a winter’s morn. Capone, well known to have gold bar, coin, and jewelry stashes throughout the Midwest, had melted down some of his treasure into balls and had them packed in fake bocce casings. In an era when violin cases, iceboxes, engine blocks, stuffed bears, and even corpses had been filled with guns, hooch, or loot, it was hardly out of the ordinary for him to have sought another way to hide something.
But it was still ingenious. And likely even more ingenious for Easy Eddie O’Hare to have transported them out of the Lexington via underground railway to a waiting boat tied up along the river.
My mind made lightning-quick calculations: my best guess of the price of a troy ounce of gold, the number of troy ounces in a pound, the weight of that ball in pounds.
Times eight balls.
Times ten racks.
Plus the pallini, the little object balls.
It wasn’t ten million dollars, but it was a whole helluva lot of money.
And now I was looking at the only thing between me and that bocce ball bonanza: a very angry mob capo and the very big axe he had to grind.
Sal moaned lightly from across the room. He was still alive. The only thing I could do now was offer Carpaccio all the gold if he’d let me help Big Horn. But that would expose Claudia. And with the gold in hand, there wasn’t one reason in the world for him to let us live and better than a million not to.
Carpaccio stooped to pick up the ball, held it up to the light, his eyes reflecting the brilliant sparkle of the very precious metal.
I didn’t have time to cook up a plan, I just started talking.
“Listen, that man you just shot is a Chicago cop. His partner knows he’s here with me.”
He kept staring at the ball in his big, scarred hand, enraptured.
“Carpaccio! Are you listening? He dies and you get the chair.”
He looked up. “Huh?”
“Let me help him. You keep all the gold. I don’t care, just let me help my friend.”
“Where’s the rest? Down there?” he asked, pointing with his weapon.
“Yes. I’ll bring it up. You’re going to need my help loading it on the boat.”
He took aim. “Nah, I’ll load it myself. The fisherman I hired can help me.” He chuckled at his cunning and good fortune. “Funny what fifty bucks and a gun’ll get ya in this town.”
“Uh . . . would your fisherman be the one I hear motoring away, probably on his radio alerting the Coast Guard?”
“Whaaaat?” He took a step backward, turned his ear toward the crib entrance, listening intently to the fading sound of a boat motor. “Son of a bitch!” he shouted.
I grinned. “You might’ve wanted to give him a hundred. Looks like we’re partners again.”
“Like hell we are. Gimme the keys to your boat!”
“It doesn’t have a key, it has a marine ignition system. A lummox like you could never figure it out—you won’t even find the fuel switch. You shoulda spent a little time in the navy, you might’ve learned those kinds of things in your spare time aboard ship.”
He spit out a raft of profanities. It sounded like one of the big boys in the ape house in Lincoln Park letting loose.
I was stalling for time, flat out lying. There was no such thing as a “marine ignition system,” at least not on the Pelecanos, whose key was in my pocket. But Carpaccio didn’t know that. And any time my bluff bought me was more than he was giving me. Every second was a chance to turn something else in my favor.
“Look,” I said, stepping off the ladder, hands up, “I’m going to help my friend. Then I’ll go down and get the other balls—there’s a whole rack of them. We’re doing this my way—you go down there, I take the boat and leave you here.”
He parted my hair with a shot.
“We’re going down there together—you first. I’ve had it to here with your tricks,” he growled, gesturing toward his throat with his free hand.
He had me in check again, and he didn’t even know it. If he went down in that storeroom, he’d find Claudia and the balance would tip back to him.
I put one foot on the rung below me, hesitated, trying to come up with another stall.
Then I felt a tap on my ankle, looked down, and saw Claudia at the base of the ladder, a workman’s apron slung over her shoulder.
“Make some room here, eh? Lady coming up—with a package.”
85
Claudia handed the apron to me. I had to put both hands on it to lift it so I knew it contained a couple of the balls, which I estimated at an easy fifteen pounds apiece.
“Gimme,” Carpaccio said, almost drooling, overjoyed at finding both the treasure and the woman he coveted in the same place.
I slung the apron over to him. Keeping his weapon on me, he squatted down, picked up a ball, slammed it into the concrete floor. It split like a coconut shell, the wooden casing fracturing along the grooved lines etched into the ball. He eye-checked me again, shook the core free of its shattered casing. The metal center was as big as a grapefruit. A grapefruit made of pure, glistening gold.
He broke into an enormous smile.
“Are you happy now, Fiorello?” Claudia asked sarcastically.
“Oh, I’m very happy,” he answered. “I’ll be even happier when I have the rest of these babies.”
“Okay,” she said, “I’ll get them for you—and something else.”
“What?”
“Me.”
Carpaccio and I both did double takes. I turned, looked into her eyes, shooting question marks at her.
“How’s that work?” he asked.
“Yes, how does that work, dear?”
“It’s simple,” she said. “Carpaccio, I am going to go with you. It’s what you say you always wanted, non è vero?”
I stared at her, incredulous, unable to speak.
Carpaccio’s eyes widened under his brutal brow at the thought of something he wanted almost as badly as the gold. “And?”
“You let Joe go—and the friend if he is alive. They will not tell anybody.”
“Why should I take that chance? You belong to me anyway.”
“Not the way I am offering you now. I can be your girlfriend, your wife if you wish.”
I almost choked upon hearing that. “The hell you say. You—and that animale? Wife?”
She held up a finger, cut me off. “Is the only way, Joe.” She looked over at Carpaccio again. “Don’t you see, Fiorello, this way is best. Give to Joe a bocce or two, help him with his friend—and pray to God that he lives.”
“A bocce or two?” I cried. “That’s what I’m worth to you?”
“You are worth nothing to me dead, bello. If Signor Carpaccio lets you go, I will know that you are alive. That is something at least. I am sorry, baby; I think you must take any deal I get. What do you say, Fiorello? The police are probably coming. You want to deal, or do you want to keep shooting people and making a bigger and bigger mess?”
“Get the gold, Buonomo,” he said quietly. “You got two of my guys, I got one of yours. I keep the balls—all but one. You get that, I get the girl. Your friend ain’t gettin’ up—I hit ’im square.”
“You keep the woman I love? While I take money for my friend’s life? What kind of deal is that?”
“The only one I’m offering. Otherwise, I drop you right now, throw you and the cop in the lake, talk or bribe my way out of any hot water, and come back here in a few months and take all the gold.”
“Joe, please,” she pleaded. “Is the only way.”
I stared into her eyes, watched her getting a little farther away with each passing second.
“Okay,” I finally said, still reeling, “but let’s get going. Sal can’t wait.”
86
We all went below, Carpaccio sending me first and holding Claudia close so I wouldn’t get any “bright ideas,” as he put it. He and Bo’palazzo must’ve been reading from the same script.
The balls were too heavy to move in their racks, so I emptied out cases of the bootleg whiskey and placed them inside, four per, lugging the boxes to the edge of the intake bay. Carpaccio seemed to enjoy it all, driving me on and taunting me like a galley slave as I performed the heavy labor, even gibing me on how he was lightening my load as he slipped the two decased balls into his suit pockets.
With each trip into the storeroom, I took a hurried look around for anything that might be useful as a weapon. There were sections of pipe, whiskey bottles, and the balls themselves, but nothing to help me ward off a pistol held at a distance. On my last trip, I took a chance and pushed the ledgers off the wooden bench, hoping a knife or a blackjack—anything I could stash in my pocket for a quick strike—would magically appear.
The click of a pistol arming sounded behind me. “What the hell are you doing in dere?” Carpaccio roared from the doorway.
The ledgers lay on the floor before me. Most were unmarked. One, undoubtedly Easy Eddie’s, was entitled “Accounts, Hawthorne Park.” At the bottom of the pile, I noticed a brown portfolio with embossed lettering. It probably contained many things a grand jury would have found extremely compelling in 1932, but nothing that did a damn thing for me at that moment.
My Kind of Town Page 27