Hope Rides Again

by Andrew Shaffer

  “Which gang hit the freight yard?” I asked.

  “How should I know? I’m just telling you what I read in the paper, man.”

  Morrison started to light another cigarette, and I snatched the lighter from his hands.

  “I’ve half a mind to cut that damn ponytail of yours.”

  Barack held me back. “Joe—”

  “Wait,” Morrison said. “Nobody gets away with a robbery like that without the cops getting their cut. People in the neighborhood talk. Informants talk. Somebody in a squad car has taken a pay-off to keep the heat turned down, to bury this thing.”

  “Crooked cops,” I said. Been there, done that.

  “Just ‘cops,’” Morrison said. “Calling them crooked in this town is an oxymoron.”

  “You mean ‘redundant,’” Barack said.

  I pocketed the lighter. “Nobody’s going to cross the thin blue line to talk to us. I’m already in hot water with the mayor’s fixer. If we go sniffing around, asking questions like what you’re asking, we could wind up in Chicago overcoats. Six feet under.”

  Barack shot me a perturbed look. “Chicago overcoats? The last person to actually say that out loud was John Dillinger. Just say coffins, Joe. Coffins.”

  I grunted an acknowledgment of his request but by no means a yessir. Barack had asked me to be part of his campaign in 2008 because he wasn’t looking for a “yes man.” I wasn’t about to start now.

  I was, however, going to brush up on my Chicago slang when I had a chance.

  “I suppose you’ve got a plan for getting us this insider information,” Barack said.

  Morrison nodded enthusiastically. “Cops talk. All you have to do is follow the trail of loose lips. And like I told you, I know people.”

  I couldn’t believe Barack was seriously entertaining this fool. Where did he get off using top secret information as a bargaining chip? I’d been in government longer than he had. I’d been chairman of the foreign relations committee before he could even walk. This wasn’t the first time Barack had teased me with his superior clearance level. One of his favorite sayings was, Only one of us knows what happened in Roswell, Joe.

  Morrison scribbled a name and address on a Subway napkin. There was a half-eaten meatball sub on white sitting on the computer desk, next to a laptop.

  I took the napkin, expecting it to read THE RED DOOR.

  It didn’t.

  “Gal Capone, the alley,” I read aloud. “Which alley?”

  “It’s a club,” he said. “The Alley. A speakeasy on Broadway. You can find the cross street online. Some of the guys who come in here talk about it.”

  “Gal Capone?” Barack said.

  “Gal owns the place. If anyone can help you on the down-low, it’s Gal. She’s got girls on her payroll in every ward. But you have to understand: I can’t guarantee you’ll like what you find.”

  “There are no guarantees in life,” Barack said, rising to his feet.

  Morrison stared at him expectantly. “Well?”

  “Well?” Barack repeated. “Joe and I need to get on the road and check this out. Thank you for your help. Now if—”

  “No, the thing. The thing you said you’d tell me.”

  “Oh, right,” Barack said, as if he’d simply forgotten his end of the bargain. I’d known all along that he never intended to tell the store manager a damned thing about Roswell, aliens or otherwise. Classified information was classified for a reason. You couldn’t go around trading it for favors whenever it benefited you personally. Even if you were doing it for the right reasons.

  Barack told me to head on out, that he’d catch up with me in a second.

  I waited at the front of the store. Thirty seconds passed. I looked outside through a small break in the posters. Nobody out there. I’d expected the Secret Service, or Rahm’s man in green. But there was nobody following us. Nobody but our own shadows.

  28

  Barack joined me in the front of the store and handed me a stocking cap. He put one on—gifts from our new friend.

  There were, Barack had once told me, two truly spectacular months in Chicago: June and October. Today wasn’t bad, though. You couldn’t ask for better weather to do a little amateur detective work in.

  I knew it wasn’t going to last. When the front passed, another long, deep freeze would set in that wouldn’t lift until April or May, and only then to make way for freezing rain. God bless Chicago, they still played baseball outdoors. The way America’s pastime was meant to be played. Playing indoors was blasphemy, like low-fat ice cream.

  While we waited on a cab, I asked Barack what he’d told Morrison.

  “About Roswell?” Barack said. “You know I can’t tell you that, Joe. That’s classified information, on a need-to-know basis. You’re better off not knowing.”

  “You’re saying that you told him? The truth?”

  The taxi interrupted us, and Barack didn’t say another word about it. I didn’t want to bring it up, even with the closed partition between us and the driver. By the time we reached our destination, I had other mysteries on my mind.

  The address we’d found online turned out to be a laundromat in the middle of a block of low-rise brick buildings. I looked from my phone to the address and back again. “GPS says this is it. Maybe it closed down?”

  Barack rubbed his chin. “Could be in an alley behind the building. Or…”

  He went inside without completing his thought.

  Three commercial dryers were running. A college-age girl was sitting at a table, head down in a Gillian Flynn paperback. Barack marched right on through the laundromat. He stopped at a navy-blue police phone-call kiosk, the freestanding kind they used to have in Great Britain. It was tucked into a corner. Was there a phone inside that connected to the Chicago PD? Had the longhair sent us here on some sort of wild moose chase?

  Barack opened the kiosk and turned to me. “Ever been to a speakeasy?”

  “Just how old do you think I am?”

  “I’ll let you go first,” he said, ushering me into the box. It was bigger on the inside than it looked, and opened to a wide staircase leading up to the second floor. A single light—an “Edison” bulb—hung from the ceiling on the landing, giving off a warm orange glow.

  I pounded on the metal door at the top of the steps, eager to get this over with. We shouldn’t have shrugged off Barack’s Service detail. Who knew what was lurking behind this door? We could have been walking into a trap. Now that we weren’t tethered to security, we were exposed. Naked. Not as naked as I’d been in the sauna, but close to it.

  “What happens when there’s a fire, and the fire department doesn’t think to go through a phone booth looking for an address?” I asked Barack. “How do all these businesses in Chicago make money without signs? Who are they trying to fool?”

  “I’d imagine that if there’s a fire, they’d follow the smoke.” He paused. “But, you know, this city doesn’t have a great track record with fires, so maybe you’re on to something.”

  I pounded again. And waited.

  “I’d feel better about this if I had some hardware,” I whispered.

  He cast me a sidelong glance. “Your guns are locked up at home right now, aren’t they? Tell me you’re a responsible gun owner, Joe.”

  “You can’t go out on a book tour armed to your teeth.”

  “I believe Hunter S. Thompson tried that once.”

  He wasn’t somebody I’d read in college. “How’d that work out for him?”

  Barack chuckled. “His pistol went off during one of his readings. Same bookstore you were in earlier today, if you can believe it. Shot the hat off some poor fellow seated in the back row.”

  “Was he OK?”

  “The guy who’d been shot? I don’t know. Hunter was pissed when his literary agent confiscated the gun.”

  “Terrible accident.”

  “Oh, it wasn’t an accident,” Barack said. “He was shooting at a copy of Nixon’s autobiography.”


  “Makes sense,” I said, though none of it did. We’d clearly been to some very different book readings over the years.

  Finally the door creaked open. A bald head poked out. It belonged a weak-jawed man with a black goatee and too much eyeliner. He even had a couple of tiny metal studs on his forehead. Horns. It’d taken me seventy-six years to look the devil in the eye, and I could barely keep a straight face.

  “Yessssssssss?” he said, drawing out the S so that he sounded like a snake hissing.

  “We’re here for the early show,” Barack said.

  “There is no early show,” Beelzebubba said. “The Alley is closed. We open at nine, at which time—”

  “Step aside,” I said. “We’re here to see Ms. Capone.”

  “Everyone comes for Madam Capone,” he said with a wink, as if he’d just invented puns. I’d heard worse on the Senate floor.

  I stuck my foot between the door and the frame.

  He sneered at me. “I am sorry, sirs, we are closed—”

  “Not today, Satan,” I said, wrenching the door from him and opening it wide enough for Barack and me to barge in. Beelzebubba tripped backward over his own feet, then scurried off down a narrow hallway like a spooked cockroach. He disapeared around a corner.

  Barack shook his head. “Chicago goths.”

  29

  I took the lead, marching us down the first of many labyrinthine hallways in pursuit of Beelzebubba. More old-timey bulbs lit the way. I couldn’t tell if it was an interior decorating choice, or just an indication of how long the Alley had been in operation. Was there a fire exit, or was the staircase we’d come up the only way in and out of the club? How much had they paid off an inspector to approve an arrangement such as this? I was genuinely curious. In Wilmington, you couldn’t put up a treehouse without a permit.

  “I bet they don’t even have a liquor license,” I said.

  “That would certainly lend some authenticity to the speakeasy vibe,” Barack said. I thought I heard admiration in his voice. “The Prohibition era was interesting. Many parallels to today, if you think about it. We’re fighting some of the same fights—the growing divide between urban and rural Americans, the rising anti-immigrant fervor. The Moral Majority. We’re repeating the past.”

  “Nothing ever changes,” I said.

  “Some things change. Civil rights, equality. I’m talking about the patterns we’re doomed to repeat. If you take the long view of human history…”

  He droned on. There wasn’t any way to get a word in when Barack Obama was in professor mode. I knew exactly what he was talking about, anyway. A hundred years ago, the Irish had been the immigrant boogeymen. The popular image of the leprechaun began life as a xenophobic political cartoon. Once, nobody thought a Catholic could be president. Then Kennedy came along. From time to time, we liked to pat ourselves on the back and think we were done with hate. Recent history had shown us it didn’t take much to awaken it, though.

  We rounded the bend and found ourselves in a candlelit room with a handful of empty tables. It was roughly the size of my first college dorm, where we’d squeezed in two guys (and a couple girls on the weekends).

  A spotlight switched on, illuminating a stage at the front of the room. A black curtain, serving as a backdrop, was swaying slightly.

  I tapped Barack on the arm. “Over there,” I said, pointing to the stage.

  He swatted my hand away. “I’m not blind, Joe.”

  A trumpet sounded, a snare kicked in. A bass joined them. A jazz trio was playing—not live, but the sound reproduction was so crisp you could have fooled me. It had to be a Bose system. Nobody did audio like Bose.

  “Welcome to the stage the one, the only, Gal Capone!”

  Barack took a seat at the table nearest the stage, and I followed suit. I searched around for Beelzebubba, but the spotlight made it difficult to see anything else in the club.

  “I have a bad feeling about this,” I whispered to Barack.

  He shushed me like I’d blurted the winning lottery numbers in the middle of a Wawa. Before I could tell him to knock it off, the curtain parted. A woman emerged, stepping onto the stage one long leg after another, each in fishnet stockings. Her skin was ivory, blinding in the spotlight, her hair and lips cherry red like a ‘67 Corvette straight off the assembly line. She was wearing a sparkling, diamond-encrusted bikini top and bottom…and nothing else. Her eyes were closed as she stalked the stage, writhing in slow motion to the music.

  “This reminds me of a bachelor party I once went to. You know Bob Dole? Well, it was 1975, and—”

  Barack shushed me again. The look on his face said it all. Too bad. It was quite the story, and I couldn’t guarantee I’d be in the mood to tell him later—

  Something smacked me in the face and fell into my lap.

  The dancer’s glittering top.

  Slowly, I looked up and was relieved to see that Gal wasn’t topless. She was wearing pasties, which were made entirely of red sequins. I say “relieved” because I wasn’t sure if I’d be able to look Jill in the eye had I been patronizing a club of ill repute, where women pranced around in their birthday suits. Had Barack known what type of club this was ahead of time? He’d seemed awfully certain about entering through the phone booth…

  I was about to risk him shushing me again when Gal slid off the stage and cartwheeled toward us, landing in one magnificent, fluid motion. The spotlight followed her. She stood tall over me and held out a palm.

  I tried to hand back her top, but she shook her head.

  “I think she wants you to dance with her,” Barack said, smirking.

  “No thanks,” I said. “I’m not much of a dancer.”

  She stuck out her bottom lip, making a pouty face. I’d never been susceptible to such female manipulations. It wasn’t going to work on me.

  “My friend’s got some moves,” I said. “You ever watch the first Inaugural Ball? Barack—”

  His eyes went wide. “Ix-nay on our ames-nay.”

  Before I could change up my story, she switched her focus to Barack, staring at him expectantly. The smirk dropped from his face. I knew there was no way in Sam Hill he was getting up on that stage with this woman, even if we were the only ones in the room. For one thing, if Michelle found out—

  Barack rose and nearly tipped over.

  “Everything OK?” I asked. At first I suspected he’d been drugged, but we hadn’t had anything to drink. Then I followed Barack’s eyes down to his chair—his shins were tied to the legs with rope. I made a move to help him out but found that my own legs wouldn’t move either. While we’d been entranced by the show, Gal’s master of ceremonies had tied us up. Beelzebubba, emerging from under our table, tossed the end of the rope up to his partner, and before Barack and I could react, he’d turned our chairs around so that we were back to back. Gal Capone flung the rope around us, round and round, up and down, trapping our arms against our bodies until we were bound like hogs on the way to market.

  30

  “So, you come here often?”

  I could feel Barack twist his head behind me. “Joe, now’s not the time.”

  We were alone, tied up in the middle of the blackened club. The spotlight had been turned off. Gal and Beelzebubba had disappeared without a word, despite my adamant protestations.

  We’d been sitting back to back for at least fifteen minutes. I tried to twist my arm so that I could get a look at my watch, but the ropes were too tight to allow even that little bit of movement. Every time I pushed back, they seemed to constrict like an anaconda. I’d have bet money she’d used a modified Miller’s knot.

  “We walked right into that one,” I said, shaking my head. “Did you ever think for one minute that we were walking straight into a trap?”

  “It crossed my mind,” Barack said.

  “And you didn’t say anything?”

  “I assumed it had crossed your mind as well.”

  “It did, but you know what happens when you assu
me.”

  “What happens, Joe?”

  “This,” I said through gritted teeth. “This.”

  “It’s going to be OK. Relax.”

  “You have a plan?” I whispered.

  “I think it’s pretty clear that I don’t. If I did, we would have already turned the tables on these goofballs.”

  “Damn. I thought maybe you had planned to get caught.”

  “That’s not a very good plan, Joe.”

  “I didn’t think so, but I was holding out hope. You’re supposed to be the one who’s never caught off guard. You’re the cool guy. I’m the hothead. Remember?”

  He didn’t say anything. The music had long since stopped, but my ears were still ringing. The club was a small, intimate space, and the jazz had been cranked to eleven.

  “Nothing?” I said.

  “You know, I’m getting tired of hearing that I’m the ‘cool guy.’”

  “It’s a compliment.”

  “You want to know why I wore the tan suit today?” he asked.

  “You had a stroke?”

  “It’s because I’m tired of being the Cool President. I want to be myself again. Being the Cool President means I’m smart (but not too smart), funny (but not too funny). It means I know what 420 is and can name every member of both the Beatles and One Direction. The Cool President enjoys the taste of craft beer but knows there’s a time and a place for everything—if I’m in the bleachers at Wrigley, God forbid, it’s Old Milwaukee Time or GTFO. And, yeah, the Cool President drops a naughty acronym every once in a while.

  “And before some word nerd points it out, I know that’s technically an initialism and not an acronym. IDGAF.