Embers & Ash (6 page)

NOTHING CRUSHED OUR SKULLS AND WE DIDN'T
have to crawl through sludge. Instead, traveling on, it was our noses that were assaulted.

“
Mamma mia,
” Doug said, sniffing the air, “do you smell that?”

“Are you kidding? How can I not?”

“It reminds me of the worst field trip I ever took,” he said. “A chicken farm on a hot day.
Disgusting
is too small a word for it.”

I slowed down, shining the flashlight in front of me. The tunnel ended abruptly. Moving the beam, I said, “Is that a door?”

Doug brushed cobwebs from it, showing a painted hand pointing upward and the words
To Fillmore Avenue
. “Fillmore?” Doug said. “I've studied the crap out of Chicago streets and I've never heard of that one.”

“Look, no latch,” I said.

Doug pushed on the door but it didn't move.

I stepped up and thumped a shoulder against it, and it budged a little. “Help me,” I said, and we shoved together. It opened slightly, scraping at the ground.

“Pee-freakin'-yoo!” Doug said. “Something in there needs to change its socks!”

“Once more,” I said. We threw ourselves against it and the door popped open with a thunderous crash as we stumbled inside.

“Is that . . . it's a
snake
!” Doug said, rolling around in the dark. “Help me, Sara Jane! It's a huge—”

I shined a beam toward him. “Hose. It's a hose, Doug,” I said, moving the flashlight, spotting a light switch. I flipped it and lit the space. By pushing through the door, we'd knocked over a shelf that had been placed against it, scattering tools and round plastic tubs. I stared at one marked
Chromic Acid
and another,
Ammonia.
“I think we're in some type of storage area,” I said.

“Look,” he said, pointing around. “Three walls built from concrete blocks. But the one we came through . . . old brick.” He looked closely at the door. “It was sealed off. See how it was soldered at the edges? Someone did a lousy job.”

“Thank god,” I said. The stench was stronger, and I looked across at another door that was decades newer than the other one. “Come on,” I said. It opened easily, and we stepped onto a concrete platform that seemed to stretch forever in both directions. It was bisected by a slow-moving stream of beige goop, emanating a scent best described as slaughterhouse mixed with nursing home. Another platform, just as wide, ran along the other side of the stream. “Sewer. A big one and fairly modern, too,” I said, looking at the concrete walls and buzzing fluorescent lights. “This thing is fairly new . . . built way after Capone Doors. No painted hands.”

The muffled sound of traffic
guh-dunk-guh-dunk
ed from far above.

Doug tilted his head. “That's why there's no Fillmore Avenue,” he said. “Walking northeast from the bakery . . . I bet we're under the Eisenhower Expressway. Fillmore probably got wiped out to make room for it.”

“That's not all that got wiped out,” I said, staring around the cavernous space. “The tunnel used to continue somewhere up here, but it's gone. Built over by the city.”

“Now what?”

I shrugged. “No idea.”

“I know you don't want to go back, but I think we have to, and find another Capone Door. I hate the idea of squeezing into that tunnel, but it's our best option,” he said, reaching for the door that had closed behind us. “Okay, scratch that. It's locked.”

I looked at the punch code on the door, at the stencil reading
Maintenance C-316,
and at Doug biting his lip. “So, we head north,” I said, pushing the helmet back on my head, wiping at a line of sweat. “Hopefully, we'll find something that leads back to Joe Little's tunnels.”

Doug shifted the backpack and sighed. “Hopefully,” he said.

The platform was covered in a layer of slippery scum, with large pipes jutting from the wall, dripping into the terrible canal. We stepped over them carefully, our boots making suction noises as we walked. Now and then a big bubble of methane gas would pop lazily in the stream beside us, while cars and trucks rocketed overhead. It was as impossible to ignore the unbearable odor as it was the feeling of defeat, until I remembered something. “Last night,” I said, “I found a letter from Nunzio to Enzo hidden in the notebook.”

“Really? Where?”

“Under the back cover. It said all kinds of stuff but only one thing that mattered.”

“What?”

I grinned at him. “‘Ultimate power is freedom.'”

“Wow,” he said. “What the hell does that mean?”

“You got me. But I like it,” I said, as my ears perked up, hearing a familiar tune—someone whistling “Take Me Out to the Ball Game.” Carefully, with a finger to my lips, I pulled Doug into a dark corner.

Footsteps echoed toward us as a wiry guy in an orange vest and hard hat appeared on the platform across the stream. A walkie-talkie crackled, asking if he was at the door yet. The guy told it to relax and asked what the code was again. The walkie-talkie told him—
four-six-three
—as he stopped at a door stenciled with
Pump 12,
punched the buttons on a lock, and swung it open. A light flicked on and I squinted through the gloom, seeing the walls inside, made of old brick. After some clanking and hissing, the guy reemerged, slammed the door, held his nose, and told whoever was on the other end of the walkie-talkie that there was something in the air down here that reminded him of the Cubs. When the footsteps faded, I said, “Come on.”

“Over there?” Doug said, pointing at the stream. “Through
that
?”

“How else are we going to get to the other side?” I said. “What, you're scared to get dirty?”

“No. I'm scared of drowning in toilet paper and nightmare condoms.”

“It can't be that deep,” I said, stepping over a low railing and sliding in, the sludge rising to the top of my boots as my feet touched bottom. It was syrupy and warm even through rubber. I moved cautiously, terrified of the slightest splash. Doug eased in behind with the backpack on his head. I grabbed the railing on the other side, pulled myself up, and helped him climb up, too, right outside the door.

“Let us never speak of this again.” He shuddered as I punched four-six-three into the lock. Inside, the fluorescent light spread a yellowish glow. The pump dominated the room like a huge steel octopus, fat in the middle, pipes twisting off in several directions, the thickest ascending into darkness. Doug touched the wall and said, “It's the same brick as in the tunnels. But this place goes nowhere. Now what?”

Something else answered, high-pitched and insistent.

I turned to a tiny pair of gleaming yellow eyes.

“Antonio?” I said.

It wasn't possible, of course. The two original sewer rats that Great-Grandpa Nunzio had trained to guard Club Molasses decades ago, Antonio and Cleopatra, were long dead. But throughout the past six months, their descendants had appeared at critical moments to do what they'd been bred to do—aid and protect a Rispoli. This one twitched its worm tail, impatient, not the least bit intimidated, and scurried up the high middle pipe. I aimed the flashlight after it, seeing footholds, and said, “Let's go.”

“Whoa, time out,” Doug said. “I was willing to walk through a stream of human gravy, but follow a rodent to who-knows-where? Really?”

“At least it goes up.”

“At the very least.” He sighed.

We climbed quickly, leaving the ground far below. The helmet lights helped but the rat made the difference. It scrambled from foothold to foothold, guiding us upward, reassuring us with encouraging squeaks until it was quiet. I peered around, seeing nothing, and then spotted the little animal directly across from me, standing in the entrance to a tunnel. I knew rats were good jumpers; it had leaped across the three feet of air floating between the pipe and the tunnel entrance, and we'd have to do the same.

Running in a frenetic circle, the rat squeaked once in farewell and disappeared. “We have to jump over there,” I said to Doug. “Can you make it?”

“Of course. I'm in great shape,” he said nervously.

I took a deep breath and pushed off, landing solidly on both feet. Peering down into darkness and then at Doug hugging the pipe, I said, “Don't think too much.”

He looked down, and then back at me. “I'm thinking too much.”

“Jump!” I yelled, the word bouncing from the walls, and he did, but with his arms extended instead of feet first. He hit the ledge at his chest, fingernails digging at the brick floor, and began sliding backward. I grabbed his wrists and pulled like it was a tug-of-war, grinding my heels, yanking with all I had as he came barreling up and over, knocking me flat. While he lay on the path fidgeting and talking to god, I rose and looked at the wall across the chasm. Just like in the sewer, it was solid concrete. My guess was that once, long ago, the tunnel we occupied continued on the opposite side. I turned and looked at a pointing hand on the wall behind me with the words L
OOP—
¹
/
₂
MILE
.
Doug stood, foul-smelling and trembling. “Uh . . . is that your boots, or you?” I asked.

“At this point, what's the difference?” He shuddered, drawing out a cigarette and the steel lighter. “Sorry to be a cliché, but I really need a smoke.”

“Doug,” I said, “remember? Explosive gases?”

He glanced at the lighter, sighed, put it away, and followed me into the tunnel. We covered the half-mile in silence until he said, “Hey. Look.” I turned my flashlight on a pointing hand with the words M
ONADNOCK
B
UILDING—6
FLIGHTS UP
next to a passageway.

“We're beneath Jackson Street, downtown,” I said. “In the Loop.”

“There's another one,” he said, shining on the words S
HERMAN
H
OUSE
H
OTEL—VIA COAL
ELEVATOR
.
“Never heard of the place.”

“Must be gone. Knocked down and built over,” I said.

Our trek took us past more passageways leading to other phantom locations—Henrici's Ristorante, The Venetian Building, St. Hubert's Grill—until, slowly, the ever-present darkness was cut by weak illumination. It came from an entrance just ahead and we picked up our pace, hurrying toward it. Doug entered the large room first and I followed, gaping up at a cathedral-like ceiling, tall and airy, with light streaming through distant grates. There were no seeping pipes or flowing sewage, but instead, in the middle of the room, a circular bar. Empty bottles and overturned tumblers sat on it next to a rotary telephone and a ticker-tape machine, all of it caked in decades of dust.

“It's an octagon,” Doug said, staring around the stop sign–shaped room, “like an intersection or crossroad.” Each of the eight walls bore a sign above a tunnel entrance leading to a specific location. “Krauss Music Store, Bruno's Diner, House of Eng,” he read, nodding at three of the openings. “Never heard of those places, either.”

“Wrigley Field is still there, of course,” I said, picking up where he left off. “That tunnel leads to the Issel Building, that one goes to St. Alphonsus Church.” I turned and looked at the tunnel from which we'd emerged, its sign reading L
OOP
, which was now behind us. It was the seventh entrance, leaving one more. I walked across the room and stared at the words above the eighth tunnel. “Riviera Theatre,” I said, turning to Doug with a grin. “You know where the Riviera Theatre is, don't you?”

“Next to the Green Mill Lounge, across from Uptown National Bank,” he said. “Follow that tunnel and we'll end up beneath the Troika of Outfit Influence.”

“Where ultimate power is waiting,” I said quietly.

It was one of those pause-before-you-leap moments, and Doug exhaled, staring around the room. “There hasn't been anyone down here in a long time. The old telephone, that ticker-tape thingy . . . I wonder how it's survived.”

“The tunnel got cut off. It was forgotten,” I said, lifting the phone, hearing nothing. Knowing the Outfit as I did, I realized that the tunnels weren't used only to flee the law, or one another; they were also ideal places to conduct dirty business in private. As counselor-at-large, I could only think how perfect this room was—beyond perfect—for a sit-down. I looked at the bar's scarred surface and blew away a layer of grit, seeing hundreds of names, curses, and dates carved into the soft wood:

Beware! Dominick DiBello is a gun-packing fellow, 1939

Lefty Rosenthal marks cards and loads dice, the schmuck

1952, Good for me, bad for you!—Jimmy “the Bomber” Cattura

And finally, nearly obscured but still visible:

NR, C-a-L, era qui

“Nunzio Rispoli, Counselor-at-Large, was here,” I murmured, tracing the inscription with a finger. Doug was just inside the tunnel leading to the Riviera Theatre, moving a flashlight around. I started after him and hesitated—the pharaoh key chain was in one pocket, a pocketknife in the other. I took it out, returned to the bar, and began to scrape into the wood.

“Sara Jane,” Doug said, “let's go!”

“On my way!” I said, staring at my handiwork, carved directly below Nunzio's:

SJR, C-a-L, was here.

The mouth in the brick wall beckoned and I went to it. I glanced around the room once more, unsure if I'd ever pass this way again, and then the tunnel swallowed me up.

HEADED TOWARD THE RIVIERA THEATRE, TIME
no longer slipped away. Instead, we tracked it by the minute, having calculated that the walk from the tunnel intersection to the Troika of Outfit Influence would take an hour. That, combined with our true north direction—GPS was useless underground but Doug had thought to bring a compass—meant that we were close to our destination.

We traveled on, knowing we were close and saying little.

A long descent had begun after we left the tunnel intersection and now the rotten perfume of human waste reemerged. The mossy brick walls, no longer concrete, told us that the branch of the sewer system we'd entered was very old; Doug reminded me that some of Chicago's sewers had been in place for more than a hundred years. Just ahead came the sound of moving liquid—not the comforting rush of a clear stream but the spattering echo of something thick and noxious. Moving the beam through darkness, Doug said, “Whoa,” and raised an arm to stop me. He pointed the flashlight, and there it was—a waterfall of slimy waste spilling from a trio of pipes at the top of a high concrete wall. The brick floor of the tunnel ended a few feet in front of us; a twelve-foot abyss floated between it and the waterfall. We squinted into the stinking drop-off, unable to see the bottom. “Perfect,” Doug said, “dead end.”

“You're right. Too perfect,” I said quietly. “It reminds me of an Outfit guy, Bones something . . . Bones Caputo.”

“Quite a moniker,” Doug said.

“He goes around with this monstrous pit bull on a chain, Goliath. The dog's like a walking, snarling shark,” I said. “Months ago, I presided over a sit-down between Bones and his partner. They're bank robbers, hitting small neighborhood branches for a couple grand at a time. The partner suspected Bones was holding out, not giving him his fair cut. After a dose of cold fury, Bones confessed that he'd hidden the money. Guess where.”

“Kind of obvious, isn't it? In Goliath's doghouse.”

“You'd think so. But no . . . Bones is dumb, not stupid,” I said. “He'd been wrapping the cash in garbage bags and burying it in this disgusting hole in his backyard where he'd trained the dog to, you know . . . do his business.”

“Ugh . . . where no one in his right mind would look.”

“It's Outfit mentality,” I said, staring at the waterfall. “Hide something valuable where there appears to be nothing but a repulsive wall of shit.”

“You think ultimate power's behind that wall?”

I nodded, staring at the pipes spewing out gunk. “Nothing up there but concrete. There's got to be a tunnel or a door at the bottom,” I said, looking into the pit. “No ladder. No footholds. Okay, grappling hook it is.”

“We're going down there? Into
that
?”

“Not we. Me,” I said. “Attach it to something sturdy and lower me down.”

“For once, I won't argue . . . Be my guest,” he said, uncoiling the rope and hooking it to a nearby pipe.

“If I'm wrong and there's no entrance—”

“Then I'll hose you down and shoot you full of penicillin,” he said, “and we'll find another way inside.”

I looped the rope around my waist. “Hold on tight.”

“Hold your nose.”

Doug lowered me by inches until I could see what waited beneath. The waterfall emptied into a circular pool equipped with some type of gurgling pump, like a giant bowl of gross butterscotch pudding. I touched down on a walkway that wound around the pool, leading to a door. “I found it!” I said, pulling it open, hearing a low rumble, and then—

Ka-thump!

—I went down on my hands and knees as Poor Kevin, in his filthy ski mask and greasy plaid suit, leaped from a shadow and punched me in the head so hard, and—

Ka-thump! Ka-thump!

—I was kicked once, twice in the skull and rolled on my back to see Teardrop, its glowing red eyes cutting through the murkiness, as—

Ka-thump!

—Goatee dropped his boot squarely on my face, grinning with the same evil smirk as the devil tattooed on his chin, until—

“Sara Jane!”

I blinked up at my parents and Lou hovering over me, staring silently, not underground but in our living room, which was as violently trashed as the night they'd disappeared. A family portrait made creepy-clownish by our grinning naïveté clung to the mantel, slashed to ribbons. Cabinets were kicked in like mouths full of broken teeth, shelves splintered, the bust of Frank Sinatra shattered to pieces. The couch I lay on was gutted, with its cottony intestines spilled across the floor. I tried to sit up but a hand eased me back to the lacerated cushions, which were cold and sticky beneath my head. I turned from my dad to my mom to Lou, their eyes riveted on me in a troublesome, anxious way.

“See?” I said, “I kept going, kept looking. I'm almost there.”

Quietly, nearly inaudibly, my mother said, “We are alive . . .”

“Thank . . . god,” I croaked.

“In Sara Jane,” she hissed.

“Each day we wait . . . ,” Lou said, taking a slow, threatening step.

“For Sara Jane,” my dad continued with a blade of contempt in his words. He yanked me toward him, his voice rising as my mom and brother joined in, chanting, “Our daughter, our sister,” pausing to spit, “
our savior
 . . . Sara Jane.” And then my dad did something he'd never done in my life: he raised an open hand and slapped me so sharp and fast across the cheek that I froze, squeezing my eyes shut—

“Sara Jane!”

—and fluttering them open to Doug, his face tight with anxiety. I was on my back just outside the doorway and he was leaning over me, hands pressed together. “Sorry I hit you,” he said, “but I was scared you were dead.”

“I'm . . . alive?”

“Luck of the Sicilians, I guess,” he said, nodding inside the door, where a pile of brick and stone lay. “Part of the ceiling in there collapsed when you opened the door.”

“I heard it,” I said, struggling to sit up as the universe did a jackknife and a mule kicked me in the head. Pain reverberated through my skull like a controlled explosion. I leaned over, heaved bile, wiped my mouth with a shaky hand, and touched at the cuts and abrasions on my bare head. “Where's my helmet?” I wheezed.

“In pieces. If you hadn't been wearing it, I could've slapped you around all day and you'd still be lying there, forever,” he said. “Something hit you hard enough to knock you back outside the door. It sounded like the rest of the bricks and stuff came barreling down seconds later. If it had all fallen at once, you'd be a pancake . . . no, a crepe . . . a crepe run over by a steamroller hit by a—”

“Got it,” I said, hawking blood and recalling a blip from my fever dream. “I saw them,” I murmured.

“Who? Your family?”

“Yeah. They're angry at me, losing patience,” I said, feeling the trail of a tear. “If I don't save them soon, they could . . . all of them will—”

“Sara Jane,” he said, touching my shoulder, “you just got hit on the head with something very heavy. This one time, maybe give yourself a break, okay?”

I looked into the tunnel behind the door, and back at him. “We can climb over that stuff, but it might happen again. If you want to stay behind—”

“I just rappelled into a crap-filled pit,” he said. “If I was going to bail, it would've happened by now.” He pointed a flashlight and we climbed over the debris, careful not to touch a wall or brush the ceiling. The floor was powdery, the air stale and unmoving. The tunnel curved and ended at a ladder descending into gloom. We exchanged a glance and then began to climb down, first one rung, then another, Doug saying, “Relax. It'll hold. The law of averages says—”

And then the ladder collapsed beneath us.

The thing about free-falling is that it's too late to scream.

Your nervy stomach lurches at not being attached to the world any longer and your brain goes into turtle shell–protective mode. It's only when you land on something that's not soft, but that also doesn't kill you, that you're able to emit an oh-my-god-I'm-not-dead! sound. Mine was guttural—a raccoon backed over by an SUV—while Doug's was shrill and surprised, like an elderly nun hit with a water balloon.

I was able to speak first, saying, “Goddamn . . . ladders.”

“What are we lying in?” Doug groaned. “Please don't say sewage.”

I stood on the pile of stinking, caked dirt that had broken our fall. Pure circumstance had dropped us near an ancient industrial light switch mounted on the wall. Stumbling toward it, seeing its rusty tubing snake toward the surface, I flipped the handle to
ON
. First came an anemic
buzz
and then three of a dozen large, suspended lights hummed to life. I looked up at the mouth of the tunnel, high upon the wall from which we'd fallen; remnants of the ladder clung to it and the rest lay in pieces around us.

I turned slowly, staring at a vast, triangular room.

“It's, like, the size of an airplane hangar,” Doug said in awe, “but V shaped.”

I stared at the three soaring walls and said, “Those must be the foundations of the troika—the buildings that hold the Riviera Theatre, Green Mill, and the bank.”

“Which one is which?” he said.

I shrugged, brushing a stray lock of hair from my eyes. “I can't tell. But we're in a big, hidden pocket beneath them.” The only entrance and exit seemed to have been via the collapsed ladder, and its tunnel and doorway had been craftily concealed behind the disgusting waterfall—this place was not meant to be stumbled upon by random Outfit members traversing the tunnels. It gave me pause, as I wondered exactly how we were going to get out of here, and I stared around the room. Joe Little had fashioned it from a landscape of brick and concrete, leaving a floor of hard-packed soil. Piles of dirt like the one we'd landed on had been pushed into corners to accommodate—

I spotted it, and gasped a little, elbowing Doug.

—a rounded structure built from white bricks, like an oversized igloo, crouching in the middle of the room.

“Is it possible?” Doug said. “Could it be . . . ?”

“The last chapter of the notebook,” I said slowly. “
Volta.
I think it's a vault.”

“If so, it's a big one,” he said, following me toward it. A pathway hugged the structure's exterior, and as we looked for the entrance, we passed by a hulking, rusty metal box the size of a refrigerator bolted to the wall. It had a sign with a flaking image of zigzagging electricity and a warning:

CAUTION! HIGH VOLTAGE! DO NOT
TOUCH!

“You think that old thing's still functional after all these years?” Doug said.

“Let's don't find out,” I said, continuing around the vault to a green brass door held fast with thick hinges, studded with bolts. It took only seconds to rub away decades of tarnish, revealing numerals and letters etched into brass:
U.N.B. 001,
and the year
1932.
“Vault number one,” I said, “or at least the number one most important vault. All it takes is a key.” The chain came easily from my neck and I leaned toward the doorknob. I looked again, felt around it, and turned to Doug. “There's no keyhole.”

“There has to be,” he said, edging past. Bending, squinting, touching, he stood back finally, confused. “There's no keyhole.”

“Then what's the key for? Why does it have U.N.B. 001 on it?”

He shrugged, staring at the door. “You think maybe it's . . . unlocked?”

I stared at him, saying nothing, unable to believe that anything so simple could be possible. Like cracking a safe, moving my fingers with precision, I gently turned the knob. A loud
click!
made us both jump.

The door opened a few inches, creaking on dry hinges.

Now all we had to do was step through.