“They’re fully loaded,” Heaven said. “But when they’re done, they’re done. That’s all the bullets I had.”
“Thank you,” Tricia said. “I can’t tell you—”
“Don’t tell me. Just go. I can’t be seen with you.”
“Who’s with Artie now?” Tricia said.
“Malwa. A Ukrainian girl. He’ll be fine. Now, go.”
“No,” said a deep voice from further down the corridor, “you stay right where you are.” A hulking shape moved toward them. The gun held in one of his hands came into view before his face did, but eventually his face followed.
“Bruno,” Tricia said.
“Drop the guns,” Bruno said. “The boss said to bring you in alive if I can, but I can shoot you if I need to.”
“Kill him,” Heaven said. “That’s what they’re for—use them!”
“Quiet,” Bruno said, and his rumbling bass voice made the word sound like a commandment. “Now put the guns down.”
“You, too, son,” said a nasal voice from the other end of the corridor, where (Tricia saw, turning) several men were clattering down the stairs she and Charley had used just minutes before. “Drop it. You too, Borden. You’re all under arrest.”
And as this new figure stepped from darkness into light Tricia saw it was O’Malley, his nose bandaged and his face bruised. He had his police service revolver outstretched and two patrolmen behind him had theirs out, too.
“I don’t even have a gun,” Charley said.
“Well, put down whatever you’ve got, all of you.”
Tricia lowered her hands and bent to put the guns on the floor. Bruno seemed to be weighing his options.
From the other side of the wall, then, the bell sounded and a second later a massive punch connected. The crowd, roused from its stupor, roared; you could hear chairs tip over as people rose to their feet.
And Tricia took the opportunity to raise one of the guns she’d been about to put down and, aiming well over everyone’s heads, fired it.
She’d only meant it as a distraction, a warning shot, a ploy out of sheer desperation; she couldn’t have hit the ceiling light if she’d aimed at it, not in a million years. But she hadn’t aimed at it and now it winked out with a tinkle of shattering glass.
Hearing the gunshot, the audience screamed and stampeded; from the ring came the sound of the bell being rung repeatedly in a futile effort to restore order.
From somewhere in the darkness, O’Malley shouted, “Nobody move!”
Someone grabbed Tricia’s arm and in the chaos she didn’t know if it was friend or foe until Charley said, his breath warm in her ear, “This way.”
She ran beside him down what she guessed was the middle branch of the ‘T’, one gun in each fist, her legs aching and her breath short.
“Do you know where we’re going?” she gasped.
“Nope,” Charley said.
This arm of the corridor dead-ended at a doorway and, barreling through it, they almost toppled down the stairway just inside. They were in the basement, but apparently the place had a sub-basement, since the barely illuminated steps were inviting them further down.
Charley slammed the door behind them and locked it. Instants later, they heard the knob rattle and a fist pound against the door’s surface. Charley held out his hand for one of the guns and Tricia passed him the Luger. He fired a round into the door below the knob, scaring off the person on the other side at least for a moment and maybe—Tricia hoped—jamming the lock mechanism in the bargain.
Of course, while that might keep their pursuers out it also left them only one way to go, since this room was where the stairs began. There was no up—only down. Which struck Tricia as an apt metaphor for their entire situation.
Side by side, guns held tightly in their sweating fists, they started to descend.
26.
Grave Descend
The stairs turned twice at little square landings, but there were no doors at either, no way to go but further down. The only light came from low-wattage bulbs hanging overhead in metal cages, and few enough of them that there were stretches where Tricia couldn’t see a thing. In an act of what she first thought of as unaccountable bravery Charley led the way, walking in front of her into the unknown; but then she thought about the known they were walking away from and his eagerness made more sense.
“Do you see anything?” she said.
“Sh,” he said.
In the faintest whisper she could manage she said, “Well? Do you?”
“No.”
“Be careful,” she said.
“That’s good advice,” he muttered. “I’ll keep it in mind.”
He stopped suddenly and she collided with his back. The gun fortunately didn’t go off.
“Door,” he whispered.
“Can you open it?”
She heard a knob turn. Charley leaned into the door with his shoulder, gently eased it open.
Past it, the light was slightly better, but only slightly. A long tunnel extended perhaps twenty yards before curving out of sight. It looked a little like a subway tunnel except for the absence of rails along the bottom. Instead the ground looked to be dirt—hard-packed earth, uneven and pitted, as though dug by hand.
They stepped inside, closed the door behind them, and Charley swung a metal bar down to latch it shut.
“What is this?” Tricia said. “An old bootlegging tunnel? Some sort of secret escape tunnel?”
“You know something,” Charley said, “you read too many books.”
“Well what do you think it is?”
“Oh, I’m not saying you’re wrong. I’m just saying you read too many books.” He started off down the tunnel and she followed.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
He crept cautiously through the tunnel’s curve, gun held high, finger tight on the trigger. They came out into another straight stretch. There was no one in sight, but he didn’t lower the gun. “You say ‘bootlegging tunnel’ like it’s something romantic. It’s not romantic. It’s ugly. It’s people stealing from each other, cutting each other’s throats. There are probably people buried down here, you know—nice romantic bootleggers who fell out of favor with Uncle Nick.” He kicked at the dirt underfoot. “We’re probably walking on their graves.”
“That’s horrible.”
“It’s the real world, kid. It’s not like you read about in paperbacks.”
“You mean like the ones you publish, Charley?”
“I mean like the one you wrote,” he said. “Bang-bang stuff, where the blood all washes off by the final scene and the bad guys all wear black.”
“You liked it well enough when I wrote it,” Tricia said.
“Sure. I just don’t like living the real-world version.”
“You think I do?”
They walked on at as fast a pace as they could manage, the tunnel stretching out more or less endlessly in front of them.
“I’m sorry, Charley,” Tricia said. “Okay? I shouldn’t have done it. I shouldn’t have written the book.”
“Ah, hell,” Charley said. “I shouldn’t have asked you to.”
“You didn’t ask me to make things up.”
“No,” Charley said. “But all you did was make them up. I’m the one that published it.”
“You thought it was all true,” Tricia said.
“And that makes it better? Would you tell me what the hell I was thinking, deciding to publish the actual secrets of an actual mobster?”
“That you’d sell a lot of books.”
“Yep. That’s what I was thinking, all right.”
“And you will,” Tricia said.
“Maybe the profits will pay for a nice headstone,” Charley said.
“Only if we get out of this tunnel,” Tricia said. “They bury us down here, we don’t get a headstone.”
They both walked faster after that.
By the time they reached the far end of the tunnel, Tricia figured the
y must have walked a good quarter of a mile, maybe more. How anyone had been able to dig a tunnel under the streets of Manhattan that ran at least five blocks she couldn’t fathom. Unless this was a much older tunnel even than Prohibition—maybe, she thought, the tunnel came first and the buildings were built around it.
The room at the far end had wooden crates stacked against the walls and a folding card table in the center. It had no chairs and no people, though, and the one door in the room was closed and barred. The question was what they’d find when they opened it.
“They know we’re here,” Charley said. “They must. There’s nowhere else we can be. The only thing we can hope is that we made it faster than they could because they were busy dealing with the cops.”
“And that none of them had the chance to telephone ahead,” Tricia said, “to tell someone to be here when we came out.”
“Yeah,” Charley said. “That, too.”
He hesitated, counted three, two, one with his fingers, and in a rush of movement raised the metal bar, pulled the door open, and stepped through it gun-first. There was no one on the other side.
“Well, that’s a relief,” he said.
“We’re not out yet.”
They raced up the staircase they found, cousin to the one in the basement of the Stars Club. At the top another door waited. When Charley started the bit with his fingers again, Tricia just pushed it open and walked out into the basement of the Sun.
Off to one side she saw the freight elevator and two of the fabric-sided carts the maintenance staff used to wheel supplies in and out—the same sort she’d had her unnamed thief use to escape with the loot in her book. The same sort the real thief had used, too, apparently.
She heard sounds from the loading dock outside: running feet, then hands at the metal gate, trying to raise it. Tricia went to the freight elevator door, banged on it with the flat of her palm. From the loading dock came the rattle of a padlock. “Come on, come on,” came a muffled voice. “Who has a key?”
Tricia rapped on the elevator door again, kept pounding until it slid open. The operator stuck his head out, barking, “What are you doing, banging away—”
She put her gun in his face and he quieted down. When he saw Charley leveling a gun at him too, he meekly put his hands up.
“I were you, I wouldn’t rob this place,” he said. “We got hit just a month ago and the people in charge are out for blood.”
“We’re not here to rob the place,” Tricia said. “Just take us upstairs.”
Out on the loading dock, a gunshot went off like a cherry bomb and what Tricia had to assume were padlock fragments rained against the metal gate.
She stepped into the elevator. “Up.”
The operator pulled the door closed and worked the lever to start the car. Heavy chains clanked overhead and they started to rise.
“How far?” he said.
“All the way,” Tricia said.
“Is that smart?” Charley said. “Why not just go to the lobby?”
“Because it’s almost two AM, Charley,” Tricia said, “and at two AM people from Nicolazzo’s other clubs start showing up in the lobby, delivering the night’s take. Some of them are probably there already. With armed bodyguards. Not to mention the man in the security booth out front.”
“But if we go up to the club,” Charley said, “how are we going to get out...?”
Tricia watched the little metal arrow above the door travel to the end of its arc. “What, you didn’t read my book?”
At the top floor, they left the operator tied hand and foot with his belt and Charley’s necktie; a handkerchief they found in the man’s back pocket served for a gag. They turned the elevator off. Let the boys in the basement holler for it. That’d buy a few minutes at least.
They followed the hallway to a pair of swinging doors and pushed through, finding themselves in the kitchen, where a sloe-eyed saxophonist sat nuzzling a tall glass of something amber. A woman setting dishes in one of the sinks looked up when they entered: Cecilia, still wearing her costume from their dance number, which she’d presumably had to turn into a solo. “Trixie! What happened to you? Where were you?”
“It’s a long story, Cecilia,” Tricia said, hurrying past, “I’m sorry I let you down tonight.”
“Robbie didn’t show up either. Do you know where he is?”
Probably still in the trunk of Mitch’s car, wherever that was. “No,” Tricia said. “Listen, we’ve got to go. If anyone asks, you didn’t see us. It’s for your own good, trust me.” She realized as she said it that it was the same thing Charley had told Mike. Well, it was doubly true for her. Cecilia certainly didn’t need a ‘ZN’ added to her cheek.
“Will you be here tomorrow?” Cecilia asked.
“I don’t think so,” Tricia called over her shoulder.
“That lady’s sure in a hurry,” the saxophonist said to no one in particular.
They burst through the door to the storeroom, rushed down the crowded aisle between two tall metal shelves. The window at the end was closed; the glass was unbroken. Tricia tried to open it but couldn’t. “Charley, you try,” Tricia said.
“I’m not climbing eleven stories down the side of a building,” Charley said.
“Then open the window so I can,” Tricia said. “And when he gets here, say hello to Uncle Nick for me.”
Charley gave her a murderous stare, spat on each of his palms, planted his feet and tried to wrench the window up. When his first try failed, he gave two more heaves, grimacing furiously each time. The third, true to form, was the charm. Tricia, meanwhile, slipped the gun into the pocket of her dress, next to the box of photos. It was a tight fit, even though she’d kept the smaller of the guns for herself.
“Okay.” She stuck her head out the window, looked down, wished she hadn’t. Not that she could see much in the dead of night, but the little she could see didn’t make her want to climb out on the window ledge.
She climbed out on the window ledge.
Charley gripped her legs with both hands. Holding on tight to the window frame with her left hand, she fished for the rain gutter with her right. Her fingertips brushed it twice before she was able to get a good grip.
“Okay,” she said. “Let go.”
“You sure?” Charley said. He sounded dubious.
“Yes.” Stretching out one leg to the side, she found the nearest of the metal brackets that anchored the pipe to the wall and when she felt reasonably secure putting her weight on it, she brought her other hand and leg over.
“Nothing to it,” she said, or tried to, but her teeth were chattering too much and she gave up.
“You think it can hold both of us at once?” Charley said.
She would’ve shrugged but didn’t want to chance it. Instead, she started carefully inching her right leg along the pipe, feeling for the next bracket down. It was too far beneath her, especially with her legs constrained by the way she was dressed. (Slacks, she thought. Why couldn’t I have worn a nice pair of slacks?) But she knew the bracket was there, just inches below her toes. So holding tight to the pipe with both hands and both knees and thinking of all the trees she’d climbed as young girl in Aberdeen, she let herself slide slowly—slowly!—down to the bracket. She rested there for a moment, flexed her fingers slightly, then tightened her grip and let herself down to the next one.
As she went, she kept her eyes focused on the bricks immediately before her. This was about feeling her way, not seeing where she was going. Slide; stop. Slide; stop.
Down had to be easier than up, at least. That’s what she kept telling herself. But her hands had already started to hurt. Her chest, too, from tension and the drumbeat of her racing heart. She chanced a look up, saw Charley’s legs and posterior a few feet above her. He was on the pipe too, now. Once again she found herself with nowhere to go but down.
I’ll never tell another lie as long as I live. I swear it. I’ll never write another book about gangsters. Only friendly, happy
subjects, like trips to the beach and picking flowers. I promise. Just let me not die here in this airshaft. Let me make it down. Please.
Slide. Stop. Deep breath. Slide. Stop.
“You know something?” Charley’s voice was weak; she imagined she could hear his teeth chattering too. “It’s not eleven floors.” He let himself down to the next bracket above her head, made sure of his footing. “It’s only ten.”
“What?” Tricia managed to say.
“We only have to make it to the roof of that news peddler’s place,” Charley said. “That’s the second floor. So we’re only going ten floors, not eleven. And,” he added with a hopeful tone, “a fall from just one floor up probably wouldn’t kill us. So it’s really only nine that we have to worry about. And,” he said, “we must be at least halfway there already.”
“Charley,” she said.
“Yes?”
“Shut up and climb.”
Two stories later, Tricia lost her grip. Her left hand, sweaty and tired, slipped off the pipe. She felt herself tilting backwards, her feet losing their purchase on the bracket. Desperately, she tried to wedge her entire right arm between the pipe and the wall, but thin as it was, it wouldn’t fit. She scrabbled with her feet, tried to hold on with just one hand, but found herself falling. She meant to scream, but somehow nothing came out, and as she fell she only had time to think, So, this is it.
Then she hit, and though the breath was badly knocked out of her, she was somewhat astonished to find that the life wasn’t. She lay where she’d landed, flat on her back, just eight or nine feet below where she’d lost hold of the pipe.
“Tricia!” Charley called. “What happened? Are you okay?” When she didn’t answer, he looked down. “Oh, thank god.” He quickly slid the rest of the way to the bottom. “You see? We were more than halfway.”
Looking up at him from where she lay, she nodded very slightly and concentrated on breathing in and out.
“Come on,” Charley said, inching over to the chicken wire-laced window above the toilet. “It looks like there’s a light on.”
27.
The Peddler
Tricia forced herself to get up, brushed off her hands and the seat of her dress, which was smeared now with god only knew what. The smell here was dismal, and though she’d made up the rat for the chapter in the book, she didn’t doubt that there were various sorts of vermin here, biding their time in the darkness.
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