My Kind of Town

by John Sandrolini

  “That the boiler room in there?”

  “Yes, suh. My office is in there, too. Plenty warm on those cold winter days when the Hawk comes out.”

  That was something about Chicago I didn’t miss: a winter wind so biting the locals called it the Hawk. I shuddered just a little thinking about all those bitter days trudging through snowbanks when I was a kid.

  A hundred feet beyond the boiler room we came to the short end of the building. Spaced out in twenty-foot intervals in the center of the brick wall were a half dozen recessed storerooms with arched frames. Vaults.

  I felt a low-watt tingling as I surveyed them. Storerooms in the basement of the very hotel where Capone had lived and run an empire. They almost certainly had contained some of his goods at one time, possibly Edward O’Hare’s as well. But what they contained now I could only guess since they were all sealed up tight with concrete plugs from floor to vaulted ceilings.

  Even Sal’s eyes were alive. I could picture the images dancing behind his pupils as he speculated on what lay just a few feet beyond. It was impossible not to thrill like a kid on a treasure hunt looking at those rooms, not to dream of the wealth they might have once contained, not to hope that someone somehow had neglected to empty them.

  Vernon took care of all that. “What you thinking?” he queried, unable to suppress his smirk.

  “I’m thinking I’d like to know what’s behind those concrete plugs. Is this where Capone kept his spoils?” I asked, gesturing with my index finger toward the nearest one.

  Mr. Pryor’s guffaw cut through the vast space, echoing sharply off the cold masonry. “Spoils?” he asked incredulously. “This was no treasure vault—it was a liquor locker. They kept thousands of cases of that bathtub gin down here. Now that’s somethin’ ol’ Vern could use right now!” He laughed again, slapping my shoulder as he did.

  “So there’s nothing back there?”

  Vernon made a dubious face. “Ohh, I don’t know. . . . Maybe a paint bucket or two. After Mister Capone went up, we used to use the vaults for storage. . . . That is, until those Treasury men sealed them up. Said they didn’t want any more of Capone’s boys using the place. That’s the last time they’ve seen the light of day.”

  I’d known it was ridiculous to even hope, but once I’d actually gotten down in front of the vaults, the temptation to dream ran away with me. I struck a Lucky with my lighter, then kicked at the concrete plug in dejection.

  “Oh, don’t feel too bad, Joe.” Vernon smiled. “You had to know there was nothing down here.”

  I exhaled some smoke, frowned. “I know, Vernon, I didn’t really expect it to be that easy. I was just hoping to find some clues to anywhere else Capone might have salted it away.”

  He scratched the stubble on his chin, thought a second. “Well, there are a couple of tunnels down here I can show you. Maybe there’s some clue there.”

  “Tunnels?”

  “Oh yes, there’s tunnels scattered all over this place. Some of them like the ones I showed you upstairs, but others down here running off every whichaway.”

  “But these can’t be the Loop freight tunnels. They don’t run this far south.”

  Vernon shook his head. “No, suh. These tunnels were dug by Mistah Capone. Some were for sneaking the gin in and out, others were escape tunnels. He even had one that connected to his old headquarters at the Metropole—two blocks away! His men were always burrowing around down here; this place was literally honeycombed with those tunnels.”

  As I started to speak, Vernon raised a hand. “Now, mind you,” he cautioned, “most of them are bricked up or collapsed. There’s just two that I know of still open. Like to see them?”

  “You bet. You’re in charge of the expedition, Dr. Pryor. Lead away.”

  “Oh boy,” he said, “half an hour with you guys and I’m a doctor already. Can’t wait till we find that treasure—I might become a world-famous professor of archaeology.”

  “I’ll make sure your name gets in all the papers so the IRS can come get its fair share. Of course, the Treasury boys may take the lot of it first.”

  His eyes expanded again. “IRS? G-men? Tell you what, how about you just send me a thank-you note with a couple thousand in it—on the QT.”

  I took hold of his sloped shoulder. “How’s this? If Sal and I find any treasure, I’ll buy you a new house to replace the one the city flattened. Good?”

  He grinned at me, a gold tooth gleaming in the dim light. “That would be fine, mighty fine. It won’t save Daley from the devil’s dogs, but it would be just fine by me even so.”

  We turned and began walking, Vernon hitching along with his hobbling gait, Sal trailing along reluctantly behind him, and me in the rear, musing quietly on the hardships of a life spent with a hellhound on your trail.

  31

  We stopped at the boiler room on the way so Vernon could grab his flashlight. He pushed open one of the iron doors, banged it into the wall, and then fished out something with his foot to hold it open.

  “Wait right here, fellows; I’ll get my torch. It’s a good one with a handle and that big light on the front—army issue.”

  When he returned, I gestured toward the doorstop that I’d been staring at the last fifteen seconds. “What’s that, Vernon?”

  “What’s what?”

  “That thing you propped the door open with?”

  He cocked his head, pointed at the same spot I had, closed an eye. “That? It’s a doorstop, Joe. We call it that on account of how it stops the door from closing. You foolin’ with ol’ Vern here?”

  Sal cut in. “That’s no doorstop, that’s a bocce ball.”

  “Well, it’s a doorstop now. Been knocking around here forever, I put it to good use when I came back to this grand old lady a couple of years ago.”

  He tapped a finger to his temple, winked at me.

  “It goes way back?” I asked. “Really?”

  “Oh yes,” he nodded. “Mr. Capone, he loved him that lawn bowling. Those whiskey runners used to play it all the time down here when they were waiting on a shipment. Now let me show you those tunnels.”

  We walked off across the basement, Vernon’s flashlight arc cutting a dancing beam on the unevenly lit cement floor as we made for the opposite side. I took a last, curious glance at the boiler room, shaking my head in amusement at Vernon’s revelation.

  Al Capone. Lawn bowling.

  Go figure.

  The first passageway Vernon showed us was smack in the middle of the wall, just an innocuous door frame with a corridor right-angled off behind it. Vernon waved his torch into it, pointed it into the distance as we entered the old bootlegger’s passage. A hundred feet in, the corridor dead-ended at a crude wooden staircase, a bricked-over doorway looming at the top of the steps. And that, as Vernon said, was that.

  The other tunnel was clear at the north end of the building, its entrance cleverly hidden behind a water main access door beneath a stairwell that led to a bricked-up exit. That alone stirred my blood. Vernon had to produce a large key with unusually cut teeth to unlock the camouflaged entryway. He stuck it in the hole set in the middle of a brace of raised letters, gave it a firm twist to the left, and pulled the brass door open. Mystery was in the air as we stepped inside the cloistered chamber.

  The passageway beyond was much narrower than the first one, and cut right through the foundation wall of the Lexington. This was an actual excavated tunnel, not just a converted corridor. After three minutes walking and two more foundation walls, I figured us to be a solid city block away from the Lexington. But there was nothing other than scattered bottles, rags, the occasional section of loose pipe, and a dead rat along the way.

  We eventually came to a plywood slat propped against the wall and anchored by a pair of cinder blocks. I could feel a cool rush of air around its edges. Intrigued, I leaned close to Vernon,
excitement undoubtedly gleaming in my eyes.

  “What’s all this about? What’s on the other side of this opening?”

  White teeth shone against darkened gums. “I figured you’d want to see this. Go ahead, push that board out of the way.”

  I muscled away the cinder blocks then turned the panel ninety degrees to the side, revealing a three-foot opening chiseled through the brick and mortar. Vernon handed me his flashlight, and I played the light into the cleft. A jumble of bricks lay scattered on the floor around the opening, suggesting that this tunnel, unlike the others, had been concealed in its time. Crouching down, I stepped through, just grazing the top as I did. The space was very dimly lit via a sewer grate far above. I swept the open space from side to side with the light to get a better look. A wry smile came to my face as I did.

  Familiar sights from my childhood roustabouts greeted me: a latticework of iron support girders, limestone-lined walls, hoary cobwebs cluttered with dust, and a pair of narrow-gauge rail tracks, wending toward a three-quarters oval tunnel in the distance. We were in one of Chicago’s underground freight tunnels, used since the 1880s to move coal, freight, and mail to the towering downtown structures above.

  A dozen yards down, a shape loomed on the tracks—a hopper car—just like the ones Sal and I used to bag rides on below the city.

  “Sal, do you see that?” I said, advancing toward the scaled-down coal carrier. “It’s one of those old freight cars. Man, did we used to raise Cain on those things!”

  “Right, Joe, only now I’m a cop, and I get paid to send kids like us to juvee for stunts like that.”

  I waved a hand at him. “Oh come on, killjoy, let’s check it out.”

  He said something I couldn’t hear as I crunched my way across the rubble toward the tracks, making big sweeps with the light as I advanced just to be sure we were alone.

  The car was standard issue, right down to the Chicago Tunnel Company stencil on the side, but it hadn’t moved in years judging from the rust and accumulated dust clinging to its iron surfaces. The hopper bin was empty of course. The tracks it stood upon just sort of began about ten feet from the wall opening, a stack of wooden ties demarcating the end of the line. It was obvious that the rail spur was either an ad hoc adjunct to the old system or just a place where the line petered out—it was already several blocks farther south than any part of the system I knew of.

  I walked the tracks to the lip of the tunnel, the open room narrowing down to the typically tight clearances present on the many miles of underground trackway cut through the soft midwestern clay. Exhilarated, I aimed my beam deep into the tunnel and peered as far down the egg-shaped passage as I could. Ghost sounds from three decades past filled my ears as my eyes scoured the subterranean passage, my heart hopelessly seeking a relic, a clue—any sign at all—of Al Capone’s presence in this ancient railway that ran unseen far beneath the city’s spires.

  But it was not to be. There wasn’t anything more down there to see than there had been in Capone’s room or the vaults. I cased the tracks and the subbasement for another ten minutes until finally Sal’s protestations and the sense that I’d been a bit overindulgent with Vernon’s time forced me to admit there was nothing more to be gleaned. It had been entertaining, but we were just chasing phantoms.

  Chagrined, I gave up the quest. “Okay, guys, I’m done. We can go.”

  Almost inaudibly, Vernon said, “Sorry, Joe.”

  I think he wanted to believe, too.

  One by one, we ducked into the hole and stepped back to the other side. The last thing I glimpsed before I slipped through was an overturned wheelbarrow off to one side of the opening. “Some treasure,” I sighed as I stooped down, leaving my childhood memories behind me.

  Vernon went as far as the elevator with us, saying he’d probably catch hell from Freel if it looked like he’d been with us for such a long time. I handed him back his flashlight, giving it a good look-over for the first time as I did, noting its sturdy construction and olive drab Bakelite shell.

  “Wow, this is army issue—and old too. How long you have this thing, Vern?”

  “Since the Great War. Something works, you stick with it.”

  I looked him over in a new light. “You don’t say?”

  “I do say,” he countered. “Gentlemen, you are looking at one of the last of the Buffalo Soldiers. Fought in the Mexican Expedition with the Ninth Cav, then transferred into the Ninety-Third Infantry in ’17 so I could take a whack at those Huns. Served my country with distinction in the Argonne Forest.”

  Gesturing at his game leg, I asked, “That where you got that hitch in your step?”

  Vernon looked at me, his eyes interrogating mine. “Yeah,” he said, his voice almost a whisper. “Fightin’ for America. Of course, the army put us Negroes under French command—heaven forbid those white soldiers would have to actually associate with the men dying alongside them in the mud.”

  Neither Sal nor I spoke. We just gave him his moment, seconds passing slowly in the cool air.

  “I’m sorry, fellas,” he said at length. “It’s an old wound, but it still burns from time to time.”

  I understood. I couldn’t possibly feel it the way he did, but I understood, and I was pretty sure the wound he was referring to wasn’t the one in his leg. I looked deep into his tearing brown eyes, wishing I’d known a few more Vernon Pryors in my life.

  “Thank you, Vernon. From one vet to another, thank you.”

  “Army?” he asked hopefully.

  “Uh-uh. Navy—flew in the Pacific.”

  “See much action?”

  I exhaled, nodded once. “Yeah.”

  “Thought so.”

  The elevator chimed. We all shook hands again, and then Sal and I stepped on. I waved good-bye to Vernon as the door rolled shut, leaving him alone in his underground empire. As we chugged upward, I heard him shout out, “Don’t forget about that house!” before breaking into a hearty cackle.

  Freel was talking to some other scuzzball at the counter when we emerged from the elevator. Their backs were to us so they didn’t notice us approaching. The pride of the South Side was making a loud declaration to his companion about finding “that lazy nigger Vernon after those two cops leave and kicking his black ass back to Africa.”

  This time, I went over the counter for him.

  32

  All in all, I was pretty sanguine on the ride back. We’d come up empty at the Lexington, but I’d never expected to find anything anyway. At least Sal and I had gotten some kicks out of the deal and met a stand-up guy in Vernon. Besides, the drizzle had let up while we were downstairs, bright yellow gobs of sunshine now bursting through the scattering clouds, chasing off the chilly morning and ushering in a warm fall afternoon. My knuckles were a little sore, but that was a good kind of hurt, considering.

  The last thing I said to Sal as we rolled down Roosevelt and made the right at Loomis was, “It’s just as well we didn’t find anything. I could use some downtime anyway.”

  That didn’t work out the way I’d planned.

  It isn’t every day that you come home to find Frank Sinatra in your living room. He was parked on the couch, gray fedora canted back on his head, one of my nieces seated on his lap, another eagerly awaiting her turn. My mother was sitting next to them, dictating what he should write in their autograph books. Jilly was off in the hallway with my aunt Teresa, looking at family photos.

  “Hey . . . there he is!” Frank exclaimed as Sal and I walked through the door. “Now, no cutting, Joseph; you boys will just have to wait your turn for autographs.”

  I nodded at Jilly, bent down to kiss my mother, and then dropped onto the edge of the couch next to her. “Who’s this, Ma?” I asked. “A traveling rainmaker?”

  She just beamed, gripping my arm tightly. Frank leaned over toward me, put a covering hand to his mouth. “Nice of
you to drop in,” he jabbed. “Thought you were coming to my trailer shoot this morning. Maybe you could call once a month or something—if it’s not too much trouble?”

  “Whaddya talkin’? I did call.”

  “Maybe you shoulda called again. A girl’s wondering . . .” he retorted.

  “Who . . . ? Vanessa or Gianna here?”

  “What?”

  “Who’s wondering what?”

  He waved a finger at me. “No, no. Not these lovely young ladies. A big girl . . . name of Claudia.”

  I could see my mother’s eyes. She knew something I didn’t.

  Leaning over, I whispered, “Oh yeah? And what might she be wondering?”

  “When the hell you’re going to ask her to dinner. Sorry, girls, remember, that’s a bad word—we shouldn’t use it.”

  The children giggled.

  “But that’s why I asked you for her number.”

  “That won’t be necessary any longer,” he countered.

  Tilting my head and stealing a glance at my mother’s conspiratorial smile, I intoned, “And why not?”

  “Because I brought her with me—she’s upstairs talking to your sister.”

  “Here? Uh, now?”

  “Mmmhmmm.” He jerked a thumb over his head. “Get to work, Casanova.”

  Rising, I could see the mirth in Frank’s smile. I tried to reach behind my mother to whack him as I got up, but he just managed to duck out of the way.

  Claudia was with Francesca in my sister’s room. A brace of family photo books lay on the bed between them, another one open in Cesca’s hands. They were speaking Italian.

  “Ciao, signorine,” I announced as I entered the room.

  “Ciao, Giuseppe,” thrummed Claudia.

  “No school today, sis?”

  Francesca made a face. “With Frank Sinatra in your house? I took the afternoon off as soon as Mamma called. I just came up a minute to show Claudia your navy scrapbook. I didn’t think you’d mind.”