My Kind of Town

by John Sandrolini

  “Not exactly,” he said sadly.

  His response was still hanging in the air when the elevator came to a stop. The doors opened onto a hallway. We crossed it, turned down a narrow cleft, and entered a second elevator, this one much smaller than the first. As the door closed, the valet inserted a small key into the brass panel and pushed the only button, unsurprisingly marked PH. Intrigue built as we soared upward into rare air seldom breathed by the city’s hardscrabble workforce. The door opened, and the little guy gestured silently with his hand. I stepped out of the elevator and into a dream world.

  The domain beneath me was spectacular, its rose-colored walls lined with fabulous oil paintings and soaring walnut bookshelves, its vast marble floor bedecked with acres of rich Persian rugs. At the far end of that run, flames danced inside a massive stone hearth, the crackle of the logs clearly audible from the staircase. In between, the large central hall was packed chockablock with statues, candelabras, suits of armor, birdcages, Indian headdresses, spears, daybeds, a grizzly bear, glass display cases filled with ephemera, and hundreds of other items large and small. Far above us, a stuffed condor, poised forever in full flight, completed the inventory. I felt like I’d stumbled into the central holding warehouse of the 1893 Columbian Exposition.

  Below me, in the center of that trove of antiquities, a man in a purple smoking jacket stared up at me. “Welcome to the exalted realm of the sacred Fraternal Order of the Potawatomi,” he said.

  I guess I stood staring just a little too long, taking in the ossifying splendor of the chamber, the unusual-looking man in the middle of it, and the word jumble of a name he’d just thrown at me. “Come, come, lad,” his voice boomed out then. “Let’s have a look at you. And a drink then, too. Come on down, won’t ya?”

  Nodding, I grabbed the wide mahogany banister and sauntered down the carpeted stairs, daydreaming like a kid in a toy store as I went. Scanning the room as I walked, I made my way toward the curator in the velvet robe. We met in the center of the room, above the inlaid image of a compass rose. He took East; I got West.

  The man drew a bead on my eyes, held out a hand. “Jack McBride,” he said as we shook.

  Jack McBride was no ordinary cat. Tall with a stocky build, he would have commanded great respect himself once, but gravity and time had done their mischief. He was on the handsome side still, with solid Gaelic features and a wild mane of tousled white hair that was rather thick given his age, which was absolutely Methuselian. His right eye was a startlingly compelling aquamarine; the left was hidden behind a black silk patch. Both were set off against a pale Irish complexion that apparently saw little sunlight despite the loftiness of his quarters. No one had the panache to pull off a purple smoking jacket, but he’d managed the silk ascot rather well. The ram’s head walking stick in his left hand, upon which tilted his considerable mass, was well over the top but a sartorial home run nevertheless.

  So leaned the great Chief McBride before me: imperfect, raffishly dignified, and decidedly not Indian.

  “Whiskey?” he inquired.

  I noted the time on a huge grandfather clock clicking rhythmically nearby. “Perhaps a tad early for me.”

  “Horsefeathers.”

  McBride began calling out for the man who’d brought me up on the elevator.

  The little fellow in the threadbare suit came hustling on the third call. “Yes, Chief?”

  “Fix us a couple of drinks, man. Whiskey for me and whatever Mr. Buonomo is having.”

  “Coffee . . . splash of Jameson’s.”

  The chief eyed me suspiciously. “Trying to suck up to the old Irishman, are ya?”

  There were hints of a brogue in his speech, but I suspected his lineage was quite local. “You sound a lot more like a Chicagoan to me.”

  He snorted. “True enough—but with pure Irish blood.” He clapped me on the shoulder and gave me an approving grin. “All right then. Let’s have a sit and get on with the particulars.”

  We dropped into a pair of outrageously high-backed leather chairs. McBride smiled at me, said, “Now then, would you like to hear a story, Mr. Buonomo? A fantastic story dating to the eleventh century that strains credulity but is nevertheless true?”

  I smiled back. “No.”

  “How’s that?” he blurted out, his eye dilating.

  “Let’s talk about the money. Looks like you’ve got a little to throw around.”

  “Less than you think, I’m afraid.”

  The little man arrived with a tray holding a tall tumbler of whiskey and soda for McBride and a black coffee mug with an enameled coat of arms for me. He placed them on the table between us, nodded subserviently, and then backed away. I picked up the drink and sipped, savoring the guilty pleasure of the whiskey so early in the morning.

  “How’s your drink?” McBride asked.

  I raised the glass. “That’s good coffee, Chief. Mind if I smoke?”

  “Not at all.”

  “Thanks,” I said, pulling one out. “You gonna tell me about the money now?”

  He shook his head. “I don’t think so.”

  “Okay. How ’bout you tell me how you came to be the leader of the Potawatomi tribe? Last time I checked, there weren’t any teepees in County Cork.”

  “County Galway. And there were never any Indians in the Order, no real ones anyway. That wouldn’t have passed muster in the old days.”

  “You’ve got a real one now, don’t you? His gun looks plenty real too.”

  “Well, times change, you know. Ronnie’s grandfather and I went way back, and his great-grandfather was one of the original signatories on the land purchases of the Order. Now, are you going to listen to me or what?”

  I looked up at the condor, sighed. “Fine. To the Magna Carta if you must.”

  McBride sat up, took a breath. “What would you say if I told you that you were brought here today to help the Order recover a treasure dating back to the time of the Crusades?”

  “I’d say you’ve been watching too many Bogart movies.”

  A cold eye met mine. “Christ, Buonomo, would you work with me a little here?”

  I relented, held up my hands. “All right, all right. But I’d like to get home to see my family today, so would you please tell me just what the devil I’m doing here?”

  McBride quaffed down some of the glory of Ireland and cleared his throat. “Are you familiar with the story of the Knights Templar?”

  “The basics.”

  He gave me the CliffsNotes just to be sure. The twelfth-­century rise of the mythic papal army, their epic battles in the Holy Lands, their betrayal and persecution by King Philip of France, their reemergence alongside the Knights of St. John on the Island of Malta, and their five-hundred-year stint as sea raiders on the shipping lanes of the Mediterranean, a run that ended only when Napoleon evicted them from the island in 1799, scattering the last remnants of the mythic order on the four winds, where, McBride averred, they remained to this day.

  I stubbed out my cigarette nub in what looked to be a solid gold ashtray. “Excuse me,” I interrupted, “but just what does any of this have to do with an Indian tribe on the banks of the Chicago River?”

  He held up a hand. “I’m getting to that. Now, can you imagine, Joe, what sort of a fortune one might build from half a millennium of plundering the high seas?”

  “Quite substantial, I imagine.”

  “Gasp inducing.”

  “But if the Order disintegrated . . .”

  “It didn’t,” he corrected, “it exists still—in many quarters. The Freemasons, the Rosicrucians, the Illuminati, the Medinahs who built this palace, the Potawatomi—we have different agendas, but we all flow from the same holy wellspring.”

  “What about the Elks?”

  “Come now,” he chided with a shake before resuming his aggrandizing. “And if our treasure a
nd our power were ever reunited . . .”

  His eye wandered off to distant places then, trumpet flourishes undoubtedly sounding inside his head. “Nations would kneel before us!”

  I knew what was coming next. I had been in the presence of no small number of madmen over the years and knew one by his throbbing temples when I saw him. A meeting with a garden-variety sociopath like Carpaccio seemed positively ducky in comparison at that moment.

  “And all you need from me is . . . ?”

  “That which will unite us all again in one Holy Army.”

  I looked askance at him, offered, “The head of St. John the Baptist?”

  The ancient Hibernian’s head swiveled back and forth several times. Then he leaned forward, pushing off with the ram’s head cane until we were nearly face-to-face, his rumpled hair a billowing mass of clouds, that crystalline eye sparkling like a gemstone as he quietly whispered, “The Merchandise Mart.”

  I half choked on my Irish coffee. When I’d finally managed to gather myself, I cocked my head to the side and asked, “Did you just say the Merchandise Mart?”

  “You bet your ass I did. The largest building in the world—four million square feet of capitalism—the centralized hub of wholesale trade in Chicago. Right down the street from us, and all of it mine.”

  “Thought so. You’re completely crazy, aren’t you, Jack?”

  “I am a driven man, that’s for certain. And I aim to have what was once mine.”

  My jaw opened, but I couldn’t get any words to come out.

  “That’s right, ‘once mine,’” he said definitively. “Stolen from me by a onetime partner who became a full-fledged criminal overlord.”

  “Oh my,” I managed.

  “One of your kinsmen, Buonomo. Born of New York but made famous in this very metropolis of Chicago.”

  It began racing toward me then, like a well-aimed bullet.

  “And this is where you come in. . . .”

  “Oh no,” I said, foreseeing the response.

  “Oh yes,” he smiled. “Alphonse Capone.”

  All around me I could feel the air getting heavy. There he was again: the legendary gangster. A man I’d never met—dead almost twenty years—yet someone to whom I was beginning to feel inextricably linked. And I knew then that somehow, somewhere, our paths were going to intersect.

  It was not a particularly good feeling.

  41

  Despite knowing better, I went ahead and asked the question. “The holy descendants of the Kingdom of Christ in league with the crown prince of bathtub booze? You gotta be kiddin’ me.”

  “Afraid not.”

  McBride went on to elaborate on his earlier declaration that the Fraternal Order of the Potawatomi was a modern face of the Knights Templar. After their exile from Malta, many members had made their way to the new world with a substantial amount of the vast treasure, gradually breaking off into different sects scattered throughout the Americas. The founders of the Potawatomi had pooled their considerable resources into a Chicago land-holding company in the 1830s, buying up large tracts of the then-­burgeoning city from the Indians along the banks of the river, making a killing in the process but losing sight of the original aims of the Order amid the rush of wealth, privilege, and manor.

  “So everybody still got rich—uh—richer. What’s the problem?” I asked.

  He gave me a weary look. “You know what followed. Arrogance, greed, hubris. Foolish petty quarrels, a hundred destructive lawsuits, a slow siphoning away of the Order’s wealth in bad land deals and damage settlements, member pitted against member, family against family, squandering all we had built. After the Crash in ’29 we were left teetering on the brink of insolvency.”

  “And that leads to Capone how?”

  “He offered us a way out.”

  “Come again?”

  “We went into business with him. It began easily enough when he was still fronting for Johnny Torrio. You know this has always been a swindler’s town. From the first commandant of Fort Dearborn to Hinky Dink Kenna and Bathhouse John Coughlin to that clown Mayor Thompson and every hustler and whore in between. Everyone has always been on the take here—everyone.”

  I swigged some bootleg coffee, gestured for him to continue.

  “Business with Capone was quite lucrative for a time—and we had nothing whatsoever to do with Mr. Capone’s turf wars or gunplay. We only helped facilitate his transactions when the financial institutions—”

  “Oh,” I interjected, “you laundered his money.”

  “Yes. Basically.”

  “Sooo . . . the Merchandise Mart then?”

  “Our last great property. Capone stole it, the son of a bitch.”

  “How do you steal an entire building?”

  “Just how you think. By illegally acquiring title to the land beneath it.”

  Like Carpaccio before him, McBride now went into an elaborate story whose provenance belonged to the fowl and bovine orders, explaining how Capone and none other than Marshall Field III, scion of the department store founder and onetime member of the Potawatomi, had conspired to steal the deed to the entire city block the Merchandise Mart was built upon. There were many purported twists and turns and much palace intrigue, but when all was said and done, Field was the de facto owner of lot and building, and Capone, the title holder, the deed locked inside one of his many vaults.

  “And after Capone melted down, how could you ever know what became of it?” I asked.

  “I wouldn’t have, but Eddie O’Hare tried to peddle it back to me when he was trying to clear town back in ’39. Said he had it stashed with some other things that he’d stolen from Capone.”

  “And . . . ?”

  “And the Syndicate blew his brains out on Ogden Avenue.”

  “All right, with O’Hare and Capone out of the way, couldn’t you go to the County Records office and prove you guys owned the land?”

  “We tried. Got laughed out of there every time. After the swindle, Field had one of his cronies on the inside at the clerk’s office record it as a sale to him—claimed it had been his family’s all along. A classic Chicago scam.”

  I couldn’t help smiling. “That’s funny, you complaining about a scam.”

  He glowered at me silently.

  “And you couldn’t fight that in court?” I queried.

  Jack’s eye doubled. “In this town? Against the word of the Field family? Come on, Buonomo, you know the score.”

  I nodded back at him as the dead-end scenarios played out in my mind. “Had you cinched up tight, didn’t they?”

  McBride covered his face with his hands, sighed deeply. “A title worth a gazillion bucks—the foundation of a restored Order of the Potawatomi—locked up somewhere in a hidden safe in a basement God knows where.”

  A silence fell over the room. We stared at each other across the coffee table. McBride sighed again.

  “How’s your coffee?” he finally asked out of courtesy.

  “Shit tastes like whiskey.”

  He showed some teeth. We both chuckled. “By God, I like you, Buonomo,” he declared. “I knew I would.”

  “I like you, too, McBride. I’ll be sure and send you a valentine.”

  “Ohh,” he countered, “not in this town. That’s bad luck you know.”

  We both laughed some more. I was surprised to realize I was falling for the old bullshitter. He was totally nuts but quite charming.

  But I still didn’t see his connection. “So, Jack,” I asked, “what can I, Joe Buonomo, freight pilot, do for you? I’m not in real estate, I don’t have any political connections, and I’m sure as hell no lawyer.”

  McBride grinned broadly. “Don’t kid a kidder, Joe. You know, and have known, certain people in your lifetime—namely Frank Sinatra, Sam Giancana, and the son of the man who gave Capone
to the feds, one Edward ‘Butch’ O’Hare.”

  His knowledge of that surprised me, but all I gave him was, “And?”

  “I was curious about you after I saw Sunday’s paper. But when Huser’s byline on Monday morning referred to you as ‘Sinatra’s mysterious aide-de-camp,’ I became very curious. So I tapped some of my contacts, and did I ever get some interesting reports on your activities after the war. I also learned all about your air freight business, and its acute need for capital enhancement these days. Apparently, you owe a substantial amount of money to some rather unsavory fellows.”

  I nodded in acknowledgment. His sources were good—and high up. “First off, Huser’s an idiot. I’m not anybody’s aide-de-camp. Nor am I a batman, a valet, a manservant, or anything else other than a freight pilot. But I am Frank Sinatra’s friend, and friends help each other out from time to time. You got that?”

  McBride looked at me blankly. “Fine. Huser’s an idiot—the whole town knows that. But you are close to Sinatra, were seen talking to Giancana the other night, and spent several weeks traveling with the late great O’Hare Jr. during the war.”

  “Let’s say you’re right about those things. What’s that add up to for you? Because it’s dick nothing for me.”

  McBride got a little piqued. “Now look, this isn’t some pitch for a soda jerk’s stipend we’re talking about. There’s an enormous amount of money at stake here—twenty-five percent of which would make you very, very wealthy—so much so that I doubt rather highly that you’d ever climb into another grease-caked flying boxcar again.”

  I drank the last of my coffee and whiskey, scoffed out loud. “This ain’t my first air derby, McBride. Your land claim is malarkey—compared to yours, Captain Streeter’s was etched into the city’s bylaws. And what makes you think I’d want to go around town digging through rose gardens looking for Al Capone’s blood money anyway?”

  McBride broke out laughing. “Oh, come now, stop being so cagey. You aren’t going to tell me Carpaccio sent you to the Lexington Hotel yesterday for high tea, are you now? That’s right, I know you met with him, and I know you scoped out those empty tunnels too. I’ve got reach, bucko.”