My Kind of Town

by John Sandrolini

  I finally got around to picking up last night’s clothes off the floor. Somebody’s blood was all over my shirt, and the suit smelled like smoke and booze and perfume and tunnel mold. The tie had gone missing. That left me the charcoal gray suit with the narrow lapel. I pulled it out of the closet, paired it with a pale blue shirt and an indigo tie.

  I started out for Claudia’s suite. While I was waiting for the elevator, I remembered my smokes and dashed back to my room. The phone was rattling inside when I got to the door.

  Frank.

  It rang three more times while I was fumbling with the key, turning the knob, and rushing across the floor. I was certain the line would be dead when I picked up.

  It was much worse.

  “Dere you are,” Fiorello Carpaccio teased. “I figured you might be hanging out at Sinatra’s digs.”

  “What do you want?”

  “Nutin’ much. Just a few hours of your time.”

  “Do we really need a sit-down over this? You talked to Frank, I did too. Everybody made bail, right? Let’s just bury the whole thing. . . . I’m all done with any more treasure hunting. Trust me, I got your message.”

  “You ain’t done just yet. You got one more little favor to do for me.”

  “A favor?” I scoffed. “I don’t ever want to have anything more to do with you guys, all right?”

  “Tsk tsk,” he sneered. “That’s gonna be too bad. Guess I’ll just have to send my guys down to Alton without you.”

  “Downstate? You bet your ass you will. I got nothin’ for those cornpone hamlets.”

  He laughed disingenuously. “All right . . . But it’s funny, isn’t it?”

  “What?”

  “Me finding this lady after alla dis time. And to think it was you that tipped me off. Kinda serendipidous, wouldn’t you say?”

  “You’re a regular Lucky Luciano, Carpaccio. Good-bye.”

  “Okay, Buonomo,” he chirped, “if you don’t wanna come, I’ll just let my guys talk to Mrs. O’Hare all alone. I’m sure they’ll have a lovely time with the old girl.”

  61

  The Fates are strange kittens. When you’re buried on the schneid, they can flip you an ace. But it can just as easily be another deuce, too—you just never know. They love, they hate, they pitch pennies with your face on them—that’s divine intervention. Either way, you deal with it. In this case, the deal was raw.

  Carpaccio explained that his guys had taken note of me telling Frank about Mrs. O’Hare coming to the airport rededication back in April. A simple library visit did the rest. As luck would have it, the newspaper writeup identified her as Mrs. Selma O’ Hare of Alton, Illinois, a river town just north of St. Louis.

  Knowing Carpaccio wouldn’t hesitate to employ any form of persuasion necessary, I had little choice but to go along to try and protect her from harm. The next train to St. Louis left at noon, giving me just enough time to say good-bye to Claudia and grab a taxi over to Union Station. The last thing I told her was to stay put and not let anyone in.

  I waited out front a couple minutes for a cab to arrive. The weather had turned from blustery to brutish, an early winter wind swirling down from the north in great vrooming gusts that howled through the narrow clefts between the buildings. Styrofoam plates, hot dog wrappers, and crinkled leaves whirlwinded across the frigid streets as darkening skies closed in overhead.

  As I stood there, I was thankful for my father’s overcoat and the black fedora Frank had insisted I take. November had arrived in full, and it had ridden in on the wings of the Hawk.

  62

  The cab let me out on Canal Street. I stood in place on the sidewalk for several moments as I took in Union Station’s massive limestone dimensions for the first time since 1944. Dark memories from that turbulent time began bubbling up as I started toward the huge Greek columns and the wood and glass entrance doors beyond.

  I stopped, took a few uneasy breaths underneath the oversize red lettering far above me, then reached for a cigarette, reflecting on what had been the low point of my life at the time. A check of my watch told me there just wasn’t time for a mental handholding session. That stuff would have to wait. I put my Lucky Strikes back in my suit pocket, took the last three steps, grabbed the brass handle on the nearest door, and pulled hard.

  Then I was inside, gliding down Tennessee marble steps worn low by millions of tromping feet, decade upon bustling decade. The staircase brought me into the Great Hall, an epic, hundred-foot-high chamber based on ancient Rome’s Baths of Caracalla, whose majesty still inspired awe.

  I stopped still, took in the imposing splendor of the hall. The shell of the epic public space remained unchanged, but the interior elements had metamorphosized. Gone were the rafts of forty-eight-star flags, the enormous war bond banners, the cadres of milling soldiers and sailors. The only familiar trappings were the double rows of long wooden benches and the newspaper stand at the edge of the room.

  Scanning the crowd, I walked slowly into the center of the hall, the clicks of my heels scaling the lofty, colonnaded walls then echoing back down to the floor where they mingled with the murmurs of people on the benches. I pressed on through the under-street tunnel into the Grand Concourse, another massive chamber beehived with hundreds filing toward or away from trains. The concourse was also largely the same, but the site of the USO where I’d once sought refuge from a collapsing world was now a candy and nut kiosk. I chuckled silently at the irony.

  I leaned against one of the crosshatched support girders, searching for a face I didn’t want to see. Far above me, the ornate clock between the glass skylights stared down indifferently on the timeless scene, black hands crawling inexorably toward the departure times of the Southwestern Chief, the Dixie Flyer, and the City of New Orleans, trains whose names spoke of the vast sweep and many faces of the nation.

  I waited and watched as long minutes clicked by, shifting my weight from foot to foot on the hard stone floor. Maybe I should have been relieved, but instead the waiting brought on anxiety. Anxiety over Claudia’s well-being—and my family’s also. Anxiety over the hash I’d made of a weekend getaway. And anxiety over the demons clutching at me from my past, trying to drag me back to that bleak day I’d experienced in this very station so long ago.

  Fuzzy announcements periodically cut the air. Passengers scurried by with suitcases in hand. I stood alone in the middle of the grand rail hub, watching as impassively as the clock at the crisscrossing thickets of ordinary Americans going about their business. Even among them I remained apart.

  Three men dressed like Outfit guys appeared in the tunnel. Any of them could’ve played tackle for the Bears. Carpaccio stepped out from the herd, a cigar lodged in his beefy hand. I walked toward the men, met them under the archway separating the Great Hall from the Grand Concourse. Nobody offered to shake hands.

  “Rough night?” the big boss smirked. His breath smelled like White Owl and garlic.

  Turning my face, I said, “Better than some.”

  He gestured to one of the men. “Jerry, give ’im his ticket.”

  An Acme-issue henchman reached into his coat, handed me a pass on the Abraham Lincoln.

  “C’mon, walk wit’ me over to track eight,” Carpaccio entreated, head-shaking his guards away. “We only got a coupla minutes.”

  We turned, walked in tandem toward the south end of the station.

  “Okay, Buonomo, here’s how it’s gonna be: You’re going with my guy out to Hickville dere to find out what dat old broad knows—dere’s gotta be something she can tell you.”

  “What if she can’t? Should I just draw up a treasure map, tattered edges and all?”

  He smiled, looked down at his highly polished shoes, shook his head. “Can’t say I’d recommend dat. Look . . . You know I ain’t sending you out for a ride. You’d already be swimmin’ in the Sanitary Channel if dat was the case.
”

  “Yeah,” I said, brandishing my ticket. “But I see you didn’t pay for round-trip. That doesn’t exactly put me at ease.”

  “Perspicacious, ain’t ya?”

  I put my hands on my hips, shot him a look. “If I were so goddamn smart I wouldn’t be standing here. But we’re past that now, aren’t we?”

  “Dat we are, wise guy. But you can square dis whole little mess from last night if you help me here. All’s you gotta do is squeeze dat nice little granny a little for me and everyone plays nice from here on out. But don’t get tricky. It won’t pay—not even a nickel, let alone millions.”

  We walked out to the platform and then down the tracks alongside a polished aluminum prewar train, the smell of oil and machinery heavy in the air, redcaps and train hands moving nimbly around their stations on the endless rows of parallel tracks as people boarded their cars. In a rapidly modernizing world, Chicago Union Station—a relic of the past—remained a place that worked, that breathed, that lived.

  The great shining streamliner next to us still gave an impression of quicksilver speed and sinewy beauty even while idling, the low-frequency rumble of her big diesels reverberating throughout the covered shed with a hum you could feel through your feet. The conductor was calling “all aboard” above the din as the last stragglers darted down the narrow passageway.

  I stopped at the next open door, put one foot on the step, dead-stared Carpaccio. “I’ll do this—but only to make sure you guys leave Mrs. O’Hare alone. There’s nothing she can tell either of us, but I’ll go just to prove it to your guy—who is where, by the way?”

  Carpaccio jerked a thumb. “He’s already aboard. You’ll find ’im in the smoking car.” He paused, flashed a stillborn smile. “You’ve met.”

  “Yeah yeah,” I nodded. “Now here’s what you’re going to do for me in return for this trip. You’re going to release Claudia from that contract and leave her alone, too.”

  “Ha,” he roared. “Dat’ll be the day. You can play smack and tickle wit’ her all you want, but I’m keeping dat contract. I paid fifteen grand for the rights to that little songbird and I’m gonna keep her. Her bookings are up lately thanks to your pally boy out west.”

  I started to react, caught myself. There just wasn’t any more time for anything else.

  The conductor beckoned me inside and began closing the door. I angled my shoulder out of the car, jabbed a finger through the grease-tinged air. “You’ll let her go, Carpaccio. There’s something you can make book on.”

  I leaned back inside. The door slid home between us with a click while Carpaccio and I made tough-guy eyes at each other through the window. The Abraham Lincoln’s bell clanged several times, then the train began easing away, gliding out beneath the long covered portico, picking up speed, engines chuffing out heavier breaths with each passing rail.

  Working my way forward, I found an open seat, tossed my hat on it, then passed through several other passenger cars and pushed the door to the smoking compartment sideways. There was a man at the far end reading the sports section. I walked up, stood across from him several seconds, lurching gently with the rocking of the accelerating locomotive as it powered through the chiseled cityscape of the South Side.

  I read his headlines while I waited for him to look up. The Black Hawks had won again, Bobby Hull scoring twice more. The kid was unstoppable.

  The fedora behind the paper tilted up. The sports page drooped.

  “Well, whaddya know?” a regrettably familiar voice muttered as he ditched the coy act, a wide predatory grin and an incipient shiner gleaming above a slate double-breasted pinstripe and a black shirt. “Here we are—two strangers on a train.”

  He riffed through a few lyrics from “On the Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe,” grinning smugly. He was off-key.

  I turned my head slowly from side to side, frowning. “More like the 3:10 to Yuma. I’ll be in back—don’t crowd me, Bo’palazzo.”

  I pivoted on my heel and walked out of the swaying car. He was still murdering Johnny Mercer as the door slid shut behind me.

  63

  It was better than four hours to Alton, each one longer and lonelier than the last.

  I spent a lot of the time thinking about Butch, recalling how he electrified the nation by single-handedly shooting down a fistful of Japanese bombers, his stunning audacity and courage undoubtedly saving his carrier from a severe mauling. Uncle Sam had been taking an extended ass-kicking in the Pacific up to that point, but Butch lit up the newsreels and our hearts with his Medal of Honor–­winning flight. He made us proud. He gave us hope. He showed us we could win.

  His good looks and humble, forthright manner hadn’t done anything to hurt his popularity with a gaga American public during the extended PR tour that followed his famous engagement. The guy was just bedrock. Everyone admired him. Everyone. I’d always felt privileged to be his friend. His death in combat in late ’43 was a body blow to all of us.

  And now I was clattering south on a train with a miscreant not fit to kiss his tail hook, and we were going to see his mother. The thought of it made me sick inside. I swore to myself right there that no harm, no fright, no whit of apprehension would trouble the mother of my long-deceased friend while I remained on this side of the divide.

  And I think Bo’palazzo knew it, too.

  A car was waiting for us in Alton. An older Hudson Hornet: deep maroon and freshly waxed, noisy whitewalls and windshield brow. Even in the sticks, the Outfit guys couldn’t resist the urge to put on the dog.

  We rode in silence along the brick-paved streets, passing through the heart of the old riverfront city as the sunlight ebbed. Drugstores, dress shops, banks, taverns, churches—Alton had the look of a good, honest town. The kind of town that had given her good, honest sons to an overseas conflagration without hesitation, suffering her devastations behind closed curtains when the Defense Department telegrams arrived, little gold stars in the windows replacing the bright-eyed boys who’d once lived there. Boys with dreams. Boys cut short. Boys like Butch.

  Chicago was no such town as Alton. She was big and brawling and painted and hard. But she, too, had sent her sons into the maelstrom—whole convoys of them—many thousands of whom never returned or came home crippled or broken beyond repair. Men who lived out their days drinking themselves off barstools in VFWs or sitting quietly in basements from Pilsen to Pullman, battling phantoms only they could see. They’d gone forth into that grinding maw while grifters like Carpaccio and Bo’palazzo had stayed behind to jimmy out hunks of people’s lives with pry bars. People like Mrs. O’Hare. And Claudia. And ten thousand others.

  A rage began to rise in me as I sat in the car stewing over it, a primal desire to put my hands on the mobsters’ throats and suffocate the life out of them, an overwhelming urge to jerk the steering wheel hard—to dump us all into the churning Mississippi just below road’s edge, willingly surrendering my own defiled life to rid the world of two of them. A fair trade all the way around.

  But I had a family to protect, and Claudia, too. Taking us all out now wouldn’t stop Carpaccio from exacting his revenge, or from sending another car to Mrs. O’Hare’s house. So I waited, watching silently as the car pulled away from the turbid water, driving upward into the limestone bluffs where old Alton resided. I wasn’t sure how things were going to go from here on out, but I knew I’d have to fix it so these men didn’t ever come back.

  64

  We crested the cliffs, entering into the quiet neighborhoods atop the hills. At length, the driver turned down a tidy street of broad lawns and brick houses. We passed several old mansions that dated to the Civil War, their turrets, porches, balustraded balconies, and widow’s walks in differing states of repair. The driver went down several blocks then stopped the car in front of a relatively modest Queen Anne, the duck egg–blue paint with cream trim exuding a cheery note not in keeping with the bluste
ry fall day—or our mission.

  Bo’palazzo told the other man to stay in the car. I took a few steps up the walk, turned, faced Vinnie. The brutish fall wind whipped through the elms above us, a few more reddish-brown leaves dropping with each gust.

  He cocked his head, shoved his hands in his pockets. “Cold feet?”

  I swiveled my head twice, gestured for him to follow me, headed to the edge of the walk, out of sight of the largest windows.

  When he was standing next to me, I said, “You want to know what this woman can tell you about her son, right?”

  He gestured with unseen hands. “Of course.”

  “So let me talk to her alone.”

  “That isn’t going to happen.”

  “Just listen to me here, Vinnie. Two guys—one of them sporting a pimp suit and a black eye—crash this lady’s sitting room and ask her to dredge through painful twenty-year-old memories. For what? Who are we to her? What’s her incentive for telling us anything?”

  “I dunno. Staying alive?”

  “C’mon, goddamnit. You guys always go for the sledgehammer first. Look . . . I knew her son, I served with him. . . . We exchanged letters. Don’t you think I can pass myself off as a guy just looking in on an old friend’s mother better than the two of us can by plowing in there like Spartans on holiday?”

  He scratched the back of his head, pursed his lips. “I see your point, but you could come out of there saying anything. Mr. Carpaccio will put me in the freezer if you get that treasure from under our noses.”

  I made a face, swatted his lapels with the back of my hand. “Don’t be a simp. You guys have all the cards here. You said it yourself. I’m not going to cross you guys—not with my family living down the street. Whaddya got in your crew—twenty, thirty soldiers? I’m one guy. Think about it, Vinnie.”

  It took another five minutes to get him to see it my way, but I finally convinced him he had nothing to lose by letting me try honey first. We both knew they could always come back with the vinegar if they still believed Mrs. O’Hare could help them.