My Kind of Town

by John Sandrolini

  He slung a familiar camelhair coat at me. “He said to give you this, you dumb Californian.”

  I closed my eyes, exhaled. “Bless you, Sal. I’ve got a real problem with Carpaccio now.”

  He regarded me warily. “How much of a problem?”

  “Tell you about it on the way. Let’s get this baby cranked up first.”

  “Where we goin’ anyway? Benton Harbor? Michigan City?”

  “Tell you that on the way too, old chum. C’mon, the Greek told me the key’s in the aft locker. Help me find it.”

  It took a few minutes to locate the key, but the Chrysler Marine big blocks fired right up when I turned them over. I filled Sal in on the downward spiraling situation of the last twenty-four hours while they warmed up.

  Sal collected the dock lines while I got the lay of the harbor and figured out a bearing to pick up once we cleared the breakwall. I took note of the large Coast Guard cutters tied up a few hundred yards away on the other side of the sluice gate. We were going out pretty early in the morning to pass ourselves off as a fishing boat, but I figured Sergeant Bencaro could run interference for us if it came to it. I still gave some thought to running dark but flipped on the navigation lights at the last second to make everything look normal.

  That’s one I’d like to have had a mulligan on.

  79

  The ride was rough, five-foot seas driven by a twenty-knot north wind that spanked the Greek’s boat broadside, sheets of green water periodically breaking over the port bow and spraying back over the pilothouse. I had no problem with it, but Sal was over the lee rail within five minutes. Fortunately, Marco Kabreros was right: the Pelecanos was a good ship. Steady, stout, and well powered.

  The trip wasn’t that long anyway, maybe thirty minutes at the eight knots we were making—and not across the lake to the Michigan side as Sal had speculated. Just a fraction of that distance, in fact.

  In Chicago, the word crib refers to one of several in-lake intake stations that provide fresh drinking water to millions. Their foundations were sunk well offshore via caisson in the 1860s, when the polluted water at land’s edge became too foul to drink, their extensive connecting pipes channeling clean, cold Lake Michigan water inland to the legendary Water Tower and other pumping stations. These low stone edifices dotted the horizon from Evanston to Hyde Park—origins and function unknown to most of the populace—mysterious castles or coastal batteries in the minds of children like me who gazed out at their fuzzy images from the beaches on shimmering summer days.

  But the cribs were wholly visible from any lakefront building that topped five stories—and almost certainly from the roof of the Lexington Hotel as well. An enterprising man like Al Capone might have conceived of the remote citadels as the ultimate bastion for hiding his whiskey—or treasure—in plain sight, justifiably proud of his own cleverness. The man who clutched an entire city in his vise-grip fists could surely have exerted control over a pumping station run by the Chicago Water Works, a department—like most other municipal entities—honeycombed with men in his employ. And after Capone had fallen, an equally enterprising man might utilize these same cribs to hide the spoils he’d plundered from Big Al’s cache.

  A man like his consigliere Easy Eddie O’Hare.

  There had been fragments of things—conversations, memories, intuitions—jumbling around in my head all week. What I discovered at Selma O’Hare’s home crystallized them all.

  During our time together, Butch and I had often discussed our love of sailing, even making a plan to do so at his next duty station in Hawaii if the stars aligned. He was an expert seaman, as was his father. And it was Edward O’Hare Sr. who had taught Butch how to sail—both in the numerous bodies of water around St. Louis and on the windward shore of a lake the Ojibwa called the “Great Water.”

  In the town beside this lake, Edward O’Hare had made his fortune—and sealed his fate. There, too, he had shared time with his teenage son, on and around the water, even taking him to an intake station on their day-sailing trips, having become so casual about his visits that he took his son’s picture from a stone landing several miles from shore, his point of vantage as unmistakable as the land beyond.

  In that photo, stretching out behind young Butch’s smiling face, was a vast curving elbow of what was once sand and prairie, home to the Algonquin, the Sauk, and the Potawatomi, later the men of Fort Dearborn, and finally the stampeding generations of hustlers, swindlers, and squares who’d come to inhabit what a white-haired poet had dubbed the City of the Big Shoulders.

  Chicago.

  Once it hit me that the “Lex” Butch had referred to in the letter Carpaccio showed me was not the Lexington Hotel at all, but his ship, the USS Lexington, I understood what he meant by “check the Lex for the key to my father’s affairs.”

  It wasn’t so much code as it was impossibly arcane. No one who wasn’t standing in that room in Selma O’Hare’s home, looking at that wooden model, armed with that statement would have figured it out. Even then, it only made sense because I had spoken to Butch about his trips on Lake Michigan and learned from that dog-eared photo where he had alighted. And then, on top of all that, what I found inside the aircraft carrier was only significant for me because I had seen those same markings earlier in the week: the raised-letter CWW of the Chicago Water Works.

  Seeing that, in conjunction with all the other clues, put me very close. But the markings on the key inside the ship were my Rosetta stone. Anyone else looking at the sets of Roman numerals etched into the brass shaft would likely glean nothing from the numbers 4, 1001, and 100 in series.

  But to me the meaning of the clue was indisputable—IV MI C wasn’t a number sequence at all. It was a place.

  The Four Mile Crib.

  80

  None of this guaranteed that I would find anything more than an empty storeroom—if even that—among the many locked doors inside and out of the Four Mile Crib. This was only an eleventh-hour gambit in a week full of ghosts, bricked-up chambers, and busted flushes, just one more forlorn prayer flung into the wind in a city that ate hope for breakfast.

  But it was all I had. I was at full-on war with Carpaccio now. Even Frank couldn’t sway Giancana if he wanted me hit. Money was the only answer. It always was with the Outfit, and the Outfit had always been what Chicago was about.

  I picked up the flashing red beacon on top of the crib about half a mile out, holding course until the damp stone sides began to glisten dully in the blackness, working my way slowly toward the landing on the southern face of the weathered cut-block redoubt.

  I put the helm over as we neared the crib, brought the Pelecanos in bow first, lighting up the landing with her spotlight. It was tricky in those seas, but Sal got a line on a piling on the second pass. I jumped out and lashed her fast fore and aft, waves breaking against the stones below me, splashing up on the concrete at my feet. Then I put my hands out and hauled Sal onto the pavement, where he sat mopping his brow, oblivious to the wetness and the smell of dead fish.

  “Think anybody’s here?” I asked him.

  “No way. My cousin Ralphie works for the department. Somebody high up makes the call, you think some city worker’s gonna ask any questions? This job is major patronage gravy—nobody’s gonna blow this deal.”

  “Yeah. But what about the door? You think it’s open?”

  He struggled to his feet, recovering well enough to be exasperated already. “Joe, this is the city of Chicago. If your guy has any juice, the shift got pulled and the door got left unlocked. That’s how it works here, remember?”

  We marched
over to a pair of large, rusty iron doors set flush in the casement wall. I placed a hand on the circular handle, looked back at Sal.

  “Well . . . Open it already,” he prompted, looking plenty eager himself.

  I pulled on it hard. It gave with a groan and swung forward, dim light from the recesses spilling out onto our windy, wave-swept perch.

  “Told ya,” Sal trumped.

  Then we stepped inside, out of the blustery elements and into the dead calm of the deserted crib. I began to pull the door shut behind me. Then, in the wind outside, I thought I heard a cry. It sounded like my name. I wheeled, stopped cold at what I saw: Claudia was running across the landing, waves nipping at her heels. “Joe! Joe—aspetta! Wait for me! Don’t leave me out here!”

  She’d stowed away while Sal and I were getting the boat ready, probably hidden in the captain’s berth below. I was flabbergasted.

  She ran up, threw herself into my arms, shivering. “Don’t be mad with me, baby. I couldn’t stay with that crazy old man—I want to be with you and Salvatore.”

  I wanted to be angry with her, but the move was right out of my own playbook. Sal and I gawked at each other for a second, then he shrugged, “’Nother set of eyes at least.”

  I wrapped her in my coat, hugged her close, kissed her forehead. “All right,” I said, “now we’re three. Let’s get started.”

  And so we set off to find the treasure a deranged mobster had told me about that allegedly lay behind the door that fit the key I’d found in a wooden ship in an old lady’s house three hundred miles away in rural Illinois.

  And we were now out on a dark and stormy night.

  On a water intake station.

  In the middle of Lake Michigan.

  Alone.

  Hell’s bells.

  81

  We entered into an empty brick-walled crew quarters, picking up the pair of workers’ lanterns left on a dining table along the way. The complex’s radiant steam heating was a welcome change from the chilly air outside, the warmth emitted through the floor an immediate boon to our cold, damp bones. At the far end of the quarters, we stopped in front of a door marked intake room in red-stenciled letters. I smiled again at my companions, opened it, and stepped through.

  The sight that greeted me was familiar—but only from childhood readings of Jules Verne. First, a narrow brick passageway, crowned with an arch. Then a large circular chamber beyond, roughly sixty feet in diameter, punctuated by stacks of glass block windows every ten feet through which daylight surely fell at a better hour. A few spartan offices and a minimal amount of furnishings filled out the near side of the room, wall-mounted clipboards containing reams of paper detailing whatever tasks the crew wouldn’t be getting around to tonight. That stuff was all pretty routine.

  What made it so peculiar, however, was the fact that the intake room was essentially an inverted bowl on top of the water, the great majority of its open space occupied by the lake itself. Other than the catwalk ringing the wall’s circumference, the room was an open sheet of flat water ten feet below floor level. That water looked every bit as fresh and as cold as the turbulent lake outside, but inside it was as placid as a martini on a Pump Room tray.

  Sal explained the little he’d learned from his cousin about the operation of the complex. The crib itself was fixed to the bottom by its caisson. Offshore hydraulic pumps drew lake water into the cribs, carrying it past filtration screens then into the large intake pipe at the base of the open bay. The pipe then led down into the lake bed and ran submerged several miles into the waterworks’s pumphouses ashore.

  It was all quite fantastic, the dim lighting, steady hum of distant pumps, and extreme isolation all heightening the science-fiction feel of the setting.

  We all stared in silence at the strange scene, our minds processing the physics at work as our eyes pored over the hardware. Despite having been previously ignorant of the process, I had an immediate appreciation for the Civil War–era engineering that had created a water delivery system still in use a hundred years later.

  All of which was well and fine, but it wasn’t going to open any doors on any imperial treasuries. I was going to have to stick a brass key into a lock to do that. And that meant some good old-fashioned looking around.

  “Claudia, Sal, we need to get cracking,” I said as I pulled the key out of the inside of my suit jacket and held it up. “See the unusual shape of this thing, two outward-facing teeth, each one on its own shank?”

  Sal’s eyes doubled up as he fixated on it. “What is that?”

  “It’s a key, Sal-ee pal. One that may lead us to everything we’ve been hoping for.”

  Claudia reached out and touched it, running her index finger down its length, smiling at the strangeness of it, just a flash of pink appearing between her teeth. “It’s, how you say? Med-eye-evuhl?”

  “Medieval. Yes, it is.” I swept out my arms, “Now . . . let’s find out where the hell it goes before the king gets home. We need to split up to save time. Claudia, you take the crew quarters; Sal, check outside between the seawall and the building here. Try every door you see, every cabinet, every closet, every storeroom—who knows where this key fits. Okay?”

  “Okay,” they both agreed.

  “Let’s go.”

  I grabbed a lantern, handed the other to Sal, walked toward the crew quarters.

  “Dove vai, Joe?” Claudia inquired as she walked with me.

  I pointed toward the double iron doors. “I’m going outside, to look along the outside of the seawall. See you soon.”

  The wind was bracing and the air damp, but I was on a mission. It was pushing four thirty now, and a new crew was due at seven. This was likely the only time McBride’s contact would be able to pull off that “storm relief” stunt. Chicago tolerated a lot, but you didn’t want to try the same trick twice, “Don’t make no waves,” being a well-known figurative dictate of the Chicago Code.

  The nuances of that code kept nagging at me as I worked my way around the slippery curving contours of the crib’s protective seawall amid some very literal and rather large waves, each treacherous step putting me a little farther out on the ledge but no closer to the door I’d hoped I’d find. A particularly big swell broke beneath me, icy water soaking my trousers up to the knees as I clung to the wall like a starfish, cursing like a longshoreman.

  The cold shock did it.

  They didn’t need to hide anything.

  One was Al Capone, the other his lawyer. Who in hell in the Water Department was ever going to question them? Those guys didn’t skulk about; they walked in shouting orders, if anyone was even there when they arrived. “Urbs in Horto” might have been the official city motto on some charter somewhere, but “Go big or stay home” was the only ethos the people here had ever known.

  That door, I knew then, was inside the building if it was anywhere.

  Despite my rising excitement, I managed to make my way back around without falling in. Before I went inside, I double-checked the Pelecanos’s lines. When I looked up, I thought I saw a light on the water in the distance. It was way too early to be the morning crew, but if it was, Sal was going to be working his badge and the phone something fierce. I stared at the spot for a long time without seeing anything again. Reassured, I went inside.

  That’s another one I wish I could redo.

  82

  I rounded up the others and gathered them in the intake room. Neither of them had turned up anything remotely relevant, although Sal had gotten a hold of an Italian sausage sandwich in the fridge and was administering the coup de grâce to one half
of it.

  “Listen,” I told them, “we’re short of time. There’s nothing outside, nothing between the walls, and nothing in the crew quarters. Know why?”

  Heads turned silently. Sal burped, covering his mouth a moment too late.

  “’Cuz it’s in here in plain sight—in this room. It’s gotta be. Because when Al Capone or Edward O’Hare came here, this room was empty—just like it is now.”

  I gestured toward Sal. “I thought about what you said earlier. You were right. Jack McBride isn’t the first guy to ever order a crib crew off-shift. Torrio, Capone, O’Hare, Nitti—they all could’ve done it. Those guys had major clout, and clout talks in this town. Bullshit and everything else—including city workers—walks.”

  The energy and urgency of the opportunity so close at hand was amping me up, my temples beginning to pulsate, my voice spiking like Rockne’s at halftime as I spoke. “You two following me?” I demanded.

  Again the heads moved, this time up and down.

  “Good,” I declared, thrusting the key up high. “Now let’s go find that damn door!”

  Claudia worked the near side, Sal the open electrical closet down a small flight of stairs. I took the catwalk, scanning every inch above and below the metal bars as I worked my way around the circle. Doors got slammed, pipes got banged on, drawers got rifled. Minutes flew by on winged feet. No one found a thing.

  A little before five, Sal called out “Hey Joe!” from the brick passageway. I whipped around from the far end of the catwalk, eyeing his big frame in the archway to the crew quarters.

  “You got something, Big Horn?” I yelled, excitement and hope surging through me. Claudia stopped searching too, her attention rapt on my buddy.

  He shook his head sideways. “Oh . . . no . . . I just wanted to know, didya want the other half of this sandwich? I’m getting hungry again.”