by Sikes, AJ
Nothing, and she knew it. At least not yet. Maybe if they got into a place with just the one soldier by them. Maybe she could get word to Nagy somehow and they could make a plan together.
Soldiers kept moving lines of prisoners down the street and out of the neighborhood. Emma would cough to get Nagy’s attention. That was it. She’d wait until the soldiers told them to move and would cough, turning her head to see if she could meet Nagy’s eyes. The soldier was ahead of her, nudging Biros and yelling for them to move it. Emma got ready to cough on the next shuffling step. Instead, she dropped all thoughts of escape and focused on the terror in her chest when she heard the unmistakable voice of Detective Tom Wynes.
“Go on and join the house-to-house teams, soldier. I’ll move out with your bunch.”
Chapter 30
Aiden spun around and put both hands out, feeling his way down an earthen tunnel. He could only see a few inches in front of his nose, but the menace of the voices he’d heard forced him onward. Aiden kept his palms on both sides of the tunnel and counted his steps, like he’d been taught during a cave walk one summer. The scout troop leader had all the boys line up and walk through an unlit tunnel in a cave. It turned out to be only twelve steps from entrance to exit, but Aiden remembered feeling like it took half his life to walk through that pitch dark passage.
Now, with his hands rubbing crumbs of dirt from the tunnel walls, he stepped slowly and kept his breathing quiet. Up ahead a light flickered in the darkness. After five steps, Aiden saw it was a candle. He picked up his pace until he stood below the wiggling tongue of flame that grew from a yellow stub stuck into a wad of wax drippings. Aiden thought the candle was floating in the air until he saw the stout wooden sconce jutting from the tunnel wall. The candle guttered, dripping fresh melted wax onto the ground by his feet. A small mound of accumulated drippings sat in the dirt like the leavings of some underground animal.
Aiden stretched out a hand. The candle cast enough light for Aiden to see just beyond his fingertips. He shivered and kept moving into the tunnel. He passed from the glow of the candle, leaving it behind him. His palms instinctively found the walls to either side and he pressed on, forcing each foot in turn to lift from the ground, step forward, and find safe purchase on the dirt floor. One step. Two.
Another candle lit the path father ahead. Once he saw it, Aiden made for it as fast as he could. Five more steps and he was there. He reached it just as a man’s voice broke the silence of the tunnel. Aiden waited, frozen in place with his hands against the walls. The cool earth felt oddly comforting against his palms and the silence settled in around him again. He let it be a blanket, something to hide under as he moved. One step forward. Nothing. Two steps. Three.
The man’s voice came again. Another voice followed the first, and then the clink of a bottle against a glass. Laughter. Aiden’s chest almost warmed to the cheer the sounds grew from, but his fright and tension won out as he remembered what Digs had told him about the tunnels.
Gypsies hid out down here. The kind who’d cut you up if you wandered into their territory. Aiden fought back a cry of fright and, with his lips tight and eyes open wide, he stepped through the light cast by second candle. The tunnel around him looked no different than before. So where were the voices coming from? Above him maybe?
Aiden took a careful step and passed out of the glow of candlelight. He took another step and toppled forward, his foot catching on a cable stretched across the tunnel floor. Nearby, a bell jingled, but the sound was quickly drowned out by the scraping of wood on wood and a metallic click that Aiden recognized as the hammer of a revolver being cocked.
Shivering with his palms pressed against the dirt floor of the tunnel, Aiden waited for the gunshot. When nothing came he shifted his weight to his knees and made to stand. Aiden cried out when he felt thick hands drag him to his feet and grab the front of his shirt, pressing him against the wall. Dirt crumbled from the surface and fell into Aiden’s hair and down into his eyes. He lifted an arm to brush it out but the hands on his chest shifted. One moved to his collar and the second brought a cold metal blade against Aiden’s throat.
In the weak fringes of candlelight, Aiden couldn’t see the man who held him, but he guessed enough about the fella to know he meant business. His hands were rough and calloused against the skin of Aiden’s neck, and the blade had come out of nowhere.
“You don’t move,” the man said.
A lantern flared from down the tunnel and Aiden gasped when he saw the man’s face. Bushy brows lifted over two angry eyes. Below them a sharp nose and flaring nostrils. At the bottom a quivering mouth with the lips curled back showing a fierce grin of rage.
“Still don’t move,” the man said. Aiden grunted, “Uh-uh.” No, he wouldn’t move. Not even enough to shift his head side to side to show he understood.
The hand on his collar snaked around his shoulder and neck, pressing him into the ground where he stood, then pulling him away from the wall and shoving him into the lantern light. Aiden froze when he saw a doorway set into the earthen wall to his right. Through the door was a small room with a table and two chairs. Floorboards had been spread out to cover the bare earth, but it showed through in places. A tall thickset man with a fat drooping black mustache stooped in the tunnel, his girth filling the passage and preventing Aiden from even thinking about making a run for it. The man held a bullseye lantern in one hand and a pistol in the other. Running was not in the cards. Not a bit. Turning the lantern aside, the man beckoned for Aiden to follow and stepped through the doorway.
The man with the knife nudged him gently and Aiden stepped forward, following the other man into the room.
“Sit here,” said the man with the lantern, motioning with the pistol at one of the chairs. Aiden heard the second man close the door and stand against it. The room had a higher ceiling than the tunnel, and the tall man could stand upright here. It was still dark, but the enclosed space was warmer. Aiden felt his ears and fingertips tingle as blood moved more freely under his skin.
The taller man spoke again. “You are boy. Only boy, not policeman. Right?”
Aiden nodded, and when it seemed that wasn’t enough to satisfy the man, he said “Yeah. I’m—. Mister, I’m scared,” he said and let loose the tears he’d been holding back since he saw the G-men putting his parents into a car, leaving a soldier in his family’s house armed with an electric rifle.
Aiden’s chest bucked and shuddered as he sobbed. The men blew air between their teeth. The one with the knife said something fast and the taller man barked a reply, cutting off any objections. They went back and forth, each speaking too fast for Aiden to follow, but he caught the mood of what was said. They weren’t going to kill him. At least not here. Whatever they had planned, he’d live to see it.
The one with the knife came around to where Aiden could see him, his bushy eyebrows casting shadows in the lantern light, making his eyes that much more threatening and large as he stared down his nose at Aiden.
“You come, he says. Come to house. Stand.”
The knife had been put away, but the man had no sheath on his belt that Aiden could see. His face was threat enough, so Aiden stood. The man extended a hand.
“Lahz-low,” he said “Other man is Mee-hawl-yee.”
Aiden wiped at his eyes and rubbed his fingers dry on his pants before shaking Laszlo’s hand. He turned to Mihalyi and they shook as well. Before Aiden could thank them for not killing him, Laszlo put a hand on Aiden’s chest.
“Open coat, please. Here,” he said, patting the bulge over Mr. Brand’s camera box. Aiden did as he was told, even as his mind raced with thoughts of how he could escape and protect the camera box from discovery. Laszlo lifted the strap from around Aiden’s neck and hefted the box. He passed it to Mihalyi who turned it in his hands in the light of the lantern.
Aiden opened his mout
h then. “It’s my boss—”
“Is camera,” Mihalyi said, his mustache twitching over his mouth as he regarded the device and brushed his thick fingers across the screen. Aiden wanted to say Stop touching the box, but his lips and tongue weren’t in the mood to play ball.
“Professor’s house,” Mihalyi said, stabbing a finger at the ceiling. “We go.”
Aiden cursed himself for being weak, and then remembered where he was and feared what would come next. He followed the men out of the room and into the tunnel. They put him between them and moved deeper into the earthen shaft. Aiden kept his hands out like before, touching the walls. He heard Laszlo chuckle behind him and almost pulled his hands in. But the thought came that he should act strong. Make up for the weakness he’d shown in the little room, crying like a child. He was scared still, but he was alive to be scared and that meant he might still get out of whatever trouble was coming his way.
Chapter 31
Brand held onto the airbike. Chief gripped the handlebar and rode them both through the city’s memories. Flashes of light pockmarked the surfaces of buildings that rose and fell around them. Indistinct glimmers made the gossamer cityscape into a projected image rather than a reality. Brand knew what he was seeing couldn’t be real, but the feeling in his chest told him it was. Passing through the street he grew up on, Brand confronted his own memories. His family home stood down the block, flickering against a backdrop of blackness shot through with star points of light. Brand couldn’t take it and shut his eyes against the scene, against the memories of his childhood and everything he’d thought forgotten and buried.
“Hang on, Mitch. We’re almost there.”
Chief veered their course around the stockyards, over the rail lines, and finally into the Ukrainian Village. They pulled up beside the looming mass of an enormous home, larger than any other on the street. All around it hovering like supplicants were a collection of newer homes and a few apartment blocks.
“Even back here this place looks like a palace,” Brand said.
“We both know that’s not true though, don’t we?”
“And how, brother,” Brand agreed. “Let’s get me out of here and into there,” he said, jutting his chin at the building. Chief breathed out and gave Brand a look. Brand gave him a look back.
“You can’t hang around here all day, Chief. Any minute your boss’ll be sending you on a delivery, hey? So just let go and I’ll get out of your hair.”
Brand couldn’t explain the change in his mood. Maybe it was where he was headed. He’d grown resentful during the ride. Something loomed over Chicago City’s future, and it wouldn’t do for Brand to just sit around waiting for it to happen. But that didn’t mean it should fall to him to make things right. Chief lifted his hand off the airbike and Brand couldn’t hold back the shiver that rippled up his spine when the city fell back around him like a drape.
He straddled the airbike and hovered behind an evergreen tree by the front steps, his head just level with the porch. Chief’s head appeared in the air beside Brand, only long enough for the man to sigh at him and shake his head.
“Good luck, Mitch,” Chief said before he vanished behind the curtain.
Shouting and the sounds of vehicles came from down the street. Brand almost edged the airbike forward, but thought better about it. If the Governor’s boys had followed him somehow, he’d be a sitting target out here. Nobody in the Village had as much as a bicycle. They all used wagons, horses, or their own blistered feet to get around Chicago City.
“I’ll take any kind of luck right now,” Brand muttered to himself. He slipped off the airbike and stepped out from behind the tree to examine the street. The Village was in full uproar a few blocks away and the commotion was heading in Brand’s direction. Not wanting to get caught on foot either, he slipped back into hiding and searched for the escape route he hoped was still there.
The house next to him stood as it had the last time he’d seen it this close. Heavy and dark with peeling paint and cracked basement windows. But it was still the biggest, sturdiest building on the block.
Brand felt around the clapboard siding of the porch until he found the catch, his fingers lifting it slow and careful just as they had a year ago when he’d come here chasing a story about bootleggers. Chief had word from the Mayor’s office about Capone’s crew using old cellars and a tunnel network to run their hooch around the city. The cellars and tunnels were supposed to be closed off to prevent that very thing from happening. But somebody had gotten in, and now Brand was here again, following in their footsteps.
The side of the porch swung in on well-oiled hinges, not making a sound, and the tunnel entrance showed signs of use. Footprints and freshly tracked snowmelt marked the earthen floor of the passage. Brand went really slow, letting the door stand open behind him to give him light as he stepped deeper into the space. Three steps in and he lifted the crank torch from his pocket and spun the handle a few times to get a weak glow going in front of him. The stairs were still there, concrete steps, six of them, leading down to the basement below the manor house.
Brand waited and listened for movement or voices from below, in case anyone was there and had seen his torchlight. After a few quiet, deep breaths he moved to the steps, turning the torch handle and following the watery glow it let out. Without its focusing lens, the filament’s glimmer was barely enough to light up a pile of dry straw in the heat of summer. It helped Brand make out shapes in the darkness, but only just.
He slipped at the top of the steps, nearly missing the handrail in the dark. Brand’s feet hunted for purchase on each step and finally he felt the soft earthen floor of the cellar. Remembering the space from when he’d been here before, Brand felt to his right and found the light switch. Should he hit it?
He heard noises from outside, shouting and the tooting of horns. Someone out there had a megaphone. Brand was probably safe down here. Anyone in the house would be watching the street. He slapped his right hand against the button, letting his body sag against the wall in relief at finally getting a moment of quiet safety.
Light flickered on overhead and a single bulb glowed bright and clear in the cellar space. A set of steps descended into the space from across the room. All around the room shelves stood against the walls, packed full of items. Brand stood away from the wall and took it all in. Old picture frames, tools, lamps, cups and saucers, a doctor’s bag and even a few pistols. On one shelf near Brand’s head a small box held a collection of eyeglasses like a tangle of golden spiders with eyes the size of silver dollars.
Brand shook his head, recalling the story that had brought him down here before and the sense of failure he’d taken back to Chief’s office along with the truth about the tunnel network. It was supposed to be Capone’s liquor operation, his smugglers’ corridor. All it turned out to be was a neighborhood full of immigrant gypsies who knew better than to let anything go to waste.
The tunnels went down into the ruins of Old Chicago itself, the city that had burned to the ground in 1871. For a few years during the rebuilding, tunneling was encouraged. People went back down to the old city to collect mementos and lost possessions. After a time, the tunnels were forgotten, and the old city along with them. When they first discovered the tunnels under the manor house, the people living in the Village thought the Mayor had built them, so he could sneak his spies and police into their homes. Then the first kid had come back from the tunnels carrying a golden necklace, and it was worse than the rush out to California.
Every gypsy in the neighborhood had gone down into those tunnels, and the things they’d brought back were put up for sale in the manor house above. There wasn’t much to find, but they found enough. The manor house became Chicago City’s most infamous curio shop, with belongings of the deceased up for sale alongside fakes the gypsies had made. Brand had to hand it to them, because nobody had ever made the rich
folks in Chicago City look so damn foolish before. They’d pile in from the Gold Coast neighborhoods, driving up in their cars and carriages, stepping lightly through the mud and beating a path to the shelves, fighting with each other for a chance to get the only remaining porcelain dish from this or that potter’s shed, or to maybe find great old Aunt Doreen’s cherished silver hairbrush.
Brand had been sent to get a story on Al Capone’s hidden stash of booze and all he’d come back with was a dirt-encrusted beer bottle that some kid had dug up. It was that kid whose ghost haunted the space around him now. When the Mayor found out Capone wasn’t using the tunnels, he quickly made sure the mobster wouldn’t get any funny ideas. Teams of coppers went around the Village neighborhoods dynamiting any tunnel entrances they found. They hadn’t bothered to check if anyone was in the tunnels before setting off the charges though, assuming the people knew well enough not to interfere with police business. It wasn’t until the boy’s mother came calling at the Mayor’s office with her son’s body wrapped in a sheet that anyone knew different.
The gypsies kept the manor house from harm because nobody ever found a tunnel connection in the building’s cellar. Not even Brand, and he’d had a full day and night to search the cellar. The gypsies offered him the chance to find the secret tunnel, and laughed long and hard when he came up the stairs with nothing but his hat in his hand. The kid gave him the bottle and headed back downstairs to disappear in the cellar.
Standing in that space now, Brand still couldn’t see anything that looked like a doorway. If there was a secret door, it was hidden but good. A shuffling in the room overhead put Brand on alert. If the gypsies’ reputation was to be trusted, they wouldn’t take kindly to a nosy newshawk poking around in their cellar without permission. Before he had a chance to move into hiding, the shelf with the box of eyeglasses swung out into the room, knocking him across the brow.
