Flicker & Burn: A Cold Fury Novel
Page 28
“When I look at him, I see myself if I’d gone a step further. If he has any chance at all, he’ll need someone who really loves him. Or tough-loves him. Whatever,” he said, punching my arm lightly. “Anyway, it’s the least one ex-junkie can do for another.” He pointed at the folder and said, “Promise you’ll read it on your way to Rome?”
I did, I promised, so when Tyler went to speak with the pilot—“my airborne chauffeur,” he called him—I reached into the backpack for La Ciencia de Ghiaccio Furioso and my Spanish dictionary. Instead, a sheaf of papers caught my eye. It was Uncle Jack’s screenplay, The Weeping Mafioso, bound by brass tacks that had gone green with age. I flipped it open, intending to skim a few pages.
An hour later I sat back, dumbstruck.
Uncle Jack wrote it in 1966 when Nunzio was counselor, Enzo was in training, and Lucky had recently become Boss.
It was part family history, part Outfit lore, and it completed part of the puzzle in a way that the notebook never could.
The story centered on Uncle Jack’s protagonist, a sort of super-gangster called Renzo “Rumrunner” Nispoli. Renzo runs a bootlegging operation, and as the years pass, his fortunes and power increase based on a singular talent for brutality. He kills, kills, and kills again at the behest of his superiors, first freezing victims with “the Look,” squinted ferociously through sky-blue eyes. Renzo was a composite of Nunzio’s and Enzo’s cold fury, Nicky “Daggers” Fratelli’s ability to murder without guilt, and Lucky’s emotional peculiarity—the weeping part—which even Uncle Jack would’ve known about. After Renzo kills a club full of innocent people (the Catacomb Club massacre fictionalized), he hides out in a theater showing Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. When the witch murders Snow White with a poison apple, Renzo bursts into tears. He’s overcome by what he’s done, weeping away the guilt in the privacy of a darkened theater.
So many old, dead secrets mixed up in that screenplay, just like Uncle Jack’s mind, and I kept reading until my eyes froze on the page.
I blinked, but the words were still there.
All I could hear was the vacuum-hum of jet engines, the chatter of my teeth, my heart punching my chest, as I whispered the dialogue spoken by Renzo.
“I know the secret to ultimate power . . .”
And there it was, lifted from “Volta” all those years ago by Uncle Jack, transcribed as a throwaway plot point in a movie script that no one wanted to make. It was Renzo speaking furtively to the only person he trusted and who wouldn’t betray him, someone near the Outfit but not allowed inside. His wife.
RENZO
I know the secret to ultimate power—potenza ultima—and where it’s hidden! All I need to get my hands on it is one little brass key . . .
WIFE
How? How do you know where ultimate power is, Renzo?
RENZO (grinning like a fox)
Because my old man helped put it there, a long, long time ago. He told me when he didn’t think I was paying attention. But I always paid attention.
WIFE
Tell me . . . where is it?
RENZO (cautiously, whispering)
It’s in a vault made of brick, deep beneath the streets of Chicago. Right under what the old-timers used to call the “Troika of Outfit Influence.”
I read all the way to the end but no further mention was made of ultimate power.
None was necessary.
I knew beyond all reason that the “Troika of Outfit Influence” was the heart of “Volta,” the hidden nugget I’d been searching for. So long ago, when Uncle Jack was a young man transcribing Nunzio’s words into Buondiavolese, the poetic phrase must’ve stuck with him. He was paying attention—he always paid attention—and had recycled it decades later for his script.
“The Troika of Outfit Influence,” I said, tasting the secrecy of it.
I licked my lips, feeling my brain spin like a roulette wheel, wondering where in Chicago it could possibly be. And then the little white ball click-clacked to a stop on the only possible answer, where everything began and ended—the notebook.
Ultimate power in its physical form resided inside the earth, but the meaning of the elusive phrase—the actual, pinpoint location—had to be contained within the creased and tattered collection of old secrets. “Volta” provided the what, and now I was sure that some other chapter, or yellowed letter or blurred snapshot, contained the where. All I had to do was examine each page, line by line and word by word, for the last elusive link to finding and freeing my family. Whoever had taken them hadn’t cared about my dad’s blood or Juan Kone’s plan for a genetically engineered army. They’d cared about my family, the Rispoli clan, Outfit counselors-at-large for four generations.
They cared about ultimate power.
I nearly had it in my hands.
What I did not have was the notebook, which I’d locked in the steel briefcase and hidden where no one would find it back in Chicago. I wondered suddenly what I was doing on a plane to Rome—what I was doing anywhere outside the city while my family was still there—and I waved at Tyler. I met him the aisle, where he said, “Hey, sorry, I’m not ignoring you. He’s a chatty one, my airborne chauffeur.”
Remember the chauffeur, I thought, dismayed at how easily I’d been sidetracked by disappointment. “Listen, we have to turn the plane around.”
“Huh? You’re kidding, right?”
“I’m not much of a kidder, Tyler, you should know that by now. I need to get back to Chicago right away.”
A slow smile spread over his chiseled face. “You almost had me there. Turn the plane around, my ass . . .”
“Do it now or it’s gonna be your ass,” I said, blinking once, grabbing his cool green gaze with my cold furious one, seeing his worst fear—it was his parents waving good-bye to Tyler from the steps of a private jet that would soon crash. I blinked it away, too ashamed to watch, and when he was able to face me, I said, “I’m sorry, but it’s really important. I wouldn’t ask if it weren’t.” He thumbed sweat from his lip, nodded obediently, and turned toward the cockpit. Watching him go, I thought of the movies where the girl—me—would utter Tyler’s name. He’d look back, and I’d take his hands, pull him toward me, kiss him tenderly, and tell him to continue on to Rome, where the golden light of Italy awaited.
This isn’t a movie.
This is real life, where families are kidnapped, brutalized, and lost, beautiful cousins overdose, loyal boyfriends leave you, and smart friends become stupid junkies. And where the answers you need most are never out in the open but always buried, sometimes within worn notebook pages, sometimes beneath Chicago.
The Outfit concealed speakeasies, massacres, and vaults far below the earth.
Muddied and bloodied, I was about to discover its biggest subterranean secret.
“Our daughter, our sister,” I whispered, feeling the plane make its slow, determined arc through the clouds. “Our savior, Sara Jane.”