“Right . . .”
“None of which explains how Capone died,” Doug said, inspecting the corpse.
I stared at the body, thinking, He’s an empty shell. The secret of his death died with him—
“No bullet holes or dried blood,” he said, and snapped open the .38.
—and so did ultimate power, which means—
“It’s loaded. He didn’t defend himself. Also, the door was unlocked. Why didn’t he walk out?”
—there’s nothing in this vault that can help me. Nothing at all.
“And where’s the money?” Doug said.
“I don’t know,” I replied absently.
“Do you think Nunzio killed him somehow?”
“Maybe.” I shrugged. “Or maybe someone else did. It doesn’t matter.” What had happened in the past—to Capone’s fortune, or how he died—was irrelevant to the present. The real question spread through me like winter frost. “Why did Nunzio say ultimate power was freedom,” I asked, “if it’s just a bag of human bones?”
Doug faced me and said nothing.
“I thought ‘Volta’ existed to protect the Rispolis . . . I was so sure the notebook would save my mom and dad and Lou. Poor Lou,” I said. “I was a fool . . .”
“No . . .”
“Yes!” I cried, my voice bouncing from the white brick dome. “Goddamn that notebook! I hate it! I hate myself for relying on it! All the time I wasted believing in it, hoping so hard, while . . .” I said, the truth so painfully evident. “I killed my family, Doug . . . just like everyone else I’ve killed . . .”
“Sara Jane . . .”
Leaning over the corpse, staring into its vacant eye sockets, I blinked once, feeling the cold blue flame flicker and burn. “You son of a bitch,” I said through clenched teeth. “It’s your fault, too. You and your Outfit tore my family to shreds.”
It sat silently with a smug grin on its shrunken head.
“Right. Okay,” I said, extending a hand to Doug without looking at him. “The revolver. Give it to me.”
“What for?” he said, handing over Capone’s .38.
“He’s dead. He can’t get any deader,” I said, blowing dust from the chamber, aiming it, and squinting down the barrel. “But at least I can have the pleasure of shooting him with his own gun.” And I squeezed the trigger, blasting that smile and the rest of his brittle skull to bony bits.
“Good aim,” Doug said quietly, looking at the empty neck, and he then stared past it, paused, and walked to the wall. Running a hand over the bullet marks, he turned and muttered something unintelligible.
“What did you say?” I asked, moving toward him.
“A-u seventy-nine,” he repeated. “Like the flecks in your eyes. Gold . . .”
“What is? That brick?”
He nodded and I scraped at the white paint, seeing a heavy yellow gleam, like solidified honey. I used the pocketknife to chip away mortar and pry it from the wall.
The brick was the size of a small loaf of bread, heavier than it should’ve been.
It didn’t take much to flake away the rest of the paint. When I’d finished, Doug and I stared at a thick bar of gold stamped with:
SERIAL NO. 260911
1932
BANK OF CALIFORNIA
999.9
FINE GOLD
400 OZ.
“You have any idea what this is worth?” Doug asked solemnly.
“Absolutely none,” I said, unable to peel my eyes from it. “Do you?”
“Gold is, like, two thousand bucks per Troy ounce. It’s measured according to—”
“Wait. How do you know that?” I asked. He arched an eyebrow in a how-do-you-think? look, and I said, “Sorry . . . movies, movies, movies.”
“Anyway, two grand multiplied by four hundred ounces is . . .” he said, squeezing his eyes and doing math.
“Eight hundred thousand dollars.”
“Eight hundred large.” He whistled. “Motherfu— And we found the one gold bar hidden in an entire wall of bricks? What are the chances?”
The question stopped me since I knew nothing happened by chance in the Outfit, that even the smallest scam, plot, or racket was thought out to every infinitesimal detail. I looked at the thousands of conjoined rectangles from which the domed vault was constructed, licked at dry lips, and said, “It’s the other way around. What are the chances we’ll find even one brick among the gold bars?” I lifted Capone’s .38 and fired at another wall, and another, and at the ceiling; each shot answered with little beams of golden light.
Doug stared at the ceiling, the walls, me. “All of it?” he said in a tone as soft as rustling leaves.
I handed him the pocketknife.
He carried it to a far wall, picking spots at random and scraping gently. “This one, too . . . and this. And this. Capone converted a hundred million dollars into enough gold bars to construct a small building.” Poking a finger in the air, counting, and breathing excitedly, he said, “There have to be five thousand of them here.”
“Times eight hundred grand,” I said.
“Equals . . .”
We held each other’s gaze with little calculators clicking away in our brains. I said it first, beginning with a slow, “Ho . . . ly . . . shit,” and ending with, “Four bill—wait, can that be right? Four billion dollars?!”
“Ho . . . ly . . . shit . . .” Doug gasped. “That’s an enormous fortune!”
“It’s more than that,” I answered slowly. “It’s ultimate power . . .”
My surprise that it wasn’t a massive bomb or something equally destructive proved that while I was in the Outfit, I still wasn’t completely of the Outfit—at least not yet. If so, I would’ve remembered that bloodshed is merely a tool used to advance a goal. The organization’s real weapon was its collective belief that all people were driven by greed. And that the intense, selfish desire for something—status, narcotics, sex, whatever—placed every human being into one of two categories: either a customer, or someone who could be bought. In the Outfit, the boss has absolute control of how profits are made and spent, which guarantees his control of the organization. Beyond the murders he can order on demand, it is his authority over every dollar that imbues him with power.
With the gold at her fingertips, Elzy would have that power times four billion.
She could do anything with it. The Outfit could easily be subdued by purchasing members’ loyalty while paying to neutralize those who didn’t cede to her control. Every shady business could be expanded exponentially, from drugs and gambling to prostitution and shadow construction and far beyond, into territories yet unexplored. Unions could be bought wholesale, along with legions of cops and aldermen, mayors, congressmen, all the way to the White House. If Elzy were crafty enough, her criminal organization could grow from local to global.
Looking around at the painted bricks, I repeated myself. “It’s ultimate power,” I said, and then in a burst of comprehension, I understood Nunzio’s meaning. “But . . . it’s also freedom. At least for my family,” I said, the words echoing off the walls. “A hundred million in 1951, four billion today. It’s enough, much more than enough, to escape the Outfit forever. It could carry my family so far away, insulate us in such deep secrecy, that no one would ever find us.”
“Nunzio was right,” Doug said. “But also wrong.”
I looked at him, waiting.
“He assumed the Rispolis would be intact, that if something terrible happened, they could use ultimate power to escape together,” he said. “Your family isn’t.”
The vault was so quiet that it felt full of ghosts. “Elzy wants the notebook for ultimate power, but she doesn’t know what it is,” I said slowly. “She wants me for cold fury because she knows what I can do. And she wants both in order to take over the Outfit. But what is the Outfit? Wh
at has its sole purpose been since day one?”
Doug answered without hesitation. “To make money. Needs more to make more.”
“I’ll use ultimate power to buy my family’s freedom. As much as she hates us, not even Elzy would turn down a score like this. It’s worth a hell of a lot more than the Outfit and the Russian mob combined,” I said, “and she can have every damn ounce of it.”
“So you’re going to tell her what ultimate power is?”
“But not where it is,” I said. “When the deal is done and we’re safely away, then I’ll tell her.”
“How can you trust her? Not just to make the deal, but to honor it?”
“What choice do I have?” I said. “Look, all I know is that yesterday I didn’t have a single bargaining chip. Today, I have four billion of them.”
Doug hefted the gold bar. “Then we’d better take this. She’ll want to see one of those chips.” When it was zipped inside the backpack we went to the door, stepped out, and closed it behind us. I tried it once to make sure; it opened easily. Doug stared up at the remnants of the ladder hanging from the wall. “So how do we get out of here?”
“I don’t know,” I said, looking around again. “There aren’t any tunnels or—”
“Shh,” Doug said, cocking an ear. “You hear something?”
“What? I don’t hear any—”
“Quiet,” he said, his head swiveling slowly. “This way, it’s music.” I followed him around the vault in the direction we’d come from, past the electrical box, and he paused. “I think it’s coming from there.”
“Where?” I said. “From this thing?”
“Inside it,” he said, moving his ear near the box, staring at me. “It’s a trumpet.”
I leaned in, careful not to touch the box, and heard it—a trumpet, drums, maybe a trombone—and thought of the music Grandpa Enzo used to listen to in the kitchen of Rispoli & Sons while he, Uncle Buddy, and my dad baked and decorated cakes, cookies, and all other types of fancy pastries. “It’s jazz,” I said. “Big band.”
“The Green Mill has live jazz five nights a week,” Doug said. “Joe Little hid one door behind a waterfall of crap. Maybe he put another one back there.”
“Where no one would be stupid enough to touch it,” I said.
“Are we stupid enough?” he said. “Let me rephrase . . . Are you stupid enough?”
I stared at the warning on the refrigerator-sized box. The C in CAUTION! seemed slightly raised, but I wasn’t sure. With a silent prayer, I pushed it quickly, and the face of the box popped open, revealing a dark passageway. “Stupid is as stupid does,” I said, relieved.
“Good old Forrest Gump.” He peered inside. “What if the tunnel collapsed?”
“Like everything else, we’ll get through it,” I said. After a last look at ultimate power squatting in middle earth, I followed Doug into the passageway, feeling the ground ascend. A few steps through the cool tunnel led to a flight of rickety wooden stairs.
He shone his flashlight upward, saying, “It’s really steep, as high as the ladder we fell from, maybe higher. You think it’s safe?”
“Down here, safe is subjective. It’s standing, isn’t it, and it leads out?”
“Good enough for me,” he said, leading the way. We creaked toward the surface, turning and twisting a dozen times, and freezing when a low groan of old wood and nails sounded beneath us. The stairway swayed back and forth. “Oh shit!” Doug said, “this thing’s going down!”
And then it didn’t.
“Just keep moving,” I said, “carefully.”
We kept on, almost tiptoeing, the music growing nearer, until Doug shone a light overhead and said, “Look.” A trapdoor—so close we could touch it, held tight by a padlock gone orange with rust. As we inched closer, voices chattered and glasses clinked above us. Heavy footsteps fell again and again, back and forth, and Doug said, “We must be under the bar.” We were, and we stood on a narrow landing, praying it would hold, until the last horn bleated, the last cocktail was slurped, the last receipt tallied, and the Green Mill locked up for the night. When we were sure it was empty, I used the .45 surgically, firing one shot to blow off the padlock. The trapdoor swung on antique hinges, sounding like a crow being strangled. I pushed away a floor mat and we climbed back on top of the world, crouching to make sure no one was around. I closed the trapdoor, pushed the mat into place, and Doug followed me around the winding bar. The booths were empty, the bandstand vacated, the glass wall sconces devoid of light.
A clock on the wall pointed at four a.m.
“Late for a school night—or day.” Doug yawned.
As we moved to the exit, I noticed a framed black-and-white face leering from behind the bar. Its left cheek was creased with scars and the head was topped by a fedora. In the photo, Al Capone was at the height of his power, truly the original gangster. I knew from the notebook that “Machine Gun” Jack McGurn had once owned the Green Mill, but that Capone was the real proprietor, using it as a base of operations. It made sense that an entrance to his vault—the most important Capone Door of all—would be located here. I felt the brass pharaoh in my pocket, yet another mysterious key, and was flooded with exhaustion and tired of secrets. We moved to the door, unlocked it, and slipped onto the deserted sidewalk. An entire day of sun had been extinguished while we were underground. It felt as if natural light would never return.
“Let’s take the El,” I said.
We crossed the empty street toward the station as a yellow light changed to red, the click audible in the silent air. I paused in the intersection where Broadway, Lawrence, and Racine met. Bridgeview Bank, formerly Uptown National Bank, was ahead, the Riviera Theatre to my right, the Green Mill just behind.
B U R G L R
It was the oddest feeling I’d had since my family disappeared, something like confidence, knowing that ultimate power was in my hands and deep below my feet. In the world I occupied, where murder was for sale and lives could be bought, I was now armed with a four-billion-dollar weapon.
11
MONDAY MORNING, CROSSING THE THRESHOLD into the old brick fortress commonly known as Fep Prep, I was at the beginning of the end.
The fall semester was quickly winding down. When holiday break began, I’d lose the seven hours of relative safety I clung to each weekday. With its checkpoints, omnipresent guards, and watchful cameras, my pursuers would be foolish to try to breach Fep Prep.
It was all courtesy of Mr. Novak.
Thaddeus “Thumbs-Up” Novak, Fep Prep’s long-serving principal.
Short and roly-poly, bald except for tufts of gray hair around his ears, he favored short-sleeved dress shirts with a rotation of unusually patterned neckties—Tweety Bird one day, little flying toasters the next, and so on. Mr. Novak was as committed to the safety of his students as he was to the concept—which caused most kids (including me) to roll their eyes and hide under their desks—of school spirit, bringing the same bouncy energy to both. Whether herding students to class with cattle noises (Mooo-ve it!) or gleefully taking a pie in the face at a pep rally, it was as if a little happiness motor whirred inside his round belly at all times. My introduction to Mr. Novak came on the first day of freshman year via the PA as he recited the rules of Fep Prep in his best Dr. Seussian effort—
“Doors lock each day at eight fifteen,
dear student, don’t make me repeat it.
Get your butt directly to homeroom,
And then, promptly, seat it.”
It was impossible not to like him, or at least admire his relentlessly positive attitude about, well, everything—which is where his nickname came from. As Mr. Novak bustled through the halls, he’d call out to students and give them a smiling thumb’s-up, his way, I guess, of saying it’s a great day, you’re a great kid, and all is well at Fep Prep.
He came chugging past me now, chee
ks rosy, tie flapping, thumb in the air, calling out, “Hey there! The sun’s out! Smile, Sally Jane!”
After almost three years, he still hadn’t gotten my name right.
I’d continued with school to uphold my mom’s educational standards, especially important to me in her absence, and for the safety behind Fep Prep’s walls. At the same time, I tried to attract as little attention as possible. Besides attending class and Classic Movie Club (two hours, concealed in darkness), I existed below the radar. If Mr. Novak thought I was Sally Jane while leaving me alone, it meant I was doing something right.
I walked on, my mind racing with thoughts of subterranean gold.
And then it leaped to Max’s heartbreaking absence.
Passing his empty locker filled me with nauseating butterflies. Sorrow and loss were the twin feelings that followed me down the hallway. With supreme effort, I willed them away. They weakened me, and besides, it was over between us.
Still, not thinking about him was impossible.
It was ten minutes until homeroom, and three hours earlier in Los Angeles. If I called now, he’d still be asleep and I could at least listen to his voice-mail greeting. It wasn’t much, but it would be enough. I dialed quickly, hearing one ring, two rings, and then, “Hello.” I was waiting for “This is Max, leave a message.” Instead, the newly awoken Max said, “Hello?” again. My finger hovered over the End button but before I could push it, he said, “Whatever. It’s too early for a wrong number,” and hung up.
Too early. Too late. It was the story of our relationship.
I nearly jumped out of my skin when a text message buzzed seconds later, scared that he’d figured out the blocked number was mine. But no, it was camouflaged in Outfit code. I didn’t need the notebook to translate. I’d been summoned to enough secret sit-downs to understand it:
Aunt Betty’s making a delicious lasagna for you and Candi, and bought a new pink dress for the occasion. Dinner will be late . . . hot out of the oven tonight at ten p.m.!
“Aunt Betty” was code for Knuckles Battuta, “lasagna” meant a meeting, and “Candi” stood for Tyler (StroBisCo produced the world-famous Wonderfluff candy bar). “Pink dress” was the location—the Edgewater Beach Hotel, painted in shades of Pepto-Bismol—“late” meant early, and “hot out of the oven” signified urgency. “Tonight” (or “today”) always meant tomorrow, and vice versa, and “p.m.” meant “a.m.,” and vice versa. Also, it was crucial to subtract three hours from the stated time. A sit-down called by the VP of Muscle with his counterpart in Money didn’t happen every day. My guess was that it concerned the street war—whatever, I’d find out tomorrow morning. At least I’d get to see Tyler.
Embers & Ash Page 8
