Embers & Ash

by T. M. Goeglein

  “What about me?!” Elzy shouted.

  “The cops can have you. Maybe you’ll know some of them. Maybe they’ll let you go, but I doubt it,” I said. “A dead principal is hard to explain.” I stood slowly, cautiously, with every nerve in my body twitching, arms held out at my sides like an acrobat. Doug tossed me a rope. I secured it at my waist, exhaled as much fear as possible, and rappelled up the building. He hauled me onto the roof and we hugged quickly, urgently. “You’re alive!” he cried into my shoulder.

  “You too,” I gasped.

  “Don’t leave me here, Sara Jane!” Elzy wailed. “I was your nanny!”

  I stared down at her. “You’re the devil.”

  “You little bitch!” she screamed. “I hope those Russians cut your family’s throats! I hope Lou suffers until he’s dead!”

  My hand was on the ledge, inches from the rope that held her. It would be so easy, I thought. Use the lighter, burn the rope, another enemy dead, and . . . what would that make me? I swallowed the temptation and said, “You’re on your own, Elzy.”

  “I’ll survive this! I’ll come for you again! You’ll never escape me!” she cried, trying to climb, kicking at the building, raging against it as the coil beneath her arms unwound with a wild whipping noise. Her scream pierced the air and she slipped, grasped the rope with one hand, swung like a human pendulum, and fell.

  In contrast to movies, where a person yells “No-o-o!” as she hurtles to her death, Elzy let loose a string of obscenities that faded but didn’t end until it was blotted out by the faraway screech of brakes and blowing horns. I stared over the edge at the toy cars and ant people already converging, and then we hurried across the roof, pausing only when we came to Mr. Novak.

  Doug bent down, closed the chubby little man’s eyes, even straightened his tie.

  Staring at him, I could only think, A good man, dead. Elzy had killed him neither for self-preservation nor even as a twisted form of justice, but because he’d served his purpose and become useless. She’d paid, of course, but her evil goal—revenge—had come with a price. Poor Mr. Novak had owed nothing and paid far more.

  “Sara Jane,” Doug said quietly, “we have to go.”

  And then we sprinted down 106 floors without stopping. The door at the bottom of the stairwell was equipped with an alarm, but I had the metal clip. I disabled the alarm and we peeked into the north lobby, watching hell break loose on the street outside; it was choked with cop cars, fire trucks, ambulances, and gawkers. I was a mess, eyes red and swollen from the pepper spray, dried blood from Elzy’s kick to the face spattered on my nose and shirt. Doubtless, Fep Prep students were reporting to security that they’d seen me on the Ledge. Doug and I needed a way to escape without drawing too much attention, but catching a cab would be impossible. I eased the door shut as Doug said, “Now what?”

  I thought for a moment, biting my lip. “Everything’s happening on the north side of the building, where Elzy landed. But there’s a south lobby, too.”

  “So?”

  “So. Shawshank,” I muttered, taking out my phone.

  “Starring Tim Robbins and Morgan Freeman . . . what are you talking about?”

  “A long shot,” I said, texting furiously: Are you still here? In Chicago?

  Tyler answered: Making final plans. Leaving tonight. U okay?

  I used the code word, telling him that I needed one of his sleek black cars sent to the south lobby of the Willis Tower as quickly as possible—that I was doing confidential counselor business and needed a ride, right now, no questions asked.

  He texted back: No ?’s necessary. Car there in five mins.

  You thanked me at the Davis, I replied. My turn: thx.

  Not necessary, either. Anything for u, he answered.

  Be careful.

  U too, he replied. Hope we see each other someday soon.

  I stared at the phone, a hard, sad knot in my chest, and explained it all to Doug, how Tyler and I had pledged to watch each other’s backs, and he nodded, saying, “You’re sure you can count on him?”

  “Yeah, because we’re sort of in the same boat in the Outfit.”

  “Forget boats,” Doug said, “I’d be happy with a car.”

  I wiped away as much blood from my face as possible, tried vainly to do something to my hair so it didn’t look as if I’d just scaled a tower wall, and we slid out the door, hurrying but not running to the south lobby. It was nearly deserted, with everyone from security guards to gawkers having rushed to the other side of the building, and—yeah, I could count on Tyler—a black car was gliding to the curb when we pushed outside through the lobby doors. The driver said nothing, only nodded when we jumped in and I told him to head for the Currency Exchange Building. Safely inside the car, Doug took the bullet-dented lighter from his pocket. “I’m going to build a monument to this thing,” he said quietly.

  I stared out the window thinking of Elzy—how she had had nothing to do with my family’s abduction or the Russian mob. I’d always believed in the saying, Better the devil you know than the devil you don’t, but now I wasn’t so sure. After all, I’d known Elzy since I was a kid. As our nanny, she’d nearly lived in our home and—“Holy . . . shit,” I whispered.

  “What?”

  I shook my head as the scales fell from my eyes, seeing how the omnipresent threat of Elzy had blinded me to clues in the past. “She was always listening, always snooping around the house, the bakery,” I said more to myself than Doug. “Always pushing Uncle Buddy to . . . what did she used to say? ‘To get what you deserve.’ I thought she meant from the bakery, but she meant the other family business. And she wanted something for herself, not for him.”

  Doug said nothing, letting his face ask the question.

  “Greta,” I said, the name cold on my tongue.

  My uncle Buddy’s wife, Greta Kushchenko Rispoli. A nice, shy Russian girl who was the exact opposite.

  I really had known the devil all along.

  24

  FROM EARLY WEDNESDAY MORNING UNTIL late at night, in short bursts and deep conversation, Doug and I slid facts into place and filled in the rest with educated guesses.

  It had to be Greta.

  “Blinders are off,” I said, pacing the Bird Cage Club, “it can only be Greta.”

  In the past, knowing the identity of an adversary sparked feelings of bitter disappointment or betrayal or sheer confusion. This was different. As the astonishment wore off, I grew violently angry with Greta for the sustained hell in which she’d kept my family. Electricity pinched my spine. It was as dangerous for me as it was for her.

  “How’d she do it?” Doug said, flicking the lighter, staring at the orange flame. “I mean, get hooked up with the Russian mob?”

  “Besides the fact that she’s Russian,” I said, “no clue. Now that I think about it, she just sort of . . . appeared.”

  It was true: when Uncle Buddy first brought Greta around, she was timid and mousy, whispering back and forth with him but jumping out of her skin when spoken to. If someone asked her a question about herself, Greta blushed and recited the same information every time. Her parents, now dead, had been poor but humble Russian immigrants to Chicago. It was too painful to discuss, as was most of her background.

  “Where in Russia did your parents come from?” my mom once asked.

  Turning pink, Greta mumbled, “Moscow.”

  “So what is it you do?” my mom said.

  “Hair, sometimes,” she said, snuggling close to Uncle Buddy.

  “Enough with the third degree,” Uncle Buddy said, patting her hand protectively. “Greta’s a little shy.”

  Dead parents. Moscow. Hair sometimes. That was basically it.

  And then, as she and Buddy grew closer, Greta began to transform—lips sparkling redder, hair growing blonder, necklines plunging deeper—while her passivity g
ave way to barely concealed aggression. She snooped around our house and the bakery, opening drawers, inspecting receipts, even nosing through my and Lou’s rooms. Worse, she hectored Uncle Buddy every chance she got. He was too lazy, not assertive or ambitious enough, and for heaven’s sake—did he really intend to bake cookies the rest of his life? A grown man? Who deserved so much more?

  “Weren’t your dad and mom suspicious?” Doug asked.

  “They were, but they couldn’t tell Lou and me why—that their lives were built around hiding the family secret to end all secrets, and now this interloper was rummaging around, berating my uncle,” I said. “Instead, my parents told us to be cautious around Greta, just like we were around friends and neighbors, that we were private people—it was how we lived. And my dad made a point that seemed so true.”

  “What?” Doug asked.

  “Everyone loved my uncle to death but he was . . . hamstrung, I guess is the word, like, he just couldn’t get it together. My dad reminded us that it was Buddy after all, he’d never managed to date anyone for longer than a month or two,” I said, “and that Greta would be no different.”

  “Wrong-o,” Doug said.

  “After a while, no one in the family cared where she came from. We just wanted her to go,” I said.

  But Uncle Buddy took her straight to the altar, Vegas style.

  After they were married, Doug and I reasoned, she must’ve squeezed him for as much information as possible about my family and the Outfit before casting him aside. Uncle Buddy redeemed himself before he died, rescuing Lou and me from that vicious psycho Poor Kevin, but no redemption would’ve been necessary if not for Greta. “She lit a fire under him,” I said, “made him resent my grandpa and my dad for excluding him from the Outfit.”

  “Maybe she urged him to spy on them,” Doug said, flicking the lighter.

  “Probably,” I answered. “He found out about the notebook, that it contained something so powerful that even he, Buddy Rispoli, the one with brown eyes who hadn’t inherited cold fury, could take over the Outfit.”

  “Surely he told his beloved wife about it,” Doug said.

  “Poor Uncle Buddy.” I sighed. “I’m unsure now if he wanted the notebook and ultimate power for himself or for her. Either way, she left him.”

  “She sounds like a real piece of work,” Doug said, lifting Harry into his arms.

  “Beyond. She and I were oil and water,” I said, “but Lou was more patient with her. Greta even sort of liked him.”

  “What I don’t get,” Doug said, cradling the little dog, kissing his nose, “is where she’s been all this time. Elzy, Juan Kone, and poof . . . he-e-re’s Greta.”

  I thought of Lou again and saw the answer skulking in the shadows. “She’s been here all along. On the periphery,” I said. “Whatever cosmic joke timed Juan’s kidnapping of my family with Elzy’s attempt, Greta somehow found out about it.”

  “Just because she left your uncle doesn’t mean she wasn’t still watching your house and the bakery,” Doug said.

  I nodded slowly. “She discovered that Juan had my family, and passed herself off as an ice cream creature. Took Lou to the Ferris wheel to draw me out—”

  “Maybe she was going to try to snatch you,” he said.

  “Maybe. But Poor Kevin got in her way. And then she took my family when Juan’s operation failed. And here we are.”

  “Where?”

  “At the place where I’m so pissed off, it’s scaring me. I have to stay in control, but I’m not going to Czar Bar unarmed,” I said. “I haven’t been taking aspirin, Doug. I’m not going to start now.”

  He shook his head. “Shame on you for lying, but for once, no argument. Just be careful in there,” he said. “They’ll all be wearing the crimson eyewear,” he said. “Greta’s tricky, I’ll give her that.”

  “And smart. Smart as hell to have lined up the Russians behind her.”

  “Smart enough to know you lied about ultimate power?”

  “Let’s hope not.”

  “What if she is?”

  “Plan B.”

  “What’s plan B?” he asked.

  “I was hoping you had one,” I said, as Doug’s phone chirped.

  “That makes ten calls from my mother. More times than she calls me in a year. She heard about yesterday, obviously,” he said. “Her messages aren’t even complete sentences. She just sputters ‘criminal prosecution’ and ‘reform school.’ Do reform schools even exist?”

  “She doesn’t know about the Bird Cage Club.”

  “Never asked,” he said, tossing the phone aside.

  “My high school career ended yesterday. I’m never going back to Fep Prep. But what are you going to do?”

  “Focus on the immediate future,” he said. “I’m planning nothing other than petting Harry and being your getaway driver.”

  “Tomorrow night. Eleven thirty.”

  “Czar Bar. Where only the finest Russian mobsters get loaded.”

  “First thing in the morning,” I said, “we gotta take that seat out of the Ferrari.”

  • • •

  It wasn’t first thing in the morning.

  I slept and slept, Wednesday night into Thursday afternoon, the shock of the Willis Tower incident and anxiety about facing Greta sinking me into a deep, unconscious cocoon.

  It also wasn’t the Ferrari.

  It was an empty space in the subterranean parking garage beneath the Currency Exchange Building where the Ferrari should have been parked.

  “Did you hear me?” I asked. “Where is it?”

  Doug stood next to me, shoulders in mid-shrug, palms open. “It . . . it was right here last time I saw it.”

  The Lincoln was either rusting at the bottom of the Chicago River or relegated to a dump (the Vehicle Identification Number had been filed off, leaving it untraceable). There was no way I could rent a car and stealing one was too risky. Trembling with the knowledge that I was in dire need of a getaway car, I said, “It couldn’t just disappear. Where are the keys?”

  Doug swallowed once, thickly. “Um . . . well, don’t you have them?”

  “No. You asked me for them last night.”

  “Right, right,” he said, patting himself down, and then deflating with a sigh. “Okay, look. I thought I was doing us a favor,” he said. “While you were asleep, I came down here and made sure the car would start, then took it out and filled the tank. So we’d be ready. I must’ve—”

  “Left the keys in the ignition,” I said, staring at him. “Doug, it was stolen.”

  “You think so?”

  I’d bet on it. Automobile theft was a steady source of income for the Outfit; a valuable model like the Ferrari had either been sold outright or stripped to the chassis by now. The irony was that someone in the Outfit had probably stolen it with no idea who they were stealing it from. “Now what?” I said. “I need a car.”

  He pursed his lips, thinking. “I know of a Cadillac that’s available.”

  “Cadillac? Wait,” I said, “you mean the one at Reebie? Nunzio’s?”

  “Yeah. It’s just sitting there, ready to go.”

  “It’s also from 1929. There are probably fewer cars on the face of the planet that would draw as much attention.”

  He crossed his arms and put on his logic face. “The pickup at Czar Bar is late at night. It’s not like high noon or anything. There won’t be many people on the street,” he said. “Besides, we know the old car runs. Do you have a better idea?”

  I was out of ideas. All I cared about was freeing my mom and Lou, and in the near future, rescuing my dad. Doug and I returned to the Bird Cage Club where we spent the rest of the day trading the lighter back and forth like a good-luck charm, working out the details of the pickup. Doug would drop me off a block from Czar Bar. I’d walk to the meeting and then, as so
on as he saw us exit, he’d speed to the curb, gather us up, and roar away. The deal with Greta was in place, but I’d have been a fool to trust her. Once I had my mom and Lou in the car, I intended to get the hell out of there as quickly as possible.

  We did nothing else the rest of the evening except rehearse the plan.

  At 10:15 p.m., we boarded the elevator, on our way to pick up the Cadillac.

  Harry whined as he watched us fall away.

  • • •

  Clark Street was nearly empty outside Reebie Storage, with only a scattering of pedestrians and an occasional taxi floating over the pavement. I pointed past the front entrance, where the twin Ramseses stood guard, and down the alley. “Capone Door, remember?” Doug nodded and we began inspecting the warehouse wall for a tiny C, finding only a mosaic of blank red brick.

  “Nothing,” Doug whispered. “Not a single word or letter.”

  “Ray Jr. said the Capone Door was in the alley,” I murmured, looking up, around, and down. “But ‘alley’ doesn’t necessarily mean a wall.” I toed my Chuck Taylor at a manhole cover coated with a veneer of rust, stamped with CHICAGO WATER WORKS. Carefully, I stepped on the C in Chicago, and with a pleasing scrape it slid aside revealing a stairway into darkness. “Got your lighter?”

  “Are you kidding? I’ll never go anywhere without it again,” he said, handing it over. I held it like a mini-torch and descended under the pavement to an intersection of two tunnels. A faded sign above the entrance directly ahead read, REEBIE STORAGE—KEY REQUIRED. The other tunnel was pitch-black, emitting a chilly, faraway breeze that was tomb-like and sour with the stench of something long dead. I lifted the lighter to a sign above that entrance; it read, SAL THE BUTCHER. “Why was a guy operating a meat shop way down here?” Doug said.

  The senses of smell and taste are intertwined, and I recalled the flavor of that awful scent from the times (too many) when I’d been punched in the face and had licked my own blood. “I don’t think he was butchering animals,” I said quietly, as we stared at each other. “That’s one tunnel I’m never going down.”

  “Ugh,” he said with a shiver. “You got the pharaoh?”