Embers & Ash (7 page)

A FEEBLE GLOW EMANATED FROM THE VAULT—
the switch had activated its lights, too—and I pushed into a room that was completely empty.

Except for a dramatically thin guy sitting with his legs crossed, waiting.

I scream-jumped
and then caught myself, focusing on the first mummy I'd ever seen in person.

Doug and I edged inside, and he propped the door wide open, whispering, “If that thing moves, I'm outta here, fast.” For a minute or two, or maybe ten, we stood staring at the dead human being, while absorbing the barrenness of the vault. Doug spoke first, saying, “There's nothing here except him. Where's ultimate power?”

“Maybe he knows,” I said.

We crossed slowly to where the desiccated body sat next to a table holding a dusty glass, a whiskey bottle, and an ancient cigar. It wore a plain blue suit and dull brown tie, moldy with age. What grabbed my attention, though, was its snap-brim fedora and a diamond-encrusted ring hanging lazily from its shriveled pinkie. Even with every trace of life long evacuated, its posture exuded a haughty, intimidating presence. I stared at the leathery flesh clinging stubbornly to its face, marked by jagged scars on the left side. The thing leered with its lips stretched back, and I felt a chilly whisper of recognition. “Holy shit,” I said. “Nunzio found ultimate power all right.”

“What?” he said, looking around the empty space. “Where?”

“Remember? The one with lasting influence on the Outfit?”

“Wait, you don't mean—” he said, staring at the gristly skin that had been disfigured by a sharp knife long ago. “Oh. Oh . . . god . . .”

“Close, in terms of veneration by mobsters,” I said, nodding at the mummy. “Al Capone. Scarface Al himself. Mister Ultimate Power, in the flesh, or what's left of it.”

“The cold air down here preserved it, kept him from becoming a complete skeleton,” Doug said, gaping at the body. “Can I . . . should I make sure it's him?”

“He won't complain.”

Riffling through his pockets with careful fingertips, Doug extracted a snub-nosed .38 revolver, followed by a fat billfold. He flipped it open and said, “Driver's license name . . . Al Brown.”

“His go-to alias. Used it for years, according to the notebook.”

“This thing was issued in 1951. Every history book on the control center says he died in 1947, in Florida. It was a closed casket, no one saw the body,” he said with a smirk. “That's because there was no body. I guess the rumor was true.”

“Faked his death and escaped the Feds and the Outfit alike with a hundred million dollars in cash,” I said. “There's a scrap of a newspaper article taped in the notebook, some old cop swearing he saw Capone in Chicago, alive, with Joe Little—”

“In 1951,” Doug said.

We faced each other then, my friend and I who had been through so much together, not only on (and beneath) the streets of Chicago, but hacking like jungle explorers through the notebook, untangling its secrets, memorizing its facts. Combining truth with what-ifs, I began enunciating a theory. “Joe Little built the vault for Capone so he could hide a hundred million dollars before he went to prison . . .”

“And then four years after faking his death, when he thought the coast was clear, he snuck back to Chicago to make sure it was safe,” Doug said.

“Or to make a withdrawal?”

“But it was dangerous,” he said. “If the Outfit hierarchy discovered that Capone had hidden a fortune from them, they would've been pissed. After all, he wasn't boss anymore in 1951.”

“He needed someone with real influence to negotiate a settlement so they wouldn't snuff him for the cash. The counselor-at-large,” I said. “He needed Nunzio.” I glanced at the diamond pinkie ring and flashy fedora. “Capone was a showboat. A braggart. It fits that he would've brought Nunzio down here to show off his stash.”

“Which is how Nunzio learned about the vault,” Doug said.

“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? What 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.”