Cold Fury

murkiness like a goldfish in dirty water, spotted a switch on the wall and flipped it, and time reversed itself by ninety years. Green sconces lit the walls while brass lamps with green glass shades burned at opposite ends of a long curved bar trimmed in leather. There were no barstools, no bottles or glasses behind the bar, only a long mirror stained with age that bore the words Club Molasses in curved golden script and my reflection staring back. Across from the bar was a raised, empty platform that I recognized as a bandstand; in front of it spread a parquet dance floor with a large CM set in an intricate pattern. One wall was stacked with dozens of old, empty barrels, one on top of another reaching high into the air like a rounded, wooden pyramid, each stamped with the image of a maple leaf and the words 100 % PURE CANADIAN MOLASSES. I crossed the floor to a line of old-fashioned steel and wooden slot machines. I’d seen ones like them only in movies, and a place like this in one movie in particular.

Doug’s favorite, Some Like It Hot.

In the opening scene, two musicians play bass and clarinet in a speakeasy.

Secret nightclubs flourished during Prohibition, providing jazz, gambling, illegal booze, and stealthy good times to Chicagoans.

Later in the movie, the musicians witness the Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre, a bloody, real-life incident that happened in Chicago in 1929. Gangsters disguised as Chicago cops machine-gunned seven rival gangsters execution-style in a North Side warehouse. Speakeasies like this one, operated by those same violent criminals, were hidden in the most unlikely places.

In barely a whisper, I heard myself say, “Dad. . what you didn’t tell me was a lot.”

Then again, I thought, he said I could handle whatever came my way and more.

That was good, because there was more, covered by a tarp.

It was a large, oblong mass, squatting in the shadows. I knocked my fist against it, hearing the report of metal beneath my knuckles. I lifted the edge of the material and saw thick tires, and then rolled the whole thing back, revealing a silver two-door convertible with its top down that looked more like a rocket ship than a car. It was wedge shaped-high in back descending to a pointed hood that bore the silver image of a horse kicking up on its hind legs. Carefully, I opened the driver’s side door to an interior of black leather that was thick and tight, punctuated by a five-speed gearshift edged in chrome. When my mom taught me to drive, she insisted that I learn how to operate a manual transmission like this one, her theory being that if I was going to learn to do something, I should learn it completely. I looked from an odometer showing a grand total of four miles to a speedometer showing a maximum speed of two hundred and twenty miles per hour to a box with a silver bow on the passenger seat.

I slid in and slid the top off of the box.

I lifted out an operator’s manual that read 2000 FERRARI 360 SPIDER.

I put it aside and removed a small plain card bearing a message in black ink.

It was in Italian and I inspected it closely, doing my best to decipher both the poor handwriting and the verbs. My lips moved as I read-

Caro Antonio-

Un piccolo simbolo per la nascita di suo figlio, Luigi. Un bambino maschile e il massimo regalo che un uomo puo avere!

Fedelmente-

I Ragazzi

I read it again, not completely sure of my translation but sure enough that on the one hand, my head swam, and on the other, my blood boiled. Basically, I read-

Dear Anthony-

A small token for the birth of your son, Lou. A masculine child is the greatest gift a man can have!

Loyally-

The Boys

In the head-swimming column: Who were “The Boys”? Why were they loyal to my dad? And why had they given him a car for Lou? In the blood-boiling column: What did they mean that a masculine child is the greatest gift? Did my dad agree with them? And where the hell was my car? I looked at the manual again-2000 Ferrari 360 Spider, the year my brother was born-and remembered my mother saying how the Lincoln had been a gift from some “friends” to Grandpa Enzo for the birth of my dad. I understood now that if my dad had been born a girl, Uncle Buddy would be the one driving the sleek Lincoln convertible instead of the crappy red one. I didn’t know much about Ferraris other than that they were fast and expensive, which meant that “The Boys” weren’t just loyal, they were really loyal. I looked around, trying to figure out how in the world someone had gotten a car down here, and absorbed the forgotten quality of the room. It was like a museum that had been closed for a long time. Everything, including the twelve-year-old sports car that had never been driven, was dusty, unused, or antiquated.

Except, I now noticed, a door.

It was near the bar, in a small, dark alcove.

It looked twenty-first century, and it looked locked.

The shock of the existence of this place-a speakeasy with a Ferrari in middle earth, far below the bakery-had numbed my powers of observation. But I saw the door now, and was drawn to it like a magnet. Whether it was some sort of weak joke or it had been made that way, the door bore a small sign that read EMPLOYEES ONLY. I put my ear against its cool metal and heard nothing, and then turned its handle that didn’t move. A keypad of numbers glowed next to the door, mocking me with its endless possibility of combinations. I tried my birthday-4-29-1996-and then Lou’s-6-26-2000-my mom’s, my dad’s, my grandparents’, my social security number, phone numbers, and nothing. The keypad remained mute, the door locked. My blood began to boil again over a cold blue flame. I’d come this far, this deep, with every inch of myself bruised and a couple of cracked ribs just to encounter “Employees Only”? Without thinking, my body running on its own electrical circuits, I heard myself murmur, “Son of a bitch!” as I threw a hard right full of frustration at the keypad.

My knuckles popped off plastic and metal.

The keypad cracked and buzzed and squeaked and smoked and sizzled.

The door yawned.

Shaking the punch out of my right hand, pushing open the door with my left, I entered a small room that was nearly empty except for a battered desk with a lightbulb hanging over it. I pulled the cord and it dropped a circle of light, and I heard a gentle scratching at my feet. Looking down, I saw a rat looking up, sniffing the air, sniffing at me. There was nothing threatening about it-it just seemed to be inspecting me-and then it turned and skittered away, and I watched it disappear behind an enormous map of Chicago that covered almost an entire wall, as yellow as parchment, with streets and avenues drafted in perfect lines. It showed dozens of old structures in amazing detail-the Monadnock Building, North Avenue Beach House, the Biograph Theater, even Wrigley Field. I stared at the ballpark, my eye drawn to the accuracy of the main gate sign, and noticed that something circular gleamed around the C in “Chicago”-as in “Home of the Chicago Cubs.” Looking closer, I saw it was a tarnished but still bright ring hewn from brass. It was odd. But then, everything was odd, including the stickpins with colored heads-red, blue, black, purple, green-stuck into neighborhoods. The head of each pin was also lettered-the blue one carried a B, the black one an S, and so on, while the red pin, which was stuck directly on the map where the bakery existed, bore a small, sharp R.

“R for. . Rispoli?” I murmured.

I leaned back on the desk and touched something cold. Looking down, I saw a steel briefcase covered in a thick layer of dust. A note written in my dad’s hand sat on top. I picked it up, blew away the dust, and read, “In case of emergency.” It was a link to him, and I turned it over looking for more words, but there were none.

I tried the latch, which was locked.

I lifted the briefcase, feeling its contents shift.

Every instinct in my body tingled with certainty that the notebook was locked inside that briefcase.

I looked at my dad’s note again and questions flooded my mind-how long had the briefcase been there, and what sort of emergency? Of course, my entire life was now one big emergency, but if it had sat long enough to collect dust, what had my dad been anticipating? I recalled my parents’ mysterious conversations about “the right thing to do.” Had they done it, whatever it was, and it led to this-they and Lou disappeared from the face of the