I pulled Lou to me, holding him tightly, feeling the Ferris wheel beginning its descent. He moved away slowly and looked over the edge, and I did too, at the crowd of ant people forming around the two twisted, leaking bodies. I saw Lou’s head move and I followed his gaze past the scene to the curb. Even from a hundred feet in the air I could hear the haunting jingle of the little black ice cream truck. Without looking at me, he said, “We have a friend inside, Sara Jane. One friend. She brought me here, and now she has to take me back.”
“No,” I said, feeling my chest cloud with tears. “Please.”
“Do you want me to tell Mom and Dad anything?” he said.
The relief that my family was alive was smothered by a deathly feeling of isolation-that I was not yet among them and no one was safe. “Tell them. . tell them that they shouldn’t have done this to us, goddamn it,” I said, with water springing from my eyes. “It’s their fault, all of it, because they didn’t tell us anything. . they didn’t warn us, or tell us who we really are. And please, Lou. . please. . tell them that I love them.” My brother nodded, and maybe it was what had been done to him with the wires, or maybe because he was only twelve years old and it was all too much for him, but besides a bleeding nose, his face remained as pale and impassive as it had been since we met. Sirens cut the air and I saw how near to the ground we were. “Don’t give up on me,” I said. “Whatever happens, I’m going to save you. Remember. . I have the notebook.”
The Ferris wheel was twenty feet from the ground, then five feet, and then Lou blinked as if seeing me for the first time. The corner of his mouth rose in a small smile and he extended a pinkie. “All or nothing,” he said quietly. “Right?”
I hooked mine with his and said, “All or nothing,” and felt him slip something into my hand. It was cold and hard, and I stared down at my mom’s gold signet ring with the Rispoli
Except that he did.
My mom, my dad-they all existed in this time, somewhere in this town full of secrets and lies.
To be alive is sometimes to kill and I knew now that I was capable of it, and so much more.
25
I am convinced that there are other types of Capone Doors all over the world-secret black holes where people exit one life and enter another and, when the time’s right, reappear somewhere else. Some of these doors possess an actual physical form, like the ones I travel throughout Chicago, while others may be legal loopholes, or cracks in the system, or unenforced laws. For example, the notebook outlines several simple methods for obtaining false ID documents-birth certificates, social security cards, driver’s licenses, passports, even library cards-and in effect, these are Capone Doors too, since they allow a person to travel through the world undercover.
The notebook contains a phone number that was answered at police headquarters.
I said, “J. Edgar Hoover wore women’s underwear.”
There was a pause, then a voice asked what I needed.
I told him, computer keys clicked, and he muttered a meeting place.
I knew him by his lunch-he told me to look for a guy in Daley Plaza near the Picasso eating peanut butter from a jar. He was a classic mole, a bland-looking Outfit lifer who had burrowed into the police department as a records clerk with access to the department’s vast computer network full of information about everything. No, he explained, there was no record whatsoever of a Chicago police detective named Dorothy Smelt. I told him other cops had worked for her, someone must know something, and he paused, working peanut butter from the roof of his mouth, and lowered a hand slowly in front of his face from his forehead to his chin, as if lowering a curtain. I have since come to understand that in the secret sign language of police, it means no one knows anything, no one saw anything, and no one will say anything, ever.
So Elzy was gone.
She’d exited her life as Detective Smelt through her own Capone Door.
My gut told me that eventually she would reenter through another door, as another person, but with the same twisted ambition to control the Outfit.
She was correct about one thing-I believe that in the twenty-first century, it would be impossible to do that without the notebook.
The official story is that the Outfit is weak, broken, and on its last legs after a long series of trials and convictions. The fact that most people believe this fantasy goes to show how well the Outfit has learned, in a hundred years of existence, to protect itself in a chameleonlike fashion by becoming invisible. The open displays of its existence-think Al Capone driving a Rolls-Royce convertible down State Street smoking hundred-dollar cigars and giving nickels to orphans-are so long gone, it’s like they never happened. The organization has wormed its way so deep into legitimate businesses that every time someone orders a latte with extra foam or downloads a movie or upgrades a phone, the Outfit gets its cut. Yes, there are still plenty of limo companies and cement companies and “gentlemen’s clubs” where the management uses “dem” and “dose” in daily conversation, but in general, the public accepts the bullshit that the Outfit has shrunk so small as to be almost nonexistent.
And then, out of nowhere, a headless, handless body stabbed sixty-six times will bob to the top of the Sanitary Canal.
A judge will commit suicide, and six hundred thousand dollars in cash will be found hidden in a shoe box under his bed.
There will be a long weekend of South Side shootings, which Chicagoans will dismiss as “drug-related gang activity” without realizing who’s actually selling the drugs, and how they use modern street gangs as their sales force.
Only the notebook explains how to access and utilize all of the forces of the Outfit. It contains the past and present of the snaking, unseen organization, and in doing so, lays out a blueprint for its future. Most important, it makes crystal clear that the Outfit is a heartless, soulless business-not a family or a club but pure, grinding commerce-and that the Boss of Bosses, the old man referred to only as Lucky, demands that every single day is business as usual. As Knuckles recently told me, my real job as counselor-at-large is not peacemaker but profit maker, since conflict, infighting, and turf wars serve only to shut down the cash-making machine. He told me that I’m at the center of everything in the Outfit because its center is the almighty dollar.
Knuckles doesn’t know that my family has been taken away.
What I’ve seen and heard as counselor-at-large, and the fact that I’ve been left alone to do the job, leads me to believe that no one else in the Outfit does either.
They don’t know that behind the papered windows of the bakery and the sign that announces a renovation in progress, the place is still and empty.
They also don’t know that the notebook exists, or that I’ll use it to tear the whole rotten Outfit apart to get my family back.
In the meantime, I had to push myself forward to Fep Prep for final exams before school let out for the summer.
The first thing Max and I talked about on Monday was Bully the Kid, how bizarre the whole butt-kicking thing had been, and when he would be out of the hospital. We were in the theater room, waiting for Doug to show up with the movie, and Max took a long look at me and said, “You sparred recently, huh?”
I thought about Poor Kevin, about the melee in the gondola and about Uncle Buddy, and turned away, stifling a crying jag. When I was sure that it had passed, I said, “Yeah. A couple of times.”
“You didn’t answer your phone all weekend.”
“Oh, yeah. It got. . wet. I’ll get a new one soon.”
Max stared at me, looking past the bruises. “You seem different. Like something happened to you. Like. .”
“It did, for sure.”
“. . you met someone else?”
