Fifty-to-One

“Well what do you think it is?”

“Oh, I’m not saying you’re wrong. I’m just saying you read too many books.” He started off down the tunnel and she followed.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

He crept cautiously through the tunnel’s curve, gun held high, finger tight on the trigger. They came out into another straight stretch. There was no one in sight, but he didn’t lower the gun. “You say ‘bootlegging tunnel’ like it’s something romantic. It’s not romantic. It’s ugly. It’s people stealing from each other, cutting each other’s throats. There are probably people buried down here, you know—nice romantic bootleggers who fell out of favor with Uncle Nick.” He kicked at the dirt underfoot. “We’re probably walking on their graves.”

“That’s horrible.”

“It’s the real world, kid. It’s not like you read about in paperbacks.”

“You mean like the ones you publish, Charley?”

“I mean like the one you wrote,” he said. “Bang-bang stuff, where the blood all washes off by the final scene and the bad guys all wear black.”

“You liked it well enough when I wrote it,” Tricia said.

“Sure. I just don’t like living the real-world version.”

“You think I do?”

They walked on at as fast a pace as they could manage, the tunnel stretching out more or less endlessly in front of them.

“I’m sorry, Charley,” Tricia said. “Okay? I shouldn’t have done it. I shouldn’t have written the book.”

“Ah, hell,” Charley said. “I shouldn’t have asked you to.”

“You didn’t ask me to make things up.”

“No,” Charley said. “But all you did was make them up. I’m the one that published it.”

“You thought it was all true,” Tricia said.

“And that makes it better? Would you tell me what the hell I was thinking, deciding to publish the actual secrets of an actual mobster?”

“That you’d sell a lot of books.”

“Yep. That’s what I was thinking, all right.”

“And you will,” Tricia said.

“Maybe the profits will pay for a nice headstone,” Charley said.

“Only if we get out of this tunnel,” Tricia said. “They bury us down here, we don’t get a headstone.”

They both walked faster after that.

By the time they reached the far end of the tunnel, Tricia figured they must have walked a good quarter of a mile, maybe more. How anyone had been able to dig a tunnel under the streets of Manhattan that ran at least five blocks she couldn’t fathom. Unless this was a much older tunnel even than Prohibition—maybe, she thought, the tunnel came first and the buildings were built around it.

The room at the far end had wooden crates stacked against the walls and a folding card table in the center. It had no chairs and no people, though, and the one door in the room was closed and barred. The question was what they’d find when they opened it.

“They know we’re here,” Charley said. “They must. There’s nowhere else we can be. The only thing we can hope is that we made it faster than they could because they were busy dealing with the cops.”

“And that none of them had the chance to telephone ahead,” Tricia said, “to tell someone to be here when we came out.”

“Yeah,” Charley said. “That, too.”

He hesitated, counted three, two, one with his fingers, and in a rush of movement raised the metal bar, pulled the door open, and stepped through it gun-first. There was no one on the other side.

“Well, that’s a relief,” he said.

“We’re not out yet.”

They raced up the staircase they found, cousin to the one in the basement of the Stars Club. At the top another door waited. When Charley started the bit with his fingers again, Tricia just pushed it open and walked out into the basement of the Sun.

Off to one side she saw the freight elevator and two of the fabric-sided carts the maintenance staff used to wheel supplies in and out—the same sort she’d had her unnamed thief use to escape with the loot in her book. The same sort the real thief had used, too, apparently.

She heard sounds from the loading dock outside: running feet, then hands at the metal gate, trying to raise it. Tricia went to the freight elevator door, banged on it with the flat of her palm. From the loading dock came the rattle of a padlock. “Come on, come on,” came a muffled voice. “Who has a key?”

Tricia rapped on the elevator door again, kept pounding until it slid open. The operator stuck his head out, barking, “What are you doing, banging away—”

She put her gun in his face and he quieted down. When he saw Charley leveling a gun at him too, he meekly put his hands up.

“I were you, I wouldn’t rob this place,” he said. “We got hit just a month ago and the people in charge are out for blood.”

“We’re not here to rob the place,” Tricia said. “Just take us upstairs.”

Out on the loading dock, a gunshot went off like a cherry bomb and what Tricia had to assume were padlock fragments rained against the metal gate.

She stepped into the elevator. “Up.”

The operator pulled the door closed and worked the lever to start the car. Heavy chains clanked overhead and they started to rise.

“How far?” he said.

“All the way,” Tricia said.

“Is that smart?” Charley said. “Why not just go to the lobby?”

“Because it’s almost two AM, Charley,” Tricia said, “and at two AM people from Nicolazzo’s other clubs start showing up in the lobby, delivering the night’s take. Some of them are probably there already. With armed bodyguards. Not to mention the man in the security booth out front.”

“But if we go up to the club,” Charley said, “how are we going to get out...?”

Tricia watched the little metal arrow above the door travel to the end of its arc. “What, you didn’t read my book?”

At the top floor, they left the operator tied hand and foot with his belt and Charley’s necktie; a handkerchief they found in the man’s back pocket served for a gag. They turned the elevator off. Let the boys in the basement holler for it. That’d buy a few minutes at least.

They followed the hallway to a pair of swinging doors and pushed through, finding themselves in the kitchen, where a sloe-eyed saxophonist sat nuzzling a tall glass of something amber. A woman setting dishes in one of the sinks looked up when they entered: Cecilia, still wearing her costume from their dance number, which she’d presumably had to turn into a solo. “Trixie! What happened to you? Where were you?”

“It’s a long story, Cecilia,” Tricia said, hurrying past, “I’m sorry I let you down tonight.”

“Robbie didn’t show up either. Do you know where he is?”

Probably still in the trunk of Mitch’s car, wherever that was. “No,” Tricia said. “Listen, we’ve got to go. If anyone asks, you didn’t see us. It’s for your own good, trust me.” She realized as she said it that it was the same thing Charley had told Mike. Well, it was doubly true for her. Cecilia certainly didn’t need a ‘ZN’ added to her cheek.

“Will you be here tomorrow?” Cecilia asked.

“I don’t think so,” Tricia called over her shoulder.

“That lady’s sure in a hurry,” the saxophonist said to no one in particular.

They burst through the door to the storeroom, rushed down the crowded aisle between two tall metal shelves. The window at the end was closed; the glass was unbroken. Tricia tried to open it but couldn’t. “Charley, you try,” Tricia said.

“I’m not climbing eleven stories down the side of a building,” Charley said.