Immortal

woman (she was at the far end of the floor, near the band) and the exit. In the past, every single time I spotted her, she was either too far away to reach or somehow managed to slip away before I could get to her. I wasn’t going to let that happen this time.

Then fate intervened, as it always seemed to. Just as I started forcing my way through the dance floor crowd, the front door—which was made of solid iron—blew open with a loud BANG that startled everybody and knocked Looie’s corpulent nephew backward several feet. The band came to a discordant stop, and as one, we turned to see what had just happened.

From where I stood, I could see right up the short flight of wooden stairs and outside. A car blocked the entrance. It had been fitted with a wooden beam, a rudimentary battering ram. Someone had crashed their car specifically to take out the door.

Keep in mind this was prefire code and an illegal establishment to boot. The front door was the only public exit.

I had a very bad feeling about this.

The room remained silent, all except for Looie’s nephew, who had been knocked down the stairs and was groaning unpleasantly. I think we all knew what was coming next.

The first Molotov cocktail spun into the room, shattered on the wooden railing, and started spreading fire down the stairs. The second made it all the way to the edge of the cement floor and caught on the sawdust. The third reached the wall near the bar about two feet from where I’d been standing a minute earlier. It caught as well, as it should have. Except for the cement floor, the entire building was made of wood.

I had landed in the middle of a Chicago-style hostile takeover and asset liquidation.

As you can imagine, I’ve been in quite a few tight situations in my long life. One of the first things I learned was if there’s going to be a mob panic, don’t be standing between that mob and wherever it is they all want to go. The second thing I learned was, don’t try to run through fire.

Other than me quickly stepping away toward the bar—where I was less likely to be trampled—the first person to make a move was one of the black guys Irma had been dancing with. He ran up the flaming steps, and it was like a spell being broken because a second later everyone else was behind him. I wanted to scream out that that was an incredibly stupid thing to do, but the decision had been made and nobody would be interested in listening to what I had to say. Get out, they all agreed, before the steps are gone and the fire has reached the rest of the room. Get out because we don’t know about any other exits. Just get out.

I saw Irma fly past me and managed to grab her by the elbow, yanking her in the other direction despite her hysterical protestations.

“We have to get out!” she shrieked.

“Not that way!”

“There’s no other way!”

“Of course there is,” I said confidently.

But was there? We were below street level and all the windows were half-sized, covered on the outside by iron bars, and nine feet from the floor. Great security if you don’t want people breaking in and stealing your supplies. Bad idea if you desperately need to get out and the door is barred.

The sound of gunfire filled the air, causing me to duck instinctively. Whoever it was that had started the fire decided to discourage any attempts to get the hell out of the place by shooting a tommy gun through the doorway. Interestingly, this only managed to affect the people who were actually hit by bullets. Everyone behind them kept trying to plow through.

“You see?” I said to Irma, who I was still holding back. “We can’t go that way!”

I scanned the back of the room. There had to be another door, and there was. It was on the far side of the bar. I’d never even noticed it before. Better, it was open.

I threw my fur coat (it was the style at the time) over Irma and dragged her to the door. It led to a small back room that smelled even fishier, and a narrow wooden staircase which led upstairs. At the top, sitting in front of the door and crying, was Looie.

“It’s locked!” he cried, in Italian.

“Unlock it!” I commanded.

“No, no, no. It’s barred. It’s…” And then he continued his weeping.

I stormed to the top of the stairs, pushed Looie aside, and threw my weight into the door. It wouldn’t budge. He was right. Whoever took care of the front door also knew there was another exit and had taken care of it. Great.

In another minute we would all be unconscious from smoke fumes, and another minute after that we’d all be dead.

“Looie,” I barked. He couldn’t even acknowledge me, so I slapped him hard across the face. “You know this place better than anyone. There HAS to be another way out!”

“No, no, no other way…” He was inconsolable. At the bottom of the stairs, Irma was curled up and bawling on my coat. I could hear the rising panic in the other room. People were burning. This was getting to be as bad as Rome, albeit on a much smaller scale.

I ran through what I knew about the building. It was on Lake Michigan. They used to sell fish upstairs and gut and store them on ice downstairs. That was why the floor was cement, because melted ice can just wreck a wood floor.

Fish. I knew a lot about fish. Worked on a fishing trawler once, in Galilee. We never used a place like this. No, we had to clean the fish on the boat, salt it, and get it to market right away, because nobody had invented the ice machine yet. It was messy work. We’d slice the fish up the middle, pull out the bones, and toss the bones and the guts overboard.

It was stupid when I gave it a little thought. Who cleans fish in a basement? What do you do with the guts?

What did they do with the guts?

I grabbed Looie and pulled him to his feet, dragged him to the bottom of the stairs, and sat him next to Irma. “Watch her!” I commanded.

I took two steps back into the main room and immediately discovered there was almost no breathable air left. The smoke had gotten thicker and the ceiling was nearly engulfed, and the heat from the flames was palpable. At the front of the room, the wooden staircase had collapsed, and I could see several bodies already piled up near the door, either victims of the fire or victims of the sons of bitches on the other side of the doorway. Those that were still alive were in pretty much the same state of paralysis as Irma and Looie.

Me? I had an idea.

Back when I first saw the old fish market, my first thought had been that the building was surely about to tumble into the lake. It jutted out over the water a good five feet. My new thought was, you don’t build a building hanging over the side of a lake unless you’ve got a good reason for it.

There was one part of the floor that wasn’t just cement plus sawdust, and that was where the band played. An area rug defined the space. Coughing madly, I managed to push the equipment out of the way—thoroughly destroying a snare drum in the process—and pulled up the rug.

At the edge of the wall was a trap door.

It was where they threw the bones after cleaning the fish, and where the runoff from the melted ice traveled. And since it had been years since anyone had used it—based on the rust buildup—there was a good chance the guys outside didn’t know it was there. Looie didn’t even know it was there.

I grabbed the metal ring and yanked. It opened with an unpleasant creak and there was the lake, and best of all, nobody was standing there with a tommy gun.

Stifling the impulse to just jump down and get away, I instead ran back to Irma and Looie, grabbed them both, and pulled them over to the trap door. Irma—by then resigned to the idea that her life was over—refused to recognize the significance of the trap door, so rather than wait for her to get herself together, I just pushed her out. Hopefully the cold water of Lake Michigan would snap her out of it in time to understand she was supposed to swim.

“Looie,” I said. “I need you to look out for her. I’ll be right out.”