“What kind of friends?” I pressed Looie. “You’re not selling out, are you?” Looie had been under pressure to join one of the Chicago families, and I was one of the few people who knew about it.
“I may be, my friend,” he said. “I am tired. This business is for the young.”
“Business is great and this is the best place in town. Everybody knows it. Why mess that up?”
He smiled. “It will be no less good with another man behind the bar.”
I shook my head. “It’s not the man at the bar, it’s the man at the door, and you hire the man at the door.” I was speaking metaphorically. The doorman was another one of Looie’s nephews. He was somewhat slow—not apparently fluent in either Italian or English—but he did comprehend each night’s password. My point was, Looie’s nephew let everybody who knew the password through. Under new ownership, that could change. Most of the other speakeasies in town were stratified according to race, class, and musical preference. Franchised, in today’s lingo.
“We will see,” he said simply. Then, hailed at the other end of the bar, he toddled off.
I checked on Irma again, but with the surging crowd it was difficult to spot much more than her raised hands. Fairly soon I was going to have to join her, but I wasn’t nearly drunk enough yet to try dancing. I downed my scotch. Still not drunk enough.
That was when I saw her.
The surprising red hair is always the first thing I notice. Even in the poor lighting of Looie’s place it stood out quite clearly, almost glowing. I squinted. She turned. I met those magnificent eyes. It was definitely her.
“Hey!” I called out uselessly. Nobody could hear me, and if they did, hey was pretty non-descriptive anyway.
I ran to the dance floor and started to push my way through, positioning myself between the red-haired 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.