it for the ages. His trousers were a brown denim, and he wore a kerchief around his neck and a cowboy hat. A six-gun stuck out of the waistband of his denim trousers. The cowboy nodded at Dion and allowed them to pass before he pushed the wall back into place.
The corridor was so narrow Dion's shoulders brushed along the walls as he walked ahead of Joe. Dim lights hung from a pipe above them, one bare bulb for every twenty feet or so, half of them out. Joe was pretty sure he could make out a door down the far end of the corridor. He guessed it was about five hundred yards away, which meant he could easily be imagining it. They slogged through mud, water dripping from the ceiling and puddling the floor, and Dion explained that the tunnels commonly flooded; every now and then they'd find a dead drunk in the morning, the last of the stragglers from the night before who'd decided to take an ill-advised nap.
"Seriously?" Joe asked.
"Yeah. Know what makes it worse? Sometimes the rats get to them."
Joe looked all around himself. "That's just about the nastiest fucking thing I've heard all month."
Dion shrugged and kept walking and Joe looked up and down the walls and then at the pathway ahead. No rats. Yet.
"The money from the Pittsfield bank," Dion said as they walked.
Joe said, "It's safe." Above him, he could hear the clack of trolley wheels followed by the slow heavy clop of what he assumed was a horse.
"Safe where?" Dion looked back over his shoulder at him.
Joe said, "How'd they know?"
Above them several horns beeped and an engine revved.
"Know what?" Dion said, and Joe noticed he'd grown closer to bald, his dark hair still thick and oily on the sides but ropey and hesitant up top.
"Where to ambush us."
Dion looked back at him again. "They just did."
"There's no way they 'just did.' We scouted that location for weeks. The cops never came out that way because they had no reason to - nothing to protect and no one to serve."
Dion nodded his big head. "Well, they didn't hear anything from me."
"Me, either," Joe said.
Near the end of the tunnel now, the door revealed itself to be brushed steel with an iron dead bolt. The street sounds had given way to the distant clank of silverware and plates being stacked and waiters' footsteps rushing back and forth. Joe pulled his father's watch from his pocket and clicked it open: noon.
Dion produced a sizable key ring from somewhere in his wide trousers. He opened the locks on the door, threw back the bars, and unlocked the bolt. He removed the key from the ring and handed it to Joe. "Take it. You'll use it, believe me."
Joe pocketed the key.
"Who owns this place?"
"Ormino did."
"Did?"
"Oh, you didn't read today's papers?"
Joe shook his head.
"Ormino sprung a few leaks last night."
Dion opened the door, and they climbed a ladder to another door that was unlocked. They opened it and entered a vast, dank room with a cement floor and cement walls. Tables ran along the walls, and on top of the tables were what Joe would have expected to see - fermentors and extractors, retorts and Bunsen burners, beakers and vats and skimming utensils.
"Best money can buy," Dion said, pointing out thermometers fixed to the walls and connected to the stills by rubber tubing. "You want light rum, you got to remove the fraction at between one sixty-eight and one eighty-six Fahrenheit. That's really important to keep people from, you know, dying when they drink your hooch. These babies don't make a mistake, they - "
"I know how to make rum," Joe said. "In fact, you name the substance, D, after two years in prison, I know how to recondense it. I could probably distill your fucking shoes. What I don't see here, though, are two things that are pretty essential to making rum."
"Oh?" Dion said. "What's that?"
"Molasses and workers."
"Shoulda mentioned," Dion said, "we got a problem there."
They passed through an empty speakeasy and said "Fireplace" through another closed door and entered the kitchen of an Italian restaurant on East Palm Avenue. They passed through the kitchen and into the dining room, where they found a table near the street and close to a tall black fan so heavy it looked like it would take three men and an ox to move it.
"Our distributor is coming up empty." Dion unfolded his napkin and tucked it into his collar,