Valentine’s Day 1929
The golden glow of late afternoon spun a sparkle onto the long display of bottles behind the counter. The light gleamed off the polished wooden surface of the bar in a spangle of glitter. The clink of glass reverberated like an echo throughout the elegant room, and people, as if aware of the place’s tradition and history, spoke in whispers and laughed behind their fingers; quietly in suitably revererent fashion.
On that golden day the doors of the exclusive club burst open and without a word, the patrons were on guard. It was nineteen-thirty-four and the gangs were as bust as the gapping establishment’s door.
But still everybody knew…
A crack as loud as a horsewhip ricocheted off the backs of the comfortable chairs with a bounce and the room fell as silent as a corpse.
His darkness cast a huge shadow; eyes shone white as everyone watched the door, their pupils drowned in terror.
It was a gunshot. A bullet was lodged as a reminder of favors undone.
No one was hurt and nobody looked for the bullet.
The figure loomed from shadow into the light, but his features were still indistinct…yet, the mark was on him for all to see; he wore a bottle of booze on the top of his boot; a bootlegger.
“Fanny Capone?”
A doe-eyed woman with a plume of feather in her hair inched forward. Fear was not a pall on her. She stepped up to meet the shadow.
A spotlight from the ceiling-high windows pooled around Fanny. Her delicate look made her seem all the more vulnerable as she quivered, reluctantly in her defiance.
She made no sound and the air drained around her; a whirlpool of doubt.
The shadow hesitated, but then stepped into Fanny’s light.
The crowd gasped, fear forgotten.
The shadow was a woman, not a man.
“Fanny, there’s a floorboard. A loose floorboard in this place. I’m sure you know what I’m talking about?”
Heads swiveled; the crowd gaped.
Not a word…
“What of it Betty?” Fanny’s fine golden hair fell forward and fluttered in the wind of her words.
“So you know?” Betty was a stout, robust figure; tall and confident.
Fanny waited. She knew about the floorboard and the underground distillery, long forgotten in the era of legalized liquor.
“Bugs Moran had my ring.”
Fanny feigned confusion, “your ring?”
“My engagement ring. He was a hustler. We both know what that means.”
Fanny quivered; her defiance, arrested.
“Come with me?”
The incorrigible pair no longer posed a threat so the crowd went back to the business of entertainment.
Fanny lifted the floorboard, she held out her hand. They descended together; through cobwebs; passageway’s of the mind. The distillery, abandoned and eerily quiet, made them stop dead in their tracks.
“It was Valentine’s Day, Chicago, nineteen-twenty-nine and he took my engagement ring to trade as a payoff in his bootlegging deal with your uncle, Al Capone.” Betty’s eyes clouded.
“Well, it didn’t do him any good, did it?” Fanny raised herself on tiptoes and wiped the tears from Betty’s cheek.
“I know where my uncle kept his bloody mementoes. It’ll be in a dusty velvet pouch, but I think that you’ll have your ring back in a moment, for whatever it’s worth.”
This story is based on the 1929 Valentine’s Day Massacre. Al Capone’s gang wiped out the rival gang headed by Bugs Moran. This fiction is a legacy to the lives that might have been touched by those violent times and those violent men.
web reference to the massacre
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