“Go on, spit it out.”
“It’s not in their interests up front, that I agree with. But those guys have been at this stuff for a thousand years and they’re always thinking ahead, seeing the future. They knew Prohibition was ending and they were ready for it; they’re moving in Hollywood, they’re trying to set up a national wire so they can control gambling everywhere, they’re looking for a city to own, a gambling town, like Hot Springs, which they’ll take over hard one of these days—I’ve heard, they’re even looking at Cuba—it goes on and on. Plus, they’re unifying—Chicago, New York, Cleveland—it’s not one outfit per town but a single organization coast to coast.”
“We’re farm boys scratching for chicken feed in towns meatball never heard of, like South Bend and Sioux City,” said Johnny. “And next month, Wheaton. Do you think meatball gives a crap about Wheaton? It’s too much trouble to step on us, I guarantee it. Les, you get so wrought up sometimes. You got to stay calm for this kind of work. Listen to me, kid, I love you, but you got to find a way to put this screwball shit out of your head. You could spook the boys, and you do not want to be on a job with spooked boys. No room for mistakes in our line of work.”
“Okay, Johnny. Maybe you’re right.”
“You should be writing for the movies. You got that kind of mind.”
“Ha-ha—wouldn’t that be something? Me writing for Cagney and Robinson.”
“Crazier stuff has happened. How crazy is this? Speaking of movies, the girls are dragging me to see that little kid I can’t stand, you know, ‘On the Good Ship Lollipop’”—and he jumped around like a moppet on a string, prancing it up for comic effect, and Les had to laugh hard, the big guy, broad shoulders, handsome as Gable, imitating a dancing child.
“Still, it’s a way to beat the heat,” Johnny said when he’d stopped dancing. “And I love that big house, the Marbro. It’s like a palace or something.”
“You ought to see this Manhattan Melodrama,” said Les. “It’s still around. Helen and I saw it a few nights ago. Gable is the gangster—Blackie, I think—and it’s pretty good. He’s not like any gangster I ever saw, but, still, he just makes you go with him all the way.”
“Would the girls like it? I guess they would, if it’s got Gable—they like Gable. Hell, I like Gable.”
“He should play you, Johnny. What a picture that would be. Chicago Melodrama, with Gable as Dillinger! It would make a million bucks!”
“Nah,” said Johnny, “they make you die at the end of pictures. It’s the law now.”
24
McLEAN, VIRGINIA
The present
SWAGGER PULLED AWAY from her apartment building, drove three blocks and took a random turn down a residential street, flicked off his lights and waited.
Nothing. No car turned down the thoroughfare on his tail.
Followed? Who the hell would follow me?
But, then, Nikki was unusually sensitive to being watched or followed. Maybe it was a Swagger thing, as he himself had it; that is, the weird, hackles-rising shiver when a predator’s eyes crossed over you. It had saved his life a time or two, and he knew enough at his age to trust it. Yet he hadn’t felt it, she had.
On the other hand, his mind was all knitted up over 1934 and his grandfather. He’d been talking a blue streak on the subject, no doubt boring her to death. So he had been distracted, his mind occupied with theoretical prospects, the animal part of him even further away than it was normally. She, on the other hand, had probably stopped listening and was gazing off dully into space when her deep brain heard it, the whisper of the ax, the trill of the wolf, the snap of the hammer cocking. She’d gotten it, he hadn’t.
He was puzzled. He waited a few more minutes, alone on a dark street full of beautiful old houses under elms, since he was in the northwest quadrant of D.C., and he knew enough to realize that was where “quality” lived. But no one came, there was no further traffic, and his internal radar system picked up nothing.
He started again, drove a few blocks and wound his way back to the main drag—Wisconsin—and turned left, aiming to head down to Georgetown, take the Key Bridge to Virginia, then the parkway to the Beltway to Nick’s big house near McLean. He drove, checking mirrors for headlights that didn’t waver in their pace or distance from him, and saw nothing. At a busy intersection, he looked around, committing to memory the cars behind him, and then pulled into a street parking space to let them slide by. He waited, he waited, he waited, and then resumed his journey. At the next stoplight, he made the same quick check to see if any of the cars were from the first batch. Nope, nothing.
He drove on back to McLean, again monitoring for pace and distance behind him, saw nothing. He finally arrived at the road off of which Nick’s cul-de-sac was sited and, a street before, turned off, parked, went dark. No car followed along the road for some time, much less pulled into his street. He felt secure now, so he completed the journey to Nick’s, waiting in the driveway for any action. There was none.
He went in the house with his key, found no one awake, reset the alarm code, and went straight to the guest room to go to bed. But first, he called his wife and had a nice old-marriage chat, and then said, “Look, this is silly, but you haven’t seen anybody around, have you?”
“Around? What could that possibly mean?”
“You know, lurking, following, peeking.”
“Lord, Bob, you promised on this one, no adventures.”
“I can’t see that this is an adventure. It’s only my sordid old past. It shouldn’t be of interest to anybody, it makes no sense, but I just had a feeling I was being followed.” He edited Nikki out of the sequence to keep it simple.
“Maybe it’s just paranoia. You have many reasons to be paranoid, and I don’t know why you never are.”
The answer: his enemies tended to be dead, not in the shadows.
“Okay,” he said, “maybe it’s just that,” and signed off.
The next morning—he lingered in bed to avoid Nick’s wife, Sally, who had never been a big Bob Lee fan—he put the question to Nick over coffee.
“No,” said Nick. “Nothing.”
“No strange parked cars, no weird sensations of being observed through glass, no odd coincidence like the stranger turning up over and over again.”
“I haven’t been paying attention. But I’d like to think I’d notice.”
Bob told him of last night’s oddness.
“She wouldn’t feel something or see something if something weren’t there.”
“I’ll bump my head up to Condition Yellow for a few days,” said Nick.
“Appreciate that. See, what bothers me is not the possibility that she’s wrong but that she’s right. Because if she is, these guys were really good and when she picked them up they disengaged. How would they know their cover was blown?”
“Isn’t that an interesting question.”
“They’re so good, in fact, either a. they don’t exist or b. they’re high-skill operators and that kind of talent doesn’t come cheap, so whoever—again, if he exists—is behind this is investing big money in the op.”
“So it would seem,” said Nick.
“Now, let me ask you: you know everything I know about my grandfather, you know everything I’ve learned, maybe you know more because you’ve read the files a lot more carefully than I have, can you see any reason in any of it for anybody else to be interested?”
“Anybody else? Do you have an idea?”
“I have nothing. But, after all, I’m known to the Agency, I’m known to your folks, I’m known to various alphabet agencies that don’t exist, and it’s not impossible that one of them has opened a new file on me.”
“Maybe it’s the IRS. Have you paid your taxes?”
“Always over-generously.”
“No alimony, no back payments, no debts, no angry husbands,
croupiers, environmental impact agencies, nothing from your big land deal?”
“I don’t think so. Nothing I can see.”
“Well, maybe the Agency or Homeland Security have you tabbed as an antiterror consultant, subject sniping, and they’re discreetly checking you out before they make an offer, because if you’re up to something nasty, they don’t want to go down with you.”
“I suppose. But I’ve done nothing for months but sit on the porch like a lump and, all of a sudden, I go off on this little crusade to learn about a man who’s been dead since 1942 and suddenly, somewhere, there seems to be a stirring.”
“Any organized crime irons in the fire?”
“Nothing I’ve turned up. Maybe the old bastard’s downfall at the Bureau involved organized crime somehow, but, really, that was over eighty years ago. Who would care now?”
“Well,” said Nick, “if you’re still thinking conspiracy, it’s my experience that, more often than not, if any kind of conspiracy, even potential conspiracy, exists, it’d for one reason: not intelligence, not revenge, not justice, not anger, it’s dough, it’s bucks.”
“That’s a very good point, and I agree that the profit motive is the motive in just about everything.”
“So . . . where’s the lost fortune? Under the X in that Boy Scout map Granddad drew? Where’s the treasure? Are you likely to turn up the lost John Dillinger millions? Did Baby Face steal an Old Master? Did any of the boys steal diamonds, stock certificates that later became Xerox, land deeds, gold-mine maps?”
This was the stumper.
“That thousand uncirculated I found in the strongbox. Maybe they think there’s more, but I can’t believe there was, as the sums those days were so much smaller. Dillinger stole about a hundred fifty thousand over all his robberies, and Baby Face was way behind him. So even if there’s a hundred fifty grand under the X in that map, that’s not so much by today’s standards.”
“No, it’s not.”
“And even if there were, uncirculated money from 1934 would be damned hard to reintegrate for profit without lots of attention.”
“That’s true,” said Nick. “So thinking about units of wealth disproportionate to their small size that could be hidden in that final X-marks-the-spot, diamonds would seem to be one of the possibles, because you could get a couple of millions’ worth of stones into a briefcase. Big uncut stones, unregistered. That might be worth mounting some kind of operation.”
“I don’t see anything about diamonds in this. All those other things, nothing either. These farm boys were strictly in a cash-and-carry business—as in, they carried a lot of cash out the door. I just don’t see any kind of hidden wealth in play here.”
“Many questions, no answers.”
“Maybe it’s just my imagination, but then there’s one other thing.”
“What’s that?”
“I don’t have no imagination.”
Part III
25
LINCOLN AVENUE
CHICAGO
July 22, 1934
THERE WAS HUBBUB everywhere on the nineteenth floor. Young agents couldn’t settle down to work, though it was Saturday, and drifted about, forming and reforming knots, full of ball-game excitement and not a little apprehension. Everybody smoked, and the heavy overheads pushed the fog out the open windows into the superheated Chicago air. It would break 100 again today, not that the young men were in any state to notice it. The bathroom was overused, nobody ate a thing, nobody could sit still. Some guys went all chattery, some went all solemn, some just wandered, dreamy looks on their faces.
Only in one room could serenity be found. That was the arms room. Since the apprehension was slated to take place in a public area, the Marbro Theatre, an ornate palace of exhibition, and it was certain to be crowded on a hot night where its air-conditioning offered some surcease from the hammer of the heat and the anvil of the humidity, Sam had declared no long guns. The Thompsons, the Browning rifles, the Model 11 riot guns sat in their rack in the vault, the vault door sealed, no chits out, no guns unaccounted for by Ed Hollis’s careful reckoning.
Charles sat alone at the table. He was in shirtsleeves, but the hand-tooled, tied-down shoulder holster harnessed his shoulders in leather belting, holding the holster firmly below his left shoulder; a further strap ran from the toe of the holster to his belt, looped it, then returned to snap tight. He smoked Camels as he worked, as he didn’t want any of the boys to see a tremor in his hand as he worked his fixings.
Before him, in fifty-two separate parts, sat his Colt Government Model, 1928 Commercial Variation, 157345C. Each of the fifty-two had been inspected for wear, oiled lightly, and dried off. Now he worked with a fine-grain needle file, doing the little things that could be done to turn the pistol into as smooth an operator as possible. He took just a few grains of steel off the ninety-degree angle at the cusp of the frame, where the cartridge rode from magazine to chamber under the propulsion of the slide’s forward motion. He wanted to break the sharpness of degree a tiny bit so that no burr from a cartridge—they had already been inspected, of course, twenty-one government-issue .45 hardballs from the Springfield Armory, Springfield, Massachusetts, already fit into three likewise inspected magazines—could catch during the firing transaction. It took a while, and a great deal of judgment, because too much made the passage tricky. When he was satisfied, he moved on to work the sharp edge of the sear, where the disconnector pivoted under the trigger pull to remove it from its nook and thereby drop the hammer. Again, the harshness of the angle was just a bit too much and he gently softened it into a blur, which reduced the trigger pull from six pounds to two and a half, though still leaving enough metal to guarantee the hold’s security.
“Charles, what’re you doing?” asked Ed Hollis, who, though a competent armorer, had never seen the inside of the frame before.
“If I have to draw and shoot fast for blood,” Charles said, “I want the one-in-a-million chance the gun will hang up on me reduced to one-in-a-billion.”
“Can you do it to my Super .38?”
“Not today. Sometime in the future.”
“Got it,” said Ed.
After an hour of careful work, everything wiped clean, and wiped clean again, Charles swiftly reassembled 157345C, making sure all pins were centered, all screws were tightened up to the max, and that function was perfect. Then he reached into a paper cup and withdrew a six-inch piece of rawhide from its soak in the water.
Again, carefully and with much dexterity, he looped it around the pistol grip, including the grip safety, a shoulder of metal that emerged from the curve under the sweep of the hammer well and had to be depressed by a proper placement of hand to gun for the weapon to go bang. It was one of three safety systems John M. had designed into the piece. He pulled the loop tight, flattening the grip safety in the off position, tied a knot, then called Ed over.
“Not your finger, but hold this knot tight with a screwdriver or something.”
Ed did as told, and Charles doubled the knot over the first knot, pulling it tight with his long, strong fingers. Then with his pocketknife he trimmed the extra lengths of rawhide down to the knot, which he adjusted till it was under the trigger guard.
“Old Texas Ranger trick. I want the safety grip pinned so that if my draw is a little off and I don’t get square on the gun, it’s still going to fire. I’d hate to have to provide my own bang while Johnny’s filling me full of pills.”
“Nothing to chance.”
“Not where this damned character is concerned. Now, as the rawhide dries, it’ll pull even tighter. Trick is, don’t let it soak too long or it gets brittle. Then what have you got except a vaudeville that can turn ugly in a split second.”
With that, he slipped a magazine in, threw the slide to hoist a cartridge into the chamber, and pushed the safety lock up into position, freezing the gun in pre
-volatility. He slipped it into the holster, then slid the two additional magazines into the leather keeper on his belt behind his right hip, praying that if there were a fight, it wouldn’t last long enough to require a reload.
“Sheriff Swagger?” It was Mrs. Donovan at the door.
“Mr. Cowley wants you. Big powwow in Mr. Purvis’s office.”
—
IT WAS LIKE SOMETHING out of Arabian Nights, a pleasure palace decreed into existence in 1927 by two genies named Marx, then sold to two other genies named Balaban and Katz in 1930. The Marbro even had what could have been a minaret outside it, piercing the sky. It was a vast, domed structure, covered with fretwork, pale in the vanishing sun, on Madison Street, the 4400 block.
Charles had infiltrated a few minutes early, from a staging point a couple blocks away. Sam, wisely, didn’t want a mob of agents showing up at once so played them in at odd intervals so that at no particular moment it seemed unusually hectic. The traffic was heavy, the octane fumes intense, the theater buzzing with desperate souls ready to spend a few hours in the adorable company of a dancing tot in order to escape their dull lives as well as the crushing heat.
Charles had no such luck. He and his new pal Zarkovich tried to appear indifferent to their situation, which required milling in front of a women’s haberdashery in the steamy heat just across the street from the Marbro while waiting to see Johnny appear. He would be with two gals: Mrs. Sage and another one, Polly something. Mrs. Sage would be dressed in orange. Johnny would be wearing a straw hat, a white shirt, and tan slacks over white suedes. That meant if he had a gun, it would have to be a small one, concealable in a pant pocket. No .45 auto was coming out, and he wouldn’t have six more mags stashed in a jacket pocket. It also meant he wasn’t wearing steel, so a torso shot would bring him down if that’s how it broke.
All along the street, agents and East Chicago detectives—but not Chicago cops, for they had been exiled from the plan, out over worries about leaks and too big an assemblage to maneuver quickly—lay about with similar supposed lack of interest. The plan was fluid, depending on the whimsy of the actuality.