“Thank you for seeing me, Sheriff.”
“We are in the same business, sir. I owe you courtesy and attention, and that’s what you’ll get from me completely.”
“How wonderful. In some places, federals are not beloved at all, and on my trip I’ve run into a fair amount of acrimony.”
“Not in the judge’s Polk County, sir.”
“I’ll come to the point, Sheriff. You’re too busy and important to waste time. You have of course heard of our unfortunate arrest attempt in Wisconsin in April? Little Bohemia?”
“I believe I have, sir. Not a happy day for police officers countrywide.”
“No, a disgrace, to be sure. We lost a very fine young agent, we shot two innocent men, killing one, and our quarry, so neatly gathered in one spot as never before, scattered to the four winds.”
“I have seen all the bulletins. You were up against some very nasty folks. Shooters all, and I have learned that too many in our business get squeamish when it comes to the gun.”
“Our Director had a vision, Sheriff Swagger. He envisioned a scientific national police force, incorruptible, untainted by ego, vanity, and politics. Alas, as we have learned, that also meant untainted by experience, toughness, cunning, and marksmanship. Lawyers make poor gunfighters.”
“Fighting’s a technique, like anything. It’s a skill to be learned, that’s all.”
“So our Director, and I agree with him of course, now sees the need for your kind of law enforcement. That is, heroes. Men of the gun. Our criminal class is too violent and too skilled to be arrested by lawyers. We need the likes of you, of Frank Hamer, of D. A. Parker, of Bill Tilghman, of Jelly Bryce, of men who’ve been hardened by battle, in war or arrest situations. Do you see what I am driving at?”
“I believe I do, sir.”
But Charles saw something else. He saw his family up north, he saw his damaged boy in some sort of caring facility, where the other children wouldn’t tease him and throw rocks at him, where his wife wasn’t beaten to a frazzle by the ordeal of caring for such a boy, where he himself could look at the boy, whom he knew had been delivered to him by a stern God as punishment, and not feel a racing current of self-hatred.
And he saw one other thing. Certain developments were weakening Charles. Certain opportunities were available as never before. He felt the yearning, the needing, the hunger, but he could not give in. The punishment was eternity in hell. Thus, Chicago was escape. It solved an immediate problem. It saved Charles from his worst enemy, who was Charles. It was his getaway.
He knew in that second he would take the job.
“I was also impressed by your modesty. I have it on authority that you were part of the team that ended the careers of two famous bank robbers. Yet you chose to leave the scene early, you had no hunger for special attention, the adulation of the press, the advancement of your reputation. Most man killers are like baseball stars and they love to be at the center of things.”
“I am a private man,” said Charles.
“That is very impressive and entirely in accordance with the wishes of the Director, who believes it is the organization, not the man, who should get the credit. That ensures the survival of the organization, and believe me, Sheriff, as America fills and gets yet more and more sophisticated, so will its criminals, whether gangsters or Reds, and we will need the most sophisticated, most modern law enforcement organization in the world, if we are to keep up with them.”
“I can’t help you on modernization, sir. I can win fights for you and help your boys win fights, that’s the extent of my talent.”
“And that is what we need right now. Yes, I’m here to offer you a job. You would be appointed Special Agent, a rare privilege, as most men have to go through six months’ training. You will work under me out of Chicago, and the pay is about twice what you are now making, eight thousand dollars a year. Needless to say, it will be a much better life for your wife and boy.”
“I believe I would leave them here for now, sir. My wife has family here, my boy is set in school, and I don’t want her obsessing about the danger.”
“Certainly. You would know best. To continue, you would be in charge of firearms training, to try and get the fellows to shoot a little better and not lose their heads when they are being shot at. If we’re thin, you’d have stakeout duties, which nobody enjoys, but it’s part of the job. Even I do it. You might be asked to run security on crime scenes where our technicians have to work undisturbed. Interrogation is a special art, and possibly you have an old lawman’s gift for it, but, if not, no problem. Interrogators are easier to find than gunfighters. You’re familiar with the Thompson gun, the twelve-gauge riot gun, the Browning rifle, the Remington Model 8, and the Colt .45 automatic? It’s said you’re a superb shot.”
“I have fired them all courtesy of our State Police, some more than others. We could have used that Thompson in France, let me tell you.”
“A bit heavy for a lawyer like me, I have to say. Is there anything else?”
“Sir, I’m wondering if we could do this on the sly. No publicity, no newspapers, some way I don’t have to resign this here job. I’m sure the judge will let me go, perhaps even encourage me, as he’s a big Democrat and a true Roosevelt man, but here are my roots and I’d like to have something to come back to.”
“It’s an excellent idea,” said Inspector Cowley. “I wish more of our men felt that commitment to the team.”
“Then I think you’ve got yourself a man.”
“I am gratified and will notify the Director immediately.”
“If I get Johnny Dillinger in my sights, I will bag him for you or die trying.”
“I know you will. But the newspapers have perhaps made too much of Dillinger. He’s got a gift for publicity over and above his talents for larceny, and it seems he’s not a key larcenist as we’ve been led to believe. In any event, it’s not Public Enemy Number One I fear. It’s a man called Lester. Now, that’s a scary proposition. Only a Charles Swagger has the nerve to face Lester J. Gillis.”
“Lester?” said Charles. “Never heard of him.”
4
LITTLE ROCK, ARKANSAS
The present
BOB, IN A SUIT THAT HIS FORMALITY DEMANDED, sat in the law offices of Smathers, Vincent and Nichols in a skyscraper in Little Rock and looked at the odd collection that Jake Vincent’s assistant had gently removed from a much-battered and dirtied old box.
The pistol was at least knowable. It was a well-preserved Colt Government Model, greasy from the oil-soaked cloth that had been its shroud for eighty or so years underground. The firm thoughtfully provided Bob with rubber gloves, so he could pick it up.
His fingers knew it immediately. As a design, the thing was one of many masterpieces that had tumbled from the brain of John M. Browning before World War I, so perfect in conception and execution, such a chord of power and grace and genius of operation that even now, more than a century after its year of adaptation in 1911, it was the standard sidearm of many of the world’s elite units. Nothing plastic, nothing sleek and streamlined, with a huge magazine of smaller cartridges, could really replace it for the trained man.
This one bore no rust, testament to the care with which it had been packed and the airtightness of the tin box, which, upon reflection, could not have been tin, as all had assumed, but welded steel. Again, that expressed care and savvy.
Bob eased back the slide, finding it smooth, until it locked, exposing through the ejection port the pistol’s cockpit. He looked in, and though slick with oil, the pistol showed its perfection in the harmony between barrel and magazine follower and the firing-pin hole in the bolt face, with two other nubbins projecting slightly, the extractor and the ejector. Amazing that an eighty-year-old spring held so tight and true, locking the whole gun in powerful tension. He held it close to his eye to behold the workmanship of the old Colt Hart
ford plant in those days, the precision of the Colt lettering—COLTS PTS FA MFG CO/HARTFORD CT U.S.A.—along with the patent line, and, on the other side, COLT AUTOMATIC/CALIBRE .45, complete down to old-school spelling. The serial number was 157345C, meaning it left Hartford in 1928, and the Colt Company had cooperated swiftly, locating the bill of lading, which had sent a batch of fifteen pistols to the U.S. Postal Department. Evidently the Postals didn’t like the heaviness and big, smacking kick of the big-bore, and the guns must have been shipped to the FBI in ’34, where the high impact of the fat bullet was more meaningful to the operators than the size and weight of the piece. To an experienced man killer like Charles, the .45 would have been far preferable to the mousy .38 Special that most of the other agents carried, though some of them might have upgunned to a higher-powered .38 on a .44 frame. The .357 Magnum, which became synonymous with the Bureau, didn’t arrive until ’35.
He drew it closer to his eye. The fit of metal to metal was flawless, all the pieces locked in and held by precision machining, not pins or screws. In fact, the whole mechanism was united in solidity by a single pin that ran from the slide release through the body of the gun, and only by popping it out—it took a touch—could the gun be disassembled. The checkering on the hammer spur was a constellation of perfectly aligned pinpricks, the parallelism of the slide serrations was masterful. They knew how to build them in those days, when it was the machinist’s skill and intuition that made it happen, not some computer algorithm. He popped the slide release and let that heavy part ease forward in capture, encompassing the barrel again, let the gun settle into his hand, and peered through the tiny sights that took someone with talent to get the most of.
No holster, as whoever squirreled it away knew that the leather, being organic, would disintegrate, moisture or not. He put it down and moved next to another relic of the firearms world of 1934. Unwrapped from a coil of oiled cloth, it revealed itself to be some kind of cylinder, obviously created at the lathe by a skilled machinist. It was a fine piece of work, a heavy chunk of sculpture cut from a single block of high-strength steel. It looked a little like a Japanese grenade or something, but it was hollow, and perforated at each end lengthwise by a hole that appeared to be roughly three-tenths of an inch wide. At one end, the width compressed into a cone that encircled what had to be the muzzle; at the other, the interior of the opening had been machined expertly with precise screw grooves, so it could be twirled on and tightened against the barrel of whatever weapon it assisted. It was cut by twelve grooves, each exactly parallel to the others, all angles squared perfectly to ninety degrees.
“Ever see such a thing?”
“Not exactly. Looks like some sort of automatic weapon accessory, a muzzle brake or something. The slots let hot gases escape upward, and their jet action keeps the muzzle down. Most automatic weapons have ’em. But this is so big and strange. Maybe from a Japanese or a French gun, a Belgian or Czech, something he brought back from the war, I’m thinking.”
“What would it be doing here?”
“Hell if I know,” said Bob.
Putting the cylinder down, he next considered the bill. It bore the picture of the stentorian Grover Cleveland, and its green was a lighter green. All the zeros after the 1 looked kind of goofy, particularly up at the corners, where they had to be curled around to fit. Some associate had wisely sealed it in a baggie so nothing of this century could tarnish it. Passed from teller to robber at gunpoint. What else could it be? Then, tossed somewhere, maybe as getaway money, in case someone had to move fast and didn’t have time to pack. Or maybe it was swag that old Charles had picked up, a bill from a big gambler in Hot Springs he’d shaken down or found dead or money otherwise unaccounted for in the aftermath of a robbery that he presumed nobody would notice if missing. He put it away for the rainy day sure to come, knowing nobody would ever look for it. But its denomination had to make it something of a singularity that would make it easy to identify, easy to trace, less valuable than its face value, since it would have to be stepped on several times by brokers before a third of it returned as usable, untraceable cash. Unlikely that Charles would not know that. Unlikely also that he’d have the connections to get the job done and the time to wait for it to happen. And, finally, unlikely that it would be worth the effort, in 1934 terms, for a payoff coming in at two-thirds less than a grand.
So the getaway stash made the most sense. A bad guy on the run would need to finance his travel. The folks he dealt with would be far from law enforcement, would take the dough without question in small increments as he voyaged, and it would be months before any of it came to Treasury’s attention and tracking efforts were started.
“A thousand?” said Bob to Jake, who sat across the conference room table from him. “How much is that worth in today’s money?”
“A thousand in 1934 buys about three hundred dollars’ worth of goods today,” said Jake.
“Ain’t getting rich on that,” said Bob.
“Don’t be so sure. It’s not the value, it’s the bill’s rarity. That makes it worth something, perhaps a lot more worth than a thousand. The numismatist told us it was quite rare, an AC-1934-A out of San Francisco. He said it was Friedberg-2212-G, rated as 66EPQ, which is called Gem Uncirculated. It’s pretty close to perfect. Worth about six or seven grand today, depending.”
“But that’s now. Then it was just flat 1934 one-grand value. After being walked through the cleaning process, it would go down to three hundred.”
“That’s right.”
“So it hardly seemed like killing money, like a big chunk of swag that enters legend, and if located, would confer a life of luxury on its locator.”
He put it down, picked up the map, or whatever it was. Well, map was too grand a word. It simply traced what appeared to be one wall of an irregular dwelling, with juts to sustain windows, and a diagonal of ten dashes leading off to the northeast quadrant, if the map was oriented with the north at the top, of which there was no indication. At the tenth step, in the same steady fountain-pen hand, a circle denoted what was certainly the trunk of a tree, and on the back side of the tree, from the wall of the house, if it was a house, was an X marking a spot.
“All of this stuff makes some sense if the year was 1940, the year of the big train robbery in Hot Springs, which rumor tied to Charles. But this was six full years earlier, and nothing happened down there in 1934. So we can discount the train business.”
“Got it,” said Jake.
“Why would he bury a treasure map under a house? He buries the map to buried treasure? Odd. Why wouldn’t he just bury the treasure under the house?” Bob asked.
“Maybe the ‘treasure’ was too big. Maybe it was some sort of contraband, and if he was caught with it, it meant jail. So he wanted it off the property. Did he ever say anything?”
“He died four years before I was born. I don’t know a thing about him.”
“Did your dad say anything?”
“Not a thing. But my grandmother told my mother, who told me that he had the bottle disease. His pleasure was rye, lots of it, lots and lots toward the end. He started going to the Caddo Gap Baptist Prayer Camp for help with it, but the bottle beat down the Lord, because he drank hard till the day he died.”
—
THE REAL MYSTERY was what happened in 1934 that prompted the gun to be hidden as well as the money, some kind of treasure buried in some unknowable place? And maybe sent him staggering down the Rye Highway toward a dissolution so deep, even the Baptists couldn’t help.
And all of it had to revolve around the last of the objects in the reliquary. The badge. Both his forefathers had worn badges, had been lawmen, and so as a totem the attraction to such emblems of state power must run strong in the Swagger blood. And his own son now wore a badge. Yet Swagger himself was an outlier from his own DNA, in that it had never drawn him in. He had no police impulses. The Corps, with its top-down, to-the-de
ath mandates of discipline, had been enough, and when it was over, it was also not a bad thing to be done with certain ceremonial requirements that a police career would have maintained. And like his grandfather ruined by the song of hooch, he had that same weakness. So he’d been too drunk after invaliding out to go into the State Police, and had never felt the call that his father and his grandfather, and who knows what Swagger before then, had felt? The bottle was far more interesting than the badge, and though he hadn’t touched a bottle in years, it remained so.
When he picked it up, it meant nothing, delivered no charge. It was just a piece of—what?—an alloy of some sort, bronze, iron, maybe a salting of steel, crushed into a symbol of not merely justice but also authority and its facilitator, force. Had his grandfather worn this one? He looked carefully, and having no meaningful acquaintanceship with badges, only saw the random set of power emblems, as basically invented by the Roman Empire—that is, scrolls, raised lettering—embossed, that was the word—the whole thing a kind of mini shield that suggested a legionary’s strength and probity, though some Knights of the Round Table shaping had crept in, as it was more elegantly designed than the legionaries’ minimalist rectangle. It was heavy too, like a gun, much heavier and more substantial than it looked like from afar. In the dull but shadowless illumination of the overhead fluorescents of the law firm, it threw off glints of sparkle as you turned it, and the light caught or missed various heights and depths it wore on its uneven surface.
It didn’t say FBI. It said, in an arch across the top, JUSTICE DEPARTMENT, and in a straight line under some kind of bas-relief of blindfolded Greek Lady Justice, DIVISION OF INVESTIGATION.
“They didn’t become FBI officially till 1935,” said Jake. “I’m an expert, I looked it up on Wikipedia.”
“I should have done the same,” said Bob, still rapt in the presence of the badge.
“It was only a division for that year. That’s what they called it, the Division. Sounds kind of 1984. The newspapers simply called it the Justice Department, or Justice. They liked the pun, as in ‘Justice fells Dillinger,’ that sort of thing.”