Irish Above All

by Mary Pat Kelly

  “Save me three columns on the front page and leave room for a picture.” He dropped the receiver.

  “You’re not taking my camera,” I said.

  “Then you’ll have to come with me. Can you really use that thing?”

  “So long, Mr. Winchell,” I said and took a step toward the door. He ran ahead of me, turned and grabbed my arm again.

  “Ten bucks,” he said, “and a good word about Ed Kelly in my column.”

  I stopped.

  “Surprised you didn’t I?” he said. “I know who you are. Ed Kelly’s flack. I remember you from the Dempsey-Tunney fight. I never forget a face. Especially somebody who could give me some information.”

  “Well, that’s not me,” I said. “I’m going to the hospital.”

  “As you should, but if you come with me you’ll arrive with the latest dope on the gunman. I’ll get him to tell me all about who hired him. I’m betting on Nitti and the Chicago Outfit.”

  “That’s what Manny Mandel said.”

  “Manny’s around? Now there’s a real photog. Tell me how to find him and you’re off the hook.”

  “I’m perfectly capable of taking the picture,” I said.

  “Well come on then. I’ve got a cab waiting,” he said.

  A crowd of reporters stood in front of the police station but Winchell ignored them and went into the county courthouse across the street. He ran up the marble steps. Hard to keep up with him. Winchell had been a song and dance man in vaudeville and he could move. He headed through a side door and down a flight of stairs to the basement. A cop stood in front of an open freight elevator.

  “Come on, come on,” the cop said. We got on. The cop closed the grill and when he opened it we were in the jail. Except two uniformed policemen and a fellow in a suit stood in the hallway.

  “What the hell,” the fellow in the suit said.

  “It’s me, Chief. Walter Winchell. And you’re about to become famous. You’re the man who arrested the most notorious assassin in history.”

  “Assassin?” I said. “But Roosevelt’s alright, isn’t he? And the mayor—”

  “Four people shot but it looks like they’ll all recover,” said the police chief.

  “Looks like?” Winchell asked. “Is that a medical term, Chief? I got a tip that they’re operating on one dame and it’s touch and go. And as for Cermak, listen, Chief, the mayor was the real target. The Chicago Outfit hired the zip you’ve got here to rub him out. And you’re the man that will get the headlines. Give me ten minutes with the guy and he’ll confess on the front page of the Mirror with a picture of you right beside him.”

  “Ten minutes,” the police chief said. He wasn’t much taller than Winchell, though broader and much more rumpled. One of the other cops opened a door. As we stepped through it the police chief turned to me. “No dames,” he said.

  “She’s not a dame,” Winchell said. “She’s my photographer. Doesn’t the chief have the right look, Miss Kelly? That firm chin, his forehead.”

  “Very photogenic,” I said.

  “Okay,” the police chief said.

  I expected we’d be walking through a cellblock but instead the cop took us to a single iron door with a square opening. We looked in. There he was, the gunman. Sitting on a thin mattress on top of a slab of concrete. His hands were on his knees, his head down. He looked up at us, not a bit bothered. Dark eyes, olive skin.

  “I want my picture taken,” the gunman said. “Everybody should know me, Giuseppe Zangara, killed the president of America. Me.”

  “Roosevelt’s not dead,” the police chief said.

  “But you don’t care, do you, Giusep?” Winchell asked. “Because Cermak was the target, right? And you plugged him good.”

  “Who’s this Cermak?” the gunman asked.

  “See?” Winchell said to the others. “He’s lying. Look at him, he’s laughing at us. Open the door. Let’s get in there. Come on, Chief, we’ll take your photo with him and then watch, he’ll tell me everything. I know how to get secrets out of people. Even this guy.”

  The cop opened the door and we stepped into the small room. The fellow started to mumble and pointed to his stomach.

  “What’s he saying?” Winchell asked. “Where’s an Italian interpreter?”

  “I don’t think that’s Italian,” I said. “Probably a dialect.” I’d taken enough pictures of the citizenship classes at Park District fieldhouses to know that often immigrants from Italy spoke a language particular to certain regions. Sicilians didn’t understand people from Naples. They all knew a kind of serviceable Italian, but it wasn’t their mother tongue. Zangara kept speaking.

  “So, Miss Smarty Pants, you think you know how to talk to this fellow?” Winchell said.

  “Not really, but…”

  Zangara stood up.

  “Whoa there,” the chief said. “Sit down.” The two uniformed cops pulled their pistols out and aimed at him.

  “No shoot me,” he said in English, and then a stream of his dialect.

  “Siciliano?” I asked him. He shook his head.

  “Calabrese,” he said.

  “He’s from Calabria,” I told the others.

  “Where the hell is that?” the police chief asked.

  “The toe of the boot,” I said.

  “What?” the police chief asked.

  “The most southern part of Italy,” I said.

  “Seems like you know a lot. What are you? Some sort of an anarchist? Communist?” the chief said to me.

  “Take it easy, Chief,” Winchell said. “She’s okay.”

  “Yeah? Well, this punk must have had accomplices,” the police chief said.

  “He did,” Winchell said. “The Chicago Outfit. He hit the guy he was aiming for, Anton Cermak. Enemy number one of the Capone gang.”

  “I hate all kings and presidents,” Zangara said, his English accented but clear.

  “See? He’s an anarchist for sure,” the chief said.

  Zangara was just so small. I was taller than he was and certainly outweighed him. Still, put a gun in his hand and he was more deadly than a six-foot-tall wrestler. He’d shot five people and might have killed Roosevelt if not for … Oh God.… “Move closer.” Could life and death be that random? Was Zangara just some loner, a nut with a gun? I wanted to believe someone smarter and bigger was behind this. Thompson, the Outfit, Garner, somebody, otherwise it just made no sense.

  “Hey, you with the camera.” Zangara was talking to me. “You take picture now and get out of here. I want to sleep. Take good picture so everybody in Ferruzzano knows what I do. Tell them Giuseppe Zangara is important now. They’ll hang my picture in the church. Nobody in all of Calabria is as big as me.”

  There was just enough light, so I raised my camera. And he posed. Turned his head slightly and smiled.

  “Give this to the newspapers in Rome. The captain will see it, that general who treated me like dirt. I am biggest man in Italy, in the world.”

  Oh dear God, I thought, did this fellow want to kill Roosevelt just to be famous? To get in the newspapers, to astound his neighbors? He was right, the whole world would know his name. That wouldn’t have been possible even twenty years ago, but now here was Winchell, the man who could make Zangara known. Horrible. But I took more pictures.

  “Okay, fella,” Winchell said, “but I need a story to go with these photos. Tell me when you met Nitti. How much did he pay you? Where did you get the money to travel over the last two years?”

  “It was from the anarchists, right?” the police chief said.

  “Why not ask him about Garner?” I said. “Or even Thompson.” But Zangara had gone back to speaking his own language.

  “That’s it, Winchell. Your ten minutes are up,” the police chief said and turned to me, asking, “Where should I stand?” I wasn’t sure what he was talking about, but Winchell stepped in.

  “Come on fellows,” he said to the two cops, “each one of you grab one of the Dago’s arms and, C
hief, you stand just to the side of them. Remember this guy’s bad, a killer. He fought you all the way but you got him.” The cops followed Winchell’s directions. Pulled Zangara off the cot. Each of them was a foot taller than Zangara, so the gunman looked more like some boy they’d caught shoplifting rather than a would-be murderer or international terrorist.

  “Don’t smile,” Winchell said to Zangara. “You’ve just shot five people. You might have killed the president of the United States.”

  But Zangara started laughing. “Me,” he said. “Little Giuseppe. Wait ’til my father sees this. I’m not the boy he kicked in the stomach. I am the greatest man ever born in Ferruzzano. I am famous.”

  And I took the picture.

  * * *

  “Give me your film,” Winchell said when we left the jail. “I’ve got a fellow at AP will wire the photographs. We’ll make the first edition. You’ll be on the front page of the New York Mirror.”

  It was two in the morning. Ed was flying at first light, so he would arrive in Miami by nine o’clock or so.

  “If Cermak dies,” Winchell said, “they’ll have to have a special election for mayor and this time Thompson and the Republicans will win. Cermak herded all the Irish together but now they’ll turn on each other.”

  “But Thompson almost destroyed the city. He’s a disaster.”

  “Maybe, but he was great copy. He gave the people what they wanted, bread and circuses.”

  “But even Thompson wouldn’t have hired Capone’s cousin, Nitti, to get rid of Cermak,” I said.

  “Why not?” Winchell said. “Assassination has been part of politics for all of history. Look at the kings of England. Henry Tudor murdered his way to the throne, and as for his son, Henry VIII, well at least the men in the Outfit don’t kill their own wives. And then there’s your Borgias the poisoning popes, Catholics every one. I might use some of this in my column. People like a little history. Makes them feel smart and after all when I was a boy the old people were still talking about where they had been when they heard Lincoln had been shot. And then there’s McKinley and Teddy Roosevelt who managed to live.”

  And Mick Collins, I thought, killed by a former comrade. And Peter Keeley.

  “Could FDR have almost died because Zangara wanted to be famous?” I asked. “Incredible.”

  “Don’t underestimate the drive to be famous,” Winchell said. “You wouldn’t believe what people do to get a mention in my column. The calls I get every day from flacks trying to get their clients a little bit of ink.” He stopped. “But then of course you know all about that. You’re a flack yourself.”

  “Good night, Mr. Winchell,” I said. The street in front of the jail was clear. The chief of police probably was holding a press conference inside for the reporters, taking his chance at fame. There was traffic moving on the avenue beyond and some taxis at the cabstand. I’ve got to get out of here. Why did I let this jerk distract me. Insult me. I started to walk away. “Don’t you want your ten bucks?” Winchell called after me.

  “I don’t want your money.”

  “It’s not mine. It’s William Randolph Hearst’s. Take it. Your cousin Ed will get a laugh, scoring off the enemy. Here, here.” He waved the bill at me. “Come on. You can be press now,” Winchell said, “paid by Hearst himself.”

  But I kept walking.

  2

  No, I wasn’t press. Not one of this crowd of reporters trying to get into Jackson Memorial Hospital. It was a huge place, faintly Spanish, with a grand middle building and two side wings. Some of the men were waving cameras at the line of cops blocking the main entrance.

  “The president’s got to talk to us,” one man yelled.

  “Hey Jim! Jim! Over here,” another called. I saw Jim Farley, Roosevelt’s aide, standing in front of the door with two uniformed policemen next to him.

  A fellow with a big brain—Ed, who’d gotten to know him at the convention, said.

  Farley raised his hand, and the shouting stopped.

  “The president-elect has left the hospital,” he said. “He’ll spend the night on the yacht and come back here tomorrow morning. He’s visited each of the four victims, except for Mrs. Gill, who’s in surgery. All are doing well and are expected to recover completely.”

  “What about Cermak?” one shouted.

  “Resting comfortably,” Farley replied.

  “Not what I heard,” the man said. “A nurse told me it’s touch and go.”

  “If you fellows had any decency you’d stop bothering the hospital staff and get out of here.” He turned away from the reporters and started back into the hospital. “Jim, Jim,” they shouted after him.

  I’d managed to move down the line and get close to the door.

  “Mr. Farley, Mr. Farley,” I yelled. “I’m Ed Kelly’s cousin. Wait … wait, I just spoke to Ed.” He stopped. “I came down to do a job for Mayor Cermak,” I said. “How is he? Can I see him?”

  “Who’s the dame?” one of the reporters called out. “No fair talking to her and not us.”

  Farley let me walk into the hospital with him, then down the hall past the elevator. We stopped at a small waiting room. Tables and chairs piled with magazines. Nearly two o’clock in the morning, so no visitors in the hospital.

  “Ed and Pat Nash are flying down first thing in the morning,” I said. “I know Mayor Cermak will want to see them but maybe I should go up now. It might reassure him to see someone from home.”

  “What’s that you’re carrying?” Farley said. I lifted up the Seneca.

  “My camera,” I said.

  “Are you using your connections to take a picture? A vulture like all those other newshounds!”

  “I’m not, I’m not,” I said. “The mayor hired me to take the photograph that would save Chicago, but it was me who told him to move closer to the president and that’s why he got shot. But then maybe Roosevelt…”

  I was babbling. But suddenly I very much wanted to convince this dignified man that I wasn’t part of that pack outside.

  “You people have no decency,” Farley said.

  “I’m not ‘you people.’ And I’ve seen Zangara, the gunman. There could be a plot. Roosevelt may not be safe.”

  But Farley wasn’t listening. He walked out of the room.

  I expected a cop to show up and throw me out, but no one came. I sat on a hard wooden chair. My teeth start chattering. My whole body was shivering. I saw it again. Blood coming through Cermak’s white shirt at the belt.

  “Who are you?”

  A nurse stood in the doorway.

  “I’m … I’m…,” I started, but the words wouldn’t get past my chattering teeth.

  “I’m about to make myself a cup of tea,” she said. “You look like you could use one.”

  A woman about my age. Very starched for the middle of the night. Blondish hair and a bit of a tan, even in February. She opened a closet door. I saw a small table holding an electric kettle, cups, and, like a sign from Heaven, a box of Barry’s Tea.

  “You’re Irish,” I said to her.

  “Kathleen Quinn, both parents from Galway.”

  “That’s where my grandmother was born,” I said, “though her family were originally from Connemara, and…” I stopped.

  She lifted the kettle, gave it a shake, and then plugged it in. “We keep it filled with water,” she said. She looked at me. “You may need yours doctored.”

  She reached up to the closet shelf and brought down a bottle of Jameson. “Sent over to my da at Christmas. Our relations in Ireland just can’t believe that the US government would outlaw drink.”

  Five minutes later I was sipping strong, sweet tea, full of the wonderful smoky taste of whiskey. The real thing. I’d almost forgotten.

  “Father Kevin’s cure for everything,” I said, which confused Kathleen Quinn, and then I started explaining about the Irish priest I knew in Paris, and my life there, until she touched my arm and said, “Drink your tea. I’d say you’re in shock. Were you at t
he shooting?”

  I couldn’t stop myself from telling her everything. Why I came down to Miami. How the only reason that Cermak got so close to Roosevelt was so I could photograph him.

  “I almost feel like it was my fault that Cermak got shot. Except if he hadn’t been there, Roosevelt might have been killed. Oh why did I get involved at all?” I took a breath. “Except that I need the hundred dollars to find my dead husband’s grave in Ireland,” I told her.

  Kathleen Quinn asked no questions. Just patted my arm until the flow stopped.

  “Your mayor’s sleeping, which is the best thing for him,” she said. “The doctors have decided not to operate and take the bullet out. It’s lodged in a funny place. But I don’t know.” She shook her head. “I think they should remove it.”

  “Always the danger of infection,” I said. “Internal septicemia.”

  “Are you a nurse?” she asked me.

  “Not a nurse, but I did take care of soldiers in France.”

  “Me too.” She smiled.

  “So I can’t understand why I’m falling apart like this. I’ve seen worse.”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “But we were only a bunch of people in a park. Music. Kids. Out for a good night. No one was expecting it…”

  “No,” she said. “A very strange battlefield.”

  “And I was on a real battlefield,” I said. “Belleau Wood. I saw young Marines walk into machine gun fire. Drop down into a wheat field full of blood and poppies. I took on the Black and Tans for God’s sake…”

  Again the pressure on my arm. I cannot stop talking. It was as if I was trying to put a hedge of words around what happened.

  “You should go home,” Kathleen Quinn said.

  “I know I should. I really should get on a train to Chicago right now, but Ed’s coming, and Pat Nash, and Mayor Cermak’s family will be heading down here and they’ll expect me to help and—”

  “Whisht,” Kathleen Quinn said. “I mean go to your hotel. Where are you staying?”

  “Some place on Biscayne Boulevard. Not far from the park.” The park. I can’t go by that park, but I do need to sleep. “I suppose I can call a taxi,” I said, and stood up.