The Confessions of Al Capone

by Loren D. Estleman

  McGonigle wore his gray hair long, and although he had on a clerical collar with a rusty black short-sleeved shirt, he kept pulling at it with a finger as if he wasn't used to wearing it. After Vasco declined an offer to pour him a glass from a bottle of Green Spot whisky, he didn't ask again, although he helped himself several times.

  Under its influence he waxed autobiographical, but not nostalgic. He'd been suspended by the archbishop from a pastorship in Maryland for lecturing the Vatican from the pulpit about the persecution of the Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe.

  Plainly he didn't believe the story he'd been told by someone with the General Intelligence Division, that Vasco was an actor researching a small but important role in a defense documentary. (For McGonigle's benefit he was "Philip Viterelli," to derail possible inquiries from Florida and Chicago.) "Bing Crosby made a better-looking priest than you, and he didn't sell me, either." Just as plainly, he didn't care, because a cashier's check had been delivered to his address by special messenger an hour before his protege arrived, drawn on the account of a business front maintained by the Bureau.

  "You could call yourself O'Reilly and it'd stick just as tight," McGonigle said, observing him from beneath paper-thin lids watermarked with blue veins. "The District's rotten with mongrels. Half the tar babies in this neighborhood could sue for a piece of the Thomas Jefferson estate. I'm the only purebred for eleven blocks. County Cork, both sides, clear back to William the Bloody Conqueror."

  "Is it a problem?"

  "Not as long as the check clears. I just want it on the record this Mick ain't so far gone in drink he can't tell a ginzo from a potato-eater."

  Vasco hoped the transparency didn't extend to the credentials Hoover's people had furnished to fool Ralph Capone.

  "My mother came to this country from County Sligo, if it's any of your business." A pinch of truth never hurt when a lie needed seasoning. He'd learned that much at his father's knee.

  "Shanty Irish, the lot. I might've guessed."

  "I'd have thought a man who risked so much to speak up for the Jews would be more tolerant."

  "And what's being tolerant to do with crying out against injustice, I ask you? Hook noses and greedy mitts offend me as much as the next fellow, but wholesale slaughter's not the answer. That man that calls himself Pius behaves as if the kike that comes around offering to sharpen all the knives in my kitchen pounded the nails into Jesus personal. He'd speak up bloody quick if Mussolini wasn't an Eye-tie and it was his people taking the gas pipe."

  "Father, I'm just here for the Canons."

  "Right." He dashed the liquor around in his glass, then knocked it back like a cowboy in a movie; Vasco had a flash of Tom Mix and a rocking horse, lost along with so much else. The glass slammed down on a mission oak table hard enough to crack a vessel made of finer material. "Let's start with what you don't know, and see just how much heathen we need to burn out."

  The first session was humiliating.

  It amounted to a grade-school catechism, and he was mortified by how much he'd forgotten. He was like a graduate mathematician stumped by two-plus-two. McGonigle's inebriated self-satisfaction at every stumble put him right back in the corner of Brother Dismas' classroom at St. Francis—the one nearest the barrel stove, and by ham-handed metaphor nearest the Lake of Fire—for confusing Isaiah with Ezekiel. When he was dismissed after three hours, the sadistic gleam in the priest's eye promised no respite the next time.

  Vasco returned to his furnished room on Sixteenth Street, amazed in spite of his exhaustion to find it unchanged from that morning. He'd left it a government clerk and had returned a special agent of the FBI. He'd met J. Edgar Hoover and been chosen by him to perform a service vital to national security. (Not precisely vital, perhaps, but more distinctly connected than splicing split infinitives.) From that adrenaline-charged moment, the day had drained him of energy and self-worth. He dragged his limbs up two flights of stairs, the briefcase hanging heavy on one side, and fell back against the door. If he'd had the strength, he'd have hauled the chest of drawers across it to keep the world out.

  Most nights he cooked supper, read, listened to the war news, and went to bed at ten. Tonight his brain was too stale to focus on anything but the basics. He ate the second half of his egg-salad sandwich from the icebox and fell onto the mattress at half past eight. Dreams disturbed his rest, but the next morning all he could remember was Seamus McGonigle coming at him with a baseball bat.

  The ordeal was just as bad the next few days—his tutor seemed determined to reduce him to Protestant—but when his studies moved beyond the basic tenets of the Church into theosophy, Vasco had the opportunity to demonstrate his grasp of those metaphysical questions that had kept him in the seminary long after his zealotry faded. The insults and sarcasm fell off precipitously. He'd forgotten the joy of the challenge, and McGonigle was a gifted adversary when they differed over interpretation. Vasco admired his scholarship without disliking him any less.

  When the priest broke to drink and ruminate, Vasco learned that in his youth McGonigle had run guns to the rebels in Northern Ireland, but having been drawn more by the thrill of adventure than devotion to Home Rule, he'd quit when it became routine. For a time he'd courted a young woman in Belfast, but that ended when she took the veil.

  "We were related by blood," he said. "I like to think that was the reason, but in any case I was relieved when it happened. Beautiful women can be boring, have you noticed?"

  "Is that when you got the Call?"

  "Oh, I was already wearing the collar. You might say I was a priest without portfolio."

  He continued before the shock set in. "A friend who'd emigrated for his health—he had a king's order of execution upon his head—cabled me with an offer to leave the politics behind and run whisky to the States. Scotch, it shames me to confess; the Sons of Erin lacked the criminal enterprise of our neighbors to the North and of our cousins over here. The money was good, and I'd rather be shot at for it than just for fun, but when my friend took one in the belly and I brought him to hospital I made the mistake of hanging around to see what became of him. Two blokes with blue chins arrested me in the waiting room: nine months in the Baltimore jail."

  Vasco began to see how McGonigle had come to Hoover's attention. He wondered how long the Bureau had been tracking him. "What happened to your friend?"

  "He got better. He's a judge now. Well, I was always one for a brawl, and when I got out I hadn't a shilling, so I accepted two dollars to go five rounds with a fellow who called himself Paddy Ryan, though he was as Irish as a plate of lasagna. I dropped him in the second round. I'd found a career, I thought. Then a bruiser named Sailor Maccabee laid me out flatter than unleavened bread thirty seconds after the bell. I was still snatching at invisible butterflies three weeks later."

  "Then what?"

  He grinned for the first time, showing a row of lower teeth dyed amber. "Hell, after bootlegging and prizefighting, what else was there? Saints Mary and Joseph needed an assistant pastor, and with rum boats steaming in and out of the harbor regular as the tide, the committee wasn't asking questions it didn't want to hear the answers to. It was steady work in unsteady times."

  "That's all it meant?"

  "It was fourteen years ago, and six months is as much of an investment as I put into anything before that, not counting the hoosegow. Judge for yourself."

  "Others have already judged."

  "This?" He swept a hand around the room cluttered with open books and empty bottles. "The Church is responsible for this. God's the only commitment I ever made past payday. How about you?"

  He remembered what he was about. "I'm just an actor preparing for a part."

  McGonigle poured. "Bit of advice, Phil, my lad. Take the Civil Service exam and you'll never go hungry."

  Mornings were the only time he had to study the FBI file on Alphonse Capone. His sessions with the priest left him too wrung out to concentrate at night, and McGonigle wasn't available the next day unt
il he'd slept off the previous lesson.

  Over his ration of coffee, which he stretched out with burnt chicory, he looked at Scarface Al's earliest arrest photo at age eighteen, round-faced and balding even then, booked for beating a man half to death in a dockside saloon in Brooklyn, New York (charges dropped); a candid shot taken at Comiskey Park, getting a baseball signed for his son by Babe Ruth; a relaxed pose on the steps of the Federal Building in Chicago, smiling with one hand in his suit pocket and his hat at its jaunty angle; the infamous "Public Enemy Number One" mug that had run again with the article announcing his release from prison; finally, the gangster in retirement, fishing in a striped bathrobe off Palm Island, Florida.

  He was arguably the most photographed felon in U.S. history. Billy the Kid had posed only once, Jesse James a handful of times, and a roll of Kodak film had been sufficient for John Dillinger. John Wilkes Booth looked like Clark Gable in some lithographs, in others like a deranged Mark Twain. Everyone old enough to remember Black Friday knew Al Capone's face as well as Charles Lindbergh's, and better than the president's.

  Vasco thought that if he cut the images to a uniform size and arranged them into a child's flip-book, he could provide a moving-picture account of the rise and fall of America's Crime King, from his squalid origins in the slums to his palace of debauchery at age twenty-five to his decline into imprisonment and madness in his forties. It was a cautionary tale for all would-be transgressors.

  The medical reports were frightening enough without illustration: penile discharge, skin eruptions, genital warts, periods of rage and panic. Then there was his arrest file, with its description of the facial disfigurement that had given him the nickname he detested: "oblique scar of 4" across cheek 2" in front left ear—vertical scar 21/2" under left ear on neck"; retaliation for an indiscreet remark made to a woman in a Brooklyn nightclub, courtesy of her brother. Vasco could only guess at the vengeance that Capone Ascendant had exacted for this Mark of Cain. The record was silent where it should be explicit.

  But the sheer volume of material that had been collected would take days to digest; weeks even, with his afternoons and evenings pledged to his spiritual reeducation. Someone with a blunt pencil had scribbled in the margins and on the backs of the parcel-brown pages of the Institution Rules 6-Regulations manual for residents of Alcatraz, providing a semilegible account of Prisoner #85's day-to-day life for a number of weeks; apparently, Hoover's people had either planted an undercover man in Capone's cell block or recruited an inmate to observe and report upon him with a promise of favors. It was clear that Capone had continued to be of interest to the Bureau long after the rest of the world had turned to other diversions: Depression, labor unrest, the war.

  What to do with the fat folder when Vasco went out posed a challenge. His landlord, whose son had gone down aboard the Arizona, considered him a shirker, and certain items left out of order indicated that his room had been searched from time to time for evidence of subversive activity. At length he settled on wrapping it in an undershirt and getting on a chair to push it to the end of his reach inside the ventilation duct; he had six inches on the landlord, and the old man's rheumatism argued against such exertion even in the interest of protecting the Home Front. After replacing the screen he carefully smeared the screws with grimy dust. It made him feel like Secret Agent X-9.

  At the end of two weeks, Father Seamus McGonigle—IRA retired, former pugilist, ex-convict—marked his place in St. Thomas More with a book of ration stamps and fingered the burst blood vessels on his nose. It had been broken and reset at least once.

  "Who'd you study with, boyo? Dollars to dog shit I've heard of him. I've been shuttled so many places I know the King of the Hoboes by his Christian name. You're no novice. You've had training, and it took. The training, I mean. You can teach a monkey to dance but it don't make him Fred Astaire."

  "The first day you said I was unteachable."

  "The first day I was as drunk as the Wedding at Cana, as who wouldn't be with an open bar. You expected me to swallow that crock-a-shit story you came in with, which didn't improve my disposition. 'Philip Viterelli,' my Aunt Katy's ass. I called you Phil three times that night and you didn't look up once. Whoever sent you must've been in one hell of a hurry."

  He held back panic, but a palm shot up before he could frame a response. "Hold your fire for the enemy. In the first place I don't care damn-all, and in the second place who'd listen if I did? I'm a pope's fart away from a mission in Greenland. It just might have saved us some effort in this our season of trial if you'd told me up front you'd worn the surplice. We could've dispensed with the first communion horseshit no one remembers anyway and cut straight to the prime rib."

  "I never said I had no religious education. You assumed I knew nothing."

  "I'm saying it still. You know all the verses right enough, and not to spill soup on the vestments, which is more than I can say for a certain archbishop. It don't matter to me if you sat at the feet of the Fisherman himself, though I'm curious as to why you wasted your time since it's as clear as Galilee you don't believe any of it."

  "I believe in God. I hold sacred the teachings of Jesus Christ, our Lord and Savior."

  McGonigle skinned back his upper lip and blew a Bronx cheer.

  Vasco rose, his face burning. "I won't sit here and be called an atheist."

  "Stand, then. If you're worried the disguise won't hold up, don't. I know a cardinal with a wife and three brawling boys in Albany. No one expects you to fall for your own pitch, only that you don't forget the words. As for me, I make it a practice not to stand between a man and his own damnation."

  "I doubt that. I don't think you're a believer any more than you think I am."

  "I'd not bet any red points on it, if I were you." He lifted his glass. "Here's to the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. And your immortal soul, while I'm about it." He drained it. "Leave my sight now, and don't come back. I just drank up the last of my tutorial."

  FOUR

  He hadn't ridden a train since before the war. The changes that had taken place in the years between made him feel like an oldtimer of thirty. By now, the coal-burner that had carried him from Chicago to Washington, D.C., was probably part of a submarine or troop transport, or demoted to switch-engine duty in some rail yard. The diesel-electric locomotive pulling this impossibly long line of cars south wore a shiny aluminum skin and looked like a flashlight. It made no noise except when its horn blew. Would his children, he wondered, know what he meant when he said choo-choo?

  The bartender in the club car was colored, with polished-looking skin and the best-kept hands Vasco had ever encountered in his sex; Hoover's were manicured, but the Director spoiled the effect by biting his nails. "Beverage, sir? I'm sorry I can't serve spirits for another ten minutes. We're passing through a dry county." That explained the fact they had the car to themselves. "Ginger ale is fine." The bartender opened a bottle of Canada Dry from the refrigerator and poured. He paused when the glass was half full.

  "To the top, sir?"

  "Yes."

  He filled it. "Some gentlemen carry a flask. I guess the old days aren't so old." Vasco smiled. He'd been feeling positively antique. "Did you tend bar during Prohibition?"

  "Tended it, varnished it, swept around it, and helped a coupla gen'lemans out into de alley." His sunny grin flickered; he'd forgotten his Pullman grammar in the moment. "I was single then, and wicked in my ways. I guess I'd be six feet under now if not for my Cassie."

  "Shot in the dark: Chicago South Side?"

  "No, sir. Detroit. Chicago got the press, but Detroit's where it got its liquor. Those days, if you drank, it either came across the river from Windsor or you mixed it up in a tub. Did you ever hear of the Purple Gang?"

  "They ran whiskey for Capone." Should he have played dumb? The time he'd spent studying the rituals of the Church might better have gone into learning undercover etiquette. Maybe the Director considered naiveté an asset in the field: but it was a minefi
eld.

  "To, not for: that's an important distinction. Detroit fellows, every one. Hired their guns to him, too. It was Purples killed those gentlemen on St. Valentine's Day."

  "I heard it was—someone else." Feigning ignorance felt proper here.

  "Oh, Scarface Al used a couple of local boys to slap on the final coat, as we say, but it was Killer Burke and the Keywell brothers wearing the uniform of Chicago's Finest that day, to throw off witnesses. Well, the gang's all in jail now, or dead. But you know who's out? The Big Fellow himself. Capone. If you're riding through to Miami, you might just see him."

  "I wouldn't know him if I did. I was ten years old when they put him away."

  "A railroad job, sir, with all due respect to the industry I work for. Are you aware of the number of people who have served time in maximum security for failure to pay their income taxes in the thirty-one years since the law was ratified?"

  "Not offhand."

  "Just one, sir. Alphonse Capone. I'm not saying he wasn't guilty, but do you think he'd have spent a day behind bars if his name was Mahoney?"

  Vasco drank ginger ale. He'd almost forgotten it; the bubbles were flattening out. "You make him sound like a martyr. You just said he hired the Purple Gang to commit murder."

  "I did, and he should've hung for it, or done a stretch for selling liquor when it was illegal, as I surely would if I sold you a gin-and-tonic in the next three minutes. If you want to punish a man for something he did, you ought not to punish him for something else, and throw the book at him for the other thing. That's just my opinion," he said, grinning suddenly; shambling. "Where else can a man blow off but in a bar?"