The Confessions of Al Capone

by Loren D. Estleman

  "That's why you came home so late and left so early. You had to make up for the time you took off."

  "Sure. The Outfit's like any other job when it comes to punching the clock." He shut his eyes tight. Breathing hurt; he had a furniture clamp on his chest. He should have felt the opposite. A burden he'd been carrying all his adult life had vanished. But it had done its damage. He opened his eyes. He could see his father better now in the dimness. "Why didn't you tell me? It's been five years."

  "I'm Italian. Your wife dies, you blubber a lot, you don't shave, you pray her over to the other side, you go home, and don't talk about her for a while. Then your son comes down with a bad case of Jesus. There didn't seem no point."

  Sea noises broke in on silence. Paul set his can on the floor and got up with a gentle yelp of familiar pain. "Time to scuttle the old bladder. Buy me lunch. I'll say you shooed me back into the fold and you can charge it to the pope."

  "Is there someplace quiet?" He had more questions to ask that couldn't be shouted over chatter and colliding crockery. He reached for his collar.

  "Place we're going, you'll think you're in Pharaoh's tomb."

  Paul Vasco had a gift for saying the wrong thing at the right time. It lifted the weight from his son's chest.

  Peter waited outside a public lavatory while his father relieved himself. It sounded like a gushing fireplug. He came out wiping his hands on his shirt, pale yellow with half-sleeves and flap pockets. Dirty white deck shoes covered his feet and a fisherman's cap with a long bill cast his face in shadow.

  They walked to a twelve-story beachfront hotel. "Bubble job," his father explained, "Owner shot himself when he couldn't unload it. Then when real estate turned around a syndicate bought it and renovated. Now they soak big shots in munitions sixty-five bucks a night to stay in the suites. 'The Warbucks Wigwam,' we call it."

  Peter checked his valise with a bellhop in the lobby. The dining room was modern Havana, with cedar wainscoting, potted palms, bowl fixtures suspended from chains, and all kinds of exotic flowers exploding on the wallpaper. The maître d', a smooth Cuban in a white drill suit, frowned slightly at Paul Vasco in his beachcomber's costume, but Peter's collar secured them a corner booth upholstered in red leatherette.

  "The monkey suit comes in handy." Paul took off his cap and ran a thick palm over his Fuller Brush haircut. "Most days I'd have to dress up like Carmen Miranda just to get in the door."

  "They probably think you're a charity case."

  "Look who made a joke."

  "I guess you missed the one about Al Jolson."

  "Your heart's got to be in it to make it funny."

  He'd surprised himself at how easily it had come out. Was it that simple? A moment of excruciating pain followed by instant recovery? He doubted it. These things probably came in waves. They were all extensions of grief.

  It was early. The place was less than a third full, and they were waited on quickly, by a younger Cuban who filled in his pencil moustache with eyeliner. Peter ordered the sea bass, Paul a steak, blood rare. "I can eat fish anytime I drop a line," he said. "Nobody can do what Sharon does with day-old bread crumbs." Peter didn't want to talk about Sharon. He sensed he was about to start mourning his mother all over again. "Back home, I'd never have pictured you owning a boat."

  "Shows how much you know. All the Bascanos lived on the water. My grandfather had webbed feet. But I'm not the fisherman he was. You ever read Heming-

  "There's a fisherman." He'd never seen his father with a book in his hands, not even a hymnal in church.

  Paul snorted. "He fishes like Boris Karloff dances ballroom. I took him out once."

  "Ernest Hemingway?"

  "Don't act so surprised. Hang around Florida long enough you'll hear him if you don't see him, he's that loud. He signed up as a war correspondent and put his boat in mothballs, but then the trip was delayed a week, so he picked me out of the book to kill time. He's a big fucker, bigger'n you, and fumble-ass clumsy. When you ain't tripping over his big feet he's tripping over them himself.

  "He comes on board carrying this big canvas zip bag. I figured he had a coupla six-packs in there, but out he hauls a fucking tommy gun. To shoot sharks, he said."

  "Did he shoot any?"

  "If it swam he shot at it, but the dolphins and Gertrude Ederle didn't have nothing to worry about. Son, he couldn't hit the ocean. I told him a tommy pulls to the left and up, so you got to hold it sideways against your hip and put that failing to your advantage; you know, sweep to the side. He tried it and shot the hell out of my beer cooler."

  Peter laughed, loud enough to turn heads. He wondered if he'd laughed in years.

  "Funny to you, maybe," his father said. "Beer was easier to come by when it was against the law. He was the worst shot I ever saw, and the second worst fisherman. He must be just about the best writer in the world or he'd've starved to death by now."

  Peter stopped laughing. "Where'd you learn how to operate a machine gun?"

  "Who do I look like, Edward G. Robinson? You can't drive and shoot at the same time. You'll miss what you want to hit and hit what you want to miss; a telephone pole, say, or a cop. Like I said, I never learned nothing listening to myself. Jack McGurn liked to talk, and he knew what he was talking about, guns and dames. They didn't call him Machine Gun Jack for nothing."

  "He was a Capone lieutenant, wasn't he?"

  "That's newspaper talk. The Outfit didn't hand out military commissions. But, yeah, they was tight, him and Mr. Capone. Word in the pool hall was he plotted out that Clark Street business."

  He couldn't get away from the St. Valentine's Day Massacre, for some reason. "I thought you only associated with hangers-on."

  "Associated?" Paul Vasco's grasp of English was slipping—conveniently, his son thought.

  "Worked with."

  "Worked? Shit. I told you I gave some fellows a lift time to time. Jack had this souped-up Auburn was always breaking down. I guess he liked the way I handled a Mack in traffic. He asked for me whenever his car was in the shop, and he always paid."

  He felt the pressure again on his chest. He shifted in his seat. "Dad, about Capone."

  His father wasn't paying attention. "It's about time. I could eat a horse."

  The waiter had returned, balancing their plates on a shimmering tray. "What's this? I asked for a steak." Three slices of meat the size and thickness of half-dollars shared Paul's plate with a scoop of mashed potatoes and greenery. They were deep maroon and looked like sliced beets.

  "Medallions of beef, sir."

  "What's-a matter, you run out of red points? I wouldn't bait a hook with one-a these. Any self-respecting fish would swim right past it."

  "I'm sorry, sir. That's our standard serving." He placed the sea bass in front of Peter. His father looked over at it.

  "I threw back bigger."

  "Sir?"

  "Please, Dad."

  He shrugged. "Medallions, you said? It's still steak, right?"

  "Yes, sir."

  "Okay. You better bring me a Schlitz. This won't hold me till I get out the door. This war," he said when they were alone. "I bet they're using frozen T-bones for home plate on that air base in Alaska."

  The waiter brought a smaller tray containing a tall foaming glass and a brown bottle. Paul took a long slurpy draught and swallowed loudly. "You believe I never drank beer back when I was hauling it around? I couldn't wait to get back home to that wine Mrs. Terrazzini made in the basement."

  Peter couldn't remember which landlady Mrs. Terrazzini was, but he remembered two men sitting at a kitchen table with a jug between them.

  "Dad, did you know Frankie Rio?"

  His father's head was bent over his plate. He forked beef into his mouth and chewed. "It don't ring a bell. There was a shitload of Frankies around in the old days."

  "He wore a lot of grease in his hair and had a bad lip."

  "The grease ain't no clue neither. There was more sheiks around than Frankies. You couldn't fi
nd a jar of Vaseline in Woolworth's. Bad lip? Nope." He washed down a mouthful with beer.

  "He was Al Capone's bodyguard."

  "Closest I ever got to Mr. Capone was that time in the cab and in the apartment when he came for his gun. He stopped running his own errands after he took over. Didn't hang around the working stiffs like Henry Ford."

  "What about the roadhouse in Indiana?"

  He slid the knife and fork into his plate and sat back with his napkin tucked in his shirt. His eyes were bright. "Who told you about that?"

  "It was a small apartment. I heard you and Mom talking. You'd been drinking Mrs. Terrazzini's wine."

  "Not wine. All the wine in Cicero wasn't strong enough that night. It ain't lunch conversation, son."

  "You witnessed two murders."

  "I never did. Whatever happened to them poor bastards happened after the party broke up."

  "But you saw them beaten."

  "I still do. You don't forget a thing like that."

  "It was an object lesson. You owed the Outfit money."

  "I got a bum steer on the World Series. Somebody told me it was fixed like in 1919. I ain't so much as dropped a nickel on the slots since."

  "Capone must have trusted you not to go to the police or you'd be dead too."

  "You been to Wrigley Field. You seen what a wood bat does to a ball when it clears the fence. You know what it does to a man's head?"

  He did, but he couldn't tell him he'd seen a picture. "It would scare anyone, but frightened people talk to the police sometimes, even in Chicago. Capone knew you well enough to know you wouldn't talk." It was a long shot, not much more than a wild guess; but hypotheticals were lost on the immigrant mind.

  "I didn't talk when he threw that pistol in my backseat."

  "That's because he paid you. He didn't pay everyone at that banquet to keep his mouth shut."

  "I needed the job."

  "That wouldn't be enough for Capone."

  "Why should I talk? Them two didn't mean shit to me."

  "Then why did you invite them to my birthday party?"

  Paul's face darkened beneath the sunburn. "You was five. You wouldn't remember if Mary Pickford was there."

  The constriction worsened. He drew as deep a breath as he could, but it only increased the pressure. He expelled it. "How did you know I was five? I didn't say which birthday it was."

  His father didn't move, didn't blink. He was something stamped in copper. Then a pale tongue-tip emerged and slid along lips chipped and cracked by sun and wind. When it finished they looked as dry as ever. "What is it you want, Pietro?"

  "I want to know about you and John Scalise and Albert Anselmi."

  "But what do you want?"

  He'd been working toward it all morning, but now that it was here he wished he could change the subject again. Then again, he wished many things that would never be.

  "I want you to introduce me to Al Capone."

  SIX

  The noise level had increased, although it would never be Mistaken for the din of a burger palace or corner tavern. The lunch trade had arrived: women in bright silk and men in pastel sport coats and foulards, their eyes making a reverse-raccoon effect where dark glasses had left the skin pale. The rest of their faces were tanned a uniform caramel.

  The scent of money wafted from them; not quite the deep pungency of unlimited wealth—that would come with winter, when hotel rates and slip fees were at their highest—but a scent that Peter Vasco would never know at firsthand. An unseen piano spread a light strain under the sliding of chairs and rustle of fine linen: "Brazil," which was close enough to the tropical atmosphere to pass. No one had yet written a song called "Cuba." That gangsters' haven would require brass accompaniment. That island ninety miles off Key West would be the source of the black market in that region.

  Peter looked at his sea bass, giving his father a few moments to collect himself. It was flaky and moist and melted on his tongue. He wondered how many of his contemporaries were eating K rations at that moment and chasing them with water from a canteen.

  "I told you I only saw him a coupla times," Paul said finally. "Why you want to meet him anyway? Get his autograph, trade two of 'em for one of MacArthur's?"

  He'd rehearsed the speech in his head a hundred times, in Washington and on the train and last night in bed while waiting for sleep. Now that the time had come to give it, it struck him as artificial and hollow, a tour guide's spiel the thousandth time around. He drank water from a tall crystal glass with a lemon wedge perched on the rim and put down his fork.

  "I'm guilty of the sin of pride," he said. "If I can save Al Capone from eternal damnation, I can become a bishop before I'm thirty. I want to be his confessor."

  Utensils tinkled around them, the piano fluttered ("... where hearts are entertaining still...")

  Paul Vasco laughed then, drawing stares from other tables. Peter could count on the fingers of one hand the times he'd heard his father laugh, really laugh, and keep free the thumb: once while dancing with his mother to a Paul Whiteman record on their secondhand Victrola; two or three times when he was drunk, which didn't really count; another time when he'd given his small son a bright penny, explaining that it was fresh from the mint, and Peter had licked it to see if he could taste the mint.

  But those were happy occasions. The laughter had not had a cynical edge.

  "I never knew the Church was so much like the rackets," he said, dabbing at his eyes with a corner of his napkin. "Climb right over another man to get to the top."

  Peter wasn't offended. He'd seen things similarly and it had contributed to his neglect of his studies. He said, "It's like every other job when it comes to punching the clock."

  Having his own words thrown back at him offended Paul, and that was a surprise. His mouth turned down. "You seriously see him stretched out on some cloud eating grapes from an angel's mitt?"

  "He's dying, they say. In that situation a man starts thinking about things of the spirit."

  "You know how many times they came after him with guns? They even tried to poison him once. If he didn't go all Christ back then, he ain't about to now just 'cause he caught a cold in his pants." He pushed aside his glass and drank straight from the bottle. "Anyway, you're half his age. A sinner likes his Hail Marys from someone that's sinned himself a coupla hundred times."

  "When Capone was my age, he was already running Chicago with Johnny Torrio."

  "Did your homework, did you?"

  He wasn't unstrung by this. "Anyone who reads the Sunday supplements is an expert on the subject."

  His father held the bottle by thumb and forefinger, drumming the rest of his fingers on the neck. "Scalise and Anselmi got here about the same time I did. They was mixed up in some vendetta or other back in Marsala and shipped out with just what was on their backs. They never bothered to learn the language so good. Your mother didn't want me talking Italian around the house; she wanted you to grow up a hundred-percent American. It was good to have a coupla fellows I could talk with in the language of the Old Country."

  "They were the ones you whistled to when you saw someone coming?"

  "No, that was strictly cloth-cap work. They didn't bend their suits busting into places and hijacking. They followed me in a Cadillac. This stuff was gold." He waggled the beer bottle. "Anybody can cook alky on a kitchen stove, but breweries was an investment. You needed a warehouse, a crew, trucks, protection. They made sure the beer got to where it was going and that the delivery was accepted. Some-a them saloon keepers had short memories. Albert and Johnny helped them remember who they was buying from.

  "They was like Mutt and Jeff in the funnies. Johnny was built like a fireplug, close to the ground and about as easy to knock down. Albert was a beanpole. When a barman wanted to fight, he'd hold him off with one arm, let him swing at the air, while Johnny busted up the place."

  "You went in with them?"

  "Seen it through the window coupla times. They was all crooks, son. They
knew what they got themselves into. And it wasn't just them. I felt an itch one night, like I wasn't alone on the street. Looked down the block and seen a Chicago Police captain sitting in a sedan under the light on the corner, watching Albert and Johnny kick the shit out of a barman. I could see the bars shining on his shoulders plain as day. He just sat there, and pulled out just before we did."

  "Did anyone ever try to hijack you?"

  "Two O'Donnells went to block me in once. I wheeled around them before they got set. I didn't have an escort that night; it was just after Polack Weiss went after Mr. Capone with a whole army in Cicero and every man was needed. Tommy O'Donnell pulled a U-turn and put the hammer down. But I outran him."

  "What was he driving?"

  His father's smile was proud and shy at the same time, like a child's when the nuns gave him a prize. "Packard Eight. Put me behind the wheel of a Mack or a White with a full load, point me downhill, and I'll outrun Barney Oldfield. Wasn't long after that I met Jack McGurn. Word gets around fast."

  "Was he at my party?"

  "Nobody from work was except Scalise and Anselmi, and they just dropped in lugging that rocking chair up four flights of stairs. I guess I'd bragged on my boy a little. Two things Sicilians can't resist are children and money, but not always in that order. I don't mind telling you your mother wasn't keen on them just showing up like that. You might've heard us talking about it that night."

  He didn't remember. His parents often had loud differences of opinion, his mother in her mile-a-minute brogue, his father breaking into Italian when his English was inadequate. These sessions were an annoyance, disturbing sleep, but raised no alarm. The buildings they'd lived in all had thin walls and the details of domestic disturbances were well known to all the residents. No one ever separated or divorced. People whispered about husbands strangling wives and wives stabbing husbands; strangers all, the survivors photographed by reporters sitting on benches in police stations looking like stunned cows. Black eyes and broken dishes were as bad as things usually got in their circle. A Mrs. Benedetti had made her point by commandeering Mr. Benedetti's Franklin and driving it down the steps of a cellar club on Twenty-First Street. She'd never operated a motor vehicle before. It was a conversational topic for weeks.