The Confessions of Al Capone

by Loren D. Estleman

  Vasco saw no answer for these rhetorical questions. Fowler, gray at the temples and meticulously shaven, struck him as a cross between the vice president of a bank and one of the bunco steerers he'd warned him against. He had a high-flown grasp of language that suggested the latter, and when he took off his glasses the bank executive went out the window. When Vasco introduced himself he said, "What church?"

  "Redemption, but I'd rather you didn't bother my pastor. My reason for being here is personal. I'm not filing a complaint."

  Fowler had his hat off the telephone and the earpiece in hand. "Well, I need a reference. That collar just makes a man in my line suspicious."

  "I was ordained at St. Francis Catholic Church in Cicero, Illinois."

  The sergeant gave the information to the switchboard operator. While he was waiting for the call to go through he said, "We nailed a character dressed like a rabbi last month for raffling the same Cadillac all the way down the coast. He stole it in New Jersey and just sort of ran out of U.S. here in town. The beard was genuine. Who's this?" he said into the mouthpiece. "Brother, I'm Estes Fowler with the Miami Police. Florida, where else?" He rolled his eyes at Vasco. "I'm talking with a fellow says his name is Father Peter Vasco, with Our Lady of Redemption here, friendly visit. Says he's from your neck of the woods. I'm checking his credentials. Sure, I'll hang on."

  A minute went by, during which Fowler twirled his hat by its crown around his fist. He said, "Yes? Okay, thanks." He hung up and replaced his hat. "What's on your mind, Father?"

  He hesitated. He hoped he wasn't making a mistake. Capone's healthy appearance had made him question the surveillance reports, and he wanted to know more about the gang chief in Florida. He expected Capone's people to find out he'd been asking questions; a show of reluctance on Vasco's part to become involved would lend support to his story. But there was no guarantee it would be taken that way.

  "My father knew Al Capone slightly, many years ago. I went to Capone's house last night to give him his regards. Is that all right?"

  "It's jake with me, but I'm not the one you should be asking. Those feds stacked up around his place think he's planning to smuggle Mussolini into the country by way of Key West."

  "That's not really why I'm here. I may be invited back, but before I accept I want to make sure Capone isn't in any trouble with the authorities. I don't want to embarrass the Church."

  "What's your father's name?"

  "Is that necessary? He's never been in trouble himself."

  Fowler waved it off with a hand wearing an elk's-tooth ring. "I guess Horowitz told you Capone and I have a history."

  "He said you arrested him three times."

  "That wasn't hard. He was as easy to track as a parade float. He made the society page every time he came down and trailed C-notes all the way down Seventh Avenue."

  "What laws did he break?"

  "I think he went fishing on an expired license, but he paid the fine and gave the game warden a box of cigars for his trouble. It was before he went to the joint. There was one conviction on his record, in Philadelphia, for carrying a concealed weapon, which he never did here. Nothing stuck because there wasn't anything to stick. Vagrancy? He had on a pearl stickpin you could shoot marbles with and a roll in his pocket as big as a coconut. Disorderly conduct? He made Emily Post look like Ma Barker. I think the last time we picked him up was for being Al Capone, which of course was the reason all along. We had a director of public safety who wanted to be governor. He thought he could make it by taking the one citizen he could count on obeying all the local laws and running him out of town."

  "I suppose having him here was bad for tourism."

  "I don't know about that, but real estate agents loved him. After the land bubble burst in '26, you couldn't give away lots on Ocean Beach. Then Capone pumped a hundred grand into that house on Palm Island and property values shot up all the way to Jacksonville. That twerp McCreary threatened to arrest Capone's mother if she showed her face here. In the end even the reformers wouldn't touch it. By the time he was through, Al had the better chance of being elected."

  "How about now?"

  Fowler leaned an ear toward the crackling speaker, but it was just a traffic accident. "The four-f punks give us more trouble than Capone ever did, them getting drunk and picking fights with airmen on leave every Saturday night. Now and then the boys in Rackets get bored and pull in his bodyguards, but they're back on the job with their guns in their pockets before the paperwork finishes processing. Last year an FBI agent got arrested by mistake and J. Edgar Hoover himself called the chief to bawl him out."

  Hoover seemed to be a subject of conversation nearly as often as Capone. "There was only one bodyguard on duty last night."

  "Only one you saw. He's got himself a regular fortress there, with Biscayne Bay for a moat. One of the reasons I asked to be transferred to Bunco was so I wouldn't have to go down there every time some busybody do-gooder had a conniption fit because he saw Little Caesar too many times. The last straw was when Dade County deputies brought me along for backup while they padlocked the house. Capone's own house. If he'd been home, he'd have been within his rights to shoot them for criminal trespass, but Director McCreary would've eaten that up. He'd have leveled the place."

  "I never thought I'd hear an officer of the law defend Al Capone."

  "He should've fried for McSwiggin, which was the same as killing a cop. Only he didn't, so the rest is chickenshit. Sorry, Father."

  "I've heard the word. I wasn't born a priest. Since his record here is clean, I'm guessing you won't object if I visit him again."

  "Not me, but if I were you I'd cash in all my stamps and bring Brownie a great big hunk of prime rib. You don't want to get on the wrong side of him."

  He remembered the Negro cook. "He told me he lost his fingers in a prison cafeteria."

  "More like misplaced. For the record, he was part of the civilian kitchen staff, not a convict. That was in Raiford. A trustie dishwasher went berserk with an ice crusher and Brownie cut his head half off his shoulders with a cleaver: it was a case of scissors breaks rock. He overlooked the fact he had his other hand on the trusties throat at the time."

  "Self-defense?"

  "Uh-uh. It was his assistant the guy went after, another civilian. Brownie didn't even like the assistant, said he was a screw-off who made more work for him. He likes Capone: he's as loyal to him as a big old dog. Think what he'd do if he thought you were going to hurt him."

  The radio speaker crackled in the brief silence. "I'll remember"

  "Then, of course, there's the Outfit, which is forming quite the colony down here since Capone drew all the lightning for them. Come to think of it, you'd better cash in all your friends' stamps while you're at it."

  He tried not to dwell on that part. "I heard Capone was sick. He doesn't look it or act it."

  "Syph comes and goes. We get cases sometimes, illegals mostly, who can't afford or won't trust a doctor to give them penicillin; they think it's poison. Cool as ice when we book them, then when we put them in the cells upstairs they try to bend the bars with their skulls."

  "Is it that common? I never heard of the disease until Capone got it."

  "Wait till the boys come back home. It'll make Spanish influenza look like chicken pox."

  "Thank the Lord for modern drugs."

  "They came along too late for Capone, though I hear he's being treated to slow down the rot. One day it'll be friendly Uncle Al, the man with the free soup kitchens. Next day he'll think you're Bugs Moran and drag you into that giant pool of his and hold your head under until you learn to play the harp."

  He had what he'd come for. "Thank you, Sergeant. You've been very helpful."

  "We're pretty friendly down here when no one's running for office. It isn't Cicero." Fowler put on his hat, squaring the brim across his brow, and now the bank vice president was back. "On that same friendly note, I wouldn't worry about embarrassing the Church by dropping in on Capone. The las
t time we picked him up, back in '31, he was having cocktails with a cardinal."

  The fussy little wardrobe man at the Bureau had consulted his books of sketches and missed nothing.

  Vasco put on the soutane, whose black hem reached his insteps, and over it the knee-length chasuble, kissed the stole, and draped it around his neck, crossing the ends on his chest. He felt a sting of shame, as if he were naked in public; but when he observed the result, turning the small square mirror this way and that to see himself head to foot, he felt somehow more comfortable with what he regarded as a mortal sin, as if taking care to look the part represented respect.

  That, at least, was the case he would try to make to the angel in charge of perdition.

  He left his borrowed quarters and, vestments rustling, crossed the courtyard and entered Our Lady of Redemption, genuflecting inside. A smattering of people sat in pews and he looked at none of them directly, a nod to the anonymous nature of confession for those who were waiting.

  The atmosphere in the confessional mingled darkness with dust and furniture polish and aftershave lotion. Vasco, who at St. Francis had done his part to remove dust and apply polish, was under no illusion that priests spent their time between confessions meditating on pious subjects. He'd caught old Father McCloskey snoring there on several occasions, and had found various items of reading material left behind, including an illustrated brochure from a nudist camp. They used flashlights, like little boys reading Nick Carter under the covers. He'd comforted himself by assuming they put aside such distractions when someone was actually unburdening himself on the other side of the partition.

  Father Kyril, not the sort of man to conceal his behavior or make excuses for it, had installed a ceiling bulb with a chain switch, under which he studied the U.S. Navy manual of arms. Vasco found the slender volume bound in grubby leatherette lying open-side down on a cushion covered in striped ticking and picked it up to examine it. Most of the page-corners were turned down and numerous passages underlined in ink.

  He'd just taken his seat when someone entered the booth and sat down on the other side. He slid aside the panel, revealing a face shadowed by the screen. "Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. It's been six weeks since my last confession."

  It was a woman, and for his first sinner he'd drawn a subject more absorbing than any book. She'd spent much of those six weeks violating her marital vows with a succession of men, most recently within the hour; he detected a faint residue of sweat and semen that confirmed the admission. When she began to go into detail, he interrupted to ask if she intended to stop being unfaithful.

  She hesitated. "You haven't met Harold, have you?"

  He told her to say ten Hail Marys.

  "Ten!"

  "One for each transgression."

  "You're stricter than Father Kyril."

  Oddly, this pleased him. If he couldn't be genuine, he could at least be a stickler.

  He did a thriving trade for most of two hours. A man had made change from the collection plate: two Hail Marys. A girl had talked back to her mother: three Hail Marys. A young woman had gone to see Bataan and had had impure thoughts about Robert Taylor: one Our Father.

  "That's all? I thought lust was bigger than that."

  "Actors are chosen to create temptation. The greater sin is Hollywood's."

  He felt wrung out at the end. Two hours in the booth was like eight hours digging ditches, only without the sense of self-satisfaction that came of honest labor. He no longer feared damnation, as that was everyone's fate thanks to the God-Devil, but he was mortified to have swindled the devout out of the absolution they had every right to expect. He wanted to tell them that redemption was for this world.

  After three days he felt the same. He learned of minor indiscretions, shocking indecencies, infractions that sounded like inventions; lonely people desperate for human contact, even separated by a screen. He heard petty crimes described in such detail he suspected the penitents were secretly proud of having gotten away with them: a decade of the Rosary for that deadly sin. He was an ecclesiastical vending machine, dispensing penance like candy and cigarettes. He wondered if the church would run out of candles.

  Some sessions were slow, and these were the most exhausting of all. Thanks to Kyril s reading preferences, he learned how to dismantle and reassemble a bolt-action carbine in under five minutes, assuming he was as good with his hands as he was with his imagination. (He wasn't.)

  When not in the booth he tried to stay close to Redemption, in case an invitation came from Palm Island. But he refrained from asking if there were any calls for him lest he create suspicion. Father Kyril, he knew, was dubious. Brother Thomas was harder to read. He went about his menial duties with broom and taper and polishing rag with little conversation and, it seemed, great devotion. Novices often whistled during chores, but he didn't even hum, not even a solemn hymn. Attempts to draw him out with polite personal questions were unrewarding, although the responses were respectful. At the end of three days, Vasco knew he was twenty years old and that he'd been born in Ohio.

  Vasco made an effort to be useful. He made his own bed, took Kyril's advice and bought a half-dozen celluloid collars from a uniform store to save on laundry, drove the Model T to a garage for a tune-up so it would start when the motor was warm. To avoid draining the church of its provisions he ate his meals in the drugstore and at inexpensive lunch counters (gaining, no doubt, a reputation for aloofness, but avoiding awkward exchanges at table). He considered offering his assistance at Sunday Mass, but rejected the idea in fear of being invited to officiate. He knew the rituals but had never put them into practice before a congregation.

  The owner of the garage where he took the Ford, a small wiry Italian who reminded him of his father, had a bleeding heart in a frame on the wall of his greasy office. He said the tune-up was on the house, but Vasco kept insisting and he finally accepted five dollars. It was bad enough he was cheating the Catholic community of its trust.

  "That left front tire's balder than me," the garage man said. "I got one out back I can let you have, and FDR don't have to know about it. Not many tin lizzies around no more. I'd hate to see it rot."

  "Another time, and I'll pay you for it. I have to get back to church."

  "I wouldn't wait too long. You don't want to get a flat in the middle of a blackout."

  Two o'clock found him back in the booth:

  "Bless me, Father, for I have sinned...."

  "Bless me ..."

  "It's been two weeks since my last confession...."

  "Bless me..."

  "It's been three days ..."

  "Ten minutes ..." (A compulsive liar fresh from Kyril's booth, looking for a second opinion.)

  "Bless me, Father..."

  "Bless me ..."

  That fourth day was slow. He almost nodded off once, and chided himself for judging Father McCloskey too harshly. He shifted his weight onto his feet to improve circulation just as the curtain rings on the other side slid this way, then that, and the floor bent beneath a heavy tread. The penitent sat with the wheezy grunt of a man seriously overweight.

  Vasco slid open the panel. He heard heavy breathing, but no words. Some people required more patience than others; they were out of the habit, their sin was embarrassing or too great in their eyes to find instant expression. With his elbow on the padded rest and his hand to his brow—the classic confessor's pose—he risked a sideways glance at the screen. The face in artificial twilight was enormous, as big and round as a medicine ball. If Vasco hadn't been sitting there all week he'd have thought the screen had magnifying qualities.

  More silence.

  "My son?"

  A throat cleared, a long liquid gurgling like a drain coming unclogged. Loose particles seemed to rattle in the voice that followed. "The name's Ralph Capone. My friends call me Bottles. How they hanging, Father?"

  NINE

  Vasco's hand went to the crucifix his mother had given him; an Automatic reaction lately when shock
came his way. He drew courage from it, and from his surroundings. The Church of Rome was older than Prohibition, older than the Black Hand, and its traditions went deeper than the rules of vendetta.

  "I'm pleased to meet you, Mr. Capone, but I'm afraid this isn't the place and time."

  "Bottles. I figured that, but I didn't want to take a chance on missing you. The pasty-faced kid sweeping the floor told me where to find you."

  Ralph Capone's accent was as broad and solid as the Brooklyn Bridge. Unlike his brother, he hadn't had the advantage of Johnny Torrio's crash course in drawing-room deportment. Al's senior by six years, he'd be about fifty, but his phlegmy voice and shortness of breath belonged to a man a decade older.

  "I'm free in ten minutes."

  "I'll be the one wearing a carnation." The bench on the other side of the partition made a sighing noise, like a horse made when a heavy rider stepped down. Curtain rings rattled and then the entire booth seemed twice as large.

  It was a long ten minutes. No one came to replace Ralph, and Vasco was left to contemplate the futility of regular hours and a rigid schedule. It made for better thoughts than wondering what was in store for him when he stepped out. If just one link failed in the long and delicate chain of credentials the Bureau had forged to put him across as a priest in good standing with the diocese of Cicero, Illinois—a place not exactly known for its loyalty to any faction that might be outbid by another—well, history had shown that sacred places gave no sanctuary from the Outfit. That at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, of things in heaven, and things in earth, and things under the earth; a legend all but obliterated by bullets on the front steps of Holy Name Cathedral, along with Hymie Weiss.