Danny Coughlin awoke with a snort—startled, perhaps, by the silence—looked around quickly, lurched to his feet, and left the room, describing an arc when a straight line would have done. Vasco doubted he'd noticed he wasn't alone in the room, or that he'd remember anything of the evening the next day.
With the table lamps extinguished and the rest of the room in darkness, the davenport Vasco shared with Capone might have been the bench in a confessional. It might have helped him to open up. Hoover had said he was predisposed to seek forgiveness for decades of depravity. Decades of depravity; that was a phrase that would appeal to the Director, whose every utterance rang with the Old Testament thunder of a March of Time announcer reporting on the Battle of Britain. His man in Miami would have to stop arranging his thoughts along those lines if he were to assimilate himself into Capone's society.
But what, ultimately, had Capone revealed that wasn't already public knowledge, or was of any practical use?
His pimp's tale had sounded sufficiently shame-faced, but it would hardly galvanize the authorities to action even if he were the target; and it must not be forgotten that it was his friends the Justice Department was after, not him. The Galluccio incident was illuminating, something the younger Snorky would never have admitted to, but it was nothing more than a sordid story garnished with gore. Frankie Yale was dead, the victim of Capone killers after their association soured. It was the first tommy gun murder in New York; as innovators went, Al Capone was to gang killing what Louis Armstrong was to jazz. In any case there was no prosecuting a dead man for a dozen or so murders his former employee had attributed to him. Artie Finnegan, if he still lived, couldn't press charges against Capone for brutal assault so long after the statute of limitations had expired, and it was a rap scarcely worth pursuing considering his slaughterhouse career.
He'd even fudged the facts of Sonny's birth. That event took place twenty-six days before Al and Mae were wed, a matter of public record; were gangsters so reticent about childbirth out of wedlock? Assuming Capone himself chose not to shirk his responsibility (he was many, many, many things, but a moral coward was not one of them), the delay suggested severe antipathy to the marriage on the part of Mae's parents. Ordinarily, a father willing to preserve a young woman's honor received encouragement—and a swift ceremony. In turn, Capone's glossing over the facts suggested eagerness to spare his wife's reputation.
Interestingly, there was a crime involved in their very application for a certificate of marriage: in order to avoid embarrassment, Mary Coughlin, twenty-two, had sliced one year off her age, and Alphonse Capone, twenty, had added one to his, bringing them even. It was a mild fraud, and certainly not uncommon, but it bemused Vasco to learn that Al could not enter even into the holy union without breaking the law.
So far as the record was concerned, that document appeared to be the very last thing that carried his signature. Apart from it, one could argue that the most photographed and quoted felon in history had never existed. It would have been the slickest public disappearing act ever, if only his legitimate friends hadn't caved in to authority.
Capone had also overlooked at least one murder.
He was questioned in the shooting death of the big winner in a crap game sponsored by Frankie Yale; one of those "scraps" he'd mentioned in passing. Police accused him of demanding the money from the man at gunpoint, then putting a bullet in his belly when he balked. No witnesses came forward to confirm the details, but shortly after the case was filed as an unsolved homicide, Capone was promoted from street pimp to bartender.
In that context, Yale's intervention on his behalf after the Galluccio indiscretion made perfect sense. Capone delivered the money to Yale, and Yale never failed to reward loyalty. Whatever his motives, chivalry or self-defense, Capone remained Machiavellian even in his extremity. He appeared to let his hair down while buttoning himself up tight. No wonder he was so good at poker.
"Father? I mean, Peter?"
He looked up at Sonny, who was standing in front of the davenport. The young man looked worried. Evidently he'd discovered he'd neglected to turn his hearing aid back up after finishing the movie.
Vasco put a finger to his lips. He felt like a damn fool playing a priest on stage. "Your father's asleep. Can I help put him to bed?"
"I can manage. I've done it before. Did he fall asleep during the picture?"
"No, he saw it all the way through. I can't say the same for your uncle."
"Did you talk about the movie?"
"Yes."
"May I ask what else you talked about?" Sonny colored. "I'm sorry to pry, but Dad rattles on sometimes. Mother"—he stopped, started again—"I didn't want you to go home with the wrong impression."
It was late. His defenses were down, and like a man mildly drunk he needed to slow down his reflexes to avoid catastrophe. But he'd anticipated the interrogation. He'd considered letting Sonny think Capone had been sleeping all this time, but if Capone remembered and their stories didn't match, even the little bit of progress Vasco had made would be lost. He'd be barred from the house.
The challenge was to tell neither the whole truth nor an outright lie.
"He told me how he got his scars. I didn't ask. Something in the movie must have put him on the subject."
Sonny smiled. It was so strange to see that expression, those lips, on another's face. "Did he tell you that story about fighting with the Lost Battalion in France?"
"No. He said it happened in a place called the Harvard Inn."
The smile faltered. "He never tells anyone that story outside the family. What's your secret, Pete?"
So it was Pete now. He couldn't tell if he was being mocked, but it seemed time to crack the whip.
"I'd prefer it if you called me Peter. Pete was the name of a man who went to jail for exposing himself to the sisters of St. Francis in Cicero." Pete and his Peter, ran the chant in the street.
"Peter." He didn't repeat the question. He waited for the answer.
"I'm a priest. People sometimes feel compelled to tell me things, knowing they won't be passed on."
"You just told me what he told you."
"No. You asked what we talked about. That's not the same as pressing for details. That request I would have refused."
"High-wire act, is it?"
"You have no idea."
"I'd like one."
He suppressed a sigh. Sonny was three years his senior, but in many ways he was an obstinate child. It might have been the disease in his blood, the debt he'd inherited from his father's profligate youth, or it might have been his sheltered upbringing. In either case it required patience.
"I keep confidences, Sonny. It's part of my work, but I inherited the ability from my father. I still know very little about the time he worked for yours. I'm not his confessor."
"But you're Dad's."
"I'm not."
"Yet you tell me you're honoring the seal of the confessional."
"I'm honoring something told me in private by a friend."
"Are you friends?"
"I hope so. You'll have to ask your father."
Sonny looked at Capone, breathing evenly with his mouth open slightly and a dot of spittle glittering in one corner. He ran a hand through his hair. It was receding in front and he'd trained the forelock to tumble forward and cover the loss, a Napoleonic effect. "Mother won't be happy to hear I let you two talk alone.
Uncle Ralph says we have to be careful when strangers are around. Dad gets confused sometimes and forgets who he's talking to."
"I saw that this afternoon. If it's any help, tonight he called me Padre two or three times. He was quite lucid. He talked about his family and how he met your mother and some people he knew in Brooklyn. Nothing I couldn't have read about in Liberty or Collier's." Which was true. Even the scarring story had probably appeared somewhere, offered as a choice among tall tales.
Sonny sat in an upholstered chair turned toward the davenport, a Louis XIV replica that seemed to re
flect Mae's personality more than the oversize pieces; possibly a remnant of the furnishings she'd been forced to sell while Capone was in prison. He loosened his collar and tie. He was dressed formally, like his father, but his coat and vest were cut more sportily in the collegiate fashion. "Did he say anything about when I was born?" His tone was transparently casual. The man simply could not bluff.
"I can't see any harm in talking about that. Your father's very proud of you. He said you and your mother made him a settled man, a solid citizen. He couldn't imagine his life without you." A safe falsehood. By his own testimony, he'd either have been slain by Wild Bill Lovett or added another murder to his rosary. But Capone would not be likely to contradict Vasco's version.
"I doubt that. If anything, Dad's imagination is too vivid. He hallucinates sometimes. The doctors say it's part of his condition. It's one of the reasons he has to be watched. People don't always know when he's talking about things that really happened or about some dream he had. It's hard sometimes. Mother has the Church for comfort, but when she's at Mass or confession it's up to me. Uncle Danny's no help after the sun goes under the yardarm. I'm in the middle, with Dad to take care of here and Ruth and the kids at home. Sometimes I'm not sure if I've started my own family or am still living with my parents. A man needs to grow up, you know?"
He realized he was listening with his elbow propped on the upholstered arm at his side and a finger touching his temple, as he did in the booth at Redemption. He hadn't anticipated becoming Sonny's confessor. "Your mother says you're working for the war at the air depot. That must bring some fulfillment."
"I'd rather be in Europe or the Pacific. This thing." He tapped the hearing aid clipped to his lapel. "I tried all the services. I couldn't even get clerical work."
He wondered if Sonny was aware of the connection between his affliction and his father's syphilis, if there was resentment there. He hadn't seen anything about hallucinations in Capone's medical record. That might have been an invention to prevent an outsider like Vasco from assigning importance to anything that slipped out.
"If it means anything, I know how you feel. I tried to enlist myself, but all the branches had all the chaplains they needed."
That was a gamble, if Ralph had any sources in the War Department. Unlikely, considering Ralph's own history with the federal government. But he had been turned down by the military, and the fact that he empathized with Sonny's frustration was an advantage he felt he couldn't afford to ignore. He reminded himself to run it past Hoover for possible damage control.
Sonny smiled boyishly. He sat slumped forward with his wrists resting on his knees, hands dangling between them. He was a handsome young man of the rumpled-gigolo type. In two years he'd be overweight and bald beyond concealment, but at that moment in time Vasco could see something of Al's appeal to twenty-year-old Mae Coughlin. He'd portrayed himself as an oaf during that courtship, but personal accounts in his file said he was quiet-mannered in youth (when he had his rage and drinking under control) and a graceful dancer.
Capone stirred suddenly, shifted positions, and lapsed back into unconsciousness. It was as if he overheard thoughts about him the way Mae said he heard people discussing him aloud despite distance and ambient noise. Keen instincts had played at least as large a part in surviving numerous assassination attempts as guns. Larger; Dion O'Banion had died with three revolvers on his person, all unfired. Sonny glanced at his father, then fished a pack of Camels from his inside breast pocket and offered it to Vasco.
"Thank you, but I don't smoke."
He tapped one loose, drew it out with his lips, and used a heavy brass lighter shaped like an elephant from the coffee table to ignite it. Tawdry thing, that lighter, in a world of silk and gold and full-grain leather, with lead showing dull where the thin plate had worn through, an item from a secondhand shop. It smacked of Al, the inveterate collector; anything elephants. How Mae must have loathed it. But she wouldn't get rid of it while he lived. "I think I only took up the habit to annoy my uncle," Sonny said.
"Danny?"
"God, no." He crossed himself for taking the Lord's name in vain. "You can't blast the smile off Danny's face with dynamite, drunk or sober. I mean Uncle Ralph. He smokes a fancy Egyptian brand. They smell like scorched rags and burn twice as fast as American."
He remembered the smell, from the Lincoln. It had clung to his clothes afterward. How quickly Ralph went through them.
"What he says about Camels—"
Vasco finished. "They call them that because they cure the tobacco in camel shit."
The sun broke out on Albert Capone's face when he grinned. It was no wonder everyone called him Sonny.
"I never heard a priest say shit before."
"I'll have to confess it. But I'd be misquoting your uncle if I said spit."
"It wouldn't sound like him. Ralph's a good man, don't get me wrong. He shamed Dad's old cronies in Chicago into coming through for Mother when they were afraid to let go of a buck because the government might trace it. He called them ungrateful sons of bitches and got them to see where they'd be without Dad, which was nowhere. But he's always complaining about something, Uncle Ralph: The country's going to hell, kids have no respect, that communist cocksucker Roosevelt. He sucks all the energy out of a room just by walking into it. The only way to have any fun when he's around is to push him so hard he starts stuttering. Lighting up a Camel works every time." He drew on the cigarette and sat back, blowing smoke out his nostrils. "I guess I have something to confess myself. Does honoring your mother and father apply to uncles?"
"My pastor says it doesn't even apply to sons. The Golden Rule would seem to cover your situation. My policy is to confess when there's any doubt at all. What's a Hail Mary or two compared to eternity? Better safe than sorry."
"There's a policy to salvation?"
"It's all based on good and bad investments, like banking. St. Peter keeps the ledger."
"Sometimes you don't even sound like a priest."
He didn't respond. There was something about the company that made him relax his guard, let leak his disillusionment with Holy Mother Church. He'd worried first about Al, then Ralph, then Mae, now Sonny, who was most dangerous of all because Vasco was beginning to like him. Capones, the lot, each with a unique advantage. He ought to have that tattooed inside his eyelids.
"Forgive me, Father. I didn't mean to offend." He didn't remind him to call him Peter. He needed the reaffirmation.
"I wasn't offended. We do a lot of business with the laity, construction firms and automobile dealerships. Schools and hospitals don't build themselves, and a diocese takes in too much territory to cover on foot. The early Christians did it unshod. Today it's in a Pontiac. Sometimes I forget I'm talking to a parishioner." That was a splinter of truth that threatened little. A real-estate developer in Cicero had let it be known the pastor at St. Francis could sell building plots under Lake Michigan. Only pious idiots believed spirituality fed on itself.
"What did you and Ralph talk about besides camel shit, or is that asking you to violate a confidence?"
"If you do, I won't hold it against you. I just won't answer. But we said nothing I can't repeat. He advised me to report to him anything that passed between your father and me whenever your mother wasn't present. I'm sure he meant you as well."
"Don't be so sure. He thinks I'm still ten years old. He has his heart set on Ralph, Junior, taking over someday. Ralphie's idea of a square meal is a six-pack and sleeping pills. I'd be grateful if you kept that between us."
"Of course. No seal doesn't make me a gossip." So now Sonny had entered the fold. He had the beginnings of a cult. "He said if I failed there'd be one more empty saddle in the old corral."
"He said that?"
"Word for word." He crossed himself at the heart.
"Danny must've been there."
"It was in Ralph's car. He was driving."
"Danny loves his westerns. I don't apologize for my family, Peter."
"I like westerns."
"I think you know what I mean."
"No one should have to." A bald lie. Vasco had been apologizing for his father all his life. What was he doing now, if not that? The sins of the fathers.
"Ralph doesn't make empty threats," Sonny said, "but he's a fair man. He won't back someone into a corner if he can leave him a way out. It would be different if you heard it from Frank Nitti. He's the muscle in the Outfit. I only met him once, when I was a boy. I had nightmares for a week; Mother blamed Dad for taking me to see The Phantom of the Opera. But Lon Chaney's eyes were never as cold as Nitti's, like black stones. In Chicago they said when he gave you a warning, it was already too late.
"I'm not telling tales out of school," Sonny added. "I wasn't part of that world. But you hear things even when you're deaf."
He'd heard some of the same things. The file was light on information about Nitti: "The Enforcer," the newspapers tagged him. Undoubtedly he had his own file, but there seemed to be pieces missing from the record as opposed to what Vasco had been given on Capone's other close associates.
There had been something in the papers, after Capone was sent up, a botched attempt to arrest Nitti in his offices or an attack on his life; the reports were confusing. He'd been badly wounded. Vasco wondered if the Miami library had old Chicago newspapers on file. He didn't want to bother Hoover with questions he might be able to find the answers to himself.
He realized suddenly that he and Sonny Capone had had the same childhood. No bodyguards had accompanied Vasco to the playground and he owned no signed baseballs, but they had both been sequestered from their fathers' worlds by order of their mothers. Al's only son could no more tell him what had taken place in the Hawthorne Inn or in Capone's Chicago headquarters in the Lexington Hotel than he could tell Sonny what Paul Vasco had been doing all those days and nights when he said he drove a beer truck. They'd grown up in the Judas calm of the eye of the hurricane, unaware of the death and destruction surrounding it. And he sensed that Sonny sensed it as well.
The Confessions of Al Capone Page 18