The Confessions of Al Capone

by Loren D. Estleman

  Vasco unshipped the stack of atlas-size books from the crippled librarian's extended forearms and frowned at the reading carrels, awkward places to open huge flat books with privacy partitions in the way. "Do you have anything I could spread them out on?"

  The librarian shrugged, brushing dust off his worsted sleeves. "The floor."

  "Whatever happened to library tables?"

  "We stand up the out-of-town phone books on those. This isn't Texas, mister. You'd cry to see the size of the offices."

  No "Father," nor even "Reverend"; the man had either failed to notice his collar through the thick lenses of his spectacles or disdained the Church of Rome and all its titles and customs.

  Vasco thanked him and carried the volumes to what he hoped was an untrafficked area between stacks, went back for a chair to hang his hat and coat on, and sat Indian fashion on the floor in his shirtsleeves, spreading out the book like a little boy settling down to read the funny papers.

  He began with May 1932, skimming the fading headlines and turning the brittle yellowing leaves carefully to avoid tearing them; but moving as rapidly as he could through society and sports and entertainment sections and past grocery and department store and automobile advertisements ("The New Essexes Are In!"), knowing that the near-fatal shooting of Capone's head muscleman was front-page material. In this way he made steady progress, but it required resisting the temptation to stop and study photos and text devoted to unrelated gang violence: bodies stretched out on the tile floors of barbershops and across varnished oak bowling lanes, spilling out the open doors of automobiles clobbered with holes, wallowing facedown in puddles in ditches, rolled into gutters, staring marble-eyed on white enamel tables in the Cook County Morgue; tailored vests rucked up to expose silk shirttails, glittering patent-leather shoes showing pale scuffed soles, naked torsos stripped of all emblems of status; gardens of hats, forests of hats, they never seemed to stay on, just fell off in the first orgasmic arch of death and lit on the edges of their brims, rolled, and came to rest against curbs and steam radiators and the bases of primitive jukeboxes. The city and county property rooms must have been stocked with more hats than the haberdashery department at Marshall Field's, and each one another dead man.

  Tillie the Toiler, Jiqqs and Maggie, Dick Tracy, Thimble Theater, all the funnies in black-and-buff and on Sunday in four colors. Radio columns, fashion columns, humor columns bearing Will Rogers' baggy smile in a photo the size of a thumbnail. Rotogravures in a full blossom of lace dresses, picture hats, and movie stars beaming beside custom-made convertibles. Help Wanted classifieds, giving way to Situations Wanted as the Depression took hold. Shots of men and women standing in long outdoor queues, a man selling pencils, residential neighborhoods transformed overnight into commercial laundering districts; shirts, stockings, and union suits hanging from transverse clotheslines like flags at the League of Nations. The usual novelty shot of a boy frying an egg on a blistering sidewalk followed by the man-on-the-street shot of a fellow in earflaps and a mackinaw, shoveling snow off a sidewalk. The summer of 1933 and the winter of 1933-4 had been the hottest and coldest on record. Hard economic times hadn't been enough for God's sinister side.

  There was nothing in the first book, just the usual local mayhem, domestic disasters, and thugs smashing shop windows in Berlin, with some human interest about Capone's first days in the federal penitentiary in Atlanta; he played tennis and had coddled eggs for breakfast. The Drys were speculating that FDR's promise to repeal the Eighteenth Amendment was typical election-year grandstanding and would come to nothing. The Wets said the Drys were probably right and that Prohibition was here to stay like it or not; and of course they did not. It was the only thing the two groups had agreed upon in fourteen years. Vasco reflected that this kind of reading carried all the suspense of watching newsreel footage of a baseball game he'd attended to the finish.

  Before opening the second volume, July through September, he got up to work the kinks from his legs and back and gingerly pluck the handkerchief from the inside pocket of his suit coat on the back of the chair. His fingers were stained black to the first knuckles, there was a smudge on his right shirt cuff (what, exactly, was the composition of newspaper printers' ink, that in twelve years it had not yet completely dried?), and dusty grains of decaying newsprint adhered to the sweat on the heels of his hands like sand from a wet beach. Vigorously though he scrubbed, the handkerchief seemed only to grind the black deeper into his pores and under his nails while staining the linen as black as his fingers. Nothing he'd seen in the movies or read in sensational serializations had compared undercover work to sweeping chimneys.

  The clubfooted librarian gave him the key to the men's room, dangling a brass tag with PROPERTY OF THE MIAMI PUBLIC LIBRARY engraved on it, and in the small echoing room with a narrow window cranked open on elbow hinges he made headway in the white porcelain sink with liquid disinfecting soap from a dispenser. In the mirror he saw more traces of ink on his forehead where he had swept away perspiration. He attended to that as well, wiped his hands on the roller towel, and went out to return the key.

  "Any progress?" The librarian was stamping the library's name on the page-ends of a stack of books on his small oak desk. It was his first attempt at small talk; evidently Vasco's dedication had elevated his status somewhat.

  "Hard to tell. I thought working in a library was a white-collar job."

  He smiled a constipated, tight-lipped smile and touched his detachable collar. "Celluloid."

  Vasco smiled back and tapped his. "Mine too."

  "Well, good luck."

  The second volume was identically unrewarding. With only two hours left until confession, he decided to put off any more ablutions until he'd finished with the third. The presidential race was heating up. Herbert Hoover insisted the economy was fundamentally sound and would begin to improve by the end of the next quarter. The Tribune, a Democratic paper, ran pictures taken from the wire of hobo jungles in city parks across the country; "Hoovervilles," someone had dubbed them. Roosevelt promised to stimulate recovery and addressed the Anti-Saloon League with a pledge to regulate the liquor business heavily once Prohibition was lifted. A cartoon showed Hoover's trademark homburg floating on a field of quicksand with THE GREAT DEPRESSION spidering across its oily black surface. The American Communist Party held rallies in parks and high school gymnasiums. Henry Ford called them anarchists and reinforced security at his automobile plant in Dearborn, Michigan. Al Capone ate tuna casserole and made shoes for his fellow inmates in the prison shop.

  Vasco turned the page and Frank Nitti's name leapt out at him.

  It was a one-column piece six paragraphs long, not much more than filler when compared to Capone's attention in the press. A head-and-shoulders shot showed a fussily dressed Italian with hair parted left of center and a smudge of moustache, who looked like the floorwalker in a department store, NITTI FREED, ran the headline.

  The FBI file had mentioned that both Nitti and Ralph Capone had served time in Leavenworth for income tax evasion: test cases before going after Al. Ralph had alluded to it, but Vasco hadn't seen his name in the editions he'd read. Bottles' day-to-day routine behind bars obviously didn't sell newspapers the way his brother's did. It went some way toward explaining his chronic belligerence; or perhaps not. He was like Sonny Capone, only in Ralph's case he was trapped between his responsibility to Al and Outfit business, and he lacked the irony to smile about it.

  Nitti's name and likeness appeared sporadically thereafter as he assumed his duties as Al's surrogate in Ralph's absence, but it was mostly speculation on the part of reporters. Nitti didn't treat the press to fine liquor and rich food and twenty-five-cent cigars, didn't furnish colorful quotes for the bulldog edition, and (on the evidence of fewer grisly photographs and diagrams of murder scenes with Maltese crosses where the bodies had landed), didn't write his name large in machine-gun bullets. Gangland had turned a new page in its playbook.

  But then the face of the enem
y had changed, too. The North Siders were on the run after February 1929, and with Capone neutralized the authorities were picking off the survivors on both sides with warrants, not weapons. The scarecrow figure of George E. Q. Johnson, the federal investigator who had nailed Scarface Al with his own ledgers, and Prohibition agent Eliot Ness's receding chin and center-parted hair appeared in place of blue jowls and loud neckties, and to ambush such men the traditional way would have brought down the wrath of Washington with all its might. Peace on the streets didn't mean the Enforcer had ceased to enforce, merely that he had channeled his malicious energy in quieter directions: better lawyers, more careful accountants, discreet bribery. No more pineapples or thick envelopes tossed contemptuously into the backseats of official cars, only generous campaign contributions with no cameras present, "anonymous" gifts to the Police Widows' and Orphans' Fund, a handsome cabinet radiophonograph stocked with all the latest records for the wife of a member of the crime commission. Chicago was still Chicago, even with its boss villain cobbling shoes in Atlanta.

  But the old ways weren't entirely dead, even in city hall. Like so many searches, Vasco's took him nearly to the end of his resources before it paid off. He should have started there and worked his way backward.

  On Monday, December 19, 1932, the Tribunes printers broke out headline type rarely used since Capone's conviction to spell out Nitti's name in letters the size of Vasco's thumb. Two sergeants with the plainclothes division of the Chicago Police Department, Harry Lang and Harry Miller, burst into Nitti's office towing two uniformed officers they'd recruited on the street, flashed their gold sunburst badges, and at the top of their lungs informed the occupant that he was under arrest by order of Anton Cermak, who had succeeded Capone's hand-picked man, William Hale "Big Bill" Thompson, as mayor of Chicago in 1931. That much was reported clearly enough, but what happened next was a jumble.

  The account given by a police spokesman said that Nitti drew a revolver and fired. Detective Sergeant Lang was wounded in the arm, but managed to return fire, hitting Nitti three times. Doctors at Chicago General Hospital confirmed rumors that Nitti lay near death and had been given Last Rites by a priest. Nothing Vasco had ever read, in newspapers or in files, contained a single other incident in which a racketeer of Nitti's standing had tried to shoot his way out of a jam with the law. They drew lawyers and fired writs. That paragraph smelled of something other than stale ink and dry rot.

  He turned to the next edition. Against all predictions, Nitti rallied, and began the glacial process of recovery from gunshot wounds delivered at close range to the chest, neck, and back near the spinal column, all fired by Detective Sergeant Lang; Maltese crosses marked the entry wounds on an accompanying anatomical diagram, like corpses in the garage on Clark Street. Lang's statement, corroborated by Detective Sergeant Miller, reported that he'd shot Nitti first in the neck and chest, then in the back with his finger convulsing on the trigger after the second impact spun him around.

  Pages turned rapidly now. A full-length advertisement for gentlemen's camel's hair overcoats and ladies' astrakhan hats tore three-quarters across in a diagonal with a shrill rip that must have made the clubfooted librarian lift his head from his book-stamping. Vasco kept going without pausing.

  He stopped at the Christmas Eve edition.

  A bylined article under a howling headline contained the sworn statement of Officer Christopher Callaghan, one of the uniformed patrolmen Lang and Miller had drafted into action, that Sergeant Lang had shot Nitti first in the back after Nitti raised his hands and turned around, then in the neck and chest when he swung around to face him. As Nitti collapsed, Lang inflicted himself with a flesh wound to back up his claim of self-defense.

  Vasco read to the end of the year, but the rest was rehash: charges and countercharges, denials, sputtering outrage from Ted Newberry, Mayor Cermak's general factotum, first at Officer Callaghan, then at sergeants Lang and Miller, whom he had selected for the duty, and the inevitable rash of editorials signed by the city editor, the managing editor, and Colonel McCormick, the publisher, followed by letters from readers calling for a clean sweep from the commissioner's office on down to the cop on the corner. Undoubtedly it had had the newsboys crying themselves hoarse, but as for information it was useless.

  Twenty minutes to confession. It would take more than Sharon Baumgartner's leftover brisket to smooth this one over with Father Kyril. Vasco apologized to the librarian at his desk and asked if he could see one more volume.

  "The Tribune?"

  "No, The Miami Herald. January through March 1933."

  That night, Peter Vasco dreamed; not of Sergei Kyril's weary resigned acceptance of the excuse he'd invented for reporting to his booth half an hour late, but of hats: supple Panamas, sturdy bowlers, straw skimmers, shaggy borsalinos, smart snapbrims, silk toppers, and Tyroleans with feathers in the bands, rolling around and around on the edges of their brims, bisecting one another's path in graceful swooping balletic circles, then tilting one by one, falling on their crowns and wobbling and vibrating to a stop like hubcaps and dead men.

  SEVENTEEN

  Al Capone was in a foul mood.

  A nearly physical thing, that mood, traveling in a white-hot arc and scarring a fine day like a knife slashing through cheek flesh. When Danny Coughlin offered him a steadying hand on the porch steps, he slapped it away and barreled down them, only the top of his yellow crown showing as he made for the sky-blue Lincoln parked in front of the house on Palm Island.

  The car was in showroom condition, its enameled fenders like molded mirrors, with only the bottom third of the spotless rear whitewalls showing under the skirts, everything streamlined and bullet-shaped, like a toy spaceship that wound with a key and rolled across the floor. Capone, wound up also, wore a suit the claret shade of sacramental wine, a pale yellow tie on a lemon-colored shirt, and yellow spats buttoned over the tops of black patent-leather shoes. The ensemble suggested Easter more than St. Patrick's Day, but then he'd never been inconspicuous in matters of dress. The reporters from all over the world who had covered his tax trial had filled more columns with his aggressive color combinations than with the fantastic figures unspooling from the witness stand (telephone bills in 1929, $3,141.40; rug for the house on Prairie Avenue, $3,500; twenty-three suits and three topcoats purchased from Marshall Field's in 1927 and 1928, $3,715; meals, entertainment, and valet service at the Metropole and Lexington hotels during that same period, $12,000-$15,000 a week).

  He carried a cane with a tapering ebony shaft, a silver tip, and a carved ivory handle, undoubtedly elephant ivory. A swell cane, Vasco thought, coasting up the driveway; very Boul' Mich', as they used to say in Chicago; but a cane just the same. However sportily he hooked it in the crook of his arm, he could lean on it if he had to, and that was the story on what had happened to Scarface Al Brown.

  Vasco coasted the Model T to a stop behind the Lincoln and set the brake. Capone was turned away from him and paid no attention to the ratcheting sound or the tockity-tock of the motor at idle. (In earlier days, cracking one's gum would have sent him diving to the pavement.) Having beaten his brother-in-law to the car by three steps, he was glaring at him impatiently, waiting for him to open the door to the rear passenger's seat.

  "No green?"

  Capone jumped and swung around, his face flushing the color of his suit under its frosting of powder, then returning to its normal swarthy shade as he recognized Vasco. He smiled the same distracted smile he'd given to photographers on the steps of the federal courthouse and showed him a roll of greenbacks from his pocket. It was the size of an artichoke, with the corners of the bills curling around the thick rubber band that bound it. For the first time, Vasco fully understood why some people called cash lettuce.

  Danny reached the ground. "Al, you shouldn't take those steps like a kid. I'd have all kinds of people to answer to if you broke your neck."

  "Don't be a cunt. Where the hell's Mae? It's her fucking holiday, for chrissake. It was C
olumbus Day I wouldn't keep her waiting."

  He sounded like Ralph, the chronically irritated. This must have been what he was like when he worked himself up to a poisonous rage over the latest O'Donnell atrocity or when Eliot Ness paraded his own confiscated beer trucks past his offices in the Lexington. That the rage was impotent now did nothing to stem it; Vasco imagined it only made things worse.

  "She's packing up dinner. She'll be along in a minute." Danny smiled at Vasco. "Happy St. Paddy's, Father. I don't guess them Cubans held you at Redemption with shillelaghs this day." He was clear-eyed in crisp serge, hatless. His curls were coppery in the late-morning sun. Vasco marveled over how a man could drink so heavily, presumably every night, and face the day as bright as his hair.

  "Father Kyril has things in hand. Seeing you there Sunday was a nice surprise. I'm sorry you couldn't stay to visit." They'd left right after the service; much to his relief. Vasco, the Capones, and Kyril all in the same place were enough on its own to disturb a man's day of rest without awkward conversation at the door. "Al got ants in his pants."

  "I can't sit still no more in a public place." Capone was calm; a curtain seemed to have dropped on his anxiety. He wore his pale yellow hat in the standard Snorky fashion, the brim turned up on one side and down on the other, casting his scars in shadow.

  "Don Giovanni came to town last month. I sent Danny to reserve a box, had the tux cleaned and pressed, bought a new shirt and studs. Left before the end of the first act. Never thought I'd ever walk out on the opera."