The Confessions of Al Capone

by Loren D. Estleman

  "In a manner of speaking. Thank you again for setting my conscience at rest. The Good Samaritan never worried about His reputation when He saw a soul in need."

  "Well, my booth's always open." He returned the orange to the stack and got the vendor's attention.

  Small world, Vasco thought, walking away. Or perhaps not so small. Had he been under police observation all this time? He stopped to look at a display of electric razors in a window. People passed him, no one ducked into a handy doorway; but he supposed professionals were more subtle than they appeared in pulp stories. He resumed walking. Capone's paranoia was contagious.

  No new invitations came from Palm Island. Vasco wondered if Capone's porch revelations had been overheard and steps taken to prevent more. Mae's and Sonny's faith in Vasco's power to bring comfort to the afflicted gangster was no match for the cloud of secrecy that surrounded their world, that maintained it. Life in that Moorish house was sealed as tightly as the customs of the Church. After two weeks he thought of calling, but decided not to. Hoover had warned him against appearing to take the initiative. It was easy advice to follow, especially since he had no idea how he should behave when he saw Rose.

  Kyril asked him to take part in the Easter Mass. He agreed, no fears of entrapment now. He placed the Host on the tongues of the communicants, incensed the Gospel, passing the smoldering pot over the pages to be read, sang the Alleluia, managing not to make his voice crack, and read aloud from Matthew. ("His countenance was like lightning, and his raiment white as snow...") On this most important of days in the Church calendar, he looked for the Capones among the congregation, but they did not attend. Mae, he thought, would choose to celebrate the Resurrection at Blessed Sacrament, where she was most comfortable, but he couldn't help feeling he'd been cut loose. The thought disturbed him and relieved him. Perhaps silence was the sign he'd prayed for after all. But was the prospect of returning to his tin desk in the Justice Department building God's mercy or Vasco's punishment?

  He had never felt so alive as in the past two months. Capone would probably say it was God's idea of a joke and call it malarkey.

  Nearing the end of May, and six weeks after St. Patrick's Day dinner, Kyril told him he had a telephone call and excused himself from his study. Vasco recognized Helen Gandy's voice, instructing him to call the secure number from an outside phone. She used no names.

  He shut himself in the drugstore booth and dialed the number. Hoover himself answered.

  "Where are you calling from?"

  He told him.

  "Acceptable, but don't make a habit of using any one instrument. This line is safe, so we can speak freely. I'm quite satisfied with your performance so far."

  "Thank you, sir."

  "I didn't call to scratch you behind the ears. So far you haven't brought us anything worth moving on. We're not officially interested in John Torrio, who's living in retirement in Brooklyn, where he started out. He hasn't had anything to do with the mob in years, except to attend the occasional funeral of a former colleague. If we were to take action against him now, we'd risk tipping our hand to the rats we really want. But you're on the right track. Capone seems to trust you. When do you see him next?"

  "I'm not sure. I haven't heard from him or his family in over a month." He was disappointed by the tepid reaction to the Torrio news.

  "Surveillance agents report he hasn't left the house in weeks. No one in or out except servants, the immediate family, and Phillips, his doctor. Maybe he's suffered a relapse. As his spiritual counselor, looking in on him would be the natural thing to do."

  "Yes, sir. Sir?"

  "Yes?"

  "Is the Bureau interested in Frank Nitti?"

  "Has Capone mentioned him?" The Director's speech became even more rapid when something pricked his interest.

  "His son did, in passing. An old memory from childhood, nothing useful for our purposes. I did some research in old newspapers about the attack on Nitti in his office by city detectives in Chicago."

  "I remember the incident. The detective who shot Nitti had a personal grudge. He and his partner were fined for assault and allowed to return to active duty. Unarmed man shot three times, a self-inflicted wound to support a self-defense claim, records falsified, they're back in uniform in a matter of weeks. Chicago was and always will be a cesspool."

  "The papers said they were sent by Ted Newberry, Mayor Cermak's deputy."

  "He might not have known about the detective's history with Nitti."

  "A month later, Cermak was gunned down in Miami."

  "Everyone knows that. It was an assassination attempt on President Roosevelt. Cermak caught a bullet that was meant for him."

  "But, sir, in your office—"

  "I'll lead discussions of anything said in this office. The assassin confessed that Roosevelt was his target. He was executed five weeks later, only two weeks after Cermak expired of peritonitis caused by the bullet. Hardly a professional-sounding job, wouldn't you say? What did Sonny Capone say about Nitti?"

  "He said he had cold eyes. They gave him nightmares."

  "That's all?"

  "He said they were like stones."

  "Poetic, but as you said, useless."

  "He was just a boy at the time. He said he saw him only once and never forgot it."

  "For a number of people, the first time was also the last. You didn't mention that conversation in your report."

  "I didn't want to waste your time with it. That's why I decided to investigate Nitti myself."

  "Reading newspapers is not investigating. Your assignment is Capone, not Nitti."

  "Yes, sir."

  "If I thought you needed to know more about him than was in Capone's file, I'd have given you his. He's done one stretch for income tax evasion and Treasury is preparing another case against him for the same thing. Al Capone is your resource. He can provide you with more pertinent information than you'll ever get from the press. When you waste your time, you're wasting mine as well. If Capone's condition has taken a turn for the worse, you haven't a minute to waste."

  "Yes, sir." The receiver felt hot against his ear. He turned his back on someone waiting to use the booth.

  "Nitti's one of those we want to put behind bars, and not just for failing to file a return. Keep your ears open for anything Capone says about him. Linking him to just one of the murders he's suspected of committing would give us the leverage we need to get him to open up about the entire organization, including the black market. Once you separate these rats from their writs and lawyers, they squeal from morning till night."

  "Yes, sir."

  "Agent Vasco?"

  "Yes, sir?"

  "Good work. Clyde tried to talk me out of putting you in the field, but as usual my hunch was right."

  Clyde Tolson was the deputy director and Hoover's oldest associate after Helen Gandy. Vasco had had no idea he'd been the subject of such high-level discussion. There seemed no point in having told him, apart from Hoover's eagerness to keep him on the job.

  "Thank you, sir," he said. But he was speaking into an empty line.

  A man in a tweed cap with a cigarette burning in his face swept into the booth as soon as Vasco stepped out. He had a copy of the Racing Form rolled up under one arm; Vasco had seen him before in the store, making marks on the handicappers' sheet with a stubby yellow pencil he stuck behind his ear when he used the phone. He'd never seen the man drink from his coffee cup; plainly, ordering it was the cost of taking up space at the counter. Hialeah was only a brief streetcar ride away, with all its color and excitement and fresh air, but the bookies of Miami didn't seem to be hurting for business. Swimming, sunning, and gambling were the local attractions. It was no wonder Capone had been drawn there. Vasco walked back to Redemption. He was beginning to recognize people in the neighborhood, strangers with familiar faces who recognized him in turn. They nodded and smiled and touched their hats. He touched his, wrapped in thought.

  The Director had changed stories on the
Cermak killing. It confirmed Vasco's suspicion that the conspiracy theory was part of a whispering campaign to discredit the Secret Service as an FBI rival, not to be overheard coming directly from him. Vasco wondered if Hoover had his own line tapped and recorded the conversations. It would explain his reluctance to say anything that could be put on record.

  Rubbing out Cermak for orchestrating the attempted murder of Frank Nitti and doing it in the presence of the president of the United States was either brass arrogance or lunacy. The victim's languishing for three weeks afterward supported the official account, that he had accidentally wandered into the line of fire. On the other hand, Cermak's agonizing final days furnished a powerful object lesson for anyone who might have considered finishing the job on Nitti. The papers had reported no further attempts.

  Hoover had taken the conversation in a different direction before Vasco could ask him about the other thing he'd learned from his reading session in the library. Ted Newberry, Mayor Cermak's general factotum, the man who had ordered the invasion of Nitti's office (the "hatchet man," as he was referred to by the opposition press), had turned up three weeks later in a roadside ditch in Indiana, shot full of holes. Apparently the Enforcer hadn't considered him prominent enough to wait until he brushed shoulders with a world leader.

  The weather was hot and humid. As he climbed the church steps a scrim of perspiration formed on the back of his neck under the celluloid collar. Come July you'll swear you're in hell, his father had said; and it was only May.

  TWENTY

  AFTER A SWEATY, TOSS-TURN NIGHT, PETER VASCO GOT UP RESOLVED TO commit an act of insubordination and compound it by violating national policy in wartime.

  It was early and still dark out, but dim light glowing through the stained-glass windows told him Brother Thomas was already at work, sweeping carpets and attacking with a zealot's fervor the daily cobwebs spun by heretical spiders from the crown of thorns behind the altar. Vasco went straight from the rectory to the toolshed and drove off as soon as the Model T sputtered into action. He was not dressed as clergy.

  After showering and shaving in the tiny monastic bathroom he shared with Kyril, he'd put on a sport shirt and gray flannels and after a moment's consideration left even his hat behind. He'd seen more bare heads in Florida than anywhere he'd ever been and felt an almost desperate urge not to stand out.

  He found a filling station that opened early for fishermen and waited while a man in a dirty yachting cap pulled away from the pump, driving an old Dodge pickup towing a boat with an inboard motor, a bundle of fishing rods sticking out over the stern. The sun was just beginning to stain the empty black sky above the ocean.

  The attendant, a man too old for military service, took his stamps and cash, scratching behind his ear with the nozzle in his other hand. "You with the government?"

  He'd anticipated that reaction to the number of stamps. "No, I work at home. This is the first time I've had the car out in a month." For some reason he found he could lie with less guilt in civilian clothes.

  "Hoarder, huh? Oughtta be ashamed of yourself." The man grinned, his tongue showing through the gap where his front teeth belonged.

  He did feel shame, but not for that reason. He was disobeying Hoover's orders, to take back up with Capone as soon as possible, and using gasoline for nonessential travel. A tank or a jeep might be made useless because of this impulsive act. A poster pasted on the station window read is this trip necessary?

  It was. He was compelled beyond all reason to spend one day as something other than a priest.

  A train was out of the question. They didn't begin running for another hour, and he couldn't afford to be seen waiting on a bench dressed as he was. Also, the chance of encountering a regular commuter on board who had seen him around town was too great. How strange that he should feel more as if he were acting undercover as plain Peter Vasco than when he masqueraded as a servant of the Roman Catholic Church.

  He turned off a side street onto the coast highway and entered the thickening stream of traffic. The shipyards and defense plants were changing shifts. He crawled along among carloads of workers sharing vehicles, many of them yawning, some of the women applying makeup behind the wheel with the aid of rearview mirrors. All the windshields bore lettered ration stickers (his was C, the most generous designation, restricted to doctors, ministers, and mail carriers), and a preprinted sign plastered to the rear bumper of a chalky, battered 1939 Plymouth coupe announced that the driver had placed his Cadillac in storage until the boys came home. It was as faded as the glint of optimistic humor that had accompanied its purchase in some novelty store. Pearl Harbor seemed very long ago.

  The sun glared harshly through the window on the passenger's side. The Ford didn't have an adjustable visor and he regretted not bringing his hat so he could turn down the brim against the dazzle.

  North of the city, the traffic began to thin out and pick up speed. He saw only flashes of water now between clusters of hotels, some still under construction. Hotels in bunches were a new phenomenon in his experience. In Chicago they spaced themselves out, sometimes by only the width of a street, but never stood cheek-to-cheek, as they did here; even in Washington, a city of transient diplomats, reporters, and hat-in-hand governors, visitors tended to segregate themselves by party affiliation and geographic origin, with small parks and heroic statues serving as buffers in between. With so many temporary dwellings arranged so tightly together, the population of coastal Florida waxed and waned according to the inclemency of the weather in the Northeast and Midwest, a census-taker's nightmare. Many of the hotels seemed to have sprung up just since he'd made the trip last. Where did the contractors find the material, with so much of the nation's resources co-opted by the military? Did the black market conduct business with big industry as well as the private consumer, or was big industry funneling money directly to bureaucrats and politicians in return for priority? Hoover had said that Chicago was a cesspool and always had been; but cesspools left undrained had no choice but to spread.

  Vasco was getting away from Al Capone just in time. Prolonged exposure to the supreme corruptor was having a corrosive effect on his idealism.

  Miami Shores, North Miami, North Miami Beach. What the various city fathers lacked in originality they more than made up for in consistency. He passed housing developments, tracts of homes laid out like games of domino. Some developers were more successful than others in obtaining supplies and labor, based on the projects that were completed as opposed to those where bare wooden frames stood exposed to the elements and grass grew on heaps of turned earth abandoned by the bulldozers. A DeSoto with blackout headlights chugged resignedly between lawns overtaken by feral alfalfa in the absence of sod, towing a banner of ocher-colored dust.

  He drove at a steady rate, observing the national forty-mile-per-hour speed limit despite the lingering presence of signs saying he could go faster. (The Model T was incapable of doing more, but he felt sanctimonious nonetheless.) The state police seemed to share the laissez-faire attitude of the highway department in leaving them up; although he was passed frequently by drivers going fifty or better, in the first twelve miles he saw only one car pulled over by a jodh-purred officer on a motorcycle, a wood-paneled station wagon with suitcases lashed to its roof carrier and two children in back. After three years of fighting, the We Can Do It fever had broken, and people were going about their daily business while waiting for it to end. "When the Lights Go on Again (All Over the World)," the singer sang; and the people listening asked, "When?"

  A siren sidetracked this train of thought. Flashers mounted on the front fender of a fat-tired motorcycle stuttered in his rearview mirror. His first, irrational thought was that he'd been followed by the same officer who'd ticketed him in Miami for leaving his motor running unattended his first full day at Redemption, but as he decelerated and drifted onto the gravel apron he thought it more likely it was the state patrolman who had stopped the station wagon.

  "Is something wrong, O
fficer?"

  "License and registration, please." He was standing at an off angle to Vasco, his leather helmet under his arm, his other gloved hand hanging near the checked butt of the revolver on his hip. He had startling blue eyes in a tanned, square-jawed face crowned by a flattop haircut like Father Kyril wore. In fact he could be the pastor's younger brother. They shared the same expression, equal parts weary and wary; brother officers sworn to uphold different rules of order. Vasco unsnapped the document holder from the steering column and handed it over along with the Florida license showing a picture of him in his clerical collar.

  "You're a minister?"

  "A priest, with Our Lady of Redemption in Miami." Now that his anonymity had ended, he felt the old rush of shame when he pronounced the lie. But the name of the church was on the registration.

  "You have a cracked taillight, Father. You want to get that fixed." His tone had softened slightly.

  "I will." He'd noticed the crack the first day, but hadn't thought such things mattered in a world that discouraged unnecessary displays of light.

  The officer was still holding the registration and license, pinned to a ticket pad by a leather-encased thumb. "What brings you up from town?"

  "I have parish business in Fort Lauderdale."

  "That's twenty-five miles from your home base. The trains run all day. Gasoline's precious."

  "I had to get an early start. It's a matter of some urgency. Last Rites."

  "I'm Presbyterian myself, but I'm pretty sure there are Catholic churches in Lauderdale, each with its own priest."

  "This man moved there recently to be near his children and grandchildren. He lived twenty years in Miami. Extreme unction from a stranger—"

  "Dressed kind of casually, aren't you?"

  "The heat." He fought a stammer. "My vestments and oils are in the compartment on the running board."

  "The toolbox?"

  He nodded, struggling to maintain eye contact. The tan line left by the officer's goggles made him feel as if he were being watched closely through field glasses. He was sure the man would ask him to open the toolbox. (Last Rites; children and grandchildren. Where had that come from?)