"A pleasure, Father. I hear you and Al are tight."
"He's an affable man." Nitti's hand felt hot; astonishingly so in contrast to the dry-ice cold of his eyes. Capone had seemed no warmer when he was running a high fever. The Outfit's assassination chief had shaven off the moustache he'd worn in photographs, but looked no less like an Italian store clerk for the absence.
Except, of course, for those eyes.
"Affable, yeah." He bit off his words in the manner familiar to Chicago. "A little heavy on the gun stuff; but times were different then. We try to keep the peace now, no matter what. When we can."
"Mae's in the kitchen," Ralph said.
Recognizing he'd been dismissed, Vasco excused himself and left the room. He found Rose at the stove and Mae seated at the table with her hands wrapped around a steaming cup. She wore a vertical crease of pain between her eyebrows. "Al's theory about avoiding hangovers is to stay drunk," she said by way of greeting. "He may be right, but I decided to go ahead and bite the bullet. Brownie's coffee is strong enough to burn out tuberculosis."
He asked where Brownie was.
"In town, buying groceries. It pays to stock up. You never know when Ralph may take off and leave the car at the train station. When you're stranded out here, brother, you're stranded."
Rose set a cup of coffee and a dish of scrambled eggs and bacon, still sizzling, in front of him. Her face was tight. He asked how Capone was.
"Sleeping like a baby," Mae said. "I don't think he even knows we have company. They woke the rest of the household this morning. I think they drove all night from Milwaukee."
He'd noticed a shadow on Nitti's chin. The meeting in town must have been with him. Breakfast was delicious, no doubt, but he was unable to taste it. He forced himself to eat. "Is anything the matter?"
She set down her cup with a click. "Frank's worried about you. I think if he hadn't had business to finish he'd have come with Ralph and Frankie on the train. Him and his private army. I don't like that man."
Rose let go of the skillet too soon. It landed on a cold burner with a clank. He'd never known her to be tense about anything.
He pressured himself into taking a sip of coffee before he spoke. "I'm nothing to be concerned about."
"I told him that, but he's the most suspicious man I've ever met. He was shot once in his own office and he hasn't trusted anyone since. He has one of his soldiers start his car for him and taste his food. It's the way he is, Peter. Don't let it upset you."
"He hardly even spoke to me just now."
"He's more famous for his actions than for his words. By now he has someone else going around asking the questions. I imagine he wanted to get a look at you for himself."
"I think it's time I went back to Miami."
"I won't have him chasing you away."
"I don't want to be the cause of trouble."
"Al wouldn't have it, and Ralph would never agree to anything Al was against. He knows he wouldn't have anything if it weren't for his brother."
"Still, he runs the organization."
"That's what the newspapers say, and the authorities seem to agree. The steps he took to leave Chicago without tipping them off make what Al and I did look like the Rose Parade. But Ralph just looks after the family interests and owns a few places with Outfit connections. His name sells more papers than Nitti's. Frank runs the show."
It seemed impossible that Hoover hadn't known that. "I'll have to think about it. I didn't come up here to disturb anyone's vacation."
Just then Ralph came in. Vasco had noticed he wasn't in fishing costume. He wore a dress shirt tucked into pleated slacks, without a necktie and with the collar spread. Rio was dressed similarly, only with a suit coat covering his pistol in its harness.
"We got business to talk over," Ralph told Vasco. "Why don't you take Rose out for a walk."
It wasn't a question, but Vasco raised his eyebrows at Rose. "That would be pleasant, if she wants to and if Mae can spare her."
"Go ahead, Rose, if you like. The dishes will keep."
The girl beamed and untied her apron.
Tarnished clouds hung low above the pines and the air smelled like rain. Vasco had paused in the mudroom off the kitchen to unhook an old umbrella from a peg, but Rose stopped him. "We won't melt." She tied a white cotton scarf around her head. It softened her features further and made her resemble a little girl.
He helped himself to the old hat Capone had worn fishing, which fit him perfectly.
They walked between columns of trees filled with chirping birds and one angry squirrel, who squeaked at them with its paws wrapped around a pinecone halfway up a tall spruce. Other creatures rustled among fallen needles and last year's maple leaves on the ground. He felt slightly disreputable, unshaven and unshowered, and he was preoccupied with what was being discussed in the cabin in his absence, but Rose looked fresh in a blue cotton blouse printed with pink flowers and her hands in the pockets of a pleated skirt. She wore saddle shoes and white bobby sox.
"That man Nitti scares me," she said. "Did you see his eyes?"
"Yes."
"I wouldn't worry about him, though. That kind lays off reverends."
"I'm leaving, just the same." He couldn't let her know her words weren't a comfort. "I shouldn't be away from Redemption too long."
"I expect we'll be pulling out soon ourselves. Sooner or later those whiskers will figure out where Mr. Al went and Mr. Ralph doesn't want to upset the locals with a lot of strangers hanging around."
It amused him despite himself to hear her using Capone's slang for the agents who served Uncle Sam. "It's so peaceful up here. I've always lived in cities, so all this is new to me."
"Not me. I couldn't wait to get out of that jerkwater town in Alabama. You never see the places we have to live in those small-town pictures, but you can see them when you're sitting on the wrong side of the train."
He had: nine-hundred-square-foot houses with sagging porches and burned-out lawns, wash gathering soot on clotheslines and heaps of rusty oilcans and newspapers blowing about. Black men in undershirts sat on the porches swigging from flat pints and black women worked pump handles, old beyond their years.
"The air here is clean, anyway," she said. "Miami, too. I got dead aunts and uncles never saw the ocean."
"Does it bother you, the man you work for?"
"Well, I told you I was scared at first. But he and the missus treat me better than the banker I used to work for. If I broke something there like Mr. Al's elephant, that missus would've slapped my face."
"Is Mrs. Capone still doing nice things for you?"
"Sure. I thanked you for that."
"I wasn't fishing for gratitude." It seemed very important he kept her good opinion.
"I know, and I'm sorry I thought it. White folks give you their old clothes and think they're doing you some big favor. You get so you expect it."
"Where are we going?" He realized they'd been walking in a straight line, up a hill in the direction opposite the lake.
"Place I found. I don't think even Mr. Ralph knows about it. Fat men ain't in the habit of taking long walks."
He liked the fact she felt relaxed around him so far as to let her grammar lapse. In general she spoke better English than most of the Italians he'd grown up around. She took a hand out of a pocket and it seemed the most natural thing in the world for him to hold it. It felt warm, although not nearly as warm as Nitti's, which seemed to feed on a source of heat he found unhealthy. Hers was a little moist.
In a little while they came to a clearing where stood an old shack, thrown together from packing crates—so much forest around to provide logs, hence the appearance of haste—with half its roof fallen in. A crooked stovepipe stuck out through a hole, with a conical cap on top to keep rain out, cocked like the headgear of a juvenile tough in a movie exposing the evils of urban blight. Its door was missing and he could see piles of leaves inside, but one window still had all its panes, with gaps showing in the p
utty, discolored like neglected teeth.
"That's it," she said. "I think some fisherman built it way back before the first war. I found it when I was looking for wildflowers for the table. I'll show you."
He allowed himself to be led inside. It smelled of moss and disintegrating wood. There was an iron bedstead with a mattress whose cover and stuffing had been appropriated by mice and squirrels for nests for their young so that mainly the springs remained, naked and rusted. A barrel stove, rusty also, stood with a pile of shingles holding up the corner where the leg was gone and a stack of magazines moldered in a crate made of staves. The cover of a sportsmen's magazine was chewed away except for part of the title and a date: March 1917. For all he knew the place had been deserted since five years before he was born. Had the occupant died or joined the army or grown tired of the isolation and just walked away? Suddenly he was curious about someone he'd never known existed.
There was a pattering sound, accompanied by a plunking, like the music of a washtub band; the rain had started, striking the roof with fat drops and hitting the hollow iron stove through the gap where the shingles had shrunk away from the stovepipe. They made slapping noises on the earthen floor, packed and trodden as hard as pavement.
"Just in time," Rose said; and then she was in his arms, kissing him hungrily, her tongue working between his teeth. He responded, as famished as she.
They fumbled with buttons, tore shirttails out of waistbands. He found the catch of her bra and it came open almost to the touch, as if he were an accomplished seducer of women. If she noticed that he seemed more practiced than expected, she was too eager to hesitate. She unbuttoned his fly and then he was in her hand, pulsing hot. He got hold of her skirt and gathered it up in his fist. She was too slim to need a girdle and he slid his other hand into her panties and palmed the warmth of her and his fingers found their way inside her. She was wet.
They lay on the stony earth, he on his back to cushion her, and she straddled him with her panties still on one ankle and he thrust up into her, feeling the electric thrill from the sudden friction, his grunt stifled in her mouth. He exploded after only three thrusts. He tore his mouth away from hers to apologize, but she covered it with a hand and worked herself up and down, now arching her back, now leaning forward with her breasts crushed against his chest, until her panting built to a thin wail and then she slowed down gradually, like a motor sputtering to a stop after the current is cut. She collapsed on him and they lay there while their breathing became more measured and their hearts beat in different rhythms, his heavy and powerful, hers rapid and shallow like the wings of a captured bird.
Her back was wet when he stroked it; the shack gave little shelter from the rain. "You'll catch cold." His voice dragged in his throat as if he hadn't spoken aloud for days.
"Hush, now." She covered his mouth again. "Hush."
After a while she rose and drew up her panties and fumbled in a pocket of her discarded skirt for dry matches. Together they built a fire in the stove, using shredded magazines and dried leaves and twigs blown in and tangled in the corners for kindling and fed it with shards of wood from the fallen-in roof. They dried their clothing piece by piece before the heat, using the stave crate and a broken chair for racks. The rain had stopped by the time they finished drying. Vasco, aroused by the muscular play of Rose's buttocks beneath the lace-trimmed step-ins, seized her again. This time she insisted she be on the bottom. His part of it took longer this time and she cried out before his release.
She smiled, took his head in her hands, and kissed him.
"I do believe you have a confession to make, Reverend."
"Peter."
She shook her head. "I might slip."
"Then don't call me anything. I can stand that better than 'Reverend.' "
"It's a deal, but only if you go easy on me in the booth."
"You've done nothing wrong." If she only knew how true it was.
"Are you sorry?"
"I should be. I don't know why I'm not."
"That's the nicest thing anybody ever said to me."
They dressed and tidied themselves, using each other in place of a mirror. When they went back outside, the air smelled as if it had been scrubbed with wet pine needles. Drops fell off branches in unpredictable patterns that made him jump and her giggle when they landed anywhere on them. Something stung the back of his neck. He slapped at it and rolled off the smashed remains of a mosquito the size of a housefly.
"Told you they's big as B-17s."
He made a tardy admission. "I should have worn something."
"I don't guess you gents go around prepared. I know tricks. My mother didn't want me to have any surprises."
"But you couldn't have known—"
She laughed—not a giggle. She looked around, turned, and went up on the balls of her feet and kissed him again.
He thought, I've been seduced.
A loon laughed from the direction of the lake.
Nearing the cabin, she widened the distance between them suddenly. Someone stood on the little covered back porch, smoking a cigarette in a holder.
"You're dry." Frank Nitti had shed his suit coat. He wore a striped silk shirt with black suspenders embroidered with red diamonds. One hand rested in the deep slash pocket of his trousers.
"We found a shack." She spoke matter-of-factly.
"Cozy."
Vasco chose to ignore the remark. He thought it a priestly thing to do. "Have you concluded your business?"
"Not yet."
"Will you be staying the night?"
"I am. You're not. Frankie's driving you to the station."
Rose climbed the steps to the porch, head down and hugging herself with both arms. Excusing herself, she pulled open the screen door and went inside, stepping around Ralph on his way out.
"We thought it'd look better if we didn't all travel together," Ralph said. "I'm closing the place in the morning. Vacation's over, Padre. Sorry it couldn't be longer. When the feds figure out where Al disappeared to, they'll be up here thick as skeeters. I got a reputation to protect in Mercer."
He was making little effort to veil his hostility. What had started out as ordinary suspicion had solidified into something else.
"I'll pack," Vasco said.
"Brownie took care of that. Your bag's in the station wagon."
"May I go in and say good-bye?' "
"Sure," Nitti put in. "You're not being run out on a rail. What we got to talk about you don't want to hear." He turned toward Ralph. "What time's the train tomorrow?"
"Ten-fifteen."
"Swell. The sooner I get away from all these bears and shit the better."
"What about the Lincoln?"
"You and Frankie are going back in it."
"That'll take twice as long!"
"You should've thought of that before you came up here to live with the injuns. I never saw the benefit." Nitti plucked the cigarette from its holder and flicked it off the porch.
Automatically, Vasco crushed it out. Forest fires meant nothing to a Chicago hoodlum. Nitti had already gone back inside. Ralph followed him without another word.
Mae had been right: it was the Enforcer calling the shots.
Vasco knocked on the Capones' door. Mae's voice asked who it was, then invited him in. He found her on one knee beside Capone's bed, tying his shoelaces. He wore scuffed hiking boots, a soft flannel shirt, and the trousers belonging to an old suit, baggy in the knees. He beamed at Vasco. "Valet service. I dumped eight grand a week on the same thing at the Lexington."
"I wish we had it now." Mae stood. "The doctor says a little walk would be good for him. Once around the outside of the house ought to do it."
"I keep telling her I could outrun the dogs at Lawndale." But he looked pale still.
"Maybe when we get back to Miami. I'm sorry about this, Father. I'd hoped we'd have another two weeks."
He noticed it was "Father" once again.
"No apologies necessary. I've had
a terrific time."
"How'd you like the fishing?" Capone asked.
"Very much. My father won't believe I had such good luck my first time."
"You're Calabrese. That makes you part pelican."
How could he remember the Vascos were Calabrese?
"Have a safe trip," Vasco said. "I'll see you soon, if I haven't worn out my welcome."
"We'll fish off the pier. You haven't been till you hook onto a marlin."
"Well, good-bye."
Mae took his hand in both of hers, a protective gesture. Her eyes were clearest blue. "Don't be concerned. Once Frank's satisfied you're on the level, you'll never hear from him again."
He thanked her and pulled the door shut in the hallway with a clammy lump in his belly.
There was no opportunity for the conversation he wanted with Rose. She was working at the counter beside the sink with a loaf of sliced bread and a jar of mayonnaise and Brownie was washing his knives. The big Negro manservant always seemed to be occupied with lethal instruments. Over a chipped Bakelite radio a nasal British correspondent was reporting the fall of Saipan to U.S. troops; Emperor Hirohito was encouraging Japanese civilians to commit suicide rather than be taken captive. It was a grim background for parting.
She wrapped something in waxed paper, slid it into a brown paper sack, rolled down the top, and turned away from the counter, holding it out. Her smile was cloudless. "Walleye sandwich," she said. "You don't want that powdered-egg salad they got on the train."
"Thank you."
"You caught it yourself."
"Thank you for everything, I mean." He felt himself flush.
"I wish I could do something as kind for you in return."
"You already did. I enjoyed the walk."
He thought she winked. It was over so fast he couldn't be sure.
RIO sat behind the wheel of the station wagon, looking preoccupied. Vasco's valise lay on the backseat, presumably placed there by Brownie after he'd packed it. He was sure the man had overlooked nothing, and had not bothered to check to see if anything was left behind. They took off with a spray of gravel. Ralph's bodyguard said nothing the whole way, except to curse when he was forced to brake for a deer bounding across the road. His passenger watched, fascinated, as the golden-brown animal, as much a creature of the air as of the earth, vanished into the brush with its hooves not seeming to touch down. He envied it its power of flight. Then he remembered the heads he'd seen mounted at stops along the way through Wisconsin and knew nothing was immune to fate.
The Confessions of Al Capone Page 39