The Confessions of Al Capone

by Loren D. Estleman

  But he was happy for the silence and the opportunity to think. Frank Nitti had his number, he felt certain, or if he hadn't, he wouldn't stop investigating until he had. As authentic as they might appear, the references and credentials arranged by the FBI would not stand up to threats, bribery, and torture. Too many people knew the truth. Surely the Director would see that Vasco's usefulness had come to an end. It only remained to see how far the Outfit would go to make an example to others that its walls could not be breached without bloody consequences. He gripped the sack in his lap and thought he would never have the appetite to open it.

  Regret tinged his fear. He would miss Mae and Sonny; he would even miss Al, the ogre of most of his days on earth. He could still feel his embrace, the firm grip of his hand on Vasco's wrist as he led him through the steps of the graceful freedom of casting a fishing lure far out over the calm surface of a lake so far distant from the bloodstained asphalt of Chicago and Cicero as to belong to a planet on the other end of the solar system. He had never known such physical closeness from his father; a quick, self-conscious hug before they'd separated in Fort Lauderdale, unexpected as it was, was unwieldy in comparison, a matter of form only, not genuine.

  And he would miss Rose. He did not know what that had been about, only that he'd sensed it coming for a long time without really being aware that he had. Was it attraction on her part, or just a diversion not uncommon among the bitter serving class? The distinction seemed important, although he didn't know why. He could still smell the lemon-scented soap on her skin, mixed with rain and perspiration, the musty air in the cabin. He felt the silkiness of her tongue sliding against his. He felt other things as well, and adjusted the sack to dissemble his physical reaction from the man seated beside him. Dear God, but he was poor material to pose as a priest.

  What, he wondered, was expected of him now?

  Rio ground to a stop abreast of the train station, dust drifting forward to bread the hood. "Take care, boy." The car was rolling again before Vasco got the back door shut. He had to snatch his valise out of the way to avoid a collision with the rear fender. The back end of the wagon slewed sideways in the dirt and pebbles before righting itself, attracting the attention of a loafer on the platform, who tipped back his straw skimmer to watch it retreat beyond Ralph Capone's clapboard-Tudor hotel, then tipped it back forward to resume his empty ruminations. Was stool-pigeonry (was there such a word?) considered contagious in the underworld, like leprosy? Vasco was too fanciful for the work.

  The atmosphere in the little pioneer building lacked the electric urgency of Union Station, or even the shuffling hurly-burly of a whistle stop between arrival and departure. He was twenty minutes early for the four o'clock train. A few passengers and well-wishers were seated on benches, chatting and reading newspapers (farm reports, baseball scores, record fish caught, the war) and a pair of old men in overalls played checkers on a board set between them on the polished hickory, making an entire afternoon out of the simplest game invented by man. One was wrinkled and shrunken enough to be the 103-year-old Capone had told him about. What were the thoughts of a man who'd spent most of a century scraping whiskers off the same face in the mirror? At the moment it seemed unlikely Vasco would ever know.

  He sought diversion in a small newsstand operated by a woman wearing a perforated aluminum patch taped over one eye, a recent cataract patient. MacArthur scowled resolutely behind dark glasses from Time, Superman wound an iron girder around Hitler, Tojo, and Mussolini on the cover of Action Comics, pinning their arms to their sides. Retribution drove the world.

  Was Nitti the type to torture a confession out of a man before he finished the job, just to be certain, or for the sheer entertainment of the exercise? He'd seemed to enjoy letting a man twist in the breeze of what appeared to be simple conversation. Vasco imagined the Outfit had made subtle refinements on the practice of the homely baseball bat; on the other hand, there was really no need to improve upon perfection. Scalise and Anselmi were no less dead than if they'd been worked on scientifically with electrodes, the tactics Walter Winchell said the Gestapo had employed on American POWs to learn the details of D-Day.

  It was a singularly bad moment to turn away from the four-color illustrations and screaming headlines to encounter a man in uniform standing in front of him with his thumbs hooked inside his gun belt.

  "Peter Vasco?"

  He was dressed in forest green with brown patches on his shoulders, a hard man running to fat around the middle but a hard man just the same, with a toothpick rammed into the corner of his mouth and a dimpled campaign hat strapped under his chin. His middle-aged face was burned red; no amount of suntan oil would render it the burnished brown of advertisements in travel magazines.

  "Yes?" He'd conquered a sudden panicky urge to deny his identity.

  "Come with me, please."

  He followed the man past curious onlookers through a door with station-master painted on the frosted glass. A revolver with a saddle ring incongruously attached to the butt rode in a hip holster, secured with a leather strap.

  "Vasco, sir."

  "I'm aware of that, Deputy. Leave us, please."

  The man obeyed, jerking the door shut against a swollen jamb. The small room was decorated by a sepia photograph in a walnut frame of a train pulling logs and steam along a narrow-gauge track. A yellow oak desk and two captain's chairs provided the furnishings. Every cigar that had been smoked and plug that had been chewed there in thirty years haunted the place. The viscous odor permeated the plaster and wainscoting and desk, scalloped as it was with burn canals old and new.

  "Special Agent. It seems years since we spoke."

  The man seated at the desk wore the uniform of a railroad conductor, too snug for the thick, bulbous body imprisoned within. The band collar fell two inches short of closing, and the flat-topped cap with patent-leather visor upended on the desk had left a ridge in J. Edgar Hoover's coarse black hair.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  VASCO SAT IN THE CHAIR FACING THE DESK WITHOUT WAITING FOR AN INVItation. The decision was made by a sudden weakness in his knees.

  The Director showed no disapproval. "I regret alarming you with the show of local authority. It's no secret who your host is, so routine official interest would not be unexpected. A trim stranger in a business suit would only arouse suspicion. No doubt you're wondering how we found you."

  "I wasn't hiding, sir."

  "It would be foolish to think you were, if that were your intent. Even so it took an inordinate amount of time to remember that Ralph Capone has a vacation home here. I take some responsibility for that oversight; but I've quite enough to occupy my mind without arrogating unto myself the duties of investigators trained at considerable expense to the taxpayer. It was sheer chance that you were spotted loitering in the waiting room."

  He'd seen no evidence of trim strangers in business suits loitering also. It seemed unlikely that even the inexhaustible supply of disguises in the FBI closet would make a convincing old man playing checkers. But Vasco had had no instruction in penetrating the invisible.

  Hoover tipped a pink ruthful palm toward the conductor's cap on the desk. "Naturally, I was driven to extreme measures in order to infiltrate such a small community. I wouldn't have risked exposing my already overexposed person if I thought it wasn't important to meet with you face-to-face, assuming you could be found in this wilderness. Clyde Tolson was in favor of issuing an order of detainment in your case. The prevailing theory in Division Five was that you'd gone AWOL."

  Vasco suppressed a shudder. Assistant Director Tolson was in the way of being the Bureau's answer to Frank Nitti, the Enforcer. "I never meant to keep you in the dark, sir. The invitation came suddenly, and I thought it unwise to delay. I'd hoped to establish contact with the District once I got here, but—"

  "You needn't elaborate. All the telephone subscribers in this county belong to a five-party line. I take it from your presence in the station that your business here is concluded."
>
  "The Capones are returning to Florida in the morning. It was decided I should leave separately."

  "Decided by whom?"

  He told him, and saw surprise on the bulldog face for the first time. It passed quickly, replaced by annoyance. Hoover sat back, creaking pegs in his chair. "He's here?"

  Vasco related the morning's events, leaving out Rose and the shack in the woods. They were not public property. He was aware that he had only minutes before his train arrived. It would stop just long enough to discharge and take on passengers.

  "Those fools in Chicago haven't learned a damned thing in ten years." The profanity, together with an acceleration in his already rapid speech, declared the depths of the Director's rage. He had never forgiven Melvin Purvis, the former Special Agent in Charge of the Chicago office, for multiple blunders in the Dillinger investigation, and particularly for his eventual success. Purvis' fame had threatened to eclipse his own, and long after Purvis had been drummed out of the Bureau for a number of widely reported technicalities, his name had not passed Hoover's lips. Their falling-out had permanently contaminated relations between Chicago and the Seat of Government. "These chief rats never travel without an entourage as large as the president's, and still Nitti managed to slip out bag and baggage with no one the wiser. I thought I made my position clear after the Miami exodus, but apparently I was speaking in code where that office was concerned. Have you given Nitti any reason to suspect you?"

  "Not that I'm aware of."

  "That isn't an answer."

  "No. Mae Capone says he's suspicious as a matter of course."

  "As well he should be, thanks to that idiot Cermak. But I have confidence in the steps we've taken to protect your cover."

  "I don't know how well they'll hold up once he applies pressure."

  "He isn't the only one who can apply it."

  That seemed vague even for one of Hoover's circumspection regarding the inner workings of his organization. Vasco felt he was being placated.

  "Sir, he has a history of rooting out informants and disposing of them without the nicety of a hearing."

  "Are you asking to be relieved of this assignment?"

  "I thought under the circumstances you might want to suspend it."

  The man behind the desk rotated the ball of his thumb against the varnished arm of his chair. "What have you learned up here?"

  Vasco produced a thick sheaf of notepaper from his coat pocket. He'd scribbled swiftly in the uneven light of the kerosene lamp in his room and hadn't had the chance to transcribe his notes into legible form. He'd kept them on his person—a prescient precaution, in view of Brownie's having packed his belongings for him—and they'd gotten damp in the leaky shack, but Hoover unfolded the pages and scanned them as quickly as if they'd been typewritten. He refolded them and tucked them inside his tunic.

  "Capone's loosening up at last," he said. "It would be disastrous to abort your mission at this time. He won't remain coherent much longer—Dr. Phillips' office keeps us apprised of his deteriorating condition—and we may never be able to regain the momentum. Will never, if we're forced to replace you. Let me worry about Nitti."

  "Sir—"

  An insolent air horn tore the air.

  "You need to catch your train. If you miss it and have to go back with the Capones, Nitti will be certain you planned it. He strikes fast when he thinks he's cornered."

  "Yes, sir. But—"

  "Special Agent, have you been following the reports from the front?"

  "They're hard to miss."

  "Thousands of young men are hurtling themselves toward certain death even as we speak. Do you hold your life to be of greater value than theirs?"

  "With respect, Mr. Hoover, they can see the guns that are pointed at them."

  "You'll never catch your train if you insist upon qualifying your responses. I gave you every opportunity at the beginning of this venture to excuse yourself. It's a singularly bad time to show the white feather now that so much time and so many public funds have been spent to bring us this far. I ask you again: Is your life worth more than those that are being tested in the European and Pacific theaters?"

  "Certainly not. I'm not a coward."

  Hoover appeared clinically interested. "You seem more settled upon that account than you did in Washington."

  "I didn't know myself as well then."

  "In that case I see no reason to make any changes at this time. You know how to get into contact with me if the situation changes."

  "Yes, sir."

  "Don't concern yourself any further with Nitti. He's through. He just doesn't realize it yet."

  "Yes, sir."

  "Go now. If anyone asks why you were detained, it was because the railroad wanted to satisfy itself you weren't carrying contraband in wartime. Given your most recent place of residence, you'd have been more suspect if you were allowed to pass undisturbed."

  Vasco rose and picked up his valise.

  "Special Agent."

  He turned back toward the desk.

  "You forgot your lunch."

  The sack had slipped off his lap into the space between his hip and the arm of his chair. He retrieved it and left. The station was crowded now with pedestrians streaming toward the platform, where a train stood with its diesel engine idling. He passed a sailor in blues and a jaunty cap carrying his duffel inside, one arm around the waist of a girl whose bones showed under her one-piece cotton dress. When he was in his seat with his valise in the overhead rack, Vasco kept his eyes on the station through the window, but Hoover didn't appear, in or out of disguise. He wondered what arrangements the Bureau had made for him until he'd determined the Capones and Nitti had returned home.

  The old eagle had some surprises left in him. Through newsreels and the wire services his face was as well known as Cary Grant's, but he'd undertaken to enter a rural community where strangers were routinely scrutinized by the natives in the middle of a top-secret operation just to encourage the agent on the scene to stay the course. He was still the man who'd slapped the cuffs on Public Enemy Number One in person.

  When the train stopped in Oshkosh, he got out to stretch his legs and buy a Coke from a vendor, which he drank in the shade of the platform roof while he ate his sandwich. He couldn't tell if it was delicious because he'd caught the fish himself or because Rose had made it. He used the empty sack to wipe his hands and dumped it and the bottle in a trash can and gave another vendor a nickel for the Milwaukee Journal, which was plastered with details on Saipan.

  Heading back toward his car he passed a man browsing among hand-painted neckties displayed on a folding stand belonging to a lanky entrepreneur in a seersucker suit, with the mobile eye of an unlicensed operator. The customer was built from the waist up like a folded napkin, square shoulders tapering toward narrow hips in a three-piece suit with glossy black pumps on his incongruously small feet. His nose was flattened at the bridge, spoiling a collegiate Buster Crabbe profile. The last time Vasco had seen that particular silhouette, the man had been lighting Frank Nitti's cigarette in the living room of Ralph Capone's cabin in Mercer.

  By the time Vasco was back in his seat, the man was gone and the vendor had converted his stand into a sample case with a rolled leather handle. The diesel's horn blatted and the train started forward. He wondered if the man had paused long enough to buy a tie.

  "HOW was the fishing?" Paul Anthony Vasco cut a notch in a steak and turned it over when blood ran out. Yellow flame leapt up from the charcoal grill when grease dripped down.

  "The fish were biting."

  "Ain't the same as marlin."

  "That's what Capone said."

  "That all you talked about?"

  "That and Chicago." Peter drank from the bottle of ice-cold Altes that Sharon had brought him, watching the muscles tense and relax in his father's naked back as he moved the meat around on the grate. One couldn't tell much about what a man was thinking from his back.

  Sharon had made a fuss over Peter
at the door, noticed the bandage on the finger he'd hooked, and had him set down his valise while she rebound it with a mother's patient care. Paul had said he might as well throw on another steak seeing as he was there.

  "I'll make up the sofa," she'd said.

  "So now we're running a restaurant and a hotel."

  "I'm catching the evening train. I just wanted to say hello."

  "I'll never hear the end of it if you don't stay over." But his gruffness had lacked conviction.

  While the men stood in her tiny backyard, Sharon busied herself in the kitchen making potato salad.

  "German," Paul had said. "You'd think she'd make it some other way."

  One could follow the war from the radio waves spilling out of open windows and from portable sets in adjoining yards. The announcers had exhausted the Pacific. Hitler was in Berchtesgaden, making a show of holidaying unconcernedly while the Americans and British pushed across France and Africa and the Russians broke out along the Eastern Front.

  "Aren't you afraid of what the neighbors will think when they smell that meat?" Peter had asked.

  Paul had pointed his long-handled fork at the board fence separating the patch of grass from the property next door. "Stieglitz there saved up his stamps and boiled a six-pound ham last month. His boy's a rabbi. Nobody said nothing. Them Hebrews mind their own business. Anyway, the show's as good as over. They're taking jitterbug lessons in Berlin."

  From there the conversation had shifted to the subject of Wisconsin and the fishing. When Paul replaced the dome-shaped cover on the grill, Chicago was closed. He pulled on his own beaded bottle. "Jesus, it's hot. They're breaking records in Miami. You shoulda stayed up North."