The Confessions of Al Capone

by Loren D. Estleman

  He was retreating into self-pity, the last querulous refuge of a sick man. Vasco had to step in before the details were lost in the fog of dementia and years gone.

  "Who drove the getaway car after Weiss was killed?"

  Capone looked surprised; then furtive. It was as much of an answer as was required. With every cell in his body, Vasco wished he could leave it at that. But the God-Devil wasn't satisfied. The last turn in the screw must be made.

  "He didn't tell you?" Capone asked.

  "He told me about outrunning a Packard Eight in a Mack truck. He left out the rest."

  "Well, it ain't my place to horn in on something between a man and his son. I will tell you, you should be proud. A lot of guys with more experience under their belt would've stepped on the gas as soon as the shooting started and went home to rinse out their drawers."

  He felt dizzy, and sick to his stomach; there would be no sitting down to brunch that day. A big piece of the puzzle had dropped into place with the slam of a shell going into the chamber of an automatic pistol. Frankie Rio, Paul Vasco, a jug of homemade wine in a homely apartment, a man bleeding out his life on the steps of the Holy Mother Church. No hobby store would carry such a puzzle in its window.

  "Snorky?"

  Capone turned in the direction of this new voice. Vasco, who was already facing that way, had not seen Mae Capone approaching. She stood hugging her bare freckled arms in a sleeveless printed blouse, ocean wind pulling tendrils of pale hair from the pins struggling to hold them in place. Her blue eyes alone were alive in a face that had encountered thousands of questions from the authorities and the press. She did not wear her emotions on the outside, that was the central tragedy of her allegiance to her husband; the sacrifice of everything granted the feminine race to the volcano of public scrutiny. Of the many who had lost everything in the war against Prohibition, she had suffered the most. She was compelled to go on living after all the others had been lain to rest.

  "Snorky, you should come inside. You know what Dr. Phillips said about drafts."

  "I was just telling the Padre about how Hymie Weiss was afraid of 'em. He wore flannel nightshirts when everybody else was sleeping in silk."

  Vasco felt himself pale. He'd never heard Capone tell another person what had passed between them. If someone who didn't share Mae's respect for secrets happened to be on the receiving end ...

  She twined her arm inside Capone's. "We'll move the meal indoors."

  "Jake with me. These Wisconsin skeeters ought to come with navigation lights."

  "That was last week, dear. We're in Miami now." Her tone was gentle, unworried. She led him across the sand, whorled like the surface of a clamshell where the tide had advanced and retreated in stages.

  Rose had been industrious, Vasco saw as they passed the outdoor table, stripped now of linen and dinnerware.

  Inside the house, he blinked until his pupils caught up with the dimmer light. "Take your place," Mae told Capone, steering him in the direction of the dining room. "Don't wait for us. You must be starving."

  "You kidding? I could eat Irish."

  At a look from her, Vasco remained with her in the living room as the head of the house passed through the arch. She made use of a mirror in a gilded frame hanging opposite the portrait of father and son to restore her hair.

  "What was all that about?"

  He decided to make a clean breast. Her confidence was one of the few he trusted. "Mostly it was about 1926."

  "I didn't mean that. Who was that man the bodyguards took away?"

  "They didn't tell you?"

  "They report only to Ralph, who I'm sure has the story by now."

  "One of Frank Nitti's men. He's been following me ever since I left Mercer."

  "I thought he looked familiar, but they all blur together after a while. Did you tell Al about him?"

  "I told Sonny, but only because I thought someone in the family should know."

  "I wish you'd told me instead. He's never kept a secret from his father, although Lord knows he's kept them from me. We were expecting him today, but there was some sort of emergency at the air depot. If anyone finds out what happened outside, Al could be committed to an institution as a danger to himself and others. I'll take him out of the country before I'll let that happen."

  "No one will find out from me, not even Sonny."

  She slid the last pin back into place and turned away from the mirror, smiling. "I know that, Father. Let's go see what we can rescue from the menu."

  He lied. "I'm sorry, but I'm expected back at Redemption. Father Kyril could only spare me a couple of hours."

  "Please? Your company means so much to Al."

  "I wish I could stay." He'd never wished less for anything in his life.

  She drew in a shallow breath and let it out. "I'm sure he enjoyed your talk. He's never had anyone he could trust to tell things to. Things might have gone differently if he had."

  She insisted he join Capone and Danny while she and Rose prepared a package for him. In a room furnished surprisingly simply, with chairs around a table that could extend to serve eight and a sideboard painted country blue, he sipped coffee from a cup with a gold rim and listened to Danny deride the Chicago Cubs with its roster of has-beens and flat-footed rookies while the cream was in the armed forces. Mae's brother ate sparingly and drank beer while Capone helped himself to sausage links from a heaping tray and yellow fluffy scrambled eggs from a huge porcelain bowl and drank tomato juice poured from a pitcher. Vasco had given up trying to keep track of ration points on Palm Island. Capone's cheeks were filling out. It wouldn't be long before the pre-Alcatraz porky Snorky was back in full flesh.

  "I wouldn't let Schuster stack cases of Old Milwaukee, let alone play second base," Danny said. "As for Hughes—"

  Mae and Rose came in, the girl carrying a wax paper-wrapped package the size and shape of a loaf of bread.

  Mae said, "You may need a can opener. Rose should be packing parachutes for the Air Corps."

  He stood to accept it just as Mae turned fond eyes on Capone shoveling food into his face. At that moment he felt Rose's hand in his left trousers pocket and heard a tiny rustle of paper. She withdrew her hand quickly, but not before Vasco noticed Danny watching them. He tipped up his bottle, let it gurgle twice, set it back down, and returned to the dismal subject of baseball in wartime; but his eyes sparkled and something tugged at the corners of his long upper lip.

  The note was written on ruled notepaper, coarse-textured and smelling faintly of exhaust from a greasy griddle, overpowering any citrus scent she might have left on it from her skin. The neat schoolgirl script read:

  Black-and-Tan

  64 SW 3rd

  I'm usually there at midnight

  He didn't know if she meant she was there every midnight, or that when she went there, that was the time. He was sure the note meant that midnight. No other made sense. The practice of months had him thinking like a coconspirator.

  He had no way of refusing. With Danny possibly aware that a communication had changed hands, he didn't dare read it until he was behind the wheel of the Model T, after which going back inside would arouse curiosity in the household, and any reply he sent by messenger might be intercepted; perhaps by whoever Nitti assigned to take Joe Verdi's place.

  Then again, he had no intention of refusing. He smelled again the mossy damp of the shack in the woods, the tang of mingled perspiration, and had to shift his weight on the seat in order to drive comfortably.

  In a cafe across from the ocean he ordered coffee to justify taking up a booth, transcribed Capone's memoirs from the years 1925 to 1929 into his notebook as legibly as possible, tore out the sheets, and folded them into a pocket. He left out the subsequent conversation involving his father. Paul Anthony Vasco was one former associate who would not be incriminated; not by his son's hand. A Woolworth's on the way to Our Lady of Redemption provided an envelope and a stamp from a machine. He addressed the letter, adding the code number he'd
been given that would place it directly in Hoover's hands, and dropped it into the first mailbox he came to.

  He caught two hours' sleep early in the evening, having—gratefully— encountered neither Kyril nor Brother Thomas on the way to his room. Less than two hours; he worried a long time about Danny, what he'd guessed, who he might say something to once the beers and whatever else he drank began to work on his caution. If pressed to explain, Vasco would have to say that spiritual counseling was requested and that his oath prevented him from giving details. The Seal was not confined to the booth or restricted to those inside the faith. The lies were coming more easily now, with less bidding.

  It only remained to be seen whether Rose would back them up. She was, he had learned, a willful creature who apparently lived without fear. He wondered what that was like. He could no more easily imagine a color he'd never seen.

  Rising, he put on lightweight slacks and a sport shirt, no clerical collar. He'd parked around the corner and had hoped to reach the car unobserved, but when he emerged from the rectory Thomas was carrying an industrial canister by its handle along the flagstone path to the church, spraying for palmetto bugs. The novice looked up, seeing him in mufti, and resumed spraying. Vasco would never know the man, how he thought.

  He had hours, and he was hungry. When he'd turned down brunch he'd skipped eating at all that day. He'd forgotten all about Mae's food package, spoiled by now in the heat. He dumped it in a city can and stopped at a seafood restaurant he'd passed often, where people were waiting outside under the striped awning for a table; it was Saturday night, and tourists who couldn't afford the winter hotel rates were determined to get the best out of their vacation. He went inside long enough to give his name to the young woman at the reservation desk and went back out. The sun was sliding behind the skyline to the west, taking the temperature down into the low eighties. Suppertime traffic was heavy, but few cars passed that weren't carrying women or children, and lone male drivers seemed more interested in the length of the line on the sidewalk than with anyone standing in it. Steam drifted from overworked radiators, trailing a bitter smell of scorched metal.

  The meal was indifferent, ocean perch poached in a lemon sauce patently from the bottle, green beans from a can, and iced tea sweetened with saccharine, all served with a whopping bill in a green leather folder with brass corners. He left a small tip for the service, indifferent also, and went into the warm night, where others were still waiting.

  The same pair of blackout headlights turned twice behind him and he was certain he was being followed until he made four right turns, putting him back where he'd started, and the car behind fell away and didn't return in his rearview mirror. It was too much to hope that Capone's treatment of Nitti's man had caused him to abandon Vasco, but the delay in lining up a replacement might give him respite for one night.

  His filling-station city map brought him to Southwest Third Street without mishap, but he drove up and down the same three blocks several times looking for number sixty-four. There were no commercial signs and few addresses were posted. The neighborhood was old Miami, predating the boom-and-bust by years, and the few faces he saw on the street were black, belonging to shapeless women in cloche hats carrying shapeless sacks and rangy young men awaiting or avoiding the draft smoking under streetlamps. The third time Vasco passed the same man he saw his eyes following the Ford under the bent bill of his cap, the whites eloquently expressing suspicion. The buildings were blank-faced, residential, with light leaking through cracked or crooked shades and stucco falling off the facades in heaps like tiny rockslides.

  At length he selected a block, parked strategically in the light from a lamp, and followed his ear. Music was playing somewhere; working, rather, thumping like a pile driver with a sense of rhythm, growing louder as he approached a squat three-story building with the weathered profile of an Indian's head jutting perpendicular to the sidewalk, identifying it as a former Pontiac dealership. Plywood covered a display window behind which nickel and enamel had gleamed when Coolidge was in the White House.

  He raised his fist to knock on the cracked paint of the front door, then noticed a grubby pearl button next to it and pressed it into its socket with his thumb. Something buzzed that reminded him of flying insects sizzling against the bug light under Ralph's porch in Wisconsin and the door swung open, releasing a gusher of noise from inside: people shouting above the general din, glass colliding, a trumpet growling lewdly through a mute, a drummer punishing his snares to a Krupa beat, but as if he were trying to punch holes in the skins; a rendition of "Minnie the Moocher" that would never be allowed within range of a radio microphone. Somewhere in the inky depths of the room a high-pitched nasal laugh rose, peaked for a full second like an air raid siren, and trailed off under the relentless surging of the music.

  The man who stood in the opening filled it nearly as effectively as the door had. He was taller than Brownie by at least two inches and heavier by forty pounds, most of it hanging over his belt in a striped jersey, but hard, like dripped limestone that had piled up and petrified. A gold hoop glinted piratically in an earlobe a half-foot above Vasco's head, deep black skin glistened like polished wood in the dusky light escaping from inside. Apart from these impressions, Vasco's picture of the man was of a solid presence, felt rather than seen.

  "Uh-uh." The voice rumbled from deep inside that belly, which was evidently hollowed out like a grotto so that the tone reverberated. "Uh-uh." A hand resembling a catcher's mitt rested on something interrupting the smooth curve of the overhang, one end thrust under the belt.

  "It's okay, Chester. He's with me."

  He recognized her scent before he placed the voice, wafting his way on a gust of music and clatter. The big man turned a little, making room, and Rose craned the top half of her body around him from behind. A rhinestone clip holding a feather to a hat pinned to the side of her head twinkled.

  "Maurice won't like it," rumbled the voice from the belly.

  "What he don't like won't hurt him." A slender hand gripped Vasco's upper arm and pulled. Big Chester resisted briefly with his bulk, then withdrew far enough to let him past.

  The size of the room was impossible to gauge; its perimeters were lost in gloom and the smoke of cheap tobacco and something that didn't smell like tobacco at all, a stench of burning grain he remembered from a rebellious excursion among fellow seminarians into Chicago's South Side. Candle flames flickered pale yellow in jars on tables crowded together. White teeth and an occasional gold incisor reflected their light, also that from a bare bulb under a funnel shade suspended above a bar to one side, where a wide-bodied bartender in a white T-shirt poured beer from a tap and mopped up spills with a rag. On a tiny stage in what may have been a far corner, a trio of musicians brayed and pounded their way through Minnie's fortunes, the bass fiddle thumping under the racket of the drums, working in near total darkness above the candle glow and beyond range of the illumination from the bar. A cigarette burned there, and the orange cyclops eye of a cigar.

  His pupils were unequal to the journey. He let Rose guide him through the labyrinth. His hip bumped a table, causing a jingling of glass receptacles and "Motherfuck!" in a voice thin and sharp as copper wire. A pale knee-length dress fitted to the girl's slender form fluttered in the meager light. He prayed his skin was less visible. He was sure it was the whitest in the place, despite its olive Mediterranean tones.

  Eternity ended at a table placed where two walls met painted with thick ivory or yellow paint showing coarse brush strokes, an adobe effect. "I went ahead and ordered," she said. "Hope you don't mind hops in your beer. They brew it in the basement."

  He drank from a thick glass with a handle. Something that had been floating on the surface lodged between two teeth. He prodded at it with his tongue. The aftertaste was acrid, like harsh medicine.

  His expression must have showed in the candlelight. Rose said, "Sometimes they get impatient and serve it green. I can order something else, but you could st
rip furniture with it."

  "I'll get used to it." He sipped at it more gingerly.

  "So how you like the Black-and-Tan so far?"

  "I'm just glad I found it. There's no sign."

  "They don't advertise. It could be someplace else next week. It only opens when all the other joints close on account of the curfew."

  "You mean it could be raided?"

  "Not if Maurice goes on paying the freight. What he saves on sign painters he spends on cops. He ran rum from Cuba during the dry time and didn't blow any of it on cars or women." She laid her hand on top of his. "Glad you could make it, Reverend."

  "I think under the circumstances you should call me Peter."

  "Names are for strangers."

  The trio had swung into a different tune without pausing, a more guttural melody he couldn't identify. There was no vocalist, but he was certain if there were lyrics they couldn't be sung most places. A few couples found room to dance between the tables; or more precisely, to clutch each other and sway in place.

  "Hottest band in Miami," Rose said. "Bass man got kicked out of the Apollo in Harlem when he pulled a razor on Satchmo."

  "Everything in here is hot." Salty drops prickled his forehead like cockleburs. Thirty or forty warm-blooded parties crammed into one small space created their own atmosphere.

  She smiled broadly. He liked her large even teeth and full lips painted candy-apple red. He hadn't seen her in makeup before. The kohl on her eyelids made her eyes look like polished teak by contrast. "Go ahead and sweat. Don't tell me you took no oath against that." Suddenly she leaned forward and kissed him on the lips. Just a peck, like that first time on the cheek; then she sat back and drank from her glass.

  He looked around. "Are you sure it's safe?"

  "Safer here than downtown. There's Cubans here, Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, all kinds of mixed blood. Anyone don't like what he sees can take it up with Chester. He's got a Purple Heart. VA fixed him up with a steel plate after a Zero fell on his head." She tapped ash from a filtered cigarette into a tray.