The Confessions of Al Capone

by Loren D. Estleman

  HE WOKE UP HURTING IN SEVERAL PLACES, INCLUDING THE BASE OF HIS spine. The bed he was in was too soft. The cotton blanket covering him was thin, but it took most of his strength to push it off along with the sheet. He was wearing only his undershorts and a skin of perspiration that chilled him when the breeze came in through a screened window. It was light out, but some dim memory prowling the back of his mind told him it was not the same day. Pictures of strangers in homely domestic situations stood in frames on a chest of drawers made of veneered plywood with a straw mat on top: men, women, and children sitting around a dining table, a man in a rumpled double-breasted suit smiling beside a showroom-shiny Studebaker, a man with a vaguely familiar face standing with his arm around a woman's waist. On closer examination he recognized a younger Sharon and the man whose photo he'd seen in uniform on the radio in the parlor the first time he'd visited.

  A door opened and Sharon came through it carrying a wicker tray. He hurried to cover himself, setting aflame every ache and pain, especially the pounding in his head.

  "No need for modesty," she said. "Who do you think helped undress you?"

  "It's only the second time I've gotten drunk. I seem to have a talent for it."

  "You got here under your own power, sort of. Paul just did the steering. How much do you remember?"

  "It's fuzzy. Then black. Did I behave terribly?"

  "You were as docile as a sheep. Cute. Sit up, will you? I'm not a Harvey Girl." She made a motion with the tray. He hoisted himself into a sitting position with his back propped against the maple headboard, drawing the blanket and sheet up over his chest. She placed the tray on its feet straddling his waist. There were two rashers of bacon, scrambled eggs on a blue china plate, coffee in a white mug, and orange juice in a small glass with flowers stenciled on it. "Your father said he thought you liked your eggs sunny side up, but I didn't think you wanted them looking back at you. I hope you like your bacon crisp. Your father does."

  "He's not my father."

  "Yes, he is."

  He looked at her stern face, felt his flush, and drank orange juice. He was parched; the sweet cold liquid was like water in the desert. Coffee next. The real thing took getting used to.

  "I brought milk and sugar. For some reason Paul's connections are no good with cream."

  "Thank you. If I'm going to be a drunk I might as well start taking it black."

  "Stop feeling sorry for yourself. Do you think you're the only one who ever had a shock?"

  He thought of the man with her in the photograph, drowned at Midway. "I didn't mean anything. Where is he?"

  "Your father?"

  He picked up a fork and got interested in the eggs. "Yes."

  "Out with a customer. He has one occasionally. He doesn't spend all his time in that shack drinking beer, whatever you may think."

  "You don't know what I'm thinking, Sharon."

  "Sure I do. I honestly don't understand how you managed to fool so many people for so long."

  "He told you." The eggs were bland and a little dry. Butter seemed to present the same challenge as cream.

  "Did you think he'd wait till we were standing at the altar?"

  She stood with her hands folded in front of her. She wore a crisp blouse under her frilly apron and a dark wool skirt, street clothes. "Am I keeping you from your job?"

  "My shift starts at four. Plenty of time. I emptied out the top drawer of the bureau and unpacked your suitcase. You'll find your toothbrush and shaving things in the bathroom down the hall. You're staying with us a few days."

  "I don't want to impose. I'll go to a hotel."

  "Why don't you finish your breakfast, then plot out the rest of your life?" After she left, closing the door behind her, he ate greedily. He'd always thought people who drank hard woke up sick to their stomachs, but his seemed to be a special case. He couldn't even get being hungover right. He'd finished and was wiping his mouth on the plain napkin when Sharon returned. The apron was gone. She'd tied on a flimsy scarf and pinned a felt hat to her hair. She picked up the tray. "There are books and magazines, and the radio. It's a good neighborhood to take a walk in, if you don't mind being interrupted by chatty neighbors. Paul will be back around dark. Please don't leave."

  "I won't. Sharon?"

  She'd turned away. She turned back.

  "He—Dad said you don't keep secrets. Did he tell you about the day Hymie Weiss died in Chicago?"

  "He did. He said someone like that wasn't worth caring about."

  "He told me the same thing."

  "He thinks if he says it enough times he'll believe it. Your father's done a lot of things he wished he hadn't. Raising you isn't one of them."

  "Thank you."

  "I'm not the one you should be thanking." She went out.

  HE felt sleepy—and he'd slept away a night and most of the day— and slid back down and closed his eyes, but his mind was racing. After an hour of painful tossing and turning he got up wincing, leaned a hand against the wall until he had his balance, and found his way to the bathroom, painted a restful shade of pale pink with chintz curtains on the window. His razor and tube of shaving cream were laid out on the edge of the sink. He thought the swelling had gone down, but his bruises looked darker than ever against his pallor, noticeable even in the rose-tinted mirror.

  His hand, he was pleased to note, was steady when he picked up the razor. Shaving for him had never been a tedious chore; the daily pursuit of perfection appealed to his natural sense of order. He wondered if it was the same for Capone. So many things that had baffled him before seemed reasonable now. He had shared none of Paul Vasco's traits. It wasn't uncommon for a son to bear no physical resemblance to his father, but character was altogether more durable in the bloodline.

  Shaving represented one of the few moments in the day when a man was completely alone with his thoughts. In the past he'd arranged his schedule as he was rubbing lather into his face, resolved problems that had vexed him nights as he plowed pink furrows through the white and flicked the buildup into the sink and rinsed the blade. His brain slowed to a reliable working rhythm, turning belts and pushing pistons. By the time he toweled off, he had a solution.

  It had not come to him in a bolt of inspiration. Good ideas seldom did. It was more like a dirty blossom opening under palest starlight, fertilized by a memory buried deep in the compost of months; an anecdote, enhanced possibly for dramatic effect, and only barely heard in his impatience for information more directly useful, but he was blessed—cursed—with a nearly photographic memory. And he had an insane certainty that it would work, provided he went about it properly. There were a thousand ways to do a thing wrong and there was only one way to do it right.

  If only he could. And if the story it was based on wasn't just another lie in a sea of them.

  The sun was a long time setting. He dressed, tried to interest himself in a profile of Eisenhower in an old copy of Newsweek, cranked the dial on the big Westinghouse radio all the way right and all the way left, never stopping on any one station for longer than a minute. The war news was only slightly more diverting than static, the musical programs were as irritating as the squeal of feedback when he tuned between them, the daytime dramas banal, with overheated dialogue and the organ music played with an elephantine hand. The commercials were aimed at idiots. He switched off the set and thought about going for a walk, but he was afraid he'd miss Paul if he came back early.

  When at dusk the front door opened at last and Paul came in, smelling of salt and sweat, fish blood staining his shirt, Peter leapt up from an overstuffed chair, startling him.

  "Jesus. You look like you need a drink."

  "Dad, we have to talk."

  "Jesus," he said again. "I think I need a drink."

  But Peter was too impatient to wait. And after they'd talked, both men needed a drink.

  THIRTY-FIVE

  THE FACE HAD APPEARED—IN PHOTOGRAPHS, NEWSREELS, AND CARICAture—in every country in the world. Men with simila
r features were often mistaken for the original, but when one saw the genuine article there was no doubt. One just knew.

  Alcohol use had thickened the skin on his cheeks, and a season of hunting U-boats in the Gulf Stream had burned it the color of hickory, throwing into sharp relief the silver strands in his beard. He wasn't as tall as Vasco had expected—an inch or so below six feet—but his shoulders were broad and his chest deep beneath the faded khaki shirt unbuttoned halfway down the front and his hard belly hung over the wide belt buckled outside the loops on his teadyed shorts. He had big feet in dirty white deck shoes wearing through at the toes and a long-billed fisherman's cap like Paul Vasco's tugged down over his left eye. The eyes were oddly vulnerable, watching for the reaction to everything he said, and despite his physical substance and the outdoorsy glow there was something unhealthy about him. He had scales in his beard.

  The bar was called Sloppy Joe's, and it's cool dim interior, shuttered with wooden blinds against the sun and brutal heat of Key West in July, was parsed into horizontal stripes of light swarming with dust floes. The jukebox was silent; at that early hour of the afternoon the largely male clientele had not gathered there to listen to music. That totem of southernmost Florida, the stuffed marlin plasticized to a blue-and-white sheen, arched on a wall behind the bar with oldtime prizefighters in cheap plaster frames and an autographed photo of the man Vasco had come to see standing on a dock beside what may have been the same fish hanging from a winch.

  He had keen peripheral vision. Vasco could tell he'd spotted him from among a gaggle of companions at the bar the moment he'd entered—his eyes flicked his way—but it was three or four minutes before he managed to extricate himself—a hand on this back, a likely dirty joke murmured in that ear—from the group and approach the corner table where Vasco waited, carrying a tumbler half-filled with clear liquid and ice cubes. He set it down on the table and took his hand in a hard grasp. His face was broad and his grin seemed broader.

  "I'm glad I had a description. You don't look a thing like the skinny old bird."

  "No, sir, I don't." The voice surprised him, a flat drone. He'd expected something gruff and booming.

  The man swung a leg over a chair like a cowboy mounting up and sat. "Consider it an advantage. My father was a good man, but yellow. My mother's a bitch and I take after her more than anyone in the family."

  "Thanks so much for making time to see me."

  "It was already made. I'm going to London next month, off to cover the war while there's still time, and you can't start a book with that over your head. I like that old dago. I was pleased as hell when he called. He tell you about our time out on his boat?"

  "He said you shot up his beer cooler with a tommy gun."

  The dark brows drew together. "I remember it differently. But I'm used to having the facts blown up all around me."

  "I know a man who can say the same thing, Mr. Hemingway."

  "Ernest. Ernie, if you'll let me buy you a drink. This one's my authorship." The writer tapped his glass. "You mix vodka with water and put it in the freezer in an ice cube tray. The vodka doesn't freeze, so when you float the cubes in more vodka, they break up against your teeth and it's like drinking from a mountain waterfall made of pure grain alcohol."

  "A beer would be fine."

  "Ballantine's, Joe. And another of these."

  A man built along Hemingway's sturdy lines, who didn't look sloppy at all, collected bottles and glasses from a table nearby and returned to the bar. He came back, set another tumbler in front of Hemingway, this one filled almost to the rim, and poured beer into a tall pilsner. When he left, Vasco's host drained his first drink and lifted the second. "To victory. But not till I'm there to supervise it." He didn't think much of the toast, but he touched glasses and drank. Hemingway swallowed. "Where's the screed?"

  "Screed?"

  "The manuscript. Or is that your knitting you're carrying around?"

  He opened the moleskin briefcase he'd leaned against a table leg and drew out the bundle of paper tied with a cord. Sharon, who'd worked in a steno pool before the war, had transcribed his hastily handwritten notes into a hundred neatly typewritten pages. Vasco trusted his memory; he doubted the account wandered more than a few sentences from how it had been told to him, and he was sure of the facts.

  Hemingway took it and held it out at arm's length to read the title page. "The Confessions of Al Capone. Catchy. Is it nonfiction?"

  "It's a novel."

  "Too short; but they said the same thing about The Torrents of Spring. You're in for a legal shitstorm if you get it in print. But being sued by Capone is worth a fortune in free advertising. I was in Paris all the time he was climbing up from the gutter, so most of what I know about him I read in French. The romance languages aren't quite equal to that task. One of the Gennas was gunned down in Oak Park, not six blocks from the house where I grew up. Say what you like about him, his boys hit where they aimed. Did you meet him in Miami?"

  "Yes." He was determined to get by with only one lie.

  "I'd like to. Franco's already got me down as a gangster." He undid the cord and drew a pair of steel-rimmed glasses from a tortoiseshell case in his shirt pocket. He read five pages while Vasco sipped from his glass, then folded his spectacles and put them away. "You've got an ear for dialogue. I'm supposed to know something about that. He as nuts as they say?"

  "His wife says he has good days and bad."

  "Don't we all. Hers is the story you should tell. They say I can't write women, but I did a good enough job with Brett Ashley for a real Lady Ashley to take me to court. The press that got sold an extra fifty thousand copies of Sun, not that I saw any royalties. Those went to my first wife. How much of this is bullshit?"

  "Most of it is public record."

  "So it's bullshit. No matter. The only thing that needs to be true is your sentences."

  He had no idea what that meant.

  Hemingway drummed the sheets even and retied the cord.

  "Keep a carbon?"

  "No. That's the only copy."

  "Dumb. All my early work was stolen in a suitcase at a train station in Paris. I'll keep a close eye on it when I go to New York next week, but I'm not making any guarantees."

  "You'll show it to your editor?"

  "I promised your father I would if it didn't turn out to be crap. You'd be surprised how much crap is out there, how much I have to paw through for friendship's sake, and how much actually gets into print; although not on my nickel. Don't get your hopes up. Nobody's interested in reading about gangsters since the war. You might as well write about Edwardian tea parties and carriage rides down gaslit lanes. Bootleggers are no less quaint."

  "All the same I'm very grateful."

  "You shouldn't have to wait long for an answer. Max Perkins is a dithery old fussbudget, but he's my best friend in that goddamn town and anyway he doesn't believe in leaving people hanging." He downed his drink in one motion, doubled the typescript over lengthwise, and stood up with his hand out.

  Vasco took it.

  "I can't thank you enough, Mr. Hemingway."

  "Ernie."

  He nodded, but he couldn't see himself calling him that any more than he could address Ralph Capone as Bottles.

  "Really, I'd be more comfortable in a hotel. You offered to put me up for a few days and it's been two weeks."

  Sharon shook her head. They were all sitting on the front porch of the house in Fort Lauderdale, digesting one of her masterful briskets and watching the twinkling of the fireflies. A boy pedaling a bicycle on the sidewalk slowed to hurl a late edition rolled into a tight tube onto the doorstep. Peter saw warsaw in bold print in the porch light. "We let you move to the sofa," Sharon said. "That's as far as you get."

  Paul belched. He had his legs stretched out from his seat on the glider and his hands folded on the little bulge in his stomach. Every heavy meal he ate passed through his tubular body like a pig in a python. "You need to hang onto your dough. Sooner or lat
er Hoover's gonna figure out you ain't earning your keep."

  HE'D CALLED KYRIL AT OUR LADY OF REDEMPTION TO EXPLAIN THAT HE was visiting his father and to ask him to call the house if any calls came in for him. The pastor had agreed without asking questions. He was either the least curious man Peter had ever met, or the most discreet.

  But he didn't delude himself that he was hiding out from Hoover. Since what seemed as long as he could remember, he'd sensed he was being watched constantly, and he sensed it now more than ever. Whenever he stepped outdoors he wondered about cars parked on the street he had not seen before. Sharon would know the neighbors' vehicles, but he didn't ask her at the risk of alarming her. She was treating the entire situation as an adventure; or pretending to, for his sake. Paul, after that first conference and his call to Hemingway to set up the interview in Sloppy Joe's, had made no mention of it. He was smoking regularly now. The orange tip of his cigarette glowed fiercely in the assembling darkness.

  Sharon rose from her painted wicker chair and announced she was going to bed. Peter got up to say good night. She hesitated, glancing at Paul, then went inside. After the screen door clapped shut behind her, Peter resumed his seat next to Paul on the glider. "I think she wanted you to join her."

  "I ain't a machine." The cigarette tip moved. Paul's throat worked, swallowing beer. Then the tip moved back the other way.

  "Maybe that isn't what she wanted."

  Paul smoked. "I guess you're the big expert on women now."

  "What do you mean now?"'

  "There's only two people worth getting the shit beat out of you for: your mother and your girl. Your mother's been gone a long time."

  "It wasn't serious, Dad."

  "That's a crock-a-shit."

  "That's your answer to everything."

  "Only where it fits. It's like a Bible verse that way."

  "What would you know about the Bible?"

  "Just what you know about women. It's always serious, Pietro. Even if it's for just one night, it's serious at the time."