They got beyond Lake Geneva and in twenty minutes were into Illinois, on the straightaway that was Northwest Highway to Chicago.
“Now what?” J.P. finally asked.
Les slid out of his craziness slightly.
“Just keep going. Straight on, into Chicago.”
“Les—”
“Just do it,” screamed Les, who didn’t feel up to explaining.
More silence, and finally Les said, “Okay, okay, we have to get to Chicago, we know where. We have to be there when Phil D’Abruzzio gets back from downtown in his limo with his bodyguards. Okay, we know it’s him, he ratted us to the feds, we’re going to light him and his boys up like a Christmas tree, and then we’re done. Next stop, Reno. Next stop, peace and quiet. Next stop, retirement. This one last thing.”
More silence.
“Les,” J.P. finally said, “let’s think this through.”
“Nothing to think through,” said Les.
“Les, listen to J.P., will you please. As a favor to me.”
Les sighed.
“Okay, we know who to hit. But we also know the Division is on us. Nobody’s behind us, but you can bet they called ahead and they’re sending guys out from Chicago. Meanwhile, they’re on our tails, running hard, especially the guy who shoots so good. Nothing’s going to stop him short of a full Tommy mag. So we can be jumped at any time. Now, what about I take a hard right, head us west, and we’ll bunk tonight in Iowa? Right now, we’ve got a free run to make a getaway, nobody’s on us. Nobody’s behind us, nobody’s intercepted us. Okay, we do some soft time in Iowa, then, a week or so down the line, we come on back, do the D’Abruzzio thing, we pick up Helen, pick up the kids, and it’s on to Reno. So much less risk, so much fairer to Helen.”
“He’s got a point,” said Helen. “We don’t have to finish this thing today. We’re being chased we—”
“No,” said Les. “If they think about it, maybe they figure it out. The Division has connections with D’Abruzzio, maybe they alert him of the possibility. Maybe D’Abruzzio goes underground, or moves, or beefs up his security, and we did all this for nothing. He will be most vulnerable tonight. We have to do him tonight.”
“Les,” said Helen, “it’s—”
“Helen, please, this is how it has to be. This guy did us all, all us road bandits, Johnny, Homer, dumbbell Pretty Boy, and now me, I’m the last. It can’t stand. There’s got to be payment on those accounts. We owe it. Now, Helen—you too, J.P., if you want—I’ll drop you off at a motel and go on alone. With the Monitor and a Thompson, I can do it. Then I come back tonight and pick you up and off we go. If I don’t make it, Helen, I love you so, but J.P.’s a good man and he’ll take care of you, and I’ll die knowing you’re in good hands and that makes me happy. But this has to be done—don’t you get it?—it has to be done!”
They were silent. Who could speak out against such conviction?
“Okay,” said Les. “J.P., pull over. Let me drive now. You saved our bacon once, let me pilot us to the hit. You get some shut-eye so you can drive through the night.”
—
AFTER THE LONGEST twenty-two minutes in history, Charles’s Pontiac straight-8 came up the road. Metcalf and MacRae, good men, if young, saw right away from his tension on the porch that something had happened.
“Sheriff, what’s going on?” Metcalf asked, getting out.
“He was here. Nelson, a little while ago, drove up big as life.”
“Jesus Christ!”
“He took off like a shot.”
“What’s he doing here so early?”
“I have no idea. Okay, you guys, out of the car, get the heavy weapons loaded, and come along as soon as possible in the Division vehicle. I’m going after them now.”
“Charles, you’ll never—”
“I ain’t sitting here. I also have to stop and call Sam. I have the plate number and the car make. Mark this: shiny black 1934 Ford V-8, Illinois 639578. I’m going after it now, you come along with the automatic stuff.”
“You don’t know where he’s going!”
“I’d guess back into Chicago. If not, then we lost him. But I have to assume it’s Chicago. I’ll tell Sam to send people the other direction, out Northwest Highway, with the car description. If he’s going to Chicago, we may still nab him.”
“He can’t be that stupid.”
“He can. Now, get out and start loading.”
They dashed into the house to unlimber the BARs and Thompsons, plus the ammunition that still had to be loaded into spare magazines. Meanwhile, Charles jumped behind the wheel of the Pontiac, turned the key, backed up, oriented down the dirt road, and accelerated out of the lodge property. It wasn’t five minutes before he was in Lake Geneva, and he pulled into a filling station, had the attendant fuel him up while he ran to a phone booth.
He looked at his watch; it was 2:30.
He got the operator.
“Law enforcement emergency, Justice Department, Chicago, Randolph 6226.”
In a few seconds, Elaine Donovan answered.
“Elaine, this is Swagger. Get me Sam—fast.”
Another second.
“Charles?”
“We had him. He just showed up and saw me and took off.”
“Oh, Christ,” said Sam.
“Sam, he’s in a 1934 shiny black Ford V-8, with two or three others, the license plate is Illinois 639578. He may be heading straight down Northwest Highway to Chicago.”
“I don’t have anyone. Lord, Charles, I’ve got the boys all over the place and no way of reaching them.”
“Well, if anyone—”
“No, Ed’s here, that’s right. Okay, we’ll load up and head out Northwest.”
“Sam, be careful. This guy’s crazy. He wants to go all the way. If you get him in your sights”—the thought of Sam in a gunfight with Baby Face Nelson filled Charles with horror—“fire. Don’t mess around with arrest orders or anything like that. He’s too dangerous. Put him down like a rabid dog and go home to your kids. Let Ed work the Thompson, he’s real good with it. Ed can take him, Sam. Please, don’t you try.”
“I hear you, Charles.”
58
THE OUACHITAS
ARKANSAS
The present
“WE KNOW WHAT happened on that last day,” said the one that talked, Braxton, according to the ID.
“And goobers can fly,” said Nick. “They can even carry passengers.”
“You don’t want to hear? Fine, we’ll do our time. We got some pals too, and it won’t be so hard on us as you think—ha-ha. And the sniper there, he’s got to spend the rest of his life wondering, What did them boys know? How’d they know it? And since we been living in his iPhone for six weeks, we know he’s as serious about this as anything on earth, except the welfare of his kids. Sniper, you want to just wonder? You’d pay that price to put two only sort of bad bad guys away for a few years?”
Swagger said, “Keep talking.”
“Look at him, Rawley,” said Braxton. “He’s all curiosityed up. He’s got to know.”
He laughed.
“You know, Rawley,” he said, “I think we should have just come in with Plan B in the first place. So much easier. Saves us all this stomping around in the woods. I wouldn’t have had to put on no diapers, though I have grown fond of the Depends lifestyle.” He laughed again, and even Rawley, who resembled an Olmec stone head settling into its second thousand years under the vines, cracked a smile.
“We’ll hear the pitch,” said Bob.
“You only get pitch. You don’t get no info. The pitch is enough.”
“We’ll see,” said Bob.
“Here’s the bargain. We tell you what happened. I prove to you it’s legit and can be backed up at any time. I also tell you where you went wrong and where
Rawley went right. You are a hundred percent pleased with the info, and you believe it. You snip these cuffs, present us with the Monitor, and wave bye-bye. We’re over the hill in ten minutes. Oh, we get our guns back.”
“I’ll drop the guns at some place in Little Rock, if that’s the way the decision goes,” said Bob.
“You figure he’s on the level, Rawley?” Braxton asked.
Rawley nodded imperceptibly.
“That one doesn’t talk much, does he?” asked Nick.
“I speak when I have something to say,” said Rawley. “I save a lot of time that way. Okay, Sniper Swagger, you think you’re so smart, but I figured out your next move in the investigation, where the genius FBI agent here couldn’t, and I went ahead with it, so I have the document in question. That’s why I have the answers and you never will.”
“He can talk,” said Nick.
“He’s a goddamned genius,” said Braxton.
“Your initial problem was conceptual,” said Rawley. “As I followed the investigation, I have to say that you were certainly doing a professional job, and a few of the discoveries were impressive. Tracking Baby Face back to Lebman by means of the compensator, that’s very solid. But it’s also clear to me that you have reached the limits of your known world and it’s unlikely that you’ll get any further. What that represents is a failure not of logic but imagination. Your brains are limited by boundaries. You can’t see beyond them, have no concept of what’s beyond them, and, lacking that, no process for navigating them.”
“Don’t he talk purty?” said Braxton.
“No points for style and grammar,” said Bob, “only content.”
“Oh, it’s about to get interesting. Go on, brother, the floor’s all yours. Oh, Mr. FBI Man, sir, maybe you could change my diapers, as they’re beginning to chafe.”
Braxton enjoyed his own joke immensely, and Rawley did him the courtesy of letting him finish his laugh.
“You scoured the overworld,” he finally said, “that is, the bourgeois matrix of propriety, rule, order, documentation, memory, index, memoir, rumor, myth, and Google. You were thorough, precise, and diligent. But you never got close to the truth. The truth isn’t in the overworld. It’s in the underworld.”
He let that sink in.
“We Grumley, and all like us, we like what we do. And so we talk and remember and pass along. We know it’s historically important and explains so much. We know it tells us things you could never understand, many of the whys and hows of history. The fact that it’s ours, and not yours, is fabulously enjoyable.”
“Get on with it,” said Swagger.
“I looked at the same data you did, but I saw possibilities extending into our world. One of the things I noticed was that the single witness to that last day lived until 1974.”
“We read the Bureau interrogations of John Paul Chase,” said Nick. “He seemed to say a lot, but he really didn’t say much. He didn’t even call it a Monitor, just a machine gun.”
“He was a professional criminal and, as you will see, he had a mandate to lie. So he told the story that your people wanted to hear, and they were so pleased to hear it, they bought it. It became the narrative. But it’s far from the truth.”
“And you learned the truth?”
“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. First, I had to find what remained of his presence on earth. Not easy. You could not have done it. But I saw he spent his time at Alcatraz, and I asked older Grumley to come up with names of other Alcatraz veterans. It took some time, but, one by one, I got in contact with these old salts and found one who remembered Chase as quite a mild fellow who, when paroled, went to live with a relative in Sausalito, his hometown. The birth records of Sausalito led me to the tax records, which led me to Chase’s great-granddaughter, and, through a lawyer, I approached, feeling my two hundred forty pounds and KILL and MAIM tattooed on my knuckles might scare her off. Through the lawyer, I put out a gentle tender. You could never have done that, Swagger, because the crucial connect with the ex-Alcatrazer is denied you. You could never have found him. And if you had, he wouldn’t have spoken to you, overworlder. He sang to me. This is why it’s so much fun being a criminal.”
Swagger said nothing. Dammit, he was impressed. Maybe he could have—but maybe not. Anyhow, Rawley was back on his pulpit.
“So here’s the John Paul Chase story. He was paroled in 1968. An old man but spunky. He went to live with a great-granddaughter and spent the next six years in pleasant circumstances in his hometown, painting bad landscapes. To Grumley, that’s a happy ending: comfort, memories, the sense of singularity and accomplishment the professional criminal feels, because no matter how you punish him, you’ve only punished him for a fraction of his crimes. He has the last laugh. And, believe me, John Paul had plenty to laugh about.”
“Where is this going?” said Nick.
“To the heart of the heart of the matter. Now, would you mind shutting up so I can finish?”
Even Nick’s irritation was tamed by curiosity. Was this it? Could this unlikely creature with his giant guns, tattoos, skull fractures, and over-brightened teeth actually know something?
“Initially, Chase was silent. He enjoyed it too much to share it. He never talked about the old days because that was his treasure and he enjoyed hoarding it. His great-granddaughter begged him to write it all down, but he wouldn’t because he said nobody cared and spilling it all for nothing would be disrespectful.”
“But he talked in his sleep?” asked Nick.
“No, the environment changed radically in 1972. Can you guess why?”
“You’re ahead of us on everything,” said Swagger, “I guess you’re ahead of us on 1972.”
“I guess so. The great American movie The Godfather is released, from the Mario Puzo bestseller. It’s the rare hit that deserves its fame and fortune, but it ignites a fire in popular culture regarding organized crime. Mobster, mobster, mobster, twenty-four/seven, and for the next two years three out of every four movies, and six out of every ten books, are about the gangster world. Can you imagine the impact this had on the old man living in the basement in Sausalito who knew things? It was like he was holding stock in a gold mine or Haloid before it became Xerox. So finally, he sat down and wrote it, the true tale of the end of FBI war on the motorized bandits, in a public park in Barrington, Illinois—oh, yes, and elsewhere—on November twenty-seventh, 1934. He wrote it down. I’ve read it. Several times. Would you like to, fellows?”
Silence.
“You know the price? Snip the flex-cuffs, hand over the Monitor and our artillery, and be quit of us, just as we will be quit of you.”
“You have the thing?”
“Not only do I have it, I have it not far from here. You’ll laugh at this, Swagger. Not only were we not going to kill you, we were going to leave it with you, so that when the sodium pentothal wore off, you’d know that you hadn’t been robbed, you’d been given fair value: your goods for ours. So you’d have no need to come looking for us. We don’t want you dogging us, any more than you’d want us dogging you. Call it professional courtesy.”
“How can I verify it? I mean, even if it’s authentic and you put it in front of me, how can I know it’s authentic?”
“Well, first of all, does it seem likely that Brax and I had a three-hundred-page handwritten manuscript in several ’thirties-era notebooks fabricated against the possibility of this occurrence? We’re smart, but nobody’s that smart. I’d guess you could have the rag content of the paper, the age of the ink, the fading of the cover pages, any number of forensic factors, analyzed.”
“That would only take six weeks. Do you want to sit in that hole in flex-cuffs for six weeks while we check? It’s okay by me.”
“I’m simply noting probability, not actuality. As for the actuality, he notarized his thumbprint on it. He knew that if he were going to have it published
, instant authentication was part of the sale. So it’s got his notarized 1974 thumbprint and his Chicago 1934 fingerprint card. You can compare the prints. Even with the naked eye, you’ll see they’re the same.”
“Why didn’t his family publish it?”
“As you will see, they realized it tells a different story. Maybe they thought that the different story would do more harm than good. Maybe that’s an issue you’ll have to contend with as well. Wasn’t there a movie where some newspaperman says, ‘When the truth conflicts with the legend, print the legend’?”
“Liberty Valance,” said Nick, who knew of such things. “Starring John Wayne, the Charles Swagger of the movies.”
“Tell me where this manuscript is.”
“Snip, snip,” said Braxton.
59
BARRINGTON, ILLINOIS
November 27, 1934
SAM GAVE ELAINE INSTRUCTIONS to relay the Baby Face information and car ID and plate number to any agents who called in and then he went swiftly to the arms room.
“Okay, Ed,” he said, “Charles just called. I’ll explain later, but we’ve got to move fast. Nelson may be coming down Northwest Highway to Chicago. I have his make and plate. Maybe we can intercept him.”
Ed jumped.
“Sam, are you sure you don’t want to wait until we get some more fellows in? You and me against Baby Face, that’s a tall order.”
“The others will join us as they can. Charles is in pursuit from Lake Geneva. Come on, we’ve got to get cracking. What’s loaded?”
Ed keyed open the gun vault, revealing empty racks, but for one Thompson and one Remington riot gun.
“All the other stuff is out with the boys,” he said. “I just loaded up a drum for the Tommy.”
“Good, you take that, I’ll take the shotgun. I’ve fired a shotgun before, at least.” It was a short-barreled Remington Model 11, a semi-auto with a capacity of four rounds. It had come over from the Department of the Army, where it had been acquired for trench warfare.
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