He looked at me blankly, but there was respect in his eyes. “You’re pretty good, mister. Are you a cop?”
“Of sorts. Let me guess something else, while I’m at it. You two are a childless couple. You’ve been married for maybe twenty years, maybe twenty-five, but there was never an off-spring. You wanted a family. With your background, adoption was tricky. But then, finally, like a miracle—somebody gave you a son.”
He took a small step back and slipped his arm around his wife’s shoulder; she pressed close to him, weeping quietly. “That’s right,” he said. “And we love our son, mister. And he loves us.”
“That’s just swell. You do know who the boy is?”
“Yes, we do. He’s Carl Belliance, Jr.”
“You got the ‘junior’ right, anyway.”
Madge Belliance, lip trembling, said, “We’ve never said that…never said that name. Never spoken it.”
I raised an eyebrow, the gun still trained carefully on them. “Charles Lindbergh, Jr., you mean? Where is he?”
“He’s at school,” she said. She was trying to summon some defiance, but it wasn’t playing.
“When does he get home?”
“You’re not going to hurt him…” she wondered, gripping her husband’s shirt; he patted her.
“Hell no, lady. I’m giving him back to his real parents. When does he get home?”
“It’s a long walk,” she said. She licked her lips. “In half an hour, maybe. We never did anything wrong, mister.”
“Ever hear of a guy named Hauptmann?”
“Yes,” Belliance said, and he raised his chin. “We hear he was a goddamn extortionist and is getting what he deserves.”
“Oh, is that what they told you? That’s a good one. You got a hired hand?”
“Not now,” he said. “Some of the year I do.”
I glanced quickly around the place. “You seem to be faring pretty well, here, despite hard times. What are you raising on this farm, besides a stolen kid? Berries? Corn? Never mind—I don’t really care. Here.”
With my left hand, I extended the roll of electrical tape toward Madge Belliance. She took it, with reluctance and confusion.
“Use some of that to tie your husband’s wrists behind his back. Do it now.”
“But…”
“Now, I said. Let’s get this done before Junior gets home, and that’ll lessen the chance anything bad does happen.”
She exchanged glances with her husband; he looked at her gravely, and nodded, and she sighed heavily and nodded back. He turned his back to her, put his wrists behind him and she bound him with the tape.
When she was done, she held the tape out to me. I took it and told her to turn around and put her wrists behind her. With the nine millimeter held in the crotch of my left arm, I quickly wound the black tape around her wrists. Then I nudged her forward. I told them to turn and face me again, and they did.
“Let’s go to the cellar,” I said.
They led me there; the double storm-cellar doors were along the side of the house where I was parked. They went down the half-flight of wooden steps ahead of me. The basement was hard-packed dirt. It had that same reddish cast.
“Sit against that wall,” I said. “I don’t want to have to knock anybody out.”
They sat. Keeping back from them, the gun tucked under my arm, I used the hunting knife to cut the rope. I bound both their ankles, and added a length of rope to the wrists of each. Then I had them sit back to back against a support beam and tied them together, around the chest and waist, the beam between them. Nobody said anything through any of this.
Her apron I cut into strips with the knife and gagged them that way; that was kinder than using the electrical tape, which had been my original plan. When you’re pulling a kidnapping, you have to be flexible.
I stood before them. “I don’t want you to make a sound,” I said. “Don’t alert that boy you’re down here.”
Belliance’s eyes were hard; his wife’s were soft.
“You behave yourselves,” I said, “and maybe I won’t turn you in. All I want is to put that boy back with his rightful parents. Understood?”
They just looked at me.
“Understood?” I repeated.
The father nodded curtly; then, hesitantly, his wife nodded, too, several times.
I put my gun in my shoulder holster, not in my raincoat pocket, and left them in the cellar with the dirt and some rakes and a wall of jarred preserves.
Then I climbed from the cellar to the cool fresh air and walked around and sat on the front-porch swing and waited for Charles Lindbergh, Jr., to come home from school.
It wasn’t a long wait. Less than fifteen minutes.
From my vantage point on the porch of the hillside farmhouse, I could see down on the gravel road where half a dozen kids of various ages were walking, kicking up a little dust as they did. He was the youngest—what would he be, now? Six? Almost six. This was either his first or second year of school.
He came up the gravel lane all alone, a tiny figure in a brown coat and gray slacks; his hat—it made something catch in my throat to see it—was an aviation-style helmet with decorative goggles that the kids had been wearing the last couple years. He had mittens. No schoolbooks—too young for that yet, I guessed. He walked up the lane like a little soldier. A little man. And the closer he got, the more that face was Slim’s.
He hesitated when he saw me, then he moved confidently toward the porch and said, “Who are you, mister?”
I got up off the swing. I smiled. “I’m a friend of your parents. Come on up here, Carl.”
He thought about that. The dimpled chin, the baby face, were so familiar. Was he hesitating, because somewhere in his memory he remembered getting pulled here and there by strange people?
“Where are Mom and Dad?”
“They had to go away, suddenly. They asked me to pick you up after school, and take you to them.”
The little eyes narrowed. “I’m supposed to go with you?”
“That’s right. I’m going to take you to your folks, real soon.”
“Well. Okay. But I’m hungry.”
“Let’s see if we can find you something in the kitchen,” I said.
A pie was cooling on the kitchen table. Other food was still in various stages of preparation; some chicken Madge had been about to roll in breading sat naked on the counter. Peeled potatoes were in the sink. But the little boy didn’t put it together.
“Can I have a piece pie?” he asked. He was taking off his coat and hat and putting them neatly on a chair; his mittens were already off.
“Sure,” I said. “Then later we’ll stop for a hamburger on the way to see your folks, okay?”
“Okay.”
So I cut him a “piece pie.” Dutch apple. I had a big slice myself; I’d worked up an appetite. Delicious.
I gave him a napkin and he wiped off his cute little Lindy mug and said, “I have to go to the bathroom.”
“Okay,” I said.
I followed him upstairs. He asked me to undo his pants and I did. But he went in by himself and did what he had to. I stood by the closed door and listened as he flushed the toilet and ran the water and washed his hands.
He was drying them on his pants as he came out.
“Let’s go in your room,” I said, bending to button the pants back up, “and get some of your things, and then we’ll go. If you have some special toys you want to take with you, pick ’em out. We can’t take everything.”
“Why do you keep your raincoat on in the house?”
“Because we’re going, real soon. Now, let’s get your things.”
He was picking some toys out of a chest by the window, while from a dresser I was getting a few of his clothes, which I was in the process of stuffing in a pillowcase, when I heard something outside. Something like gravel stirring. I went to the window.
A car was pulling in, next to mine. It was a black Ford, brand shiny new. Two men got quickly o
ut.
“Jesus,” I said.
“What’s wrong, mister?”
“We’re going to play a game, Carl,” I said, bending down again, taking him by his little shoulders and looking him straight in his dark-blue eyes. “It’s like hide-and-go-seek. I want you to hide under your bed, and I don’t want you to say a word or make a sound, okay? Until you hear me say, olly olly oxen free.”
“Okay.”
He scurried under the bed.
“Quiet as a mouse, now,” I said, and got my gun in my hand.
The two men I’d seen were old friends. I hadn’t seen them in a very long time. The last time had been four years ago in a suite at the Carteret Hotel in Elizabeth, New Jersey. When they’d been shooting Max Greenberg and Max Hassel to shit.
I stood just around the corner from the top of the stairs as I heard the front door open.
“Where is everybody?” A high-pitched whiny voice.
“I’ll check the house.” A gravelly baritone.
They were whispering, but I could hear them.
“What should I do?”
“Like the boss said—nobody breathing.”
“Jesus, a little kid, Phil?”
“Yes. Check around outside. Do Heller, the farmer and his wife and the kid and any chickens and cows that get in your fuckin’ way.”
While this was going on, I got on my belly and snake-crawled to the edge of the stairs and soon I could see them down there: Phil was the flat-faced guy with Oriental eyes, wearing a black coat and a gray hat and gray gloves with a great big .45 auto in one mitt; and Jimmy (I remembered his name from our first encounter) was the pug-nosed, bright-eyed, round-faced guy, who I’d winged last time, and who wore a gray tweedy-looking topcoat, and he too had a .45 in one gloved hand. No silencers. Who was going to hear it out here?
Jimmy was opening the door to go out when I opened fire on the fuckers. I got Jimmy in the side of the head and it shook him, made him jump like he was startled, only he was more than startled, because the inside of Jimmy’s head made it outside before the rest of him did, and he flopped sideways on the porch, on his brains, wedging the door open with his dead body.
Phil caught one in the arm, but unfortunately not the arm of his shooting hand, and he was returning fire, and .45 slugs chewed up the world around me, wall and banister and stairs and then he was gone, not out the door, where Jimmy’s body blocked the way, but into the house somewhere.
I didn’t see any other way to play it: I started down the stairs two and three at a time, the nine millimeter pointed off to my left, where Phil had gone, and I was looking at an empty living room when the son of a bitch popped up from behind a chair and fired off one well-placed round, clipping me in the side, sending me tumbling headfirst, clattering my way to the bottom in a jumbled mess of arms and legs, all tangled in my raincoat. I was stunned by the fall more than the gunshot, having hit my head five or six times on the way down; but I didn’t feel pain in my side yet, just wetness, and still on the floor, I fired back at where Phil had been, but he was gone and all I managed to do was put a bullet into the upright piano. It made a little musical ouch.
I wasn’t the only one bleeding: Phil had left a trail, and I followed it. I stumbled through the house, through a sitting room, into the kitchen, where a doorway led, goddammit, to the upstairs. Carefully, hugging the narrow walls of the stairwell, I made my way up the back stairs, and was following the bloody trail when I heard the child yelp.
I ran to his room; now it hurt.
Phil had pulled the boy out from under the bed, obviously, and was clutching the boy to him; the blond-haired baby-faced child looked at me with wide beseeching eyes as Phil hugged the boy to him like a shield and pointed that .45 at me.
I was weak, and I could feel myself slipping, but I steadied the nine millimeter at him and said, “Phil—there’s something you should know.”
Phil, whose face was whiter than the peeled potatoes in the sink downstairs, said, “What, asshole?”
I shot him between the eyes.
“A shot in the head,” I said, “kills all reflex action.”
Phil didn’t hear me, of course. He’d gone where Jimmy went. The little boy dropped himself to the floor, landing nimbly on his toes, as the dead Phil teetered on feet waiting for signals they’d never receive. Then Phil’s corpse decided to land on its face, rather than its ass, and the furniture in the room shook.
“Nice shot, huh, kid?” I said.
“Mister—you don’t look so good.”
“I know…”
“Mister, I’m afraid.”
“Son…your parents…they’re downstairs…in the cellar. They’re tied up…”
Concern gripped his face. “Are Mommy and Daddy hurt?”
“They’re fine, just…you go down there, go out the back way…untie ’em. Bring your daddy…bring your daddy up here.”
He was thinking that over.
I fell to my knees. “Do…do that, son, please…do it…now.”
“Okay, mister,” he said.
And then I flopped on my face.
Vaguely I remember Carl Belliance turning me over, gently, then hovering over me like a homely angel.
I whispered, “They came to…came to kill…you…too.”
“What?” he said.
The boy was with him; the boy was hugging Carl’s arm. I could hear him saying: “Daddy, Daddy, Daddy….”
I said, “Don’t call Ricca…don’t call the Waiter….”
“What?”
Daddy…Daddy…Daddy…
“You’ll die, too, if you do…he sent them…Ricca sent them…call number…in my wall…”
“Your wall?”
Daddy…Daddy…Daddy…
“Wallet. In my…wall…call Nitti….”
I saw my father’s face. I saw my mother’s face. I went to sleep.
41
I woke up.
My mouth felt thick with the taste of sleep, and with something else, something bitter. Medication?
I was on my back in a bed. Hospital bed. I felt weak.
“Ah, you’re awake,” a woman said. “Good. Let me crank you up.”
The grinding sound signaled my being raised to a sitting position. I was in a private room. I had an IV in my arm. I could feel, or sense, the bandage on my side. Out the window, it was day.
“Where…?”
The nurse was an attractive brunette with lipstick as bright as a cigarette girl’s, but her nose was too big. Italian.
She smiled and it was white and nice and I forgave her her honker. “You’re in Jefferson Park Hospital,” she said.
“How…how’d I get here?”
“Private ambulance, I believe.” She checked my pulse, then brushed hair off my forehead. She gently pulled back the sheets; for a second I thought she was going to blow me, but I was only getting my dressing checked. Just my luck. I drifted away then.
When I woke up again, a small dark man with slicked-back, graying, perfectly barbered hair was sitting in a chair next to my bed, hands folded in his lap, patiently. He was wearing a tailored gray suit and a black-and-gray-and-white knit tie; he might have been attending a wedding, or a funeral.
“Hello, Frank,” I said, having to work to make my eyes focus on him.
“Nate,” Nitti said neutrally, and he smiled. It was a restrained smile.
Out the window, it was night.
“How’d I get here? Don’t tell me an ambulance.”
“That’s not important.”
I started to remember. “Belliance! He called you…”
“Somebody called. Who is not important.”
“Thank God. If he’d called Ricca…what about those torpedoes I shot?”
Nitti glanced around behind him, making sure the door was shut. He scooted his chair closer to the bed.
“You insist on talking about this,” he said, a little bit weary, a little bit irritated.
“What about those guys I shot?”
/>
“Fish food.”
I swallowed thickly. Sleep taste. Medicine taste. The IV was still in my arm, I noticed. “Who were they, Frank?”
“Out-of-state talent. Freelancers. People the Waiter uses…used…time to time.”
“How’d they find me?”
“How should I know.”
That janitor at the Sheridan six-flat? Maybe he called Ricca.
“I think,” Nitti said quietly, “that Paul might’ve been having them watched.”
“The Belliances?”
He nodded. “He knew you was sniffing around. But I don’t think he was having you tailed. He knew you was under my protection, wouldn’t go against me unless he had no other choice. Besides, he knew the only way you could spring Hauptmann was if you found the kid. So he must’ve had the farmer and his wife staked out, in case you found the kid.” He shrugged. “You found the kid.”
“They were gonna rub out the whole fuckin’ family, Frank.”
He frowned, shook his head. “That’s terrible. That’s a bad thing. You stopped a bad thing, Nate. I admire that.”
I couldn’t hear any irony in the words. “You do?”
He touched his chest with both hands. “I’m a father. I got a son. You don’t kill fuckin’ kids. Paul oughta know that; he’s got a boy.”
“So does Capone.”
Nitti shook his head. “Some people got no morality. These are churchgoing people, too, Nate. Hard to picture.”
“Frank!” I tried to sit up.
“Here,” he said, and he rose and cranked the bed up, some; then he sat calmly back down.
I was not calm. “What have you done with the boy?”
“The boy?”
“Don’t do this to me, Frank. I don’t feel good.”
“He’s safe. He’s with his family.”
“He’s back with Slim…?”
“Slim?”
“Lindbergh!”
Nitti laughed, shortly. “Hell, no. He’s with his family.”
“The Belliances, you mean.”
“That’s not their name, now.”
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