Now and Then, Amen

by Jon Cleary

  Paddy Mulligan had come to America in 1890. He had tried to get a job with Tammany Hall in New York, but all the good jobs were already taken in that hive of political patronage. He had come west to Chicago and been taken on by John “The Bath” Coughlin and Michael “Hinky Dink” Kenna, two Godfearing, church-going scoundrels who ran the First Ward; he had become a devout Democrat, though he had never bothered himself with the party’s national policy or image. He had gone back on a visit to Ireland in 1904, met, courted, married and got pregnant Cathleen O’Farrell. He returned to Chicago and she followed him a year later with young Seamus, already dribbling at the nose.

  Jimmy grew up, got over his chest ills, wiped his nose and joined his father in the First Ward. But politics didn’t offer enough for an ambitious eighteen-year-old. He began doing odd jobs on the side. He invented the term “feasibility consultant,” putting it under his name on printed business cards, and equally ambitious but minor gang leaders began paying for his advice. He did no killing, never carried a gun; he just advised on the feasibility of an assassination, the risks and potential in a new bootleg territory; he was the forerunner of one of today’s flourishing professions. He came to the attention of Dion O’Banion, Hymie Weiss and Vincent Drucci, three wise men looking for a wiser one, but he always remained his own man. Working for men as disparate as those three, he had to be his own man if he was to survive.

  Then he had been called in to do a job for the Big Fella himself. Al Capone’s liquor was being hijacked; he suspected it was being done by Bugs Moran, but he was not certain. Could Mr. Mulligan infiltrate the Moran gang?

  “I can give it a try, Mr. Capone. Moran don’t know me—he never met me when I did a job or two for O’Banion. I’ll try another name and see what I can do. Is it okay if I lose a consignment of booze, maybe two, just to get the proof?”

  “Sure. I’ll get it back, one way or the other.”

  So he had been working for Capone for a month and every day he was coming to realize that no one remained his own man while working for Capone; or ever would be again. Consultants, more than any other businessmen, should be aware of their own expendability.

  So on this February day in 1929 he walked uptown, with the wind behind him, to the Metropole Hotel on South Michigan. Snow covered his shoulders like his mother’s shawl; but his expensive hand-made shoes were dark with slush. Winter lashed, poked and scratched at him; the North Pole let him know it was just a suburb of Chicago. He pined for sunshine and warmth, for Florida, which he had never seen, or even for that home of ratbaggery, California, which he had only read about. He would go out there and make love to Billie Dove or Lil Tashman, two classy dames.

  He turned in to the Metropole Hotel, glad of its warmth. He walked across the big lobby to one of the private elevators, nodded hello to the house detective who stood outside it, and got the elevator boy to take him up to the second of the two floors occupied by the Capone mob. Each floor was more heavily guarded than the White House; occupancy here was not guaranteed by the voters. In any event, who would be bothered bumping off Herbert Hoover?

  Jimmy Mulligan got out of the elevator, looked down at his soaked shoes in disgust; he should have worn his two-toned galoshes. He took off his overcoat and straightened his silk tie against the stiff collar of his Sulka shirt. He had once heard a newspaperman describe him as “natty” and the description had haunted him ever since.

  “Mr. Mulligan to see Mr. Brown,” he said to the chief guard, two hundredweight of lard and a few dimes’ worth of brain.

  “Al ain’t here.” Capone was still referred to as Al Brown, a nom de guerre he had adopted when he had first come west from New York; he was also known as the Big Fella, a compliment he appreciated though he did not like to be addressed as such to his face. He positively hated to be called Scarface, even behind his back. “He’s down to the other place. He expecting you?”

  Mulligan nodded, only half-attentive to the big hoodlum. He was always fascinated when he came up here, or to the floor below. Capone rented fifty rooms in the hotel; this was the powerhouse of his empire. Politicians and judges and police officers came here to pay their respects and to be paid off; Sunday morning was pay-day and the supplicants came straight here from Mass, their souls clean if not their hands. The senior ones got in to see the Big Fella himself, in Suite 409-410, where he sat beneath portraits of his three heroes, George Washington, Abraham Lincoln and Mayor Big Bill Thompson. There he burdened them with little homilies on the dangers of being in the limelight, an illumination the politicians couldn’t live without, and how he longed for respectability, the dream of every mother for her son. Mrs. Capone had raised five sons and four of them had become gangsters; even her only daughter had married a gangster. If Mrs. Capone had been praying for respectability for her family, she had been facing the wrong way. The fifth son had left home in 1919, gone out to Nebraska and become a law officer, a blot on the family honour.

  Today was a slow day: there were only whores, gamblers and bootleg liquor salesmen on the two floors. But this was Monday and the smell of Sunday’s power still lingered; it was like snuff in Jimmy Mulligan’s nostrils. Some day he would have power like this, but in a warmer climate.

  “Call the other place and tell him I’m coming,” he said, practising authority, and the hoodlum, recognizing someone higher up the brain scale than himself, made a gesture that almost looked like a salute.

  Jimmy put his hat and overcoat back on, went out of the hotel into the grey day that now seemed lighter because the snow had settled in thickening banks. He walked two blocks down to 2145 South Michigan, his feet freezing in his soaked shoes. He paused outside the doctor’s office, admired the respectability of the name-plate on the door: Dr. A. Brown. He pressed the bell-button and was admitted. The Metropole Hotel might be where the power lay, but this was where the money was. And Jimmy Mulligan was as fascinated by money as he was by power.

  There were people waiting in the reception room, but none of them, Mulligan knew, would be patients. Not that they were a healthy-looking lot; they had the look of men and women who rarely, if ever, saw sunlight; their livers and lungs would resemble a brown string-bag. The prescriptions they were waiting for were cheques or bills.

  Mulligan was admitted at once to the surgery behind the reception room. The back wall was lined with shelves, on which were rows and rows of bottles of various sizes, all containing coloured liquids. These were Dr. Brown’s medicines, his panaceas and elixirs: samples of all the liquors supplied by the man behind the desk. Who was Dr. Al Brown himself, the Big Fella, Alphonse Capone.

  “Mr. Mulligan—” The relationship between the two men was always formal. There was very little difference in their ages; each of them had ambitions to be a gentleman, “You made the arrangement we talked about?”

  “It was like selling candy to a sweet-toothed idjit,” said Mulligan. “The brains in that outfit wouldn’t make a decent breakfast. Greed turns intelligence into a headache.”

  Capone looked around at the four other men in the surgery. “Don’t you guys wish you had Mr. Mulligan’s education?”

  “I had no education,” said Mulligan modestly. “An hour a day in the public library, that was all. Emerson on Monday, Thoreau on Tuesday . . . I’ve also read Machiavelli,” he added with touch of his forelock to Mr. Capone’s Italian heritage.

  “I’ve heard of him,” said Capone, impressed. His four henchmen nodded, thinking he was probably some educated hood from New York or Detroit. “So Moran is expecting the shipment tomorrow?”

  Mulligan gave him the details. At the same time he was observing Capone, as he always did when he met the crime boss. The big jowly face with the two three-inch scars down the left cheek and the thick lips was not a friendly one; the smile could be pleasant, but the dark eyes never seemed to match it. The thick fingers sported diamond rings and the gold watch on the fat wrist was a reminder that time could be expensive. The silk-and-mohair suit was a little flashy for Mulligan�
��s taste and so were the grey spats above the small, almost dainty shoes. But Capone owned an empire and emperors have to have the right clothes. A little vulgarity never hurt, since 99 per cent of the peasants were themselves vulgar.

  “What do I owe you, Mr. Mulligan?”

  Mulligan had already got his payment, though Capone didn’t know that. “I’ll leave that to you, Mr. Capone. Ours has been a gentleman’s agreement.”

  Capone smiled: even the eyes seemed to have some mirth in them. “You trust too much, Mr. Mulligan. Ain’t you ever been double-crossed?”

  “Once.”

  “You kill the guy?”

  Mulligan shook his head, “There are other ways, Mr. Capone.” He had betrayed the double-crosser to the police; but it would not be politic to tell that to the Big Fella. “You’re not a double-crosser.”

  “No, you’re right, I ain’t.” He had all the assurance of an emperor. “That’s what fucks me about Moran. Two grand for your trouble, Mr. Mulligan, that okay?”

  “Three, Mr. Capone,” said Mulligan and was aware at once of the stiffening attitude of the four henchmen in their chairs against the walls.

  But Capone was relaxed, just smiled again. “They told me you was ambitious. You hoping some day to make the sorta money I make?”

  “Maybe.” Mulligan knew he was treading on ice much thinner than that out on the shores of Lake Michigan, but he could not resist the thrill of it. “I ain’t aiming to compete against you, I ain’t that dumb. But there are other cities . . . I’m fascinated by power, Mr. Capone, and you gotta have money to have that.”

  Capone nodded, still relaxed: this Irishman would never be a real competitor. “That’s right. I’m king of this city, of the State too, and I only got that because I got the dough. I could be king of America, if it wasn’t for the fucking Government.”

  “I’m sure we’d all vote for you,” said Mulligan, who hadn’t voted in his life.

  “Sure,” said Capone, who knew a liar when he sat in front of him. “Okay, go through to the back room. Mr. Guzik will fix you up. You want it in cash, right?”

  “Is there any other form of currency?” said Mulligan. “Good-day, Mr. Capone. May your empire increase.”

  “It ain’t getting any easier,” said the crime boss. “The fucking Government’s starting to take itself seriously.”

  “Ain’t it always the way? Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

  Capone pondered that for a moment, then nodded. “Who said that?”

  Mulligan could not remember, but he never admitted ignorance. “Leonardo da Vince.”

  “Us Italians,” said Capone, though he always claimed to be 100 per cent American, especially when talking to Immigration. “We got it all figured out, right?”

  “You certainly have,” said Mulligan and thought, But wait till us Irish come into our own.

  II

  Next morning, St. Valentine’s Day, at 10.30 Jimmy Mulligan sat in his car fifty yards up the street from the S.M.C. Cartage Company’s garage at 2122 Clark Street. His car was a 1928 black Chevrolet tourer, an inconspicuous vehicle that was the opposite of Mulligan’s dream, an emerald-green Duesenberg, the sort of car that should be driven only in bright sunlight. The Chevrolet’s side curtains were up against the biting wind and Mulligan sat hunched down behind the wheel.

  Clark Street was a good site for a massacre, an urban substitute for the Badlands. It was an ugly narrow thoroughfare of small stores, apartment buildings that looked like eroded cliffs, gas stations where only shabby, rundown vehicles stopped, and the occasional narrow-fronted warehouse that hinted at secret stocks behind their locked doors. The street’s inhabitants, blue-collared and hopeless, welcomed any sort of excitement as long as they were not harmed personally. On this cold, windy, snow-swept morning the street was virtually deserted.

  At a few minutes before eleven o’clock Mulligan sat up as he saw the big black tourer come down the street. It drew in to the kerb just north of the cartage company’s garage and five men got out, three of them in police uniform. Wonderful, thought Mulligan. Only an Italian, a Machiavelli, would think of sending killers dressed as cops.

  The five men went into the garage. Mulligan waited, face pressed against the micre window in the Chevrolet’s side curtain. Then, out of the corner of his eye, he saw the three other watchers on the opposite side of the street. He turned his head slightly, then abruptly slid down in the seat. The three men on the other side of the road were Bugs Moran and two of his bodyguards.

  “Holy Jaisus!” said Mulligan, who, like all Irishmen, was given to prayer when in need of help. Holy Jesus had one ear continually turned for yelps for help out of Ireland.

  Moran, equally Irish, had been late for his appointment. There was a burst of gunfire from the garage, then silence, then several more shots, as if coups de grâce had been effected, though none of those involved or watching would have called them that. The police report would later say that over a hundred bullets had been fired, including fourteen into the body of one man who, as he lay dying, insisted to the police, “Nobody shot me.”

  Mulligan did not bother to count the shots, even if his ear had been sharp enough and his National Cash Register mind nimble enough. He heard only one shot and it seemed to him that it was destined for him, though it might take a day or two to hit. He lifted himself up in the seat and saw the three “policemen” come out of the garage, herding the two civilians ahead of them with their hands up, a nice pantomime that Mulligan admired even as he felt close to vomiting with shock. The five men got into the Packard tourer and drove off at a sedate speed. He swivelled his gaze to the other side of the street, but Moran and his bodyguards were already gone. They would not have seen him, but that did not matter. They would know who had set up the massacre and that it had been intended Moran should be part of it.

  Mulligan started up the Chevrolet and started south, then east. He finished up on Lake Shore Drive, though later he would not be able to remember how he had got there. He parked the car and sat in the freezing tent of it, while the snow, coming in across Lake Michigan, piled up to obscure the windscreen. It didn’t matter that he couldn’t see the other side of the street. He could see the future.

  He had been too smart, but not smart enough: he hadn’t allowed for bad luck, a Celtic fate. Banking on Moran’s demise, he had already sold the supposedly hijacked truckload of liquor to a man from Kansas City; if Capone had queried where it had gone, he would have blamed it on the dead Moran. But now . . .

  He started up the car, got the snow off the windscreen and drove home to his one-bedroom flat just off Prairie Avenue, on the South Side. He lived five blocks from the Capone family home, but he had always kept his private address as private as possible; his business card put him at a downtown hotel, where the day and night clerks took all messages for him. Now he had to find a new address, one far from here.

  He packed three suitcases, taking time to pack them neatly; on top of his folded clothes he put the brass-framed photo of his dead mother and father. He had no brothers or sisters; his nearest kin were cousins in Ballyseanduff in County Kerry. As he was going out the door he saw the envelope and card on the table: he had forgotten to send Mae her St. Valentine’s greeting. He had already written in the card: To Mae, my favourite hump. He thought a moment, then he put the card in the envelope and addressed it to Mrs. Mae Capone.

  On his way out he dropped the envelope in the mail-box on the street corner. Then he put the suitcases in the Chevrolet and drove to his bank. He drew out his entire bank balance, including the 3,000 dollars he had deposited the day before: 28,869 dollars. Then he got back into the car and pondered where he should head. For one moment, out of sentiment for his mother and father, he thought of going back to Ballyseanduff, his birthplace; it would be a good place to hide while he planned his future. But the Winter Country, as its Roman conquerors had called it, was not inviting: he had had enough of winter. He started up the car and drove south,
not sure where he was going but knowing that he was not looking for the sun but for safety.

  Eight months later he landed in Australia. His name now was Fingal Hourigan and he was determined to found an empire, maybe not as evil as Capone’s but just as rich.

  He could see the years stretching ahead of him like a golden road. Like all of us, though, he couldn’t see those whom he would meet along the way.

  4

  I

  COMMISSIONER JOHN Leeds was the neatest officer in the New South Wales Police Department; Assistant Commissioner Bill Zanuch was the second neatest. Sitting opposite them, hunched down as if he had been flung into his high-backed chair by an Opposition front-bencher, an unlikely political happening, was the untidiest politician in the country, State Premier Hans Vanderberg.

  “It’s no good turning your good eye to skulbuggery.” He was also an untidy man with a phrase.

  “No,” said Zanuch and looked at his chief to see if he had got the meaning of what the Premier had said. Leeds just looked imperturbable, which was the only way to survive a meeting with The Dutchman, as he was called.

  “Something’s going on and I don’t want to know anything about it,” Vanderberg went on.

  “Are we talking about Archbishop Hourigan?” Leeds guessed that they still were, but the Premier did have a habit of going off at tangents that might have been lunatic in a less devious man.

  “Who else? His old man, Fingal, was on to me first thing this morning, half-way through my porridge. That bugger of yours, Malone, is causing more trouble.”

  “He’d only be doing his job.” Leeds hadn’t yet read the summaries that were always waiting on his desk for him each morning. He and Zanuch had been here at the State Office Block for a nine o’clock appointment; Vanderberg, who knew better than any of his ministers how to handle power, was his own Police Minister. “Is he handling that nun’s case, Bill?”

  Zanuch nodded. He was a vain, handsome man whose ideal world would have been lined with mirrors; but he was a good policeman and hoped some day to be Commissioner. He looked at the Premier, the man who appointed commissioners. “I can have him taken off the case.”