Chicago

by David Mamet

  He knew that Parlow understood his outburst, and would accept the gift less as an apology, and more, correctly, as thanks for his understanding.

  “Yes, but it can’t be the old pipe,” he thought, “. . . the bulldog.”

  As he walked he reviewed the New Yorker’s story. It was not that it was bad, he thought, and who cared if it was improbable; but it was offensive for a stranger to apostrophize the gun violence yarn in the place of its birth.

  “If it were one of the lads,” Mike thought, “I could appreciate it, but a fellow in spats had no right to tell a story involving guns. And he had his fucking facts wrong.”

  He stopped to light his cigarette. The El ran overhead, and Mike turned toward the window to shield the match. The window held a selection of sporting arms: the handguns displayed flat, and the long arms mounted in a star radiating around the company’s trademark, Von Lengerke and Antoine. V, L, and A. Sporting goods. Mike went inside.

  He told the floorwalker, “Gun department.” The floorwalker directed him to the back of the store. The salesman was displaying a rifle to a customer. Mike took the pipe box from his pocket and opened it. He took the leaflet covering the pipe from the box and read, Congratulations. You have just purchased the finest briar pipe made. Alfred Dunhill, of London, warranties this pipe against not only defects, but wear, and dissatisfaction. If at any time you find yourself less than pleased, return the pipe for a full refund. We thank you for your purchase, and your . . .

  The salesman said, “May I help you?” Mike looked up. He closed the box and put it down upon the counter.

  “I wanted,” Mike said, “to ask a question.”

  “Yes?”

  “About a shotgun.”

  “What sort of game do you wish to hunt, sir?” the salesman said.

  “No,” Mike said, “I’m actually, I’m just curious.” He saw the salesman conceal his disappointment. “Well done,” thought Mike, “you work on commission, selling to the high end, here comes a bloke with a crushed hat, and what if a hot prospect walks in?”

  Mike took a card from his pocket and handed it to the man. “The Tribune is thinking of doing a service feature on the”—his mind raced for a quarter second—“guns of the cognoscenti.”

  “Ah,” the salesman said. He looked at the card. “I know you, sir,” he said, “and I know who you are, and I appreciate your work.”

  “Thank you,” Mike said.

  “And I”—he leaned closer to Mike—“although I don’t know this would interest you, have been mulling over an article about language and firearms.”

  “Really,” Mike said.

  “Yes, although you might say, as it would deal with antique arms, the current interest might seem lacking. But . . .” The man espoused to Mike the history of expressions, part of the language, whose origin, seemingly lost, was rooted in the Age of Black Powder.

  “‘Hang fire,’” the man said, “‘flash in the pan,’ ‘chewing the rag,’ ‘shot his wad,’ which was ‘shot his rod,’ being the ramrod, the loss of which, having been shot, rendered the arm unable to fire . . . ‘Lock, stock, and barrel.’” The man ran down and Mike agreed that his observations might indeed make good copy, and that he might forward his article to his editor, Mr. Crouch, City Desk, Tribune.

  The man thanked Mike.

  “But, on no account,” Mike said, “mention that we spoke, for my endorsement would, with my editor, do your chances harm.” The salesman nodded. “Envy,” Mike said.

  “Thank you, I understand,” the man said. “And take this,” he said, “as a coincidence.” He pointed to the pipe box on his countertop.

  “What of it?” Mike said.

  “It’s a bulldog,” the man said. “The bulldog shape, pugnacious—”

  “Is there such a thing—” Mike said.

  “Pugnacious, aggressive, squat—”

  “Fine,” Mike said, “but is there such a thing as a presentation-grade Purdey—”

  “Also, the name of a revolver. I beg your pardon?”

  “I beg your pardon,” Mike said, “I fear I interrupted you. You said the name of a pistol. What is it, please?”

  “The Bulldog,” the salesman said. “More accurately, a revolver.”

  He took a stack of sales catalogs from the counter, and opened one. “Webley Arms,” he said. He turned to the line drawing of an ugly squat heavy revolver.

  “Webley Bulldog,” he said, “or, more accurately, Webley R.U.C.”

  He turned the drawing to Mike, who recognized it as the handgun the man had used to murder Annie Walsh.

  The salesman was still speaking when Mike looked up. “. . . never see them over here,” he said, “as the caliber, four fifty-five, is unobtainable. In Europe, however—”

  “R.U.C.,” Mike said. “What does that mean?”

  “R.U.C. Royal Ulster Constabulary,” the salesman said. “Black and Tans. Keeping down the IRA. And here’s another instance for your article . . .”

  The salesman turned and took down from the gun rack a submachine gun.

  “Thompson, forty-five caliber, commercial grade and the best protection you can buy.” He opened the bolt; showed the gun, empty, to Mike; and laid it on the counter.

  “John Taliaferro Thompson invented the gun, in 1914. Known, currently, as the tommy gun, most assume, incorrectly, in compliment to Mr. Thompson. No. The first recorded use is Irish. For they, in the Time of the Troubles, adopted the gun to assassinate the Tommys, which is to say, the British soldiers.”

  “The Irish,” Mike said, “where did they buy the guns?”

  “Oh, no, they couldn’t buy them,” the salesman said. “There was, and is, a strict embargo. No. They stole them.”

  Chapter 34

  Mike was getting Sergeant O’Malley drunk.

  The Piper’s Kilt was the cop bar for the Forty-Third Ward. The eight-to-four was on, and the two o’clock hour granted no immunity to any on duty, being neither at the top nor at the bottom of the watch, nor sufficiently adjacent to noon to explain a working officer’s presence at the bar.

  The odd patrolman came by, casing the bar for superiors, his survey aided by the least perceptible “yea” or “nay” nod from the bartender.

  The presence of the sergeant in the back booth would have been sufficient to dissuade the incursion of the rank and file, but Sergeant O’Malley had been drinking for an hour, and was drunk.

  “Oh yeah,” O’Malley said, “the North Side got the Thompson gun, what was it, ’twenty-two or -three.”

  “Before Capone . . . ?” Mike said.

  “It wasn’t Capone, then, it was, yes. It was Torrio. O’Banion and them—”

  “You guys didn’t have it?” Mike said.

  “Will you let me tell it?” O’Malley said.

  “Did you have it?”

  “They came through,” O’Malley said, “my recollection. Some of the, the National Guard, downstate? Somebody, I think, was impressed, its operation, or a couple of bucks and a hooker, salesman threw in, it might have been, ordered a few, one, two, for ‘evaluation,’ what there is to evaluate, escapes me, it is the most perfect instrument of peace since the Holy Sacrament; but, but bureaucracies turn slow, like a ship of the line. You in the navy?”

  “No,” Mike said.

  “Marines?”

  “No.”

  “Yeah. The navy? Was the white guys, mainly, I think. I was a Marine—that’s where they put the Catholics.”

  “A lot of Irish.”

  “God bless ’em,” O’Malley said. “Father Durning, St. Malachy’s? Lot of the force are members, for the early Mass, it being convenient to the House, ‘opined,’ that the unpleasantness, as he said, blotting the name of our fair city, could be eradicated by referral to those same Catholic virtues shared by both the Irish, which we comprise, the North Side lads, and the Outfit, with whom, for all their dark Italian ways, we also share a faith.”

  “That’s a fine sentiment,” Mike said.

 
; “We thought so,” O’Malley said, “and it furnished food for philosophic contemplation.”

  “What did you conclude?” Mike said.

  “The consensus was the sermon was well said, and poetic, but it lacked the common sense that God gave geese. As, accepting that the Eyeties and Sons of Eire are of one faith—which I am, finally, no wise inclined to fully grant, though the two rituals may share some outward trappings—who fights more fiercely than the members of a family?”

  “Well done,” Mike said.

  “Witness the eternal and the bloody wars of the goddamned Protestants, over their points of doctrine discernible to no one at all but the fanatic, or those who, speaking in their favor, just enjoy a fight. The Prods are clustered, in their comfort, along the Lake, looking down on the lesser races who, in which we are united, struggle to eke out a living catering to their otherwise illegal needs, those who are mobbed up, or, as in our case, endeavoring to regularize, if not to diminish, the depredations of the aforesaid.

  “Fellows, I believe, acting freelance, or, as we said in Ireland, as factors—or middlemen—flogged the few trench guns to the National Guard. It was some of these, I believe, which went missing into the hands of O’Banion.”

  “How do the dots connect?” Mike said.

  “The Jews,” O’Malley said, “who would sell you the shirt off your back, who wholesaled Our Savior, who run the pawnshops, the bucketshops, and who are in league, in the main, with the North Side, were, I believe, the middlemen, who were, on speculation, hawking the trench broom, or tommy gun, to the police forces of the Middle West.”

  Mike nodded.

  “But, but: in 1922 the police, they were not buying. How, then, the gun makers reasoned, to draw attention of the law enforcement community to the true merits of this piece of genius?”

  “Give it to the crooks,” Mike said.

  “Mike, for a Protestant, you have an agile mind. Yes. Now see here, for I will ask you, can you quote from that captain of industry Philip D. Armour? And tell me what it says upon his cans of lard?”

  “‘We sell every part of the pig except the squeal.’”

  “The Sheenies, likewise, whom he must have observed, understand that it is the gleanings of the field in which the profit rests. That is your profit. Our arms middlemen, coming through, could, it is true, appeal directly to the forces of crime. Of course. But: first, the public outcry, of which you I know have heard, having, time to time, created it, would turn against the arms manufacturer.

  “No, no, the arms must be sold to a legitimate purchaser, and then stolen. This, you will see, apes the acumen of Philip Armour, for the merchants of death not only thus immunize themselves against the accusation of aiding the lawless . . .”

  “They collect a commission on the guns they sell,” Mike said.

  “Yes, and, and, after the guns go wandering off with the lawless, they create a demand for their like in the police community, and increase their sales commissions there, too.”

  “It pays to advertise,” Mike said.

  “Indeed it does,” O’Malley said. “And now both sides are armed with Colonel Thompson’s gun, and the opposition of crime and the law is less and less likely to resemble Pistols at Dawn, and more and more the Chinese New Year. Why did you ask about the Thompson gun?”

  “Because they used it to shoot Nails Morton’s horse,” Mike said.

  “The poor beast,” O’Malley said. “And wasn’t it an act of irony.”

  “How’s that?” Mike said.

  “Because who was it stole the original guns from the armory,” O’Malley said, “and flogged them to O’Banion?”

  “Who?” Mike said.

  “You disappoint me,” O’Malley said. “Who would arrange it but the Sheeny businessmen who were the salesmen in the first place? They arranged it.”

  “Why did they go to O’Banion rather than to Capone?” Mike said.

  “Well, everyone trusts their own,” O’Malley said, “when it is in preference to trusting a stranger. The Jews, they went to the Irish through Samuel ‘Nails’ Morton, a man of their faith. Didn’t they? . . . All them guns.”

  O’Malley stood.

  “Where are you going?” Mike said. “You got to rush off? Have another drink for the love of God.”

  O’Malley sat. “You trine a get me drunk?” he said.

  “After the first guns . . . ,” Mike said. He filled the two glasses.

  “Alright. The profusion,” O’Malley said. “Well, now, as with any luxury product, its distribution may have outdistanced its inventory control. Torrio, and them, could obtain them through purchase and barter with associates here and there, and back east, closer to the factory. Which, I am not saying, but, if I were they, I would have left but minimally guarded. And let nature take its course.”

  “And O’Banion?”

  “Well,” O’Malley said, “he had his entrée, some might say, more directly, through the arsenals of the patriotic lads in blue.” They both drank. The bartender laid the check on the booth table, and Mike waved him away.

  “Patriotic to who?” Mike said.

  “What?” O’Malley said.

  “Patriotic to who?” Mike said.

  “Why, to their country,” O’Malley said. “Sláinte.” He drank.

  “All the guns,” Mike said.

  “What?” said O’Malley.

  “‘All the guns,’ you said. How many were there? That went stolen?”

  “Well,” O’Malley said. “I’m going to have to look into that.”

  Chapter 35

  Mike met Danny Doyle at dusk on North Avenue Beach, at the end of the breakwater. The Gold Coast stretched behind them. In the clouds to the south they could just make out the orange glow of the steel mills in Gary. The wind was, as usual, cruel.

  Danny had come in civilian clothes; he wore an overcoat, a cloth cap, and gloves, his face and neck swaddled in a thick blue muffler.

  Mike had been sitting on the last bench, looking at the Lake. He rose as Doyle approached, and noticed that Doyle had so correctly interpreted the invitation as to have come out of uniform.

  “Yeah, fine,” Doyle said, “and let’s walk, or we’ll freeze to death.”

  They began to walk down the breakwater and back toward the beach.

  “You got,” Doyle said, “a romantic streak, which, being neither a Jew nor an Irishman, I got to say has to come from your nurse dropped you on your head out of the cradle.” Then, having run out of small talk, he stopped.

  “I want to know about the IRA,” Mike said.

  “Well, Jesus, Mary, yes, and Joseph,” Doyle said, “you don’t want a lot.”

  They kept on walking.

  “Lot of people were in France,” Doyle said. “You could ask some other one of them, other than me.”

  “Tell me who to ask,” Mike said.

  Doyle shook his head in disgust.

  “My mother,” he said, “I was growing up? She told me two things: ‘Whatever you have to do? Never get a good girl in trouble.’” He turned his back to the wind and lit a cigarette. “And ‘Never trust a Protestant.’”

  He turned to Mike.

  “The best way I can help you,” he said, “and I will help you, and, I swear to you, this is a gift: we never had this conversation.”

  Doyle walked away, down into the underpass to Lake Shore Drive.

  Sir William Frederick, the secretary at the British consulate regretted, was in Chicago only for a short stay, and would be unavailable for interviews, “as his time was not his own.”

  Mike hung up the phone. He walked down to the Newspaper Morgue and pulled the files on Sir William. Then, after what he felt was a shamefully short debate, he went home and affixed to his lapel the rosettes of the Croix de Guerre and the British Distinguished Flying Cross.

  The desk clerk at the Palmer House knew Mike, and tipped him the room number. Mike knocked on the door. He was admitted into the first five feet of the suite’s anteroom by a bodygua
rd. A well-bred fellow at a desk looked up annoyed and said, “What is it?” in the poshest, most dismissive accent Mike had ever heard.

  His eyes went to the medal rosettes on Mike’s chest, and he rose, coming, unconsciously, to a modified attention.

  “I beg your pardon,” he said. “May I help you?”

  “My name is Captain Hodge,” Mike said. “I would like three minutes with Sir William.” He passed the man a card.

  “Could you tell me the nature of your inquiries?” the man said.

  “I’m sorry, I can’t,” Mike said.

  The secretary excused himself into the next room. Mike and the bodyguard each looked at nothing. Half a minute later Mike was passed into the inner room.

  The sitting room held a fireplace displaying neat birch logs, a white baby grand piano, and a large, ornate desk. The bodyguard stood against the wall, halfway between Mike and Sir William.

  Sir William rose from the desk, still looking at the card. He put the card down and removed his spectacles. He wore a business suit, and, in its lapel, the single-wing emblem of the Royal Flying Corps.

  “Captain Hodge,” he said.

  “Once,” Mike said.

  “No, you don’t actually keep the rank over here, do you?”

  “Regular army, they might; though they usually don’t under colonel. On retirement. Mere captain’s nothing to brag about.”

  “Well, no, but one does. You introduced yourself as ‘Captain,’” Sir William said. He indicated, with the most deniable of questioning looks, Mike’s rosettes.

  “Yeah, I’m ashamed of myself,” Mike said.

  “Because they’re false?” Sir William said.

  “No. They’re mine,” Mike said, “but my exploiting them is an insult to the glorious dead who fell to ensure, for us all, the future.”

  “Would you like a drink?” Sir William said.

  The bodyguard poured the whiskey. Sir William and Mike settled into their seats before the fire, and Mike was pleased to see him utilize the apparent conclusion of his interrogation to ask the telling questions.

  “What did you see of it, whom did you fly with, who pinned the medals on” were easy, beautifully thrown away, and answered as if casual small talk between two acquaintances. And Mike was growing pleased that, after what was, in effect, the grilling, the bodyguard left the room to request the vetting of Mike’s story. Nothing would be done until someone had vouched for him, so Mike spent the time chatting Sir William up.