The Many Deaths of the Firefly Brothers: A Novel

by Thomas Mullen

  “Good. It’ll make him easier to read.”

  Chance was in his early fifties but had managed to age with the grace of a silent-film star. Usually he moved with a thespian’s confidence, fluidity to every gesture, but now he stepped slowly, as if under water. A thin man, his gray hair was trimmed short and his wrinkles were ironed flat in the neon light. Then his blue eyes lit red.

  “Jason?” He was ten feet from the Pontiac.

  “Not so loud.” Jason grinned. “Tell your loogans you’re okay. And get in—we have a crazy story for you.”

  “You weren’t followed?”

  “Only by the Grim Reaper—he tailed us leaving the cemetery. C’mon, get in.”

  Chance waved off his men and opened the back door. Jason eased off the brake and began driving the calm streets of Karpis.

  “How’s tricks?” Jason asked. Whit had turned halfway in his seat to keep an eye on the restaurateur.

  “Not so good as they are for you two, apparently. Jesus. I even offered a prayer for your eternal souls.”

  “I’m sure our souls appreciate it.”

  “What happened?”

  “Look, Chance,” Jason said. “No one needs to know about the crazy hallucinations you’ve been having. Everyone can just go on mourning the dead Firefly Brothers, got it? They can send us all the prayers they like.”

  “Understood. That Houdini you pulled in Toledo was impressive, boys, but this one is by far the best.”

  “Thanks. And we aren’t going to tell you how we did it, no offense.”

  “I wouldn’t ask.”

  Jason pulled into a small park and turned around to face his passenger as Chance handed out cigars. Jason hadn’t had a smoke since before the cooling boards, and just by biting off the end he saw that Chance knew how to keep his cops happy.

  “Heard anything on Owney?” Jason asked.

  Chance produced a lighter and that produced light. “What kind of anything?”

  “We were supposed to meet him last week in Detroit.” Jason left it at that. He still couldn’t remember if the meeting had occurred, but the fact that the Points North cops had found the full seventy thousand dollars on the brothers meant that they’d never paid Owney his share, so either the meeting hadn’t happened or it had gone very badly indeed.

  “He hasn’t been arrested,” Chance said. “And he ain’t ratted that I know of.”

  Even with the windows down they were consumed by delicious smoke.

  “Know where he is?”

  Chance didn’t answer.

  “We still owe him his stake,” Jason explained, not mentioning that they no longer had the money.

  Chance exhaled a cloud. They were like three bored dragons in a too-small cave. “There’s a cottage he and his wife have used.”

  “In the U.P.?” Jason raised his eyebrows. Chance made an expression that was not fully a confirmation. “Jesus, then he’s an idiot.”

  Jason had met Owney Davis in prison during his second bootlegging rap, before graduating to bank jobs. Let out two weeks after Jason, Owney became a part of the Firefly Gang from the beginning. He was a loyal friend whose life ambition was to form a new church, in the hope of spiritual as well as financial enrichment. Jason found it difficult to believe Owney would turn Judas. But he also found it difficult to believe that, with all the heat on them, Owney and his wife would run to the same Michigan lake house they’d used as a hideout months earlier, when the heat had first intensified.

  “What’s the word on Marriner, Brickbat, and Roberts?” Jason asked.

  “Look, Jason, if someone did stooge on you, it coulda been anyone. Ten grand is a lot of money.”

  Ten grand was the most recent reward the Justice Department had posted for information leading to the Firefly Brothers’ arrest. It had started at fifteen hundred, then doubled after two cops were killed during a November bank job in Calumet City, then doubled again in the early spring, when the feds belatedly realized that a fatal February bank job in Baton Rouge had actually been pulled off by the Firefly Brothers. Louisiana was far outside their usual territory, of course; after a busy autumn in the Midwest, the brothers had spent much of the winter hiding out, first in Florida and then in New Orleans. It had been a wise time to hide: the U.S. attorney general and a bureaucrat named J. Edgar Hoover from something called the Bureau of Investigation were making speeches about the need for a stronger national police force, something capable of investigating the complex cases that bumbling state squads couldn’t handle. A federal crime-fighting agency would conquer gangsterism just as the New Deal would conquer the depression, Hoover claimed. When the Firesons’ money grew scarce—and the exoticism of the South was overpowered by their nostalgia for home—Jason had started scouting banks in Baton Rouge, leading to the reunited gang’s first endeavor in more than two months. After that, the price on the brothers’ heads continued to rise as stories proliferated about their escapades, some of them accurate and some of them the falsely attributed crimes of other, less famous outlaws. Finally, the feds had rounded the price off to an even ten, causing the brothers to wonder if that number would continue to appreciate for as long as they drew breath, or if it would eventually crash like the stock market if people lost interest. Or if they simply disappeared.

  “Well,” Jason said now, “we’re hoping to narrow the list of suspects.”

  “You should have too many other things on your mind to be interested in revenge, boys.”

  “We didn’t say anything about revenge. We’d just like to know if someone did rat on us, so we can avoid that someone in the future.”

  “Well, if anyone did they didn’t tell me.”

  “I never asked if they did. I just asked if you knew where our boys are.”

  “People haven’t been using the Chance McGill line the way they used to, but—”

  “Because you wouldn’t let us,” Whit said.

  “Damn right I wouldn’t let you!” He held the cigar away from his face and extended a reproachful finger. “I’ve worked my way up inch by inch, son, and I’m not gonna let it get torn down by a couple brothers who’ve managed to get ten state police forces, Pinkertons, postal cops, the National Guard, and the fucking federal government after them, no matter how goddamn charming one of them happens to be.”

  Jason put a hand on Whit’s shoulder. “We’re not blaming you for anything, Chance. We’re just—”

  “Your brother sure as hell is.”

  “Whit didn’t mean anything by it. Anyway, back to square one. You’re saying you don’t know hell’s first whispers about where our boys are?”

  Chance managed to move his eyes from Whit to Jason. “Marriner’s still living the good life, far as I know.” Marriner Skelty, Jason’s bank-robbing mentor with decades of endeavors to his name, had possessed the good sense to retire after the Calumet City job in November. “As for Brickbat and Roberts, nix.”

  “Brickbat was never my biggest fan,” Jason said, to draw him out.

  “I always did notice an added degree of tension in the room when he was in it. Crazy bastard. Never shoulda gotten involved with him, Jason.”

  “I got wise eventually.”

  The brothers had kicked Brickbat and Roberts out of the gang after the bloody Baton Rouge job. Brickbat was as his nickname implied, all stubborn force and no thought. He was only five-six, but his thick frame contained the coiled rage of three generations of doomed Iowa homesteaders. Still, if you were at least a few feet away from him you stood a reasonably good chance of outsmarting him before he got close enough to break your face. Unless he was packing, which he always was. Starting out as the muscle guarding cigarette shipments in St. Paul, he’d worked a few bank jobs with the Barker Gang in Minnesota. According to the police, he’d rubbed three cops in the process; according to Brickbat, the body count was seven. He’d been in the opening months of a permanent holiday courtesy the state of Illinois when he was liberated during the same jailbreak that freed such now-infamous hoods as
Henry Pierpont and John Makley, of the Dillinger Gang. Brickbat knew Owney through some work they’d done on a Minnesota bootlegging line, and at the time Jason needed an extra torpedo and figured the man’s brand of pugilistic cockiness would make him a natural for the job. Thus was a regrettable relationship born. Jason quickly tired of the way Brickbat’s palsied trigger finger made bank jobs more violent affairs than they needed to be. Jason had handed Brickbat an extra cut when he booted him from the gang, in the hope that it would constitute ending on good terms, but something in the man’s demeanor had left Jason with the uncomfortable feeling that this was not yet a farewell.

  Elton Roberts, Brickbat’s only friend, was a heavy drinker, a trait the Firesons distrusted. A little here and there was fine, but a man who couldn’t be counted on to drive straight or think straight was an unnecessary risk. Fortyish and debonair, Roberts was a grifter who’d spent the past few years ripping off the hopeless jobless across the Midwest. Decked out in a dapper suit and possessing a smooth voice, he looked every bit the trustworthy businessman, or at least what a poor egg thought a trustworthy businessman would look like, if there were any. He would troll the breadlines and find a few suckers, preferably immigrants or farmers who had lost their property and were overwhelmed by their urban environs. He’d tell them he was the manager of a new building in town that needed four elevator operators; the job paid thirty a week— not bad at all—and all the fellows needed to do was front him fifty each for their uniforms. The fellows usually didn’t have that much cash, but they’d ask for a day or two to rustle the funds from their cousins or in-laws or dying grandparents. Once Roberts had their money, he’d tell them the building’s address and ask them to show at eight the next morning. When they did, they would find that Roberts wasn’t there and that the building had no elevator. Roberts bounced from city to city working that grift and a few others before the cops got wise. Then, while doing time, he met a jug marker with a list of banks to hit once he got out. Like a skittering asteroid, Elton Roberts eventually came into Jason’s orbit. Because Roberts looked straight and could talk his way out of trouble, Jason had taken him on as a faceman. He learned about Roberts’s jobshark scams only after a few weeks of working together, when Elton got drunk and boastful. That’s when Jason realized he’d never liked the man.

  “Look,” Chance said, “I know Brickbat’s crazy, but I don’t see him for a finger-louse. Last I heard he was gearing for some big job. Was trying to get the Barkers involved, but they wouldn’t bite.”

  “What was the job?”

  “He wasn’t that talkative.”

  Jason eyed him. “You’re not telling us everything.”

  “It’d take a week to tell you everything, and you never seem to have enough time. But I’m telling you the important parts.”

  Jason turned around and started the engine. “You’re right—I’d love to chin with you all night, but, yeah, we’ve got to go.”

  “Where you headed?”

  That was at the top of the list of questions Jason wouldn’t answer, so he lied. “Very far from here.”

  “Any messages for me to pass on?”

  “Dead men don’t pass messages. This never happened.”

  “Got it. Except, dead men pass lots of messages. You can take just about any message you want off a dead man.”

  Jason declined the philosophical argument and drove back to Last Best Chance in silence.

  “Well, if it means anything to you boys, guys are awful broken up over your alleged demise. Lotta depressed folks in my club these days. Buying plenty of drinks, though.”

  “That’s nice. Hopefully our funerals will be well attended.” Jason pulled up to the curb in front of the funhouse. Out in the parking lot, an elastic-legged drunk was supported by two prostitutes.

  “Thanks for the smokes, Chance,” Jason told him. “And goodbye forever.”

  Chance nodded at the two of them, stepping out of the Pontiac. “I’ve heard that one before.” Then he tapped the roof and walked toward his ramshackle empire. No one was watching them as Jason hit the gas and pulled away.

  “So,” Jason said to his brother, “if the cops had broken up our meeting with Owney on their own initiative they would have arrested him, too, which Chance would have heard about by now.”

  “Or maybe they weren’t just on to Owney—maybe he did rat on us,” Whit said. “Maybe the feds offered him starting-out money for his new church.”

  Whit had never been as tight with Owney, perplexed by the many contradictions between the man’s deeds and his proclaimed holiness. A recent convert to revolutionary politics, Whit proudly proclaimed himself an atheist, but to Jason that was just a front for the fact that Whit hadn’t forgiven God for what He did to Pop. Regardless, anyone who claimed a special relationship with the Man Upstairs was someone Whit could not understand.

  “I just can’t see Owney rolling on us,” Jason said.

  “If we assume there even was a rat and that there isn’t some other explanation, then if it wasn’t Owney, that leaves Brickbat and Roberts.”

  “I wasn’t interested in getting mixed up with them anyway. All I wanted to know was whether it was safe to try to find Owney and get him in on the next endeavor. My take is maybe, but maybe not. So let’s avoid the risk and lure Marriner out of retirement instead.”

  “You act like all you’re interested in is doing another endeavor. Like you couldn’t care less about finding out what happened to us.”

  “It’s what I told Chance: I’m not interested in revenge. I just want to know who to avoid so we can make a score and cash out of this once and for all.”

  Whit looked at Jason incredulously. “You’re saying you don’t want to figure out what the hell happened to us?”

  Jason sighed. As usual, it would be his job to keep them focused. “We can look into it once we get back on our feet, okay?”

  Whit held his hands in front of his face for a moment, staring at them. He’d been doing that a lot lately, Jason had noticed. “We can still bleed, you know, if we cut ourselves.”

  “That’s fascinating.”

  “It hurts, too.”

  The stars were still out but they faded as Jason drove back into Lincoln City. He hadn’t driven with so little fear in weeks—but he did check the rearview every few minutes, out of habit.

  “No one’s following us,” he told his brother. “Being dead has its advantages.”

  V.

  Darcy woke amid newspapers, smudges on her cheek. Her head was a desert scoured by a sandstorm, and she had no memory of the event or whatever had preceded it, no memory of anything since that policeman had helped her back to her building. She was in bed, the sun rudely shouting through the windows, and the first thing she saw when she opened her eyes was a headline about some FDR speech, and another about the Nazis’ latest grab for power, and another about … Yes, of course. That.

  Darcy rose, and was reminded that she should move more slowly. Oh, my. She had forgotten about hangovers. If she drank in the face of death, what should she do after she’d stopped drinking? Death didn’t stop, so neither should the drinking. Sad how easily she slipped into past routines; this was how she had responded to her mother’s death, and now death was again chasing her to the bottle. Jason had always been so controlled, never overdoing anything, and she thought it had rubbed off on her. How sudden and irrevocable death was.

  She rose from the bed and poured herself a gin. Then the bathroom, her penance, and next a long shower, holding the walls. Everything was vibrating, pulsating. She scrubbed the ink from her face and hands; she opened her mouth and drank hot mouthfuls from the shower. She wanted to clean her tongue, clean the insides of her skull. The worst part was knowing she would feel this way for so, so long.

  Leaving the bathroom, she gathered up the newspapers, crushing the awful reality into a great crackling mass, and stuffed them into a wastebasket. The basket wasn’t big enough. She gathered the remainder and carried it into the kitchen
, threw it into the bin. Her hands were filthy again. She walked back to the bathroom, willing herself not to cry, scrubbing at her fingers with soap, watching the dark remains of spiteful text swirl down the drain.

  Minutes later, she was sipping ice water when the buzzer sounded. Western Union, the tired voice said. She buzzed him in before thinking that no one was supposed to know she lived here.

  A knock on the door, a man in uniform sweating from the summer heat.

  “Came by yesterday, ma’am, but there was no answer.”

  She signed for the telegram without making eye contact. When he was gone, she tore it open. She read it once without understanding. She read it again. Images revealed themselves, sounds. Again. Voices now, textures. His laugh, the silk sleeve reaching out to touch her face.

  PERFECT WEATHER FOR BIRD WATCHING / MIGRATING EARLIER THAN PREDICTED / DON’T BELIEVE EVERYTHING YOU READ / HAVE BINOS READY.

  She crumpled to her knees. What?

  “Don’t believe everything you read.” That’s what he always said, or some variation: don’t believe everything you hear, or everything they say, or everything you see, or everything you feel. His mantra—that life was a big trick, that the gullible were secretly guillotined while only those who doubted everything had a chance to escape. She had believed, for a day, and it had nearly killed her.

  She was down the stairs and out the door in seconds. It was midday and the sidewalk was scalding on her bare feet. The Western Union truck’s engine had just started but she banged on the door before he could pull away. Who sent this?! When?! How?! The poor man didn’t know anything, shaking his head at her. There were no other messages, no other clues. Only this. A whisper in a graveyard. He drove off, left her standing there in her bathrobe, receiving looks.

  Back inside, she tried Veronica again. Woman would not answer her phone. Did she know? Was she with them even now? Darcy hated her; she burned, envy lighting her aflame. She emptied the wastebasket, tore through the newspapers, and found the photographs. Well, they were grainy. She had thought that he looked so … different in them, but had assumed that was how it was in death. And now? She was crazy. Surely.