The Many Deaths of the Firefly Brothers: A Novel

by Thomas Mullen

  Jason’s eyes were drawn across the street as Whit, baking alive in the Pontiac, took off his hat. The brothers made eye contact and Whit put his hat back on. Seconds later, the bell at the diner’s entrance was jostled into music.

  Marriner Skelty had the sort of mug that did not convey shock easily; his rubbery skin deadened the impulse from brain to face. It bore the marks of his fifty-plus years: a knife scar across his chin, an eyebrow whose leftmost inch had been burned off in a chemical accident (of which he had endured many), old smallpox scars, shaving wounds, and the sudden smoothness of past cauterizations. For many years he had understandably hidden his cheeks beneath a dense beard, until images of his scruffy face had appeared on enough wanted posters for him to take up shaving.

  But all those wrinkles and crevasses were nearly immobile as Marriner made like he was scanning the diner for an available seat. His gray eyes rested on Jason for an almost imperceptible moment before he turned and sought out an empty booth on the other side of the diner.

  Jason dropped change on the counter and excused himself, picking up his hat and jacket and strolling over to Marriner’s booth. The old man was facing away from him, so Jason took the side that faced the entrance.

  “Jesus Christ.”

  “No,” Jason corrected. “But I do a great impersonation, don’t I?”

  “They said you were dead.”

  “They’ve said a lot of things.”

  Marriner stared for a long moment, and Jason finally broke the silence. “You certainly are ugly without the beard.”

  “So they tell me.” Only a guy who’d known him as long as Jason had could have seen how shocked those eyes were. “How in hell—”

  “Do you really think some farm cops could take us like that?”

  “I’m waiting for your explanation.”

  “Mistaken identity, police desperate for good publicity, gullible press—you know.”

  Marriner nodded, clearly aware that Jason’s story was fiction but unsure how much of it was veiled autobiography. “You are one hell of a lucky bastard.”

  “So you’ve always said.”

  Marriner Skelty was an old yegg from St. Paul, an expert safecracker whose adolescent glee at mixing chemicals proved quite lucrative when it was applied to shattering hinges and melting locks. He’d been robbing banks since the days when it was a nocturnal activity conducted by those with an affinity for liquid nitrogen and other silent destroyers. By the time Jason met him—in Indiana State Prison, during Jason’s second bootlegging rap—Marriner’s chosen profession had changed dramatically. The advent of faster cars, the expansion of state highways, the invention and easy accessibility of submachine guns and other automatic weapons, and the inadequacy of local police forces—most of which still hand-cranked their Model A’s, if they could even afford automobiles— had turned bank theft into a speedier, daylight affair. Years earlier, after serving a different stretch for a moonlit job that turned foul when his chemicals froze on an unexpectedly cold September night in Rochester, Marriner had taken up with the various St. Paul crews that had turned that town into a haven of criminal minds. At underworld taverns and cooling-off joints where wanted men circulated in and out, ideas were bandied, hot tips traded, hands lent and borrowed. For a time, Marriner had run with the Barker Gang, until one of the Barkers’ lesser witted associates was arrested and rolled on him. So another jail term, this time in Indiana, where Marriner met a charismatic young man determined to succeed where others had failed.

  Marriner spent nearly seven months robbing banks with Jason before retiring. After the Firefly Gang’s lucrative Calumet City job in November, Marriner persuaded Jason and Whit to hide out until spring, as Midwestern country roads became too unpredictable for getaways in midwinter. But while the brothers vacationed first in Florida and then in New Orleans, Marriner heard the noise coming from J. Edgar Hoover and his band of upstart agents and decided that the time had come for him to walk away. These are the last days of bank robbing, Marriner had said, with an apocalyptic tone. Jason had come to realize the old yegg was right.

  “When I saw your note,” Marriner said, “I figured it was the cops.”

  “I was afraid you would. I’m glad you came, though.”

  Having decided the cops were getting too close back in Indianapolis, Marriner had moved to a nondescript neighborhood in Cleveland Heights. You disappear best by not disappearing at all, he’d always said. Jason had made a point of memorizing the address should he ever need it. This morning, as was their old method, Jason had left a copy of the Plain Dealer on Marriner’s doorstep, and on the bottom of the twelfth page (for twelve o’clock) he had scribbled the name of the diner.

  “So how are those ice cubes coming?” Jason asked.

  “I’m damn close.” Marriner’s life project was to invent ice cubes that would not melt. He spent countless hours dabbling with new chemicals, compounds, and colloids. He would come agonizingly close to achieving his goal, but every time he found one with a high enough melting point it proved too toxic. He had poisoned himself dozens of times, occasionally requiring hospitalization, though usually he just treated himself with restorative swigs of whiskey.

  “Well, I look forward to my first scotch with Marriner Cubes dancing in the glass,” Jason said.

  A young waitress whose red hair matched her apron smiled at them. They both ordered ham and eggs, and coffee. She finished scribbling into her notepad and had started to walk away when she turned back, eyeing Jason. He looked back with eyes as innocent as he could make them.

  “Anyone ever tell you you look like Jason Fireson?”

  He smiled. “I get that from time to time. But he’s a lot deader than I am.”

  She shook her head. “It’s amazing. The spitting image. Lucky no one’s shot you by mistake.”

  “He is a lucky man at that,” Marriner monotoned.

  Jason glanced out the window at the Pontiac, where Whit was pretending to read the newspaper and likely plotting some savage payback for being assigned lookout duty on a ninety-degree day.

  “So I guess congratulations are in order for you being alive—and for that last job of yours, too. Hear you boys set the all-time record. You here to get my thoughts on retirement?”

  “Not yet. Whit and I are planning an endeavor, and we need your help.”

  Again, the old man’s face was unreadable, like a pile of discarded typesetting keys in a junkyard. But his voice was a billboard. “After that last job you did?”

  “We’re no longer in possession of those funds.”

  “You buy an island or something?”

  “Yes, but it flooded. Never go into real estate, Marriner—those people are crooks.” The waitress brought coffee. Marriner spent a solid ten seconds adding sugar to his mug—he could barely taste anything owing to the potpourri of nonpotable substances he had scoured his tongue and palate with.

  After he took his first sip, Marriner lowered his voice. “What happened to the money? Washing problems?”

  “Yes, sort of. I don’t want to go into it.” Jason shifted in his seat. “Bottom line is that we’re cash-low. We’re doing an endeavor, and we have it all planned. We need you and at least two other guys.”

  “What about the guys you been with lately?”

  “As you probably know from reading the papers, they’ve developed the bad habit of being arrested, or dying. The ones who are alive have already disappeared, if they’re smart.”

  “You aren’t doing such a swell job of selling me on this.”

  The waitress returned and slid plates before them, the eggs shiny, the ham thin, the toast damp with butter. Even thin pig smelled delicious, and Jason saw the way Marriner looked at his own plate.

  “I’m betting that your impressive devotion to the ice-cube task is beginning to drain on your resources. Don’t tell me you couldn’t use this.”

  Marriner liberally salted his food. “I didn’t say that. And yes, I know of a couple guys could be helpful.�
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  “They ever done an endeavor before?”

  “No. But they’re eager, and smart enough.” He took a bite. “You seem awfully sure I want to do this.”

  Jason cut into his ham. Since his awakening, food did not necessarily taste better than it had before, but ham was still ham, which was something you did not take for granted. “I know how much fun I am to be around.”

  “Your brother more than makes up for that. That why you made him wait in the car?”

  “One of many reasons.”

  “Why do you even need to do an endeavor? What about that heiress of yours?”

  He put his fork down and spoke with barely contained fury. “I’m not with her for some payout, goddamnit, I’m with her because I’m with her.”

  Jason was surprised by his own outburst. He was worried about Darcy.

  “So,” the old man asked after a pause, “when are you thinking?”

  “Four days from now. We do two in one day.”

  Finally, surprise registered on Marriner’s face.

  “The heat’s vanished,” Jason explained. “But once they realize we aren’t dead it’ll get uncomfortable again. We want to take what we can, then disappear.”

  Marriner finished his ham. Then he reached into his glass and his fingers emerged with an ice cube. He held it as if he had excavated a priceless gem. The air was thick and hot and the cube seemed to visibly diminish as tiny rivulets ran down his wrist, wetting his sleeve.

  “We all do, Jason. Most of us just aren’t as good at it as you are.”

  X.

  Their numbers were dwindling, as if each time one of the Public Enemies died so did ten reporters. But there were still enough of them camped out in the hallway between the elevator and the office door to make Cary Delaney’s arrival at work—not to mention trips to the bathroom—exasperating.

  The reporters shouted a few questions as he walked toward the door for the Chicago field office of the Department of Justice’s Bureau of Investigation. Queries about the various remnants of the now-headless Dillinger and Firefly Gangs were tossed out, and Cary’s expression was stoic until one threw him.

  “The Firefly Brothers were spotted in Cleveland yesterday—what’s the Bureau’s take?”

  Cary rolled his eyes and cracked a grin. “We only arrest live criminals—dead ones are beyond our jurisdiction. Cathedral’s two blocks south if you want to get their take on it.” Then he opened the door.

  Cary nodded hello to the secretary and found his place with the rest of the agents in the bullpen, a room consisting of desks so crushed together that it looked as if it had once been a much larger room until the walls had closed in by twenty feet. Off the bullpen were doors leading to the impenetrable file room, which no one but the secretary was allowed in; a conference room, also used for particularly delicate phone calls or interrogations; and one decent office for the SAC, the special agent in charge. The headquarters were on the twentieth floor of the Bankers Building, in the financial district, a block away from the Chicago Federal Reserve, which had been robbed a year earlier by the Barker Gang in a speedy, silent, but nonetheless botched job: the five bags the crew made off with were actually filled with mail, not cash. The Barkers had crashed their armored Hudson a few blocks away, killing two flatfoots as they switched cars. Cary often wondered how many sad stories or checks or money orders had disappeared in those mailbags, which the escaped crooks likely burned.

  This morning it was hot, again. The windows were all along the same wall, and fresh air refused to enter the workspace, as if it had been warned off by an armed guard.

  “The Firesons were seen driving through Lincoln City yesterday morning,” said the agent two desks over from Cary, his head obscured by an open Tribune.

  “There, too?” Cary smirked. “I was told Cleveland. Those are some busy corpses.”

  For weeks Cary had rotated between the Bureau’s special Dillinger Squad and its Fireson Squad, both of which were now focused on apprehending the dead men’s few at-large associates. Most were small-time in comparison with their fallen ringleaders, troglodyte misfits who eluded capture only because they likely hid away in tiny apartments or abandoned farmhouses, where they would remain until they grew too hungry or bored. The highest-profile Public Enemies still breathing were Baby Face Nelson and Brickbat Sanders: diminutive, hot-tempered gunmen from the Dillinger and Firefly Gangs, respectively. Cary was following up on various leads, reading wire reports, and calling many an overexcited small-town cop who insisted that the petty thief sitting in his dusty jail was in fact a notorious outlaw. There were days Cary never left the office.

  Which was perfectly fine with him. Cary Delaney was not a police officer, after all; he was an agent of the Bureau of Investigation. Although the two occupations were becoming more similar, that certainly had not been the case two years ago, when Cary joined the Bureau fresh out of Georgetown Law. He had hoped to procure a job at a prominent firm, but the depression was in full-throated howl when his graduation date arrived. Many of his silver-spoon classmates had appointments lined up, of course—their places had been secured the moment their mothers mailed their gilded birth announcements—but to a scholarship boy like Cary life came free of guarantees. He had decided to stay in Washington and look for a government job, something that could pay for a roof over his head. What little he had known about the Bureau of Investigation made it seem like any other legal-research office, with just a splash of intrigue due to its focus on crime.

  How things had changed in two years. He had started by investigating interstate auto-theft cases, looking into crimes of passion on Indian reservations, and pursuing seditious rabble-rousers. When Cary joined the Bureau, agents weren’t even allowed to carry firearms. But that unwritten law was reversed after the Kansas City Massacre in June of ’33, when three police officers and a federal agent were gunned down at K.C.’s Union Station while escorting a bank robber to prison. Cary and his fellow agents had watched in amazement as Mr. Hoover used that case to lobby for a strong federal police force, nominating his Bureau for the job. This would be a War on Crime, the Director declared, and suddenly Cary and his stunned colleagues were thrust into the role of upholding civic order, restoring public faith in a strong central government, and chasing down vicious, homicidal maniacs.

  The Bureau had suffered many embarrassments in Cary’s time: suspects walking away from stakeouts; dreadful performances in shootouts; and, worst of all, the disaster at Little Bohemia. The Bureau had cornered Dillinger, Nelson, and others in a small lake resort in Wisconsin, surrounding the building, only to discover, after the passage of a frigid night, that the criminals had escaped hours ago via an unknown path along the frozen beach—and had managed to kill an agent along the way. Mr. Hoover’s prized young Ivy Leaguers were out of their league, and only when he began recruiting more “cowboys,” as he called them—toughened cops from the Southwest—did the successes mount: Machine Gun Kelly and his kidnapping crew had been nabbed, Dillinger was ambushed, Clyde Barrow and his poet girlfriend were gunned down along a rural Louisiana road, and now the Firefly Brothers were dead. Suddenly every kid in America was reading comic books about heroic G-men, and Mr. Hoover was consulting with Hollywood on forthcoming pictures about the Bureau. There was no end to the ironic grumbling among the real, flesh-and-blood, overtired, underpaid, caffeine-riddled, stakeout-sunburned agents.

  There were always more leads for the agents to explore, but fewer now that the Firesons were dead. That was the thing with death: it could leave the old mysteries unsolved. The stories could go on telling themselves, altering with the passage of time. And there were plenty of mysteries about the Firesons, such as how they managed to get money to their relatives when the family was so carefully watched, how they eluded so many ambushes. Most perplexing was a stakeout in which Cary had taken part. Two months ago the Chicago cops had arrested a grifter who had laundered money for the Barker Gang, and upon questioning he claimed he could cough up the Firefl
y Brothers. The launderer said the Firesons were desperately trying to wash their score from the recent Federal Reserve job in Milwaukee; he was to meet them three days later at a restaurant in Toledo. The Bureau mobilized a huge squad, studying the building’s floor plan and staking out men at every possible exit. At eight o’clock on a rainy evening, Cary—who had been requisitioned by the understaffed Cleveland field office—had sat in a closed deli across the street from the restaurant when a taxi pulled up in front of the building and deposited Jason Fireson, carrying a briefcase. There he was, a living, breathing man entering the restaurant. His dark-gray fedora was turned low and his lapels were pulled up, but Cary recognized the eyes. Smart and watchful, and something else, indefinable. The SAC put out the curious order not to storm the building until the second Fireson showed up: they would wait as long as thirty minutes for Whit to appear. Two agents were already stationed inside the restaurant. Time passed.

  Cary’s heart had been loud in his chest—it was one of the few times he had needed to wear his sidearm, in a shoulder holster beneath his jacket. He had spent hours practicing with the thing, especially over the preceding few weeks, as more and more agents suddenly had use for them. He tried not to think about his mother back in Pennsylvania, and how panicked she had been since realizing that her son’s job consisted of more than just poring over legal books on the distinction between theft and grand larceny.

  Time passed as the agents waited for Whit, but he didn’t show. The SAC finally gave the order to signal the men inside and storm the building. But the men inside couldn’t be signaled because the curtains were drawn, which had not been the case when they’d studied the place the previous evening. Still, storm the building they did. Inside they found three or four tables’ worth of terrified customers raising their hands as armed agents and cops ran in jagged lines in search of Jason Fireson. In the men’s room they found the two agents who had supposedly been watching him, unconscious and handcuffed to each other. The launderer, too, had disappeared. The Bureau frisked and questioned every busboy, waiter, cook, and customer while they searched for hidden nooks, looked beneath planks in the attic, and combed through the cellar, opening boxes of pasta and crates of onions. The agents outside swore that Fireson and the launderer hadn’t left the building, but they weren’t inside, either. They had simply vanished. The launderer turned up a week later in Joplin, but he wouldn’t talk. How on earth Jason Fireson had escaped was something Cary had spent far too much energy on. It couldn’t have happened, yet it did. Reporters loved that story.