by John Gardner
He explained, carefully, as he so often had, about the inadvisability of being seen together in public, making their affair obvious. “We just can’t socialize together, Soph. If Carlo got even a hint, I doubt you’d ever see me again.”
Sometimes, her reaction would be philosophical. She would nod, shrug her shoulders and raise her eyes to heaven. On other occasions she would explode and begin to rant about the situation, particularly against the petty-mindedness of the Italian family system, which would quickly turn into a denunciation of Carlo who, she claimed, had always been frightened of her parents.
“You think I don’t know what goes on with Carlo?” she blazed now. “Whores, killings, law-breaking, mob rule. Carlo’s all part of that. But, because I’m his cousin—family—I can’t do what I like with my own body.
“They’re old-fashioned, Louis. They’re out of date, my parents and family. Mr. Capone also. It’s okay for men to go around doing what they like, but if the beloved daughter, niece, cousin or sister decides to fall in love, it’s wrong and they’ll be damned in hell.”
Then she turned on Louis. “Well, go out and enjoy yourself with that Sicilian murderer, Tony Genna, but don’t be surprised if you come back and find I’ve gone off with one of the clients from this exclusive whorehouse.”
Louis calmly went on dressing, while she railed at him and slammed out of the room. She was just in time, for, a minute or two later, Carlo put in an appearance. They were playing at The Barn that night, and Louis, deftly flicking his double-end tie around the starched wing collar, glanced into his mirror to see Carlo with a face like a thundercloud.
“Problems?” Louis asked lightly, hoping the black brow was unconnected with Sophia and himself.
“Looks like it.” Carlo slumped into a chair and helped himself to the bottle of good Scotch Louis was allowed in his room. “I been saying it for months. Now, I think it’s coming.”
“What?”
“The O’Donnells. Ya know, Steve, Walt and Tommy. Al mentioned they hadn’t been around the Four Ds in almost a week. Sent me out checking on them, and I hit the jackpot. Their big brother, the real brains—Spike—got outta Joliet last week. They been seeing lotsa guys: the other O’Donnell family, and Deany O’Banion. Word is they’re planning to break the pact and start supplying places under pressure.”
“They got that kind of muscle?” Louis turned, reaching for his tux.
“Well, I guess they could make things difficult. Not like those three punks who tried it on a while back. Spike’s got some good friends in New York.” He stopped to light a cigarette, as though giving himself time to think. “Look, Lou, if ya get a chance, tap Tony Genna. See if he’s heard anything.”
“There’s a lot of talk,” Genna told Louis over dinner on the following evening. “My family have heard things. But, Lou, I’m full up with Beethoven and Rachmaninov. What a mixture to assault any ear, eh? The ancient and the modern. Or perhaps you like that Rachmaninov concerto?”
They had been listening to the Beethoven Fifth Symphony, and the Third Piano Concerto of Sergey Rachmaninov, a relatively modern work. Louis said, yes, he liked the piano concerto. “It complements his Second Concerto, Tony. You could put both of them together and make one huge piece from them. In a way, the Third is simply an extension of the Second. But you’re quite right, the program was wrong. Beethoven and Rachmaninov are like oil and water for a concert.”
Tony Genna nodded. “Oil and water, huh? Like both the O’Donnell families and Dion O’Banion sitting next to the Gennas and the likes of Torrio and Capone.”
“That would seem to be it.” Louis grimaced, and Genna laughed. He knew, from their many conversations, that Louis Packer was not cut out for the rackets.
“Take my advice, Louis, while I can still give it. You’re a musician, a serious musician, and you belong to a different world. I cannot join you in that world because I have the family to think about. I have to stay. You can get out anytime you want.”
Louis thought about the endless nights, playing piano to hoodlums and their customers; he thought of the places where he performed with Sophie. Most of them were badly decorated, if at all, with brick interior walls and cheap tables. But for his attachment to Sophie, this was a terrible, barren place. Yes, he must find a way out.
But, it was almost three years, and a lot of blood and death, before Louis Packer made it out of Chicago. Reflecting on it later, he wished that he had cut his losses, taken Tony Genna’s advice and walked out into the night, taking a train far away from the Windy City, the Toddlin’ Town, City of the Big Shoulders.
Instead, he went on playing, doing solo spots, and accompanying Sophia Giarre. To look back on that was to see and hear a lot of jazzy music, played to the crash of revolvers, shotguns and Thompson submachine guns; to step from the piano over the bodies of all those killed in the next few years. But through it all, Sophie sang, wildly, better, and with more and more success. In bed she behaved wildly also, and with greater abandon, as though the events, and the danger through which they lived, gave an edge to the moments of pleasure.
“And there was a great deal of pleasure, Herbie. A huge amount. Not just the sex, for I discovered through Sophie that love is not just good sex.”
Kruger nodded, and thought Louis was right. No, he considered, love is not just sex. Any man knows that, but also any man knows that good sex helps one hell of a lot. Take his own wife, Martha, for instance. Please, as the comedians would say. He had shared real dangers with her. She had lived on that razor edge of an agent in place. But now the dangers were over, and so was the sex. Some of the mortar that was love had lost its binding qualities.
Way back in the 1920s, in the city of Chicago, war broke out within two weeks of Louis’ talk to Tony Genna.
THERE MUST HAVE BEEN upward of two hundred cars in Seminole Square when Pucky Curtiss found a slot, picked up her long shopping list and strode out in the disguise of black wig, tweedy suit, and dark glasses. She knew, the instant she made the first pass through the square, that there was at least one team watching. She had no idea of how she knew, but she did. Intuition? A slightly higher perception than usual? Maybe. Possibly it was the famed agent-runner from way back in the Cold War, Big Herbie Kruger, who had relayed some invisible wisdom to her, like bishops are supposed to pass on the Apostolic Succession to priests at ordination. Back at the Office they thought like that.
“The SIS is like the church,” they would say. “It has similarities with the Church Militant.”
During the drive into town she had pondered about her behavior with Kruger. He was well-named “Big” Herbie, with his height and broadness of shoulders, but it was an uncoordinated bulk. He shambled, without a graceful movement in his body. Then she thought of him, sitting with old Louis Passau, and the speed with which he had pulled the automatic pistol. Now that was amazing. He was lounging back, a lump of man, splayed in an easy chair, then, in less time than it took to blink, he was completely together, even compact, the pistol in his hands like some magic trick.
It was the same with his speech, full of misplaced and mispronounced words, yet concise and economical when serious matters were on the line. He was all they said about him. In the special classified handbook on agent running, he was thinly disguised as “Harry,” whose old cases and operations were set out for study at Warminster. Harry used all his quirks of nature to advantage: the lumbering gait, the bouts of heavy drinking, his long streak of sentiment, and the tears that came easily when listening to the music of Gustav Mahler.
Big Herbie Kruger was a source of power and Pucky Curtiss was aware that simply coming into close proximity with this legend had led her to feel the way she did about him. “I’m not talking love, here,” she said to herself behind the wheel of the car, “but I’m going to have Kruger. Eventually, I am going to have him. I am going to steal the Holy Grail of his secret from him and make him feel for me,” which was breaking all the rules of tradecraft.
Now, as she app
roached the crowded entrance to the supermarket, she knew they were watching. Probably a team of two, in a van, though she could not see it. Possibly one, maybe two, agents in the store itself.
As she pushed the cart along the aisles of canned goods, the fabulous fruit displays, the exceptional piles of vegetables, and the other wonders you could not get back home—in the tight-little-bright-little U.K.—she saw another danger. Naldo and Barbara Railton had chosen this moment to do their own weekly grocery stockpiling.
They would not recognize her in the proverbial month of Sundays, but she had to stay clear of them. Whatever kind of surveillance team the local cops, or the Feds, had on Barbara and Naldo they would examine everyone who came close to them. They would scrutinize, photograph, and note the car registration of any strange face seen more than a couple of minutes, loitering near the Railtons. Pucky could not afford that. She was fireproof with the disguise, but dreaded the license number of her car being noted, for it might be their only safe transport out of the area when the time came.
As she thought about it, picking canned goods from the shelves and tossing them into a rapidly piling cart with a mind of its own, she knew that they would have to run soon.
Virginia was no place to be if the authorities remained alert, still believing Passau and Kruger to be there.
It took a very long time for Pucky Curtiss to complete her shopping, late that afternoon.
CARLO HAD BEEN RIGHT. Spike O’Donnell, sprung from Joliet, and his hoodlum brothers began to team up with anyone else who had no time for the Italian monopoly. Torrio-Capone houses started to receive visits. Usually it was one of the O’Donnell brothers with a herd of hoods brought in from out of town.
“From now on, we supply you with booze,” they said to managers and proprietors. “Or else.” The last two words conveyed destruction. “Or else,” meant “or else you get your place smashed up, and maybe a few people get rubbed out.”
It began to happen often and, naturally, Torrio and Capone fought back. Hardly a day passed without a shooting, or some speak being raided and splintered into matchwood. Innocent people died as well as those connected to the mob.
At the end of the year, things took another turn for the worse. A new mayor, Judge Dever, and a newly elected chief of police, Morgan A. Collins, took office and pledged to drive the gangster element from the city. Whole areas of Torrio-Capone joints were shut down. Even The Four Deuces and The Barn were served with closing orders and duly padlocked. Louis Packer was moved into a small apartment in Cicero, and Sophie went to stay at a plush hotel, all expenses to Mr. Capone. The authorities had now sealed off the lake and river routes from Canada, and the importation of good liquor was forced to be done overland—more difficult and certainly more dangerous.
Johnny Torrio left the country to settle his old mother in Italy, while Capone took over, using the Hawthorne Inn, on Twenty-second Street, as his headquarters.
“I went there a few times,” Louis told Herbie, “but as little as possible. The place was permeated with an atmosphere of danger. Capone even had bulletproof shutters fixed to the ground-floor windows.”
It was during this time, with Torrio out of the country, that Capone started to become the real leader. He began to organize the infamous takeover of the suburb of Cicero, a move that would take his money-making properties outside the jurisdiction of Mayor Dever and the police chief, both of whom he failed to corrupt.
Louis found himself regularly playing piano at places in Cicero soon after the spring of 1924, when Capone was virtually the one-man controlling influence. The last elections in Cicero had been rigged, some people actually voting at gunpoint, and Capone soldiers stood near every ballot box. Louis did as he was told but tried to plan his own getaway. It was only because he played a club in Cicero one night, with Sophie, that he even knew Johnny Torrio was back in America.
By then he was getting in over his head. Carlo had been promoted, running one of the biggest clubs in Cicero, and Louis often found himself riding shotgun on consignments of liquor being trucked in from other states or Canada. He complained to Carlo, saying he was a pianist, not a gunman, but Carlo simply looked bleakly at Louis and said, “If ya wanna stay here, and make money, then ya do as yer tol’, okay?”
“So I began to make my own plans, Herb. In secret. I told nobody. I moved all my money, except for a few hundred dollars, right out of the State of Illinois. I closed the account I had set up just outside Chicago and I bought a car in an assumed name. I even managed to collect a couple of pieces of I.D. for myself under different names. Nobody knew about the car. I kept it in a small lock-up on the edge of the city, always full of gas. Ready to go at anytime.”
The one thing he needed, though, was real money. In the out-of-state account he had salted away almost thirty thousand dollars, earned both legally and illegally. Louis knew this was a fortune to some people, but it would never be enough to stake him in the world he was determined to enter.
“I needed to save at least another fifty K to be safe, Herb. You understand that? Another fifty grand and I could make my real life. But the opportunity was not yet there for me. I was forced to wait.”
In a roundabout way, the chance was to come, together with the motivation, through the fast-rising gang boss, Dion O’Banion.
Most of what went on among the warring factions passed by Louis. He kept his eyes and ears open, but did not wish to know too many details. He did what he was paid to do and listened, mainly to Carlo, who was very close to the seat of power.
Then, slowly, Carlo began to change his attitude regarding his cousin Sophie. He began by making obvious, and telling, remarks to Louis about Sophie’s future. These comments at first made Louis apprehensive, for they appeared to indicate that Carlo had become, not suspicious, but certain that the pair were guilty of that greatest of family crimes in the Italian unwritten code.
Talking of Sophie one afternoon he said, “Ya know what she needs, Pianist? She needs a husband. A man she can trust. A man she can turn to. Now, if ya wasn’t …”
“I know, don’t even tell me, Carlo. I know what you mean, and I know you’re saying I’m not suitable. You need a good Catholic Italian boy.”
“Just a good Catholic boy would do,” Carlo grinned. “And a chair and a whip, like a lion tamer, eh?” They started to go through this routine about once a week and after the lion tamer bit, Carlo would add, “Know what I’m sayin’, Pianist?”
“Let me explain what things were coming to, Herbie.” Louis Passau sat erect in his chair. “The entire underworld of Chicago was in a melting pot, and quickly splitting into two distinct factions. Most of the Irish, Poles, and Jews aligned themselves with Dion O’Banion. Now he was a very good-looking guy, and he loved flowers. He doted on flowers. Dion even had a half share in a flower store and spent an awful lot of time there. They specialized in doing what you call floral tributes for gangland funerals. Wreaths, that kind of thing.
“But Deany was a tough, ruthless, leader. He didn’t have to think twice about having someone iced, or even doing the job himself. You know, the O’Banion mob had men like Hymie Weiss on their payroll, and Hymie invented a new technique. When he took people for a ride, he would have them driven to some remote spot where they were shot in the back of the neck, right there in the car. Usually with a twenty-two caliber bullet. Sound familiar, Herb? It’s still the favored mob-style method of execution.”
Big Herbie nodded. “KGB liked it also,” he said, dry as a moth wing.
“They also had a couple of other nice guys: ‘Nails’ Norton and ‘Bugs’ Moran. Now Moran’s style was killing by motorcade. He’d have four or five cars circle around a victim’s house, blasting away, like Indians around a wagon train. Truly, this was happening in Chicago.”
“I believe you, Lou. I believe you.”
On the other side there was the Torrio-Capone organization, allied to the Gennas; and the small, powerful Druggan bootleggers.
Yet, inside the rival c
amps there was further dissension. Nobody could be really certain of who would become suspect. Louis felt wary, being one of the only Jews working for the predominantly Catholic Italian-Sicilian mob. It was uncomfortable, particularly as he also found himself caught midway between the Capone-dominated people and those related, or allied, to the Gennas. Already there were sudden, unexpected assassinations, ambushes, threats. Eventually, he was certain, the leaders would come under fire.
After visiting the opera one night, Tony Genna asked Louis if he had heard anything within the Capone hierarchy about relations between the Gennas and Dion O’Banion. The question came out too casually for Louis.
Instead of replying in the negative which would have been the truth, he asked—
“What should I be hearing, Tony?”
Genna made a gesture, as though brushing a fly away with his right hand. “My brothers, they’re hotheads. They worry me. I got a tongue lashing from Johnny Torrio last week because my brothers stepped out of line, forcing one of O’Banion’s places to buy our liquor. I told him we can do it cheaper than anyone.”
Louis passed it off with a laugh. “Maybe your people’re doing it cheaper, but your stuff kills quicker as well.” He had not forgotten the production of rotgut liquor the Gennas had organized into a cottage industry within their fiefdom.
Genna shrugged. “Maybe.” Any humor had gone from his face and voice. “But O’Banion’s getting too big, Louis. It’s time he left town, for the good of his health. Did you know he hijacked a couple of convoys of our best stuff? Canadian whiskey. I tell you, in confidence, Louis, that it is our family’s feeling that Dion O’Banion’s days are numbered.”
In November, O’Banion was shot dead in the flower store. The bullets that riddled his corpse were found to have been anointed with garlic, an old Sicilian superstition which held, untruly, that a man wounded with a bullet rubbed in garlic would die of gangrene, if not by the bullet itself.