The Confessions of Al Capone

by Loren D. Estleman

  That at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, of things in heaven and things in earth, and things under the earth ...

  Vasco had made all the necessary appearances for one day. He put away the book, changed into gabardine slacks and a rayon sports shirt, and went out to walk on the beach, leaving the uniform behind.

  Afternoon sunlight scalloped the waves, drawing a strong shoreward wind that riffled his hair and drove away the heat. A flock of sailboats glided around as aimlessly as butterflies far out, but few motor craft with gasoline rationing in place. A man in a white Civil Service helmet stood on the end of a pier with binoculars, scanning the horizon for U-boats. Despite these things it was difficult to believe that men were spilling and shedding buckets of blood on just the other side of the Atlantic.

  He looked at the horizon, too, but not for enemy submarines. God, he believed, was not to be found in the sky, but at the junction of heaven and earth. In that murky violet line was Paradise Everlasting; Hell, too, because at the end of his time in the seminary he had come to the conclusion that God and the Devil were one and the same, and that was why he'd left. He believed it still, and now he had entered that place that was always within sight and forever beyond reach.

  "Forgive me," he said into the wind.

  He rose early, with dewy droplets making tracks in the brine on the windows and before the heat could come rolling in against the tide. In a fresh dickey, with his summer-weight suit falling lightly on his shoulders, he breakfasted on powdered eggs and ersatz bacon in a diner that opened at dawn to serve fishermen. Most of the anglers had come and gone, but local types and a smattering of tourists drank Postum, a coffee substitute, and looked at the ocean through a row of windows with a roll of black oilskin mounted above it to serve as blackout curtains during air raid drills. The waitress who refilled his cup, a tall bony woman in a teal uniform, said that the ban on pleasure driving had knocked a hole in the tourist trade worse than the Maginot Line.

  He replied sympathetically, but made little effort to sound sincere. The morning was going to be unpleasant enough, and he wanted to get all he could out of these last few contemplative moments. The waitress, apparently thinking him distracted by reflections of a religious nature, withdrew without belaboring her subject. Later he felt guilty and left a generous tip.

  The address Hoover had given him for Sunrise Charters was burned into the lintel of a shack built of the same planking material as the pier it shared with a competitor. It had a slant metal roof with a recent coat of white paint to deflect the sun and retard rust, but orange spots had already burst through it like boils in the salt air.

  He had a flash of hope, inspired by the name of the enterprise, that the owner had sailed with a customer, but the small motor launch tied up to the pier told him procrastination wasn't an option, maureen was painted in professional lettering on the fantail: his mother's name. He stood on the dock with his fists balled in his pockets, waiting for the anger to fade.

  Friendly relations must be established.

  He took a deep breath, let it out, fanned the heat from his face with his hat; walked up to the door and knocked on it before he had a chance to change his mind.

  It opened on brass hinges. But verdigris had managed to do what rust could not. They squeaked like startled rats. A man blinked at him from the doorway, naked but for a pair of dirty shorts with cargo pockets, a can of beer in his hand.

  "Well, if it ain't the little sky pilot," he said.

  "Hello, Dad."

  FIVE

  "Come ahead in, since you're here. Don't track in no fish scales on the Persian rug." His father turned and retreated inside, not so much leading his visitor as walking away from him.

  People who'd seen them together never guessed they were related. Paul Vasco was short, stooped from too many years sitting in driver's seats not designed for the human spine, and scrawnier than Peter remembered; a man could cut a finger on his shoulder blades. His son was taller by a head and had to watch his weight. He had his mother's face and fair coloring, while his father's belonged on an Indian-head penny.

  The rug was a straw mat, faded to the same shade of khaki as the plank floor. There was a kerosene lantern on a nail, a writing table and chair, a tin ice chest, and a sprung rattan chair with a firm cushion for Paul's back. An army cot was the only other furniture.

  "You live here?"

  "Sleep it off here sometimes. I got arrangements with a lady in town. That shock you?"

  "I've heard too many confessions to shock easily."

  "It ain't no confession." He lowered himself into the rattan, squirmed around until he got the cushion right, and crossed his bare ankles. The sun had bleached his close-cropped hair white and burned his body dark as red oak. He looked older than fifty, but his arms were strung with sinew, his eyes as bright as a bird's. The soles of his feet looked like ox hide. It occurred to Peter he'd never seen him with his shoes off before. "You want a beer?" He gestured toward the ice chest with the can in his hand.

  Thirty years since he left Calabria and he hadn't altered the accent, except to seal it with a hard Chicago overlay.

  "It's early for me."

  "Breakfast of champions, like it says on the Wheaties box." He swigged from the can. "Sit yourself down. Or you more comfortable on your knees?"

  "You used to kneel in church."

  "I didn't do it for no living. When'd you get out?"

  "You make it sound like I was in prison."

  "Prisoners don't got a choice."

  Peter drew the chair out from the table and sat, bracing his hands on his thighs. "I was ordained two years ago. I stayed to serve at St. Francis, but now they're sending me to Miami."

  "Blessed Sacrament?"

  "Our Lady of Redemption."

  "I took the choir director from Sacrament out after marlin coupla times. Swears like-a the police sergeant." His enunciation came and went when he drank; this wasn't his first of the day. Peter wondered what he did with the empties. "How come you didn't join the army and be a chaplain?"

  "You might not think so, but civilians need spiritual counseling just as much as soldiers."

  "Also you don't get shot at."

  Were you ever? he wanted to ask. But that wasn't the point of the visit. "Cubans," Paul said.

  "What?"

  "Miami's crawling with 'em, that's why there's two Catholic churches. Otherwise there'd be a temple on every corner and kosher in every restaurant. Jolson comes down in December and stays till February, what you think of that? The Jazz Singer himself."

  "Do you think he'd convert?"

  The joke failed. He didn't remember his father's eyes being so steady and bright; maybe it was the deep sunburn. "I figured it had to be work brought you when I seen what you was wearing. You wouldn't come here just to see the old man."

  "I didn't have to come at all."

  "How'd you find me, anyway?"

  "You wrote me at the seminary."

  "I didn't think you got any of my letters. You never answered."

  "I'm sorry. That's one of the reasons I came, to apologize. And forgive."

  "I don't need no apologies and you can stick the other thing up your ass. What psalm's that from, Padre?"

  He felt the blood engorging his face. Probably the old man thought he was offended by the language. What right did he have to be bitter? Peter touched the gold crucifix on the chain around his neck. It was a gift from his mother. Her serenity touched him back.

  "Christ, it's hot already." Paul rolled the can of beer across his forehead. "A man misplaces his manners. Lower that thing."

  He got up to pull the cord that secured the wicker shade over the window facing the sun. The beer can cleared the sill just before the shade came down, missing him by inches, rolled on wood, and landed on water with a splat. "Get me another one while you're up. That one was warm as piss."

  That solved the mystery of the missing empties. He fished a fresh can of Pfeiffer's out of the chipped ice in th
e chest. Paul took it and punched two triangular holes in the top with an opener he took from a cargo pocket. "You're gonna like Florida, especially when the rest of the country's freezing its nuts off. Come July you'll swear you're in hell. What you do, you can't stand it no more, you come up here. I'll take you out on the boat. It's like taking a cold shower, only wetter."

  "Is business that slow?"

  "It's this pleasure-driving ban, but they're gonna lift it because they can't enforce it any better than they done Prohibition. Diesel's a bitch to get hold of on account of rationing. But I got connections."

  "Still?" He sat down, keeping his voice neutral.

  Paul heard something anyway. "What, you never hoarded stamps so you could stuff yourself on roast beef one day out of the month? They say it's wrong, but everybody does it."

  "I was just saying I didn't know you knew anyone with the black market."

  "Let me tell you, I was in line at the OPA, I heard a sailor tell the clerk his air base in Alaska had so much fuel they dumped it out on the runway and set it on fire to melt the ice. We need it more than they do. The way I see it I ain't doing nothing no worse than what I done back in Chicago."

  There it was, right in his lap. Lead us not into— "What did you do back in Chicago, Dad?"

  "I drove trucks, son. I gave some fellows a lift when they needed it. I loaded and unloaded crates. Sometimes I stood outside a place and gave a whistle when I seen someone coming. You knew all that."

  Peter stared, but the face had gone as immobile as the Indian's on the penny. He never had been able to read him when that happened, and it was worse with the shade breaking him up into horizontal bars of twilight. Maybe after another beer; but that wasn't why he was here.

  "Anyway, this war can't last forever. That's what I told the man at the bank. He thought about it for a week, then saw I was right. It didn't look at the start like I'd ever own that boat, just go on paying rent on it till I was all dried up and blind like my uncle Umberto in Strongoli. But I'd've made a hell of a fine senator a coupla thousand years ago. Your old man could have talked Pontius Pilate into giving Jesus the key to the treasury."

  "That's good, Dad. You always had the gift of gab." Even if he hadn't been sworn to silence, he'd never have been able to bring himself to tell him it was J. Edgar Hoover's miracle and not his. No matter what else had passed between them, he couldn't take that away.

  Paul beamed and lifted his beer. "Any day now, our boys will land in Europe and go through them Huns like salt through a hired girl. The Japs are already on the run. We'll have peace by Christmas, and then I'll be up to my neck in tourists and fuel for old Maureen. Did I tell you I named her after your mother, God rest her soul?"

  "I guess she earned that much at least."

  Once again he'd misjudged his father's ear. The can remained at half-mast. "What does that mean, Pietro?" He only called him that when he told him to fetch the strop.

  "I didn't come here to rake up the past."

  "Then you should not have brought a rake. You said you had something you wanted to forgive, so spit it out."

  He retreated onto less dangerous ground. "Do you remember what you said when I told you I'd been accepted at St. Francis?"

  "I don't remember what I said two minutes ago. I never learned anything listening to myself."

  "You said, 'Son, there's no sense giving up on fucking girls your whole life. You won't always look like something that just crawled out of a sewer pipe.' "

  "Well, you don't. You don't look like me, either, but nobody'd mistake you for a rat no more. I almost didn't know you at first." He swallowed beer, burped. "Maybe lay off the potatoes. Dames like a flat belly." He slapped his. It made a sound Peter found vaguely obscene.

  "I'm a priest, Dad. You don't get to be one if you aren't meant for it."

  "Bullshit. You think I was meant to push a hack?"

  "That was a job. This is a calling."

  "There's-a no difference. Don't forget, I was an altar boy in the Old Country. Also I was the bocci champion of the neighborhood."

  "I don't see what those two things have to do with each other." He wondered if his father's mind was wandering.

  "You're lucky, then, because if I wasn't fast on my feet I'd've got the Holy Spirit rammed up my ass. You think Father Angelino got the Call to do what he done to the boys that wasn't?"

  "I didn't expect your blessing, but I didn't deserve to be insulted."

  "A man don't like to see his son throw his life away. I hoped you'd find that out for yourself, but that won't happen now. You were what, eighteen?"

  "Nineteen. Three years older than you when you came through Ellis Island."

  "You know what they done to me there?"

  "What?" He regretted asking. He was afraid he would say they'd rammed the American way up his ass.

  "Took away who I was, that's what. Paolo Antonio Bascano was my name when the boat put in, but the man in the processing center was in too much of a hurry to write it down right." A bony shoulder lifted, fell. "Life is an accident. When there is a Call it's usually a wrong number."

  "This one wasn't."

  "Well, then." His father made the sign of the cross, blessing him with the beer can.

  It made him absurdly happy, and he chided himself for it. "What about you? Wrong number or lucky accident?"

  "So it is confession you're after."

  "Can't a son ask his dad if he's happy?"

  "It'd be easier if you'd take off that choker."

  Peter reached behind his neck and unbuttoned the collar. He put it and the dickey on the writing table, next to a tin cigar box that might have been the same one Paul Vasco had kept his fares in back in Cicero.

  His father looked surprised. "Them things can't be too comfortable down here."

  "Cross to bear." He smiled briefly, surprising himself. "I asked you a question."

  "I want you to meet Sharon."

  He wasn't prepared for that, but he doubted he'd get away with changing the subject again. "That's the lady you have an arrangement with?"

  "I shouldn't have put it like that, but I wasn't expecting you. We help each other make ends meet. She gives me a place to stay, and a woman deserves butter and eggs now and then."

  "So it's convenient." Paul seemed determined to flaunt his black market connections; but Peter was just as determined not to appear curious. If it came up again—and he was sure it would—he'd use it to get what he came for.

  "Well, it's a little more than that. She has her widow's pension, apart from what she makes working in the shipyard, but you can't curl up with no paycheck. I'm not trying to shock you now. Seeing your Adam's apple makes things different. Her husband died at Midway."

  "How old is she?"

  "She says thirty, and she could pass for it. She takes care of herself. I may be an old drunk, but I never robbed no cradle. Your grandmother wasn't born yet when my father buried his first wife."

  "What's she like?"

  "You can judge for yourself. She gets off her shift at four."

  "I'll take a rain check. I'm leaving on the four-fifteen to Miami. Father Kyril's expecting me."

  "Fuck kind of name's Kyril?"

  His father had become profane. Maybe he always had been, with his cronies, but had held back around his wife and child.

  "Russian, I think."

  "Don't turn bolshevik. Bad enough you wear a dress Sundays."

  "Is it serious?"

  "Damn right it is. FDR should never have crawled into bed with that moffetta Stalin."

  "You know what I mean."

  "Me and Sharon? Well, we smile a lot, so I guess the answer's no."

  "I'm happy for you, Dad. Mom wouldn't want you to be alone."

  "That's the second time you did that."

  "Did what?"

  "That thing with your mouth when your mother came up, like you had a mouthful of boiled turnip. It's a good thing nobody can see you in the booth. What's wrong?"

  He wasn't
strong enough to retreat a second time. Maybe if he'd had training. "You were away a lot. It wasn't easy taking care of me with her leg in a brace."

  "She never told you that."

  "You think I couldn't figure it out?"

  "There was bills to pay, boy. I couldn't go to work and stay home both."

  "The cab company paid you a decent wage."

  "And after I turned it all over to the doctors, what then?"

  "That was later. She wasn't in the hospital then."

  "Where you think she was when you was in school?"

  "What do you mean?"

  "I asked you a question." Throwing it back at him.

  "Home, scrubbing floors and shaking out the rug."

  "She was at Sisters of Mercy Hospital, getting treated for polio."

  "That was over before I was born. It made it hard for her to get around, which is why she could've used your help. She didn't need treatment until her heart failed."

  "She needed therapy. Hot and cold compresses. Vitamin shots to keep up her strength. All that costs money, son, more than a man could make just driving people around. And all down the drain, because she died anyway."

  He felt himself pale. "The death certificate said nothing about polio."

  "It weakens the heart."

  "I don't believe you."

  "All the same it does. It stopped once when she was giving birth. They had to pound on her chest to start it back up. She wasn't supposed to have children, but she didn't tell me that till after we brought you home.

  "Wherever I was, Chicago or Cicero, whatever I was doing, whoever I was with, I left him to go back to the apartment, pick her up, and bring her back home after her treatment. I bet you Maureen Vasco's the only patient ever got a ride to Sisters of Mercy in a beer truck."

  "I didn't know. I never even guessed."

  "We timed it so you were in school. No little kid should have to worry if his mother's gonna be around to see him graduate."

  He was suddenly, perversely glad she hadn't seen him fail. He would never have been able to fool her as he had his father. She'd have stared at him with those eyes like blue-green lagoons until he broke down and confessed.