The Confessions of Al Capone

by Loren D. Estleman

  Ralph, he found when at last he emerged, was a man without irony; a very real carnation had burst like a huge popcorn kernel from one lapel. He stood near the big front doors in a cocoa-brown double-breasted suit that made him resemble a stout chest of drawers with a white hat set on top. Next to him stood a man not as broad, but broad, dressed all in gray; a shadow enveloped in shadows. In Cicero the deep gorge of his suit coat would have meant easy access to a shoulder holster. There was no reason it meant otherwise in Miami.

  "I don't know how you stand it," Ralph said as Vasco approached. "I try to stay out of tight places ever since Frank and Pete Gusenberg gunned Jack McGurn in a telephone booth at the McCormick Hotel. He pissed through a tube for six months."

  "My room's not much less tight, I'm afraid."

  "I got a can outside. We can talk there."

  "A can?"

  "A bus. A heap. A jalop. How long you been in this country, you don't know English?"

  "I'm not exactly dressed for outdoors."

  "You look swell, like the angel on top of the tree. This here's Frankie."

  The other man stepped out of the shadows and shook Vasco's hand with his left, as if there was something wrong with the other. One of Dion O'Banion's killers had grasped his gun hand while the others pumped bullets into him. The lesson had not been lost. "Hiya."

  The face under the gray felt brim was heavier now, older, the chin less blue with the graying of the beard beneath the skin; but time alone couldn't straighten that crooked upper lip.

  Frankie Rio. Al Capone's personal bodyguard. Survivor of the attack on the Hawthorne Inn. The man he'd seen helping his father empty a jug of Mrs. Terrazzini's homemade wine in the kitchen of their apartment.

  He felt the armor of the Church melting away from his body. He was a little boy in a nightshirt standing on a cold linoleum floor staring at a pair of suddenly silent men seated at the table staring back.

  Rio's face showed no recognition. Vasco took comfort from that. He himself had changed, of course, and the encounter had lasted seconds; but if the name Vasco didn't ring bells, Rio's relationship with his father couldn't have amounted to much.

  Then again, career mobsters weren't in the habit of tipping off others to what they were thinking.

  It was a rare cloudy day, with a stiff breeze blowing from the southeast. It was early for hurricanes, but one couldn't help but think about them when the weather changed abruptly. In 1928, a savage storm had torn through the area, killing twenty-five hundred people, doing millions of dollars' worth of damage, and putting fifty thousand residents out of their blasted homes. Farmers were still plowing up bodies when Capone went to prison.

  Ralph plodded down the front steps, his toes turned out like a duck's; a ponderous man, heavy on his feet, a blimp filled with suet instead of hydrogen. Not one of those bouncy fat men you saw in vaudeville. Rio preceded him by a step, leading with his left shoulder like a boxer. Vasco seemed to remember he'd fought professionally under an Irish name. Or was that Jack McGurn? Cramming for a test always carried the danger of forgetting much of what you'd learned.

  The car, straddling two spaces parallel to the curb, was a 1942 Lincoln, the last model before the auto manufacturers in Detroit retooled to make B-24 bombers and Liberty ships. It was long and rounded and the sky-blue finish, many coats deep, reminded him of Mae Capone's eyes. All the chrome was painted over, the headlights too, in flat black with narrow slits for the light to get out. The vehicle had been parked strategically, preventing other cars from boxing it in without advertising deadly intent.

  "I keep it down here," Ralph said. "Rentals are all shit since the war and Al needs the wheels. Fucking feds took everything he had and Mae had to sell the rest to keep the house. She and Ma don't get along so good, so the house in Chicago was out. Damn shame, them blackout headlights. You can't see two feet in front of the car. Like the krauts and Japs got enough planes left between 'em to drop a bomb on one crummy Ford."

  He looked like his brother, only heavier and softer, with eyes that seemed to make direct contact only when he was looking at Vasco out of the corners. His hat had to have been custom-made; few haberdashers would have one his size in stock. It was a Panama, worn the way Al wore his in photographs, the brim flipped up on one side and down on the other, in Al's case to place a shadow on the side where the scars were. He had a ruby stickpin in his striped tie and a ring just like Al's on his left little finger. Vasco assumed that this time the diamond was real. It occurred to him fleetingly that Ralph may not have disposed of the infamous sparkler after all, as he'd told Mae. A thief was a thief, in burlap or silk.

  "Let's go for a ride."

  He felt himself pale. Ralph noticed and laughed. His laugh sounded like a dog panting; no, a broken bellows; no, steam sputtering from a loose safety valve; no, a dog panting. He'd been right the first time. "Not that kind of a ride, Padre. You been listening to Gang Busters when it shoulda been the Shrine of the Little Flower."

  Heat came into his cheeks. White to red, a human chameleon. "This is Danny Coughlin, Mae's brother. We coulda used him behind the wheel in Chicago."

  He shook the hand of a smiling middle-aged Irishman with the beginnings of a double chin, standing by the open door to the backseat. He wore plain blue serge like a chauffeur's uniform but no cap. Vasco had seen more hatless heads outdoors in Florida than in all his life. "How are you liking Miami, Father?" His brogue was more pronounced than his sister's.

  "Very much." Although it was starting to look like Cicero.

  "Danny manages business for the Bartenders and Waiters Union when he ain't driving. You ask me in the old days I'd let a Mick count my money, I'da coldcocked you for cracking wise."

  "Not me, though, greaseball." Danny's smile remained sunny.

  Ralph panted; roughhouse teasing was nothing new to a man with many brothers. "Not you, neither," he told Vasco. "Not dressed up like Pat O'Brien. What was that picture, Danny, he played a priest?"

  "Pretty much all of 'em."

  "Danny'd know. Al's got him one of them pull-down screens in the living room, projector behind a panel just like a fairy Hollywood producer. They get all the latest down there, even before the theaters in Miami."

  "I've a friend through the Projectionists Union," Danny said. "Fella whose job's to pick up the reels at one theater and drop 'em off at the next. On the way he stops by Palm Island. You like religious pictures, Father?"

  "Westerns, actually." He found himself smiling. Danny's attitude was contagious.

  The other man's smile got wider, if that was possible. "We're screening Buffalo Bill tonight. Joel McCrea. Maureen O'Hara, but don't tell Winnie. She's visiting her mother, and she's the jealous type. You should come down."

  "Let's don't get ahead of ourselves." Ralph's thick voice held an impatient edge for the first time. Danny's smile went away. "Well, let's not stand out here waiting for a gull to fly over and shit on us." Ralph tipped a flipper-size palm toward the backseat.

  The interior was tan glove leather, soft as meringue. Vasco sank into it. He could straighten his legs without scuffing the back of the front seat. Ralph got in beside him, the springs squeaking on his side. Danny slid under the wheel, Rio took shotgun. Vasco wondered at what point a metaphor became literal.

  Ralph told Danny to drive alongside the ocean. "There was still snow on the ground when I left Chicago," he said. "The lake don't get that blue till Mother's Day." The motor started with almost no noise at all, just a pleasant vibrating massage Vasco felt in his buttocks and in the soles of his feet. Danny spun the wheel between thumb and forefinger and they swung out into shift-change traffic and turned east. The mayor of Miami turned on all the green lights for him. Paul Vasco had been that kind of driver as well.

  With the bay on their right they powered north on Highway One. The water was choppy and not as blue as when the sun shone, but bluer than Lake Michigan that time of year. Sailboats, a seaplane floating on an updraft, its pontoons reminding him of Brownie'
s feet in their giant Oxfords. He wondered if he had stamps enough to swing that prime rib Sergeant Fowler had recommended. But then he wouldn't need it if he failed whatever test Ralph had in mind.

  It started right off the bang: No "pencils up," no countdown by the clock. "Cicero, huh?"

  "Born and raised. Well, born in Chicago. My father said he didn't want me delivered by an abortionist."

  "Smart man. I wouldn't trust no Cicero doctor except maybe to pull a slug out of my fanny. They're good at that, through practice. I own a coupla joints there, but I wouldn't want to slip in one and hit my head. When's the last time you went to Umberto's on Second, ate a mess of fried clams?"

  "Five years, anyway. That's when it burned down. It was on Twenty-Second, not Second, just down from the Hawthorne Inn."

  Ralph was lighting a cigarette, watching him out of one of those eye-corners. He shook out the match, coughed smoke, a stuttering blast as from a tommy gun, dropped the match into a nickel tray with a hinged lid in his elbow rest. "Kerosene bomb. Insurance job. One of them Molotov cocktails didn't have a name till the krauts tried to take Stalingrad."

  "Leningrad." Not that it mattered. He wasn't being quizzed about the Russian campaign.

  "Grad this, grad that. You don't get nowhere in this life till you learn good English. My old man was Michelangelo with scissors and a cutthroat razor, but he never did learn how to put together six words in American, and he died with only a suit with two pairs of pants and his white smock. We buried him in 1920, know why?"

  Death by heart failure in a pool hall down the street from the family apartment. "I imagine it was because he was dead."

  Ralph shared his brother s affinity for bad jokes, but not his laugh. One of Al's "har-hars" was worth ten of Ralph's leaky bursts of steam. He didn't like Ralph. But then of course he didn't like Al either. Focus.

  "You're hep for a psalm-seller, I'll tell the world. Not like old Father Ahearn. 'Father A-Hole,' we called him. He ever tell you about the time my boy Ralphie hollowed out a votive candle and stuck a cherry bomb down inside?"

  "I never met a Father Ahearn. Was he at St. Francis?"

  Ralph took a drag that burned the cigarette all the way down to where Melachrino was printed on it in Arabic-looking letters and mashed it out in the tray. Vasco had never seen a man smoke a cigarette in less than a minute. Gray smoke kept coming out of his mouth and nostrils long after the point at which he thought a pair of human lungs could hold it. He could think of no argument to justify setting fire to something and sucking on it. "You're right, I got mixed up. Ahearn was in Brooklyn, and it was our brother Mimi planted that cherry bomb. A lot's happened in a little time. You know, it was just four years between the papers spelling Al's name right and the day they put him away for skimming off Uncle Sam? Things sure moved fast after the country went dry."

  Vasco drew a deep breath and let it out, coughing a little smoke from Ralph's exhaust. He cranked down his window without asking permission. He didn't have to beg leave of thugs. He wasn't his father. "Mr. Capone—"

  "Bottles. I got that name on account of I was the chief distributor of bottled water in Chicago. Surprised? City up to its fanny in bootleg beer, I'm selling God's own bounty? But ask yourself, whaddaya order to take the sting out of a slug of needle beer? Or you're a saloonkeeper, you want to turn a case of Old Log Cabin into five and cut down on overhead? Not that pisswater they pump from Lake Michigan, where fish fuck and everyone on down from Big Bill Thompson to Molly the Meter Maid flushes their toilet. Bottles Capone, that's who you come to. Nectar straight from the pure springs of Maine, or maybe Montana. One of them M states. See, I cornered the market not just on boozers, but on teetotalers as well. Al said I was a genius. Coming from a genius, that's like being asked to ride tailgunner for Lindbergh. Bottles, that's me." He jerked both thumbs toward his well-padded chest like Jimmy Cagney.

  "Bottles. Why don't you just ask me what you want to know, and I'll answer as truthfully as I can."

  Ralph lit another cigarette, coughing again and spraying sparks, which he swept off his coat with a panicky gesture that suggested a closetful of expensive suits pockmarked with holes. Then he turned his head and met Vasco's gaze square on for the first time. "That sonofabitch Hitler. May his soul rot in hell. Thank God for him." Belatedly he took note of the company and crossed himself awkwardly. He was out of practice.

  "Why do you say that?" The confessional had been a good idea, even if it had been arranged for a different reason. It had increased Vasco's capacity to suspend judgment.

  "He took the heat off Al, that's why. Until that goosestepping, sauerbraten-eating, house-painting son of a pretzel-twisting pimp came along, Al Capone, my brother Snorky, was the by-God Antichrist." No sign of the cross this time. "They tried to hang everything on him from the Chicago fire to Leopold and Loeb. Every harness bull on the street thought he could run him in on no charge at all, him without a single conviction or even an indictment, till that business in Philly. When they arrested him here in Miami on nothing at all, they took his cash and jewelry and threw 'em in the toilet. In the shitter. I ask you, what kind of person don't respect diamonds and greenbacks?"

  Incorruptible public servants.

  "Bolsheviks, that's who. Bolsheviks and Nazis and them little monkey-faced Japs what rubbed out Pearl Harbor. And for what? Cutting the dust from the throat of some street-sweeping schnook on South Clark with the same hootch drank by the judge what sent him to jail for lugging a pint around in his pocket? So excuse me, Father, if I don't buy that get-up you got on as any more than sweat from Christ's left nut. The Bible says a man's got to stand up for his brother when he can't stand up for himself. Take that to federal fucking court and see how far you get."

  "Actually, Cain says in Genesis, 'Am I my brother's keeper?' "

  But Ralph wasn't listening. "I done most of three years in Leavenworth and on McNeill's Island on a tax rap. That was just practice for Al. I'd do three times that to keep this country that ought to be putting up Hitler's ass what they're putting up Al's from chiseling him out of what life he's got left. Hai capito?"

  "Capisco." He had to admit Ralph made a good case. Mob mouthpieces had been making good cases for years without coming close to the truth.

  "All right. Just so's we're clear."

  The radio was playing softly in the front seat. A baseball game, with simulated cheers and sound effects to suggest the action was being broadcast live. Dizzy Dean's drawling play-by-play had a soporific effect as the conversation lulled.

  There were fewer sails now, and those that were visible were tacking shoreward. Raindrops spattered the windshield and made crooked tracks in the slipstream. Danny turned on the wipers. Vasco rolled up his window. Unseen lightning crackled on the radio speaker. A flat gust of wind slapped the side of the car, but the Lincoln was heavy and solid and held the road like a brick. The sky was low and dirty. The water had turned a gunmetal shade. Interesting how easily "gunmetal" came to mind in that company. In leaner days Ralph had worn brass knuckles and swung a blackjack during the Cicero takeover and on the streets of Chicago in the Pineapple Primary of 1928, when Outfit grenades hurled into polling places did the campaigning for favored candidates for office. Now those big meaty hands, broken several times and healed over shiny white, busied themselves lighting a fresh cigarette off the butt of the last.

  "I put in a call to St. Francis before I left Chicago," he said. "That stuck-up pastor wouldn't come to the phone, but some flunky said you made the grade in the seminary there and got transferred here. I talked face-to-face with your pastor while you was in the booth. Not exactly the curious type. He didn't even ask who I was."

  "His mind's on other things." He looked out at the rising waves, seeking calm. He felt like a schoolboy waiting for his parents to come back from a meeting with his teacher; and his academic record was rocky.

  "He says you're working out so far. I ain't just sure what that means. I guess you didn't set fire to the place."


  Vasco said nothing. There was always another shoe.

  "I dropped by your old man's boat dock on the way down. I was in his bar once after Repeal, but I think it was after he sold it to my cousin Rocco, so maybe we didn't meet. I could be wrong; come hard times we had a hundred people a day looking for work, and like I said I was in charge of water, not beer. Anyway I missed him again. The boat was gone. Must of had a customer."

  "He'll be disappointed. He could've told you about the time he went out on the water with Hemingway."

  "Fuck's Hemingway? Never mind. I ain't interested." He popped open the gold case with his initials engraved on the lid (the Capones slapped their brand on everything), but he was out of cigarettes. He snapped it shut, cracked his window, and poked his stub out into the current of air. "Frankie, gimme a nail."

  Rio reached inside his coat and turned in his seat to pass a cellophane-wrapped pack over the back.

  Ralph snorted. "Camels. Know why they call 'em that?"

  Rio said it with Ralph: " ' 'Cause they cure the tobacco in camel shit.' Hey, sorry. There's a war on, you know? We don't all have your connections."

  "Go boil your head, you Sicilian son of a bitch." Ralph snatched the pack out of his hand, speared one between his thick lips—they lacked his brother's Rubenesque curve—and jammed the rest into an inside pocket. Danny chuckled and turned up the volume on the ball game. The 4-F first baseman for Cincinnati whiffed an easy fly.

  Vasco watched Ralph light up, marveling at the democracy that appeared to exist between gangland general and lowly GI, the casual insults and name-calling.

  In movies the henchmen always called their superiors boss and scrambled to carry out orders.

  "I couldn't get a line on your father's crib. He sure don't sleep in that shitty shack."

  "He has a lady friend."