The Confessions of Al Capone

by Loren D. Estleman

  What sin worthy of confessing could she have committed in two days? She would have been too busy all day Friday, preparing for a party and hosting it. But then there wasn't one in the book that couldn't be polished off in less than a day. He was more concerned with why she had chosen him. He kept silent.

  "I was sharp with my serving girl."

  "Rose?" It slipped out. Would he be a better priest if he'd gone about it legitimately, graduation and ordainment? It seemed to be a character issue, not one of bases touched. She showed no surprise. He'd forgotten about the nameplate.

  "Yes. I didn't sleep well last night and I was impatient with her this morning. I called her a stupid girl."

  "What had she done?"

  "Must I answer? It was a small mistake. The best of us make them, and she's the best girl I ever had."

  "It's not important. Is there anything else?"

  "I humiliated my son in front of one of his friends."

  "What did you do?"

  "You were there, Father. You must remember."

  She had scolded Sonny for comparing his father to a sack of cement. Vasco lowered his hand and faced her; to continue the subterfuge was ludicrous. "Did he tell you he was humiliated?"

  "He never would. He's a respectful young man. He wouldn't have said what he had if he weren't tired. Anyway it wasn't that bad. Just a joke, although one in bad taste. His father would have laughed if he'd heard it."

  He was relieved. He'd feared she'd come to beard him in his den. And he was elated. "Do you consider me his friend?"

  "Don't you?"

  "Nothing would please me more than to be considered a friend to you all, Rose included."

  "Rose keeps her own counsel. But Sonny likes you, and you must know Al was taken with you from the first."

  "And you?"

  She hesitated. "This may not be the place for this conversation."

  End of subject. And telling. Or not. The woman was the Siegfried Line. "Of course you regret your acts."

  "I do."

  "For the injury to your son, five Hail Marys."

  "And for Rose?" A stickler, Mary Coughlin Capone. She really thought he might forget. Not one to smuggle expiation through a warp in the confessor's memory. Al's opposite.

  "Do something kind for Rose every day for a week."

  "Something kind? That doesn't sound very spiritual."

  "It is the definition of it, regardless of language. Consider the Good Samaritan.

  "Can't you be more specific?"

  "I could, but it wouldn't be as if it came from you." He blessed her with the Sign and the absolution, which he delivered in Latin but always thought in English: "God the Father of mercies through the death and resurrection of His Son..."

  "Amen," she repeated after him, signing in response. Silence spread. Into the gap he offered, "Is there any other service I can perform?" He sounded to himself like a salesclerk behind a counter. Will there be anything else?

  "I'd like to know what you and Al talked about last night."

  In the house on Palm Island the question would have set a maelstrom going in his head. The confessional was his home court, however fraudulently he had come to occupy it. He had merely to dismiss her with a polite phrase. She had supplied it herself: This may not be the place for this conversation. But he had said something along the same lines to Ralph Capone, which had led to a change of venue to a place where he'd had no authority, the Capone limousine. He decided to be truthful.

  To bear false witness on her side of the booth was damnation; what circle of hell awaited one who had lied on his side? He expelled the breath he'd been holding.

  "He did most of the talking. He spoke of early days in Brooklyn. His childhood, mistakes he'd made in his youth, your marriage, Sonny's birth. He fell asleep after he came to your leaving for Chicago."

  "My God." The cross, swift as Frank Galluccio's disfiguring blade; Why that connection? He thought at first she was concerned with birth out of wedlock, but she disavowed him of that. "Father, you mustn't attach too much importance to everything Al says. He doesn't always know what's real."

  This apparently was the story the Capones had worked out, probably at Ralph's direction. Short of gagging Al or locking him in his room, there was no way to guarantee he wouldn't blurt out something that would lead to complications. So they'd agreed to dismiss everything he said in advance as the ramblings of a sick mind. Best course for Vasco was to go along with the policy.

  "Sonny said the same thing. In any case, Brooklyn was so long ago. The world has other things to worry about."

  "You young people think anything that happened before the miracle of your birth has no meaning. Twenty years is nothing. Stalin had Trotsky killed in Mexico twenty years after they broke. Halfway around the world wasn't far enough to run even after twenty years."

  Vasco let this lesson in history pass without comment. Russia held no interest for him. Lenin takes the Czar for a ride, Stalin muscles in on Trotsky, Trotsky goes on the lam and is bumped off south of the border. Vasco had seen it all before in Chicago.

  "I don't repeat private conversations, in or out of the confessional."

  "I believe you," she said after a moment. "Al's been chipper all day. Even Dr. Phillips noticed; he mentioned it this morning when he came by to give him his shot. His blood pressure was normal for the first time in weeks."

  "Maybe the shots are working."

  "Phillips says they can't reverse the damage at this stage, only slow down the progression. But he said there was no reason to renew Al's prescription for antidepression tablets because he hasn't used up the last batch. I didn't tell him about last night, but he said whatever we've been doing, we should keep it up. Al's a different person since you showed up. Sometimes it's like having him back the way he was." Her voice broke on the last word.

  "He seemed to be enjoying himself. I thought it was the movie."

  "I doubt he remembers anything about it. You should have seen his face when Sonny told us he invited you to his house on St. Patrick's Day. Father, I'm beginning to think you're the medicine he needs."

  "He's probably just happy to be telling his stories to someone who hasn't heard them all a hundred times."

  "You don't understand. He never talks about Brooklyn. I only know how he got his scars because it was the talk of the whole town, even on Third Place where I lived with my parents. When Sonny was old enough to start asking awkward questions, I took him aside and told him. Al always said it was shrapnel in France. I don't know what he said to that woman that night and I don't want to know. That wasn't the man I've been with all these years.

  "Those scars were one of the reasons my parents opposed our marriage. It's one thing to hear things against a person, something else when you can see the truth on his face. You're the only one he ever told, Father. The only one. Do you know what that means?"

  "I honestly don't." He'd been asking himself the same question for fourteen hours.

  "He trusts you. It's as simple and as complicated as that. In his world, trust is worth more than hard cash. When you come down to it, that's as sacred as it gets in his world."

  "Mrs. Capone, I have the impression you're asking for something, but I don't know what it is."

  "Just your loyalty. The sun and the moon. It's the only thing Al respects outside the family. You can't know how precious it is if you haven't lived the life he's lived. That I've lived." She raised a pair of hands in white cotton gloves and folded the veil back over the brim of her hat. Her eyes were turquoise in the dimness of the booth. He saw now the delicate webwork around her eyes; each tiny fissure a day waiting to hear Capone's key in the door of the house on Prairie Avenue. "Ralph must never know what passes between you."

  "I promise you he won't hear it from me."

  "Nor from me, and certainly not from Sonny. He always was a secretive child, and now he's a man who keeps secrets. I suppose his upbringing is to blame. I worked so hard to protect him I never realized he was aware of wh
at I was doing and learned from my example. I didn't even know he'd dropped out of Notre Dame until he didn't go back to finish the semester."

  The conspiracy was widening. It really did seem to be turning into some sort of cult: the Church of the Buttoned Lip.

  "You know why, of course," she said.

  He thought at first she was still talking about Sonny and how he had grown to be a man who kept secrets; in other words, a Capone. But she had returned to the earlier subject. "Because if Ralph found out I wasn't reporting to him he'd kill me."

  "I don't know if Ralph ever killed anyone. I don't know if Al ever did. But I know. Anyway, what's the difference between doing it yourself and having it done? I mean in the eyes of the Lord, not the law, which parses itself out by pleas and degrees. If, for instance, I thought you were sharing Al's stories outside the family, I'd be just as damned if I took the matter to some of the people who still come to the house as if I pulled the trigger myself. I couldn't cop a plea."

  He stared at the smoky face behind the screen. "Mrs. Capone, are you threatening a priest in the House of God?"

  "Father, if I thought you would do anything to hurt Al, I'd kill you even if it was in the lap of the Holy Mother Virgin.

  "Now I have something to confess next time, haven't I?"

  And she crossed herself.

  Sunday Mass was the one that counted.

  You could miss the weekday services without inviting disapproval from any but the most hidebound priest. People had jobs, and employers didn't place as much store in the disposition of the souls of the people who worked for them as in daily time sheets. But miss Sunday and you had better be prepared to confess Monday.

  Vasco had no intention of missing, although he'd hoped to be allowed to attend as just another member of the congregation and not as a participant. Transcribing Capone's memoirs at the expense of sleeping during the customary hours had kept him from his duties. He couldn't help thinking he was being punished for the lapse by being compelled to take an active part. If passing Father Kyril the chalice like a boy handing his father a wrench in the garage of the family home could be considered active. And he still suspected a trap. He repeated to himself the office of the breviary as he dressed. He almost forgot to kiss the stole before draping it around his neck.

  Every pew was taken, but he was too distracted to pay close attention to the parishioners at first. There was a boys' choir, containing some dark faces—he remembered what his father had said about the preponderance of Cubans in Miami, hence the presence of two Catholic churches. Kyril appeared to be a progressive in the matter of integration, and a shrewd judge of vocal talent. The boys were quite good. The organ, on the other hand, a middle-size Wurlitzer, had leaky pipes. They whooshed like a broken bellows and the notes lacked resonance. The player was an elderly woman with a dowager's hump in a flower-print dress and silver-framed bifocals that she let dangle from a chain around her neck when she wasn't playing. Kyril had said he'd rescued her from retirement ten years after the Olympia Theater on East Flagler stopped showing silent movies. Either her glasses weren't strong enough or her skills were failing in her old age, because she missed some chords, putting out of step the extraordinary ministers during their march up the aisle.

  "Bless you, and welcome." The pastor, resplendent indeed in his silks and brocade and heavy gold cross, was not a man to overgild an affair already ponderously ornate with a flowery greeting. Vasco's mind wandered during the Penitential Rite, a hundred or more voices untrained in oratory droning the collective sins of the Confiteor ("I confess to almighty God, and to you, my brothers and sisters, that I have sinned through my own fault..."), which had always been a long way from his favorite part of the ceremony. Standing behind the pulpit two steps upstage of Kyril and two steps to his left—not a position required by ritual, but the one he found the least uncomfortable—with his head bowed and his hands clasped, he felt the weight of his vestments in a room without air-cooling in a southern climate in a church packed with people, each putting out ninety-eight-point-six degrees of body heat, some undoubtedly more; deep rattling lung-coughs and noses braying into handkerchiefs punctuated the quieter moments, as they did everywhere else throughout the year. He hoped, when the time came to perform his function, that the chalice, a moderately hefty-looking one of silver, wouldn't slip from his sweaty palms, sending the Blood of Christ splattering on all the Catholic finery within range.

  Gloria, Trinity, the reading from the lectionary, by Kyril, a fat deacon in a tropical-weight tan double-breasted suit, and a lector with a bad toupee that looked like a rasher of bacon. The lector broke at awkward places in the text to breathe noisily through his mouth. He was one of the stricken, pumping out more than their share of heat. Vasco wished they'd stayed home in bed and confessed afterward, and wondered if he should confess that.

  Of course he should. But then he had worse things to confess that he could not.

  Came the Eucharist. Surreptitiously he wiped his palms on his soutane as the collection basket made its rounds. His cue was approaching like the express train from Jerusalem.

  Choir and congregation chanted the Sanctus, all the Holies and Hosannas. Then the worshippers knelt for the Eucharist Prayer, which Kyril delivered in Latin in a strong baritone, speaking of the Last Supper. The fat deacon poured sacramental wine from a silver pitcher into the chalice, sprinkled it with water, and lifted the chalice for Vasco to take. He had evidently been instructed by Kyril not to offer it directly to him. Vasco accepted it in both hands. He wished churches provided towels and talcum like bowling alleys. A rogue chalice was worse than a runaway bowling ball.

  The deacon let go. The heavy vessel remained steady. He'd dodged that bullet. He turned and presented it to Kyril. The pastor hesitated, hands at his sides. Vasco was certain this was the springing of the trap. Now that he had him holding the bag in public, Kyril expected him to finish the blessing that would transform the wine into the Blood of Christ, the wafers on the altar into the Body of Christ; and compromise the trusting souls who had come forward to kneel on the rail and take into themselves the corpus of the Savior; although Kyril didn't know that part. Or did he? Would he risk becoming an accessory to heresy just to punish a heretic?

  The answer seemed to be no. After what seemed like five minutes but was more likely two seconds, Kyril accepted the chalice and held it up for all to see. "This is the cup of My blood, the blood of the new and everlasting covenant...."

  In his relief, Vasco turned his attention to the pews; more dark faces there. Redemption seemed to be the church of choice for immigrants from the Caribbean. He thought, however uncharitably, that this may have helped press Mae Capone's decision to worship at Blessed Sacrament. The Irish were the Cubans of their day and had selected the next group down to ostracize.

  But he may have been hasty in this conclusion, because in the third row left he spotted the Family Capone: Al himself, yawning into a fist wearing the fabulous fake diamond ring, draped in a fine dark suit with a bright yellow tie, a pearl-gray fedora resting on his lap; Mae in a violet dress with an ivory jabot at her throat and a hat that might have been the same one she'd worn to confession, with a bowl-shaped crown and a veil pinned above the brim; Sonny in an Ivy League suit with what looked like a fraternity pin in his lapel, a hat similar to his father's placed in the identical position on his lap; Danny Coughlin in his serge, the eternal smile tattooed on his face. Mae was the ringleader, that much was certain. The mob boss.

  FIFTEEN

  A SEAGULL FLUTTERED BLACK-TIPPED GRAY WINGS, DODGING THE PURPLE sphere that struck the boardwalk near its toes and bounced, a projectile the size and shape of a musket ball. The bird stopped six inches away, scrutinized the alien object with first one eye, then the other, cocked its head, and hopped forward to pluck it up.

  The gull exploded, replaced by a tuft of feathers attached to a pair of yellow feet. No blood: it seemed to have been vaporized by the blast. The sphere remained untouched where it had landed. />
  "Blueberries. Filthy fuckers can't get their fill. Up in New England they flock fifty miles inland at berry-picking time. I guess they're like an imported delicacy here."

  Paul Anthony Vasco broke his pistol, basically a hollow pipe mounted on a straight handle with black grips and a trigger in a big loop, took a paper shell with a brass receiver from a cargo pocket, inserted it in the pipe, and snapped the action shut. From another pocket he fished a fresh blueberry—he carried them loose, and his shorts on that side were stained purple clear to the hem—and flipped it with an overhand twist toward a gull that had just landed a little farther away. He took careful aim, steadying his hand on the weathered salt-stained two-by-four railing in front of him, and squeezed the trigger. The pistol made a small, sharp crack, and a load of shot, each pellet no larger than mullet seed, rattled and skittered on the boardwalk. He'd missed. The bird snatched up its prize and took to the air.

  Peter Vasco was mildly horrified. The birds could be annoying in their numbers, only reluctantly opening a path when he strode on the beach and even on a sidewalk downtown, and their creaking cries sounded like someone pulling rusty nails from siding, but the destruction seemed to him a kind of sin, magnified by the fact that it was Paul who supplied the bait. When he'd produced the weapon from his waistband, his son had assumed it was an air pistol and that he intended to take target practice on seashells and discarded Dixie cups.

  Paul spat. "Out of range. Must-a woke up the patron saint of birds with that first shot."

  Peter watched him extract the smoking shell, drop it into yet another pocket, and replace it with a fresh one. "Dad, why?"

  "First week I was here, the harbor patrol towed in a small skiff with a corpse in it. Local fisherman. Coroner said he had a stroke, but I don't see how he had enough to work with to say that. He figured the poor son of a bitch was still alive when the gulls started on him. They couldn't even wait for him to cool off." He flicked another blueberry and took aim, but the berry struck the bird it was intended for, startling it into flight. "Aw, hell."