The Confessions of Al Capone

by Loren D. Estleman

  The stop at Dearborn station lasted just long enough for some passengers to step down and others to board. A pair of soldiers in pressed khakis slung their duffels into the overhead rack and sat down in front of Vasco, their overseas caps tilted at the identical jaunty angle. They were younger than he and chatted excitedly about "getting into the show while it's still on." Outside on the platform, a newsboy with the face of an old man was shouting about Cherbourg and rocket attacks on London. A well-dressed couple in their fifties bought a paper and read with their lips moving, the wife over the husband's shoulder. They carried no luggage, probably lived nearby and came down regularly for the latest reports. Every man in the fighting had someone back home hoping not to see his name on a list.

  He was glad when the train resumed moving, gladder still as it picked up speed entering the northern suburbs and leaving the brute city behind. Cicero had been particularly painful, his first sight of the St. Francis steeple in four years reminding him of an accusatory finger aimed at heaven. He had asked for a sign and they were all around. A man should think hard before he prayed, look at it from God's point of view.

  No one knew he was aboard this train. He had told Kyril only that he was going away for a while, asked him not to tell anyone who called for him that he'd left Miami, and said that he would check in from time to time by telephone to ask if anyone had tried to reach him. Kyril had asked no questions. He would guess that the word Vasco had been waiting for had come, whether or not Brother Thomas told him of the Special Delivery letter, but explanations were unnecessary in a season of secrets. Vasco hadn't called the Director. What little he'd heard of Wisconsin told him he was headed for a wilderness where strangers stuck out, especially the kind Hoover would send, who brought attention to themselves by trying so hard to blend in. He hadn't forgotten the kosher delivery van posted on the street after sundown on the Sabbath. All would be forgiven once his reports continued; if it wasn't and he was returned to his tin desk or dismissed, at least he would be free. Apathy had its points.

  North of Chicago—not as far north as he might have predicted, but a thousand miles distant in terms of culture—the train chugged past plowed fields, worked by teams of mules and horses, and increasingly tractors—Farmalls, John Deeres, Fordsons farting balls of smoke out of straight stacks and dragging furrows with discs where no plantings had yet occurred. He seemed to be witnessing the tipping point between beast labor and mechanization. Prairie wind combed acres of graceful wheat and rattled the leaves on stalks of corn. The crops grew right up to the edges of small towns populated by men, and as often women, in bib overalls and floppy straw hats, with brief commercial blocks lined with feed stores and harness shops and general mercantiles, a quaint term banished from big cities; buildings with false fronts, freestanding partitions masquerading as second and third stories, with real windows, blue sky showing through them on both sides. They looked like western movie sets. Vasco couldn't see the purpose of the pretense, except to provide shields for villains to hide behind with Winchesters, waiting to ambush Randolph Scott.

  He liked westerns, even though he failed to understand the architecture or why the Indians insisted upon getting themselves shot out of the saddle chasing stagecoaches instead of shooting the horses in their traces; movies seemed to operate on a logic all their own, like organized religion. The lawmen were generally incorruptible, with the occasional crooked sheriff dispatched satisfyingly in the final reel, often at the moment of repentance, and the outlaws died instantly with bullets in their hearts rather than rotting in prison for nonpayment of taxes or being elected to high office. Justice was swift and clean and had no need for coroner's inquests or grand juries or writs of habeas corpus. Perhaps that was why Danny Coughlin liked westerns as well. In the old West he might have owned a gambling hall, worn a fancy vest, and been his own best customer at the bar.

  The towns in northern Illinois were named Morton Grove and Wheeling, Deerfield and Prairie View. They had narrow brick movie houses, not palaces, but with grand names like The Empress and The Araby, and their rounded marquees advertised westerns and war movies that had played in the cities last month. Boys on bicycles pedaled the reels in cans from one town to the next for pocket money after school. The train didn't stop at any of these towns. Their stations had been boarded up since the Depression. But they looked prosperous now, with late-model Fords and Chevies parked in diagonals among the pickup trucks with their front wheels turned into the curbs. The government was buying the farmers' crops to feed the troops. All the barns had fresh coats of red paint, even if the farmhouses were weathered gray, with pumps in their backyards supplying the running water.

  Pickups bucked along dirt roads, the drivers seated in bulbous cabs with radiator grilles like medieval visors, their beds stacked high with baled alfalfa and sacks of grain and live chickens squawking in slat crates. Vasco watched one stop at a country crossing long enough for its cloud of dust to catch up and powder it with a fresh layer of brown. The crossing was deserted otherwise, but the driver paused obediently before moving on. People abided by the law here.

  But that was an unreasonable assumption to make based upon a passing glimpse. Crime recognized no Switzerlands. There would be petty thefts, juvenile delinquencies, drunk driving on Saturday night, and once in a blue moon a farmer would snap under pressure and take an axe to his wife or vice versa. Each community had a constable for a reason. Vasco knew that many of the farmers furnished Washington with faulty livestock counts in order to slaughter pigs and chickens for their own tables without bothering with rationing. But crimes of violence were an anomaly, rare enough to fuel barbershop conversations for months, and chiseling the OPA was a grass-roots rebellion waged against outside interference; entirely American, like bootlegging, penny-ante poker, falsifying tax returns, and the Whiskey Rebellion that Kyril had spoken of so fondly. Resistance to authority was the business of Americans. It was hardwired into them since the Boston Massacre and still thrived in the wartime black market. Vasco realized what J. Edgar Hoover did not, or would not, that to go against it carried no hope of victory or even progress; they might as well try to dig a hole in the surface of Lake Michigan. He felt useless, and yearned more than ever for a well-pressed uniform like the ones worn by the eager young men seated in front of him—bound, as likely as not, for one more visit home on leave before shipping out. They were playing cards now on the armrest that separated them. The game, appropriately enough, was War.

  His collar was choking him. He unbuttoned it, slid down as far on his spine as space permitted, and closed his eyes. But sleep missed its cue. In a little while he sat up and looked out, saw tall pines flanking the cinder bed, and knew he was in Wisconsin.

  Mercer was eight hours north of Milwaukee, some forty miles southeast of icy Lake Superior, although glimpses he'd seen of water belonging to what turned out to be a mammoth man-made reservoir had fooled him into thinking the town stood on its shore. The station was painted red, like every barn he'd seen in the farm country, but he hadn't seen a tilled field in more than fifty miles, only logging trails and clearings in dense evergreen forests where cabins had been built of the same trees that had been cut down to make room for them, each with a whitewashed iron oil pig to furnish heat. Trucks pulling flatbed trailers with great logs lashed to them whined up a main street as broad as a tennis court, shifting often, their chain drives rattling and clanking like a drawbridge being raised. The street was a dirty orange, a combination of asphalt and iron ore; the entire northern half of the state, it seemed, was built on iron, pierced all over with mines whose towering elevators were visible for miles where they loomed above the tall trees. Tailings were used heavily in all the pavings and foundations, and the ruddy color against the green of the cedars and pines made Vasco think of Christmas.

  The climate here enhanced the image. He was glad he'd brought a topcoat. The air smelled of sawdust and iron and chilled his skin. The appeal to the Capones was obvious after the dripping heat of Miami. V
asco felt conspicuous in his city clothes among so many high-laced boots and ear-flapped caps. The fashion palette seemed to be red-and-black buffalo plaid. He stood on the platform with his valise at his feet, out of the way of pedestrian traffic while the greeters and embarkers evaporated and the train blew its ugly-sounding horn and rolled out, leaving behind a flat brown stench of diesel exhaust, like charred nose hairs. Mae's note had said he'd be met, but he wished she'd risked giving him a telephone number or an address to send a telegram so he could let her know when to expect him. Whoever she sent to meet the train daily had missed today, and now he was stranded. Should he step into the Indian souvenir shop across the street and ask where he might find the residence of Al Capone?

  That would be the exact wrong note upon which to begin. Small-town people were insular, suspicious of outsiders, and never deviated from first impressions. This he'd learned from reading Sinclair Lewis, which although it had come secondhand, like the lessons he'd learned about theosophy and the inner workings of the Church from Seamus McGonigle, its truths had been acquired through observation and experience. However the locals felt about the gangster living in their midst, seniority alone would direct them to close ranks around him against interlopers, even if the interloper wore the trappings of an ancient faith. That distrust would spread like wildfire because the hearts of natives beat as one, at drugstore counters and in line at the little stone post office and in meetings at the Elks Lodge—a log building with real elk's antlers mounted above the front door—in parlors and over backyard fences. An indiscreet comment inevitably found its way to its subject, and from there back to the source. What intelligence Vasco had managed to gather had come from keeping his mouth shut and his ears open and possessing his soul in patience, and not by promptings on his part. A good spy (let's call it what it is) had all the qualities of an expert confidence man, lying back and allowing the mark to think he was the one calling the shots. All things come to those who—

  An automobile horn prevented him from falling into mindless cant. He'd been so wrapped up in rumination he'd failed to notice the green Plymouth station wagon that had pulled abreast of the platform. It might have been there all along, although he knew it had not. He'd simply failed to observe its approach. Some undercover man he was. Its fenders were battered, lacy with rust, and the ubiquitous dust of oxidizing iron had streaked its finish with a pinkish residue like pale lipstick. (He thought suddenly of Rose: Why?) The particles had formed hammocks on the ribs of the varnished wooden panels on the doors. The motor was running, knocking in an uneven, unpredictable rhythm, the product of a loose lifter or of the random quality of gasoline in the provinces, obtained from varying sources according to price and the current attitude toward rationing. Native behavior in regard to edicts from the U.S. capital depended heavily on distance.

  The man behind the wheel leaned across the front seat and opened the door on the passenger's side. "Long time no see, Father. Throw your gear in back and hop in."

  The smile on Frankie Rio's face, distorted by his imperfectly joined upper lip, was amber, stained by hundreds of generations of Camels like the one burning between his teeth.

  He wore a tan shooting jacket with a corduroy patch on the right shoulder over a flannel shirt and dungarees. The square checked butt of a pistol slid back out of sight under his jacket when he straightened up.

  Vasco hesitated, then opened the door to the backseat, slung his valise onto its cushions, and got in beside the bodyguard Ralph Capone had inherited from his brother.

  Rio seized his hand in a corded, hairy-backed paw, incongruously manicured to perfection, with the trademark diamond ring glittering on the pinky. "I been here every day this week, watching Scandihoovians climbing on and off the train, looking for that collar. I was starting to think you gave Al the bird."

  "I came as soon as I could get away." He refused to elaborate. Mobsters were always testing for disloyalty.

  Rio let out the clutch and steered a wide path around a farm wagon carrying a contraption that looked like a spider with an iron tractor seat mounted on top. A harrow, possibly; everything Vasco knew of rural life had come from newspaper pictures taken during the Dust Bowl.

  "You believe this street? You cross over, you're out of pistol range of the other side. Hicks in the sticks got more space than they know what to do with."

  "It's a nice change of scenery."

  "Gimme the Loop any day. You fish?"

  "My father does. I never saw the point, with a market in every block."

  "That's all Ralph and Al do every day. I eat one more fucking fish I'll bust out in scales. I'd kill for a pastrami on rye. How is your old man?"

  "He's well. I told him you said hello."

  "I can't get over him winding up on a boat. He could spin a Packard around on a dime and give you back a nickel."

  "I thought he drove a truck."

  "Well, he wasn't exactly union."

  A nerve jumped in Rio's cheek. Apart from that Vasco would not have known he regretted opening his mouth. On the other hand, it might have been a chronic tic. Rio had gained weight since his photographs, quilting his powerful frame with a layer of fat. He was hatless, and his hair was receding and graying, but not in a dignified way. There were patches all over like pieces of tape. In profile, he left no doubt he was the man Vasco had seen seated across the kitchen table from Paul Vasco in Cicero.

  "I saw you once when I was little."

  It was a dangerous chance to take, particularly at the start of his stay, and it went directly against everything Hoover had taught him. But he was tired from the long trip and had not expected to be met by Rio. Exhaustion and surprise had made him invulnerable and impatient.

  "Yeah?"

  "You were drinking homemade wine from a jug with my father. I came in for a drink of water and saw you."

  "Sure it was me? It's a long time since you was little."

  "I remember your lip."

  A hand went automatically to the old injury, the thumb out to rub it smooth, a gesture of long habit. "Everybody asks me about that. I got a story for each one, but I won't lie to a priest. I tripped and split it open on a streetcar track when I was nine. Lost my front teeth. My parents didn't have a pot to piss in: it was either pay a dentist to fix my teeth or pay a doctor to stitch up my lip. My old man flipped a coin and my ma got out her sewing kit. We was living in a five-story walk-up and they said they heard me hollering on the ground floor."

  "I wondered what Al Capone's personal bodyguard was doing hanging around with a truck jockey."

  "I seen him around. Jack McGurn said he was the nuts behind a wheel. When I heard he retired to Florida, I thought maybe there's hope for me. You get awful tired sitting around hotel lobbies watching people come and go. I don't remember ever drinking with him. There was a shitload of busted lips around then: busted everything. They called Willie White 'Three Fingers' on account of he lost two under a streetcar, and Deanie O'Banion came by that short leg of his falling off one. Streetcars tore up more guys than tommy guns in them days."

  "My mistake." He watched a garage roll by, two men with long Nordic skulls in wool caps and mackinaws squatting in front of the glazed bricks drinking Dr Peppers from a big red cooler with the logo painted on it in white. Rio and Paul Vasco couldn't have gotten their stories straighter if they'd met to compare them. He didn't know whether the man was lying to protect himself or Peter's father.

  Outside Mercer the road narrowed, but not by much. It was a logging trail, with chevrons pressed deep into the sandy soil by the tires of big trucks. Rio moved closer to the edge to make room for a mud-plastered Mack coming in the opposite direction carrying more giant logs toward the sawmill in town. If he opened his window, Vasco could put his hand out and touch the pines growing up from the berm. He saw a flash of white among the straight trunks and knew they'd spooked a deer. He'd never seen one in the wild. He couldn't imagine a less promising habitat for the Capone watcher.

  "I don't know if Al and
Ralph are back yet." Rio rolled down his window to throw out his cigarette stub and lit a fresh one off the dashboard lighter. "They went fishing. You can't walk three miles in any direction without falling in a lake."

  "They left you behind?"

  "Thank God. Only thing I hate more than eating fish is trying to catch one of the slippery sonsabitches. Up here I'm just an errand boy. A gun punk from the city gets lost in these woods, so unless they piss off some moose, they're both of 'em safe as houses. Things've settled down even in Chicago. Every few months or so some chiseler turns up in a car trunk at Union Station, but that's about it. It ain't like the old days." He blew a jet of smoke in a sigh.

  "What do you all do for entertainment besides fish?"

  "Not a hell of a lot. Go for walks when Al's up to it, go into town to the picture show or play slots in the Rex, Ralph's joint. The radio in the cabin's swell if you like static. Fucking trees play hell with the reception."

  He'd seen the Rex Hotel near the station, a two-story box with false Tudor timbers on the outside. "I suppose Ralph owns most of the town."

  "Naw, there's just that and Beaver Lodge and the Redcap at Martha Lake, just to keep from going squirrelly out here among the bugs and birds. Crickets keep you up all night and in the morning the birds are singing their asses off. I don't know how people get any shut-eye up here. I'd rather live next to the elevated." He turned his head to give Vasco his broken grin. "Some night, you don't object, we'll drop by Billy's Bar in the Rex, you'll meet Jake Guzik. He's a hoot."

  "Greasy Thumb Guzik?" It slipped out before he could think.

  "Jesus, don't call him that in front of Al or Ralph. He's just a big tub of blubber, but they stick up for him. People like Jake. He makes 'em laugh. Somebody put a slug in a guy's face back in Cicero just for slapping him around a little." Vasco's temperature dropped suddenly, unrelated to the northern air. That somebody was Capone, the night he ditched the murder weapon in Paul Vasco's taxicab.