The Confessions of Al Capone

by Loren D. Estleman

  Or worse. His first thought, when that blow came out of nowhere in the Black-and-Tan, was that the Outfit had finished deliberating his case and had passed sentence. But his first fear had been for Rose.

  Do you consider yourself a man of courage? Hoover had asked.

  I like to think so. Then again. I've never been tested.

  He'd been tested, and he had passed.

  He didn't suppose that he loved Rose. The fact had nothing to do with race. She was beautiful and reckless, brave without having to stop to consider the fact, and she attracted him physically as no woman ever had, but his feelings for her were not deep. His parents were his yardstick. Whatever Paul Vasco's faults, he'd worked a perilous job at all hours to pay his wife's medical bills, and she in turn had waited up for him night after night until he came home safe. Peter Vasco didn't see himself accepting such a responsibility on Rose's behalf, or Rose giving up a night's sleep worrying about him. They were only together because of a set of circumstances that could never be duplicated, against the backdrop of war, which accelerated all things and made the artificial seem real. They were lovers, they could be friends. There was a third ingredient missing that made all the difference.

  He was thinking about his father when a stake truck trundled around a corner with the MIAMI herald painted in Olde English letters on the slats, its bed piled high with bound stacks of copies of the early bird edition. It made him think of a man driving an old Mack away from a supercharged Packard; of the same man driving John Scalise and Albert Anselmi away from the scene of Hymie Weiss' murder in a Hudson Super Six. He was so engrossed in these thoughts he failed to take close note of the day's headline on the big sheet of newsprint flapping on the side of the truck as it passed him. In his memory's eye he saw capone. He saw dead. He leaned the Model T into a U-turn and gave chase, history repeating itself.

  THIRTY-THREE

  CAPONE LIEUTENANT FOUND DEAD

  SUICIDE SUSPECTED IN NITTI'S DEATH

  The name Capone was still magic in Miami, where he was its most celebrated resident; Al Jolson remained a distant second. Perhaps the editor had put the story on the front page to spoil Capone's breakfast. Vasco remembered reading editorials in the file protesting his presence.

  He'd parked under a streetlamp to read the article. Details were sparse, as befit a story that had broken only hours before. Frank Nitti, under indictment once again for extorting protection money from key figures in the Hollywood film industry, had been found in a weedy lot near the Illinois Central Railroad tracks in Chicago, shot through the head. Although some thought he'd been executed by Outfit associates for refusing to take the rap quietly and spare a more extensive investigation that might implicate others, the prevailing theory was he'd taken his own life to avoid serving another sentence in Leavenworth.

  Vasco had bought the paper at the first newsstand he came to, where a yawning vendor was just cutting the twine on the first bundle of Heralds to hit the sidewalk; as he was paying for it another truck, this one from the Miami Sun, had rumbled past, slowing down just enough for the man standing in the bed to throw down another bundle. Vasco had bought a copy of that, too. He turned to it now, glanced at a grainy photo of a pathetic-looking figure who resembled an Italian floorwalker, slumped on his back propped up slightly against a board fence with his hat tilted over his eyes as if he were taking a nap, a foreshortened angle with the soles of his hand-lasted shoes looking enormous in the foreground. This account contained late-breaking information not available to the Herald at press time. Three slugs had entered the Enforcer's skull.

  There were no lights on in the rectory at Our Lady or Redemption. Father Kyril would not rise until dawn to prepare for Sunday Mass, and Brother Thomas was probably taking his rest in whatever quarters he'd arranged for himself while Vasco was sleeping in his bed. Vasco had been exhausted after dropping off Rose, but something more desperate had replaced the need for sleep, and in any case he did not want to be present when the household was stirring. There would be questions then, beginning with his ruined face.

  He packed his valise with all the clothes he'd brought from Washington except those he was wearing. He threw in his scant toiletries, the Bible his mother had given him, wrote Kyril a note, and put it on the neatly made bed where he knew Thomas would find it and take it to the pastor. He apologized for leaving without notice, claiming urgent family business and that he did not know when he would return. A lie followed by a half-truth: He doubted he'd be back ever. There would be no questions to answer if Kyril called his father to check his story, but he didn't think he would, and if he did, Paul would not tell him his son never arrived. His first answer to any question was seldom the truth.

  Vasco thought of leaving his collar with the note, then changed his mind and put it in the valise. He'd worn it for the last time, but there was nothing to be gained by provoking curiosity, except more suspicion. He crept quietly into Kyril's study and called for a cab, asking to be picked up at the corner. He would not burden the others with the inconvenience of retrieving the Ford from the train station.

  A Cuban cabbie with a Rosary swinging from his rearview mirror told the passenger there were no trains running until morning. Vasco said he had a family emergency and that he didn't want to take the chance of missing the first train out.

  "Family emergency and how. I'd be in a hurry too if my old lady bust my face like that." He threw down the flag on the meter.

  As they got under way, Vasco didn't bother to look out the back window. There would be no one following now.

  Let me worry about Nitti, Hoover had said. He's through.

  At the time, he'd thought the Director was referring to Nitti's legal troubles. For a brief moment he'd suspected Capone. Reading brittle newspaper clippings and hearing other sides of the events from Capone and Hoover had weaned him away from trust in the official accounts, so he'd rejected the suicide theory even before he'd read the details. But Capone was no longer running Chicago. His sphere of influence had shrunken to encompass only Palm Island, where he'd demonstrated the extent of his jurisdiction with Joe Verdi. He was strictly past tense, a magic name in the columns, a wistful memory of bygone days before Poland and Normandy, when seven men slain at a crack still had the power to shock. Capone was through, the Outfit was through. There was a new gang chief in charge.

  He managed to sleep on a bench inside the station, but so fitfully he might have paced the floor all night for all the rest it brought. His face throbbed, he snored himself awake, he dreamt in snatches that always ended with him standing in an overgrown lot by the railroad tracks. He saw Nitti from behind, walking to clear his brain, saw him stop and turn at some sound, the expression on his face when he saw the gun, felt the gun pulse in his hand, saw smoke and blood and awoke to the stench of burned powder and the horrible sensation of having killed a man.

  From Charleston on his car was crowded, predominately with women in starched blouses and tailored skirts; government workers filling in for men in the service, but there were men in uniform as well, mostly officers with gold braid on their visors, carrying briefcases. Many of the last were nearing retirement, and looking uncomfortable in their government-issue. These were ranking Pentagon officials who'd been accustomed to wearing business suits to work until the dress code changed to discourage enemy espionage. In Washington he waited for his chance to step out into the aisle, then joined the line waiting to get off. The Russians were advancing toward the west, the Americans and British toward the east, and back home it seemed everyone wanted to be in on the finish. On the platform, boys were waving newspapers and crying the names of foreign cities. In the District, Frank Nitti was strictly second section.

  He'd sublet his room to an FBI code clerk who'd been sharing accommodations with a naval courier he didn't get along with, a development approved by his landlord, who still suspected Vasco of giving aid and comfort to the enemy. But he found a vacancy in a residential hotel in a grubby neighborhood not far from where Father S
eamus McGonigle was no doubt already drunk at that morning hour and reminiscing about his adventures running guns to Ireland and Scotch to the U.S., about the woman he'd romanced in Belfast after he was ordained. Vasco smiled bitterly at the memory of how much that had shocked him. Less than four months had passed. They might have been years.

  The bathroom was down the hall. The shower was running. He waited outside in his robe and slippers with a towel over his shoulders until a stout, Semitic-looking woman came out wearing a raveled housedress and carrying a toothbrush. She shot him a suspicious look and shuffled back to her room in shapeless men's slippers. He showered and shaved, and back in his room put on his priest's suit over a white shirt and black knitted necktie; a secular look and well within Bureau restrictions regarding grooming and dress. He walked two blocks to a streetcar stop and took the car to the Mall. It was July. The air was thick, sopping, but nowhere near the tropical hell of Miami. Collars were wilting all around him but he felt fresh, at least on the outside. Inside he felt old and wrung out.

  The Justice Department Building was a beehive as always, clerks and stenographers rustling through air-cooled hallways and watching the needle climb the dial in the elevator. He recognized some faces, but only to nod to. The place was a city unto itself and one could never hope to meet all the neighbors. They registered no reaction to his swollen nose and black eyes. A fellow he'd known well enough to have coffee with in the commissary and discuss the war with entered on the second floor, but the car was crowded and he didn't see Vasco standing in back. Vasco didn't call out to him.

  Helen Gandy was on the telephone when he entered her office. She wore a blouse with slightly padded shoulders and one of those scarves women of a certain age adopted when their necks began to show lines. Her hair looked redder, proving either that she did get out in the sun despite the rumors or that she'd been to a hairdresser recently. She looked up at him curiously, but showed no surprise, either at his presence or his bruises. She was listening, a fat fountain pen in her hand moving rapidly across a pad scratching shorthand symbols, making none of the vocalizations people usually made to show they were listening. She filled the page, started another, then thanked the caller and placed the bulbous receiver in its cradle.

  "Special Agent Vasco. Your name isn't in the book."

  "I need to see the Director. It's urgent."

  She glanced at the telephone, where a light glowed. Hoover had been among the first to discard the cumbersome battery of phones in favor of a multiple-line system. "You'll have to wait. He's on the line with the White House."

  He chose a seat from where he could see the tiny light. There were magazines scattered on a low blond wood table, Life and Time with pictures of movie stars and generals on the covers, and city newspapers, but he didn't pick them up. Miss Gandy began typing rapid-fire. In a little while the light went out, but she finished a page and put it on a stack before she flicked the switch on the intercom. "Peter Vasco, sir."

  "What line?" Hoover's voice barked from the speaker.

  "He's here in person. He says it's urgent."

  There was a pause. "Ask him to wait."

  "Yes, sir." She broke the connection. "He's very busy. You should have made an appointment."

  Vasco didn't reply. He doubted the wait would have been shorter if he'd called ahead.

  Forty minutes went by on the twenty-four-hour clock on the wall. Miss Gandy put through five calls and did some more typing; he knew which were outgoing letters and which were interoffice memos by the color of the sheets. Yellow carbons formed a third pile. Nothing about the system seemed to have changed in his absence.

  The intercom crackled. "Send him in, please."

  She made eye contact. "You remember the way?"

  He nodded and went through the connecting door to the dummy office. The scant motherly warmth she'd shown on his first visit was gone, but he'd expected that. He'd breached protocol.

  The splendidly furnished office designed for ceremony and public relations—a Bureau term of recent coinage—struck him now as a great empty waste, squandered space that could be used for rolling bandages and holding Red Cross blood drives. He preferred Sergei Kyril's cramped crowded study, the shabby nerve center of a business that traded in hope and salvation and incidentally a place to store hymnals and bundles of paper for recycling to make maps of enemy terrain. He crossed the deep seldom-trod carpet and entered the homely back room without knocking. He thought it a redundancy, like the office itself.

  Hoover was sitting at his work table on its raised platform, writing with a buff-and-blue pen wearing the FBI seal. The proportions of the neat stacks of papers and folders may have changed slightly, but they still resembled a desktop model of a modern city. The Director wore a blue suit and a red tie on a white shirt, a subliminal American flag.

  "You're away from your post." He continued writing without looking up. "I assume this is important. The word urgent is overused these days. It's lost its value."

  "I came about Frank Nitti."

  "Nitti's dead."

  "That's why I came."

  "To tell me? The lines of communication between Chicago and Washington are intact. So far the blunderers in that office haven't managed to cut them by accident." Even his attempts at irony were heavy-handed.

  "They say he killed himself."

  "Who says? I insist upon attribution in this room."

  "The newspapers and the radio. Walter Winchell said this morning it was confirmed."

  "No doubt they checked their facts. Even Winchell's allowed to get one right now and then."

  "He shot himself three times, they said."

  "The Associated Press said twice, but I'll surrender the point. The AP reported Churchill's plane shot down last year. It turned out to be a commercial airliner. Leslie Howard, the actor, was aboard. His body was never recovered."

  "In the head."

  Hoover went on writing, signing letter after letter in the distinctive cerulean blue ink he employed. He was the only person in the Bureau entitled to use the color; blue-signed letters got instant attention in all the regional offices.

  "Nitti was a thorough man. There is ample evidence of that in his file."

  "How is it possible for a man to sustain two severe head wounds and self-inflict a third?"

  "I can cite many similar examples. Records is filled with them. You'd be astonished what a determined suicide is capable of once he's botched the job twice."

  "I don't believe you."

  Hoover rocked a blotter over the last signature, laid aside his pen, and drummed the sheets together. Only then did he raise his hardboiled-egg eyes to Vasco's.

  "Say what's on your mind, Special Agent."

  "You told me to let you worry about Nitti, that he was through. At the time I didn't know you meant you were going to order his execution."

  "You've let the months you've spent in bad company distort your judgment: an occupational hazard, but in your case the training was insufficient to prepare you against it. There wasn't time. As to your accusation, it's absurd. Murder is Capone's specialty."

  "You deny it?"

  "Categorically. On your way here, did you take note to see if you were followed?"

  "There was no need, with Nitti out of the way."

  "An assumption like that can put your entire mission in jeopardy. Had you gone through channels, I would have decided whether the risk was worth your being summoned. Summoned."

  "I don't care about the mission."

  "Sit down, please."

  "I'll stand."

  "Sit down!" It was a roar.

  He sat, blasted off his feet by a rage he'd seen only in Capone when his murderer's instincts flared. He was looking up at Hoover now, but unlike his first time in that seat the Director's stature was unchanged. Vasco had the sensation of gazing at a crude carving of a primitive idol propped on a pedestal. His head was too big for his body, even allowing for the batting his tailor had put in the shoulders of his suit coat. />
  Hoover ran a pudgy finger down the edge of a pile on the table, slid one out, and spread it open before him. The homely maneuver, so familiar to the born pusher of pencils, drove the high dangerous color from his cheeks, returning them to the indoor pallor. When he spoke his tone was level.

  "Our surveillance team outside the Capone estate saw two of his bodyguards forcibly remove a man from his car, disarm him of a semiautomatic pistol, and escort him through the gate. A few minutes later a shot was heard, but the agents took no action because there had been shooting going on for some little while, which they interpreted as routine target practice; they'd heard it before. In any case they're under orders not to try to enter without a federal warrant. The local authorities can be difficult, and they have interfering friends in Congress.

  "Moments after that, the same pair of bodyguards came out supporting the man they'd taken by force and dumped him—I don't think 'dumped' is an exaggeration, under the circumstances—back in his car. He sat there five minutes before starting the engine and driving away. He appeared to be disoriented and in considerable pain. You were present on the grounds when whatever happened took place; it's in the report. Enlighten me."

  "The man's name was Joe Verdi. He works—worked—for Nitti. Capone had him brought to him and fired Verdi's own pistol close enough to his ear to burst the eardrum. He told Verdi to tell his boss he'd kill the next man he sent to follow one of his friends. Meaning me."