The Confessions of Al Capone

by Loren D. Estleman

  "I know what I don't want. Maybe that's a start."

  "I don't even know that. I know what everybody else doesn't want for me. I've known it all my life, but it isn't the same thing. You're the lucky one."

  Vasco watched him closely. The sun was going down fast, as it did at sea level, and Sonny's features were losing their shape. He wondered if he suspected. He was sure Mae didn't, as sharp-eyed as she was; but she didn't share Al's blood, his talent for Machiavellian thought. Sonny couldn't bluff; but poker wasn't life.

  "Well, I've managed to bore myself. I can say that, because I'm not as polite as you." He pushed back his chair and got up. "Ruth and the girls are waiting supper. Will I see you again?"

  "I don't know when. I'm not sure if I'll get leave before I ship out. If I ship out. With my luck I'll wind up taking dictation at Fort Benning. I test high in stenography." He rose and shook his hand.

  "Good luck."

  "You, too."

  Sonny turned, squared his shoulders, and trotted off toward the house. Vasco watched him go, with an empty feeling of having been part of something that had been handled inadequately on both sides.

  He waited a minute before going inside, to give Sonny time to leave. There was nothing more awkward than saying good-bye twice. The lamps were on in the living room. Mae came to the bottom of the stairs as he was closing the French doors.

  "The doctor just left. The nurse is up there now. Al won't let her give him a sedative until he's seen you."

  He thanked her and started upstairs. She touched his arm.

  "I didn't tell him you're leaving the priesthood. Please don't say anything about it. I'll tell him when he's stronger."

  "Of course, if that's how you want it."

  "I do."

  The bedroom was surprisingly spare after Mae's elaborate lace-curtain Irish decor on the ground floor. It was just twice as large as his old cell in the rectory and its furnishings differed from it only by the presence of electric lamps and a second twin bed. Capone sat propped up against pillows in the one by the window, where a horse-faced nurse in a starched uniform sat on a straight chair reading a paperbound book with a pirate on the cover. The air was close, with a sickroom smell of medicine and rubbing alcohol.

  "Padre! They tell me I see things sometimes that aren't there. I was beginning to think you was one of them. Beat it, sister. We got business to discuss." Business?

  The nurse drew in breath sharply. Vasco gave her a smile he hoped was kindly. She got up, smoothing her skirt, and left carrying her book. The door closed gently.

  "Looks just like Seabiscuit, don't she? I guess all the cute ones are overseas looking after the boys. Take a load off."

  He sat in the chair the nurse had vacated. Capone wore yellow silk pajamas with his initials embroidered on the breast pocket. He had a satin quilted bedspread pulled up to his waist and his hands rested on it. They looked bloated, like rubber gloves filled with water. He'd continued to take on flesh and now he was retaining fluid; his face looked fatter than it did in old photographs and the skin was pallid beneath the natural pigmentation. But the lips were still gracefully curved, the smile as broad as the bay doors on a beer warehouse. "Too hot for the collar?"

  "I've been on a leave of absence. I just got back to town today."

  For the first time he found himself unable to look the man in the eye; and he was telling the truth, so far as he'd gone. He looked at the forest of bottles on the night table that separated the beds, some with eyedroppers; a spoon with brown liquid congealed in the bowl; a heavy volume in a tattered beige jacket with Capone's reading glasses folded on top: Emil Ludwig's Napoleon.

  The sick man followed his gaze. "Yeah. I read it the first time in the joint, not that I learned anything. Turns out we made entirely different mistakes. The only thing we had in common was we both got fat. That and a fair knowledge of how to use artillery."

  "You said something about business."

  The thick brows drew together, but not in anger. He appeared troubled. "I wanted you to hear it from me, before my brain gets to where it don't know what my tongue's up to. When the time comes to pray me across, I want somebody who's had a shitload of experience at it. It don't reflect on you, but when I was your age I made some bad decisions I still regret. I'm putting Mae to work on the bishop over at Blessed Sacrament. He's got one foot in the grave himself, so I figure he's got the inside track. I'm a special case, and I need the extra ammunition if I'm not going to wake up with a hot foot every day for the rest of eternity." It struck him then—for the first time, incredibly, after the medical reports he'd read and the evidence of his own experience during Capone's lapses—that Al Capone would die, and die soon; not by the angry hand of an enemy or of organized justice, but for something he'd done as a lusty sixteen-year-old. It could have happened to anyone. It could not even be called divine retribution, because at the time the poison was planted he was nothing more than a young tough living in a part of the world that bred them like Holland bred tulips.

  Capone misinterpreted his silence.

  "It ain't you, Padre. Well, it is, but not the way you think. If I was friends with that sour son of a bitch Phillips, I wouldn't let him near me with his needles. You can slip up when you like a guy."

  "I'm not offended, Al." It was the first time he'd called him that. That impossibly intimate Christian name sprang to his lips without thought. "It will take more than just experience to spare you the flames."

  "Fuck repentance. I'd do some things different, sure, but I ain't sorry for what I am or how I got to be me. I don't expect anybody who wasn't there to understand."

  "Times were different."

  "Not so's you'd notice. What was Chicago then, it's Washington now. You know, some people say FDR knew about Pearl Harbor before it happened."

  "He has powerful enemies."

  "Who doesn't? That's one crip I'd like to meet. I think I could've made a deal with him. That sourpuss Herbert Hoover had it in for me ever since a few of my boys kept him awake blowing off steam here in town. I—" He stopped himself, his brow darkening.

  "I shouldn't've said nothing about crips. How's your mother?"

  He wet his lips. "Al, she died."

  His eyes went wide, then shifted. "Yeah. I forgot for a minute. I used to keep whole columns of figures in my head: inventories, who owed who and how much. Now I can't remember when I went to the can last. But you're wrong about whipping the devil. I figure when the time comes I can work out a deal with God. Didn't He shoot craps with Old Nick over who got Job?"

  "The holy scriptures don't say anything about craps."

  "I could be wrong. Maybe it was solitaire."

  He stared at Capone. Who else but his own father could have come to the same conclusion about God and the devil? But Vasco didn't believe it anymore. They were each and separate, pulling in opposite directions with equal strength. In that one area he knew more than the man in the bed.

  "Yeah." Capone sounded groggy. "I couldn't get those bastards in Treasury to see eye to eye, but God I can sit down with. He's got a bit of gangster in Him."

  The nurse came in without knocking. "You have to leave."

  "See how far I slipped, Padre? I can't even win an argument with Seabiscuit in a skirt."

  He took Capone's hand. It was limp and clammy. His eyes stung; it must have been the alcohol fumes.

  "I may not see you again for a long time."

  "Transferred? The hell with that. I'll get the cardinal on the phone."

  He had an overwhelming desire to confess. He didn't care if the nurse remained in the room. But Al Capone's face had gone slack, his eyelids were drifting down. His body was producing a sedative fully as strong as the one the nurse was preparing from the bottles on the night table.

  Night had fallen behind OUR Lady of Redemption. A cicada made a high-pitched noise like an electric drill as he climbed the steps to the front door. He opened it and almost collided with a man coming out. The man stared at him for a fu
ll second, then looked away, muttering an apology.

  Vasco turned and watched him trotting down the steps. At the end of the short flagstone walk at the bottom he turned right and strode down the street without looking his way. He was out of sight before Vasco placed him. He was the man he'd seen so often in the drugstore in the neighborhood, studying the Racing Form at the counter and making calls from the telephone in the booth.

  He went inside. Brother Thomas was busy with his carpet sweeper, trundling it over the worn runner between the rows of seats up near the altar end. He looked up, saw Vasco, put his head down quickly, and turned around to chase down lint at the base of the rail.

  Vasco had the distinct feeling—the certain knowledge—he'd missed a conference. For months he'd been sure he had eyes on him constantly; until now he hadn't known to whom they belonged. Hoover had assured him he wasn't alone.

  It wasn't over. It would never be over. It would not end with Capone's death. As long as he and Hoover lived, there would be eyes on him always.

  He didn't bother to confront the novice. He was empty of lies himself, and like a reformed drunk he could no longer tolerate his old weakness in others. He went up the aisle and out the side door and along the barren path worn in the grass to the rectory.

  "Father Vasco?" Sergei Kyril rose from behind his desk when Vasco opened the study door without pausing to knock. Nothing about him had changed in six months; in ten. His brush-cut hair might have come straight from the barber's chair and his black soutane hung straight down from his square shoulders like a curtain on a rod. The overhead light was off. The banker's lamp on the desk cast an oval that reflected up onto the planes of his square face.

  "I'm barging in uninvited." It didn't sound like an apology even to himself.

  "All are welcome here. How is your father?"

  "Very ill, I'm afraid."

  "I'm sorry to hear that. Have you come to talk about it?"

  "I came to confess."

  "Very well. Would you prefer the booth?"

  "Anywhere is all right."

  "Here, then."

  "Yes."

  Kyril tipped a square palm toward the chair on Vasco's side of the desk. As Vasco shifted a pile of books and rolls of paper to the floor and sat down, the pastor sat down also and pulled the chain switch on the desk lamp. For a moment the room was pitch black. Then ambient light from the streetlamp on the corner sifted between the wooden slats covering the window, casting the room in sepulchral gray. Kyril's voice rumbled smoothly from the darkness on his side of the desk.

  "My son, what is your sin?"