Then as they neared Calumet City, open spaces with wild grass greeted them, prairie land suggesting they were indeed about to enter the Wild West.
“You know, kid,” Campagna said at one point, after a long silence, “Mr. Nitti likes you.”
“Yeah?”
“You come along at a good time for the both of you—there’s people who’d like to see Frank retire, the hard way. So somebody he can trust, like you…it’s a Godsend.”
“That’s generous of you, Louie.”
“Hey. Just sayin’, keep your nose clean, please the boss, every reason to think you could go places.”
Four days had passed since Frank Nitti had hired Michael as a chauffeur-cum-bodyguard. Nitti had dismissed his other bodyguards—at least the daytime crew—and occasionally Michael was joined by Campagna in duties that consisted primarily of driving Nitti here and there, and sitting outside or sometimes inside one of the crime boss’s offices.
Nitti worked out of the Bismarck Hotel more than the Lexington, Michael soon learned; and, on nearby North Clark, held court in a booth at the Capri Restaurant. Nitti’s home in suburban Riverside was the final stop on Michael’s route. Nitti, whose wife of many years had died last year, had recently remarried, and the home was a new purchase; he had a nine-year-old son.
Campagna had commented on that, too: “He worshipped Anna.” That was Nitti’s first wife. “Hit him hard, last year…he was depressed as hell. And some people took advantage of that. But Frank’s coming on strong again. Comin’ on strong.”
Occasionally other stops were made during Michael’s daily tour of duty as Nitti’s driver, as when the ganglord sat down for a powwow with Outfit treasurer Jake Guzik, an obese creature who apparently worked strictly from a perpetually food-filled table at St. Hubert’s English Grill, near the Union League Club. Like any executive, Frank Nitti spent his time in meetings and on the phone—that the men he met with were frequently on various public enemies lists did not change the mundane nature of things.
Nitti was friendly but preoccupied, and in four days perhaps ten sentences had been exchanged between employer and new employee…until late this afternoon, when the Enforcer had summoned Michael to sit beside him on a couch in the white-appointed, gold-trimmed Victorian-looking presidential suite at the Bismarck.
“So much for challenging work, right, kid?” Nitti said good-naturedly. He was drinking milk. An attractive colored maid had provided Michael with a Coca-Cola on ice, already established in the Outfit as the war hero’s drink of choice.
“Beats tossing pizza dough,” Michael said, the nearness of Nitti unnerving him.
“But soldiering is like that, right? Hurry up and wait? Nothing happens, nothing happens, nothing happens…then bang, all hell breaks loose.”
“Is it about to?”
Nitti laughed, patted Michael on the leg. “I just wanted to watch you for a few days. Let you get used to me, so’s you could see how things go around here.”
“And size me up a little?”
“And size you up a little…Ready for a real job?”
“Give the orders, Mr. Nitti. I’ll carry them out.”
Nitti rested the milk glass on a nearby coffee table, on a coaster, then shifted on the couch, his arm on the back of the sofa; the intimate nature of the conversation should have made Michael feel more relaxed, and didn’t.
“You see, Michael, because you’re Sicilian, you have the potential to go a long way. Hey, don’t get me wrong—we ain’t biased against nobody. A good earner is a good earner. You met Guzik the other day—he’s a Jew, but what the hell do we care? He’s smart, so he’s one of our top people.”
“That’s the American way,” Michael said, hoping no irony showed through.
“It is. It’s what you fought for. Still, blood is blood, and we Sicilians run this business. To be more than an errand boy, though, you need to be a ‘made’ man.”
“I don’t understand.”
Nitti shrugged. “Here again, it’s a blood thing. When you’ve taken a life, in the line of duty, you’ll be in a position to be made. Invited inside. It’s that simple.”
“Who do you want me to kill?”
Nitti sat there, frozen, for a few moments, then said, “Kid, I was just…filling you in. You understand, we don’t attract heat no more. One of the reasons Al had to go away was he attracted heat. Too many shootings on public streets, in the subway, red splashed all over the headlines.”
“Sounds like it’s hard to get ‘made,’ then.”
“It may take time. Years. But we’re not the Cub Scouts. Now and then, here and there, the knife and the gun, we turn to them. There are disloyal people who have to be…weeded out. There are scores that need to be settled, examples that need to be made. We’re just more discreet about it than in Al’s heyday.”
“How does Mr. Capone feel about retirement? If you don’t mind my asking.”
Nitti shook his head. “He’s not retired, kid. He’s still the boss. I run things, but with his approval. Don’t ever forget that.”
“I won’t.”
“Now…Like I was sayin’, I do have a little job for you. It could get rough…I don’t think so, but it could, and it’s possible things might get messy.”
“I’ll be fine.”
“Any case, Louie will be there to back you up. Also, we have the local cops in our pocket, so even if things get good and goddamn messy, you’re in the clear. Understood?”
“Yes.”
“You have to go in strong, because this is one of those set-an-example deals I was talkin’ about. You ever hear of a guy called Ness?”
“No,” Michael said.
“Think back—it was in all the papers maybe ten years ago, early ’30s.”
“I was just a kid, then. Reading the funnies was my speed.”
Nitti grinned; he had large teeth, very white, and Michael wondered if they were real. “Well, if you was readin’ Dick Tracy, you were close: Ness was one of the feds that got Al on income tax charges; he’s a raider type…likes to bust up and confiscate property. Costly prick. But dedicated and smart.”
“You want me to threaten him? Hurt him?”
“No! Jesus, kid. Settle down.”
Nitti explained to Michael that he’d decided to curtail prostitution activities, to head off Ness’s vice efforts. But Calumet City—the wide-open little town owned by the Outfit, which catered to servicemen and defense plant workers—was going to be a problem.
“Our partners there,” he said, “are kinda cowboys. Whole damn town is like Dodge City or Tombstone or some shit. And I have sent word that the brothels are to be shut down…I’ve made it clear that the strippers can still strip, and can still negotiate fun and games with customers.”
“Isn’t that prostitution, too?”
“Yeah, but untraceable to us. B-girls, hostesses, not a problem. A lotta girls live in Cal City, and can take guys home to their places, what’s the harm, who’s to know? But the out-in-the-open whorehouses, they gotta be shuttered.”
“Which these cowboys don’t want to do?”
Nitti’s smirk was disgusted and humorless. “No. Worst of them is a pipsqueak called Frank Abatte. Owns a dozen clubs in Cal City, with us as silent partners, of course. Does just fine with gambling, so he’ll make do without the broads. Problem is, he thinks he’s the boss of Cal City.”
“You’d like me to point out that he isn’t.”
“If you would, Michael. Now, Abatte’s got his own crew—couple lads called Vitale and Neglia, both killers, and they can be triggerhappy…You sure you’re up for this?”
“Piece of cake,” Michael said.
Louie provided the details, explaining a lot about how Calumet City worked, along the way. The Outfit controlled the town in part because Cal City was in Cook County, but also by political clout. The bartenders, entertainers, taxi drivers, tavern owners, gamblers, prostitutes, strippers, bouncers, and so on all lived right there in Calumet City, the rif
fraff outnumbering the better element.
But even some of the better element voted along with the riffraff, since the sinful two blocks at the extreme northeastern part of town, nudging the Indiana state line, paid the lion’s share of the city’s taxes by way of high license fees.
This kept property taxes down for those who lived in the neat crackerboxes with well-tended lawns on the intersecting streets of this typical small American town with its city hall, stores, library, and churches. The police? Mostly ex-employees of the joints, who spent their time trying not to run over drunks in the town’s four patrol cars. The number of Cal City saloons: 308. The number of Cal City cops: fourteen.
Night had fallen by the time Michael and Campagna reached Calumet City’s State Street; the sky to the north blazed red, courtesy of the steel mills, which complemented the street’s own scarlet hue, countless relentless neons washing the world garish shades of red and yellow and orange. It was as if the city were on fire, names screaming out of the conflagration: Rainbow, Ron-da-voo, 21 Club, Playhouse, Show Club, Club Siesta, Oasis, Rip Tide.
Wasn’t quite nine and things hadn’t started to hop yet, the sidewalks populated but not thronged; uniforms from every branch of the service could be spotted as well as the rough faces and leather and denim jackets of mill and factory workers.
These were ordinary storefronts that had been converted into saloons and clubs, and most had big picture windows through which the activities within—sometimes a little band tearing it up, or comic telling jokes, but also strippers working runways—could be glimpsed as a come-on.
Michael prowled down the street in the Ford, the electric fire reflected on the windshield and bathing both their faces; finding a parking place here was tougher than downtown Chicago.
Campagna pointed out a spot in front of a fire hydrant, and Michael obediently pulled in.
“We don’t pay any kinda fine in Cal City,” Campagna said, getting out into the neon noon.
Campagna wore a wide-lapeled gray suit, presently orange, and a darker gray fedora, scarlet at the moment. Michael’s dark brown suit, from Marshall Field’s, was a little big for him, to accommodate the nine-millimeter Browning in his shoulder holster; later he’d get something tailored. He wore no hat. He too was tinted orange and red.
Right in front of them, through a window, they could see past the bartender into the club, where over the heads of seated patrons, a pale shapely woman on a behind-the-bar runway was removing her G-string, her pasties already off.
“Must be kinda different for ya,” Campagna said with a knowing chuckle.
They began to walk down the sidewalk, weaving in and out among mostly male strollers. As they moved past one joint after another, various musical styles asserted themselves: honky-tonk; jazz; blues; even polka music…here an accordion, there the mournful wail of a clarinet or earthy moan of a saxophone, country shuffles and stripper-friendly tom-toms courtesy of a succession of low-rent Krupas.
“Different how?” Michael asked.
Campagna snorted a laugh. “Well, you musta never seen the likes of this, before. I mean, they don’t have this kinda fun in DeKalb, right?”
“No they don’t.”
But they did in Manila. And Michael wasn’t terribly impressed by the strident sinning of Cal City. He was a veteran, not only of the war in the Philippines, but of dives with names like the Santa Ana, the Zamboanga, the Circus Club, and the Yellow Den. Joints where Filipina babes were too bored to walk the streets, making the customers come to the bar stools where they sat, and God help the guy who didn’t know these doll-like beauties had been taught to use knives since childhood; a town where even the best hotels had prominent signs saying: FIREARMS ARE PROHIBITED ON PREMISES; PLEASE CHECK GUNS AT DOOR.
Yes, Cal City had wide-open gambling; you could hear the rattle of dice from the street, slot machines, roulette wheels, birdcages, games of poker, right out in the open. But in Manila there was all that plus jai alai and cockfights and the ponies.
“Yeah, Louie,” Michael said, dryly. “Hick kid like me can only say, ‘wow’…Where can we find our friend Frankie Abatte?”
“One of a half-dozen places. You wanna get a steak first?”
“I’d rather eat, after.”
“He might not be in yet; it’s not even nine. This place is barely woke up. Anyway, we oughta chow down before it gets too drunk out, in Cal City. People puking around me takes the edge off my appetite.”
This seeming a good point, Michael followed Campagna to the Capitol Bar and Lounge, which had a fancy awning (CONTINUOUS ENTERTAINMENT!) and occupied a defunct bank that looked vaguely familiar. Maybe he and his father had robbed it. Probably the fanciest joint in town, with a number of well-dressed slumming couples in attendance, the Capitol featured an attractive blonde in a black ball gown who played the organ and sang current hits with a nice smile and pitch that nestled in the cracks of the Hammond.
“What’s the story on Abatte’s boys?” Michael asked.
Both men were eating rare T-bones smothered in grilled onions and mushrooms, with french fries on the side. The blonde was butchering “Blues in the Night.”
“Vitale’s tall, dark, looks sleepy,” Campagna said. “He ain’t. Usually kind of duded up. The other one, Neglia, is short and squat. Froggy-lookin’ guy, a slob. Dangerous.”
“What do they do for Abatte?”
“Rough people up who welsh on gambling debts. I hear Vitale’s the one who does the shooting. Neglia, he beats on people, while Vitale holds a gun on ’em.”
“Thanks. Always good to know the players.”
“Well, Abatte himself’s more dangerous than his boys. Time to time, he makes a point of putting a bullet in a welsher’s head his own self, so that word gets around what a hard case he is.”
“Nice to know.”
Campagna cut into his steak, blood running. “Squirt’s got a big sense of himself. Likes to throw his weight around, like little guys do, sometimes.”
Campagna himself was on the small side, but Michael said nothing, and managed not to smile.
“Will they have guns on them?” Michael asked.
“Mutt and Jeff will. The boss, he’ll have a gun and probably a shiv in his desk. But he likes to wear a tux and act the big shot, and a gun under the arm ruins the cut of a tux, you know. The line.”
“Yeah. Fred Astaire hardly ever packs a rod.”
Campagna thought about that for a second, then laughed. “Hey, that’s funny…Kid—you don’t look nervous.”
“Should I be?”
“You’re puttin’ that steak and fries away, just fine.”
“Is this a test, Louie?”
“No! No, hell no, kid. It’s just, I’d be nervous, if I was thrown into this pit for the first time. Little slice of hell, like Cal City.”
“This isn’t hell, Louie. Purgatory, maybe.”
They began checking specific clubs of Abatte’s; he had offices in the back of all of them.
In the 21 Club, where the decor ran to college pennants, a skinny stripper with an appendicitis scar was bumping and grinding, and all the lipstick in the world couldn’t hide the horsiness of her face. But the young army trainees sitting along the runway were staring up at her pubic thatch in awe, perhaps just figuring out where they came from.
At the bar, drinking Coke from a bottle, his back to the naked woman, was a little boy of perhaps ten in a plaid short-sleeve shirt and jeans, seated way up on a stool, kicking his legs in boredom.
“Stripper’s kid, probably,” Campagna said with a shrug.
In the Club Siesta, a little Mexicale combo played for another stripper; at the Oasis, a bigger band, six pieces, offered up swing and boogie-woogie tunes, filling a postage-stamp dance floor, the men keeping their hats on because nobody stayed at any one of these joints long—whole point was to go up and down the street sampling sin.
The smell of cheap beer common to all these joints Michael found repellent, and all of them were filled
with gray-blue clouds of cigar and cigarette smoke—no wonder the steel mill hands felt at home here.
Whatever the theme of the club, the ambience was the same: skimpy decorating failing to deliver on neon promises, crude unprofessional murals of pinup girls often drawn directly on otherwise unpainted walls, cheap wooden tables cluttered with beer bottles and ashtrays, where men sat with women they usually hadn’t come in with.
The floozies were not dolled up—they looked like ordinary factory or shopgirls, if a little harder; and Michael could not be sure if these were hookers or just pick-ups. Party girls or pros, Campagna explained that such shenanigans were fine with Nitti—this kind of thing could not be policed by Ness.
In several joints, however, Michael noted women taking men by the arm—sailors and other servicemen, and steel-mill hands—and disappearing up back stairways. Each time, Campagna gave his young friend a knowing look and nod.
And in every joint, Campagna asked to see Mr. Abatte and, in every joint, Mr. Abatte was not in.
The Ozark had a three-piece hillbilly band including a balladeering guitarist, with a slightly larger sawdust-covered dance floor. This was a rough crowd, and a bouncer had to break up a couple of brawling steel workers at the bar, fighting over a young woman who seemed bored to tears, blowing smoke rings while they hammered at each other.
This cleared (and knocked over almost) every stool at the bar, at least momentarily, and Campagna seized the moment to approach the bartender, a bald bruiser with a cigarette in his tight lips and a white shirt and black tie.
Campagna asked, “Mr. Abatte in?”
“Maybe. Who wants him?”
“Frank Nitti.”
“You’re not Frank Nitti.”
“You’re not Frank Abatte.”
The bartender mulled over that conundrum for a moment. Customers were returning to the scene of the brawl, turning stools right side up, and climbing aboard.
“I’ll let them know you’re here,” the bartender said, and used a phone down the bar.
Several minutes later, as a courtesy, the bartender brought them draw beers. Campagna nodded to the guy, but neither man drank them. Michael didn’t care for the stuff, and he had an idea Campagna feared a Mickey.
Road to Purgatory Page 8
