The lines broke up. Jack retired into the warehouse with the hard fat man, but not before I saw a thick packet of stiff new bills change hands.
Moments later, Springfield, Andy Kramm, and I were back inside the Hudson, Kramm resting his arm on a crate with a red maple leaf stenciled on it on the seat between us. Jack climbed under the wheel, uncorked his thermos, and helped himself to a swig of chicken broth. This time he didn’t offer it to anyone else. He rammed the cork back in and reached inside his coat.
“Here, Connie.” He stuck a Luger over the back of the seat with his hand wrapped around the barrel.
I stared at the brown checked grip. The sharp oil smell nipped my nostrils. “What’s that for?”
“You flip back the little dingus on the side and pull the trigger. It goes bam. Take it. I got another.”
“Thanks. I’m just an observer.”
Springfield, staring out the window, muttered something about pulling weight. Jack told him to shut up. He took the Luger in both hands and studied it. His face in the light from the loading dock was childlike. “I filed down the trigger sear and converted it to full auto,” he said. “You can empty a clip in two seconds.”
“What’s the good of that?” I asked.
“You don’t always get time to aim. The other one’s regular semi-auto for when you do. I only offered you this one because I don’t know what kind of a shot you are. Hell, suit yourself.” He put the pistol away and stamped the engine into life.
I heard a clank and watched Andy Kramm remove a disassembled Thompson submachine gun, glistening black with walnut handgrips, from the toolbox where he’d rested his feet on the way over. He rattled the buttstock into place, wound tight the lever on the pie-tin clip, and clamped it to the action. Finally he drew back the breech and slammed a cartridge into the chamber.
This was becoming real. I asked Jack if he thought guns would be necessary.
“Only for shooting.” He let out the clutch. “Bon voyage, gents. We’re in the wrong country.”
We followed a confusion of side streets to an imperfectly paved road that paralleled railroad tracks for six blocks and then degenerated into gravel as we left the city limits. After a hundred yards of that we swung down an antique logging trail leading toward the lake, that blank expanse with the lights on the American side looking tiny and far away. The lamps of the other cars followed us and slowed when we slowed. We were barely moving as we crunched through spears of tall grass in the snow where the trail frayed out. The blades lisped along the running boards.
“This is the interesting part,” Jack announced. “Sometimes it don’t freeze all the way to the edge.”
I said, “Shouldn’t one of us get out and check?”
“Nah.”
In decades past, the foot of the trail had provided a gentle grade for launching sleighs and barges loaded with logs bound for Detroit, Cleveland, and Buffalo; but the lake had receded since that time. Our front tires dropped from earth to ice with a sickening lurch, answered by a groan that seemed to issue from the depths of the lake and made my heart skip. But the ice held. After a moment Jack slipped the clutch again and the rear tires bumped down the bank and plunged with a jingling of bottles. The chains munched at the frozen surface. Behind us, the second car made a similar descent. The lamps of the third swayed, flickered, and then jolted into a frightening forty-five-degree angle, but righted themselves, and within minutes the entire procession had quit land. Anyone watching would have seen what looked like a ghost convoy rolling across the water, a Second Coming with backfires.
Papery flakes had been fluttering down when we left shore, but now a shrapnel moon glinted through an unpredicted hole in the clouds, causing the lake to glow under its layer of white, except in dark ominous patches.
“Fucking radio creeps,” said Kramm. “Couldn’t tell you it’s raining if they was standing up to their ass in a puddle.”
Jack was sanguine. “Don’t get your balls in an uproar. Nobody knows we’re out.”
“What are those dark spots?” I asked.
“Shoals. Current flows over them and hollows out the ice on top. Little Augie drove smack across one and that’s how come he’s down there looking up.” As Jack spoke he corrected his course to circle a patch larger than most.
After that I relaxed by degrees. We were in expert hands. Even the creaking and groaning of the ice, paralyzing at first, ceased to worry me as the others ignored it. The car was swaddled in black silence, heightened by the sight of the distant lights of Monroe beyond the windshield and the burbling of the engine under the cowl-shaped hood. The black box heater beneath the dashboard, little more than an extension of the manifold, didn’t reach past the front seat, leaving the back cold and dank, but I felt safely cocooned, even drowsy. It was well past one.
Conversation—the first in many minutes—awakened me. The shore lights appeared much closer. I had done more than just doze.
“I didn’t see nothing,” Springfield was saying. “Maybe it was just your reflection.”
Jack said, “Maybe not.”
The Hudson was equipped with a police spotlight on the driver’s side. Jack twisted it up by its chrome handle and switched it on. A hard white shaft rammed a hole through the darkness. I saw shapes of cars two hundred yards ahead, strung out in a horizontal line. Their lamps were dark.
Jack’s eyes sought mine in the rearview mirror. “You tell anybody about this run?”
“Not a soul.”
Something struck the post to the left of the windshield. Sparks sprayed. The report followed an instant later, a hollow plop.
“They’re trying for the light!” Kramm cranked down his window hurriedly, letting in a blast of arctic air. He poked the machine gun’s snout out the window.
Jack killed the spot and headlamps. Behind us the lamps of the other cars in our party broke formation in both directions and blinked out raggedly. I wondered how they could avoid the shoals without light. Then Jack hurled the Hudson into a skidding turn that barked my ribs against the crate of whiskey, and I wondered about us.
All the windows were down now except mine. Something buzzed past the car on the passenger’s side, a hornet in January. Kramm nestled the Thompson’s butt into his shoulder and squeezed the trigger. The pounding shook the car, spent shells bounced against the seat and floor, brimstone fouled the air.
I heard two spaced shots in reply, then I saw a spot of bright light flickering, the reports hammering behind the flashes like an out-of-sync soundtrack. My eyes were growing accustomed to the moonlight. The bursts came from the backseat of a long, light-colored sedan with dark fenders and running boards.
Something thudded against the side of the Hudson. I felt a hot wind on my face and my window disintegrated. I slumped down in the seat. For the next few moments I heard more than I saw.
Springfield leaned out his window and fired his .45 pistol, the shots pounding at a stately pace. I heard a burp that had to be Jack’s goosed Luger disgorging the contents of its clip in a heartbeat. The other cars in our party joined the fight with automatic and single fire. A shotgun boomed. I hoped everyone knew where his friends were.
Jack said, “What color’s that Packard?”
“If you’re thinking of buying it, you better wait till the owner stops shooting at us.” Kramm rattled the Thompson’s breech. It had jammed.
“Don’t Pete Rosenstein own a yellow-and-black Packard?”
“Black and tan.” Kramm paused. “Holy shit, no wonder I couldn’t do anything to it. That car’s armor-plated.”
“It must weigh three tons.”
“Pete always did think with his prick.”
“Next swing I make I want you to shoot at the ice under that Packard.”
“It won’t do nothing. It’s froze two feet thick.”
“Hang on. Don’t fire till I say.” Jack threw open the throttle.
I barely got upright when the Hudson swung into a sharp turn and I felt the wheels on my side l
eave the ice. They came back down with a bang and my head hit the roof. I snatched hold of the leather strap by my window. The lights of Monroe—or maybe they were the lights of Leamington; I had lost all bearings—went past in a streak. Our slipstream stiffened my face and numbed my ears.
We flashed past something metallic on my side. I hoped it was one of our cars, but I knew better. I heard shots, warped and curved like a train’s whistle as it rackets past, saw muzzles flare. We executed a sliding turn, changed gears, and made another pass. As the other car swelled inside the frame of the windshield I recognized it as the two-toned sedan with the backseat gunner. A medieval-looking louvered visor covered the radiator.
“Now!”
Kramm had cleared the breech. Now he braced his foot against the hump in the floor over the driveshaft and stuck his entire torso through his window. I heard the clattering reports, the clinking of the spent shells striking the Hudson’s roof. He fired two long bursts and pulled himself back inside.
“What the hell, everybody dies.” Jack turned again. A spray of ice crystals coming off the tire chains caught the moonlight in an iridescent gusher.
I saw then what was happening. In his attempts to outmaneuver the lighter Hudson, the driver of the lumbering Packard had forgotten where he was. The armor-plated car’s front tires, unchained, had locked and the car had slewed over the edge of a dark patch over a shoal. As we powered past within a hundred feet, drawing machine-gun fire which at that range was haphazard at best, Andy Kramm thrust himself half out of the Hudson again and hammered at the thin ice under the Packard.
At first there was no effect. The bullets vanished into darkness as if poured down a hole. Then a pattern of fine cracks starred the dark patch, etched white on black, spreading outward.
“Shit!”
Kramm fell back into the seat, the Thompson across his lap with its breech locked open. It was a bad time to run out of ammunition.
But bullets were still hitting the ice. As we sped away from the Packard, having veered too close to its gun for comfort, I watched the battered black Lincoln following our original path with Lon Camarillo standing on the running board, bracing himself with an arm hooked around the window post and pumping away with what looked like a Browning Automatic Rifle at the center of the network of cracks. His face in the moonlight with the buttstock against his cheek looked like the Grim Reaper’s. At the wheel of the Lincoln, his bald head shining, sat Hannion, the train robber from Oklahoma.
“Son-of-a-bitch cowboys,” growled Kramm.
The former aviator and his partner weren’t the only ones who had caught on. The driver of the Packard was spinning his wheels in a white blur now, frantic to back away onto a better footing. His engine whined, but the car only subsided into a drunken tilt, spoiling the aim of the gunner in back and thrusting its armored prow farther out over the shoal.
A wheel broke through and the car stumbled, then went down on both knees as the ice collapsed under the other front wheel. White floes stood up in shards and slid under the black water. The Packard teetered, rear wheels turning in empty air, a scaled-down Titanic suspended on a cloud of exhaust.
We didn’t stay for the rest. Jack threw on the headlamps and started in a long loop toward the Michigan shore. With their lead car foundering, the others in the hostile party had lost interest in the fight and sought to spread out to avoid a chain reaction. Bumpers and fenders tangled as more than one driver chose the same route. Friendly headlamps came on behind us.
“They’ll try again in town,” Kramm said.
“No, Pete’s got a deal in Monroe.” Jack’s voice was pitched high, but not from fear. “How we doing, any fresh dead? Connie?”
“I’m okay.” Actually I was. I had thought I’d wet myself in the excitement, then discovered that a bullet had pierced the crate at my elbow, smashing a bottle and drenching the seat in Old Log Cabin. “They’d go to all that trouble just for liquor?”
“This is a million-dollar load. He’s got payments to make on that rolling hunk of boilerplate. Besides, he never did forgive Joey for kidnapping him that time. It made him look common.”
“Wonder how the others come out.” Of all of us, Bass Springfield seemed the least transported.
Jack said, “They know where to go when we get separated.”
Kramm chuckled. “You see that lardbutt Packard go down? I never seen nothing like it, not even in Russia.”
“Good thing Lon come along,” said Springfield.
“I softened it up for him.”
Jack wasn’t listening. His eyes in the rearview mirror were bleak. “When I find out who stooled I’m fucking gonna pick his bones.”
Chapter Seven
Minor’s Majors
BY CONNIE MINOR
BONAPARTE AT AUSTERLITZ HAD nothing on a local lieutenant of bootleggers, hardly more than a boy, who last night on the battlefield of icebound Lake Erie routed an army of hijackers with a few bursts from a submachine gun.
Historians tell us Napoleon destroyed the Russian Army in Prussia by directing his cannon at a chain of frozen lakes over which the enemy sought retreat, plunging horses and men into the icy waters and claiming victory. Although it’s a fair bet this gang tactician has never read Von Clausewitz (or even Hans and Fritz) and knows nothing of the Napoleonic Wars …
And like that. It creaks a little now, but it read better when it was fresh. Well enough anyway to be picked up by the wires and land me my first Pulitzer nomination. I think I’d have had a shot at it, too, had not the deadline been months away; by which time, for reasons I’m about to set forth, the notion of gangsters as modern Robin Hoods was as dead as Franz Ferdinand.
The night the Banner with my Battle of Lake Erie column hit the streets, I celebrated. With a bonus practically in my pocket I started high, watching the Grosse Pointe suckers and getting suckered myself at roulette in the Aniwa Club on Van Dyke, then did Blossom Heath and floated from there to Doc Brady’s and the Arcadia Ballroom, where Don Redman was blowing saxophone with McKinney’s Cotton Pickers. At one point it occurred to me that some of the liquor I was drinking had probably come over in the load I had helped escort. Somewhere, although I don’t recall stopping at her place, I collected Hattie Long, who had on a gold lamé shift under an ermine coat and one of those metal headpieces stuccoed with jewels like Marie Dressier wore in the movies, only on Hattie it looked less like the coronation of the Queen of the Dykes. I remember putting the arm on her for fifty when my pockets turned inside out over the blackjack table at the Green Lantern in Ecorse. My luck improved after that, but all told I figure that twenty I hadn’t gotten yet cost me two weeks’ pay.
Once—Jean Goldkette was directing the band, so it must have been in the dining room off the Graystone Ballroom—a liveried waiter brought a green bottle with gold foil on the neck to our table. When he pointed out the gentleman who had sent it, I looked at Jack Dance in black tie and black satin lapels raising a glass of beer to me at a table in the corner. The woman he was with was no flapper. She was wearing black velvet off the shoulders and pearls, and her hair was long and blonde in an old-fashioned sort of way, no curling irons or peroxide. She had a long straight nose like a Greek statue and when she turned my way her eyes went past me as if I were a fern growing there. Hattie told me later I waved back at Jack with an idiot grin, “like you were separated at birth and he saved your life and you were partners in a gold mine in Alaska or something.” Women exaggerate.
The next morning, standing in the same clothes I had put on the morning before, I watched Hattie drawing on her eyebrows at the little French Empire vanity a Hupmobile vice president had given her when he went back to his wife. The bedroom of her apartment on Livernois was fussily decorated in a high school cheerleader’s idea of Bourbon splendor, ruffled polka-dot bedspreads and flouncy curtains and gold fleurs-de-lis on pale blue wallpaper.
“Did I propose to you last night?” I asked.
“Not me.” She did something with a brush
that made her chin look less pointed. “It was the hatcheck girl at the Addison. Don’t pretend you don’t remember.”
“I don’t remember going to the Addison.”
“If you can’t hold your liquor, don’t pick it up.”
“So when are the nuptials?”
“She was already married to the bouncer.” She exchanged the brush for a lipstick.
“I was wondering why my nose was so tender. I must’ve been drinking gin. Gin always makes me propose to hatcheck girls.”
“All the more reason to take the pledge. Hatcheck girls always marry bouncers.”
“If I were a sensible drunk I’d propose to you.”
She painted on the beestung lips. “Don’t joke about it.”
In the streetcar later I said, “Whoops.”
I’d been in the office ten minutes when Howard Wolfman woke me up by crumpling a twenty-dollar bill under my nose. He looked country-squirish in Harris tweeds and a red silk necktie that brought out the pink in his eyes behind the gold-rimmed cheaters.
“I got an angry call at home last night from an Agent McPeek with the Prohibition Navy,” he said when I snatched the bill.
I couldn’t read him. My eyes were still woolly from the night before and I didn’t want to move my head too quickly for fear my brains would spring out like watchworks. I could read the twenty, though. I uncrossed my ankles on the desk, crossed them the other way, and stretched the bill in both hands. “What did the floating Keystone Kops want?”
“He said the Navy patrols that part of Erie with Model T’s on skis and no battle like you described took place night before last or any other.”
“The river was open that night. They were probably busy sinking some auto muckety’s yacht off Belle Isle on the theory it belonged to Joey Machine. That’s all they’re good for, unless you want to run them in the funnies next to Happy Hooligan.”
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