Black Hats

by Max Allan Collins

  And Al Capone was stumbling backward, his eyes huge and filled with surprise and rage and pain.

  Three gashes, almost perfectly parallel, the top one widest, shed tears of blood down his left cheek and upper neck.

  Capone’s left hand clutched the wounds, scarlet oozing between his fingers, and he yelled, “You prick!” and he was advancing on Johnny, knife or no knife, when Bat came out of the booth and cracked Capone a good hard one on the back of the skull with the gold crown of the cane.

  People were screaming and scurrying, and Capone was on the floor, on his knees, blood everywhere—on Capone, on the floor, and on the five inches of steel of the knife still in a stunned Johnny’s grasp.

  Then Wyatt was out of the booth on Bat’s side, and Dixie on Johnny’s, and, taking time only to grab their hats, they took the nearby exit out into an alley that led them onto the Bowery again and soon back to the Stillwell Avenue station.

  They’d ridden fifteen minutes in shocked silence before Wyatt said, “Where’d you get the knife, John?”

  “It was my father’s,” Johnny said.

  Dixie, looking dazed, her complexion as white as blistered skin, clutched one of his arms with both of hers and pressed against him in the subway seat.

  Johnny was saying, “My mother gave it to me.…Even the scabbard was my daddy’s.”

  He showed it to them, an aged brown leather sheath with two straps affixed around his left forearm shirtsleeve. Probably the knife that slashed Ed Bailey in Fort Griffin.

  “Your mother would be proud,” Bat said dryly.

  “Well, his father would be,” Wyatt said.

  Which was the last any of them said for quite a while.

  TEN

  The last thing Frankie Yale needed right now was this Holliday thing turning bloody, and on his own goddamn turf.

  Didn’t he have enough on his goddamn mind? Any day now those fucking White Handers would retaliate for the Sagaman’s Hall shooting. He’d dispatched young Capone to handle the Holliday matter and other potential speakeasy accounts in Manhattan’s Midtown, in part to get the kid out and off the front line; but also because Capone was a smart boy who could think and talk, able to reason with people when possible, yet could put the muscle on them when need be.

  But for all his size and commanding manner, Al Capone was still just a big enthusiastic kid, horny and ornery and hot-headed, God love him.

  Frankie, a mere six years older than Al, could relate. Hell, he knew his reputation was built on his own bad temper; he’d put guys in the hospital with his bare hands (including his brother Ange) and he’d put his share on a slab, too, though these dozen kills whispered about, that was inflated. If he’d kept proper count, the number was closer to nine, though that of course did not include hits he did for money or favors.

  More important was his standing in Brooklyn as a gracious type of big shot—that time when thieves robbed a poor deli owner in town, Frankie replaced the cash; when a fish peddler got his pushcart knocked over into splinters by a runaway horse, Frankie gave the old guy two C’s, and told him to get his own horse; when two freelancers tried shaking down a popular hatcheck operator at a restaurant that wasn’t even Frankie’s, why, Frankie personally pounded the piss out of both the interloping pricks.

  He was especially proud of how he’d helped Nick Colouvos, who ran the Mount Olympus Restaurant in downtown Brooklyn. Nick had come to America with nothing, started out washing dishes, worked up to chef and finally saved enough to open his own place.

  But on one visit to Mount Olympus last summer, Frankie noticed Nick wasn’t his usual cheerful self.

  He took Nick aside and asked what was wrong and the little man broke down crying. In back of the restaurant Nick admitted there was trouble at home.

  “The wife?” Frankie asked.

  “No, no, Mr. Yale, everything’s fine with my Maria. It’s my daughter…you remember little Olympia, you gave her twenty dollars, her last birthday?”

  “Yeah. She turned eight.” Nick and Maria had a beautiful kid, face of an angel, flowing auburn curls. “Kid’s always smiling, always laughing.”

  “Not no more,” Nick said. “She’s been crying and won’t say why. Won’t eat a bite. Hardly sleeps and, when she does, she wakes screaming from the nightmares.”

  “You take her to a doc?”

  “Finally we did, yeah, but the doctor, he says Olympia, she has nothing wrong with her. It’s a phase she goes through, he says. But Maria and I, we can tell something is not right.”

  Frankie knew at once what to do. “Nick, you know Mary Despano?”

  “Sure. Everybody knows Mary. She’s a saint. Her husband dead for two years, in the flu epidemic, she still respects him, wearin’ nothing but black.”

  “Yeah, well she’s got a real way with kids, Mary does. These kids will tell Mary things they wouldn’t tell their own mother or a nun or nobody.”

  “You think Olympia…but Mr. Yale, my daughter doesn’t know Mary, except maybe a little from church.”

  “Never mind. Look, Nick, I got pockets full of these Annie Oakleys for out at Coney Island.”

  “Annie what?”

  “Annie Oakleys—free tickets. Merchants out there, we treat each other good. So you loan me that kid of yours for a Saturday afternoon, and Mary’ll take her on rides and buy her cotton candy and ice cream and you watch, your kid’ll open up to her like a flower blooming.”

  Which was exactly what happened.

  And when the solemn Widow Despano reported her findings to Frankie, he let loose a torrent of obscenities that would have turned Mary’s face ghostly pale if she hadn’t already been that way.

  Frankie called Nick and said he knew why Olympia was crying and having nightmares…but he couldn’t tell Nick till next Sunday.

  “Why next Sunday, Mr. Yale?”

  “No questions. Just have Maria prepare her best meal, but make sure your daughter, make sure none of your kids, eats with us. I’ll have Mary take Olympia, and your two boys, too, back out to Coney for more fun.”

  “All right, Mr. Yale…but I don’t understand.”

  “You will soon enough. And there’s one more thing, very important.…”

  That Sunday, Frankie went to the Colouvos apartment in a brownstone on Clinton Street. Nick met Frankie at the door and escorted him into the living room, where Maria and Nick’s brother George, who had the apartment just above them, were already seated. After some small talk, Maria excused herself to put the finishing touches on dinner.

  Soon Frankie, Nick, brother George and Maria had put away a wonderful meal, including roast leg of lamb with all the trimmings, followed by Turkish coffee and baklava. Finally little jiggers of ouzo were served.

  Frankie took a last sip of his, then turned to Nick and said, “I have bad news…for you, Nick, and for you, Maria. Nick, your brother George is the reason Olympia’s been having nightmares.”

  Nick cocked his head as if he hadn’t heard right. Maria’s expression was blank, or maybe stunned. George was looking at the tablecloth, as if memorizing its lacy pattern.

  “You want to tell them, George, or should I? About how you lured their little girl down to the cellar, promising her chocolate, and then raped her? And told her you’d kill her if she ever said a word?”

  George froze in terror, then jerked to his feet, but before he could run, Frankie had the .45 revolver out and pointed at him.

  “Sit down,” Frankie said. “It ain’t polite to leave when somebody’s talking.”

  Maria was weeping, her hands over her face. Nick was on his feet, eyes popping, but saying nothing. George, slowly, sat down.

  Frankie put the .45 on the table and pushed it over to Nick. “As much as I would like to kill this disgraziato degenerato brother of yours, I am not a selfish man. I would not deprive you of the honor.”

  Nick, his face white, his eyes wide with shock and sorrow, said, “My…own…brother?”

  “I know. It makes me sick, too.”


  “I mean…you want me to…to kill my own brother?”

  Frankie gave Nick a hard look. “I know you’re a gentle fella, a peace-loving man. But I went to a lot of trouble to find out what was troubling your daughter, and I didn’t go to all that bother to have this sick bastard escape punishment. But it’s not my place to mete it out. It’s yours.”

  Nick stared at the gun on the lacy tablecloth.

  George was trembling. George was crying.

  Nick’s hand reached in stops and starts for the weapon. Finally the revolver was in Nick’s hand.

  George, cringing in fear, blurted: “Adelphi, mou…oyi!”

  “You are no longer my brother,” Nick said.

  “Nick, please…please. I did a sick thing because I am sick! But I am still your brother!”

  Nick’s hand quavered as he trained the gun on his mother’s other son; and his voice quavered, too, as he said, “I am ashamed and humiliated that you are my brother. If Papa was alive, he would kill you himself. But he is gone, so I must.”

  Frankie sat back, folded his arms, and smiled just a little as Nick squeezed the trigger, twice, both shots entering George’s left temple, as the man had turned his head away as if that would help. Twin spurts of blood ruined the tablecloth and preceded George dropping wound-side down in the remains of his baklava.

  Maria began screaming, but Frankie settled her down and made it plain that the job right now was the same as after any Sunday dinner: clearing the table.

  Frankie helped Nick dispose of the body, putting the man’s blanket-wrapped brother in the Colouvos family sedan, which they drove to the New Jersey ferry and conveyed their human garbage to a weedy, illegal dumpsite.

  A phone call from Nick a week later made all of the trouble Frankie had gone to worth it. In the sedan and on the ferry, Nick had been pretty glum. But now the restaurateur was his old ebullient self, reporting that his daughter was talking again and smiling just as before. Even eating again, and no more nightmares, since “Uncle George went back to the Old Country.”

  Nick said, “You are a very fine man, Mr. Yale, and I am proud to call you my friend.”

  Such considerate, high-class behavior had made him beloved in Brooklyn.

  He thought of himself not as a common criminal, but a successful businessman, and what some called “protection” he considered insurance, and what others called “kickbacks” he considered fees. He owned a mortuary, which was a business that never went out of fashion and which was useful, where certain of his other business interests were concerned. He owned race horses and pieces of boxers and his two nightspots, the Harvard Inn and the Sunrise Café, just around the corner from his big brick house on Fourteenth Avenue, out of which the mortuary operated. For the new booze business, he had a fast fleet of boats, for pick-up, and a garage full of trucks, for delivery.

  Of all his enterprises, though, Frankie got the biggest charge out of the “Frankie Yale” cigars manufactured right here in Brooklyn. To show how legitimate he was, he put his own picture on the box; wasn’t a tobacconist in town from whose shelves Frankie’s image—jet-black hair parted on the left, square handsome face, stiff white collar and black necktie—didn’t beam. He didn’t gouge the public for this fine smoke, either—twenty cents per, three for a half-buck.

  Of course it had been hard to market a new product, however fine quality the item, and a few windows and arms had to be broken, to get the smokes their proper shelf space all over the borough. That had led to hard feelings, which was the only logical explanation for the cigars being nicknamed “stinking Frankie Yales,” an insult that his boys didn’t know had got back to him.

  But he had the class to shrug that off; he knew that little people were naturally jealous of big men. Anyway, beating up on shop owners was one thing, pounding on customers was another. So what if some guys with their taste in their ass dismissed his cigars as cheap, bad smokes? The tobacco shops were meeting their monthly minimums, weren’t they?

  Frankie Yale considered himself an American success story. Born Francesco Ioele in the poor province of Calabria, he’d come over at age eight and spent his young days in the Five Points junior gang, just having fun and fooling around, like kids do. He’d first done time when a poolroom fight got ugly—he’d been surprised himself, how much damage the fat end of a pool cue could do to a human head—and another for carrying a firearm. He had a bunch of arrests for thefts, but luck and pay-offs helped him avoid any convictions. In fact, as an adult, he had no convictions whatsoever.

  Still, he might have gone down the wrong road in life if he hadn’t met Theresa. No question, married life had changed him. Hard to believe a respectable businessman such as himself had once been nothing but, let’s face it, a cheap hoodlum.

  In these last few years Frankie Yale had accomplished so much—he had taken over the insurance action on twenty-some pier operators and shipping firms, who’d formerly paid protection to those White Hand bastards. And his superior product in the liquor business had put him way out front of the White Handers, who’d been reduced to hijacking Yale’s trucks, so weak was their own bathtub product.

  Plus, South Brooklyn’s small businessmen were also availing themselves of his protective services, and warehouse heists and hijacking and loan-sharking were filling the Yale coffers nicely, as well. And his stable of strong-arm boys he could contract out when politicians needed backup, or industrial outfits needed strikebreakers.

  Maybe he was getting spoiled; maybe things had been going so smooth, he was turning fat and lazy. Maybe to fight such slothful urges was why he’d declared war on the White Handers—they were, really, the only major obstacle to his controlling the Brooklyn rackets. And maybe that was why he’d ventured across the river, into Manhattan, to expand his booze business.

  No question Al had fouled up the Holliday play. What started out a little problem was now a big fucking mess. Frankie could put it down to two kinds of growing pains—a business, expanding by leaps and bounds so much that Frankie maybe gave too much responsibility to a kid like Capone; and a kid like Capone, whose dick swelled up to where he didn’t have brains left to lay off a business rival’s doll in the middle of a goddamn peace parlay.

  But why did the shit have to hit the fan at the Harvard Inn last night, when Johnny Torrio was in town?

  Little John, these days, was a mostly silent partner, trusting Frankie to run the Brooklyn end while Torrio took care of their Chicago action. But from the sound of things, Chicago was heating up, prompting Torrio’s second Brooklyn visit in three months.

  Down the street from the Adonis Club, in the office of the garage where Frankie kept his bootleg delivery trucks, he and Little John sat and talked. Young Capone would be here soon and the Holliday matter discussed. For now, however, Torrio was filling Frankie in on the state of affairs, Chicago way.

  Behind his desk, Frankie swivelled his chair to look at Torrio, who had the seat of honor just beside him. The ornate, expensive chair—mahogany and plush maroon cut-velvet and lushly padded—stuck out like a fancy sore thumb amid the scratched-up, serviceable wooden furniture of Frankie’s otherwise strictly functional office.

  The chair had been in Frankie’s living room for years, till his father-in-law suffered a heart attack and died in it, after which Theresa told Frankie to get rid of “the unlucky accursed thing.” Rather than let the fucking junkman have it, Frankie brought the chair here, where he used it to honor certain guests, like Torrio…or sometimes to spook other ones (“Don’t get too comfortable—my father-in-law croaked in that son of a bitch!”).

  Also in the room was Frankie’s squat, muscular bodyguard, Little Augie, standing by the window onto the alley, keeping watch, suitcoat unbuttoned, butt of a shoulder-holstered .45 auto handy. Between the White Handers and the Holliday’s screwup, you couldn’t be too careful.

  Torrio, in the fancy chair, sat with an ankle resting on a knee, exposing money-green silk socks; his beautifully tailored suit, downplaying
his small potbelly, was a lighter shade of green while his silk necktie was emerald, in color, the stickpin emerald, in reality.

  Frankie almost smiled—they called Little John a fucking Italian leprechaun, and this afternoon, he looked the damn part.

  His voice soft, mellow, almost soothing, Little John said, “I trust your friend Augie completely, so I know he won’t be offended if I ask you to ask him to take his position on the other side of that window.”

  Augie had not heard that, apparently. He had the ability to pay no attention at all to business conversations, but Frankie relayed the request, which of course wasn’t a request, and soon the two men were truly alone.

  Frankie, whose navy suit was every bit as well-tailored as his partner’s, complimented Little John on the cut of his clothing.

  “Maxwell Street,” Little John said with a gentle smile. “The material, the craftsmanship, is comparable to anything in Manhattan and comes close to England. And they give you a hell of a price, down there.”

  “So Chicago has its points.”

  “It does indeed. I only wish I could say the same about my uncle.”

  Frankie shifted in his chair, frowning. “I thought you and Big Jim were gettin’ along famously?”

  Torrio’s round pallid face turned grave. “We were. I’ve made him rich beyond his limited imagination.”

  Frankie knew Little John had, in just a few years, doubled the revenues on Big Jim Colosimo’s whorehouse business, from the classy House of All Nations down to the sleazy buck-a-fuck Bedbug Row, and all the steps between.

  “I’ve made him so rich,” Little John said, “he’s like a big fat spoiled house cat.” Little John’s expression saddened, as if he were about to report a death in the family; perhaps, in a way, he was. “Big Jim is resisting getting into the booze business, Frankie—money in the street, and he won’t bend over.”