"I recommend that you do so without further delay."
"Yeah. Listen, can you get a message to Jim for me?"
"I'll try."
"Jake has gone plumb crazy. He thinks there's a contract let on him or something, and he's going out to Giovanni's now for a showdown. He's taking a big head party, and I've been elected to escort them out there. Tell Jim to for God's sake do what he can to head this off. There's no telling what might happen. All of us might be in for a whole lot of hell."
"You're not escorting him with all these cars, I hope."
"No, he very kindly settled for a two-car escort. Look, I've got to get this moving, so..."
"By all means. Do me a favor first. Get me a ride to Central."
"I'll call in a car," the Captain agreed. "Don't forget that message."
"Okay, and listen... a word of advice. If things do start going to hell — well, when it gets down to sheer survival remember that first and last you're a cop. Get me?"
"Thanks, I'm learning that fast."
Captain Hamilton leaned into the cruiser and reached for the radio microphone. The man with the eyepatch limped along the sidewalk and took a station at the curb where the taxi had been. Seconds later another cruiser pulled to the curb, the man got in, and the car sped away.
Minutes later the cruiser eased into the "officials" lane of the Central Police Station in Chicago's loop area. The tall man in the gray suit stepped out, thanked the officers, and went quickly up the steps and inside the station. He was exhibiting a barely noticeable limp, the topcoat was draped neatly over one shoulder; he carried the briefcase in one hand, the unlighted pipe in the other. As he threaded his way through the confusion of uniformed policemen and newspapermen crowding the main lobby area, the man with the eyepatch could have been taken for a police official, a lawyer, or simply a businessman on an errand with the law.
The man was, in fact, none of these. He was the most wanted "criminal" in town at the moment — he was Mack Bolan, in another daring exhibition of "role camouflage."
His uncovered eye scanned the building directory in a lightning sweep as he walked casually past and on to the back stairway, then he penetrated deeper, past the bull rooms and along teeming corridors, and into a quieter area of the building until he found the offices he sought
The plaque on the door read, Department Liaison. He entered and walked through a deserted anteroom, inspecting plaques on the three doors opening from there and selecting the one marked, Mr. McCormick, State.
Bolan rapped with his knuckles and went inside. A pudgy man of about fifty looked up from a solitaire layout on the desk, showed a visitor a sour smile, and said, "If it's business, you're too late. If it's not, then you're lost."
"Are you Josh McCormick?" Bolan asked quietly.
"That's me. Stuck in town on the worst night of the year. I guess you're not lost, eh."
"You do the liaison work between the department and the state prosecutor's office." It was a statement, not a question.
The man nodded his head, eyes narrowing in a late inspection of his guest. "I'm one of them," he conceded.
Bolan set the briefcase on the corner of the desk, opened it, and withdrew the Stein notebook. "What stuck you, Mr. McCormick?" he asked in a cold voice, "The weather — or your moonlighting job?"
"What is this?" McCormick growled. "Who the hell are you?"
Bolan had turned the pages of the little book and found the notes he sought. He read aloud, in a voice fit for a funeral service, "McCormick, Josh L. — political appointee, special liaison team for the office of police superintendent, representing state prosecutor in policy matters affecting Chicago Police Department." He glanced up from the reading and inquired, "Are you that Josh McCormick?"
"What's that you've got there?" the man snarled. "What do you?.."
Bolan growled, "Shut up," and showed him the Beretta Belle.
The guy turned pale and pressed his hands flat against the top of the desk. "What th' hell is this?" he asked in a hushed voice.
The notes on McCormick were jotted neatly over six and one half pages of the Stein notes, detailing six years of his close association with known Mafia figures in and out of Chicago, and revealing various details of his treachery to the State of Illinois. He had intervened in scores of criminal cases involving the Chicago syndicate, either buying-off or "clouting" judges and jurists who were not already owned outright by the mob, and often with this influence extending clear into the state supreme court. He had been on the present job for only the past fifteen months, and now functioned chiefly as an informant for his Mafia connections in matters related to their legal wellbeing.
The guy was not a cop, nor an elected official, nor anything other than what the notes indicated. He was a political hack, a paid fink, bagman and clouter for the syndicate — and certainly, in Bolan's mind, he had no more going for him than any fulltime Mafioso.
McCormick was breaking out in sweat above the brows and a film was forming over his eyes as he stared up the mouth of the Beretta. He whispered, "I don't know what this is all about. I've done nothing. Is this a contract job? Money? If it's a money job, I'll double the contract, I'll triple it. I'll give you everything I've got."
Bolan's free hand had restored the notebook to its place in the briefcase, and the hand emerged with a marksman's medal. He tossed it on the desk.
It hit the guy's outstretched hand and his eyes focused there, and he gurgled, "Oh God no!"
Bolan told him, "You've already given everything you had, McCormick. And it's not enough, not nearly enough."
"I'm not Mafia! What does that book say, that I'm Mafia? I'm not, God believe it, I'm not!"
"Maybe you're worse," Bolan told him, remembering Leo Stein's little lecture about the vehicle. "It's people like you, McCormick, that make it all work for them."
"I'm nobody, I'm just a tiny cog in a great big machine, Bolan. Hell, it's not just crime, it's politics, bigpolitics. There's a thousand like me, hell maybe ten thousand." The guy was talking for his life, and Bolan didn't even want his life, but he did nothing to discourage the talk.
"Maybe eighty thousand," Bolan said, still remembering.
"I wouldn't be surprised. It's not little people like me, Bolan. It's the machine, the damned machine. You think I have any influence in this town? Me?" The guy laughed bitterly. "I've been in the circles for a long time, sure. I know a lot of people, in the courts and in the police establishment, sure — but do you think I could work anything on my own? They'd laugh me out of town. It's not me, Bolan. It's the system, it's the God-damnedsystem. A guy can't live around here outside the system; not and make a go of anything."
Bolan knew all about the system. And he knew how easy it was for straight people to get sucked into that mess, and turned into dirt, and remolded like so much clay into the image the system needed.
He told the frightened man, "I don't especially want your life, McCormick. I want your office. I want you."
"Just give me the chance, you'll see how fast I get out."
"And never come back. You tell it to all your buddies in the system. Tell them that Bolan will be around for a long time, and that he'll be looking into that system regularly."
McConnick was still looking into the Beretta, but there was hope in the eyes now; he was beginning to breathe normally and to settle himself down. He said, "I can't believe that you walked past a thousand cops just totell me that."
Bolan replied, "You're right, I didn't. Pick up the phone, McCormick. Call your boss in Springfield. I mean your official boss. And I expect you to be very convincing. You've just stumbled onto some solid information. All the celebrities of the Chicago underworld are meeting at Giovanni's at this very moment. They might be talking up a street war. And you have a solid make that Bolan will be crashing this party. And wouldn't it be a neat feat for the state prosecutor if he could very quietly coordinate an army of state and local cops into that little bash out there. That's the idea — now you show
me how well you can present it."
McConnick was already placing the call. His hand was shaking but the voice was steady as he told Bolan, "Don't worry, I'm an expert at this stuff, or should I remind you of that?"
Bolan could almost like the guy, even realizing what he was, but realizing also that there were many shades of gray between black and white. He listened critically to the excited two-way conversation, nodded his approval when it was all done, then he tied and gagged the guy and locked him in a closet of the anteroom. That done, Bolan got out of there.
He rounded the corner of the corridor then resumed his affected limping, leisurely making his way back into the swirling chaos that was normal routine for a big city police station — on through scared and snarling suspects, and weeping and angry wives and mothers and sisters.
With a careful disinterest, he pushed on past harried cops and cold-eyed lawyers and cloutmen and fixers of every ilk, through confused complainants and indignant witnesses, on beyond the drunks and the junkies and the frightened kids and the lost souls, on beyond the reporters and the social workers and the photographers, past rattling teletypes and shrilling telephones and back into the frigid but welcome sanity of the wild jungle outside.
And during that trip Bolan quit wondering why sometimes a cop or a lawyer or a judge went sour, or hard, or just plain bad; he had to wonder, instead, how any of them ever kept from it.
He had to wonder, also, if any of this war was really worth it. Was anything actually worth fighting for?
So what if, by some magic and with one mighty thrust of the sword, he should succeed in putting the Mafia down, once and for all, everywhere at once. Wouldn't others arise to replace them, wouldn't the clouters and the grafters and the pushers and the rotten core everywhere simply reassert itself? Wouldn't the shit machine simply reassemble itself?
Hell, he couldn't start thinking like that, he told himself. Doubt must not be allowed to creep in at a time like this. He made his way back to the war-wagon, inspected the heavy-weafher tires and double checked the chains, then he stepped inside and changed back into his combat gear.
A very hot war awaited him.
Sure, there was more to life than just taking all you could milk out of it. With so many sucking leeches hanging on, life would sooner or later run out of the good milk, leaving nothing but the bitter for everybody.
Yeah, Bolan had his reason for existence. Sometimes a guy simply felt a hand on his shoulder, and he knew that he was being turned around to look at something rotten, something sucking all the good out of life and leaving nothing but bitterness in its place. According to Stein's notes, more than two-hundred-mil]ion bucks a year were being sucked out of the Chicago ghettoes by the system, and not a damn cent was finding its way back in.
So bigtime crime created — indirectly — smalltime crimes, juvenile delinquents, broken homes, junkies, and human misery of every description.
This was Bolan's message from Central, as finally broken down and assimilated.
And yeah, that hand was still on his shoulder. Someone had to stop sucking and start putting back in. Sometimes a guy had to be willing to stop and look around him, and maybe volunteer for a transfusion to life.
The Executioner smiled grimly and eased his war-machine onto the icy street.
It was not a war-wagon, he was thinking.
It was a bloodmobile.
12
Battle site
Bolan's battle plan was simple in conception but delicately complex in its execution. A lone man in a frontal assault could never hope to overcome the staggering array of forces pitted against him; Bolan held no illusions in this respect. He had known from the beginning that the one hope for success lay in his ability to exploit their weakest points, to incite confusion and fear, and to keep the enemy reeling and off balance long enough for the Executioner to take his toll of their leadership.
Jake Vecci, boss of the Loop, had emerged as Bolan's bonus baby, the big wallop of the battle order. Greed and fear, the human factors that had combined to create the Cosa Nostra, were now being recombined in Chicago — in only the slightest variation of the original formula — to destroy it. Bolan was the chemist, Chicago was his laboratory, and the most primitive ills of mankind were his materials.
And yes, he just might shake this kingdom down, after all.
The nagging worry in Bolan's mind at the moment, however, was that the larger enemy, the truerot that had drawn him magnetically to this troubled old city, actually lay outside the kingdom — that is, outside the family organization itself. Wherever Bolan had gone in the past to battle the syndicate, he had found a condition wherein the mob seemed to be both the cause and the effect of organized evil. This did not appear to be the case at Chicago.
The Stein intelligence bothered Bolan. Oh, the mob was well represented in those notes, okay — they were just as busy in Chicago as anywhere, manipulating and looting and raping their human environment with all the gusto characteristic of Mafiaentrenchment everywhere.
But... Bolan could not shake the growing conviction that the mob's position at Chicago was a unique one. This was a "made" city, yes, but the Cosa Nostrahad not made it. They were simply a part of the fix and, Bolan suspected, a relatively small part. Actually, it seemed, the city had "made" the mob, not vice versa. The iron grip of power that held this town in virtual slavery did not appear as a typical exercise in Mafia domination. Mafiosiwere not astute politicians, they did not have the finesse nor even the interest required for the delicate maneuverings that kept a political machine functioning and self-perpetuating.
When the mob really got their hooks into a town, they simply raped it, sucked it dry, and left it writhing in ruin. Like Reading, Pennsylvania, when the Philadelphia mob descended upon it. They bought practically the entire city administration, from the mayor on down, and cowed those they couldn't buy. Before the local citizens could realize what was happening, this quiet heartland of the Pennsylvania Dutch countryside was transformed into the sin mecca of the Atlantic Seaboard, featuring the largest red-light district and the grandest gambling establishment in the East. The most active illegal still since the repeal of Prohibition was operated directly off the city water supply, municipal improvements slowed to a halt, industries began moving out, and the downtown area fell into ruin. The helpless and bewildered citizenry were not even aware of the leeches at their throats until it was too late to save the situation, and Reading was sucked dry before the feds could step in and put an end to the rape.
So why hadn't Chicago been sucked dry, if the mob had truly been in charge here for so many decades? The answer, in Bolan's troubled mind, was that the mob was simply operating a franchise in this town. So okay. Who issued the franchise? Who was the actual "Mr. Big" of this fantastic empire of corruption and clout, an empire which — according to the Stein intelligence — was powerful enough already to dominate bothpolitical parties in some areas of the state, send handpicked men to Congress and to the legislature and city councils, install federal judges, and even strongly influence the national political organizations and conventions.
Cosa di tutti Cosi, eh? Bolan smiled wryly to himself. It was a mere imitation, a second-generation blueprint. Chicago, it seemed, already had its own version of The Big Thing — and Chicago did not belong to the Cosa Nostra.
The Executioner sighed regretfully and shook venal Chicago out of his thoughts. Somewhere he had read that "a people have the government they deserve." Bolan would let the people of Chicago worry about Chicago — and maybe, he decided, people all over the country should start worrying about Chicago. His job was impossible enough as already laid out — and his war was with the Mafia, not with an entire American city and a political way of life.
This shaking-out process helped. A little, It defined the battle-ground and put the enemy in better focus. Bolan did not now "want" The Big Four — he merely wanted the syndicate member of that cartel, "Don Gio" Giovanni. And he had very suddenly lost interest in many of
the "nine names" he had requested of Leopold Stein. His guns would be tracking on the hierarchy of the syndicate itself. Let the wage-earning "pigeons" put down their own rotten labor bosses. Let the purchasing-power pigeons put down the gouging businessmen. And let the ballot-marking pigeons handle their own smelly garbage at the polls. All of that was something the people could do for themselves. It was a job for civilians. Bolan had a hot war to fight.
The supper club known as Giovanni's occupied a piece of ground which rightfully belonged to the people of Cook County. Some years earlier the county had acquired, at considerable expense, several sections of unimproved land in this sparsely settled neighborhood for development into a public park and golf course. A particularly choice piece in the northeast corner of this development provided access to the Des Plaines River, and the original park planning called for the construction of a water-recreation facility in that spot.
Through some mysterious reasoning, it was later decided that the water-recreation plan was "unfeasible" — and, by an equally mysterious set of circumstances, the plot of parkland which fronted the river was "acquired" from the county by a recently incorporated firm identified as Club's Management, Inc. for the ostensible purpose of constructing and operating a public entertainment facility at that location.
The "public entertainment facility" which emerged was, of course, Giovanni's. No one could complain that the new club was not available to the general public. It was open to anyone who could wangle a table reservation and shell out an average of fifty dollars per head for an evening's entertainment. Patrons were required to observe a strict "dress code" and the joint was "first class" all the way — from the tie-and-tail waiters and headline entertainers in the dining room to the black-tie dealers and table men in the private back room casino.
Just south of Gio's stolen grounds lay the promised but only half-completed (nine holes) public golf course; directly west and across a specially constructed road lay the park proper, covering eight hundred and sixty acres of mostly unusable and therefore unused scrubland. With the river at Ms back, Don Gio had a rather secluded setting for his night time playground. Only to the north did he have neighbors, a straggling line of upper middle class "estate-ettes" which Don Giovanni contemptuously referred to as "the wealthy man's ghetto" — and which were suitably screened from Giovanni's place by a thick stand of timber.
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