by Ray Celestin
He bought a new shirt and jacket and trousers and changed into them, taking the old clothes with him, dumping them into a trash can on the street.
Then he went into a grocery and got on the phone. He called Loretta’s sister’s house and Mary answered, said Loretta had left that morning for the funeral, and Dante put the phone down before she asked him too many questions. Then he called the Drake, checked for messages: Frank had left Sacco’s home address, which he memorized before ending the call.
Then he retraced his steps back to where the shoot-out had started. Police were milling about, the whole area cordoned off. He looked around and saw Sacco’s coupe abandoned in the alleyway around the corner from the main road, a half a block from where the cordon started. He walked in the opposite direction to the crime scene, in a wide circle, and entered the alleyway from the far end. He guessed the man hadn’t locked it when he’d jumped out to chase him down. He checked and found he was right: the driver’s side door – with great scratches down it from Dante having rammed past him – opened up when he tried the handle.
He sat inside, and saw that the keys had dropped into the footwell. He picked them up and pocketed them and then he searched the car for clues. In the glovebox he found a wallet, money, a cafeteria receipt, and a cellophane wrapper with heroin in it, the same stuff Dante had been buying from the shoeshine man, the same stuff they were importing into the city. Nothing under the seats or in the door pouches except for a book of matches from Schiller’s, the bar Frank said they worked out of.
He got out and checked the trunk: a shotgun, shells scattered about. A leather holdall. Sports clothes inside, boxing gloves, boots, all of them with the Illinois Athletic Club crest on them. He closed the trunk and got back in the car.
Through the mouth of the alleyway he could see the main road where the shoot-out had happened, the police cordon, and in the distance, the bullet-ridden wreck of his own car, the once-beautiful Blackhawk, and opposite it the sedan and beyond that, the drugstore, where the old man and the girl were talking to a beat-cop. Dante tried to think what he had left in his car, what the police could use to trace it back to him aside from a week’s worth of fingerprints.
Then he started up Sacco’s car, reversed it down the alley, and headed off in the direction of the Drake. He ran a mental list of where Loretta could be: Schiller’s bar, Sacco’s home, the Illinois Athletic Club, Coulton’s home, an apartment they had rented for the occasion; absolutely any enclosed space in the vast, endless city of Chicago. The futility of it made his heart wrench. He tried to think of ways to find a woman in the middle of a city, to bargain her back to safety, but he came up blank and cursed his guilt-ridden, drug-addled excuse for a brain.
He pulled up outside the Drake and saw two Cadillacs badly parked on the forecourt, each with curtains pulled over the back window and a bell on the driver’s-side running board – police cars. He carried on driving. He drove and smoked and ran through every angle in his head, and every angle ended up with either him dead or Loretta dead or both of them dead. Gangsters normally left women out of the warfare, there being an unspoken agreement between all of them that girlfriends and mistresses, and wives especially, were off limits. The breaking of this code by the people who had taken Loretta disconcerted Dante, made him wonder what else they were capable of.
He thought about Al finding out the traitor was Sacco, and that Sacco’s link back to New York was Coulton, and Coulton’s link in New York was Luciano and Lansky – Dante’s friends – and what Dante’s chances were of surviving that. He thought about the chances of surviving an exchange with Coulton. He thought about the unlikely possibility of him getting out of Chicago and what his chances were if he went on the run. He tried to imagine the happy ending, with him and Loretta getting out of it alive, and he couldn’t do it.
At some point the adrenaline and the last of the dope wore off, and the pain came on hard, so he pulled up outside a pharmacy somewhere in Pilsen, went in and bought a hypodermic and some needles, then returned to the car, found a quiet road, and prepared a spike with the dope he’d found in Sacco’s car, heating it on the end of a tin can he’d found in the street – a trick from his days on the boxcars.
He snapped his lighter shut, sucked the dope into the syringe and spiked himself in the arm. He stared down the empty road in front of him, where in the distance the city shimmered pale in the heat above the asphalt. He saw a playground further up the block, children playing on swings and a dome-shaped climbing frame coated in rust, looking like the skeleton of some long-dead mammoth, half submerged into the earth. They’d never had playgrounds in Little Italy when he was growing up, but the energy of the children, the joyful racket they were sending into the air, reminded him of his own childhood, and his mind went woozy and drifted for a moment from the job at hand.
He remembered playing stickball with Jacob, running down sidewalks, chasing fireflies in the dusk, double-dates, getting into trouble, his father coming home from work, his mother at the stove, birthdays, church parades, schoolrooms, pranks. Another city now, vanished into the past, fully submerged into the underworld, laid to rest.
As his heart pumped the dope through his bloodstream, he felt the pain leaving his body, felt his injuries dissolving one by one: the swollen ankle, an echo of the infirmity he’d given Jacob; the shotgun wounds in his arm and shoulder; the bruises in his armpit from firing the tommy gun; the bruise on his head from the crash; the ruined veins all along his arms and legs.
He’d abused his body well over the years, eked as much pleasure and pain from it as he could, and here were the marks to show for it – a body broken, smashed, in need of repair. I’m already dead, he thought. And in that moment he realized why all those years of trying to kill himself hadn’t worked. He’d died when his wife had, and ever since he’d just been killing time, waiting to catch up with her, a ghost, or maybe its opposite, a body without a soul, wandering through the world in a daze.
And that was when he realized what he had to do. If Dante was already dead, he might as well sacrifice himself. Then maybe Loretta might survive and maybe he’d finally get to do something noble with the broken half-life that was now his existence.
He opened his eyes and stared at the empty road ahead and he noticed how strangely calm he was, and not just on account of the dope. For the first time that day his heart wasn’t racing, he wasn’t panicked or remorseful, anxious or filled with dread. He had a purpose, finally. Something that would see him through till the end.
He started the car and drove around the neighborhood till he found a speak-easy. He went in to see if they had a phone he could use, and they did, so he sat and ordered a beer, and dialed the number for Sacco’s home address on the phone they had behind the counter.
No answer. The beer arrived and a bowl of peanuts. Dante took a sip of the drink, but when he tried to eat, the peanuts felt like lead in his gut. He called the number he had on the matches from Schiller’s bar.
‘Schiller’s,’ said the voice on the other end.
‘I want to speak to Sacco.’
‘He ain’t here.’
‘Well, where is he?’
‘Who’s asking?’
‘The man who killed his brother . . .’
The line went quiet, muffled, a hand over the receiver at the other end. A few seconds later the man came back on the line.
‘He’s not here, but I can get him. What do you want?’
‘I want a deal. I’ll call back in an hour and he better be there.’
‘All right . . .’
Dante passed the hour in a swirl of cigarettes and beer and the sound of the Fletcher Henderson Orchestra fluttering out of the radio behind the bar, a medley of popular songs played tight and precise. When he called back, an agitated voice answered the phone.
‘Yeah?’
‘Is that Sacco?’
‘Yeah. Who’s this?’
‘You already know.’
There was silence on the line
for a moment, then Sacco asked, ‘What do you want?’ And Dante could feel the pain in the man’s voice; Sacco had lost his brother, but then, so had Dante.
‘I want to bargain. I want the girl back.’
‘Yeah? What’ve you got to bargain with?’
Dante had to press home his only advantage, what the hood had said on the railroad tracks before he died – that Coulton was scared of anyone finding out who his New York connection was, lest he as the middle man was squeezed out of the operation.
‘I know who Coulton’s connection is in New York. I can set you up with them. And once you’re set, you can kill Coulton like you’ve wanted to all along and take over the operation yourself. You’ll be the king of Chicago. All I want in return is the girl.’
The line went quiet as Sacco debated whether or not Dante was being honest, and if he was, whether he should enter into a double-cross with a man he didn’t even know. As Dante waited for a response, he listened to the electrical rustle of the static going down copper wires, bouncing about the city’s exchanges and switchboards.
‘And what about Capone?’ Sacco asked.
‘I haven’t breathed a word to him. You let the girl go and he’ll never find out about all the dope you’ve been distributing in his vans, or the fact it was you and your pals behind the poison party at the Ritz.’
Dante paused to let the revelation that he knew all about their schemes sink in. More silence. And as he waited to see if Sacco would buy the bluff, Dante’s heart pounded, and the receiver felt heavy in his hand.
‘All right,’ the man said. ‘But if you want the girl, you got a problem. She’s with Coulton, not me.’
‘Then arrange a meeting. Tell him I want to bargain with him. I don’t care if I end up dead. All I want is the girl to walk away.’
There was another long pause as Sacco debated yet another rearrangement of the pieces on the chess board.
‘Okay . . .’ he said eventually. ‘I’ll need to check with Coulton first. You got a number I can call you on?’
‘I’ll call you,’ said Dante. ‘In an hour.’
He put the phone down, and thought. Sacco had played the calmness well, speaking so levelly to the man who had just killed his brother. Maybe Dante had inflamed Sacco’s greed, and the man really was in on the scheme to double-cross Coulton. Or maybe he was bluffing too, pretending he was in on it, whilst actually plotting to double-cross Dante.
The permutations branched off and spun around each other in so many variations Dante soon realized there was no point trying to account for them all. He’d find out soon enough how it’d go down, and he prayed it would be enough to see Loretta safe.
Another hour, another swirl of alcohol and smoke and the radio program changed to a puff piece on the fight that night, journalists interviewing pundits. The barman and some of the regulars were comparing odds they’d gotten on the fighters, and Dante thought of Michigan Red, who must be in the middle of his busiest day ever, trying to level his book, and Dante remembered his parting words – He a shaky dog, jus’ like you – and he started laughing till tears formed in his eyes, and the barman and the regulars were looking at him sidelong.
The clock ticked by and he called Schiller’s back.
‘It’s on,’ said Sacco. ‘Come by Coulton’s at ten. The old man wants to see you, and you’ll get to see the girl’s all right.’
‘And then what happens?’
‘The girl gets to go free. I’ll make sure of it. Then we’ll drive you out to the prairie somewheres, and before we put a bullet in your head, you tell us who the New York connection is.’
The image of an endless cornfield flashed into Dante’s mind, sun-drenched and serene, caressed by the wind. He’d always thought he’d end up buried near water for some reason, a lake or a sea, but now the thought of the prairie somehow seemed fitting, it being an inland ocean, vast and unknowable and tender in its way.
‘Okay. What’s the address?’
Sacco gave it to him and Dante memorized it.
‘And if you get any ideas,’ said Sacco, ‘about telling Coulton we had this chat, I’ll make sure the girl hurts.’
‘Sure,’ said Dante, and he put down the phone.
He wondered whether he’d done the right thing by Loretta, then he realized with some sadness that he’d probably never know.
He left the bar and went back to Sacco’s car, drove about until he found a fleapit hotel, in a run-down part of Pilsen. He parked the dead man’s car a couple of blocks away, walked back and rented a room. It was as depressing a hotel room as he could imagine – grey walls, lumpy bed, low ceiling, stiflingly hot. On the wall opposite the bed there was a print of a sunset over a beach somewhere nice, California maybe, making the room feel even worse by comparison.
Dante took the Suicide Special out of his pocket, tossed it on the bed, took his hat off too. Then he undressed, checked the bleeding from his shoulder, eased the bandages off and took a shower, and thought how it would be the last time he’d ever experience the sensation of water rushing over him.
Then he lay on the bed and shot up one last time, with the heroin supplied by the men who were going to kill him. Through one of the walls he could hear a couple having sex, through the window children playing in the street, from somewhere else far away, the sound of a Victrola, playing a blues. A dead man’s blues.
His eyes wandered around the sorry-looking hotel room and he briefly thought of his suite at the Drake, then he looked at the print of the California sunset on the wall, and the actual sunset out of the window, and was unsure which of the two was more dread-inducing. Then the earth got dark and the city lights came on and he rose and went into the bathroom and splashed some water on his face.
Then he came back into the room and searched for his Beretta, sure that he’d left it on the bed. He found it under his hat, and as he was putting the hat on his head, he realized something. He took the hat back off, took the Beretta from his pocket and dropped it into the crown of the hat. A perfect fit. His small, woman’s gun fitted into the top of his hat, and that gave him an idea.
Maybe he wasn’t a dead man after all.
NATIONAL BROADCASTING CORPORATION
RADIO TRANSCRIPT
Commentary – Graham McNamee
. . . NBC has linked 82 stations together to form a nationwide broadcast that is the largest single broadcast in history, ladies and gentlemen, with over 50 million people listening in. We’d like to say a special hello to those of you listening via the amplifiers set up in public spaces in towns across America. Give yourselves a round of applause, ladies and gentlemen . . . Now the fighters aren’t scheduled to enter the ring till 9.45 p.m., so let me take a moment to give you a quick description of Soldier Field . . .
I guess the easiest way to describe it would be to say that it’s like a modern-day Roman amphitheater, a coliseum. It’s a rectangular-shaped, open-air stadium, right on the lakeside, and it’s currently bathed in the light of 44 giant arc lamps set up all around it, each one 1,000 watts strong, turning the night into day . . .
On the north side of the arena, 700 feet from the ring, is a line of 32 giant columns, the portico of the Field Museum. On the south side is a stand where hundreds of rows of people rise into the night, and above them all a row of 26 giant American flags. On the east and west sides are another two great stands rising up into the sky, and above each of those stands are two more porticos, each containing double rows of Doric columns, and it’s above these that the 44 great lights are shining down on the stadium, which is filled to capacity. And let me tell you, it’s quite a sight . . .
150,000 fight fans have been streaming in through the 50 concrete vents underneath the east and west stands since 6 p.m., helped by 6,000 ushers. Perhaps the most noticeable entry of all was that of the city’s own Al Capone, who entered in the center of what I can only describe as a ring of muscle. Mr Capone has apparently bought 100 of the most expensive $40 seats for himself and I have it on good authority
that he’s got $50,000 riding on Dempsey, ladies and gentlemen . . .
At the moment the ring is occupied by some of Illinois’ most prominent politicians, Governor Len Small, Mayor ‘Big Bill’ Thompson and State’s Attorney, Robert E. Crowe. The politicians are addressing the crowd and receiving rapturous applause . . .
56
The roads to the stadium were packed with more people than Ida had ever seen, like Mardi Gras and election night and the Lindbergh parade all rolled into one. Thousands on the streets, even though not one of them had a ticket. But history was in the making, the eyes of the world on their city, their neighborhood, their stadium, and the excitement couldn’t be appreciated sitting at home. The buzz in the air, the hubbub, the electric pulse – it had to be shared, so people deluged the streets, the whole of Chicago milling about the sidewalks, arguing, drinking, listening to radio broadcasts that echoed like static down the streets, washed against buildings, followed Ida and Michael as they ran from their abandoned car for Soldier Field.
Then the stadium itself hove into view, a hulking, towering mammoth of stone, slumbering on the lakeshore, topped with Roman columns. Ida saw how the arc lamps on its roof had turned the whole thing into a basin of dazzling golden light, shining unnaturally skyward, as if the glow was the overspill of some miracle taking place inside.
They sprinted across the grounds that ringed the place, carpeted with a debris of peanut bags and sports-paper pages and countless cigarette ends, barreling through the fuzz of people on the grass.
Then they were through the last of the crowds, at an entrance, the beast of the stadium looming high, a line of police and a gaggle of guards stretched across its turnstiles. Walker had called ahead, had hopefully gotten through to the captains that were at the stadium, and the police were already searching the place for rigs or grenade men or Severyn himself, and hopefully the whole thing hadn’t been put down to a hoax. Michael flashed his ID and told them who they were and they were waved through, one of the cops coming with them.
