Agent Delaney turned, finally seeming to notice her.
“I’m sorry, Miss Windham. They’re dead.”
Men with long guns cradled in their arms were hesitantly walking into the rubble, kicking at the largest pieces and turning them over. Archaeologists of the present, sifting through the many layers of now.
“I tried to tell you,” she said. Holding herself with shaking arms. “But no one would believe me.”
I often think of that morning, when I seemed as close as I would come to solving so many mysteries that instead would elude my grasp. Like that beautiful, haunted woman, who was standing right beside me but might as well have been in another world.
They never even let me get close to the rubble. As a member of the now disgraced Fireson Squad, I was one of the many agents whom Norris viewed as scrub brush that needed to be cleared away. Other agents were given the task of looking through the wreckage and making sense of the brothers’ recent movements—if there really had been any—while I was sent back to Chicago and assigned casework on various New Deal frauds. The white-collar nature of that suited me just fine, at first, but as time passed I began to wonder about what I might have missed that morning. Had the brothers even been in the cabin, or had I been a pawn in an elaborate ruse? Had they really managed to escape death so many times only to reach their final end that day? Why had we blown up the building without knowing exactly who was inside?
The Bureau’s secrecy surrounding the event only intrigued me further. Most of us weren’t allowed to view the reports of that morning or the reports detailing the strange days between the Points North “shootout” and the final detonations. Fingerprint records from the Points North and Sedalia incidents vanished, as did the coroner’s report from Points North. Even memos I myself had written were now classified, like a dangerous part of my personality that was sequestered from the rest of me. Mr. Hoover wanted everything stage-managed for public consumption: the federal apprehension, the inescapable ambush, the victorious government, the thankful people. But the Bureau refused to offer many details about what exactly the Firesons had done during those intervening two weeks, and even Mr. Hoover’s subsequent book about the War on Crime was vague on the Firesons’ final days, dedicating more ink to simpler tales like the shooting of Pretty Boy Floyd or the ambush of the Barker Gang. Still, rumors persisted. When the brothers were buried after their much delayed funeral, what exactly was put in those coffins? According to what little information I was able to get out of Norris’s foot soldiers, all that was left of the Firefly Brothers were a few shards of bone and scraps of charred clothing, but those remnants could well have been squirrel parts and bedsheets for all anyone knew. So what was in those coffins? The fragment of a hip bone, the sole of a shoe? Or nothing but broken glass and crumbled brick, mortar, and ash?
Even after the very well-publicized burial, people continued to see the Firesons in various cities, at state fairs and traveling carnivals, in bank heists and lesser crimes, in subway cars, in speeding Packards, in storm clouds. But no one could produce evidence confirming such visions, so they were ignored by the Bureau and even the newspapers, both of which had moved on to the hunt for Baby Face Nelson. Either the Firefly Brothers did, indeed, blow up that morning or, if they escaped somehow, they went on to lead quiet, lawful lives.
I know we can’t rise from the dead, yet sometimes I wonder if I was surrounded by exactly such an event without wanting to admit it. The very stories that I had earlier dismissed soon began to make sense to me, albeit a sense that could have rung true only during the strange crucible of those times. After many years had passed and I’d moved on to a position at a Chicago law firm, I called Chief Mackinaw again, chatted with some of his men. I sweet-talked the Bureau’s Chicago field-office secretary into showing me confidential files. I made the mistake of calling Weston Fireson, but he hung up as soon as I said my name.
I let myself wonder if the impossible could have occurred, and why. I tried to think of the Firefly Brothers the way their legions of loyal fans had, but still I couldn’t see it.
Finally, I tried to see the brothers the way they themselves did. Then I understood.
I still wonder about Darcy. Her disappearance was equally mysterious, not to mention illegal, as she skipped bail days after that morning by the Mississippi. I let my imagination run with her sometimes, because she seemed haunted by something I was unable to understand. Imagination. We tell ourselves to ignore it when times are tough, when we need to focus, concentrate on the facts. But facts make only so much sense on their own, when they’re laid bare, like little corpses, with nothing to animate them.
XXXV.
Thousands had come for the funeral, but Darcy was not among them. She was out of jail by then, so imprisonment was not her reason for missing it. With what little money she could gain access to she had hired a lawyer, careful to choose one who was not a friend of her old man’s. The authorities had quite a case against her father, yes, but little in the way of evidence against Darcy. Regardless of Mr. Windham’s sinister machinations, the kidnapping had been quite real to her, and the prosecutor’s attempts to make her seem complicit in it—or in the deaths of the various kidnappers at the farmhouse, or even in the deaths of Brickbat Sanders and the doctor and the judge—were flimsy indeed. At the hearing she had done her part to look the poor, distraught victim, and, despite the prosecutor’s accusations, the judge was swayed by her performance. The charge of conspiracy to commit insurance fraud was dropped, the accessory-to-murder charges were expunged, and she was released, on bail, to await trial for aiding and abetting multiple bank robberies.
Dozens of photos had been snapped as she walked out of the courthouse and ducked into the stylish Windham Windster commanded by her father’s faithful, distraught old driver. The codger just didn’t know what to do with himself now that his employer was behind bars, so he had offered his services to Darcy. He had dutifully driven her back to her apartment, and she had smiled and shaken his hand afterward, then told him to park the Windster on the street, give her the keys, and take the streetcar home. She told him he would never see her again.
Her three days in jail had been awful, though no worse than being in her kidnappers’ lair. At least she hadn’t been blindfolded. They had kept her apart from the rabble, as she was considered something of a celebrity villain. A gun moll, a term she’d never understood. Larger than life, she’d heard someone say. What can be larger than life? Death, or is that smaller? People do tend to become larger in death, their finer qualities extending outward like an endlessly serialized tale, their flaws and foibles forgotten, their stories continually retold. Larger than death. She thought about that and smiled, here, late at night, in a graveyard.
Breaking in hadn’t been nearly as difficult as she’d expected. If there was a night watchman, he wasn’t on duty, or he had been watching something else when she’d steered the Windster into the cemetery. The two men she’d hired for the job had been silent all along, but their silence became almost reverential as she steered them through that land of the dead. She had no map but her memory to guide her—she had cased it earlier that day. The papers claimed that thousands had visited the brothers’ graves, and the worn paths and trampled grass were evidence enough. The funeral had been in a local church, and the viewing—closed casket, of course—had lasted an entire day. The burial had been conducted in privacy, family only—she had been touched to receive an invitation from Mrs. Fireson, and had felt terrible about declining, making up some excuse about being prohibited from crossing state lines—but in the days since, the brothers’ grave had been well visited. She had wanted to come sooner but had waited until no more reporters or private dicks were skulking outside her door.
Here she was, with these two young men she’d found on a street corner, broad shoulders and long arms and a willingness to take on a job regardless of how macabre it sounded. They with their shovels and she with her flashlight, and the earth was still fresh—surely this
wouldn’t take long. She saw the men’s expressions in the light of the full moon, wordlessly asking if she was sure before they began. She was quite sure. They began.
They were large men—she had chosen wisely—and of course they might have considered simply taking her money. Here they were in a dark graveyard, no one around to save the damsel, at least not yet. But she knew enough of male desperation and low mores and therefore had allowed them to glimpse, during their short drive, the gun barrel poking out of her skirt. She was an employer, not a victim, and the men would act accordingly.
She had waited for him to contact her again. There was much she didn’t understand, but she was trying. Would there be another coded telegram from the great beyond? Or would he show up at her door unannounced, or nearly drive into her one night? How would it be this time? Because surely this madness—whatever this madness was—could not end this way.
Then she had remembered one of the last conversations she’d had with him, the strange promise he’d extracted from her. And here she was.
The shovels seemed to whisper with each plunge. It was taking longer than she had hoped, but she told herself to be patient. She had waited this long. She had not been able to keep her promise to Jason—she hadn’t understood it at the time—but she would make good tonight.
In the distance she could see stove fires lighting the southern hills of Lincoln City, the Hooverville that Whit and Veronica had once called home. To the west the office towers were dark, no one working on this late night. The tire factories weren’t operating, either, yet she could smell the melting rubber, that burned-chemical odor she always found so noxious when she visited, leaving her bewildered as to how anyone could actually live here. A smell Jason and Whit had known for so long they claimed not to notice it; it was a part of themselves.
She had read a snide editorial commenting on the lunacy of a burial without bodies. The grenades had decimated the brothers’ persons as well as their hideout, the columnist noted. What had been buried was not a pair of bodies—which no longer existed, he argued, and may he rot in hell for being so flippant about it—but misguided hopes for a sad and broken people.
So much death, and so contagious. She’d read that old Marriner Skelty had been found in a rented house in Gary, Indiana. One of the rooms he had turned into a makeshift laboratory, cluttered with vials and jars of bizarre solutions and notebooks filled with indecipherable chemical equations. He had consumed a number of these potions, as well as an entire bottle of whiskey. Suicide or an accident, the authorities weren’t sure. And only two days later Owney and Bea Davis, chased by police in the woods of northern Michigan, had lost control of their car while crossing a bridge, plummeting to their doom. At least Veronica had disappeared with her son, as she had done so many times before.
“Miss,” one of the men said. Resurrection men, that was the other term for grave robbers. A far more poetic description. She darted toward him, close enough to see how sweaty he and his partner had become. She could smell the rich loamy earth exhaling beneath them. He reached down with his shovel and gently tapped it on something.
“Clear it off, clear it off!”
She had told them to start with Jason’s, of course. Whit would understand, though likely he would hold a grudge.
The two men looked at each other, as if afraid to continue, but she ordered them again and they set to their task. They threw dirt in both directions to clear the top of the casket. She grew impatient—hurry!—and wanted to yell for her lover, but she was afraid it would only tease him, as she didn’t know how much longer this might take. More shoveling and the men grunted, and Lord only knew what they would say the next morning or whom they would tell, but, for God’s sake, they were taking too long! Darcy fell to her knees and crawled into the gaping hole, reaching forward, tearing at the soil with her bare hands. Dirt beneath her nails, grit tearing the pads of her fingers, but she was so close, and breathing so fast, and the two resurrection men had backed off now, as if amazed, or frightened. And what was that sound? Again and again, a pounding. She tore and grasped at this earth that dared get in her way, and though she may have been hearing only the frantic beating of her heart, it sounded—could it be?—like barely muted fists inside a coffin, a plea to the heavens, a wish for the impossible.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Anyone wishing to learn more about the real-life bank robbers of the Great Depression should read Bryan Burrough’s definitive history, Public Enemies: America’s Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI, 1933–34. Also helpful to the author were Pretty Boy by Michael Wallis, The Dillinger Days by John Toland, Hard Times by Studs Terkel, The Hungry Years by T. H. Watkins, The Case That Never Dies: The Lindbergh Kidnapping by Lloyd C. Gardner, Public Enemies: America’s Criminal Past, 1919-1940, by William Helmer with Rick Mattix, and Daily Life in the United States, 1920–1940, by David E. Kyvig. For a list of other works the author found inspiring during the research and writing of this book, please go to www.thomasmullen.net.
A tip of the fedora to my agent, Susan Golomb; my editors, Jennifer Hershey and Laura Ford; and everyone else at Random House for their hard work. Big thanks to Lloyd Gardner for his fine historical eye. A two-Tommy-gun salute goes to my family, and a wink and a smile to Jenny.
A CONVERSATION WITH THOMAS MULLEN
Random House Reader’s Circle: Where did you get the idea for this book?
Thomas Mullen: In the months after my first novel, The Last Town on Earth, was published, I read a lot about Depression-era bank robbers like John Dillinger, Pretty Boy Floyd, Bonnie and Clyde, and Baby Face Nelson, all of whom were active in 1933–34. It was an amazing time. These larger-than-life characters were robbing dozens of banks across the country, getting front-page headlines, and captivating the public.
It was the perfect time to rob banks. The recent invention of the Thompson submachine gun (the tommy gun) and the advent of faster cars and well-maintained highways meant that bank robbers could be more heavily equipped and speedier than small-town police forces, which typically had nothing but a few revolvers and old, hand-cranked Model-A Fords. These itinerant bank-robbing “gangs” weren’t well-organized urban machines like Al Capone’s Mob so much as a few like-minded men and women who tended to rob only small-town banks, staying clear of the big cities. Also, state police forces at the time tended to be insufficiently staffed, and seldom communicated with each other—you could rob a bank in Ohio, drive all night to Minnesota, and you might as well have fled to South America. This would change by mid-1934, when J. Edgar Hoover turned the Justice Department’s minor Bureau of Investigation into what we now know as the FBI, a federalized police force capable of tracking national criminals. In the early years of the Depression, though, this wasn’t yet the case. Because of widespread anger and disgust at the banks and the government, these criminals were praised as often as they were excoriated. Plenty of people hated them, of course, and viewed them as yet another sign that the world was falling apart. But for many people whose worlds had been turned upside down, who felt abandoned by country and law and God and all the things they had been taught to believe in, these bank robbers were heroes. They were fighting back. Stories spread that Dillinger, Pretty Boy Floyd, Clyde Barrow, and the Firefly Brothers gave all (or at least most) of their money to the poor, or at least that they robbed only wealthy bankers and never did any harm to small, mom-and-pop businesses. They were seen as Robin Hoods for a modern, disenchanted, and very disorienting age.
There had of course been earlier criminal folk heroes, like Billy the Kid, Jesse James, and the Newton Boys, but never before had there been so many such desperadoes operating at the same time, and so brazenly. Never before had there been a multipronged media juggernaut of newsreels, comic books, pulp novels, and glamorizing movies like The Public Enemy pumping out stories (fact and fiction) about them, which added new layers of myth to their every move. And never before had they seemed to have such moral force and public outrage at their backs.
&nbs
p; RHPC: Most of the novel is written in a realistic vein, yet the central conceit is the Firefly Brothers dying and coming back to life—why the juxtaposition?
TM: Part of what attracted me to the idea of The Many Deaths of the Firefly Brothers was the melding of fact and fiction, the way that, even in 1934, there were so many crazy rumors circulating around the actual criminals. Did John Dillinger really break out of jail using a wooden gun he’d whittled while in lockup? Was Pretty Boy Floyd just an honest family man who gave all his money to the poor? Were Bonnie and Clyde really beautiful, star-crossed lovers who wrote poetry and couldn’t get a break? And, most interesting, did the feds possibly kill the wrong guy in that Chicago alley and merely claim it was Dillinger, as many people believed?
These criminals were romanticized, fictionalized, lionized, and heroized. They were blown out of all proportion to who they really were, while at the same time certain lesser aspects of their personalities and lifestyles were overlooked. (They did, let’s not forget, kill people. Quite a lot of people.) I love the questions this poses about our identity and how it’s really formed, about mythology and folklore, about our ability to craft our own fate. Plus, I’d get to throw in a car chase and some gunfights. What’s not to like?
The Many Deaths of the Firefly Brothers: A Novel Page 44
