Fever City

by Tim Baker

  But the photos are fiction.

  Giancana was a brutal, disgusting man, capable of acts of both great and petty evil. His pride and ambition hid grievances that bordered upon paranoia and were fed by a need for generalized vengeance. His speech had a foul, keening sense of the sewer combined with a self-grandiosity that was almost lyrical in its absurdity.

  He began his career as a hoodlum for the Forty-Two Gang, before becoming a wheelman for the Chicago Outfit, which was reinventing itself after Scarface Al Capone’s arrest. Then Momo took a major step upwards by orchestrating the takeover of the South Side numbers racket through a series of annihilating racist attacks. He unleashed extreme sadists like ‘Mad Sam’ DeStefano and ‘Milwaukee’ Phil Alderisio onto the streets of Second City, USA, knowing that their rampages of unimaginable barbarity strengthened his authority—they were all 42-men and they were taking over the Outfit. Giancana was beaten up several times in one-on-ones in Vegas. A physical coward, afterwards he’d order his henchmen to exact revenge. Facial and genital trauma followed by unmarked graves in the Nevada desert.

  Momo got messed up when he started fucking a pretty brunette in her twenties, sharing her with Sinatra and JFK. Judy Campbell had a big smile and a frank, open face, although her firm jaw should have warned them she was trouble with a capital T. Judy was an unlucky talisman. Her curse rubbed off on all who touched her. Sinatra lost his casino license. JFK lost his life. And Momo lost his war with Joey ‘Doves’ Aiuppa, who took over Chicago without a fight.

  Momo got old. Momo got scared.

  Momo ran away to Mexico, spending his last years in luxury running gambling rackets.

  When he was finally nabbed, he squealed.

  Under house arrest in Oak Park, not far from Hemingway’s old joint, he was betrayed by the very institution he had owned for so long—Chicago law enforcement—his police guards mysteriously withdrawn just before an assassin pumped seven bullets into his head right when he was due to testify before the US Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities. The killer took one of the sausages Momo was cooking—the mob never turns down a free meal—and left him lying there in the greasy smear of burning oil, bullet holes rimming his lips.

  The question is a slap in the face: how could this worm of a man be responsible for the death of a president of the United States?

  ‘Fascinating, isn’t it?’

  I look up at Miriam Marshall: real estate agent, conspiracy advocate, and surprisingly cheery survivor of alien abduction. ‘Creepy is more the word I’d use.’

  Mrs. Marshall nods understandingly. She has been through so much creepiness herself: interstellar travel, outer space organ transfer, internal brain tattooing. ‘As you can see, Mr. Giancana organized it all.’

  The finger has been pointed at Momo ever since the Magic Bullet started to pirouette. Momo had access to Vegas dough. Big Oil dough. Howard Hughes dough. CIA dough. And US Attorney General Bobby Kennedy was after him and his mobbed-up pals. What better way to get rid of Bobby than get rid of Jack?

  ’And why did Giancana organize it all?’

  ‘Because he knew the truth about President Kennedy . . . ’

  ‘I don’t think even JFK knew the truth about himself.’

  ‘Mr. Giancana knew, because he was one himself . . . ’

  Oh-ho. One of what? Take your pick. Freemason; Catholic; Mafioso; Elder of Zion; Illuminati; Communist; Knight of the Golden Circle. Alien. Abductee. ‘And what was Sam Giancana, Mrs. Marshall?’

  ‘A homosexual of course . . . They know. They can tell others of their kind.’

  Of their kind. ‘And that would make Judith Campbell . . . ?’

  She nods sadly. ‘A transvestite. Just like Mrs. Kennedy.’

  Jackie O indeed. ‘I suppose she had the last laugh on Onassis then . . . ?’

  She shakes her head. ‘He was one too.’

  ‘And how do you explain Maria Callas?’

  ‘A castrati . . . ’

  Castrato. ‘I see you’ve given this a lot of thought.’

  ‘It’s my life’s work . . . ’

  ‘You have sources?’

  ‘Gore Vidal, for one. He was a fellow abductee on the spaceship.’

  Of course he was. ‘Well, thank you, Mrs. Marshall.’ I get up. Three days in Dallas and I haven’t spoken to a single sane person so far. At least Mrs. Marshall isn’t coercing me into buying endless rounds of bourbon and Coke. I actually enjoyed her coffee—the first decent cup I’ve had since arriving in the city. Her espresso machine sits dramatically in the centre of the room like a gleaming holy tabernacle.

  She looks at me gathering my things together. ‘But you’re not leaving already?’

  ‘Afraid so.’

  ‘That’s so disappointing, I prepared a PowerPoint presentation and all.’

  ‘I’m terribly sorry.’

  ‘I even had a section on the Bannister case.’

  ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘You know about the case, of course?’ I think I nod. ‘Mr. Giancana was involved.’

  ‘How exactly was Sam Giancana involved?’

  ‘It’s in the PowerPoint presentation, right after the Adelsberg Suicides.’

  I glance over at the door. Escape is only five strides away. If I stay, I will be subjected to an insane conspiracy theory based upon the prejudices of a deluded crackpot who believes in the existence of gaydar and little green men. But I may also be able to get a lead on one of the most persistent and enigmatic rumours surrounding the Bannister case. Before Elvis, there was the Bannister kid. Did he die or was he saved? Is he still alive today? Did he ever really exist?

  What the hell, at least it’s air-conditioned in here and I could do with another cup of coffee to wake me. I turn on the voice recorder of my iPhone. ‘Can we perhaps start with the Bannister case?’

  CHAPTER 12

  Chicago 1963

  Roselli set the meet in Chicago for Halloween. Nobody laughed. Hastings left Bella at a boarding kennel in the canyon. She whined and scratched at the wire cage as he drove away, her face cleaved with anxiety.

  Premonitions.

  People used to have them before the marble temples and the men in robes, the newspapers and the radios, the pay slips and the railroad stations. People used to heed the warnings. They wouldn’t get on the boat, they wouldn’t cross the bridge at night. They’d turn when the whispers urged them to; they’d watch the flight of birds and harvest a day early. But in these modern times, premonitions were discarded like dinner scraps—left only to household pets.

  Unless it was a hunch on the second race at Hollywood Park, no one listened to the internal voice anymore. But Hastings did, thanks to Bella. Hastings had lied to Roselli at the Monogram Pictures Ranch. Bella didn’t bark but she did see ghosts. In July ’62, just a week before the Brentwood break-in, Hastings had come back one night from a job—a fence who had stuck ten grand’s worth of paste in with the merchandise he was passing on to DeSimone’s people—and was going through the back door in the kitchen when Bella slowly lifted her head, trembling in fear.

  Hastings thought she must have been poisoned, Bella was shaking so much. She had refused eye contact, her gaze frozen at a point always just behind him. Hastings did a slow circle around the kitchen, Bella’s head rotating, following the invisible secret sharer who was tailing him.

  Hastings went out the way he came in, strode all the way down the driveway, then made a loud noise with the keys as he came in through the front door, Bella waiting for him, her wagging tail hammering hard against the wall. She jumped up on him, unable to contain her joy, but when he tried to get her to follow him into the kitchen, she had refused.

  He went in alone, stepping into a contained wave of cold air rising up all around, as if the kitchen had been built upon a layer of snow. It took him a minu
te before he noticed them: the smudge marks of wet footprints that had nearly dried. Men’s shoes. He crouched down, and ran a handkerchief across the drying stains of red. The faintest trace of blood.

  He turned to where Bella sat in the doorway, pleading with her eyes for him to cross the threshold back to the world without apparitions. The world where the dead did not return. He peered at her, moving closer. There was something wrong. Her breath was smoking in the cold. Her whiskers were coated in a thin white casing of frost about her muzzle. The cold ice tingled his fingers.

  He gathered up a single suitcase and left forever. For all he knew the cold and the footprints were still lurking in that house. Many times he had tried to recall the footprints. Were they his? Or did they belong to the fence? He’d been waiting for the fence for two hours, sitting low in the front of a stolen car in the shadows he had made when he’d taken care of the streetlights. The fence didn’t seem to realize he was already merging into darkness as he got out of his car, Hastings walking quickly across the soft, betraying lawn, his pistol fully extended, timing the shot with the slam of the door, the fence going backwards into the car and then forwards onto the lawn. Hastings caught a glimpse of the eyes right after the shot: not so much a regard as a physical affirmation of the passing of life. The swift flutter upwards as they cast off their light and prepared themselves for the big stare into the Long Oblivion. Then he was crossing the road, disappearing into the altered summer night, looped with the shadows of assassination; with the loss of a stolen life.

  No witnesses.

  Except for Bella.

  Was the presence he and Bella had both felt that night merely the last vestiges of the fence; a physiological registration of extinction like that final look in his eyes? Or was it a manifestation of something else—life after death, the pursuit of judgment; the suffusion of a restless, aggrieved life force? Perhaps a shattered energy had contaminated him when he fired the kill shot. The splatter of psychic evidence linking him to the crime forever.

  Or maybe it was simpler than that. Maybe it wasn’t a ghost that was haunting them in the kitchen; maybe it was just Hastings and his past. A past that was catching up with him in Chicago.

  ‘Well, look what that mangy, poor excuse of a cat dragged in!’ Roselli slapped Hastings on the back like he was arriving at a Jaycee meeting in Waterloo, Iowa, everyone excited by the quality of the wives who were being swapped that night.

  Hastings peered through the curtains. Jack-o’-lanterns flickered with orange malice from the windows of otherwise normal households. Kids circulated with bedsheets and broomsticks. Old people were taunted, cats tormented, children terrified. The Feast of Fear stalked the city, feeding on superstition and confectionary. ‘Close that fucking blind, Jesus, the Feds could be watching.’

  Indeed the Feds could be watching. Hastings could almost hear the stutter of the shutters of long-lens cameras across the road. One by one, they’d be shot, going in or coming out, their images imprisoned by a rusted thumbtack against a wall in some clapped-out office south of downtown.

  Hastings exchanged looks with Luchino, who offered him a French cigarette. Yellow paper; black tobacco. Harsh and strong as the mistral. Of all the men in the room, Luchino was the mystery. Hastings had heard he’d started up like him; on the legit in a war, a seventeen-year-old franc-tireur nailing Nazi officers with precision shooting in the maquis, then elbowing his way into the black market as a gofer during the USS Corsica period. Cigarettes gave way to heroin; Bonifacio to Marseille and the French Connection, Luchino always around to deliver a bullet to anyone who got in the way.

  Hastings watched Nicoletti and Alderisio sitting in the corner like two classroom dunces. They were not friends, they didn’t even like each other, but they were forever linked by the primordial bonds of blood—both family and spilling. Hunched and illiterate, they avoided any communication, even eye contact, barely acknowledging anyone else in the room. Association was complication—what if they had to whack you going out the door? Their heavy presence created a claustrophobic gloom. The only jauntiness came from Roselli, drinking scotch and talking about a visit he’d made the summer before to Agrigento. ‘Fucking amazing. Those Greeks. Those Romans. Building goddamn temples you wouldn’t believe. History. There ain’t nothing like it.’

  ‘Who gives a rat’s ass about history?’ The dulcet tones of Momo, as he came through the door. ‘You’re all here to change the future, not fuck around with the past. And you’re doing it by putting a bullet in the president.’

  There was the rasping irritation of a dry flint, then the silence of flame. ‘Why?’ Luchino asked.

  ‘Ain’t none of your fucking business, why?’

  Luchino leant forward and exhaled with a brief, sharp thrust and the flame disappeared. ‘When I kill a man, I want to know why. It is not a right; it is a requirement.’

  ‘Be careful, my French friend. In this country we don’t ask questions.’

  ‘I am Corsican, not French. And in my country even the dead ask questions.’

  ‘Well, in my country the dead shut the fuck up and stay that way.’

  Luchino stared at Momo for a long moment. His face had been polished bronze by the sun: more a visage on a coin than something living. ‘Any brute can kill . . . ’ He half-glanced at Nicoletti and Alderisio, his eyes passing judgment. ‘But to end a man’s life under carefully controlled circumstances and then to elude capture is another matter. For that, there is a psychological element. And this requires an understanding of the motives behind such acts.’

  ‘His brother is causing—’

  ‘Shut up.’ Momo barked at Roselli, then turned back to Luchino. ‘We want him dead. That’s motive enough.’

  Luchino smiled and nodded, stubbing out his yellow cigarette. It was not a gesture of capitulation, it was a moment of resolve. He had just come to the same conclusion as Hastings: kill the others. Steal the money. Run.

  Roselli led the way into a windowless room, Hastings pausing before going inside. He could sense death the way a fisherman could sense a change in the weather: through his bones; reactive, not deductive. His eyes swept the surfaces: bloodstains mopped off the floor. Cordite blush on the furniture. Bullets wormed out of walls by prodding fingers. The room was a sponge of evil acts and wicked memories. Carnage, cruelty, suffering.

  Luchino felt it too, but the others just sauntered in with the bored indifference of a husband forced along on a house inspection when he has no intention of buying.

  There were maps up on the far wall. Little red pins—like schoolboys playing soldier at Soldier Field. The motorcade route. A photo of a gun-crazy chump, posing with an M1 Garand and an angry scowl, his cheeks puffed out in indignation. ‘This is your patsy. Thomas Arthur Vallee. A-1 certified nut. Korean vet. Fucked around with some U2 intelligence unit in Japan. Weapons collector. Knows how to handle a rifle.’ Roselli tossed a file on a table, then sighted through an imaginary carbine. ‘Bang-bang. Happy Deathday, Mr. President.’ Momo laughed, but Nicoletti and Alderisio just stared. Luchino’s hand hesitated, like a snake handler who had just been bitten the night before, then opened Vallee’s file. The word schizophrenic stamped on a medical form invaded the room and was mocked by the dual gaze of Nicoletti and Alderisio.

  ‘So what’s the plan?’ Hastings asked.

  Roselli tapped a street on the map. ‘Set up a sniper’s nest here in the warehouse, where the motorcade slows to take the turn, shooting down as they pass. Four guns in a hotel here, shooting across as they come.’

  ‘Four guns . . . ?’ Luchino and Hastings exchanged shadow glances.

  ‘Four.’ Momo shouted it as though Luchino were deaf, holding up four stubby fingers. ‘Back. Side. Bang-bang and good-bye.’ Momo leant over, spat between his feet.

  Hastings stared at Luchino. The same thought was going through both their minds. Cross fire. Stray bullets. Confusion. Perfect cover for
Nicoletti and Alderisio to fire point-blank into the back of their heads.

  Hastings cleared his throat. ‘So who takes what?’

  ‘You’re the sniper’s nest team.’

  Meaning . . . ‘Just me?’

  ‘Fuck no, the four of you plus the patsy.’

  ‘And who is in the hotel?’

  ‘That don’t concern you . . . ’

  ‘Mais . . . ’

  ‘How do you say “Ain’t none of your fucking business” in French?’ Momo’s laugh was more a cough.

  Luchino’s eyes appealed for solidarity. Hastings turned to Roselli. ‘This other team . . . ?’

  Nicoletti stepped forward. It was the first time Hastings had ever heard him speak. ‘The man said, none of your fucking business.’

  Two options. Kill him or walk away. Hastings voted for kill, but before the fatal gesture was released, Luchino had stepped between Hastings and Nicoletti, speaking to Roselli. ‘Two teams getting away? In the middle of a firestorm, with hundreds of policemen? I am sorry, my friend, but that’s our business.’

  Nicoletti got in real close to Luchino. They were all grown men. All killers. So-called professionals. And still they couldn’t avoid this—a schoolyard challenge. ‘What the fuck’s the problem? Just drop the gun and run.’

  Alderisio snorted with amusement.

  Luchino’s voice was low with the effort to control his anger. ‘Runners are targets. Runners get chased. Have you not seen what dogs do to passing runners?’

  Nicoletti turned to the others. ‘What the fuck is he talking about?’ Then to Luchino: ‘Did you just insult me?’

  Hastings couldn’t stand it anymore. ‘All he’s saying is: we don’t want to stand on each other’s toes . . . ’

  ‘What is that, a threat?’

  ‘This is . . . ’ Luchino had the blade to Nicoletti’s throat. Hastings didn’t see it coming. He glanced at Nicoletti, caught the glimpse of nickel in his fist. Nicoletti had gone for his piece and Hastings had missed it too.