by John Gardner
Torrio left town immediately. There was an attempt on Capone’s life. Nobody doubted that O’Banion’s murder had been ordered by Johnny Torrio and carried out by the Gennas.
Only a few weeks later, at the wedding of Angelo Genna, where Louis had been asked to play, he heard the remark that finally made up his mind.
“Herbie, I knew that I had to leave, money or no money. I just had to get out quickly. The town was going to burst open, and death would stalk the streets by daylight as well as under cover of darkness.”
As he played, Carlo and Capone stayed near the piano, watching the happy newlyweds cavorting with their guests. During a pause between numbers, Louis heard Capone say, “Just wait a short while, Carlo. Hymie Weiss has taken control of O’Banion’s mob.” He laughed, “They’re out looking for Johnny and they won’t find him. So, when they get frustrated, they’ll go for the Gennas. They’ll clean those Sicilian bastards off the streets, then we can pick off Hymie’s people, one at a time. Maybe Johnny’s getting a little old for this game. Maybe he shouldn’t come back. But, if he does … well. Soon, my good friend, Carlo, we’ll have the whole city to ourselves. Just have a little patience, huh?”
Louis reasoned that nobody could be trusted anymore. During the next few days, he sought desperately for a way to raise the money he needed, but knew he would have to go with what he had. His car was ready.
“I had, for some time, faced the fact that I would have to leave Sophie.” Passau gave Kruger a sheepish smile. “Anyway, it was over. Finished. I thought I would never love any woman again.” His tone was frighteningly matter-of-fact. But then, it was a long time ago.
So, Herbie thought, Sophie, the morning and evening star, had finally set.
On the night before he planned to make a run for it, Carlo came into the club where he was playing, a newly opened place which doubled as a brothel, out near the Hawthorne race track.
Louis gave his old friend a smile of welcome, and, in the break, asked, “They keeping you busy, Carlo? I haven’t seen you in a couple of days.”
Carlo gave one of his diffident shrugs. “Well, we look after Johnny. He’s decided he wants out. He’s fixing to retire. Me? I’m lookin’ after number one, Pianist. Eventually Big Al’s gonna retire, and I wanna be up there near the top.” He paused, and grinned his old grin at Louis. “Hey, we come a long ways together, Pianist, huh? Yeah, they’re keepin’ me busy enough. I’m even supervisin’ the convoys of good liquor we’re bringin’ in from Canada. Ya know how much dough’s invested in all that? A fortune. A fuckin’ fortune. Just take the one coming in two nights from now. One hundred thousand clams worth, just bein’ brought in by six trucks, along the main highway. By the time we pass it around, we come away with three hundred thousand bucks. The profit’s incredible.”
Louis’ mind lit up. Fireworks on the Fourth of July, he thought. Six trucks. Half a dozen men, driving slowly through the night. For a well-organized team of hijackers they should be easy meat.
“Isn’t it dangerous, Carlo? I mean with all that dough involved?”
“Nah.” His right hand made a small flourish, and he laughed. “Ya know the way the trucks come in, Lou. On the main highway. I mean we got the cops organized again now; they take care of everything. It’s routine. They meet the cops around four thirty in the morning and we have everything stashed away before eight. Everyone gets their share; everyone’s happy. I don’ even lose much sleep.”
“Herb, it was the answer to my prayer, and I decided to wait another couple of days.” He smiled, dreamily, as though he was tiring. “As I recall it, Sophie came over that night. I was like an acrobat, Herbie. Like a fucking acrobat. A real flying sophisticate.”
Kruger heard Pucky’s car pulling around to the back of the house. He looked at Passau and wondered how this old man, with his gigantic knowledge of music and his huge memory for facts and the weight of his sins, could look so good. Already he had been amazed at how Passau arrived downstairs each morning looking so crisp: the pants sharply pressed, and shirt and pullover clean and neat, his face shaved so you could have polished a diamond on it.
He shook his head, “So, you managed to hijack a hundred grand’s worth of booze, all by yourself, Lou?”
“Well, not the whole lot. I did have some help, and the help had to be paid. But it got me out. I’ll tell you about this tomorrow. I think I’ll have a little sleep now, okay?”
“You just sneeze away, Lou.”
Passau opened one eye. “I think the word is snooze, Herb.”
But Herbie was already making his way down to help Pucky with the food.
She stood in the conservatory, the wig thrown off; and her lovely blond hair dancing in the light.
From above them came the sound of Berlioz. The Symphonie Fantastique. It was the fourth movement, “The March to the Scaffold”—“One of the final things in music,” people had written, arguing that the composer should have finished there, among the muffled drumbeats and sonorous brass.
As he looked down at Pucky, Herbie could only hear the awful finality of the drums. It gave him a shiver, as though, from the grave, Hector Berlioz was trying to tell him something personal.
(22)
PASSAU HAD THE STEREO turned up loudly, and the Berlioz continued to intrude into the kitchen—the clanging bells heralding the Witches’ Sabbath. Herbie had lugged Pucky’s purchases up from the car; now he helped her to stow them away in cupboards, fridge and freezer.
“Enough for an army, eh?” He laughed.
“An army marches on its stomach, Herb,” she said. “I should know. My father was a general, God help me.”
“God help you,” Big Herbie parodied.
“Amen to that.” Pause. Count to ten. “We’ll have to move out of here, Herb. You know that.”
“Move? Why?” Then, with concern. “They spot you? They blow the cover off your car?”
“No, but they’re around. Naldo and his wife were doing their shopping; a chance in a million. They’ve got a team boxing both of them. Cops, Feds, CIA, some bloody outfit.”
“So, why we got to leave?”
“You’re the expert, Herb.”
“Sure.”
“Come on, Herbie. You know why we have to get away from here. Christ, you practically wrote the book.”
“No. I just obeyed orders, like the SS in the war. Name, rank, number. Just obeying orders.”
“Herbie, I did the kindergarten at Warminster. They use your old cases as models.”
“To show people what not to do, ja!” There was a hint of bitterness under the sentence, like an orchestration that uses the cellos to hint at darkness below a happy melody from the brass.
Pucky stopped putting two bags of sugar onto a shelf, turned and came close to him. “Herbie, whether you like it or not, you’re a Cold War secret hero. Maybe, in a few years, they’ll tell the story. Someone will write it. …”
“And find himself in the law court, with Official Secrets Act. That’s about it. They tell my story, and everyone will have damned good laugh. Big fat idiot, Kruger. Some turnip put in a report I was most visible spy in Berlin.”
She reached out, her right hand squeezing his shoulder. “You think you were a failure?”
“’Course I was bloody failure.”
“No, Herb. They teach it now. Truly, they say you were the greatest. They tell how you used your characteristics to advantage.”
“Don’t know what you’re talking about. Why we got to leave, Pucky?” He twisted from her hand, unscrewed the cap from a bottle of vodka, and began building himself a stiff dose: plenty of vodka, two eyedrops of tonic. No ice. “Come on, if you been trained proper, you know all the answers. Pretend the communists still hold old Russia to ransom. Why we got to leave?”
“You tell me.”
“Okay.” Herbie took a gulp from his glass and gasped. “Okay. So the Feds, or whoever, are still watching Nald. This means they believe we’re here still. In turn the logic is that Nald’l
l get spooked and try to make contact: dead drop; slip the leash and come running, make a wrong number call. That’s your logic, Ms. Pucky Curtiss. I know Naldo won’t get spooked.” He gave her a big grin. “So, Pucky, you win. We got to go anyhow. Even though dear old Nald could never be spooked in a hundred-year surveillance op, we still got to go, in case. Just in case. Satisfied? Third rule of Big Herbie Kruger, most visible spy ever. You paint a rock-solid officer into the corner, then you leave him, because he can’t leave you. Am I right, or am I right?”
“That’s what you taught them, Herb.”
“Ja. You know why I taught that?”
“Because you once broke the rule, and the guy you thought impregnable went soft?”
“You a quick study, Puck. Ha.” It was a little, one syllable laugh. “Puck. ‘Either I mistake your shape and making quite, or else thou art that shrewd and knavish sprite …’”
“… ‘call’d Robin Goodfellow.’ Jesus, Herb, I wish bloody Shakespeare had never written Midsummer Night’s Dream. You don’t know what hell I went through in school.” She stopped and frowned. “How is it you’re so good at poetry and Shakespeare, yet you can murder the English language?”
“Old secret. Naldo Railton and his family dinned it into me. Codes and ciphers.” He gave her an enormous wink.
That evening, they both cooked, laughing a lot and disregarding Louis Passau’s constant shouts, nagging that he wanted company. Later, over dinner, the old man dominated the conversation, sprinkling it with anecdotes and name-dropping that would have shamed a Hollywood gossip columnist.
Finally, he yawned, “I must rest. Tomorrow, good Herbie, we come to the end of one phase in my life and enter another.”
Kruger simply nodded, gravely. Pucky smiled and wished the Maestro a good night. Then they went together and loaded up the dishwasher.
“I’m off.” Pucky evaded Herbie’s outstretched arm. “I need my beauty sleep.”
“You had your beauty sleep,” Kruger called after her, kicking the dishwasher. Then he set the alarms, taking extra care that night, and not knowing why.
When Louis Passau and Eberhardt Lukas Kruger met the following morning, Passau again looked like a men’s fashion ad. Not a hair out of place, the razor crease in his pants, and the top button of his shirt casually undone for effect.
Big Herbie figured that it came from all those years of living out of suitcases: London, conducting Tannhäuser one night, the next in New York on the podium doing Brahms, Liszt and Shostakovich, and three days later in Melbourne for an American night of Ives, Gershwin, Copland and Hanson.
Worse than working for the Office, Herbie thought, but it was the only explanation for Passau’s immaculate turnout. Why did he not smell like an old man? A man of ninety should carry a fragrance of age, but Passau smelled of lemons, just like his wife smelled of lemons. What is with the lemons? Big Herb wondered. He also wondered about Sophie. Why, he asked himself, do I think I have seen her in the flesh? Passau’s descriptions were more than word pictures. He made the young girl become fully dimensional: a creature of flesh and blood stood in the room between them when he spoke of her. Surely she must be dead or, like Passau, very old. So, why? Herb thought. Why was he so sure he had actually seen her? Yet he was convinced he had set eyes on her. Not quite as Passau described, but certainly her. A little older but … where? How?
Pucky, they had decided, would listen in on headphones through the recorder. “I think he will be doing too much of the off-showing, Puck, if you sit in.” She agreed.
“So, Lou,” he began now. “So there you were, with all hell breaking out, and your boyhood friend, Carlo Giarre, tells you about a load of whiskey coming in. Tell me about it”, eh?”
LOUIS WOKE AT TEN the next morning. “I wrestled with my conscience, Herb. Truly, I wrestled with it.”
But not for long, Big Herbie thought.
At eleven he went to a telephone booth and called Tony Genna. They arranged to meet for lunch at a small out-of-the-way place never used by any of the Torrio-Capone people.
Tucked into a booth at the back of the room, where they could both see the main entrance, they ordered coffee and tuna sandwiches. Neither of them spoke until the talkative waitress was out of earshot.
“Herbie, to this day I remember she was called Millie. She had her name on one of those little badges on her uniform, and she talked like she was on the Olympic chattering team. I can see her quite clearly, even today.”
“She play a part in what happened?”
“No.”
“Okay, Lou, keep to the story then, huh?”
“Just adding some color, Herb. I amaze myself sometimes. To think I can even remember her name.”
“What happened, Lou?”
Tony Genna asked what was on Louis Packer’s mind. “Sounded important on the horn, Pianist.”
Louis took a deep breath. “I’m going to put my neck on the line, Tony.”
“Shoot, it’s safe with me. You know that.”
“Would you be interested in a booze convoy? Six trucks, coming in tomorrow night? One hundred grand’s worth of regular booze, shipped in by road from Canada. It’s being trucked down here now.”
Tony Genna, the undoubted counselor of the Genna family, went straight to the important facts. How many men? What other kind of protection was there? What was the bottom line on the deal?
Louis told him all he knew. The convoy would have to be taken on the state highway, not less than ten miles out of town. He figured there would be one driver and one guard in each truck, with two men in a car scouting ahead. Corrupt police officers, paid for the job, were set to pick up the convoy and escort it into Cicero. The meet with the cops was fixed about five miles out of town—outside city limits. It should be easy to take the trucks, then turn off and follow back roads into town, leaving the police waiting for a cargo that would never arrive.
As for the deal, Lou put it to Tony Genna that he knew how much could be made out of one hundred thousand dollars’ worth of good Canadian liquor. He was prepared to be personally present when the convoy was hijacked, and would not take a penny until the dirty work was done. “Not a penny, Tony. That should prove I’m not screwing around. I’m risking everything on this.”
“Yeah, but how many pennies, Louis? What kind of money are we talking here?”
“Half the bulk value. Fifty grand, as soon as it’s done. You’re going to make over four times that much.”
Genna nodded. The deal was fair. Louis was putting it on the line. If the Gennas double-crossed him, he was dead. If the shippers found out, he was also dead. “Who owns the consignment?” Genna asked.
It was the moment of truth. “Capone.” Louis looked him in the eye. “It’s Big Al’s shipment.”
The Sicilian did not even blink. “You’re prepared to sell out Capone? So why didn’t you go to someone like Hymie Weiss, now he’s taken over O’Banion’s slot? God rest Deany’s soul.” Tony Genna crossed himself.
“Because you’ve always shown friendship. You’ve always told me to get out and follow my real talent. Also, I think you must know what’s going on. Big Al will be taking over soon. He’ll wait, and maybe let you fight it out with the old O’Banion crew. Then he’ll probably kill off the winners. Capone wants to own Chicago.”
Genna gave a brisk nod. “I could go to Capone now, and talk fast. You’d be dead before the sun goes down, Louis.”
“I know. But I want out, Tony. If you turn me down, or if I think you’ll go to Capone behind my back, I’ll be a hundred miles away before the sun sets. It’s simply more convenient for me to leave with a good stake in my pocket. Anyhow, Capone can afford one consignment. He brings them in every week. The reason he hasn’t been hit before is that nobody knows where, or when. I found out about this last night. Someone close to Capone trusts me.”
Genna thought for a while. “We’ve still got one or two Irish boys on the payroll. I’ll have to use them, make it look like the Micks’ve had a hand
in it.” He looked hard and unsmilingly at Louis. “I wouldn’t like Al to think we were involved. Now, you are leveling with me Louis? No tricks?”
“You think I’d take a risk like that?”
“I think you’ve taken one hell of a risk already. If I didn’t know you better, I’d think you were setting me up. Or setting up the whole of my family.”
“If I were doing that, I know I’d be a dead man. I want to live.”
Genna did not smile. “Oh, if it’s a setup, you will be a dead man. No doubt about that. And if you’re on the level, the word’ll get out and some day Capone’ll kill you.”
“Not the way I have it figured, Tony. As long as you play fair and I get the dough on delivery. Now, let me get it straight.” He went over the proposed route, the protection, the money and all the details, for the last time.
Genna finally nodded. “I’ll meet you here at noon tomorrow. Then I’ll tell you what we’ve decided. If it’s on, then we’ll talk through the plan.”
That night, Sophie came home with him after the show. They did not get to sleep until dawn. At eleven thirty they were both scuttling around the apartment.
“Sophie said she had an appointment with someone.” Passau smiled bleakly at Herbie. “She seemed very excited. Hyper, they’d say nowadays. Eventually I found out what it was all about. But that’s another story.”
He told her he had promised to meet an old buddy. “Might be seeing Carlo as well,” he added for luck.
Each of them had their own reasons for not speaking the truth, and Louis did not get to his meeting until twelve fifteen. Genna looked very anxious when he arrived.
Louis was petrified. Across the road from their meeting place, he had spotted a long black car. In it there were three men and a driver. It was the first thing he asked about after shaking hands with Genna.
“It’s okay, Pianist. They’re my people. Just taking care, that’s all. Now, you are certain about tonight?”
“Absolutely.”
“You’re one hundred percent sure they’re not setting you up?”
