G-Man

25

There was hubbub everywhere on the nineteenth floor. Young agents couldn’t settle down to work, though it was Saturday, and drifted about, forming and reforming knots, full of ball-game excitement and not a little apprehension. Everybody smoked, and the heavy overheads pushed the fog out the open windows into the superheated Chicago air. It would break 100 again today, not that the young men were in any state to notice it. The bathroom was overused, nobody ate a thing, nobody could sit still. Some guys went all chattery, some went all solemn, some just wandered, dreamy looks on their faces.

Only in one room could serenity be found. That was the arms room. Since the apprehension was slated to take place in a public area, the Marbro Theatre, an ornate palace of exhibition, and it was certain to be crowded on a hot night where its air-conditioning offered some surcease from the hammer of the heat and the anvil of the humidity, Sam had declared no long guns. The Thompsons, the Browning rifles, the Model 11 riot guns sat in their rack in the vault, the vault door sealed, no chits out, no guns unaccounted for by Ed Hollis’s careful reckoning.

Charles sat alone at the table. He was in shirtsleeves, but the hand-tooled, tied-down shoulder holster harnessed his shoulders in leather belting, holding the holster firmly below his left shoulder; a further strap ran from the toe of the holster to his belt, looped it, then returned to snap tight. He smoked Camels as he worked, as he didn’t want any of the boys to see a tremor in his hand as he worked his fixings.

Before him, in fifty-two separate parts, sat his Colt Government Model, 1928 Commercial Variation, 157345C. Each of the fifty-two had been inspected for wear, oiled lightly, and dried off. Now he worked with a fine-grain needle file, doing the little things that could be done to turn the pistol into as smooth an operator as possible. He took just a few grains of steel off the ninety-degree angle at the cusp of the frame, where the cartridge rode from magazine to chamber under the propulsion of the slide’s forward motion. He wanted to break the sharpness of degree a tiny bit so that no burr from a cartridge — they had already been inspected, of course, twenty-one government-issue .45 hardballs from the Springfield Armory, Springfield, Massachusetts, already fit into three likewise inspected magazines — could catch during the firing transaction. It took a while, and a great deal of judgment, because too much made the passage tricky. When he was satisfied, he moved on to work the sharp edge of the sear, where the disconnector pivoted under the trigger pull to remove it from its nook and thereby drop the hammer. Again, the harshness of the angle was just a bit too much and he gently softened it into a blur, which reduced the trigger pull from six pounds to two and a half, though still leaving enough metal to guarantee the hold’s security.

“Charles, what’re you doing?” asked Ed Hollis, who, though a competent armorer, had never seen the inside of the frame before.

“If I have to draw and shoot fast for blood,” Charles said, “I want the one-in-a-million chance the gun will hang up on me reduced to one-in-a-billion.”

“Can you do it to my Super .38?”

“Not today. Sometime in the future.”

“Got it,” said Ed.

After an hour of careful work, everything wiped clean, and wiped clean again, Charles swiftly reassembled 157345C, making sure all pins were centered, all screws were tightened up to the max, and that function was perfect. Then he reached into a paper cup and withdrew a six-inch piece of rawhide from its soak in the water.

Again, carefully and with much dexterity, he looped it around the pistol grip, including the grip safety, a shoulder of metal that emerged from the curve under the sweep of the hammer well and had to be depressed by a proper placement of hand to gun for the weapon to go bang. It was one of three safety systems John M. had designed into the piece. He pulled the loop tight, flattening the grip safety in the off position, tied a knot, then called Ed over.

“Not your finger, but hold this knot tight with a screwdriver or something.”

Ed did as told, and Charles doubled the knot over the first knot, pulling it tight with his long, strong fingers. Then with his pocketknife he trimmed the extra lengths of rawhide down to the knot, which he adjusted till it was under the trigger guard.

“Old Texas Ranger trick. I want the safety grip pinned so that if my draw is a little off and I don’t get square on the gun, it’s still going to fire. I’d hate to have to provide my own bang while Johnny’s filling me full of pills.”

“Nothing to chance.”

“Not where this damned character is concerned. Now, as the rawhide dries, it’ll pull even tighter. Trick is, don’t let it soak too long or it gets brittle. Then what have you got except a vaudeville that can turn ugly in a split second.”

With that, he slipped a magazine in, threw the slide to hoist a cartridge into the chamber, and pushed the safety lock up into position, freezing the gun in pre-volatility. He slipped it into the holster, then slid the two additional magazines into the leather keeper on his belt behind his right hip, praying that if there were a fight, it wouldn’t last long enough to require a reload.

“Sheriff Swagger?” It was Mrs. Donovan at the door.

“Mr. Cowley wants you. Big powwow in Mr. Purvis’s office.”

It was like something out of Arabian Nights, a pleasure palace decreed into existence in 1927 by two genies named Marx, then sold to two other genies named Balaban and Katz in 1930. The Marbro even had what could have been a minaret outside it, piercing the sky. It was a vast, domed structure, covered with fretwork, pale in the vanishing sun, on Madison Street, the 4400 block.

Charles had infiltrated a few minutes early, from a staging point a couple blocks away. Sam, wisely, didn’t want a mob of agents showing up at once so played them in at odd intervals so that at no particular moment it seemed unusually hectic. The traffic was heavy, the octane fumes intense, the theater buzzing with desperate souls ready to spend a few hours in the adorable company of a dancing tot in order to escape their dull lives as well as the crushing heat.

Charles had no such luck. He and his new pal Zarkovich tried to appear indifferent to their situation, which required milling in front of a women’s haberdashery in the steamy heat just across the street from the Marbro while waiting to see Johnny appear. He would be with two gals: Mrs. Sage and another one, Polly something. Mrs. Sage would be dressed in orange. Johnny would be wearing a straw hat, a white shirt, and tan slacks over white suedes. That meant if he had a gun, it would have to be a small one, concealable in a pant pocket. No .45 auto was coming out, and he wouldn’t have six more mags stashed in a jacket pocket. It also meant he wasn’t wearing steel, so a torso shot would bring him down if that’s how it broke.

All along the street, agents and East Chicago detectives — but not Chicago cops, for they had been exiled from the plan, out over worries about leaks and too big an assemblage to maneuver quickly — lay about with similar supposed lack of interest. The plan was fluid, depending on the whimsy of the actuality.

Sam originally wanted two teams of agents to thread down the aisles from each side of Johnny’s seats, squeeze their way in, and go to guns immediately upon closing, presenting him with such an array of muzzles, he would see the idiocy of resisting. But Charles didn’t like it.

“Sir,” he’d said, “all those men, all those guns, all those people, all in the dark with a thirty-foot-high four-year-old dancing on-screen, plus music and picture talk blasting away, it could get away from us real easy, and nobody wants a shoot-out under those circumstances. Lots of people could get hit, our target hard to see and track, chaos everywhere.”

“Duly noted, Charles. But my thought is, take him as early as possible, because the longer he’s free, the bigger the chance of him seeing something and bolting. I’ve been on the phone with the Director all day and, believe me, the pressure’s on this one. We can’t let it fall apart.”

Clegg was big on the inside arrest, which in itself was an argument against it. Purvis was agnostic.

“If you wait till he leaves,” Clegg said, “you’ve got him in a flow of people and you don’t know how they’re going to react and mess things up. If they’re seated and we do it fast, I think it’s actually safer. They won’t even figure out what happens.”

“Moving in from the aisles on him seems tricky,” said Charles. “He’s too salty a boy. He’d see it coming and he might draw. Then you’ve got your shoot-out among three thousand suckers.”

“Probably won’t be a full house,” sniffed Clegg.

“Charles?” asked Sam.

“There’s an old hunting saying that might figure in here,” Charles said. “Hunters say, ‘Get as close as you can, then a little closer.’ So that’s what I’d do, outside the theater, still plenty of street light, no suspicions about him. I’d move a small team in from behind, get almost within contact distance, then, guns drawn, call him down. Hands go up or triggers are pulled. So close in, we won’t hit nobody else, unless it’s a through and through, but it probably won’t be with handgun velocities. So what everyone else has to commit to is discipline. If you see him, don’t draw and shoot, don’t jump for him or move aggressively. He’s as touchy as a jackrabbit. Let the arrest team move in quietly until they’re almost in his pocket. Even if he’s fast, he can’t beat a drawn gun.”

Sam’s decision was more political than practical.

“When he’s in and seated and the show is on, Mel will wander in and see if he can be located. If he’s near an aisle and there’s some maneuver room, then we’ll go that way. If he’s not, then we’ll wait.”

So now they stood, smoking, trying to keep their feet from falling asleep, handkerchiefs out to wipe the accumulated sweat from the brow. Zarkovich kept up a steady chatter, mostly about what he was going to do with the reward money, what kind of big car he’d get, maybe one of the new auto transmissions where there was no clutch, you just pushed a button or pulled a lever. He also thought maybe not black. Cars weren’t all black anymore. You could get any color you wanted, any color of the rainbow. Why not a nice yellow car?

But at that point — it was about 8:45 p.m. — it was a black car that pulled up, a government Ford. Clegg was behind the open window on the passenger side.

“Cowley just got a call from the Sage woman. They’re not coming here. They’re going to another one, the Biograph, on Lincoln. Get in, we’ll hop over.”

“Where’s the Biograph?” said Charles.

“A couple miles away. On Lincoln. Come on.”

Of course that meant all the plans were atomized. No one had seen, much less mapped, diagrammed, thought critically about, the Biograph. It means the whole thing would have to be made up on the fly.

“We’ll leave a few here, just in case, and in the meantime try and drop fellows over at the Biograph in ones and twos. I don’t know how much time we have.”

“Fewer might just be better,” said Charles.

“I’m dropping you a half block away. Sam’s in Brewer’s Menswear, the back room, with his people. You check in with him, see how he wants to play it.”

“Where’s Purvis?”

“He’s already there. He’s seen Sage, so he’s a key. He can make her out and get the ball rolling, one way or the other.”

Charles didn’t say: I saw her too. I smelled her.

“How about Hollis and Hurt?”

“I haven’t got them yet.”

“Get them next. I want them close by,” said Charles, and as a consequence got a sharp look from Clegg, who didn’t like his tone, his assumption of command, his closeness to Sam, and, presumably, Charles himself, and his taciturn sheriff ways.

Clegg left them off on Lincoln, and like Madison, it was a jam-up on Saturday night, in the dead summertime, with traffic clogged, lots of pedestrian action, a batch of bars all busy and smoky, and the marquee of the Biograph—Manhattan Melodrama, Charles noted — blaring brightly, filling the night with its brightness. COOL INSIDE, it said on a banner hanging from the front of the marquee.

The whole scene had an odd not-Chicago feeling to it. The buildings on both sides of the street were but two stories tall — all manner of bars, retail, honky-tonks — all aswarm, but there was nothing of that looming-city sense of tall towers closing out the sky. It could have been Saturday night in a Texas cattle town, with all the cowboys in for a night of hard drinking and, if lucky, soft rubbing. People milled and jostled, smoked, bumped, smiled, tried to find space at a new bar, celebrated the death of Prohibition by acquiring a happy, drifting buzz no matter the heat. Cow town all the way, with cars instead of horses, octane instead of methane.

Charles and the momentarily quiet Zarkovich slipped into the menswear place, walked between aisles of coats and piles of shirts, and slipped in the back, where they found Purvis and Sam, five or six others, gathered around a blackboard on which an awkward map of the theater had been inscribed.

“Okay,” said Sam, “glad you made it.”

“Ready to get this done,” said Charles.

“We’ve got a real solid ID, with a girl and Mrs. Sage buying tickets for the eight-thirty show. I saw them from the car,” said Purvis. “He was big as life. He looks a little, uh, different. The face is sort of blurred, but it’s still him, you’d have to be drunk not to see it.”

Charles nodded.

“What time does the show end?”

“Ten-thirty.”

All checked watches, saw that the movie had little more than an hour to run.

“Mel, what about taking him inside?” asked Cowley.

“I walked in and didn’t spot him. I can’t say where he’s sitting. I could go in again and get an exact location.”

“No sir,” said Charles, out of order but sound enough. “Too much hunt in that dog. He’d spook easy and then we lose our surprise and the whole thing goes into the crapper.”

“I think Charles is right,” said Sam. He paused, to think on it a bit, as the gathered agents — a few more had come in — waited. Finally Hurt and Hollis showed and moved toward Charles.

“Best thing,” Sam said, having worked it out, “is to take him on the street when the show lets out. I see it like this, but please improve on it if you can. Mel, you are up near the box office, maybe a little to the left. You’re eyeballing the crowd. When you spot him, you light up a stogie, and we’ll see that and from that we can locate him. With two women, one young, one middling, him being in straw hat, white shirt, tan slacks, white suedes, we should have no trouble. I’m guessing he turns left and begins to amble down Lincoln. Charles, I want you to the immediate left of the theater with Hurt. Is Hurt here yet?”

“I’m here, sir,” Hurt said.

“Okay, you move in on him from the rear. I’ll put Hollis there too, and he can join the two of you as you get in close for the collar. Guns away, please. I’m afraid someone will see the gun too early and scream and it’ll go bad. So the guns don’t come into play until the very last second.”

“If he sees us, he might draw. I’ll have to draw against him,” said Charles.

“Is that a worry? Are you fast enough?”

“Charles is so fast, it seems to be over before it starts,” Hollis said, and there was some laughter.

“Fine,” said Sam. “Good to have the gunfighter on our side, for a change. Anyhow, I’ll be across the street with Detective Zarkovich and reinforcements en masse. I’ll put two men in the alley about forty yards down from the theater, but I want them alert, and when they see your little parade approaching, they break cover and start moving against the crowd toward Johnny. When you converge, you call him out, Charles, and hopefully his hands go up and all of you can get him cuffed before he gets anything out of that pocket.”

He paused, still thinking.

“My one worry is the Chicago guys. They don’t know we’re here, and if anyone notices a lot of us, they might show up. So you cannot get into it with them. If they show, you have to play it cool. And refer them to me, if necessary. We don’t need five hundred uniforms with shotguns showing up in the middle of our arrest. Anybody got any questions?”

Nobody did.

It was now around 10. In ones and twos, the agents deployed themselves at the designated spots along the street, in the alleys and doorways, across from the Biograph and in parked cars along the busy road. The heat hadn’t broken, but it had fallen off its perch a bit and, at 97, it now seemed cool. Above, no moon, but clear black sky, ribbons of dim stars bleached out by the hot lights of Lincoln and its spangled array of nighttime action.

Charles and Hurt found their spot. In a few minutes, they saw Hollis move into place, just across the sidewalk and up a bit, angled against a car with a slight bend, as if he were talking to a friend sitting in it.

“Hurt, mosey over there and grab Hollis. I want to talk to you birds.”

Hurt nodded, ambled with exaggerated casualness to Hollis, passed the word, and each went through a bit of pantomime before they arrived back at Charles’s spot.

“Okay, y’all recall the briefing?”

“Yes sir.”

“Good. Now forget it.”

“Ah, Sheriff, what do—”

“I said forget it. Too busy, too many moving parts, too much coordination, too much depending on stuff that can’t be controlled. So you don’t look for Purvis’s cigar. You don’t look for a lady in orange. You don’t look for a fellow without a jacket in a straw hat. Got that?”

“Sheriff—”

“You look at me and only at me. I’ll spot Mrs. Sage. In the first place, Purvis is short, he may not see Johnny. In the second place, Purvis is short, you and our other chums may not see Purvis. That’s how it turns to crap, with nobody knowing, everybody trying to see stuff that can’t be seen.”

“Yes sir.”

“Ed Hollis, I didn’t hear a ‘Yes sir.’”

“Yes sir,” said Hollis over a gulp of air.

“I will move behind him, slide through the crowd. Hurt, you’re on my left. Hollis, you wait until we’re past. Also, neither of you fellows are to look directly at him. You’ll see him clearly enough when we close, but these big-time bad men with lots of gun experience, they can feel eyes on ’em — some sort of snake instinct, I think. If you’re staring at him, he will feel it, I guarantee it. Got it?”

“Yes sir.”

“After we pass, Hollis, that’s when you break from your position and come onto us. You’re to the left of Hurt. We’re three abreast, just behind him. Okay?”

Nods.

“Next thing. The two boys converging from the alley? Forget ’em. You got enough to worry about without trying to time it right so that they’re where they’re supposed to be. They don’t matter. Nothing matters, because once we get in contact distance of Johnny, we go. You both have your .38s holstered on your belt?”

“Yes sir” came the replies.

“You can put your hand on the grips under your jackets. That way, you aren’t disobeying no orders. But if Johnny wants to go hard, you will have to draw and shoot fast, making sure you see both the gun and him as you squeeze. You will find the point of aim naturally, but only if your eyes are driving the action. You don’t shoot until the gun is low in your vision and the barrel is pointed right at him, right at that white shirt, which ain’t gonna be but two feet ahead of you, then you fire. Got that?”

Again: “Yes sir.”

“As I reach him, I’ll skip ahead a step, so I’m at a kind of forty-five-degree angle to him. I will call him out. ‘Johnny,’ is all I need to say. And, believe me, he will know it’s him I’m talking to. That’s the key moment. He may draw, he may reach for the sky. It’s his call. If he reaches, you two break him down, wrap his arms around backwards, knock his knees out, and get him in cuffs. I will have him covered. Now, if he decides to go, and if it turns out he’s faster or he has a sleeve gun or maybe a crossdraw under his shirt, or if he even goes for a gun in the pocket, he will turn on me, and maybe he’s faster, maybe I’m faster. In any event, if he gets a shot off, it’ll be into me. Y’all will have clear shots, but keep moving into him and, as he goes down, be sure to track him and adjust your own hold to keep your slugs in him and not Joe Blow three feet ahead.”

“Sheriff, if we come around him from the left and he cottons to it, draws, and gets a shot off, it could go our way instead of toward you—”

“No, this is the game I signed up to play and I will play it full out. I will initiate. Got it?”

The two younger men looked at each other and could think of nothing to say.

“Got it?” Charles repeated.

“Yes sir.”

“Since I’m set, my drawstroke should be faster than his, unless he’s John Wesley Hardin, and I believe John Wesley Hardin is dead. So in that situation, I’ll draw and fire. I don’t believe in shooting a man once. It’s against my religion. If he’s worth shooting, he has to be shot a lot. I’ll put three or four into him. And that should be that. And you don’t tell nobody about this little chat. As far as you’re concerned, you followed Sam’s plan perfectly, Sam had it all figured out. And if it goes wrong, it was because I got it screwed up. You don’t blame Sam or Melvin or even Clegg. Any mess is on me. Got it?”

“Yes sir.”

Charles glanced at his watch: 10:16.

“Okay,” he said, “let’s do this.”

It was happening, though somehow time slowed down so it all poked along at five miles an hour. Charles saw the tallish woman he recognized from the severe profile as Sage, slid his eyes to the man next to her, and beheld John Dillinger.

Johnny seemed to have melted a bit, or perhaps wilted would be the right word, for his clearly recognizable features were subtly softer, as if the bloom that drove the bush had finished and everything had lost its precision and begun the fall to earth. He’d added a mustache too, not Gable’s full swagger of Fuller Brush but a more sophisticated, more dapper little pencil line just above the lip. He sparkled. Whatever you could say about the man, he had “it,” which nobody could quite define, but it made him the one you noticed. Perhaps it was his comfort with himself, perhaps it was a number one’s sense of entitlement and belief in his own self-achieved placement high in human aristocracy, or maybe it was just sheer animal testosterone, pure rampant, wanton masculinity radiating from every pore. Even now, the man wore his sloppy grin and wide-eyed apprehension of all things large and small with perfect grace. He actually looked good in a straw boater. The hat was tilted rakishly, he held hands with Polly, and the two were in lovers’ syncopation as they walked the walk. His shirt billowed slightly — he was one of those men who wore his clothes well and turned every off-the-rack suit into a London tailor’s masterpiece.

At that point, Charles slid his .45 from its holster, keeping his finger off the trigger, feeling the rawhide strip tight against and disabling the grip safety, snicked off the frame safety with his thumb, and inserted the weapon deftly into his waistband, just to the left of the belt buckle. Then he eased ahead, with his left hand quietly pushing his suit coat a little unnaturally to the right to cover the automatic’s big grip. He felt Hurt beside him, heard the Oklahoma detective take a brief breath and mimic Charles’s easy glide through the crowd. The two tried to slip, and not push, as they moved a little faster with each step, oriented on the silhouette of Johnny’s straw boater, which was twenty-five feet ahead, then twenty, then fifteen.

Charles felt as if he was sliding, as he kept cranking a little to left or right to get between folks ahead of him without touching or forcing, turning sideways to get a shoulder between and ooze or wiggle through. If he was breathing hard, he didn’t feel it at all, he just watched as Johnny grew nearer and bigger. Somewhere in here, he felt Hollis coming from the right, and he was aware that the young agent had gotten around Hurt and they now formed a line of three abreast. And if this last little knot of happy moviegoers could just be penetrated and passed, they’d be there and it would be time.

Charles broke from the two, edged his way with perhaps too much energy between a man and woman talking about the great Gable, and suddenly came free so that nobody was between him and Johnny and his two gals.

It went from slow to fast. It went from clear to blur. It went from five miles an hour to five hundred miles an hour. Without checking on, but with complete faith in, the loyalty and technique of Clarence Hurt and Ed Hollis, he skipped a pace and came around Johnny’s right, shouldering Sage aside, with his left hand tugged his coat back to free the Colt’s grip from its hiding place, and went to gun. At that precise moment, Johnny himself bucked a fast step beyond Polly. He knew.

Don’t know how, don’t know why, maybe just the animal in him sensing the approach of pure threat, some primordial feeling welling up from wherever that animal slept deep in the brain, but Johnny snatched for something in his pocket as he launched forward. He was drawing.

Johnny was fast. Charles was faster.

Mind to arm, arm to hand, hand to trigger, trigger to hammer, hammer to cartridge, cartridge to powder, powder to bullet, the need to act and the act itself were almost simultaneous. Charles felt energy and purpose coursing through his veins, liberated at last from the long discipline, and instantly alchemized into pure gunfighter’s hunger to win. 157345C, all its safeties carefully disabled, streaked from where it was to where it had to be without thought or motive but only instinct, and Charles fired three times so fast, he seemed to have pulled a Thompson gun from his pants. His finger was a jackhammer against the trigger, firing before the recoil impulse could distract the gun muzzle, itself locked in a grid of hand, wrist, and forearm muscle crushing so tight it could have rendered the steel into pure diamond. He did not shoot well, but he did shoot fast. The first bullet grazed Johnny on the right side, the second went in behind the shoulder, and the third, the killer, off the gun’s inevitable rise, hit Johnny square in the back of the neck, blowing a blister the size of a quarter into that stretch of flesh, continuing through the low brain on a slight upward angle, then exiting rather tidily from just beneath the right eye.

Eons later, it seemed, but in the same second, Hollis fired once, Hurt twice, each of the three a lethal but not immediately effective body shot, each of the three moot. Dillinger was done after Charles’s third bullet had eviscerated most of his right-skull gray stuff.

His knees went, and like a sack of potatoes tossed off a truck, he hit the ground with a thud that could be heard in the instant of silence decreed by the thunderclaps of the six shots delivered in so small a fraction of time. He pitched forward onto the bricks of the alley, and Charles was surprised to see they’d progressed that far along Lincoln, but there the man lay, a pool of red spreading like a flood from his perforations, collecting in a lake of blood next to his head. The hat had fallen away and his feet were oddly pigeon-toed.

Charles knelt by the fallen man, who still breathed out of reflex, and when he saw the now gray lips muttering, bent close to hear the last words.

“I’m not dressed for company,” Johnny said, and if there was a passing then, Charles missed it, as the eternal stillness of the dead just seemed to fall from nowhere and drape the body, no trespassers allowed.

With his left forefinger Charles touched the carotid, that river of blood that united brain and heart running shallowly through the neck, and could feel no pulsations.

“He’s gone,” he said to Hurt, who now leaned close to him, staring at the downed man, the blood, all of it bright, all of it shiny, in the power of the streetlights.

When they rose, they rose into a new world, one without Public Enemy No. 1 in it. It took a second, or possibly two, for this electric news to dazzle the crowd. And then — chaos.

Charles, with Hurt and Hollis as fellow centurions, stood mute above the ruined man, while some kind of crazed energy radiated from the crowd. The magic of the name turned into sheer electricity.

“It’s Dillinger!”

“Jesus Christ, they got Dillinger!”

“Just shot him down, you know, bang, bang.”

“I don’t believe it!”

“Look at him. Big Public Enemy Number One, flat-faced, in an alley.”

“Ever see so much blood?”

“Did they have a machine gun?”

“That tall cop, he’s the one. Man, did he shoot fast.”

“Never gave the poor guy a chance.”

And then it was Purvis stepping into the light — the limelight, actually — and taking over.

“Folks, folks, you have to move back and give us room! Anybody hurt, anybody else shot?”

“This lady here is slightly wounded.”

“Okay, ma’am, just relax, we have medical on the way.”

Other agents flooded in, chasing a few ghouls from Johnny’s body, where they had knelt to dab their handkerchiefs, hat brims, even the tip of a tie, into his blood. The reinforcements formed a cordon, driving against the crowd’s need to see, to be close, to participate in something called history. Sirens rose as the Chicago police, called by half a dozen, poured into the scene en masse.

Zarkovich seemed to have battled his way to Charles.

“You really blasted the sonovabitch. Man, great shooting.”

Then it was Purvis.

“Charles, congratulations. I don’t have to tell you what this means. You’re the best.”

Charles nodded, turned to indicate Hollis and Hurt. “These fellows were in on it too. It’s them as much as me.”

“I’ll make sure the Director knows.”

Someone suggested that Charles and his cohort move away from the body, to a Division car, and there relax and wait for Sam to arrive. Meanwhile, reporters — was it the smell of blood in the air that drew them? — arrived, along with photographers, who angled in for shots, each flashbulb a miniburst of illumination that blanched color from what it touched and created shadow and design and drama and artistic unity where there had been nothing but randomness. The hollowed-out pops of the bulbs firing became the preeminent sound and visual signature of the event as it imploded from reality into journalism.

“Smoke ’em if you got ’em,” said Charles to Hurt and Hollis, and he pinched a Camel out of its half-empty pack, slipped it between his lips, and fired it up over his Zippo. The smoke felt great as it rushed into and inflated his lungs, bringing with it just the slightest softening toward blur. He was surprised how weak he felt. The comforting curve of the Ford fender supported him, and he tried to relax, to shake the heebie-jeebies, to eliminate the images of the automatic ripping to life as he pumped the three faster than a burning jackrabbit into Johnny. You don’t want to treasure the killing part, only the shooting. It was good combat shooting — that was a compliment he allowed himself.

He watched as an ambulance nosed its way down the jammed Lincoln to pull up to the scene at the alleyway. Two attendants got out, opening the rear door, but the crowd was too thick and too intense to be penetrated by a gurney, so finally six agents just formed an ad hoc funeral squad and lifted Johnny, still facedown, and lugged him to the ambulance. An arm spilled out loosely, the hand, a big athlete’s hand, now utterly relaxed. The guys got him into the ambulance without much in the way of ceremony or dignity and laid him on the floor. They turned him, awkwardly, so that his empty eyes peered upward. Charles could see vivid stains spattering the white shirt where Johnny’s life fluid had arrived after he’d been deposited on the alley surface. Someone had put the straw hat on his chest, as if at a country funeral.

“You two,” he said to Hollis and Hurt, “go take a last look so you remember it good and will always have a sense of what you done here tonight and take proper pride in it.”

The two slipped off for that rite, just as Sam Cowley emerged from the death site, pushed his way through the crowd, and got to Charles.

“Charles, please, shake my hand. Outstanding.”

“I heard we hit two gals.”

“It’s nothing. Grazed them. They don’t even have to go to the hospital. They’re already bandaged and giving our folks statements.”

“That’s good.”

“Charles, I know you must be exhausted, both physically and mentally. I want you to get away from this circus, go to the office, file your report, then go home and take the next couple days off. See a ball game, have a drink or two, ride the roller coaster at Riverview or the zeppelin at the World’s Fair, go to the big science museum. Or just sleep. I don’t want to see you until Wednesday.”

“Yes sir.”

“And I don’t mind telling you, the Director is immensely pleased. I was on the phone with him when the shooting occurred. We could hear the shots. It was a tense few minutes until the news arrived. I shouldn’t have worried. As I said, this time we had the gunfighter.”

“Just want to know: was he armed? I fired before I saw a gun, but he sure as hell wasn’t reaching to itch a mosquito bite.”

“Colt .380 Pocket Model, loaded and cocked. Another half second and he could have shot you or some poor lady in rhapsody over Gable.”

“Good. Good to know. Sometimes it happens, but I don’t cotton to shooting the unarmed.”

“Don’t you worry, Charles. You saved a batch of lives here tonight — your own, Hurt’s and Hollis’s, people in the crowd, and all the people he may have killed on down the line. And you may have saved the Justice Department’s Division of Investigation.”

26

It was a good dream. Les was in the Forest Preserve on a beautiful fall afternoon, with Helen and Ronnie and Darlene. J.P. was there, and so were Fatso and Jimmy Murray and the others. Then Johnny came along, on a bicycle, with his gal, Billie Frechette, waving and rushing to join them. The sun was bright but not hot, the waters sparkling, the pines filling the air with that spruce perfume, and everybody was happy. Even goofy Homer showed up, with that whore gal nobody liked, but Homer was on his best behavior and, for once, his jokes were actually funny.

Then it dissolved. Someone was shaking him. He forced his eyes open to see Helen’s grave face just above him and knew from her drawn and pinched look that something bad had happened.

“Uh—” He struggled to find some clarity of mind and vision. The bed was so warm, he wanted to curl deeper into it, sink into its safety and protection. He didn’t want to be awake. He didn’t want to hear what she had to say and to deal with it. But there was no escape.

“Les! Les, they killed Johnny last night. They shot him outside some movie show downtown. It’s in all the papers and all over the radio.”

“Oh, Christ,” said Les.

“Federals. They shot him down like a dog. He didn’t even get his gun out!”

Les cranked upright, putting his bare feet on the cold floor, hoping to shock some electricity into himself. Oddly, he felt no grief, only the arrival of a large bundle of confusion. What did this mean? What else was happening? Who talked? Were the detectives outside even now? How much time did he have? He was going to see his kids tonight, was that off? Would his mother assume he had been killed too? That’s the way her mind worked these days. Where were Fatso and J.P.? What about the big Rock Island train job? What would—

But then the grief struck.

It struck hard, heavy, and hurtful. It amazed him how much pain he felt. Johnny, gone! How could that be? He’d just met with the big guy a day ago. Johnny: bigger than life, with a lopsided smile for everybody, a glad hand, a twenty-spot for every loser, cool when lead was flying, smart where the planning was needed, able to hold everything altogether on force of personality. It was as if a huge hole had been ripped in the sky and was sucking stuff out into nothingness, and he felt inadequate to patch it, to save what remained.

“I told him to be careful. But the big dope thought everybody loved him so much, nobody would ever rat him out. If they were waiting, he was ratted. The idiot. He had to live like a king ballplayer instead of a guy on the run, which is what he was. Some clerk notices him going in and calls the Division, and they show up and hose him down.”

Helen hugged him to make the pain stop hurting. It didn’t work much, but he appreciated the softness and looseness of her breasts against him, the warmth of her body, the sensation that she would give him everything she could and never let him down, and that she, and a few others, stood for what was worth preserving in the world.

Of course next to arrive, as if by on-schedule railroad, was the rage.

The Division! Those bastards. They were so new at this stuff, how’d they get so good so fast when at Little Bohemia they’d been clowns and fools, tripping on their own size 14s. In his mind, he saw them standing over poor Johnny and pumping bullet after bullet into him, maybe with a big Thompson gun, laughing and hooting. In fact, he knew it had to be that lanky champion who’d stood still as a sculpture on Wolf Road while Les’s squirts raised the dust all around him and he just coolly returned fire, even clipping Les’s brim! That guy! That guy!

“Les, are you all right?”

“I am, I am. Just shook-up a little. Honey, put a pot of coffee on, I need it to get my brain working straight. I’m going to hop in the shower. Where’s J.P.? Does he know?”

“He hasn’t showed yet.”

“Okay, after the coffee, we have to pack. We’ve got to make tracks until this settles down and—”

“But the kids!”

“I know, honey, I’m disappointed too. But I’m telling you, we’ve got to scram. We’ll go somewhere else, to a town that ain’t so hot, I’ll get a big score set up, and then we’ll be out of the life. It’ll all work out, you’ll see.”

Les was out of the shower by 7:20 and into his glen plaid double-breasted over fresh white shirt with red foulard tie by 7:30. Always had to look sharp! What was the point of gangstering if you didn’t look the part?

At 7:35, J.P. showed with the car. Les poured him a cup of joe.

“You heard about Johnny?”

“Just a few minutes back, Les. Jesus Christ, we just were drinking with him a night or so ago.”

“Shows how fast it can happen. Anybody on you?”

“Nah. Empty streets all the way over. None of those black Fords with two guys in ’em. We’re clear.”

“For now.”

“What’s our move?”

“Our move is, out of town, fast and far. Like… by eight.”

“Jesus, you ain’t messing around.”

“J.P., we don’t know one damned thing about this yet, and I ain’t hanging around for further developments. Maybe the Italians ratted out Johnny and—”

“The latest — I just heard this on the radio, it’s not in the papers yet — is some bimbo he was renting a room from blew the whistle. She made him and then used him to leverage a beef with Immigration. Some foreign dame, they want to ship her out. She tipped off the Division boys, and wore a red dress so they could spot her at that movie. They’re calling her the Lady in Red. She’s the one who—”

“I ain’t buying that. They always put out some cover story to make it sound like it was nothing but dumb luck. That way, they cover up what’s really going on, and who they’re really talking to, and until we know what’s really going on, we have to make ourselves scarce. Are you ready for a long drive?”

“Sure, Les. I’m with you, you know that. I always am. What about Fatso and Carey and Jimmy Murray?”

“Right now, it’s every man for himself. But they’re small fry, no way the Division is going to waste manpower on them.”

“Should we call Homer or Charlie Floyd? They’ve got names, they’re famous. Along with you, they’ll be next on the Division squash list.”

“I don’t have a number for them, and if I stop to make inquiries on the subject, that’s just what Mr. Melvin Asshole — excuse me, Helen — Purvis wants.”

“You can’t talk that way around the kids!” called Helen.

“The swearing really ticks her off,” Les confided.

“Dames got rules. All of ’em. Anyway, you’re right on the getaway, Les,” said J.P.

“That’s why I’ve lasted so long in this business. Hell, I’m almost twenty-six!”

Both laughed for the first time that day. They were young, beautiful, deadly gangsters after all. The world knew, loved, feared, and, best of all, respected them. The business involved a lot of fast moves as part of the craft, and if you couldn’t do that, you didn’t belong, as they both knew. Both knew they could lock themselves in a car and put hundreds of miles behind them in a day, rough roads or smooth, paved or dirt, grinding the American highways and state lines to powder behind them. That was part of the craft too.

“I got over fifty-five hundred dollars from South Bend still left,” Les said. “That’ll get us a long way. Maybe somewhere in Oklahoma or Arkansas we can pick up some more dough, some little country bank or something.”

“Got it. Oklahoma? We’re not headed to L.A. or Reno? They’re friendly towns.”

“And the Division knows that! No sir. We’re going to Texas. I got my eye on something Mr. Lebman has in San Antonio, and it can’t be any hotter there than it is here.”

“Is Helen okay with this?”

“I am fine,” said Helen from the bedroom. “Les always figures the right move.”

“Boy, did you get a peach!” said J.P.

“Ain’t that the truth. Now, let’s get the machinos in the trunk. The ammo too, though we could use a lot more. I want to be on the road before eight.”

27

“Are we getting anywhere?” asked Bob. He sat in the easy chair in Nick’s den.

“Well… sort of. Let’s take a look. Evidence the old goat wasn’t an FBI agent — no mention in files, no official acknowledgment, no mention in any history of the period.”

“Doesn’t sound to me like we’ve made a dent in it.”

“The best thing is the retyped report pages, with what could have been Charles’s name replaced by a name of the exact same length as his own.”

“That one is pretty solid,” said Bob. “The others, not so much.”

“Voice in memo analyzing South Bend robbery, shooting, typical Swagger in understanding the dynamics of shooting situation. Then there’s the culture of the Director’s Bureau, where his word was absolute and the ability to erase dissenters from memory was just like Stalin’s. It certainly wasn’t beyond him to do it. If your grandfather was disappeared, I’ll bet others have been too.”

“Plausibility is not evidence.”

“Your granddad’s possession of a Colt .45 automatic, known to be assigned to the Division, from the Postal Department. The way it was worked over to increase speed shooting, as in arrests, again knowledge of a higher form probably appropriate to a gunfighter like Charles.”

“Maybe, maybe not. Certainly not convincing.”

“The badge.”

“Could have been picked up in a pawnshop.”

“But it’s been there since 1934. They would have been much harder to come by in 1934. Next, verified absence from Blue Eye and Polk County from June through December 1934.”

“He could have been on an epic drunk and off whoring in New Orleans.”

“A good Presbyterian like Charles?”

“Especially a good Presbyterian like Charles.”

“The fact that you think you’re being followed suggestive of… well, of exterior interest, shall we say, suggesting further there’s some mystery here we haven’t yet figured on.”

“Yeah, maybe.”

“The fact that he started his heavy drinking in late 1934, as per Mrs. Tisdale. It just gets worse and worse, until he’s finally going to the Baptists for help. Drink to forget? Drink to ease guilt? To make the blues go away? Whatever… Drinking.”

“Not evidentiary.”

“Finally the other contents in the strongbox and the map. This goofy thing. I had Jake send it.”

He pulled a tissue-wrapped object from his pocket and unrolled it — the cylinder of some mechanical provenance, sleek, bulbous, blued, slotted, produced by highly refined machinework, all angles square and sharp, all dimensions symmetrical, about twelve ounces of pure mystery.

“I guess I gotta go into the gun books on this one. Ugh. Or the car books or the airplane books or…”

The hopelessness of identifying a piece of oddly shaped metal out of the world’s inventory of oddly shaped metal across all applications daunted him.

“You haven’t gotten anywhere on the map, have you?”

“Nope, and that includes looking at every 1934-or-earlier house in Blue Eye for a similar configuration as what I take to be a wall. I suppose I could start on outlying homes and structures.”

“That’s an act of desperation.”

“I am desperate. Come on, you’re a detective. Detect something.”

“I detect that I need a drink.”

“Excellent. Wish I could join you.”

Nick rose, went to the bar in his study, poured himself a finger of Maker’s. It was twilight, midweek, moderate out, the sun through the window leaving streaks in the clouds. Nick disappeared, came back, having prepped the tumbler with a very large ice cube.

“Cheers,” said Nick, taking a sip. Then he asked, “Coke, soda, coffee, tea, dancing girls?”

“I’m fine. Oh, wait.”

Something was buzzing at his chest, either his heart announcing that it was about to quit or his iPhone signaling the arrival of an email. It was the latter, and he pulled out the iPhone to examine: it was from Jen.

“Just checking,” she wrote. “Remember you have that speech for Bill Tillotson next Tuesday. Thought you might forget.”

Ach. Bill Tillotson — Dr. Bill Tillotson — was head of the Idaho Veterinarians’ Association and a former marine officer, and he’d been after Bob for years to address a joint meet of the Vets’ group and the Marine Corps League. Finally, Bob had relented when it was so far in the future he didn’t have to think of it. Now it was on him and couldn’t be gotten out of. It meant he had to fly to Boise, though he’d given what he thought of as The Speech enough times, it was no difficulty and low-anxiety. It irked him, but maybe the removal from his quest for Charles might clear up his thinking.

“Trouble?” asked Nick.

“Nah. I just have to go home for a few days next week, that’s all.”

He was putting the phone back in his jacket pocket when it buzzed again.

“Ain’t I the popular one,” he remarked as he called up his emails on the device.

It was from Jake Vincent, at his law firm in Little Rock.

“Call me,” it said.

He dialed the number.

Jake answered right away.

“Great. How’s it going?” Jake asked.

“Out of leads,” said Bob.

“Well, something just came in. Sort of nuts, may scramble things more, but kind of interesting.”

“Please, shoot.”

“You remember the thousand-dollar bill, unissued and still wrapped, we found in the strongbox?”

“Yeah. We were just talking about it.”

“We returned it to Treasury and they tracked it for us — finally.”

“Please, tell me it was taken at South Bend, June seventeenth, 1934.”

“Wish I could,” said Jake. “But it was taken in a robbery, all right. On July twenty-fifth, 1934. A small town called Mavis, Arkansas, on the Texas — Arkansas border. Six thousand nine hundred fifty-five dollars was taken in loose cash… and a specially ordered money pack of five thousand, in five thousand-dollar bills, from the San Francisco Mint, ordered for a peculiar landowner who didn’t trust checks and paid in cash.”

Bob thought perhaps Charles had been dispatched to the small town to investigate, see if there was any connection to the big-boy robbers. Maybe he tracked the robbers down, disposed of them, and plucked the dough from their cold, dead hands and reported it as an unsolved case. He spent the other money, just had the one crisp thousand left and dumped it in the ground. But still, that wasn’t squaring with the Charles he was uncovering, not really. And he didn’t want to believe it.

“Any suspects?”

“Oh, of course. They were widely identified. It was in the papers.”

“Baby Face Nelson?” he said with a burst of hope.

“This is where it goes screwball. No, not Baby Face Nelson. Bonnie and Clyde.”

28

“I’ve seen bigger,” said Les.

“It sure ain’t no Sioux City or South Bend,” said J.P.

They sat in the Hudson parked across from the First National Bank of Mavis, on the shady, single street that Mavis offered, and amid its few retail outlets, a mom-and-pop grocery, and, farther back, a nest of dwellings, hazy in the shadows of the trees.

The bank sat on the northwest corner of Main and Southern streets, a single-story chunk of masonry, with a double-doored entrance set at an oblique to the right angle of the corner, the Southern Street façade displaying a double window, the longer façade on Main three single widows. It was all-white brick, as plain as a Dutchman’s dream, distinguished only by the towering tree that stood above it, shielding it somewhat from the hot Texarkana sun.

“The money inside is probably as green as anybody’s,” said Helen.

“You do have a point, sweetie,” said Les. With that, he put the car into gear, eased back into the sparse traffic, and headed out of town. He didn’t want to risk suspicions of a stranger staring at the bank from a stranger’s car for too long. In towns where nobody noticed a thing, everybody noticed strangers. In a few miles, he came to a bend in Highway 45, where it crooked south and plunged across a stout wooden bridge over the Red River into Texas. Other than which side of the river they occupied, there appeared to be no difference between the two states, each offering the same rolling prairie, broken here and there by stands of timber, with lots of fallow fields, lots of rotting but a few healthy farmhouses, old barns painted with chew advertising, fences fencing nothing in and nothing out, just Dust Bowl Americana at its dustiest.

“So this is where we got to git,” said Les. “Get across this bridge and no Arkansas lawman will follow. He’s not going to get shot in Texas. The Texans probably don’t give a damn about crimes committed in Arkansas because they consider themselves so superior to the slobs in Arkansas.”

“I don’t see it as a problem,” said J.P. “There can’t be much in the way of guards or local law enforcement. It doesn’t seem a bird has landed in that town in thirty years. They probably haven’t heard of radio, much less electricity. Any town with nothing but outhouses isn’t in modern times yet.”

“But I bet their guns go bang just like yours,” said Helen.

“That’s why I go in hard with machino,” said Les. “They see that big gangster gun and they start thinking Saint Valentine’s Day, and seven men on the floor, and it tends to discourage heroism. I hate heroism. The last thing I want to run into is a hero. I’ve had my fill of heroes.”

“Helen, honey,” said J.P., “I love you like you were mine, but Les has the right idea.”

“Sure, I don’t like it,” said Les. “There’s guns in there, and there’s heroes everywhere down here — ask the Indians — but I don’t see we have no choice as we could use a refill in the purse tank, sweetie. Don’t you see?”

“I see,” said Helen. “Of course I see.”

Then she said, “That gas station over there, in Texas? Let’s cross and get a nice cold cola.”

“I thought you were an orange gal,” said J.P.

“I wonder if Orange Crush has reached Texas yet?” said Helen.

Les took the Hudson over the bridge and pulled in next to the station. J.P. went in for the drinks and Helen and Les walked to a picnic table set in a glade of trees. In a bit, J.P. came out with two Coca-Colas and an Orange Crush.

“See how sophisticated they are in Texas, Helen?” he said, holding up the Orange Crush, and they all laughed. Helen sat on the table’s bench while J.P. and Les sat on the tabletop. They enjoyed the cold jolt of the beverages, and the shade of the willow trees so close to the great brown rush of the river.

“Now, I don’t know a thing about your business,” she said, “but it seems to me that if you go in with that big gangster machine gun and shoot holes in the ceiling and blow out windows all up and down Main Street, the first thing that’s going to happen is that everybody is going to say, ‘Why, what’s Baby Face Nelson doing in a little Arkansas town?’ The second thing is, every Texas Ranger between here and Tijuana is going to head up to this very spot. And the third thing is, every Division boy in Chicago takes the Ford Tri-Motor to Dallas and joins the Rangers at the roadblocks. And you remember what happened to Bonnie and Clyde at the roadblock?”

“Wasn’t a roadblock, as I heard the story,” said Les. “And it was only one Ranger and a bunch of cowboys and sheriffs.”

“The point remains the same: anything that draws attention to the great Mr. Baby Face out of his Midwest stomping ground is big news. It’s what they call man bites dog; it’s so different, it makes itself noticed. It makes things hard. So if you and J.P. go blasting into that bank, you alert them all. ‘Come get Baby Face,’ you say, ‘and get famous fast.’”

“Helen has a point,” said J.P.

“Sure she does,” said Les, “but can you take the bank all by your lonesome? That’s the real point. You alone? Good a criminal as you are, it’s no easy thing, you’re looking one way and the farmer pulls the .47 caliber Dragoon revolver out of his pants and blasts you. Banks are, minimum, two-man jobs. This gas station, that would work for one man. But, what, maybe seven dollars and change?”

“I am not saying he does it alone,” said Helen.

“What are you saying?” said Les.

“I am saying, you wait here in the trees, three miles away, drinking a Coca-Cola,” said Helen, “and J.P. and I will rob the bank.”

After they were done laughing, it occurred to both Les and J.P. that Helen hadn’t told a joke, she had laid out a possibility.

“Honey, it’s very dangerous work. I can’t risk you for a few dollars.”

“I’m risking me, sweetie, you aren’t. And if it’s the difference between another tourist cabin, with J.P. snoring on the couch, and separate rooms in a first-class hotel, plus fine meals among the gentry in the dining room and a bath every single day, for two minutes of danger I can do it.”

“Les, she’s not far off, if at all,” said J.P. “Two people aren’t twice as good as one for a bank, they’re twenty times as good.”

“Here’s another thing,” said Helen.

“You have thought hard on this,” said Les.

“I have indeed.”

“So this one will be rich, I bet,” he said.

“Very rich indeed, Mr. Gillis. I will get a cheroot and clench it in my teeth. I will wear a bucket hat. I will put on some black hose. I will call J.P. Clyde and he will call me Bonnie.”

“Bonnie and that dumb buckra Clyde are dead, sweetie. As you mentioned, they ran into a Ranger with a Browning rifle and that was that.”

“Dead in body but not in spirit. To these folks, they were heroes. They still talk and dream about them. So if they think it’s Bonnie and Clyde, that’s all they’ll talk about, and no matter how the Division detectives hammer on them, it’ll always be Bonnie and Clyde. It’s like spreading a fog over it all, so much Bonnie and Clyde stuff, there won’t be a soul who connects it with the great and famous Chicago gangster Baby Face Nelson.”

“She has a point there, Les,” said J.P.

And even Les had to admit, she has a point there.

“Besides,” said Helen, “this’ll be fun.”

As it turned out, Les, who was very brave in a gunfight, was not very good sitting in a grove of trees while his wife robbed a bank. It was the next day. They had stayed the night in Texas, sleeping in the car, driven back across the bridge, and J.P. and Helen had each moseyed into the bank, saw it had a standard layout, with two tellers’ cages, a small administrative area, a corner office for Mr. Big, and a vault in the rear, opened sharply at 10 a.m. and closed at 4 p.m. The money in the tellers’ cages did in fact appear to be quite green, even if there wasn’t much of it, and the few customers were sad old farmers, mostly coming in to pay off loans or explain why they couldn’t.

“It’ll be easy,” Helen trilled on the ride back.

“It should be easy,” said Les glumly. “This sort of thing can go haywire on the tiniest screwup. A customer walks in at the wrong time. An old lady screams. The cop decides to take his coffee break an hour early. It can’t be predicted. That’s why you got to be ready to improvise on a moment’s notice and hope you can do it right. Why, I remember—”

“Okay, honey, we will be on our toes, won’t we, John Paul?”

“Yes, ma’am, Miss Bonnie Parker,” said J.P., and they both laughed. But Les didn’t.

They figured mid-afternoon, guessing the sheriff’s deputies would mostly be out in the country on patrol, while the old man himself snoozed off too much lunch in his corner office, and if there was a sheriff around, he’d most likely be snoozing too, in one of his own cells.

They dropped Les at the station at 2 and he went in and bought a chicken salad sandwich the owner’s wife sold, wrapped in waxed paper, a nice cold Coca-Cola out of a machine that suspended various soft drinks in a tub of very cold water, and a newspaper, the Dallas Times Herald, and sat at the picnic table as his wife and friend disappeared.

The time dragged. He forced himself to eat slow, to make the sandwich last, but no matter how long he dragged it out, it was gone, as was the Coca-Cola, by 2:30. Agh, now what? How many times can you read a sports page? How much further can the Cubs fall behind? How many more stupid picture shows can come in? How long can the Division crow about getting Dillinger? All these dramas were revisited in the pages of the Dallas newspaper, and after he’d read all the stories he wanted to, and all that he sort of wanted to, and even a few that he didn’t want to read at all, there was no sign of anybody. But, at the same time, it wasn’t as if Texas cops had raced to the bridge to seal it off, knowing a robbery had taken place.

He checked his watch and saw that it was now well after 3, getting on to 3:30, and now and then a car, more likely a truck, once even a tractor, ambled along and crossed over into the Lone Star State. He could feel his stomach knotting up, clouds of heartburn gas rising through his gorge, inflaming that which they touched, and his mouth and nose were dry, so that the air felt raw and harsh as it went into or out of these orifices.

Where were they?

What the hell was happening?

He bought another drink, but because of the stern architecture of the soda-pop bin, couldn’t get a Coca-Cola out, as other brands blocked them in the racks. He had to settle for a cherry pop, which was way too acidic and only made his various pipes burn more fiercely. He’d sweated through his collar and his Panama hat band, and it occurred to him to loosen his tie, but there were some things he just could not do. Meanwhile, the .45 lolling in leather under his sweaty armpit seemed to grow heavier and heavier.

The geezer who owned the station came out and they chatted a bit, Les claiming to be a haberdashery salesman breaking in a new man on his route before moving himself to a bigger route, and the old fellow listened with no interest in his old gray eyes. His name was McIvens, he was from downstate, his people had always been cow people, but up here you hardly ever saw a cow, it mostly being just small-plot farming. Without the highway here, the whole county would dry up and blow away. Everybody had a story, the story was always sad, but it was the Depression.

Then Les caught a flash of motion as another car emerged from the woods and headed at a brisk pace to the bridge.

In another second, it revealed itself to be a State Police car.

The first problem was the sheriff. He decided not to take his nap in a cell but to park across from the bank, enjoy a pipeful, and perhaps think of better days. Like most country folk, he was content to just be. He sat there motionless, not particularly observant but not asleep either.

“He sure isn’t waiting for a robbery,” said J.P. “He’d have his shotgun out and there’d be boys all up and down the street. It’s just this one old fella waiting for the clock to move but in no particular rush.”

“We can’t just sit here,” said Helen. “Let’s take a drive or something.”

So off they went, a half hour back into Arkansas, then the same half hour back to Mavis. There was the sheriff, still sitting.

“Maybe he’s counting crows,” said J.P.

“Well, then, how about some ice cream?”

“Sounds good to me.”

So they walked back along Main Street and found the drugstore, and it turned out that Helen didn’t feel like ice cream, so she got a Green River at the soda counter and J.P. got a chocolate phosphate. They sat next to the big Coca-Cola dispenser, all red, with the white script of trademark big across it.

“I feel like a traitor to Coca-Cola,” Helen said.

“I do too, but I’ve had so many in my time, I don’t think the Coca-Cola people will hold it against me.”

“They may be keeping track,” Helen said. “They’re everywhere.”

At that point, the sheriff’s car, visible through the window, pulled out of town.

“Well,” said J.P., “looks like we’re up to bat.”

“Let’s go, Mr. Barrow.”

They ambled across Main Street, waiting to let a farmer, with two colored men riding in the back of his truck, pass by. He waved at them, as did the two colored men, showing off fine American hospitality, and J.P. touched his hat brim in response.

The two entered the bank, and Helen pulled her Bonnie-like bucket hat low across her forehead, then inserted a cheroot between her pretty lips. She sure wasn’t going to smoke the awful thing, just as she knew Bonnie hadn’t in the famous picture, but it made her feel all the more Bonnie-like. With the black stockings added to the hat and the cheroot, she thought she looked the role. Looking up, now fully Bonnie Parker, she saw that one of the tellers’ cages was closed and that three people waited in line for the other.

“Okay,” said J.P., slipping his hand inside his suit coat to remove his .45, “let me do the talking. You just—”

“HANDS UP!” screamed Helen, pulling a large .45 Colt revolver from her purse. “This here is a robbery!”

It was amazing! Helen, so quiet and cute her whole life, was suddenly transformed into a demon of energy and command by the liberating surge she felt in stepping beyond the wall.

“Ladies, hands up, dump those purses. Teller, you reach for the sky or I’ll shoot you between the lenses of your glasses. Everybody else, freeze, reach, and pray I don’t lose my temper.”

J.P. did a double take, even as, for emphasis, Helen used her left thumb to ease back the hammer on the big revolver in her right hand, the ominous click of its new position filling the stunned, silent air.

“Clyde, get the cash, and fast!”

“Yes, Miss Bonnie,” said J.P., remembering the Bonnie and Clyde gag, and he dipped beyond the counter, went to the teller’s cage as he unfurled a flour bag from his pocket. He quickly dumped the bills in the bag, then turned to a fellow in a three-piece suit sitting deskbound, hands up.

“You, sir, you lead me into the vault and point out the cash drawers. No need to be a hero. Come on, now, git!” He gestured with his handgun. But he was good at this, and had not forgotten the president’s office, so instead of following the clerk into the vault, he stationed himself just beside the door to the office, figuring it would have required just this much time for the president to win the debate with himself over the requirements of Duty, and just as he emerged with a double-barreled gun, J.P. clunked him hard on the head, but at nowhere near killing power, and the gentleman went down, dropped the gun, and curled up in a fetal position, his hands flying to the gash in his head.

“Bet many’s the time you’ve wanted to do that,” J.P. said to the clerk, who’d obligingly pulled open a drawer with tens and twenties stacked within. “Now, fill it up!”

The clerk filled the bag.

“That too,” said J.P., pointing to an unsealed stack of clearly fresh-from-the-mint bills.

“Won’t do you no good,” said the clerk. “Them numbers is recorded. Use ’em and you get arrested.”

“Granddad, ’preciate the help, but you let me worry about the technical questions.”

“Hurry up there, Clyde,” yelled Bonnie. “These ladies can’t stand around much longer, they’ve got a tea to attend.”

She smiled, but the flinty Arkansas gals had no smiles for robbers and instead sniffed their noses imperiously. Snobs everywhere, even in Mavis!

Then Helen noticed through the window: that damned sheriff was back, right across the street.

Les studied on it. If the State boys were laying a trap for Helen and J.P., it occurred to him he had to act now. He saw it in a second: he could ease across the bridge, nice and smiley, waving, get up close, ask them something about the road to Dallas or somewhere, and then go to his gun fast. Close in, hardball, that should do it. Two pops a man, so close it would all be head shooting. Then he’d…

Then he’d what?

Wait for J.P. and Helen to show? Yeah, sit there waiting, lounging on the fender of a car, with two dead cops. Good idea. Meanwhile, what if Helen and J.P. didn’t show? What if, just as he fired, six more cop cars came around the bend? What if… A trickle of sweat jiggled down his forehead from under his hatband.

He did not like this at all. With action, it was all about now. This second, this instant. You were lucky or you weren’t. The bullet whacked you or it missed and hit the mom pushing the buggy. Too bad for her, but that’s the way it went.

This sitting, waiting stuff was for the birds. He found himself doing unmanly things, like a dame or a nancy, sitting there with a boob’s look on his mug, trying to guess how cops would act, trying to figure where he could run to, hoping he was lucky instead of making his own luck. But… he was no good at that stuff, never had been. He was the guy you want with the Thompson in hand, not bluffing and charming his way through touchy situations on savvy and intuition.

He found himself breathing hard, his focus scattered, the gases in his stomach really scorching and wasting his pipes, the sick, weak need to take a crap. It was as if his whole personality was falling apart — him, the famous, the legendary, the frightening BABY FACE NELSON, in whose presence all men trembled and all women got, even if they never admitted it, the tingle. Because everybody admired the fellow who took things and didn’t just sit there hoping someone would hand him something gratis.

He thought it through again. This time, the best way would be to avoid the bridge, wade across the river — but it looked pretty damned deep — and lay up just under the lip of the incline where the riverbank rose to meet the flats. That way, if the State cops netted Helen and J.P., he could move on them if he had to, as they’d be occupied, and it could still work out. And maybe he wouldn’t even have to pop the cops, could just disarm them, toss their pistolas in the Red, shoot out their tires, and go on. See, people got all agitated if you killed a cop, to say nothing about how angry the cops themselves got.

But even as he was sorting this out, he wasn’t moving. And doubts soon arrived that suggested the plan was a mess waiting to happen next. Maybe he couldn’t wade the river, got swept away, drowned. What a way to go! What if he’s down there and Helen and J.P. come by, don’t see him, figure he caught a ride into the next town, and rented a tourist camp cabin and—

No matter which way he figured it, it came to catastrophe. So he just sat there, torn between doom and desolation, grief and anguish, thinking this whole thing was a goddamned stupid idea and he was screwed for certain.

“Now, you people,” said J.P., “you had it easy, except for that clunk on the head of the president there. Don’t make us mad. No screaming, no yelling, no alarms, no nothing, you just hang cool as lemonade for three minutes till we clear town. You’ll have stories to tell your children for years. You’ll never pay for a drink in this town again!”

Nobody seemed inclined to disagree with him, though the three elderly women kept that prim, holier-than-thou look on their pinched and dried-out faces.

“Sister,” said Helen, “don’t see why you’re looking so put-out, nobody took a thing from you.”

“Well, Miss Parker, ’tain’t that. It’s that I have mah-jongg at four and this’ll make me so late.”

“Well, you apologize to the girls for me. Now, hold steady, everybody.”

She and J.P. backed out together, one looking forward, the other back. At the doorway, she pulled him close.

“That damned sheriff is sitting over there, big as life.”

“DAMN!” cursed J.P. “I’ll mosey over and try and get a shot into him through the windshield. You start the car and—”

“No, and the whole county’ll be out here with shotguns and rope in two seconds. YOU start the car, Mr. Barrow.”

Since she had conviction, and J.P. only experience, he yielded to her, put his head down, the gun low in one hand, the bag of swag pressed into his thigh, and beelined for the car. Meanwhile, Helen tucked her big .45 behind her purse and smilingly approached the man with the badge lounging sleepily behind the wheel of his big car.

He looked up.

“Oh, Sheriff,” she said, “sorry, but I’ve got to do some, you know, business, is there a public facility in this town?”

The sheriff blushed as if he’d just been shown a French postcard displaying unlikely anatomical positions, then got his wits about him and started to offer the use of the restroom in the jail to her, but by that time she’d laid the barrel of the big Colt revolver on the sill of the window, pointed straight into his vitals.

“Your gun, sir. Left hand, upside down, nothing fancy, as I would have no pause in doing what I must do. Be a dear, won’t you please?”

To emphasize her argument, she thumbed back the hammer of the revolver until it clicked locked. The sheriff, in his sixties, with many a mile on him, blinked, and his outsize Adam’s apple became spastically active as he swallowed hard and got nothing down but a gallon of dry air.

The firearm, an actual cowboy gun in silver with engraving, came over to her backwards.

“What a nice revolver,” she said. “I won’t even take it. I know you treasure it.”

She stepped back from the car, still smiling, turned and lobbed the gun up onto the porch roof of the ice-cream shop. Then she walked smartly around the car, stopped at first the left, then the right, front tire and fired a bullet square into each, the sound raising dust, chicken squawks, feathers, startlement, and confusion all along Main Street. She stepped across the street and climbed into the backseat of the Hudson, which J.P. had obligingly backed out of its space.

“Helen, I believe you have a gift for this kind of work,” said J.P. as they sped away.

Les was raised Catholic, and still considered himself a believer, but he didn’t like to waste the man upstairs’s time on minor matters. But he broke his own rule this time.

Dear Lord, he prayed, please, please, please let Helen be all right. Sir, I couldn’t get along without her, and she’s the best mom any kids ever had, plus my own mother loves her to death, and she only stepped off the path this one time to help us out of a jam, so please, sir, this is Lester from the West Side, please, sir, let her be all right.

It didn’t seem to have much effect on reality, as nothing happened or changed. Before prayer, after prayer, he was the same, just a fellow in too fancy a suit sitting on a picnic table in a glade of trees right across the Red River Bridge into Texas from Arkansas. Maybe a cloud shielded the sun, maybe the breeze kicked up, but neither of these could be taken as a message from God, so he decided that God must be busy elsewhere, with much to do that day, and just didn’t have room for Lester from the West Side. He didn’t take it personally. Though his temper had gotten him in trouble his whole life — had invented his whole life, as a matter of fact — he knew it was absurd to be angry with the same God who had guided so many bullets fired his way to miss, and so he didn’t feel at all ill-used by God.

He felt ill-used, he decided, by John Paul Chase. That was how his brain worked: he always had to have a target, a grudge, something to fuel the processing of his mind and thereby provide him with energy, passion, and courage. He had wanted to kill Homer, and if a chance had come, he would have. But now that seemed laughable, since Homer had gotten clipped in the head by a bullet and wasn’t himself — all this after saving everybody’s bacon in South Bend. He was the sort of man who said “I’d like to kill you” about people all the time and it didn’t mean anything — that is, unless he actually killed you.

So he focused on John Paul. Like many men with close friends, he didn’t really trust his close friends. He was too complicated for that. They got along so well, Les the boss, J.P. the servant, and as helpful as that was, it sort of sickened Les that J.P. took so much abuse, was so obedient. What was the problem with him? Les thought maybe he wasn’t too bright.

And he could see J.P. making a stupid decision, just like that idiot farm boy Charlie Floyd had at South Bend, because he didn’t really trust J.P. to do the right thing. So he could see J.P. panicking and plugging a cop, and he and Helen getting pinched when J.P. turned the wrong way down a dead-end street, and Helen goes up for accessory to murder one and is given fifteen-to-thirty, and he never, ever sees her again. That was a possibility, and it was so immense and destructive, it made him shaky.

Pretty soon he’d convinced himself not only that it could happen but that it did happen, and he decided, if so, he’d get himself arrested in Arkansas, he’d go to the same prison just so that he could kill J.P. to pay him back for what he’d done to Helen, then somehow he’d bust out. He felt righteous rage steaming through his insides, building up a pressure so intense, he thought he’d burst, and the more he thought about it, not only the madder he got but the more tragic it seemed, until he couldn’t tell whether he was in a killing rage or a sobbing tantrum. He knew one thing and one thing alone: he felt miserable.

“Honey?”

He looked up. Helen had a big smile on her face, and J.P. was smoking a cigar. Les hadn’t even seen them cross the bridge, he’d been so wrought up.

He raced to them.

“This gal of yours,” said J.P., “she’s the best!”

29

One thing the world had no shortage of was machine guns.

A wonder of the late nineteenth century, the serial-firing, belt- or magazine-fed, recoil-operated weapon had been produced in bewildering variety since at least 1883 with the advent of the original, the Maxim gun. Every industrial culture tried its hand and the results were an infinity of ventilating holes, barrel jackets, cooling tanks, belt-linking designs, magazine curvatures, bolt protrusions, mounting iterations, stock or grip configurations, sight apparatuses, muzzle brakes or flash hiders (or both!), tri- or bipod support structures, carrying grips, to say nothing of the endless array of maintenance devices, ammo boxes, shipping crates, the detritus of the machine-made world, all in the service of chopping down men with industrial efficiency in battle. And of course each gun itself had then gone through model issues, dedication applications, prototypes, and experimental advancements, thus multiplying the base number by a staggering amount. There were thousands of the goddamned things, and the guns of ’14 through ’18 were particularly ornate, where the pressure of war had upped the pace of research and design and manufacture. The Great War guns lacked mobility — that would arrive in War 2—but were superb at their task, which is why the best of them, the Maxim, was often called the Devil’s Paintbrush. It left landscapes of ruined flesh, which it had stroked on the world’s scabrous battlefields, but there were dozens, perhaps hundreds, of imitations — Vickers, Browning, and so on — that attempted to duplicate the Paintbrush’s effect on the world.

At a variety of websites, Bob wandered among these details at a computer station in the business center of his McLean motel. Next to the screen on the table, slightly illuminated in its moonlight glow, lay the mystery cylinder, that little bit of machined perfection that looked so similar to machine-gun muzzles from the world over, and generations of machine guns past, but never quite exactly.

Maxim?

No.

Browning?

Uh-uh.

MG-42?

Nein.

Degaratov?

Nyet.

Thompson?

Almost, goddammit. But not quite.

Type 92?

Bren?

Breda?

Chauchat?

Nix to all.

He knew the damned things. He’d carried, fired, maintained, deployed, taken down, improvised with them his whole life in the military. It was a key part of the infantry trade. It was warcraft at its most demanding, and whoever kept his own guns running hot, well-fed, and positioned creatively usually won the fight to fight again.

But even with all that time behind the hammering, and all the surgery on the gun’s guts under fire or sweltering in tropic heat, struggling to keep track of pins and springs or any of the thousand tiny parts that made the thing go bangbangbang instead of click, all the miles draped in M60 belts slogging uphill or over dikes, the creature itself banging hard against his back on an improvised strap, all of that machine-gun time, machine-gun culture, machine-gun savvy, did not aid him in placing the cylinder in the machine-gun world.

He almost got a hit on a strange French heavy beast called the Hotchkiss Model 1922. This one looked as if it had been designed in a bar in Montmartre after a long day of whores and absinthe shots, being a crazy jigsaw of angles and latches and bolts. The version of it he found even had a thumbhole stock, which otherwise was shaped like a violin trying to act tough. But the Frenchies had happily affixed a big chunk of metal to its muzzle to keep the strings of 7.9s it fired from rambling all over the landscape. It looked to Bob as if he’d struck, if not pay dirt, at least dirt, though no Net picture got close enough to tell if it had twelve slots or not. If he couldn’t get a close-up, he could at least get his eyes up close.

From a distance of six inches, alas, the French gun revealed its fraudulence. The rear of the piece, just where it reduced itself in circumference to mate with the barrel proper, didn’t have the same graceful convex of angle as the thing on the desktop.

He looked at it anew and, anew, was struck by the artistry of the thing, the superiority of the metalwork. Guns being pieces of machined metal fitted together, he’d examined those pieces and the way they fit his whole life, and whoever was on the lathe for this one was a master machinist, one of those boys who over a lifetime gets so sublime at his skill, it almost beggars belief. Damn, the boy was good.

He checked his watch. Getting close to dawn in Northern Virginia. He’d gotten nowhere, learned nothing. Where was the big break, the eureka moment?

Like the thing on the desk, it was unknowable.

30

Charles had a bad one that night. The war, the usual stuff, the limitless landscape of mud and wire, the faces of slaughtered boys gone away for nothing that ever made any sense, the paleness of their bodies in the ever-falling rain, the delicacy of their faces, if the faces had refrained from being blown off, the hell where youth and laughter go, the silliness of the trinkets of tin and ribbon he’d come home with. He woke, all lathered up in sweat, hungry with rogue impulses about which he could not even think, consumed with self-loathing and a sense of so much Duty undone, so many obligations still owed, the infinite pain of his two sons, the sense of a universe without hope.

At 9 he rose, showered, put on his slacks and a short-sleeved shirt, but left his coat, tie, automatic, and shoulder holster locked in the suitcase under his bed and to his bed. He went downstairs to the diner — he’d forgotten to eat that whole lost Monday — and picked up the Tribune and the Herald-Examiner and ordered some eggs and bacon while he read, at last, what the world was making of the death of John Dillinger.

It bore no resemblance to any world Charles remembered. In this world, the heroic G-Man Melvin Purvis had tracked down and slain the monster almost on his own. Charles had to laugh because it was so extravagantly wrong and yet there it was, the product of the immutable logic of the odd politics of the Chicago Field Office.

Yes, Sam was boss; yes, Hugh Clegg was second in command. But, yes, at the same time, Melvin Purvis was sort of there, and him being extremely handsome, dapper, affable, and pleasant, the press congregated around him, and Charles could only assume that the longer he went on, the more the story became about him and the less it was about the Division of Investigation. If you knew the truth, it wasn’t hard to sniff the myth, but, at the same time, it was hard to hate Melvin Purvis. He wasn’t claiming to be a hero, really, and making immoderate boasts, it’s just that he was there, the reporters knew and liked him, and the easiest way for them to do the job was to put some kind of Melvin shine on everything. It would have taken a man far stronger than Melvin Purvis to turn down the temptation of self-glorification.

Charles almost laughed. He knew the old bastard “bachelor” Director, off in Washington, was in need of a triple bicarbonate of soda this morning. The fellow must be apoplectic. It was exactly what he didn’t want, but at the same time exactly what he couldn’t prevent. What could he do now, fire his “hero”?

“The Man Who Got Dillinger” one paper had headlined under a fine file photo of the dapper Purvis, looking all serious, and the story began, “It came down to a duel of two men, the Man From Crime and the Man From Justice, and, fortunately for all of us, the Man From Justice won.”

Charles had a good time pushing through the nonsense, amazed at just how wrong wrong could be, but at a certain point ran out of newspaper. He needed something to do, something to get his mind off all the politics of the office and the government man-killing trade. He thought of a movie, but that idea wasn’t appealing because of its association with Johnny’s end in Gable’s shadow. Then he remembered that Sam had mentioned a ball game and that appealed to him. He checked the paper, saw that the Cubs, the nineteenth floor’s unofficial mascot team, were on the road, and so he looked and indeed saw there was an American League game at Comiskey Park on the South Side. He knew nothing about the Sox, but that wasn’t the point: losing yourself in the spectacle, the ceremony, the anonymous camaraderie of the stands, erasing the mind and numbing the spirit, that was the point.

Thus, he mounted the El station, which was like climbing into a gigantic iron-girdered monster — maybe an old dreadnought tied up at the dock, with its constellations of iron rivets and stout timbers everywhere, and the smell of the tar with which they sealed off the wood from the elements — caught the southbound train, rocketed through the Loop, and then plunged into loud darkness for twenty minutes as whatever lay between the Loop and Comiskey fled by unseen on the surface.

He emerged in what by lore was called Bronzeville, and the ballpark customers were obvious strangers in this all-Negro world. The two civilizations regarded each other across their great gulf as the fans passed among the residents down 35th Street, approaching the thing ahead, where the ball game would be played. But it was all in good cheer, for the sun was bright, the folks happy, the prospects enticing. The streets were full of hum and buzz, not quite thronged, but still heaped with people, while the park — a castle of brick? a cathedral? — dominated the area, as from all directions citizens approached. All sorts of bright hustle assaulted the newcomers, hot dog stands, fellows selling programs, cotton candy, Cracker Jacks and popcorn, souvenir pennants, little Sox caps, the works. If it was affiliated with baseball and could be sold on the streets approaching Comiskey, it was.

He bought a general grandstand ticket, entered the half-full arena, and got a jolt of pleasure from the green of the field, which dominated the structure, against the red brick of the walls and the quasi-Medieval stylings of the towers and ramparts of the stadium. At half throng, the place was still impressive, as fifteen thousand people of basically one mind and common interest made their presence felt. Charles drifted until he found a nice vantage point of the field, about thirty rows up from the demarcation between box seats and general admissions, a little this side of third base. Really, there wasn’t a bad seat in the place, unless you were stationed behind one of the frequent steel girders that kept it upright, and Charles could see the young men on the field below him, full of life and speed and grace and strength. He made sure not to order a beer, though the whole stadium was generally a giant, circular beer barrel, and everywhere fans were overacting with the elaborate exacerbation of the nearly inebriated. Meanwhile, it was a festival of advertising, as the great American enterprises such as Coca-Cola, Standard Oil, Hamm’s Beer from the Land of Sky Blue Waters, and the Chicago Tribune purchased space on the walls to sell their goods. Pennants and flags spanked the air, the smoke of ten thousand cigarettes and two thousand cigars rose to form a kind of gloriously hazing blur atop it all. It was like a volcano getting ready to blow. Everybody was loud, everybody was happy, everybody wanted to be no other place on earth that particular day, that particular time.

Not much of a game. The enemy team hailed from D.C. — perhaps the Director was a fan — and the Sox, themselves no prize edition this year, handled them pretty easily. The Sox scored in the first inning and never trailed. Swanson, in right, got a couple of hits to lead the team to four runs, and other guys with hits included Appling, Conlon, Simmons, Bonura, and Dykes, for a total of six. A fellow named Les Tietje pitched, lasted until the eighth, and got the win. It all went as it was supposed to go, and Charles took most pleasure from the green of the grass, the white of the uniforms and ball, and the long dramas of interception when someone skied one and it floated through its arc high in the hot, bright sky, then lost energy and began its descent to where it was nabbed in the glove of this or that young fellow, who then uncorked a long trajectory throw that rose a bit, fell a bit, and landed exactly where it had been aimed and was then tossed this way or that at speed, depending on the game situation. There was something soothing in watching the grace of these transactions, and the game, while lacking suspense, also lacked drama or intensity, both of which Charles was glad to leave behind him for a time.

In the seventh, someone said to him, “How about a Cracker Jack, Sheriff?” putting the box in front of him, and Charles looked up and saw that the Italian called Uncle Phil had taken the seat next to his. He wore a creamy-white linen suit, a red tie, white shoes, black, circular glasses, and a Panama shading his handsome face.

“Thanks but no thanks, friend,” said Charles. “Say, are you guys watching me? How’d you know I was here? This can’t be coincidence.”

“Same way we knew where Johnny would be. We’re everywhere. Not all the time, but enough so we can keep our eyes on things. Don’t take it personally. We’re just paying attention. Knowledge is power is wealth is a long, happy life.”

“I don’t like it.”

“Nobody does, but you’ll get used to it. Anyway, I’m hearing that despite all the yakkity-yak about Purvis, it was the sheriff who handled Johnny. And did a fine job on it too.”

“I just did what my badge required,” said Charles. “It wasn’t nothing special. Any detective in this town could have handled it.”

“Knowing a few of them, I’d have to disagree,” said Uncle Phil. “They’d have ended up with dead citizens everywhere. Must tick you off to read the papers and see it’s the Melvin Purvis G-Man Heroic Hour. He didn’t do nothing but light a cigar, never went up against Johnny and his little Colt.”

“I don’t care about that. It’s beyond me. I don’t like nobody in my business anyhow, so if nobody pays no attention, that’s fine by me.”

“Give it to you, Sheriff, no need for stroking, like so many, and that stroking gets so many killed or crushed. It’s an admirable trait.”

“I don’t put on airs. No percentage in it. I don’t like them that do. What’s this about anyway? I don’t see you as no South Side ball fan.”

“It’s a good game, lots of fun. You would not believe the money that moves on it every day. It seems so straightforward here in the sun, with all the pops and kids and hot dogs, but every time one of those Apollos throws a ball, twenty million moves one way or the other.”

“I don’t know nothing about that,” said Charles. “I’m not good at numbers. I leave that to the others. Now, do you have some dope for me?”

“The latest is that Homer’s somewhere up in St. Paul but laying low while the bump in his head goes down. Baby Face cleared town but fast when you put Johnny in the morgue. He sees the writing on the wall. Pretty Boy’s too dumb to come in out of the rain, but that makes him hard to predict because he just bounces around with no plan. I think we’ll have hard info on Homer next. Pretty Boy will fall victim to his own bad luck. Baby Face will come back. He’s a Chicago boy, he knows which way the streets run and the shortcuts. But you already knew that. Here’s why I’m here: I wanted to hand this over.”

He laid an envelope on Charles’s lap. Charles looked at it.

“Just a little extra. You’re doing your job, you’re impressing people, and we like to show our gratitude.”

“I won’t take that,” said Charles. “It makes me a bounty hunter, not a cop.”

“It ain’t a payment, it’s a gift from citizens who appreciate it.”

“If I take it, I get used to it. You give me some more and I enjoy it. I buy stuff, I’m a hero to my wife, and I’m looking for more, which comes along soon enough. Then you’ve got me hooked. You own me. So let’s get this straight right now. Nobody owns Charles Swagger. He pays his own way, he walks his own path, all of it for his own reasons, explained to nobody. I won’t never meet with you again, you understand that, pal?”

“You throw ’em hard and tight, don’t you, Sheriff? Like Wyatt Earp or some other old gunman. Dodge, Silver City, Laredo, other dirt-water shitholes not worth dying for. Okay, you want to play it like that, that’s the way we play it.”

He smiled, picked up the envelope, and then rose and walked away.

Charles went back to watching the boys play their ball game.

31

Not much remained of Mavis. It was one of those towns that had been passed by on the Interstate rush to throw concrete ribbons around America, and, far from any six-lanes, it languished. It didn’t even have a Walmart or any fast-food joints.

Where the bank had been, a Dollar Store now sold cheap Chinese goods. There was a 7-Eleven, a one-story town hall/police station/public works department, clearly a relic of the ’70s. A café sold coffee and pastry, but if you wanted food, you had to go out by the Interstate and feed at a TGIF’s or a McDonald’s or something off a gas station candy rack. No library, no Historical Society, not much of anything except people, all of whom seemed to be on welfare. Or minimum-subsistence jobs. Or crystal meth.

Nobody could answer any of his questions, as they seemed mostly to be in their twenties, the men living thirty or more miles from factory jobs in the last Arkansas town or the next Texas town. But the bank had to stand at the corner of Main and Western, and, looking at the structure, he felt it was probably the same building, though now occupied by Mr. and Mrs. Ling and their emporium of plastic goods from Szechuan Province. He doubted the Lings would know a thing about Bonnie and Clyde’s visit eighty-five years ago, three months after they were killed in Arcadia, Louisiana.

He sat outside the coffee shop, sipping a cup, wondering what this trip proved.

What it proved was: yes, I am being followed.

He knew it. You get certain feelings, and if you’re a field operator like him, those feelings are honed and developed over the years. Call it ESP or spidey sense or whatever, you can feel the weight of certain eyes on you, even through binoculars. This vividness of sensation had saved his life a thousand times, and it was never wrong, unless, all of a sudden, it was.

Am I that old? Has the little gizmo gone crazy? Is the mechanism not working? Am I losing it? Is this whole thing sort of an old man’s vanity, a ridiculous concoction built on a lifetime’s sniper paranoia and having been shot at way too much for anyone’s psychological health? Do I need to be the object of some dark conspiracy, of forces that hide in shadows and pull strings? Does it make me feel… alive?

But he understood and obeyed the fundamentals of the game — the game being Man Hunting 5.0—that is, at the highest level. And that game was: if you are under observation, do not acknowledge it. Thus, you possess a microscopic advantage, which a clever operator might leverage into a victory when or if the guns came out. So, though his brain screamed at him to turn and look, to apply his still-great vision to the shadows and the horizon and the trees all the way out, he probed in another direction, along lines of staying loose-limbed, goofy, sort of pokey and old. If whoever was out there really was out there and they realized they’d been discovered, he — or they — would change their whole plan of attack, method of operation, and he might never find them until they decided it was time for the kill. To survive, he had to know they were going to kill before they did.

Keeping his eyesight determinedly local, he looked up and down the street in Mavis and noted a few of its oblivious citizens in the street, old pickups, a few automobiles of unidentifiable vintage, and not one thing out of place, different, new to the eye. No traffic had passed in ten minutes, except for a mom with a mini SUV full of squealers on the way to the Costco in the next town down the line, a State policeman of about thirteen, on patrol, and an old boy on a tractor. No sign of the Mafia, Soviet airborne, jihadhis, Japanese marines, rogue Agency cowboys, the sons, brothers, wives, daughters of men he’d killed, whatever or whoever else could be interested in him. Just daylight America, small, dying-town variety, edging quietly toward tomorrow without much in the way of drama or excitement.

But why was he being tracked? Because it’s always and only about money. It’s never vengeance, justice, irony, curiosity, envy, romantic competitiveness, any human motive, except the oldest of them all: greed. Cain probably whacked Abel out of greed. He figured he’d get an extra quart of goat’s milk from the old man if his brother wasn’t there. Somewhere, there had to be a money angle in all this, but, damn, if he could find it.

He drove to the Dallas Airport for tomorrow’s flight back to Boise and his upcoming speech, and that night, in the hotel, he did what he’d done twice already. He inspected every single item with him, feeling, probing, shaking, sniffing, and if licking was suggested, he’d have licked. But nothing from sock to jock to razor to toothpaste, to the stuff you wore underneath, to the stuff you wore on top, to the thing you carried it all in, suggested a dual purpose, an intelligence usage. It was just bland, dreary stuff, like anybody’s stuff. No bugs, no microprocessors, GPSs, new spy toys, James Bond buzzers or decoder rings, just… nothing.

Then he rose early and spent an extra hour before breakfast looking at the car, even though it was a rental selected randomly from a row of rentals. No way anybody could have anticipated in Little Rock which car he was going to choose of ten available. He didn’t even know; he just picked the first one, and, he supposed, maybe he always picked the first one, so that’s how they knew. But that was ridiculous, because there was no possible motive for such a thing, and the expense to penetrate a car agency and plant a bug to listen to a lone man who didn’t talk to himself would be out of scale with any possible gain.

You are losing it, you old bastard, he thought, as he drove to the airport to fly back.

32

Leon Kaye was the most respected rare-coin dealer in Little Rock, and his high-end retail outlet, The Coin, was swank, plush, serene, and soothing. There, he found and sold and bought and traded the most unusual specimens of the world’s four-thousand-year history of money, with a mid-South clientele of many well-off collectors. If it was money, or looked like it, he was interested. He was represented as well on the Internet, which meant globally, and was an active traveler who would view and bid on spectacular items as they periodically came up. He dressed as one might expect, in sedate J.Press blazers and charcoal suits; shirts, blazing white, from Brooks Brothers; ties so trustworthy, they put you to sleep; and of course Alden wingtips, jet-black, and narrow in the British fashion. Manicured, buffed, coiffed, polished, shined, and blow-dried, he looked like a wealthy priss who’d been to Yale.

But there was another Leon Kaye whose eccentricities might have surprised, perhaps even dismayed, his many respectable clients. They never realized that he was also Mr. K of Little Rock’s nine Mr. K’s Pawn & Gun Shops, whose proud claim, on billboards all through the black, Hispanic, and poor-white neighborhoods of the Queen City, was I Buy Gold. I Buy Silver. I Buy Diamonds. I Buy Guns! Hell, I Buy ANYTHING. He did too. Then he sold it for more.

All his shops prospered, as a pawn license, extracted only via great criminal or political leverage from the Arkansas state licensing bureaucracy, was an excuse to xerox money. He also owned a few car washes, three strip malls, a laundromat, and the larger interest in a chain of Sonic Drive-Ins throughout the area. And a restaurant or two. And a porn shop or two. And a bar or seven, including three of the strip variety. He owned a Jeep agency, a country club, of which he was president and head of the greens committee, and a private airplane.

No one ever said of Leon that he lacked a nose for opportunity, and when opportunity came, he was shrewd in manipulating his way toward it. This is why he sat in the back room of The T&T & A$$ Club — his, naturally — in Little Rock’s seedy little tenderloin, talking intently to two large men.

They were Braxton and Rawley Grumley. By profession, they were skip tracers, a sort of modern-day bounty hunter, by which effort they man-tracked those who’d skipped out on the money owed bail bondsmen — and bail bondsmen aren’t the sort of fellows who can let such a thing happen. They take even the smallest sums quite seriously, and there is no humor or irony in their business. In all states, the law is vague on what skip tracers are allowed to do to recover the missing man, but some states allow more leniency than others. Arkansas allows a lot of leniency, which is why Braxton and Rawley had a ninety-seven percent recovery rate. They were extremely good at finding people, and though they looked like Country-Western singers channeling ’50s professional-wrestling-style types, they were technically adept, cunning, cruel, and relentless — all career prerequisites. It was also said they could be influenced to do certain other things for the right clients, and for the right fee, and nothing would ever be said about it.

They were large men, and one tended to notice them. They liked red or purple (or both) cowboy boots and belts, polyester jackets, paisley scarves, gold chains, tattoos of the figurative, heroic variety, and polished white teeth. Each had a blond pompadour and wore a selection of gaudy but expensive rings on hefty fingers. If you looked at the fingers, you noticed the hands, and if you noticed the hands, you noticed the knuckles, and if you noticed the knuckles, you noticed the scars. They looked like their hobby was beating up radiators.

“All right,” said Braxton, the more loquacious of the two, “we are here, Mr. Kaye. You have our attention, and I assume you will soon be making us a pitch.”

“Boys,” said Mr. Kaye, who for this meeting had forsaken the Ivy trad look and was in jeans and a jean jacket — the so-called Arkansas Tuxedo — over a Carhartt work shirt, and who had driven to work not in his black Benz S but in his white Cadillac Escalade, with its vanity license plate I PAY CASH, “I want you to think back with me to the year 1934. Maybe you saw the movie Public Enemies? John Dillinger, Tommy guns, bank robberies, and, boys, think on this: cash. Lots and lots of cash. In thirteen months the Dillinger Gang stole over three hundred thousand dollars, and most of it was never recovered.”

Mr. Kaye let that sink in, but Baxter and Rawley were not the type to be impressed by old-time crime stories.

“Sir, we are Grumley,” said Braxton. “We have been working our side for one hundred and fifty years, against revenue agents, sheriffs, constables, federals, even congressional investigating committees. Millions done passed through the Grumley hands. That amount of swag, and supposed big shots like John Dillinger do not impress us, no more than a Moon Pie without a Dr Pepper to wash it down, so to speak, if you get my drift.”

“I do, I do. However, three hundred thousand in cash is nothing to scoff at, but suppose — think about this — that cash were uncirculated 1934 bills, valued far more than for its face value. Depending on the bills, it could be worth twenty times as much, dispensed carefully and discreetly to collectors, of whom there are many. Three hundred thousand times twenty comes to six million dollars, and think how nice that would be, especially when the only thing you have to do is follow a seventy-year-old man who has a line on where it’s buried. He has a map, he just ain’t figured out what it’s to.”

“Is he dumb?”

“He’s not. He’ll figure it out. He’s known for figuring it out. He always figures it out. He’s working on it now. His father was good at figuring out before him, and his father’s father before him. All of them, more or less, of the law. All of them, more or less, having conked many a head with the Grumley label. And that’s the second part of this pleasure for you. It has a personal angle which you will oh so enjoy. So what I have for you is an odd confluence of opportunity. Cash money, unaccounted for and long forgotten, very rare, thus immensely valuable, untraceable in ways that many large sums might not be. Maybe other relics of extreme value. All of it being searched for by a fellow named Swagger, of the Polk County Swaggers. You know the family?”

“I know the family,” said Braxton. Rawley cracked a pistachio between his large white molars, spit a spray of shell grit into the air, and ate the meat.

“There’s Grumley sleeping eternally underground, and four or so yet in prison because this Swagger fellow got involved in preventing a certain Grumley enterprise at the Bristol Speedway,” said Braxton.

“I know that.”

“What else do you know?”

“His daddy, Earl, was involved in the so-called Veterans’ Revolt of 1946, which was far bloodier than history tells us. Grumley deaths occurred in a plethora of Hot Springs shoot-outs, and in the end the town’s spirit was broken, and instead of becoming Las Vegas, it became another decaying Southern town that the Interstate passes by. Earl was also, for a time, the bodyguard of the famous Congressman Uckley, a power in Washington in the ’forties and ’fifties, which made him untouchable, though in the end he got touched. The father’s father was Polk County sheriff, way back in the ’twenties and ’thirties. He worked close with Judge Tyne’s machine, and whenever the machine had to enforce its will on the unruly Grumley, Grumley head got busted, Grumley tail went to prison, and Charles Swagger did the busting and imprisoning. Does all this sound familiar?”

“We are well versed in our own family history,” said Braxton. “Grumley have long memories.”

“I thought Grumley might. So listen hard, fellows… More pistachios, Braxton?”

“I’m Braxton,” said Braxton. “I don’t eat pistachios. That’s Rawley, with the pistachios. I talk for both, but don’t think he ain’t listening because he is, very carefully. He’s the smart one. I just got the gift of gab.”

Mr. Kaye nodded, and proceeded with his story. A short time ago, he had been approached by a fine Little Rock law firm to advise them on an old piece of money. Imagine his amazement when it turned out to be an AC 1934-A thousand-dollar bill of a very rare variety. It was a Friedberg 2212-G, graded as 66EPQ by PMG. Rated “Gem Uncirculated.” Pretty close to perfect. It was easily worth ten thousand dollars on its own, and with a pack of uncirculated siblings still linked by Mint seal, its value went up astronomically. So Mr. Kaye advised the young associate who had sought the appointment and arrived with the bill, sensibly sealed in plastic. The young man was not discreet, as so many of them aren’t, and soon revealed to Mr. Kaye that it had been recovered from a strongbox in the foundation of a house being torn down. And the strongbox included some other items, including a .45 automatic, an FBI badge, an odd metal contrivance that could have been a machine-gun part, and a map of some sort that pointed to yet more buried treasure, but was oriented to the wall of a structure that was only known to the creator of the map.

“Not hard to do some inferring, now is it?” asked Mr. Kaye. “Nineteen thirty-four was the year of the big bank robberies, the Dillinger — Baby Face Nelson — Pretty Boy Floyd combine. As I say, three hundred thousand dollars in all vanished, never to be recovered. The badge and pistol suggest that the grandfather may have been, for some time at least, an agent, as any history of the Bureau will tell you that in 1934 Mr. Hoover took in a batch of Western and Southern gunfighters to go bullet to bullet against the Dillingers. Charles Swagger of Blue Eye, victor in the famous Blue Eye First National shoot-out of 1923, and First World War hero, in two armies, might certainly have been one, and they would have been well served by him. There was indeed lots of killing. Gunfights all over the Midwest, agents down, gangsters down. But, as I say, no big-money stash ever turned up.

“Now we have a direct link to those days, direct evidence of purloined money taken in robbery but also not returned to authorities, as perhaps Charles Swagger, accustomed to the Arkansas way of doing things, might have allowed himself. I have made discreet inquiries and I have learned that the grandson, Bob Lee Swagger, seventy years old but spry, also a war hero, as well as a rancher, father, businessman, and a man bent on weird quests for his own private satisfaction, is now researching his grandfather and trying to find out what happened. A necessary part of that search will be placing the map against its palimpsest—”

“Its say what, Jack?”

“Ah, its objective correlative.”

Rawley spit a large gunk of pistachio off into space. It landed on Mr. Kaye’s desk.

“Its thing, whatever it is that is the basis of the diagram. As described to me — I have not seen it — it’s a crude penciled rendering of the wall of some kind of building, with a diagonal, broken line radiating from a given point to the northwest, delineating about ten steps, orienting to and just passing a circle that must denote a tree trunk. There, X marks the spot, and I’m guessing the X might be something that Charles Swagger made off with in 1934 when his FBI career came to an end. Whatever this is will certainly be of value, perhaps great value. Would it not be a shame if, at that moment, Mr. Swagger were interrupted, his family legacy taken from him and put to other, more profitable uses. Imagine how disappointed he’d be.”

“Hmm,” said Braxton.

“You have the means to make this happen?”

“Sir, we track men for a living. This is easily doable by us, discreetly and with sophistication. So what remains is the deal.”

“Seventy/thirty?”

“Seventy for us, thirty for you.”

“Now, boys, let’s not get greedy. Standard recovery in your business is fifteen percent. I give you twice that to show good faith. You have to show good faith too. And I believe I qualify for a Grumley family discount, since Grumley accounts will be settled.”

“Perhaps. Sixty-forty, but you pick up expenses.”

“Sixty-five/thirty-five. Yes to expenses, but only with receipts. No ‘Miscellaneous: $68,925.32,’ or anything like that.”

“And,” said Braxton, “the haircut fee.”

“The haircut fee?”

33

Charles worked fourteen straight days, after his two days off, and didn’t have another day to himself until halfway through the month. On that day, he ate the usual diner breakfast, while he read more fairy tales in the Trib and Herald-Examiner, checked yesterday’s ball scores and saw Tietje had taken another loss for the Sox, making his fine showing at the game Charles saw even more of an oddity. It was probably too late for them to make much of a move anyway, and it was equally clear the North Siders weren’t going to do anything memorable either. In a few weeks, college football would begin, but Charles had no feeling for Illinois teams and doubted the papers would pay much attention to the Arkansas Razorbacks. Maybe all this crap would be wrapped up before then and he’d get back in time to follow the season. But he doubted it, as Baby Face sightings were random and refused to fit into any pattern, and he’d heard nothing from Uncle Phil. And the same was true of others on the Public Enemies list, like Pretty Boy, Homer, the Barkers, and Alvin Karpis. Lots of work left to do.

He had two jobs to do today. First, he had to buy a car. He was tired of all this public transportation, or signing out, then signing in, a Bureau Ford or Hudson, which every hood in Chicago recognized as Division cars anyhow. The buy took an hour and a half, the transaction facilitated by him paying in cash from the squirrel fund he’d brought north with him. There was a place up Halsted, a garage run by a Mulligan, who was an ex-cop and gave the boys in blue and State Troopers, as well as G- and T-Men, good deals. Charles paid three hundred fifty dollars for a 1933 dark green four-door Pontiac, a flat-8, said to be in good shape. He was more drawn to a Plymouth coupe, but he saw that the Pontiac would do better for hauling agents around, if it ever came to that, and wife and child, if he ever got back to that.

That set him up for his second job, the dinner he would have at Sam’s place that night in Evanston. In the big new car, the drive was easily handled, pleasant. No traffic on the Outer Drive. The city fathers were glamorously developing the lakefront, and new hotels, including a pink thing called the Edgewater Beach, were rising, turning the zone into a kind of Miami.

At Belmont, the drive turned into the traffic-light-stunted Sheridan Road, and Charles poked through the edge of the North Side until he reached a cemetery, said to be a holding spot for gangsters waiting to get into hell, that marked the passage between Chicago and the pleasant city of Evanston. Evanston had elms, lots of them, and old, big houses, lots of them, and colleges, lots of them, and traffic, not so much of it. Within a few minutes, he found the intersection of Sheridan and Noyes, turned left, and halfway down the block came to 624, a vast place roughly thrown together of brown timber and sandstone boulders. It had porches everywhere and a roof line as complicated as Texas history, with gables and mansards and crests somehow forming a whole, which seemed to indicate an interior rich in passageways, secret rooms, unexpected stairways, closets everywhere, odd-shaped bedrooms, as if sort of invented on the spot, not drawn from any plan. The house sat under trees, between Sheridan and the next main stem, an Orrington Avenue, on a large chunk of land, guarded by a front porch that looked like the entrance to a castle of some sort. The whole thing in fact was a castle or fortress in mentality, presumably unassailable by anything short of Big Bertha or some other piece of Krupp hellaciousness.

He parked, went up the stairs, knocked, and Sam opened, immaculate in three-piece and tie, and brought him in. Charles was glad he’d worn his own suit, though he didn’t ever not wear it.

If the atmosphere outside was Medieval, the atmosphere inside was childish. Children lived here, lots of them, and their smell, clutter, noise, and business were everywhere. Sam led him through a foyer to a grand living room that ran half the length of the house, uttering pleasantries.

“Thanks so much for coming up, Charles. I hope it wasn’t difficult.”

“No problem, a nice night for a drive.”

“Pardon the mess, but having six children is like having six horses under the same roof. You never get it cleaned up, you just get the mess under control, temporarily. Here, meet the brood and the heroic brood mare. KIDS!” he yelled.

They seemed to come out of holes in the walls, from under the furniture, through windows, down chutes and up ladders, more or less assembling themselves into a skittish mass of constrained energy and temporary attention. He was introduced one by one to towheaded boys and girls cut from the same perfect mold, running from fourteen years down to fourteen months, all more or less clean, more or less civil, but minds clearly set on adventures and mischief, not the tall, stolid figure before them.

Then the Mrs. Her name was Betty, still a beauty, tawny, blond, and sturdy. She’d been cooking but disengaged easily enough and greeted Charles graciously, making him feel her whole purpose in life was to ease his way. She was like one of those good officers’ wives he’d met in the war stateside, a campaigner, game, tough, worked like a dog without a complaint, and always there for everybody who needed her.

It wasn’t lost on Charles that this was a life worth aspiring to: respect, progeny, the best in shelter, prosperity, the best that America had to offer a man from nowhere, as he was, as Sam was.

“I’ll spare you the tour,” Sam said. “Unless you like socks, dirty underwear, unmade beds, broken toys, dolls missing heads, single shoes, and the odor of a monkey den.”

Charles laughed.

“Sounds like a few barracks I’ve been in,” he said. “Don’t think it would faze me much.”

“Actually, now that we’ve got a little time, I’d like to talk to you. Away from the office, so that no one will worry about it and spread rumors and Hugh Clegg won’t panic and wire the Director and Mel won’t figure it’s about him and call a news conference.”

“Sure,” said Charles.

“I could use a drink. I’m Mormon, but since I’m also an Elder, I grant myself one day’s dispensation. Not sure you’re a drinker.”

“I had a bad spell with the hooch when I got back from the war. But I got myself straightened out. I don’t drink the hard, but I can handle a beer or two.”

“Sounds good. Honey, can you open a couple Schlitzes? We’ll be on the patio.”

“Be right out,” Betty called, cheerily, from the kitchen.

Sam led him out a rear door, where they found a patio raised above ground level, a little redoubt from which a lord could survey his fief. The backyard seemed immense and it opened all the way around the side of the house. But as usual, trees everywhere, shrubs, the whole range of chlorophyll-kingdom enterprises, lurking, climbing, blossoming. Through the foliage, other equally prosperous houses were visible.

“Very nice here,” said Charles.

“I didn’t want the kids in the city. Evanston turned out to be perfect. They have a six-block walk to school, up Orrington Avenue. It’s a great school, I’m told, equal to anything in the East.”

“Beautiful place,” said Charles.

“The traffic isn’t bad if I drive, but mostly I just take a two-block walk to the El. Straight up Noyes. Gets me downtown in forty minutes.”

“That’s why you keep such long hours, I guess,” Charles said.

“I hope you like steak, Charles. Betty’s got three of the best rib eyes out there I’ve ever seen. She’ll get the kids down — we won’t put you through our mess-hall family-dinner ordeal, nobody deserves that.”

“It sounds great, Sam. Thanks so much for having me. I was getting tired of diner cooking.”

Betty came out and served the two beers in tall glasses, frosty up top, glistening with dew, yearning to be consumed. Charles lifted his, clanked a toast with Sam, who said, “To the end of the journey,” and each took a draught.

It was good, as Charles knew it would be, and it opened longings that he felt but knew he was strong enough to withstand. Now, what was this going to be? Had someone seen him with the known Italian Uncle Phil? Was he in trouble? Had Hugh Clegg brought off some coup to have him exiled, which was the same as having him fired, since he wouldn’t stay in the Division without Sam? Had some rumor, a suspicion, about a favor he may or may not have done for someone in Hot Springs in 1926 emerged? What the hell would this be?

“Charles, first off, between us, I just wanted to thank you for what you’ve brought to the office. I can’t begin to tell you how grateful I am.”

“Sam, I’m just doing my duty. Nothing special—”

“No, no, hear me out. You see, one of the things I have to know about is weakness. And I know my own as well as I know Clegg’s scheming bitterness and Mel’s vanity and Ed Hollis’s lack of a first-class brain. Here’s mine, Charles: I don’t like the violence. To be honest, it scares me. Maybe I’ve got too much to lose, unlike some of the others—”

“Sam, nobody likes the violence.”

“Well, I really don’t like it. So it was important to me that I find somebody who knew it, could lead the boys through it and bring most of them home, who was as brave as he was honorable, who would be the me I could never be. I couldn’t have done better. My first choice, Frank Hamer, with his big ways and hunger for glory, would have been a disaster, I see that now. Charles Swagger has been my finest triumph.”

“We’ll get you trained on the guns, and when you know how to shoot, the ugly stuff won’t be a problem. The guns will get you through it.”

“Well, perhaps. But there is one other thing I wanted to say, do you mind?”

“Not at all.”

“I’ve been meaning to have this conversation with you ever since you stood wide open on that hill and fired at Baby Face. But when I learned you told the boys — no, they didn’t tell me, they told a pal who told a pal who told a pal who finally was overheard by someone who was not a pal — that you went straight into Johnny’s gunhand because you knew if he got a shot off it would be into you and nobody else — I realized I had to act. That accounts for this overly engineered little tête-à-tête.”

“Yes sir?” said Charles.

“Charles… do you know what a ‘death wish’ is?”

34

Courtesy of Helen And J.P.’s Adventuring, they stayed at the Aurora Hotel, one of the city’s nicest, a couple blocks from the old fort where the Texans had stood off the Mexicans for so long, setting a standard for bravery in the face of treachery and force for all, including bank robbers, to admire. And these bank robbers did.

But history’s charms ran out quickly enough, and soon enough they turned to nourishment, which the old city offered in abundance. They ate well, in the Aurora’s elegant dining room or the superb Mexican restaurants the town boasted. It was a streetcar city, and the amble of the big cars down the thoroughfares under wires that popped sparks at every junction was its own special pleasure, a kind of ongoing spectacle out-of-towners never tired of. But it was also a pastel-and-ocher city, in the colors of the desert, and it had the warm-climate casualness that outsiders find so appealing, and the availability of a smiling peasant class to facilitate all transactions. It was a city that wore its pride and grandeur well, like a beautiful gown.

They had plenty of money, at least for now, even if the unexpected triumph of five crisp, new thousand-dollar bills couldn’t be touched.

“That stuff is so hot we’d end up in the stir before nightfall if we tried to pass it,” Les said.

“Maybe I should have left it there. Who knew it’d be so much trouble?” said J.P. They sat on the balcony of Les and Helen’s room, which overlooked the gently Hispanic city.

“Nah,” said Les, “you were right to grab it. We’ll hang on to it. It’ll cool off, and somewhere along the line we can pass it off at a good rate, maybe in Reno. Right now, we wouldn’t get one-for-five, but by this time next year it’ll go easily for four-on-the-fiver. That’s close to standard, can’t bitch about that.”

“Good idea, Les,” said J.P., as if ever in his life he could have said, “Bad idea, Les.” His submission was as complete as it was weirdly satisfying to him. It completed him.

“Tell you what,” said Les. “We’ll peel one of ’em off and put it in the getaway bag, with a few guns and some ammo, some license plates, something to grab if the Division starts to blast us. On the run, we can spend it, because we’re moving so fast, and by the time they track it back to where it was passed, we’ll be long gone. One way or the other.”

“That’s good,” said J.P.

Both men had their feet up and were relaxed, coats off, ties loosened. Helen had gone to Frost’s, the great San Antonio department store, to buy a few new frocks, as she was sick to death of the ones in her suitcase that she washed out every night after wearing. She’d earned a few new dresses, Les thought.

“So, tomorrow Lebman. I called him, he’s expecting us at eleven and is very eager for the business.”

Hyman Lebman was a great mystery to many of his gangster clients. No doubt, he was a talented gunsmith, and could modify a good gun into a perfect gun, almost too clever to use on the job yet too lethal not to use — but what did he know about his customers and the uses to which they put his brilliance? He pretended to know nothing.

If he was faking it, he was faking it brilliantly. He could be with Les and Johnny, showing them some work of genius — like his adaptation of the Colt Government Model automatic into a machine pistol, complete with compensator, twenty-two-round magazine, and Thompson grip, which Les had used to great effect on Carter Baum the night of the escape from Little Bohemia — and at the same time be completely oblivious to their identities. He just thought, or pretended he just thought, they were new-money oil millionaires giving their adolescent selves a fun binge, with a love of guns so intense, it had taken them beyond the normal range of hunting and target-shooting firearms. Their hobbies seemed to be acquiring the still-legal fully automatics and retiring to an obscure corner of the ranch for a few hours’ and a few thousand rounds’ worth of shooting holes at anything in front of them, amid a clatter of noise, a storm of dust, and a spray of debris. It seemed to suggest a sort of polo-with-machine-guns kind of life.

If anything else was involved, it never occurred to Mr. Lebman, who either made no connection between his clients and the massacres and bullet blizzards of the Midwest or, again, did a fine job of impersonating someone who made no connection.

That was fine all around. The guns were perfectly legal, no laws were broken — well, the National Firearms Act had just been passed in June, but it seemed nobody was much interested in enforcing it for now — and it freed Mr. Lebman to his own pleasures, mainly leatherwork, as he was also extremely skilled at that craft and his saddles and bridles were prized among the high-swell class of Texan.

So the next day, at 11, just outside the Flores Street shop in downtown San Antonio, a block from city hall and the police department, across the street from the sheriff’s department, Les and J.P. pulled in. Both were smartly turned out after the fashion of the big-money gun aficionado, and they entered the store. It had the rich smell of leather to it, and was decorated with the owner’s more flamboyant enterprises — saddles with elaborate scrollwork carved into them, bridles and reins, cuffs and chaps, which displayed the same kind of bas-relief tapestry.

“Is the boss around?” Les asked a clerk behind the counter, who was showing a silver buckle to a richly appointed cowboy millionaire.

“Sir, he’s in back waiting for you.”

“Great,” said Les. He and J.P. went back, opened the door, and passed into another universe. Now they were in the world of ordnance.

No leather smell back here. Instead, the fragrance of Hoppe’s No. 9, the ubiquitous bore solvent to the shooting fraternity, mingled with odors of petroleum lubricants of various densities, for one wouldn’t oil a machine-gun bolt with the same delicate vintage one used on a tiny Colt .25 automatic pistol.

It was like a library of guns down here. The walls were lined with fine hunting rifles, many of foreign manufacture, as Lebman considered the European gunmakers far ahead of the American when it came to hunting rifles. A Mauser, a Mannlicher, or a Westley Richards far outshone their cruder American counterparts from Winchester and Remington and Marlin. Now, pistols were a different story. No one had surpassed the genius of Mr. Browning when it came to the automatic pistol, and Mr. Smith and Mr. Wesson had shown the world how to build a revolver, though the Colt revolver was a treasure, particularly its Officers Model that rode in so many police holsters, or its sawed-off cousin, the Detective Special, which many a plainclothesman carried tucked away. An ample supply of all these variants, plus dozens more, lay in shelves on either side of the place.

“Mr. Lebman, sir, how are you?” Les called, all charm and willed charisma. He could be a gentleman to you if he had decided not to kill you. Besides, he loved guns, he loved Mr. Lebman, he loved this place. He felt at home, happy, safe, which might be why he kept coming back.

“Mr. Smith,” said Lebman, looking up from a bench where he’d been filing tiny checks into the grip of a Government Model with his strong, greasy hands, watching his progress through a jeweler’s loupe. He rose, pushed the loupe up, stopping to wipe his hands, and then put one hand out. “Back in town, eh? So good to see you!”

“You know my associate, Mr. Davis?”

“Howdy,” said J.P., and Lebman nodded.

“Still having great fun with the machine pistol,” said Les. “I do think I like the .38 Super better than the .45. You need more weight in the gun to compensate for a .45’s recoil, but the .38 doesn’t move off its target at all.”

“But was it designed to be a bull’s-eye gun?”

“Hell, no. I like to get up close with it and just press the trigger. It’s empty in a second, and whatever I’m shooting at looks like it lost a fight with a hand grenade.”

Everybody laughed.

“Now, I heard you might have a little something I’d be interested in adding to my collection. That’s why I’m here,” said Les.

“I bet I know what it is,” said Mr. Lebman.

“Folks do talk to folks, and you hear things. So I heard you had this particular piece. Hard to come by, I’m told.”

“And you know, Mr. Smith, ‘hard to come by’ means ‘hard to pay for.’”

“I do indeed,” said Les. “Fortunately, we hit a new gusher on some property across the river, so I just have so much money coming in, I don’t know what to do with it. I’d give it to the poor, but that would be communistic. So I’ll just spend it, thinking that Texas has been mighty nice to me.”

“Okay,” said Lebman. “And you know the law has changed on us, so there’s a new level of discretion advised. You understand that?”

“Jimmie ‘Discretion’ Smith, that’s me. Fair price for the merchandise, lips sealed at no extra cost.”

“Well, maybe we can do some business,” said Mr. Lebman. “But not out here, where anyone might walk in. Hoping you’ll come back at closing time, and when the doors are locked and the lights out, we’ll see what we can come up with.”

“Sounds square to me,” said Les.

35

It was boilerplate, but it was good boilerplate, and he knew it well. He’d eked it out several years ago. Jen had helped him, when it got too tangled and the tenses threatened to go atomic, and he’d tested it enough times to know it worked. It’s what came of a bit of fame in a little pond in the boondocks. But he took some pride in doing it well, an old guy with buzz haircut, a face that looked like raw leather beaten with a crowbar, a weird gait to his walk, and a wardrobe perfect — just perfect — for 1957.

“Now, I know we have a new president,” he concluded, “and it’s too early to tell which direction we’ll be going, how wise, how just, how reasonable, how reluctant to use force, but also how willing to use force, hard and fierce, when it’s called for. But I do know this, from hard-earned experience: if and when the time comes, the president — and you and I — can count on the United States Marine Corps, thank you very much.”

Standard, but given meaning and dignity by the history he carried with him, having acquired it in rough zones. The applause was exuberant and he smiled, though tightly — he did everything tightly — and returned to his seat on the dais.

The banquet room of the Boise Hilton had been turned into a Temple to the United States Marine. Iconographic images dominated the walls, and the tables were full of prominent men, many former marines, many well into what passed for “establishment” in Idaho, who wished to share the marine feeling, express their belief and honor in country and service, and of course make business contacts and hand out cards. The chicken had been fine, the green beans not so fine, the bread awful, and he’d been speaking during dessert, so he’d missed the sheet cake with whipped cream and a pineapple chunk. Now, at the end of the evening, coffee was being served, and people were beginning to trail out.

“Nice job, Bob,” said Dr. Bill Tillotson, the vet and friend who’d asked him to do this gig as a favor, and, being involved in business with Bill, Bob had been unable to say no. It was okay. A few others leaned over, offering nice words, while on the dais the president of the Idaho chapter of the league was wrapping up routine business before signaling the end of the evening.

Bob just sat there, slightly exhausted. It takes it out of you, and it took it out of him more than others because of his seemingly genetic recessiveness. He’d never thought, and couldn’t have predicted, his business would be such a success, but things just took off, and he dealt with it as well as he could. Some cross to bear! he sometimes joked to himself.

But now the slight buzz of anxiety gone, he was free to relax and let his eyes find occupation in the photographs of marine history around the room. Of course he couldn’t see the most famous, which was mounted directly behind him, and showed the flag raising on Suribachi, caught in a freak moment of exquisitely designed perfection that seemed to sum up the marine experience in the war: filthy, exhausted men, sublime grace.

His eyes passed to others, and other wars, until he came to his real favorite, because it seemed to sum up his father’s war, though it was taken on an island his father never set foot on. It lacked the Iwo symmetry, and caught more of the awkwardness of combat, how men just did the best they could, and were almost always completely un-self-conscious as to how they looked or appeared, though the marines in the shot certainly looked solid enough. It had been taken on Wana Ridge, in the last great battle and slaughter of the war, Okinawa, in May of 1945, where the Japanese were determined to teach the Americans what an invasion of the home islands would cost them. Swagger had gotten interested in it once, and knew that the marine with the Thompson was named Davis T. Hargraves, and the BAR gunner, Gabriel Chavarria, and that they were from F Company, 2nd Battalion, 1st Regiment, 1st Marine Division. Both survived the war; both even revisited this spot fifty years later.

Hargraves stood upright on a slope of ruin, almost in perfect profile, against a landscape of shattered and leafless brush, and leaned into his Thompson. Somehow, he achieved a shooting position that was range-perfect, braced into the gun formally, locking it against his shoulder by the strong backwards pressure of his right-hand clutch on the pistol grip, his left arm also locked, pulling hard against the forearm piece and drawing it back into the shoulder for as much muscle as could be brought to bear on ten pounds of sheer weight and highly volatile recoil energy. His head perfectly aligned, so that his right eye precisely indexed both rear and front sights, he was in the act of firing — carefully, in light of the mandates of marksmanship — a burst at a Japanese sniper fifty or so yards away. Given his position, he probably didn’t miss. Just beyond him, Chavarria is pivoting to action with his BAR, rising from a crouch and following his comrade’s fire to the target so that he might fire too.

But the photo always had its little mysteries, primarily the magazine in Hargrave’s weapon. It was a twenty-rounder, a short, stubby thing. Why? Why, in an environment rich in both danger and targets, would you carry the smaller, twenty-round magazine instead of the longer, thirty-round magazine? An extra ten .45s could have saved somebody’s, including the gunner’s, life. Swagger could never look at the picture and not wonder.

Well, a couple possibilities suggested themselves. The thirty-rounders weren’t designed until 1942, and didn’t reach general distribution until 1943, so, in the meantime, plenty of twenty-rounders were in use. When the thirties came, no one bothered to collect the twenties. So they were equally accessible throughout the war. Maybe Davis Hargraves, who clearly would have begun the assault on Wana that morning with as much ammunition as he could carry, had used all his thirties and was now working his way through his few twenties. Or — this game was always fun! — possibly he thought General Thompson’s trench broom balanced better with the weight of the twenties, was more maneuverable in the busy, vegetation-clotted, and cratered surface of Wana on that May day. It could be either of those. Or a host of others.

Swagger smiled. He wished he was still a drinking man. Here’s to you, young Hargraves, and your buddy Chavarria, at the point of the spear, doing what had to be done, not because you loved it, but because it was a thing called Duty, and your generation — his father’s as well — had a war dumped in their laps and didn’t whine, complain, explain, they just went out and won the fucking thing, and Davis, standing stoic and stark against the Wana sky, was an emblem of just that.

“You okay?” said Bill.

“Ah! Yeah, fine. That picture, the guy with the Thompson. I always tighten up a little. Reminds me of my father.”

“God bless him,” said Bill.

“And all who went ashore with him. They were the best.”

At that point, his eyes drifted. The photo, blown up so big, revealed itself in ways its publication in books or on the Net never did.

“You always notice something new,” he said to Dr. Tillotson.

“What do you mean?” said the vet.

“I must have looked at that image five thousand times in my life. Yet not to this day did I notice something strange about the BAR that Chavarria is holding. Do you see?”

For those not of the gun, Swagger’s ruminations may have seemed insane. But Dr. Tillotson had hunted on six continents and had the biggest trophy hall in Idaho, except for some oil people. He knew what a BAR was.

“I don’t see anything,” he said.

“Look at the muzzle. He’s removed the compensator. It’s just got a blunt muzzle. He must have been a strong guy, he didn’t need any help holding the thing on target, though a .30 Government kicks like hell, especially in full auto. But — and I’m only guessing here — he must not have liked the upward flash signature the slots in the compensator created. The flash might have blocked his sight. He wanted to see what he was shooting at. I can’t think of anything else that”—that’s when it hit him, hit him so hard, finally, that it knocked him out of the moment, and he had to somehow get back into it enough to finish the sentence—“uh, would explain it.”

He saw in his mind the standard BAR compensator as he remembered it from his own infantry days in the early ’60s. From there, it was a small step to the realization that the odd, twelve-slotted cylinder he had been unable to identify was exactly the same length and, by measurement, also .30 caliber. It wouldn’t have been included in any machinegun.com website or books because it wasn’t technically a machine gun; it was, by definition or sheer whimsy of the Ordnance Department, an “automatic rifle.” So it followed that perhaps at some point, in some forgotten iteration, some godforsaken experiment, or something, someone might have tried to increase the propulsive power of the compensator by enlarging the vault in which the expanding gases were trapped before they spit out of the twelve slots that dissected the roof of the cylinder to hold the muzzle down to counteract the principle of action/reaction. He could recall no such thing in his experience, but, then again, neither he nor anybody knew all the guns in the world.

It made some kind of sense if there had been such a BAR variation.

The hours elasticized into decades, then generations, before he got back to the computer in his house in Cascade.

“How did it go?” Jen called.

“Swell, fine,” he yelled in a tone that meant “I’m obsessed.”

He got on, googled Browning Automatic Rifle.

And that’s when he discovered the Monitor.

It was another second before he realized that that’s what Baby Face was doing in Mavis, Arkansas, in the week after the shooting of Johnny D. He was traveling to San Antonio, Texas, and the shop of Hyman Lebman, the gangster gunsmith and merchant. Lebman would be exactly the sort of man to sell him a Monitor.

Now, what the hell did he need a Monitor for?

Swagger realized: he had to go to San Antonio and visit what was left of Hyman Lebman, what was left of Baby Face Nelson, and, possibly, what was left of Charles Swagger.

36

“Have you ever heard that term, Charles? Death wish?”

They sat on the patio of the big house.

“No, can’t say I have.”

“Do you have any idea what it could mean?”

This was not Charles’s game. He liked the real, the practical, the hard-edged world. Thinking deeply about things that couldn’t be seen or touched held no appeal for him.

“Well, in the war,” he groped, as the twilight came on and the lightning bugs began their illuminated pulses, “sometimes there’d be men who just couldn’t take it. It was tough, you know, the shelling, the snipers, the raids and counterraids, the mud and filth, the pressure of seeing buddies killed, and, after a while, it was hard to believe in anything, especially the future. It was said — I never saw it in the American army but I heard about it in the Canadian, where we were involved in what they called trench warfare; you know, living in mud, just waiting to get hit, for months and months — it was said that some men just gave up and walked into the German guns. Would that be a death wish?”

“Very good, Charles. That would be a death wish at the most practical level, an immediate response to an immediate and overwhelming stimulus, with no end, no relief, in sight, and all social pressure demanding that you stick it out while everything inside you screamed to run away. Yes, that would be a death wish.”

“But that’s not what you meant. I can tell by your tone. You meant something else, and I haven’t figured it out. I guess in your sense of the term, no, I ain’t never heard of a death wish.”

Where is this going? he wondered. He also knew he did not like not knowing where it was going. He hated not knowing what to do or say, being on the spot like this. What did it prove? How did it help?

“There’s some new theories of how the mind works, Charles. Recent findings in medicine and thought processes. Some folks believe that your mind is divided into two parts. One part, where you live, operate, talk, love, fornicate, work, shoot — whatever — that part is called the conscious. It’s everything you know, feel, or remember. It’s everything you think or believe.”

“Yes sir.”

“But, as I said, some folks believe there’s a second, hidden part to your mind. It’s called the subconscious and it lurks beneath. It never forgets; it harbors urges, secret pains, angers, grudges, even the impulse to resort to violence. And in some ways, at some times, it reaches out and influences what you do. And you don’t even know it. You’re confronted with choice A or B, and clearly A is the best choice but somehow you are compelled to choose B. That’s your subconscious working, influencing you to act, in some respects, against your best interests and to do things that otherwise make no sense at all. Do you see?”

Not really.

“Well, I suppose it’s possible.”

“Look, say, at these two men, John Dillinger and Baby Face Nelson. Johnny, who’s from a conventional and quite decent farm family, is sent to prison early after doing something stupid. In prison, the kings are the bank robbers; he falls in with them, learns from them, and gets his whole education and orientation from them. He, quite logically, wants to please them — they’re his real fathers — and sets out to become the biggest and best bank robber ever. See how it fits together?”

“Sure.”

“But then there’s Nelson. There’s no criminal in his family. But there’s a drunken father who beats his mother in front of him and he feels weak and worthless because he can’t stand up for her. He hates himself. As he grows up, that hatred transfers into a generalized hatred of society. There’s no influence on him, no bank robbers educating him and setting an example for him. It’s all in his mind, and somehow he sees the banks specifically, and society generally, as his father, and now that he’s brave and strong, he has this need to strike at his father. He does so by becoming a bank robber and, unlike Johnny, he’s especially vicious, he likes to kill. He hates law enforcement and takes pleasure in killing symbols of authority, like Carter Baum. That’s his subconscious working on him, making him do things that he doesn’t fully understand but can’t stop doing.”

“He sounds nuts to me,” said Charles.

“He is, in a way. That doesn’t make him innocent, it just makes sense out of him.”

“So you’re saying this subconscious thing can help us catch him.”

“Well, yes, but there is more to it than that… Here, let’s have another beer.”

Charles didn’t want another beer. He wanted to get out of there. This whole line of talk was giving him the heebie-jeebies. It was so far above his head.

“Betty, another couple Schlitzes, please,” Sam called, and in seconds she was there with two bottles.

“You two are so serious,” she said. “Now, no more. I’m going to put the steaks on. Charles, how do you like yours?”

Normalcy! How do you like your meat? Another beer? Gravy for the potatoes or not? This was stuff he understood. But then she turned away and he was again alone on the patio, with the humming of insects and the squawking of birds. And Sam.

“See, he may have a death wish in there too,” said Sam. “He hates himself for being so helpless where his mother was concerned. So he thinks he should be punished. So he takes insane risks. A part of him secretly wants the punishment of the bullet, has sought out a dangerous occupation and for that reason is unafraid in battle, because he welcomes the finishing shot. From the outside, it makes no sense. But it could from the inside.”

“Well, when you put it like that, I suppose it could make some sense.”

“I’m going this way not because I’m interested in them but because I’m interested in, and care for, you,” Sam continued. “I want to see you get back to Arkansas, get your youngest boy some high-quality help, make peace with the older boy so that he can understand what a brave and honorable man his father is. He deserves that. You deserve that.”

“I hope it works out like that, sure.”

“But do you really hope it does, Charles? Does your subconscious hope it does? You see, when I look at your heroism, I see something in there too. A crazy recklessness, a willingness to die for the cause, for any cause, for no cause, just to die. That’s why you put yourself way out front at both these shooting events you’ve been through, and I bet that happened in all your other gunfights, going back to raids in the war. It wasn’t just heroism; it was also a subconscious need for death. It was pure death wish.”

“Sam, I don’t feel nothing like that.”

“You can’t feel it. I mention it to get it out in the open, to get you thinking about it. If you get killed, I want it to be because it was Duty, not because you took wild, crazy-heroic, reckless, completely unnecessary chance number two hundred forty-five and you finally cashed out.”

“See,” said Charles, “in a fight you have to be aggressive and reckless. That’s how you win. Get close, shoot straight, keep moving. It’s common sense, not something underneath.”

It was such an odd conversation to have on the patio of a suburban mansion, amid the beauty and serenity of the well-achieved life, surrounded by comfort, ease, the succor of mild weather, the glow of a setting sun. Who could believe such a conversation would take place in such a place?

“Just hear me out,” said Sam. “I think it’s working like this. Somewhere in you is a secret. You’ve buried it way down deep, so deep you’ve trained yourself never to think about it. It’s something you know is wrong, whatever it is, something you did, something you are, that I don’t know, that I can’t imagine. I know you hate it. It shames you. It tarnishes your ideal of yourself, it makes the man you want to be unattainable. You would do anything to make it go away, but you have no tools. It’s an enemy that can’t be shot or arrested; it never goes away and comes out at the worst times. At some level, you believe you should be punished for holding it.”

“Wish my damned life were that interesting. I’m a country boy with a knack for the pistol, that’s all there is.”

“You’re too brave and honorable to ever commit suicide, so the pain just lingers. So you are attracted to behaviors where you could easily get killed. You want God to kill you. You want him to punish you, so you give him chance after chance after chance, starting with the war. Put me out of my misery, you’re saying to him. All those bullets that missed, you just want one of them to hit and end the whole thing.”

“Never heard such stuff,” said Charles. “Honest to god, Mr. Cowley, I don’t have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“Nor would you. That’s the point, Charles. This stuff is far below the surface.”

“Well, I suppose I’ll keep my eye on it, then,” Charles said.

“I see other things too, Charles. Your style is solitude. Most of the other men marry and live with their families, or, if they’re bachelors, they share apartments to save on expenses. They’re always around other folks, they’re part of a community. Charles lives alone in a small apartment. He doesn’t hang out with any pals, he doesn’t have any close office friends, he never goes drinking with the boys or bowling or to ball games. He’s pure loner. He’s separated himself from society. Maybe to keep himself pure, maybe because he’s never relaxed around other people, maybe because he’s afraid his secret will come out. It’s not natural.”

“Sir, I’m just trying to do the job y’all gave me best I can. All this other stuff, I don’t know enough to even answer.”

“Charles, you know I was a missionary, and for two years I lived in Hawaii. Those people are different. They have no repressions, they hold nothing back, they just are what they are. Sometimes I think that must be the better way. We hold, hide, bury, smother, pound, deny our feelings, and the result is, we make them worse, not better. The Hawaiians, who act on every impulse and hold nothing back, are far healthier and happier. The only thing our civilization is doing is teaching them to be unhappy like us.”

“Yes sir.”

“So all I am saying, Charles, is this. You can talk to me anytime, and you need have no fear of holding anything back. Nothing can shock me, not after two years in the tropics. And if you uncover a secret, you will find that sharing it with someone who cares is the best medicine in the world. It’s penicillin for the mind.”

“Yes sir.”

“I will be so disappointed, Charles, if you die racing into fire not because you have to but because your subconscious wants you to. What a waste that would be of the many gifts you bring to us. What a loss to your boys, the community, the Division. Charles, together we can work this thing out, I swear.”

“Boys, it’s dinnertime!” yelled Betty.

37

Lebman emerged with his trophy in both hands, shoulders bent to demonstrate the weight they carried.

“That’s what we came fifteen hundred miles for,” Les muttered to John Paul.

“Almost impossible to find,” said Mr. Lebman, “as Colt only made one hundred and twenty-five, and most were sold to police departments, the Justice Department, and industry security squads. But now and then one comes on the market, and I was in the right place at the right time.”

Les looked at it. The Monitor was John M. Browning’s famous Browning Automatic Rifle for infantry warfare, principally trench sweeping, as reimagined by Colt for law enforcement use. It had a whole list of modifications for lawmen to make it handier, lighter, easier to control, easier to conceal, more portable, and probably more fun. The Colt engineers had shortened both the barrel and the stock, they’d added a stubby pistol grip to accommodate upright shooting (the military BAR being shot primarily prone), the bipod had been jettisoned and a newly designed, expanded compensator had been added, to harness the hot gases of a burst of .30 caliber fire. Colt had not been mindful of what it was truly building, but it was the ideal bank robber’s gun, in that it was powerful enough to penetrate both the bulletproof vests and the car doors and hoods of the typical police department vehicle. It also outgunned most police departments, who couldn’t afford such a high-end product. But with all that power, it was handy to handle in the confines of a car, where, unlike its longer parent rifle, it was unlikely to snag or catch on or get caught in the upholstery. That was its chief value to Les, who saw that cars figured in all future plans.

“Oh, boy,” said Les. “I have to shoot that!”

“This way, boys.”

Lebman led them to a cellar door engineered for airtightness, down the wooden steps to a chamber heaped at one end with broken lumber, stacks of newspapers, old mattresses, busted furniture, and various expendable bric-a-brac, the wall behind lined with sandbags. It smelled of gunpowder and brass, which emitted the unmistakable odor from the piles of casings that had been swept against the brick walls. Other odors generated an atmosphere as rich as it was unhealthy, much amplified by the total lack of ventilation: carbon, the stench of splattered, splintered lead, the more acrid tang of shattered copper, and the styphnate of fired primers.

“Smells good down here,” said Les. “Man, I love this place.”

It was no formal shooting range, but it let potential customers run a few rounds through whatever pleased them. He took the weapon from Mr. Lebman, reacting first to its weight — sixteen pounds, unloaded — and then experiencing its easy heft when tucked under his arm and braced against his body, the comfort of its pistol grip, the fluidity of its design that seemed to encourage firing from the hip.

“This is the aces,” he cried in delight. “Man, it feels like a million bucks. Wait’ll you try it, J.P.”

“That’ll be a toot,” said J.P.

Mr. Lebman handed over another pound of twenty-round magazine, fully loaded with .30 caliber Government, and, knowingly, Les inserted it into the mag well. Then he reached up, caught the bolt handle, and slid it back to apogee, released it, and felt it slam home with a satisfying chunk as it stripped a cartridge from the mag and locked it in the chamber.

“Here we go,” said Les. “Cover your ears.”

Les squeezed off a five-round burst and the gun cracked hard and fast, leaping, spitting, filling the air with its exhaust and the explosiveness of its muzzle blast. It flashed so incandescently, it almost obliterated reality, since the barrel was shortened and only a portion of each cartridge’s charge burned inside, the rest left to alchemize to golden radiance just beyond the muzzle. Twenty-five feet away, the chaos that had been junk furniture and other detritus seemed to detonate and fill the air with shards and splinters and pellets.

“WOW!” said Les. “Oh, boy, is that a blast! Here I go again!”

This time, confident of his control of the weapon, he hammered out the last fifteen in the mag, ripping the barricade up, down, sideways, left and right, driving yet more carbon stench, paper flecks, and hot gas, jet-spraying frags and bits into the atmosphere, sending a steady stream of brass from the blur of the bolt operation that landed with audible clinks on the pavement floor.

“HOLY COW!” screamed Les again. “That is the wildest thing I ever saw! Man, I can’t wait”—and he almost blurted a fiction-destroying wish—“to hose down a State Police car and turn the coppers inside to hamburger”—but caught himself and instead said, “to get this on the ranch and shoot up some hay bales!”

“It is a superb piece of work,” said Mr. Lebman.

“How much, Mr. Lebman?”

“Now, we have to be careful, fellas,” said Mr. Lebman. “There is this new federal law, though I do so much business with Texas law enforcement, I think I’m okay. But, at the same time, just to be safe, I’d like some discretion. No walking out with the gun over your shoulder, then going to the nearest field for an afternoon’s shooting.”

“Of course not,” said Les.

“Maybe pick it up on your way out of town. I’ll break it down, clean it, lubricate it, make sure there’s no cracks, though I’ve never seen a Colt product crack, and have it secured in a case for an after-dark pickup.”

“No problem,” said Les. “Extra mags, plenty of ammo, what’s it come to?”

“Ten magazines, five hundred rounds of .30 Government, the gun itself, the secure packing, I’m thinking, fair profit for me, economical for you, five thousand seems right.”

That was the standard underworld fee for the gun.

“Hmm,” said Les. “Man, I love this piece, but five, I don’t know. What about four, cash, right now?”

“Four?” said Mr. Lebman.

“Who knows, maybe the cops come by tomorrow and confiscate all the full-autos because of that new law. The longer you hang on to it, the more awkward it could become. The four is instant, right now, this second.”

“Hmm,” said Lebman.

“Four crisp thousand-dollar bills, you won’t go wild with ’em? You’ll sort of wait, or maybe spend them in Mexico or on a foreign buying trip, and just like we’d never tell anyone where we got the Monitor, you’d never tell anyone where you got the cash?”

“I think you’ve got a deal,” said Lebman.

“J.P., want to burn a mag?”

“No, that’s okay. I’m fine.”

They headed upstairs, and Mr. Lebman took the gun to the back of his shop. Les got out his wad, peeled off the four big ones, and laid them out for Mr. Lebman. When the gunsmith came back, he took the money without counting and slipped it into his own pocket. No accounting was necessary; they’d done enough business before.

“Now, you call me when you want to pick it up.”

“Absolutely,” said Les. “I think we’ll be in town another week. All that good Mexican food, man, I have five more restaurants at least I want to try.”

38

“Ah,” said Mr. Leon Kaye, “haircut fee?”

He didn’t like where this one was heading. It was going to cost him money and he didn’t like spending money on something of little calculable value.

“Now, look here, Mr. Kaye,” said Braxton. He put his hand on his hair. It was thick, luxuriant, golden, a pure Viking mane from the seventh century A.D. It cost Braxton about three hundred dollars a month to maintain it.

“This hair, see, I been growing it for twenty years. It’s what’s called my brand. Rawley and I are known for our hair in the way a country singer or a rock star might be known.”

“Braxton, it’s your choice how to grow your hair. It’s nothing I’d be expecting to pay a fee for.”

“It took me best part of three years to grow it out like this. It takes one of Little Rock’s best beauty shops on healthy retainer for a visit twice weekly to keep it such a brilliant blond. Same for Rawley.”

Rawley nodded. His mane, if anything, may have been a little more luxuriant, a little more blond, a little more Viking than his brother’s. It was quite a head of hair. And, taken together, the two of them looked like Siegfried and Roy on HGH from Samoa.

“See, that’s where you’re misunderstanding the situation, sir,” said Braxton. “What you ain’t getting is that in the Negro community, where we do most of our work, and as well in the low-white community, mostly of Appalachian heritage, found in trailer parks and government housing the mid-South over, this hair ain’t only a certain look — a trademark, you might say — it’s a communication, and it speaks in a certain tone to them that has to be spoken to. First off, it gets their attention fast. They ain’t the most alert folks, you see, and getting them to pay attention is part of the battle right there.”

Glumly, Mr. Kaye nodded. His pawnshops also served roughly the same demographic and he had to admit there was some wisdom in Braxton’s assertion, not that under any other circumstances, and things being what they were, he would have acknowledged it.

“And here’s the message it carries. It says to them: We wouldn’t look so ridiculous if we couldn’t kick your asses all the way to Tuesday. It says: We do this for a living. We done a lot of it. Best now you cooperate with us, you save yourself a lot of hurt that way. It says: See, we ain’t no white person all teared up and gulpy over the horrible things our kind did to your kind. We the other kind of white people. We the kind that did them horrible things. We do ’em again, twice as hard, twice as mean, if you don’t cooperate. That’s a language our Negro clients understand, clear as a bell, and, like as not, they cooperate. Nobody done gets smacked about, arms broke, teeth swallowed, faces swelled like a grapefruit, right, Rawley? They have to know we represent the principle that it can all go away fast.”

Rawley could speak. It was just that he didn’t very often. At this point, he elected to say something quite strange.

“Sick. Transit. Gloria Monday.”

Mr. Kaye swallowed. What the hell? Tongues? Gibberish? A lunatic’s blubbering?

“Now, see if you can’t follow where I’m going,” said Braxton. “In order to follow the hero Swagger over the next few weeks, we will have to go in mufti, so to speak. Nothing showy, nothing with style and sparkle and ritz to it. No Viking tribal chief bouffant. No, it’s hair close-cropped, dull-black Men’s Wearhouse suits. No Lucchese boots, black inset with purple and red with silver skull points. It’s Rockport walkers instead.”

“I own a Men’s Wearhouse,” said Mr. Kaye. “I can get you a good price…”

But Braxton hadn’t heard him.

“To get to that point, we got to stop at the barber and sit still while he shaves us near clean, as we are blond to the root. All that investment in time and care and money to attain a certain thing, all that will be gone. It’ll be gone good and far away. And when our job is done and you have your serial 1934 bills and are counting all that money they brings you, we got months of downtime, waiting for our hair to grow out. We can’t do our real jobs without no hair. Without our hair, we just two old, fat, bald white guys, and nobody is more invisible in our world today than old, fat, bald white guys. So it’s only fair we be compensated for our sacrifice.”

“Fellows,” said Mr. Kaye, “I’m known as a bargainer. As a negotiator par excellence, good with money, quick with the numbers, able to see now versus then in any exchange, and patient enough to wait for the long-haul payoff. So I did my investigating. And I know you aren’t really in a position financially — certain gambling debts, a lawsuit by the family of that boy you misidentified for that other boy — to walk away from the very generous amount of my initial offer. So I’m afraid it’ll have to stand.”

Braxton squealed with delight.

“He done ’vestigated us, Rawley,” he said. “He ain’t no fool, that Mr. Kaye! He didn’t make a fortune in the gold business by being no fool, no sir!”

He smiled, his caps glowing like the Chiclets of Death.

“Now, because we are big, you’re thinking, ‘They’s dumb.’ But, sir, here’s my news for you: we ain’t dumb. You think we could run sophisticated software-intercept programs that get us in the most amazing places and be dumb? No sir. We smart enough, most important, to know what we know, and what we don’t know. And if we don’t know a thing, we get help. Are you following me, Mr. Kaye?”

“Of course,” said Kaye, “but my position is firm.”

“So, being Grumley, we ask another Grumley for help. Grumley always help Grumley. Like the Masons, only without the goofy hats. Who needs goofy hats when you got blood working on your side?”

“Braxton, I’m a busy man. I don’t mean to be rude, but I need you to get to the point, if you have one.”

“The point is, you invested heavily in property and development of a new Vegas to be called Razorback City, in Fayetteville. You done that to get in on the ground floor when gambling becomes legal in certain areas of our state. When that happens, you will make billions, owning the prime land in Razorback City. You can develop your own casinos; you can sell land to other interests, make a ton there. The sky’s the limit, and the money just pours in. You’re in the money, you’re in the money.”

How the fuck did they know?

“He looks surprised, don’t he, Rawley?”

Rawley nodded.

“Yep, a Grumley can find anything out if he sets his mind to it. They found out that secret. And they found out the other secret too.”

Fuck! thought Mr. Kaye.

“And that is, an interest payment came due for a certain party a few weeks ago and you just didn’t have the cash, because even if you’re pawnshop and strip joint and Men’s Wearhouse rich, you’re cash poor, and so you borrowed from some nasty boys with Russian DNA now in Vegas. You expected a big surge of dough when the Recession got fixed under the new president, only it didn’t. The economy just stayed where it was, flat like a ’tater pancake.”

Mr. Kaye swallowed. Their intelligence was so good! These two… professional wrestlers!

“So this here game ain’t some little minor con you got going ’cause you like old thousand-dollar bills, it’s life or death because you need cash fast or the Russians will bring the big pain on you. They are not the sort to be persuaded to patience, no sir. You deliver to them when you say you will or you go for a swim with a slot machine chained to your thumbs. Sir, you are mortgaged so tight and in debt so far, you are breathing through a little tiny whisper of nostril left above the water. If you don’t come through in a very short time, you going to be permanently in the big wet glub-glub.”

Mr. Kaye said nothing. His eyes crinkled into a reptilian life-form’s and seemed to see nothing, while, behind them, images of his own lungs filling with unstoppable cold Arkansas lake water took over his brain.

“So here’s the deal. Haircut fee, five thousand dollars per man, now, in cash, from a fund not even your accountant/mistress — the Korean gal, she manages a pawn for you in Roberts, and, by the way, she’s also fucking the guy that owns the Burger King across the street, and I sort of think she likes what he brings to the table more than what you bring, but I won’t bother with the pictures for now — not even Miss Lilly Park knows about. Then, as agreed previously, a sixty-five/thirty-five split. Plenty of swag for both, gits you out of the deep lake water. And we will be with you every single step of the way so that we can follow the bookkeeping down to the penny. To the penny, sir. Miss Lilly Park will check the math.”

39

The trip to Texas proved anticlimactic.

“More circumstantial stuff,” said Bob. “Nothing hard, empirical, subject to other analysis, irrefutable, useful.”

“Circumstantial is admissible,” said Nick. “Sometimes it’s all we have.”

Swagger threw back another swig of Diet, again looked longingly at the highball in Nick’s hand. They sat in the basement workroom, unofficial headquarters of Operation Charles Fitzgerald Swagger.

“So let’s hear it.”

“First, to Waco. Texas Ranger Museum. They have a Monitor there, only one I could find fast. Went to museum, looked at it — they say it was Frank Hamer’s — and compared my little nozzle with the comp on the Monitor, through the glass case.”

“And?”

“Yep, the same. That’s why it was such a fine piece of machinework. Colt had the best machinists in the trade in those days, their standard product of the finest quality. Mine was actually a little bit better than theirs, but it’s been sitting in a box since 1934. The Rangers probably haul theirs out to the range every six months for the fun of it and run a couple hundred rounds just to watch the dirt fly and the soda cans pop.”

“Sounds like fun to me.”

“With that, I headed to San Antonio to look into Mr. Lebman. After the passage of the National Firearms Act in June of 1934, he kept very careful records. He knew the federal hammer could drop at any second and that in the end his contacts with San Antonio law enforcement might not do him any good.”

“He could feel their breaths on his neck.”

“Exactly. So Bill Lebman, his grandson, let me look through the records. He guided me and we found it. In mid-August 1934, it’s in the book as ‘Colt Rifle IA-83-25433, sold to Jimmie Smith, Midland, Texas.’”

“Is that a Monitor number?”

“It is. I have a guy big in collecting circles with a contact at Colt. Called him, he made the call, called me back. It was a Monitor, one of a run of a hundred and twenty-five made in 1931, sold to Dallas Mercantile and Security in February of 1932. No further information.”

“And Jimmie is Nelson.”

“Yeah, because he’s down as buying a .38 Super Colt machine pistol from Mr. Lebman in mid-1932, and that gun was found in a Dillinger arms cache in St. Paul in ’34. Testimony from gang associates puts it as a gift from Nelson to his hero, Johnny.”

“Solid,” said Nick.

“But we can’t prove the comp in Charles’s strongbox was the comp on the Monitor sold to Baby Face. It’s not a serial-numbered part. Still, it strongly suggests that Charles had an interaction with Baby Face in 1934 and somehow came into possession of the comp, maybe the whole gun. As I said, circumstantial, provocative — it certainly would follow that Charles could have that interaction only as a member of the Bureau. But… it don’t prove nothing.”

“And now for the bad news,” said Nick.

“Wait, I missed the good news,” said Bob.

“You ID’d the muzzle brake. You made it to Baby Face, then to Charles. It’s getting tighter and tighter. Tight enough for public consumption. Well, I came up with something too. Or, rather, our senior historian came up with it and sent it on to me.”

“Bad news?”

“Probably not. But you should know, it should be in the air, and it’s something we should look to disprove.”

“You’ve got me all tangled up.”

“Come over here.”

Nick led him to his computer, where he opened email, selected a message topic-lined “Recording,” from the official Bureau address, and opened it.

“He came across a cardboard box marked ‘Arkansas.’ Went through it, nothing of note but an old reel of magnetic-tape recording. He played it. Nothing on it but a recording someone had made in early December of 1934 of the Walter Winchell Show. Know him?”

“Some big news guy?”

“Gossip, more like. Claimed to have the inside scoop. New York columnist, syndicated all over the place, got a network radio show when network radio was the TV of America. He was pals with lots of big shots, including a certain Director of the FBI, which wasn’t even the ‘FBI’ until six months later.”

“Okay. It has to do with Arkansas? So what?”

“Let me play it for you. If the voice is familiar, it’s because you’re old enough to have watched The Untouchables as a kid, and Winchell was the narrator on that show.”

Nick moved the cursor to an icon in the text of the message, hit “Enter,” and a voice emerged from eighty-odd years ago over the speakers, stentorian, witless, full of rectitude and certainty.

“Now, I’ll never criticize Mr. J. Edgar,” said Winchell into a radio mic the size of a hubcap in a studio in Manhattan on that cold December night, and Nick and Bob listened to it through technology Winchell couldn’t have imagined eighty-three years later, “and the job he and his boys are doing against vermin like John Dillinger, Pretty Boy Floyd, and Baby Face Nelson, Public Enemies Number One, who are now Public Enemies Number Dead. But even J. Edgar makes mistakes. It seems one of the boys wasn’t up to the task of going gun to gun against the Tommy-toting gangsters and he cut and ran — all the way to Hicktown, Arkansas, where he came from. Quitters never win and winners never quit. What that shows is two things: first, Mr. Hoover is capable of making a mistake. He’s human too, after all, and admits it. Second, there’s no room for yellow among the red, white, and blue.”

“Can’t be Charles Swagger,” said Bob. “That old bastard didn’t have any run in him.”

“I’m not saying it is,” said Nick. “But it could be aimed at Charles. It meant to destroy him. Someone in high places used Winchell to smear the only man in Arkansas who’d been in the Division. Really, to crush him. It’s like erasing. I don’t know what he did, but he managed to get folks real angered.”

“A coward? No,” said Bob, but, even so, he didn’t like the feel, the sound, the direction. He shuddered. “A bastard. A crook, maybe. A drunk, absolutely. But a coward? No way.”

40

Another stakeout. This one was off a Purvis tip, so Purvis ran it. It was pure theater. Charles knew that he’d hear about Baby Face from Uncle Phil alone, and any other source was almost certainly bogus. But protocols had to be observed and so he and a team of young fellows set up in cars on the North Side, around a joint called The Yellow Parrot, once a favorite of Big Al’s, and said, for tonight at least, to be a spot where Baby Face might make his presence known. In the cars was enough heavy artillery to make him regret the decision.

Charles, a Thompson with a fifty-round drum in his lap pressing heavily against his legs, sat breathing through a tailor-made in Division car number 13, a big Hudson, with Ed Hollis behind the wheel, his Browning rifle in the backseat for a fast grab if it happened, which it wouldn’t. They smoked, they felt their wristwatches ticking the night away, they watched the occasional drunk stagger this way or that from one North Side gin joint to another, they tried to stay alert and ready.

“It’s not going to happen, is it, Sheriff?” asked Ed.

“Probably not.”

“I thought Baby Face was a homebody. He’d be screwing Helen, not prowling jazz cribs on the North Side.”

“That’s what they say. But maybe it’s a professional meet, a job-planning session. That might get him out on the town.”

“Wouldn’t you see other faces on the wall in there by now?”

“You would. Inspector Purvis said he got this from a State Police informant inside a downstate car-theft ring, who’s known to sell heaps to the bank gangs. It could be legit. It ain’t, but it could be.”

Both men sighed, smiled, and settled back. These things were usually called off around 2 a.m. And that was an hour away, so there was nothing to do but squirm after comfort, stretch cramping neck muscles, keep the hands loose and flexible, and eat up time diddling with the makings of yet another tailor-made.

Suddenly a phantom swept before Charles on the right. It was Purvis. Charles rolled down the window.

“Charles, can you do me a favor?”

“Sure thing,” said Charles. “Name it.”

“I owe a reporter a favor. I also owe myself a favor because everyone thinks I’m just out promoting myself. So this guy from the Herald-Examiner got wind of tonight’s operation, and he’s showed up. Can you chat with him a few minutes? He’s pretty solid, can be trusted, okay?”

“Sure,” said Charles, “but I don’t know what I could tell him.”

“Tell him Dillinger’s last words. It’s something we haven’t released yet. He’ll appreciate it. It’s Page One for him. Then tell him you’ll return his phone calls. But of course never return his phone calls.”

“I never do,” said Charles.

He set the Thompson down, after pushing the SAFE lever into position, and slipped out of the Hudson. His legs issued distress as they unfolded and found themselves required to perform labor again. He twisted, stretched his back, and followed Purvis down the dark street and into an alley, where a man awaited.

Purvis handled the intros, and the fellow was a Dave Jessup, Chicago Herald-Examiner, one of the more respectable rags, and immediately impressed Charles as someone never to play poker with. Feral, over-alert, a little nervous. City rat, knew the angles, the deals, where the bodies rotted. Oh, and of course wiseguy. Smart aleck. Fast lip. Wanted to write movies and hang out with stars.

“So, I guess that you’re him?”

“Him?” asked Charles.

“You know, the cowboy gunfighter who plugged Johnny. Your outfit wants Mel to be the face of it, but I figure it had to be someone more cowboy than Mel, who’s a little uptown for that kind of work.”

“Sir, the policy is not to release details. I was there, I did my job as it came up, and that’s all I can say.”

“They wouldn’t have put you there unless you’d been there a lot of times. It’s the kind of game where experience counts, right? A lot of time behind a pistol. See it, hit it, bury it?”

He had an eager aggression that almost caused his face to shine.

“It’s okay if you tell me,” he said. “Off the record means off the record.”

“Until it don’t,” said Charles.

“No, no, when I say it, I mean it. Ask around, you’ll see that I keep my word. We’re not the Trib, or the Sun or the Times. We run a class outfit and shoot square all the way.”

“Well, I’m not the type that talks things up. I just did what was required by circumstance, and that’s all I’d be comfortable saying, record or no.”

“Okay. But I have heard you got to him first when he went down. You heard what he said.”

“I did. Truth is, it didn’t make much sense.”

“Can you tell me?”

“Something about the way he was dressed.”

“I guess he thought he was a dude. You remember the exact words? Something I can put in the paper?”

“I’m thinking it was”—what was it? — “something about wanting to be ‘dressed right for people.’”

“Was it a joke?”

“He had a hole the size of a tomato in his face. His brains were on the sidewalk. I don’t think he was trying to be funny.”

“You know it, I know it, but the rubes don’t know it. Say, pal, you’re okay. I’m thinking something like, But I ain’t dressed for church. Or, I’m not even wearing a tie!”

“He was wearing a tie. No jacket, though.”

“Then, I’m not dressed for this.”

“It might have been something like that, I suppose. But there was another element. I’m not dressed for folks, maybe. Or, I’m not dressed for company.”

“So if I say his last words are ‘I’m not dressed for company,’ you’re not going to call me a liar?”

“I’m not going to call you anything. I’m not going to call you.”

“That’s all I want. You just got me a bonus. ‘I’m not dressed for company’—swell, the rubes think Hollywood writes everything, they want a snappy end line. Here, let me give you my card, it’s got my number at the Examiner, and if there’s anything I can do for the real hero of the day, you let me know. See, I know stuff, I know folks, I do favors and find things out. I always know the real story behind the story I print and I know the story I print is basically bullshit. Maybe I can do you a favor someday.”

“Sure, and some day pigs will star in movies.”

“Good one,” said Jessup.

Charles slipped the card into his pocket and watched the fellow slip away, happy with his little fake prize.

Charles had another nightmare that night, a particularly bad one. The war; men jostling and climbing to meet the bristling fire; gray, muttering faces, masked with fear — Jesus, when will it stop? — and, in the aftermath, the men who’d died, the paleness of their bodies against the mud, the reaching white limbs, the results of ballistics against the tenderness of flesh, the smell of shit that occluded the Western Front from start to finish. He woke, blinking and sweaty, glad at least he hadn’t screamed. He was okay. But it was mid-morning and there was no point in trying to get back to sleep. He rose, showered, dressed, slipped the .45 in the shoulder holster, and left. Not much business at the diner, and he had a nice breakfast of eggs, bacon, coffee, juice. That would keep him going until a late dinner.

He got in about 11:30 and noticed it right away. It was a note from Elaine: “Call your Uncle Phil as soon as possible.”

41

“Okay,” said Bob, “you got me all excited.”

“This one is big. I think you’ll be pleased.”

They were in the study, sometime before dinner, and Bob had just arrived after a hasty call from Nick.

“I got another call from History itself,” Nick explained.

Swagger knew that was the senior historian, who could find anything in the vast array of frayed papers stuffed into filing cabinets and cardboard boxes that occupied the entire floor of the Hoover subbasement, as he had with the Winchell recording.

“He was on another project, but he came across this and saw immediately how it might fit in for us.”

Bob took the document, and looked at it closely. Unusually, it wasn’t a photocopy but the real thing, typed on four pieces of real paper, each secured in a plastic sleeve to protect it from the elements, human touch especially.

“I was running late; he was running early,” Nick explained. “He had a speech to give. Photocopying was backed up. He said, just take this one, but have it back on Monday. And be careful. Otherwise, no significance. We just can’t make a paper airplane out of it.”

It was a closely typed report of some sort, whose typeface, nomenclature, official seal, and catalog number all accorded with Bureau paperwork protocols as Swagger had encountered them. The title read

Below that, it said “Submitted, June 18, 1934, by REDACTED.”

Scanning the brief accumulation of pages, he saw also that at the bottom right of each page it bore the notation “REDACTED/EPD.”

“EPD typed it,” said Nick, “we know her. That’s our favorite gal, Elaine Donovan, the hardest-working gal in showbiz. She also typed the thing from South Bend, or at least the original pages.”

Bob began reading.

It was, clearly, in a voice of a man knowledgeable in handgun fighting, physics, mechanics, maintenance, and training; clearly, a man who had won more than a few gunfights. His suggestions also seemed radical for the time. He didn’t believe in the concept of the static range, where agents stood still in rigid target positions and fired one-handed at silhouette targets twenty-five yards away. Instead, he recommended a “dynamic action” course of fire, in which agents would draw from concealment, move, engage sculptural targets from concealed positions at unusual angles, sometimes firing down, sometimes firing up, sometimes firing at movers, sometimes at chargers. They would be encouraged to fire two-handed, instead of the conventional one, to always use their sights, and to load under time pressures. It was just like the latest SEAL or SWAT doctrine. He encouraged high-hip carry, cocked-and-locked .45 automatics or Smith & Wesson Heavy Duty .38s on .44 frames, with much practice on draw and first-shot placement, followed by rapid movement toward cover or, if cover wasn’t available, to evade return fire. For raid or arrest teams, he urged special training in maneuvering off a base of fire, based on army raiding techniques; use of short-barreled fully automatic weapons, such as Thompsons, with the stocks removed, or .351 Winchesters or .35 Remington semi-autos, tweaked to go full rat-a-tat-tat. He believed in a sniper component as part of deployment, and took it further by recommending establishing a sniper school, for he felt that the precise long-range shot was a useful tool in the law enforcement repertoire. He recommended the heavy-caliber bullet for both automatic or revolver, in the year before the .357 Magnum was developed and adopted.

“It sounds Swagger, doesn’t it?” said Nick. “There may have been other fellows around who had the experience and had thought rigorously about the issue as well, but I don’t think any of them worked for the FBI at the time.”

“Someone fixed the grammar and spelling, for sure, but that’s him. And he knew what he was talking about,” said Bob.

“In that time period, only a few did, but they didn’t have the Bureau’s ear. I’m thinking of Elmer Keith, Ed McGivern, maybe some others. The other handgun-and-tactics writers and thinkers didn’t come along until after the war.”

Bob nodded.

“It really seems to cement the case,” said Nick.

“Well,” said Bob, “still in the goddamned ‘circumstantial’ zone. But maybe there’s something else here.”

“I missed something?”

“Not at all. But this paragraph, page 4, bottom, and on to page 5, top, is interesting.”

Nick read:

“‘It is also suggested that the Division field offices hire or place under part-time contracts professional gunsmiths, as opposed to the current practice of appointing an armorer from among the agent pool. Gunsmithing is a fine art, and a man who has mastered the intricacies and nuance of firearms can contribute a great deal more than simple maintenance, cleaning, minor repair, and cataloging, which is the limit of the armorer’s abilities. A gunsmith, for example, can transform a stock automatic into a far more useful fighting tool that will give our agents the advantage, particularly in close-range public arrest situations that are so likely to occur. A Government Model Colt .45 ACP, for example, can be improved for reliability by judicious filing of the joinery between frame and barrel; its tiny sights, almost worthless in any kind of shooting event, can be replaced with larger sights, which are easier to pick up in the blur of action. The sights can also be painted red or white, again for faster visual acquisition. The grip safety, which all too frequently prevents a quickly drawn pistol from coming off safe if the agent misplaces his hands, can be neutralized, either temporarily by a rawhide tie-down or more permanently by the usage of a tapped screw. The safety lever on the frame can be enlarged, so that the thumb naturally falls upon it and depresses it with one hundred percent reliability in emergency situations. Finally, the trigger can be rendered, by polishing certain interior surfaces, much smoother, so that the gun is not apt to betray its shooter with a pulled shot when the uneven or gritty trigger pull torques the muzzle off target.’”

“I did see that,” said Nick. “As I recall, the pistol you recovered from the strongbox in the foundation had been worked on in exactly that way.”

“It had. I shot it, I think I told you, and it was a solid piece of work.”

“But you think it has other significance?”

“Hmm, maybe. Maybe he did it right away, when he was issued it. But he was very busy, he was trying to impress people, first-day-on-new-job bullshit, he wanted to hit the ground running, maybe he didn’t have the time. Maybe also he wanted to wait a bit until he’d built a reputation and was respected by management before he took a file to a piece of government-issue equipment. Some might have considered such an enterprise vandalism of government property. He’d want cover before he did it.”

“Unprovable, but it makes sense via the universal workplace rules that apply everywhere, from the Third Reich to the building of the Pyramids and back, on up to NASA: the star gets to do what he wants. But I’m still not sure where this is going.”

“Given that, what would impel him to take the file to the metal?”

“An upcoming arrest,” said Nick. “Potential for action. He had to get the gun up to his standards if he knew he was going to a shoot-out.”

“That’s it.”

“I get it. You think he was on the Dillinger team. He shot John Dillinger.”

“It was his kind of party. It was what they brought him in to handle.”

Nick chewed it over. The identity of the agent who shot Dillinger had never been released, as per the Director’s mandate that no individual got the glory, the outfit did. Most people assumed it was Melvin Purvis because he was the “face” of the Division in those days, though Purvis himself had never made such a claim.

“I wonder if there’s any way of proving it?”

“The serial number was recorded, even if his name was redacted. It was one of ten pistols received from the Postal Department, C-variants shipped to the Chicago Field Office. That particular one was marked ‘Duty Loss,’ but the other nine remained in service until they were retired, whenever. If we know that the agents they were issued to weren’t present during the Dillinger shooting — those being the only issued .45s in Chicago — then that lost pistol had to be the one. That seems pretty airtight.”

“I think you’re on to something.”

“But here’s where I’m going with this. Remember how I said I couldn’t figure out a money angle? There was no treasure. Why was I being followed? You told me it’s always about money. I’m just following your advice.”

“Sometimes I’m so brilliant, it amazes even me,” said Nick.

“That gun — the verified pistol that shot John Dillinger dead in Chicago, July twenty-second, 1934, at the Biograph Theater — that gun might be worth… I don’t know… thousands… hundreds of thousands…”

“It should go to the Bureau.”

“It should. But if somebody who knew the rare-gun trade, who had contacts, who had connections in the black market, and knew a lot of wealthy collectors — let’s take it another step — maybe then there are other guns from that era that my grandfather somehow ended up with — that trove of guns, all of them verifiable by serial number — Jesus Christ, now I see it — maybe even Baby Face’s Monitor, we could be talking millions.”

Then he sighed.

“Now all we have to do is solve the map and prove that Charles was in fact in the Bureau.”

“Details, details,” said Nick.