Road to Perdition

Seventeen

My father took me to Chippiannock Cemetery, or rather I took him — drove him there, from St. Peter’s. When he was sure we weren’t being followed, he gave me directions, and my next memory is Papa and me all alone in the vast sloping graveyard, surrounded by stone cherubs and crosses, the snow gone, patches of green trying to overtake the brown.

So we had our graveside good-byes, after all.

I remember kneeling at Mama’s simple gravestone, next to Peter’s, and saying, “We should have brought flowers.”

And Papa said, “That’s all right, Michael. It’s still too cold for flowers.”

That had troubled me, and I asked, “Is Mama cold?”

“She’s free of earthly concerns, son.”

My father is buried next to them, now; and one day — one day soon — I will join them in the Village of the Dead. Connor Looney is buried in Chippiannock, too. When I first heard, I thought that was a terrible thing — even the ground should be more discriminating.

But with the passage of years, I’ve come to see the rightness of it. We were bound together in life and death, all of us, and my father, mother, and brother will be forever linked to the Looneys, as will I, at least as long as people are interested in the history of that lefthanded form of human endeavor called crime.

John Looney, unfortunately, is not buried at Chippiannock. His grave is at his ranch in New Mexico, next to his wife’s, one last getaway from Tri-Cities trouble.

They say he was packed and ready to go to Chama, that rainy Sunday night; he could have caught an afternoon train, but instead he lingered, for reasons of his own. Perhaps he had pressing business that needed tending before he could leave.

Or maybe the old man had a sense of his destiny. Maybe he believed in fate — though I’m not convinced he believed in anything at all.

The Paradise Hotel was in downtown Prophetstown, near the Tri-Cities, on the way to Chicago. Nondescript, almost rundown, the three-story frame building was anything but paradise, the kind of lodgings the less successful traveling salesmen resorted to in these hard times.

The boy was asleep in his clothes on top of one of the twin beds in a room whose yellowish wainscoted walls had grime and stains from the decades that had passed since the hotel’s heyday. A naked bulb screwed in the wall provided the only illumination; O’Sullivan switched it off, and sat on the bed next to the boy. Rain streaked the windows, and its reflected shimmer made patterns on the slumbering child. Thunder rumbled, sounding distant, but a threat nonetheless.

O’Sullivan was in the same suit he’d worn to the church today. He wore no tie. This was the end of the road and he knew it — and he knew what had to be done, knew now the only way that Capone and Nitti would give up Connor to him.

Because he had phone calls to make, and other preparations, O’Sullivan had taken the adjoining room, as well; and he’d made his arrangement with the desk clerk for the long-distance calls.

From that adjoining room, he sat at a table, a work area where salesman and businessmen could go over their receipts and records, and used the phone. Shabby, sparsely furnished, these two rooms did not constitute a suite worthy of, say, Alexander Rance. But it suited Mike O’Sullivan’s purposes just fine.

He did not reach Nitti at first. Someone at the Lexington asked for a number where Mr. Nitti could return the call, and O’Sullivan refused to play along.

“Tell Nitti,” he said into the receiver, “that Mike O’Sullivan will call again — in one hour.”

Then O’Sullivan hung up. Still seated at the table, he made out a list of banks and safe deposit box numbers on a sheet of Hotel Paradise letterhead; he wrote “Michael” on an envelope and inserted the sheet into that, with eight little keys folded up inside — also included were Uncle Bob’s phone number and directions to the farm on the lake. Then he slipped in a fat wad of cash, enough to carry the boy for weeks, perhaps months, and licked the flap and sealed it shut.

O’Sullivan went back in where his son slept, and placed the envelope on the scarred nightstand, where a fat little Lone Ranger book lay folded open next to the boy’s small revolver. Again he sat beside Michael and looked at him for a long time — studying him, committing to memory every detail of the child, as if he hoped to recognize the boy in some other lifetime.

Then he stroked his son’s hair, thinking how much he loved the child, hoping Michael knew, and got up and returned to the next room, not realizing the boy had only been pretending to be asleep.

Alone in the room now, Michael eyed the letter on the nightstand suspiciously. The word “good-bye” seemed to rise off the envelope like steam. Glancing toward where his father had gone, the boy saw a strip of light along the doorway’s edge. He rose and went to the door, nudging it open another crack, and peeked in.

His father sat at a table, the hard-shell black case before him, closed; like a master musician, he unsnapped the clasps, lifted the lid, and revealed the protectively nestled parts of his instrument — the tommy gun, which had been with them on their journey, but had gone as yet unused.

Michael was amazed by the speed, the precision of it: piece by piece, checking each one, his father assembled the gun quickly, efficiently, snapping the parts together, tiny loud mechanical clicks and clacks, each one making the boy flinch. Michael had seen his father like this many times on the road — intense, methodical, precise; but something seemed different tonight. Papa was preparing not just the gun, but himself — snapping his own parts together, somehow.

Steeling himself.

Finally, the drum of ammunition was clicked in place onto the assembled machine gun, and the boy went in.

O’Sullivan turned to him, with an expression almost like a kid getting caught doing something he shouldn’t — the gun before him like the contents of a forbidden cookie jar.

“What are you doing?” the boy asked sternly.

“Preparing myself.”

“For what?”

“For the one last thing that has to be done.”

“And then?”

“Then we’re free of it, son.”

Michael just stood there in his rumpled clothes, and stared at his father with blank accusation.

Papa, not irritated, even gentle, said, “Go back to bed, Michael.”

“Who are you going to kill?”

“Michael... ”

“I know I should want you to kill Mama’s and Peter’s killer. But right now I just want us to go off somewhere. Even if it is Perdition.”

“This is perdition, son.”

“What?”

“Son — go to bed.”

“Shall I say my prayers, Papa?”

“If you like.”

“Because I’m a sinner, too, Papa? Helping you like I have?”

He shook his head. “We’re all sinners, son. That’s the way we enter this world. But we can leave it forgiven.”

The boy knew what that meant — more candles. But he had been skeptical when the nuns at the Villa taught him theology, and he was skeptical now, when a man holding a machine gun was giving the lesson.

“You’re leaving me here,” Michael said — the accusation boldly out in front of them both.

“... I’ll be gone tonight... tomorrow morning, I’ll be back.”

“If you don’t get killed, you mean.”

His father shot him a look. “Michael — I’ll be back. I promise.”

But neither of them quite believed it.

And nothing was left to say. The boy stumbled off to his bed, and the man took one last look at the machine gun before moving on to his Colt .45 automatic, which could use a cleaning.

When he was done, O’Sullivan made his phone call.

For several hours that rainy evening, at the small restaurant in downtown Rock Island, not far from his newspaper office on Second Avenue, John Looney met with certain key associates. Looney was handling his own legal matters now, since the demise of Frank Kelly, and he needed to make sure the wheels would move smoothly while he had his little rest out at the ranch.

His bags and a trunk were already waiting at the train station, where they would head now — a ten a.m. night coach west awaited. Seven bodyguards — Sean and Jimmy among them, all the boyos armed to the teeth — would be at his side, throughout his travels, just in case Mike O’Sullivan hadn’t taken their little church talk to heart.

Even the boss got chased out at closing time, and as the restaurant staff piled chairs on tables, and lights winked off, the old man and his six young bodyguards (the seventh, Jimmy, had stayed with the Pierce Arrow) shrugged into topcoats, Sean plucking his umbrella from where it leaned against the wall, and prepared to head out into the storm. Out the restaurant windows, the night was as dark as it was wet, raindrops streaming down in glimmering ribbons, the street black and shiny, as if freshly painted.

Thunder growled, as Looney stepped onto the sidewalk, rain pelting the umbrella Sean held for him. Sean and the other watchdogs had no umbrellas of their own — the rain had at them, assailing them as they flanked their boss, their eyes searching the darkness, the downpour, for anything suspicious, any moving shape, any sign of life on streets where reasonable men had long since been driven indoors by the weather.

The two automobiles were parked down the street a bit — Looney’s Pierce Arrow touring car, and the Velie sedan, for the bodyguard overflow — and the old man walked quickly, not anxious to get wet, his shoes and spats taking a shellacking as he strode through puddles. He paused at the car — did he hear something? Something other than the relentless raindrops?

He looked around, and so did Sean, and so did the others. Nothing. Just ovals of streetlamp light and pools of water making strange designs on the pavement as rain slanted down like a watery ambush. How welcome the dry heat of New Mexico would be after this sodden godforsaken night...

Looney waited for Jimmy to open the door; he could see his driver, behind the wheel, but not clearly, the rain-streaked window clouding the issue. Annoyed, Looney tromped around to the driver’s side, the bodyguards following, Sean keeping the old man covered with the umbrella — and shook the driver’s door handle, saying, “Hey, Jimmy! Open the door, boy — Jim!”

His shaking of the locked door handle was just enough to prompt a reaction from Jimmy — who slumped forward onto the steering wheel, face tilted toward the side window. Even through the smear of rain, the dark-red hole in Jimmy’s forehead could be seen, as could the man’s open, empty-staring eyes.

“Christ,” Looney said, stepping away from the grisly, ghostly sight, “Mike’s killed him... Jimmy’s been shot!”

And all around him his bodyguards drew their weapons, spreading out along the traffic-free street, eyes fanning the rain-swept darkness.

Looney did not carry a gun — he left that to his men. And a small army of his soldiers were all around him. O’Sullivan would know what he’d be up against — so he’d killed Jimmy, as a warning, to spook Looney, and fled into the night. The old man just about had himself convinced of that when thunder shook the night.

Not God’s thunder: a Thompson submachine gun’s.

All around Looney, in rapid succession, his bodyguards — few of them even getting their weapons unholstered, to fire off shots of their own — were cut to pieces by a rain of lead, the chopper blazing orangely in the dark, sending his soldiers tumbling, stumbling, flopping, dancing, shaken like naughty children, blood mist puffing in the night. One by one these fierce men with guns splashed whimpering to the wet pavement, blood flowing into rain puddles, turning the street a glistening pink.

Looney could not watch. Unarmed, he could not act. Trapped, he could not run. So he just stood there and stared at the pavement and listened to the ungodly roar of gunfire until it had stopped, only to echo through the empty streets of Rock Island.

And now, scattered all around him, his loyal boyos, this one on his belly, that one on his back, this man in the gutter, that man rolled into a ball, another with brains leaching out of his shattered skull like jelly... and Sean on his side, the umbrella just out of his grasp, as if he were reaching for it, the gun in his limp hand only half-raised. Rain pounded the blood and the gore, diluting, then obliterating it; and lightning flashed and thunder clapped, and in a momentary flash of white, there stood O’Sullivan — down the street — with the Thompson in his hands.

Then, without moving, he disappeared into darkness. Looney waited. Why run? Mike had figured it, hadn’t he? The only way to get Capone to give up Connor was if John Looney were dead.

The old man could hear the footsteps on the wet pavement, growing closer, closer, and then Mike O’Sullivan — the machine gun in his left hand now, the .45 Colt in his right — was standing before him, the two almost close enough to reach out to each other... but not quite.

“You would kill your father,” Looney said, “to avenge your son?”

“You’re not my father.”

Looney’s chin jutted — trembled. “I was as much a father to you as to my own boy.”

“Only I wasn’t blood.”

The old man swallowed. “And now you need mine, don’t you?... Well, those of us who take this path, we know don’t we, son? Someday... some night... we all may come to an end like this.”

O’Sullivan kept the .45 trained. “Spare me your blarney, old man.”

But there was truth in his voice when Looney said, “If this way it must be... I’m glad it’s you.”

O’Sullivan shot him anyway.

Looney, a bullet in the brain, stumbled back into the Pierce Arrow and slid down the side of the car, sat for a moment, then fell on his side. A stream of blood from his forehead made its way toward the gutter.

O’Sullivan stood for several long moments, staring at the corpse of a man he had loved; he had wept over his dead wife and son, and for Michael too, and he might have been weeping now, but the rain streaming down his face concealed it, even from himself.

Around him, in buildings on all sides, lights were going on in windows, yellow squares glowing in the dark wet night — then faces appeared in those squares, indistinct, smeary bystanders looking down on the carnage in silence from the warmth of their lodgings.

Only one man in the street was standing — the rest were scattered in various postures of violent death. He must have looked so small to them, O’Sullivan thought, viewed from on high, a man standing alone in the rainy street.

He looked up at them, his face moving from blurred face to blurred face, explaining himself... no, warning them of where life could take them.

“Go back inside!” he called, voice echoing like the earlier gunfire. “And pray — pray that God never puts you on my road!”

But the lights stayed on, the faces continued to watch... to judge. Police would be called; sirens would wail.

And Mike O’Sullivan — knowing he hadn’t made his point to these witnesses, but confident he’d made an impression on John Looney — walked back into the rainy darkness, which swallowed him, leaving the empty street behind.

The almost empty street.

Though Frank Nitti’s office was in the Lexington Hotel, he — unlike Capone — did not live on the premises; he’d come over from his home on the near West Side to be available when O’Sullivan called back.

Right now, with most of the lights off, he sat at his desk, in his shirtsleeves and suspenders and no tie, taking his second call tonight from the remarkable Mr. O’Sullivan.

“It’s done?” Nitti asked.

“John Looney is dead,” O’Sullivan’s voice said over the scratchy line, as cold and matter of fact as a nurse saying the doctor will see you now; the sound of clatter and chatter in the background indicated the man was calling from a restaurant or diner.

Nitti asked, “You expect any retaliation?”

“No — I took down his seven best men, too. Best, after me, that is.”

“Seven,” Nitti said, impressed. “You’ve tied the St. Valentine’s Day record.”

“I wasn’t keeping score. You want Rance’s records returned to you, Mr. Nitti, or should I send them to the feds?”

“Send them back addressed to me here at the hotel,” Nitti said. “What do you want in return?”

“The money I’ve taken from you... and a permanent truce between us.”

“Done... How long will it take you to get here?”

“I’m two hours from the city. I’ll have no opposition?”

“Those were your terms,” Nitti said, putting his shrug into his voice, “and I agreed to them.”

“Mr. Nitti, if this is a trap, pray I don’t survive it.”

Nitti sighed. “Mr. O’Sullivan, I have been sympathetic to your cause from the start. It was only due to business concerns that I couldn’t aid you, before.”

“Where does Capone stand on this?”

“With the old man dead, Al won’t give a damn about Connor Looney... in fact, with both of them gone, it opens the door wide for us in the Tri-Cities. But then, you’ve already figured that out, haven’t you, Mr. O’Sullivan?”

“Yes.”

“Are you still interested in working for us?”

“No.”

Nitti twitched a smile, but that he kept out of his voice. “If you change your mind, I’m sure we’d have a position for you. You’re the best at your trade I’ve ever encountered... Mr. Capone agrees. But in any event, he will want your assurance that, after this... it’s over.”

“You both have that assurance... My son and I will disappear.”

“Good... You remember where the Lexington Hotel is, I assume? Well, you’re looking for room 1032.”

“... You sure you want this done on your premises? Won’t that attract undue attention?”

“Oh, Mr. O’Sullivan — you of all people should not be so naive. Here we control things. Do you really think every dead body that turns up in a ditch died there?”

“... Remember what I said, Mr. Nitti — if this is a trap... ”

“Don’t lower yourself with a threat, Mr. O’Sullivan. Have a little dignity. Retain your aura of mystery.”

And Nitti hung up.

Then the Chicago mob’s top business executive — the real spider at the web’s center — considered going home; it was, after all, late on a Sunday night, though his wife Anna would be asleep by now. Perhaps he should stay until O’Sullivan arrived at the hotel, and this nasty business was over...

On reflection, this seemed to Nitti the prudent course of action, and he selected a file from a stack on the desk and, in a pool of yellow light from a desk lamp, went to work.

It had rained in Chicago, too, but on the drive from Rock Island, the downpour had faded to a drizzle and now it was a memory, the streets in the Loop taking on a slick, glisteny black sheen reflecting streetlamp glow and the neon of sleeping businesses, as if the pavement had caught occasional fire.

O’Sullivan parked down the block on 22nd, glad to be alone, pleased not to be making his boy part of this. The Thompson was in the car, in the backseat, still assembled; all he was carrying was a .45 in his shoulder holster and a.38 in his topcoat pocket. The wind picked up scraps of paper, which seemed to race across South Michigan Avenue, scrambling across toward the Lexington Hotel. O’Sullivan took his time. He was in no hurry.

This endless night had been long coming.

No doorman was on duty, not in the wee hours of early Monday morning. And the lobby was nearly deserted — a hotel man at the front desk; and by the elevators, skinny, edgy, snappily dressed Marco — who’d been his armed elevator operator on O’Sullivan’s last visit to the Lexington — seemed to be the only watchdog.

“Marco,” O’Sullivan said.

“Angel,” Marco said, with a respectful nod.

And the watchdog reached over and pressed the UP button for him; the grillwork doors opened, Marco stepped aside, and O’Sullivan stepped inside. The doors closed, leaving an unconcerned Marco behind.

On the tenth floor, O’Sullivan exited the elevator, taking the corridor at left, following Nitti’s instructions. His gloved hand was in his topcoat pocket clenching the.38 revolver. He moved down the empty corridor, glancing at doors, ready to react — trusting Nitti, but not trusting him.

At room 1032, with his left hand, O’Sullivan knocked twice — softly. Almost at once, the other brawny watchdog from his previous visit — Harry — answered the door.

The two men nodded at each other, Harry standing aside as O’Sullivan entered the comfortably plush, well-appointed suite. In the adjacent room, a radio — turned up perhaps a shade too loud — played Paul Whiteman music, jazz for white people who hadn’t heard colored people play it.

O’Sullivan gave Harry a look, and Harry nodded toward a door.

“Bathroom,” Harry mouthed, and pointed.

O’Sullivan nodded, and Harry moved back nearer to the entry, as the Angel of Death made his way deeper into the suite, approaching the door the watchdog had indicated.

He took a breath, and pushed open the door, a bright white-tiled bathroom, larger than some whole apartments; the mirrors were fogged, the air thick with steam.

Lolling back in the hot, soapy bath, a whiskey flask near his reach on the edge of the tub, Connor Looney — his eyes closed, dark hair plastered down — said, “Harry — take your piss down the hall, for Christ’s sake! A little privacy, please.”

O’Sullivan stood looking down at the pale figure — a scrawny-looking naked man, such a pitiful creature to have caused such a fuss.

Then Connor sensed something and his eyes popped open and his sallow complexion paled even further, his mouth open as if frozen in midbreath.

“I should take my time killing you,” O’Sullivan said, “but I can’t bear your company.”

Connor’s eyes narrowed, flaring in defiance, and he was coming up out of the tub when he said, “I’ll see you in hell!”

O’Sullivan shot him once in the chest, and again in the stomach, the naked man smacking against the tile wall, making a bloody trail as he slid back down sloshingly into the tub, not dead yet.

“Hell will be heaven,” O’Sullivan said, “if I can spend eternity making you pay for what you did to them.”

And O’Sullivan shot Connor in the head — just as he had the man’s father.

The corpse dropped down into the soapy, blood-frothy water, the white tiles surrounding spattered and smeared with crimson.

When O’Sullivan emerged, Harry said, “That was quick,” and the Angel said nothing, not waiting even for the watchdog to open the door for him. He walked down the corridor, staying alert, and at the end of the hall — as Nitti had requested — he dropped the murder weapon to the carpeted floor.

He would still have his .45 if the little gangster crossed him.

But Nitti was true to his word, and O’Sullivan’s exit through the Lexington lobby was as uneventful as his arrival. Within minutes he was in the maroon Ford, heading back to his son.

Michael had slept very little. He never did put on his pajamas. He tried to read the Big Little Book, but the Lone Ranger just seemed... silly, now. From time to time, he would kneel by his bed and pray for his father’s welfare.

But he was confused — because he wasn’t sure if God could protect Papa, if what Papa was doing was a sin. After all, his father wasn’t Mr. Looney’s soldier, anymore. Maybe he was God’s soldier, now — administering justice to sinful men like Mr. Looney and his son.

And Michael had never sorted out his feelings about his godfather. The man had been like a grandpa to Peter and him, and in these long weeks, in the boy’s mind, Mr. Looney had become a sort of boogeyman... and yet the good images of his godfather remained in his memory. Papa had said all men — and that included boys like him — were sinners. Could a sinner seem kind, like Mr. Looney, and really be a monster?

When he heard the footsteps at the hall, he’d been sitting on the edge of the bed, eyes shut tight, praying for his father — at this point, just that his father would return. Never mind any of the rest of it.

And then he opened his eyes, the footsteps very near, surprised to see light coming in the window — dawn — and the key turned in the lock... the boy’s hand moved toward the small revolver on the nightstand... and the door opened.

Papa.

The man shut the door behind him and rushed to the boy, dropping to his knees, and Michael threw himself into his father’s arms. Had their embrace been any tighter, it would have hurt.

Then Papa held him by the arms and looked into the boy’s face. “The man who killed your mother and your brother,” he whispered, “is dead.”

“Good... Did he suffer?”

“Not enough,” Papa admitted. “But the world is rid of him.”

“And... Mr. Looney?”

“He’s gone, too. It had to be, son. Don’t ever ask me of it.”

“I... I won’t, Papa.”

His father sighed, smiled tightly. “... And now we can finally go on with our lives.”

“To Perdition, Papa?”

“Yes... but together.”

They hugged again. Michael closed his eyes, blinking away tears — and the brightness of the dawn. The way the sun was pouring in the window, you would never know how hard it had rained last night.