The Million-Dollar Wound

Although the historical events in this novel are portrayed more or less accurately (as much as the passage of time, and contradictory source material, will allow), fact, speculation, and fiction are freely mixed here; historical passages exist side by side with composite characters and wholly fictional ones-all of whom act and speak at the author’s whim.

What immediately comes to mind, with this-the final book of the Frank Nitti Trilogy-is the battle over the title I had with editor Tom Dunne of St. Martin’s Press.

My title was The Hollywood Wound. This was a World War II phrase among combat soldiers, meaning a wound bad enough to get you sent home, but not so bad you wouldn’t recover to a normal life. I felt it also had a secondary resonance, which is the Hollywood aspect of the story-the move by Nitti and the Chicago Outfit to take over the motion picture unions.

Well, Dunne just hated the title (loved the novel, though). Word came back to me from several other writers that Dunne had said to them, “Your friend Collins writes great books, but he comes up with terrible titles,” which I thought then was fairly ungracious and still do. But he was the boss, and I did my best to come up with alternates. The only one I remember (of a long undistinguished list) is True War, which would have been a natural follow-up to the prior books (True Detective and True Crime), but seemed both too easy and…wrong.

I had also considered The Million-Dollar Wound as a title, because that, too, was a combat phrase with the same meaning as “Hollywood wound.” “Million-dollar wound” did come into use during World War II, but not with the prominence of the “Hollywood” term; and “million-dollar” was more commonly (if inaccurately) thought of as strictly a Vietnam-era term (and admittedly that’s where “million-dollar wound” really became common G.I. vernacular). In addition, there’s a “million-dollar” resonance in the story that I won’t spoil here.

Finally, in desperation, as a throwaway, I told the editor over the phone that the only other title I could think of that satisfied me even remotely was The Million-Dollar Wound. But why-if he hated Hollywood Wound-would Million-Dollar Wound seem any better?

Who knows why, but Dunne loved it. Thought Million-Dollar Wound was a terrific title (despite its source). Oh well. I still prefer Hollywood Wound, but not enough to reinstate it.

The other thing I recall is how many people assumed that this would be the last novel about private eye Nate Heller, because in my endnotes I mentioned that this book concluded the Nitti Trilogy. But Heller came back, and even Nitti did now and then (notably in Stolen Away). I am the rare writer who likes to do series, who thrives on sequels. Familiarity breeds content (pronounce “content” any way you like-both meanings apply).

Boy, you know, I was really trying to challenge myself in this period of my career. Part of what the Nate Heller books were about was finding the truth behind the cliches of private eye fiction-in the case of Million-Dollar Wound, I was exploring the convention that P.I.s were almost always ex-military guys with combat experience, usually traumatic combat experience (Mike Hammer being the poster child of postwar psychosis). But it was always off-stage-always moody, nonspecific backstory. I wanted, in this novel, to accompany the private eye to war and experience with him that trauma. I wanted to show, and explore, how the war changed him-made him grow, but also damaged him.

Nate Heller, post-Million-Dollar Wound, is not the same guy as the breezy brash kid-on-the-make of the ’30s novels. He is much more prone to dark behavior, including murder, when he considers it the right thing; he makes fewer wisecracks out loud-and thinks very nasty, cynical thoughts. I remain proud of the difference between the Heller of the prewar flashback section and the Heller of the postcombat section that concludes the novel. And I like to think it contrasts ’30s and ’40s America as much as it does the “two” Nate Hellers.

I also think this novel has a particularly difficult yet successful structure-flashbacks moving around in time, organized not in a linear way but in a manner that works best for the story. I really didn’t take the path of least resistance on this one-I wonder if I’m still capable of challenging myself in so bold a manner. Anyway, this is clearly the most ambitious and artistically dexterous of the three novels, and remains my favorite in terms of craft and even, dare I say it, artistry. And I really love where the Heller/Nitti relationship goes in this novel.

One of the interesting things about the Heller novels, from the author’s point of view, is that readers tend to think the first one they read-whichever one it might be-is the best. I believe that to be “shock of the new”-that encountering my hardboiled history mix for the first time has an impact that can only hit you once…after that, you kind of take it for granted. I’m not complaining. The first time you hear Sean Connery say, “Bond, James Bond,” is never going to be surpassed.

But many of the true aficionados of this cycle of novels consider the book you’re holding in your hands to be the best Nate Heller. Now, I usually consider whatever book happens to be the latest Nate Heller novel to be the best one…that’s mostly just me kidding myself, but I have to psyche myself up to stay in the game, okay?

I will admit, however, that of the three novels making up the Frank Nitti Trilogy, The Hollywood Wound… I mean, The Million-Dollar Wound (goddamnit!)…is the one I consider the best.

Maybe you’ll agree.

— M.A.C.

April 2003

Lucky indeed for America that in this theater and at that juncture she depended not on boys drafted or cajoled into fighting but on “tough guys” who had volunteered to fight and who asked for nothing better than to come to grips with the sneaking enemy who had aroused all their primitive instincts.

— Samuel Eliot Morison

History of the United States Naval Operations in World War II

Say a prayer for my pal Who died in Guadalcanal.

— Commonest of inscriptions among the hundreds of crosses in a cemetery on that island

If you don’t do like I say, you’ll get shot in the head.

— Frank Nitti

There’s no business like show business.

— Irving Berlin

My name was gone.

When I woke, I didn’t know where the hell I was. A small room with the pale green plaster walls and antiseptic smell of a hospital, yes, but what hospital? Where?

And then the damnedest thing happened: I couldn’t remember my name. Couldn’t remember for the life of me. It was gone.

There was nobody to ask about it. I was alone in the little room. Just me and three other beds, empty, neatly made, military fashion, a small bedside stand next to each. No pictures on any of the stands, though. No mirrors on the wall. How in hell did they expect a guy to know who he was without a mirror on the wall?

I sat up in bed, the horsehair mattress beneath me making an ungodly racket, working against itself like a bag of steel wool. My mouth had a bitter, medicinal taste. Maybe that was it; maybe I was so pumped full of medicine I was woozy. My name would come to me. It would come.

I stood up, on wobbly legs. I hadn’t forgotten how to walk, exactly, but I wasn’t ready for the Olympics.

Funny. I knew what the Olympics was. I knew all sorts of things, come to think of it. That the mattress was horsehair, pillow too. I knew what color green was. I knew that this brown, wool, scratchy blanket was government issue. But who was I? Where did I come from? Who the fuck was I?

I sat back down on the edge of the bed; my legs couldn’t take standing up for long, and neither could the rest of me. Where did my memory begin? Think back. Think back.

I could remember another hospital. Yesterday, was it? Or longer ago? I could remember waking up in a hospital bed, next to a window, and looking out and seeing, goddamnit, seeing palm trees and screaming, screaming…

But I didn’t know why palm trees would make me scream. I did know what palm trees were. That was a start. I didn’t think seeing one today would make me scream. Shit, I needed some joe. That taste in my mouth.

Then I remembered looking at myself in the mirror! Yes, at the other hospital, looking at myself in the mirror, and seeing a man with a yellow face.

Fucking Jap! somebody said, and broke the mirror.

Still sitting on the edge of my rack, I lifted a hand to my forehead; felt a bandage there. The hand, I noticed, was yellow.

It was me. I broke the mirror. I was the one who yelled at the Jap. And I was the Jap.

“You’re no fuckin’ Jap,” somebody said.

Me, again.

You’re not a Jap. You think, you talk, in English. Japs don’t think and talk in English. They don’t know Joe DiMaggio from Joe Louis. And you do.

You know English, you know about Japs, you know about DiMaggio and Louis, but you don’t know your own name, do you, schmuck?

Schmuck? Isn’t that Jewish?

I’m a Jew. A Jew or something.

“Fuck it,” I said, and got up again. Time to walk. Time to find another window and see if there are any palm trees and see if they make me scream.

I was in a nightshirt, so I dug in the drawers of the bedside stand and found some clothes. Skivvies and socks and a cream-color flannel shirt and tan cotton pants. I put them on; I remembered how to do that, anyway. And I about tripped over a pair of shoes by the bed; stopped and put them on. Civilian-type shoes, not the boondockers I was used to.

The adjoining room was a dormitory or a ward or something; twenty beds, neatly made, empty. Was I the only guy here?

I walked through the ward into a hallway, and at my right was a glassed-in area, behind which pretty girls in blue uniforms with white aprons were scurrying around. Nurses. None of them seemed to notice me. But I noticed them. They were so young. Late teens, early twenties. I hadn’t seen a pretty girl in so very long. I didn’t know why. But I knew I hadn’t. For some reason it made me want to cry.

Held it back, though. Instinct said tears would keep me in here, longer, and already I wanted out. I didn’t know where else I’d go, because I didn’t know where the hell I belonged, but it wasn’t here.

I went over to the glass and knocked; a nurse looked up at me, startled. She had light blue eyes, and blond curly shoulder-length hair showering from under her white cap. Petite, fine features. The faintest trail of freckles across a cute, nearly pug nose.

She slid a window to one side and looked at me prettily from behind the counter. “Ah-you’re the new patient,” she said. Pleasantly.

“Am I?”

She checked her watch, glanced at a chart on a clipboard on the counter. “And I think it’s about time for your Atabrine tablets.”

“What is it, malaria?”

“Why, yes. You’ve had quite a flare-up, as a matter of fact. You were just sent over from M and S after several days there.”

“M and S?”

“Medical and Surgical building.”

She got me the pills-small, bright yellow pills-and a little paper cup of water; I took the water and the pills. The aftertaste was bitter.

“Tell me something,” I said.

She smiled and I loved her for it; tiny white teeth like a child. “Certainly.”

“Do they have palm trees outside the window, over at M and S?”

“Hardly. You’re at St. E’s.”

“St. E’s?”

“St. Elizabeth’s. Near Washington, D.C.”

“I’m in the States, then!”

“Yes you are. Welcome home, soldier.”

“Never call a Marine ‘soldier,’ sweetheart. We take that as an insult.”

“Oh, so you’re a Marine.”

I swallowed. “I guess I am.”

She smiled again. “Don’t worry,” she said. “After a few days, you’ll get your bearings.”

“Can I ask you to look something up for me?”

“Sure. What?”

“My name.”

Her eyes filled with pity, and I hated her for it, and myself, but the feeling passed, where she was concerned; she checked on the clipboard chart and said, “Your name is Heller. Nathan Heller.”

It didn’t mean a thing to me. Not a thing. Not the faintest fucking bell rang. Shit.

“Are you sure?” I said.

“Unless there’s been a foul-up.”

“If this is a military hospital, there could sure as hell be a snafu. Double-check, will you? If I heard my own name, I’m sure I’d recognize it.”

Pity in the eyes; more pity in the eyes. “I’m sure you would. But we’re not strictly military here, and…listen, Mr., uh, sir, why don’t you step into the dayroom and relax.” She gestured graciously to a wide, open doorway just down and across from us. “If I can straighten out this snafu, I’ll let you know.”

I nodded and walked toward the dayroom; she called out after me.

“Uh, sir!”

I turned and felt my face try to smile. “I’m no officer.”

“I know,” she said, smiling. “You’re a PFC. But that gives you plenty of rank to pull around here, believe me. You guys are tops with us, never forget that.”

Pity or not, it was kind of nice to hear.

“Thanks,” I said.

“Those palm trees you mentioned?”

“Yeah?”

“You were in Hawaii three days ago. At Pearl Harbor, in the Naval hospital there. That’s where you saw the palm trees.”

“Thanks.”

Only I had a crawling feeling Hawaii wasn’t the only place I’d seen palm trees.

The dayroom stretched out like the deck of an aircraft carrier, eighty feet long by forty feet wide, easy. The same institutional pale green walls dominated, with an expanse of speckled marble floor where massive furniture squatted-heavy wooden tables, chairs, a piano, the smallest stick of this furniture would take two guys to toss around, and maybe not then. That was when I figured it.

I was in the nuthouse.

Hell, where did I expect to be? I didn’t know my own fucking name, right? Of course, I knew who was singing “White Christmas,” as the radio was piped in over an intercom system: Bing Crosby. I was no idiot. I knew the name of the song and the name of the singer; now, for the sixty-five-dollar question: who the hell was I?

If I had any doubt about where I was, the human flotsam sprawled across the heavy chairs cinched it. Hollow cheeks and hollow eyes. Guys sitting there shaking like hootchie-coo dancers. Guys sitting there staring with ball bearings for eyes. A few very ambitious guys playing pinochle or checkers. One guy sat in the corner quietly bawling. Made me glad I held my own tears back. I had enough problems just being minus the small detail of an identity.

Most of the guys were smoking. I craved a smoke. Something in the back of what was left of my mind told me I didn’t smoke; yet I wanted a smoke; I sat next to a guy who wasn’t shaking or staring; he was smoking, however, and he seemed normal enough, a tanned, brown-haired, round-faced man with distinct features. He was sitting along the wall over at right next to a window; this window, like all the other windows, looked out at a nearby faded red-brick building, through bars.

I was in the nuthouse, all right.

“Spare a cig?” I asked.

“Sure.” He shook out a Lucky for me. “Name’s Dixon. What’s yours?”

“I dunno.”

He lit me up off his. “No kidding? Amnesia, huh?”

“If that’s what they call it.”

“That’s what they call it. You had the malaria, didn’t you, Pops?”

Pops? Did I look that old? Of course Dixon here was probably only twenty or twenty-one, but somebody who hadn’t been in the service might peg him for thirty.

“Yeah,” I said. “I guess I still got it.”

“I hear it’s the ever-lovin’ pits. Fever, shakes. What the hell, you got any other injuries?”

“I don’t think so.”

“What about that noggin of yours?”

He meant my bandaged head.

“I did that to myself. In some hospital in Hawaii.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. Didn’t like what I saw in the mirror.”

“Know the feelin’,” he said. Yawned. “That’s most likely why you’re on MR Four.”

“What’s that?”

“Men’s Receiving, fourth floor. Anybody remotely suicidal gets stuck here.”

“I’m not suicidal,” I said, sucking on my cigarette.

“Don’t sweat it, then. There’s six floors in this joint. Worse off you are, higher your floor. As you get better, you get promoted downwards a floor or two. Hit MR One and you’re as good as home, wherever that is for ya.”

“Wherever that is,” I agreed.

“Oh. Sorry. I forgot.”

“Me too.”

He grinned, laughed. “You’re Asiatic, all right.”

I understood the term; didn’t know why I did, but I understood it. It described any man who’d served long enough in the Far East to turn bughouse. Subtly bughouse, as in talking to yourself and seeing the world sideways.

“You’re a Marine, too,” I said.

“Yeah. That much about yourself you remember, huh, mac? Not surprising. No Marine alive’d forget he’s a Marine. Dead ones wouldn’t, neither. You can forget your name, that ain’t no big deal. You can’t never forget you’re a Marine.”

“Even if you want to,” I said.

“Right! Here comes one of those fuckin’ gobs.”

A medical corpsman in his work blues strolled over; he seemed cheerful. Who wouldn’t be, pulling duty on a land-locked, home-front ship like St. E’s?

“Private Heller,” he said, standing before me, swaying a bit. Something about bell-bottoms makes a Marine want to kill. If there was a reason for that, I’d forgotten it.

“That’s the name they’re giving me,” I said. “But there’s been a fuck-up. I’m no Nathan Who’s-It.”

“Whoever you are, the doctor would like to see you.”

“I’d like to see him, too.”

“Report to the nurse’s station in five minutes.”

“Aye-aye.”

He flapped off.

“Don’t he know there’s a war on?” Dixon growled.

“I don’t wish combat on any man,” I said.

“Yeah. Hell. Me, neither.”

“Is there a head in this joint?”

“Sure.” He dropped his cigarette to the floor and ground it out with his toe. “Follow me.”

He rose-he was shorter than I’d thought, but had the solid build that comes from boot camp and a tour or two of duty-and led me out into the hall, into the head, where finally I saw a mirror. I looked in it.

The face, with its white-bandaged forehead, was yellow-tinged, but it was American. I was not a Jap. That was something, anyway. But I could see why Dixon called me Pops. My hair was reddish brown on top, but had gone largely white on the sides. My skin was leathery, wrinkles spreading like cracks through dried earth.

“Do I look Jewish to you?” I asked Dixon.

Dixon was standing at the sink next to me, staring at himself intently in the mirror; he tore himself away to take a look at my reflection and said, “Irish. You’re a Mick if ever I saw one.”

“Micks don’t use words like ‘schmuck,’ do they?”

“If they’re from the big city they do. New York, say.”

“That where you’re from?”

“No. Detroit. But I had a layover there once. I put the lay in the word, lemme tell ya. Now, there. Look. Will ya look at that. That proves it. Once and for all.”

He was covering one side of his face with his hand. Looking at himself with one eye.

“Proves what?” I asked.

“That I’m nuts,” he said, out of the side of his mouth that showed. “Now, look.”

He covered the other side of his face. Looked at himself with the other eye.

“They’re completely different, see.”

“What is?”

“The two sides of my face, you dumb sonofabitch! They should be the same, but they ain’t. My goddamn face, it’s split it in two. This fuckin’ war. Oh, I got a screw loose, all right.”

He turned away from the mirror and put a hand on my shoulder and grinned; there was a space between his two front teeth, I noticed. “We’re in the right place, you and me,” he said.

“I guess we are,” I said.

“Semper fi,” he shrugged, and strutted out.

I took a crap. That’s something I hadn’t forgotten how to do. I sat there crapping and finishing my smoke and thinking about how I wanted to get out of this place. How I wanted to go home.

Wherever the hell home was.

I flushed the shitter, went over to the sink, and threw some water on my face. Then I went out to meet the doctor.

He was waiting for me outside the nurse’s station; he wasn’t in military apparel. White coat, white pants. He seemed young for a medic, probably early thirties. Trim black hair, trim mustache, pale, kind of stocky.

He extended his hand for me to shake.

“Pleased to meet you, Private Heller,” he said.

“If that’s my name,” I said.

“That’s what I’d like to help you determine. I’m Doctor Wilcox.”

Civilian, apparently. “Glad to make your acquaintance, Doc. You really think you could help me find my way back? Back to my name. Back to where I come from.”

“Yes,” he said.

“I like your confidence,” I said, walking next to him down the hall. “But I always thought when a guy went bughouse, it was pretty permanent.”

“That’s not at all true,” he said, gesturing with a hand for me to enter a small room where two chairs and a small table waited; not a straitjacket in sight. I went in. He went on: “Many mental disorders respond well to therapy. And those due to some intensely stressful situation, such as combat, are often easier to deal with.”

“Why is that?”

“Because the trauma can be more or less temporary. Be grateful your problem isn’t a physical one. That it isn’t chronic.”

I sat down in one of the chairs. “You going to give me truth serum?”

He remained standing. “Sodium amatal is one possibility. Shock treatments, another. But first I’d like to try to knock your barrier down with simple hypnosis.”

“Haven’t you heard, Doc? Vaudeville is dead.”

He took that with a smile. “This is no sideshow attraction, Private. Hypnosis has often proved effective in certain types of battle neurosis-amnesia among them.”

“Well…”

“I think you’ll find this a less troublesome route than electric shock.”

“It cured Zangara.”

“Who’s Zangara?”

I shrugged. “Damned if I know. What do I have to do, Doc?”

“Just stand and face me. And cooperate. Do exactly as I say.”

I stood and faced him. “I’m in your hands.”

And then I was: his hands, his warm soothing hands, were on my either temple. “Relax completely and put your mind on going to sleep,” he said. His voice was monotonous and musical at the same time; his eyes were gray and placid and yet held me.

“All right, now,” he said, hands still on my temples, “keep your eyes on mine, keep your eyes on mine, and keep them fixed on mine, keep your mind entirely on falling asleep. Now you’re going into a deep sleep as we go on, you’re going to go into a deep sleep as we go on.”

His hands dropped from my temples, but his eyes held on. “Now clasp your hands in front of you”-I did; so did he-“clasp them tight, tight, tight, tight, tight, they’re getting tighter and tighter and tighter, and as they get tighter you’re falling asleep, as they get tighter you’re falling asleep, your eyes are getting heavy, heavy…”

My eyelids weighed a ton; stayed barely open, his eyes locking mine, his voice droning on: “Now your hands are locked tight, they’re locked tight, they’re locked tight. Can’t let go, they’re locked tight, you can’t let go; when I snap my fingers you’ll be able to let go, when I snap my fingers you’ll be able to let go, and then you’ll get sleepier, your eyes getting heavier-”

Snap!

“Now your eyes are getting heavier, heavier, heavier, you’re going into a deep, deep sleep, going into a deep, deep sleep, deep asleep, far asleep, now closed tight, closed tight, deep, deep sleep, deeply relaxed, far asleep…you’re far asleep…far asleep…now you’re in a deep sleep, no fear, no anxiety, no fear, no anxiety, now you’re in a deep, deep sleep.”

I was in darkness now, but his hands guided me, as did his voice: “Now just sit down in the chair behind you. Sit down in the chair behind you.” I did. “Lean back.” I did. “And now fall forward into a deep, deep sleep. And now falling forward, going further and further and further asleep. Now when I stroke your left arm it becomes rigid, like a bar of steel, as you go further asleep, further asleep.”

My arm, as if of its own will, extended, rod straight.

“Going further, further, further asleep. Rigid.”

I could feel him tugging at my arm, testing it.

“Cannot be bent or relaxed. Now when I touch the top of your head, when I touch the top of your head, that arm will relax and the other will become rigid. You’ll go further asleep. In a very deep sleep.”

His hand, lightly, touched the top of my head; my left arm relaxed, right one went sieg heil.

“And your sleep is deeper and deeper. Now when I touch this hand my finger will be hot. Now when I touch this hand my finger will be hot, you will not be able to bear it.”

Searing pain! Like red-hot shrapnel!

“Your arm is rigid. Now when I touch your hand you will no longer feel any pain there. Will be normal.”

Pain was gone, no trace of it.

“Now your arm is relaxed and you’re further and further and further asleep. Now you’re deep asleep. Going back. Going back now. Going back to Guadalcanal. Going back to Guadalcanal. You can remember. Everything. You can remember everything. Back on Guadalcanal. You see everything now, clearly. You remember it all, now, every bit of it coming back. Tell me your story. Tell me your story, Nate.”

Through the haze I could see it, the island, “the Island” we’d soon call it. A red-tinged filter of dawn, like a soft-focus lens on an aging movie queen, worked its magic on the cone of land ahead, seducing us into thinking a Pacific paradise reclined before us, a siren lounging in a cobalt sea, waiting, beckoning, coconut palms doing a gentle hula.

Even then we knew we were being lied to. But after a month of duty on Pago Pago-that grubby barren no-man’s-land we’d come to call “the Rock,” in honor of Alcatraz-the vista before us made us want to believe the come-on.

“It looks like Tahiti or something,” Barney said.

Like me, he was leaning against the rail, sea breeze spitting pleasantly in both our faces. We, and the rest of B Company, 2nd Battalion, 8th Regiment, 2nd Marine Division, were so many sardines in a Higgins boat, a landing craft without a ramp, meaning soon we’d be going ass over tea kettle over the sides into the foam and onto the beach.

“Don’t kid yourself,” I said. “You’ve heard the scuttlebutt.”

“Only it ain’t scuttlebutt,” a kid squeezed in just behind us said.

The tropical paradise beckoning us was, we all knew, the site of the bloodiest fighting to date in the Pacific Theater. We of the 2nd Marine Division were on our way to spell the battle-weary 1st Division, who since early last August had been struggling to hold on to and preserve Henderson Field, our only airfield on the Island, named after a Corps pilot who fell at Midway. Outnumbered and outsupplied by the Japs, the 1st had held on in the face of air attack, Naval shelling, and jungle combat, the latter enlivened by mass “banzai” charges of crazed, drunken, suicidal Japs. We also heard about the malaria, dysentery, and jungle rot afflicting our fellow leathernecks; the sick were said to outnumber the wounded. Scuttlebutt further had it you couldn’t leave the battle lines unless your temperature rose above 102.

That was no travel poster come to life, stretched out before us like Dorothy Lamour. It was green fucking hell.

I looked at Barney, an aging bulldog loaded down in battle gear. “Another fine mess,” I said.

“Semper fi, mac,” he said, grinning, not seeming nervous at all. But he had to be.

Like me, he wore a steel, camouflage-covered helmet, heavy green dungaree jacket with USMC stenciled on the left breast pocket, a web pistol belt (with a pair of canteens, Kabar knife, hand grenades, ammo pouch, and first-aid kit hooked on), green dungaree trousers tucked into light tan canvas leggings over ankle-high boondockers, and a bronze Marine Corps globe-and-anchor emblem on one collar, for luck. The heavy pack on his back no doubt contained, like mine, a poncho, an extra pair of socks, mess kit, boxes of K rations, salt tablets, twenty rounds or so of carbine ammo, a couple hand grenades, toothbrush, paste, shaving gear, and a dungaree cap. Barney also carried photos of his family and his girl, and writing paper and pen and ink, in waterproof wrappers. I didn’t. I didn’t have family or a girl. Maybe that’s why, at age thirty-six, I found myself in a Higgins boat gliding toward an increasingly less beckoning beach.

Still, in a way, Barney really had gotten me into this fine mess. Mess kit, maybe I should say.

Oh, for the record: Barney is Barney Ross, the boxer, ex-boxer now, former world lightweight and welterweight title holder. We grew up on the West Side of Chicago together. The friendship stayed, as did we in Chicago, and in fact I was sitting with him in a booth in his Barney Ross Cocktail Lounge, across from the Morrison Hotel, on December 7, ’41, when the shit first hit the fan.

We were arguing with a couple of sportswriters about how long Joe Louis would hold the heavyweight crown. The radio was on-a Bears game-and the announcer must’ve cut in with the news flash, but we were a little sauced and a little loud and none of us heard it. The bartender, Buddy Gold, finally came over and said, “Didn’t you guys hear what happened?”

“Don’t tell me Joe Louis busted his arm in training,” Barney said, half meaning it.

“The Japs bombed Pearl Harbor!” Buddy’s eyes rolled back like slot-machine windows. “Jeez, boss, the radio’s on, aren’t you listening to it?”

“What’s Pearl Harbor?” Barney asked.

“It’s in Hawaii,” I said. “It’s a Naval base or something.”

Barney made a face. “The Japs bombed their own harbor?”

“It’s our harbor, schmuck!” I said.

“Not anymore,” Buddy Gold said, and walked away, morosely, polishing a glass.

From then on, or anyway right after President Roosevelt made his “day of infamy” speech, joining up was all Barney talked about.

“It’s stupid,” I told him, in one of God only knows how many arguments on the subject in his Lounge. Over beers, in a booth.

“So it’s stupid to want to defend the country that’s been so good to me?”

“Oh, please. Not the ‘I came up from the ghetto to become a champion’ speech again. You’re not cutting the ribbon on some goddamn supermarket today, Barney. Give a guy a break.”

“Nate,” he said, “you disappoint me.”

Nate. That’s me. Nathan Heller. Onetime dick on the Chicago PD pickpocket detail, currently a fairly successful small businessman with a three-man (one-secretary) detective agency in a building owned by the very ex-pug I was arguing with. Actually, it was about to be a two-man agency-my youngest operative was going into the Army next week.

“I suppose,” I said, “you think I should join up, too.”

“That’s your decision.”

“They wouldn’t even take me, Barney. I’m an old man. So are you, for that matter. You’re thirty-three. The Marines aren’t asking for guys your age.”

“I’m draft age,” he said, pointing to his chest with a thumb. Proud. Defiant. “And so are you. They’re taking every able body up to thirty-five.”

“Wrong on two counts,” I said. “First, I turned thirty-six, when you weren’t looking. Squeaked by the draft, thank you very much. Second, you’re a married man. I know, I know, you’re getting a divorce; but then you’re going to marry Cathy, first chance you get, right?” Cathy was this beautiful showgirl Barney had taken up with after his marriage went sour. “Well,” I went on, “they only take married men up to age twenty-six. And you haven’t been twenty-six since you fought McLarnin.”

He looked gloomily in his beer. “I don’t intend to shirk my duty by using some loophole. As far as I’m concerned, I ain’t married anymore, and even so, I’m joining up.”

“Oh, Barney, please. You got dependents, for Christ’s sake. You got family.”

“That’s just why I’m doing it. I got a special obligation to represent my family in the armed service.”

“Why?”

He shrugged expansively. “Because nobody else was able to go. Ben’s too old, Morrie’s got back trouble, Sammy’s got the epileptic fits, and Georgie’s got flat feet and the draft board turned him down.”

“That poor unlucky bastard, Georgie. Imagine goin’ through life with flat feet when you could’ve got ’em shot the hell off.”

“I take this serious, Nate. You know that. Think about what’s happening overseas, would you, for once? Think about that cocksucker Hitler.”

A word that harsh was rare for Barney; but the feeling ran deep. He’d gotten very religious, in recent years; and his religion was what this was most of all about.

“Hitler isn’t your problem,” I said, somewhat lamely.

“He is! He’s mine, and he’s yours.”

We’d been over this ground many times, over the last three or four years. Longer than that, really. From the first news of persecution of the Jews in Nazi Germany, Barney had gone out of his way to remind me that I too was a Jew.

Which I didn’t accept. My father had been an apostate Jew, so what did that make me? An apostate Jew at birth? My late mother was a Catholic, but I didn’t eat fish on Friday.

“Okay, okay,” I said. “You hate Hitler; you’re going to whip those lousy Nazis. Fortunately for you, Armstrong isn’t on their side.” Armstrong was who Barney lost his title to. A little desperately I added, “But why the goddamn Marines? That’s the roughest damn way to go!”

“Right.” He sipped his beer, very cool, very measured. “They’re the toughest of all the combat outfits. If I’m going to do this thing, I’m going to do it right. Just like in the ring.”

I tried a kidney punch. “What about your ma? It was rough enough on her when you were fighting in a ring-now you want to go fight a war? How could you do that to her?”

He swallowed; not his beer-just swallowed. His puppy-dog eyes in that bulldog puss were solemn and a little sad. His hair was salt-and-pepper and he really did look too old to be considering this; he looked older than me, actually. But then I hadn’t taken as many blows to the head as him. Very deliberately, he said, “I don’t want to bring no more heartache to Ma, Nate. But wars have to go on no matter how mothers feel.”

It was like trying to argue with a recruiting poster.

“You’re serious about this, this time,” I said. “You’re really going to go through with it.”

He nodded. Smiled just a little. Shyly.

I finished my beer in a gulp and waved toward the bar for another. “Barney, look at this place. Your business is going great guns. Ever since you switched locations, seems like it’s doubled.”

“Ben’s going to take over for me.”

“Aw, but you yourself are such an important part of it-the celebrity greeting his customers and all. No offense to your brother, but it’ll flop without you.”

Again he shrugged. “Maybe so. But if Hitler comes riding down State Street, I’ll be out of business permanent.”

Such a child. Such a simple soul. God bless him.

“How far have you gone with this thing?”

“Well,” he said, smiling, embarrassed now, “they turned me down at first. Told me I was overage and should go run my cocktail lounge. Just like you did. But I kept swinging, and finally they sent a letter to Washington to see about getting me a waiver on the age rule. Took sixty days for it to come through. And today I got the word. All I got to do is sign on the dotted line, and pass the physical.”

I sat there shaking my head.

“The recruiting office is in the post office,” he said. That was just a few blocks away. “They’re open twenty-four hours, these days. I’m going down tonight. Why don’t you keep me company?”

“What, and join up with you? Not on your life.”

“Nate,” he said, reaching across to touch my hand. It wasn’t something I remembered him ever doing before. “I’m not trying to talk you into any such thing. You have every right to stay here, doing what you’re doing. You’re past draft age, now, you got my blessing. Really. All I want is yours.”

He didn’t know I’d already given it to him. I just sat there shaking my head again, but smiling now. He took his hand off mine. Then suddenly we were shaking hands.

That’s when we started to seriously drink.

It gets hazy after that. I know that my own mixed feelings-my own barely buried desire to get into this thing myself, my expectation of being drafted having turned to guilt-edged relief when the call-up missed me-came drifting to the surface, came tumbling out in confession to Barney, and, well, I remember walking him to the post office, singing, “Over There,” along the way and getting strange and occasionally amused looks from passersby.

I remember studying a poster boasting the great opportunities the Marine Corps offered a man. There were three Marines on the poster-one rode a rickshaw, one was cleaning the wings of an airplane, one was presenting arms on a battleship. I remember, albeit vaguely, studying this poster for the longest time and experiencing what must have been something akin to a religious conversion.

I’m sure it would have passed, given time.

Unfortunately, time for sober reflection wasn’t in the cards. The blur that follows includes a recruiting sergeant in pressed blue trousers, khaki shirt, necktie, and forest ranger hat (a “campaign” hat, I later learned). I remember looking down at his shoes and seeing my face looking up at me. I also remember saying, “What a shine!” Or words to that effect.

The conversation that followed is largely lost to me. I remember being asked my age and giving it as twenty-nine. That stuck with me because I had to concentrate hard, in my condition, to be able to lie that effectively.

I remember also one other question asked of me: “Any scars, birthmarks, or other unusual features?”

And I remember asking, “Why such a question?”

And I remember the matter-of-fact response: “So they can identify your body after you get your dog tags blown off.”

One would think that would have sobered me up (and perhaps that question was the recruiting officer’s attempt to do so, to not take undue advantage of my condition); but one would be wrong. It took the next morning to do that.

The next morning, by which time Barney Ross was in the Marines.

And so, when I woke up, was I.

We took a train at Union Station and left Chicago behind. Ahead, immediately ahead, was San Diego. Boot camp.

It was a three-day journey cross-country. Barney and I weren’t the only ones aboard over thirty, and a fair share of these recruits were in their twenties; but the bulk of ’em were kids. Goddamn kids-seventeen, eighteen years old. It made me feel sad to be so old; it made me feel sadder that they were so young.

But so was the war, and, judging from the high spirits of its passengers, this train might’ve been headed for a vacation camp. Oh, it’d be a camp, all right; but hardly vacation. Still, the trip-particularly the first day or so-was filled for them with childish fun, yelling and pranks and waving out the windows at cows and cars and particularly girls.

These kids had never been west before. Both Barney and I had, but just the same we sat like spellbound tourists and looked out the window at the passing scenery. As the farm country gradually gave way to a more barren landscape, it seemed fitting somehow. I was leaving America slowly behind.

The kids knew who Barney was, and some of them razzed him, but mostly they wanted autographs and to hear stories. He’d humor them, fight Canzoneri again and again (which he’d had to do in real life, as well), and occasionally get the heat off himself by trying to make me out as somebody.

“Talk to Nate, here,” he’d say, “if you want to hear about celebrities. He knows Capone.”

“No kiddin’?”

“Sure he does! Frank Nitti, too. Nate was there the night Dillinger got shot in front of the Biograph theater.”

“Is that so, Nate?”

“More or less, kid.”

So word got around about the boxer and the private eye and we got paid a certain gosh-wow respect because of it. And our ages, we were the oldest aboard by a yard; nobody since that recruiting officer seemed convinced I was twenty-nine. Including me.

I had plenty of time on the train to reflect on the nature of my enlistment. Even before we left Barney had said, “You might be able to get out of it, Nate.”

“I signed the papers.”

“You were drunk, and you lied about your age. I had to get a waiver to get in, and I’m younger than you. Maybe you should…”

“I’ll think it over.”

Yet somehow, here I was, on a train cutting across a desert, on my way to San Diego and points God-knows-where beyond.

On the second day of the trip, sitting in the dining car, at a table for two, Barney looked across at me and said, “Why didn’t you try, Nate?”

“Try what?” I asked. The meal before me was a hamburger steak and cottage fries and a little salad and milk and I was digging in, instinctively enjoying what I guessed would be one of the few decent meals of my foreseeable future.

“To get out of it,” he said.

“Of what?”

“Don’t play games, schmuck. Of the Marines.”

I shrugged, chewed my food. Answered: “I don’t know that I could.”

“You don’t know that you couldn’t.”

“I’m here. Let’s leave it at that.”

He smiled tightly and did. Never uttered another word on the subject.

I wasn’t sure myself why I didn’t try to worm out of it. I’d worked long and hard to build my little one-man show into a real agency. It’d be waiting for me when this was over-I’d left it in the capable hands of the sole remaining operative in the agency, Lou Sapperstein, a sober soul of fifty-three who was unlikely to get drafted, or drunk and enlist, either. But why leave at all?

I didn’t know. I was a cop once. It hadn’t worked out. It had been my dream since childhood to be a cop, to be a detective, but in Chicago the game was rigged, for cops, and to play it, you played along, and I’m no boy scout but there came a time I just couldn’t play along anymore. So I went in business for myself, and I liked it, up to a point. But ever since December 7, something had been gnawing me. My old man was a union guy, an idealistic sap who never learned to play the game when it was straight, let alone rigged; you don’t suppose I inherited something from him besides the funny shape of my toes? Who the hell knew. Not me. Not me. Maybe I was tired of following cheating husbands and cheating wives around and then coming home to read a paper filled with Bataan and Corregidor and ships going down in the Atlantic. Maybe the life I’d made for myself paled into something so insignificant I couldn’t the fuck face it anymore and, well, folks, here I was in a dining car with that Damon Runyon character I called my best friend, on my way to war.

I wasn’t the only one. Out the windows almost all the rail traffic we passed was military. Long trains consisting of flatcar after flatcar loaded with tanks, halftracks, artillery parts. Troop trains seemed constantly to pass us, going both ways. Army troops, mostly. We hadn’t been Marines long enough to hate the Army yet, so the kids whooped and hollered at them as well, give ’em hell, guys, give ’em hell.

In Chicago, it had been late summer and felt like winter. The morning we arrived in San Diego, it was summer and felt like it, sunlight bouncing blindingly off the cement walkways of the terminal. We were wearing heavy winter gear, the only gear we’d thus far been given, lugging sea bags, sweating, immediately sweating. Falling into ranks just alongside the train, we watched a first sergeant amble up, seeming surprisingly cheerful, and inform the noncommissioned officers among us which of the waiting buses we were to board.

The first sergeant looked old to the kids, most likely; but I knew he was only a few years older than me, just enough so as to’ve made it into the previous war. His crisp green uniform bore campaign ribbons and a braided cord around his left arm.

“You people have some tough training ahead,” he said, rather informally. “But it’s gonna see you through, if you can see it through. Good luck. Now, fall out-board your assigned buses!”

On the bus, the kids were whispering about how nice the first sergeant was. Not at all like what they’d heard boot camp would be like.

Well, they weren’t at boot camp yet, and being older than them, I didn’t allow myself to be lulled into a false sense of security by the fatherly manner of a guy not much older than me. My cop’s nose sensed trouble ahead.

And there was nothing wrong with my sense of smell.

As the buses rolled into camp, a.k.a. the Marine Corps Recruit Depot-a massive rambling assembly of cream-colored buildings with dark roofs-out the window I could see platoons of recruits rigidly marching to the individual cadence of drill instructors. Snappy as hell, had to admit. I was impressed, sure, but I’d been a guy on his own, a guy his own boss, for so many years that I couldn’t keep from seeing this mindless regimentation as stupid and pointless. I was here on a stopover before going to kill some Nazis for Uncle Sam, right? I used a gun before; I killed before-I hadn’t liked it, but I’d done it, and was prepared to do it again, for what seemed a just cause. Point me at Hitler and set me to shooting. Don’t expect me to be a martinet, for Christ’s sakes! I’m not one of these fucking kids…

Our bus’s NCO, prior to this an agreeable sort, turned suddenly into that Nazi I’d been looking for; he stood at the front of the bus and all but screamed: “All right, you people, off the goddamned bus!”

The kids rushed off, and Barney and I got swept up with them. We lined up with men from the other buses and counted off into groups of sixty. A truck rumbled by, carrying in its open back a work party of seasoned-looking recruits. They laughed at us.

“You’ll be sor-eeeee,” one called, the truck leaving us behind in the dust.

A corporal in a campaign hat came walking toward us with a tight-lipped, somehow hungry smile. He was about five-ten and probably weighed 160 pounds; smaller than me by two inches and twenty-five pounds. But he was a muscular s.o.b., with massive arms and chest and a stomach flatter than day-old beer. His cold green eyes squinted and his hawk nose jutted and he clearly hated us, and just as clearly enjoyed doing so.

“All right, shitbirds, get in line,” he shouted, from the gut, and the heart. He began walking up and down, like Napoleon inspecting his troops, giving us the once-over twice. “So you wanna make Marines, huh?” He sneered more to himself than at us, shaking his head. “What sad sorry sacks of shit. Where the fuck’d they dig you up?”

The kids were stunned by this; me, I smiled a little. I preferred this to the fatherly approach of the first sergeant back at the train station. This was bullshit, too, but at least it was amusing.

Only the corporal wasn’t amused. He came over and looked me right in the face; his breath was hotter than the sun and bad.

“What in the fuck are you doing here?”

I knew enough not to say anything.

“Don’t you know we don’t take grandpas in the Marines?”

Then he noticed Barney.

“What did they do, empty out the goddamn old folks home?” He shook his head, walked back and forth in front of us. “Grandma and grandpa. And I’m expected to make Marines out of this shit.”

Out of the corner of one eye I could see Barney starting to take this wrong; we were about half a second from Barney swinging on the guy, and starting his glorious patriotic service to his country in the guard house. I nudged him with my foot and his face went expressionless.

The corporal exploded but not, thankfully, at Barney in particular. At all of us in general: “Patoon halt, teehut. Right hace. Forwart huah. Double time, huah.”

We didn’t know what the hell that meant, but we did it. The s.o.b. ran us up and down the streets forever, and then a while longer, and then we were in front of the wooden hut that would be home, for a while. My guts were burning, my breath a slow pathetic pant; the former lightweight/welterweight champ didn’t seem any better off. The corporal, who’d set and kept the pace, wasn’t breathing hard, fuck him.

“Patoon halt, right hace!” He put his hands on his hips and rocked on his heels as he smiled tightly, oozing contempt. “You people are stupid. Now we know who you are. I am Corporal McRae. I am your drill instructor. This is Platoon Seven-fourteen. If any of you idiots think you don’t need to follow my orders, just step right out here and I’ll beat your ass right now.” He began walking back and forth again. “You people are shitbirds. You are not Marines. You may not have what it takes to be Marines.”

No one was moving; they were barely breathing. I did not hate this man before us. I did not even resent him. But I was scared of the fucker.

Before long we were in a chow line, trays flung into our hands, food flung from all directions onto the tray. One course flopped right on top of another, and if you didn’t position your tray right as you passed, the food ended up on the floor or you or some goddamn where that wasn’t the tray. The sweating cooks had done a real number on whatever this had been before it got to us.

“Hell of way to serve a meal,” Barney said, under his breath, just loud enough for me to hear. “Good thing I don’t keep kosher.”

We didn’t see him but, like God, Corporal McRae was everywhere, because he was right on top of Barney, saying, “Real wise guy, aren’t you? Think you’re in the fucking Waldorf?” Then something akin to thought seemed to pass across the corporal’s face. “I’ve seen you before, shitbird. What is your name?”

Barney smiled a little; his smugness made me wince.

“Barney Ross,” he said.

The corporal’s face lit up like Christmas. “Whaddya know,” he said, so everybody in the mess hall could hear. “Grandma here’s a celebrity.” Then his face went dark again. “Well, you’re no fuckin’ champ here, Ross. You’re just another goddamn shitbird. You get no special favors and no special treatment.”

“I didn’t ask for-”

“We know you goddamn celebrities. You expect the red goddamn carpet. Well, you’re gonna toe the mark, buddy. In fact, I think we’ll give you a few extra things to do just so you’re sure how you fit in here.”

He strode off.

Barney stood there with the tray of food in his hands, steaming (both Barney and the food); a kid from Chicago standing nearby said, “Why don’t you sock the bum, Barney?”

“Yeah, Barney,” I said. “Sock him. Get us all off to a swell start.”

He grinned crookedly at me and then we found our way to a table, joining some recruits who seemed seasoned, hoping to get some encouraging words about how the first day is toughest.

The main course on our trays was, apparently, beans and wieners, and I was about to apply some mustard to a wiener when one of the old-timers (who was probably twenty) said, “When you’re through with the baby shit, pass it my way.”

I swallowed and passed him the mustard without using it myself; I was more squeamish then than I am now. I’ve since asked somebody to pass me the baby shit on many an occasion.

Then, after lunch, like guys going to the chair, we had our heads shaved. To the skin. Now I knew how Zangara felt. You know-the guy that shot Mayor Cermak.

Anyway, most of the 714 seemed to be from Chicago, though Barney and I never met any of ’em before; but we did have a couple of Southern boys. That first night, Corporal McRae assembled us in our barracks and said, “All right now-any of you idiots who got straight razors or switchblades, throw ’em on the bunk next to me. I won’t have you shitbirds cutting each other up. I draw the blood around here, people.”

A kid from the South Side named D’Angelo-who told us he used to work for Capone crony Nicky Dean at the Colony Club on Rush Street-tossed a switchblade on the bunk. Two straight razors followed, and then some brass knuckles thudded on the thin horsehair mattress.

“You can’t cut anybody with that, idiot,” the Corporal said, and tossed the knucks back at the kid.

The Southern boys had apparently not seen any Chicago silverware before; their eyes were round as Stepin Fetchit’s, although their complexions were considerably lighter.

Even for us Chicagoans, the chill San Diego morning came as a shock. That was Dago: freezing your ass off at dawn, and by noon you were roasting. The days were long and hard, brutally hard: calisthenics, close-order drill, marching, long hikes over rough terrain, bayonet training, judo, breakneck runs over obstacle courses, gas-mask drills, infantry training under combat conditions with live ammo whizzing overhead. McRae had his own special brand of sadism, unique to him among the Dago DIs: he’d double-time us to an area near the beach at San Diego Bay. There, while the beautiful, indifferent water watched, we’d drill back and forth on the hot, soft sand. My legs ached so, I would cry myself quietly to sleep in my rack on such nights.

McRae followed no pattern; we never knew what indignity or when it would be inflicted-in the midst of most any activity, we could take a break for rifle inspection, close-order drill, or a run in the sand by the bay. Sometimes in the middle of the night. It all seemed so chickenshit.

Barney was getting extra KP, garbage duty, and other dirty details, all because he was a “celebrity.” And, since I was his pal, I caught some of that duty, as well.

My major run-in with McRae was on the rifle range, though, where I made the mistake of referring to my M-1 as my gun. Soon I was running up and down in front of the rows of barracks with my rifle in one hand and my dick in the other, shouting, “This is my rifle,” as I hefted my M-1, “and this is my gun,” as I gestured with my, well, my other hand. “This is for Japs,” M-1, “and this is for fun,” well.

Thirty-six years old, running around with a rifle in one hand and my dick in the other. Telling everybody about it.

Barney’s moment came when McRae noticed him reading in his bunk before lights out; Barney was always poring over these books on religion and philosophy he lugged around with him. And he kept his mother’s picture propped somewhere he could see it.

“The celebrity is religious, I see,” McRae said.

Heads bobbed up, ears perked, all ’round.

“That’s right,” Barney said, bristling a little. All the religion and philosophy books in the world couldn’t completely put his fighter’s fire out.

“You pray a lot, celebrity?”

“Yes.”

“Good. You better give your soul to God. Your heart may belong to mother, but your ass belongs to the United States Marines.”

The corporal strutted off, leaving a trail of laughter behind. Not Barney’s.

Eight weeks later, we were physically fit-even two old fogies like Barney and me-and mentally prepared for what lay ahead. Or as close to it as possible.

Wearing service greens-rifles and cartridge belts left behind-we each received three Marine Corps globe-and-anchor emblems, which we pocketed, and were marched to an amphitheater, to sit with other recruits.

Or I should say Marines. We were Marines, now. The short, friendly major on the stage smiled at us and told us so and we reached in our pockets and pinned an emblem on either lapel of our green wool coats and one on the left side of our caps. Then the major told us the one about the farmer’s daughter and the three traveling salesmen, and we all laughed, and he said, “Good luck, men,” and that was the first we’d been called men since we got here.

I passed McRae, later, and he nodded. I stopped and said, “Could I ask you a question?”

He nodded again.

“Why’d you get us up in the middle of the fucking night to go run in the fucking sand?”

Something nearly a smile touched his tight lips. “Combat allows sleep to no man, Private Heller.”

I thought about that.

I thought about it on that Higgins boat, gliding toward a tropical “paradise” called Guadalcanal.

I sensed, even then, that McRae was wrong. Combat allowed sleep to just about anybody. Waking was something else again.

It was a peaceful landing, a beachhead having been long since established by the 1st Marines-many of whom were there to greet us as we waded ashore, hollow-eyed scarecrows with mud on their faces, oddly amused by our identifying shouts: “B Company here!” “A Company here!” The first 1st GI I encountered-just a kid, really, but older in his way than me-immediately asked me for a smoke, despite the gear I was shouldering. I told him I didn’t smoke. He laughed in a curiously empty way and said, you will, mac, you will.

The palms lining the beach greeted us as well, bending to us as if in deference, when really they were just swaybacked seaward from the tropical winds, their fronds shredded from shelling; these evenly spaced, precisely aligned palms weren’t, as you might assume, the handiwork of God on one of His more particularly inspired days-they’d been planted by Lever Brothers, on whose once (and, if the war went right, future) plantation grounds we were entering. This made our first approach, to Henderson Field, an easy one, the soap company having kept the ground in the groves cleared for harvesting purposes.

The crushed-coral airfield was the hub of activity, with two large air stations, machine shops, and electric-light plants, among other buildings inherited from the Japanese, fewer now than before the Nip bombing raids, of course. Repair sheds, hangars, and retaining walls had been built by American hands. And occasionally rebuilt.

The field, we were told, was shelled every night; its two airstrips were in understandably lousy condition, and under constant maintenance. Much of what had been crushed coral was filled in with dirt and packed down, and on hot dry days the runway swirled with dust, and on rainy ones sloshed with mud. No such problem on a humid sunny day like this one. The field was abuzz with warplanes, including F4F Wildcats, and it had been a long time since a Zero, Betty, or Zeke had dared try anything here in the daylight.

Night, however, was a different story; “Maytag Charlie,” as one nightly Japanese visitor had been nicknamed due to his noisy, washing machine of an engine, dropped his 250-pound turds in an ongoing effort to keep the Marines on the Island awake, and to give them something to do the next morning.

Some of the battle-weary scarecrows of the 1st were filling in craters left by last night’s raid, as we trooped in around noon, the transports at the beach having been unloaded of machinery, equipment, supplies. The living corpses halfheartedly jeered at us.

“We’re safe now,” a Southerner drawled, leaning on a shovel. “Here come the Howlin’ Marines.” Our division commander was General Holland “Howling Mad” Smith.

“Fuckin’ A,” a buddy of his said, shoveling. “Just in time for the Japs.”

“I hear they’re servin’ tea today,” said another.

I glanced at Barney; he smiled and shrugged. But I’m sure he was as unnerved as I was. Not by these lame, fairly good-natured jabs; but by the punch-drunk palookas throwing ’em. Would we look like they did, after a few months on this island?

We went through a chow line and received Atabrine tablets, a supposed malaria preventive, a corpsman flicking a tablet in our mouths and then peering down in to make sure we swallowed it. Later I learned this was because many had mutinied against the pills, suspecting them to be saltpeter. Whatever they were, they tasted bitter, but then so did our lunch, which was a bowl of captured Jap rice, to supplant our K rations. A few months on Spam and rice, and we no doubt would look like the skinny, grizzled 1st Marines. The deadness in their eyes, however, wasn’t from something they ate.

Some of the 1st, preparing to be relieved, were bivouacked near Henderson, pup tents under coconut trees, nestled among the jungle growth-liana vines, twisting creepers, and smaller trees, many of them just overgrown weeds with bark, slanting skyward for no good reason, hogging space, making life tough for nearby plants, which assumed defensive postures, leaves fanning out into knifelike blades. In front of the tents were often bamboo makeshifts, racks to put things on and/or under, a pole to rest a helmet on. This was home to the 1st, though I doubted, having left, any of ’em would feel homesick.

“Ever seen combat?” one asked Barney and me; he was sitting out in front of his tent on a makeshift bamboo stool. He had light blue eyes, somehow very out of place in the tanned, mud-stained face. The eyes seemed more alive than some, albeit somewhat feverish. The most alive thing about him was the glowing tip of his Chesterfield.

We shook our heads no to his combat question; Barney added, “Nate here was a cop.”

That same wry, weary smile the entire 1st seemed to share crawled onto his face. “You won’t be writing any traffic tickets out here, Pops.”

Barney got defensive, jerked his thumb toward me. “He was a detective! He’s been in his share of shoot-outs.”

I nudged him, embarrassed. “Please.”

Barney gave me a disgusted look. “Well, you have.”

“Any experience is better than nothing,” the leatherneck granted.

“We just came from gettin’ jungle training on Samoa,” Barney said. “They told us how at night the Japs creep through the brush like ghosts and then all of a sudden jump right up in front of ya and blow your head off or slash your throat or cut off your…is that really true?”

“Fuckin’ A a doodle de do,” the leatherneck said. He smiled the wry, weary smile again, sucked on the cig. “Like some pointers?”

“Sure,” we said.

He gestured to the ground, or anyway the brush and trees that clung to it. “Watch for trip wire. Those little bastards can set wires up in the jungle that can wipe out half a platoon.”

It looked hopeless to me. I said as much: “How the hell do you spot a wire in undergrowth like this?”

“You either spot it or it spots you. And never go by a bunch of so-called dead ones without spraying the little fuckers. They like to play possum and then open up on you, when you walk on by.”

“Thanks,” I said. “Anything else?”

“The most important thing. If they capture one of your men, write the poor bastard off. They’ll tie him to a tree and go to work on him. They’re experts at it. You’ll hear him holler, probably beg you to come rescue him. This is exactly what they want. They want your men to come running in like big-ass birds. ’Cause they’re waiting for you and not a man one of you will survive, mac. Not a one.”

Then he just sat there and smoked his cigarette.

“We appreciate the advice,” Barney said, after a while.

“They feed you rice today?” he asked us.

“Yeah,” we said.

He almost shivered. “I had a gutful of that swill. You know what winning this fuckin’ war means to me? Never having to eat rice again.” Wistfully, he added, “I could sure go for some of that Jap pogey bait, though. Hard and sweet-like the dame that ditched my Uncle Looie.” Pogey bait was Marine for candy. “But you guys don’t need to worry. You’re gettin’ the tail end of the rice, anyway.”

“Why?” we asked.

He sucked on the cigarette, made a face. “The First’s been cut off since we landed, the fuckin’ Navy all but deserted us, what little supplies we got come in from flyboys and destroyers that broke the Nip blockade. If it wasn’t for the food the Japs left behind, we’d’ve been eating roots and bark. But you ain’t gonna have to eat no fish heads and rice; supplies and men are comin’ in every day, now.”

“The tide has turned, then,” I said.

“It’s turnin’. But you still got your work cut out for you.”

“Henderson seems well secured,” I said.

Barney, glancing back toward the busy airstrip-planes taking off, troops trooping in, supplies being unloaded-nodded.

“Boys-if you don’t mind my callin’ older gents like you ‘boys’-my last piece of advice for ya is keep thinking like that and you’ll be deader’n Mr. Kelsey’s nuts by nightfall.”

He was right, of course. The Nips were all around the perimeter, including Sealark Channel-or Ironbottom Sound, as it was informally known, referring to the sixty-five or so major warships resting there, about half-and-half American/Japanese. Nightly shelling from the Sound meant Henderson Field was virtually surrounded. Its security was as false as the orderliness of the plantation palms.

Soon we were moving up, past Henderson, toward the Matanikau River just five miles away, the west bank of which belonged to the Nips, and across which they weren’t shy to come. Shells exploded all around us, shaking the earth and those creatures crawling on it, us included, on our bellies, inching through thick underbrush, thorns and brambles nicking us, marking us, shell smoke drifting over us like dark dirty clouds.

But we weren’t the only crawling creatures. We crawled past snakes, and they crawled past us; we met bugs the likes of which the worst Chicago tenement never dreamed of, but is “bugs” the word when it’s a spider the size of your fist, or a wasp three inches long? Lizards flitted by, forked tongues flicking; land crabs skittled along, like dismembered skeletal hands clawing frantically at the earth. And most of all mosquitoes. Ever-present, less than swarming, but so constant there soon came a point where you couldn’t swat at them any longer.

Finally we reached the forward foxholes, where more of the 1st waited to be relieved. We did that, crawling in as they crawled out, into the two-and three-man holes. Barney and I and that kid from Chicago, D’Angelo, another veteran of Corporal McCrea back at Dago, shared a foxhole with the mosquitoes. Before us was a row of sandbags, stacked, beyond which was a double-apron barbed-wire fence. From our position you couldn’t see the river, but I could hear it, and smell it. The smell of the jungle and the rivers and streams that cut through it was not nature’s finest hour; it was a fetid perfume made from equal parts oppressive humidity, rotting undergrowth, and stink lilies.

The rest of the afternoon we stayed dug in, listening to and watching artillery shells explode, as our side traded fire with the unseen Japs across the river. It never became a passive experience-with every explosion, you knew that if the direct hit didn’t get you, the flying red-hot shrapnel could, and if neither got you, it was getting some poor bastard just like you, down the line. And you knew most of all that you could be next.

In the lulls we’d talk and D’Angelo smoked; he was a thin, dark kid with a sensual mouth that the girls back in the Windy City no doubt loved, for all the good it did him here. We sat beating our gums, comparing bug bites and agreeing that Chicago was a pretty tame place to live, compared to this hellhole, anyway.

Then we watched a sunset paint the sky red and orange, in an impressionistic, tropical dream right out of Gauguin. The moment was a peaceful one; it was enough to make you forget bug bites and shrapnel and humidity, and darkness fell.

Generally speaking, I’m not afraid of the dark. But I’m here to tell you I’m afraid of the dark in a jungle. The rustle of leaves, the flutter of wings, the skittering of land crabs, indiscernible yet ominous shapes moving, looming out there. We’d been ordered not to shoot unless the Japs fired first, so as not to give our positions away. So we crouched in the foxholes with bayonets at the ready, and if I thought this was making me nuts, Barney was truly ready for a padded foxhole.

Seemed like every minute or two, he’d half rise and lunge forward, across the sandbags and barbed wire-a leaf moved in the wind, or an animal rustled in the brush, and Barney was out there slashing, stabbing, destroying imaginary Japs. Some of these nonexistent enemies would sneak up behind us, and Barney lunged to the rear, stabbed, slashed; you never knew when or from whence one of the yellow bastards was going to strike next.

It spread to the other nearby foxholes, and soon our whole platoon was going crazy slashing and stabbing little yellow men who weren’t there. Finally I touched Barney’s arm and said, “Take it easy. There’s lots of sounds out there. If it’s Japs, we’ll know it.”

I’d barely finished the sentence when an ungodly screech ripped the night apart, and I was on my feet, yelling, “Banzai charge!” bayonet flashing in the moonlight.

From a foxhole down the way, a voice that could only have belonged to one of the combat veterans of the 1st, a handful of which had stayed behind with us, whispered harshly, “It’s a fuckin’ bird, mac. A cock or two. Put a lid on it.”

Cock or two? Oh. Cockatoo. Well. I was too scared and tired to be embarrassed. I sat down in the foxhole and pushed my helmet back on my head and the mosquitoes zoomed in for virgin territory.

They came at us the next morning. For real. They came up a slope of golden kunai grass, shoulder-high, the blades of which cut you like a knife, but the Nips didn’t care. They were screaming, “Banzai,” and they weren’t cockatoos, either. They were savage little men in uniforms the color of brown wrapping paper. Many in the first wave weren’t even carrying rifles; they had big mats in their little hands, rushing through the grass lugging those mats, screaming like hopped-up madmen, as were those coming up behind them with rifles in hand, firing past their mat-bearing brethren. Some had machine guns, chattering like a child’s toy gun, but there was nothing childish about the bullets they were spitting at us, kissing the sand through the cloth of the sandbags nearby. There was mortar fire, too, ours and theirs-ours was landing amongst them, scattering them in the air like tenpins; where theirs was landing I couldn’t say. Not near us, thank God.

Barney and I were side by side, firing our M-1s; D’Angelo, too.

We were cutting the Japs down like weeds, like they were the very kunai grass into whose spiky golden sea their bodies sank as our bullets hit the mark.

There was a moment when D’Angelo was firing and Barney and I both were pausing to reload our rifles, the barrels of which were red hot.

“What are those things those little bastards are hauling?” he asked.

“Mats,” I said. “I think they plan to throw ’em over the barb wire, so the ones behind ’em can crawl over it and on top of us.”

Then we were firing again, and they kept coming, shouting “Banzai,” screaming, “Die, Maline!” They kept coming and we kept shooting and they kept dropping, disappearing, into the golden grass. A second wave tried; a third. We cut them down.

A kid named Smith-or was it Jones? — in the foxhole next to us, took a bullet in the head, in his forehead under his helmet. No mosquito bite, that. He tumbled over dead. I saw men die before, but never one so young. Seventeen, he must’ve been. Barney never saw a man die before, and turned away and puked on the spot.

Then he wiped off his face and started firing again.

When it was over, most of their dead remained hidden in the kunai; you could see the impression the bodies made, where they went in, but not the bodies, for the most part. A few were visible-those who’d gotten the closest to us, a few from the first wave, their mats spread out before them like offerings to their emperor or their gods or whatever. They seemed so small, rag dolls flung into the weeds by a spoiled child.

As the days wore on, they grew larger, puffing and swelling in that brutal tropical sun. A stench swept the area like a foul wind. But we got used to it. All of it. Dead, rotting flesh and kids like Jones (or was it Smith?) catching the one with his name on it and falling over dead, eyes blank as an idiot’s gaze. Blanker.

The next attack came on the night of the following day. Shortly before 3:00 a.m. the sky lit just above us with a pale green glow-Jap flares-and coming up the hill in the darkness was the sound of chattering machine gun, mortar fire, and “Banzai!” It was an eerie moonlight replay of the previous attack, and we cut them down like so much cordwood.

Days stretched into a week; we ate K rations, smoked (me, too), talked about good food and bad women, took demeaning shits in the woods with flies swarming around our asses as we did the deed, turned into pitiful lowlife creatures who stank from the sweat of humidity and heat and killing. Even the rains, which came out of nowhere, like the Japs, didn’t improve matters; it merely left us soaked and soaking in muddy foxholes. It made our K rations mildew-it didn’t affect the canned Spam, but the chewing gum and biscuits just somehow weren’t the same.

After two weeks they moved us off the line.

Back at Henderson Field, some Army infantry-the Americal Division-watched us troop in, looking like something the cat dragged in, I’m sure.

“How long you guys been on the Island?” a fresh-faced kid asked.

“Got a smoke?” I asked him.

The afternoon after we came off the line, the war took to the sea and to the sky. Like standing-room-only customers, we watched the show from the edge of the coconut palms lining Red Beach-Barney and me and just about everybody else from Henderson Field, Marine and Army alike. We could see them out there, battle wagons and cruisers and destroyers, from both sides, blasting away at each other with their big guns. Even from the shore the sounds of the sea war were deafening. Still, it seemed oddly abstract-like tiny ships, movie miniatures, battling out there on the horizon.

The air show seemed more real, and was certainly more exciting. Our Marine Grummans fought dogfight after dogfight with Jap Zeros and Zekes; dozens of the Jap planes went down, and not one pilot bailed out. Suicide was in their blood. I knew that from the banzai charges.

Whenever a Jap plane went spiraling into the sea, trailing smoke like drunken skywriters, the boys would whoop and cheer, like the crowd at one of Barney’s fights. I never found myself doing that, cheering the battle I mean, and I noticed Barney didn’t either. Maybe it was because we were older than most. Even at a distance this didn’t seem like a game to us, or remotely fun.

The sea battle brought that home, finally. As we all watched silently while an American cruiser spewed smoke, burning orange against the sky, an obscene midafternoon sunset, Barney looked at me with those puppy-dog eyes gone wet in that battered puss of his and said, “Everybody’s watching like it’s a football game or a movie or something. Don’t they know nice guys are getting blown up out there?”

“They know,” I said, noting the wave of silence that had just washed up over the beach.

Before long, oil-splotched, water-soaked sailors were being brought ashore by rescue boats, among them the PT boats stationed on nearby Tulagi. The plywood torpedo boats bore an oddly cheerful insignia: a cartoon of a mosquito riding a torpedo, drawn by Walt Disney, so it was said. This Hollywood touch seemed perfect to me when I recognized the commander of the boat, who at the moment was helping usher a dazed seaman from the boat onto the narrow shore of Red Beach; his crew was helping similarly dazed, drenched, sometimes wounded gobs.

We were all moving out of the front row of trees to lend a hand, and I moved toward the familiar face.

“Lieutenant Montgomery,” I said, saluting.

His smoothly handsome face streaked with grease, Montgomery didn’t return the salute, his hands full. I could tell he didn’t recognize me.

But he did say, “Lend a hand, would you, Private?”

I did, and as we unloaded the boat, pointing the soaked human cargo toward Henderson Field, other Marines pitching in to walk them there, Montgomery paused to look at me hard and say, “Don’t I know you?”

I managed a smile. “I’m Nate Heller.”

“The detective, yes. What in God’s name are you doing here? You’re easily past thirty-five, I should think.”

“So are you. I got drunk and woke up the next morning in the Marines. What’s your excuse?”

He smiled; even grease-streaked and in wartime, it was the sort of sophisticated, vaguely intellectual smile that had typecast him as British in the movies, even though he was as American as the next guy.

He didn’t answer my question, but posed his own: “You know what we’d be doing right now, if we hadn’t got noble and enlisted?”

“No, sir, I don’t.”

“Testifying to a grand jury, or getting ready to.”

“What do you mean?”

“The Bioff/Nitti affair has really hit the fan, back home.”

“No kidding. I wish they’d subpoena me back there.”

“No such luck,” he smiled. Looking past me, he said, “Isn’t that Barney Ross, the boxer?”

“No,” I said. “That’s Barney Ross, the raggedy-ass Marine.”

“Like to meet him sometime.”

“Maybe you will. It’s a small world, you know.”

“Too goddamn, these days. Got to shove off.”

We shook hands, and he climbed on board, and I turned back toward the beach, where Barney was guiding a wet, groggy sailor toward the airfield.

“Wasn’t that Robert Montgomery you were earbangin’ over there? The actor?”

“Nope,” I said. “That was Lieutenant j.g. Henry Montgomery, the PT boat commander.”

“Sure looked like Robert Montgomery the actor to me.”

“That’s ’cause they’re one and the same, schmuck.”

“What’s a guy like him doing in the goddamn service, of all places?”

“You mean when he could be home running a cocktail lounge?”

The battle continued on through the night-flares and tracer bullets lighting the sky-and well into the next day. The Army guys, who were on the Island in force now, the brass getting ready to launch a counteroffensive, were mostly combat virgins, and these air and sea battles they’d witnessed from the beach were an education.

Marines are pretty notorious for mixing it up with the other branches of the service-the Army and Navy being ahead of us in line, where supplies and equipment were concerned-and a lot of resentment naturally developed; but the sailors who survived their ship going down were treated royally on the Island, and I don’t know of a single fight between a soldier and a Gyrene on Guadalcanal. Maybe the jungle took the orneriness out of us. Maybe the Island was so all-consuming it reduced us all to common dogfaces and leave it go at that.

Or maybe what kept the peace was pogey bait.

The Army boys were Hershey-bar rich; we Marines had souvenirs up the wazoo to swap ’em. The bartering was intense and as all-pervasive as combat: Hershey bars and Butterfingers and Baby Ruths were traded for samurai swords and battle flags and Nip helmets. The Army had plenty of cigars and cigs, too-I swapped a rising sun battle flag for a couple cartons of Chesterfields and a quart of whiskey.

“Got any advice for somebody who was never in combat before?” an Army private asked me, after we swapped for something or other.

“Ever hear the expression ‘watch your ass’?”

“Sure.”

“It’s got a special meaning in combat. See, the Japs know us Americans don’t shit where we eat-we don’t like to take a crap, or even take a leak, in or near our foxhole. So at dawn, when you get out of your hole to go looking for a bush to squat behind, stay low-that’s when the snipers are really on the lookout for you. It’s the most dangerous goddamn time of day.”

“Thanks.”

“Don’t mention it, kid.”

“Say, uh-are you feeling all right?”

“Never better. I’m in the pink.”

“Okay,” he said, smiling nervously. And went on his way.

But I wasn’t in the pink. I was in the yellow, from the Atabrine tablets, despite which I had a fever. Goddamn malaria, no doubt.

“Check in at sick bay,” Barney said.

“I already did,” I said.

“And?”

“I’m only running a hundred and one degrees. And I can walk.”

“So you’ll be going back on the line with the rest of us.”

“I guess so.”

I guessed right. Late that afternoon we were moving past the native village, Kukum, to the dock complex we’d built there, a pontoon bridge having been thrown across the broad Matanikau days before. Some of the natives looked on-dark men in loincloths and the occasional scrap of discarded Marine clothing, faces tattooed, ears slit and hobbling with ornaments, frizzled hair standing eight inches and reddened by (so I was told) lime juice of all things, carrying captured Jap weapons: knives, bayonets, rifles. Several of them saluted me; I saluted back. What the hell. They were on our side.

On the sandbar nearby, as a grim reminder to the hidden enemy holding the river’s west bank, lay the charred and/or water-logged remains of several Jap tanks, dropped dead in their tracks like great beasts gone suddenly extinct. A dead Jap soldier, bloating up, bobbled on the water as we crossed the pontoon bridge.

“One of Tojo’s men who made good,” the skipper commented, nodding toward the corpse as we passed. The skipper was Captain O. K. LeBlanc-we all liked him, but he was a hard-nosed fucker.

We pushed through the humid, pest-ridden jungle a few hundred yards and dug in for the night; digging foxholes through the roots of small trees and deep-tendriled weeds and brush was no picnic in the park. All I could think about was how nice it would be to be back in Chicago-indoors.

Barney was bitching about his knee-in that and other joints he had some arthritis setting in, and this sodden hellhole wasn’t helping. He had to do all his shoveling without the bracing of a foot on the spade, and that made it tough; I told him not to worry about it-I could carry his weight, where the digging was concerned.

“Shit,” he said, “you’re half dead as it is. Your fever must be up to a hundred and three by now.”

“You’re the one’s delirious,” I said. “Just take it easy-I’ll do the goddamn digging.”

The next morning, after cold K rations, the skipper got the platoon together and asked for a patrol to go scout up ahead. The patrol was to pinpoint the Japs’ positions for the Army regiment that was coming up and taking over within hours.

I have to say, here, one thing: the number-one Marine Corps rule is Never volunteer.

Barney volunteered.

“You dumb schmuck,” I whispered to him.

“Fine, Private Heller,” the skipper said. Whether he heard what I really said, or truly misunderstood me, I’ll never know.

Whatever the case, his “fine” meant I was on the fucking patrol, too.

So was D’Angelo, and a big dockworker from Frisco named Heavy Watkins; also a short kid from Denver named Fremont and a Jersey boy we called Whitey, both of ’em right out of high school. There was also a big Indian guy named Monawk. I don’t know where he was from or what he did for a living before the war.

And soon the seven of us were stalking into the daytime darkness of a jungle held by Japs.

We didn’t crawl on our bellies, but we stayed low. Low enough for the bugs and scorpions to crawl on our clothes; low enough for kunai grass to cut us. The liana vines, with their nasty little fishhook barbs, reached down to try to hang us. There was no way to move quietly through underbrush and overgrowth like this and I kept thinking about that 1st Marine’s advice about trip wires, knowing any given step could be the end.

“Hey, Ross,” D’Angelo called out, in a harsh whisper. “Those bastards are real close.”

We all looked over at him; the good-looking Italian kid from the South Side was bending down, holding a turd in the palm of his hand, like his hand was a bun and it was a sausage.

“It’s still warm,” he said, very seriously.

Barney and I exchanged glances, wondering if this kid had been on the Island too long, already.

Then, as we started pressing forward, D’Angelo said, in an effort to build support for his case, “It has to be Japanese. It smells Japanese.”

Now we knew he was going Asiatic on us.

That was when we heard the machine gun.

It was nearby, but not aimed at us.

We settled in behind various fat-trunked trees or logs uprooted from artillery shelling, a man or two behind each; Barney and me together behind a massive tree.

“Who the hell’s he shooting at?” I whispered.

“We’re the only Americans this far forward on this side of the river,” Barney whispered back.

“Well, he doesn’t seem to be shooting at us.”

The sound of it was growing louder, though.

A smile cracked my face. “He’s fishing. He’s sweeping the woods in a three-quarter circle, hoping to hit something.”

“It’s getting louder.”

“I know,” I said, and took a grenade off my belt.

When it seemed to me the machine-gunning had grown loud enough, I pulled the pin and leaned out and pitched.

There was an explosion and a scream, followed by silence.

We pushed on.

For a couple more hours, trudging through the dank jungle, the sun beginning to beat mercilessly down through the trees on us, we patrolled. We saw no more Japs.

Another guy from the platoon, Robbins, found us around four o’clock.

“Take another half hour,” he said, “and then you’re supposed to report back to the skipper.” And he headed on back.

We were just starting back when Monawk nudged my arm.

“Look,” he said.

It was the first thing he’d ever said to me.

But it was a worthwhile comment: he was pointing to the advance patrol of Japs, at least double our number, moving toward us through the jungle.

“Let’s get the fuck out of here,” I said to Barney.

He waved back toward Heavy, Fremont, and Whitey, who were over to our right. Just parallel to the Jap patrol.

Who spotted them.

And opened up a machine gun on them.

Bullets danced across Whitey’s chest and as if in response Whitey did a little dance himself and dropped into the brush, blood splurting out of his chest wounds like three or four men spitting tobacco. We ran to him, keeping low; the Japs hadn’t seen us yet, and Whitey had fallen out of their sight.

Heavy, Monawk, and Fremont were right there with Whitey, too. I didn’t know what the hell had become of D’Angelo.

“I’ll be damned,” Whitey breathed. “I’m still alive.”

“You got the million-dollar wound, kid,” I said, smiling at him, reassuring him. “You’ll go home for sure.”

“Looks like…the war’s over for me,” he said, smiling, his eyes cloudy.

“Let’s make a stretcher for him,” Heavy said, “out of our dungaree jackets.”

“Yeah,” Fremont said, “we can try and carry him back.”

We improvised a litter, and Barney and I took all the rifles while Heavy, Monawk, and Fremont, bending low in the brush, carried Whitey. We moved slow, making as little noise as possible. No sign of the Jap patrol. Maybe they figured they got us. Maybe they moved on.

We’d got about fifty yards when machine-gun fire bup-bup-bup-bup-buped across our flank.

Heavy and Monawk screamed, one unified searing scream of pain-they’d taken the slugs across the legs, and the litter bearing Whitey capsized and Whitey spilled out into the spiky brush. Fremont drove for cover as another spray of machine gun chopped up the landscape. He howled sharply, and then was silent.

Barney and I were flat on our bellies, mosquitoes buzzing happily around our faces. Sweat was running in my eyes and my mouth, salty sweat. My mouth tasted as putrid as this goddamn jungle. Life was less than wonderful, but I resented the men with machine guns out there trying to end it for me.

They hadn’t spotted us, I didn’t think, but they were arcing their machine-gun fire around, bullets cracking, snapping all around.

I could see Heavy and Monawk, like cripples flung from wheelchairs, pulling themselves by the hands across the brambles and brush of the jungle floor, slowly, slowly, slowly finding their way to cover behind some trees. Then I saw Heavy slip down into a hole, a crater formed by an artillery shell. Barney and I edged over toward him, coming across Fremont on the way.

He was in bad shape: gut shot. He was whimpering, barely conscious, his stomach a black/red soggy mess into which he dug one hand, trying to hold his life in.

Above us, Jap bullets chewed up the landscape in a methodical arc.

Staying on our bellies, Barney and I each took one of his arms and dragged him toward the shell hole. We pulled him down in, by which time he was unconscious. Too many people for one small hole. I looked around, frantically; I was burning up, felt like I was looking out through red eyes.

Nonetheless, I saw it: another shell hole, ten yards or so away, a larger hole. In front of it, between us and the direction the Japs had been firing, was a fallen tree, dropped there by a bomb. Just beyond the shell hole, behind a tree, Monawk was slumped, legs shot to shit.

It was more than one machine gun now, and rifle fire was in there, too. Were they zeroing in on us?

Barney and I crawled to the hole, I slid in and he went on past and got Monawk and pulled him down in with us. We had that massive fallen tree between us and the Japs, whose bullets were hitting close enough to home that it was time to give up on keeping our position hidden, and start throwing it back at them.

About then D’Angelo crawled in the hole, grinning. “I told you that turd was warm.”

“Shut up and shoot,” I said.

“You’ll have to prop me up,” he said.

He’d gotten it in the leg.

“Not you too,” I said.

“Thanks for the sympathy, Pops. Prop me up!”

I helped him sit up and he started tossing M-1 fire their way; our efforts seemed feeble compared to the barrage of bullets they were sending us. Barney started to throw Fremont’s rifle and Heavy’s BAR back to them, but they yelled from their shell hole that they were too weak, and in too much pain, to do any shooting.

“You guys can do more good with ’em than us,” Heavy shouted. “Keep ’em…”

His voice trailed off.

“Hit?” I asked Barney.

“Sounds like he passed out,” Barney said.

“He’s got company,” I said, nodding toward a barely conscious Monawk and a slumped D’Angelo.

“Christ! He isn’t dead, is he?”

I checked D’Angelo’s neck pulse. “No. Just unconscious.”

Bullets continued to zing and whiz overhead.

I called out to Fremont and he didn’t answer.

“Looks like we’re it, buddy,” I told Barney. “Everybody else is asleep.”

I thought of Corporal McRae’s remark, back at boot camp, about combat allowing no man sleep. He’d been wrong. So wrong.

“They aren’t sleeping,” Barney said, meaning those sons of bitches throwing machine-gun fire at us.

Neither was Whitey. I could hear him out there, not quite dead yet, yelling “Mother, Mother-Dad, Dad, please help me!”

And then whimpering.

It was the saddest thing I ever heard, but I didn’t cry. I was in that limbo world, that oddly detached place where men under fire go, to keep from going mad during the madness.

With cool desperation I fired my M-1 into the rain of bullets.

Wondering when sleep would next come for me.

And, when it did, if waking would follow.

Barney was leaning against the fallen tree, firing the BAR from within the shell hole. The big automatic rifle made him look like a grizzled, demented dwarf; maybe that look in his eyes was one his opponents in the ring were used to seeing from him-I’d known him a long, long time and never saw it before.

The barrel of my M-1 was getting hot as I fired clip after clip; I too was leaning against the tree, not able to see who I was shooting at, not really, an occasional shape moving in the denseness of the jungle, with only the bullets that were chewing up the jungle around us to prove anybody was really out there at all.

I heard a scream just behind me, and wheeled around and the nose of my M-1 thumped Monawk in the chest like a bayonet. He’d come around, the big Indian had, screaming in pain. Scared the hell out of me, too, but the poor bastard could hardly help it.

Monawk would come in and out of it, like that, blacking out, then suddenly wake and start moaning and groaning and sometimes even screaming, bellowing like a big wounded animal. He was too weakened, too pain-racked, to help shoot or even reload. His legs were shot up real bad, way beyond anything we could do for him with the combat dressings in our first-aid pouches.

“That’s all she wrote for the BAR,” Barney said, lowering the big weapon.

“Watkins carries an extra fifty rounds on his belt,” I said. “Want me to crawl over and get it for you?”

Barney shook his head. “I’ll go. You’re weak with malaria; you wouldn’t be on your feet if you weren’t leanin’ on that log.”

I didn’t argue with him; he had a point-you could’ve fried an egg on my forehead. You could’ve fried a powdered egg on my forehead.

Barney continued: “Anyway, I want to stay over there awhile, and lay down some fire-let’s make the Jap bastards believe they got a whole crowd of healthy Marines on their hands.”

“Why not. Get Fremont’s extra rifle ammo, too, while you’re at it. I’ll lay some cover down for you.”

I fired the M-1 over the log, emptying the rifle rapidly, then switching to another of the M-1s, to keep a steady barrage going while Barney crawled on his belly up and out of our hole and over to the one next door.

Then his BAR opened up, and damn near convinced me there was a whole healthy Marine platoon out here, giving the Japs hell.

I kept switching guns (rifles-this is my rifle, this is my gun, this is for Japs…) with the help of D’Angelo, who was groggy but awake, barely, and able to keep reloading for me. Even rotating six rifles, their barrels got so hot I was afraid they’d warp; the palm of my left hand was scorched black.

At some point, Christ knows when exactly, two soldiers-two young-looking, scared-shitless Army boys-came out of nowhere, crawling on their bellies and dropping into the hole. They were both wounded in the legs, and one in his side as well; they were sobbing with pain. They didn’t have their rifles.

“Who the fuck are you?” I said, with all due sympathy, switching rifles again.

“We…we got detached from our infantry regiment,” the less wounded one said. “We’re lost.”

“Join the club,” I said. I fired off two rounds, looked back. D’Angelo was unconscious again. “You boys’ll have to reload for me.”

“Yes, sir.” They were panting, but no longer sobbing. They reloaded for me.

“Don’t call me ‘sir.’ My name’s Heller.”

They told me theirs, but I don’t remember them.

Barney’s BAR firing let up, about then. Soon he had crawled over and dropped down in with us, eyes going wide when he saw our two new tenants.

“The Army’s here to start that mopping-up operation you been hearing about,” I said. “They’re just a little early.”

Barney looked the boys’ wounds over; applied a combat dressing to the wound in the one boy’s side.

“What’s the story?” I asked, no enemy fire coming our way at the moment.

Barney looked up from his medic duty and said, “Watkins said you and me should get the hell out of here-while we still got our legs to do it with, he said. Said they were trapped, couldn’t hope to get out alive, but maybe we could.”

“What’d you say to that?”

“I told him he was full of shit as a Christmas turkey. I told him we were sticking around, and not to give up. Help’ll come.”

“You really believe that?”

“Sure. Robbins was only a half hour ahead of us; the skipper knows by now we must’ve run into trouble. They’ll come for us.”

“I take it you’re out of BAR ammo.”

“Yup. But I got the extra rifle ammo. That’ll help.”

“What about grenades?”

“We’ll have to go back for those, if we need ’em. Couldn’t carry ’em in one trip.”

“We’ll be out of ammo before you know it, Barney.”

“Maybe they’re gone, those lousy Jap bastards. There hasn’t been a round fired in three or four minutes.”

I lit up a smoke. My mouth and throat were dry, my eyes were burning with the malaria and my head was pounding; a smoke was the worst thing in the world for me right now. But it was something to do. Which reminded me: “How’s our water situation?”

He was finished with the dressing, now. He took his position down from me against the fallen log and looked at me glumly and said, “Not good. We had a bad break-both Watkins and Fremont’s canteens got stitched by that machine-gun fire.”

“Monawk’s, too,” I said. “I already checked.”

The two Army boys did have canteens, and so did Barney and me, and D’Angelo. But the wounded men were going through the water fast. I craved it, or anyway my malaria craved it, but the poor shot-up bastards needed it worse.

Twilight.

The machine-gun and rifle fire had let up long enough, now, for the jungle to come back alive, birds cackling, land crabs skittering. Maybe the Japs were gone. Maybe we’d worn ’em down with the 350 or so rounds of ammunition we’d hurled their way.

The wounded men were sleeping, or in comas, who could say, and I began to think maybe we might just be able to last, just hide here, tucked away, and the American troops, Marines, Army, I didn’t care if it was the fucking Coast Guard, would stumble across us, as the front moved forward.

Then machine-gun fire ripped open the night, whittling at the fallen tree, carving Jap initials in it, some bullets ricocheting wildly off the log, hitting my helmet, Barney’s too, putting puckers in our tin hats. We ducked down.

“That fucker’s close!” I said. Bullets flew over us, popping, snapping; tracers bounced off the log and rolled into our hole, sizzling like tiny white-hot rivets. It woke Monawk up with a scream, which dissolved into groaning.

“He’s too damned close to keep missing,” Barney said, over the gunfire and Monawk, “that’s for sure.”

“Hit the fucker with a grenade!”

“I can’t stand up to do it! He’d riddle me to pieces.”

I wasn’t in the running for this event, standing or otherwise; the fever had weakened me too much. It had to be Barney. I mustered a pep talk: “You’re a world’s champ, you little schmuck; just throw ’em from where you are-body punches! Do it, man!”

Face bunched up like a bulldog’s, he pulled three grenades off his belt and, one at a time, pulled the pin with his teeth and hurled. Each one in a slightly different direction.

He did it so quickly there seemed to be only one explosion.

And one high-pitched scream of terror.

And then Barney was standing up, bracing his rifle against the log, firing and screaming, “Got you, you dirty fuckin’ bastard!”

Such profanity was rare from Barney, but he was right: he had got the dirty fuckin’ bastard, only more machine-gun and rifle fire was coming our way-not from as close as the guy Barney just nailed, but coming and coming closer.

We started in firing again, and within fifteen minutes were running out of ammo. Soon we’d be down to the.45 automatics on our hips.

“One clip left,” I said. Eight rounds.

“Cover me while I go over and get the rest of the grenades.”

I used my eight rounds sparingly, but they were gone before Barney was back. D’Angelo, groggy but willing, was suddenly at my side, handing me a.45.

“It’s Monawk’s,” the kid said. “He won’t mind.”

Monawk was out of it again.

By the time I’d emptied the.45, Barney had scrambled back in, dropping handfuls of grenades like deadly eggs into a basket.

“Gotta make another trip,” he said, and scrambled back out.

I’d just taken my own.45 out of its holster when the mortar fire started in; I ducked down into the hole. The shells were landing close. White-hot shrapnel was flying, but it missed us.

It didn’t miss Barney. He was on his way back to us with the rest of the grenades as the burning shrapnel ate into his side, his arm, his leg.

“Bastards, bastard, bastards!” he was screaming.

He stumbled back to the hole and I pulled him down in and put rough dressings on the wounds. The mortar barrage kept pounding on, and on. Like my feverish head. And everybody else but Barney in the goddamn hole was sleeping. That’s war for you-you end up envying guys who passed out.

Then the shelling stopped.

We waited for the lull to explode away; half an hour slipped by, and the lull continued. Darkness blanketed us, now. We’d be hard for the Japs to find at night. But hard for anybody else to find, either.

“How are Fremont and Watkins?” I asked Barney.

“Watkins is conscious, or anyway he was. Fremont’s got his finger in his stomach trying to stop the flow of blood.”

“Jesus.”

“Poor bastard doesn’t stand a chance.”

“I wonder if any of us do.”

“I thought the infantry or B Company would’ve come to the rescue by now.”

“There was a chance of that, till it got dark. They sure as hell won’t try to advance at night.”

He shook his head. “Poor Whitey’s still lyin’ where the boys dropped him. Dead by now. Poor bastard.”

“Only difference between us and him is that we’re already in a hole.”

The mosquitoes were feasting on us, crawling in our hair. Barney was chewing some snuff to keep his thirst at bay-he’d given his water to the wounded men-and I was having a smoke, shaking, sweat dripping down my forehead in a salty waterfall. The fever seemed to keep me from getting hungry, that was something, anyway. But Christ I was thirsty, Jesus I could use some water.

It began to rain.

“Thanks for small favors,” I told the sky.

Barney and I each had a shelter half along, and we covered the two shell holes with the camouflage tenting, or anyway Barney did. I was too weak even for that. The rain seemed to rouse the wounded men and boys to the point of being able to move themselves. We huddled together. As the shelter half collected water, I stuck my head out and tilted the tenting over and drank from its edge; Barney did, too, guzzling at it greedily. We drained the water into a canteen and passed it around to the wounded. Monawk was in especially bad shape, now, conscious, but moaning like a dying man.

The hole stayed fairly dry, but Barney and I would occasionally stick our heads out into the refreshing cloudburst; so did D’Angelo, who seemed in better shape than the others. Thirsty again, I drank from puddles near the edge of the hole.

Heavier and heavier, the rain came down, turning from blessing into curse; the shelter half began to leak, water running in along its sides, the earthen floor of our home turning into a muddy mess. I was starting to chill, now, hugging myself, shivering.

Barney was rubbing his knee.

“Nice weather for arthritis,” I said.

“Ain’t it.”

Then, like all tropical downpours, this one ended as abruptly as it began. We sat under the shelter half, pigs in a wallow, listening to fat droplets finding their way down off the trees above, landing on the tenting like bird droppings.

The wounded, except for D’Angelo, were sleeping, or whatever it was they were doing. I was smoking. I lit one up for D’Angelo and passed it to him; he nodded thanks and sat quietly smoking. My chills had stopped. I felt the fever taking hold again, but by now that seemed only natural. I couldn’t remember what it was like not to have a fever.

“I wonder if I’ll ever see Cathy again,” Barney said.

Did I mention Barney married his pretty blond showgirl just before we left San Diego? Well, he did. She was a gentile, so they had a civil ceremony. I stood up for him. He was writing her General Delivery, Hollywood, almost daily. But he hadn’t got any mail from her, yet.

“Still not a single one,” he said. “My God, d’you suppose maybe she was in an accident, knocked over by a hit-and-run driver or something?”

“She’s fine. Service mail’s always snafued, you know that.”

He kept rubbing his knee, a little pile of grenades next to him. “If by some miracle I stay alive and get back to the States, back to Cathy, I swear the first thing I’ll do is kiss the ground, and never leave the good old U.S.A. again.”

The U.S.A. That sounded so far away.

It was.

“Ma and Ida and my brothers and my ghetto pals,” he was muttering. “I’m never going to see ’em again, am I? Rabbi Stein’ll read a funeral service over me, but who’ll say Kaddish? I don’t have any sons.”

I wanted to comfort him, tell him not to give up, but the fever wouldn’t let me. I was having my own thoughts, now.

“Funny thing is,” he said, “I got into this to fight the Nazis, not Japs… I’m a Jew.”

“No kidding,” I managed.

“So are you.”

I couldn’t find a wisecrack; maybe one wasn’t called for. Anyway, I wasn’t up to it. I saw my father. He was sitting at the kitchen table with my gun in his hand. He lifted it to his head and I said, “Stop!”

Then Barney’s hand was over my mouth; he was shaking, wild-eyed. His.45 was in his other hand. We were still under the shelter half. D’Angelo was awake, alert, automatic in hand; the two Army boys were too, similarly armed. Not Monawk-he was slumped, breathing hard.

His mouth right on my ear, Barney whispered: “You passed out. Be quiet. Japs.”

We could hear them walking, twigs snapping, brush rustling. They couldn’t have been more than thirty yards away.

Barney took his hand off my mouth, just as I was getting my.45 off my hip.

Then Monawk awoke, in pain, and screamed.

Barney clasped a hand over the Indian’s mouth, but it was too late.

A machine gun opened up.

D’Angelo dove for Monawk as if to strangle him, but Barney pulled him off.

The machine gun chattered on, swinging in an arc.

That meant they’d heard us, but hadn’t spotted us.

“Bastard’s gonna get us killed,” D’Angelo whispered harshly. Monawk, barely conscious, was confused, to say the least; then his eyes shut as he slipped away again.

Soon mortar shells began to land all around, and bullets zinged at us, as machine guns swept the area. It’s all pretty hazy after that; images floating in a fever dream; one of the soldiers takes a hit in the arm but sucks in his howl and doesn’t give us away; a slug creases Barney’s ankle; bullets flying everywhere; Monawk starts to scream again, but then is quiet, a bullet with his name on it finds its way home.

More clearly, I remember: Barney, flat on his belly in the hole, starting to pitch grenades.

That was safe-it wouldn’t give our position away; the enemy couldn’t tell where the grenades were coming from, in this darkness. He must’ve thrown a couple dozen.

The sun was rising; I was burning up. They’d be coming any minute, climbing over the log, flowing over the edge of the hole, banzai, bayonets flashing, Barney saying the Shema Yisrael over and over, holding on to one last grenade to take the Japs with us when they came streaming over in and on us.

A mortar shell hit, nearby, rocking the earth.

“It’s from behind us!” Barney shouted.

Our side firing…our side firing…another shell landed in front of us, in a crashing rumble, throwing up a huge cloud of smoke.

Hooray for our side.

“Nate, I’m going for help-the Japs won’t be able to see me in all this smoke. Okay, Nate?”

I nodded. Nodded off. Slipping into a fever dream where things I never wanted to remember would teach me to forget them.

“Nathan Heller,” I said.

The captain smiled. He was a Navy man, the only uniformed doctor of the four on the panel. He seemed to be in his early forties-a doctor on his either side outranked him in age-and he was the only one who wasn’t a little on the heavy side. One of the well-fed civilian doctors was Wilcox, my doc, sitting at the far end. But the captain was in charge. It took a Navy man to give you your walking papers, your Section 8.

“You know your name,” the captain said, pleasantly. “That’s a good start.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Dr. Wilcox feels you’ve done very well here. It’s seldom a patient makes it down to the first floor so quickly.”

“Sir, if I might ask a question?”

“Yes, Private Heller.”

“It was my understanding that the program here is a three-month one, minimum. I’ve been here a little over two months. Now, I’m not complaining, mind you-I’m glad to be getting this consideration, but…”

The captain nodded, smiling again. “Your curiosity about this early Board of Review is a sign of your improved condition. I understand you were a detective before you enlisted.”

“Yes, sir. I’m president of a little agency. It’s waiting for me back in Chicago, when the Marines get through with me.”

“You understand, Private, that returning to combat, to any sort of active duty, is out of the question.”

It was the ultimate Hollywood wound, the jackpot million-dollar wound: if you cracked up in combat, there was no going back to it. Heller goes marching home.

“I’ve heard the scuttlebutt, yes sir.”

“You’ll be honorably discharged, when you’re released from St. E’s. You should feel no stigma about that.”

“Yes, sir.”

“You’ve served your country honorably. I understand you’ve been awarded a Silver Star.”

“Yes, sir.”

“You’ve acquitted yourself admirably, to say the least. Bravery under fire is no small distinction. But you’re wondering why I haven’t answered your question, about this early hearing.”

“Yes, sir.”

He gestured toward the wall behind me, which was lined with chairs. “Pull up a chair,” he said. “Have a seat.”

I did.

“There is a precedent for your early release, should we decide to do so, in response to the special circumstances that have come up. For example, many Army hospitals run an eight-week mental rehab program. So, Private Heller, you mustn’t feel shortchanged by getting a ‘rush job’ at St. E’s.”

“Oh, I don’t feel shortchanged, sir…”

He stopped me with an upraised hand. “Please relax. Consider the smoking lamp lit.” He was getting out his own cigarettes, Chesterfields, and the other doctors joined in. He offered me one.

“No thank you, sir. I lost my taste for it.”

His own cigarette in hand, the captain looked at me suspiciously. “That’s unusual, under these conditions. There isn’t much to do at St. E’s but sit and smoke.”

“Oh, they found some floors for me to scrub, sir. That kept me busy.”

The doctors exchanged smiles, although one of them, a roundfaced man with thick glasses, asked, “Is it because you associate smoking with combat? Dr. Wilcox’s report indicates you didn’t begin smoking until you were on Guadalcanal.”

I looked to the captain, rather than the doctor who posed the question. “May I be frank, sir?”

He nodded.

“Suppose smoking does remind me of combat,” I said. “Suppose it does take me back to the Island.”

They looked at me with narrowed eyes.

“Then I’d be crazy to smoke, wouldn’t I? And put myself through all that.”

Only the captain smiled, but then he was a military man; he could understand.

“I don’t feel like a Marine, anymore,” I said. “I don’t feel like a civilian, either, but I’m willing to try to learn. I see no reason to dwell on what’s happened.”

The third doctor spoke for the first time. He had a small mouth, like a fish, and wire-rim glasses. He said, “You suffered amnesia, Mr. Heller. That, too, was an effort not to ‘dwell’ on your traumatic experiences.”

“I don’t want to forget what happened, or anyway I don’t want to ‘repress’ it, as Dr. Wilcox calls it. But I do want to get on with my life.”

Dr. Wilcox came to my defense, saying, “I think I’ve made it clear in my report that Private Heller quickly learned to regard his experience in its true perspective, as a thing of the past-something that no longer threatens his safety. I might add that it took only simple hypnosis, and no drug therapy or shock treatments, to achieve this effect.”

The captain waved a hand at Wilcox, as if to quiet him on subjects better spoken about when the patient wasn’t present.

But the doctor with the fish’s mouth and the wire glasses picked up on Wilcox’s little speech, taking offense, bristling openly, patient present or not: “I hope by that that you don’t mean to imply anything derogatory about the use of drugs or shock by others here at St. Elizabeth’s.”

“Not at all. Merely that some battle neuroses are relatively minor compared to chronic cases we might encounter from within the civilian population.”

“Gentlemen, please,” the captain said. He looked like he wished he had a gavel to pound. Instead he looked at me and said, “We are going to have to ask you some questions, at some length, before we can reach a decision.”

“Understood, sir. But before you begin, could you answer my question?”

“Private?”

“You said some special circumstances had come up, that made this early hearing necessary.”

The captain nodded. “A federal prosecutor in Chicago wants you to give testimony before a grand jury.”

“Oh.” I thought I knew what that was about.

But the captain didn’t realize that, and he shuffled through some papers, looking for the answer to a question I hadn’t asked. “It involves racketeers and the film industry, I believe. Yes, here it is. The defendants include Frank Nitti, Louis Campagna and others.”

“I see.”

“You seem strangely disinterested, Private. Do you remember the incident this involves?”

I couldn’t “repress” a smile. I said, “I don’t have amnesia anymore, sir. But you can get amnesia permanently testifying against Frank Nitti.”

For the first time the captain frowned; I’d overstepped my bounds-after all, I wasn’t discharged yet. I was still in the service.

“Does that mean you’re not interested in testifying?”

“Does it work that way? If I choose to testify, I’m sane and a civilian? And if I choose not to, I’m crazy and a Marine?”

The captain wasn’t at all pleased with me; but he only said, calmly, “There are no strings attached to this hearing. We were merely requested to move it up a few weeks, to give a federal prosecutor-in Chicago-the opportunity to speak with you. Nobody’s requiring you to do anything.”

“Yes, sir.”

“But I’m sure the government would appreciate your cooperation in this matter.”

“Yes, sir.”

“After all, it is one government. The same government prosecuting these gangsters is the one you chose to defend-enlisting, out of patriotic zeal.”

Out of a bottle is more like it, I thought, but was smart enough to “repress” that, too.

“At any rate, we’ve been asked to consider your case, and we do have a few more questions for you.”

The interview covered a lot of things-my memories and my feelings about what had happened on Guadalcanal. How and why I lied about my age enlisting. They even talked to me about the suicide of my father. One of them seemed to find it significant that I had carried the gun my father killed himself with as my personal weapon, thereafter. I explained that I had done that to make sure I never took killing too lightly, never used the thing too easily. But you killed in combat, didn’t you? Yes, I said, but I left that gun home.

Anyway, it covered lots of ground, including how my malaria hadn’t flared up since I first got here, and I didn’t lose my temper anymore or crack wise and the captain seemed to like me again by the end of the interview. I was dismissed. There were chairs just outside the conference room, where I could sit and wait for the verdict. I sat and looked at the speckled marble floor. Part of me wanted a smoke, but I didn’t give in.

“Hi.”

I looked up. It was that pretty little nurse from the fourth floor; I hadn’t seen her in weeks. She was a student nurse actually. Her name was Sara, and we’d struck up a friendship.

“Well, hello,” I said.

“Mind if I sit down?”

“I’d mind if you didn’t.”

She sat, smoothed out the white apron over the checked dress; her blouse was blue, her cap white. And her eyes were still light blue, freckles still trailed across a cute pugish nose. She had some legs; you can have Betty Grable.

“I heard you were getting your Board of Review today,” she said. “I just wanted to come down and wish you luck.”

“Too late for that. I already said my piece.”

“I wouldn’t worry. You’ve made remarkable progress. I don’t know of anybody ever getting a Board of Review after only a couple of months.”

“Uncle Sam has something else in mind for me, that’s all.”

“Pardon?”

“Nothing. Just a federal grand jury they want me to testify to, for some stupid extortion racket that dates back before the war.”

Her tight little smile crinkled her chin. “It all seems so…unimportant, somehow, doesn’t it? What happened before the war.”

“Yeah. It all kind of pales, that life back there.”

“You’ll be going back to it.”

I shook my head. “It’s all changed. Haven’t you heard, lady? There’s a war on.”

“Nate. Are you sleeping better now?”

I put a smile on for her. “Oh, yeah. Sure. Fine. No problem.”

“You had some rough nights on the fourth floor.”

“I graduated to the floors below, remember? I’m the wonder boy, or I would be if I were younger.”

“You weren’t sleeping much at all. And when you did…”

When I did I had nightmares of combat and I woke up screaming, like Monawk.

“Not anymore,” I said. “Ah, you know, that Doc Wilcox is a whiz. He put my head back together, piece by piece. I feel great.”

“You have dark circles under your eyes.”

I was glad she wasn’t on the Board of Review.

“I’m fine, honestly. If I wasn’t sleeping, how could I be so bright and cheery today?”

“You get plenty of rest sitting around the dayroom. You seem able to catch naps, sitting there, not knowing you’re sleeping. But at night-”

At night, sleep refused to come, until I was so tired it and the nightmares sneaked up on me, like a Jap with a knife in the dark.

“It’s not a problem, anymore. Really. Gosh, Sara, it was nice of you to stop down and wish me luck.”

“I know you’re still not sleeping. I know you’re still having the nightmares.”

“Sara, please…”

“I’m not going to say anything. I know you’re keeping it to yourself so the doctors won’t keep you in here. You want to go home, don’t you?”

“Yes,” I said, and suddenly my goddamn eyes were wet. What is this shit!

She slipped her arm around my shoulder. “Come ’ere, big boy.”

I wept into her blue blouse, and she patted me like a baby. Another woman did that once, babied me while I bawled; I’d seen somebody I cared for die, violently, and it had rocked me, and Sally had helped me through that.

“There, there,” Sara said.

I sat up, glancing around, hoping nobody saw me. After all, I wouldn’t want to look like a nut in a mental ward; people would talk.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“It’s okay,” she said. “I’m not going to say anything to the doctors. You’ll be better off back in Chicago, anyway. Do you really know some of the people you say you know?”

“Yeah. What’s wrong, haven’t you ever met anybody famous?”

“Oh sure. Napoleon, for instance, and a guy who thinks he’s Hitler.”

“Did you ever consider that if you had the genuine articles they’d be in the right place?”

She smiled broadly, showed me those pretty childlike teeth. “Good point.” She stood. “If you’re ever in Washington again, try and look me up.”

“Are you implying you’d go out with a former mental patient?”

“Sure,” she said. “There’s a man shortage.”

“Some compliment. Say, how’s Dixon doing?”

Her cheerful expression faded and she shook her head; sat back down. “Not so good. He’s up on the sixth floor. No early Board of Review for him.”

“Damn. What about that Navy guy who wasn’t talking, the uh, what did you say his condition was called?”

“Catatonic,” she said, and started to giggle.

“What’s so funny?”

“I shouldn’t laugh. You remember the fuss he made, when we fed him with a tube?”

I had helped her, on several occasions, her and the corpsman, feed the guy his mixture of tomato juice, milk, raw eggs, and purged meats and stuff; if they won’t eat, they get this concoction in a tube down the throat, but this guy-completely clammed up otherwise and placid as glass-would go berserk when you tried to put the tube in him.

“He’s started to talk,” she said. “He’s had some shock treatments, and he’s talking now. He told us why he squirmed so when we tube-fed him.”

“Yeah?”

“He thought it was an enema and we were putting it in the wrong end.”

We sat and laughed and laughed and pretty soon I was crying again, but it was a different kind, a better kind.

She stood.

I stood.

“Good luck,” she said. She touched my face. “Get some sleep.”

“I’ll do my best,” I said. Sat.

She swished off; pretty legs. I’d spent hours here beating my meat, thinking about those legs. There’s not much to do in a mental ward.

I wiped some residue of moisture off my face, thinking what a sweet cunning little bitch she was. She knew I was holding back; she knew, hypnosis or not, there were things I hadn’t told Wilcox.

Hell, there were things I couldn’t tell Wilcox. There were doors that just wouldn’t open. Or was that jumble of events, that rush of images in the shell hole, simply the fever that had gripped me then?

How the fuck did Monawk die, exactly? He was shot. Who shot him?

Well, the Japs, of course. Don’t be stupid.

Then why did he have black, scorchy powder burns on his chest, where he was shot? Why was the hole in his goddamn back big enough to drive a Mack truck through?

Close range; somebody shot him close range.

With a.45, that had to be it, like the.45s we all had, Barney, D’Angelo, those Army boys, me.

Me.

Like the.45 I had in my hand when I noticed the powder burns on Monawk’s dungaree jacket…

I bent over, covered my face with my hands. No, I hadn’t told Wilcox about that. I hadn’t told anybody about that. I hadn’t told anybody that I thought I’d seen it happen, Monawk’s murder, but I, goddamnit, I repressed it, it’s stuck back here someplace in my fucking head but I can’t, I won’t remember.

Did I kill you, Monawk? Did you scream and endanger us all and I killed you?

“Private Heller?”

It was the captain. In the doorway of the conference room.

“Please step in.”

I did.

“We’ve reviewed your case,” the captain said, sitting back down behind the table. I remained standing. “We’re quite impressed by your recovery, and are convinced that you are in every way ready to rejoin society.” There were some papers in front of him, with various signatures on them; he handed them to me.

My Section 8.

“And here’s your honorable service award,” he said, handing me a little box.

I didn’t bother opening it; I knew what it was: my Ruptured Duck, the lapel pin all armed forces vets got upon their discharge-so called because the eagle within the little button spread its wings awkwardly.

“Check with the front receiving desk, and they’ll help you arrange transportation. You should be able to make train reservations for this afternoon, if you like. You’re going back to Chicago, Mr. Heller.”

I smiled down at my discharge. Then I smiled at the captain. “Thank you, sir.”

He smiled too and stood and offered his hand and I shook it. I went down the line shaking all their hands. I lingered with Wilcox, squeezing his hand, trying to convey some warmth to this heavyset little man who’d brought me back to myself.

“Good luck, Nate,” he said.

“Thanks, Doc.”

Just as I was leaving, he said, “If your trouble sleeping persists, check in at the nearest military hospital. They can give you something for it.”

I guess I hadn’t fooled him so good, after all.

“Thanks, Doc,” I said again, and headed back to my ward, to pack my sea bag.

It didn’t matter what happened back there in that shell hole; that was over, that was history. What mattered was not that Monawk died, but that some of us had lived through it. Fremont and Whitey hadn’t, of course, but Watkins did and D’Angelo and the two Army boys and Barney, hell, Barney was a hero. They said he killed twenty-two Japs with those grenades he was lobbing. They also said he was still over there, on the Island. Still fighting. How could he still be over there?

And me here?

I sat on the edge of my rack and thought about how screwy it seemed, going back to Chicago to see some federal prosecutor about Frank Nitti and Little New York Campagna and the Outfit bilking the movie industry. What did that have to do with anything, today? Who cared? Didn’t they know there was a war on? It seemed another world, Nitti’s Chicago-a lifetime ago.

Not three short years…

The deli restaurant on the corner was calling itself the Dill Pickle, now, and the bar next door was under new management. Barney Ross’s Cocktail Lounge had moved to nicer, more spacious digs, across from the Morrison Hotel, where Barney kept an “exclusive” suite. I lived at the Morrison myself, in a two-room suite, not so exclusive.

Which was still a step up from the days, not so long ago, when I slept in my office, on a Murphy bed, playing nightwatchman for my landlord in lieu of rent. My landlord, the owner of the building, was then, and was now, one Barney Ross.

Who had walked over from the Morrison with me on this brisk Monday morning, back to the former site of his cocktail lounge, above which was-or anyway had been-my one-room office. He wasn’t the only one who was expanding.

“I’m anxious to see what you’ve done to the place,” Barney said, working to be heard over the rumble of the El.

I stepped around a wino and opened the door for him and he started up the narrow stairway (Barney, not the wino). “No permanent improvements,” I said to his back as we climbed. “I wouldn’t want your investment to appreciate.”

“Ever since you started paying rent,” he said, grinning back at me like a bulldog who spotted his favorite hydrant, “you just ain’t your charming self.”

Actually, I was feeling very much my charming self this morning. Very much full of my charming self. Life was good. Life was sweet. Because business was good. And that’s sweet in my book.

I was a small businessman, you see. But not as small as I used to be. I was coming up in the world.

You couldn’t tell that based upon Barney’s building, however; this block on Van Buren Street, the hovering El casting its shadow down the middle of the street, remained a barely respectable hodgepodge of bars and hockshops and flophouses. And our building wasn’t exactly the Monadnock. We had a couple of cut-rate doctors, one of whom seemed to be an abortionist, another of whom purported to be a dentist; anyway, they both made extractions, including from wallets, and even an old pickpocket-detail dick like me couldn’t do anything about it. We also had three shysters and one palm reader and various marginal businesses that came and went.

And one detective agency, now proudly expanded to a suite of two offices, count ’em, two. At the far end of the hall on the fourth floor was my old office, now partitioned off and used by my two freshly hired operatives, whereas the office next door, looking out on Plymouth Court and the Standard Club (a scenic view of the El now denied me), was mine and mine alone.

Almost.

I opened the door, the pebbled glass of which bore the fresh inscription A-1 DETECTIVE AGENCY, NATHAN HELLER, PRESIDENT (I was afraid if I touched it, it’d smear), and Barney and I entered my outer office. My outer office! Hot damn. All I needed was a stack of year-old magazines and there wouldn’t be a waiting room in the Loop that had anything on me.

I also had Gladys.

“Good morning, Mr. Heller,” she said, smiling with no sincerity whatsoever. “No calls.”

I glanced at my watch. “It’s five after nine, Gladys.” We opened at nine; Pinkerton never slept-Heller did. “How long have you been here, anyway?”

“Five minutes, Mr. Heller. During which time there were no calls.”

“Call me Nate.”

“That wouldn’t be correct, Mr. Heller.” She stood from behind the small dark beat-up desk Barney had given me from downstairs, when he moved his cocktail lounge. “If you’ll excuse me, I’ll just keep working on straightening out your files.”

My four wooden file cabinets were in the outer office here with Gladys, now, and she was putting them in order, something which hadn’t been done for a couple of years. Gladys, by the way, was twenty-four years old, had brunette hair that brushed her shoulders, curling in at the bottom, a fashion a lot of girls seemed to be wearing. None more attractively than Gladys; right now, as she stood filing, in her frilly yet somehow businesslike white blouse and a black skirt that was tight around the sweet curves of her bottom and then flared out, she was any lecherous employer’s dream.

Unfortunately, that dream was unlikely ever to come true. I had hired her for her sweet bottom and her delicately featured face-did I mention the dark brown eyes, their long lashes, the pouty puckered mouth? That sulky mouth should’ve tipped me off; some goddamn detective I was. Anyway, I hired her chiefly for her rear end, noting that her secretarial background (letter from former employer, secretarial school diploma) looked pretty good, as well.

But she double-crossed me. She was turning out to be an intelligent, efficient, utterly businesslike secretary, without the slightest personal interest in her boss.

Barney nudged me.

“Uh, Gladys. This is my friend Mr. Ross. He’s our landlord.”

She turned away from the filing cabinet and gave Barney a smile as lovely as it was disinterested “That’s nice,” she said.

“Barney Ross,” I said. “The boxer?”

She’d already turned back to her filing. “I know,” she said, tonelessly. “A pleasure,” she added, without any. She had the cheerfully cold cadence of a telephone operator.

Barney and I moved past her, past the dated-looking “modernistic” black-and-white couch and chairs I’d bought back in ’34, in the art-deco aftermath of the World’s Fair, and opened the door in the midst of the pebbled-glass-and-wood wall that separated Gladys from my inner office. My old desk was in here, a big scarred oak affair I’d grown used to. I had sprung for a new, comfortable swivel chair so I could lean back and not fall out the double windows behind me. Barney got it wholesale for me. There was a secondhand but new-looking tan leather couch from Maxwell Street against the right wall, on which hung several photographs, including portraits of Sally Rand and a certain other actress. Both photos were signed to me “with love.” Something that personal has no business in an office, but the two famous female faces impressed some of my clients, and gave me something to look at when business was slow. Against the other wall were several chairs and some fight photos of Barney, which he’d given me, one of them signed. Not with love.

“She’s a sweet dish,’’ Barney said, jerking a thumb back in Gladys’s direction, “but not a very warm one.”

“I knew it when I hired her,” I said, offhandedly.

“The hell you say!”

“Her looks didn’t mean a damn to me. I looked at her qualifications and saw she was the right man for the job.”

“You looked at her qualifications all right. She was friendlier when she interviewed for the position, I’ll bet.”

“Yup,” I admitted. “And it’s the only position I’ll ever get her in. Oh, well. How’s your love life?”

He and his wife Pearl were separated; he’d gone east, briefly, to work in her father’s clothing business and it hadn’t worked out-the marriage or the business arrangement. Back to the Cocktail Lounge for Barney.

“I got a girl,” he said, almost defensively. “How about you?”

“I’m swearin’ off the stuff.”

“Seriously, Nate, you’re not gettin’ any younger. You’re a respectable businessman. Why don’t you settle down and start a family?”

“You don’t have any kids.”

“It’s not for lack of trying. Aw, it’s probably for the best, since it didn’t work out with Pearl and me. But Cathy, she’s another story.”

His chorus girl.

“Out of the frying pan,” I said. “When you’re in my business, it’s hard to have much faith in the sanctity of marriage.”

He frowned sympathetically. “Doing a lot of that sort of work these days, are ya?”

“I have been. Divorces keep many an agency afloat, this one included. But from here on out I’m leaving as much of that horseshit as possible to my operatives. When you’re the boss, you can pick and choose your cases.”

“Speakin’ of your ops, why don’t you take me over to their office and introduce me? Haven’t met either of ’em.”

We walked back out through the inner office, nodding and smiling at Gladys, getting back a nod as she filed on, and went next door, to my old office, the pebbled glass on the door of which said simply: A-1 DETECTIVE AGENCY, PRIVATE. I went in without knocking, Barney following.

It had always seemed such a big room when I’d been working in it; partitioned off into two work areas, desks with extra chairs for clients, it seemed tiny. The plaster walls were painted a pale green, now. Only one of the desks was filled, the one at left. The man behind it, a bald fellow with dark hair around his flat-to-his-skull ears, wire-rim glasses sitting on a bulbous nose, fifty-one years of age, rose; his suit-coat was off, hung on a nearby coatrack, but he still looked very proper, in his vest and neatly snugged solid blue tie.

“Barney,” I said, “this is Lou Sapperstein.”

Sapperstein grinned, extended a hand across his desk, which Barney, smiling, shook. “You made me some money last year,” Sapperstein said.

“How’s that?” Barney said.

“He bet on Armstrong,” I said.

Barney laughed a little. “What a pal,” he said, meaning me.

“I wasn’t referring to that,” Lou said, a little embarrassed. “Actually, after you lost, I bet a friend of mine you would quit. Which you did, of course.”

“How’d you know I’d quit and stay quit? I had plenty of comeback offers, you know.”

“I can imagine. I couldn’t collect the bet till a year from the day of your Armstrong defeat. That was part of the deal. It was fifty smackers, too. Thanks, Mr. Ross.”

“Make it ‘Barney,’ please.”

“Lou retired after twenty-five years on the force,” I said. “We were on the pickpocket detail together.”

“I was his boss,” Lou told Barney. “Hiring me is just Nate’s idea of revenge.”

“Hiring you is my idea of being a nice guy,” I said. “Working your ass off is my idea of revenge. Where’s Fortunato?”

“Late,” Sapperstein shrugged.

“On his first day?” I asked, a little stunned.

Sapperstein shrugged again.

“I wanted him to start right in on those credit checks,” I said, pointing over to some paperwork on the other desk, which from where Lou was seated he couldn’t see, anyway.

The door opened behind us and Frankie Fortunato came in; he was small, thin as a knife, with dark widow’s-peaked hair and sharp features. He would’ve looked sinister, but his smile was bright, white and wide. His suit was brown and snappy and his tie was yellow and red.

“Hey, I’m late,” he said. “Off to a flyin’ start.”

“You don’t have to be here till nine o’clock,” I said. “Is it asking too much…”

“You looking for quality, or punctuality?”

“Actually, I was looking for both.”

“Heller, you’re turning into an old man. You don’t remember what it was like to be young. I had a hot date last night.” He was over behind his desk, now, dialing his phone.

“That better be a credit check,” I said.

“Sugar?” he said into the phone. “It’s Frankie.” He covered the phone, waved us off. “Do you mind? Little privacy.”

I went over to the phone and took it from his hand. I said, “Hi, sugar. Frankie just called to say he was unemployed.” I handed the phone back to him.

“Talk to ya later, sugar,” he said into it, and hung up. He grinned. “Just testing the waters, boss. Mind if I get started on these credit checks now?”

“Go right ahead. This is my friend Barney Ross, by the way.”

“Listen,” he said to Barney, by way of greeting. “There’s dough in a comeback. It don’t have to be Armstrong. Hey, Canzoneri’s still fighting; a third Ross-Canzoneri fight’d make some tidy dough. We should talk.” He glanced at me and smiled on one side of his face. “After business hours of course.”

I nodded to both Frankie and Lou and we went out.

Barney said, “That kid’s cocky, but I bet he’s bright.”

“Safe bet. I’ll get him straightened out. Much as possible, anyway.”

“What’s his background?”

“He was fired off the force in his first year for rubbing Tubbo Gilbert the wrong way.”

Captain Daniel “Tubbo” Gilbert was, even in Chicago terms, a notoriously corrupt cop. A notoriously powerful corrupt cop, at that.

“Aw,” Barney said. “No wonder you like the kid. You see yourself in the little son of a bitch.”

“Hey,” I said. “I see admirable qualities in a lot of sons of bitches. I’ve even been known to hang around with washed-up ex-pugs.”

Barney’s expression turned suddenly thoughtful. “You’re liable to lose that kid to the draft, you know.”

I shook my head. “It’ll never come.”

We were standing just outside my office now.

“I think it’s going to have to come, Nate. We might get caught up in it, too, you know.”

“That I guarantee you will never happen.”

“I might go whether they ask me or not.”

“Don’t be foolish,” I said.

“Don’t you know there’s a war on?”

“In Europe. We been snookered into fighting their battles before-never again.”

“You really believe that?”

“Sure.”

“But, Nate, you’re a Jew…”

“I’m not a Jew. That doesn’t mean I don’t sympathize with what’s happening to the Jews in Germany. I don’t like the idea of military seizure of property happening anywhere to anybody. But I don’t feel it has anything special to do with me.”

“You’re a Jew, Nate.”

“My pa was a Jew, my ma was Irish Catholic, and me, I’m just another mutt from Chicago, Barney.”

“Maybe so. But as far as Mr. Hitler’s concerned, you’re just another Jew.”

Well, he hadn’t scored a knockout punch, by any means, but Barney had made his point. It wasn’t the first time, and was hardly the last.

So without even trying to crack wise, I sent him on his way, while I went in to get to work. I made several calls on an insurance matter before I noticed the morning was nearly gone.

Then Gladys stuck her pretty, impersonal puss in my office and said, “Your eleven o’clock appointment is here.”

I’d almost forgotten.

Which considering the stature of the client-potential client, as we hadn’t talked, he’d merely called for an appointment-was stupid of me.

“Send Mr. O’Hare in,” I said, straightening my tie and my posture.

But Mr. O’Hare wasn’t the first person in. A striking-looking woman was, a rather tall, dark woman who strolled in as if out of an Arabian dream (or was it a Sicilian nightmare?), regal in her camel-hair swagger topcoat with padded shoulders, open to reveal a mannish, pinstripe suit beneath. Beneath the suit, any good detective could deduce, was not a mannish body, the lapels of my suit didn’t flare out like that. She wore a gray pillbox hat atop long black shining hair pulled back in a bun; a large purse was slung over her shoulder on a strap-she could’ve carried a change of clothes in the thing. She glanced at the portraits of actresses on my cream-color wall and seemed faintly amused. Then she smiled at me. nodded; there was no warmth in it, but there was sensuality and smarts: a wide mouth, with dark red lipstick, a patrician Roman nose, dark, dark eyes and ironic arching brows.

O’Hare, shorter than her, was on her heels, helping her with her coat, like she was the queen and he was her foot servant.

Which was ridiculous, whoever she was, because Edward J. O’Hare-a small but powerful-looking man in his own natty pinstripe suit, a diamond stick pin in his red, spotted-black tie, a black topcoat over his arm, black fedora in his hand-was a big man in this city, a millionaire with connections in both city hall and the underworld. Especially the underworld. His face was handsome in a lumpy way, dark bushy black eyebrows hanging over piercing dark blue eyes, a sharp, prominent nose, strong features undercut by a small chin riding a saddle of flesh.

He hung her coat up, and his own, and smiled at me, the smile of the professional glad-hander. “Mr. Heller, 1 hope you don’t mind my bringing my secretary. Miss Cavaretta, along…to take some notes during our visit. It’s my practice at business meetings.”

I was standing, gesturing to the chairs along the nearby wall. “Not at all,” I said. “Such charming company is always welcome.”

She smiled, tightly, holding something back, her eyes alive with things she knew I didn’t, and she sat down and crossed slender, shapely legs, getting a steno pad and a pen from her purse.

O’Hare was standing across from me, offering his hand, still smiling like a politician. I shook the hand, smiled back, wondering why he was so eager to please. This was an important man. I was nobody in particular. Did he always come on this strong?

“It’s a real pleasure Mr. Heller,” he said. “I’ve heard good things about you.’

“Who from, Mr. O’Hare? Frank Nitti, possibly?”

His smile disappeared; I shouldn’t have said that-it just blurted out.

He sat. “My associations with that crowd are exaggerated, Mr. Heller. Besides, you can make money through such associations and run no risk if you keep it on a business basis, and are forthright in your dealings. Keep it business, and there is nothing to fear.”

He sounded like he was trying to convince himself, not me.

I said, “I didn’t mean to be rude, Mr. O’Hare.”

“Call me Eddie,” he said, getting out a silver cigarette case. He offered one of the cigarettes to Miss Cavaretta; she took it. He offered me one and I politely refused, though I eased an ashtray toward Miss Cavaretta. Our eyes met. She smiled at me with them. She had long legs. They were smiling at me, too.

“We’ve just closed the season out at Sportsman’s Park,” Edward J. O’Hare said, lighting Miss Cavaretta’s cigarette with a silver lighter shaped like a small horse’s head. He put the cigarettes and lighter away without lighting one up himself.

I said, “You’ve had a good year, I understand.”

Sportsman’s Park, of which O’Hare was the president, was a 12,000-seat, half-mile racetrack, converted from dogs to nags back in ’32. It was in Stickney, very near Cicero. In other words, right smack in the middle of mob country.

“Yes. But we have had a few problems.”

“Oh?”

Miss Cavaretta was poised, ready to write something down; she’d written nothing as yet, not even a doodle. She wasn’t the doodler type.

“As you may know, at a park like ours, some of our clientele is less than savory.”

“Sure,” I said. “Ex-cons, thieves, bookmakers, whores…excuse my French, Miss Cavaretta.”

The faintest wisp of a smile.

“Particularly on the weekdays,” I went on, “when working stiffs can’t get away from the salt mines.”

“Precisely,” O’Hare said, sitting forward, striving to be earnest. “We’ve done our best to keep out the hoodlums and deadbeats and troublemakers. But there’s only so much we can do, in our business. That’s where you come in, Mr. Heller.”

“I do?”

“We’ve been having pickpocket trouble. A regular epidemic. We don’t mind our customers getting their pockets emptied, it’s just that we prefer to do it ourselves.”

“Naturally.”

“I understand that you have a certain expertise in that area. Pickpocket control, I mean.”

“That’s my police background, yes. And, since going private, I’ve done a lot of security work in that area, that’s correct.”

He smiled-patronizingly, I thought. “I understand you even handled the pickpocket problem at the World’s Fair.”

“The Chicago one, back in ’33,” I said. “They didn’t invite me out to New York for the new one.”

“They’re holding it over, I hear,” someone said.

Surprisingly, it was Miss Cavaretta-who was now in the midst of actually taking a few notes-putting in her two cents, in a lush, throaty voice that was like butter on a warm roll.

“Maybe they’ll invite you there next year,” she said.

O’Hare laughed at that, a little too loud I thought. Was he trying to get in her pants? Was that what this was about? And since when did a millionaire have to try so hard to get in his secretary’s panties? Then again, on the other hand, I kept in mind my own situation with Gladys. Of course, I wasn’t a millionaire.

“Maybe they will invite me,” I said, feeling like the unwanted chaperone on a date.

“What I would like,” O’Hare said, “is for you to instruct my own security staff in the art of spotting and catching pickpockets. I will want you to spend some time at the park yourself, when the next season opens, supervising. You’ll need to come out, as soon as possible, and take a look around the facility, of course.”

“Just a moment, please,” I said, and I picked up the phone and called next door.

In a few moments Lou Sapperstein, wearing his suitcoat, looking spiffy as a hundred bucks, entered, nodding, smiling, eyes lingering just a second on the enticing, enigmatic Miss Cavaretta. I made introductions all around, ending up with Lou: “He was my boss on the pickpocket detail. And he’s my top operative, now. I’ll put him on this for you, Mr. O’Hare.”

O’Hare’s face turned pale; weird as it might seem, his expression was tragic as he said, “But that simply won’t do. I must have you, Mr. Heller. I must have the top man.”

I laughed just a little, a nervous laugh. “You don’t understand, Mr. O’Hare. Lou’s my top man. He was my boss. He taught me everything I know about dips. You couldn’t be in better hands.”

O’Hare stood. “Perhaps when it comes to the supervision of my people, he would be satisfactory. But I’m afraid I must insist that you come out to the park and have a look around personally. I only deal with the top man, understand?”

“Mr. O’Hare, with all due respect, I am the top man in this agency, and I delegate work as I see fit…”

O’Hare reached in his inside coat pocket. He withdrew a checkbook. Leaned over the desk and began to write. “I’m leaving you a thousand-dollar retainer,” he said. “On the understanding that you will come out to the park tomorrow afternoon to inspect the plant, personally.”

He tore off the check and held it out before me, the ink glistening wetly on it.

I took it and blotted it and put it in my desk.

“You want Nate Heller,” I said, “you got Nate Heller.”

“Good man,” O’Hare beamed. He turned and all but bowed deferentially to his secretary. “Miss Cavaretta?”

She stood; smoothed her dress out over long, presumably lush thighs. Why is a woman in mannish clothing such a perversely attractive thing? Maybe Freud knew; personally, I didn’t give a damn. I just knew I would’ve liked to see the lacy things underneath Miss Cavaretta’s pinstripe suit.

She extended a hand with long, clear varnished nails, which I took; was I expected to kiss it? I didn’t.

She said, “It’s been very interesting meeting you, Mr. Heller.”

“Same here, Miss Cavaretta.”

He helped her with her coat, and got his own coat on; he left his hat on the rack. Lou was about to point that out to him, but I raised a finger to my lips and stopped it. I’d been watching O’Hare closely; he’d left that hat on purpose.

I stood and waited and then O’Hare ducked in again, calling back to Miss Cavaretta, “Forgot my blamed hat, my dear,” and went to the hat rack and got it and said to me, very quietly, his face sober and without a trace of the glad-hander’s smile, “Come alone.”

He closed the door and was gone.

Lou and I looked at the door, our brows furrowed.

Lou sat down and so did I. He said, “What the hell was that all about?”

“I haven’t a clue.”

“That guy’s connected up the wazoo, you know.”

“I know.”

“He was Capone’s front man for the old Hawthorne dog track. He’s been an Outfit front man for years.”

“I know.”

“Why’d he bring his secretary along?”

“So she could take notes, he said.”

“Did I miss something? All I heard him do was ask if he could hire us-hire you-to do some security work at his lousy racetrack.”

“That’s right.”

“What did he need to bring a secretary along to take notes for, if that’s all he wanted? Hell, why didn’t he just call you on the phone, if all he wanted was to hire you for some pickpocket work?”

“I don’t know, Lou,” I said.

And I didn’t know.

Nor did I know why he felt he had to impart his final message to me out of his dark, lovely secretary’s earshot.

But I was detective enough to want to find out.

E. J. O’Hare was a lawyer, but he hadn’t practiced law since he moved from St. Louis to Chicago in the late ’20s, to begin overseeing various of Al Capone’s business interests, specifically horse-and dog-racing tracks. And not just in Illinois: O’Hare also looked after the Outfit’s tracks in Florida, Tennessee and Massachusetts. He was a stockholder in all of those parks, having gotten a foothold via owning the patent rights on the mechanical rabbit used in dog racing. From that he’d built a financial empire that included extensive real estate holdings, an insurance company and two advertising agencies. According to Barney, O’Hare was also a heavy investor in the Chicago Cardinals pro football team, though that wasn’t widely known.

He was unquestionably a wheeler-dealer, and a financial wizard; the mob’s “one-man brain trust,” the papers called him.

But today, as I entered his office at Sportsman’s Park in Stickney, he was just a nervous little heavyset man in a gray vested suit and blue-and-gray-speckled tie, sitting at his big mahogany desk atop an elaborate Oriental rug, cleaning and oiling an automatic pistol. A foreign make, I’d say.

“Nate Heller!” he said, with a big grin, standing behind the desk to extend a hand, like I was an old friend, an unexpected and welcome guest who just happened to drop by. Never mind that I’d known him since yesterday and was here at his paid request.

I shook his hand; the other one held the automatic. There was a little 2-in-l oil on the hand that firmly gripped mine, and when I took a handkerchief out of my pocket to wipe off my palm, he apologized for this uncharacteristic messiness.

“Sorry,” he said. “A man can’t be too careful.” He meant the gun, which he now lay gently on the desk.

“I’ve already had a walk around your facility, Mr. O’Hare,” I said, hanging my topcoat and hat next to his on the tree in one corner. “I hope you don’t mind my taking the liberty.”

“Not at all, and I asked you yesterday to call me Eddie.”

“Fine, Eddie. Call me Nate.” He already had, actually.

“Pull up a chair,” he said, and I did, glancing around the office, which-like O’Hare-was small but plush. Dark wood paneling, a wall of framed photos to my left, a built-in bookcase at right. The wall of photos-from which I took a chair-showed O’Hare in the presence of various civic leaders and Chicago celebrities, here at Sportsman’s Park, lots of big smiles and arms around shoulders, his Outfit associates conspicuous in their absence. My favorite picture was one of him with Mayor Cermak at the opening of the park, His Honor and O’Hare standing on either side of the winning jockey who was atop his horse, with a huge floral horseshoe draped around them all. Behind him at his desk was a gigantic framed photograph of Sportsman’s Park, from a slightly overhead angle that got both the grandstand and the track in, in color, pastel tints. On the desk, at either side, were clusters of framed family photos. The bookcase at right was brimming with volumes, some leather-bound, interspersed with an occasional fancy crystal glass piece and various busts of various sizes of Napoleon.

He must have noticed me taking in the Napoleon busts curiously, as he smiled, rather proudly, and said, “An interest of mine. Those books, all of them, are on the Little General. A small sampling of what I daresay is the largest collection of Napoleonana in the United States.”

“Really?”

He had a distant expression as he looked at the wall of Napoleon stuff. He said, “Napoleon was a little man.”

“Uh, yeah. So I heard.”

“But he was the biggest general history ever saw.”

“No argument there.”

He turned his attention back to the gun he was cleaning; he had a pipe cleaner stuck down the barrel at the moment. He said, “He always made the right decision when it counted.”

“Who?”

A little crossly he said, “Napoleon.” Then wistfully: “Once he had to decide whether to carry fifteen hundred prisoners of war or have them killed.”

“Really.”

He gestured with a fist, suddenly firm. “He had them shot, making the decision in five minutes.”

What decisions had Eddie O’Hare been making in this office, of late?

“Mr. O’Hare. Eddie. I’ve looked over your plant, and can see no insurmountable problems, assuming your security staff numbers twenty or more.”

“Few problems regarding what?”

“Your pickpocket situation. The grandstands themselves are too large to effectively control, but I doubt the dips would hit there much, anyway. It’s down by the cashier windows that they’ll make their move. And at your concession stands.”

He nodded, a strained look on his face, as if the relevance of all this was something he couldn’t really grasp.

“At any rate,” I said, “I think a few weeks before the next season begins, we can give your staff some pointers, and not just the security people. Ushers and concessionaires and all. Do you have any questions?”

“How did you come?”

“What?”

“Did you drive out here?”

“No. I took the El to Laramie and hopped a streetcar. One of my other operatives needed my car. Why?”

“Good.” He smiled, but more to himself than to me. “I’ll give you a ride into the Loop.”

“That isn’t really necessary.” Just as this trip out to Sportsman’s Park wasn’t really necessary.

“No! I insist.”

A knock came at the door.

“Yes?” O’Hare said.

A small, boyish, nattily dressed man with graying hair entered, smiled pleasantly, said, “Excuse me, gentlemen. Is this a private conference?”

“Not at all, Johnny,” O’Hare said, half rising, gesturing for him to come in with one hand, continuing to clean his automatic with the other.

I stood and shook hands with the little man.

“This is Nate Heller, the private detective,” O’Hare said. “Nate, this is-”

“I recognize His Honor,” I said, trying not to sound tongue in cheek.

I had recognized him at once, though I’d never met him: Johnny Patton, the boy mayor of Burnham. The “boy” mayor was well over fifty now, but he’d supposedly been fourteen when he opened his first saloon and wasn’t yet twenty when first elected mayor of Burnham, another of the mob-dominated southwest suburbs like Stickney and Cicero. Once upon a time he’d been Johnny Torrio’s boy; in recent years he’d been snuggled comfortably in Frank Nitti’s pocket.

He was also O’Hare’s chief partner in Sportsman’s Park. That is, excluding the silent ones.

“Oh yes, Nate Heller,” Patton said, nodding for me to sit back down, but not taking a seat himself. “You’re going to help us lick our pickpocket problem.”

“I’m going to try,” I said.

“I’m sure you’ll come through for us. I’ve heard good things about you.”

Nitti again? I wondered to myself. I had presence enough of mind, this time, not to blurt it out.

He turned his attention to O’Hare. “Could you step in my office, E. J.? Bill and I have the last of that publicity material ready-you need to take a look at it.”

“Certainly,” O’Hare said, and rose. “Wait here a moment, will you, Nate? I’ll give you a lift back to the Loop.”

“Fine,” I said.

Patton said, “You’ll be riding back with E. J.?”

“Yes,” I said.

“I see,” he said.

Then, slipping an arm around O’Hare’s shoulder, Patton and O’Hare exited.

Not long after, Miss Cavaretta came in; she was in another mannish suit, and it fit her curves snugly, in a most unmannish manner. An attractive woman, all right, although she had a certain West Side hardness, and she’d seen the last of thirty-five. She seemed a little startled to see me; or anyway as startled as a cool customer like her could seem.

“Well hello,” she said. In that throaty purr.

“Well hello,” I said.

“I didn’t know you were here.”

“I seem to be. I’m surprised this is the first I’ve seen of you today. I expected you’d be taking notes while Mr. O’Hare and I spoke.”

“Yes, uh-Ed has been having me keep minutes of his business meetings of late. But I just got back from lunch.”

In the midst of the wall of photos was a square clock with roman numerals.

“Mr. O’Hare must be a pretty soft touch, as bosses go,” I said, nodding toward the clock. “Here it is a quarter till two and you’re just back from lunch.”

“I didn’t leave till one,” the secretary said, not at all defensively. She walked to the coat tree, near the wall of books and the solemn Napoleon busts, where O’Hare’s topcoat hung, as did mine. She stood digging in one of his pockets, her back to me; her seams were straight, despite the curves in the road they traveled.

Then she turned and shrugged and displayed two open hands to me and said, “I was looking for his keys. I’m missing some papers that I thought might be in his car.”

She didn’t have to explain herself to me; I wondered why she bothered.

“Tell Mr. O’Hare I’m back from lunch, will you?” she said, and left.

Curiouser and curiouser.

I got up and looked around a little. In the midst of the framed photos on the one wall, just under the clock, was a framed poem, in flowery lettering:

The clock of life is wound but once

And no man has the power

To tell just when the hands will stop,

At a late or early hour.

Now is the only time you own:

Love, live, toil with a will.

Place no faith in tomorrow,

For the clock may then be still.

Having absorbed that bit of philosophy, I sat back down. The faces in the framed photos on O’Hare’s desk-a boy and two girls who, in the various photos, grew into a handsome young man and two attractive young women-seemed as confused about being here as I was. They were innocent faces, out of place here, ill at ease, sharing the desktop with the foreign-looking automatic.

O’Hare came back in and smiled, not in his glad-hand manner, and said, “I see you’re admiring my kids.”

“Nice-looking family.”

“Separated from my wife. I’m getting married again, when…when everything’s straightened out.” He was behind the desk again, cleaning the gun. “I think my kids understand.” He put the gun down and turned one of the photos to me: the boy, in a Naval uniform.

“He’s a pilot,” O’Hare said, beaming. And to himself: “I’d do about anything for Butch. Or Patricia Ann or Marilyn Jane, for that matter.”

“Your secretary came in while you were out.”

He looked up sharply; put his boy’s picture back in place. “I didn’t realize she was back from lunch.”

“Well, she is, and said to tell you so.”

“Oh. Anything else?”

I gestured back to the coat tree. “She was looking in your coat, for your car keys, she said.”

Something like relief crossed his face. “Oh. There were some papers of hers in the car. Anyway, my keys weren’t in my topcoat pockets.”

“I gathered as much.”

“It can wait.” He stood, dropped the gun in his suitcoat pocket. “Let me get you back to the Loop.”

“Mr. O’Hare-”

“Eddie.”

“Mr. O’Hare, what is this, anyway? You haven’t said two words to me about your pickpocket problem, and now you’re hustling me back to the Loop.”

He waved that off, getting into his black topcoat and fedora. “We’ll talk in the car.”

I got my own coat and hat and gloves on and followed him out. We entered directly onto the betting area, two rows of cashier’s windows facing each other across a wide expanse of unpainted cement. No Oriental carpets here.

We rounded a corner and Patton was talking to another little man, pale, slight, bespectacled, conservatively dressed, and both men stopped talking as we approached, smiling and nodding at us.

“I won’t be back in till tomorrow, Johnny,” O’Hare said as we passed. And to the other man: “See you later, Les.”

Les said. “See you later, E. J.”

As we were going out onto Laramie Street, into the crisp overcast November afternoon, I said. “Who was that little guy?”

“The park’s accountant.”

“He looks familiar.”

O’Hare said nothing, moving toward an expensive-looking, shiny black late-model Ford coupe.

“What’s his name?” I asked.

“Les Shumway.”

“Shumway.” Familiar.

He unlocked the door for me on the rider’s side and I climbed in.

“Shumway,” I said.

He got behind the wheel, started her up, pulled out onto Laramie. Awkwardly, he withdrew the automatic-a.32, I’d say-from his suitcoat under his topcoat and placed it on the seat between us.

“Wait a minute,” I said “That’s not the same Shumway that testified against Capone, is it?”

O’Hare said nothing, glancing behind him as he drove. A railroad yard was on our left; Sportsman’s Park stretched along our right.

“That’s who it is, isn’t it?” I said. “The accountant from the Hawthorne Smoke Shop who identified Capone as his boss? Without him, the feds couldn’t have made their tax case.”

“Yes, yes,” O’Hare said, irritably.

“What’s he doing working for you? Better still, what’s he doing alive?”

“Les’s a good man,” O’Hare said, as if that explained it.

“Capone’s getting out in a few days,” I said. After seven years and some months. “He and Les’ll have a lot to talk about. Old times and all.”

“Capone’s sick.”

“So I hear,” I said. “Syphilis. The papers say the docs gave ’im malaria, to induce a fever. Some cure.”

We were in Cicero, now, having passed out of a thumb of Stickney that stuck into Cicero’s pie; this was a working-class neighborhood of single-family dwellings, an occasional two-flat, mostly wood-frame structures.

“Never mind that,” he said, looking nervously behind him. “We don’t have all that much time.”

“For what?”

“For me to tell you why I hired you.”

“Oh. Somehow I figured it didn’t really have much to do with picking pockets. But why the elaborate show in front of your secretary and everybody?”

We were passing by a nice little park, now. O’Hare turned right onto Ogden, which was a well-traveled four-lane thoroughfare, a diagonal street, making each major intersection a three-way one. For now, the railroad yard was on our left, more frame dwellings on our right. And lots of neighborhood bars. This was Cicero, after all.

“I don’t know who I can trust,” he explained. “Every person in my life, with the exception of my kids, is tainted by those hoodlums. Even my fiancee.”

“Who’s your fiancee?”

Vaguely sad, he said, “Sue Granata.”

I’d seen her before; a beautiful young woman with dark blond hair and a brother who was a mob-owned state representative.

I said, “And you figure you can trust me?”

“You have that reputation. Also, we have a mutual friend.”

“Besides Frank Nitti, you mean?”

“Besides Frank Nitti.”

“Who, then?”

He looked back over his shoulder. Then he said, flatly, “Eliot Ness.”

“How do you know Eliot?”

“I was his inside man with the Outfit.”

I felt my jaw drop. “What?”

O’Hare had a faint, sneering smile. He was gripping the wheel like it was somebody’s neck. “I’ve always detested the hoodlums I’ve been forced to deal with. Their loud dress, their bad grammar, their uncouth manners.”

“Yeah, their grammar’s always been one of my chief complaints against ’em.”

“This is hardly amusing, Mr. Heller.”

“What happened to ‘Nate’?”

“Nate, then. All I ask is that you ride along with me, into the city, and listen to what I have to say.”

“I’ll listen, but I don’t appreciate being brought out to your track on false pretenses.”

He shook his head, the firm little chin contrasting with the quivering flab it rested on. “The security work for which I’ve retained you is legitimate. But I have a second job for you-a matter that must stay between just the two of us.”

“I’m listening.”

“Some years ago, I was a conduit of information for your friend Mr. Ness, as well as Frank Wilson and Elmer Irey.”

Jesus. That was a laundry list of the federal agents credited with “getting” Capone.

“Then this is about Capone getting out,” I said. “You’re nervous he may’ve found out you were an informer.”

“That is a part of it. And I’ve been told as much, that Capone’s been making noise about me in Alcatraz. But I’m valuable to the Outfit, and am as powerful in my way as any of them.” He sighed. “It’s all rather complex. With Capone’s release, various factions within the Outfit will be jockeying for position.”

We were moving up over a tall traffic bridge, over the railroad yard; then we came down into Chicago, into a factory district.

“What do you want of me?” I asked him.

“I haven’t been an…‘informer,’ as you put it…in years. And my racing interests are quite legal, now. But recently federal agents have tried to contact me, left several messages at my office, asking for information about a small-time thief from my St. Louis days. Apparently somebody told them I’d be willing to talk. This comes at a very bad time indeed!”

We were in a residential area now; occasional bars, mom-and-pop groceries.

“With Capone’s return imminent,” I said, “it’s a very bad time to be renewing your federal acquaintance. Say-the recent problems Billy Skidmore and Moe Annenberg have had with the feds could also be laid at your doorstep-”

Skidmore, scrap-iron dealer and bailbondsman, had run afoul of the Internal Revenue boys; and Moe Annenberg’s nationwide wire service-on Dearborn, around the corner from my office-had just been shut down for good.

“Precisely. And I had nothing to do with either. But I’m afraid some people suspect I may have.”

“Oh?”

“I fear for my life, Nate. I’m being followed. I’m being watched. I’ve taken to staying in a secret little flat in a building I own on the North Side.”

We crossed Pulaski and 22nd Street-renamed Cermak Road, though nobody seemed to call it that yet-into a commercial district. A black Ford coupe, a similar make to O’Hare’s, pulled out from the curb and fell in behind us.

I said, “If it’s a bodyguard you want, I’m not interested.”

“That’s not what I want of you. I wish that simple a remedy were called for. What I want is for you to go to them, the feds in question. Woltz and Bennett, their names are.”

“I don’t know ’em.”

“Neither do I! But you’re Ness’s friend. He’ll vouch for you.”

“He’s not a fed anymore; and he hasn’t been in Chicago in years.”

“I know, I know! He’s in Cleveland, but he’d vouch for you, with them, wouldn’t he? There’s such a thing as telephones.”

“Well, sure…”

“Tell them I’m not interested. Tell them not to call me. Tell them not to leave messages for me.”

“Why don’t you tell them?”

“I’ve had no direct contact with them as yet, and I want to keep it that way.”

We were now in what had been Mayor Cermak’s old turf-some of the storefronts even had lettering in Czech. I’d grown up not far from here, myself-we were just south of Jake Arvey’s territory, where Czech gave way to Yiddish.

“Okay,” I said. “I suppose I could do that.”

“There’s more. I want you to go to Frank Nitti and tell him what you’ve done.”

“Huh?”

He was smiling and it was the oddest damn smile I ever saw: his upper lip was pulled back across his teeth in a display of smugness tinged with desperation. And what he said was everything his smile promised: “As if you’re going behind my back, out of loyalty to him, you go to Nitti and tell him that somebody’s trying to make it look like O’Hare’s informing the feds, but that in fact O’Hare isn’t informing, that he went so far as to instruct you to tell the feds he is not about to do any informing.”

I hate it when people talk about themselves in the third person.

“Why don’t you just go to Nitti yourself?”

“Coming from me, it would be dismissed as self-serving. I might be lying to him. Coming from you, without my knowledge, it can prove my loyalty.”

We went under the El.

“Will you do it?”

“No.”

“No?”

“I don’t want anything to do with Nitti.”

“Nitti likes you. He’ll believe you. He respects you.”

“I don’t know that any of that is true. I’ve had dealings with him from time to time, and he’s been friendly to me in his way, but I always wind up in the middle of something bloody.”

He took one hand off the wheel and reached over and grasped my arm with it. “I’m being set up, Heller. Only somebody on the outside can save me.”

I shook the arm off. “No.”

“Name your retainer.”

“No.”

We crossed Kedzie into Douglas Park. I used to play here as a kid; I wondered if the lagoon was frozen over yet. Probably not.

“Five thousand. Five grand, Heller!”

Judas Priest. For running a couple of errands? Could I say no to that?

“No.” I said. “No more Nitti. Five grand is five grand, but it ain’t worth getting killed over. Now, pull over and let me out.”

“Somebody’s following me.”

“I know. They have been since Twenty-second Street.”

The park was empty of people; the faded green of it, its barren trees, leaves blown away, seemed oddly peaceful. O’Hare was picking up speed, going forty, now, and the Ford was a few car lengths behind, keeping right up.

“Do you have a gun?” he sputtered.

“In my desk drawer in my office, I do. Pull over.”

“Use mine, then!”

“Okay.”

I picked up his automatic and pointed it at him. “Pull over and let me out.”

His cheeks were blood red. “I’m not stopping!”

I put the gun in his face.

He swallowed. “I’ll slow down, but I’m not stopping!”

“I’ll settle for that.”

“At least leave me the gun!”

He slowed, I opened the door, stepped onto the running board, tossed the gun on the seat and dove for grass.

The other black coupe came roaring up, and then it was alongside of O’Hare, both cars going fifty at least, barreling through the park, and then a shotgun barrel extended from the rider’s window of the coupe and blasted a hole in the driver’s window of O’Hare’s car, the roar of the gun and the crash of the glass fighting over who was loudest.

O’Hare swerved away from the other coupe, then back into it, nearly sideswiping them; they were riding the white center line of the four-lane street. I could see them, barely, two anonymous hoodlums in black hats and black coats in their black car with their black gun, which blew a second hole in O’Hare’s window, and in him, too, apparently, for the fancy coupe careened out of control, lurched over the curb, sideswiping a light pole, its white globe shattering, and then shuttled down the streetcar tracks like a berserk sidecar and smashed into a trolley pole and stopped.

The other black Ford coupe cut its speed, stopping for a red light at Western. I couldn’t make out the license plates, but they were Illinois. Then it moved nonchalantly on.

I was the first one to O’Hare’s car. The window on the side I’d been sitting on was spiderwebbed from buckshot. I opened the door and there he was, slumped, hatless, the wheel of the car bent away from him, his eyes open and staring, lips parted as if about to speak, blood spattered everywhere, one hand tucked inside his jacket, like the Little General he’d patterned himself after, two baseball-size holes from close-up shotgun blasts in the driver’s window just above him, like two more empty eyes, staring.

The.32 automatic was on the seat beside him.

I had to find a phone. Not to call the cops: some honest citizen would’ve beat me to it, by now.

I wanted to call Gladys and tell her if she hadn’t already deposited O’Hare’s check, drop everything and do it.

The two dicks from the detective bureau knew who I was, and called my name in to Captain Stege. So I ended up having to hang around waiting for Stege to show up, as did everybody else, four uniformed officers, the two detective bureau dicks, a police photographer, somebody from the coroner’s office, three guys with the paddy wagon that O’Hare would be hauled off to the nearby morgue in. The captain wanted to see the crime scene, including poor old Eddie O’Hare, who accordingly had spent the past forty-five minutes of this cold afternoon a virtual sideshow attraction for the gawkers who’d gathered around the wrecked car, which was crumpled against a trolley pole like a used paper cup. Ogden is a busy street; and several residential areas were close by, as was Mt. Sinai Hospital, a pillar covering the corner of California and Ogden. So there were plenty of gawkers.

Lieutenant Phelan, a gray-complected man in his forties, asked me some questions and took some notes, but it was pretty perfunctory. Phelan knew that Stege would take over, where questioning me was concerned. Stege and me went way back.

The captain was an exception to the Chicago rule: he was an honest cop. He’d helped nail Capone-his raid on the Hawthorne Smoke Shop, where O’Hare’s accountant Les Shumway had once worked, provided the feds with the ledgers that allowed them to make their income-tax case against the Big Fellow. Later Stege (rhymes with “leggy,” which he wasn’t, being just a shade taller than a fireplug) had been the head of the special Dillinger Squad.

His one bad break was getting unfairly tarnished in the Jake Lingle affair. Lingle, a Tribune reporter gunned down gangland style in the pedestrian tunnel under Michigan Avenue, had been thick with both Al Capone and the police commissioner-the latter being the bloke who appointed Stege chief of the Detective Bureau. Guilt by association lost Stege that job. And being even vaguely linked to Capone was a bitter pill for one of the Chicago PD’s few good men.

But that was almost ten years ago. Now he was the grand old man of the force, a favorite of the Chicago press when an expert quote on the latest headline crime was needed.

There was a time when Stege despised me. He had me pegged as a crooked cop, which was true to a point but by Chicago standards I was a piker; all I did was give some false testimony at the Lingle trial (in return for a promotion to plainclothes), so the patsy the mob and the D.A.’s office selected could take the fall and put a sensational story that refused to die in the press finally to rest.

Plus, I’d later testified, truthfully, against Miller and Lang, the late Mayor Cermak’s two police bodyguards who had attempted to assassinate Frank Nitti for His Honor, and failed (which Nitti’s hit on Cermak, less than two months later, had not). Testifying against those cops, dirty as they were, still made two black marks against me with Stege: I’d embarrassed the department publicly; and I’d tarnished the martyr Cermak’s memory. Stege, you see, had been a Cermak crony.

Still, in recent years, Stege seemed to have earned a grudging respect for me. We’d bumped heads in the Dillinger case and a few times after and found, despite ourselves, we often saw eye to eye. Considering how much shorter he was than me, that was an accomplishment. Anyway, he no longer seemed to despise me.

Or that’s what I thought, until I saw the look on his face when he climbed out of the chauffeured black-and-white squad car, which had come up with siren screaming, as if there was any rush where O’Hare was concerned.

Stege was a stocky, white-haired little man with a doughy face and black-rim glasses. He looked like an ineffectual owl. Looks can be deceiving.

“Heller, you lying goddamn son of a bitch,” he said, striding over on short legs to where I stood, on the grass, away from the gawkers and the crumpled car and dead Eddie O’Hare. He wore a topcoat as gray as the overcast afternoon and a shapeless brown hat and half of a grayish-brown cigar was stuck in the corner of his tight mouth. He poked my chest with a short, thick finger not much longer than the cigar. “You’re out of business. You overstepped yourself this time, you cagey bastard. You’re going to jail.”

“I’m glad to see you’re keeping an open mind,” I said.

“Stay,” he said, as if to a dog, pointing to the ground where I stood.

He went over and had a lingering look at O’Hare. Then he allowed the paddy-wagon cops to pull the body out of the car onto a sheet. Lieutenant Phelan bent down and frisked the corpse; emptied its pockets. I couldn’t make out the contents from where I stood. The crowd was wide-eyed as the cops wrapped the body in the sheet and tossed him in the paddy wagon with a thunk and, with no more ceremony than that, Edward J. O’Hare exited public life.

The car had already been searched; I’d seen Phelan find a steno pad in the glove box of the car-O’Hare’s secretary’s steno pad, perhaps? Had that been the “papers” she wanted to get out of his car? At any rate, Phelan was showing the pad to Stege, who was thumbing through it; he stopped at a page and read, then glanced over at me.

Stege came over and said, “Give me your story from the top.”

“O’Hare approached me to handle a security matter at Sportsman’s Park,” I said. “He had a pickpocket problem there. I went out today and had a look at his plant. Then he offered to drive me into the Loop and I took him up on it.”

“That’s it? That’s your story?”

“Every word is true, Captain.”

“A witness-a guy who was painting windowsills on a ladder over on Talman Avenue-saw the whole thing. And he says you jumped from the car, seconds before this went down.”

I’d seen a guy in work clothes being questioned, earlier, by Phelan. I’d noticed them looking over at me, too, so this revelation came as no real surprise.

“Yes I did jump from the car. I noticed we were being followed, and I noticed too that the car behind us was picking up speed. I asked O’Hare to let me out, he refused, and I jumped.”

Stege grimaced; then he spoke, with a formality filtered through sarcasm: “And what made you think the car following you presented a danger great enough for you to risk injury by jumping from a moving vehicle?”

I nodded over at the wreck that had been O’Hare’s car. “Gee, I don’t know, Captain. For the life of me.”

His cigar was out; he looked at it, as irritated with it as with me, and hurled it off into the park. Then a stubby finger was pointing at me again: “You jumped because you knew they were going to shoot O’Hare.”

“It was a reasonable assumption on my part.”

“That’s all it was? An assumption?”

“O’Hare was acting jumpy, nervous. He was cleaning a gun in his office this afternoon, when I went to see him. He had it on the seat next to him while we drove.”

“And why is that?”

“Haven’t you heard, Captain? Al Capone is getting out of jail in a few days. Not that he would ever think of having a respected community leader like E. J. O’Hare murdered…”

Stege reflected on that for a moment. More to himself than me, he said, glancing over at O’Hare’s smashed car, “There’s no one on earth Capone wouldn’t send to his death if he thought his interests would be served.”

I shrugged. “I’ve heard rumors O’Hare was an informant, and that Capone’s known about it for some time.”

He didn’t confirm or deny that; his putty face looked at me blankly, only the hard dark blue eyes behind the round dark rims of his glasses betraying his dislike for me as he said, pointing at me again, less forcefully now, “You fingered him.”

“What?”

“You fingered O’Hare. You set him up, I was right about you the first time; you are a bent cop.”

“I’m a private bent cop, I’ll have you know.”

“You’ve been known to have audiences with Nitti himself. Are you still for sale, after all these years? Are you Nitti’s man, now?”

“I kind of like to think of myself as my own man, Captain. Are you going to charge me with anything, or maybe just haul me into the basement of the nearest precinct house and feed me the goldfish for a few hours?”

Red came to the white face. “I wouldn’t waste a good rubber hose on you.”

“You could always use a lead pipe. Can I go?”

He was lighting up another cigar, the wind catching the flame of his match and making it dance. “You can go,” he said flatly. Puffing. Pointing the cigar at me, now. “But I’m going to investigate this killing myself, personally. And if you were Nitti’s finger man in this nasty little episode, you’ll spend Christmas in the Bridewell, and eternity at Joliet. That’s a promise.”

“That’s funny. It sounded like a threat. What did it say in that steno pad?”

“What?”

“The steno pad. It’s O’Hare’s secretary’s steno pad, right? Her name’s Cavaretta. I don’t know her first name.”

The hard blue eyes squinted at me from behind the owlish glasses. “It’s Antoinette. Toni.”

“I see. Did she take notes on O’Hare’s visit to my office yesterday?”

His lips were pressed together so tight, it was a shock when they parted enough to emit: “Yes.”

“And does it confirm my story about O’Hare wanting some pickpocket work done?”

“Yes. Very conveniently, too.”

He was right about that. Was the steno pad left there on purpose, to explain away my presence? To let the cops tie off the loose end called Heller?

“You met this Cavaretta woman?” he asked.

“A couple of times, yes. Briefly.”

“Any impressions?”

I shrugged. “Handsome woman. Pretty hard-looking, though. Calculating.”

“What makes you say that?”

“Just an impression. She’s in her mid-to late thirties but she isn’t married. Yet she’s not bad looking. Nice shape on her.”

“By which you mean to imply what?”

I shrugged again. “A dago gal from the West Side working for somebody like O’Hare, unmarried. She must be somebody’s sister or mistress or something. Both, maybe.”

Stege was nodding. “I’ll keep that in mind when I question her.”

“You see this as something Capone ordered from inside, Captain?”

He looked over at the wreck again. “Well, it’s more Capone’s style than Nitti’s.”

“True. Nitti doesn’t like to fill the headlines with blood.”

“Nitti would’ve arranged it much less spectacular,” Stege agreed. “Nitti has more finesse. His boys would’ve taken Mr. O’Hare at their leisure and dumped him in a spot from whence he would not emerge, till Gabriel blew his horn.”

The crowd was thinning. With O’Hare gone, there was nothing much to see but the wreck. Some reporters had arrived, but Phelan was holding them off.

I said, “This does seem a strange place for a hit to go down. A major thoroughfare like Ogden, with Cook County Jail a stone’s throw away, ditto for the Audy detention home for juvies. There’s always cops all over this area.”

“Imported killers,” Stege said, nodding again. “Local boys wouldn’t have done this this way.”

Stege was right, although I failed to point out that using out-of-town help was the way Nitti usually went, when he veered from his normal low-profile use of force. It helped keep the heat off the Outfit, if the killers were seen as out-of-towners, where their actions could be written off as having been the bidding of Eastern gangsters.

“It’s the Maloy hit all over again,” Stege said suddenly.

“By God, you’re right,” I said. It hadn’t occurred to me.

Tommy Maloy, the movie projectionists’ union boss, had been driving one February afternoon in 1935 on Lake Shore Drive just opposite the abandoned buildings of the World’s Fair, when two men in a car drew up alongside his, poked a shotgun out the window and blasted the driver’s window, blowing a hole in it, then blasted again, blowing a hole in the driver.