True Detective

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True Detective

MAX ALLAN COLLINS has earned an unprecedented seven Private Eye Writers of America "Shamus" nominations for his "Nathan Heller" historical thrillers, winning twice (True Detective, 1983, and Stolen Away, 1991). Termed "mystery's Renaissance Man" (by Ed Hoch in The Best Mystery and Suspense Stories of 1993), Collins has created three celebrated contemporary suspense series: Nolan. Quarry and Mallory (thief, hitman, and mystery writer respectively). He has also written four widely praised historical thrillers about real-life "Untouchable" Eliot Ness, and is an accomplished writer of short fiction: "Louise," his contribution to the popular anthology Deadly Allies, was a Mystery Writers of America "Edgar" nominee for best short story of 1992. He scripted the internationally syndicated comic strip Dick Tracy from 1977 to 1993, and wrote three Tracy novels. Working as an independent filmmaker in his native Iowa, he wrote, directed and executive-produced Mommy, a suspense film starring Patty- McCormack, which aired on Lifetime cable in 1996; he performed the same duties for a sequel, Mommy's Day, released in 1997. The recipient of two Iowa Motion Picture Awards for screenwriting, he wrote The Expert, a 1995 HBO World Premiere film starring James Brolin. A longtime rock musician, he has in recent years recorded and performed with two bands: Seduction of the Innocent in California, and Crusin in his native Muscatine, Iowa, where Collins lives with his wife, writer Barbara Collins, and their son, Nathan.

MYSTERIES

Published by ibooks, inc.:

NATHAN HELLER MYSTERIES

by Max Allan Collins

True Detective

True Crime (coming June 2003)

The Million-Dollar Wound

(coming August 2003)

AMOS WALKER MYSTERIES

by Loren D. Estleman

Motor City Blue • Angel Eyes

The Midnight Man • The Glass Highway

Sugartown • Every Brilliant Eye

Lady Yesterday * Downriver

TOBY PETERS MYSTERIES

by Stuart M. Kaminsky

Murder on the Yellow Brick Road

He Done Her Wrong * Never Cross a Vampire

The De'ti! Met a Lady

THE LAWRENCE BLOCK COLLECTION

After the First Death You Could Call It Murder • Deadly Honeymoon

Alfred Hitchcock in The Vertigo Murders by J. Madison Davis

The Big Heat by William P. McGivern

To Barb with love

A Publication of ibooks, inc.

Copyright © 1983,2003 Max Allan Collins

Introduction copyright © 2002 Max Allan Collins

An ibooks, inc. Book

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.

ibooks. inc.

West 25^th Street

New York NY

ISBN 1-58824-761-

Cover photograph copyright © Brian Leng / CORBIS

A LIGHTBULB MOMENT

An Introduction to True Detective

For the first few years of my writing career, I taught part-time at a community college. One of the ways I kept my sanity was by teaching a course on mystery fiction. It was in my capacity as a college instructor, then, that I re-read my favorite mystery novel, Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon, for the umpteenth time.

Perhaps it was that academic mode of thought that made me glance at the indicia page, note the copyright, and muse, "Nineteen twenty-nine… that's the St. Valentine's Day Massacre. That means Sam Spade and Al Capone were contemporaries."

In the comics field (where I also occasionally toil), this moment might be marked by a lightbulb going on in a balloon over my head. It was that kind of idea- the stray thought that lights up the world and changes everything, or at least a career.

For a long time I had been looking for a way to write private eye novels in the classic mode. I grew up on Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Mickey Spillane and dozens of their imitators, but my first published novels did not include the private detective narrator those writers made famous. Instead, at the University of Iowa's Writers Workshop, I wrote a trio of novels about three different protagonists: a thief, a hitman and a mystery writer; but in each case, the novels had roots in the P.I. form as much as the crime novel.

My lightbulb moment probably took place around 1974, not long before Chinatown came along, doing something of the same kind of P.I.-in-history thing I had in mind. And a couple of mystery writers, good ones (Andrew Bergman and Stuart Kaminsky), did their own period private-eye novels right around the same time.

Robert Towne's great screenplay for Chinatown loosely dealt with historical events, but his characters were fictional. Both Bergman and Kaminsky placed their P.I.s amid real people- chiefly, movie stars and various other Hollywood celebrities- but not in the context of actual events or specific crimes.

My concern, back at the end of the '60s and start of the '70s, was that the private eye character had become anachronistic- I did not (and still do not) care for the Marlowe type of noble-urban-knight detective earned over bodily into modern times (those times starting around 1963), a guy in fedora and trenchcoat with a bottle of whiskey in his bottom desk drawer, who apparently stumbled into a time machine.

Such novels seemed to me forced, cliched, ungainly pastiches of a form that was fixed in the amber of a bygone day. That was why my lightbulb epiphany was so crucial to me: I had come up with a way to write the private eye today… by setting the stories yesterday.

The first incarnation of the Nathan Heller character (the protagonist of the book you're about to read) was in a comic strip called "Heaven and Heller." An editor at Field Enterprises, around 1975, asked me to take a stab at creating a new story strip. That editor- Rick Marschall- was bucking the conventional wisdom, still held today, that story strips were no longer marketable.

The Heller samples (two batches were done- one by Ray Gotto, creator of the baseball strip "Ozark

Dee"; another by Fernando DaSilva, the last assistant to Alex Raymond, creator of "Flash Gordon") had to do with a seance being held in Chicago by Harry Houdini's widow: the true-crime aspect of the Heller novels was there, in embryonic form.

"Heaven and Heller" was sold to Field Enterprises. But my visionary editor lost his job. and the contract was cancelled. "Heaven and Heller" went into the drawer. A few years later. Rick Marschall recommended me to the Tribune Company as the writer of "Dick Tracy," a job I held fifteen years (starting in 1977)… By the way- thanks, Rick!

In the meantime, Chinatown happened, and a good but short-lived period private eye TV series called City of Angels (co-created by Stephen Cannell and Roy Huggins) appeared, as did those aforementioned novels by Bergman and Kaminsky. The private eye in period setting was becoming a distinct if underutilized sub-genre of mystery fiction.

But it still seemed to me that nobody had fully plumbed the potential of the P.I. in period. In fact, that was the problem: they were doing the private eye in period, but not in history'. It occurred to me that Heller shouldn't just bump into real people, but that he should be involved in real events… that he should crack a real unsolved case. I was not thinking in terms of a series of novels, just one book, though I did contemplate the possibility of sequels (one of the reasons I made Heller a younger man in True Detective than most protagonists of private eye novels).

From the first inklings of Heller, I began gathering research materials, and the case that attracted me most- that seemed like a classic under-explored Chicago subject- was the attempted assassination of FDR that wound up taking the life of Mayor Anton Cermak. My fascination for that case had been sparked by a TV show I saw as a kid…

One of the pop-culture touchstones that served to interest me in true crime and real detectives (or. should I say. real crime and true detectives) was the Robert Stack-starring television series. The Untouchables, based on a slightly fictionalized memoir by Eliot Ness (who was one of the real federal agents Chester Gould patterned his Dick Tracy upon).

The Untouchables had done a two-part episode about the attempt on Chicago Mayor Cermak's life, and it was typically inaccurate- the series, while wonderful, played fast and loose with the facts even as it pretended, courtesy of real newspaperman Walter WincheH's voiceover, to be a docu-drama. Only the original two-part TV movie, "The Scarface Gang" (which aired on Desilu Playhouse and was a kind of accidental pilot film), hewed at all close to the facts of any of the cases the show explored.

Years later, digging into the research, I discovered a much better story in real life, having to do with Cermak's own attempt on the life of Frank Nitti. To say more would be to spoil the story you're about to read: but I will say that the facts of the Cermak case- and the mainstream historical accounts aren't much more accurate than the Robert Stack series- opened my eyes about the realities of Chicago crime and politics.

* * *

This book could not have been written without the research assistance of George Hagenauer. I don't use the word "assistant," anymore, because that doesn't do George justice- he has been my great friend and collaborator on these novels, not only helping with the research, but with the interpretation of that research. The plots have always been formed out of endless phone conversations in which George and I turn over all the facts like stones, looking for the wriggling, squirmy things underneath.

George now lives near Madison. Wisconsin, but he was born and raised in Chicago, and lived there throughout the writing of the first eight or nine Heller books. He- and another valued friend and Chicago historian, Mike Gold- helped me shape the character and the world of Nate Heller. Let me give an example.

When I first approached George, whom I knew through our mutual interest in collecting original comic art (we met at a comic book convention in Chicago), he was happy to help with the Chicago end of the research. Among other things, he said he could help with the sometimes complicated geography of the city and its many neighborhoods. He asked me about the story I had in mind.

"Well," I said, "Nate Heller is a young plainclothes cop who is forced to do something corrupt. He quits the force out of moral indignation, and opens his own detective agency."

When he stopped laughing, George said, "Max, you gotta leave all that Philip Marlowe nonsense behind, if you want to write about Chicago. This is the Depression we're talking about- a young guy would try to get on the Chicago cops for the graft. To take advantage of the corruption. And you couldn't get on the force at all without a Chinaman to pull the strings."

A Chinaman, he explained, was not an Asian gentleman, but someone rich enough, or anyway connected enough, to get a person a prized slot on the Chicago police force.

Later. George (and I think Mike Gold accompanied us on most of the trips) would walk me around the Loop, pointing out key buildings and the sites of various murders and other crimes. One time, we stopped for a Coke at a bar on Van Buren and George discreetly pointed out a transaction taking place: the bartender was paying off the beat cop.

"That's Chicago. Max," George said.

A very well-respected mystery writer wrote a negative review of one of the early Heller novels, criticizing my detective because he broke Philip Marlowe's "code." He could hardly have known that I set out with malice aforethought in True Detective to break every one of the rules that Chandler set for private eyes, in his famous "down these mean streets" speech. Heller takes bribes, he despoils virgins, he does any number of un-Marlowe-like things.

And yet I think he remains a hero, the best man in his shabby world- that much of Chandler I wanted to retain. The other thing was the easy-flowing poetry of Chandler's great first-person voice. (What came from Hammett was a certain way of looking at the world, and from Spillane came the level of violence and action, and Heller's thirst for getting even.)

Ironically, the use of Chandler-esque first-person in this novel was one of the most controversial aspects of True Detective, prior to its sale, anyway. Conventional publishing wisdom was, you didn't write a first-person novel as long as this one- readers didn't like being trapped inside one voice that long. Also, a mystery novel was supposed to be 50,000 or 60,000 words long- not over 100,000 words, like this one.

My agent at the time, a very prestigious one. didn't think True Detective should be about a private eye, and he thought the novel should be told in the third person, from multiple points of view. One of my favorite writers, a valued mentor of mine (very famous), agreed with my agent and told me either to re-work the novel as a non-P.I, third-person book, or just put it in a drawer.

I fired my agent, and ignored my mentor. (Fortunately, my other, even more famous mentor- Mickey Spillane- also read the manuscript, called me up and said it was the best private eye novel he'd ever read. Let me tell you- that felt good.)

Because this novel broke so many rules, I had to write it on "spec"- that is, I could not just send a proposal to one of my publishers and hope for a contract. The writing of it was an ordeal for my wife Barb and me. The historical nature of the novel meant that the research was ongoing and ever-shifting, and for the longest time, I could not get past the first chapter, which I rewrote and rewrote (and retyped and retyped on my trusty IBM Selectric). So I ended up selling one of our two cars to buy a newfangled gizmo called a word processor. It cost five grand and was an amazing machine, fast as the wind- 16k!

Shortly after the manuscript was completed, I was informed by my wife that she was pregnant. After the ultrasound told us we had a boy on the way, Barb- caught up in the novel herself- asked if maybe "Nathan" wouldn't be a good name for our son.

"Okay," I said. "If we sell the book before you deliver the kid, he's Nathan. But if we haven't sold it, we'll go with something else- I'll be damned if I'll have a walking rejection slip running around this house."

Our son, Nathan Allan Collins, was bora November 5, 1982.

True Detective- my original title, by the way. was Tower Town (how glad I am my editor asked to come up with something else!)- sold to the first publishing house my new agent. Dommick Abel, approached. The book won widespread and glowing reviews, as well as the 1983 Best Novel Shamus Award from the Private Eye Writers of America, in a very tough year- the other nominees included the likes of James Crumley, Robert B. Parker and Stanley Ellin.

In addition, the novel set me on a new path as a writer of historical crime fiction- eleven more Heller novels have followed, as well as four Eliot Ness novels and another half-dozen historical crime novels, including The Titanic Murders, a paperback bestseller a few years ago. Heller also led to my writing a graphic novel called Road to Perdition, which takes place in the same world of Frank Nitti, Al Capone and Eliot Ness that you are about to enter. But Road to Perdition, as successful as it's been (thanks to the Tom Hanks/Paul Newman/Sam Mendes film fashioned from it), is only a spin-off of the Heller series. Specifically, Road to Perdition grows out of the first three Heller novels, the "Frank Nitti Trilogy," of which True Detective is the first installment.

I hope you enjoy the novel. I think you'll find Nate Heller good company… even if he does take the occasional bribe. He sleeps around, too.

- Max Allan Collins October

He felt like somebody had taken the lid off his life and let him look at the works.

- Dashiell Hammett

The Blind Pig December 19- December 22,

I was off-duty at the time, sitting in a speak on South Clark Street drinking rum out of a coffee cup.

When two guys in topcoats and snap-brim hats came in and walked over without crawling out of 'em, I started to reach for the automatic under my jacket. But as they neared the table, I recognized them: Lang and Miller. The mayor's bagmen.

I didn't know them exactly, but everybody knew them: the two Harrys- Harry Lang and Harry Miller, the detectives handpicked by Mayor Cermak to handle the dirty linen. Lang I'd spoken to before; he was a guy about ten years my senior, thirty-seven or eight maybe, and a couple of inches under my six feet, a couple pounds over my 180. He had five-o'clock shadow and coal black hair and cold black eyes and the sort of shaggy eyebrows you don't trust; even the impression of hair was a lie: under the hat his forehead kept going. Miller was forty and fat and five eight, with a blank face and blanker eyes- the kind you can take for stupidity if you aren't careful. He was cleaning off the lenses of his wire-frames with a hanky, the glasses having got fogged up in the cold. His ears stuck out; when he put his glasses on, they stuck out more. The Coke-bottle lenses magnified the blank eyes, and it struck me he looked like an owl- an owl that could kick the crap out of an eagle, that is.

Before he was a cop, Miller was a bootlegger- one of the Miller Gang, who were West Side Boys. That made it Old Home Week: we were all West Side Boys. Maxwell Street, where my father's stall had been, was where I knew Lana from.

But I didn't know Lang well enough to merit the old-drinking-pals camaraderie he suggested in his words if not his tone: "Hiya, Red. Heard you hung out here."

Red wasn't my name. Heller was. Nathan Heller. Nate. Never Red, despite my mother's reddish-brown hair I was earning around.

"The joint's halfway between Dearborn and LaSalle Street stations." I shrugged. "It's handy for me."

It was around three in the afternoon, and we had the place pretty much to ourselves: just me, the mayor's front-office dicks, the guy at the door, the guy behind the bar. But it was a cramped, boxlike joint with lots of dark wood and a mirror behind the bar and framed photos everywhere: celebrities and near-celebrities, signatures on their faces, were staring at me.

So were Lana and Miller.

"Buy you a cup of coffee?" I said, rising a little. I was a plainclothes officer, working the pickpocket detail, bucking for detective status. These guys were the best-paid detectives in town, sergeants yet, and they maybe didn't deserve respect, exactly, but I knew enough to give them some.

They made no move to sit down. Lang just stood there, hands in his topcoat pockets, snow brushing his shoulders like dandruff, and rocked on his heels, like a hobbyhorse; but whether it was from nerves, or from boredom, I couldn't say: I could just sense there was something I wasn't being let in on. Miller stood planted there like one of the lions in front of the Art Institute, only meaner-looking. Also, the lions were bronze and he was tarnished copper.

Then Miller spoke.

"We need a third" he said. He had a voice like somebody trying to sound tough in a talkie: monotone and slightly off-pitch. It should've been funny. It wasn't.

"A third what?" I said.

"A third man," Lang chimed in. "A third player."

"What's the same?"

"We'll tell you in the car."

They both turned toward the door. I was supposed to follow- them, apparently. I grabbed my topcoat and hat.

The speak was on the corner of Clark and Polk. Out on the street the wind was whipping at package-clutching pedestrians heading for Dearborn Station, which was around the comer and a block down, where I should be getting back to, to protect these shoppers from losing whatever dough they had left after Marshall Field's got through with them. Skirts and overcoats flapped, and everybody walked with heads lowered, watching the pavement, ignoring the occasional panhandler; dry, wind-scattered snow was like confetti being tossed out of the windows during a particularly uninspiring parade. Across the way the R.E.A. Station was busy, trucks pulling in and out, others being loaded up. Four women, pretty, in their late twenties, early thirties, bundled with packages, went giggling into the speak we'd just exited.

It was a week to Christmas, and business was picking up for everybody. Except for Saint Peter's Church-maybe, which was cattycorner from where we stood; business there looked slow.

There was no parking in and near the Loop (which was loosely defined as the area within the El tracks), but Lang and Miller had left their black Buick by the curb anyway, half a block down, across the street; it was the model people called the Pregnant Guppy, because the sides bulged out over the running boards. The running board next to the curb had a foot on it: a uniformed cop was writing a ticket. Miller walked up and reached over and tore it off the cop's pad and wadded it up and tossed it to the snow-flecked breeze. He didn't have to show the cop his detective's shield. Every copper in town knew the two Harrys,

But I liked the way the uniformed man handled it, a Paddy of about fifty who'd been pounding the beat longer than these two had been picking up the mayor's graft, that was for sure. And clean, as Chicago cops went, or he wouldn't still be pounding it. He put his book and pencil away slowly and gave Miller a look that was part condescension, part contempt, said, "My mistake, lad," and cleared his throat and shot phlegm toward Lang's feet. And turned on his heel and left, swinging his nightstick.

Lang, who'd had to hop back, and Miller, his face hanging like a loose rubber mask, stood watching him walk away, wondering what they should do about such unbridled arrogance, when I tapped Lang on the shoulder and said, "I'm freezing my nuts off, gentlemen. What exactly is the party'?"

Miller smiled. It was wide but it didn't turn up at the corners and the teeth were big and yellow, like enormous kernels of corn. It was the worst goddamn smile I ever saw.

"Frank Nitti's tossing it," he said.

"Only he don't know it," Lang added, and opened the door on the Buick. "Get in back."

I climbed in. The Pregnant Guppy wasn't a popular model, but it was a nice car. Brown mohair seats, varnished wood trim around the windows. Comfortable, too, considering the situation.

Miller got behind the wheel. The Buick turned over right away, despite the cold, though it shuddered a bit as we pulled out into light traffic. Lang turned and leaned over the seat and smiled. "You got a gun with you?"

I nodded.

He passed a small.38, a snubnose, back to me.

"Now you got two," he said.

We were heading north on Dearborn. We drove through Printer's Row, its imposing ornate facades rising to either side of me, aloof to my situation. One of them, tall, gray, half-a-block long, was the Transportation Building, where my friend Eliot Ness was working even now; he seemed a more likely candidate to be calling on Al Capone's heir than yours truly.

"How'd you finally nail Nitti?" I asked after a while.

Lang turned and looked at me, surprised, like he'd forgotten I was there.

"What do you mean?

"What's the charge? Who'd he kill?"

Lang and Miller exchanged glances, and Lang made a sound that was vaguely a laugh, though you could mistake it for a cough.

Miller, in his monotone, said. "That's a good one."

For a second, just a second, despite the gun I'd been handed. I had the feeling I was being taken for a ride. That somehow I'd stepped on somebody's toes and whoever it was was big enough and hurt bad enough to take it on up to the mayor, who Christ knows owed plenty of people favors, and now His Honor's prize flunkies were driving me God knows where- Lake Michigan maybe, where a lot of people went swimming, only some of them had been holding their breath underwater for years now.

But they didn't turn right, toward the lake; they turned left at the Federal Building- which meant the Chicago River was still a possibility and the Union League Club ignored us as we passed. We turned again, right this time, at the Board of Trade. We were in the concrete canyons of the financial district now- and by concrete canyons, I mean just that: in the thick of Chicago's loop, you can see towering buildings at left and right and front and back. Chicago invented the skyscraper and never lets you forget it.

The dustlike snow wasn't coming down hard enough to collect, so the city remained gray, though touched with Christmas red and green: most office windows bore poinsettias, and every utility pole had sprigs of holly or balsam: and now and then an ex-broker in what used to be a nice suit sold bright red apples at a nickel per. Just a few blocks over, on State Street, it would've looked a little more like Christmas, albeit a drunken one: the big stores with their fancy window displays were high on drinking paraphernalia this year, cocktail shakers, hip flasks, hollow canes, home-brew apparatus. All of it legal, but a violation of the law's spirit, as if hookahs were being publicly sold and displayed, just because public opinion suddenly sanctioned smoking dope.

We passed the Bismarck Hotel, where the mayor often lunched; it hadn't been so long ago that the famous old hotel had changed its name to the Randolph, after its location on the southeast corner of Randolph and Wells, to assuage anti-German sentiments during the Great War, though nobody had ever called it the Randolph, and a couple years back the name went back to Bismarck, officially. We were on the Palace Theater side, where Ben Bernie and his Lads had top billing ("Free Gifts for the Kids!") and the picture was Sports Parade with William Gargan; across the street was City Hall, its Corinthian columns and classical airs making an ironic facade for the goings-on within. Then we crossed under the El, a train rumbling overhead, and I decided they were kidding about Frank Nitti, because the Detective Bureau was on our left and we'd obviously been heading there all along- only we went past.

In the 200 block of North LaSalle, City Hall just a block back, the Detective Bureau less than that. Miller pulled over to the curb again, NO PARKING be damned, and he and Lang got out slowly and I followed them. They drifted casually toward the Wacker-LaSalle Building, a whitestone skyscraper on the corner, the Chicago River across the street from it. A barge was making impatient noises at the nearby example of the massive drawbridges Big Bill Thompson gave the city, but its iron shoulders didn't even shrug.

Inside the Wacker-LaSalle, a gray-speckled marble floor stretched out across a large, mostly empty lobby, turning our footsteps into radio sound effects. On the ceiling high above, cupids flew halfheartedly. There was a newsstand over at the left; a row of phone booths at the right; a bank of elevators straight ahead.

Halfway to the elevators, more or less, in the midst of the big lobby, a couple of guys in derbies and brown baggy suits were sitting in cane-back chairs with a card table set up between them, playing gin. They were a Laurel and Hardy pair, only Italian, and Laurel had the mustache; both had cigars, as well as bulges under one arm. We were a stone's throw from the financial district, but these guys weren't brokers.

Hardy glanced up at the two Harrys, recognizing them, nodding; Laurel looked at his cards. I looked ahead at the building registry, in the midst of the elevators with their polished brass cage doors: white letters on black, coming into focus as we neared. Import/export, other assorted small businesses, a few lawyers.

We paused at the elevators while Miller cleaned his thick wire-frames again. When they were back on his head, he nodded and Lang hit the elevator button.

"I'll take Campagna," Miller said. It sounded like he was ordering drinks.

"What?" I said.

They didn't say anything; they just looked at the elevators, waiting.

" 'Little New York' Campagna?" I said. "The torpedo?"

An elevator came; a guy in another brown suit with matching underarm bulge was running it.

Lang put a finger on his lips to shush me. We got on the elevator and the guy told us to stand back. We did, and not just because he was armed: in those days when you were told to stand back on an elevator, you listened- there were no safety doors inside, and if you stood too near the front and took a shove, you could lose an arm.

He brought us up to the fifth floor: nobody was posted up here; no comedians with guns playing cards. Nobody at all with a bulge under his arm. Just gray walls and offices with pebbled glass in the doors with numbers and, sometimes, names. We were standing on a field of tiny black-and-white tiles- looking down the hallway at the receding mosaic of them made me dizzy momentarily. The air had an antiseptic smell, like a dentist's office, or a toilet.

Lang looked at Miller and pointed back to himself. "Nitti," he said.

"Hey," I said. "What the hell's going on?"

They looked at me like I was an intruder; like they didn't remember asking me along.

"Get a gun out, Red," Lang said to me impatiently.

"It's Heller, if you don't mind," I said, but did what he said, as he did likewise. As did Miller.

"We got a warrant?" I said.

"Shut up." Miller said, without looking at me.

"What the hell am I supposed to do?" I said.

"I just told you." Miller said, and this time he did look at me. "Shut up."

The blank eyes behind the Coke-bottle glasses were round black balls; funny how eyes so inexpressive could say so much.

Lang interceded. "Back us up. Heller. There may be some shooting."

They walked. Their footsteps- and mine, following- echoed down the hall like hollow words.

They stopped at a door that had no name on its pebbled glass- just a number. 554.

It wasn't locked.

Miller went in first, a.45 revolver in his fist; Lang followed, with a.38 with a four-inch barrel. I brought up the rear, thoroughly confused, but leaving the snubnose Lang gave me in my topcoat pocket: I carried a nine-millimeter automatic, a Browning- unusual for a cop, since automatics can jam on you, but I liked automatics. As much as I could like any gun, that is.

It was an outer office; a desk faced us as we entered, but there was no secretary or receptionist behind it-There were, however, two guys in two of half a dozen chairs lining the left wall two more brown suits, topcoats in their laps, sitting there like some more furniture in the room.

Both were in their late twenties, dark hair, pale blank faces, average builds. One of them, with an oft-broken nose, was reading a pulp magazine, Black Mask; the other, with pockmarks you could hide dimes in, was sitting smoking, a deck of Phillip Morris and a much-used ashtray on the seat of the chair next to him.

Neither went for a gun or otherwise made any move. They just sat there surprised- not at seeing cops, but at seeing cops with guns in their hands.

In the corner to the left of the door we'd just come in was a coatrack with four topcoats and three hats; the right wall had another half dozen chairs, empty. Just behind and to the left of the desk was a water cooler and, in the midst of the pebbled-glass-and-wood wall, a closed door.

Then it opened.

Standing in the doorway, leaning against the jamb, was a man who was unmistakably Frank Nitti. I'd never met him, though he'd been pointed out to me a few times: but once having seen him, you couldn't miss him: handsome, in a battered way, fighter's nose, thin inverted-V mustache, faint scar on his lower lip: impeccably groomed, former barber that he was, slick black hair parted neatly at the left; impeccably dressed, in a gray pinstripe suit with vest, and wide black tie with a gray-and-white pattern. He was smaller than Frank Nitti was supposed to be, but he was an imposing figure just the same.

He closed the door behind him.

There was a look on his face, upon seeing the two Harrys, that reminded me of the look on that uniformed cop's face. He seemed irritated and bored with them, and the fact that guns were in their hands didn't seem to concern him in the least.

A raid was an annoyance; it meant getting booked, making bail, then business as usual. But a few token raids now and then were necessary for public relations. Only for Nitti to be involved was an indignity. He'd only been out of Leavenworth a few months, since serving a tax rap; and now he was acting as his cousin Capone's proxy, the Big Fellow having left for the Atlanta big house in May.

"Where's Campagna?" Lang said. He was standing with Miller in front of him. partially blocked by him. Like Miller was a rock he was hiding behind.

"Is he in town?" Nitti said. Flatly.

"We heard you were siccing him on Tony," Miller said.

Tony was the mayor: Anton J. Cermak. alias "Ten Percent Tony."

Nitti shrugged. "I heard your bohunk boss is sleeping with Newberry," he said.

Ted Newberry was a Capone competitor on the North Side, running what was left of the old "Bugs" Moran operation.

Silence hung in the room like the smell of wet paint.

Then Lang said to me, "Frisk the help."

The two hoods stood; I patted them down with one hand. They were unarmed. If this was a handbook and wire-room setup, as I suspected, their being unarmed made sense; they were serving as runners, not guns. Lang and Miller taking their time about getting into the next room also made sense: most raids were conducted only for show, and this was giving the boys inside time to destroy the evidence.

"Let's see if Campagna's in there." Lang said finally, nodding toward the closed door.

"Who?" Nitti said, with a faint smile.

Then he opened the door and went in, followed by his runners, then by Miller, Lang, and me.

The inner room was larger, but nothing elaborate: just a room with a table running from left to right, taking up a lot of the space. At right, against the wall, was a cage, and a guy in shirt sleeves wearing a green accountant's shade was sitting in there with a bunch of money on the counter; he hadn't bothered putting it away. Perhaps it wouldn't all fit in the drawer. At left a young guy stood at a wire machine with a ticker tape in his hand, only this wasn't the Board of Trade by a long shot. Two more sat at the table: another one in shirt sleeves, his back to us, suitcoat slung over the chair behind him, four phones on the table in front of him; and across from him, a hook-nosed hood wearing a pearl hat with a black band at a Capone tilt. There were no pads or paper of any kind on the table, though there were a few scattered pens and pencils. This was a wireroom, all right. The smoking wastebasket next to the table agreed with me.

The guy in shirt sleeves at the table was the only one I recognized: Joe Palumbo. He was a heavyset man with bulging eyes and a vein-shot nose; at about forty-five, the oldest man in the room with the exception of Nitti, who was pushing fifty gracefully. The hood in the Capone hat was about thirty-five, small, swarthy, smoking- and probably Little New York Campagna. The accountant in the cage was in his thirties, too; and the kid at the ticker tape, with curly dark hair and a mustache, couldn't have been twenty-five. Lang ordered the accountant out of the cage; he was a little man with round shoulders and he took a seat at the table, across from Palumbo, next to the man I assumed (rightly) to be Campagna, who looked at the two Harrys and me with cold dark eyes that might have been glass. Miller told the runners to take seats at the table; they did. Then he had the others stand and take a frisk, Campagna first. Clean.

"What's this about?" Nitti asked. He was standing near the head of the table.

Lang and Miller exchanged glances; it seemed to mean something.

My hand was sweating around the automatic's grip. The men at the table weren't doing anything suspicious; their hands were on the table, near the phones. Everyone had been properly searched. Everyone except Nitti, that is, though the coat and vest hung on him in such a way that a shoulder holster seemed out of the question.

He was just standing there, staring at Lang and Miller, and I could feel it starting to work on them. Campagna's gaze was no picnic, either. The room seemed warm, suddenly; a radiator was hissing- or was that Nitti?

Finally Lang said "Heller?"

"Yes?" I said. My voice broke, like a kid's.

"Frisk Nitti. Do it out in the other room."

I stepped forward and, gun in hand but not threateningly, asked Nitti to come with me.

He shrugged again and came along; he seemed to be having trouble deciding just how irritated to be.

In the outer office he held his coat open as if showing off the lining- it was jade-green silk- and I patted him down. No gun.

The cuffs were in my topcoat. Nitti turned his back to me and held his wrists behind him while I fished for the cuffs. He glanced back and said. "Do you know what this is about, kid?"

I said. "Not really," getting the cuffs out, and noticed he was chewing something.

"Hey," I said. "What the hell are you doing? Spit that out!"

He kept chewing and, Frank Nitti or not, I slapped him on the back and he spit it out: a piece of paper: a wad of paper, now. He must've had a bet written down and palmed it when we came in: hadn't had a chance to burn it like the boys inside did theirs.

"Nice try. Frank," I said, grasping his wrists, cuffs ready, feeling tough, and Lang came in from the bigger room, shut the door, came up beside me and shot Nitti in the back. The sound of it shook the pebbled glass around us; the bullet went through Nitti and snicked into some woodwork.

I pulled away, saying, "Jesus!"

Nitti turned as he fell, and Lang pumped two more slugs into him: one in his chest, one in the neck. The.38 blasts sounded like a cannon going off in the small room; a derby dropped off the coatrack. Worst of all was the sound the bullets made going in: a soft sound, like shooting into mud.

I grabbed Lang by the wrist before he could shoot again.

"What the hell are you"

He jerked away from me. "Easy, Red. You got that snubnose?"

I could hear the men yelling in the adjacent room; Miller was keeping them back, presumably.

"Yes," I said.

Nitti was on the floor; so was a lot of his blood.

"Give it here." Lang said.

I handed it to him.

"Now go in and help Harry," he said.

I went back in the wire room. Miller had his gun on the men. all of whom were standing now. though still grouped around the table.

"Nitti's been shot," I said. I don't know who I was saying it to, exactly.

Campagna spat something in Sicilian.

Palumbo, eyes bulging even more than usual, furious, his face red, said, "Is he dead?"

"I don't know. I don't think he's going to be alive long, though." I looked at Miller; his face was impassive. "Call an ambulance."

He just looked at me.

I looked at Palumbo. "Call an ambulance."

He sat back down and reached for one of the many phones before him.

Then there was another shot.

I rushed back out there and Lang was holding his wrist; his right hand was bleeding- a fairly deep graze alongside the knuckle of his forefinger.

On the floor, by the open fingers of Nitti's right hand, the snubnose.38 was smoking.

"Do you really think that's going to fool anybody?" I asked.

Lang said, "I'm shot. Call an ambulance."

"One's on the way," I said.

Miller came in, gun still in hand. He bent over Nitti.

"He's not dead," Miller said.

Lang shrugged. "He will be." He turned toward me, wrapping a handkerchief around his wound. "Get in there and watch the arease-balls."

I went back in the larger office. One of the men, the young, nervous one with the mustache, was opening the window, climbing out onto the ledge.

"What the hell do you think you're doing?" I asked.

The other men were seated at the table; the young guy who was half out the window froze.

Then somebody at the table tossed him a gun.

Where it came from, who tossed it. I didn't know. Maybe Campagna.

But the guy had a gun now. and he shot at me, and I got the automatic out and shot back.

And then he wasn't in the window anymore.

My father never wanted me to be a cop. Particularly not a Chicago cop, the definition of which (my father frequently said) was a guy with change for a five. He'd been a union man, my father, and had been jailed and beaten by police; and he'd always had disdain for Chicago politics, from the butcher down the block who was assistant precinct captain to "Big Bill" Thompson, the mayor who wanted to be known as the "Builder" when "Boozer" was more like it.

Pa would've liked nothing more than for me to quit the force. It had been a major stumbling block between us, those last few years of his life. It may have led to his death. I don't know for sure. He didn't leave a note that night he shot himself. With my gun.

The Hellers came from Halle, in eastern Germany, orginally, and so did their name: Jews in Germany in the early 1800s were forced to abandon their traditional lack of surname and take on the name of either their occupation or home area. If my name hadn't been Heller it probably would've been Taylor, because a tailor is what my great-grandfather, Jacob Heller, was, in Halle, in the late 1840s.

Which were hard times. The economy was doing handstands due to developing railroads and industry; technology was making jobs obsolete for everybody from the guy who weaved the cloth to the oxcart driver who shipped it. Unemployment flourished, while crops failed and food prices doubled. A lot of people headed for America. My great-grandfather hung on. His business was suffering, yes, but he had contacts with the richer Jews in Halle- moneylenders, bankers, businessmen- and when the region was rocked by political unrest in 1848, great-grandfather watched from the sidelines. He couldn't afford getting involved: his business depended on an upper-class patronage, after all.

Then the letter arrived. From Vienna, where great-grandfather's younger brother Albert had lived; had lived: he'd been killed in the March 13, 1848. revolt against Metternich. His brother left an inheritance, which had been placed in the hands of Rabbi Kohn, the rabbi of Vienna's Reform synagogue. Greatgrandfather didn't trust the mails during such troubled times, and he went to Vienna to pick up the money. He stayed for a few days with Rabbi Kohn. and enjoyed the company of this kind, intelligent man and his gracious family. He was still there when the rabbi and his family were poisoned by Orthodox fanatics.

My great-grandfather was apparently hit hard by all this: political unrest had taken his brother from him; and in Vienna, he'd seen Jew kill Jew. He'd always been a very pragmatic businessman, preferring to be apolitical; and where religion was concerned, he practiced Reform Judaism rather than strict Orthodoxy. But now he renounced his faith altogether, and became apostate. Judaism hasn't been seen in my family since.

Leaving Halle couldn't have been easy, but staying would've been hard. The secret police that grew up in the wake of the revolution of 1848 were making things tough. So were the Orthodox Jews who attacked my great-grandfather verbally for his apostasy, and who spread the word to his wealthy clients that their tailor's late brother had been a radical. The latter didn't help business, certainly, nor did the general economic climate, and my great-grandfather decided, all in all, that America had to be a safer place to raise his family of four (the youngest, Hiram, having been born in 1850, just three years before the family immigrated to New York City).

As a youth, Hiram, my grandfather, worked in the family tailor shop, which was proving a moderately successful business, though Hiram never went into it. He went instead into the Union army at age seventeen. Like a lot of young Jews at that time, he wanted to prove his patriotism: Jewish war profiteers had been giving their fellows a bad name, and my grandfather helped make up for that by getting shot in both leas at Gettysburg.

He returned to New York, where his father had died in his absence, after a long hospitalization. His mother had died ten years before, and now his two brothers and his sister were squabbling over the business/inheritance, the upshot being that sister Anna left the city with a good chunk of the family savings, not to be heard of again for some years. His brothers, Jacob and Benjamin, stayed in New York but never spoke to each other again; they rarely saw Hiram, either, a nearly crippled, isolated man who was lucky to get his job in a sweatshop in the garment district.

In 1871 my grandfather married Naomi Levitz, a fellow sweatshop worker. My father, Mahlon, was bora in 1875, my uncle Louis in 1877. In 1884 my grandfather collapsed while working and from then on was totally bedridden, left at home to look after the two boys as best he could, while grandmother continued working. In 1886 the crowded tenement building the family lived in caught fire. Many died in the blaze. My grandmother got my father and uncle out safely, then went back in after grandfather. Neither came out.

My father's aunt- who had left town with her estimated share of the inheritance- had got back in touch with the rest of the family, letting them know she was "successful." It was to her the two boys were sent. To Chicago. From the train to the streetcar, the wide-eyed boys were shuttled not to the Jewish section of the near West Side but to the section of the city known as the Levee. The First Ward- home of "Bathhouse" John and "Hinky Dink," the corrupt ward bosses; site of the most famous whorehouse in the country, the Everleigh Club, run by sisters Ada and Minna, and scores of lesser houses of ill repute. Their "successful" Aunt Anna was a madam in one of the latter.

Not that Aunt Anna was at the bottom rung; not when there were tenements housing row upon row of crib upon crib of streetwalkers taking a load off. Vile establishments, one of which was owned by the police superintendent at one time; several others by Carter Harrison, Sr., five-time mayor of Chicago. And then there were the panel houses, providing rooms furnished only with a bed and a chair, the former occupied by a girl and her client, the latter by the client's pants; and from a sliding panel in a wall or door, a third part)' would enter at an opportune moment and make a withdrawal, often at the very moment a deposit was being made.

At the other end of the spectrum were the Everleigh sisters and, before them. Carrie Watson, into whose parlor one could go at least five ways, as there were five parlors in her three-story brownstone mansion. There were also twenty bedrooms, a billiard room, and, in the basement, a bowling alley. Damask upholster>^;, silk gowns, linen sheets; wine served in silver buckets, sipped from gold goblets.

Then there was Anna Heller's house. Wine was served there, too; the dozen girls residing there had it for breakfast. This was around 1:00 P.M., and the third liquid meal of their (so far) short day: at noon a colored girl woke these "withered roses of society" for cocktails in bed; they dressed themselves with the assistance of absinthe, and headed down for breakfast. Soon the girls, in pairs, would sit at windows and attract the attention of male passersby. This would be done by rapping on the window and providing a glimpse of what a girl was wearing, if you could call it that: costumes ranging from Mother Hubbards made of mosquito netting to jockey uniforms to gowns without sleeves to gowns without bosoms (or rather, with bosoms out) to nothing. Business was brisk. And by four or five in the morning, the girls would find a novel use for a bed: sleep. Or drunken stupor.

It helped a girl to stay drunk at Anna Heller's. Anna was known to boast that no act was too disgusting or perverse for her girls-- Circus Night was held three or four times a month- and heaven help the girl who made a liar out of Anna. It was said- though this one aspect of his aunt's business my father never witnessed- that Anna had in her employ six colored gentlemen who resided at a separate dwelling of hers; and that she would take business trips to other cities and return with girls from age thirteen to seventeen, having promised them jobs as actresses. The act Anna had in mind was a predictable one. though her variation wasn't. A girl would be locked in a room without clothing and raped by the colored gentlemen. In this way a airl became accustomed to "the life" and soon was having wine for breakfast. So it was said, at any rate.

My father didn't like his aunt; he didn't like her house or the way she slapped the drunken "chippies" (as she constantly called them) or the way she hoarded the money her girls made her. And she didn't like the way my father looked at her. a look of silent unveiled contempt (which my father was good at), and so my father got slapped a lot, too.

Anna and my uncle Louis got along fine. The parlor wasn't a fancy one, but it was upper-grade enough to occasionally attract a clientele that included ward politicans and successful businessmen, bankers and the like, and Louis must have liked the life these men led. or seemed to lead, and got a taste for capitalism. Of course Aunt Anna was a hell of a capitalist herself, so maybe that was where he picked it up. He probably learned to kiss ass watching Anna deal with the politicos and the posher types who occasionally showed up, and he put the skill to good effect by using it back on Anna, playing upon her pockmarked vanity. While Anna made my father stop school after the third grade, making him the bordello's janitor, Louis was attending a boarding school out east.

My father didn't like Louis much either, by this point. Louis didn't seem to notice, or care. When he was home from school out east, that is. If you called that house a home. Anna and my father did have one thing in common, though: a hatred of cops. Pa hated the sight of the patrolmen arriving for their weekly two dollars and fifty cents each, plus booze and food and girls anytime they were in the mood, which was every time. And Anna hated paying the two-fifty, and providing the booze, food, and girls. The beat cops weren't the only freeloaders: inspectors and captains from the Harrison Street police station held out a helping-themselves hand, as did the ward politicians, for whom my father also built a dislike. These were the same politicians, of course, who were among those my uncle Louis looked up to.

After eastern prep school, Louis returned to Chicago, and Aunt Anna sent him promptly off to Northwestern. And it was about then that she started taking her favorite nephew to the annual First Ward Ball, where Louis would not only see those admired politicians, but rub shoulders with them, and more important ones than just the First Ward ward heelers: Hinky Dink and Bathhouse John themselves, and most every other alderman in town, and bankers and lawyers and railroad executives and prominent businessmen, and police captains and inspectors and maybe even the commissioner: and pimps, madams, streetwalkers, pickpockets, burglars, and dope fiends. Everyone in costume, the men running to knights, gladiators, and circus strongmen, the ladies (most of whom were of the evening) to Indian maidens, Little Egypts, and geisha girls (costumes the newspapers understatedly described as "abbreviated"). The ball filled the Chicago Coliseum every year, a few days before Christmas, and added twenty-five to fifty thousand dollars to the Hinky Dink-Bathhouse John campaign fund.

"Bathhouse" John Coughlin, former rubber in a bathhouse. Democratic alderman from the First Ward, was the showman: he recited (his own) lousy poetry, wore outlandish clothes (lavender cravat and a red sash), and blew a fortune or two on the horses. "Hinky Dink" (Michael) Kenna was the brains, a little man who chewed on his cigars and accumulated a fortune or two while running the Workingmen's Exchange, a landmark Levee saloon; among his contributions to Chicago was establishing the standard rate for a vote: fifty cents. Their First Ward Balls were described by the Illinois Crime Survey as the "annual underworld orgy." Hinky Dink didn't care. "Chicago." he said, "ain't no sissy town."

But at the time Uncle Louis was being impressed by the balls of the First Ward, my father was long gone. In 1893, during the Columbian Exhibition- Chicago's first world's fair- business at Anna Heller's had boomed, and extra girls were taken on, and Anna's iron hand had taken its toll: on the girls and on my father. The syphilis was probably starting to eat Anna's brain and possibly explained her erratic behavior. When my father exploded at her, his silent contempt finally erupting after his aunt slapped a young woman senseless, she came at him with a kitchen knife. The scar on his shoulder was five inches long. Pa stayed around long enough for the doctor Anna had on call to come sew up the wound, then hopped a freight south.

He got thrown off the train near 115th Street. The Pullman plant nearby was where he ended up working; a year later he found himself in the midst of a strike, and was one of the militant strikers who got laid off when the strike finally ended.

And so began Pa's union work: with the Hebrew Worker's Congress on the near West Side; with the Wobblies on the near North Side; as a union organizer; a worker at various plants, and involved with union actions and strikes…

Uncle Louis took a different path. By now he was a trust officer with the major Chicago bank, Central Trust Company of Illinois, the famous "Dawes Bank," founded by General Charles Gates Dawes, who went on to be Calvin Coolidge's vice-president. Aunt Anna died in an insane asylum the year Louis graduated from Northwestern, so he was able to start out with a degree- and an inheritance, which is to say the money off the sale of the brothel and its hookers- and leave his sordid past behind him.

So the occasional meetings thereafter between my father and uncle were strained, to say the least- a polished young financier on his way up. and a radical worker into union organizing- and usually ended with my father shouting slogans and my uncle remaining quiet, expressing his contempt by not condescending to reply, which is funny because that was my father's favorite tactic. My father, despite his union activities, was not a man prone to losing his temper; Iris rage he swallowed, like an unchewable piece of meat that couldn't be spit out because times were too hard. But at my uncle, he would shout; at my uncle, he would vent his rage. So by century's turn, the two men weren't speaking; it made for no awkward moments: they didn't exactly travel in the same circles.

Also, by century's turn, my father was in love. Having been denied the education Louis got, he'd taken to reading, even before his union interests led him into books on history and economy. Perhaps that was where my father's capacity for smugness and contempt came from: he had the insecurity-based arrogance of all self-educated men. At any rate, it was at a cultural study program at Newberry Library that he met another (if less arrogant) self-educated soul: Jeanette Nolan, a beautiful redheaded young woman who was a bit on the frail, sickly side. In fact, it was repeated bouts of illness keeping her out of school that led her into reading and self-study (I never found out exactly what her health problems were, though I've come to think it may have been her heart). But this only made her all the more appealing to Pa. After all, his two favorite authors were Dumas and Dickens (although he once admitted to me his disappointment when he discovered that the same Dumas wasn't responsible for both Camille and The Three Musketeers; he had gone through many a year wondering at the versatility of the author Alexandre

Dumas, till he found out that pere and fils were different people).

Not long after she and my father started to court, Pa landed in court, then in jail: his work with unions was repeatedly bringing him into conflict with cops, and his arrest came during a textile plant strike, landing him a month in Bridewell Prison.

Which was a hellhole, of course. A sandstone hellhole with no heat, no toilet facilities other than a five-gallon bucket in the corner of a rusty, paint-peeling cell with two wall-suspended bunks with straw mattresses and wafer-thin blankets, and a stench you could almost see. No water in the cells, though each morning at six, prisoners were given a few moments at a trough with cold running water before one of the two cell-mates got his turn at joining the parade of slop cans, which were carried from the cells and dumped outside in huge cesspools and then scrubbed clean with chemicals. And once a week, a gang shower. The shower came in handy after a week in a clay hole, which is where Pa was assigned: a stone quarry; a deep pit where big pieces of limestone got turned into little ones.

Pa was used to hardship: Aunt Anna had seen to that. And he was pretty healthy: he had the same framework as me, roughly six feet with one-eighty or one-seventy attached to it. But one month in Bridewell took its toll even on a healthy man, and he came out twenty pounds lighter- meals ran to a breakfast of bread and dry oatmeal, lunch of bread and thin soup, supper of bread and a concoction that was peas and fragments of corned beef swimming in something unidentifiable, all servings negligible, with the three pieces of bread the only thing that got him and the other prisoners through the day (one odd thing: Pa often said it was the best fresh-baked bread he ever ate), and he had a cough from breathing quarry dust, and was of course very proud of himself for the moral victory' of going to jail over a union matter, and loved his martyr's role.

But Jeanette was not impressed, not with the glory aspects of it, anyway. She was horrified at the condition Pa was in after Bridewell, just as she'd been horrified the times she'd cleaned and bandaged him after strike-related beatings. Before he went to Bridewell, he'd proposed marriage; he'd asked her permission to ask her parents for her hand. She had said she'd think about it. And now she said she'd many him on one condition…

So Pa left union work.

Pa was no stranger to Maxwell Street; he'd been there, from time to time, passing out political and union literature. He didn't want to work for a "capitalist" institution, like a bank (he'd leave that to his brother Louis); and he couldn't work in a factor)' he'd been black-listed from most Chicago plants, and the ones where he wasn't black-listed would only present the temptation of future union work. So he opened a stall on Maxwell Street selling books, used and new, with an emphasis on dime novels, which, with school supplies- pencils, pens and ink, notebooks- attracted kids, who were his best customers. Occasionally, a parent frowned upon the union and anarchist literature that rubbed shoulders with Buffalo Bill and Nick Carter on Pa's stall; even the similarly politically conscious Jeanette was critical of this, but nothing could sway Pa. And Maxwell Street was a place where you could get away with selling just about anything.

About a mile southwest of the Loop, Maxwell Street was at the center of a Jewish ghetto a mile square, give or take, and on Maxwell Street it was mostly the latter. The Great Fire of 1871, thanks to Mrs. O'Leary's less-than-contented cow purportedly kicking a lantern over, left Maxwell Street, which was just south of the O'Leary barn, untouched. The Maxwell Street area had a big influx of new residents from the burned-out areas of Chicago, and the now densely populated area attracted merchants- most of them Jewish peddlers with two-wheeled pushcarts. Soon the street was teeming with bearded patriarchs, their caftans brushing the dusty wooden sidewalks, their black derbies faded gray from days in the sun, selling. Selling shoes, fruit, garlic, pots, pans, spices…

By the time Pa opened a stall there, Maxwell Street was a Chicago institution, the marketplace where the rich and the poor would go for a bargain; where awnings hung from storefronts to the very edge of the wooden stalls crowding the curb, the walkway between so dark a tunnellike effect was created, and lamps were strung up so bargain hunters could see what they were getting- but not too many lamps, and not overly bright, because it wasn't to the seller's advantage to let the buyer get too close a look at the toeless socks, used toothbrushes, factory-second shirts, and other wonders that were the soul of the street. Whether the street had a heart or not, I couldn't say, but it did have a smell: the smell of onions frying: even the smell of garbage burning in open trash drums couldn't drown that out. Accompanying the oniony air were the clouds of steam rising from the hot dogs; and when the onions met the hot dogs in a fresh bun. that was as close to heaven as Maxwell Street got.

Pa and his bride moved into a one-room tenement flat at Twelfth and Jefferson, in a typical Maxwell Street-area building: a three-story clapboard with a pitched roof and exterior staircase. There were nine flats in the building and about eighty people; one three-room flat was home for an even dozen. The Hellers, alone in their one room, sharing an outhouse with twenty or thirty of their fellow residents (one outhouse per floor), had room to spare, and maybe that's what led to me.

I would imagine Pa was living your typical quiet life of desperation: his union work, which meant so much to him, was in the past; taking its place was his stall, in an atmosphere more openly capitalistic than the banks he loathed (and Pa was a well-read, intellectual type, remember; irony didn't get past him).

So all he had in life was his beloved Jeanette, and the promise of a family.

But mother was still frail, and having me (in 1905) damn near killed her. A midwife/nurse from the Maxwell Street Dispensary, pulled her- and me- through; and, later, diplomatically suggested to them, separately and together, that Nathan Samuel Heller be an only child.

Big families were the rule then, however, and a few years later, my mother died during a miscarriage; the midwife didn't even make it to the house before my mother died in my father's bloody arms. I think I remember standing nearby and seeing this. Or maybe my father's quiet, understated but photographically vivid retelling (and he told me this only once) made me think I remembered, made me think it came back to me from over the years. I would've been about three, I guess. She died in 1908.

Pa didn't show his feelings, it wasn't his way. I don't remember ever seeing him weep. But losing mother hit him hard. Had there been relatives on either side of the family that Pa was close to, I might've ended up being raised by an aunt or something; there were overtures from Uncle Louis, I later learned, and from mother's sisters and a brother, but Pa resisted them all. I was all he had left, all that remained of her. That doesn't mean we were close, though, despite the fact that I was helping at the stall by age six; he and I didn't seem to have much in common, except perhaps an interest in reading, and mine was a casual one, hardly matching his. But I was reading Nick Carter by age ten and used hardbacks of Sherlock Holmes soon after. I wanted to be a detective when I grew up.

Conditions in the neighborhood got worse and worse; shopping in the Maxwell Street Market could be an adventure, but living there was a disaster. It was a slum: there were 130 people crowded in our building now, and the father and son who shared one room were looked upon with envy by their neighbors. There were sweatshops which of course got my union-in-his-blood father's ire up- and diseases (mother had had influenza when the miscarriage took her. and Pa used to blame the flu for her death, perhaps because in some way it absolved him); and there was the stink of garbage and outhouses and stables. I attended Walsh school, and while I managed not to get involved directly, there were gang wars aplenty, bloody fights in which kids would slash each other with knives and fire pistols at one another. And that was the six- and seven-year olds; the older kids were really tough. I managed to live through two years of Walsh before Pa announced we were moving out. When? I wanted to know. He said he didn't know, but we would move.

Even at age seven (which is what I was at the time) I knew Pa wasn't much of a businessman; school supplies and dime novels and such made for a steady, day-to-day sort of income, but nothing more. And while he was a hard worker. Pa had begun to have headaches what years later might have been called migraines- and there were days when his stall did not open for business. The headaches began, of course, after Mother died.

It couldn't have been easy for him, but Pa went to Uncle Louis. He went, one Sunday afternoon, to Uncle Louis' Lake Shore high-rise apartment in Lincoln Park. Uncle Louis was an assistant vice-president with the Dawes Bank now; a rich, successful businessman; in short, everything Pa was not. And when Pa asked for a loan, his brother asked, why not go to my bank for that? Why come to my home? And why, after all these years, should I help you?

And Pa answered him. As a courtesy to you, he said, I did not come to your bank; I would not want to embarrass my successful brother. And an embarrassment is what I would be, Pa said, a Maxwell Street merchant in ragged clothes, coming to beg from his banker brother; it would be unseemly. Of course, Pa said, if you want me to come around. I can do that; and I can do that again and again, until you finally give me my loan. Perhaps, Pa said, you do not embarrass easily; perhaps your business associates, your fancy clients, do not mind that your brother is a raggedy merchant- an anarchist- a union man; perhaps they do not mind that we both were raised by a whorehouse madam; perhaps they understand that your fortune was built upon misery and suffering, like their fortunes.

With the loan, my father was able to start a small bookstore in the part of North Lawndale we knew as Douglas Park, a storefront on South Homan with three rooms in the rear: kitchen, bedroom, sitting room, the latter doubling as my bedroom; best of all was indoor plumbing, and we had it all to ourselves. I went to Lawson school, which was practically across the street from Heller's Books. And the school supplies Pa sold, in addition to the dime novels he continued to stock, kept his store afloat. In twelve years he'd paid Uncle Louis back; that would've been about 1923.

I didn't know it then, because Pa never showed it, but I was the center of his life. I can see that now. I can see that he was proud of the good grades I got; and I can see that the move we made from Maxwell Street to Douglas Park had mostly to do with getting me in better, safer schools and very little to do with improving Pa's business- he still wasn't much of a businessman, stocking more political and economic literature than popular novels (Pa's idea of a popular novel was Upton Sinclair's The Jungle), refusing to add the penny candy and junk toys that would've been the perfect commercial adjunct to the school supplies he sold, that would've brought the Lawson kids in, because the school supplies and dime novels were the only concession he'd make to commerce, the only room he'd sacrifice to his precious books. And he didn't stock the religious books that would've sold well in this predominantly Jewish area, either; a taste for kosher food was about as Jewish as Pa got, and I guess the same has proved true for me. We're that much alike.

He wanted me to go to college; it was his overriding dream. The dream was no more specific than that: no goal of a son as a doctor, or a lawyer; I could be anything I wanted. A teacher would've pleased him. I think, but I'm just guessing. The only thing he made clear was his hope that business- either on Uncle Louis' high scale or his own low one- would be something I'd avoid; and I always assured him that he needn't worry about my following either of those courses of action. The only thing I had tried to make clear, since I was about ten years old, was my desire to be a detective when I grew up. Pa took that as seriously as most fathers would; but some kids do grow up to be firemen, you know. And when I kept talking about it on into my early twenties, he should've paid attention. But that's something parents rarely do. They demand attention; they don't give it. But then the same is true of children, isn't it?

To his credit, when he gave me the five hundred dollars he'd been saving for God knows how long, he said that it was a graduation gift, no strings, though he admitted to hoping I would use it for college. To my credit, I did; I went to Crane Junior College for two years, during which time Pa's business seemed to be less than prospering, with him alone in the shop, closing down occasionally because of headaches. When I went back to help him there, he assumed I was working to save up and go on for another two years of college. I assumed he realized I'd decided two years was enough. Typically, we didn't speak about this and went our merry private ways, assuming the hell out of things.

We had our first argument the day I told him I was applying for a job with the Chicago P.D. It was the first time Pa ever really shouted at me (and one of the last: he reverted to sarcasm and contempt thereafter, the arguments continuing but staying low-key if intense) and it shocked me; and I think I shocked him by standing up to him. He hadn't noticed I wasn't a kid, despite my being twenty-four at the time. When he finished shouting, he laughed at me. You'll never get a job with the cops, he said. You got no clout, you got no money, you got no prayer. And the argument was over.

I never told my father that my Uncle Louis had arranged my getting on the force; but it was obvious. Like Pa said, you needed patronage, or money to buy in. to get a city job. So I went to the only person I knew in Chicago who was really somebody, which was Uncle Louis (never Lou), who was by now a full VP with the Dawes Bank. I went to him for advice.

And he said, "You've never asked anything of me, Nate. And you're not asking now. But I'm going to give you a present. Don't expect anything else from me, ever. But this present I will arrange." I asked him how. He said, "I'll speak to A.J." A.J. was Cermak, not yet mayor, but a powerful man in the city.

And I made the force. And it was never the same between Pa and me, though I continued to live at home. My role in "cracking" the Lingle case got me promoted to plainclothes after two years on traffic detail; and it was shortly after that that my father put my gun to his head.

The same gun I had used today, to kill some damn kid in Frank Nitti's office.

"So I quit" I told Barney.

Barney was Barney Ross, who as you may remember was one of the great professional boxers of his time, and that time was now; he was the top lightweight contender in the country, knocking on champion Tony Canzoneri's door. He was a West Side kid. too. another Maxwell Street expatriate. Actually, Barney still was a kid: twenty-three or twenty-four, a handsome bulldog with a smile that split his face whenever he chose to use it, which was often.

I knew Barney since he was baby Barney Rasofsky. His family was strictly Orthodox, and come Friday sundown could do no work till after Saturday. Barney's pa was so strict they even ripped toilet paper into strips so the family wouldn't be tearing paper on the Shabbes. For about a year, when I was seven or eight, right before we moved out of Maxwell Street, I turned on the gas and did other errands for the Rasofskys, as their Shabbes gov, since I was as un-Orthodox as my pa. Later, when I was a teenager in Douglas Park, I'd come back to Maxwell Street on Sundays, to work with Barney as a "puller" a puller being a barker working in front of the door of a store, shouting out bargains supposedly to be found within, often grabbing a passerby and forcing the potential customer into the store. We worked as a team, Barney and me, and Barney was a real trombenik by this time, a young roughneck; so I let him do the pulling, and I handled the sales pitch. Barney had turned into a dead-end kid after his pa was shot to death by thieves in the little hole-in-the-wall Rasofsky's Dairy. That's what turned him into a street fighter, and the need to provide for the family his pa had left behind eventually turned him into Barney Ross, the prizefighter.

Barney was smarter than a lot of fighters, but just as lousy with money as the worst of 'em. He'd been pulling in big purses for almost a year now; fortunately, his managers. Winch and Pian, were straight, and got him to make a couple of investments that weren't at the track. One of them was a jewelry store on Clark; another was a building at Van Buren and Plymouth with a downstairs corner deli next to a "blind pig"- that is, a bar that looked closed down from the street, but was really anything but (lots of things in Chicago looked like one thing outside and something else from inside). Barney planned to call the place the Barney Ross Cocktail Lounge someday, after Prohibition, and probably after he retired from the ring. His managers had a fit when he decided to keep the speak going, because Barney was a public figure in Chicago, with a wholesome image, despite a background that included being a runner for Capone and hustling crap games.

"So you quit," Barney said. He had a soft, quiet tenor voice, incongruous coming out of that flat, mildly battered puss of his, and puppy-dog brown eyes you could study for days and not see killer instinct- unless you swung at him.

"That's what I said," I said. "I quit."

"The cops, you mean."

"The opera company. Of course the cops."

He sipped the one beer he was allowing himself. We were in a corner booth. It was midevening, but slow; the night was just cold enough, the snow coming down just hard enough, to keep most sane folk inside. I only lived a few blocks from here, so was only moderately nuts. None of the other booths were taken and only a handful of stools at the bar were filled.

You went in through a door in the deli and found yourself facing the bar in a dark, smoky room three times as long as it was wide. The only tables were on the small dance floor at the far end, chairs stacked on the little open stage nearby- the nightclub aspect of the joint was on hold till Repeal. Boxing photos hung everywhere, shots of Barney and other fighters, in and out of the ring, with an emphasis on other West Side kids like King Levinsky, the heavyweight, and Jackie Fields, the welterweight Barney used to spar with; and, of course, the great lightweight Benny Leonard, who last year suffered a humiliating defeat attempting a comeback- Jimmy McLarnin put him down in six, giving him a bloody beating (the photos of Leonard on Barney's wall were from the 1917 championship victory over Freddie Welsh).

"Your pa woulda liked you quitting," he said.

"I know."

"But Janey ain't gonna."

"That I also know," I said.

Janey was Jane Dougherty; we were engaged. So far.

"You want another beer?"

"What do you think?"

"Buddy!" he said. He was talking to Buddy Gold, the retired heavyweight who ran the place for him and bartended. Then he looked at me with a wry little grin and said, "You're throwing money away, you know."

I nodded. "Being a cop in the Loop is good money in hard times."

Buddy brought the beer.

"It's good money in good times." Barney said.

"True."

"This Nitti thing."

"Yeah?"

"It happened yesterday afternoon?"

"Yeah. You saw the papers. I take it?"

"I saw the papers. I heard the city talking, too."

"No kidding. You serve lousy beer."

"No kidding. Manhattan Beer, what you expect?" Manhattan Beer was Capone's brand name; his Fort Dearborn brand liquors weren't so hot, either. "When did you decide to quit, exactly?"

"This morning."

"When did you turn your badge in?"

"This morning."

"It was that easy, then."

"No. It took me all day to quit."

Barney laughed. One short laugh. "I'm not surprised," he said.

The papers had made me out a hero. Me and Miller and Lang. But I came in for special commendation because I was already the youngest plainclothes officer in the city. That's what having an uncle who knows A. J. Cermak can do for you; that and if you help "crack" the Lingle case.

The mayor was big on publicity. He had a daily press conference; made weekly broadcasts he called "intimate chats." inviting listeners to write in and comment on his administration; and kept an "open door" at City Hall, where he could be seen sitting in shirt sleeves, possibly eating a sandwich and having a glass of milk, just like real people, any old time- or till recently, that is. Word had it open-door hours had been cut back, so he could better "transact the business of the mayor's office."

Today the papers had been full of the mayor declaring war on "the underworld." Frank "The Enforcer" Nitti was the first major victim in the current war on crime; the raid on Nitti's office was the opening volley in that war, Cermak said (in his daily news conference); and the three "brave detectives who made the bold attack" were "the mayor's special hoodlum squad." Well, that was news to me.

All I knew was when I went to the station after the shooting, I wrote out my report and gave it to the lieutenant, who read it over and said, "This won't be necessary." and wadded it up and tossed it in the wastebasket. And said. "Miller's doing the talking to the press. You just keep your mouth shut." I didn't say anything, but my expression amounted to a question, and the lieutenant said, "This comes from way upstairs. If I were you, I'd keep my trap shut till you find out what the story's going to be."

Well, I'd seen Miller's story by now- it was in the papers, too and it was a pretty good story, as stories went; it didn't have anything to do with what happened in Nitti's office, but it'd look swell in the true detective magazines, and if they made a movie out of it with Jack Holt as Miller and Chester Morris as Lang and Boris Karloff as Nitti, it'd be a corker. It had Nitti stuffing the piece of paper in his mouth, and Lang trying to stop him, and Nitti drawing a gun from a shoulder holster and firing; and I was supposed to have fired a shot into Nitti, too. And of course one of the gangsters made a break for it out the window, and I plugged him. Frank Hurt, the guy's name was- nice to know, if anybody ever wanted the names of people I killed. I was a regular six-gun kid; maybe Tom Mix should've played me.

It was a real publicity triumph, made to order for His Honor.

Only I was gumming it up. Today I told the lieutenant I was quitting; I tried to give him my badge, but he wouldn't take it. He had me talk to the chief of detectives, who wouldn't take my badge, either. He sent me over to City Hall where the chief himself talked to me; he. also, didn't want my badge. Neither did the deputy commissioner. He told me if I wanted to turn my badge in, I'd have to give it to the commissioner himself.

The commissioner's office was adjacent to Mayor Cermak's, whose door was not open this afternoon. It was about three-thirty; I'd been trying to give my badge away since nine.

The large reception room, where a male secretary sat behind a desk, was filled with ordinary citizens with legitimate gripes, and none of them had a prayer at getting in to see the commissioner. A ward heeler from the North Side went in right ahead of me and without a glance at the poor peons seated and standing around him, went to the male secretary with a stack of traffic tickets that needed fixing, which the secretary took with a wordless, mild smile, stuffing them in a manila envelope that was already overflowing, which he then filed in a pigeonhole behind the desk.

The male secretary, seeing me, motioned toward a wall where all the chairs were already taken.

I said, "I'm Heller."

The secretary looked up from his paper work as if goosed, then pointed to a door to his right; I went in.

It was an anteroom, smaller than the previous one, but filled with aldermen, ward heelers, bail bondsmen, even a few ranking cops including my lieutenant, who when he saw me motioned and whispered, "Get in there."

I went in. There were four reporters in chairs in front of the commissioner's desk; the room was gray, trimmed in dark wood: the commissioner was gray. Hair, eyes, complexion, suit; his tie was blue, however.

He was referring to daily reports on his desk, and some Teletype tape, but what the subject was I couldn't say, because when he saw me, the commissioner stopped in midsentence.

"Gentlemen," he said to the reporters, their backs to me, none yet noticing my presence. "I'm going to have to cut this short… My Board of Strategy is about to convene."

The Board of Strategy was a "kitchen cabinet" made up of police personnel who gathered in advisory session. I wasn't it, though I had a feeling the commissioner and I were about to convene.

Shrugging, the reporters got up. The first one who turned toward me was Davis, with the News, who'd talked to me more than once on the Lingle case.

"Well," he grinned, "it's the hero." He was a short guy with a head too big for his body. He wore a brown suit and a gray hat that didn't go together and he didn't give a shit. "When you going to brag to the press, Heller?"

"I'm waiting for Ben Hecht to come back to Chicago," I said. "It's been downhill for local journalism ever since he left."

Davis smirked; the others didn't know me by sight, but Davis saying my name had clued them in. But then when Davis wandered out without pursuing it, they followed. I had a feeling they'd be waiting for me when I left, though; Davis, anyway.

I stood in front of the commissioner's desk. He didn't rise. He did smile, though, and gestured toward one of the four vacated chairs; his smile was like plaster cracking.

"We're proud of you, Officer Heller," he said. "His Honor and I. The department. The city."

"Swell." I put my badge on his desk.

He ignored it. "You will receive an official commendation; there will be a ceremony at His Honor's office tomorrow morning. Can you attend?"

"I got nothing planned."

He smiled some more; it was a smile that had nothing to do with pleasure or happiness or even courtesy. He folded his hands on the desk and it was like he was praying and strangling something simultaneously.

"Now," he said slowly, carefully, looking at the badge on his desk out of the corner of an eye. "What's this nonsense about you… leaving us."

"I'm not leaving," I said. "I'm quitting."

"That is quite ridiculous. You're a hero, Officer Heller. The department is granting you and Sergeants

Lang and Miller extra compensation for meritorious service. The city council, today, voted you three the city's thanks as heroes. The mayor has hailed you publicly for helping score a major victory in the war on crime."

"Yeah, it was a great show, all right. But two things flicked it up."

He squirmed visibly at having the word "fuck" said in his office, and by a subordinate; this was 1932 and school children weren't using the word at the dinner table yet. so it still had mild shock value.

"Which are?" he said, struggling for dignity'.

"First, I killed somebody, and I wasn't planning to kill anybody yesterday afternoon. Let alone a kid. Nobody seems too concerned about him. though. Nitti's boys say he has no relatives in the city. Claim he's from the old country, an orphan. But that's all they claim: they aren't claiming the body. That goes into potter's field. Just another punk. Only I put him there. And I don't like it."

The smile was gone now: a straight line took its place, a pursed straight line. "I understand." the commissioner said, "you weren't so self-righteous one other time."

"That's right. I helped cover something up, and it got me some money and a promotion. I'm from Chicago, all right. But awhile back I decided there's a line I don't go over anymore. And Miller and Lang forced me over that line yesterday."

"You said two things."

'What?

"You said two things got… gummed up. What's the second?"

"Oh." I smiled. "Nitti. We went up there to kill him yesterday. I didn't know that, but that's what we were up there for. And he fooled all of us. He didn't die. He's in the hospital right now. and it's beginning to look like he's going to pull through."

Nitti had been taken to the hospital at Bridewell Prison, but his father-in-law. Dr. Gaetano Ronga, had him transferred to Jefferson Park Hospital, where Ronga was a staff physician. Ronga had already issued statements to the effect that Nitti would live, barring unforeseen complications.

The commissioner stood: he wasn't very tall. "Your allegations are unfounded. The address at the Wacker-LaSalle Building was believed to be the headquarters for the old Capone gang, now under Frank Nitti's leadership."

"It was a handbook and wire room."

"An illegal gambling den. yes, and in the course of your raid. Frank Nitti pulled a gun."

I shrugged Got myself up. "That's the story," I said.

"Keep that in mind," the commissioner said There was a tremor in his voice; anger? Fear.

'I will." I said.

I turned and headed out.

"You've forgotten something."

I glanced back; the commissioner was pointing to my badge, where I'd laid it on his desk.

"No I didn't," I said and left.

"So what's bothering you?" Barney said. "Killing some innocent kid?"

I sipped at my third beer. "Who's to say he was innocent? That isn't the point. Look. I held on to this goddamn thing"- I patted under my arm, where the automatic was- "because my father blew his brains out with it. Anytime I take it out of its harness, somewhere in my brain I keep the thought of that. So that I won't take using it lightly. Only I did use it, didn't I?"

"Yeah." He patted my drinking ami. "But you ain't takin' it lightly."

I found a smile. "I guess not."

"So where do you go from here?"

"To all one rooms of my apartment. Where else?"

"No, I mean, what kind of trade you gonna take up?"

"I only got one trade. Cop. For what it's worth."

We'd talked about it plenty of times. Barney and me. That one day I'd quit the department and open my own agency. I'd talked about it with my friend Eliot, too; he'd encouraged me to do it. said he'd help line some business up. But it had always been a pipe dream.

Barney stood up and got a funny little smile going, a little kid smile, and motioned with a curling forefinger. "Come with me," he said.

I just sat there with half a beer in my hand, giving him a "what the______" look.

He grabbed me by the coat sleeve and tugged till I got up and followed him, back through the deli and out onto the street, where the snow had stopped and the city had got quiet, for a change. There was a door between the blind pig and the pawnshop next door. Barney searched for keys, found some, and unlocked the door. I followed him up a flight of narrow stairs to a landing, and then did that two more times, and we were on the fourth floor of his building, which ran mostly to small businesses, import/ export, a few low-rent doctors and lawyers and one dentist. Nothing fancy, certainly. Wood floors, glass-and-wood office walls, pebbled glass doors.

At the end of the hall the floor dead-ended in an office that bore no name. Barney fished for keys again and opened the door.

I followed him in.

It was a good-size office, cream-color plaster walls with some wood trim, sparsely furnished: a scarred oak desk with its back to the wall that had windows, a brown leather couch with some tears repaired by brown tape, a few straight-back chairs, one in front of the desk, a slightly more comfortable, partially padded one behind it. The El was right outside the windows. It was a Chicago view, all right.

I ran a finger idly across the desk top. Dusty.

"You can find a dustcloth. can't you?"

"What do you mean?"

"Well, it's your office. Leave it filthy if you want."

"My office?"

"Yeah."

"Don't go meshugge on me. Barney."

"Don't go Yiddish on me. Nate. You can't pass."

"Then don't go Jewish on me when you tell me the rent."

"For you, nothing."

"Nothing."

"Almost nothing. You gotta live here. I can use a night watchman. If you ain't gonna be here some night, just phone in and I'll cover for you somehow."

"Live here."

"I'll put a Murphy bed in."

He opened a door that I thought was a closet. It wasn't. The office had its own washroom: a sink, a stool.

"Not all the offices have their own can," he said, "but this was a lawyer's office, and lawyers got a lot to wash their hands over."

I walked around the room, looking at it; it was kind of dingy-looking. Beautiful-looking, is what it was.

"I don't know what to say, Barney."

"Say you'll do it. Now, in the morning, you want a shower, you walk over to the Morrison." The Morrison Hotel was where Barney lived. They had a traveler's lounge for regular patrons who were in town for the day and needed a place to freshen up or relax- sitting rooms, shower stalls, exercise rooms- one of which had been converted into a sort of mini-gym by Barney, with the hotel's blessing.

"I'll be working out there most mornings," Barney continued, "and at the Trafton gym most afternoons. You're welcome both places. I'm training, you know."

"Yeah, somebody's got to pay for all this."

Barney was known for being a soft touch: a lot of the guys from the old neighborhood had taken advantage of him, hitting him for loans of fifty- and a hundred like asking for a nickel for coffee. I didn't want to be a leech; I told him so.

"You're makin' me mad, Nate," he said expressionlessly. "You really think it's smart to make the next champ mad?" He struck a half-assed boxing pose and got a laugh out of me. "So what do you say? When do you move in?"

I shrugged. "Soon as I break it to Janey, I guess. Soon as I see if I can get an op's license. Jesus. You're Santa Claus."

"I don't believe in Santa Claus. Unlike some people I know, I'm a real Jew."

"Yeah, well drop your drawers and prove it."

Barney was looking for a fast answer when the El rumbled by like a herd of elephants on roller skates and provided him with one.

"No cover charge for the local color," he said, speaking up.

"Don't you know music when you hear it?" I said. "I wouldn't take this dump without it."

Barney rocked on his heels, smiling like a kid getting away with something.

"Let's get out of here." I said, trying not to smile back at him, "before I start dusting."

"Nightcap?" Barney asked.

"Nightcap," I agreed.

I was having one last beer, and Barney, staying in training, was just watching, when a figure moved up to the booth like a truck parking.

It was Miller; the eyes behind the Coke-bottle glasses looked bored, half-asleep.

"How's the fight racket, Ross?" Miller asked, in his off-pitch monotone, hands in his topcoat pockets.

"Ask your brother," Barney said, noncommitally. Miller's brother Dave, also an ex-bootlegger, was a prizefight referee.

Miller stood there for a while, his capacity for making small talk exhausted.

Then moved Iris head in a kind of sideways nod, toward me, and said, "Come on."

"What?"

"You're coming with me. Heller."

"What is it? Visiting time at Nitti's hospital room? Go to hell, Miller."

He leaned over and put a hand on my arm. "Come on. Heller."

"Hey, pal, this is where I came in."

Barney said, "I'm going to land you on your fat ass, Miller, if you don't take your hand off my friend."

Miller thought about that, took the hand off, but out of something closer to boredom than fear from Barney's threat.

"Cermak wants to see you," he said to me. "Now. Are you coming, or what?"

I'd never spoken to Mayor Cermak, but I'd seen him before; almost every cop in Chicago had. His Honor liked to pull surprise personal inspections on the boys in blue and then cany his criticisms to the press. He claimed he wanted to weed the deadweight out of the department, to cut down on the paperwork, to have a maximum number of men out on the streets at all times, battling crime. All this from a mayor with the behind-his-back nickname Ten Percent Tony, whose political life seemed a study in patronage; who as Cook County commissioner (a position also known as "mayor of Cook County?") had given Capone free reign (well, not exactly "free") to turn the little city of Cicero into gang headquarters, with it and nearby Stickney becoming the wettest of the wet in this dry land, as they were simultaneously overrun with slot machines, whores, and gangsters. Cook County, where two hundred roadhouses had been personally licensed by Tony; where Capone dog tracks flourished thanks to an injunction by a Cermak judge; where Sheriff Hoffman permitted bootleggers Terr Druggan and Frankie Lake to leave his jail most anytime they pleased, and they consequently spent more time in their luxurious apartments than behind bars, though Hoffman eventually landed behind bars himself- for thirty? days- after which Cermak gave him a post with the forest preserves at ten grand per annum; and, well, all this "reform" talk coming from Cermak sounded like a crock of shit to most Chicago cops.

But we cops didn't underestimate our mayor. We may have referred to him as "that bohunk bastard," among other things, and, like most other civil service employees, hated or feared him or both, and at the very least resented the "for sale" nature of positions and promotions; but we didn't underestimate him. We knew him to be unfailingly familial' with every operation in his administration- from beat cop to building inspector, from clerk to cabinet officer; and he brought a level of competence, even administrative brilliance, to the office of mayor, equaled only by the level of his paranoia, which he manifested in his incessant wiretapping, mail interception, use of surveillance, planting of undercover men. and seeking out of stool pigeons- all within his own administration.

Cermak was a roughneck made good. He was foreign-born (a first for a Chicago mayor), brought to this country as an infant, from Czechoslovakia, and went no farther than third grade. By age thirteen he was working with his father in the coal mines of Braidwood. Illinois; by sixteen he was a railroad brakeman in Chicago. A brawler and two-fisted drinker, he was soon leader of a youth gang that based itself in a saloon; this rising star attracted the local Democratic organization, and young Tony was suddenly a ward heeler. He purchased a horse and wagon, started hauling wood, and built a business, using his political contacts to good advantage. He became secretary to an organization called the United Societies, a lobby of saloonkeepers, brewers, and distillers; he maintained this position when, in 1902. he entered the state legislature- showing his versalitity by simultaneously serving as state representative and lobbyist for the saloon interests.

From the state legislature Cermak went to the city council (a step up: an alderman got a bigger salary and had more patronage at his disposal), then on to baliff of municipal court, commissioner of Cook County Board and, by '29, head of the Democratic organization of Cook County. His mayoral victory in '31 was by the widest margin in Chicago history; he had crossed ethnic lines to build coalitions within his party, and put together a machine. It was a lot like what Capone had done.

Cermak probably had no idea, till tonight, that I lived across the alley from him. He lived in the Congress Hotel, and had a view of the park, I'd bet; I lived across the alley in the Adams Hotel, a residential hotel that was not a flophouse, but it sure didn't have a view of the park. It had a view of the back of the Congress, is what it had.

I wasn't home when Miller came calling on me, of course, but evidently somebody- Cermak's fabled espionage system. I supposed- had known enough about me to gather I'd be at Barney Ross' speak. After all. somebody had known enough about me to know where I'd be yesterday afternoon. I was starting to feel like an open book. A well-thumbed one.

It wasn't much of a walk from Barney's building to the Congress; just follow the El up Van Buren a few blocks- the wind off the lake seemed more cool now than cold, the powderlike snow blowing around a little- then down State Street, past Congress and up Harrison, past my hotel, all three less-than-luxurious stories of it, and on to Cermak's.

As we walked, I was thinking about how my hotel didn't have a lobby, just a narrow stairway that hesitated at a check-in window at the right as you came in. But the Congress, now that was a hotel; the lobby was high-ceilinged, ornate, lots of red and gold with plush furniture to sink down into while you waited for some society girl. Or while you waited for somebody to pick somebody else's pocket, because that was the only reason I'd ever had for being in the Congress lobby before. Of course I'd also done some pickpocket duty in the corridor of fancy shops in the Congress, Peacock Alley. But this time I was going in to go up to a penthouse. Even though I hadn't been given much choice, it wouldn't be so bad, going first class for a change.

We went in the alley way.

And I don't mean Peacock. Just the alley; in the service entrance.

In a narrow vestibule, rubbing shoulders with some mops and buckets, hobnobbing with a couple of refuse cartons, I reached a hand out to push the button on the service elevator and Miller batted it away casually.

"Well walk," Miller said.

"Are you kidding? What floor is he on?"

"Three."

"Oh."

We walked the two flights; evidently it wasn't enough for the rich folks in the lobby not to see me. I was even persona non grata to the hired help who might ride the service elevator.

The exchange at the elevator, incidentally, was the extent of conversation between Miller and myself since leaving the blind pig. Miller seemed distant behind his Coke-bottle glasses; about as personable as a potted plant. He wasn't somebody I particularly wanted to know any better, so I didn't press it.

Miller knocked twice and the pale gold door opened and a detective I'd seen around but whose name I did not know answered with a gun in hand. He was a skinny guy with a pencil-line mustache and a dark brown suit that hung on him like it had been a good buy but they didn't have his size. His hat was off and his mouth hung open; he wasn't the brightest-looking sort I ever saw, and my guess was he was temporary Lang would be back as soon as the finger healed.

We went in. Miller first, and he pointed me to a sofa that looked, and was, about as plush and comfortable as the furniture in the Congress lobby. This was a sitting room or living room or whatever, with chairs and a couple of sofas, a fireplace and a glass chandelier, and various furniture that was probably named for some French king with numbers after his name. The only light on in the room was a standing lamp over in one corner, and it was consequently a little dark in there, like a cloudy day.

Across the room from me were windows looking out on Grant Park and Michigan Avenue; the south corner suite, this was. In front of me was a coffee table, a low marble-topped one, with a silver champagne bucket full of ice and brown bottles. Beer. The only thing between me and the view of the park was an empty chair, not a soft-looking, plush chair, but a wooden one with a curved shape to its back, like a captain's chair, or a throne. It was not a chair that had come with the room.

Miller parked himself over by the window, leaned against the sill, and looked out; he was miles away. The other guy, who introduced himself as Mulaney, sat as far away from me as he could and still be in the room, over on a sofa at left. He had put the gun away shortly after we entered. There was the faint sound of a radio playing Paul Whiteman from next door, off to the left, beyond Mulaney.

To my right, on either side of the fireplace, were doorways standing open; from the room beyond the door nearest me came the muffled sound of a flushing toilet.

His Honor, hitching up his trousers a bit, rolled into the room like a pushcart.

"Heller!" he said, beaming, like we were the oldest, bosomest of buddies, thrusting a hand forward; I stood and took it- it was a bit damp.

He gestured for me to sit and I did. He went to his chair across from me but did not sit. as yet; he just stood there studying me, with the friendliest of smiles and the coldest, hardest of eyes. Like Miller, he wore glasses with round lenses- but the frames were dark and thick and clumsy and rode his face uneasily, like the foreign object they were.

He was in his shirt sleeves and suspenders, but his tie wasn't loosened 'round his neck; he looked a bit like a participant in the Scopes trial, if cooler. It was, in truth, a bit warm in the room, and he bent down and pulled a bottle of beer from the champagne bucket and took an opener from somewhere and popped the cap and handed me the bottle. All the time smiling, almost apple-cheeked, a big man, barrel-chested, thick-bodied, broad-shouldered, larger than life, getting himself a beer now.

We sat there silently, each of us having a couple of swigs at his beer.

Finally I said, "This is good beer."

The smile turned into a grin, and the grin seemed more real. "It beats that piss Capone bottles and calls beer, by a hundert miles," he said.

"There's no label."

"It's Roger Touhy's beer. The beer he bottles isn't for sale. It's for friendship. The beer he sells, he sells by the barrel, to the roadhouses, saloons, and such. All outside of Chicago."

Roger Touhy was a bootlegger in the northwest suburbs; the sort of safe, minor-league gangster Cermak could control.

"Well, it's the best beer in or out of town." I said.

Cermak nodded, his smile gone, his expression thoughtful. "It's the water, you know."

"Pardon?"

"They got an artesian well near Roselle. The finest, purest water. That's Touhy's secret."

We sat and drank for a while. Periodically, Cermak would seem to wince or something; put a hand on his stomach.

"And how is your uncle Louis?" Cermak said, putting the half-empty bottle of Touhy beer on the marble-top. "I understand he had kidney stones."

"Why, uh, yes," I said, startled that Cermak had remembered me and my connection to my uncle, "that's right. But he's, uh, he's over it, I think."

Cermak shook his head gravely. "You never get over that. I had 'em, you know. Goddamn stones, if you pass 'em, it's like pissing glass."

I suddenly realized that Cermak didn't remember me, or that particular piece of patronage; he just had done his homework.

He offered me another beer and I turned it down: I'd already had three or four at Barney's, and I was feeling the effect. This guy was too cute, too cunning to deal with tipsy.

"I suppose I should get to the point." he said. "You're a busy man. I don't want to waste your time."

He said this quite ingenuously, as if he didn't sense the irony of the mayor of Chicago not wanting to waste one of his cop's time. One of his ex-cops, at that.

"I want you to take this back." he said, and he reached a hand out behind him and Miller came over and reached in an inside jacket pocket and withdrew something and filled Cermak's hand with it. Cermak showed me what it was. My badge.

"I can't do that" I said.

Cermak didn't hear that, apparently.

"What I have in mind." he said, putting the badge on the marble-top. "is you joining one of my hoodlum squads. We've got the world's fair coming up. you know, and I've got some promises to keep. And I keep my promises. Nate. Can I call you Nate?"

"Sure." I shrugged.

Cermak took a swig of the beer and said. "I'll have no truck with lawlessness. Nate. I promised Chicago I'd run these gangsters out of town, and by damn I'm going to do it. I won't have 'em working their shady sanies at the fair."

I nodded.

"Yesterday is an example of what we need to do, where these hoodlums are concerned. You- like Sergeants Miller and Lang, and some of my other top people- will be sworn in as a deputy coroner so you can go all over Cook County picking up these gangsters."

"Your Honor," I said, "I killed somebody yesterday. That isn't my idea of how to do anything"

He rose; his face got very red. And then he exploded.

"It's a war! It's a goddamn war! Don't you know that? I'm giving you an opportunity that any cop in town, every cop in town, would give his left ball for, and you- you"

He touched his stomach with the flat of one hand; he squinted.

"Excuse me," he said, and left the room.

I could hear Paul Whiteman again, faintly. Over by the window, Miller, looking out at Grant Park, said, "You better listen to the mayor."

I didn't say anything.

There was another flush, and Cermak came back in; he didn't roll in this time. He seemed old. He was only in his late fifties, but he seemed old.

He sat. "I made some campaign promises. I said I'd salvage Chicago's reputation. I said I'd drive the gangsters out. I told important people in this town that the town would be safe for a world's fair. A fair that could restore Chicago's dignity. Her reputation."

"Do you really think Chicago's reputation was enhanced by what happened yesterday?" I said.

He seemed to think about that. "We were shown to be courageous."

"Some people say it was real police behind the guns at the Saint Valentine's Day Massacre, too. you know."

He glared at me; it was like an oven door opening and the heat hitting you in the face. "What the hell is that supposed to mean?"

"It simply means," I said, trying to drain all the smart-ass out of me, "that headline-making violence adds to the city's bloody reputation no matter who is pulling the triggers."

He touched his hands together lightly, prayerlike. "Suppose yesterday had gone differently. Suppose that young man had not been in the window. Suppose the only person to die in that room had been Frank Nitti. A message would've been sent. To the gangsters. To the public. That this administration is not fooling around."

"Somebody did die. and it wasn't Frank Nitti. That's the bad part, isn't it. Your Honor. The public sees a shoot-out involving police, and several people are shot but the big fish gets away. Oh. Nitti took a fall, all right- only he's going to set up again. Nitti's going to live."

Cermak nodded, suddenly lost in thought. "Yes." he said. "I believe you're right…" There was a pause the word "unfortunately" might have filled."… and while the world would be a better place without Mr. Nitti. we're not murderers, after all. He did shoot Sergeant Lang, and Sergeant Lang returned fire, and that's the end of it."

I glanced over at Miller. He didn't seem to be listening; he was still looking out at the park.

"Could we speak in private, Your Honor?" I asked.

Without turning, Cermak said, "Sergeant Miller… you and Mulaney go and have a smoke in the hall."

Miller shambled by, without looking at me; Mulaney followed him out, or anyway the oversize suit he was wearing did, taking him along.

When the door had closed behind them, I said, "Are you really aware of what happened at the Wacker-LaSalle Building yesterday?"

"Suppose you tell me, Nate."

I did.

He listened with a rather glassy, frozen smile, and when I finished, he said. "It's a funny tiling. Nate. You can have a dozen witnesses to an event, to an accident, a crime, and you can end up with a dozen damn versions of it. It's human nature. Take the Lingle case." And here he paused and broadened his smile momentarily, as if to say. You remember the Lingle case, don't you, Nate? Then he picked my badge up from the marble-top. looked at it, tossed it on the sofa next to me. "You'll be a sergeant for a while, and a lieutenant by next year this time. Sergeant's pay is twenty-nine hundred dollars, but you'll get deputy coroner's pay. which is three thousand sixty. Lieutenant's is thirty-two hundred. That's a thousand-dollar raise for you. isn't it, Nate?"

Cermak talked about that extra grand like he wasn't a millionaire, like it meant something to him; or maybe that's why he was a millionaire: because a grand did mean something to him. Like it did to me.

"And the salary isn't everything," he continued, with an offhand gesture, a little smile, a shrug. "There are extras. I don't have to be specific, do I, Nate?"

"You don't have to be specific," I said.

He sat and stared at me and smiled at me and it was like having a shotgun smile at you and I finally had to look away.

When I did, he said, "I think the boys have had time enough for their smoke now, don't you?"

Sure.

He got up and went to the door and called Miller and Mulaney back in; then, his upper lip pulled back over his teeth, a hand clutching his stomach, he excused himself and left the room again.

"Does he do that often?" I said.

Miller, who had resumed his post by the window, said. "He has to take a shit now and then. Don't you. Heller?"

"Not every five minutes."

Cermak came back in. sat down, seemed embarrassed, smiling, gesturing awkwardly. "Sorry about the interruptions. I got the trots to beat the band today. It's my goddamn stomach. Ulcer or something. Colitis, gastritis, the docs call it. About as bad as goddamn kidney stones."

"Your Honor…"

"Yes, Nate?"

I held the badge out toward him. "I can't take this back."

He didn't understand for a second: it was as if he thought I were fooling. Then his smile fell like a cake. and his eyes could've turned Medusa to stone.

When I could see he wasn't going to take the badge, I put it on the table, next to the bucket of ice and beer.

And now Cermak softened his gaze, like somebody fine-tuning a radio.

"Mr. Heller," he began (not "Nate"), "what is it you want?"

"Out. That's all. I don't like killing people. I don't like being used. By you. by your people. By anybody. Just because I helped you people cover up that fucking Lingle case, that doesn't mean that every time there's a dirt)' goddamn job to do. you go pull Heller in off the street."

Cermak folded his hands across his troubled stomach. His expression was neutral. "I don't know what you're referring to," he said. "The Lingle case was prior to my administration, and it's my understanding that the murderer was convicted and is serving his sentence right now."

"Yeah. Right. Look. All I want to do is quit the force. That's all I'm after."

"Nate." So it was "Nate" again. "We need to present a unified front on this matter. You killed a man. You have an inquest to attend, when? Day after tomorrow?"

"Tomorrow. Morning."

"If my people tell conflicting stories, it will reflect badly on me. On all of us. It will get very complicated. You are the only officer who killed anyone in that office, Nate. Surely you don't want this to linger on, to fester in the public's eye."

The beers from Barney's, and the one Touhy, were knocking at my bladder door. I asked if I could leave the room this time, and Cermak, looking wear)' (or pretending to- who knew with this guy?), assented, pointing, as if he hadn't already made the direction of the bathroom perfectly clear.

I walked through a big fancy bedroom, where against one wall a rolltop desk was stuck, looking about as out of place here as me. But what really struck me as wrong were the three suitcases, the four boxes of personal papers and other work-type stuff and the steamer trunk, all standing at the foot of the bed. like a crowd at a political rally. Cermak was going someplace.

I let the beer out. then came back and sat down.

"Taking a trip, Your Honor?"

Absently, he said, "Florida. Taking Horner down there."

Horner was the recently elected governor of Illinois- one of Cermak's more recent miracles: a Jew elected to the state's highest office. It was a cinch Cermak wasn't going along to help Horner write his inaugural address; they were probably going there to divy up patronage jobs.

"You don't exactly travel light, do you?" I said.

Cermak looked at me, pulled away from whatever strategy he was forming to use on me, and said, "Oh, that. I'm moving out of here. I'll be living in the Morrison Hotel after I get back."

That's where Barney lived: small world.

"Why? This is a terrific view."

"There's a penthouse bungalow on top of the Morrison, with a private elevator. The security'll be better. I'm taking on a few extra bodyguards, too. You can't wage war on the goddamn underworld without getting 'em irritated at you. you know," and he save out a forced chuckle.

"I'd imagine Nitti's pissed off." I admitted. Nitti was. after all. about the extent of this "war" Cermak kept talking about. The rest of the "war" seemed to be restricted to busting beer flats on the North Side, where private citizens were brewing suds in their apartments to make a few extra depression dollars.

"Yeah." Cermak was saying, rather grandly, "they're fitting me for a bulletproof vest. I think that's going too far, but I suppose there is some small danger…"

What was he trying for now? My sympathy? Maybe I was supposed to admire him; or maybe this was a role he liked to play just for himself.

"I better be going, Your Honor," I said, getting up.

He stood, too; put a hand on my arm. I could smell his breath: it smelled like Touhy's beer, not surprisingly. But his expression was sober, somber. "What will you be saying at the inquest tomorrow?"

"The truth. I suppose."

"Truth is relative. Even off the force, I can be of a little help to you, you know. Have you decided what line you'll be going in?"

J WW

I shrugged. "I only have one trade."

Cermak looked surprised; he took his hand off my arm. "What do you mean?"

"I'm a cop. a detective. I'm going private, that's all."

"Who with? Pinkerton's? You got something lined up?"

"My own little agency."

"I see." He was smiling again; I didn't like that. "When were you planning to get started?"

"Right away."

He shook his head sadly, continuing to smile. "That's a shame, really it is."

"What do you mean?"

"Oh. the paperwork on these matters. A goddamn shame. The red tape. Sometimes an application for a license can be turned down for, oh, the most trivial of reasons. For no reason at all, actually."

"So that's how it is."

He pointed a finger at me like a gun. Til tell you how it is. You go out of the department under a cloud- you tie yourself up in a police scandal, where month upon month goes by. trial upon trial drags on, and you're not going to get a private detective's license, not till it's over, maybe not till never. I won't have to pull any strings to make that happen. You'll have made it happen."

I thought it over.

"You know I'm right" he said

I nodded. "Suppose I agree to corroborate Lang and Miller's story."

"You'll have a license tomorrow."

I thought some more. "When the trial comes up, suppose I double-cross you. Suppose I tell a different story. Like maybe the real one."

Cermak beamed. "You wouldn't do that. You're not a stupid man. Licenses can get revoked for no good reason, too, you know. The Lord giveth and He taketh the hell away, too, Heller."

For the first time, I realized, Miller was looking at me; his body was still turned toward the window, but his head was turned my way, casually.

"I'll do it." I said. "Goddamnit."

"Good." He took his gaze off me. I felt he'd forgotten all about me already. He didn't look at me as he said. "I think you know the way out," and. with a faint grimace and with a hand on his stomach, went in the other room.

Miller took me back down the way we'd come in; you know- the scenic route between my hotel and Cermak's: the alley. It was okay if you liked fire escapes, bricks and cement, and garbage. And Miller.

Who delivered me to the front door of the Adams and, hands in his topcoat pockets, eyes unfathomable behind the glasses, said, "So you ain't as dumb as you look."

I was getting fed up, and was beer-brave. I said, "Neither are you, and that's no compliment. Why don't you flap your ears and take a flying fuck, lardass?"

His head tilted back; it was just the slightest movement, really, but it seemed sinister, somehow, coming from him. He said, "You ought to be on the radio, Heller. Cross us, and maybe you will be."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"Cross us and see, wise guy."

I hit him in the stomach. With every fucking thing I had.

And he went down. It was like seeing a building fall under a demolition ball. It was beautiful.

When he was on the pavement, I reached inside his jacket, and tugged his.45 revolver, the same one he carried into Nitti's office, out of his shoulder holster, and stuffed the barrel in his fat gut. I stayed in close to him, right on top of him, not letting the gun show, just in case somebody going by on foot or in a car or something might take notice and stop. Not that that would happen: Harrison wasn't particularly busy this time of night (it was about eleven); it was also Chicago, and not a great place to go wading into something that looked dangerous.

"What the hell are you doing, Heller?" he said. His monotone voice was breathy; there was fear in it. I liked that.

"Telling you to get your butt off the pavement and walk around the comer, back in the alley."

He had nothing smart to say; the remark about radio had about used up his wit inventory' for the night. He gave me that mean owl look and got up, slowly, as I kept right with him, my free hand in the crook of his arm, the revolver buried in his side now', and I noticed for the first time that he smelled of lilac water. It didn't do much for him. I walked him around the comer into the alley, and we stepped back into a small, courtlike area back of the Adams.

It was dark, but light from the street let us see each other, not that either of us were wild about it. The El rumbled in the background, like an earthquake happening a country over. I didn't make him back up against a wall; I'd already taken this too far, thanks to the beer, and the crap I'd had to take these last couple days. But I had something to say, and I said it.

"I made a deal with Cermak," I said, "and I'll stick to it. When Nitti's trial comes up, I'll be playing parrot to you and Lang. Don't worry about it."

"Then what's this about?" Miller asked.

"Cermak wanted to know why I turned my badge in. Everybody wants to know why I'm so upset over Frank Nitti getting shot. I couldn't care less about Nitti. I don't like being put in a position where I have to kill some damn kid, but never mind. You and Lang are the ones who fucked me over. You pulled me in on something and didn't tell me what the score was. People get killed in this town for any old reason- no reason sometimes. So I don't appreciate you pulling me in unawares on a raid that turned out to be a hit- on Frank Nitti. no less. Thanks to you, my life isn't worth a plug nickel. Nitti'll probably have all three of us hit. Haven't you figured that out yet?"

Miller just looked at me.

"Sure you have." I said. "I saw in the papers where there's a police guard on Lang's house. Watching the wife and kid. Seems there were threatening phone calls."

Then he said, "They wouldn't kill cops."

That rated a laugh. "Right. Like noboby would dare kill a state prosecutor. Only Capone killed McSwiggin. And nobody would dare kill a reporter. But Jake Lingle is real dead. We can be real dead, too, and in the wake, you should pardon the expression, the papers'll be full of us, full of how dirty we were, full of how we were on the take, and most of it'll be true. And then it won't be cops dead. It'll be crooked cops dead, and who'll give a damn?"

We stood and looked at each other in the darkness.

And when I got tired of looking at him. which didn't take long at all. I dumped the slugs out of the revolver's cylinder and they rained on the pavement. Then I kicked 'em away. Handed him the gun.

"Fly home. Miller. Sleep. Dream."

He glared at me. As much as that owl mask could glare. He said. "You haven't heard the end of this. Heifer."

"Touch me. and I'll tell the world the real story. Kill me. and a lawyer will open the envelope I left him. in case something happened to me. The envelope with my statement in it." That last part was a bluff, of course, but by tomorrow afternoon it wouldn't be.

Miller cleared his throat, spat a clot of something to the right of me.

"Get out of here, Miller."

He did.

Pretty soon I was in my one-room apartment in the Hotel Adams, on my back in my underwear on top of the blankets; the radiator in the little room was overambitious tonight, so there was no need to climb under the sheets. The lights were out. but some neon pulsed in from out on the street, three floors below. I was on the third floor, just like Cermak. And, like the mayor, I was getting ready to move out- only / couldn't afford the secluded suite atop the Morrison, though Christ knows I could've used the protection.

What I'd told Miller was right: there was good reason to expect a reprisal from the Nitti forces. I hadn't told it to anyone- not the commissioner or the hundred other people I tried to turn my badge into, not the mayor, not even Barney or my girl Janey when I had called her last night, briefly, to assure her everything was all right- but one of the main reasons I turned my badge in was to send a message to Nitti: To let him know I was unhappy about being sucked into something I had nothing to do with. If he and his boys had been paying attention yesterday at the Wacker-LaSalle, they might have picked up on that. And my quitting the department over the incident would confirm it. I hoped, and might indicate my intention to tell the truth at Nitti's trial.

Except my intention to tell the truth at the trial had changed. I'd done a deal with the mayor, to tell the story his way. Otherwise, no op's license. I could lie now. to the mayor, and tell the truth later on the witness stand. But. as Cermak had pointed out. my license could then be revoked, if for no other reason than I'd waited all that time to change my story. If I had to corroborate Miller and Lang's story at the inquest tomorrow, under oath, and then went back on it later, that'd be perjury. Testifying against Nitti could get me killed, however, in which case not having an op's license would be something I'd get over.

I was tired. It had been a long, draining day, but my brain kept buzzing; it buzzed about half an hour, anyway, at which time (approximately these things are hard to pinpoint) I went away. I dreamed about Nitti and Cermak and Miller and Lang and Little New York Campagna and all sorts of people, and I won't go into it, but it wasn't a nice dream, and it climaxed with somebody grabbing me upright in bed, by the front of my T-shirt, only that part wasn't a dream, I finally began to realize.

My first thought was Miller: He'd come back to beat the crap out of me, despite my threats of envelopes and attorneys. Then somebody turned on the lamp on the dresser next to my bed, and I saw two guys in gray topcoats with black Capone hats with pearl bands; they would've looked like twins, only they were a Mutt and Jeff pair. Jeff was particularly unimpressive, one of those guys who when he needs a shave looks like his face is dirty. Mutt, unfortunately, a big swarthy guy with a wart on his cheek the size of a knuckle, was the one hoisting me up by my T-shirt.

"You're coming with us. Heller," he said, and goddamnit, that was enough. How many flicking times were people going to grab me and take me someplace I didn't want to go, and since the place these guys were going to take me was probably for a ride, I got my hand on my spare pillow and slapped the guy with it.

It surprised him, anyway, and knocked his hat off. It didn't hurt him much, but it did give me time to take the automatic out from under my other pillow and show him, and Jeff.

They were tough guys; probably as tough as Miller and Lang, maybe tougher.

But they had woken up a guy in his sleep who had been pushed once too often in too short a time, and I must've had a look on my face that said they might die, because they put their hands up and Mutt said, "Heller! Please. This ain't that way. We ain't even armed."

That didn't sound right.

"It's true," Jeff said. "Can I take my coat off?"

I was off the bed now, standing on the floor: the wood was cold against my bare feet.

"Slip out of it"- I nodded "but nice and easy. I haven't killed anybody all day. Help me keep it that way."

Jeff slipped out of the coat, no tricks at all. and held his dark gray suitcoat open and there was no shoulder holster.

"You do what he did," I told Mutt.

Mutt slipped out of his topcoat; his suit was a blue pinstripe, but there seemed to be no gun under there, either. I had them both put their hands against the wall, or actually one of them put his hands against the door, because there wasn't wall space enough in that room for two people to be frisked against any one wall; and. standing there in my underwear. I frisked them, and they were clean.

"Sit on the bed" I told them.

They sat on the bed.

"Tell me what this is about." I said, and got my pants on, taking my time, keeping the gun on them, buttoning my fly one-handed.

"Mr. Nitti wants to see you," Mutt said.

"Oh, really? Isn't he a little under the weather to be having visitors?"

Jeff said, "He's gonna be okay. No thanks to you coppers."

I motioned with both hands, including the one with the gun in it "Hey. I'm not a copper anymore. And I wasn't in on it."

"You was there." Jeff said accusingly.

"And that was the extent of it," I said.

"Maybe so." Mutt said, "but Mr. Nitti wants to see you."

"So you come break in my apartment and put the muscle on me."

Mutt pursed his lips and moved his head from side to side slowly. "We got the key from the guy at the desk. It only cost a buck. You got great security here, pal."

"It's okay. I'm moving tomorrow. You boys can go now. Tell Mr. Nitti I'll talk to him when he's feeling better."

Mutt said. "This is a friendly gesture. He just wants to talk. That's why we didn't come heeled."

I thought about that.

"I still don't like it," I said.

"Look," Mutt continued, "you know if Mr. Nitti wants to see you, Mr. Nitti's gonna see you. Why not do it now. when you got a gun on us, and when he's on his back in a hospital bed?"

I nodded. "Good point. Car downstairs?"

Jeff smiled a little. "You bet."

"Okay," I said. "Let me get my shoes and socks and shirt on."

They watched me dress; it wasn't that easy to do while keeping a gun on 'em. but I did it and Mutt sat in back of the big black Lincoln with me. as we took Monroe Street over to the near West Side, to Jefferson Park Hospital.

There were four more guys in topcoats and hats in the corridor on the third floor where Nitti had his private room. The lighting in the corridor was subdued- it was roughly three in the morning now and I saw no doctors and only one nurse, a woman about thirty-five, stocky, dark-haired, scared shitless. Nitti's room was halfway down the corridor, and I stood outside with Jeff while Mutt went in.

Mutt didn't come out: a doctor did. A rather distinguished-looking man in his late fifties or early sixties, short, medium build with a paunch, gray-haired with a gray mustache. He had a near-frown on his face when our eyes met; he didn't approve of my being here, I could tell already. In fact I could tell he didn't approve of me, period

"I consider this ill-advised," he said, as if my being here was my idea. I told him it wasn't.

"Frank being here is your idea, though, isn't it?" he snapped, in a whisper.

"Actually, no." I said. "I got pulled into this by the short hair."

"You're the one who killed the boy."

I nodded.

He sighed. "My son-in-law insists on seeing you."

"You're Dr. Ronga?"

"That's right." He didn't offer a hand to shake; I thought it best not to offer mine. "I wouldn't have agreed to this at all if I couldn't see that Frank might get agitated if we refused him. and he does not need to get agitated right now."

"He is going to live?"

"No thanks to you people, I would say he is. I would say he's got as much chance to live as you do to drive back across town safely."

I glanced sideways at Jeff. "That could depend on who's driving, Doc."

Ronga said, "Frank needs rest and quiet. Absence of worry and shock." He pointed a finger at me.

"Which might open the wounds and cause a hemorrhage- if that happens it could'prove fatal."

"Doctor, I have no intention of agitating Mr. Nitti. I promise. Whether or not Mr. Nitti has any intention of agitating me is another story."

Ronga gave out a terse, humorless laugh and held out an open, yet somehow contemptuous, hand in a gesture that said. Go on in.

I went in.

Nitti was sitting up in bed; his reading lamp was on, otherwise the room was dark. He wasn't hooked up to tubes or anything, but he didn't look well; he was even paler than usual and seemed to have lost about fifteen pounds since I saw him last- yesterday. He gave me a little smile; it was so little his mouth curved but his mustache didn't.

"'Cusa me if I don't get up," he said. His voice was soft, but there was no tremor in it.

"It's okay, Mr. Nitti."

"Make it 'Frank.' W^e're going to be friends, Heller."

I shrugged. "Then make it "Nate.'"

"Nate.

Mutt was standing on the other side of Nitti's bed; he came around to me before I could approach Nitti's bedside, and said, in an almost gentle way, "You're going to have to let me have your gun."

"This isn't a great place for a scene, pal."

"There's six of us here, Heller, me and five guys out in the hall, plus I think Dr. Ronga would be willin' to take your appendix out with a pocketknife."

I gave him the gun.

Nitti made a little gesture that meant I was to sit down in the chair that had been provided for me next to his bed.

I sat. Seeing him up close, he didn't look any worse. He was bandaged around the throat, from the slug he took in the neck, and he didn't seem to be able to move his head, so my chair was seated at an angle where he didn't have to.

"You didn't know, did you?" Nitti said.

"I didn't know," I said, and I told him how Miller and Lang had picked me up at that speak and brought me along for the ride, without telling me the score.

"Bastards," he said. His mouth was a line. He looked at me; his eyes were calm. "I'm told you quit the department."

"That's right." I said. "I've had it with those sons of bitches."

"You were the one that got an ambulance called. Those bastards woulda let me bleed awhile."

"I suppose."

"Since you quit, that means what? What are you gonna say at my trial? They'll try me for shooting that prick bastard Lang, you know."

"I know."

"You read that load of baloney in the papers that Miller's giving out? Is that the story they're going with?"

"More or less, I guess."

"You going along with it?"

"I'm going to have to. Frank."

Nitti didn't say anything; he looked straight ahead, at the wall, not at me.

"Cermak had me in for a talk," I said.

Nitti turned his head to look right at me; it had to be painful- he moved like the Man in the Iron Mask. His teeth were together when he said. "Cermak."

"I'm opening up a little private agency. Cop is the only trade I got. Cermak'll block my license if I don't play ball."

Nitti turned his head back and looked toward the wall again. "Cermak," he said again.

"And I killed a guy up there. Frank."

Nitti's mouth twitched in a one-sided smirk. "Nobody important."

"Not to you. maybe. I didn't like doing it. And since I'm the only copper up there who managed to kill somebody. I'm the one to take the fall if the stories don't jibe."

Nitti didn't say anything.

"If you have any other ideas, I'm open," I said.

Nitti said. "I don't suppose you'd want something with my outfit."

I shook my head no. "It'd be no different than the cops. It's something I want out of altogether. Thank you, though, Frank."

Nitti's eyes looked at me. They were amused. "You're a pal of Ness', aren't you?"

"Yeah." I said, smiling a little, suddenly feeling embarrassed. "But I ain't no Boy Scout."

"I know," Nitti said. "I remember the Lingle case."

A voice behind me said. "Frank. Please." It was Dr. Ronga.

"Un momento, Papa"Nitti said.

Ronga shook his head, shut the door, and Nitti and I- and Mutt, who was seated over in the corner- were alone again.

"I want you to know." Nitti said, "that I hold you no grudge. I understand your position. No reprisals will be taken against you. At this time. I don't even think reprisals will be taken against Lang and Miller. The bastards. They are not worth the trouble. As Al used to say, 'Don't stir up the heat.'"

I smiled a little. "Did he say that before or after Saint Valentine's Day?"

Nitti smiled a little, too. "After kid. After."

"I better be going. You get some rest. If you want to see me again, just call. You don't need to send anybody forme."

"Good. But stay a few moments. There are some things you need to know."

"Oh?"

"You know Cermak was ours, don't you? Al helped get him in, you know."

I nodded. Cermak's association with the Capone gang went back at least as far as when Tony was "mayor of Cook County," and let Cicero happen.

"But now this fair is coming in. This world's fair. And there's gonna be a lot of money to be made. People coming from all over. Hicks and high-hats and everybody between. And they're gonna want things. They're gonna need things. And somebody's gonna provide things. Whores. Gambling. Beer- on the fairgrounds if it's legal by then, in the speaks if not. Either way, it'll be our beer they're drinkin'. Lot of money to be made. I ain't telling you nothing you don't already know.

"But the bankers and the other swells, they know Chicago's got a bad rep. In fact, this fair they're throwing is supposed to bring people back here, to see what a great place this is, safe, wonderful, and all. So how can somebody like Ten Percent Tony clean the city up and still give the people what they want- like whores and gambling and booze- and keep his pockets nice and full, too? By putting the screws to us, the old Capone mob. The feds got a lot of mileage out of sending Al up. Your pal Ness got lots of press, 'Eliot Press' we call him, the fed who announces his next raid in the papers." He laughed, and flinched just a bit.

I said, "So Cermak's connecting with the smaller mobs, then. Roger Touhy. Ted Newberry. Small fry he can control, manipulate."

Nitti looked at me so hard it about knocked me over. "And throw us to the goddamn wolves. The people who made the son of a bitch."

"You're probably right. Frank. But what does it have to do with me?"

Nitti smiled. "I just thought you'd like to know that Ted Newberry put up fifteen thousand dollars for anybody who'd bump me off."

I leaned forward. "You're sure of this?"

"Dead sure. And added to all the other ways those sons of bitches Miller and Lang screwed you is they weren't gonna cut you in."

I just sat there.

"Just thought you'd like to know," Nitti said.

I stood. "Thanks, Frank. I hope you get well."

"You know," Nitti said, "I believe you do."

The fix was in at the inquest. It was held in a meeting room at the morgue, presided over by the coroner. Since all the cops on Cermak's hoodlum squad were officially deputy coroners, the phrase "conflict of interest" might come to mind. But not in Chicago.

Cermak had covered himself, where I was concerned: I was never asked to give my version- or any version- of Frank Nitti being shot. A signed statement by the still-hospitalized Lang was entered, which covered the Nitti shooting, and Miller testified to his part in the proceedings and backed up Lang's story (though he had not been in the room with us). The questions the coroner asked me were limited to the second, fatal shooting, with the foregone conclusion that the truth on the Nitti matter had already been entered into the record.

The rest of the (you should excuse the expression) gang from the office at the Wacker-Lasalle all testified as well: Palumbo, Campagna, the accountant, the two runners. None of them were asked anything about the Nitti shooting- and, in fairness, none of them had been in the room when it happened, so why should they and all of them confirmed my version of the death of one Frank Hurt (which sounded like something Nitti might've muttered deliriously on his way to the hospital). Hurt panicked, Palumbo said; the kid had commented on having an out-of-state warrant against him and not wanting to go in for a showup, and Campagna had suggested he take the ledge over to the fire escape while he had the chance. And I'd come in and somebody had thrown him a gun and I'd shot him. Everybody told it the same; nobody (including me) seemed to know where the gun had come from.

I think Nitti had put the fix in, too; I was starting to be glad he and I'd had that little talk. Both he and

Cermak had made the inquest easy for me.

So it was cut-and-dried. But it didn't start till ten-thirty, and with all those witnesses, it dragged on. and I missed a lunch date with Janey. I caught her in the office at the county treasurer's at City Hall by phone, about two. and apologized for standing her up.

"Did it come out okay?" she said. There was just the slightest edge of irritation in her voice. "The inquest?"

"Yeah. I came out smelling like a rose. So why do I feel like I need a shower?"

"There's a shower at my place." she said, sounding friendlier.

"Yeah. I remember."

Janey, incidentally, was a lovely girl of twenty-five years and 125 well-placed pounds; with darkish blond hair worn short and wavy, and dark brown eyes highlighted by lona. standing-at-attention lashes. She was smart as she was beautiful, and she let me sleep with her once a week or so, as soon as I started talking marriage. We'd been talking marriage for almost three years now. and I'd given her a little diamond last year. I only had one problem with Janey: I wasn't sure if what I felt for her was love, exactly. I also wasn't sure if it mattered.

"I'll make lunch up to you," I said.

"I know you will." she said, like a threat.

"How about tonight? I'll take you someplace expensive."

"I'm working late tonight. You can come out to my place if you want. About nine-thirty. I'll fix sandwiches."

"Okay. And tomorrow night, we'll take in the Bismarck dining room."

"I'd settle for the Berghoff- that's expensive enough."

"We'll do the Bismarck. It's a special night. I have something special to tell you."

Real special: I hadn't broken it to her yet that I'd quit the department.

"I already know, Nate." she said.

"What?"

"It was in the papers today. Just a little footnote to one of the follow-up articles on the shooting. That officer Nathan Heller had resigned to pursue a career in private business."

"I, uh- I wanted to tell you about it myself."

"You can, tonight. I'm not crazy about you quitting the department, but if your uncle Louis has offered you a position, I think that's fine."

Janey was like that: jumping to conclusions based upon her own desires.

"Yeah, well, let's talk about it tonight," I said.

"Good. I love you, Nate."

She didn't whisper it, which meant she was in the office alone.

"Love you, Janey."

That afternoon I moved out of the Adams and into the office in Barney's building. Barney had moved fast: a big brown box was against the right wall as you came in, next to the closet door. The box was a Murphy bed; he'd even got sheets and blankets for me, which were in a drawer at the bottom of the box, under where the bed fell down out of it when you pulled the latch, which I did. It was a double bed, no less; Barney was being optimistic for me. I stretched out on the bare mattress. It wasn't as comfy as Janey's bed, but it beat the hell out of what I had at the Adams. I studied where some paint was starting to peel on the ceiling, for a while, then got up; put the bed back up and in.

The closet was hardly spacious, but it was roomy enough for my three suits. And I had a box of books and other personal junk, which I slid onto the shelf at the top of the closet; it just fit. My suitcase went on the floor in there; I figured to live out of the suitcase, till I got some kind of dresser or something.

Which presented a problem: How could I make this place look like an office and not a place I lived in? I didn't think that would impress prospective clients much: an office with a dresser and a Murphy bed in it, an office that was obviously where this poverty-stricken private dick was forced to live. It wouldn't inspire confidence.

Well, the Murphy bed I couldn't do anything about; but I could get around the dresser. I'd get ahold of a couple filing cabinets, or maybe one big multi-drawer one. and file my clothes and such in the bottom drawers. And speaking of bottom drawers. I could then file my underwear under U, I supposed. I smiled to myself, shook my head; this was ridiculous. What was I thinking of. giving up the cops and a life of crime for this? I was sitting on the edge of the desk, laughing silently at myself, when I noticed the phone.

A black, candlestick phone with a brand-new Chicago phone book next to it. My flat-nosed Jewish mother, Barney Ross, did work fast. Bless him.

So I sat behind the desk and I tried it out. I called my uncle Louis at the Dawes Bank. He and I weren't particularly close, but we kept in touch, and I hadn't talked to him since this mess began, and I thought I should. I also thought he might be able to get me a couple file cabinets wholesale.

I had to go through three secretaries to get him, but I got him.

"Are you all right, Nate?" he said. He sounded genuinely worried. But this was Wednesday, and the shooting was Monday, and I didn't exactly remember Uncle Louis calling on me at the Adams to express his concern.

"I'm fine. They had an inquest today, and I'm completely in the clear."

"As well you should be. You deserve a medal for shooting those hoodlums."

"The city council's giving me three hundred bucks. Me and Miller and Lang, each of us get that. And commendations. That's like getting a medal, I suppose."

"You should be honored. You don't sound it."

"I'm not. I quit the department, you know."

"I know, I know."

"You saw it in the papers, too, huh?"

"I heard."

Where would Uncle Louis have heard?

"Nate," he said. "Nathan."

Something was coming; otherwise it would've just been Nate.

"Yes, Uncle Louis?"

"I wondered could I have lunch with you tomorrow."

"Certainly. Who's buying?"

"Your rich uncle, of course. You'll come?"

"Sure. Where?"

"Saint Hubert's."

"That's pretty fancy. My rich uncle's going to have to pick up the tab if we go there. I never been there before."

"Well, be there tomorrow, promptly at noon."

"Promptly, huh? Okay. You're the boss; you're the only rich relative I got."

"Dress nice, Nate."

"I'll wear the clean suit."

"I'd appreciate that. We won't be dining alone."

"Oh?"

"There's someone who wants to meet you."

"Who would that be?"

"Mr. Dawes."

"Yeah. sure. Rufus or the General?"

"The General."

"Say, you aren't kidding, are you?"

"Not in the least."

"The biggest banker in Chicago wants to see me? Former vice-president of these United States meets former member of the downtown division's pickpocket detail?"

"That's correct."

"Why, for Christ's sake?"

"Can I count on you for noon. Nathan?"

Nathan again!

"Of course you can. Hell. Maybe we can stick Dawes for the check."

"Noon, Nathan," Uncle Louis said humorlessly.

I sat looking at the phone, after hanging up. for maybe ten minutes, trying to figure this. And it just didn't figure. Cermak and Nitti wanting to see me was one tiling; Dawes was something else again. I couldn't work it out.

And I had forgot to ask about the file cabinets.

At about six, I went down onto the street and found another cool evening waiting for me- the day had been cloudy, no snow, a little rain, and the sidewalk was shiny, wet. Van Buren Street itself, though, sheltered by the El tracks, looked dry. A streetcar slid by, obscuring the store across the way- Bailey's Uniforms- for just a moment. I walked to the restaurant around the corner from Barney's building; it was a white building with a vertical sign that spelled out

B

I

N

Y

o

N

S in neon-outlined white letters against black, with the word "Restaurant" horizontally below in black cursive neon against white. Not a cheap place, but they didn't rob you either, and the food was good, and since I'd missed lunch I decided I could afford something better than a one-arm joint.

I couldn't afford it, really: I'd get one more paycheck from the department and then would have to dig into the couple thousand I had salted away- a combination of the remainder of the small estate my pa left and money I'd been putting aside for a house for after Janey and I got married.

I had about an hour to kill before hopping the El to go out to Janey's flat on the near North Side, so I hit Barney's blind pig again, and Barney was in there, sitting in a booth with a hardly touched beer; he lit up like July 4 when he saw me.

I was embarrassed What can you say when somebody goes that far out of his way for you?

"Might've made up the bed, you thoughtless bastard," I said, with a sour smile.

"Go to hell," he said pleasantly.

"I tried to call you at the gym this afternoon, but couldn't get you."

"I was doing roadwork around Grant Park. I usually do that in the morning, but I had some business to do. and Pian and Winch insist on that roadwork. 'cause my wind ain't my strong point."

"You had business to do, all right. Going out and getting that Murphy bed. and getting a phone put in. You forgot to get me a file cabinet, you know."

He shrugged. "They couldn't deliver till tomorrow."

"You're kidding."

He wasn't.

I said. "I hope you know I'm paying you for all this."

Barney nodded. "Okay."

"You might have argued a little."

"That gracious I'm not."

Buddy Gold came over from behind the bar and leaned in to our booth, raising his furry eyebrows sarcastically. "You got a phone call. Heller- that fed friend of yours."

I took it behind the bar.

"Eliot," I said "what's up?"

"Nate, can you get free?"

I looked at my watch; I needed to hop the El in half an hour to keep my date with Janey.

"Is it important, Eliot?"

"I think it's something you'd find interesting."

Eliot tended to understate, so that meant it was probably crucial I come.

"Okay. You going to pick me up?"

"Yes. I'm at the Transportation Building, so it won't be more than ten minutes. I'll try for five."

"Okay. You know where I am, obviously. Want to stop in for a beer?"

"No thanks. Nate." There was a smile in his voice; he liked to pretend he didn't have a sense of humor, but he did.

"Why don't you pick me up in that truck of yours, the one with the prow on the front end? You can just butt your way in. pick me up. and get a little work done on the side."

Eliot allowed himself a short laugh. "Why don't I just honk instead?"

"And I thought you had style," I said, hanging up.

I tried to call Janey to tell her I'd be late, but she wasn't home yet. So I went back to the booth.

"What does Ness have going?" Barney asked.

"He didn't say. Sounded like he was in a hurry to get there, wherever it is we're going. I haven't talked to him since this brouhaha started brewing. I do know he's involved peripherally. I saw in the papers that he and another prohibition agent questioned Campagna and Palumbo and the others when they were still in custody, that same day of the shooting. I meant to give him a call, but I didn't get 'round to it."

That wasn't quite true: in a way, I'd been ducking Eliot; not consciously, exactly, but I hadn't gone out of my way to see or talk with him, because he really was one of the few straight-arrow law enforcement officers in Chicago, and I liked him, and had earned a certain amount of his respect, and I didn't know if I wanted to talk to him about the shooting until I found out exactly how I was going to be able to play it. And now that I knew- knew that I'd be playing Cermak's crooked game, out of necessity I didn't know if I wanted to tell Eliot the truth, even off the record.

Eliot was, after all, one of the primary forces behind Al Capone's fall. The original Prohibition Unit had proved as corrupt as it was underpaid and poorly trained. That had been a Justice Department operation, but was transferred after an inauspicious seven-year run to Treasury in '28. In '29 Eliot, then only twenty-six and only a few years out of the University of Chicago, was chosen to command a select detail. He scoured personnel files for honest men. found almost no prospects among Chicago's three hundred-some prohibition agents, and finally came up with nine (and even of these "untouchables." one did prove crooked, a sore point with Eliot). The members of Eliot's detail were young- thirty or under- and expert marksmen, and included specialists in wiretapping, truck-driving, shadowing suspects on foot or by car. you name it. They shut down breweries and distilleries, made speakeasy raids, hitting Capone hard in his pocket-book; and they put together enough evidence to indict Capone and some of his cronies on "conspiracy to violate the Volstead Act."

But Nitti was right about Eliot's weakness for publicity. The effectiveness of his efforts was somewhat hampered by a tendency to inform the press of his battle plans, so that cameras would be on hand when the ten-ton truck smashed open the doors of a Capone brewery. And Eliot and his squad by no means single-handedly "destroyed" the Capone empire. For one thing, it was Elmer Irey, of the IRS Enforcement Branch, and Treasury Agent Frank Wilson, among others, who nailed Capone on tax evasion. And for another thing, the Capone gang was still around and doing quite nicely, thank you.

About five minutes had gone by since Eliot's call, and I was getting up to try Janey one last time, when I heard his honk. I reminded Barney to keep trying Janey till he got her, and went out and climbed in the front of Eliot's black Ford sedan.

I was barely in when Eliot pulled away.

"Where's the fire, chief?" I asked him.

He gave me a sideways glance and tight smile. "Your old stomping grounds."

Eliot had a certain grace; even sitting behind the wheel of the car. he seemed somehow intense and relaxed at the same time. He was of Norwegian stock, with a ruddy-cheeked, well-scrubbed appearance. a trail of freckles across the bridge of his nose; a six-footer with square, broad shoulders, he looked like somebody who could be Eliot Ness, if you were told that. But left to your own devices, you might take him for a young business exec (he was only twenty-nine, not that much older than me- but then Capone, at the time of his fall, had only been thirty-two, not the fortyish mobster of Scarf ace). He was wearing a tan camel's hair topcoat, a gray suit and maroon tie peeking out. His hat was on the seat between us.

"Ever hear of a guy named Nydick?" Eliot said.

"Nope."

"He's wanted for a couple of robberies: a shoe store, which is pretty much for sure, and a bank robbery, just for questioning."

"So?"

"The mayor's hoodlum squad is going to pick him up; they'll beat us there by ten minutes, probably."

"The mayor's hoodlum squad. As in Harry Miller?"

Eliot looked at me with a nasty little smile. "You got it."

We were on Clark Street now. going past Dearborn Station, then soon up an incline onto Twelfth Street, which rose over the train yards. It was a dark night, with little slashes and splashes of light coming from the yards: trains pulling in; barrels with fire in them; lit-up cabooses.

"Where are we headed, exactly?"

"The Park Row Hotel. It's at forty-one-forty. That's"

"I know where it is."

That was only five or six blocks from my old neighborhood, where my father's bookstore had been; alderman Jake Arvey's territory, adjacent to Cermak's district. A middle-class, working-class Jewish community; not seedy, but not the Gold Coast either.

It was where both Lane and Miller lived.

"About a year ago," Eliot was saying, "when they were investigating the shoe store robbery, Lang and Miller cornered Nydick. And Nydick got the drop on them, somehow, and disarmed them, kept 'em captive for over an hour."

"I'm starting to remember this," I said, nodding.

"Pretty humiliating for a couple of tough guys like those two." Eliot said.

We were riding through the north end of the Maxwell Street district Maxwell Street on our right. Little Italy on our left- not that you could tell the difference: tenements were tenements.

"There's also a rumor." he said, "just a rumor, mind you. that Miller and Nydick's wife are… acquainted. That it was her that led Lang and Miller to Nydick the time he disarmed and humiliated 'em."

"So where does the woman stand? With her husband or Miller?"

Eliot shrugged. "I don't know. My guess would be she doesn't stand at all. More like reclines."

"For both of'em?"

He shrugged again. "This is just rumor. But I've been monitoring the hoodlum squad on the police radio in my office, and after what happened with you the other day. I thought you'd find Miller's further adventures… interesting."

"What's your connection?"

"You. My excuse is the bank robbery, which involves interstate transportation of a stolen vehicle. And Nydick is wanted for questioning in some Volstead-related matters."

"You mean he drinks?"

Eliot grinned this time. "That's what I hear."

I shook my head and smiled. I knew it was more than just our friendship that had sparked Eliot's interest: the mayor's hoodlum squad was indulging itself on his turf. The cops weren't supposed to raid Frank Nitti; Eliot Ness was supposed to raid Frank Nitti. Miller and Lang (and even yours truly) had got the kind of press thunder Eliot loved. Look how he showed up after the Nitti shooting, to ride the story's coattails and make it into the papers.

"So you came out all right on the inquest," Eliot said, as he weaved around streetcars and other vehicles. He wasn't going quite fast enough to need a siren, which was a good thing, because he didn't have one. He did have credentials in his billfold with the name Eliot Ness on them, which was one of the few ways in Chicago to get out of a speeding ticket without handing over a couple of bucks to the traffic cop.

"Yeah," I said. "All clear."

"Listen." he said. Quietly. "You don't have to tell me what went on in there. At the Wacker-LaSalle, I mean. You don't have to explain."

I didn't say anything.

"Your turning your badge in is enough explanation," he added.

But it was clear he wanted one, and since even speeding through traffic we were still a good twenty minutes away from the Park Row Hotel, I told him what had really happened. And I told him about my arrangement with Cermak, and my meeting with Nitti. too. I left out Nitti's condescending remarks about him.

"This is all off the record, Eliot."

He nodded, sighed heavily, passing a truck that might have been hauling beer.

"It took guts to turn down the hoodlum squad post," he said. "It paid good over the table, let alone under. But I'm glad you quit… even though you were one of the few contacts I had on the department I could trust."

"For a Chicago cop," I said, "I was honest. Which means anywhere else, I'd be in for twenty years."

"Thirty. Did you see what the Crime Lab made out of the note Nitti tried to eat?"

It had been in the papers.

"Yeah," I said. "It sounded like a grocery list…'call Billy for dinner'…'potatoes'… I think it was just notes he'd made for himself on any sort of mundane matters, which he scribbled a bet on and had to eat."

"The chief of detectives says it's an underworld code," Eliot said with a straight face.

I looked at him with a straight face, and we both started laughing.

"You know." I said. "Cermak and company can't be sleeping too good, with Nitti alive and well."

"I think you're right. Did you see the News tonight?"

"No."

"Cermak gave a speech about driving the gangsters out of the city"- he paused for the punch line- "then he left for Florida."

We were only a couple blocks away now. driving through a shopping district.

Eliot, suddenly serious, said, "About that guy you shot… I know it's bothering you. I've shot men myself, and I think I know how you feel. I know I hope never to kill anybody or anything again. But you were in a position where it couldn't be helped. Just let go of it, Nate, and be glad you're a private citizen again."

There was silence, as the Park Row loomed up on the right, its blue-and-red neon sign glowing. It was a big brick building squeezed into the middle of a block like a fat lady in a movie-house seat.

"I'll be glad to help you get set up as a private cop," Eliot said as he pulled over to the curb, half a block from the hotel. "I used to work as an investigator for a retail credit company, you know. I can get you some work."

We got out of the Ford and headed for the front door. I stopped him and looked into gray eyes that were kind, even a little innocent. I said. "They say a guy's rich when he's got one good friend. With you and Barney on my side. I'm rolling in it."

He smiled, looked away self-consciously toward the hotel entrance, and said. "Let's go see what the mayor's top men are up to."

Across the modest lobby of this primarily residential hotel was the check-in desk, behind which was a switchboard, where a sandy-haired woman of about forty-five wore a purple-and-white floral dress and a harried expression.

"Are you more police?" the woman wanted to know.

Eliot nodded, flashed her his credentials, which she looked at but didn't read.

"That fat creep held me down here at gunpoint" she said, voice trembling, holding a fist up, "like I was a criminal"

Her indignation seemed righteous: she looked like somebody's mother. She probably was.

" What do you mean?" Eliot said.

"They asked to see Mr. Long. Five officers. I told them room three-sixty-one. The fat one with the thick glasses sent the others upstairs and said he'd stay down and watch me so that I couldn't warn Mr. Long. And then he held a gun on me!"

Eliot shot me a quick, disgusted look.

"They're still up there?" he asked.

"Yes." the woman said. "One of the other officers came down, and said, 'We got him.' And then he went up, too."

"When was this?"

"A couple minutes before you came in, detective."

We took the elevator up to the third floor. A man in a brown rumpled suit and brown hat stood in the hallway, gun in hand, guarding a dowdily attractive woman in her thirties in a blue-and-white-pattern dress, and a boy in a blue-and-red-striped sweater who was maybe twelve. The boy was quite understandably confused, looking all about him, looking at the cop, looking at his mother, the mother staring off into space, a somber, somehow resigned look on her face.

We had just reached them when we heard the shots.

Three of them, each on the other's heels.

The woman's composure broke; she screamed "No!" and the cop restrained her, and the kid hung onto her, afraid.

"What do you think you're doing?" the cop said as we moved by, pointing the gun toward Eliot, who flashed his credentials at the guy.

"I'm Eliot Ness. And I'm going in that room." He pointed to the room with the number 361 on it. across from where we stood. He didn't have to say. Care to try to stop me? I doubt the cop would have, even if he didn't already have his hands full with the woman and boy.

Eliot put his credentials away and took his gun out and opened the door.

A man was sprawled on his stomach over by a far window; nearby there was a chair, a calendar on the wall, a dresser with an open drawer. On the dresser, a scrawny two-foot-tall Christmas tree roped with tinsel sat in a little green wooden stand that looked to be home-made. The man was bleeding; there were three entry wounds in his back, three bloody scorched bulletholes against the pale yellow of his shirt. If this guy wasn't dead or about to be, I was the Marx Brothers.

Speaking of comedy, Miller was standing over the apparent corpse with a gun in his hand; smoke trailed out the barrel like a ghost.

Two other plainclothes cops, neither of whom I recognized, were closer to us as we came into the hotel room: a stocky guy with a mustache, and a stocky guy without a mustache. The one with a mustache was near the door; the one without was over at the left, by the double bed, which had a cream-color bedspread and a nightstand with phone. Everybody looked at us- except the guy on the floor.

"Ness," Miller said, something like surprise registering on the blank putt)' face, eyes wide behind the

Coke-bottle lenses. "Heller? What the hell…?"

Eliot bent over the body. Eased him over, barely; put him back.

"Nydick," he said to me. I was still over by the door. "I think he may be breathing, but it's a habit he's going to break real soon." He looked at the cop near the phone. "Call an ambulance. Now!"

The cop did as he was told; in sotto voce, he could be heard asking the switchboard for Mount Sinai, the closest hospital.

Eliot rose, staying by the body. "How did it happen. Miller?"

"What jurisdiction you got here, Ness?"

"I have jurisdiction anywhere I damn well want it. This man was wanted for questioning in several federal matters, if it matters. How'd it happen. Miller?"

Miller put his gun on the dresser, under the Christmas tree, like a gift; it was the only one. He pointed at the open drawer, where a little.32 lay; the drawer was otherwise empty.

"He went for the gun." he said, like the bad actor he was. "I had to shoot."

"Three bullets in the back." Eliot said. "That'll slow a man down."

Miller continued. "The boys came up and broke in and secured the suspect. I came up and sent the wife and kid out. and I read him the warrant. He grabbed it and tore it up." He pointed. The warrant lay on the floor, not far from Nydick, torn in two.

I said. "Are you sure he didn't try to eat it?"

Miller got a little red. "You got no jurisdiction anywhere, Heller, so shut the hell up."

Eliot said. "Then what happened?"

"He was sitting a few feet from that dresser. Then he turned and tried to reach in a dresser drawer for that pistol. I couldn't take any chances. I fired and he fell."

Eliot turned to the cop near me. "Why didn't you just grab Nydick?"

The cop made a helpless, shrugging gesture. "I wasn't close enough." The other cop, having finished with his phone call, was staying in the background.

"How about you?" Eliot asked him. "Why didn't you grab Nydick when he went for the gun?"

"I started to jump over the bed, but- Miller, he- already fired."

Eliot glared at Miller. "Let's step out in the hall." He pointed a finger at first one, then the other cop. "You two stay put. Make sure your suspect doesn't make a break for it."

When we got out in the hall, the wife, being held by one arm by the cop in the brown suit, said, "What in God's name happened in there?"

Eliot said, "Are you Mrs. Nydick?"

The woman lowered her head. "I'm Mrs. Long."

Miller said, "That's the name Nydick was registered under."

Eliot said it again: "Are you Mrs. Nydick?"

She nodded, looking at the floor. "He's… dead, isn't he?"

"He's been shot," Eliot said. "It doesn't look good for him."

She kept nodding, kept looking at the floor. She didn't ask to go in and be with her husband; she just nodded and looked at the floor. The boy started to cry. Nobody comforted him.

A few other guests were cracking their doors and peeking out. In a loud, firm voice, Eliot said, "This is a police matter- go about your business." The doors closed.

Then he took Miller by the arm and led him down the hall and around a comer, glancing back at me to follow, which I did.

With a smile that was in no way friendly, he backed Miller up against the wall, gently.

"Didn't you kill somebody else this year?" he asked.

Miller nodded. "A thief. I don't like thieves. Nydick was a thief."

"Ever meet Nydick before?"

"No."

"He didn't hold a gun on you and your partner Lang once?"

"No. That… story got around, but it was just a story. Nobody can…"

"What?"

Miller swallowed. "Nobody can prove it happened."

"I see. Boy. the hoodlum squad's going all out. First you and Lang nail Nitti. Now the notorious Nydick. What next?"

"We're just doing our job. Ness."

Eliot took him by one arm and squeezed and said, "Listen to me. you trigger-happy son of a bitch. I got my eye on you. You keep turning your job into a shooting gallery and I'm going to fall on you like a wall Got me?"

Miller didn't say anything, but he was shaking- it was barely perceptible, but he was shaking.

Eliot turned his back on him and started to walk away. Then he glanced back and said, "How long do you think your buddy Cermak is going to back you up on these pleasure cruises? The word's out about Newberry offering fifteen grand for Nitti dead, you know. And if that wife of Nydick's isn't your girl friend. I'll invite you over for Christmas dinner."

Miller started to blink behind the glasses.

"Oh. by the way," Eliot added. "Heller wasn't here tonight. Neither one of you needs the stink that might raise, and Heller's along innocently, just 'cause he happened to be with me. I'll tell your boys, and you tell 'em. too. The civilians won't remember how many cops they saw. Got it?" He turned to me. "Anything you care to add?"

I said, "Give me a minute with him alone, Eliot."

He nodded and walked back around the corner and down the corridor.

Miller looked at me and tried to get a sneer going; he didn't quite manage. "I don't like the company you keep," he said.

"Maybe you picked the wrong person to pull in out of a speakeasy to do your shit work for you."

"What's the idea of bringing Ness into this?"

"Ness has been in since the first day, but never mind. You and Lang should've told me about Newberry, Miller."

"I don't know what you're talking about."

"Let's just say if Nitti has a relapse and kicks the bucket, I'll expect my five thousand. Give my love to Lang. Tell him when his finger heals to stick it."

"You're dead. Heller."

"Sure, why not, what's another body to a big-game hunter like you? Some free advice: I don't know what you and Nydick's little lady had going, but I don't think she expected you to kill him. I hope you can get her to get her story together. You just got to start letting those close to you in on your plans, Miller. See you in court."

I left him there to think about that and joined Eliot, who was waiting by the door that said EXIT over it.

"Take the stairs down," he said. "Find your way home. The ambulance and reporters'll be here anytime. You don't need that kind of publicity."

I grinned at him. "Don't tell me Eliot Ness is helping cover something up?"

He laughed a little, but his heart wasn't in it. He'd been sickened by what he saw here tonight.

He said. "That guy really puts the 'hoodlum' into hoodlum squad, doesn't he?"

And opened the door for me to leave.

Chicago is a city where rich and poor stand side by side, ignoring each other. Take the block where my office was. Starting at the deli on the comer and looking down toward Wabash, you'd see Barney's blind pig, a pawnshop, a jewelry store, a flophouse, a sign advertising a palm reader one floor up- buildings wealing fire escapes on their faces like protective masks, looking out stoically on the iron beams of the El: not the classiest landscape in the world. But just around the corner from the deli, right before Binyon's, was the Harvard-Yale-Princeton Club, and across the street from Binyon's was the Standard Club, the Jewish equivalent of the Union League. Some of the richest men in Chicago walked under the SC canopy into the gray, dignified Standard Club, while around the corner and down the block, winos slept it off in a "hotel for men only."

Saint Hubert's, the restaurant General Charles Gates Dawes had selected for our luncheon meeting, was on Federal Street at the foot of the Union League Club, where he'd be able to stop in after his conference with the two Jews (even though neither Uncle Louis nor myself had been raised in that faith, we were, technically, so "tainted"). Maybe the General would have a smoke on his trademark pipe with its low-slung bowl while chatting with another top "bankster" (as big-shot bankers were often referred to by lesser Chicagoans, like yours truly) in the room at the Union League that had been papered with a million dollars in failed stocks and bonds. The Million-Dollar Room, like so much else in Chicago, had been made possible by the depression; and it was sure heartening to know that the banksters were taking the hard times with a sense of humor. My uncle Louis, of course, was a member of the Standard Club, but we couldn't 20 there for lunch with General Dawes because Dawes wasn't a Jew- it worked both ways, you know. It just worked the other way more often.

It was a walk of only a few blocks. The temperature was in the forties and it looked like rain. Perfect weather to go to Saint Hubert's English Grill- Federal Street was like some narrow, gloomy London bystreet, anyway. All that was missing was the fog. and my state of mind provided that.

I hadn't woken up till about eleven, because I had come back to Barney's speak last night, after taking a streetcar back to the Loop, too late to go out to Janey's, and had tied one on. So I awoke fuzzy-mouthed and like-minded, and didn't have time to take up Barney's standing offer of using the traveler's lounge at the Morrison to freshen up, and made do with the sink in my office bathroom. I felt it was a major accomplishment getting up, dressed, relatively clean, and to Saint Hubert's by three minutes after noon. But from the look on my uncle Louis' face as a pink-coated waiter showed me to the table he and the General were sharing, you'd think I was three days late. Christ, I'd put on the clean suit as promised; wasn't that enough?

Apparently not. My uncle stood and gave me a smile and a glare; the smile was forced- the glare wasn't. He gestured toward a seat: the General rose, as well.

First, my uncle. He was a thinner, taller version of my father, wearing a navy suit with vest and bow tie. His hair and mustache were salt-and-pepper, heavier on the salt, and he had the paunch that a thin man can set in his middle age. if he's eating well.

And the General. He was in his mid-to-late sixties, one of those men who manage to look lanky and beefy at the same time, with a long face, its most prominent feature a long, low-slung nose that seemed designed to go with the long, low-slung pipe clutched tight in his lips. He, too, had salt-and-pepper hair, but heavier on the pepper, and the faintly amused smile and bemused eyes of a man so self-assured that it never occurred to him he was superior to you: that, after all, was a given. He wore a dark gray suit with a lighter gray pinstripe and a gray-striped tie. He offered a hand for me to shake, and I did. It was a firm grasp

I sat. I knew about the General. He was Chicago's number-one Good Citizen. Not just a banker, but a public servant. The "General" title came from his serving under Pershing as the U.S. Army's purchasing agent in the Great War, after which he authored the Dawes Plan for postwar European reconstruction. He was comptroller of the currency under McKinley and, of course, vice-president under Coolidge. He'd even done work for Hoover: recently, he'd headed up the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, to provide emergency support for banks hit by the depression, but he had had to resign to save his own bank and, by a remarkable coincidence, the RFC had loaned his bank S90 million just three weeks after he resigned as RFC president.

But even a cynical soul like me had at least one good thing to say about Dawes. In memory of a son who had died at twenty-two. he established a hotel for down-and-outers at six cents a bed and three cents a meal; the Dawes Hotel for Men was the Ritz of flophouses and a genuinely charitable endeavor.

Dawes sat and so did my uncle, who made the introductions, as if we didn't all know who we were. They were drinking tea and soon I was, too. The atmosphere of Saint Hubeil's was that of an old Dickensian inn. The pink-coated waiters had English accents, presumably real. Prints of fox hunts and other pip-pip-old boy sporting events hung on the rough stone walls, and a fireplace across the room was providing warmth and a homey feeling. The ceiling was low: long clay pipes hung from its beams, and a few of the all-male guests were smoking them- the pipes, not the beams.

No clay pipe for the General, though: he took too much relish in the monster he was already smoking, with its special fire bowl designed to trap in its false bottom the tobacco tar distilled in smoking. This was not the first thing the General told me about over our lunch, but when I did express interest in his unusual pipe, he perked up. as if he had suddenly realized we were both of the same species, and promised to send me one. which he did. He kept his promises. But I never used the pipe.

He sat leaning against one elbow, pulling on the pipe, and, looking about the place, said. "I'm reminded of England."

No kidding!

"When I was ambassador," he said, "I grew to love Loudon. What do you think of Leon Errol?"

"Pardon?" I said.

"Leon Errol," Dawes said, with enthusiasm. "The renowned comedian, man!"

"Oh. Sure. Leon Errol. Yes. Funny. Funny man."

What the hell did Leon Errol have to do with London? He wasn't even English.

"Allow me to tell you a story," Dawes said, and smiling to himself, he leaned forward and told us a story, not looking at either Uncle Louis or me during the telling.

When he gave his first formal dinner as ambassador to England, in attendance were Her Royal Highness Princess Beatrice, the prime minister, the Japanese ambassador, the Spanish ambassador. Lord and Lady Astor, among many others, including several famous authors and artistes, among them Leon Errol, who was strangely absent when the prim and proper dinner began. But suddenly things began to go awry. One of the waiters, who had a rather large mustache, began filling water glasses with lemonade; he removed plates before guests had finished the course at hand; he began to pass a tray of crackers then spilled it onto the plate of one of the guests; he stumbled while carrying a tray and nearly upended it in a lady's lap; and, finally, he dropped a spoon, kicking it under the table clumsily, and took a candle from the table and got down on hands and knees and searched.

"And then Lady Astor, bless her," Dawes smiled, "saw through our ruse. For you see- "

"Leon Errol was the waiter," I said.

Dawes looked surprised. "You've heard the story?"

My uncle was giving me a look-to-kill.

I tried to cover. "My uncle told it to me. It's one of his favorites of your stories."

Dawes seemed faintly embarrassed. "You should have stopped me- "

"No," I said, "I wanted to hear it again, from the source's mouth. You tell it much better than my uncle."

Dawes beamed, and looked across the table at Uncle Louis. "I don't remember telling you that one before. Louis. Is that really one of your favorites?"

"Oh. yes," Louis said, beaming back.

"Mine, too," Dawes nodded. He turned his distant gaze on me. "I took the liberty' of ordering for you, Mr. Heller, since you were a bit tardy."

Tardy? What was this, fucking school?

"Not at all," I said. "What are we having?"

Dawes relit his pipe. "Mutton chops, of course. The specialty of the house."

Mutton? Jesus Christ!

"My favorite," I said.

"Mine, too," Uncle Louis nodded.

I was starting to understand why my father had hated Uncle Louis.

But I was wrong about the mutton chops- they were thick and juicy and good. And when the General ordered plum pudding for us, I didn't argue; I trusted his judgment about such things by now, and that too proved, as the General said, a culinary delight. The General had a way with words: he left no cliche unturned.

"Of course they lack the brandy so necessary in the making of proper plum pudding." the General said after we'd finished it. "But the law? is the law. Even in England, I refused to serve liquor at embassy functions, out of regard to the prohibition laws in force at home."

"But liquor wasn't illegal there," I said.

"I was a representative of the United States government." he said, matter-of-factly. As if that explained it.

"General," I said, "it was a wonderful lunch. I'm honored you asked me… though I'm still confused as to why."

When Dawes smiled, he smiled with his mouth closed; that's the way he was smiling now, at any rate.

"Is it such a surprise to you," he said, "that one public servant should want to meet, and honor, another?"

"I hope it won't be rude of me to say this," I said, "but neither one of us is a public servant, at the moment. We're both, you might say, in private business."

Uncle Louis shifted in his seat.

Dawes nodded. "That's fair. But you were recently honored by the city council for meritorious,

hazardous service, in the line of duty, as an officer of the law."

"Yes."

"And now you've chosen to leave the department."

Not again!

"Sir." I said, "my decision to leave the department is final."

He sat back, looked down his pipe at me. "Fine," he said. "I respect that." Then he leaned forward, just the slightest bit conspiratorial. "That, in fact, is why you are here."

"I don't understand."

Uncle Louis said, "Let him explain, Nate."

"Sure," I shrugged

We had been there an hour and a half, and the room was emptying out: with no liquor served on the premises, the long lunch hour for executives was less common. It had been this near-privacy in a public place that the General had been waiting for.

"You're familiar with President Hoover," he said, with no apparent humor.

"We've never met." I said, "but I have heard of him."

"Are you aware that he is the man who put Al Capone away?"

I grinned. "I always thought my friend Eliot Ness had something to do with that."

"Indeed he did." the General said, nodding sagely. "A good man. He is part of what I am talking about. You see, there were some of us here in Chicago… in positions of responsibility… who began to feel, a few years ago. that Mr. Capone and company were giving our city more than just a 'colorful' reputation. Chicago had come to be viewed as a happy hunting ground for gunmen and other criminals, and. while I undertook a European campaign to defend her good name, Chicago to a degree did deserve this stigma. This colony of unnaturalized persons, which Mr. Capone came to symbolize, had undertaken a reign of lawlessness and terror in open defiance of the law. My friends on Wall Street were beginning to ponder upon whether or not their money was safely invested here. The time had come to act."

The time had also come for me to ask a question, because the General paused dramatically, here, to light his pipe again.

So I said, "How does this make Herbert Hoover the guy who got Capone?"

He shrugged facially. "That is just a way of putting it. The efforts actually began before Mr. Hoover reached office, but it is well known that for many months, every morning, when he and Andrew Mellon would toss the medicine ball around on the White House lawn, the president would ask Andrew, who is a personal friend of mine and the secretary of treasury, if that man Capone was in jail yet. So it has been the interest and support of Mr. Hoover that made the end of Mr. Capone possible. You see. prior to Mr. Hoover reaching office, several of us here in Chicago had devised a two-part plan. First, a world's fair. What better way to restore Chicago's image in the eyes of the nation, of the world. What better way than to attract millions of people from around the globe to our fair city on the lake, to prove to them that the average person in Chicago never so much as sees a gangster."

I would've liked to have met that average person, but never mind.

"We felt we needed a good ten years to do the exposition up right. We would call it 'A Century of Progress,' and it would take place in 1937, the hundredth anniversary of the incorporation of the city- "

I interrupted. "But you're planning it now for this summer. And it's still called 'A Century? of Progress,' isn't it?"

"Yes," Dawes admitted, "but, after the Crash, the city needed the exposition more than it needed correct mathematics."

Uncle Louis said, "Fort Dearborn was a village in 1833. That's a century, isn't it?"

"Hey, it's okay with me," I said. "Hold it any year you like. I think it's a good idea. Good for the city; it'll bring some money in."

The General smiled and nodded, as if he hadn't thought of that before but it was a good idea.

Then he continued. "When we were first discussing the possibility of an exposition, we knew that for it to truly be a success, for the point we were seeking to make to be made. Mr. Capone would have to be excised. And then we would need to restore the law and order that preceded him."

"Excuse me. General." I said, "but Big Jim Colosimo and Johnny Torrio preceded Al Capone. not law and order."

My uncle gave me another sharp look; like a knife.

But the General only smiled enigmatically. "Shall we say the relative law and order that preceded Mr. Capone."

"All right_?" I conceded.

"This was when some of us here in Chicago, who were concerned, and who had certain influence- and since I was, at that time, still vice-president of these United States, I did have influence- thought something should be done. I arranged for a special prosecutor, a Dwight Green, to begin dealing with Mr. Capone and company. A two-part attack was devised. Mr. Ness and his 'untouchables' would damage Mr. Capone financially, while Mr. Irey of the IRS attempted to put our income tax laws to a good use, for a change. The first of the gangsters to go to prison for tax evasion, you may remember, was one Frank Nitti, with whom I believe you are acquainted."

"Him I've met."

"Of course these things go in cycles, and Mr. Nitti is no longer in prison, though Mr. Capone is. and will be for some time. As you so rightly pointed out. Mr. Heller, the gangster element was with us long before Al Capone. and will go on being with us for time immemorial, human nature being what it is. But it should remain in its back-alley place, inconspicuous, within bounds. It should keep out of City Hall, for one thing."

I sipped my tea. "You've got a Republican to thank for that, sir."

Uncle Louis closed his eyes.

"True," Dawes said, "but I will not take credit nor blame for William Hale Thompson. The man was a public drunkard, his campaign tactics an embarrassment, his connection with the Capone crowd, the obvious graft, the embezzlement"- he glanced about Saint Hubert's sadly "all crowned by the absurdity of his anti-British stance, demanding 'pro-British' textbooks be burned, threatening to 'whack King George on the snoot.' As ambassador to Great Britain I was personally ashamed by such remarks coming from the mayor of my own great city. 'Big Bill,' as he is so quaintly referred to, bankrupted this city, humiliated and disgraced it, to a degree that, well… how should I put it?"

"Like Capone," I said, "he had to go."

"Precisely."

"And now in his place you have Cermak," I said.

Dawes sighed heavily, nodded. "Still, there are things to be said in Cermak's favor. When city employees under Mayor Thompson were having payless paydays. Commissioner Cermak's count)' employees were paid regularly. His fiscal skills were an encouraging sign. But I have always had misgivings about Mr. Cermak."

"I thought you bankers were all behind him." I said. "He's one of your own, after all."

Dawes smiled again, but barely concealed his contempt for the subject at hand. "A. J. Cermak sitting on the boards of a few minor banks does not make him 'one of our own.' But you are correct. Mr. Heller. There was Cermak support among financial and commercial leaders of Democratic leaning, certainly. And we Republicans could hardly be expected to rally around William Hale Thompson's bid for a fourth term."

"I seem to recall." I said, somewhat coyly. "Cermak nominating a friend of yours as favorite-son candidate for president at the national convention last month."

That was Melvin Traylor, president of the First National Bank and perhaps the only banker in Chicago of nearly equal stature to the General.

"Yes." Dawes nodded, "Melvin was a major Cermak supporter. And Frank Loesch. of the Chicago Crime Commission. There were any number of Cermak-for-mayor businessmen's committees. Many of us came to support Mr. Cermak, as the 'lesser evil.'"

"Well," I said, "he has been helping you bankers out on the tax front, hasn't he?"

Uncle Louis said, a bit testily, "Which is only fair, since he must come to the banks to obtain loans for the city."

The General dismissed all that with a wave of the hand. "That would be the case under any mayor, under current conditions. The major reason Mr. Cermak gained the support of business was his promise to 'redeem Chicago,' to restore her good name. To put an end to all gangster operations during the fair."

"Did you really believe that?"

"Yes, within reason. As we've both said, gangsters will always be with us. The people who come to our fair will occasionally seek that which is not offered there. So I would not expect, for example, a gentleman from Des Moines having a great deal of difficulty finding a glass of beer to drink while in Chicago this summer."

"Cermak's declared war on crime. Isn't that what you want?"

"Bloody headlines are not what any of us want. The fair is designed to paint a whole new picture of Chicago. And blood is not the sort of paint we have in mind."

"I can see that," I admitted.

"Now. You may be wondering where you fit into all this."

"Yes."

"I'm merely hoping you'll be civic-minded when Mr. Nitti's trial comes up, before too long."

"Civic-minded?"

"Yes. I would hope you would take the stand and tell the truth."

"Which truth is that?"

Dawes looked at me hard. "The truth, man! The truth. Whatever it is. Wherever the chips may fall."

"Okay." I said, unsurely.

"Like the city- council." he said, with humor. "I believe a sense of civic duty should be rewarded."

"That's nice. How?"

"I understand you've opened a private agency."

"That's correct."

"I understand further that you were a member of the pickpocket detail."

"Yes."

"We'll have our own security force, at the fair. I would like them instructed in the ways and means of the pickpocket. I would like you to do that. And I would like you to spend a day or two at the fair, each week, yourself, when your schedule allows, to supervise them, doing spot checks, perhaps nabbing an occasional pickpocket personally."

"Fine," I said.

■

"Would a retainer of three thousand dollars be sufficient?"

"Oh, yes."

"Good. Now this is all tentative, mind you. Contingent upon your performance at the trial."

"Oh."

"Come and see me afterward. And we'll draw up a contract." He stood. So did my uncle Louis. So did I.

He offered his hand for another shake, and I shook it, and said, "Well, thanks for the offer. It's very kind of you."

"Most of my troubles have come from attempted acts of kindness," he said. "But most of my happiness has come from the same endeavor. It will be illuminating to see into which category you fall."

Right." I said.

Out on the street I said to Uncle Louis, "What was that all about?"

"Isn't it self-evident? He wants you to tell the truth at the trial."

"We're talking about the truth, here? As in. what really happened?"

"Of course."

We walked with hands in topcoat pockets; the wind off the lake was finally kicking in. It was down in the mid-thirties now.

"He wants to expose Cermak?" I said. "I don't get it. That's just more bad Chicago publicity."

"Exposing Cermak would be the best thing in the world for the General and his high-hat friends. Nate. The bad publicity could force Cermak to resign, on account of 'health problems.' He has 'em, you know."

I had a sudden image of Cermak getting up and heading for the toilet.

"Yeah, I know," I said.

"And if he doesn't resign, it'll scare him into cleaning up his act. He won't send his hooligan squads around assassinating gangsters anymore. And he may keep his own associations with gangsters a bit closer to his vest."

"Maybe you're right." I said.

"Besides." Uncle Louis went on. "Cermak is a Democrat. This'll provide a nice cloud to hang over him when reelection comes around, and we'll get a real Republican back in. It's going to be a cold day in hell when a Democratic machine runs Chicago again, after Cermak gets dumped."

"Well, it's already getting colder, you know. Uncle Louis."

"What do you mean?"

"I can't sell Cermak out. At least I don't see how I can. He can yank my license. I won't be able to work. I won't be able to cam' a gun, either. And maybe Ted Newberry or Roger Touhy'll send some guys over to take me for a ride."

"Well." Uncle Louis said, "think it over. Cermak is powerful, but the General is power. When he said Hoover was the guy who got Capone. he was just being nice, you know. It's Dawes who did it. Well. Here's the Standard Club. Let's talk soon. Nate."

And my uncle patted me on the back and entered the gray old club. I walked around the corner, turned down a panhandler's request for a dime, and went up to my office, and called Eliot.

"That looks like a Murphy bed," Eliot said, coming in the door and pointing at the Murphy bed.

"There's a reason for that." I said, sitting behind my desk, feet up. like a big shot.

He took his topcoat off. walked to the straight-backed chair in front of my desk, and turned it around, and draped the coat over it, and sat backward in it and faced me: his face was deadpan, but he was smiling around the cool gray eyes, "You didn't say anything about living here, too."

I shrugged. "I'm not nuts about it getting around."

He pointed again, this time at the varnished-pine four-drawer file in the corner behind me, to my left. "I suppose you got your shorts filed under 5."

I reached over and pulled the bottom file drawer out and pulled out a pair of shorts. "Under U,"l said.

Eliot started laughing till his eyes teared; so did I. A couple of tough guys.

My own laughter under control, the shorts on the desk in front of me like something I was working on, I said, "Well, this used to be a lawyer's office. I suppose he had briefs to file, too."