Макс Коллинз - Road to Purgatory

“I don’t wanna be a man,” the boy said, “if I have to eat this.”

And he began to cry. The child’s stop-and-start wailing agony ricocheted shrilly off the kitchen walls.

His father stood. Pointed. “Go to your room.”

Still crying, but obviously relieved, the boy climbed down out of the youth chair with the help of Mary Jane, who walked him out of the kitchen. The boy halted and the maid almost stumbled.

“Mama,” he said, pausing in the doorway, looking back at her with red eyes and a tear-streaked face, “will you read to me, anyway?”

“Yes, dear.”

“Daddy?”

“Yes?”

“Will you still tuck me in?”

“I’ll think about it.”

The boy smiled, just a little, through his tears, realizing his victory.

Then the maid and the child were gone. Mike was reaching for his son’s plate to help himself to the extra serving when Annie began to laugh.

“What are you laughing about?”

“Cry in your food,” she said, “you’ll make it saltier.”

He grinned. “Well... it’s what my pop said to me.”

“And look at you today, the corned beef fiend.”

Mike shrugged and dug in.

Half an hour later, she managed, despite her girth, to embrace her husband at the door; she could feel the hardness of the pistol under his arm. She even managed to get up on tiptoes to kiss him on the mouth. Then she settled back on her sore feet and looked up at him, stroking his face.

“Every time I leave the house,” he said, with a funny little smile, “you look at me like... like you’re trying to memorize this puss of mine.”

“Maybe I am.”

“Baby,” he said, “I memorized your kisser a long, long time ago.”

And he gave her a quick smooch and slipped out.

She stood in the doorway and watched him cross to the garage, wondering if he’d avail himself of further weapons from the arsenal out there, kept under tight lock and key.

Annie O’Sullivan loved her life, her storybook life, and yet every time her husband left the house, she had to wonder: how could there be a happy ending, when Mike worked for John Looney?

On Twentieth Street’s bluff, the formidable three-story structure rose castle-like, with its gabled red-tile roofs, ceramic lions, bay windows, sloped turrets, substantial dark-brick walls, and many-pillared porch. The mansion provided its owner a view of the Mississippi River second to none; but also on the mansions below, the homes of high society, his perch enabling the master of this domain to look down upon those who considered themselves his betters.

This had given John Looney no small pleasure, over the years.

The mansion’s interior had a warmth to the eye — walnut paneling, mahogany trim, parquet floors, oriental carpets, massive fireplaces — that did not extend to physical reality. The downstairs, with its high ceilings and various cavernous rooms, was prey to winter chill, wind whistling through, turning the place into the haunted house the local children had long ago deemed it. For all its elegance — Victorian furniture, velvet upholstery, stained glass, ornate mirrors, sparkling chandeliers — the mansion was (Looney had to admit it) good and goddamn cold.

Only when a party — holiday festivities or a wedding reception or the occasioned wake — brought the warmth of other human beings into the sprawling place did Looney’s Roost seem a home, and he’d come to relish such gatherings, accordingly. With Nora gone these eight years, and his daughters off to boarding school, that left only himself and his son Connor to knock around these endless rooms.

When Nora was alive, and the girls underfoot, Looney never conducted business in the mansion — would never think of it! He left such things for his law office or the Java House at the Sherman Hotel; or possibly out at Bel Aire, his second, less ostentatious mansion on the Rock River.

Now, of course, parties at Bel Aire weren’t the family affairs the Roost occasionally put on; they were for men only... and a certain type of woman, the kind who fit in with cockfights in the barn, shooting matches in the yard, and drunken orgies upstairs.

Bel Aire was where Looney entertained the Chicago boys, when they came to town. Looney had been aligned with Johnny Torrio for years, though Looney did not have much faith in the chunky scar-faced youth Torrio was grooming for his heir, a hot headed Sicilian named Capone.

But Looney would have to learn to deal with Capone, and vice versa; as he often said, this business was one of strange bedfellows.

Tonight he’d called a small meeting of a handful of his most trusted associates, and they had gathered at the long table in his library, all seated toward one end. Looney — gauntly handsome, white mustached, in a dark brown suit and gambler’s black string tie — sat at the head. On a chair against the wall behind him, not officially a part of the inner circle, was Michael O’Sullivan.

O’Sullivan was Looney’s most trusted lieutenant. In some ways, an odd duck (you’d never find him at a Bel Aire orgy), the war hero had earned himself and his boss respect all around Midwestern mob circles. Looney had loaned Mike out to Chicago numerous times; and somewhere along the line Mike had become a living legend — the Angel of Death, they called him.

This melodramatic sobriquet supposedly derived from O’Sullivan taking no pleasure in killing — it was said he wore a somber, even regretful expression when pulling a trigger.

Though O’Sullivan’s relatively lowly duties included bodyguard and occasional driver, Looney trusted the man like no one else in his organization. Someday there would be a place for Mike at this table; someday, perhaps, at its head.

When such a thought crossed his mind, John Looney would wince, feeling he’d committed a small betrayal against his own blood. At the eventual head of the table — the seat he would one day vacate — should be his son, Connor. But Connor was... a troubled boy.

Looney did not mind that his son had done poorly in school; the reports that Connor was a bully, and a mean one at that, did not discourage him, either. The family business was a brass-knuckle affair, after all. But Connor had other unattractive traits — he was impulsive and violent; and he drank, and he got emotional over women.

Yet John Looney loved his son; he often paired Connor with Mike O’Sullivan, in hopes that Mike’s self-control and professionalism might rub off. That Connor and Mike would form a bond, so that O’Sullivan could sit at Connor’s right hand one day, and help John Looney’s son rule.

Tonight, at the conference table in the booklined room with lamps glowing yellow, Connor sat at his father’s right hand. Connor, wearing a gray suit with vest and dark blue silk tie with diamond stickpin, looked sharp indeed; a youthful version of his father, albeit with a longer nose and slightly weaker chin, and minus the mustache. He seemed to be just a little drunk.

At Looney’s left hand sat the lawyer Frank Kelly, affable and prosperous-looking in a brown suit and red bow tie, a gray-haired fleshy man of fifty with a confident manner. Kelly had been Looney’s law partner since the last century.

Next to the lawyer was Emeal Davis, a brawny cueball-bald black man in a light blue suit with his dark blue derby before him on the table like a meal he was contemplating. In his mid-thirties, Davis oversaw the transporting of liquor, guns, and whores between Rock Island and Chicago.

Across from Davis, seated next to Connor, was a striking blonde in her late twenties, Helen Van Dale. She wore a tight-fitting black satin dress with a lace collar, her hands in white gloves folded primly before her; on the back of her chair was her mink coat (she had not trusted it to the Looney butler). A former whore herself, Helen was the madam who coordinated all prostitution in Looney’s realm.