Стивен Хантер - G-Man

“Sheriff, is he the most dangerous?”

“Yes sir. By far. He’d be shoot-on-sight, in my opinion. Tricky, nasty, crazy sonovabitch. You see him, put him down hard, that’s my advice, and if I get a chance, that’s what I’ll do without a second thought. He’s too dangerous to take alive.”

“And the others?”

“Charlie will do something stupid to get himself killed. He won’t think nothing out. Mr. X is a pussycat, he’ll go into the cuffs without a fuss. He knows he ain’t got the constitution for Thompson gunwork. Johnny and Homer could go either way. Both are smart and disciplined. I don’t quite see them as shoot-on-sight, but you got to hit them with maximum manpower so that they see no escape is possible from the get-go. Cornered, they’ll give up. Johnny’s escaped already twice, and he believes he can get out of any jug. Probably the same with Homer, so it’s in them that tomorrow is another day, and on that day they’ll pull a wood-gun trick and go free. Plus, they ain’t haters. They’re in this for the money and the glory, not to burn the world down. They really ain’t trying to hurt nobody, whereas Baby Face likes to hurt folks and gets his laughs thinking about all the tears been shed.”

“Mrs. Donovan, did you get all that?”

“I did.”

“Great, Sheriff. One more question: since you know so much, how many banks have you robbed?”

There was a lot of laughter, and even Charles rewarded Purvis with a rare-enough smile, enough to insert him further into legend, but then he said, “None that I can tell you Yankees about,” and more laughter busted out.

When it had died down, Purvis addressed them all.

“Please mark that if you get yourselves into an arrest situation, Nelson gets a slug in the face; the others, depending. Fair enough? Okay, anything else?”

A few minor questions about per diems came up, another big laugh — say, wasn’t this turning into vaudeville? — and Purvis fielded them gracefully enough, and then said, “Okay, fellas, good work, y’all did well, you have an hour to pack, and Mr. Cowley already has our Tri-Motor on the runway. Sleep late tomorrow, but the duty day will start at one p.m., and I expect to see you in the office. Sheriff, got a sec?”

“Sure,” said Charles.

When the room was empty, Purvis said, “As I said, I think that’s good work. We don’t get that kind of thinking. But you have to understand — and think this through — you can’t just crash ahead. That’s what we did wrong at Little Bohemia.”

“Just trying to apply common sense,” said Charles.

“Gunfighter’s common sense, hard-won. Anyhow, this is personal, I didn’t want to say anything in front of the men, but your wife called the Chicago Office and she needs to talk to you. They said she sounded kind of upset. If you come to need a weekend off, just let me know and it can be easily arranged.”

Charles had a sinking feeling. Had Bobbie Lee wandered off into the woods again and this time nobody could find him? Or maybe he’d been hit by a car. The weight of the damaged child was never far from Charles’s shoulders.

“Yes sir.”

“I’m going to get some lunch. Go to my room and call from that phone. Don’t worry about the cost. I’ll see you in a bit.”

Charles thanked his supervisor, acknowledging the thoughtfulness of the offer, took the key, and went upstairs.

He found himself in the Excelsior’s best room — no surprise — as befits the celebrity that Purvis had become, and the maid had already come through, so it was immaculate and impersonal. But it had probably stayed that way, as Purvis’s personal neatness was already a legend.

He picked up the phone, got the hotel operator, and after the connections were made, heard his own phone ringing, the operator asking her if she wanted to take the call, and finally he was on the line with the woman he married, the mother of his sons.

“Hello,” she said, her voice crackily over the long-distance wires as they hopped from connection to connection.

“It’s me. They said you called. Anything the matter? Is Bobbie Lee—”

“He’s fine.”

“You have to watch that fool kid. He’ll end up facedown in a pond or eaten by bears.”

“Charles, he’s fine, he’s been quiet. He stays in his room and draws rocket airplanes. Every once in a while, he says, ‘Where Dada?’ That’s the only thing.”

“You know I don’t believe that. He don’t even know who I am.”

“He loves you very much, Charles, if you’d let him. Anyway, got a letter from Earl. He made corporal. He likes the field, he says he hasn’t been in a fight yet, but his mind is all set for it if it happens.”

“He’ll do well. He’s got sand, even if he’s no booster of his mean old father. You’re getting the money okay? They said it would take a while for the paperwork to go through.”

“We’re fine, Charles. Better off than most. You provided for your family, Charles, when so many weren’t able to.”

“So what’s this about?”

“Charles, the judge came by yesterday.”

“What?”

This was unprecedented. The judge rarely left the courthouse. It meant something significant.

“Yes. He said he had a message from some folks in Hot Springs. He said — and I wrote it down — he said that you should go to the World’s Fair Saturday at four p.m. and sit on a bench across from an exhibit called Midget Village. They have a whole town there of little midget people.”

“Ain’t that something?” said Charles. The sarcasm was lost on her, however.

“Go there, sit there, have an ice-cream cone. A man will come and talk to you. Do you know what this is about?”

“No idea,” he said. But he had an idea. If this came out of Hot Springs, it meant someone from the Italians was reaching out, because the Italians had connections and influence everywhere.

“Anyhow, anything else?”

“No, Charles.”

“Okay,” said Charles, and hung up.

McLEAN, VIRGINIA

The present

Bob had come to Nick’s under urgent entreaty. Nick had something. Good old Nick.

“I can’t wait to hear this,” said Bob. “I ain’t got nothing but the Underwood stuff.”

“Well, this is substantive, but it’s not empirical. As I said before, not ipso facto evidentiary. But it is solidly circumstantial.

“I’ve read these reports over and over again,” he continued, “and after a while you learn the tone and the way of thinking behind them. Mostly, they’re assembled by lawyers, and they seem to be very thorough legal documents. They proceed logically, they conform to format and outline, they’re put together in such a way as to yield their information quickly — for prosecutors, that is, other lawyers. It’s like you’re reading internal memoranda from a law firm. If I remember, I went to law school three thousand years ago and even passed somebody’s bar, so I think I know what I’m talking about.”

“Makes sense.”

“So I’ve read all the Dillinger reports and all the Nelson reports, going back to Itasca, Illinois, October 3, 1930. Lots of others. Plainfield; Hillside; Peoples Savings of Grand Haven, Michigan; First National of Brainerd, Minnesota; Security National in Sioux Falls, South Dakota; First National in Mason City, Iowa; and, finally, South Bend.”

He gestured at the stacks of Xeroxes of ’30s-style typing, with the odd diagonal designations of CLASSIFIED or FOR INTERNAL USE ONLY randomly stamped across them. They lay on the worktable in Nick’s office/den.

“They’re all the same, and, frankly, they’d put a sugared-up child to sleep. But finally, in South Bend, I get— Well, you read it yourself. I’ve marked it in yellow.”