Стивен Хантер - G-Man

“ Mel. Anyhow, you must be beat. Want to take the rest of the day off?”

“Got lots of stuff set this afternoon.”

“Fair enough. Tomorrow.”

“Same. I’m fine.”

“Okay, Charles.”

He clapped Charles on the shoulder and Charles left. He got back to his desk, and as he half suspected it would be, there was a note from the agent on his phone.

“Charles… Your Uncle Phil called. Wants you to get back to him right away.”

NORTHWEST COOK COUNTY, ILLINOIS

July 1934

Another country road, another hot night.

The discussion: the last country road, the last hot night.

Les was morose. It was one thing for two State Troopers to show up, and the papers said they made a habit of taking back roads home at the end of the duty day to look for people in trouble off the main roads. Their appearance was simple luck of the draw, unpredictable. It represented nothing in the cosmic scheme of things.

It was the guy — a federal, Les was convinced — who got there just in time to save the troopers’ hash and almost put one through Les’s face. What the hell was he doing there? That had to be more than coincidence, even if the papers said nothing about his arrival. In fact, that alone convinced Les he was federal, and he saw him as a sort of night-riding phantom, a man of mystery, who had magical ways of knowing, and always, just like on the radio or at the picture shows, got there in the nick of time.

“You didn’t say anything?” he queried his pals. “I mean, how could he know?”

With J.P., it was about his girl in Sausalito, Sally.

“You didn’t say a thing?”

“Why would I? She thinks I’m a tractor salesman.”

“Could she have eavesdropped or gone through your pockets, sniffed a reward, and come up with the tip.”

“Sally’s not that kind of girl. She’s pretty, and like a lot of the pretty girls, she don’t get it. She isn’t a noticer, a rememberer. She just thinks I’m a handsome guy, a salesman on the road, lots of fun, knows stuff, and that’s it. She never heard of any big-gangster crap. She doesn’t read the papers or listen to anything but music on the radio.”

Les always had a thing about women. He didn’t trust them. He felt the same about Mickey Conforti, Homer’s honeybee. But he could get no satisfaction out of J.P., so he moved on.

“It couldn’t be wiretap,” said Fatso. “Les, we’re on to that. You can always hear the click when they come on to listen. There were no clicks. It’s impossible.”

“Think! Think! Think! Did anyone overhear you? Did you talk in public? How could they get inside if—”

“Les, if it had been federals, they would have had a whole outfit out there, with machinos and Browning rifles and the works. It would have been the Fourth of July. It was one guy. He was driving by, remember, he wasn’t there at the start. He wasn’t hiding by the road. He heard your fire, turned, raced to the top of the hill, piled out, and opened fire on you. If he was planning anything, it wouldn’t have been shooting at you from a hundred fifty yards out with a pistol. He couldn’t have known. It’s just coincidence.”

“One coincidence, I get,” said Les. “First the cops just happen to show up, then this fed shows up. That’s two, one on top of the other, back-to-back. That don’t make no sense. The world don’t work like that.”

Nobody was interested in arguing how the world did or didn’t work with Les, whose ideas were pretty much etched in stone, unchallengeable, unchangeable. He might go off if you pressed him too hard with your system of logic against his. Fatso backed off fast, as did Jack, when his turn came, and finally Carey.

“You haven’t noticed anything odd at the garage?” said Les. “You got the only fixed address in the bunch. Maybe they’re on to you? Maybe they followed you?”

“Les, I swear, I’m being careful. I double-check every move, every day. I come and go by different routes. I don’t conduct any of our business over this phone. I keep that part of my life completely separate. I got a nose for guys fishing around or peeping. I don’t have a record, except for juvie shit no one cares about. I’m perfect for you! I’m good at this! That’s why I want to be with you guys, I have a talent. I don’t want to spend my life changing oil in cars I can’t afford for people who treat me like a monkey. Man, if they knew I was in with Baby Face Nelson, they’d shit a brick.”

For once Les didn’t explode when he heard the name the papers had pinned on him, which always slapped him raw since he didn’t have a baby face, he wasn’t a half-pint or a squirt, but pretty much average-sized, and good-looking, as everybody said, and he always turned out well in suits and ties. But Carey’s sheer bliss at being this close to Baby Face Nelson was enough to keep Les from throwing punches, as he’d been known to do.

“All right,” Les said. “You’re still on with the cars? And you can boost that bus?”

“Yes sir,” said Carey.

“Good kid,” said Les.

He returned to the tourist cabin he’d rented just outside of Glenview for Helen, not far from Curtiss Airport, though the planes were an annoyance. Wasn’t much to do. She shopped every day and bought the Tribune or the Herald-Examiner , going out again at night for the Daily News . He read, he listened to the radio, and every once in a while they snuck out to the movies. One night they went to Manhattan Melodrama in Mount Prospect, surprised that it was still hanging around, since it had come out two months earlier, in May. But he liked it, and it really felt good to leave his troubles in the old kit bag while he watched Gable act it up as a gangster, unlike any gangster Les had ever known, and he’d known them for years, going back to his teenage days as an errand boy for the Capone and then the Touhy mobs. Gable was too likable, too charming. Your real gangster was a man of extreme toughness, and no matter how old and how much dignity he had, he would go to fists or knives or pistolas at the drop of a hat where matters of honor or business were concerned. Edward G. got that, and Cagney, but as handsome a palooka as Gable was, he wasn’t any gangster. He wasn’t tough enough. He was big, not tough, and there’s a difference, as Les’s whole life had proven. That’s why he liked the gangsters so much: they took shit from no man and gave shit when and where it pleased them, never looking back, always having the best dames, cars, clothes, and pals. He fashioned himself on that image, if his stronger ethic was to Helen, whom he loved almost as deeply as he loved being the gangster, and she had never, ever once told him to quit his ways. How great was that?

Their only contact was J.P., who came by every day to see if anything needed doing. He had liberty and flexibility because he wasn’t famous like Les was after South Bend and he could still live a normal life. One day he and Les drove west and tracked by map the Des Moines train as it came in around 5 p.m., as per Jimmy Murray’s scouting report. They were looking for a spot to heist it and had found a good enough place just outside of Wheaton, a long straightaway with a road that led quickly enough into a forested area with lots of crossroads. They could stash a car there, hit the train, disappear back into the woods, change cars, and get out with nothing showing to give them away. Following wider circles in the farming community, they came across a lady dropping off kids in a big yellow school bus. They followed her and, sure enough, she kept it at home, outside. It would be easy for Carey to jump it that day and lay it across the tracks to get the train halted, and then the guns would come out.