Стивен Хантер - G-Man

“So anyway, Les,” Tony finally got around to asking, “I love you, but you ain’t here to hear that, you got something going on. What can I do for you? I owe you, buddy, and always will.”

“Ah, that’s old stuff, forget all that,” said Les, knowing it was impossible to forget all that. In 1924, when both were sixteen, they’d boosted a haberdashery in Melrose Park, just west of the city beyond Oak Park, and when they came out, the beat cop was waiting. He grabbed, they squirmed, and Les got away clean, but Officer O’Doyle, or whatever his name was, laid eight inches of kibosh on Tony and, when he was down and out, cuffed him. Then he dragged him back to his feet, hauled him to the nearest call box, sat him on the curb, and started to call in the paddy wagon for the bad boy.

Since it would have been Tony’s tenth or so infraction, he was looking at hard time. Since they’d clunked the haberdasher so hard, he never woke up, it would have been murder in the first degree. At sixteen, Tony wouldn’t have gotten the sizzle seat, but he was looking at forty years in Joliet. No big place in River Forest, no Ginny, no two kids, number three on way, no downtown side action, no place in the Nitto organization, no prospects except getting drilled by jigaboos in the shower every day until 1974.

But before Officer O’Whatever could punch the phone, Les jumped him from the roof and laid him out with a brick and laid him out cold. Les hadn’t run a step. He’d doubled around to set his pal free. You don’t buy loyalty like that. It took a few minutes of rummaging, but they got the key off the slugged cop, popped the cuffs, and took off, laughing wildly in the night.

“I do need a favor,” said Les. “I don’t think I ever asked you for one, even when Capone’s people told me to go blow.”

“So shoot. I’ll see what I can do, you know that.”

“You mentioned the guys going down. Johnny, Homer, now Charlie. You don’t even know that I got jumped by a cowboy, who almost parted my hair permanently, just barely scrambled out of there with my head still in one piece.”

“Well,” said Tony, “I hear that Floyd got himself blown out because he ran into a tree.”

“I did some jobs with him. Yeah, the guy was no genius. Dumb as a cockroach. But still — the other guys were all smart, careful, professional, the best. Seeing them notched, feeling myself almost done the same way, it’s damned strange when nobody came close for eighteen months before. It just suddenly starts happening. See what I’m saying?”

“I’m listening.”

Les laid it out, his fear that the only outfit that could collect and coordinate intelligence from all over the Midwest and put together a solid idea about when-where on the bank robber stars was the one run by the Italians, and that they had decided as policy, for some reason, to put all these Thompson gunners out of business.

“Well, I haven’t heard anything like that,” said Tony. “Honestly, it don’t make no sense, because while the Division is so busy hunting you guys, we’re just oozing into this and that. Jesus, Les, you have no idea where we are. Not just whorehouses and clubs and the book. No, in unions, in shops, in the movies, for god’s sake, controlling the racing wires, radio. Man, we are everywhere!”

“It doesn’t make sense to me either,” confessed Les. “But I know they got long-term thinkers, and soldiers like you and me can’t figure on their level.”

Tony had to admit that was true.

“So you want me to look around, see what I can nose out?”

“Not quick enough. No, I want to plug this up now, fast, and get back to business.”

“Don’t go to war. These old Eye-ties can have a hundred guns on the street in an hour, all of ’em looking for you. They’d go hard, and full-time, on you. I’d hate to see that.”

“Wouldn’t think of it. But if there was one guy putting all this together and someone were to rub him out, who would know? Nobody would put it together. They’d think it was some old feud. You guys are famous for your feuds, and they get settled in every alley in Chicago six nights a week.”

“It’s true. Maybe it’ll change, but it’s true.”

“So here’s my plan. I’m guessing Mr. Nitto would give this to someone high up. Someone who could make phone calls and get answers. He’d have a rank or something. I know you got ranks, divisions, sort of like the army.”

“It’s all in Italian, so you wouldn’t understand. But there are four ‘underbosses’ that basically run each quarter of the city and report only to Mr. Nitto.”

“That’s what I figured. So I figure it’s one of them. They’re the only ones with the power to get the answers. He’s snitching to the Division each time he’s able to put two and two together from reports that a certain guy will be at a certain place, like Wolf Road, or the Biograph, or a street corner in St. Paul.”

“How do you find the right guy?”

“Here’s how. You go, one at a time, to each guy. You say to him, or to one of his guys, real casual-like, ‘Say, Louie’—or whatever his name is—‘Say, Louie, I got a call last night from my old pal Les — you know, Baby Face Nelson.’ ‘Yeah?’ says Louie. ‘Yeah,’ you say. ‘He’s back in town, hanging out in Morton Grove at a motel called The Star. He’s trying to put together a big job. Thought I ought to share with you.’ ‘Good man,’ says Louie.”

“Okay,” said Tony.

“So, we go to The Star Motel in Morton Grove, or whatever. If the Division jumps us, we know it’s Louie. If they doesn’t, we know it’s not.”

“Les, I hate to say it, but that’s a crazy plan. If the Division hits you, you’re probably going to be dead.”

“Nah. For two reasons. First, I’ve upped our firepower. I’ve got a Monitor, real handy in the backseat, plus it’ll cut right through the Division cars. They only have one guy who can shoot, far as I can tell. He’ll be there, but I know him, and if I put a pill through him, they’ll break and run, and that’s my plan. Plus, second, we’re waiting for them. If we can, we’ll cut and run, but, if not, we’ll go to the Monitor and leave their heaps smoking in the road.”

Tony regarded him with wide eyes and a gaping mouth. “Man, you got balls. I never heard of anyone with balls like that.”

“I just want to nail the guy who got Johnny and Homer. And even dumb-bunny Charlie. If I get that Division gunslinger in the process, so much the better. This is the only way I can figure out how to do it.”

But Tony couldn’t get over it.

“You got the biggest set in the world. You make Capone look like a little purple nancy!”

McLEAN, VIRGINIA

The present

His iPhone rang. It rarely did. He hated it, and seemed only to get bad news out of it, and kept trying to lose it, but people kept bringing it back to him. He almost never gave out the number, and those few to whom he did knew better than to call frivolously, if at all, unless absolutely necessary, by which he meant an announcement that the world was ending.

He looked at it, saw a Texas area code in the number box, followed by integers of a certain familiarity, and then recalled he had given the number to Bill Lebman, Hyman Lebman’s very helpful dentist grandson in San Antonio.

“Swagger… Hello, Bill.”

“Mr. Swagger.”

“That’s Bob, Bill.”

“Thank you. Bob, your visit sort of haunted me, and I was sorry I couldn’t do more. And you do remember that I said Grandpa was worried about Treasury agents because of the National Firearms Act and so he started keeping very careful records?”

“I do.”