Dead Man’s Blues Read online

  At some point after one o’clock, he spotted Alpha entering the party. He perked up when he saw her, smiled and waved her over. She looked good in the summer dress she was wearing, dark-skinned, seven years younger than him, bright with youthful expectation. It was only then that Louis realized he had left Lil for her opposite, too; Alpha was homely, unpretentious, uneducated, down-to-earth, non-judgmental. He guessed it wasn’t a point of failure, but one of self-awareness. He was a month shy of twenty-eight years old, and he’d already left behind two wives, and if things went well with Alpha he’d have a third before he was thirty.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ Alpha asked when she reached him and saw his face.

  ‘Oh, nothing,’ he said. ‘What took you so long?’

  ‘I had to wait for Momma to get home before I could leave Clarence,’ she said.

  ‘Everything all right?’ he asked, and Alpha nodded.

  ‘Good. What you wanna drink?’

  ‘Bourbon,’ she said, and he stood and was turning to head toward the kitchen when she touched him on the arm.

  ‘I almost forgot,’ she said. ‘Ida called the house.’

  ‘Oh, yeah?’ he said, frowning. ‘What she want?’

  ‘Business. Said to call her back first thing tomorrow.’

  Louis thought a moment, then he headed into the kitchen, casting a look at the dead flies dancing in front of the night sky as he went.

  18

  It was all on account of a girl, just the wrong side of sixteen. Greek and blonde – how often do you see that? Al had taken her virginity and put her up in a luxury suite at the Metropole, and pretty much kept her under lock and key, and he knew none of his men were stupid enough to touch her, so when she started burning and went to see the doc and took the Wassermann test and the doc diagnosed her with the pox, it meant she could only have gotten it from Al. She moaned and whined and bitched until Al agreed to get himself checked out too, even though he knew what the doc would say.

  He found a clinic outside Chicago, in a two-bit town in the middle of nowhere, far enough away that word couldn’t get out, and he dropped the Capone and booked in under the name Al Brown. He’d driven out there one afternoon in the emerald-green Rolls-Royce, stripped naked, sallied through an onslaught of tests, and now he’d gone back to get the results. Just him and his driver and Jack and Frank in the Rolls. The convoy he normally traveled in – a flivver in front, a touring car behind – he’d left in Chicago, figuring for these two trips the Rolls would be enough, with its bulletproof windows, steel sides, combination locks and machine gun strapped to the driver’s seat.

  He’d gone into the clinic and listened to the doctor for twenty minutes, asked a few questions, and walked out again in a daze, stepping onto the front steps and standing there looking at the street, the doctor’s words still roaring like motorcycles round the metal drum of his brain.

  Tertiary syphilis, mostly likely. That’s third stage. It means it’s spread. Maybe to the nervous system and the brain. For early stages, there’s an arsenic-based drug – Salvarsan. But for late stage, I’m sorry, there’s no cure. What exactly do you know about the disease?

  There was the green Rolls, parked up on the sidewalk, and there were Jack and Frank, smoking cigarettes, turning to look at him, their faces dropping.

  ‘Boss?’ said Frank, hurrying over. ‘Jeez, you look like you seen a ghost. What the hell happened in there?’

  It took a couple of seconds, but Al snapped out of it. ‘Let’s get the fuck out of here,’ he said, brushing past Frank and into the car.

  They pulled into traffic, and Al stared out of the window.

  Syphilis is caused by a spirochete, a worm-like bacterium, shaped like a corkscrew. (Here the doctor spiraled his finger through the air.) First stage happens soon after infection. You get a chancre or boil on your genitals. Then it goes away. Second stage happens a few weeks later, you may get rashes on your hands and feet. Flu-like symptoms. Again, it all goes away, and the disease enters a latent stage. And then, in roughly a third of infected people, about fifteen years after infection, it comes back as tertiary syphilis. Unfortunately, it looks like you’re one of them.

  Fifteen years. Flashes of Brooklyn. Borough of Churches. Navy Street in Red Hook, the slum where Al had grown up. It was next to the ocean, flushed with the brackish air of the Atlantic, spattered with seagull shit and the burned-oil smell of shipyards, and whatever businesses trailed in the wake of docks and sailors – saloons, tattoo parlors, gambling houses, brothels. Among the whores on Sands Street was an Irish girl, red-haired, the ocean in her eyes. His brother Ralph had caught something too. But like Ralph’s case, Al’s had cleared up. He remembered stepping out of her building, onto the street, a smile on his face.

  If it develops into neurosyphilis, the spirochete may enter the brain, attack the frontal lobes – your personality may become exaggerated. You may suffer from mood swings, irritability, anxiety, loss of memory, mental impairment. Judging by what you’ve reported, you’ve experienced most, if not all of these symptoms. Eventually it erodes the personality completely, and you’ll lose your mind. After that, it’s just a matter of time.

  He ran the doctor’s words through his head, as if by repeating them over and over they might take on new meaning; he might discover he had misunderstood them, that it wasn’t inevitable he’d go mad and die. He looked up to see his driver giving him a funny look through the rearview. The man’s gaze flicked back to the road as soon as they made eye contact.

  Al looked out of the window and saw they were driving through the Factory Belt. Soon they’d be in the Bungalow Belt, the ring of middle-class suburbs that encircled the city in a crescent shape, where people who had the means to escape the urban chaos moved. Al had always thought of them as suckers, drones who had to work for a living, but recently he’d started to envy them; he’d realized too late in life that unlike luxury suites and mansions and holidays, you couldn’t purchase peace of mind and domestic tranquility with money and violence.

  Roughly six percent of Americans have the disease. When the draftees were tested for the Great War, that number went up to ten percent. The vast majority recover from it. I’m sorry to say, for you, Mr Brown, it’s a case of managing the disease, rather than curing it.

  As they were driving through the slums on the outskirts of Chicago, he realized he didn’t want to go back to the Metropole just yet, to face the questions and bantering of the men. He needed to be alone for a little bit longer.

  ‘Take me to the schvitz.’

  ‘It’s nearly evening, boss. It’ll be closing.’

  ‘Then they’ll open it.’

  They pulled up outside the 14th Street Bath House, near the Maxwell Street ghetto. Al had learned about schvitzs from Jack Guzik, one of the many Jews he was friends with, and employed in the Outfit. Jack had taken them along and they’d all become regulars, though it was years since Al had last visited the place.

  They walked into the lobby and Frank and Jack spoke to the owner, and with a nod and a glance at Al, the owner, an old, stooped Yid, locked the door and hung up a sign: Closed For Boiler Repairs. Al told his men to wait outside, and he went into the changing rooms alone, hung up his clothes in the rusty metal lockers alone, walked into the schvitz itself alone, and sat in the Stygian heat and darkness and steam of the main sauna room alone. He couldn’t remember the last time it had happened; being surrounded by sentinels was part of his life. Always bodyguards in front of him and behind, from the moment he woke to when he fell asleep. That was another thing those suckers in the Bungalow Belt had that he didn’t – privacy, and the space to think.

  But then he realized he wasn’t alone, not quite. There was another customer in there who’d yet to leave, a middle-aged man sitting on a bench at the other end of the sauna. He smiled at Al through the gaps in the plumes of steam, and Al wondered if the man was a fairy. He glared at him through the gloom, but the man must not have seen; he continued to sit there, smiling, sweat dri
pping through the hairs on his chest, black and coarse. Then the steam billowed and the man disappeared and Al was alone once more.

  He’d been in gangs in Brooklyn, but then most of the boys had. He’d met Frankie Yale and Johnny Torrio, but even then he’d been mostly legit. After he left school in the sixth grade, he worked three years in a munitions factory and another three as a paper-cutter. He met Mae and married her, and the two of them moved out to Baltimore and Al got a job as a bookkeeper for a construction firm. He wore a suit, learned accounting, spent his free time playing pool and dancing. That was his unremarkable life, and that might have been it – Al Capone the accountant. But then his father had died and it unearthed some deep-buried urges and anxieties. He quit his nine-to-five and called up his old mentor Torrio and asked him for a job. Torrio had told him to head out to Chicago to run one of his brothels. From there came riches and infamy and de-facto control of the world’s third-largest city.

  If it develops into neurosyphilis, the spirochete may enter the brain, attack the frontal lobes – your personality may become exaggerated.

  Al had always thought his decision to go from regular working Joe to gangster had been caused by his father’s death, by it triggering some deeper understanding of his own mortality. Now, in the darkness of the schvitz, he wondered about the spirochetes. What if it was them gnawing away at his brain that had been responsible for his decision? He imagined them like tiny worms, long and thin, not the spirals the doctor had suggested. Serpents or dragons, like the Chinese ones he saw snaking their way down chopsticks or the sides of chop-suey joints. Thousands of them in his head, eating away at his brain, deciding on his personality and the course of his life.

  He thought about all the people he had beaten and tortured and killed, all the lives he had changed – had all that been caused by the spirochetes, too, plotting away in the darkness of his skull? And if all the bad things he’d done were the work of the worms, what did that say for his chance of entering heaven? If they were in charge, what did any of it matter – good or evil?

  He couldn’t be losing his mind. He couldn’t not be in charge. Not now he was facing a war on three fronts – with Bugs Moran looking like he might make a move any minute, and the mayor withdrawing his backing, and the possible fight with New York that was looming.

  Al rubbed the sweat from his face and looked about the gloom for the metal bowl of cold water. He found it near his feet, pulled the birch branches from it and swatted himself, the iciness trickling down his torso, cooling him, relaxing him.

  When Al had originally moved to Chicago years before, the idea was to set up Chicago as an outpost for the New York Mob. But Torrio and Al had been so successful that Chicago ended up the more powerful of the two cities. Now Al was hearing that New York was going to try and wrestle back control, that Frankie Yale and some up-and-comers – Meyer Lansky and Lucky Luciano – were in on the plan. Al knew the New York mobsters considered him an embarrassment – a man who courted the press, who’d turned himself into a celebrity, who made waves, who got them noticed by all the wrong people in Washington. Was that need to make himself famous the spirochetes too? That grasping after greatness? That grandeur that seemed forever just beyond his reach, in the haze at the top of the mountain?

  . . . your personality may become exaggerated.

  Now in the middle of one possible war with New York and another with Moran, half the Republican Party had been poisoned at the Ritz. Al had called Dante over from New York to investigate, and Dante had come, not suspecting he was being set up. If Dante got to the bottom of the poisoning, so much the better. But Dante was also friends with Lansky and Luciano back in New York. So if they did try to make a move, Al had one of their friends in Chicago, ready to be abducted, made to squeal, held for ransom, killed. And if Dante was in on it, and tried to double-cross him, the men Al had assigned to follow Dante would pick up on it.

  It was a win-win situation for Al – inviting the friend of his enemies to his table. It was the kind of knight’s move he used to take pride in, the kind of stratagem that had got him to the top and kept him there. But now he was wondering if it wasn’t just foolishness; some overly elaborate plan the spirochetes had conjured up. The doctor’s diagnosis had shaken his confidence in his wits. How could he tell the difference between smart moves and stupid ones, if he was going mad?

  In the gloom, the plumes of steam parted, and Al looked up and saw the man on the bench opposite staring at him once more, smiling, a gleam in his eye. Al glared back at him, and wondered if the man had bad eyesight not to see the look on Al’s face. Then the man blew him a kiss, and an unholy rage welled up inside him and he imagined picking up the bronze bowl of cold water at the end of the bench, turning it over, beating the man around the head with it.

  You may suffer from mood swings, irritability, anxiety, loss of memory, mental impairment.

  Al tried to calm himself, and the steam moved in between the men once more and Al stared down, at his toes resting on the hot tiled floor. As he stared on, the image of Frankie Yale came into his mind, a year and a half ago in New York, when they were making their deal. It was on the same trip that Al had taken his only child, Sonny, to the surgeons in the city to have the mastoid infection in his left ear fixed up. A wave of guilt washed over him and more of the doctor’s words circled through his brain, causing the spirochetes to quiver like willows in a breeze.

  Congenital syphilis is passed from mother to child. Perhaps you could tell me about your son’s symptoms?

  Like his mentor, Torrio, Al had picked an Irish girl for his wife. He’d wed Mae when he was nineteen and she was twenty-one, at St Mary Star of the Sea. He remembered signing the marriage license. I declare I am free from all venereal diseases and infections. Now it was clear what had happened: Al had infected his wife, and she’d given birth to a child with the disease. That was why Sonny’s life had been full of illness. Illness that Al had caused. It also explained why he and Mae had never had any other children – the spirochetes had left them barren.

  Now Al wondered what the point was of building an empire, if all it had to rest on were Sonny’s sickly shoulders.

  He sighed. And something about the idea of an empire tugged at his despondency. He took a long moment to think about it, then out of despair came hope. He’d been looking at it all wrong. He realized that now. If the spirochetes were in charge, he was free to do as he pleased. Not being in control could be a form of freedom, if only he saw it as such. All it took was looking at things in a new way, and the way he looked at it was, paradoxically, something he could control. A great warmth washed over him, and he grinned, elated with the joy of a liberated man.

  He rose, suddenly in a rush to get back to his empire, to his men, to the high life and intrigue of la malavita. He fixed his towel around his waist and walked toward the shower-room. The fairy watched him go, a look of disappointment on his face.

  Al stepped into the bright lights and cold white tiles of the shower-room and froze, suddenly realizing something, something that made the starkness of the shower-room seem even more hellish than the sauna. His mood had swung from despondency to joy in just a few seconds. Was that the spirochetes at work, too? Were they also playing with his feelings? His happiness was replaced with a sense of injustice. After all the work he’d put in to get where he was, would he be left to enjoy none of it?

  He turned and stomped back into the heat and gloom of the sauna. He picked up the bronze bowl, and in a burning rage, he beat the fairy to death with it.

  PART FOUR

  SOLO

  ‘The gangster’s defense of his mode of life arises only when he comes in contact with the legitimate outside world. Only then does he become conscious of a conflicting way of living. In his own group, on the contrary, he achieves status by being a gangster, with gangster attitudes, and enhances his reputation through criminal exploits.’

  THE ILLINOIS ASSOCIATION FOR

  CRIMINAL JUSTICE, 1928

 
; 19

  The lobby of the Ritz Carlton was so spacious and abuzz with people that it had the feel of a great bazaar or a Continental train station. About halfway through the morning Dante entered through the revolving doors, holding the dog in his arm, letting it hop onto the floor when they were inside the lobby. The dog had stayed in the car the previous night, refusing to budge when Dante had started the engine to head home, so he had taken it back to the Drake with him, washed it down in the bathtub and ordered it a steak tartare from room service. The next morning, when Dante had to leave for his meeting with the house detective at the Ritz, it gave him doe eyes.

  Dante sidestepped bellboys and porters and scooted around guests, the dog scuttling behind him all the while. He got to the bar, sat on a stool and called the barman over, a tall man with a hooked nose held high into the air, and macassared hair with a center parting so severely straight Dante imagined the man standing in front of a mirror with a comb and a set square.

  ‘Would sir like something from the special menu?’ he asked in a hoity-toity tone of voice.

  ‘Yes, he would,’ replied Dante. ‘A beer, please. Chicago brew.’

  The barman about-turned and got him his drink, which was served in a tall metal cup, a sweat of condensation on the outside, and was accompanied by a porcelain bowl loaded with salted cashews. He laid a few cashews down on the carpet for the dog, then took a sip of his beer.

  Chicago was one of the few cities in the country it was easier to get a beer than it was hard liquor. Distilleries were simple enough to hide, but for a city to be as full of breweries as Chicago was, it took a whole army of policemen and politicians to look the other way, to not notice the noises and smoke coming out of buildings that were supposed to have been closed down years before, to not notice the convoys of trucks going in and out all day. Half the neighborhoods in the city, especially the German and Czech ones, were permanently drenched in the sweet aroma of malt, hops and fermented yeast. It took corruption on a truly grand scale to make it so easy to buy a beer, but with beer sales in the city topping thirty million dollars a month, the bootleggers had enough spare cash to keep oiling the machine.