Stolen Away

I didn’t speak to Ricca as he drove me. My mind continued whirring, wondering why in hell we were alone; there wasn’t even a fucking driver! Ricca had, once upon a time, been a driver, however, and the ride was as smooth as it was surprising. I expected to be taken to the Capri Restaurant, or the Bismarck Hotel or maybe the Congress, all frequent sites for Nitti holding court. Instead we took Monroe over to the near West Side.

To Jefferson Park Hospital, where Nitti’s father-in-law, Dr. Gaetano Ronga, was chief of surgery.

Was Nitti sick? I’d been summoned here before, by two lesser Outfit lights than Ricca, in December of ’32, in the aftermath of an assassination attempt on Nitti at an office in the LaSalle-Wacker Building by two cops who’d been Mayor Cermak’s personal hitmen. Those cops had dragged me along when they went to hit Nitti, without telling me that that was on the agenda, and I’d double-crossed them eventually, by telling the truth on the witness stand. By backing Nitti’s story. Which was why Nitti felt he owed me one, and why news-guys like Davis and certain cops like Captain John Stege considered me to be in Nitti’s pocket.

My first meeting with Nitti—not counting the few minutes in the LaSalle-Wacker when Cermak’s two cops had shot Nitti full of holes—had been in this same hospital, in Nitti’s private room, where he was surprising Cermak, Cermak’s killer cops and probably God Himself by surviving multiple close-range bullet wounds to the neck and back. Nitti was a hard man to kill. Cermak had proved less hard, when Nitti’s one-man suicide squad, Giuseppe Zangara, hit His Honor out in Miami. But that’s another story.

We were on the third floor. It was after visiting hours and the corridor was dark; what little light there was reflected off the shining waxed hardwood floor. An occasional nurse or doctor drifted by, faceless in the dimness. Ricca was walking quickly, his steps echoing, and sick people in their white beds and dark rooms glimpsed at left and right made a sort of morbid, moving and occasionally moaning tapestry. I kept up with Ricca, but stayed behind him, following like a kid being led to the principal’s office by a strict and pissed-off teacher.

Then we went around a comer and moved away from hospital rooms into what seemed to be an administrative area. At a door marked Dr. Gaetano Ronga, Ricca knocked; his lips were pursed with quiet annoyance.

“Yes?” said a confident male voice from within.

“It’s Paul,” he said. “Your package is here.”

“Send him in,” the voice said.

And Ricca, for once, did wait on me: he opened the door. The look on his face was glazed and quietly contemptuous. I went on by him, into the room, and the door shut behind me. Ricca had not followed.

In a medium-size office, filled with dark wood filing cabinets, its walls hung with diplomas, family pictures and prints of flying fowl, behind a big desk on which various manila folders were neatly arranged, sat Frank Nitti.

“Nate Heller,” Nitti said, with a generous gesture of one hand and a smile, but not getting up, “sit down. Nice to see you again. Thanks for comin’ around.”

“My pleasure, Mr. Nitti,” I said, finding a hardwood chair and sitting across from him.

“You know better than that,” he said, mock-scoldingly. “It’s ‘Frank’ and it’s ‘Nate.’ Right?”

“Right,” I said. We were old friends, after all; ask anybody.

Nitti was a small, well-groomed man in his early fifties, damn near handsome, his face flecked with scar tissue here and there, his lower lip particularly. His hair was slicked back, dark with a little gray, and very neat; he was a former barber and fussy about his appearance. He seemed uncharacteristically casual in dress tonight, a white shirt open at the collar, sleeves rolled up.

“I hope you’re well, Frank,” I said.

“Just in for a checkup. Ever since Cermak’s sons of bitches pumped that lead in me, I gotta come in all the time and get this and that checked.” He shrugged dismissively, but I’d heard about his bleeding ulcers and back problems. “I take these physicals at night. It’s more private that way. So. How’s business, Heller?”

“Not bad. Little divorce work. Some retail credit accounts.”

“I see in the paper you picked up a client out east.”

I figured that was it. Davis’s story about me working for Governor Hoffman on the Lindbergh case was undoubtedly all over the evening edition of the News.

“Yeah,” I said. “Hell of a thing. Governor of New Jersey, no less.”

“You worked the Lindbergh case as a cop, didn’t you? Back in ’32?”

“I was the Chicago police liaison, yes. I was just on the fringes. No big deal.”

“That was when Al said he could get Little Lindy back. Right?”

“Uh, right, Frank.” Where the hell was this going?

Nitti folded his hands; he looked strangely thoughtful. “I’d like you to do a job for me, while you’re out there.”

“A job?”

He shrugged. “Nothing hard. Just, if you turn anything up that would be of interest to me, I want you to let me know.”

“Of interest to you…?”