Stolen Away

He looked at me pointedly. “Heller, don’t make me spell it out.”

I wasn’t “Nate” anymore, I noticed.

“Okay,” I said tentatively. “But I’m not quite following you.”

He lifted a hand and one finger of that hand. “If this thing comes back to Chicago…if it comes back to the Outfit…I want to be the first to know.”

I shifted uncomfortably in the chair. “Frank, maybe I better call Governor Hoffman and just back out of this thing. I don’t want to be put in a position where I’m working at cross-purposes for two clients.”

Nitti stood and I damn near jumped. He walked past me to the door and opened it. Ricca was waiting out there, across the hail, a sentry in a tailored topcoat.

“Paul,” he said, gently. “See if you can find me a glass of milk.”

Ricca nodded and disappeared and Nitti shut the door.

He began to pace, saying, “You know, I was the first of the boys to take a tax-rap fall. They got me before they got Al, you know.”

I nodded.

“I hadn’t been outside so very long, when they put Al away. While I was gone, Al moved the Waiter up in my place—temporarily of course.”

I said nothing.

He stopped pacing, stood before me. He was not a big man; and he was slender. But his presence was towering. He said, “A1 and the Waiter always been tight. They got tighter when I was away. I feel they could be…reckless, at times. One thing you know about me, Heller, is I don’t like attracting the heat. If something has to be done, then you do it in such a way it don’t come back to your doorstep.”

What Nitti was talking about was his disagreement with Capone over such PR catastrophes as the shooting of reporter Jake Lingle and the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. Not that Nitti was nonviolent. But Nitti was a master manipulator, a cunning impresario of events. When he took Cermak out, it looked political; when he got rid of John Dillinger, it was the feds who took the rap. Just last month, “Machine-Gun” Jack McGurn—longtime Outfit guy who’d reportedly gone disloyal—was gunned down in a bowling alley, on St. Valentine’s Day. The hitters left a comic valentine on the corpse, leading the cops and press to assume that this was some long-overdue revenge upon McGurn by remnants of the old Bugs Moran gang for McGurn’s role in the famed Clark Street massacre seven years before. To me the slaying had Nitti’s chess-master fingerprints all over it.

“I think Al and the Waiter may have done this Lindbergh thing,” he said. Shrugged. ‘That is, had it done, through their East-Coast contacts. Ricca spent as much time out there as he did Chicago, in those days; he was Al’s contact with Luciano and Gordon and Schultz and the rest.”

I didn’t know if I liked hearing Nitti talk this openly. But I didn’t seem to have any other choice than to listen.

“If Al did this—had this done—to try and buy himself out of stir, I want to know.”

“Wouldn’t you have been…consulted?”

“Jesus, Heller! Are you kidding? You think I’d let them pull a crazy fucking stunt like that? It would’ve been from Capone’s lips to Ricca’s ear. I don’t know for sure that they did it, understand. It’s rumor. It’s just…what you say, supposition, on my part.”

“Capone always claimed a former employee of his, name of Bob Conroy, pulled the job.”

“Conroy was Al’s man. No former about it.”

“I don’t think the feds ever found Conroy.”

Nitti winced with amusement. “Oh sure, they did. Frank Wilson himself, workin’ with that New York dick Finn, turned Conroy up, in August of ’32.”

“Really? I never heard about it.”

Nitti shrugged. “Didn’t make the papers out here. Nobody picked up on the Chicago angle. Conroy was found in a rundown back-room apartment he’d been hiding out in on West Hundred and Fourth in New York. Him and his pretty blonde wife. Double suicide, they called it.”

“Jesus.”

“There was a beer war that broke out, right about the time the body of the Lindbergh kid turned up. A lot of people in the bootlegging business was dropping like flies out on the East Coast. Waxey Gordon and Dutch Schultz was going at it. Ever hear of a pair called Max Hassel and Max Greenberg?”

“I don’t believe so,” I said.

“They were so-called victims in that war. So were half a dozen of their associates, over a period of six months or so. Could Al, through the Waiter, been tying up some loose East-Coast ends? If bootleggers were recruited to snatch the kid, that would make sense.”

I could only nod.

Another sharp rapping made me squirm in my chair.

“’Cusa,” Nitti said. He went to the door, where Ricca was holding a glass of milk. Seeing Ricca like that, his face as white as the milk though considerably less wholesome, would have been amusing if it hadn’t been so frightening.

“Paul,” Nitti said with a smile, taking the milk, “thank you. Would you find my father-in-law, please, and tell him I’m ready for him.”

And Ricca, with an almost imperceptible disgruntled sigh, again disappeared. Nitti shut the door and turned to smile at me like a kindly priest.