Stolen Away

“I just don’t understand you guys,” he said, trying to sound reasonable, but damn near whining. “When I came to Chicago eleven years ago, I had only forty bucks in my pocket. I went in a business that didn’t do nobody no harm. They talk about the unemployed. Well, I give work to the unemployed. At least three hundred young men are getting from one hundred fifty dollars to two hundred dollars a week from me, in the harmless beer racket. Put me out of business, and all my men lose their jobs—they have families and little houses. What do you think they’ll do? Go on the streets and beg? No. These are men I’ve taken out of the holdup and bank-robbery business and worse and gave real jobs. Where will they go, and what will they do, when you put me out of business?”

“We’ll find cells for them, too, Al.”

His eyes blazed. “You’re so high and fuckin’ mighty! Sharing in a bootlegger’s profits by way of income tax, you’re aiding and abetting after the goddamn fact. It’s like the G was demanding its percentage of a bank burglar’s haul!”

“Old news, Snorkey. Very old news.”

The rage was bubbling in Capone, but he restrained himself.

“Look, look,” he said, patting the air in a peacemaking gesture, “never mind that. Never mind any of that. I just want to help, here. There isn’t a man in America that wouldn’t like to return that child to its folks, whatever it cost him personally.”

He pointed to a picture of his young son gilt-framed by his bed in the cell.

“I can imagine,” he said, gray-green eyes glistening in the sorrowful mask of his round face, “how Colonel Lindbergh feels. I weep for him and his lovely wife.”

“Do you really?”

Capone’s lip began to curl in a sneer, but he pulled back, and meekly said, “They’ll listen to you, Ness. You tell them.”

“Then tell me something you didn’t tell anybody else. You’ve run this vaudeville routine past Captain Stege, and Callahan of the Secret Service…but if you want to convince me, tell me something new. Tell me why you really think you can get that little boy back.”

Silence hung in the air like a noose.

Capone licked his fat lips and, mustering all the earnestness he could, said, “There’s a possibility a guy who did some work for me, once, did this awful thing. He is not in my employ now. Understood? But if he did it, and I can find him—and I can find him—we can get that kid back.”

“Who is it, Al? Give me a name.”

“Why in hell should I tell you?”

“Because you care about that kid. Because you cry yourself to sleep at night, over this ‘awful thing.’”

Capone lifted his head, looked down at Ness suspiciously. “If I tell you, you’d take it as a show of…sincerity?”

“I might.”

The glittering eyes narrowed to slits. “Conroy,” he said.

“Bob Conroy?”

The big head nodded once.

Eliot thought about that. Then he said, almost to himself, “Conroy lammed it out of Chicago years ago.”

Conroy was said to be one of the shooters in the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. Word was he’d gone east, when the heat got turned up after that noisy little affair.

Capone clutched the bars. “I can find Conroy. Get me out of here. Let me help.”

Ness smiled blandly at Capone. “I wouldn’t let you out of that cell to save a hundred kids.”

The round face filled with blood.

“So long, Snorkey.”

“Only my friends call me that,” the gangster said ominously. “You son of a bitch…who the hell do you think you are…”

“I’m Eliot Ness,” Eliot Ness said pleasantly. “And you—you’re right where you belong.”

From behind us, as the deputy was unlocking the big steel door for us, Capone called out, “I’m going to the papers with this! Lindbergh’s going to hear about my offer!”

Going down in the elevator, Eliot said, “Lindy already has heard, obviously. That’s why Irey and Wilson are going up there. To advise him.”

“Do you take Capone seriously?”

“Well, this morning, President Hoover and his cabinet discussed his offer.”

“Jesus.”

“The Attorney General suggested exploring whether Capone’s proposal would have to be referred to the Circuit Court of Appeals.”

“For Pete’s sake, Eliot. Capone’s just trying any desperate measure to get out of stir…”

“Right. But how desperate is he?”

“What do you mean?”

“Desperate enough to engineer this kidnapping himself, so he can ‘solve’ it, and earn his freedom?”

The elevator clanked to a stop.

“What do you think, Eliot?”

“I think with Capone,” he said, “any evil thing is possible.”

3

The road to the Lindbergh estate was called Featherbed Lane; but the winding, rutted dirt path was hardly rest-inducing. In fact, it woke me out of a sound sleep I’d been enjoying since shortly after leaving Grand Central Station, at 10:00 A.M., where the Twentieth Century Limited had deposited me into the care of a stuffy, well-stuffed Britisher named Oliver Whately.