“So I should duck Drury, too, you think.”
“For right now. And when you feel up to talking, we’ll get you somebody federal.”
“You know they won’t beat me, Nate. I will not give in.”
“Take it easy, Jim-”
“If they kill me, my associates, my family, will carry on. They may kill others-but somebody in my organization will always be left to fight. I have told my boys this over and over. If we stand together, they can’t take us.”
“Okay, Jim. What do you say we talk about that later?”
“You know what they say, Nate?”
“No. What do they say?”
“The first hundred years are the hardest.”
And the sixty-five-year-old wounded son of a bitch winked at me.
An op of mine named O’Toole showed up a bit after nine to spell me. O’Toole, tall, thin, bored, was a few years older than me and I’d worked with him on the pickpocket detail back in ’32. I trusted him.
I left Peggy to comfort her aunt and found my way down to the main floor lobby and stepped out into an unusually cool evening for late June. I stretched; to my left was a statue of stocky, mustached Michael Reese himself, whoever the hell he was. Odors mingled in the breeze-from the nearby Keeley Brewery, and the stockyards, and the slum. Nasty odors, but I didn’t mind. I’d been on the South Side before.
Visiting hours were getting over and cabbies were picking up their white fares; I considered grabbing a cab myself, though it’s generally against my religion-not giving cab drivers my money is about all the religion I have, actually-but I was in a hurry to get to Bill Tendlar’s flat on the Near Northwest Side, where Lou was probably getting tired of sitting on the guy. And I was on expense account, so what the hell.
But the cabs were full up, and rather than wait and see if another would pull up, I wandered back over toward 29th, and the Mandel Clinic, where I noticed a jitney driver loading up colored passengers in his seven-passenger Chrysler. I walked up and asked the driver, a skinny Negro of maybe twenty-five wearing a brown army uniform stripped of all insignia, if he could take me to Cermak Road.
“If ya got a deece, jack, you got a ride,” he said.
That meant even if I was white, if I had a dime I was welcome aboard, so I flipped him one and his hand caught it like a frog would a fly and I climbed in back of the limo. A burly black guy who might’ve been a beef-lugger from the yards was in the seat next to me; in the seats facing us, a pretty colored gal sat next to a dark heavy-set woman who might have been her mother; the probable mother had a handbag you could hide a head in. The girl, whose hair had been chemically straightened, smiled at me nervously and the mother, whose hair was presumably under her yellow and blue floral scarf, gave me a dirty look that had no nerves in it at all. I stared between them at the back of a male passenger in the front seat.
I didn’t work Bronzeville often, but when I did I used jitneys and instructed my ops to, as well. They drove a little fast, but it was safer than standing on the sidewalk. If you stayed on the line, which was whatever boulevard the jitney driver was working, you could travel four blocks or forty for a dime (side trips cost a little more). But you couldn’t ride past 22nd-graft only bought these illegal overloaded taxis rights to the South Side streets.
As I got out at Cermak, I risked a wink at the pretty colored gal and she smiled at me, momentarily improving race relations; if the mother caught it, you wouldn’t be able to say the same for family relations.
I took the El back to the Loop, adding another twelve cents to my transportation costs, and I got off at Van Buren and Plymouth, right at the doorstep of my office. I would rather have gone straight to the Morrison and my comfortable bed. I was tired. I’d been shot at and scolded; I’d driven a shot-up Lincoln and lugged its shot-up bloody owner into an emergency room; I’d had to teach the director of medicine at Michael Reese what security was about; I’d even taken a jitney ride. But this day, this night, was not yet over.
For one thing, I needed to go up and reload my nine millimeter, and grab a rubber hose while I was at it. We had a little box of such things, saps and brass knucks and the like, on one of the closet floors. Every office has a “miscellaneous items” file, after all.
I headed for the door nestled between the pawn shop and the men only hotel, opened it, relieved not to find a wino sleeping it off there, thinking for perhaps the thousandth time that moving to better digs was way overdue for the A-1 Detective Agency. True, we’d taken over the better part of the fourth floor; but it was becoming an embarrassment to have clients drop by. The block had never been classy-despite Binyon’s and the Standard Club being just around the corner-but my business had come up in the world.
Still, certain things about my business never seemed to change.
He was waiting for me at the top of the first flight of stairs; he was sitting on the floor, hook-nosed and pale, black greasy hair combed back, cigarette dangling from his lips, a pile of butts before him at the center of the V made by his long legs. He was tearing a matchbook with his hairy hands, making something out of it. He wore a green and white checked sportcoat and brown slacks and a pale green shirt and a green and yellow and orange tie that was an offense against nature. His socks were green argyles with some ungodly pattern and his shoes tan loafers. He looked like the golf pro at a country club for felons.
I hadn’t seen the guy-who Guzik, on the phone, had once referred to as “the Greek”-since the night he approached Peggy and me on the street. His eyes flickered as he saw me, and he straightened his spine.
“Don’t get up on my account,” I told him, thinking about the unloaded automatic under my arm.
He got up slowly-like a building reassembling itself in a newsreel played slow-motion and backwards-and glowered at me.
“Mr. Guzik wants to see you.”
This wasn’t a point worth discussing.
“All right,” I said.
“Now,” he said, as if I’d refused.
“Fine. Where?”
“The restaurant.”
“Oh,” I said. “Okay.”
We walked the few blocks silently. The lake was in the summer breeze. Nice night or not, he was unhappy; he had a constipated look. I figured Guzik had told him not to rough me up or anything, and that ruined the Greek’s evening. It wasn’t the first time I’d ruined his evening, after all.
On narrow Federal Street, at the foot of the Union League Club, was St. Hubert’s English Grill, where I had once lunched with General Charles Gates Dawes himself, former vice-president of these United States, mover and shaker behind Chicago’s Century of Progress, one of the biggest bankers in the city. Dawes had been concerned about Chicago’s image-he was outraged by the Capone gang, this “colony of unnaturalized persons” who “had undertaken a reign of lawlessness and terror in open defiance of the law.” I wondered if Dawes, who undoubtedly still lunched here from time to time, was aware that another powerful figure in Chicago, one Jake “Greasy Thumb” Guzik, sat nightly in this same Dickensian-style inn dispensing graft to district police captains (or the sergeants who collected the payoffs for them) and to the bagmen (often plain-clothes cops) of numerous Chicago politicians, including various Mayors over the years.
Jake Guzik grew up in the rough Levee district on the near South Side, one of five brothers, and it was said he made his first nickel by running an errand for a prostitute. He was a pimp before he was a teenager and owned several whorehouses before he was twenty. His self-taught accounting skills attracted the attention of notorious Levee aldermen “Bath House” John Coughlin and “Hinky Dink” Kenna, who schooled Guzik in the art of the payoff, the place where politics and the underworld met.