“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.
Tall, rawboned yet fleshy looking, dark hair thinning and slicked back, Whately was Colonel Lindbergh’s butler, not a chauffeur, and he seemed to resent the duty. I’d tried to make conversation, and got back a combination of stiff upper lip and cold shoulder, so I buttoned my lip, settled my shoulder against the door of the tan Franklin sedan, and began sawing logs.
I needed the sleep. I’d been up much of the night, moving from the smoking car to the dining car, drinking too heavily for my own good. The Chicago P.D. had predictably seen fit to buy me the cheapest accommodations possible-frankly, I counted myself lucky I wasn’t in the baggage compartment-and I had slept only fitfully, in my Pullman upper.
But it wasn’t the accommodations, really. It was me. I was nervous. I’d never been east before, and certainly never met anybody as famous as Colonel Charles A. Lindbergh-except maybe Al Capone, and we hadn’t really met, had we? Besides which, Lindbergh was one of the few men on this disreputable planet that a Chicago cynic like yours truly couldn’t help but admire.
Only a few years older than me, Lindbergh was, of course, one of the most famous and admired men in the world. Five short years ago he’d piloted his tiny, single-engine plane-the Spirit of St. Louis-across the Atlantic Ocean; this 3,610-mile jaunt-the first solo nonstop flight from New York to Paris-had made the gangling, unassuming youth (twenty-five years old at the time) an immediate international celebrity. Without meaning to, he won hundreds of awards and medals, including the Distinguished Flying Cross and the Congressional Medal of Honor. Judging by the papers and newsreels, he was a quiet, even shy midwestern boy who’d managed to give Americans a hero in an age of immorality and corruption.
I didn’t believe in heroes, yet Lindbergh was a hero to me, too. I felt strangely embarrassed about this, and oddly uncomfortable about going to meet him; and uneasy about encountering him at such a sad, desperate point in his life.
“Sour land,” Whately said, suddenly, in a bass voice that rattled the windows of the sedan, and shook me from half-awake to fully.
“What?”
Whately repeated himself, and it turned out to be one word, not two: “Sourland-sometimes known as the ‘lost land.’” The butler, dressed in funereal black, sitting back regally from the wheel, nodded his big head toward his window at the tangled thickness of woods through which the long black-mud private lane had been cut.
“They say,” he said, “that Hessian soldiers fell prey to the maze of these woods, and, giving up, settled here.” He looked at me ominously. “They mixed their blood with Indians’.”
He said this as if he were referring to a laboratory experiment, not some good-natured redskin nookie.
“Later, runaway slaves hid in the Sourland Mountains,” he added, darkly.
I made a clicking sound in my cheek. “I bet some more blood got mixed, too.”
Whately nodded, his expression grave. “The descendants of the Hessians and their interbred rabble live in tar-paper shacks and caves in these hills and mountains.”
“Funny neighborhood to stick a fancy house in,” I offered.
“The Colonel chose the location from the air,” Whately said, shifting gears on the sedan and the conversation. He sounded matter-of-fact, dismissing from consideration the wild bands of mixed-blood hillbillies he’d summoned up. He lifted one large hand off the wheel and painted in the air. “Colonel and Mrs. Lindbergh chose the crest of a knoll, higher than fog could disrupt.”
“He has a landing strip, then?”
Whately nodded. “Even this dirt road itself discourages travelers and sightseers. The Colonel likes his privacy. A remote estate is a necessity for the Lindberghs.”
“And a liability.”
He turned his head slowly and looked at me down his long nose, which was quite a trip. “Pardon?”
“Stuck out in the middle of nowhere, they’re an easy target. For cutthroat mix-breed hillbillies, say-or a kidnapper.”
Whately snorted and turned his attention back to driving.
Autos and ambulances swarmed the roadsides by the whitewashed stone wall with wrought-iron gate. Some of the cars bore the cachet of a particular news service, while the ambulances were an old press trick: they’d been converted to mobile photo labs-retaining their sirens, of course, to ensure getting where they needed to as fast as possible. Standing out in the bitter March air, mixing cigar and cigarette smoke with that of their breaths, were hundreds of reporters and photographers and newsreel cameramen, gathered like flies at a dead animal. An abandoned ramshackle farmhouse, well outside the gate but in sight of it, was providing shelter for dozens of newshounds.