"Well, get to the point."
Wild shrugged with one shoulder. "It's just a rumor."
"A rumor."
"A rumor. Backroom talk. To the effect that a very high-ranking police official is on the pad."
This time Ness shrugged. "That would be no surprise on a department as… troubled… as this one."
"Don't worry," Wild smirked. "We're still off the record. If you want to call the department 'corrupt,' be my guest. I won't repeat it in print."
"Make your point."
"The point, simply, is this high-ranking cop is said to be the 'outside chief.' The chief of the 'department within the department.'
"
Ness' eyes tightened. "The department within the department, huh?"
Wild smiled patiently, as if teaching a child. "The crooked cops know each other. They protect each other. They're a department within, and yet outside of, the department. And their 'chief-whoever he is-directs things, makes assignments, passes the graft around even-handedly and keeps everything and everybody in line. So rumor has it."
"I see."
"Are you sure you haven't heard this rumor before?"
"Not in such detail. Never that there was a so-called 'outside chief.' "
Wild lifted his eyebrows, set them down. "It's just a rumor. I wouldn't print it in the paper."
"I understand," Ness nodded. "Thanks, Wild."
"And their ties to the May field Road mob are, well, obvious."
"That much I knew."
"I figured you had to know something. Now. What are you going to do for me?"
Ness thought for a moment, then, eyes still on the road, said, casually, "I'm going along with a squad of cops on a betting-joint raid tomorrow. How would you like to be the only reporter along for the ride?"
"It beats a streetcar all to hell," Wild grinned.
"I ask only that you don't make a sap out of me," Ness cautioned. "I'm just tagging along to check out their procedure. See if the raid goes off without a hitch."
"Or whether somebody tips off the place," Wild said, nodding.
"Right. It won't make a big story for you, but it'll be a start. Anyway, just stick around. Be patient. There's going to be plenty of dandy headlines for you in the next couple of months. I can just about promise you that. Now, here's City Hall."
CHAPTER 7
Eliot Ness had never really seen a fire before.
That is, not a fire in the sense of a burning building, like this modest, run-down two-story frame house that was managing somehow to retain its structure while the inside of it burned, the flames having eaten away much of the roof to lick the night sky. Now that the fire was more or less under control, the flames no longer rose from the top of the house. Instead, a strangely white column of smoke climbed into the overcast sky to make it even more cloudy, while flames twitched in the otherwise dark and broken windows of the house, like the flickering within the eyes of a jack o' lantern.
Ness had been here almost from the beginning. He'd even pitched in with getting the old people out of the house and onto the cold street. Many of them were in robes and even pajamas but neighbors had come out bearing heavy coats to help the shivering, bewildered old folks; some of them were barefoot, and neighbors rustled up shoes and slippers for impromptu footwear. Most of these now-homeless elderly were wheezing from the smoke, several were crying, and a few vomited onto the frozen ground.
Two were dead. Two old men who'd shared a room in the back of the house, on the ground floor, where the fire had started. Incinerated. Their bodies, the charred logs that had been their bodies, were removed by firemen who'd carried them out of the steaming, smoking building, cradled in their arms like black babies, to be deposited in asbestos-lined wicker baskets, and put in the back of a Black Maria, bound for the morgue.
It had shaken Ness. A fire striking one small building-a dilapidated house passing as a refuge for the aged, just another shabby frame house on the East Side, in a working-class, mostly Slovak neighborhood-made for a full-scale disaster.
Especially in Cleveland, where the fire department was using equipment that was modern only in the sense that horses weren't pulling it. Ness had taken the safety director's job because of its relationship to the police de-partment, to law enforcement. He had not, frankly, given the fire department much thought.
Thus far he'd had only one brief meeting, on Thursday morning, with Fire Chief Grainger. All else had been police matters. The mayor's two-month ticking clock made that the top priority. This included dealing with Potter, who'd seethed silently at the news of his "promotion," and the betting-parlor raid, on which he'd allowed Wild to come, where as expected someone had phoned in a tip-off, queering the bust.
Tonight, Friday, he was learning that the fire department was just as troubled as the police. Corruption wasn't the problem. The men Ness had seen tonight did their jobs bravely and relatively well. However, he'd also seen fire hoses with low pressure due to leakage, patched hoses that wouldn't fit hydrants without some imaginative jury-rigging, and a hook-and-ladder truck so decrepit that it, arrived after the two police squads and the pumper truck and the ambulance.
Ness had been on his way home this Friday night, after a long afternoon of meetings with various commissioners and department heads, when he heard on his one-way police radio the call go out for police backup on a fire at an old folks' home at 933 East Seventy-eighth Street. It seemed like a good opportunity to check out the fire department in action. It was already ten o'clock, and he had a brief thought of Eva waiting for him well into the evening, but he dismissed it.
He had pulled up in the Ford and leaped out and pitched in, helping those old people out the front door. The frame house was distinguishable from its neighbors only by its state of dilapidation, a small sign saying JOANNA HOME that hung from the roof over the porch and, of course, the fact that it was very much on fire.
"I'm the safety director," Ness had snapped at the team of three firemen who were trying, with little success, to get the pumper truck in operation. "Where the hell's your hook-and-ladder?"
They looked at him and shrugged, in unison, and went back to their work. It would have been amusing, if the air hadn't been filled with the crying and coughing and rasping and puking of the dozen or more old people, trooping out of the house like refugees, aided by fire fighters and neighbors.
The hook-and-ladder arrived minutes later, and Ness identified himself to the battalion chief who rode on board, a middle-aged potbellied Irishman with a nose as red as the fire.
"Where the hell have you been, Chief?"
"Director Ness, I'm sorry-but you can only get to a fire so fast when your truck's so old it can only climb hills in reverse gear. Now if you'll be excusing me, sir, I have a fire to put out."
Ness had no answer to that, and when he got a look at the ancient, rusted-out hook-and-ladder, he could only sympathize.
The fire fighters did a good job, considering. They began by quickly, thoroughly wetting down the houses on either side of the burning one. The street was filled with curious neighbors, including those who'd fled the homes bordering the Joanna, and the two police squad cars, which Ness had beat to the scene by several minutes, another fact that didn't sit well with him, began crowd control procedures, keeping them back on the other side of the street. The front of the house became a wall of ice as water from the hoses froze on contact. The whole scene was a nightmare of hot and cold, fire and ice.
"These goddamn winter fires are the worst," one soot-rouged fireman told Ness, in a panting, hoarse voice.
Ness understood. He had watched the frustrated fire fighters, kneeling over the frozen-up hydrants, using blow torches to melt them down-fighting fire with fire.