He felt ill at ease in the sprawling, lavish office with its high, ornately sculptured plaster ceiling. It was known as the Tapestry Room, after the five massive tapestries depicting the Indians of the Western Reserve in the wilderness days, draped here and there above the room's fancy oak paneling. His desk was nestled in the corner between a tall, wide, beige-draped window and a fire-place, its mantel covered with more pictures of Selma and the kids. One hundred thousand on relief, Burton thought, and I sit here like Nero fiddling. Only he wasn't sitting, nor was he fiddling. He was pacing, waiting for the man who could enable His Honor to carry out his top-priority campaign promise, if that man said yes to the job Burton planned to offer.
Unfortunately, Burton felt the odds of this man's taking the job were slim. But goddammit, he had to try…
Burton had been elected as a reform mayor-a Republican who had run as an independent, steamrolling over both parties' machines. Elected by the largest majority ever won by a mayoral candidate in Cleveland's one hundred years, Burton had a clear mandate. But the political waters where he had to swim remained muddy.
The Republican mayor he replaced, Harry L. Davis, had used his two years to turn Cleveland into a wide-open town, with the loosest of standards at City Hall. Not only had crime increased, particularly gambling and vice, but the business of government had, through Davis' patronage tactics, gone all but bankrupt. Scrip was issued to meet city payrolls. Deficiency taxes were levied in order to have some cash on hand. Meanwhile, Davis spent much of his time out of town, and the newspapers, with which he'd feuded from the beginning, gleefully, and correctly, labeled him an absentee mayor.
Burton had promised a return to efficiency in government; he had promised to bring a businesslike approach to City Hall.
But he had promised more than that.
He stalked the office, puffing the cigar, checking his watch. At four-thirty, he checked with his secretary.
"When Ness arrives," he told her over the intercom, "send him right in."
"Mr. Ness has been here for ten minutes, Your Honor."
He didn't snap at the girl; he hadn't been in office long enough for his staff to learn to read his mind. He'd give them another week to do that.
"Send him in," he said, and clicked off the intercom and put out his cigar. He smoothed his suit as best he could, and walked to the door to greet Ness as he came in. The slim man in the tan camel-hair topcoat, open to reveal a rather natty gray-striped double-breasted suit and maroon tie, slipped in, hat in hand, from among a horde of waiting politicos and job-seekers, the likes of which had thronged Burton's office doorstep for weeks.
Burton hoped his disappointment didn't show. From all he'd heard about Eliot Ness in the past two weeks, he had expected someone more physically impressive. In his mind's eye, he'd been picturing, foolishly, he knew, the movie actor Chester Morris. But this was no movie tough guy.
This was a man who looked even younger than his thirty-two years. This was a man who looked like he should be wearing a college graduation mortarboard, not a headful of pomaded, parted-in-the-middle hair, a dark disobedient comma of which made its way down his forehead.
"Your Honor," Ness said, his voice soft, husky, "allow me to be the last to congratulate you on your election." With a smile, he extended a hand.
Burton took the hand, shook it, relieved that the grip was as strong as it was.
He said, "I'm glad to finally get around to meeting you, Mr. Ness. I've heard so much about you, I feel I already know you."
Again Ness smiled, almost shyly Burton thought, and stood and waited until the Mayor rather awkwardly moved across the spacious office, gesturing toward a chair waiting opposite the desk in the corner.
"Sit, please, sit," Burton urged, taking his place behind the desk.
Ness sat, keeping his topcoat on, in apparent anticipation of a brief meeting. He crossed his legs, ankle on knee. Good, Burton thought: he wasn't nervous. He might look like a collegian, but he didn't intimidate easily.
"Smoke, if you like," Burton said, trying a smile out on the young Treasury agent.
"No, thanks. I don't smoke cigarettes."
Burton opened the cigar box on his desk. "Perhaps you'd like one of these Havanas?"
"No. Thanks. Go ahead, though."
Burton smiled tightly and shook his head no and shut the box. Then he said, "I do hope you have some vices. I don't trust a man who's too goddamn pure."
"I'm known to take a drink now and then."
"Ah. That's reassuring somehow. The most famous Prohibition agent of them all is a drinking man."
Ness lifted an eyebrow. "I've never had anything against drinking. The Prohibition law was a lousy piece of legislation."
Burton smiled again, not tightly this time. "That's interesting, coming from a man in your line."
Ness leaned forward a little, turning his hat in his hands restlessly. "The trouble with Prohibition was that so many people didn't believe in it. They were either against it or figured it was for the other guy. A law like that breeds contempt for the law in general. That helps make the underworld very strong, very wealthy. It gives them plenty of money to corrupt the law."
"So it's the… 'underworld' you've been after."
"I've never put John Q. Public in jail, Your Honor. I did put some gangsters out of business though."
"Al Capone, for instance."
Ness smiled, shrugged.
"And you're proud of that."
"It's going to be a hard one to top."
Ambitious. Burton liked that, too. That would help.
Feeling more at ease, Burton reached for the cigar box and withdrew and lit a Havana. He puffed it regally. "Do you know," he said, "that I've had you under investigation for two weeks, now?"
"No," Ness said, with mild surprise. "But where in hell did you find a Cleveland cop up to the job? No offense meant-to you."
Burton smiled and shook his head. "None taken. But truer words were never spoken. I had to rely on myself and some handpicked staff members. We've been checking around. Dwight Green speaks highly of you."
Dwight H. Green was Federal Prosecutor in Chicago.
"I'll speak highly of Dwight," Ness said, "if given half a chance."
"Frank Cullitan is another booster," Burton said.
Frank T. Cullitan was Cuyahoga County Prosecutor.
"Cullitan's a Democrat," Ness said.
"Does that matter?"
"Not to me."
Burton blew out a dark cloud of cigar smoke. "Every phone call I've made-Joe Keenan with the FBI, for instance-has resulted in high praise for Eliot Ness."
Ness smiled faintly, a hint of cockiness in his expression. Burton didn't mind that, either. That trait, too, would be necessary if this man were to take this job.
Actually, Burton would have been greatly surprised if Ness hadn't been at least a touch arrogant. The young man's record was impressive, to understate the case. Ness had been just twenty-six when he was recruited by the Justice Department to head up a special independent Prohibition Unit in Chicago that was designed as part of a two-pronged federal effort, born in the White House, to put public enemy/public embarrassment Al Capone away. While the other prong, a crack IRS team, worked to build a tax case, Ness and his raiders hit Capone's breweries, confiscated trucks and equipment, and made numerous arrests. This distracted Capone, dented his bank account, and disrupted his business practices by limiting the amount of payoff money available, without which countless crooked cops-both local and federal-had gone off the take.
The ten men in Ness' unit, handpicked by himself after poring over hundreds of government records, were widely respected as that rarity among big-city cops in this damn Depression: they couldn't be bribed. These "untouchables," as the Chicago papers had dubbed them in the aftermath of Capone's fall, routinely turned down bribes, at times being offered weekly payoffs damn near as large as their yearly salaries.