“I don’t care what you believe.”
She slowed. She stopped. She turned to me.
“I loved Frank,” she said. “I loved him for years. And he came to love me. He worshipped Anna, but he loved me.”
“Goddamn,” I said, stopped in my tracks now. “I believe you.”
She shook her head slowly, lecturing with a jerky finger. “Perhaps some…some… of what you said is true…but know this: I was never in Ricca’s pocket. I never betrayed Frank. I didn’t blackmail him into marriage. I’m no black widow! No black widow.” She sat down, on the slope, by the tracks. “Just a widow. Another widow.”
I sat next to her. “I’m sorry.”
It was still raining, a little. Still drizzling.
She was breathing heavily. “I understand. You felt something for my husband. That’s what caused your anger.”
“I guess so.”
The pain was showing on her face now. “It’s hard to lose him like this. Death by his own hand.”
“My father committed suicide,” I said.
She looked at me.
“He put a bullet in his head, too.” I looked at her. “It’s something you learn to live with, but you never forget.”
“Perhaps you’ve lost another father today.”
“That’s putting it a little strong. But I am sorry to see the old bastard go.”
Then I looked at her again and she was weeping. The steel lady was weeping.
So I put my arm around her and she wept into my shoulder.
When I left her at her door, the boy was just getting home.
I had supposed the final favor Frank Nitti promised me was one he’d been unable to keep. After all, I asked him Thursday night; and Friday afternoon he was dead.
But Saturday morning a pale, shaking Barney Ross, in civvies for a change, brown jacket, gray slacks and a hastily knotted tie under a wrinkled gray raincoat, came into my office, around eleven, slamming the door behind him.
I was standing at Gladys’s desk, handing her my notes on an insurance report.
“We gotta talk,” he said. He was sweating. It was starting to look and feel just a little like spring out there, but nobody was sweating yet. Except Barney.
Gladys seemed thrown by this uncharacteristically sloppy, angry Barney Ross. And it took quite a bit to throw a cool customer like her.
“Forget this last report,” I told her. “Go ahead and take off a little early.” We only worked till noon on Saturday.
“Sure, Mr. Heller,” she said, rising, gathering her things. “See you Monday.” And, with one last wide-eyed glance back at us, she was out the door.
“Step into my office,” I said, gesturing, smiling.
His one arm hung at his side, hand shaking; the other leaned against the wooden walking stick, which trembled like a coconut palm in a storm. “Did you do this, Nate?”
“Step into my office. Sit down. Take a load off.”
He went ahead of me, as quickly as his walking stick would allow; sat down. I got behind the desk. He was rubbing his hands on his trousered thighs. He didn’t look at me.
“Did you do this thing to me?”
“Do what, Barney?”
Now he tried to look at me, but it was hard for him; his eyes darted around, not lighting anywhere. “Nobody’ll sell me anything. I need my medicine, Nate.”
“You mean you need a fix.”
“It’s for my headaches, and earaches. The malaria relapses. Goddamn, if you don’t understand this, who would?”
“Go to a doctor.”
“I… I used up the doctors the first three weeks, Nate. They’ll only give me a shot, once. I had to go to the streets.”
“Where you’ve found your supply has suddenly dried up.”
“You did it, didn’t you? Why did you do it?”
“What makes you think I did?”
His sweaty face contorted. “You’ve got the pull with the Outfit boys. You coulda gone straight to Nitti himself. That’s what it would take, to dry this town up for me like this.”
“Don’t you read the papers, pal? Nitti’s dead.”
“I don’t care. You did it. Why? Aren’t you my friend?”
“I don’t think so. I don’t hang around with junkies.”
He covered his face with one hand; he was shaking bad. “You can’t stop me. I’m going back out on the road tomorrow. Back on the war-plant circuit. I can find what I need in any town I want. All I got to do is find a new doctor each time-they’ll give it to me. They know who I am, they’ll trust me. They know I’m traveling with a Navy party on this tour…they got no reason to think I’m looking for anything but just one shot of morphine for a malaria flare-up.”
“Sure,” I said. “That’ll work. And when you run out of doctors, you can go back to the street, to the pushers. But not here. Not in Chicago.”
“Nate… I live here.”
“You used to. Maybe you better move to Hollywood with your movie-star wife. You can go make your connection out there. I can’t stop that.”
“Nate! What are you doing to me?”
“What are you doing to yourself?”
“I’ll get past this.”
“That’s a good idea. Get past it. Get some help. Kick this thing.”
He screwed his face up, sweat still beading his brow. “You know what the papers’ll do with this? Look what happened to D’Angelo-all that poor bastard did was write some love letters, and they ruined him.”
I shrugged. “I talked to him a couple of days ago. He’s fine. They’re fitting him a leg. He’ll be working someplace, before you know it. He understands that this thing we went through, we got to put it behind us. You got to put the Island behind you, too, Barney.”
He was almost crying, now. “How could I ever face people? How can I tell Cathy? What would Ma say, and my brothers and my friends? What…what would Rabbi Stein think? Barney Ross, the kid from the ghetto who became champ, the guy they call a war hero and the idol of kids, a sickening, disgusting dope addict! The shame of it, Nate. The shame…”
I got up from behind the desk and put a hand on his shoulder. “You got to do it, Barney. You got to check in someplace and take the cure. You can keep the publicity down to a minimum if you go into a private sanitarium, you know.”
“I… I hear the best place is the government hospital at Lexington. But then everybody’d know…”
“They’d understand. People know what we went through. They don’t understand the extent of it. But they’ll forgive you.”
“I don’t know, Nate.”
“You could start with forgiving yourself.”
“What…what do you mean?”
“For killing Monawk.”
He looked up at me, the tragic brown eyes managing to hold still long enough to lock mine. “You…you know?”
“Yeah.”
He looked away. “H-how long have you known?”
“A little over a month. The night some people broke into my office, it was. Like you, I’d been having nightmares. I dreamed I killed him myself, in one, that night. But when I woke up, I knew I hadn’t. After I thought about it, though, I knew why I’d dreamed that-you killing that poor son of a bitch was the same as me killing him. It was as hard for me to accept, to live with, as if I’d done it myself. That’s why I blocked it, pal. You been sticking a needle in your arm to forget. I managed to forget without any help.”
He was shaking his head. “God, God. I didn’t mean to.”
I squeezed his shoulder. “I know you didn’t. He was screaming, giving us away; you had the forty-five in your hand, and you put a hand over his mouth like you did before, only this time the gun just went off. It was an accident.”
“But I killed him, Nate.”
“Not really. The war killed him. You were trying to save all us poor wounded bastards, him included.”
“I didn’t know anybody else saw it happen.”
“I don’t think anybody did, but me. We were all hurting so bad we were floating in and out of it. But if anybody did, they’ll never say a word.”
He was looking at the floor. “I… I should have reported it. Admitted it. I let them hang this hero shit on me…what kind of man would do that?”