“Sure rolling in dough, ain’t ya, dick,” he said, cheerfully.
He was too big to banter with.
So I said, “Right,” and stepped inside the elevator. They followed me.
We went to the third floor, where the two guys got off first. The elevator didn’t go back down; the elevator operator with the suit and the gun bulge stepped out and joined us. We were in an anteroom paneled in that same unfinished oak; the walls were barren.
Opposite the elevator there were double doors, which smile-dimples pushed through; he came back a moment later and, holding the door open for me, gestured with a thumb.
“Mr. Nitti’ll see you now,” he said.
I went in, and my escorts didn’t.
I was alone in a big dining room — cloth-covered tables and along the left wall a banquet table, the walls that same scarified oak — alone, that is, with Frank Nitti.
He sat, by himself, at a table for four at the far right of the room, his back to the corner. He was eating. He looked up from his plate and smiled on one side of his face and waved me over with a hand with a fork in it and looked back at his food.
There was no carpet on the parquet floor and my shoes made small echoes as I weaved through the well-spaced-apart tables back to the corner table, where Nitti glanced up again, half-rose, and nodded to a chair across from him. I sat.
I hadn’t seen him in about a year. He looked skinny and quite a bit older; he’d shaved his mustache off. Still, he was a roughly handsome man, with flecks of scar here and there on his face, notably his lower lip. His hair was slicked back and parted at the left. A former barber, he was always immaculately groomed. His suit was black, his shirt too; his tie was white, with a ruby stickpin.
He was eating what looked to be boiled beef with some small skinned potatoes and some sliced carrots. He was drinking milk.
He must’ve noticed me looking at this less-than-lavish lunch, because he grimaced and said, “Goddamn ulcers. Can you believe it? And this is one of the better meals I had lately.”
“Hardly pays to own a restaurant,” I said.
He smiled a little. “Yeah. Maybe I oughta find another line of work.”
I didn’t say anything; I was nervous. Nitti seemed to like me, but he was an intimidating figure, albeit a short one.
“Heller,” he said, “you look older.”
“You look about the same, Frank.”
“Bullshit. I aged ten years since those bastards shot me last year. If you hadn’t been there and made ’em call an ambulance, I’d be with the angels right now.”
“The angels, Frank?”
He shrugged elaborately. “I’m a good Catholic. Are you a Jew, Heller? You look more like a Mick.”
“I’m both and neither. I never been to church in my life, except your occasional wedding and funeral.”
He pointed his finger at me, and gave me a scolding look. “That ain’t good. Take my advice, kid — get some goddamn religion. You ain’t gonna live forever.”
“Should I take that as a threat, Frank?”
His smile returned; the ruby on his tie winked at me. “No. Just advice. I like you, kid. You did me a favor. I don’t take that lightly.”
“You returned the favor. We’re even.”
“Maybe. But I like you. You know that.”
“Well, uh, that’s good to know.”
“I got respect for you. You got, whaddya call it, integrity. Not too many people got that, you know.”
I figured he held this opinion because I’d quit the force after Mayor Cermak’s two police bodyguards had taken me along, unawares, into what turned out to be an assassination attempt on Nitti’s life.
“And you got balls,” he said, picking at one of the potatoes with his fork. “You’re smart and honest — though not so honest as to be a problem — and you got integrity. So that’s why I like you.”
I risked a wisecrack. “This is starting to sound like a testimonial,” I said. “Maybe we should move over to the banquet table, and invite those guys who brought me up here to join us.”
He tolerated that, even smiled again, then frowned and quickly said, “They didn’t get nasty, did they? I told ’em you were to be my willin’ guest. Nothin’ nasty.”
“They weren’t nasty, Frank. But they didn’t have to be. Where’d you get those guys, Lincoln Park Zoo?”
He drank some milk and this time when he smiled he had a milk mustache, which he wiped off with a thick hand on which rested a gold ring that must’ve weighed half a pound.
“Healthy-looking boys, ain’t they?” he said. “I beefed up my security after the Cermak hit.”
I didn’t know if he was referring to the attempt on his life by Cermak’s two cops, or the subsequent assassination of Mayor Cermak in Miami last summer, which he’d directed. And I didn’t ask.
“Would you like something to eat?” he asked, gesturing to the empty place in front of me.
Actually, I hadn’t eaten all day. But somehow I didn’t have much of an appetite, and declined.
“You’re wondering why I asked you up here,” he said.
“I think I know, Frank.”
He looked up from his boiled beef, with an almost pop-eyed look. “Really?”
“Well, let’s just say that I’ve figured out that Piquett kept me waiting in his office for half an hour so he could call you and you could send some people over.”
Nitti didn’t confirm or deny that.
He just said, “You’re involved in something. And I’m sorry as hell about it.”
He cut his beef with the side of his fork, leaving a pause for me to fill, but I couldn’t find anything to fill it with.
He ate a bite, and went on. “This thing that’s about to go down, I’m on top of it — it’s happening with my approval, even my guidance. But I’m an executive, kid. I don’t handle the detail shit, you know?”
“I can understand that, Frank.”
“I didn’t know they were going to pull you into this. And if I’d known, I’d have stopped ’em.”
“Who, Frank?”
“Don’t ask questions, kid. Just listen.” He paused to see if I was going to pay heed, and I was.
“I want you to get out of this,” he said. “And stay out. Just let things take their course.”
He ate his boiled beef.
“Is that all, Frank?” I said.
“Sure. You wanna go, go ahead. It was good to see you again.”
He’d been very careful in choosing his words — everything vague, all references couched in euphemism.
“Frank, we are talking about setting John Dillinger up, aren’t we?”
He shrugged, chewed, watched me with eyes that warned me not to go too far.
I went ahead anyway. Just a step at a time.
“It makes sense that you and your associates might like to be rid of a guy like this,” I said. Carefully. “Having the likes of Dillinger in town — and he seems always, eventually, to come back to Chicago to hide out — stirs up all kinds of heat. Local and federal.”
Nitti nodded, chewing.
I shook my head sympathetically. “Cops and feds can’t put out the dragnet for Dillinger and his ilk without disrupting your Outfit’s activities, of various kinds, in the process. Public outcry over gangsters like Dillinger leads to mass arrests — which your people get caught up in. Dillinger’s bringing down too damn much heat on the Outfit.”
Nitti narrowed his eyes and said, “Last December three of my best people were killed. It was a raid on a flat on Farwell Avenue by Stege’s Dillinger Squad; those trigger-happy sons of bitches mistook my guys for Dillinger and two of his pals. Shot ’em dead. Didn’t know they had the wrong men till they took their fingerprints, hours later.” Disgusted, Nitti sipped his milk. “It’s gotta end.”