Lang turned and looked at me, surprised, like he'd forgotten I was there.
"What do you mean?
"What's the charge? Who'd he kill?"
Lang and Miller exchanged glances, and Lang made a sound that was vaguely a laugh, though you could mistake it for a cough.
Miller, in his monotone, said. "That's a good one."
For a second, just a second, despite the gun I'd been handed. I had the feeling I was being taken for a ride. That somehow I'd stepped on somebody's toes and whoever it was was big enough and hurt bad enough to take it on up to the mayor, who Christ knows owed plenty of people favors, and now His Honor's prize flunkies were driving me God knows where- Lake Michigan maybe, where a lot of people went swimming, only some of them had been holding their breath underwater for years now.
But they didn't turn right, toward the lake; they turned left at the Federal Building- which meant the Chicago River was still a possibility and the Union League Club ignored us as we passed. We turned again, right this time, at the Board of Trade. We were in the concrete canyons of the financial district now- and by concrete canyons, I mean just that: in the thick of Chicago's loop, you can see towering buildings at left and right and front and back. Chicago invented the skyscraper and never lets you forget it.
The dustlike snow wasn't coming down hard enough to collect, so the city remained gray, though touched with Christmas red and green: most office windows bore poinsettias, and every utility pole had sprigs of holly or balsam: and now and then an ex-broker in what used to be a nice suit sold bright red apples at a nickel per. Just a few blocks over, on State Street, it would've looked a little more like Christmas, albeit a drunken one: the big stores with their fancy window displays were high on drinking paraphernalia this year, cocktail shakers, hip flasks, hollow canes, home-brew apparatus. All of it legal, but a violation of the law's spirit, as if hookahs were being publicly sold and displayed, just because public opinion suddenly sanctioned smoking dope.
We passed the Bismarck Hotel, where the mayor often lunched; it hadn't been so long ago that the famous old hotel had changed its name to the Randolph, after its location on the southeast corner of Randolph and Wells, to assuage anti-German sentiments during the Great War, though nobody had ever called it the Randolph, and a couple years back the name went back to Bismarck, officially. We were on the Palace Theater side, where Ben Bernie and his Lads had top billing ("Free Gifts for the Kids!") and the picture was Sports Parade with William Gargan; across the street was City Hall, its Corinthian columns and classical airs making an ironic facade for the goings-on within. Then we crossed under the El, a train rumbling overhead, and I decided they were kidding about Frank Nitti, because the Detective Bureau was on our left and we'd obviously been heading there all along- only we went past.
In the 200 block of North LaSalle, City Hall just a block back, the Detective Bureau less than that. Miller pulled over to the curb again, NO PARKING be damned, and he and Lang got out slowly and I followed them. They drifted casually toward the Wacker-LaSalle Building, a whitestone skyscraper on the corner, the Chicago River across the street from it. A barge was making impatient noises at the nearby example of the massive drawbridges Big Bill Thompson gave the city, but its iron shoulders didn't even shrug.
Inside the Wacker-LaSalle, a gray-speckled marble floor stretched out across a large, mostly empty lobby, turning our footsteps into radio sound effects. On the ceiling high above, cupids flew halfheartedly. There was a newsstand over at the left; a row of phone booths at the right; a bank of elevators straight ahead.
Halfway to the elevators, more or less, in the midst of the big lobby, a couple of guys in derbies and brown baggy suits were sitting in cane-back chairs with a card table set up between them, playing gin. They were a Laurel and Hardy pair, only Italian, and Laurel had the mustache; both had cigars, as well as bulges under one arm. We were a stone's throw from the financial district, but these guys weren't brokers.
Hardy glanced up at the two Harrys, recognizing them, nodding; Laurel looked at his cards. I looked ahead at the building registry, in the midst of the elevators with their polished brass cage doors: white letters on black, coming into focus as we neared. Import/export, other assorted small businesses, a few lawyers.
We paused at the elevators while Miller cleaned his thick wire-frames again. When they were back on his head, he nodded and Lang hit the elevator button.
"I'll take Campagna," Miller said. It sounded like he was ordering drinks.
"What?" I said.
They didn't say anything; they just looked at the elevators, waiting.
" 'Little New York' Campagna?" I said. "The torpedo?"
An elevator came; a guy in another brown suit with matching underarm bulge was running it.
Lang put a finger on his lips to shush me. We got on the elevator and the guy told us to stand back. We did, and not just because he was armed: in those days when you were told to stand back on an elevator, you listened- there were no safety doors inside, and if you stood too near the front and took a shove, you could lose an arm.
He brought us up to the fifth floor: nobody was posted up here; no comedians with guns playing cards. Nobody at all with a bulge under his arm. Just gray walls and offices with pebbled glass in the doors with numbers and, sometimes, names. We were standing on a field of tiny black-and-white tiles- looking down the hallway at the receding mosaic of them made me dizzy momentarily. The air had an antiseptic smell, like a dentist's office, or a toilet.
Lang looked at Miller and pointed back to himself. "Nitti," he said.
"Hey," I said. "What the hell's going on?"
They looked at me like I was an intruder; like they didn't remember asking me along.
"Get a gun out, Red," Lang said to me impatiently.
"It's Heller, if you don't mind," I said, but did what he said, as he did likewise. As did Miller.
"We got a warrant?" I said.
"Shut up." Miller said, without looking at me.
"What the hell am I supposed to do?" I said.
"I just told you." Miller said, and this time he did look at me. "Shut up."
The blank eyes behind the Coke-bottle glasses were round black balls; funny how eyes so inexpressive could say so much.
Lang interceded. "Back us up. Heller. There may be some shooting."
They walked. Their footsteps- and mine, following- echoed down the hall like hollow words.
They stopped at a door that had no name on its pebbled glass- just a number. 554.
It wasn't locked.
Miller went in first, a.45 revolver in his fist; Lang followed, with a.38 with a four-inch barrel. I brought up the rear, thoroughly confused, but leaving the snubnose Lang gave me in my topcoat pocket: I carried a nine-millimeter automatic, a Browning- unusual for a cop, since automatics can jam on you, but I liked automatics. As much as I could like any gun, that is.
It was an outer office; a desk faced us as we entered, but there was no secretary or receptionist behind it-There were, however, two guys in two of half a dozen chairs lining the left wall two more brown suits, topcoats in their laps, sitting there like some more furniture in the room.
Both were in their late twenties, dark hair, pale blank faces, average builds. One of them, with an oft-broken nose, was reading a pulp magazine, Black Mask; the other, with pockmarks you could hide dimes in, was sitting smoking, a deck of Phillip Morris and a much-used ashtray on the seat of the chair next to him.
Neither went for a gun or otherwise made any move. They just sat there surprised- not at seeing cops, but at seeing cops with guns in their hands.
In the corner to the left of the door we'd just come in was a coatrack with four topcoats and three hats; the right wall had another half dozen chairs, empty. Just behind and to the left of the desk was a water cooler and, in the midst of the pebbled-glass-and-wood wall, a closed door.