I woke up.
My mouth felt thick with the taste of sleep, and with something else, something bitter. Medication?
I was on my back in a bed. Hospital bed. I felt weak.
“Ah, you’re awake,” a woman said. “Good. Let me crank you up.”
The grinding sound signaled my being raised to a sitting position. I was in a private room. I had an IV in my arm. I could feel, or sense, the bandage on my side. Out the window, it was day.
“Where…?”
The nurse was an attractive brunette with lipstick as bright as a cigarette girl’s, but her nose was too big. Italian.
She smiled and it was white and nice and I forgave her her honker. “You’re in Jefferson Park Hospital,” she said.
“How…how’d I get here?”
“Private ambulance, I believe.” She checked my pulse, then brushed hair off my forehead. She gently pulled back the sheets; for a second I thought she was going to blow me, but I was only getting my dressing checked. Just my luck. I drifted away then.
When I woke up again, a small dark man with slicked-back, graying, perfectly barbered hair was sitting in a chair next to my bed, hands folded in his lap, patiently. He was wearing a tailored gray suit and a black-and-gray- and-white knit tie; he might have been attending a wedding, or a funeral.
“Hello, Frank,” I said, having to work to make my eyes focus on him.
“Nate,” Nitti said neutrally, and he smiled. It was a restrained smile.
Out the window, it was night.
“How’d I get here? Don’t tell me an ambulance.”
“That’s not important.”
I started to remember. “Belliance! He called you…”
“Somebody called. Who is not important.”
“Thank God. If he’d called Ricca…what about those torpedoes I shot?”
Nitti glanced around behind him, making sure the door was shut. He scooted his chair closer to the bed.
“You insist on talking about this,” he said, a little bit weary, a little bit irritated.
“What about those guys I shot?”
“Fish food.”
I swallowed thickly. Sleep taste. Medicine taste. The IV was still in my arm, I noticed. “Who were they, Frank?”
“Out-of-state talent. Freelancers. People the Waiter uses…used…time to time.”
“How’d they find me?”
“How should I know.”
That janitor at the Sheridan six-flat? Maybe he called Ricca.
“I think,” Nitti said quietly, “that Paul might’ve been having them watched.”
“The Belliances?”
He nodded. “He knew you was sniffing around. But I don’t think he was having you tailed. He knew you was under my protection, wouldn’t go against me unless he had no other choice. Besides, he knew the only way you could spring Hauptmann was if you found the kid. So he must’ve had the farmer and his wife staked out, in case you found the kid.” He shrugged. “You found the kid.”
“They were gonna rub out the whole fuckin’ family, Frank.”
He frowned, shook his head. “That’s terrible. That’s a bad thing. You stopped a bad thing, Nate. I admire that.”
I couldn’t hear any irony in the words. “You do?”
He touched his chest with both hands. “I’m a father. I got a son. You don’t kill fuckin’ kids. Paul oughta know that; he’s got a boy.”
“So does Capone.”
Nitti shook his head. “Some people got no morality. These are churchgoing people, too, Nate. Hard to picture.”
“Frank!” I tried to sit up.
“Here,” he said, and he rose and cranked the bed up, some; then he sat calmly back down.
I was not calm. “What have you done with the boy?”
“The boy?”
“Don’t do this to me, Frank. I don’t feel good.”
“He’s safe. He’s with his family.”
