“Why’s that?”
“They’s business men.”
“Well, aren’t you?”
He grunted a laugh. “We’s small fry. Kind gets gobbled up by the bigger fish.”
I knew what he meant. There would always be room for the Capones and the Nittis; like Karpis said, the Syndicate was in “public-service-type business.” The outlaws were a dying breed. And some of them seemed to know it.
“Take this ‘Pretty Boy’ shit. And ‘Baby Face.’ Those ain’t names nobody who knows us calls us. That’s newspaper shit. Only I don’t think it starts with the newspapers.”
“You don’t?”
“I think it’s Cummings and Hoover trying to make saps out of us.”
Cummings was the U.S. attorney general, the man who was spearheading FDR’s war on crime.
“Why?” I said.
“Why? They make us sound like mad dogs so they look like big heroes when they catch us.”
“They haven’t caught you yet.”
He shook his head. “Matter of time. Matter of time.”
“My experience with the feds is they’re pretty goddamn lame.”
Floyd nodded, chewing on the weed. “But they’s so many of ’em.”
“Yeah. And they got guns now. They can cross state lines, and they got guns now.”
“I got so little to show.”
“Huh?”
“I been at this since I was in my twenties. Just a kid. And I got so little stored away. This life is expensive, you know.”
“They say you gave a lot of your money away.”
He smiled, almost shyly this time. “I did some of that. I ain’t no Robin Hood, like some’d have you think. Took care of my friends, in the hills, is all. And they took care of me. And mine.”
He sat and stared at the river.
Then he said, “I got a boy, nine. Just a tad older than that boy of Ben’s. And I got a pretty wife.” He chewed the end of the weed; then turned eagerly and said, “Want to see?”
“Sure.”
Grinning, he dug his wallet out of his back pocket. He showed me a snapshot of his wife—a lovely dark-haired woman in a white dress and hat; standing near her, putting a supportive arm around her, was a beaming kid in a white shirt and slacks.
“Good-looking kid,” I said. “Honey of a wife, too.”
He smiled, looking at the picture; after a while the smile faded, but he kept looking.
Then he put it away in the wallet; stuffed the wallet in his pocket.
I said, “They were dressed nice—look healthy, well-fed.”
Floyd nodded. “I been providin’ for ’em. But in the long run, what? This life can’t last. I’m gettin’ too old for it. And the times is passin’ me by. It’s time to get across the river.”
I didn’t follow him. I said so.
He smiled. “Sometimes you got to do something that common sense says not.”
“Like what?”
“Like a impossible job. Like a score so big, you can make a new life.”
My mouth felt dry.
I said, “Is that the kind of job going down tomorrow?”
He nodded—just the trace of a smile on the cupid lips.
I said, “All
“Did you know it’s a big shot? A national figger, like the damn papers put it?”
I felt something cold at the base of my spine.
“No,” I said.
“Well, it is, Jim.” He rose.
He began to walk up the slope.
I followed.
“Who?” I asked.
