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.
N
ITTI
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
