True Detective

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And it goes on like that: the Sears Roebuck Building, an off-white, blue-trimmed tower rising from a sprawl of modernistic wings; the Swedish, Czechoslovakian, and Italian pavilions, looking just as futuristic as the next guy, with little old-world flavor in evidence; then up a ramp to the Hall of Science, the 'capitol' of the fair, with its U- shaped front facing the lagoon. Inside, a ten-foot transparent robot human says to us (and others gathered around him), 'Now, ladies and gentlemen, I shall swallow. You can see this mouthful of food passing down my esophagus. Now you see the swallow entering the top door of my stomach. Watch my stomach contract to churn up food.'

I had been hungry, before that, and when the memory had faded a bit we did partake of a couple of red hots from a futuristic white stand by the Sky Ride; Mary Ann was anxious to take this ride- with its six-hundred-some-foot towers standing a couple thousand feet apart. At about two hundred feet up, so-called 'rocket' cars traveled back and forth on steel cables, above the lagoon. It was not something I

wanted to do after having a hot dog-Once you got past the assault upon your senses by geometry and color gone berserk, the fair turned out to be a fair: we wandered anions plaster dinosaurs; saw Admiral Byrd's City of New York, the ship he used to explore Antarctic seas; hit the two-block stretch of midway, and rode the roller coaster, the Bozo, and the Cyclone, but. hoping to keep the red hot down. I begged off the Lindy Loop, passing up, too, the Pantheon de la Guerre, where the world's largest war paintings were on display, and doing without the flea circus and the Florida alligator show. We crossed the lagoon and had a look at the Enchanted Island, where parents could dump kids (after a doctor inspected each tyke) and gigantic cutouts of Oz characters and a two-story boy riding in his red wagon ruled the five-acre roost.

The whole fair was big on giantism, despite a midget village on the midway the Time and Life Building had, on its either side, towering huge mock covers: a Fortune cover depicting planets in space; a Time cover featuring the man of the year- FDR- whose face loomed over the fair, even if he hadn't been able to make it there. The Haviland thermometer was just this big goddamn thermometer, several stories high, with a red neon stem; no wonder that kid at Enchanted Island was trying to get away on his wagon.

We walked hand in hand. Mary Ann wasn't saying much, but was trying to maintain a cynically bohemian attitude- she wore a black beret with a black slit dress, and heels that must've killed her, while everybody else in sight wore colorful, holidaylike apparel; but while her look was Tower Town, her eyes were full of Iowa. This place made Little Bit O'Heaven look sick. This was the most unreal unreal place on earth, and Mary Ann, whether she would admit it or not, loved it here.

So did the rest of the people, and it was a swell place to hide from the depression, even if a lot of families did have to pass up the many food concessions and find a bench to eat the lunch in brown bags they'd brought with 'em. Most of the tourists were staying in private homes, usually at fifty cents per person, meals included; and many a frugal head of the family- whether in trousers or skirts- insisted on getting the full fifty cents worth by bringing their lunch.

Of course a lot of people were buying their lunch here, in which case it was likely their money- at least some of it- would go into Syndicate coffers. Capone might have been in Atlanta, and Cermak in the ground, and Chicago superficially a cleaner city, but Nitti's boys were cleaning up at the fair. Quite literally, since they controlled the fair's street-sweepers union, and the union the college-boy rickshaw pullers/carriage pushers formed, and half a dozen others. The San Carlo Italian Village restaurant was run by Nitti people; they had the popcorn concession, hatcheck, parking, towel/soap/disinfectant concessions; every hot dog and hamburger sold at the fair was theirs, and Ralph 'Bottles' Capone, Al's brother, had seen to it that, with the exception of Coca-Cola, no soft drinks sold on the grounds came from any other bottling works than his own. Most of the beer here was Nitti's, too, of course. And why shouldn't Nitti make money off the fair? He built it.

Word from the street, confirmed by Eliot, seconded by the private police I'd been working with on pickpocket prevention, was that Nitti-dominated unions and employers' associations had controlled the trucking and much of the construction work in the clearing of Northerly Island and the turning of the lakeshore into a futuristic landscape of geometry and giantism. And all contractors accepting construction jobs on Northerly Island had added an extra 10 percent on top of their bids- because Nitti had decried 10 percent off the top for the mob.

Nobody was talking about this, really: not the papers; not the Dawes boys, certainly. You had to look the other way in certain matters, after all. For example, with all these tourists coming in, prostitution was bound to go through the roof, so the city fathers had required prostitutes to register as 'masseuses.' and to submit to weekly examinations by a city-appointed doctor who would look for. well, 'skin diseases.' And now all around town neon signs had sprung up saying MASSAGE PARLOR, and so what? Hadn't the General admitted to me once that he only wanted to clean the town up 'within reason'? The world wasn't going to end because some bird from Duluth got laid- and if we wanted him to brine his business back to Chicago again sometime, better to send him home without the clap.

This fair that Mary Ann was wandering through so gaga-eyed was not the City of Tomorrow, it was just another never-never land; harmless, but transitory. In a few months the brightly colored plywood and glass would come crashing down. These tourists from Iowa and every other hick state were all aglow, thinking their future was all around them; some poor souls even imagined they were in Chicago.

They weren't, of course; they were in Chicago only in the sense that the fair was what Chicago- which is to say, Dawes and Cermak and Nitti- had planned it to be. In that sense, they were in Chicago, all right.

In every other sense, they were in Tower Town, with Mary Ann.

'I haven't mentioned you looking for my brother.' Mary Ann said, 'for ages.'

We were seated at a small round table in the open-air gardens at the Pabst Blue Ribbon Casino, overlooking the fair's south lagoon, just to the rear of the Hollywood pavilion. There was a lake breeze.

'Actually,' I said, pouring a legal Pabst from its bottle into a glass, 'it's been two weeks. But you have been good about it, I must say.'

Ben Bernie and his Lads were taking a break; they'd been playing on a circular revolving platform right out in the open, next to a canopy-covered dance floor that extended into the garden. We'd had to wait half an hour for our table, even though it was only around three-thirty in the afternoon, well away from either lunch or supper crowds. But this was opening day at the Century of Progress, and the Pabst Casino (casino in the cabaret sense only- no gambling was going on) was the largest, swankiest joint on the exposition grounds; it was, quite legitimately, touting itself as the place 'to dine and dance with the famous,' and the three round white-red-and-blue interlocking buildings, one of them twice the size of the other two, were jammed to capacity.

She poked at her Hawaiian salad. 'It's been over a month since you told me you 'finally had something.' Remember?'

'You're right. And what else did I say?'