'Listen,' Eliot said, 'I wanted to see you this morning, not just to pry into your affairs. I wanted to give you some news.'
Oh?
'I'm putting in for a transfer.'
'Out of Chicago?'
'Yes.'
'Why?'
'The show's over, here. I'm a lame duck. Chief prohibition agent in a city that'll be selling beer legal 'fore you know it, and everything else, soon as FDR gets 'round to it. I want a real job again.'
'Eliot, you always used Prohibition as a weapon against the gangs; an excuse to go after them. Why not keep using that excuse as long as you can get away with it?'
He shook his head. 'No. It's over.' He looked at me and his eyes were tired: he looked older than twenty-nine. 'You know something, Nate. Sometimes I think getting Capone was just… public relations. They brought me in, they sicced me on him, and we did the job, and now he's gone, but hail, hail… the gang's still here. And with Prohibition gone, they'll be less vulnerable. More underground. But here. Still here. And I'm not sure anybody cares.'
I didn't say anything for a while.
Then said. 'Eliot- surely you knew how much the Capone conviction was a PR effort, from word go. Nobody was better at getting in the papers than you.'
He smiled sadly, shook his head some more. 'That's a nice way of saying I'm a glory-hound. Nate. I guess maybe I am. Maybe I like my picture in the papers, my name in headlines. But did it ever occur to you that the only clout I had, the only way I could build public support, the only way I could show the concerned citizens and the politicians who brought me in to do the job that I was doing that job was to get in the goddamn papers?'
Actually, it hadn't occurred to me; and I felt kind of ashamed of myself that as one of his best friends. I had been right in there giving Eliot an at least partially bad rap all along, where his supposed publicity hunaer was concerned.
'Where will you go?'
'Where they send me. I'd imagine I'll be here through the summer. They may have some use for me during the fair.'
'You'll be missed. I'll even miss you.'
'I'm not gone yet. Anyway. I wanted to tell you about it. Kind of; you know. Get it off my chest.'
'I'll be leaving town, myself. For just a week or two.'
Oh?
'Yeah. I'll be down in Florida, early next month.'
'Isn't that when Cermak'll be down there?'
Ever the detective.
'Is it?' I said, with what I hoped came off as genuine ignorance/innocence.
'Think it is,' Eliot said noncommittally, rising, picking up the check, putting down a dime for the tip. I added a nickel. He looked at me. 'You
'I fall in love easy when I haven't been laid in two weeks,' I said.
He smiled at that, and didn't have a tired look in his eyes anymore. We walked out on the street together, and I walked over to Dearborn with him and down to the Federal Building, where he left me, and I went on to Van Buren and 'round the corner to my office. It was windy, which was hardly a surprise in January in Chicago, but the wind had real teeth now, and I buried my hands in my topcoat pockets and walked with my head looking at the pavement, because the wind made my eyes burn when I walked into it.
My head was still down as I opened the door and came off the street and into the stairwell, and I raised my head only when I heard footsteps coming down above me.
In the stairwell, half a flight up. a woman was coming down. A woman in her early twenties with a face like Claudette Colbert's, only not as wide. She was rather tall, perhaps five eight or nine, and wore a long black coat with a black fur collar, nothing fancy, yet not quite austere. She had dark black hair, short, a cap of curls that lay close to her head, and another cap cocked over that: a beret. She carried a little black purse in one hand. As we passed on the stairs, I smiled at her and she returned it. She smelled good, but it wasn't a perfumy, flowery scent; it was a fragrance I couldn't place: incense? Whatever the case, I was in love for the second time in an hour.
Then when we'd passed, she called out to me, in a melodious, trained voice that seemed affected, somehow, in a way I couldn't quite define, like the fragrance.
She said, 'Do you have an office in this building, or are you just calling on someone?'
I turned to her, leaned on the banister, which wasn't the safest thing in the world to do, but I was trying for a Ronald Colman air.
'I have an office,' I said. With understated pride.
'Oh, splendid,' she smiled. 'Then perhaps you'd know what Mr. Heller's hours are.'
'I'm Mr. Heller,' I said, losing my air, but managing not to sputter. 'Anyway, I'm Heller.'
'Oh, splendid! Just who I've come to see.'
And she came up the stairs and I allowed her to pass, her body brushing mine, the fragrance still a mystery,
