On the floor, by the open fingers of Nitti's right hand, the snubnose.38 was smoking.
'Do you really think that's going to fool anybody?' I asked.
Lang said, 'I'm shot. Call an ambulance.'
'One's on the way,' I said.
Miller came in, gun still in hand. He bent over Nitti.
'He's not dead,' Miller said.
Lang shrugged. 'He will be.' He turned toward me, wrapping a handkerchief around his wound. 'Get in there and watch the arease-balls.'
I went back in the larger office. One of the men, the young, nervous one with the mustache, was opening the window, climbing out onto the ledge.
'What the hell do you think you're doing?' I asked.
The other men were seated at the table; the young guy who was half out the window froze.
Then somebody at the table tossed him a gun.
Where it came from, who tossed it. I didn't know. Maybe Campagna.
But the guy had a gun now. and he shot at me, and I got the automatic out and shot back.
And then he wasn't in the window anymore.
My father never wanted me to be a cop. Particularly not a Chicago cop, the definition of which (my father frequently said) was a guy with change for a five. He'd been a union man, my father, and had been jailed and beaten by police; and he'd always had disdain for Chicago politics, from the butcher down the block who was assistant precinct captain to 'Big Bill' Thompson, the mayor who wanted to be known as the 'Builder' when 'Boozer' was more like it.
Pa would've liked nothing more than for me to quit the force. It had been a major stumbling block between us, those last few years of his life. It may have led to his death. I don't know for sure. He didn't leave a note that night he shot himself. With my gun.
The Hellers came from Halle, in eastern Germany, orginally, and so did their name: Jews in Germany in the early 1800s were forced to abandon their traditional lack of surname and take on the name of either their occupation or home area. If my name hadn't been Heller it probably would've been Taylor, because a tailor is what my great-grandfather, Jacob Heller, was, in Halle, in the late 1840s.
Which were hard times. The economy was doing handstands due to developing railroads and industry; technology was making jobs obsolete for everybody from the guy who weaved the cloth to the oxcart driver who shipped it. Unemployment flourished, while crops failed and food prices doubled. A lot of people headed for America. My great-grandfather hung on. His business was suffering, yes, but he had contacts with the richer Jews in Halle- moneylenders, bankers, businessmen- and when the region was rocked by political unrest in 1848, great- grandfather watched from the sidelines. He couldn't afford getting involved: his business depended on an upper- class patronage, after all.
Then the letter arrived. From Vienna, where great-grandfather's younger brother Albert had lived;
My great-grandfather was apparently hit hard by all this: political unrest had taken his brother from him; and in Vienna, he'd seen Jew kill Jew. He'd always been a very pragmatic businessman, preferring to be apolitical; and where religion was concerned, he practiced Reform Judaism rather than strict Orthodoxy. But now he renounced his faith altogether, and became apostate. Judaism hasn't been seen in my family since.
Leaving Halle couldn't have been easy, but staying would've been hard. The secret police that grew up in the wake of the revolution of 1848 were making things tough. So were the Orthodox Jews who attacked my great- grandfather verbally for his apostasy, and who spread the word to his wealthy clients that their tailor's late brother had been a radical. The latter didn't help business, certainly, nor did the general economic climate, and my great- grandfather decided, all in all, that America had to be a safer place to raise his family of four (the youngest, Hiram, having been born in 1850, just three years before the family immigrated to New York City).
As a youth, Hiram, my grandfather, worked in the family tailor shop, which was proving a moderately successful business, though Hiram never went into it. He went instead into the Union army at age seventeen. Like a lot of young Jews at that time, he wanted to prove his patriotism: Jewish war profiteers had been giving their fellows a bad name, and my grandfather helped make up for that by getting shot in both leas at Gettysburg.
He returned to New York, where his father had died in his absence, after a long hospitalization. His mother had died ten years before, and now his two brothers and his sister were squabbling over the business/inheritance, the upshot being that sister Anna left the city with a good chunk of the family savings, not to be heard of again for some years. His brothers, Jacob and Benjamin, stayed in New York but never spoke to each other again; they rarely saw Hiram, either, a nearly crippled, isolated man who was lucky to get his job in a sweatshop in the garment district.
In 1871 my grandfather married Naomi Levitz, a fellow sweatshop worker. My father, Mahlon, was bora in 1875, my uncle Louis in 1877. In 1884 my grandfather collapsed while working and from then on was totally bedridden, left at home to look after the two boys as best he could, while grandmother continued working. In 1886 the crowded tenement building the family lived in caught fire. Many died in the blaze. My grandmother got my father and uncle out safely, then went back in after grandfather. Neither came out.
My father's aunt- who had left town with her estimated share of the inheritance- had got back in touch with the rest of the family, letting them know she was 'successful.' It was to her the two boys were sent. To Chicago. From the train to the streetcar, the wide-eyed boys were shuttled not to the Jewish section of the near West Side but to the section of the city known as the Levee. The First Ward- home of 'Bathhouse' John and 'Hinky Dink,' the corrupt ward bosses; site of the most famous whorehouse in the country, the Everleigh Club, run by sisters Ada and Minna, and scores of lesser houses of ill repute. Their 'successful' Aunt Anna was a madam in one of the latter.
