Chicago Confidential

Charley, breathing hard, leaned against the sink counter. “Nate…Nate, are you insane? Aren’t you fucking aware my brother is a very violent man?”

“I’ll take those questions in order: yes I am insane; that’s how I got out of the Marines. And your brother is a violent man—almost as violent as I am, and much tougher with women than I’ll ever be.”

Charley was shaking. He reached a hand in his tux pocket and found the small round silver box, from which he selected two pink pills. He popped them in his mouth, and ran a faucet and stuck his face under the water and drank. Then he used a paper towel to dry his face and turned to me, his hazel eyes tight with apparent earnestness.

“Nate…I will handle my brother. I will make sure this unfortunate incident is a…one time thing…. Just a sad falling out among old friends.”

“I’ll kill him if he touches her.”

“I know! I know…. You made your point. What Rocco fails to understand is how…misguided he was in evicting Miss Payne.”

“Why is that? He was tired of her—she was nothing to him but a dog to whip.”

Charley drew in a long breath and let it out slowly. “This inquiry…with the potentially damaging publicity it could bring…. Miss Payne might feel sufficiently alienated from my brother to do something unwise.”

“You mean, she lived in your penthouse for a long time, and saw people come and go, and probably heard things.”

He nodded, once, a kind of a sideways nod. “Now. If I…handle Rocco. Keep him away from her—and from you…will you see to it that Miss Payne does not become friendly with the senator from Tennessee and his little tea party?”

I considered that. Then I said, “You know, that seems fair.”

He sighed and beamed. “Good. Good…. And thank you for helping my brother, my other brother out, with that Mortimer character.” He shook his head. “Such a lout. Such an uncouth lout.”

“Some people have poor social graces,” I said, holstering my nine millimeter.

Charley exited the men’s room, with me right behind him; no sign of Rocco. I think Charley was as relieved as I was. He turned to me and extended his hand.

“We have a deal, then?”

“Deal,” I said, shaking with him.

When Charley had headed back toward the showroom— where Sinatra was singing, “If I Loved You”—I glanced toward the ladies’ room door, and saw Jackie cracking it, peeking out.

“Come on, honey,” I said. “We’re missing the show.”

She rushed to my side, looped her arm in mine. “I saw Rocco come out! He didn’t see me, but I—”

“He’s not going to bother you, anymore.”

“What happened?”

“I didn’t kill him.”

And I couldn’t keep the disappointment out of my voice.

Washington, D.C.—the seat of political power in the western hemisphere—was also the hub of the mightiest industrial and military machine in the history of the world. The White House, the Capitol, various imposing monuments and a multitude of marble buildings swimming in seas of manicured green, were dignified symbols that imparted a stateliness, a nobility to the terrible powers certain men in this town possessed—men who charted the strategies and movements of armies and navies all over the world, who dispatched diplomats and spies to every corner of the earth, who controlled the man-made cataclysm of the atomic bomb.

I had come to our nation’s capital to see two men who wielded power of a different sort—the power of information…or sometimes misinformation. A few well-placed words—truth or fabrication, it didn’t seem to matter much which—could destroy lives as surely as any bullet or bomb…and without the mess.

One of those powerful men resided in a townhouse on Dumbarton Avenue in Georgetown, a quaint neighborhood of cobblestone streets, reconditioned slave quarters, and Early American shutters. This was a cool, overcast Sunday afternoon, and the well-shaded lane was alive with fall colors—coppers and yellows and oranges and reds (not the card-carrying variety).

I’d flown in this morning, arriving at the National Airport, on the Virginia side; from my window seat, as we glided over the city, the pilot executing a tourist-pleasing swoop, I’d taken in the grand obelisk of the Washington Monument and the familiar Capitol dome, dominating a distinctive skyline they and other monuments formed, no skyscrapers to compete with—buildings over 110 feet were banned by law, locally.

I had spent a lot of time in D.C. over the years—particularly on various jobs I’d done for the late James Forrestal, our nation’s first secretary of defense—and was quite used to Washington’s old-fashioned Southern sensibilities, its spacious avenues, tree-shaded lawns, the landscaped green (some of it dyed to stay that way year-round). What the hell—green seemed to symbolize the power in this city even better than stately marble.

At the townhouse in Georgetown, I trotted up the half-dozen steps to the landing and used the polished brass knocker. The golden-tressed young woman who answered smiled in recognition.

“Mr. Heller,” she said, playfully, because in other circumstances she had called me Nate, “you are expected.”

She had a perfectly delightful middle-European accent.

“Hi, Anya,” I said, stepping at her invitation into an entrance hall that fed both the residential and office areas of the townhouse. “You look swell.”