For one thing, I needed to go up and reload my nine millimeter, and grab a rubber hose while I was at it. We had a little box of such things, saps and brass knucks and the like, on one of the closet floors. Every office has a “miscellaneous items” file, after all.
I headed for the door nestled between the pawn shop and the men only hotel, opened it, relieved not to find a wino sleeping it off there, thinking for perhaps the thousandth time that moving to better digs was way overdue for the A-1 Detective Agency. True, we’d taken over the better part of the fourth floor; but it was becoming an embarrassment to have clients drop by. The block had never been classy-despite Binyon’s and the Standard Club being just around the corner-but my business
Still, certain things about my business never seemed to change.
He was waiting for me at the top of the first flight of stairs; he was sitting on the floor, hook-nosed and pale, black greasy hair combed back, cigarette dangling from his lips, a pile of butts before him at the center of the V made by his long legs. He was tearing a matchbook with his hairy hands, making something out of it. He wore a green and white checked sportcoat and brown slacks and a pale green shirt and a green and yellow and orange tie that was an offense against nature. His socks were green argyles with some ungodly pattern and his shoes tan loafers. He looked like the golf pro at a country club for felons.
I hadn’t seen the guy-who Guzik, on the phone, had once referred to as “the Greek”-since the night he approached Peggy and me on the street. His eyes flickered as he saw me, and he straightened his spine.
“Don’t get up on my account,” I told him, thinking about the unloaded automatic under my arm.
He got up slowly-like a building reassembling itself in a newsreel played slow-motion and backwards-and glowered at me.
“Mr. Guzik wants to see you.”
This wasn’t a point worth discussing.
“All right,” I said.
“Now,” he said, as if I’d refused.
“Fine. Where?”
“The restaurant.”
“Oh,” I said. “Okay.”
We walked the few blocks silently. The lake was in the summer breeze. Nice night or not, he was unhappy; he had a constipated look. I figured Guzik had told him not to rough me up or anything, and that ruined the Greek’s evening. It wasn’t the first time I’d ruined his evening, after all.
On narrow Federal Street, at the foot of the Union League Club, was St. Hubert’s English Grill, where I had once lunched with General Charles Gates Dawes himself, former vice-president of these United States, mover and shaker behind Chicago’s Century of Progress, one of the biggest bankers in the city. Dawes had been concerned about Chicago’s image-he was outraged by the Capone gang, this “colony of unnaturalized persons” who “had undertaken a reign of lawlessness and terror in open defiance of the law.” I wondered if Dawes, who undoubtedly still lunched here from time to time, was aware that another powerful figure in Chicago, one Jake “Greasy Thumb” Guzik, sat nightly in this same Dickensian-style inn dispensing graft to district police captains (or the sergeants who collected the payoffs for them) and to the bagmen (often plain-clothes cops) of numerous Chicago politicians, including various Mayors over the years.
Jake Guzik grew up in the rough Levee district on the near South Side, one of five brothers, and it was said he made his first nickel by running an errand for a prostitute. He was a pimp before he was a teenager and owned several whorehouses before he was twenty. His self-taught accounting skills attracted the attention of notorious Levee aldermen “Bath House” John Coughlin and “Hinky Dink” Kenna, who schooled Guzik in the art of the payoff, the place where politics and the underworld met.
He’d moved up in the Outfit, it was said, by virtue of his accounting wizardry, and because he had once warned Al Capone-who he barely knew at the time-of an impending visit by a pair of hitmen. Later, when Jake was roughed up by a hardass thief named Joe Howard-who stuck around the bar where it happened bragging about “making the little Jew whine”-Capone repaid the debt, by confronting Howard at the bar, holding a gun to the man’s cheek, instructing him, “Whine, you fucking fink.” Howard begged a little and Capone shot him in the face. Six times.
Now Capone was crazy as a bedbug, syphilis nibbling his brain while he fished in his swimming pool down in Florida, and Jake was still here. Here in St. Hubert’s; sitting alone at a table for four near an unlit fire place, cutting off his next bite of lamb chop. The low, open-beamed ceiling and prints of fox hunts and other sporting events made this a warmly masculine room. At tables nearby, coldly masculine bodyguards sat, lumpy-faced men in loose-fitting suits under which guns lurked, men with the blank expressions of somebody who could kill you in the morning and forget about it by noon.
Guzik did not look like a killer; he looked like a prosperous, gone-to-seed accountant, which is what he was. He was chubby but small, flesh hanging loose on him everywhere like the underside of a fat lady’s arm. His pouchy eyes huddled behind dark gray tinted wire-rimmed glasses; his flesh was a lighter gray, mottled, aged beyond his perhaps sixty years. His suit was dark blue, nicely tailored but nothing fancy, his tie a solid color blue as well, a shade lighter. He was eating the lamb chop slowly but single-mindedly.
They say the night that Capone threw the testimonial banquet for Scalise and Anselmi at Robinson’s Restaurant in Cicero, only to surprise the boys by pulling a baseball bat out from under the table and clubbing them to death, Guzik just kept calmly eating his dessert while the fatal beating went on. And when Capone, bloody bat in hand, began giving a speech to the stunned assemblage, pointing to the fresh corpses, saying, among other things, “This should teach you to keep your traps shut-and to be loyal,” Guzik tugged Capone’s sleeve and paused between bites to say, “Okay, Al-that’s enough. You made your point.”
“Heller,” Guzik said, glancing up from his plate, his mouth tightening between the jowls into what passed for a smile on that ravaged face.
“Hello, Mr. Guzik.”
A pink-coated waiter, whose English accent struck me as about as real as Mayor Kelly’s campaign promises, had ushered me here, to this side room which Guzik and his retinue had to themselves.
“Sit.” The fat little man gestured. On his pudgy fingers there were no fancy rings-just his wedding band.
“Thanks,” I said, and pulled up a chair across from him.
He nodded to the Greek who’d accompanied me here and the man took a seat at one of the nearby tables with his fellow (if less spectacularly attired) bodyguards.
“How did you and the Greek get along tonight?”
“I didn’t slap him around, and he didn’t kill me. I consider that a fair exchange.”
Guzik grunted his laugh. “Frank got a charge out of you. I can see why.”
He meant Nitti.
“How did you know I’d be going to my office?” I asked.
“I didn’t. I posted a man there and another at the Morrison.”
Fat little bastard thought of everything.
“Mr. Guzik, before we get into anything, there’s something you ought to know: Lt. Drury has a warrant out for your arrest right now.”
Guzik shrugged gently. “I’ll talk to my lawyer. Go in to the station, tomorrow or the next day.”
“But you’re in a public place…”
“Don’t be silly, Heller. Are the police going to bother me here? Who is Drury going to get to make the collar?”
He was referring to the fact that St. Hubert’s was where Guzik acted as paymaster for the police, prosecutors and political bosses of the eight-county metropolitan area. So that pretty much made it hands off. He felt safe here. That was more than I could say.
“I have a job for you,” he said, cutting the lamb.
“I guess you know I’m working for Jim Ragen,” I said, carefully. “I don’t mean to insult you, Mr. Guzik, but there’s such a thing as a conflict of interests.”
“I like you, Heller,” he said, but I didn’t figure he liked me. I didn’t figure he liked anything or anybody, except maybe his family, money and food. Of course that’s true of a lot of people.
He went on: “Loyalty is important. Al was loyal to me, and now I’m loyal to Al. He’s down there in Miami nutty as a squirrel, and a lot of the boys think there’s no need to keep him on the payroll. There’s not a lot of call for
