Chicago Wipe-Out

sure.'

'H-how will we ever find each other again?' she asked in a barely audible voice.

'I'll find you,' Bolan promised.

Stein coughed and dryly observed, 'He found me.' He threw back his head and yelled, 'Missy!'

A cute kid of about sixteen appeared immediately in the doorway to the office. Stein told his visitors, 'This is my daughter. She answers to Missy. Missy, say hello to the pretty lady and get her out of here for awhile. I have some business to discuss with the troubled gentleman.'

Bolan showed Jimi a reassuring smile and nodded his head. 'Go ahead,' he murmured. 'We'll say goodbye later.'

Jimi accompanied the youngster into the living quarters, pausing just inside the doorway to throw Bolan a wistful glance. He again nodded his head, and she went on.

Stein had moved his wheelchair to a low buffet and was busying himself with a silver service. 'Come and get it,' he called over. 'I can't play the perfect host in this rig...'

Bolan went over and accepted a steaming mug of coffee. 'Thanks,' he said, 'it's just what I need.'

'You need more than that, but it'll have to do for now. Go on and sit down. I'll be with you in a second.'

Bolan took the coffee to an easy chair and carefully sipped it, finding that it was liberally laced with something more stimulating than mere caffeine. The attorney rolled over to the desk and told his guest, 'That'll brighten your perspectives a bit, though. Tell me, Mr. Bo... aw to hell with that, let's get directly to first names. Tell me, Mack, what do you think your chances are of busting this town?'

Bolan again sipped the coffee before replying, then: 'From one combatman to another, Leo, I guess it's about a chance in a million.'

Stein soberly nodded his head. 'About the way I count it. So why'd you come? Why Chicago, of all places?'

Bolan offered his host a cigarette, got declined, lit one for himself. He sighed and said, 'After New York, I guess Chicago was a must. I ran into something there that really shook me up. You ever hear of a Cosa di tutti Cosi?'

'That translates, roughly, as...'

'The Big Thing, or Thing of AM Things,' Bolan helped.

Stein shook his head. 'Sounds very romantic, but no — I've never heard of anything like that around here.'

'Picture,' Bolan said quietly, 'this entire nation chained the way Chicago is.'

Stein was evidently picturing it. Presently he said, 'Well, it's almost that bad already.'

'You really think that?'

The lawyer nodded his head. 'Sure. They're everywhere, into everything. The legislatures, the congress... ward, precincts, cities, counties — from one end of this country to the other. Sure, it's that bad.'

'Think about it for a minute, though,' Bolan urged. 'Think of national party organizations, the federal executive, the senate, the house, justice department... all of it. Think of all that completely and in factdominated by the mob. Are we there already?'

'Oh, I'd hardly think that. No, hell no, thank God, things haven't become thatbad. On the other hand, they're not...'

'Not what?' Bolan prompted.

Stein's face was working at an old frustration. 'Do you realize the amount of public propaganda that's being issued merely to convince the people of this nation that the syndicate — the Mafia — does not exist! It's the most fantastically flagrant public conspiracy I've ever encountered — why hell, it's a Madison Avenue campaign. Despite all the evidence, all the facts, all the sworn testimony, all the official revelations — despite everything that's been done for the past three decades to expose this menace — there are public officials in practically every echelon of government who are swearing and be damning that the Cosa Nostrais purely a creation of the American press.'

'They can say it until they're blue in the face,' Bolan declared quietly. 'That doesn't change anything. I'm not fighting ghosts, Leo.'

'Hell, I know that. And anybody with a grain of sense or a spark of honesty knows it, too. I was just drawing a contrast between the Gloomy Gussies and the Pollyannas. You're telling me that the mob is about ready to pull a national coup — these other idiots are trying to...'

'I'm not Gloomy Gussing you about the tutti Cosi, Bolan assured his host. 'I lucked onto the summit affair, the organizational meet, at a joint out on Long Island. And before I busted it, I heard enough to shiver my underwear down. These guys are going for all the marbles. If they have their way, they'll soon be handpicking even our presidential candidates.'

Stein seemed to be chewing the information. Presently he sighed and took a pull at his coffee. 'Just last week,' he said, 'I read where this professor from Columbia or some school back East told us to quit worrying, the Mafia was dying in the generation gap.'

Bolan smiled. 'I saw that.'

'Lord deliver us from the academicians,' Stein groused. 'This educated fool conducts a 'study' of an individual Italian family and then releases his breathtaking finding that there is no central pattern in the web of organized crime gobbling this country. Where the hell does he get off? Against a million pages of hard evidence — against facts, figures, names, dates, places, against the most overwhelming mass of evidence ever developed anywhere — where the hell does he get off interviewing one little Italian family and... Tell me something, Mack. You've been inside the syndicate. Have you ever known oneof them who would even give you his true name? Huh?'

Bolan chuckled. 'Most of them can't even remember their true name,' he replied.

'Ugh. Cosa di tutti Cosi, eh? Okay, I'll buy. It's the logical next step. But how does that bring you from Long Island to Chicago? What's the tie-in?'

'Chicago's the model city,' Bolan replied quietly. 'It's the unofficial blueprint for the nationwide thing.' He sighed. 'I just thought I'd like to try my hand at tearing up the damned blueprint.'

'So why don't you hit this Big Thing itself?' Stein queried. 'Why fool around with blueprints?'

'What the hell is there to hit?' Bolan muttered. 'It's like taking on an invisible octopus. You hack away at it and you thinkyou're chopping off a tentacle here and there — but you're never sure — and even if you do succeed in chopping one off, the damned octopus just promptly grows another in its place. I can't hit things, Leo. I can only hit people.'

'Uh-huh, I guess I get your drift. But that's the fatal weakness of your brand of warfare, Mack. The only way to beat the mob is to remove their avenues of operation. You must destroy the thing, the vehicle.'

Bolan shook his head. 'For me that's impossible, and you know it. Armies of crime-committees and federal agents are working that angle — and, hell, they're all hamstrung. You should be the first man to recognize that. For me, the thingis people, and they can't hamstring me. Their vehicle and their avenues of operation resolve finally into people— rotten, corrupt, grafting, grasping people.'

'You can't kill every rotten person in the country, Mack. We'd suddenly have a population explosion in reverse.'

'I can't believe that,' Bolan muttered. 'The rottenness is in that one percent at the core of the thing. They distort and manipulate everything around to the point where simple ordinary people have to get with the system or get out. I don't consider a guy rotten simply because he's trying to get along in. the world.'

The attorney heaved a deep sigh and told his visitor, 'Well, maybe you're right. Maybe I've allowed bitterness and self pity to get the best of me. Or maybe it's just the business I've been in all my life. The practice of law, my young friend, will make a cynic of any man. So all right, you're in Chicago and you're gunning for that one percent of rot at our core. For this town, call it five percent — and that's not bitterness talking, it's experience. But even if it were only one percent... do you know how many living souls constitute one percent of this city? We have something around three and a half million people in Chicago proper, about eight million in the metropolitan area.