I’d left out a lot, like Louis B. Mayer’s desire to keep the Marx Brothers from bad publicity. Mayer didn’t like the Marx Brothers. He thought they were about as funny as Capone found Eddie Cantor and the Ritz Brothers. But
Capone’s head was nodding in understanding.
“I’m a good citizen,” he finally said, pulling his eyes away from the direction of the Mecca of Cicero. “You check with Colonel McCormick back in Chicago, at the
“And?” I prodded.
“I don’t know no Gino,” said Capone. “I mean, I know lots of Ginos but I’ve been away from it too long. I didn’t see any friends on the Rock. No letters. I lost touch. It went by.” His fat hand went up in the air to show things going by, and then rested on the deep scar on his left cheek. His middle finger traced the rut of the scar as he chewed on his cigar.
He coughed or sighed, removed the cigar, and spat in the water.
“Pace, pace, mio Dio,” said Capone softly.
“Cruda sventura m’astringe, ahime, a languir. Come il di primo de taut’ anni dura profondo il mio soffrir.” Capone looked up at me. “That’s Italian.”
“I figured,” I said.
“It’s Verdi,
“It’s beautiful,” I said.
Capone spat another piece of his cigar into the Atlantic.
“Go to Chicago,” he grunted. “Find my brother Ralph, or Nitti or Guzik or the Mayor. He owes me. I got him elected. Tell them I said you were O.K. They can call me and check. They’ll find this Gino.”
“Thanks,” I said, getting up and wondering what, if anything, I could do with the information.
“If you see Red,” Capone said dropping his voice, “tell him Snorky said hello. You got that?”
“Snorky said hello. I got it.”
“Good,” added Capone, pointing a fat finger at me. “Good. You know I learned to play banjo on the Rock? Red remembers. I wrote a song for my mother.”
His fat body under the robe tightened suddenly and shuddered. I think it was rage, but I couldn’t tell for sure because he turned his head away. He threw the fishing pole into the water and looked across the waves. The interview was clearly over.
I had something I might be able to use-the name of Al Capone-though I didn’t know what it was worth. I was also wet. My plan was find a hotel, change clothes, and decide what to do next.
I wobbled off the swaying pier and stood next to Leonardo. He looked like an inverted pyramid-his legs were thin and his upper body broad. He probably couldn’t run worth a damn, but if he caught whatever he was chasing, his arms and shoulders could melt it like a sugar cube in hot water. If he couldn’t catch what he was chasing, the gun bulging under his jacket could make up for a lot of distance. His dark face showed no teeth. He barely opened his mouth when he spoke. A neat round patch of hair on top of his head was white and unnatural, as if a finger of fire had scorched him. I wondered why, but had no intention of asking.
“You heard him?” I asked, glancing at the house to our left as we walked toward the waiting police car. The house was big, white, and made of wood. It was no mansion. We walked past a swimming pool with a life preserver bobbing in the middle.
“Al’s brother Ralph paid off this place when Al was in the can,” Leonardo volunteered. “Fifty grand. I don’t think Big Al has a dime of his own.”
I repeated my question: “You heard what we said out there?”
Leonardo grunted as we walked, then he spoke softly. We were far enough from the shore so the sound of the waves didn’t come between us.
“My job’s to hear. To be sure Al don’t say anything that might not be good for whoever hears it.”
We were a few dozen yards from the road. Leonardo whacked a palm tree with his open hand. I assumed it was his way of communing with nature and expressing his joy of life. I never communed with nature. It got me nowhere and gave me a backache. Leonardo kept walking. I sloshed.
“And if Al had said something embarrassing?”
“Some I warn. You wouldn’t take a warning.”
I’m five-nine and 165 pounds dripping wet, which I was at that moment. My face was benign when I was twelve, but it had gradually become semimalignant. My nose was almost flat from too many encounters with an older brother who was now a cop, and my business scars ran, and still run, from my big toe to my forehead. Leonardo thought I looked tough. I’m reconstituted scar tissue and bone, tentatively glued together by a kid doctor in L.A. named Parry. Leonardo could have given me the chance to take a warning. But he was right. I probably wouldn’t have taken it.
I looked straight ahead as we reached the road.
“You know the guy I was talking about, this Gino?” I said, drawing back my upper lip.
“Naw,” said Leonardo, eyeing the waiting cop. The cop eyed him back from behind dark blue sunglasses.
“I’ve been here about a year. Like Al, I’m a little out of touch.”
Leonardo shrugged and headed back toward the pier. I took a last look at “Snorky” Capone. He was sitting like a melting snowman with his body turned seaward. I crossed the road and got into the cop car.
The cop got in and adjusted his tan sheriff’s hat with the strap behind his head like Black Jack Pershing. He didn’t know that I knew he was almost bald. I had spotted him removing his hat while I walked with Leonardo. It gave me secret, useless information to compensate for the fact that there wasn’t a wrinkle or the sign of a wrinkle in his tight brown uniform. If he took off his mirror-shined brown shoes, his socks would be tailor made and odorless. The car was as neat as he was. I was sure he he hated firing his pistol because it made the barrel dirty. His smile was fixed, but whatever he was smiling about was his alone, and he didn’t plan to share it.
“Simmons,” I said, as he pulled away. I had cleverly deduced his name from the silver plate over his left shirt pocket. “Simmons, that man is stir crazy. You could have-”
“No he’s not,” said Simmons, gunning his Dodge past a truck full of watermelons and down a highway lined with heavy, tired green trees sagging under huge leaves. Louis Garner Simmons had the kind of downhome drawl I never could get used to.
“Capone’s got the tods, gator fever, Cuban itch, syph, venereal disease, whatever you want to call it. His brain is getting eaten up.”
Simmons had not taken me to see Capone by choice. The order had come from a captain who got his order from a local political boss who got a call from a Miami lawyer who did some work for MGM. That put Simmons far down the line, and made him angry. He was probably as clean in thought, word, and deed as he was in uniform, and the idea of being an escort for someone who wanted to talk to Capone pleased him not at all.
Simmons shot a glance at me without turning his head. What he saw didn’t please him-a wilted California lump making a puddle on his vacuumed seat. I was a contaminant he wanted to get rid of. He gunned the engine and we shot forward, hitting sixty-five.
“Capone got syphilis years ago,” he said. “It’s in his records. He knew it probably, but he was scared of the needle for the test. That’s a God’s fact. You beat that? Son of a bitch shot men down, got shot and cut himself, but he’s turning to jelly ’cause he was afraid of a needle. They finally tested him on the Rock after he blacked out one morning. But it was too late to do much. Some New York doctor comes down here every month giving him a new medicine, pencil-in, but that fat taxpayer’s a dying man.”
The idea of Capone dying tickled Simmons so much that he barely missed an old lady going fifteen miles an hour in an antique Ford. We were on a narrow strip of land with the Atlantic Ocean on our left and Biscayne Bay on our right.
“Why the rush?” I said, bracing myself with one hand on the windshield and one on the door handle.
“Got to get you to the train,” he said, reaching over to remove my hand from the window and wiping my hand print off with a cloth drawn from his pocket. Even the cloth was unwrinkled. “You can catch the
