The Winter Family (22 page)

“So,” Noah said, arching an eyebrow, “you’re comparing Burns to Tweed, are you?” He turned to the journalist. “I do hope you’re getting all this down.”

Honest Jim smiled, but it was hard smile, hard indeed.

“You’re a funny one, aren’t you? You’re all about the free markets. You’d think a man like you’d know that everything has its price.”

“A free market depends on some things being without price,” Noah said. “Such as the rule of law.”

“Isn’t that something,” Honest Jim said. “For someone who don’t like regulation, you’re awfully keen on rules. I wonder if you have any idea about what life’s really like. Maybe you should ask your brother when you go back to your hotel.”

Honest Jim looked at the reporter and grinned. “Print that, boyo. Print that I told him to ask his murdering brother.”

“Good morning, gentlemen,” Noah said.

He left the house with the reporter while the three police officers stayed inside. On the doorstep, Noah said to the reporter, “Make sure you write that King Conor is one of his bondsmen. You can leave out the part about my brother. I’m sure their papers will cover that angle.”

After the policemen finally left, the Democrats ate in silence.

“That rat-bastard Reiman sold us out,” Honest Jim finally said. “He stuck you with a spy.”

“I admit that was first my thought,” Burns said. “Then I remembered
that Reiman told me that he didn’t know the man. Tried to get me to take someone else.”

“That’s just the way he fooled you,” Honest Jim said.

King Conor laughed.

“Rather subtle stratagem for a kraut, don’t you think?” Burns said. “More likely Ross sent a man to spy on Reiman but I ended up taking him instead. If only I’d stuck with me own boys!”

“Ah,” Honest Jim said. “They was bound to get a few licks in. After all, Mister Ross is a sharp one, and we’re no angels. Are we, gentlemen?” Honest Jim was smiling broadly and looking from Burns to Conor. You could not have told, by looking at him, that anything was amiss.

Burns was buttering a bun, staring at his plate. Twenty-five years ago he had been as poor as potatoes. Lifting heavy things to earn his living, sleeping in hovels, and fighting at night. It was politics that had brought him here, and luck, but most of all it was shrewdness. It cut Burns to the quick to have been tricked.

King Conor wiped his mouth with a napkin and threw it down on the table, hard enough to make the silverware and china clink.

“If Jim ain’t going to say it, I will,” King Conor said. “I’ve put a lot of money in this man Harrison, and I don’t want you screwing it up to protect your clients. You don’t have nothing to worry about in this election but the fucking main event is as tight as a gnat’s asshole. You were worried about your fucking alderman’s syndicate. Well, this is my election, because I fucking paid for it.”

“I told you, Conor,” Burns said. “The man who paid me to widen State Street has been giving us tips on what the Republicans have been planning. That’s why I brought someone who didn’t speak English, to keep it secret like.”

“You think I believe that?” Conor said. He kicked back his chair and towered over them. Suddenly he was shouting. “You think I need you, Burns? You think I can’t reach out into the street and—”

“Conor!” Honest Jim thundered.

And King Conor, for all his money and power, for all his policemen and hired thugs, stopped at the sound of that voice. It was a voice that had boomed across crowded party conventions where every
man had a knife up his sleeve, that had commanded platoons of volunteer firefighters, and that had carried across open fields during stump speeches. Honest Jim Plunkett had never run for office, but it was only because he’d never needed to.

“You do need him, Conor,” Honest Jim said. “Votes ain’t like cans on a shelf that you can go up and buy for a set price. You’ve got to grow them like cabbages. Now all my men, Irish or not, have been working their districts like their gardens. They’ve been planting and watering and tending all this time. They’re the head of every glee club and every firefighting force, they’ve gone to the weddings and funerals, they’ve done it all. That’s how they got the loyalty of the voting public. And so you do need him, just like he needs you. All right?”

Conor scowled. “He was looking out for his syndicate.”

“What if he was?” Honest Jim said. “I ain’t saying he was. But what if he was? Everyone’s in this for himself, Conor. Everyone stands to profit. I wouldn’t ask them to throw in with us elsewise, would I? He’s every right to look out for his syndicate.”

King Conor’s face abruptly shifted into a smile, a little too quickly for Burns’s liking. “Well, all right then,” he said, sitting back down. “What are we going to do now?”

“Election’s in two days,” Honest Jim said. “We’ve just got to keep on. Get them votes out. All the usual tricks.”

“The police are ready?” Burns asked.

“When the voting starts, we can count on the support of three-quarters of the constabulary,” Honest Jim replied.

“It cost me enough,” King Conor said. “It better be worth it.”

“What do we do if they turn those fellows loose?” Burns asked. “The ones they’ve got cooped up in the hotel?”

“They won’t dare do it now,” Honest Jim said. “But even if they do, our boys have been in scraps before. They’re ready.”

Burns shook his head.

“What?” Honest Jim said. “You scared?”

“There was something about this German,” Burns said. “He wasn’t mean. It was more like he was hurt somehow. Damaged. He was a wild one in a scrap.”

“Ours are wilder,” Honest Jim said. “Plus we’ve the police.”

“I’m worried, Jim,” Burns said. “I don’t want to spread ourselves
too thin. Maybe we ought to pull out of some of the touchier neighborhoods. The Polish ones …”

“Fuck off,” King Conor said.

“Mickey,” Honest Jim said patiently. “It’s those ones as are most important. We can’t just give ’em to the Republicans. Come on now. Buck up, my son. You just do your part in your district and get the repeaters out there on the street. Get all your tough boys organized and ready. It’ll be quite a scrap, but you just trust old Honest Jim. It’ll all turn right in the end.”

When Dusty Kingsley woke up, there was a dull throbbing behind his eyes and his mouth was dry, but all in all it was one of the mildest hangovers he’d had since he’d moved into the Michigan Avenue Hotel. He dressed quickly and made his way down the stairs to the dining room. What he saw when he arrived made him stop short in his tracks.

“Jesus, Bill. Didn’t you go to bed last night?”

Bill sat at the bar. At the sound of Dusty’s voice he turned around, very slowly, with exaggerated care. The whites of his eyes were orange and he was slick with sweat. As Dusty approached he caught a whiff of urine and wrinkled his nose.

“Oh my god,” Dusty said.

A half-empty bottle of gin stood at Bill’s elbow. Dusty snatched it away. Bill made no move to stop him. It did not look like Bill could make any sudden movements at all without toppling from his stool.

“Just hold tight,” Dusty said. “I’ll be back.”

A gilded mirror hung behind the bar. Bill Bread slowly lifted his eyes and looked into it. You could try to look at other things, sitting at this bar. The label of the bottle in your hand, the slick zinc surface of the bar, the flickering light of the gas lamps. But you couldn’t hide from yourself.

At the beginning it had been sort of sadly amusing. He would wake in the morning, appallingly sick, and the game would start. Attempting to take a day off. Just one. Part of him knew that he would lose the game every time he tried to play, and after a while,
Bill didn’t see the point in playing. But when the game ended, when the force of his own staring and bloodshot eyes in the mirror stripped away all his illusions, and he stopped pretending that he was not going to get drunk, Bill discovered that his self-delusion had been restraining his behavior far more than he had guessed.

When Dusty returned to the dining room, bringing Johnson with him, they found Bill lying stomach down on the bar, blindly fumbling for another bottle.

“Bill! Quit that!” Dusty said.

Bill surrendered as they took him by his armpits.

“He stinks,” Johnson said.

“I’m gonna be sick!” Bill said, and both Dusty and Johnson dropped him. Bill helplessly threw up on the floor.

“Fagh,” Dusty said.

Johnson only frowned.

They waited a while after Bill was done, just to be safe, and then they carried him to his room. Dusty went to draw a bath while Johnson carefully laid Bill on his side.

“I’m sorry,” Bill said.

“No you ain’t,” Johnson said.

Johnson brushed the sweaty black hair out of Bill’s eyes, a gesture devoid of tenderness. “You don’t even know what it means to be sorry, Bread. You ride with a cold bunch, but you’re the coldest.”

Bill smiled. “I can’t help it.”

“So it would appear,” Johnson said. “I’ll say this much for your sorry ass. It ain’t good for you to be cooped up like this. If Noah was trying to kill you I don’t know if he could have found a surer way to go about it.”

Bill said, “I feel guilty about my uncle.”

“You were drinking before your uncle died,” Johnson said.

“I don’t mean it like that,” Bill said. “It’s not to do with that.”

“Hmm,” Johnson said.

“He wasn’t an imaginative man,” Bill said. “I keep wondering what he’d think if he could see all this. I don’t reckon he could have even conceived it. Conceived any of it.”

Dusty came out of the bathroom with a pint bottle of whiskey in his hand.

“He had it stashed behind the toilet,” Dusty explained.

“Let’s get him cleaned up,” Johnson said.

When they were halfway through undressing him, Bill looked up at Johnson and said, “Men aren’t meant to know that everything is possible.”

A noise was coming from outside, a kind of murmur, rising above the normal din of the busy streets.

“You’re quite the philosopher today,” Dusty said.

They got Bill naked and tossed him in the tub and left him there.

“Do you think we should do something about him?” Dusty asked.

“We already did,” Johnson said.

“I mean about the drinking in general.”

Johnson said, “Let him go to hell in his own way.”

The noise from the street was louder. Someone laughed—the sound of it cut through the drapes—and then a knocking came from the ground floor.

“What is that?” Dusty said.

They pulled back the drapes. Johnson had enough sense to be subtle about it. That was when they saw the mob of newspaper reporters, policemen, Democratic agitators, and general miscreants gathered at the front door of the hotel.

The tailor’s shop in downtown Chicago was well lit by the windows facing the street. Men’s clothing hung on the racks and a mirror leaned against the back wall. The bell rang. John Jones, an elderly Negro with bright white hair and a long, smooth mustache, looked up from his sewing. A man and a boy had come into his shop. The man had fine pale hair, milky skin, and golden eyes. The boy had pistols hanging from his hips. They were both raggedly dressed.

“May I help you?” Jones said. His voice was slow, calm, deep.

“We need a suit for the boy,” Winter said. “Before the end of the day.”

“Well now,” Jones said. “I’m not sure I can have something ready for you by then.”

Winter dug into his pocket and tossed a cloth bag onto the table in front of the tailor, landing on the jacket on which Jones was working.

“You go on and name your price, old man,” Winter said. “And don’t you make me ask again.”

Jones dumped the contents of the bag over the table. The coins were mostly gold, with some larger silver ones scattered through. Jones carefully separated a number that seemed fair to him and then looked back up at Winter speculatively.

“Don’t suppose you want one too?”

“No,” Winter said.

“Aw, come on Auggie!” Lukas said. “Think how good we’ll look, n’how surprised they’ll be! They’ll be tickled to see us’n suits! Get yourself one!”

“Those clothes are just about falling off,” Jones said. “You’ll need some new ones soon anyway.”

“Fine,” Winter said.

Jones separated a few more coins and dropped them in his pocket. Then he put the rest of the coins in the bag and walked it over to Winter.

“Here you go,” he said. “Come into the back with me.”

Jones took their measurement with firm, strong hands, taking no notes, repeating the numbers under his breath only once.

“I suppose you gentlemen don’t have any particular kind of suit in mind.”

“You sure got that right,” Winter said.

“Well, all right then,” Jones said, glancing at the clock. “It’s nine thirty. You get on back here round three o’clock or so. Then I’ll make some minor adjustments and try to have you on your way by five. Meantime if you want to get a shave and a haircut, just head on down the street.”

The bell rang again as the door shut behind them. Jones drew the curtains and flipped the sign from
OPEN
to
CLOSED
.

“What are we going to do, Auggie?” Lukas asked. “Want to get a haircut?”

“All right,” Winter said.

They walked down the street to the barbershop in the Palmer
House. As they waited, Winter read the newspaper and paid particular interest to the various exposés concerning Mickey Burns. Lukas, who could not read, kicked his legs back and forth in his chair and whistled with effortless skill.

A stout barber called Lukas to his chair, and a few minutes later Winter was summoned by a tall, thin man with an effeminate manner.

“So what were you thinking?” he said as he gathered Winter’s long hair and pulled it behind his neck.

“Wasn’t thinking of anything in particular.”

“I take it you are accustomed to simpler haircuts?”

“You are correct.”

“You don’t mind if I try something a little different, perhaps, than what you are used to?”

“Knock yourself out,” Winter said. “If I don’t like it I’ll say so.”