O’Sullivan pointed at Looney. “When you’re gone, Nitti will kill Connor and take over here in the Cities. You know that, John — either way, this ends with your boy dead.”
“That may be. But I won’t be alive to see it. Anyway, do you expect me to give you the keys to his room and point the way for you to walk in, put a gun to his head, and pull the trigger? No. He’s my son. I’m his father. I will not do that.”
Quietly, as if praying, O’Sullivan said, “For your godson — Peter. For my wife — Annie.”
“No! No... Mike, how many men have you killed? Do you imagine they didn’t each have a wife? Children? A mother, a father? Didn’t Danny McGovern have a brother? Who were these men we killed, you and I — clay figures? Phantoms? Or men who lived and breathed, until we took that away from them, forever?”
“Soldiers kill soldiers. Your boy murdered a woman and a child.”
Looney’s eyes and nostrils flared; his false teeth flashed. “Open your eyes! Look around you — who do you see in this room? Only murderers, nothing but murderers, here. This is the life we chose, Mike... and the only certainty in this life is that we’ll be damned in the next one.”
Muffled Latin filled the silence.
Then O’Sullivan said, “My boy Peter is in heaven, with his mother. Michael will join them one day — many years from now.”
Looney winked at him. “If that’s what you want, boyo, do everything you can to make sure that happens. But never mind the next life — there’s still a life here on earth for you and your son. Reach out for that life, Mike... and take it! Leave us; go! It’s the only way out.”
“Not the only way.”
Looney nodded. “You could kill me,” he granted. “And then Nitti might give up Connor. But can you do that, son? Can you look me in the eyes and see me off to hell?”
“Suppose... ” For the first time O’Sullivan considered the possibility of taking Looney at his word. “... Suppose I do go.”
Looney nodded, pleased. “Go with my blessing, and take the money you’ve stolen with you.”
“Capone’s money.”
“I’ll replace it.”
“I took a lot.”
“I have a lot.”
O’Sullivan stared at the old man; the old man stared back.
“And what will you do, John, if I go?”
“Why, I’ll mourn you, Mike... mourn the son I lost.”
O’Sullivan wondered if this was more self-serving blarney, or came from Looney’s heart; then he had a sudden revelation: the answer to that question didn’t matter! When the time had come to choose between loyalty and blood, between sentiment and blood, even money and blood, Looney had chosen blood.
As he stepped from the room, leaving Looney to the plaster Christ, backing out into the corridor with his .45 drawn, keeping a close eye on Sean and Jimmy, O’Sullivan could not shake that thought: Looney had chosen blood.
And by the time he slipped away from the sanctuary of the church — the mass loud now, muffled no more, though still its arcane Latin self — O’Sullivan knew what had to be done.
Seventeen
My father took me to Chippiannock Cemetery, or rather I took him — drove him there, from St. Peter’s. When he was sure we weren’t being followed, he gave me directions, and my next memory is Papa and me all alone in the vast sloping graveyard, surrounded by stone cherubs and crosses, the snow gone, patches of green trying to overtake the brown.
So we had our graveside good-byes, after all.
I remember kneeling at Mama’s simple gravestone, next to Peter’s, and saying, “We should have brought flowers.”
And Papa said, “That’s all right, Michael. It’s still too cold for flowers.”
That had troubled me, and I asked, “Is Mama cold?”
“She’s free of earthly concerns, son.”
My father is buried next to them, now; and one day — one day soon — I will join them in the Village of the Dead. Connor Looney is buried in Chippiannock, too. When I first heard, I thought that was a terrible thing — even the ground should be more discriminating.
But with the passage of years, I’ve come to see the rightness of it. We were bound together in life and death, all of us, and my father, mother, and brother will be forever linked to the Looneys, as will I, at least as long as people are interested in the history of that lefthanded form of human endeavor called crime.
John Looney, unfortunately, is not buried at Chippiannock. His grave is at his ranch in New Mexico, next to his wife’s, one last getaway from Tri-Cities trouble.
They say he was packed and ready to go to Chama, that rainy Sunday night; he could have caught an afternoon train, but instead he lingered, for reasons of his own. Perhaps he had pressing business that needed tending before he could leave.
Or maybe the old man had a sense of his destiny. Maybe he believed in fate — though I’m not convinced he believed in anything at all.
The Paradise Hotel was in downtown Prophetstown, near the Tri-Cities, on the way to Chicago. Nondescript, almost rundown, the three-story frame building was anything but paradise, the kind of lodgings the less successful traveling salesmen resorted to in these hard times.
The boy was asleep in his clothes on top of one of the twin beds in a room whose yellowish wainscoted walls had grime and stains from the decades that had passed since the hotel’s heyday. A naked bulb screwed in the wall provided the only illumination; O’Sullivan switched it off, and sat on the bed next to the boy. Rain streaked the windows, and its reflected shimmer made patterns on the slumbering child. Thunder rumbled, sounding distant, but a threat nonetheless.
O’Sullivan was in the same suit he’d worn to the church today. He wore no tie. This was the end of the road and he knew it — and he knew what had to be done, knew now the only way that Capone and Nitti would give up Connor to him.
Because he had phone calls to make, and other preparations, O’Sullivan had taken the adjoining room, as well; and he’d made his arrangement with the desk clerk for the long-distance calls.
From that adjoining room, he sat at a table, a work area where salesman and businessmen could go over their receipts and records, and used the phone. Shabby, sparsely furnished, these two rooms did not constitute a suite worthy of, say, Alexander Rance. But it suited Mike O’Sullivan’s purposes just fine.
He did not reach Nitti at first. Someone at the Lexington asked for a number where Mr. Nitti could return the call, and O’Sullivan refused to play along.
“Tell Nitti,” he said into the receiver, “that Mike O’Sullivan will call again — in one hour.”
Then O’Sullivan hung up. Still seated at the table, he made out a list of banks and safe deposit box numbers on a sheet of Hotel Paradise letterhead; he wrote “Michael” on an envelope and inserted the sheet into that, with eight little keys folded up inside — also included were Uncle Bob’s phone number and directions to the farm on the lake. Then he slipped in a fat wad of cash, enough to carry the boy for weeks, perhaps months, and licked the flap and sealed it shut.
O’Sullivan went back in where his son slept, and placed the envelope on the scarred nightstand, where a fat little Lone Ranger book lay folded open next to the boy’s small revolver. Again he sat beside Michael and looked at him for a long time — studying him, committing to memory every detail of the child, as if he hoped to recognize the boy in some other lifetime.
Then he stroked his son’s hair, thinking how much he loved the child, hoping Michael knew, and got up and returned to the next room, not realizing the boy had only been pretending to be asleep.