...but he could also see three more guards in their sport shirts and shoulder holsters running toward him with teeth bared and eyes wide.
He threw a few shots their way, catching one, and headed into and through the kitchen, corned beef and cabbage taunting him, and hurtled across the backyard, tossing away the spare .45, which was empty, and replacing it with the commandeered .38, from that first guard.
Up ahead was the swimming pool, but beyond that the dock, and a speedboat; that seemed his best, perhaps his only bet...
But as he approached the pool, men came streaming down the stairs of the cabana — four men, two of whom were the round-and square-faced cardplaying guards from Capone’s anteroom. They were in their underwear — these were some of the live-in guards — wearing T-shirts and boxer shorts... and handguns.
The cardplayer who hadn’t spoken this afternoon paused halfway down the steps. “There! Get him!”
Michael took the offensive, running right at them, along the edge of the pool, firing up at them with a gun in either hand, and the round-faced guy, who’d been in the lead, caught a couple slugs in his head, which more or less exploded in a bone-and-blood red-and-white shower, and then tumbled down, flung onto the steps, and the other three stumbled over him, trying to shoot at Michael, who was doing a better job shooting at them.
Soon they were in an awkward pile of death at the bottom of the steps, as if they’d all gone after a fumbled football, the hard way.
Michael wheeled, looking to see if any more of them were coming up behind him, from the house.
Nobody. Not right now, anyway.
And he wheeled back to the pile of guards in their bloody underwear and went over and kicked at them, making sure they were dead; not so long ago, he’d checked the Japs in that clearing much the same way.
Behind him a voice said: “Nail the fucker!”
Two guys were running at him, across the backyard, firing wildly, barely more than shapes in the moonlight. The .38 was empty — he flung it to one side — and flopped onto the grass, withdrawing a spare magazine from his pocket and slamming it into the automatic.
Now they were close enough, and he took them down with head shots; one flopped face-forward onto the grass, dead too quick to be surprised, and the other caught one in the neck and his hands went to his throat and blood squirted through his fingers as he did a sad, short crazy dance before tumbling into the pool sideways, not making much of a splash, then floating there, blood streaming out, diluting itself in the pool water, the red looking black in the moonlight.
Michael got to his feet.
He listened carefully. He could not hear anything but the lapping of the water behind him, the bay beckoning; only now he could afford to head back to the house and use the rental car. Or would others be waiting...?
He was weighing that when another sound drifted across the eerie solitude of the night.
A whimpering.
At first he thought he’d wounded one of them, but the sniveling sound just wasn’t right. It was coming from near the swimming pool. Carefully, he stalked over there, 45 ready; and then he saw the figure, down on the cement beside a deck chair.
A big, fat figure, with curly gray thinning hair, rolled up like the world’s largest fetus. Wearing a purple bathrobe over cream-colored pajamas; with purple slippers.
Michael almost laughed.
In all the excitement, distracted as he was by killing a dozen or so men, Michael had forgotten what this was about.
Capone.
Al Capone, who right now was a whimpering terrified blob on the pool’s cement skirt, and Michael — his mind’s eye filled with the image of his father, dead on the kitchen floor in that farmhouse — grabbed the figure by the arm and flung him onto his back, though the man’s knees pulled up, his eyes wide and confused.
The famous face had a formlessness about it, but this was King Capone, all right — even if those chipmunk cheeks, scars and all, happened to be smeared with tears and snot.
Michael knelt and put the gun in Capone’s pudgy neck, dimpling the flesh, and hovered over him, the ganglord on his back, his about-to-be killer on his knees, as if in prayer.
“Look at me, Snorky! Look at me.”
Capone looked at Michael.
“Do you know who I am?”
Capone’s big eyes registered nothing.
And just as Michael was about to tell the king of crime exactly who he was, Capone asked, in a very small voice, “Where is it?”
Through his teeth, Michael spat: “Where is what?”
“My... my fishing rod?”
Michael winced, trying to make sense of this. He got on his feet, looking down at the fat child-like figure. In the moonlight, around them, lay dead bodies — Michael’s grim handiwork, all to bring him to this moment.
But Al Capone was rummaging around on the cement like a baby seeking its rattle.
“Here it is!”
With great effort, Capone lifted the fishing rod, which had been on the other side of the deck chair, where he managed to awkwardly seat himself; then he cast the line limply into the water.
It was as if Michael weren’t there at all.
The greatest of all gangsters sat fishing in his swimming pool, smiling the smile of a very young and not at all bright child, drool dribbling from plump purple lips as he hummed a tuneless song, oblivious to the carnage around them.
And Michael knew.
He understood. Understood it alclass="underline" the syphilis had reduced Capone to a near vegetable, and Nitti had hidden that from all but a small select circle, to maintain his own power and the illusion of Capone’s.
There would be no revenge upon Big Al, on this or any night; the syphilis had beaten Michael to it, leaving a brain-damaged, befogged husk where Alphonse Capone had once been. Barely forty, this ancient mariner sat fishing in his pool, waiting for a bite he’d never get.
As he processed this shocking news, Michael did not notice the men slowly approaching — three more guards with guns drawn, and behind them Mimi Capone.
Who said, “Put the gun down, Michael.”
And Michael tossed the gun on the grass, turning his back on what remained of Al Capone. He fell to his knees and began to weep as the men closed in.
Book Two
Looney Days
The Tri-Cities
March 1922
One
Annie O’Sullivan had a storybook life, and she knew it.
She was twenty-six years old with a heart-shaped face, reddish blonde hair bobbed Irene Castle — style, with china-blue eyes, doll-like features and the fair, faintly freckled complexion of the Red Irish. Normally petite, at the moment she was a monster — nine months pregnant in a dark blue maternity dress whose feminine white collar made the garment no less tent-like.
The morning had been notably uncomfortable, making her wonder if today would be the day. But by the afternoon, the stirrings had settled down, not even a kick from the anxious resident within her.
She sat reading The Ladies’ Home Journal in the living room of the two-story house on Twenty-second Street in Highland Park, up the hill in Rock Island. Being “up the hill” meant a lot: she and her husband, Mike, had spent almost three years in a shanty in the Greenbush neighborhood below. Now they had one of the nicest homes in town, a two-story white stucco well back from the street on a generous lawn with a detached garage.
Not that the house was ostentatious; there was nothing showy about the O’Sullivans or their home, with its nearly austere interior of pale plaster walls of green and yellow against dark woodwork, softened by curtains of lace.