“You never have and you never will. We’ll be fine.”
He raised one eyebrow. “Oh, in Mary Jane’s capable hands, I’m sure you will be... If you have a problem, call the hospital number. I’ve made arrangements for an ambulance to come pick you up.”
“Don’t be silly.”
“Nothing silly about it. I don’t want anything to happen to you.”
Or to our baby, she thought. But it went unsaid.
“Shall we have a walk before dinner?” Annie asked.
“Are you up to it?”
“I have to get some fresh air or I’ll die.”
“The park is out of the question.”
“I know. Just up and down the block.”
His smile was mocking, in a nice way. “I could just sit here and bask in the bouquet of your corned beef.”
“Mary Jane cooked it.”
A week ago he’d have made a face; but Annie had been schooling the girl. “If she sticks to your recipe, we’re a cinch for a feast.”
They walked down toward the corner, slowly, Annie just trundling along, her gloved hand in his, her fur-collared coat not buttoned around her (that would have been an impossibility), him in his topcoat but without the fedora. In the spring or summer, the street was lushly lined with trees; now, in winter’s final days, their skeletal branches silhouetted themselves eerily against a dusk-tinged sky.
“Please be careful tonight,” she said.
“It’s just business.”
A car rumbled by over the brick street.
Then she commented, “We’re saving money, you know.”
He nodded.
“Nice nest egg,” she said.
They were at the corner now. Stopped and looked at each other, breath smoking. “We could go somewhere else,” she said. “Live somewhere else.”
He frowned slightly, just the faintest hint that her words had hurt him, somehow. “I make a good living.”
“Oh, I know.”
“Don’t you love your house?”
“I never dreamed we could live like this.”
He shrugged. “Then let’s go home.”
Shortly, they were enjoying Mary Jane’s corned beef and cabbage, or most of the family was. Young Michael, recently graduated from high chair to oak youth chair, just picked at his food, which his mother had cut into small pieces.
“Too salty,” the boy said.
“Just eat half of it,” his mother said.
“It’s nasty.”
Mike looked sharply at his son.
The boy lowered his gaze, which brought his eyes in closer proximity to the corned beef, and he shuddered.
“I can’t help it,” the boy said. His lower lip extended; his chin crinkled in a familiar preamble...
“If you cry in your food,” his father said matter of factly, “you’ll only make it more salty. Eat half of it. It’ll grow on you.”
The boy frowned in horror. “Grow on me?”
His mother covered her smile with a napkin.
“I mean,” his father said, “someday you’ll acquire a taste for it. You’ll like it when you’re a man.”
“I don’t wanna be a man,” the boy said, “if I have to eat this.”
And he began to cry. The child’s stop-and-start wailing agony ricocheted shrilly off the kitchen walls.
His father stood. Pointed. “Go to your room.”
Still crying, but obviously relieved, the boy climbed down out of the youth chair with the help of Mary Jane, who walked him out of the kitchen. The boy halted and the maid almost stumbled.
“Mama,” he said, pausing in the doorway, looking back at her with red eyes and a tear-streaked face, “will you read to me, anyway?”
“Yes, dear.”
“Daddy?”
“Yes?”
“Will you still tuck me in?”
“I’ll think about it.”
The boy smiled, just a little, through his tears, realizing his victory.
Then the maid and the child were gone. Mike was reaching for his son’s plate to help himself to the extra serving when Annie began to laugh.
“What are you laughing about?”
“Cry in your food,” she said, “you’ll make it saltier.”
He grinned. “Well... it’s what my pop said to me.”
“And look at you today, the corned beef fiend.”
Mike shrugged and dug in.
Half an hour later, she managed, despite her girth, to embrace her husband at the door; she could feel the hardness of the pistol under his arm. She even managed to get up on tiptoes to kiss him on the mouth. Then she settled back on her sore feet and looked up at him, stroking his face.
“Every time I leave the house,” he said, with a funny little smile, “you look at me like... like you’re trying to memorize this puss of mine.”
“Maybe I am.”
“Baby,” he said, “I memorized your kisser a long, long time ago.”
And he gave her a quick smooch and slipped out.
She stood in the doorway and watched him cross to the garage, wondering if he’d avail himself of further weapons from the arsenal out there, kept under tight lock and key.
Annie O’Sullivan loved her life, her storybook life, and yet every time her husband left the house, she had to wonder: how could there be a happy ending, when Mike worked for John Looney?
Two
On Twentieth Street’s bluff, the formidable three-story structure rose castle-like, with its gabled red-tile roofs, ceramic lions, bay windows, sloped turrets, substantial dark-brick walls, and many-pillared porch. The mansion provided its owner a view of the Mississippi River second to none; but also on the mansions below, the homes of high society, his perch enabling the master of this domain to look down upon those who considered themselves his betters.
This had given John Looney no small pleasure, over the years.
The mansion’s interior had a warmth to the eye — walnut paneling, mahogany trim, parquet floors, oriental carpets, massive fireplaces — that did not extend to physical reality. The downstairs, with its high ceilings and various cavernous rooms, was prey to winter chill, wind whistling through, turning the place into the haunted house the local children had long ago deemed it. For all its elegance — Victorian furniture, velvet upholstery, stained glass, ornate mirrors, sparkling chandeliers — the mansion was (Looney had to admit it) good and goddamn cold.
Only when a party — holiday festivities or a wedding reception or the occasioned wake — brought the warmth of other human beings into the sprawling place did Looney’s Roost seem a home, and he’d come to relish such gatherings, accordingly. With Nora gone these eight years, and his daughters off to boarding school, that left only himself and his son Connor to knock around these endless rooms.
When Nora was alive, and the girls underfoot, Looney never conducted business in the mansion — would never think of it! He left such things for his law office or the Java House at the Sherman Hotel; or possibly out at Bel Aire, his second, less ostentatious mansion on the Rock River.
Now, of course, parties at Bel Aire weren’t the family affairs the Roost occasionally put on; they were for men only... and a certain type of woman, the kind who fit in with cockfights in the barn, shooting matches in the yard, and drunken orgies upstairs.
Bel Aire was where Looney entertained the Chicago boys, when they came to town. Looney had been aligned with Johnny Torrio for years, though Looney did not have much faith in the chunky scar-faced youth Torrio was grooming for his heir, a hot headed Sicilian named Capone.
But Looney would have to learn to deal with Capone, and vice versa; as he often said, this business was one of strange bedfellows.
Tonight he’d called a small meeting of a handful of his most trusted associates, and they had gathered at the long table in his library, all seated toward one end. Looney — gauntly handsome, white mustached, in a dark brown suit and gambler’s black string tie — sat at the head. On a chair against the wall behind him, not officially a part of the inner circle, was Michael O’Sullivan.