I had never met Colonel Robert R. McCormick, only seen him at a distance once or twice when he came down to the local room to talk to Beck. As I rode the elevator to the rarified altitude of the 24th floor, I turned over the possibilities: He was going to reward me for the story. He was going to can me for being too easy on someone he detested. He was going to have me demoted to working nights. He was going to...
The elevator doors opened onto a paneled, carpeted reception area bigger than most living rooms, and some ballrooms. I gave my name to a pleasant-looking woman with blonde, marcelled hair who was sitting behind a mahogany desk. She spoke a few words into a phone, then smiled at me and gestured toward a paneled door. “Go right on in, he’s expecting you,” she said, her voice barely above a whisper, apparently in keeping with the sedate surroundings.
I felt as if I’d wandered into somebody’s castle, and I suppose in a sense I had. The office had high, coffered ceilings, dark paneling, a chandelier, and a fireplace, and it could have held six pool tables with room to spare. On the window sill were several sculptures, including a bust of Lincoln. At the far end, working at an oversized desk with a polished marble or granite top, and with a German shepherd dozing on the carpet beside him, was Colonel Robert Rutherford McCormick, editor, publisher, and, so I always assumed, sole owner of The Chicago Tribune. As I approached, he looked up from his paperwork and nodded off-handedly. He had a full head of white hair and, in his tweed, vested suit, he looked like my conception of an English nobleman, although I was aware that he detested almost everything about the English, their country, and their culture.
“Mr. Malek,” he said, and I immediately understood why Capone had called him mush-mouthed. “Sit down, sit down.” He indicated a chair facing his desk. I sat.
“Read your article on Al Capone last week. Most interesting.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“Never liked the fellow, you know. Bad for the city, very bad. He tried to muscle in when we were negotiating with the circulation drivers years ago. I ordered him out of the room and told him to take his plug-uglies with him. I also suggested later to the federal law enforcement people that the way to get Capone into jail was through his failure to pay income taxes. And they listened to me.”
I tried to swallow, but my mouth was too dry. “So I understand, sir.” Actually, I understood the story somewhat differently, but this did not seem like the time or the place to refute the McCormick version.
“But whether I like the man or not is totally beside the point,” the Colonel continued, reaching down to stroke the German shepherd. “The Tribune always deals fairly with everyone.”
“Yes, sir,” I responded, curious as to where we were heading.
“And you, Mr. Malek, have proven to be a paragon in that regard. Your interview with Capone was sensitive and even-handed, not to mention extremely well-written. You brought out the human side of the man and made no judgments about him. I like that. Further, Mr. Beck tells me that almost no rewriting was necessary. He also says this high caliber typifies much of your work.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“Mr. Malek, it is I who thank you on behalf of the Tribune and its readership, and please accept this as a token of the newspaper’s gratitude.” He handed me and envelope with my name typed on it. It was unsealed, so I reached in and pulled out a company check for $200, made out and signed by R.R. McCormick.
“I’m... I really appreciate this,” I sputtered, standing and trying to string together the words to thank him. Two hundred was more than I made in a month. The Colonel had turned his attention back to the papers on his desk, clearly dismissing me, so I rose and pivoted to leave. But I could see no door — the entire wall surface of the big room was paneled in wood. I went to two of them and pushed, but they were solid. I turned back to the Colonel, but his head was down; he was signing papers.
I looked around the room again, baffled. Without looking up, he spoke. “Kick the plate.”
“What?”
“Kick the plate.”
I finally spotted it. One panel had an unobtrusive metal plate at floor level. I nudged the plate with my toe, and the panel swung silently open. As I turned to look back at the man, who was still concentrating on his paper, I thought that I heard a low chuckle.
However well done my interview with Capone may have been — and it was damn well done if I do say so — it didn’t let him avoid the dreaded Isle of Pelicans. According to James Bennett, director of the U.S. Bureau of Prisons, he had become “too big a problem for our officers in Atlanta to handle.” Late in the summer of 1934, Alphonse Capone became one of the 53 “incorrigibles” given the signal honor of becoming the first inmates in the new federal penitentiary in San Francisco Bay known as Alcatraz.
Chapter 3
Logan Square... I’ve never completely gotten used to going back. At the start, just after I moved out, I wasn’t surprised that my stomach tightened up every time I rounded the corner and turned into what had for almost ten years been referred to by Norma and me as “our block.” But that feeling had never gone away, never diminished in all the times — it must be close to a hundred times now — that I’ve gone back to the apartment to pick Peter up for our times together on weekends. And it was no different on this second Saturday morning of the new year — the dryness in my throat, the perspiration even in freezing weather, the urge for one last Lucky Strike, even just a few puffs.
I climbed the eight concrete steps to the door of the brick two-flat and rang the upper bell with the typewritten N. MALEK under it. The buzzer sounded, unlocking the door, and I walked up the carpeted stairs, which squeaked in all the usual places. Norma was silhouetted in the doorway at the top, also as usual.
“Hello, Steve,” she said. “Peter’s been talking about the museum for three days now.”
“Glad to hear it,” I answered, thinking how good she looked in the brown housedress with white trim on the collar and sleeves, which I had never seen. “How’ve you been?”
“Fine, fine.” She nodded and brushed a strand of auburn hair from her cheek as she backed into the living room. “And my folks are well, too. Dad’s back at the plant on a regular schedule again; the doctor says his heart is strong, that he could easily live to be 90 despite the stroke.”
“I’m glad to hear that, I really am. He’s one heckuva guy. You said hello to both of them like I asked?”
“Just like you asked. And they said to wish you a happy new year. Oh, and Peter could hardly wait to get home to start playing with that Erector set you gave him. It’s his favorite Christmas present, by far. He really loves it. But now he says he has to have more girders, whatever they are.”
I laughed. “Yeah, I figured that was going to happen. I should have given him a larger set. Me, I had a nice quiet New Year’s Eve,” I volunteered.
“We did, too. But then, so does everybody back home, as I know you recall. We listened to the midnight countdown on the radio, Peter too, and we played ‘Twenty Questions’ and were all in bed by 1:00.”
“No surprise there. I did have one interesting thing happen myself last Saturday, which was New Year’s night,” I said, pausing for effect. “I had dinner with Helen Hayes.”
“Helen Hayes!” Norma’s brown eyes widened. “You and Helen Hayes? Only the two of you?”
“Yep, only us chickens. At Henrici’s. I’d gone to a movie, and I just ran into her there, after her play.”
She put her hands on her hips and shook her head in wonderment, smiling. “Steve Malek, you’ve been ‘just running into people’ all your life. You really are something, do you know that?”