Читать книгу On the Spot - Edgar Wallace - Страница 7

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VINSETTI was something of a litterateur. He kept a big diary, which, to the disappointment of Chief Kelly, and to the infinite relief of at least one person, contained no vital information.

On a visit to Hollywood he had made this illuminating comment:

The gangster's life has no continuity. It is a series of short stories written round the same funeral parlour... New characters appear on the stage and vanish, almost before they have established their identity... The story of gangland is punctuated with shootings by machine-guns, and most of the punctuation marks are full stops.

The diary was in Italian, and Chief Kelly, reading a translation, enlarged his philosophy but did not extend the volume of his files.

Minn Lee saw gangland from her own peculiar angle. She met men and women who came and went, and sometimes reappeared. The women were pretty, rather loud of voice, expensively gowned and jewelled. They seemed perfectly happy in their environment, which perhaps was an improvement upon the life they had previously known.

Tony was kind to her, much kinder than John Waite had been. He showed her consideration, a pleasing tenderness and a large understanding.

Once a girl came from Cicero to lunch with them. Her attitude towards Perelli was familiar, and yet the familiarity was tinged with a certain reserve which might have meant respect or fear, and probably had in it something of both. She was pretty in a coarse way, had a sable stole and elegant rings.

She drank incessantly throughout lunch, and her conversation was more or less Greek to Minn Lee. She knew the place, too; looked round it with a proprietorial smirk, appraised Minn Lee in one sweeping, searching glance, and thereafter ignored her; except that toward the end of lunch she leaned over and took Minn Lee's hand and examined the big ring.

"You want to be careful of that baby," she said. "It's a bum cut, and the stone slips out of its setting."

Looking up, she caught Tony's glance and dropped the girl's hand as though it were red hot. But Minn Lee was no fool. The woman had worn this ring, and in her crude way was acquainting its new proprietor with the important fact.

Any reserve Tony might have maintained was shaken down by this incident. He began to ask questions about the jewellery the visitor was wearing, where it had come from, how much it had cost. It was a little embarrassing, both for Minn Lee and the person to whom the queries were addressed." Apparently they had been given to her by various "boys". She named Vinsetti.

"Because he's dead?" asked Perelli quietly. "Tell me the names of some live men who gave you those things."

She was confused, went red and white, tried to carry off the situation with a laugh and a wisecrack, but Perelli drove through all her flippancy. "You should be very careful, Enid," he said, that metallic tang in his voice. "You have a good job, yes? And receipts are falling very severely."

She came back with a whine about the vigilants and the difficulties of finding the right people—a tactful move apparently, for Perelli changed the subject with an abruptness which would have been offensive to any other woman.

He would not speak about her to Minn Lee.

After she had gone:

"She is nobody—just trash," he said. "Once she stayed here, but she was too fresh for me, and she laughed at my music, because she has no brain—just a face and a line of flip talk, and she bored me. I hate people who bore me, little Minn Lee."

She smiled quietly at him. "I wonder if I ever shall?" she asked.

He took her hand and kissed it. "When I am very, very old," he said. "That is possible. When I do not like lovely things and lovely voices and all that is good for the eyes." He took her head in his two hands. "Are you 'appy?" And, when she nodded, he lifted her on to his knee, and, taking her in his arms, nursed her like a child without speaking; and in the comfort of that caress his mind was soothed and expanded, and he could give undivided, dispassionate attention to the problem of Shaun O'Donnell and the Feeney crowd. For they were getting on his nerves.

Mike Feeney was big, awkwardly built, atypical mick of a man, who had started life as an excavator, and, having secured control of a trade union, had multiplied its membership to an amazing extent by the simple process of beating up every man who refused to join. To his credit it must be said that he had secured concessions for his members, for he was one of the initiators of the pineapple method of persuasion. A pineapple is a bomb, and a bomb placed on the porch of an employer who refused to accept the conditions which Mike and his executives dictated usually brought about a change of heart in a very short time. If it did not, then the next bomb was more destructive. Few employers waited for the second pineapple; none stood out for the third.

The booze racket offered golden opportunities. He had all the machinery for terrorization. His speakeasies appeared overnight—queer little dives, some of them, elaborately furnished others. He supplied them with booze; his gun squad grew in importance. He opened gaming houses, pool rooms, muscled in to the handbook industry, which is a euphemism for bookmaking.

His sister, Mrs. Shaun O'Donnell, played an important part in the organization. She was a driving force, and, through her husband, the executive of the outfit. Almost as tall as her brother, big-boned, gaunt, red-faced, with hands like raw meat and a nose which was long and permanently red, this big-footed lady had once, so it was said, fought a man and beaten him. Nobody ever questioned this. Mike Feeney in his cups boasted of it.

With all the money in the world, she was the worst-dressed woman in Chicago. She affected naming violets, impossible reds, wore diamonds as big as nuts, set in gold brooches the size of coffee saucers. Her voice rasped and rasped, and when she spoke the Feeney crowd stirred uncomfortably.

Perelli she hated for his very masculine qualities. To her he was always "the wop dude". She called him other names, for she did not approve of those houses at Cicero. When her history comes to be written it will be found that she urged on her husband to inaugurate rival establishments.

She ruled her husband rather than her brother, which was remarkable, for Shaun had a temper of his own and the brain of three Mike Feeneys. For the rest, she was as remorseless as any; sent men to their death and never thought of them again. It was she who organized an attack on Tony Perelli.

"We surely scared that peterman," she said to her husband. "If you had the heart of a man you'd go and get him, after what he said about me to Mrs. Merlo. Maybe it don't mean nothin' to you, having your wife called 'Romeo's nightmare!' But if that don't mean something insulting I'm a crazy woman! Go get that wop, Shaun!"

Shaun snarled round at her.

"You're in a hell of a hurry to get rid of me, ain't ye?" he snapped. "You keep outa this, Bella."

She had been named by an unimaginative parent Floribella.

News of the beautiful Chinese girl who was staying at Perelli's apartment reached her, and feminine curiosity took her calling. She towered above little Minn Lee like an ugly derrick above an Easter lily. For once in her life she was human. Perelli was amazed to learn that she had left a good impression upon the girl. As for Mrs. O'Donnell—

"That baby's too good to live in a place like that with a dirty little Sicilian around. Gee! He's getting fat, Shaun. You couldn't miss him unless you was drunk."

Shaun said nothing. He had his own plans, and was not to be rushed.

His wife brought back one piece of information.

"Perelli's got a new man from New York, one of them Five Points people—Con O'Hara, do you know him?"

Shaun knew him; Mike Feeney knew him better, and had good reason for disliking him.

"He's a gun, and a slick one—nothing yellow about Con. He never stops talking, and I guess that means that he'll just have about time to see the city before he passes on."

That week Perelli gained another recruit. There was a man in Boston who was a booze importer and a highly respected member of the community. Through another friend he heard of a Harvard boy's misfortune and wrote to Tony.

"I don't know whether you'll be able to do anything for this fellow, but he comes of a good family, speaks two or three languages, and is the kind of man you might find useful."

So Jimmy McGrath came to Chicago with a letter of introduction, and a sense of humiliation which was all the more bitter because it was deserved. He had been expelled from a great university for a theft which was both mean and stupid, and which in his sober moments he could not understand. The college authorities accepted inebriation as the admission of another and even more serious offence. It was certainly no excuse. Jimmy scribbled a hurried note to his New England mother, went into hiding in New York, and, after a futile month spent in searching for work, accepted the rail fare and the letter of introduction which brought him to the Venetian magnificence of Tony Perelli's apartment.

He was tall, tow-headed, good-looking, nervous. Perelli liked him from the start, though he was puzzled as to how he could place him. There were the makings here of a big shot. He had a well-ordered mind, and would certainly become a capable organizer. But a big shot must be blooded. Here, too, was a substitute for Vinsetti, but again he must qualify. Tony's rule was inflexible; a man must have blood on his hands before he was initiated into the inner mysteries. It was not his sense of drama but his sense of safety which dictated this condition. A man must be "in"—up to his neck. There must be no member of the outfit so guiltless that he could take the stand without fear or knowledge of guilt.

You were either in or out.

There was a farm in the country where members of the gang rusticated. It was a sort of club, and it had its own shooting-range. Perelli sent the boy down with Ricardo, champion of all machine-gun choppers. "Give him the keys," he instructed, and by"keys" he meant the freedom of this drab little world.

Ricardo reported a week later that the pupil showed no promise.

"He hasn't the nerve for it," he said. "You'd better find him something easier first, Tony."

So Jimmy McGrath was brought back to Chicago and "was given the keys" of that territory which Perelli ruled so efficiently. He met gangsters, men on the one side or the other, and a few who were on neither but were in danger from both. For some reason or other he liked Shaun O'Donnell, and, more wonderful still, O'Donnell liked him and took him to his apartment off North Place and introduced him to his wife.

"One of Perelli's mob, ain't you?" she asked disparagingly. "Say, why do you go and get yourself fixed up with them Sicilians?"

"Leave the kid alone—that's his trouble," said Shaun. "You going to be Tony's fixer, Jimmy?"

Jimmy was puzzled.

"Well, I guess I'm going to be anything that he makes me," he said.

Shaun looked at him thoughtfully.

"He'll be wanting a fixer now that he's humped off Vinsetti."

"His best friend—that's the kind of yellow dog he is," interrupted Mrs. O'Donnell.

Shaun explained.

"Vinsetti ran around and fixed things. He saved Perelli a lot of trouble."

He might in truth and in justice have said that he himself had been relieved from many an embarrassing situation by the intervention of the fixer.

There was a fourth man at the luncheon, a gloomy Italian who was introduced as Mr. Camona. Exactly what role he played in the complicated business of Shaun's activities Jimmy did not know. The man spoke little and then only in monosyllables. Throughout the meal he ate and drank, and when he was not eating and drinking he stared blankly out of the window and seemed immersed in his thoughts. If he spoke at all it was in very bad English. Later, Perelli was to give the man's history. He was a Sicilian, who had been smuggled into the United States without a passport.

Mike Feeney controlled a number of alky cookers, men and women who distilled denatured alcohol, later to be doctored and bottled and sold to people who could not afford the best, and certainly got as near the worst as made no difference. Camona had been a bandit, had certainly suffered imprisonment in Italy, and was a fugitive from justice when he was imported into Chicago. His job had to do with the organization of the alky cookers. Incidentally, he had served in the Machine Gun Corps of the Italian Army and was a useful recruit to Mike Feeney's corps of killers. Either Camona or the driver of the car which carried him was at fault one evening. Tony was driving back from the opera with two of his trusted gang. He had turned into a side street off Michigan Avenue when another car drew level. Tony dropped to the floor as a hail of machine-gun bullets came through the window. One of his companions was not so fortunate, and went down with a bullet through his neck. It was all over in a few seconds. Four alert eyes saw a drooping moustache behind the sights of the machine-gun.

Tony drove the wounded man to hospital and came back to his apartment, very calm and unflurried. Minn Lee, who was waiting up for him, had no idea what had happened, though she supposed it was something serious, for Tony ordered her peremptorily to bed.

Camona lived in a little apartment house on the south side. He arrived home at two o'clock in the morning, was putting his key in the door when a man walked up behind him, laid a pistol against the back of his head, fired, walked back with the greatest unconcern to the waiting car, and was whisked off before the nearest police patrol was within sight.

"Good work. Con."

Perelli congratulated his newest recruit at breakfast the next morning, and Con O'Hara, stocky, classily tailored and interminably talkative, grinned at the compliment. It was his first solo job.

"Clean, Tony—that's my speciality, I never give a guy more than one, and after that his name's 'was'. I could have got him on the street, but there was a broad saying good night to her feller. I see him go up the stairs and nicked out me thirty-eight—"

"Sure, sure." Tony had little patience with people who dramatized their actions. "You're a swell feller."

Jimmy learned the news from the afternoon editions and was shocked. Here was a man with whom, two days before, he had sat, a living, breathing entity, with a history and a future, and who was now nothing but an object of curiosity to certain police officers and a name on a sprawling headline.

"Who do you think did it?" he asked Tony.

"I did it, Jimmy." Perelli's eyes never left the boy's. "Sure. That guy tried to stop me last night. He poked a machine-gun on me—the nerve!"

"Were you in the car that was fired at?" asked Jimmy incredulously.

He had read of the shooting on Michigan Avenue, but no names had been mentioned.

Perelli nodded.

"Sure."

"Are you certain it was Camona?" Jimmy was unconvinced.

Tony Perelli laughed softly. He was tickled by the effect of his confession.

"That's the way it is, Jimmy—killing and killing! I don't want to kill nobody, but what are you to do when these guys come after you? There's no law for us, Jimmy: we've got to be our own police and our own executioners. If a guy gives you the works you've got to give it him back, and if he gets you then the other boys have got to see you right. That's the way it goes. Suppose I go to the police, eh, and say: 'Mr. Camona poked a machine-gun on me,' what do all them lawyers say. Jimmy? 'Proof! Where's your proof?' And the only proof I've got is my eyes and something here"—he tapped his breast. "In this racket one of two things happens: you bump or you're bumped. And you see why, Jimmy. The law's not with us. We can't take a guy before a judge and say, 'He's done me dirt,' or 'He owes me this and he won't pay me,' and we can't get injunctions against fellows who come into our territory, and we can't advertise and say, 'Our brand of hooch is better than anybody else's.' The only law we know is what we get from lawyers and the coppers. A copper don't mean anything after he's on our pay roll."

"Killing a man seems pretty awful—in cold blood."

Perelli shook his head. "Killing a guy in hot blood—that's awful, because nine times in ten you make a mistake, and you kill somebody you wouldn't kill, that you didn't oughta kill. Look at the war, Jimmy—I was in that. Killing guys we didn't know—regular fellers, some of them. They'd done nothing wrong, but we just sailed in and killed them and they killed us. There's no sense to it. But when we bump off a man there's a reason, and when we do it it's been worth doing. The things you do in hot blood are generally foolish, and the things you do in cold blood are the worth-while ones."

So Jimmy had his first lesson in the ethics of gangland, and, being young, he was impressed.

"Keep next to Shaun O'Donnell," Perelli instructed him. "Maybe you'll be our fixer one of these days."

McGrath told him of the conversation he had had with Shaun.

"Fine," said Perelli. "Him and me thinks alike. Maybe you'll take Victor's place, and that will mean big money for you, Jimmy."

In his heart of hearts he knew that nobody could take Victor Vinsetti's place. Vinsetti had started steeped in the traditions of this strange underworld, with a complete and exhaustive knowledge of its code, founded on actual contact with its members.

One by one Jimmy met the executive of the gang. Angelo, with his lazy smile and his caustic sense of humour, he liked. The blustering Con O'Hara impressed him less favourably. At last he met Minn Lee. He had heard of her, and was curious to see how far rumour accorded with the truth. Her loveliness swept him off his feet. Whatever natural beauty was hers became enhanced by the setting. Tony spent money lavishly upon her. He had imported from the East silks that were worth a little more than their weight in gold. Literally he had changed the tapestry coverings of his furniture to show her colouring to greater advantage. Jimmy came away from that first interview conscious that an empty space in his soul had been filled. He was in love with Minn Lee from the first moment he met her. Thereafter he came very frequently, and Minn watched this development gravely. The one man in the world had come into her life, and that man was Tony Perelli—there could be no other.

Minn Lee looked toward tomorrow, knowing how dread a day that may be. She had inherited from her one European parent a philosophy that went well with the Oriental in her.

Tony asked her one day if she loved him, and she was so long answering that his self-esteem—a very vulnerable point of him—was made raw.

"I suppose so; I think so; yes," she said."Perhaps I don't know what love is. These girls who come in here, they talk about it as though it was a face massage, a new picture. I can't talk about it. You frighten me, that's all I know."

He looked at her, a question in his frown, in the set of his face, in the cold scrutiny of his eyes.

"You love me, huh? Suppose I had a guy waiting in the hall and I said to you, 'Minn Lee, go out, he is waiting there with his choppers, and the first one who goes through that door will be killed.' Would you—"

She laughed. Very rarely she laughed, and when she did, it was the low laugh of the European, not the high, shrill giggle that he had heard from Chinese girls.

"I would go, yes, of course."

His breath came quickly. "You would be killed, Minn Lee, huh?"

She nodded. "That's nothing," she said.

"For anybody else would you do that?" She thought, her brows puckered.

"No," she said at last. "For nobody else."

A broad smile lightened his fleshy face, his brown eyes sparkled.

"That's love, then, you little fool! You lovely darling!"

He took her in his arms and kissed her for a long time.